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Aug 2nd, 2014 at 17:13:46 - Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (PC) |
Well that was short and sweet...and buggy as hell!
I'd heard this game was buggy. After the first hour, I'd already gotten stuck on a curb, run into an invisible wall, and when I minimized the game to look up how to open a safe, not only is the way to open it different than the game tells you (game says enter the numbers clockwise, you actually have to go right, left, right, left turning the dial, NOT clockwise!), but the game window disappeared, yet is still running on my computer. I cannot find it anywhere, and it won't shut down through the task manager. So I have to restart my computer! Since then, I learned that the game crashes if you minimize it, I hit several more annoying bugs, like one where I couldn't get on some moving box properly, and then the sound would screw up every time I did it.
Finally, I encountered one of the game-stopping bugs, which I learned is referred to as the 'blue lights' bug, closely related to the 'invisible reef' bug. This happens about 80% of the way through the game. You're on a ship sailing toward Devil's Reef (or Demon's Reef, or something like that), and you have to look through a cannon's zoom to target 3 enemies on the reef and kill them. The enemies are supposed to be represented by blue lights, but in my game, when I zoomed in, I was like, wait what am I supposed to shoot?! There were no blue lights! So where were the enemies? How can I kill them?
I looked this up online and some people had come up with clever solutions, such as mapping where to aim, where the blue lights should be. You're supposed to memorize the locations. Even then, it takes these experts about 15 minutes to kill the 3 enemies. It would have taken me god knows how long. The cannon zoom view barely moved, and I had to increase the mouse sensitivity to max, but even then, by the time I'd find about where I thought I should target, the enemies would cause another tidal wave, and I'd have to go hide somewhere while it passed.
So, I finished the game watching a walkthrough on YouTube where a guy was going for an "A" ranking by saving less than 5 times and meeting some other insane requirements.
Why is saving less than 5 times insane? Because this game is not easy! I'd read that it was frustratingly difficult, and I assumed that was in the typical survival horror way where ammo and health are scarce. However, neither were scarce, and the game was hard for surprising reasons. First, your character, Jack, dies fairly easily. I suppose it's realistic in that way. Instead of just getting shot and losing health, you lose mobility if you get shot in the leg, aim if in the arm, you get dizzy from head injuries and so on. Further, you can have just scratches (require bandages), deep cuts (require sutures), breaks (require splints) and so on. So the health and healing system was more involved than normal. I actually thought it was pretty cool, but it does make things difficult at times! You can't just pop a medkit. Jack actually pulls out the healing supplies and performs the action on himself, vulnerable the whole time. So it's usually a good idea to hide before healing. Sometimes it was eyeball-rolling because he would get hurt so easily. For example, if you jump off a crate, you might break your leg.
Jack can also go insane, which was an obvious influence on Amnesia. The screen shakes, he sees bugs, hears voices, becomes paranoid, that kind of thing. It was cool. He loses sanity from looking at disturbing things mostly, like corpses, or statues of Cthulhu and whatnot.
There are plenty of little puzzles. Many are annoyingly obscure to solve, and the game definitely had an adventure/puzzle game element where you have to use items on things and it is sometimes something I'd never ever think to do. Opening safes was particularly stupid. I swear the game tells you exactly how to open that first one, then you have to do it a different way. Lots of the puzzles were just trial and error type things. Sometimes I wouldn't know where to go next because what I thought would work would keep getting me killed, but nothing would deter me from thinking it was the right thing. For example, this one time I was trying to escape Innsmouth. I found a way to go with lots of enemies. I kept trying to get past them, shooting my way through. After many deaths, I finally decided the enemies were infinitely spawning (they do that sometimes, very irritating!). If they are infinitely spawning then what am I supposed to do?! I know I have to go that way. I used a walkthrough a good 5 times to figure out what the hell to do next. In this case, I had to go find a key and let a guy out of jail first. He gets a truck and then we DRIVE that way. OH OF COURSE.
Why else was it hard? Hmm..Oh yes, the AI. At times they were your typical omniscient goons, knowing exactly where you are. At other times, they were complete idiots, running around in circles while you stood right in front of them. They'd patrol sometimes. Sometimes they just seemed erratic. Their aim was usually terrible, but sometimes the game would decide that they could blast you from the other side of the room with ease. Yeah, just very unpredictable. I guess that made it important to learn to be stealthy. Once you get guns, especially in the later areas, the combat became easier.
Oh, and Jack is a perma-walker. He never runs. Even when caves are crumbling or buildings are burning, he walks. And if he hurts his legs, he walks.real.slow. That's another weird thing that seems inconsistent with the plot. You think you'd run if you were being chased by fishmen. He's also never out of breath. His speech is always completely level, normal, and he's always got attitude. Even if he's going insane or his friend just got killed or both his legs are broken, he's a sassy 1920s cop. His best line was when some fishmen trapped him in a tunnel, one said "I don't believe you're on the guest list for our little party." Jack replied, "Just check the guest list again. I'm on the section not reserved for ugly freaks." I laughed at that one.
Anyway, cool game, great atmosphere, genuinely creepy. I'm glad I played it, even with all the bugs and the eventual gamestopper.
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Jul 30th, 2014 at 14:38:16 - Dino D-Day (PC) |
Some bundle site has been giving out free Steam keys for a handful of games. I couldn't resist grabbing Dino D-Day because...Hitler found a way to resurrect dinosaurs and use them during WWII? Yes please.
