dryfter | Entries tagged with games

This week I played through Braid, a little indie game.
It was a bit on the short side for USD$15, but it was genuinely interesting and thought-provoking.

At first glance the game is a platformer - run, jump, collect puzzle pieces.. Except that key to the game is the manipulation of time, and playing the game requires you to really get your head around that idea. Levels experiment with different concepts, like localised time rates, loops, phases, and more.

The other key element is the story, which is admitedly only rather loosely interspersed with the gameplay, but is still quite interesting, and manages to convey it's tale, or tales, well. It's not a clear story, but rather something David Lynch would be proud of. It appears clear-cut at first, but as you progress you realise things are not what they seem, and yet make sense, at the same time.
And like a Lynch film, I've spent the past hour searching the internet to read alternate theories on what the story means.

If you like gaming and feel like an interesting new twist on old styles, then give it a go, I think you'll like it. If you hate computer games, or hate obtuse plots, then you should give it a miss.

I'm quite glad that computer gaming seems to have finally evolved to include interesting things like this, rather than yet more things with nothing but bigger technicolour explosions.

One of the more relaxing games in a while: Phyta by Cambrian games..

You basically play a sort of abstract vine that's growing towards a sun, controlled by your cursor, in a vertically-scrolling game with some random violin playing in the background. It's free. Check it out.

Check out this bloke's reviews: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation
(Thanks to Simeon for the heads-up)

Current Location: Adelaide

Here's some news that I somehow missed: Bethesda is making a new Fallout game, using the same game engine as Oblivion!

In other news: The Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie has been out for several weeks and I STILL HAVEN'T SEEN IT. Damnit.. Has anyone else? What's it like?

Current Music: Fallout trailer theme

So, I'm feeling really quite ill today. Ugh.
I went out and bought some nice cheese from Borough Market though, which cheered me up slightly, although the pouring rain didn't.
Anticipating staying at home feeling ill for some time, I bought a new computer game to play (Neverwinter Nights 2). However, I've been spending the last two hours just trying to get the damn thing to work. It installs fine, but then tries to auto-update, which after downloading for 20 minutes, tells me it received a corrupted file, and quits. Run it again, same problem. *sigh*

Having downloaded the file about 5 or 6 times now (at 115 Mbyte a throw!), I receive identical files each time (according to diff and md5sum), yet am always told it's corrupted by the updater.

This is having distinct echoes of the last EA patch to Battlefield 2142, which was a complete clusterfuck, and took me days to manually hack until it would work. These are meant to be games, played for enjoyment. I shouldn't be having to beat them over the head so much just to get them to work.

I know that writing and debugging software is hard. I do it for a living.. However, the quality of games at version 1.00 is UTTERLY FUCKING APPALLING, and the patches often seem to make things worse rather than better -- if you can even get them to apply.

[Edit: By using Linux's "unshield" utility to extract things manually, plus someone's 3rd party patch util for NWN2, I've managed to get things work. Took a bit over 5 hours!]

Current Mood: angry
Current Location: Home.

Copied over from

xterminal: TES: Oblivion has gone gold, and should be shipped 20th of March!

Black & White 2 initially attracted me, as it appeared to have the elements of the early Settlers-type games.. ie. you lay out elements of a town, and autonomous people go about their lives building and living within it. B&W pushes itself as having strong AI, for the people and your giant creature that wanders the land doing your bidding when it feels like it.
The AI for the creature does seem passable, but the AI for your settlers is rather poor. They can complain that they are starving, yet have loads of fields full of crops that are just crying out to be harvested. However, their AI is of genius levels compared to the enemy AI.
Christ.. could it be any worse? It's almost embarrassing playing against it. It's like putting an experienced {Go,Poker,Chess} player up against a six year old who just had the rules rapidly explained to them 5 minutes ago. No, I take that back. It's worse - at least a six year old would learn.

An example: The enemy sends out groups of soldiers to attack you. It always seems to send these out towards your main city, which you've learnt to leave well defended. The enemy ignores other towns you capture or create. In one scenario I captured a town that was sitting next door to the enemy capital city. Not only did the enemy not send out reinforcements to defend the town, but after I captured it, the enemy was sending soldiers *past it* on the way to my capital. Some hurriedly built battlements and a retinue of my archers later, and those soldiers would happily walk along the outside of the wall under the rain of arrows.

