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jazzfishSimilar games; both third-person adventure with more emphasis on exploration and puzzle-solving than on combat. (Sphinx is designed by Eurocom and published by THQ; BG&E is both designed and published by Ubisoft, if you care.) In both the secondary cast is largely composed of anthropomorphs; in both you turn out to be The One Of Whom The Prophecies Speak, Mother****er; both have a Cool Gimmick that works pretty well (Sphinx has, well, the Mummy, and BG&E has Jade's camera). So why does Sphinx feel incredibly rough around the edges, while BG&E was smooth sailing almost all the way?
Good points about Sphinx: the control system was nigh-perfect (the camera was occasionally a problem, but very rarely; and when you control a secondary creature you can no longer move the camera at all). The combat was pretty clean, too: Sphinx has well-defined combos, whereas BG&E's Jade does random cool stuff with her staff when you press the A button and hold a direction, reducing fights to "Look at that cool thing! Hope it did some damage!" The world is gorgeous, and the pacing is good. The Mummy is so brilliant he deserves his own paragraph, sic:
For part of the game you get to control a mummy. His combat skills are nonexistent, but that doesn't really matter since he's effectively immortal. This lends itself to some clever problem-solving. For instance, there might be a wooden grate barring your way, or maybe you need to fit through a really tight space. Normal adventure games might make you carry a torch to the grating, or pry the space open. As the Mummy, though, you simply set yourself on fire or get squashed flat as a piece of paper, and voila! The Mummy sections of the game are really, really cool puzzles, and the Mummy himself is wonderfully animated. He doesn't speak, but he makes expressive noises, and even occasionally has as much facial expression as you can get under fifty feet of bandages.
The rest of Sphinx. . . eh. Gameplay is good, no question: I had fun playing, and that's ultimately what matters. But the plot was hackneyed (gotta beat the evil God and save the world) and had a few threads that got dropped in the middle of the story, with no explanation. (I was really looking forward to beating the crap out of Horus, my fellow student / rival / traitorous enemy, the next time I saw him. No such luck. There's also no voice-acting, which makes a surprising difference. (No voice acting beats bad voice acting, but even "okay" speech would have added so much to the game.) You get granted abilities, use them once or twice, and then forget they ever existed. Random side-quests that start out sounding really cool ("Bring me a specimen of every creature you come across!") devolve into "wander around and get enough money to buy the super-expensive one-of-a-kind beastie from the shopkeeper so you can finish." The fights are pretty good, too. . . but the final boss is just pathetic. I can see where they tried to make him a timing puzzle as well as a boss . . . but it was just too little. I felt gypped at its ease. Overall, there are big chunks that feel either incredibly rushed, or just amateurish. And the end doesn't so much shout "Sequel hook!" as jump up and down waving a brightly-colored flag with the words "PLEASE PLAY THE NEXT GAME" embroidered on it in hot pink.
Still, I look forward to the sequel. I imagine that given a second chance these [gender-neutral] guys can make an all-around good game out of these two characters.
And then there's BG&E. It's gorgeous. It's got nifty minigames (hovercraft races! and a REALLY FRICKIN' HARD game that's a cross between air hockey and pool). It's got well-developed characters and a plot that ties up loose ends while leaving questions open at the end. The controls rock, except for the aforementioned combat-is-button-mashing problem. There's combat, there's puzzle-solving, there's wander-around-and-look-at-the-cool-stuff, there's even stealth sections. I adored this game, almost without reservation. Even the final boss-fight had sections of pure beat-things-up plus bits of puzzle-solving, which is always neat. (And it was tough, but not so tough as to be bloody impossible.)
Let's do a comparison. In both games, there's a side-quest involving tracking down every creature in the game. Sphinx gives you one reward as soon as you get your first creature (it's required to progress in the game, actually), and some Monster Hunter medals as you progress. These are of no use in the game; they're just coolness badges. BG&E, on the other hand, gives you cash for each critter you photograph, plus a pearl for every eight critters. (Pearls are sort of BG&E's generic quest rewards. They can be traded for hovercraft or spaceship upgrades.) In addition, if you manage to get all the critters (not insanely hard; unphotographed critters show up on your map), you get to go back and view all your photographs. Sphinx's sidequests are just that; BG&E's actually give you something useful, give you some sort of motivation beyond sheer bloody-mindedness. (Which I have in spades.)
