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En Garde! (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 15th, 2024 at 17:11:30)

This is a silly, short adventure game (~4 hours) featuring fencing, and the combat is really quite good. It's predicated not only on fencing moves (dodge, parry, riposte), but on using the environment to gain advantage over enemies. For example, you can kick things at enemies (boxes, crates, vases, etc.), which will momentarily surprise most enemy types. Surprised enemies are opened up to being kicked themselves, and you can kick them off ledges, into traps, and so on. You can pick up objects (buckets, turkeys, lanterns, etc.) and throw them at enemies too, distracting them or, if you're close with a bucket or turkey, putting them on the enemies' heads. It's amusing seeing an enemy running around with a turkey on his head.

You can also interact with the environment, such as by throwing a lantern at a cannon, which will cause it to fire, or by cutting a rope holding up a chandelier, which will cause it to fall. You can jump on tables, swing on poles, and generally run circles around your opponents, throwing and kicking things at them. Doing such acrobatics also surprises them, opening them up to kicks and attacks, or just distracting them so that you can focus on other enemies, because they will swarm you.

There are a variety of enemy types that, especially when there are a lot of enemies together, can be pretty challenging. They basically escalate in the complexity of their patterned moves. If their swords highlight red, it's an unblockable attack that you must dodge. If their swords highlight blue, you need to parry. Different enemies have different combinations of these two moves, and they come at you fast, so you have to react quickly to their series of attacks. As you dodge and parry the more advanced duelists, you wear down their guard bar. Once that's depleted, you do damage to their health. If you get hit, their guard bar replenishes. So, you need to string together perfect moves to defeat enemies. Combat happens in arenas, often with waves; it's intense and fun!

The fencing and acrobatic antics align with the narrative and tone of the game. You play as a heroic rapscallion who is against the "Count-Duke" and his evil scheme to milk the population and enrich himself. The plot and characters are usually over-the-top. There are plenty of funny one-liners. It's all very silly, endearing, and colorful. And I say all this with the feeling, in the end, that it was missing things. It moves at a fast pace and feels like it could have been fleshed out more, perhaps even taken a bit more seriously, and been a more engrossing action game. What's here is solid, but it feels like more of a foundation for something else than anything I'd encourage others to go out and play, although it was totally fun.

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007 Quantum of Solace (DS) by jp (Oct 14th, 2024 at 19:21:18)

Ugh. Ok. This is going on the shelf.

I got really frustrated at the end of the 3rd mission - you're chasing a rogue agent - all that was fine. But, at the end there's a showdown - you fight and defeat him (health to zero) but then there's "magically" a second stage where he sits behind a barrier and shoots you while goons come out and fight you with punches.

By this point I had very little ammo left. Fortunately for me I had just enough so that I could shoot him and kill him - but only if I left that for the second stage. Had I ran out of ammo I'd have to punch goons, hope they dropped a briefcase with ammo, equipped it and continued. This would have been a timing nightmare (I do think the game pauses when you're checking the inventory), but still - it's extra awkward because tapping the inventory is a stylus rather than button (thus, a little bit slower).

So, all of this to say that I saw how this game let me paint myself into a corner - you have to shoot the baddie in the 2nd stage - what if you run out of ammo? Sure, more can appear from punching bad guys - but you have to pick it up in an awkward way all while being shot at. So, not a design I'm particularly impressed by.

BUT, it gets worse... at least my limited experience indicated it.

If you kill the baddie - yay, a door pops open. BUT the goons are still there and you need to take them out. AND, they keep on coming forever...you have to run to the door. But there's little room to move around and I was already weak. So, I lost a few times despite taking out the big baddie because I thought you had to clear the rest... and they kept on coming and then I died. Eventually I just booked it to the door which I think is what you're supposed to do. But I got there with some, IMO, unfair frustration.

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Prince of Persia: The Fallen King (DS) by jp (Oct 14th, 2024 at 19:12:32)

Playing this back to back with Quantum of Solace on the DS was interesting - both games lean heavily on the stylus as the only means of interaction (ok the Bond game uses one button). And, they're both different in how they do it. This PoP game mostly has tapping - at least in what I've played so far. Tap and hold is an option too I guess (tap hold to run to a location, just tap to move). (Bond has lots of swiping and holding while moving the stylus). Which is better? It's sort of a "meh" question - depends on the game and implementation, no?

