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Nov 28th, 2012 at 07:23:55 - Company of Heroes (PC) |
I cannot for the life of me get into Company of Heroes. I tried when it originally came out. Couldn't do it then, can't do it now. I always get irritated when some renowned game doesn't hold my interest. Like, do I not get it? Am I missing something? Am I disconnected somehow from other gamers? But this does follow the trend of me not caring much for real-war games, so I dunno. Maybe all of the above.
Anyway, CoH is neat for sure. It's a gritty, realistic RTS about storming the beaches at Normandy and that whole Allied invasion of France. It's really similar to Relic's previous Dawn of War games in terms of squad and resource management. You collect 3 types of resources by capturing resource nodes on the map, which give you control of a chunk of territory. There's no resource gathering besides just capturing control points. Otherwise it just flows in and you spent it on troops and tanks and air strikes and things. You do build a few buildings, and you have a handful of defensive options like barbed wire, sandbags for cover, MG emplacements, etc. All that stuff is cool. The cover system is neat. Everything about CoH looks and sounds amazing, especially for being like 6+ years old now.
I've been trying so hard to figure out then why I don't want to play it. It is relatively slow-paced. I play some slow-paced games though, so you'd think I can deal with that. It's hard, and I've had to turn the difficulty down to 'easy.' I can swallow my pride and live with that. The narrative is cool and presented via mission briefings on a map, what your overall objective for the map is and all the little mini-objectives you must or can complete along the way. Something about it all together is...not boring, but...tedious? I feel like I'm pushing, always pushing forward, and it's a difficult push. Not that I want to be a superman and blast my way through with a horde of tanks. I like the micromanagement because CoH plays a bit like a tactical game. But still I just lose interest halfway through every single mission. One of them took me a few days before I could even bring myself to play it. It was a defense mission and I had 10 minutes to prepare for a counterattack, and I was just like "Ugh, 10 minutes to prepare? This is going to be long." And I couldn't get the motivation to try. Then I died a couple times and that's the mission where I conceded that I needed easy difficulty.
I dunno. Sort of fun, sort of tedious. Please don't let me convince myself I need to try CoH 2.
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Nov 25th, 2012 at 07:51:45 - Stacking (PC) |
Also finished the last bit of Stacking today. This is one of those Double Fine games from their prototyping sessions, and it's cute. You play as Charlie, a poor working class kid with a big family who all get lured away/abducted along with other children by The Baron, the big mean industrialist proponent of child labor. Charlie befriends a hobo who helps him out on his mission to save his family and all the other children and rid the city of The Baron.
The game is an adventure game, but basically the characters and the items are the same thing. The characters are those Russian dolls that stack into one another. Each doll type has a special ability, and you use these abilities to solve puzzles to progress. Charlie is the smallest doll, and he can jump inside one doll size larger to 'possess' it. Then with that doll, you jump in the next size up, then the next size, and so on. And you can unstack them to use an ability that one of your smaller dolls has.
So for example, one part I remember well today was that I needed to get Charlie's sister out of a cage guarded by some guy called the Shadow Man or something. I found a doll walking around with a flame on his head whose special ability was to make it burn brighter. So I got inside him and tried to illuminate the Shadow Man. Didn't work, and he gave away that "Ha! You'll have to find something brighter than that to faze me!" So I looked around and found another doll whose special ability was to spill oil. I nested those dolls, went back, spilled oil, then burned the candle, and it made an explosion and the guard ran away! The cool thing is there are usually at least 3 ways to complete any given challenge. I found one and played straight through, but I might go back and mess with it to see more for fun.
That's the game. You stack Russian dolls and use their abilities just to have fun or to solve challenges to progress the story. It's pretty straightforward and fun.
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Nov 25th, 2012 at 07:42:18 - Dishonored (360) |
Enjoyed Dishonored even though it just took a weekend to play through. I had read about how short it was, but really I thought the length was fine for it. I *thought* it was ending just before the big twist, and if it had ended then I would have felt let down. I didn't see the twist coming per se, but I felt that something was off just before. Things felt eerie. My feeling was right! Then there are like 2 more missions after that. And with all the different paths and ways to complete missions, there really is some good replay value. I'm borrowing it so I won't replay it, but I think my friend will when I give it back to him. There are various different endings depending on your 'chaos' level, whether you cause no chaos by being very stealthy and not killing enemies or being detected, versus causing high chaos by killing everyone. In my case, I tried to be reasonably restrained in my dealings, but I usually ended up blowing my cover and having to fight off waves of enemies who all alert one another. There was a loading screen tip that said "Not all fights have to end in a bloodbath!" implying you can zip away to cover, but my fights always ended up in bloodbaths, even if I didn't mean for them to.
