Depression Quest

Zoe Quinn - 2013 - PC

Depression Quest is a game that makes me really excited about where the medium of video games is now and direction it's going in the future. Depression Quest is an interactive educational simulation about living with depression. It attempts to use game mechanics to communicate to the player what living with depression feels like. The mechanics are simple and certainly nothing revolutionary. But what makes me excited about this game is that to me it serves as an indicator that the medium of video games is maturing to a point where games can start to cover serious topics like this and tell deeply personal stories.

The game of Depression Quest is basically a text-only roleplaying experience that repeatedly presents you with a scenario and then offers you several choices of how to deal with a the presented scenario. For instance, your in-game girlfriend may call you up and ask you if you'd like to attend a birthday party. You're then given several choices like "attend" or "politely decline" or "say you're not feeling well" or something like that. The catch is that while you can see all of the options, the ones you can actually select are almost always limited based on how depressed you're feeling. There's a few blurbs of text near the bottom of the screen which essentially serve as your "depression meter" and as you get better or worse, more or fewer options are available to you. As far as a simulation of depression goes, it was pretty effective. Sometimes you can see the option you'd really like to choose, but you just can't pick it, which is kind of frustrating.

The game states that its authors have personally struggled with depression before which makes Depression Quest's story feel very authentic. Now I'm not sure if it was the quality of the writing or how personal it felt, but I was alarmed at how many times the writing really struck a chord and resonated with me. There were many times where I was like "Oh wow, I think that to myself all the time". Again, I've never struggled with the serious, deep kind of depression this game is about, but those thoughts I had were a testament to how relatable the writing is even to someone who doesn't know much about the subject matter.

Summary:
As someone who has never personally dealt with depression before, this game was a very educational tool for me and I'm very glad that this game exists. I hope it helps to raise awareness of what exactly depression is and how the people suffering from it can feel limited in their lives. I also hope that this can influence more developers to make more really personal experiences like this game. It's probably less than an hour long, but it's totally free and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a personal game or anyone who would like to try to roleplay what it's like to live life with depression

A Bird Story

Freebird Games - 2014 - PC

Earlier this year, Freebird Games and head developer Kan Gao released a free mini-DLC epilogue for their excellent 2011 game To The Moon. This DLC served as a sort of epilogue for To The Moon that wrapped up the story and tied into the next entry in the series. A Bird Story, which came out earlier this week, was teased as being the game in the To The Moon series and that's both true and misleading at the same time. I found A Bird Story to be actually more like the DLC that was released earlier this year - it's a short mini-episode that's meant to bridge To The Moon and its eventual full-length sequel together and introduce the sequel's new main character. While A Bird Story is a full, albeit very short, standalone game in the To The Moon universe, it also has some notable differences from its predecessor. Firstly, there is absolutely no dialogue in A Bird Story. Secondly, because A Bird Story takes place long before the events of To The Moon (and presumably long before Watts or Rosalene were even born), you play not as Dr. Watts or Dr. Rosalene, but as a young boy who will eventually become their patient in the next game.

The most defining characteristic of A Bird Story is its heavy focus on narrative, but complete lack of dialogue of any kind. This is in stark contrast to To The Moon which was a game made up almost entirely of reading text boxes. I found this to be the most interesting "mechanic" in A Bird Story. This places a greater importance on music to set the mood and the animation to convey the action in the game, which is pretty ambitious for a 2D sprite based game. After finding a few of the opening scenes to be ambiguous and difficult to interpret, I was initially not too fond of this style of storytelling. I was getting annoyed that I couldn't tell what the game was trying to convey to me, so I instead chose to focus on what *my* interpretations of the scenes were. I found this approach to the game made it much more enjoyable and I'll go as far as to say that I think the game was actually intended to be played this way. By the nature of removing all dialogue, A Bird Story sets itself up to be much more open to interpretation than literal like its predecessor. Plus A Bird Story has a very metaphorical and almost dreamlike quality to it which meshes well with its dialogue-less-ness.

While To The Moon had qualities of science fiction, these sci-fi laws were explained and defined and for the most part, the game played by its own rules throughout its story. A Bird Story is much less concerned with what rules govern its in game reality, and instead goes for a very dreamlike aesthetic. It's often hard to tell if what you're witnessing is "actually happening" or if its part of the main character's fantasy or daydream. This is exemplified not only in the events of the story, but in the game's level design too. In the first scenes of the game, the main character walks from his school to his apartment, establishing their physical locations in the game world. But then in a subsequent scene, the character walks back to his school from the apartment via a different path which goes in a totally contradictory direction than the one taken in the previous scene. You still know where you are, but the game invalidates its own rules for how its game world is laid out structurally. It reminded me of how sometimes the architecture of dreams isn't quite exactly correct. You still know where you are, but there are sometimes little shortcuts and inconsistencies with reality.

