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Sep 25th, 2013 at 18:38:17 - The Book of Unwritten Tales (PC) |
This is the best point-and-click adventure game I've ever played. Or at least that I can remember. I know I really enjoyed a lot of the Lucas Arts adventures like Full Throttle when I was a kid. Anyway, barring my childhood, this one takes the top spot. My expectations were much lower! I tend to have lukewarm experiences with point-and-clicks, generally finding them frustrating and too slow. I usually finish them with walkthroughs or watch on YouTube, but I always get sucked into buying another one because many have such great art (Machinarium, Botanicula, the latter of which I did very much enjoy). Anyway, I came off playing a few hours of Sanitarium the other day, which I got bored of and quit, and figured I'd give this a shot because I felt I hadn't sufficiently gotten enough pointing and clicking.
The Book of Unwritten Tales shines in the art department. The style is reminiscent of Monkey Island, but fantasy, but the details of the backgrounds are wonderful. The color palette is vivid. I found myself studying each and every room, not looking for interactable objects, but going over the skulls in the walls in the dungeons, the lava flow in the dragon's cave, relishing every detail I could. The sound was also very nice, with EXCELLENT voice acting. It was so nice because that's one thing that killed Sanitarium for me. The females, for whatever reason, were cast perfectly and sounded especially awesome. Most all characters have a British/European English accent, which was a good choice.
The game wasn't frustrating in the ways that so many of these games are for me. I rarely had to pixel hunt. If you press space bar, all interactable objects have an icon over them. SO USEFUL. I hate scouring backgrounds for items. This way I could see exactly what was in the room that I could interact with. Your controllable character would say something about each item that highlighted when you clicked on it. Usually you clicked on things once to fulfill the magnifying glass 'inspect' option, then if you could do something else to it, you could click again to fulfill another 'inspect' or a 'pick up' or a 'use' or whatever. It was really easy to combine objects in your inventory or to use inventory objects on another world object. The vast majority of puzzles made sense and followed David logic. I *hate* when point-and-clicks have weird logics, when I don't get puzzles and item combinations and uses because it's just some wacky thing I would never thing of. I can count the times this happened here on one hand. The last one I remember was you had to put a stick of dynamite in a trash heap. Another near the end of the game was to tie a string to a pom pom to distract an ogre. I never would have figured that out. Consequently, I turned to walkthroughs also less than the number of fingers on one hand, which felt really good! And one of those was when the 'inspect' option was missing off an object, so I didn't see it. Not my fault!
Another fantastic thing about the game was its use of humor. I feel that most games that try to be funny fall flat. This one resonated with me though, which was one thing I was worried not happening about before playing. It pokes fun at itself, yet takes itself seriously, pokes fun at adventure games, role-playing in general, and MMOs. The devs were definitely giant WoW players, as there are numerous references and jokes. There's one character who they use solely to make fun of WoW paladins. As a former WoW paladin myself, those were some of the funniest moments of the game. Let's see what I can remember...Upon meeting the paladin, your character asks: "So are you a strong warrior?" "No." "Ah, are you a wonderful healer?" "No." "So then you must be a paladin!" He also gets the paladin to cast buffs on him and the paladin BUBBLES and comments something about being invulnerable now, and then BUBBLE HEARTHS. It was awesome. There are tons of other references to other games, pop culture and so on. I remember specifically Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Terminator, Monkey Island, Mission Impossible, Back to the Future...there were probably 20 others that I caught and probably 20 more I didn't. It wasn't just a giant reference fest though; they were used cleverly and usually just in one quote or a little scene. The game does have a story. It is decent and ends abruptly though.
The real joy are all the characters, who were very well done. You actually get a little team together and get to switch characters and perspectives a fair amount. There are puzzles that you need all three characters to solve, and those parts (mostly Chapter 3) were really fun, and the most puzzly parts of the game. Otherwise, the puzzles tended to be very simple. Again, I appreciated this because I could focus on the humor and the characters instead of beating my head against something that I found illogical or overly difficult.
