Glen Stevens

I bought Braid in the Humble Indie Bundle 3 which seems like a long time ago now, but I never got around to playing it because I thought it was just a standard platformer.

Braid is anything but standard.

It is a platformer, and it’s making a bit of fun of Mario Bros. as you go to each castle a dinosaur comes out and says “The Princess is in another castle” but the gimmick is the time manipulation ability.

Because you can rewind time whenever you want you don’t have lives, if you die you just rewind until you are alive again.  The puzzles to solve are ingenious.  They add in new mechanics at a good pace, enough time to master the previous before adding in the next.  The key is that not everything reverses with time, sometimes the trick is moving something and then reversing time for everything but the thing you moved.

The part that really makes this game stand out is the story and how it’s presented.  As you read through the back story of protagonist Tim, you almost feel as if this game was designed as a kind of poem, allegory, or thank you for all the late nights spent making it.  The story seems full of metaphor and symbolism, unless I’m reading too much into it.

Even the way the game is presented, when you start there is no title screen, no menu, your character is standing there awaiting input from you.  Your first game level is level 2, you work your way through to the beginning eventually.  The title screen only comes up after you have beaten the game, and there was no credit scroll.

Definitely worth the 5 hours I spent playing it, it’s as much an example of “games as a story-telling medium” as Mass Effect.

I just finished two very quick indie games that were great for completely different reasons.

Vidiot Game is just batshit insane.  It plays like an old Atari style game (or rather several games) complete with bad music, bad translations, glitchy graphics, etc. but the game just from playstyle to playstyle without any consistent pattern or meaning.  It’s like a game designed by someone who was completely high the entire time.  It’s a crazy non sequitur trip that really is interesting to play for 10 minutes or so.

Vidiot Game is free.

Afterwards I played DLC Quest, which came in an Indie Gala bundle I believe.  This game has a lot more polish than it lets on, being styled like an old NES game.  It’s mostly a satirical commentary on the state of the games industry and it’s nearly total reliance on downloadable content packs in order to monetize a game.  When you start you can’t even move left until you buy the movement pack, you can’t pause the game until you buy the pause menu pack, there are no animations until you buy the animation pack, and there is no sound until you buy the sound pack.  The achievements (the game calls them awardments) are as frivolous as any game achievements anymore, including an awardment for buying all the DLC (including Horse Armor).  The game has a great sense of humour and to get the full effect you should read every signpost, conversation, and DLC write up.  It’s actually also a fun platformer. Great fun for about half an hour.

DLC Quest costs about $1 on Desura.

I’ve been playing the steam game Eufloria for a few months now, off and on.  If you play it for an hour you may find it interesting, and then put it down, but when you try it again it becomes satisfyingly addictive.

It’s a really clever concept, and while it’s not too unlike an RTS I still want to play it (I cannot say the same for most RTS games).

You control a group of seeds which orbit an asteroid, you can choose to play some of your seeds to create a tree that will create more seeds, or send your seeds off to another asteroid where they may encounter rival seeds which they will fight.  In later levels the other seeds become much more aggressive and it becomes a balancing act between creating trees which need defending, and attacking rivals to gain their asteroid so you can plant more trees and grow.  When you grow a massive army of 300+ seeds and can just ransack any other asteroid that isn’t defended too heavily, you start to feel really powerful, and the more asteroids you control, the faster you can create seeds for your army.  The tough part is staying alive long enough in the beginning of each round to get enough seeds to take over an asteroid while defending the one you start on.

The music is very soothing, and I find myself playing a game before I go to bed often, but I can also find myself playing 3 or 4 games on a Sunday and finding that the whole day has gone by.  Some levels take 15 to 30 minutes and some take much more than that.  I just finished the very last level of Dark Mode (there are two main modes, each having 25 levels) and it took my approximately 90 minutes, but I’ve seen some records down in the 30 minute range.  I also took over the last asteroid with well over 1000 seeds with lots in reserve, to take out 40 defending seeds was major overkill, and I probably could have gotten a better time if I wasn’t so pragmatic.

Steam says I played it for over 34 hours, so well worth it’s current price of $15, but I’m sure I got it for much less (such is my MO on Steam, probably under $5).  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I played Limbo for about 3 hours one night when I decided to try it out.  Eventually I got too tired to keep my eyes open and quit, and I didn’t play it for several weeks afterwards.  I finally ran it again today and it turns out I stopped about 10 minutes and 2 puzzles from the end, hehe.

