steampowered sunday Archives - Page 4 of 6

Savior of the Heavens

March 7, 2014 by Belghast

War of Guilds

A few days ago on a whim I decided to reinstall Guild Wars 2 and patch it up, which is not an insignificant process at this point. Last night before getting into anything else I decided to give it a spin. I have done this a number of times since launch, with essentially the same results. After a few minutes of running around I decided that I still don’t like the game. I figured this post is relevant with all of my recent Elder Scrolls fanboyism… that yes it is perfectly okay for you not to like a game. Guild Wars 2 is one of those titles that I want to like, because so many people have so many great moments with the game. However for whatever reason I just cannot see the magic in it that others can.

Guild Wars 2 stands alone as the only alpha program I have ever resigned from. I just did not like what the game was, and how it deviated from all of things I had read into their manifesto about the game. When it came close to release I got into beta and had a marginal amount of fun, and with it launching in a relative dead spot I decided to take the plunge and try it. On the initial play through I managed to make it through to about level 40 before running out of care to continue pushing forward. This is round and about the place most of us dropped out of it. Largely it was the chaos that is GW2 group combat that soured the milk for me.

All of that said… I want to see the magic that others see in this game. So every few months I patch it up and give it another try. I have always prided myself in being able to see the good in something despite its flaws, and as a result it drives me absolutely insane that I cannot grasp why people love this game. I don’t want the game to change to fit my desires, so after a bit of playtime every few months we agree to disagree and I end up uninstalling it again. Other than the chaotic game play, there is just something about the game that feels largely pointless… and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I love faffing about as much as the next person, and I do so happily in many other games… but there is just something about this games style of faffing that seems hollow.

I am not going to rage against this game and bash it for being bad… because it very obviously is NOT bad if so many people seem to be enjoying themselves. It is just not a game for me. I don’t pretend to believe that I could have built it better, nor would I even know where to start to make it feel more like a game I would want to play. So I guess in writing this… I want to show that it is perfectly okay to not like the game that everyone else likes. In doing so you can not like it, but also not seek to spoil the fun of those who really do enjoy it. There are a long list of games that I just don’t “grok” for one reason or another, but it is okay. They exist, and people like them… and it is just fine for me not to.

Savior of the Heavens

Last night I finished my play through of Diablo 3 this time on Hard mode. I am not sure why, but for whatever reason I prefer to level my characters linearly. I know I can jump around a bit after beating the game ages ago on my Monk, but it seems pleasing to see the story play out in front of me as I trudge through it. Last night I played with a handful of friends, and managed to get a few nice legendary drops. Traditionally I have stuck with dual wield, because in general I prefer that in most games. However last night I managed to get an early 50s version of the Zweihander and it good enough to get me to abandon my dual wielding ways… at least temporarily.

I am pretty sure at some point I flipped a slider and the game decided I needed “more spikey bits”, as I now am this bladed lord of death. The appearance is growing on me, and when you see it in small form on screen I look a bit like I imagined the Shrike looking from the Hyperion series. Upon defeating Diablo I promptly restarted the game, this time bumping the difficulty up to expert. As a result I have had to tweak my build a bit to add in a bit more survival. It is not quite as faceroll as it was during my run through Hard. Mostly I am noticing that my healbot spec Templar is starting to struggle to keep up, or at least allowing me to drop quite a bit before topping me back off. Wondering if this will change as I upgrade his gear a bit. I have been trying to keep it upgraded, mostly with my handmedowns.

At the close of the night I managed to ding 56, so hopefully tonight I should be able to finish off my push to get this character to 60. At this point, I can’t really see playing up another character until the crusader. I am sure the Witchdoctor, Demon Hunter and Wizard are cool in their own way… but each of them is very much a ranged/finger wiggler class. They are just not the type of character I enjoy playing. I realize you can tweak them a bit to make them play in different ways, but at the core they will still be more glass cannonish than I care to play. I enjoy tanks and tanky dps… and I feel like the Barbarian, Monk and Crusader fit that bill just fine. If I continue to struggle a bit I might switch to a sword/board build on my Barbarian as I have done in the past. For the time being it is working, but I am having to finally start using my heal pots on elites and champions.

