Search for a Voice

Not Enough Time

Yesterday is one of those days that I both hate and love at the same time.  Two very different games released, but both were games that I had been looking forward to for some time.  When this happens, generally speaking I will wait on one of them until I have a lull in game play enough to be able to pick it up and consume it.  Problem is, in this case I inadvertedly pre-ordered both not really knowing when one of them would release.  So last night I made an attempt to devote a sufficient amount of time to both of them.  At the very least we have a long holiday weekend coming up that hopefully I can spend completing them both.

Honestly the pure joy of playing two amazingly crafted games was exactly what I needed to combat yesterday.  Everything about yesterday was pure crap.  Monday afternoon I remember remarking with joy that I had a completely open Tuesday, then over the course of the day one by one the meetings piled up.  So not only did I spend almost the entire day in one meeting or another, we also had a handful of crisis to deal with.  So by the end of the day I just wanted the world to burn around me… which is something you can do very easily in a video game.  Braxwolf made an interesting post about the nature of gaming, and for me… games are often more than just games.  After a bad day like yesterday… games are very much therapy.

Search for a Voice

Since the E3 that they announced it, I have been looking forward to Transistor, the new isometric beat-em-up from Supergiant Games the creators of Bastion.  The game company has singlehandedly redefined how I feel about the narrator and how it relates to the action on screen.  With Bastion, the narrator was a character in itself, telling you the story of the protagonist you were playing.  In Transistor we have a similar setup going on, except this time the narrator is actually the sword you wield named Transistor.  As the course of the game unfolds you find that you are Red a famous pop singer, and that some organization called the Camerata killed your boyfriend… somehow transforming him into the blade and stole your voice.  The other odd twist is that all of you seem to be computer programs, and after one dies you can pick their core up and use them as a weapon against the evil “Process”.

The entire treatment of the game has a very “Tron-Noir” feel to it, and I am eating up all of the visuals.  Your character is gorgeously animated, and the surroundings feel lush and vibrant, with tons of little things for you to encounter that serve no real purpose other than to have the narrator tell you more tidbits of information.  The gameplay is…  to say nothing else “different”.  It is a mix of real time and turn based gameplay that feels fresh and unique.  I have no clue what the controls are without a controller, but if you press the right trigger button you pause time allowing you to plot a move and funnel attacks quickly into a target.  Pressing the trigger again unfreezes time and executes the attack pattern.  The gotcha is that lots of mob types will move out of your way and you will have just wasted all of your energy on an attack that doesn’t land the blow.

The trick of the game seems to be figuring out which attacks work best on which mob types and figuring out which to take out in real time and which to defeat using this pseudo “bullet time”.  Executing a sequence of attacks causes you to be drained for a period of time, which means you can do absolutely nothing but run around to avoid mob counter attacks.  There are lots of white boxes scattered throughout the levels that you end up using as a buffer to avoid getting hit.  These are unfortunately destructible which means you only have so long to faff about before you have no cover to duck behind.  The death sequence is a bit odd, in that instead of losing a life it overloads whatever weapon you happen to be using.  This weapon then stays down for as long as it takes you to get to the next checkpoint.  This means you want to be proficient at more than one weapon in case you are stuck without your attack of choice.

I played the game long enough to clear the first “world” of sorts and am in transition to the next main area of the game.  The game has me hooked and wanting more, so I figure over the next few days I will devote the several hours needed to finish it up.  From what I have heard the game has around 6 hours of game play in it, which seems like a good amount for an isometric beat-em-up like this.  Because of the way you can combine new attacks that you find with your existing attacks to product new results, I feel like there is more than likely quite a bit of replay value.  Even if there isn’t the game is gorgeous, and absolutely oozing personality… so more than worth the $20 purchase price.  Right now I am very much in the “not as good at this game as I wish I was” phase, so hopefully that will improve as I get more used to the unique control scheme.

Faff About In Cyrodil

Since I am running out of time… and I ended up writing so much about Transistor without really meaning to, I am opting to leave my review of Wolfenstein: New Order until tomorrow morning.  I actually ended up playing it quite a bit longer last night, so I am afraid I have even more to say about that.  It was a really great day for gaming.  Just a friendly reminder that tonight I will be playing Elder Scrolls Online as we have another “Faff About in Cyrodil” night planned.  If you have not seen the notice check out the Anook event.  If you are a member of the Alliance of Awesome community, you are more than welcome to join along even if you are not in the House Stalwart guild.  We are all Daggerfall Covenant so there is also that restriction.  I just dinged 50 this week and will actually be Veteran Rank 1 as we do this… so maybe just maybe we won’t get rolled quite so hard out in Cyrodil.  I am not holding my breath however.  In any case it was a lot of fun last week and we ran around collecting skyshards and doing quests out there as a horde.

#AllianceOfAwesome #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Transistor