Well all my tests are done for the year so now I'm out of excuses for not updating this blog. Since there's no single topic sitting on the top of my mind like some horrifying spider I'll do another one of those weekly updates I did last post (you know, at the start of October).
First and foremost, the game I could talk about for several hours and my friends can listen to for several seconds: Minecraft. One of the main reasons this game appeals to me so much is there are just so many potential anecdotes. For example between the last post and now I've:
-Carved a valley through a mountain (because I could). I then roofed the entire thing in glass and started to send lava over the top.
-Discovered my first underground cavern. I had been expecting it to be the size of a house or two like the ones that are topside, only to find it was the size of the shopping centre, full of monsters and ores.
-Started multiple forest fires.
-Opened a portal to hell, a world full of a stone that burns eternally and monsters that manage to be worse than Creepers. What's worse than a silent creature that spawns in the darkness and suicide bombs you? How about a something that flies, spawns everywhere, shoots fireballs and screams constantly.
-Used the hellstone to create walls of fire for defence, lighting and just sheer fun. Fortunately there were no trees left nearby to burn down.
-Lost the entire save file......
.....moving on.
I finally got around to watching Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Going in I didn't have strong feelings either way; I liked the comic but I wasn't convinced they could be adequately adapted. Here's an abridged summary:
Pros
-Good implementation of title cards, narration, scene transition etc, as both a throwback to the comic and as just creative film editing.
-The final fight. While I preferred the comic's version, how the 'extra life' part was handled was a unique twist that caught me completely off guard.
Cons
-Michael Cera. I know it's mean-spirited and heaps of other people have already complained but he didn't have the manic energy I associate with the character.
-The various comments by onlookers during fights just don't translate well. In comics talking is a free action, but in any other medium you can't have dialogue without affecting the scene to some degree.
-Uninteresting action scenes. Despite (or maybe because of) the flashy visuals I felt no rush, no excitement while Scott was fighting. I've heard plenty of people over the years talk about special effects-centric scenes being incredibly dull but until now I'd just written them off as stuffy critics and nerds nostalgic about older films.
Neutrals
-I didn't care about Ramona in the slightest, but I can't hold that against the film as I felt the same about her in the comic.
-Negascott lost all of the emotion depth (it was one of my favourite of the actual serious scenes) that he had in the comic. However what they did do with him was both funny and unexpected so the two points cancel out.
In the end I'm apathetic about the movie. Shocking, me displaying that emotion, but what more can I say? There's nothing substantial that either excites or aggravates me to any significant degree.
There was going to be a third thing but I'm tired now, so just imagine me saying whatever you want to hear.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Odd Picture Choice
Foreshadowing!I had this idea to help myself update regularly by doing a weekly post that just talked about the various media I had consumed recently. This was a week or two ago. As you might guess, I've already let the schedule slip before it even really began. But Apple just crashed TF2 and I'm too bitter to play anything now.
The first order of business is Minecraft. After hearing good things about this game from multiple sources I gave it a go. And for a couple days I thought it was freaking brilliant.
You are placed in a world made up of cubes of various materials that can be harvested and turned into various items. Also at night monsters spawn and murder you rather effectively if you haven't built some shelter. Beyond that you are left to make your own fun (like Garry's Mod) in a world where basically everything wants to kill you (like Dwarf Fortress). Unlike these two games however, Minecraft is a lot more accessible (once you've browsed the wiki).
Here's some of the shenanigans I got up to while I played.
Since monsters spawn in darkness I decided to convert my house to glass in my spare time when I wasn't doing things such as...
...building a tower to the top of the sky. Unfortunately you cannot walk on the clouds. Naturally the next step was to dig to the bottom of the world which was considerably more difficult. At the bottom there's several nearly complete layers of unbreakable stone. If enough gaps line up the can reach the void beneath the world. So naturally I decided to link the tunnel containing the infinite abyss to the ocean of infinite and see if I broke the game:
Nope, but apparently stairs break the water physics.I found a strange level of enjoyment linking the ocean to the tunnel. The inability to tell where you are in relation to everything lead to me making a series of tunnels coiling all around the place, and there was a sense of suspense because I never knew when I would strike a another tunnel, which may have been full of water.
Ultimately what turned me off the game was the lack of goals as I'm not obsessive enough to be one of those people that make huge scale structures and models. Once the multiplayer gets stabilised (the game is still in alpha) I will give it another look.
Since I'm running longer than intended I'll finish up with Highschool of the Dead. When visiting the Madman site for an unrelated reason I came across this show andwas intrigued by the idea of the Japanese take on the the standard zombie apocalypse scenario. Turns out it is the same as the western one except with lots more fanservice.
No seriously, lots of fanservice.
After getting over my initial disappointment that this wasn't a dark and slightly serious work that the first episode made me believe, I came to except the show for what it is: an entertaining romp full of bloody and breasts. It's not a work of genius but it still rates higher to me than most zombie fiction.
Oh right, I haven't actually really said anything about the show itself: great animation, adequate attempt at plot, one brilliant musical homage, serviceable action, mostly fast paced, no gore despite excessive violence and blood, fanservice (cannot stress that enough), possible second season.
Friday, August 20, 2010
The Silver Age Begins...
Now that I've got a scanner I can subject you all to the various pictures that I can't reproduce in MS Paint. Here's a brief comic showing my standard reaction to the presence of a cat:
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Audiosurf Vs Beat Hazard
While working towards the last achievement in Beat Hazard it occurred to me that I'd never got around to doing a comparison between Audiosurf and Beat Hazard despite there being no good reason not to. After all I frequently lament the fact that I find it difficult to rate media in a vacuum or in relation to it's context at large, but not in a direct comparison. So why the hell haven't I done this yet?
Anyway, AS and BH share the same premise, using your music to generate the level, but take it in two different directions genre-wise. AS gives you a track the length relative to your song choice and you 'race' do it, collecting coloured blocks to make groups of 3+ whereas BH gives you a top down space shooter where the firepower is determined by your music. These are both games were basically the entire goal is to get a high score. For convenience I'm going to harness the ultimate power.....of subheadings.
Visuals
The great thing about superficial things is that they're generally easier to discuss. AS' visuals could be summed up as simplistic. There isn't much in the way of textures, so everything is rather blocky and reminiscent of virtual reality in older films. Not that there is anything wrong with this; you're a car collecting blocks for points, not some war-wearied soldier or something. While the objects may be plain, the colouring is actually important. The blocks are colour-coded for value, with hotter colours being worth more. Further more, the track and background take on a hue relative to the speed of song/track, with the slow sections being blue or purple, and the fastest, most intense parts red.
BH is probably the better of the two games in terms of actual visual quality. The spaceships have some detail, and there's plenty of bloom. The catch is there's too much bloom. You see, visual distortion is a deliberate game design choice.
Anyway, AS and BH share the same premise, using your music to generate the level, but take it in two different directions genre-wise. AS gives you a track the length relative to your song choice and you 'race' do it, collecting coloured blocks to make groups of 3+ whereas BH gives you a top down space shooter where the firepower is determined by your music. These are both games were basically the entire goal is to get a high score. For convenience I'm going to harness the ultimate power.....of subheadings.
Visuals
The great thing about superficial things is that they're generally easier to discuss. AS' visuals could be summed up as simplistic. There isn't much in the way of textures, so everything is rather blocky and reminiscent of virtual reality in older films. Not that there is anything wrong with this; you're a car collecting blocks for points, not some war-wearied soldier or something. While the objects may be plain, the colouring is actually important. The blocks are colour-coded for value, with hotter colours being worth more. Further more, the track and background take on a hue relative to the speed of song/track, with the slow sections being blue or purple, and the fastest, most intense parts red.
BH is probably the better of the two games in terms of actual visual quality. The spaceships have some detail, and there's plenty of bloom. The catch is there's too much bloom. You see, visual distortion is a deliberate game design choice.
Artist's representation of a climatic boss fight, probably.Unfortunately BH doesn't take a note from AS and so colour is meaningless in the gameplay. With the exception of the grey ships and the yellow missiles, the colours of the various explosions, lasers and so forth all alternate through a neon spectrum with no apparent rhyme or reason.
Gameplay
AS can be rationalised into two different styles: combo and evasion. In combo you collect the various coloured blocks and the challenge is not getting yourself in a position where you can't make groups of 3+. You can select from several racers each with their own unique abilities which further varies the gameplay. In evasion there is only one colour to get, but there are also negative grey blocks, which hurt your score noticeably, so the challenge has a lot more focus on fast manoeuvring and less quick decisions. There is only one racer choice for this (because evasion style is really just a racer's ability).
BH has several actual gameplay modes, but the core challenge remains the same: you continuously shoot while dodging oncoming objects. Beyond that there's the choices of when to use a screen-clearing bomb and when to stop shooting to raise your point multiplier. This is what kills a lot of BH's longevity for me as all rounds play out basically the same, whereas AS as some variety.
Music Relevance
Despite being a fundamental part of both games, there isn't too much depth to the effect music has on the games. In the end it is really just the speed of the song that does anything. AS changes the gradient of the track based on the song, with slow parts being uphill and fast naturally being down.
In BH your musics speed effects both the size and power of your shots, and the frequency of the enemies. Your weapons will vary between a pea shooter and a death-beam that covers a quarter of the screen, and the idea is in the lulls where you guns are useless, the idea is to play evasively and raise your daredevil multiplier. Sounds pretty cool right? Just like communism, in theory it works. As far as I can tell which enemies spawn and in what amount seems to be all determined by the difficulty and not be the music at all. I've had plenty of times where I've had massive lasers but only a couple asteroids to destroy, and other times have been stuck with the pea shooter and had to survive against two bosses.
Longevity
These are both score-based games. There are no definite goals and accomplishments, as any success just means that now the bar is higher. Personally I'm really not interested in games like this; I want to have more concrete goals, and I can't stand that feeling that there is no ceiling, I could always do better.
AS has a noticeable lead over BH in this area, as each song has its own global leaderboard complete with comment, whereas BH has just a leaderboard for highest scores in general or something (I really don't know exactly, BH doesn't present it after a song unlike AS).
Conclusion
Whether these games are worth playing depends on how into the whole 'your music makes the game' idea. If you really like that then you'll probably be disappointed, but if you already like the genre of either game anyway, then you might get more enjoyment out of it than me.
What I would like is a game that is a cross between AS and Mario Kart. I like the idea of a song making the track but I hate the implementation. I want people to race against, I want weapons, I want the track to be a circuit rather than a straight line. But that's not going to happen. Or is it?
No.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Epic
It's been too long since I've actually finished and published a post.
It seems like a weekly ritual that I must start typing something, my head swimming with awesome sounding sentences, only to realise that I have no idea how to tie the increasingly mundane sounding sentences together, and that my central idea is flawed and limited. And then I close the window and another draft is orphaned.
But enough of that, I want to talk about James Cameron's Avatar.
First off I'll say that I was pleasantly surprised by the film. I was well aware of the cliche storm (and in fact knew the entire plot) and was prepared for a long unnecessary film full of visuals that I would not care about. And I got all that I had expected: weak plot, stupid message, CG vistas.
But what I didn't expect was the level of quality. Everything may have been unoriginal but at least it was adequately done. For instance I initially groaned when there was a voice over at the start, but it had both an in universe reason (instead of say some all seeing disembodied voice) and was present through out the entire film (none of that very beginning and then very end when the audience has forgotten crap).
If I had to give it a rating on the fly, I'd say 3/5. Not worth the decade of work or deserving of the hype, but much better than I had expected.
Now that I've got that done, I can get to the meat of this post: discussing the setting. Bear with me, this will be awkward.
When you look at sci fi worlds you can often hazard a guess as to whether they are built around established rules and their consequences, or whether it just follows the rule of cool. Avatar is an interesting film as I think it was conceived as just a bunch of awesome ideas (floating mountains, world trees, pterodactyl mounts) that then had reasons made to hold them all together. It's contrived but it's better than no reason at all.
So the planet Pandora is rich with Unobtainium, which is a multi-purpose material that is incredibly valuable and a tradition trope of sci fi universe. The presence of this substance (I assume, it better be fucking canon or else they've got one hell of a contrived coincidence) allows the development of basically a tree-based network that connects living creatures, acts as a pseudo-afterlife, and contains an alien god-mind. It's the cross between the internet and the Farplane.
What's the problem then? Remember the end battle, with the military about to win only for the forces of nature to arrive and wreck their shit up. Sure it's a deus ex machina but at least there's some foreshadowing; it's not completely out of nowhere.
No what bothers me is this: how does Eywa communicate with all the predators? Does the wildlife just plug into trees in their spare time? One could argue that there was some sort of wireless communication but that completely undermines the whole premise of the bio-USB's and is not hinted at what so ever. It happens purely because the plot needs it to.
This same level of reasoning occurs in two other situations. The first is the mind transfer bit at the Tree of Souls. Apparently Pandora's plants can connect to the human mind via our skin, kind of like how when your put a book next to a TV, the story is shown on the screen. Fine I'll ignore this one, it only happens twice so it's not in your face all the time mocking logic. The next point is though: the freaking avatars.
The drivers get in their tanning beds, see some stock swirling vortexes, and then bam! they are controlling an alien body. How is this possible? Are their brainwaves being broadcast between bodies? If so wouldn't the floating mountains interfere? A side effect of this slopping planning/design is that it trivialises the whole Pandora USB thing. Who cares about wired stuff when there's wireless.
Something I don't understand is how this problem even came up. They could have made it that the drivers have to get body modifications done on them, namely a one of the neural links. The drivers could be hooked up to their avatar and transfer bodies. We'd lose the possibility of a driver being disconnected whilst in their avatar, but we'd gain the threat of their human body being killed when their are out playing space elves.
