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Mar 13th, 2012 at 07:31:07 - Monkey Island 2: Special Edition (PC) |
Just finished Monkey Island 2. It was pretty much the same as the first one, but a little more polished. I feel like I played one longer game the last couple weeks. Actually MI2 WAS long. The first one with all my getting stuck and playing a bunch of it on an airplane and everything took me a little over 7 hours. The second one with my extravagant use of the Hint button still took me 9 hours. 9 hours of pretty much any other type of game wouldn't feel long. This one felt long because you spend most of your time just walking back and forth to places you've already been clicking on things to see if something will happen. This is more fun now than it was at the beginning of MI1 a couple weeks ago, but still, I can think of other things I'd rather be doing. Given that it was made in 1990-something, good job. And I do appreciate the overhauled graphics and voiceovers. Some other weird copyright things -- Every time it says Monkey Island, there's a TM sign next to it. LucasArts did the remake in-house I thought. It's just weird to see Monkey Island TM on a Monkey Island game developed by the same company. Also they place little ads for other LucasArts games. I'm glad the ads were left alone only for other 90s games like Loom and Indiana Jones. I would not be surprised to see ads for newer games thrown into the remake of Monkey Island. I wonder what the earliest in-game ads were? Besides the old adver-games. I'm playing through Xenosaga at home right now and Namco actually emails you with the in-game email system advertisements for their games that were out at the time. It's really annoying, virtual spam!
So MI2 has slightly better graphics, some new character designs, a couple voice actor changes, and a vastly improved interface. I'm really grateful for the interface changes. You can do everything easily with the mouse now, and the menus don't lock up on you, and the mouse doesn't eat the edge of the screen, and Guybrush moves nice and smooth across the maps now. I'm assuming the two remakes weren't done at the same time. If they were, I wonder why MI2 was so much better done than MI1. I mean, I bought them at the same time, so I have no idea if they were re-done by different teams or what. Since so much of the remakes were the same, I can't see how it could have been that different a team, and thus that different qualities of interface. But really, who cares. The games are fun pirate tales and the first one carries over nicely to the second one. There are some recurring characters, some carryover jokes, etc.
My favorite part of MI2 was when you fall from dangling on the rope with Big Whoop into utter darkness. This happened once before sometime and you light a candle or something, but this time I was out of matches in my inventory. I'm mousing around and I just see treasure box debris and can't figure out what to do. I'm looking and I'm looking around and through my inventory. Finally I decide to slowly mouse the room over. I find...a light switch. I lolled.
Finally, Steam incorporated achievements for MI2. It's nice to struggle through some difficult situations and get rewarded with an achievement. There are only 12, so it's not like Gears of War or something where you get an achievement for every little thing. 12 are spread out over 9 hours, and I only got 7 anyway. The others are various forms of not using hints and doing a speedrun, which are not in the stars for me. But this is interesting. I was looking at the global achievements on Steam and I see that only 59.2% of players completed part one (of four). That's weird. Not even 1/3 of people who bought the game have gone past the first part. Granted, I have lots of Steam games in my account that I haven't touched, but...am I like 40% of Steam account-holders? Maybe. Seems like a lot of people. Only 39.2% finished part 2, and just over 1/3 beat it! Even with all those hints! The crazy thing is how many people beat it without hints, or with fewer than 10 hints, or by only using object highlight fewer than 5 times...16.1%, 18.2%, and 24.9%. So like half the people who beat it used 0 hints. That's a lot of replays man! Or like one reaaaally long play through for a lot of people. If it took me 9 hours with lots of hints...I mean...it could take me 100 without using any. And that's probably a huge underestimate. And I'd probably kill myself before then. So. Cheers to those people who can do that.
It's been fun. I'm going to pretend that in the end it was all kids' imagination in a carnival ride.
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Mar 6th, 2012 at 08:24:55 - The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (PC) |
Why oh why can't I get into adventure games? I don't think I lack patience. The puzzles aren't over my head. They have plenty of humor, engaging stories, lovable characters and beautiful artwork. So what the hell is it?
Adventure games just don't seem to make sense!
When I was a kid, I played a lot of the old LucasArts games like The Dig and Full Throttle, alongside Myst and others. I liked them. I was good at them. I kept journals in Myst and got pretty far. I beat The Dig and I beat Full Throttle over and over because I wanted to be in a motorcycle gang.
Then I grew up and didn't play adventure games.
Then one day I saw Machinarium and oooh'd and aaah'd and clicked "buy now." It was so cool at first, the cute robot, the mean policeman, the mechanical city, the music, the gorgeous backgrounds. I eventually became frustrated by some of the puzzles and relied heavily on a walkthrough to finish.
I've also tried out some Sam & Max, which went similarly. The solutions seemed random and didn't make good sense.
