The Old Man and The Kid

I mentioned that one of the XBLA games I've been playing was Bastion. At first I thought I was more taken with Outland, which I bought at about the same time, but Bastion is really growing on me. I guess that makes sense, it's a game that relies heavily on your desire to collect!, upgrade!, and replay! The replay part of is actually my favorite so far. I started a New Game + immediately after I finished it because you get to start over with all your weapons and upgrades. Also, you make a couple binary choices at the end of the story that I'm sort of curious to see the effects of the opposite choice. Also, since I spent a good chunk of the original playthrough feeling underpowered and confused on which weapons (there are a lot) to use, I was excited to give it another go with a more powerful character and the knowledge of what weapons and upgrades I wanted to move towards.

Oh right, what kind of game is this? It's basically a top-down hack and slash with some RPG elements. The art style looks more sprite based than 3D-heavy, but it looks great. The story is purposely left pretty vague. You never even learn the name of The Kid that you control. The Old Man is your constant companion. Well, his voice is anyway. Think of it as a gravelly Tom Waits sound that narrates your almost every move. The amount of lines that guy had to record must have been insane. He'll often make reference to the fact that you have full health, what weapons you have equipped and sometimes just references to stuff you're doing. My favorite was him pointing out that "the Kid's smashing every bush he sees like there'll be some sort of prize." Basically pointing out the stupid video gamey concept of something like that.

This game is rich with different ways to play it based on all the weapon and upgrade combinations and it's as good as everyone says.

More Dead Space

You'd think, by all the posts about it, that I'm like, OMG so in lurve with the Dead Space series. That's not really the case. But since it's an EA property, they have the $ to put it on every platform out there. Anyway, I've really enjoyed 1 & 2, thinking they're some of the tightest, most polished games to come out on consoles in recent years. The concept of strategic dismemberment adds a new wrinkle to the tired "always aim for the head" strategy of most first person shooters. The weaponry is usually interesting and more inventive than "machine gun" and "bigger machine gun."

But outside of the core game series, there have been a few missteps with respect to control scheme. I mentioned that I played through the iOS version, and fought the touch screen the whole way.

Now I'm doing the same thing with Dead Space Extraction. This is a light-gun game, pure and simple. You have no control of where your character looks or goes. You just need to shoot and pick up powerups. Picking these up can be really frustrating because I'm used to being able to take my time and make sure I pick up every single bit of ammo. Often, the guy jerks his head (and your perspective along with it) around so much that you have a fraction of a second to pick up stuff. I'm not doing myself any favors by playing it without a light gun too. Oh, let me explain. This game just happened to be on the disc when I bought the PS3 version of Dead Space 2. It's a port of the Wii version of the same name. You're supposed to use it with the Playstation Move controller, which is pretty much like a Wii-mote, I guess. But I'm not gonna buy that thing just to play an essentially free game. So I mainly get by with a mixture of playing it on the easiest difficulty setting and cursing a lot.

Since it's on rails, I've run into a couple of spots where it got confused about whether I should continue on the path or not. Normally you don't move on to the next area and set of monsters until you kill all the ones in the area. But I've seen it get messed up where it tries to continue on but there's still a monster around that will kill you slowly from off screen. Since you're no longerlooking at it, you have to use area attacks like a flamethrower or similar that do damage to the area all around you. So there are a few bugs. Thankfully, the invisible checkpointing scheme is pretty good. When you get killed by stupidity like this you don't start very far back from where you died.

I was playing this a lot for a while, but lately I've been distracted by a couple of XBLA releases (Outland and Bastion) that I'll talk about in a future post.

Looking forward, not back

Usually how it works on here is that I play a game, gather my impressions, then write a bit about it on here. Since I haven't been playing nearly as much I can't really do that. Plus, since we're sort of in the dead period of game releases (seriously, no sports I care about and no games coming out?) I start to think about what I'm going to play next when it finally comes out.

Tops on that list is Skyrim. The fifth in the series and I only started at four. But that one was Oblivion and it sort of blew me away when I first played it. Coming from a Zelda background where you had a ton of freedom to go wherever you wanted in whatever order you wanted, this game took that and brought it to a whole new level. You could interact with just about anything in the world. I quickly found that I could pick up any of the items I found laying around. I held on to the rusty dagger or wooden spoon I found in a cave because I may just need that! Anyway, the game had some issues, but it was lovable all the same. Some of the videos for Skyrim look like a huge graphical leap, which is sort of impressive considering it's running on the same Xbox 360 as the previous.

Speaking of Zelda, Skyward Sword is coming at some point and I'm excited because it's more Zelda, and it will be something to play on the dust-covered Wii. Looking at those trailers for the first time just now I'm pleased with the art style. Looks like they took the semi-realistic look from Twilight Princess and threw in the bright color palette from Wind Waker. But nothing in there makes me salivate or anything. It will be more Zelda I suppose, no more, no less.

Rounding out the list are the 3DS versions of Mario Kart and Super Mario. But Dave, you say, you don't even have a 3DS and have been calling them "stupid expensive wastes of tech" or something like that. That may be true, but this blog is called DS Lunch for a reason and I'm pretty much obligated to get the next portable Mario Kart based on the hours and hours I've gotten out of the last one. Surely I'll be able to find some kind of a system/game bundle or something for cheaper by the time that comes out, right?

iOS games

I thought it might be neat to list a few of the games I've loaded up on my iPad. I haven't given up console games by any means, but sometimes a different sort of game will show up on iOS that I'll try out for a while. Most of the things I've found are the "play for a few minutes" type of game rather than "spend an hour or two" type of game. Except for Dead Space, I guess. That one encouraged longer play sessions like the console game. Unlike the console game though, the controls were frequently frustrating. I'm glad I played it though, especially since I happened to catch it on sale.

Tiny Wings, Fruit Ninja, Current, Simon Says, (couldn't find links), and Bumpy Road all sort of operate on the same concept of "play from the same beginning point and try to see how far you can make it." The better you do, the higher you score and the longer a play session lasts. There are no checkpoints for levels, really. This sort of game is unusual for me coming from the console space, where games haven't done this since the NES days. But it can be a refreshing change if you're expecting it. These three have great art style and sound design, just don't expect to be entertained for more than a few minutes at a time.

Continuity 2 and World of Goo tend to have "levels" and your you can only access higher levels by completing the earlier ones. Also these two are interesting little brain benders at times.

Words With Friends is unique in that it's the only one I play with other people. Even if it's asynchronous. It's really a perfect concept for a mobile game. I just wish it didn't make me feel so dumb sometimes.

Lastly, The Final Hours (of Portal 2) isn't a game, but rather an interactive article about a game. I loved Portal, so I got a kick out of this. It's also neat to see what's possible with this new medium of an internet enabled device that you're actually touching. The Wired.com app similarly lets you see a somewhat interactive magazine issue. Some of it is gimicky, some is neat, but it's interesting to see what designers do when they can actually can make the moving pictures newspaper that you see in Sci Fi all the time. Welcome to the future.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit is the devil

I just realized that I was racing a course that I hated, in a car that I hated, in a race mode that I hated, while a song played that I hated. But I kept playing it because i wanted to get to other portions of the game that i really like. Well done NFS, well done.