What is the story behind the overturned cabbage cart?

Skyrim, Skyrim, Skyrim. Yes, it’s nearly all I’ve been playing for the past few months, and I’ve put in a lot of time. I’ve written about the game so much at this point that I’m hesitant to include too much more, but I’m very much enjoying it, and it’s a strong contender for 2011 Game of the Year. Unsurprisingly, Skyrim gets an ‘A‘.

Starcraft 2 is a game that I’d been looking forward to for quite some time. The original had been my favorite RTS for a long time, and hearing that the sequel was nothing more than an updated version was good news to me. But after playing it for a while, I got Starcraft fatigue. For some reason, I just didn’t end up loving it.  It’s a good solid game, but I quit playing it after I failed at the final mission for the fourth or fifth time. Maybe I’ll like the Zerg expansion better. Starcraft 2 gets a ‘B‘.

Part of a recent Humble Indie Bundle was a game called Steel Storm. It’s a very retro top-down “bullet hell” shooter, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s an age-old and incredibly simple formula, and as such there’s not a lot to say about the game. Shoot other spaceships, reach goals, and upgrade your weapons and shields. But it’s very well made, and I continually go back to the game when I’ve got only ten minutes to kill. Steel Storm gets a ‘B-‘.

Although I’ve been progressing through my 2011 games more or less in alphabeticaly sequence up until now, I’ve got to briefly break from that to hit a game that seems to have slipped through the cracks somehow: Limbo.

Like so many other XBLA exclusives that eventually come to other platforms, I played Limbo much later than everyone else. I really enjoyed it though. Dark, disturbing, and pleasingly puzzly, Limbo is a perfect bite-sized downloadable game. I enjoyed it so much that I wrote all kinds of hints posts for it. Limbo gets a B.

Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles was largely about nostalgia for me. Resident Evil 2 was probably my favorite game on the original Playstation, exceeding even Symphony of the Night. The fact that Umbrella Chronicles retells that story within an on-rails shooter sounded awesome to me.

The reality is that while it was fun to re-experience the story, on-rails shooters never end up being as fun as I want them to be. And like Darkside Chronicles, it got extremely hard towards the end and I was unable to finish the game and see its ending. Too bad. Darkside Chronicles gets a C.

My wife and I have always enjoyed playing RPGs together. We’ve played Dungeon Siege, Icewind Dale 1 & 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights, Champions of Norrath, and we’re currently trying out Hunted: The Demon’s Forge. So back before we’d tried Dungeon Siege 3, we tried Sacred 2.

As it turned out, Sacred 2 wasn’t that great. The game mechanics were weird and hard to grasp, the leveling and combat weren’t satisfying, and in the end we just quit before we got very far. Sacred 2 gets a D.

Before the big holiday releases of 2011 started hitting, Shadow of the Colossus HD was one of my most looked forward to games. I’d loved playing the original, and I’ve always loved replaying good games. Now, I got to replay this one with trophies! It’s ridiculous to think I’d try to get all the lizards or fruits in the game, and I didn’t have much interest in time attack or hard mode, but I did very much enjoy the playthrough. The HD remake of Shadow of the Colossus gets a B. I plan to get to Ico HD sometime in early 2012.

Even if you haven’t tried Skyrim, you probably don’t need me to tell you how huge the Elder Scrolls games are. They eat your free time like the Cookie Monster with a box of Chips Ahoy. In January, Bethesda is releasing the Skyrim Creation Kit, and the mods that have as yet been missing will begin to appear. Ostensibly, I’ll even be able to log on with my phone, select mods, and they’ll automatically be installed when I next play.

That said, I’ve noticed a number of things missing from Skyrim, and here are the mods I’d most like to see.

Darker Dungeons / Droppable torches
Oblivion had two mods that I loved. One was called darker dungeons, and did just what it said. By default, there are no areas in the game in which you need a torch, lantern, or light spell. You can walk around the deepest caves and still see just fine. The Darker Dungeons mod made it so that nighttime and dungeon environments were actually dark, requiring some light source.

The second was called Droppable Torches, and made it so that if you were holding a torch and drew a weapon, the torch would automatically drop to the ground and continue to provide light. Together, these two mods completely changed the experience of dungeon delving, much for the better.

