Whoops I forgot about Scary games month: Dead Space 2

The scariest thing about scary games month is the way, every year, like a creeping zombie the holiday sales crawl just a little bit further up the month. I fully suspect by the time I pass from this mortal coil that "holiday sale" will follow "back to school" in like, early september, and halloween will be a one day event where they jam candy at a 400% markup then it disappears from the shelves after being priced 'to move' into garbage bags full of candy while they rush out their Christmas cacophony. But we're not allowed to call it Christmas sales, which does actually make sense, since really who cares?

"Dead space" is a good term for a horror game in a lot of ways even beyond being a puntastic little riff. There's a lot of dead space, filled with spooky but pointless noises, in just about every horror game I've ever played. Need to walk down the spooky empty corridor for your spooky surprise! Which is, unspookily enough, more zombies. Or sometimes, just nothing. Spooked you! You get nothing!

in a shocking twist, horror goes surgical

Oh I'm sorry, necromorphs. Which is basically like going through the dictionary and assembling two words which are as close to 'zom - be' as ghoulishly possible. Regardless, while I've always been a huge fan of the title of the game, I have largely mixed feelings about the first game. I really liked the crumbs button, the ship design and the way combat felt just different enough to be different. But horror largely isn't my cup of tea, and horror seems to mean 'colon sounds and raspberry jam' more than trying to build a scary atmosphere.

I feel sometimes like the feeling that violence is all around you gets away from 'horror' and turns more into being 'horrifying' if that makes sense. Dead Space 2 has even less restraint than the first game, it opens up with a reference to hallucinations that slowly unveil themselves in the first game then some totally hyper violent murder. I understand they're sort of going for a 'look at how real this shit has already got' moment, but horror is at its best when the shit is more implicit, less real so I don't even know how to start with this game.

Eight Long Weeks of Roling - Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

So after a couple weeks of playing shooters, more shooters, even more shooters and a few random games mixed in between more manshooting than I've ever done before, I feel like it's time to return to my roots - Or rather what eight years of World of Warcraft (or maybe just what felt like eight years of WoW) have left me as the only type of game I'm any good at besides Magic the Gathering.

Kingdoms of Amalur has one of those weird stories - Well, I mean development stories, though it's got a pretty weird in game story too - Where it bankrupted its studio but was also a mmorpger that didn't end up as one. It's also a game that is much easier to obtain outside Steam, so I'm actually playing the Origin version of the game instead. After sort of realizing you can either not use Origin and uPlay, or play their games cheaper, I just sort of gave up on avoiding it. I don't know anything about how poorly the studio did - I know a bunch of people lost their jobs and apparently Rhode Island suffered to make this game, which sucks to hear, but the software industry is a very odd one to break into. I always feel like a studio, even one with lots of venture capital lined up, should try to break into the market with a series of games to get their name and brand out there.

But what would I know, about anything...

To talk about Origin briefly, the client looks fine, but isn't anything special and the overlay feels rather primitive while a bit more visually pleasing. I prefer the orange gradients of Origin to Steam's grey to grey downer, but once you get away from the slickness it's just a fair bit jankier and it feels like it is missing features, or links to elements that Steam provides. Though I do like that it specifies which DLC are installed in a group as opposed to Steam's iffy implementation. I don't have any friends on Origin though, since I use their client rarely, so maybe it has really nice voice chat and I just don't know. Origin itself doesn't take screenshots - A steam feature I adore - but KoA itself does just by hitting printscreen, which is pretty nice. It took me a little bit to figure out where the "time played" display is, but it's there.

Weirdly enough, KoA itself gets excited about achievements, but of games on my account (about ten or so) only Dead Space 3 has any reference to achievements. I guess Steam does this from time to time as well, but it seems a little weird that an EA published game put out recently wouldn't integrate achievements into the client. I looked it up, and apparently Steam does? What?

Back when two thousand was the FUTURE: SimCity 2000

All that hootin' an hollerin' about simcity got me inclined to playing the version of simcity I knew best, then the version of simcity others claim is the best. This isn't precisely a review or a nostalgia trip, but a brief discussion of SimCity 2000, which was made when you labeled everything as TWO THOUSAND because in 95 we didn't know what cool was.

