Stretch

Wednesday, 2 January 2013

Year In Review - Best/Worst Games Of The Year

Year In Review:

This year has been a relatively disappointing year for gaming, especially when compared to 2011 which contained such masterpieces as Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Portal 2 and Dark Souls, all three of which may just be the three best games I have ever played. But let’s not get crazy.

2012 started off poorly with games like NeverDead and Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, and even Mass Effect 3 had flaws that were impossible to ignore. But eventually we got great titles like Halo 4, Dishonored and Borderlands 2, and even others I missed such as XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Journey, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron and Far Cry 3 look great and I will probably get around to most of them soon enough.

When I think about this year of gaming the phrase “Year Of Crummy Endings” comes to mind, and no, I’m not just talking about Mass Effect 3…but I will soon.

· Darksiders 2 and Assassin’s Creed III’s endings were both depressingly vague, and I’m still not even sure if the main characters are even alive.

· NeverDead, Borderlands 2 and Inversion all had long, boring and repetitive final bosses, with Borderlands 2 being the only one I bothered to defeat.

· Spec Ops: The Line had a climax that seemed a little too serious for its own good, and all I thought was; this guy doesn’t need to go crazy, he just needs to go home, have a shower and take a nap.

· Halo 4’s ‘end stage’ was a tedious gauntlet of enemies resulting in the pseudo-villain trying and failing to kill you.

· Pokémon White 2’s ending is almost impossible to remember.

· Pokémon Conquest’s final boss wasn’t necessarily annoying, but the fact the villain had both Zekrom and a shiny Rayquaza is ludicrous.

· Mass Effect 3’s ending was just weird. I LOVED the sense of finality it had, but it felt so rushed, unexplained and childishly simplistic.

Nothing has caught my interest in 2013, except Lost Planet 3, but hopefully we’ll see some new and original ideas spring forth this year. Anyway, time for my personal best and worst games of last year.

Top 5 Best Games Of 2012

5. Dishonored

I’m surprised I don’t hate this game. I’m not much of a stealth enthusiast, it looks and plays a lot like BioShock and Might and Magic: Dark Messiah Elements, two games I despise, and the latter was actually a game Arkane Studios worked on. But Dishonored is a very solid gaming experience, with masterfully balanced stealth and combat, with dynamic powers that make the game an overall joy to play.

My main complaint, and why it it’s only number five, is that the enemies are pitifully inept at noticing your presence. There was a moment when I was in an apartment building, standing near the doorway of a room with two guards inside. Just as a test, I got out my knife and smashed the glass of a nearby cabinet, without the guards, located about 15 feet away from me, noticing. Idiots.

4. Halo 4

Like Dishonored, Halo 4 is just a generally fun game to play.

Even though Bungie isn’t driving the series now, it really does feel like a Halo game. The scenery is beautiful with lovely open maps, and your ammo is surprisingly limited, resulting in you switching between multiple weapons during missions or even single battles. There isn’t much else to say about Halo 4 except what I said on the Game Out Loud podcast that nobody can hear because the audio got corrupted: I recommend it to anyone who wants a fun and colourful shooter for the weekend.

3. Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 3 is one of four games this year that I actually played again after reviewing it, and it’s the only one I actually finished twice in the same year.

I really needed a second go to see how much detail and love has gone into ME3, as well as the series as a whole. Characters you probably forgot about are referenced here and even show up, with Thane and Mordin’s appearances, and inevitable disappearances, being more heart wrenching than I ever could have imagined.

The combat is arguably the best it’s ever been, although I found my Warp and Throw Powers 10 times more useful than using weapons, so combat became a little too ‘magical’ for my liking. Yet the guns and Powers are dynamic and display excellent graphical animation and force, with the downright flawless sound design wrapping the game play together into one beautiful package.

However, there definitely was a lot of failed potential when it came to the idea of The Reapers, with the only display of an appropriately Armageddon-y scenario appearing at the tail end of the entire damn game. The Reapers were supposed to fall onto planets like gargantuan rain drops and shoot out putrid black smoke like Sovereign’s first appearance in the first Mass Effect. Instead, you only see what feels like four actual reapers (The smaller ones you fight on Tuchanka and Rannoch don’t count for obvious reasons), and they don’t seem to be doing anything except stepping around the place and randomly shooting ships, buildings and even vacant pieces of ground with their lasers of conveniently varying power.

But, it’s impossible to disregard the quality shown in Mass Effect 3, and is easily placed on my list of best games this year.

