I read what had to be one of the weirdest articles I’ve come across in a while. Yes, I know it’s IGN, and IGN is some sort of joke in the game journalism universe, but it’s still about Dark Souls, and I wanted to see where they were going with the article.
It didn’t go very far.
The points of the article irk me. It’s one thing to compare two relatively similar games, but this is almost going beyond apples and oranges into a whole other realm of incompatibility. View full article »
Oh my!
Here we are, post-PAX. I’ve got a can of Pepsi and Poets of the Fall playing in the background, so let’s gossip.
PAX Prime was pretty frickin’ awesome. On a scale from 1 to SuperJam, PAX Prime scored a grand total of Bloody Good Times All Around. There were games to see, and panels to attend, and developer parties to crash, and swag to get.
Let’s start with I got hands on time with: Minecraft 1.8. View full article »
Lucid dreaming is a bizarre phenomenon that I’ve experienced a few times. Like one time the Power Rangers were attempting to murder me, a situation that I found so ludicrous even asleep that I realized I was dreaming, realized therefore that I could control my own dream, and then proceeded to fight off every single one of the Rangers with my sudden awesome karate skills.
Vincent Brooks doesn’t have to worry about the Power Rangers busting down his apartment door. He’s got more realistic problems: the uncertainty of a new job, no cash, a stable girlfriend that wants to talk commitment… the general things that cause anxiety in a long-time stereotypical bachelor.
The giant towers that he’s forced to climb that can kill him if he falls, well, okay, that’s unusual. View full article »
I really want to love inFamous 2, and indeed a part of me does love this game. I have long been enamoured with superheros, especially those with electricity-based powers, and so the purchase and play of the two games starring bike courier Cole McGrath was no-brainer for me. And for the most part, the games delivered exactly what I hoped for: an open-ended environment with which I leap across digital rooftops and shock the mess out of bad guys to my heart’s content.
But somewhere around the halfway point, the shiny polish of Cole’s new powers begin to wear off, and I started to realize I was playing a slightly re-arranged, slightly more polished copy of inFamous. I stopped doing side-missions. I stopped hunting for blast shards to increase Cole’s energy supply. I just started plowing through story missions in an attempt to see the ending. I’d go back later, I told myself, to work on those trophies and the Evil ending.
As of this writing I have yet to touch inFamous 2 again.
Why did I fall out of love with inFamous 2? What happened? View full article »
Oh what a month-
It’s July! Actually it’s almost August but I haven’t had anything to talk about just yet.
July used to mean the summer slump, when nothing would show up and everybody just laid around and waited until Madden came in August to signify the fall season.
Once I discovered Harvest Moon, July started to mean a new Harvest Moon game every year. That lasted right up until I got tired of Harvest Moon.
Now July means Catherine! I used to think this upcoming puzzle/platformer was just another quirky Atlus title, and then I discovered that Michelle Ruff (Rita Mordio from Tales of Vesperia) played the part of Katherine McBride, and as a fan of Michelle Ruff, I immediatly went out and pre-ordered the collector’s edition of the game. So next week, I’ll have a new pair of boxers! And a very uncomfortable pillow case.
So beyond inFAMOUS 2, I haven’t been doing much game-wise. Just sitting back, playing Minecraft and Tactics Ogre, and relaxing. I picked up a couple of pen & paper RPG books (Paranoia: Troubleshooters and Unknown Armies). P:T looks like it will be a vast blast to play. UA, meanwhile, seems ridiculously over-complicated.
Oh, and there’s Terraria:
.
I’m starting to love Terraria. Muahahaha.
It was a bright and sunny day when I bought Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
It was a dark and stormy night when I finally launched Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
“Put on headphones,” the game whispered to me. “Play with the gamma turned down. Yeah, we know it’s one in the morning and you’re short on sleep and the lights are off and you’re all alone in a big scary house while a storm rages outside, but this is just a video game.
“You play video games all the time.
“Trust us. You’re safe. This is nothing more than a systemic arrangement of 1’s and 0’s. You can do it.”
Successfully lulled into a false sense of security, I proceeded to play one hour of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. And then I shut it off and, despite repeated attempts, never managed to play it again.
