 |
|
Dec 14th, 2013 at 15:25:40 - Super Meat Boy (PC) |
Playing this with a controller is the difference between night and day. I tried SMB a year-and-a-half ago and freakin hated it. I made it to the boss in Chapter 1 and ragequit. At some point after that I watched the movie Indie Game that follows the development of Super Meat Boy, Braid and Fez. The SMB guys talked a lot about the game's controls and basically said you were an idiot if you played it without a controller. I decided then that I would try it again in the future, and that future is now...or the last few days at least.
Last time I played, I totally had the wrong attitude toward the game. You've got to be patient and you've got to want to die...a lot. Dying is very instructive. Last time I got frustrated; this time I'm taking note. The game is still hard as hell, but I've already made it way farther and am quite proud of myself. Out of 7 chapters, I'm in the beginning of chapter 4. Also (big smile) I've gotten A+ ranking on every light world level so far. I thought a couple times that I was done shooting for A+, but I've persevered and gotten it every time. I also (another big smile) go all A+ on the dark world in Chapter 1. I started dark world in Chapter 2, got a few A+, but came up against some major obstacles, which I will tackle after making some more progress in the light world. I don't even think I knew about the dark world last time. Nor did I remember warp zones or trying to get bandages. I've tried to get all the bandages I've found so far, and have gotten the majority, though some are in insane places. You collect bandages to unlock new playable characters, and you also get new characters from completing warp zones, which are 3 mini-levels each designed to look like different retro games like Mario and Castlevania. The different characters have different movement styles. I got one that can sort of float downward. I got bit.trip.runner, who can glide in a straight line and is slower than Super Meat Boy. I got a head crab (?!) from Half-Life that can stick to the sides of walls. I think some of the bandages definitely require you to use different characters!
The boss battles are really fun. It's too bad I ragequit at the first one last time! In the first boss battle, you're being chased by Dr. Fetus (the bad guy) and you have to just do a level while being chased. In the second, there is rising lava and this silly monster swimming in it and you have to climb up for a while to win. In the third, you have to run alongside another character to escape another 'rising deadly stuff' level. It's like a mixture of the first two boss fights, plus a shadow run.
That third boss level was amazing because it shows how smart the game is in teaching you new things. Since it's a shadow run, you get to see how the other character navigates some of the obstacles. In that one level, I learned 2 badass tricks from watching my opponent that I've used to decrease my times on some other levels already. One is jumping over and around and off the far side of an obstacle in one swift motion, instead of jumping over it, landing, then jumping up and off the side. The other is using the edges of ledges to sort of ricochet off and boost me up, which saves a jump and a split second. And split seconds matter big time in this game. It is soooo fast.
Also, I didn't mention in my entry the last time I played, but the way SMB handles death is brilliant. Not only is there practically 0 wait time between when you die and when you get to try again, but all your deaths are saved and replayed for you once you beat the level. So after you beat the level, then it goes back to the beginning and like 50 Super Meat Boys (or however many times you died) break from the starting line in synch, dying by the handful as they died in your individual attempts. Not only is that just a neat feature and cool to watch, but it is really helpful for locating bandages and warp zones AND especially for figuring out how to improve your times on a level. By studying your attempts, you see where you can shave off a second here and there, take one less jump, slide up the wall farther there, jump over three obstacles instead of two there, and so on. Brilliant.
Seriously, use a controller. The game is fun that way! If you are prepared to die at least. I wonder how far I can make it...I heard even the light levels get absolutely insane by chapter 7.
add a comment  - read this GameLog  |
|
Dec 14th, 2013 at 14:57:31 - Max Payne 3 (360) |
Girlfriend and I finished MP3 a couple nights ago. Fantastic game, we both really enjoyed it, especially the story. We played on easy to focus on the story. My friend and I have been having a conversation regarding Jesper Juul's Casual Revolution. He keeps trying to make the argument that games are becoming easier, more hand-holding, more casual. I disagree and think that instead of games trending toward becoming easier, they are trending to cater to a broader range of players and play styles, greatly expanding players' options. Max Payne 3, as one of a thousand examples, has at least 3 difficulty settings. Like I said, we played on easy in order to focus on the story without many difficult gun battles getting in the way. The game WAS easy, but that was because we chose to play it that way. We could have played it on hard, we could have gone for achievements, we could have set our own goals, any number of things that the devs allowed for to let us play the game at the difficulty of our choosing. This friend of mine I've only known for a couple months, and I think he is just a hardcore gamer who sees his territory of hard games being eroded by mobile games, sees his World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online catering to new players, and he's feeling...hosile or something. I'm trying to get him to see a more balanced perspective. Anyway...
