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Dec 12th, 2012 at 21:41:56 - Sanctum (PC) |
Paused Thief, tried Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath but my computer thinks its .exe file is a virus and I don't feel like messing with it, so I moved to Sanctum.
Played Sanctum an hour and very much enjoy it so far! I played a demo a year or so ago, and the full version is immensely better. The demo just dropped you in a level and said 'go.' You didn't get to choose your weapons or towers, so I was surprised by those options. Sanctum is an FPS-TowerDefense game. If you played Orcs Must Die, it's sort of like that. You set your towers and then can run around the map shooting enemies as they traverse your death maze. The game definitely assumes you have experience with Tower Defense, as it gives you like 8 guns to choose from and like 12 towers immediately. You make a 'loadout' with 3 guns and 8 towers.
I've played half of stage 1. There are 5 stages. Stage 1 has 20 waves. I took all the default guns and towers, which, if I can remember, is an assault rifle, sniper rifle, and freeze gun. The freeze gun doesn't seem to have much utility. The assault rifle is my staple, quick firing, can lob grenades, and takes a while to overheat. The sniper rifle is essential for shooting armored enemies. There are various enemy types with strengths and weaknesses, and this particular type has thick armor that can only be destroyed by "a high powered shot," which I figure means "aka, sniper rifle." That'll break the armor, then the towers whittle them down into nothingness. Enemies do seem to get tougher as waves increase. Those guys first took one sniper shot to destroy their armor. Now it's two. Luckily, you can upgrade weapons and towers using money that you get in between stages like any TD game. So far, I haven't hit an upgrade cap. I have some level 5 towers and I can still upgrade them, though it's getting quite expensive.
Towers are handled a bit differently and it's pretty damn cool. Instead of just placing towers, you have to place a 'block' first. Then you put a gun on/in the block. Blocks by themselves are used to reroute enemies. One thing I love about Sanctum is that you do have to do rerouting. The levels (I assume - I'm only on the first) aren't all preset with narrow paths that you simply line with towers. There are a lot of potential paths and spaces for enemies to run to the core. Although there are preset spots to build blocks, there are a lot of them and it makes for lots of tinkering. So, put blocks to reroute enemies, and build guns on the blocks. I can't remember all the different types I have right now. There is a gatling gun, which is your basic one, high fire rate, big-ish range, relatively low damage. There is the laser, which does high damage but takes some time to recharge. There is some kind of scatter shot thing that I think sprays an area, but doesn't always hit everything in it. There are plates you can put on the ground (which is more like Orcs Must Die) where if enemies walk over them, they are slowed, or take more damage, or whatever. There are very neat 'televators' that allow you to quickly navigate the map. You just open the overhead view and click a televator you've built, and zip, there you are. Televators, as you can guess, also lift you up so you can get on top of the blocks. These things are super important to place around so you can move quickly, shoot enemies from above, have line of sight to build towers on top of blocks, and so on.
There is no pause function, but you have an indefinite time to plan and build in between waves. You do the 'build' phase first, then hit Enter and do the 'wave' phase. Get your money, then 'build' phase, then 'wave' phase...And it tells you what enemies are in each wave, 5 waves ahead, so you can plan in advance. The only downside is that, I imagine, if you don't pick a necessary tower or gun at the very beginning of the stage, you might be screwed somewhere along the line and have to start over. I could be wrong, but like this time I had to have a sniper rifle. What if I didn't select the sniper rifle? Would I have to start the whole stage over? I suppose prepare for everything! Another great thing, in light of Thief, is that there are checkpoints every few waves. The bad thing is that you can't manually save, so if you are about to make a potentially stage-breaking decision, you can't go back to beforehand if you cross a new checkpoint. Anyway, nothing bad has happened so far. Hopefully these aren't really issues going forward!
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Dec 12th, 2012 at 07:33:01 - Thief: Deadly Shadows (PC) |
My last 'play an old game' experiment didn't go so well. This one is better, but is driving me insane because it doesn't have any autosave feature. No autosave, no checkpoint, no mission selection, no nothing. I found this out the hard way when I died after an hour or so and had to start the whole game over. I've since not thought about saving when I should have thought about saving probably 20 times, died, and lost a lot of cumulative time.
