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Oxenfree (PS4) by Sparce (Sep 20th, 2017 at 21:35:14) |
Today I started a brand new game Oxenfree. In this game you play as a blue haired girl named Alex and you and your friend Ren and new step brother Jonas are on a boat to an island getting ready to have a party. You learn that you are not supposed to be on the island and then you hop a fence to get to the party. We then go to a cave where using a hand radio cause weird lights to appear then I follow Jonas into a cave where we end up trapped and cause some weird ghost alien triangle thing to appear. When this happened my audio just gave feedback and I wasn't able to tell what was going on. I then get a call from Ren and ignore the other person trying to call me since I thought it would be bad If I switched lines. Then on my way to Ren I get trapped in a time loop where I get some weird information about my dead brother. I break out of the time loop and go on to see Nora one of the girls at the party. After convincing her to go to the radio tower I leave to go find Ren where I get stuck in another time loop and after breaking out of that one have to get evil spirits out of Ren with the radio. Ren then goes to the radio tower while me and Jonas go to find the last person Clarissa. We head over to the army base and fight through another time loop and also a quiz from the ghosts where in the middle of it I have to free Jonas from spirits. When we finally get to Clarissa and she jumps out a window while possessed. I ran down but she was not there any more. I head back to the tower and have to decide who to take with me to go find a key. I want to take Nora but I can’t leave Jonas and Ren together or else they will tear each other apart so I decide to take Ren because I need dependable people at the tower in case something happens and Ren just ate a pot brownie. This is the end of today’s play through.
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Destiny 2 (PS4) by jp (Sep 20th, 2017 at 15:24:19) |
Played my second Nightfall strike last night. I find it really interesting that they've added a tough time limit (run out of time, you fail and get booted back to orbit) together with some non-shooting mechanics. In the case of the inverted spire nightfall you had to jump through hoops (literally!) to get increments of 30 seconds added. In the current one, you have to destroy hidden/secret lattices for 30 second increments of extra time.
I guess it makes the nightfall more "creative" because it's less about DPS and holding out for longer, and more about coordination and tactics. I'm not sure yet if it's more "fun" - because sometimes I just enjoy going in to shoot monsters, and the time pressure sort of gets in the way of that. On the other hand, after you've done them a few times you get into a hyper-efficient mode where you literally run to the end as quickly as possible and hammer away at the boss. I kind of liked the challenges they had at the end of D1, but I guess I also stopped paying attention to those after a while.
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Soul Bubbles (DS) by jp (Sep 20th, 2017 at 15:18:29) |
Made it to the next-to-last world (Himalayan/Tibetan themed) and I realized I was starting to get a bit tired. Each new world introduces a new mechanic you have to use before moving on to the next world. It's very "by the book" design - competent and solid, but not inspired. Tellingly, new mechanics are usually only used in that world. Mixing them all together wouldn't really work and then there'd be too much to worry about.
I've really enjoyed the general "mushiness" that moving the bubble around has. It's quite imprecise, but purposefully so. It reminds me very much of LocoRoco - in a good way. The game feels more organic, more like "play in the real world".
However, I got a bit bored, looked at the pile of shame and decided to call it quits when I got to a section where I was unable to do what I wanted after 20 minutes of trying (tried to swing a bubble into a secret area, but kept failing).
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This is the Police (PC) by Miranda (Sep 20th, 2017 at 00:22:35) |
Starting the game This is the Police, the game revolves around the struggles of balancing your morality and ethics as you play the role of police chief Jack Boyd. The game begins with an introduction to your roles as Jack Boyd: after an investigation goes wrong, you must work to keep your job and make money for your retirement. Your tasks include keeping the city safe by solving cases, leading your task forces, and making moral decisions involving the mafia.
The first great moral dilemma I faced in the game was when an old colleague, Kendrick, comes asking me for a favor. Kendrick has gotten into trouble working with the mafia, and now needs assistance because he made a contract with them but isn’t able to pay them back the money he owes. If he doesn’t get someone to take over the contract for him, the mafia’s going to kill his family. At this point, I’m given the choice of assisting Kendrick or refusing him. I figured that since I’m already knee deep in with the mafia and my future as Jack looked bleak, I would save Kendrick and his family so I chose to assist him. There wasn’t an immediate consequence for my actions, but I’m sure I’ll be hearing
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Life is Strange (PS4) by vic1500 (Sep 18th, 2017 at 16:09:24) |
Today I finished episode two of Life is Strange, and the choice system has demonstrated to keep a tight record on what you have done until that part. This is mostly seen with Kate Marsh and when you have to prevent her from committing suicide.
Kate remembers all the actions you took on the first episode, whether to support her or not. This leads me to believe choices not only have short-term consequences, but long term even.
Overall, it seems the game's ethical framework is really hard to decipher, due to all the grey areas representing the choices Max has to do (emphasized by her monologue after the choice is made). Only the long-term outcome for some characters really dictate whether or not you choose correctly. For example, If I hand't supported Kate as much as I did despite getting glared from David or other people, she would have probably killed herself.
I believe this game perfectly ties with the vision of Rochard Garriott: Making you feel personal and responsible for the game's actions.
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GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that
they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
you still consider yourself to be playing the game. If it's closed, you finished playing the game. (it doesn't matter
if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
for that game. Call it a weblog of game playing activity if you will.
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1883 registered gamers and 2259 games. 6351 GameLogs with 11163 journal entries. 4646 games are currently being played.
