Finished this tonight sitting at work. Some fellow office mates helped out. One guy walked by and was really intrigued at the boat level and wanted to try, so he figured that one out then apparently was talking about the game to other people because when I went to go eat later, another girl stopped me and asked if I was playing Crayon Physics, because the guy was raving about it, and she said she'd played it a long time ago. Neat!
So my verdict is that it's not terribly interesting. Once you figure out how to make pulleys, you can complete nearly every level after that. Also, there are neat set pieces, like the boat, rocket ships, sun and moon, robots and other stuff in a lot of the middle levels. The ending levels though are all very dull, just a couple platforms on each and tons of empty space. It's supposed to be hard I guess, but pulleys really are the answer. Also, if you don't want to bother with finding a proper solution, I found out you can be quite cheap by creating secure platforms and just wedging shapes underneath the ball all the way to the star in practically every later level.
I suppose that's a pitfall with such an open-ended game. Given the tools to draw anything, there are a zillion possible solutions to every level. The game doesn't really prevent you from doing much. So if wedging shapes under the ball is allowed by the physics, then you can wedge to your heart's content. Since there was such freedom, I would have liked more of the set pieces on levels, or levels that were multiple screens or just something more complex.
It's a short game, which is good enough since it gets repetitive, but overall I did find it interesting. There is one additional island of levels or something (locked) in the middle but you have to collect 120 stars to travel to it. At the end of the game you have 80, but there is a possible 160. It tells you at the end of the game that you can pick up an extra star on each level if you complete it with three unique solutions. Yikes! I mean, if you want to play some more, go for it and do all the levels 3 times 3 different ways. It could be fun. But once was fine for me, and I'll have to live without seeing what's on the middle island. Or YouTube it.
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After finishing Far Cry 3 yesterday evening, I decided to just stay in and start Halo: Reach and thought if I played the rest of the night I could beat it by the time I went to bed the next day. Turns out I beat it by noon the next day. Short game! It took me somewhere between 6-7 hours only, which was from about 8-12 Saturday night and roughly 9-12 Sunday morning, max. So yeah, short, but whatever because it was awesome and is my favorite of the Halo games thus far. I'll rate Reach, 2, 3, 1. Reach is a prequel to the trilogy.
It's action-packed and epic as hell. There are epic space battles, ground battles, lower atmosphere battles...battles everywhere. The space battle stuff is all new as far as I know (never played Halo 3: ODST, so that might have some) and was a lot of fun. The vehicles handle better than ever, and the controls in general are tighter and more precise. The game is faster, something like the same leap from Halo 2 to Halo 3. One noticeable thing missing from this game is dual wielding, which turned out to be quite fine.
They also ditched Halo 3's item system, which I was very glad for, and this is genius, replaced it with ability pickups. You might say, Well David, that's the same thing, isn't it? No Dear Reader, it is not. You see, when you picked up items in Halo 3, you could still sprint, and as I recall, using items was an odd button that I didn't press much. In Halo: Reach, Sprint isn't a given. Sprint is a default pick-up. So the other pick-ups replace sprint. Since I LIKE Sprint a lot, then I'm going to use those other pick-ups because they're replacing one of my favorite things. Also, you can't sprint to checkpoints in Reach like you could in previous titles, so that helps. The new abilities are mostly awesome. There is a jet pack, which lets you fly around some and reach high ground, hover over enemies, and so on. Very useful. There is a hologram, also incredibly useful when dealing with tough/multiple enemies. You kind of shoot it at a spot in the distance and a hologram of yourself runs to that point and stands there, distracting enemy attention so you can flank and whatnot. The last one was some sort of armor boost where you kneel down and become invulnerable for a short time. You can't do anything while you're invulnerable. This was, in my play, useless, but I imagine it being great in co-op or multiplayer since one player could run out and draw fire, then become invulnerable, while the other player flanks or supports, sort of like a human hologram. But these abilities were so useful precisely because they replaced sprint. And you know you would encounter more pick-ups throughout the levels, so abandoning sprint for the jet pack or hologram was a situational strategic decision. Actually by the end of the game I wasn't thinking in terms of "abandoning sprint," but of sprint simply being another pick-up.
