Tag Archives: thoughts

Aug 26 2014
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gaming

Thoughts: Shadowgate

sg_deathtrap

When you start your first game of Shadowgate, it’s likely you’ll do exactly the same thing I did. You’ll sit through the tutorial that walks you through the first and second rooms of the game, picking up keys and torches while an evil wizard does his Guardian-From-Ultima You’ll-Never-Defeat-Me schtick, and then when you get to the third room the game cuts you loose and leaves you to sort things out on your own. There’s a collection of verbs along the top of the screen that represent the ways you can interact with the room you’re in, which contains a statue of a hooded figure holding a book, flanked by a couple of candles. Now, if you’re anything like me you’ll immediately start experimenting by doing the usual adventure game thing of using VERB on OBJECT. LOOK at the statue. OPEN the book. LOOK at the book. LOOK at the candles. TAKE the can-

And then the floor opens up beneath you and crushes you under ten tons of stone. You have spent less than two minutes in game, and you’re already staring at the Grim Reaper’s death screen. Welcome to Shadowgate. Fuck you.

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Jul 28 2014
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gaming

Thoughts: Sokobond

soko_gap

Sokobond is a puzzle game that tripped several of my alarm bells when I bought it. Indie darling, with suspiciously high review scores from the usual suspects? Check. Use of the words “minimalist” and “elegant” – which too often turn out to be synonyms for “shallow” and “vapid” — to describe the game on its Steam store page? Check. Co-opting of a science-y theme to make itself seem cleverer than it really is?  Check. This didn’t exactly augur well for Sokobond, but on the other hand its molecule-arranging gameplay did remind me of SpaceChem and SpaceChem was awesome, so I decided to give it a whirl.

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Jul 21 2014
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gaming

Thoughts: Divinity – Original Sin

div_market

Apologies for the spotty posts over the last month or so. Normal service should be resumed from this point onwards.

It’s possible that writing this review right now is a bad idea. I’ve just ragequit from Divinity after encountering yet another drastically unfair difficulty shift in the combat, and am seriously considering giving up on the game altogether as its frustrations have been outweighing its better qualities for quite some time now.  This probably doesn’t put me in an entirely objective frame of mind for assessing Divinity as a whole, and so I am liable to put the boot in a little more enthusiastically than I might do otherwise. On the other hand, that I can even consider up and quitting after investing more than thirty hours into what had appeared, during the first dozen hours, to be the best game I’d played all year? That’s a situation that needs some explanation, and one which I think says a lot about Divinity’s darker side. You can read dewy-eyed coverage of the return of the old-school RPG at your other, more respectable gaming websites. This review is going to contain a lot of bitching, because god knows Divinity gives me a lot of things to bitch about.

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Jun 23 2014
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gaming

Thoughts: Rise of Nations Extended Edition

Posts have been a bit spotty on here recently, which is entirely down to work suddenly rearing its ugly head and leaving me with precious little time to play games, let alone write about them. I shall attempt to rectify the situation this week. STAY TUNED.

ron_cities

Despite my misgivings last year it seems like the Extended Edition is a concept that’s here to stay. I’m cautiously in favour of giving older games a spruce-up with some modern quality-of-life features and then setting them loose on various digital distribution channels just so long as the resulting product doesn’t come across as a low-effort cash-in on a beloved classic’s nostalgia value. There’s a couple of reasons I’m happier to see the extended edition of Rise of Nations pop up on Steam than I would most other games, though, and they are in no particular order:

  • Rise of Nations is well thought of by those who played it a decade ago, but that’s not a very large number of people – even I missed out on it at the time. While successful it wasn’t a smash hit like Age of Empires, and so there’s a decent argument for resurrecting it in digital format and presenting it to a much larger audience.
  • Rise of Nations has been genuinely unavailable to buy – at least in the UK – for a couple of years now (unless you count the dodgy Ubisoft copies you can find on Amazon that may or may not come with a CD key). This situation has been exacerbated by the legal uncertainties following the implosion of RoN developer Big Huge Games; there’s been an entry for RoN in the Steam database since at least March last year, but (I presume) it’s taken until now for the rights to be sorted out to the point where somebody can actually release it.
  • I really, really liked Megalomania, and aside from the execrable Empire Earth RoN is the only game I can think of that’s really run with the concept of an RTS covering the whole of human history divided into distinct technological epochs.

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Jun 16 2014
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gaming

Thoughts: Xenonauts

xeno_terror

When Xenonauts development started all the way back in 2009, it had a simple mission statement: to be a modern update of the X-COM series, giving things a new lick of paint but otherwise preserving the mechanical core of the game. This was very much a good idea at the time. X-COM had been criminally neglected for over a decade, with only Altair’s excruciatingly mediocre1 UFO: AfterX series carrying the torch in the meantime, and there was definitely a gap in the market for an X-COM remake — especially after 2K announced that their own X-COM reboot would be a third-person shooter (this was the game that would eventually become the insipid Bureau).  Thus it was that Goldhawk Interactive was formed, and work began on Xenonauts.

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  1. I actually quite liked the first one, up to a point. That point was when I assaulted a UFO and spawned with my squad clustered in a small chamber surrounded by three aliens with rocket launchers. I never went back to the series after that. ↩
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Jun 02 2014
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gaming

Thoughts: Wolfenstein – The New Order

09/06/14 – Xenonauts is taking a very long time for me to crack, mostly due to my being unable to decide whether the funding system is unnecessarily harsh or just outright broken (currently leaning towards the latter). I will try to get something up this week. Even if it’s “science”. 

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If you asked me to pick words to describe the latest entry in the Wolfenstein series, the chances are you could probably predict most of them before I’d even said anything. They’d be words like:

  • Fast.
  • Violent.
  • Gory.
  • Gruesome.
  • Silly.
  • Over-the-top.

Historically this little collection of verbs has been all the series has ever reached for; it’s been content not to take itself too seriously in its Nazi-slaughtering exploits, and focuses instead on providing simple, low-brainpower fun. What you might not be expecting, however, is for New Order to add an additional word onto the end of that list, and that word is:

  • Intelligent.

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May 27 2014
5 Comments
gaming

Thoughts: Transistor.

transistor_green

I was a more than a little bit surprised when I went back and looked at my two year-old Bastion review to discover that, well, I didn’t think it was that great. I thought it was good, sure, with fantastic art and music and some excellent design choices in terms of how it dealt with character customisation and difficulty, but I also thought that its minimalist plot and overreliance on a single narrator telling you everything (while showing you very little) was both confusing and more than a tad overbearing and seriously let the game down in its attempt to tell a meaningful story. This surprised me for two reasons. One was that in the intervening two years of not playing it I’d actually forgotten all about the Bastion’s flaws and had built up a mental picture of the game that was far more generous than what I apparently thought at the time, and this led to me expecting rather more of Supergiant’s next game, Transistor, than was really fair. Transistor never really had a chance of living up to those expectations, and so I’m going to keep that in mind when reviewing it; I might have ended up being disappointed in Transistor, but that’s at least partially my fault and nothing to do with the actual game. The second reason, though, was that I re-read the Bastion review after completing Transistor to see how my view of each game matched up, and I was genuinely shocked to discover that if you strip away the superficial trimmings of each title my opinion of Transistor now is exactly the goddamn same as my opinion of Bastion then: Transistor has fantastic art and music and some excellent design choices in terms of how it deals with character customisation and difficulty, but its minimalist plot and overreliance on a single narrator telling you everything is confusing and overbearing and lets the game down in its attempt to tell a meaningful story.

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