Dream of Waking

Jedi Knight is one of those games I would’ve been best off leaving in my memories of it. To say it has not aged well is an understatement. Some of these levels that I fondly remembered are absolutely godawful, in particular the last three and early Jedi levels. Though you get a lightsaber in this iteration and it does become your primary weapon through most levels, reflecting blaster fire with it simply doesn’t work early in the game and late in the game it’s still easier to use Force Pull to rip the weapon out of your enemies hands before you get shot up too bad than it is to reflect shots back at them till they die. The last boss was a total pain in the balls and left me with this sour feeling. I don’t think I’ll be playing Jedi Knight again anytime soon.

I’ve said this before but Dark Forces is probably my favorite Doom clone. It brought the Star Wars universe with all its diverse locations and creatures into a two-and-a-half dimensional game with an engine capable of faking 3D environments and set pieces. It didn’t and still doesn’t get near enough respect.

Let’s get the negatives out the way first. Though there are 10 weapons, nearly all of them fall into two categories; repeating lasers and explosives more likely to blow yourself up rather than the enemy. An enemy type, the Grans, are armed with their fists and grenades, and they throw those grenades with laser precision. They are easily the most annoying enemy in the game and they come in ridiculous numbers. One of the levels takes place on Jabba’s space cruiser and that level is filled with Grans and nowhere near enough health or shields. The absolute worst level in the game is the third one, Anoat City. Really too early for a level as un-fun as Anoat City, which is a pain in the balls that begins with a switch-flipping sewer puzzle and ends with platform jumping followed by a swarm of health-sapping enemies. The whole level is filled with enemies of the health-sapping variety and by the end of it, after you’ve performed the olympic triple-jump marathon, you’re either dangerously low on ammo or (in my case) completely out and stuck running a gauntlet to the end. And the final, minorest of quibbles, some of the level music (which is fantastic and ramps up appropriately when you’re in the action) repeats itself.

Now that I’ve taken a dump on one of my favorite games, why don’t we explore its merits! There’s a fantastic variety to the levels. Imperial bases, desolate moons, hazy mines, scummy bars, and the ubiquitous ice planet are just examples. One minute you’re crawling through a disgusting sewer and the next you’re blasting stormtroopers in an Imperial detention facility. The variety extends to the creatures you encounter along the way. Of course there’s stormtroopers and Imperial officers, then there’s aliens, droids, and mindless monsters. You do spend an inordinate amount of time blasting stormtroopers and those damned Grans but the other enemies of the game are by no means underrepresented.

Though I list the lack of variety in the weapons as one of the game’s detractors, the weapons all feel sufficiently destructive and Dark Forces has one of my favorite video game weapons of all time: the Stouker concussion rifle. It’s one of the most powerful weapons in the game so you don’t get it until you’re three-fourths finished with it but when you do it’s like the heavens open up and you can hear a choir of angels praising your new implement of destruction. It is neither repeating laser nor explosive. It’s basically a rocket launcher, minus the rocket. You fire it, with an amazingly satisfying sound, and things in the distance blow up in a blast of white-blue. No projectile, just a flash and and explosion. If you fire it at something too close to yourself, it gets you too, but it’s a risk well worth taking. You can clear whole rooms of enemies in one or two shots of the concussion rifle and while it only uses 4 units of ammo, it comes with 100 each time it’s dropped. Oh yes, you get the Stouker concussion rifle only after feeling its effects a couple times at the hands of your enemies. I absolutely love this weapon and though it’s been replicated in Jedi Knight and Jedi Knight 2, it never feels as good as it does in Dark Forces.

Dark Forces isn’t all action and no brains though. There’s a number of rather enjoyable level puzzles. Breaking out a prisoner in a maximum security in the Imperial detention and gaining access to an Imperial computer vault stand out as two of the better ones, though as said before, Anoat City has an absolutely ridiculous switch-flipping puzzle in the sewers and that one sucks.