Kan Gao's excellent musical composition skills are on display again in A Bird Story. I did catch at least one recycled track from To The Moon, but I'm pretty sure all of the rest of the music in the game was original. I'm also a fan of the old school 2D sprite aesthetic and some of the backgrounds in the game are very well drawn. Without any dialogue, the music and artwork get an increased emphasis, and they do a good job of creating mood and atmosphere.

Summary:
A Bird Story does stand on its own, but I'm not sure I'd recommend this to people who haven't already played To The Moon and enjoyed it. It feels more like a shorter and more compressed version of everything that was great about To The Moon. Clocking in at just over an hour, it's a very short experience, but is probably priced appropriately at $5. The storytelling without dialogue works, but it just didn't quite have the same impact on me as To The Moon. I'm now looking forward to Finding Paradise which I guess will be the next "proper" game in the To The Moon series

Beyond: Two Souls

Quantic Dream - 2013 - PS3

Beyond: Two Souls is the fourth game from developer Quantic Dream and director David Cage. Other titles by Quantic Dream include the excellent Heavy Rain, Indigo Prophecy - which I really want to play, and Omikron: The Nomad Soul - which I had never heard of prior to reading the Wikipedia article for Quantic Dream. Beyond plays very similarly to Heavy Rain (and Indigo Prophecy, from what I understand) which made me very excited to try it as Heavy Rain was one of my favorite games I played last year. But, oh boy, Beyond has so many problems. This was such a disappointment after what was a very promising game in Heavy Rain. This review is probably going to get pretty rant-y, so heads up. I don't even know where to start with this game. I guess I'll start by tearing apart the plot.

Beyond: Two Souls tells the story of the life of Jodie Foster who is played by actress Ellen Page. Yes, this is the game that actually stars Ellen Page, as opposed to The Last of Us, which just stole her name and likeness. Anyway, Jodie was somehow linked at birth to a ghostly entity named Aiden, hence the "Two Souls" moniker in the title of the game. Aiden has the ability to manipulate objects in the physical world, give Jodie visions of the past, can phase through walls, and has the ability posses others and force them to do whatever actions he pleases. But Aiden cannot otherwise speak or interact with the physical world. How did Jodie and Aiden come to be linked together? How did Aiden get his powers? How do we even know Aiden's name to begin with??? These are important plot points that the game just chooses to never address.

The plot of Beyond is delivered Pulp Fiction style, which is to say that important parts of Jodie's life are sliced up and given to us out of chronological order. Why is the story presented this way? I have no idea, it only serves to make the narrative more confusing and it felt unjustified. A lot of the pieces of Jodie's life that we are given seem to be largely unrelated to one another and are stylistically and tonally completely different from the last. I remember noting this back in my Heavy Rain review - that some pieces of the plot didn't seem to fit in or progress the story in any meaningful way. But Beyond is an entire game made of these unrelated segments. It's as though 20 different writers wrote 20 different stories about Jodie and no one bothered checking to see if they were related in any way. Then to make things worse, they're presented to us all out of order.

I'll say this though: Beyond has a very promising and interesting open. The first tutorial chapter sees a young Jodie being tested for "physic powers" by recreating the scene in Ghostbusters where there's a supposed physic on one side of a room and someone with symbols on flash cards on the other side of the room. The game wants you to take control of Aiden to peek at the flash cards before Jodie gives her answer. This is a really interesting scenario because it gives the player information that the playable characters in the game shouldn't otherwise have. Aiden essentially becomes a personification of "The video game camera", which is a really interesting concept. The physic tester then asks Jodie to manipulate objects in the other room. The game lets you take control of Aiden to accomplish this. Then Jodie asks Aiden to stop, but you don't necessarily have to listen to her. This is another interesting scenario because it puts the player in the position of performing actions that directly oppose what Jodie, your player character, wants. This is another really interesting scenario that I was really excited to explore. But nowhere else in the game do these scenarios exist. Okay, maybe there's more time where the game gives you the option of pitting Jodie and Aiden against each other, but it's still a really interesting concept that went way underexplored.

These missed opportunities are a symptom of a larger problem: Beyond is a game that has no idea what it does well. The best parts of Beyond, for me at least, were the sections where I was roleplaying as Jodie and making decisions about how she would act in certain situations. Would she tell her friends about Aiden even though it may make her seem strange? Or lie to fit in? But the game seems less interested in these character shaping decisions and would rather tell this action story about how the U.S. government wants to weaponize Aiden's abilities.