I came up with this in idea in like ten minutes; Avatar was being designed years ago. Go figure.
It seems like a weekly ritual that I must start typing something, my head swimming with awesome sounding sentences, only to realise that I have no idea how to tie the increasingly mundane sounding sentences together, and that my central idea is flawed and limited. And then I close the window and another draft is orphaned.
But enough of that, I want to talk about James Cameron's Avatar.
First off I'll say that I was pleasantly surprised by the film. I was well aware of the cliche storm (and in fact knew the entire plot) and was prepared for a long unnecessary film full of visuals that I would not care about. And I got all that I had expected: weak plot, stupid message, CG vistas.But what I didn't expect was the level of quality. Everything may have been unoriginal but at least it was adequately done. For instance I initially groaned when there was a voice over at the start, but it had both an in universe reason (instead of say some all seeing disembodied voice) and was present through out the entire film (none of that very beginning and then very end when the audience has forgotten crap).
If I had to give it a rating on the fly, I'd say 3/5. Not worth the decade of work or deserving of the hype, but much better than I had expected.
Now that I've got that done, I can get to the meat of this post: discussing the setting. Bear with me, this will be awkward.
When you look at sci fi worlds you can often hazard a guess as to whether they are built around established rules and their consequences, or whether it just follows the rule of cool. Avatar is an interesting film as I think it was conceived as just a bunch of awesome ideas (floating mountains, world trees, pterodactyl mounts) that then had reasons made to hold them all together. It's contrived but it's better than no reason at all.So the planet Pandora is rich with Unobtainium, which is a multi-purpose material that is incredibly valuable and a tradition trope of sci fi universe. The presence of this substance (I assume, it better be fucking canon or else they've got one hell of a contrived coincidence) allows the development of basically a tree-based network that connects living creatures, acts as a pseudo-afterlife, and contains an alien god-mind. It's the cross between the internet and the Farplane.
What's the problem then? Remember the end battle, with the military about to win only for the forces of nature to arrive and wreck their shit up. Sure it's a deus ex machina but at least there's some foreshadowing; it's not completely out of nowhere.
No what bothers me is this: how does Eywa communicate with all the predators? Does the wildlife just plug into trees in their spare time? One could argue that there was some sort of wireless communication but that completely undermines the whole premise of the bio-USB's and is not hinted at what so ever. It happens purely because the plot needs it to.
This same level of reasoning occurs in two other situations. The first is the mind transfer bit at the Tree of Souls. Apparently Pandora's plants can connect to the human mind via our skin, kind of like how when your put a book next to a TV, the story is shown on the screen. Fine I'll ignore this one, it only happens twice so it's not in your face all the time mocking logic. The next point is though: the freaking avatars.
The drivers get in their tanning beds, see some stock swirling vortexes, and then bam! they are controlling an alien body. How is this possible? Are their brainwaves being broadcast between bodies? If so wouldn't the floating mountains interfere? A side effect of this slopping planning/design is that it trivialises the whole Pandora USB thing. Who cares about wired stuff when there's wireless.
Something I don't understand is how this problem even came up. They could have made it that the drivers have to get body modifications done on them, namely a one of the neural links. The drivers could be hooked up to their avatar and transfer bodies. We'd lose the possibility of a driver being disconnected whilst in their avatar, but we'd gain the threat of their human body being killed when their are out playing space elves.
I came up with this in idea in like ten minutes; Avatar was being designed years ago. Go figure.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
My Day at Supanova
Having just got back from Supanova, I decided it was a blog-worthy experience. Since I don't have a particularly good camera on my phone, I'll be providing MS Paint pictures to compliment the text. Enjoy.
The morning started low key, as there's only so much excitement a person can have when they have no real expectations except that a lot of money will be spent. My only concern was who was coming with me and how we would get there.
Several weeks earlier I had mentioned Supanova to my group of friends, and there had been plenty of agreement, even from people I know would not enjoy going. As the days past I would occasionally bring up the approaching event in conversation when relevant but never managed to get a definite answer of who was going.
Finally I posted on Facebook in a last attempt to get clear responses. All I really got was advice that it would be better to go on Sunday than Saturday. Fine fine I though, this group doesn't do organisation well. Or at all. Everything will be done on the fly then.
So Sunday. I kill several hours waiting for some sort of communication from someone. Nothing, no phone call, no email, no Facebook message. Eventually I spy Keiran online only to discover that he had no money and thus was not going. Given that he was one of the people I moved the date from Saturday (which was better for me) to Sunday, at that point I lost it a little.
Just a little.
At this point I resolved to go alone, and hope everyone else has an unpleasant bowel movement.
The next part was surprisingly simple. Getting there was quick, parking was effortless (although expensive), and the line moved deceptively fast. And inside lay Supanova, my first convention.
The first thing that struck me was how comparatively normal I was. If there was a normalcy scale from 1 to 10, even with my attire (all black with an Ergo Proxy shirt and my Trilby hat) I would score an 8, beaten only by people wearing completely normal clothes (9) and people dragged there by their significant others (10).
This was my first experience with cosplayers. As a closeted one myself, I could not decide whether these people are brave (for having the guts to make a spectacle of themselves) or just sad (for not understanding that just because you want to do something, doesn't mean that it is a good idea). I found I have a similar response to cosplayers as I did to prostitutes: I'm not comfortable starring directly at them even though I'm allowed to, and I have a strong urge to ask them where they went wrong in their lives.
I can't bash the cosplayers completely. While most of them were generic mainstream characters (I'm not sure whether I saw more Naruto or Bleach characters) and girls in outfits that they could not pull off, them were some good/interesting ones. Two that come to mind are the fairly awesome xenomorph outfit, and a girl that I think was dressed up like some sort of representation of GLaDOS.
I wish I had asked her...
The sheer amount of people proved to be rather daunting so I sought out higher ground to get a good view of the entire convention. At this point I spied the guest autograph signing area and more importantly, Summer Glau. Not content to wait in the massive line, I nonchalantly edged towards the table. At about four metres I burst into a sprint, leapt the table, scooped up the rather startled actress and flew off into the sky. At about this point the fantasy ended and I went to look at more shops.
Not pictured: actual events.
Whilst wondering aimlessly I encountered some sort of Nintendo booth, complete with No More Heroes 2. After playing a Ranked battle and impressing at least one 12 year old, the nice lady at the counter informed me that I could buy the game for $25. given that I had bought the game several weeks earlier for around $80, I died a little inside.
After the monetary loss by technicality, to check out the Madman booth again for potential bargains. Naturally there was none as the only things that are ever cheap in life are things I already own. Since my quest for cheaper DVD's had been a complete failure, I bought Darker than Black and Rebuild of Evangelion 1.11 (at a slight discount when I mentioned that I already had bought the earlier edition). Why? Because like France I'm always ready to concede. Yeah that's right, I went there.
Aware that there was probably other stuff I'd like to see/buy, I decided to leave. With no one to make witty observations to, I didn't have enough interest to plunge into the crowds. But I left with a resolution, that I would return in several years time, only this time I'd have more money and a better group of friends. And it would be awesome.
To be continued...
Total spending:
$25 entry
$12 parking
$75 Darker than Black
$20 Rebuild of Eva 1.11
The morning started low key, as there's only so much excitement a person can have when they have no real expectations except that a lot of money will be spent. My only concern was who was coming with me and how we would get there.
Several weeks earlier I had mentioned Supanova to my group of friends, and there had been plenty of agreement, even from people I know would not enjoy going. As the days past I would occasionally bring up the approaching event in conversation when relevant but never managed to get a definite answer of who was going.
Finally I posted on Facebook in a last attempt to get clear responses. All I really got was advice that it would be better to go on Sunday than Saturday. Fine fine I though, this group doesn't do organisation well. Or at all. Everything will be done on the fly then.
So Sunday. I kill several hours waiting for some sort of communication from someone. Nothing, no phone call, no email, no Facebook message. Eventually I spy Keiran online only to discover that he had no money and thus was not going. Given that he was one of the people I moved the date from Saturday (which was better for me) to Sunday, at that point I lost it a little.
Just a little.At this point I resolved to go alone, and hope everyone else has an unpleasant bowel movement.
The next part was surprisingly simple. Getting there was quick, parking was effortless (although expensive), and the line moved deceptively fast. And inside lay Supanova, my first convention.
The first thing that struck me was how comparatively normal I was. If there was a normalcy scale from 1 to 10, even with my attire (all black with an Ergo Proxy shirt and my Trilby hat) I would score an 8, beaten only by people wearing completely normal clothes (9) and people dragged there by their significant others (10).
This was my first experience with cosplayers. As a closeted one myself, I could not decide whether these people are brave (for having the guts to make a spectacle of themselves) or just sad (for not understanding that just because you want to do something, doesn't mean that it is a good idea). I found I have a similar response to cosplayers as I did to prostitutes: I'm not comfortable starring directly at them even though I'm allowed to, and I have a strong urge to ask them where they went wrong in their lives.
I can't bash the cosplayers completely. While most of them were generic mainstream characters (I'm not sure whether I saw more Naruto or Bleach characters) and girls in outfits that they could not pull off, them were some good/interesting ones. Two that come to mind are the fairly awesome xenomorph outfit, and a girl that I think was dressed up like some sort of representation of GLaDOS.
I wish I had asked her...The sheer amount of people proved to be rather daunting so I sought out higher ground to get a good view of the entire convention. At this point I spied the guest autograph signing area and more importantly, Summer Glau. Not content to wait in the massive line, I nonchalantly edged towards the table. At about four metres I burst into a sprint, leapt the table, scooped up the rather startled actress and flew off into the sky. At about this point the fantasy ended and I went to look at more shops.
Not pictured: actual events.Whilst wondering aimlessly I encountered some sort of Nintendo booth, complete with No More Heroes 2. After playing a Ranked battle and impressing at least one 12 year old, the nice lady at the counter informed me that I could buy the game for $25. given that I had bought the game several weeks earlier for around $80, I died a little inside.
After the monetary loss by technicality, to check out the Madman booth again for potential bargains. Naturally there was none as the only things that are ever cheap in life are things I already own. Since my quest for cheaper DVD's had been a complete failure, I bought Darker than Black and Rebuild of Evangelion 1.11 (at a slight discount when I mentioned that I already had bought the earlier edition). Why? Because like France I'm always ready to concede. Yeah that's right, I went there.
Aware that there was probably other stuff I'd like to see/buy, I decided to leave. With no one to make witty observations to, I didn't have enough interest to plunge into the crowds. But I left with a resolution, that I would return in several years time, only this time I'd have more money and a better group of friends. And it would be awesome.
To be continued...Total spending:
$25 entry
$12 parking
$75 Darker than Black
$20 Rebuild of Eva 1.11
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Wherein I like to use the word wherein
I should continue to set up my shiny new Facebook account, but frankly I hate where everything is and how it works so instead I'm going to do a blog post ie this one you are reading right now.
And hello I suppose to any newcomers via Facebook. Welcome to a world where quality is an afterthought at best.
This morning I finally got around to finishing Shadow of the Colossus. For those who don't pay attention to the pretentious video game culture, SotC is a PS2 game that apparently is one of God's children and doesn't get enough praise.
Ok I'll admit that looks awesome
The player character Wanda/Wander travels to a bleak land to raise a girl from the dead. To do so he is set the task of slaying the sixteen colossi. That's about all the plot for the majority of the game.
The gameplay is fairly simple as well. You trek through a vast, almost lifeless land till you find the colossus you're after. Combat consists of you climbing on the bastards to get to their weak points and commence stabbing. If the name didn't clue you in on it, the colossus for the most point are BIG:
After you work out the trick to scaling and killing a colossus you are are sent back to the central temple where you are given your next target. And that's pretty much the entire game. The only other thing to do in the big wide world is to hunt for lizards and fruit which get really small increases to your maximum grip and health gauges respectively, but that's only there for obsessive completionists and people who want to survive on hard mode.
Minimalism is pretty much the theme of SotC. The visuals of muted, the music is absent when you are exploring the world, and the dialogue is present only briefly. Not that any of this is a bad thing. The stark simplicity gives the game a unique feel and identity.
This is why SotC is so fondly reminisced about by many critics and gamers. What I don't like is how everyone forgets the game's flaws in light of this style.
Really there is only one relevant flaw, one that makes in anything else (awkward camera and horse handling, and the occasional physics glitches) fade in comparison. When you are climbing along the colossi, they will thrash around in an attempt to throw you off. Fair enough, I'd try my hardest to get a spider that was on back off. While they are doing this, Wanda can only hold on tight and wait for the colossus to stop. This prevents you from climbing further or charging up a stab.
Where I lose my patience is that there is sometimes little if any time between thrashes. All you can do is hang on and watch your grip bar slowly decrease, which naturally causes you to fall when it reaches zero. Several of the fights were dragged out purely because I wasn't getting an opening to attack. And this soured the SotC experience for me.
I can't get excited about an epic fight to the death because I know the last five minutes will be me hanging onto a giant's head and screaming in frustration. I can't feel saddened about the dead colossi in the end credits either.
I'm not saying that the entire game is ruined, but between the flaws and the internet's over-hyping, I just can't appreciate Shadow of the Colossus as much as everyone else.
And hello I suppose to any newcomers via Facebook. Welcome to a world where quality is an afterthought at best.
This morning I finally got around to finishing Shadow of the Colossus. For those who don't pay attention to the pretentious video game culture, SotC is a PS2 game that apparently is one of God's children and doesn't get enough praise.
Ok I'll admit that looks awesomeThe player character Wanda/Wander travels to a bleak land to raise a girl from the dead. To do so he is set the task of slaying the sixteen colossi. That's about all the plot for the majority of the game.
