#22: The Beginner's Guide - Some post-play thoughts

I just wrapped up a play-through of The Beginner's Guide, so it seemed reasonable to resuscitate my blog and put some of my thoughts out there while the gears are still turning in my head.

The Beginner's Guide is the type of game that loses value if you know ahead of time what it is about, in a storytelling sense. It's from the creator of The Stanley Parable, but in many ways it is not, ways that become immediately apparent through the introduction of the game. I believe that the structure of TBG is flawed. Despite that, the ideas it plays with are novel to me as far as gaming themes are concerned, and should ring true to anyone doing creative work, for show or for themselves. It is a game exploring art, audience, privacy, depression, and validation from the perspective of one artist relating to another artist.

Because I cannot describe the sequence of events in TBG without reducing its value to the reader, the rest of this post will explore some of the thoughts it gave me, bubbling and churning in my mind in the hour after my play. This language is a bit more academic than I'd typically use to engage with a game, but I suppose it's not a good indie game unless it takes longer to discuss it than it does to beat it.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Most of us assume that art is created with intent to share. No one besides the creator sees art that goes un-shared; how can one even point to an example besides one's own? This only reinforces the notion that audience and art are intrinsically related.

Where many of us go wrong, I think, is in assuming that the art is designed to illuminate something about the artist. I could point to the public-image focused society of our current moment, where flattering photos are social currency and fame is a goal in and of itself. 

A question I'm left pondering is whether an audience member for a work of art has any right to raise his or her voice above that of the work's creator, particularly if the creator elects to not use their voice. Must there be a voice? If the creator doesn't choose to ascribe a public-yet-personal meaning to the work for others to consume, is the only other option letting the audience do it instead? If that is the case, are there situations wherein the creator is better off never showing an audience at all?

The question only becomes more interesting when you consider games as an artistic medium, compared to, for example, a novel or a movie. Games are unquestionably defined by their relationship to a player. What that player does within the confines of the game are part of the art, but the key is that a player is acting within the game world. Anything beyond that, from a consistent game mechanic or even an objective of any kind, is an extension of decisions that the creator, the artist, made.

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So what happens when a game is designed with no intent to appeal to hordes of players, yet is still playable? To a creator who is unmotivated by public validation in the spheres of novel writing, filming a movie, sculpting, etc., the exchange with the reader or viewer is not coded into the definition of the medium, though it is often assumed. In fact, what with all this "unmotivated by public validation" talk, I'd say that Ayn Rand would be a great reference point for this train of thought if she didn't also have a pretty strict view of what we can even call art.

There are famous examples of writers whose work went unpublished, or artists whose paintings went undiscovered until their deaths. Do you suppose that, on their deathbeds, they did not see their work as legitimate because they did not share it? I see this as unlikely.

Do you think they did not share it because of a fear of the public's ascribed meanings and the burden of having the public misunderstand the purpose of their work? Or perhaps a fear of presenting work for public validation only to find none?

The idea of an artist creating a specifically a game entirely for themselves as a creative outlet seems to defy reasoning. We assume that games are about us, the user. Without us pressing the buttons, nothing even happens, after all.

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Let's return to that idea I started with: the notion that art is for sharing, because any artist who creates without sharing is not visible as the counterpoint. What if an artist made games only as an outlet for themselves? If these were shared against their will, is it the artist's job to justify their work's existence and give it a discernible meaning?

When J. K. Rowling uses a pseudonym to seek public validation in an honest light, that is understandable to the world. It's quite possible this would be seen differently if she stopped releasing new writing to the world altogether, or if this work were shown off without the choice to do so as part of the art.

I don't have an answer to these hypothetical questions because, as many #LiberalArtsDegree discussions end, there is no clear answer. What's more important is that I think I have a clearer understanding of the complexities between art, artist, audience, and privacy. 

An artist is not a product, nor are they, necessarily, the art.

Movie Review: Elysium - Self-indulgently Macho Sci-fi Satire

Elysium stands as an excellent example how to fashion a brilliant setting welded to a political statement and then largely waste the effort. While Neill Blomkamp succeeded in social commentary via sci-fi in his previous outing, Distrinct 9, his new movie Elysium failed to convince me that this splendid society of economic inequality was created for something more than furistic gunshots and exo-suit powered fist fights.

The story takes place in 2154. Matt Damon is the Earth-bound Max, a man with a criminal past just trying to make his way on a planet that has long since been abandoned by the wealthy elite. This patrician class has fled the desolate and ruined surface to a luxurious man-made habitat satellite in the sky called Elysium. When he finds himself with only a few days to live, he makes it his desperate mission to travel to Elysium where his solution awaits.

With Jodie Foster playing homeland security chief for the satellite promised land, the two soon find themselves at odds. Max battles an agent in her employ, Kruger (Sharlto Copley). Kruger is amoral, lives for combat, and has a terribly confusing accent. And of course, he has a major case of JWD (Just Won’t Die).

This conflict steals the show, but not for the better. The brutality of their back-and-forth devours the intended satirical effect of the movie. I was left longing for more exposition about the fascinating state of Elysium, or the day-to-day toils of those down on the surface of Earth. Instead, I got explosions, guns, and fistfights. These could have been lifted from any number of movies you’ve seen before. For example, within the whole fascinating world of Elysium, Blomkamp chose to put a protracted ten minute fight seen on a barren patch of dirt. Not only are the fights nothing special, they aren’t even performed on the proper stage.

With a premise as promising as Elysium’s, every punch thrown and shot fired felt like another wasted opportunity. It seems to me like Blomkamp might have taken the wrong lesson from his previous movie, District 9, ascribing its success to the action-packed bits at the end. What made that movie splendid was its attention to world-building and the characters that lived there. On the other hand, Elysium teases a dystopian future with depth to spare, yet barely dips a toe in the pool and fails to deliver characters that can carry the story. Perhaps next time Blomkamp ventures back into the realm of bleak sci-fi as social commentary, he’ll give his viewers a bit more credit.

