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Apr 1st, 2017 at 21:42:11 - Papers, Please (PC) |
What a strange game! I knew it was going to be different, but I wasn't prepared for quite what it asks me to do, that is, make strenuous decisions as fast as possible by scanning documents.
I imagine I'm better at this game than most people. As a long-time copy editor and writer, I'm adept at finding consistency issues within and between documents. Nonetheless, my immigration checkpoint supervisor just informed me that I had 21 violations. 21. I don't know who I am anymore.
Oh wait, I'm an immigration officer in a fictional Eastern European communist country in the early 80s. As local and global events happen (terrorist attacks, murders, worker strikes, etc.) my instructions for who to target and how to check documents changes. In fact, it becomes ever more complicated with more rules, exceptions, and technology.
I have to process as many people as possible each work day, and I get $5 per person processed. But if I make too many mistakes, I get fined $5 at a time ($10 if I really fudge up). I've struck a deal with a police officer, and I get a kickback for every couple people I detain. That is, some discrepancies between documents (e.g., mismatched ID numbers) can have severe penalties for the unfortunate person seeking entry.
I have to work as fast as possible because I'm supporting a family of 5. (Why none of them work, I have no idea. Oh wait, I'm taking employment for granted. But wait, isn't there low unemployment in communism? Or is that just the ideal?) I have a wife and child, a mother-in-law, and an uncle. I need to set aside money for rent each day, plus I have the option of paying for heat and food (and medicine when someone gets sick). I actually played through the game once and only lasted 7 days because my entire family died. This second time around though, I'm doing much better. I had like $30 on day 10 or something (I'd been broke since like day 3 the first time) and actually someone gave me $1000 (there's some shady political resistance stuff going on) that I will probably get in trouble for.
It's a really interesting game because you have to go fast, but you've got motivation to do the job carefully to some extent to avoid fines, but also to detain people. And every so often some sort of special character will come through that you need to look out for. And it gets more and more tedious. For example, just now, people have started forging seals on official documents, so I have to check images of seals now too. And I was threatened for not playing by the rules of this sinister political organization (I denied entry to one of their members without realizing it). And my inspector will return in a few days to check on my accuracy.
I can set aside moral qualms about type 1 and type 2 errors since I'm in a game frame, but I would prefer that my family not get sick and die, as that is an end game state and is reminding me of the anxiety-inducing This War of Mine. One thing that is driving me crazy though, and that is genius, is that the game penalizes you for not catching discrepancies in all sorts of minor details, like the person's sex. So you have to look at the person, look at their name, determine sex, and compare to what's written in their passport. I got fined a couple times for getting it wrong, and was thinking that I was just misinterpreting. Then a man showed up and gave his reason for immigration "to be with my husband." I'm thinking, "ooooh, this is the point of the rigid sex categorization." I let him in and I got fined for a sex mismatch. Since he had a husband, he should have been a woman, but everything in his info was masculine. That's homophobic communist and authoritarian countries for you. You've got to follow the logic of the game. Then the next time, I caught a sex discrepancy and interrogated the person. (If you use a machine to check information against other information and find something invalid, you can interrogate). The person said they didn't know what I was talking about, so the option came up to do a body scan. Holy crap. So you see in the scan that the self-identified male appears not to have a penis, and therefore, is lying, and so must be detained. The handling of sex has been the most jarring thing about the game. I look forward to seeing what other tricks of social commentary it has up its sleeve.
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Mar 13th, 2017 at 08:22:13 - Mirror's Edge Catalyst (PC) |
Thoroughly enjoyed this second installment of Mirror's Edge. The city of Glass is breathtaking, and traversing its rooftops thrilling. I kept comparing this to Assassin's Creed and would love Mirror's Edge to get a longer game in a bigger world (I said this about the first game too, and the second is bigger, but I want more!). The verticality is impressive, and the movement and platforming are so much better than Assassin's Creed games.
