Ajuste de Wii

“Que es obeso!” la voz gojea feliz. La voz, perteneciendo a anthropomorphized la báscula de baño, es mi Némesis. Es Ajuste de Wii, y diario me dice que sea gordo (o, después de una noche que bebe demasiados margaritas, obeso). Lea más

Kudos: Leyenda de la roca

Era el año pasado justo que repasamos Estrella de levantamiento de O sombrío' Grady, un juego listo del sim de la construir-su-propio-roca-venda. Pensé que encantaba, si un pedacito áspero-afiló ocasionalmente. Ahora un segundo juego en el género ha cruzado mi trayectoria: Kudos: Leyenda de la roca. Lea más

Automóvil magnífico IV del hurto

I really wanted to hate Grand Theft Auto IV.

I had decided not to buy it early in its hype-cycle. “Fool me twice, shame on me” was my attitude. I had bought Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City because of the glowing reviews from just about everyone, but I found them tiresome, sophomoric, morally bankrupt and — worst of all — not much fun to play. I fully expected GTA IV to be more of the same. When our Editor-in-Chief informed me he was sending it my way, I prepared for the worst.

The worst didn’t happen. I don’t hate this game, even though it has things about it — many things — that are hateful. It is, in some ways, like two separate games sandwiched onto a single disc. One of those games is the sophomoric, hard to control, ponderous and boring festival of reloaded missions that I remembered from previous editions. But the other game is a brilliantly scripted, lovingly realized analysis of the American dream in general, and New York City in particular.

The writing, dialogue, and acting in this game are beyond superb. That in itself makes the game impossible to hate. That the writers so effectively persuade players to sympathize with the characters, including the player’s sociopathic Eastern European avatar, speaks volumes. And the most important character, of course, is New York City itself. No one who has spent any time in Brooklyn, Queens, or Manhattan can fail to be stunned at how effectively Rockstar has distilled these boroughs to their essences: making them navigable in reasonable game time, while still preserving their character.

Little, it should be noted, has changed about the core gameplay, and when you drift away from the script, the game deadens and ossifies. The sensitivity and subtle humor of the spoken-word aspects of the game only serve to widen the chasm between the script’s high quality and the visual game’s penis-joke mentality. Apart from the missions, there is precious little to do in Liberty City if you aren’t interested in mayhem or exploitation.

The save system, as in previous games, is ponderous. A mistake late in a mission can force you to replay it from the beginning, including the pointless and boring drive from your house to where the action is. It’s as if the game is begging you to stop playing it and find something more fun to do, such as playing Mario Kart.

GTA IV is a seriously flawed game with a split-personality. The sandbox portion of the game presents a false choice between being bored or engaging in brutality. The game’s setting and screenwriting, however, contain moments of great insight and beauty. If you can accept the moral ambiguity of choosing to play a game that presents murder as inevitable and acceptable, then you will find parts of GTA IV to be entrancing.

I don’t hate GTA IV. But I still don’t want anyone to watch me play it.

On the Rain-Slick Precepice of Darkness

If you’re a fan of Penny Arcade (and who isn’t?) you’ll buy this game no matter what I say about it, so I’ll keep this short and to the point: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is $20 well-spent. It plays as a sort of mixture between the Telltale adventure games and a less pretentious Final Fantasy game with characters that aren’t big-haired, androgynous, and pouty. The user interface can be a bit hit-or-miss but the game makes up for it by being extremely forgiving.

The plot opens with the protagonist’s house being destroyed by a gigantic robot whose purpose in life is to sexually molest fruit. You give chase, and soon encounter a large number of smaller robots (keep some oranges handy to distract them!), mimes, hobos, and other assorted enemies. You’ll also become an associate of the alter-egos of the creators of Penny Arcade, Tycho and Gabe. With some assistance from Tycho’s girl-genius niece, Anne-Claire, you’ll upgrade your weapons, find clues, and uncover new areas in which to go forth and issue beatings.

It’s a short game, but in this case I think that’s a vice, and not a virtue. The writing, riddled with in-jokes, is merely serviceable, but the art direction and animation are superb. At its best, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness comes close to giving you the feeling of being in a Penny Arcade comic strip. God help us all.

Endless Ocean

I have been known to be obnoxiously dismissive of “sandbox games”.  “GTA III isn’t really a game,” I’d sniff over a glass of port and a bit of Stilton, “but more of a toy.”  It’s thus with some embarrassment that I admit that Endless Ocean has me hooked.  It’s a toy, but what a toy.

