Shadow Covenant

First of all, I got to say I’m pissed…

Yesterday I started playing Heavy Rain, and my PS3 decided to crash during one of the millions of cutscenes… Had to turn it off and on again (in the power outlet!), and when Heavy Rain started again, I’d lost ALL my progress in the game! I have to start all over again! The most boring game in the world, and I have to do it all over again! ARGH!!!!!

Good to know that Yahtzee agrees with me on the game though… But remember, you heard it here first! 🙂

Thankfully, I picked up my collector’s edition of God of War 3 aswell, so I’m going to play that before I go back to Heavy Rain…

Now for my rant: localization…

Ok, I get it, localization makes the games more accessible to the audience and that (supposedly) translates to higher sales and more $$$…

But do they have to do such a poor work on the localization?!

Number 1: my God of War 3 Collector’s Edition is more expensive, and it is for collector’s… So why do they spoil the cover (which had a nice relief image in golden ink that shines wonderfully) with a stupid logo saying “Game In Portuguese”?!?! I don’t care! Specially, I don’t care enough for it to be in the front of the game… No, it’s not a sticker (that could be placed outside the protective plastic), it’s part of the damn cover! Can’t be removed and it looks awfull (it’s big and has the portuguese flag colors, green and red, which look horrific with the gastly scene in the background!). There’s 2000 warnign signs in the back of the game box, along with full portuguese text, why couldn’t they put that info (if it was important enough…) on the back! Thank you so fucking much, Sony Portugal, for devaluating my game…

Number 2: I understand “big names” are almost mandatory for voice acting, but was the best it could be done was to cast Ricardo Carriço as Kratos?!?! I don’t have anything against the actor, to be honest, he’s been involved in interesting projects in the past and has always been a strong supporter of gaming in Portugal, but casting him as Kratos is just wrong!

Kratos is an hyper-violent sociopath that speaks like he has had a cheese grater passed through his throat at a young age… Everything he says is an extension of that, and that’s why he is believable when he says he wants to kill Zeus… I wouldn’t doubt anyone that spoke like that!

Then we have Ricardo Carriço, which just tries to mimic the general style of the voice and fails miserably, because he doesn’t sound like that ever! You notice his voice failing at times because of the exertion of trying to speak violentely…

I know our country is small and all, but in approximately 2 million portuguese of the right age and sex, they couldn’t find a closer match?!

Thankfully, the game has the option for english voice, which makes it good again! Yay!

In my view, voice localization is only worth the effort if the game doesn’t loose character and intensity with it… Specially in a country like Portugal, in which we don’t dub anything, so we are used to listening to movies and content in general to be in English with portuguese subtitles… If you’re going to do it wrong, don’t do it at all!

From a “review” standpoint, I’ve played about 3 hours of GoW3, and I must say that it’s the same as GoW1 and GoW2… So if you liked that, you’ll like this one… The game doesn’t feel stale at all, and it’s great fun (the ending of the first boss battle is awesome, with the first person view and all).

The only complaint I have (and it’s not really a complaint, it’s more a statement of fact) is that I don’t see a big difference graphic-wise from GotW2 to GotW3… Sure, if has more polygons, and GotW2 was probably the most beautiful PS2 game made, but I was kind of expecting something more… next-gen… It still looks beautiful, but I can’t help the feeling that the much-vaunted next-gen isn’t really next gen, it’s “extended gen”… It’s “current-gen” on HD (when the games support it, which GotW3 does).

The storyline is the usual GotW fare, which means starting mega-powerful, losing powers, complain at the Gods, getting powers, more threatning everything that moves (I swear I’ll see Kratos starting to threaten rocks for just being there!) and I imagine a climatic ending…

Anyway, time for numbers:

God of War 3

• Gameplay: 10/10
• Story: 7/10
• Graphics: 7/10
• Sound: 9/10
• Brutallity and Violence: 10/10
• Overall: 9/10

It’s definately a must have on the PS3, on par with Uncharted 2…