Quick Look: p0nd

Being the dirty dirty hipster that I am, nothing really makes me happy like a good ol' super pretentious art game! P0nd (that is a zero in there) is a simple quick experience that really made me think about game design. The game offers a very simple one button mechanic in order to make the character breathe in and out. I would say more about the game but I really think that would ruin the experience! Play p0nd over here

Outland: First Impressions

Outland is owned by Ubisoft and developed by Housemarque

Outland is a really cool concept for a game. The premise is to take the color switching damage absorbing mechanic made popular in Ikaruga, and making a 2D platforming game. From what I have played so far though it surprisingly plays less like most plaforming games and more like Legend of Zelda. The overworld is large and certain areas can only be accessed by unlocking additional powerups. Exploration is done by visiting special zones in the overworld that lead to specific powerups and bosses. Combat also takes on a very Zelda-esque feel. The only way to hurt enemies is to be the opposite color of them (but they can still hurt you) and exploit whatever weaknesses they have. It is all very reminiscent of combat in the Zelda games, whether that is a good thing or not I will let you decide.

Puzzles also use an interesting mechanic. Occasionally I came across a large area where the camera pans out to reveal a pattern of bullets being constantly shot in a certain rhythm, much like in the picture above. I quickly learned this was done to promote quick calculated runthroughs of puzzle areas, as opposed to careful slow navigation. This concept really works for the game and helps create an awesome sense of movement when I correctly survived a dangerous area.

I am a huge fan of the art style too. I absolutely love the vibrant tribal feel of the game. Enemies all have unique designs that fit in perfectly with the rest of the world and really help to make the game alive.

Another quick thing that I adore about this game is a small added mechanic. If you are full on health, you can destroy health pickups to get more money. It sounds like a simple idea at first but I often found myself staring at a heart wondering if I REALLY needed it for the next section. Hats off to whoever thought that up.

So far I am really enjoying Outland. I give it a solid recommendation.

Quick Look: Rayhound

Just thought I would post an interesting little free game here. Rayhound is a unique little shooter arcade game in which your ship does not actually have any guns. To play, one must redirect enemy attacks back at them with the help of a gravity field. It is simple, fun, and a great time waster. Great looking graphics too. get Rayhound here

Catherine Review

Catherine is owned by Atlus

I debated whether or not to review Catherine because it got a lot of coverage due to its sheer strangeness in combination with being developed by the Persona team. The game also sold very well considering what it is. Despite this, I feel obligated to touch on it due to its sheer uniqueness.

Catherine is a puzzle game about adult relationships. If that doesn't seem like the kind of thing you would like to play turn back now, it only gets worse from here. I should also mention that when I say adult relationships I mean marriage and commitment and maturity, not sex (though there is a healthy amount of that too). Still here? Good. Lets get into the nitty gritty.

Catherine stars Vincent, a typical average Joe in a steady relationship with his high school sweetheart Katherine (with a K). Katherine is pressuring Vincent to tie the knot, while Vincent is unsure due to a mix of fear and resistance to change. While getting drunk at the bar with his friends he runs into a girl named Catherine (with a C) who he has a drunken affair with. Meanwhile a string of mysterious deaths has afflicted the town, and Vincent starts having strange dreams, which is where the real gameplay comes in.

Most of the game takes place in Vincent's dreams, which consists of a block pushing puzzle. The rest of the game takes place in both the bar Vincent frequents, and lengthy cutscenes that change depending on Vincent's decisions in the rest of the game.

The block pushing part of the game is very entertaining and surprising deep. Solutions for the various puzzles are numerous and require serious noggin use to figure out. Some of these puzzles get agonizingly frustrating (I almost threw my controller during the clocktower stage) and take a lot of fun out the game. Sometimes I wish I could have just skipped the dream segments and seen the rest of the story. When a player wants to skip the actual game to watch a cutscene it doesn't exactly scream praise for the design of the game.

