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Sep 11th, 2011 at 08:29:50 - Angry Birds (Other) |
When I got my new (first) smartphone last month, I was excited to be a part of the app-using world. I also figured I'd check out the few games that I keep hearing about over and over and over, the #1 of which is definitely Angry Birds (complete with t-shirts, plushies, and I heard even a TV show?!) I didn't know a thing about it besides you launch birds for some reason or another. I didn't know that it had a physics system, for example, or that there were a few different types of birds with different abilities.
After playing it at lunch or dinner here and there, I really don't get it. Part of me feels like I should hide under my desk after saying that I don't get it, to save myself from the gasps and dirty looks of the general public. But, it's what I said after the first time I played it. You just fling birds at stuff. I understand what people like about it. It's not un-fun, but I can't imagine ever playing it outside of some situation where I had nothing else to do, like if I'm eating by myself or forgot my book to take on the train. Anyway, flinging the birds is neat to watch. I like crossing my fingers hoping I hit the planks just right and hoping they collapse just right. I find that sometimes all the thinking and planning I can do to get a level just right simply does nothing for me. Then almost randomly the nth time I play a level I'm stuck on, everything will fall into place. It makes each fling of a bird exciting, but I feel like I get (un)lucky and that that's really the motivating force. It's like bowling. I'm not that good at bowling. I throw the ball and then the mystery of physics carries it down the lane and knocks some pins over. It's going right down the middle! It might be a strike! Awww, 7/10 split, damn! Then the next round I toss the same ball the same way and it's a strike and I get all excited and high five everybody.
I can't believe I compared Angry Birds to bowling, but it's accurate for me. And the general issue is that the times I would play a game like Angry Birds, those 'casual gaming' times on a train or at lunch or whatever, I much prefer reading. So I only have been using it as a "eh, I don't feel like carrying a book around." I've got a handful of other games on my phone. I tried one other one yesterday, Star Traders, which appeared to be a really complicated space RPG with a ton of factions and stars and a giant universe to explore...but I deleted it after 15 minutes because there's honestly no way I can get into that casually. And there were lots of typos. I made my friend laugh showing him some. At one point my crew and I landed on a planet, and I decided to explore with 17 crew members. It said something like "It was a very dangerous journey. You survived, but 16 of your crew members were killed by fell into a hole. You survived, but you were attacked and now you are blind in one eye." Sweet! 16 crew members killed by "fell in a hole" and now I'm a one-eyed space captain. I guess that makes me a space pirate. I got some other one called Everlands that looks like a badass card game that reminds me of the one in FFVIII or IX. I actually have high hopes for that one.
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Sep 11th, 2011 at 07:56:37 - Zeno Clash (PC) |
Really interesting game. The first thing that struck me was its unique look. I would describe it like...Mad Max meets dinosaurs meets sci-fi alien planet meets genetic freaks of nature meets lots of punching. The game looks beautiful, and yet the style reminds me of a nightmare. Think Elephant Man or a circus or Pigsy from Manhunt. The story is bizarre too. It's quite anthropological, as in, it's about family and kinship, in a way, and about freedom and reality in another. Basically, you killed your Father-Mother, and now your family is pissed as hell, and coming to kill you. You and this girl (girlfriend?) escape before being killed. You discuss with her where you've been the last month and what led you to kill Father-Mother, and much of this explanation is played in flashback segments as the narrative bounces back and forth from flashback (getting closer to Father-Mother) to present escape (running from your brothers and sisters). It's quite interesting and flows very well, from story to fighting, back to story.
