Superhot

SUPERHOT, SUPERHOT, SUPETHOP, etc.

The thing that made Portal so successful, you'd think, was it's wonderful excellence in terms of memetic suggestion.You can say a lot of things about Super Hot, but there's a temptation to say what the game instructs you to say instead of actually reviewing what the game actually is. You'd be surprised, once you're "in on the joke".

Me, I don't know, I don't think I really felt much for the joke.

Regardless: Superhot's description almost always starts with a lie. The line is, I believe, a shooter that moves when you move. This isn't precisely true, though it isn't precisely untrue either. Instead, Superhot is a very simple shooter with a single enemy type and a weird meta story I won't get into that moves faster as you move faster, but is always moving just a little.

The end result could actually be described as a FPS-puzzle game, though that 'just a little' thing and certain other components degrade that puzzle element as well. So you end up with a shooter that is puzzling, both in gameplay and description.

Superhot, etc

Eight long rolling weeks; SRR: Dragonfall

Welcome to Rolling play game month(s) in which we spend eight weeks playing roles with the grenade that is the computer. Please enjoy your stay as we jack into steam for another exciting romp through fictional worlds with large, elaborate dialogue trees that don't do anything to actually influence conclusions and whatever else we like to pretend makes for roleplaying.

Choices matter. They matter because you make a choice, and then, that's what you did. Deep. Deep like the rolling pin games, on the computer.

Dragonfall is the follow up to Shadowrun Returns, which contained the campaign "Deadman's Switch" or some variation on that string of letters. A lot of people seemed pretty down on DMS, but I thought it was a pretty effective tutorial, which I've said about 75 times or something in the last year. Dragonfall inversely is meant to be more of a standalone adventure more suited to experienced players.

On a basic level this is a RPG with squad based tactical combat set in a cyberpunk world. Dragonfall (as a game) comes off as a fair bit more toward the dystopian than DMS, but not really to the point it feels like the setting isn't being used - more like the setting has more depth to it than the usual RPG nonsense, and different parts of the world feel different. Which is a good thing.

I don't, and I know I've said this, feel much of anything special toward Shadowrun. As earlier RPG systems go, I never really played anything other than D&D. I don't even like D&D though, the only systems I have much of a soft spot for are the White wolf nonsense which is endearing in its completely ridiculous nature and BattleTech which just has the best world-building coupled with a legacy of endless failure. Shadowrun is just "there" for me, it is built out of disparate cyberpunk parts but doesn't really hum with its own energy. So while I think these games are cool, I'm not saying that out of nostalgia.

I kinda like or dislike this game on its own merits, even disregarding it as a sequel, since I barely remember DMS other than how good the story hook was.

Over the verge; Axiom Verge

Axiom Verge is the product of a single dude, which has long since lost real meaning to me. Thomas Happ be his name, and he made a game about ... Whatever this game is actually about is somewhat hard to describe. I'm going to try to describe the game without spoiling the game, which is actually much more difficult than you'd think, because certain explicit and implicit elements of the gameworld are tampered with as a matter of due course for the story to unveil and then unfold.

At its core, before anything else is layered on, Axiom Verge is a Metroid leaning Metroidvania. There are a lot of reviews and a lot of commentary built from that central point, and a lot of it goes from there to become very hostile and negative. Oh how dare a single gentlemen lovingly craft a passion project in his side hours that builds from his experiences in retro-gaming of the Nintendo-kind! How dare he infringe on that holy space!

Thing is, as I said back in the Super cyborg review, I honestly don't care anymore. We're not in the early generations of gaming here, and the fact that someone who was raised on video games made a video game that feels like video games is like complaining that a major book series feels like a book within its genre. Yeah, it is a Metroidvania that feels like a Metroidvania.

Get over it. The genre is actually pretty narrow, if you actually want it to feel like Metroid, and not something like Strider where the Metroidvania elements feel like a contagion that infected an action game's genome and dragged the entire production down.

To me the real question is whether or not Axiom Verge, in and of itself, by itself, feels like a quality and polished product that I enjoyed playing, and/or, think others should play.

Eight weeks of playing roles: Shadowrun Returns

 

Roleplaying winter couple of months continues with some sort of successful kickstarter game. Hurray. It's cold out! Let's play the role of someone who can open their not frozen shut windows. Because I can't open my window. It is covered in ice. Is this ok?

I don't have any strong memories of Shadowrun as a teen; I'm not sure if I was too old or too young. I have the weird luck of having read Neuromancer in my formative years - like, to the point I was young enough that William Gibson marched me right past a sex scene and I didn't even know what they were doing - which I think shaped a lot of my ideas about how the future is going to go. Everyone should read Neuromancer, even if it isn't Gibson's best work. Shadowrun is, to my loose grasp of cyberpunk as a conceptual predecessor to the eventual genre it "became" Neuromancer by way of magic and other wackiness, likely making it more akin to the early Warhammer 40k lore which was also something of a melting pot of concepts.

Did you know Warhammer 40k actually originally had a sense of humor?

As for kickstarters, I was really excited when kickstarter first came into being as it represented gamers being allowed to choose what would be developed and influence the market in a more hands on, or wallets on, manner.  The end result however has been something of a mixed blessing. The whole cycle of Kickstarter into Early Access into Steam Cards into Steam Sale has really highlighted a lot of points where the game industry has problems that we all gleefully blamed on like, Electronic Arts and Bobby Kotick for the last decade and as it turns out those perceptions might not have been on the money.

See the joke there is kickstarter has wasted a lot of people's time and money, though I think it is less egregious than the whole green light early access "give me money for an unfinished product I don't plan on finishing chortle" set up.

But SR:R is a kickstarter "success"; the game was made on time, I think, came out and people reacted to it in a pretty reasonable fashion. I've heard mixed opinions on it, but it's a roleplaying game and I had more interest in playing it than finally trying to get through Fallout: New Vegas (which is just so hyped I'm scared) and trying to figure out what the first Dragon Age actually "is". Is it Origins? No I mean yes it is on Origin and I have the full version, but which one actually is it? I don't want to think about it. What happened to putting numbers or clear titles after games?

Right I'm getting distracted. SR:R is a top down, isometric RPG with guns, magic and trolls. It is a mix of cyberpunk and magic, though it ends up feeling like the cyberpunk side is pretty subdued compared to the magic, so that might disappoint a little. As I hinted by mentioned Neuromancer, it takes from an oddly bog standard view of the future, in which nations no longer quite exist and huge megacorps do things for money. Very close to Syndicate, I believe, which this game feels like the more honest RPG cousin of.

I'm referring to the shooter that people wanted to be an isometric RPG there, in case you didn't care. You don't. Let's move on.