As a 2D side scrolling puzzle platformer it's a lot easier to control/make sense of the game compared with the 3D sort of isometric view...but, there's still some stuff that seems a bit too hard to do in this game. I'm about 17% of the way through (according to the save file at least) and, to be fair, I've only run into one major moment where I really struggled to make progress because I couldn't get either the timing of the taps or something else in order for me to make a jump. I eventually cleared it, but even as I type this I could not say what it was I was doing wrong and then did right. Perhaps it was just a finicky thing? Was my timing off? I even went back into the tutorial/help screens to see how the different moves were described in order to see if I had misunderstood something. Sadly the info was too sparse for me to figure anything out.

I'm not sure how much further I'll continue to play - so far the gameplay has gotten a bit deeper and richer, but not THAT much? And there's so many other games left to try out...

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007 Quantum of Solace (DS) by jp (Oct 13th, 2024 at 21:34:09)

I guess what's most interesting about this game - from what I played - is how it is almost entirely controlled using the stylus. At this point in the platforms lifecycle I get the sense that game companies where either forced to (or desirous to try out?) to implement mostly stylus-controls. Here's it's stylus all the time except that you can sometimes press a button (or keep it pressed), any button to toggle a state change. For example, to enter shooting mode, and stuff like that.

The game is also, curiously, played with the DS sideways - book mode?. This results in a taller but narrow screen. It's interesting, and reasonably comfortable, but I felt the camera was pulled in too tight so I was often getting shot at by baddies who were out of camera. Sure, you can look at the radar/map on the other screen, but it's all dots with no facing, so it's only marginally useful (when it comes to combat). The game itself has some interesting ideas, though the controls took too long to get used to for my tastes and things were still rather imprecise and wonky. Interesting ideas (for a Bond game):

a. This one's interesting, but probably bad. You can pick up different weapons and they have stats - like better aim and damage. So, you need to be careful. I didn't like this too much because, while firing isn't hard - you miss a lot and it's hard to tell if you missed because you were bad at aiming/tapping the stylus or if the gun's stats betrayed you.

b. Enemies sometimes drop playing cards. They each do something different (bonuses to melee damage, for example) and you can equip five of them at a time. BUT, you get special combo bonuses if you have special poker hands! Pair, two pair, that sort of thing.

c. Reloading is really annoying - you have to enter inventory and drag a clip over to the gun. It's annoying to do in the middle of combat. An auto-reload might have been the better design choice here?

d. Melee combat is a special mode, you walk up to an enemy, press the button and then enter melee where you must swipe the screen in different ways to do different punches. Sometimes they'll block - or be ready to block, so you need to be careful. It's a neat system, and is definitely more interesting than just tapping a button. It feels more involved.

I think the game is also voice acted - by the actors, and there's images from the film. So, it's pretty authentic in that sense. Mostly I'm impressed by how smooth the game runs (for being polygonal 3D and so on) even if the camera often gets in the way - I mean, the level geometry gets in the way of the camera.

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The Eternal Cylinder (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 6th, 2024 at 10:58:31)

Played a couple hours and this did not click for me. Neat art design and silly enemies were the highlights, as well as, of course, the titular eternal cylinder, a massive thing that rolls forward, destroying everything in its path as the game progresses. You play as "trebhums," little creatures that can eat stuff and gain mutations, which allow them to do things like "take no damage from gas clouds" or "become a square and fit in some holes" or "convert food to water" or "jump higher." You can collect up to 5 trebhums, each of which can be mutated and has its own inventory. So, you run around with your little group of pals, eating stuff and finding water (because you have hunger, hydration, energy, and stamina meters to manage) and generally trying to figure out how to solve puzzles and where to go next. You can explore around, but it's rather minimal. The world is procedurally generated and quickly looked same-y. You are contained in little biomes. If you leave, the eternal cylinder starts rolling again, and you can stop it by getting to the next in a series of towers before the cylinder gets there and crushes it. Like, it's interesting in theory, but really weird and boring in practice. I also didn't like that the narrator tells you that you can run ahead and your other trebhums won't die, that they'll find their way to you, but they definitely do die for no reason sometimes. It costs resources to get new trebhums, and you have to find them, and you may have spent mutation resources on them, so this is not cool. They can also lose all the mutations you put on them, which I also disliked. In all, the game felt tedious, like a chore to play.

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