The gameplay is fairly simple as well. You trek through a vast, almost lifeless land till you find the colossus you're after. Combat consists of you climbing on the bastards to get to their weak points and commence stabbing. If the name didn't clue you in on it, the colossus for the most point are BIG:
After you work out the trick to scaling and killing a colossus you are are sent back to the central temple where you are given your next target. And that's pretty much the entire game. The only other thing to do in the big wide world is to hunt for lizards and fruit which get really small increases to your maximum grip and health gauges respectively, but that's only there for obsessive completionists and people who want to survive on hard mode.
Minimalism is pretty much the theme of SotC. The visuals of muted, the music is absent when you are exploring the world, and the dialogue is present only briefly. Not that any of this is a bad thing. The stark simplicity gives the game a unique feel and identity.
This is why SotC is so fondly reminisced about by many critics and gamers. What I don't like is how everyone forgets the game's flaws in light of this style.
Really there is only one relevant flaw, one that makes in anything else (awkward camera and horse handling, and the occasional physics glitches) fade in comparison. When you are climbing along the colossi, they will thrash around in an attempt to throw you off. Fair enough, I'd try my hardest to get a spider that was on back off. While they are doing this, Wanda can only hold on tight and wait for the colossus to stop. This prevents you from climbing further or charging up a stab.
Where I lose my patience is that there is sometimes little if any time between thrashes. All you can do is hang on and watch your grip bar slowly decrease, which naturally causes you to fall when it reaches zero. Several of the fights were dragged out purely because I wasn't getting an opening to attack. And this soured the SotC experience for me.
I can't get excited about an epic fight to the death because I know the last five minutes will be me hanging onto a giant's head and screaming in frustration. I can't feel saddened about the dead colossi in the end credits either.
I'm not saying that the entire game is ruined, but between the flaws and the internet's over-hyping, I just can't appreciate Shadow of the Colossus as much as everyone else.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Wherein I talk about trivial matters
When I signed up to Twitter I had the idea of doing mini-posts, only to discover the whole 140 character limit. I was hesitant to do it here cause it seems like a kind of tease, similar to how you are playing a game only for the the end boss and credits to jump out at like the two hour mark or something.
I'm going to do it anyway though, cause I've got vague thoughts and no one to humour me in real time.
Idle thought number one
Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0 was finally released on DVD in Japan, so I'm downloading what I hope is a subbed rip. What I can't grasp is how Gainax seems to hate money and success.
1.0 was released in Japan in 2007 (screenings) and 2008 (DVD). It wasn't until 2009 that Australia got it on DVD. Now I could except this for an unknown movie or even one of middle-level popularity, but this is the anime equivalent of Watchmen; they should be getting this out as fast as possible.
Gainax, like a lot of Japanese companies, do favour the whole updated release thing which is suppose does milk money out of obsessive fans and collectors....like me.
The other cause for my bafflement at Gainax is the absence of inducing nostalgia. Other franchises have got nostalgia generation down to an art.
Recent Legend of Zelda games have made a habit of squeezing in music from previous games, Motoko Kusanagi can't go a movie/season without jumping off a tall building and cloaking midfall, and most of the Metal Gear series seems to be call backs to earlier instalments.
But despite remaking the original series in glorious high budget detail, no one has truly tried to deliberately get the fanbase screaming. Where are the homages and shout outs to iconic elements (actual plots and characters in the remake don't count).
Really the point of the last two paragraphs has been these two questions; where is a new version of Cruel Angel Thesis? and where is a new version of Fly Me to the Moon? They should be big and dramatic and orchestral. Look at what FF7's One Winged Angel has done to a generation. Evangelion could do that too. Twice!
Idle thought number two
Can't remember anymore.
I'm going to do it anyway though, cause I've got vague thoughts and no one to humour me in real time.
Idle thought number one
Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0 was finally released on DVD in Japan, so I'm downloading what I hope is a subbed rip. What I can't grasp is how Gainax seems to hate money and success.
1.0 was released in Japan in 2007 (screenings) and 2008 (DVD). It wasn't until 2009 that Australia got it on DVD. Now I could except this for an unknown movie or even one of middle-level popularity, but this is the anime equivalent of Watchmen; they should be getting this out as fast as possible.
Gainax, like a lot of Japanese companies, do favour the whole updated release thing which is suppose does milk money out of obsessive fans and collectors....like me.
The other cause for my bafflement at Gainax is the absence of inducing nostalgia. Other franchises have got nostalgia generation down to an art.
Recent Legend of Zelda games have made a habit of squeezing in music from previous games, Motoko Kusanagi can't go a movie/season without jumping off a tall building and cloaking midfall, and most of the Metal Gear series seems to be call backs to earlier instalments.
But despite remaking the original series in glorious high budget detail, no one has truly tried to deliberately get the fanbase screaming. Where are the homages and shout outs to iconic elements (actual plots and characters in the remake don't count).
Really the point of the last two paragraphs has been these two questions; where is a new version of Cruel Angel Thesis? and where is a new version of Fly Me to the Moon? They should be big and dramatic and orchestral. Look at what FF7's One Winged Angel has done to a generation. Evangelion could do that too. Twice!
Idle thought number two
Can't remember anymore.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Finally
Ghost in the Shell.
...
...
...
Christ this will be tough. For convenience I will be assuming that you the reader are familiar with GitS and will not hesitate to spoil anything from the movies or TV seasons.
The Ghost in the Shell franchise generates a good deal of ambivalence for me. There are parts that I really love and parts that I really hate. The two sides meet, cancel out, and leave me unable to decide how feel about the series.
GitS in some ways is a return to science fiction's roots, ie showing the effect of new technologies on society. But unlike the sci fi of many decades ago it still tells a story and doesn't let itself get bogged down in intricacies of how it all works (that's the philosophy's job).
Naturally there are many plot points based off the impact of cyberbrains but GitS really shines in the subtleties when it doesn't draw your attention.
The most common example would be simply all the times when anyone casually communicates via what is essentially telepathy. A more awesome example is in the end of the first film. The snipers have lasers that are invisible to normal eyes, so they can have laser sights without alerting the target (unless their eyes can also see them). Simple but clever.
The counter point to the above is the philosophy, the deeper effects of a world full of robotic bodies and mind-hacking. For starters, it just isn't well implemented. There are occasions where someone (usually the Major) either asks a vague question or stares off into the distance, despite it being not the appropriate time (in either the plot or pacing).
Look at the first film again; Section 9 have just apprehended a victim of the Puppet Master and then everything is put on hold for the Major to go for a swim.
Innocence has what I can only believe is a parody of this guerrilla philosophy in the scene where Batou and Togusa are investigating the remains of the gynoid. The doctor present begins to talk all deeply about dolls for no good reason while Togusa just tries to get straight answers and Batou ignores both of them. To me, Togusa's exasperation and the doctor's tangential musings can only be a self aware joke by Production IG. Which makes it worse because that means they are aware of the awkwardly wielded philosophy.
Often tied into the philosophy in GitS is the politics. It generates obstacles and antagonists, and often leaves Section 9 struggling between what's right legally and right morally. What it doesn't do is be interesting.
All the politicians are the the 'Director of X' or the 'Such-and-such Minister'. Their motives are generally personal gain and their beliefs are either vague or outright unknown. They tend to be devices and contrivances more than characters and most disappear into irrelevance as quickly as they came.
What baffles me is how dull the politics is in GitS. The setting is perfect for it and the philosophical questions that get raised could be expressed in a smoother fashion. If some of the political groups or leaders were properly upgraded to the status of secondary characters and given some depth beyond 'nuisance' I think GitS could turn one of its weaknesses into a strength. Here's an example of what I mean:
Cyberbrains and cyborg bodies are divisive issues I'll call X and Y respectively; from here we can create four generalised viewpoints;
-'Luddites', Anti-X, Anti-Y: this group is full of those that feel threatened by the new tech. They feel that one loses their humanity and individuality the more cyberised they become.
-'Futurists', Pro-X, Pro-Y: this group is all about improving oneself, removing limitations, pushing the boundaries. The new tech is another step for society and personal freedom.
-'Instrumentalists', Pro-X, Anti-Y: like the futurists, this group is all about taking humanity to what they believe to be the next step. However they view the next step as only involving freeing the mind and dealing with cyberspace. To them any sort of physical body is a hassle,a distraction and something that will eventually be obsolete.
-'Realists', Anti-X, Pro-Y: this group is the inversion of the instrumentalists. Cyberbrains are the threat to humanity and cyborg bodies are the way of the future.
And there's four new factions who each have more depth than the majority of the ones in GitS. From here you could also weave philosophical ideas into the plot more smoothly; eg when dealing with some radical futurists that are now indistinguishable from androids the question of what constitutes a person could be raised. It beats having the Tachikomas do it at least.
Things a feeling a little too negative so let's look at another positive: the animation. I know it's shallow in comparison to the above but it must be said. GitS looks good, in all its animated forms. Quality is often related to budget and so it is natural that a popular franchise such as this will have more money to spend on the visuals than a lesser known show. But what makes GitS great and worth mentioning here is the fluidity of the animation, which in to me is more important than the actual level of detail.
All too frequently in anime there are moments that can only be described as wonky or awkward, which mostly occur in action scenes. It's the times when the characters gracelessly shift stances or casually ignore conventional time or motion. This tends to be a result of adapting straight from manga, as the panels will only show the important actions, and the movement in between is left unknown.
Getting back to the topic on hand, GitS rises above this to frequent fault. And in the action scenes it really shows. If only the action was a bit more frequent.
For a long time when I thought of Ghost in the Shell, I thought of it as primarily action, but with depth behind it. But as time progressed I realised I was getting the proportions of the genres wrong. GitS is not an franchise about gun play, it's just that sometimes the philosophy leads to someone firing a shot.
While typing this was going to say that GitS needs more fighting less talking, and then attempt to come up a valid explanation about why I know more than the makers of a wildly successful franchise. But then it hit me; GitS doesn't need more action, it needs more suspense.
Let's look at the episode in 2nd GiG where Section 9 has to take down the rogue military helicopters: I was thinking "this looks great" and "yes finally some action", not "oh I hope they make it out alright".
I say this because I've recently been re-watching Death Note and there are times were you're not sure who's going to come out on top and how. And this is mostly when characters are just talking, so when there's car chases and explosions involved it is even more intense. Whereas the dialogue in GitS is informative but dry.
Tied to this lack of suspense is the characters. They are a bunch of super skilled counter terrorists, equipped with cutting edge technology, and against direct conflict they are basically never threatened. Section 9's real threat is bureaucracy, which like Superman's Kriptonite is kinda lame.
The Major Motoko Kusanagi is an issue all by herself. She's the most talented (better than the rest except in their specialised fields), most knowledgeable (able to quote obscure philosophy to ease) and most focused (remains professional almost always) member of Section 9; she's practically a Mary Sue. The Major's only real flaws are her disconnectedness to humanity and slight psychotic tendencies. These sound like they are fairly major (no pun intended) but are downplayed considerably: her disconnectedness never seems to interfere with predicting how people behave and the psychosis shows up so very rarely and briefly.
Batou and Togusa bother me as well, but for a lesser reason. In comparison to the Major they are more rounded individuals but the plot treats them like devices. Batou's purpose seems to be to fail so the Major can succeed, to the point that he needs her assistance in a Batou-focused episode (the one with Angel's Feathers). Similarly Togusa mostly gets attention when the plot Section 9 needs to fail or at least be challenged, and what better way to do that than with the soft fleshy human.
Despite saying all this I still like ghost in the Shell; it's better than much of the anime out there. What I can't decide is whether it is a good show that could be great. or whether I just want it to be something it's not.
PS Although the date says the 9th, this was actually finished on the 22nd. Make of this what you will.
...
...
...
Christ this will be tough. For convenience I will be assuming that you the reader are familiar with GitS and will not hesitate to spoil anything from the movies or TV seasons.
The Ghost in the Shell franchise generates a good deal of ambivalence for me. There are parts that I really love and parts that I really hate. The two sides meet, cancel out, and leave me unable to decide how feel about the series.
GitS in some ways is a return to science fiction's roots, ie showing the effect of new technologies on society. But unlike the sci fi of many decades ago it still tells a story and doesn't let itself get bogged down in intricacies of how it all works (that's the philosophy's job).
Naturally there are many plot points based off the impact of cyberbrains but GitS really shines in the subtleties when it doesn't draw your attention.
The most common example would be simply all the times when anyone casually communicates via what is essentially telepathy. A more awesome example is in the end of the first film. The snipers have lasers that are invisible to normal eyes, so they can have laser sights without alerting the target (unless their eyes can also see them). Simple but clever.
The counter point to the above is the philosophy, the deeper effects of a world full of robotic bodies and mind-hacking. For starters, it just isn't well implemented. There are occasions where someone (usually the Major) either asks a vague question or stares off into the distance, despite it being not the appropriate time (in either the plot or pacing).
Look at the first film again; Section 9 have just apprehended a victim of the Puppet Master and then everything is put on hold for the Major to go for a swim.
Innocence has what I can only believe is a parody of this guerrilla philosophy in the scene where Batou and Togusa are investigating the remains of the gynoid. The doctor present begins to talk all deeply about dolls for no good reason while Togusa just tries to get straight answers and Batou ignores both of them. To me, Togusa's exasperation and the doctor's tangential musings can only be a self aware joke by Production IG. Which makes it worse because that means they are aware of the awkwardly wielded philosophy.
Often tied into the philosophy in GitS is the politics. It generates obstacles and antagonists, and often leaves Section 9 struggling between what's right legally and right morally. What it doesn't do is be interesting.
All the politicians are the the 'Director of X' or the 'Such-and-such Minister'. Their motives are generally personal gain and their beliefs are either vague or outright unknown. They tend to be devices and contrivances more than characters and most disappear into irrelevance as quickly as they came.
