Aether Magic Cake and Intellect Magic Bead review
July 12th, 2010
Archive
Archive for the ‘Games’ Category
Get Out!
February 10th, 2010
Created by HelixFox on the Something Awful forums, here’s a game consisting entirely of in-jokes.
My response was this incredibly stupid video that I highly recommend not watching:
If you need some context, read this.
New Zelda Games Suck
December 20th, 2009
DORG here, not Rob. Yeah, I haven’t written anything in a few months. I’ve been busy lazy.
Having recently played the most recent installment to the Legend of Zelda franchise, Spirit Tracks, I can officially confirm that Zelda games now suck. Back in the 80’s and early 90’s, video games did not require long, drawn-out, insistent tutorials on how to perform every possible function of the game from ‘how to attack enemies’ to ‘how to navigate the menus’ to ‘how to press the button.’ I understand that these games are basically targeted to be playable for children, retarded children. I was a child when I first played Zelda games on NES consoles at a friend’s house. (I always had Sega consoles, SMS, Genesis, etc.) We didn’t need tutorials on how to do anything; we didn’t even read the fucking manual. We learned by playing the game.
So the games are easier, the tutorials are mind-numbingly mundane, and the plot is more convoluted than ever. This isn’t even what really pisses me off about the modern titles of the series. It’s the ever-increasing length of time between inputting your name on the New Game menu to how long it takes before you actually get a sword and kill something, as in, actually playing the game.
Because of this, I have taken it upon myself to play every official Nintendo Zelda games, (not the CDi ones because they’re horrible and I do not own a CDi) and timed typical play through from the very beginning, to the moment Link holds a sword above his head.
For consistency, I have read only essential dialogue at a steady casual pace, and skipped as many optional side-quests as possible in every game, going straight for the sword. These times are not meant to be speed-run based, and could probably be lower, but for the sake of this experiment, it must be based on a typical first-play pace.
The conclusion: A trend that shows how each successive Zelda title is drastically increasing the time from the beginning to actually being able to carry out the traditional point of the game. I predict that if the world does not end in 2012, the next Zelda title will take approximately 2 hours from starting out to actually being able to play. This comes as very little surprise, since the last teaser poster revealed by Nintendo showed Link holding no sword at all. Furthermore, with the addition to Wii Motion Plus, if we do happen to get a sword in the next game, arm-cramping waggle control will ensue.
I played a game with zombies in it
August 20th, 2009
Has anyone else noticed the sudden incline of zombie-oriented video games lately? I have an impressive stack of very serious and horrific games dealing with the slaughter of masses of undead. In recent memory, there’s Resident Evil 5, Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising, Prototype, fuck, even Call of Duty 5 has zombies in it for some reason.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane, to a time when killing zombies, (is it considered killing if they’re already dead?) was a more carefree and ridiculously humorous occasion. We weren’t dealing with epic tales of civilizations collapsing, and facing the internal struggle of butchering your reanimated loved ones in a high resolution fully three-dee rendered bloodbath. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with any of that. How many of you remember a little old classic game called Zombies Ate My Neighbors? It was a top-down shooter on Genesis/SNES, in which the joy of killing zombies was in a more simple and charismatic fashion. There was no plot or character development, no explanation of what may have caused the outbreak, just the good stuff: run around and kill zombies with whatever you can find. The primary weapon of choice, the noble squirt gun. For reasons unexplained, zombies spontaneously exploded on contact with water. The slew of other usable weapons were vast for its time, and extremely imaginative, pop cans as grenades, weed whackers, popsicles, and I really can’t remember the rest right now. If you haven’t played this game before, go fucking play right now. What are you even waiting for? Shit!
Anyways, enough with the nostalgia. I got sidetracked. The game we’re talking about right now, here, today, in all its bloody zombie massacre glory, is found on the newly renamed Indie games category on Xbox 360. Its called I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES IN IT!!!!1, and it is fucking brilliant. Go download it now. Stop reading this right now. Get off your fucking computer and boot up your 360 and download the demo. Nay, scratch that. BUY the damn game. Its only a dollar! I can name a thousand worse ways I’ve spent a dollar before. Parking stubs, upgrading fast food meals to super-size, buying some shitty toy from a dollar store, wouldn’t you want to spend one dollar on a fun game?! Do it? Don’t have a 360? What kind of person are you? Do you call yourself a nerd? Because if you do, you’re wrong. Go buy a 360 right now exclusively for this game. This fucking game. Go. Now. Fuck. Do it. Are you back? Did you play the game? Isn’t it fucking awesome? Are you glad you listened to me? Get used to listening and doing the things I tell you because I’m pretty much always right.
First impressions, you move with the left stick, aim/fire with the right. Simple enough, easy to learn. The game seems pretty staple, generic for the first 30 seconds or so, until the fucking ground starts flashing and you suddenly realizing the lyrics to the song are emblazoned across your screen in gigantic seizure-inducing beauty. Turn up the volume and absorb the games rich, immersive original soundtrack. Scream with delight as you pulverize endless hordes of zombies, among other enemies, with rockets, lasers, shurikens, and fucking FLAME THROWERS! Everyone loves flamethrowers. Grab your friends. Its four player. Get high. Its probably even better if you’re high. The game will blow your mind in half and then have sex with your newly formed brain crevice.
