World of Goo

I just finished World of Goo, and while it was fun, I can't help but feel there's a lesson trying to be crammed down my throat. World of Goo at its core is a puzzle game. You have goos of varying abilities that you use to build goo structures across the level so that they reach a pipe. All goos that are not part of your structure will be sucked into said pipe. To complete each level, there is a minimum number of these unused goos that have to be collected. In each level, you have to balance building a structurally sound goo tower/bridge/blob while leaving enough goos to be collected at the end.

Throughout the levels, there are signs present with both thinly veiled clues for how you should tackle the level and also subtext peppered in of the overarching themes and, let's say, lessons of the game. Mostly, this felt like throwaway text that I didn't really enjoy. The level design and text, though, were clearly meant to make some statement about our society. It touched on things like our ever present need for more energy, the fact that we as a society are overly obsessed with physical appearance, the destruction that is required in the name of "progress", and the fact that our online habits are constantly monitored and personal information sold in the service of marketing. That's awful deep shit for a game I just thought was a neat playground for goo physics.

I enjoyed the puzzles. They were difficult at times. They were confounding at times. The puzzles were fun.

However...

World of Goo was like a box of assorted chocolates. The puzzles were the tasty chocolate coating hiding the kinda gross center of underlying subtext. "Kinda gross" or no, I still ate the whole damn box.

Axel & Pixel

"Axel & Pixel is another title from the "What the hell is this?" Vault. Axel is a painter and Pixel is his dog. They get lulled to sleep by some weird ass rat creature, and in the dreamworld, they must chase said weird ass rat creature through numerous locations representing the seasons to get a key the rat's bogarting, which will unlock a door back to reality. While in this dreamworld, you try to collect tubes of paint and find vistas to sketch in order to finish a painting out in the real world.

They call it an adventure game, but I contest that it is not. It's more like a hidden object game. You're presented with a scene, and you mouse over things until your cursor changes to a hand, indicating you can interact with the object. You click it, things happen, and new things will become glowy and clickable as a result. To break up this gameplay, there are a couple odd mini-games thrown in between scenes, one where you navigate a hot air balloon through a cavern, one where you drive a monster truck over hills and across gorges, and a third where you navigate a sailboat down the river, avoiding whirlpools.

It's a fairly odd game. The art style reminds me of Terry Gilliam's animations in Monty Python because it looks to be composed of existing images that have been Photoshopped together to make a scene. Axel and Pixel themselves are drawn, and there's a few 3d creatures thrown in there, but for the most part, it looks like someone went to town with some scissors and paste.

The audio might be the most enjoyable thing to me just because it's weird. There's no dialogue, but Axel does talk...but they're like nonsense sounds. Things like: Ahhhya! Oh ho! Aww doh doh. Aidoh! It's weird, but you get the meaning behind the sounds based on the inflection of his voice. This game was made in the Czech Republic, so it was definitely easier to merely translate the sparse text to whatever language rather than bother with getting a voice actor for each language.

I went through the entire game in less than 3 hours. When I got to the end, and Axel starts painting a scene of the four seasons, there are holes not filled in. He starts to pin up sketches he took during the game and fills in those holes. I missed one... Whoops. He then starts to paint. He can only paint three of those sketches. I missed lots of paint tubes... Text then appears on screen telling me that Axel didn't finish his painting, and then the credits roll.

...

Listen, Axel and Pixel. You were fine for a distraction from a boring day at work, but you're not nearly fun enough for me to go back and find all those paint tubes. I don't care that much. I figured I'd just watch the ending on Youtube. I find two people who have posted video playthroughs of the game, and much to my dismay, neither of them finished the painting either. Consensus: Axel and Pixel is not actually fun enough to finish.

It's not hard. I could probably do it in another 20 minutes, but it's not worth it. If I hadn't gotten this game in a 2K Bundle during a Steam Sale, I probably never would have even known about it, but now that I do know about it, it's not something I would have paid for on purpose. It's fine for a three hour distraction, but I wouldn't classify what I experienced as fun.

A Virus Named TOM

A Virus Named TOM? what the fuck is that, you say! Exactly. I didn't know either. I got it in one of those Humble Bundles as a tag along. Pleasant surprise, though, it's pretty enjoyable! I had no idea what to expect going in, but A Virus Named TOM is a puzzle game. It takes place in this futuristic world where Dr. X has created such things as robo-dogs and moving sidewalks everywhere so walking isn't necessary. But then he created a giant people killing robot to make sure people were using his inventions, and that seemed kind of too far. As a result, he was fired. Like most crazy mad scientists types react when fired, he wants to watch the world burn, and thus, TOM was created.

The good doctor then sics TOM on each of his inventions in turn, until they're reduced to malfunctioning scrap piles. He does this by helping the virus spread in multiple levels of each invention. That's where you come in. In each of these levels, there's a main source of the virus that you're trying to spread throughout the entire circuit by matching up ends of differently shaped circuit segments. Each of these segments can be rotated, and the goal is to rotate the pieces so they make a complete circuit. In a complete circuit, the green virus is glowing in every piece, and there are no remaining grey non-infected pieces. The gameplay kind of reminds me of the hacking mini-game in Saint's Row IV, except way more stressful.

The stress is a result of both the level being timed, the possibility that you can run out of energy, and that there are anti-virus drones of various kinds roaming around that can kill your virus spreadin' ass. It's fun and stressful and caused me to shout many expletives at my screen. It remained enjoyable though because each level is a little bite size chunk that you can jump in and tackle even if you only have a couple minutes to play.

At times, it got slightly too stressful, and I needed a gameplan in order to tackle a puzzle. This may seem like cheating, but I contest THAT IT IS NOT! I would take a screenshot of the field of play and work it out outside the game in Microsoft Paint. "I'm still using my brains. I'm still solving the puzzle. It is not cheating.", I say to all the people that saw me drawing on my screenshots and proceeded to accuse me of cheating. You don't know what it's like in there! Don't judge me.

A Virus Named TOM was very entertaining to me. I could tell my brain was working out some of the levels long after I stopped playing that day, and I'm preeetty sure I even had dreams where I was solving these puzzles. All in all, pretty good for a game I essentially got as a free Humble Bundle bonus.

BRAID

I'm having a hard time putting into words my experience with Braid. There were parts I liked, parts I didn't, and parts I just thought were being vague and ambiguous for the sake of being vague and ambiguous. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Braid, as I'm sure you know, is an indie puzzle platformer sprung from the mind of Jonathan Blow. The main mechanic this game is built on is the manipulation of time. While in Super Mario Bros, you'd fall in a hole to your death and have to start the level over, Braid gives you the power to rewind time. At the point of would be annihilation, you can rewind prior to the point you flubbed up and give it another go.

The game is broken up into six separate worlds. These worlds are accessed via a house interior, where each door leads to one of these worlds. You only have access to Worlds 2-6 downstairs. World 1 is accessed through the attic, which is inaccessible at the beginning due to a broken ladder. You will gain rungs to this ladder as you finish all the puzzles in each world. As you enter a World's door, you proceed to a cloud scene in which there are a number of books and multiple doors present. Walking in front of each book will display text on the screen, which is about our protagonist, Tim, and a relationship that seemingly went south. Each door available leads to the individual levels of that world. In each level, there are puzzle pieces scattered about, and you must figure out how to use the environment and your ability to rewind time in order reach the puzzle pieces that are enticingly close but always seem to be just out of reach.

My first experiences with acquiring puzzle pieces were very...let's say inefficient. I would see a piece and have no idea how to get to it. I'd try a couple things, fail miserably, and move on to the next puzzle piece and/or level. I appreciated the fact that no level really forced you to accomplish everything, or really anything, before you could leave for the next level. This was good because I wasn't really grasping the rewind mechanic at all due to my impatient mood that day.

I think I yelled, "THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE!" at one point. Then I calmed down, realized I wasn't just going to tear through this game, and started using my noodle. I had a breakthrough in which I realized the very simple concept that jumping on a baddy from a high place made me jump higher. That led to solving numerous problems, getting a bunch of puzzle pieces, and the acceptance that I was just being an impatient asshole shouting about impossibility. Figuring one of these puzzles out when it had been stumping you is a very satisfying experience. I kept having the same experience in each world where the puzzles made me feel like a fucking idiot and then a fucking genius and then a fucking idiot...

