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Jan 12th, 2012 at 12:30:33 - Braid (PC) |
So I've fallen behind on updating this. I was home for Christmas, and then there was the Steam winter sale where I played a bunch of random games for achievements, and then I came home and played even more random games. I'll just go through some memorable moments that I have had in the last month. And if this sounds weird, it's because I'm using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a voice-to-text program, that I just installed today. I'm learning how to use it and training it by dictating gamelogs.
I played Braid for the first time visiting P in the hospital. Z and I kept him company while he was recovering from appendicitis or food poisoning or something painful sounding. I brought him his laptop and we all played Braid for like four hours. It was a very collaborative effort. We were all giddy and playfully competitive from trying to solve puzzles first. We took turns at the controls.
This time I played Braid in the Chicago airport where I had a three-hour layover followed by a three-hour delay, and I was lucky enough to snipe a seat next to a power outlet, where I happily played Braid for a couple hours. The first thing that struck me was how pretty the hand-painted backgrounds were. I remembered them from last time. I also remembered the story about time and regret and saving the princess. Essentially it seemed to be about the game designer's relationship with his girlfriend.… Or ex-girlfriend. Regardless of the emo-ness of the story, I find it quite compelling. Like Mario, the Princess is always at a different castle when you reach the end of the level.
I also remember a lot of the puzzles and solutions from P's hospital extravaganza. However, I forgot a lot. I remember the bit about manipulating time. I remember the objects that are not affected by time reversal. I remember some of the puzzles where you have to slow down time so that objects unaffected by time interact in specific ways with objects that are affected by time. This particular level involved I think three doors and three keys or something. Actually, as I'm sitting here thinking about it, it's really hard to describe. So, the controls are basically left right jump and rewind time. When you rewind time everything moves backwards in time except certain colored objects, or sparkly objects or something. So some of the keys are sparkling and some of the doors are sparkling, which means that some keys can be reused and some doors can be reused when you rewind time. So you have to figure out in what sequence to use each key on the doors in order to make it down the hallway where there is a puzzle piece. The levels are somewhat nonlinear, and the puzzle pieces are scattered around in such a way that you have to come back to many levels later once you figured out tricks to get earlier puzzle pieces. We never really figured out the point of the puzzles because it paints a little picture of the story ( and they let you walk across them like a ledge) space and that's about it as far as we can tell.
There's not a lot to say, and I'm mostly just writing this to train Dragon, but those painted backgrounds are so pretty and stand out so vividly that playing the game feels like a dreamscape to me. I've got a few games to finish before I picked this one back up, but I look forward to getting back into it.
Oh my God, I just selected all and said copy and it selected all and then replaced all of it with the word copy. That was scary.
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Dec 8th, 2011 at 15:20:54 - Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie (360) |
Having heard forever that this one is totally worth playing, I finally bought it (for the second time) to play. I bought a PC version a year ago but it didn't work with Vista and I could never patch it or anything, so grabbed the 360 version a couple weeks ago. The great thing about this is that it's a film game that is indeed worth playing. The only other good one I can think of is the Chronicles of Riddick game, so it's an elite club.
King Kong is short and sweet. It follows the movie pretty closely from what I can remember and all the movie cast provides voiceovers. Jack Black is the best voice for sure, and the Ann character has such a blood-curdling scream. You play as the Jack character. It's funny though, I don't think he's EVER shown because the game is in first-person. So all the other characters, yeah, I recognize them from the movie, but MY character I have no clue what he looks like because I don't remember from the movie!
There are a few really cool things about this game. Even though it's from 2005, it's pretty. The environments look good, and Kong and the other big dinosaurs especially are epic looking. I read an article once that was talking about the horrible facial animations for the human characters, Ann in particular, and that one was spot on. I don't even think their lips move when they talk. It doesn't take away from anything though. The game is from a first-person perspective and you play as Jack AND King Kong. The King Kong sections involve big monster fights and ape-platforming, swinging from branches and such. Playing as Kong is awesome. The controls make it feel just like you're maneuvering a giant gorilla. It slows down and feels powerful. You can go into "Fury Mode" by mashing Y a lot. Kong beats his chest, roars, and then deals a ton of extra damage. The game is completely linear, and the Kong sections really benefit from this because it makes the platforming fast and purposeful. See, Kong is always doing something specific, chasing a dinosaur, running away with Ann, or whatever, so he has these short and intense platforming sequences.
