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Jan 21st, 2014 at 12:44:46 - Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (PC) |
Continuing my MLK Day extravaganza...
Straight off the bat, Brothers was something amazing. So the premise of the game is simple. You play as two brothers simultaneously. Your mom is dead. Your dad is ill and you have to take him to the town doctor. The controls! God, the controls. So you use the left stick and left trigger to control the big brother and the right stick and right trigger to control the little brother. Sticks move and triggers are for actions. Your dad is in a cart to be transported. So move one brother to the front of the cart and one to the back, then hold both triggers. The boys lift the cart and then you can move the boys simultaneously with both sticks. When they're moving a cart or other object, it's almost like controlling a ship. But once they get their dad to the town doctor's house, they set off on their own on an adventure to find a cure.
Controlling the boys separately is a little harder and more fun. They run through the rest of the rural town on their way, following a map that the doctor gave them. They can interact with a lot of the residents of the town and sometimes other objects. Most of the time, each boy will interact a little differently toward people and objects. These nonverbal (again, like Papo & Yo, no English speech) interactions give the brothers personalities. The younger one likes to dance and play. The older one will, but is generally more serious, leading the two onward. I played basketball with another kid, spit down a well, sat on a bench for a splendid view, danced with an old woman, and ding-dong-ditched in the town. These interactions are neat because they are nothing major by themselves, just quick little things that put a smile on my face, but by the end add up to be quite meaningful in describing the world and the brothers.
Other characters that you meet play central roles in the adventure, like the lovesick troll, the mysteriously strong and agile girl and the young gryphon. Interactions with these characters tend to be very emotional based on the circumstances and whoever the hell directed the scenes in the game. They must have been in movies before this. With still other characters, who are not central to the game, you can sort of do quests, but they aren't quests, nor are they required. They're just something you can do, like save baby turtles and bring them to their mother, or sing to some killer whales. I got achievements for these two, and there are more achievements that I didn't get. It's worth exploring where you can and interacting with animals or whatever you think you can interact with! The playfulness that the boys exhibit on their adventure is contagious while playing the game. The more you make them explore and play, the more you want to do it yourself (in the game).
Then there's the relationship between the brothers themselves that grows and gets expanded upon throughout the game. Quite wonderful to see.
So the gist of the adventuring is sort of puzzle platforming, where the two brothers must help each other overcome obstacles. Maybe there's a drawn drawbridge and its lever is on a cliff. There's a broken ladder down from the cliff but you can't get up there. So the big brother will boost the little one up. He will pull the lever, and then they can cross the bridge. There are all kinds of puzzles like this throughout the varied environments of the game. Speaking of which, my god, the environments, the scenery. It's beautiful. One part in particular was my favorite. It involves giants. The puzzles are not very hard, easy on the spectrum, though there were a few times I had to stop and think. Using the brothers to solve puzzles together really wraps you up in their relationship, how they need one another on this adventure and as a family.
Really amazing game, emotional, touching, exciting, fantastical. It's short (~3 hrs), give it a play through!
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Jan 21st, 2014 at 12:16:39 - Papo & Yo (PC) |
I'd read about this since before it was released. Story sounded impressive for game content matter and intrigued me. It's about a boy's relationship with his abusive alcoholic father (sort of an auto-biography of the designer/creator). He's in this dream-like slum with another female child, his toy robot Lula, and a creature called Monster. Monster represents his father, and Monster likes to eat toads, which represent alcohol. When Monster eats a toad he becomes enraged and attacks the boy.
I picked the game up in the last Humble Bundle. I'd avoided purchasing it before because it got slammed by some of the press. But I'll pick up all kinds of things in Humble Bundles that I normally wouldn't pay for, and I'm REALLY glad I have this game now. I disagree completely with the negative reviews for the game and myself would rate it very highly. Maybe it was patched up or something since its release because I didn't encounter any bugs like a lot of people had said.
So Papo & Yo is like an action adventure/puzzle game. I can't go much into the plot details for fear of ruining the emotional story, but you essentially follow this girl around, use your robot pal Lula to solve some puzzles, and lead Monster from place to place. The game is really imaginative. The dreamlike favela is more than just reimagined slums, but takes on the nuances as seen through a child's eyes. Instead of seeing poverty or dirtiness, you see lots of pretty blue sky and soccer fields. The art is this mixture of the realism of the favela and chalk lines of childrens' drawings. As you go through the game, the environments get more and more trippy, which represents, I don't know, the strain on the boy of dealing with Monster's rage and unpredictable nature.