I had played a few chapters of MP3 by myself a month or two ago, but stopped when my girlfriend said she wanted to play it too. So we started over together. We haven't played a game together in years due to me living halfway across the world, and I have to admit I thought she was...more skilled than she was! She didn't do so hot with the 360 controller aiming and whatnot. But I know we've played Halo before! Turns out she said she doesn't like Halo because of the controller and aiming is hard. I was hoping she could play and I could watch, since I'm always the one playing games, but after she tried for an hour, she made me control Max.
I can't say a lot for the gunplay really. It's basically the same as the previous Max Payne games. There's bullet time and slow dive, you can have 4 weapons, can dual wield pistols and SMGs. There's a nice cover system that you use all the time. No grenades or anything besides guns. Still pick up pain pills. There's a nice new feature where if you are shot by a bullet that would otherwise kill you, if you have a painkiller, Max automatically enters slo-mo, and if you kill an enemy in slo-mo, he automatically takes a painkiller. So you don't die unless you are shot with no painkillers or unless you don't manage to kill anyone when Max enters slo-mo. There's also a gratuitous kill-cam. When you kill the last enemy in a section, you get to see a gory death. That's nice to let the player know when they've cleared an area.
You can find golden gun parts scattered around the levels. I'm not really sure what they do besides make your gun golden. It is probably more powerful or has more ammo capacity. I unlocked one only. Then you can find clues around too and investigate them for Max's commentary. Some of the early levels are timed, which I thought was stupid since there were clues around. It made it so we couldn't explore and search for clues. Why are the clues there if you can't spend time to look for them? After the early levels though, there weren't any timed levels. Kind of strange.
Ok, enough about gameplay. The story was fantastic. That's what we played the game for. Max is washed up popping pills and drinking himself to death. He gets a job from another cop from his past, and the story is about that job, that cop the family they work for, and as usual, Max battling his demons. Of course there's a massive conspiracy and backstabbing and people aren't the people they say they are. Some of the game's locales are pretty incredible. The majority of the game is set in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In particular I remember the night club, the favela (though that spans like 3 chapters and is the one part where the game dragged!) and the police station. The voice actor who plays Max Payne really does a top-notch job. All the characters were excellent and voiced very well. We were hoping that the ex-cop from North Dakota that Max kept running into was a criminal mastermind, but it remains inconclusive. He sure did show up in some suspicious spots.
When Max is drunk or really injured or his head is spinning or whatever, there is this cool visual effect that is sort of neon, Drive / Hotline Miami screen tearing and fuzz. Whoever did the cinematic video parts of the game deserves an award. Seriously, that visual effect was SO perfect for conveying Max's physical and mental states. Also, the game's music, perfect.
Pretty much everything about MP3 was spot on. We enjoyed every minute (save the overlong favela section). Highly recommended.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Dec 12th, 2013 at 12:06:31 - Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (360) |
Fun action game in the vein of Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, though not as good as either. The combat just isn't as deep or varied. You can pretty much button mash this one and it doesn't matter much whether you learn a bunch of specific combinations and moves. You will need to learn to parry and dodge though, mostly for boss battles. There are only 3 sub-weapons and your main weapon, no range attack options really.
It's a Metal Gear game and plays off of the Metal Gear 4 story, which I haven't played yet. I didn't need to play them in order though. Knowing enough about Metal Gear in general and the game doing a good job presenting its backstory made my experience of the narrative pretty smooth. The story is actually pretty sick and involves harvesting poor street children to turn them into cyborgs/child soldiers. It's funny, my girlfriend and I are playing Max Payne 3 and that story also involves organ harvesting. Anyway, the voice acting is good, story is typical convoluted Metal Gear, but I'm used to it so I liked it.
Ok, I've said some rather vague things so far. More pointed here...When I first started the game, I was on the edge of my seat. Really that persisted through most of it. It is action-packed to the max. There are giant explosions and loud pounding music and the visuals are excellent and it's so damn fast and the enemies are brutal and it's just like GO GO GO GO GO a million miles an hour. It was relatively easy to learn for an action game like this. There's a soft attack and a hard attack button. You get some items, like grenades and rocket launchers and of course a box to hide in. I used items if I was in a pinch, but that was pretty rare.
