Category Archives: Game Reviews

Playstation 4 Binge

Hey guys, I borrowed my brother’s PS4 over the holidays, and played through some great games. Figured I’d write a few quick reviews about them as I’ve got some thoughts, so here it goes.

Inside
Inside has some of the most fluid animation I’ve seen in a game. Every movement feels incredibly natural: The way your character stumbles after a jump, objects flexing as you walk on them, the way background characters react when they see you, and so on. It’s a spooky puzzle-platformer game that tells a story without words, and does it well. It’s a good game to study if you want to see how much feeling can be conveyed with relatively simple graphics.

Unfortunately, it’s very similar to Limbo, which is a good thing, but also makes it feel much less groundbreaking. I’ve already played something like this before.

The Last of Us: Remastered
The Last of Us is a masterpiece. It’s the first game I’ve ever played where I would consider the storytelling to be as good as a top-notch TV show or a movie. The cutscenes are exciting, and the scenery is detailed enough so that areas in the game actually look like real places. Even the gameplay enhances the story: The characters visibly work together, get power ups as a result of story progress, and actions have consequences. It’s all tied together.

Also the general variety of pacing and combat is very refreshing. You may be fighting thugs, soldiers, or zombies. You may be chased, ambushed, navigating complex terrain, stealthing your way through an obstacle course, or just having an all out shoot-out. Each enemy encounter in the game felt different, and the game rewarded taking your time and experimenting with approaches.
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Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
If you’ve heard anything about this game, it’s probably that it’s an incredibly slow-paced walking sim, where your character can’t run. This is very accurate, but I feel like it adds to the weird dream-like atmosphere. It’s much easier to enjoy if you play it first thing in the morning or just before bed, when you’re very sleepy. I thought the voice acting was great, and I liked the way characters were portrayed as glowing lights – it meant that you could imagine real people instead of falling into the uncanny valley of modern games. Anyway, it’s different from any game I’ve played before, and if you’re in the right state of mind and don’t rush it, it’s easy to look past its flaws.

Until Dawn
Until Dawn is a fun interactive-horror-movie to play with friends. It’s got some very pretty graphics – though the framerate is noticeably less than 60fps. There’s a lot of story branches, and although I’m unlikely to play through the game again, it’s still fun to talk to other people about how many characters died in each other’s playthroughs.
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Call of Duty: Black Ops III
I played through the campaign mode just to say I’ve completed a Call of Duty game, but apparently I didn’t pick the best one to start with. I found the gameplay and story excruciatingly boring. There’s no sense of pacing: Every mission is just over-the-top action and chases and explosions – there’s no stealth missions, or moments to enjoy the scenery, or time to question the choices I’ve made in the game. It just flies down a linear path at a constant full speed. The characters are as bland and shallow as they can be – I don’t think any of them ever told a joke or talked about their history at all. The dialogue is mostly made of military cliches. The enemies types become repetitive very quickly.

Also I just outright suck at CoD. I’m okay at other FPSs: I can play Doom or Halo. But something about CoD just never clicks with me, and I die a lot even on easy mode. I can’t tell which guns to use in which circumstances, nor how aggressively I should be moving forward. *shrugs*

Doom
I’ve already played new Doom several times on my PC, but only on the lowest settings (being 5 or 6 years old, I suppose it’s good that my PC can run it at all). I played it again on PS4 to compare graphics and controls – and woah does it look good on a huge 4K TV. Until I get a new PC, I should probably enjoy AAA games on console for a while.

Anyway, I definitely prefer playing FPSs on PC – mouse controls are more accurate and it’s much easier to switch weapons with all the keys you got. But Playing with a controller wasn’t too bad. It’s still nice to have the comfort of sitting on your couch.

Oh, and Doom is a great game. Probably my favourite of 2017.
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Alwa’s Awakening Review

Hey guys, today I finished Alwa’s Awakening, here’s a little review.
It’s a charming NES-style platformer that’s enjoyable if you can be patient with it’s flaws.
alwa's4The platforming is quite slow paced, with the challenge being more about planning your actions in advance, rather than muscle memory and super fast reactions. So it likely will play a bit differently than what you might expect, and if you’re expecting something fast paced you’re definitely going to be disappointed.

Also the game is a bit rough around the edges, and there’s some parts that look a bit rushed. Such as, well… the ending. A slightly more complex upgrade system could have helped make things more interesting too.

But if you can look past all that, the game offers some unique gameplay mechanics (you can create blocks and bubbles to aid in platforming and combat) and super appealing art, and should keep you busy long enough to justify the price point.

I’d definitely like to see a sequel or similar game with improved gameplay and polish.

Anyway, I’m always looking out for NES style games because the style really appeals to me. Is there any great ones you know of? Besides the obvious stuff like Shovel Knight, 1001 Spikes, etc.

I feel like there’s a lot of them out there, but few that do a really great job of bringing the best elements from the past and present together.
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Ico and Shadow of the Colossus reviews

I spent some time recently playing through the remastered versions of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus on PS3, since they’re rather iconic games.

