Platform: PC

Alan Wake was developed by the same people who made one of my favorite games, Max Payne. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent to the awesomely addictive bullet-time shooting mechanics of Max Payne. Instead, the main gameplay hook is that you shine a light on the bad guys to wear them down before you can hurt them with your gun. It’s not a horrible system but it gets old really fast. Unlike Resident Evil, which mixes up gameplay on just about every level, in Alan Wake the thing you do in the tutorial to kill that first enemy if the same thing you do to defeat the foes in the last level.

What Alan Wake does have going for it is a lovely Twin Peaks vibe (all the way down to a clone of the Log Lady) and well thought out story. There are a bunch of collection achievements, but that sort of thing doesn’t really interest me as much as plowing through the main storyline.

I’ve had this game for quite a while now and have been waiting until I complete it before writing about it. Man, I suck at Jamestown. I don’t know if I will ever finish it, so I guess I will say a few things about it now. Despite my inability to finish the game, Jamestown is great. It’s a rare PC exclusive bullet-hell shooter with pixel perfect art and wonderful music. On top of all this is a goofy 17th century colonial America on Mars theme. There is a good risk/reward balance and, even though I keep dying, it always feels like I almost could get past that last enemy. I think it will even support my massive X-Arcade joystick controller. So good.

Dear Esther is a noble little experiment that pushes the notion of video games as art. The problem is, it isn’t much of a game. You walk around a beautifully rendered desolate island in first-person view. As you move along you are fed bits and pieces of a narrative involving a car accident and a woman named Esther. The story slowly comes together as you approach your goal but remains vague and feels unfinished even near at the very end. Again, this is not a game. Unlike the very similar (yet excellent) text adventure, Photopia (similar both thematically and game-aticly [yes, I made that up]), in Dear Esther there are no choices to be made and any exploration is limited to a couple of structures off to the side of the main path. You pretty much stick to that path and keep pushing forward. In Photopia the story becomes coherent, complete and satisfying at the end. Dear Esther – not so much.

Now all this isn’t to say that it isn’t a worthwhile hour or so of holding down the walk-forward key. The game is beautiful, and, even though at first I didn’t really get what was going on, the narration is very, how shall we say, “fancy” sounding and arty. Whenever someone tries to push the position that video games can be art they always seem to compare games with movies. I think this is a bad comparison. Video games have much, much more in common with site-specific and installation art. It isn’t so much about the scene-to-scene plot as it is about the immersion and exploration. In that context, Dear Esther is an admirable work of art that I’d recommend despite its non-gamey-ness.

There have not been many wild west shooters. I guess there was Outlaw for the 2600 and, of course, now there’s Red Dead Redemption (a game which will never come to the PC). But when Call of Juarez came out, it was about the only Western themed game around. The old west had all you needed for a decent FPS: guns, outlaws, sparsely populated towns and dysentery.

I liked Call of Juarez. It has a nice blend of shooting, platforming, stealth and story. There were times while I was sneaking around it felt very much like my favorite FPS, No One Lives Forever except without the awesome dialogue. The shooting mechanics are good, and it has a “bullet time” mechanic that you will completely over use. The story is simple but is told in a unique way by having you play as two separate characters. Nothing revolutionary here, just a solid first-person shooter with a unique setting and narrative style.

I have never really been a fan of superhero comics. What I know about Batman comes mostly from the Super Friends cartoon and the 60s television series. Although I feel they are waaaay overrated by millennial geeks, the recent movies are good enough and it’s obvious this game draws from the darker tone of these films. Knowing beforehand that I would find the storyline to be as stupid as every other superhero plot, I wasn’t sure what to expect with this game. Lo and behold, it’s a really good game, and I actually didn’t mind the idiotic plot so much either. The great voice work and graphics help too.

You move around the large open-world map using the acrobatics of Assassin’s Creed but, unlike that game, you actually feel like you are doing something towards a goal. The fighting is challenging and relies on mastering your timing and button combinations. Beating a wave of foes is really satisfying.

The main story line is short, but there are a ton of side missions and puzzle-based Riddler challenges. I am not OCD enough to complete all these tasks, but they are a nice diversion if you want to jump into the game for a quick challenge. Now, I am patiently awaiting an open-world Wonder Twins game.

