What i’m Playing
In lieu of any big launch announcements or new Pimp My Game posts, i thought i’d write a few capsule reviews for the games i’m playing right now.
Rock Band 2
Essentially, this game is more of the same … but that’d just fine with me, when the original game was so strong. i mean, let’s take the example of Nutella® chocolate hazelnut spread on a baguette slice. i really, really enjoy eating Nutella® chocolacte hazelnut spread on a baguette slice, so if someone were to offer me another Nutella® chocolate hazelnut spread on a baguette slice, i would happily oblige.
i prefer the first game’s soundtrack to its sequel’s, but for a cool five dollars you can port all of your disc 1 games to the Rock Band 2 experience. Those songs, coupled with any downloaded songs from your collection, make for a massively gigantic whopping blob of rock. We salute you.
The big difference for me, being a friendless loner, is that i can play the campaign mode by myself. i missed out on a lot of the first game because i could never lure the same three people to my house to play for any appreciable amount of time. As a result, i think i’ve played “Say it Ain’t So” and “Maps”, among the game’s first-tier songs, more than the bands who actually wrote them.
What i really appreciate about Harmonix’s efforts, which are drawn in stark contrast to Activision’s non-canonical Guitar Hero franchise the longer they have it, is that Harmonix has made good on its “campaign promises”. They said that Rock Band would be a music platform, and they delivered. They promised weekly downloadable content. Lo and behold, every week, whether i enjoy the music or not, they delivered. Meanwhile, on the other front, we’re awaiting the ninth Guitar Hero game, Guitar Hero: Captain & Tenille, which contains the full 15-minute version of Muskrat Love.
Hey lady – don’t ruffle the ‘stache
Castle Crashers
i know, i know. i bad-mouthed this game after i saw it at X08. But a week later, i went in to get my bike fixed, and the guy in the shop started going on and on about it – how you can collect animal orbs with little pets that give you combat bonuses, and about how your weapons storehouse is inside a giant antlered frog, and how there are all sorts of hidden things you can find by bombing the walls, like in Zelda, and …
Sshhh. Stop, stop. You had me at “animal orbs”.
i actually ended up buying two copies – one for home and one for the office. i like that i can play the game with my wife and that it requires very little skill – two ingredients for keeping a marriage together. i also find it very inspiring that a 2D game can hold players’ attentions and earn a big stinkload of monays for its creators. Finally, i am happy that the game makes me kill a bunch of ninjas to earn enough money to buy a pet monkey. Top marks.
Braid
A testament to what you can do with one man, a computer, and a creative writing course from the Learning Annex, Braid is a puzzle platformer where you can reverse time to pull off some amazing brain-bending trickery. Some of the puzzles in the game were wonderfully challenging, but on the whole, Braid was too short. When you reach the end, you can complete a few above-and-beyond tasks to unlock some further snippets of the story, displayed in text fields on the screen. But after reading a few of these tediously-worded blurbs, i would have taken my character to Hell and back to avoid reading any more of them.
Our world, with its rules of causality, has trained us to be miserly with forgiveness. By forgiving too readily, we can be badly hurt. But if we’ve learned from a mistake and become better for it, shouldn’t we be rewarded for the learning, rather than punished for the mistake?
***
Tim needed to be non-manipulable. He needed a hope of transcendence. He needed, sometimes, to be immune to the Princess’s caring touch.
***
But the ring makes its presence known. It shines out to others like a beacon of warning. It makes people slow to approach. Suspicion, distrust. Interactions are torpedoed before Tim can open his mouth.
Good gracious gravy, that’s some gawd-awful writing. Quick – where’s the “stab out my eyeballs” button on the Xbox controller?
Touch Detective
This is an older game that i threw into my DS for toilet time in the hopes of spicing up my bowel movements. The previous spot was filled by Etrian Oddyseey II, which was becoming too monotonous to bear (much like sitting on the toilet).
Touch Detective, about orphaned little girls in boarding houses who solve supernatural mysteries, is a lesson in how not to design a graphic adventure game. The cardinal sin being committed here is dropping the thread. You’ll be on a roll questioning people and gathering clues before the game just comes to a grinding halt, with no indication of where you should go or who you should speak to next.
What’s worse, your progress is not broken down into smaller problems with clear goals. You’ll get one big goal, like “solve the mystery”, and beyond that, you’re on your own. Too often, the game doesn’t explain what you’re trying to accomplish, and you’re left to wander around town randomly using objects on other objects until something (dumb) happens.
The review scores for the game were middling, but i decided to take a chance on it anyway. i’m a huge fan of graphic adventure games, and i figured that the reviewers were probably just disappointed in the lack of exploding zombies or heavy weaponry. But now i see the light: Touch Detective is abysmal, and i can’t wait to find a replacement for it.
What are YOU playing? Anything good? Please let me know – i’d much rather die with a good game in my DS and the pixels of a solid entertainment experience burned into my bloodshot retinas.
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