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May 11th, 2013 at 20:02:29 - Halo 3: ODST (360) |
I'm torn about this Halo game. It's obviously just a placeholder in between Halo 3 and Halo Reach. It took me 6-7 hours only, 3 sittings over a week. The story is simple and doesn't have strong ties to the others. The characters kept mentioning something about "like on Reach" but I have no idea what they were referring to, and I just played Reach. In ODST, the Covenant appear above a city somewhere in Africa, and I think above other Earthly cities. The entirety of the conflict between the Covenant and your ODST team here is that the Covenant is searching for something. That's it. Your ODST team dropped in to complete a mission, with fuzzy secretive orders, but something went wrong on drop and the team was scattered throughout the city. You play as the Rookie and you play this detective game to find all your drop team members.
Basically there are two phases to the game. The first is when you play as Rookie, wandering through the mostly deserted city tracking down beacons. Fights against the Covenant are scarce and often avoidable. When you near a beacon, you need to turn on, I don't know what it's called, night vision or something. This looks like Batman's detective mode or various other vision modes that highlight enemies and useful objects in other games. Activate night vision and you can follow the beeping sound emanating from whatever beacon object to find it. When you find the object, there is a little scene showing, as if tapping into the memory of the object, what it "saw" in the past, which is a snippet of story about what happened to one or more members of your team.
Then you enter the second phase, which is to play through that memory. This is the meat of the game with the typical Halo gameplay - drive vehicles, kill Covenant, work with ally AI, reach checkpoints, and so on. Once you complete that part of whichever teammate's story, the game brings you back to Rookie in the city to find another beacon. You go through this back and forth until Rookie finds out that his team has all pretty much found one another, but then he hears a distress call from the captain, earlier presumed dead. Rookie goes and hooks up with her and there is a final mission to locate and then rescue some alien bio-computer called an Engineer. Again, this guy seems like he's supposed to have some connection to the rest of the Halo story in other games, but I can't remember anything about Engineers or aliens who look like this one, a floating brain with appendages thing. And before you know it, with no fanfare or anything, the credits roll.
The strong point of Halo: ODST is the storytelling. The Halo Noir detective story presentation is fresh. Find a clue about your team, then play through what happened from other characters' perspectives who left that object there, or who destroyed that bridge that Rookie is standing at the edge of, or who were captured on security footage of that camera, and so on. The other characters' trajectories all link up by the end and, although the story itself isn't much to praise, it's the structure of it that I liked.
The weak point of Halo: ODST is that neither phase (detective or mission) is exciting. The detective phase with Rookie is a lot of aimless wandering through the city in the dark. Your night vision is almost always on because it highlights Covenant in easy-to-spot red outlines. I just looked at my map and tried to go from point A to the waypoint point B as efficiently as possible. The aesthetics of the abandoned city under siege somewhat make up for this, and the same can be said for the mission part, because there are fires and Covenant ships flying by and massive background scenery and all that, but there is really nothing to do, nothing going on, except to trek from point A to point B in a rather uneventful fashion. In the mission parts, the game is completely on rails. There is no exploration whatsoever. You usually get in a vehicle and let your teammates drive you around, or you drive them around. But in other Halo games, there are multiple approaches, you can explore the terrain, devise clever strategies for taking out Covenant outposts. In this one it's just linear set pieces. Drive along this 2-lane road for 20 minutes. Defend this building for 20 minutes. They're coming from the left so aim left! Now they're coming from the right so aim right! Escort this guy from here to there on a path with no alternate routes. It just lacked excitement and failed to engage me very deeply. In fact, when I played the other night, I started playing a game with myself: How long can I play Halo: ODST with only my right hand on the controller? The answer was that I hit several 20-minute stretches where I literally just needed to aim and shoot with my right hand and drink coffee with my left hand.
I guess I'm happy to have played the game, but I would have rather been left with the awesome impressions from 2, 3, and Reach. I will just look even more forward to playing 4!
