It’s been quite a while since I have been able to make myself play another BioWare Game. I really liked the Baldur’s Gate games, but Neverwinter Nights left such an awful taste in my mouth that I have been avoiding their titles ever since. I only decided to give Jade Empire a try after playing Fallout 3 which had revived some of my faith in RPG style games.
Thankfully, Jade Empire steers clear of the swords and sorcery setting and simplifies a lot of the horrible, number-based statistics that Neverwinter used to describe every object in the game. Also, I had heard the combat had a more of a action-fighting game feel than a traditional RPG style combat system (point at an enemy and sit and watch your character battle). Overall, I think Jade Empire was a pretty good game, especially for the $5 price it goes for on Steam.
The combat system is not quite as fun as I hoped it would be. In a difficult fight it really just comes down to spazmatically mashing the attack button like a fool. The story and characters make up for most of the game play deficiencies. The voice acting is good but suffers from stilted playback by the game’s dialog engine. I found myself skipping the audio and reading the subtitles more often than not. Spoiler alert: Also, add this game to the ever-growing list of games that use a friend’s betrayal as the main plot twist!
Mirror’s Edge is another free-running inspired game like Assassin’s Creed. But unlike Assassin’s Creed, the acrobatic roof running is actually an integral part of the game mechanics and fun. With its puzzle-based level design, this game has much more in common with Portal than anything else. The puzzles are a bit more straightforward than the mind-bending logic tests of Portal, but they offer just about the right amount of challenge for my impatient gaming skills. Once you get a knack for the controls, running and leaping across the scenery is very satisfying. The combat can be a little frustrating, but in most cases you can just run away from your opponents. There is also enough of a shallow story here to provide some motivation. Although—spoiler alert—when are you game writers going to come up with a plot twist more original than a standard betrayal by an ally? Add Mirror’s Edge to the list that includes Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, No One Lives Forever, Anachronox, Bioshock…
Pictured above is one of the many exciting “sit and watch some guys talk” missions from the PC game Assassin’s Creed: Director’s Cut. Yup. Your goal on these quests is to find some guys, sit on a bench, and listen to them. No this isn’t a Wii Fit balance game, it’s Assassin’s Creed!
The main reason you would want to play Assassin’s Creed is to experience the free-running acrobatics—dashing across the rooftops of ancient Damascus—in the privacy of your own home. In case you are unfamiliar with free-running or its somewhat gayer French cousin, Parkour, they are an EXTREME!!!!! version of jumping off playground equipment, running around abandoned city scapes and basically behaving like a twat.
Actually, it’s not that bad of a game. The free-running is fun and there are plenty of missions that require you to use this skill to complete the quests. Unfortunately, as the game progresses, the focus of the game increasingly begins to lean towards swordplay and fighting. The combat mechanism works, but it never quite feels like you are actually controlling the action. It’s like a mildly sophisticated series of quicktime events in which you are just timing mouse clicks to the movements of your enemies. The missions very quickly become repetitive and tedious.
Despite this, the game managed to hold my attention with its story and setting. The graphics, details and open world levels are pretty amazing to explore. By the time the final battle begins, I was really wanting to see how the story was going to end. The climax doesn’t quite deliver as it very blatantly leaves the door open for a sequel. Not a great game, but well worth it if you can find it for under ten bucks like I did.
Fallout 1 and 2 are two of my favorite computer games. Those games had a great style to them, engaging post-apocalyptic story lines and a great turn-based combat system. Fallout 3 is a worthy 3-D successor to those games that falls short only in its game combat mechanics. At first glance Fallout 3 looks like a first person shooter. You can try to play it that as a standard shooter but you will soon find out that it’s an awful FPS. Fortunately, the game has a pseudo turn-based combat system in which you can pause the action and spend “action points” to attack specific parts of an enemy’s anatomy. This works out pretty well although the combat is nowhere near as deep as it was in the original 2-D games.
However, Fallout is much more than just killing things. The devastated Washington D.C. area is a great environment to explore. There are tons of little areas to discover. I finished the game with about a third of the map left to explore and I am already going back and seeing what I can find. The quests and character interactions are usually pretty entertaining and filled with a nice, black sense of humor. The role-playing aspects are there, but you don’t spend you time worrying much about your stats and leveling up. The game as a gentle difficulty curve and even if you get off track you feel like you are accomplishing something.
Braid got a lot of critical praise when it was released for Xbox. When it went on sale for the PC on Steam for $4.99, I immediately grabbed it. For once, this is a game that actually lives up to the hype that surrounds it.
Braid uses standard 2-D platforming conventions like jumping around on enemies and prize collection, but what sets the game apart is its unique time-manipulation mechanic. At first, the ability to reverse time if you make a mistake seems like a rip-off of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. In that game, reversing time only served as a “lives” or respawning system—a way to undo mistakes and try again. In Braid, this mechanic gets a major upgrade by adding items that always persist in time even when it’s being reversed. This simple addition makes time manipulation the means of solving puzzles rather than just an undo system. For example: if that time-persistent key is above a flaming pit that will kill you, you can still grab it and die, and then reverse time and the key will come back in time with you because it isn’t reversed back to its original position. Confusing? Trust me, you get used to it pretty quickly.
Just when you do get a handle on controlling time, the game mixes things up with each level. Various worlds have different time rules. In one world, your position on the screen determines where the play head on the time line is. Run right, time goes forward. Run left, it reverses. There are six levels, each of which has its own challenging rules.
