Night Twenty-Two

So after making my way through two novels and three games, I appear to have left the restaurant (or theme park) and found myself solidly back in a childhood bedroom, hearing things moving in my house and trying to make it through the night.

Five Nights at Freddy's 4 appears to have left the setting of all the previous games behind, there is no longer a fellow calling on the phone, nor are there security cameras.

Instead you play a child in their own bedroom, listening to noises in your house and either shining a flashlight or holding the door closed as something makes its way towards you.

First up, the graphics are really good - the animatronics look incredibly detailed and the ability to move (even just moving across your room) makes the game feel much more immersive.

The problem for me comes from the sound.  Now to be fair, I think if I had a limitless amount of time I could more easily figure out which sound means which creature is coming and more importantly which door to guard, but as I've only got nine days left this month, I'm afraid I'll have to live with the half week I spent trying to get through this game and then move onto the fifth and most current game Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location - which is where I'll be spending my virtual time next week.

A really neat game and one I'm sure to return to when I've got the time!

Night Three

In Scott Cawthon's Five Nights at Freddy's you play an unnamed night security guard at Freddy Fazzbear's Pizza, a theme restaurant that includes a number of animatronic creatures which seem to get up to no good between the hours of midnight and six am.  Your goal is simple - survive five nights.

The game begins inside an office, with little light, a running fan, and a door on either side of you.  You can scan left and right, and before you begin clicking randomly on buttons a phone rings and the following message plays:

Hello, hello? Uh, I wanted to record a message for you to help you get settled in on your first night. Um, I actually worked in that office before you. I'm finishing up my last week now, as a matter of fact. So, I know it can be a bit overwhelming, but I'm here to tell you there's nothing to worry about. Uh, you'll do fine. So, let's just focus on getting you through your first week. Okay?

And so begins the first of your five nights.  Unlike the majority of horror-themed games out there, you are incredibly limited in what you can do - basically your options are

1) Turn on the light to your left

2) Turn on the light to your right

3) Lock the door to your left

4) Lock the door to your right

3) Look through the security cameras

There are only two problems - first, every time you operate the lights or lock a door, your power goes down and eventually you run out, and second, the animatronics appear to be slowly but surly moving towards you...

Night One

When I was a kid there were a number of places that topped my list of perfect birthday party venue.

3) My backyard - nearby, lots of food, no chance of getting lost.

2) The Movie Theatre - going down with a few friends to see whatever the latest action/horror/comedy popular culture had to offer. A little pricier than home, but tasty snacks and a shared experience nonetheless.

1) Bullwinkles. For those not familiar with the chain, it was pretty similar to Chuck E. Cheese, wherein there was pizza, ball pits, birthday rooms and lots and lots of games. Also giant animatronic animals that would sing songs and perform.

So every summer as I start to gear up for my October Theme-month, I begin looking around the horror genre for either an old favourite to revisit or a new topic to take a deep dive into. This summer, while spending a day hanging out with my youngest daughter at West Edmonton Mall, she suggested I look into doing Five Nights At Freddy's, a horror video game series.

Having never heard of it, I asked her what it was about and she immediately took me into the nearest Hot Topic to show me the section devoted to the game.

Doing a little research on my own, I found the game, which takes place at a Bullwinkles-styled establishment, actually has four sequels, two novels and a potential upcoming movie.

So yeah - let's do it! This year I'll be spend October with Five Night's At Freddy's.

So I've started Mass Effect...

Continuing my hobby of starting games years after they've been popularized, I'm now giving the 2007 Science Fiction game Mass Effect a try.

To be clear, I'm the type of player who grinds away at these type of games for an hour or so a day a couple times a week until I finish after a month or so - no all-night binge sessions for this guy.

At this point I've played the game for a non-consecutive 30 minutes, leaving me with the following impressions:

1) Like a lot of role playing games, a lot of early effort goes into character creation, unlike say a game like Uncharted, don't expect to actually play anything for the first little while - but definitely expect to create some backstory for your character!

2) After going through the work of creating your character, get ready to walk around and talk to a bunch of people.  Like many similar games you get to effect how your conversations will go, but again, no early running and jumping.

3) Finally getting to run around and shoot a little, my character has touched down on a planet under siege and gets to shoot aliens and collect various bits of equipment I'm sure I'll get to use later.  Not quite as intense as the Dead Space series, the gameplay seems kind of fun, although I'm pretty sure I'll miss being able to jump - also it looks as if I'll be in charge of a group as I move along.

