Enemy Mind

Schell Games - 2014 - PC

Enemy Mind is an interesting take on the arcade style space shooter games like Galaga. In most arcade style space shoot-'em ups, you'll pilot your ship through a level, all the while collecting powerups or weapons that may make your craft stronger. In Enemy Mind, your ship has the ability to take over and "transfer consciousnesses" into any other enemy ship. Each craft also has a limited ammo supply, so you'll usually want to expend your entire ammo clip before transferring over to another ship. This creates a gameplay style where the optimal strategy is also the most fun one: blow all your ammo trying to kill everything on the screen, transfer to another ship, rinse and repeat

The playstyles and designs of the enemy ships are varied and interesting enough to make it exciting each time you encounter a new type of enemy craft. It makes the player want to take it over immediately and experiment around with how much armor the craft has and how its weapon systems work. Some craft are agile with fast firing, low damage weapons. Some craft are slower with huge area of effect damage style explosions. Some craft are themselves weapons and are designed to be torpedoed into other craft to drill through their hulls. There's also an accompanying story that is played after each stage in the single player campaign, but I almost entirely ignored it. It was doled out in little text lines one at a time and it seemed mostly forgettable and inconsequential.

Summary
Enemy Mind isn't a revolutionary arcade style shooter, but it's a lot of fun. If you like games like Galaga, you'll have a good time with Enemy Mind. Navigating the bullet hell that the enemies throw at you while throwing back a bullet storm of your own while simultaneously possessing and experimenting with new craft and different playstyles felt really good. The boss battles are challenging and unique. There's also a couch co-op multiplayer mode, but I unfortunately haven't gotten a chance to check it out yet. This seems like the kind of game that would be fun to screw around in for a little while with another friend. I wouldn't go out of your way to buy it immediately, but it's worth a look if you find it discounted on a Steam sale or something like that

Ether One

White Paper Games - 2014 - PC

The premise alone for Ether One probably would have been enough to get me interested in playing this game, not to mention that it had mostly positive(ish) reviews upon its launch earlier this year. Gameplay wise, it's kind of one is one part interactive story and one part puzzle game. It's like if Gone Home had a baby with the old school adventure/puzzle games like Myst. In Ether One, you'll be playing the role of "The Restorer". You're contracted to help a medical researcher treat a patient with dementia by entering the patient's mind Inception style and then finding and restoring the patient's lost or broken memories. Really interesting premise, right? Unfortunately, most of what's typed below are a lot of the faults I found with the game. There's a lot of good stuff to be found with Ether One too, but I chose to focus mostly on the things I thought could be improved to make a more complete experience. I want to submit some constructive criticism because I know that Ether One is the type of game that I usually like, but there were a few problems in the way of making my experience truly awesome

Like Gone Home before it, the story of Ether One is told via voiceovers that occasionally kick in and give you narrative details when you're standing near or looking at something of importance. You'll be exploring a deserted island as it exists in your patient's memory and discovering your patient's life history by exploring this small island. The primary voice you hear is that of the lead researcher of the project you're assigned to. She chimes in now and again to give you your objectives and bark out orders on how you're to carry them out. Her character reminded me a little bit of GLaDOS from Portal. She serves to guide the player and move the game along, but her motivations seem questionable. You don't feel like you can completely trust her. The game seemed content to keep this character sort of ambivalent all the way up until the end of the story. Actually, I found a lot of the story's details to be a little vague and I'm not sure if this was intentional or poor narrative execution.

Adding to the confusion and the vagueness of this story is the other female character's voiceover who just starts talking to you out of nowhere. For the longest time, I thought I had missed some important cutscene where the game delivered a bunch of narrative exposition and this other voice was introduced, but nope. For most of the game, you're not sure who this voice is supposed to be or what the relevance is of the details she provides are. To me, this sort of ambiguity wasn't even interestingly vague or mysteriously vague. It was more confusingly and annoyingly vague. A lot of what either of the two voices talk about seemed incohesive and irrelevant to the rest of the story. Because of these problems, it took Ether One quite a while to grab me and for the game to really click with me. There's some really well executed scenes about halfway through the game that pulled me in and there's also an interesting twist at the end, but unfortunately you'll have to tough it out while the game stumbles through the confusing introduction of the setting and characters.

The focus of the gameplay in Ether One is on exploration. You need to find a certain number of red ribbons in each area before being allowed to proceed to the next one. The game also includes some puzzles, but interestingly, nearly all of the puzzle sections in Ether One are completely optional. Since they're not required, solving these puzzles serves only to give you an extra bit of narrative about whichever area you're in. I think it's fortunate that the designers made these optional, because the puzzles I attempted to solve were so frustratingly poorly communicated. I had absolutely no idea what the game wanted me to do with some of these puzzles. Sometimes I wasn't even sure if what I was looking at was supposed to be a puzzle at all. I happened to accidentally solve one of the puzzles, and I wasn't even really sure what I had done to complete it. A lot of them involve placing the correct items gathered from various places around the island, but you can only carry one item at a time for some odd reason. It felt like the game designers were hacking around the game engine rather than coding a decent inventory system. It was a pretty unintuitive mess. Mercifully, these are indeed optional. Aside from the puzzles, the rest of the gameplay was sort of unremarkable and uninteresting. If you're playing Ether One, you're doing it for the story, nothing else. But just like its story, I felt that there was something missing from Ether One's gameplay that could have really made this game special

