Rise to Honor
My hobbies run in phases. For a time, it will be all about reading old comics, then it moves to video games, then movies. Right now movies/TV is waning, and video games appear to be ascendant.
Playing Jet Li: Rise to Honor, which is an interesting take on the brawler/beat-'em-up genre, starring, unsurprisingly, Jet Li. The game's first act is set in Hong Kong, and I really liked the fact that they went Cantonese with subtitles for the audio.
Control is interesting in that there's not a lot of button-mashing. Instead, it's control-stick mashing, where you move the two control sticks to attack enemies. A lot of Jet Li's moves are in the game—he's here to eat dim sum and kick ass, and they're all out of dim sum. It's as much a Jet Li simulator as it is a video game, giving just the briefest hint of what it must be like to have trained at wu shu since you were eight.1 There's a bit of meta-gaming in that you're playing a character in a movie, of sorts, but based on a real person. Maybe not as meta as the virtual internet in Front Mission 3, which people either loved or hated.
The shooting levels are less interesting, trying a little too hard to be Max Payne. Besides, I've always been a bigger fan of his period pieces like The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk or New Legend of Shaolin or, of course, Hero. OK, so Black Mask was awesome, where he's a librarian OF DEATH with a secret past. I also see from his Web site that he's looking into doing a Green Hornet movie. Could be good, could be... not so good.
I'm not sure I need to own the game, but it's well worth looking into. It follows Hong Kong Action Theater rules, where the more important you are to the plot, the harder you are to hit. Jet Li's character can battle tons of cannon fodder guys with little problem, but the boss levels are actually challenging, requiring timing and skill to win.
1 - Fun fact: Jet Li was one of the Chinese martial arts team that visited the Nixon White House back in the day to demonstrate wu shu.
