1. The term Metroidvania should only refer to the Castlevania games w/ Metroid-like structure but instead refers to all games w/ Metroid-like structure. This is proof that every last person who plays video games is stupid. Also, Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania game.
2. There's some really clever hints of the Metroid influence early on. Little things like crawly enemies that stick to all sides of platforms like the zoomers in Metroid are abound. It makes Hollow Knight come off as a winking but sincere homage. I thought this was funny and cool but I play video games so I'm stupid.
3. Presumably, most people reading this will know the deal but here is how Hollow Knight works in brief: you are presented w/ what is theoretically an open world map with some pathways visible but tantalizingly unreachable. When you run into one of these pathways, you go off some other direction until you get an item that increases your mobility options then you go back. You repeat this process until you win. Go you!
4.Typically, this style of game is fairly short. Super Metroid, for example, is under ten hours and in no way feels short or incomplete. Hollow Knight is two or three times that easily. It is set in a sprawling world that takes a long time to traverse and that has some interesting effects on how the game plays.
5. I initially didn't like Hollow Knight's controls. The jumps seemed slippery and lacking impact but it all started to feel natural as my skill level built up and more of the moveset became available to me. This is pretty much what you want.
6. The Chirstopher Larkin composed score is a highlight . It combines orchestral elements w/ a touch of synth, giving it an expansive feel that suits the game's vast scope. The main theme is one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of music in all of gaming. Actually, a lot of these pieces are.
7. The graphics don't work nearly so well for me. Part of this is personal preference; I just don't find its cartoonish style terribly appealing. More so than that though, it fails from a gameplay standpoint. Specifically, it's often hard to tell harmless background objects from enemies and hazards and there's frequently enough action in the foreground and background to be distracting. It never breaks the game but it's enough to be annoying.
8. Hollow Knight is essentially a plotless game. There is a story there but everything notable happens before you show up to put the final pieces together. You see, videogames are typically much more about the world they build than exactly what happens while you play them.
9. Many of the items you find are straight-up upgrades and new moves but Hollow Knight adds an additional system of mix and match charms which grant different abilities but you can only equip so many at a time. This is cool on the surface--you can re-kit depending on what you are currently doing--but it kind of just winds up being a pain in the ass because you can only change them at save points. Most notably, the ability to see where you are on the map is a charm and it seems like you are forever swapping it out for boss battles then, once the boss is beaten, you can't tell where you are in the new area that opens up to you. I see that they were trying to add a layer of depth and strategy w/ this system but it just winds up feeling like a chore.
10. And speaking of maps, you cannot map areas yourself w/o purchasing a map for each new area you find. I understand making purchasing the map optional if you want the challenge but not having the area map fill in at all w/o purchasing the map is just cumbersome. This and the requirement to use a charm to tell your location on the map are the two design choices that strike me as the most strange in Hollow Knight. These are two abilities you'd typically have by default in most games removed for no real positive effect.
11. This gets us in to one effect Hollow Knight's massive scope creates. Little things that would be slightly annoying to deal w/ for ten hours get obnoxious when you have to deal w/ them twice that long. Things like long, dramatic walks before boss battles stop feeling tense and exciting and start to become busy work. Having relatively few fast travel locations goes from pushing you to re-explore previously visited areas w/ additional abilities to just having to walk past the same scenery again and again and again and again.
12. The other thing I noticed is that the giant world made things more open and created a sense of freedom in what you do next. You can really feel the opportunities to explore sprawl before you. It even reminded me a bit of playing an Elder Scrolls game at times though unfortunately sometimes to the point where the list of paths I wanted to visit or area bosses I had to defeat started to feel a bit like the Radient quests in those games.
13. If you took any ten hour stretch of Hollow Knight, you will have yourself a wonderful gameplay experience in that time. You will also have to have a couple additional and nearly identical gameplay experiences to finish the game. I will say though that I do appreciate the ambition behind Hollow Knight's scope. I appreciate how Team Cherry pushed boundaries and how pushing those boundaries changed the way the game played. I do think they made a few missteps but, ultimately, Hollow Knight is still a must-play game. Check it out, nerds.
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
13 Points on Child of Light - Ubisoft Montreal - 2014 [PlayStation Vita]
1. Child of Light is the game equivalent of big movie studio releasing an Oscar bait movie. It's quiet, contemplative game released by Ubisoft, a giant studio known for sprawling open worlds and considerable bombast.
2. W/ its ornate, hand-drawn look, it is unequivocally a beautiful game. A later sidequest had me going back through from near the end to the very beginning area by area and, even after looking at this stuff for hours on end and having seen everything before, I was continually impressed by the gorgeous detail top to bottom.
3. Almost as striking as the graphics is the fact that all of the dialog is done in verse and it's most often rhyming at that. This is a brave artistic decision, which I appreciate, and fits the fairy-tale setting perfectly even if there's quite a bit of it that doesn't really land.
4. This gets categorized as a platformer and an RPG but it is really neither. It's really more of an adventure game. You can injure yourself traversing the world but it doesn't really feel like this is supposed to be a challenge like and most of the gameplay is pure exploration and storytelling punctuated by RPG-like turnbased battles.
5. Actually, it has the makings of a wonderful, deep RPG but these elements ultimately feel underutilized. Child of Light is a really easy game. There's no way around it. Still, its many aspects come together marvelously.
