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Jan 10th, 2011 at 12:46:00 - Audiosurf (PC) |
I'm not trying to make a ton of new entries and logs, but I'm sitting around at my mom's with not much else to do but read, watch TV, and play games, and so it's happening.
I've downloaded a lot of new music since I've been home this break and decided to open up Audiosurf to "ride" some of it. I've watched videos of Audiosurf, but playing it is better! I love how you can feel the track moving underneath you to the beat and tempo of the music. I tried out various oldies, metal, rock, techno, and acoustic stuff to get a feel for some different things. Audiosurf creates a unique track for each song. The point of the game is to navigate your ship left and right to stack blocks, 3 of a color, that come down the track to the beat. More intense parts of songs have "hot" colored blocks, and they come faster and are worth more points. Slower parts have cool colors like blue and purple and are easier to stack, but worth less. Syncopated beats make bumpy tracks, and things will speed up and slow down during stops and gos. I found that the most fun songs to play aren't just super fast ones, but ones that change tempos and beats because it makes the tracks quite dynamic. Super fast metal songs are fun and totally intense, and slow acoustic tracks are mellow, but the slow-fast-slow stuff, whatever you can find like that, is my favorite.
I am most surprised by all the different variations of gameplay. One mode you just match colored blocks and avoid gray ones. All these different modes are with different ships, so one you can rearrange the board to match colors, another you can grab a block and hold it to use later, another you can jump or spread out to cover all 3 lanes at once. It's pretty cool, but I had the most fun with just the basic "casual" modes. The others are just too insane for me to care about perfecting, but it's awesome that so many hardcore play styles are supported. I tried some technical death metal in Ironmode and I don't know how anyone could keep up! I definitely foresee playing this from time to time in the future. In a way, it makes me pay attention to the music more than I would if I were listening to stuff while doing something else since the music is wrapped up in the movement of the character.
I even showed it to my mom and she things it's neat. We did co-op Beatles songs for a while. The universal stat tracking is awesome too. I didn't play a single song that hadn't been played before, which surprised me. You can even hold top spots and it tells you you're in first place for some song. I imagine this game brings out the competitiveness of anyone who likes it, even if it's just a little competitiveness. I sure feel it! I'm going to tell some folks about it and see if I can't get friends to match scores with. Cool game. I will be riding some new music this week!
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Jan 9th, 2011 at 23:45:34 - Darwinia (PC) |
Darwinia started crashing on me at the Pattern Buffer level with various errors at various points, so I downloaded the latest patch and it erased my profile and save game. Haaaate. Annoying because the game is a bit tedious. I just looked to see how close I was to the end. Turns out I'd done 7/10 missions, gotten all the available weapons and units, and seen all the enemies. Therefore, I have gotten enough of Darwinia. It's not a long game. 7 missions probably took me 4 or 5 hours, but like I said, the missions get tedious because you've got to babysit units so they don't get stuck moving from point A to point B. It's a neat game, looks like geometry class and a classic arcade. My favorite thing to do was to take my 4 squads of 6 units each and just run into a web of viruses spewing grenades and air strikes. The blasts and ensuing rumbles and screen shakes were satisfying. Mass carnage.
I don't have a whole lot to say, much less than I thought I would. I think I overhyped the game for myself and it was just a bit of a letdown. I was expecting a faster pace and definitely expected not to have to babysit moving units around the map. Maybe that's just something that really inhibits my enjoyment of a game, the babysitting units. Oh well! I'm glad I played a bit of it because I enjoyed the visuals, the premise, and all the unique things about it.
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Jan 8th, 2011 at 21:50:17 - Darwinia (PC) |
Darwinia is a neat little game. If I have to pick a game that it reminds me of most, it's Lemmings, and if I have to pick a genre, it's RTS, yet it's very unique and only vaguely resembles the above. The goal of the game is to destroy these computer viruses that are taking over Darwinia, a computer program with little digital living beings called Darwinians. The scientist who created Darwinia guides you through the game, offering help and telling you what you need to do to help the Darwinians and eliminate the viruses.
Basically, it's a game about troop movement and capturing points on the map. Right now I can create 3 unit types: squads that shoot stuff, engineers that capture stuff, and generals (or commanders or something) that lead Darwinians to points on the map. The viruses are little Snake(the phone game)-like creatures, and then there are beefier ones that are like Centipede and some giant spider-like ones. You can tell the scientist to work on upgrading things like laser gun range, number of units in a squad, or number of "programs" you can run at once. When you begin a level, you run "programs," which are your units or groups of units. So at the beginning of the game, you have three available programs, and might choose two squads and an engineer. You run around the level and kill viruses with the squad, and the engineers can collect their souls, which are the souls of devoured Darwinians, and can turn the souls in at a particular building to produce Darwinians, which you then usually have to save by moving them somewhere using a leader-type Darwinian. The path-finding in the game can be annoying sometimes when units get stuck on some piece of geometry or walk into death walls and explode...but all other AI seems good so far. Using the general leader types to rally the Darwinians is also slow and boring because you have to move the leader near to the Darwinians to get them to move to the rally point, and Darwinians naturally drift apart, and running up mountains is slow, so you can spend a lot of time trying to grab the Darwinians, get them all moved to a certain point, and then by the time you do that, they've began drifting again. But I imagine I'll get faster at it.
