Forum Overview :: Deleted Posts :: Viewtiful Joe

[quote name="Forensic"]I bought this game in a kind of vampiric entertainmentlust frenzy, and once sanity kicked back in I was afraid I was soon going to wish I'd only rented it. Luckily, it turned out to be well worth the full price. It's a fairly standard platformer on the surface. While Joe is fighting off his girlfriend Silvia's attempts to jump his bones in the movie theater, they both get sucked in to the film and Joe becomes a superhero to rescue her. It steals enough from other games to make it original. First, there's a healthy dose of the original Mega Man in here. In an era where most games let you just cruise right through to the end, this one was kicking my ass by the second level. Bosses are almost completely impossible until you can react to their patterns with perfect timing. This would be maddeningly frustrating, but Capcom also yoinked a key game mechanic from Tony Hawk Pro Skater. The whole gimmick for the thing is that you can press the shoulder buttons and the right joystick to go into bullet time, mach speed, or zoom-in modes. Bullet time makes your individual punches more powerful, mach speed lets you zoom around the screen attacking multiple targets at once and setting them on fire once you get going, and zoom-in unlocks a bunch of show-offy moves that can be used in conjunction with the other two. The game makes you use all of these, often in rapid succession to get past areas that once seemed completely impossible. Once you master that level, it presents you with something an order of magnitude more challenging, until by the end you're satisfyingly (if embarassingly) skilled at jamming on all the shoulder buttons and racking up thousand-point combos. Finally, it lifts a little from Devil May Cry, earning you points based on how badass you are when you defeat enemies and letting you buy upgrades and new moves between levels. Some of these moves add on another level of complexity that you can incorporate into your fighting style. Downsides: Sewer level. Blah. Also, there's not a big variety of enemies, so the stratagies for advancing don't change much. I would have liked to see more of the weird uses of the special abilities that the first few levels present. A few other nice touches: It seems like every game out there is a genre knockoff of the same-old-same-old, even if the mechanics are solid. Joe is one of the few that isn't afraid to be weird on its own terms, reminding me a little of the original Jet Grind Radio. The whole game has a weirdly subversive quality to it without trying to shove it's 3DGY in your face. It's all brightly cartoon colored, but the backgrounds have porn ad tucked away, and the peons sneer "Go to hell," once you start listening to what they're mumbling. Also, when you beat the game on normal difficulty, you unlock a mode that lets you play as Silvia, making the opening cutscene an Olson Twin-esque lesbian makout session. Nice. This game continues a two-game console streak, started by Knights of the Old Republic, of games that actually have quality voice acting and not completely awful humor. Cutscenes are mercifully skippable, since you're going to be dying a lot, but they're good enough that I still watch them voluntarily. Possibly a pro and a con: Beating the game also unlocks a music video with a song apparenly recorded just for the game. The game's characters stand in for the musicians. Thing is, it's J-rock.[/quote]