Resident Evil 3, Code Veronica and 0.

 After talking about the first and second game I will talk about the last "classic" Resident Evils together, with more focus on the 3rd one and its remake. 

 

"Classic" Resident Evil games are those done in the old style, more focused on horror, where items are scarce, atmosphere is creepy and scary, gameplay is based on fixed cameras in each area, where you aim and shoot in straight lines on front of the character and graphics tend to be squared and old fashioned, with low detail still. You have the herbs and sprays to heal, you have similar enemies although some new ones every time, and in general gameplay-wise they're exactly the same, just changing the plot and scenarios.

Resident evil 0 follows this model. This one is a prequel, and I haven't finished it. Prequels for some reason interest me less, maybe because we know more or less what will happen. Also in this case it was weird, because they introduced zombies already ,which would have been reported, and then a new type of monster based in slugs which is pretty disgusting. The game is nice, but it's a bit tiresome, a big chunk of it revolves around limited Inventory and having to share things between two characters back and forth. One character, a girl that appears weak and needing rescues, appeared in Resident Evil 1 in Chris' playthrough, which I haven't done, and the other is a typical macho-man and therefore boring. The game has this strange mode where you have two characters that you alternatively control, and it seems they have eliminated the storage, something I miss quite a lot because it's hard to organize and prepare and you always end up with extra items that you need to get rid of or something. At least in this one you can just drop them on the floor, but still feels bad not being able to store them somewhere safe. The game doesn't seem to add much to the saga to be honest, and feels a bit dated and not as interesting as others for some reason. I guess my main complaint is that it tries to show you something before the mansion incident...but well, before the mansion incident there were no interesting questions left unresolved or anything. If I finish it I may comment more about it. 

Code Veronica, by order,  should be played after Resident Evil 3, but we can discuss it first because it's very independent. I finished it long time ago with university friends, and it still follows the classic model. The game came out only for Dreamcast, in a bold move to promote the console, but that made it more obscure and no remakes have been made for any other platform. You play first as Claire (from RE2) and then as Chris (from RE1), the two siblings. Another virus outbreak happens in an island, and you meet two crazy villains that are controlling the place. While still being a classic RE, the tone is more action-based in general, with the start of the trend of some ridiculous cutscenes. The villains are also more cartoonish and extreme: While in previous games we had some people with self-interests or that had gone mad, here they're directly crazy and flamboyant. It's also the game where Albert Wesker reappears after being left for dead, and showing superhuman speed and strength, although you don't fight him directly and he escapes after this. In summary, while being still the classic style, the game starts to resemble what will become the style for RE4 and RE5 a bit.

Finally let's talk about RE3. 

This game dind't bring much originality to the saga, that is true. The main character is Jill Valentine, a choice I approve strongly but we have seen her in the past. She appears as a tough person that has experience in the outbreak, as it happens in the city, right before the events of RE2. Jill needs to go through the city trying to find escape routes. The setting therefore is the same as RE2, sharing locations with it and reusing maps, which while fun it does seem more repetitive at times. You meet other survivors and a group of mercenaries hired by Umbrella to help contain the outbreak and save citizens. One of them Carlos, is nice and helps you, but some of them are secretly working just to gather data and keep experimenting, betraying you. At the same time, a special bioweapon called Nemesis has been sent to eliminate all mebmers of S.T.A.R.S., raccoon city elite police officers, and sicne you're one of them soon enough this thing keeps appearing and following you. Nemesis is similar to Mr.T from RE2, but stronger, less robot-like and more organic. Defeating it is usually temporary, although you can see it deteriorates as you achieve more wins. Nemesis is different also in the fact that it can wield weapons, like a grenade-launcher that, of course, is used to fuck with helicopters that were about to rescue you.

There's a small section of the game where Jill becomes infected and you play as Carlos while finding a cure, but it's quite reduced and finishes fast. The general tone is that the mercenaries underestimate Jill and then she proves herself again and again to be much better than them at dealing with these things, except for this period after Nemesis infects you. The game has some hard logical puzzles and mysteries, and the feeling that you're in a city overrun by zombies is always quite present, at least during the first half of the game. Hunters reappear and ruin your day plenty of times, but monsters keep being not very original, just iterations of previous ones, including the zombies, mutated giant animals, lickers and so on. The original game also offered some branching at a certain moments, making you choose between two options. Your choice didn't affect much apart from sometimes avoiding being hurt, or exploring different areas, or making your life easier or harder, except in the end where one of the choices gives you an extra cutscene.

In the end you defeat nemesis quite awesomely, especially if you choose the extra cut-scene, and you discover that the US government, president included, has decided to nuke the city and fuck the possible survivors in there. You barely escape the blast together with Carlos, and thousands get killed while it's true that the outbreak gets contained, in an exercise that indicates some collaboration between Umbrella and the government and both of them not caring at all for the people.

The remake of RE3 plays very similar to the RE2 remake. Graphics have been upgraded to the modern level too, so they're pretty awesome, and there's some sections of 1st person that help create a certain tone, darker and scarier, which is nice. The game then plays like RE2, with the 3rd person perspective where you move the camera freely but have to be precise and point at the enemies correctly to do some damage. The game has more action than RE2, with zombies being a bit weaker and finding more ammo in general, and soon enough you also start being followed by Nemesis, although here it looks even bigger and as it receives damages turns into a  more animalistic and huge thing, to the point that the final versions occupy the whole room and you feel like you're an insect compared to it. The game makes puzzles a bit easier while introducing different areas and boss fights than in the original, and sometimes it's hard to tell if you're supposed to run or fight. There's also no choices in this one, although the ending is still pretty awesome. 

The change in this game that did bother me the most is that they made Jill more of a damsel in distress that Carlos had to save. She's still badass, but there's a stupid moment when she's infected that Carlos has to fend an army of zombies and hunters, and she becomes this delicate thing, giving more protagonism to him than in the first game. What also bothered me is that his weapons suck a lot more than her weapons: She could have dealt with the monsters sooo much better than him. What's more, right after this you get to play with her again and she breezes through the areas where Carlos was having issues. In the end it's still established that she's very good, but it feels they damage her more and make her "weaker" than in the original, and this frankly pissed me off a bit, because games have this tendency of abusing the "distressed damsel" trope and I thought we had finished with this.

All in all, I really loved RE3, and I'd say the remake of 3 was also really good and I liked it more than the other one.  

Having finished with the "classic" ones, I'll talk next about RE4, where they renewed the franchise completely and I have pleeeenty to say....

Resident Evil 2: The old version & the remake

 Although the first game was the original and the one I tried first, the second one was the one I played the most when I was little. 

 

Resident Evil 2 seemed to me easier, shorter, more approachable than the first one for some reason. There's also the fact that I played a version that came with an activated "cheat" that let you use powerful weapons with infinite ammo, which made things easier overall. This meant that I played the original several times, back to back, just for fun and to see if I could do it better or to show it to someone else too, playing with friends and relatives, and therefore I have quite good memories with it. 

