Coded Arms
The PSP finally gets its first FPS, but is this hack job DOA?
Published: July 12, 2005
I've just finished Coded Arms after what seems like a bazillion retries on one of the last bosses. I'm tired, a little edgy and just a bit underwhelmed, but what's really odd is this is pretty much how I felt after playing through the first section of the game and taking stock of things a good ten or so hours back.
For a first-person shooter -- especially a portable one -- it's certainly not bad, but we've seen so many incredible FPSes over the past couple years and hungrily adopted dual analog stick inputs as a fair replacement for the good ol' keyboard and mouse. So with a single analog nub, the PSP is ill equipped to handle a FPS the way most gamers have come to accept it.
The question is, should I take this as a throwback ot the days of Goldeneye when one analog stick and a couple or remapped buttons allowed me to basically get by with strafing and firing, or do I force the fact that Konami knew full well going into the development that this wouldn't be a very precise shooter?
It's a tough call, and one I don't make lightly. It's obvious Konami understood this basic fact from the beginning, effectively letting you remap nearly every button as you see fit and making sure that enemy movements weren't so fast that you were constantly hitting air while including a lock-on system that just just enough of a job of lazily attaching to enemies so as to keep things from getting too tough, but the problems here go beyond just the control scheme and basic five year-old FPS gameplay.
There's the matter of the story, one of the rise of a worldwide network for all computers and a program designed for military training called A.I.D.A. that went out of control during its beta phase and was supposedly shut down. Instead, it merely lay dormant, the artificial intelligence routines inside slowly becoming more corrupted and advancing light years beyond what the original programmers envisioned as the program spread across the worldwide network.
Around the same time A.I.D.A. was created, technology advanced to the point where humans could directly interface with machines, and, seeing it as the ultimate thrill, hackers have taken it upon themselves to use the errant mainframe as a test of mettle, diving in with out a backup of their minds to take on the AI programs in increasingly powerful numbers and attacks as they dive deeper into the core in an effort to reboot the hardware (or at least score themselves some rare and valuable items). If they die, they're turned into vegetables -- a body with no mind.
Or at least that was the general idea, the one pitched to us back when we were shown the game at an Editors' Day event here in San Francisco a week or so before the launch of the PSP. It was a decent idea, and Konami was awfully keen on embracing the whole idea of everything existing in the computer world.
Instead, though, upon starting the game up, you're treated to a few lines of text and little to actually suck you into the vaguely cyberpunk-ish threads the game hints at. There's more detail in the manual, actually, expanding on things to reveal that the system was designed as a training aid to bolster the ranks of experienced soldiers waging a secret war with aliens on a far-off world, and the fact that diving into the system after it had spread too far to be shut down externally was a crime, thus making the items inside that much more rare, and, thanks to an emerging underground economy, incredibly valuable.
Nor is there really an in-game explanation of why there are really only about a dozen or so types of enemies in three distinct categories: bugs, bots and soliders. The game identifies them in a round-about way, telling you which weapons you pick up will be effective against what enemies, but that's really about it. For those that would like to know, at the Editors' Day, it was explained to us that each of these programs was designed to test different military trainees' skills, and as you progress deeper into the core, you're encountering the older, more powerful, and more advanced versions of these original AI routines.
It's not that I need a reason for everything in every game, but in a game like this so ready to be stuffed to the gills with copious references to Phillip K. Dick or Neal Stevenson -- especially because of the slower pacing -- I feel like more time was spent on making it look pretty than giving it some substance, and it's a shame, because most doubted from the start that this would work as a pure action game.
For a first-person shooter -- especially a portable one -- it's certainly not bad, but we've seen so many incredible FPSes over the past couple years and hungrily adopted dual analog stick inputs as a fair replacement for the good ol' keyboard and mouse. So with a single analog nub, the PSP is ill equipped to handle a FPS the way most gamers have come to accept it.
The question is, should I take this as a throwback ot the days of Goldeneye when one analog stick and a couple or remapped buttons allowed me to basically get by with strafing and firing, or do I force the fact that Konami knew full well going into the development that this wouldn't be a very precise shooter?
It's a tough call, and one I don't make lightly. It's obvious Konami understood this basic fact from the beginning, effectively letting you remap nearly every button as you see fit and making sure that enemy movements weren't so fast that you were constantly hitting air while including a lock-on system that just just enough of a job of lazily attaching to enemies so as to keep things from getting too tough, but the problems here go beyond just the control scheme and basic five year-old FPS gameplay.
There's the matter of the story, one of the rise of a worldwide network for all computers and a program designed for military training called A.I.D.A. that went out of control during its beta phase and was supposedly shut down. Instead, it merely lay dormant, the artificial intelligence routines inside slowly becoming more corrupted and advancing light years beyond what the original programmers envisioned as the program spread across the worldwide network.
Around the same time A.I.D.A. was created, technology advanced to the point where humans could directly interface with machines, and, seeing it as the ultimate thrill, hackers have taken it upon themselves to use the errant mainframe as a test of mettle, diving in with out a backup of their minds to take on the AI programs in increasingly powerful numbers and attacks as they dive deeper into the core in an effort to reboot the hardware (or at least score themselves some rare and valuable items). If they die, they're turned into vegetables -- a body with no mind.
Or at least that was the general idea, the one pitched to us back when we were shown the game at an Editors' Day event here in San Francisco a week or so before the launch of the PSP. It was a decent idea, and Konami was awfully keen on embracing the whole idea of everything existing in the computer world.
Instead, though, upon starting the game up, you're treated to a few lines of text and little to actually suck you into the vaguely cyberpunk-ish threads the game hints at. There's more detail in the manual, actually, expanding on things to reveal that the system was designed as a training aid to bolster the ranks of experienced soldiers waging a secret war with aliens on a far-off world, and the fact that diving into the system after it had spread too far to be shut down externally was a crime, thus making the items inside that much more rare, and, thanks to an emerging underground economy, incredibly valuable.
Nor is there really an in-game explanation of why there are really only about a dozen or so types of enemies in three distinct categories: bugs, bots and soliders. The game identifies them in a round-about way, telling you which weapons you pick up will be effective against what enemies, but that's really about it. For those that would like to know, at the Editors' Day, it was explained to us that each of these programs was designed to test different military trainees' skills, and as you progress deeper into the core, you're encountering the older, more powerful, and more advanced versions of these original AI routines.
It's not that I need a reason for everything in every game, but in a game like this so ready to be stuffed to the gills with copious references to Phillip K. Dick or Neal Stevenson -- especially because of the slower pacing -- I feel like more time was spent on making it look pretty than giving it some substance, and it's a shame, because most doubted from the start that this would work as a pure action game.