Both games were fun and Not A Waste Of My Time, but BG&E is by far the better. The little things count, is probably the moral here.
Good points about Sphinx: the control system was nigh-perfect (the camera was occasionally a problem, but very rarely; and when you control a secondary creature you can no longer move the camera at all). The combat was pretty clean, too: Sphinx has well-defined combos, whereas BG&E's Jade does random cool stuff with her staff when you press the A button and hold a direction, reducing fights to "Look at that cool thing! Hope it did some damage!" The world is gorgeous, and the pacing is good. The Mummy is so brilliant he deserves his own paragraph, sic:
For part of the game you get to control a mummy. His combat skills are nonexistent, but that doesn't really matter since he's effectively immortal. This lends itself to some clever problem-solving. For instance, there might be a wooden grate barring your way, or maybe you need to fit through a really tight space. Normal adventure games might make you carry a torch to the grating, or pry the space open. As the Mummy, though, you simply set yourself on fire or get squashed flat as a piece of paper, and voila! The Mummy sections of the game are really, really cool puzzles, and the Mummy himself is wonderfully animated. He doesn't speak, but he makes expressive noises, and even occasionally has as much facial expression as you can get under fifty feet of bandages.
The rest of Sphinx. . . eh. Gameplay is good, no question: I had fun playing, and that's ultimately what matters. But the plot was hackneyed (gotta beat the evil God and save the world) and had a few threads that got dropped in the middle of the story, with no explanation. (I was really looking forward to beating the crap out of Horus, my fellow student / rival / traitorous enemy, the next time I saw him. No such luck. There's also no voice-acting, which makes a surprising difference. (No voice acting beats bad voice acting, but even "okay" speech would have added so much to the game.) You get granted abilities, use them once or twice, and then forget they ever existed. Random side-quests that start out sounding really cool ("Bring me a specimen of every creature you come across!") devolve into "wander around and get enough money to buy the super-expensive one-of-a-kind beastie from the shopkeeper so you can finish." The fights are pretty good, too. . . but the final boss is just pathetic. I can see where they tried to make him a timing puzzle as well as a boss . . . but it was just too little. I felt gypped at its ease. Overall, there are big chunks that feel either incredibly rushed, or just amateurish. And the end doesn't so much shout "Sequel hook!" as jump up and down waving a brightly-colored flag with the words "PLEASE PLAY THE NEXT GAME" embroidered on it in hot pink.
Still, I look forward to the sequel. I imagine that given a second chance these [gender-neutral] guys can make an all-around good game out of these two characters.
And then there's BG&E. It's gorgeous. It's got nifty minigames (hovercraft races! and a REALLY FRICKIN' HARD game that's a cross between air hockey and pool). It's got well-developed characters and a plot that ties up loose ends while leaving questions open at the end. The controls rock, except for the aforementioned combat-is-button-mashing problem. There's combat, there's puzzle-solving, there's wander-around-and-look-at-the-cool-stuff, there's even stealth sections. I adored this game, almost without reservation. Even the final boss-fight had sections of pure beat-things-up plus bits of puzzle-solving, which is always neat. (And it was tough, but not so tough as to be bloody impossible.)
Let's do a comparison. In both games, there's a side-quest involving tracking down every creature in the game. Sphinx gives you one reward as soon as you get your first creature (it's required to progress in the game, actually), and some Monster Hunter medals as you progress. These are of no use in the game; they're just coolness badges. BG&E, on the other hand, gives you cash for each critter you photograph, plus a pearl for every eight critters. (Pearls are sort of BG&E's generic quest rewards. They can be traded for hovercraft or spaceship upgrades.) In addition, if you manage to get all the critters (not insanely hard; unphotographed critters show up on your map), you get to go back and view all your photographs. Sphinx's sidequests are just that; BG&E's actually give you something useful, give you some sort of motivation beyond sheer bloody-mindedness. (Which I have in spades.)
Both games were fun and Not A Waste Of My Time, but BG&E is by far the better. The little things count, is probably the moral here.