Go buy it if you haven’t already. Honestly, its the best cheap-thrills zombie game we’ve had in over a decade, and its only a dollar. Its a bizarre instant classic in a sea of pure shit we’ve come to expect from the Indie games category.
Tales of Monkey Island review
August 20th, 2009
I am a casual gamer.
I know, I know, 90% of everyone who read that just closed their browser window in disgust. I know it’s the gaming equivalent of driving a minivan, but it’s true. For the 10% of you remaining, let me say I wasn’t always like this. I used to be a hardcore gamer. I upgraded my hardware whenever I had some spare cash, I subscribed to gaming magazines, and I played all the latest games the moment they were released. Hell, I even went to LAN parties. Unfortunately, as I’ve gotten older, gaming just isn’t something I have time for, especially modern games that require huge timesinks just to get anything done. Gaming is now something I do when I have a couple extra bucks in my pocket and half an hour to kill, not a way to spend an entire evening. I’ve played far more Peggle this year than I have every other game I own combined. So, before you send me an angry spittle-flecked email that I’m lame for not “getting” today’s Red-Bull-fuelled FPS twitchathons and relentless MMORPG grinds, let me just say that I am lame. I prefer causal games to Halo and GTA 4. Sorry.
Anyway, on with the review/old man ranting.
Out of all the video game genres to die out in the last two decades, the adventure game is probably the only one that actually deserved it. By the time Jane Jensen gave us Gabriel Knight 3’s infamous cat-hair moustache puzzle in 1999, the genre had gone from “creative thinking puzzles” to “illogical mental hurdles through utterly incoherent gibberish”. Playing these games without the official walkthough was borderline futile. The entire genre dug itself into a hole, although it occasionally popped its hand out of the ground, zombie-like, to wave to a public that continued to ignore it.
A far more recent failure is with episodic gaming. Valve Software has managed to produce a whopping two short Half-Life episodes in the amount of time it took them to create Steam, Source, and Half-Life 2 (Episode 3 is still, at the time of this writing, nowhere to be seen). Sin Episodes released one episode before being cancelled. Kuma Games is one of the few companies to actually produce a constant stream of episodic content, although they’ve yet to figure out how to make a game that’s not objectively terrible. Actually, I’m being a little harsh on Kuma. Their games are terrible, but because they use the Source engine, you can import Half-Life 2’s texture packs into their games and spawn an army of Striders to help you storm the beaches of Iwo Jima. That’s good for a chuckle at least. Still, episodic gaming hasn’t quite been the revolution it was supposed to be. Instead of getting short games in fast succession, we’ve either got quality games with huge gaps between them, or utter garbage getting cranked out at an alarming frequency.
This is why I’m so impressed that Telltale Games is attempting to resurrect both the adventure game and episodic gaming at the same time. Even more impressively, for the most part they’ve succeeded. It’s some of the best adventure gaming since LucasArts glory days. Younger readers may not know this, but there was a time when LucasArts produced some of the funnest and funniest adventure games ever made. They abandoned them sometime in the mid-nineties when they realized that they could sell a zillion copies of anything, regardless of quality, if it had a Star Wars logo on it. Day of the Tentacle made way for garbage like Yoda’s Pro Bass Hunter 2k6 and Jango Fett Teaches Typing. Tales of Monkey Island brings me back to the days when I used to stay up all night microwaving hamsters in Maniac Mansion for the NES. It’s not revolutionary, and it won’t make your eyes bleed with next-gen graphics, but you know what? It’s fun. That’s right, fun. I know that’s a dirty word in gaming today, but it’s true.
This is going to make me sound like a cranky old coot, but I remember the days when video games used to be fun instead of realistic or gritty. I’m not sure when exactly this happened, but I think it reached the point-of-no-return around the time Rockstar Games decided that what people really wanted in a Grand Theft Auto game was realistic driving physics and bowling simulators That game had absolutely everything you could possibly imagine going on inside it, except for fun. Also, I’m convinced that every first-person shooter made in the last five years is the exact same game packaged in different boxes. You know what, I’m just going to drop this rant right now before I sound any more like my mom talking about hip-hop.
Launch of the Screaming Narwhal is the first episode of the new series, and it wastes absolutely no time in getting to the meat and potatoes of adventuring, namely the puzzle solving. It drops you right into the game with an objective, a pocketful of items, and a quest. It’s a nice break from the excruciatingly long unskipable cut-scenes that are so fashionable today. The puzzles are fun, too. They’re offbeat, as pretty much everything in the series is, but they make total sense in the context of the game’s cartoon world. In other words, no cat-hair moustaches. Some of the puzzles are downright innovative, my favorite being one where you’re attempting to escape from a surgical table and you can’t move your arms. It feels like you’re playing a cartoon, something that the best LucasArts games got right, and the worst got horribly, horribly wrong. Quite a few of the puzzles are pop-culture heavy (an early puzzle might be confusing to people who haven’t seen a certain Mentos meme on YouTube), which could be a pro or a con, depending on how you feel about those things. Personally, I enjoyed them, although future generations might find them more annoying than funny. However, I think episodic gaming is shaping up to be something that’s to be enjoyed now, as opposed to a decade or more down the road. Monkey Island is enjoyable on a topical level the same way South Park is, just on a much smaller scale. I give the developers props for going the South Park route rather than the Family Guy route. If it had gone the other way, you wouldn’t be reading this right now because I would have punched a hole in my monitor a week ago.