Everything in Braid tends to have a purpose. There's not really any superfluous platforms or other bits in the environment that aren't somehow involved with the puzzle. If it's there, I'm probably supposed to do something with it. This logic helped me figure out some of the puzzles because when a solution was not readily apparent, I started to breakdown all that was at my disposal, trying to figure out what purpose everything served. This exacting way he created the game world meant that everything was important but also that there was a single specific solution to every problem. There was one right way to do things, and sometimes that one way was difficult to figure out. Sometimes the timing or my position was so critical that I had to try over and over, despite the fact that sometimes, I totally understood the puzzle and how I should be able to complete it. My execution of those steps was sometimes the hinderance, and that was occasionally a source of frustration. The level "A Fickle Companion" drove me nuts for this reason. I think I consulted a Youtube video for that one because I failed so many times that I assumed I must have been taking the completely wrong track. Nah...I was right, I just needed to time everything better or stand a few pixels to the right. Infuriating.

As I continued through each world to pick up puzzle pieces I missed, I reread the text each time. I wasn't really grasping how the text and gameplay related. There seemed to be a bit of a disconnect both with the game and the text and between texts themselves. However, I later realized that each bit of text foreshadowed the new wrinkle in gameplay that was to be added in that world. For example, the first world you enter, World 2, talks about forgiveness and learning from mistakes. This seems like an introduction to the rewind mechanic in general. In World 6, there's much talk about a ring, and the new gameplay ability involves a circle you can deploy which slows down time within that circle.

I continue to backtrack and pick up missing puzzle pieces. Collecting all the pieces in each level allows you to put together the whole puzzle for that world, and once that world's puzzle is completed, the ladder extends further to the attic. Once Worlds 2 through 6 have been taken care of, the ladder is complete, and I proceed to World 1. In order not to rob you of your aha moment here, I'm gonna be Lady Vague. World 1 is likely the most stressful. What once were puzzles meant to stare and ponder on must now be solved quickly as you rush forward to save the princess and escape the fiery inferno that blazes behind you in hot pursuit. (Accidental pun...sigh) When you make your way to safety, that's when the game changes, and your perception of events gets turned on its head. You understand your role in this story much clearer now, and I think I recall a "whoa" falling out of my mouth.

After this realization comes the epilogue, complete with more books and text, more indecipherable now than ever. What was contentment regarding this game's ending swings over to bafflement. The game is over, and I'm left scratching my head. I assume there is some deep meaning hidden in those final words that this pleb isn't going to get, so TO THE INTERNETS THEN! My biggest aha/whoa moment was that realization at the end, but Jonathan Blow contends that this wasn't the point of the game. Oh...well... Tell me what the point was, internet. What does it mean? There are lots of discussions going on regarding this topic, but Mr. Blow says we're all pretty much wrong about what the game means, but he smugly refuses to tell us what the game means because it cannot be explained with words, which is why he made the game, which, don't forget, we were all just apparently wrong about the meaning of. Great... Glad we cleared that up.

I don't think we'll ever uncover all that the creator intended in Braid, but that's okay. When one takes away meaning from a piece of art, there is no right or wrong interpretation. That was YOUR interpretation. I think that's what has always annoyed me about comparative lit or art appreciation. There's no RIGHT answer, and I have to get over that. I think Jonathan Blow needs to get over that as well.

What I do know is that guy who made this game is a clever dude. There's some very well designed puzzles in Braid. There's also some not so good ones peppered in there with one time use mechanics or "Gotcha bitch!" traps, but it's worth taking a look at. I think any game that causes this much discussion and wildly different opinions on it has to be experienced oneself. Go get your own interpretation. Dear Jonathan is not going to clue you in on which one you SHOULD have.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

I love the Monkey Island franchise. I've beaten most of them, save the new Telltale Games episodes, but it's been so long, I've forgotten...you know, everything. Thus, a Special Edition of "The Secret of Monkey Island" was the perfect excuse to revisit the series.

If you've been living under a rock and know not of Monkey Island, just know that it's a point-and-click adventure game following around Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate...or wannabe might pirate. It's funny, awesome, inspired loads of adventure games that were to come, and you should go and play it already, you gutter-crawling cur!

Sorry, been insult sword fighting today.

What makes this a Special Edition was that they went back in and remade all the backgrounds and characters to be all fancy and drawn lookin'. They also added voice actors to do all the dialogue. While I really liked the addition of voice actors, the new art lost some of the charm for me. I wanted to experience it now as I did then. Thankfully, they gave me that option. Pressing F10 toggles between original and Special Edition looks.

It was a very bizarre way to play this game, but each time I would enter a new screen, I would switch over to the Special Edition and take note of the updated graphics. They very faithfully recreated the old scenes, but I would immediately then switch back to the old look. It's like a comforting blanket, the old graphics. The new backgrounds looked pretty good, but I really didn't like the look of Guybrush himself. He's too lanky or something, he's got a dopey haircut, and his walk animation looked too...smooth. It was as if he floated over the ground rather than was actually walking on it. And since I'd have to look at that gangly mook the entire time, I took Mr. Pixel instead.

I also didn't bother to figure out the new controls. The Special Edition utilized a hidden inventory and action window rather than take up the bottom half of the screen with the standard controls, but it wasn't immediately intuitive to use. It was probably designed for controller in mind, but I was using a good 'ol mouse and keyboard, and I wanted to play in old school mode anyhow, so I said fuck it.

Like I mentioned previously though, the voice acting was an excellent addition. That alone was worth the price of admission. I would walk around and use items on other items in old school mode, but anytime there was dialogue, I'd flip back to fancy schmancy mode to enjoy the audio. They brought back many of the voice actors from later Monkey Island games, which was most excellent.

If you haven't played The Secret of Monkey Island, there's no time like the present. I've loved this game for years for its existing awesome, and I love the Special Edition for allowing me to re-access that awesome without floppy disks. Kudos.

LOOM

Reaching back into the adventure game vault again, I pulled out LOOM. I really had no idea what this game was about going into it, and I had tried to play it once before. It was during overtime at work though, so I was probably pissed, and it wasn't the best time to try anything new. (Before you start judging my work habits, know that we were stalled with nothing to do and were waiting and waiting...and trying LOOM...and waiting.) I don't think I at all grasped what was going on in that initial playtest, and therefore, I didn't stick with it.

What got me to jump in with both feet was The Adventure Gamer started playing it recently, and in his LOOM: Introduction blog post, he made me aware of the existence of a 30-minute audio drama that came as a cassette with the game. It covered much of the backstory, setting the stage for the prologue of the game. I bought LOOM on Steam, so I had no idea the cassette even existed. The audio drama is fairly well done and uses all the voice actors from the game. You could gather the backstory from bits and pieces in the game itself, but I really enjoyed the 30-minute exposition. It pushed me to start playing immediately. Give it a listen on Youtube if you're so inclined.



In short, you are Bobbin Threadbare, a child born of the LOOM. Your mother, Lady Cygna, created you via weaving a single grey thread on the LOOM after losing yet another child. She did this in defiance of the Elders' wishes, who thought this would be playing God. This act of rebellion led them to transform Cygna into a swan, banish her for her disobedience, and left young Bobbin all alone. Fortunately, he was taken in by Cygna's friend Hetchel and raised as her own, and while she was given strict orders not to teach Bobbin the Guild of Weaver's craft, she defied that decree and taught him some simple drafts.

A draft is the weaving of threads by playing four musical notes with your distaff in a specific order to affect change in the world around you. For example, ECED is the Open draft, which can be used to open doors and whatnot. More notes become available as you progress, allowing you to play more advanced drafts that you'll learn along the way.

You'll have to write these drafts down somewhere as there's no way in-game to keep track of them. If you have the original boxed version of this game, it comes with a "Book of Patterns" to write these down in, along with some useful descriptions of the drafts that I'm sure I would have found useful in my playthrough. You can manage without it though so never fear.

Since playing these drafts is the main way to interact with objects in this game, the UI for LOOM is a tad different from other LucasArts games. You don't have an inventory, and the normal verbage of USE, LOOK, PICK UP, etc. is gone. The lower third of the screen is occupied instead by your distaff and an area to display the image of the currently selected object.

When you mouse over an object that's interactable, an image of it will appear in the lower right. Clicking on that object in the game world will keep it selected, and the image will remain in the lower right corner, allowing you to use a draft on it. Clicking on the image itself will allow you to LOOK at the object, making Bobbin say a few words about it.

These controls work well enough...but it is a minor pain in the ass that you can't look for interactable objects while walking. You have to be standing still for the images to appear. I can do two things at once, LucasArts. Let me be efficient. Navigation is also a bit odd when there's multiple planes in one scene. For the most part, clicking high or low on the screen won't make you go forward or backward in the scene. It's the left/right location that's important. In instances where there are multiple depths at which you can move, you'll have to ease Bobbin onto whatever bridge or walkway leads to that second plane because just clicking where you want him to go results in him moving to that lateral location on whatever plane he's currently on. It's odd, but thankfully only two or three scenes share this problem.