I’m not sure what to think of a game that scared me so badly that I literally never wanted to play it again for fear of soiling myself. I hunt monsters. I destroy monsters. By rote and by choice I am a weekend Space Marine, armed to teeth against the ever-present horde of the Zerg or the Orks or whatever game I’m playing. I stood toe-to-tooth against a giant, flying, saber-toothed cat with a scorpion tail and wore it’s fur as a battle bikini. I am a frickin’ superhero, and superheros aren’t afraid of some drafty corridors and uneven lighting.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent does not care what power fantasies I entertain in other video games. Amnesia cares only that I be scared out of my mind in the shortest amount of time possible in the greatest way possible.
And that is why I’m never playing it again.
YAY!
For a while, after I had beaten the game, I didn’t know what to think about Hunted: The Demon’s Forge.
I had fun with it. I was amused by it. I had frustrations with it. I finished it, or at least I finished the adventure for the single player. And then, by some stroke of ill luck, I deleted my clear game file, thus rendering fourteen hours of progress extinct in a puff of digital smoke. And even then, as I stared at the pristine spot where my upgraded Caddoc had once been, I didn’t feel anger. Instead, I just started to laugh softly.
Accidentally wiping my save file and having to start over for all the unlockables seemed like an unexpected yet elegant end to this game.
In my last post I mentioned that the game was a fantasy version of Gears of War, but I don’t think that’s accurate. Gears of War is a third-person shooter; at least one character in Hunted is very much melee, and having him hang back, taking cover behind a chest-high wall while he waits for his opponents to pop out so he can shoot them with his crossbow feels wrong. Except for two puzzle segments where I played E’lara, I went through the entire single-player adventure as Caddoc, and it was there, as Caddoc and I rushed towards enemies and beat them all to death with his giant glowing axe, that I realized that the melee experience is nothing less than Dungeons & Dragons: The Tower of Doom. You can’t get much more old school, hack-and-slash than that.
Hunted: The Demon’s Forge feels like a great re-imagining of what an old school arcade game should be like today: short, steady bursts of progression with swift combat and a level designed to funnel you towards the end, and the appropriate set-piece boss fight that closes out the chapter. Each character has three “lives” before you’re kicked back to the last checkpoint. Comparing weapons is a simple matter of checking which has the larger number. The story doesn’t seem to try and rise above its “Here’s why you’re killing stuff” premise. Rinse and repeat until the credits roll. There’s even an entire mode (the Cruicible and its level editor) that whole-heartedly embraces its arcade roots. The only things the game seems to be missing is a giant glowing arrow that flashes and beeps brightly, urging you towards your next destination when you hang around a completed combat area for to long, and a poorly-translated “CONGRURATIONS A WINNER IS YOU” screen featuring the protagonists posing after the credits rolled.
A WINNER IS YOU – THANKS FOR PLAYING
The arcade nostalgia that Hunted engendered within me does mean that I took an issue with, of all things, the side quests. Do I explore or do I keep going? If I explore I’ll get new weapons, but as the enchantments are temporary then they may not be worth it, and to spend half an hour solving a puzzle for a weapon that will have twenty-five or so charges before becoming weaker than a regular dropped weapon was starting to lose it’s appeal. By the end of Chapter 4, I found myself actually growing a little tired of the exploration side-game. And it seems inXile understood the side-quest fatigue because by Chapter 5 the sidequests and riddles are mostly gone, the chapters are shorter, and the game feels like it’s picking up speed and barreling towards the ending as soon as possible before the fatigue makes you quit entirely. I appreciate a game that starts to realize its wearing out its welcome and just gets on with it.
I also appreciate the AI. While no substitute for an actual person, the computer’s control of E’lara was servicable. Only on occasion did I become annoyed with the AI, usually when E’lara’s pathfinding took her out of the combat (and once, when a door glitched and she actually was trapped in the room behind me, leaving me to complete an entire section solo- thankfully not a puzzle section requiring her flaming arrows), and the rare moment where I, as E’lara, was dropped repeatedly to my death by an AI Caddoc that would move off a switch holding my bridge up over a spiked pit. These would be wholly unremarkable AI comments if AI E’lara, perhaps in the developer’s acknowledgement that a human partner would be a massive jerk at least once, scripted E’lara to almost kill me with a trap while coyly joking about doing so, and endeared the AI to me just a bit more than the normal robot pal. After that, I made sure to keep an eye on her.
