u/onex7805

I played The Godfather game on PC a long, long time ago, around the time it was released, but I quit pretty early. I suppose I expected 1940s GTA, but it was very restrictive in comparison. You can't jump, the map is small, less freedom, less chaos simulation...

When I saw minimme's review, in which he described it akin to an empire-building game than GTA, it piqued my interest. I heard Don's Edition on PS3 was the best version of the game, but it was way too expensive that I decided to go for the Blandhand Edition, which is essentially a Wii port of Don's Edition... which might have been a mistake.

Wii accidentally extended the lifespan of the 6th gen games. Because Wii was technologically two Gamecubes taped into one, a lot of PS2 and Xbox were easily ported to the "next gen" Wii, on the cheap and fast method. And because it was so cheap and fast that they didn't bother adapting the gameplay into the new motion control scheme, where the developers were still struggling to figure out what to do with this.

Let's consider the best Wii shooters that utilize the motion control the best. You will realize that the camera is either: first-person, or the third-person where the camera is always at the back of the character or over the shoulder. Basically, you are facing exactly where the character is facing, so that the motion control input is one-to-one with the character. This is why Resident Evil 4 controls phenomenally on Wii. The Godfather's shooting scheme is a slightly advanced version of the console GTA 3--free directional movement, and the lock-on. It's the same control scheme the same studio used on its Bond games.

What happens is that the only real motion control input you do in shooting is when you lock on, you can aim your Wiimote to selectively choose the body part you want to shoot. However, because you don't know where your Wiimote is pointing before the lock-on (the crosshair only pops up in the target lock-on), what will happen is the crosshair will slide off without you knowing it. It is awkward to lock on and shoot enemies. The Wii port of Resident Evil 4 avoids this problem because you always see the pointer on screen. In addition, the entire lock-on system kind of lessens the importance of the motion control, where the strength lies in aiming itself. You can press the + key to enter the free aim mode, but it is so awkward that you rarely use it.

In addition, if you want to shift your target, you have to press the D-pad left and right, which is located on the top of the Wiimote, so you have to constantly shift your hand up during the combat... And the D-pad function goes further than that. Because the Wiimote lacks the second analog stick, which is often used to control camera movement in the normal gamepad controller, the developers decided mapped the camera control to the D-pad. Yes, in order to look up, down, left, and right, you have to constantly fiddle with the Wiimote to reach the D-pad. If you are familiar with Wii, you will realize how awful this is.

And don't make me talk about the melee combat, which is some of the worst I have ever played. It seems that they just mapped certain waving motions to certain punch keys. There is nothing like, let's say, Punch Out, where the entire game is built up to match the precise character actions to the player's actions. So instead, all you do in this game is wiggle your Nunchuk and Wiimote mindlessly, hoping that the game will register your inputs and punch correctly. ...or the character accidentally punches because of the slight motion of your controller. This is a serious problem in this game, which demands careful melee action to *not kill" certain NPCs. I often found myself accidentally killing the shopkeepers because my character registered my inputs wrongly as punching or choking. This happened so many times.

Rather than changing the gameplay to adapt to the motion control, they simply ported the PS2 game over to Wii, without much thinking how it would affect it. And this half-ass porting job goes further because this game looks absolutely ugly and runs horribly. It somehow looks worse than the PS2 version. It seems that they made Don's Edition first for PS3, which overhauled the engine and the graphics to fit the new hardware, and then downgraded that version for Wii. So what happens is that it is essentially a PS3 game downgraded to run on Wii, not a PS2 game upgraded to run on Wii. The lighting and textures are flat as hell, and the game often randomly hovers 10fps for no reason. This console runs Xenoblades Chronicles. Are you telling me that this N64-looking ass shit runs 15fps???

Regardless, let's talk about the game itself. So the empire-building aspect is quite fascinating. You wander around, find a shop, and threaten the rival gang's shopkeepers and racketeers to join your gang. This will regularly generate income. In that process, you might have to kill the rival gang's goons, and you might have to enter a big gunfight, so you have to hire a companion to fight with you. And when it happens often, the rival gangs might see you in the world and automatically attack you in the world, which make the traversal harder. And it also increases the police activities, so you have to bribe the police, so the police will turn against the rival gang, creating a big gunfight between the enemies and police. And when you do hostile activities against the rival gang too often, you will enter a full-blown mob war.

All this is admittedly underdeveloped. You are not playing STALKER or XCOM, but the empire-building and faction system are surprisingly enjoyable. Beating the shit out of merchants, racketeers, and shopkeepers to join your gang is quite addictive and leads to the emergent gameplay scenarios.