What baffles me is how dull the politics is in GitS. The setting is perfect for it and the philosophical questions that get raised could be expressed in a smoother fashion. If some of the political groups or leaders were properly upgraded to the status of secondary characters and given some depth beyond 'nuisance' I think GitS could turn one of its weaknesses into a strength. Here's an example of what I mean:
Cyberbrains and cyborg bodies are divisive issues I'll call X and Y respectively; from here we can create four generalised viewpoints;
-'Luddites', Anti-X, Anti-Y: this group is full of those that feel threatened by the new tech. They feel that one loses their humanity and individuality the more cyberised they become.
-'Futurists', Pro-X, Pro-Y: this group is all about improving oneself, removing limitations, pushing the boundaries. The new tech is another step for society and personal freedom.
-'Instrumentalists', Pro-X, Anti-Y: like the futurists, this group is all about taking humanity to what they believe to be the next step. However they view the next step as only involving freeing the mind and dealing with cyberspace. To them any sort of physical body is a hassle,a distraction and something that will eventually be obsolete.
-'Realists', Anti-X, Pro-Y: this group is the inversion of the instrumentalists. Cyberbrains are the threat to humanity and cyborg bodies are the way of the future.
And there's four new factions who each have more depth than the majority of the ones in GitS. From here you could also weave philosophical ideas into the plot more smoothly; eg when dealing with some radical futurists that are now indistinguishable from androids the question of what constitutes a person could be raised. It beats having the Tachikomas do it at least.
Things a feeling a little too negative so let's look at another positive: the animation. I know it's shallow in comparison to the above but it must be said. GitS looks good, in all its animated forms. Quality is often related to budget and so it is natural that a popular franchise such as this will have more money to spend on the visuals than a lesser known show. But what makes GitS great and worth mentioning here is the fluidity of the animation, which in to me is more important than the actual level of detail.
All too frequently in anime there are moments that can only be described as wonky or awkward, which mostly occur in action scenes. It's the times when the characters gracelessly shift stances or casually ignore conventional time or motion. This tends to be a result of adapting straight from manga, as the panels will only show the important actions, and the movement in between is left unknown.
Getting back to the topic on hand, GitS rises above this to frequent fault. And in the action scenes it really shows. If only the action was a bit more frequent.
For a long time when I thought of Ghost in the Shell, I thought of it as primarily action, but with depth behind it. But as time progressed I realised I was getting the proportions of the genres wrong. GitS is not an franchise about gun play, it's just that sometimes the philosophy leads to someone firing a shot.
While typing this was going to say that GitS needs more fighting less talking, and then attempt to come up a valid explanation about why I know more than the makers of a wildly successful franchise. But then it hit me; GitS doesn't need more action, it needs more suspense.
Let's look at the episode in 2nd GiG where Section 9 has to take down the rogue military helicopters: I was thinking "this looks great" and "yes finally some action", not "oh I hope they make it out alright".
I say this because I've recently been re-watching Death Note and there are times were you're not sure who's going to come out on top and how. And this is mostly when characters are just talking, so when there's car chases and explosions involved it is even more intense. Whereas the dialogue in GitS is informative but dry.
Tied to this lack of suspense is the characters. They are a bunch of super skilled counter terrorists, equipped with cutting edge technology, and against direct conflict they are basically never threatened. Section 9's real threat is bureaucracy, which like Superman's Kriptonite is kinda lame.
The Major Motoko Kusanagi is an issue all by herself. She's the most talented (better than the rest except in their specialised fields), most knowledgeable (able to quote obscure philosophy to ease) and most focused (remains professional almost always) member of Section 9; she's practically a Mary Sue. The Major's only real flaws are her disconnectedness to humanity and slight psychotic tendencies. These sound like they are fairly major (no pun intended) but are downplayed considerably: her disconnectedness never seems to interfere with predicting how people behave and the psychosis shows up so very rarely and briefly.
Batou and Togusa bother me as well, but for a lesser reason. In comparison to the Major they are more rounded individuals but the plot treats them like devices. Batou's purpose seems to be to fail so the Major can succeed, to the point that he needs her assistance in a Batou-focused episode (the one with Angel's Feathers). Similarly Togusa mostly gets attention when the plot Section 9 needs to fail or at least be challenged, and what better way to do that than with the soft fleshy human.
Despite saying all this I still like ghost in the Shell; it's better than much of the anime out there. What I can't decide is whether it is a good show that could be great. or whether I just want it to be something it's not.
PS Although the date says the 9th, this was actually finished on the 22nd. Make of this what you will.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
PSP Shenanigans: A True Story
I don't want to do my TAFE work so let's hear about a frustrating chapter of my recent life.
Ever since I'd sold my Gameboy Colour several years ago, I had not had any real desire to get any kind of portable console. My Ipod was enough in most circumstances and there were rarely games that caught my eye anyway.
Last year though I became aware of Dissidia: Final Fantasy, a fighting game which pitted the mian hero and villain of the first 10 games in the series against one another. It had the two thing I like in my fighting games: recognisable characters and unconventional gameplay.
But alas Dissida was PSP only and there was no real chance of it being ported (games only get ported from consoles I own, not to). As any person with basic comprehension will have figured out, I bought a PSP.
Realising I just spent several hundred dollars for a single game, I looked for others in an attmept to justify my purchase (although Dissidia did get me through Brisbane with my family so it has been fairly worthwhile).
On the suggestion of internet personalities I like, I bought Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles. The downside with this is that it is a remake of game from era when games were still at ridiculous arcade difficultly, and so I'll probably never finish this. It did come with Symphony of the Night which was decent.
So it was around this point I decided I should actually do some research on the console I bought several months earlier cause I'm all about careful planning. Turns out that the PSP is the loser by far in comparison to the DS. It has a weaker battery life and game library. Just like with the N64 I made my choice and it was the wrong one.
Only recently a lot of my friends have been getting into mod chips for their DS's. Why don't I do the same I thought. Well I can't because my PSP is a 3000 with version 5.5 on it, and no one can hack that. Oh boy, things just keep going my way (irony).
And that's basically where I am now. Really the only good thing about the PSP is that it is region free so I can get games from the US and Japan. If only there was something particularly worth while.
PS I apoligise for all the dryness between the few interesting parts.
Ever since I'd sold my Gameboy Colour several years ago, I had not had any real desire to get any kind of portable console. My Ipod was enough in most circumstances and there were rarely games that caught my eye anyway.
Last year though I became aware of Dissidia: Final Fantasy, a fighting game which pitted the mian hero and villain of the first 10 games in the series against one another. It had the two thing I like in my fighting games: recognisable characters and unconventional gameplay.
But alas Dissida was PSP only and there was no real chance of it being ported (games only get ported from consoles I own, not to). As any person with basic comprehension will have figured out, I bought a PSP.
Realising I just spent several hundred dollars for a single game, I looked for others in an attmept to justify my purchase (although Dissidia did get me through Brisbane with my family so it has been fairly worthwhile).
On the suggestion of internet personalities I like, I bought Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles. The downside with this is that it is a remake of game from era when games were still at ridiculous arcade difficultly, and so I'll probably never finish this. It did come with Symphony of the Night which was decent.
So it was around this point I decided I should actually do some research on the console I bought several months earlier cause I'm all about careful planning. Turns out that the PSP is the loser by far in comparison to the DS. It has a weaker battery life and game library. Just like with the N64 I made my choice and it was the wrong one.
Only recently a lot of my friends have been getting into mod chips for their DS's. Why don't I do the same I thought. Well I can't because my PSP is a 3000 with version 5.5 on it, and no one can hack that. Oh boy, things just keep going my way (irony).
And that's basically where I am now. Really the only good thing about the PSP is that it is region free so I can get games from the US and Japan. If only there was something particularly worth while.
PS I apoligise for all the dryness between the few interesting parts.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Steam Sale Conclusion
It's been almost several months but here we are at the end. One last post to bring all the games together in comparison and then let's never speak of this again.
Even before I finished all 10 games I had begun to try and rate them only to discover that I was more lenient the less I remembered about the game. This raised the question, what's a better indication of a game's quality? The recent memories of me frothing at the mouth over bad controls/camera angles/etc, or the more distant memories where the emotions attached have faded.
A more forgiving person would probably pick the latter as there would hopefully be less rage-induced bias but for me that just raises another issues: do the games deserve to be critiqued in a calm rational way. After all, the frustrating gameplay is still there, I just can't recall it as well anymore.
So here's the not-definitive-by-any-means-but-don't-expect-any-better final ratings:
10 - Painkiller
As the only game I couldn't bring myself to finish, Painkiller receives the very shameful ten. Seriously, who designs a boss fight to have several unavoidable parts where you take fall damage? When I'm more afraid of the physics than the giant flying demon, something is just plain wrong.
9 - Indigo Prophecy
I liked the premise and I was open to the interactive movie thing; too bad the premise went off the deep end and the gameplay was just badly implemented. When I encounter bad story/characters/setting I can get over it if the actual gameplay is good enough, and vice versa. This game obviously had neither and practically collapsed on itself while I watched with morbid fascination.
Here's where things get hard. Do I rate the remainders based on my initial feelings or current ones? What about originality? Is a game that tries to do something new but fails better than something that one that sticks to a formula and succeeds? Is replayability a factor?
8 - Eufloria
I'm actually a little surprised I put this here. The aesthetics were pleasing, so pleasing that they caused me to remember there's really nothing more to this game. No tactical depth, no evolution, no plot, no characters, no emotion. Eufloria is like some strange drug; you are doing something fairly boring for many hours, but you just don't care and you keep going back to do it some more.
7 - Beyond Good and Evil
I really want to put this higher because it has actual characters and tries to do something to my emotions unlike many of the games further down which seem to be excuse plots filled with 2 dimensional people. But then I remember the dull melee combat, awkward vehicle driving, and broken stealth. If only BGaE had had more focus instead of trying to be so many different things.
6 - Torchlight
I've put this game at 6. I've also played 53 hours according to Steam (I really want those last few achievements dammit). Two statements shouldn't go together but here we are. Torchlight shouldn't be above BGaE but that's what happens when your gameplay ain't broke. It may just be a pretty looking 'make numbers bigger' simulator but at least it works.
5 - Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3
RA3 gets this position by the virtue of being the last game left to place. There are no glaring flaws and no shining brilliance. It does have the advantage of having a lot more cash to toy with than basically all the other games bar Mirror's Edge, but this is countered by huge amount of nostalgia I have for earlier C&C games.
4 - Braid
I wish I could come up with a good reason why this game should be placed lower but I can't. As frustrating as I found the late game, I can't fault it for being difficult (except for a few parts that were just plain unintuitive). Despite the frequent pretentiousness of both the game and its fanbase, the gameplay both functions and is not repetitive, which is something I can't say about the previous games listed.
3 - Mirror's Edge
The time spent playing ME was a combination of screaming at difficult sections, cursing at screwy programming, and cringing at the plot. What put this so far up (down?) the list is that one day I may decide to replay this game, which is something that I won't consider for some of the others here, including Braid.
2 - Trine
I went to the enough of getting every single achievement for this game. It in my eyes is fully completed and experienced, Trine has nothing more it can offer me. But like Mirror's Edge I can see the possibility in a year or two of going back and playing it again. It also helps that there are no massive flaws in the game. Trine is the Mario, an all rounder in various stats/features, and in this instance that proves to make it the better than most.
1 - World of Goo
Things were always in WoG's favour. Where every other game was an unknown to some extent, WoG was something I had played and finished in the past but wanted to own for myself. It also has the honour of having a second post to make up for deficiencies in the first one. Other games probably needed that treatment but I didn't feel guilty enough to do one. I could mention actual features of the game which I think earn it the number one place but I'd prefer to go anecdotal. When I finish a good game I get a little sad as there is no more for me to play. Of the 10 games, only World of Goo caused this to happen and that is why it is in first place.
Even before I finished all 10 games I had begun to try and rate them only to discover that I was more lenient the less I remembered about the game. This raised the question, what's a better indication of a game's quality? The recent memories of me frothing at the mouth over bad controls/camera angles/etc, or the more distant memories where the emotions attached have faded.
A more forgiving person would probably pick the latter as there would hopefully be less rage-induced bias but for me that just raises another issues: do the games deserve to be critiqued in a calm rational way. After all, the frustrating gameplay is still there, I just can't recall it as well anymore.
So here's the not-definitive-by-any-means-but-don't-expect-any-better final ratings:
10 - Painkiller
As the only game I couldn't bring myself to finish, Painkiller receives the very shameful ten. Seriously, who designs a boss fight to have several unavoidable parts where you take fall damage? When I'm more afraid of the physics than the giant flying demon, something is just plain wrong.
9 - Indigo Prophecy
I liked the premise and I was open to the interactive movie thing; too bad the premise went off the deep end and the gameplay was just badly implemented. When I encounter bad story/characters/setting I can get over it if the actual gameplay is good enough, and vice versa. This game obviously had neither and practically collapsed on itself while I watched with morbid fascination.
Here's where things get hard. Do I rate the remainders based on my initial feelings or current ones? What about originality? Is a game that tries to do something new but fails better than something that one that sticks to a formula and succeeds? Is replayability a factor?
8 - Eufloria
I'm actually a little surprised I put this here. The aesthetics were pleasing, so pleasing that they caused me to remember there's really nothing more to this game. No tactical depth, no evolution, no plot, no characters, no emotion. Eufloria is like some strange drug; you are doing something fairly boring for many hours, but you just don't care and you keep going back to do it some more.
7 - Beyond Good and Evil
I really want to put this higher because it has actual characters and tries to do something to my emotions unlike many of the games further down which seem to be excuse plots filled with 2 dimensional people. But then I remember the dull melee combat, awkward vehicle driving, and broken stealth. If only BGaE had had more focus instead of trying to be so many different things.
