irtual reality remains an unrealized technology, arguably still a jejune fad fueling allegorical media pop from The Lawnmower Man to the Matrix trilogy. In Konami's Coded Arms, a "military-industrial mega-conglomerate" has developed a VR system code-named A.I.D.A., designed to train military units for combat with aliens on distant worlds. During beta phase testing, however, a fatal flaw shuts down the project.
Like its numerous fictional counterparts, A.I.D.A. lives on, managing to circumvent its confines and trickle into Earth's public networks, where hackers discover and use it to salvage "rare" data files or engage in "ultra-realistic" extraterrestrial combat. The catch is that A.I.D.A.'s architecture requires users to "digitize" their personalities, thus risking "personality loss" if death occurs while they're jacked in. With all use of A.I.D.A. thus officially declared illegal, exceptionally skilled hackers called "Coded Ones" have been outfitting themselves with sophisticated melee programs in hopes of recovering data files from A.I.D.A.'s labyrinthine virtual topography, to be traded for beaucoup bucks back in the real world.
Coded Arms offers multiple control interfaces that jockey manipulation of the camera (360 degrees of panning) and movement between the left analog thumbstick and the PSP's four primary buttons. Weapons are selected by clicking left or right on the D-pad and fired by pulling the right shoulder buttons, while the left shoulder button allows simple jumps.
Sectors (levels) are randomized and premised on four types of battlefields that determine their look and feel. Thus, city and base sectors are structurally sterile and essentially unadorned while ruins sectors are highly organic and sport oscillating flora. The goal is to complete each sector (six per battlefield) in record time while eliminating enemies and gathering plugins, which vary from offensive weaponry to defensive armor. A multiplayer mode allows up to four players to compete in head-to-head deathmatches or "keep the mark," in which players gain points by holding on to a special "mark" for as long as possible.
Unimaginative corridor crawl
Coded Arms is reminiscent of a barely remembered game called Kileak: The Blood, which arrived as one of the original Sony PlayStation's debut first-person shooters. It was essentially a boxy corridor-creeper set in the near future, with detailed and fluid graphics but terrible enemy A.I. and repetitive gameplay—Coded Arms shares both its successes as well as its critical failures.
Lifting its story in part from Tad Williams' Otherland series (in which humans also "digitize" their personalities in a rogue online simulation), Coded Arms has little beyond its anti-climatic introduction to offer players looking for anything resembling a plot. After registering a username, it's a simple run-and-gun imbroglio from random (yet disappointingly similar) room to room until levels and eventually battlefields are cleared of enemies. A typical battlefield, consisting of six levels, takes a few minutes to wipe clean, making the entire game—including most of the scattered weapons and defensive upgrades—easily digestible inside the space of a few hours. The developers bill the game as having "limitless replay value," which is something of a joke considering how utterly similar the gameplay is no matter how many times a battlefield is rebooted.
Primary to a first-person shooter is good control, and in this regard Coded Arms grades merely average, perhaps owing more to the PSP's lack of a second analog joystick than shoddy response or button mapping (both of which are configurable). Ranking a close second (in terms of importance), the visuals here are almost always fluid and occasionally even interesting. It's too bad that the levels are nothing more than big boxes connected to each other by short corridors, or that the artificial intelligence routines are no more sophisticated than "charge forward," "back up" and, amusingly, "jump in place a lot."
As a multiplayer game, there's some fun to be had with fellow PSPers (considering the long—and certain to grow longer—dry spell of PSP releases), in particular "keep the mark," which works like an online game of tag, made all the more engaging as players ratchet up their plugin arsenal. Alas, there's little else to recommend about Coded Arms, other than recommending it be avoided altogether, save by those manic for any sort of PSP first-person shooter at all.
Given the sophistication of the PSP's hardware, it's unfortunate that publishers are mistakenly equating "portable gaming handheld" with "uninvolved, brainless and tragically vapid."
—Matt
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