IvanF's Cut and Paste, No-Name, Nintendo Gamecube Reviews of Activision's Call of Duty: Finest Hour and X-Men Legends 2005...

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IvanF's Cut and Paste, No-Name, Nintendo Gamecube Reviews of
Activision's / Spark Unlimited's Call of Duty: Finest Hour
and Activision's / Raven Software's X-Men Legends 2004

I own a hell of a lot of Xbox games, and not nearly enough Nintendo Gamecube games for my own goddam good. Especially considering it's Nintendo that's having full backwards compatibility with their next system, while Microsoft is just leaving the Xbox to rot in the dust... And because of that fact alone? There are about five multiplatform games for the Xbox that I currently own that I just want to pick up and collect for the Gamecube as well...

These include Freedom Fighters (fun as hell game), Gladius (ditto), Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (surprisingly good co-op action), X-Men Legends (ditto on the multiplayer)...

To be honest, I didn't like the game much at all really. Compared to most Xbox first person shooters, the reticule aiming and ridiculous controls were all way off, the AI was dumbass as hell, and the game fucking gave me more blue screens of death than any Microsoft Windows version since goddam 9x. And I'm sure all of these "features" are much worse in the Gamecube version of the game, with the addition of even worse dual shock controls and goddam framerate issues, I'm sure...

... but sigh, my cousin with a GC and not an Xbox is desperate for a decent first person shooter. And while in my own opinion, Geist and the Timesplitters series are the best first person shooters out there for the Gamecube, I guess it really says something when that I can't think of a single, goddam "realistic" FPS on the GC better than goddam Call of Duty. And my cousin is only into the so-called GTA, "realistic" shit these days, so what is a pussy whipped pansy like me to do?...

"Call of Duty is by no means a bad game... but there's a reason why it was overshadowed so damn badly by Halo 2 during the holiday season, and I ain't just talking about the good ol' American hype factor...

Ironically, Call of Duty suffers from the reverse Halo PC syndrome... Now, I absolutely loved Halo on the Xbox itself. But on the PC, it somehow became one of the worst damn first person shooters I've ever played in my life... The game balance, the graphics (somehow), and especially the controls were all messed up to no end, completely ruining the harmony and flow that the Bungie game had on consoles...

Now, I won't really admit that I liked Call of Duty much on the PC. But at least on my cousin's rig, the game was definitely one of the better PC first person shooters to come in a long time... But on the Xbox? I swear that Activision pulled a Deus Ex 2, and just assumed that console FPS players are complete idiots or something. Because just like with Halo PC, something was definitely lost in translation, as Call of Duty: Finest Hour feels like a rushed and definitely dummed down version of its PC brethren...

Call of Duty definitely does some things right... I do enjoy the sound effects. They may not be as crystal clear as they were on the PC, but they sure beat the hell out of all WW2 first person shooters on the Xbox that I've seen... And I do appreciate the presentation of the game. Splitting the campaigns up between Stalingrad, Tunisia, and Germany ended up actually providing variety that most FPS don't provide... and for the most part? The FPS controls on the Xbox controller weren't bad. Now, sure it frustrated me to hell that thanks to all the "realistic" weapons, I had a horrible time trying to snipe off machine gunners with my pathetic M1 Garands and Kar98 rifles (when on the PC, sniping without a scope was so damn easy thanks to the mouse...). But besides the piss poor auto aiming in this game, and the occasional bad hit detection (I somehow seem to miss every single shot, when pelting a room with machine gun fire...), the game does definitely hold its own against its Xbox counterparts. The rifles are extremely fun to use against enemies in corridors, the grenades have a nice old skool effect to them, and the SMGs aren't so bad, as long as you use either the MP40 or Thompson (since those are the only two machine guns that get any ammo in the game)... besides, it's fun trying to actually hit someone at point blank range (with "try" being the key word) with the PPSH...

But for every good thing that Call of Duty: Finest Hour managed to accomplish, there sure as hell were a lot of cons as well... The graphics are only adequate. The gritty look can only go far in hiding low polygonal models and stiff animations... The framerate itself normally stays steady, but it does get jarring whenever it drops below the 20 fps mark... I already mentioned piss poor hit detection at times (or is that simply from WW2 weapon piss poor recoil?), but I suppose I should also add that machine gun fire can sometimes hit me around corners it seemed (and sorry for having no patience, but I just can never wait for those bastards to reload...)... There were also a ton of bugs in this game as well. The first stage alone locked up on me three times, and I think the game froze another four or something times in later stages, until it was finally all cached on the hard drive... I hated how rare checkpoints are, with no quick save ability whatsoever... And while the first person controls were good themselves, I must say that I absolutely hated every damn vehicle in this stupid damn game. The Jeep machine gunner stage was a total joke, feeling more like a dummed down 90's arcade game than an epic battle in North Africa... And the tank stages? Is it me, or does the damn tank handle as goddam awful as a... umm?... tank?...

