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May 3, 2006 - More video games -- Blazing Angels

In the true spirit of procrastination, I'm writing up an entry on a video game at 1:30 AM on a Tuesday night, instead of sleeping. And I thought I left that back in college. Apparently not. Anyhow, on to the good stuff:

My latest video game is 'Blazing Angels: Squadrons of World War II', for the 360. This seems to be a pretty low-key release; I didn't even know it existed until Brad walked through the door with it a month or two ago. He played it on and off while I was engrossed in Oblivion. It looked fun enough, sure, but dangit, I had a world to save, and I couldn't be bothered to do anything else until I was quite done. Well, I conquered the last parts of Oblivion over the weekend, so I dove into Blazing Angels. I was pleasantly surprised.

Blazing Angels is a very arcade-feeling flight combat game, loosely set in World War II. This is not "flight simulation", where every detail of flying a plane is crucial to your success. This is not Call of Duty, with ultra-realistic warfare and a somber tone. This really does feel like a game you'd encounter at an arcade; it's easy to pick up, fairly intuitive, and fun to play but tough to master. Initially all you can do (for single-player, anyhow) is play through the campaign, a series of 18 missions that progress chronologically through World War II. Much liberty is taken with the historical accuracy, and the game chooses to throw you into some highly made-up situations (flying through narrow Nowegian fjords to bomb a nuclear plant comes to mind), but in the end, you pretty much single-handedly win the war. Ah, American gaming. You save London, fly reconnaissance in north Africa, sink the Japanese Pacific fleet, protect Pearl Harbor, liberate Paris, and help capture Berlin, so you're never hurting for new scenery.

Speaking of scenery, the game looks amazing. You'll be hundreds of feet in the air, in the middle of fifty planes -- all of which are shooting at each other, mind you -- with hills, forests, cities, and water all around you being drawn for miles, and the game won't even miss a beat. Sinking ships bellow smoke and fire. Pieces fly off of the planes that you destroy and tumble downwards. Ground targets blow up and leave rubble behind. Accidentally shoot a couple buildings in Paris? They'll become smoking husks. When you speed up and dive, the game gets a very realistic blurring and shaking effect. Start shooting while you're going at top speed, and your field of vision narrows and focuses like you'd see in a movie. Neat visual effects like this make the game a joy to play; heck, just start flying around if you like.

While the visuals are great, the rest of the game lacks polish. There are typos everywhere. Misspellings and grammatical mistakes are all over. Written text doesn't match up to what's spoken in places. Each sentence of the speech loads from the disk, so sometimes you'll have a 20-second gap between sentences. The campaign selection menus are inconvenient, in that they don't show you how well you've done on a mission, or what the last one you completed was. I'm really anal about the typos and the grammar mistakes; it really just seems like taking two days to clean all that up would make the game so much more "professional" and take away the nagging feeling that you're playing some art student's final project.

Like the stuff I mentioned above, the sound comes in at two levels. There's the very good: the menu music is great, and fits the theme well, and the in-game music is superb. It sounds a little like a Star Wars movie, but that's okay; when I played the game with my own music on, I was noticeably less immersed in the game. And then there's the very bad: The voice acting. Almost constantly, there's some form of chatter on your "radio", accompanied by text at the top of the screen. This happens whenever you give an order, shoot or kill an enemy, or at random times throughout the missions. After the thousandth time hearing your hick wingman say "That one blowed up good", I guarantee you'll be cursing everything south of the Mason-Dixon line. And the voices of everyone else are equally terrible; the German, Japanese, French, and British voices have ridiculous accents that border on outright racism. Again though, if you turn them off, you'll find that the game just isn't the same.

On to actual gameplay. Like I said, it's arcade-style, and easy to learn. You have wingmen which you can command to attack a target, defend you, or repair you. The last one especially is the thing that makes the game easy, but without it, it would be nigh impossible. For the most part, it's pretty simple: you track the enemy (planes or ground targets) and shoot them until they blow up. But there are a surprising number of variants in the gameplay, so it's not always the same fly-and-shoot. You get to torpedo aircraft carriers, bomb German bunkers, blow things up with rockets, fly through tight spaces, fly reconnaissance in a sandstorm, and even take the 360-degree gunner seat on a B-52. There are kill-them-all missions, protect-your-buddies missions, and do-this-before-time-expires missions. Very rarely will you feel like you're just doing the same thing over and over again. This makes Blazing Angels very fun to play, if not terribly deep. Oh yeah, and there are several dozen different planes that you can fly, each of which behaves noticably differently in speed, firepower, handling, and more. Super fun.

And once you finish the main campaign, there's a handful of other modes to go through as well. There's a mini-campaign, which is basically one-dimensional shoot-em-all. There's the "Ace Duel", a one-on-one dogfight against a skilled computer opponent in the same model plane as you. And there's the Arcade mode, where you have a time limit and need to shoot down incoming waves of planes. Oh yeah, the Ace Duel and Arcade can be done with each individual plane (over thirty in all), and the game tracks what you've completed, which is a nice progress indicator. As a bonus, you get Xbox Live achievements for completing all of the above modes, for collecting all the planes, and some other things.

So basically, Blazing Angels is just a good time. It's definitely got its downsides; one decent proofreader could have improved the game immensely. But it's good fun and easy to pick up. Don't expect to be blown away by anything about it, though.

Thumbs up for Blazing Angels.

May 8, 2006 - Oops

A couple "oops"es to report. First, I let my picture-of-the-day get out of hand. Sorry about that; it's fixed now.

And the big oops: This past week, they were power-washing the outside of my apartment complex. I ended up having a small run-in with one of their tools, as you can see:

May 18, 2006 - Visitors!

I've been absent from here for a bit, but I have a good reason: Three very awesome people flew all the way to Seattle to visit Schneek and me! Emily, Kristi, and Meredith got up at 3am on a Saturday, and basically had a non-stop good time in Seattle until their all-too-soon departure Tuesday afternoon. A brief and incomplete summary of things we did include: