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?

Which bundle was this in: Retrovirus

So imagine my surprise when I download a game that starts with "Retro" in the title and expect an entirely different game, one I'm not altogether excited for at all, and instead end up with something I didn't even realize existed and is actually from the guys who made Sol Survivor - which I really liked - that is more or less a Descent style game. Descent, in case no one has ever heard of it, was a moderately successful fully three dimensional fps in which you played a little space ship and I don't remember much else about it. It was a long time ago, and anyway, it was a sweet game that had a bunch of sequels ... And let's not get too far into describing ancient games.

I really liked Sol Survivor and never realized the guys (or gals, who knows) who worked on it were doing anything at all, let alone anything that might appeal to my nostalgia bone. So when I fired it up and the neat little opening video began running I was sort of staring at the screen in complete confusion. When did I buy this? I thought I bought something else, something I wasn't too excited to play.

Retrovirus feels like a fusion of Descent and the best I can come up with is ReBoot by way of Tron. The world design is top notch and interesting, although the game isn't quite as pretty as the model and texture work would allow. The game's story focuses on a "worm" which is infecting the system, and running through the system trying to piece together how to fight it while butting heads with various other major agencies within the system. Your character "agent" has no voice, but the game's story is mostly explained through dialogue delivered by 'Oracle' and her contemporaries, who are a mixed and oft times silly lot.

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2013 in review

As with last year, this is a set of mini reviews summarizing my recollections of games I played over the course of 2013. Unlike last year, I'm going to be really frank about something: I don't necessarily recall, with perfect accuracy, how I felt about the games while I was playing. This is more or less a summary of how I feel about them a week, a month or almost a full year afterwards. This is after digestion, these are the lasting impressions.

I divide this into four categories, which work in the following somewhat conflicting ways. Category A is the games I think, regardless of your tastes, you should give a serious look at and try because I really enjoyed them. Category B, inversely, are game I think you should try only if you like the genre they're in, but otherwise I felt pretty highly about them. Category C are games I liked or sort of like, but I'm not really recommending unless you're already inclined towards them, or I had problems with getting them running. Category D lastly are games I just stopped playing and/or can't really see personally ever telling anyone to play.

You may notice this review system is entirely subjective. While I do my best to be impartial about things that aren't objective in nature, the truth of the matter is, you're going to have to look at my reviews and decide if you agree with me or don't. If you do, then my opinion is worthwhile, but if you don't maybe you like the games I don't like, and vice versa. As an aside, where I put my experiences does not interrelate with where you put yours. If you really liked a game and I didn't, it doesn't matter, it just means we disagree and you can probably look at the review to figure out why. I get hung up on stuff that doesn't matter to most people, but I do tend to talk about why.

To me, that's the idea, to talk about flaws and facets, and then maybe other people can figure out from my subjective opinions how they'd mesh with their subjective opinions. Because ultimately we're not all that objective, except I will say I'm a fanboy of absolutely goddamn nothing and that's my thing.

Also these reviews are not, as with last year, of games entirely from MY 2013. Many of them are older, but some are more recent, but I feel like hey - how often do you get to read a review of complete games years later, or compared to modern titles? The point here is to discuss if this $5 title is still worth your money four years after its release, and how shit ages, and if we have time how many donkeys power uPlay.
 

Play relevant month: Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon

There's not many games or releases or concepts I get hyped for. We live in something of a two pronged gamer assault world now - God, what does that sentence even mean - somewhere between the shitpipe that is early access and the other, shittier pipe that is triple A hype machines. We are constantly being blasted on the two sides of our faces. Yet games are largely all about the same level of quality, with a few stand out gems, but most are "fine" or even "fun but flawed". Yeah there's a couple really obvious stinkers, but usually if you don't like a game in this day and age it has more to do with genre and intent. So why get excited? There's going to be 2-3 more entries in that genre, that very year, in case you don't like a given individual game.