The story is excellent. It's a story of sacrifice and heroism, very sad (and happy?), sets the scene for Halo 1, and the end of Reach is a nice loop back to the opening scene of the game. Highly highly unexpected that I would enjoy this so much. I had no idea it would top the other games in the trilogy. Highly recommended.
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Finished the main story of Far Cry 3 yesterday. It was a trip (ha, get it?) I'll not spoil much since this came out relatively recently and many people haven't played it yet. Thoroughly enjoyable game. Excellent story, a bit weird/funny/over the top at times, but still really good. I never made it far into Far Cry 2 so I can't say how similar it might be, but for my comparative purposes imagine some assemblage of Just Cause 2 and Assassin's Creed (esp. Brotherhood). Besides the story, you go around liberating the island by securing enemy strongholds and disabling communications towers. You can also do Wanted Dead quests, Path of the Hunter quests, Supply Drop quests, and various other non-quest but just-if-you're-interested activities for no relative reward. There are also additional quests, which the game calls 'story quests' or something, but which are just quests where you have to go do some usually trivial task for some personality void NPC. Anyway, all this extra stuff is totally optional and I quit doing it once I began feeling like I wasn't getting anywhere in the game and these extra quests started feeling repetitive.
These extra quests can get very dull, especially the 'story quest' quests. The mundane NPCs are really lifeless. They stand there, utter the same couple things aloud, repeat the same few conversations, and crucuially don't respond to you in the least. I was disappointed with this. Supposedly I'm their savior and they don't interact with me at all. Also, the game uses like 5 skins for NPCs. There were towns full of twins, triplets, sextuplets, octuplets...
The world itself didn't feel too alive in large part because of this. Pirates, for their part, were either guarding their posts or driving maniacally down the road (for no purpose I ever saw), gleefully stopping to hunt you if they saw you. The animals on the island felt more real than the mundane people, and many of my favorite parts of the game involved hunting or just watching animals. You need to hunt animals because they're how you craft ammo pouches, rucksacks, syringe packs, etc. You either stumble upon them haphazardly in the wild or hunt them by looking for their icon on the map, which is their general zone of habitation, and go looking. You kill them and skin them, in gross detail, while your character expresses accurate sentiments like "Eeew," "Ugh, gross" and "Fuuuck." Many times I'd be walking somewhere and hear a predator roar, and I'd start looking around trying to find it, only to see some deer or something dart past me with a leopard in hot pursuit. The predator kill the prey. The prey run from the predators. It's very cool. One time I was hunting deer by a riverside and I killed a deer, which fell into the water. I ran up to the water's edge and BAM! A giant crocodile attacked me from the water. I jumped out of my seat...then killed and skinned it. That was awesome and made nature feel so vibrant, and after that was really when I began paying attention to the predators around me because it dawned on me that I wasn't the only hunter on the island. Anyway, most of the hunting I did just to make everything I could, and I did it relatively early in the game, after only a few main story missions, just to craft everything I could. But after that, there was no point in hunting and I didn't do it the entire rest of the game, except for the odd Path of the Hunter quest, which asked you to kill a special animal with a specific weapon. These were sometimes challenging (especially using the recurve bow) and usually granted materials to make the final [crafting item] in a set, like the wallet that holds the most money or whatever, but ultimately hunting and crafting were over with too quickly. After that, I ignored all animals unless I could use them to kill enemies.
I wish some of the other activity types rewarded you instead of just gave you a high score, like the racing. I would have liked to race, if there were some reward to gain. But there wasn't, and there were rewards for tons of other things, so why bother? One activity was called Trials of the Rakyat, and was the part of the game where they forced multiplayer into your experience. Walking around the island sometimes, I'd see a bright red rock with something like [XxPWNYOUxX], who held the high score for that particular Trial. Nothing like that to break the fantasy. I played a couple to see what they were, and you just try and kill as many enemies as possible with the weapons provided. Fun, but just leaderboard type stuff. And I guess everyone can see your dumb Xbox Live name plastered over rocks in their game.