(Mild spoilers in this paragraph). Okay so there's this scene later in the game where the CIA sends Jodie to Somalia to assassinate a warlord. After the successful assassination, Jodie learns that the CIA had lied to her and her target was not an evil warlord at all, but a democratically elected president. What's worse is that she learns she has made a young boy fatherless after also killing one of the president's bodyguards. It's a pivotal moment in the game where Jodie realizes she can't trust the CIA and is only a tool being used to perpetuate an endless cycle of death and violence. So she throws away her weapon, quits the CIA and goes into hiding. But then after the next couple scenes, she's right back to killin' more dudes again! Aaaand then she rejoins the CIA... YOU CAN'T DO THAT!!! You can't write these pivotal, character defining moments and then undo them a couple chapters later when you want to tell another story and it becomes convenient to the plot! It was pretty obvious that there were sections of the story that were added in order to pad out the game's length, but these sections didn't fit in at all thematically and sometimes clashed directly with the rest of the story. It seemed to me like Beyond struggled to find its identity throughout the entire duration of the plot. This culminates in the game's ending where the last topics and themes have absolutely nothing at all to do with the story leading up to that point. The game then tries to execute what I'm guessing was supposed to be this surprise twist ending, but the twist doesn't really add anything at all or change the player's understanding of the story in any way. It was a confirmation of my theory that the writers were not at all on the same page about what they wanted Beyond to be about and the result is an incohesive mess of a plot.

Alright, alright, enough ragging on the plot. So how does the game actually play? It's fairly similar to Heavy Rain which is to say there are lots of quick time events and moments when you can give input on what choices Jodie will make or what her dialogue will be. The main difference coming from Heavy Rain is that you can also take control of Aiden during certain action sequences to either strangle enemies or possess them in order to use their physical bodies to take out more enemies. How does the game determine which enemies you can possess and which you can strangle? It seemed totally random and inconsistent to me. There were enemies I wanted to strangle that I could only possess and there were enemies that I wanted to possess but could only strangle. Coming from Heavy Rain, the QTEs are a bit different as well. I see what they were going for here, they wanted to eliminate all of the button prompts from the screen so the player can focus on the action, but I don't think it really works. The idea is that when the game prompts you for a QTE, you're supposed to simply follow the motion of Jodie's body and press the joystick in that direction. But it's often really ambiguous and hard to tell which direction Jodie is punching or dodging or whatever. No meaningful feedback is given to the player when they miss a QTE either, the screen just flashes red as if to only say "NOPE! YOU DID IT WRONG!".

(Sigh). Beyond was a pretty big disappointment for me especially after playing through Heavy Rain. This game felt like a big step in the wrong direction. I'd like to close this review/rant with an open letter not only to Quantic Dream, but to all game developers: Please respect the player's time. If you have a story to tell, tell it. But please don't pad out the game with filler or copy/paste segments of the game to artificially lengthen the play time. I may not speak for all gamers, but I'm way more likely to be angry when I can tell that my time is being wasted as opposed to the notion that a game I'm playing might feel too short. Sincerely, James.

Summary:
As for a recommendation - if you haven't played Heavy Rain, please go do that first. It's a much more complete, cohesive and interesting game than Beyond. If you have already played Heavy Rain, just be sure you know what you're getting into before you start Beyond.

Super Smash Bros. for 3DS (Smash 4)

Sora Ltd. (Nintendo) / Bandai Namco Games - 2014 - 3DS

I am huge, huge fan of the Smash Bros. series. I've poured literally thousands of hours into the first three Smash games and love them very dearly. I first played Smash 64 at a friend's house and instantly fell in love with this series' accessibility and wacky party game-like zaniness that all came wrapped in a package of Nintendo characters I already was familiar with. After dozens of hours of play, my friends and I found that we really enjoyed playing with the items off and on the more neutral stages, and we started playing the game from a more competitive angle. When Melee came out, its faster game speed and emphasis on combos and juggling nicely facilitated this playstyle and I fell deeper in love. Brawl didn't have Melee's speed, depth or balance, but Brawl mods like Project M have quenched my thirst for playing Smash competitively and I actually recently competed in a national Project M tournament earlier this year. (Don't bother looking for my name among the finalists, although I did manage to take 3 stocks off of one of the guys who tied for 7th). Anyway, I wanted to preface this review with my history of competitive Smash so you know where I'm coming from here when I talk about Smash 4.

