Review of 1942: Joint Strike

My first review for GameRevolution has been posted! It covers1942: Joint Strike, a game that was quite a bit of fun. Especially when I played it with a friend, and we were drinking. Woo!

Hit up the review here, and let me know what you think!

 

I’m Not Quite Dead

I know it’s been forever since I’ve posted, but things have picked up for me recently. Since I’ve been so busy, and it’s not like this blog actually makes me any money, it’s kind of fallen by the wayside.

Since I last posted, I’ve taken on two new jobs. The first, as kind of a side gig, is that I’ve begun to write reviews for Game Revolution. My first review, of the game 1942: Joint Strike, should be posted soon, and I’ve been working on another one this week for Bionic Commando Rearmed. I’m just doing Xbox Live Arcade games so far, since it’s easy for GR to send me a redeemable code, and so far I’m just getting free games out of it, but hey, free games!

On a more career-oriented note, in eleven days I will be starting work in QA at Blue Fang Games. It’s entry-level, sure, but it’s a foot in the door of the industry in which I’ve wanted to work since I was five years old, drawing old Nintendo Power-style level layouts for imaginary platformers. (I created multiple concepts for a Calvin & Hobbes game of which I was particularly proud.)

 

On Multiplayer Personalities

In a bit of site news, I’ve added a new page at the top called “What I’m Playing.” It’s exactly what it sounds like, just a simple list of games I’ve been playing lately.

One game that’s on there that wouldn’t have been there two days ago is Team Fortress 2. I’ve had the Orange Box for a while, obviously, but TF2 is probably my least-played of the package. There’s not anything innately wrong with the game, it’s just that I’ve always been more of a single-player gamer, my twenty-one-month addiction to World of Warcraft notwithstanding. Dealing with the attitude of the average twitch gamer online isn’t really something I enjoy doing.

But yesterday, after reading about the impending “Heavy Update” to the game, and looking at all the changes that Team Fortress 2 has undergone in the last few months, I decided to give the game another shot. At about two in the morning, I looked up and realized I really needed to go to bed.

 

New Dead Space Video Chokes In The Home Stretch

There’s a new gameplay video for Dead Space at 1up’s GameVideos, and for the most part, it’s another great showcase of the game’s diegetic interface. The avatar’s health is displayed in a series of lights along the spine of his armor, crosshairs are laser-projected from the weapon itself, and there’s even an “upgrade bench” with a pop-up holographic menu where the player can upgrade weapons.

There are some good scares as well, and the trailer ends with a fantastic sequence of a player getting dragged down a hallway by a giant tentacle, before shooting it off it and making a narrow escape. It’s a great bit of gameplay, but just as it finishes, right before the trailer ends, the severed tentacle fades away.

 

Review: Braid

For a game about time-travel and changing history, it’s appropriate that Braid seems to come from some alternate timeline in which Super Mario Bros. was a collaborative effort between Vincent van Gogh and H. G. Wells.

At its core, Braid is a platformer. You play as Tim, a dapper gent in a sport coat and tie who travels through bright, colorful levels while jumping on the heads of enemies, avoiding carnivorous plants that pop out of green pipes, and trying to save The Princess, who is always in another castle.

Does any of this sound familiar yet?

What distinguishes Tim from a certain plumber, however, is his ability to stop, speed up, and rewind the flow of time. If you’ve played Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, you’ll be pretty familiar with how the system works in Braid. Yet Braid’s time manipulation is more versatile and is the focus of gameplay instead of just a way around death, (although it’s used that way too.) It’s easy to learn and dead simple in practice, but you’ll find yourself pulling off increasingly complicated strategies as the game progresses.