Steampowered Sunday Bioshock Contest

Just a quick reminder that I am running a contest of sorts to let you guys pick what I will be playing this Sunday for my Steampowered Sunday feature. The idea behind Steampowered Sunday is to get me to install and play a game from my steam backlog. Then I will write about the game play experience. Sometimes it is extremely glowing, other times not so much. This week I decided to mix things up a bit and post a google form that allows you guys to vote on which title I will be playing the following week. I have had a handful of votes to date, but I am really hoping for more. As of this morning it looks like if nothing changes I will be playing Alan Wake. Tomorrow when I blog I will be tabulating the results and declaring a winning game.

Additionally to make this more interesting, I have decided to use this as a way to get rid of some of the duplicates I have in steam and have gotten through the various indie bundles. This week I will be giving away a copy of the original Bioshock for Steam. So when you vote, make sure you let me know if you want to be entered in the running for the copy of Bioshock. If so make sure you include your steam id in the form. Saturday morning when I blog I will be picking a winner for this as well and sending off the free game. So get out there and vote… and decide my Steampowered Sunday Fate.

Vote Here!

Risk of Rain

March 2, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #7

I feel like I am getting on on this bandwagon about three months too late. Risk of Rain is an interesting indie metroidvania shooter, with randomly generated worlds and randomly placed objectives. I remember seeing this and thinking, man that looks cool. So I picked it up over the Christmas break, but never ended up playing it. When I started this whole Steampowered Sunday section this was also the very first game I think that a friend of mine gifted me to do a write up on. It was at that point that I knew sooner or later I would have to devote a Sunday morning to it. It was with a certain bit of trepidation that I finally sat down to play it. I had watched a few streamers playing this… and saw the frustration of them dying horribly over and over.

Your Death Was Extremely Painful

I honestly cannot remember a game that has been quite so successful at making me feel like a complete and total failure. I just finished playing roughly thirty minutes of the game and I feel like I want to throw the controller across the room. I of course won’t because I don’t want to break my favorite controller. The deck is stacked against you from the start it feels like, and the longer you take to find the teleporter, the worse the enemies get. However the longer you hold out, the better your chances are because you level up and can unlock various abilities throughout the level. The best I managed was getting to level 8 before finally getting swarmed to death by so many adds on screen at one time.

The problem I had with this level is I seriously could not find the damned teleporter. I wandered all over the place, picking up all sorts of nifty things, but never finding the actual objective. This is the real frustration of the game for me, is the dual missions… find the teleporter fast, and level up and find interesting weapons. When you finally do trigger the teleporter, you have to stay alive for 90 seconds while this insanely huge colossus attacks you, along with tons of other baddies that have spawned in. I have made it to the colossus phase half a dozen times at this point but the closest I have managed to make it is 30 seconds to go.

I think in part my issue is that it is set up with “modern” controller settings. I am just not used to using my trigger buttons for anything. I am far better controlling games with the face pad, so I have considered remapping the controls greatly to put all of my cooldowns on the face buttons. This is a side effect of growing up in the Atari/Nintendo/Super Nintendo era and pretty much disappearing from consoles in any serious way until Playstation/Playstation 2. I am just used to having everything controlled with the thumb buttons, and even while playing super nintendo games I tended to remap the controllers to put the buttons I almost NEVER pressed on the shoulder buttons.

The game itself is pretty gorgeous, and for not having many pixels to work with, the sprites evoke a sense of character to them. It honestly reminds me of the same kind of graphical treatment that the old school PC lemmings games used to have. Super intricate world made up of super tiny sprites. The music adds a certain character of foreboding to the alien landscape. Running around this world just feels eerie and I can’t really explain why. The purplish color palette fits the first level, but I am not sure if this changes the further you go in the game. The game is extremely well crafted for the limited resources it has on screen at a given time.

What the game reminds me of honestly is a bullet hell shooter, but if a bullet hell shooter started out extremely sparse and continued to get progressively worse over time. In most bullet hell games there is a point of equilibrium where “it can get no worse”. Once you reach that point you can adjust to it, and move forward. Risk of Rain always gets worse, there is no point at which you can really take a breather from the gameplay and prepare for the next assault. Each of the mobs on screen has a pattern, but some of them are purposefully non-complimentary. So far the things that always seem to kill me are the little flying jellyfish things. At the very least they whittle down my health to a point where one of the other mobs, like a lemurian can finish me off.

