Thirty Flights of Loving

When playing Brendon Chung's short game Thirty Flights of Loving I can't help but be reminded of the sporadic energy which seemed to enthuse the early films of Jean-Luc Godard. A florescent mixture of ideas, influences and oblique storytelling propels this short into a dream-like state which crosses in an out of playful parody, postmodernist tangles and artful themes of memory, love and loss. In equal measures it plays out as a heist, a love story and a dream. Yet at its heart Thirty Flights of Loving remains a fun and inventive piece of interactive fiction.

Imagining Dunwall

Dishonored is a game. Most of us who play computer games regularly (and even those that don't) are most likely aware of this. It's a game which gives the player control of a character with the ability to knife people, teleport, possess living beings and peek at a bathing lady - amongst other things. It  has also been widely praised for its breadth of player freedom; not so much in terms of critical narrative choices (though there are a few of those too) but within the gameplay itself. Much like it's spiritual forefathers Deus Ex and Thief, Dishonored lets the player make gameplay decisions for themselves. Questions such as: "How shall I infiltrate this building?" and: "Do I want to kill all these people?" are important and actually answerable by the player. In this respect Dishonored recalls the playgrounds of late nineties, early 2000s PC gaming; it is a toy box in which the player can use the toys any way they wish. So there is Dishonored: very much a game. And then there is Dunwall.

Review: Deadlight

Here Lies a review I wrote for Critical Gamer about the XBLA (and now available on PC) game Deadlight. Its a mix bag of a game and though I remember shouting bad words at the T.V. quite a few times while playing it I also believe it to be a pretty unique vision of the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Visually stunning and quite scary/tense in places. Check out my thoughts after le break. 

A little bit of Halloween - HOME

This represents Halloween

Halloween past without much of a mention in my house. I've never been one to celebrate the "holiday"/festival (or whatever it is) but less so this year I seem to have completely missed it. There were no trick or treaters tentatively knocking on my door, nor did I watch any scary movies in an attempt to celebrate the wonderful feeling of being scared. I did however, without real forethought, end up playing a game.

The Steam Halloween sale saw a few really great deals but my purchases were pretty limited. The only game I bought which I really wanted to play was Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines a game which I missed when it was first released. I also bought Closure - a puzzle based platform game with what looks like quite an inventive conceit - and Home.

Twitching on the Floor: Hotline Miami

My eyes sting and my hands hang claw-like over the mouse and keyboard. I have spent the last three or so hours hunched over my glowing laptop dispensing quick precise death. Or at least for part of the time. The rest has been taken up with frantic gasps between badly aimed gun shots, misplaced punches, and strange backward movements which more often than not have left me leaking florescent red stuff over some indistinguishable hotel lobby.  

Horrible Murdery Game Out Tomorrow

Sooo.... Hotline Miami is out tomorrow and, though there's loads of other important, life maintaining work to be done, I'm really looking forward to spending the evening bludgeoning and being bludgeoned within a sleazy 80s neon malaise (bloody remains apparently spewed over a post-modern hotel interior).

Torchlight et al : A Haphazzard Defense of Genre Refinement

I posted a  review a couple of weeks ago on Critical Gamer for Runic Games' RPG sequel Torchlight II. As the review attests it's a superb action RPG in the vein of Diablo etc. Despite the much aggrandised looting I actually found the most exciting and enjoyable aspect of the game to be the combat. This was mostly down to two things:

1) lots and lots of enemies

2) variety of enemy attack patterns.

So a  lot of the time during combat I was a bit lost amidst the flashing colours; which also left my puny laptop struggling for breath. But I never felt like my many, many deaths were unfair; my mortality only ever recalled thanks to me taking my eyes off the Diablo style health-bubble-thing for too long. It was a lesson quickly learnt - though also one surprisingly easy to forget when being pummelled by masses of tentacley djinni-beings.

Book Review: Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

The subtitle to Tom Bissell's book is so ambitiously vague that it at first appears like something of a moot point when approaching the cultural history of computer gaming. The lengthy issue of Why Video Games Matter could possibly be segmented and approached in a veritable spiral of niches and areas of study - culture, technology, art, to begin with - without ever having to propose to your reader: This is why videogames matter. Such ambitions therefore seem admirably grand for such a modestly sized book. And yet when first starting the book it instantly becomes clear that such ambitions - or at least perceived ambitions - were never really intended.

