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Jul 12th, 2016 at 19:59:31 - Return to Castle Wolfenstein (PC) |
Ugh, 15-year-old FPS. It was fun for a while, but after 2 hours, it's just turned into me save abusing. Kill a room, save, kill a room, save, die, reload, kill an enemy, save, die, reload, etc. The story is ridiculous, as Wolfenstein should be, and it's way more difficult than I thought. Maybe I should have put it on the easiest difficulty. Oh well.
All the guns so far feel about the same to shoot. You just run and jump and crouch. No cover at all. The AI is really dumb. They'll just charge straight at you, run out of cover and stand there, and so on. I think that's why it's hard in part is because there's nowhere for me to run either in some of these open areas. And they hit hard, and there isn't a lot of health or ammo lying around. I had to use an ammo cheat!
I also had to use a health cheat once! I'd saved the game before this door, and when you open the door, you get hit with a sniper round for 20 damage. I had less health than that and so I died about 20 times before I got pissed off and looked up cheats. The funny thing? After I used the health cheat, I ran through the door, and the sniper didn't shoot. Funnier thing? I ran back that way after hitting a dead end, and got sniped and died. But thanks to the health cheat, I hacked my way past the sniper again.
Right now I'm fighting some super female soldiers and they are kicking my ass too. There are three of them in a big open room and I just can't handle them. I mean, more practice, sure, but I'm not having fun. I'm sure this was great in 2001, but not now. The game feels soooo dated. At least it's not like when I tried to replay Duke Nukem and realized that it was made before you could look up and down in FPSes. Haha, that sucked.
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Jul 8th, 2016 at 19:51:43 - Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (PC) |
Played this a long time today, but am going to retire it. I think I bought it like 4 years ago, but I could never get it to work on Windows 7, even with patches and community support, on my old machine. Installed it on a whim the other week, and it works fine on this machine with Windows 8.1. Definitely glad to have played it. A beautifully flawed game.
The game's version of Los Angeles is super grim. Story NPCs are great characters, from Smiling Jack to the split personalities of the night club owner in the first hub (I didn't realize she was a split personality until 1 second before it was revealed; I thought the game was glitching and/or one of the characters was being silly and dressing the same as her sister) to the college-educated anarch in Downtown. The story is engrossing as well, enjoyed the quests, tracking people down, planting some explosives, learning about different vampire clans, etc. There is a ton of potential to explore vampire fiction in games and not have it be like Twilight.
The game is soooo reminiscent of Deus Ex, it's crazy. It looks similar, the atmosphere is the same, the movement and combat feel similar, similar sinister story, etc. As I thought about Deus Ex though when I replayed it years later, Vampire is showing its age. The graphics are still okay, and the art is good so it's nice to look at, but the combat suuuuucks. I mean, the ideas are cool. You get melee weapons, guns, and vampire powers. I can throw a swarm of bats at people, go invisible, and call on super strength, all very handy. But getting into fights is just a clickfest hoping you drain their life before they drain yours. Also interacting with objects in the environment is finicky. Sometimes the interact icon just doesn't show up, other times you can't click on it. Irritating.
It would be cooler if there were more of a traditional action RPG or adventure game skill tree. They sorta mapped D&D rules onto character creation and stat management. You get some starting feats, points to put into various attributes, which raises the value of skills. If you have played D&D, it's nothing you haven't seen. But I think it works to the game's disadvantage because your character doesn't noticeably improve much. The D&D system for CRPGs works so well because it's usually with squad-based games. You have four or five characters you're managing, and you're learning more spells and doing more micromanaging, seeing improvement in how skills and abilities interrelate as new enemies and situations are tossed at you. In this game, combat is just always me running around clicking left mouse to attack until someone dies. I can stealth in the beginning and get some stealth kills, sure, and I can toss some bats or use my super strength, but I'm still just clicking madly. It's lost its charm quickly, which is too bad.
Another way it's showing age is that, although the NPCs are neat and the dialogue is excellent, they don't feel very interactive. They're information dispensers. Vampire came out in 2004, so we hadn't seen any Mass Effects or Dragon Ages. More interactive NPCs were just around the corner for the most part, NPCs who seemed to KNOW you and your character and seemed to really be invested in what happened, or in what you said to them among the various dialogue options, or who frequently did things with you.
So anyway, I did enjoy this for the most part, but I get the gist of it, and I think I will use Vampire as the excuse to play a string of older games I have lying around on Steam.
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Jul 8th, 2016 at 08:58:45 - Apotheon (PC) |
Apotheon is an excellent 2d action/action-RPG/metroidvania game from, and I was surprised, the same devs who made Capsized. I really didn't like Capsized. But, I see similarities in the movement and combat here. Apotheon's loose, sort of floaty movement works well. You pick up a lot of different weapons of several types (spear, sword, club, ranged...) and generally swing it wildly while moving back and forth and jumping up and down. You've got to actually connect the weapon to the enemy for a hit, so for example, you'll miss a lot because enemies will hug you. Solution? Jump up and swing downward, switch to a dagger (which hits right up close), roll away and then attack, etc. The fighting can be pretty hectic, and it's definitely a lot of fun, kept me thoroughly entertained.
There are also a ton of items, including bombs, potions, "bone dust" that summons skeletal warriors to fight with you, and all manner of special items that permanently enhance attack speed, amount of health and armor restored, etc. Consumable items are created via a simple crafting system. Weapons and armor and other things can be purchased from a few vendors (though I never purchased anything except recipes to make potions), and you can upgrade your skills with each weapon type at a trainer. It is really expensive to upgrade weapons all the way! I think they can all go up to level 4, though I only leveled them to 3 (and one to 2 only).