As maddening as I found the game, and while I could only take thirty minutes in one sitting… I have to say I enjoyed myself. I kinda want to boot the game up again and give it another try until I can defeat the first level. The game is extremely enjoyable and the concepts are simple enough to pick up in a few minutes. Survival is the major problem. I think if I could find the leech seed again, and then locate the teleporter early on I would be able to make it through the 90 second phase. If I got better at using the trigger buttons, namely to dodge I would have had a much better chance of success as well. Sooner or later I will have to adapt to “modern” controller layouts, because this new fangled trigger button thing apparently is not going away.

Now For Something New

For some time now, I have gathered up not only a backlog of games to play… but also thanks to the various humble bundle packs, a number of duplicates. As a result I have decided to start hosting a contest. The idea is that you the reader votes for the next game to be featured on Steampowered Sunday. I picked 10 possible titles from my steam backlog, and you the reader will pick which one you want me to play next sunday. During Saturday’s blog post I will declare a winner and choose a random submitter to win the game that is up for grabs that week. This week I will be giving away a copy of the original Bioshock. For this giveaway you must have a steam account to be eligible. I will be tabulating the results using a Google Form. If you are not interested in the game, but want to vote anyways… there is an option for that as well.

Click Here To Vote

Farcry 3: BLood Dragon

February 23, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #6

A few weeks back I did Steampowered Sunday over Far Cry 3, and thanks to the frustrations of dealing with UPlay I didn’t really give it that stellar of a rating. The forced stealth play just was not my thing, but one resounding chorus from folks responding to the post was… play Blood Dragon instead. From the moment I saw the artwork for the title… I knew I would love it, because I am an unrepentant child of the 80s. Everything about the game artwork alone screams 1980’s arcade cabinet artwork. Hand drawn polygon landscapes were a thing that became insanely popular in the post War Games sequence of games. We all wanted to be part of cyberspace in one way or another… even though at the time this was a largely fictional destination. Which leads to the question… did William Gibson predict the future in Neuromancer… or did we just build his future because of our love for it. That however is a topic for a completely different day.

All the Movies Rolled Into One

This game is in every way a love song for not only the video games of the 1980s but the movies as well. You start off with a minigun raid on a base form a Helicopter, while Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” plays on the stereo… a song that featured heavily in the pinnacle of 80s scifi action movies… Predator. It just keeps getting better from there. If you took Robocop, Universal Soldier, Ultraforce, and dumped them in a blender with Bad Dudes, Shinobi, and Duke Nukem… you might come close to creating a game like this. The visuals seem like a 1980s movie arcade scene vomited its magenta and red neon all over your screen. I could pick apart the picture above and name a dozen different movie and video game references in this one shot alone.

The Music is So Authentic

The visuals would not be enough to deliver the feeling of travelling back in time… but the music is really where the game scores 110%. Listening to the insane synths gave me flash backs of so many separate movies at once. I mean you could take this game as making fun of all the absolutely over the topness that was the 1980s, but instead they chose to make it some sort of a time capsule. For someone who lived through all of this, it is like a really crazy trip down memory lane. I had moments where I remembered the first time I watched Terminator, the first time I caught Highlander on HBO, the first time I watched Big Trouble In Little China… and Escape from New York. While none of it really is some kind of clone of the original tracks that obviously inspired it… it has the same feeling of sonic dissonance, driving drum machines and power chords.

Neon Archery Should Be A Thing

The weapons not only look great, but they are really functional. There is a sequence not far from the start of the game where like every 80s movie… you are captured and stripped of all of your weapons. Your fearless hero that has named Captain Rex Colt Power… has to get by with nothing but a bow and the ability to use the environmental behemoths… the Blood Dragons to take down a base. Sure the Blood Dragons do a lot of heavy lifting, but I feel like some sort of Neon Green Arrow as I headshot the guards with a bow. Firstly… I would wonder how the hell I could sneak around with glowing arms, and massively glowing weapons. However since everything in this world seems to glow… I am guessing also glowing is a form of camouflage? Whatever the reasoning behind it, things look badass. I mean as a child of the 80s… making something glow neon and putting skulls and spikes on it… is the absolute guarantee for making something awesome.

