Dragon Age: Origins
Again I am late to the party, but this always allows one to benefit from others’ knowledge of a game - especially so since I have friends who respect the game experience and know how to help you get the most out of it without spoiling it for you. Anyhow, among other things people told me they liked Dragon Age a lot while playing it but couldn’t remember why afterward, maybe I am still under whatever spell holds the explanation for this but I cannot agree. Rather I feel like restarting the game and see what it would offer me had I approached it differently, but then again that seems to be the case with Bioware games.
It is a lot more hardcore an RPG than Mass Effect, and perhaps I am just unused to stat maxing or micromanaging party members but it was also a lot harder. In fact, in terms of gameplay and presentation I would say it has some ways to go; even if it was just me being crappy gamer the difficulty curve was very uneven, automatic checkpoints placed seemingly without respect to the opposition and responsiveness and feedback was subpar. Neither was it as pretty as Mass Effect on a technical level, and the game had frequent bugs in the dialogue and animations. I would assume some of the gameplay issues stem from old PC rpg tropes and people who are used to the genre do not mind them since they are used to it, but that is not really an excuse.
But really - it is not a bad game by any means, like Final Fantasy and Persona it just has some glaring issues that make fighting frustrating at times. And again like Mass Effect, what really sells it is the narrative and the experience it provides - you really feel that the game responds to the decisions you make and the way you play it. The story and world felt a little less interesting than that of Mass Effect - maybe partly due to the presentation being worse in Dragon Age - but the roleplaying and branching of the story is a lot more complex. The game throws a lot of hard questions at the player, and as the full fallout of your actions is very seldom obvious it becomes a lot more interesting - you can play the character you want, but it might not result in the situation you had hoped for.
Which is why I feel an urge to sit down and start again, I guess, but I do not really have another 40 hours to spend on it. Maybe sometime in the future.
Ufouria : the Saga
This little exploration platformer, originally for the NES, recently appeared on the Wii. I never owned a NES myself so I never had the opportunity to play obscure titles back then, but that is truly the nice thing about emulation.
Anyhow, so in the words of mcc whose recommendation I followed this looks and plays like “the horribly deformed child of Metroid and Hello Kitty”. You explore a small world in order to find your friends, once found you can swap to play as them at any time and use their abilities to reach new areas of the map. Standard metroidvania and rather lightweight on the exploration - it is very easy to find everything there is to be found in the game.
For a NES game, Ufouria is very nice looking. The animations of the characters are uncommonly smooth and give character to every creature you are controlling, the tilework is crisp and in some places it sports 2d scrolling. Controls are usually fairly good but tend to be a bit sluggish whenever the game’s framerate drops - which sadly happens quite often. Overall, the gameplay sometimes lack polish and feels uneven; enemies are placed at unfair positions at times and feel pointless at other times, certain design decisions only serve to make it more cumbersome in order to be thematically consistent… But held up against any other NES titles (except for the possible exception of Nintendo’s own) this is nothing out of the ordinary.
The game is fairly short and finding everything interesting requires little effort, so I do not really see myself playing this again… Although it is a very nice game and well worth playing through once.
Starcraft 2 - Wings of Liberty
I play relatively few RTS games - few enough to view them as distinctly different - so I am mainly going to compare Starcraft 2 to Blizzard’s previous games. Which is not very hard it seems, since this is a true sequel where very little is changed. The main mechanic and most of the units are the same as in the first Starcraft, although there are a lot of subtle differences that make Starcraft 2 a completely different and more refined experience.
First of all, the troop selection is a lot more strategic and it is no longer possible to rush someone with the same army configuration every time. Some people complain about the acronym RTS as there is no strategy in incessant clicking, and the winner is always the quickest - true to some degree, but mostly in professional matches or matches where one player is severly outclassed. When playing a good RTS on a reasonable level, selecting the right units and using them in the correct manner is no longer something taken for granted and requires a lot of thought - this is especially true in Starcraft 2 where a small force can easily take out a sizeable army of units it is strong against.
Secondly, the campaign is very well thought-out. It doubles as a varied experience where no mission is simply “take out the base” and a clever tutorial presenting situations where different units are suitable. Most unit-specific upgrades are not available during missions but purchased in between and then gained permanently, a welcome change to repeating the same tech tree mission after mission but it does take the single-player experience away from the multiplayer somewhat. Making a more refined single-player experience is no bad idea, though, and Blizzard thought to include a series of more advanced tutorials describing different styles of play in order to broaden appeal.
What is sort of a disappointment is the narrative. I personally think this is kind of sad as Blizzard has always been about masterful CGI interludes and - for RTS games, at least - involving characters and stories. Starcraft 2 does not have a completely linear story but rather a set of paths you can complete missions from in any order, making it very disjoint in the mood it sets. It also tells the story rather poorly, sacrificing the believability of the world and characters to overstate everything in order to bring the point across… I get that it is supposed to be appealing to a large audience, but there are better ways of doing that.