#18: The Showdown Effect - Carnage and Cliche

The Showdown Effect is a mish-mosh of action movie tropes proudly assembled in the form of a 2.5D action sidescroller. Surprisingly, it focuses on fast-paced multiplayer matches with several unique game modes, with no true single player mode. These games are no longer than your average session of Call of Duty, with an equally impressive body count. Competition is fierce, and the skill required to be the best is deceptively high. If you're into skill-based multiplayer games and have a hankerin' for something fresh after you've exhausted Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and Natural Selection 2, then The Showdown Effect delivers.

There are two basic varieties of weaponry: ranged and melee. Ranged weapons hit the opponent only if you click directly on the opponent, not behind them, a task that can be more difficult than expected. Melee weapons, on the other hand, deal massive damage and can be used to deflect incoming damage but are by their very nature more difficult to touch an opponent with. Add to this mix some dodge rolls, dives, bandaging, special moves, customized loadouts, wacky game modes, and active reloads a la Gears of War and you've got a Showdown.

Why shoot while standing when you can shoot while wall-jumping?

The basic deathmatch mode did not impress me. I found it to be relatively slow paced and uninteresting. With no single-player to speak of, the choice cuts of Showdown Effect lie in the less-played modes of One Man Army and The Expendables (referencing this). One Man Army is a different take on the classic FPS variant called Juggernaut. Everyone gets one turn per round as a super-powerful character while everyone else gangs up on them. The One Man Army who gets the most cumulative kills during their turn is declared winner.

My favorite, however, was The Expendables. Both teams are the same size, but one is stronger, spawns with their loadouts and special abilities, and can self-heal. How could the other team possibly win with their weaker characters and randomized weapons? Simple: they have instant respawn times while the super-team respawn timer gets longer and longer. Then teams switch. A sample game:

I join a game and choose Dutch McClone, whose terrific and intentionally generic backstory involves having no memory, being a clone and trying to figure out who took away his memory. My loadout has me using dual hand-crossbows, a rifle, and a golden ax. I load in on the overpowered team, where we fend off the henchman hordes for about twenty or thirty points. Suddenly, things go downhill: two team members fall, with respawn times above forty seconds.

Blue here is on the "Heroes" team, so if he dies to that rocket, he's got a long
respawn timer ahead of him. 

I flee from the marauding hordes of rocket-toting rabble. They outnumber my remaining teammate and me, and we both know our only hope is to run, try and pick them off one at a time, and stall until we can re-assemble. The tension of holding out against the endless henchmen as long as possible is one of the most enjoyable multiplayer moments I've had in recent memory, made even better by playing on a team with a few friends.

I do doubt the long-term replay value of the Showdown Effect, but I would have also said the same about games like Call of Duty. Many gamers continue to play the franchise with only glacially slow modifications to the formula, so what's fun may stay fun.

There is also the issue of map variety and the amount that player skill can be tested by awareness of surroundings. There are limits to how much these factors matter in a game that only moves from side to side. Bringing some buddies will drastically improve your mileage; when you get tired of gibbing folks with your shotgun, you can always get into a healthy diving-enemies-off-of-cliffs competition.

Its shortcomings aside, the Showdown Effect is a kitchen sink-salad of disparate game genres that shouldn't work nearly so well as it does. The simple deathmatch I first jumped into underwhelmed me, but my experimentation with the novel game modes alongside my friends made it clear that the risks Paradox took making this were rewarded. As I often find myself saying in my reviews, for $2.50 on sale or $10 full price, it's a worthy purchase. I'd more strongly recommend a 4-pack though; this is a game best played on a team with three friends.

3.5/5

#17: FTL: Faster Than Light - Boldly Go Where You'll Go Many Times Again

In FTL: Faster Than Light, you captain a starship on a secret mission. You carry information critical to the success of the last stand of the Federation fleet. As you can imagine, the "Federation" isn't doing too well if they're having a last stand. Outer space is full of people that want to shoot missiles, lasers, and people into your spaceship until it blows up. Once it blows up, it's game over, and it will blow up. And you will start over. But that's how the game works.

You see, FTL is randomly generated each time. As you jump from waypoint to waypoint across the stars evading the advancing rebel fleet, unpredictable encounters with enemies and conditional-friends will help you collect fuel, missiles, weapons and scrap with which to upgrade your ship. Upgrading is essential: the opposing ships rapidly increase in power and will leave you in the dust unless you use every trick in the book to stay alive and make your ship battle ready.

The UI is initially overwhelming, but you'll quickly be rerouting power from healing bay to shielding like a pro.

A typical game sees me starting out in my bare-bones ship, sending my crew members to their stations and warping to the nearest point of interest. I encounter a basic automated drone; because knocking out the oxygen will do nothing, I opt for the simple and direct approach of blasting at its shield generator until it explodes in a shower of debris, awarding me with some scrap.

Next, I find a slave ship. It offers to sell me a slave for a sum of scrap I cannot afford. My other two options are to fight it or leave. I opt to fight it; after beating their ship within a few seconds of death, they offer me terms of surrender: I take a slave for free, or else they will all die. Acknowledging my need for another crew member more than scrap, I agree to their terms. My crew member is not human, though; he's a rock-person, with 50% more HP, fire resistance, and half speed.

Jumping to the next waypoint, I encounter a planet of strange, six-legged, doe-eyed creatures. I am given the option of harvesting them to sell or attempting to communicate with them peacefully. In my greed, I opt to harvest them for money, only to have them turn aggressive and kill one of my crew members.

The best part is that eventually, your ship will be unprepared. You'll be boarded and your crew overpowered, your ship obliterated by overwhelming firepower, or simply gimped by an opposing ship that knocks out your engines and has defenses you can't penetrate in time.

"That's the best part?" you might be justified in asking. "Dying?" 

Of course it's impervious to heat. I mean, why wouldn't it be?

Yes. It is the knowledge that your ship is woefully unprepared that makes the run when the stars align and you power your way through the universe that much sweeter. For those who have ever played The Binding of Isaac or another rogue-like, it's the blistering difficulty and element of the unknown combined with permanent death that makes every attempt intense and enjoyable.