The old version plays the same way as the 1st one, with weird camera angles and basic block graphics, herbs and sprays to heal, and basically same weapons, with maybe a few new ones like a flamethrower, an electric stunner and a machine gun. That's the standard weapons, of course. The special edition I played also had an infinte rifle, an infinte bazooka and an infine gatling gun, which made things easier of course. The enemies were more modular than before, making it easier to aim for certain areas and maim them or shot their heads off. Enemies were still mostly zombies and zombie dogs. Hunters did not appear again (luckily, probably the reason why it was easier), and lickers were introduced, which are harder than a zombie but not very hard overall, although quite disgusting and more intimidating at first. 

This time around we had a main antagonist, the chief researcher that created the virus, that got infected and mutated worse and worse as we won fights against it. And of course, the setting in this one is also very different: The virus has escaped around the city that was close to the mansion in the first game, and all the city has been infected. This means that the streets are full of zombies and that your only hope is to reach safe places that have been barred shut. 

The game has again two characters, Clarie Redfield (Chris' Sister, that has come to try to visit him or try to find him) and Leon Kennedy (a rookie policemen that has come to join the racoon city police department). They meet by chance while finding the first zombies, and then get separated by accident. You select one of them, but to finish the game you need to play as both, since each has a slightly different plot and they meet different people, although the areas and puzzles are mostly the same. The characters here are likeable and nice, which I mention because Leon in later games downgrades his personality quite a lot. 

The game starts in the streets of the city, which makes the first moments of action probably the hardest overall: You need to evade a lot of zombies with almost no weapons, till you get to the police station where most of the game, the first half, happens. The police station in turns acts like the house of the first game, with weird secrets inside, strange puzzles to open doors and sections requiring special keys. This is explained in-game by the fact that lots of officers are corrupt and working for Umbrella, to the point where part of the station is linked to secret areas and labs. From here you travel to some underground passages and abandoned areas till you reach the central Umbrella lab. The general feeling is that you spend most of the time underground. In the process you met occasionally some people, the most important ones being Sherry Birkin (a child, daughter of the monster that keeps following you) for Claire and Ada Wong (an FBI agent, or so she says, that clearly has other intentions too) for Leon, characters that appear also in later games (Ada is especially good about "dying" to then appear again and save you in some way while being always ambiguous about if she's bad or not). 

 In order to see the proper final ending, you need to play first as one character and then as the second one. The first character has more encounters with the final boss, but the second introduces a new villain: "Mr T.", a huge guy that clearly is some kind of monster, that follows you around and tries to kill you, which is revealed to be a new type of Tyrant (the final boss of the first game), a bioweapon that they dropped on you basically. Mr T. was a lot more annoying than the zombies and it made the game more interesting for the second playthrough, so you don't just repeat the scenarios and puzzles and some bosses. Both stories were matched nicely, making you avoid certain boss fights and just finding the result of them with your second character and the other way around, which was a great idea that forced you to play with both while presenting you with new plot.

The remake changes some things. For starters, the graphics are now amazing and realistic, to the point of being a bit disgusting at times: What before where blocky things now they can show gust and gore. The game is quite gorgeous though, that is true. Also a lot darker because now they can do torch light and show you only what you're looking at. The puzzles have been downgraded I have to say, being easier to do, and although each character has its own story still, there's more overlap, so it's less interesting to play the second character. The game is a bit more action-oriented because now you have a permanent third-person view behind the character, and you need to be accurate and shoot at enemies more like in a shooter, instead of being able to point in their general direction. They've also added some new areas, characters and a bit of new developments inside the plot. I'd say the biggest change is that now Mr T. appears in both playthroughs and he's a lot more mobile, tougher, more annoying, and it is quite scary to hear him walking around. The improvements it has are good to create tension, but it also feels they copied the idea from the 3rd game, which we will comment a bit later. I think the fact that it appears in both games now is not as nice, part of the fun was knowing the other character had no idea what you were going through. Same way as the puzzles are easier, the action part of the game becomes harder, with tougher enemies and more chances to miss your shots because of the new game mechanics. Overall is still really great though, and the new graphics are truly amazing, making you feel like you're in a movie. 

While I prefer some of the game design of the original, I cannot complain with the remake and I hope more older games get this treatment (especially thinking about Dino Crisis and Parasite Eve, which were also classics of the time and amazing games)

The original: Resident Evil

As I mentioned, let's start talking about Resident Evil, the first game of the saga. 

 

I had this game when I was a teenager, for the original PlayStation, but I never played it long enough to finish it, I always got stuck at some point or died and had to redo a lot and abandoned it. The best run I had was when I played till the second snake combat.This game was one of the first popular survival horror games, and I remember seeing it with my cousins or talking about it with classmates, and it had lots of important new concepts. Maybe there's other games that also did the same, but this one for sure was the one that popularized them. 

 I played a remastered version, so it's the same game but with better graphics, and it seems some reshuffled puzzles, sometimes.

 The game starts after a very cheesy live-action video of some soldiers/police being hunted as they try to arrive to the house by strange monsters, which seem to be basically dogs. You can play as Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, and depending on your choice you'll find different allies and the plot will vary slightly. Chris playthrough is harder plus I always like to play as the women in games, so of course I chose Jill. Jill starts with a gun and has more inventory space, which is important. 

The game starts in the house you arrived, which apparently is owned by Umbrella Corporation. As you navigate the place, you find your first zombie, followed by more zombies and other monsters, and you discover that they're this evil organization that creates bioweapons in the form of viruses and the associated monsters. 

You spend a lot of time in the initial house before moving to other areas, and the creepy music, changing camera angles and insane puzzles give it a very nice atmosphere. The voice-acting is quite exaggerated, but considering there's not much cutscenes, it's fine. You keep finding journals of Umbrella employees, some of them quite sadistic, others just workers that got slowly infected and turned into zombies. Plenty of them talk about the weird house that requires emblems to open doors and other such things. During the game you also find occasionally other members of your group, although most of the time they're dead or dying. As you progress you discover that you may have a mole in your team, and that not all is as it seems...since in the end is your own boss, Albert Wesker, one of the bad guys that secretly works for umbrella. He keeps appearing in the series, and keeps being an annoying antagonist, although in this first one you discover this just at the end, when he's apparently killed by the final boss, a humanoid monster with a big claw that you end up killing with a special grenade launcher after surviving some minutes of combat with it.

The gameplay is the original one: You point to raise your weapon, and then you can rotate the character, point higher or lower, and shoot. You run around with a fixed camera showing you the room you're in, and sometimes the camera changes and then you may not know anymore which direction you're moving, which is kind of funny. Also sometimes the angle makes you not see that there's a zombie coming your way, so you also need to pay attention to the sounds around you, since different monsters have different sounds. 

The puzzles are not very hard, you just need to apply some logic, although some of them may take a bit longer than others. There's not a lot of variety in enemies, although soon enough zombies give way to faster and deadlier foes. Once you leave the house the areas manage to still be creepy, with special mention to the section where you meet some type of zombie prototype that is immortal. Related to that, there's an occasional boss fight, although they're not very hard in general but feel more like draining you of resources. The difficulty of the game is based on scarcity, and killing every monster you encounter, while making it easier for you to move, can make you run out of ammo or health items. 

