Happy Black Friday!
Sola Rola is a pretty cool little puzzler, very much like those handheld games where you try to roll the ball bearings into their slots. But in space!
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Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit. When I first started writing the Keepers column, I looked through all the games on my game shelf and made a list of which ones I thought deserved to be written about. I am now at the end of that list. And so the final game on my list has finally come up: Beyond Good and Evil. Call it a magical Turkey Day special surprise. Or something. It’s difficult to talk much about it without repeating things I’ve already written many times before. Suffice it to say that I have an uncommon fondness for the game. I love it. And I’ve already played the game start to finish five times, the last time being when the vintage game club played Beyond Good and Evil. I’ll say it one last time – if you haven’t yet played the game, buy it here. Ten dollars. So now I’ll turn future Keepers columns over to Frank, as it seems like his game cache is plenty full.
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20 – Cold Fear (PC) 19 – Muramasa, The Demon Blade (Wii) 18 – Killzone 2 (PS3) 17 – Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure (DS) 16 – A Boy and his Blob (Wii) 15 – Wolfenstein (PC) 14 – Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box (DS) 13 – House of the Dead: Overkill (Wii) 12 – Prince of Persia (PS3) 11 – Punch-Out (Wii) 10 – Torchlight (PC) 9 – Demon’s Souls (PS3) 8 – Dead Space Extraction (Wii) 7 – Brutal Legend (PS3) 6 – Assassins Creed 2 (PS3) 5 – Batman: Arkham Asylum (PC/PS3) 4 – New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii) 3 – The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (PC) 2 – Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles (Wii) 1 – Uncharted 2 (PS3)
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This is the third part in my series on what themes tie together my all-time favorite video games. In April 2008, Blogs of the Round Table covered “Variations on a Theme”, and discussed what themes tie together your favorite games. I’m a bit late to the party, but I’m catching up now. Early on, I found that one of the themes that came up in many of my favorite games was atmosphere. I remember the first time I played Half-Life 2. At one point, I came to a beach with the sun setting over the water. The scenery was so amazing that I had to stop and just stare for a few seconds. In those few seconds, I got shot. The amazing outdoor scenery and realistic run-down East European urban landscapes make Half-Life 2 an incredibly atmospheric and immersive game, but it’s by no means the only one. I had similar reactions to many areas in Oblivion. The snowy peaks of Bruma’s Jerall Mountains, the swamps around Bravil, and the softly glowing depths of Aleid ruins all stood out to me, made me feel that I was truly there. The final pair of games in my immersive/atmospheric collection, which I feel I need to hit in tandem, is Dead Space and Doom 3. Both take place on dark spaceships filled with hideous demonic creatures. And while each does certain things better than the other, both make excellent use of light, darkness, and sound to create a tense and threatening atmosphere. They’re best played in the dark. Muahahahaha!
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Check it out – a game for the Wii worth buying! It’s been a while. I hope to pick up a copy of Super Mario Wii soon.
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Let me introduce you to the best bear driving sim that I’ve ever played. What amazing realism! You’ve got to actually grab the wheel with the bear’s paw to steer! Yeah – it’s weird. That’s what makes it fun.
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This is the second part in my series on what themes tie together my all-time favorite video games. In April 2008, Blogs of the Round Table discussed this topic, and I’m only just now catching up. One aspect of games that I’ve always appreciated is innovation. When a game comes out that does something totally new or that bucks the formulas to which it might be expected to adhere, it’s hard not to stand up and take notice. The most recent example of a totally new type of game I can think of is Scribblenauts. And while the game may not have succeeded on all fronts, being quite annoying at times, it did deliver on its promise to create nearly any object that you can imagine. You’re limited only by the words you can think of, and by how the game may misinterpret multi-word objects. The game may be a full generation old by this point, but Shadow of the Colossus still stands out to me as an innovative game. It set you against sixteen opponents, and removed any possible distractions. No leveling up, no gear to acquire, and only two attributes to improve. Only sixteen unique opponents in the entire game. I imagine that this allowed the developers to focus on making the game a cinematic experience and making the colossi sufficiently epic, which they most certainly were. Since Maniac Mansion and Myst, adventure games have innovated very little. Their text adventure origins led to graphic adventures, and then to point-and-click adventures. The advances since then have been small and incremental. While the genre certainly does have gems like Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey, and Syberia, they haven’t really broken out of the old formula at all. Games like Still Life have some limited real-time components, but not until 2005’s Fahrenheit (remarketed in North America as Indigo Prophecy) had I ever seen real innovation in an adventure game. Many people complain about the pseudo-quicktime events in the four-directional keys that take place during action scenes, comparing it even to old games like Dragon’s Lair. But beyond that, the fact that you had only seconds to reply in a conversation, the fact that they included stealth segments, and the inclusion of a sanity meter made the game new and different. There were even keyboard and mouse related minigames for completing everyday tasks that ranged from playing with a yo-yo to giving CPR. Not your standard adventure game fare. I’m looking forward to 2010’s Heavy Rain for many of the same reasons. Perhaps Indigo Prophecy was a game mash-up of sorts. Mixing game genres is certainly becoming more popular, whether it’s Word Worm Adventure’s combination of word puzzle and RPG or Borderlands’s mashup of RPG and shooter. I think the first I’d noticed game genre mashing up was when I played Puzzle Quest for the Nintendo DS. That was certainly an innovative game. Later came Braid, with its mixing of platforming and puzzle genres. The time rewind mechanic as an alternative to losing a life may have been used previously in Prince of Persia, but in a 2D sidescroller, it seemed to be a totally different animal. What are your favorite game mash-ups? What games do you think have been most innovative?
