No Game New Year - Progress Report

I continue to have a hard time finding moments to squeeze in game play, but here's a little bit I was able to accomplish:

To The Moon - This is a retro style 16 bit RPG that tells the story of a dying man who requests the help of a company to achieve his dying wish through his dreams.  It's all very sci-fi obviously.  It's available on Steam and I bought it because I had heard the story was good.  I'm afraid that up to this point I can't really agree.  You move slowly backwards in time through the man's life to gain information about him, and you learn that his wife is a little strange but don't know why.  Except it's really obvious almost from the start what's wrong with her, but the game treats it like a big reveal when you finally get there.  Throughout all this, the "gameplay" is just walking around and touching objects to collect colors so you can move further back in time.  I did finally reach a part that was a little more puzzle oriented, but the story is moving so slowly that I don't find myself very interested.  I may come back to this one eventually, but right now I'd rather spend my time playing other games.

Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea Part 2 - I played this the weekend after it came out.  I enjoyed the sneaking gameplay and most of the execution of the story.  There was something really fun about possessing a Big Daddy and watching him go to town on the Splicers in the area.  The only thing I didn't really care for was the end attempt to tie Infinite into the original Bioshock.  Not only does it throw Bioshock 2 out the window but it has the obvious marking of a retro-active change rather than something that makes logical sense.  Still, I enjoyed playing it.

Tomb Raider - I had picked this one up because I had heard a lot of good reviews about the story.  I should have spent a little more time looking up the style of game play.  I knew there were puzzles involved, which was fine, but there's also a lot of moments that rely on real time events and Lara's primary weapon (at least at the beginning) is a bow and arrow.  I hate real time events and I can't do FPS with a controller.  On top of this, Lara's "survival instinct" is just a ripoff of the detective mode introduced in the Batman Arkham games.  About an hour into this one I just wasn't having any fun at all.  Lara gets hurt a lot and there was nothing enjoyable about seeing her constantly beat up and having to urge herself on.  I feel like I wasted my money on this one.

Psychonauts - I knew this was a 3D platformer and therefore wasn't sure how far I could get in it.  I imagine I will hit a wall with this one eventually, but for now it's really fun.  The humor is really great and the levels creative, so that even when I had a hard time pulling off some of the jumps it kept me going because I wanted to know what was next.  I plan on coming back to this one.

Mario & Luigi: Dream Team - I may be stopping this one.  I got to a boss fight that's three enemies, and you have to defeat them all at once or they heal each other.  Multiple attempts, including some on "easy mode" all ended in failure, and I'm not having fun anymore.  I understand that in modern times they feel like they have to upgrade the difficulty on turn based RPGs to keep them interesting but I like the old way that relied on thinking rather than reflexes to accomplish the challenges.

Paper Mario Sticker Star: Having given up on the above, I put this one back in my 3DS.  I had started it earlier and got distracted by other games.  I mostly fiddled around this time reminding myself of the mechanics.  It has similarities to M&L as it has turn based battles that require real time response, but instead of leveling up and gaining abilities you use the stickers to fight.  Logically, some are more powerful than others.  You also use the stickers to solve puzzles, and I accidentally lost my poison mushroom sticker I needed to unlock a door, so I'm going to have to find one before I can move forward.  The gap in time since playing means I have no idea where I got the first, but that's just a quick google search away.

Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee demo - I had really enjoyed the original Abe's Oddysee game in this series, so I downloaded this demo ages ago to try out the newer version of the game.  Similar to the original, it's a platformer that is primarily about solving puzzles and rescuing the other inhabitants of Oddworld along the way.  Like Lemmings with platforming elements.  It's been ages since I played the first one, but this felt just as fun, with only a few minor annoyances because this is a 3D platformer instead of 2D.  I won't be purchasing the full game in keeping with my promise to not buy any new ones, but I enjoyed it.

Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time demo - I've never played this series before but I had downloaded the demo out of curiosity.  My fondness for Lupin III guarantees that I usually like thieves with a heart of gold, and the characters seemed cute and the game had an interesting set up.  But I found the controls annoying, with the double jump not working very well and Sly not going where I wanted him to.  Combining sneaking with platform jumping just wasn't enjoyable to me at all, and  I didn't even finish the demo.

Shadow of the Colossus - This was another one I had gotten free thanks to PS Plus.  I started up the game and I thought it looked beautiful. The animation was a little unnatural, but the backgrounds were gorgeous.  With no dialogue or narration in the intro, I thought the protagonist looked like a young woman, and I thought it would be cool to play as a female protagonist.  But then "she" started talking and was actually a he.  On top of that the story was a little bland - he wants to bring a woman back to life, and the gods speak from the sky and tell him he needs to kill the colossi in order to do so.  I then finally had control and immediately became frustrated.  The tutorial was minimal, and controlling the horse was absolutely terrible.  It also wasn't really clear where it wanted me to go.  After struggling and wandering around for about five minutes, I gave up.  Perhaps I was just tired after a long day, but there was nothing here grabbing me enough to make me want to figure  this one out.

Brothers - I heard a lot of positive reviews about this one, and so far I have to agree with them.  The puzzles are clever and the gameplay unique.  It took me a while to get used to controlling them with the two analogue sticks, and I often do find it easier to control one brother at a time, especially when there is jumping involved.  The main issue I have is that using the PS3 controller isn't very comfortable.  I got as far as the moment when the boys ride the hang glider, and found my fingers were far too tired to keep holding down the trigger buttons while also moving them back and forth to make the turns on the glider.  I'll come back to this one for sure.

Darksiders - Another PS Plus freebie I downloaded a while ago.  It's essentially yet another God of War hack and slash clone.  It doesn't take long for me to get bored with this style of gameplay.  However, the graphics and story kept me going for a bit, and for now at least I found it pretty simple to dodge the enemy attacks and hack away at them.  I like the style of all the demons and the concept of War working for the Balance and Mark Hamill voicing the Watcher that's with him along the way.  While certainly nothing spectacular, the game seems like a decent way to unwind for an hour or two.  I'll come back to it.

Bioshock Infinite

While I fell in love with the original Bioshock soon after purchasing my Xbox 360 and ran through the sequel shortly afterward since I just couldn't get enough of it, I was originally hesitant to purchase Bioshock Infinite.  A large part of what I had loved was the creepy atmosphere of Rapture and how the game had combined the first person shooter genre with survival horror.  Infinite on the other hand was set on a floating city, and I didn't think that open world would excite me as much.  I was also nervous about the need to navigate the skyline, something that originally sounded a bit like 3D platforming, and various mentions I'd seen where they were trying to make the game more challenging by not giving you all your special powers to access at any given time.  Since I'm not that great a player, I wasn't sure if I would be able to make it through the game.

However it was many glowing reviews that primarily focused on how good the story was that inevitably drew me in and made me decide to give it a chance.  Since I'm writing this review, you can probably guess that I was in fact able to beat the game, and you are right.  Of course, I did play on easy difficulty, but that's pretty much a given for me when we're talking about games.

While it has been a while since I played the other two games, I feel confident in saying that they did up the difficulty this time around, at least for my own personal skills.  You're not really limited on your vigors (aka magic) as once you find a vigor you have the skill - it's just that you only can have two at the ready to switch between.  But you can easily jump into your inventory of them and select another one when you need it.  What you are truly limited on is your guns, as you can only hold two at a time.  You're able to store all kinds of ammo all over your person to the point that a real man wouldn't be able to move because his pockets would be so stuffed, but we need realism so no you can't hold a pistol, shotgun, and a machine gun.  Don't be silly.  This is a fairly minor complaint though, as at least on the easy setting, your enemies drop their guns and there were also tons of other guns just lying around waiting for me to pick them up.  It's difficult to do that in the middle of a fight, but not impossible.