The inventory system where important quest items, weapons and ammo all share the same limited space is a bit of an annoyance, I have to say. Usually it causes you to either go unprepared sometimes or having to backtrack to grab an item, leave in the the storage, go back to grab another one and so on. This extends the game unnecessarily, but well, it's more realistic than carrying everything with you, that's true. This reminds me that the health system deserves a special mention: You use "herbs", the green one heals you, the blue one cures poison and the red one increases the green one potency (1 red + 1 green is the same as 3 greens). How do you use the herbs is never addressed, but when you combine them they look suspiciously...joint-like. You do have also healing sprays though, to heal fully.

The original graphics were quite primitive, although groundbreaking for their time. This remastered version has improved models, but still feels similar in how some elements of the background that you can interact with are clearly more visible because they're a 3d model and not a more realistically painted wall fixture. However the whole thing feels just charming and not bad. 

 The game has a few different endings based on your actions in key moments of the plot. While not very different exactly, I always think more games should have this philosophy, since it makes it more interesting to replay it and try to see what did you miss last time, with the best ones doing it in a way that you get the whole story after finding all the endings. This first resident evil doesn't quite achieve this, but it sure adds an extra layer of wanting to do all the correct steps to get the best one. While i've never played with Chris, the game is almost the same, changing only the companions you find along the way. I also have to say that Jill, even if the protagonist, gets some annoying damsel-in-distress moments where this other big guy has to come and save you, something that feels totally unnecessary.

Overall it's a great first game, a bit long I have to say, that starts in a great creepy tone while putting strong bases for the next ones.

Latest Confinement Games

This past year I've strongly reconnected with my gaming side, since there was not much else to do sometimes.  I'd like to comment on a few of these games that I've played or I'm still playing.

 

 First, there are the Resident Evil saga. With plenty of time and seeing as we were in lock-down, I decided to get myself most of the resident evil saga games, from 1 to 7. There are other spin-offs, of course, but some of them I never really finished or played properly. Others were just re-maked recently, and seemed like a good idea to replay all of them. They have faults, but it's one of the first horror games I played and it's still fun to revisit and check it. For them though, I've decided I'll write a post for each one, and here I'm just mentioning them for the moment. I will just say that it took a while to get through all of them...

Then, Control. I've talked about Control before and it's still awesome, but recently there was some new DLC. I've done the first part and it was as good as the rest, introducing some new mechanics and being overall really good. Now I've heard that the second part of that DLC includes a section that ties with Alan Wake, and I'm very curious to play this soon, as Alan Wake had lot of potential but it was at the end that this potential shined, to then be left hanging and unfinished, with the protagonist still stuck in a nightmare dimension of some type. I don't know what will happpen in the DLC, but I'll be happy to try it soon and see if there's some closure finally.

 A game that I also talked before about but that I left unfinished was Alien Iolation. This game was very very scary, as mentioned, and playing it required a special state of mind. However during this period I finally played it for longer periods and more seriously. Once I got into track, I have to say that it's still scary, but also a bit frustrating and a bit too long in the end. There were sections that felt a bit repetitive, and also there's a limit to "and then things got worse" can happen without being tired about not catching a break ever. Nevertheless the game is still pretty good, and I consider it as a horror masterpiece for sure. I was very glad to finish it I have to say....

For a while now I've heard good things about the Doom remake that was published some years ago. This year Doom Eternal was also published, a continuation of the other one, so I decided to give the first one a try. Doom would correspond, by number, to Doom 4. I've played 1st and 2nd, of course, and they're classics. I didn't play the 3rd one because at the time I didn't feel like playing as much, and what I've heard is that it tried to be more like survival horror, something that Doom should not be. Well, I have to say that this new Doom recuperates very well the spirit of the first ones. It's brutal, it's fast, and it's a lot of fun. Playing it feels like dancing, you don't stand in one place for a second and you transition from enemy to enemy, from gun to gun, in a complicated pattern of jumping/shooting/evading/crushing that feels organic and challenging. It's not an easy game, but it feels rewarding. 

I've started Doom Eternal recently, and it looks amazing and more open, with lots of things to explore, but also the difficulty seems ramped up even more and I'm struggling a bit with that. I didn't get stuck that fast with the previous Doom. I believe this is not ideal in any game, but well, we'll see. It does have even more mobility and tools, so I'd say it's a more complex type of dance. Also, plot-wise it lacks a bit of connection between the two games. I don't know if there were expansions or something that I missed, but original Doom and original Doom Eternal should be enough to understand what has happened in a linear way, and currently they're not, which detracts a bit. Still feels like a good game though.

As part of promoting their new game shop, Epic games have been giving awesome free games, and one of them has been Civilization VI. I didn't play any other Civ games, although I've heard a lot of good things about them, so I gave it a try. I have to say it's quite addictive, quite complicated and well, overall awesome. I understand a lot better now what other people have been saying about them. It's a complex strategy game with different paths to victory (science, military, religion, culture...I feel I'm missing another one. But you get my point), although some seem easier than others. It has a crazy amount of options and combinations, and it's turn based and rather long, I'd say. But well, I've played a couple of games against computer and yeah, definitely recommending it if you like strategy and civilization-building. Reminds me in a good way of the table game 7 Wonders.

For Christmas, in my new place we got some credit to buy in amazon as part of a Christmas basket. I took the chance to get some of the games I comment here, plus I also got Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2, a remake of the skateboarding games. I played 2 and 3 when I was a teenager and I really loved them, 2 more than 3 I have to say but 3 was still rather good. I know that after 3 it got all weird, but the original idea was simple, amazing and good. You just have different scenarios with goals, and 2 minutes to do them. This version has much better graphics, although I remember the scenarios as if they were the same, because of how immersive the original was. You have a selection of skaters to use, you can max up their stats, and in the end you get a video of the real-life skater doing cool stuff. The things you do inside the game are quite unrealistic, but it's still really enjoyable to do different tricks, combine combos and mess around. One thing that helps a lot is that the soundtrack of the games was quite amazing, and it motivated you into doing tricks. It's a game where you keep learning how to do increasingly more complex goals, and while simple it's strangely compelling. I've finished all the main goals already of all the stages, but there's still plenty of secret goals, and skater videos to unlock, and it feels relaxing and fun to play it.

Finally, I'd like to talk about Hades. Hades is a rogue-like slash-them-up game, similar to Bastion. It has an isometric perspective, you control the son of Hades, Zagreus, trying to escape the greek Underworld, armed with a sword or some other special weapon, and you find random rooms with random monsters. When you die, which is normal, you appear again in the underworld where you can interact with the people there before trying to escape again. Every time you may recollect certain items and experience that may make your life easier, unlock new weapons and in general get better, so next time you get further. What's more, that's a bit of a spoiler but even when you finish the escape successfully, you end up dying again and having to repeat the whole thing, around 10 times to reach a point where the main plot is "complete", while leaving subplots and branches to investigate. That may seem tedious but it's not. It has amazing art, great voice acting, the gameplay is intuitive and fast and never boring, and every time a number of gods give you special boons to help you and the different combinations are quite interesting and change things quite a lot. The plot is developed between escape attempts, and characters are rich and interesting. This game is an independent game that has received quite a lot of praise, and it's very well deserved. Also, the developers of this game have folowed rather ethical practices, so I'm more than happy to support such things. I really recommend it.