Raiden (your character) has some sort of special vision that lets him see enemies through walls and see item crates. You can sometimes avoid fights if you want. There is a slight/optional stealth element to the game. But fighting and killing enemies gives you points to upgrade your health, weapons, learn new combos and so on. I pretty much killed everything I could.
Some enemies get really hard though. They've all got some weakness or another that you can exploit. In the beginning, you just slice and dice the crap out of everyone around. Then you start having to play surgeon a little more carefully and cut off enemies' arms to get rid of their rocket launchers, or cut off their legs so they can't dropkick you. Raiden has this contextual move called [some Japanese word] that slows down time and lets you literally cut enemies to pieces. If you cut specific highlighted parts of their bodies, you can get bonus points, intel, disable them, and so on. It's really bloody, if that goes without saying. Oh, and the camera is really wonky. Sometimes it can't keep up with the action on screen. That can make battles overly difficult.
Bosses are a lot of fun, some more in-depth battles with several parts. If you are getting stuck, you can talk to your team through the codec and they will tell you "you have to parry his attacks!" or whatever. Lots of help there. The final boss battle though was a pain in the butt. I made it to the last phase with 0 health kits and couldn't do much to beat him. Watched it on YouTube instead.
That's really about it. Fairly generic action game when all is said and done. Doesn't hold a candle to Bayonetta.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Dec 5th, 2013 at 11:05:47 - Faster Than Light (PC) |
Real proud of myself! My "how far did I get tally" (if I were keeping one) would now look something like this:
Sector
1 - III
2 - IIII
3 - IIIII
4 - IIIIII
5 - IIIII
6 - I
7
8 - I (!!!!!)
I made it ALL THE WAY to the final boss yesterday. I was SO nervous once I got into Sector 6 because I'd only made it there once and had gotten obliterated. But I didn't have much trouble there, then nail-biting in Sector 7 got me through without much of a problem. Sector 8 is set up a bit differently. There are still all the random nodes, but the Rebel Mothership (or whatever it's called) is in the sector and you have to intercept it before it gets within range of the Federation base. There are a few free repair stations near the Federation base and the Rebels take one node every couple turns, which limits your options on where you can (relatively safely) go.
The Rebel ship would get within range of the Federation base in 5 jumps. It seemed to take 1 jump for every 2 of mine. But the Rebels also occupied nodes every couple of my jumps too, so if I had dallied, I would have been cut off from intercepting, or would have had to go into Rebel controlled areas, super dangerous. I went more or less straight for the Mothership and intercepted it when it still had 2-3 jumps left.
The Mothership is a beast. It has (or at least this one had -- is there a range of values?) four weapons EACH under a different system! So I couldn't just knock out their weapons system and disable the guns because it had 4 systems too. Lame. It also had four shields, like 8 crew members, and I think every system installed. I don't remember drones, but it probably had them. It had a teleporter, but its crew never teleported. I did okay against it I think, survived and knocked a little bit of health off, but eventually I it hit me so much, the fires were spreading too fast, the oxygen was draining too fast, and it destroyed my hull after a couple minutes. Wasn't really a close fight. One thing that I think would have definitely helped is if I'd had defense drones. I had 3 shields, which is good I think, but the missiles penetrate shields, and that's what tears me up if I don't have defense drones to shoot down some of the missiles.
I had an awesome crew and setup going though. I had a full 8 crew, like 5 engi to super repair things, a rockman to put out fires, a mantis for some combat. Ideally I would have maybe 2-3 engi, 2-3 rockmen, a mantis or two, and the zoltan are neat because they power systems of rooms they are in, freeing up a power bar for you to use elsewhere. I was trying to get that achievement to have 6 unique crew members, but I only had 5! I've never seen the 6th and have no idea what it is. I need that or to "repair the Kestrel from 1 hull to full" to get my second Kestrel achievement to unlock its alternate layout. I had thought I would get to the end with the main Engi layout because it had gotten me into Sector 5 a lot and into Sector 6, but the Kestrel proved a beast. I had a really nice weapons setup going on and 3 shields, so I could more or less obliterate the enemy's hull before it did much to me. And I had so many crew members, being boarded was never a problem.
Anyway, I feel very accomplished. I'm going to tone down how often I get a game of FTL in since I know what the end looks like. I want to try and unlock some of the other ships. I've still only got 2, out of however many...6? 7? I guess they come from quests and events and things that I just have to get lucky and find. I got that Engi ship like my 5th game from something, before I knew what I was doing, so I wasn't paying attention to how I got it.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