Trivial. It's fine. The important thing was that the story was interesting and kept me engaged. The backgrounds were very nice looking, and there weren't any puzzles that were so convoluted that they couldn't be figured out. I made sure to take my own advice and didn't feel rushed or antsy to finish. It isn't a very long game, making it doubly shameful to cheat and look up hints. The few times I did get stalled, I allowed myself to be stuck and came back to it later, confident knowing that it was solvable. This was because LOOM was one of the first LucasArts games to adhere to their code of not letting the user get into some unwinnable state requiring reloading from a previous save or worse, restarting the game entirely. I appreciated this change in game design ideology. It's too easy to think you screwed up in some gargantuan fashion rather than remain calm and assume you're just not trying the right things. This leads to reluctant cheating. Reluctant cheating leads to frequent cheating. Frequent cheating leads to being an asshole. Thanks for nipping that in the bud, LucasArts.

I enjoyed the world of LOOM. There were interesting characters, lore, and unique game mechanics. The game was a bit short and rather easy at times, but it was an enjoyable experience throughout. The real shame of it is that the ending is clearly open ended, setting them up for sequels which never were to be. I'm only 23 years too late, but somebody want to make that sequel? I'm ready now. Telltale Games, perhaps? Anyone, anyone? Bueller?

Sam & Max: Season 1

Just getting this out there... "Sam & Max Hit the Road" might be my favorite adventure game of all time. Of all my adventure games, I'm pretty sure I've replayed it the most and could very likely quote the whole damn thing. Therefore, I was delighted that TellTale Games were going to pick up the torch and bring these characters I love back to video game land for "Sam & Max: Season 1" ...or "Sam & Max Save the World" or whatever the hell they're calling it.

"Season 1?", you say. I know. It's weird. While it's not the first game to employ an episodic release, I'm pretty sure it's the first that I've ever played in that vein, and I'm a little conflicted. Instead of releasing one game that took multiple years to develop, they release individual episodes in much quicker intervals, where each episode is a part of an overarching story. Granted, I didn't really get the full benefit of the episodic nature since I played it seven years after the fact...

I was busy. Shut up.

Each episode is about two hours long. Sam and Max have a new case each episode, all which tie in together to slowly reveal the parts of a massive hypnosis conspiracy.

I feel that it took a couple episodes for the developers to hit their stride. The first three episodes feel very samey. There is essentially three rooms in which the bulk of the adventuring takes place in, plus an additional "boss" area at the end. The puzzles in those early episodes are fairly straightforward, and it's fairly obvious what an object is for once you get it. The formula for those first episodes seemed to be:

1. Notice people are hypnotized in some fashion.
2. Bosco, the Inconvenience Store owner, has an item you don't have enough money for.
3. Your adventure reveals three things you need to do.
4. Do the three things, get money and consequently the item from Bosco, proceed to "boss fight".
5. Go through the Boss Fight dialogue tree a bajillion times to find the correct combo to win.

The fourth episode broke the mold a little bit and was by far the strongest and most enjoyable. The dialogue was better overall, more..."Sam & Maxish". There were more visually interesting locations and lots of back and forth between them. Items were both more obscure in their purpose and could be used in various ways, making the solutions not so obvious. It was the first episode I had to stop and think about a puzzle for a moment. Plus, you're chasing around a giant mechanized Abraham Lincoln, which is pretty great any way you slice it.

The remaining two episodes weren't quite AS good as the fourth one, but they were still solid in that the dialogue was humorous, and the puzzles required slightly more pondering. Visually, there were additions of vehicles on the street to add a bit of life, and in Episode 6, they made it look like dusk. Not huge changes, but I like that you're trying. I also appreciated that, in the last two episodes, they wrote new dialogue for each clickable item. Every episode, I clicked on every single item in that office. Thanks for eventually rewarding me with new funny words. It made it worth it, unlike my obsessive opening of 516 toilet stall doors in Fallout 3, every time expecting a ghoul to leap out and scare the bejesus out of me. Ghoul tease...

Anyway, I enjoyed my reunion with Sam and Max overall, and I'm hopeful for the remaining two seasons. I give Season 1 a rating of...six hyperkinetic rabbity things and vow it won't take me another seven years to get around to playing Season 2.

FEZ

Well...I beat FEZ. I know that because credits were involved. As to what happened, what I accomplished, what the fuck that ending was about, it's hard to say...symbolism is not exactly my forte.

Let's back up for a sec though. I don't even know what FEZ is, you say. For the uninitiated, FEZ can best be described as a puzzle/platformer. The interesting mechanic that it's built around is the ability to rotate the world. Not everything is as it first appears. What looks like a 2D world is actually 3D, and Gomez, after receiving his magic fez hat, is able to rotate the world 90° left or right at will to navigate through the world. Platforming will always be performed in a 2D space, but each 2D face has three other corresponding sides that can be rotated to the foreground. Platforms, ledges, ivy to climb, etc. may not line up in your current configuration, but with a change in perspective, the way can be found.

The immediate surface goal is to find shiny yellow squares scattered around the world. Find 8 of those squares, and they form a cube. Find/construct enough cubes, and you can open certain doors around the world, revealing more of the world. The true goal is exploration and discovery. As you progress, you realize there are secrets, hidden cubes, puzzles that will make you tear your hair out, and even an entire language to decipher.

When you start playing, you're totally confused. You're also lost and can't use the map system for shit, but that's okay! Keep plugging away, and you start to understand how to get around in the world. I told one of my friends, "I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but I'm doing it better than I was an hour ago."

Whenever you actually figure out one of the puzzles USING YOUR OWN BRAIN, there is tremendous satisfaction in that. In order to have the best gameplay experience possible, I recommend resisting the urge to look to the internet for help. I did that on occasion and felt like a cheating asshole when I did. Three things to keep in mind while playing FEZ:

1. Don't go into this game putting time constraints on yourself. If you think you're not progressing as quickly as your arbitrary self-imposed schedule demands, you're going to get frustrated and look shit up. Try not to look shit up.


2. Know that there are some rooms that you simply cannot do anything in on your first pass. You may do something down the road that makes unlocking the secrets of that room possible. Don't feel like you can't backtrack. You're going to have to backtrack. You're not a failure if you backtrack.


3. You don't have to unlock everything to see the endgame. Finding 32 cubes will allow you to "beat" FEZ, however there is a slightly different ending if you find all 64 cubes and anti-cubes. Whether or not that's worth it depends on how much fun you're having, I suppose.

I was an impatient asshole and did not follow rule #1. I only created the rules after realizing I was being an asshole, so forgive me. The nature of the game is meant to be a little frustrating. The true joy of the game comes from overcoming that frustration with your noggin.

FEZ was one of the games featured in the documentary "Indie Game: The Movie", and Phil Fish, FEZ's creator, said he "wanted to bring it back to the old days of gaming pre-internet when there'd be like these urban legends where if you stand in this one corner and stand still for 5 seconds and then press down, and jump two times, it warps you somewhere." You definitely get that feel. Secrets abound within FEZ. I even heard that there are hidden images, text, and QR codes hidden in the tracks of the soundtrack when viewed in any audio program with a spectrogram.

Phil Fish, you're a clever dude, and I'm glad that after five years, you could share FEZ with the world. It made me feel like a genius at times; it annoyed the shit out of me at times, but all the while, it was an enjoyable world to spend some time in.

Humble Bundle Strikes Again

Just when I think I'm making some headway on this gaming backlog, a Humble Bundle comes out with stuff I actually had on my wishlist...

Welp, add Trine 2, Mark of the Ninja, Eets Muchies, Brutal Legend (although I already had this on PS3), and FEZ to the pile. Put em over there on the floor in that small empty space I was starting to feel good about.

Go over to humblebundle.com if you want to add these games to your collection.

Saints Row IV

It's not often that I pre-order games. The only franchises that garner this kind of pre-order inducing fervor in me are Dragon Age, Fallout, Mass Effect, and Saints Row. I have an enormous backlog of games, and to even bother purchasing something at full price, I have to know I'm going to dive into my new acquisition immediately and not come up for air until I'm done with it. Otherwise, I know I won't get to it until it's like 2 dollars on Steam. Two of my friends were commenting on my Saints Row love, saying, "I like it when [she] fanboys about stuff. It's rare. And very intense." What's not to like? Everybody talks like they're in a Tarantino movie, I can leap tall buildings in a single bound, and I get to blow shit up while listening to classical music.

Saints Row IV starts off five years after the third installment, and you're now the President of the United States. Life is good until a bunch of douchey aliens come, enslave humanity, and explode the Earth a little bit. Zinyak, the head douche of the alien race known as the Zin, and his cronies have captured oodles of humans and have plugged them in to a simulated version of Steelport.