I thought the game would be more an FPS, but it's more action-adventure from a first-person view than a shooter. Your main weapons won't be guns, but spears. Guns are kind of like your "oh shit" button. So there are spears laying around everywhere. There is also fire everywhere. If you dip the spear in fire it becomes a flame-tipped spear, which does more damage and can be used to ignite grass. This is important because apparently on Skull Island grass and knee-height shrubbery is impossible to walk through. It must be burned away. I wouldn't call any segments of the game puzzles, but they could have been. Maybe they're puzzle-like. Sometimes you need to burn grass, but there's no fire in sight, so you've got to set out with a spear and find fire. There are these gates all around too that require handles to turn to open the gate, but the handles will be missing, so you've got to set out to find the handles. It usually takes just a minute to spot them and another minute to get it, but sometimes there's a small sequence of things to do in order to get the handle.
Enemies can all be killed with spears, except the giant V-Rexes, which can only be killed by Kong. It's kind of unrealistic to kill a big dinosaur with two flaming spears, but at least # of spears to kill varies in proportion to the difficulty of the dinosaur. There are a couple other weird things, like why are there crates of ammo and guns on Skull Island? Who hung ammo crates up by ropes? Why are some of the fires located way up high in ridiculously stupid places that no one would ever look and serve no purpose (I'm looking at you, Millipede level).
That's about it. Fun game. I think it took me maybe 7 hours. It's divided up into really short chunks, usually probably in the 10 minute range, but some as short as walking through a tunnel or watching a cut scene for like 1 minute.
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Nov 26th, 2011 at 21:00:04 - Okami (PS2) |
I can't believe I haven't written about Okami yet. I've meant to do it a couple times. In Okami, you play as a reincarnated god, in the form of a white wolf, on a quest to save the world from evil. The story is rooted in Japanese mythology, which is such a cool inspiration. The one thing I knew about Okami beforehand was that you get to paint with a brush, and that different brush strokes do various things, like attacks or whatever. So basically, you go around learning different brush strokes from different 'brush gods,' and I assume these are part of the Japanese mythology. I recognized one, which is the rabbit in the moon pounding rice cakes. Most of the brush gods are hidden, captured, lost, and you get them during or at the end of quest/exploration segments. There's really no pattern to when you learn brush strokes, which I like. I've learned 3 in pretty rapid succession, and then gone for hours without learning one. The game is linear, but it's not predictably so, and there's a lot of exploration to be done, including backtracking to use newly acquired brush strokes to unlock things you couldn't unlock the first time around. One other thing I really like about it is that the locations all seamlessly blend into one another. What I mean is that in most adventure games or RPGs or whatever, there's the overland map, then towns, then dungeons, and they're all delineated. In Okami, they flow into one another, and half the time you don't realize you're in a dungeon or even doing a quest until you're halfway through it. The quests are like that too, seamlessly integrated into the story and the exploration that you'd do anyway. There's no one with a yellow exclamation mark over his head.
Speaking of exploration, the game's art style is beautiful. I can't describe it to do it justice. Just go watch a video or two. The music and sounds as well, very cool. Characters talk in this weird gibberish. My roommates keep asking me if it's Japanese, because it's obviously a Japanese game. I keep saying no, it's just gibberish and you're supposed to read the subtitles, and they keep saying how weird it is. I like it though! It's somehow charming, like the other 99% of the game.
