Cat Mario

Cat Mario is a short platformer that is a hilarious, ridiculously unfair knock off that has been designed to be as infuriating as possible. Kind of in the same vein as ‘I Wanna Be the Guy’, but a lot shorter and actually possible to finish in a reasonable period of time. I really recommend it as a little diversion. Besides, it’s free , probably because it’s crap (in a good way) and legally questionable.

Go have a look for a download if you’re into this kind of thing.

My best effort so far is just a single death. I have no screenshots but I swear it’s the truth.

The Witcher: First Impressions

The problem with reviewing RPG’s is that they’re really, really long. They can also be a little patchy, with awesome sections mixed in with horrible grind sessions. Sometimes the ending of an RPG actually ruins the entire experience. I remember Vampire: The Masquerade turning from an involving vampire story into a boring, buggy, brown dungeon crawler. Other times an RPG improves as the story goes on. Vagrant Story started off poorly and improved steadily until it reached a very cool and well-told ending. Fallout 3 went all over the place, with some of the best sections hidden around the map.

So I’m going to take the Witcher in a few pieces.

So far the least explicit of the postcards.

The Witcher has the player in the role of Geralt; a pasty white guy with strange eyes, magical mutagenic abilities and incredible reflexes. Geralt fights a monster in the opening cutscene, has a convenient case of amnesia and must learn all about his strange new world with the help of the player.

Anyway, the protagonist is introduced as a part of a small, declining group of monster hunters called Witchers, who appear to have been living in a large, abandoned castle. A collection of bandits make an attack on the Witcher’s hideout and the game almost immediately throws you into the action with barely a tutorial to guide the way. Luckily the combat is fairly simple. One click initiates an attack, a second click at the right moment chains another attack, and a third click activates a finishing move. Right clicking makes Geralt use magic. Double tapping a direction makes him dodge. Z, X and C chooses a fighting style. It feels a touch clumsy for the first few minutes, but is easy enough to pick up the flow of combat within a half hour or so. The controls are simplistic as compared to simple. I never had any serious problems with the combat system in terms of getting Geralt to do what I wanted him to, but it always felt slightly clumsy and limited. It’s possible that the range of things he can do improves throughout the game. On the normal difficulty I’ve only died twice, though I guess I’d count myself as a pretty experienced gamer. Both of those deaths were during a boss fight where I was stupidly trying to save an invincible NPC who falls over a lot when taking damage.

Like all PC RPG’s, the interface for levelling is unnecessarily complex and lacking in documentation. Once a level is gained a few bronze, silver or gold points are given out to distribute to various abilities. I like being a fire guy so I put a whole series into the fire magic tree and intelligence. The interface for making potions is a headache that takes a good half hour to really understand. It’s nothing too bad, but nonetheless makes the game flow badly for the first few hours.

The scenery is typical for a darker fantasy setting. There are lots of clouds hanging underneath a dreary sky, peasants toiling in muddy villages, glowing dog monsters, dull brown and grey stone walls and impossibly proportioned women in ridiculous fantasy outfits. There are spectres, hazy memories and a prophecy about the One Man who must find his fate. It’s pretty generic, but it works well enough to let me sink into the fictional world.

So far the Witcher has two main things that make it stand very slightly apart from other RPGs. First is the ridiculous sex scenes and associated dirty card collection. Geralt isn’t exactly an attractive guy. I’d go as far as to say he’s even less attractive than most of us geeks playing the game. He’s pasty white, a bit dirty looking, has a horrible stringy haircut, is as charismatic as laminex, wears a long red scar over his face and has funny yellow eyes. Nonetheless he still manages to get in bed with every second female NPC, sometimes without ever really flirting with them at all. They’re just that eager to sleep with him. After a silly cutscene the game gives out an explicit postcard as a reward. I’ve got three so far after about six hours of play. Sleeping with the female characters seems to have no tangible impact on the game’s story and merely exists as a little minigame. Collect them all! I’d say it was sexist, but Geralt himself hardly seems to be a misogynist and the female characters are otherwise presented as self sufficient and often quite powerful. Anyway, the target audience is younger men and this kind of thing is endemic in every fantasy game, I guess. I spose it sells a few extra copies. I’ll try collecting most of them for the sake of completion and screenshots.

It wouldn't be a PC RPG without unnessecary complexity.

The other main difference is the focus on using potions. I’ve always been slightly repusled by potions and elixirs in games, often finding them either useless or so rare that I’m reluctant to swallow one. Fortunately the whole potion thing is done well here. The potions in the Witcher last for ages and are rather powerful, but the toxicity level is used as an effective balancer on how many potions Geralt can swallow at any given time. They mostly consist of buffs to damage, health or basic statistics, but a few of the potions offer cooler effects like night vision. A good bit of the grinding and collecting in the Witcher is potion related, with several collectible ingredients necessary to make a single concoction. It works, though, and in a manner which is much better than just about any other RPG.

Overall, game itself was okay during the introduction. It wasn’t anything special – merely an adequate way of wasting time, as if I was watching Law & Order or CSI or any other generic, syndicated show. By the time I was part way through the first area, I found myself feeling like it was somewhat of a grind. Then it picked up a little and came to a nice little climax with the cutscenes surrounding a fight with the Beast. So far, the Witcher is almost, almost, very nearly fun. It drags itself around in small amounts of grind and generic environments, before shining for a moment with a fun battle or interesting piece of lore, then returning back to dullness. I’m enjoying it, sure, but The Witcher has so much potential to be better. Hopefully it will improve as I get further into the game.

