Unlike most, I left the demo of Enslaved with a suspicion I would enjoy the full game more than the Uncharted series. I still find video games to cost way too much and got it from Gamefly. Much like the game I played through this weekend, Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, it felt like two stories in one.
Enslaved starts with traversing a lush detailed nature-overtaken New York City. The demo is the beginning of the game, so if you've played that, you've seen the establishing shot. Something happened 200 hundred years ago, and now human beings are being collected/killed by robots. Don't think too hard about which the robots seem to be arbitrarily trying to do.
I wanted to enjoy navigating these gorgeous environments, but the game felt a need to give me an unskippable fly by of every area. This didn't one hundred percent tell me where I needed/could go. There's several invisible walls, and the game won't let you jump unless you can jump. I understand why they didn't go with auto-jump, because this is taken after the uncharted series, but it felt like it was playing itself. Indeed any of the wall climbing sections I completely by hammering the jump button and paying enough attention to point my character in a proper direction.
Our cast and title and the first half are based on Saiyuki:Journey to the West which I like everyone else know was the basis for Dragon Ball and nothing beyond it. But our Monkey has a slave helmet on that we are shown can totally kill the person wearing it if conditions are met. Our conditions are if we get to far away or our slaver (girl-protagonist Trip) dies. She eventually gets semi-kidnapped but that doesn't seem to hurt us that much. Also our mind-fuck left-field ending (which game stupidly calls an epilogue) makes the slave helmets not make any sense, but who am I judge?
Before that ending the game tosses away our Journeying 300 miles west of NYC to Chinese Mountains and gives our team a need for revenge and a 3rd cast member that got his own DLC. I almost bought that DLC but then the game was already back to Gamefly, so I guess I didn't care that much about him. Our quest for revenge starts (I guess?) and for the second half of the game I kept asking "What are we even doing?"
Meanwhile we are witness to frankly amazing dialog:
"We did it. We made it to the crash site. This is where the slave-ship crashed."
REALLY? That was only our goal for the first 3 stages.
"That submarine is in some kind of hanger."
followed a minute later by.
"It's some kind of rail system."
Jesus. Reviews talk about the excellent dialog of this game. Well, I guess all 3 of those lines were delivered by the same person. Also I'm glad people in the wasteland know what a god damn submarine is. I'd probably be less scrutinous of the plot if it wasn't rated Teen so that we had gratuitous God of War Robot torture-murder and completely out of place "Shitttttttttt!" Not of place with what's happening, but very little of this story would need to be changed to make it E.
Then again, I guess it's the first retail game ever to use the word "penis." As in, "Your hand is on my...penis."
I'm ramming pretty hard against it, but it really wasn't that bad. Outside of the story, the game has good level progression, and it made me mildly excited for DmC because at least this game never gave me an artificial barrier and said, "destroy an arbitrary amount of monsters to make the barrier disappear. Usually your weak girl-protagonist won't move unless you kill them. I don't know if that was them being clever, or a happy accident. I guess we'll see!
I guess it's better than Heavenly Sword too, as I at least played this one. Not immediately shut off after hearing a girl want to play a game that sounded like something a child pounds out on a computer then asks if it's a real word. (I would actually give that word if I remembered it/hadn't blocked it out.)
On to Dead Men, a game where the demo left me feeling incredibly cold to. I only decided to play it because Kane and Lynch Dog Days is definitely GAME OF THE YEAR 2010. Should you play Dead Men? No! Because in that same time frame you could play through Dog Days again! Halfway through Dead Men you'll suddenly be playing a squad based cover shooter war game. It's weird and cumbersome and I didn't really like any of it.
There's also a "Nam Lu Parkway" which I think (There's a lot of globetrotting for international police murders) is in Tokyo and that sort of made my blood boil. I'm glad I played this game second, because it would have had a hard time getting me to play Dog Days, which is a much better game in every way. Yeah I guess I don't really have much to say about Dead Men.
I did play through Shining Force (Genesis) this week, and that was fantastic.
Part 1:
ReplyDeleteI'm going to buy a new PC from the discount supermarket right across the street in exactly 3 hours as of this writing. I will leave in two, because a lot of people will try to buy some of these PCs as well. I will stop writing at the latest in 1 hours because I still need to shower and get out the clothes I've been wearing for 30+ hours now.
