#346 Gran Turismo

Posted: 12th November 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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2

378th played so far

Gran TurismoGenre: Driving
Platform: Playstation
Year of Release: 1997
Developer: Sony Computer Entertainment
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

Gran Turismo cars are luxury touring cars – the high performance semi-racers that allow you to travel fast, for long distances, in comfort and style – or so Wikipedia tells me. The word is Italian, the cars also known as grand tourers in English.

Gran Turismo, the game, allows you (as you can guess) use these kind of cars to race around tracks.

Our Thoughts

(Semi-)realistic 3D graphics on Playstation games can be a bit of a mixed bag – while the console works well enough with bigger polygons and flat colours, the sprites and quality involved in more realistic titles can easily become a mess of pixels. Fortunately, Gran Turismo avoids that and instead has nice track surroundings. Sure, not overly detailed, but not sparse, and not overwhelming.

I lead off with that for two reasons. First, to start with something positive. Second, because there are sections of scenery that you will see a lot early in the game.

When it comes to difficulty, I don’t mind a slightly difficult game start. Having to take a minute or two to get used to the controls can be okay. (At the same time, I’ve been admitting that I don’t mind playing on a lower difficulty if it makes the game more playable for me – it’s about the fun of the game, and while accomplishment is part of that, the frustration of a game that’s too difficult isn’t worth it for me. My backlog is too big!). Gran Turismo gets it wrong though. You are forced to go through a tutorial to get your license, which you need to do just about anything else in the game. That tutorial is meant to teach you controls and bits about good lines and how to take corners. Fine, that’s useful – tutorials in games are good.

What isn’t good is having to repeat the tutorial ten times. I was playing each of the tutorials several times – at least five times for each of the seven or so lessons, and I’m sure I reached double digits on some. The time limits on them were so tight that you had to be incredibly precise from the start, or you’d have to try again – sitting through several cutscenes and swoops to the car as you do. While it’s fine to expect the precision demanded after a while, as a first impression for the game it made me want to throw the disk away and play something else, and only a lot of persistence allowed me through. That’s fine for the main game – although please hook me in first so I feel like the game offers me something worth my time – but as this is before you can actually play the game, it feels like a waste of my time. Especially as some of it goes out the window anyway as having opponent cars makes it difficult.

This is an inexcusable mistake, coming from a dev team that played their own game too often to judge what a beginning player can do. Because to be honest, the game wasn’t worth it. Sure, it’s a fun racer, it looks good for the time and has a lot of tracks and car options for what you can do. It seems to be the complete package, of which it was apparently the first at the time. For me, however, this is now offered better by others, in a less frustrating package.

Final Thoughts

For my contribution to this game as part of the final thoughts I am going to channel the eight year old me who asked for this game at the local Virgin Megastores since everyone was telling him how amazing it was:

I just wanna play the computer game. Why did they make this training level so hard? I can’t get a licence to play this game properly. This cost so much too. I hate cars!

The difficulty that I faced playing this game (as well as the original Driver) probably goes a long way to explain the lack of enthusiasm that I have for realisting driving and racing games. Maybe if it wasn’t for my addiction to Crash Team Racing I may have written off the whole genre until I got my copy of Mario Kart: Double Dash. Who knows.

#524 Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire

Posted: 8th November 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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2

377th played so far

Pokemon-Ruby_SapphireGenre: Role-Playing
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Year of Release: 2002
Developer: Gamefreak
Publisher: Nintendo/The Pokémon Company

If we timed it right, this entry will go live around the same time this game’s remakes will be released. It’s not something we can normally arrange this easily, but for once the numbers worked out and we were aware in advance.

I know the Pokémon series incredibly well – there are few games I know better – thanks in part to a long time helping maintain related websites. We held off on the write-up for some time simply because it seemed cheap and because we could do it from memory, something I’ll be doing even now. Even so, the timing of the book’s release impacts a lot, with some of the best games being released just after the book’s initial publication. Still, we have to try to be objective here.

Our Thoughts

Pokémon, as a series, does not seem like the most interesting game for a hardcore player. The main campaign is usually fairly easy, with the solution to any problem consisting of gaining levels – almost any team will work to finish the game. Once you get deeper into the game, this changes, and the battling system can get frighteningly complex, down to the partial disassembly of the game people have done to understand how systems work and how everything affects each other. While many rarely go deep down the rabbit hole, it’s all there (although not always explained) and you’ll likely still use one or two bits of them.

Even now, people have analysed all the different monsters in teh game, compared them to each other, and made tiers of competence. Large groups turn up for official tournaments each year, with some of our friends having travelled to Hawaii for the official tournament – paid for by Nintendo, who support what is their second biggest franchise (following the Mario series) and is, by sales figures, the second biggest gaming franchise in the world. I suppose this is a story as much told by the other places the franchise has gone, through trading cards and the now 17 season long anime series.

