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Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story (PC) by jp (Nov 3rd, 2024 at 12:23:23) |
I'm really loving what Digital Eclipse is doing. Karateka, Llamasoft, etc.
This one's a strange collection for me - unlike, I'm guessing, most non-UK game players, I am quite familiar with Jeff Minter. Not through his games, but sort of one step removed. I've been reading Edge magazine for almost a quarter century at this point and he's someone who is often brought up, interviewed a few times, and so on. So, he's a name that was familiar to me, I know of his reputation within the UK scene. But, I had never played any of his games. So, it was nice to finally get that chance. More fairly, I'm thankful that I was able to create the circumstances that resulted in my playing his games and having a closer-to-first-hand experience of what he's done. At least the old stuff (up until Tempest 2000 pretty much, but if I recall Minter then went heavily into light synths and stuff like that...returning later to videogames).
Actually, to be fair, I had played some of his games - but his much more recent games on iOS app store. Sort of early ipad days. I don't remember the names of any of them. But I think I played two games?
Anyways, back to the old retro original Minter stuff...
If I was mean I'd describe his early games as "clones" with zany characters thrown on top. They play well, are really hard, but it's super clear that he's working on top of other ideas, trying to find new spaces within those. And, this work continued even across ports from one computer to another. A mean person would say that he's just re-hashing his stuff all the time, few big new ideas, and blablabla. And, that might be fair to an extent. Minter isn't the kind of developer/designer who seems to always be looking for another crazy idea, to really push game designs into uncharted territory and so on. That's not a bad thing. Or a good thing either. It's just who he is. He's stuck to his guns doing what he likes and refining and working on that. He's sort of like a carpenter who only makes chairs - and iterates, refines, etc. But his chairs are still chairs - and they're interesting. He's the super specialized craftsman. Other carpenters migth make tables, and then try chairs, and then decide to make a closet, and then a table chair combo, and so on. So, broad in their skills and interests.
And so Digital Eclipse's work really does a great job of laying all his stuff out in front of you so you can see it, in context, and with great additional documentary details. I loved it.
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Eternal Threads (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 29th, 2024 at 19:38:58) |
I've been playing this with Patrick all semester and we've finally beaten it. It's a strange one, like this slice of life narrative game about some housemates in England. The house burns down and everyone dies. Your job is to go to the house after the tragedy and watch fragments of past interactions, some of which you can affect by having characters make different choices, and prevent the housemates from dying in the fire.
To do this, you engage in incredibly mundane gameplay, watching incredibly mundane scenes of the housemates. One woman is pregnant, and another character figures it out, and she can hide the pregnancy or not. Another guy is being blackmailed, he grows pot in his basement for his ill mother, and has a psycho ex-girlfriend who he may or may not sleep with. He also has a secret door in the basement (ooh, aah!). Another woman is a photographer and artist who owns a creepy doll. Another guy has anger issues, takes another guy's bike out for a spin, and gets beat up and the bike is stolen. He also likes to play video games. One guy's sister moves in because she separated from her husband and sleeps with one of the other housemates. Another guy is a doctor and is considering taking a job far away, but doesn't want to tell his girlfriend (who is secretly pregnant). All these things cause minor drama. All of the characters are some degree of annoying. The voice acting is mediocre. After every event, your character types some "clever" name for the event on his timeline-travelling handheld device, and you have to wait for him to type out all the letters.
Despite all this, it's oddly compelling. You select events to watch on a timeline spanning about a week before the fire until the fire itself. Select the event, walk to the event location in the house, watch characters' interactions in the event. Select another event, walk to the event location in the house, watch characters' interactions in the event. Literally this for the entire duration.
We decided to start from the beginning and watch all the scenes, assuming that we'd uncover information that would allow us to make dialogue choices (available in some events) that would save characters from dying. I will save you a lot of trouble: there is no way to know which combination of dialogue choices will save characters and there is no way to prevent the fire. Even when you learn what caused it, there is nothing you can do about it. The easiest solution would seem to be to have a character make a decision to do something that would prevent the fire. But no. You go by trial and error. It follows zero logic. I do not know why they designed it this way. Toward the end, you'll sort of realize that you need to make decisions for each character that will result in them being out of the house, or like at least away from their place of death in the fire. One woman, you need to get her out of her bed; another two characters, you can get them out of the house together; another guy, you need to prevent from falling down the stairs and knocking himself out; etc. And there are long chains of events throughout the timeline that apparently lead to, for example, the woman getting out of her bed.
So, we played through every event and saved two of the six housemates. We clicked around on different decisions that seemed important, changing them, trying to reason our way to saving other housemates. Eventually, we found a walkthrough with instructions, which was wrong. I later found another walkthrough, which was right, and saved everyone. What an odd game!
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Webbed (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 29th, 2024 at 19:08:31) |
Another quick retirement. Webbed was an exercise in frustration with the controls. So, in this game, you play as a spider, and you can spin webs. You aim to a surface you want to attach to, left-click, and release to shoot a web to swing. Or you can aim to a surface, right-click, aim to another surface, release, and you'll spin a web connecting the two surfaces that you can walk on. My favorite part of the game was the movement, which took some getting used to. I first tried to play with a controller, but the aiming was finnicky. It seemed like it'd be better with a mouse for precise aiming to shoot webs. It was better, and I got past the very beginning, but I quickly realized that this was a sort of physics puzzler. It's less about the movement itself and more about manipulating the environment and objects to move yourself and to move things where you want them. You constantly have to attach things to webs to move them around, spin webs connecting surfaces, but spinning other webs to connect the first web for support (if you've ever played World of Goo, it reminded me of that).