If it was not already obvious, I've enjoyed my time with FTL. I admit it was improved by my appreciation of sci-fi TV shows like Star Trek and Firefly, but I think that's more of a cherry on top than anything. However, the game has a few snafus.

After a few runs, it starts to feel like there are too many ship fighting events and not enough of everything else. The way ship shielding works can create a brick wall for players that, through sheer luck, are unable to properly equip themselves with appropriate weaponry in time, and this can be frustrating when it puts an end to an otherwise flawless run. And lastly, without revealing too much, you may very well never fully complete the game, and I would not blame you.

Despite its flaws, I think FTL is one of the most bold. inventive, and lets not forget fun indie games around. I recommend it sincerely and particularly because it is only $15 even at full price.

4.5 out of 5


If you found this review useful, please comment below, follow me on twitter @CraigCainkar, and follow, share, bookmark, staple, or lick this blog if you enjoyed it! And if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in future entries, please leave that in the comments as well. If you suggest a game and I own it, I'll play it for a future entry.

#16: Dust: An Elysian Tail - A Furry Case of the Metroidvanias

Dust: An Elysian Tail is an exercise in genre-blending. With its 2D platforming elements and slowly trickling supply of new tools to navigate hidden areas, it quickly prompts comparison to the famous Metroid and Castlevania games. Where it diverges noticeably, however, is in its approach to combat. Put simply, it's a brain-melting frenzy of projectiles, sparks and numbers, with combo counts in the hundreds for even basic enemies.

There's probably a Dragon Ball Z move to reference here,
but it's not one that I'm familiar with. Missed opportunity.

Within minutes, I was hitting X, Y and B in essentially random arrangements, with my Dust (the name of the protagonist) soaring into the sky, comboing baddies with my talking sword, and flooding my screen in a manner I would normally expect from a Japanese bullet-hell shooter. I was expecting the classic game design trick of "now that you know how powerful you can be, we'll take away all your powers!" But it never came. You start Dust: An Elysian Tail with most of your combat skills, and quickly gain those that remain. The rest of the game feels like that final hour of most RPGs when the player is a nigh-indestructible demigod. Once you gain a basic grasp of how to fight, the game actually expects you to achieve 300+ hit combos: you gain bonus experience for chaining hits! And you will. It's easy and satisfying to alternate between covering the screen in projectiles to stack up your combo meter and attacking foes directly to recharge your special gauge.

As you can see, the whirly-blur is using lightning to create
yellow numbers out of the purple smears.

The RPG elements spill over to the quest-driven nature of the game, with towns full of NPCs just chomping at the bit to send you off on a fetch quest. You equip Dust with various armor which enemies can drop or by crafting recipes using specialized materials (that enemies drop and are sold in stores). Level ups let you prioritize your favorite stats first, although for the most part it doesn't make a huge difference.

In fact, there were only two occasions I wasn't enjoying myself during Dust. The first was any time I was being forced to
backtrack because enemies respawn in rooms behind you.
Luckily, this did not happen too often.

Beware: for better or worse, this critter follows you all game.

The second issue, unfortunately, was more front and center: the characters and plot fell completely flat for
me. Within the first ten minutes, Dust is established as an incredibly talented warrior with amnesia who is mysteriously united with a sentient, talking sword. Without going further than that, I can assure you things don't get much better. If that weren't groan worthy enough, your flying orange squirrel companion has an appearance and irritating voice straight out of Digimon. In fact, all the main characters had melodramatic voice acting combined with hackneyed writing that made me want to play with subtitles only. Additionally, the decision to make every single character an anthropomorphic anime animal did not fit the attempted seriousness of the story. If you were wondering why the subtitle says "tail" instead of "tale", that's why.

It's my opinion that Dust: An Elysian Tail is an excellent expansion upon the 2D platformer explore-a-thon genre typified by games like Metroid, adding incredibly stylized combat to the mix and empowering the player with more RPG elements. The attempt to introduce a serious plot using essentially cartoon animal characters, though it fell flat, was at least an admirable risk. For $7.50, I'd certainly recommend giving it a shot. Go grab it while it's on sale.

4 out of 5

#15: Darksiders II - Who Knew Death Could Be So Much Fun?

I must admit that I originally planned on reviewing both the original Darksiders and the sequel, but I found that there were enough similarities that discussing them back to back would be a waste of words. So instead, I opted to talk about by far my favorite of the two: Darksiders II.

Both games are a mash-up of several other famous game franchises, Darksiders II even more so. This creative franken-game combines the combat of God of War with the loot and talent system of Diablo II, the questing of an MMORPG, the wall-running gymnastics of Prince of Persia, the dungeoneering of Legend of Zelda, and even a little bit of Portal. While some might expect these elements to jive poorly, I found them to combine to create a game greater than the sum of the ingredients.

Fans of Norse settings will love the first 1/3 of the game

3rd person shooter section? Why not?

Perhaps you've seen Darksiders before and been intrigued by the darkly ornate art style or the classic "Angels and demons, heaven and hell" setting. Both games are heavy on the visual flair and light on the story, so appreciating the aesthetic is important. I could tell you everything you need to know about the story of both games in about three sentences, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers I will simply say that you play as Death, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I am personally a huge fan of what they've accomplished both in character design and in their environments. Whether tearing into an enemy with dual scythes or simply galloping about the overworld, I found myself marveling at my surroundings and taking copious screenshots.

The combat in Darksiders II, as mentioned earlier, borrows heavily from God of War. What makes it unique is the presence of equipment and two distinct skill trees that lend themselves to either a merciless melee-heavy shredding machine or minion-and-ranged necromancer play style. You can painlessly respecialize Death with a simple trip to a vendor, so players can feel free to experiment with whichever style they prefer. The equipment drops off of enemies and from chests throughout the game, and comes in multiple levels of rarity, including legendary weapons from specific bosses and possessed weapons that players can "feed" extra items in order to boost their stats. The level of customization the player is offered for combat is frankly remarkable for this style of game.