The Path

The Path is a short horror game made by an independent company called Tale of Tales. As far as I know there have only been a few horror games in the past four or five years, such as Alone in the Dark, Deadspace (kind of) and some re-hashed Silent Hill titles. I’m not counting Resident Evil 4 or 5 because it’s turned into a ridiculously over the top action game… which is admittedly lots of fun, but barely even tries to create fear.

So I played the demo and watched the Let’s Play video of it.

The Path is barely a game in the traditional sense of the word. The controls consists simply of forward, back, left, right and run. To interact with an object simply requires that the player stand in front of it and press nothing at all. Instead, it works mostly through exploration, with little problem solving or reflex actions required.

The game is played as one of six versions of a metaphorical Red Riding Hood, represented by girls aged between 9 and 19. The game is completed, in a way, by breaking the one rule of not straying from the path. By leaving the path you end up exploring the forest in search of each girl’s ‘wolf’. The aim of the game appears to be to find each of the girl’s metaphorical wolves, since that’s the only way to get a ‘success’ message at the end of each chapter. Finding the wolf, whilst being necessary to complete the game, has horrible consequences for the girl. These consequences very strongly imply abuse or rape, and the subsequent endings are extremely dark. The Path has an undercurrent of dread running through the whole thing, as if some terrible, unknowable thing is always creeping beneath the trees. The only comparable feeling I got was whilst playing Silent Hill 2 and 3. It’s unusual even compared to Silent Hill, as there is very little graphic violence and most of the awful things that occur are only implied. The other thing about the Path is that, by completing the game, the player is inevitably leading each girl to her demise.

As far as the rape thing goes… I can only think of one scene where that’s the definite implication. Sure, the scene bothered me. That was the point of it. It seems strange that people who regularly play games like GTA, Fallout or Silent Hill suddenly recoil in disgust at The Path.

So, anyway, it’s a horror game involving teenage girls who are dragged to their death (kind of) by the player. I can think of several horror movies where teenage girls are dragged to their death in front of the viewer – in a way that’s done far less intelligently than The Path. The messages about growing up the loss of innocence are done reasonably well. Sure, a lot of the things in the game are excessively vague, silly or artsy, but it’s at least a better attempt at storytelling than most games.

I still felt uneasy with actually playing The Path (somewhat because one of the endings). So much so that I don’t want to pay $10 to play the full version myself. That doesn’t mean it has no merit as a game, though, or that people should be frowned on for wanting to give it a go. Sure, it’s not that great, but it’s something different to the usual bunch of shooters, brawlers and MMO’s.

Darkfall Looks Not Bad

Darkfall has recently caught my attention as something I might want to play. I’m aware that these games never live up to the hype, but the mere idea that players can build their own cities, craft any usable item and have some actual impact on their virtual world is just so appealing to me. Eve has all of that. I couldn’t get into Eve, though. Most of the time, it was so unnecessarily complex, dull and dreary that it just wasn’t worth the effort to try and get into the really fun parts of the game.

Anyway, it has been pushed back to late February, now. The chance of me being able to play is close to nil – considering the number of pre-orders and potential subscribers (apparently around 200,000). On the upside, I can find out if the game is a flop before I invest my time in it.

WoW Burnout

I think it took me three weeks to get from seventy to eighty. Another month passed as I got enough items to make myself look respectable. Shortly afterwards, I didn’t care anymore.

He looks kinda cool, I guess.

At first, I was loving every minute of it. After a long break, WoW was fresh, exciting and engaging. Northrend was completely unexplored by the vast majority of the server’s population. I was genuinely surprised to find myself watching one of the first cutscenes within the game, before doing a story quest that for once seemed epic. The Argent Crusade chain, too, was involving and extremely enjoyable. The architecture and feel of regions like Icecrown and Storm Peaks was impressive – much better than anything Blizzard had designed beforehand.

I polished off a few quests and explored the world a little more before I started to really look at my character’s equipment. The first few upgrades only required a little bit of gold or running through a couple of dungeons. Then, for a few more items, I spent a moderate amount of gold. The next couple of pieces I wanted took five or six hours to obtain. Meanwhile, theNorthrend became familiar, and therefore less and less exciting.

I spent ten hours doing fourteen runs of a single dungeon… just to get one pair of pants.

Shortly afterwards, I was aimlessly flying through Outlands. The dreaded, hopeless moment arrived. I realised that all those millions of hours people spent doing the old content were now just memories. Shattrath, once a hive of level 70′s, was now just an eerie ghost town. All those epic items I had worked for in the last few weeks would end up the same, eventually. I didn’t feel like playing it anymore. WoW was suddenly an obligation, rather than an exciting adventure.

I had burned out.

I guess this is what happens to anyone who delves too deep into an MMO. I think, in a way, that burning out is a way of finishing a game that can’t be completed. It’s a little depressing. Instead of the satisfaction and rolling credits that I’d get from a single-player game, I instead admitted to myself that WoW was no longer the game I wanted it to be.

It was fun while it lasted, though.