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Griftlands (PC) by dkirschner (Apr 29th, 2025 at 15:53:58) |
This is a roguelite deckbuilder that’s neat in that you have two different decks and there is some interesting worldbuilding, with probably like 100 characters you can meet. It’s also narrative heavy. You play runs with one of three characters, each of whom has their own story. Unfortunately though, it never really clicked with me; I was always sort of bored. I played two runs with the first character, Sal, dying near the end of my first attempt. On my second attempt, I noticed “story difficulty,” set it to that, and steamrolled the second run. I left it on story difficulty and steamrolled the game with the second character, Rook, too. When I started the third character, I was sort of dreading learning his mechanics, the tedium of leveling up another set of cards (you can level up each card once by using it a specific number of times), the endless filler-feeling dialogue, and the tons and tons of negotiations and battles I would have to wade through to get to the end of another story that I didn’t care about. So, I played part of the first day for him to get a sense of the character and any new mechanics, then called it quits.
Here's how the two types of decks/combat work. The first is “battle” and needs no explanation. This is normal deckbuilder stuff. Do lots of damage and kill stuff. Some mechanics include “prepare” (a card is “prepared” when it is in the leftmost spot in your hand and can activate special abilities), “gamble” (one character has a coin that he flips, and some of his cards do different things depending on heads or tails), “burn” (deals damage over time), and so on. Each character has a few unique mechanics.
When you battle enemies, you can spare them or kill them. If you spare them, they might hate you (all the various characters you encounter can either hate, dislike, like, or love you). If you kill them, their friends might hate you. If you kill them in an isolated place, well, you got away with murder. It can be tempting to kill enemies because they drop items, and sometimes quite good ones, or maybe because they were real jerks and deserved it. But, when someone hates you, you get a debuff (e.g., status cards cost one extra action), which does go away if you kill that person later. When someone loves you, you get a buff (e.g., gain 4 defense and 2 power at the beginning of every battle). It’s obviously good to have a lot of people love you and few people hate you. I definitely had some hate debuffs that were pretty annoying to deal with.
The second thing you can do is “negotiation,” and this one is different. It’s the same basic idea as battle, except think of it as the passive option. This second deck is full of cards that are meant to manipulate, persuade, and intimidate others. In a negotiation, you have “arguments.” Characters all have a “core argument.” Then, they can make other arguments that do various things. All arguments have “resolve” (HP). When an argument’s resolve reaches 0, it is defeated. No big deal for a regular argument; these come and go during a negotiation. If your core argument loses its resolve, then you lose the negotiation.
So, there are generally two ways out of a situation: battle or negotiate. Sometimes, negotiations make subsequent battles easier. As you think about building your decks, remember that if you lose a negotiation, you might still be able to battle, but if you lose a battle, you can’t then negotiate…because you’re dead. That means that, for me at least, negotiation was far more useful, and I chose that option far more. On the other hand, there are more mandatory battles than mandatory negotiations, and bosses are typically trying to kill you, not argue with you. So, you can’t rely on only one deck; you must figure out how to balance them.
There are some other things to consider, such as the battle and negotiation grafts (like skills or perks you acquire each run), and then the various roguelite meta upgrades. You can unlock permanent upgrades for each character, perks that can be used on any character, as well as new cards that will appear in your runs.
In the end, it feels strange to say, but I wish I had just stopped after the first run. I feel like I wasted my time with this one hoping that it would click. There are certainly things I enjoyed (like the negotiations and trying to get a ton of characters to love me), but like I said earlier, I just found Griftlands tedious and boring.
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Gris (PS5) by jp (Apr 20th, 2025 at 20:25:52) |
I distinctly remember Gris getting a "meh" review score in Edge magazine. So, I was expecting to be underwhelmed gameplay-wise though wowed visually.
And yes, I was wowed visually (and aurally too - playing the PS5 version that makes use of the speaker controller in a cool way)...and the gameplay was sort of meh - but, it got better and better the longer I played!
Not counting the "hub" area, the game has four zones/levels that each introduce a mechanic, as well as some in-world things to interact with. And so, the game really goes from less to more as later levels incorporate more in-world mechanics as well as require use of the character mechanics you unlock. It also all makes sense with the game's theme and story and balblabla (ludonarrative harmony is what my students brought up).