Yes. It's totally The Matrix. In said simulation, each of your homies are reliving and being subjected to their greatest fears over and over. You, as the most awesome one, must break out each of your homies in turn and unite to take down your alien overlords. And since you're pretty much Neo in this little tale, when you're in the simulation, you have super powers including Super Sprint, Super Jump, Freeze Blast, Telekinesis, Super Stomp, etc. It's an incredibly satisfying way to wreak havoc.

Outside of the simulation, you're on a ship. (I'm going to call it the Nebuchadnezzar because duh...Matrix.) While on the ship, the tone switches from Matrix to Mass Effect, as you can talk to and/or romance all your homies on the ship, resulting in many a laugh.

Gameplay itself has not changed a whole lot between games save the addition of super powers, which I mentioned are immensely fun. There's still a boatload of Activity mini-games to play. New ones have been added and existing ones have been tweaked to utilize your new abilities. There are stores to buy stuff, but instead of purchasing the stores, you have to hack into them to use them. Remember, this is a simulation of the world. Hacking. Viruses. All that. And of course, there's a heaping helping of new ridiculous weaponry that's sure to tickle your fancy. A few examples include an Inflato-Ray which inflates your target like a balloon until they explode, an Abduction Gun that places a beam of vertical light where you shoot and all caught within that light are sent skyward, the 'Merica gun, which plays patriotic music while shooting fireworks that catch people on fire, and the ever popular Dubstep Gun that pulses bursts of light to a dubstep beat which elicits cars to hydraulics hop and nearby people to dance until their hearts explode.

Saints Row IV leaves enough things intact to keep it familiar but adds enough new to excite and make it feel fresh. The things I like most about Saints Row in general are the ridiculous, over the top storylines, humorous dialogue, and kick ass voice actors. Female Voice 1 Laura Bailey is pretty much amazing, FYI. She made a simple sentence of "Well...fuck." make me laugh for like 5 minutes. That's fuckin' pro.

The Loyalty quests for each homie are generally the most humorous, ridiculous, and memorable. I don't want to give too much away, so I'm just going to say: Fun Shaundi, Paul, and Double Dragon, bitches.

Speaking of homies, one of the things that bummed me out was that I didn't really need to use them that much out in the regular game world. It's kind of a pain in the ass to use them, in fact. If my main mode of transportation is super jumping/sprinting everywhere, that makes it a smidge difficult for people with cars and regular legs to follow.

The concept of Notoriety kind of goes out the window for similar reasons. I don't fear you alien assholes chasing me with your insignificant vehicles. I'm the Gingerbread Man, motherfuckers. This makes things like Flashpoints a little less exciting. I remember in Saints Row III, rolling up with a carload full of homies, taking out a Flashpoint, and driving away with enemies in hot pursuit, while we're shooting out the windows and hucking grenades behind us. It was magical. Nowadays, I shoot em all in the head before reinforcements arrive and jump jump jump to freedom.

Sometimes I'd use cars just because of the nostalgia of it though. I actually wanted to use my homies, so I started taking out Flashpoints, doing Virus Injections (waves of enemies attacking), and Virus Collection (car stealing) with Super Shaundi in tow just for funsies. The car thieving wasn't any more or less difficult with Shaundi with me, but it was way more fun having her hanging out the window, shooting at my pursuers. Also, when waves of enemies are attacking me, having her around adds a little something extra when she Super Stomps the whole lot of them up into the air or starts hucking cars at people.

One thing that was a little frustrating with driving cars though is that I can't hop into them as easily as I used to. Super Sprint makes life a bit difficult in this regard. I'll run at the car, press 'E' to hop in, but instead of jumping into the car, my sprinting hurls it three city blocks away from me. Whoops. This must be how mutants feel. Someone call Professor X. I need to rein this shit in.

Also, I miss the concept of owning all the things. Even though Notoriety isn't really that serious, I have no place to call my own. I can't run into a Friendly Fire and have my Notoriety slate wiped clean. Plus, I have all this money and nothing to spend it on. Boo-urns.

And since this section has turned into the mild bitching and moaning portion of my word spew, I'll say I also kind of miss the different factions. Variety is the spice of life and all that. Aliens are assholes, and it's all well and good to blow them to hell, but sometimes you just want to find a nice Decker or Morningstar to hit in the teeth.

Those things are all super minor though. My main gripe about the game is how side quests were handled. When you free each of your homies, they'll have you do a series of side quests. However, these really aren't side quests like I was expecting. They're mostly sending you out into the world to specific activities already littered around the city. I like hacking the stores and playing all the mini-games without any prodding, so most of the time, I already did the quest objective before they asked me to. This led to me missing potentially humorous dialogue, which is one of the reasons I love this franchise. Sadness. I would start a mission and go talk to a certain crew member, which is generally the first objective. They told me to go do something that I had already done, so I immediately talk to them again. They'd tell me I was awesome and did a good job, and on occasion they'd reference something they would have said earlier when I was out doing the mission, but since I already did the mission, never left the ship, and never heard the dialogue, I was just confused by the reference. Then that mission would be over, and I would be sad because I obviously missed something. In the future, don't tie mini-games into side quests. It's lazy and makes me sad. Quit making me sad.

If I would have not done any activities until someone told me to do them, I probably would have had a better experience. Then I could just clean up any leftover activities right before the finale. However, this negates the sandboxiness that they're trying to tout. Let mini-games be mini-games and think up other legit side quests.

I don't know if it was because I dicked around longer in Saints Row: The Third or this one actually had less to do, but the game seemed quite a bit shorter and my total playtime corroborates that story. I spent a little over 30 hours in Saints Row IV, while The Third held me for 47 hours.

The last couple paragraphs have gotten kind of bitch and moany. Let's bring it back home. Overall, Saints Row IV is incredibly enjoyable. I have spent the last couple weeks playing it at every opportunity. Hour lunch break, time for Saints Row. 20 minute break during the work day, time for Saints Row. I enjoyed the shit out of this game and will be excited for any future installments. However, taking into account all the bitching I just did, I think Saints Row: The Third is stronger overall. I'm tempted to go back and verify that these perceptions and comparisons are accurate and not just based on the warm and squishy feels in my heart, but I have like a hundred more games to get through... Ain't nobody got time for that.

10 Reasons MMOs Piss Me Off

Sometime when I wasn't looking, I started disliking MMOs. I don't know when it happened, and it came as a bit of a shock when I finally came to this realization. But now I've moved beyond that initial surprise and mild sadness and onto some state of rage about the genre as a whole. This was made clear in a recent conversation about the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online MMO, where my rage was prolific enough to take list form. Now, I want to preface this, saying that I haven't played every MMO that exists, and these are just my perceptions of the ones I have played, so if your favorite MMO defies my words, I hope you two are very happy together. So without further ado, 10 reasons MMOs piss me off:

1: Shitty Story
The main goal of an MMO is to have a huge world with stuff to do littered evenly among the various zones. Quests are merely a means to move you from one place to the other, not because you're needed over there or because it's particularly interesting in that neck of the woods. That place exists, and you haven't visited it yet, so here's some bullshit delivery quest to goad you into heading toward the next town. I guess lots of games might be subject to this when you start thinking about it, but other games generally have a main overarching story that connects the tent pole plot points. Side quests exist, but they are deemed just that...side quests. With an MMO, I feel like I'm just constantly hopping from side quest to side quest. This is largely because of my second gripe...

2: I Can't Win...Ever
It's hard to craft a compelling story that has no climax or ultimate goal. But MMOs can't have an ultimate goal because once you have completed it, you'll get that lovely feeling of accomplishment and feel like you can leave. That just won't do. MMOs, whether subscription based or microtransaction based, rely on the user coming back month after month (or at least forgetting about their active subscription month after month). I have a backlog of 153 games according to "How Long to Beat.com". I'm sorry MMOs. I don't have time for your just play forever bullshit.

3. I'm Not Accomplishing Anything
No, this one isn't about "wasting" time playing games making me less productive in the real world. I'm talking about in-game. Nothing I do creates lasting change in the game world. Everything in an MMO has to be designed to reset so that the next person that comes along can do what you just did. These assholes aren't in any better shape after I completed their quest. Whatever I did will reset within a few moments, and it will be like I had never been there. This brings me to my next two quibbles...

4. The World Is Full of Fucking Liars
All the quest-givers will whisper sweet nothings in your ear, tell you you're somehow special, it's a miracle you arrived when you did, you're the only hope to save them, etc. etc. Horseshit. If I do what you ask, you're going to say I saved the day, but some asshole's going to come up behind me and re-save you. You sit on a throne of lies!

5. Helpless Motherfuckers
Are none of these NPCs self-sufficient? How could every town I come across be full of lazy, helpless motherfuckers that need me to fix their rat problem, or gather some potatoes for their stew, or deliver their mail. Aren't I supposed to be a hero or some shit? The necessity of a boatload of quests in any one hub inevitably creates this glut of mundane quests. Quantity over quality is definitely at work here.