I found it so frustrating trying to manipulate objects with webs. An early task required me to bring a cog to an ant. I accidentally dropped the cog into a pool of water that killed me if I touched it. So, I kept trying to shoot a web at the cog to pull it out, but I kept getting pulled into the water when I did that. Or, I'd attach to the cog, try to pull it out, and it would get stuck below a tree branch. I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure this out, and finally got lucky when I realized that I needed to spin a web higher to stand on to pull the cog out. Half the time, I would still fall off the web into the water anyway. In another spot, I had to pull an ant out of a pit, and that freaking ant would not come over a ledge onto solid ground. It's hard to pull stuff around where you want it, it's hard to precisely shoot a web where you want it, and objects stick to one another. For example, another time, I was trying to move a cog to some gears, but an ant that was there kept getting stuck on the cog. I kept having to try to get the ant off the cog before I could try to move the gear, but they kept inevitably getting stuck on each other. It was driving me nuts!
The game is cute, and I think the webby physics puzzling is neat, but I didn't like doing it. I noticed that 97.5% of players have the first achievement, which comes a few minutes into the game. The rate for getting the second achievement (which I didn't make it to after an hour) drops to 57.4%. 40% of players bail within an hour. I wonder how many quit because they got frustrated!
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The Pale Beyond (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 29th, 2024 at 06:31:19) |
I don't remember where I got this. Amazon? It's in my Steam account. Humble Bundle? Somewhere for free or in a bundle...Anyway, it wasn't on my radar, but it sounded interesting and it was so good! The Pale Beyond is a narrative, point-and-click(ish), survival, resource management game. You are recruited for an expedition to the South Pole to find a missing ship that was searching for [mystery]. Once you arrive, things go south (ba-dum!). Your ship gets trapped in the ice, the captain abandons ship with several other crew members, and you are thrust into the leadership role.
After the caption & co. left, I had 25 people to manage. Those people have different roles. There are "key" story people like a photographer, the head engineer, the doctor, and the benefactor's contact, who is clearly withholding information. They can't die except through narrative choices. Then there are the regular sailors, some more engineers, scouts, and a medical team. They can die. Every day, you talk to the crew members. They will petition you for things, argue with you, your relationship (and their relationships with one another to some extent) will increase or decrease. This is the "loyalty" meter. You want them loyal to you so they don't mutiny, and for some other reasons later on. I actually had a really rare ending that netted me the rarest achievement I currently have on Steam (0.8% of players!) because of how my relationships played out. It's pretty easy to figure out which dialogue options increase loyalty (hint: be kind and understanding for the most part).
You also have to manage food and heat resources. To get food, you'll need to use scouts to explore the ice around you and send crew to hunt game. To get heat, you have to constantly fuel the boiler with whatever you can find, from animals you hunt to resources you scavenge from the ship. There is also a morale to manage. If you don't provide enough rations or fuel for heat, morale goes down. Sailors will get malnourished, which, if left untreated with food, turns into scurvy. If that's untreated, the character dies. Sailors will get "freezing," which, if left untreated with heat, turns into frostbite. If that's untreated, the character dies. They can also become demoralized, which decreases the whole expedition's morale unless that's treated. You can send crew to the doctor for scurvy and frostbite, and they'll recover. The game progresses from summer to winter, so it gets colder and colder, which means that crew freeze more and more often. And as game becomes scarce, if you haven't managed food resources well, hunger becomes more common too.
So, you're constantly managing your human resources too because you need people to hunt and perform a variety of other tasks. If people are out sick, you can't use them. And if they die, well, you've got less mouths to feed, but also that's fewer resources you can get. I think I had one sailor die fairly early on, then I had a bad week about halfway through the game and lost another three. I ended the game with 21 crew out of a potential 25. Not too bad!
I really liked the story. Each of the main story characters plays a big role in the expedition, and they all have backstories and whatnot that influence their behaviors and relationships as the expedition progresses. Even the minor characters (the regular crew) have histories and relationships with one another. What the game does so well is create a horrific survival setting, and you feel it as you play. Like, it's life and death out there. The game plays out in several "chapters" where story events happen and then the setting and conditions for resource management change a bit. It kept me on my toes the entire time, and I never got bored. I often felt in a precarious position, like one mistake, one poor week of resource (mis)management could have a domino effect and ruin the expedition. I only died one time, and that was because of an inevitable story event that I didn't anticipate would happen (at least, not as soon as it did). The ending is different than what you would expect and, although it changed the game up, I thought it was neat. If you want a harrowing polar adventure with some challenging resource management and decisions (that isn't overwhelming with the amount and complexity of mechanics!) and a well written story, then this is a good bet.
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Manifold Garden (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 29th, 2024 at 06:05:03) |
Quickly, this is a really disorienting puzzle game. It gave me motion sickness. I tried to play twice. The first time, I made it like 30 minutes, but I didn't recognize the dullness behind my eyes and the yawning (which happens either when I'm tired, bored, or about to barf) as motion sickness. I thought I was just tired. Then yesterday, I sat down to play and started feeling sick within like 10 minutes and retrospectively interpreted the other day's symptoms as motion sickness. I went to YouTube to see more of the game, and felt even worse watching the YouTube video. Blech.
The handful of puzzles I did solve were mind-bending. You shift gravity by pressing spacebar. Doing so basically rotates the world around you by 90 degrees, so you can "run up" walls, change gravity again to get on the ceiling, and so on. There are all these cubes and switches, and it seems like you're really trying to navigate Escher-esque structures and figure out how to get cubes in the right places to open doors. I'm not sure I would have stuck with it anyway, or if I'm just interpreting it more negatively because of how I felt. But it seemed really hard, and the lack of narrative was turning me off. Also, puzzle games after work are not necessarily the best idea.
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