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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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Hadean Tactics (PC) by jp (Apr 7th, 2024 at 13:32:36) |
This game is supposed to be a deck-building tactical game and it sort of isn't, but very lightly is - at least in my experience so far.
So, like CD2: Trap Master this game REALLY wears it's Slay the Spire inspirations on its sleeve. Again, there's a path you that branches and you need to pick which nodes to visit - and there's fights, boss fights, resting spots, stores, artifact/rewards, and shops. Oh, there's also "story encounters" where you make a choice that often results in a benefit and a drawback. VERY Slay the Spire - though I noticed the way the events are distributed is different and that it's much more important to plan your way through it since the paths intersect a lot less and you can, for example in my last run, set yourself up with 4 rest/upgrade a card spots in a row!
In addition to a deck of cards you have the character you chose and two "minions" (they're all monsters) that exist on a 2D grid that's quite typical of tactical games. The enemies will spawn, you have energy to cast your cards - generally you cast your cards, unpause and wait for the timer to pause the game when it hits the threshold (7 seconds) for your hand to flush, a new hand is drawn, and you get more mana to cast spells. What isn't really tactical about it is that all the fighting on the tactical grid (which includes everyone having abilities they cast once their mana is full) happens automatically. You can't (afaik) give orders to anyone. At best, if you have the right spells, you can move creatures around (your own or enemy), but they then move back to whatever it is they want to do (e.g. attack the nearest enemy).
One of my runs used a character that had access to "trap" cards which are pretty neat since you lay them on the grid and then have to trigger them (with a different card) and ALL the trap laid will trigger. Some do damage, others heal your allies, and so on. So, the game isn't tactical at all in the turn-by-turn combat and movement decision-making sense. Yes, you choose whom to roll into a fight with, which spells to cast on whom, and when to cast things. But, since you don't directly control your combat units it all feels pretty indirect.
Where the game goes pretty wild (and above/beyond what Slay the Spire does) is that once you've cleared a run - you gain access to making your own hero - choose skills/talents from a list AND choose which spells will be available (again from a list, which only has the ones you've unlocked). So, in this sense the game has a lot, lot more options/replayability and that sort of thing. But, I'm not sure it's that much more interesting?
Oh, there is a meta-progression. When I beat my first run a giant death/reaper creature appeared and said "ok, now you can start to make progress towards winning - you have to collect wings". And I've collected a few since, you get them from killing the stage end bosses (which is nice in that you don't have to get all the way to the end). I need to get 7 - so I wonder if I'll just have to play over and over until I randomly get the right bosses or will the game feed me different ones until I get them all? I've also unlocked a new (third) character...but I kind of don't want to use it because I want to get all the wings with the character I've made some progress with.
I've played about 4 hours and I've really enjoyed the "decay" and "trap" mechanics... we'll see how it goes!
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Deathloop (PS4) by jp (Apr 4th, 2024 at 11:14:36) |
Argh. The longer you go without playing, the worse this game's experience becomes. This is almost entirely due to me forgetting both how to play, but also all the localized information and knowledge you pick up - like who is where, when, and so on.
I love the idea of a "clockwork" game where you deftly navigate your way through things that happen and certain times and places - there's a sense of beauty and elegance to the choreography you develop and create (sort of like when you watch those time loop movies and see a character weave through people and places because they know what's going to happen when and they've just learned it). BUT, that beauty also creates an entry barrier - at least a psychological one for me, because the game's on-ramp is past and now you're in the thick of it. But you've forgotten everything...
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Devil May Cry 5 (PS4) by jp (Apr 4th, 2024 at 11:09:05) |
So I took a break - and then came back to the game and had forgotten how to play. It took a bit to remember (I purposefully avoided looking stuff up because I wanted to see how easy it was for me to remember). So, some of the fights with V took longer than they should have - because I had forgotten that V has to "finish off" the enemies...lol.
While I often focus (for my own personal interests) on game play and game design aspects of a game - I realized as I was playing this game that..wow, the visual design of the large enemies really is phenomenal. They're both beautiful, awesome, creepy, gross, and disgusting. It's quite the accomplishment and I really appreciated it. And, this is in the context of me playing a game that is ~7 years old and running on last gen hardware. Perhaps I haven't played enough PS5 games yet so I'm still too impressionable? Have things moved that far in terms of photorealism?
I have decided to move on even though I realize, from the back of the box, that I'll miss out on the 3rd playable character. It's no fault or problem with DMC5...it's just that I've got too many games to play and I think I've understood enough about this game to move on to another.