Everything about Dark Forces feels right. The movement, controls, weapons, enemies, levels, even the lack of lightsaber. About the only thing missing is a multiplayer mode, which would’ve been awesome, but the game stands on its own without it. Any Star Wars or action game fan would be remiss to pass up playing through Dark Forces.

I’m not very good at adventure games. I bought this in a two pack with Time Gentlemen, Please on Steam for $5 on the Idle Thumbs’ recommendation. I didn’t quite know what I was getting into except that they were adventure games by indie developers that were rather good.

To be honest, when I fired it up the first time I felt like I’d been scammed. It opened in a small window with no apparent option to switch to fullscreen. There’s sparse music but no voice-overs. The graphics and animations were very base and simple. Despite these, the game is absolutely charming. It’s well-written, funny, and at times absurd. It’s short and easy (remember, I suck at adventure games so if I beat this one, it must be easy) and completely enjoyable. I haven’t touched Time Gentlemen, Please yet, but I feel I may have already surpassed an acceptable dollars-spent to entertainment-gained ratio.

I personally enjoy supporting “the little guys” when I can, apparently even to the point of buying two games I may not even finish, so if you’re into adventure games and you have $5 to spare, you should probably check these out.

I can’t really give this one a finished number because it’s just a Half-Life 2 mod but it’s a REALLY GOOD Half-Life 2 mod.

Anyway, Research and Development. Requires Half-Life 2: Episode 2, which you probably already own because it was part of The Orange Box and god knows everyone’s played Portal and some of us enjoyed TF2. This is almost a puzzle mod, much like Portal, except there’s quite a bit of action to it. There’s no weapons except for the environment, the gravity gun, and the antlion pheromone pod. It starts off with some pretty basic physics puzzles, then it starts to get into WTF physics mode, and by the end you’re doing some really elaborate tricks. It’s Portal-short in length, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s absolutely enjoyable without overstaying it’s welcome.

I’m not going to throw out any spoilers here, even though there’s not much of a plot, because there’s some pretty good gags. With a couple more levels and some spit-shine, I could see this being included in the next Valve release if it weren’t so vanilla Half-Life. I mean, this is fun and well done but there’s nothing that really differentiates it from the other Half-Life games like TF 2 and Portal did. You can’t look at a Half-Life level 2 and confuse it for Portal. As it is, any of the levels in R&D could be dropped into Half-Life 2 and no one would know the difference.

Don’t let my negativity about it getting picked up by Valve stop you though. If you own Half-Life 2: Episode 2, you should play this. It’s pretty awesome.

Neotokyo is a Source engine mod that released last weekend. I started playing Monday night and I’ve put maybe 2 hours into it. I like it. There’s a lot of people on the internet bitching about it and I think I’m going to chalk it up to either clueless idiots who don’t “get it” and Dystopia fanboys who wanted another Dystopia.

Neotokyo has been described as Ghost in the Shell meets Counter-Strike and that’s not far off the mark. It’s class-based and centered around a capture the flag variant called Capture the Ghost. The ghost is a limb-less torso that requires the capturor to drop his primary weapon in exchange for the ability to see all enemies within 50m of the capturor. In a pinch you can put the ghost on your back to arm yourself with your pistol or knife but if you have any teammates alive around you, you’re better off holding the ghost and telling the rest of the team where to shoot. The setting is near-future (30-40 year) Japan, so while you have things like thermoptic camouflage and all manner of alternative vision, there’s no lasers or rocket launchers. The armature is strictly SMGs, assault rifles, long rifles, and pistols.

I’m not entirely sure why I enjoy this so much. I play recon, which is the lightest class, and I almost never survive a whole round. It’s fun to sneak around back and try to get the drop on as many members of the other team as I can before I’m inevitably sniped. The game doesn’t count assists or else I’d probably score much higher but I’m usually in the top five.

