Two Personas for the Price of One

The quality of a game or story's characters can make or break the whole thing. A good character is a wonderful thing, perfectly encapsulating the marvelous thing that is a human being and making you feel like this fictional person really exists. They have strengths and flaws and are complex individuals (at least, when they need to be). A bad character is stereotypical or at best, boring.

As gamers, we sometimes get to do what writers do every day - create our own character. The option is still very limited and mostly confined to the RPG genre but opportunities do exist. Some people make a basic stereotype or just pick the first option because they don't really care what their character looks like. On the other end of the spectrum exist people like Brendan Keogh.

Brendan Keogh recently wrote a post on Games On Net about his alter-ego Qwae. Qwae is the persona he inhabits any time he plays a game where he has some amount of character choice (and even in some where he doesn't). She isn't just a set look or age; he has basically created a complete personality for Qwae and sticks to it whenever he plays a game as her. She is a "set of ideas" that he adheres to as he plays his role.

The idea seems so simple but brilliant. While (I assume) most of us create a character for a particular playstyle or to match the tone of the particular game, Qwae is always the same person no matter the situation. She may be a Grey Warden in one game and savior of the galaxy in the next but her ideals, quirks, and beliefs never change.

As a writer, I envy this ability to perfectly slip into another character, making decisions they would make and knowing their innermost thoughts. As a gamer, I envy it even more. The idea of a complete alternate persona that lives in my favorite game worlds but also exists entirely in my head fills me with a desire to go forth and create such a persona. Who wouldn't want to become more immersed in their favorite games (well, maybe not the post-apocalyptic ones...). Maybe I can't create as three-dimensional and realistic alter-ego as Qwae but I intend to try.

PS: The article by Brendan Keogh can be found here. Enjoy!

Steam Roundup: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is a Lucasarts adventure game from released in 1992. It used the SCUMM language, the same language that powered most of Lucasarts adventure games such as the Monkey Island series and Maniac Mansion. It is essentially a Indiana Jones game in a Monkey Island shell and it works well for this game.

I've never been the biggest fan of adventure games. For one thing, they were really popular around the time when I was in preschool. The main reason I've never liked them much is the frustration I feel when I can't figure out how two objects are supposed to interact. Adventure games are infamous for crazy puzzle solutions that make little to no sense and it's always infuriated me when one of them pop up. I can bear most adventure games today but my anger is on a hair trigger when it comes to being stuck on a puzzle. Lame trait I have.

So, in all honesty, I used a FAQ to get through this game in a timely manner. In fact, I use FAQ's for most of my adventure games. To me, the story of the game is the enjoyable part, so I don't feel bad trying to get past the annoying parts of these games any way I can. Some of you may argue that I'm ruining the game or I'm making the length of it that much shorter but it's what I feel comfortable doing.

As far as this game's story goes, it's pretty darn good, as most Lucasarts games are. The titular fate of Atlantis is discovered over the course of the game and the beats are pretty good. Interesting characters, decent voice acting, and a nice variety of locations round it out. I could easily see the plot of this game being another Indiana Jones movie (probably a better one than the Crystal Skull...).

On the downside, there are a lot of puzzles that require backtracking and thorough searching to complete. True to the era, yes, but it doesn't hold up so well nowadays. Having a FAQ certainly helped but there were a few areas where I still had to poke around a bit longer than I liked.

I've heard people talk about this game for years as one of the better Lucasarts games and I have to agree. It holds up as well as I expected and was a nice change of pace from the (mostly) FPS games I've been playing for this roundup.

Steam Roundup: Duke Nukem Forever

As all but the most casual gamers know, Duke Nukem Forever is the highly-anticipated (or at least it was until more than five years had passed) sequel to Duke Nukem 3D, a very highly regarded FPS for the old days of PC gaming. It was in development by 3D Realms for 14 years, the longest known development cycle ever heard of for a video game. Of course, the longer it was in development, the higher expectations went and the hype built to crazy levels at some points. If you take the time span into account, the time when the game should have released, it probably would have been a damn fine shooter for its day. Unfortunately, since it was released this year, things have changed and it feels extremely antiquated.

