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May 18th, 2013 at 07:44:04 - Ultima VII: The Black Gate (PC) |
I'm just making this to chronicle my efforts to play Ultima 4 and 7 today. I gave both games a good-hearted run but they are so. very. old. These games are always on 'best of' lists so I finally downloaded 4 since it was free with my GOG.com account, and bought 7 because it was on sale and is usually the one people cite as the best. Surely these games have been influential to the fantasy genre in games, to RPGs, perhaps especially of the open-world variety. But I had forgotten what games were like when I was a kid I guess.
Playing Ultima 4 was like attempting to read Chinese. I haven't played a text-based role-playing game in such an unbelievably long time that I've forgotten how they work. Moving north, south, east and west, pushing T to talk to an NPC then typing north to talk in that direction. The NPC greets you and says nothing else until you ask him about specific things: "job," "look" and so on. I had to look these interaction words up in the manual because I couldn't figure out what I should say to him. Then I couldn't figure out how to disengage from the conversation, so I was stuck. Oh, maybe "bye" would work...
Anyway, I couldn't deal with that, so I installed Ultima 7. Ooh, point and click, sort of. Uses mouse, plus 10 points. Ooh, inventory screens and character panes from 1992. The first thing you have to do is investigate a murder, which was surprisingly gory. I figured out how to pick up items (hold right mouse and drag & drop them onto your character), so I guess I investigated the crime scene. I was supposed to go talk to the mayor, who was *just* at the crime scene before I went in, but he seemed to have disappeared and I wandered all through this city looking for him. Dunno what he got up to.
When I talked to the NPCs this time, they have the interaction words like "job" and "look" as options to choose, like a dialogue tree. I noticed the "murder" option and thought I might see what happened if I murdered a citizen. Alas, I could only *ask* about the murder, not murder anyone. I retract my praise about this open world! Anyway, I never did find the mayor and the text really hurt my eyes. It's in yellow, on multicolored background, so it's kind of like reading a highlighter. Also ye olde font and olde English style of language really bothered me after a short time.
I'm sure these early Ultima games were amazing decades ago. I'm sure some people can enjoy them today. I appreciate them, but cannot play them. And that's my uncritical review. Oh, but all the manuals and extras from GOG.com were neat to browse.
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May 16th, 2013 at 10:49:27 - Beat Hazard: Ultra (PC) |
Veeery entertaining music game. It's a twin stick space shooter that thumps along to your music. Be warned: there are a lot of flashing lights. Luckily I don't have epilepsy because this game would surely trigger fits. It took some getting used to, keeping an eye on my ship, being able to track all the various enemies and missiles amidst the utter chaos on screen. But once you get used to it (start with some slow tracks on easy) you become able to keep track of 100 things on screen at once and it is a really good feeling.
Along with the visual and mental training to keep up with everything, you also need to be able to identify at a glance every enemy ship type. Some just sort of hover around you. Some shoot red bullets which are unkillable. Some shoot golden bullets of various types which are killable. Some drop red flashing mines. Some pull you toward them while others push you away. Some meteors fall in a straight line while others seem gravitationally attracted to you. Some ships launch about 15 missiles when you blow them up. Other ships move in unpredictable ways. Then there are all the boss types and you have to know all the variations on all the different types.
Then you need to know what all your weapons are, what each pick-up does, how to monitor your ammo and score and multiplier and track length and everything all at the same time, without dying. It becomes absolute insanity at times and it is awesome to be able to find your way through it.
There are two meters with related pickups that increase them. One is power, which makes your guns stronger, and the other is volume, which makes the music louder. The stronger and louder stuff is, the more enemies come flying out and the more visual effects, explosions and auras and things, start going off everywhere. Doesn't necessarily make it harder (harder to keep track of, yes), but you're stronger and more pickups drop and you rack up the score with tons of multipliers. You really do fall into a groove playing this. I kept finding myself nodding along to the music because lights and things will pulse and burst and explode in time.
Different types of music don't seem to do a lot to change what happens on each song though, which is a bit of a letdown. There's some variation but nothing like, say, Audiosurf. For example, I think every single song starts off with hardly any enemies, and then a few asteroids float around, then the easy small ships float near you...then depending I guess different types and amounts of other ships start. But it always starts slow and easy no matter if the song is reggae or death metal. Then the enemies always pick up and there are always faster crazy parts, no matter what happens in the song.
