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May 7th, 2011 at 00:54:25 - The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (PC) |
Finished this just now. It's not the masterpiece I remember it being like 6 years ago, but it's still pretty fun. I remember it as more gritty, some of the best graphics I'd ever seen, and a more thick prison atmosphere. It's still gritty and got character, graphics of course look a bit dated now, but still nice.
The voice acting is awesome, what little of it there is. I'm glad Vin Diesel had a hand in making the game and starred in it. Unlike most action/stealth games, Riddick isn't scared of anything. All the guards, even the warden, everyone is terrified of him because he's a ruthless killer. When you start the game, this officer, Johns, has captured you (again?) and brought you to Butcher Bay to get a fat bounty from the warden there. The warden is on a power trip and has Butcher Bay on serious lockdown. He doesn't pay the bounty and instead mistreats Johns and tosses Riddick in a cell, from which he promptly escapes, starts a prison riot, and wreaks havok on the prison in an attempt to escape, which he finally does, with Johns. They have a cool relationship, one of those where the cop always catches the criminal, but they both revel in the chase and help each other at the end of the day.
The first chunk of the game is rather RPGish. Riddick has to escape general population, so he either wins some pit fights or gets caught with drugs, and has to run around doing favors for the inmates. That part was cool because you get to talk to the inmates and watch them interact. Some of them are crazy, some are mean, some are nervous, etc. etc. There's a decent amount of interesting extraneous dialogue to eavesdrop on. I stumbled on a repairman at one point improvising a song as he was working by himself. He was fixing an electrical panel. Something like "Oh yeah, gonna fix your panel baby. Mmmm, yeah, I'm fixin it good, gonna put it in place and fix your panel baby." Silly and random, and fun to stumble on. Unfortunately I had to break his neck for a key card.
The game relies on light and shadow. Riddick can see in the dark due to some ocular implants, so it's in his advantage to shoot out lights and be stealthy. Guards aren't so good in the dark. Their guns have flashlights though, and they'll sometimes wise up and use them. Usually the dark really does provide serious advantage, and I figured this out at some point, to stop trying to run & gun. I died a lot from doing that, but probably even more from trying to play the light & dark game. Why? Because the enemies like to cheat and see you in the pitch blackness. They like to suddenly open fire on you. They like, after you shoot a light or shoot one of them, to run right next to you and shine their light on you and alert all the other guards. And they like to shine their light from completely across the room, in your general direction, and then pump bullets into you from impossibly far away. And they run around like chickens with their heads cut off sometimes if they're alerted, which makes it really annoying to get rid of them. For the most part, this actually made the game fun and challenging because the guards and their cheating was so unpredictable, but after replaying some parts 20, 30 times it could get old.
Another highlight was getting to drive mechs. I like mechs. I like being overpowered and shooting missiles at guys with pistols. The final sequence in the game involves a mech, and is like a gauntlet. Very fun romp through the warden's offices for some payback.
I tried to get on the multiplayer to check it out, but as I figured, no one was playing. Oh right, there are extras, cigarette packets you can pick up. Each one is some fake brand of cigarettes with some punny health warning on it. I picked up maybe half, and they were a strange diversion that were fun to read, but really didn't fit in the game world. You can argue about cigarettes being contraband in prison, but random packs lying around in the caves, the mines, in the oddest places. How did they get there?! A couple: "MBryo - Don't smoke while getting pregnant." "Charlie's Chocolat Cigarettes - Emits toxic gas if heated." "Lung Busters - Tracheotomy tickles." Yeah, anti-smoking campaign?
Anyway, fun stuff. Played it because I found it and Dark Athena on Steam and never played Dark Athena. So refreshing myself on Butcher Bay and will get to Dark Athena soon!