Hunted feels rough and not quite refined in almost every aspect of the game, but honestly if I hadn’t deleted my clear file I would be re-playing it again, as E’lara, on the hardest unlocked difficulty (appropriately named “Old School”). It’s a good, solid fun romp that doesn’t take itself seriously, which makes it a great game when you just want to play something for a few hours at a time. Perhaps that’s why I don’t feel to bad that I wiped my save file: you always have to start from scratch in arcade games after you’ve won.
I have been busy the past few weeks, mainly with work, but a bit with games. Here’s the breakdown. It’s long:
After suffering through the simulated head trauma that was the storyline of The 3rd Birthday, I moved on to slaughter another childhood friend that I remembered fondly: Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Tactics Ogre, in return, let it be known that it wasn’t going to take none of that “nostalgia filter” guff from me and backhanded me across the room with its unrelenting difficulty.
As a pleasant change, it is just as difficult as I recall.
I’m sixty-five(?) hours in and almost done with Chapter Three (of four), following the Law route. There’s so much about this game that I love: the combat, the menus, the music, the classes. It’s everything that I loved about Final Fantasy Tactics and the original TO, cleaned up and given a beautiful, polished shine. It really makes the PSP release of FFT look like a steaming pile of dog vomit.
There’s a few downsides, of course, though it took me the better part of forty hours to find even one. The crafting system is poorly implemented and ridiculously tedious, the new class leveling system means lots of level grinding whenever I gain a new class, and there’s the fact that, without a guide, you can go the entire game without ever realizing how many potential unique unit recruits you missed.
But I’m still enjoying the game a great deal. Hopefully, I’ll have a review up in the next couple of weeks.
Other than TO, I’ve been puttering about in other games that require less brain-busting and stat-keeping.
I bought and finished Portal 2. It was a fun romp, both single-player and the little bit of Co-op that I played. But, oh my goodness, is the Steam engine showing its considerable age. I don’t think I’ve played a game with that much loading, on any system, for a good long while. I also picked up Witcher 2, which I haven’t played because I re-started Witcher 1 to get a save file, which I’m now not playing because I bought the Witcher novels. It’s Witcher overload!
Minecraft continues to tickle my fancy whenever I’m not paying attention to what I should be doing, snaking its tendrils into my brain more insidiously than TvTropes. I’ve started over half a dozen times, including a fresh new world with the latest 1.6 update. Prior to the update I messed around with mods for the first time, and found a farming mod that added a bunch of fruit trees and new crops, so now I’ve got the idea to recreate the villages from the Harvest Moon series in my world. I should probably take some pictures or a video or something for any folks interested, but my brain has been drawing a blank creatively as of late.
Starcraft II is played every so often. I’m still ranked Gold in the second season, and seem to be doing pretty decently. Zerg is still my weakest race by far, both playing as and against, and I’m all around bad at maintaining macro when I go on the offense, but I think that if I really tried and practice I could be a higher rank, perhaps even Diamond. But then that would mean less Minecraft. Decisions.
I haven’t touched a console (other than my PSP) since pre-PAX, so with a bit of boredom and general crankiness spurring me on, I finally sat down and played through Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light over the Memorial Day weekend, which I bought last year and had been holding off on for a Let’s Play with Greg that hasn’t happened yet. I love the game: it’s short, sweet, and explosive, and I really loved the final boss encounter.
Against my better judgment, I picked up Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale for Live. While I still can’t believe somebody took the ultimate turn-based tactical RPG and turned it into a hack-and-slash, I at least hoped it tickled the part of me that loved the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games. And it does. Kind of. Mostly, though, for a game that costs the same amount as Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, I was disappointed by the sluggish controls, the poor targeting, the bland characters, and the lack of voice acting. It might be fun with more people, but the game didn’t grab me in the ninety minutes I’ve already spent with it, and I think I’m going to chalk that one up to just a bad purchase decision.
Speaking of co-op, I got to play more Monster Hunter Tri with a couple of GameCritics.com pals. I would personally like to thank Red Bull for making gaming even semi-competently at two in the morning possible. I suppose I should finish my grinding for my Guild Armor, so expect an extraordinarily bad video of an Urugaan fight on my Youtube channel soon.