I realize that autosave features are a rather modern invention in video games, and that I take some form of autosaving for granted. As a kid, I had no problem manually saving games. I have no problem nowadays manually saving at 'save spots' like in RPGs. But pretty much every other type of game saves automatically when you move from one area to the next, at some loading screen or another, after a tough fight, after finishing a mission, at set checkpoints, etc, etc. I feel that this is something where, if your game doesn't have an autosave feature, you will piss a lot of people off.
Thief is outstanding otherwise. I had no idea this was such an important game, but it *obviously* is influenced by early Elder Scrolls games like Morrowind, other FPS stealthy games like Deus Ex, and whatever else that I've never played. And having just played Dishonored, Thief feels like an earlier version of that. It's very similar in many ways, and focuses exclusively on the stealth part. Your character, Garreth, is a terrible fighter. But he's sneaky and agile and invisible in shadows. You have a dagger, a bow, and various types of bombs. For the bow, you have different arrows that do different things. Water arrows put out fires to create shadow. Moss arrows coat the ground in moss allowing you to walk across previously noisy metal surfaces quietly. Noisemaker arrows draw guards' attention. It's clever and fun. You can one-shot guards with your bow or dagger if they are "unaware." If they see you, they become "aware" and actively search. You can't one-shot them in this state, must wait for them to give up looking for you.
The AI is basic. They patrol in set paths, just waiting to be killed. But they will respond (predictably) to noise and search. They notice dead bodies and blood, which alert them. Although the shadow element is nice, it is silly when they can't see you 1 inch away. Sometimes they get stuck in doorways. Today, in an interesting occurrence, I died and was ready to reload my save from 15 minutes earlier when the guards said something about taking me to prison. Huh? Sure enough, they put me in jail this time and I had to escape. First I had to find my things in the requisition room. I was trying to figure out how to get in, when I saw a guard open the doors. Aha! I can follow him in. He went in and shut the doors before I could get in. Then...he couldn't get out. I think he locked himself in somehow. It was amusing.
Anyway, I'm really agitated by lack of autosave. I played almost an hour tonight and just kept doing the same parts over and over because I keep forgetting to save. The game is wonderfully engrossing, so I don't think about stopping to save! So I'm going to take a break from Thief, try another "play an old game" experiment, and come back to it later. I do want to continue. When I'm not reloading old saves, it's very fun.
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Dec 10th, 2012 at 01:33:41 - Beyond Good and Evil (PC) |
My sessions before the other day and the previous entry were no doubt positive. Since then, it's been half and half. Some of the things I didn't mention last time have really begun to irritate me to the point where I'm giving up. I do like the game for the most part, but there are a couple big things:
(1) The camera is terrible. Awful. This became a problem once I got into the Factory level, and now I'm 1/3 through the Slaughterhouse. It's the tight spaces that kill it for me. These levels are giant puzzles and quite maze-like. But the camera can't handle them. It zooms in to the floor. It follows Jade's legs. It does 360s going round and round and round. It turns Jade 180 degrees, then when I turn to run the other way, it swoops again, and I keep going the wrong way, swoop swoop swoop, running into guards and getting killed. You have very very little control of the camera anyway, so there's no way to fix it. It's not player error. It's just a crappy camera. And thanks to that, I've started feeling dizzy and feeling like I'm going to get a headache. Just kinda of reeling.
(2) The levels are mazes. While this is sort of fun because they are complex, it is also sort of annoying because the map isn't very good, and because the game does a really bad job at times of guiding you from one place to another. In a maze, a little guidance here and there would be much appreciated. The thing is sometimes it does guide you, but then there is some hidden requirement to continue. Example: Yesterday I was in the Factory. I'd taken all my pictures and found the code to the Loading Bay where it seemed like I was supposed to go. I enter, run around, look around, nothing happens. Hmm. Go back in the level, poke around, don't see anything new, different, interesting, go back to the loading bay, can't do anything there. Hmm. It seems like I'm supposed to go there, but I must be missing something somewhere else. I spent more than half an hour traversing the level, doing all these sneaky parts again, blah blah, and made it back to the loading bay, where again nothing happens. So I looked up a walkthrough and it tells me to point my camera up at a specific spot. Really? I have to go in the loading bay and point my camera around at everything to trigger a scene? Come on. I had previously taken pictures in the loading bay and pointed it at anything I saw, but I didn't do it in the right spot that it never told me to point it at, so nothing happened. I was kind of pissed. And now, today, I've done 1/3 of the Slaughterhouse and cannot for the life of me figure out where to go to get into the other 2/3. I don't want to start playing this according to walkthroughs, so I'm just stopping instead. Plenty of other games on my list to play.