2. Spec Ops: The Line

At the very least, Spec Ops: The Line is a very functional and engaging cover shooter that cleverly utilizes team members allowing you to tactically kill enemies in relatively varied and intense situations.

At the very most, Spec Ops: The Line is a disturbing and provocative look at the idea of murder and the effects war has on somebody. When compared to a game like Mass Effect 3, Spec Ops: The Line is fairly standard as far as character development and story goes, but the player experiences the story so gracefully that it makes many other shooters look downright boring.

Long story short, Spec Ops: The Line = Pretty fun and will make you feel stuff. NUMBER 1 NOW!!!

1. Borderlands 2

Where do I begin?

The landscapes are gorgeous and massive, with deceptively varied locations such as an icy tundra, underground mine, desert, city (I guess) and bandit fortresses. It makes the prequel look like a grain of sand, and even though the area is a little too ‘set out’ to feel truly alive, Pandora sure is a fun place to blow stuff up in.

The combat is explosively engaging, and the guns are crazy as hell, though the flawed Fight For Your Life mechanic means you’ll often resort to brandishing a shotgun and crudely throwing yourself into a cluster of enemies no matter your class.

I’ve probably played Borderlands 2 for at least 60 hours now and it still feels massive and creative, among other things, and has everything that made all the other games on this list great. The game play flows as well and Dishonored and Halo 4, and the almost uncomfortably good story definitely gives Spec Ops: The Line and Mass Effect 3 a run for their money. Crap final boss though.

Top 5 Worst Games Of 2012

5. Inversion

Inversion certainly has its perks. There are several moments where the gravity idea is pulled off very well with some awesome looking visuals, and the plot twist, if you can call it that, is surprisingly interesting and has a huge amount of potential.

Sadly, the rest is just a standard shooter in virtually every way. Even fighting enemies while in zero gravity lacks the freedom it should have and feels far too linear, like pulling yourself along the lane ropes in a public swimming pool instead of swimming around in the water. That may just be the best analogy ever.

The bosses are the only thing stopping Inversion from just being standard. They all have monstrous amounts of health and are an overall pain to encounter, making Inversion the 2^nd most infuriating game I played this year.

4. NeverDead

It’s actually quite hard for me to hate NeverDead, and it’s not just because of the awesome soundtrack. NeverDead was the first game I reviewed on Bag Of Games, terribly mind you. I think I actually took up about ¼ of the page just to list two things I liked, man, why did I do that? Anyway…

The combat is repetitive, not helped by constantly re-spawning enemies and Bryce constantly splitting apart like a piñata. Enemies are generically demonic, though some creature designs are pretty cool, and playing through the game is just generally dull.

Like Inversion, there was loads of potential here, with Bryce starting to grow on me a little, but there just wasn’t enough ‘juice’ for me to get invested here.

3. AVSEQ

I had oddly high expectations for AVSEQ. A colourful and simplistic casual game with no sense of story or context? Move over Tetris! But, no. There really isn’t anything good about this game. It’s just clicking a circle of a certain colour and then clicking another circle of the same colour.

AVSEQ has as much excitement as dusting some dirt of your shoe, and isn’t worth anybody’s time. Stick to Tetris.

2. Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City

RE: ORC contains every flaw 3, 4 and 5 has all in one experience.

The story is vague and the overall experience is ‘hypnotising-ly’ boring, involving characters with virtually non-existent personalities and most enemies being boring soldiers and zombies. Some enemies take huge amounts of damage to take down, most notably a big mutant guy with a machine gun that you need to shoot to death, despite me using literally every gun and grenade in the room on him without him giving off any animation to let me know I was even supposed to be attacking him at all.

RE: ORC is flawed is pretty much every way, right down to something as simple as gun power and ammunition. Definitely give it a miss.

1. Dragon’s Dogma

Dragon’s Dogma is more than just bad. It’s wrong. Wrong for gaming and wrong for fantasy in general. Levelling up, choosing a class, customizing your character, exploring the land, the story and even the tactics of defeating enemies feel so lazily handled and hollow.

Your character, and every other character now that I think about it, is totally vacuous and everything about Dragon’s Dogma lacks energy, especially the idea of Pawns which just comes off as a way of having party members without going to the lengths of giving them any kind of personality. Game play is beyond repetitive, with multiples fireballs and lightning strikes failing to take down a single bandit, and my “teammates” battle cries have nearly driven me insane.

I honestly could come up with dozens, if not hundreds of flaws Dragon’s Dogma has, but I’m getting really depressed now, so I’ll just end it here. Oh, the lip synching sucks too.