Most dungeons have some kind of twist. This one gives you huge
rolling stone golems with rocket fists.

Death finds himself plundering Legend of Zelda style dungeons with regularity in Darksiders II, even down to the grappling hooks, bombs, switch puzzles, and long-running collect-a-thon sidequests. While the puzzles never quite seem to reach too far in complexity, they're enough to make most players do a double-take before coming up with a solution. The original Darksiders had puzzles that were too easy for most of the game, but the follow-up gets it right. Darksiders II is not a short game, either; it contains a solid 20 to 30 hours of gameplay for those who do the side quests, and that's before the "New Game+" that lets you bring all of your equipment, levels, and stats into a second playthrough.

Death's "Reaper Form" is only available in short bursts, but
 is completely awesome and unstoppable.

I came very close to ending this review with a wholehearted seal of approval, but I simply can't in good conscience ignore a few major flaws, particularly in reference to the DLC (an area of discussion that often doesn't get a proper review; aren't you glad I was late to the party now?)

First of all, the game never explains the stats beyond giving you a number that goes up or down. I guess most gamers can probably figure out that "Strength" helps you with melee attacks while "Arcane" helps you with abilities, but what about melee attack abilities? What about abilities that summon minions? Does it increase the health of the minions or the damage? What about defense, does that reduce all damage? Is it a linear reduction or are there diminishing returns to stacking defense? What does "health regen: 36" even mean, that isn't a rate! While this might seem like nitpicking, I believe that trawling the internet to find this information is ridiculous when it's central to the function of your character.

The Darksiders franchise has a uniquely mechanical
take on the appearance of angels.

The second issue is that the DLC has some quality control issues. The first DLC, Argul's Tomb, is very bland, with the only highlight being the use of an icy mountainous setting. The second DLC, The Abyssal Forge, is acceptable though short. The third DLC, The Demon Lord Belial, is fine enough . . . if you can even play it without your game crashing.

See, there's a crippling freeze bug in Darksiders II that can happen to anyone but tends to rear its head for players working their way through the DLC, particularly those who reach the third one. Eventually, your character's safe file is "too big" for what the game is set up to handle, and basic actions will cause the game to crash. Despite this being known for months prior to THQ's own death, it was never fixed.

Luckily, one intrepid internet troubleshooter created an executable that fixes this bug as long as your Darksiders II game is saved in the Steam default location. I personally thanked him for his troubles, as it allowed me to finish playing this otherwise enjoyable game. For those who are interested, you can find it here (make sure to turn off Steam auto-updates for Darksiders II after applying the fix): https://code.google.com/p/ds2fix/

The Verdict

Darksiders II was an excellent hybrid of several phenomenal game franchises. In addition, it has its own endearingly intense and unabashedly over-the-top artistic direction. I recommend Darksiders II to nearly anyone who enjoys one of the "component games", with the caveat that you might need to do some self-troubleshooting. The publisher THQ is now defunct, so I can only pray that someday the IP for Darksiders gets picked up and a third entry (starring Fury or Strife) is given the attention it so clearly deserves.

4 out of 5

Thanks for reading! Please comment below, follow me on twitter @CraigCainkar, and follow, share, bookmark, staple, or lick this blog if you enjoyed it! And if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in future entries, please leave that in the comments as well. If you suggest a game and I own it, I'll play it for a future entry.

#14: Resistance: Burning Skies - Better Than Nothing

As I was just freed from a lengthy 17 hours worth of flights, you can imagine that I had an awful lot of time to kill. I spent a reasonable chunk of that time sleeping awkwardly in the fetal position, to take advantage of the adjacent empty seat. At some point I clawed the businessman next seat over in half-awake confusion.

The other chunk of time was spent playing my freshly purchased PS Vita that came with Resistance: Burning Skies. I'm aware it's not a Steam game, but I personally believe that consoles and handhelds have great offerings as well. Unfortunately, this particular entry in the Resistance franchise was average in almost every way, which was both a slight disappointment and better than nothing, especially considering a certain critically-reamed Call of Duty spin-off on the Vita.

The gameplay is everything you'd expect from a shooter on the Vita, which comes with the caveat of "there is no gold standard for what to expect from a shooter on the Vita". You aim down various gun barrels at various baddies, with just enough of both to be kind of interesting. There's generous aim correction out of necessity, because even though the Vita has two control sticks, they simply cannot replicate a console controller.

Because the plot is just so incredibly forgettable and cliche (you play as a one-man-army fireman fighting for his family), Resistance: Burning Skies really depended on the gunplay to save it and only barely succeeded. Enemy AI is a joke; they move in a jerky, illogical manner and seem to always enter the battle in strategic locations in lieu of actually having any logic governing their behavior to lead them there. There are really only five types of standard enemies, each assigned a specific gun, and they all have quirks that don't feel quite intended. For example, I found the enemy type that sports the wall-penetrating "Augur" gun to be easily countered by stepping left and right and firing an Augur back at him. They don't seem very inclined to move while shooting.

Generally when I died, it was because I was caught by an enemy with a clean line of sight on you at close range. I get the impression enemy accuracy was reduced by giving them unnaturally high bullet spread; this means that when even the lowest level baddie gets a few feet away, he can still kill you in two seconds by himself. I think switching it to "Hard" would have perhaps caused me to die to other things as well, but even on normal, point blank enemies hurt so bad that the shotgun was often too dangerous to use.

You need to be able to make your own fun in Resistance: Burning Skies. Your various weapons all have imaginative secondary fire modes, like the franchise trademark "Bullseye" automatic rifle's "tag" that causes all bullets fired to home in on the tagged target. Because the environments are lazily-made hallways with cover leading to rooms with cover leading to hallways with cover, the only meaningful variety must come from the player's usage of their toys.

Let me put it this way. Resistance: Burning Skies is not worth the price unless you are truly a die-hard Resistance fan or you're desperate for a shooter on the Vita. I personally acquired my Vita for so cheap that the copy of Resistance was just a bonus, so I don't feel slighted in the least.

