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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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Jan 17th, 2014 at 10:52:00 - The Longest Journey (PC) |
Closing The Longest Journey prematurely because I think it is really boring. It's a shame because the story is intriguing and the more fantastical art is pretty cool. I'd like to know what happens and to see more locations, but it's not worth the time and slow pace.
I made it to Chapter 5 (of 13) and have probably sunk in 10 hours. A lot of the puzzles are just like...what? They detract from the story. Those 10-minute long dialogue scenes and the poor character animations are not letting up. I just find myself sitting here with my head resting against my palm, mouth hanging open, staring blankly at the screen, idly clicking through dialogue options, listening to characters drone on and on about stuff that seems tangentially relevant to what I need to know.
Also the game seems very linear. You have to do things in the exact order for necessary dialogue options or actions to become available. So I've been in this library area reading books. To "unlock" the books to read, you have to get a priest to mention each book that you have to read. Then you have to talk to the librarian about each topic, get him to get each book, then read each book. There was apparently one I missed, but I don't know if I didn't read it, didn't talk to the librarian about it or didn't talk to the priest about it.
But because I didn't read it, or unlock it (?), I can't have the dialogue option with this sailor to ask about some island that I need to get to (that is mentioned in the book). Because I don't have that dialogue option, I can't win the sailor's pet bird back in a game of cups because the option to select the bird as a prize isn't there, even though I've known from like Chapter 2 that I need to win the bird in a game of cups and give it to the sailor. IT WON'T LET ME DO IT AND IT'S SO FRUSTRATING! All because I didn't ask someone 2 hours ago about one stupid book. I won the game of cups. The bird is sitting right there. I've traded the game master a screwdriver (??) for an "exotic prize" which is obviously the bird. April knows the sailor lost the bird to the game master and it's obvious he wants it back. But April keeps going "Hmm, I have to think about what prize to choose." IT'S THE BIRD, APRIL. THERE'S NOTHING THERE BUT THE BIRD.
I guess I can't enjoy all the classics, can I? What do I do about the sequel then?
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Jan 13th, 2014 at 09:30:27 - Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 (PS2) |
Hour 3: Wow, that was a long introduction. Not as bad as Final Fantasy XIII (not by a long shot), but man am I glad to be controlling my character for the first time.
I'm really excited to be playing Persona 4. Persona 3 was the game I was playing when I moved to Singapore 4.5 years ago. Funny how I measure time by what games I was playing. My girlfriend started it with me back then and we made the best accidental character name. Persona always asks you to input your character's Last Name, First Name, but we didn't read the instructions and assumed it was just Name. So my girlfriend typed in Dickslammer. I don't know who or what a dickslammer is, but the game read the input and produced my character name, Mer Dickslam. When we leveled up for the first time, it said "Mer Dickslam felt a surge of power inside!" and we laughed for a long time.
Now that I'm back in the US and my girlfriend and I are living together, I felt it was appropriate to play Persona 4. I left the country with 3 and came back with 4. I named my own character this time, after my girlfriend's sort of pet name for me, which is also a funny name, Drangus Kerber. Drangus sounds like a mix between dingus and something Tim & Eric would say, so it makes me laugh every time. And Kerber I think she got from mixing my last name with the "Ermahgerd" meme (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ermahgerd). Anyway, I especially like when the other characters refer to me as Drangus-san or use some other honorific with the name.
Personal stories aside, I'm really enjoying the game. It's quite similar to 3. You split your time between school, hanging out with friends, and fighting in some alternate dimension. You move through a calendar year and play each day separated into Early Morning, Morning, Lunch, After School and Evening. In this case, the alternate dimension is a world inside the TV. Drangus moved from the big city to live with his uncle and cousin in Inaba, a small town in the countryside. The day after he moves, there is a brutal murder of a TV newswoman who was having an affair with a politician. She is found hanging dead from a TV antenna. The girl who found the body goes missing soon after.
Around school, a rumor spreads that if you look into the TV at midnight on a rainy night, you see the "Midnight Channel" and you'll see your soul mate in the screen. Drangus and his friends try it and see the missing girl, who is also a student at their school. The girl is found dead the next morning hanging from a telephone pole. Drangus and his friends find this strange, and through a series of events, realize that they can go inside the TV.
So begins a series of rescues as they see people on the midnight channel, and go find them in the TV world, and try to solve the mystery of how people are getting in the TV, who is killing them and why. There are a bunch of subplots and it's more complicated than what I've written here of course.
Most every system is the same as Persona 3. Combat, using personas, social links, etc. etc. The big addition in 4 is weather. You can only view the midnight channel on rainy nights. That is when you will see the next person who will be abducted. Then you have until the fog comes to save that person. The fog comes after a long period of rain. So you have to watch weather forecasts to stay prepared and determine how long you have to rescue the person. If you fail to rescue them before the fog comes, they die and it's game over. The weather factors into other systems and player decisions as well. For example, if you join the soccer team, they won't practice when it's raining. You get more out of studying when it's raining.
