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Sep 30th, 2012 at 09:51:43 - L.A. Noire (PC) |
After quitting Aion today, I moved to LA Noire, which I've had installed for a couple weeks. LA Noire is a very neat game so far, about 2.5 hours in. You play as a detective named Cole in the LAPD and you go around solving crimes. I dare say I've never played anything quite like it. I find even the similarities to GTA are not that deep. It's definitely its own game. For example, you have the same type of open world city, but it's more linear here. There's much less reason to go cruising. Part of that is the cars obviously aren't made for stunts and mayhem like in GTA. While I enjoy the craziness of GTA's streets, I really like driving in LA Noire because it feels tight, and I have to follow traffic rules. Other drivers are less crazy than GTA drivers, so it's not that difficult. But even though I like the driving, LA Noire has this awesome option to let your partner drive for you. I use that because it gets me to my case quickly and in a thoughtful twist, the game won't skip over conversations with your partner if you insta-travel. It'll show him driving long enough to get through the conversation so you don't miss any story. It's so convenient.
The gun fights are not as fun as GTA, though I've only done one. My mouse might be set too sensitive. Also the cover system is a little wonky. But again that's only from a couple times using it. Fist-fighting I like though. But anyway on the whole, the game is broken up into cases. As you solve them, you gain rank, "intuition points" which you can spend to uncover clues at a crime scene (which I did once and it was very helpful) or eliminate incorrect interrogation options (which I should probably use because I've gotten several bits wrong). The cases so far are unrelated to one another. I thought before playing that there would be some overarching characters or story or something, but so far I can't tell if that's the case. There is Cole's backstory from his days in the Marines in WW2, and that's pretty interesting. You reveal more of it as you solve cases. I wonder what it has to do with his life as a detective?
The facial motion capture is blowing my mind. It's extremely detailed. I can see doubt, I can see confidence, I can see avoidance...sometimes interrogation suspects (everyone is a suspect!) hold your eyes, sometimes their eyes falter. Sometimes they blink too much. Sometimes they bite their lips, or stick their chin out or give a fake smile, and on and on. I did not expect to be this impressed with it.
The problem is that they are still "human" faces that the player has to interpret. Although people generally interpret facial expressions mostly the same as anyone else, I'm not sure the designers quite took into account (how would they?) that deciding whether the character is lying or not is way way more than just facial features. Obviously they know it's evidence too, and they design for that. If you call out a suspect for lying, you have to back up your accusation with proof from evidence you've gathered. But even then it's far from easy to agree between the characters' facial expressions, the evidence you've collected, what the evidence MEANS, the players' own interpretation of events, what the interrogation suspects are telling you, and then the gaps in the evidence that aren't filled in.
What I mean is that there's so much interpretation that needs to be done on the player's part that the "hard" evidence and the taken-for-granted expressions simply don't account for. Thus it is very easy to be wrong. I totally understand it's got to be hard as hell to justify in designing the interrogations sometimes why this or that answer is right or wrong. You can always imagine some player going "But wait..." and providing a reasonable answer from their perspective. Maybe this game about truth and lies is a critique of our judicial system. Who knows. This has happened a couple times to me where I felt like I had a valid reason, and evidence to back it up, to accuse a suspect, or where I felt I should believe the suspect, but the game sees it differently. It's kind of irritating.
Another time the problem was in the interrogation design. This is the only real issue I've seen so far. You have to talk to an Argentinian diplomat whose car was stolen. Before that, you go talk to the car salesman. The car salesman claims he never spoke to the diplomat before. But during the crime scene investigation, I found the diplomat's planner with the car salesman's phone number. I pressed the salesman and he confessed that in fact he and the diplomat had met personally at a bar to cut a deal for the car. So when I went to interrogate the diplomat after this, he denied any involvement in purchasing the car. I accused him of lying! I had just spoken to the salesman who told me that he met the diplomat and sold him the car. But that piece of information wasn't available as evidence! Several times earlier in the game, I had used statements from witnesses as evidence. But for some reason that option wasn't available to me here. So I thought okay, I still had hard evidence, the salesman's name and number in the diplomat's planner. So I used that, and it failed! Why? I don't understand how I was wrong here.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to checking out some more cases. I don't think this is a game I can sit and play for a long time at a stretch. Maybe a couple cases a day.
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Sep 30th, 2012 at 04:45:50 - Aion (PC) |
Tried Aion over the last couple days. P bought a hard copy like 2 years ago, and neither of us ever even installed it. But since it went free-to-play, I figured it was about time. It took me about a month to actually play it from the time I downloaded it because of various login issues and all kinds of stuff that I really can't believe I bothered with the tens of help tickets to fix. Only to play for 2 days!
