30 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 30 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 042d - Last Load Of Dirty Laundry

0:00 - house of the night
1:40 - Triss
2:50 - Vincent
4:40 - secret meeting
6:00 - hideout



Witcher 042e - Last Load Of Dirty Laundry

0:00 - hideout
1:00 - Azar
5:00 - hideout
6:20 - Professor



Witcher 042f - Last Load Of Dirty Laundry

0:00 - cave
2:30 - dike

29 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 28 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 042a - Last Load Of Dirty Laundry

0:00 - Vincent
3:00 - mini-concert
4:40 - Triss
5:10 - Leuvaarden
6:50 - Triss



Witcher 042b - Last Load Of Dirty Laundry

0:00 - Radovid
5:40 - Yaevinn
6:40 - Patrick



Witcher 042c - Last Load Of Dirty Laundry

0:00 - Blue Eyes
1:00 - Patrick
1:40 - ~Blue Eyes~
3:10 - Patrick
4:10 - ~Lady of the Night~
8:20 - Everybody

27 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 27 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 041a - Unexpected Guests

0:00 - talents
0:50 - bombs
2:30 - Dandelion
5:20 - stupid merchant
6:10 - ~merchant's daughter~
8:50 - Dandelion



Witcher 041b - Unexpected Guests

0:00 - dice
6:10 - sewers
8:00 - hideout



Witcher 041c - Unexpected Guests

0:00 - Radovid
1:20 - hideout
3:30 - werewolf cinema

That last conversation tree is a repetitive mess. Here's the short version.

Kill werewolf?
- If not, tell werewolf about Salamandra's connection to King Radovid?

25 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 25 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 040g - Farming And Fallout

0:00 - salamandra hideout



Witcher 040h - Farming And Fallout

0:00 - salamandra hideout
0:50 - Jethro
4:20 - salamandra sewer group
8:20 - inn
9:50 - Leuvaarden



Witcher 040i - Farming And Fallout

0:00 - swamp errand
1:20 - Jethro
4:10 - Leuvaarden
6:20 - Siegfried
7:10 - undertaker
7:30 - guard officers

24 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 24 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 040d - Farming And Fallout

0:00 - Alvin & Shani
1:40 - DeWett
3:10 - Velerad
5:00 - graveyard
8:20 - Velerad



Witcher 040e - Farming And Fallout

0:00 - trade quarter
2:30 - Thaler
4:00 - Jethro
7:10 - Angus



Witcher 040f - Farming And Fallout

0:00 - royal huntsman
1:50 - sewers
3:20 - salamandra hideout

23 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 23 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 040a - Farming And Fallout

0:00 - Yaevinn
0:40 - Sewers
9:00 - trade quarter



Witcher 040b - Farming And Fallout

0:00 - mage tower
0:50 - swamp forest
6:00 - talents
9:00 - swamp forest



Witcher 040c - Farming And Fallout

0:00 - Voref
1:00 - swamp forest
8:40 - temple quarter
9:00 - Yaevinn

19 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 19 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 039a - The Negotiator

0:00 - trade quarter
3:30 - Velerad
5:30 - warehouse



Witcher 039b - The Negotiator

0:00 - bank
2:40 - Yaevinn

voting choices

17 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 17 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 038d - Nobility

0:00 - inn
1:00 - Velerad
1:50 - Thaler
8:10 - Adda
8:40 - Thaler



Witcher 038e - Nobility

0:00 - Thaler
1:30 - Triss
3:30 - ~Adda~
6:20 - Triss
8:20 - Leuvaarden



Witcher 038f - Nobility

0:00 - inn
1:30 - talents
2:30 - Andrew Gablodda
5:20 - trade quarter dispute

16 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 16 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 038a - Nobility

0:00 - trade quarter
0:30 - town hall
1:50 - trade quarter
2:20 - merchants
4:30 - royal huntsman
6:20 - inn
7:40 - sewers
9:30 - elven ruins



Witcher 038b - Nobility

0:00 - elven ruins
2:40 - sewers
3:50 - inn
5:00 - town hall
5:50 - ~townclerk~
8:00 - party
8:20 - Triss
9:40 - Leuvaarden



Witcher 038c - Nobility

0:00 - party
0:50 - Velerad
1:40 - Thaler
2:50 - Adda
4:50 - Velerad
6:20 - Adda
10:10 - Velerad

13 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 13 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 037d - New Wildlife

0:00 - cave
4:30 - swamp forest
7:50 - Vaska



Witcher 037e - New Wildlife

0:00 - Vaska
1:10 - swamp forest
3:40 - bandit camp
8:40 - fallen tower



Witcher 037f - New Wildlife

0:00 - fallen tower
1:20 - bandit camp
5:50 - Vaska
6:30 - cave



Witcher 037g - New Wildlife

0:00 - swamp forest
2:10 - Vaska
5:40 - Hierophant
9:20 - Triss

12 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 12 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 037c - New Wildlife

0:00 - Yaevinn
4:40 - swamp forest
7:50 - cave

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 12 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 037b - New Wildlife