If you've never played Mirror's Edge, it's basically dystopian parkour. You play as Faith, a "runner." Runners are anti-corporate political dissidents in a world controlled by conglomerates. Their domain is the rooftops of the city of Glass. The key mechanic is "runner vision," which highlights objects in the environment that Faith can use to continue fluidly freerunning. Runner vision automatically highlights objects in a path that is the shortest distance from A to B, but you're free to turn the help offered by runner vision up or down or off completely and find your own paths. This is a really unique way to move in a game, and its easy to get entranced by the speed and grace of it all. Runner vision makes it so you rarely have to stop and contemplate while running; instead, you're on the edge of your seat reacting to new obstacles and feeling the adrenaline rush of successfully landing a series of difficult moves. The one caveat is that runner's vision doesn't always work. It turns itself off and back on. I initially thought this was because Faith was in a communications dead zone where her Beat (mobile device connecting to the Glass network) was offline, but it happened seemingly randomly. So sometimes you'll be standing there looking around for something to turn red. Eventually something will, I guess as the game figures out a path for you. It's easy to feel lost without runner vision.
The combat in this series gets a lot of flak. I remember thinking it wasn't good in the first game, but in this one, I appreciate the point of it. Faith tries to avoid combat, running away instead. But forced into combat, she holds her own against K-SEC (Kruger Security, part of Kruger Industries, the main evil corporation in the game). Combat is clunky, with one button for light attacks and one for heavy attacks. You do way more damage if you attack after jumping off a wall or launching off a zipline, so combat looks kind of silly with Faith running toward walls all the time to get the momentum to jumpkick enemies in midair. It was annoying at first, but became challenging in its own fun way later on. Try to run through enemies and jumpkick on the fly to continue your run though. This actually builds "focus," and when your focus meter is more full, you are more likely to avoid bullets and you take less damage. So you're actually rewarded for running through enemies.
The story is decent, characters one-dimensional. For a game about social conflict, I found the PG dialogue really odd. Come on, these people would drop f-bombs and they'd say shit instead of crap and they'd say damn it instead of darn it. In the future, corporations control everything. Everyone is an "employ" at a corporation. Loyalty is encouraged and deviance heavily sanctioned. There is a small corporate ruling elite and a mass of "LowCaste" workers with everyone striving to become "MidCaste"--the good ole Glass Dream, and false consciousness to the extreme. The runners are basically socialists, and one of the factions, Black November, is so hilariously communist in their talk about the social class system of Glass--overthrowing the corporations, getting the employs to wake up and realize that they have a shit deal, and inciting the employs to take back power. The dialogue was practically lifted out of the Communist Manifesto, and made me think about writing a paper showing how sociological theory is embedded in video games. Add that one to the idea list.
Mirror's Edge provides a lot of side missions and other challenges, such as time trials, platforming puzzles, and courier missions. These other challenges generally tie into the story, or at least one character, but don't add much. The courier missions, for example, give some insight into employ life as they ask you to deliver flowers to a secret lover, or deliver food to someone, etc. Doing all this would probably double the game's length, and I did a healthy dose during my playthrough, but did a good job ignoring most of them. One interesting thing is that users can create new time trials and they will show up in your game. While interesting, I found it distracting and it broke the sense of immersion. I'm running and I'm really into what I'm doing and I notice that "PuRpLeHAZE420" has left a time trial challenge. Hmm.
All in all, a wonderful experience that I would recommend. People will be turned off by the combat (but accept that it isn't supposed to be a fighting game and ignore it when you can) and the story (but accept that narrative isn't why you're here). Remember that it's all about the running, and the running is stellar. More please!