Any major change you can think of in first person shooters (or practically gaming in general) is probably absent here, barring the inclusion of regenerating health and two weapons at a time. It's an odd game to play in the present day, almost as if the developers of the game didn't have the time to play any games from the last decade and to incorporate the changes in design. It truly feels like what it is - a shooter from another time.

Duke himself is just as antiquated at this point. His misogynistic nature and tendency to quote random movies with his own spin on them was funny in the Duke 3D days but it just seems stupid now. I don't think I laughed at any one comment he ever made, except maybe to laugh at just how ridiculous it was. I also can't ever forget the horrible sense of humor from The Hive level, as I mentioned in yesterday's post.

Most of all, the game is just boring. I've played a lot of shooters and this one just doesn't ever seem fun. The enemies don't do anything interesting, the developer's idea of mixing things up is shrunk levels full of jump puzzles, and boss fights in an FPS were never a good idea. I took several breaks from the game because I just couldn't stand to play it anymore at the time. I'm not saying it needed to be the 'roller-coaster ride' of today's games; it just doesn't have any personality of its own and is highly derivitave.

As I stated in my post yesterday, I knew I had to play Duke Nukem Forever. The history behind this game is the most storied and confusing that gaming has ever seen and the final product is something that anyone who has heard it has to get their hands on. I never expected the game to live up to the hype. I only wish it could have been a halfway-decent FPS.

The Hive - One of the Worst Things Ever?

I just started playing Duke Nukem Forever yesterday. Yeah, I know, I'm way behind everyone else. I refused to pay any more than $5 for this game (and achieved this goal thanks to the Steam sale going on now) but I knew that I needed to play through it, knowing its long and storied history. I decided to throw it into my Steam Roundup because it managed to fit in alphabetical order as I was proceeding.

Now, I've seen bit and pieces of this game before, mostly from one of Giant Bomb's well-known Quick Looks. It is one of the areas that I saw in this gameplay video that I want to talk about today - The Hive. Yes, some of you may remember the comments about this section of the game back around its release and I'm finally getting my two cents in. I didn't want to say anything until I had actually played through the section.

Watching The Hive level being played by someone else was enough to make me disgusted and I was dreading my own play of it. I can't really say it was any worse than what I had already seen but remembering just how bad it is is enough. For those of you who don't know, Duke Nukem is all about saving the babes from the alien threat. That's what he did in Duke 3D and that's what he's doing now. Now, it's been taken to a gross, unseemly place in Duke Nukem Forever.

In this level, you find the women that have been kidnapped and see what has become of them. They have been impregnated with alien seed and are left stuck to the ground in some sort of half-cocoon things, topless. Throughout the level, you can hear them crying for help and begging to go home. Some of them start to burst apart with their alien babies later in the level.

Now, so far, you may be wondering why this is such a bad thing. In fact, if this had been the extent of the level, I might have felt alright about the whole thing or my disgusted feelings would have been justified. The problem lies within Duke Nukem himself.

As he walks through the level, he comments on what he's saying. Sure, some of his lines are sorrowful (or as sorrowful as Duke Nukem ever sounds). It is the others that made me entirely angry with the developers for writing such godawful and demeaning lines. The two I can recall are "Why do they always take the hot ones?" and the egregious "You're fucked." Upon hearing these lines, I felt a sharp lance of fury for the developers' seeming inability to let the gravity of the situation fall into place. Without Duke's smarm, it would have been a good moment or at least a decent one. It's his comments that make the whole thing disgusting.

I'm going to keep playing through as I feel that I have to at this point. I just hope that The Hive was the worst part and that it is now behind me...

Steam Roundup: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is a 2006 game developed jointly by Arkane Studios and Floodgate Entertainment (odd to see two developers on one game - three if you count the separate multiplayer developer). It is a first-person action RPG, Oblivion style combat if it was trapped in smallish, linear FPS levels. You have the choice to spec your character as a warrior type, rogue type, or magic type with skill points you earn from completing objectives.

The thing most people will remember from hearing about this game was the much touted kick button. You can hit a key at any time (if you have enough stamina, that is) and kick enemies. You can kick them off cliffs, through boxes, and into conveniently placed spike racks found all over the game. It seems like a dumb idea but it is actually quite a bit of fun. I once kicked three enemies in a row into a campfire and couldn't help but giggle as they all burned with the same animations. It does get old rather quickly and later enemies seem much less susceptible to it.

