Last year, I bought my friend Matt Grey’s Anatomy: The Video Game, because I am a jerk. He retaliated by getting me Cthulu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII, because he is not a jerk. They were two of the most popular Xbox Live Indie Games of all time, and had just been released for PC on Steam, to rave reviews.
The problem is, this game has a very specific target audience. It’s an homage to the old 16 bit Final Fantasy games of yore. I may have mentioned this before, but I will keep mentioning it: my parents wouldn’t let me have a nintendo when I was growing up. The first console I ever owned was a Nintendo 64, and that was well into the PS2′s life cycle. The game trades HEAVILY on nostalgia, and its nostalgia for a period of gaming I never experienced.
So while someone viewing this game through the lenses of their childhood will likely enjoy it, lets take a look at this game without nostalgia goggles.
So the whole point of this experiment was to get through some of the games in my PC Library that are unplayed. Ideally by the end of the year I would have played all the games I own, or at least be closer to that goal. And hey, in January alone I played 5 games I hadn’t played before. Some were good; some…not so much.
The problem (if you could call it that) is that in January I either purchased or came into ownership of a staggering TWENTY-SIX new PC games. I only spent 34 dollars, which is pretty good restraint, but I now own every King’sQuestgame, including fanmade sequels, almost every Serious Sam game, and a variety of random games I know nothing about, but were free.
I may not be making progress toward my stated goal of getting through my entire library by the end of the year, but the good news is you can look forward to 6 months more of posts from me! I’ve mixed these new games into the rotation, so you can expect to start seeing them soon!
In addition to all of the games Rose has been playing this year for the site, she has been playing A LOT of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Recently I jumped back into Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for Xbox 360, and have been earning up a bunch of achievements I never got. We both have Elder Scrolls on the brain, so we decided to go back to the beginning, and play through the game that started it all: Elder Scrolls I – Arena.
Here are the first two videos:
More coming soon!
Interested in playing for yourself? You can download it for free at elderscrolls.com
I know some things about it; I know it was a mod for the original Half-Life that used to be free but now costs 5 dollars, I know it is a very obvious Tron rip-off, where people in brightly colored outfits jump around on light platforms and throw light disks at each other, and I know that somehow, I own a copy of it in my steam library.
The first problem I ran into is that this is a multiplayer ONLY game. The only option is to play online. There is almost nobody playing this game online, and the few who are have been playing the game for years. Not a great way to start out. Luckily, I did find a third party bot, and was able to get a game going.
Rose got me the Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition for Christmas 2010, and i loved it, it was a wonderful gift, and I played and enjoyed it for about 2 and a half hours total before I got distracted and moved on to the next thing. This is not new, most of my life I’ve considered myself a fan of the Monkey Island franchise, though I’ve never (until now) finished a game.
So I picked it back up, a year later, and dove in headfirst, not really remembering what I was doing or how to play the game. As per my usual, I filmed it, and you can see the results below. However, normally i try to film about a half hour’s worth of play and edit it down to about 5-8 minutes, here, I got lost in the moment and played for over an hour. It was a bitch to edit down, and the end result is a bit choppy in places, but here you go:
I did wind up going back and starting a new game from the beginning and playing it through to the end. My full thoughts after the break: Continue Reading »
There was a time — I recall it! — when I was able to play games without marked quest-givers, without useful in-game maps, the kind of games that just dropped you right into the deep end of the pool with a stern reminder that it would “build character.”
I am getting ahead of myself.
Half-Life 2 isn’t a game I chose for myself. I don’t care much for first-person shooter type games, not because I find them distasteful but just because by and large they don’t especially appeal to me. Evan somehow had a spare key that he passed along to me as a “bonus” Christmas gift. I claimed it but it pretty much just sat around for a year, and it wound up first on my list of unplayed games to tackle in 2012.
So how did it go? Well…
This pretty much sums up my Half-Life 2 experience: wandering depressing hallways covered with tattered propaganda posters. Actually this is nicer than my last apartment. Where's the For Rent magazine?
I went into it knowing pretty much exactly nothing about the game or the franchise, save a passing familiarity with the main character Gordon Freeman (because how can you not know who he is?) and the fact that I have seen Evan shoot up lots of identical dudes wearing headcrab hats. The game really pulls no punches at all about throwing you into chaos — the mysterious intro puts you directly into Gordon’s shoes, and the player’s confusion prompts immediate identification with him.
I had a lot of fun listening to the propaganda reel, being thoroughly creeped out by the masked guards, and bumbling around until I found the single valid route out of the area — but even at this point, I was thinking to myself, what am I supposed to be doing now?