... yeah, well... after getting used to the brilliant vehicle controls in the Halo series, I certainly didn't appreciate getting stuck on dozens of Russian walls as I could never drive damn straight with my goddam tank in Stalingrad...

Take for instance the first American mission (part 1) of the assault on Aachen or however you spell that German city... At first, I really liked how epic that episode felt, following behind Sherman tanks as they blew up machine gunner snipers left and right... but then the ugly problems starting rearing their fugly asses... It annoyed me to hell how that there wasn't a checkpoint throughout that entire mission. Especially at this one point, where I ran out of ammo for both my Thompson and BAR. So I thought, it shouldn't matter right? I could just go back and get one of those dozens of MP40's that I never picked up on the streets, right?... Wrong, it seems. I went back through the stage, only to find that every single damn MP40 or Kar98 had just magically disappeared from the map. And worse yet, my M12 artillery was destroyed while I was gone, causing me to start the entire damn stage over again... So the second time I played through that stage, I did it with the M1 Garand, knowing how it saves me ammo. Eventually, I got to the part where you enter the sewers... only to have the game refuse to let me enter the damn sewers for some odd reason... I tried for 10 minutes, and still I couldn't move onto the next stage. So I really had no fucking choice but to restart the entire stage yet again, with the third time eventually being the charm it seemed...

Call of Duty: Finest Hour was definitely not the finest hour for the series... The game definitely felt rushed, with so many bugs and glitches that it almost felt less polished than its PC version did before its patches... But it wasn't just the translation to the Xbox that annoyed the hell out of me. A lot of the core fundamentals of the series just drove me nuts as well... I hated how my own men couldn't even aim damn well enough to shoot at Germans standing right in front of their damn faces. Instead, their AI was so damn dumb, that they would throw grenades at themselves (and me), causing me to lose aim with that god-awful Saving Private Ryan, slow-mo effect that's completely overused in Call of Duty... My partners were so damn useless in this game, that I actually chose to shoot them myself, just so they wouldn't get in my way... Of course, without them as cannon fodder, I did end up having to redo a lot of stages thanks to unstoppable machine gunners. And thanks to all those repeated stages, I must admit that I really did get bored of all the scripted events in the game, from Stuka bombings, to even the M12 blowing up buildings for me (although that definitely was badass the first time around...)...

I really wanted to like Call of Duty for the Xbox... and in many ways, I did... I do love the weapons in this game. I do still love the WW2 epicness of the genre. And I do love the German deaths, with the sniping of their hats a nice throw-back to my Goldeneye and Perfect Dark playing days...

But the tank controls provided probably the most frustrating stages that I have ever played in a first person shooter. My stupid ass AI completely made the North African stages into a mindless chore. The complete lack of multiplayer off of Xbox Live (which I don't have, since I'm broadband impaired and damn cheap...) definitely hurts the replay value of this game. And dammit, even if I did hate the tank stages, the overall game still felt too damn short... Even when you add in all the times the game locked up on me, all three campaigns still only lasted me 6 or 7 hours. And that can't be good for business...

Now, Call of Duty: Finest Hour is a fine first person shooter in many respects, and is definitely better than any other WW2 FPS on the Xbox to date (since the Medal of Honor series really sucks...). But the game still can't garner my respect, simply from all the bugs, problems, and frustrations that plagued this rushed port of a translation from the very beginning...

... it was a battle for me, just to keep playing through this game it seemed...

... there be war in them trenches... although I did eventually see this whole game through...

Game Design - 7.0
Enjoyment Factor - 7.0
Overall (not an average) - 7.0

A lot of people would tell you that X-Men Legends is the best X-men game ever created. While obviously that doesn't mean much in the end, considering Marvel games have been pretty much pure shit for the past two decades, I would still have to disagree...

Compared to such classics as the Konami X-Men Arcade Game (and umm, that's about it), X-Men Legends just isn't that great. Activision has created a game that has piss poor hit detection, completely repetitive AI, cel-shaded graphics that somehow don't match the X-Men comic book world, and some of the most frustrating level designs ever devised by even a goddam supervillain...

But still, the thing is, I still have a soft spot in my heart for games such as this...

I'm a Nintendo / Maple Leafs / Toronto Raptors / Star Trek / X-Men fanboy at heart. Yeah, I'm one of those guys... And whenever it comes to any of those beloved topics of mine? I just seem to be so damn forgiving, no matter how goddam sucky my fucking Toronto Raptors may be...

X-Men Legends was a game I never completed, simply due to the fact that just falling off of one damn ledge could ruin all your progress in the entire goddam stage. The boss designs were anything but logical either, and most of the puzzles were fucked up as hell...