At first I thought Limbo was just a style piece with no real gameplay, something you show to people to justify games as an art form or something.  The whole game is in a silhouette with muted grey backgrounds and plays as a 2.5D side-scrolling platformer.  The visuals are interesting, because it’s all in shadow you have to guess at some things, which is fine as an artistic choice.  Visuals aside the game is still dark in it’s mood.

You play as a boy who wakes up in the forest and is compelled to walk to the right (as Mario always used to be) and traverse certain obstacles that get in your way.  There are many opportunities to die in this game and many of them are quite grim.  Often the little boy will be skewered on a pike or cut in half by a giant circular saw each time with satisfyingly grotesque squishy sound effects.

The game does not penalize you for trying and dying, you almost always start just a stones throw away from where you died, so the game is mostly about figuring out how to get past the puzzle in front of you.  This includes many types of “gizmos” such as switches that change the direction of gravity, giant electro-magnets, and electrified rails, among many others.

I won’t say too much about it, because it’s an interesting experience and for only $10 or so on Steam it’s worth spending three hours beating it.  It’s actually remarkable how it conveys feelings without a single word.  Go play it.

After 4 months I finally got around to finishing Assassin’s Creed Revelations.  I had played it a lot when it came out, but then SWTOR released and then I went on vacation and it just kept getting overlooked, but as soon as I started to play it again I couldn’t put it down until I’d finished it (or had to sleep/work).  It’s very compelling, and usually does a good job of making you want to complete the next story mission. There are a few pauses in the story where it makes sense to run around and complete all the side missions and buy up all of Constantinople.

Not to spoil Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, but at the end of that game you are in a coma, so Revelations starts with you stuck in the Animus (apparently that can keep you alive somehow) and so the interface is a lot more glitchy, there are times when it runs through commands like a shell script, and you end up on some test island.  This is all part of the aesthetic and sets up the premise that you must unfragment the Animus’ memory in order to free yourself.  For that reason you never see all the people you became so familiar with in Desmond’s world in Assassin’s Creed 2 or Revelations until the end, and this cliff hanger ending is just as gripping as Revelations.

Revelations is essentially the same gameplay as Brotherhood, with a few minor additions.  This is fine because the gameplay is pretty solid, so it’s mostly about adding in features like the new bomb crafting mechanic and the hook blade.  They have also fleshed out the Assassin resource management mini-game from Brotherhood by allowing you to send recruited assassins to stay in different Mediterranean cities and run missions.  This minor change (which I didn’t understand for a few hours after getting into it) meant that I could recruit around 60+ assassins and have most or all of them running missions all the time.  Only once did I miscalculate my odds and send 3 people on a mission with only 85% success rate and they all died.

One major addition they added in this game was the assassin tower defence mini-game, where the templars are attacking one of your assassin hideouts and you must position leaders, crossbowman, rifleman, barricades, etc. in order to stop their advance so they don’t take over the tower.  Unfortunately I was not very good at this mini-game and found it very frustrating.  Luckily you can upgrade your assassins so that they no longer get attacked, and if you fail at defending your tower you only have to seek out the templar captain, kill him and light the signal fire to reclaim the tower.  Being a completionist, to a degree, I wanted to get a bonus for defending my tower three times, I was only able to do it twice after trying at least 10 times, so I gave up.  Turns out that if you upgrade all your assassins (which would remove the ability to defend, since they are no longer attacked) you get the bonus as if you had done it.  I wish I’d known that up front, I would have only done the tower defence the one time that it is part of the story.

The other major addition is in the Desmond sequences which unlock if you collect enough Animus fragments scattered around the world.  It created a completely different mode which is a first person puzzle mini-game which I really enjoyed, you can create blocks that hover in mid air and you can walk on them but there are certain traps in the world that destroy them or make them move.  I really liked these parts, unfortunately there are only 5 of them, but the puzzle solving aspect was pretty fun.

I am really enjoying the story of the Assassin’s Creed series and this one was a great end to the Ezio trilogy.  I can hardly wait for Assassin’s Creed 3 in the fall.  I loved that they included more Desmond back story, although some of it seemed like retcon because in Assassin’s Creed Desmond acts like he had no idea what assassins were and it is sort of explained that the Animus is responsible for transferring some of his fighting skill that you have at the end of the game.  It’s hinted that he is gaining the abilities of his ancestors, but in this game they explain that he ran away from the assassin order when he was in his late teens and lived as a bartender for 10 years, then when he was picked up by Abstergo he just pretended not to know anything, and all his training failed him.  Regardless it is a much better story this way so I can’t fault them for changing it a bit.