 

That's all for the moment, I'll try to write posts for the Resident Evil games soon :)

Creating Your Own Narrative In Rebellion

Warning: Geeky post ahead...

As I keep saying, I love to play games...however, we don't have much free time every day, so we tend to use it to do things together like watching a movie or series. Sometimes we play together, but it needs to be some special game, with a plot, interesting to watch too.

Anyway, that means I have a big waiting list for games....not necessarily new games, since I also love replaying. And just now I have been(and I haven't finished ) re-playing Star Wars: Rebellion.

I don't know if I mentioned it before, but I'm...well, cannot really say a Star Wars fan maybe, but well, a fan of the universe described in Star Wars, or fan of the original trilogy and of several of its games. Some people like the force and the lightsabres,  some people may like the story...but what attracted me since I was little were the spaceships.

I loved the spaceships. I loved the small fighter types, the transports, the capital ships..and I especially loved the Imperial ships.

I mean, look at an Imperial Star Destroyer..it's a city-sized monster with lasers. Look at a Super Star Destroyer dwarfing all the other ships....look at the Tie Interceptor, sleek and menacing, agile and fast...look at the spotless decks, the white polished ships, at the superior technology....of course I like the Imperials.

Also, the Imperial March kicks ass...

Anyway, that's something that I always remember being attracted to, the ships and the space combat, although it is in the games that I really started to love it...Games like X-Wing, Tie Fighter and the corresponding successors.

So imagine my emotions when, as a kid/teenager, I heard they were making a game,  a strategy game, where you could expand your side, conquer planets, make fleets, etc. I remember hearing about it and salivating, basically. Most other games made by LucasArts were pretty awesome, so a Star wars strategy game where you controlled all that seemed a dream come true.

I remember the game took some time, was delayed, etc...and when it came out it was not a success.

This was because the game has big flaws.

The first one is the interface. Playing the game is more like managing windows and trying to copy files from one folder to another. Everything opens windows and plenty of times you need to rearrange then and move them around to do what you want. With a rather low resolution, this becomes a problem fast..

The available actions are not evident, and it is actually a bit annoying how you manage building things and assigning them to planets. Mission assignment is also not very clean, and movement without confirmation means that a mistake can send something the wrong way without you realizing it or being able to do anything about it.

Then you have the graphics. They are not good even  for the time, with plenty of low resolution images and less than stellar original drawings.

There is also the space combat area, which uses a different interface. It still is pretty clunky, not comfortable, and hard to operate efficiently. The graphics in this section are also not good, with 3D models without details and without realistic shapes and forms. To put an example, the SSDs should look impressive as hell, but they look kind of small and short. Also, the combat lacks detail, showing only the occasional laser. The internal engine maybe only does a combat simulation once every so much seconds, but only firing once in so much seconds looks bad. In the end you have the option to let the computer to take charge of the battle, and plenty of times this is better.

The game itself also has a lot of little annoying bugs, like needing to click several times to make someone start a mission and similar issues.

There is no plot, you just start after the first death start and continue your way, and the planet assignment and forces makes no sense, starting with a few planets and spaceships even if you're the Empire. The game mechanics have some flaws that you can abuse and make the game easier, and I think it's not especially hard once you figure a few things out.

However, I loved the game. Even with all these flaws, I enjoyed it a lot. I loved designing new advancements, building capital ships, fighting in space, performing missions, recruiting and using diplomacy...one of the things I liked most is that you can rename all the ships, so I could recreate fleets from the X-Wing games...

The game has sectors with around 10 planets each, and you have a few central sectors and lots of outer sectors. Central sectors are populated and can be neutral or support the rebels or the Empire, while outer sectors tend to have just a few populated planets, and you can colonize the rest. You can control a planet that doesn't support you by assaulting it and leaving troops in there, but it is better to maximize support by making a character do a diplomacy mission on it. You have characters from the movies and expanded universe, and you can make them command troops and ships or perform missions, with each character having its strengths and weaknesses. You have ships, ground troops and buildings. Resources are quite simple, you can have mines and refineries, and this gives you maintenance units. Everything uses maintenance units to be build and maintained. Factories can be built in planets, and the more you have the faster things are built, but planets have a limit on buildings they can have.

Building and moving around takes days, and you can change the speed of time passing. Usually the game is played by triggering movements, missions and constructions, and then speeding things up until something interesting happens.

The game is hard to win and hard to loose: you need to capture the 2 leaders of the rival side (the leaders cannot be killed) and destroy the rebel base (you only need to do it once but the base can move around) or capture the planet Coruscant (you need to maintained control of it but you always know its location). This means usually you will need to conquer everything or be very lucky to win the game.

In these games without plot, you create the plot. You create an internal narrative, and you get attached to squads and characters without there being a real plot, just based on random events. And there's plenty of those, that make the game extremely interesting, at least for me. I'm going to explain some of them....

For starters, one of the most common stories that motivates you to play this game is as follows: you have control of some planet with big support, and then the other side comes with a fleet and bombs the place. You have some fleet situated somewhere else, and you move it there. You arrive late, and meanwhile the enemy is now in another close planet, bombing it. You start a nice chase around the sector, but every time you encounter them they flee. Then you finally research the interdiction technology and create a ship that blocks hyperspace jumping, and when you finally catch again with them you disintegrate them and feel quite rewarded...

Another good one is when you send a diplomat to some neutral planet. Diplomats are usually the nicest characters, and some of them get really good at it, so you develop certain care for them, also because not so many characters can do this. However, this time the planet changes sides before they reach it, and when they arrive they get captured or even wounded.

Of course what follows is a epic rescue mission across the galaxy, searching for the fleet that had them and hoping you didn't blow them up in that last combat...and when the mission is successful you feel pretty awesome^^

To finish the post, one last story...

If you control the Empire, you can make death stars. They are very expensive, hard to maintain and take forever to build, but once you have one you can destroy planets. The downside is that this lowers Empire's support in all planets in the galaxy (usually your actions just increase or lower support in on planet or one sector, so this is a big deal, you can end up losing all planets).

The first time I played the game, I was having difficulties in capturing the enemy leaders and in convincing sectors to like the Empire. I had maintenance problems and ships were falling apart. Tired of this and just to see what happened, I managed to get a death star and I proceeded to visit planets that supported the rebels and blow them to pieces.

Fast enough I had whole sectors rebelling against me. Of course, I was a bastard leaving a path of destruction on my way...I even started to destroy planets that had slightly lost support, but I was leaving no land to hide.

And then something magical happened, that I don't know if it's a bug or was programmed like this....the sectors that I still controlled, not that many by that time, started being indifferent to me blowing up another planet. Not only that, support for the Empire started to increase galaxy - wide after each new destroyed planet. Planets were cheering around for every new explosion.

It was awesome,  I had manage to obtain support by pure fear somehow, or by tiredness. I think it was a bug maybe, but it was extremely funny.

