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Dec 27th, 2014 at 15:09:58 - The 7th Guest (PC) |
I know I had written something about 7th Guest before, but I can’t find it! Oh well. My girlfriend and I played this together. We were regular about it 3 months ago, then got to the end and became stuck.
7th Guest is a cheesy murder mystery type game about a haunted house. Six or seven people get invited to a mansion a la A House on Haunted Hill. You play as one of those people. You’re trapped in the house and everyone else is gone. You must solve puzzles to progress the story and unlock more puzzles. When you beat a puzzle, you usually get some (often times hilarious) scene with actors (who were probably the developers’ and their families) depicting events at the house. There were some murders, a sexy time in a bedroom, someone suffocating a baby, characters plotting together, bleeding walls, wailing paintings, etc.
I love that this was made in 1993 and that it was such a big deal. I have learned that this was one of the first games exclusively available on CD-ROM, that it was responsible for accelerating the sale of CD-ROM drives, that it sold millions of copies, and that it was quite risqué for its time! Also, Bill Gates called it “the future of interactive entertainment.” Ha. Hahahaha. Yes, you remember back when FMV in video games was the pinnacle of awesomenesss? Greg Costikyan was in the credits. I don’t remember what for, but it’s cool that people involved with this are still working.
Some puzzles are easy and others are very difficult. Most involve finding patterns and tons of trial and error. I hated a few. First was the crypt maze. It’s a giant labyrinth, and this is where we thought we were stuck and quit playing months ago. The other was the microscope game, where you have to play a Go-like game against the AI, which must be impossible. Everyone online said this puzzle was optional, but it turns out you do have to beat it to finish the game. That’s where A and I were stuck. We’d done all the puzzles, even the prerequisites to unlock the final two. After much googling and way, way too much backtracking and double-checking each room and puzzle to make sure we’d done them, we finally followed a tip that said the microscope puzzle was mandatory! But these tips also said it was impossible and you had to use the hint book to beat it.
Long story short, we finished using walkthroughs because we were over it. Long game, some interesting puzzles, many frustrating ones, no map, very old and slow, amusing nonetheless. Horrible FMV scenes were funny. Recommended for nostalgia.
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Dec 27th, 2014 at 07:33:25 - Space Channel 5: Part 2 (PC) |
I got this in the Sega Humble Bundle. I had no idea what it was. When I ran it, I watched a bizarre intro video with a singing, dancing news reporter in outer space. I started a new game. A troupe of dancing space invaders teleports aboard a civilian ship and zaps people with ray guns that make them dance uncontrollably. The news reporter, Ulala (pronounced Ooh la la!), comes to report on the situation/save the day.
Space Channel 5 is basically a Simon Says game. The enemies do brief sequences of moves and call out what buttons you need to push (up, right, left, down, cha (S), and hey (D). So the enemy troupe will dance and say like "Up! Up! Down! Down! Cha cha cha!" and you have to repeat it. They start changing it up with crazy rhythms and it gets pretty difficult by the second or third level. The enemies also sing and taunt, and you retaliate by saving "silly dancing rich people" or "dancing old grandma" or "schoolchildren eaten by giant dancing plant." Seriously. It's hilarious. As you save people, they dance with you, so you build up "viewership" that is converted to HP.
I told my girlfriend about it last night and she'd actually heard of it. Apparently one of our friends used to be obsessed with Ulala and has cosplayed as her before. Who knew?! We played some, but the further along we got, the more we realized how bad the PC controls were. They are pretty okay for the slower rhythms, but when you have to hit buttons quickly in a row, it just doesn't register properly. The other Dreamcast ports in the Sega bundle were the same way with pretty abysmal controls. So unfortunately we couldn't progress too far, but we still had a lot of fun for a little while. If I had a Dreamcast, I would 100% find this game.
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Dec 20th, 2014 at 07:50:16 - Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening (PC) |
Alright, expansion pack! This will also cover the four official DLCs. I actually started a couple weeks ago but never made a new log until yesterday. I decided to create a new rogue character instead of importing David the mage from the original campaign. I'm glad I had the opportunity to try out different types of characters. I had a rogue in Origins, but I didn't spec it into any stealth skills, so I did that here. But the stealth rogue was kind of lame. Stealth didn't add much to the experience. It's hard to be stealthy when the rest of your party isn't. I'd tell them to wait, then go into a room full of enemies alone...then realize there wasn't much I could do. I'd toss a bomb or lay a trap, or sometimes just backstab an enemy, fade into the shadows, and call my party in. Not all that effective. But, still cool to sneak around. Oh, and there were hardly any locked chests! There were a ton in Origins, but relatively few in Awakening. Plus, out of like 7 characters, 3 of them were rogues! In addition to me, you get a dual wielding rogue and an archer rogue. It was rogue overload!
There was no tanky character until late in the game (in the order that I did the objectives at least), so I was running around with the dual wielding rogue in heavy armor. She survived pretty well. My rogue had stealth and lots of evasion tactics, so he survived pretty well. You get Oghrun again, a 2-hand weapon wielding warrior. He had great armor, so he survived pretty well. It was interesting playing without a tank because normally, I'd set each character to attack the tank's target, ensuring that enemies attack the tank and other party members wouldn't pull aggro. But without a tank, I set them all in a free-for-all. Every fight, they just spread out and took on enemies themselves. My fourth character was a healer, and she managed to keep them up. But when that tank character came along near the end, I defaulted to my usual party makeup.
