PC

Review – Shatter (PC)

Sidhe | March 15th, 2011

I seem to be picking up a lot on Breakout clones lately. Or maybe it’s just games that at the core are remakes of older classics I’ve been hitting a lot lately. I suppose it’s an easy gimmick, take something people like, flashy it up and add a new gimmick or two, then throw it out into the world. I’m not really complaining or anything but Shatter, like BIT.TRIP BEAT and Meteor, has it’s core in the game Breakout.

It adds a few gimmicks to help keep it fresh at least.

It’s kind of hard to mention the music and graphics without admitting that I am biased. I am a total sucker these days for these style of flashy bright colored graphics with a heavy techno soundtrack. It’s like going to a rave without all of the crowds of people and drugs. In fact I enjoyed the soundtrack enough that I bought it and listen to it pretty regularly in a line between my BT tracks and the Portal 2 soundtrack.

The core gameplay involves clearing fields of blocks by reflecting a ball at them. As I mentioned before, Breakout. One interesting mechanic that has been added however is the ability to attract and repulse the ball from your paddle. This can be used to manipulate it’s path and clear out blocks more quickly. The push/pull mechanic also works on the little score diamonds you collect throughout the game, which can be useful for maximizing your score. You can push a pile of chits away until a score multiplier drops then suck them all in at once. This of course will also affect your ball so you’ll still have to be careful not to let it careen off the playing field.

There are also several different styles of playing fields. The horizontal and vertical oriented arenas are pretty easy to handle, the tricky one comes in the round arena. The physics feel a bit off to me which I find makes directing the ball to be a bit tricky. Also however the programming was designed to handle the push pull it doesn’t always work as expected on the circular stages. I’ve found that more often one will veer the ball to the left or right versus actually pulling the ball in the expected direction. It can be a bit tricky to follow but it’s not something that can’t be adapted to.

There are several modes available to play, most of which are to be expected in an arcade style game, story, time attack, endless, and bonus modes. The story mode is essentially a sequence of increasingly difficult stages with some “bosses” at the end of each world. The bonus mode is rather interesting. You get only 3 balls and you have to keep them going for as long as you can to rack up a high score.

There is also a coop mode available so you can play with your friends.

It’s quite a bit of fun if you like quick simpler arcade style gameplay. There are no major flaws with the gameplay or presentation which makes for a pretty solid experience.

Review – Poker Night at the Inventory (PC)

Nov 22nd, 2010

by Ramen Junkie.

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Telltale Games | Nov 22, 2010

So Telltale games, makers of something like 90% of the Adventure games on the market (maybe) had an interesting idea. Why not take the idea of computer poker, and instead of playing against made up kooky PC characters you don’t recognizes, why not throw in a cast of known characters from popular games and nerd sites.

Thus, you end up with Poker Night at the Inventory. You play poker against Tycho from Penny-Arcade, The Heavy, of Team Fortress 2 Fame, Telltale’s defacto mascot, Max, from the Sam & max series, and Strong Bad from the popular web series Homestar Runner. I didn’t even realize Homestar Runner was still around personally but hey, whatevs.

The Poker part of the game is limited to Texas Hold Em style poker. It’s not a game style I’d played recently, most of my Poker experience is in Draw Poker. It’s not too difficult once you get the hand of it though I find the game is based a little more on chance than I care for. This brings up Poker Night’s biggest flaw. Texas Hold Em, as near as I can tell, is very much a game of bluffing. This could be pretty interesting with real humans to compete against since you can “read” them or whatever. When you’re playing against a bunch of computer controlled AIs, this thrill is almost non existent. The characters do have some built in little stories and tells but everything really just seems to be randomly played. It’s not real obvious who is bluffing and who has something.

This also works the other way. It’s pretty much impossible to truly bluff the PC AI. The closest I’ve found is that shoving your entire pot in at once will cause all of the characters to gasp and often will force them to fold. Often, but not always, and they will almost just as often bet it all and go bust with nothing. Someone needs to tell the AI that calling a bluff when you have even a pair is risky but doable, but calling a massive bluff with “queen high” then going bust is kind of a stupid move.

