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Jun 24th, 2012 at 13:15:12 - Child of Eden (360) |
This game is sweet. Also difficult. N insisted I borrow it probably a year ago, and I finally decided to try it out because I want to give all his games back. I also tried out his Darksiders for a minute. He also insisted it was amazing, but it didn't interest me at all. I played 5 minutes and put it back on the shelf. I figure I'll wait for Darksiders 2 and see how that fares before I commit to this one.
Anyway, Child of Eden on the other hand did interest me, but in a different way at first than later on. At first I just thought it was like a rail shooter with Kinect, which is awesome because I never use my Kinect. It was a mandatory buy with my Xbox because Singapore ONLY sold the Kinect bundles for a long time, and that's when I happened to get dead set on a new console. So finally, something to play on it! So I popped it in, recalibrated my Kinect, and set about trying to shoot things.
You have two weapons, a lock-on gun and an autocannon. Use your right hand for lock-on gun and your left for autocannon. I had trouble trying to switch guns. Put one hand down, raise the other, and there was always a hiccup where the game was like "which gun?!??" I played the first two levels with Kinect but I really didn't like the controls! It could be because my Kinect isn't in an optimal spot, or it could be that the controls just aren't as perfect as I wish, or a combination. As I realized later, it was probably also that I wasn't playing the game right. I switched to the controller, which was much easier. I played through the first two levels again, but then I couldn't unlock the third! You get stars for beating the levels. I'd only managed 2 stars each level, and you need more than that for the third level. I was at a loss for what to do because I went and re-played them and didn't get anymore stars. So I went to the internet and learned some valuable things. I learned that I was going about playing wrong.
Actually I had the GENRE of the game all wrong, which is almost embarrassing, but how was I supposed to know?! I was just shooting things, but apparently it's a music game. I mean, I knew I was making some music by shooting, but it never occurred to me that that was the objective, to shoot enemies in time with the beat. I don't recall the tutorial ever telling me I could lock on to multiple targets, but that's what you're supposed to do to get point multipliers to get a higher score to get more stars. So back to it I went, replayed a level, unlocked level 3, and then spent the next hour dying on level 3, getting just a little bit farther each time. Normally if I died on one level (and had to repeat from scratch every time) over and over, I'd be like 'screw this' and quit. But no, Child of Eden is really something else. The game looks beautiful and the soundtrack and your part it producing it is freaking amazing. I've played and enjoyed some of these newer music games like Audiosurf and The Polynomial, but none of those are quite like Child of Eden. The better you time your shots, the more your part in the music sounds right. It sounds good even if you suck, but it's really rewarding to work on your timing, not only because you get more stars and can progress, but it's just fun and you really get in the zone trying to stay on the beat. I could see easily losing hours to sitting there nodding and tapping my foot to perfect button presses and wrist flicks to get those 8x perfect multipliers.
Long story short, N isn't getting this game back any time soon, haha. Unless he asks. I'm not a jerk! But it's incredible how the game changed when I realized that I was going about it wrong. And also now I want to go back and try the Kinect again that I know what I'm doing.
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Jun 24th, 2012 at 12:54:54 - Bag It! (Other) |
Briefly, I had this on my Android, but I had to wipe it and have the phone serviced, so bye-bye all mobile games. I had been playing this on trains for a long time. It's amusing, but not something I'll download again. Basically, you arrange groceries in a grocery bag. There are several modes. In the main game, the food moves across the top of the screen, and you have to pack the grocery bag as full as you can without squashing too much food. There are different foods like bread (which is tall and skinny, light and weak), watermelons (which are short and long, heavy and strong), milk cartons, orange juice boxes, egg cartons, etc. They're different sizes and you can rotate them as you see fit. Some are strong and can support a lot of food being placed on top of them, like watermelons, and others, like the egg cartons, are weaker and break easily, so you'd want to place them on top or stack bread or something light on them. I had fun trying to arrange the food and trying to get the bonus objectives. Other game modes had you trying to squish a lot or doing a time attack. Each food is kind of like a character too. The egg carton was my favorite. He had a mustache and a monocle.