0:00 - wyvern island
8:10 - Yaevinn

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 12 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 037a - New Wildlife

0:00 - Dandelion & Zoltan
3:30 - Kalkstein
4:00 - talents
5:10 - swamp forest

10 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 10 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 036a - Child Protective Services

0:00 - temple quarter
0:30 - Dandelion
3:10 - cabbage harvest
3:50 - aftermath



Witcher 036b - Child Protective Services

0:00 - Alvin
1:00 - Shani
2:40 - Dandelion
3:20 - Dandelion & Zoltan

Final Thoughts On The Void

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 10 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Honestly, I don't know what to think. On one hand, the game was weird and different, which I enjoyed. But behind the novelty there was a system that turned out to be broken in many ways. The lore of the game never makes sense, and there's never anyone explaining it to you who can be trusted. Even when you finish it, all you get is a poem that doesn't really tell you anything. Well, if you get one of the good endings, anyway. I became custodian of the void into perpetuity, ruling in hell, as it were. (Although technically the nightmare, which exists below the void, is hell.)

Since the game was going for a bleak, depressing vibe from the outset, I suppose it's not surprising that the endings are vague and meaningless. I definitely can't recommend the game. I guess I'd give it a three if I was going to review because I don't regret my time with it. But it felt like there was a lot missing.

In a way The Void is a lot like the old game NetHack. You can't know what you need to know on your first play. I was willing to go along with that and start over once, but only once. From then on it was strictly cheating. None of the mechanics where enjoyable enough to engage in them for their own sake.

But I still wonder about the void. Will the brothers I sent back to the nightmare ascend again? Would I eventually have resurrected the dead sister? But all I can do is know I'll never get answers and move on. It's healthy, but it's boring.

09 July, 2010

Ramblings From The Void

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 8 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

The Void is a bad game by many of the standards I commonly apply.

Obscure goals? Check.
Impossible fights? Check.
Hours of lost progress? Check.
Annoying interface? Check.


But it's the question. "It's the question that drives us, Neo." And it's not just one.

What is this place, really? What will happen if I feed a sister more than is allowed? How do I defeat the monsters? How do I do it efficiently? How much color can I safely give and use? What colors should I value most?

And there are still secrets. In each phase, a major change occurs. I've only seen three phases so far, so I suspect there will be many more changes to adapt to. I've heard that the void will die in a fixed amount of time, so there may be a clock on everything I do. I'm still encountering new monster types. The Brothers are giving me new tasks. And there is at least one major part of the game journal marked "Souls" that has no meaning to me yet.


Initially, Zelda games were about exploration. Some of it was annoying and stupid (trying to burn every bush and bomb every wall). But it was exploration. Now most of what you do in those games is expected, has become cliche.


I forgot what it was like to see something alien. The annoying robots in Bionic Commando and punishing platform bits of Rearmed seem so incredibly stale now, fossilized, really. Even Zeno Clash is conventional compared to this. "Let's go exploring!"

08 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 8 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 035e - Chapter Three Begins

0:00 - Zahin
2:20 - Kalkstein
4:10 - Triss
6:40 - trade quarter



Witcher 035f - Chapter Three Begins

0:00 - royal huntsman
2:20 - new contracts
4:20 - New Narakort
5:40 - Shani

Postcards From The Void

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 8 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Welcome to The Void.





No one knows for certain what this place is, only that it is dying.





Somehow you have entered The Void, although what you are exactly is unknown, even to you.





But somehow you absorb and process the meager amounts of color available, which allows you to survive, reinvigorate the landscape, and feed the sisters.





These actions will have consequences.

06 July, 2010

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 6 July, 2010

It's never fun giving up on a game. It's always a failure. And it's almost always a failure on both sides. Sure, a game may have a ridiculously obscure puzzle, or ridiculously hard stage, but at some level, any gamer that enjoys a challenge feels like they could have hung in there. The game was made to be beaten, so there must be a way.

For me the tipping point is always about whether the joy of the experience is worth the effort. I recently bailed on three games in a day, so I thought a discussion of why I bailed on them might be illuminating.



Odin Sphere was always prettier than it was fun. The combat is laggy, which is not always bad. Some games deliberately give the player windows of vulnerability to balance out more powerful moves. Odin Sphere is just plain laggy, though, with large amounts of slowdown. The slowdown can actually be helpful because when there's lots on screen, there's lots of dodging to do, but even with slow motion, it's often nigh impossible to avoid damage. Plus you're graded on damage taken and time, so regardless of whether you take hits or play conservatively, you're being punished. When the game added in wizards who can instantly summon exploding clouds of poison under your feet when they're not even visible on the mini-map, that was the end.