GOTW: Alan Wake

Throughout the strange, unbalanced thread of Alan Wake's narrative, the writer, who gives the game its name, is mockingly referred to as, among others, Stephan King, Raymond Chandler and, most strangely, James Joyce. Personally I felt more like Garth Marenghi, but it's Stephan King, and his supernatural thrillers, whose presence is most heavily felt throughout. Alan Wake exists in that same liminal place inhabited by many of King's novels - where trashy fiction can be both utter nonsense and kind of important; kind of profound - well, at the very least genuinely enjoyable. Alan Wake gets away with a great deal because it seems to know this; it's trashy nature slips into the game as a whole, leaving memories behind which skitter between pure joy, genuine scares, ham-fisted acting, awful smiles and a few large holes in which moments of the game just disappeared into shear ordinariness. But, as with Deadly Premonition -  the cracked-out Japanese brother to the more straight-faced Wake - the game's faults and instability help it to become endearing. It's a bit messy, but when it hits the mark it does so incredibly well and the messiness only helps to underline the moments of quality.  

Gaming Report: June

A screenshot from Proteus, showing at Rezzed

Hello, hello! So, just a few updates on a couple of reviews I've written recently and a coming plug for a few further articles. Unfortunately I've recently fallen victim to a very slow case of the internet so I haven't managed to play that many new games - so if the head of BT is reading this: Sort it out! I've been trying to download Resonance for bloody ages now. Ok, sorry I'll be quiet....

Review: Dark Scavenger

Here's a review of the game Dark Scavenger which was originally published on Critical Gamer earlier this month. Dark Scavenger is made and released by Psydra Games via their website: http://www.darkscavenger.com/ Check it out. 

Remember when games required the player to use their imagination? When places, characters and whole narrative worlds could be grown from paragraphs of white text on a monitor? When rudimentary representations were merely springboards for the player's desire to experience new imaginative universes? Gamers of a certain age will still be able to fully recall, and may even still play, primitive graphical and text based adventure games but for many others (this reviewer included) such experiences remain vague childhood memories. Psydra Game's adveture-RPG Dark Scavengers feels like a much needed exercise in hypnotic regression; an excavation of all those obscure, childhood adventures of the imagination which many of us lost amidst years of graphical realism and beautifully rendered interactive worlds.

Game/Cultural Issues of the Week

This week month has been a busy one... excuses abound about why I haven't stayed true to my humble principle of writing more regularly, but, to be completely honest, it doesn't really matter. So I'm going to ignore my own self pity and talk a little about what's been going on in the realm of computer games! What follows is an amorphous mass of writing on the issues of sexism and violence in computer games. Oh god...

It seems that socio-cultural issues spread like wild fire in game journalism. First it was the issue of violence which found itself most cohesively expressed in the demos of E3 - that now much derided convention/colossus of a sales pitch. Much was said about Usher, dubstep and all round disappointment/bewilderment, but more importantly there has been a general backlash surrounding the fetishistic insistence on violence and realism still dominating the big budget game releases. Then this was coupled with some serious criticism coming from journalists apparently finding themselves agasp at gender issues in mainstream computer games, meaning that there has been some really interesting and heated web-debates going on in computer game journalism.

Superbrothers: Swords & Sworcery EP

I've failed this fortnight in writing a 'game of the week', which is a shame because I've actually been playing an awful lot. Unfortunately all this game playing is related to articles so it doesn't seem quite right to use the material elsewhere. The only game which isn't related to an article is The Witcher 2 for 360, which has been fun, but I've only played a few missions so I'm not entirely qualified at the moment to comment. Anyway, here's a review which was previously published by the wonderful website Critical Gamer. Its for Swords & Sworcery for the PC, which is a 'good' game I think. The review is very positive, but be warned that the game, for all its style and uniqueness visually, kind of lacks what the original iOS game had - gameplay. Or at least anything which the average PC gamer would consider had any depth. However the game is lush - so yeah, review over... 