Well, that’s 2012 done. Thanks to those who stuck around and to anyone who bothered to read all of this instead of just seeing what I listed as my best and worst games of the year before closing the window. I’ll be back this year with more…whatever it is I do.

Sunday, 11 November 2012

Saturday, 3 November 2012

Don't ask...

...don't you dare ask

Thursday, 13 September 2012

BOG: Game Out Loud Podcast #2

I was brought back for the second episode of the Game Out Loud Podcast. I think I'm getting better at...you know....talking...

http://www.bagofgames.com/2012/09/bog-game-out-loud-episode-2/

Wednesday, 5 September 2012

BOG: Game Out Loud Podcast #1

http://www.bagofgames.com/2012/09/bog-game-out-loud-podcast-episode-1/

This is the first episode of the Bag Of Games: Game Out Loud podcast. It was just called Game Out Loud but then Bag Of Games allowed them to host it at the site. Anyway.

I, along with Ryan from Bag Of Games, were asked to join in on the first episode. So here it is. excuse me if I'm extremely quiet, nervous and stutter-y....it's because I am.

Tuesday, 31 July 2012

A Dark Souls Response

Recently I received a very nice comment on my Top 5 Worst Moments In Dark Souls article on bagofgames.com. The commenter, Van Hammersly, responded to a few points I made but I was unable to respond because the 'reply' button stops working after a certain amount of times, apparently. So, I'll respond here. It's very unlikely that Van will ever see this, but hopefully anyone else reading will find this interesting. You could find the article with the comment I'm responding to here
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First, Van responded to my phrase "A game is there to entertain the player, not assume the player will automatically care about everything it has". He says that that sentence insinuates that there is only one way for a game to entertain the player, and that Dark Souls itself rewards the player for being patient and 'practicing' within its world.

The latter I completely agree with, and what makes Dark Souls a better 'practice game' than something like Another World is that virtually every 'trap' is never hidden from you. For the most part, the only reason you would ever die in Dark Souls more than once (I'll get to that later) is that you're not trying hard enough, and many player, including myself, have revelled in its challenge and engaging gameplay.

Yet, I really don't see how my quote could mean that there is only one way for a game to entertain a player, and it's certainly not what I meant. I'm just saying that a Video Game's primary purpose is to entertain with the components that make it a Video Game. Them being a game that is displayed with video...of course.
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He then responded to my description of the Crystal Cave area. I explained how the falling crystals didn't do a good enough job of showing the player the path to the other side of the cave, resulting in a boring and tedious road block in the game's progression.

Van called this particular moment of Dark Souls to be particularly tense, as the game gives you a necessarily vague idea as to where the path is, keeping you unsure as to where to go. This, he says, stays consistent with the 'feel' of Dark Souls.

Now my problem with the Crystal Cave is one based on personal experience, yet still has followed me on my two other playthroughs. Simply, the crystals just don't fall frequently enough, or at all. There were several moments where I just stood on the invisible path, waiting for a crystal to land onto an area in front of me...but never did, leaving a big gap that may or may not be safe to step on. There was never a chance for me to pay attention because there wasn't anything to pay attention to.

Also, he says that my tactic of 'running off the path and memorising the layout of it' to be the wrong way to tackle the area, but he goes on to say that a 'leap of faith' is something he found appropriately stressful, even though it's exactly what I was doing. I also don't think that is something the game should make the player do, which is something that really annoys me about many of Dark Souls' areas, especially finding Blacksmith Vamos in the Catacombs.

He also praised the ability for online players to leave messages on the invisible paths to 'mark' them, showing other players where to go, which I find very unfair to those who don't go online...like me.
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Van then commented on my opinion of the first encounter with Seath The Scaleless, being (spoiler) the number 1 worst moment in Dark Souls, according to my list anyway.

I said before that I admire Dark Souls for always giving the player a chance to survive, and if you die, it's your own fault. But the encounter with Seath breaks that idea, creating a trap that automatically kills you without any warning.

Van said that it perfectly suits Dark Souls, as dying is a 'core' part of the game, and the fact that Seath kills you should be seen as one of the many traps Dark Souls has.

Now, I've played Dark Souls about 2.5 times, resulting into well over 100 hours of play time and I can't think of a single trap that 'imprisons' you and automatically kill you. There are traps that severely hurt you like the statues in the Catacombs, but that isn't the point. The point is you can't stop Seath from killing you, which wouldn't be so bad if you weren't then given the punishment of dying.

