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?
I get it, 2011 was a great year for games. Couple in the fact that a lot of the really good ones came out in November/December, it will be months before I will have had enough time to play enough of them to speak intelligently. Maybe I’ll make a “Best of 2011″ list in April when I’ve finally gotten through them all.
But if I do make that list, I guarantee you, Gears of War 3 will be on it. And I’ve seen many GotY lists relased and I have yet to see it included. Rose told me she even saw it on a WORST games of 2011 list. Really? I don’t understand. Here’s 5 things Gears of War 3 did right that easily make it GotY material.
1) Emphasis on story. Lets admit it, some of the story in previous Gears of War games has been tenuous at best. But for this game, Epic hired a legitimate, well-respected novelist, Karen Traviss, to be head writer for the game. And she knocked it out of the park.
Not only did the story work well as a standalone tale, it even managed to explain some of the loose plot threads from the first two games, retroactively improving them. That takes some skill. Not only that, but it works on multiple levels. If you’ve never played a Gears game before, the story holds up. If you’ve played the first two, you get a little bit more out of it. If you’ve read the Gears of War Comic books, you get a little bit more out of it. If you’ve read the novels, you get more out of it.
2) Additional game modes. Some games you can basically just play through once, and once the campaign finishes, you don’t have much else to do. That is not the case with Gears 3. You can play the campaign again in up to 4-player co-op. You can play it in Arcade Mode, a single-player/co-op campaign mode, but with competitive scoring and respawns. You can play Horde Mode 2.0, an up to 5-player co-op mode where you face off against waves of increasingly difficult enemies, now with the ability to build fortifications to help protect yourself. There’s the brand new Beast Mode in which you get to play as the Locust (including boss monsters like Corpsers and Beserkers) and you attempt to kill COG Soldiers. And if competitive multiplayer is your thing, there are 6 different competitve modes.
Playing any game mode rewards you experience points that help you level up, and reaching certain levels unlocks various character models, weapon skins and titles that you can use in multiplayer modes. It’s all very well done, and give you incentive you to play the game, but allows you to play however you want.
3) Continued support. If all the various game modes weren’t enough to keep you playing, almost every weekend there is a special event with a one of a kind, limited edition playlist. Maybe its boomshots only in competitive multiplayer, maybe its extra tickers in horde, its some new challenge that keeps the game new and interesting.
On top of that, they’ve released several DLC packs, all of them substantial. They even released a 5 level mini-campaign that takes place prior to Gears of War 1, featuring characters from the comics and previous games. The additional content all improves replayability, and has all been incredibly well done.
4) Improved graphics. The first two Gears of War games had a very bleak color palette to them: A lot of greys and browns. I get it, they were very bleak games. But it made the games almost depressing to look at.
Gears 3 took a different path, and is vibrant and bursting with color. And on top of everything else, it just looks amazing.
Graphics aren’t nearly as important to me as gameplay and story, but its worth noting that Gears 3 did a great job.
5) Finality. Okay, I know that I already had a whole section on story, but story’s important to me! And Gears 3 did something with there story that I feel bears pointing out: They finished it.
I understand that from a business standpoint, familiar sells. This last year saw the release of the 8th Call of Duty, the 11th(?) Battlefield and the 13-2nd Final Fantasy game. Familiar sells.
And while there may be another game in the Gears of War universe (likely a prequel), this is the last game with Marcus, Dom, and the gang. We got a satisfying trilogy, and it’s not going to get drawn out into some zombie property. We got closure.
So there you have it: 5 reasons. While we can argue until the end of time what the BEST game was of 2011, Gears of War 3 clearly is merited enough to make the list.
MMORPG.com features a fantastic interview today with original lead designer and producer of EverQuest Brad McQuaid, in which he provides some interesting backstory on the inspiration and development of the game.
This is great fun to read for a longtime fan, but as someone who enjoyed (read: suffered through) the olden days of “The Vision,” I do have to take issue with some of the interview’s assertions.
First of all, I can’t agree that original EQ created “themepark” style games. I really think World of Warcraft deserves that distinction, and though EverQuest was undeniably the inspiration for and spiritual progenitor of WoW, calling EQ a “themepark” is a huge stretch. A “theme park” is not simply an area centered around some kind of theme, it’s also a place for harmless play, a place carefully constructed to create the idea of adventure while simultaneously ensuring that no actual harm can possibly befall you. Playing original EQ, with its punitive consequences for failure and bad luck alike, was really more akin to being a deer on a game preserve.
Secondly, though McQuaid insists that their intention was to create a game first/world second, I don’t think they managed to meet this goal. Much of the “game” in launch-era EQ was sort of like winding a jack-in-the-box toy which, 99 times out of 100, would punch you square in the jaw when triggered. The 100th time, though, you get a great, gleaming golden egg.
First off, introductions are in order! I’m Evan, Rose’s significant other, and I’ll be making posts here too, occasionally.
Rose and I both realized that we have a LOT of PC games that for one reason or another we haven’t played. Either we bought a bundle pack of games, or bought some things during a sale we intended to play, or were gifted games when we were super busy, well, there’s just a lot of backlog. Rose has upwards of 20 games she hasn’t played. I have upwards of 50!
So we both made a New Year’s Resolution to play these games. I’ll be playing one, at random, every week. Rose will be playing a game every two weeks. And we’ll be sharing our experiences here!
Since I have the distinction of going first, let’s dive right into the game I’ll be playing this week: Flora’s Fruit Farm. I have no idea what this game is or how it came to be in my possession (I think it might be part of the Square Enix complete pack, which I bought last year). I just played it, and I still have no clue what it’s supposed to be.
Well, I filmed my entire 45 minute sojourn at Flora’s Fruit Farm, and have edited down the highlights video below. Enjoy!
I don’t think I need to play this game again.
NEXT WEEK: Hitman: Codename 47
I’ve always “liked” the Hitman series in a theoretical sense. Every couple years I get a crazy urge to play them, play one for like 15 minutes, and then am sated again for another two years. Will the series hold up to my extended scrutiny? And does the first game in the series hold up or is it just too old? Find out next week!