How was Awakening? I liked it. These smaller campaigns are so much more focused than Origins. Origins was a long game with tons of side quests, overly long areas (Deep Roads, Fade, I'm looking at you) and inventory management. Awakening packed the same punch, but condensed. The main drawback was the keep-building element. You are tasked with fortifying Vigil's Keep, the city of Amaranthine, and the surrounding farmland, to prevent the Darkspawn from sacking it all. You have to go gather materials, recruit traders, and pay money so that Vigil's Keep will have strong walls, the army will be well outfitted, the nobles will be pacified, and so on. I thought this would be like that one Neverwinter Nights expansion pack where all of your decisions really matter, where you get to actually manage the keep, see the walls being build, allocate soldiers here and there. But unfortunately there was no real management. The facade of meaningful actions was very disappointing. Why did I bother spending money on walls or finding ore to improve the army's armor? It didn't matter.
Despite that letdown, the story was cool, characters were good as usual, and I especially liked the bad guys. They developed a great plot thread that explained more about the Darkspawn, why they seek out the Old Gods, and how some Darkspawn may prevent that. The sentient Darkspawn idea felt silly at first (they're...SMARTER!), but it went in a cool direction. There was a nasty bug I encountered that caused my main character to lose all his equipment. Watch when you go in the mines. I didn't realize I should have gotten my stuff back til the end of that area, and by then I had been down there for like two hours. I had more equipment in storage, so I just used that. Not as good, but it worked. I can imagine though some players being wrecked by this bug.
As for the 4 DLCs, I first played Leliana's story, which explores her back story with...whatever her lover/companion's name is back in Orlais. That was my favorite because I really liked Leliana. The Darkspawn Chronicles DLC was interesting. You re-play the end of Origins as a Darkspawn commander trying to repel the Grey Wardens and save the Old God. I didn't like playing it much though. Being a Darkspawn wasn't any different than being a Grey Warden as far as gameplay went. Ok, you can enthrall other Darkspawn, but that's pretty much like recruiting a new party member or summoning a spider. There was no important narrative element to this.
I did those two before Awakening. After Awakening, I played Golems of Amgarrak. This was the hardest of the 4. I had imported my rogue, but upon having another melee companion as my first, I switched and imported my healer. You wind up with a cool Runic Golem in your party that also heals and does golem-y things like hurl boulders. This DLC had a neat puzzle element with different colored switches that phased objects and enemies in and out depending on what color you activated. You could also mix colors, so by activating blue and red switches, you phased into the purple realm. Finally, Witch Hunt brings Morrigan back and seemed to provide some hints for another Dragon Age game, maybe Dragon Age II. My favorite parts about that one were talking to Morrigan again and creating a battlemage character with badass control spells. Crushing prison, paralyze, mass paralyze, miasma...these spells are fun. Also the battle mage was cool because he could stand back and cast spells or wade into the fray with various armor spells, one that repulsed nearby enemies, one that debilitated nearby enemies, spells that drained life and mana, animated dead...all kinds of cool things. And there was one spell that made the battlemage's spellpower modify weapon damage instead of strength. I simply pumped every point into magic. I had like 80 magic. The battlemage's sword was deadly!
OH, and I forgot to mention one other funny thing. In the last DLC I played, I learned that...you can expand the hotkey bar. WHAT?! I played the entirety of this game being like "Man, I wish I could have two hotkey bars or expand it somehow." Literally with 30 minutes left out of the 90 hours I spent on this game, I figured out how to do it. Haha. It sure was useful for those 30 minutes.
Anyway. Dragon Age: Origins is officially and fully complete. I feel accomplished. Excellent game, highly recommended if you like RPGs. Dragon Age II is downloaded and ready to go, though I'll likely wait a bit. I feel like some console games under a blanket with the heater on. Winter is good for that.
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Dec 20th, 2014 at 07:19:57 - Worms Crazy Golf (PC) |
This Team 17 Humble Bundle turned out to be more lame than I expected. I remember loving Worms games when I was younger. Although they are still silly in a good way, I was so bored with every one of them. I think Armageddon was the best. It was 2D like the original, simple, but with good graphics, cool backgrounds, and fun weapons. Mayhem I had played in college at some point. It was the first 3D entry in the series. While I had fun with it then, I think it was because my roommate and I used to play each other. Playing solo was slow going. And the camera is not very good, making it difficult to see where your worms are headed and how to orient yourself to fire or at the end of turns to be protected.
There was also included a horrible Worms Pinball game. It had one table and I couldn't even figure out how to control the flippers. No instructions. Finally, two were sort of neat. There was a Worms puzzle game which used various weapons to match three. Other minigames within that game I didn't like. Anyway, despite it being novel, again, I was bored. Then the name of this entry, which represents the whole bundle, is Worms Crazy Golf. It's just a little physics puzzler with a golf ball. You have to shoot par or better on each hole to advance to the next. There are a bunch of courses and various obstacles in each course, including lawn maintenance guys, grannies (why?), sheep, wind, and all manner of Worms-like geography such as cliffs, statues, and holes in the ground. It was my favorite of all of these, but...again...slow.
It would be great if they speed up the pace of Worms. I still love the premise, and the weapons are zany. But it doesn't matter much if it feels like every turn takes 10 minutes and hitting a golf ball becomes a chore of watching it slowly fly through the air, then watching your worm crawl across the grass to the ball. How about a Worms arena shooter? That would be fun...
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