So far that's about all I've got - I haven't completed the first mission yet (wait till next week), but the graphics are fun, the gameplay is pretty straight forward, and expect for a clear impression of where I'm supposed to go (probably a feature I'm currently unaware of so far), the game looks like it's off to an interesting start.

Lately I've become obsessed with Red Dead Redemption

It started out simply, as with every other game I've played on the PS3 for the last few years, I finished the previous game, decide on which to start next and then work at it two hours a week (Saturday and Sunday), for as many weeks as it takes to finish.

To be fair, I've always had a harder time with sandbox-style games (or emersive games as my "Understanding Video Games" course taught me), where you can do all sorts of side missions, explorations, and also buy new outfits, weapons, etc. (or play dress-up, as my wife calls it).  Basically, it's just so easy to say, "5 for minutes and this side mission is complete!", only to discover that your five minutes has stretched into 95 minutes.

Like last night in my latest obsession, Red Dead Redemption (2010), which allows you to play the role of John Marston, who in 1911 visits the western United States to complete some unfinished business.

Last night I decided to do a quick side mission, wherein I would help an old-timer put together a bouquet of flowers for his wife's birthday, only to find the task involved travelling to the far corners of the game map and getting into a pretty significant shoot-out.  But in the end the story (sorry for the mild four-year-old spoiler) ended up being a reference to Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily", so I found yet again, another place in my video-game playing life where high school English turned out to be pretty useful.

At this point I'm about a third of the way through the game, and I'm digging it a lot - the mechanics are pretty great, the setting is incredibly well done, and the story is a lot of fun.  In the past I've played previous RockStar games like L.A. Noire and some of the Grand Theft Auto series, but this has been a great find.

Maybe I'll play for a little bit tonight, you know, just for a quick side-mission...

I'm taking an Online Course!

Having been out of grad school for a few months now, I started to get the itch to get some more schooling, and what do you know, my alma mater recently added a free online course called Understanding Video Games.  

So I signed up, and have been having a pretty good time of it so far - each unit has a video component, some readings, and the ability to chat with other students about the course content.  Also I'm able to play video games as homework (which is quite nice), and I'm hoping to use it as an excuse to catch up on both my Angry Video Game Nerd and Extra Credits viewing.

As I'm only one unit it, I can't say much more than that, but so far the reading has been a lot of fun (first one focused on the game Portal), and I'm excited to see what else the course has to offer.

Book Review: All You Need is Kill

For the first time since finishing Grad School, I've finished a book in a day.

Also the book was pretty freaking awesome!

All You Need is Kill, by Hiroshi Sakurazaka is a great little military science fiction story which begins like a bizarre war-themed SF story mixed with the film Groundhog Day and quickly evolves into something much more interesting.

I fully admit that I picked up the novel as I wanted an excuse to go see the new Tom Cruise film Edge of Tomorrow (which is based on the book) and always find it easier to justify seeing a film if I've read the original source material.

The story moves incredibly quickly and is a great mix of Japanese Mecha Science Fiction (focusing on stories involving robotic suits controlled by people) and an intriguing concept, both of which kept me interested throughout and turning pages faster than I normally do while reading SF.

Would I recommend it?  Absolutely.

First Impressions: Lego Marvel Super Heroes

Last week I managed to get the new PS3 video game Lego Marvel Super Heroes from my local library, and so far it's pretty fun!

Although the game itself is pretty simple - run around, smash things up, make new lego things out of them and run around some more, the game has a pretty great sense of humour, and offers me something I've never seen in any of the great Marvel Cinematic Universe films that have come out over the past few years; the Marvel Universe.

Yup, in this game Spider-Man can totally ignore the fact that he's owned by Columbia pictures and hang out with The Avengers (Disney), and even the X-Men (20th Century Fox) or any number of characters who haven't made it to the big screen yet.

Which is totally amazing; for the first few levels you pretty much play the Avengers (Hulk and Iron Man in level one, Captain America in level two, and Hawkeye and Black Widow in level three), but throughout you get to play as Spider-Man and even Mr. Fantastic for a while.

So far I'd say the game is pretty simple and aimed at young teens - most of the jokes are puns and the Lego theme keeps everything very family friendly, but as a guy in my late '30s, I'm still having a lot of fun playing the game and I get pretty excited every time a new playable character is added, because once you beat a level you can go back and do it again with any playable characters you have collected so far - and in the end the game includes dozens of characters (and yes Mike, that includes both She-Hulk and Squirrel Girl).

The game is pretty fun, and I think a lot of it comes down to exploring the Lego New York setting and just seeing all the neat ways in which these characters interact.