The first boss of Demon's Souls killed you but you kept the souls you earned. It didn't make any sense, but at least the game didn't swipe away your 'hard work' without warning. But here, you have NO way of knowing that Seath is going to kill you, at least not until the fight is already happening, and even then it's probably too late for you to equip a Ring Of Sacrifice.

Van also said that the only way it could be unfair and cruel is if Seath sent you back to the last bonfire you rested at, which raises my next problem with this moment.

It was established in Dark Souls' game play that you would return to the last Bonfire you rested at if you died . So why is it that you get, or even CAN be, put into a prison next to a Bonfire you haven't used yet? Do you stay as a corpse when you die? How do you get sent back to Bonfires in other situations? How do Bonfires respawn enemies? Why do some monsters respawn and others don't? It's these kinds of questions that really makes me dislike a lot of Dark Souls' vague and unexplained ideas that many people lazily call 'interpretive', as if the game they love is perfect in every conceivable way, and if you don't understand...'think' harder!

And finally, Van responded to a sentence I used in response to another commenter. The sentence was: "Exploration should never be mandatory".

Van said that exploration is a big part of Dark Souls and that your journey can feel aimless at times.

I completely agree with that, but a journey feeling aimless doesn't make it explorative. Just because you don't know where you're going doesn't mean you're exploring. And really, you don't know where you're going in Dark Souls, most of the time. You're vaguely told by some random warrior to ring two bells. One is up and one is down. Sure, your path is revealed to you at the same time your character is seeing it, but you're still progressing through the story because you're still travelling down a linear path, and Dark Souls' story can still be completed without exploring at all.

An example of exploration in games is getting an objective in Skyrim but deciding to disregard it and venture off into an unknown area for the sake of it. That is exploring because you're essentially disobeying the game's requests. In Dark Souls, you may not know exactly where you'll end up, but you're still pressing forward. A man who is walking down a corridor isn't instantly exploring if he suddenly becomes blind. Really, the only explorative areas of Dark Souls is The Great Hollow and Ash Lake because you can finish the game without even knowing they exist.

And that's pretty much it. I'd like to thank Van Hammersly for his thoughtful and, most importantly, civil comment. Sorry if I'm talking about Dark Souls too much...I have another article about it coming out in the next few days...you're welcome.

Tuesday, 29 May 2012

Bastion Review

I have no graceful way to start, so I’ll just say this: I didn’t really like Bastion that much. It is definitely a decent game, but little annoyances nibbled away at my enthusiasm throughout the experience.

The game does not start before The Calamity; an event that caused the ground to crack away, allowing fragments of it to rise up at the playable characters feet. So it’s difficult to understand how this affects the people and places, because we don’t really know how the world existed previously. Even with the narrator talking about certain locations the world feels depressingly hollow and underdeveloped.

Your character doesn’t react to the environment while other people and the layout of objects give off the impression that The Calamity is not incredibly odd, but something everyone expected and prepared for. This may have been the case but it hardly feels like a problem when everything is essentially fixing itself as you move.

Also, if you fall off the ‘floor’ your character just plunks down onto it again, so the game play itself makes the rules of this place even more confusing.

The ground constructing itself beneath you doesn’t serve much purpose during game play, since Bastion could very easily have just taken place on “Earth” with the gaps in the ground being replaced with basic holes.

Ofcourse it’s a stylish choice, and an interesting one at that, but since the pre-determined paths form as you walk near them I was constantly asking myself ‘Why doesn’t everyone just walk around and rebuild their world over?’

The path you’re supposed to take is consistently clear, only rarely leading you to dead ends filled with useful items. As far as exploration goes, you never feel in danger. I could easily tell where the ground would form so I was never nervous or stressed, almost as if my progression was already laid out.

However, the clustered environments can make it tricky to tell if you’re about to step on a gap or just a dark tile, but falling off is only punished with a tiny bit of damage from the fall back. This can make the absurd situation feel weirdly safe, especially since there are some gaps that are so small that it’s impossible to fall through them.

It is purely an aesthetic choice, since combat doesn’t really make use of it either.

As you progress through Bastion you systematically obtain varied weapons to fight equally varied enemies. I was afraid that I would spend all my…gems…or whatever they are on upgrading lesser weapons, which would later become obsolete when I found one more suitable to my playing style. Fortunately, you are given an appropriate amount of time and currency to test out each weapon before finding one that suits you. And, predictably, there are some enemies that can be killed more effectively with certain weapons, so you can’t just stick with one. For me, it was a big hammer and a musket.

