#973 Shadow Complex

Posted: 2nd June 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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788th played so far

Genre: Action/Adventure
Platform: Xbox 360
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Chair Entertainment/Epic Games
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

At the point when this game was released, it felt like the Metroidvania (Metroid and Castlevania, referring to their large worlds with backtracking to find all the secrets as you unlock more powers). They’ve becme a lot more popular in the last decade, especially in the indie sphere, but I’ve not seen them in this list as much. Shadow Complex is an XBLA game that seems to have gotten there early. As I want to play our XBLA games (if only to prevent hardware failure making life difficult), it feels like a good one to tackle.

Our Thoughts

Shadow Complex‘s start feels promising on its own. Rather than arriving in a space ship or as a vampire hunter, you’re a (relatively) normal man trying to save his girlfriend as she’s been kidnapped after exploring some caves. You find a big high tech underground base that you explore. It’s more stealth focused – while there are times to attack, avoiding and indirectly taking out enemies happens as often. Not as much as Mark of the Ninja, but there’s some of that feeling of exploration. It’s a decent setting that makes sense and feels more down to earth – sort of – even if the plot follows some pretty standard beats.

The base looks really good too. It’s of course somewhat stylized, but aside from it being big, it feels deep. Obviously this is a 2D game in gameplay, but the rooms go deeper (which you get to experience in a handful of first person shooter bits) and it makes the base look gigantic. It really creates a sense of scale (and possibly explains why the enemies keep respawning). There’s quite a variety in the rooms as well, with some of the first person shooter bits and some large scale battles as well as other options. It’s a place where I kept wanting to play another room, just to see what came next.

Final Thoughts

Shadow Complex is a fun, good looking game that gives you a big world to play in that rewards exploration. The setting isn’t as outlandish as other metroidvanias, nor is its powerset, but playing as a normal person actually works really well.

#949 Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising

Posted: 29th May 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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787th played so far

Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up/Strategy
Platform: PC/Playstation 3/Xbox 360
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Codemasters
Publisher: Codemasters

I’m starting to feel more apathetic towards these military shooters. They’re big and popular, but while some Call of Duty games can sort of manage to draw me in, the first iteration of Operation Flashpoint didn’t work for me and my recent experiences with Battlefield haven’t been great either. I want to say I’ve got a good feeling about the sequel, but I don’t expect to make it deep in.

Our Thoughts

I don’t think Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising improved on the first game… I still didn’t see any actual enemies, was killed out of nowhere and felt I mostly relied on the AI to deal with all of that. I guess it’s strategy, but not in a way that made me feel I was directing anything, more just spamming the attack button. I’m not sure if it’s the graphics or the game’s intentions, but since we’re not set up for sniping in that first mission, it still failed as much as it did before.

That lack of clarity continued as I progressed in the first mission. As part of the game’s semi-tutorial, you’re told to call in an air strike on a specific place. It took me several goes to trigger that… and then didn’t have it change anything. I couldn’t call a second strike, but while I thought I hit it, it wasn’t enough. Since I didn’t seem to get the option again, it felt like the mission just broke (I had no chance of defeating them), and so that was it, really.

With a game setting that’s generic army fare against bad guys, so that, too, didn’t give me a reason to keep going in the game.

Final Thoughts

While I’m sure the game works when you get into it, it just came across as broken to me, inaccessible and very much paint by numbers. It wasn’t worth the investment and it feels like other games do it better.

#934 Halo Wars

Posted: 25th May 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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786th played so far

Genre: Strategy
Platform: Xbox 360
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: Ensemble Studios
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

I’ve played some console strategy games before, they lean more towards the tactical – something like Final Fantasy Tactics or Valkyria Chronicles, where you have a predefined set of units that you control individually. Larger grouped units in theย Command & Conquer mold, with more units you build as you go along, while growing the army and base building are a part of it.