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May 6th, 2013 at 07:21:14 - NightSky (PC) |
Quick and easy game where you guide a ball/marble through a dark twilight world. Reminded me of Limbo. Some physics puzzles, the best ones of which involved the vehicle contraptions. Got this free in a bundle and it looked neat. Fun to play, not necessary. Bonus levels at the end but you have to go back through old levels and find hidden stars to unlock a couple of the levels. Sounds tedious, no thanks. YouTube did the work, extra levels have cool colors and designs, some ASCII art. Hooray.
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May 2nd, 2013 at 03:26:14 - Eufloria (PC) |
I had a dire urge to finish this game today. Plus I have far too many games open that I need to finish or close. I might close one or two after this and clean my list up.
I don't remember where I got Eufloria. It may have been some indie sale on Steam, or perhaps Humble Bundle. I had thought it looked neat when I first saw it, but didn't buy because of the garbage reviews. Tried it out, and Eufloria is definitely a case where I disagree with review scores. It's sitting at 63 on Metacritic but I'd give this at least 20 points higher. It could be that I have affection for the genre. Eufloria is very much like Galcon Fusion, a little space game where you take over other planets with colored triangles. Instead of triangles, Eufloria has seedlings, and the game has a little more depth to it.
Just like Galcon, your planets constantly spawn seedlings, if you've planted a seedling tree (forget the proper names). You can plant x number of trees on each planet depending on the level. In addition to the seedling tree, you can choose a defensive tree, which sprouts little defensive seedlings if that planet gets attacked. For every seedling tree you have on a planet, that planet spawns more seedlings. You don't necessarily want to go maxing out seedling trees on all your planets though because, like Galcon, there are different planet sizes and bigger is usually better. There are 3 stats, energy (health/toughness), strength (attack), and speed that each planet has to varying degrees. Usually larger planets have better stats, so you want to focus spawning seedlings on larger planets becauuuuse seedlings inherit the stats of the planet they spawned on.
Another addition to the Galcon formula are flowers and mines. When your seedling trees get big enough (trees grow and become more effective over time) they sprout a flower, which you can float from planet to planet and finally plant in order to boost the effectiveness of seedlings from one of your seedling trees. When your defensive trees get big enough, they sprout a mine, which does very good damage to swarms of enemy seedlings. You can move flowers and mines around just like you move your seedlings.
So that's the game. Grow, expand, conquer. The single-player story mode is the majority of the fun. You progress through a not-terribly-exciting story that really sucks at the end. I admit I was intrigued for a while, but nothing really happens and it gets predictable, and the end is completely unsatisfying. But the missions themselves are sweet. They vary only a little bit, but that little bit was just enough for me because I enjoyed the basic game progression so much. I can see how other people might get very bored of Eufloria. There are 25 levels. One you have to hold out for 10 minutes, one you have to amass a 200-seedling swarm, and there are just a few others with objectives other than 'kill everything.'
The pace of the game is slow. Very slow. It reminded me of Osmos in its pacing, and certainly not Galcon because Galcon is frantic. There's some nice ambient music to set the mood and a simple UI. The graphics are simple and elegant. I like the curves of the tree roots going to the core of the planet. You can zoom in and out. If you zoom in on a battle, you see all your individual units flying around fighting. You can see how damaged units and trees are because they start turning red. I wish there were some way to send masses of units aside from individually click-dragging every single planet. All the clicking got tiresome. Galcon let you select a handful of planets at once. Why didn't Eufloria do this? Maybe it was to stay in line with the simplicity of everything else, but it was the functional equivalent of giving every single unit a move command in an RTS. Unnecessary!
Slow paced game, requires some patience. If you aren't a patient person, you'll hate Eufloria. If you want to sit and relax and not think too much, it's a nice game. Oh, it is a bit on the easy side. You can generally swarm most levels to win. A couple trip up that strategy. Because swarming works about all the time though, I did catch the levels feeling samey by the end. Nonetheless, I like what the game offers. After beating the single-player I played some of the Skirmish maps. There are 8, and I completed 6, and skipped the last two because they are also mostly all 'kill everything.' Then there is some other game mode where the colors are inverted or something and it looks weird. I didn't like that. Wish there was an online mode. That's what made Galcon so much fun after getting the hang of it against the computer.