Now, let's talk about the story. There really isn't anything too atrocious about it but it all feels so...predictable. Master who sends you on a quest that is more than it seems? Check. Sexy sidekick who is more than she seems? Check. Love interest who falls for you in roughly ten seconds? Check. It's all quite laughable at times but I have seen much worse portrayals of these stereotypes before, so I can't condemn the game entirely. The voice acting is extremely hit-or-miss but luckily, the main characters are decent enough (although your character's voice hits some low points).

The game starts with a decent amount of challenge as you learn to fight carefully with your easily-drained health pool but it gets fairly easy by the midpoint of the game. Enemies start to fall more quickly but by that point, the combat is repetitive enough that I was glad for it. The boss fights are extremely simplistic, consisting of patterns of 'hack-hack-hack, avoid attack, hack-hack-hack, win' and repeating quite a bit.

As for the levels themselves, they are very linear but extremely confusing in places. For one thing, the default brightness is nowhere near good enough. I could barely see without my Night Vision in one or two places, which I'll admit, may have been the developer's intent. Unfortunately, too many of the areas look like other parts and I got turned around more than once. A complete lack of a map or any kind of waypoint system meant I had to poke around longer than I liked to find the right path. Not the worst thing in the world but hard to get used to again after today's hold-you-by-the-hand level design.

One other small thing I really liked about the game was the Rope Bow. It is what it sounds like - a bow that shoots a rope. For such a simple idea, I found it really cool, creating my own ways out of situations. Of course, you can only use it in preset places and it isn't always entirely clear when to use it in some of them, but it was still a neat concept.

This is a game I picked up years ago on a Steam sale because I had always wanted to play it. I remember downloading the demo when it came out, being the year that I had my first computer, and having a great time with it. While it couldn't possibly live up to the expectations I formed at that time, it was a fun romp that I feel good about recommending for anyone interested in this type of game.

Steam Roundup: Battlefield Bad Company 2

Now, I've played a decent amount of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 before but I hadn't touched past the second level in the campaign. That was the goal this time. I have heard it was a decent shooter campaign and love the witty dialogue between B-Company and figured I'd give it a shot.

As anyone who's played both games can tell you, Battlefield games are a lot different than the Modern Warfare style of game. The pacing is much slower and your avatar is a lot more susceptible to bullet, encouraging you to peek along a bit more carefully. I played through CoD4 not too long ago and found the change in pace to be okay. Personally, I like the speed of the CoD games but am not afraid to try something different. There were a few different spots where I wished I could just book my way past a fight but it wasn't too bad.

The campaign wasn't really anything special. It was pretty much the now standard run from point A to point B to point C structure, with a few 'defend this point' and 'mounted gun' sequences to change things up here and there. The story was predictable but had some pretty great characters, particularly the stoner pilot who flies you to all your missions.

The only other thing I feel I have to mention is sound design. While the music is by the books and boring for the most part, the sound effects and voice acting were phenomenal. Battlefield games are known for their unbelievably loud and sharp sound effects and it is the best I have ever heard here. Shooting sounds different when you fire in a structure or outside and you can even hear the shells falling to the ground in the places where you would hear that. Shots echo throughout the level and the din of war soon becomes the only thing you can hear. Beautiful.

The voice acting is no slouch either, mainly B-Company. These characters are what most people remember most about the last game, their hilarious comments and witty asides standing out in this genre full of machismo and military dialogue. Unfortunately, the best of this only occurs if you stop the action entirely and hang around with your group. It is then that they start to talk about things like what if having a woody was instead called having a clarinet or what the Sarge's MMA name would be. I laughed long and hard at several of these and only wished that more people would get to hear them; I expect most people don't even know they exist.

I enjoyed this campaign a lot more than I would have expected. First person shooter campaigns are becoming so by-the-numbers nowadays that I groan every time a new one comes out. Bad Company 2 managed to do enough with its humor and interesting takes on standard genre affairs to make me not absolutely hate playing through it.