6. The battle system, for example, is a fantastic dance between actions that take varying lengths w/ varied cool downs and a myriad of ways to manipulate the timeline of events to your advantage. You can dominate or be destroyed w/ the same party build depending how you manage the encounter. It's awesome.
7. Rather than a full kit of equipment, each character can equip three gemstones, giving you a paper, rock, scissors type system of elemental attacks and defense or an array of other buffs if you prefer. The variations you can get w/ just three equipment slots is pretty staggering. It's enough that you can make pretty much any party work so long as you get everyone equipped w/ the right gemstones. Again, awesome.
8. On top of all this, you get a branched skill tree to use as your character levels up in addition to some fixed bonuses. This doesn't so much let you completely rejigger your characters so much as it allows you to focus them on the skills you actually use.
9. The real issue is you level up so often it's actually annoying. Esp. once your party swells in size, it feels like every encounter winds up w/ someone leveling up. After a while, you just stop being excited about it. This is also probably the reason the game is so easy. Balance is a really tough thing and, to be blunt, they whiffed it here.
10. Or maybe I'm just so smart and amazing that is was easy for me but will be hard for you.
11. They story here served mostly to set the fairy tale mood rather than be strictly engaging in its own right. Aurora, the titular Child of Light, is tasked w/ defeating an evil queen. In conquering this task, she meets a miscellany of companions who inevitably join her party and bring about the opportunity to do side quests. This is nothing groundbreaking but it works really well and never gets in the way.
12. The reason I say this feels like an adventure game more so than an RPG is just because the progression of the main plot is so strictly linear. You feel very much like you are wandering a single path much more than you are creating a presence in a world. It is a joy to wander this path but there is not much to do outside of it. This is all fine. It just doesn't feel like an RPG to me. (Sorry to talk about my feelings.)
13. Big developers and Ubisoft in particular sometimes struggle when they try for something smaller w/ a more immediate connection to the player like you often see in indie games but here I think they succeeded wildly. You would not know there was a huge studio behind Child of Light if there wasn't an enormously long roll of credits once the game was complete. There is a hand-crafted level of detail top to bottom and you cannot help but to get the sense this was a labor of love for those who made regardless of who they work for.
2. W/ its ornate, hand-drawn look, it is unequivocally a beautiful game. A later sidequest had me going back through from near the end to the very beginning area by area and, even after looking at this stuff for hours on end and having seen everything before, I was continually impressed by the gorgeous detail top to bottom.
3. Almost as striking as the graphics is the fact that all of the dialog is done in verse and it's most often rhyming at that. This is a brave artistic decision, which I appreciate, and fits the fairy-tale setting perfectly even if there's quite a bit of it that doesn't really land.
4. This gets categorized as a platformer and an RPG but it is really neither. It's really more of an adventure game. You can injure yourself traversing the world but it doesn't really feel like this is supposed to be a challenge like and most of the gameplay is pure exploration and storytelling punctuated by RPG-like turnbased battles.
5. Actually, it has the makings of a wonderful, deep RPG but these elements ultimately feel underutilized. Child of Light is a really easy game. There's no way around it. Still, its many aspects come together marvelously.
6. The battle system, for example, is a fantastic dance between actions that take varying lengths w/ varied cool downs and a myriad of ways to manipulate the timeline of events to your advantage. You can dominate or be destroyed w/ the same party build depending how you manage the encounter. It's awesome.
7. Rather than a full kit of equipment, each character can equip three gemstones, giving you a paper, rock, scissors type system of elemental attacks and defense or an array of other buffs if you prefer. The variations you can get w/ just three equipment slots is pretty staggering. It's enough that you can make pretty much any party work so long as you get everyone equipped w/ the right gemstones. Again, awesome.
8. On top of all this, you get a branched skill tree to use as your character levels up in addition to some fixed bonuses. This doesn't so much let you completely rejigger your characters so much as it allows you to focus them on the skills you actually use.
9. The real issue is you level up so often it's actually annoying. Esp. once your party swells in size, it feels like every encounter winds up w/ someone leveling up. After a while, you just stop being excited about it. This is also probably the reason the game is so easy. Balance is a really tough thing and, to be blunt, they whiffed it here.
10. Or maybe I'm just so smart and amazing that is was easy for me but will be hard for you.
11. They story here served mostly to set the fairy tale mood rather than be strictly engaging in its own right. Aurora, the titular Child of Light, is tasked w/ defeating an evil queen. In conquering this task, she meets a miscellany of companions who inevitably join her party and bring about the opportunity to do side quests. This is nothing groundbreaking but it works really well and never gets in the way.
12. The reason I say this feels like an adventure game more so than an RPG is just because the progression of the main plot is so strictly linear. You feel very much like you are wandering a single path much more than you are creating a presence in a world. It is a joy to wander this path but there is not much to do outside of it. This is all fine. It just doesn't feel like an RPG to me. (Sorry to talk about my feelings.)
13. Big developers and Ubisoft in particular sometimes struggle when they try for something smaller w/ a more immediate connection to the player like you often see in indie games but here I think they succeeded wildly. You would not know there was a huge studio behind Child of Light if there wasn't an enormously long roll of credits once the game was complete. There is a hand-crafted level of detail top to bottom and you cannot help but to get the sense this was a labor of love for those who made regardless of who they work for.
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
13 Points on The Room - Fireproof Games - 2012 [PC]
1. The Room is originally an iOS game but you shouldn't hold that against it. It plays just fine w/ a mouse on PC if that's how you chose to play. Relax.