I also downloaded Secret of Monkey Island 1 & 2, and Syberia 1 & 2, the former for being point-and-click classics, and the latter for looking really interesting.
Fast-forward to me being bored on an airplane. I boot up my computer and go to start a point-and-click adventure of The Secret of Monkey Island because I have only a touchpad and can run the game on low power. I'm excited. It's supposed to be one of the most-loved point-and-click games ever. Maybe this one will bring me back to my childhood and reinvigorate my love of adventure games.
Pros: the usual suspects -- like the style, good voiceovers in the special edition, lots of personality, interesting characters and intriguing story and setting...
Cons: clunky interface -- Pushing buttons doesn't always work and I have to push things repeatedly to register sometimes. This can be really annoying for timed events, like carrying a mug of acidic grog and switching mugs before the grog melts the first mug. The button inevitably doesn't work and my mug melts, forcing me to go do the whole thing over. Also, there's a hidden edge to the screen. If you mouse to the apparent edge, the game cursor gets over-riden by the Windows mouse cursor and you can't click on anything. So you can never mouse to the edge of the screen. Want to move to the edge of the screen? Too bad! You have to take baby steps! The clunky buttons also make it so you can rarely skip dialogue that you've heard 20 times and really don't want to listen to anymore. Just mash that Backspace and hope it skips. The voices are great, but they get real old having to listen to the same lines over and over.
And then, the usual suspects -- too many of the solutions don't make any sense! They're not puzzles in this game. There aren't any patterns or anything like that, like I found in Machinarium. There are just objects you use on other objects.
Examples:
My first need for help was when I had to find a helmet so some carnies would let me launch out of a cannon. So I went looking for a helmet. I had a pot I'd found, but I was busy trying to fill it with grog to poison some dogs. It wouldn't fill up. I used the "H" hint system, which told me to give the pot to the carnies. Oh, okay. Yeah I guess a pot could be a helmet. I've seen that. But that particular pot doesn't look like a helmet. And when you get shot out of the cannon, the pot falls off your head anyway. Why did I need it?!
So the pot made some sense. But the next one is why I can't seem to get into these games. There's a part where you have to poison some dogs. I thought I needed to poison some meat I'd found to feed to the dogs to get past them. I'd figured out how to evade the cook and get some meat, figured out how to season the meat, but couldn't figure out how to poison it. There is grog all around, including a barrel of it with a skull on the side, and it's leaking slime green (poison alert?), so I just knew I needed to get some grog on the meat too. There was a chalice elsewhere I couldn't pick up, and the pot-helmet I couldn't use to fill with grog because 'I don't need that much.' So again, nothing left to do. Used H. H tells me to poison the meat with something in my inventory. I look. There is nothing in there. Breath mints. A flower. I use the mints. Nothing. Push H again. "Poison the meat with the yellow flower." What? But why? There is no indication that the flower is poisonous. If you 'look' at it, it just says it has a striking yellow color. How is that intuitive or indicative of poison? Sure, some plants are poisonous, but why would I think this flower is, especially with the presence of the obviously toxic grog? Lame.
At another point, I had to give an object to a troll as a toll to pass his bridge. He wanted food. I'd tried to give him everything under the sun, and finally obtained a carrot cake from a prisoner, who needed a file to get out of his cell. When you inspect the carrot cake, it just says "It's heavy." Okay. So I take it to the troll, who doesn't want it. That's like the 5th piece of food I've tried on him. I can't do anything else so I use H. H says "Look inside the cake." What? Why would I ever decide to look inside the cake? Because it is heavy? It's totally normal for cakes to be heavy. So, really? I can't go on because I didn't figure out to dig into a cake? I can't go on because I didn't figure out to use a flower to poison some meat? I can't go on because I didn't walk to the end of a pier to step on the edge of a plank and flip a bird off a red herring? I thought I could actually scare the bird like a normal person using any variety of things? Nope!
So. I've been using H whenever I get stuck. Usually it just tells me to do what I've already been trying and I then figure out a way to do it slightly differently and quite right. Sometimes I'd rather just play this game like an interactive movie with a walkthrough. It's very frustrating, but I do like the characters and am intrigued by the story.
Le Chuck.
Le sigh.
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Mar 6th, 2012 at 07:40:20 - Portal 2 (PC) |
Finished the single player 3 or 4 weeks ago and never wrote it up. Been spending all my time watching other people play single-player and co-op, yet haven't experienced co-op yet firsthand. I suppose it would be a bust by now since I know all the levels from observations. It was a race enough to beat the single-player without watching someone else do it first.