Too bad that all this shit matters nothing when it comes to the missions, which are some of the dullest I have ever played in this genre. They created this system with the incredible potential, but this is not the meat of the actual game. That's all optional shit. You can never engage with the empire-building aspect, and that affects shit. The meat of the game is the missions, and they are somehow even more linear and worse than the GTA counterparts? It's literally step-by-step, and drive to this place, and shoot everyone. Throw in some ocassional mandatory stealth sequences or "follow this NPC and do exactly as they tell you, or mission fail".

What's comical is that empire-building and factional dynamics have no impact to the narrative. In the cutscene, Vito is making peace with the head of the rival gang, and they say it's all good... yet the moment that cutscene is over, I can't move anywhere but getting shot at by that gang because I'm engaging in a literal mob war with them. I just hired my companion to fight alongside me, but when the mission begins, he is gone. I singlehandedly turned half of New York into my gang, becoming one of the biggest high-ranking mafioso, yet in the story, I'm just some low-level goon.

The missions being this linear and simple means that they are only reliant on combat and driving, which is all you do, and as I said, combat and driving in this game are terrible. Driving is so simple and awful, with zero depth to it. Like, this is one of the worst in this genre. Even Saints Row 1 feels better to drive than this.

I wonder if the reason for the way these missions are is because of the premise and the setting. You, the player, can't be the leader in the story in the way you are in the empire-building aspect, because the story is supposed to be a side-story where you are supposed to be a no-name extra spectator to the movie's story. The game recreates the scenes from the movie in such hillarious fashion. Remember Abe Vigoda's end in the movie, where he pleads to Tom to let him live, but eventually accepts his death and goes into the car? Well, it turns out that a minute after that, Abe Vigoda runs away, leading to an insane Scarface-like gunfight and chase to kill him. It is so funny that I actually laughed out loud. There are so many hilarious added "backstory" to the movie's plot. The recreated movie's scenes are somber and quiet, but the moment that movie scene is over, it goes full Rambo. All those off-screen stuff in the movie? Apparently, you were the one who was behind all that shit. You do the baptism of fire assassinations in the movie... singlehandedly. Literally every kill shown in the movie.

I think the game should have been set in the 1910s or 20s, so that it stays out of the movie's plot. All this empire-building and gang fights make more sense as a prequel where Corleone's family was on the rise to take over New York. There were a lot of implied violence in Corleone's rise, and that would have made more sense to gamify it than gamify the movie's plot. That also lends creative liberty to build the player character, making him a lot more important in the narrative and missions, not awkwardly put in the movie's plot.

For what the game is, it is only fun when you ignore the missions and do empire-building and fight the rivals on your own, but even then, it is still lackluster. When you get into the missions, it becomes one of the shittiest and clunkiest shooters and racers ever. Why not build around the gang sandbox the game excels at and make that the whole game? Why add these terrible missions? I hope some other game would actually expand on this concept and make a full game, something like the strategy of Omerta but with the gameplay of Hitman.

Initially, I didn’t understand how the more arcade third-person shooter approach could work with the fixed camera tank controls. I already found DC1’s moment-to-moment gameplay to be weak because RE’s control scheme is not meant for strong moment-to-moment gameplay. DC2 is going to double down on that?

Then I played the first stages, and it turns out it works. It works quite well that it feels like DC2 kind of created a new type of TPS genre. While the moveset is still lacking, it focuses on fast decision-making, but rather than the player being defensive and running away in the cramped hallways as in DC1, DC2 centers on the player being aggressive in the open area. Quick positioning, firing, stun the dinosaurs, crowd control, melee, move, and climb up and climb down between vertical floors… which is very much like what RE4 did, except in the fixed camera angles. I have heard that Dino Crisis 2 was Resident Evil 4 of DC, and it turned out to be accurate. In addition, there is a shop system where you can buy weapons and tools by using the points earned from a combo meter like DMC, so you are encouraged to kill the dinosaurs this time.

But for all the changes made to the gameplay, the core gameplay isn’t meant to be last as an arcade action game. It was very fun initially, but once I played for the first ten minutes, it dawned to me that this is all the game is going to be. By then, you have already mastered all the depth the game has to offer. It doesn’t really have systems. The gameplay is extremely controlled with a few ways of interacting, and offers so few tools.

Dino Crisis 2 reminds me of Shadows of the Damned, which I found to share the same problem as this game. That game is basically Resident Evil 4 if it only had shooting, which might not sound like the worst thing on the surface. Although RE4 is praised for the gameplay loop, if you judge its surface shooting and combat system, it is barebone. Kind of clunky, tanky, and slow. What made the combat fun was all the elements complementing that shooting: the inventory management, the stingy ammo and resources, enemy variety, the level design, escorting Ahsley, diverse weapons, crowd control, and tactical choices. You are constantly shifting between short-range and long-range combat situations. SOTD feels like RE4 shooting and nothing else I mentioned.