As of this writing, the WiiU version of Smash 4 has yet to be released, so the version of the game I'm reviewing is the 3DS one. This is the first iteration of Smash that has appeared on a handheld platform, and I'm glad to say it's made the transition about as well as it possibly could have. Any complaints I'd have about the mobile version of the game would be more against the 3DS' hardware than Smash 4's software. The circle pad feels a bit flimsy for a quick reflex based fighting game like Smash, but other than that, the game plays fine. I still don't like looking at that tiny screen and my hands do start to hurt after after a few matches of gripping that un-ergonomic surface of the 3DS, but those are more complaints against the 3DS than Smash 4. Speed wise, Smash 4 plays somewhere in between Melee's speed and Brawl's speed, although Smash 4 retains Brawl's "floaty" feel when characters are airborne. I actually think this "game feel" is a good fit for the 3DS version of Smash 4. I don't really want to have to press a million buttons really quickly on the tiny 3DS gamepad. I think the game speed of Smash 4 is appropriate for the mobile hardware and I don't think it would work if Nintendo tried to put a game as fast as Melee or Project M on the 3DS, even if they could.

I know most players treat Smash as a party game, but I'm going quickly discuss how Smash 4 plays as a competitive fighter because I belong to that small subset of hardcore Smash players who are interested in such things. I know some fellow competitive Smashers may disagree with me here, but I don't think Smash 4 really works as a competitive game. At least not in the same way Melee or Project M do. I know Nintendo has made concessions to competitive players like "For Glory" mode and the neutral "Omega" versions of each stage, but I don't think the actual game engine quite facilitates deep competitive play. While the slow speed and floaty feel makes the game feel appropriate for the 3DS, it also de-emphasizes combos and technical skill. In Melee and P:M, once you win the situation that is referred to in fighting games as the "neutral position", you can use combos, prediction and technical play to rack up as much damage as possible while your opponent uses mix-ups and DI (Directional Influence) to attempt to escape your combos and counter your efforts. These deep and complex systems are what I love about Smash. Almost none of these systems are present in Smash 4. In my experience, once a player wins neutral in Smash 4, they can get one or maybe two hits - that's it. Then the situation is reset to neutral again. I recently competed in a local Smash 4 tournament and I found it to be...well... not really that much fun. Games took nearly 8 minutes to finish, even when we played with only 3 stocks (competitive smash is normally played with 4). Systems like "auto-sweet spotting the ledge", "multiple air dodges", and blast zones being too far away all contribute to Smash 4 just not feeling quite right when played competitively.

But alright, enough comparisons to Melee and Project M. As a party game, Smash 4 is just as fun as ever. Once my friend and I stopped trying to play this game competitively, turned the items back on and played on some of the non-omega versions of the stages, the game became very fun for me again and I found myself enjoying Smash's wacky "anything can happen" feel all over again. The roster of selectable fighters has been expanded from Brawl's 39 characters to 49 (50 if you count the Mewtwo DLC) and you can additionally play as any Mii character found on your 3DS. You can also customize your fighter's movesets which is something I admittedly haven't played around with much yet. Old game modes from previous iterations make a return and are joined by new ones like "Smash Run" which is the sort-of successor to Brawl's "Subspace Emissary" which can also be played multiplayer in Smash 4. Speaking of which, the multiplayer on the 3DS works pretty nicely. It's quick and easy to set up and we never had a problem with connectivity, even when there were tons of 3DS's in the room at the local Smash tournament. I've only ever played one Smash 4 game where I experienced any lag as opposed to Brawl's online multiplayer which was a borderline unplayable laggy mess.

Summary:
Smash 4 may not be the competitive successor to Melee like I foolishly hoped it might be, but it's still a really fun party game. I think it's great that tons of people will now be able to play Smash together on-the-go now. It'll also be nice to have something to do now when waiting at Melee/P:M tournaments in between matches. Also if you're interested in learning about competitive Smash, I would highly, highly recommend this documentary on YouTube. It's an 8-part series and is kind of long, but it's really well made and provides a window into why players like me have fallen in love with playing the Smash series competitively. Also if you own Brawl, go download Project M.

Parasite Eve

Squaresoft - 1998 - PS1

I'm really not sure why I didn't try this game before now. It's got "me" written all over it. Parasite Eve is a text heavy horror RPG by Sqaresoft for the PS1. I love horror, I love RPGs, I love story and I love Squaresoft games. Classic Squaresoft, of course - not necessarily Square-Enix. Okay, so full disclosure: I haven't finished this game yet, but I'm on the 5th of 6 chapters. I usually try to complete every game I review here, but I wanted to play a bunch of new horror games in October and I think I bit off a few more games than I had time to chew this month. I'll admit to not finishing Clock Tower last week either. But I'm quite excited to wrap up Parasite Eve this weekend as opposed to Clock Tower which felt too aged for me to really enjoy.