6 - Torchlight
I've put this game at 6. I've also played 53 hours according to Steam (I really want those last few achievements dammit). Two statements shouldn't go together but here we are. Torchlight shouldn't be above BGaE but that's what happens when your gameplay ain't broke. It may just be a pretty looking 'make numbers bigger' simulator but at least it works.
5 - Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3
RA3 gets this position by the virtue of being the last game left to place. There are no glaring flaws and no shining brilliance. It does have the advantage of having a lot more cash to toy with than basically all the other games bar Mirror's Edge, but this is countered by huge amount of nostalgia I have for earlier C&C games.
4 - Braid
I wish I could come up with a good reason why this game should be placed lower but I can't. As frustrating as I found the late game, I can't fault it for being difficult (except for a few parts that were just plain unintuitive). Despite the frequent pretentiousness of both the game and its fanbase, the gameplay both functions and is not repetitive, which is something I can't say about the previous games listed.
3 - Mirror's Edge
The time spent playing ME was a combination of screaming at difficult sections, cursing at screwy programming, and cringing at the plot. What put this so far up (down?) the list is that one day I may decide to replay this game, which is something that I won't consider for some of the others here, including Braid.
2 - Trine
I went to the enough of getting every single achievement for this game. It in my eyes is fully completed and experienced, Trine has nothing more it can offer me. But like Mirror's Edge I can see the possibility in a year or two of going back and playing it again. It also helps that there are no massive flaws in the game. Trine is the Mario, an all rounder in various stats/features, and in this instance that proves to make it the better than most.
1 - World of Goo
Things were always in WoG's favour. Where every other game was an unknown to some extent, WoG was something I had played and finished in the past but wanted to own for myself. It also has the honour of having a second post to make up for deficiencies in the first one. Other games probably needed that treatment but I didn't feel guilty enough to do one. I could mention actual features of the game which I think earn it the number one place but I'd prefer to go anecdotal. When I finish a good game I get a little sad as there is no more for me to play. Of the 10 games, only World of Goo caused this to happen and that is why it is in first place.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Steam Sale Review: Beyond Good and Evil
Finally last game:
When you look at that, what do you expect? When I bought this game all I had to go on was that picture, the title, and people occasionally mentioning this game as underrated.
What I expected:
I figured BGaE would be a mix of genres. There would be some Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider style adventuring mixed with some multi-faction conspiracies and some good old cosmic horror elements.
What I got:
Space opera.
You see those space ships in the above picture? I thought they were meteors. I hadn't been this wrong about a genre of something since Lost.
For those who may not know, space opera refers to series like Star Trek or Star Wars; sci fi at its softest.
BGaE takes place on a little planet called Hillys, under attack by a mysterious race called the DomZ. You play as Jade, a reporter who also looks after a bunch of orphans on a lighthouse. In need of cash to power the shield protecting the lighthouse, you take up a job to investigate the why the Alpha Sections (a military group whose exact political position is rather vague) are doing such a poor job of dealing with the DomZ.
Naturally there's revelations, tragedies and a big space battle by the end.
BGaE is another one of those games who, much to my chagrin, contains several gameplay styles. The on foot sections remind me of 3D Zelda games what with the basic platforming and 'dungeons', but the actual combat is fairly weak. There are also times when suddenly it becomes a stealth mission and then you are playing a poor man's Metal Gear Solid. Outside there's what seems to be a big open sandbox until you realise there's almost nothing there, and what is there is probably compulsory. You explore this pseudo-sandbox in a vehicle that handles like someone from Indigo Prophecy (woo continuity nod). and finally there is a small degree of RPG gameplay, but like the sandbox is either compulsory or just irrelevant.
As I must have said before, I'm not fond of things that jump between moods or genres. While I don't won't all fiction to instead to become either grimdark angstfests or wacky lighthearted romps, I wish that tone wasn't allowed to jump so far.
An early scene in BGaE has Pey'j your pigman accomplice demonstrate his fart-powered rocket boots. Much later in the game Jade breaks down after [MASSIVE BUT FAIRLY OBVIOUS WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT SPOILERS]. For me the emotional weight of the later scene was lessened by the earlier scene, and all of its ilk.
It's been so long since I actually played this game I've forgotten most of the details, and all I'm let with are slightly bitter memories. There's nothing inherently terrible about this game (hmm I think I've already used that exact phrase previously, never mind), there's just nothing particularly good about it. BGaE has developed a fanbase so who knows, perhaps this is all just a combination of my very high standards and my disappointment that this was not what I expected.
If nothing else I can say that BGaE is an experience you don't get all that often despite containing alot of typical features, kind of like Fifth Element.
When you look at that, what do you expect? When I bought this game all I had to go on was that picture, the title, and people occasionally mentioning this game as underrated.What I expected:
I figured BGaE would be a mix of genres. There would be some Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider style adventuring mixed with some multi-faction conspiracies and some good old cosmic horror elements.
What I got:
Space opera.
You see those space ships in the above picture? I thought they were meteors. I hadn't been this wrong about a genre of something since Lost.
For those who may not know, space opera refers to series like Star Trek or Star Wars; sci fi at its softest.
BGaE takes place on a little planet called Hillys, under attack by a mysterious race called the DomZ. You play as Jade, a reporter who also looks after a bunch of orphans on a lighthouse. In need of cash to power the shield protecting the lighthouse, you take up a job to investigate the why the Alpha Sections (a military group whose exact political position is rather vague) are doing such a poor job of dealing with the DomZ.
Naturally there's revelations, tragedies and a big space battle by the end.
BGaE is another one of those games who, much to my chagrin, contains several gameplay styles. The on foot sections remind me of 3D Zelda games what with the basic platforming and 'dungeons', but the actual combat is fairly weak. There are also times when suddenly it becomes a stealth mission and then you are playing a poor man's Metal Gear Solid. Outside there's what seems to be a big open sandbox until you realise there's almost nothing there, and what is there is probably compulsory. You explore this pseudo-sandbox in a vehicle that handles like someone from Indigo Prophecy (woo continuity nod). and finally there is a small degree of RPG gameplay, but like the sandbox is either compulsory or just irrelevant.
As I must have said before, I'm not fond of things that jump between moods or genres. While I don't won't all fiction to instead to become either grimdark angstfests or wacky lighthearted romps, I wish that tone wasn't allowed to jump so far.
An early scene in BGaE has Pey'j your pigman accomplice demonstrate his fart-powered rocket boots. Much later in the game Jade breaks down after [MASSIVE BUT FAIRLY OBVIOUS WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT SPOILERS]. For me the emotional weight of the later scene was lessened by the earlier scene, and all of its ilk.
It's been so long since I actually played this game I've forgotten most of the details, and all I'm let with are slightly bitter memories. There's nothing inherently terrible about this game (hmm I think I've already used that exact phrase previously, never mind), there's just nothing particularly good about it. BGaE has developed a fanbase so who knows, perhaps this is all just a combination of my very high standards and my disappointment that this was not what I expected.
If nothing else I can say that BGaE is an experience you don't get all that often despite containing alot of typical features, kind of like Fifth Element.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Steam Sale Review: Painkiller
Once or twice a week I glance guiltily at this blog on my favourites list. I then do something else. I just really don't care about finishing up all the posts I have already promised. They are what I was thinking about months ago, I no longer care or remember enough to do anything about them.
But not tonight, because I'm reviewing:
Remember first person shooters like Doom? Where it was basically you mowing down hordes and plot was something to fill the back of the box? For everyone who misses those days Painkiller is the game for you.
It is not the game for me.
I'm not going to bother mentioning story or actual characters; Painkiller makes Braid look like an epic legend written by both Shakespeare and Tolkien.
Gameplay consists of you entering a room/area, killing every single present enemy, somewhere new opening up, continue previous steps until the level ends.There aren't many guns but they each have alternate fire and deserve special mention that the story's characters don't.
-The starting weapon doubles as your melee option and the crappy infinite ammo gun. It has several tricks up its sleeve, none of which I bothered to learn;
-The shotgun is your bread and butter gun. Its effectiveness is second only to its mundaneness. The alt fire is a single target freeze shot because shut up that's why;
-Next is the parabolic projectile weapon. It shoots stakes or grenades, and functions as crude sniper till you get something better (you don't);
-After that is a gun that mixes two of the most powerful stock weapons together: a rocket launcher and minigun.Somehow this gun still manages to be very underwhelming;
-Lastly there's the infamous gun that shoots shurikens and lightning. I couldn't determine the use for this gun apart from giving the internet a boner. The minigun was better than the shurikens and the shotgun was better than the lightning.
What's great about this game is the diversity of both the locations and the enemies. One level you are in a castle, the next a military base, then mass graveyard. Monsters might be hellhounds, undead WW1 soldiers, or demonic children. The only problem with this is that there is no clever unifying themes behind this, and no real difference gameplay features, just different skins and stats.
There is one flaw in Painkiller that overshadows EVERYTHING else. The game is repetitive. After the first few levels you have already experienced everything the game has to offer aside from higher difficulties and other visuals. Painkiller can't even be called a grind because that implies you make some sort of progress.
This was the only game of the ten I did not finish. I got to the second last boss, was killed several times, and decided that I didn't care enough to continue on. Painkiller is the sort of game that makes me wish I could delete stuff permanently from Steam. I don't like sitting in the same list as stuff like Portal, World of Goo, or Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines.
In the end the only redeeming thing I can say about Painkiller is that it gives you the opportunity to shoot children in an orphanage, because how often do you get to do that?
But not tonight, because I'm reviewing:
Remember first person shooters like Doom? Where it was basically you mowing down hordes and plot was something to fill the back of the box? For everyone who misses those days Painkiller is the game for you.
It is not the game for me.
I'm not going to bother mentioning story or actual characters; Painkiller makes Braid look like an epic legend written by both Shakespeare and Tolkien.
Gameplay consists of you entering a room/area, killing every single present enemy, somewhere new opening up, continue previous steps until the level ends.There aren't many guns but they each have alternate fire and deserve special mention that the story's characters don't.
-The starting weapon doubles as your melee option and the crappy infinite ammo gun. It has several tricks up its sleeve, none of which I bothered to learn;
-The shotgun is your bread and butter gun. Its effectiveness is second only to its mundaneness. The alt fire is a single target freeze shot because shut up that's why;
-Next is the parabolic projectile weapon. It shoots stakes or grenades, and functions as crude sniper till you get something better (you don't);
-After that is a gun that mixes two of the most powerful stock weapons together: a rocket launcher and minigun.Somehow this gun still manages to be very underwhelming;
-Lastly there's the infamous gun that shoots shurikens and lightning. I couldn't determine the use for this gun apart from giving the internet a boner. The minigun was better than the shurikens and the shotgun was better than the lightning.
What's great about this game is the diversity of both the locations and the enemies. One level you are in a castle, the next a military base, then mass graveyard. Monsters might be hellhounds, undead WW1 soldiers, or demonic children. The only problem with this is that there is no clever unifying themes behind this, and no real difference gameplay features, just different skins and stats.
There is one flaw in Painkiller that overshadows EVERYTHING else. The game is repetitive. After the first few levels you have already experienced everything the game has to offer aside from higher difficulties and other visuals. Painkiller can't even be called a grind because that implies you make some sort of progress.
This was the only game of the ten I did not finish. I got to the second last boss, was killed several times, and decided that I didn't care enough to continue on. Painkiller is the sort of game that makes me wish I could delete stuff permanently from Steam. I don't like sitting in the same list as stuff like Portal, World of Goo, or Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines.
In the end the only redeeming thing I can say about Painkiller is that it gives you the opportunity to shoot children in an orphanage, because how often do you get to do that?
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Tuesday Night, Not Feeling Tired
One thing I'm sick of doing is explaining the difference between a twist and a swerve/surprise/asspull. And hearing people mention that stupid Robot Chicken sketch whenever this topic comes up.
Here's a satisfying explanation about what a twist:
That’s the frustrating thing about the game’s twist: it’s the worst kind. In a good twist the audience is led, by artful storytelling, to an incorrect conclusion that makes perfect sense given the facts available. But then, after the twist has been revealed, and they know the truth, all of those facts take on a second, deeper meaning. On subsequent readings the story plays entirely different, as the characters dialogue, thoughts, and actions make sense in multiple ways at once. This wasn’t one of those twists.If the level of quality didn't give it away, the previous part was by someone else. It is an extract from a rather snarky but good look at Heavy Rain's apparently numerous plot holes, which is a good read for anyone who enjoys popular things being torn apart and criticised. Since you are reading my blog, I would assume that means you. Go now.
Here's a satisfying explanation about what a twist:
That’s the frustrating thing about the game’s twist: it’s the worst kind. In a good twist the audience is led, by artful storytelling, to an incorrect conclusion that makes perfect sense given the facts available. But then, after the twist has been revealed, and they know the truth, all of those facts take on a second, deeper meaning. On subsequent readings the story plays entirely different, as the characters dialogue, thoughts, and actions make sense in multiple ways at once. This wasn’t one of those twists.If the level of quality didn't give it away, the previous part was by someone else. It is an extract from a rather snarky but good look at Heavy Rain's apparently numerous plot holes, which is a good read for anyone who enjoys popular things being torn apart and criticised. Since you are reading my blog, I would assume that means you. Go now.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Steam Sale Review: Torchlight
Remember when I had a blog? Me neither.
Also I think I've made that joke before.
What is our feature presentation tonight? Why it's the third last game on the the list,
As I said way back in that fantasy time known as 2009, Torchlight was made by some of the people who worked on Diablo 2 and has more than a passing resemblance to it. It would not be unfair to say that Torchlight is really just Diablo 2.5.
Actually that is a little unfair to Diablo 2.