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Apr 29th, 2013 at 15:20:14 - Syberia (PC) |
Finished up Syberia today, which has been a long time coming. I really enjoyed it. I described the beginning of the game in a previous entry, but essentially you find out that Anna Vorelberg, the woman who dies in the beginning and who is supposed to sign away the toy factory, has a younger brother named Hans who is still alive. Thus there is an heir to the factory and you have to go search for him to get him to sign it over. There is a lot of mystery surrounding him and a lot of backstory that you uncover as you travel from place to place on a train with a lovable automaton train engineer named Oscar.
Without giving a lot away, Hans is a mechanical genius of sorts and has laid a path for Kate (your character) to follow to find him, although he hoped it would be his sister, Anna. The path takes Kate from the initial French Alps town of Valadelane to a university where Hans studied to an old Soviet factory where Hans used to work, which is now overseen by a madman and a drunk ex-cosmonaut, and an old resort spa. Each of these locations is a character unto itself. They are absolutely beautiful, stunning, and always have an edge of eeriness to them because of the automatons, the passage of the years, and the general uneasy feeling that Kate is getting closer not only to Hans, but to danger. I can't quite identify it, but the game creates a very unique feeling.
I loved the artwork in the game. The visuals look excellent, practically every object looks lovingly crafted, there is a lot of attention to detail, the orchestral score is simple and elegant. The interface is quite good. The only thing that bugged me a little bit is that Kate takes stairs very slowly and if you click to move over some stairs, she always only walks to the top and then you have to click again. She won't just keep going. She never runs up stairs!
The puzzles usually were easy, though I was stumped a handful of times and always had a walkthrough handy. The downfall of adventure games for me are when things don't make sense according to David logic. This one did a pretty good job of making sense to me though. A couple solutions I scoffed at. One, which was easy but time-consuming, was to find some grapes to feed some cuckoo birds that were standing at the base of a ladder blocking my path. I never understand animals blocking your path in adventure games, unless it's like a bear or a mammoth. These were 3 little birds. Shoo them away! Why do I need to go on a 30-minute hunt for grapes to feed the birds? Just go up the ladder and they'll move out of the way! Then once you get up the ladder, you have to get a bird's egg, but Kate says "It's too far away. I'll never reach it." This egg looks clearly within reach. Anyway, you eventually find a test tube holder to use to pick up the egg. As anyone remembers from chemistry class, test tube holders are maybe 6 inches long. Kate could have stretched to reach the egg!
So the game played up this 'change' element in the main character, Kate. Supposedly she was unsure of herself in the beginning but confident in the end. I didn't really see much of a change in her besides that she got real absorbed in finding out more about Hans and just got deep into the detective-y story. Where the imputation of change really came from were Kate's significant others who kept in contact with her through cell phone. These characters were SO STUPID. All the other characters, the face-to-face ones that she met along her journey, were cool, many were excellent, but those through the cell satellites were irritating. There was her mother, who kept calling her to dote and talk about being rich and the man she was dating (who turns out to be a famous singer who knew some other famous singer that Kate ends up having to track down - small world...), Kate's terrible boyfriend Dan, who is one of the most annoying romantic others I've ever had to listen to in a game. He calls her up and whines that she isn't home yet, doesn't like her going on an adventure, gets pissy at her, and then whines some more. Every time she says she won't be home another day he flips out. Finally they get in a fight because he is an idiot. Then she has a friend, Olivia, who isn't too bad until she sleeps with Dan, which was both dumb and funny at the same time. Luckily by this point I think Kate was tired of them all too as she heroically blows Dan and Olivia off at the end. And her boss too. He just called to yell at her every now and then. I mean they all called her 10 times each throughout the game. Like, she's working, leave her alone, what are you all doing to be calling so often?
That's about it. I'm real glad to have played this and look forward to Syberia 2. This game was...enchanting. That might be the closest word to accurately describing it.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Apr 29th, 2013 at 15:21:06.
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