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Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (PC) by dkirschner |
| Ok, good atmosphere, interesting plot so far. Voice acting bad, some other irritating things. Buggy. We shall see... ------------ Really engrossing game. I got the blue light bug though :-( |
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most recent entry: Saturday 2 August, 2014
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Well that was short and sweet...and buggy as hell!
I'd heard this game was buggy. After the first hour, I'd already gotten stuck on a curb, run into an invisible wall, and when I minimized the game to look up how to open a safe, not only is the way to open it different than the game tells you (game says enter the numbers clockwise, you actually have to go right, left, right, left turning the dial, NOT clockwise!), but the game window disappeared, yet is still running on my computer. I cannot find it anywhere, and it won't shut down through the task manager. So I have to restart my computer! Since then, I learned that the game crashes if you minimize it, I hit several more annoying bugs, like one where I couldn't get on some moving box properly, and then the sound would screw up every time I did it.
Finally, I encountered one of the game-stopping bugs, which I learned is referred to as the 'blue lights' bug, closely related to the 'invisible reef' bug. This happens about 80% of the way through the game. You're on a ship sailing toward Devil's Reef (or Demon's Reef, or something like that), and you have to look through a cannon's zoom to target 3 enemies on the reef and kill them. The enemies are supposed to be represented by blue lights, but in my game, when I zoomed in, I was like, wait what am I supposed to shoot?! There were no blue lights! So where were the enemies? How can I kill them?
I looked this up online and some people had come up with clever solutions, such as mapping where to aim, where the blue lights should be. You're supposed to memorize the locations. Even then, it takes these experts about 15 minutes to kill the 3 enemies. It would have taken me god knows how long. The cannon zoom view barely moved, and I had to increase the mouse sensitivity to max, but even then, by the time I'd find about where I thought I should target, the enemies would cause another tidal wave, and I'd have to go hide somewhere while it passed.
So, I finished the game watching a walkthrough on YouTube where a guy was going for an "A" ranking by saving less than 5 times and meeting some other insane requirements.
Why is saving less than 5 times insane? Because this game is not easy! I'd read that it was frustratingly difficult, and I assumed that was in the typical survival horror way where ammo and health are scarce. However, neither were scarce, and the game was hard for surprising reasons. First, your character, Jack, dies fairly easily. I suppose it's realistic in that way. Instead of just getting shot and losing health, you lose mobility if you get shot in the leg, aim if in the arm, you get dizzy from head injuries and so on. Further, you can have just scratches (require bandages), deep cuts (require sutures), breaks (require splints) and so on. So the health and healing system was more involved than normal. I actually thought it was pretty cool, but it does make things difficult at times! You can't just pop a medkit. Jack actually pulls out the healing supplies and performs the action on himself, vulnerable the whole time. So it's usually a good idea to hide before healing. Sometimes it was eyeball-rolling because he would get hurt so easily. For example, if you jump off a crate, you might break your leg.
Jack can also go insane, which was an obvious influence on Amnesia. The screen shakes, he sees bugs, hears voices, becomes paranoid, that kind of thing. It was cool. He loses sanity from looking at disturbing things mostly, like corpses, or statues of Cthulhu and whatnot.
There are plenty of little puzzles. Many are annoyingly obscure to solve, and the game definitely had an adventure/puzzle game element where you have to use items on things and it is sometimes something I'd never ever think to do. Opening safes was particularly stupid. I swear the game tells you exactly how to open that first one, then you have to do it a different way. Lots of the puzzles were just trial and error type things. Sometimes I wouldn't know where to go next because what I thought would work would keep getting me killed, but nothing would deter me from thinking it was the right thing. For example, this one time I was trying to escape Innsmouth. I found a way to go with lots of enemies. I kept trying to get past them, shooting my way through. After many deaths, I finally decided the enemies were infinitely spawning (they do that sometimes, very irritating!). If they are infinitely spawning then what am I supposed to do?! I know I have to go that way. I used a walkthrough a good 5 times to figure out what the hell to do next. In this case, I had to go find a key and let a guy out of jail first. He gets a truck and then we DRIVE that way. OH OF COURSE.
Why else was it hard? Hmm..Oh yes, the AI. At times they were your typical omniscient goons, knowing exactly where you are. At other times, they were complete idiots, running around in circles while you stood right in front of them. They'd patrol sometimes. Sometimes they just seemed erratic. Their aim was usually terrible, but sometimes the game would decide that they could blast you from the other side of the room with ease. Yeah, just very unpredictable. I guess that made it important to learn to be stealthy. Once you get guns, especially in the later areas, the combat became easier.
Oh, and Jack is a perma-walker. He never runs. Even when caves are crumbling or buildings are burning, he walks. And if he hurts his legs, he walks.real.slow. That's another weird thing that seems inconsistent with the plot. You think you'd run if you were being chased by fishmen. He's also never out of breath. His speech is always completely level, normal, and he's always got attitude. Even if he's going insane or his friend just got killed or both his legs are broken, he's a sassy 1920s cop. His best line was when some fishmen trapped him in a tunnel, one said "I don't believe you're on the guest list for our little party." Jack replied, "Just check the guest list again. I'm on the section not reserved for ugly freaks." I laughed at that one.
Anyway, cool game, great atmosphere, genuinely creepy. I'm glad I played it, even with all the bugs and the eventual gamestopper.
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