The gameplay is basically the same as it's spiritual predecessor, but with improvements to the formula: spells are hotkeyed in a better fashion, you don't have to manually pick up gold, dropped items can display their names constantly.
Visually Torchlight is for the lack of a better word, cartoony, in a style similar to Warcraft 3 or WoW. Effects are bright and colourful, and spells hit with a level of 'oomph' scientists have determined as satisfying.
So if you like D2's gameplay but want to play something more modern Torchlight is a decent choice, at least until D3 comes out sometime near/distant/apocalyptic future.
But if you want something more than repetitive combat and gear collection, then Torchlight ain't so great.
The story and general setting leave much to be desired. Evil monsters in near endless labyrinth beneath town, murderise them, profit. It's basically D1 but without the morbid atmosphere and sidequests.
A minor but frequent annoyance is the physics involving stairs and projectiles. Torchlight has 3d environments that for the most part function fine until you have to interact with a non-level plane. Once that happens your character will shoot at the stairs in front of him rather than the monster upon them. As I said this is minor, but it is frustrating when you realise that D2 (a 2d game faking 3d) handled this better.
It's been a while since I finished Torchlight so there's probably something I've left out but it really doesn't matter. The game is very mediocre. There's nothing gamebreakingly wrong with it, but there's nothing that makes it jump out and say 'play me'. The most enjoyment gleamed I out of it was the initial nostalgia for D 1 and 2.
Also I think I've made that joke before.
What is our feature presentation tonight? Why it's the third last game on the the list,
As I said way back in that fantasy time known as 2009, Torchlight was made by some of the people who worked on Diablo 2 and has more than a passing resemblance to it. It would not be unfair to say that Torchlight is really just Diablo 2.5.
Actually that is a little unfair to Diablo 2.
The gameplay is basically the same as it's spiritual predecessor, but with improvements to the formula: spells are hotkeyed in a better fashion, you don't have to manually pick up gold, dropped items can display their names constantly.
Visually Torchlight is for the lack of a better word, cartoony, in a style similar to Warcraft 3 or WoW. Effects are bright and colourful, and spells hit with a level of 'oomph' scientists have determined as satisfying.
So if you like D2's gameplay but want to play something more modern Torchlight is a decent choice, at least until D3 comes out sometime near/distant/apocalyptic future.
But if you want something more than repetitive combat and gear collection, then Torchlight ain't so great.
The story and general setting leave much to be desired. Evil monsters in near endless labyrinth beneath town, murderise them, profit. It's basically D1 but without the morbid atmosphere and sidequests.
A minor but frequent annoyance is the physics involving stairs and projectiles. Torchlight has 3d environments that for the most part function fine until you have to interact with a non-level plane. Once that happens your character will shoot at the stairs in front of him rather than the monster upon them. As I said this is minor, but it is frustrating when you realise that D2 (a 2d game faking 3d) handled this better.
It's been a while since I finished Torchlight so there's probably something I've left out but it really doesn't matter. The game is very mediocre. There's nothing gamebreakingly wrong with it, but there's nothing that makes it jump out and say 'play me'. The most enjoyment gleamed I out of it was the initial nostalgia for D 1 and 2.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
MYOB
I don't wanna study,
So I'm doing a blog,
This is almost a poem,
Almost.
~~~
If there's one thing I'm good at it's procrastination, which is why I'm here and not studying for tomorrow's test. I was going to do an actual half decent post on either another Steam game or maybe get around to doing another GitS draft but common sense pointed out that would be unwise.
After all, I want to put off the work for some time, not outright skip it, because when I start a post there goes the night.
You see, I can get rather anal about sentence structure and word usage, and will whittle away hours of my life agonising over trivial choices. Eventually I'm left with some decent but unconnected paragraphs and no more interest in my topic. At this point I say fuck it and force the post together like a guy gluing odd lego blocks to each other. This is one of the reasons my conclusions suck so hard, if they are even there.
~~~
In completely unrelated news I want this game. Now.
So I'm doing a blog,
This is almost a poem,
Almost.
~~~
If there's one thing I'm good at it's procrastination, which is why I'm here and not studying for tomorrow's test. I was going to do an actual half decent post on either another Steam game or maybe get around to doing another GitS draft but common sense pointed out that would be unwise.
After all, I want to put off the work for some time, not outright skip it, because when I start a post there goes the night.
You see, I can get rather anal about sentence structure and word usage, and will whittle away hours of my life agonising over trivial choices. Eventually I'm left with some decent but unconnected paragraphs and no more interest in my topic. At this point I say fuck it and force the post together like a guy gluing odd lego blocks to each other. This is one of the reasons my conclusions suck so hard, if they are even there.
~~~
In completely unrelated news I want this game. Now.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
The Hell with Planned Posts
Several weeks ago I finished watching Now and Then, Here and There and I've really wanted to talk about it with someone, and I guess that someone is my blog. Good enough.
What? Long overdue posts on Silent Hill and Ghost in the Shell? Several more Steam games? What is this nonsense you are going on about?
Anyway, NTHT is a deconstruction of the whole 'kid travels to another world' plot. Shu the protagonist meets a strange girl Lala Ru one day after school, only for soldiers to appear from nowhere and try to kidnap Lala Ru. Things get messy and then everyone returns to where the soldiers and Lala Ru came from: millions of years into the future.
The world is a desolate wasteland, the Sun has gone supernova, and Shu finds himself in Hellywood, the stronghold of an army run by a mad king. Always an optimist, Shu vows to protect Lala Ru and escape from Hellywood.
One of this series' strengths is that it makes good use of the rule 'show not tell.' For every detail that is explained directly, several are left implied. What's even better, is that for the earlier episodes, even the morality of various people and groups is left unspoken. Sure Shu does act baffled and accuse people of being crazy, but he's the fish out of water; he's from a functional society and they are on a post-apocalyptic deathworld.
I personally found this style refreshing as I've come to expect present day morals forced into settings where things should be different. Unfortunately in the later episodes of NTHT the character of Sister is brought in, who is an out of place voice of reason. And then the audience is told that violence leads to violence, children shouldn't be soldiers, you shouldn't abort a child because you were raped, no one should be sacrificed for the greater good, and so forth. Gee I didn't notice when we left the endless desert and returned to present day Earth.
Something else that bothered me were the main characters Shu and Lala Ru. Ordinarily I tend to either dislike or just ignore the central characters as the outliers often are more interesting and not constricted by plot. In NTHT's case, I actually have slightly more solid reasons than usual.
Shu is a deconstruction of the 'knight in shining armour' archetype, which means that he still has all the traits of said type; the entire series kicks off with him risking his life for a girl he just met and doesn't know until halfway in the series. His limitless optimism and ability to take a tremendous amount of physical abuse strains my suspension of disbelief. How can you empathise with a character who shrugs off torture and whose argument against someone's attempt at suicide is that he promises things will get better (they don't (repeated)).
Where Shu is unbelievable, for me Lala Ru is outright unlikeable. She has the ability to summon and control water, a powerful ability in a desert with a supernova overhead. Using this power weakens her each time though, so we the viewer are left to ponder how much of sacrifice must this young girl make, if any.
Later however, Lal Ru mentions that she is much older than she looks (decades, centuries, millennia I can't remember how long), and this destroys an possible empathy with the character. Why should we feel bad about a character shortening their life when they have already outlived a normal human? And when she does occasionally use this ability, Lala Ru doesn't seem to be too efficient with it.
Further more she doesn't seem to actually take much initiative in helping herself. Years of experience and supernatural powers should make it rather easy to escape captivity but apparently she'd rather just leave it to Shu.
Those issues aside Now and Then, Here and There is an excellent series (to the point that I actually feel bad about partially spoiling some of the events). At about a dozen episodes it doesn't get slowed by filler and side stories. If you can tolerate the bleak tone then it is well worth watching.
What? Long overdue posts on Silent Hill and Ghost in the Shell? Several more Steam games? What is this nonsense you are going on about?
Anyway, NTHT is a deconstruction of the whole 'kid travels to another world' plot. Shu the protagonist meets a strange girl Lala Ru one day after school, only for soldiers to appear from nowhere and try to kidnap Lala Ru. Things get messy and then everyone returns to where the soldiers and Lala Ru came from: millions of years into the future.The world is a desolate wasteland, the Sun has gone supernova, and Shu finds himself in Hellywood, the stronghold of an army run by a mad king. Always an optimist, Shu vows to protect Lala Ru and escape from Hellywood.
One of this series' strengths is that it makes good use of the rule 'show not tell.' For every detail that is explained directly, several are left implied. What's even better, is that for the earlier episodes, even the morality of various people and groups is left unspoken. Sure Shu does act baffled and accuse people of being crazy, but he's the fish out of water; he's from a functional society and they are on a post-apocalyptic deathworld.
I personally found this style refreshing as I've come to expect present day morals forced into settings where things should be different. Unfortunately in the later episodes of NTHT the character of Sister is brought in, who is an out of place voice of reason. And then the audience is told that violence leads to violence, children shouldn't be soldiers, you shouldn't abort a child because you were raped, no one should be sacrificed for the greater good, and so forth. Gee I didn't notice when we left the endless desert and returned to present day Earth.
Something else that bothered me were the main characters Shu and Lala Ru. Ordinarily I tend to either dislike or just ignore the central characters as the outliers often are more interesting and not constricted by plot. In NTHT's case, I actually have slightly more solid reasons than usual.
Shu is a deconstruction of the 'knight in shining armour' archetype, which means that he still has all the traits of said type; the entire series kicks off with him risking his life for a girl he just met and doesn't know until halfway in the series. His limitless optimism and ability to take a tremendous amount of physical abuse strains my suspension of disbelief. How can you empathise with a character who shrugs off torture and whose argument against someone's attempt at suicide is that he promises things will get better (they don't (repeated)).
Where Shu is unbelievable, for me Lala Ru is outright unlikeable. She has the ability to summon and control water, a powerful ability in a desert with a supernova overhead. Using this power weakens her each time though, so we the viewer are left to ponder how much of sacrifice must this young girl make, if any.
Later however, Lal Ru mentions that she is much older than she looks (decades, centuries, millennia I can't remember how long), and this destroys an possible empathy with the character. Why should we feel bad about a character shortening their life when they have already outlived a normal human? And when she does occasionally use this ability, Lala Ru doesn't seem to be too efficient with it.
Further more she doesn't seem to actually take much initiative in helping herself. Years of experience and supernatural powers should make it rather easy to escape captivity but apparently she'd rather just leave it to Shu.
Those issues aside Now and Then, Here and There is an excellent series (to the point that I actually feel bad about partially spoiling some of the events). At about a dozen episodes it doesn't get slowed by filler and side stories. If you can tolerate the bleak tone then it is well worth watching.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Bandwagon
As you probably have noticed, I've got a Twitter account now. I signed up so I can keep in touch with all my vocal readers who have stuck with me for so long. I did this because as an earlier post hinted, there are times when there is something I want to say but it is not worth writing an entire post about it (not that it always stops me).
While writing the Indigo Prophecy 'review' I realise most of my thoughts would have been better suited to brief, as-they-happened messages rather than trying to stuff them into an overview at the end.
So now there's Twitter for all the minor things that I want to voice regardless of whose listening.
While writing the Indigo Prophecy 'review' I realise most of my thoughts would have been better suited to brief, as-they-happened messages rather than trying to stuff them into an overview at the end.
So now there's Twitter for all the minor things that I want to voice regardless of whose listening.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Steam Sale Review: Indigo Prophecy
Ever since the Steam sale all I've talked about are the games I bought and why they mostly suck. I'm sure if I had readers some of them would be getting sick of the lack of diversity but screw them, this blog is all about catering to a small pool of interests: namely mine.\
Plus anime and video games are about all I can speak about with some extent of knowledge.
Just like the last few times I've posted, I've just finished playing another of the ten games, and so naturally I'm going to do a review of one I finished weeks earlier, because accurate recollection just leads to deeper reasoning and we don't want that.
Wait what?
Alright we'll do the most recent game:
Calling Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit depending on where you live) a game is quite a stretch as even the developers refer to it as an interacting movie. If you were to give it a genre, I suppose adventure game would be the most apt (you know, the genre that died out years and years ago).
The plot kicks off with Lucas Kane murdering some random in a restaurant bathroom while in a trance of sorts. The early game consists of you playing as Lucas as he tries to cover his tracks and work out what happened, and also as two detectives who are trying to track Lucas down. As the game progresses things get out of hand with Mayan Oracles, unexplained AIs, and an Illuminati-like conspiracy (who stylistically remind me of SEELE). I'll expand on this in a minute but first I'll address the simpler stuff.
Actual gameplay comes in a few varieties. There's moments of direct character control where you can interact with your surrounds to some extent, kind of like a sandbox game except the only things you can do is advance the plot. These parts of IP unfortunately become less and less frequent which is a shame because they are the most interesting when done well. Take the very start for example: you have to clear up the murder scene and then escape without being noticed. I hid the body and cleaned Lucas' bloody hands but it didn't occur to me to clean up the blood stain on the floor. Whoops.
While the freedom this mode offers is a refreshing change, how you perform actions is less so. Rather than just presssing some sort of context sensitive 'use' button, you must hold down the mouse button and move the cursor in the indicated direction/pattern; this is to create a greater sense of immersion or some bullshit. On a side note, one would expect this game to be on the Wii since the control style's would fit perfectly but apparently IP is on everything but the Wii.
The main two other types of gameplay are the "physical challenges". The first is essential Simon Says, where directional inputs appear on screen and you have to mimic them fairly quickly. These tend to be more tedious than difficult. The second type is just straight out button bashing, where you hammer left and right to slowly increase a meter and then keep it maxed till the action ends. This is to make you the player empathise with the challenges your character is going through but all it did for me was make me want to play something else. Yay immersion.