6. This Is Not How I Play RPGs
This is mostly a result of my earlier qualms, but I'm going to call it out specifically. I am soooo slow when clearing enemies from an area in any single-player RPGs. I send out my thief to look for traps, I pull one baddie at a time if possible, and check every single room thoroughly. This method is bizarrely something I enjoy, but it is impossible to play this way in an MMO due to how quickly things respawn. I like to take time to smell the roses...or carcasses, I guess in this situation. Gross. You're gross.

7. Worthless Ass Set Decorations
It saddens me a bit that all these little bits and bobs decorating a house/dungeon/general area are just there to be pretty and don't really function in any capacity. In a standard RPG, I check every chest, drawer, jar, and pile of debris for items. This search for loot leads me to canvasing every inch of a room before moving on. The fact that no storage containers contain anything unless it's a part of a quest results in me blowing through areas without really taking in the scenery. If it's not glowing, it's just background fluff that my brain can afford to ignore. You made me this way!

8. Constant Change
I am a creature of habit. Change scares me, and on some occasions, infuriates me. New content is all well and good, but when they start nerfing my shit, I get a little upset. Constant tinkering with the balance usually goes hand in hand with them resetting my abilities too. That always drives me crazy because I have to spend my first half hour back reading tooltips to respec. Change in the form of giving new players previously hard to attain things earlier is also a source of frustration. Yeah, I'm thinking about when WoW started allowing mounts at Level 20. Sonsofbitches... Also, as player numbers start to fade, there's generally changes to make a grab for a wider, yet possibly dumber, audience. They call it making it "more accessible"; I call it dumbing it down. I don't exactly like things being super easy, and a once enjoyable game can be ruined in this redesign for the masses. Being able to fix bugs post-launch and adding new content is fabulous, but sometimes I miss the days where patching wasn't a thing.

9. Judgey Assholes
This is probably the biggest problem I have with MMOs. I can get over a lot of these things, but this one leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I've had good experiences, at times, but the ratio leans more toward the negative side. Pick-up groups are usually death. From the merely annoying jerks going AFK when you're ready to go, to the unforgivable asshole in the group that insists on aggroing every fucking beastie in creation, wiping your group over and over. Then there's the random bigotry and bile you encounter in chats or the random stranger that feels the need to examine your gear and chastise you for not having the optimum gear that's available for my exact level and class. These online games allow us to connect with one another like never before, but sometimes...I just don't wanna.

10. Déjà vu
The details may differ, but all MMOs feel very much the same to me. They may be in a different setting and have different races and classes, but the core gameplay is very much the same. Big world, lots of little quest hubs, level up, talent tree, kill 10 of this, collect 20 of that... I'm just bored of them. It costs so much money to create one of these behemoths, and you're just fighting over the same customer base of people that like MMOs. It hardly seems worth it.

Even though I bitch and moan about these things, when a new MMO comes out, I'll usually give it a go. I'm not sure whether that makes me an idiot or an optimist. Maybe that's a fine line...

BIT.TRIP RUNNER

RELIEF! The long, infuriating, eye tiring, carpal tunnel inducing BIT.TRIP RUNNER binge I've been on for the past two days has finally come to a close. I beat that motherfucker. High fives all around!

If you're not familiar with BIT.TRIP RUNNER, it's basically a platformer, but it's a platformer in which you are constantly charging heedlessly toward oncoming death. There's no stopping. It's all about reaction time, jumping, sliding, kicking, and blocking your way through a boxy pixel world full of obstacles. Well...it's about reaction time and learning from mistakes...lots of mistakes. Each level requires you to perform the appropriate action at the appropriate time or you'll bump into an obstacle and be sent back to the beginning of the level. There's no health meter. You touch anything you're not supposed to touch, and you start over.

This repetitiveness results in the user becoming very familiar with each level they're struggling with. I knew exactly which objects were coming up. I knew I had to jump, slide, jump here and slide, jump, block there. Each level you'd be faced with an entirely new configuration of obstacles, and many times, at first glance, they seemed impossible and you'd die immediately, but after failing a few dozen times, you'd be getting through those "impossible" bits unconsciously. Then you'd get to some unfamiliar territory, and start wiping again, slowly adding to your mental map of what you need to do. Repeat this learning process until you cross the level's finish line. Then you can start failing anew in the next level.

Some of the levels are surprisingly easy, and I would be waiting the entire level for the other shoe to drop. In these instances, I'd cross the finish line without issue and be perplexed, feeling a trick was about to be played on me. Other levels are ridiculously long and treacherous and make me want to punch babies and scream at the computer. Sometimes I did. The screaming part...not the baby punching part. Observe Exhibit A...



With this game being so much about timing, it got harder and harder the later it got because I was getting tired. My reaction time slowed, my eyes started getting bleary, and my left hand looked a bit like a claw when I removed it from the keyboard. I'm pretty sure I stopped blinking at times to keep an eye on what was coming up. Blinking...that's when they get ya.

Last night, I went to bed at 2AM, after playing for multiple hours. The second to last level kept tripping me up, but the stubbornness in me wouldn't let me quit even though my logical brain knew my level of accuracy was declining the later I played. I went to bed defeated, and when I awoke this morning, the first thing I did was play this damn game. After a night of sleep, I beat the level that was haunting my dreams in a few tries. Lesson Learned: BIT.TRIP RUNNER is not an "I'm about to go to bed" game. I needed to know when to cut myself off.

Overall, BIT.TRIP RUNNER was quite fun, but it was certainly frustrating and made me yell many obscenities. That type of passionate yelling is usually reserved for football season. Sorry neighbors.

CivCity: Rome

Ah..."CivCity: Rome". I picked you up last October during the Extra Life 24-hour Charity Gaming Marathon. For the first 18 hours of that marathon, I powered through "Batman: Arkham City" from start to finish. After beating that, I was tired, sick of using a controller, and just wanted a game that was kind of running itself while I could also watch TV for a change of pace. Multi-tasking, bitches. These type of building games, like real-time strategy games, have a tendency to make me draw out missions way longer than they should. Build slow, watch em work...it's kind of calming.

Well...usually it's calming.

Apparently, back in October, when the last 6 hours of the marathon ended and I went into my sleep coma, I had left the game in the middle of a high stress campaign that required some skill that I had built up in those 6 hours of play but had since lost in the months that followed. The mission required me to send bushels of wheat to Rome whenever asked...which was frequently. Pushy emperor... If you missed the deadline, Caesar got pissed. I had forgotten everything I once knew in this game since I had successfully ignored its existence for 9+ months. Not knowing stuff made it difficult to plan a proper city. I needed wheat farms and mills and a trade dock and a large boatyard, a shit ton of wood... It was all very stressful, and as the months passed and each wheat deadline approached I watched my little workers scurry around, and I yelled at my screen, "HURRY YOU LOAFS!"

This was the opposite of calming. Because of my mad dash to mass produce wheat, I didn't organize my city very well, and it made it hard to upgrade my housing later because everything was thrown together...like Homer trying to put together a barbecue pit.

I couldn't for the life of me get their houses to upgrade to Large Insulas. The lazy bastards wouldn't go across the street to the bathhouse. More yelling of "IT'S RIGHT FUCKING THERE!" ensued. So many hours wasted trying to relearn the game and reorganize this shit show that I had created. (No more stopping playing a game halfway through. This I vow.) I finally completed this mission and had the chance to move on.

Moving forward, there were oodles of cities to choose from. Some peaceful missions, some military. Too many choices. Hate it. That's the same reason I hate Subway. Do I have to tell you every fucking thing? Can't I just point at the board and say gimme that one?

I have digressed.

This was one of the problems I have with this game. There is clearly a progression from easy to hard that is present in the missions presented, but cruelly they just give you all the options on the map and say "Just pick one, idiot." while I'm sure they quietly laugh amongst themselves at your expense. I looked up all the missions online, and I had apparently been a moron and picked one of the fairly difficult ones previously. If there's a logical progression of difficultly in the missions, make me do them in the right order. Save me from myself. The system they use is terrible because:

1. It makes it possible to play a mission that's way above your skill level, which makes you say bad things about yourself, and could result in rage quitting.
2. Having a shit ton of missions to choose from is kind of overwhelming. I thought this game might go on forever, but thankfully, the internet was helpful in debunking those thoughts.
3. When you complete a mission, that city isn't removed from the map. You can play it over and over. Why the hell would I want to do that? Your game is fun, but it ain't THAT fun.

After the growing pains of my first return mission, I got back on the right progression path and slowly eased into the rest of the game. It was back to being calming again. I built slow and managed my output of goods better. There's a bit of pride that happens when you only have to use one Granary, which fills up and empties out consistently, and everyone gets their rations. I found the exact right balance of food production to people. Awww yiss.