If the game were just these mechanics it would still be a pretty great game. But, on top of all this, the game has an unconventional, painterly art style, wonderful music and a pretty interesting story to go with it. The story is presented solely as text at the beginning of each level. Admittedly, the writing feels like overly wordy English lit student writing—pretty much like every “community” interactive fiction game ever written—but it gets its point across in a way that at least feels artistic. This minor quibble aside, I think Braid ranks up there with Portal as one of the best games of the decade.
My overview of the video game classics continues with the LucasArts adventure game, Grim Fandango. In many ways Grim Fandango can be seen as the high point of point-and-click adventures. The genre, at least as a commercially viable entity, has since retreated into the more uncomfortably geeky corners of gaming world’the gaming world’s parent’s basement as it were. Rather than calling these adventure games, these keepers of the flame prefer the term interactive fiction. The hardest of the hardcore scoff at the notion of representational graphics cluttering up the ASCII purity of a command prompt. However, even these holdouts can’t deny the artistic vision and narrative brilliance of Grim Fandango.
If it wasn’t for the fact that the game requires a user to click and solve puzzles, Grim Fandango has the makings of a Pixar-type animated feature. We all know the tried and true Pixar formula. Take a group of non-human things: ants, toys, cars, fish, etc. Anthropomorphize them, and show us the secret workings of their society when the people aren’t around. In the case of Grim Fandango, we get to see the secret life of Mexican Day of the Dead statuettes.
Grim Fandango’s Land of the Dead a fully realized fictional world, with its own set of rules and customs. The art direction is a combination of Mexican folk art and forties noir cinema. A host of these cinematic clichés get turned inside-out, and are transformed to work within the game world. The end result is an engrossing story that is fresh and unmatched in the repertoire of video game storytelling.
There came a point during play when I stopped caring about the puzzles, and was tempted to download walk-throughs just to get on with the narrative. Eventually, I did have to cheat a few times, due more to my ineptitude rather than my impatience. In addition, I did have a few adventure game hair-pulling-out moments during the course of playing the game—Grim Fandango does have its fair share of glitches. Most notably for me, there’s a point in the game, very near the end, when, in order to pick up an object, the usual hit the enter key action does not work, you need to use the more specific pick-up item key (which I never used the whole game up until that point). There are also times when you are picking up objects just because you can, and you know there is a puzzle waiting for them somewhere. The metal detector comes to mind.
But, like I said, the story is enough to overshadow these shortcomings. I can think of a few great games that while I was playing, I felt like I was part of a story Half Life 2 comes to mind, but, in hindsight, I couldn’t begin to tell you what the narrative was. Let’s see, something about a gravity gun and helicopters and physics puzzles. In Half Life or just about any first-person shooter you, as a player, are far more immersed in the world than you are in an adventure game. I mean this in the sense that your mind is tricked into believing you are within that virtual space. But in Grim Fandango, I never felt that I actually was Manny Calivera. Rather, I acted as his guide. I don’t, in any way, see this as a bad thing. The designers took the time to develop (in the narrative sense), not only the main character who the player controls, but the dozens of side characters. You understand Manny’s motivations and so you begin to have a vested interest in his survival and eventual triumph regardless of whether or not you feel truly immersed in the environment.
Grim Fandango is a computer game fully worthy of its legendary status. LucasArts really needs to get back in the adventure game business. The Nintendo DS is ripe for this type of game experience, oh, and PC users would like it too!
Most of the platform-type games made for the PC are utter crap (remember Duke Nukem 1 or Biohazzard, yuck!). Abe’s Oddysee is an exception. The graphics and animations, although a bit chunky by today’s standards, are stunningly detailed, and the game makes great use of light and shadow, and the cut-scene animations are smoothly coordinated with actual game play scenes. The story and characters are imaginative and original. Although the basic story is your typical “Business is Evil” fare, it plays out is such a way that you actually care about what happens to Abe. There are always new twists on how you solve the game’s many puzzles: some visual, some skill-based, and others audio based.
Ever since my brother was suckered into buying a 3D0 console system, I have heard good things about the FIFA soccer games that have been released. I have never been much of a fan of sports games. The only exceptions I can think of are Intellivision Baseball, Larry Bird and Dr. J Go One on One for the Apple ][ (also by Electronic Arts) and Konami’s Double Dribble for the NES. FIFA is most similar to Double Dribble. The action is team-based and quick (well, quick for soccer). One button shoots, one passes, and one steals. In addition to these basic controls there are more advanced combinations that allow you to pull some fancy foot work. The graphics are great and the announcers make it a fun game to listen to as well. I have come to the conclusion that sports games are the closest thing to a traditional Pac-Man era video game being produced these days. Simple twitch-based game play without attempting to interject story. The player is concerned more with points and improving skill over beating the final monster, etc.
Nox is an action packed role playing game for the PC. Many would compare this to Diablo. Both feature hack and slash combat and are rendered in a top-down isometric view. Nox is a much closer cousin to console style RPGs like Phantasy Star or Zelda. The thing that sets Nox apart for me is its goofy sense of humor and the ability to make your character run around in a pair of briefs! Visually, the game is top notch, especially the use of shadows to obstruct areas not in the player’s line of sight. The action is very fast paced and fun, and the controls are easy to master. Über Geeks may be turned off by the simple non-D&D style of character development, but you have to realize that this is a different type of game. I have gone back and played through the game twice now and I’m still not bored of it.
Essentially a first-person shooter game mixed with lots of role-playing elements. For the most part the game is pretty fun. The graphics are great (but slow at times) and the game play is pretty good. One of the better things about the game is that it isn’t always to your advantage to just shoot everything in site. Stealth plays a big part in solving many of the game’s puzzles. Some strikes against the game are it’s convoluted story and the awful voice acting of the main character. It is a massive game (with massive save files) that can drag on here and there, but overall it’s a fun experience.