Definitely worth trying out.

Things I've Noticed: My Wife is Pretty Amazing

Sorry I didn't get this post up earlier in the weekend; I came home on Friday expecting to have an evening's worth of stuff to do, and would hopefully get out a review of the book I was planning to finish (should come next week), when my wife told me she had a surprise for me - which turned out to be a copy of the new PS3 game The Last of Us from my local library.

So, as a huge fan of post-apocalyptic stories, I've spent my weekend working my way through the game (also schoolwork, hanging with the family, visiting friends, etc.), and so far I've got to say it's pretty amazing.

The company who produced the game, Naughty Dog, are the same folks who created the Uncharted series, so I've found a lot of the controls are similar (which is nice), but what really amazes me about the game is just how amazing it looks - considering I'm playing a guy fighting zombie-like creatures, the sheer level beauty of game, showing a world where nature is slowly creeping back up on the remnants of our modern world.

I'm still probably in the first quarter of the game, but wow; it's a huge amount of fun.

Have I mentioned how amazing my wife is?

Game Reivew: Flower

Two weeks ago I picked up a new PS3 game for my wife; actually a three-in-one game, being Flow, Flower, and Journey.  All three were originally released as games on The Playstation Network which means they were downloadable content (games purchased online rather than as hardcopy discs).

Playing the three games in order of release, my wife quickly worked her way through Flow and moved onto Flower, which after watching the gameplay for a couple of days may be one of my new favourite games - right up there with Ico (although not quite at the level of Shadow of the Colossus).

Using no dialogue, the game takes place in the dreams of flowers, specifically a group of flowers on a small shelf in an urban apartment.  In the dreams, you control flower petals which travel across a landscape waking up other flowers and slowly, but surely bringing the landscape to life.  Like Katamari Forever,  the levels each start out easily and get tricky very quickly - also like Katamari, the game is quite addictive.

Things I've Noticed: Sometimes Hyper-Realistic games can be adorable

Since I finished ICO for the PS3 I’ve moved on to one of the console’s classics, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which is designed to be a wrap up for the franchise and is, for my money’s worth (my money being 7.99 at a used DVD shop) it is an incredibly fun game of hide and seek wherein you try an manouver an older guy through battlefields where either side will start shooting at him if they see him. The game’s main character, Old Snake, is pretty cool as a grey-haired, moustached guy who has seen too much war and although is incredibly skilled, is also getting very tired with it.

Why is the game cute? Three reasons:

1) As my wife puts it – the main character may be an old man, but he sure has a young man’s butt.

2) Like with previous games Snake is able to hide using cardboard boxes or rusted out oil drums, and as he moves around in these it is, simply put, one of the most adorable things I’ve ever seen.

3) Akiba (Johnny), a member of the Rat Patrol team, Johnny is well meaning, more than a little disgusting (the first time you meet him he is suffering from severe diarrhoea) and desperate to be thought of as “cool.” Honestly, he may be my favourite character in the game

Seriously, the game does introduce a lot of questions about war economy, the nature of soldiers and even the use of AI in wartime technology, but for me it is the surprising levels of cuteness throughout the game that keep me going.

Things I've noticed: My style of videogaming may be weird

Over the last week my kids have been playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Wii non-stop.

Hold on - I guess I should put some sort of context to the term non-stop, as your definition is surely different than mine. When I say non-stop I mean they play for a couple hours (2-3) each day.

We borrowed the game from my younger brother who played it for eight to ten hours a day (this was before he went back to school) and finished the game in just under a week.

Personally, my gaming habit is to play 60 to 90 minutes twice a week (early Saturday and Sunday mornings).

I suppose all of us (my kids, brother, the readers of this post, and myself) all consider the amount of time we spend playing videogames “normal,” but when I explain to others how I play my games (two to three hours a week, one game at a time, until I’ve finished the game), I’m often met with strange looks – as if the way I’m playing is somehow wrong.

I have lots of friends who juggle multiple games for multiple platforms, but personally I like the style wherein I spend a couple hours a week actively playing and then take five days to think about what I’ll do next. In addition, because my local library now loans games and my newer consoles (PS3 and Wii) can both save my progress, I have a much larger catalogue of games to choose from.

In addition I have a couple games which get played on a yearly basis (on New Year’s Eve), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Katamari Damacy – both of which I’ve been working on steadily for 5-10 hours a year for the last five years.

It’s funny, but until I started comparing my time spent gaming with other people, I thought my way was the normal way – I mean, how else would you play a video game?