Each new mission, I got better at building up my city and upgrading the houses quicker. I mostly stuck to the Peaceful campaign, not because I'm averse to fighting or some such shit, but because the combat system in the game is really kind of terrible. You build structures to house and train your military, and then when people come a fightin', you take your soldiers out and run them toward the attacking horde. They clang clang clang a little bit, and then it's over. It's not fun. It's not hard. It just...is. Le sigh.

While we're on the complaint train, I just want to say that Civilization Rating is a bitch as a mission objective. I never quite figured out what made it go up, and it's infuriating because it slowly decays, decreasing your Rating over time. I thought building a Wonder (giant showy structures) would bump up my Civilization Rating tremendously. No dice. You gain as much with a Wonder as you do with adding a shrubbery. COME ON! Plus, because it takes a long time to build and they're ginormous, they play this ridiculously long video where it pans around the Wonder to show off the "beautiful" 3D structure. By the time they're done ogling the Wonder, what little Civ Rating I gained has already decayed away. Great...

This was the biggest hurdle in the final mission. I had gotten really good at upgrading housing so that I got to the Palaces stage without too much consternation. I just had to get loads more people and bump up my Civ Rating to 95. Getting more people was easy. Build more structures. Ones that don't create any new materials or products because it'd screw up my delicate warehouse inventory balance. More structures mean more jobs, and more jobs bring all the boys to the yard. Population huge. Check. Onto Civ Rating.

Like I said, I still haven't quite figured this out. It did seem that temples bumped it up 1 point for each temple. This led to much chaos. I just wanted to finish the game, and I was so close, so I just started throwing shit anywhere. More temples, more temples...okay, stop temples. Now, gardens. A shit ton of gardens! Now some purdy statues. AHHHHH! The Civ Rating is going down the longer I wait. Just throw stuff anywhere! Click, click, click, click...clickclickclick! God, this looks awful. My nice organized town looks terrible now. Fuck it, more trees!!

That did the trick, but I felt kind of dirty afterward. It was like a giant statue vomited baby statues all over town.

Despite the issues I mentioned, "CivCity: Rome" is still a good game. Once I started getting the hang of managing my town efficiently, the game became incredibly addictive. Who wouldn't like a game that makes you shout things like "Go take a bath!", "Go to church!", "Shut up! It's fine!", and "There's olive oil in that warehouse, ya fucks!" Once I started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, I ran heedlessly toward it. I played til 3 in the morning last night; I played during my lunch hour; I played during our 20 minute break at work. I have a nasty habit of not finishing these types of games because they require such a time investment, but I kicked this one's ass, and I'm proud to knock another game off my backlog list.

Tiny Tower

I have yet to talk about any mobile games in this blog, and I never really intended to as I don't really count them among my backlog. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that most mobile games have no win condition. They're designed to be a quick distraction you can use to pass the time while you're on a bus or possibly sitting on the terlet.

However, I feel compelled to describe my experience with "Tiny Tower". There's something about Nimblebit games that suck you in against your will. It happened with "Pocket Planes", it happened with "Tiny Tower". I remember telling people multiple times that it is absolutely no fun but for some reason I keep playing it.

First, let me describe what "Tiny Tower" actually is. It's a management game. You are in charge of a tower in which you will build floor upon floor infinitely toward the sky. That's basically it.

You have a lobby and an empty floor, to start, to put either a residential apartment area, food establishment, retail store, recreation location, service, or creative business. You move people, called Bitizens, into your residences, but they can't just spend all their time holed up at home. These motherfuckers have needs...like Froyo. Build it and they will come.

The Froyo won't function without workers though. That's fine. I have a whole floor of people loafing in the residence I have renamed Shithole Apts. Swish. Each Bitizen you assign to an establishment will unlock a new commodity that is sold there, with three being the maximum number of workers at any one location.

Choose a product to purchase and after waiting an inordinately long amount of time, it will be ready to stock. Lather, rinse, repeat and your shop will be fully stocked with all three available items. But what's this? Eileen Miller hates her job at the Frozen Yogurt stand, as evidenced by her frowny face. I would be a terrible human being to allow her to continue this unfulfilling digital existence. She just won't be happy unless she's working in the recreation industry. It is her dream to work at a bowling alley. Dream big, Eileen.

Well, I'm raking in the frozen yogurt money and can build another story to this tower. I'll build a random recreation business, so I can whisk Eileen away from her personal hell.

What? It's going to take 14 hours to build this?!

Wow...this game is really no fun at all, yet I keep checking to see if my inventory needs to be restocked. I reorder and restock the shelves as necessary as construction of my new floor trudges on. If I leave these bastards to their own devices, we sell out of product, and they all go home. Get back to work you loafs.

That seems to be the key to the addictive quality of these games. It requires constant management. It's not fun, but it requires you to check up on your Bitizens numerous times during the day lest your whole tower ecosystem grind to a halt. Everything takes time to build or restock, and this keeps you coming back. For the impatient out there, you can speed this up though, with TOWER BUX! You can gain these slowly by playing the game or you can buy them immediately with real moneys. It's genius really... Who wants to wait 15 hours to build a Hat Shop? I got shit to do. (Note: I have never spent money on microtransactions, and I don't intend to, but there are apparently people out there that are making this monetization system feasible or it wouldn't exist. Right? Right.)

Anyway, I waited the whole time, used TOWER BUX I accumulated in-game, or used the various VIPs that arrived in my lobby to speed up the process when I chose, without spending actual money and slowly built up a total of 38 floors. I even went home on vacation and kept playing it. All while I was there, I tried to explain to my Mom why this game was terrible and that I wasn't quite sure why I kept playing. The Brainy Gamer wrote an article which echoed my experience of forced unfun. (You can read that here. He's way more eloquent than I and curses much less, if you're into that sort of thing.)

"Tiny Tower" is a hamster wheel. When you get enough money, you can build more floors, which require more workers, which require more residential areas to house them, which requires more floors, and so on and so forth. I was trying to form some sort of exit strategy because I wasn't enjoying myself but couldn't quite tear myself away. The way I usually do away with a game is to beat it. How was I to get that feeling of accomplishment in this sort of game?

My only hope were the missions. There were only...75 of them. *gulp* These missions require you to collect a certain amount items for a particular event and only one could be active at a time. Example: The "A Day at the Beach" mission requires 900 Sandals from a Shoe Store, 13,500 Tournaments from a Volleyball Club, and 1,350 Jumbo Swirls from a Frozen Yogurt. I had all those establishments, so I accepted the mission and started collecting. After finishing it, I found two others that required businesses I already had plus a Pub, which I didn't have. Therefore, I set out to build a Pub.

Upon building the Pub and completing those two missions, I looked at the remaining missions and thought, "What the hell am I doing?" It was like King Théoden coming out of the fog of control created by Gríma Wormtongue.

It no longer held any interest for me. I've been "Tiny Tower" free for three days. "Tiny Tower" is not a game. It is a constant obligation in the guise of a game, and I'm glad to be rid of it.

Ben There, Dan That

"Ben There, Dan That" is a point and click adventure game from a couple of guys who clearly have a love for old school LucasArts point and click adventure games. There's little references to the classics throughout the game. Ben and Dan's apartment, for instances, has posters up from "Day of the Tentacle", "Sam & Max", and "Full Throttle". Looking at the Day of the Tentacle poster elicits a Bernard quote of "Ooh baby, what a man.", while looking at the Sam & Max poster, Ben will talk about the "cheesy retro ambience", a la Max. I particularly liked when you looked in the mouse hole in their apartment, the character mentions that he doesn't keep money in there because that would be ridiculous. (Sam & Max reference) A bunch of little things like that stuck out to me as enjoyable just because you know you've had a shared experience with the game's creators.

I enjoyed their humor for the most part. They may have crossed a couple lines from time to time, but it was all in good fun. I will say that I don't agree on their stance that American Football sucks or that museums are boring, but they may be right on about American beer being akin to horse piss... These dudes are British, if you hadn't noticed. I guess my point is here, fuck soccer. Go 'Murica. Haha!

Regarding the visuals of the game, they appear simply drawn in a scribbly, couple steps above stickman kind of style. I don't mean this as a criticism as it was definitely distinct. I believe they made this game using Adventure Game Studio, which was of interest to me. I've wanted to create an adventure game myself, and this was a fun, enjoyable experience that was fashioned using this tool, so I will probably look into it further to potentially use it for my own purposes. Most excellent.