The same applies Dino Crisis 2. You have plentiful ammo, plentiful money, and no inventory, going through a series of repetitive combat stages. There is really no thought to anything but to shoot. This works if it is like DMC, where the core combat has a shit ton of depth, but not if the combat is still that of RE1, but faster. The game gets stale really fast. There is really no strategic consideration involved here. Remember, this isn’t the criticism that the game is no longer a survival horror—it’s that as an action game, you need more than this.

The same with the story as well. The premise is killer. The US continued the energy experiment, only for the accident to happen again. The genius is that rather than teleporting the dinosaurs into our time, it’s that the entire lab and the town teleported back to the prehistoric time. When we go back there to rescue, the human settlement is empty because it’s been over a decade in the survivors’ point of view. All the while, not only the dinosaurs that attack the rescue team, but also the mysterious human survivors who begin attacking them.

The actual story coming from this premise is… eh. Considering the game was directed by Shu Takumi of Ace Attorney and written by Noboru Sugimura, I was expecting a better one. The lore and timeline become incomprehensible; meanwhile, the actual story is too simple. Nothing like RE2’s emotional anchoring or heart. Regina, in particular, volunteers for this dino crisis again for… reasons. She really is a nothing character. I don’t know why she even joined this mission after all the traumatizing events of DC1. The twist sounds cool, but once you think about it for a moment, it becomes, wait, why did this work this way? Why did that thing happen then? If it’s gonna be a schlock, I preferred them to go full nuts like RE4. Make it a self-aware camp.

I do not mind much about taking a more actionized direction with Dino Crisis, but they could have done way more with it than this. A more deliberate level design, varied set-pieces, and a robust moveset. It isn’t a bad game for what it is, but I found myself bored halfway through the game.

Quake is the IP where id can dump whatever they wanted at the time. Quake is notable because the games are so loosely connected, storywise and designwise. Not that id particularly cared for continuity, but their IPs tend to be more connected with the core identity than Quake. If there is a core identity, it's randomness, from the very beginning.

Quake 1 wasn't a game the creators were happy with due to how many turns its development took and how it strayed away from the initial concept. Initially began as John Romero's idea to make a melee-focused RPG, the infant 3D technology was taking a toll on the team, so they eventually made a decision to turn it into a pesudo-Doom sequel because it would be faster and less risky to develop. This result was one of the motives for John Romero to leave id and pursue his original concept via Daikatana.

The chaotic development with multiple iterations resulted in the abstract and inconsistent design, with the composition of the episodes was just randomly created maps with different themes strung together with the "teleportation". However, this unintended inconsistency, in turn, made it a unique experience with an interesting blend of sci-fi, steampunk, medieval, and Lovecraftian elements. id took all these radically different ideas and made them work in one game.

id, however, wasn't satisfied with how random Quake 1 was, which is why Quake 2 was the way it was with more narrative-driven and coherent. If Quake 1 was a glimpse inside id's sick soul, Quake 2 is an example of its safe professionalism. Quake 2 was the exact execution of what they wanted. id consciously tried to break away from Quake 1's abstract direction and designed an environment that had some authenticity and purpose in line with the main plotline.

The only random thing about it is that it wasn't even supposed to be called "Quake 2". It was supposed to be a new IP called "WOR", but because of the legal concerns, they decided to use the Quake title despite having no connection with Quake 1... and the long tradition of doing whatever they want with this IP began.

John Carmack was fascinated by the online gameplay of Quake 1 and 2, so they decided to extrude it into a full game with Quake 3. It didn't have a singleplayer or a story. Quake 4 was narratively a sequel to Quake 2, but it wasn't made by id and was more inspired by the contemporary shooters like Halo and Call of Duty. With Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, it was a sequel to the multiplayer game, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory--not even the same IP. It was made because John Carmack wanted to experiment with the megatexture, so the result is a sci-fi Battlefield imitator that uses the name and universe of Quake.

Really, the only commonality that binds all these games is the title "Quake". It is one of the reasons why rebooting Quake in the vein of Wolfenstein: The New Order and Doom 2016 is an impossible task because... reboot which game? Quake 1 with Ranger and the Lovecraftian mythos? Quake 2/4 with the more hubworld-style military sci-fi Strogg storyline? Quake Wars? The only quasi-reboot we had was Quake Champions, which is Quake 3. However, is it even possible for these games to have any semblance of continuity, or is that even a desirable change?