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Mar 7th, 2017 at 23:05:15 - Unravel (PC) |
I played for about 90 minutes and got bored, tried to pick it back up today, immediately got bored. Thought I'd enjoy this more, but it's much slower paced than I'd anticipated. Unravel is a 2d platformer with beautiful scenery steeped in natural environments (I played three levels: a rustic farm-type area, a beach, and some woods with apples and berries). You play as "Yarny," a yarn...creature. An old woman drops a ball of yarn from a basket, and Yarny materializes and enters a series of framed photographs in her home. I think the point is that Yarny serves as a symbol of the old woman's memory, as he (she..it..) traverses environments in photographs, he sees figments of children (presumably her family members) playing and doing whatever kids do. I heard it gets a little sad later on.
The yarn platforming gimmick is neat for a minute, but loses charm, much like the repetitive (if beautiful and soothing and emotionally appropriate) music. Yarny unravels as he moves, leaving behind a string of yarn. If he runs out, he can't move forward. So he has to find balls of yarn to continue forward. He uses the yarn to swing like a lasso and reach high places, to string together on pegs to create a little trampoline to jump, and so on. Yarny can also drag some objects. I found the controls a bit sluggish; Yarny regularly didn't do quite what I wanted him to, and objects would move as if I pushed them harder than I did. Stuff like that kills the quality of the platforming for me.
Ultimately, this seems like a neat idea that gets dull rather quickly because you realize that it's really nothing new. The yarn could be replaced by other platformers' movement tools and it would be no different except with the limitation that you can't move forward if Yarny unravels. In my play of the first three levels, this was never a big problem. If I did run out of yarn, there was always a spool nearby, and it was just a matter of backtracking to be a little more efficient, getting the spool, and continuing. I'm sure the puzzles get more difficult later, but I think that would detract further from the fun of the game because it would just take even longer to progress and you'd have more situations requiring precision and manipulating objects and all this stuff that just doesn't feel that great.
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Mar 5th, 2017 at 19:04:07 - Trine 2 (PC) |
I watched a friend play through parts of one or two Trine games several years ago. They always looked gorgeous and like fun puzzle games in the vein of that old Blizzard game about Vikings. What was that called? Anyway, this was my first time playing one and it's pretty much what I expected. The game is beautiful. I love the art. It's got a great whimsical high fantasy style and narrative. Nice that the game doesn't take itself too seriously.
You play as three different characters (a thief, a warrior, and a mage) who can swap out with one another on the fly, letting you use all their different skills whenever the situation calls. The thief has a bow and arrow. She can shoot enemies and objects from afar, freeze things and set things on fire. She can also grapple to some surfaces and swing around. The warrior is strongest, and has a shield to protect him from fire and acid. He can also throw a hammer to break stone walls. The mage is super cool. He can conjure boxes and planks (by drawing with the mouse) and can lift objects into the air to manipulate them. Using all of your characters' skills, you can overcome any obstacle in the game.
The puzzles in the first half of the game are pretty simple, but they start to have more moving parts. By the end, you're tasked with some relatively complicated screens to solve. Luckily, all the characters compliment one another. Throughout the levels, you collect experience potions, and these allow you to level up skills in each character's skill tree. Some of the skills are really useful for progressing through levels, like the thief's frost arrow, which when fired into water turns into a raft, or the mage's increased conjuring skills, which allow him to create 2-4 objects at the same time. Very useful! What ends up happening is that you can basically solve a lot of the puzzles and complete some entire levels with just one leveled up character. Pretty neat for options of how to solve puzzles!
I beat the main game, and then apparently I had an expansion pack too. It's about some goblins who abduct the mage's wife and the trio goes to get her back. I played through a level where the goblins sack some human city, a desert level after the goblins' wyvern leaves you all for dead, and a third level inside the belly of a giant sand worm. I encountered two bugs there that inhibited my progress, and I was also getting tired of how skill-based the puzzles were becoming, specifically by how I was having to be very precise with the mage's conjuring. It reminded me a bit of a game I played called Crayon Physics Deluxe where you could be really cheap in your solutions by manipulating the physics engine. That's what Trine 2 started to feel like. I watched the rest of the expansion on YouTube and saved some time. Fun little game. Apparently has couch co-op.
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