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Jun 24th, 2012 at 12:46:29 - Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (PC) |
I totally caved to all the praise this game got and it was one of the reasons I bought that Humble Indie Bundle. But I gotta say I didn't really enjoy it on the whole. It just seems to have this 'cool retro indie' thing going for it that everyone is loving these days.
Pros: excellent pixelated visuals, soundtrack & sound effects, zelda love
Cons: boring gameplay, mood feels wrong mostly thanks to weird writing and language, illogical puzzles, TWITTER
For the pros, yeah it looks all retro which is very cool these days. But it's not just old school looking, it does sweet things with pixels. They animate ever-so-subtly to add apparent motion to the background. These visual throwback games should take notes because for me it's the difference between rolling my eyes at it and dropping my jaw at it.
The music is great and fits the game perfectly. The sound effects are enchanting and remind me somewhat of 'calming' games like Osmos, these airy blips and synthesized droplet notes. I loved everything about the sound, except the voiceovers, which fall under con category 'mood feels wrong.' A neat thing about this game is that it's also an EP for this musician, John Guthrie. I don't know who he is and I don't particularly care, but he did a nice job here, and it's something I'd like as standalone music too. It's also a neat way to distribute your music, wrapping it as an EP/game. He's in the game as himself briefly too, which is cool one time and just weird another time (again, see con: mood feels wrong).
For the cons, let's start with the worst. Twitter. This game really wants you to tweet about it and it's annoying and intruding as hell. Every time there is dialogue or any text whatsoever, this little Twitter tag pops up the top right of the screen. If you mouse over it, it asks "Tweet this?" No I don't want to fucking tweet this. Every single line of text! Which on one level is impressive that each piece of text is 140 characters or less. I applaud brevity, but I enthusiastically boo the devs insisting that I should tweet "The girl named girl and Logfella are sitting in the cabin." I can't think of much that people on my SNSes could care less about. BOOOOO!
Second, as you can tell from the girl named girl and Logfella, the writing is a mix of clever and irreverent. I actually like the girl named girl. But I didn't like Logfella...until I realized the dog was named Dogfella. Then I thought it was funny. There's a lot of alliteration, especially with the letter 'S.' It becomes over-the-top silly. I'm sure I didn't get a lot of the references in the game, but the main quest is most obviously and unabashedly Zelda's. You recover the Triforce for God's sake. And I said that the language and the writing make the mood feel off. The character says things like "There are three graves and we wondered what was up with that" or "We were totally jazzed about the awesomeness of that deer we just saw." Jazzed? Awesome and cool? What's up with that? I don't think it fits. I mean it fits, but I don't think it SHOULD fit. It's a fantasy game, but it has this modern bro-nerd-trying-hard-to-be-hip-and-ironic language. The visuals are cool and the sounds are cool, and the language just doesn't mesh. Also the voiceovers are weird. It sounds like the devs just leaned in to their laptop microphone in their bedroom and started talking "Hey...So uuh, you don't say much do you? Yyyyyep." It's not funny and it sounds out of place.
Finally, gameplay. The game was first released on touch devices and ported over to PC, but it's still obviously for touch devices first. If it had standard adventure game controls it would be fine, but they're below par. You play the whole game with the mouse just clicking and holding left-button for everything. It's just really boring. The fighting is boring and the wandering is boring if you're not busy marveling at the visuals or the sound, interacting with objects and things is tedious, especially the puzzles. Puzzles in this game stumped me completely at first. They all have to do with using this sworcery spell and just figuring out which order/which things in the environment to click on. It's not usually logical, just kind of start clicking on stuff and see what lights up.
I quit playing halfway through in the beginning of chapter 3 because I was stuck and when I looked up what to do in a FAQ, I couldn't believe the solution. I won't say it in case someone reads this and wants to play the game because it will totally spoil it. But I will say, study that book very carefully and you might figure it out. Let's just say that even if I wanted to continue, I'd have to wait until next week. Like the character names, I think this solution is both clever and stupid. Like, I enjoy the IDEA of it, but I don't enjoy being on the receiving end of it.
