BIT.TRIP BEAT

BIT.TRIP BEAT is like Pong on acid. Except instead of the sparse black background and one block you're knocking about, you have rainbow colored pixel imagery of brains and bushes and trains and whatever the fuck dancing around in the background, distracting you from the dozen blocks hurling toward your paddle at any given moment. The goal is to block all those blocks. You have to be Neo to accomplish such a thing, and I was far from it.

The first time I played this game, I thought it was fun but categorized it as something that I would probably never beat. I was fine with that, but in an attempt to get silly Steam trading cards, I started playing it again. After swallowing my pride and turning it down to Easy, I started having slightly more success. That is, until the third level, Growth. That level is evil, and the final boss is back to basics with a simple Pong game to 15 which made me feel incredibly bad about myself.

This section was surprisingly hard. If the bossman gets to 15 before you do, you have to start the level over. The trick is to hit the ball on the very edge of the paddle to get it going fast and at a sharp angle, but actively trying to do that led to more failure. The music on the boss level is also pulsing, kind of like a heart pumping, which makes everything more stressful, and also led to more failure.

So so many failures...



It wasn't until I played music over top the game that I relaxed enough to beat the damn thing. (Thanks Gwen Stefani's "Baby Don't Lie".) I wouldn't say I'm good at this game now, but I can confidently say that I don't altogether suck, and that's more than I could have hoped for with this ridiculous game.

Dragon Age Inquisition: PS3 Edition May Have Been a Mistake...

Today I was happy. I got Dragon Age: Inquisition in the mail, and I was ready to sink serious hours into a franchise that I love. Unfortunately, right when I was ready to play, the Playstation Network took a shit. I couldn't log in and import my Dragon Age Keep saved world state. I refused to start the game using the default game state, so I wait. After waiting for a couple hours for PSN to come back up, I finally get into the game. After spending about 15 minutes in the game after character creation, I think I may have made a mistake getting the PS3 version. I heard people complain about the graphics, but I dismissed them because I'm no graphics whore. However, there are visual problems that are distracting me from the game, and it sucks. Some points of suck:

• It takes forever to load. It takes so long to switch scenes to the point where I think it may have froze when it hasn't.
• All the people's clothes seem to have a low res texture on them. They all kind of look blurry.
• The draw distance is really close. I'll be walking and objects on the ground will pop into existence once I got close enough to them. It's distracting.
• It seems like there's no lighting effects on, so everything looks a little too bright and because things are not getting environmental light, it's just a certain brightness level always. This is especially noticeable with people's clothes, and it just calls attention to the crap texturing I mentioned earlier.
• The particle effects look really crummy.
• I saw clipping during the initial cut scene.

I didn't think it would look bad at all. Dragon Age: Origin looked a lot better. Skyrim and Uncharted both look amazing on PS3, so I didn't think it would make a difference. The PS3 seems like a strong enough workhorse to show awesomeness. I know it's capable. I think the problem is that those titles were developed for the PS3 and optimized for that system. They got all they could out of it. However, with Inquisition, I'm sure they worked to get all they could out of the next gen system, and the PS3 version had to have the settings turned down significantly just to make it work.

I'm bummed now.

I'll probably try to trade this in for the PS4 version, and it'll just sit around til I actually get a PS4. *sigh*

SteamWorld Dig

"SteamWorld Dig": It's...fine. That's as glowing as my review's going to get. You are Rusty, a steam-powered robot who shows up at a mining town after your uncle gave you the deed to the place.

As you go down into the mine, you can mine for various ores and sell them to upgrade your gear, including your pickaxe, lantern, drill, and other various mining implements you unlock as you go deeper into the depths.

This got very tedious to me because I was mining without a real purpose. Why do I even need this shit? Why should I keep making trips above ground to sell this junk? And the act of mining alone was not fun to me.

My goal then became to go as deep in the mine as possible. I'll just dig up ore on the way as it's convenient. And so I did, and I reached the bottom. Now what? In my haste, I apparently missed a door that was blocked by lasers and would trigger a new objective to, you know...unblock it.

It wasn't until my shitty robot existence was given this purpose that I didn't feel like the game was a chore. I mined more by choice to upgrade my gear and worked to turn off the lasers by destroying hidden generators. And once that was taken care of, I got to fight a mean mad boss man.

Because I hadn't leveled up much during my non-fun having, my health bar wasn't maxed out, and this fight was more difficult than it should have been. I'm glad I beat it and it can be checked off my backlog list, but SteamWorld Dig is not something I would necessarily recommend.