All in all though, Starcraft 2 is to no-ones surprise an insanely polished and brilliant game.
Limbo
Limbo popped up in the news in 2006, if I recall correctly they had secured funding from danish authorities based on some concepts and were looking for developers. After that they pretty much went silent and it was easy to assume they never got anywhere for one reason or the other. When looking at indie game marketing it is easy to assume a non-transparent development process is a nonexistent one, although Phil Fish has some interesting points on the subject.
Anyhow, the game. Belonging to the puzzle-platformer genre it is hard not to compare Limbo to Braid in Particular. While Jonathan Blow was far along with the game design before David Hellman started working on the art of Braid, Limbo seems to have been developed around the visuals. Many puzzles rely on items being hidden in the background and the mechanics feel slightly less polished than Braid - a lot of the puzzles are physics-based and and rely on momentum, and as margins are fairly low it is sometimes hard to know if you are using an incorrect solution or simply are too slow.
Such occasions are rarely annoying for very long, though, and the game is beautiful and dark in a way few others in the genre dare to be. The years spent on this project certainly shows and it is well worth the time it takes to complete.
Final Fantasy XIII
I like Final Fantasy a lot more than I should, but after the Persona IV experience I am starting to suspect it has something to do with the work-reward balance and the time it demands. The amount of effort you need to put in to actually accomplish something is bigger than shorter games, and it is not afraid to tell you you have failed - meaning the feeling of accomplishment when you cross hurdles is greater. Also, the simple fact that you spend more time playing this game means the mere familiarity of it will make it appealing.
In terms of how it compares to the other games in the series, FFXIII is a very linear experience where what exploration exists is more or less confined to a single chapter and separated from the overall story and rest of the game. It is a bit sad since you do not have the freedom to change pace and do something else if you want to anymore, but I guess after the very open last iteration some experimentation with a more Xenosaga-like progression was in order.
The battle system is what usually changes a lot between Final Fantasies though. FFXIII offers a mix between the somewhat revolutionary system of FFXII and the more traditional ATB systems, having well defined encounters but letting players focus solely on overall strategy instead of micromanaging commands. This leads to a faster, almost real-time battle system that actually functions to make the most of the IP, for once I actually used all of those status-enhancing spells to a meaningful degree. FFXIII has also removed most of the internal economy, no stats - not even health - are kept between battles so each fight is a new start. Dying will not set you back more than to just before the fight, which is a pleasant surprise considering the strict adherence japanese game developers usually have to old design ideas.
I like these changes as they remove a lot of the tedium and let you focus on the overall flow of the game, but it is a bit weird to see SquareEnix removing so much from the game. Less is more to be sure, but minimalism taken far enough will ultimately remove the game altogether. Maybe they consider the narrative and art styles to be the core of the game, and FFXIII offers nothing new in this regard - all of the character archetypes are there, so are the mysterious demigods and all of the sentimental monologues about how everything can be accomplished as long as you believe… But maybe I am just too old to appreciate it. Graphically it is kind of a letdown, the design is decent and the prerendered cutscenes are stellar, but technically it is not very impressive - looks more like a hi-res PS2 game than one from this generation. Not ugly, but you expect at least some technical marvels from games of this caliber.
Of the main Final Fantasy series, all of the games have a personal meaning to me - a connection to the place I was in my life when I played them, in a sense. It is going to be interesting to see where I will be when FFXIV is released, and if I will even have time to play it.
Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time
Ratchet and Clank is a very refined game on many levels. It is technically complex and has a clean and consistent art-style that harmonizes with the engine, and it is very balanced design-wise. The game has just the right amount of variety and levels are remarkably free from annoying areas. The trademark set of wacky weapons arguably makes for a little too many different powerups, but as what kind of pickups you get rarely matter a lot I do not consider this an issue.
Gameplay is more reminiscent of Mario Galaxy in terms of progression and sidequests than was Ratchet and Clank Future. This makes sense seeing as the design of Ratchet and Clank is a lot more character progression and story-driven than the very platform-driven Mario series… Although it does place more responsibility in the player of how much of the game you want to experience than a linear set of levels, which I guess can be annoying.
A Crack in Time has some issues to be sure, the checkpoint placement is sometimes uneven, some puzzle segments drag on for a bit too long and some of the minigames feel a lot less polished than the main platform game. It also does not have the perfect platform game camera, but then again nobody has done that yet… It cannot be argued that it is not a very solid platform game, though.
It occurs to me that I have said basically the same thing about all of the games I played during my vacation so far, which seems kind of pointless; I should probably try and elaborate more on what constitutes quality in the individual games instead of rambling about them not being perfect but having the core mechanics down. I will have to think about that next time…
Lost Planet 2
Lost Planet 2 is made to be a co-op game, and even though it does give you the opportunity to replace friends with AI companions I get the feeling that this is not really the experience the developers had in mind so I will not say much about it. The multiplayer focus means it lacks most of the story and characters and some of the level ingenuity the first Lost Planet had, so it would not be a fair comparison.