2. Conceptually, this is straight forward: things have happened and you've got to solve puzzles.
3. You'd think, given the title, The Room would be escape the room type adventures but it's actually a series of virtual puzzle boxes. The intricacy and detail of the design of these boxes--just how pretty they are--is one of the chief appeals of the game.
4. If you are a big puzzle game fan, The Room will probably strike you as being on the easy side. I feel like this term is more damning that it should be but I can't help but to describe The Room as being a casual game.
5. Absent of a strong gameplay challenge The Room still manages to draw you in w/ its dense and well-crafted atmosphere.
6. The backstory is revealed through notes left behind by some unknown person who seems to vaguely be some sort of colleague of yours. He delved into some serious cutting edge alchemy and shit got heavy on him real fast. Now you have to solve a bunch of puzzles.
7. Part of the aesthetic of the game is really cool looking alchemical symbols. I can't tell you if these were made up by the game designers or drawn from actual alchemy because alchemy is useless and there is no reason to know anything about it.
8. There is an in game hint system which continually seemed terrible but then were always somehow helpful. It would be like, "Look at the box more," and you'd be like, "Damnit, I've been looking at the box. The only thing to look at is the box." Then you'd find yourself looking at just the right place in a few seconds. There is probably some sort of real life magic involved here. I'm just gonna leave that here.
9. My only real complaint about this hint system is it delivers the hints based on time and it occasionally gives you hints for something you already figured out so then you gotta just dick around a minute and wait for the next one.
10. I realize that using hints kind of undermines me saying this was a bit easy earlier and I don't care at all. The real reason the puzzle boxes are easy is they are mostly divided into discreet and easily digestible chunks so you don't need to hold the whole of it in your mind at any given time, just the part you are immediately working on.
11. As far as art and sound design, this reminds me very much of Myst. It's got this quiet tension and otherworldly smoothness to everything. Thankfully, the puzzles here are not nearly as obtuse as the ones in that seminal adventure title so The Room is not horrible to actually play.
12. Really, what's impressive here is just how much The Room draws you in w/ its fairly simple puzzles, smallish settings and sparse sounds. It is not a huge world it builds but it feels real. When you sit down to solve these puzzles, you will be sitting down until the puzzles are solved.
13. The ending was sort of abrupt and was almost painfully obviously meant to simply leave the door open for sequels. This is especially obvious writing this after no less than three sequels to The Room have already been released. I'm looking forward to playing them eventually though so good enough for me.
2. Conceptually, this is straight forward: things have happened and you've got to solve puzzles.
3. You'd think, given the title, The Room would be escape the room type adventures but it's actually a series of virtual puzzle boxes. The intricacy and detail of the design of these boxes--just how pretty they are--is one of the chief appeals of the game.
4. If you are a big puzzle game fan, The Room will probably strike you as being on the easy side. I feel like this term is more damning that it should be but I can't help but to describe The Room as being a casual game.
5. Absent of a strong gameplay challenge The Room still manages to draw you in w/ its dense and well-crafted atmosphere.
6. The backstory is revealed through notes left behind by some unknown person who seems to vaguely be some sort of colleague of yours. He delved into some serious cutting edge alchemy and shit got heavy on him real fast. Now you have to solve a bunch of puzzles.
7. Part of the aesthetic of the game is really cool looking alchemical symbols. I can't tell you if these were made up by the game designers or drawn from actual alchemy because alchemy is useless and there is no reason to know anything about it.
8. There is an in game hint system which continually seemed terrible but then were always somehow helpful. It would be like, "Look at the box more," and you'd be like, "Damnit, I've been looking at the box. The only thing to look at is the box." Then you'd find yourself looking at just the right place in a few seconds. There is probably some sort of real life magic involved here. I'm just gonna leave that here.
9. My only real complaint about this hint system is it delivers the hints based on time and it occasionally gives you hints for something you already figured out so then you gotta just dick around a minute and wait for the next one.
10. I realize that using hints kind of undermines me saying this was a bit easy earlier and I don't care at all. The real reason the puzzle boxes are easy is they are mostly divided into discreet and easily digestible chunks so you don't need to hold the whole of it in your mind at any given time, just the part you are immediately working on.
11. As far as art and sound design, this reminds me very much of Myst. It's got this quiet tension and otherworldly smoothness to everything. Thankfully, the puzzles here are not nearly as obtuse as the ones in that seminal adventure title so The Room is not horrible to actually play.
12. Really, what's impressive here is just how much The Room draws you in w/ its fairly simple puzzles, smallish settings and sparse sounds. It is not a huge world it builds but it feels real. When you sit down to solve these puzzles, you will be sitting down until the puzzles are solved.
13. The ending was sort of abrupt and was almost painfully obviously meant to simply leave the door open for sequels. This is especially obvious writing this after no less than three sequels to The Room have already been released. I'm looking forward to playing them eventually though so good enough for me.
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
13 Points on Pinstripe - Thomas Brush - 2017 [PC]
1. Pinstripe plays as a platformer but it has the soul of an old point and click adventure game. Sure you have to run and hop about the but the focus on puzzles and story make it feels a lot more like The Day of the Tentacle than Super Mario Brothers.
2. Really, there isn't a strong focus on gameplay at all. The player's interaction w/ the world serves more to provide a connection to it than it does to bring excitement or challenge.