Rob Liefeld art. Look it up. Argh.

building straight out of Doom or something

More specifically, Simcity 2000 was released in 94 for the platform I played it on - DOS - and is part of a family of "Sim" games I'd played as a kid, which included SimAnt (which was, in retrospect, stupid), SimLife and SimEarth. If you ask me to differentiate between Life and Earth I ... I don't know. The one of them had Gaias, starfish people and ... uh, something about weather zones. Evolution!

Ahem.

SimCity 2000 is probably the high point of that generation of games. Life and Earth were certainly deeper and more ambitious, but there's always been a hard limit to how far Sim games can go. Look at Spore. You need to sort of define the box, and this was the game with the box that made the most sense. You build a city! It's also vaguely educational, though not in the way people like to pretend it is.

So I fired it up and built me some cities. Nostalgia won't take you too far, and Simcity 2000 actually doesn't need all that much nostalgia. The GoG.com dosbox version runs pretty well (certainly better than SC4) and surprisingly looks pretty pleasing. Look at those sprites! Gorgeous! They've certainly aged better than most SNES games, which look a little off nowadays. The game is pretty and it has nice trees, and traffic is rendered in a good little shortcut. Honestly the little ever denser black dots while very simple are an elegant way to convey the information. This game would run on my 486, a PC which I believe has the same processing power as a modern oven clock.

SC2k is actually pretty shallow and hilariously nonfunctional in a bunch of ways. The three zoning types have two different densities which on the most part have no difference other than costing you an extra $5. I think that commercial dense doesn't cap value, while light does, and then light residential/industry has some advantage where you get less people slash jobs but you end up with better land value? On the most part though, it doesn't really matter. Anyway residential is where people "live" and then you must make traffic connections through commercial and onto industry to get your city to grow.

As a child I picked up pretty quickly that there's some sort of voodoo barrier insofar as commercial vs residential: You must have commercial zones near residential otherwise people just won't stay in the residential areas. I could never quite figure out how far you're allowed to go, but they needs it man. It's kinda awkward since Commercial demand is always the one you wish you had more of, and you want to use commercial to provide barriers for the industrial smog zones. But you need to push it back and damn it residential, why you gotta be so close to the store?

Once you get past the basics - you power the lots, people build some chemical plants, workers move into the Residential zones and then someone builds a grocery store - the game starts throwing the larger "challenges" at you. It's funny watching how a bunch of these things barely seem to work or act all weird. Large scale commerce and industry ask for air and seaports, respectively. Airports break constantly if you don't turn disasters off, unless you put them miles out into the countryside, at which point you benefit less from them. Otherwise its a constant spew of planes crashing into tiny little buildings. Commerce also likes to demand airports when the airport is there, but hasn't been "taken" yet as for some weird reason its a form of "zoning". Seaports usually work fine, which made me favor seaports.

Except sometimes they'd be covered in warehouse. No ports. Just storage space. Right on the water! At least I don't have to turn the sound off because the planes keep crashing and its driving me nuts.

Traffic is the one that always gets me. I mean the thing where the water system doesn't work because your city is so big, that's pretty weird. Like you'd have "enough water" but there are water outages? It's a little strange. You'd think people would be complaining nonstop about it.

Pardon my terrible chart

Anyway so traffic, traffic is the funniest. See, in the original Simcity, the answer to traffic problems was to build nothing but rails. People would just ... take the train hobostyle, and not need roads, and life was good. Doesn't work in this game. Well, it kinda does, but I'll talk about why it mostly does not. Traffic works like so:

The basic jist here is very close to real life, except for two big things: the first is that traffic, in real life, generally follows towards heavier demand capable roads and avenues. In SimCity 2000, people just drive wherever because their pathing AI (which is sort of a misnomer, they don't really path) has no discretion. Highways, as best I can tell, don't work at all like you'd imagine they do. I think people just drive on them if they happen to be there. It would certainly explain why highway terminations have traffic on them past the last onramp - which is to say people are just, driving off the edge or something.

The other thing is, sims (as you can see in my pictures) take exactly 3 tiles to get to a method of transportation. If roads are available, they're always at least fine with that. The issue is actually better defined with an image. Say you have a subway station sitting in the middle of that plot above. It does nothing.

Ok, that being said, say you have two subway stations. Sims will enter and exit a subway in the exact same way as shown below, assuming you build a subway beside a road right? I mean that's what people do in the real life!