So the big draw of Aion, when it came out at least, was that you got wings to fly. Sounds awesome. I want to fly around. This was supposed to radically change the way people PvP and give players unlimited freedom and blah blah blah. You get the wings at level 10, so let's talk about what you have to do before then. You slog through an overly long starting zone that has excessive amounts of sluggish running. I can only assume that this is to make flying feel liberating. That's a major problem with the game. It is sluggish, slow. My character felt drunk. There's no oomph in the fighting and the response time for the hotkeys just isn't as quick as I'm used to. I create a mage, and whenever I wanted to do a normal attack, she had to go through this annoying animation where she pulls out her tome, flips the pages, and then casts some magic bolt. Like, just do it faster!
Consequently, enemies take a while to kill. I did make an assassin character and melee is faster than spell casting. With the mage, I was out of mana constantly. There didn't seem to be many ways of speeding up mana regen short of buying potions. Health was okay. You start the game with like 30 bandages. Why wasn't there the same for mana? It's like non-mana classes get a definite boost in speed since they don't have to worry about mana. This is not the case in all MMOs at all. Most have systems in place so that you don't go out of mana every other fight. Otherwise, the mage is very basic and boring. Fireball, ice bolt that slows, earth spell DoT, and a root. Just like every other game. And nothing new once I hit level 10 and chose a 'specialty' class! Learning new skills are few and far between. I think I had a total of 5 abilities by level 10. And it was looking like I'd get one new one or be able to upgrade one every 3 or so levels. Way to spaced out to keep it interesting.
On the other hand, Aion has these things called chains, kind of like semiautomatic macros. So I had a fireball spell and a blaze spell. After using fireball, blaze lights up and you have used a 'chain.' Then blaze goes on a 30 second cooldown. Kind of neat, and they looked to get more complicated and let you have a couple options later on. Speaking of options, there don't seem to be more than a couple. You specialize your character at level 10. By 'a couple chain options later on' I meant like 3 of the chains had two branches. There are no talent points. You unlock some thing called a stigma panel at level 20 where you can like customize some skills or something, and you get 5 slots by the time you're 60. And that's...it? See what I mean about slow? This game is slow and grindy as hell.
The game is also really linear for an MMO, at least to start out. The starter zone was basically a few areas of interest/quest hubs off of a road. You just walk down the road, stop at various points to collect quests, and just continue back and forth down the road. And there is way too much back and forth, so much running, even with a flight path there. But I just really can't believe that skills and things are so few. And that after choosing my specialization, I didn't get even 1 skill for it.
So how about the flight? It is an unbelievable letdown. First of all, the game didn't even tell me I could fly when I hit level 10! There was no tutorial or anything until I found the button because I was like "man, can't you fly at 10? I hope it's not 20. I'll just mouse around the UI...Oh hey look!" Why don't they make a bigger deal out of it? It's supposed to be the draw, the cool hook. But flying is only slightly faster than walking, like any first mount in any MMO. So I thought, well at least I can fly over mountains and things. Nope! Magical barriers prevent you from going all over the damn place. So many barriers. So much for freedom! And there's a timer on it. You can't just go fly. You have to stop and land and let it recharge every minute.
And just a couple other comments and criticisms..the rest of the tutorials worked well in the beginning, the on-demand ones that pop up as you need them. Quest are dull, repetitive and uninspiring. Kill x of these, fetch x of those, and give this thing to that person. Every single quest, for real. And it was rather annoying that I typically only had to kill/fetch 3. It's not even worth the trip to the quest area to kill 3 monsters! Run for a minute, take 30 seconds to kill 3 monsters, run for a minute back. It's fair to say most of my time spent here was running. So not only was the game sluggish, but dull as well. Though it does look nice. The character models in particular are cool. You can make some hilarious characters at creation. Small body, giant head, super skinny legs, fat arms, all kinds of funny stuff. Oh, there is a nice help system with information links on important names and places, but oddly there are few tooltips. I have no idea what my character's stats are for. What is 'knowledge' and how is it different from 'willpower?' No idea. I'd have to go look it up outside the game. They do have this neat tutorial/reward thingy for new players called the Atreian Atlas. It tracks your first character through the main story (in a browser outside the game) and gives you periodic goals to meet and rewards for doing them. I found it quite neat in the newbie zone. But I can tell it would be something I'd soon forget about since the next item on there is level 16. If getting to level 10 took like 5 or 6 hours, 16 is probably another 10 hours at least. And that thing at level 16 is just a solo dungeon. Solo dungeon! What's the point of a dungeon if not for playing with others? I can go solo everything outside the dungeon. Oh, better loot? Man who cares! It's not like the game is hard yet. Story? Make the rest of the quest stories better! And finally, Aion has nice movable windows. I like that. More and more games are letting players move the windows around. I recall Rift's was particularly liberating. Aion also has some neat stuff with the map. There are 4 different levels of the map. You can actually draw on the map. There is a drawing tool in-game. You can also write memos in-game. And you can share locations with other people, which is awesome. I kept observing people doing this in chat constantly, and I'd click and some map would pop up on my screen of another area. Cool way of sharing spatial information.