With the support of these sectors too afraid to complain, I laid waste to half the galaxy, and eventually managed to capture the rebels (because they ran out of planets :D )

It was one of the best narratives I've ever seen in this type of game :D

Double Fine And Broken Age

A few weeks ago I was finally able to play Broken Age for a little bit, and I thought I wanted to explain the story, since we're rather proud to have participated in it :)

For those of you who do not know, Double Fine is a games development company created by Tim Schafer. Tim was one of the people working in LucasArts when they developed some of the greatest graphic adventures ever created, and he did or participated in most of them. However, one of the last games, Grim Fandango, didn't do good in sales. This, accompanied by other great graphic adventures that failed to produce money, caused big studios to abandon this format of gaming. 

After Grim Fandango, Tim went to create Double Fine, and they produced a number of games. Their first one was Psychonauts, another great game (this time a platformer) that did not do so well on sales at the beginning and did not help the company in stabilizing its situation. 

The next game they developed was Brütal Legend. However, during its development, their publisher (Activision) decided that they wanted a different game, and when the studio declined to change it, Activision dropped them. The studio managed to make an agreement with EA to publish the game instead, but then Activision filled a lawsuit claiming that they had invested in the game and were still interested. Things eventually got resolved, but the studio suffered from it, and the game didn't have all the content it originally should have, and became quite shorter. It still is a pretty good game. The gameplay is a little bit lacking, but the story, cast and atmosphere are really awesome. 

After this incident, Double Fine was in a precarious situation, lacking money and low on morale. They managed to stay afloat by releasing some smaller games produced with the same engine used in Brütal Legend. In this situation,  they remembered that fans constantly were asking them to do one graphic adventure like the ones in the past. Big companies said that this was no longer profitable, and therefore no one wanted to invest on them...but with the internet, there were alternative ways of financing such a project.

Kickstarter is a website that lets you donate money to projects you believe are worth doing and that lack funding. At the time when Double Fine was considering its future, Kickstarter had done some small campaigns, with only one or two very successful ones.

Double Fine decided to make their fans prove what they were saying and proposed to fund a new graphic adventure, using this video to promote the bid. The initial bid was 400.000 dollars, which is quite a big sum, of course...

For some weird reason, I managed to find out about this the same day that they put this video up. I got really excited about this, and I went to check the Kickstarter page. I wanted to donate money so a small, great game company could basically do whatever they wanted with no publishers messing around the final product.

When I entered the page, donations had reached 800.000 dollars. The 400.000-mark had been crushed in less than 8 hours. The Kickstarter server was crashing and didn't handle the load well. In the middle of this, I managed to make a small donation. I explained the story to Olia, and she got excited about it as well, and we started to check the page and refresh to see what was happening. In a few minutes thousands of dollars were being donated to the project. Everybody was crazy about it, the comments of the people participating were awesome, and checking twitter accounts of people from Double Fine and Tim Schafer, they couldn't believe it either.

We actually saw it arrive to 1.000.000 dollars. It was amazing, and less than 24 hours had passed. It felt like  a special moment of partying with the world.

After this, the rhythm of donations slowed down, and days passed without big donations. However, in the month that the campaign lasted, they managed to get 3.3 Millions.

I forgot about this for a long time, and after I while I read that even with that money they had production problems, because they made the game way too big. In the end they divided the game in two, and decided to sell the first part and then produce the second part (that would not require another purchase).

The game came out just recently, and since I was a backer, I had the right to get a copy. I didn't install it in a long while, but some weeks ago we finally tried the game that we helped a little bit to make.

We haven't played much, for obvious reasons....but we can already tell: Broken Age is awesome. The animation, the drawings, the voice acting, the music,  the little details...it's incredible, it feels like playing inside of a painting.

What remains to be seen is if the plot and the puzzles are also top notch since we haven't played much....but so far the feelings we're getting are pretty good.

The most important thing about all that is that it has shown that publishers can be very, very wrong about their opinions. Sure, publishers know a number of tricks that increases your chances of being economically successful, and they may correctly guess that some projects will fail...but this is not an exact science. Publishers are also usually ruled by rich people with very fixed ways of thinking that prevents innovations, or just adapting to new times.  And now there's lots of chances to make something awesome and popular, that innovates in things that nobody has dared to try, and we're free to put such ideas to popular vote in form of donations.

Anyway, Broken age seems like a great game, and  supporting it guarantees that Double Fine will keep producing imaginative, incredible games. 

Metal Gear And Other Classics

Elay (our future son, if he's really a boy) seems to be quite comfortable and hasn't come out yet, although it's a matter of days now.

I cannot help but feel that right now I'm in a waiting state. Any minute now labour could start, so I have the feeling I'm doing small things to distract my attention to this fact. 

One of the things I've been able to do is to play some computer games, on my PC or in Xbox. These are all old games, and I want to comment on them, because they're clearly classics. 

First, on my PC I got some really nice games that I already owned, but that I have now in my GOG account. Among these games, lately I've tried to play again "The Last Express", "Commandos" and "Carmageddon".

The Last Express is a graphic adventure set in the Orient Express, right before the first world war. It has a rich and complex story, with interesting characters and different conspiracies. It tries to show the feelings people had in Europe at that time, and I believe it succeeds very well. The mechanics are very simple: You navigate the train, find clues and things, talk with passengers, and sneak into private compartments. There's also some action sequences in which you need to evade attacks.

The graphics of this game are weirdly awesome. They used real actors and rotoscopy, so the faces are quite alive. The train is rather nice, with lots of luxury touches. This game costed a lot of money to make, and was considered a great game, but did poorly in sales, which helped to end the development of graphic adventures.

I love trains, specially night trains, with their private compartments and bunk beds and all that....and this game gives an awesome impression of being in one. It also puts you in that time period, with loads and loads of extra information, like newspapers, that are not necessary for the plot, but add to the atmosphere. The clues and actions to take are not evident and require you to eavesdrop, sneak around, and use your brain. The game also uses a very unique system of representing real time, with actions happening at certain moments independently from the fact that you are there to see them, and you don't save the game, you can just go back in time to fix something, specially if you fail at some point or do something stupid (and the game gives you freedom to prematurely end it in lots of ways) .

The Last Express is a great game, and it's a real shame that because of its failure to gain money no more similar games were made (a sequel was cancelled, and the game ends leaving some questions unresolved...although it could be considered an ending nevertheless).

Commandos is a strategy game, developed by a Spanish game studio and set in the second world war. You control a small number of very specialised soldiers, and you need to perform missions in which you need to infiltrate German areas to perform key tasks that will help win the war.

In this game you need to sneak around, distract patrols, deploy bombs and other tasks while being undetected, to avoid reinforcements. The graphics area really beautifully done, representing several areas in Europe and Africa. The game is incredibly advanced for the time and for being Spanish, and it's really addictive. You always need to keep all your soldiers alive, and you need to combine them in smart ways, analysing patterns of patrols and using your resources very carefully. It's a very difficult game, but it's totally worth it. There's a second and third part, which are even more detailed, with more options, more things to consider when sneaking around (which makes them even more difficult), and with real 3D scenarios (in the first game you only had a 2.5 perspective that was impossible to change).