Since I'm not a fan of shooters, the combat sections were definitely my least favorite part of the game.  I would find myself wishing to just continue the story instead of having to fight through yet another wave of enemies.  While it may just be the fact that this type of game play was a near constant struggle for me, I'd also say that the combat is not well integrated into the story.  Sure, the bad guy wants to stop us by sending his men after us, and there is also a revolution going on so there are bound to be fights that you're going to stumble into.  I just never felt like slaughtering all those men was really important to the main story of trying to help Elizabeth escape.  Or maybe it's just that the fights don't really change at all throughout the game, the only differences being that the men eventually have heavier armor on and have more brutal weapons.  I know that's largely the point of shooters, but I guess what I'm saying is this should have been something more like an adventure game where more focus could be put on using puzzles to unwrap the complexities of the story.

That disconnect meant that I probably didn't take full advantage of the vigor system like I should have.  I found myself being really impatient and just trying to shoot everyone.  It was quite frequent that I saw the message "Remember to use your vigors!" after a fight because the game was chiding me for not taking advantage of them.  So what I'm saying is I may have made this game harder on myself than it needed to be.

The story itself is worthy of the praise it's getting.  While definitely not Rapture, Columbia is a well built world that has its own atmosphere, relying more on shock this time around rather than creepiness.  Once again, they've put music to great effect to aid the atmosphere, using both old songs of the time period along with re-imaginings of modern songs done in the old style to go along with the fact that this is set in an alternate universe from our own.  Some of the songs are so different that I didn't recognize them at first, and I hope they are able to release a soundtrack at some point so I can have them all.  There is an "inspired by" soundtrack, but it doesn't have any of those great covers on it.

Then there is the journey of our protagonist Booker and your companion Elizabeth.  They went to great lengths when the game was being promoted to assure you that you would not have to protect her the entire time throughout the game, and that she was not just there to be a love interest.  They were not lying.  Elizabeth actually ends up being more like a game genie code almost, the way she will toss you ammo and first aid during battle and then coins while you are exploring areas.  She even points out where to find lock picks in case you are rushing through an area and miss them yourself.  She also does not have a health bar at all.  There were times when I had to laugh because she was supposedly taking cover from enemies but she was actually more in their way then I was.  Lucky for her the bullets just passed right through her.  Her help does have limits though, especially the further you get into the game.  There were times when she would shout to me "I'm still looking!" which I'm guessing is probably some time related bit of code where she wasn't  going to give me another freebie for a certain amount of time even though I was running low.  But she saved me more often than not, and at some points of the game I didn't see any point in purchasing ammo when I knew she would just give it to me once the fight started.

Despite my occasional frustrations, I mostly blame them on myself and my poor skills at playing these types of games.  People who are more comfortable with shooters would probably have a much easier time of it.  While the final battle is a sharp increase in difficulty compared to a lot of what you have been doing previously, it's not impossible.  And the fact that it is a battle rather than a specific boss makes for something a bit more interesting  than this type of game normally throws at you.  The story most definitely makes it all worthwhile, and it hits some great emotional notes while also having a bit of humor tossed in thanks to the Lutece twins.  If you follow me on twitter, you may remember Jak and I pretending to be them on my birthday this year.

The rest of the review under the cut will deal with spoilers for the end game.

Birthday

Things don't always turn out the way you planned.  Such is the case with today, where I had hoped that I would get a chance to go to the zoo and maybe also hang out with some friends tonight, but both plans fell through outside of my control.  However that doesn't mean that the day wasn't good.  In fact there was lots of good.

Starting at midnight I changed my twitter picture and name and began roleplaying as Rosalind Lutece, a character from Bioshock Infinite.  The Luteces are hands down my favorite characters in the game, speaking in riddles and thoroughly confusing you until you reach the end and what they are saying suddenly makes sense.  Jak and I have been playing around with mimicking their speech patterns in real life, and after I saw my friend Devin do his own roleplaying on his birthday, I thought it would be fun to take it to Twitter.  It was,  We thoroughly confused everyone in a wonderful way.

I've recorded all our interactions below, along with links to references I made. Things marked with an asterisk are game references that will spoil you if you go searching for them.