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Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit. Because of the emphasis on its high-end hardware requirements, I didn’t try Crysis until long after its initial release. When I finally did, I found that while it wasn’t as amazing a game as its predecessor Far Cry, it was still an excellent game. The jet-piloting and zero-G segments were fairly terrible, but were also mercifully brief. I had a lot of fun with the game, and I’m ready to dub it a keeper.
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Many years ago, when I had a friend who was into the original Everquest, I remember him explaining the notion of “aggro” to me. The creature in the game would attack whomever had done the most damage to it. Seems simple – makes sense. Since then, I’ve heard the terms “mob”, “dps”, “instance” and “raid” bandied about often enough that I understand them. And I understand Aoe, buffing, and min-maxxing from my long years of playing Dungeons & Dragons. Nonetheless, I need to be honest: since I’m someone who assiduously avoids most online games, some of these terms elude me. Their increasing use in single-player games makes me a bit uncomfortable. And this type of gameplay can get stale very quickly. I noticed this recently when reading some online FAQs while playing Final Fantasy XII. The walkthrough talked about kiting, about casting ‘bubble’ on your tanks, and about aggro. Sigh. I’m not arguing that the whole tank/dps/healer system isn’t effective – it obviously is designed to be the most efficient way to defeat monsters. But what I’d like to see is a game that’s designed to disallow or defeat what has become the dominant party configuration, simply because too much of the same thing gets old. Recently, when reading PC World’s article 10 Reasons You Must Play Torchlight, I noticed the usage of the terms “tank”, “ranged DPS”, and “nuker”. That’s what made me start thinking about this whole thing. Sure, I’m MMO-phobic. I’ll admit that. But that’s not the only reason I’m squeamish about these terms. When games force you to abide by these mechanics, it removes your ability to be creative. Even Borderlands has a tank (Brick) and a healer. (Roland) The other characters, I suppose, could fall into the DPS role. Compare this to the somewhat older set of RPG roles: fighter, magic-user, cleric, thief. While there are certainly some analogies between these, (fighter=tank, cleric=healer) they really are different. A magic-user and fighter are both very good at dealing out damage, and a cleric can often do close to as much. But the fighter can take more hits. The magic-user and thief, while they can’t do high damage as consistently as a fighter, can generally do higher damage in the right situations: spells are generally limited, and backstabbing can be tricky to accomplish. I’m not sure that I’m trying to make a point with this analysis, I’m primarily sharing a stream of consciousness. Perhaps tank/dps/healer is just the new fighter/magic-user/cleric/thief. Maybe in another decade the system will be revamped again and we’ll see caller/swarmer/pillar or maybe fetishist/raconteur/ninja/pirate/jai alai player.
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You may have never heard of Blogs of the Round Table. It’s a cross-blog event that encourages blog authors to write about specific topics each month. BoRT has undergone a format change recently, but I’ve been examining many of the older entries, and in playing catch-up, have decided to begin by writing on the April 2008 topic: Variations on a Theme, in which authors discussed their favorite (or least favorite) videogames, and what theme(s) tied them together. In examining my favorite games, I found that much of what made me enjoy various games was gameplay related: very atmospheric or innovative games, games with a lot of variety, or just games that are excellent examples of their genre. The one element I was able to identify that seemed more thematic was conspiracy. Perhaps that’s not the right word. Let me explain. The two games I pinpointed here are Beyond Good and Evil and Half-Life 2. In Beyond Good and Evil, you’re a photographer working to destabilize the obviously evil government by obtaining photographic evidence of their wrongdoings. In Half-Life 2, you play Gordon Freeman, a human freedom fighter battling an occupying extraterrestrial army. Without gushing, I absolutely love both games. While the government conspiracy in Beyond Good and Evil is clear, classifying The Combine in Half-Life 2 as a government may be a stretch, as may be label of conspiracy. Nonetheless, there are definite thematic similarities. I suppose there’s something about taking on an enemy that’s so obviously more powerful that calls to me. Head-to head, the DomZ and the Alpha Sections would destroy Jade. That’s why it’s largely a stealth game. Head to head, Combine armies would overpower even the mighty Gordon Freeman. That’s why he so often has NPC companions and never fights more than one helicopter, airship, or strider at a time. Perhaps it’s all about freeing oppressed people. In a totalitarian envoronment, a member of the populace arises to become the classic unlikely hero. Maybe that’s the lure for me. Resisting a powerful government or occupational force is a theme we’ve seen in movies like Red Dawn and V for Vendetta, but not nearly as often in video games. I suppose the same could be said of Red Faction: Guerilla, but I haven’t yet played that game. Perhaps I should.
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