The highly addictive and hard missions are combined with explanations of the war's progression and footage of that time. Everything adds up to one of the best strategy games ever, really intense and addictive.

Carmageddon is an (in)famous game. You drive a car, and you kill people and other cars while "racing". You get points and time by doing these things, and you get even more points and time the more brutal the killing has been done. There's no plot whatsoever, and you just go through several stages, gaining ranks and obtaining improvements while stealing other cars.

This game is very, very violent....but so over-the-top violent, that you cannot take it seriously. Even the slightest touch at the lowest speed makes people to explode in a rain of blood and guts, accompanied with the corresponding sound effects, while you get extra points for "artistic impression" and other such things. Even the game itself makes it clear how stupidly over the top is, by showing you a severed hand when using the mouse, and by asking if you're sure you want to go back to the real world when quitting.

Each stage can be completed by killing all civilians, by wasting all other competitors or by finishing all the laps and checkpoints in the stage. Usually, the best way to finish is by wasting competitors (completing the race is boring, and killing all civilians is an insane task when there's usually around 600 per stage and they don't show up on the map). Therefore the main gameplay is to trash other cars, which is not as violent...however, the main selling point, and the thing that was used to try and ban the game in some places was the "killing civilians" part, of course.

The graphics in this game are not that great, the cars are 3d models and the civilians are flat textures moving around. The moment you let an opponent go far away, they become really hard to differentiate from the rest of the environment, and in general everything is a like a big, bright mess.

Even with all this and with no plot, this game is absolutely awesome. It does so many things well, it's impressive. The soundtrack is based on heavy metal riffs and sounds, reminding me of Fear Factory style. The driving is just plain fun, with physic laws be dammed. Trashing other cars is also lots of fun, and the extra pedestrian killing while this happens is just brutal with heavy black comedy style. I always picked the girl driver (because the guy looks retarded), and to hear "sorry!" while splashing the insides of some pedestrian on the road was always so stupid that it keeps being funny.

This game did so many things right, it will always be mind-numbingly fun. Just to take your highly-modified car, accelerate and frontally crash against an opponent, sending both of you flying for thousands of meters and falling on top of some unlucky bystander.

I've been playing these games in my laptop. However, I've also been playing a little bit on my Xbox, where I have finally finished Metal Gear Solid 2, and I've started the 3rd one.

Metal Gear Solid was a game for PlayStation. It follows the plot of two older games, in which the main character, Solid Snake, infiltrates some installation to kill terrorists. This newer version for PlayStation had the same initial plot. The principle is very basic, but things get complicated quite fast, and the plot gets very complex, with interesting characters, while mixing philosophical ideas and in general trying to pass a very anti-war message and hating that you have to defeat some people (while doing pretty awesome war-related things...and somehow it all works and makes sense).

I still remember the first time I played Metal Gear Solid, for no more than 15 minutes I believe. After that, I bought a PlayStation and this game right away, to be able to play it at home (and at that time, that meant spending 90% of my savings...just after those 15 minutes of play).  The second and third part were already made for PlayStation 2, a console I never bought, so I had the trauma of not continuing with the story.

The Metal Gear games are very movie-like. They have great voice-acting, intense action scenes, camera effects and other tricks like that, while sometimes breaking the 4th wall and talking directly about things that the player is doing (and not the character). Their plots are incredible, very complex and plenty of times totally ridiculous, but in an awesome way.

Recently, they made a special version of metal gear solid 2 and 3, plus another one called Peace walker, for the Xbox. I bought this HD version quite fast, but I didn't get around to play them until recently.

Metal Gear Solid 2 is, in a way, a retelling of the first game. The plot is very different, but there's lots of things that are very similar, and that's an actual plot point. The whole game can be easily understood by the following fact: The game's creator didn't want to make this game, he was forced to do so by fan's request, and the game is the way the creator punished the fans.

I'm not saying the game is not good...but, for example, during 90% of the game, the player controls this other character, not Solid Snake, who is clearly not as good. Meanwhile solid Snake is doing stuff around you too, showing how awesome he is (and you cannot control him). That's a clear response to the fact that fans wanted more solid snake. Another poke is the fact that you don't seem to control the actions in the game, you just do as you're told, mindlessly, and the game insults you for that.

There's other things and plot points that help to give this message. The game is still really good, with a difficult story, very confusing and ridiculous sometimes, but interesting. The gameplay is the same as the previous game, with some extra actions you can do now (like aiming in 1st person with any weapon). You still need to sneak around, distract and avoid guards, and such things. However, it's true that it's important to know these facts about the creator before playing, otherwise you could get annoyed about it.

After finishing the 2nd game, I finally started the 3rd. I haven't played much yet, just a little more than one hour, but I can already see that the 3rd one is incredible. It's much better than the 2nd one (I guess this time the creator did not mind), with important changes in gameplay. The most important overall change seems to be that this one explains a story that happened in the past, and instead of controlling Solid Snake, you control his "father" (well, Solid snake is a clone). In just one hour I got quite an awesome feeling, kind of like a Bond movie (after all, the game has an introduction, a break with bond-style credits, images and music-including a female singer, dream-like images and lyrics that vaguely reference the game's name-, and then the real game starts).

One thing it's true about these games....the cinematics are a little too long. It is nice to see a story develop in its own pace, but sometimes you play for 10 minutes and then watch a 60-minute cinematic. It also does not help that you cannot pause them, which makes it annoying since you cannot take breaks to, for example, just go to the toilet. Playing the 2nd game I skipped one or two by mistake, just trying to pause the game.

However, it's also good to see a game that centres itself in the plot, and makes sure that the acting, the graphics and everything else makes you forget you're the player and submerges you into a different world. Even the first game achieved that, and made you forget that the graphics were very simple and the faces were not even moving while talking, they had a fixed expression. When a game makes you forget these things and the memory you have of it is of action-packed scenes, dialogue between people, and a complex, interesting story, you can tell the game is really really great. All metal gear solid games I've played so far achieved this without problems.

And that's all for the moment. We'll see how much more waiting will we do....

New Graphic Adventures

Since I discovered the GOG page, I also discovered that graphic adventures, one of my favourite genres that has spent some years without new developments, actually have survived and there are some new ones available.

Made mostly by indie companies, these new graphic adventures may not be innovative regarding gameplay, but they transmit a similar feeling as the old ones, using today's graphics.

In the past months I have bought (always important to buy games if you want similar ones to be produced in the future) and played some of them. I have not finished them all, but all of them seem to be really great. I'd like to comment on a few of them:


Deponia: This is the first game I found in GOG that was mentioned as a very nice and new graphic adventure, while being funny like the original ones (Monkey Island, Day of The Tentacle) or some others (like Discworld). I was afraid I would find it childish or stupid, but there was an offer for this game, so I decided to get it and try it.

The game puts yourself in Deponia, a world made of trash. You're Rufus, an idiotic young guy who invents all kind of things, usually resulting in injuries and mayhem. He wishes to leave Deponia and reach the Elysium, a futuristic floating palace that has no contact with the Deponians.  After one of his latest inventions, he ends up causing Goal, a girl from Elysium who is exploring the planet, to fall into Deponia's surface, rendering her unconscious. From this point, Rufus will try hard to make her recover from her fall and bring her back to the palace together with him.