Getting to Grips With the Games of Dr. Foddy

I first heard of Bennett Foddy's game QWOP via a 'demotivational' poster posted on one of the many meme sites I incessantly stared at while writing my dissertation last summer. The image displayed a picture of Modor with a strangely primitive rendition of a man falling backwards in a running position; the lower text read 'One does not simply QWOP into Modor'. After chuckling in a confused and self-conscious way I quickly typed the word 'QWOP' into Google, hoping for a simple answer to my apparent internet illiteracy. I then spent the rest of the day struggling to play QWOP, a game in which the player has the apparently difficult task of making a man run 100 metres.

In many ways QWOP is simply a funny game in which the basic faculty of running - possibly the most popular and simple modes of transport either in life or represented in computer games - becomes a task of immense difficulty. The ridiculousness of the actions on the part of the game's runner as the player tries to negotiate the utterly different controls generally results in either fits of hilarity or bewildered frustration, or both. Whereas pressing a directional arrow had sufficed throughout gaming's history, QWOP forces the player to reacquaint themselves with the human body as a means of propulsion. The Q and W keys are assigned to the character's thighs while O and P are the calf muscles. Pressing these keys causes the character to move each muscle and, hopefully, the body forwards. Whether this occurs in stiff spasmodic jolts or smooth strides is really down to the player's familiarity with the control scheme and seeing as it's a scheme which belies all our collective knowledge of 'how games work'  it generally requires a great deal of practice.

Game of the Week: Time Gentlemen, Please!

The history of comical pastiche is one of varying success. Family Guy's parody of Star Wars succeed only in being the most turgidly boring thing ever created by human minds while films such as The Princess Bride and Chinatown showed that, done properly and with some intelligence, pastiche  can be as good as those which they lampoon and pay tribute. Spaceballs fits somewhere in the middle I guess.

                            

This week's game, Time Gentlemen, Please!, developed by Size Five (formally Zombie Cow) Games, who were responsible for Time Gentlemen's freeware predecessor Ben There, Dan That, possibly sits a bit higher than Spaceballs on the scale of Family Guy (-20) to Chinatown (+ 2,000). Despite what I just wrote please don't be put off by my comparison to Spaceballs (the scale means nothing!), Time Gentlemen is a genuinely funny game which pays great homage to the classics of the point-and-click genre while also being a clever and deserving example of it.

Freeware Love: PMQs

For some strange reason I've always enjoyed watching Prime Minister's Questions. There's something alluring about watching the leaders of your country act like the unadulterated school ground toffs that they are. It's almost like watching a parody of itself. So what better way to celebrate this strangely addictive spectator's sport than having a go yourself? PMQs, a game developed by Mark Richards alongside his blog Pixel Politics, allows for just that.

Game of the Week: Bioshock 2

Finding myself working far more than I'd ever reasonably want to I thought that a good way to make sure that I continued to write regularly was to make an easy and accessible way to discuss videogames (for myself that is). So I hope to suggest a 'game of the week'. This might be a game I'm currently playing or a game which I think is worth talking about - whether its surprisingly good or remarkably bad. Ultimately it allows me to indulge in a bit of creative bankruptcy and also lets me chat about games I like - win, win. 

Kicking off this week I want to look at a relatively recent, big budget game which kind of deserves a bit more credit than it received. It's Bioshock 2 of course! woop! Now the first game, Bioshock 1, is certainly more worthy of 'classic' status, despite the fact that its plays like a crayon drawing of System Shock 2, but I personally think that it's the sequel which has the better gameplay. It might lack the impact of setting which the first game had, and misses out on having truly insane characters such as Sander Cohen or Steinmen, but I think Bioshock 2 provided a much more convincing and exciting experience overall. 

Ys: The Oath in Felghana

After nearly eight years since its initial release in Japan for the PC, Ys: The Oath in Felghana has finally received an official localization in the West thanks to Steam and publisher XSEED Games. This release isn't exactly the first Western iteration of the game - which appeared on the PSP a couple of years ago as well as having several fan translations over the years - but it is no less welcomed and despite the years in interim it remains an excellent example of an Action-RPG for the PC.