Revelations lets you play several sequences as Ezio reliving the life of Altair from the first Assassin’s Creed game, including playing Altair as an 80 year old man who doesn’t move very well, but can still hold his own in a fight.

The more I play other games, the more I feel I was unjustly harsh in my review of Uncharted 3.  It did have a genuinely compelling story and the fighting mechanic wasn’t the worst ever, and the repetitive “run this way, not that way” mechanic is not unique to the Uncharted series.  While I did notice a similar mechanic at work in some missions in Revelations for the most part you “can” continue on even after making a tactical mistake.  The main difference will be that you don’t get 100% synchronization in that memory block, and later you can choose to redo that section.  When I finished the game there were several parts that I didn’t have 100% on, and some of them I went back to complete, but it’s really strange to even start doing something like that when there is nothing at stake anymore.

I didn’t do most of the Peri Reis side missions until I’d beaten the game, and I wish they would have somewhat forced me to do them, since after doing them I learned a lot about the bomb system that could have come in handy during the actual game.  On the other hand I spent so much time in the Mediterranean assassin side missions that before I finished the game I had the entire region until my control and each city was maxed out on assassins and percent.  That actually made me care a little less about it, except when I went into the underground area and it would politely inform me that the templars were attacking a city but there was no way for me to communicate that they should fight back.  When you control all the Mediterranean cities and own everything in Constantinople money becomes no object and I bought every single book and weapon I could find even though I had no use for them.  I still finished the game with 400,000   akçe.

This is one of the few games that I actually tried the multi-player, since it claims to be so much different because instead of just running around shooting people in the face, your goal is to stealthily walk up to your target and stab them in the back while avoiding another player who is trying to do the same to you.  Unfortunately I tried playing it early on a Saturday morning and I think that might have limited my potential matches, and I was put into matches with level 49s while I was still only level one.  Needless to say I got stabbed a lot because I didn’t really understand the mechanic and everyone else had unlocked certain cheats.  I gave it 3 hours, and I’d like to try it again when I could possibly play with people my own rank, because there is apparently story elements about the Templars that are unlocked from playing multi-player.

If it’s unclear from what I’ve said up till this point, I really liked this game and can’t wait for the next one.  I think this series is worth playing for anyone that can get past the awkwardness of the first game.

I wasn’t looking forward to Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) MMO after I’d seen a few videos, but then I was invited into the beta weekend twice and I liked it enough that I pre-ordered through Origin.

You can’t really review an MMO since you would have to play all 8 classes through to the high levels and then play for a year or so before you even get an idea of the whole game.  Instead I’ll just give a few points about the game as a whole, and probably add in some extra posts about individual classes as I play them.

I was very gung-ho about SWTOR when I first got it, and I quickly made one each of the 8 classes.  I have been playing the 4 imperial classes roughly concurrently.  When I reach the end of a planet (planets are broken up by appropriate level) I switch to another character and play through the same planet.  By doing this I know my way around the planet on the second play through, and don’t  have to remind myself where everything is.

This does have some negative consequences.  First of all you grow to really dislike a planet by the 4th playthrough, and secondly you have to reacquaint yourself with how to play each class when you switch back to them or else you find yourself tanking a fight with your healer.

Having played WoW I had always played DPS characters, and you can never get into a group, so I decided in SWTOR I would play two tanks and two healers.  Luckily it doesn’t have the huge drawback that you normally find in MMOs like WoW.  The main drawback about playing a tank in WoW is that you can soak up a lot of damage but when the fight is done, you need to get your health back up and it’s a slow process, conversely when playing a healer you can’t take hardly any damage during a fight but afterward you can heal yourself right up.  Both classes have a lot of downtime in WoW, but in SWTOR they added companion characters which fight along side you.  My tanks have a healer companion and my healers have tank companions so it’s like a rudimentary group always at hand.  If you have a buddy to play with you would have a four person group at all times which means you can consume just about all of the content without strangers.  Without a buddy you can take on anything the game throws at you except the group missions, for which you will need to look for a group.  Luckily for me there isn’t a lot of those group missions and they can easily be skipped.