The Stealth Did Not Piss Me Off

Normally I hate stealth in games, but there is something about this game that simply changing the skins and color palettes immediately makes the default Far Cry 3 engine feel so much better. I think in part it is because I know that if I perform a take down, I get to see the awesome glowing blue wakizashi slice through the enemy and spill light blue glowing cyber fluid. Additionally there is a completely broken and overpowered ability to chain a bunch of take downs together by pressing your movement keys in the direction of the next mob in sequence. So far I have managed to take down 4 at once, but I imagine in later levels this becomes completely ludicrous. I think mostly my problem with stealth in games is the whole idea of a “bloodless” victory. I play these games to kill everything that stands, and when a storyline impedes me from doing this… my brain rebels.

The Cut Scenes are Amazing

Normally I also hate cut scenes of pretty much any kind. However apparently if you take those cut scenes… make them infused with the spirit of the 80s… and hand drawn… apparently I love them? The combination of the arcade game style pixel artwork and cheesy action movie dialog makes the whole experience enjoyable for me. That seems to really be an undercurrent of this game, “taking things Bel hates and making them enjoyable.” One of the more humorous moments is when your stereotypical mouthy partner initiates a tutorial sequence moments after dropping you on the island as a way of screwing with you. So you are forced there to sit through a sequence of tutorial commands… all the while you are yelling at your partner for making you do them. This is an awesome and irreverent way of making you play through the basic commands so that you know how the game controls.

The Game Is Still Farcry 3

Everything about the game is still very much Farcry 3. You move around the world capturing back positions… but instead of doing so from generic badguys that happen to all wear red bandanas… you are doing it from the Omega Force androids. I guess at the end of the day it is all about the packaging. If you have played Farcry 3, you know how the gameplay works. Capture a base, which opens up side missions, which then leads to the next base to capture. The key difference everything from Farcry has been taken to eleven. One of my favorite things is capturing cyber hearts and then using it to lure the Blood Dragons to bases and make them do your work for you. I mean what is cooler than than giant dinosaurs with glowing neon stripes… that have a plasma cannon breath attack? While I gave Farcry 3, a colossal score of 3 Mehs out of Meh… I have to give the Blood Dragon counterpart 5 Kick Asses out of Fucking Awesome.

While I have not really made it terribly far into the game at this point, I know this will be one that I return to and play again quite often. It is the sort of game you need to be in the mood for mindless carnage to be able to enjoy. At this point I have secured the first base, and started working on some of the side missions. Every now and then I come home from work, and just need to kill something. This is the ideal game to reach for, because the objectives pretty much are all “kill all the things”. There is zero subtlety here, but I am not really that subtle of a person, so it works for me. Since this is such a nostalgic ride for me, I find it odd how popular it has been among generations of folks who did not live this experience the first time. Maybe the camp of the 80s is universal and will always appeal. God save us all.

Portal 2

February 16, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #5

Okay here it comes… huge confession time. Prior to today I had never actually played Portal 2. I have owned it for ages, and picked it up when it was damned near free on a steam sale. I always meant to play it, but something… namely an MMO usually happened instead. Here goes confession number two while we are at it. I didn’t think Portal was that amazing of a game. I know shock and confusion all around… but it fell into the “cute and cleaver” games category. The whole portal gun thing was brilliant, but the concept of essentially a “puzzle shooter” was fun for a bit but I quickly got tired of it.

To be truthful I am not sure if I would have owned the original portal were it not for the orange box. I got it as part of that, and even then it was probably a year before I fired it up and played it. I mostly got the orange box for Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, and Portal for me was a bit of a footnote. Based on the copious amount of cosplay and fan art out there… I can tell that the Portal franchise is a life changing thing for some people. I was just not one of them. For ages my friends have pestered me for owning Portal 2 but never actually playing it. In a way I made a promise to redress that wrong during my Steampowered Sunday series. Things happened… and I am finally getting down to playing it today for what would be week 6 if I had not skipped a week.

