#641 Golden Tee Live

Posted: 13th December 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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292nd played so far

gtlive2006marqueehiresGenre: Sports
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 2005
Developer: Incredible Technologies
Publisher: Incredible Technologies

Yeah, you read that right. For those of you who’ve been following our adventures for a while, you will know why that title matters. If not, it’s quite simple. Golden Tee Live is one of our big ‘worries’ – a game that’s difficult to get hold or find, in this case because it’s only available on the arcade game, with a quite distinct controller, with no clues on where we could find one. A similar situation to Final Furlong, really.

Or so we thought. Recent investigation revealed the existing of a home version of the game. While it would lack the connectedness of the ‘official’ edition, it appears identical in (nearly) every other aspect, so the rest of it seems to matter little. We’ll take it.

Our Thoughts

For once, I can come in with a bit more background information about a game. While it’s a long time ago (and the controls obviously don’t match), when I was younger we used to have a golfing game for an old PC. It was surprisingly fully featured, thinking back on it, with its own course editor, and quite some variety in controls and such. I can’t say I was addicted to it as such, but I spent quite some time playing it… and messing around with courses and making my own way through.

I have not, however, played actual golf yet, which is sort of the other side of all of this. Something that shocked me since I was always a fan of pitch and putt when I was a kid.

One of the biggest things that makes the game enjoyable are the controls. Not unlike Steel Battalion (another one of those big ‘can we get it’ games), the controls are what make the game unique, difficult to get, but worth the time.

The controls are satisfying visceral. The most important bit – your swing – comes from you rolling a trackball back and forward, with the speed of your roll determining the strength of your swing, with the back and forward swing being adjusted by the direction you roll in. It feels awesome.

 The courses are as interesting and diverse as you’d expect and want. Different areas of the course have noticeably different effects on your swings, there’s plenty of water and difficult areas to move around and so on.

Added variety comes from the other obligatory options (really) – your choice of club really does matter, easily shown on the screen when you pick. Wind plays a fairly major part as well, nudging the ball enough to get it to the hole… or into a lake, to be honest.

One of the slightly disappointing things (at least in the version we played) is that all of this plays out on an overhead map. It’s useful to track your trajectory and adds accuracy, but it’s not as visually interesting. The shame here is that the game gives you a (semi-)3D ‘intro’ at the start, giving you a look at the area (looking quite nice), but that disappears the moment the game really starts.

Still, it’s a small blemish on what, for us, is an addictive sports game that certainly brought out the most competitive in us. Especially one of us (I don’t know what you’re talking about). It’s actually a keeper now, which we didn’t expect (and didn’t have for Steel Battalion and such…)

Final Thoughts

It’s difficult to find the arcade game – or at least it was for us, since it seems like all listings that are out there are broken or wrong. Trust us, we tried. The home version, however, is easier to find and a lot of fun to play. Absolutely worth it, even if it doesn’t look as fantastic as you’d expect now. Then again – with the lack of golf games on the list, you have to wonder whether you need it.

The list… 2nd Edition

Posted: 11th December 2013 by Jeroen in New Edition
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So, just after the third anniversary of our project to play through all 1001 games that we should play before we die (and are doing our best to do so), we found out that the second edition of the book has been released, and we picked up our own copy.

This has been a moment we’ve been fearing. Based on a tenth of the entire book being from 2009, several annual series being featured and the past few years having a lot of awesome games released, the second edition surely featured quite a few new games from recent years – 100 or more games replaced, lots that we have already played. Based on those numbers, we’d probably lose so many games, 30 to 40 that we’d played already, that switching would lose us a lot of games. It’s why, a year ago, if a list was released with that many changes, we’d ignore it and continue with the original list, possibly playing the new games separately afterwards. Keep things manageable.

So we were all ready to look at it and probably ignore it for now. And then we looked at the book.

Twenty new entries. Twenty out, twenty new ones in. Many of them good games we’d want to play anyway, and a lot of the usual suspects. Yes, Skyrim, Ni No Kuni and Journey are all in there. There’s a couple of interesting indies in there that we are new to, such as Year Walk. Enough fun stuff to try, in a small enough collection that it’s manageable to add in.

