Eschalon, Book 1

Consider the most amorphous of genres, the computer based role-playing game, or CRPG. Put 10 gamers in a room and ask them to define a CRPG, and you will get 10 different definitions.

Eschalon, Book 1 begins with that time-honoured trope, the adventurer with amnesia, who must search to discover not only the world around him, but also himself. It is turn-based to the core and is chock full of hideous monsters, unforgiving combat, swords and sorcery, and a large and richly-realized world. Read more

Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People

Everyone wants to have their own restaurant.

You know the one I mean. You walk in, and it might as well be your office. Before you’ve even sat down, they’re already preparing your order. They don’t have to ask you what you want, because they already know. You trust them. Everything they do is perfect. Read more

Spectral Force 3

Atlus has published some of my favorite games of recent years, including La Pucelle Tactics, Disgaea, and Disgaea 2. When I was chosen for this review, the thought of having an Atlus tactical RPG on my Xbox 360 was exciting. Read more

Vaporware

People love talking about games that don’t exist.

Consider that 11 years later people still talk about Duke Nukem Forever as if it were a real game.  Some credulous souls still speak about the RPG Grimoire as if it will ever be released.  Or consider the ironically-named Phantom game console, an idea that seemed to have begun as forum speculation. Read more

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Alone in the Dark

Survival horror games walk a fine line. When too frantic, they devolve into simple action games. When too measured, they feel more like technology demos than games. Alone in the Dark tries to resuscitate one of the earliest survival horror games, with only mixed success. Read more

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Wii Fit

“That’s obese!” the voice happily chirps. The voice, belonging to an anthropomorphized bathroom scale, is my nemesis. It is Wii Fit, and every day it tells me I am overweight (or, after a night drinking too many margaritas, obese). Read more

Kudos: Rock Legend

It was just last year that we reviewed Shady O’Grady’s Rising Star, a clever build-your-own-rock-band sim game. I thought it was charming, if a bit rough-edged at times. Now a second game in the genre has crossed my path: Kudos: Rock Legend. Read more

Grand Theft Auto IV

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.

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