Endless Ocean is a scuba diving simulator. The purpose of the game is to swim around underwater, look at pretty things, and occasionally interact with different types of marine life.  That’s it.  There is no shooting, no danger (the sharks in this sea won’t eat you), and no sense of urgency whatsoever. The only plot is various assignments, such as to escort a wealthy donor on a dive, pointing out their favorite fish to them. 

The game is structured in such a way that information opens up to you through experimentation and exploration.  You interact with animals in various ways (poking them, feeding them, writing in front of them with an “underwater pen”, and so on), and if you reach a certain level of interaction you earn an entry in the encyclopedia for that creature.

Some of the most intriguing experiences were the underwater caves. In a game where there is no way to fail, these beautifully created and realized caves still managed to introduce both grandeur and drama through natural splendour.  Douglas Adams describing Fjordland, New Zealand once wrote “one’s first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.”  That’s the best way I can describe some of the sights I’ve seen in Endless Ocean. You can dive day and night, and the seasons vary offering subtly different experiences.

There are minigames going on all about you, but they are not intrusive and are easily ignored.  The music is soothing, lyrical,  apropriate, and reason enough to lazily explore the sea-floor.

You have a variety of tools to bring with you on dives.  The whistle can be used to summon any friendly sea creatures such as a dolphin. The camera is used to take photos for certain missions  or simply to add detail to your scrapbook.

There are also a number of “off-screen” locations that you can unlock through the course of the game.  For example, a local aquarium may ask you to stock one of their tanks; you decide what sort of marine life should live in the aquarium.  As in most of Endless Ocean, there is no particular reward or reason for this beyond pure esthetics.  And that’s just fine.

Some might pick nits about the accuracy of the game.  There is the aforementioned lack of danger.  There is the setting, a fictional sea which conveniently has flora and fauna from every ocean in the world.  There is the ease with which complicated diving manuevers can be performed.  But these complaints fundamentally miss the point.  Endless Ocean is a simple world meant to evoke wonder and joy simply by existing, and by being interesting and beautiful.  And that’s more than enough to make me happy.

Professor Layton

I recently tried to explain to a friend about the fox, chicken and the worm.

“It’s a classic puzzle.  You’ve got a fox, a chicken, and a worm on one side of a river.  You can only carry two of them on a boat. If you leave the fox alone with the chicken, it will eat it, and if you leave the chicken alone with the worm, it will eat it.  How can you get all three of them across the river safely?”

My friend, having never played Zork Zero, looked at me as though I were mad.  But now I have my revenge, for I have introduced him to Professor Layton and the Curious Village, which has a variant of this puzzle, and he is completely addicted.

Puzzle games have been a bit outré in the past few years since the PC community recovered from the excesses of the early CD-ROM years.  Perhaps it was a lingering sense of guilt over wasted hours spent playing The 7th Guest.  The typical puzzle in today’s games tends to be a sideshow to the main event and boring to boot.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is all about good puzzles, what are sometimes called “brainteasers”.  Some of them are straightforward, some of them are trick puzzles.  Some are easy, some are hard.  But nearly all of them are interesting, and they don’t talk down to the player.

The eponymous Professor Layton and his apprentice, Luke, visit the village of St. Mystere to assist in a mysterious bequest.  The villagers of St. Mystere spend their days, and nights, trying to solve puzzles.  As Layton unravels the thread of the game’s plot he will also be presented with well over 100 puzzles, of varied difficulties, by the villagers.

The artwork is beautiful: simple lines, and somehow evocative of the animated film The Triplets of Belleville.  The music, likewise, evokes the French countryside, and if it can get a bit repetitive at times, it still enhances the experience.  That being said, I’m a sucker for accordion music.   Your mileage may vary. The inhabitants of the village are by turns awkward, fat, ugly, grotesque-looking, and supercilious, so it looks to me as though the authors actually did carefully survey the inhabitants of small French villages before creating the game.  

Throughout the game you’ll find “hint coins” which can be used to purchase hints on any puzzles.  You’ll also receive different puzzles from the same villagers.  At the end of a given “chapter” of the game, any unsolved puzzles will appear in “Granny Riddleton’s Puzzle Shack”, so there is no way to  permanently miss a puzzle.  It did seem to me that solving a puzzle in Granny’s shack was less satisfying than solving it “on the street,” but that’s entirely a question of mood.

There are also various meta-puzzles along the way that unlock bonus content, and there is extra downloadable content that can be played without impacting the main storyline of the game.