The reason for its popularity is probably, in part, that at this point, it’s up to you how far deep you dive in. You can do your favourites, or you make it tough. You can go deep into battling or have fun with contests. You can place onerous restrictions on yourself – the Nuzlocke challenge is a recent favourite. On the whole though, unless you go for the boring repetitive stuff, the game is fun, with bright, cartoony visuals and easy new choices to make each time – new starters, new catches, new moves to use and try.

The gameplay is pretty basic – battles, against wild Pokemon (which can be caught) and trainers (who use a team like you) pit your team of up to six Pokemon against the opponent. Each Pokemon knows up to four moves, which can be damaging or supporting moves, and the one you have out (or two in double battles) can use one each turn. Damage is influenced by the type of the move and the type(s) of your opponent in a giant web of rock-paper-scissors setups. All sorts of additional effects then come in – the aforementioned double battles require you to interact with each other more, there are status effects to consider, abilities that make each Pokemon a bit more unique and held items that can change their abilities a bit further. These are not too different from other RPGs, but through the generations of the game, these have become more refined, with the system only being adjusted between games, with the majority staying and only bits and pieces being added on.

To progress through the game, you level up your monster and capture more of them – one of the game’s main tenets was (and still is) the “catch ’em all” aspect of trying to fill your Pokedex by having owned all of them in the game. It’s really just an element for the obsessive, but even trying to get some part of it done can be fun for a while.

As the basic concept of the game doesn’t change much, then (and most of the write-up should stay relevant for our future discussion of Diamond and Pearl), these games have often been accused of being repetitive. Ruby and Sapphire try to fix this in a few ways. The big one that stuck were the double battles – setting up Pokemon in a 2vs2 match, changing the feeling of battles and underlying strategy. The concept was expanded on later, but feels solid here already. Less permanent were contests, which were slowly removed, but feel like a full extra game here with different Pokemon being viable and different strategies being needed. Their biggest sin is probably that they exist so far outside main gameplay, only happening in a few cities and unlocking only halfway through the game, that there’s rarely a need to bother with them. Not much useful comes in. If they were integrated better (such as in-route battles, as we speculated about back when drips of informations leaked during the months before release) they would have made for an interesting, if at times frustrating alternative, but as it is it seems to fall flat, being more a bother than an interesting game.

The third generation of Pokemon games seems to have more detractors than many others. It will be interesting what these critics will say of the remakes, as it feels like their concerns won’t apply as much. The big one seemed to be the shock of being unfamiliar – most of the old monsters weren’t available in the game, to be released in later games, with no way to trade them from earlier games (the only time this was not possible between generations in a Pokemon game, and one that seems to have been the reason transfering was possible in every future generation). The region, while prettier, tried to imitate a number of known beats a bit too closely, which is the common joke about the series now, but didn’t seem to offer enough personality of its own. Again, here a remake could help.

Looking at it with the benefit of hindsight, it all isn’t as bad. If you’re not familiar with all the beats, they work well enough here. There is a feel, now, of the game being a step in between, and any player who wanted to play them is probably better off playing Emerald, the third game in the list, which cleaned up some issues and expanded the endgame with a lot more focused battling facilities that were as difficult as they should be in a game like this. Beyond that, the region and games are different, perhaps at times a bit flavourless, but good fun once you’ve gotten into the franchise. If you haven’t, Diamond and Pearl play better from the games on the list, and you’re probably always better off playing the most recent games.

Final Thoughts

I know a lot about the Pokémon games having played one from each pair that has ever been released. The inclusion of Pokémon Ruby/Sapphie baffles me since it is by far my least favourite of the main RPGS. To be honest I find it hard to express what it is exactly about this game that makes me dislike it significantly than the other ones.

I figured once the list was updated it would be jettisoned for the newer version that I enjoyed… but no. Still, I might enjoy the remakes.

#298 The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery

Posted: 4th November 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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0

376th played so far

Gabriel_Knight_The_Beast_WithinGenre: Adventure
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 1995
Developer: Sierra On-Line
Publisher: Sierra On-Line

For a long time now, my personal page on this blog has listed, as one of the biggest omissions in the list, the Sierra adventure games. As you can see above, this is a Sierra On-Line game. I still stand by my decision though.

While the Gabriel Knight series certainly derives from their tradition and builds on their experience, it diverges in some key ways – there’s no real death scenarios or ways to get stuck, and it’s more serious than the otherwise often whimsical scenarios. For that reason it’s not generally seen as ‘classic’ Sierra.

Our Thoughts

As we jump into the game, it’s clear it’s more linked to another trend popular in the mid-nineties (and really at no other point in history) – the FMV scenarios. With the advent of CD-ROM, it became easier to include vidoes in games, and for a short while a large number of adventures using real actors appeared. As 3D rendering became easier and cheaper, the inflexibility of using real actors became more noticeable and the genre quietly disappeared a few years later, only to be remembered by a single Gabriel Knight installment, as well as early notable example Phantasmagoria, the Tex Murphy series and the originally hyped 7th Guest. These days it’s constrained to a handful of cutscenes in some games – Command & Conquer is still famous for it, as was the Myst series for some time – but if you want real acting in, motion capture is now the way to go.