Improved Alchemy
Alchemy has been one of my favorite parts of The Elder Scrolls games, but there are a few improvements I’d like to see made. Firstly, I think you should be able to name your potions. For example, when I combine Canis Root, Imp Stool, and Orange Dartwing to create my favorite poison, it damages the foe, paralyzes him, and also has a lingering damage effect. But the name is simply “Poison of Paralysis”. There has to be some way to better identify this amidst a list of dozens of potions that I’m carrying. Were I able to relabel the poison “Bloodboil” or even “Paralysis and Damage”, it would help a lot.

Another thing I think could make alchemy more interesting is delayed onset effects. Whether this was governed by ingredients and skill or manually chosen by the alchemist, I think it could add some interesting complexity. Imagine if when I create a paralysis/slow/damage poison, I could delay the onset of the slow effect until after the paralysis wears off. It would be much more useful. Similarly, imagine that when I use the more common Red Mountain Flower in a Damage Health poison, it takes 4 seconds before the damage takes place, but when I use the much rarer Troll Fat, it’s instantaneous. Seems like a cool twist.

Indirect fire weapons
Other than magic spells, bows are the only projectile weapon in the game. How cool would it be to allow alchemy to create molitov cocktails or acid flasks? I’m sure that the physics behind the indirect fire would be a bit tricky, but the engine has gravity built in, so it may not be too bad.

New Monsters
As much as I love fighting giants and sabrecats, I do sometimes miss Oblivion’s goblins, scamps, and minotaurs. How about a mod that would re-add those monsters?

New Mounts
I know that it’s possible to climb into the back of a carriage. How about making the thing mobile? How about allowing players to mount a tamed mammoth or sabrecat in the same way that you can mount a horse? Could be epic.

New Spells
Skyrim has some wonderful and creative spells. The rune traps and the wall spells are great in that they’re new and creative, and the clairvoyance spell is fantastic. What about a spell that duplicates the effect that occurs when you’re hit by a giant? Boom – and you go flying up in the air.

Whereas many of my installments in this series contain nothing but C- games, this chunk contains some good ones. First off, Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe. Along with Beyond Good & Evil, Pixeljunk Monsters is one of those games that anyone who reads this site often must get sick of me talking about. I love the game. This year, I bought a PSP, and Pixeljunk Monsters Deluxe is nearly the only thing I’ve played on it. And you know what? It’s totally worth it. The game includes new towers, new monsters, and a whole new island. It’s essentially a third expansion pack that’s for the PSP only. As such, it’s one of my favorite games of 2011. It gets an A.

Next off, the Android version of Plants vs Zombies. I played the PC version of this game and got 100% of the Steam achievements, and then later went back to it to finish off new Steam Achievements that they’d added. And now I’ve got the mobile version on my phone. I hit some issues at first where the game would pause at odd intervals, but that was fixed by uninstalling all updates to Google Maps on my phone. Who needs GPS when there are zombies to fend off? There was a period of a month or so where I did without the Maps updates in order to play Plants vs Zomibes. The game is still great. B+.

Ahh, Portal 2. Definately one of my favorite games of the year. It’s become nearly forgotten amidst such fare as Skyrim and Arkham City, but I really do plan to go back and finish off that second run through the game some day. After all, I’m like 85% done and I still have achievements I want to get. The Smash TV and Overclocker achievements have me particularly intrigued, although I’ll probably never get most of the co-op achievements. I’ll just be happy if I can go back and run through the newest co-op levels.

The Portal and Half-Life series are Valve’s best and most valuable properties, and as such, I’ll buy (and probably love) every one they put out. Along with half of The Internet, I’ve been eagerly awaiting Half-Life 2, episode 3, but it’s looking more and more like we’ll never see that one. Half-Life 3 seems more likely. In any event, Portal 2 was a triumph. Again. A.

This week, my list of the games I’ve played throughout 2011 continues. First off, Metroid Prime. Yeah, the old Gamecube game. I just got around to finally playing it. I never owned a Gamecube, but a few years back, I’d played Eternal Darkness on my Wii and had a lot of fun. When I mentioned to a friend that I was interested in trying out other Gamecube games I may have missed out on, he recommended Wind Waker and Metroid Prime. I’d really enjoyed Wind Waker, so it was with much zeal that I dived into Metroid Prime. I was, frankly, disappointed. I understand that this game came out way before anyone had figured out the best control configuration for first person shooters on a gamepad, but the controls just did not gel for me. I played the game a good bit, and only quit while fighting the plant boss. Sorry, Samus. Did not like the game. C-.