The gameplay is all about punching people. You get a nice story-embedded tutorial in the beginning that totally piques your interest in plot. The punching feels awesome. It feels like you're really hitting someone hard. You can do various combos, block, dodge, throw, counter, and so on. There are also weapons, rudimentary pistols, crossbow, shotgun, grenades, and giant mallets, all of which are pretty handy at the right time. You can't just go around shooting everyone because if you get hit hard enough, your weapon flies out of your hands. Same thing for the enemies, and they'll run for guns sometimes, which can be deadly. Much of the fighting is about control. Say there are 3 enemies and a shotgun on the ground. Maybe two of them come after you and one goes after the shotgun. If you ignore the shotgun guy, he'll just stand back and shoot at you, which hurts. So you've got to switch targets a lot and control the gun. It's pretty fun. My only real complaints with the fighting are that blocking is really difficult to do right (for me at least), and sometimes trying to cancel or switch targets is wonky and gets you beat up or killed.
Boss fights are generally easy, with the exception of the very last boss. The game itself has a pretty good difficulty level. It ramps up by tossing more, smarter enemies at you, tossing more weapons out, and on a couple fights, really giving you a disadvantage in terms of environmental layout. This one that took me a while to beat was in a narrow town street. There were two enemies with guns up in the rafters above the street, then two enemies in the street, one with dual pistols. It took a lot of patience to learn how to manage all 4 of them...keep moving, keep the pistols and other gun(s) that was laying on the ground away from the two on the ground, and kill them while trying your hardest to stay out of sight of the snipers. I finally got that far after 20 times or so. Then just take out the snipers with a gun, which was the easy part. There were def some frustrating battles, but just keep trying and you'll get them.
I'm positive the fighting would have gotten very repetitive after much longer because there are only so many moves and guns, and the game repeats enemies like crazy, like the main sister and the main brother you have to fight at least 5 times, kind of like *sigh* after the 3rd time. Same thing with this one boss. You have to beat him 3 times. So in that sense, I'm glad the game was short, like real short, just 4 hours. In the other sense, the sense that there was so much creativity packed into that 4 hours, I wish it were longer. Sequel maybe? Or another game by the same team? The credits were real short. It looked like it was basically made by 3 brothers and a handful of other people helping.
Good stuff, seriously spend $5 on this if nothing else than to look at for a couple hours.
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Sep 3rd, 2011 at 13:30:17 - Borderlands (PC) |
And because I didn't write enough today...I'm calling off Borderlands. It looks great, neat concept, but I can tell it's going to be suuuuper repetitive. I put 5 hours in already the last few days and I've done two things: run and shoot. I've run across one thing: wasteland. I've shot two categories of thing: ugly dog-aliens and bandits. This game is just crying out for more variety. It's too bad because the shooting (in smaller doses) is pretty good shooting. The weapons are real satisfying to fire, they feel good. It's a game built around tons of guns. I read somewhere that there are like 17 million potential types of gun you can find. Wow.
Things off the top of my head that would make Borderlands better:
Borderlands needs more NPCs or interesting objects to interact with. I met like...4 NPCs. And it's too bad there aren't more because I liked them. The game is funny. There's a doctor without a med degree, a crazy redneck car rental guy, an old man without a leg, and a dancing robot...There's absolutely no interaction though between your character and anything else in the game, except this disembodied face/voice that is guiding you toward "the vault," the goal of the game. Even then she just talks at you, but at least it makes you seem special. No one else treats you as anything but an errand-person, and you can never talk back. Even interesting objects would be better than what's currently there.
There are objects to interact with, but they are (1) loot and (2) things containing loot. For me, there is waaaay too much crap strewn around to pick up. There are little ammo boxes and things all over the frikin place. I spent a lot of time staring at the ground (because you have to look down to push E to pick stuff up). I understand this is a game about loot, but Diablo with guns this ain't.
I guess a corollary of this would be less space. The maps are big, like real big, and luckily you can get a car to drive around (and run enemies over), but you've got to run a lot. I went in one boss HQ for this quest that I assume ends the first area, which I may go finish out of curiosity (just stopped before turning in the quest), and that mess took me like 2 hours to go find and get in and out of his hideout. The hideout is massive. Way off-putting for a first big mission. It would be cooler if there were more variation in what I had to do, but nah, just run and shoot enemies.
