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Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (PS4) by jp (Apr 21st, 2024 at 00:26:13) |
This game is way more interesting than I initially gave it credit for (and I might even play all the cases, I'm that curious!)
There's a bunch of cases, you're Sherlock and you gather clues, investigate locations, use your special "eyesight", interrogate suspects, and more. So far, this is what you'd expect.
Some clues become more important and they show up in your "brain" where you can pair it up with another clue (if it's the correct one) to deduce something. Once you have enough of those, you can reach a conclusion. ALSO, once you've reached a conclusion you can decide how to act on it (usually it's either call the cops or call Mycroft - i think...).
What's really wild is that in the brain-connecting clues interface, you can reach lots of different conclusions! (I think it's 4 per case, at least it has been that so far and I've completed two cases). OH! And, as far as I can tell, the you can get it wrong! And, you just move on...the game calls some of them moral choices - which I'm confused by. But the idea that you could arrive at an incorrect conclusion and the game just moves on to the next case is pretty wild. So far, I've gotten both right (because there's abutton you can press that even warns you - like "spoiler alert" and it shows my result in green - which I assume is that I got it right).
Anyways, that's super cool!
Oh, and the game haslots of little mini-games that you play once, and they're part of the story (e.g. taking sherlock's pulse, or arm-wrestling with a sailor)..
The 2nd case is pretty neat - it takes place in the UK, there's a missing train...and there are rich Chilean (and Mexican) businessmen involved! Whoah.
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Fights in Tight Spaces (PC) by jp (Apr 21st, 2024 at 00:19:38) |
This one's a bit weird and I'll confess I didn't play it that much (just played one mission - which is like 1/5 of a full run?). It looks like it wants to be SuperHot, but it isn't - that's ok. But, it has a "play the movie" of what you just did in a level that you would think would play fast and smooth and super action-y. But now, it's slow and it even pauses between card plays...so it looks rather boring, which is a real shame.
As for the game, there's interesting stuff going on, but I haven't fully understood everything:
a. There's a typical energy system for casting, but a secondary system (combo) that lets you play some cards with a combo cost. If you move in your turn you lose combo so it's sometimes tricky to get everything to pull off.
b. While playing I was disappointed (because it seemed unfair) that there are objectives (bonus ones) in each level - and I wasn't getting any because I didn't know what they were! Apparently they're actually shown on screen, but in a place I did not see or notice.
c. The game seemed a bit slow - I was just moving and getting out of the way as I waited to draw into a good hand of cards. This cuts the momentum for sure and also made it hard/impossible to accidentally hit the secret (not really secret) objectives. So, I'm curious to go back and try again with awareness of the objectives. They should help a lot - in that I'm more likely to try to "solve the puzzle" of each turn and hopefully get the bonus objectives.
d. It's strange that you have to pay to heal, but I thought it was neat that you can upgrade several cards (if you have the money) and that some cards are cheap to upgrade - there's different pricing for them!
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Hadean Tactics (PC) by jp (Apr 21st, 2024 at 00:11:34) |
Ok, I've now cleared the game (not unlocked everything, of course) and it really is quite fun and interesting. The 3rd character (which I was waiting on to try out because I wanted to clear the game with the 2nd one) is pretty neat as well though as I write this all I can really remember is that it has an orb mechanic similar to one of the characters in Slay the Spire.
The harder ending is basically another 3 levels, but they get shorter! The last one, if I remember correctly, is just the boss. I don't remember what deck I was running, but it was pretty good - in the sense that I had picked up some good combos..traps and all.
I'm going to stop playing, for now, mostly because the list of games too look at keeps on growing - one a week - because of the design seminar I'm teaching.
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Before Your Eyes (PC) by dkirschner (Apr 14th, 2024 at 13:51:13) |
I've been looking forward to playing this, especially after playing One Hand Clapping, which had a singing mechanic. That game activates your mic and you use your voice, raising and lowering pitch, to interact with the game. Before Your Eyes was similar in that the game activates your webcam and uses your eye blinks as input. Before Your Eyes works WAY better than One Hand Clapping, and it's the better game all around. I figure that detecting blinks (yes/no) is easier than detecting notes along the range of human vocal pitch, so kudos to One Hand Clapping for trying.
Blinking in Before Your Eyes doesn't do anything unless you do it over a prompt (mouse over the prompt, then blink to interact) or unless you do it when the metronome icon is visible, which progresses the story to the next scene. The rules are simple, and it became a game in and of itself for me to blink strategically. I imagined that at the end of A Clockwork Orange, Alex's eyes are forced open so that he could successfully complete this game. At times, I felt like holding my eyes open with my fingers. This is because your eyes will get tired/dry/itchy while playing and you will screw up and blink when you don't mean to, skipping dialogue or ending a scene early. That's frustrating enough. Make sure you do the blink calibration, but I think that no matter how well you do it, it will still occasionally register some non-blinks as blinks. This really didn't happen much for me; through calibration, I think I turned the sensitivity way down, and I wonder what effect wearing glasses had. But like I said, it works surprisingly well.