3. Something about Pinstripe strikes me as the kind of game you might show to your friends who haven't played a video game in twenty years to show them that games are something reasonable for adults to do in their free time. Or, it would be, but nobody reading this has any friends.
4. The setup is you play as Ted, a former minister. You are traveling w/ your daughter, Bo, who is kidnapped early on by the titular Pinstripe who whisks her off to hell and promises to become her father. As you might expect, you are on a mission to get your daughter back from this point on.
5. Pinstripe borrows heavily from creepy cute vibe of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which seems to be about as influential on indie games development as Super Metroid is.
6. Moment to moment, you spend pretty much of your time just wandering about. This is fine. The world is interesting and believable enough that just finding new stuff is its own reward. Every corner has new creepy cute things to find and it all holds together very well.
7. Well, there is one section of backtracking that feels like padding and it wears a bit thin at that point.
8. The puzzle solving is mostly just "Can't go this way? Go the other way until you find a thing and then come back." It sounds superficial on paper but its purpose is more to give the player just a little something to hang on to as Pinstripe draws you into its world.
9. This also gets to why this feels a lot like an old adventure game. There is this collect-absolutely-everything-and-keep-it-until-you-need-it feeling. There's also a bit of looking on the back of items in your inventory to find various codes and combinations to progress the story. I dunno... I don't get paid to explain this stuff. This makes it feel like an adventure game to me.
10. There's also not much challenge to the platforming either. It's just how you get around. There was exactly one part that was hard at all.
11. As the story goes, it pretty much develops just how you might expect. Or, actually, it doesn't develop. Pinstripe remains an evil guy that kidnaps your daughter. The place he takes her to continues to be hell. Her situation gets no more or less precarious as the game rolls on. Thing is: it's all still fun and interesting. You don't really progress in this game except in the sense you literally get closer to finding your daughter but you are constantly learning more and more about the world that is presented to you.
12. I am terrible at writing video game reviews so it's not obvious from what I've written so far that I really enjoyed Pinstripe. It is one of those games where you can feel a real connection w/ the developer, like they are sitting there and telling you a story.
13. Case in point: there is a new game+ mode and I actually wanted to play it immediately after finishing my first playthrough.
2. Really, there isn't a strong focus on gameplay at all. The player's interaction w/ the world serves more to provide a connection to it than it does to bring excitement or challenge.
3. Something about Pinstripe strikes me as the kind of game you might show to your friends who haven't played a video game in twenty years to show them that games are something reasonable for adults to do in their free time. Or, it would be, but nobody reading this has any friends.
4. The setup is you play as Ted, a former minister. You are traveling w/ your daughter, Bo, who is kidnapped early on by the titular Pinstripe who whisks her off to hell and promises to become her father. As you might expect, you are on a mission to get your daughter back from this point on.
5. Pinstripe borrows heavily from creepy cute vibe of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which seems to be about as influential on indie games development as Super Metroid is.
6. Moment to moment, you spend pretty much of your time just wandering about. This is fine. The world is interesting and believable enough that just finding new stuff is its own reward. Every corner has new creepy cute things to find and it all holds together very well.
7. Well, there is one section of backtracking that feels like padding and it wears a bit thin at that point.
8. The puzzle solving is mostly just "Can't go this way? Go the other way until you find a thing and then come back." It sounds superficial on paper but its purpose is more to give the player just a little something to hang on to as Pinstripe draws you into its world.
9. This also gets to why this feels a lot like an old adventure game. There is this collect-absolutely-everything-and-keep-it-until-you-need-it feeling. There's also a bit of looking on the back of items in your inventory to find various codes and combinations to progress the story. I dunno... I don't get paid to explain this stuff. This makes it feel like an adventure game to me.
10. There's also not much challenge to the platforming either. It's just how you get around. There was exactly one part that was hard at all.
11. As the story goes, it pretty much develops just how you might expect. Or, actually, it doesn't develop. Pinstripe remains an evil guy that kidnaps your daughter. The place he takes her to continues to be hell. Her situation gets no more or less precarious as the game rolls on. Thing is: it's all still fun and interesting. You don't really progress in this game except in the sense you literally get closer to finding your daughter but you are constantly learning more and more about the world that is presented to you.
12. I am terrible at writing video game reviews so it's not obvious from what I've written so far that I really enjoyed Pinstripe. It is one of those games where you can feel a real connection w/ the developer, like they are sitting there and telling you a story.
13. Case in point: there is a new game+ mode and I actually wanted to play it immediately after finishing my first playthrough.
Tuesday, December 4, 2018
13 Points on Firewatch - Campo Santo - 2016 [PC]
1. Firewatch is a story about running away from your problems. As such, it is going to be easy for most folks to identify w/. We all run from our problems. Right now, I am writing a barely read video game blog while things people rely on me to do are going undone. We all have our vices.
2. The events of Firewatch could have probably made for a decent--albeit kinda quirky--rom-com but it does much better as a game. The first person perspective plants the focus firmly on the characters rather than the plot and that is where its strengths lie.
3. You play as Henry who is basically Seth Rogan. He is bright but w/o any intellectual pretense, he maybe drinks a little too much and he wears shorts. But he is a good guy and his self-effacing sense of humor has won him the hand of the brash, intelligent Julia whom he eventually marries.
4. Things work out for Henry and Julia until she has devastating medical issues that Henry has difficulty coping w/. He has trouble keeping up w/ her care and starts drinking maybe a more than a little too much. Henry is running away from his problems. Eventually, Julia's family shows up and brings her back to her childhood home. Henry runs away from his current place in Boulder, Colorado all the way to Wyoming to be a fire warden for the summer.