I was grateful to receive direction once it came — keep going until you get to the plaza! — but once I got to what I assume was the plaza, I was stuck once again. All the doors appeared to be locked and the gates out of the area patrolled by security cameras and impassable. I circled around for a while, receiving no prompts or even any dialogue from any of the other citizens in the area. No other friendly personage showed up to meet me. Bear in mind that all I really know how to do at this point is pick stuff up, throw it, and move around. Eventually I put my limited knowledge to use to climb up a fire escape and leap over a fence, because it seemed like the only thing to do. Loading message, that means I solved the puzzle, right?
In the next area, I got to run around a neighborhood full of miserable citizens undergoing a police inspection. After a fair amount of aimless wandering (and fruitless searching for anything to interact with), suddenly there’s an alert! Miscount detected! My fellow citizens, aware that I don’t belong in their section, rush to hide me! To the roof, they cry, hurry! So, I ran to the roof…
And I got there! Success, right? Except that once I got to the roof, again, without any obvious cue what my next goal should be, I pretty much just ran around aimlessly looking for something to point me in the right direction. And got gunned down. Okay, back to the checkpoint, I’ll try another direction this time. Ooops, died. So, okay, I’ll try another way… oops, that’s where I came from… oops dead.
There’s a bundle on Steam called “The Orange Box” (also available for Xbox 360) which contains Half-Life 2, it’s two episodic sequels, Team Fortress 2 and Portal. I had to buy Team Fortress 2 for a LAN party, and figured “Why not buy the bundle, I’ll play all those games eventually.” The idea of “I’m going to play it eventually” has heavily factored into my decision to buy many games I didn’t really need, and this week is no exception.
Looking back, I don’t think we played Team Fortress 2 at that LAN after all. But I digress.
The point is, I owned Episode 1 for a long time, but never played it, since it was a sequel and until very recently, I hadn’t beaten the original.
But coming fresh off my completion of Half-Life 2, I jumped right into Episode 1. Or as this video demonstrates, I fell right off of Episode 1:
Without getting into spoiler territory, at the very end of Half-Life 2, you DO SOMETHING. Immediately after you DO SOMETHING, the game ends. You don’t really get to see the effects SOMETHING had on the world around you, or what happened to THAT ONE PERSON.
So my main hope for Episode 1 was that it would pick up those plot threads and continue the story – and it did not disappoint. Continue Reading »
The focus of this blog is to chronicle the adventures Rose and I have in PC gaming. I am still, however, primarily a console gamer, and from time to time, when I feel it’s relevant, I may share my experiences playing Xbox 360 games. This is one of those times.
Of late, I’ve been playing the game AMY. If you’re not familiar, its a new Survival Horror game that just came out for Xbox Live Arcade. Here’s a trailer:
My experiences with this game after the break, but for any who don’t make the jump, let me be clear: you probably shouldn’t buy this game. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: This post contains minor spoilers for an 8 year old video game. You've been warned.]
You have probably already figured out, I am a big fan of plot in video games. But you may not know just how deep it goes; see, I have a compulsion for continuity and order. If there is even a thread of plot carried over from an earlier game, I can’t play the sequel until I’ve played the original. I have a lot of sequels in my game library that haven’t been played for just this reason.
So when I resolved to play the unplayed games in my library, many of those were sequels, and they went on my list. Now I am CONTRACTUALLY OBLIGATED to play these games (it’s a verbal contract).
That didn’t make my compulsion go away, however. So in addition to the 52 games I’ll be trying out this year, I’ve also got a bunch of games that I need to beat before I can play these sequels. Prerequisites, if you will. Games I never beat, but now I have to in order for my compulsion to allow me to play the follow-ups.
The first such game I encountered on my yearlong journey was Half-Life 2. Continue Reading »
Every year for the holidays, Steam has mega sales, including entire publisher catalogs for super cheap. 2 years ago I bought the Square Enix/Eidos Complete Pack. Sure, it had many games in it that I was not familiar with or didn’t care about (see Flora’s Fruit Farm), but the two main things included in that pack that pushed me to buy were Deus Ex and the Hitman series.
So the game I am playing this week, Hitman: Codename 47, is not a game I just happened upon. It is a game I actively went out of my way to own.
Years ago, I bought a different bundle of games, back in the days when games came out on CD-ROMs. It had Hitman: Contracts, Tomb Raider Chronicles, and a couple other games in it (Now that I think about it, that may be how I first came to own Deus Ex). My enthusiasm at the time leaned toward some of the other games in the pack, but I did play Hitman: Contracts, and remembered it fondly.
Likewise, when Hitman: Blood Money came out a few years ago, I had some degree of excitement for it. I rented it for my 360, played it for a while, then returned it. My brief time with the title was enjoyable.