I'm going to start assigning numerical values to my evaluation of games, because the way I look at it, if Tom Chick can end up on Metacritic while shattering the "game review scale" under the justification of total subjectivity (2/10 for Halo 4?), then my number is just as good. So...


2 out of 5


Thanks for reading. Please comment below, follow me on twitter @CraigCainkar, and follow, share, bookmark, staple, or lick this blog if you enjoyed it! If you agree, disagree, or have something to add, please comment below! I'll give you a personalized response.

#13: To The Moon - I Hope They Have Kleenex There

Borrowed from the Wiki page!

If you've ever wished your video games made you get weepy more often, then To The Moon is the game for you. We're going to cover some ground similar to my Dear Esther review here, but rest assured that I think To The Moon stands on its own two feet as an enjoyable experience. Just make sure to play it alone and in one sitting, because it's like a movie both in structure and length.

To The Moon is a touching story about fulfilling a dying mans wish to, you guessed it, go to the moon.. It's got a sort of science-fiction tint to it since it's done through a device that allows traveling through memories and modifying them in a manner similar to a combination of Inception and Memento. As with any tearjerker story, a romance is involved. Considering the game uses a retro pixel-heavy art style, you've got to have at least a little bit of imagination for it to work, but I think the creator has done an admirable job.

To The Moon's gameplay is shallow at best. It can be played with a gamepad, arrows and spacebar, or a mouse as a point and click adventure, but it makes little difference because there is no skill element whatsoever except for a simplistic panel-flipping mini game you encounter in order to progress. Essentially, the story is stapled to a skeleton of a game that sometimes feels utterly unnecessary except to keep the player directly involved in what's going on. The story truly carries it all the way from beginning to end, to the extent that sometimes it feels like segments that are player controlled would be better off as cut scenes. Whether you feel cheated when you play To The Moon will be determined largely by whether you're in it for the story or for depth of mechanics. Luckily, I knew what I was getting into when I played it, and the narrative was more than enough to make me happy (and sad).

Image credit: MajorMitch at Giantbomb.
My Steam overlay wasn't playing nice for taking snapshots. 

I don't think it's possible to talk about To The Moon without mentioning the soundtrack. The score truly sets the mood. The music is haunting and beautiful, particularly the "main song" of the story. You'll know which one I'm talking about when you play, because it's played so much it almost (almost) loses its effect.

I must make a few comments on the narrative while hopefully avoiding anything too spoiler-y. I do not think that the story was well served by the "sci-fi memory diving machine" aspect. It was almost entirely separate from the true story being told, the dying man's life story. I also found that the dialogue was sometimes painfully unrealistic or awkward, particularly between the two doctors working through his memories. There were too many moments that felt like the writer was saying "Look! This character is a nerd! You are probably a nerd! This makes this character cool!" I found that particular character obnoxious because he was inconsistent with the tone of the story.

Despite my narrative bashing and dislike of cliches, my cynical self was shedding manly tears by 2/3 or so through the game. I cry when things are sad, so your results may vary, but there's a certain twist that left me pleasantly surprised.

To The Moon is a good peek at how narratives in video games could develop in the future. Between Bioshock: Infinite and this, I am optimistic (though I think I've had enough stories with lighthouse motifs for a while.) It's nowhere near perfect, particularly in the "game" aspect, but it's a step forward. For that, To The Moon was totally worth $2.50, and I'd recommend picking up the soundtrack as well if you've got the cash.


Thanks for reading. Please comment below, follow me on twitter @CraigCainkar, and follow, share, bookmark, staple, or lick this blog if you enjoyed it! And if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in future entries, please leave that in the comments as well. . . If you suggest a game and I own it, I will most likely play it for the next entry.

#12: They Bleed Pixels - Taking a Stab at "Good Difficult"

They Bleed Pixels is an H. P. Lovecraft-themed 2D platformer in a pixel-art style with an emphasis on wall-climbin', baddie stabbin', and dying an awful lot. Subtract the Lovecraft and stabbin' elements from that description, and you might notice a similarity to a certain other well known 2D platformer that starts with "Super" and ends with "Meat Boy". The similarities between the two games are occasionally so noticeable that if the Game_Design.doc for They Bleed Pixels doesn't make reference to Super Meat Boy at least once, I will eat my keyboard.

In my best Christopher Walken impression: Spooky!

It's not a crime to borrow elements from other platformers. To an extent, that's what nearly every genre in every entertainment medium does in order to move forward. There are many aspects of They Bleed Pixels that are innovative in the sense that at least I have not personally encountered them before. Therefore, let's discuss what TBP does differently than Super Meat Boy, what it borrows, and what I think works and what doesn't work.

The levels are often heavily vertical. Don't look down.

In TBP, you've got the classic full-stop-in-mid-air double jump and wall climbing abilities, which you will use about a million times per level, so familiarizing yourself with how it works is important. There's a basic combat system revolving around a rapid stabbing move and a kick that can send enemies away into environmental hazards or upward to be juggled further. There is no ability to block, though you'll find yourself often wishing there was one as you only can survive two hits before dying. The more variety in your combos, the more "pints of blood you spill" (translation: points earned). The more points you earn, the faster your checkpoint meter fills up and you can lay another checkpoint in any spot you choose, so long as there are no moving environmental hazards in your immediate vicinity and you can stay still for two seconds.

Exhibit 1: The purple glyph that indicates a fresh checkpoint.
Exhibit 2: The reason the game is called "They Bleed Pixels".

This sounds like a totally rad, hip way of dealing with the ancient problem of saving progress in a platforming game, right? Unfortunately, it becomes irritating after the first time you accidentally place a checkpoint in a terrible spot that requires you to repeat the same section over and over in order to get another stab at the part you're actually dying on. 

The odd thing is that this is a quality endemic to platformers; it's pretty much tradition that until you can do the whole level all the way through, you repeat the sections you've already mastered on your way to the tricky part (which is always toward the end). However, this treatment tastes far, far worse when it's obvious that it's your fault as the player. It also hints at the necessary question: why introduce a feature that does nothing but allow the player to screw themselves compared to static checkpoints intelligently chosen by the developer to minimize frustration? I was unable to find a good answer. The only saving grace is that there is no limit to how many times you can die and retry at a checkpoint. Be forewarned: I died upwards of 100 times on some levels before completing them.