Another addition is part-time jobs. You have various personality traits (knowledge, diligence, expression, courage, understanding...1 more) that you need to get certain jobs, and that certain jobs will increase. You sign up for jobs and can go to work when you have time. You'll often get boosts in some personality trait and some cash. So I've taken a baby-sitting job that pays well and increases my understanding, and I can take the bus to work on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays. I've also taken an envelope folding job that pays hardly anything but increases my diligence because it's boring work. I can do that any night in my room.
At this point in the game (15 hours in or so) I have rescued one person from the TV, and she joined my party. I've gone through all the story bits and am primed to go into the TV world again to rescue the next person, who is a punk whose family owns a textile shop in the town's shopping district. All the victims are related somehow (I think it has to do with the fact that they're all involved in local businesses, and there's a big department store come to town putting them all out). I also just got this fox companion who will heal my party and restore SP (magic) in the TV world. Previously, I had to leave the TV world to heal. It will be great if I can stay in the TV world, because once you leave the TV world, then it becomes the next day. So if you don't leave, you don't waste time having to go back there multiple times, and you can spend the time instead working on improving social links or personality traits.
My main goal right now is to figure out strategies for maximizing increasing social links and personality traits. Each social link represents a certain arcana (Strength, Justice, Priestess, Magician, whatever...all the types in the SMT universe in every SMT game). If you have a persona of the arcana matching that social link, then hanging out with that person will boost your closeness faster. This is awesome with party members in this game because as your social links with them level up, they gain abilities in battle. So far Yosuke (social link level 3) can take a mortal blow for me and can occasionally counter. Chie (level 2) can take a mortal blow. Yukiko (no social link yet!) can't do anything. And then increasing personality traits is good for all kinds of things. Having certain traits at certain levels unlocks quests, unlocks conversations and the ability to form social links, unlocks part-time jobs, and more. For example, I studied a lot before exams to try and increase my knowledge. Consequently, I did really well on the school exams, which made me more popular. Each level in diligence makes me able to catch one more fish while fishing (you can trade fish to a vendor for items) before I get tired and have to go home. Anyway, maximizing efficiency in these areas will make Drangus Kerber a better character.
Aaaand that's that. I suppose I'll update again if something crazy happens. I expect the game to take me like 80 hours, so unless something crazy does happen, this log will be silent for a while!
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Jan 13th, 2014 at 08:43:54 - The Longest Journey (PC) |
Going to write a couple quick entries for some ongoing games. First is The Longest Journey, a point-and-click adventure game from the late '90s. This is one that appeared on "Top 100 PC Games of All Time" lists and so I had grabbed it and its sequel at some point. I installed it to be my next "I don't have a mouse handy" game and it got some initial play time while I was on vacation when I was doing what I do waking up hours before everyone else in the house.
First impressions: Very awesome environmental art. The backgrounds, especially the fantasy stuff, are colorful and imaginative. I had no idea what the game was about before playing, and I'm happy to say now that I like how it alternates between two worlds, two Earths. It's a cool story that has been built up nicely so far.
~Hour 3: I began using a walkthrough. I made it through the prologue and most of Chapter 1 without help, but yeah, this is a classic point-and-click in the sense that the puzzles are just...hard. I would never think to do most of the actions that turn out to be puzzle solutions. Last time I was playing, there is a scene with a rubber duck float in a canal, a pulley, a seagull, and a wooden crate. You have to throw the bread (inventory item) onto the duck float, which makes the seagull swoop down and land on the crate, which dislodges the duck float and sends it downstream. Then you pull the pulley up and take the rope on it. Then you have to go retrieve the duck float. You have to get this key that is on a train track. To get the key, you have to blow up the duck float, put a bandaid (inventory item) on the hole in the duck float to keep the air from leaking too fast, tie the rope (inventory item) around the duck float, attach a clamp (inventory item) to the rope, and toss the duck float/clamp thing at the key. I'm still not sure how the key actually got picked up, but that's what you have to do to get it.
Thanks to puzzles like these, I am now just playing with a walkthrough next to me. It's much faster and keeping my attention much more.
~Hour 5: Wow, this really is the longest journey. I thought that with a walkthrough I would breeze on through. Not the case! I used the walkthrough straight up in Chapter 2 and it took almost 2 hours! There are like 13 chapters! Not complaining. I like a long story-rich game.
On the downside, I've noticed that there are quite a few long, drawn out dialogue scenes that literally go on for 10+ minutes. These draaaag. One in particular with some priest who explains the entire history of the world to you was way way way too much information at once. I guess in Chapter 2 there were a lot of these scenes. Hopefully that's a front-loaded exposition kind of thing and it tapers off, but we shall see. The story is really neat and the voice acting is pretty good, so I want to listen. I just don't want to sit still for so long at a time!
~Hour 6: I have noticed the protagonist April Ryan has clown feet. Shaquille O'Neal called and wants his shoes back.
I've decided since this is such a calm point-and-click to just play when I am eating a meal by myself. If I play when I'm not doing anything else simultaneously, I get sort of bored. Playing in small chunks while eating seems to be right on. This'll replace Seinfeld for my "what to do while eating" activity.
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