All that history is a long-winded way of saying that I was genuinely excited to play the original Hitman this week. The game did not live up to my expectations.
I recorded myself playing and edited down this video:
I had three major problems:
1) The controls. Oh god, I realize this game is 10+ years old, but still. WOW. You have two options: Mouse and numpad or mouse and “WSAD”. Since mouse and numpad are both designed to be used by the right hand, you’re pretty much stuck with “WSAD”. It’s not the default, though, and none of the controls are remappable.
I’ve played my share of games using WASD. This wasn’t WASD. In WASD, W is forward, S is backward, A is strafe left, D is strafe right. In Hitman’s “WSAD” W is run forward, S is walk forward, and A and D turn. To emulate WASD, you have to use SZXC. It’s a major adjustment. On top of that, every other control is mapped poorly. Reloading your gun is 1, Toggle Sneak is 4, and both firing and zooming your sniper rifle is LMB. Its an uncontrollable madhouse. At a certain point I gained a passing familiarity, but never a mastery, and any time I tried to do something new, I had to pull up the menu, look it up, and then wonder why the Hell they chose what they did.
2) The text/interface is tiny/unreadble. This game came out in 2000, so it was designed to be played in 640×480. The game supports up to 1600×1200 (which I played it at), but the text doesn’t scale. All the text is microscopic. In the closed captions its forgivable, because you just listen and don’t need to read them. But when you try to interact with anything – open a door, pick up some ammunition, push a button, loot a corpse – a context sensitive menu pops up allowing you to select how you want to interact with it. There’s also important mission information in the top left that you need to read (including the message that lets you know you failed). You need to read all of it, and unless your monitor is massive, its near impossible to read.
Subsequent playthroughs I bit the bullet and just played at 1024×768.
3) The tutorial level doesn’t teach you how to play the game. Maybe I sound like a noob at this point, or maybe I sound like I’m grasping at straws, but I feel this was a legitimate problem. There is no on-screen prompts of what the controls are or what your objectives are. For the first 3/4 of the level there is a guy on the intercom (who sounds like Vlad from Magicka) talking about what you’re doing, but not really telling you what to do. During this 3/4 of the level you pick up various weapons and fire them all. Seriously, there’s like 4 firing ranges and an interactive course with popup targets you need to shoot. All the while “Vlad” is encouraging you to go on this shooting spree.
Then, at the last part of the level, you need to kill a guy, steal his clothes, then use the disguise to get past a guy at the next checkpoint. But at this point in the game, Vlad shuts the hell up and lets you figure all this out on your own. I didn’t know the guy was hostile until he started yelling and charging at me. I actually tried to pull up the map to find out if he was a hostile or not (you can’t use the map this level). Then, after playing the tutorial telling me to fire my guns recklessly, and shooting a dude point blank with a shotgun, I went into the next room and killed that guy too. That’s what the tutorial level taught me to do. This caused me to fail the level.
Did I mention that there is no saving? If you fail, you have to restart the level at the beginning. I understand the dynamic for the regular game. A lot of problem solving in Hitman is based on trial and error – try beating the level a certain way, and find out what works and what kills you, then try again until you succeed, and in the main game, its open world. It works. When you fail there its because of what you did, and the next time you fix it. Here however, it was incredibly frustrating – they actively teach you to behave a certain way, and then when you behave that way, they punish you.
A second playthrough of the tutorial level revealed to me that all the extensive weapon training “Vlad” is telling you to do? Totally skippable. The part of the game the tell you to do is optional. Bizarre design choices all around on this tutorial. It just seems like it was tacked on the front as an afterthought, and I’d be kind of okay with that except it’s not skippable.
But, frustrations aside, I did play the game a second time, and I enjoyed it much more. The first level you need to take out a Triad leader. after trying (and failing) some more complicated strategies, I found out that you can just shoot the dude with a sniper rifle and then sprint back to the car. I played the second level too, this time you’re supposed to kill more Asians (some diversity might be nice). This level I somehow lost all my weapons and gadgets and couldn’t figure it out before I ran out of the time I had allotted for the game.
Would I play again? Maybe. The game wasn’t nearly as frustrating once I figured out all its quirks, but it still wasn’t as fun as the later iterations. The levels did seem to be ramping up though, and later ones may be more fun, and now that I know what I’m doing they shouldn’t be terrible.
Just don’t try to come at this game with a blank slate, because it will kick your ass.
NEXT WEEK: Half-Life 2: Episode 1
I enjoyed Half-Life 2, but never finished it. I’m a stickler for playing games in order, so even though I have the Orange Box (on both PC and Xbox 360), I never played the follow up. Will I manage to play through Half-Life 2′s campaign in time to get a review in for Episode 1? And if so, will I enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the original game?