Case: I went to go play Rotten Sound, a grindcore band, for some super fast music. When browsing my folders, I found Robert Jordan just above them, the author of the Wheel of Time fantasy books. Out of curiosity I played an audiobook chapter. Even though it's just some guy reading a book, the enemies varied, it was fast and slow, easy and harder, boss fights happened still, and so on. Less frantic overall, but it didn't really diminish the flow that every song seemed to have.
Also, I am proud to say that I completed the 18-minute first chapter of the first Wheel of Time book! I was on my last life. Do you know how hard it is to not make more than a couple mistakes for 18 minutes? Hard! I was focusing and then my roommate came in and was talking to me and I was like 'cant talk, focused,' and he's all like 'oh, what's that? what are you playing? what's going on? oh, you died? this game looks boring' and I was like 'omg will explain later, dying, busy focusing.'
Anyway, then I played Rotten Sound and it wasn't a whole lot different. I had remembered playing some technical death metal a while back on this game and it being insane, and I tried that particular band I remembered, but it wasn't insane. Maybe I had turned the difficulty up. There are 5 difficulties: easy, normal (which I was playing on), hardcore (which I did a few times), then you can unlock insane and suicide, which are probably a lot of fun. There are also some other game modes and an extensive leaderboard system.
There are also perks you unlock as your overall score increases. You rank up, and I thought I had hit max when I got an achievement for reaching "Elite." That was after the 18-minute Robert Jordan chapter that netted me something like 55 million points (usually i would get 1-2 million per song), and I leveled up an unprecedented 4 or 5 times from one song and it boosted me all the way to elite. Anyway, I ran to look at the leaderboards, and turns out about 20,000 people were still ahead of me. Since Elite still had a point value attached to the high end, I wondered if anything was after it, or if you just hit that high cap and points stop accumulating. So I played a little longer and reached...Elite 2. Huh. So I went back to the leaderboards and went to the beginning. First place person? Something like Elite 24,000. Whaaat. Yeah, people are all in the thousands. They must have played this a hell of a lot. So apparently there is no cap. You just keep going, Elite XXXXXX. And you keep getting money too, so there is one category on the boards, like "Rich Kid" or something, that ranks peoples' money. It's in the millions. I have like $60. You use money to buy perks, and you pick it up in levels, by the way.
Anyway, since Elite was the last named level and it was just neverending from there, I consider that I have beaten the game. The achievement means I won right?! This has proven an excellent way to listen to some music and play games and be visually overstimulated. Since I 'beat' it, I doubt I'll play much more on my own besides to show it to people.
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May 12th, 2013 at 01:44:58 - Splice (PC) |
Finished Splice, though admittedly with the help of a walkthrough on the last strand. I used a walkthrough for some other random strand in Sequence 3 which I was hopelessly stuck on. The game hadn't really clicked for me at that point though because after finishing Sequence 3 I pretty much bulldozed it to the last Sequence, 7, and everything before 3 was pretty confusing because I didn't understand what I was doing. There is no tutorial, and just a help window that tells you the most basic of basics. I really could have used some more handholding in the beginning.
Not exactly sure how to describe the game. It's a puzzle game. You have to fit "cells" into a predetermined shape shown by a white outline. You can move the cells around, split them, create additional cells, send them floating into space...but you have a limited number of moves, called "splices" to create the proper shape. There are 7 series of levels, called sequences, and the game introduces these new cell types each sequence. So I think it was sequence 3 when you get the cell type that splits cells, then sequence 4 that creates a new cell, then sequence 5 deletes cells. Sequence 6 for some reason was really simple, and then sequence 7 puts everything together. Once I beat the game, there was an epilogue with a whole nother 4 sequences (that's 28 more strands to do), which is more than 50% of the game. That's a lot of bonus puzzles. But I looked at them and they look really complicated, and I will pass.
The game could have benefited from some variation in puzzles. I don't mean with the mechanics, which were fine, but with the puzzle design. Each level is just some symmetrical or nearly symmetrical molecular chain looking thing, and a ton of them look almost exactly the same. It would have been cool if I were making some shapes, or some recognizable pictures, or just something besides 49 strands worth of similar-looking outlines. Also, more help in the beginning would have been welcome, like I said earlier. I spent a long time off and on playing up to sequence 3 where I ended up stuck forever. I'd turn on the game, maybe get lucky and figure something out, and quit in frustration after 10 minutes. I'm not even sure why I persisted playing. I guess I thought it would click with me eventually. The piano music soundtrack is nice and the game's got a slick look to it that I like. Anyway, I'm glad I had it around to rouse my brain when I was feeling dead at work for the last couple weeks, and glad to have finished it.