One of the more incredible things about the game is how much you identify with the boy. I didn't have abusive parents or anything, but I think the rage of Monster can stand for a lot of things anyone can relate to in life, the things you can't control, the things or people that you love even though they hurt you, maybe even some part of yourself that you are struggling with. But the boy has to deal with Monster, sometimes purposefully, sometimes accidentally feeding the Monster's rage. The boy also has to quell its rage. The whole time he is dealing with Monster, he is solving puzzles. Whatever Monster means to you, you can't just drop everything, forget everything and deal with Monster. You have to keep living, keep going to work, keep up appearances, whatever...you've got to keep solving puzzles regardless of the rampaging Monster.
Anyway, there is no English dialogue in the game, so all character development is achieved through character/environmental interactions aside from decipherable speech. It becomes pretty obvious what the boy and girl's relationship to Monster is. You immediately feel a certain dangerous curiosity toward Monster, and you alternatively like him (he's useful sometimes, sometimes he's calm and easy to guide around) and/or hate him. It becomes obvious the significance of Lula to the boy. He needs Lula (fantasy?) to help him solve puzzles and deal with Monster. Lula becomes a lovable character. Every time you use it, it says its name in a cute robot voice. You learn the relationship between the boy and the girl, and finally understand why she is always in war paint. The boy's attitude seems to change throughout the game too. He gets lets naive for sure. It's just a beautifully told story. The end is just like...wow. My girlfriend (who does have a history of being abused) was watching me play, couldn't turn away from the game the whole time, and when it was over we just sat there for a while. I think she cried. It was emotional.
One thing I haven't said much about are the puzzles. Since it is a puzzle game, you're going to be solving a lot. Don't worry. They aren't hard. They're on the easy side of the spectrum. Some people didn't like the puzzles. I liked them because every switch, every thing that happened, was neat to watch. Most (early) puzzles are solved just by finding a gear, pushing it, finding a bar, pulling it, finding a box, moving it...pretty simple stuff. But every time you do any of those things, the environment shifts in often unpredictable ways (at least the first time you see it) and I found it pretty exciting to watch what was going to happen when I pushed or pulled puzzle controls. The farther the game gets, the puzzles themselves become interesting. I like the ones where you have to stack houses or other objects, then manipulate the stack in this way you could only do in a dream universe to reach new places.
So I highly recommend giving this a play through. It's not long (~3.5 - 4 hrs), and it's probably not expensive. I want more games with emotional stories like this. Want to talk about the medium maturing? Papo & Yo is an example.
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Jan 21st, 2014 at 11:44:47 - Joe Danger 2: The Movie (PC) |
Since yesterday was MLK day in the US and I couldn't go to work, I decided instead of playing Persona 4 all day, I would burn through the shortest PC games I had, which turned out first to be this one. I picked up Joe Danger 2 in the latest Humble Bundle. It had good reviews and I like racing games. Didn't like this one at all though. Right away I found it completely annoying. The visuals were grainy for some reason, which muddled all the junk in the races on screen. I turned everything up, turned everything down, unplugged it from the HDTV, reinstalled it, but it still looked pretty bad. I don't care if a game is colorful or has great graphics or whatever, but if I have trouble distinguishing objects from one another because they aren't well-defined, I lose patience.
The audio quality was fine, but the music and sound effects sound like I was at the circus. It was too silly and cartoony sounding for my tastes. Also, the premise that Joe Danger is doing stunts for a movie director is great, but the voice of the movie director sucked. He sounds like this crazy southern/Wild West yee-haw over-excited drunk cowboy or something. And he yells at you through all the levels telling you to duck or jump or disengage the rockets or whatever. God he was annoying.
The controls seemed slow to respond. Ducking and jumping happened too long after you pressed the button. Joe seemed to move a little sluggishly too. Didn't like it. I like quick, crisp movements and very responsive controls especially in racing games like this one.