I play SWTOR pretty much like a single  player game, which would be ridiculous in most MMOs but since there is a complex story for each character it’s a lot more like playing a Star Wars version of Mass Effect to me than it is an MMO.  A lot of people complain that it’s not different enough from WoW, but the parts where it is different are very significant to me, so I don’t really care that the combat is the same and the skills are nearly identical, because I didn’t have a problem with them in WoW.

Now that I have been playing SWTOR for over 3 months I find that I desire to play it less and less, which for a game with the potential to steal your life away is probably a good thing.  What is keeping me paying the monthly subscription right now is the story aspect, and I know the stories are designed to continue well past max level but we’ll see if I still want to keep playing all four or even any of them after I get some closure on the current story arcs.

I picked up Fortix 2 in the Indie Gala bundle about a week ago and hadn’t gotten a chance to play any of the games in the bundle until today.  This game alone was worth the $10 I paid and I still have 10 other games to look at.

Essentially the game is the old arcade game Qix but with a theme of a knight laying siege to fortresses of an evil tyrant.  You start off on the outside line (the base line) and most things cannot hurt you while you are there, in order to take land you must venture out and fence off areas connected to the outside.  Once you have taken land it cannot be taken back and the creatures cannot pass the fences, which then become your new base line.

There are several different creatures to watch out for, each with their own specific attacks and they are added during the campaign is a smooth difficulty curve such that you never feel overwhelmed by multiple new creatures.  If you section off a large area which includes creatures they are destroyed and you get bonus.  In addition there are stars that spawn on the map and if you section off an area while a star is in it, you get a buff of some kind.  Each stage has different walls that you cannot go around which adds a lot of fun.

I always loved playing the game Qix and was surprised no one  had used that game play mechanic in anything other than porn arcade machines until now.  I beat the game in about 4 hours and then went back to get perfect on all the stages for another 3 hours.  If I didn’t have 80 other games to play I’d probably keep it around to play some more, but as it is I might just download it again in a year or so when I’ve hopefully made a larger dent in my game queue.

I came across a story on Rock, Paper, Shotgun today about this game and it seemed to have such an interesting idea that I gave it a play.

The Fourth Wall is a side-scrolling platformer with a puzzle element.  At any point, after the first few introductory screens, you can hold Ctrl and the screen will stop scrolling when the character moves.  In addition when the screen is held in place this way, moving off the right side of the screen will make you appear on the left, and vice-versa.  The same thing happens with the top and bottom of the screen which means if you are trapped in a room, you can move so that the wall is off screen, freeze the screen and move off the side to another area.

It’s a brilliant idea and is really fun to figure out this new way to move through the environment, I wish there was more of it.  Unfortunately it’s a bit short, probably because it was designed for an Indie Game Challenge, but hopefully it will be fleshed out more in the future, perhaps with a full release.

Currently the game is available free off the above linked website so I suggest trying it out.  It shouldn’t take you more than 45 minutes, I accidentally restarted twice and it took me less than that.

The Hitman series dates back to 2000 and yet I hadn’t played any of them, so when the first three games went on sale on Steam, I thought I’d give them a try.  A friend of mine mentioned that they were his favourite back when the movie came out so I figured it was worthy.

I have to temper my review with the fact that this game is 11 years old now and I can’t hold it to the same standards I have for games of the current generation.  In comparison to other games that came out around the same time, it offered an amazingly different experience with stealth via outfits that make you unnoticed in full view of others.  Actually this is still really rare considering most stealth games rely on you hiding in the shadows or the hay bails.

I really enjoyed this aspect of the game, and with so many other games that I didn’t get around to playing until they were several years old, I find myself thinking I’d enjoy them a lot more if it’s played them when they were released.  Damn college for taking all my free time back in the early 2000s.

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I seem to recall liking both Uncharted and Uncharted 2, but after about 45 minutes with Uncharted 3 I was thinking it couldn’t be true.

I think Uncharted 3 suffers a little (or a lot) from following Batman: Arkham City and really cannot hold up to it in many ways.  It’s not really a terrible game, it just has some issues that seem archaic after playing Batman.

Let me say that I did play it all the way through without getting so frustrated that I put it down.  When I played it, I played until I was tired enough to sleep.  Unlike other recent games (for another way of saying Batman), I passed up playing it for several days at a time.  I would play it for a few hours until I went to bed, then not play it for a few days and not really have a desire to play it until I basically forced myself into it at which point I would play until bedtime again.

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