These Superchunk reviews are going to get a bit repetitive from here on out. Another good collection of poppy rock songs that are drifting farther and farther from punk rock. There are a few questionable choices here (“Nu Bruises”?) but a good record for the most part.
An Italian thriller (aka L’ultimo treno della notte) that leaves you feeling a bit icky not because of gore, but because it takes its time depicting horrible people generally being horrible. There are a few attempts to get all philosophical as the characters start conversations about the nature of democracy and violence but then it’s immediately back to the sleaze. The sappy main theme is sung by Demis Roussos of Aphrodite’s Child!
I’m on a bit of a tear here finishing off games. I guess after that last Winter Steam sale I had about six different games going concurrently. Anyways, I just finished the Rise of the Triad remake and it was pretty much what I expected: a technological upgrade of a mid-Nineties FPS shooter. The developers were pretty clear that outside of the better graphics, sound and controls there were not going to be any big game play changes.
This is a pure run-and-gun shooter. There is no plot, the voice acting is crap and the art direction is pretty incoherent. Like the original (seen below)…
…the joy comes from the powerful weapons and crazy power-ups. “God Mode” from the original remains the best power-up from any game, ever (grow to eight feet tall and become “moaning with power” as you launch cosmic death orbs!).
As fun as this reboot is, it is still a bit behind the times. There are glitches galore, the AI is mediocre at best and the boss battles just suck. But it’s short and cheap and there are lots of fun little touches like the mission briefings and insulting death taunts.
I had hoped that when they adapted the Web version of Surgeon Simulator into a full game they would have added a funny story line ála Trauma Center. Instead they have just expanded the original game by adding two more procedures and a couple more environments. It’s still much the same game: purposely horrible game controls, inappropriate tools for the job, painfully hilarious physics interactions and general surgical mayhem.
Most of the fun of the game comes from unintentionally butchering your patient. Tools are flying everywhere and your calculator watch will inevitably fall off into the patient’s chest. All the while you have to watch that blood level. Get a little too aggressive with your hacksaw and you will have a flatliner on your table. The challenge is mastering ridiculous the 1-button-per-finger hand controls. Back in the Atari 2600 days, mastering awkward controls was actually part of the game design too but, thankfully, that has faded from game design. Who would have thought such a bygone, horrible design choice could be revived in a way that is actually fun. Maybe it’s not worth full price, but Surgeon Simulator 2013 is worth trying out a few laughs.
Like a gazillion other people, Doublefine Adventure was the first Kickstarter that I bought into. It was scheduled to come out two years ago. During the delay I started playing many other more modern adventure games to get me in the groove again (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here). It’s finally out (at least the first half of the game is out), but how does it stack up against other adventures?
Well the game looks fantastic. The hand-painted art style and character design is reminiscent of other Doublefine games like Costume Quest and Psychonauts. Doublefine has a tendency to make games with a great art direction but lackluster game-play. Fortunately, the point-and-click adventure game mechanics are pretty well established and Broken Age doesn’t stray too far from the tried and true formula.
If I have any complaints, it would be that the game is too simple. In many cases, just clicking down every path of a dialogue tree will get you an item you need. Most of the actual puzzles are fairly logical and involve using an object how you would expect to use it. The challenge is just to collect all the needed objects. I guess being too easy is not a bad thing. It’s better than having to rely on a walkthrough. But I would have preferred a little more challenge and perhaps an in-game hint system like Telltale uses in their games.
In the end, the low difficulty can be forgiven since the story is so well done. The two parallel narratives work well against each other. Each is filled with unique characters, strange environments and a touch of sly humor. I don’t find the writing to be the laugh fest that many reviewers are claiming, but it’s cute and clever and never dull. I hope this does well beyond the just the Kickstarter backers. We need more adventure games.
Ok, so here we are a year-and-a-half later and Act II has finally been released. If I were to rate the game as a whole I would probably drop it to a 7 or 8. The second half of the game ups the difficulty of the puzzles by a notch, but loses much of what made the first part’s story so interesting.
There were a few horrible adventure game sins committed where the answer to a puzzle relied on information that the current character couldn’t possibly ever know. And, unfortunately, that faux pas was about as close to inter-connectivity we got between the two character’s worlds.
I didn’t dislike the second act, but much of the magic was lost. Oh well, this Kickstarter got me playing all sorts of other adventure games like the (far-superior) Blackwell series and Telltale games.
Four pretty good songs and 45 minute long recording from a community radio program in which the hosts deconstruct the lyrics to “Hyper Enough.” Worth one listen, but gets annoying after a while (especially if you suffered through an art school critique).
Infinite is a worthy successor to the original BioShock. It’s not so much a sequel as it is a re-theming of the game with a new story, new environment but much of the same game play. The cloud city of Columbia is simply beautiful and filled with visual and sonic detail. There’s something to look at around every corner.
Once the killing starts the game really begins to shine. You are still shooting with your left button and casting magic powers with your right but in much more open, vertical spaces. Battles flow nicely and are never too unfair (I finished the game on hard difficulty) and the new system of sky-rails adds another wild element to the action. My only gripe with the game mechanics is the return of the “vita-chamber” life restore system. I hate, hate, HATE this system. I would rather just have check points and if you die, you die. The revival system just doesn’t make death seem that consequential.
The main draw of the BioShock games is their stories. Infinite does a could job of building up the characters and the mystery up until about two-thirds the way through when a dimensional-travel plot device comes into play. Things just get confusing and you stop care about what happens since you know if a dimensional hole might open up and just fix everything. They try to tie it up with a bit of a twist ending, but it doesn’t really make sense like the twist in the original BioShock. There’s no thinking back to earlier parts of the game thinking, “Oh, yeah. That’s what that was all about.” That said, I immediately started a new game the moment I finished the first one.
I may have to reassess where Foolish resides in the Superchunk pantheon. This CD pretty much took the direction set upon in Foolish and refined it with richer arrangements and better production. As I listen to this now, I’ll have to admit that it is a better record than its predecessor. My only complaint here is that I don’t understand why they don’t end the record with the track, “Here’s Where the Strings Come In.” From here on out, every Superchunk record after this more or less sounds the same with at least one punky song, a (relatively) quiet ballad, and a smattering keyboard drizzled throughout the record.
Another game that came bundled with my new video card. I had never played a game in this series because I assumed it was some sort of military sim. It is actually a third-person stealth game, and a very good one at that. While shooting everyone you see is always an option, you are mostly out-gunned and very vulnerable to attacks. I would usually opt to stay in the shadows, moving from cover to cover and performing knockout take-downs. This sort of game-play style is very satisfying to me, like when I play the spy in Team Fortress 2.
There is a story here too. It’s a ridiculous plot involving random terrorist attacks across the globe until the U.S. pulls its forces out of somewhere-else-o-stan. It’s not the most creative plot, but it gives you enough to go on and does a good job of setting up the main villain as your adversary.
I was surprised by how much I liked this one and I may go back and try some of the other games in the series.
The second singles collection from Superchunk is a bit more of a hodgepodge than the last. There are a few great songs but conspicuously missing is “Basement Life.”