Parasite Eve is actually a "sort of" sequel to a novel of the same name by a Japanese author named Hideaki Sena. The characters and themes of the novel were adapted to be used in the game, and a lot of new narrative was written by Takashi Tokita, who also helped direct Chrono Trigger. There's actually a lot of well-respected industry talent that worked on this game. Hironobu Sakaguchi and Tetsuya Nomura, both of Final Fantasy fame, respectively produced and did lead artwork for Parasite Eve. The game's excellent soundtrack was composed by Yoko Shimomura who is arguably the most prolific video game composer of all time who is not named Nobuo Uematsu or Koji Kondo. "Primal Eyes", "Missing Perspective" and "Out of Phase" are examples of Shimomura's great work on the soundtrack.

Parasite Eve tells the story of Aya Brea who is a cop working for the NYPD in a fictional New York City during Christmas of 1997. The game opens as Aya and her date are at Carnegie Hall watching an opera. During her solo performance, the lead actress of the opera starts to creepily stare directly at Aya and while the two gaze across the theater at each other, everyone else in the room suddenly begins to catch fire and spontaneously combust. It's a pretty crazy and horrifying opening scene. Aya then learns that the lead actress is being possessed by a being named Eve who is the source of the body melting fires. Eve eventually escapes Carnegie Hall and Aya must spend the rest of the game unraveling the mystery of who Eve is, learning what she's trying to accomplish, and finding a way to foil her plans. Parasite Eve isn't the greatest written game, but the story has its moments and keeps you interested by teasing a mysterious relationship between Aya and Eve.

One of the first things I noticed about Parasite Eve is how beautiful and detailed the backgrounds were. I love and miss all of the hand drawn backdrops that are present in all of Square's PS1 RPGs and I hope some of the modern RPGs will start to take a crack at this art style again. Parasite Eve's battle system is in some ways an evolution of Chrono Trigger's. There is no "battle scene"; encounters happen seamlessly while you're exploring. You also have full control over Aya's movements during the battle. You can move around to dodge enemy attacks and move closer when your ATB gauge is full to deal maximum damage at close range. All of Aya's weapons have range rating which determines how far away you can be from enemies and still successfully make an attack. I found I was constantly managing Aya's spatial position while my ATB was charging, which was an interesting mechanic. I know this is back-to-back reviews where I'm complaining about this, but really I found Aya's move speed to be too slow, both in and out of battle. Aya's snail-like move speed combined with the slow screen fade transitions made exploring a bit tedious at times.

Summary:
Parasite Eve isn't the most pulse-poundingly terrifying game out there, but I still found it be enjoyable. The game's creepy themes, excellent artwork and eerie soundtrack work together to make Parasite Eve an interesting play, but it's probably not anything that will make you want to sleep with the lights on. The combat was overall pretty decent, but it was hampered by Aya's slow move speed and the battles lacked that real addictive hook that's found in most of Square's games around this era. The story has its moments, but could really be aided by a little more character development early on. I did enjoy the realistic setting of New York City as opposed to the imaginary fantasy locations that are in most RPGs. I'm excited to finish this game up and to eventually move on to Parasite Eve 2 in the future

EDIT: Finished the game. The highlights of the game for me were the 4th chapter which is spent locked in a creepy abandoned hospital basement during a power outage and the 6th chapter final boss fight. Without spoiling too much, my first real moment of terror in Parasite Eve came during the final boss fight. I'd recommend this game, but only to players who can tolerate the pacing of older RPGs

Clock Tower

Human Entertainment - 1995 - SNES

Clock Tower is a true survival horror game that actually pre-dates Resident Evil and was released on the SNES in 1995. This game is not to be confused with the 1996 PS1 game Clock Tower 2 which was released in the U.S. simply as Clock Tower because the original SNES game never made it outside of Japan. So the Clock Tower series has the old Final Fantasy numbering problem where no one really knows which game you're actually talking about until you clarify with the year or system. I think we should all just universally agree to use the Japanese numbering for these games to minimize the amount of unnecessary confusion. 

It actually surprised me that the original Clock Tower was never released outside of Japan because on the surface at least, it seems like a very American styled game. You play as the very American-sounding "Jennifer Simpson" who is a young teenage girl and an orphan. In the beginning of the game, Jennifer and a few of her friends are sent to live at the "The Clock Tower" which is a giant old mansion owned by the wealthy Barrows family. Shortly after arriving, Jennifer finds herself separated from her friends and can her distant screams from somewhere in the mansion. She eventually encounters "Scissorman" - a short boy with a deformed face who wields a gigantic pair of hedge clippers. Scissorman is a villian who is totally straight out of all of the American slasher films that gained popularity in the 80s. Even Clock Tower's opening music sounds remarkably similar to Michael Myers' theme song from Halloween. 