5. To be fair, I have been to Boulder and don't blame Henry one bit.
6. Once in Wyoming, the only person Henry talks to is Delilah, who is the head fire warden in the area. Delilah's brash personality clicks w/ Henry in the same way as the brash personality of Julia did. Their conversation moves from having flirtatious overtones to being distinctly romantic over the course of a few months. This is all somewhat predictable, mind you, but the dialogue and voice acting make the relationship feel real and immediate. Also predictably, Delilah maybe does, maybe doesn't still hold a torch for a past boyfriend. In spite of the trust Henry has built w/ her, there seems to be other things she's avoiding talking about. This becomes the fulcrum over which their relationship is stressed. It seems Delilah is also in Wyoming because she is running from her problems.
7. As the game goes on, Henry starts finding into more and more strange things around the park. It looks like there is a conspiracy against our two happy fire wardens. There's vast areas fenced off and things hidden in valleys out of site of the lookout towers. At one point, Henry is physically assaulted and left unconscious. Henry finds out about all this stuff through random wanderings in the park spurred on initially by the discovery of two teenage girls drinking and lighting off fireworks.
9. This wandering proves to be a joy. Firewatch is a beautiful game with a slightly abstracted version of nature that strikes me as just a touch sentimental. It doesn't necessarily match the exact look of walking around in the woods only partially knowing your way around but it really nails what that feels like.
10. The music and soundscape are appropriately sparse but assert themselves just enough that you only occasionally notice how much you've been enjoying them.
11. Not sure if this is just my penchant for abusing OTC antihistamines but in spite of this having full controller support, I could not get it to work and had to use a mouse and keyboard like some kind of nerd.
12. There is something profoundly incomplete about the end of Firewatch. The explanation of what's been going on is wholly unsatisfying and it ends such that it would be impossible for Henry and Delilah to ever go back and find more answers should they want to. This strikes me as having strong parallels to the inadequate results you might see from running away from your problems. I understand why someone might not like this ending but it makes total sense in context.
13. If I'm being honest though, I did feel a bit disappointed when Firewatch ended. The story in it felt real enough that it just didn't seem right for it to ever end. I guess you might say I wasn't so much disappointed as I was simply sad for it to be over. It's a good game. You should play it.
2. The events of Firewatch could have probably made for a decent--albeit kinda quirky--rom-com but it does much better as a game. The first person perspective plants the focus firmly on the characters rather than the plot and that is where its strengths lie.
3. You play as Henry who is basically Seth Rogan. He is bright but w/o any intellectual pretense, he maybe drinks a little too much and he wears shorts. But he is a good guy and his self-effacing sense of humor has won him the hand of the brash, intelligent Julia whom he eventually marries.
4. Things work out for Henry and Julia until she has devastating medical issues that Henry has difficulty coping w/. He has trouble keeping up w/ her care and starts drinking maybe a more than a little too much. Henry is running away from his problems. Eventually, Julia's family shows up and brings her back to her childhood home. Henry runs away from his current place in Boulder, Colorado all the way to Wyoming to be a fire warden for the summer.
5. To be fair, I have been to Boulder and don't blame Henry one bit.
6. Once in Wyoming, the only person Henry talks to is Delilah, who is the head fire warden in the area. Delilah's brash personality clicks w/ Henry in the same way as the brash personality of Julia did. Their conversation moves from having flirtatious overtones to being distinctly romantic over the course of a few months. This is all somewhat predictable, mind you, but the dialogue and voice acting make the relationship feel real and immediate. Also predictably, Delilah maybe does, maybe doesn't still hold a torch for a past boyfriend. In spite of the trust Henry has built w/ her, there seems to be other things she's avoiding talking about. This becomes the fulcrum over which their relationship is stressed. It seems Delilah is also in Wyoming because she is running from her problems.
7. As the game goes on, Henry starts finding into more and more strange things around the park. It looks like there is a conspiracy against our two happy fire wardens. There's vast areas fenced off and things hidden in valleys out of site of the lookout towers. At one point, Henry is physically assaulted and left unconscious. Henry finds out about all this stuff through random wanderings in the park spurred on initially by the discovery of two teenage girls drinking and lighting off fireworks.
9. This wandering proves to be a joy. Firewatch is a beautiful game with a slightly abstracted version of nature that strikes me as just a touch sentimental. It doesn't necessarily match the exact look of walking around in the woods only partially knowing your way around but it really nails what that feels like.
10. The music and soundscape are appropriately sparse but assert themselves just enough that you only occasionally notice how much you've been enjoying them.
11. Not sure if this is just my penchant for abusing OTC antihistamines but in spite of this having full controller support, I could not get it to work and had to use a mouse and keyboard like some kind of nerd.
12. There is something profoundly incomplete about the end of Firewatch. The explanation of what's been going on is wholly unsatisfying and it ends such that it would be impossible for Henry and Delilah to ever go back and find more answers should they want to. This strikes me as having strong parallels to the inadequate results you might see from running away from your problems. I understand why someone might not like this ending but it makes total sense in context.
13. If I'm being honest though, I did feel a bit disappointed when Firewatch ended. The story in it felt real enough that it just didn't seem right for it to ever end. I guess you might say I wasn't so much disappointed as I was simply sad for it to be over. It's a good game. You should play it.