Unfortunately the goofy premise is entertaining for all of half an hour. What's left is a mediocre class-based shooter.
Yeah, you can play as dinosaurs on either the Axis or Allies side. Yeah, you can claw people to death as a Velociraptor, explode as another dino, spit acid as another dino, and eat a lot of sheep scattered around the maps. Be ready for a dose of Jurassic Park references.
Yeah, you can also play as humans with guns. You can be the medic, the flamethrower guy, the shotgun guy, the sniper, the machine gun guy...
After playing all the dinosaurs and a couple human classes, totaling maybe one hour, I was bored. There are a few game modes, mostly standard. One has one team piloting a giant dino that the other team has to kill before it reaches a checkpoint, but in a few games, no one got close to killing it. It just blasts you to death if you get close.
Also there were 3-4 servers up when I was playing, with maybe 10-15 players total. Not many people...and the game crashed twice while I was playing, once when I clicked on a 'storybook' button, some feature that isn't implemented yet, and a second time just in the middle of a fight. Hmm.
Glad this was free. Funny concept. Maybe one day the devs will do something more interesting with it. I'll take my Steam cards and go now.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jul 30th, 2014 at 14:41:29.
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Jul 30th, 2014 at 10:08:06 - Paper Sorcerer (PC) |
Cute old school RPG made mostly by one guy. I got this in a bundle with another game I actually wanted, but ended up enjoying this one to completion too! So, a nice surprise.
You're a sorcerer trapped in a book. You must fight your way through 10 levels of the book's dungeon and break the book's bindings (kill the boss) on each level to advance. On the way, you learn to summon at least 3 party members. Since I didn't know what the game was going to be like, I just picked the first 3 available, which were Werewolf (agile melee attacker, lots of party buffs), Minotaur (strooong DPS), and Skeleton (tank). You are always the Sorcerer (magic DPS). There were probably 7 or 8 other options, and then you can find more minions along the way. Like, I found a puppet that I could swap in if I wanted.
There are all the normal stats and a large set of skills for each character to learn. Buy equipment in 'town,' rest in your room to heal, use items to help in battle, normal stuff.
On the way through the book's dungeons, there are a number of secrets to find. These were always rewarding to discover, and any time there was a quest that I actually completed, that was rewarding also. The secrets and quests are not necessarily easy to find or complete. The game is punishing in that if you, for example, use the wrong key to open a door, or use the wrong item for something, the item becomes irreparably damaged! So don't use items that you aren't 95% sure are correct for the task.
The game itself was pleasantly challenging, especially toward the end. Actually the challenge was mainly from the normal enemies you encounter on each level. These especially became more difficult, and I think this is because I was very outleveled, like on the magnitude of 10-20% lower level. You can sort of grind in a couple spots, but I really didn't want to. The bosses were difficult in the earlier game. The later bosses were a cinch, and the final boss wasn't any trouble either.
And...that really is the entire game. It pushed a lot of the right old school RPG buttons and I found it quite charming. It's not the prettiest game, and there are like 100 typos, but hey, props to the guy who made it!
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Jul 28th, 2014 at 07:11:28 - Burnout Paradise (PC) |
A surprising change to the old Burnout formula. This is the first open world Burnout game, though the world is disappointingly small. It takes place in fictional Paradise City (cue Guns n Roses ad nauseum), which is 1/2 city and 1/2 mountain roads. On the one hand, it's nice because I'm learning my way around pretty good, learning shortcuts, turns, locations of important things. On the other hand, I've already driven back and forth across the entire city like 20 times already doing races and other events.
The word that jumps out at me to describe this game is "grindy." It's like a car MMO. Like many (older?) racing games, your progression goal is to upgrade your license. You start with a D license and must win x number of events to upgrade. I think so far it was D -> C (8); C -> B (15); B -> A (26). I'm working on getting the A right now and have 9 or so more. Last night I sat down with the game for a couple hours and, really, grinded my way through the C and most of the way through B.
Events are handled in an interesting way. In old Burnout games, you just select events from the big map. In this game, you discover events by driving around the city. Every traffic light has an event that gets added to the map when you drive through that intersection. You start an event by going to the intersection and pressing brake and gas at the same time.
One big letdown is that there is no crash mode! There's also no aftertouch takedowns! These were two things I LOVED about previous Burnout games I've played. I can understand why crash mode is gone, because that would be tough to do in a constantly moving open world. Like, when you start events, it doesn't phase you to some preset section of the city where traffic is arranged just so. No, you just start a race, and other cars come blazing from behind you.
But, there is the very cool addition of stunt mode. Paradise City has a huge emphasis on shortcuts and stunts. In stunt mode, you try to match a score, like get 50,000 points of stunts in 2 minutes. There are multipliers like jumping through billboards, doing super jumps, getting big air time or doing barrel rolls. I like this mode a lot because it's just awesome to find some of the crazy routes in the game and chain together jumps, billboards and the rest.
As usual, the sense of speed is intense, especially with the speed class cars (there are even classes, like an MMO, haha). Each class (speed, aggressive and stunt) has a different type of boost bar. One of them is normal, I forget, but speed is interesting. You can only boost when the bar is full, and if you stop boosting, the bar goes to 0. However, you can chain boosts, so if, while boosting, you get a takedown or drive the whole time in oncoming traffic, the screen will flash "Burnout" and your boost gauge will fill up, letting you continue boosting. One time I got Burnout x 4, which was awesome.
That's the gist of the game. There seems to be robust online play as well, and I will likely check that out sometime. But that's all for now!
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