First, the graphics are rather awesome. Everything is made out of 2D drawings in high resolution, and I believe the animations are also very nice. The music is good, without being specially memorable. The gameplay is simple and traditional, point and click style, and you don't have any inventory limitation (which is also traditional and funny sometimes, considering the amount of clutter you carry around). All this is technical stuff, and even if it is nice to have good graphics and good interface, the most important things are other ones.

Graphic adventures are usually based and evaluated on their plots and their puzzles. Deponia's plot is a kind of traditional "Distress Damsel" plot, but it is well executed. The best part are the characters, clearly defined and interesting. The world setting itself is quite weird, impossible to actually be functional but still interesting. You're curious to learn all the little details of this society, and as the plot advances, you want to know what will happen next. The main character is idiotic, but he does try to do good things, even when making a couple of bad decisions.

The puzzles themselves are rather hard. The logic behind them is quite twisted, and some particular ones are too obscure or illogical for my taste, it's hard to think that certain actions will work as the solution of a particular problem. Nevertheless they are interesting. Mixed with the normal puzzles, there are sometimes "mini-game" puzzles, which you can skip if you want but that are usually very interesting, while possible to do.

The humor in this game is ok, maybe not very smart, or maybe not that good, but good enough that I enjoyed it while playing. Comedy is a very subjective thing, and evidently it's not the same as some of the works that advertisements says this game resembles (like Discworld), but it's still good.

The game ends in the middle of the action, since this is supposed to be the first out of 3 games, but I enjoyed it very much in the end. Since I wanted to know how the story continued, I got the second part too.

Chaos on Deponia: This is the second Deponia game. It has mostly all the strengths and weakness of the previous one, with a few differences: First, in this game we see more of Goal, who was unconscious most of the time in the previous one, and we can get a better idea of her character. This makes her more interesting, before that we didn't know anything about her. Some other characters are given also more definition, and the plot becomes more complex and important. All this is good. The bad parts of this game are that some jokes and puzzles are...cruel. They make the main character a stupid mean person, while during the first game he was just stupid, but with good intentions. Some things are not really funny, even considering black humour, and I didn't like that part. I will talk about later, but Harvey's New Eyes manages to do cruel things while making sense, being funny using black humour, and keeping the characters interesting. This one does not achieve such things. Still, the plot remains interesting, the puzzles and worlds to explore are quite nice, and I definitely want to play the third and final part, whenever they release it.

A New Beginning: In contrast with Deponia, this game has a more serious approach, while still having humour in it. The company that developed it is the same, but in this case they tried to made a morality tale, to give awareness about environmental problems. However, the game does not feel preachy, and is interesting and compelling.

I haven't finished this game, but what I've seen and played has given me great sensations. The animations and graphics are all very detailed and high resolution 2D drawings, but not as cartoonish as with Deponia. The music is nice, the voice acting is good, and in general it seems a very good game.

The plot is interesting, involving time travel and surviving in a post-apocalyptic environment (at least, that's what I've seen so far). The puzzles are logical so far, while still being hard, and there is also an occasional "mini-game" puzzle, which are always fun to solve. I don't know if this will be true during all of it, but it's certainly worth to play.

Edna & Harvey: This is actually two games, "The Breakout" and "Harvey's New Eyes". I finished the Breakout and I'm currently at the beginning of the second one.

The Breakout explains the story of Edna, a mental patient who wants to escape the clinic, together with her imaginary friend Harvey, a bunny toy. Edna does not remember anything, but believes that she's quite sane. While trying to escape, she will interact with other patients and doctors, while remembering more and more about her past with the help of Harvey.

The graphics and animation in this game are 2D, cartoonish and very simple (compared with Deponia). However, the voice acting is very good. The puzzles are quite logical, which is surprising for an asylum, but it makes the game less frustrating, since what you need to do makes sense if you speak with the people around you. The music is great, very simple while managing to transmit lots of emotions, specially in the most serious parts of the game, or in the flashbacks.

The plot is amazing. You can guess what's going on and what will happen in the end after the first 5-10 minutes, but it doesn't stop it from being amazingly done. The gameplay makes you do things that clearly show that Edna is insane, and it's stuff that you do yourself, a nice touch to provide immersion. I liked a lot the humour used in the game, crazy and surreal sometimes. However, the game has quite serious moments, and it's not only some whacky adventure. The game is not very hard or long, but the experience of playing is really a great one, very recommended.

Harvey's New Eyes follows the adventures of Lilli, a little girl in a convent. There are elements in common with the Breakout, but it cannot be considered a direct sequel. It works in a very similar way, with improved graphics and animation. I have not finished the game yet, but so far it's also great, with lots of really really dark and black comedy. As I was commenting before, Chaos in Deponia has black comedy, but it seems cruel in there. In Havery's New Eyes, on the other hand, it fits quite well with the game, showing that something very dark and twisted is going on, in this world and in the twisted mind of the main character, who seems quite innocent while being clearly disturbed somehow. The gameplay also helps in the experience, in which you're doing terrible things yourself. The game so far manages to be funny while being very, VERY dark. Just as an example, a narrator explains everything that is happening in a kid-friendly and excited way, while you can see that reality does not match that description at all, like when you find an active bomb buried in the ground.

 The Cat Lady: I have only played 5-10 minutes of this game, but I already love it. I read it's a psychological horror graphic adventure, and it seems exactly that. The graphics may not be the best, but they're creepy and beautifully detailed, also 2D drawing-based. The interface is a little weird, and the animations are a little bit clunky. However, the voice acting, the atmosphere, the music and images seem great, really really creepy. Another example of a game that should be considered "art", I believe.  I'm at the very beginning, but as I mentioned, with just 5 minutes I got all these sensations, and not many games can pull something like that.


And that's all for the moment. I haven't tried yet Book of Unwritten Tales, which seems that it's also going to be very nice, and I need to really play and finish Harvey's New Eyes, A New Beginning and The Cat Lady. There's also the third part of Deponia in the near future, some other games that may not be a traditional graphic adventure but that I will try, plus the Double Fine new graphic adventure still in development, that may be really awesome, we'll see...

In any way, it seems that this "dead" genre (according to the big publishers) is still offering great titles that are totally worth buying...

Faster Than Light

Lately I've been playing with different games, and at some moment I may make one post about them. For the moment I want to talk about one in particular.

Some weeks ago I decided to get another indie game that I'd heard very good things about: Faster Than Light. It seems it was a kickstarter project, and lots of people really liked the idea and it became quite popular.

The basis of the game is rather simple: You have a spaceship with a crew and a certain equipment, and you need to escape a rebel fleet following you, contact your allies with important information and finally defeat the rebel mothership.

The thing that is rather refreshing for a videogame is that you do not pilot the spaceship, or aim its weapons. What you do is manage the tasks that the crew does, reassign power, select targets and weapons, and manage in general some basic aspects of the ship.

You start in a space location, in a randomly generated universe, and you need to navigate through several sectors. In each sector you need to jump between several locations, and in each locations you may have random encounters with other people and ships, you may have combats or you may shop and repair your ship.