Steam Roundup: Aquaria

Aquaria is another independent game, this one developed by Bit Blot Games. It is a so-called 'Metroidvania' style of game where an large open world is segmented into areas that remain locked until the player finds new upgrades (in this case, new forms for Naija, the main character). I've played multiple games of this type in the past and have always enjoyed them immensely; this game was no different. Aquaria is somewhat simpler than games like Super Metroid or Shadow Complex but it was still an enjoyable - and sometimes challenging - experience.

Due to the fact that Naija is a mermaid-like creature, the game takes place underwater, giving the game a unique feel. You can either use standard WASD controls to move around or click-to-move controls. I feel that the WASD controls were much easier to use, especially considering the other actions you need the mouse for in the game.

The main mechanic in the game has you using Naija's voice to sing songs made up of eight notes. To do this, you must hold the right mouse button and point in the eight cardinal directions to play one note at a time. Various abilities are made up of two to four notes and are triggered by playing them in order. You can also hit the number keys to use these abilities, something I chose to do to make the game easier to manage.

Instead of missile packs and bombs, Naija acquires new forms from the bosses she defeats, giving her the new abilities to progress. These forms are varied and unique and all have different uses. The first form acquired is the actual combat form, since the standard form has no attacks whatsoever. Others include a fish form for speed and a sun form to light up dark areas.

The art style has 2D sprites floating over 2D backgrounds, giving it an almost storybook look. Very little 3D seems to exist in the game. The music is pretty good, incorporating an underlying theme throughout (relevant to the story, in fact), but gets repetitive very quickly. The small amounts of voice acting are done passably well but definitely have that independent feel.

Overall, I enjoyed this game quite a bit. It took me around ten hours to complete and I felt like I could have spent a lot longer if I hadn't gone right down the main path. The story is just cryptic enough to be 'artsy' and ends in unpredictable ways and leaves room for a possible sequel.

The next game will be Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (single player campaign) and I should be done with it in the next few days.

Steam Roundup: And Yet It Moves

And Yet It Moves is an indie game developed by Broken Rules. I can't quite remember how it ended up on my Steam list but it is probably the same way anything else does -Steam sales and package deals.

The game is a platformer set in a 2D paper world. Your character looks like a drawing of a boy or man and dies in a shred of torn paper. The backgrounds look like some weird collage of different drawings and kinds of paper. It's an interesting look and gives the game a unique style that I haven't seen in another game.

The object of the game is simple - get to the exit. To do this, you can both jump and rotate the world in any direction. This leads to some interesting momentum-based puzzles - since momentum is conserved when the world is rotated - and gets more complex as it goes, as is the norm. If you die, you reset to your last checkpoint, one of usually several in a level.

It wasn't the longest game, with something like 17 or 18 levels, but it was an enjoyable hour and a half or so. The game was never really challenging but sometimes wasn't entirely clear when or where I needed to rotate. Once, it became extremely frustrating. I don't think it holds the game back at all, however, and And Yet It Moves is a fun little experience. Currently, it is on sale on Steam for $2.49 (there is also a WiiWare version); pick it up if it seems interesting.

When Hate Gets In the Way

I Am Alive is a game that many thought had been canned until just recently, when a flood of information about the game surfaced, including the fact that it is a downloadable game coming to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Not PC, you ask? According to a Eurogamer interview with creative director Stanislas Mettra, a PC version would be a silly idea since pirating is such a big deal on that system.

Oh, Ubisoft. When are you going to learn?

Well, to be fair, it isn't exactly Ubisoft's fault this time. Sure, Ubisoft is putting out the game but this is from a person on the development staff, not someone working for the publisher. Unfortunately, this doesn't help matters much, as he almost does a worse job of announcing this news than Ubisoft would, which is kind of sad.

He offers two main reasons why a PC version is out of the question. The first? No one would buy it. I couldn't help but laugh at this point in the interview. Way to sell your game to me, random developer. I can't wait to buy it if you have little to no faith that a PC version would even appeal to anyone in the world.

The second reason is the usual Ubisoft reason and the one that I stated above - pirating. Sure, pirating is a major deal when it comes to PC games. Many developers lose a TON of business to people who can't be bothered to play the game. In fact, most developers are avoiding PC versions at all for this reason. It is unavoidable at this point, with games being so easy to crack and pirated games being so easy to find and set up - nearly anyone can do it.

