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Apr 2nd, 2017 at 16:37:06 - Papers, Please (PC) |
Unexpectedly finished quickly. I got 4 or 5 of the possible 20 endings (being put in jail and executed for treason, successfully escaping to a nearby country, entire family dead, in jail for shooting a civilian...). The game continued putting pressure on to break the government's rules. I was offered bribes for various reasons, whether to help an opposition political group, to sell a watch I was entrusted to keep, to let someone through without proper documentation, etc. I see how these are supposed to be tough decisions, but maybe because I first ended the game when my entire family died, I wasn't real sympathetic to anyone claiming that they'd be killed if I didn't let them through, or they feared the checkpoint would be closed next time. If my character had no family, I'm sure I would have helped strangers more because I wouldn't be worried about taking care of my own.
I learned not to flaunt my wealth. At one point I took a lot of money from someone and moved into a nicer apartment. My neighbors immediately reported me for my newfound wealth and I came under investigation. My savings was taken and I had to move back into a super cheap apartment. I wonder if the game can be completed after moving into a nice apartment. Just take other bribes (not the super big one that I took), and get real efficient with processing paperwork and it's probably doable. Is there yet another better apartment to move into later? What are the benefits? Just social status?
It's interesting how rules compound the job. It becomes more and more time-consuming to process paperwork the more rules there are. And the more international incidents there are, the more rules there are, but also the more people seeking entry. But the more rules there are, the more likely you are to make a mistake. By the end of the game there are two pages of rules to follow. But you still need to work swiftly because you have to pay for rent, food, and heat. But if you work too swiftly and make mistakes, you get fined. What a juggling act.
Papers, Please! made me think about immigration and politics. That's awesome. I want to know more about the developer, and I wonder if this game gets used in classes to illustrate the difficulty of setting and enforcing immigration policy.
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Apr 2nd, 2017 at 09:51:29 - Day of the Tentacle Remastered (PC) |
Hehe, silly old adventure game. I played it with a walkthrough, which I've learned is the only way I really enjoy tough point-and-clicks. This one in particular, there's no way I would have gotten very far without help. It involves time travel, and saving the world from sentient tentacles. It also features the Founding Fathers, heavy metal, a talking horse, a mummy, mad scientists, and more. You switch between three main characters who get stuck in various time periods, and many of the puzzles involve sending things back and forth in time. So like, at one point someone needs vinegar, so you put wine in a time capsule, and open it with a character in the future. Voila. There are a lot of silly moments; it's very much like an old slapstick cartoon. I did laugh out loud a couple times, but I can't remember why. My favorite character was Laverne, who is deadpan and morbid. Bernard, the nerdy science student, was fun, and I liked Hoagie, the heavy metal roadie, too. I suspect that Hoagie was an inspiration for Tim Schafer's Brutal Legend. Anyway, it's cool that this got a remastered version, as it's considered a classic game in the adventure genre. I enjoyed speeding through it with the walkthrough, and have more old gaming references in my head.
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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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