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May 1st, 2011 at 02:00:07 - Supreme Commander 2 (PC) |
I'd been hesitant to try this one because 1)I'm not a huge RTS fan, and 2)I was particularly intimidated by this one's scale and seeming hardcore-ness. I played through the informative tutorial first, which teaches the basics of camera functionality, troop movement and attack orders, building and researching. I then began the campaign, which basically served as more tutorial levels, introducing units and letting me further into the research tree. The campaign was boring though. Each of the 4 levels I played went like this:
"Hey stupid nice-guy commander with a pointless back story. I'm going to sound masculine and army tough and yell at you and at the enemy. Then you're going to complete an objective. Then more enemies will appear on a different spot on the map and you go kill them. Then more enemies will appear on a different spot on the map and you go kill them. Then more enemies will appear on a different spot on the map and you go kill them. Then I'm gonna sound tough some more and you go to the next mission."
The characters suck and aren't interesting at all, and the story so far seems like a budget sci-fi novel, a very thin one. I pretty much had to stop playing because I couldn't bring myself to care what was going on.
The gameplay is pretty fun though. It's fairly standard RTS with some neat things thrown in that I'm not used to. For one, things build FAST. Within like 5 minutes you can have your super units researched and on the assembly line. It makes them feel not very hard-earned, but they sure are cool. The scale of the game is massive, and these experimental units tower over buildings and all other units. I ended up playing some skirmish matches to see some of these behemoths. One team gets a giant mech with big guns. That team also can build a structure that launches smaller units anywhere on the battlefield. I haven't yet built all the experimental units for all 3 factions, but I will check them out. You get 'research points' by building research stations, and spending those on a tech tree is how you upgrade units and unlock experimentals and other abilities. It's quite RPGish and works well, but feels very fast.
Right, so the scaling, you can zoom way in for pretty fireworks or zoom way out for a strategic view of the whole terrain. Order large armies around and manage multiple fronts from the strategic view. It works pretty well from what I can tell.
That's really about all I have to say. I'll do a couple more skirmishes to see experimental units, but I'm not playing the campaign, and I don't plan on getting that into it to play online, so the game is fairly pointless for me. Still, it seems entertaining enough, and I imagine people more into RTSes may have a longer relationship with it than me.
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Apr 25th, 2011 at 13:48:05 - Mirror's Edge (PC) |
Alright alright, done with Mirror's Edge. Short game, didn't really like it at first, but definitely grew on me. I played two long sessions, 3 hours or so each. In the first half, I basically got used to the controls, the running, jumping and melee combat. I got used to the flow of running across rooftops, runner vision, and the cutscene story -> mission -> cutscene story -> mission format. Learning can be frustrating, but playing well is satisfying. In the second session, I played well. I beat up enemies with gusto and ran with finesse. I was also more adept at intuiting which direction to run. Also, I feel the level design was actually better in the second half and the missions were more exciting.
So what is Mirror's Edge? Mirror's Edge is dystopian parkour. You play as Faith, a runner, in a police state urban environment. Runners are subversive elements who relay political messages, illegal packages, etc. from place to place in the city, gliding on rooftops, using the urban environment to their mobile advantage. An up-and-coming politician was murdered, Faith's sister framed. Faith has to find out the circumstances of the murder, who really did it, clear her sister's name, put the killer to rest, and ultimately save her sis. The story was pretty cool, and mostly delivered in anime-style cut scenes dividing missions.
Levels involved Faith running from point A to point B, basically, then receiving instructions to get to point C, and so on, via Merc on a radio transmitter. Running is of course the main mechanic of the game and what sets it apart from anything else I've played. Now, it's not totally as original as it sounds because at its heart, it's just a platformer without puzzles. Reminded me very much of the Prince of Persia series. The difference, like I said, is the emphasis on running and 'flow.' There's flow in Prince of Persia and other platformers of course, but Mirror's Edge makes a big deal out of it by giving you 'runner vision,' which highlights important spots in the environment bright red. So as you're running to the edge of a building, you'll see a plank sticking out turn red, or a pipe on the side of the opposite building fade into red, meaning "Hey, go there." At first, I wasn't feeling this supposed flow very much, but as I played, I got a better feel for the controls. Say you have a big box in front of you. If you run right up to it and then jump, Faith will slowly pull herself up. If you come at the box with speed and time your jump, Faith will gracefully scale it. It's all about speed and timing. If you navigate in the best way, Faith's movements are quick and efficient, and it's really graceful. Despite how cool it can feel to get a hot streak of running, the mechanic is super basic and feels a little boring at times, saved though by the excitement of jumping across the tops of buildings at high speed. You basically hold W (forward run) and push space bar (jump/climb) over and over the whole game.