As with Oath in Felghana's release history, so the origin of the game's content demands a little explanation. This is in fact a remake of the third Ys game, Ys III: Wanders From Ys, which was released way back in 1989 for several home consoles including the MSX 2 and the Famicom in Japan. The game had a design similar to The Adventures of Link, which had been released a couple of years previously, and marked a distinct break (as Zelda II did) from the staples of the series. Where previous games in the Ys series were more focused on maze exploration and bashing into enemies from a top-down perspective, Ys III moved the action to a side-scrolling plane and introduced platforming elements and even an 'attack'  button (gasp!). The game was also a notable entry into the series for having a great magic system, memorable boss fights and outstanding music as well as being, as games generally were back in then, incredibly hard.

3 Notes on Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

It's been a good few months since Bethesda released the fifth entry in the consistently epic RPG series, Elder Scrolls. As with many games last year I found that on the release of Skyrim I had other things going on and didn't manage pick up a copy, despite being initially very excited. However, a couple of weeks ago I found myself standing before a reduced price copy in Tesco, basket in hand, considering the endeavour despite being halfway through several other games.

I forwent  the opportunity thinking to myself (in faux-rational terms) that I had other things to do, other games to play. Yet the next evening I found myself driving to Tesco again, this time with the sole purpose of buying the game. To my dismay it had sold out! But at this point nothing could stop me. And thus I began the rather depressing quest of finding a copy of Skyrim at eight in the evening. Basically I drove to the next Tesco (it was quite far away) and, finally acquiring a copy, ranted it home to start what I should have started long ago. 

Cures for the Gaming Blues - Some forthcoming releases

With the recent nonsense surrounding Mass Effect 3 and the series' indomitable 'fans', my cynicism for big budget games has started to reach dangerous levels. The blame for this rubbish without doubt falls across the board as the self-righteous ME fan's disillusionment is surely only encouraged by the growing incomprehensibility of the games publishing industry. Crippling DRM and unashamedly flagrant DLC have naturally worn down gamers and their response seems to have come in the form of miscalculated rage, which is, I guess, understandable. But with all these issues now clouding the general excitement and fantasy which game releases once inspired, it's worth turning to smaller games which, not without grand ambition, have managed to exist without all the marketing politics which now plague the colossal budgeted 'AAA' games.

Here are four forthcoming games which are looking pretty inspiring:

Dragon's Dogma OXM preview video

From Software's recent forays into the RPG showed that a little Japanese hardcore-ness can do wonders for the traditionally Western open-world fantasy RPG. This video from OXM shows that Capcom's upcoming open-worlder could be similarly invigorating. Seemingly lacking a fast travel option (this of course doesn't discount the obligatory mechanic showing up later in the game), there is an overall sense of danger and atmosphere which, if the Souls games taught us anything, can do wonders when becoming immersed in a game. The presenter's promise of depth to the 'pawn' mechanic also sounds great (if the game manages to deliver). I love the idea that the player will essentially be able to build their own party - if anything this reminds me more of Balders Gate than Elder Scrolls. 

Unlike the Dark Souls, whose open-world was almost wholly inhabited by baddies, Dragon's Dogma looks a tad more human. However I am excited by the idea of a truly challenging world to explore - the woods, while the video shows us little actual exploration, look both inviting and terrifying. Weirdly I'm most excited by the prospect of being caught short and having to run through the pitch black night with zombies on my tracks! Its an exciting propsect for what originally looked like a pretty standard RPG. 

Put simply Dragon's Dogma looks pretty great! Heres the video courtesy of OXM

Review: Vessel

Here's a review of the excellent Vessel I wrote for the website Rhythm Circus:

The Puzzle-Platformer genre has seen something of a renaissance in recent years. Thanks  to gaming platforms such as Steam, PSN Store and XBLA, these games  have found themselves a suitable home where they can gain a measure of success outside the money throwing competitions of the established games industry. Starting from the relatively simple design concept of the platform game many of these Indie titles have developed far beyond the realm of simplicity, with devs exploring new aesthetics and experimenting with game mechanics. Vessel, the first game developed by Strange Loop Games - a small developer based in Seattle - marks a strong step towards a grander aesthetic within the genre while still keeping experimentation close to its heart.