Bionic Commando was reviewed as a mediocre game, which it is. The swinging is good, but definitely not as good as Spider-Man 2 (2004). You have this great freedom of motion, but they mostly give you a long corridor to swing down and "radiation" on all sides to let the game look open. But the game also has serious issues with slowdown and speedup. At first it was hard to tell because the game does have some intentional slow motion to emphasize certain parts of the action, but when I'm just swinging along and can't judge my next swing because I go from slow motion to suddenly looking at the roof, the joy of movement evaporates. Also, a lot of the game is the linear environments. The few times they give you more room to play, they usually just plop down a few snipers or a couple giant robots that can't really keep up with you. When they added the multiple giant robots with the one hit kill fireballs, that was it.

Bionic Commando: Rearmed got a lot of love, from the critics. But the last stage of that game has some horrible trial and error bits that you just have to have played enough to have found the safe route through. The mechanical, gas, and electric trap sections were tolerable. But to then have a disappearing platform sequence just eat up my lives and force me to slog through the three trap sequences again (and again and again) was not.



As with all relationships, the key to the designer-player relationship is communication. As you can see, every game added challenges that were surmountable, but only through brute force and repetition. If they were challenges I'd been prepared for by learning earlier skills, or if I'd felt they were giving me tools I just hadn't learned enough about yet, I'd have stuck with them. But the designer simply put a section in front of me that required sheer stubbornness. Unless the rest of your game is so great that I have to see what's next, that's not good enough.

05 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 5 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 035d - Chapter Three Begins

0:00 - graveyard
1:50 - crypt
6:00 - graveyard
6:50 - Siegfried

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 5 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 035c - Chapter Three Begins

0:00 - trade quarter
0:40 - temple quarter
2:10 - Siegfried
4:30 - cemetary
8:30 - Vetala

04 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 4 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 035b - Chapter Three Begins

0:00 - trade quarter
3:20 - merchant
3:40 - trade quarter
4:40 - Zerrikanian vendor
5:50 - bookseller
7:20 - arms dealer
8:20 - trade quarter

02 July, 2010

Game Journal: The Witcher

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 2 July, 2010

GAME JOURNALS CONTAIN SPOILERS. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

Witcher 035a - Chapter Three Begins

0:00 - ~Triss~
5:40 - journal
6:20 - Triss
7:10 - talents
8:50 - Triss

01 July, 2010

Reviews: BioShock 2, NecroVision

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, 30 June, 2010

BioShock 2

Developer: 2K Marin
Platform: PC
US Release: February 2010
Genre: First Person Shooter
Price Paid: $15
My Score: 3 of 5

It's more BioShock. I would say it dilutes the wonder of the first game, but the first game already did that by overstaying it's welcome and having a pretty weak ending. It's still a decent progression of getting and using new weapons and powers. But that's its own problem.

BioShock 2 suffers from an abundance of inventory. A lot of games streamline inventory by limiting what the character can carry, but BioShock still lets you carry eight weapons (with three different ammo types each) and eight special powers at once. Also the powers reorder themselves when you upgrade them or get new ones. In the later stages I felt like I spent more time managing my arsenal than playing the game. And having a tough fight because you forgot you left a certain gun loaded with the wrong ammo is no fun.

And the interface to organize and buy things wasn't the best. I tried using the scroll wheel on a menu and it scrolled the menu out of view. This is definitely a rough around the edges port.

The collectivist take on the first game's theme did nothing for me. I think that's largely because I never felt included. For someone who thinks the common good and larger family is all, the idea that the villain never tries to offer you a place in the organization feels weird. I think they missed an opportunity there.

SPOILER SECTION (highlight to read)
The bits near the end where you get to fight alongside your daughter are cool, not so much for the fact that the AI is good but because it feels like my decision to be nice to the little sisters and judge some opponents as redeemable and some not shaped her personality. I will never play the game again because that's probably a really easy illusion to tear down, and I like it in place.

Also the good ending involves you dying and living on, literally, inside your daughter, seeing through her eyes. It was probably supposed to be heart warming, but the thought occurred to me that she's entering sexual maturity. That's messed up.

END SPOILER SECTION



NecroVision

Developer: The Farm 51
Platform: PC
US Release: February 2009
Genre: First Person Shooter
Price Paid: $4
My Score: 4 of 5

The demo of NecroVision was pretty bad. The combination of mediocre performance, punishing load times, and punishing gameplay was not promising. But the combo based, melee heavy combat system intrigued me, so I was willing to risk the four dollar purchase. Initially I was very pleased. The performance was great (especially when I turned the resolution down a bit). The load times were still a bit long, but bearable. And the gameplay was so much easier I wondered if the developers hadn't released a baby version for Americans. I still wonder about that.

So the bad stuff was gone and the good stuff was still in. I could still charge across a room, stab a guy with my bayonet and kick him away, knock another guy down with my rifle then shoot him, then switch to my knife to kill a guy with an end over end circus throw, all while getting powered up with combo energy for doing it. When it's going well, NecroVision is the game Bulletstorm wants to be when it grows up.

If it wasn't for some pacing problems, save game bugs that lost me hours of progress, map bugs that forced me to reload a few times, some tedious flying sequences, and a final area with lousy visibility and enemies that aren't fun to fight, I would have given it a five and told you to go buy it already. As it is, I'll probably play the fun levels a few more times and jump into the sequel.