I really like this game, really everything in it. Wheatley is one of the best characters ever, and Cave Johnson is pretty awesome too (When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade! Make life take the lemons back! Get mad!). Speaking of Cave Johnson, apparently there was a real Cave Johnson, the 12th United States Postmaster General and Congressman from Tennessee, credited with introducing the postage stamp in 1847! For science?
GLaDOS was a definitely less funny than she was in Portal. She hit a low point in the early levels where she was unnecessarily degrading I felt, like the bit about your parents abandoning you and you being a loser or a failure or unloved or whatever she said. Once Wheatley took over though, GLaDOS perked up.
And of course, the cores. SPAAAAACE!
I like how the game is segmented into three distinct areas, what I've been calling New Aperture, Old Aperture, and Wheatley Aperture. New Aperture is a remake and extension of older Portal levels, is probably 1/3 - 1/2 of the game, and feels mostly familiar save for the new mechanics. Old Aperture blew my mind. Space expands tremendously and you really have to start thinking far away from yourself. Wheatley Aperture scales the vastness down a bit, but ramps up the number of segments of each individual level.
I found it interesting how difficulty rose and fell too. Each segmented area began very easy and ramped up the difficulty. Once you beat that tough final area in New Aperture, there's a break in the puzzle-solving and it goes back to being relatively straightforward in Old Aperture. Once you get through the tougher end levels of Old Aperture, the difficulty spirals downward again for the beginning of Wheatley Aperture. Granted, the simplicity of early Wheatley Aperture is a device for humor, but it's the same rise and fall pattern as the other segments.
My favorite new mechanic is probably the orange gel because it's fun to use. My least favorite? Probably the light funnels because things move so slowly in them. They have some neat applications, but they're kind of boring juxtaposed to the movement speed the orange gel provides.
The final battle was a letdown. I feel the game never culminated into a grand challenge. I definitely expected the final battle to be this huge sprawling puzzle-solving event where you have to utilize all your tools to take out Wheatley. Instead, it was pretty much like the end of Portal 1, a claustrophobic room, easy to beat once you memorize a simple pattern. Using blue gel and orange gel...I mean, I did that like 20 levels ago. Here's to hoping for challenging DLC and mods!
I would still like to give co-op a shot even though I've already seen it all. Some of the levels are really neat, and players have done an impressive job of working together to navigate the obstacles. My definite favorite has been this part when players have to create an infinite portal loop with orange gel on the floor. One player runs the infinite speeding loop and the other times a portal to launch that player across a gap, underneath a crusher, and safely to the other side. Then that player has to time a portal for the other player, who now does the infinite portal loop to launch to another platform. It's very cool.
I could go on and on about Portal 2, but I'll save it!
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Feb 10th, 2012 at 08:23:00 - Unblock Me (Other) |
This is my combined log on games like Unblock Me, Infecct, and countless other games that I keep downloading on my phone, playing briefly and then deleting, that have you do the same thing for hundreds of levels. The same thing that they seemingly all have you do is either matching 3 colored things, moving something from one end of somewhere to another, or drawing lines, or just some other little kindergartener activity that, in many cases, even a kindergartener can do. I do not get it. I don't understand the appeal. I get so unbelievably bored.
For Unblock Me, I'm looking at it right now. I made it to like level 40. Then the game auto-updated itself and deleted my save file or something, so I had to start over. What prompted me to write this is I looked at how many levels there are. If you play on Easy, you have 1200 levels. Move on to Intermediate for 1000 more. Advanced has 400. Expert also has 400. And then there's something called "Original Free" which has another 1200. Who in their right mind would want 4200 levels of moving a red block to the hole in the wall?
Infecct is another of these where you have to draw a line through blocks in a level, and the line can never cross itself, and you have to draw it through every block. It's got 364 levels.
My question isn't necessarily, "How is this fun?" because I usually enjoy them for half an hour or so, but "How is this fun after half an hour or so because after half an hour or so I realize I'm doing the exact same thing forever and ever." You will not convince me that Unblock Me is so neat that anyone on Earth needs 4200 levels. Or that Infecct is doing anything different on level 102 versus level 267. And Infecct and ones like it are especially dumb because each level is locked until you beat the one before it. So I really don't know if level 102 is different than 267, but I'm not drawing 266 levels of lines to find out.
People may say that these games are good for small doses. I agree a little bit. I played Unblock Me on the train for at least a month, but after those 40 levels, I realized like I said earlier that the next 40 are going to be the exact same, and so will the next 40 and the next 40, ad infinitum.
Yes, there is challenge. Yes, I have a goal. There's no narrative. There's no reward except the next level, which is invariably similar to the previous one. And I don't really feel smart for completing a level. It's like how in Angry Birds I only felt kind of smart, then the other half I felt lucky that the physics made the objects fall in the correct way.
Rant rant rant! Delete all these games or quit making obscene numbers of levels!
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