That being said, it's a pretty relaxing and flowing kind of game - nods to Journey in there as well - and there isn't really a fail state, though you can get stuck on puzzles and some dexterity-timing dependent puzzles. There's some swimming bits that are just glorious - as you dash from "water bubble" to "water bubble" (blocks of water in the air) - and I loved swimming up waterfalls.
What impressed me the most though were two things:
1. I kept on trying to "go the wrong way" and most of the time, it was the right way.
2. The onboarding and tutorials are really, really well done. You notice a thing, or do a thing, and then that's the thing you have to do later to solve puzzles and so on. It feels very natural and very normal.
So, I'm actually excited to try Neva now...
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Lost in Blue 2 (DS) by jp (Apr 18th, 2025 at 18:46:41) |
Perhaps the strangest thing for me about this game is that it's a bona fide survival game on the DS. In my mind, the genre is more recent than 2006! I'm thinking of all the indie survival games (craft stuff, gather food, don't die of hunger or thirst) and then ones on Steam..and here's this game - a sequel no less - and it's straight up THAT. Survival. And there's two characters to boot - and you can die (I did, pretty soon it turns out).
I guess I was surprised by how quickly I did die - and, from a novice perspective, it felt sudden and a bit unfair. As in, CLEARLY there was nothing I could have done differently to survive. I spent too much time exploring was probably the main problem, and I left the boy behind in a cave we found, and I'm not sure that's what you're supposed to do? You have to keep both of them feed, hydrated and energized, and I felt like I had my hands full with just the one character.
I think my biggest mistake was probably not getting the spear for fishing made sooner? But then, I'm not even sure how you're supposed to use it - and all the other food I kept scavenging wasn't really doing much. Like, you'd eat it and not see a huge effect. I'm guessing there's something I'm not understanding and it makes me wonder if a full reset makes the most sense? (instead of loading into a saved game that's already doomed/too heavily stacked against success).
Perhaps the strangest thing (for me) about the game is that there's a super simple mini-game for cooking! You collect stuff to cook and also stuff to use as spices and then need to sort of trial and error recipes - though I could set the boy (the character I was not controlling directly) to cook and he'd come up with his own stuff... it's weird.
And it's a sequel? I guess I should look up if this is a port to DS from someplace else? It would make more sense in a way - the game is also low-poly 3D as you wander around the environment. Still...I might just put it on the shelf.
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Phantom Abyss (PC) by jp (Apr 6th, 2025 at 19:14:27) |
I'd heard of the game's hook (or gimmick if you will) as, everyday it's a different 1st person platforming game/run, and if you die - that's it. Play a different run later.
I'm guessing stuff changed along the way, though the concept is still here - it's a reasonably challenging rogue-like 1st person platforming game. I've had fun, you have a whip to help you climb and each level has different modifiers (the whip has an ability) and you can pick up boons in your run (if you have enough coins to afford them) and hopefully make it to the end. BUT, you see a bunch of ghosts for everyone else who played this level - if someone died, you can collect their spirit or something for a small heal! During each run you collect keys you can use to buy permanent upgrades, and so you go up the progression ladder of many roguelites...
Someone described this as first person temple run, which is close enough? I mean, the levels themselves are a lot more interesting than the "mere" reaction times that temple run goes for, here you can side-step/etc. stuff - and there are different paths, and in all you can be a bit creative for how you approach stuff...I've had fun so far - unlocked all the green levels and I've started on the blue ones!
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Cuphead (Switch) by jp (Apr 6th, 2025 at 13:37:03) |
I only get to play this when my son comes around - and we play together and I realized, yeah - I need to either start practicing seriously or just give up. And, I enjoy playing it co-op, so there's not much sense in practicing, so I decided to give up.
We did make it to the 2nd island(?), and played some of the levels there - but I was clearly starting to see a steeper path to success. As in, it too us (mostly my fault) more and more tries to make less progress. He's already played it, beat it too? So, not much point for him really.
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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,
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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)
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2287 registered gamers and 3259 games. 7790 GameLogs with 13267 journal entries. 5110 games are currently being played.
