Tag Archives: impressions

Games

Life of a Martian terrorist

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Is it just me or is there something about Mars that inspires stories about underground resistances against an oppressive authority? The 1990 film Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger used this theme and it was a recurrent subplot on J.M. Straczynski’s Babylon 5 television series. Even in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, the story about the establishment of an utopian colony on Mars quickly turned into one about a protracted guerrilla war against Earth.

In any case, Volition’s Red Faction series draws from the same wellspring. Its latest offering, Red Faction: Guerrilla is technically the third in the series. However as the first two were only middling successes I gave them a pass. Red Faction: Guerrilla has become quite a hit, especially in the eyes of game critics, plus it’s now an open world game for the first time, which makes it irresistible to me.

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Games

Street Fighter!

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In my last years of high school, Street Fighter 2 was pretty much the arcade game of choice. I remember how great a revelation its graphics and sound were coming after games like Karateka and Budokan. In the days before the Internet, we couldn’t know the full extent of its popularity or the boom in fighting games it kicked off, but we did know that we had something special in our hands. It had a variety of characters, each with different movesets. It gave each of them command-based special moves and it used six buttons to control, which I believe was unprecedented for the time. The boys in school talked about it constantly.

Due to this nostalgia, when Capcom announced that Street Fighter IV would be based not on the forgettable Street Fighter III but the classic Street Fighter II, I knew it would only be a matter of time before I got it. I knew that I would never have the time or patience to master its intricacies in the way a teenager could, and that it would be too light a game for me to be truly absorbed in, but I’d want it all the same just to be able to play around with the familiar characters at my leisure and kill the odd hour here and there with mindless bashing fun.

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Games

Drab and uninspiring city builder

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I received Civcity: Rome for free from a PR representative of 2K Games so I feel obliged to write something about it. Unfortunately, it’s a very dull game that I have no desire to really play. For one thing, despite the fact that it was first released in 2006, its graphics and general polish are so drab that it looks like more of a 2003 game. Its gameplay mechanics are also rather dodgy and uninspiring.

This is rather disappointing as it has been a while since I last played a good city builder game. In fact, I don’t recall a game of this genre really grabbing my attention since the closure of Impressions Games who were responsible for such titles as Caesar and Pharaoh in the 1990s. As its name implies, Civcity: Rome uses the same Roman theme. You’re a governor who is instructed to construct various cities in different bits of the empire and each level of the campaign game presents different challenges and geography.

One immediate disappointment is that new buildings are plonked down whole onto the map. Contrast this with the fantastic Settlers 2, where you order your workers to construct a building and they progressively move the required materials to the chosen site and you can watch them build it almost brick by brick. Most buildings only cost money, but better versions of residences can’t be built but must instead be upgraded by the people themselves once various goods and services become available in the city.

One interesting aspect of the game is that one type of upgraded residence lets you put them above shops, which helps save space in your city, but you eventually need to upgrade them again into extensive villa style buildings which take up lots of space. The odd aspect of this is that you can move around these residences anytime you wish, which I suppose make the game easier but really detracts from the feel that you’re building a real city.

Overall a solid thumbs down. It’s sad that practically no one is making this kind of games these days but if you really feel nostalgic you’re better off going back to one of the older games than making do with this one.

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Games

Research & Development – The Mod

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I’ve been playing an awful lot of strategy games these days, so getting through Research & Development over the weekend made for a nice change of pace. It’s a mod that requires Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and it’s been winning praises all over the net. It can be downloaded for free from ModDb. The main focus of the mod is on puzzles. There are action sequences as well with plenty of enemies out to kill you, but the player never gets an actual weapon. Instead, with the help of the trusty Half-Life 2 gravity gun, you’re supposed to use your wits to figure how to defeat your enemies and get to the next area.

The most fervent of the mod’s admirers have compared it to Portal, but I wouldn’t go quite that far. For the most part, the puzzles are cool without being really clever and are difficult enough to be satisfying to solve without being too frustrating. The hardest part is probably figuring where to go next, as opposed to what to do, as sometimes the only exit from an area is a tiny crawlspace. The lack of any narrative hurts it too. At least Portal cleverly put its puzzles within the context of a scientific experiment that’s supposed to be filled with puzzles.

All in all, a mod that’s well worth downloading and checking out, especially if you liked the puzzley elements of the Half-Life 2 games. Personally, I liked the action elements more than the puzzley ones, so I’m somewhat lukewarm on this mod. Not bad for a relatively short game, but I wouldn’t want to devote the time for a full length version. It certainly is a very impressive effort for just a one-man team. Just be sure to play in short bursts or your brain might hurt.

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Games

Total War in space!

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Sword of the Stars is a game that was first released way back in 2006. Despite its promising premise and a design that initially appealed to me, I held back from buying it due to the poor reviews it received. Then there was the matter of the minor controversy it generated on QT3. One of the game’s designers had the unfortunate tendency to take criticisms against the game rather poorly and had a habit of getting into flame wars with potential customers.

But it was when the designer decided to pick a fight with QT3 owner Tom Chick that the consensus on the forum turned against it. Tom Chick, a freelance game reviewer, had delivered a less than flattering review of the game. The designer responded by accusing Chick of being biased since he was involved in writing the manual for Galactic Civilizations 2, which can be seen as a direct competitor to Sword of the Stars. You can still read Chick’s reply to that accusation here.

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Games

Monster Hunter is awesome

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I have a confession to make. Until now, I’ve generally detested Japanese games.

I suppose it doesn’t help their case that the Japanese games that are most likely to appeal to me, such as Dead Rising, Shadow of the Colossus or Demon’s Souls, never get ported to the PC which is my preferred platform. Still, the fact remains that many aspects of Japanese games turn me off: cutesy anime art, ridiculous hair styles, emo characters, overwrought and melodramatic plots, grindy gameplay. What’s more, the big name Japanese titles, such as Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid, tend to be the worst offenders. That they’re widely held up as the most famous icons of gaming culture constantly infuriates me to no end.

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Games

A CCG on Facebook?!

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Barely two weeks ago I wrote a post bemoaning the low quality of the hugely popular games on Facebook. So coming across Warstorm is kind of funny. To be fair, it’s not actually on Facebook itself, though it does offer the option of signing in through that social network and using it to connect with your existing contacts. It’s basically a simplified collectible card game with a focus on building and tweaking decks. The mechanics are streamlined and simple enough that the duels play out automatically and you only get to watch what happens. All of the decision-making takes place only while constructing decks.

The game itself is free to sign up for and to play, and there are single-player missions to do that will earn you packs of cards as rewards. But if you want the really good cards you’ll have to pony some real, hard cash. It’s pretty obvious that this is an absolute necessity if you want to have any hope at all at competing against other players. For example, two cards can have the exact same statistics, but the good one will have a drastically lower playing cost than the bad one. No prizes for guessing that the good cards only come from the packs that you have to pay cash for, as opposed to the free “Novice” packs that you get for completing in-game objectives.

It’s not a bad little game but it won’t win any prizes against the real CCGs. I notice that Magic: The Gathering is enjoying a bit of a revival recently, probably due to the release of the Xbox Live Arcade version of the game with pre-made decks. So you want to have a small taste of what CCGs are like without needing to pay any money upfront or are just feeling a little bit nostalgic about your Magic playing days, checking Warstorm out won’t be a bad idea at all.

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