Christmas Games

The latest news from home are no surprise (some more corruption has been discovered, affecting the current government, president included), and lately I’ve made too many rants, so let’s talk about games.

 For Christmas, since we were going home, I ordered a large number of games. Here in Adler it’s harder to get games in English or delivered to your house. After coming back, since I didn’t want to do much, I managed to play for a while. This, plus some time playing before going home, has made me discover some really nice games:

 Xcom: 

I started playing this game before Christmas. I understand that this is a remake of an old game, where they tried to keep everything as close as the original as possible, while using the full graphic and sound capabilities that today’s computers can offer. The result is rather impressive, a very addictive game. The mechanic is quite simple: You control the resources of an organization that is trying to fight against an alien invasion. The main way to fight them by sending a small squad of soldiers against them (once they’re outside their UFOs), but you may need to shoot the UFO down sometimes with your own planes. While fighting them, you also need to capture different aliens to research them and improve your equipment. You also need to establish a network to protect countries and detect aliens, and you also manage your base, your constructions and workshops, and your research.

 This is done by having 2 main places where you play. Inside the base is one of them, where you can go to the different sections, order production of equipment or rooms, manage soldiers, manage interceptors, and all that. There is a global map, where you can make time pass. When time passes you complete constructions and research. Also, at random moments, aliens attack, or an UFO appears, or other things happen. That makes you move to the second part of the game, which is the combat. The combat is based on turns. Each turn your soldiers have a certain movement and available actions, and when you cannot do more actions, it’s the alien’s turn.

I’ve always liked strategy games, and turn-based strategy games are a very simple way to implement it, but with its own perks and good parts. In this game it’s very well done, I guess in a similar way as the original, but with 3D graphics and very detailed and personalized units (you can change faces, hair shape and color, armor design, equipment, weapons…). The trick is usually to move slowly, making sure all your units keep guarding each other. However, that’s not as interesting, so plenty of times I just charged ahead until crashing headfirst against groups of aliens. Well, it was not that bad, but always moving a little to keep the guard up slows the game down, so sometimes it was fun to just run to the middle of a mess.

The soldiers can have different specializations: Heavy (with a missile launcher and a heavy machine gun), assault (with skills to get close to the enemies and fight them there, ideally with a shotgun), sniper (to kill from far away), and assist (which is a generic soldier, good for making some damage while healing people around, or guarding places while people move). I really enjoyed playing with assault and sniper soldiers, and if you level them up these two can usually clean rooms in a matter of seconds and without getting damage. The assault in particular, with the ability to shoot people that just happen to walk next to it, it’s rather brutal. It can one-hit almost anything if they’re close enough. The sniper it’s also pretty cool sometimes, when you pull off shots from 5 rooms away, in which the animation following the bullet takes a looong while to reach the target, and it hits. In general, though, you’ll need all of them.

The plot itself is quite simple, as mentioned. You keep getting information about the aliens, while they increase the forces trying to invade it. The end feels rushed, but the point of the game is to slowly get there, and it's not really something that important to see how the plot develops.

I had not played for a while with turn-based strategy games, and it was quite addictive to try one that was so well done. The missions are certainly similar, but there’s always surprises, and new combinations, that you can try. Capturing aliens is quite tricky, but it’s vital for research, and it’s cool to keep gaining powers and skills.

It does get a little repetitive in the end, and while playing there were a couple of bad bugs that forced me to restart to the last saved game. Also, if you save-spam, the game can be quite easy. However, apart from that, I really like this game, and even without the plot, I enjoy doing missions quite a lot.
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Just Cause 2:

This game was game of the year some time ago according to Zero Punctuation. I gave it a try, without having played the first one.

The plot is one of the sorriest excuses I've ever seen: You're dumped (literally, from a helicopter) into an island-country, with the mission to find your mentor and maybe kill him depending on what he's doing. The islands are supposed to be a little third-world country, with a dictator ruling them, factions working against each other for power, and all the climates you can imagine, from snow in the highest mountains, to deserts, to jungle with rivers and lakes.

The way to find out what's going on and advance the plot consist in creating chaos, destroying militar installations and doing missions for the factions against the current government.

This sounds...well, boring. Every time I read the description I was wondering if the game was worth it, really.  I think that Yahtzee has great opinions regarding games, but one of the most important points of his videos is that, well, everybody has different tastes, and even if a game is good it doesn't mean it's good for everybody. So I believe that a game recommended by him it's going to be good, but maybe I personally will find it boring.