BioShock 2

It feels so odd to already be writing a post for the second game one week after the first, but here I am. I guess the extended holiday weekend is to blame for my being able to finish this game so quickly. I don't think it's related to the story being any shorter anyway.

This sequel is set in the same place but features different characters than the first game. It happens eight years later in the timeline than the original and is set in different places inside Rapture. This all helps you feel like you're playing something new rather than just retracing your steps. The gameplay also changes to fit the new storyline - rather than simply defeating Big Daddies like in the first game, you now are one yourself and can therefore adopt the little sisters. Once adopted, you use them to harvest Adam and you must protect them while they do so. Technically this task is optional, however if you were to ignore it you would be missing out on a large part of the game. You would also end up with the bad ending.

I think the new storyline does well in moving everything forward, but I'll admit I found it a little confusing. While I enjoyed the central villain, Sofia Lamb, her intentions and schemes were a little unclear to me. Perhaps I did not find enough of the audio recordings to fill in the gaps. I also felt like this game was not as creepy as the original. While the Gil Alexander part of the story was obviously trying to be reminiscent of the Sander Cohen scenes in the original, it just wasn't as strong. Perhaps the fact that you are playing as a Big Daddy and not your average common man also takes away some of the danger and fear. Either that or I was simply getting more used to Rapture's quirks.

I did however like the inclusion of more moral choices in the game - not only the ability to save vs harvest little sisters but being provided the choice of whether to kill people or let them survive. It's a nice subversion of games where we pretty much expect to have to kill nearly everyone we come across. To be able to take the noble choice and turn the other cheek is a nice one. On the other hand, I laughed with glee when given a new weapon in this game, a spear gun, as I watched my enemies get pinned to the wall, and was also able to remove the spears from their corpses for later reuse. Does that make me a hypocrite, or just a fan of modern horror?

I felt like the difficulty was unnecessarily increased for this game - you carry fewer first aid kits, for instance, and some of the weapons are not as effective as the ones from the first game. The upgrade system is also changed and forces you into making tougher choices early on. Perhaps most annoying of all, certain controls were changed. When the ending of the game can be changed based on whether or not you rescue or harvest a little sister, why would you reverse the controller buttons that do this?! I once had to quit and reload my game because I selected the wrong one out of habit from playing the first game. They also changed the button for using a first aid kit, therefore making it more confusing to stay alive.

In the first game I heavily relied on shocking my enemies and then shooting/hitting them, while in this game I found the shock did not last nearly as long and it was only until later in the game when I gained the ability to freeze people in ice that things got a lot easier. Maybe almost a little too easy at times, but remember I am playing on the easiest difficulty level. There is also no real final boss in this game, just places where you fight a larger number of enemies than you normally would.

You once again get to do a task that is a bit different from the rest of the game toward the end. It is not even remotely difficult, but the storytelling and atmosphere made it highly enjoyable.

There is also a multiplayer mode added to this game, but I am reluctant to try it out. It seems to copy most other FPS multiplayer modes and given my very poor skills at shooting I don't think I would last very long.

There is technically one more game set in Rapture for me to play - that being the DLC add on for BioShock 2, "Minerva's Den." I hope to be getting to that within a week or two. I'm not sure how I feel about the upcoming sequel, BioShock Infinite being such a sharp change in direction. I've come to really like Rapture and its underwater setting. My hope is that we'll eventually see a BioShock 3 that brings us back to Rapture, perhaps once again from a different perspective than what we've seen before.

BioShock

Since I didn't own an Xbox 360 in 2007, I remember hearing a lot of buzz about BioShock and wishing I could play it. On the other hand, it involved first person perspective shooting, so I told myself I probably wouldn't be able to play it anyway. I remember distinctly the moment my brother excitedly brought home Resident Evil, talking about how great it was. I tried to play, and when I went to move the character, I wasn't going anywhere.

"What is this?" I asked him.

"You use one stick to move and the other to change direction," he explained.

"What? Screw this!"

