There’s a reason I backed the Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter effort pretty much instantaneously, and that reason is the Shadowrun game released on the SNES way back when. As a western adventure-cum-RPG it’s a bloody weird thing to find on a console at that point, but it’s very good nonetheless.
Monaco is a very purple game. I mean that both in the sense that it literally does contain large amounts of purple, and also that it’s precisely the sort of critical indie darling that induces reviewers to lose their minds and write acres and acres of godawful tortured prose about how this game had such a profound experience on them that it redefined their entire worldview and now they’ve become disciples of the church of Jonathan Blow. Or whatever. You can find examples of these frothy pieces at any one of several reputable gaming news sources, but what’s slightly unusual about Monaco is that for once they’re not overegging the larceny pudding. (Much, anyway.) It really is that good.
I’ve had two quite profound demonstrations this week of how a simple difficulty setting can drastically change your perception of a game. My first was with Fire Emblem; after recalling just how much time I spent raging against the GBA incarnations whenever I lost a character I decided to save myself a lot of bother by turning permadeath off, but this removal of all risk from the equation turned most of the campaign – and especially the end of it – into a braindead steamroller. Fire Emblem just isn’t meant to be played that way, and I gained a new appreciation for just how fundamental that feature is the overall feel and flow of the game. Max Payne 3 has given me the complete opposite experience, however. I dialled the difficulty up to Hard because that tends to be the only way I can get challenge out of these interactive shooting galleries these days, only to have this throw many of the game’s shortcomings into sharp relief. With a more accommodating difficulty setting I probably wouldn’t have noticed; giving me more latitude to make mistakes means the game has more latitude to make mistakes, and I would have breezed through the entire thing and ended up assessing the combat system as “functional” when in fact it’s actually one of the most poorly-designed shooters I’ve ever seen.
The perfect music to browse and buy 13 different variants of AK-47 by.
The best thing about MechWarrior Online is the startup routine your pilot goes through every time they enter a match. When it begins you’re treated to a first-person view of the cockpit interior of your unpowered mech, with no HUD or other visual accoutrements apart from a pair of hands pushing buttons, flipping switches and even test-waggling the control stick while a calm, computerised voice intones the following:
“Reactor: Online. Sensors: Online. Weapons: Online.”
“All systems nominal.”
While I’m not going to hate on any game that lets me swarm my enemies with dozens of Sardaukar, I have to say that by far the best thing about Emperor: Battle for Dune was its soundtrack.
The trailer for the Flashback remake was released yesterday. It is one of the most awful game trailers I’ve ever seen, not only because it looks so dreadfully boring with its plasticky 2.5D visuals, snap cuts of explosions and its inexplicable side-scrolling hoverbike section, but also because it couldn’t be less true to the spirit of the original game if it tried. Flashback is an admittedly flawed game but it’s one that I revere nevertheless, and so I went back and dug out this half-written piece from a couple of months ago to try to explain why.