I'm really surprised by this game and definitely recommend it to point-and-click adventure fans and fantasy/RPG folks.
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Sep 23rd, 2013 at 20:00:20 - Sanitarium (PC) |
Played through roughly 1/4 of this game today and stopping mostly because I've got so much else to play through and this isn't captivating me. Sanitarium is a late-90s point-and-click adventure game with psychological horror themes. It isn't scary, but it is grotesque. The art deserves a big commendation. The writing is pretty good too, and the story seems like it *could* be (more) intriguing, but it's very slow-paced, and the voice acting is killing parts of the game for me. The protagonist, Max, awakes with amnesia in a mental institution that is on fire. He escapes, then goes into a series of bizarre dream worlds that I guess are parts of his psyche or something, and I guess you find out about Max, who he is, why he's in the asylum and so on, through these dream worlds. The first was this town full of deformed but pretty happy children who were being brainwashed and transformed by a dominating alien called Mother who crash landed there in a comet and lives in a barn in a pumpkin patch. Yeah, it's weird. Problem for me playing this is I've got no idea how it relates to anything, nor the second world, which is a freaky circus or something. The game as a whole seems mature for its time in terms of themes, art and music, and storytelling. Another thing I particularly liked was the UI, once I figured it out. It's minimalist, with just a magnifying glass letting you know you can "examine" something, or a hand for "use" or what looks to me like a ball of trash for "inventory." Actually I was stuck for a while because I couldn't figure out how to deselect an item from my inventory. If you click on the character you are controlling, that brings up the inventory and is how you deselect an item that you are holding too. But, I didn't know that for a long time and was quite confused as to why I would just sometimes be able to pick up an item and why I couldn't make the item go away once I'd picked it up. I then scoured the internet and figured out that I was actually clicking on Max and opening the inventory when I had assumed I was clicking on other things. Sometimes the character is close to interactable objects and it can be hard to interact with the object, and you keep opening the inventory instead. Despite the cool stuff I've found in the game, and like I said before, the snail's pace of the characters walking and the really unconvincing voice acting are turning me off. I'm sure it's a cool story and whatnot, but I'm just not bothered to continue. I think I'll go through another point-and-click game next because I've accumulated several in the past year or so.
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Sep 22nd, 2013 at 12:10:36 - EVE Online (PC) |
Suppose it's high time to write something about EVE, which I've been dabbling in for a couple months. First observation: EVE is hard. The playerbase and advertisements don't lie. Second observation: EVE requires a large commitment. I say I've been "dabbling" for a couple months, and that totals upwards probably 30 hours in-game. I still have very little idea what I'm actually doing.
Here's what I have done so far: (1) all the tutorials except advanced military, and these took me on average probably 3 hours a piece; (2) learned my way around the UI for the most part, or at least I have the basics down; (3) learned how to form a fleet and have flown around with P, doing some missions and exploring; (4) joined a corporation and chatted with the leader and his friend for a while; (5) followed all the steps, short of the actual application, to joining EVE University, a corporation that exists solely to train new players; (6) and the biggest thing, which usually defines my play session, is that I have logged on and played with my skill queue and certificate planner.
Of these things, like I said, just planning skills seems to be about all I feel like doing whenever I log in. Log in, fix skill queue, check certificates, look up fitting build for my ship, realize I have no money and if I want money I should go mine, don't want to mine, log out. EVE University is daunting. There is a humongous checklist of things you have to do, configuring the UI a specific way, reading history and rules, pass an interview, do all tutorials, and on and on. Then once they accept you, you can participate in intra-corporation PvP, which sounds neat, but also sounds very time consuming.