But Blood Dragon ... Well, for one, I had zero excitement for Far Cry 3 itself. The only excitement I get from Far Cry games is when I forget they're not Crysis sequels or whatever, but then, I wouldn't even get that now that Crysis 3 was the joke it was. However you take a brand new engine like Far Cry 3 and you commit to giving a DLC pack with some far out 80s action, I'm going to take notice. That first trailer really sells the idea. Then you announce it's going to be a cheap standalone attempt at a more experimental style of game? I won't lie, my ears perked up. Admittedly, the experimental side of Blood Dragon lies in the less than mainstream or at least less than modern mainstream because that really is quite the hammy 80s production. Or a 2013 production through the eyes of being an 80s production? Layers and layers of obscured tropes here son. It's cyber-boots on a human skull all the way down to the turtles here.

The actual resultant game almost has a sense of meta awareness to it, a box inside a box feeling of both playing and the game itself. It's petulant and juvenile on both levels, with weird quirkness that extends beyond the Play button on Steam. There is also this odd rub of being almost a truly indie production, with odd little problems and screw ups in design that surprise you given the pedigree of both the studio and the core title this one is based off. I mean I've read Far Cry 3 has terrible, terrible writing but I never heard anything about it being a bad game from a design stand point.

It's also sort of weird in that Blood Dragon almost feels intentionally mediocre at the start, luring you in with a rather bleh starting point then - When you stop expecting anything awesome to come out of the lumpy beginning and the oddities of uplay - actually gets really, really good. At everything. All of the things. And the voice actor is a wizard.

Of bad ass.

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Gravi

Puzzle, or more specifically torture platformers are not "for me". I take some solace in the fact that they're not really for most people, though there is a very vocal minority who clamour about them and I guess buy them. So I'm willing to admit, Gravi isn't for me but in spite of that it's actually still pretty neat. I don't mean that in the sense of They Bleed Pixels, though I guess mechanically it was pretty cool too. I mean Gravi is a neat take on a puzzle platformer that uses different mechanics as opposed to adding different mechanics on top of the base.

Gravi, which is also the main character, can not jump. Instead he can project matter onto surfaces, and that matter (depending on the size of the projectile) will attract him. There are two different projectile settings, either shooting a fifth of his load at a time, or all of it at once, which changes the range of the attraction as well as shrinking Gravi. Sometimes you want to be smaller, and sometimes abruptly becoming too big will kill you as well.

In other words Gravi isn't based on pixel perfect jumping, it's based on looser physics based trick shots and has an odd feeling to it that almost feels like playing pool, but with jumping puzzles? It's hard to articulate the exact strange feeling of the game, and while the difficulty isn't exactly level it fits in with the strangeness. It's mechanically different and while physics based puzzles have been a thing for a long time it's just its own sort of weird I guess. Also, Gravi doesn't adhere strictly to being a puzzle platformer - Sometimes a set of hazards are to be overcome with slapdashing forward, or precise timing, or a mix of all three, which creates a looser feeling in my mind that helps keep the "torture" platformer feeling from setting in. It's not always that you're failing the jump by two pixels, it's sometimes that you haven't figured out what you want to do and sometimes you need to let go, jam the directional stick forward and just blind luck your way through.

However, while I was hoping to get through a decent chunk of the game before just writing it off, Gravi is ultimately just another torture platformer, albeit it does have its own sense of flow and style that makes it a bit more interesting for a while. I eventually brick walled and received an achievement for dying too many times, which just prompted me to close, then uninstall, the game. Torture platformers have an element where you can tell the level development just went through a process of adding spikes or other hazards hap-hazardously and willy nilly to "increase the challenge". The problem is, honestly, you play torture platformers to overcome the difficult moments. No one is going to feel a sense of accomplishment over not twitching 2 pixels too far to the left and dying at a point the developer just randomly slapped some spikes onto "because um spikes go in torture platformers hurk". It's just brain dead design.

The game is pretty charming for a while, and as you can tell, I got a good hour of chillout gaming from it before it just spike walled me off from the rest of the content. While I know I'm not the target audience, having realized somewhere between They Bleed Pixels and Giana Sisters that PC platformers aren't for me, I'm actually not sure how good this game is as a torture platformer. The controls are weird and loose, and while the music is fantastic the graphics are a bit unnecessarily drab, which doesn't make for a great presentation. It is physics based, and while that's neat in places, Gravi is kinda hard to control at times which may turn off fans of the genre. Without that I'm somewhat at a loss as to who this game is aimed at.