Speaking of the table chatter though. It gets old. There was a bug on the initial release that caused the dialogue to not be as random as it was supposed to be, but even with that bug fixed, hearing the same 2 or 3 stories out of the 4 characters gets a little old.

So you don’t have the risk of real money poker, but you do get the monotony of playing cards against a computer for nothing, which is fun for a bit but gets a little old after a while. Still, the game is extremely cheap and if you are into Team Fortress 2 you can earn some fun special items from the players so the $5 price point is pretty decent.The real missed opportunity here is in DLC. Telltale doesn’t seem to have any desire to push any sort of DLC fo this game but the potential is huge. Just think, for maybe another dollar each, they could add more character packs. Then each game could be built from 4 random characters from the pool. Even sticking with the pool of sources used, the obvious additions of Sam, Gabe, Any other TF2 Class, and Homestar Runner would be entertaining. Maybe they just charge another $5 for a new set + new play style. The option to pick between different Poker play styles would be another welcome addition.

Review – Deus Ex (PC)

Aug 1st, 2002

by Ramen Junkie.

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There was a short period in gaming time not too long ago where many hyped up games we released all around the same period of time. These include games like Oni, Deus Ex, and Shenmue, to name a few. These games all have one thing in common. All had mediocre everything with one amazing shinny new gimmick. In the end you get a game that more or less sucks except you still feel the need to play it because of this one gimmick. Oni had it’s whole weapons and hand to hand combat thing, Shenmue had it’s whole free range suckage going on, and Deus Ex is sort of a FPS RPG hybrid.

I’ll admit, I didn’t really play this game the “correct way”. I cheated right out at the start and beefed up my player to the max after failing the Liberty Island mission 20 or 30 times in a row. By “Liberty Island mission” I mean killing more than 5 guys and making it past the first 2 or 3 enclosed areas. That said, it also means I got to play a game that was nothing but pure game play, a game that consisted of everything else besides Deus Ex’s one gimmick, the experience level up system. Frankly after playing through without it I sure as hell don’t want to play through with it.

Even as an invincible combat god the game started to DRAG immensely by about halfway through. The plot in this bitch just goes on and on and on and on and on. By the end you won’t know what the hell is going on because the plot also changes completely every five minutes or so. It’s unfortunate that Tracer Tong’s ending was the worst one since he was the only person I could remember out of the supporting cast. After New York you think you’re done but no! On to Hong Kong. Then it’s back to New York, then to some gas station in the middle of nowhere. Then some undersea lab. Eventually you end up god knows where fighting some guy in a bubble. Whoop de shit. That is what I get after all that playing?

Really the plot isn’t the only thing that I didn’t like. Honestly the character models left something to be desired as well. Every person has the same weird bulgy stretchy look to them. Also the enemy AI was pretty weak to. Not really weak in that is was easy to beat, just weak in that it seemed like it was a computer AI and not a person trying to kill me. It was not good like say, Half Life. Though it was also not as shitty as say, Shogo. Shogo being the only game I can think of where a boss killed HIMSELF through no act of my own. I just stood there just after encountering him as he blew himself away.

Anyway, Deus Ex 2 is in the works, let’s hope they can put an understandable plot in this time. The graphics I’ve seen seem pretty improved, so that is one flaw down at least. Anyway, I literally had to force myself to finish this beast just so I could uninstall without ever feeling the guilty need to install it again.

Review – Final Fantasy XI Beta (PC)

Jun 3rd, 2002

by Ramen Junkie.

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NOTE: This review was originally written for the PC Beta of FF11. I have no intention on ever purchasing the full version of the game as I do not like MMORPGs. (Additional Note, original date is approximate)

Apparently Final Fantasy is a lot like Star Trek. Both are only good when they end in an even number. Also both have the one exception to this rule in slot 7. Guess 7 really is a lucky number. That isn’t to stay Star Trek 1/FF1 are bad really, just really long and boring.