Mechanically, Clock Tower is a blend of Survival Horror and a Point and Click adventure game. You move a cursor around the screen with the SNES d-pad and can interact with items or objects by pressing the "A" button. Moving Jennifer around the screen is done in a similar fashion. I know Clock Tower is nearly 20 years old now, but there were a few things about this game that really felt outdated. Actually, moving Jennifer is actually one of the first things I noticed that really irked me. WHY IS HER MOVE SPEED SO SLOW????? Out of curiosity, I went back and timed how long it takes Jennifer to cross the the main lobby from one end to the other. It literally takes 36 seconds. Think about how long that is. Even once I figured out that you can double tap A to run (why would I not ALWAYS want my character to run??), it still takes 13 seconds. Too slow!! Even in 1995, players had to have gotten fed up with this.

Each encounter with Scissorman is resolved by running away from him; there is no combat in the game. Scissorman usually shows up randomly while you're exploring the mansion or trying to solve puzzles, but some of his appearances are triggered by certain actions. The puzzle solving in Clock Tower is not really a strong suit, but the game does build tension somewhat effectively. Like any good horror game, there is a fair amount of suspense when Scissorman ISN'T around, because you're not sure when he'll appear next. But when he does appear, dealing with him is really more of an annoyance than a terror. Moving Jennifer around often felt unresponsive and even when Scissorman killed me, the game just took me right back to where I was before I died. So really death in Clock Tower is just kind of a mild annoyance. I felt that this game could have benefited from knowing that the player's enemies are always the most scary when you can't see them. The best parts of Clock Tower were when Scissorman was nowhere around. Like Alfred Hitchcock said, "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it". 

Summary:

I can't really whole-heartedly recommend this game unless you're a huge fan of classic horror games or classic point and click games and can overlook this game's faults. I'm afraid it really hasn't aged that well. It does suspense somewhat well, but everything else will feel very old. I could see how this game would have had its place back in 1995 with like young kids staying up late and playing this at a sleepover with the lights off or something like that. I've heard subsequent titles in this series improved on the formula of the original, so maybe I'll check one of them out eventually. If you do decide to go back to the original, I'd advise doing so on an emulator that has a "speed up" feature. Seriously, that walk animation...

Zombies Ate My Neighbors

LucasArts - 1993 - SNES/Genesis

I'm cheating a little bit here by labeling Zombies Ate My Neighbors as a horror game. I don't think it's truly a horror game, but it is horror themed if you can make a distinction between those two things. So remember when LucasArts was a thing? Well back in the 90s before all they were doing was milking the Star Wars license, LucasArts used to be known for quality point-and-click adventure games like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango. It was around this time that the creative talent at LucasArts broke away from their traditional fare of PC adventure games to produce Zombies Ate My Neighbors, a co-op shoot-em-up game for the SNES and Genesis. Yes, the game can also be played single player - but find a buddy if you can. The real fun is had in multiplayer.

So you, and hopefully a friend, will play as Zeke and Julie - two teenage neighborhood kids who witness an attack on their suburb by just about every horror movie monster you can think of. There's zombies, mummies, werewolves, aliens, vampires, you name it. Zeke and Julie arm themselves with all sorts of unconventional weaponry like squirt guns, soda cans, dinner plates and fire extinguishers to combat the threat. Each weapon's effectiveness varies depending on which enemy it's used on. For instance, mummies are weak vs. soda cans. Because, you know, reasons.

The game features 55 levels, but I'm not sure I've ever even made it past the twenty something range levels in this game. It gets pretty hard pretty quick, even with co-op help. The main objective in each level is not to kill all of the enemies, but to save all of the neighbors in each level. Each level's map is a non-linear, giant block of terrain and you must rescue each and every one of the neighbors hidden in the level. You don't have a hard time limit, but the longer you take, the more likely it is that neighbors will start being killed by the infinitely respawning monsters in each level. Once neighbors die, they won't come back - even in subsequent levels - so rescuing them as quickly as possible is paramount. The game is over when all of the neighbors die or if you lose all of your lives. Ammo management is also a key mechanic as each weapon has a finite amount of ammo. You can find more ammo, different weapons, health packs and other helpful items in each level, but you'll have to look carefully as these upgrades are often well hidden.

Summary:
There's not much else that can be said about this game. It's a classic co-op shooter that still holds up very well today. It's difficult, but it's still a great game to share with a friend. Discovering the game's secrets, fighting huge mutant babies and frantically running away from chainsaw killers in a giant hedge maze is still just as fun as it was 20+ years ago.