Note the "Lives Lost" section. This was the last level, so it was particularly nasty.

For whatever reason, the creators of TBP chose to eschew the platformer genre convention of the "invincible grace period" after being harmed, an element that exists primarily to minimize frustration and feelings of "cheap deaths" from being trapped or hit multiple times in a short time window with no chance to react. While Super Meat Boy avoided this by not allowing the player to survive any hit whatsoever, TBP gives the illusion of durability through the three heart health bar. In practice, however, it quickly becomes apparent why most games elect to include that grace period; death in TBP can and almost always will be swift and brutal. This brings me to what I consider the primary issue with TBP, which is a pervasive feeling that you don't always deserve your failures. Super Meat Boy managed to be incredibly difficult without leaving the player feeling cheated, TBP does not achieve this same zen.

Here's why, when combined with the lack of a grace period. TBP has more saw blades than Sears, and these buggers will always send you flying harshly in some direction, such as off the platform or into further hazards. Thus, saw blades are often fatal despite only supposedly doing one heart of damage. The stock enemy has an attack that has the same effect of knocking about. Most enemies will simply cause you damage anyway if you try to hit them during their attack animation. Plus, a particularly annoying enemy type resembling a flying squid has a tendency to move in your way while you're platforming, resulting, of course, in an irritating "cheap death". 

Aside from the single saw blade on the bottom left, these are stationary. Regardless, hitting one will knock you into the others and result in death. Also, there's one of those pesky squids.

The game clearly aspires to be "fun because it's so difficult" in the way that is hip right now among smaller game developers, much like pixel art (not to say I think either trend is necessarily negative). At times, it succeeds gloriously; in my opinion, these are the sections heaviest on platforming and wall-climbing, like a spikey-armed Spiderman. However, the combat is relatively shallow, and sections with too many hazards everywhere are often frustrating because of being knocked around like a pinball to your death. If the extremity of some of the achievements for They Bleed Pixels is any indication, there are people out there who are much more dedicated than I (I'd like to see a real life human beat the last level without dying once). 

Oh, and slippery ground. There's a level early in the game absolutely loaded with slippery ground. There's a reason ice levels are always loathed in games: because having less control over your character is awful and everyone hates it. Only more so in a game like this.

I know I likely gave the impression that I didn't enjoy They Bleed Pixels at all. That would be incorrect. I'm pretty sure I only paid $5 for the game. Overall, not too shabby, especially from a value perspective. The main takeaway should simply be that I think the game had potential that it didn't quite live up to. It's the result of an accumulation of minor frustrations hindering enjoyment of the game as a whole for someone like me.

Still, if you like deliberately hard platformers like Super Meat Boy or Mega Man 9, then They Bleed Pixels is worth your time because it was designed for you. However, I don't believe it has the mass appeal of some of its brethren. Perhaps the developers understood that anyway when they chose a Lovecraft theme. 

Thanks for reading. Please comment and follow/share/bookmark/staple/lick this blog if you enjoyed it! And if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in future entries, please leave that in the comments as well. . . If you suggest a game and I own it, I will most likely play it for the next entry.

#11: EDGE - Rolling, Cubed

EDGE is a puzzle-platformer in which you play as a rolling cube. You have all the incredible powers typical of rolling cubes, such as existing in three dimensions, having mass, and rolling with more difficulty than, say, a sphere. 

  

In EDGE, the gameplay is the entire game. Much like most puzzle/platformer games, there is no story line or multiplayer. You simply roll your cube in one of four directions through the elaborate levels collecting rainbow-colored prisms and reaching the end zone as quickly as you can. Getting all the prisms may take you longer than a straight roll through. While the game does not force you to meet any particular time threshold to progress to the next level, you do receive a letter grade at the end letting you know whether your cube rolling skills could use some work. For people like me, the game is about completing the levels, not about training to get an S on each one, but at least it's there for the more obsessive among us.

"Close enough."

There are two noteworthy aspects of controlling the cube in EDGE that make this game feel more novel than merely a four-direction platformer. 

1. You are rolling a cube. Think about the last time you tried to roll a cube in real life. It didn't roll very easily, did it? One might argue that cubes don't even roll at all, they merely flop one side over until flopped again, in rapid succession. Regardless, this translates into controlling the game. You need to push your arrow keys / control stick pretty firmly in a given direction to get the cube to tilt far enough to fall into the next square over. Momentum helps with that as well. This means that there is no "walk" or "roll slowly" mode, for the most part. But that middle-range of movement control still sees some usage, as you're about to see.

2. Your cube has the strange, almost Catherine-like property of being sticky to whichever cube of ground it is rolling toward (as in Catherine the game). It can also climb a maximum of one cube upward via this same property. However, this means that if the cube you're moving onto is itself moving, you cling to it until you're firmly in one space or another. If you can prolong your movement by edging your control stick that direction just enough to keep the cube suspended in attachment without landing anywhere, you can travel that way. This method has the added bonus of subtracting any time spent "edging" from your final time, so hardcore speed runners will no doubt take every opportunity to "edge" while waiting, even when it's not technically necessary.

This would be an example of using edging at a time when it is not technically necessary, but it does shave off time to get a better score.

Sometimes the levels can be creative beyond just the puzzle design, either in some kind of resemblance to an object, a tie-in to the funky chip tune soundtrack, or because they temporarily made your cube into a Mechwarrior:

While entirely cosmetic mechanically speaking, stuff like this helps break apart the otherwise somewhat monotonous level design.

Now, the important part: did I think the game was actually fun?