Summary:
Despite all of my ranting above, I still liked Ether One. I wanted to like this game more than I actually did, but there was some bungled narrative and some really poor execution in gameplay that I just couldn't get over. It's also another pretty short game. That is, unless you try to figure out some of those crazy puzzles. That might pad the game a bit, but I'd advise against it. Skipping nearly all of the puzzles, I was able to knock this game out in about 3 hours. The subject matter in this game is really interesting to me and there are a few short sequences in where Ether One really shines. However most of the rest of the game is unfortunately kind of dull, incoherent or overly vague. Artsy folks who like the "open to interpretation" kind of story may dig this, but I found too many details were missing and my interest wasn't adequately captured at the game's opening. I really still did enjoy playing through this game though. Just not as much as I hoped I would.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Bethesda - 2011 - PC/PS3/X360

Watching season 4 of Game of Thrones got me in the mood for a little high fantasy. Normally that kind of setting is not my thing, but I think Game of Thrones has gotten me to appreciate it more, so I went back and replayed Skyrim. I played it initially when it came out in 2011 and got too distracted by exploring and all of the crazy sidequests and never finished the main storyline. This time around, I stayed focused on the main quest long enough to finish the game and realized that Skyrim actually isn't that long of a game if you can manage not to get distracted. That's the key though. Managing not to get distracted. The game world is so vast, immersive, beautiful and interesting... and at the same time so buggy, repetitive and in some cases downright broken. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this game. For as many things as I can think of that I love about this game, I can think of just as many that I absolutely hate. It's a very Jekyll and Hyde game to me.

First off, the things I hate about this game... Really Bethesda? You had a huge budget to make a massive sprawling universe like Skyrim, but could only afford 3 voice actors? And then you had them repeat the exact same lines over and over again every single time I walk just a little too close to them? It really breaks immersion when I hear the "Some may call this junk..." line by the same voice actor for the billionth time. And stop dropping loot for me to carry if I can only carry like three things. The carry weight restriction is really annoying, especially when this game loves to constantly unload buckets of treasure in front of you after each enemy you slay. I know Skyrim is notoriously buggy, but just two hours in to my playthrough, I encountered an enemy NPC who was literally invincible. I had to give up on one questline because I couldn't kill him. I nearly gave up on my playthrough as well. How has stuff like this still not been patched three years later? But honestly I think I could forgive all those issues if it weren't for this next thing, so listen up Skyrim developers: You CAN NOT repeat the SAME EXACT PUZZLE multiple times throughout your game. The dragon claw puzzle thing only works once, Bethesda. The tenth time I see that puzzle copy/pasted, it comes across as lazy, game-padding filler. It's poor design, it breaks immersion, and it's definitely not clever. That goes for the stupid rotating stone animal tablet things too. And also the combat in this game is kind of "meh". Yeah.

Now on to the good stuff. This game is gorgeous. I'm not an "Ooo look at the awesome graphics" guy either. Even three years later, Skrim still looks graphically impressive, especially with the outdoor scenery. It really does help with immersion and I felt more engaged with in the impressive visuals than I do with most games. I mentioned this before, but it's quite impressive how big of a world Skyrim is. The vast world and scenery is a joy to explore and it seems like there's so many varied and interesting things to do and see. It makes you want to explore every corner of every cave, talk to every NPC and complete every quest just to make sure you don't miss anything cool. While the game systems and AI don't always work the way they should, Skyrim still does a lot of technically impressive things with the game engine. Skyrim does open world sandbox exploration as well or better than any other game I've played.

Summary:
Skyrim is definitely a game whose reach exceeds its grasp in a few places. The exploration is done well, but the puzzles, combat and glitches are black marks on an otherwise excellent open world adventure game. I have a bit of a love/hate thing going on with Skyrim, but there are probably more reasons to play this game than not to. I'd say check it out if you think you might like Skyrim. Just be wary of its lack of polish in certain areas.

Elite Beat Agents

iNiS - 2006 - DS

Oh man, this game. Elite Beat Agents is a music/rhythm game for the Nintendo DS. Gameplay in EBA consists of tapping and sliding the DS stylus on the screen when the game prompts you in time with the music. It’s kind of like Guitar Hero but without the guitar. That may sound easy to you, but on faster songs with a lot of beats, the screen can fill up with a lot of beats and it becomes hard to hit them all in the correct order and with the proper timing. I found myself doing better on songs I had heard before so I could sort of use the rhythm as a guide. Nearly all of the songs in the game are pop songs, but I really don’t listen to much popular music.

The gameplay in EBA is fun in the same sort of way Guitar Hero is fun, but the real draw of EBA is the absolute lunacy of the games’ “story”. Now I looked this next part up on Wikipedia, cause the game doesn't really straight up tell you what’s going on, but the “story” of EBA is that there is a government agency that dispatches special elite dance agents to help people when they’re in trouble. The agents don’t actually directly assist people with their issues, but rather they dance to motivate and inspire people to overcome their problems. Each song in EBA is accompanied by a humorous short story about a person or people in peril that apparently need dance inspiration to overcome issues. It’s really goofy and silly in a very bizarre way. The closest thing I can draw a comparison to is the humor in the WarioWare games.

Summary:
If you like rhythm games or games with a really wacky sense of humor, check this out. It’s short and I’m not sure how much replay value it has, but it could be an interesting way to kill some time on the go.