Platform: PC

Coming off of FarCry 3, I really wasn’t sure I wanted to commit myself to another massive open-world game, but San Andreas was there in my bin of unplayed games calling to me. The GTA formula, like war, never changes: huge open world, lots of driving, violent gangster themes and general mayhem. I really wish the stories were more compelling, but they tend to get lost in the huge scope of the game. Personally, I have no nostalgia or interest in Southern California gangsta culture and music. In light of the never-ending murder in Chicago, it’s a hard sub-culture to glamorize without feeling icky. I was able to set that aside and just enjoy exploring the map and all it’s diversity.

The game technology is a slight improvement over Vice City, but it still seems empty blocky by contemporary standards. The cars still drive all floaty and weird the same way they did in GTA IV. Planes played a much bigger role and were difficult to get the hang of initially. Mouse controls don’t really work for flying but the joypad sticks for everything else so I just kept it on my lap for when I was flying. I realize I don’t have much positive to say here, but, really, I liked the game. Now that I have finished I will probably go back in an explore and be a bit more crazy for a while before moving on.

Although I haven’t written about them here, I have played through much of the first series of Bit.Trip games on the Wii. Most of those games could be classified as rhythm games with an Atari 2600 aesthetic. Beat and Runner were the stand-outs of the original six games. The former is a frantic pong-a-like and the latter is a platformer distilled to its most basic mechanics.

Runner 2 is mostly the exact same mechanics as Runner but with a 2.5D graphical makeover. Getting through the entire game is not a huge challenge. The true test comes in trying to achieve perfection by collecting all the gold and amassing the most bonus points. As such, it has more in common with a Contra game than a Mario game. Memorization is key. This is not deep, narrative game design but, as a pure arcade challenge, it’s well worth the few bucks it costs on Steam.

Although I’d give them props for creating a game with a truly unique theme, this Wadjet Eye adventure falls a bit flat. The game is set during the 1920’s land boom of southern Florida and focuses on the player-character, Alfie Banks. Essentially it’s a character study, but, unfortunately, interactive storytelling doesn’t lend itself to well so such narratives. Games excel at mood and environment but creating riveting characters just doesn’t seem to fit the medium all that well. Without a strong narrative plot focus (i.e. save the princess or defeat the evil villain) it’s hard to justify the extra time spent clicking options and parsing dialog trees to get to the same point that a short paragraph of exposition would.

The best adventure games are ones in which the plot and mood develops as the player explores and interacts with the environment. In A Golden Wake there is no sense of discovery. You are told what you need to do and your options are limited. The author just wants to paint his portrait and the puzzles are just a customary nuisance put there to force you to click on stuff. “Puzzles” may be too strong a word. In 90% of the game you are just following a path, clicking on all the objects and waiting for the next section to open up.

But still, the theme and setting are novel and they were enough to keep me mindlessly clicking. I love, love, loved the 1920 dance scene that was featured in the trailer (and the above screenshot) for all its pixelrific glory. Unfortunately the game didn’t quite meet my expectations. Flapper DDR needs to be made. Left, right, left, left, charleston…

This was a freebie from GOG.com that I went into knowing nothing about it. The first thing anyone who plays the game will think when they begin is, “Wow, this is a complete Portal rip-off.” Then you get about halfway through an you’ll think, “Wow, this really is a complete Portal rip-off!” Now, Portal was a near-perfect game, so if you are going to rip a game off you might as well steal from the best, but they could have at least tried to change a few more of the story points. You start off as a test subject in a puzzle-filled lab armed only with a fancy future gun that shoots two colored beams. You slowly discover that things aren’t quite what they seem as the test facility falls into ruin and, eventually (and here’s where things get a little different), you battle Cthulhu and the old gods of H.P. Lovecraft. That last bit wasn’t a joke (oh, I should have said, “spoiler alert”) and it’s just as stupid as it sounds.

Now, the core mechanics of the game are unique. You are not creating teleportation holes. Instead your gun magnetizes various items in the rooms with either green or red polarity. Through this you manipulate the environment using the magnetic fields to push, pull and launch your way through puzzles. It lacks the kinetic energy of Portal but offers pretty tough challenges near the end of the game. However, I felt like it went on a bit too long and was bored by the puzzles and the story by the end.

One of my favorite games of the coin-op era was Atari’s 720. It had a simple, but unique control scheme that’s pretty much impossible to replicate through emulation. You would basically jump then spin a knob (dressed up like a joystick), and the more times you spun the dial, the more points you got. As abstract as it was, this felt like skateboarding.

