Tag: games

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Recommended

Some Thoughts On Games I’ve Recently Played

Arranged alphabetically by game.

Assassin’s Creed, despite being janky and repetitive, and reminescent of the grand tradition of Rare-style collect-a-thons (“Help, Altair! Collect 18 flags in three minutes and I’ll give you the item you need!”), remains strangely enjoyable. I can’t put my finger on why, but I did notice my enjoyment went up considerably when I stopped worrying about the flashing “SOMEONE IS WATCHING YOU” meter and just ran around like a noisy dickhead assassin.

Audiosurf came onto my radar as the HOT INDIE MUSIC GAME to play this year; it’s available on Steam for $10. It is quite a lot of fun, and I enjoy throwing random songs at it. That said, I’m not experiencing the lose-hours-at-a-time thing many others in the community are.

For some inexplicable reason, I played all the way through the story mode of Bomberman Land 2. In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t.

Burnout Paradise shows how to re-invent a game series properly, even if that involves pissing off a large portion of your fanbase while you hold out your hands and swear it’ll be all right.

It only took Namco Bandai a year and a half to get Culdcept Saga released in the US after putting it out to die in Japan. I fit the target demographic perfectly: the card game nerd who also likes board games. Consequently, Katie hates the game with every fiber of her soul.

Devil May Cry 4 seems to have held my interest for the same length of time as every other DMC game: five levels. Actually, this may be longer than the previous games. No idea when I will return to it.

When Rockstar put their games on Steam, I took the opportunity to buy the GTA Complete Pack. It is such a thrill to actually be able to accurately shoot thugs with a regular mouse and keyboard interface rather than struggling with shoulder buttons.

During a week off from work in January, I played Mass Effect start to finish. It’s rare to find a game where the plot keeps me playing through horrible gameplay, but here we are. After one run through as a virtuous Infiltrator, I started a second play-through so I could be a jerk to everyone in the galaxy. Even that wasn’t enough to keep me playing, sadly.

I am not one to buy a lot of sports games, but the demo for MLB 08: The Show reminds me of why I loved last year’s edition so much: it’s not so much the sport as the technical accomplishments of what can be done taking a real life game and putting it into a video game.

Along the same lines, I picked up a pre-owned copy of NHL 08 today solely based on good buzz for it. The gameplay itself is surprisingly fun; I just wish EA would figure out how to make a sports game with a halfway decent menu system for people that are new to their series.

My immediate thought upon playing No More Heroes is “Suda must be fucking insane”. I’d like to expand upon that: he must be insane to have come up with such a high art game concept, and he must have been equally insane to load it down with the worst overworld engine I’ve seen in any game in the last five years.

Patapon is easily the must have PSP game of the first half of this year.

Poker Smash for XBLA is an enjoyable twist on the Tetris Attack formula. Unfortunately, I am largely terrible at it.

Professor Layton found an odd place with me. On one hand, as a child who read things like What Is The Name Of This Book? and Puzzlegrams, it’s basically a living breathing puzzle book. On the hand, it’s a goddamn electronic puzzle book. Were I still 12, this would be my dream game – but seeing as I’m 27, it makes me wonder why I was ever entertained by matchstick puzzles.

I picked up Rez HD when it hit XBLA, but I didn’t get a chance to finish it until this past weekend. I always liked Rez, but it never clicked – and apparently, the reason was because I never got very far into the game. Area 5 made it click.

Rock Band remains the most compelling gaming reason to buy an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.

The greatest gaming travesty I can point my finger at right now is that Singstar PS3 is not yet out in the US. I say this not because the game is perhaps the best pure karaoke game ever made (it is), and not because the online functionality is incredibly easy to use (it is), but because the US SingStore isn’t up, and I can’t buy any extra tracks. And that, my friends, is a travesty.

If you don’t own Team Fortress 2, you are part of the problem.

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Debated Enjoyed

For The Love Of PixelJunk Racers

The first significant pack-in with a video game system was the Atari 2600’s Combat.

Combat is fairly ugly, and has simplistic gameplay. You are a tank (or biplane, or jet). Pressing Up on the joystick moves you forward; pressing Down moves you back; Left and Right turn. The Fire button lives up to its name and fires your cannon. The goal: shoot your opponent before they shoot you.

What made Combat interesting is that it wasn’t merely one game type – which it easily could have been, given the space constraints of the time. Instead, by making slight variations to the rules of the world, Atari crammed twenty-seven different game types in. A mode where bullets reflected off walls, or you had more than one vehicle, or you couldn’t see the walls.

Combat allowed deep variation through slight changes to the environment.

Nearly thirty years later, we arrive at yesterday’s release of PixelJunk Racers, a $6.99 downloadable game on the Playstation Network from PixelJunk.

In a generation full of gorgeous games, PixelJunk Racers is not the prettiest game in the world. IGN dismissed the graphics as “crisp, but unfortunately the backgrounds are horribly bland and static.”

PJR, like *Combat*, has simplistic controls. You are a car. L2 or R2 are the gas. Left and right on the directional pad change lanes. That’s literally it. Most people will pick it up in about thirty seconds.