A sequel has already been released in Japan, and work is proceeding on the third game, which I will buy without a second thought.  It’s that good.

Bus Driver [Indiescene]

All racing games are, ultimately, the same. Drive a route quickly. There are no surprises and very little originality, and then there’s Bus Driver, 

More akin to a flight simulator than a racing game, Bus Driver sees you driving a bus across a nicely detailed city, picking up and dropping off passengers.  When I first began playing it I cried aloud: “It’s Crazy Taxi on a bus!”  That comparison is only partly apt.  You do indeed pick up and drop off fares, but the similarities end there.  The game is divided into “missions” where you run a certain route in predetermined weather conditions (you don’t know stress until you’ve driven a bus in heavy snow.)  Bus Driver doesn’t have the spontaneity and mayhem of Crazy Taxi. It does, however, have game-play elements that you won’t find elsewhere.

First, you are driving a bus, and it feels right.  It handles like a bus.  It’s a slow, lumbering pig.  It has a huge amount of momentum, and takes a long time to get up to speed, to stop, and has a huge turning radius.  If nothing else, the game may increase your sympathy for city bus drivers.  Second, the game is a bit like an egg race.  By this I mean that if you stomp on the brakes too quickly, your passengers will become upset, and you’ll lose points.  Stomping on the brakes when no one is in the bus results in no penalty, but those situations are few and far between.

You also gain (or lose) points for obeying (or breaking) traffic laws.  Use a turn signal before changing lanes, get 10 points; randomly change lanes without signaling, lose 100.  Similar rules apply for stopping at (or running) red lights.  Collisions result in a hefty penalty.  

You drive through a fictional European city with varied environments as well as varied weather conditions.  Traffic is a constant hazard, and the clock will constantly tick away the seconds, reminding you of your inadequacies as a driver.  The controls are keyboard-based. I eventually settled on using my left hand to steer and my right hand to control the turn signals, flashers, and doors.  One annoyance is that there’s no mouse control even on the menu screens.

There are a few missed opportunities here.  It seems to me that one of the most interesting aspects of being a bus driver isn’t just the driving, but interacting with the passengers.  It would have been amusing for the customers to have a little more color — “Uh oh, here’s that group of drunk Danish football fans again.”  But this is a nitpick.  The game makes no excuses for being purely about driving, so I can’t be too upset about that. The lack of a tutorial gave me about 1 minute of angst when I first started playing, which is 1 minute too much.

Bus Driver is a charming game, strangely paced, almost languid, but I enjoyed its attention to detail and approachable controls. It’s rare that a driving game is able to surprise me in any way, and Bus Driver surprised me in several.  If you enjoy simulators, you should give it a look.  A demo is available at the publisher’s web site.

Galaga [Retrograde]

It’s the classic arcade game that no one thinks of, yet everyone’s played. It’s also a sequel that was infinitely better than its predecessor.  It’s name:  Galaga.  

It’s easy to forget just how successful Space Invaders was.  In 1978, it was the game that you would pump quarters into endlessly until you were forced to come home.  Namco released Galaxian the following year as competition.  Analytically, you could say that Galaxian was better than Space Invaders in every way.  In color, with richer sounds, it had more motion and pizazz.  Yet, take my word for it,  Galaxian was always somehow low rent.  It was what you played only if there was no other machine available.

Galaga changed all that.  

If there’s a single word that summarizes Galaga, it’s “polish.” Everything has been honed, refined, and subtly improved.  The view is tighter, increasing tension.  Enemy ships fly into formation at the beginning of each round, rather than simply appearing.  One of the keystones of playing well is learning to pick off enemies before they form up.  Also there’s the capture mechanic:  the player’s ship can be captured by one of the ‘boss’ enemies, then if the boss is later destroyed, the captured ship “docs” with your new ship, providing you with double the firepower but twice the target area.  (I personally always found that docking made my game shorter and more brutal, but I always went for it anyway.)

Perhaps the greatest addition to the game is the idea of the “challenge stage”, which mixes up gameplay by providing you with a comparatively non-dangerous stage on which you are able to focus more on score than on survival.  Remembering the first time I got a perfect score on a challenge stage still gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling.  Having the “doubled ship” helps increase your score on the challenge stages significantly.

