Platform: PC

Fresh off of completing Broken Sword, I decided to continue my point-and-click adventure gaming with The Longest Journey. Like Nico from Broken Sword, April Ryan of TLJ has one of those early nineties reverse mullet hairdos, short in back and long in front, but that’s about where the similarities between these two games ends. TLJ is far more epic in scope with your standard video game “you must save the world from certain doom” plot. The game is massive, but it is broken up into smaller digestible chapters that could generally be completed in one sitting. Early on in the game I got stuck a few times and had to turn to the ‘net for hints, but once I got a feel for the type of puzzles to expect I was able to get through most of the puzzles on my own. The biggest help came when I realized that by hitting the ‘A’ and ‘S’ keys, I could cycle through my inventory without having to navigate through menus and icons. There were still a few times when trial and error were all I had to go on. In hindsight, I’ve really come to appreciate the subtle built in hinting system in Telltale Games’ titles like Sam & Max.

During game play, April and the other on-screen characters are low-polygon 3-D models set against pre-rendered backdrops. They must have only slightly upped the poly-count for the cut scene animation because April still looks and moves like a textured balloon animal. Grim Fandango predates this game by a year or two, but, because of its character stylization, looks leaps and bounds better.

Graphical shortcomings aside, The Longest Journey managed to engage me the whole time with its fantastical story telling and likable characters. I didn’t quite understand the need to insert F-bombs and other adult language into what should have been a safe PG-rated game. I thought it didn’t quite fit in with the dragons and whimsical tree people, but I guess that supposedly makes the game more serious and mature?

Broken Sword is a point and click adventure game from the ninties. You will spend most of the game playing as George, the bumbling American tourist who unwillingly gets entangled with murder mystery involving clowns, dirty handkerchiefs, The Knights Templar and a photo journalist named Nico. Nico has a mysterious back story that is gradually revealed in the opening sequences of the game. These early scenes in which you control Nico are the “Director’s Cut” sections of the game. I found it to be a little bit of a let down when the game switched to George as the main character. Nico was so much more interesting to play and learn about. With George, however, there is a lighthearted sense of humor that makes it worthwhile to listen through all the spoken dialogue.

As far as adventure games go, this one is very easy. The puzzles don’t require much thought, and in most cases you simply need to click through all your options and make sure you’ve hit every highlighted hotspot on the screen. But I was okay with the simplicity. There were a few puzzle-puzzles (ala Professor Layton) and the standard adventure game combine-this-with-that puzzles usually made logical sense. In the end Broken Sword is a well told story with a nice art style and lots of humorous characters.

Mass Effect 3 is the satisfying conclusion to the Mass Effect trilogy (ME1 & ME2). The Reapers have finally come to reap and it’s Shepard’s job to unite the galaxy against them. Along the way you meet up with old allies (the ones you didn’t kill last time around), fight with all sorts enemies and hide behind a lot of cover.

The game plays more or less the same as the last one with the linear levels and cover-based combat. The graphics are about the same but they no longer have a film grain effect on top of everything. The place where all the Mass Effect games excel is in the storytelling. A lot of gamers complained about the ending, but I thought it was good (I did play the “extended cut”… a benefit of waiting until after launch to buy a game). There’s not much more to say other than this is an excellent game and well worth the 90+ hours of play time it will take to complete the entire trilogy. It’s the best sci-fi I’ve seen since Firefly and Serenity.

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.