I also had a lot of issues with Gravi's hit box, which feels oddly shaped, and several of the pinpoint movement sections seemed to kill him out of hand. I also couldn't tell if shrinking reduced his hitbox. The screenshot on the right is where I gave up on the game, and while I experimented with using the size changing and different mass shots to try to squeeze past, I couldn't determine if I was messing up the precision jump or if I needed to be smaller. Because I died most often to the incidental shit around it, I couldn't nail it down and just ended up getting sick of the sloppy controls then deleting the game. I don't think this is how puzzle platformers are supposed to work and like I said, it just feels like brain dead design.

I don't mind dying a hundred times to a challenging part. I'm not going to enjoy it, but I don't mind it conceptually. I do mind dying 80 times to incidental garbage for no reason to get 20 decent attempts on the jump. So, like I said, I'm not sure who wants to play this and I'm not sure a game that could have been a sweet chill out title didn't lean back a little on the stupider pinpoint precision jumping puzzles.

I got Gravi through a groupees greenlight bundle. The soundtrack is really good.

Steam Sale!

The holiday Steam sale starts a few hours, at 1am EST or 10pm PST, or at least so everything seems to point to. I wrote a detailed analysis of how sales work here but for the sake of brevity in a time of crisis I'll go over the five simple rules to steam sale by. Also, I'm not going to talk about amazon or gamersgate or whatever else. They all have sales too.

1. Don't just look at the front page - Almost everything is on sale.

2. Don't buy things unless they're a flash, daily or vote deal!

3. Exception to 2: Unless the sale is almost over, since maybe it won't get a daily deal. The larger catalogue sales often end the day before the end of the sale, and because of repetition they probably already had a flash or daily sale if they were ever going to.

4. There will be a metagame, it looks like it's about the same as last summer - snow globes to make into badges. If it's anything like last sale, sell them right quick, because their prices tumbled and never recovered. You can finish the holiday stuff at the end for a quarter what it costs at the start.

Granted I might be wrong, but I doubt it.

5. When you go to buy something, ask yourself "Am I going to play this in the next six months?" Remember - stuff goes on sale over and over again. It's not a one time thing.

Now if you'll excuse me I have a sobbing wallet, already beaten and bruised from Christmas shopping, to prepare for sale time. Don't worry boy, this year I sold cards all year to get ready, so it won't hurt so bad.

Also if you have a SA account, feel here to join the ongoing sale thread here!

Play Relevant Month: Call of Juarez Gunslinger

Cowboys, conceptually, are not a style I particularly feel overmuch affection for. I'm not a big fan of pistols or duels or anything of the like, or ridiculous hats measured in gallons, but I do consider the Old West environments a thing of beauty. I didn't quite recollect this here thought until I fired up this game and thought my goodness, this here is a pretty gosh darn title.

But no seriously, there really isn't enough variety in the art styles of modern gaming, when you consider how immensely varied the world around us actually is. Think about all the backgrounds and ideas you could do, then thing how similar most shooters or platforming games are to each other. CoJ:Gunslinger, or just Gunslinger for short from here on in, is one of those under-appreciated motifs in action. Even from the get go I have to say I love the stylistic variety, chickens running around, bright red bandanas, dried yellow grass against the blue sky, old wood hammered together - It's gritty and not especially pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but it's different and man shooters could use a great deal more different.

Gunslinger also reminds me, as anyone with half functioning brain will probably note, a great deal of Bastion in its good ways - A slick narrator chatters through much of the game and improves the experience immensely. Narration has always had an odd transition - It's so awful in movies, but it's so underused in games. I really like the narrator in Bastion and I really like the narrator here. Especially since the narrator isn't just concealing the story from you to lead you playing forward, he's an unreliable old chap who has had a couple to drink.

And who wouldn't enjoy a story as told by an old drunk cowboy?