Vanquish
Programmed to kill
Review If Vanquish had been made around 150 years ago, Shinji Mikami would have had to commit seppuku, the Japanese ritual of suicide by disembowelment.
All right, Mr. big shot
Like many artists and scholars during Japan's Bakamatsu period, the legendary producer of Resident Evil, God Hand and Bayonetta would have sliced open his stomach with a samurai sword for contravening bansha no goku, the prohibition of studying Western 'barbarian' arts and sciences. Fortunately for Mikami-san - and for videogame players the world over – those times are long past. But an element of truth supports the allegory.
The Western videogame market long since overtook Japan's domestic market, forcing Japanese developers to abandon their own sakoku, or isolationist policy, to make games that appeal to Western tastes. Mikami-san has been at the forefront of this shift, increasingly influenced by Western themes and mechanics. And Vanquish, the last title in Platinum Games' four-game deal with Sega, marks his most occidental game to date.
That's not to say Vanquish entirely disowns its heritage. Far from it. As much a riposte to Western shooters as it is love letter, Vanquish might seem the love child of Halo and Gears of War, but its blistering pace and esoteric sensibilities owe as much to Treasure and Konami as they do Bungie or Epic.
The thin blue line
Just like Bayonetta, Mikami-san paints Vanquish with broad strokes from an eclectic gaming palette. Scratch its canvas and you'll uncover inspirations as diverse as Metal Gear Solid, Bangai-O, Zone of the Enders and R-Type. Even Splinter Cell gets a look in, with a plot ripped from the pages of Clancy and warped to the near-future.
Next page: Suit and cable ties
COMMENTS
Thermal management is old hat...
... for BattleMech pilots.
Um
"A formidable, ground breaking title that will likely be misunderstood by all but the most open-minded of gamers." Basically saying "this game is amazing and anyone who disagrees is close-minded" is not a promising start to a review.
excellent answer
thanks.
this does make sense, i'm a gamer myself but FPS for me is more of a benchmark of how well your system is running the game. I didn't think that it mattered much in terms of how good it looked (obviously so long as it stays over 30) but I wondered...
So I just broke out Crysis (had to be done) while monitoring FPS (PC, natch).
Turns out I *can* actually see the difference, even past 60 it's noticeable.
Can we have a Crysis icon?
sorry
I just couldn't get past the idea that anyone might have to deliberately overheat their ARS. 10 out of 10 for keeping a straight face all the way through your review with that bombshell sitting there waiting to go off..
Framerates
It's a common misconception that we cannot see more than 24fps, generally speaking 24fps is where the mind begins to fill in the gaps and sees fluid motion rather then jerky frame to frame changes, but the eye can discern much more than that, some gamers even feel that 120fps is visible to them.
On the flip side it's also all down to the speed of movement being displayed, if say an arm is moving very slowly, you won't be able to see a difference between 30 or 60fps because the movement is so slow you can't see any huge jumps between frames. If it's slow enough 10fps may look the same as well!
It's also worth noting that games are different to film. With film the exposure time of the camera will lead to slight blurring between frames when there's fast motion. With games there isn't any blur like this (artificial motion blur in games doesn't make games look any smoother). With games it's just fixed frames of animation which is why more frames per second leads to a smoother image. Of course that's not to say film can't benefit from more fps as well, but for games it always makes things look smoother.
Plus there's the whole area of input lag where games running at 60fps feel much more responsive because they're updating the screen in half the time it takes a 30fps game to display a change. All in all, the general rule of thumb is more fps = better. :)
