Dead Space: My October Surprise

I honestly wasn’t that excited about Dead Space. There were a few people in the office who religiously watched preview videos for this game, but I just couldn’t get into it. That main character looked weird to me and Dead Space seemed like a pretty standard third person game. It didn’t grab me initially and I didn’t plan on purchasing it. However, once the game was released, it started getting decent reviews (mostly around 90) so I took another look. Other people I knew started playing it and loving it, so I figured it was time to see what all the fuss was about. I’m glad I did.

Dead Space is what I call a “well done game.” It’s not super innovative or ground breaking, but every aspect of the game (save a few gameplay events, which I’ll get to later) from design to art to animation to sound (especially sound) is executed so smoothly. Dead Space certainly borrows from many other games. Influences from games like Doom 3, Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War are apparent, but Dead Space feels like a game you haven’t quite played before.

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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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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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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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Defender Of The Favicon

Someone made a fully playable game in a favicon.

I love stuff like this. What a creative and neat way to make a game. Okay, so it’s not terribly practical, but this person is definitely thinking outside of the box. Actually, he’s thinking inside a tiny little box which seems to work better for him.

Kane and Lynch: Why’s Everybody Always Pickin’ on Me?

I was eating lunch with a group of producers one day about the time Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (K&L) was released. Unfortunately, K&L came out during a storm of other awesome games (it was a holiday 2007 game, going up against the likes of Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect, Bioshock and so on). We were discussing various games that we had been playing when one of the producers at the table asked me “Have you played Kane and Lynch? It’s really good.” He seemed fairly adamant that this game “had something to it” and his comments stuck with me to this day. I had been itching to play it, and finally decided to see what the fuss was about.

K&L starts out interestingly enough. You play as Kane (Lynch can be controlled only in co-op, more on that later) who is being broken out of a prison transport by Lynch. It soon becomes apparent that K&L tries to straddle the style of a comic book and something out of a Hollywood heist movie. As you stumble around the tutorial level, large groups of similarly dressed (and masked) goons help cover you as you make your escape. The game jumps off immediately with huge fire fights against swarms of police, SWAT and even some choppers.

The first thing that stood out to me from a gameplay / technical perspective, is that when you shoot enemies, they just sorta twitch. I can’t think of a better way to describe it. When other games’ AI have actual pain animations, it feels a little cheap to have the enemy just kinda procedurally twitch when getting shot while not stopping. Plus, enemies can take a hefty amount of damage. I’m sure it was purely for balance reasons, but tagging a human character three times with a gun in practically any game should drop him. That’s not the case in K&L, especially for leg shots, which can take 5-10 shots to drop a guy.

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