And that leaves me with Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, a game that I’ve been anticipating for a while but has somehow not had any coverage, much to the surprise of a few reviewers out there. For people wondering what the heck this game is like: imagine a fantasy version of Gears of War, with just a little bit less polish, a whole lot more exposed flesh (E’lara, our boobtastic elven female, is basically wearing strips of fabric, while Caddoc, our burly human male, is rocking the tight pants and no shirt), and Lucy Lawless telling me to go do quests in a super sultry voice.
Well, as Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and Fallout 3 have proven, when a celebrity voice actor tells me to go do a quest, I say, “YOU BET, SIR!” (Or not even a celebrity, as I pre-ordered Catherine the instant I saw Michelle Ruff played one of the Catherines. <3 Michelle )
I’m playing through the Campaign, primarily as Caddoc, by myself (Greg and I are planning a Let’s Play), and I’m enjoying a good deal of it. It’s light fun, yet at the same time this game has some pretty heft meat on its bones, as I’m only up to Chapter Three after two nights of play- there’s definitely enough campaign here to make it worth my money. I agree with Gabe’s assertion yesterday: compared to what I’ve been playing recently, Hunted is most definitely a palate cleanser.
Which is good, because I can use some cleaning out before inFamous 2 next week!
Wait, that doesn’t sound good…
PS: You should totally pre-order Catherine and Dark Souls
When I was at PAX East in March, I stayed at Invisible Inkie’s house. While there, she went ahead and let me watch her play RIFT, in order to entice me to join the shininess. It failed miserably to entice, mostly because the game looked extraordinarily boring.
Of course, as we know by now, when I played it myself in April, something happened. Something “clicked,” and suddenly I was playing hour upon hour of RIFT, fluffing about the starting zone in a veritable frenzy of power-leveling and artifact-collection.
What changed? I wasn’t doing anything different from what I had seen Inkie do a few weeks before, in fact I might have even been in the same zone. So why was I suddenly enjoying myself so much?
It’s simple: I went from passive observer to active player.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of a video game playthrough , I can summarize it thusly: it’s a series of videos (or sometimes a screen-shot filled post on a blog or forum) of a person or persons playing through an entire game. Sometimes, the player adds commentary, reminiscent of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (these are the ones usually referred to as Let’s Plays). Sometimes the videos consist of just particular segments of the game, like perhaps the bosses or just the cutscenes. Sometimes the video series is just the game completely, from beginning to end.
It’s not hard to do a playthrough of a game and upload it to Youtube (I myself have done three complete games, and a smattering of other highlight videos), but it is hard to do such things well. That is, in a manner that engages and keeps the attention of the audience. Good game playthroughs have several things going for them: good quality for their medium (are the screenshots the right size? Is the video bright enough? The audio loud enough?), the skill of the player, the aim of the playthrough (is the player doing a speed-run? A 100% run?), the quality of the commentator’s dialogue (if any), and the ratio of gameplay to cutscene.
That last bit, I think, is especially important because, unless the gameplay is wildly off-the-wall or the commentator’s dialogue is interesting or informative enough to carry through the dullness, many games these days are really boring to watch another person play.
Such was the case with Deadly Premonition and the Let’s Play I did with my good friend Greg over on Snarky Gamers. Here is a title that had a curiously polarizing effect on the two of us: I, as the active player, love the game, and now consider it one of my favorites, while Greg as the passive co-commentator, wound up hating it so much that during the last few hours he would actively do something else on his computer, annoyed and bored with each new interminable cutscene as we worked our way towards the ending.
As the passive participant in the tale of Francis York Morgan, Greg had no say in what happened during the game. He wasn’t even in the same room with me, as we set up a scheme over Skype so he could see the action. And at most we recorded perhaps an hour or two of footage a week.
I, on the other hand, didn’t just watch someone else play the game. I played it myself in my room on my entertainment system. I edited together the video footage, often watching cutscenes a second time. And when we switched the game to Easy, I was the one that had to replay eight hours of gameplay, which I did over the course of one Saturday.
My increased (and continuous, as Greg only saw at most two hours of the game at a time) exposure to the game meant that I was suddenly far more invested in the story of Deadly Premonition and its cast post-replaying than Greg was or could be. The evidence of this shift in perspective is even noticeable in our recordings as by the time the episode rolls around post-difficulty change, I actually stop talking during the cutscenes in order to focus more on what’s happening, and continue to do so all the way until the end of the game.