With the creation of Final Fantasy 11, Square has decided that the entire system needed an overhaul. Considering it hadn’t changed in 10 incarnations, all of which have done extremely well, messing with things in any excessive manner comes off as a bad idea. So are things better or worse? Well instead of keeping cliche suspense, I’ll just say it’s not worse, it’s fucking horrible.

There are to types of RPGs in the world. Well at least as far as electronics world is concerned. The basic categories are “console RPGs” and “Computer RPGs”. Computer RPGs hark from the days of DnD, with excessive leveling and stat building where the player is in more or less complete control of the hero’s actions and thoughts. These are generally slower paced and focus less on story. Console RPGs started as simplified DnD games, they have become increasingly more simple as years have progressed, which only helped to widen the gap since the days of yore. Consoles are generally limited by their method of input and inability to store lots of changing variables (stats) for long periods. Final Fantasy 1 had a large array of different weapons and armor for each character, Final Fantasy 10 has 1 type of weapon and 1 “shield” for each character. To make up however Console RPGs are generally much more character and story driven.

This has lead to a split with electronic RPG players, while some will play both, many computer RPG players find console RPGs to be too simple and linear while many console RPG players find computer RPGs to be excessively complicated and tedious. What does any of this have to do with FF11? Well for the uneducated, Final Fantasy 11 is a Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game” or “MMORPG”. This means it’s about as Computer RPG like as you can get. It also means 50 dollars down and 10+ bucks a month to play. Have you seen or heard of Everquest? Ultima Online? If so, you’ve seen FF11.

After going through roughly 348 menus of Play Online garbage, you’ll finally be able to start playing the game. You’re greeted by the standard FMV opening. It seems some little kid’s city is attacked by a bunch of ogres or something. There is a huge battle and the kid’s sister is killed while leading him to safety. The kid returns later with a huge army of people, which turns out to be useful since the city has long been deserted and overgrown. I have no idea what this means regarding anything in the game, but it looks pretty impressive. The CG is very nice. Too bad it’s probably the only bit of CG in the entire game. FF10 had excessive CG, FF11 doesn’t have any main characters, so it likely has none.

Now you get to create your character. You can chose from 5 races, two of which are gender specific. Why the two gender specific races are not considered one race is beyond me as both of them are cat based. Anyway, you can chose from a big hulking cat guy, an anime cat-girl, male or female Elves, Male and Female Humans, or Male and Female retarded midgets. According to the FMV opening the midget things are the Black and White ages of past games, except they have “adorable” faces instead of menacing black holes. After picking a race you can select from a vaeriety of heads with selections like Squall with Brown Hair” or “Rinoa”. For the most part the heads resemble characters of old games, too bad the clothes will never match, I could go for making “Squall”. Sadly, This game is all medieval in a horribly FF9 way.

After choosing your look, you get to pick a class and start location. Start location doesn’t much matter, though you’ll probably want to Synchronize this with any friends also playing. I did not take notes, but I’m pretty sure the starting classes were just the old Final Fantasy 1 classes of Fighter, Thief, Monk, Black Mage, Red Mage, White Mage. For the record, I picked a human female with black ponytail head and Red Mage Class. At the time I figured everyone would be picking elves or stupid midgets and Female Human would be one of the least popular. Turns out Female Humans are all over. At least she has a NICE ASS. Red Mage seemed like a good idea since they generally start strong but end weak and I’m not likely to be playing too far into this garbage.