With gameplay, it's mostly what you would expect from a point and click adventure game but slightly paired down. You can LOOK at things, USE things, and TALK to people. That's it. There was no PICK UP, GIVE, OPEN, etc. to complicate things. USE did the job just fine. The inventory system is kind of clunky though. The object you just picked up would remain out to use rather than simply being put away in the inventory. It made it seem like you had to put it away yourself, which wasn't the case. Also, when you had several items, you had to page through your inventory because only one small line of them could be displayed at a time. This got cumbersome when you were trying to figure out which items to try to combine with each other. There were also some extra clicks necessary when trying to unselect inventory items when your combining of objects didn't work. This is all rather nitpicky though. It could have been improved, but none of this detracted from the game.

The only real technical issue I had involved the dialogue text. Each character was assigned a different color for their dialogue, and in some instances, this text blended in with the background or was some shade that made it difficult to read. For the most part, it wasn't a huge problem, but there were several characters that were slightly troublesome to read. The text speed was also iffy. I would read faster than they expected at times and click the spacebar to continue. If you pressed the spacebar too close to when the next block of text was going to appear though, it would cycle past the new text, and you'd miss it completely. Once again...being fairly nitpicky here.

"Ben There, Dan That" was a quick game, only 2 or 3 hours, but it's certainly worth giving it a go if you're a fan of the genre.

Mirror's Edge

Another backlogged game bites the dust. This time it's Mirror's Edge. This one would have likely languished in my backlog for ages if not for E3. Apparently there's a Mirror's Edge 2 coming out, which means hurry up and finish the first one, so I can pretend I've been looking forward to the sequel all along. I pulled that sneaky shit with Portal/Portal 2. Swish.

Mirror's Edge is set in a futuristic society in which the big bad government controls everything, eavesdrops on all your communications in the name of safety, and wants to put a bullet in you and your buddies' heads because you're "runners". Runners are couriers. Their job is to deliver messages and whatnot, circumventing the oppressive government surveillance that exists. The gubment don't like this, hence the bullets. You evade the baddies by running from rooftop to rooftop, climbing on scafolding, or whatever ledges, pipes, etc. you can get your hands around. You basically parkour around the environments, evading all the shooty bad people while trying not to fall to your death. ...but you will...a lot. Like most games where your character can fall to their death, it's best to have a cool head. Don't freak out. Calm your tits. Remember, spazzing results in splat. Lots of trial and error is the end result, which I didn't really mind. It would load back up quick, and you'd have another go at it.

I've never really seen a game like this in which your main goal is to run the hell away and gunplay is kind of secondary. There are guns, and you can use them, but it's not really a shooter. It's all about the running, which is enjoyable and a nice change of pace. Running the hell away was always my favorite part of Assassin's Creed, so I was digging this pretty quick. Jumping, sliding, and wall running around felt intuitive, and you needed to use a variety of combos and skills to make your way through each chapter. They don't hold your hand and tell you absolutely everything you can do, which had its pros and cons.

For the pro side, I liked that there was a bit of a sense of exploration and learning that occurred by not telling me everything. For example, I didn't know that some glass could be broke out by punching/jump kicking it. I learned this while trying to flee, and the only way out was to jump from one level to the other while busting out the glass of that second level while I was in midair. It was a nice aha moment that happened organically when I was spazzing out while being shot at and took a leap of faith. The fact that it worked surprised me and gave me a tiny sense of triumph.

On the other side of the coin, some things pissed me off because they didn't bother to tell me about important gameplay mechanics until it was absolutely necessary. For example, they didn't bother telling me that I could use "F" to zoom in and aim while holding a sniper rifle. I had taken sniper rifles from enemies before, and it bizarrely made the reticle disappear when I had one in hand. You couldn't aim accurately without it, and they failed to tell me the handy zoom hotkey. They kept this bit of information from me until I had a section that required me to pick up a sniper rifle from the ground and use it to shoot at a baddie convoy. This was also the first time that I realized I could even pick up weapons off the ground. It was never explicitly mentioned, and the only time I had a weapon in hand previously was when I disarmed a guy. I'm thinking this was an elaborate conspiracy to keep me running and jumping and getting shot rather than blowing the baddies away with my boomstick. I just assumed, okay this isn't a shooty shooty bang bang game. I was okay with this, but it was partially a lie.

Moving on. I was happy the gameplay itself was entertaining because, quite frankly, I didn't know what the hell was going on with the story at times. It wasn't the strongest element of the game, but I was enjoying myself enough that I gave it a pass. It was generic, kinda rambley, and didn't really come to any kind of satisfying conclusion. Despite the shortcomings of story, Mirror's Edge was still highly enjoyable. There weren't that many bugs that I encountered, the movement was smooth, fluid, and there were plenty of action packed segments. It was a good game, and I'll likely pick up the second one after it comes out.

Thanks E3 for forcing this game to the top of my backlog pile. What else you got?

Cthulhu Saves the World

"Cthulhu Saves the World"is a bit of an homage to old school Final Fantasy-ish games. It's a 2D pixel-art style turn-based RPG. The story goes, Cthulhu awakens with aims to destroy all things, as he's Cthulhu and that's kind of his thing. Before he can get started on the destruction though, he is stripped of his powers, and the only way for him to reclaim them is to become a hero. Once he's a hero, he'll have his powers back and theeeeeen he can destroy the world.

He meets various characters along the way who will accompany him on his quest, who have various skills in magic and ass kickery. Your merry little band travels from town to town picking up quests to prove your hero status, fighting baddies along the way. The combat is not too easy but not too hard. There are certain boss battles that I had to try multiple times, so there was some sense of satisfaction in besting them.

I'm not going to lie, I got somewhat annoyed by the whole surprise battle thing. I much prefer Chrono Trigger style battles where you actually run into monsters that you see rather than just randomly being thrown into battle when walking throughout a dungeon. However, I did like that they implemented this system where you would only have to fight X number of battles for each location. If a dungeon has a max of 25 battles, once you have won 25 battles, no more random battles will occur in that dungeon, and you can explore it with impunity. The dungeons are kind of long, not that visually interesting, and therefore start dragging after a little while, so infinite battling would have driven me insane, me thinks.

Don't get me wrong, it's still quite enjoyable overall. The humorous writing was a big strong point of the game. I just wish there was more of it. I wish there were more NPCs to interact with, more cutscenes, more objects that can be interacted with, etc. One little extra nugget is a commentary option that populates question marks around the game world that you can click on to read developer notes on some behind the scenes things about that particular section of the game. They're interesting, but word of warning...if you've got the commentary on during your first playthrough, it often has some spoilers for what's coming up in that zone.

Overall, I enjoyed "Cthulhu Saves the World". I got it on Steam for like two dollars, and I got about 11 hours of entertainment out of it. Seems like a good deal to me.

The Tiny Bang Story

"The Tiny Bang Story" is an interesting little puzzle game. I enjoyed it, but it's not going to get a rave reaction from most. I'm not gonna lie, the reason I chose this as my next game was because I had so much to watch on my DVR, and I wanted a game that wasn't going to require my complete attention. Half attention on TV, half on the computer...it worked.

Each screen displays hand drawn backgrounds with puzzle pieces and various hidden objects throughout. The puzzle pieces depict the world, which has been blown apart (in convenient puzzle shapes). Assembling these puzzle pieces is how you reconstruct the world. You unlock new portions of the game world by solving mini-games/puzzles. These puzzles become available when you find a number of specific items to unlock each puzzle.

As I feel like my words may not have made any damn sense, look at this picture, and I'll attempt to make more of the sense.

The puzzle pieces are hidden in plain sight. See the green arrows. The top arrow shows one of these hidden bastards, and the bottom green arrow shows the count indicator. You'll need 22 more puzzle pieces according to this. Find all the puzzle pieces for a given level, and you get to put them in the world puzzle that looks like-a so.

To unlock the various mini-game puzzles, you need to find the number of objects for that particular puzzle, indicated to the right. In this example, looking at pink arrows in the first image, you see that you need 5 valves. There's one over there on whatever the hell that sphere is. It will unlock the valve puzzle seen below. Get it now?

Find the things, unlock the puzzles, solve the puzzles, advance to new rooms, repeat... After the end of the level, you'll be able to put together the puzzle pieces you've found. At the end of the fifth level, the puzzle of the world will be complete, and you win...I guess. I say I guess because it's not abundantly clear it's over. It turns out I'm a fan of credits. It pissed me off in Skyrim, and it pisses me off here. Just roll the credits. It gives me a sense of satisfaction. Humor me...

But instead of credits, you're in a new room where all the characters seen throughout the game are now gathered together. There's a wall of all the mini-games/puzzles you've completed, which can be replayed if you're into that sort of thing...or you can just call it a day.

I'm done. Onto the next game...

LIMBO

Well, I finished LIMBO. How can I describe LIMBO? It's a critically acclaimed platformer that I'd call enjoyable with a side of confusion. We'll start with the enjoyable...

