Platform: PC

This is my main gaming platform. The games are inexpensive and offer the most variety of any system.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on PC (8/10)

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GTA: Chinatown Wars on the DS was my first Grand Theft Auto game and it remains one of the best games on that platform. When Vice City went on sale on Steam I decided I had to try out a proper 3-D GTA game on the PC.

Reviewers always seem to note the violence and mature themes as the selling point of this franchise, but really what makes it so great is that it fulfills a video gaming fantasy that I imagine most Atari aged gamers had as kids: being able to get off the race course and just drive wherever you wanted in a game. The closest I came to this as a kid was driving off the road in Intellivision’s Auto Racing looking for shortcuts. That didn’t really satisfy the way GTA does. Vice City lets you go just about anywhere your road rage fantasies want to take you. The game incentivizes crazy driving via the strategic placement of ramps throughout the city and awarding bonuses for extreme stunts. Add to this tons of eighties radio hits blasting in the background and you have enough for a fun game.

But the game isn’t just about driving. There is a simple story which evolves as you complete a series of missions. The plot is not great, but it was enough to keep me interested and, even if the story was dumb, there was plenty of variation in the types of challenges (from delivering pizzas to flying a seaplane) to make me want to complete everything. However, when the game makes you get away from driving and into combat it gets a bit wonky. The controls are pretty terrible on the PC and half the time I found myself failing because of bad hit box detection or some other frustrating glitch. I really, really wished you could just quicksave anywhere in the game.

Technical problems aside, this was a great game and I get what the hype has been about all these years. In fact, I just bought GTA IV on sale this morning and will be back to the mayhem soon!

Mass Effect on PC (9/10)

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Mass Effect is another BioWare RPG that I picked up on Steam for five bucks during their holiday sale (along with Jade Empire). This is a fantastic looking game. The Citadel (screen shot above) is an  absolutely spectactular environment in which to roam around. This is also one of the first RPGs I have played in which every line of dialogue is voiced—a big help for me and my poor reading skills and short attention span.

The story and the rich universe in which it takes place is top-notch (as far as video games go). The game does a good job in pointing the player in the right direction so I rarely felt like I was lost or didn’t know what to be doing. This means the game can be a bit linear at times, but, as a lazy gamer, I don’t mind that at all.

I don’t think I ever quite got the combat system. I never really felt like my tweaks to the characters really did anything better than just ignoring all the complexity and just shooting everything in sight. My only major complaint with Mass Effect is the horrible inventory management system in which you are forced to trash items you find if your inventory is full. This just doesn’t make any sense. Otherwise, a terrific game and I can’t wait until Mass Effect 2 goes on sale for five dollars.

Doom 3 on PC (8/10)

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No that isn’t a black square you are looking at above. It’s a  screenshot. A screenshot from Doom 3. Forget story and inventive game play, Doom 3 is all about mood lighting. And by “mood lighting” I mean darkness. Lots and lots of darkness… and shooting things.

The original Doom is a classic. I look at it as the pinnacle of the arcade-style shooter. When games were all about insane difficulty and scoring points. In some respects Doom 3 maintains much of the same feel of the original: lots of jump scares and monsters tucked away in places that make little sense in terms of real-world design. They exist only to jump out at you at the very moment you walk by or pick up that weapon upgrade across the room that is so tantalizingly lit. Your only goal is to shoot everything and then collect keys so you can get to the next area and shoot more things.

The graphics are pretty amazing and they seem to have aged quite well. It helps that everything is hidden in shadows. However, the maps all tend to look and play the same. The game does move quickly and offered me enough of a challenge to keep me plowing through to the end despite the lackluster story line. I do like the concept behind Doom quite a bit. The idea of a doorway to Hell occurs quite a few times in Lucio Fulci movies like The Beyond and The Gates of Hell. For that reason alone I was able to ignore the shortcomings of the story and just soak in the sinister atmosphere, and, in the end, that’s really what Doom 3 is all about.

Jade Empire on PC (7/10)

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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 on PC (9/10)

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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…

Assassin’s Creed on PC (6/10)

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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 3 on PC (9/10)

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Fallout 3 Self-Portrait

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 on PC (10/10)

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Braid

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.

Grim Fandango on PC (7/10)

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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!

Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee on PC (9/10)

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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.