Overall, I felt the game was more Bioshock than anything, other comparisons being Elder Scrolls games and Deus Ex. You upgrade your dark powers with runes that you search for throughout levels and enhance minor things (healing potions heal a little more, crossbow bolts don't break, etc.) with bone charms that you also find hidden. The abilities were pretty cool, and I tried all but two. The staple is blink, which is a short range teleport (upgradable to long range, which is super handy). The UI for blink was pretty annoying though. You're supposed to hold LT and then move this light orb cursor thing with LS to blink wherever it's hovering. You can either blink on top of a surface or to the ledge, and Corvo will climb up. It was a *pain in the ass* to try and get that stupid cursor positioned properly so I could blink to tougher places. Usually this problem was when I wanted to blink vertically. Your blink is also supposed to be enhanced with the enhanced jumping power. Jump, then blink, to get more distance, but it hardly works. The cursor just won't move over ledges. At first I thought it was just a distance issue, like it couldn't go that far, but sometimes it will and sometimes it won't. Very frustrating precisely because it's such a useful ability.
A couple others I used a lot were the x-ray vision or whatever that lets you see enemies and their sight cones through walls. This was really important, and would be especially if you're trying to be stealthy. The two that caught my attention immediately, and from previews, were possession and rat swarm. You can possess rats, dogs, and people. Possessing rats lets you crawl through ducts and reach hard-to-get-to places, sneak up on people, and so on. Spawning a rat swarm is *awesome.* Rats appear and just murder enemies. Then they devour the corpses. It's sick! And now I want to go watch Willard.
I think the best part of the game is the setting. The city of Dunwall is a cesspool of plague, rats, and terrible people. They did a good job writing and presenting the city's story, including several of the inhabitants, social structure, religious orders, businesses, and places of interest. It's all falling apart, and you spend the game wading through the mess assassinating people. There is no morality. Everything is just shades of gray, and all the villains plead for their lives. Everyone seems to make confessions, or to be able to tell right from wrong on some guilt-ridden level, but they all become corrupt and power-hungry. Corvo is no exception. Actually the only two people in the game I would call good are the little girl Emily and the boatsman, Samuel. Both their lives are ultimately in your hands. You make a lot of choices throughout the game that have outcomes both while playing and for the ending you get. I both saved and killed Emily, and I killed Samuel, who was being a jerk to me all of a sudden. No one had treated me negatively for killing a lot of people every level (I always spared bosses and people in extra objectives when I could though). Samuel especially was my #1 fan. Then as he dropped me off on my last mission, he yelled at me and said he never wanted to see me again! I have no idea why he turned on me, but I killed him for it, so he was dead in my ending.
The game's worth sinking some time into. It won't take forever, and it's crammed full of thoughtful opportunities for play.
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Nov 24th, 2012 at 02:33:29 - Lost Odyssey (360) |
Finished yesterday. Quite epic game. Best Final Fantasy game I've played in 10 years.
Everything wrapped up nicely, great story, some interesting revelations. The Thousand Years of Dreams are still my favorite thing. I'd like to find a collection of those stories elsewhere, or of that author's other stories. Unfortunately there's no way to roam around after you beat the game, and I stupidly overwrote my pre-final-boss save. Even if I find a collection, I still can't read them like in the game with the elegant presentation. Oh well! The internet has an answer I'm sure. But the way that the game handles character development and touches on these big existential themes through the Dreams is really freakin awesome. Now I am obsessed with thinking about the trials of living 1000 years, why it would be awesome, why it would be terrible, and what it would be like to watch 1000 years worth of people, nations, events, places, etc. go by. I'm glad every game isn't this heavy.
Another thing I really liked is that, like a lot of old-school RPGs, you get a ship (or 2) to travel around and explore. There are lots of secret places and a metric ton of things to do before beating the last boss. Basically when you start disc 4, it's like "Hey, here's your ship. The world is your oyster." And you can spend forever just doing what you like, leveling up, finding magic, completing side quests, getting ultimate weapons, fighting secret bosses, doing the secret dungeon, etc. etc. But this amount of extra stuff and the freedom to travel around finding it is just awesome. RPGs like this tend to be so much more structured than some of the old ones I remember so fondly.
The final boss battle sequence is very cool. The person you have to fight is really wicked, so it's nice to see him go down. The ending wraps up various character subplots, mostly to do with their relationships. Your party in Lost Odyssey is quite incestuous. They're all either related or in love with one another, except Tolten, who seems tacked on. The characters were all really good. The only one I was iffy about was Jansen, the womanizing jokester. He's the #1 source of comic relief, and it usually works. One area it doesn't is when it's mixed with his womanizing. For instance, he falls in love with Ming (which is the only relationship in the game that seems impossible - why would she like him?), and wants her the first time he sees her. They have to rescue her from Gongora early on. So he breaks into her room, casts a spell to knock her unconscious, and carries her off. His character makes this a really rape-y scene. But yeah, when he's not being a creeper, he's likeable. It does suck that Ming ends up falling in love with him. Queen Ming is an immortal and a queen. Jansen is...just some silly guy. I see no real reason for this besides the fact that he's a bit of a bumble and the player is supposed to be like 'aw, yay, she likes him too.' But to me, that just makes it seem like the nice guy gets what he wants if he pursues it. Again, creeper implications that I read into it.
That's pretty much it. I actually did a bunch of the side stuff, which is rare for me. But it was so fun and seemed reasonable that I just kept on doing more side things. I killed over half the special bosses, collected like 90/100 seeds, got several special magic spells, did the Kelokon tournament, went and found all the music boxes, found a bunch of the royal seals. I'm just so glad there was so much cool stuff to do! I really liked this game!
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