That's back to Observation #2. EVE is time consuming. It takes a long time to do things. You have to fly everywhere and go through each warp gate on the way. You can put the ship on autopilot, but then it takes longer. Although the background of space is BEAUTIFUL, it's not EXCITING. Battles are not active. I've killed tons of AI ships. They show up as little red squares on the screen. You lock onto them, keep them at a range, and press fire. You fire. They fire. They die. Then click the next ship from your list and target and select fire. You just fire at little red squares. More often than not, you're zoomed so far out, because you need to see more things in space, that your own ship is a little spot on your screen. And it takes a while. There are often 10 or 20 ships, sometimes multiple waves. I'm sure it picks up, and I'm sure PvP battles are at least a little more intense, but I doubt I'll make it that far. One of my friends asked me if I was having fun playing Microsoft Excel Online, and after playing for a while, I understand.
The depth of this game is incredible. Another reason for the MS Excel Online joke is not only that enemies aren't (and don't need to be) visually represented on-screen besides a red square or whatever, but that because the visuals can be so stripped away, it's all about calculations. You try and calculate optimum this and optimum that and there are a zillion fittings for your ships (I have like 6 ships already -- that's a lot of fittings and numbers to think about) and you need to learn all these mining recipes and skill trees and on and on and on. It is the most massive game I've ever played hands down. It is awesome on the one hand, as I enjoy its complexity, but on the other, like I said, it requires so much commitment to play well. The challenge of learning isn't daunting, but the commitment is. It's easy to rationalize playing now because I've managed a couple free months.
I think I'll leave more for later. Still got a few weeks free and going to run some missions with P soon.
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Sep 17th, 2013 at 12:07:37 - Space Rangers 2: Rise of the Dominators (PC) |
Space Rangers has been sitting on my computer for at least 4 years. It's sort of a letdown to have a game that long and then not think it's very great when you play it. It's a space game, and I'm sure I've played something like it before, but I'm drawing blanks on exactly what. You command a ship and there are like 50 planets and a giant map, and you go around doing quests, trading goods from planet to planet, and killing pirates. It's an isometric viewpoint, so you actually fly quickly across the solar systems pointing your cursor and left-clicking to move. At the beginning, it seemed really cool, mostly because of the big ole map and capacity for upgrading your ship and exploring, but a lot of things turned me off after an afternoon of playing.
1. Too much dialogue - Holy crap, the NPCs speak volumes. I had yet to encounter much overarching narrative, so they just go on and on about the cargo you need to pick up or why salt is cheap on Earth but expensive on Venus. Sooo much dull text. There are also a ton of grammar mistakes and just incorrect language. The game was made by a Russian team, so I understand, but there are so many it's distracting.
2. It's simple - Many games of this type have a lot of depth. Space Rangers seemed like it would have a good amount, but it's actually very simplistic. Take trading for example. I was thinking, cool, I can trade and make some money and buy stuff to upgrade, and trading will be interesting. Not quite. Trading just involves going to one place, buying crap, and going around to other places until you find one that doesn't have any of what you are carrying around. Takes a long time traveling aimlessly around. Combat is simple. Traveling is simple. Flying is boring. Too simple, and so much room for complexity!
3. RTS battles suck - These are also simple, but they are also bad. The game in this way reminds me of Spore, which tried to be 5 genres in one. Why Space Rangers felt the need to include RTS battles, I'm not sure. But you can take missions where you land on a planet and have a base and can build a few types of units. There is hardly any variety and the enemies just pummeled me every time. It didn't mean I died though; rather, I just had to spend forever building new units, killing one of theirs, building a whole new army, killing one more enemy, building a whole new army, killing one more enemy, etc. It was really frustrating. They should have fleshed it out or cut it entirely.
It was interesting playing though because I enjoyed the *idea* behind the game, and the general presentation was something I connected with and wanted to see more of. It is lucky, then, that the game I have been playing for the last 2 weeks, King's Bounty: The Legend, happens to be published by the same Russian company, and so there are some great similarities and not many of the things I didn't like from Space Rangers! So more on King's Bounty later, which I am thoroughly enjoying.
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