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Ultima VII: The Black Gate (PC) by dkirschner (May 18th, 2013 at 07:44:04) |
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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Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) by MMammose (May 17th, 2013 at 00:44:39) |
For my final session of Columbine I decided to play out the Hell level. This part was very strange. Unlike the rest of the game, I'm not entirely sure the purpose of this level.To add insult to injury these levels are particularly difficult. I died multiple times without making much progress. Never the less I continued to push through the levels until I eventually found Eric. At this point I was so frustrated with the gameplay and nature of the game I desisted.
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Beat Hazard: Ultra (PC) by dkirschner (May 16th, 2013 at 10:49:27) |
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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Columbine RPG (Arcade) by mtagliola1 (May 15th, 2013 at 23:59:48) |
Again, I spent another thirty minutes just running around the small portion of the game your allowed access to without finishing the objective. I can not being myself to plant the bombs in the cafeteria and commence real events even if they are played out in a video game. Because the events of this video game did actually take place, my vivid memory of them, and the social setting (College Student environment) I can not forgo the given objective and therefore am happy to be done playing or walking around this game endlessly. It was as immoral as the initial game (GTA) however because of its reality based story (narrative) there seems to be an added immorality built into the structure and framework of the game that make it not conducive to me completing its objectives.
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Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) by vpaz2 (May 15th, 2013 at 14:25:46) |
Today I decided to kill everyone I saw within all the levels. The process of killing everyone got to be repetitive and boring after a while. The emergence of group battles made the event more entertaining due to the use of big bombs. I felt the ammo also lasted forever. Some of the people were real easy to kill while others took longer, but the fact of the matter is that there was a lot of people to kill.
I would go into each room and see if there were any secret messages or objects I forgot when I first played the game. The traveling was easy because the character moved fast. That was something I liked about the game. It didn't take forever to go to one place from another.
The library and parking lot had to many people in it. Those places took forever to clear. I also speak at least 20 minutes trying to figure out how to kill one girl, but I guess there was a glitch in the game. There were chairs and tables surrounding her and no way to get to her. It possibly could have been part of the game though. Maybe that girl created a barrier and I wasn't suppose to ever reach her. This time around I also played with the sound. The music was actually descent. Most of the songs were familiar to me, but I didn't know why exactly they were appropriate to the game. I imagine its due to the violent nature of the song, but at least for me the lyrics represented something else to me. Those songs were not at all a fuel for rage to my ears.
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GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that
they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
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if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
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1661 registered gamers and 1787 games. 5592 GameLogs with 9912 journal entries. 4327 games are currently being played.
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Dead Space (PS3) by mmakows2 |
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most recent entry: Sunday 9 September, 2012
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On January 1, 2011, it was my birthday and in the same day I was introduced to Dead Space. During that time (last year, I know), I was familiarized with the Resident Evil and the Silent Hill series. However, I did not know how I missed Dead Space. Therefore I will proceed to say that Dead Space flat out is a fantastic game. It is the only game series to this very day that still scares the crap out of me. My reason for concluding this is because of Dead Space's basic elements: terrifying ambiance, horrific monsters, an engaging story, and it's basic gameplay. The whole notion of Dead Space is to create an atmosphere of hopeless and isolation. Therefore, you play as an engineer, Isaac Clarke, whom is sent to a space mining vessel, the USG Ishimura, with a team to repair a communications black out on board of the vessel. However, the mission does not become what it all cracks up to be, instead you are fighting to survive and trying to find a way to get the hell out! Pretty basic stuff, right? Wrong. Oh so wrong. There is more then meets the eye. Not only are you fighting the horrific alien specimen that has taken over the USG Ishimura, but you are fighting with other survivors, your repair team, and an archaic religion that worships fanatically over an alien artifact that may have caused all these horrific situations! Other than the story, the soundtrack of the game also amps up the experience. The soundtrack develops with the environment and the encounters you face on board the Ishimura, therefore, making the ambiance in the game tense and stressful. However, the soundtrack isn't the only thing that makes this game frightening. It's the environment itself! You're in a space ship that is over 60 years old and it's in disarray. You have blood everywhere, bodies strewed all over the corridors and rooms, organic materials scaling the walls, monsters in the vents, and frantic messages scribbled on the wall with blood. It's extremely horrifying and fills your every cell with dread. Aside from the basics, the gameplay is relatively simple. You shoot weapons, stomp, and hit. However, you can upgrade your weapons, your RIG (contains your armor, health, oxygen counter, and archives), kinesics module, and status module. The controls are fairly simple, therefore, allowing the player to become accustom to them very fast. I can rant and rave about this game all day. I can admit with much pride that I have all the video games ( the iOS version as well), novels, comic books, and movies. I even have the Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (Dead Space Version) song as my ringtone! Anyways, if you enjoy a good scare, a great soundtrack, and an engaging gameplay. Play this game!
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