Ico was a disaster for me. I spent so much time being lost or struggling with the controls. It often took me a long time to figure out a really obvious puzzle, just because the controls made it seem harder than it was. The worst offender was when there’s a piston that throws you into the air, and you have to jump at the right time to go even higher. I tried this a few times, never getting the strict timing quite right, and decided that this was not the way to do it. I then spent an hour stuck in that room. That basically sums up my experience with Ico I guess. The story also flew over my head completely, as by the time I got to the ending, I had forgotten what had happened at the start of the game. I’m still happy I played it though, because it was a beautiful game with some unique mechanics.

Shadow of the Colossus on the other hand I enjoyed immensely. The controls of the horse were not very intuitive, and it took me some time to get used to that, but besides that I had a great time with the game. It was unlike anything I had played before – very minimalist game design with nothing to do but slay huge foes. Since the central challenge in the game involves climbing giants that are trying to shake you off, the stamina system works very well (I’ve never played a game with a fun stamina system before, personally). You need to do a bit of climbing and then frantically find a place to rest before you drop off like a dead bug.

The pacing and feel of the game is amazing. You first spend 10 minutes or so travelling a mostly empty landscape looking for your target, with just the sound of the wind playing. Once you’re nearby, some foreboding music starts, and you start getting anxious. You have no idea what the foe looks like or what it can do. Then a huge creature appears and charges you. Battle music starts. You have no idea how to fight it – it’s dozens of meters tall and has armour on most of its body. After trying frantically to stay alive you notice a weak spot, or some feature of the terrain that you can use against it. Your fear turns into excitement as you realise you can kill this thing. Once you start climbing onto the beast and attacking its vitals, the music ramps up to epic levels. You cling on while the monster thrashes around, waiting desperately for a chance to finish it off. Then it dies and everything is quite again. It’s so satisfying to play. Well, most of the time. Many of the battles are excellent, while admittedly some are a bit dull. But the best fights were truly memorable, and the *feeling* of the game is communicated effectively through gameplay mechanics as well as the sound and visuals.

I recently played Rise of the Tomb Raider, and while I enjoyed it, the climbing and action parts have little impact. There’s checkpoints every 20 seconds, and the action is totally over-the-top constantly. Almost no punishment for failing, and little build up or contrast in pacing. I think Shadow of the Colossus does it right. You don’t die easily, but falling does require you to climb up again, and each battle is different, so taking them seriously is rewarding.

Anyway, it’s a great game, even without any nostalgia goggles on. Pacing is something I need to try harder on in my games, as it’s quite hard to test for personally, and I generally scatter story and battles at random. It’s hard to review my own games as I can’t ever experience them properly.

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I played games all week

Hey guys, I’m back from my gaming binge. I cleared out a lot of games that were on my playlist, and tried to relax a bit in general. It’s been a long time since I played so many video games in a week.

I started off with Shadows of Adam, which is a SNES-like JRPG that had quite a strong nostalgic impact on me. I spent so much of my teenage years playing Final Fantasy, Golden Sun, Chrono Trigger and all that, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve played a traditional JRPG. The newer stuff doesn’t grip me at all, and I haven’t replayed the old games cause I’m sick of random battles and the huge time sink. Maybe I should give the Final Fantasy re-releases a try, since they seem to have some nice convenience features. Final Fantasy 9 in particular, that’s my favourite. Anyway, Shadows of Adam was a mediocre game I guess, but it got me thinking about JRPGs again, which was nice.

I finally got round to finishing The Witness… well, the regular stuff anyway. I’ll probably keep working on the optional puzzles over time, as I’ve already done quite a lot of them. I think this is my favourite puzzle game ever. I’ve never been so captivated by a puzzle game before, I usually get bored of them quite quickly. I’ve played it for 30 hours and I’m still into it, even though it’s a very slow and often frustrating experience. The game just keeps calling me to explore and try to figure everything out. I think it’s the complete lack of instructions that does it for me. It just leaves me alone to wander around and curiously poke things at my own pace. Also, Ronja challenged me to beat the game without taking any notes. I’m quite proud of myself for achieving that, I think it stretched my memory a bit.

And finally, I got into the Shantae games. The music and character animations are so good. I was a bit surprised at how sexual the games are. I thought it was just going to be a sexy main character, but it goes a lot further than that, with tons of innuendo and weird fetish material. Not complaining at all. I started off playing Pirate’s Curse, which I enjoyed a lot until the later levels. It turns out I sabotaged my enjoyment of the game because I didn’t realize you could buy permanent attack upgrades, and all of the enemies had crazy amounts of health as a result. So that sucked. I played it through again on pirate mode, going for most of the achievements and getting 100% of the items. The levels designs are soooo good for speed running. You don’t even realize until you return to the earlier levels with all of your new abilities. So that game made me a fan of the series instantly. I played Half Genie Hero next, which in terms of gameplay and story I think was actually inferior to the previous game. It just wasn’t as gripping. But it was still a good game overall, and totally recommend the series.

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Brb

I won’t be working on EBF5 in March btw. I’ll be pushing out some maintenance updates to EBF3 and 4 and also just taking time off to catch up on games and stuff.

I’m playing Shadows of Adam on Steam at the moment. It’s worth checking out if you want something like the SNES Final Fantasy games but without random battles.
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