I started this entry to provide counterpoints to other people’s gripes about it but that’s an uphill battle, in the rain, wearing greased shoes. The official forums aren’t up so there’s no real outlet to voice your approval to the dev team so I’m just going to do it here. Keep it up, Studio Radi-8! Neotokyo is pretty bad ass!

This is an expansion pack. Does this count? Sure!

Though I’ve finished Doom 3 around four times, this is only my second time finishing Resurrection of Evil. It took even more tweaking to get running than Doom 3 did. For weapons it adds the grabber (a gravity gun) and the double-barrel shotgun. For monsters it adds the Forsaken (it’s an original Doom lost soul), the Vulgar (it’s an imp, and basically replaces the imp in every occasion) and the Bruiser (the size of a hellknight, shoots like a mancubus). It replaces the soulcube with the hellstone, which accumulates abilities like invulnerability as you beat bosses.

The grabber feels like a lost opportunity. RoE sticks to the Doom 3 formula of straight forward demon shooting so doggedly that it can’t toss in a physics puzzle or any other use for the grabber besides tossing boxes and barrels at demons or catching projectiles and tossing those instead. So, given an opportunity, I prefered to use the grabber to save on ammo.

The hellstone by the end of the game basically becomes thirty seconds of god mode, as you’re invulnerable, do way more damage, and everything else is moving in slow-mo. Until that point, I barely used it. Between the grabber and the double-barrel I felt I had enough firepower to deal with anything. It’s at the end when they’re tossing three revnants and two hellknights at you at once that you feel the need for that thirty seconds of god mode.

There’s nothing new in the games’ environments. Dig site, tech base, hell, they’re all there. There’s less monster closests, which is appreciated, and more demons that teleport in at will, which is not.

As far as expansions go, this one’s not bad. It’s more Doom 3, which I liked, with a couple new toys and a couple new targets and not much else.

This may have been my fourth time playing through Doom 3. It’s barely compatible with Vista and took entirely too much work to get running the way I wanted but it works. It still looks amazing, with the exception of some blurry textures particularly on other people in the game. As far as gameplay goes, it can’t get much simpler than Doom 3. Shoot demon, collect ammo, open door, end level. There’s not a ton of variety to it and that’s probably one of the reasons I enjoy it so much. When all you want to do is shoot stuff in a beautiful, tense environment, you can’t get much better than Doom 3.

For not posting recently. You see I’ve been playing this two year old game. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called Team Fortress 2.

When I got The Orange Box two years ago, I got it for Portal and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. I had probably about zero interest in Team Fortress 2. I had never played the original Team Fortress, nor Team Fortress Classic, and multiplayer gaming isn’t really my thing. Now I’ve heard the heaps of praise given to TF2. I tried to block it all out, because it’s just another multiplayer game I won’t get into like Counterstrike. Until I really knuckled down and played it about a week and a half ago.

I had an absolute fucking blast. It’s amazing! There’s not a lot that I can say that hasn’t already been said. Valve put so much effort into the details of the game that it’s always fun. Each class is balanced and full of character, the action is fast without being spammy, and it’s nearly impossible to be a true burden to your team if you’re at least playing the game. I could probably go on and on about it.

So if you’re one of those people like me who have thus far only enjoyed two-thirds of The Orange Box, jump into TF2. Play the classes, find one you like, get good at it. Play on public servers, there’s rarely any bad ones. Get a headset, it helps with teamwork! Add me to your friends, I’m emnii, we’ll shoot dudes, or each other, it’ll be great!

If you haven’t heard of this one, you’re probably not alone. It won a few indie game awards but it has kind of been under the radar. It’s also somewhat difficult to describe. To put it simply, it’s a first-person fighting game that takes place in a very surreal environment. It’s colorful, beautiful, and full of interesting creatures and people, whom you get to punch in the face. A story exists, the voice acting kind of suffers, and you spend a lot of time punching people in the face but the setting and variety more than make up for the shortfalls. There’s enough interesting boss fights and ways that they make the game more than just fighting that make it enjoyable. It’s only $20 on Steam, which was well worth it. It’s left wide open for a sequel which I suspect won’t come soon enough.

