In which I write 2300 words about computer pinball. You have been warned.
The Scientific Gamer
Science, gaming, and all things in between.
Tag Archives: thoughts
Thoughts: Monaco.
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.
Thoughts: Max Payne 3.
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.
Thoughts: MechWarrior Online.
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.”
Thoughts: Age of Empires 2 HD.
Age of Empires 2 is the latest game to get the “HD” rerelease treatment, which is a recent and not-entirely-unwelcome trend for older PC games and one which I suspect pleases both the companies that make them and the people who buy them. The developer/publisher gets to sell what had previously been a dead product all over again, and the purchaser gets… well, in theory they get to have an updated version of that old game they loved that actually functions on modern operating systems. If this is what the HD update actually delivers then everyone goes away happy. However, I suspect that Age of Empires 2 HD will be the title that makes a lot of people realise that simply attaching the letters “HD” to a game doesn’t necessarily mean that what you’re getting is going to be an improvement over that physical copy that’s been gathering dust inside its jewel case for the last decade and a bit.
Thoughts: Bioshock Infinite.
SPOILER WARNING: Bioshock Infinite is a game that is best played when you have absolutely no idea what is going to happen when you do. Unfortunately a critical appraisal of Bioshock Infinite is impossible without at least mentioning some of the general plot themes and elements, so while there’s not going to be any major plot spoilers of the OMG ELIZABETH IS YOUR FATHER variety I can’t review the game while avoiding talking about what’s actually in it. If you want to remain completely unspoiled, a potted summary of my opinion about Bioshock Infinite would be pretty similar to what I thought of Spec Ops — not the best of games, but absolutely worth playing through at least once.
Thoughts: SimCity.
SimCity! The game which, if you believe the gaming press, is irrevocably ruined by that Great Satan of modern PC gaming: always-online DRM masquerading as social functions . Many, many column inches have been written about SimCity’s disastrous launch, when (as with all online game launches these days) the servers fell over under the strain and nobody could play it for a week without sitting in an hours-long queue. The game was pilloried by its playerbase, as users flocked to Metacritic to dump SimCity’s score into the red and give it an average rating of just one star on Amazon1 It’s one of the most botched releases in recent memory, with some people blaming the resignation of EA’s CEO squarely on SimCity’s failure.
- Amazon even stopped listing the game for a few hours based on the number of refund requests they were getting and there’s still some bad business going on between them and EA. ↩