So of course, you need a ton of subways to cover the city in order to alleviate traffic problems created by sims driving willy-nilly wherever they'd like, over dirt roads and through backwoods. Of course you pick up that Sims will not drive to mass transit, at least not as far as I was ever able to tell. So subways are best planted in those very backwoods, allowing sims to access them. Trains and buses are rendered pretty useless as well, since they require another connection to work at all (as above, you can see you're giving up five of the 24 slots by having the subway by a road)

Except there's one problem, of course. I have two pictures of 'train stop' a little village I set up to try to test out the mass transportation issues that the game has. It seemed like ever when blanketed with mass transit to every corner of my fair cities, I'd still have constant traffic issues. What you can't see in that picture (because the game never tells you at any point) is that mass transit works on a percentile chance. So a Sim not only needs mass transit to interconnect the two zones it is utilizing, it then makes a check to see if the sim is willing to use mass transit even in the absence of any other means to get around!

And how, you wonder, do you increase the chances of them using mass transit? Apparently the stupider your sims are, the less likely they are they'll go on a bus. Since the simulation doesn't have any ability to tell the difference between wealthy or poor sims, everything is just a chance. I don't really know what the specific chance actually is or if you can even get it up to any reasonable amount. Since a sim is unwilling to take the chance unless there's mass transit at their destination as well, you still end up with a ton of sims driving even though you have 1 subway station for nearly every 30 zoned lots. It's enough to make a city planner bitter about the traffic woes! Of course, you could just build more roads right? Then you end up with this guy telling you that you've got too many roads!

Of course, ultimately, this isn't a big deal. The city still grows and you can still build your nightmare cityscape of twisted arcologies so you can cram millions of simulated dead souls in your 2 by 2 km block of traffic jams. It's just sort of funny to look at how water, traffic and all the other issues that the mid to late game throw at you don't really work all that well.

Is the game fun? Actually, I'm surprised EA never realized they could just sell a facebook version of this game. It's very simple when you get right down to it, which never gets in the way of just building vast cityscapes. Instead they made Simcity (2013) which uhh, man I do not understand that one. But I'll come back to that later.

Year in Review: 2012

This isn't a top ten list or even a top anything list, or even of games that came out this year. Rather, since there's steam sales going on, it's a round up of everything I can remember playing through this year, divided into categories that will probably piss off what few readers I will ever have. It also links to Steam, which may not be the best way to buy the game. Unfortunately I can't figure out what is ever on sale on Amazon, and GMG scares me. Oh and GamersGate cancelled the one thing I bought off them this season, but I don't blame them for deciding they shouldn't lose thousands of dollars on pricing errors.

So you know, do your research! Or don't, time is your own.

In space, ships are made of grey with splashes of Red

The first thing that stood out about this game, especially after playing Mass Effect 2, is how wonderfully quick the saving and loading is. Seriously! I was like wow, it saved that fast? Loads up that quick? It's delightful. The weird thing, I mean, is that this actually seems really important to a horror game. If the game had long loading screens you'd end up like ME2, where I often accidentally misclicked after tabbing back into the game.

The second thing is holy cow is that ever a ton of blood. I mean there is blood everywhere, on everything. There's more blood than there is much of anything else. It starts to completely lose impact, as blood doesn't really indicate violence coming to you. It just looks like you're actually on some deep space raspberry jam factory ship.

The blood and its over-abundance sort of defines the main thematic thrust of the game. It is horror executed through absolutes. It's not violent, it's ultra violent. There is little in the way of pacing, little in the way of slow build up in encounters. Shit goes bad quickly and then it just blasts it in your face. The game is a fire hose of gore, violence and blood to the point it's a weird mix of comical and gross, but not really horror.

What confused me at first is the fact the game does in fact understood horror. There are bits where it is decidedly creepy and atmospheric, with some really nice attention to detail. Little tricks of the lighting and odd well placed sounds that tickle you just the right way. Then some corpse smashes its skull against a pipe and all atmosphere is instantly lost. I think the end conclusion is they simply firehosed the game with absolutely everything: ultra violence, atmosphere, weird sci-fi ideas, blood, gore and every spooky anything they'd ever seen.

I've heard of the great outdoors but this is

The sci-fi elements are surprisingly a step above my expectations. I'm not necessarily saying that the game spews chemistry and physics at you, but sci-fi concepts like cloning labs, zero gravity and air production at least show an interest in outlandish concepts. It does, on some level, feel like some fifty year old crappy spaceship would perhaps feel. Or at least feels like someone sat down and thought about the possibilities - There is a serious attempt at world building. The storyline angle world building is mediocre, but the ship itself is truly awesome.