Playing this game shows why. Aside from the inability of getting any graphical update for this, the quality of the video and static photos used for the background (most of the actors interacting with the world appears to be greenscreen) aren’t that great due to capacity constraints. It feels incredibly awkward anyway, with long stretches of Gabriel just standing there while you go through what to do. Somehow all of this is feels less awkward when it’s an animated character doing it than when it’s a filmed actor, possibly because you expect it from animated characters, animation misses out the nuances. FMV games are tied to similar time constraints, but have to fit in the more natural movements you expect from real people.

What doesn’t help is that, due to the commitments of filming (which is a lot more intense than voice-acting’s “come in for an afternoon to read these lines”) the actors used are not well known ones (something that comes down to cost), which shows in their acting. Gabriel Knight, our main hero, seems the best example of this. While in the first game, he was voiced by Tim Curry (using a slightly dubious accent, but mostly pretty good), the replacement actor (whose only other IMDB credit is as an extra in a few episodes of Frasier) feels off. The word ‘wet blanket’ comes to mind. I suppose it’s not entirely unconvincing, but you still get the feeling you’re watching an amateur production. Add to that a few silly special effects of sorts and the longer time it takes to play all the feedback, and the game feels ripe for mocking.

While the acting is mixed, the environments work a bit better. They’re photos combined together – with a similar issue of lower quality – taken of the real life locations the story takes place in. With a bit of painting, but we can’t have everything. It’s probably the main thing that adds realism to the story – something the actors don’t pull off – and that makes the proceedings more interesting. While there are fantastical elements to the game and story, most of it really is about real life. And yes, it actually looks like you’d want to visit those places some day, if only because of all the history involved in it.

The story, then, comes together a lot better when you get to it, and this is where the game shines. Between the acting, you get the sense of a larger mystery involving werewolves (not a big spoiler there), with giant wolves that aren’t, and some stories of a mad German king from a few centuries ago. It mixes real life myths with the game’s fiction in a pretty interesting way.

The puzzles, meanwhile, are mostly straightforward. There’s the usual downside of occasional tricky hotspot finding, as well as a few odd item combinations (and one puzzle that was weirdly timebased in a way that wasn’t really signposted, where I couldn’t initially get it because I was too quick in showing someone an item), but mostly they’re sensible. There’s a weird minigame puzzle that comes down to tape splicing where the game is stupidly precise about wording – because it can’t do more, but some more flexibility would have been welcome. The live acting probably restricted solutions more than other games would have, but in general the game is sane and fairly straightforward in this sense.

Final Thoughts

We have come a long way in gaming technology, something demonstrated by this game requiring 6 discs in order to run and yet we have games like Red Dead Redemption running on one disc and bitch about having to change them for Mass Effect 2. As interesting as the story is I can not get past the actor portraying Gabriel Knight and wondering whether the live-action FMVs actually hindered this game rather than helped it.

#246 UFO: Enemy Unknown

Posted: 31st October 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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3

375th played so far

X-COM_-_UFO_Defense_CoverartGenre: Strategy
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1993
Developer: Mythos Games/Microprose
Publisher: Microprose

Another ‘ancient memory’ game for me – like The Legend of Zelda a few days ago, another game where I remember playing with a friend, mostly looking over their shoulder as they proved superior with it.

Recently remade (sort of) as the confusingly title future blog game X-Com: Enemy Unknown, this game (also known as X-Com: UFO Defense – this game was tricky to sort out the right version for) started this strategy game that combined 4X-like base building with turn based strategy missions.

Our Thoughts

These early X-Com games pull no punches. There’s no tutorial – your manual is all you get, which is what we loved, but feels a bit odd now – and generally no hint as to what you should do or even what buttons are for. Sure, it becomes clearer, but I’m still not sure what ducking does.

More important, while the game does try to build up difficulty (and we played on the easiest option), it starts off tough straight away. Your fighters start off as rookies and while often your first investigation of a crashed UFO starts simple, it seemed like you were as likely to be outnumbered and your enemies seemed to have some initial advantages – from being spread out across the terrain in advantageous positions to generally appearing to have loads of action points, giving them plenty of first shots before you even realise they’re there. We had trouble adapting to not rushing in, and even then sometimes shots came out of nowhere with no way to protect us except hoping for a lucky miss. It probably comes down to us not learning some tactical options, but it felt unfair, especially where it came out when the enemy seemed to get more surprise attacks than we got as players.

Once that felt balanced out a bit, though, the strategy section of the game do become quite fun and tense, as you sneak around these rural areas looking for aliens, trying to kill them before you’re dead and gathering their technology. All of this immediately feeds back into the simulation part.