So the game starts off, I’m in the middle of a huge town and a bit of story flashed by as my character walks along. Finally I am instructed to visit Reet who has nothing better to do than stand around all day helping NOOBEEs like myself. Reet didn’t seem all that interesting though and I had a friend in the same room to help out anyway. That same friend went and bought me a bunch of good armor then told me “Don’t fight anything that’s not a bee or a worm” before leaving to places unknown in the world of FF11. So I spent the next two hours fighting giant Hornets and Tunnel Worms and attained the almighty status of level 4. Unfortunately that’s pretty much all I accomplished. The enemies hadn’t dropped a single piece of gil and I hadn’t completed any sort of quests. Instead I had a large collection of Elemental Crystals and Insect Wings which I sold and bought a sword with. At that point it was getting pretty late so I decided to give it up for a while.

This seems like a good place to talk about the battles. In previous Final fantasy games, your party of characters would wander the world map until attacked at random. The screen then does some sort of crazy transition effect as battle music starts playing. Everyone lines up on one side of the screen while the monsters line up opposite. Each round you pick a command for your characters to execute such as magic or fight. In FF11 you wander the map, all the enemies are clearly visible, none of them attack without provocation (NOTE Some later enemies will attack). To initiate a battle you click on the enemy and select “Attack”. If you’re in range, the battle will start and all you are required to do is stand there until either the enemy dies, or you die. You can move your character around during the battle but it has no impact on the battle itself. I found myself running back and forth around the enemy in hopes that because the bee didn’t actually hit me with its attack animation I would not take damage. This never actually occurred though, you take damage anyway, even if you are 20 feet behind the enemy when it strikes.

After learning some magic you can interact with battle a little more, however the spells all seem to do damage equal to roughly half a regular attack so chances are you’ll just end up standing there staring at the enemy anyway. Cure is just as bad as you’ll take damage equivalent to whatever you heal in the time it takes to cast the spell.

After the battle you’ll find some items probably and gain a bit of experience. Like most computer RPGs experience levels are increasingly difficult to obtain. For example, to get to level 2 you’ll need like 500 exp, but level 3 will take 750 exp. By the time you are going from level 98-99, you’ll need approximately 1 octillion experience. In layman’s terms, at 50 exp a monster, that is “A Whole Fucking Lot”.

Both during battles and while wandering the map you’ll have a choice between 3rd person or 1st person views. While it’s slightly easier to navigate in first person view, I find it frustratingly limited. After playing so many First Person Shooters, I feel like I should be able to easily leap over those pesky fences and rocks as I navigate the world or I should be furiously clicking away with my sword and wailing on the enemy during battles. Everything is menu based. You can easily walk around the world while navigating your status and item menus.

Well, easily depends on location. So far I’ve found that during the daytime hours, while trying to fight off hornets in the desert, my course disappears completely. The sand is both blindingly bright and the same color as the courser. I’ve encountered a similar problem in another area where you enter a dark cave. The entrance is full of black pillars that are more or less invisible, it’s easy to get hung up on them.

Speaking of navigating the world. The areas are HUGE. You’ll want a powerful graphics card to run this game on your PC. You can see for miles with little to no fog and full frame rates. Unfortunately it’s a little too huge. The massive areas are just another aspect that makes this game so frustratingly boring (aside from excessive level requirements and boring missions). It takes like 5 minutes to get anywhere in the city and the dungeons are confusingly shaped (I got lost in one cave) and they really should have a map function. The town could easily have been one screen in size with everything closer together. The town could have easily been only one “screen” in size with everything more compacted. I’m sure they were trying for “realism” but frankly, I can only take so many trips across town to sell off my useless crystals before I get tired and leave to play something else. I guess the other alternative motivation was to give players plenty of room to walk around. Presumably if you had a couple of thousand people wandering around the town it would get pretty crowded. I can’t see that situation ever occurring though.