In the mean time, out of the 20 games that went out, we’ve already played eight. The other twelve are partially sports game with an annual release schedule, who probably deserve an entry on the list, but would be changed every year to the latest. The other are games I, at least, would love to play, such as Mega Man 9 (seriously, that series is just gone now? That just feels wrong) and The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai.

On the rest of the book, I’ll admit we weren’t wowed by the revamp. For a bit it looked like they only included 999 games. Two games were moved to their right place in chronological order (them being out of date due to, presumably, delayed western releases), but the index was never updated for them. We couldn’t find them and were ready to list them as having been removed. There’s more sloppiness later – factual information not listed consistently for the new games. With the small number of changes, it seems a low effort release – 2009 is still overrepresented, games appear to be removed as much to make it easiest to adjust the layout as to have their removal make sense, and aside from a few changed screenshots, the old games are all unchanged. Aside from the changes to the index and the two games that were moved to earlier, the first 833 pages of the book are all the same – even the per-decade in between pages are exactly the same.

And that’s really a waste because if you haven’t started now, this book is impossible to complete. City of Heroes, still listed, was taken offline a year ago (long before this second edition was published) and can no longer be played by anyone. Reset Generation is almost impossible to get – nGage version 2 phones aren’t that common and their shop was closed down ages ago. The PC version was pulled down in 2010. The only way to play it seems to be to sideload it onto a hacked nGage 2 phone, something that’s not easy to do. We are badly tempted to skip it, or write an entry based on Youtube videos, as there seems to be no alternative.

It seems like it would have been easy to replace these two – especially Reset Generation, as the two games that follow it in the book have both been removed. It feels a bit cheap and obvious, not worth it had we not already been doing our project (then again, would we have cared as much about not being able to complete it? The principle matters!)

Here’s our plan. We’re going to add the 20 new games to the list of games we will play. We want to anyway, might as well make it part of the project.

The remaining twelve uncovered games will be covered separately. Probably from about May 2014 onward (we’re that far ahead) we’ll start including them as separate posts, in between our regular ones, to make sure it doesn’t cost us too much time. We won’t spend as much time on them as we usually do (they are not, after all, must-play games anymore), but will still spend some time on it. If you want to write something for us, we’d also welcome your commentary on Trism, Mega Man 9, Gravity Crash, MLB 09, UFC 2009, WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2010, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, You Me & The Cubes, Army of Two: The 40th Day or Alien Zombie Death. Or any other help to make them more interesting.

#554 Pro Evolution Soccer 3

Posted: 9th December 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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291st played so far

252px-Pro_Evolution_Soccer_3Genre: Sports
Platform: Playstation 2
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami

Football games feel a dime a dozen these days. EA’s Fifa series is (at least on this side of the pond) the landmark of yearly updates  that fans slavishly buy when a new installment comes out and the bargain bins and second hand piles in various shops are filled with previous installments people don’t want to play anymore.

From that list comes a competitor’s series, Pro Evolution Soccer 3. While we cannot be sure, we believe it’s the cheapest game we’ve picked up for this blog (aside from freely available ones) at £0.10 in a Manchester shop we don’t really remember any further.

Our Thoughts

The issue with football games (and other sports games) is that unless you’re a fan and know how to play, it can be hard to tell the differences between games, either between their iterations or between different series. Passing might be slightly different between the two, but for a novice like me, there seems to be little difference between the button presses. This means that you’ve got to puzzle together your impressions from less information, making it difficult to compare to how the game ‘should be’. We can try to say something from a broader perspective though.

Another difficulty is how these annual games build upon the successes and mistakes in previous iterations. This is the reason why there are a large number of sports games in the later years of this list; they have come to represent the best examples of their respective sports in video game form. This is probably why there are not any multi-sport games from the last ten years on this list. Not enough focus. The fact that this version is on the list (despite later games getting far better reviews)  is because it signaled a shift in how football games were presented. Konami significantly changed the physics engine and the graphical capabilites of this game compared to the previous one. However, looking back on it with the experience of other football games there are a number of issues.

First, the controls feel sluggish. Players take a while to respond and turn around and it feels like you’re guessing at what to do next. Added to that are overly sensitive and unpredictable controls – it just feels like you’re not really in control of what’s going on.

The lack of clarity about how the game works sometimes does not help here. One of the control options in the game is listed as ‘hit the shoot button repeatedly for lob shot 2‘. I mean, what does that even mean? And why would I care? It just makes me feel I’m not supposed to be able to play this game… or it’s there to inspire a laugh.

