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Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Category: gamelog (Page 2 of 3)

Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction

November 28, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I actually finished this game the same day I finished Puzzle Agent, but didn’t feel like writing two summaries in one day so I put it off for a long time. I’m backdating this entry so it falls on the correct day I beat the game, but having waited a good three months, I’ve forgotten most of my impressions right after finishing the game.

In general, I remember never being disappointed in the game. It was a Ratchet and Clank game that did what I expected: relatively unpunishing but solid shooter mechanics, lots of weapon upgrades for a large arsenal that ranged from practical to silly, and a moderately humorous storyline. Having been a fan of the R&C series for a while, there was nothing in this game that turned me off the series.

The only complaint I might lay against it is that for a game that seems to not subscribe to lengthening the game by making it more difficult, the difficulty of certain portions of the game are uneven. I remember a few boss fights and on-rails jumping puzzles being unusually hard. Even so, it never felt like the game was being mean.

Like other R&C games, I still suffer from falling/drowning deaths every once in a while when the game doesn’t adequately show depth/collision on the edge of a platform, but because death is usually quite innocuous, it was never a huge deal.

So there you have it. It was a fun game and I’m glad I beat it. I almost immediately started Crack in Time, the next R&C game, so it certainly kept my appetite for the series both fed and hungry for more.

Puzzle Agent

November 28, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I bought this game only a few days ago on Steam as part of a heavily discounted indie bundle. It was a game that I had had my eye on for a short amount of time; after all, I enjoyed Telltale’s Sam and Max games (back when I played them on Gametap) and I’ve gotten to spend a bit of time with their new Monkey Island games.

This game is…short. Steam tells me that I’ve played it for 5 hours, and I’m sure more than 30 minutes of that was while the game was paused as I was feeding or changing or cuddling Simon.

But that’s really the only criticism I’d put against it. I don’t even mind that much because I got it at such a steep discount, though I might feel a bit more guff if I had paid a full $10 for it.

The game has a really interesting feel and vibe. It somehow treads that territory (that perhaps no one knew existed) between the joy, frustration, and whimsy of Professor Layton and the somewhat ominous storytelling undertones of Twin Peaks and Alan Wake. It’s a strange yet compelling short story with puzzles interjected in it.

And if you’re into that kind of thing, it’s great fun. If you’re not, it’s strange and possibly frustrating and almost certainly not rewarding enough. Luckily, I’m into that kind of thing.

(Footnote: no huge spoilers in this post, as I don’t think there’s really any need to discuss much of the plot. I will say that the puzzles that get interrupted by gnomes managed to surprise, terrify, and delight me all at once.)

Heavy Rain

July 6, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Heavy Rain is an interesting game. I almost hesitate to call it a game, but that’s me being a little bit snarky and not giving it its due. It is a game. And there are points where it is really gripping and emotional and – dare I say it? – fun. But then there are points where the game becomes tedious and dull and somewhat inexplicable.

The game bounces between three types of scenes: intriguing choices (the most fun), quick-time-event boss battles (fun at first, but get kind of old), and mundane “normal” tasks (which get old really fast). In terms of story (what I would consider both the game’s greatest strength and its biggest weakness), I found that the first 75% of it was entertaining and interesting.

SPOILERS AHEAD.
But then. But then the game reveals its big secret, and it…is disappointing. All of the gameplay and story leading up to this point has been split between four characters investigating and tracking a serial killer. All of a sudden, with the reveal of who the killer is, the motivations and gameplay that I had done with one of the characters was thrown into complete chaos. There are choices I had made that now made no sense with my newfound knowledge. Whereas a twist in a movie is set up and supported by all the writing before and after it, the fact that the game allowed me to do things that I felt like would have been completely out of character simply due to a lack of knowledge made me feel kind of cheated. What’s more, the scene in the clock shop seemed like an outright lie.

In terms of the individual chapters, I found the choices that were presented were seldom actually meaningful. I would be interested in playing through Heavy Rain again not so much from a player’s perspective but more from a designer’s perspective. I’m interested in how many of the choices I made during the game were essentially fake choices; things that may have affected a line of dialog or a short cutscene, but not had any lasting effect.

The interest is also in a sense of testing the game’s edge cases. What happens if I let any or all of the four main characters die? Can they die before they are scripted to? Does shooting the drug dealer change anything? Does not kissing Madison change anything? Does the fact that Madison can call either Ethan or Jayden mean that I can essentially fail at playing one of the three investigative paths and still save Shaun? Does any of this gameplay affect anything meaningfully other than the end cutscenes?