Osmos is one of my favorite Humble Indie Bundle games. It surprised me, and in a very good way. The premise is simple: You’re a blob. There are other blobs. Eat the smaller blobs and avoid the bigger blobs. Sounds kind of boring, but a few mechanics they added make it a lot of fun. You move by expelling a tiny amount of your substance, so moving actually shrinks you an infintesmal amount. So you want to minimize your thrust. Also, the material you expel can push other blobs, and if it hits them, they get bigger.

The amount of complexity and strategy involved is far greater than you’d think. And there are multiple sections of the game that each introduce new mechanics. Osmos is a lot of fun, and I’ve heard they introduced an iOS version. If you’ve got an iPhone, I recommend Osmos highly. It gets a B.

I got a sweet deal on The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom when I bought it on Steam. I’m pretty sure I paid $2.50. It was an XBLA game that I’d missed and heard many good things about, so I jumped all over it. It seems like all XBLA puzzle/platformers get compared to Braid, and I suppose I can understand the comparison, but the only real similarities are that they’re both XBLA puzzle/platformers, and they both have sections of levels that each introduce new mechanics. For a while, I wasn’t sure I’d get through the game without a walkthrough, but in the end I managed. My daughter watched me play more often than not.

One thing that I nearly forgot to mention about PB Winterbottom is the amazing soundtrack. The music is so well written that I enjoy listening to it at work. It’s a beautiful orchestral score that integrates ticking clocks and other elements of the time-based gameplay very well. It’s second only to Bastion as the best music I’ve heard in a game this year. I really liked it a lot – I’ll give it a B.

I passed on Peggle when it first came out. Popcap has seriously impressed me with Plants Versus Zombies (and to a lesser degree Wordworm Adventures) but I never saw the allure of Peggle. If I was going to be on a PC, I’d much rather play a less causal game. But when the Android Amazon App store offered Peggle for free, I grabbed it. And now, I play the game nearly every day. I’ve finished the “adventure”, and begun going through all the “quick play” levels. I’ve aced roughly 75% of them, and I’m working on the remaining few. On a mobile platform, Peggle is a killer app. It gets a B.

I’ve been playing Skyrim a lot, and I’m loving the game. My character is level 39 at present, and my sneak skill is already at 99 – I hope to max it out the next time I play and then work harder at maxxing out my archery, enchantment, and alchemy.

But my favorite part of any Elder Scrolls game has always been the emergent gameplay moments – those moments that weren’t specifically scripted by the programmers that somehow end up being the best thing about the game. In this article, I’d like to share a few of my favorite moments.

Taking out an entire keep of bandits Garret style

I really enjoy stealth games, so I was really excited to find that the stealth mechanics in Skyrim were way better than in Oblivion. I now sneak up on enemies regularly and slit their throats before they know I’m there. When I cleared one particular keep full of bandits recently, I did so without letting any of its inhabitants know I was ever there. They were dead before they knew they were in a fight. Skyrim’s cutscene-like final blow animations make it even more fun.

Backstabbing a snowy sabrecat

That four-word description really doesn’t do my story justice. Here’s the long version: I was coming over a snowy mountain rise and looked down to see a keep. Far away, near the keep, were two snowy sabrecats fighting an ice wraith. I watched for a while, and the sabrecats killed the ice wraith. I thought it’d be nice to get the ice wraith’s teeth since at the time they were fairly valuable to me. I hid and started firing arrows at the sabrecats, but they were so far away that I missed 80% of my shots. After 5-10 minutes of firing arrows, I’d hit a few times and they were wandering closer. One eventually charged up the mountain, and by the time he’d reached me I had him down to about 50% health. Still, I barely survived the encounter. I’d gone through all my healing potions.