Speaking of humour, the game’s actually funny. Really. I’m not going to spoil anything, but the game picks up a lot of the running gags from earlier entries in the series. If you found it funny back then, you’ll find it funny now. Today’s young gamers that grew up on Family Guy-style in-your-face randomness might not find it funny at all, but I was giggling like a schoolgirl over some of the game’s running gags and bizarre conversations. Some of the jokes are actually pretty subtle, which I really appreciated. Most of the humour is fairly blunt and obvious, but there was just enough subtlety to catch me off guard every once in a while (ie. a shrine in tribute to Ron Gilbert).
The character design and animation is good, but not anything extraordinary. The characters look pretty much exactly the same way they always did, just 3D. In fact, the only person not to make the transition unscathed is the main character of the series, Guybrish Threepwood. In this iteration, he’s been given an unfortunate beard that makes him look like a bit of a hippie douchebag. My only other complaint in the character department is that most of the other characters you meet are overused stereotypes instead of anything really original (ie.the French guy is Frenchiest Frenchman to ever eat a baguette). The voice acting, on the other hand, is excellent right across the board. Adventure games have an unfortunate habit of skimping on the voicework, but I have no complaints here. It won’t blow you away, but it won’t take you out of the game either.
I do have one major complaint with the game, however, and it’s a big one. The centre of the game world is an enormous, hard to navigate, constantly shifting maze. I hate mazes. They’re right up there with “forced stealth mission” and “mandatory sewer level” in my list of video game tropes that just need to die. They’re not fun, and the only reason they ever seem to exist is to pad the length of the game. The problem becomes compounded with a game this short. I probably spent half my playtime lost in the game’s maze, partially because several of the game’s puzzles have you wandering the jungle looking for vaguely-defined objects and landmarks. Solving certain puzzles actually changes the layout of the maze, meaning it gets more and more frustrating and the game goes on. Everything that happens outside of the maze is fun, and almost everything that happens inside isn’t.
This brings up another issue: two of the game’s puzzles involve wandering around the jungle and following a path of sounds. Unfortunately, these sounds don’t show up as text if you’re using captioning. In other words, these puzzles are physically impossible for the hard-of-hearing to solve. Everything else in the game world gets captioned, so the reasoning behind ignoring these two segments is beyond me. If this affects you, I’d avoid picking up this episode until the problem is patched.
I recommend this game for everyone else, though, especially jaded old bastards like me. It has some definite cons, but the pros outweigh them by a huge margin. It took me around four hours to beat, and it costs about the same as a movie ticket. It’s a great value, and it made my little Grinch heart go from three sizes too small to two-and-half sizes too small. The game even comes with a MMORPG-ish online component involving treasure hunting in jungle. It’s unique, but unfortunately it’s not very fun. I grew bored after finding three pieces of treasure and I have no desire whatsoever to go back and try it again. It’s the same thing over and over again, which actually might appeal to the MMORPG crowd.
The second episode, The Siege of Spinner Cay, actually fixes the few problems I had with the first episode. There’s another maze, but it isn’t constantly in your way, and much less of the game takes place in it. The character design a huge improvement in this episode, mainly because it takes place in a city full of Mermaids. Guybrush’s constant romanticizing about them versus his reaction when he finally meets one is hilarious, and shows a nice improvement in subtle facial animation form the first episode. The treasure hunting puzzles are funner this time around, and one involving island-hopping on a raft is my single favourite puzzle of the series so far. A close second involves you helping another character solve his own puzzle by giving him hints. It perfectly keeps the balance between frustrating and hilarious. The only thing dropped from the first episode is the online game, but since that wasn’t any fun to begin with, I’m perfectly okay without it.
I recommend this episode over the first, although since it’s a continuation of that story, you kind of need to play that one anyway. Some of the puzzles and running gags come straight out of the first episode, so anyone starting with this one will be left confused and frustrated at several points. The humour is much less pop-culture based than the first episode and is actually pretty dirty in a few spots, so anyone that didn’t quite get the humour of the first episode will probably like this one a lot more. Personally, I quite enjoyed both. The only knock I have against the series at this point is that this episode seemed a little shorter than the first (I beat this one in a single three-hour marathon, and the first in two two-hour runs). It probably has something to do with spending less time lost in a maze, so I’m not going to dock it any points for that.
I’m really enjoying this series so far. There’s still three episodes to go, and if they can keep up at this quality, Telltale might have a minor classic on their hands. They’re not doing anything new, but what they are doing, they’re doing incredibly well.
The Launch of the Screaming Narwhal: 4/5
The Siege of Spinner Cay: 4.5/5