2 RPGs available to Download

A very quick blog:

I've just found out that two classic RPGs (both with suitably silly names) are available to download on PC so I thought I'd let everyone know!

First, which was released yesterday, is Ys: The Oath Felghana. It's a remake of Ys III in 3D and looked amazing on the PSP version released a couple of years ago. It's got a pretty standard plot but the gameplay is brilliant. It's much more action packed then many JRPGs and involves much platforming and button mashing. Great fun. I think that I'm going to wait for it either to come down in price - as things tend to do on Steam - or buy it next month. I'm really looking forward to replaying this game.

The second game, available on GOG, is the under-rated West meets East turn-based RPG, Anachronox. The turn-based combat was an unlikely model for an RPG developed by Ion Storm but it works perfectly well. The characters and story are incredible, the setting is bizarre and epic, and the dialogue is amazing! This is a game which I actually kind of forgot about until today, but I'm really looking forward to re-playing what I remember to be an incredibly fun RPG.  

The Good, The Bad, The Jaffe

After nearly a month of sweat, dust and strong whiskey I can finally hang my boots up and call it a day with Rock Star San Diego's epic Wild Western Red Dead Redemption. It's been a long emotional journey across a dynamic and utterly spell binding landscape. The characters along the way have been just as memorable and the story has not only been exciting and deep in its own right but has also been a tale shot through with clever references and knowing nods to the dying West of Peckinpah and Leone. A thoughtful and exemplary videogame, but one which is also incredibly 'cinematic'. It's hard not to play this game without noticing the long shadow of cinema creeping across nearly every facet of Red Dead. This filmic quality is not a criticism and is partly the reason why this game is so successful, but it also points out the problems which the game faces.

It was interesting to listen to David Jaffe's speech at DICE 2012 whilst being in the midst of my romance with Red Dead. Jaffe's talk, whilst slightly meandering, seemed to come upon something important. What I understood from Jaffe's argument was that game developers - and publishers - were focusing too much upon telling stories through the medium and not enough on the mechanics of actual gameplay. So, while millions of dollars are being ploughed into developing the visual element of videogames the actual gameplay hasn't actually developed much since the nineties. While Jaffe's speech may have seemed (as it did to me at first) to deride videogame story altogether (his off the cuff comments about videogames being a rubbish story telling medium surely didn't help him), I don't think this was in fact the purpose of the talk. Instead he seemed to be saying that games need to focus on developing the gameplay rather than only focusing on the often non-interactive narrative and visual appearance.

Gaming Report: Feb and Beyond!

This month, in terms of videogames, has mostly been about completing Red Dead Redemption. It's been pretty epic and I'm feeling a bit lost now that it's over - but it had to be done. My mounting backlog is starting to feel a bit oppressive. Steam is particularly to blame for me buying unnecessary games. This month I picked up Braid, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, Freedom Force and its sequel, and Cthulhu Saves The World with Breath of Death IV. Along with this I reclaimed some old PC games which belonged to my brother when he was younger. I'm not sure whether they will all work on a Windows 7 laptop (I'm not sure I want to play them all to be honest - god knows why he bought Salt Lake Winter Olympics 2002) but there are some real classics here.

I booted up Deus Ex and that seems to work great - I've got right back into capping fools with the dart gun. The best of these games are probably: Homeworld: Cataclysm, SWAT3, Theme Hospital (I don't think this'll work), GTA3, Outcast and Star Trek: Elite Force. I'm quietly excited about  replaying Elite Force. This was a massive game for me as a kid. I was, to say the least, a little obsessed with Voyager and the promise of shooting Borg while cracking wise with Tom Paris was like a dream come true (in FPS form). If I remember rightly the game was actually pretty good - which is surprising for a Star Trek game. Working solely from memory I think there was a good variety of weapons and enemy types - and I think a half decent story. It was developed by Raven Software too which is promising. Anyway I'm hoping it'll install and run fine, then I'll report back on how it goes.

