Tag Archives: PC

Dog walk, dog listen, dog lost

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Ruins is a 2011 PC game developed by Cardboard Computer and can be downloaded here.

Self-pity runs deep through the cerebellum, rots the spinal cord to a few strands of disintegrating rubber, destroys everything outside of mind – other people, other feelings, limbs even that can’t be used to pull hair. At focus, in loathing, is the self and nothing more. This is why art games have simple controls. The player’s hapless fingers stay out and away from the artist’s vision because it’s sacrosanct or whatever. It’s generally pretty dull for us gamers.

Finding worthwhile art games is a great big gamble for this reason.

Fancy this then, that Ruins isn’t willing to shy away from this formula.

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To the end (and back again) – Endless play in Nidhogg

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If you were to trace my interest in video game endings over time, the graph would resemble a cascading wave of disinterest. I came into the gaming landscape at an age where my heightened sense of imagination was paired with a looser understanding of reality, and Rareware were the bees knees of mascot platformers with Banjo-Kazooie. As the cliche goes, it was more than just a video game to me. I was enamoured with the young man (or bear) rescuing his fair maiden (or sister) from an evil witch (that part stayed the same) because I recognised the interactive manifestation of the fantasy genre I found so compelling in books. The familiar starting point of an ancient villain disrupting the hero’s normal way of life, an epic quest spanning across countless lands, and the final triumph over evil at the end of it all was an effective power fantasy that worked because everything was so familiar. The predictable prologue and epilogue placed a greater importance on the journey through Banjo-Kazooie rather than the outcome. You didn’t play to see the ending, you played to simply… play. That was the story.

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BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY and the douchebag in all of us

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It’s late in Arkham Asylum. Dawn will break soon and it seems like the nightmare Joker would unleash onto Gotham was averted. The game is about to end, but, before it does, a call about Two-Face is overheard on the radio. It seems Batman: Arkham Asylum is all but over for Commissioner Gordon, you and me. But not Batman. He flies off to handle another crisis in Gotham City. He must endure. The game offers us a taste of what it is like being Bats, but just a taste. What that ending says is that never truly became him. His martyrdom must continue after the credits rolls.

Sometime after the first game, mayor Quincy Sharp, former warden of Arkham, together with the help of Dr. Hugo Strange, reallocated all criminals to a closed-off area in Gotham City and named that new prison Arkham City. The developer’s goal in doing this is pretty straight forward: to finally get the full experience of being Batman, as he scours the city for criminal activity.

In doing so, what they have managed to do was to corrupt all that understanding of what it means to be Batman that was so well-crafted in the first game. Batman is no longer a hero. He is a “video game hero”, with all game manias that entails.

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The digital god, Proteus

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Proteus is an ancient Greek god, called “The Old Man of the Sea”. His name carries the weight of newness, of lives left unlived and a world untouched by man. This is the impression Proteus, a game by Ed Key and David Kanaga, gives us: it is a new world for us to explore.

Inspired by taking walks in real life, along with aimless travels in video games, Proteus bottles and sells the feeling of discovery, the thrill of cresting a hill to see what’s on the other side. It gives us a world full of wonders and lets the player walk around in it, taking discovery at its own pace.

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Soundscapes – The broken sound of console ports

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There’s a problem with the sound in games that appeared in the last 5 years. Many  “well done” console ports to the PC such as Alan Wake and Dragon Age 2 actually have a serious problem. If you run these games in stereo mode, the original intent of the sound designers is subverted and you are instead presented with a broken version of the game. Unless you know what the game is supposed to sound like you wouldn’t know that you’re getting a compromised version of the intended sound experience. Even critics and technically knowledgeable gamers seem to have overlooked this issue despite it appearing in many games over several years. It’s an issue of sound samples not being played properly, compromised dynamics and ultimately a lesser emotional impact than was present in the original design.

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Is Indie Royale’s Alpha Collection ready for prime time?

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When I think of alphas nowadays I tend to recall Minecraft, a game eminently playable in its alpha state. In reality, alphas (and even betas) are not like that: they’re more proofs of concept than full games. Alphas are not feature complete, but represent where the game’s going.