I snuck down the mountain, thinking that if I could get up onto the keep’s walls, I could shoot down at the second sabrecat from safety. When it saw me, I started sprinting for a wall where it looked like I could jump up. My luck, I found that I couldn’t jump that high. So I ran. I ended up trapped in a V between one of the keep’s walls and a sheer cliff – if I fell, I knew I’d be dead. So I hid. And somehow, the sabrecat lost me. It came down towards the V and decided that I wasn’t there, then turned away and sat down. Its back was to me, and I’d just gotten the x15 backstab perk. So I snuck up very slowly and BAM. One-hit kill. It was so nice.

Arrows shouldn’t hurt skeletons – should they?

Archery is another skill I’m loving. The game’s bows take some getting used to – they have a lot less drop than you’d expect. But when you get a decent bow and your archery skill is good enough, a bow can be devastating. I entered one crypt and a number of skeletons began rising from their sacrophagi. As they rushed me, I took them out all one by one, one-shotting most of them. None of them were even able to enter melee. There were probably twelve or fifteen in all, and my bow pwned them, so to speak.

Mountain goat, Meet Waterfall

A small thing, really, but I stood and watched while a goat forded across a river and was swept downstream. When he reached the end, near a waterfall, he began struggling mightily. He fought it quite a lot, but in the end the goat went over and fell to his death.

You done with that?

This is the only thing on the list that actually is scripted, but I was shocked that it happened. During multiple runs back and forth from a store to an enchantment table, I found at one point that I was overburdened, so I dropped a shield and some boots on the ground. A passing woman stopped me and asked if she could have the things I’d dropped. Wow.

Picking Flowers during an Invasion

At the risk of spoilers, I was at one point involved in an armed conflict: the Invasion of Whiterun. While soldiers were locked in heated bloody battle, I kept sidetracking to pick flowers. I found the whole situation so utterly ludicrous that I felt obliged to mention it here.

Since Steam makes screenshots so easy, I’ve started trying to screenshot as many of these moments as I can, but they can be fleeting – you don’t realize a moment until it’s passed. You can see the screenshots I’ve collected so far here.

Metal Gear Solid
Yeah. The first one. The Playstation One game. I’d never really played it, although I scored a copy on EBay a number of years ago. My Playstation 3 plays PS1 games, so I gave it a go. The game actually looks pretty good with the PS3’s smoothing. But I played through until the part where you need a cigarette to see the lasers and quit. I’ve got no stomach for repeated fetch quests in games like that anymore. I do admit that I probably didn’t experience enough of the game to rate it fairly, but I give it a C-. Travesty for MGS fans, I’m sure.

Metal Gear Solid 4 got rave reviews, but I was really disappointed to find that the gameplay felt just like the older games in the series despite better graphics. As much as I really want to, it seems that I don’t like Metal Gear Solid Games. C-

 
It’s good that I have a chance here to write about Metro 2033, because I don’t think I’ve yet had a chance to discuss the game here. For the most part, I found it to be a passable shooter. But whatever thing about it that some people seemed to love – I just didn’t get. I got killed dozens of times because I wasn’t playing the game the way it wanted me to play it, and there was no indication anywhere as to how I was supposed to be playing. I got stuck and nearly gave up more times than I could count, but inevitably found my way past those points. I ended up stuck in a library where some demon was trying to force its way in. I know there was supposed to be some way to open this one door, but I never figured it out. I decided that the game was not fun enough to warrant the amount of frustrating effort I’d been putting into it. The game wasn’t absolutely horrible, so I’ll give it a C-.

The next segment of my Games of 2011 list begins with a PSP game: Dungeons & Dragons Tactics. This is one of the few 2011 games that I haven’t yet finished, and will likely continue playing well into 2012. I really like tactical battle RPGs, and this game does it fairly well. Since it’s turn-based, battles can sometimes be very time-consuming, but I grew up playing The Gold Box Games, and those were the slowest-paced strategy RPGs ever. D&D Tactics is fun, if not as full-featured as Temple of Elemental Evil, but it’s a portable game, and so I can forgive. D&D Tactics is also a good bit less buggy than ToEE. I’m not yet finished with the game, but I give it a B.

Fallout:New Vegas didn’t fare as well. I quit the game before I’d gotten very far. After I learned the game’s main plot in New Vegas, I just lost interest. And I was sure that the robot who was following me from the beginning of the game was going to end up being the main bad guy at the game’s conclusion. Meh. The game gets a C.