But dammit, it was still goddam good fun. The co-op mode for four people is something that I wish every game had in some fashion or another these days. And whether this is fanboyism or not, I can't get enough of the mutant powers in the game... They may not wow me nearly as much as they did back in the SNES arcade days. But they obviously still bring out the inner child in me, otherwise why would I give such a flawed game like X-Men Legends quite a decent score in the end?... besides motherfucking moneyhats, that is (I wish...)...

And what else but inner fanboyism, could make me want to buy the game yet again for the Nintendo Gamecube, just to share with my cheap-ass cousin?... even though the game is just sitting there on my shelf for the Xbox right now, gathering dust (as my review of the Xbox version below may state...)...

"There was one really memorable quote, that someone at university told me earlier this year...

He said there was only one thing and one thing alone that he needed to know, to truly know who I truly was:

Seriously, why the hell must Cyclops always suck so much ass? In the comics, he may be jakked beyond measure, yet his damn punches and kicks are weaker than Jubilee's it seems... And his optic blasts? Sure, occasionally they burrow through walls and sentinel torsos, but for the most part, Cyclops just gets owned by everyone. He's useless against Juggernaut, he gets bitchslapped by Magneto's shield all the time, and he even gets fucking womanized by Jean Grey, especially when she's going all Phoenix feminist on him... And for Christ's sakes, why the fuck did Cyclops have to suck so damn much in the movies? For crying out loud, he got wasted by Toad - by fucking Toad in the first movie! And he couldn't even beat his girlfriend in a one-on-one battle, let alone Lady Deathstrike early on... uggh... and the actor they chose for his part absolutely sucked ass at acting...

... sigh... and yet I still choose to elevate Cyclops as my favourite X-men of all time...

... and that's all my friend needed to know... to realize just why I fucking suck so damn much at university...

... which also does explain why I've definitely put up with my own fair share of god-awful X-men video games over the years... Starting from Wolverine's and the X-men's first games on the NES, I've played basically every single X-men game ever released. Some were decent, like Capcom's Children of the Atom and Marvel Superheroes arcades. Some were among the best games ever made, like that Konami 6-player X-men arcade game that I still wish they would just friggin' bring over to consoles (thank God for Mame then...)... but proportionally wise, there have been a hell of a lot of "Cyclopses" in the master mold of things, with god-awful X-men games like Next Generation and Adamantium Rage defining and defiling the holy X-men void...

X-men Legends is definitely a good game. And by X-men standards, it's definitely one of the best ever made... It may not be a great game. It may not be up to Hugh Jackman or even Captain Picard standards (despite the inclusion of Patrick Stewart's awesome voice), but it's definitely a game worthy of the X-men name...

Finally, I get a game where I can play pretty much any X-men character that I want to play... Sure, only a few of the X-men are decent to play as. Storm conquers all with her Catwoman lightning strikes, Iceman can freeze the entire screen of enemies to make the entire game easy, and Wolverine is literally unstoppable as long as you max out his healing factor... And even though none of the other characters are really any good to play, at least I finally get the chance to play them if I want to. Jubilee now boasts some nice cleavage after finally reaching the legal age to do so, Jean Grey may look absolutely awful in pictures but her telekinetic powers are neat in this game, Rogue has an awful voice but has a nifty flying move, and Gambit is just plain damn cool to be around. His kinetic charging is useless in this game, but hey - he's Gambit. He's badass personified...

X-men Legends has perhaps the best story ever told in an X-men game. Sure, that doesn't really say much, considering the competition it's up against, but at least that's saying something... Most of the plotline deals with the Brotherhood of Mutants, with Mystique somehow coming back to life a million times until you finally put the bitch down for good. But there are a ton of nice surprises for X-men fans all over the planet, from the Night of the Sentinels, to great battles with Juggernaut, to the inclusion of Magneto (naturally), and even some very nice touches with flashbacks to Wolverine's Weapon X project... The plotline wasn't entirely epic like many of the old skool cartoon episodes I watched were (yes, I even watched up to the Phalanx episode... and I even kinda liked it... that's how hardcore I was...), and it certainly can't match the caliber of either of the X-men movies. But really, the only weak point of the entire RPG campaign was the inclusion of Magma... I don't know whether she's a made-up character for this game or just an obscure one from the comic books that I don't know of, but besides her nice and very hot cleavage? She really was just annoying in the game (which sucked, considering you play her throughout the X-Mansion scenes)...

... and ah yes, I mentioned that this game was an RPG, didn't I? And how did that work out for the game?...

