Game Update

[davidn]

I haven't done one of these in a while... our usual linear queue of games has diversified recently, but this is a brief summary of what we've been playing. (At least, it was meant to be. My posts never seem to go very well in that regard.)

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

Has become the second game that we've returned to Gamefly without getting to the end. It wasn't a bad game, exactly, because the gameplay was still much the same, but the stylistic "darker" choice (a term that was overdone a couple of years ago in a way absolutely exemplified by the content of this game) was very off-putting. On reflection, the plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense - a monster called the Dahaka has begun to pursue the Prince to repair the timeline because of him messing with the Sands of Time and causing a paradox, so he sails off to the Island of Time to destroy the Sands of Time so that the paradox couldn't happen, an event which creates another paradox which... was never really touched on. I don't think he had really thought the whole thing through.

Unfortunately my initial praise of the fights having been shortened from the first game was premature, and towards the end I found myself bravely running away from yet more hordes of repeated badly acted sound file-spewing jesters rather than bothering to fight them. And I found myself lost quite a lot, because they decided to make the game less linear, and often you don't really have a clear idea of where you're going next or whether you should be going back to somewhere you've already visited.

Anyway, after listening to Prince Tosser wangsting about being the architect of his own destruction for most of the last half of the game you don't really care whether the Dahaka eats him or not, and the final boss was just a cruelty that I didn't feel like suffering after a few goes at it. It involves rolling around in close quarters for positively ages and occasionally daring to swipe a little off her screen-wide health bar, only for her to inevitably use her powers to slow down time and batter you instantly. So defiantly I decided I wasn't having any of it and watched both endings on Youtube instead.

I was later informed, though, that the game has numerous health upgrades throughout and that I had somehow missed every single one of them. In retrospect, those might have helped a bit.

Portal

Yes, I hadn't played this before (but I feel that I have, because the amount of time I've spent reading regurgitated memes from it must surely be longer than the entire game combined by now). And when dr_dos mentioned in one of his updates that it was $5 over Christmas from Steam, I leapt at the chance to finally have a go at it myself. I only got the chance to download it once we got home from California, so we're about seventeen rooms through the nineteen-room initial course, and just at the point where the sterility of it begins to break down and cracks (literally) begin showing through, hinting at a much deeper wrongness behind the facade of the mysterious training course that you've inexplicably woken up in.

Most of the game's character comes from the rather wonderfully stylized GLADOS computer, who talks to you constantly in an unsettling not-quite-human, not-quite-BBC-Micro voice, starting off by offering helpful advice but decaying fairly quickly into insanity and a mysterious obsession with cake. After watching you hop about over Crystal Maze-style obstacle rooms for a while, the challenges get more deadly and introduce little Apple-esque gun turrets which soothingly ask "aRe YoU sTiLl tHeRe?" (alternate-case being truly the only way to represent their voices in text) while sweeping their lasers around to try and detect you. They're truly the stuff of nightmares.

Mother 3

I'm fairly near the end of this now, or at least I assume I am because of who I'm fighting. "Quirky" doesn't even begin to describe this game, and it has an odd dual mood to it that's bright and cheery on the outside, but underneath has this desperately sad element to it. Major characters are killed off about as often as in Farthing Wood, and a running theme in the game is the idea of technological progress taking the soul out of things - the setting changes to three years after a series of deaths halfway through the game, leaving you to feel almost nostalgic for how things used to be, and then everyone gradually begins moving out of the central town later on - and if you talk to them, they've no idea why they're doing it or how it's going to make their lives better.

Like I mentioned, though, this is offset by the sheer madness that the game sometimes throws at you. After an underwater scene where the handily-positioned "oxygen machines" show a huge disparity between how they're described and what they are (seeing as they're very Freddie Mercury-looking mermen) is strange enough, but directly after this you're washed ashore and are forced to eat some suspiciously rainbow-coloured mushrooms to survive, launching you into a Daliesque nightmare in a forest of talking postboxes and snoozing umbrellas. While you're in this state, all monsters appear on the map as characters you've met through the game, and in battles as one-eyed insane smiles. If Nintendo had handled the translation they would never have allowed it!

The cleverest part is when you eventually take a signposted path to a hot spring that restores your health, and mysteriously your dog whines and stays outside when you swim in it. It had me checking through the menus to see if there was something wrong with him, but after eventually being cured, you can go back to this area and find out that the hot spring is actually a little further down the path and you've instead been swimming in a rubbish dump.

I was relieved, though, to find that the man in a white sailor suit that I had walked past while under the effects of the mushrooms was in fact a giant pink octopus with a hat on and "TAXI" written on its back.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

This was the first game that Whitney and I went through on the DS, and like Mother 3 above, it has a uniquely stylized charm to it (the art style being very Miyazaki-Japanese, the voices being very British and the setting being very French). It's an adventure game at heart, but most of the game involves you guiding Professor Layton, who looks like Mr Benn, and his assistant Luke, who has the haircut of Heihachi Mishima during his school days, around a village and talking to people who all ask you to do their maths homework. Progress in the game is largely done by talking to the right people and solving these miniature puzzles, which can be anything from answering trick number or word games to doing infuriating sliding puzzles.

It has to be said that it's strange that in such a mystery-based game, the main mystery storyline is played out largely without player interaction, from finding treasure to solving a murder to climbing the black towaaaaaahhh at the back of the village, while you just concern yourself with finding smaller puzzles to distract yourself while your characters do the real work. And the revelation at the end of the game is... it's child-friendly but I found the whole idea really tragic, somehow.

But it's nice as a sort of interactive version of any paper puzzle book, because of the way that you can instantly experiment, pull things around in the puzzle before you, and most importantly, don't have to go and find any matchsticks to try things out. It does a good job of extending itself with puzzles that unlock sub-games, as well as a weekly downloadable puzzle that seems to have lasted for half a year before they ran out of ideas, but despite a couple of sticking points we found it very easy in general, and finished every puzzle in the game with exactly 100 hint coins still remaining (as it had warned us to save them up before). Too many puzzle books when I was younger, perhaps?

Comments

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

On the subject of games, I thought you might appreciate this little webcomic about Animal Crossing (http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/6880291.html).

Caveat: It makes me cry every time.

[davidn]

Wow, that's... quite something. And very creepy, to suddenly find gifts from beyond the grave... I've never played Animal Crossing, but I have a vague idea of what it's about, and the idea that your environment will gradually decay if you're not there to care for it is quite sad in itself.

Also, thanks for your in-depth overanalysis, most of the rest of scans_daily.