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
13 Points on Uncharted: Golden Abyss - Sony Bend Studios - 2012 [Sony PlayStation Vita]
1. I am always skeptical when game companies farm their handheld titles to other developers. In the case of Uncharted: Golden Abyss is was Naughty Dog handing their cinematic game franchise to a first party Sony studio. I figured this was a bit more akin to Capcom developing Zelda for Game Boy than Ubisoft throwing their IPs to whatever garbage studio handles their pocketable translations so I thought I'd give it a go.
2. The goal with Golden Abyss seems to be pretty clearly to show off the capabilities of the Vita by bringing a huge AAA franchise to it in style. For what it's worth, they sure did wind up w/ an Uncharted game on the Vita but it's a "good enough" type effort if I've ever seen one.
3. This was a launch title by a first party studio so the developers were compelled to throw every possible new control method at the player, mostly in the form of touchscreen mini games. This is fine enough, I guess, but if I really wanted to rub every possible inch of my Vita screen, I'd grab a cloth and clean it for once.
4. Otherwise, it controls pretty much like any third person shooter. You run around, aim, shoot, climb ropes. All the things. You can use the touchscreen to draw a path to follow when scaling walls but this is mostly useless. Additionally, common combat controls are mapped to the touchscreen and accidentally throwing a grenade at your own feet when you are trying to engage in melee combat adds an exciting wrinkle to action sequences.
5. The setup here is you are Indiana Jones recast as a huge dumbass. You play as treasure hunter, Nathan Drake, a man tough enough to navigate caves overrun w/ people trying to kill him, smart enough to know everything about archeology and yet still enough of a dupe he can get tricked by people a child wouldn't trust.
6. In case you were wondering, no, Golden Abyss is not a clever name for the empty void that divides the hearts of those who seek fortune above all else. It is a literally an abyss w/ a lot of gold in it. Nobody seems to have put more thought about it than that.
7. Gameplay has three components: shooting, climbing and doing absolutely nothing. All of these are equally engaging. I am willing to admit though that the pacing between these is really good if a bit overly scripted for my tastes. Just when you get sick of endless waves of enemies, you get a relaxing section where you follow the exactly one path to your next destination where you then spend five minutes watching a cut scene before you repeat this process.
8. Though you have no real choice in how you go about achieving the game's objectives, there is a good deal of side content to explore along the way. Mostly, if you run into a place where you must pick between going the obvious right or obvious wrong way, you need to go the wrong way first to pick up some collectable. The reward for this is often a touchscreen mini-game so once you pass one or two collectables you can't double back and get, you realize you will never 100% the game on the first playthrough and get to avoid that tiresome nonsense for the remainder of your playtime.
9. Holy smokes are the enemies in this ever bullet sponges. I dunno... I feel like a couple shots to the chest should take down a guy who is obviously not wearing body armor. I mean not you. You are special. You can get shot like a hundred times and duck behind a short wall for thirty seconds to return to full health. That's fine. I just don't want to stand there and have to unload a full magazine into every bro that comes at me. Putting so many holes into human beings just gets dull after a while.
10. And, yeah, the headcount in this game is something close to incredible. It's like watching every Rambo movie but the first one in order three times in a row.You are in a supposedly unexplored ancient ruin and yet somehow you run into mobs packed thick at every corner. Thankfully, they spent a couple hours before you got there littering the place w/ guns and ammo. I am pretty sure Golden Abyss does not take itself totally seriously but this is a bit much.
11. Combat never gets harder. It just gets more annoying from time to time. There is a super overpowered sniper rifle that's really fun to use though so it all balances out.
12. There is a point where you feel like you're about to start wrapping everything up and you are like, "Well, short but sweet but at least it never got super repetitive and boring." This point is approximately one third of the way through the game.
13. I'm not going to lie, though this isn't really my style of game and it seems like I'm going pretty hard on it, I did actually enjoy playing it for the most part. It is not exactly good by my excruciating standards of high drama and gameplay excellence but it fills time well enough and every time I picked it up, I'd find myself playing it for much longer than I expected. The story is pretty obvious but good enough to string you along. There's a bit of mystery, a bit of romance, some witty banter. Uncharted: Golden Abyss pretty much puts you in the same fugue state as binge watching a pretty decent show. Your mind isn't really turned on but you're not bored and you can drink beer and eat popcorn if you want. It all works out.
2. The goal with Golden Abyss seems to be pretty clearly to show off the capabilities of the Vita by bringing a huge AAA franchise to it in style. For what it's worth, they sure did wind up w/ an Uncharted game on the Vita but it's a "good enough" type effort if I've ever seen one.
3. This was a launch title by a first party studio so the developers were compelled to throw every possible new control method at the player, mostly in the form of touchscreen mini games. This is fine enough, I guess, but if I really wanted to rub every possible inch of my Vita screen, I'd grab a cloth and clean it for once.
4. Otherwise, it controls pretty much like any third person shooter. You run around, aim, shoot, climb ropes. All the things. You can use the touchscreen to draw a path to follow when scaling walls but this is mostly useless. Additionally, common combat controls are mapped to the touchscreen and accidentally throwing a grenade at your own feet when you are trying to engage in melee combat adds an exciting wrinkle to action sequences.
5. The setup here is you are Indiana Jones recast as a huge dumbass. You play as treasure hunter, Nathan Drake, a man tough enough to navigate caves overrun w/ people trying to kill him, smart enough to know everything about archeology and yet still enough of a dupe he can get tricked by people a child wouldn't trust.