OK, so I realise that it's a bit much to expect the enemy AI to realise that I've created a road of death, but surely it wasn't too much to expect the AI to have tried re-taking the town when I first captured it, instead of continuuing to march straight past it en route to my capital. (Where it always camped the solders in the same spots, and of course I'd placed towers full of archers next to those spots..)

*sigh*

Now, F.E.A.R., that had good enemy AI. It can be done. (And I'd guess that writing AI for a FPS is harder than for a RTS strategy game. Squid?)

Current Music: Headless Chickens - Greedy

Fahrenheit was an interesting game; trying quite hard to be an interactive movie, it definately wasn't a FPS, and didn't quite fit into being an adventure game either, although that's the closest genre. Now I've been playing Monolith's F.E.A.R, and I like it too. It's quite different in terms of gameplay, being an out-and-out FPS, but stylistically it reminds me heavily of Fahrenheit, and with elements of Max Payne.
( cut for minor spoilers regarding apparent plot similarities )
The attitude and style of the game is very different to the one I mentioned under the cut though - FEAR has a strong horror overtone, borrowing heavily from Doom 3, only without the silly and predictable monster placement. (You know how in Doom you'd walk into a room, see some item in the middle of the floor, and just know that the moment you touch it, the doors will slam shut, and panels will open out of which monsters will erupt. ANd you're thinking, why would demons from hell be hiding in the closest for hours, just to wait for me to arrive so they could jump out?) There aren't any hell-spawn yet either, but I'm not even halfway through the game yet. Only a variety of types of soldiers.
There's lots and LOTS of blood though. It's a mutilated corpse bonanza, and the player is doing a fairly good job of adding to it, as enemies tend to die quite violently. Your character has a Max-Payne-alike slow-motion ability of limited duration, often enabling you to wade into a bunch of soldiers, spin around using scissor-kicks and shotgun blasts, and then as time speeds up again, corpses fall to the floor along with the now-sped-up tinkling of shell casings.
Also like Max Payne, you encounter various visions and interactive dream sequences, which are done nicely and fit into the game well.

The horror aspect is the only thing that provided enough interest for me to even play the game, but I feel like the plot development is too thinly spread out so far, and perhaps more than a little predictable. Then again, it might surprise me yet..

As horror FPS's go, the daddy is about to be released - after years and years in the making, Call of Cthulhu: Darks corners of the Earth is about to released. It has a lot to live up to, and will probably be a disappointment. But you just know I'm going to buy it and find out one way or the other.

OK, so Fahrenheit is messing with my head tonight.
Ritualistic serial killings in a freezing winter in NYC - seen from twi sides: A murderer, convinced he was forced to do it, as well as from the pair of detectives trying to solve the it all. Some cliches, and some interesting angles on the "interactive movie" techniques too. It reminds me of Max Payne, a little, only this one is centred around the plot unravelling, branching, twisting, whereas Max Payne concentrated on some (intentional) cliches and gunfights.
The difficulty doesn't seem too high - it isn't so much a puzzle or action game, but rather concentrates on giving you options, changing the way the story pans out depending on what, or how well, you did.

Graphically, it isn't quite as good as, say, the Source engine, and the physics are good but not great too - however it's still very good, and the scenes have been built very well, creating a good atmosphere. Pixel shader routines overlay movie grain to the image, and in flashback scenes there is an "old movie" effect.

Angelo Badalamenti (who I think was David Lynch's preferred composer?) has arranged the music; a lot of downbeat tracks that complement the characters' dispair as they fall. I like. I swear I heard Beth Gibbons singing in there somewhere too? (Anyone have the OST listing to check?)

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Beth Gibbons & Rustin' Man - Tom the Model

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Toby's journal

Nothing is true, everything is permitted

Braid

I may be a phyta but I ain't no dancer

FAO: Graham, Robin & other gamers

Fallout 3

Rant about games

I will welcome Oblivion

Black & White 2

F.E.A.R.

Winter has already arrived for some..

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December 2010

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