So the story, right, very interesting. You (rich white boy) and your friends get captured by pirates on this island. After an excellent opening scene, you escape and start on a journey to find and rescue your other friends. On the way, you meet a few important locals who help you out, one of whom gives you a tattoo, or "tatau," as the game insists, which has some mystical qualities and grows as you acquire skills and become a Rakyat warrior and champion of the Rakyat people. There are several levels to the story, and as I keep saying, it is quite good. You figure out later, once the game starts throwing Alice in Wonderland quotes at you, that your character has gone far down the rabbit hole, and doesn't want to come out. Your character goes through a transformation on the island, saying some pretty hilarious and typical rich white boy stuff about finding his purpose in life (which is, he now knows, to be on this island with the Rakyat, though I have no idea what he thinks he will do on the island once his friends leave and he kills all the pirates). For whatever reason, whether it's mystical and out of his power or because he wants to, I'm not entirely sure, he becomes somewhat power hungry and vengeful. This does make some sense since the pirates killed some of his friends and ruined his vacation, but the sense that it DOES make is made NONsensical by his clingy girlfriend who insists he is changing and keeps asking things like "What have you become?" and calls him on his cell phone in the middle of a mission to check in on him. SHE makes his transformation weirder by adding a relationship dynamic to it that, to me, was either overdramatic or unnecessary. Or both. Either way, I didn't like his girlfriend at all because I empathized with him. I wonder if people did like his girlfriend. I wonder if girls liked his girlfriend and empathized with her more while boys empathized with Jason. So yeah, the whole self-discovery/transformation thing was...interesting.
Add to that the hallucinogenic staple of the story. The island is filled with drugs, and you take them a handful of times, often in relation to the Rakyat and becoming a warrior. ALL of these trippy scenes were amazing. I loved them. To me, they clouded what was really happening between him and the Rakyat leader, I forget her name. I think she may have been using him (especially based on the ending I got where she goes all Species on him), but I can't be sure. I think the drugs muddled his mind and caused him to make, or led him to, poor decisions, and to think of himself as invulnerable, or more of a hero than he was (and he was a hero). So maybe because of the Rakyat leader and the hallucinations, and the tribal tale he was told, he became a bit self-aggrandized. I do need to watch the other ending on YouTube, that reminds me...
The main characters in the game are excellent, and I will remember them for a long time. The hippie doctor Earnhardt, the hilarious German/American spy, Vaas, oh man will I never forget Vaas, the Australian slaver...And the ending missions, wow, so wonderfully tense. You'll realized as you play the game that many characters die. The death near the end is one of the best deaths I've ever experienced in a game. I mean, not best as in I wanted it to happen, but unexpected, well-executed, fitting, etc. And speaking of deaths, I really like how Jason (your character) should have died about 5 times but didn't. I can imagine how pissed off Vaas was every time he thought he killed Jason but Jason came back. There were many, many, many authentic "holy shit!" moments. The action sequences also were excellent, from escaping burning buildings to getting free from being bound underwater.
One final thing is that since the game takes place somewhere in the South Pacific near me in Singapore, there are several references to Singapore, and I noticed some Malay (again like Just Cause 2, which was full of it). For some reason though most of the NPCs sound Hispanic or Australian. I think they're supposed to be like Maori, but it only sort of worked on that front. Anyway, according to a character in the game, in Singapore it's illegal to buy or chew gum. False! For the record, anyone who tells you that is misinformed. You can bring gum for personal use, just not large amounts. You can chew it. No one cares if you chew gum. You can also buy it here at pharmacies. Just go to a pharmacy and say you want gum. Easy. I wish people would quit perpetuating Singapore as a place with such backward rules. There are some to be sure, as there are everywhere, but the whole "gum is illegal!" thing is plain wrong. This same NPC also calls Singaporeans "ricepickers." There's no rice picked here. I didn't particularly like that character because he was the ultra-American patriot, but definitely was irritated by the Singaporean stuff.
So anyway, awesome game. Great fun. I'm going to hang on to it and probably go clear the rest of the outposts and disable communication arrays and whatnot before giving it back to J. Oh and also, multiplayer was fun. I did some team deathmatch.
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