6. In case you were wondering, no, Golden Abyss is not a clever name for the empty void that divides the hearts of those who seek fortune above all else. It is a literally an abyss w/ a lot of gold in it. Nobody seems to have put more thought about it than that.
7. Gameplay has three components: shooting, climbing and doing absolutely nothing. All of these are equally engaging. I am willing to admit though that the pacing between these is really good if a bit overly scripted for my tastes. Just when you get sick of endless waves of enemies, you get a relaxing section where you follow the exactly one path to your next destination where you then spend five minutes watching a cut scene before you repeat this process.
8. Though you have no real choice in how you go about achieving the game's objectives, there is a good deal of side content to explore along the way. Mostly, if you run into a place where you must pick between going the obvious right or obvious wrong way, you need to go the wrong way first to pick up some collectable. The reward for this is often a touchscreen mini-game so once you pass one or two collectables you can't double back and get, you realize you will never 100% the game on the first playthrough and get to avoid that tiresome nonsense for the remainder of your playtime.
9. Holy smokes are the enemies in this ever bullet sponges. I dunno... I feel like a couple shots to the chest should take down a guy who is obviously not wearing body armor. I mean not you. You are special. You can get shot like a hundred times and duck behind a short wall for thirty seconds to return to full health. That's fine. I just don't want to stand there and have to unload a full magazine into every bro that comes at me. Putting so many holes into human beings just gets dull after a while.
10. And, yeah, the headcount in this game is something close to incredible. It's like watching every Rambo movie but the first one in order three times in a row.You are in a supposedly unexplored ancient ruin and yet somehow you run into mobs packed thick at every corner. Thankfully, they spent a couple hours before you got there littering the place w/ guns and ammo. I am pretty sure Golden Abyss does not take itself totally seriously but this is a bit much.
11. Combat never gets harder. It just gets more annoying from time to time. There is a super overpowered sniper rifle that's really fun to use though so it all balances out.
12. There is a point where you feel like you're about to start wrapping everything up and you are like, "Well, short but sweet but at least it never got super repetitive and boring." This point is approximately one third of the way through the game.
13. I'm not going to lie, though this isn't really my style of game and it seems like I'm going pretty hard on it, I did actually enjoy playing it for the most part. It is not exactly good by my excruciating standards of high drama and gameplay excellence but it fills time well enough and every time I picked it up, I'd find myself playing it for much longer than I expected. The story is pretty obvious but good enough to string you along. There's a bit of mystery, a bit of romance, some witty banter. Uncharted: Golden Abyss pretty much puts you in the same fugue state as binge watching a pretty decent show. Your mind isn't really turned on but you're not bored and you can drink beer and eat popcorn if you want. It all works out.
Wednesday, November 7, 2018
13 Points on Killzone: Liberation - Guerrilla Games - 2006 [Sony PSP]
1. Let's just get this out of the way: I am a rather dedicated handheld person when it comes to consoles. I have never played the home console Killzone games and almost certainly never will. If you want to know how Killzone: Liberation compares to its big siblings on home consoles, I dunno, just imagine what I would say about it, write that down and then read that.
2. This game encapsulates both handheld games done right and handheld games done wrong. It is a paradox. On one hand, rather than trying to cram a full fledged first person shooter onto limited hardware, they redid the game as a isometric shooter. This is smart. Instead of getting a crappy version of the home console game, we get a unique game designed for the strengths of the PSP.
3. On the other hand, it really lacks the polish of a full AAA console release making Killzone: Liberation feel like "only" a handheld game. It has great potential but it is never achieved.
4. The setup here is you are some kind of super soldier. Your mortal enemies are some storm trooper types and you've got to run around killing them and occasionally pressing green buttons. Doing this successfully causes your side to win the war. Woo!
5. The voice acting, script and plotting are all pretty underwhelming. This, to me, is a fine compromise for a game destined to sell at a half the price as a home console release. Sure, I'd personally prefer no cut scenes to disposable ones but, whatever, some people expect them for some reason. But, if the story isn't going to holdup, the gameplay has to. Unfortunately, while Killzone: Liberation has some good ideas, it falls short in almost all cases--and most often due to control limitations of the hardware not be adequately addressed.
6. In spite of its isometric perspective, this plays mostly like a third-person cover based shooter. Most situations are tackled by finding a good spot to hunker down then picking off enough enemies to clear your way to the next spot. This all works out well and little is lost in translation to the new perspective. In fact, it makes for different strategic opportunities because you can see more of the battlefield.
7. To make this all work w/o a second stick to aim, the developers relied on an auto-lock-on mechanic. This would be great--maybe even better than a second stick, really--but it is forever locking on to the wrong enemy or nobody at all. Or, it will lock on the right enemy but forget about it because you moved an inch in one direction . Or, the lock-on will switch mid firefight because the enemy you were shooting fell over so instead of actually finishing off the first guy and letting you focus on the second, it will leave you w/ two enemies at half health. This would normally be rectified by allowing you to use the L and R buttons to switch who you are locked on to but the R button is dedicated to crouching and the L button allows you to strafe while staying locked on to an enemy (as long as that enemy doesn't fall over or the lock on doesn't switch to another enemy for some other reason).
8. Lack of buttons cause some other issues as well. At one point--and this is just an example--you get a jet pack which is activated by the same button as you use to disarm landmines. The game gets around this problem by just having you float in the air while disarming the mine that would be at knee level if you were standing on the ground. What the hell?