Video games, as all of those learned people with PhDs love telling dull-as-bricks folks like myself, are an active medium. But audience participation alone isn’t enough without a significant investment of time on the part of the audience as well. This is the whole purpose for game demos and trial accounts, as it means the player isn’t 1) just watching something with no idea what’s going on (much like trying to watch any movie in twenty minute clips), or 2) playing something so short that it’s over before it’s even started.
To say it in another way: a game that may look boring when viewed, might actually be fun when played, so make sure you sign up for Gamefly or bum your friends for trial codes to their MMO of choice. You might surprise yourself with how much you you wind up liking something that you thought was a piece of crap earlier.
Completely unrelated to all of that, my RIFT account runs out May 9th and I’ve already cancelled. More on the reason for that at a later time.
Parasite Eve is one of those stories that I am in love with: guy meets girl, guy gets girl, girl dies and guy develops an insane obsession with her mitochondria which results in him cloning her liver into a full-grown replica after which they have incredibly slimy sex right before she decides to destroy mankind and then they both spontaneously combust.
It’s a love story. Obviously. And a metaphor for the widespread unmitigated expansion of humanity and the destruction of nature as a result of our rampant proliferation, but that’s besides the point. All you need to know is that in 1998, Squaresoft decided to make a video game based off of a book where the premise was that your mitochondria hated your guts.
And so the United States was introduced to Aya Brea, a 5’2”, half-Japanese, blonde, blue-eyed NYPD rookie detective, and her special mitochondria that made her a freak of nature, and the endless amount of angst this produced for our tragic heroine. A sequel was produced, Parasite Eve 2, which would serve to inexplicably make Aya 5’8”, as well as give Aya a case of the cloning blues and a completely unnecessary shower scene that bordered on softcore porn.
I loved both games, and I still do today. The Parasite Eve games are one of the few games I have 100% cleared, and I’ve written fanfiction of the series for my own, amateur amusement. When I heard the series was continuing with The Third Birthday, I was initially overjoyed.
And then I played the game.
I’m going to say this upfront: I spoiled the “big twist” of the game before I bought it, which is the only reason why I’m not particularly disgusted with the plot, such as it is. I will say also that this one plot twist only serves to explain one of the many flaws of this game (specifically, Aya’s behavior), and- story-wise- nothing else is ever resolved in the entire game. The story makes sense, but only in the same way that listening to one person’s half of a static-filled phone conversation translated from Japanese to Greek transcribed to English makes sense, where Greek is foreknowledge of the Parasite Eve games. It is incomprehensible.
This is not a game for fans of the series because the only acknowledgements that the first two games ever existed is the names of the re-used characters, their relationships to one another, a small nod in the timeline, and re-mixed music from Parasite Eve 1.
At the same time, this is not a game for newcomers, because a newcomer would have no idea who these people are, why Aya is so special (no mention of mitochondria, or even the events of PE1 and 2 are ever mentioned), or what the ending is all about (Heck, I have foreknowledge, and I still don’t know what the ending is about, because it doesn’t make any sense).
So really, if you discard the plot, what do you have left? You have a cover-based shooter with a unique body-hopping mechanic, with a good number of customizable weapons and powers, that I actually found to be pretty fun in small doses. Your enjoyment of the combat will be tied primarily to how well you can make do with the camera, but players of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (and other PSP games that use the “claw” camera) will be right at home. And even if you’re not proficient with the claw (like myself), the game’s auto-lockon serves to mitigate it (there is one fight that will be horrific if you cannot manually aim fast enough with the D-pad, though).
There are unlockables galore for New Game+ players, including new outfits (yeah, I always to dress Aya up as a maid /sarcasm), new weapons and powers, harder difficulties, and even a couple of cutscenes (neither do anything for the plot, and one of them is, again, a softcore shower scene).
It took me about seven hours to beat the game on Normal, and I am never playing this game again. it is just that bad story-wise. Given the gaping holes of the plot and the suddenness of the finale, it feels like the game was supposed to be longer but that a massive quantity of exposition was cut for the sake of either time, money, or just deciding to distance the game from the Parasite Eve name. Either way, if this game gets a sequel it will be an absolute miracle, because the product as delivered is trainwreck regardless of if you liked the previous games or not.
If, Square-Enix, you do make either a proper Parasite Eve 3 or a Third Birthday 2, feel free to hook up with me. I will be more than happy to fill in those massive, gaping plotholes you left strewn about your game.