The clumsiness doesn’t stop there. The commentary is put together on the fly, as you’d expect from a game like this, but you can tell they haven’t entirely worked out how to properly do this yet. The volume levels are a bit off, emotions don’t entirely lead into each other, it feels like the old automatically generated systems where it all doesn’t match up.

Part of that also comes from something the developers could do less with, but had to work around – the licensing. Konami did not get the license for most leagues and national teams (possibly because others had them, or because they couldn’t afford them). While this doesn’t impact gameplay, one of the big attractions is (or at least can be) the ability to play with the teams you know and love. Not being able to do so is not necessary for your enjoyment of the game, but does feel unsatisfying when you know what the fake names are based on. It’s not the end of the world, but without the license you need something more to attract people… and this game just doesn’t have that.

Graphics… as you’d expect for a game like this, just not great in-game. The characters aren’t too detailed and feel a bit clumsy and we’ve seen sharper by now. What was more interesting were the pre-game intros. As we see the players line up, they do have some distinct behaviour and have fairly realistic faces – you can often make out who the player is based on, even if it’s not official.

That attention to detail is seen elsewhere in the game. The amount of settings possible to play a short match is overwhelming, and while you can often work out some effect, it seems so minute sometimes that I’m not sure you can really tell the difference. Possibly if we tried more, but when comparing it to others, ten years after its release the game just comes out lacking.

Final Thoughts

I’m sure this is the sort of game that led to many a “who’s better” flame war in the past, where the inclusion of your team might have helped. Right now, however, the game has dated. As for myself this game is without the warm fuzzies that would have occurred if we had played Pro Evolution Soccer 4 due to having played it quite a bit many years ago.

#744 BioShock

Posted: 5th December 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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290th played so far

BioShock_cover

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: PC/Playstation 3/Xbox 360
Year of Release: 2007
Developer: Irrational Games
Publisher: 2K Games

Some games do grab your imagination and, through word of mouth alone, make you want to play them.

Bioshock is one of them. It’s not a coincidence we have two copies of it (combined with Oblivion in an awesome double pack), which we both owned already before starting this project. It’s a shooter that does a lot with its story and philosophy, one of those games that has an impact and is often said to be one of the best. It even got a mention on 30 Rock which is cool in itself.

We’ve been looking forward to this. And thanks to the above logistics, we’ll be able to play simultaneously. Yay!

Our Thoughts

One of the main problems of stories these days is how you tell your story. A few paragraphs in a manual won’t do anymore – in fact, you’re not sure whether you’ll even have one. An intro movie might help, but that just starts the story – there’s not much influence afterwards, and who remembers it an hour later?

Maybe you don’t have much of a story, you can say it instead. Minecraft is the biggest contemporary example, or for something we covered, Neptune’s Pride doesn’t need much more. Maybe you’ll use cut scenes for your exposition dumps. Long, long cut scenes. Final Fantasy is guilty of this, Metal Gear Solid is worse. You can have plenty of (possibly lengthy) conversations. Mass Effect or, older, Planescape Torment follow this route. The fact is that if done well there is nothing wrong with an exposition dump. Final Fantasy X and XII found ways to do it since you cared for the characters and their fates. The same is true for Mass Effect where the system used allowed you to actually skip unwanted exposition in many cases.

Bioshock, instead, integrates its storytelling and world building with gameplay. Although the game starts with a cutscene, after that there are few sections where you don’t have control and walk around while story is being told. One of the earliest bits that showed this was a sequence going on down the stairs from a hallway you walk along. As you do, you can hear an argument downstairs, a man telling a woman to open a door. You hear the argument going on and can check it out – see the people involved (although they attack you soon after). Plenty of small scenes keep going on around you as you travel, most not necessarily relevant, but all making the world feel more alive.

Other parts of it include their own puzzles. There are plenty of log entries around the game area describing the facility, the world, the philosophy, the daily lives of people living there, tying into the characters you meet and the areas you walk through. It rewards exploration in a major way and adds a dimension to gameplay that makes it feel like you’re doing so much more.