Is this really a good enough reason to avoid a PC version entirely? Of course, Ubisoft has had some troubles with this in the past. I can remember the time that the newest Ubisoft game (I think it was one of the Assassin's Creed ones) had a DRM that required being online and connecting to a server. Not much of a problem, at least until the server crashed and no one who bought the game legally could play it. The funny thing? Since the pirated versions didn't need to connect to the server, they could play while the legal copies couldn't. Score one for DRM.

Ubisoft's history with DRM aside, Mettra's comments again don't show much faith in his game. He argues that a PC port wouldn't be worth it since it probably wouldn't sell more than 50,000 copies, costing a few months and a dedicated team. Xbox to PC porting really isn't that simply anymore? 50,000 copies at most likely $15 is a rather large amount of money, even more so when you could sell the game on Steam, a very developer-friendly PC platform. Moreso, what if the game took off and managed to sell more? That is hundreds of thousands of potential dollars that the developer is willing to overlook just because of his hate for PC pirates.

I can understand hating piracy as a developer. The thought of working on something for a year or two, putting it out on the market, and then having most of the copies that are played be stolen sounds like a huge bummer. It's only when blind hate towards those pirates gets in the way of potential profits and new fans that it seems completely crazy.

A Fun Project

Double post!

Anyways, after my post yesterday about my lack of commitment to any games right now, I spent the rest of the day playing absolutely nothing. Today looked to be going much the same way until I decided to randomly install the first game on my Steam list that I hadn't finished/could finish (Aion was technically first but being an MMO...).

That game was And Yet It Moves, an interesting little indie game where the goal is to get a paper cutout man across a flat, 2D level by rotating the world in different ways. I proceeded to play the game to completion without pause.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, I had the crazy idea that I should play through each Steam game I haven't finished on my list in alphabetical order and post something about each. I thought maybe this would be a fun little experiment that could help my post count for this new blog. Of course, some of these games are a bit longer than And Yet It Moves, so I probably can't get one out each and every day, but I plan to keep at this as long as I can. Next up: Aquaria!

A Masochistic Gamer Is Me

Games really aren't that hard anymore. The so-called 'roller coaster ride' approach to a game's campaign/story is the predominant way companies choose to design their games. Instruction manuals may be disappearing but games are packed to the brim with tutorials and tooltips meant to bash you over the head with concepts until you get it. Higher difficulty levels in a game simply means they are tougher and you are weaker, a boring and cheap way to increase a game's challenge.

When those few hard games do come out, I can't help but feel myself drawn to them. Ninja Gaiden is one those 'difficult' games (at least when compared to others of its era). This is a game that forces you to learn how to play and makes mashing buttons a very unviable strategy. The boss in the midpoint of the game, Alma, has spawned countless Internet posts and complaints about how she is unfairly challenging.

I ate this game up the first time I played it. I savored the challenge of having to learn the right way to kill each enemy, each boss. Sure, that first time I cheated certain bosses, particularly the last one who could be felled by simply jumping toward him repeatedly and hitting the Y button. At times, I wanted to pop open my Xbox and snap the disc in half (screw you, Ghost Fish!).

Even with the unrelenting challenge, I persevered. I felt like a gaming god, having beat what I assumed was the hardest game ever made at the time. How fun it was to come back a few years later and beat it on the next two harder difficulties, each time having to learn new strategies and learning to use the diverse weapon selection more effectively. Here was a game that actually earned its harder difficulty, adding harder enemies that needed different strategies and doing such sadistic things as adding respawning enemies to the game's already-tricky boss fights. I don't like playing normal games on harder difficulties because they don't live up to this example of evolving the game instead of just tweaking some numbers in the code.

From that point forward, I couldn't resist a challenging game. Demon's Souls (and its sequel of course). Super Meat Boy. Even I Wanna Be the Guy, a Flash game known for its unforgiving, pixel-perfect platforming. They inspire me to play more fervently in a way that a normal game doesn't, playing a section over and over again until I nail it and smile in victory. I don't know what inspired the gaming masochism in myself but might as well as enjoy it, right?

Disinterested

I've always been the type of person who can't do one thing for too long. I dropped out of the Boy Scouts, quit baseball after one season of play, and switched majors several times before finally choosing my current combination.