PJR becomes interesting for the same reason Combat is: slight changes to the environment provide endless gameplay variations. The game features thirty-two game types that are all created through slight variations to the rules and physics. You’re fast, everyone else is slow – pass as many cars as you can. You’re slow, everyone else is faster – don’t get hit. You’re fast, but slowing down – run into someone else for another energy boost. And so on.

Plenty of games offer customization; it’s easy to give a gamer a bunch of sliders and controls and let the gamers figure them out. Combining these rules in interesting ways should be a challenge for the developers first, and the gamers second. Too many games cop-out and provide laundry lists of options. Developers should strive to provide many varied preset combinations of rules – and if you allow users to define their own, let those combinations be saved and, even better, shared between users.

(PJR, interesting, not only combines the rules of the world into different pre-defined game types, but then combines the different gametypes into sets of three to create pre-defined party modes. Result: party games that stay fresher longer.)

Back to PJR: the game is addictive, challenging, and flat-out fun. Yes, ultimately the mechanics are simple. Yes, the game is made up of slot cars. But isn’t that what we’re all supposed to be into these days – simple, easy to pick-up games? Casual games? PJR finds the balance between the simplistic and the complicated, the shallow and the deep, the meh and the addictive. It can appeal to the hardcore gamer who loves to grind high scores as well as the casual gamer who just wants a quick five minute distraction.

With ten tracks, offline multiplayer for up to seven, online leaderboards, and a progressive tournament mode, you’re looking at a pretty robust game for a very small cost. I highly recommend PixelJunk Racers for anyone with a PS3.

If you’re interested in other deep-variation-through-slight-change games, I invite you to investigate the Halo series (specifically the multiplayer), Airburst Extreme (for variations on a theme), and MLB 07 The Show (the “My Sliders” feature).

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Recommended

Piyotama: Hands On

Sony, in what may be either a stroke of brilliance or a moment of blindness (or possibly both), allows Playstation 3 owners to create PSN accounts in any country they so desire. And by making these accounts, you can get into stores for other countries. Freebies like *Mainichi Issuo* are easily downloaded and marveled at from American shores.

Purchasing from foreign stores, though, requires a credit card in that country or a prepaid value card.

As luck would have it, I have a connection who was willing to buy me a few cards. After buying PS1 hits like *Silent Bomber* and the amazing *Bishi Bashi Special*, I was left with 800 yen – just enough to buy today’s new Japanese-only PSN release, *Piyotama*.

Of course, my XMB is now a mess with betas, PSN games, foreign PS1 games, and some random demos. But it’s worth it in the name of science. I love having weird, obscure shit on my console.

Anyhow, Piyotama.

Like most puzzle games, I can’t say Piyotama has much plot – and if it does, my inability to read Japanese isn’t helping my understanding of it. (The on-screen interface, thankfully, is in English.) But there seems to be some benevolent chicken named Mama, who sit on some sort of log and lays eggs that look like fruit – and your job is to get rid of them.

Gameplay wise, I can’t say I’ve really played another puzzle game exactly like it before. So you have a hexagon-ish grid with the round egg pieces, and the goal is to get 4 of the same color in a row. But rather than drop pieces (ala Columns) or rotate them (ala Hexic), you move them from side to side. Three pieces sit off the game field, which you can rotate the order of, and then you push it back in and pop the three on the opposite side off. I can only think to describe this movement as “threading”.

When you get four in a row (occasionally horizontally, mostly diagonally), the pieces highlight, but they don’t disappear immediately – you have a bit of time to keep threading back and forth and try and match more rows up, which leads to a bigger combo and thus more points. Eventually, all the matched pieces turn to eggs and hatch into fruit birds.

That’s right. Fruit birds. Adorable little buggers. The graphics in the game are certainly a delight – rich colors, well drawn backgrounds, and nice animation. The birds collect around the screen as you release them, and I’ve caught a few of them napping when I was having trouble making a chain.

There are also a couple of special pieces that allow you to clear all of one color at a time (which you can chain against multiple colors to clear the board), as well as a “heavy egg” that blocks you from moving that row. These up the challenge a bit. There’s also a slight degree of Sixaxis integration, allowing you to nudge the table to fill in gaps, as well as force matched eggs to hatch if you’re running out of time and space.

While the game is certainly easy to pick up and play, and it allows you to zone out and continue to do well (like so many other great puzzle games), Piyotama is missing that extra ounce of addiction that would make it crack-like, where I’d be begging to play just one more round.

Part of the problem: it’s a bit lacking in modes. You have “Limited”, which gives you a short time limit; “Endless”, with no time limit; and “2P Battle”, which is local play only multiplayer. And that’s it, really – unless you consider watching demo movies or checking the online rankings a mode.

It’s a shame the multiplayer is local only, because like many color-matching puzzle games, it has some promise. It’s neat to watch the birds fly back and forth as you match pieces.

At least the game does have Internet Ranking, I guess.

Ultimately, you’re left with a charming puzzle game with lots of personality, but lacking in modes. Ironically, this is the exact opposite of the recently released Go! Puzzle, which is mode-rich but without charm or an identity. I can only dream of the sort of offspring you could get by merging both games.

While I realize most people reading this aren’t going to have the ability to buy it, I can recommend it for people looking for a unique puzzler that doesn’t necessarily have a lot of replay value. Otherwise, you should probably look elsewhere.