With the release of Mass Effect 3 coming up pretty soon I thought I'd play through the first two games in an attempt to hype myself up for the third game. I've said this a thousand times to my increasingly beleaguered friends, but I've never really connected to the ME series. This always seemed incongruous to my general interested - Sci-fi, Rpg, Bioware, etc.- so I'm determined to recap on the series and see whether I enjoy it more another time around. This is perhaps also an attempt to regain my grip on current game releases. Last year I found that I inextricably missed some great games when they were first released. Skyrim slipped past and I still haven't bought the game or even played a single hour of the 'Game of last year'. Similarly Portal 2 pasted without me picking it up, and only with coming of January did I finally buy and play the game (needless to say it was fantastic). Hopefully by forcing myself to enjoy Mass Effect I will be able to jump on Mass Effect 3 and subsequently feel more contemporary. Unfortunately I also realised that Freespace 1&2 are up on gog.com meaning that my I'm back to the old. As always too many games, too little spare time (too heavier a conscience).  

Freespace 2

Black Mesa Revisited - Re-reviewing Half-Life

Throughout my life as a man (previously a boy) interested in videogames I have invariably tried to come up with some form of Top Games list in my head. While this list tends to change with every interesting new game I play, or every forgotten gem I'm randomly reminded of,  one game in particular has tended to stay the course and has become my go-to answer if I am ever asked. Half-life is a game which I have cemented in my haphazard brain as a true great. Like Citizen Kane to the AFI, Half-Life is my inevitable answer to the question: what is your favourite game? But, the problem with this answer is that unlike several other personal favourites such as Monkey Island 2, Okami or Thief, I haven't actually played Half-Life in a very long time. So when I answer in a suspiciously robotic tone, I am also asking myself: Is this really the case or am I just avoiding a long period of silence while I rifle through all the games I've ever played?  

The thing is, while Half-Life is often brought up as an incredibly important game in the history of the FPS genre - making aesthetic and gameplay innovations which still have influence now - and is often placed high on published lists, it was also a game which genuinely had a huge affect on me as a youngster. I was 11 when it was released in 1998 and with a mind for violence and guns Half-Life struck me as something both visceral and sophisticated. From the instantly iconic opening I was hooked and became determined to traverse all the weird puzzles and scatty AI the game could throw at me. I found everything about it enthralling - the sound of changing weapons, the voice of the HEV suit, crow baring headcrabs, playing cat and mouse with the military and making jumps which seemed almost impossible - Half-Life was a game which enveloped me and many other gamers with its mysterious, labyrinthine trip through its crumbling research facility. For an awkward young boy Black Mesa was the place to be. But since my obsession with the game early on in life I haven't gone back to it for nearly 8 years. So, with the recent purchase of a working laptop I decided to throw nostalgia to the wind and re-play this 'favourite' game of mine.

Freeware Love: Treasure Adventure Game

They say nothing in life is free. Nothing, that is, except freeware! Over the years I've downloaded my fair share of free games with often little to no expectation for satisfying or memorable game play. Once in a while though you find a game which, whilst developed with a nonexistent budget and released for free, is in fact as good as any retail game. Games such as Spelunky and Digital: A Love Story proved that freeware games can be deep, immersive experiences in which production values have no rightful place and where personal creativity is king. I recently came across a freeware game called Treasure Adventure Game which proved to be just such a game.

The Tiny Bang Story

I downloaded this quaint puzzler thanks to it being very cheap on Steam the other day and found it to be enjoyable if a bit too subdued. First of all the game looks very pretty and its calm, peaceful hand-drawn backdrops perfectly encapsulate the atmosphere which pervades this very short adventure. This atmosphere is perhaps best described as a serene daydream. The game's music equally keeps this sleepy mood up. Plucked guitars, tinkling bells and soft synths make sure that whilst you solve the game's relatively meagre puzzles you never  feel pressured to stay awake. Even the narrative, which involves you rebuilding a tiny planet after the eponymous Bang shatters it, is utterly devoid of the usual immediacy which games trash their players with. In fact its quietly refreshing to be able to play a game at your own pace. There is no urgency to the puzzles and rebuilding the shattered planet seems to hardly matter to the planet's lethargic population. This means that when playing the game I was never stressed about puzzle solving and was able to enjoy experimentation in a relaxed mood.