Sleeper of the Week: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Xbox)

[E Nice]

I've played both but aside from getting to fight as different people in Chaos Bleeds the first Buffy game is better to play than the sorta sequel.

Yeah, that little guy is Sid the Dummy. Chaos Bleeds seems to be a fabled lost episode or something in which the The First alters reality and brings back some demons who've died, during the Buffy series, Adam and Kakistos and such. The story is obviously placed before season 7 and I'm guessing before season 6 as well but not sure.

The first game is set in season 3 but very awkwardly according to the lines mentioned in it. It seems to occur after the ep in which Spike returns and the enxt episode that followed, which makes little sense timewise as he had to go all the way to South America to get Druscilla. anyways, the story there seems to do with the ressurection of the Master, big bad of season 1.

[shopkins]

This is the game I bought an Xbox for. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, even if I wasn't a rabid fan of the show, I still would have enjoyed it.

The fact that your enemies are vampires and it takes more than punching to defeat them adds some complexity that most beat-em-ups are lacking. If you master the fighting engine Buffy has a handful of cool Matrixy moves to do, and the game also has cool weapons and vampire appropriate traps. There's one point where you can throw holy water in a pool, then toss vamps in to make sort of a swimming class of death. You can also break open windows to let sunlight in and throw them into things that are pointy or into sunlight and maybe into fire, IIRC.

The Sunnydale atmosphere is recreated well. I remember being happy I could walk up and down the stairs in the high school courtyard that Harmony fell down in Out of Sight, Out of Mind. The voice acting is okay. I didn't mind Giselle Loren as Buffy. When you build your combo meter all the way the Buffy theme song starts playing, if I remember right.

As for the story, well, if it was a real episode of Buffy it would be the dumbest episode ever. The return of the Master angle just feels sort of cliched, especially since there was already an attempt to ressurect the master in the show. But it was good enough to move the game along. Other flaws include the too-hard jumping level near the end and the fact that some levels in the middle, the docks levels, seemed way harder to me than the levels nearer the end.

Chaos Bleeds is a good game, although the graphics are worse and the fighting feels clunkier and is less true to the show. The animation now lets you stake vamps anywhere, even in the crotch. Decapitations are gone and you can stake vamps with a metal sword. I also felt there were less traps and neat ways to dispose of enemies. And Chaos Bleeds isn't a bunch of shorter levels like the first game, but instead about a dozen really long ones, so the game is finished faster and feels shorter.

The voice acting is made worse by the new actress who plays Anya, who just sounds wrong, and the actress doubling for Alyson Hannigan, whose impersonation of Willow sounds like a baby-voiced nightmare on ludes. And Buffy's repetitive quips are even more crazy-making in this one.

It was a lot of fun to play as other characters, though. Despite the new voice the Willow levels magic focus makes them the most offbeat and fun. I thought they kind of missed the boat on Xander, making him too strong and too much like Buffy and Faith, instead of the normal guy that he is. He should have had to sneak or use weapons more.