The HQ mission was really really tedious for a couple reasons. One, there's no map except the big one where you push M. There's no minimap. There needs to be a minimap because locations of things are not straightforward. There are cliffs and all kinds of barricades and things outside, and inside that HQ, there were like 50 rooms and it was super easy to get turned around. Second, Borderlands does my pet peeve, too many respawning enemies. I ran through the HQ most of the way, got a bit lost, found some robot I needed to repair, went to look for oil to repair it by backtracking, and had to kill roomfuls of respawns. Couldn't find the oil, so I just wandered for a while, killing more respawns, finally got to the boss, died a few times, had to kill respawns. Killed the boss, and they made me run alllll the way back through this giant complex, and you guessed it, I had to kill respawns the entire way. Then you have to run alllll the way back through this big outdoor bandit camp where, yep, there are respawns, and then run alllll the way back to town. So. Much. Unnecessary. Running. And. Shooting.
So I'm level 13 or 14. There are four 'classes' in the game, each of which has one special ability. You never get another special ability. So all the 'classes' are the same except for one extra thing they can do. Mine could 'phase walk,' which meant she could go invisible for like 10 seconds and melee someone. That's it. I basically got an invisible melee attack. WOOHOO. There are talent trees, but they are only like 4 rows deep, not really that different, and don't unlock anymore abilities! They only modify damage and do other predictable passive things.
There's really so much that could have been done to this game to make it better. I think to sum my grievances, it's barren. There's nothing there, and what is there is just the same thing over and over. Repeating. I thought the rewards of constantly upgraded weapons and doing quests would keep me into it, but I've played so many more interesting quest-loot games. Actually, I've got it. This feels like an empty single-player MMO. Not a good thing!
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Sep 3rd, 2011 at 08:46:14 - We Love Katamari (PS2) |
Who loves katamari? We love katamari.
This game was funny. It was totally self-reflexive. It was all about how popular Katamari Damacy was, and the King just wants to please his fans on Earth. I mean, all it did was reference how much everyone loved Katamari Damacy and how awesome the King and his tights, hairstyles, head, etc. were. I loved it. And it retained all the quirkiness of the original, though at times it felt like it was trying too hard. We <3 Katamari was just like the first one except you roll stars for fans instead of for the King. I don't think they could have ever topped the story of the original, where the King got drunk and knocked all the stars out of the sky, but you know, they tried.
The levels were a bit more varied, especially their locations. One level is underwater, another you make a snowman, and the final level (I guess to one-up the final level in KD), you roll up the sun using all the stars you've rolled throughout the game. I thought it was interesting taking requests from fans, since they thought up some pretty random reasons to make you roll a katamari. The one I remember best is a request from a sumo wrestler who is too small :( He got beat by some other sumo wrestler, so you actually take him instead of a katamari and roll him up over food so he gets nice and fat and round and sumo-ish, and the goal of the level is to roll up his opponent. There was a really pretty level where you roll up fireflies to make the katamari brighter so this studious student can study at night. So yeah, more of the same silly fun.
Just a note, I've been playing games with other people lately, which is weird. I guess because I have a few roommates now, I just kind of have an audience sometimes if I'm playing in the living room. Like, H got really into watching me play Growlanser, kept asking me all about the story even outside of playing, and he came to work the other night and watched me finish Bioshock. J has been playing We <3 Katamari on and off with me. He sat and we alternated playing for a couple hours this afternoon until we finished it. We played a few head-to-head matches too (I won 2 and then let him win the 3rd!). I kind of forgot what it's like having people watch me play, since I'm always the one watching other people play. Kind of a strange feeling being on the other side of that. Other than that, I remember how much fun it is to sit next to people and play games. I played plenty with people, just usually in MMO form over the internet, over the last few years, but haven't played a lot with people or just with people in the same room really since I lived with Daniel like 5 years ago. Crazy. It's fun!
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