The success of Galaga ensured the survival of a Namco tradition of creating sequals.  As a contrarian, I actually prefer the sort-of-but-not-really sequel Bosconian, a game which transported the Galaga fighter into a war zone where its goal was to destroy space stations. The “official” sequel, Gaplus, never appealed to me (nor, if my surveys are accurate, to anyone else.)  Galaga, in the end is all about polish and balance.  The failure of similar games to prove similarly addictive demonstrates how razor-thin the edge of greatness is.

Despite being a game with no plot and no characters, people get surprisingly emotional about Galaga.  This is the ultimate proof that art is only partially about subject matter.  It is also about craft.  Galaga is not remembered for what it was, but for having been a well-crafted example of what it was.  The next time you stand in a store and deliberate over which of the HD-laden, fully 3D, online multiplayer extravanzas you want, ask yourself this question:  “Will it be as much fun as Galaga?”

But don’t blame me if asking that question makes you go home empty-handed.  Blame Namco.

Two Game Bento Lunches [Freeplay]

Everyone loves free games.  Here are two that I’ve been enjoying just a bit too much lately.  From the land of the rising sun comes Cat On A Dolphin. I love this game not least for the title, which is cuttingly accurate: the game involves a cat riding on a dolphin. It can be a bit tricky getting into the swing of it, but once you do, it’s addictive.

Rose & Camelia was introduced to me by one of my friends as “a Victorian face-slapping game”, and there’s not really much one needs to add to that. Have your mouse, and your sense of offended virtue, at the ready.

Roadwar 2000 [Retrograde]

We were just outside of Pittsburgh when the mutants attacked.

We’d seen them tailing us since DC.  Well, smelled them more than seen, you know what the mutants are like.  They picked off three of our escorts in the first wave, but then our commandos and bodyguards brought their firepower to bear, and we tore them apart.  They only caught us because we had lost two of our hardtop sports cars just north of Bethesda, where some penny ante local gang got lucky with a few shots on our tires.  Fortunately, Pittsburgh is the steel city, and we made up for the losses by bolting on armor to our bus at a foundry.  We also found a few construction vehicles.  Those will come in handy for hauling our supplies.  It takes a lot of food and gasoline to keep a gang like the Rum Runners mobile, and we’ve got a long way to go before we get to the ruins of Chicago.

Roadwar 2000 is a strategy game that borrows the trappings of the Mad Max and Road Warrior movies to simulate life and combat in a post-nuclear apocalypse United States (or, in the case of Roadwar Europa, a post-nuclear apocalypse Europe).  It’s a world where abandoned cars, guns, and ammo are plentiful — and death is just around every corner.

Life in Roadwar is nasty, brutish, and short.  Every turn you can decide to move (if you have sufficient fuel), or search for loot, vehicles, or people.  The people you meet might be weak refugees, willing to join you in exchange for food, or they might be seasoned gangsters, eager to either join or kill you.  Every possible stereotype has been thrown into the blender here, and it works well.  Mutants, Communist invaders, born-again Christians, Satanists, renegade National Guardsmen, and other groups all pick on the corpse of a devastated continent.

Your job is to survive, and as they say, the best defense is a good offense.  As you travel around the country, you’ll acquire vehicles and gang members, and even take over a few towns if you’re lucky.  Become strong enough, and you may be contacted by a secret underground network, the remains of the legitimate government.  They want you to … well, that would be telling.  Let’s just say you’ll want to stock up on gasoline.

The graphics are serviceable but sparse – think Ultima II – and the user interface is daunting, one of those “a different letter for every function” approaches that dominated the mid-80’s.  Print out a reference card from the internet and keep it near your keyboard.  Complicating matters is that the game offers not one but three different systems for resolving car-to-car combat.  There’s a full-on turn based tactical combat (similar to Steve Jackson Games’ Car Wars).  There’s also “quick combat”, which is somewhat faster and requires fewer decisions, and “abstract combat” which is even faster and requires no input at all.  Early in the game, you get a bonus for winning a full tactical battle (your gang can manage an additional car), so it’s worth going for the gusto.

For being so hard to beat, Roadwar 2000 is wonderfully approachable.  It has a wonderful setting (Fallout fans will feel right at home) and crisp, if sometimes arbitrary gameplay.  It’s not for everyone, but I have been playing Roadwar 2000 off-and-on for 20 years now, and I don’t think I’ll be stopping anytime soon.  If you’re handy with an emulator and willing to get your hands dirty, give Roadwar 2000 or Europa a try.

Roadwar 2000 and Roadwar Europa by SSI, for Amiga, Apple II, Apple II GS, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS.  Occasionally available on eBay.

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