I really like the sparse black and white art style they've gone with throughout the game. All the foreground elements were black silhouettes with multiple hazy background layers moving at different speeds to give a sense of depth. It's like that multiplane camera technique you see in old Popeye cartoons. It looks great.

Something you learn early on in this game is that death is around every turn, it's varied, and it's brutal. Pits with spikes, bear traps, a spider the size of Shelob, giant saws, machine guns, or...a mere three feet of water...all perilous. (Yeah, drowning is hella easy in this game.) The point is, there are lots of ways to die, and unlike a lot of games, when it happens, it had a tendency to make me recoil a bit. You'll be flung like a ragdoll, chopped into tiny pieces and violently strewn about, smashed, electrocuted, and probably impaled by a giant spider leg.

Part of this feeling of brutality comes from the excellent sound design in this game. I keep mentioning the spider because I think this thing was the cause of my first death, and it was memorable. The tremendous thud as its leg went through me and into the ground seemed to have a lot of force due to the sounds associated. Plus, the spider just walks away, my lifeless corpse still impaled on those pointy legs. What an asshole... The sound design is just very good. It's believable, and there's an economy of sound that causes anything out of the ordinary to make your ears perk up. You'll pause momentarily and perhaps proceed with a little more caution. In most games you won't notice the sound design at all unless it's so poor it calls attention to itself. It's nice when sound is used effectively to enrich the experience.

Regarding controls, you're limited to your arrow keys for directional movement and the control key for interacting with the world. (Pull a crate, flip a lever, etc.) It's not very complex, but it doesn't need to be. In a way, I felt like the limited amount of actions I could perform made the world all the more foreboding and scary. If something's attacking me, there is a relatively small number of things I can do. There are no weapons, so I can't fight it head on, which is unusual in the game realm. It seemed to make you feel a little more helpless in this dangerous world.

As you navigate through the world, the world evolves, bringing new challenges and perils. You start in a forested area and as you progress, the locations gradually becomes more industrialized. This evolution and variety of scenery made it very enjoyable to explore the world and as a result, nothing ever got too familiar. I wasn't sure where I was going or what I was looking for, but I was enjoying looking for it.

And that brings me to the perplexing bit... While I was playing, I didn't know what I was looking for, and after a time, there I sat, done with the game, and I still wasn't all that sure what I had been looking for. If you look at the tagline of the game, it reads, "Uncertain of his sister's fate, a boy enters LIMBO". Ah...I was looking for my sister. There was a person there at the end. A lady person... I suppose that was her...which means I win. Yay? I'm unsure how I was supposed to draw that conclusion by the content of the game alone, but I'll take that as a given since you bothered writing it and all.

There are a lot of theories about the meaning and symbolism present throughout the entire game and especially regarding the ending. A lot of them seem to be reaching a bit and others sound like total bullshit. I've never been one for symbolism and such though. *shrug* The developers keep the theorizing going by saying that it's up to the user's own interpretation. You smug bastards... I know you had a certain intent when you made the game. Nothing you did was on accident.

I won't go into the various theories because there are A LOT of them. Besides, LIMBO is definitely worth a play and going into it with preconceived notions about the meaning is going to alter your own interpretation, which will give the devs sad feels.

So yes, it was an enjoyable game, and they made me ponder on symbolism, which I hate. That's quite a success. I'm still pondering it, in fact, so my hat goes off to them. Well done, devs. Well done.

King's Quest 1

I have always been a fan of the King's Quest franchise, but I never played the one that started it all. There's a perfectly good reason for that. It was released in 1984, and I wasn't...you know...born.

This is one of the earliest graphical adventure games, and the story is pretty simple. There's a castle with a king in it. That king is perfectly cool with people just waltzing into his castle, apparently. When you talk to him, he's like, "Bro, there's a mirror, sceptre, and shield that I want you to find. I don't know you, but if you find this stuff, I'm p. sure you'll make a good king." Paraphrasing but trust me, it wasn't much deeper than that.

The story's simple, yes, but you have to walk before you run. This game is the grandpappy of all the other graphical adventure games that were to come, and I appreciate it in all it's 16-color pixelated glory. It's interesting going back to early titles like this and seeing the evolution of these games. There are certain things that surprised me during the course of the game. For one, I was surprised by the number of items you can pick up that do absolutely nothing. Red herrings out the wazoo. I'm more used to the concept of if you can pick it up, you're gonna need it at some point. I was also surprised that multiple solutions were possible for some of the "puzzles". This seems like a more advanced concept.

I must confess, I know there were multiple solutions because I cheated a couple times. Give me a break. I know adventure games. Sometimes the solutions are ridiculous, especially in these old ones. I was only going to spin my wheels for so long.

You want an example? K, fine. There is a giant. I have a sling and pebbles that I picked up along the way. Logic would dictate that I fling a pebble in the giant's face to end him. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out the correct word combination to actually do that. Turns out, the solution is to run around a tree for a couple minutes, avoiding the giant while he's chasing you, and the dude will fall asleep eventually. Uh...what? Perhaps the dude has narcolepsy. I don't know his life. But who in their right mind would think playing Ring Around the Rosie with a giant for 2 minutes would accomplish anything? I never would have gotten that. I regret nothing!

Long story short...I defeated a dragon with a quart of water, made some leprechaun's dance a jig, and may have inadvertently caused the king to drop dead by merely showing him the items he asked me to find. All in all, it was a very eventful day in Daventry.

I intend to play through the remaining King's Quest games in the coming months. I remember playing through the 7th one as a kid and watching my brother play those earlier in the series. He used to call me Lolotte to make me mad when I was around three or four... Yep, King's Quest has been a part of my life for a while, and I think I'll enjoy revisiting them. After all, Telltale Games is supposed to be rebooting the franchise in the near future. Ohboyohboyohboy!

Puzzle Agent

I feel super efficient right now. In the past week, I have beaten "Resonance", "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1", and moments ago, I beat "Puzzle Agent" from Telltale Games.

"Puzzle Agent" was interesting. I enjoyed it overall, but the ending is very sudden and open ended. There is a second game in this series, however, so I'm guessing it picks up where this one left off. Most of the game was enjoyable. The puzzles for the most part were fun. I liked the fact that I had to whip out pen and paper at times to figure out some of them. There were 3 or 4 of them that pissed me off though. There were either too many instructions or not enough instructions, that I felt no matter how long I looked at it, I wouldn't get it because the puzzle seemed flawed in my mind. Of course, it's quite possible that I just wasn't comprehending what I was supposed to be doing. I am very tired after all... In these instances, the Hints didn't seem to help much. The hints either told me stuff that I already had gathered or it essentially just threw up its hands and was like, here's the solution, dipshit. Begone.

It's nearly 2AM, so I'm not going to go on and on here. Puzzle Agent was fun enough that I'll bother with the sequel. That's all I could hope for for a game I bought on sale for 2 dollars. Well done.

Now sleep.

On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1

Next up, I decided to take a crack at "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1", developed by Hothead Games and based on the world of Penny Arcade. I didn't really know what to expect from this game because I was mostly interested in what I saw about Episode 3, which is made by an entirely different developer in an entirely different style. BUT...I have the inability to start a series somewhere in the middle, so here we are.

It's kind of a bizarre game. The main gameplay is 3D, but the dialogue/in between bits are 2D, more in line with the style of the comic. The guiding force in the game is that there's a giant robot running around breaking shit, including your house, and you're chasing after it...because you're pissed at it, I guess. It's not the strongest of objectives, but whatever. I'll go with it.

You run around somewhat simplistic and linear environments where you run into robots, mimes, hobos, etc, and you fight them via an Active Time Battle system similar to what you've seen in Final Fantasy games. The battles seem rather repetitive, and I got bored of them quickly. I think one of the problems with the battle system is that when you unlock these new attacks, the icons are tiny and not very distinct. I can't remember what does what, so I'm just clicking blindly, knowing whatever that attack is, it will do something better than the standard attack. How's that for strategy!

There's no real compelling objective leading you from one place to the other. I'm following a robot. Okay. And on my way, I run into people that want me to kill some mutant trash, find some meat, and stuff like that. These things just seem disconnected from the primary task, which I'm not all that into anyhow. The "cases" just seem like uninspired MMO quests. Gather 10 of this. Kill 15 of that. It makes me sad how disinterested I am.

Putting aside the complaints I have about combat, I do enjoy the 2D cinematics and the humorous dialogue between characters. These are in the style of the Penny Arcade comic, and the humor is probably what you came to this game for anyhow. The majority of the game though is sloughing through the kind of meh bits. This was a pretty short game. I finished it in just under six hours. I'm sad to say, I kept playing this game merely to check it off my list of things to play rather than for the sheer joy of it. I'll probably play the subsequent two games at some point, but I'm not real eager to at this point.