The 'celestial brush' is your main tool in the game to defeat enemies, solve puzzles, and do neat platforming tricks. I've no idea how far along I am in the game, but I've still got 3 brush techniques to go. Some of the ones I've learned so far are slash (which lets you cut enemies in half or just attack them, and basically...cut stuff in half), bomb (which lets you blow holes in walls and is really effective to attack enemies), vine (which lets you draw a vine connecting your character to these pink flowers, pulling your character to the flower in the air to reach high places and things), slow time (which lets you get past fast enemies, confuses guards, and so on), and more. There are also regular skills you can buy like double-jump, super dig (the main character, being a wolf, can dig up treasure in the ground -- super dig lets you dig in hard surfaces like rocks), and dodge. Each brush move has a specific brush stroke. So like the vine, you drawn a connecting line. The bomb, you draw a circle with a line through it like a fuse. The slash, you just draw a slash through whatever it is you want to slash. To make the sun come out, draw a circle in the sky. To make the moon come out, draw a crescent in the sky. It's all very intuitive and the game is thankfully not too harsh on how specific you draw. It really helps artistically challenged folks like myself. Apparently there is a Wii version now too where you use the Wiimote as the brush! Sounds awesome.
I can't say enough about how amazing this game is. The story is excellent, the characters are fun and unique, everything about the gameplay is fantastic, the bosses are epic. The only only only little thing I can complain about is that there is too much dialogue fluff, especially from Issun, a 'traveling artist' who rides on your back and serves as your voice since wolves can't talk. Issun is chatty and likes to comment on women's breasts, which gets old fast. On the other hand, NPCs all have two sets of dialogue, so you can talk to everyone twice and it'll be different, or elaborate on the first thing they said, most of the time. That's cool. I never like it when NPCs say one thing over and over, or when most of them say 1 thing, and then a few of them say a whole lot of things and give you a quest, and you end up talking to everyone 10 times hoping to exhaust them and find secrets and things. Okami is good about NPC dialogue! I'll finish the game this week, very much looking forward to it.
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Nov 6th, 2011 at 12:35:06 - Gears of War 3 (360) |
I actually bought a new game, whoa. I haven't bought a brand new newly released game since the last WoW expansion, and before that the previous WoW expansion, and before that the previous WoW expansion...and before that I don't remember. But this Gears of War series is an incredible experience. It's only gotten better through the series. J and I played the first chapter of Gears 3 today and we were both just blown away in any area you could name.
From the very beginning, we could tell a difference in visuals. It looks phenomenal, way bigger a jump between 1 & 2. There are new visual flares. The very first mission reminded me of the Sandman fight in Arkham Asylum. The environment builds itself and comes into form in this dreamscape flashback as Marcus & Co. defend his father.
Another difference is that weapons now have tooltips. It's real handy. In Gears 2 they introduced multiple types of many of the weapons. This time around I can finally see what the gun is before I pick it up. It'll say "Lancer" instead of just have a picture. Big improvement.
The storytelling is a really strong point as this series progresses. G1 didn't have a whole lot, but the characters were good. G2 really started fleshing out a couple of the characters, Dom especially, and their relationships to family members. G3 is phenomenal and really creative in its dealing with Cole Train's past. It's kind of an odd segment, very unique. I really liked it. It involves football. And the larger story revolves around Marcus and his father.
Chapter 1 is told from two perspectives. They intertwine. You lead one squad doing one thing, and the other squad doing another thing. Very cool.
The enemies are cooler. You're no longer fighting only the Locust, but also the Lambent, who most importantly explode when they die. The explosions are very nice to watch. My favorite enemy thus far is the...Globber or something. He throws these giant glowing blobs that explode, kind of like a catapult. He is tough to kill! Then there are other enemies that do like a Resident Evil thing. You kill them and they just sprout heads and become more deadly, then kill those, and they sprout legs and run around, and take a while to die. They're fun to fight for sure.
That's all I have to say so far. Just a giant WOW. Oh yeah, and the environments and cover are all somewhat destructible now. Looking forward to continuing on with J on hardcore difficulty, and jumping into some multiplayer, buying a headset and playing with M. Yay new game!
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