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Fatal Frame (PS2) by dkirschner |
| Hopefully it's still creepy and holds up well! ----------- Definitely still creepy. Parts hold up. Hated the combat though. |
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most recent entry: Saturday 30 June, 2018
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I got this cool RCA --> HDMI adapter off Amazon that lets me play PS2 on my newfangled TV. It should also work with Wii, so I've been accumulating Wii games to exhaust that system now that I'm done with PS3 and Xbox 360. Fatal Frame was the last PS2 game I had, but I acquired a stack of Final Fantasy games, including V and VI (PS1), which will work with my new combo, so I'm also excited to see SNES era Final Fantasy games that I never played.
ANYWAY. Fatal Frame. I had a girlfriend once who was always talking about this game. She liked horror games. We had an Xbox version that we never played. At some point I bought a PS2 version, no idea why. I didn't even know I still had it, but I was cleaning and found it.
ANYWAY again. Fatal Frame has some serious pros and some serious cons.
PROS
- The atmosphere is terrifying. The game is set in a haunted old Japanese mansion. Creaky. Falling apart. The site of horrific rituals. Mean ghosts. The visuals and audio hold up surprisingly well. After I heard how good the sound design was, I played with headphones on. Good choice. It's totally haunting. Very immersive.
- It FEELS like survival horror games of the era (e.g., Silent Hill, Resident Evil). This is both good and bad. For example, the controls are tough to handle, but for the beginning of the game, it's not too hindering. As you walk, the fixed camera angles will change, forcing you to reorient yourself before you accidentally walk back where you came from or run into a wall or an enemy. The game is very dark, which makes your flashlight especially important. Right, this is all nostalgic in a good sort of way. But, it is bad because (see con 3).
- Puzzles and story. Thoroughly enjoyable puzzles to move the story forward. They haven't been difficult so far, but I'm sure they get a little harder. It's how the story uses puzzles that's really cool. So for example, one thing I picked up on is that the game centers around the "strangling ritual," which is basically that a sacrifice victim is drawn and quartered...well, no, fifthed (add the head)...with ropes tied around the to-be-removed body parts. In the game, you have to find five shattered mirror pieces and put them together. Puzzles are replete with Japanese folklore and imagery. The first mirror piece you've got to find a Buddha statue, and solving this puzzle reveals where some missing children have gone to, who were playing something called "demon tag," which is like a Japanese version of tag where "it" is a demon. Anyway, I enjoyed how steeped in Japanese folklore the game is. Really added to the atmosphere.
CONS
- Voice acting is generally bad. Par for the course for Japanese survival horror from this era though. The ghosts sound good, but the humans do not. Very flat and emotionless. Slow talkers.
- Combat. Combat in the game involves pointing your Camera Obscura at a ghost, holding the targeting circle over the ghost as it moves and as your shot powers up, and then pushing X when you want to attack (or square when the circle turns orange for a critical hit). I like the combat for its novelty and how scary it can be, but hate it for other overwhelming reasons. The ghosts are extremely irritating enemies. Yeah, they're scary, but as I played more and more, they became more annoying than scary. They disappear and reappear on another side of you, become untargetable, move through solid objects, and take a large chunk of your life per hit. Each hit slows you, and since you may be disoriented from a fixed camera shift (see below) it's not unlikely you'll get grabbed again quickly before you figure out which direction to run. Add to that limited healing supplies, and this became so tedious.
- As you progress, the clunky controls (a) break the immersion and (b) get you killed. Here's a prime example in combat: As you run from an enemy, the fixed camera will change positions, which sometimes makes you run in a direction that you don't want to go. Trying to control your character in tense moments breaks immersion. Add ghost teleportation in the mix, and the controls become extremely frustrating when you are hit and die because the camera keeps changing and the ghosts keep disappearing and reappearing. Worse, the sound doesn’t accurately tell you what direction ghosts are coming from because often the sound will change with the camera angle and not the ghost direction! You literally can't tell when this is happening when you're in camera mode because it's first-person and you don't see the camera shift. The ghost noises just seem to spin around you, then a ghost will kill you from behind when you were listening to the ghost sound coming from in front of you.
Add into that how the controls change while using the camera! You normally move with LS and look around with the flashlight with RS, like every other game. But for some reason when you go into the camera mode, LS moves the camera, and RS moves the character. I cannot tell you how many times I was hit and/or died because I'd go into camera mode and walk into a ghost when I meant to move the camera up, or moved the camera around when I meant to run away. It makes no sense! And you can't change it!
I had a harsh lesson in manual save points (and Fatal Frame's combat) the first time I played. I hadn't seen a save point in an hour and then got killed by a ghost. Had to play the first 45 minutes or so, after the tutorial, all over again. That repeated over and over, the dying, if not with so long between saves. I made it about 30% of the way through and figured I'd gotten the gist of it. Read the rest of the story and watched the ending bits on YouTube. Glad I played a little bit of Fatal Frame. Also glad to cut it short.
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