Gaming Slowdown in March

Although I’ve read Reality Is Broken, and can therefore argue all sorts of benefits that gaming can bring to people, I’ve hit my last month of my graduate degree and having recently finished the first episode of “The Wolf Among Us” I’m pretty hesitant to start any new games in my last few weeks of school.

So right now I have two telltale games - The Walking Dead: Season Two, and The Wolf Among Us, as well as a three others, Assassin's Creed III, Red Dead Redemption, and Dead Space 3, all sitting on my bookshelf, waiting for me to have some free time.

I'm 100% sure I could both begin a new game and continue with my school work for the next month without much of a problem, but as I'm now four assignments away from my degree I'm using the games as incentive to put more work in to my assignments.

On the other hand, I don't think I could really function if I slowed down on my reading - past what I already did when I started school - after all, you can only slow down so far.

Things I've Noticed: Sometimes 100% Just isn't worth it

For Christmas I got the game Grand Theft Auto IV from some good friends, and each weekend since then I’ve slowly been working my way through the various missions (both story and side) that I need to complete my character Nico Bellic’s rise to power in the underworld of the fictitious Liberty City .

There is definitely a lot about this game I love, for starters the id-pleasing levels of violence and mayhem, both incidental and story-driven definitely allow me to take my daily frustrations out in a relatively harmless way, secondly, the game world is well set up, and the stuff you can do throughout the game world is pretty impressive.  Finally, the game actually requires you to make friends, hang out with them, take their calls, call them, and change up the stuff you do with them if you’d like them to become really good friends with you (in the game really good friends are willing to do special tasks for you) which is kind of funny, because for everyone saying how terribly anti-social the GTA franchise is, this concept of making and keeping friends has a lot of potential for application in the real world.

My biggest problem with the game is the stuff you need to do to complete the game at a 100% level.  This involves doing every main mission, driving every type of vehicle, doing every stunt jump in the environment (50) and killing 200 pigeons.

There was a time when I would have happily spent my weekends running through a videogame collecting all of the various things to get that precious 100% score, but honestly, once you’ve killed a few pigeons, you would have to be pretty dedicated to say, sure I’ll do this 198 more times.  At least with the stunt jumps you get cool camera views of the jump, but even with the 50 seems like it would take an awful long time to complete.

Right now I’m about 5/8ths of the way through the main part of the game, and it’s pretty fun.  I think my days of doing absolutely everything in the game are behind me – I’ll happily finish the story, but after that I’ve got other games to play.

Game Review: Batman Arkham Asylum

Since Father's Day my weekend PS3 game of choice has been Batman: Arkham Asylum and I've got to say it's been a lot of fun.  Unlike previous playstation games I've played, this time my 15-year-old daughter was playing the game as well, and she finished the game one day after I did, which was nice because some times I was a little ahead of her and could help her out and sometimes she was a little ahead of me.

The game follows (pretty closely actually) the Grant Morrison graphic Novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth which has the honour of being the first Graphic novel I ever purchased and for introducing me to Morrison and artist Dave McKean.

The game works in a sandbox style (meaning you can either follow the main story or any number of side stories) and focuses on the inmates of the asylum taking over and Batman having to put things back in order.

Honestly this game was tonnes of fun - for the voices they used a number of the same actors from the '90s animated series and the whole look of the game was pretty amazing.

I know I'm pretty far behind the curve with this one (Batman: Arkham City is the current game of the day), but if you haven't tried this one yet it's a lot of fun.

Genre Character of the Week: Sackboy

After a long run of mature games (Dead Space, Assassin’s Creed I & II, Infamous) I decided to take a run at a family game again (also I got it for Father’s Day) so for the last two weeks I’ve been playing Little Big Planet 2 for the PS3.  In addition to being incredibly eye-catching and fun, it stars a completely customizable character called Sackboy.

Here’s the thing about Sackboy – he’s adorable!  Seriously, for those of you who haven’t’ gotten the chance to play either Little Big Planet game, he looks like a tiny doll made of a course fabric which the player can change at will, including emotions, hand moves, costuming and more.

The little guy runs through levels made up over various arts and crafts style objects and in the second game joins an alliance to save the tiny world he is from.  There isn’t much more to it actually – he’s (and to be fair you can play Sack as a girl or a gender-neutral character as well) just this adorable little creature who does his best to save the day.

Personally I prefer to use the default setting, as it makes him look most like the characters from the film 9 (no not that Nine).

SO CUTE!!!

Genre Character of the Week: Wander

A few months ago I reviewed the videogame ICO and listed its main character as my genre character of the week. This week I go back to a game from the same company Shadow of the Colossus and will take a close look at its main character, Wander.