Halo Wars isn’t the first to do so for a console, but it’s one of the few in the book. Not just that, we’re playing in the FPS focused Halo universe, which I’m not sure would overlap that much here. It’s a departure for the series, but as the shooter has some squad elements anyway, I can see where they’d come from.

Our Thoughts

Halo Wars simplifies the strategy formula enough to require less group interactions while keeping the same feel. It’s not something that’s new to the genre – earlier games have done so and in general it’s been trying to get more accessible – but I feel it’s the first time I’ve come across it here. Bases are simpler – you have a central building with several smaller ones around it, which fulfill the same roles as core buildings from other games – build infantry, artillery and so on. There’s fewer, and I believe only one that upgrades research (and even that’s streamlined), but the basics are all there. You have, on the other hand, still several unit types with their own abilities and I believe the usual triangle.

You still use with less units, and that’s good – it is difficult enough to keep up with what’s there, and several levels in, on a “survive for half an hour” mission, I felt like splitting my attention became too difficult to really keep up with multiple attacks – I missed my shortcuts at that point, but that’s for a mission type I never loved much anyway.

The game has a bunch of decent objectives anyway – not just destroying bases and surviving for times, but infiltrating a base and getting out again and optional objectives surrounding numbers of enemies killed and all of that. It’s an interesting set of those.

The setting of the game is the Halo world, but in the end I didn’t feel it mattered much. There’s a couple of unit names based on it and I’m sure the characters are familiar, but I feel that so far, the link hasn’t really helped much – a new world would have felt much the same, but perhaps it’s because on this superficial level, these SF worlds can feel interchangable.

Final Thoughts

While I struggled with the survival mission, Halo Wars was mostly a lot of fun to play. While hectic at times, it tuned its elements well enough that I had to keep paying attention, but didn’t feel rushed or overwhelmed by what was going on. I need to get back to it and give it another, proper go.

#561 Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Posted: 21st May 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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785th played so far

Genre: Action/Platform
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher: Ubisoft

The original Prince of Persia was a stand out platformer, its animation standing out but the full game having a story and set up that was quite appealing. It’s a game where straight up sequels could never quite get there – add too much and the charm goes away, change too little and it won’t improve on the original. For that reason, one of the few sequels of the game that was acclaimed was Sands of Time, which instead is a 3D action adventure game, though (as our genre list says) with more platforming.

Our Thoughts

I didn’t connect the heritage of the game until I was a while in. This game has its free running elements and it preceeds the release of Assassin’s Creed by four years, but is made by the same studio and presumably at least partially the same team. And while the focus isn’t entirely on open world exploration, there are decent chunks of levels where the height matters. These manifest more as puzzles in a section, but it is good to see the DNA where these systems came from.

They do need polish – there are, for example, several ways to run up a wall, while they trigger from the same button, and it can feel a bit down to luck whether you can make certain jumps or get the angle wrong. It doesn’t always feel good or natural, but it’s getting there.

The combat system, the other side of the game, is clunkier. First of all, it has the annoying feature that you need to “retrieve” an enemy’s soul to dispatch it, part of the lore of why the undead attack you. This can be difficult to execute when others are still attacking you, but because of the relentless spawn rate it can be difficult not to get overwhelmed – there are too many enemies sometimes and it’s easy to get stunlocked in it. The block system didn’t feel great either, making the whole thing feel clunky and dissatisfying and an annoying interruption of the more interesting parts of the game.

The story isn’t very heavy, but there’s something intriguing about the middle eastern setting that makes it have that magic sometimes. It’s all half-destroyed, but at least there’s something to it here, and the magic powers it introduces later are an interesting addition. Not overly helpful, but it switches up your options enough and a rewind is always useful in a game like this.

Final Thoughts

While there is a good base game here, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time has some control issues that take Ubisoft Montreal some time to work out. It looks nice for its time, but it’s almost a shame it’s sometimes saddled wiht the name – the legacy of Prince of Persia doesn’t really do much for it.