Sort of. I was enjoying myself initially, but as the levels became longer and more intricate they started to lose my interest, as the central game mechanics remained essentially the same but with more elaborate setups and more opportunities to clumsily fall or get crushed. I have never been one to stay interested in platformer or puzzle games for too long, so this was no surprise to me. My main complaint, honestly, was that the deliberate clumsiness of controlling a rolling cube stopped being novel and started being frustrating. I like tight and responsive controls, and even if a cube being bad at rolling is realistic and required for the "edging" mechanic, I found it frustrating. I did not complete the game, but I did get about 3/4 of the way through the original levels, and 1/4 through the free DLC levels (props to Two Tribes, the developer, for going the free DLC route).

I would say I got my mileage out of EDGE despite not liking it that much because I either got it as part of a Humble Bundle, a bundle on Steam, or a daily deal. With a base price of $8, there's a good chance I paid $2 or less overall, which is about the price of a microtransaction purchase in a disappointing phone game. Not bad.

Thanks for reading. Please comment and follow/share/bookmark/staple/lick this blog if you enjoyed it! And if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in future entries, please leave that in the comments as well. . . If you suggest a game and I own it, I will most likely play it for the next entry.

#10: Dear Esther - Walking Simulator 2012

Dear Esther is essentially a British walking simulator. The primary gameplay mechanic is walking. Excited yet? The fun is only beginning! Wait until I get to the advanced mechanics, such as zooming in your vision slightly. 

[I'm pretty sure I picked this up for $2.50 during a sale at some point, but the truth is that I have no idea.]

I do not claim ownership of this image, but I'm using it as the box art because the "A deserted island, a lost man, memories of a fatal crash, a book written by a dying explorer" bit basically tells you everything you need to know about the "plot".

If it wasn't clear to you already, I'm being somewhat harsh on Dear Esther. That is only because this "game" is essentially a trap to anyone who buys it uninformed. In reality, there is no game.

Dear Esther is not a game. But it is a relatively successful experiment in interactive art.

It is lovingly rendered in detail in the Source engine, and has environments that vary from average to jaw-dropping gorgeous. Because all you can really do in the game is walk, look around, and listen, enjoying the environment is essential to finding any value in your purchase. Even the path you actually take is largely linear, with few ways to go the wrong direction. If you can't stop and enjoy the scenery, there is nothing left here for you.

Man, I wonder if I need to end up at the blinking aerial tower. They only mentioned it, like, right away.

Throughout the game, your character narrates snippets of letters, descriptions of life experiences, and reflections on the past in a British accent (I couldn't shake the feeling that I was playing as the protagonist from Amnesia: The Dark Descent). Generally these have something to do with your location. These can sometimes be cryptic or unhelpful, particularly toward the beginning, but they begin to come together to form a more cohesive story by the end. There are essentially four major plot items as noted by the first image: a deserted island, a lost man (you), memories of a fatal crash, and a book written by a dying explorer (that your character appears to be citing sometimes). There's more depth to it than that, more shades and hues of flavor and suggestion behind the story, but that's up to your individual interpretation. I switched out of being an English Literature major for a reason; I'm not going to be doing any deep symbolic postmodern feminist deconstructionist analysis here for you, thank you very much.

This guy speaks in thick prose because he's British, and all British people speak in thick prose.

Here's the honest truth: I didn't enjoy Dear Esther. Normally, I really dig indie games like this. You know, ones that push the envelope and try something drastically different from the norm. I find myself attracted to that kind of innovation instead of the regurgitated mechanics we tend to find in mainstream titles. But Dear Esther had no mechanic whatsoever. I've seen beautiful environments in games before, and I've held down W to move forward for an hour in games before. Without any way to meaningfully interact with the world around me besides walking through it at a painfully slow and plodding pace (it is irritatingly slow, trust me), I felt like some kind of empty floating camera, devoid of heft or humanity.

Dear Esther also committed one of the cardinal sins of salesmanship: failure to inform the buyer of what exactly they were buying. It's not a game in any traditional sense of the word, yet its only hope of making a profit centered on marketing Dear Esther to gamers. The mismatch left a sour taste in my mouth.

So what happens when you put me in a game where the only aspect appealing to me is the gorgeous environment, offer me a hotkey to take a screenshot within Steam, and provide no gameplay to speak of?

I play Pokemon Snap.

What follows is a galley of photographs I took while playing. The cave pictures are particularly gorgeous. The truth is that if they had not done such a phenomenal job with the caves, I would have been much more dissatisfied with the game. However, these stalactite-laden zones justified my time playing the game, which was only a little over an hour.

The caves are gorgeous. There's no doubt about it.

You'll find things painted on walls throughout the game.

You require more minerals. . .

This image was a lot more impressive in motion. Those smears of green are waterfalls, not moss.

Just thought this was cool.

So the big question is, did I consider Dear Esther worth my money and time, even if I didn't enjoy it very much?

Yes. It was a novel experience. Even if there was no game, the eye candy within the caves made it worth the hour or so I spent playing through it. While I would have probably been annoyed if I knew that I paid the full $10 for it, I know that in reality I probably paid about $2.49 for it, so I can accept that.

Dear Esther therefore gets the nod from me, but only on the basis of the lowered price. Perhaps there are people out there to whom this is worth $10, but this "game" is just not my thing.

As a reminder: future entries will not be coming on a weekly basis, but on a basis of "whenever I find the time  between my class workload", thus the change from "Week #" to "Entry #". Aside from that, nothing is different, so don't fret.

I have several partially-completed games at the moment, so once I've completed one and feel there's anything to write, I'll put up another entry. See you next time!


Thanks for reading. Please comment and follow/share/bookmark/staple/lick this blog if you enjoyed it! And if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in future entries, please leave that in the comments as well. . . If you suggest a game and I own it, I will most likely play it for the next entry.

#9: Ticket to Ride Online - Cheap Train Fare

I hope you're ready for some steamy train action, because this time I'll be talking about Ticket to Ride. I picked it up as part of an indie game bundle on Steam during the recent summer sale.

Typically, Ticket to Ride is played as a board game. It's a relatively well known board game to boot, particularly among those who have advanced beyond the occasional game of Settlers of Catan and hunger for even more European-style board game fare. It's no Monopoly or Risk though as far as infamy goes, so if you live in the USA and haven't heard of Ticket to Ride before, I can't really blame you.