I got this one during the deployment. It’s a 4X-ish, in that you research stuff, you colonize planets, you find other planets, and you kill the other races, except unlike all other 4X games I’ve played, this one occurs in real time. There are three races; one whose units are cheap (the Advent), one whose units are hardy (the TEC), and one whose units are destructive (the Vasari).

It plays a lot like other 4X games that I love except that everything seems a little more tied into itself. For example, if you want to research trade ports, you need to build enough research facilities to get up to that level. In order to build research facilities, you need logistical slots on your planet. If you’re all out of log slots, you need to colonize another planet. Once you get up to the level of research needed, then you can research trade ports. Once you’ve got that researched, you need the required amount of materials to make them. This is just one item.

It makes for some interesting strategies. When I play Advent, I take advantage of the cheap units. I’ll crap out a ton of the cheapest frigates they have and zerg rush every planet until I have more than the other guys, which will drain my credits but give me a pretty big resource advantage. You can station your fleet in the way of trade lanes and just blow up enemy traders to disrupt their credit flow. The same goes for refinery ships. If you raid an enemies research facilities, they lose the ability to use what they’ve already researched.

The one main detractor this game has is that one game can last a long time, even in real time. My longest game so far has been five and half hours; a medium size map playing 2 v 2 against easy AI. You can selectively choose to increase the speed of research and travel and whatnot though.

In February Iron Clad released a micro-expansion called Entrenchment and that name is no joke. It added star bases (huge structures you can build for defense that can’t leave a planet’s gravity well), mines, and anti-structure frigates. The star bases are ridiculous. You can upgrade them with bigger guns, more armor, hanger bays, frigate construction bays, and other such things. Mines are also rather nuts. You can drop as many mines as you like, so I littered my heavy traffic areas with them and they were well worth it. Nothing got past a heavy minefield.

I’m definitely looking forward to the upcoming two micro-expansions for this one. It’s a ton of fun to send my enormous fleet of death into an enemy colony only to find they’ve snuck some planet-bombers beyond my frontlines and scramble to stop them.

Another multiplayer game but this one actually has an extensive single player campaign. It was a lot of fun, the bots are actually kind of helpful, and there’s a strange card system where if you can’t beat a match because the odds are really stacked against you (such as you’re playing 4 vs 6 and the enemy team also has vehicles), you can play a card with some kind of bonus like more teammates or better weapons or vehicles. I had to use one and only one for the afore mentioned 4v6w/v but that was only because I had gotten really close to beating it a couple times and was tired of playing it over and over. The last match is a 1v1 deathmatch and thankfully the last boss isn’t Xan Kriegor because fuck that guy. I trounced the last match pretty easily and that was that.

There’s a lame storyline in there somewhere. Try to ignore it. But buy the game, it just had a huge patch released that added Steam achievements and new weapons and maps and mods. It’s making me replay the campaign for the achievements but whatever. It’s fun and definitely worth the $11.99 being charged for it this weekend on http://www.steampowered.com/.

Edit: How could I fail to mention my biggest complaint about this game? WHY IN GOD’S NAME DO I HAVE YOU PRESS ESCAPE FIVE FUCKING TIMES TO GET THROUGH ALL THE INTRO MOVIES?! Seriously everyone with a line of code in the game or gave Epic a dollar to see it made got an intro movie. Everytime I start the game I have to hammer the escape button just to get to the main menu without waiting for the five minutes of intro movies to finish. What. The. Fuck?

I guess I can’t really say that I beat this one because it’s a multiplayer game and meant to be played over and over but I did play through all four campaigns in multiplayer, so in essence I’ve done everything there is to do.