Off

Mortis Ghost - 2008 - PC

I stumbled across this game while searching for new stuff to play and looking really deep into the internet for recommendations. I often like to try lesser known games that are passionately appreciated by a very small group of people. I saw that Off was a game that was getting this kind of love and decided I wanted to check it out. Off is a French indie game released on the PC in 2008 which was eventually translated into English in 2011. It is a weird, weird, trippy game. I think I would pitch it as: "What if Earthbound was a horror game? And then it was given an extra dose of weirdness"

In Off, you play as "The Batter" (possible Earthbound reference?) who is tasked with "purifying" various zones of the in-game world that have become infested with ghostly specters. The Batter is guided through the game world by a well-spoken and eternally smiling feline known as "The Judge" whose in-game artwork looks like it was likely influenced by Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat. The Judge provides The Batter with knowledge and background story about the in-game world and often provides hints for the puzzle solving sections. The Batter is also assisted by a masked merchant named Zacharie who sells The Batter equipment, items and upgrades. He always greets The Batter with a signature creepy chuckle and will occasionally wear a cat mask to impersonate the Judge for some bizarre reason. Most of the characters in the game, especially The Judge and Zacharie, are quite aware that they are characters in a video game and will sometimes directly address the player as though you were a character in the game. In most games, this sort of 4th wall break is done for comedic effect, but that's not the case with Off. Here, it's used as a story element which helps construct the creepy, surreal atmosphere. This is my favorite type of horror game. Off mixes its dark and disturbing subject matter with bizarre, surreal imagery to mess with the player's mind. It uses atmosphere and storytelling to deliver its chills in lieu of jump scares.

I was initially not very taken with Off's art style. It looked cheap, minimalistic and low quality. But as I played the game, the artwork really grew on me and I think it helps to give this game a sense of style. Some of the monster designs are really horrifying too. The soundtrack also helps to create the unique and wacky feel of the game. Just give a listen to "Pepper Steak", Off's battle theme. It's a remix of an old jazz song set to a Cajun beat. It sounds completely insane and a little horrifying, which fits in perfectly with the game thematically. The one complaint I will level against the sound design is that Off repeats some basic sound effects much too often. And I'm not sure if it was just my copy of the game, but the music was very poorly looped. Minor complaints, but these are little things that can be easily cleaned up to give a game more polish.

I found the storytelling to simultaneously be a strength and weakness in Off. The dialogue is very well written, but the story is often ambiguous at times. For a good portion of the game, I felt like I wasn't sure what I was doing or why I was doing it. There are also a lot of events that take place in the game that are a little vague about what's happening, especially near the end. While narrative ambiguity is a definite problem with the game, I still felt interested to explore the world and learn about all of the characters which speaks to how strong and engaging the writing still is. The actual gameplay for Off is where the game falls flat on its face. The RPG combat is very basic and extremely repetitive. Without any interesting battle mechanics, Off's combat system started to stale very quickly. I found I could just use the same attacks and strategy regardless of which enemies I was facing. The game's designers chose to include an "auto-battle" system as well, but I feel this is actually a detriment to Off. It's never good when a game can play itself. The player always needs to feel engaged. The puzzles in this game were almost equally as disappointing as the combat. A lot of the puzzles weren't very well communicated and even the ones what were weren't very clever or interesting. There were times when I wasn't even sure if what looking at was even intended to be a puzzle or not. It's a shame because a little more polish, thought and depth on the gameplay would have done a lot to improve the playability of this game.

Summary:
If you play Off, you're doing it for the story, not the gameplay. The puzzles are weak and the combat is mind-numbingly repetitive. To its credit, Off still manages to create a very unique and bizarre world through strong writing and stylistically appropriate artwork and music. The story lost me at times, but it was still an interesting and engaging ride. Off is certainly not for everyone though and it will likely be doomed by its faults to continue to only be appreciated only by a small group of hardcore horror game fans. If you do decide to try it though, don't say I didn't warn you about that combat system.

EDIT: You can download Off completely free here if you're interested in giving it a shot

Resident Evil

Capcom - 2002 (1996 Original) - GameCube/Wii/PS3/X360

Ahhh, October. October has always been one of my favorite months. Maybe it's because I was born in the beginning of the month, or maybe it's because October means football season is in full swing or maybe it's because the oppressive Florida weather where I live starts to cool down a bit and you can go outside again without feeling like you're going to die. Or maybe it's because October is home to Halloween, which has become one of my favorite holidays in my adult life. Aside from eating candy and dressing up like ridiculous characters, the fact that Halloween is a sort of celebration of fear and scary things has always been a novel concept to me. Last year, I observed Halloween by watching a bunch of horror films and exploring specifically why I did or did not find them scary. This year, I'm planning to do the same thing here, but with games. I'm going to kick things off with one of the most obvious and well-known horror games of all time, but I promise in the coming weeks I'll cover some horror games you probably haven't played before. Also if you're looking for other horror titles to try, check out anything I've labeled with the horror tag so far. All of those titles are interesting in their own way and definitely worth a look with Silent Hill 2 being a particular favorite of mine.