If I saw that portly guy with the mutton chops and the purple tux at any point in history, I'd consider my day a success. You have to have serious #trainswag to pull that off.

In two sentences, the game consists of collecting quantities of different color "train cards" so that you can place a train linking two cities on a track of the corresponding color and length with the ultimate goal of completing your "tickets". Tickets are cards that task you with connecting two cities and give bonus points if completed, but subtract the same number of points from your final score if you fail to connect those two cities.

The people throughout the menus (such as the fellow on the left here) are all terribly voice acted, so much so that the first thing I did was go into options and look for a way to shut them up. Aside from that, the interface is basic but effective at getting you into the game quickly.

You can play the game online or against AI, and at least for someone of my competence the AI seems adequately difficult (which is to say, I played two games solo and went 50/50). For online, there's matchmaking or custom game lobbies for 2-5 players, so whatever floats your boat is available to you.

Initially the game can appear overwhelming, but it actually takes all of two or three minutes to learn. Unsurprisingly, the claim "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master!" features prominently on their Steam store page.

Let's take the above screencap of one of my games online. This is basically the entire game, so I'll go clockwise around the screen, starting in the top left, describing what we see. 

We've got a back/leave the game button, mute sound button (which you'll want to do, because the background music is beyond terrible), and a help button that can succinctly explain anything you need to know to play. After using it to check how exactly the game ends and the rules for the two-lane tracks, I pretty much figured out the rest of the game on my first try.

Anyway, next, we've got the little profiles for your opponents. You can see how many train pieces they have left, how many cards are in their hand up to a point (after 8 it just says 8+, which is a big chunk of the time), and how many tickets they've picked so far (I'll address that in a moment).

On the right side, we've got the the different cards you can draw on your turn. You may use your turn to draw 2 train cards total, each from either the top of the deck or one of the five that have been flipped face up in play. If you choose a wild card from in play, it uses both of your draws. When you choose one of the revealed ones, it will be replaced by the top card of the deck immediately. If you draw from the top of the deck, your card is essentially random, but you have a chance of getting a wild card for the price of only one card draw. 

Alternatively, you can draw three tickets from the ticket deck and choose to keep a minimum of one of them. You will probably not do this too many times per game if at all; as I mentioned earlier, each incomplete ticket deducts points from your final score.

The bottom right shows how many tickets you've kept so far, and how many you've completed. The bottom-middle is your hand, showing the various colors and quantities of train cards you currently have. While, for example, four yellow train cards could be used to place a train route that is yellow and containing four or fewer train spaces, it is also important to note that any color train cards can be used to place a route that is grey colored. These are opportunities to screw your opponents over if their intended goal is too obvious by clogging their train routes with your own trains and forcing them to build around.

Bottom left shows how many cards are in your hand and how many train pieces you have left, as well as a large and pointless picture of "you". 

Finally, going back up the left side, we've got a chat log (I almost never saw this used at any time, I guess the online board game crowd is a silent lot) and a chart explaining how many points you earn for placing routes of different sizes. While you don't get many points for placing routes that consist of 1, 2, or 3 train pieces, you get a veritable jackpot for 6 pieces and above.

I am the green kid this time. I didn't end up winning this game, but it was close. My opponents clogged several of my planned routes and left me with a meandering mess of a train system that missed several tickets and made me lose tons of points.

The game ends when any player reaches 2 to 0 remaining train game pieces. All players then have a chance to play one more turn. This can result in a viable strategy being "end the game as soon as possible" because the person who ends the game will logically have the most trains on the board and therefore a point advantage. It also makes sense to just place trains as soon as possible to end the game if you don't think you have enough time to complete another ticket, in order to deprive other players of the chance to earn more points. Plus, if you can put them in a long chain, the person who controls the longest continuous train route gets a bonus 10 points!

The results screen for that previous screenshot's game. It was close primarily because my opponents screwed with eachother's plans as much as my own, but red pulled ahead for the win with the longest train route bonus at the end.

Some observations from my 12-to-15 games of Ticket to Ride:

• Grabbing lots of tickets in an attempt to tie together a bunch of east coast cities seems high-risk, low reward. Simply grabbing lots of train cards and building the long routes on the west coast seems to generate the same amount of points before even adding in ticket bonuses, yet that plan also seems safer.
• Always grab from the top of the train deck unless you urgently need a specific color and it's available in play at that moment. By grabbing from the top of the deck, you can accumulate wild cards to fill in any holes in your train color assortment anyway.
• Don't underestimate how badly you can screw someone over by simply placing a 2 or 3 train piece route in the way of their goal. You might waste a turn and a few trains, but they will waste several turns and several more trains than you did trying to go around it.
• Sometimes, you just get lucky or unlucky. It's a board game. There's a strong element of luck on purpose. The bright side is that the game does a fairly good job of not letting you feel like your fate is being controlled by anything random.
• As someone who has played a decent number of board games, playing it online with automated shuffling, hand sorting, illuminated route goals, and other small conveniences probably cuts the playtime of this game in half, if not more. I rarely take longer than 15-20 minutes to complete a game of Ticket to Ride online, with no setup or putting it back away into the box.

The bad news of course is that in order to play with friends, they will need to fork over $10 each to buy it at full price. It doesn't stop there; in order to play any map aside from the USA, you'll need to fork over a few more bucks. There are four additional maps listed on the Steam Store, with a cumulative cost of $15. 

There are numerous pros and cons to investing in a board game's online version instead of the physical version, but I think I will save the subject of video game adaptations of board games and card games for another blog entry entirely. Hopefully you'll see it go up soon.

As always, thank you for reading, and may your trains always run on time without a fascist dictator taking control of your country.

Thanks for reading. Please comment and follow/share/bookmark/staple/lick this blog if you enjoyed it! And if you have any suggestions for what you would like to see in future entries, please leave that in the comments as well. . . If you suggest a game and I own it, I will most likely play it for the next entry.