Working Title 04.14.10: Deadly Premonition is...AWESOME!

Posted by Jordan Williams on 05.14.2010

Many have asked for it, and now, it is here. Working Title delivers a review of Deadly Premonition, one of the oddest games 411's Jordan Williams has played in quite some time. How does it fair? Check out the full article to find out!

Welcome to the #1 Column to be back after a much needed hiatus, WORKING TITLE. Seeing as I have been at this column for a little over three years now, it's getting easier and easier to run out of things to talk about and keep things fresh. So every now and then I might just have to retreat to the mountains of Southeast Asia to recenter myself and get my mojo back. Now, I don't know how much of my mojo I got back exactly. But when I was at the Yamadurang Peak I did happen to come across a game that was so cheap...so...easy to find...and just too easy NOT to pass up that I had to buy it.

I also constantly saw a comment from a guest who constantly begged for this to happen. He wanted it so bad that he could TASTE it. Every review, every column, every newsbyte. He wanted this game to get a review. Seeing as there is no OFFICIAL 411 review for the game I figure I will do one with a bit of a Working Title touch by continuing the "...is AWESOME" series with it

You asked for it. Here it comes.

Working Rant: Deadly Premonition is AWESOME

I don't know where to start with this game so I'll just go ahead and lay it out flat and tell you what you already need to know. This game is horrible. The game play mechanics are broken, the graphics are horrible, the sound is horrible, and the soundtrack is mostly horrible. Everything about this GAME is downright atrocious.

But it is also probably the most fun and charming game I have played so far this year. Deadly Premonition is the first game in a LONG time that I have equated to "B-Movie Bad". This is the SyFy Original Movies of video games. Everything, beyond a shadow of a doubt in this game is just poor but you have so much fun reveling in the poorness of it that it loops back around to being fun.



So let's just start with the plot of Deadly Premonition. You take control of FBI Agent Francis York Morgan (but I'll call him York, everybody does) as he is on his way to Greenvale to investigate a murder of Anna Graham (hurrr). She was found gutted and strung to a tree. The thing is that this murder has a lot in common with these red seeds that York has found at other murders. You see, York has a thing for murder of young girls. When he finally arrives in Greenvale he is treated to mishap after mishap involving horribly ineffective zombies who bend over backwards (literally) to try to get in your way and a shady Raincoat Killer who always seems to want to play impromptu games of Hide and Seek with our dashing hero.

But really, if you already know ANYTHING about this game you could give a shit about all of the 'serious' stuff they try to do. You want to hear about all of the SERIOUS stuff they try to do.

EVERY character in this game has a deep, dark, and often hilarious secret hidden if not placed outright. Let's just look at the main cast of characters here.

York has A FUCKING IMAGINARY FRIEND named Zach (which, in game terms is supposed to represent you) of whom he talks with ALL OF THE TIME. In the middle of shooting zombies? York will AUDIBLY applaud Zach (you) for having a good shot. Which leads to most gunfights being peppered with "Good? Bull's-eye! Amazing! Great!" Even outside of combat situations when just driving to the next location after the game opens up into it's hilarious bad 'open world' setting (a setting that gives you no way to fast travel (without doing a side quest first) a horribly slow car (unless you do a side quest to upgrade it/buy a new one) and a map that zooms out...but juuuuuuuuuuust enough so you can see your immediate surroundings and nothing else (as well as no way to set waypoints) York will talk to Zach about the most random things. From old 80s B-Movies to his love of mid 80's Punk Rock. This is easily the most enjoyable part of the game because the voice actor for York is just so stilted and monotone that it really just sounds like a crazy man just talking to himself all day.

Next up is Emily...uh...whatsherlastname. Who gives a fuck? She is the plucky small-town deputy who moved to Greenvale afte-- You know what? Emily is probably the most balanced and well off character in the game so we can just skip her and go onto...

MOTHERFUCKING GEORGE. George is the Sheriff. Period. Greenvale is his town. You DO NOT FUCK WITH GEORGE. You wanna know how awesome George is? George works out DAILY with Arnold AND Sylvester. Need more proof? He has a FUCKING HANDLEBAR MUSTACHE AND A SCAR ON HIS FACE?

MORE PROOF? YOU WANT MORE PROOF? How about the fact that he only has ONE EXPRESSION on his face the entire game. Do you know what that expression is? PURE MANLINESS. Yes, George is fucking nominated for the Manliness Award this year in the Workies.

Those are just the three main characters of the game, once to town opens up you get to see all of the other weirdoes of the town including Keith, the rocker who owns the general store, The General who is pretty much Bill from Left 4 Dead who runs the junkyard, Raging Bull who owns the gas station and talks like John Wayne and The Pot Lady.

No, not that pot. This lady constantly carries around a pot and complains that it's getting cold. All the time. She's fucking crazy...and possibly one of the only sane one outside of Emily in the whole damn game. Oh! I almost forgot about Harry.

Here is a picture of Harry.



That's all you need to know about Harry.