Other than that, Lost Planet 2 has it’s fair share of issues. The AI is downright horrible, a lot of the time they just stand around waiting for something to happen. The visuals are nice, but far from eye-popping. The levels are often incredibly linear in terms of where you can go and how you can deal with obstacles, at other times finding out what to do is very hard. Weapon placement is uneven and like so many other third-person action games it has too sluggish movement to do precision jumping but still penalizes the player heavily for failing platform challenges. Lost Planet 1 had some of these as well.
I do still like the game, though, as most of these deficiencies can be chalked up to the game being sort of an arcade experience where the focus lies in providing shooting mayhem. It is not perfect, but traveling on foot or in mechs and using a myriad of weapons to fight everything from hordes of small critters to huge monsters is fun. Maybe I should place more sophisticated demands on my entertainment and perhaps this is what reviewers have done since both games have received lackluster reviews, but when enjoying myself I find it difficult to write down a game because it hasn’t kept up with all of the latest design trends.
God of War III
The first God of War was released rather anonymously some five years ago, and quickly grew into a phenomenon. The second and now third iterations have been very careful not too introduce too many elements that might clash with the basics, and God of War III is a very similar game as it’s predecessors.
It was said that they wanted to raise the bar again and sure enough it is raised - in terms of visuals and scope of the narrative. Gameplay- wise the weapon and ability system has been changed to become more streamlined and a series of tunnel sequences have been added, but other than that it is just like God of War 2. And sure, I liked the first two God of War games, but it seemed to me that certain things were prime candidates for overhaul. For instance, the constant platforming challenges are a bit too complex for the precision of the engine and instant death when missing a jump felt unfair more than one time - it certainly doesn’t help that the game offers to lower the difficulty level when that is not going to help you with anything but the battles. Also, this being the end of a trilogy Kratos has some character development as he nears the end, a noble effort but sadly the result feels rather contrived.
I guess the important part of any God of War game would be the battles, though, and those certainly delivered so complaining about other things is just nitpicking. Different weapons offer very different fighting styles and overall it feels very brutal and violent but with controls that make it precise and elegant. On the other hand, the earlier games had this as well, so the question becomes how much a sequel really needs to add to be validated? Can we accept that even iconic games devolve into vessels for delivering narrative where nothing else really changes? I will have to consider this some more.
Bioshock 2
Like the first iteration, Bioshock 2 is not a very poor game but rather average in terms of gameplay. The thing that made the first Bioshock great, though, was the atmosphere and clever story - seeing as the first one is exactly the same in Bioshock 2 and the second is missing completely, there is little reason to play this game. The first Bioshock was great and all, but one of the great things about it was that it masterfully tied up every loose end and the story did not really require any more elements.
Sure, there are some new elements to the gameplay, although sadly most of them are actually making the game worse. The multiplayer is kind of unbalanced and uninspired, caring for little sisters makes sense thematically as it actually makes it a chore to be a good guy but is very boring to play, the underwater sequences just feel like a gimped version of the normal game without anything to do and the new weapons and enemies do not really add anything to the game.
That is not to say Bioshock 2 is without redeeming elements - a sequence close to the end is particularly well executed and presents an intriguing narrative angle - or that it is a tremendously bad game, but it is a cash-in. It’s Bioshock with a few gimmicks thrown in to flirt with the theme but with little consideration for the game, and as such it is hard to see why one should bother. On the other hand, Art Deco-style games are pretty rare and I guess if the audiovisuals was what made Bioshock good for someone they would like the sequel.
Heavy Rain
Heavy Rain was an interesting experience to play through, basically amounting to a 7 hour long quick-time-event with some clumsy animation-driven movement tacked in between. By no means am I going to hold the sparse gameplay elements or the inclination to always put the presentation first against it as that was never the point of it, but then again it’s hard to hold it against any standard but it’s own. Which is remarkable in itself, I suppose, and for what it is it does a fairly good job of feeling meaningful.
Heavy Rain brings to light the conundrum of optional paths and player choice, in more than one way. The story does branch depending on the outcomes of certain events, but very seldom are there any hard choices to be made for the player. Sometimes there is no choice, just a reflex-based challenge that you will have to overcome and the times where you as a player actually has to make a decision the morality of the character more or less answers the question for you. Gameplay-wise, the only difference are one selection of QTEs or the other so you are only really deciding how you want the story to play out, and with such a heavy characterization the game always nudges you in one direction.
It’s a tricky argument. With more gameplay and less characterization, choices might’ve felt heavier and sent ripples throughout the game in a scale closer to Mass Effect - but on the other hand, the story and presentation would’ve had to be simplerand probably not as interesting in themselves, so I you can’t really fault Quantic Dreams for making the game they set out to do. I once had a discussion with an actor that thought we needed more games presented in the same manner as movies, I doubt this is what he was going for but if I brought anything from that discussion it is that there is room in the world for niche games.