Sooo, to sum, I'm not a fan. It has a couple neat features, but I was bored out of my mind playing it. Seems very generic and grindy. No thanks.
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Sep 25th, 2012 at 11:41:10 - Plants War (Other) |
This is a little MOBA game on my Android. It is free and had high ratings with a ton of reviews. I'm not a big fan of MOBAs mostly due to the communities (a little too competitive and hardcore for me). I tried some LoL and DotA in times past and didn't care for either, even playing with friends. So anyway, I figured I'd try this highly rated single player one.
Verdict: It's fun enough for a while, but falls into one of the traps that other MOBAs fall into with me. It gets hella repetitive. Every match, same skills, same build order, same creeps spawning, same pushing, same same same. And in this game, the map is the same every time up to where I'm at (level 16 on Normal), which is halfway through the map. So I don't expect it to change. The differences are that each team has two towers instead of one now (maybe they ramp to three later) and the enemy periodically upgrades its hero and creeps. Every time it upgrades the hero, I get a grudge against it because it's noticeably harder. Right now I'm cursing "Damn polar bear!" Before that it was "Stupid penguin!"
So the key is to get boss kills. Their hero inevitably runs away when it takes damage, and you can't chase it down because the towers will kill you/the hero will heal and then turn around and kill you with the towers. But if you can chain some special attacks on the hero, you can get him down. You can also work the space by walling him behind some creeps so he can't take a straight line back to heal. This is great because heroes stay dead for like 30 seconds, which is more often than not enough time to push forward and kill a tower.
You can upgrade your own hero and creeps with gold that you receive after battles. There's another currency, leaves, that are really rare, but you need them to unlock stuff. That's where they get people at the cash shop I suppose. Basically, upgrades are few and far between. The last time I played just now I finally got a different hero, my second one, who is much stronger and has some different special attacks. I have like 4 different creeps, one tank-like one, one ranged one, and a couple regular melee ones. Since upgrading is so expensive, it contributes to the samey feeling of the game. And since the computer upgrades far more frequently (4 times now to my 2!) it definitely gets harder. But it also begins to feel unfair. Their creeps spawn at least twice as fast as mine now, or at least twice as many. I'm constantly outnumbered, which gets annoying because I end up getting walled in. That's supposed to be my trick, not theirs! Except they don't do it on purpose. They just bunch up around me and I can't go where I want and end up being shot to death.
Anyway. It's free and fun for a while.
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Sep 23rd, 2012 at 09:10:01 - Dear Esther (PC) |
This was an interesting tour of a secluded island. I've mixed feelings. I played the 1.4 hours of this earlier in the week and have been thinking about it since then, mostly trying to figure out the story. No conclusions have been forthcoming. As everyone has no doubt read, Dear Esther is less of a game and more of an interactive story. I would argue that when you play it you quickly develop a goal - explore the island - and the game quickly provides you with a reason to do so - listen to the story. If you consider navigation an obstacle, then there are constraints too. You can't wander anywhere you like, and are quite funneled toward where you're supposed to go. I say this because I never got 'off track' for more than a few minutes. So off you go, exploring the island and getting random story bits at predetermined spots.
The story made no sense to me until about halfway through when the narrator finally drops something that sounds factual and unambiguous, though whether it was is anyone's guess (actually, lots of people have been guessing over on the Steam forums and elsewhere). Lots of things in the story I'm unsure of, and I'm not even sure that I am sure of the things I thought I was sure of earlier. I thought I might trek over the island again, but after a week of mulling over my first experience, I don't really care to. It's a sad story, and the way I read it it's a cathartic ending, kind of uplifting but in a tragic way. Make sense? I have a feeling there's a lot of metaphor. The scribbling on the rock across the island is some indication of this, but I don't understand most of those references. I'm unsure of the characters and their relationships. Even that basic understanding is lacking for me. I thought I knew for a moment, but whatever I've come up with doesn't hold up when I think about it.
The island itself is gorgeous. Actually I felt like a tourist more than anything, F12 Steam Camera around my neck. I took about 40 screenshots. And although wandering the island was nice, I fully admit I was bored. Looking at scenery and listening to sparse artsy narration is only so exciting. So thumbs up for the length of it, appropriately short. IF you were to play through a second time, I expect it would be slower, paying more attention to detail and actively looking for story hints scattered around the island.
It would have been funny if there was a zombie. Just one zombie. It would have wrecked the mood and made no sense, but I would have been amused.
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