Remembering that ICO had a really basic setup (captured kids escape from castle), I was thinking that this game would have a similarly simple plot, and you know what it does – basically a guy named Wander heads in to a forbidden area with his dead girlfriend and demands that the ruler of this land bring her back to life. He is told that to perform this action sixteen statues must be destroyed, and each of these statues have a living representative in the real world that must be destroyed as well. So Warder heads off with his trusty horse Argo and begins the process of defeating each of these Colossuses... Colossi... Colo... Creatures.

So yeah – simple premise, very little dialogue, virtually no supporting characters, but wow – the graphics are amazing and the battles are shocking in how amazing they are. Rather than thinking of this game as a fighting game or an RPG game, it might be best to think of it as a puzzle game, as each of the creatures has to be defeated in a certain way. So far I’ve flat-out fought one, hidden from another, rode two and climbed the beard of a third – I’m only halfway through at this point but this game is pretty freaking cool.

Wander doesn’t have any obvious connection to Ico (the main character of ICO) and his horse Argo is a heck of a lot easier to deal with than Yorba, but like the previous game, Shadow of the Colossus is stunning in its music, visuals and overall concept.

Definitely a personal favourite.

Things I’ve noticed: Sometimes violence in videogames can mess with your head

This morning I was talking to my nineteen-year-old daughter about the game Infamous. I wrote a review of it earlier this week and she is currently working through the game herself. She explained to me that at one point in the game while stopping a prison break, she witnessed one of the villainous dustmen shoot a police officer with a rocket launcher and although she had been knocking out dustmen up to that point, she made a special effort to kill this one.

It’s funny, as neither character were actually real people (sorry ReBoot – maybe they were, but for the purposes of this post let’s assume they weren’t) there should not have been any specific reason for her to target this one villain over any others, but I suppose the fact that as the main character in the game, it was within her power to theoretically stop the villain before he blew up the police officer, the least she could do was get revenge.

I guess that is one of the biggest draws for me when it comes to video games; unlike books, movies and TV shows, video games are the one medium that let me (the player) take direct action and an effect on the game world. This was the same draw for me into the world of Role-Playing Games when I was younger. Whether I was a Fighter, a Vampire or a cyborg-dwarf Shadowrunner, I could do things in the game that would have consequences.

It’s funny, but in a way I feel pretty good about my daughter’s reaction; I mean, sure she brutally beat a (virtual) guy and then threw a grenade on him for good measure, but the part I’m talking about is the fact that when she saw something that she found unacceptable, she did something about it. It makes me feel (virtually) proud.

Things I’ve Noticed: Video games really want you to stay out of the water

For the last couple weeks I’ve been playing the PS3 game Infamous, wherein you play a bicycle courier who was granted super-powers after being at the epicenter of a huge explosion. Given powers over electricity, you can either run around the city as a good guy or as an infamous force of terror. I decided to play it good, but I’ll probably revisit the game in a few months and let my inner baddie out.

One thing the game did get me thinking about however, was just how common it is for games to deny the player access to the ocean. Some games (Tomb Raider, Uncharted, and God of War all come to mind) have many underwater levels, but for the most part the ocean is off limits for the player to explore. Put simply, if the game doesn’t allow water exploration, there is a lot less you have to design.

A lot of games have no reason for this at all (When Altaiir in the first Assassins Creed game falls into the ocean he simply dies (amazing assassin –yes, as good a swimmer as a five-year-old -no, or when Tommy Vercetti in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City hits the ocean it’s also lights out – which makes me wonder why he moved to a city with an ocean on three sides of it) but there are a few games that are actually pretty clever in explaining why you just can’t take a dip.

Bookmonkey’s Top Three excuses for why your character can’t go in the water.

#3 Electrocution (Infamous)

Sometimes your strength can also be your weakness; in Infamous Cole MacGrath has the ability to manipulate electricity to do all sorts of things: hurl lightning, throw objects around, even heal the sick, but the downside of having electricity-based powers is that when electricity touches water – you’re gonna hurt.

#2 Ancient Family Curse (The Castlevania Series)

All right, I’ll admit that this ridiculous reasons for vampire hunter Simon Belmont (who is cursed so that he can’t touch water) – would obviously leaving him dead of dehydration in a matter of days) but honestly, while playing the games I’m so focused on killing vampires and other creatures of the night that the idea of an ancient family curse works just fine for me.

#1 CHOMP! (Spore)

A few years ago I got my wife the game Spore; a kind of super civilization-style game. You start by playing a micro-organism, then evolve into a creature, then control the creatures tribe, then it’s nation, it’s civilization and eventually travel through space. As a creature in the second stage of the game, you wander around on an island (or continent) dealing with other creatures and getting more evolved, but if you go out into the ocean, a giant sea-creature will simply come out of the water and eat you. In the end, you can’t get much simpler than that.

P.S. A quick side note, one of my newer favourite blogs, Renaissance Dork posted this link to the new trailer for The Hobbit, now if it could only shoot me forward a year so I could see the movie!!!