While this is probably the most immersive FPS I’ve ever played (although, as this is not my genre, that might not be saying much (personally I would put Fallout 3 as the most immersive… whilst not technically an FPS it was in many of the ways I chose to play it) ), it would be a waste to judge it solely based on that. As a shooter, it’s brilliant too. The game flirts with survival horror style resource limitations, similar to what we saw in Dead Space, but on the whole the game is more forgiving in its resource management and offers far more ways of helping you get through tough situations. And if even that doesn’t work, a simple (but justified in-game) respawn system allows you to come back easily without much backtracking.

The RPG elements (where they are present) mostly feel limiting. You get special powers, needed to proceed or get to secrets, but can only have a limited amount of them. Switching seems to be quite a bit of bother. There are other upgrades, but there’s not even switching there – when I bought an upgrade I seem to have lost another one,  discouraging experimentation and customization (for me at least). Later on you do get the opportunity to buy more slots but at the beginning it is really annoying… especially with a Big Daddy fight around the corner.

One place where this actually seems to work better is with the Little Sisters. In short, you can save them or absorb them. Saving them gives you less immediate rewards, but has later rewards (plus the feel good feeling of saving a life in a world of crazy people all out to kill you and each other). It can be strangely sweet, adding a type of protection not many others give. Well, it is bittersweet since the only reason you even bother the Little Sisters is to harvest ADAM from them. Yes it means you get stronger and access to powers. Are you any better then the other occupants of Rapture for doing so?

For me the most interesting thing about the game itself is the philosophy that underpins the city of Rapture. Those unfamiliar with or supportive of the philosophies extolled by Ayn Rand may be left cold by a lot of the game’s settings. However, as someone who has always been bemused by Rand this game ticked many boxes. In brief, Ayn Rand’s belief system can be summarized as follows “it is your right to pursue your own happiness at all costs”, not exactly noble but it does come with the caveat that if you are in the way of someone else’s goal you do not have the right to be pissed when they screw you over (something Rand was happy to live by until she lost the person she loved).

Anyway, this is a gaming blog and in terms of gameplay this is a game that rewards those who happily tumble down the rabbit hole whilst shooting fire and ice from their hands.

Final Thoughts

While there are some elements that don’t work as well, as an FPS this game is brilliant. It’s compelling, placing you in the middle of a world that feels alive, with people who have their own stories and their own lives. Even if there are some bits that feel off, the design and purpose seem so good that, as said, this is probably the best FPS I have ever played. It’s amazing how far the genre has come.

#792 Team Fortress 2

Posted: 1st December 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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289th played so far

2013-06-01_00001

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: PC/PS3/XBox 360
Year of Release: 2007
Developer: Valve Corporation
Publisher: Valve Corporation

We recently played (well, nearly two years ago… how time flies, right?) Team Fortress Classic, a multiplayer-only FPS (bots in practice mode) based on Half-Life that became quite big. So big, in fact, that Valve made a sequel.

When it went free to play, the game became one of the most played games on Steam (second after Dota 2 at the time of writing) and the oldest game in the top five.

We needed to catch up on our FPS games anyway, so here it goes.

Our Thoughts

Similar to how our Team Fortress Classic could partially reference Half-Life, the basics of Team Fortress 2 can easily reference Team Fortress Classic. The basics remain the same – multiple classes in an FPS context, lots of multiplayer PvP team games – capture the flag and such.

The game’s received an upgrade in looks, being (obviously) based on the superior Half-Life 2 engine we also saw in Portal. It shows, the game looks nicer – not always too realistic, but more colourful and pleasant to walk around. Part of the reason for this is that the extra options are used on the game’s own style. The game is described as cartoony, and while it’s not as exaggerated as some other examples, or as comic book-like as, say, Borderlands, it creates the right sort of irreverence that makes it all less serious and a more of a game. If there was an art-style it resembled it would be the latter entries in the Timesplitters franchise (oh how I miss them).

Added to that is the voice acting. True, there isn’t much of it – there’s no real point for it in a game like this. But what is there fits in nicely. The different classes all have their own personality and make comments as you play. The big thing are comments about the start of the game, but there’s also things like thanking the medic. They’re more or less pre-scripted, but add enough to give you a good impression of the characters.

Down to gameplay, the game doesn’t really offer anything overly new.  The game modes are changed and polished, but are basically what you’ve already seen. The improvements come in with the polish. The game feels tight and balanced (once you know what you’re doing), there are clear roles and no matter what you do, you can feel effective and have fun.