Gone Home

"Gone Home" was a really interesting game. It's what one might call a narrative exploration game. I'd never played one of those before, but for those who don't know what that is, it's a game where there are no enemies to fight, merely a space to explore, and a story to uncover.

You are a 21 year old girl, Katie, returning home from a year long trip to Europe. Your family has moved to a new house since you've been away, and when you arrive there for the first time, no one's home, and your sister has left a perplexing note on the door.

As you make your way through the house, you'll find notes and clues that you can piece together to figure out where the hell everybody has gone to. Like I mentioned, there are no enemies to battle in this game, there's no beasties going to jump out to scare you, but the game still manages to keep you on edge at all times. Making your way through this eerily empty house while a thunderstorm rages on outside, you fully expect something to be lurking in the shadows. Every dark room or area I entered, my first priority was to find a light to turn on. Every creak of the house kept me on high alert.

And it's surprising how compelling a game that's based on simply reading bits of paper can be. As you explore the house, you'll start getting a sense of who each character is and hypothesizing on what happened. Those hypothesis will probably be wrong, and you might get them wrong a couple times as this game is quite good on playing with your expectations.

"Gone Home" is a fairly short game, being only a couple hours long, but you'd do well not to rush through it. Entire character storylines can go over your head if you don't piece together all the data that's available. Take your time, explore everything thoroughly, and enjoy the interesting experience that these developers crafted.

Hammerwatch

I'm going to write this while my rage is still fresh.

Hammerwatch is a dungeon crawly hack and slash title that feels kind of old school NES. My opinion of it changed from "It's alright, I guess" to "Fuck you" after I beat the game. I actually wanted to quit playing numerous times and almost did after beating the first boss. At that point, I had played enough to learn what the game was about and realize that it didn't have a lot extra to offer me, but I continued because I had quitter guilt.

It's a rather simple game. You're in a dungeon. There are monsters and puzzles. Why you're there, who you're fighting, who the fuck you are...you won't find answers to these. Story driven this ain't. Kill the monsters and solve the puzzles to make your way through the dungeon. Got it? Got it. Now, I said "puzzles", but what I meant was buttons strewn about that you'll press simply by clearing each room of monsters and loot. Brain busting this also ain't.

The controls are simple. WASD moves you around, the up arrow performs your attack, and the left arrow performs your special ability. These differ depending on which class you choose: Paladin, Ranger, Wizard or Warlock.

I chose Ranger. The ranged main attack was good at picking off beasties from a distance. The general tactic was to kite a group of critters around a corner, and pew pew pew the lot of them as they so kindly line up single file to turn the corner. The main hinderance to progression was finding all the switches around the level. This was made difficult at the beginning because my screen was not cranked up on brightness. It made some of the monsters hard to see, it made switches hard to find, and I was unable to find many of the secret areas because of this. My Hammerwatch life got much better once I turned my brightness all the way up.

And thus I continued to play, though I probably shouldn't have. The entire game is very samey. You're just shooting a bunch of assholes that don't differ that greatly from one another. Murder all the dudes on 4 floors then kill a boss, murder more floors full of beasties and another boss, lather, rinse, repeat for 12 total floors until you get to the dragon.

It's after the dragon is slain that I go from apathetic to angry. The dragon is slain, huzzah! But the castle begins to crumble and I must run. I run to a passage that has opened, and there is no walkway but a series of columns that you must put planks on in order to cross. You need to have found 12 planks throughout the game or you're just fucked at this point. I found about 5 because I had no idea what those motherfuckers were for and I wasn't going to spend anymore time than I had to on each floor to find some bullshit that hadn't been useful to me the entire game. I use my 5 sad little planks and a score screen pops up saying you have slain the dragon but didn't escape the castle, here's your score. Uhh...that's it?

I look on Youtube for someone who finished the game with all the planks. They use all 12 and are then required to run through a few floors to escape as the camera shakes to say, "Hey, shit's crumbling. Nothing's really visually breaking but trust me, it's crumbling." When they reached the exit, that same score screen pops up but with no text except for their score. Great... Way to wrap that up nicely...

In summary and conclusion, suck 14,000 dicks, Hammerwatch. You were boring. I can't believe I wasted as much time as I did on you, and your ending was bad and you should feel bad.

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

Back in the day, I played Baldur's Gate II on Mac but never had an opportunity to play the first one because it was only on PC. When Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition came out, it seemed like a good opportunity to fill that hole in my gaming history.

