It's been a long, long, time since
there has been a PC shooter that tried to take the
frenetic pace of anime combat and bring it into a game.
In the beginning, there was Shogo: Mobile Armor
Division and since then there has been nothing worth
speaking of for a long, long time.
Then came 1st Century
After: Tsunami 2265. It has still been a long, long
time since there has been a PC shooter like Shogo...
Ugh. Nothing bothers me more than when a developer will
make a game that looks like it has potential and falls
on its face. This is annoying for a multitude of
reasons.
First off, it gets your hopes up and
then dashes them to pieces. Nothing's worse than
plunking down your hard earned cash only to find that
you've been duped by the screenshot department again.
(That's why we're here folks...we take the hit for you.)
Second, the next time some company
gets the idea to do a game like that, the marketing
people will go, "Well, hey, you got any sales figures on
similar games?" And then the developers will go, "When
did this piece of crap come out? 300 copies sold?!" and
then that's the end of that project. Then the company
decides to remake Counter-Strike and call it "Al Qaeda
Invasion", and hence you end up going to E3 and seeing
10 versions of basically the same game.
Third, it pisses me off because I want
to make games. I can make better games than what people
pass off as a finished product. Why doesn't anyone let
me take a whack at it? Anyway, that's basically what
Tsunami is like. Take Macross, Neon Genesis Evangelion,
Shogo, and throw them all in a blender. Wait, who threw
Oni in there? Awww no, now you've ruined the
whole damn thing!
So, how 'bout them PC 3rd person
shooters? Aren't they fantastic? Anyone remember that
last good one the came out? You know that one with
the...oh who am I kidding. 3rd person shooters suck. I
wouldn't be surprised actually if these people just
wrote some half-assed mod for Oni and tried to ship it
as their own game. The main female character is a dead
ringer for the main character from Oni. Even the font
for the text is the same...just a different color. So
not only are you getting the pain of playing through a
3rd person shooter, you're having the additional pain of
playing through a rehash of one that has already been
given the public litmus test and has come up "bad".
Sounds like how I'd like to spend my hard earned $40
plus shipping and tax.
If you're still interested, here's the
plot. Sometime in the future (I don't remember the exact
details, because the intro movie consisted of scrolling
a camera across the in-game water effects. Absolutely
nausea inducing. I couldn't look directly at the
screen.) some guy named Shin Balhe becomes shogun of the
world. The Earth has run out of energy, and under Shin
Balhe's reign, some scientists find some casket which
gives off a vast amount of energy that they have dubbed
"E.L.E.N.A".
Then Shin Balhe dies. It was very,
very sad. I almost hurled.
So the world plunges into chaos, yet
again. Some guy kills the Daimyo of some Sector or
another and that pisses off the main male character that
you can play as, Neon Shima, because his job was to make
sure that ninjas didn't go and kill the Daimyo. At the
same time, they steal "E.L.EN.A". The main female
character, Hiroko, is tasked with with getting Neon
Shima out of his prison in the Valley of the Wind or
something like that. Apparently Neon knows the way into
Sector 3's energy barrier, and will likely want some
form of revenge on his Daimyo's killer. And that's
pretty much it. You can play as either Neon or Hiroko
(I'm not actually sure if you can choose, I opted out of
this torture far, far before that point in the game
would have occurred.) and they each have their own
selection of mechs they use, and will also play parts of
the game outside of their vehicles, on foot, a la
Shogo...only in really lame 3rd person.
The game is psuedo-cel shaded, which
if you dig, might be cool for you, but to me it just
looks like everything is in regular, non-cel shaded
style with really thick lines that jump out every once
in a while. The mech designs look exactly like what
you'd get trying to fuse the Macross and Evangelion
Angel designs...a freaking mess. The red mech you start
with looks like Asuka's Eva combined with a Veritech in
Battroid mode...and a mosquito.
In addition to the lack of inspiring
art, the gameplay leaves much to be desired. I died
while jumping. Not jumping off boxes, not jumping off a
cliff, I jumped and pushed forward, landed and died.
Considering that your jump consists of you elevating to
about the height of your knees, I would have thought
this to be impossible. I also discovered that your
weapons to start have no ammo/energy cost. This meant
that I can run around the entire level while holding
down both fire buttons and have no repercussions. Hey,
look at me! I'm the walking fireworks show...of DEATH!
A.I. consists of your enemies running
straight at you, firing, sliding the the left and right
while firing. Ta da. A.I. also consists of enemies
standing behind corners that you can see, and letting
themselves get shot to death.
As far as audio goes, the in-game
music is pretty bad. I decided to shut it off and run
Winamp in the background to play my own tunes. I found
that a high octane shuffling of Imai Eriko's "Our
Relation", Okakita Ayu's "Saite", Liv's "Without You",
and Supercar's "Storywriter" kept me entertained enough
to give this game 3 levels before I put it out to
pasture. (Regrettably, "Tsunami" by the Soutern All
Stars didn't quite fit the mood for this game.) Oh, and
I was eating dinner, too.
The effects aren't much better. Your
lasers sound like they're out of the Transformers, and
your missiles don't make any sort of decent effects. The
one decent thing about the sound is that the opening
theme song actually sounds kind of tolerable. Not really
anything spectacular, but hey, I had to say something
nice, right?
So, feel my pain and prevent your own.
Tsunami 2265 is not a new version of Shogo. It's a new
version of Oni. If you really liked Oni, you'll probably
dig this. If, for you, like most of the populace, Oni
was a huge letdown, then you'll probably want to laugh
derisively whenever anyone mentions this game. I mean
think about it...it says something about the game when
the thing I enjoyed the most about it was playing my own
music in the background.
1.2
