Doubleplusgood, doubleplusevil
Posted by Carrie on November 10, 2008 | Permalink
You may not remember Beyond Good and Evil. It’s a much-underrated last gen action-adventure game where you play Jade, a lady with myriad skills in sneaking and photograph taking. I was just re-watching the teaser trailer for Beyond Good and Evil 2. There’s no word yet on when the actual game may be out, but in the interim I’ve been thinking why Beyond Good and Evil was such a great game.
For starters, Jade is awesome. She looks like a greener version of Natalie Imbruglia from the video for Torn and, unusually for a female lead, wears all the clothes you would expect a normal human to wear. The result is that, unlike with Soul Calibur IV, you can read an article about it in public without looking like some kind of fetishistic lady-ogler. Unlike some of her more badly-packed contemporaries there is also a pleasing lack of jiggling which leaves you free to concentrate on the game, rather than wincing at the long-term sagging problems she’s creating for herself. Her fighting skills are largely stealth-based. There’s a large amount of incapacitating baddies by firing discs at gas canisters strapped to their backs, firing them into the air and leaving them waving their limbs around like little upturned turtles, which makes a refreshing change from shooting people in the head.
Another great feature of Beyond Good and Evil is the way incorporates Jade’s photography. Lots of games now seem to have camera missions tacked on – like the 50 Photo Ops in San Andreas which add hours to the game as you traipse round the map looking for little ‘photograph this building’ icons. The photography sections of Beyond Good and Evil were much more integral to the game. From the start of the game Jade is commissioned to takes photos of the various animals in the game for the Science Centre. And they really meant all animals, from the birds perching on Uncle Pey’j’s lighthouse at the beginning to the giant hideous monsters that you fight as the game progresses. I particularly like the rush to take photos of the huge boss monsters in the few seconds after they appear and before they attack which results in some great photos of monsters rushing towards you, gigantic teeth first. I like to pretend that Jade is one of those Victorian explorers muttering “You’re a magnificent beast – it’s a shame I have to kill you”.
And then there’s the brevity. Yes, it’s a short game. This tends to be something that people bring up as a criticism against it, but I’ve always thought it was one of its strengths. The great thing about having a short game is that you don’t have to suffer through time-fillers that have been shoe-horned in at the last minute to bulk the game out. It also has the advantage that, like Portal, you can play it in a weekend. When you get that warm glow of achievement when you finish it, it isn’t slightly soured by the realisation that you’ve sunk tens or hundred of hours of your life into it and are now a complete shut-in with nothing else to fill your days. Having said that, I hope that Beyond Good and Evil 2 has a bit more bulk to it. Having an excellent game that isn’t filled up with needless bits of time-wasting is good. Having an excellent game that has many hours of gameplay in it is even better.
May 16th, 2009 at 4:15 am
[...] at it – running! jumping! being awesome!. It may well be even better than the first BGAE which, as I’ve mentioned before, would make it a very good game [...]