The graphics have the horrible burden of needing to be realistic but don't have a massive budget to full back on. They are functional (you know what you are looking at) and adaptive (the characters can perform some more depending gestures and actions) as one expects from the Source engine (complete assumption, citation needed), but that's about it.
I'm running rather long so for the sake of brevity I'll just mention so of the more major irksome elements of IP.
As well as a name change, some versions of IP are censored (guess what Australia got). The only things removed was some nudity and a couple sex scenes, one of which was interactive. The developers state that these removals don't impact the story and that is what really annoys me. I can live without seeing Carla's nipples how can they say that those scenes added nothing but leave parts like the basketball game and the boxing in? In a story-driven game character interaction and relationships are kind of important, and if sex can't contribute to this what can? The aforementioned basketball and boxing parts barely contribute at all however, as the former is a trivial plot point for a secondary character, and the latter contains some generic banter between two characters but has no relevance to the plot what so ever.
We the player have to control multiple characters in IP: Lucas, Carla and Tyler. The second two people are detectives after the first. This means that you are essentially playing against yourself and since the game won't progress until you do whatever is required you can't sabotage the investigation or just hand Lucas in.
I should point out that I rarely like how magic works in fiction and so when it is an integral part of the plot I get irritated. I know that all sounded a bit nerd-ragey and tangential but it is relevant to IP in that the game falls into three 'guidelines' magic often follows:
1 - Magic can only be beaten by magic. This divides everyone and everything in the world into relevant and irrelevant. In the last chapter of IP, Lucas and Carla go to confront the villains, but since Carla is just a lowly mortal human, she does not contribute to the ordeal.
2 - Magic contains a handful of arbitrary rules for certain circumstances. So you need to see visions of a prophesied child? Then sacrifice people, by proxy, with three cuts to the heart. You need Matrixesque abilities? No ritual required.
3 - Magic can do virtually anything (when it isn't being constrained by arbitrary rules). As I just hinted, Lucas effectively becomes Neo when he develops super-speed, super-strength, flight, telekinesis and probably other stuff I'm forgetting. None of these seem to have any requirements for use apart from magical talent.
And now the plot. Or rather not. while writing this I've kept rearranging things to try and make some sort of ordered logical review but like IP that sort of coherence isn't going to be present. There isn't one giant plot hole or anything like that to identify, but patches of moon logic that sprout up every now and then, and nothing short of riffing on a LP will do it (in)justice.
Or playing it yourself.
But don't do that.
Plus anime and video games are about all I can speak about with some extent of knowledge.
Just like the last few times I've posted, I've just finished playing another of the ten games, and so naturally I'm going to do a review of one I finished weeks earlier, because accurate recollection just leads to deeper reasoning and we don't want that.
Wait what?
Alright we'll do the most recent game:
Calling Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit depending on where you live) a game is quite a stretch as even the developers refer to it as an interacting movie. If you were to give it a genre, I suppose adventure game would be the most apt (you know, the genre that died out years and years ago).The plot kicks off with Lucas Kane murdering some random in a restaurant bathroom while in a trance of sorts. The early game consists of you playing as Lucas as he tries to cover his tracks and work out what happened, and also as two detectives who are trying to track Lucas down. As the game progresses things get out of hand with Mayan Oracles, unexplained AIs, and an Illuminati-like conspiracy (who stylistically remind me of SEELE). I'll expand on this in a minute but first I'll address the simpler stuff.
Actual gameplay comes in a few varieties. There's moments of direct character control where you can interact with your surrounds to some extent, kind of like a sandbox game except the only things you can do is advance the plot. These parts of IP unfortunately become less and less frequent which is a shame because they are the most interesting when done well. Take the very start for example: you have to clear up the murder scene and then escape without being noticed. I hid the body and cleaned Lucas' bloody hands but it didn't occur to me to clean up the blood stain on the floor. Whoops.
While the freedom this mode offers is a refreshing change, how you perform actions is less so. Rather than just presssing some sort of context sensitive 'use' button, you must hold down the mouse button and move the cursor in the indicated direction/pattern; this is to create a greater sense of immersion or some bullshit. On a side note, one would expect this game to be on the Wii since the control style's would fit perfectly but apparently IP is on everything but the Wii.
The main two other types of gameplay are the "physical challenges". The first is essential Simon Says, where directional inputs appear on screen and you have to mimic them fairly quickly. These tend to be more tedious than difficult. The second type is just straight out button bashing, where you hammer left and right to slowly increase a meter and then keep it maxed till the action ends. This is to make you the player empathise with the challenges your character is going through but all it did for me was make me want to play something else. Yay immersion.
The graphics have the horrible burden of needing to be realistic but don't have a massive budget to full back on. They are functional (you know what you are looking at) and adaptive (the characters can perform some more depending gestures and actions) as one expects from the Source engine (complete assumption, citation needed), but that's about it.
I'm running rather long so for the sake of brevity I'll just mention so of the more major irksome elements of IP.
As well as a name change, some versions of IP are censored (guess what Australia got). The only things removed was some nudity and a couple sex scenes, one of which was interactive. The developers state that these removals don't impact the story and that is what really annoys me. I can live without seeing Carla's nipples how can they say that those scenes added nothing but leave parts like the basketball game and the boxing in? In a story-driven game character interaction and relationships are kind of important, and if sex can't contribute to this what can? The aforementioned basketball and boxing parts barely contribute at all however, as the former is a trivial plot point for a secondary character, and the latter contains some generic banter between two characters but has no relevance to the plot what so ever.
We the player have to control multiple characters in IP: Lucas, Carla and Tyler. The second two people are detectives after the first. This means that you are essentially playing against yourself and since the game won't progress until you do whatever is required you can't sabotage the investigation or just hand Lucas in.
I should point out that I rarely like how magic works in fiction and so when it is an integral part of the plot I get irritated. I know that all sounded a bit nerd-ragey and tangential but it is relevant to IP in that the game falls into three 'guidelines' magic often follows:
1 - Magic can only be beaten by magic. This divides everyone and everything in the world into relevant and irrelevant. In the last chapter of IP, Lucas and Carla go to confront the villains, but since Carla is just a lowly mortal human, she does not contribute to the ordeal.
2 - Magic contains a handful of arbitrary rules for certain circumstances. So you need to see visions of a prophesied child? Then sacrifice people, by proxy, with three cuts to the heart. You need Matrixesque abilities? No ritual required.
3 - Magic can do virtually anything (when it isn't being constrained by arbitrary rules). As I just hinted, Lucas effectively becomes Neo when he develops super-speed, super-strength, flight, telekinesis and probably other stuff I'm forgetting. None of these seem to have any requirements for use apart from magical talent.
And now the plot. Or rather not. while writing this I've kept rearranging things to try and make some sort of ordered logical review but like IP that sort of coherence isn't going to be present. There isn't one giant plot hole or anything like that to identify, but patches of moon logic that sprout up every now and then, and nothing short of riffing on a LP will do it (in)justice.
Or playing it yourself.
But don't do that.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Steam Sale Review: Red Alert 3
Wow two posts in two days. It's like Christmas when you realise that all your non-immediate relatives got you gifts that while acceptable are not particularly desirable; nice but nothing to write home about.
A brief history: Although initially a prequels to the Tiberian series, the Red Alert series became an alternate timeline to allow the similar game lines have differing tones. So while the Tiberian games are set in a comparatively serious grimdark near future, the Red Alert games are set in a campy Cold War gone hot scenario with a shaky timeline.
Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3's plot kicks off with the twice defeated Soviets travelling back in time to assassinate Einstein who's inventions allowed the Allies to win the last two games (this is also a neat homage to the original RA which has Einstein do the same thing to Hitler and set up the game's premise).
This disregard for causality puts the Soviets into a better position but also creates a third superpower, the Empire of the Rising Sun. Smooth. An odd side note is that while nuclear power is now non-existent, Chronosphere tech (what let the Allies win the last two games) is still present.......weird.
Each of the three teams get their own mutually exclusive campaign which seems a little outdated. Mission briefings consist of live actors treating you like a commander, a staple of the Command & Conquer franchise, and a good excuse for gratuitous cleavage and hammy acting.
Actual gameplay is a functional mix of classic C&C mechanics and more modern RTS ones. The graphics are pretty and the voices cheesy but fine.
As befitting RA's tone, the unit designs are fairly far out, with each team getting progressively more absurd: the Allies have helicopters with freeze and shrink rays, tuxedo wearing spies, and attack dolphins; the Soviets armoured warbears, cannons which launch troops safely across great distances, and the capability to crash orbiting space stations as an attack.
Neither of the original teams have anything on the Empire though. Their basic rifleman can pull out laser katanas, several of their vehicles can transform between ground and airforms, their ultimate ground vehicle is a giant samurai mech, and their commando Yuriko Omega is an emotionally-damaged psychic schoolgirl.
Surreally, there are people who think Yuriko is not anime enough
So far I've just talked about the facts without getting into my opinions that much. It's because RA3 generates a real 'meh' from me. The game feels like less of a real game and more of an improved re-release of RA2. I think this is a problem that is present for any non-story based sequel.
A side effect from playing RA3 was that I felt rather nostalgic for older C&C games. So I installed Generals (the black sheep of the franchise) and found that it was not as good as I remembered. I was also tempted to play either Tiberian Dawn or RA1 but realised that nostalgia does not compensate for years of regression in graphics, handling and general design. Hell I was even a little wistful for Tiberian Sun, a game I detested when it was newer.
I guess that's the joy of horribly biased memory.
A brief history: Although initially a prequels to the Tiberian series, the Red Alert series became an alternate timeline to allow the similar game lines have differing tones. So while the Tiberian games are set in a comparatively serious grimdark near future, the Red Alert games are set in a campy Cold War gone hot scenario with a shaky timeline.Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3's plot kicks off with the twice defeated Soviets travelling back in time to assassinate Einstein who's inventions allowed the Allies to win the last two games (this is also a neat homage to the original RA which has Einstein do the same thing to Hitler and set up the game's premise).
This disregard for causality puts the Soviets into a better position but also creates a third superpower, the Empire of the Rising Sun. Smooth. An odd side note is that while nuclear power is now non-existent, Chronosphere tech (what let the Allies win the last two games) is still present.......weird.
Each of the three teams get their own mutually exclusive campaign which seems a little outdated. Mission briefings consist of live actors treating you like a commander, a staple of the Command & Conquer franchise, and a good excuse for gratuitous cleavage and hammy acting.
Actual gameplay is a functional mix of classic C&C mechanics and more modern RTS ones. The graphics are pretty and the voices cheesy but fine.
As befitting RA's tone, the unit designs are fairly far out, with each team getting progressively more absurd: the Allies have helicopters with freeze and shrink rays, tuxedo wearing spies, and attack dolphins; the Soviets armoured warbears, cannons which launch troops safely across great distances, and the capability to crash orbiting space stations as an attack.
Neither of the original teams have anything on the Empire though. Their basic rifleman can pull out laser katanas, several of their vehicles can transform between ground and airforms, their ultimate ground vehicle is a giant samurai mech, and their commando Yuriko Omega is an emotionally-damaged psychic schoolgirl.
Surreally, there are people who think Yuriko is not anime enoughSo far I've just talked about the facts without getting into my opinions that much. It's because RA3 generates a real 'meh' from me. The game feels like less of a real game and more of an improved re-release of RA2. I think this is a problem that is present for any non-story based sequel.
A side effect from playing RA3 was that I felt rather nostalgic for older C&C games. So I installed Generals (the black sheep of the franchise) and found that it was not as good as I remembered. I was also tempted to play either Tiberian Dawn or RA1 but realised that nostalgia does not compensate for years of regression in graphics, handling and general design. Hell I was even a little wistful for Tiberian Sun, a game I detested when it was newer.
I guess that's the joy of horribly biased memory.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Steam Sale Review: Not Really
Whenever I view something that is either head-explodingly brilliant, fist-pumpingly exciting, retch-inducingly terrible.....you see where I'm going with this; whenever something results in a strong emotion or two I consider writing up a post. Key word, consider.
As you may have noticed from the lack of updates I don't really get around to doing it very often...or at all for some weeks. Because while I frequently spend my time in the shower composing choice phrases which then turn out less clever or logical in reality than in my head, I don't get around to the actual act.
Really I need to just learn how to use Twitter or something because what I frequently want to do is just deliver a brief paragraph on what just happened moments ago while the emotions are still raw. This would satisfy my immediate need to be recognised, and would allow me to cover many more topics than I currently do. Quality would dip though as posts would be much less informative, interesting or really anything substantial.
Here are some examples of what things would be like if I adopted a more social-networky style:
Now and Then, Here and There: Holy crap did they just imply what I think they implied?
Real Life: Hmmm nothing good on TV.
Team Fortress 2: FUCKING LAG. People keep shooting me from around damn corners!
Real Life: Seriously, I've got Foxtel and there's nothing worth watching....HOW?
This was initially going to be a lead in paragraph or two for other Steam game review but I kind of got side tracked if you hadn't noticed. Maybe I'll do one this weekend.
But don't hold your breath.
As you may have noticed from the lack of updates I don't really get around to doing it very often...or at all for some weeks. Because while I frequently spend my time in the shower composing choice phrases which then turn out less clever or logical in reality than in my head, I don't get around to the actual act.
Really I need to just learn how to use Twitter or something because what I frequently want to do is just deliver a brief paragraph on what just happened moments ago while the emotions are still raw. This would satisfy my immediate need to be recognised, and would allow me to cover many more topics than I currently do. Quality would dip though as posts would be much less informative, interesting or really anything substantial.
Here are some examples of what things would be like if I adopted a more social-networky style:
Now and Then, Here and There: Holy crap did they just imply what I think they implied?
Real Life: Hmmm nothing good on TV.
Team Fortress 2: FUCKING LAG. People keep shooting me from around damn corners!