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May 11th, 2013 at 20:02:29 - Halo 3: ODST (360) |
I'm torn about this Halo game. It's obviously just a placeholder in between Halo 3 and Halo Reach. It took me 6-7 hours only, 3 sittings over a week. The story is simple and doesn't have strong ties to the others. The characters kept mentioning something about "like on Reach" but I have no idea what they were referring to, and I just played Reach. In ODST, the Covenant appear above a city somewhere in Africa, and I think above other Earthly cities. The entirety of the conflict between the Covenant and your ODST team here is that the Covenant is searching for something. That's it. Your ODST team dropped in to complete a mission, with fuzzy secretive orders, but something went wrong on drop and the team was scattered throughout the city. You play as the Rookie and you play this detective game to find all your drop team members.
Basically there are two phases to the game. The first is when you play as Rookie, wandering through the mostly deserted city tracking down beacons. Fights against the Covenant are scarce and often avoidable. When you near a beacon, you need to turn on, I don't know what it's called, night vision or something. This looks like Batman's detective mode or various other vision modes that highlight enemies and useful objects in other games. Activate night vision and you can follow the beeping sound emanating from whatever beacon object to find it. When you find the object, there is a little scene showing, as if tapping into the memory of the object, what it "saw" in the past, which is a snippet of story about what happened to one or more members of your team.
Then you enter the second phase, which is to play through that memory. This is the meat of the game with the typical Halo gameplay - drive vehicles, kill Covenant, work with ally AI, reach checkpoints, and so on. Once you complete that part of whichever teammate's story, the game brings you back to Rookie in the city to find another beacon. You go through this back and forth until Rookie finds out that his team has all pretty much found one another, but then he hears a distress call from the captain, earlier presumed dead. Rookie goes and hooks up with her and there is a final mission to locate and then rescue some alien bio-computer called an Engineer. Again, this guy seems like he's supposed to have some connection to the rest of the Halo story in other games, but I can't remember anything about Engineers or aliens who look like this one, a floating brain with appendages thing. And before you know it, with no fanfare or anything, the credits roll.
The strong point of Halo: ODST is the storytelling. The Halo Noir detective story presentation is fresh. Find a clue about your team, then play through what happened from other characters' perspectives who left that object there, or who destroyed that bridge that Rookie is standing at the edge of, or who were captured on security footage of that camera, and so on. The other characters' trajectories all link up by the end and, although the story itself isn't much to praise, it's the structure of it that I liked.
The weak point of Halo: ODST is that neither phase (detective or mission) is exciting. The detective phase with Rookie is a lot of aimless wandering through the city in the dark. Your night vision is almost always on because it highlights Covenant in easy-to-spot red outlines. I just looked at my map and tried to go from point A to the waypoint point B as efficiently as possible. The aesthetics of the abandoned city under siege somewhat make up for this, and the same can be said for the mission part, because there are fires and Covenant ships flying by and massive background scenery and all that, but there is really nothing to do, nothing going on, except to trek from point A to point B in a rather uneventful fashion. In the mission parts, the game is completely on rails. There is no exploration whatsoever. You usually get in a vehicle and let your teammates drive you around, or you drive them around. But in other Halo games, there are multiple approaches, you can explore the terrain, devise clever strategies for taking out Covenant outposts. In this one it's just linear set pieces. Drive along this 2-lane road for 20 minutes. Defend this building for 20 minutes. They're coming from the left so aim left! Now they're coming from the right so aim right! Escort this guy from here to there on a path with no alternate routes. It just lacked excitement and failed to engage me very deeply. In fact, when I played the other night, I started playing a game with myself: How long can I play Halo: ODST with only my right hand on the controller? The answer was that I hit several 20-minute stretches where I literally just needed to aim and shoot with my right hand and drink coffee with my left hand.
I guess I'm happy to have played the game, but I would have rather been left with the awesome impressions from 2, 3, and Reach. I will just look even more forward to playing 4!
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dkirschner has been with GameLog for 2 years, 10 months, and 20 days |
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