There’s one (relatively) recent development we can’t say much about as we haven’t really gone into it yet. The game went free to play in 2011, supported by in-game purchases such as hats (aka, useless equipment) and other items. You can get some of these just by playing as well, but getting the special hats are mostly through payments. They didn’t really impact play, so we didn’t have a look, but it’s the next step in video game payments and all that so I suppose it’s meant to be awesome. Yeah.

Final Thoughts

What it comes down to is that the game is one of those pinnacle games. It doesn’t introduce really novel elements, but what it does, it does so well that it reaches near-perfection. It’s why it plays so well and is just so much fun (especially as the assassin… hell yeah)

#564 Rise of Nations

Posted: 27th November 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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288th played so far

2013.05.19 18'03'01 (Sun)

Genre: Strategy
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Big Huge Studios
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Some games make you wonder how they’re going to work. Rise of Nations is one such game. Created by Brian Reynolds, one of the main people behind Civilization II, it is pretty much described as real time Civilization.

We’ve played games that attempt to marry the two genres before, such as Medieval: Total War, but not ones that claim to do so during the real time parts of the game. Age of Empires sort of will in the future… but we haven’t played that yet, so officially I don’t know anything yet (apart from that Age of Mythology is awesome).

Our Thoughts

It’s amazing how a couple of seemingly small changes make such a difference to the tone and feel of a game this much. At its core, all the familiar RTS elements are there – collect resources, build structures, build units of various kinds to send out and kill the enemy (or do something similar). A few seemingly smaller changes, however, seem to have changed the focus of the game.

The game emphasizes base (or rather, city) building to a far greater extent. To get anything decent, you need to do enough research, which requires you to gather more of six different resources. You’ve got to deal with expanding your territory, formed of a combination of where you built, what you built and things you’ve researched. You’ve got to improve your units – they get stronger as you research upgrades. And even then there’s peaceful times, where you want to spend more time getting luxuries and trading between towns.

What you get then is mostly empire building like Civilization, though on a smaller and faster scale than that game, with RTS attacks when you want to fight your neighbours. This isn’t as common and feels simpler than, say, Warcraft II, but is satisfying nonetheless. Still, overpowering tends to work most of the time.

The nicest thing about this is that although the game is pretty in depth, individual levels are fast enough that you’ll finish each in somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour, so although it’s a pretty addictive game, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. It also means its main game mode fits in well: a campaign mode, with turns automatically advancing your starting technology in the individual missions/battles you use as you take over (parts of) the world.

One of the nice parts of this is that this allows for a combination of high level resource gathering and balancing (do I go and take over an easy area so it’s mine, or do I go for the high risk one that gives me additional knowledge resources in future levels), as well as not requiring you to micro manage thirty cities as your empire grows.

The game looks lovely, although not too detailed. Again, in scale and detail it’s a cross between the overview graphics of an empire game and other RTS games, 3D enough but not trying to place too much focus on the units, similar to how the individual units don’t matter much during gameplay.

Final Thoughts

Personally, I’m a fan of both genres this game is trying to combine – the empire building, long haul development of Civilization and its kind and the real time strategy of games like Warcraft II and Dune II. Just a whole load of (very time consuming) fun.

#5 Combat

Posted: 23rd November 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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287th played so far

Combat (1977) (Atari)

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: VCS
Year of Release: 1977
Developer: Atari
Publisher: Atari

Here’s an interesting landmark for you: As far as we can work out, Combat is the first game on the list that was developed specifically for a home gaming onsole and at home gaming, the Atari VCS being one of the first gaming consoles flexible enough to allow any sort of game to be played without putting the (expensive) logic components in the cartridges.

(While Oregon Trail is not an arcade game, it’s developed for school use and more general micro computers)

The game is billed to have 27 games inside – although most seem to be mostly repeats of what we already know. Let’s see.

Our Thoughts

I’m always a bit apprehensive when starting these sort of games. While they can be fun enough, many more seem to suffer from impervious controls and unclear graphics.

Combat does pull it off. It’s a fairly simple but as a simple player versus player experience, the game offers plenty of shoot out opportunities.

Whereas most games of the time that offered multiple games made minor changes, the game modes in Combat feel more versatile. There are three clearly different game modes (driving a tank, flying bi-planes and flying jets) with different controls, weapons and different options for game modes – the tanks add more walls, while the jet includes adding more planes into the mix.