Personally, I found Ethan’s storyline the most interesting (it’s supposed to be, right?), but I also really took to Norman Jayden as well. I really liked his ARI investigation scenes, but there were only two of them. I wished they had given me more of that. While I liked the archetypes presented in the characters and from scene-to-scene enjoyed the way the game was able to get me to feel a large range of emotions – lighthearted joy, suspenseful fear, nervous anticipation – I found the overall story arc left me with questions and seemed to be a bit messy.

Maybe it had to be in order to make it interactive or there were just lines or scenes that I misunderstood or missed, but here are some things I was confused about after the game ended: why would Ethan blackout and end up far away with an origami figure in his hand? What was the relationship between Madison and Norman? Why would Scott even think about helping Kramer when he’s having a heart attack when he has no problem burning Madison alive later? Why does everyone mispronounce origami?
SPOILERS DONE.

A few UI hitches: the moving, rotating icons are cool-looking but a functional disaster. It makes it hard to see what choice is attached to what icon (especially given how similar Circle and Square can look) and – in some cases – even can cut the choices off off-camera. This would be OK if I had forever to make choices, but the game forces your choices after a set amount of time in some instances. And let’s touch on camera angles for a second; it is never a good idea to suddenly switch camera angles a complete 180 degrees when I am walking relative to the camera. It means that hitting left now walks me in the completely opposite direction, which is very frustrating.

So, in the end, I don’t know what to make of Heavy Rain. It was an enjoyable ride, but that’s what it mainly felt like: a ride. It felt like a long movie where I was forced to hit play every five seconds to continue watching. And while the movie was entertaining enough, hitting play that many times is bound to get tedious at some point.

Red Dead Redemption

June 21, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I’m always a bit skeptical when games score as highly as Red Dead Redemption did on Metacritic, especially because I was not a huge fan of the critically lauded Grand Theft Auto IV. To add to my doubt, RDR is by the exact same studio that brought the world GTA.

So maybe my expectations, despite the game getting nearly perfect ratings, were lowered. In some ways, the game was exactly what I imagined it to be. In others, it completely exceeded what I expected.

There’s something intangible about the game that I absolutely loved. A feeling that I got, riding my tamed black stallion across the beautiful Western landscape, finding treasure, fending off cougars, and eventually stopping in town to sleep for the night or buy some bait for hunting. It’s one of the few games where the sandbox is a lot of fun to play in (as opposed to feeling like an environment to simply be admired or – worse – a hindrance to the fun gameplay you really want to do). There was nothing I enjoyed more than just riding around the vast landscape, occasionally skinning a coyote. This is the part of the game that took me by surprise and made me want to come back and play it night after night.

The rest of the game is what I expected from Rockstar. The storytelling is uneven, the characters exaggerated and hard to sympathize with, and the missions along the main storyline begin to blur together. There are sometimes lengthy bits of exposition that reveal no new insights into character and the main player character, John Marsten, chastises others for things that I did just a few minutes later. What’s more, most of the story is focused on John doing the vicious dirty work for less-than-savory characters in exchange for little or no information. And then, at the beginning of the next mission, John will complain about how he’s not really getting anything out of the deal!

These next two paragraphs are where I spoil the ending to this game in order to talk about how it is a brilliant piece of storytelling. There is a point near the end of the game, after Dutch dies, when I expected the game to end. It was the culmination of everything I had done so far in the game and most games would have ended the game with me returning to my ranch and reuniting with my family. But RDR doesn’t do that. Instead, the next few missions are a careful and beautiful means of pulling the player into the end of the game in an emotional way that hasn’t been matched by many games I’ve played.

The rancher missions are such a departure and so satisfying in an odd way. I felt like I had earned them, like after all the senseless killing and scheming and deception, I had earned the right to simply buy some cattle or teach my son to hunt or scare those damn crows from the corn silo. It felt like coming home. And yet, at the same time, it felt unnerving. There was no doubt that I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and when it did, it is both completely gut-wrenching and totally inevitable. The final Stranger mission is a nice denouement and, if I could condense the rest of the game to about 1/20th of its size, the game tells a really nice story.

Unfortunately, story-wise, I was forced to play through the rest of the game to get to the ending. Fortunately, I had fun doing it. When the credits rolled, the stats told me that I had played the game for a little over 2 days and 1 hour, and I wouldn’t say that I regretted a single minute of it.

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