Although not as in-depth a 4X simulation as, for example, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (to stay in the genre), its simpler form is entertaining and (he said lazily) sometimes made me wish for an auto-resolve on the too-difficult-for-me battles. There’s base building, recruiting workers and soldiers, and keeping the latter trained and equipped, researching technology – some from Earth, others found by investigating alien artifacts picked up during missions – and even defending your own base from alien attack. All this must be done while keeping as many alien threats down: you are funded by the world’s governments and if you don’t protect them well enough, they will cut your funding. You can make money by selling things you discover on the ground and have created in your base. It’s nothing overly complicated, but enough of a challenge that you can’t just sleepwalk through it either.

What’s probably most interesting (but also at times frustrating) was the variety in aliens. Although it starts off with you facing Sectoids (looking like ‘standard’ greys), aliens that are harder to kill and more creative appear soon after, starting with the more intelligent Floaters. According to the wiki, they are still low threat, but a single encounter with them wiped out my (I thought) more experienced squad. Each comes with their own additional research options and such as well.

The game offers enough ‘shiny’ options to make you want to try again, but for beginners, at this point the hurdle to get into it may be a bit too high. I am honestly more looking forward to playing its remake now.

Final Thoughts

Okay, at some point we are going to be playing the 2012 remake  so I guess I can keep this section brief until we get to that point. Thing is, this game is, in a number of ways ridiculously hard. However, it is hard in the way that Prince of Persia was hard. Meaning after you lick your wounds you do tend to pick yourself up and start again… which is more than I can say for my experience of playing Gran Turismo 16 years ago.

#128 The Legend of Zelda

Posted: 27th October 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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4

374th played so far

Legend_of_zelda_cover_(with_cartridge)_goldGenre: Action/Adventure
Platform: NES
Year of Release: 1986
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo

Wow, it’s been a while since we last played a Legend of Zelda game – nearly 300 games ago, in The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords of Adventure. This is some combination of wanting to keep the number okay and spreading them out further in the future, and us having played plenty of games on these consoles already. It’s still so long until we get to playing Twilight Princess, I’ll probably be haggered and toothless by the time we get to this point.

It was about time to come back to the series now, and where better to start than at the original? We played the 3DS version, which we got for free as Nintendo 3DS ambassadors (yay for early adopting for once… shut up I’m still sore about the Red Ring of Death debacle of 2011) so can’t claim that we had the gold cartridge that’s one of this game’s claims of fame. Instead, it’s just the gameplay we have to go for today.

Our Thoughts

As it should be for any game here, surely?

This is a game where, for me at least, memories and prior experience colour the gme, memories of speed runs once seen and hunting the world with friends for a long time looking for a dungeon being as much a part of the experience as actual gameplay. And then there are the many sequels we played – even just taking 2D, Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening (awww my first Zelda game) and the Oracle subseries have had my attention for some time.

And yet actually playing the original doesn’t overshadow any of these. Sure, it’s clearly Nintendo hard – difficult to an extent you don’t see in current games that often. The game is merciless in the number of enemies that spawn and, seemingly as often, respawn. Damage quickly becomes high, opportunities to recover from them infrequent – less than previous games, as less of the environment can be destroyed for rupees and bonuses. Still, it feels like it all plays fair. Any losses are down to lack of preparation or inattentiveness, there’s no sudden rushes you’re not prepared for. It feels finely balanced.

The dungeons themselves are similar, filled with hidden passages, puzzles, challenges to open doors and different strategies for loot to collect. Although there’s a lot less exposition surrounding it, they still follow the pattern of later games of going in, getting a new tool or weapon that helps you defeat the dungeon and is needed later on, then on to find the boss to defeat the dungeon and collect a part of the triforce.

While you could already spend a long time wandering around these, finding passages and exploring, the real getting stuck is more likely to come in when finding the dungeons in the first place. The first dungeons are plainly visible in the world, as long as you find the path to them, but to get access to later ones you need to solve puzzles in the overworld, with the help of (at most) some badly translated hints. These can be a combination of finding the right part of the overworld (with some infinitely repeating screens that require you to take the right combination), defeating the right enemies and finding out which tree to torch or block to push. While inside the dungeons, you can often get some clue you need to do something in a certain room, due to the level layouts, in the overworld there aren’t as many clues and you can spend hours trying to work out where to go and what to do. In a pre-internet world, that would get frustrated, but also has the rush of accomplishment to go with it.

As alluded to earlier, the story as explained in the game is, as with many of these games, fairly thin. The elderly helpers you meet in caves and dungeons have fairly badly translated dialogue that used to cause more confusion than it clarified. Even as explained, it’s simple, laying the foundation for pretty much all future Legend of Zelda plots – Zelda is captured by the evil Ganon and has to be rescued by Link, by reuniting the Triforce that has been broken up and scattered through the world. By doing this he saves the world. Later games expand on this – the Legend of Zelda canon is convoluted – but on the whole the blueprint appears here.