I got this for half off on Steam. It was the sale I’ve been waiting for. I knew when it was being hyped that Left 4 Dead would be an awesome game but it’s focus on multiplayer coop doesn’t exactly thrill me because I’m more of a single player gamer. Amazingly, I found three friends (doubleplusungood, GarrickMol, and praise_seitan) on Steam and through two sessions we played through all four scenarios.

In short, Left 4 Dead is a superb coop game. Getting a game going is dead simple, the levels are varied and randomized by the AI, and the way it plays encourages teamwork.

I guess the only complaint I could have about it isn’t much of a complaint. This game basically requires a headset. There’s so many instances where not being able to quickly communicate with your teammates will end badly for everyone. I found out that my headset auto-mutes on level changes and until we figured it out, I was totally less than helpful.

This all begs the question; is Left 4 Dead worth the $50 pricetag? I have to say yes, even if you’re a hermit type who never plays online, but really you should play with friends. The friendly AI is more than good enough to provide a fun but short experience for those without friends but the excitement and tension is dramatically increased when you’re playing with other humans.

This game is bad fucking ass. I loved the first Fear despite the repetitive environments and this game plays just like the first, except with even more weird supernatural crap and different places to kill replica soldiers. It was awesome. Looking forward to shooting duders in the face again.

By the way, today is a SNOW DAY. Yes, a snow day.

(I’m taking a page from Roushi and numbering the games I finish, though my count probably won’t reset every year, I just don’t finish enough games)

If I had gotten Mass Effect earlier in the year, I would’ve completed my New Years’ resolution. I own nearly every Bioware RPG and this is the first one I’ve finished. There wasn’t much of it I didn’t thoroughly enjoy. The combat is engaging, the graphics and sound are fantastic, controls great. The minor quests get a little repetitive and the resource hunts are pointless except for cheap XP and cash. Some of the sweep-and-clear minor quests gave me a serious sense of deja vu but I enjoyed them regardless. It’s a great game.

#2, Condemned: Criminal Origins, will get wrapped up tomorrow. Hopefully.

I finished Old Man’s War. It was pretty awesome but it inspired me to do something. I’m reinstalling Galactic Civilizations 2. I’m going to start a new game. Biggest map it’ll make. Fewest habitable planets allowed. Every single race.

Cave Story (Dokutsu Monogatan) is an awesome action – platformer for PC along the lines of Metroid and recent Castlevanias but with a lot more plot and story. In short, it’s totally awesome. What’s not totally awesome about it is getting it. It’s freeware but it’s all in Japanese. AeonGenesis made an English translation patch but it’s just that; a patch. So you have to get the game from the Japanese website and then get the English patch, and work it’s magic to get to play the game. Well I’m lazy and I can’t read Japanese so I don’t really give a damn about having the option to play the game in Japanese by not applying the patch. So here’s a ZIP file with exactly what you need to play Cave Story in English with no patching.

Cave Story – English

Open it up, drop the folder somewhere, open that folder, run DoConfig if you need to, and then run Doukutsu and that’s it! You’re playing an awesome Metrovania on your PC. It’s playable with your keyboard if you’re a toolbox but a really good controller (such as the Logitech Dual Action) will only set you back $20 and works perfect for this and a ton of other games. And here’s the links to the sites I got Cave Story from and the patch.

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA022293/storehouse.html

http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=cavestory

Disclaimer: I have not finished any of these. Two of them I just started. This entire entry could just be initial impression gushings.

Hellgate London This is Diablo with Guns. It’s buggy and the part I’ve left off at gets frustratingly difficult but if you’re into Diablo you can forgive these flaws pretty easily. I play as a marksman so I use nothing but guns and I play the game like it is Doom with randomly generated levels.

I could go on about more depressing garbage but how about something I like talking about? Video games.

I’ve been playing UFO: Afterlight. I’ve loved the concepts behind the X-Com games ever since I learned about them well past their prime but their soulcrushing difficulty really keeps me from progressing in the games at all when I did try to play them.