Sword & Sworcery is a bit more art than video game. In fact, the game itself is more of a container for the synth-heavy soundtrack and pixel art animation. The art style is a cross between the blocky designs of early Sierra 3-D adventure games and the limited color palette and vistas of Another World. A lot of reviews describe the sound track as being “prog rock.” It’s not. It has much more in common with a mid-eighties Golan-Globus action movie score (Rob Walsh’s Revenge of the Ninja OST comes to mind) than Yes. Generally, a good thing, and one of the benefits to buying this game on Steam is that the digital soundtrack is included in the package. I guess the prog rock associations come from the way the game feels like the weird, fantastic stream of conscientiousness of the movie Heavy Metal (without the shiny boob lady). But back to my first point. No, this isn’t the greatest game playing experience. Clicking on trees in a specific order is not a brilliant game mechanic. However, like minimal interaction of Photopia, the game elements serve as a carrot to keep you exploring the environment and experiencing the unique narrative and music.

I liked the original Dead Space well enough. The sequel is just more of the same endless dark hallways, jump scares, limb shooting and occasional weightless environment. This makes for some mindless fun, but, like the first game I was just yearning for a little variety.

The story is okay. Once again there’s that marker thingy that kills everyone but for some reason humans keep trying to rebuild it. I guess your job is to destroy it, or find out why you were hospitalized or find out why you keep seeing a ghost or something like that. It doesn’t really matter. Just shoot the arms and grab the ammo. Oh, and then there’s a Fulci-esque eye gouging scene that makes even less narrative sense an actual Fulci plot. If it’s any consolation, your character gets to speak a few lines of dialogue and we get to see what he looks like under that glowing knight’s helmet.

I have just been plowing through the sequels of nineties FPS’s lately. This time it was back to Castle Wolfenstein for me… although, technically, I am not sure if that castle in the distance is actually the Castle Wolfenstein, you know the one I escaped from (with the plans) back in 1981.

This is the best looking game I have played in awhile. When you devote most of your gaming to the Wii and $5 steam games you forget just how awesome computer graphics are these days. They seemed to have captured every little detail of a war torn 1940’s German village. That is everything except the German accents. These are some of the cheesiest German accents you will hear outside of a corn stock production of The Sound of Music. It’s like they just did a search and replace on the dialogue file swapping “W” with “V.”

However, this game, like Wolfenstein 3-D before it, is all about the shooting. Wolfenstein does a good job with this. The guns feel powerful and do lots of satisfying limb damage when blast away at those damned Nazis. The twist with this game is that you gradually develop supernatural powers that allow you to shield yourself, change time and inflict extra damage. When you engage these powers the world turns bluish green and you are shifted into a sort of H.P. Lovecraft dimensional space complete with floaty monsters and howling wind sounds. This looks neat, but rarely do the powers have anything to do with puzzle solving the way the gravity gun did in Half-Life 2. They are just there to give your player an extra advantage during tougher gun fights. Playing at normal difficulty, I never really felt that overwhelmed by the enemies but, overall, I enjoyed the game play and the shallow story line.

This is essentially the same game as Doom 3 except with the lights turned on and fewer monster closets. What both these games do well is provide tons of satisfying gun-play but with only the barest of story lines to keep you motivated to continue. I think the plot of this one was to find the big button that will win this war, but first find these three lesser (but still challenging) buttons. There is some variety in the form of a few turret and driving missions, but for the most part this is nine hours of pure arcade style run-and-gun action.

The original Duke Nukem 3D was perhaps the best of the first wave of FPS games. I also really liked Rise of the Triad and, of course, Doom but Duke was filled with tasteless humor, pop-culture references and a richly interactive world. For some reason Duke Nukem Forever has only a 53 Meta Critic rating and I can’t for the life of me see why. Sure its was released about 8 years too late and it doesn’t really bring anything new to the genre, but everything that was great about the original game is still here. I felt like there was just about the right amount of variety in game play and I especially liked the levels where I was shrunken to action-figure size and made to navigate through giant jars of mayo and mustard. I guess the only big difference here (outside of the expected technological improvements) is that they have brought the tastelessness more to the forefront of the design—the game opens with you standing in front of a urinal controlling a stream of pee. I’m glad this game finally was released and I hope that the franchise will live on, but, fellas, please just try to release next one sometime this decade so that the references are somewhat more timely.