In this case, Indie Royale’s Alpha Collection #1 has given us three alphas. It’s an interesting concept for a bundle: we gamers are used to buying four to six games in a bundle where we’ve heard of three of them and own two. That’s not the case here: as someone pretty plugged into indie gaming, I didn’t know these games existed before the bundle was announced. There’s something to be said for that level of novelty, but it also represents a risk: who’s going to buy three games they’ve never heard of? In reality, it works more like Kickstarter than a traditional bundle: you get a few unfinished games, but really what you’re doing is preordering and supporting continued development.

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MACHINARIUM and Steel-coated Contemplation

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Movies – and by extension, games – are afraid of silence. They are deadly afraid the silence will bore the audience – and a bored audience will walk away. In response, movies and games are now coated with noise, music, action… anything to deter that silence. In the end, they confuse content with busyness.

Machinarium is a game where you play as little robot trying to do some good, correct some wrongs and solve some puzzles as they come along. It is a game very much like a Hayao Miyazaki cartoon, with its whimsical graphics, charming characters, moody soundtrack – and, yes, the silence: various quiet “empty” moments where characters just stand in contemplation. Or maybe that was me? I’m not sure anymore.

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Everything old is new: Diablo 3 beta impressions

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I have to admit, I expected something with more panache. With access to Diablo 3′s vaunted beta I expected something daring, something world-shaking. What I got was, well, Starcraft 2: a game of incremental improvements.

This is not to say I didn’t love it. When I think about Diablo 3 my palms get shaky now, even after conquering the beta with two characters, and I want to play with a third, a fourth, a fifth. I’m thinking of interesting skills I could unlock, the wonderfully simple but deep system behind them, and how I could make incredibly broken armor for my character. I keep fiddling idly with the skill set generator, thinking about synergies and how to break the game.

Blizzard games have always been gaming’s comfort food. With the lone, startling exception of Warcraft 3 their games are a sort of non-evil proto-Zynga: they take good ideas other people have and make them better. Warcraft and Starcraft codified and improved upon every Real Time Strategy cliché. Diablo took the roguelike and made it for everybody. And World of Warcraft made Everquest even more addictive; it removed the inconveniences that kept you from playing all day.

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Review: Pineapple Smash Crew

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Thanks to Pineapple Smash Crew I have screamed at my computer more than any other game.

These weren’t screams of rage, or frustration: they were exhortations. “No, Jools, keep away from the fire!” They were accompanied by pleading—“Okay, Roo, we just got to get you out of this level in one piece”—and depression—“No! Stoo! Why did you have to die!” Because at its heart, Pineapple Smash Crew, like its obvious predecessor Cannon Fodder, is a game about stories. It’s not a game about burly space marines shooting anything that moves (though this does happen), it’s a game about life and death, the struggle for survival.

Pineapple Smash Crew delivers because it does everything it tries to with such aplomb. There are exactly two mechanics in the game: running around shooting things with a PC-centric twin stick control set and grenades. And the grenades are laughably, lovably dangerous. Pineapple Smash Crew plays its best card immediately. It gives you grenades and missiles, which you will fire with reckless abandon. And then your four little guys will be close to death, because you didn’t expect friendly fire.

You might as well call it Friendly Fire: The Game.

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After pressing start: The Infinity Engine’s coldest open

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(After Pressing Start is a new series running on Nightmare Mode every Friday by resident narrative guru Tom Auxier. It focuses on beginning, on the stories that happen directly after pressing start, and how those stories influence the arcs of video games. A variety of games he’s totally never talked about before will be featured. This might be sarcasm. Previous entries have included this and that.)

Video game introductions frequently use the ideas of the cold open. Games like Darksiders, Nier, and Prototype begin with the player in media res, while nearly every game uses at least elements of the cold open. This type of opening throws us into the action faster, and that’s what designers want: for us to get to the fun bits faster.

The problem with these three games opens, though, is that while they get us to the action faster they then proceed to strip away all of our cool toys, our powers, and place us into tutorials. In effect these opens aren’t cold at all! They give us a taste of the good stuff, then they strip it away and make sure we know how to play the game. Hey game developers! We don’t want to …

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