So, the game itself is narrative-heavy. It's an obvious play on the idea that a life can pass in the "blink of an eye." You're picked up by a ferryman of souls who asks you to tell the story of your life. Back in time you go to remember it: your childhood, your parents, your career, etc., blinking your way through each scene. I won't spoil the story, but there is a twist that I absolutely did not see coming (though I should have paid more attention to the mysterious dark scenes) that changes the narrative and the tone of the game. This is one you can spend time reflecting on.
Aesthetically, it's got a simple visual presentation, sort of painterly, with some really nice piano music. The voice acting is good, with the exception of the girl-next-door (who sounds the same at 10 as she does at 40). For some reason, they also used the same voice actor for your dad and her dad, which made the one scene with her dad calling her very confusing ("Why is my dad at her house?!"). But I liked the dad and mom's performances. I was wondering through the whole game if your character was mute and/or on the spectrum because he doesn't talk--only through a typewriter later in the game--and otherwise expresses himself through his prodigious musical and artistic talents. But I think he's just a silent main character, not actually mute.
Anyway, the game won a BAFTA for a reason. It didn't blow my mind, but it's a neat experience that's worth having. It's short too, doesn't waste your time. I'm considering incorporating it into a class.
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Stray (PC) by dkirschner (Apr 13th, 2024 at 12:00:39) |
Patrick and I have been playing this together this semester, and finished it a couple weeks ago. We were talking after beating it about despite how simple and straightforward of a game this is, it manages to be something new. Playing as a cat (and being able to do cat things like curl up and sleep, scratch things, knock objects off tables, etc., so cuuuute) was novel, and the setting and story were interesting. But really, playing as a cat. I smiled a whole lot throughout the game. The lil companion robot was cute too.
On the other hand, I was often tired and bored while playing, and literally fell asleep during several sessions. Patrick would be making dinner or something in the kitchen, and I'd snap awake, cat walking into a wall, and I'd pretend I had not fallen asleep, and that I was just watching the cat walk into the wall and thinking. Like how my dad always used to claim he was "resting his eyes" when he'd fall asleep on the couch.
I would not call the game exciting. It was a lot of wandering around the city and talking to robot NPCs, fetching things for them. The city is a really good-looking dystopia, and the robots are quirky, but I wish they had more dialogue. You don't get a sense that many of them have personalities besides whatever one-note thing they do. I mean, the lack of dialogue makes sense, and it's not really "dialogue" since the cat can't talk. The fact that you are a cat adds a whole layer of silly to the game. Like, why has this lil robot befriended a cat? Why are all these robots putting all their faith in a cat to save them? Cats don't understand what we're saying to them, and cats do whatever they want! Playing as a cat in a game where you're doing fetch quests (fetching is dog stuff!) and doing things to help people is very un-cat-like.
But, you know what? The ability to play as a cat and do cat things trumps how little sense it makes, and I would play as a cat in this dystopia again. Idea for next time: more cats. And what do you think? Were there cats at the end?! Optimistically, I think so.
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Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (PC) by dkirschner |
| Fast, fast, fast. Single-player is really action-packed, but the gruff military men yelling about guns and stuff gets old to me. Also, some missions are disturbing and make me think about actual events going on in the world, which is probably a good thing, but still disturbing.
Multiplayer I would like to toy with more, but I'd prefer to play other single player games and WoW instead as my persistent one. |
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most recent entry: Saturday 13 November, 2010
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I didn't expect to write about Call of Duty yet, but the single-player game is really small and I beat it in just three short sessions over a week. I bought the game over a year ago, maybe even a year and a half ago, and just never got around to it. I suppose I had some sort of expectation for CoD since it's insanely popular, high expectations. As I played the campaign, I was initially disappointed, but by the end I had experienced some shock and awe. It's clear that this is a multi-player game through and through. The single-player portion is all squad-based so you're never truly alone, and I feel like it just prepares you for online action. Of course, the AI is dumber than real players, but the teamwork, the tactics that work and don't work, you can practice offline. I found my teammates to be good role models. They take cover, they crouch and run, and sprint when it's appropriate, provide cover fire, toss grenades, etc. Having played multiplayer and being massacred, and then playing single-player, I feel relatively more prepared to step into the chaos online again.
So why was I initially let down? The game is 100% action-packed, like riding a huge wave, the entire way. But the beginning felt like an action-packed shooter that I've played before. You run through some middle-eastern and eastern European extremist-infested cities. All the countries over there are unstable and going through regime change and power struggles, and they've all got lawless militaries that you've got to gun through to get to the leaders. So you and your squad, in both the characters you play as, one in Europe and one in the middle east, frantically perform mission objectives and kill bad guys. You have to listen to lots of military guys yelling in military jargon and watch a lot of cut scenes with technical parameters of weaponry and such, which is always what turns me off about war games. I don't care about the .22 caliber blah blah with the blah blah bullet rounds that fires x times per minute and can puncture steel with x depth penetration from x meters away in rain but not sleet, or the size engine of military planes and what bombs they all drop. Don't care and not interested. I also tend to dislike just the attitude of war games, which is hyper-masculine kill people, defend your honor and bravado, and always comes across as trying to sound noble and heroic in the face of tragedy and death. I mean, those hint at my views on war and violence and masculinity anyway, so war games can grate on me if they are too typical in that sense.
