Not Human Enough

Well, if the title is any indication you can guess where this is going.

I picked up Too Human with an open mind, and thought it might be decent. Sometimes you see opinions on message boards which tend to be overreactions. Someone I knew told me they were enjoying Too Human, so why not? I didn’t have anything else lined up at the time.

I fired it up and was actually drawn in right away. The introduction was decent. I like spacey stuff and as it turns out, you coming in off a drop ship with some other military types to search some cave in some remote region that everyone is scared of. You play as “Lord Baldur,” and you soon learn that the entire game’s story is based on Norse mythos, set in some techno-future. Okay, points for originality.

The combat isn’t bad to start with. I knew beforehand there would be lots of melee attacking, so I went with the Berserker class. You end up pushing the analog stick towards the enemy you want to attack, and then you keep changing the sticks direction to attack a new enemy (no buttons required). Eventually you end up getting guns, but they do less damage than melee weapons (and the range on them is terrible). Anyway, it’s definitely unlike any control scheme I’ve encountered again. More points for originality.

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The World Without Us

I generally like to talk about games, but I enjoy reading nearly as much as playing games. So hey, here comes a book report.

I’ve been reading “The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman. It recently came out on paperback (I hate buying hardcover books, they’re too expensive and they eat up more shelf space) and it’s a book that I’ve wanted to check out for a while. I was told the premise of the book was a huge “what if” scenario if humans stopped existing on Earth. Although, out of 19 chapters, the first six mainly deal with how humans got to be where they are now (evolution through primates, and so on). Typically at the end of a chapter Weisman touches on which plants take over, which animal populations die off or take off, which human constructions fall apart, which is the good stuff for me.

Throughout most of the book, Wiesman introduces some situation, talks to an expert about that situation and tried to get them to explain what would happen if humans were gone, then follows up with his own imaginary story telling of the events that would play out.

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GDC 2008 Was Awhile Ago..

.. but here are the notes Slaypiece and I took there. I didn’t really think of posting it here until now for some reason. Anyway, better late than never!

GDC ’08 Summary:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dpgnp7v_5f57m574n

They Call it “Rockman” For a Reason

Megaman is probably my all time favorite game series.

If you’ve never played a Megaman game, it’s generally been a challenging series (which seems to be Capcom’s “thing”). I recently played through all the 8-bit and 16-bit Megamans and in case you’re wondering: Megaman 9 much harder that any previous Megaman game. All the memories of throwing NES controllers at walls are coming back, and once again I’m cursing out loud and scaring my wife while playing a video game. Thanks Capcom!

I’ve only beat one boss (Galaxy Man who I guess is the easiest to start with) and got to the end of the Jewel Man stage (and died) in two nights of playing, but I’ve played all the robot stages at least some. I’m a little disappointed they went after the super hardcore audience, and basically filled the game with all the annoying traps, puzzles and enemy placements from the previous games, instead of trying to being new people into the game. Games have come a long way since the last 8-bit Megaman, and in fact Megaman 9 seems to be missing features (like sliding).

Sadly, even if Megaman 9 was twice as hard I’d buy it since I loves me some Megaman, but this one is going to take awhile.

All the Castle Crashers Music, For Free

Go grab it here! So awesome that those guys put it up free for everyone.

Listening to those tracks makes me want to play Castle Crashers some more. Still waiting for that patch though…

I Almost Forgot… Spore

Someone asked me the other day about what games I was playing lately. I rattled off a list, but I completely forgot about Spore.

Spore. The game that many gamers (including myself) have been looking forward to for years. I remember watching the 2005 GDC video that came out which was the first public view of Spore. Everyone was amazed. You could start as a cell and evolve all the way to a space faring civilization. Plus, you could customize just about every facet of your creature along the way. Pretty inspiring stuff.

More videos of Spore surfaced every year and every year the project was delayed. After watching a recent TV special on the Discovery channel, I learned that Maxis worked on Spore for five years. Many games I play that get 2-3 years of love are usually awesome, so imagine how excited I was when I learned they put five total years of work into Spore. Plus, Will Wright is at the top of the industry when it comes to game design. The guy who gave us SimCity and The Sims can do wrong (hell, I liked SimFarm and SimEarth as well).