So your squad goes and kills things, and your engineers come behind to capture power buildings. These will power satellites, the soul generator things that spit out Darwinians, and warp gates. If you open a warp gate, it opens up a new level. Satellites allow you to transport around the map. Then you can also pick up Research, which so far has netted me the ability to toss grenades and assign the general role. That's really about it. It's basic, but engrossing. I hope there will be some puzzles or something difficult that makes me think how to move forward.
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Jan 7th, 2011 at 23:20:39 - Super Columbine Massacre RPG (PC) |
I played this about two weeks ago and never made an entry, but have been thinking about the game, mostly because I keep getting these creeping feelings daydreaming about the shootings. I imagine games, movies, books, etc. about a specific event in time and place elicit all kinds of different responses depending on the biography of the person interacting with it. When Columbine happened, I was in high school. I remember watching news footage the day of. I remember the school intruder drills we started having. Code for a shooter in the building was that the principal would come on the intercom and tell the teachers "Teachers, please bring your red folders to the office." There were other codes for like green and yellow, but I remember those drills. It's one thing to have a practiced drill for natural disasters, but quite another feeling knowing you're preparing for the event of a rampaging person. Anyway, simply being a high school student at that time made Columbine a salient event for me. Then also being a high school student who wore baggy clothes and long hair, looked different than most kids, listened to some of the music the shooters did, all made me somewhat empathize with them. I mean, I always thought they were crazy, but I always hated how the news portrayed the kids as such products of their media consumption. I could go on and on, but this all set the tone of the game for me.
I downloaded this after having read a whole lot of entries here and having read about it various other places online. It's pretty much what I expected gameplay-wise and story-wise, but what hit me like a freight train was after you plant the bombs in the cafeteria and go wait on the hill for them to go off. The bombs don't detonate, so the two boys go into the school armed. When I entered the school and saw the students and staff walking the halls, I had this moment. Nothing in the game was happening except NPCs moving and me standing in the hallway. The only way to advance is to open fire. I thought, woah, I am supposed to kill these people. If I want to play the game, I have to kill a bunch of kids and teachers. And I thought that I didn't want to kill them, and I wonder how someone could reach that point where they walk into a school and say, yes, I want to kill all these people, and I have the means, and I'm going to do it. I mean, imagine it. There's no way I could ever think that.
So the game does a good job of showing hypothetically and from stories and journals and things snippets of the boys' everyday lives, their hanging out, their jobs, their planning, their hatred, their hobbies. This is what I felt the game did best. It brings the boys down to earth. But it can only go so far before delving into pure speculation of the insides of their heads, where it doesn't go, which is good. News media never bothered to go as far as this game did in presenting the boys. It stops at, oh, they listen to Marilyn Manson and play Doom. This is violent media. This is anti-religious media. This is evil media that corrupts our youth and causes them to shoot up their school. Simply not true. There's a really good interview he gave with Bill O'Reilly on him and his music and his outlook on his influence on people. Snoop Dogg also has a good one in that series too. The music in the game was fantastic, the 8-bit Nirvana and such. The conversation between the boys I felt was really well done. I don't know what was from journals and what was made up, but I feel like it's a hell of a lot more representative of them than any news outlet would try to be. And this goes a lot farther than just Columbine of course. The same ideas this game presents, its argument for re-evaluating claims of media influence and such, are applicable to anything else that gets blamed on media, other shootings and violent acts, teen pregnancy, drug use, ADD, all the more believable and the more bizarre correlates.
Say you blame Marilyn Manson and Nirvana and Rammstein and whatever for this violence. Really, most people aren't aware that there are a million worse things out there that anyone can easily get their hands on. I listened to some of that in high school, Korn and Limp Bizkit and Marilyn Manson and whatnot, and thought that that music was the most badass heavy stuff available. Later I discovered all kinds of metal and hardcore music, and now I listen to a lot of black metal, a lot of which is satanic and certainly anti-religious, and other death metal or grindcore which is over-the-top violent and disgusting. That stuff doesn't get on the radio and so people aren't aware of it! While the news is busy talking about how bad Nine Inch Nails were (I remember this segment) saying "I want to fuck you like an animal," Cannibal Corpse was and is talking about necrophilia and other seriously messed up stuff. Which is worse? Is either one even bad? Is it okay to sing about this stuff? Does it corrupt youth? What does that even mean? This is one thing I think about whenever I hear someone railing on Marilyn Manson or whoever on the radio, and I think about how ignorant that person probably is of the vastness of media.
I'm glad this game was made. I don't find it insensitive. I find it a useful entrant into the conversation of media effects and violence in particular, angry youth, religion, gun control, all kinds of stuff that people should be thinking about. Think about how this game could be an argument for gun control laws. Those two boys have all the power because they have weapons. This is reflected in the battles that are so easy. You just blast your way up and down the halls. The jocks don't have a chance, the teachers don't have a chance, and the religious kids just pray. You can read about how the boys acquired all their weapons, and if you should think that's problematic. No one should be able to acquire and stockpile weapons like that. What need? Manson has a part in some interview, I can't remember which one, where someone asks him what he would have said to the Columbine shooters. He says something like "I wouldn't have said anything. I would have listened to them because that seems like the problem. No one listened to them."
Super Columbine Massacre is not a great game, but I find it important nonetheless. I quit playing after I got to the hell level because it actually got hard. The end.
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