When we look at games like Super Mario Bros, it’s difficult to argue the first is truly superior, as later instalments improve on all other aspects. For the first Legend of Zelda, however, the game design feels so tight and everything works so well on its own level that even know it feels like it fits in with any of the others – at least when it comes to the 2D series. And even then, you could argue whether 2D or 3D Zelda games are better, if they’re even comparable. Peter, what do you think?

I think asking whether 2D or 3D Zelda games are better is just asking for trouble to be honest since it is such a personal thing. I think I am going to have to go for the cop out answer here and play a bit to both sides. I personally have had more fun playing the two dimensional games. Link’s Awakening was such a big game for me as a child since it was one of the first games that I completed where I felt the most immense sense of satisfaction and so I am looking forward to playing that again soon as well as picking up Oracle of Ages and giving that a go since I used to play on Oracle of Seasons. I do have to say, however, that in terms of beauty and technical achievement I will back the 3D games with special love being given to Wind Waker. So, in terms of what are the better games I would side with the 3D crowd, but on a personal level I have a greater fondness for the 2D games. Not too much of a cop out I hope.

Final Thoughts

Well, after being put on the spot like that (thanks a heap Jeroen) it’s amazing to see how early a number of the tropes we consider Zelda-like originate in this first iteration of the game. Is it perfect? No it is not but I would argue that no first game in an acclaimed ever really is. One thing that strikes me about this series, however, is how both the top-down 2D style and 3D series are still being made alongside each other. Grand Theft Auto chose to abandon it’s roots but if A Link Between Worlds is anything to go by they may not fully move the whole series into the traditional 3D arena any time soon.

#867 LittleBigPlanet

Posted: 23rd October 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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0

373rd played so far

littlebigplanetGenre: Puzzle/Platform
Platform: Playstation 3
Year of Release: 2008
Developer: Media Molecule
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Here’s a game with a bit of a history for us. We’ve been looking at writing up LittleBigPlanet for some time now, as we obtained it soon after Peter got his Playstation 3. For a variety of reasons – time at first, forgetfulness, and then our year-long binge of games we hadn’t played before (while we’d gotten some time in on LittleBigPlanet already), we never got around to it. I had even played this game before I got my hands on the PS3. I played it with one of my former university housemates every now and then on his console. I really loved the game and it was the game (along with inFamous) that made me save up for my very own.

LittleBigPlanet is a cutesie platformer, cutting and pasting elements together to create its levels. There’s a big focus on puzzle solving over action elements, although the latter are still present in places. One of its big notable accomplishments is the extensive editor, which allows for players to create their own levels. It is said (although some have doubted this) that the level designers for the game used the same editor to create the main game levels as other players can use.

Our Thoughts

One of the downsides of getting deep into a game, being distracted for some time, and coming back to it… a few years later, yeah, probably. We tried to start playing where we left off, and between trying to remember how the controls worked and how the game worked, and trying to get through more difficult levels, we were frustrated just getting back into it. Going back a bit in levels made life a bit easier… But it shows how the game gets challenging enough a few worlds in.

And that shows how deceptive the game is. While you start as a cute puppet-like creature, Stephen Fry’s calm voice leads you through the game, telling you how to play. Levels feels patchwork and put together with krazy glue and start off gentle, being incredibly inviting as you play through. You collect stickers and earn items to customize your character with – different skins, hats, shirts and so on, all very customizable to create your own Sackboy.

All of this looks gorgeous, by the way. Yeah, it’s all a bit put together, bits and pieces that you could combine in any way yourself, but most of it seems unique per level and is still designed to fit in. They all still look nice as well, vaguely 3D even when they’re mostly 2D levels (something used in part when jumping up and down mountains). Exploring the different levels are fun that way already, seeing what each is about and how the themes are interpreted and linked together.

Each level has their own mini story too, combining into a simple larger ones per world. It’s stuff like going through levels to rescue people, investigate what’s wrong with animals and things like that. They really just exist to give you an excuse to go through the levels, with a handful of scripted events in each to make you go in a different direction every once in a while, but they don’t really matter much beyond giving you a reason to play through them.

But man… it gets difficult. To be honest, it seems like, in part, that’s actually because we played it in multiplayer, as described above. There’s the obvious camera limitation – something you sort of get used to, but limits where you can go, with you blocking each other’s movements. More annoying is the life meter. They, in a level, effectively come from continue points/portals (which I’m sure have a more official name). When you reach a new one, they activate, displaying four lights. Each time you die (or either player does, in our case) one of the four lights goes out and you respawn. When all four are out, you don’t, and if everyone is dead, the level is failed. If you’re playing multiplayer, this respawning also only happens when the spawn point is in view. Ironically, this, on balance, probably makes the game more difficult as often as it helps, as you have to keep reversing to make your partner reappear, and you have more chances to fail – on a tricky jump, you would each get two tries, rather than the four you’d get in single player. Sure, it helps at times as well, and several challenges can only be done in multiplayer (with some, I believe, requiring four players), but that’s optional content that feels like it might be put in for this reason.