 

Brainy Gamer Proposes Narrative “Manifesto”

Yesterday I discovered The Brainy Gamer, and reading through some of its most recent posts, I’m wondering what the hell took me so long. Its Vintage Game Club post discussing Grim Fandango alone instantly upgrades this to one of my favorite blogs, and it doesn’t hurt that the writing is excellent

In any case, I found the blog through a link from Kotaku, highlighting a number of different essays on gaming narrative that all seem to have coincidentally appeared at around the same time. Blog author Michael Abbott proposes that these essays are the beginning of a kind of manifesto concerning narratives in gaming:

Perhaps “manifesto” is too strong a word for what I’m describing, but at the moment I can’t think of a better one. Most dictionaries define the term as a public declaration of intentions, motives or views. Beyond that simple definition, however, manifestos are intrinsically anti-status-quo. Regardless of its framework -  politics, ideology or art – a manifesto is a defiant call for change and an implied “Who’s with me?” All of the people I’m about to describe are plugging into something that sounds very much like a collective manifesto to me.

I won’t go into much more of it here, save that one of the authors Abbott quotes is Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid, a game that recently hit the Xbox Live Marketplace. (A full review of which is forthcoming, but in short, a brilliant game that everyone should go play.)

Abbott’s post is an excellent read, and although I haven’t yet been able to delve into the links he provides, I expect I have several hours of reading ahead of me. Go check it out.

 

Aeris Who?

So my post two days ago decrying Square’s treatment of Chrono Trigger made me really, really want to play the game again. So I’ve put my Fallout 2 playthrough on hold while I tear through CT a couple of times. (Gotta love New Game Plus.)

Note that this post is going to contain game spoilers, so if you still, for some reason, care about the plot of Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, or Call of Duty 4 being spoiled for you, it’s probably not a good idea to click past the jump.

 

Bodies In Dead Space Include Warren Ellis

Dead Space gets more and more attractive each time I hear about it. The most recent delicious piece of news, as reported by Rock, Paper, Shotgun, is that much of the game was written by comic writer Warren Ellis. On his most recent mailing list release, Ellis revealed his involvement:

Oh, I got released from an NDA the other day, so I can finally say that I wrote a bunch of the groundwork, backstory and structure on the forthcoming EA videogame DEAD SPACE, which recently got a comic prequel from the hands of Antony Johnston and Ben Templesmith. I believe there was at least one other writer on the project, but I’m sure there’s some of me in there somewhere.

Ellis is the madman behind the comics series Transmetropolitan and Planetary, as well as plenty of other work for Marvel, DC, Wildstorm, Image, and others. Planetary being one of my favorite comics EVER, this announcement makes my fanboy gland pulsate in anticipation.

I’m sorry, that was gross.

 

The Little Franchise That Could If Square Actually Let It

I don’t get it. What exactly is the reason for Square Enix’s treatment of Chrono Trigger over the years? The only “sequel” to the game did away with all of the characters everyone loved in the first place, and then nothing for years. In 2004, a fan-created game, called Chrono Resurrection, was announced, in an attempt to recreate the original game in a 3D engine. Obviously, Square’s lawyers beat it down like a red-headed stepchild, earning more ill-will from fans of the franchise.

Finally, last month, a ticking clock appears on Square’s homepage. But no, it wasn’t a new game. Square is simply re-releasing the game as a full-priced cartridge for the Nintendo DS. And now Square’s announced that Europe, which never even saw an SNES release of Chrono Trigger, will have to wait even longer than the U.S. to play it on the DS.

 

In Silent Hill, My Paper Beats Your Scissors

Andrew Vanden Bossche has written an excellent piece over at Gamasutra about barriers in gameplay and how they relate to the suspension of disbelief. Players are willing to believe any law of a game’s universe, or any limit that the designers put on the player, as long as it remains consistent.

Players will, for the most part, happily accept limits like these. But when a restriction contradicts the very logic that has so far applied to rest of the game world, you run into situations where a character that could previously bash the brains out of a zombie with a lead pipe cannot use that same lead pipe to break an ordinary glass window.

Essentially, the article is another argument against the Insurmountable Waist-High Fence phenomenon that is such a common trait of lazy level design these days. Such obstacles aren’t just detrimental to the game in the sense that they’re annoying to the player; they actually remove the player from the game world, jarring her out of the story by reminding her that she is in a game with arbitrary laws.

Where Bossche covers some new ground, however, is in his suggestion that games can actually be more believable when they are less original in their use of obstacles.