So a few days later I decided to return to the game. People are claiming there actually is a plot buried in here somewhere and I still haven’t done any missions anyway. After returning to Reet to learn where I can pick up missions (Reet wasn’t helpful here either and I still had to wander around looking for the guardhouse). My mission (which I chose to accept) was to find the foreman of the mine and pick up a report, then deliver it to some guy at the Presidential Office. After a 5 minute jog to the nearby mines, I proceeded to search the area for the foreman. Lucky for me the guard handing out missions neglected to give me any clue as to where to find this foreman other than “At the Mines”. After talking to every NPC in the area for some hope of a clue I decided to enter the mine itself. I was fairly well armed and leveled after all, I should have nothing to worry about. It turns out the mine is just as large as the city and just as populated. After wandering aimlessly for a half hour talking to all the NPCs, I finally found a foreman. NOTE: A foreman. This foreman informed me I must go “deeper in the mines” to find the person I wanted. At least I had finally found a helpful NPC. So I proceeded into the deeper undeveloped part of the mine, which turned out to be full of bats or various types, I finally found the foreman and picked up my orders.

I’d like to take a moment to pause here and discuss the item system. During my initial search for the foreman, I was offered a reward for killing monsters in the mines. All I had to do was bring him 3 “Pinches of Soot” to prove I was there. During my wandering, I fought many monsters and did indeed win my three Pinches. Unfortunately I also discovered I have an item cap of 30 items, half of which was already tied up in equipment it wouldn’t let me sell (Apparently you can’t sell starting equipment). So I had to drop a bunch of worthless sounding items and fight even more monsters to win back what I already had won. I should also point out that items don’t seem to “stack”, meaning my inventory would have say two “Wind Crystal x 1” instead of one “Wind Crystal x 2”. In the end I couldn’t find the guy offering the reward once I had left the cave so I only ende up feeling ripped off and pissed.

Back to the subject of huge worlds and leaving the cave. I actually managed to find the foreman pretty quick once I got down in the cave. It took me another hour to find my way back out. While I have a map of the town and the nearby desert, I don’t seem to start with a map of the cave. Eventually I ran into another player who escorted me to the exit.

Report in hand I made my way to the President’s office, hoping for some sort of payment or reward, after all, I wasn’t getting much gil from these hornets and worms. Of course I ended up with an all too familiar feeling. You see there is a reoccurring theme in this game. Basically you, as the player are given some sort of quest or order. This order is accompanied by zero clue as to where the end location actually is or what you’re actually supposed to do when you get there. Basically what I’m saying here is, like the Mission Giving Guard, The Foreman, and the Mine Exit, the President’s office was not on the map. This of course lead to another bout of boring wandering talking to NPCs with nothing useful to say. For future reference to anyone reading this. The President’s office is in the Metalworks. Eventually I managed to get this bit of info out of a guard on the other side of the town from the mine. Once again though, I got to wander around the Metalworks with no clue as to where to go. This time however the problem stems from that reoccurring texture problem. You see the Metalworks had two levels to it, but the elevator is the same shade of brown as everything else in the game, so it completely blends in until you see someone riding on it.

After even more wandering talking to NPCs looking for a clue the mission was completed. No reward though, and I imagine this same mission is given to all the players. Why this guard needs reports delivered to him ever few minutes by whichever sap adventurer happens by next is beyond be but hey, I’m just glad to be done with this boring fetch quest. Now maybe I’ll get a real quest. Infiltrate the Shinra headquarters maybe while getting detailed plot information regarding Ancients. Oh wait, MMORPGS don’t have real plots. Back to the Mission Guard. Job two is to meet up with Cid to do some geological surveying. Maybe that mine job isn’t looking so bad after all. After going back to the President’s office, (NOTE: the guard is literally on the other side of the town from the Metalworks), I talk to Cid who wants me to take an Acidity tester out to… somewhere… and see if it changes color. I would like to point out that testing the acidity level of an area is not Surveying. Not wanting to argue I set off to complete my task. This time I felt a bit more confident as Cid had actually told me “It’s near South Gustaberg”, meaning “the desert”. Well of course when I get to the desert there is nothing labeled on my map anything remotely similar to where I’m supposed to take his acidity tester, so I finally decided the game was shit and gave up.