There were, on the plus side, some cool things about the tracks you raced on. You didn't just race and collect stuff, but one level I played you had to bounce on rockets to disarm the (as per the movie script). One you had to try not to trip a security system by avoiding laser grids as you rode through. One you had to outrun an avalanche. Some cool track design elements for sure. Take these and recreate them in Trials or some other great racing game, and that'd be awesome.
That's all I'm gonna say about it since I just feel like I'm complaining. Obviously a lot of people like the game so good good.
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Jan 21st, 2014 at 11:27:33 - Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (PC) |
Burned through this over the long weekend. Interesting game. I enjoyed it overall, probably give it like a 70 or 75%. The biggest thing the Longest Journey games have going for them are the stories. The stories in both were really neat, this mixture of sci-fi and fantasy. The first game set up the whole mythos of the world(s). This one uses that as a backdrop for exploring perhaps some moral question about the implications of technology, our dependence on it, our overuse (?) of it. There are also clear parallels in the story to current events about terrorism, foreign military occupation, religious freedom and oppression and so on. It's cool how so much social commentary was wrapped up in one story.
Unfortunately though, the end was really really disappointing! There were a lot of plot lines running through the game and they simply weren't wrapped up adequately. Here are some questions off the top of my head about things that were left unresolved. These things were not just "open-ended" for the player to think about, but totally unresolved. (1) Uhh, April Ryan? There's no way she died like she did. So what happened to her? (2) The entire Arcadia plot is left hanging. What happened to the rebels in Arcadia? What happened with the Azadi and the occupation of Marcuria? What happened with the tower that seemed to be such a big deal throughout the game? (3) What happened to all the characters I encountered throughout the game? Crow? The White Dragon? The innkeeper? The freaking playable character Apostle? How was a character you spend a couple hours with just dropped completely? These characters were far too important to never mention again. Then of course there were requisite cliffhangers that set up a sequel, like "That's not really Reza!" at the end. Oooh, then who is it?! Despite that mysterious line though, there was no hint of or any previous instance of people not being who they appear, so mysterious or not, I don't know where that came from. Regardless, there is plenty of material for more related stories to be told.
I found the third-person perspective much more engaging than the landscaped point-and-click of The Longest Journey. It's nice to be able to run around in a world and explore a bit, see the sights as your character sees them. None of the environments were particularly mind-blowing, but I did like the cityscape of Zoe's home, as well as the city of the Dark People. That place looked awesome.
So with the third-person perspective, they went on and committed to a more action game feel and added fighting and stealth portions to the game. Both were...functional. They didn't...not work. But they were ridiculously simple and, the fighting especially, didn't need to be there. Here's how you fight in Dreamfall: left mouse is light attack, right mouse is strong attack, space is block, move while blocking dodges. That's it. So you just stand there, dodge when an enemy strong attacks, and strong attack it back a few times, and you win pretty much every fight without any trouble. And you only fight random goons, and only one at a time, sometimes with two in a row. And you only fight maybe 10 people in the entire game. Like, completely pointless. The stealth was better. There are some segments where you're infiltrating some headquarters and whatnot, and there are sentry robots in the game. You have to go about your mission while avoiding the robots. You can sneak and hide behind walls to wait for an enemy to pass. Simple, but the stealth made a lot more sense than the fighting.
Puzzles in Dreamfall are the complete opposite of The Longest Journey. Where the latter's were overly complicated, the former's are simplified. Instead of the 20 inventory items I always seemed to have in TLJ, I usually had 2-3 in Dreamfall. There are less inventory item puzzles and more puzzles in the world. Like I said, none were very difficult. I think it must be hard to design puzzles in games because there are so many different types of puzzles that players will recognize. Dreamfall definitely used puzzles I'd seen before. One was just an object-matching thing where you have say 5 shapes on the bottom of the screen. Then there is a grid with like 30 similar shapes on the screen and you have to find and click the ones that match the shapes on the bottom. They added a timer, so you have to do it quickly. Just shape recognition. There was another of the type where you have 4 dials and you have to match shapes on each dial. But when you turn the dials, some shapes get "captured" by the adjacent dial, so you have to just manipulate the dials so that the desired shapes get in the desired spots. Not very difficult, but enjoyable, those.
Yeah so that's that one. Not a bad game. I enjoyed playing it. It felt very safe.
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