jp
Home Talks and Slides My GameLog Research and Projects Publications Resume Teaching
Back  //   GameBreadth Project  //   Game Ontology Project  //   GameLog

Resistance: Retribution (PSP)

Status: Finished playing
I started playing this game on Sunday 11 September, 2011  //  I stopped playing this game on: Sunday 6 November, 2011
Current opinion of this game
Actually quite good!

November 6, 2011 10:39:28 AM
Eek! Here's another case of playing and finishing a game without getting (lazy!) to write about it. Oh well, better late than never.

It's been an interesting experience to learn about a (large?!) franchise via the mobile game version first. I think I did the same with the Zelda games (started with Gameboy), God of War (I think?), Killzone, Metroid, Castlevania, and a few others. Fortunately, the PSP Resistance game is actually quite good and I enjoyed it more than I expected.

It did take me a while to get used to the idea that this was a cover-based shooter in which I had to carefully learn to wait, fire, hide, and so on. It took me a lot longer to realy start to take advantage of the alternate firing modes and special abilities that many of the weapons in the game have. I gather that "cool weapons" is one of the trademark characteristics of the Resistance games, so I guess I shot myself in the foot a little bit with that one. On the other hand, once I did start to use the alternate modes (when things got noticeably harder), I did feel pretty good about myself.

Overall, I think the reason I enjoyed the game the most has to do with how much the story and setting (well, mostly the setting) resonated with me. I've always had something for post-holocaust style settings. To be more precise, more than the setting, I seem to enjoy the narrative of the downfall as it where. How things fall apart. Even though I'm not familiar with the details of the storylines from the other games, there was enough detail and background in this game alone to make for a very compelling experience. I really felt that things were bad, getting worse, and desperate. All this despite the slightly hammy dialogue, and so on. I still have a lot of questions, but it's the sort of questions I enjoy having (who/what are the cloven?) and it may be that I enjoyed it BECAUSE I did not know about the other games... Perhaps those little details left in for fans of the series were more effective on me because they hinted at larger truths I was not aware of and gave me a sense of greater depth to the world.


 
kudos for original design to Rodrigo Barria