So, if you like having nails driven into your skull, I’d suggest picking this game up when it’s released! I mean repeated fetch quests where you’re given no clue where to go are such awesome fun! Here is hoping that Final Fantasy 12 doesn’t such this much ass. In the mean time, I’ll be giving my money to Valve (Half Life 2) and Bungi (Halo PC) over Square.

Just one final note. I’ve consulted with some people farther along in the game than I managed. It’s more of the same garbage for the rest of the trip.

Review – The SIMS (PC)

Mar 29th, 2002

by Ramen Junkie.

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Maxis

Some games you just love to hate. Or maybe it’s the other way around, you hate to love them. Then there are those you love and those you hate completely. I’m thinking The SIMS is just one I hate really, but I REALLY want to love it. This game is really easy to compare to Diablo 2. Both have similar play perspectives. Both have similar gameplay mechanics really. Both are games I really enjoy when I first start playing them but hate absolutely after about a week. Finally both are games I keep coming back to.

To keep in the comparison of Diablo 2, the gameplay consists pretty much of clicking on a thousand things for hours on end. Unlike Diablo 2, the things you click on aren’t little imp things of one color or another. Instead you get to control a person as this person lives their daily life. That’s pretty much it, I honestly don’t know how or why this game ever became so popular really. I mean an in game day typically consist of waking your Sim up, having the Sim cook himself breakfast, take a shit, take a shower, watch for an hour go to work, come home from work, cook supper, watch more TV, shit again, then sleep. Its like having some sort of clingy pet really. The Sims can’t function in anyway on their own. As an experiment I once let “Bob Newbie” run on his own for about an hour. I came back and found he had been fired from work and had been doing nothing but stand around in his kitchen crying because he was depressed and lonely. It should be noted the kitchen was soaked in urine and covered in dirty dishes. It seems that instead of keeping up his hygiene and going to work, poor Bob Newbie had decided to instead sit around all day burning all his money on potato chips. A similar result occurred with the Goth family, their child ended up getting shipped off to military school.

Now what is entertaining about this game? I’ll have to guess it’s the social system really. When your Sim isn’t bitching about being hungry again because he just spent an hour on the toilet you can interact with other Sims in the neighborhood. If you’re lucky you could even make your Sim become married to one of them. Then you get the fun task or trying to juggle two people’s lives at once. Just some advice, unless you plan on cheating, don’t even think of trying to juggle 8 people (the maximum for one family) at once. If you’re lucky you’ll get two satisfied ones, another who has been cleaning everything for all eternity and the rest will just party 24/7.

Anyway, about the time you’ve been playing for about two week’s you’ve got maybe 2 regular normal families going, and another couple party families that you’ve cheated on and given them all the riches they will ever need. There is a good chance you’ll need a new way to entertain yourself. Then you’ll come to the “Mass Murderer Simulator” part of the game. First select a kind of creepy looking guy and build him a nice little place to live, then befriend everyone you can. Then one by one court and marry all the other Sims in the neighbor hood. At the same time, as you grow tired of the earlier partners, build them into doorless rooms and wait about an in game week or two. Or maybe you’d like to let them take a swim, then remove the exit ladder for the pool. A person permanently swimming in the pool would make a nice art-deco life sculpture for the front yard. Then there is always death by fire. Make sure you don’t have any cooking skill or a fire alarm then start grillin’ burgers till the flames start roarin’.

Now that your fantastic and beautiful homes are all vacant, take a moment and reflect back on all the time you’ve spent doing the same things YOU do every day only for some computer simulated version of yourself. Now realize how much of a waste this game really is, especially since Maxis didn’t take into account the full potential of killing off the Sims. I mean come on, where is my torture rack? Or maybe a guillotine. Maybe the fight sequences could break into a Capcom fighter where you battle to the death with supernatural fireballs and such.

On one final note, I’ll say that I really like the customizability in this game. You can find new models and skins for all sorts of objects and characters. You can put shortcuts to MP3s in the music directory and get custom radio stations. You can build the characters and homes anyway you want. That’s probably the best part of the game really. Seeing what sort of crazy combinations you can come up with.