Everything except the initial ship configuration is randomized. Even when you found the same event decsription twice, the outcome of the event may be different. Sometimes you have crew or equipment that gives better options in these random encounters, and sometimes you can get huge rewards or huge drawbacks.

Apart form that, you usually combat lots of ships, including rebels, pirates, slavers, automated droids and other aggressive species. You start with some weapons and some power, and by buying upgrades and equipment you need to add and distribute power to increase your ship capabilities, until you reach the final sector and fight the mothership.

The game is....well, hard. You cannot permanently save one point in time, if you continue playing after saving you will lose that save, and if you get killed, you need to start from the begginning. There are lots of options, and the wrong configuration can kill you pretty fast. After several games, you learn what works best, but still it's rather hard to get to the final sector. Once you're in the final sector, the Mothership, which requires 3 combats, one after the other, can quite easily destroy you in the first fight without you landing a shot, even when you were winning all previous combats.

Even while being a difficult game, and depending a lot on your luck given the randomness of the encounters, it's very easy to grasp the basics. It's also a game where a round till the last sector takes at max around 2 hours, which means that you can play 10 minutes, save, and continue later. This is a thing that I really appreciate, since you don't always have time to dedicate 1 hour to one game, and some games require that hour just to advance a little bit.

It kind of follows the idea of old games, where the difficulty was hard, and where if you got killed, that was it and you had to start again. It makes things more interesting after all, since each gameplay does not take very long anyway, and then you can just restart. Most modern games let you fail as many times as you need until you get the hang of it and pass that spot. This makes it easier to play, specially if you don't have much time to dedicate to it, but it also makes things much less interesting, since it's just a matter of reloading to the last 5 minutes, with no penalizations. FTL is much more severe in the penalization, and that makes you more involved during a playthrough. 

Becasue of all these properties, the game is incredibly addictive. You always want to get further, to try some new configuration, some new weapon. While playing, some special events give you access to other ships, and in each ship you can also unlock a different basic configuration, so the replaying value is huge. Some ships may be a little overpowered if you know how to use them, but oh well...after being destroyed so many times, it's also good to have some ship that can rip to pieces most of the obstacles you'll find.

I have finished the game in easy, once. Let's just say the Mothersip is quite the big bastard. However, depending on your luck, it can also turn into a curbstomp battle...this single time I won, I had managed to grab 3 burst laser 2 plus one ion bomb. The end result was that I did not even have to repair the ship between battles, and the first 2 of them were done really really fast. Then again, it was mostly luck to find a shop that sold that weapon, since the items in the shop are rather random too.

Summing it up, this is a really addictive game, really good while keeping things simple and fast, and really hard. I highly recommend it, and since the prices is quite low, I'd say to buy it, since you're supporting this style of game that tries to innovate in original ways.

Good Old Games and Indies

My birthday was on 6th of March, and I got lots of very nice presents.

One of these gifts was an electronic gift, by Denis: A game added to my account in some website, provided I create one in there. At first I thought it was spam from some website where I registered and put my real birth date  but after reading the personal comment I saw that it was for real. The game was System Shock 2, and after creating the account I was able to download it.

The website is called GOG (Good Old Games)

First, I will say that System Shock 2 seems really cool. I haven't finished the game (I haven't played very long, actually), but it's a hard game, with clearly lots of options and stuff. Graphics are old, of course, but the overall feeling is tense and scary, and I still don't know what's going on in there at all. I was told Bioshock is like a worse version of this game, and I can see that Bioshock, even with better graphics because of being released years later, has huge similarities with simplified gameplay. We'll see how it progresses.

Anyway, I'd like to talk about this website, and it's awesome. It has looots of old computer games that were absolutely awesome, and lets you buy them for a cheap price  usually, and modified so they (sort of) work with new computers. You basically just download the installer, and it installs the game with the necessary emulators, if any needed. Games do not have any DRM or anything like that, and anyway you have an account with the purchased games, so you can download them again if you need to. You also get some extras, like soundtracks or concept images, wallpapers and such things.

I like to pay for games, because of several reasons  First, it requires a lot of work from lots of people, so it's always good to support that work if you enjoy the game. Second, I don't have much free time, so if I only play games that I bought, I manage to keep their numbers under control. When I buy a game, I try to finish the game before getting 4 new ones (even if sometimes I do just that).

Of course, I like to pay when the prices are reasonable. This website is charging reasonable prices (6-10 dollars for an old game seems right), so I don't mind buying them.

The website also has indie games, which are also rather cheap. I don't know if you can get them from any other place that is cheaper, but it seems to me they're cheap enough. I'd like to comment about two more games I tried, Sanitarium and Hotline Miami.

Sanitarium is an old graphic adventure, one of the last ones made when they were still popular. In the game, you apparently have some kind of car accident and wake up with a bandaged face, in some kind of mental asylum. Things got weirder and creepier from there, where you explore places without knowing what's real and what's just in your mind.

This is an old game, so the graphics, voice and controls could be better...however, it's still pretty immersive, and really creepy. You explore really demented places, when trying to solve different types of puzzles, with a few action segments. It's hard to get really stuck, although sometimes you need to pixel hunt to find some hidden object...or you need to apply certain weird logic to solve some complex puzzle.

As you move through worlds, there's a number of repeating themes in them, that develop the story and give hints about what's going on...even if the plot itself has been used other times, so it's not that hard to guess. Still, it's quite a nice experience, and it gave me a very nice feeling, like playing old adventure games.

Hotline Miami is a new indie game. You can see Yhatzee's review here.  The game is new, but it's made in a a very retro style, with very simple graphics made by pixelated figures and scenarios (that still contain huge amounts of detail, usually quite gory). The music tries to emulate electronic music from the eighties, and it gives the whole thing a very special touch.

The game itself, when explained, seems to give arguments to those who say that videogames are just violent crap: You're some kind of professional killer, clearly demented, who gets messages in your answering machines with contracts. Once you have a contract, you go to the indicated place and kill everything that moves.

The gameplay is just that. You see everything from the top, so you see buildings as if they were maps of the floors, and you move around killing everything. You can punch people to stun them and then kill them on the floor, or you can steal their weapons and kill people with them. Everything kills in one hit or shot, and everybody, you included, dies after only one (well, there are some exceptions later in the game). If you die, you press R and restart right away, without loading times or anything. Firearms make noise, and when people hear it they rush towards that position, but they can kill from a big distance.

And that's about it. You need to plan your killing spree, and you usually need to react in milliseconds to new enemies coming towards you, or sudden changes in your plan. There's also the masks, which you gain when you complete missions, that give you different extra powers or advantages. It's incredibly addictive, really.

Between killing rampages the game even develops a complex and quite touching story, and without using any text, just by showing your house every time a mission start, and showing the changes that keep happening in it. It also shows that you, the main character, is clearly going insane as well.


I've heard that this game is the computer version of Drive. And in a weird way, it is....set in the 80s, with old music and style, you're some crazy psychopath that between jobs is trying to help some people...really, quite a deep and layered game for something that looks like this....

Highly recommended.