So, in the end, I can understand why this game got a lot of praise, especially looking at it as a mobile game. It's clever and innovative, and has a great style to it. But it's also got a lot of flaws. I'd like to see its strengths used and improved upon, perhaps in a more serious offering. Also it is Supershort. But I guess it's an EP, so it's forgivable.
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Jun 22nd, 2012 at 15:35:48 - Super Meat Boy (PC) |
Just a quick one here. Came home from a night out, not tired, sitting at my computer eating some prata and drinking tea, needed something to do to kill time until I got tired, found my way into my 'games to play on my laptop' folder and clicked Super Meat Boy. I had 0 interest in this game, as I generally dislike platformers, especially these retro ones that seem to be very twitchy and rely on lots of developed skill and memorization. But, it came along with a Humble Indie Bundle I bought, so what the hell, I thought, I'll give it a spin.
First impressions: Okay, this isn't as hard as I thought it would be. [fast forward nearer to the end of chapter one, 10-15 minutes later] What the freaking hell is this madness? The game ramps up difficulty like you wouldn't believe. I got frustrated enough to quit on the first boss battle. I'm sure I could have beaten it and kept going a bit, but I didn't like the direction the game was headed, i.e., I invest a significant amount of effort to master new bits to move on in the game, die an outrageous amount (final tally: 152 deaths in chapter 1, 1/2 an hour's play time), and just get frustrated enough to quit farther down the line. Best to quit while I'm ahead...or stuck bad the first time...which is kind of like being ahead.
The game is super fast-paced. You're a little meat square and each level you have to save your girlfriend from the evil Dr. Fetus who slaps her and takes her away to the next level whenever you reach her. You can run, sprint and jump (so far at least). There are increasing obstacles. I got as far as buzzsaws.
Here's the kicker though. After I quit, I went on Youtube to see how the hell people played this and I found a gold mine, a series called "Until I Rage," where this user plays difficult, frustrating, and crappy games until he can't stands it no more and rage quits. So I watched him play Super Meat Boy for a long time. There are absolutely hilarious moments in his videos. He makes comments as he plays, makes a lot of 'jumping' noises that sound like constipation, pleads 'why?!' quite often to a god or jesus or unnamed watcher who most certainly abandoned him to the Sisyphean fate Super Meat Boy imposes. And every now and then, he goes into a mild expletive-laced rage. I applaud the guy. He made it 2.5 hours and into chapter 5 of Super Meat Boy in one sitting.
Besides the rage, I find his video series fascinating because he tries games that he's never played before. So what we have is video and audio footage of a noob. This guy thinks out loud a lot, so I can watch and listen to him making sense of Super Meat Boy. When he comes upon something new, he says out loud like "what the fuck is this? looks like a jelly. yeah, some kind of jelly. bet i die if i touch it. [touches it and dies] yep! ok, don't do that again" or "what the hell, where am i supposed to go now? buzzsaws above and below. i guess i'll just drop down. [drops down and dies but sees his platform] whoa! down, but not there. need to fall left." You can watch and listen to him developing an understanding of what he needs to do to overcome obstacles, how to deal with new information, how he deals with time and space in the game, and so on. It's pretty cool stuff to think about, and it's all just sitting right there on YouTube, him and who knows how many other gameplay videos like his.
Anyway, here's a link if anyone wants to check out the stage that finally did him in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8RstHfzO_w
I played Bastion over the last couple weeks, and this appears to be another example where a controller is superior to the keyboard. I played with the keyboard, and though I didn't encounter any real issues, I know I would have when it got more complex. So when I watched this YouTuber playing with a gamepad, I was thinking how much smoother his movements were. Also quite fascinating how different input affects player performance. You can read 1000 comments where players sound off on gamepad vs. keyboard for this game, and others.
I've no plans to load Super Meat Boy ever again, but there is a cool feature here: user-created levels. Actually that's what I found first, somehow stumbling upon them before I found the story mode. Let me just say, people are insane! I loaded a bunch of user maps and I just don't have any words. Nothing makes you feel old and 'behind the times' when you can't keep up with a game like the ones you used to play when you were a kid. Super Meat Boy vs. Super Mario Brothers? Ehh, same same but different. I think an NES would explode if you fed it a Super Meat Boy.
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