The graphics of the game are obviously simple, but functional – but obviously you wouldn’t want to go for a game like this for its graphics anyway. Interesting thing about this though – again, a first – the game is the first in the list to use colour graphics. Not through overlays like Breakout or Boot Hill, but because that’s what the game supported, and helped use to indicate different game modes.

Final Thoughts

While this game may not be interesting today, the additions to the game are pretty big to look back on and the game remains playable enough between us to stay fun even today.

Even if you have never played Combat before you will have played a variation of the gameplay in a free Flash or Miniclip game at some point. Something that much copied and clichéd that started off right here… it’s great to get a sense of the history.

#145 1943

Posted: 19th November 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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286th played so far

0004

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1987
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom

Some games (I’m sorry to say) are just too difficult to really describe for these introductions. 1943 (: the Battle of Midway) is one of those. It is a vertical scrolling manic shooter. You’re an American shooting down Japanese planes and ships in the actual WWII Battle of Midway.

Ka-Boom?

Our Thoughts

To be honest, the above explains quite a bit about the game already. The basics are all there – move your plane around, shoot things, use power-ups to shoot them better or in a different fashion. Enemies fly in in different patterns and you have to anticipate. There’s stationary enemies.

This works well enough and is combined to form some difficult levels. Enemies spawn constantly and it seems difficult to be able to destroy them all. The best place where it combines them all are the boss levels – an awesome combination of ground-based turrets that you need to destroy and more mobile enemies that fly at you to distract you.

The goal here isn’t to destroy everything (say, a large plane carrier). In fact, you won’t necessarily get the chance. You fly past the ships and need to damage it as much as possible. If you do, you go on to the next level. If not, you get to restart the level, trying again to do enough damage (and bring down the ship).

It’s a nice way to put some added stakes into completing the level (if you can’t face the boss, the game will eat up plenty of credits) and the slightly different structure makes the boss fights more interesting – you can just feel the hope sinking as complete parts of the ship drift away under you.

It’s not the most innovative of games, but what it does, it does well. That’s all it really sets out to be.

Final Thoughts

I can’t claim there’s too much into this game not seen elsewhere, but this game probably exemplifies the game and shows its peak of this age. Others have added more, but this game feels solid all the way through – controls, difficulty and graphics are good enough to combine into a very playable and fun game.

The fact that this game is very creatively named sequel to 1942 again probably means something but… to be honest it isn’t the most interesting manic shooter once you have played the likes of DoDonPachi.

#316 PaRappa the Rapper

Posted: 15th November 2013 by Jeroen in Games
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285th played so far

(Okay so taking pictures was getting irritating, especially considering how bad quality a digital camera pic of the TV is. So instead we’ll be reverting to using cover art unless there is a set screen-shot button)

USPaRappacover

Genre: Music
Platform: PlayStation
Year of Release: 1996
Developer: NanaOn-Sha
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

We actually obtained PaRappa the Rapper only recently. One of the earlier rhythm games, it seems an interesting game. Combined with its interesting aesthetic – slightly childish, but a predecessor of the paper cut-out style from games like Paper Mario and Okami, it just looks weird – and fun.

Our Thoughts

Sometimes, technology advances in such a way as to impact the blog (such as our recent misadventure of buying the wrong generation of N-Gage to play the only N-Gage title on the list… when we finally play this game it had better be worth the hassle). We’ve got our ways of working around this sometimes – DOSBox regularly plays a part in us playing older games – but sometimes it just hits us. PaRappa the Rapper gave us such a conundrum. Sure, it’s not a case of games disappearing on us – Reset Generation is still the only real worry there – but it’s more insidious, and without some Googling, we wouldn’t have known why.

One of the issues affecting newer TVs (including, obviously, ours) is display lag – basically, the screen doesn’t update straight away, instead there’s a slight delay between the console sending the image and the TV screen showing it. It matters little when you’re watching a movie, but in a rhythm game – which comes down to reflexes – it’s lethal, especially when the game is not set up for it (this simply wasn’t a problem at the time). This may also go some way to explaining why our playthrough of Space Channel 5 was a bit harder than expected.

