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Dec 26th, 2016 at 21:32:08 - Cave Story+ (PC) |
Cute 2d platformer with guns, fun story, charming characters, a handful of areas in the world to explore. Early example of kickass indie game, first released in 2004. I played it over like 4 months, so kinda hard to write up a cohesive review since I didn't take notes or anything. I will say the difficulty spikes at the end with some tricky platforming and the final boss battle (in the good ending) is brutal. There are four bosses/forms with no save or health refill. Ouch. I beat one and was like "yay, now I can save!" But I couldn't. Then I beat one and two and the boss changes form. After more trying, I beat one, two, and three, and then there is a final superboss. Come on! Super fun game though, really worth a play through if you like metroidvania stuff.
*edit* I didn't write much, was just excited to win after having started Cave Story like 4 months ago. I just wanted to point out the clever weapon upgrades because I keep thinking about it. When you get hit by an enemy, not only do you lose HP, but your currently equipped weapon loses power. Each weapon has 3 power levels, and each power level makes it substantially stronger and more useful. So you are incentivized to avoid damage not only to stay alive, but to keep your weapons at capacity! And if you do get beat up and your weapons all get weak, that of course compounds the difficulty and makes you have to be real careful until you power one back up. When you kill enemies, they randomly drop stuff, including like weapon XP which will fill the currently equipped weapon's power meter. It's really clever!
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Dec 28th, 2016 at 09:31:24.
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Dec 22nd, 2016 at 08:07:09 - DiRT 3 (PC) |
Got this for free somewhere recently and glad I didn't pay money for it. It used to be on my wishlist and I wish I remembered why I took it off. Dirt rally racing sims are apparently not my thing. Was hoping it would be more akin to an arcade racing game like Burnout, but it's closer to a sim. The game immediately drops you into a race (nice that it gets started so quickly) in which I spun out multiple times. You are on a racing team populated by three irritating people who talk at you in all the menus. One of them kept calling me "amigo" and I performed many driving feats that were "sick, bro!" Then there's a guy with an English accent and a woman with an English accent. It seems like the main purpose of these people is to build your self-esteem, as they constantly slather you with praise. I hate them, especially the "sick, bro" guy. Why do "extreme sports" games always have such terrible announcers and music?
The racing itself feels slow and the cars feel heavy. Success is all about precision in handing curves and knowing the terrain (dirt, rain, snow, concrete, etc.). There are many "assists" that will handle speed, braking, driving lines, and other things for you if you want super easy mode. I played through the first of (three?) seasons, and at the end you get a tutorial on tricks like doing donuts. The guy who gives the tutorial is a real rally racer and "YouTube star" (according to Sick Bro). I'm sure he is, and that's awesome, but it adds to how much this game reeks of all sorts of marketing and cross-promotion. (If I had a dollar for every time an announcer said or I saw a logo of: DC, Rockstar Energy, Monster Energy...) My girlfriend came home during this part and immediately said, "That guy must be a real rally racer," because his voiceover work was funny. You'd think a YouTube celeb might add some more pizzazz.
Anyway, after you complete the tricks tutorial, you get a little car playground to drive around in and complete challenges like making long jumps, driving over collectibles, doing slaloms between objects, doing donuts around objects, and so on. That was fun for a while, and I completed a bunch of challenges before turning off the game and uninstalling. I need another Burnout game!
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Dec 21st, 2016 at 00:06:36 - The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (PC) |
I’ve played both DLCs this month, Hearts of Stone and Blood & Wine. Both were excellent and better than 90% of standalone games. There’s not much more to say really! I obsessed over the core Witcher 3 offering, and these were like dessert.
Hearts of Stone: This one had the better story in the main quest, but less in the “stuff to do” category. The first chunk of hours was just more of the same, going around discovering “?” locations and doing little secondary quests as I re-learned how to play. I played a couple games of Gwent and found new none-too-helpful recipes. It’s cool how the main cities have changed since the end of the main game regarding the Church of the Eternal Fire and Nilfgaard. Scholars and science are suppressed!
Without giving too much away, the main quest is a blast. Kiss a frog prince. Get possessed. Plan a heist. Enter a painting. I didn’t know I wanted to do all those things with Geralt, but I did. While playing, I wished there were more useful gear upgrades and more Gwent, but luckily, that’s where the next DLC comes in…
Blood and Wine: This full on expansion features the giant new area of Toussaint (seriously, clocked near 40 hours on this – it’s firkin huge). Toussaint is renaissance France inspired and the country is BEAUTIFUL. Google screenshots. It’s a fully realized and inviting fantasy world with knights errant, tourneys, dukes and duchesses, codes of honor, and lots of peasants. And monsters. Which is why Geralt is there. The murder mystery story is good and gets especially interesting toward the end.
Exploring the Land of a Thousand Fables was probably my favorite part. I love how our fairy tales and lore about monsters are taken, twisted to be novel yet recognizable, and presented back in the world of The Witcher. For example, Rapunzel (Longlocks in the game) gets tired of waiting an eternity for a prince to come rescue her from the tower and hangs herself with her hair. The Big Bad Wolf, after endless deaths at the hands of Little Red Riding Hood and the Huntsman, gets smashing drunk with Thumbelina and murders them both. And you can ride a unicorn.
There’s way more to do in Blood and Wine than Hearts of Stone. Thankfully, there are new treasure hunts for Grandmaster witcher diagrams, so you can upgrade all your gear one more time. There’s a whole new Gwent faction, Skellige, and a ton more cards to collect. I actually won a Gwent tournament! I remember losing them in the base game, and I actually kept losing to the first opponent in Blood and Wine and reloading because I wanted the trophy I got for winning. There’s this whole side plot about hardcore Gwent players being pissed off that there’s a new faction. The tournament is sponsored by the guy who developed the new faction, and you have to enter the tournament playing Skellige. The tournament is basically a battle of the factions to determine which is superior. Cool how they worked the Gwent addition into the game as a side plot. Anyway, after I finally beat the first opponent 5 or 6 reloads later, I beat all the rest on the first try!