That's pretty much the moment video games left me behind. When it comes to modern games I generally play puzzle, jRPG, and rhythm games, because their control schemes aren't as challenging to me. I'm much more used to the SNES controller than the analog sticks and the multiple shoulder buttons of today's systems. Gaming addict that I am though, this doesn't stop me from now owning all three modern systems. I broke down and got the 360 because of the Kinect, or more specifically Dance Central. But I also couldn't resist downloading a very large number of demos that I found on Xbox Live. BioShock was among them. It was the perfect chance for me to see if I could handle the controls. More than anything though, it excited me.

BioShock sits somewhere between survival horror games and first person shooters. It absolutely oozes atmosphere. It is set in an alternate reality 1960 where a man by the name of Andrew Ryan has built an underwater society named Rapture. Meant to be a utopia and escape from the cold war turmoil facing the world on the surface, it is in fact a dystopia, where its citizens have devolved into crazed mutants hungry for a drug that gives them power. You can use a wide variety of weapons to defend yourself, similar to many first person shooters, but you also gain powers along the way, like the ability to shoot fire, electricity, or even bees at your foes. These various abilities also aid you in puzzle solving as you make your way around Rapture to put a stop to the dictator who has allowed its citizens to become these monsters.

The voice work in this game is incredible and helps to make every single one of the characters seem real, even the nameless enemies scattered throughout the game. All video games suffer from repetition, and while it was only a matter of time before I got tired of hearing the rantings of one particular foe, the fact that he (and all the others) have full scale rants and not just one or two lines repeated ad nauseum gives the game a mood the likes of which I've never really seen before. I spent most of the game on edge between these rants, the dark hallways, and the ghostly music that fills the halls. There's also tons of posters lining the walls and advertisements that occasionally come over the intercom systems that help to make Rapture feel real. I even screamed at one point when an enemy that I thought was frozen came to life right in front of me and started attacking me.

The music deserves a special mention because beyond the original score, there is also a lot of licensed music from the 30s, 40s, and 50s within the game. I absolutely loved hearing this music and was severely tempted to just sit where I was at certain points and listen. Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby and more are included - click the link to see the full list. Another fun highlight is the cassette tape messages you find scattered throughout the game, diary entries by various citizens that help flesh out the story for you.

The story has multiple twists and turns and forces you to make moral choices as well. I chose the good path on this play through because I'd heard that is what is considered the true ending that leads into BioShock 2. From what I've seen online, choosing the greedy route (it's not exactly bad, just not 100% altruistic) gives you a very different ending but otherwise leads to a pretty similar playing experience. I may eventually play it that way myself just to see if there's any difference - this game is enjoyable enough that I would be happy to play it a second time after a bit of a break.

As far as the controls, I chose the easy difficulty. It describes itself as "I'm new to shooters" and I think it is a fair choice for someone who fits that description. As I said earlier, the idea of just using two sticks to move confuses me, let alone having to aim with the right stick while pulling the right trigger button to fire, and if I have to switch weapons I have to hit the right shoulder button, and oh yeah I better heal with A before I'm dead... I still only died a few times throughout the length of the game. Of course, if I didn't have Jak sitting right next to me reminding me when to heal or switch weapons I might have died quite a few more. I think video games are best experienced with at least one other person there at all times anyway, assuming that person is helpful and interested in the story.

The end boss actually ended up being ridiculously easy for me. I don't know if it's because of the choices I made in the game or just the difficulty in general, but he was a cakewalk compared to some of the other parts of the level. The most difficult time I had was actually right before the boss, but I don't want to tell you what I had to do to avoid spoilers.

In my opinion, this game is a must play for just about anyone. It's a great example of how video games can be art and its story is top notch. If I can get through the control scheme, anyone can. I can't even play Katamari Damacy well and I made it through to the end, I bet you can too.

As you may have noticed in my sidebar, I've already started playing BioShock 2. So far the difficulty seems a little harder, but I'm determined to make it through. I also plan to purchase BioShock: Rapture to tide me over until Bioshock Infinite is released.