The bar bits of the game are a nice break up of the more intense block climbing segments. Vincent can talk to his fellow alcoholics and learn about their problems. Turns out a lot of them are having the same strange dreams as Vincent, I wonder why. Who Vincent talks to can change a good portion of the story, as many side tales are hidden with other characters. Another delightful side point to the bar is the random alcohol trivia that is given out whenever Vincent finishes a drink. These quickly became my favorite part of the bar scenes.

The story of Catherine is somewhat disorderly. Towards the beginning it tries to be a horror game, but it sort of fails due to the repetition of the levels. The story then focuses very heavily on Vincent's relationship to K/Catherine. After a while this focus gets downright tedious. Then, the story makes a 180 degree turn and pulls all sorts of strange stuff out of its ass. It leaves off being one of the strangest endings I've ever seen; not really satisfying, just strange.

Surprisingly, this isn't the strangest thing the game has to offer

Catherine in whole is a unique experience. Giving it an adjective like "great" doesn't really make a lot of sense in this case. If this is something that sounds appealing, check it out. Otherwise, steer clear. Don't worry, I won't think any less of you.

Backlog Spotlight: Iji

One of the most badass pieces of Iji fanart (by kardiyak at Deviantart). Iji is copyrighted Remar Games.

Instead of doing a regular old review, I am just going to cut right to the chase here. Iji (pronounced E-JEE) is a fantastic game. I would even say that Iji is one of the best free games I have ever played. Everything this game does it does right. When I think of a 'perfect' game, this is one of the titles that comes to mind.

Iji is a platformer done in the Metroidvania (warning, this link leads to tvtropes, do not click it if you value free time) style. There are RPG elements, with an extremely customizable character. Anything is possible to do and different character builds can lead to a completely different experience. Want to blast alien's faces off with high powered space missiles? Check. How about just forgetting about all those silly guns and kicking people in the face berserker style? Oh yeah. A stealth expert manipulating the environment and enemies to stumble blindly while you sneak past? Roger.

Despite the fantastic gameplay what really establishes Iji as an amazing game opposed to a great game is the plot. Iji stars... well Iji; a twenty year old girl who visits her fathers lab. She sees a strange light in the sky and next thing she knows it is six months later, aliens have taken over the facility, everyone in her family is dead except her brother, and her fathers fellow scientists have turned her into a solider using stolen alien nanotechnology. That is just the first five minutes. It is also what turns out in the long run to be the weakest part of the story, and brings me to my one major complaint with the game. The whole supersolider-against-an-army thing is really played out in video games. Iji does little to hide this flaw, and just pushes it on the player before moving on to the meat of the plot. Without spoiling anything deals with tragedy, coping, the meaning of humanity, and race relations. Heavy stuff in the long run, which is why it is such a shame that the story starts out so weak.

Iji also looks great. The style of the game is similar to the 1991 adventure game Out of This World (Another World in the USA). Where the graphics differ is where that game focused on a simplistic style to accent depth and scale, Iji focuses on movement and color difference. There are lots of cool little things in the world of Iji that come together to make a great looking game. Iji also has a love for explosions approaching Micheal Bay levels.

ka-BOOMFOSHWOSH

The final strong point that Iji has is the absolutely stupid amount of collectibles in the game. Every single corridor is packed with stuff to unlock. Combined with multiple endings depending on how one plays the game, Iji has an almost endless amount of things to do, shooting its replay value through the roof. One of the more interesting options is a pacifist runthrough. A strange option that some games contain but do not work into the story. Iji is different, pacifism is not only an option but recommended. I would go so far to say that pacifism is the most rewarding way to play Iji.

Iji really is a game that deserves to be played. I can't think of a single person that I would not recommend this game to. It really is just that good.

Capsized Review

Capsized is owned by Alientrap games

A good part of my childhood was spent playing flash games, both bad and good. Most of my early video game experience comes from them. I haven't played a flash game in years but I was very surprised to find out that I paid money for the equivalent of one.

Capsized was created by Alientrap games and is currently being sold on Steam. An Xbox release is in the works. Capsized originally caught my attention due to a Steam sale a while back. The games trailer boasted an exploration heavy game with intense combat and beautiful hand drawn graphics. Being a complete sucker for awesome platforming I immediately purchased it. Needless to say I was not impressed.