So yeah, this is Europe now. Where you cross the street, walk over the concrete that was once just a simple parking lot for a discounter and is now the lid on top of a giant fucking gas tank, because people need to have discount gas stations, and in case you don't blow up, stand in the freezing cold for an hour at a place that's supposed to be a cheap grocery store on steriods, yet carries no vegetables or fresh bread, yet cutting-edge computers with brand names removed.
So.
Games, yeah. I haven't played any videogames in the last 5 years. I noticed, going through gamerankings.com, year by year, that I have in-depth knowledge of every notable PC game from the mid-90s up to 2006 as if I wrote all the things my damn self. After that things get patchy. I know some of the titles. I have opinions about some. Mostly I just fished out whatever I thought was worth a couple hours and made a list of that, without doing any research.
I got bit torrent fired up and I'm gonna suck a full game out of the internet every 30 minutes, like clockwork. I don't even know what's gonna work on this PC. I'll start with a demo of Bulletstorm (I think that's what the game is called) and then judge how many years I have to go back for games to run smoothly. So, I know I'll be able to play SOMETHING from the last five years. What, though, remains to be seen. Pretty exciting!! It's like a lottery for a grab bag inside of a crane machine. I really have no idea what the hell I'm gonna get!
Truth be told I don't even know how good exactly this PC is. I know it's gonna run all the things I need to watch high-def porn and publish my books! I can't even run Adobe InDesign on this here bitch I'm using. Imagine talking to someone and getting a silly reply, barely sufficient reply every 15 minutes. How the hell are you gonna have a conversation like that? My smartphone handles the browser and OpenOffice better than my PC!
Part 2 of 2:
ReplyDeleteComing to the point here. I read "Kane and Lynch" and considered that for my list. I read it twice, as there are now two of those games, yay! For those that like them. I have absolutely no clue if they're good or not, and the only thing I remembered was someone on selectbutton or ABDN complaining about what the first game could have been and why it failed and why it sucks and is great, yet sucks. As you do. And of course how he had hopes for the second game to be better and improve ON ALL THE MENTIONED AREAS, as you do. And as NEVER happens. People that play games don't have the same kind of brain structure as people who make games. They're just not compatible. They're like Mac and PC. It goes so far that when a man in the process of making a game turns around and PLAYTESTS it, he undergoes a transformation as unreasonable as that of Bruce Banner turning into Hulk. Where's all that extra mass coming from? Out of the air? Don't you need some protein for that, at least? And so, his brain sucks itself up and turns up side down, little bit around and then the eyes get unplugged from the brain and re-wired and the man is now no longer a man who makes videogames, he's a man that plays videogames. Two totally different things.
So I'm pretty sure that the second game of the Kane and Lynch series is different in some way from the first one, definitely. If it's "better" or if that man's prayers, which I don't remember, have been heard, I'll never know because I'm lazy. Since you say Dog Days is a better game than Dead Men, and ALSO that Dog Days is GOATEY wearing, game of the year worthy game -- for a year as recent as 2010 even, which is probably the year it was released in, and not a RATING according to my rating system, in which any game from any time can be "okay for the year XXXX", (the higher the year, the better the game, because it doesn't take much for a videogame to impress the people of the 1950s, say) -- I shall check it out. If it runs on my PC. Because, why the fuck not? I'm sure you shoot guys. That's never going out of style. So even if everything goes wrong, at least I got to shoot a guy, right?
Why do I even play videogames again, when the only thing I played the past 5 years was Tetris in all varieties on tetrisfriends.com? (To impress my girlfriend of all things. Women are cruel; it was like the beginning of Rambo 2.)
I don't really want to play games. I've got to complete the fashion designs I got here digitally now, I got to get the layout for my book straight -- I got serious shit to do.
There is one ancient rule though. Passed down from men no longer alive, enforced among friends no longer friends, inescapable even now. You get a new PC, you play games for three days and three nights straight. And then, you and your PC are one. Like that kid and the dragon in that Panzer Dragoon RPG. It's like that.
So what can you do? I really don't want to, right? :D