#558 NBA Street Vol. 2

Posted: 17th May 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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784th played so far

Genre: Sports
Platform: Playstation 2/Gamecube/Xbox
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: EA Canada
Publisher: EA Sports BIG

I’ve not only played the main NBA series before, but NBA Jam introduced me to something closer to the street basketball we are going to get into here and I swear it’s come up as a minigame before. NBA Jam appealed to me because you’re playing with a small team, which felt like it made play a lot more accessible. NBA Street Vol. 2 promises something similar. It feels like this is a sports game that’s going to be more appealing and accessible to me.

Our Thoughts

I quite enjoyed playing NBA Street Vol. 2. It took a bit of practice, but I felt I learned the game quite quickly and it felt like the difficulty was tuned well – I didn’t feel like I was cheating the AI to overwhelm it, but I managed to win most of the time. Only by a few points each time, but that felt quite right. There’s a lot going on, but the game takes you through the tutorial quite quickly while going quite in depth, which helps the game a lot to be accessible. It gave me a lot of wins, which was useful for sure, but I really had to work at it.

And I needed those wins. Wins get you points that help you unlock further things. In most games, you would start off unlocking a new game mode in one or two games, a new location one or two more, and keep rewarding you early on. Here, I got one early, but I felt I had to play for quite a while to get anything else. I get that this might make sense for the curve long term, but I wish I could have seen a few more different things a bit sooner, just to feel like I’m doing something.

It’s a small complaint if I wanted to jump into the game for longer, I suppose, but even then it seems like there is so much content here that a faster start wouldn’t have mattered much. If anything, the changes would have gotten me excited, and I don’t think the extra practice would have been that important.

Final Thoughts

Again, one of the better sports game is one that doesn’t get too serious. The game isn’t too complicated and having a smaller team gave me a lot more chances to keep control of what was going on. All of this felt incredibly well balanced and easy to control.

#457 Super Monkey Ball

Posted: 13th May 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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783rd played so far

Genre: Action
Platform: Gamecube
Year of Release: 2000
Developer: Amusement Vision
Publisher: Sega

Anyone who knows us is probably not surprised that as I write this, we’re going through a fairly major monkey phase. There’s a monkey pillow, some small decorations and quite a few in joke references that I won’t explain. As Peter owned Super Monkey Ball anyway, he was quite excited to see me play it – it has been a long time for him – in part as this is the stereotypial monkey look.

What I know is that it’s not Ape Escape, but it obviously has a related protagonist and some other monkey business. Next is the question, what is it really then?

Our Thoughts

When you look at Super Monkey Ball, the first comparison that comes to mind is those puzzle games you sometimes get as promotional item, where there are small iron balls that you have to guide through a maze, through some holes or similar and get them to rest at an endpoint. They’ve been turned into bigger games too, but here you’re doing it digitally with everything that implies. You basically tilt the stage, the monkeys roll ahead and they can’t fall off, and you continue. Think of it as Mercury Meltdown with a cuter skin and larger feeling levels that really focus on you not falling off. Completing levels gets you points to unlock minigames, while you also race through levels to get to the end. The easy mode is best for that – 10 levels where the last one is near impossible (only with Peter’s many times of training did I see an end to it) but that ramps up difficulty nicely and gives you a good idea of what the game is up to. Higher difficulties run for more levels, but start off devilishly difficult from the start. They are great puzzles to solve, but I really did struggle to get deeper in.

The minigames are weird variations on this – the ones I played didn’t necessarily play a lot with the rolling concept, but instead had our monkeys flying in one, and become a less controllable bowling ball in another. They’re quite fun diversions, with an unlock mechanic that forces you to play the main game – I’m not sure whether that’s good to get you to experience that, or is something that gets in your way to find a diversion – but in the end they’re not substantial enough to have a big influence on the game.

The graphics and setting, though, ooze charm, and the fact that you’re controlling a moneky in a ball rather than just a sphere elevate the game beyond its inspiration. There’s something really fun about the setting and ideas and it wouldn’t be the same eabout that. Not just that, but it adds a few other influences – mostly in the form of bananas and related references – that inform the full aesthetics. They’re Gamecube focused, but nice in there nonetheless.