Of course, this personality quirk applies to games too. Very rare is it that I find a game I want to play more than necessary. Most single-player games get beaten and put on the shelf, maybe picked up again if I feel the wish to play it. If a game has multiplayer, I can only play it seriously for about a week at a time before I take a rather long break. The only exception to this really has been World of Warcraft, which I played rather religiously for about four years before starting to play that off and on as well.

As a result, I buy a lot of games, always making sure that I have something to move on to next. Steam sales, cheap used games that I missed out on, and the pay-what-you-want bundles that have become quite popular give me a leg up on my habits. Even still, sometimes I get to the point where I am right now; I have plenty of things I can play but nothing I want to play.

My unfinished/unplayed Steam list is around thirty games right now with things like Far Cry 2 (which I've never been able to like) and Transformers: Fall of Cybertron (decent, but repetitive). None of them sound appealing. Instead, I only have one game installed on my computer - Skyrim (which I play infrequently, having done most of what I want with it) - and Resonance of Fate for my X360, a game that I am not sure I want to get into just yet.

It's a strange problem that I have off and on and there really isn't any solution to it that I've found. Most of the time, it solves itself; I wait a few days and something jumps out to me as appealing. It's still a troubling notion and it sometimes makes me wonder if I play games for the wrong reasons. Why don't I want to play these games that I have purchased, even the ones that I really want to play?

The Best Resident Evil

Tonight, I realized something important: Resident Evil 2 is one of my most nostalgic games.

I own two copies of Resident Evil 2. The first is an N64 copy that I bought when I got my N64 off of eBay about three years ago. The N64 is where I played most of my RE2 so I knew that I needed to get it (it didn't hurt that it's one of the cheaper N64 games either). The other is a PSN copy on my Playstation 3 that I bought a month ago when the whole series was on sale. I knew how much the series meant to me so I picked all three up for a song.

Now, here's the crazy thing: I like the old-style RE games much more than the new ones. Crazy, right? I'm definitely in the minority in this case. I just don't care; to me, Resident Evil isn't complete without tank controls and static camera angles. Sure, I like the new games well-enough but they just can't compare to the classics.

On a whim tonight, I started up RE2. I hadn't played the PSN version yet and wanted to give it a try. After just twenty minutes, I couldn't believe how much everything resonated in my mind. The corny dialogue (which I can practically quote word for word). The music and sound effects. The various locales, particularly the nearly-unmatched police station. This game is firmly set in my memory in a way that very few games manage to match. It is the very best of a very strange series.

A Little About Me Before We Start...

I am a textbook example of the classic "gamer" stereotype. I wear glasses, have bad skin, and am overweight. I live at home with my mother and sister and currently don't have a job. In fact, I am doing nothing right now, after a missed semester of college (due in part to both a mix-up with the school and a change of majors). I don't live in a basement but this still puts me closer to the stereotype than most.

I have a severe problem with laziness, I'm not afraid to admit. Getting motivated enough to do something, do anything, can be a challenge. It has led to me failing an entire year of college and taking three years to finally decide on a major. My days are filled with video games and Internet browsing as I wait for the spring semester to start up so I can take classes again. Every so often, I attach to something and work hard on it - like NaNoWriMo this month - but my excitement quickly diminishes.

This blog is part of my initiative to try and combat this. By forcing myself to write this every day, I have something to do and also feel the need to do more interesting things so I actually have something to write about. As a soon to be Creative Writing/Journalism major, any writing I can do at all is helpful, hopefully strengthening my many weak points.

Don't get me wrong; I don't expect you to feel any pity for me. My situation is entirely my fault and I accept that. I believe a good writer, one you can connect with, is one who isn't afraid to talk about themselves, giving up a piece of themselves to their readers. I will try to be that writer.

Insert Stupid Welcome Title Here!

Welcome to a piece of my brain.

I have always wanted a place to call my own on the Internet, a place where I can post whatever I want, whenever I want. This blog will be that place.

Expect to see nearly all of my posts talking about various aspects of the games I play. As an aspiring games journalist (yes, I know, how cliche), I wanted to work on my writing in a place where very few people (read: none) will be reading it. Of course, I hope that one day it will be full of people that will dissect every word I say and complain when I make mistakes. That is the dream and I can't wait for that day.