9. On top of everything else, the check-pointing system can be a little weird. You are typically allowed to backtrack and pick up previously passed over health pickups and such but you never re-trigger the checkpoint. If you come upon section you struggle w/, you need to backtrack and pickup everything you need over and over again. There's also the issue where some checkpoints are immediately before a dialog cut scene and having to rewatch those gets to be a chore too.
10. All of these previous issues seem like they could have been smoothed out just by refining them a little bit. They are compromises, sure, but you only notice them because they are compromises that don't work like they're supposed to.
11. Even w/ all these complaints, I think the combat could have worked if they had just made it a bit slower paced and focused on picking the right approach. There are times when you can do clever little tricks like shooting a walking mine which homes in on the nearest person be it friend or foe and using that to thin out enemy ranks before a firefight. You don't really need the tightest controls if you are going for a more puzzle-oriented approach and I think that would have been a better fit here. The problem is Killzone: Liberation only really plays at this idea while its bread and butter is more action based.
12. I also don't want to forget to mention that the enemies that shoot homing missiles that can one shot kill you are one of the most annoying enemies I have encountered in any game.
13. Killzone: Liberation is one of those near misses that just winds up being all the more frustrating because it's almost a good game. You can feel that there was real effort putting into matching the franchise up w/ the PSP but it just falls a little short in painful ways. Combat winds up being a frustrating chore all too often and the story and cut scenes are in no way good enough to make up for this. Still, there are moments were the kernel of goodness at this game's core shines through. I just wish that was more often than not.
2. This game encapsulates both handheld games done right and handheld games done wrong. It is a paradox. On one hand, rather than trying to cram a full fledged first person shooter onto limited hardware, they redid the game as a isometric shooter. This is smart. Instead of getting a crappy version of the home console game, we get a unique game designed for the strengths of the PSP.
3. On the other hand, it really lacks the polish of a full AAA console release making Killzone: Liberation feel like "only" a handheld game. It has great potential but it is never achieved.
4. The setup here is you are some kind of super soldier. Your mortal enemies are some storm trooper types and you've got to run around killing them and occasionally pressing green buttons. Doing this successfully causes your side to win the war. Woo!
5. The voice acting, script and plotting are all pretty underwhelming. This, to me, is a fine compromise for a game destined to sell at a half the price as a home console release. Sure, I'd personally prefer no cut scenes to disposable ones but, whatever, some people expect them for some reason. But, if the story isn't going to holdup, the gameplay has to. Unfortunately, while Killzone: Liberation has some good ideas, it falls short in almost all cases--and most often due to control limitations of the hardware not be adequately addressed.
6. In spite of its isometric perspective, this plays mostly like a third-person cover based shooter. Most situations are tackled by finding a good spot to hunker down then picking off enough enemies to clear your way to the next spot. This all works out well and little is lost in translation to the new perspective. In fact, it makes for different strategic opportunities because you can see more of the battlefield.
7. To make this all work w/o a second stick to aim, the developers relied on an auto-lock-on mechanic. This would be great--maybe even better than a second stick, really--but it is forever locking on to the wrong enemy or nobody at all. Or, it will lock on the right enemy but forget about it because you moved an inch in one direction . Or, the lock-on will switch mid firefight because the enemy you were shooting fell over so instead of actually finishing off the first guy and letting you focus on the second, it will leave you w/ two enemies at half health. This would normally be rectified by allowing you to use the L and R buttons to switch who you are locked on to but the R button is dedicated to crouching and the L button allows you to strafe while staying locked on to an enemy (as long as that enemy doesn't fall over or the lock on doesn't switch to another enemy for some other reason).
8. Lack of buttons cause some other issues as well. At one point--and this is just an example--you get a jet pack which is activated by the same button as you use to disarm landmines. The game gets around this problem by just having you float in the air while disarming the mine that would be at knee level if you were standing on the ground. What the hell?
9. On top of everything else, the check-pointing system can be a little weird. You are typically allowed to backtrack and pick up previously passed over health pickups and such but you never re-trigger the checkpoint. If you come upon section you struggle w/, you need to backtrack and pickup everything you need over and over again. There's also the issue where some checkpoints are immediately before a dialog cut scene and having to rewatch those gets to be a chore too.
10. All of these previous issues seem like they could have been smoothed out just by refining them a little bit. They are compromises, sure, but you only notice them because they are compromises that don't work like they're supposed to.
11. Even w/ all these complaints, I think the combat could have worked if they had just made it a bit slower paced and focused on picking the right approach. There are times when you can do clever little tricks like shooting a walking mine which homes in on the nearest person be it friend or foe and using that to thin out enemy ranks before a firefight. You don't really need the tightest controls if you are going for a more puzzle-oriented approach and I think that would have been a better fit here. The problem is Killzone: Liberation only really plays at this idea while its bread and butter is more action based.
12. I also don't want to forget to mention that the enemies that shoot homing missiles that can one shot kill you are one of the most annoying enemies I have encountered in any game.
13. Killzone: Liberation is one of those near misses that just winds up being all the more frustrating because it's almost a good game. You can feel that there was real effort putting into matching the franchise up w/ the PSP but it just falls a little short in painful ways. Combat winds up being a frustrating chore all too often and the story and cut scenes are in no way good enough to make up for this. Still, there are moments were the kernel of goodness at this game's core shines through. I just wish that was more often than not.
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