So then we move onto the "game" in and of itself. Gameplay is pretty simple stuff: You're an engineer, you shoot the monsters du jour with various weapons that actually feel like less than military hardware. Gunplay is pretty accurate and monsters feel tense without being overwhelming. The game is generally pretty fair about combat in a way I like - I find myself looking around and wondering where the freshly arrived enemies are, but usually they don't go for me before I get a chance to find them. It seems weird to complain about this, but going into a "horror game" you expect a ton of cheap ass bullshit. The game is mostly well paced and fair in that regard, at least on normal. I did say mostly - There's some crap, especially in zero gravity environments, but also awkward 'lockdown' scenes where you're jammed into a closet.

Enemies remain scary, even though they're not much of a threat in the true sense of the word. They're at least dangerous enough that you pay attention to them, though scary in this context may not be quite the correct word. Combat is surprisingly interactive, as you need to aim to remove limbs, not just body and head shots. You don't just find the target and hold down fire, but quickly move to tear it to pieces.

Puzzles, unfortunately, vary between interesting and totally boring. One of the issues I have with the game is that save points, as a rule, should always come before and after puzzles that take a couple minutes to solve. I mean literally the save point should be right there. It's all well and good to have checkpointesque system, and I can live with that, but several of the larger puzzles have combat in and around them. That's irritating. More frustrating is the fact that the game basically loses its stride in regards to puzzles, eventually just using them to burn time. The crate shit at the end is beyond obnoxious. I honestly don't understand the purpose of boring me to death (ha) with moving boxes around or fetch quests.

The storyline is ... I don't know. I started to pick up that there were going to be derpier elements as I went. The game didn't go outright berserk with them, rather it keeps much of it pretty low key, but there's some definite macguffin action to try to tie things together.  There's an especially odd moment where one of the cast just ... Screws you over. For reasons I'm largely not altogether too sure, other than the needs of the narrative, really work. The macguffin itself is at least given a sense of, if not personality, then at least a certain feeling of inevitability that governs its "actions" in the game. The subtle difference between a plot object that people just do things crazy like around, and a plot object that drives people crazy to do things around for it, is enough that the story never really catches itself too harshly.

There's a couple other elements that felt bent in to feed the needs of the narrative. I've mentioned the game just has too much blood, but it also has too many corpses. Now this may sound odd, but the game implies that the necromorphs are made from the dead, very actively at that. And yet there's just random bodies and bits all over, just to add to the gore factor. Thing is, those bodies should just be necromorphs, not gorish decorations. Also you're generally supposed to smash bodies, which is just more hassle and chore added in. There's also way too many of the "baby" necromorphs - which do actually have an explanation in game for existance, but they make up like half the necromorph population in game.

This wouldn't bother me if they weren't more or less a chore to deal with.

The other thing that becomes such a chore is the audio. Now, I understand the idea that you want spooky sounds in a horror game, but Dead Space's audio direction is just goofy nonsense. About halfway through the game, I just muted it. That's really bad. The big problem here is that yes, a horror game should have spooky and tense sounds, but after a while you just get sick of all the goofy noises the game constantly makes. It's just constant grinding, irritating slop bucket noises, off key chanting and Isaac panting just to fill dead air. It's entirely fine for a horror game to ease up and just have normal sounds for a while, you know?

there's a hole in your plan

So in summary: A largely good and interesting game, bogged down by overwhelming audio direction, puzzles that slip into terrible and way too much pointless gore. The boss fights especially where mostly neat, though the end of the game (past about chapter 9) just turned into a monstrous chore. I get that you need a macguffin to justify all this gore, but seriously, I shouldn't spend multiple hours of my life pushing the fucking thing around. If I were to assess the game by its ending, I would actually call it "terrible" but that's probably a little unfair.

Though seriously, pushing a crate around? Like, seriously? What the fuck is wrong with a development team that honestly thinks a human being wants to spend more than an hour of their life pushing around a box, clearing the way for a box, pushing the box some more, so on?

The last boss, though, was pretty good. Neat and epic. Ended the game on a far better note than I was expecting. The boss fights really were, on the most part, the stand out elements of the game.