And the entire cast of characters STILL isn't full. But moving onto another big part of the game...the game play. Whoever this SWERY guy is...I want to shake his hand. I know I trashed this earlier for being horrible but the more and more I played it the more it felt like I was slowly becoming part of an in-joke. This game IS bad, but in the right frame of mind the game could also be seen as sort of a joke or parody of survival horror games of the time. They have the same tropes with the lame jump scares to the droves of largely ineffective enemies (at least until you finally meet the Faux-Witch who actually poses a threat) and the unbeatable boss who shows up when you most expect him to.

QuickTime Events? Check.

Horrible Inventory Management? Check.

Tank Controls/HORRIBLE Gunplay? Check and Check Plus Plus.

There are even some things that this game does that even the games it's ripping on don't do. You have a hunger AND a tiredness meter that are independent of your health meter. Yes, INDEPENDANT. You must eat food or else you will die. You must sleep or else your character becomes horribly sluggish and unresponsive. A fourth meter tracks how afraid/pumped you are and when THAT reaches the max point York pretty much has a goddamn heart attack.

So that is FOUR meters that you have to tend to during this murder mystery, as well as also getting paid. Yep, York isn't doing this for fun. He gets paid from the FBI as he does his work. Shooting a zombie in the head, finding 'Agent Honor' around levels, peeking into windows and just smelling good (if you go too long without shaving or changing clothes York begins to look and smell like a bum, complete with flies) all net him ridiculous amounts of money. At first you might wonder just what in the hell you need this money for in the first place...or why it's even here. But then you realize that for some reason Gonados and Magini dropped gold coins for no reason...and let's not forget about the random merchant who just HAPPEND to sell all of these weapons Leon needed during his adventure at a low low prices.

That's another joke this game has, EVERYTHING is priced crazy. Things that should be dirt cheap are abnormally expensive and things that should be abnormally expensive are dirt cheap by comparison.

How much is a box of crackers in the local store? About a 2 MAYBE 3 bucks. In Greenvale? 35 dollars.

FOR A SINGLE CRACKER.

Now in comparison how much does a fresh off of the lot car cost? 1500 bucks.

Somewhere right now SWERY (the game's director) has to be cackling at his madness here. And that's what makes Deadly Premonition awesome. Ever since the big technology leap of last generation, we started to see more emphasis on graphics and the budgets games had rather than just making a game to make a game. Gone were the days of a development house being 15 people in an Austin, Texas basement. Now development houses are 400+ employees in high rise buildings. Or they are MANY locations around the world. You don't have games that were made for 5000 bucks anymore with a 5 month development cycle. Now you have games with budgets in the BILLIONS that take two YEARS to make.

So with so much money involved it seems like the industry as a whole grew up. With the big wigs tossing so much money into video games there was no more room for a game that was bad seemingly on purpose. Bad games now are still LIGHT YEARS beyond bad games from 10 or 15 years ago. You can take the worst game from this current generation and it would still kick the shit out of a truly bad and broken SNES game.



And I think that is the charm that has gotten a hold of so many people with Deadly Premonition. It's a bad game, but not by virtue of trying to re-invent the wheel and failing. Not due to the failings of its budget or story (actually, the story may be inspired by Twin Peaks but it's pretty damned decent) it's just sort of...bad because that's all it can be. Ignition and SWERY did the best with what they have...and then some. Did they need to add in the Yakuza-like "You can do ANYTHING in the world" stuff? Nope. But you know what? Being able to put to the story on hold and just play some darts or go fishing was sort of refreshing. Especially since the game flows in real-time. And when I mean real time I mean REAL TIME. If you have a mission at 21:00 and it's only 9:00 game time. You literally have to kill about a whole day in REAL TIME (or use the hilarious time travel item) until that mission becomes active.

All in all, if you really want a deep down and serious review of this game Mr. Commenter (who I will name Zach) then I will gladly do a legit official 411mania Review of the game with game rankings score and all. But if you were just looking for validation that Deadly Premonition is the one of the MUST PLAY games of this first half of the year based on just it's charm and quirkiness alone...then rest assured that Deadly Premonition is AWESOME.

Note: For those of you who might be weary of dropping dough on what is honestly a bad game game play-wise. Keep in mind that Deadly Premonition is 20 bucks NEW. Which means even used its still dirt cheap. Plus it has Xbox 360 Era 1 (I.E SUPER EASY) achievements


Working Gaming Update

Usually this is at the top of the column but I decided to move it to the end of the column just this week. You'd think with my times on Mt. Yamadurang I wouldn't be able to play most of these...hmmm.

Super Street Fighter IV

I do not fancy myself as much of an online fighter player because I never really found the fun of deconstructing a game down to its meta levels (frame counting and all of that jazz) fun. I just like to play a few matches with friends and maybe venture into the online jungle and be done with it. So I picked up SSF4 mostly just to see what really changed. I found out quickly that pretty much all skill I had with Guile had been reduced into a steaming pile of shit thanks to Juri and Dudley. So I started to search for a few main. I dug Makoto in SF3 but was dismayed to find out that she is utterly useless in SF4 (what the FUCK is up with that walk speed?) so I decided to go to another character I liked from previous SF games and found a home with Cody. Cody might be getting a bit of a bad wrap due to the perceived scrubbiness he has. But I went from losing match after match to winning 1 out of every 3. That's okay in my book. At least he's not Ken.