Final Thoughts

Super Monkey Ball is a good puzzle game that ramps up quite well, getting challenging at the right spots (although I wish the final level of the easiest difficulty would have been a bit easier, so I could have finished that without being bothered by that spike) where the earlier, easier levels are fun enough to be replayable while also being easy enough to finish that you can get back to the levels that bother you. It might have been better if the continues are always unlimited, but I hope that unlock is within reach for me.

#382 Street Fighter Alpha 3

Posted: 9th May 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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782nd played so far

Genre: Fighting
Platform: Arcade/Playstation 1/Dreamcast
Year of Release: 1998
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom

I’ve played a bunch of Street Fighter games before and, well, I think they’ve been looking better over time. Now while this might seem like another variation of the third game, based on the title, it’s actually part of the Street Fighter Alpha sub series, which.. does something with combos that I don’t quite get because, well, you really need to be into the genre to understand the words. Perhaps playing the game will make it clearer.

Our Thoughts

One of the daunting things when playing this game is that it starts off asking you for a fighting style. These are A-ism, V-ism and X-ism, terms that are absolutely meaningless to me and even a bit confusing from the manual (which, in our case, was based on the Alpha Anthology, so more confusingly laid out as it combined bits of all three games in the series). I understand that this has something to do with how your combos build and fire, but I don’t think I quite got the differences, and the combos mostly went unused.

I suppose that means I missed out on one of the major selling points of the series, and what sets it apart, but as always this genre seems to enjoy expecting you to figure it out without much guidance (probably thanks to its arcade roots) and so I struggled to really care.

When you get past that system, this is a standard fighting game. It’s decent fun, I enjoyed exploring it a bit, while I managed to progress a bit, but at the same time it doesn’t offer anything special. It really is quite similar without that one feature and it feels like it could have pushed it further, made it a more readable part of the gameplay that I could actually do something with.

Final Thoughts

By 1998, home console were a major enough thing that arcane arcade games weren’t as necessary. I doubt the original manual would have given me more to go on, but here it especially didn’t explain much and the game just never grabbed me as much as it should have.

#853 MotorStorm: Pacific Rift

Posted: 5th May 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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781st played so far

Genre: Racing
Platform: Playstation 3
Year of Release: 2008
Developer: Evolution Studios
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment

I feel like I’ve played Motorstorm, the first game in the series, fairly recently (about a year and a half ago), but as I am approaching the end of the list these two entry series will need to disappear at some point anyway. I enjoyed it at the time, but the game had its flaws for sure that put it lower down that a game like Colin McRae’s Dirt series that feel like they really reward play.

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift takes the series to a tropical island, including its own volcanoes that will affect the game and race, which could be quite interesting. It’ll be interesting to see whether it fixes the issues I felt.

Our Thoughts

Sadly, Motorstorm: Pacific Rift is still quite brown and there are plenty of times where the darkness and browns fade into the brown and it is difficult to see what’s happening. It wasn’t a constant problem, but I certainly had trouble in some places. Luckily, the game still felt a bit easier, which compensated for that a bit – while some tracks stayed fairly difficult, I did manage to get a win and second places on the brighter tracks, where this made a big difference. It’s a shame too: The game is incredibly pretty, set on a lovely tropical island, but the colours sometimes hide a lot of that detail. The boundaries of the courses don’t help here either – the edges of the track have become pretty unclear in places, where it feels arbitrary where you go out of bounds. You get a sudden reset, not even a warning that you’re going too far, and it feels pretty unfair.

One thing that I felt I got a better grip on was the boost system. It wasn’t just useful for speed, but I found it quite good at correcting my direction and getting out of my drifts. It really started helping me get ahead on the tracks. Another element of this is new to the game. There are heat and water effects, with lava bubbling out from the volcano. Your vehicle can overheat, with water giving you a chance to cool down, but you need to get to that point first. It adds an element of danger and tension to the tracks, where there’s an added risk to taking shortcuts that take you past the heat and adding a different punishment if you go too far off the track. It was a nice addition and while I didn’t always get it right, I feel it’s a neat and unique idea.