(3) It's aging. So it's nice, it's pretty, it's interesting. Awesome. But unfortunately I just played Dishonored. And Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is in recent memory. And Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And I'm sorry Beyond Good & Evil, but you do not compete. I'm very interested to go back and play old games that I missed years ago, but the problem is that there are almost inevitably newer games in similar genres that are just better. In this case I've classified BG&E as a stealth game. Or is it an action game? Enslaved was a billion times better. Or is it an open world game? Saints Row 3 wins. Sigh! Oh and also, the title of the game made me think there would be some moral dilemma or philosophical questions being discussed through the story. There aren't. I'm disappointed!
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Dec 8th, 2012 at 10:56:46 - Beyond Good and Evil (PC) |
I finally got a chance to play this for more than an hour tonight. So far it's just been quick dips. I think I'll sink more time into it tomorrow too. So finally, extended engagement is possible and it is good!
I'm usually quite surprised when I like older games (9 years old here, and playing the original, not HD update). BG&E is a really fun original adventure game. Your planet is being constantly bombarded by attacks from some evil aliens, and the planetary defense force seems to be evil too, kidnapping people, and maybe even in league with the aliens. You are Jade, a journalist, who falls in with an underground opposition group, and it's your job to infiltrate enemy operations and uncover evidence of the planetary defense force being assholes and possibly in league with the aliens. Right now, I'm off to explore a factory where they're shipping kidnapped citizens. Then they ship them somewhere else, and finally it's bon voyage to the moon. I suspect the game involves going to these three places since the most expensive item in the shop is moon rockets or something which I figure I need to convert my ship to fly in space.
The story is interesting, and the characters are really good too. I especially like Jade who is a *gasp* normal female. She's clever, likeable, funny, has a job, and she isn't sexualized. It's refreshing. Her partner, Pey'j (pronounced Page) is funny too. He's a pig with good ole southern charm. He does mechanic-type work and is handy for his various special abilities. So far he can cut through fences with wire cutters and he can do a super jump and smash the ground, which when done on a button will launch Jade up to a ledge, or when done near enemies, will launch them up, break their defenses or make them vulnerable. Other characters that populate the world are humans or anthropomorphic animals - sharks, walruses, cows, rhinos...
There are other animals too. At the beginning of the game Jade gets an assignment to catalog all the organic life on the planet for the Science Center. She has a camera that she uses to take photos. Take photos of normal animals, friendly NPC sharks and things, and enemies too, and they get uploaded to the Science Center, and for every 10 you take, you get a pearl. Pearls are one of the types of currencies, spendable on cool upgrades like said space rocket, a missile system for my boat, and other stuff. Pearls are hidden in caves, behind locked doors, won through various minigames like speedboat races and gambling games, from beating bosses, buying them in stores, and doing various other events. It's really varied all the things you can do in the game! So far I've explored some caves, done speedboat racing, explored more generally on my boat, found hidden islands, got robbed by a pirate and chased them down through a speedboat obstacle course, investigated a town, played some game that was some tabletop version of shuffleboard, shopped a lot, took photos of lots of animals, and more. The other currency is...I dunno what it's called. Credits or something. You get them in more mundane ways, killing enemies, breaking boxes, taking photos, etc.
The game looks really nice for being 9 years old. I'm impressed even now by it. The music is also excellent, and I recognize a couple old songs they got.
I am looking forward to pushing on in the story, and more than that, exploring in my boat. Hunting for pearls too. There are some neat looking things to buy!
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