Despite the hectic combat, the game is easy on standard difficulty. You could definitely bump it up to the other option it gives you. I died maybe twice during the whole game, though I did *almost* die a lot. Once your health hits 0 or 1, you get like a second chance kind of thing. If you get hit one more time, you'll die, but I almost always had time to drink a health potion, of which you will never run out.
Enemy types don't vary too much, and you could probably criticize Apotheon for lacking some diversity in combat. I mean, the weapons really aren't *that* different from each other. And the enemies are mostly just humanoids with the same weapons you have. Sometimes you fight a large cyclops, or a wolf, or an underground demon thing. Some enemies fly near the end of the game. Boss fights were pretty fun. My favorite was (I forget which god--oh yea, this is very God of War-ish. You kill all the gods of Olympus for revenge) the one where you mount a horse and chase after the god to try and kill him on horseback. You never ride a horse otherwise in the game, but it was fun, so I sort of wonder why they didn't incorporate it more.
One great thing about Apotheon is the exploration and incentive to do so. There are all sorts of hidden hallways, floors you can destroy with bombs, doors you can pick with locks. You can collect tons of cool weapons, even some rare items granting permanent bonuses, and the best, upgrade armor for free. Usually you would purchase armor upgrades like you would purchase weapon skill upgrades, but there are these special lockboxes hidden around that sometimes contain armor upgrades. You feel really lucky and accomplished when you find one. There are also various doors where you need a specific key or item to pass, as well as hidden quests you can find that will give you some instruction or puzzle to solve, such as assassinating 5 people that Hermes was supposed to kill but didn't, or following clues to a sunken treasure in Poseidon's realm, or hunting three unique animals and then finding the doors that their trophies unlock. It's great stuff, and I poked around in all the nooks and crannies looking for secrets.
As mentioned, you will kill god after god as you obtain their items and powers. Each god's realm is unique, and this was a huge strength of the game that kept things from feeling repetitive. You'll have quite different types of objectives in each realm. My favorites were the more puzzle-oriented ones for the most part. There was one with these three concentric rotating structures, and you have to make your way to three different doors (one in each structure) as they rotate. It was a nice platforming challenge. In another, you had to use ranged weapons to hit switches (some of which you couldn't even see) throughout the level to open doors. It was like taking a ton of trick shots and practicing aim, very cool. In another, you've got to raise water levels to navigate the level, while fending off mermen. Really really liked the level designs and varied objectives.
Finally, one must praise the clay pottery art style which is absolutely beautiful and looks fantastic in motion. The music is also perfect, rising with the action, drums pounding for boss battles. I don't know what else to say except the visuals and audio are damn near perfect.
So, really fun game. Some people disliked the controls and/or combat, but I liked them. Great exploration, lots of secrets, decent story, recommended.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jul 8th, 2016 at 09:03:57.
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Jul 5th, 2016 at 15:46:48 - Really Big Sky (PC) |
This twin-stick shooter / bullet hell / schmup has some beautiful neon colors going on! Unfortunately, when things get hectic, I get big framerate drops, even if I turn the graphics to low (which shouldn't happen on an indie game from 2012). Really Big Sky manages to be different than any other twin stick shooter I've played, and it was fun for a couple hours before it got grindy.
Things that set Really Big Sky apart from others in the genre that I've played:
- annoying narrator, who occasionally provides warnings when a boss approaches, but more often says inexplicable things such as "Gordon Freeman!" and "Gordon Levitt!" and "Tits!" (when you die...why?)
- TONS of different enemy types, though only a few different boss types (so far)
- planets! you can switch your ship from fire mode to "drill" mode to drill through giant planets. Sometimes, you just drill through and get powerups. Sometimes, you drill through and have to destroy a planetary core. Sometimes, it's a gas giant, and you can get a lot of points. You can also switch to drill mode and save yourself from getting nailed by meteors when those come at you.
- persistent upgrades! A rogue-like, this ain't. Your ship upgrades carry over, and you collect star bits to spend on upgrading like 12 different things like laser strength, shield strength, laser weapon spread, wide range of absorbing star bits, etc.
- flying dinosaur skull fossils that breathe fire (this is clearly the best thing)
SO, the game does begin to feel grindy because at some point, you are just trying to buy upgrades. It doesn't much matter how far you get or how long you last, you will collect plenty of star bits to upgrade stuff. I upgraded one thing to max, have about 5 more things close to max, then have all the rest near halfway. You don't feel the impact of these upgrades until you've done a LOT of upgrading. Each thing probably has 30-40 upgrade levels, so you see tiiiiny increases in your shields and weapons. And the game is hard, so the grind feels Sisyphean.
The other thing that sucks is that framerate drop. Things will get hectic, and when that happens, the neon colors just get too busy to distinguish the who/what/where of it all. There are like 50 enemies flying around, hundreds of bullets, and your tiny, tiny ship somewhere among it all. And then a meteor will slam into you. Sometimes, the screen turns a sort of photo negative black and white, and it's really hard to make out who/what/where when that happens. And the rest is pretty standard for the genre. Apparently there is/was online play, but the leaderboards don't load and I see no option to play online. My guess is the game isn't really supported anymore. It is pretty cool and was worth the couple bucks I paid for it.
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