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most recent entry: Friday 8 February, 2008
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SUMMARY
Metal Gear Solid 2: Son's of Liberty's first hour takes place on an oil tanker off of New York. The player plays as Solid Snake, who is apparently a protagonist from previous installments, as he attempts to infiltrate this ship to take photographs of a new piece of Metal Gear, a sort of war machine, called RAY and expose it. So the object is to sneak around the ship amongst a good number of military personal in order to get the photographs and escape.
GAMEPLAY
This is definitely on my top 5 games list now. It plays so smoothly, the controls are so responsive (gently hold the 0 button to shoot out a laser sight, push harder to shoot), the enemies seem to have some amount of AI, the characters are really interesting and conflicted, and the story seems to be such a cool vigilante-esque type of dark hero story in a Batman sort of way that I personally find rather intriguing. And it doesn't seem to matter what my mood has been all day, every time I push play, the game wipes me clean and gets me in such a good mood. Possibly the greatest point to the game is the unique first person/third person shooter feel to it. It requires much more stealth than any other sort of action or shooting game I've ever played. Walking to fast or loud will alert a soldier, who in turn calls his cronies, and that complicates the game a wee bit. Most of the ones I'm used to require little more than walking into crowded rooms with some absurdly large gun and mowing them all down, so the change of pace certainly is nice.
As much as I love the gameplay, and as good a mood as it gets me in, the confusing story line is a huge turn off. All the characters are really dark and strange, and I really want to know a bit about them, but I can't do that without having played previous editions or making a Wikipedia search. The same goes for the storyline, but I have only a vague idea of what Metal Gear is and what Solid Snake actually does, or why he does it. The game should come with some sort of a guide that catches all those unfamiliar with the series up to date, but it doesn't, and it makes me sad all day. Aside from the confusing plot, the only other thing that threw me off a little bit was that there is no multiplayer, and watching it is only so fun for so long. I prefer playing socially, and that just didn't work with the game. Overall though, I really like this game.
One hour of playing later...
GAMEPLAY
One hour later, the game is still really fun to play. It gets me in a nice, euphoric, escapist mood, and the shooter setup is still really stealthy and cool. This time around, though, I have progressed to a new level and the next character that comes with it. This time, I am Raiden, I work with an organization called FOXHOUND, and I am rescuing the president from a terrorist organization, who is currently holding the president on an ocean clean up facility (I think). The game plays really easily and requires minimal thought, which can be nice, as it flows very directly and succinctly. I could play this game as long as the story keeps progressing, as it is very fun.
Alas, though, the story and characters put me off, only because I do not and cannot know anything about them. Raiden's girlfriend is somehow involved in the mission, they keep calling Raiden snake, and I'm not entirely sure what is going on at all times. I mean I know what to do, I just don't know how I got there or why it's all happening, if that makes sense. If that wasn't the case, I think this might be the ultimate game for me personally, as everything else from the graphics to the control set-up is spot on. Definitely some of the best gameplay I've ever experienced.
DESIGN
Whoever designed this game has really good ideas as far as games go. Players are kept occupied with different types of tasks that range from stealthy snooping to bomb location and diffusion to shoot outs and all back again. It all goes down in innovative, complex levels that don't occur in too many other games, which is nice, as the levels also help to set a really dark mood through the use of shadow and darker earth-toned hues to match the dark story line and secretive, edgy characters. The game keeps the player in constant conflict with all the tasks and the confusing story and the hints of serious confusion within Raiden, as bits of this nefarious scheme and his relationship with his girlfriend are all unraveled and complicated though a series of events. And all of this is guided by the semi-occasional cut scene, that unfortunately usually leaves me more confused than confident with what I was doing.
Like I keep saying, all I would change about MGS2 is the unnecessarily tied up story and the lack of any socially redeeming qualities to the game. It would be so unbelievably cool to have a little one on one fight to the death between you and your buddy as Raiden and Solid Snake on a grungy oil tanker filled with hostile Marines. It would be even cooler to know what I was doing, but thems the breaks. I can only assume that the story will keep getting really quirky until at some point it all becomes clear through some crazy event and then all will be spanky. The fast pace and mini puzzle things are really fun, and completing them is very rewarding. All in all, there are many more hours of playability in this awesome game, and I hope to enjoy that at some point soon. Go buy this game.
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