Tag Archives: thoughts

Feb 29 2016
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gaming

Thoughts: Plague Inc: Evolved

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If you’ve been on the internet for a little while you might remember semi-ancient Flash game Pandemic, which was released onto the world wide web nearly a decade ago now. It was a game where you controlled a virus with the aim of infecting (and eventually killing) the entire world’s population through evolving a plethora of nasty symptoms and transmission abilities. Pandemic was a minor sensation at the time, consuming a couple of afternoons that I really should have spent working on my Ph.D and giving rise to the now-decomposing Madagascar/”SHUT. DOWN. EVERYTHING” memes. It was popular enough that I am not particularly surprised that someone has tried to make a proper game out of it, for that is what Plague Inc: Evolved is. I am surprised, however, that so little has changed between the Flash version and this paid-for product, because when you get right down it they are exactly the same goddamn game.

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Feb 22 2016
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gaming

Thoughts: The Witness

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Usually I divide my puzzlers into distinct categories. On the one hand you have your SpaceChems and your Infinifactories; these are games that present you with a set of tools and then leave you to figure out what you have to do in order to hit the target output. On another, you have the Talos Principle. If Infinifactory was a question of “What?”, then The Talos Principle is a question of “What else?” in that you have a set of items that have known uses, but solving each puzzle is usually a matter of making a mental leap and coming up with a new, outside-the-box way of combining those items to reach the goal.

Now, though, we have The Witness. It is the first puzzler I have played in a long, long time that didn’t fall into either of the above broad categories. Instead, The Witness is in one all of its own; a category aptly labelled “What the fuck?”

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Feb 09 2016
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gaming

Thoughts: XCOM 2

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About six months after my glowing review of the original XCOM reboot I wrote a followup piece that comprehensively laid into the game for flaws that had become apparent on subsequent playthroughs. The aliens’ completely passive presence on the geoscape. The introduction of new, tougher enemy types being linked to your completing plot missions that had no time factor involved, allowing you to game the system by researching endgame weapons and armour before tackling any of them. An inverse difficulty curve where the first three months of the game were by far the hardest as you desperately tried to keep your rookies alive with only basic weapons and equipment. A whole host of paper tiger systems (such as panic), where the various NPCs screamed at you to play the game in a certain way in an attempt to mask the fact that playing slowly and cautiously — and liberally vomiting explosives anywhere in direct contravention of Vahlen’s instructions — would result in flawless completion of 95% of missions. The Enemy Within expansion pack alleviated some of these flaws, but it couldn’t fix the worst of them as they were baked into the very structure of the game itself. Any trulycomprehensive cure would require a complete restructure of XCOM’s systems that only a sequel could provide.

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Feb 01 2016
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gaming

Thoughts: Assassin’s Creed Unity

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08/02 – I’m halfway through the XCOM 2 review and it’s shaping up to be a monster, so I’m postponing it to tomorrow so that I can a) finish it and b) get some screenshots that aren’t of the late game.

So I guess it’s admission time: I would not have had anywhere near as positive an opinion of Assassin’s Creed: Rogue as I did if I hadn’t immediately gone on to play Assassin’s Creed: Unity afterwards. Rogue is a great game, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t until I experienced the series debacle that is Unity that I realised I’d been taking a lot of the good stuff Rogue was doing completely for granted. It turns out there’s a hundred little things about Black Flag and Rogue — from the ease of the movement to the speed of the combat (even if it is a bit button-mashy) to the sheer sense of freedom that having a ship gives you — that you don’t notice until they’ve been replaced with clunky, regressive mechanics that take the AC series back at least five years to a time when it was far weaker as a game and was coasting largely on the strength of its history porn and a charismatic main character. This was fine when the star of the series was Ezio and the games were all set in Renaissance Italy (and Constantinople) and abused the historical elements of that setting in a particularly egregious yet crowd-pleasing way. It’s less fine when you have a lead with all the charm of a particularly smart-ass 12 year-old; a locale that, while not inherently dull, is something that Unity summarily fails to do anything even remotely interesting with; and an additional half-decade on the clock that means your game comes across as a relic from the very historical time period it is supposed to be set in.

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Jan 25 2016
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gaming

Thoughts: Homeworld – Deserts of Kharak

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Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is Homeworld, in a desert, on Kharak.

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Jan 18 2016
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gaming

Thoughts: 80 Days

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If you grew up in Britain in the late 80s/early 90s there’s a fairly high chance you’ll have encountered the Fighting Fantasy series of Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks1 at some point. They’re something that left a fairly deep impression on me – I still have basically the full collection sitting in a box somewhere – as their fusion of entry-level RPG elements (character stats, a player inventory, combat) with the CYOA format provided some badly-needed structure to something that even nine-year-old me felt was rather on the light side. The Fighting Fantasy series eventually succumbed to the vagaries of time and the whimsy of a young population that was increasingly drawn to video games, but I still remember them fondly. That’s why I was intrigued to see iOS developer Inkle attempting to resurrect them on the App Store a couple of years back, and even went as far as buying their version of Sorcery! for my ancient iPad Mini2 to check out what they’d done. My conclusion was that while their conversion was solid and they’d even tried to innovate by including an actual honest-to-god interactive map to represent your journey across the continent (which any young player of Fighting Fantasy would have killed for back in the day), Fighting Fantasy itself has aged rather badly; it was one of the strongest CYOA formats out there and yet today it comes across as both childishly simple and incredibly dated in terms of its structure and design. There was nothing wrong with Sorcery! as a concept, but the reliance on a twenty year-old adventure really let it down.

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  1. Created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone after they sold their stake in Games Workshop. Ian Livingstone then went on to be president of Eidos Interactive, a UK developer/publisher who were responsible for some minor hits you may or may not have heard of. British gaming culture in general owes a lot to those two. ↩
  2. I’ve declaimed against the tablet format a couple of times on here so it might be a bit of a surprise that I own one; however, while it confirmed my views on tablet gaming I found it to be an excellent format for viewing PDFs of old game manuals and gaming magazines any time I want a nostalgia trip. So they do have a use. ↩
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Jan 11 2016
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gaming

Thoughts: Nuclear Throne

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Nuclear Throne is yet another entrant into the increasingly-crowded roguelike1 genre, this time with the twist that it’s been spliced together with a twin-stick shooter. I find the recent glut of roguelikes (or games with roguelike elements) a little tiresome, especially since playing a bad roguelike is one of the most painful gaming experiences you can possibly imagine, but I do enjoy the good ones. Nuclear Throne is one of the good ones.

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  1. Which is a broad-brush term used to describe games with at least two of the following: quasi-RPG mechanics; procedurally generated, pseudo-random levels; and permadeath. ↩
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