Just Cause 2

I am actually struggling to finish this game because I really just want to give it back to GameFly already. The problem I am having is that the storyline is so...blah and there seems to be almost TOO many missions. Where it is not a requirement to beat ALL of the faction missions I still feel compelled to do it. The problem is going to them I almost ALWAYS get sidetracked by something awesome to blow up and I end up spending three hours going apeshit on some army base and killing a Colonel instead of actually doing the missions.

Splinter Cell: Conviction

I did NOT like the previous Splinter Cell games...and this one I am still on the fence. I rented it played through it a bit and...eeeh. While I don't necessarily liked sneaking around and taking it slow. It seems like Conviction was the exact opposite. It tried to be this game that revolved around epic gunplay when all you needed was a silenced pistol and a shot to the dome to dispatch 90% of the enemies in that game. I might pick it up again and finish it later but I'm not really compelled to.

Left 4 Dead 2

Before The Passing I hadn't played L4D2 in about three months and The Passing did exactly what Crash Course DIDN'T do for L4D. Crash Course I think to this day I have only played once. That one little campaign didn't give me enough to jump back into the game fulltime. The Passing is still short, but the campaign feels just as long as any other one time-wise. The Scavenge Levels are GREAT for it but the shining thing that The Passing has done right is Mutations. That is the thing that keeps me coming back week after week for this game as the Mutations seem to get better and better. If they can sustain a decent flow of good mutations then I think we are going to have a good run with Left 4 Dead 2.

Although I swear to shit, and I am putting this is writing. If I see an announcement for Left 4 Dead 3 at E3 this year. I will be the first person in line to take a greasy shit on it. I defended L4D2...but not an L4D3 so soon.


Working Question

We got three orders of business here. Two of them are questions and the third one is something for you guys to help me out with.

Question 1: With Super Street Fighter IV reportedly doing very well at 40 dollars, do you think more companies should embrace the '40 dollars new' model for games that might not be necessarily a worth a full purchase (similar to how people said Left 4 Dead 2 and ODST should have been 40 dollars)

Question 2: With EA now pretty saying "Fuck you" to people who rent/buy used by locking them out of online play for all future sports titles. Do you think the whole "Free DLC/Content for New Purchase" gimmick is getting out of hand?

Personally, I am fine with Preorder/New Purchase DLC until it starts changing the way I experience the game. You want to give me a golden gun or a new skin? Fine. But once you start giving me stuff that literally changes the game OR locks out content because I didn't drop 60 bones on a new copy of a game I'm not sure on OR I decided to rent it instead...we have a problem. Just to clarify, I am not talking about the recent EA Sports Online Pass, to me that is fine because the VAST majority of people who buy sports games year after year buy them on day 1 OR don't have a problem dropping 10 bones to play it. I mean the idea that this might slope into cases where newer games with maybe not as big of an install base or a new IP with multiplayer that might charge you to play online...and the fact that 360 users (and maybe PSN users in the future) are already paying an annual fee for premium content and the sole purpose to play online already.

And the third piece of business is that June is right around the corner, which not only means it's time for E3 but it's also time for the Working Title Halftime Awards.

Seeing as in previous years many games that come out during the first half of the year tend to get lost by the fall/winter. I made an award ceremony just for games released in the Q1 and Q2 of the year.

As always these are voted on by you all (with some input by myself and other writers) but the only real rule is that only games that have come out worldwide BEFORE the first week of June are eligible. So where you come in is that I need more categories.

I DO NOT NEED NOMINEES YET.

So if you have an idea for a CATEGORY, feel free to let me know. Keep in mind that I do -NOT- do console specific awards.

Here is the current list of categories plus a few new ones added for this year:

The Batman Award of Manliness - Best Male Character. Award changes name dependent on the winner of the previous year.

The Baddest Bitch Award *NEW* - Best Female Character. Award will change name depending on who wins it this year.

The Die in a Fire Award - Character/Game Mechanic/News Story/Personality that can just die in a fire.

"Shit just got real" Moment of the Half-Year *NEW* - Epic/Awesome moment of the year (so far).

Not with a Bang, but a Whimper Award - Games that had a ton of hype going into release, but underperformed either commercially or critically when released.

Workaholic's Choice: Game you want NOW *NEW* - A game that isn't slated to come out until the second half of the year that you wanted NOW. Nominees will be decided by you.

Workaholic's Choice: Halftime Game of the Year - Simple. The Game of the Year so far. I'll put a ballot up of the Triple A titles so far this year and you all vote. If it ends in a tie we'll cut out the rest and do a second vote.

Like I said, I am not looking for nominees YET; right now I am just looking to add two or three more categories. Any ideas?

Until next time, I'm Jordan Williams...and who wants to be in my Red Dead Redemption Posse?