I’ve never been as huge a fan of the Mass Effect series as everyone else seems to be. The first one was good, but not amazing. Mass Effect 2 was pretty much the same. Good, but not brilliant. I thought the ending was very well done – I liked that part a lot. In the end, I’ll give Mass Effect 2 a B.

I have a lot more to say about the games on today’s list than I have about many others. That’s probably just because I like to complain, and I’ve got a lot to complain about with these three titles.

I got Dead Nation for free as part of PSN’s “oops my bad” program. In the end, I was favorable impressed, as it ended up sucking way less than I’d expected. The game’s tragic flaw is that in a world of zombies, you’re at a distinct disadvantage in melee combat, and when you’re mobbed by as many zombies as appear in the game’s later chapters, avoiding a face-to-face with the undead is easier said than done. In other words, I was overcome and devoured alive by Zed so often that I uninstalled the game. It’s one of the few on this list that I never completed. Dead Nation gets a C.

I could easily write an entire article about Dead Space 2, the summation of which would be “The excessive gore in the game bothers me much more right now than it did even two years ago”. I’m not sure why that is. It’s odd, because I remember really liking the original Dead Space. I had to go back and re-read my original take on the game just now to remind myself why I really liked it. Turns out it was because it was the closest thing I’d played to a survival horror game since I’d had a Playstation 1.

That said, I mostly enjoyed Dead Space 2. I enjoyed getting many of the different weapon-specific Playstation trophies, and upgrading my weapons. I enjoyed using detonator mines and the line gun secondary weapon in a strategic way. But stomping on corpses got old quickly. Still, I was just about into the game’s final chapter when I quit. You see, near the end of the game, you’re forced to play a mini-game where you have to guide a large-bore needle into the center of your eyeball for no apparent reason. When you fail, you’re treated to a hideous and unskippable 20-second long death sequence. After watching that death sequence three or four times, I turned off the game, and I haven’t gone back to it. It’s been over six months, and I don’t see myself firing up Dead Space 2 ever again.

It seems a shame that the difficult segment that led to me quitting Dead Space 2 was gameplay for which the game had in no way trained me. After putting all that time into the game, I’d have liked to see the ending, and getting the endgame trophy would have been nice too. Despite all my complaints, I’m giving Dead Space 2 a B.

Back when the original Dungeon Siege was new, my wife and I had tons of fun playing it together, although we never got that far. We later tried Dungeon Siege 2, but for some reason that I can’t entirely pinpoint, I hated it. When the Dungeon Siege 3 became available for a console I owned and I found that I could get an inexpensive used copy, I jumped all over it. Linda and I played through the first seven of the game’s twenty-one chapters in split-screen co-op and got stuck at the Grand Chapterhouse amidst an Ikaruga-like trap complex that killed us over and over again.

While I won’t say for sure that we’ll never go back to the game, our recent purchase of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge makes it seem unlikely. I give Dungeon Siege 3 a C+.

Part three of my list includes games seven, eight, and nine in my list of the thirty-something games I’ve played in 2011.

The first of these is Bioshock 2. I waited a long time after the game’s release to play it because, honestly, I just wasn’t that excited. In the end, the game pretty much met my expectations. It was okay, it was well-made but hardly my favorite of games. The whole parenting angle was kind of neat, and I enjoyed turtling during the guard-the-little sister portions, but somehow I’d hoped for more from the game. I guess the Bioshock series just doesn’t gel with me like it does with some people. Still, I give it a B.

Chime Super Deluxe is a game that really surprised me. One day, I’d been looking for something new, scanning the PSN demos, and I downloaded the game to check it out. After trying it, I bought it, and it’s been added to the list of 3-4 casual PSN games that I constantly go back to, right beside others like Hoard and Pixeljunk Monsters. Chime is a Tetris-like shape placement game, but the shapes don’t drop. Instead, you’re looking at the grid top-down and playing against a time limit. The game’s music also reacts to your in-game actions. B+.

I suppose that in playing a game like Cut the Rope, I’ve jumped on the bandwagon a bit. It’s up there with games like Angry Birds. But despite its mainstream nature, it really isn’t a bad game. I’ve finished nearly every level with a 3-star rating. C+.