At the beginning of the game, I got frustrated at this one jump, literally right at the beginning, that almost made me quit immediately. There were a couple other relatively minor areas that were frustrating because I couldn't find the precision to make Faith do what I wanted her to do. In all the rest, I ended up working on the controls and getting the move down. But that first one, I think was just ridiculously punishing and a bad spot to locate it in first thing. There were some other sections later on where I was a little stuck as to where to go, and then figured it out, but the path wasn't anything I would have thought to do. Like "Oh, I can climb on this? I haven't had to do that before." There was another part where you have to do this running wall jump, but jump halfway because the space wasn't big enough for an actual wall jump. I couldn't figure it out for the life of me, so I went to a walkthrough, which noted that the tutorial, instructions, controls, nothing tells you this (and a couple other) move is possible, so I guess I was just supposed to magically figure it out. Ah yes, and there was a bug that caused the game to freeze. Luckily I was able to patch it away early.
I have two favorite things about Mirror's Edge. First is the general visual aesthetic. The game is whitewashed, bright, bright whites and pastels. I mentioned the red of runner vision. There is also yellow, blue, lime green, orange, and a couple others. It's really pretty and really cool-looking. The graphics themselves are really nice too. At one point I emerged onto a boat deck and saw the cityscape across the ocean. I went "whoa" out loud and looked for a minute. And since you're in a city scaling buildings, the game is vertical. You go up and down, up and down, instead of the typical side to side. A couple levels were practically nothing but finding your way up 8 or 9 stories of a building, and then maybe back down.
My other favorite thing was a specific sequence where you must jump on a train and avoid fans and support beams as it goes. Then you come to a low-hanging ceiling and have to jump trains, and avoid more stuff. It was just really intense and unexpected. There were other cool sequences too, notably anything involving chasing/being chased.
So, neat game. Loved the style, and the platforming was done pretty well. I'd like some more variety in acrobatics and a longer story because I felt like it was over as I was really getting the hang of it. I think a sequel to this game could be really great. The story totally leaves it open for one.
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Apr 22nd, 2011 at 12:57:24 - Amnesia: The Dark Descent (PC) |
Amnesia is an adventure/horror game. It has no UI besides a tiny little dot cursor that turns into a hand when you can interact with something. It is frightening. I have been thinking about it almost nonstop since I started it yesterday. I cannot play it for more than a couple hours without stopping. Yesterday, I played with headphones and dim lighting. The sound design is excellent. Today, my headphones battery died and I didn't have a replacement, so I cranked the speakers and turned the lights out. Much scarier. Tomorrow I will use headphones + darkness to play.
At the beginning of the game there is a message to the player. It says something like "Don't worry about which button is to shoot. Don't worry about when and where you can save your game. Just immerse yourself in the story and the environment. This game is best played with headphones and the lights out." You might think, ha-ha, such overconfidence! But no. They back it up with atmosphere, writing and gameplay. You shouldn't worry about which button is for shooting because there is no shooting. There are no weapons. You are being followed, perhaps hunted, by some monster/spirit thing that is after a mysterious Orb you took from a tomb. There are probably multiple Orbs. There is also a possibly immortal Baron in whose castle you wake up in, with no memory and no clues to your past other than a note telling your future self to make your way to the Inner Sanctum and kill Alexander, the Baron. His castle is claustrophobic, gothic, creaky, has more dead bodies than most castles, and also sports such amusing locales as Morgue, Storage, Cell Block IV, Guest Room (hey, that's me!), and Cistern.