Anyway, this game isn't boring, at all. It's really really a lot of fun. Stupid fun. First, the country, made up of islands, it's huge. As in a  30km x 30km area, more or less (and if you walk, it would take around the same time to cross the map as a real person to walk that distance). There's thousands of locations, and you can spend hours just going from one place to another, depending on what you use for moving. That brings us to the second thing, which is that you can use any transport that you see moving around in the game, and you can do so from the start. You can choose to drive cars, motorbikes, tanks, different boats, helicopters and planes, from fighter jets to passenger planes. And apart from that, you can use a parachute any time you want and without any limitations, plus a grappling hook. The end result is that you can move quite fast, grapple yourself to a moving plane, pilot it against a mountain, and jump out of it with your parachute before it explodes, safely landing afterwards. And if you get tired of that, there's the black market chopper that can drop you (again, literally) into any location you have previously discovered.

Physics are frequently ignored, like when a good way to survive a 3km fall is to grapple the floor with your hook, safely landing after going even faster towards the floor. On the other hand, there's quite nice physical concepts, like the option to tie two things with the hook, or the way every transport moves around, quite different from one another.

So, most of the game you play around the island, jumping from place to place, shooting at things, falling from helicopters, tying people to planes and seeing them bounce around, and lots of other quite really funny things.

Actually, in the Zero Punctuation review it's mentioned that "Just Cause" basically can mean "Just because". After playing it, yeah, that's definitely the meaning they wanted it to have, since there's no just cause in the plot (the "just cause" is shoehorned at the end, but it's clear for everybody that it's just an excuse).

All in all, lots of stupid fun, with great graphics, awesome views and scenery, and fun stupid missions where you jump to the roof of moving cars or get grappled to a helicopter while you try to shoot down a rocket.

L.A. Noire:

Just to show, Yahtzee didn't like this game. I have only played a little bit, but I love it. It's basically a C.S.I, the game, set in the 50s. You're a police inspector, and you go to crime scenes, recover clues, and then interrogate people about them, trying to guess if they lie, if they're telling the truth or if they just didn't mention everything they knew. You need to guess these things by their facial expressions and ticks, and you need to prove they're lying by using the clues you've found.

The game has also a city you can patrol around, in GTA style, but I find this part secondary. I feel they put it there, same as with some chase scenes or shootings, to make publishers happy, because a pure "investigation" game would seem too "boring", specially if it's not based in any previous movie or T.V. franchise.

I haven't played much, but so far the different cases I've done were interesting, even if simple, and I really like the interrogation mechanics, were you need to find proofs, and where if you guess incorrectly you may miss whole investigation branches.

Halo 4:

Being a fan of the previous Halos, and after hearing this one was really good, I had to give it a try. I haven't played much yet, but so far it's really good. Well, the usual stuff, but good. I really like that in general, Halo is not trying too hard to be "realistic", and that it also does not use cover systems or anything. You move, and if you find objects were you can hide behind, that's the cover. You need to ration your bullets, and you need to manage your weapons so you don't get stuck into corners with nothing but a little powerless plasma pistol.

The plot is becoming interesting, with weird alien planets and ancient technology. It's true that the covenant are becoming a little repetitive, specially since you're supposed to have defeated them, or allied with the rest, and I was expecting new enemies and weapons (or at least, more new enemies and weapons from the start), but still has this epic feel while making you like the characters involved (unlike Gears of War. I liked the gameplay, but the characters were extremely boring and I didn't feel attached to them at all).

The forerunner areas that remind me of the first Halo endless corridors are a little boring, but so far they keep changing much faster than in the original, where after a while you kept having Deja vu's in each room.

Super Meat Boy: 

This is an indie game, and a very geeky one. It uses references from thousands of older games (the game starts with the Street Fighter 2 stupid intro, only changing the characters and the names used), and the mechanic is quite simple: You move inside a little scenario, avoiding traps, until you reach another character. Everything kills you, and if you die you just start again, without wasting any time in loading or anything.

The levels get harder and harder, and they're stupidly addictive. In the process you gain very fast reflexes, because the slightest mistake kills you and makes you repeat the whole level. There's special bonuses, portals, and if you finish a level fast enough you gain access to an even-harder version of that same level. Once you finish a level, you can see all your tries, simultaneously, including the successful one.

It's a very simple game mechanic, but the game is awesome, with different traps and puzzles. There's lots of details that are very well polished, and the gruesome ways in which you day makes it funny more than frustrating. To that end it also helps that you don;t lose time reloading or anything, and you just go right back to the start to try again, so eventually you learn. Sometimes you can day 6 times in less than 5 seconds, but that's the point. You just try again until you master the level and move on.

To point out why it's funny, your character is a square block of meat that bleeds any time you touch anything (well, it's a piece of meat after all), the character you need to rescue is a square made of bandages, and the evil character that kidnapped her is a foetus floating in a square glass tank with a suit, who likes to troll all other characters all the time, while beating them.

It's highly addictive and highly recommended. But it may take quite a lot of time from you, without you realizing about it....



And that's all for now. I still have plenty of games that we brought back during Christmas  plus some games we already had that I have not tried yet.

I have a big waiting list, and I'll try to slowly get through all of it (and comment about all these nice games in here).

We'll see which one's going to be next...