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Castle Crashers: Good Game or Awesome Game?

A friend of mine who does contract art work for various studios sends me links to gametrailers.com every now and then. He’s big into old-school and arcade games and he was super excited about Castle Crashers (CC). I watched the video and wasn’t initially impressed; I thought it looked okay but there was so much stuff going on it seemed too chaotic to play. However, in the video they mentioned CC had four player co-op. I’m a sucker for co-op so I decided to give it a shot.

As it turns out, CC is pretty awesome. In fact, one question I get asked often is “which arcade game should I get, CC or Braid?” I always say CC just out of personal preference. I prefer action games over puzzle games. If I had to compare them, I’d say while CC isn’t terribly innovative, it blends a lot of “old school” mechanics into a really well done package. The overall experience was more fun and memorable for me than Braid.

Enough of the Braid comparisons, get both. CC is awesome for a whole slew of reasons. Four player co-op rocks. The art style is awesome. The scripting is incredible (the best I’ve seen in an XBLA game). The game play is addicting and rewarding. Leveling up characters and finding new items is always welcome. The music and sounds are great.

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Four Soul Calipers, Sir

I’m not the biggest fighting game fan. I played some Street Fighter II back in the day, mainly on the SNES. Outside of that, I’ve only really scratched the surface of the fighting genre. I think it’s because I’m not a terribly competitive person. When I play a fighting game I play almost exclusively single player. Sometimes though, you just need to play something different to mix things up. I was watching a few other people play Soul Calibur IV (SC4) around the office and decided to give it a go. Due to it’s buttery smooth frame rate and instant gratification gameplay, I bought it the next day.

Since I’m not much into the multiplayer side of things, it was nice to find so much single player content for a fighting game. Single players modes in SC4 include arcade mode, story mode and the Tower of Lost Souls. The Tower of Lost Souls was a blast to play through. Basically, there are two parts: ascending or descending. The ascending portion allows players to pick a few characters and fight a few floors up a “tower”. As they move up floors, they can do objectives like “perform 3 throws” in a match to unlock a treasure chest. Each chest contains some piece of equipment you can put on your characters. Once you beat a set of floors you’ve unlocked those floors for later play. Descending on the other hand, starts you at the first floor each time and you just go until you lose. Every five floors nets you a chest when you descend; no need to complete mini-objectives here. Going up and down the tower while unlocking items and getting gold was terribly addicting and fun.

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Forever is Composed of Nows

Braid is one of those games that love it or hate it, it gets people talking. People have told me everything from “Braid is pretentious bullshit” to “You owe it to yourself to play this game.”

If you’re unfamiliar with Braid, it’s a 2-d puzzle platformer available on XboxLive Arcade. The art direction is done in the painterly style, which give Braid a really unique look. The major game mechanics involve time manipulation, which I saw from a lot of indie games (for example, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom) at GDC this year. The music is interesting too, as it features classical and folk music, which isn’t normally found outside of a pub in a Never Winter Nights game.

I just finished Braid (I was home form work, sick and bored and figured why the hell not?) and for an arcade title it’s exceptional. While the price tag of 1200 points ($15 US dollars) might put people off, the game has enough uniqueness, fun, and polish to justify the price point.

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Every Generation Needs a New Revolution

Civilization is one of my all time favorite game series. I have fond memories of playing the original Civ on a friends PC and later playing the graphically superior Mac version for hours on end. Watching the Civ series grow and get better over time has been awesome for me. There’s been multiple ways the game could have been fucked up (hey, lets not make it turn based!), but it only seems to become more fun. Sid Meier rules, and his Civilization games have stolen hundreds, if not thousands of hours from my life. Not bad for what basically amounts to a fancy video board game.

Now that you know I’m fully biased towards the Civ series, you can probably guess that I thoroughly enjoyed Civilization: Revolution (Civ:Rev). However, just like all previous Civ iterations, I was extremely worried that something would go terribly wrong with the next iteration. I feared that Firaxis might make the game too complicated, or that the controls might suck, or that they might over simplify the game for the console. However, Firaxis did a great job finding the right balance of complexity (it’s roughly as a deep as Civ 1 or 2, although some might argue less) and found a control scheme that works really well on the 360.

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