... RPG features are always a mixed bag of both good and bad in the end... On the plus side, I always manage to get addicted to RPGs, no matter how bad they are, and it happened yet again with X-men Legends. Leveling up Wolverine, Iceman, and yes, even Cyclops, became an obsession for me. I put all my points into strike and body, and waited for my mutant powers to max themselves out before really having fun with the X-men unleashed... but then again, the RPG formula really did make the game feel a bit too damn linear in the end, like most RPGs do. Even for a beat 'em-up, X-men Legends did kind of feel shallow. Beating up endless hordes of Morlocks (who somehow kept rising from the dead...) was not my idea of fun. And it really does seem to disrupt the game whenever a character does level up, considering a) the loading times to get to the level up screen, and b) the leveling up happens so damn often, considering you play as four characters on screen at once...

Presentation wise, I really have to say that X-men Legends is a mixed bag as well... On the plus side, the sound is simply incredible. Not all voices in the game are great (Gambit, Rogue, and yes, even Cyclops all suck ass...), but the key players (Professor X, Wolverine, and Iceman) are all done to really nice perfection. And I just love all the little sound effects that bring the comics to life, like the whirl of the Sentinels, or the hum of Magneto's powers... But then again, for every good thing that the game accomplishes in sound, it really just negates it all with the piss poor graphics in the game. At least the framerate was steady, and the colours on screen were plentiful, but... I respect that Activision went with cel-shaded characters, considering the game is based on a comic book, right?... But did they really have to make each damn character look a million times less detailed than their actual comic book selves?... Professor X has a blank head and mittens for hands. Rogue and Storm meanwhile, look like they're having bad hair days from the 80's... And WTF is up with Jean Grey? Even in her portrait picture, she looks like an ugly 50-year old whore... Maybe that has more to do with the new designs of the X-men in the comic books (I admit, I stopped reading the graphical novels around the time that Prime Sentinels came into the fold...). But still, at least it would've been nice if we players could just choose the uniforms we wanted to wear, instead of having to unlock the yellow Wolverine (or the actually decent looking Cyclops) only after beating the 15 to 20-hour game...

... yes, for an X-men game, X-men Legends (coming in over 15 hours of gametime) was pretty damn long. And with all the repetitiveness of an old skool beat 'em-up, the game did kinda get boring at times... There were a lot of frustrating parts as well. Some areas were just ridiculously hard (such as the infinitely respawning Morlocks, or the infinitely strong Sentinel glitch in the system...), and some parts were just idiotic in their design (dropping to our instantaneous deaths in fucking sewer water, by missing the damn hand rails, was not my idea of being an uncanny X-men...). And to be honest, the AI of your CPU partners in this game was just atrocious at best... If you tell them to use up health to save themselves, they end up using all your supplies for themselves. And if you tell them to remain defensive so that they won't die all the time, then the CPU pretty much does nothing, and it's just you against the entire army of muties and mutant haters out there in the world... Using the L button, you can call for help from your allies (and in the case of Storm, it does help out). But once they run out of mutant powers, they become useless again for the next five minutes of the game, making X-men Legends feel a hell of a lot more tedious and infuriating at times than it really should...

... the 6-player X-men arcade game was just a beat'em-up too though, right? And I loved that game to death, not just from nostalgia, and not just from my completely inexplicable obsession with Cyclops...

... but rather from the fact, that the arcade was fucking 6-players simultaneous...

I love co-op games. I always have, ever since the first Turtles arcade, and I think I always will love co-op... And X-men Legends truly delivers on the fun factor in that department as well, as the multiplayer campaign is simply pick up and play at its finest. I have four controllers at my house, and while I'm playing solo, all my brother or friend has to do to join in, is press start on another controller. And voila - we have a kickass party game going... Words cannot describe how much more fun a co-op session is than a single player campaign. Ganging up on Juggernaut from behind, or witnessing just how damn much Cyclops sucks against the Master Mold in two fold, is exactly the kind of shit that I wish every single friggin' game on the friggin' planet would just give to me these days... And even without co-op, this game has pretty decent multiplayer. It may not be Children of the Atom quality, but the skirmish mode does provide a few decent matches now and again. And the Danger Room scenarios (if you can collect them all, at least) offer a hell of a lot of replay value after the game is done. Because in them, at least Cyclops doesn't suck that damn bad...

... and he gets to bone Jean Grey, which besides her ugly mug in this game, is a good thing as far as I'm concerned...

My friend only needs to know one thing and one thing alone, to figure out what kind of man I am...

But I guess it really shows something as well, about both X-men Legends and I... that no matter how damn much he sucks in this game...

... well, thanks to four player co-op... thanks to a great X-men storyline... thanks to the RPG leveling-up... and thanks to one kickass voice by one kickass Captain Jean-Luc Picard...

Game Design - 7.5
Enjoyment Factor - 7.5
Overall (not an average) - 7.5