Baldur's Gate II is pretty much my favorite game, and the first one was pretty much along the lines of what I expected. Isometric RPG style that I love, focus on story, and it kept my interest like whoa. When I started out, I did every side quest and searched every inch of every map. My Labor Day weekend consisted of playing this game and only playing this game. That next day at work, my forearms hurt. I temporarily carpal tunneled myself.

This madness kind of ended after a timed quest screwed me over. In my enjoyment of every side quest and every map, I had dicked around too long, and there was a timed quest I didn't realize was counting down. One of my NPC buddies, Minsc, wanted me to rescue a woman from gnolls. After completing a bajillion side quests beforehand, I showed up to the place to rescue Dynaheir, and Minsc flipped his shit, saying I took too long. He then attacks the party. The 20 in-game hours it took to travel to that location put me over the time limit. I had to load a saved game from way before to make it in time, which made me lose a ton of playtime.

Most of that lost progress was spent on fluff, extra maps. I kind of stuck to the main quest line after that. I was paranoid that any one of my companions could have been a ticking time bomb.

It took me about 40 hours to finish, but I could have spent far more if that whole Minsc thing hadn't put a damper on my funtimes. Baldur's Gate II is still better, but this one's certainly worth the play.

Papers, Please

"Papers, Please" is surprisingly intriguing. I've never seen anything like it, and when I try to explain to people what it's about, they all think it sounds ridiculous and the opposite fun. They'd be wrong. In "Papers, Please", you are an immigration officer for the country of Arstotzka. You have to look at peoples passports and various paperwork and verify if they are fraudulent or valid, letting them in or denying them entry into the country.

Your choices affect the lives of the people you interact with. How well you do your job and what you're willing to do to make an extra buck will affect your ability to provide for your family.

My first playthrough was a disaster. I was thorough in my job at the expense of speed. Each day, you only have so many hours in the day, and it's in your best interest to go fast to process as many people as possible. You get more money the more people you process, but if you go too fast, you're going to start making mistakes. Make too many mistakes, and they'll penalize you with fines, and you might let a dangerous person through unwittingly.

My slow ass didn't make enough money to pay for heat AND food, so my family was cold and hungry and eventually sick. I had to spend what little I made on medicine, but without food and warmth, assholes still died. Eventually, wife DEAD, son DEAD, uncle DEAD, mother in law DEAD. Since I couldn't take care of my family, they assumed I couldn't be trusted to perform my work duties, so I got fired. Whoops...

The second time, I realized how important it was to make as much money as possible in order to keep my family alive, so I whored myself out at any opportunity. Detain people to get a bonus? SURE. Advertise jobs to all engineers you meet? SURE. Accept mystery money you have no idea where it came from? SURE. This was an interesting departure from my normal game playing M-O. In all games, I try to make the "right" moral decision. I'm the good guy, but here, I chose to do things that weren't very moral in order to help my family. The one I felt the worst about involved a guy trying to bribe me to let him through. He placed some money and a nice watch on the counter. I had him detained and still took his shit. WHAT HAVE I BECOME?!

That particular strategy did not serve we well in the end. That mystery money got me thrown in jail, and who the hell knows what happened to my family.

This game required you to make tough decisions. Most times I needed all the money I could get. On one occasion a woman begged me not to let a certain person through that was waiting in line after her. She feared he was going to sell her into slavery. When he came to the window, all his papers checked out. Do you deny him entry and take the hit to your paycheck, risk getting fined, and lose that money you need to buy medicine for your dying son, risking his life...or do you let the guy through and endanger this frightened woman? These types of debacles are an interesting balancing act, and you'll have to make these decisions frequently.

To add moral dilemma on top of moral dilemma, this game makes you feel kind of icky about the whole process. On occasion, the potential immigrant will have a discrepancy where their gender on their ID doesn't seem to match. This requires a search, and when the nude photos that were taken pop up, it's pretty horrifying. Sometimes searches are also required if the person's weight doesn't match. Sometimes that reveals nothing. Dude probably just ate too many cheeseburgers. Other times that will reveal motherfuckers with grenades strapped to their thighs. I can't be sure and therefore I must check.

Prior to playing this game, I had never thought too much about either party involved in this kind of situation, but after playing, you can't help but look with some compassion to both sides. Things are not always black and white. There's a shit ton of grey.

Whether or not I "won" was even hanging out in this grey zone. My gauge for success was that I wasn't in jail, wasn't executed, my 5 family members that depended on me were still alive, and I get to keep working a horrible job that barely supports me. #thisshitisreallife