For that reason, we shamefully had to adjust the difficulty setting to easy, so we could at least continue past the first level. Unfortunately, it also cut us off after the third, so we couldn’t play as much as we wanted to. Read our comments in this vein. I know it sounds pathetic because neither of us are what you would call hardcore gamers (seeing how our average gaming difficulty level is Medium) but having to play Easy was a real ego-bruiser.

When you see what’s going on though, the game just gets weird. The gameplay is straight forward rhythm gaming – press the right buttons at the right time (with scary precision), the tunes simple, but the lyrics (that you’re speaking by pressing these buttons) are.. odd at best, crazy more often. While using the combinations to learn how to fight may have some value, another level has you rap to pass your driving test, which… well, I don’t think there was any way in which they could have had it make sense.

And it gets away with it somehow. Yeah, we were laughing at the stupidity of some of it, but at the same time we did want to see more. Not because of how the story progresses, but because it’s simply so much fun and tied into the rhythm mechanics in such an odd way.

Minor praise perhaps – but more engrossing than other such games, which is surely worth something more.

Final Thoughts

Looking at what we played today, the game is barely playable (especially all the way through). It’s a shame though, as the game looks fun and (yuck) somewhat quirky (not a dirty word Jeroen). We would have loved to play it further… but unless you get a chance to play a remake, it’s not worth it now. Luckily it has experienced a PSP release which is worth checking out.

#790 The Witcher

Posted: 11th November 2013 by Jeroen in Games
Tags: , , , , ,
2

284th played so far

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Genre: Action/Role-Playing
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2007
Developer: CD Projekt Red
Publisher: Atari, Inc.

Woo, awesome. Here’s a game I’ve been looking forward to for a while (pretty much the start of the blog – it’s on my list of games to play anyway).

This was helped, too, by our fifty deal (may its conclusion be swift). Peter hasn’t played it directly, but seen it played enough (thanks to a housemate at uni), meaning he doesn’t need to watch it as much. I can focus on it, share experiences, and we can save a bit of time that way. Let’s go for it!

Our Thoughts

Somehow, good things happen to games made using Bioware’s engines. Aside from the afore-linked Planescape: Torment, we’ll be looking at the sequel to Knights of the Old Republic later. But it’s not about the engine – it just helps with making good things come to life.

Yeah, there’s bits I don’t like as much. The overly sexual nature with the gathering of (semi-)nude playing cards. And the click-rapidly-to-attack-lots-of-times gameplay seems a bit unnecessary at time, when some form of auto-attack could be used.

But that doesn’t matter. It hits all the right notes. The game derives from an existing story (semi-amnesia used as an excuse for most of the exposition), which means you feel like you’re in an existing, bigger world from the start. It feels like the game immediately allows itself to do more with that base, less setup and more play.

Even beyond that, it also offers options. Despite playing an established character, the game offers plenty of choice – from moral quandaries to different quest routes and establishing parts of your personality. It makes for an interesting mix of both a set story and the options we want in a western RPG.

Although we didn’t get that far, these decisions are meant to impact later parts of the game as well, which makes it even more interesting – as much as Mass Effect‘s use of save game transfers does.

But it’s also these non-main story parts that entertain for other reasons. Aside from the large amount of side quests, partially fueled by fairly realistic NPC behaviour (walking around and living their lives as time goes on – one sidequest coming from you escorting someone home if you’re there at the right time), there are many other things to do. Alchemy is a large part of the world, and going around getting ingredients, recipes and finding enough about creatures to be able to skin them is a lot of fun.

Then there is character advancement. It’s a subject that, in many RPGs, you barely discuss – numbers go up, you may get an ability, or make a minor choice. Some offer skill trees  anice way to compromise between new abilities and advancing existing ones. The Witcher, in its own lovely way – has multiple skill trees (or one giant, branched tree, if you wish), one per ability, making for a lot of fun times trying to figure where to go next. Luckily, skill points are plentiful and you can always get more – even through brewing potions, as you find out early on.

The best thing is probably how it all feeds into each other – abilities unlocking quests, the world moving on around you, opening and closing opportunities, exploration rewarded with its own abilities. And all of that means you’ve just got to try that next ability, get to that next area… it’s amazingly well done.

Final Thoughts

On the whole, this game manages a good marriage of setting, gameplay, character development and story that feels to be be at the front of what the genre is capable of. It has its rough edges, but when playing it’s addictive all the way through.

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