OlliOlli is the only skateboarding game that I have played that comes close to matching the rhythm and feel of 720°. The controls seem complicated at first: flick and spin the left stick to jump and press A to land. But once you start to get the hang of it (you never really get the hang of the landings) there’s an incredible flow as you grind from one obstacle to the next. Landing is everything though. If you don’t time that tap of the A button just right you lose out on big points.

In the end the game is better compared with a bullet hell shooter. Timing and memorization are everything. Strategy and exploration have no place here. Still, trying to get everything perfect is addictive and the reward of hitting a huge combo just right is greatly satisfying.

I was a bit hesitant to play this game. I really didn’t like FarCry 2 all that much. It was repetitive, dull and not a worthy successor to the first game. Then, I decided to give the eighties sci-fi themed expansion FarCry 3: Blood Dragon a try. That game was great, so when 3 went on sale I grabbed it hoping for the best, and, oh man, I was immediately blown away.

The first ten minutes of the game are incredible. Mind you, this is your basic tutorial sequence where you learn to crouch, sprint and look around. You are quickly introduced to the main bad guy, the dire stakes are laid out as you watch your comrades get tortured and die, and boom, in an instant you are forced into an absolutely heart-pounding, gunplay-free escape.

From there on out it’s shooting everything that moves, lighting the local fauna (and wildlife) on fire, and blowing stuff up. Yet, despite the seemingly limited variety, this works extremely well. Every outpost battle is tense, every tower climb is harrowing and even the hunting sequences are a blast.

On top of all this, there’s a real story here with interesting characters, narrative story arcs and real tension. Even the side quests are an important part of the game, as they help you gain experience and unlock some of the best weapons in the game. I loved this game and will probably keep it around as I attempt to get all the collectibles and explore every nook of the island.

Uh oh, here we go again with another mediocre adventure game. Surprisingly, this one comes from Wadjet Eye Studios whose games have all been really good to me up until this one. On the surface Resonance has a lot going for it: well done pixelated graphics, a decent score and some clever twists on point-and-click interaction. However, the story and characters never grabbed be. Maybe it was the sub-par voice acting from a few of the leads or perhaps the controllable character overload. Controlling four characters seems like it would make for some interesting game play, but it is more of a hassle than it’s worth. Constantly having to round up everyone to go to a different area is not fun.

One of the key puzzle mechanics of the game is the ability to access memories and items within dialogue sequences. It’s basically a point-and-click version of the old text adventure trope of typing “ask character about xxx.” It worked about half the time. The other half I reverted back to the old “try everything on everything” brute force method of getting through the game. I felt like my motivations or objectives were never quite telegraphed in a fair manner. In fact, as I type this I still have a sour taste in my mouth from the final two puzzles which are just dialogue trees in which you need to pretty much need to guess blindly how the respondent is going to react or die.

Pass on this one and play Primordia or Blackwell instead.

I’ve had pretty good luck with the string of adventure games I’ve played lately. It was inevitable that sooner or later I’d come across a dud. Yesterday had promise. I was initially drawn to the slick graphics (well, slick for a point and click game). However, the game is bogged down with nonsensical puzzles and an uneven tone to the story. There’s a horrible tangent where your character needs to learn martial arts that almost made me give up on the game completely. Eventually the story comes back around but it never is that gripping.

Started out okay enough despite the idiotic button mashing mechanics. But, man, this game became pure tedium by the ending. If there was a story here, it was totally lost on me. Just a bunch of feathery haired leather-boys jumping around and killing Raggedy Anne dolls. Is this what console gaming is like? What a bore.

The Witcher is a flawed but ultimately satisfying role playing game that puts you in the role of monster killing mutant named Geralt. In some aspects the game is a bit more hardcore than other recent RPGs. You need to pay close attention to dialogue as clues are not spoon-fed to you and the almighty quest arrow is somewhat deceiving. The first half of the game feels more like an adventure game in which you are talking to NPCs and running back-and-forth across the map to advance. I eventually got the hang of the way quests worked and was able enjoy the game much more about one-third the way through.

While story and questing are complicated, fighting and building your character have been simplified. Combat involved a timing-based system of clicks and weapon swapping. You only have two real weapon choices and five magic spells. While others may scoff at this simple system, I rather enjoyed it. It’s not the mindless clicking of Diablo and not the thinky strategic multi-character battles of a Baldur’s Gate style game. Relaxed but engaging.

The big story arc is a basic one in which you are to recover a stolen goods, but, along the way, you get entangled in politics, romance and lending the occasional helping hand. The side quests eventually tie in nicely with the main story, although I never quite felt like the main baddies were that much of a menace. Oh, and as for the “romance” aspect, that consists of bedding anything with a pair of polygonal boobs in exchange for a racy trading card. Classy stuff.