The main problem with Capsized is the controls. The game doesn't necessarily control badly; it is just that nothing feels right. Moving, jumping and grappling all feel imprecise and floaty. Jumping is too slow to give any tension to the situation and grappling just never functions how it should. The game is not exploration based but mission based, which wouldn't be a crime if the missions weren't so dull. The game does little to engage in the plot, which is mostly told through out of gameplay still images.

Another major problem is the combat, which also suffers from a drastic case of imprecision. Shooting a volley of bullets felt great until I realized only about half of my shots hit, and did little to defer my target. Bigger weapon suffer a different problem, none of them feel satisfying to shoot or do major damage. This combination makes combat frustrating and unrewarding.

The world in general is lifeless. This is a huge problem for a game that focuses on exploring an alien planet. The local wildlife all just seemed just out to get me. Monsters wait offscreen until I get close enough to charge. Others will explode out of nowhere for the single purpose of killing me. The single strategy the evil aliens seem to know is charging forward and shooting, with no respect to any obstacle that might stand in their way, like walls. It leads to a game world that feels specifically designed to kill the player, which is something that shouldn't fly in today's gaming.

The one compliment that I will give Capsized is that the game does look nice. The hand drawn aspect really shines through and makes a very pretty game. Everything else is crap though. Wouldn't recommend.

Trenched Review

Owned by Double Fine and Microsoft

I have the biggest man crush on Tim Schafer. The guy is designing genius, and I have yet to play a game by him that I didn't like (despite my complete lack of ability at adventure games). He is also one of the only people that knows how to make a genuinely funny game without sacrificing all other aspects of gameplay.  Schafer's newest project, titled Trenched (or Iron Brigade apparently), keeps the high standard of Schafer quality.
Trenched is, at its core, a tower defense game with WWI giant robot mechs. Just the thought alone of paying for a tower defense game really turned me off to it. Why should I pay 15 dollars for a game that I can play on flash for free? Trenched solves this problem by offering many different ways to play the game in the form of different chassis. There are "engineering chassis" which focus on laying down as many towers as possible, allowing the player to sit in the back and watch the action like a pansy. For men, there are "assault chassis" which focus on bringing HUGE GUNS that shoot EXPLOSIONS!  Friends don't let friends use engineering chassis.

Using a gun smaller than this means you still wet your bed at night

The plot of Trenched revolves around two main characters, neither of which is playable. Both characters were fighting on the same side in an unnamed war, one an apple pie inhaling American family man, and the other a dirty communist. One day they were touched by a strange alien force that gave both of them incredible intelligence. The communist, being evil and all, created a race of television creatures to take over the world called the "broadcast" (continuing Schafer's ironic hated of television). The american created giant mechs to fight them. The player is a random solider fighting in one of these mechs.

Honestly as far as Schafer goes, the story is pretty weak. It doesn't have the depth to it that Psychonauts or Grim Fandango brings; it is also lacking in the comedy department when faced with his previous works. There are some great one liners and subtle jokes, but none of it is as memorable as the off the wall humor in Psychonauts or Brutal Legend. The best humor is found in the subtitles that barrage the screen 60's batman style, unfortunately  reading them all is a challenge, so most of it falls on deaf ears. As a whole the entire game felt dialogue-light, humorous or otherwise. Many times I was just wondering why there wasn't more noise, some levels even felt eerily silent.

The good news is that the gameplay WORKS. Big guns are fun to shoot and each level offers a unique challenge that forces one to think on their feet.  There are tons of different bad guys each with different abilities that may not devastate on their own, are cruel with certain other enemies.  There is a ton of cool stuff to unlock and play around with. The bosses are challenging and go far beyond the ol' shoot-him-in-the-glowy-bit mentality that dominates modern gaming.

Trenched is a overall a "good" game. It is not a classic like some of Schafer's other works, but it certainly is worth its price tag. Fans of Schafer or giant robots really can't go wrong with this one.