Real Life: Seriously, I've got Foxtel and there's nothing worth watching....HOW?
This was initially going to be a lead in paragraph or two for other Steam game review but I kind of got side tracked if you hadn't noticed. Maybe I'll do one this weekend.
But don't hold your breath.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
World of Goo: Electric Boogaloo
Previously:
While fun, the mechanics are nothing compared to the aesthetics.
The visuals, sound and plot all come together to create something that teeters between wondrous and heartbreaking like so many kids movies from our childhood. I can't adequately explain the tone of WoG nor how it achieves it so I guess that's all.
I've been regretting ending the WoG review like that, but I've only just realised just how much of a dick move it was. I had forgotten the above line where I said that I hadn't described the best aspect of the game yet and then proceeded to not do so. It's the equivalent of a TV series or a movie building up to a climatic showdown and then having it occur, offscreen. And what kind of bastard would something like that?
Not me, which is why I'm going tomake that extra effort and finish what I started.
WoG has a adopts a cartoony visual style, to the point were people are deliberately drawn as though done by a child. Early levels are bright, pleasant and reminiscent of the first world in many Sonic games:
But as you advance...
...things get...
...darker...
...and more surreal.
The music follows a similar progression: early music is fast paced and exciting but in later levels it becomes haunting or just plain weird (screaming children feature in one song).
As for the plot, don't expect much. There is a vague goal in each chapter but you probably won't know until you've finished it. There being only two actual characters present in the game doesn't help matters along.
But it doesn't matter because the plot isn't what matters in WoG, it's all about the tone. And that is tongue-in-cheek self-aware humour, with the occasional bit of tearjerking depression.
It really says something when someone like me is slightly moved by animated goo balls. Years of gaming have resulted in me having a psychopathic but practical approach to gameplay where I won't hesitate to murder my way to victory. But in WoG, the joyful squeals of the little goos as they gleefully sacrifice themselves managed to get to me.
Okay I kind of trailed off there and now I've lost my train of thought, but that's alright because I'm essentially out of things to say. I wish I could think of a decent way to wrap this up though.
While fun, the mechanics are nothing compared to the aesthetics.
The visuals, sound and plot all come together to create something that teeters between wondrous and heartbreaking like so many kids movies from our childhood. I can't adequately explain the tone of WoG nor how it achieves it so I guess that's all.
I've been regretting ending the WoG review like that, but I've only just realised just how much of a dick move it was. I had forgotten the above line where I said that I hadn't described the best aspect of the game yet and then proceeded to not do so. It's the equivalent of a TV series or a movie building up to a climatic showdown and then having it occur, offscreen. And what kind of bastard would something like that?
Not me, which is why I'm going to
WoG has a adopts a cartoony visual style, to the point were people are deliberately drawn as though done by a child. Early levels are bright, pleasant and reminiscent of the first world in many Sonic games:
But as you advance...
...things get...
...darker...
...and more surreal.
The music follows a similar progression: early music is fast paced and exciting but in later levels it becomes haunting or just plain weird (screaming children feature in one song).As for the plot, don't expect much. There is a vague goal in each chapter but you probably won't know until you've finished it. There being only two actual characters present in the game doesn't help matters along.
But it doesn't matter because the plot isn't what matters in WoG, it's all about the tone. And that is tongue-in-cheek self-aware humour, with the occasional bit of tearjerking depression.
It really says something when someone like me is slightly moved by animated goo balls. Years of gaming have resulted in me having a psychopathic but practical approach to gameplay where I won't hesitate to murder my way to victory. But in WoG, the joyful squeals of the little goos as they gleefully sacrifice themselves managed to get to me.
Okay I kind of trailed off there and now I've lost my train of thought, but that's alright because I'm essentially out of things to say. I wish I could think of a decent way to wrap this up though.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Steam Sale Review: World of Goo
It's day's like this that make me hate summer much more than winter. The heat just wafts and spreads everywhere, ignoring walls and closed doors. This unwanted presence engulfs me and makes everything seem less attractive than usual.
So I'm going to do the least demanding thing I can do at this moment in time; I am going to post on my blog. With that high note, let's look at today's game:
Of all the games I purchased, WoG is the only one I had played before. In fact I had finished it and was planning on buying it eventually, it's just that there was always something better clamouring for my attention. But now (for a given value of now) thanks to the awesome power of capitalism WoG is now mine.
World of Goo is an indie puzzle game released on both PC and Wii. Each level gives you are certain amount of goo balls with which you must use to build some sort of structure to reach the pipe which then sucks up all the remaining goos. Each level requires you save at least a certain amount of goos so the constant challenge is to build a sturdy structure without consuming too many of the little guys.
As you progress through the levels you will encounter various types goos, such as floating Balloon Goo or detachable Green Goo, and plenty of hazards for both your building and your goos, such as spinning blades and bottomless pits.
The difficulty is largely dependant on how many goos you want to save. Just completing the game with the bare minimum can be challenging at times but ultimately is not that hard. If you want more of a challenge simply try and save more in each level; if you are feeling masochistic you can aim for the Obsessive Completion Distinction in each level which seperates the men from the boys, and the freaks from the norms.
While fun, the mechanics are nothing compared to the aesthetics.
The visuals, sound and plot all come together to create something that teeters between wondrous and heartbreaking like so many kids movies from our childhood. I can't adequately explain the tone of WoG nor how it achieves it so I guess that's all.
I'm aware that the above is quite a cop out but it's too damn hot for me to care.
So I'm going to do the least demanding thing I can do at this moment in time; I am going to post on my blog. With that high note, let's look at today's game:
Of all the games I purchased, WoG is the only one I had played before. In fact I had finished it and was planning on buying it eventually, it's just that there was always something better clamouring for my attention. But now (for a given value of now) thanks to the awesome power of capitalism WoG is now mine.
World of Goo is an indie puzzle game released on both PC and Wii. Each level gives you are certain amount of goo balls with which you must use to build some sort of structure to reach the pipe which then sucks up all the remaining goos. Each level requires you save at least a certain amount of goos so the constant challenge is to build a sturdy structure without consuming too many of the little guys.
As you progress through the levels you will encounter various types goos, such as floating Balloon Goo or detachable Green Goo, and plenty of hazards for both your building and your goos, such as spinning blades and bottomless pits.
The difficulty is largely dependant on how many goos you want to save. Just completing the game with the bare minimum can be challenging at times but ultimately is not that hard. If you want more of a challenge simply try and save more in each level; if you are feeling masochistic you can aim for the Obsessive Completion Distinction in each level which seperates the men from the boys, and the freaks from the norms.
While fun, the mechanics are nothing compared to the aesthetics.
The visuals, sound and plot all come together to create something that teeters between wondrous and heartbreaking like so many kids movies from our childhood. I can't adequately explain the tone of WoG nor how it achieves it so I guess that's all.
I'm aware that the above is quite a cop out but it's too damn hot for me to care.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Steam Sale Review: Braid
Anyone who knows me well knows that I tend to be turned off by popular things, partly because the masses have low standards and partly because I'm fairly juvenile. So when Braid came out and had praise and awards heaped upon it again and again I lost interest in playing it. But when it was being sold for less than milkshake, why wouldn't I give it a go.
Braid is a puzzle platformer, which differs from more traditional platformers (like Mirror's Edge) in that the challenge isn't making difficult jumps as much as working out how to use your jumps to solve the current problem.
You also can rewind time as for back as you want, and each world after the first have their own unique time manipulation feature, such as the world's time moving only when you do, or that you leave a shadow double after each rewind which follows what you just did.
The game's difficultly may as well be a feature. It starts off easy enough but with each world it gets harder and harder to collect all of the jigsaw puzzle pieces till you hit a brick wall where there's nothing left you can solve yourself. Or at least that's what I found.
It's hard to design challenging puzzles as at any difficultly there's going to be people unable to complete it and other's who aren't breaking cerebral sweat. Once I gave up and started using a walkthrough I found that there were some puzzles that I could have worked out if I had tried harder and there were others that I never would have thought of.
So my point is that Braid is hard. Really hard. Often it is clever, and some times it is totally bullshit, but once you get past the early stuff it is always hard.
Braid's story is very dividing. You play as Tim, a guy searching for the princess; that's about all you can be definite about. At the start of each world and in the conclusion of the game there are rooms with books that display text of debatable clarity and relevance. In the actual gameplay only the very last level of the last world has any storytelling what so ever (and that one level redeemed many of the game's flaws).
If the game's strange story bread crumbles don't indicate it, the quaint hand drawn art and the peaceful classical music will. Braid is an artsy game, and it follows the line of thinking that true art is incomprehensible. Fans claim that the story is layered and deep, and critics claim that it is just random stuff thrown together. Personally I think that there is some sort of a coherent story, but that it was deliberately distorted to be more artistic.
The levels themselves undermine Braid's plot (see above) and tone (dark) in my opinion. The locations and puzzles are abstract and don't seem to fit in anywhere. This is probably just another case of the drastic segregation of gameplay and story. As for the tone, Braid is full of homages to Mario Bros; goombas and piranha plants are common enemies, and at the end of each world you are in formed that the princess is in another castle. These less serious tributes clash noticeably with the a lot of the games themes such as a protagonist (for lack of a better word) being consumed by obsession.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Steam Sale Review: Mirror's Edge
Right from the start I had my doubts about this game. It's a console port of a first person platforming game where when faced with enemies you are advised to run as opposed to fight. To some people, the previous sentence is enough reason to avoid Mirror's Edge, but because I'm so dedicated to my blog I won't just call it a day here.
You play as Faith, a Runner who transports information and goods via parkour while dodging armed guards. You have a large repertoire of skills to cross the rooftops and navigate the environment such as wall running, sliding, climbing, vaulting and much much more.
While the levels are linear, often the exact path you take is up to you. Runner vision frequently helps by making possible options turn red, and when you get some momentum going and you are chaining together acrobatic feats across a roof top you can really see what the developers were aiming for. Too bad this euphoria gets periodically punched in the gut as though the developers also wanted to make sure that you didn't enjoy yourself completely. General gameplay and the underlying physics are the main (but not the only) gut-punches present.
Despite saying it already, it needs repeating: it's a platforming game....in first person. The inability to see your feet without looking down is frustrating when you plummet to your death because you jumped too soon and missed the ledge, or waited too long and just ran straight off the edge.
The standard response to this is that you can't see your feet without looking down in real life as well, but unlike Mirror's Edge in real life you can feel your feet so you have some indication of where you are standing.
To help with this issue as well as others, some of the moves Faith can do are automatic. How well this work varies.
Wall running starts off as terrifying as Faith will briefly run across any walls you leap into at a shallow angle; once you get the feel for it it actually works rather well.
Faith will automatically grab onto pipes should you jump directly at them, but if you have done a more general leap and come across one whilst falling you better remember to melee the pipe on the way past. Sounds simple, but this is not the sort of thing you want to have to work out via repeated deaths. Which is what I did.
There's more that could be said about this mechanic and the associated deaths of mine but I've got more ground to cover.
Ground such as the level design. For some reason the developers decided to make a considerable amount of the game (ie any) set inside. Some of these areas are spacious like the mall but others like the ship are narrow and confining. Is there a law or something that says that a video game has to have parts where you crawl through a vent?
I'll move on past gameplay after this last paragraph because while I have much more to say, most of the complaints are anecdotal. The gameplay isn't actually bad, just flawed, and these flaws kill you in ways that make you scream at the monitor. Two memorable instances was when a swat guy shoved me away from him as I was jump kicking him in the face, and the time when Runner vision highlighted an elevator's button to show me the right direction, which I interpreted as me being supposed to use the lift (bear in mind I had a dozen armed police behind me).
Mirror's Edge uses a minimalist colouring style. Most of the world is white and full of bloom. Various objects are coloured blue, orange and yellow (plus red with Runner vision). I'm not sure whether the colours are associated with anything in particular or if it is just random. I like that the stylised look but I don't think it fits with the tone as everything else is realistic.
And this just leaves the plot, setting and characters. We are told that the government monitors basically everything and that the Runners are a means to avoid this. I have two problems with this premise. For starters we see things through the view point of the Runners who of course are going to see themselves as just rebels against an evil government. And then there's the issue that anyone who feels they need to use an illegal courier service probably don't have the best of intentions.
The game sidesteps these grey areas by having you only ever deliver something in the first level and then your sister Kate gets framed and the rest of the game is of Faith trying to get her cleared and all the resulting misadventures. The plot differs from most games with a similar context; when you are given an oppressive government and a group of outcasts it generally ends with the government's HQ in flames, possibly with said outcasts standing over the rubble looking down at the city/country/whatever.
But Mirror's Edge presents something much more small scale. You move around meeting with various contacts who direct you to new ones. The new contacts tend to end up betraying you or dying (often both) so you go back to the originals only to have them betray/die/both as well. By the end you have uncovered a conspiracy but it's fairly minor given that there already is an all seeing government.
I'm not sure what I think of the plot but I'm not fond of the characters. Mostly this is because none save Faith get any real screen time and even she doesn't get that much. So when someone from the less-than-a-dozen cast betrays you or gets killed, you the player don't care that nuch because they were just 'suspicious guy', 'dumb muscle' etc.
Faith annoys me more though. She's a badass action girl, which of course translates into remorseless, self centred bitch. The whole evil oppressors/good underground thing wouldn't bother me nearly as much if it wasn't for Faith's attitude. Sure, constant surveillance is unpleasant but don't believe you have such a moral high ground after you wilfully break the law and punch cops who are only doing their job off ledges to their doom. The scene that cemented my dislike for the protagonist is when you meet Kate at the murder scene. They both know Kate's been framed and time is limited, but this doesn't deter Faith from still correcting Kate about her politics.
Wow what a class act.
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