No weapon that you receive feels useless, except maybe the carbine that takes forever to aim, and each enemy can take a satisfying amount of punishment from each one. Although there are some enemies, like plants that shoot spikes at you, that have such a wide and long attack range that they're pretty much impossible to kill without taking damage yourself. In those cases, I just ran up to them and smashed them with my hammer as fast as I could.

The upgrades you place onto your weapons are my favourite kinds of upgrades; dynamic and game changing. Granted, there are some boring ones like +15% damage, but many improve the reload and firing rate among other things by relatively large amounts. Each upgrade, the good ones at least, are instantly noticeable and greatly increase your effective in combat.

The game play progresses smoothly and even though the environments can get repetitive the more you play in them, the enemies and situations never become crude upgrades of themselves. The only exception to that are these miner monsters made out of gas, apparently, that just become larger and/or more numerous as the game continues.

Combat itself can get rather manic. I’m positive that a small amount of it is due to my lack of experience using a keyboard. But since you have a plentiful supply of health and healing potions (I think they’re called something else but whatever, they’re potions) you never feel cheated when you get swamped by enemies. You don’t necessarily have to be careful, just quick and skillful. And since the camera angle makes it virtually impossible for you to be blind sighted, combat, although sometimes tricky, never feels overly oppressive.

Like Dante’s Inferno, the fact that enemies are introduced in areas they suit but later show up in completely unrelated areas makes the world itself feel shallow and even claustrophobic. You’ll go to a foggy swamp areas, fight some toad-like creatures, only for them to revisit you later in a non-swamp area. Luckily they don’t appear in places covered with ice, which would have been more ridiculous than this game’s premise.

Since the areas you go to only have small retrospective back-stories or reason for being how they are, Bastion’s world, while still showing mildly different locations, has the explorative feel of a street with a cul-de-sac.

Massive praise has to go to the attention to detail here. I’m not talking about the beautifully artistic look of the locations and enemies. I mean the games acknowledgement of your seemingly trivial actions.

Virtually every aspect of the game is narrated, which automatically makes the journey feel more charming and story book-ish. There are many moments where you are given weapons that you can later replace with others during a single level. When you get the weapon, the narrator comments of it, giving rather subtle clues beneath his narration as to how it works and how to use it effectively, such as “The kid knew he had to stay out of harm’s way when reloadin'”. And when/if you replace it later, he will say something like “He put away his new toy and got something more to his liking”. This is such an impressive and praiseworthy thing for a game to do that it basically breaks the immersion. It makes the journey feel infinitely more personal, and because the narrator never describes your actions with negative inflections you always stay positive and never feel like you're doing the wrong thing.

The narrator commenting on such a numerous amount of things is simply delightful, and gives emotional context and feeling to every situation. This is needed in practically all moments since the playable character has as much personality as Pac-Man.

The story itself isn’t anything special. With not much back-story, simplistic characters and areas in the game that just let you crudely test out your weapons like you’re in an arcade, Bastion doesn’t seem to care about the world it’s creating.

The narration helps the underdeveloped story, but it is most effective when mentioning specific events that happened before The Calamity, since it makes the fact that the ground is rising beneath and falling above you more engaging. Really, the narration is the only thing that makes the vague enemies, story, setting and characters have any amount of interest and understandability. Even enemies that look like Wailmer from Pokémon feel more substantial when there’s a story-teller backing them up.

Bastion isn’t anything new. Personally, I was very used to the art style from Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes.

The concept of reforming floor isn’t a part of the game play in any major way, and isn’t explored enough to feel important, especially since you start with it already happening and never play without it, making The Calamity feel uncomfortably normal.

Combat is enjoyable thanks to useful weapons, distinct enemies and fairly dynamic upgrades. Yet you can very easily be surrounded and pummeled by enemies, which doesn’t become a huge problem because you can roll away and attack them easily.

The world Bastion creates is sadly underdeveloped. It is more focused on putting in good game play that reacts well with all its components then actually placing meaning behind what’s happening. There’s an ability that allows you to jump that you only get during the climax, which seems like a pretty random place to put such a classic improvement to the game play. And there are many times when you are introduced to a new enemy and the narrator says something to the effect of “Those things. They live here. Watch out for them”.

On a small level I found the look and feel endearing. I finished it all in 1 day, and I never felt like leaving it, which is one of the biggest compliments you can give any game. I wanted to keep playing.