Call of Duty 4 looked like it was going down that road, but then it took a nice turn toward the serious when the story picked up somewhere between the nuke going off and the helicopter mission to gun down the enemies using just some technology to detect them, not infrared, but something like that, not with simply sight. The story was heading toward typicality, but as you hunt down a warlord, a nuke goes off, and brings some drama and urgency to the whole thing. You then look to Russia to find out where the nuke came from, which leads you to this older Russian military badass guy with one arm (you get to blow it off in a visceral flashback mission where your commander missed assassinating him just barely). You have to go after his son, which you chase through a village/military complex, at the dead end of which he blows his brains out. In retaliation, the Russian general guy launches 2 nukes toward the east coast US and it's a race against the clock to abort the launches and escape the facility. The last missions, I'd say after the son's suicide, are just awesome. And there were a ton of awesome moments throughout the game too, mostly involving things getting blown up, like helicopters, tanks, and communications towers. The game looks phenomenal, and I was pleasantly surprised that after, what, 3 years maybe, it looks so amazing. It certainly made it more immersive, when it was already there. Even though I poke at the story and triviality of the early game, it was still completely engrossing, like, what it was doing, it was doing great. I actually saw my stepdad playing CoD4 a long time ago, years, and I kept wondering when I would get to the level I watched him being stuck at. Turns out it was the very end when you're racing the clock to abort the nukes. I wonder if he ever beat it.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about CoD4 that I hope other people got out of it, was that it made me think about war, the media, and the world today. Games with nuclear weapons always tend to strike a little nerve because there's always some nuclear threat by some country, and it's like, yeah, someone could launch some nukes, and any other number of attacks, and obliterate a chunk of people. The majority of us actually not being dead is impressive to me. Peace is very precarious. We (in the US, Singapore, the West in general) are very lucky that we don't have to directly deal with, on a daily basis, war and the threat of war that so many less fortunate people do. In these places where our video game Marines are fighting, civilians are dying all the time, but we tend to forget that. CoD actually hide this from us, as it never (or hardly if I'm forgetting) shows civilians, alive or dead. They simply aren't there. We do know they've been killed by nuclear weapons, but we never SEE them or interact with them or have to deal with them in any way. This is where our media comes in. The media can reveal or hide events. I found it interesting at the end of the game after you abort the missiles and escape (and one of the most epic very last parts of a game ever), the news reporter reports on rumors of nuclear testing in Russia. Nothing happened, just rumors of testing. This is the official government line and the media has to report. I can assume that people soon will go do some investigative journalism and uncover some of what really happened, but in this case, the media relays the Russian government or military's assurance that it's all right, it's okay. And of course the player knows that, yeah, it's okay because the international and US special forces saved the say, and their accomplishments are going to go unrecognized by everyone on earth, but it's just part of their duty, and they love keeping the peace and taking out the bad guys. Oorah, right? Which should make you think if special forces can influence such events on the side of good, surely they can do so on the side of evil or moral ambiguity.
This brings me back to that helicopter mission I talked about. It made me really uncomfortable. Why? Because I couldn't actually see who I was firing on. Looking down, I just see a lot of white and gray human-like figures running about, and I have to rely on orders to say who I'm to shoot and who I'm not to shoot. Some people below were flashing, and those were our allies. Others weren't flashing, didn't have tracers, and those were enemies. It was very impersonal, firing a gun hundreds of feet up from a helicopter picking off groups of enemies, or people I was told were enemies. We've all seen stories uncovered where gunners of this perspective and others have killed civilians, bombed churches, and so on, because they were acting on orders or thought they were firing on bad guys. Or worse, we've heard instances of soldiers killing civilians and committing other crimes just because they can. I wonder how many regular people I killed in that mission? All I know is whenever someone died, I got approval and praise from the officer radioing in my ear.
Another point that I'm not sure whether it was a design intention or not, is that I was initially very, and still somewhat, easily confused by who is an enemy and who is a friendly. The enemy soldiers looked really similar to my teammates to me. The thing is, if you stop to look, you get killed, but if you just fire on a hunch, you can live. So what if you see someone who might be a soldier or a civilian? If you shoot, you live. If you don't shoot and it's a soldier you die, so what are you going to do? You do what I ended up doing because I got tired of dying to enemies that I thought were friends. You shoot first, think later. This caused me multiple game overs due to friendly fire, which I think is funny because it's a serious no-no, yet so easy to do! So bravo to the design team if they did that on purpose. I mean, obviously the guys with socks over their heads are enemies, but really, at least in the first half, I was having trouble telling who was who.
And the most important question of all: Why do eastern European bad guys always wear track suits?
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