As you make your way from one area to the next, you are stalked by this...I'll call it a spirit. You are stalked by this spirit. This spirit shambles toward you if it sees you. Once you see (or more likely hear) it, you need to turn off your lantern/get out of the light, and cower in a dark corner until it goes away. Don't look at it either because that raises your Sanity level. Yes, if you spend too much time in the dark, watching where the spirit is, or witnessing disturbing things (standing among corpses, witnessing torture/murder/surgery on live dogs/etc.) you slowly go insane. The screen bends and shimmers, roaches skitter on the ground and up the screen in a very cool effect, and you hear a shrill noise, among other things. To restore sanity, you need to get out of the darkness or make progress in a puzzle. I only went really insane one time so far, and it reduces you to a puddle on the floor, basically. You can crawl, but the room spins and it's very disorienting. You also have health. Health and sanity are represented by a heart and brain in various stages of damage on the inventory screen. You refill health with laudanum.
So back to this spirit. He is terrifying. Since you can't look at him for long, you hide in the corner a la Blair Witch Project and stop breathing in real life as you concentrate on hearing the thing walking and wheezing down the hall, into the room you're hiding in, and back out into the hall. Then you stand up, creep to the door and peer out, cautiously turn on your lantern, and hope he's gone. During these parts, I am glued to the screen. Two parts have been the most nerve-wracking. Number two was in the prison section of the castle. The spirit basically stalks you the entire area as you go from cell to cell trying to figure out the puzzle to exit the area. Every time you leave a room, you've got to make sure the spirit isn't coming around the next corner. I felt like I was in the lair of the minotaur. And by far the scariest experience, surpassing anything in my recent playthrough of Dead Space, was what I'll call the 'can't-touch-the-water' level. In this level, the spirit is in the water. If you touch the water, the spirit sprints to attack you. There are crates and barrels scattered in each room, and you basically need to pick up the smaller crates and move them to give yourself ground to move above the water as you progress toward each door. I think there were only three or four rooms to this. At the end of the first room was an iron door, the crank to which was at the beginning of the room. So turn the crank and high-tail it to beat the door slamming shut. The second room was the same thing except much less grounding and a crank right next to the door. The spirit follows you through all the rooms except, mercifully, the last, but I guarantee you that you will be freaking out when he follows you through that first door. I thought I was going to be safe, but no. See, you have to walk in the water. Can't avoid it. You can distract him by tossing boxes or body parts far away and then running, but those objects aren't usually closeby. So, you've got to say, like when it's raining and you're running from the car to shelter, "I'm going to get wet, but as least wet as I can manage. 3-2-1, run!" And as soon as you hit the water, "splash! splash! splash!" closing in fast behind you as you bolt to the next box. Oh yeah, and you're dead in just five or so hits, so it's serious.
I have been in the office alone playing this after hours and I've been yelling at the computer, obscenities when I get scared and just screaming a little. I yelled a couple times for Dead Space, but I'm going to say that Amnesia induces a greater sense of dread since you can't fight. Dead Space was more...I don't know. Disturbing terror? Bloody surprises? Fiendish nightmares? But its environment was crushing too. There was certainly dread and despair on that derelict vessel. This castle though, feels more claustrophobic. There's more a feeling of mystery and being hunted. I think because there's only one (as far as I know) enemy, plus the haunting presence of Alexander through diaries and the castle itself (which might as well be a character, or the embodiment of Alexander, or representative of his mind, or something). Dead Space had lots of enemies all the time, but they were for the most part more trivial than this one spirit. The game actually reminds me of Silent Hill 3 on PS2, which I specifically remember as terrifying, because that's the only game I've ever played before this where I really couldn't sit and play for long because I'd get so jittery. Just writing about Amnesia is making me feel nervous. Therefore...I shall stop.
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