We Weren’t Even Testing That

For the last hour and a half I have been sitting here playing Portal 2. While I still for the most part consider this game to be a novelty, so much about it has improved. Namely the setting seems more enjoyable to me. The sterile environment of the first lab was interesting, but watching the place fall down around me is far more enjoyable. It has a Portal meets Fallout feel that I really enjoy. Additionally the characters are so much more interesting this time around. GlaDOS was a really cool character in the first game, but now that the gloves are off her lines are that much more enjoyable. Then we add in Wheatley, which near the beginning of chapter three I have not seen a ton of since the first chapter, but I am figuring that will change soon.

The game setting is absolutely gorgeous and they have managed to pull off “believable decay”. Things are broken and out of whack and it feels like they are legitimately so. Like they used to work at one point and then just collapsed. So often in a game when the world is disintegrated, you cannot piece it back together in your mind to see what it looked like before the fall. Here the rooms seem to have all the right number of bits laying around to have been a whole unit at one point. I am not really sure why this is important to me, but in the games where it is not this way there is a nagging feeling that something is just plain off. Even in my beloved fallout series there are plenty of locations that have a chunk of the building broken off, but nowhere near enough debris to account for it.

There are two really cool stories going on at the same time, that are what if anything would keep me playing through the rest of the game. The first is… GlaDOS seems to think you are the same person who destroyed her in game one. If that is the case… how did you end up back in stasis. The other thing going on that I want to know more about are the weird messages that get left to you through the chambers. These are almost always well hidden, in a chamber behind an angled panel or something of the sort… just a bit off the planned path. I’ve snapped a few of these so far but I imagine that when taken together they will make some additional story.

I’ve really let the place go since you killed me

I have no idea how long the game is, but at this point I saved out and gave up on the first of the light bridge puzzles in chapter 3. This seemed like a good stopping point since it was the first time I had actually died. I feel that maybe the puzzles are easier this time around, either that or I was simply lucky. I was able to breeze through most of them to that point. Since the first game was so popular I wonder if maybe they watered down the difficulty level a bit for mainstream success. Not saying that is a bad thing necessarily, but it does give the game a feeling that it is just easier. I remember in the first one I was having to retry levels pretty early on at least by the time I reached room 10. It feels like I am further into the game right now than that. Maybe the “real” game didn’t actually start until Chapter 2, and I am just counting all the training stuff at the beginning to make it feel longer.

The rooms I always do badly at are the ones that involve going out over massive pits of water. I don’t handle platforming over open air that well, never really have in any game. Those levels add extra anxiety to my movement and I think I screw up more often. Namely on the light bridge I just could not see the hook point for a portal where I needed one. I figure that room is one I will have to die a bunch on to be able to find the “secret”. Generally speaking the key to every room is this one little nugget of information that you either see immediately or it takes a truly silly number of tries to finally find it. I am by no means an observational genius, in fact I am usually good at overlooking the painfully obvious… so I am sure it is just a case of that at work again.

…there’s nothing to stop us from testing for the rest of your life

I have to give my friends credit in that Portal 2 is a much better game than the original. However that said I still do not see it as this life affirming phenomena that everyone else seems to. It is a good game, and has some interesting characters and an even more interesting setting. The gameplay is novel, but there is a point where I feel like I am just done with it for a a sitting. I am not sure if I will go back and finish playing through it. The best thing about the Portal experience is that for the most part you can play a single level at a time without feeling like you are missing something. I know I played through the first one over the course of about 12 gameplays. When I couldn’t really play anything else that was too involved, like when I was waiting on something to cook… I would fire it up and figure out a level, constantly inching closer to the finale.

I have a feeling Portal 2 may just claim this slot for me, that game I play when I don’t have time to play something more detailed. At the very least it did not instill in me that feeling of “omg I have to finish this”., I am happy to eventually beat it, but I am also equally happy not to. The game however is really well done, and I can at least see why so many people love it. I think I am just wired wrong for this sort of single player experience. At some point I would like to check out the multiplayer game, as I have heard that it is a completely different animal. I would imagine it plays a lot like forced where you can royally screw up your friends by not doing the right thing at exactly the right time. For now at least I have to say it was an hour and a half well spent.