There are tons of new witcher contracts and side quests, new mutations to unlock, and hanses to exterminate (like big bandit organizations where you go on romps through their bases and kill tons of enemies, fun!). The new witcher mutations unlock ability augmentations and mutation slots. These cost a lot of ability points and I didn’t really play with them, but I did unlock one that makes the Aard sign freeze enemies and have a chance to instantly dismember them. That was fun. I saw one very expensive augmentation down the tree that saves Geralt from death once every 5 minutes or so. Can you say OP?
Since Toussaint is basically France, wine plays a huge part in the narrative. Geralt acquires a vineyard and house where he can display trophies, armor, weapons, and paintings. There was one fun secondary quest to help a wildlife photographer capture images of monsters. You later attend his art show and he gifts you a flattering photo of Geralt fighting a giant centipede. But the house is so dark that I couldn’t really see well the interior! Even aside from that, the house wasn’t that exciting and I rarely went there.
In the end, I did every single quest in both expansions. Didn’t get all achievements, but I still feel quite accomplished. Best RPG ever. Must play.
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Dec 4th, 2016 at 22:34:13 - Depression Quest (PC) |
This semester I gave a presentation on gender and sexuality in gaming post-Gamergate, i.e., what has changed in response? I read more about Gamergate than I ever had before and figured I'd download the game that sparked the shitstorm. I'm all for interactive fiction and games thematically outside the norm, as is practically everyone who studies the medium. So one of my questions was simply, "Did I think this was a good game?"
My first point is, although this isn't a game by mainstream definitions, it's a game by academic ones. That was the first and main criticism of Depression Quest before sex and journalism ethics was brought into it. There's artificial conflict (between your character and him/herself and other characters), there are rules, and there is a quantifiable outcome where your depression exists along a continuum. There is a goal (manage your depression), a feedback system (the answers you select change the following scenes and your character's depression state), and you play voluntarily. Given that I'd read soooo many diatribes calling this not a game, I kinda thought it wouldn't be, but it totally is, though atypical.
My second point is that this is an important game. One way you can tell it is an important game is by the controversy it caused. People are having existential crises over games not looking and playing like AAA titles, which is bizarre in 2016. There are more indie games than grains of sand on the beach, man! Though one can easily imagine something more interactive to teach us about depression, this is a solid effort. I've recently played a game about a blind girl (Beyond Eyes) that provides some insight into that condition, and hopefully some empathy. I've played Papa & Yo about having an alcoholic father and child abuse. I have my students play Darfur is Dying to give them insight into life as a refugee in the Sudan. There's an app about everyday racism. There are so many important games that are not about shooting aliens or getting high scores. This is art that needs to be made and experienced. You can't convey in a painting what I just experienced in this simple text game about depression.
Intro matter aside, I do not have depression. I do live with someone who does. My favorite person in the world suffers from it. I see her in this game. But the game encourages the player to see themselves too. I relate to some of the social anxiety that the character deals with (being anxious at a party, avoiding socializing with strangers, wanting to retreat to a room and/or just drink a lot real fast to get comfortable around strangers). That stuff isn't abnormal. One difference is that a depressed person is often embarrassed or ashamed by their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, whereas non-depressed people usually aren't. My partner sometimes sleeps like she's dead, stays in bed half the day, thinks she's screwing everything up, avoids difficult tasks, has low self-esteem, even talks about killing herself when things get overwhelming. That's life. You draw support from your network. You see a therapist. You try to find things that are meaningful to you. You try to find things to look forward to. It's not always going to happen, but you keep working at it. It's important for non-depressed people to understand that you can't rationalize a depressed person's thoughts. I can tell my girlfriend all day long, "You are stressed out because you are sleeping until 3pm and then you don't have time to do anything, and it's making you more stressed out" and it doesn't matter. Depression isn't rational. And depression makes people spiral inward and downward.
The “quest” element in Depression Quest is thought-provoking, as I actively managed the character’s depression. That's the goal: get less depressed; manage it. It worsened to severe, but I got it back down to regular depression, and then to under control. Seeing a therapist helped in the game as in real life (luckily the character had a good therapist!). I usually couldn't pick the dialogue option that the real me would pick, but there was usually an option that's like a more resigned version of what I’d pick. Like, instead of “Just get out of bed and get ready for work. You’ll be late, but it’s better than not going at all!” I picked “I guess I'll get dressed and go to work, even though I'll be so late it won't be worth it.” There’s not that optimism, that positive thinking there. It’s more dread, futility.
After I completed the game and got the "good" ending where you are successfully managing your depression, I replayed making clearly terrible choices and predictably the outcome was terrible. I hated my job, my girlfriend left me, I made a scene at dinner, I'm terribly lonely, etc. I must be good at dealing with life since I made all the "good" choices in the game. Oh, I also like that you can get a cat, which again as in real life, helped the character feel less lonely (if your cat isn't an ass at least).
But does this sort of invalidate the premise of the game, that you can make choices that ease the depression? The game sort of undermines its own premise because you can easily choose the "correct" answers and get a positive outcome where the character manages their depression very well. I imagine this simply confirms for some people (who don't suffer from depression) the idea (that people with depression refute) that you can just think yourself out of it, which is problematic for developing empathy.
I found Depression Quest a worthwhile experiment to click through. If you're curious, it takes like 45 minutes. Definitely made me think a lot more than I'd anticipated.
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