You can’t blame the game for it, and in fact, it’s refreshing for a game of this age. It just doesn’t stay the simple, friendly game LittleBigPlanet seems to be when you first start playing.

The area where LittleBigPlanet really shows off what it can do is in the level builder. All the way through the Story Mode you aim to collect as many of the stickers and items as you can to create your own levels (this was later supplemented by a large number of downloadable content from original Media Molecule items, mythological packages to other games including the likes of Heavy Rain, Metal Gear Solid and Sonic the Hedgehog). I have tried to make my own levels before (for the sake of trophies naturally) but could never produce something as creatively amazing that these easy-to-use tools would allow. I am clearly not of the mind for this sort of mode since the range of free-to-play user made levels out there in the PSN is staggering. I mean someone managed to create a working calculator from all the available stickers, wires and switches?!

Final Thoughts

In order to have a properly successful console there needs to be the killer app which is exclusive and makes you want to invest hundreds of [INSERT CURRENCY HERE] in a machine that will go out of date in 5-6 years. The original XBox had Halo: Combat Evolved and the Playstation 2… was just the best console to grace God’s green Earth. The Playstation 3 has since amassed an impressive roster of exclusive games but in my opinion LittleBigPlanet really was the first of these in terms of chronology. I only hope that we see one from the Playstation 4 in the near future.

#15 Rogue

Posted: 19th October 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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1

372nd played so far

Rogue_221212_201733.pngGenre: Strategy/Role-Playing
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1980
Developer: Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, Ken Arnold, Jon Lane

Here’s to a game that’s probably named and referenced by a group of people several orders of magnitude larger than have actually played it. As we discussed with Nethack, roguelikes are an old genre, combining randomly generated dungeons with often simple graphics but complicated game systems.

Although the old games are mostly limited to corners of the internet and were for some time forgotten by most players, although the legacy lived on in many games – the Diablo series being roguelikes made to look fancier with more modern enhancements, but using some basic systems.

Oddly enough, the genre, in a way, has made a comeback recently. Dungeons of Dredmor was released to moderate success a few years ago – being quite notable on Steam – and the recentish Kickstarter campaign for FTL has led to it becoming one of the biggest indie hits recently.

Still, all of that started with Rogue (and to a lesser extend predecessors like DUNGEON). How did it?

Our Thoughts

It’s quite obvious why a game like this was created and, back in the day, became this prominent. Dungeons and Dragons – and the many later RPGs, although D&D would still have been the most promiment – was popular, especially amongst the crowds who’d be playing games on university mainframes.

The idea of having the dungeons you go into refereed for you, randomly generated so the game is different each time with its own surprises, is very enticing, and hunting for treasure and killing monsters seems like something people would try to add early on. In that sense, there’s a clear line from Adventure, earlier similar wish fulfilment (although there based on spelunking) living in another world and trying to survive in there.

The way the game plays shows the two different tracks early games took. We’ve looked a lot at the arcade side of things, coin guzzling action-based games like Pong and Asteroids. On the other hand, there are the games developed, often, on university mainframes, where death is still a threat, but play is slower and often more focused on puzzle focused and longer consideration. Aside from the earlier mentioned Adventure, we also have Eamon and MUD as earlier examples of this.

Rogue, then, is probably less complicated than its legacy suggests to modern players. Having played some ‘classic’ roguelike successors like Nethack and Angband, Rogue is simpler in many places. There are less monsters – only 26, one per letter of the alphabet, instead of multiple per letter – less treasure and simpler dungeons. It’s still more complicated than many RPGs, with food systems, complicated armour and weapon setups and many more systems available… it just doesn’t have the insanity some later roguelikes offer (even when the monsters can be a bit silly, such as emus and kestrels).

For a genre that thrives of complexity, this is a good thing for us more casual players. The game feels easier to get into and with some knowledge of the genre, it’s easy to dive in and get a few levels down. Not far enough to win – that’d take far more practice – but enough to feel like we’re making good progress. already.

It’s interesting, and more important, addictive, as each game adds a bit to your knowledge and makes you a bit better at dungeon diving. It’s absolutely enjoyable.

Final Thoughts

Due to its age it is less engaging than Nethack on the grounds that it is, as we said before, a lot simpler. Then again there is the whole food thing that can really screw you over… which can really up the difficulty if you are unlucky. From my (limited) experience I would say that Nethack would be a better port of call than Rogue. Sorry Rogue.

#726 OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast

Posted: 15th October 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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1

371st played so far

Coast_2_CoastGenre: Racing
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 2006
Developer: Sumo Digital
Publisher: SEGA

We really need to play more racing games. We enjoy the more ‘manic’ ones like Mario Kart, but have less of an affinity for more realistic games. Sort of enjoyable when we get into them, but not something we enjoy playing too much. It’s no real wonder then that we fall behind with them this often.

Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast is an update of an earlier coin-op, the sequel to the original Outrun. That’s about all I know about it, with the book mentioning it’s more about fun than physics. And loads of Ferraris it seems.

Our Thoughts

Yeah, the developer clearly wanted to have some Ferraris in there. It makes sense though, as a run from coast to coast, cruising past beaches and other settings that you can just see, well, someone who can afford to drive a Ferrari race past.

Sure, in parts it’s pretty predictable. Race against other people, rack up points to buy upgraded cars and such. The game is mission based (presumably this race from coast to coast, although there’s not a lot of story in the game), with a few different goals. Often it seems to be to come out on top – be in the top three (we think) in a race around a set track, while there are also time trials. More interesting is the ‘Heart Attack’ option, where (and I quote the manual) you have to “[S]how off your driving skills to win your girlfriends (sic) heart. The better you are, the more hearts you will be given”.

It offers some more variety in a game that is otherwise similar to many others. This is, I am sure, in part down to our games ‘vocabulary’ not featuring a lot of ways to describe racing games.

The game, in that sense, fits tightly together though. The controls feel good and responsive and gave us less trouble than our earlier semi-misadventure Race Pro, it never really getting in our way when playing. It’s tough to complete our games, but that’s down to our racing skills, not the underlying systems.

There’s one place where this didn’t feel like it was the case though. When racing against others, it feels like your opponents rubber band more than should be needed. A few times, it happened that we managed to overtake (almost) all of them – second place or so if I’m not mistaken – and about five seconds before the end, suddenly three or four opponents showed up, overtook us and we ended up in last place after all. It felt horribly unfair and realistic, blatantly so.

For the better part of it, however, the game felt strong, a good racer through some pleasant environments. Certainly worth it if I wanted to play more racing games of its kind.

Final Thoughts

It is nice to have a racing game that, whilst being a bit true to the whole driving thing, is able extend itself towards the sillier side. This silly side really comes pout when you are on the verge of failing a challenge and your girlfriend (who is sitting in the passenger seat) starts to beat you up. It reminds me a bit of the Crazy Taxi series in that way.

As mentioned earlier, this is an area of gaming that we lack the lingo and proper knowledge of the history to comment to much on it. It’s developing slowly but it’s getting there.

#174 Prince of Persia

Posted: 11th October 2014 by Jeroen in Games
Tags: , , ,
2

370th played so far

Prince_of_Persia_1989_coverGenre: Platform
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1989
Developer: Broderbund
Publisher: Broderbund

Prince of Persia is a familiar title. I remember playing it on our old PC, back in the days, for some time unable to play it properly as the shift-key on the keyboard didn’t work – some cheating was involved to get further into the game.

So yeah, I’ve been looking forward to revisiting one of the games of my childhood. This should be fun.

Our Thoughts

Some game skills never disappear. While some of my reflexes and precision jumps are off now, not having played this game for about 18 years, part of the muscle memory was still there, as were the ways of thinking – when to do the long jumps, when to step forward, floor switches to trigger and ones to avoid. While I never was an expert, after a bit I did as well as I always did and remembered a fair share of the way.

What helps is how well the levels are put together. While they don’t telegraph what’s happening, and don’t make real life sense, there is some internal logic with the positioning of floor plates, and plenty of smaller pointers in what could happen and how they interact. The number of elements to learn in the levels are fairly small – most of them introduced in the first level, the last few (mostly some saw blades chopping you in half as you walk through) early on, with everything being clear what they do.

This plays within a time limit of sixty minutes. From a story perspective, this makes sense – the vizier will get you if you waste too much time – but it also works for the game. For a long time, nobody really cares (to be honest), as you’re not going to get far enough in the game that that hour sets you back more than a few levels. A lot of time is spent mapping the levels and finding the right path through – the fastest, too, but that comes with the frequent restarts you’ll have no matter what. Later, it adds pressure, but as (if you get good enough) the game is easily beatable within the limit, it’s not the biggest limitation in the game. Skill takes over first.

What stands out about the game are the animations. Rotoscoped (yeah, an early version of what The Last Express did – it’s almost a Broderbund trademark), the lead character’s animations are based on the designer’s younger brother walking around, jumping and running. The animations look very fluid and natural as a result. It looks nice, although it causes its own effect on gameplay. The character feels sluggish, being slow to get started and taking his time slowing down – you’ll probably fall off ledges occasionally because you misjudge the stopping distance of your character. Because of the same animation restrictions, your running jumps need to start a bit early as well – once you get to the edge of the ledge, the falling animation already starts and you can no longer jump.