Final Thoughts

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift is a clear improvement over the original, but it’s also one that still at times puts form over function and makes for a visually nice game that becomes less playable because of its ‘realism’. Higher definition systems may help this in the future, but at the moment this isn’t it quite yet.

#284 Full Throttle

Posted: 1st May 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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780th played so far

Genre: Adventure
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 1995
Developer: LucasArts
Publisher: LucasArts

I’m still excited to see all these LucasArts games. I’ve played a bunch of them once, but never got Full Throttle. When I was younger, I think the theming put me off a bit, but it’s been cited as one of the best since then and I really should be trying it now.

After Monkey Island‘s insult sword fighting, this introduces some bike fights. I’m not sure how that will work, but we’ll see soon enough.

Our Thoughts

It felt like Loom was a big surprise for us with how effective it was and how far it drew us in. It had some great world building and writing with decent puzzles that felt quite doable. We were compelled to finish it in one sitting. Full Throttle wasn’t quite in a single sitting (dinner intervened) but it created its own world and was mostly as effective. Sure, a rough biker’s world isn’t the same as Loom’s musical magic, but it had its own grounded world. The other thing these two have in common that you don’t get as much in, say, Monkey Island 2 or some acts of Grim Fandango is that it’s set in smaller chunks, a handful of screens at a time, which means that you both get a more focused story to follow and puzzles that have to be solved with everything near you. It avoids the “try everything on everything” problem these games can have and it’s less likely you miss some details. The puzzles in these locations can still be tricky, but usually you know there aren’t too many other variables.

The bike fights are probably the least liked of the options. It feels a bit like button mashing and I don’t think I was that strategic about it. I don’t think the engine is really set up for it and I believe the remake might have excised the worst of it. There are a bunch of other timed sections as well that I think didn’t work as well – it feels like it moves away from the puzzles and change to think, although the end of the game mostly suffered from that and it is quite narratively justified.

The story is probably the most attractive part. There’s some twists and changes that make it less predictable than it could be (although I was getting savvy enough that I saw some of them coming). The characters are well written and have become more three dimensional than the characters in the earlier games are. Most of all, it’s funny and entertaining. which is what I wanted out of the game most.

Final Thoughts

The setting of Full Throttle feels quite different from the other LucuasArts adventures, including style and all. When playing, however, it works well and makes for an effective game – mostly challenging, but not too much so, and with a rich world that works well. I’m not sure it will be my favourite, but it deserves to be in the pantheon of great adventure games.

#898 Battlefield 1943: Pacific

Posted: 27th April 2019 by Jeroen in Games
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779th played so far

Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: Playstation 3/Xbox 360
Year of Release: 2009
Developer: EA Dice
Publisher: Electronic Arts

Time to get back to the Battlefield series, since I still have two to go and won’t enjoy them much more this time. Especially since, from what I have been able to determine, Battlefield 1943 is online only…

Our Thoughts

As I’m nervous enough about jumping into multiplayer, I thought I’d start by playing through the tutorial, hopefully getting a feeling for the game and especially what new things the game has added. The maps were familiar, I believe the same as one from an earlier game, and the basic controls were similar enough.

The new addition seems to have been an air superiority focused mode and the tutorial has you take a plane in the air to try that mode. That felt like a mistake. The controls for the plane felt impossible to use and I couldn’t finish that section – I barely managed to take off once – and couldn’t get out of it other than quitting the tutorial. It wasn’t fun and didn’t feel good.

That’s where it all fell down for me. I don’t feel the game improves on its successors, the control issues made it feel worse for me without anything to compensate. If I wanted to get into the series, I feel the other entries would work as well, while there are bot optins that let me ease into it instead. It’s a shame, I guess, but mostly feel like the game just never tried for me.

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