Even so, the game looks amazing for it. Sure, it’s dated for now, but for its age it looks amazing (and looked amazing to us back then), on all systems and resolutions, with little compromise even on the lesser systems I believe I used to play it on. The higher levels especially look appropriately oriental, with all characters animating expressively.

Final Thoughts

Dated as it is there is something to be said for a game that remains compelling despite the amount of rote-learning you need to do to master any of the levels. It is a very tough game which makes the more recent versions (like Sands of Time) play like a cakewalk in comparison. Okay those games have their fair set of challenges too but this is beyond the pale. The princess is very much other such female characters present in video games… a plot device and pretty inconsequential otherwise. Samus really was a blip.

#727 Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent

Posted: 7th October 2014 by Jeroen in Games
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0

369th played so far

tom-clancys-splinter-cell-double-agent-xbox360-boxartGenre: Stealth
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 2006
Developer: Ubisoft Shanghai
Publisher: Ubisoft

When we think of stealth games the first thing that comes across out mind is Metal Gear Solid and the fact that very early in our blog we managed to cover five of them in pretty quick succession. As such it has been a good few years since our last stealth game and we thought it was time to do so.

Seeing how we are incredibly behind on the mongrel platform that is ‘various’ we are going to be doing our second game in the Splinter Cell series… but like when we did Age of Mythology we are actually doing this out of order. The original Splinter Cell is on our radar but since it doesn’t count in the book as a stealth game (and we are becoming more and more aware of the inconsistencies of the book in regards to genre labelling) we shall leave this game for another time.

Our Thoughts

Released just a year and a half after Chaos Theory, Double Agent once again sees you take control of NSA agent Sam Fisher who, after experiencing a personal tragedy, is placed undercover into a domestic terrorist group with the hope that it will provide enough distraction from the pain. I suspect this ties into the storyline of the works of Tom Clancy, the thriller writer who passed away about a year ago. It is worth noting here that we played the Xbox 360 version of this game; I make this distinction since I have just been made aware that the storyline depended on your version. So we will be referencing the Xbox 360, PC and PS3 version rather then the Xbox, Gamecube, PS2 and Wii version… wow that’s confusing.

Anyway, this role as a double agent allows the game to create a very interesting trust system. In the opening level, where you infiltrate a geothermal plant in Iceland and end up preventing the release of a missile (or not depending on your success) it is just touched upon that certain actions will cause the NSA to stop trusting you and if you lose all trust then the mission is lost. In the opener this is near impossible to do since you will be preoccupied with using EMPs to take out lights, sniping and moving bodies and to my recollection we only lost a smidgen of trust on our playthrough. The trust system comes into play later when you have to maintain the trust of the NSA whilst also gaining and retaining the trust of the JBA (i.e. the terrorist group). This results in a number of interesting choices and moral dilemmas that you have to plough through to complete the game but (like the infamous finger cutting in Heavy Rain) you may be swayed by your own principles forgetting this is a work of fiction.

Where this game works well, not that the trust system isn’t an interesting spin on a karma system, is how the Splinter Cell series keeps upping the ante on their ability to create tension. The opener in Double Agent is a lot more challenging than Chaos Theory and the fact that you have a green rookie on the mission with you (not as in a crappy escort mission but you are being made aware of his actions) does well to aggravate you but also help you feel culpable when the obvious happens. Something that actually is annoying is the absence of objective markers. Okay I know that if I was an NSA double agent I wouldn’t have a magical HUD with objective markers and it affords a greater sense of realism… but I like those little arrows so you don’t end up walking around in the dark for bleeding ages. I would also argue that if you were a true NSA agent, you would have more recon information and a better idea of where to go, which is what the markers could make up for. Right now you’re going in blind, with no clue what to suspect, you wouldn’t have that (as much) in a real mission.

Tying into this, while the game has a tutorial, it is actually not that useful. It tries to get you to go through the motions, but rather than explaining the controls and how the game works, it just gives you goals and a handful of explanation popups that tend to not apply to the current situation or give wrong or vague information, while not actually giving you the basic information on how to actually play the game that you’d expect during a tutorial. While you don’t want your hand held through the full game, the tutorial is an excellent place to do that. As the controls can be inflexible and unintuitive, you need the tutorial, and there’s no excuse for one where, like us, you get stuck for ten minutes because it’s not clear that the pipe is climbable and that you can’t keep climbing up, but instead need to climb up a wall, then jump facing the exact right way in the exact position, to continue.

It’s a bit opaque and unfriendly to beginners, which seems unnecessary.

Final Thoughts

Setting aside these beginner’s difficulties – we’re not stealth gamers, there’s a fun game in here. It’s pretty difficult, but with a nice variety of actions and ways of solving problems in the world. What’s interesting from the first level alone are the efforts taken to integrate story into the levels. It’s not just cutscenes, briefings or Metal Gear Solid‘s talking heads, but is at times far more integrated – as with the previously mentioned second agent.

Difficult to get into perhaps, but worth of your time when you do.

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