The original Resident Evil made its debut on the PS1 in 1996 and is considered to be the genesis of the survival horror game genre. It was very well received critically and commercially and it of course spawned many sequels, spin-offs and movie tie-ins. Starting with Resident Evil 4, recent entries in the series have been more action/shooter than survival horror, but the original Resident Evil is certainly true survival horror. As important and influential as the original is, the game I want to specifically talk about is the 2002 remake for GameCube that was then ported to a bunch of other consoles. The 2002 remake contains completely redone visuals and cutscenes, alterations to gameplay, completely different puzzles and re-recorded voice acting, sound effects and music. This sounds like total blasphemy, especially to remake a game as iconic as the original. But the remake is SO well done; it's faithful to the vision of its predecessor and it's a testament to the quality of the remake that the remake is arguably even more well received than the original. Aside from more immersive sound and graphics, probably the most important thing the remake did was re-record the voice overs. The voice acting was, well, pretty terrible. I think the enhancements made in the remake enable this game to age a little more gracefully and stand the test of time as a horror game masterpiece.

If you've ever played any of the other entries in the Resident Evil series, you know that the story is kind of ridiculous and throw away. There's all sorts of plot holes and inconsistencies and it can get pretty absurd at times. Most of my other favorite horror games use excellent writing to help create their creepy mood, but not really so with Resident Evil. What it lacks in storytelling, it makes up for with superb audiovisual presentation and excellent game design. One of the first unusual things you'll notice when playing the game is that it uses a fixed and stationary camera. The game is still rendered in full 3D, but the camera never moves, only the the player and enemies do. This can be a little disorienting at first, especially when changing scenes, but I'm surprised I haven't seen this elsewhere in other Survival Horror games. It makes the game feel very cinematic and gives the designers complete control over exactly what they want the player to see. In first person games or games with an adjustable camera, the designers have to design set pieces and jump scares around knowing or guessing where the player's camera will be. Resident Evil is freed up to design its scares however it pleases, and it does so very well.

Resident Evil does a great job of not only creating creepy atmosphere with its audiovisuals, but also by creating stress and nervousness through gameplay. Encountering an enemy in is scary in its own right, but that fear is also accompanied by the stress of considering how to deal with the enemy. You may have a pistol, but ammo is limited. Should you still shoot it? Knives don't consume ammo, but are also more risky as you have to get close to the enemy in order to kill it. And even if you do manage to "kill" a zombie, it will actually eventually reanimate and become stronger and faster. You can prevent a zombie from reanimating by burning their corpse, but that means you'll have to carry around kerosene and a lighter which take up precious inventory slots. Burning corpses will also consume kerosene which is preciously finite resource. Is the corpse in a key corridor that you'll have to walk through frequently? It might not be worth your kerosene. And if ammo or health are low, sometimes the best option may be to simply run away.

Another smart game design choice was the limitation of the player's inventory slots. You'll eventually find a giant crate in the game that can store all of your items, but you can only take so many of them with you at a time when you leave. You'll have to make strategic decisions about how many healing items you want to bring, how much ammo you want to bring, whether or not to bring the kerosene/lighter and you'll also want to think about how many inventory slots you want to keep open in case you find something interesting while exploring the mansion. There's also a finite number of saves you can make while playing Resident Evil, which is a really interesting mechanic that I'm surprised more games haven't copied. Your character in the game saves their progress by typing on an old-fashioned typewriter, but using a typewriter requires ink ribbons which are then consumed. When you burn through all of your ink ribbons, you can't make any more saves until you find more ribbons in the mansion. This keeps the player from just killing a few enemies and quickly running back to a save their progress. There's an ample amount of ink ribbons to find in the mansion as to not make the number of saves an annoying issue, but it still makes you think twice before making a save with minimal progress. Very smart game design.

Summary:
Resident Evil is a horror game classic, and the remake is a masterpiece. You absolutely must play this if you're a horror game fan, but if you call yourself that you probably already have. For those looking to test the waters of the survival horror genre for the first time, the Resident Evil remake is a great place to start. It excellently builds and maintains tension through superb audiovisual presentation and smart game design. In the most Capcom of moves, I hear they're remaking the remake for next-gen consoles and PC and it will be out early 2015. I think this is just going to be an "HD remaster" of the remake, but this will still hopefully give more people a chance to play this game. Shinji Mikami, the creative director of Resident Evil, also has his latest game "The Evil Within" coming out later this month. From what I've seen of the game so far, it looks very interesting. Hopefully he can recapture the terror and suspense he created so well initially with Resident Evil

Riven

Cyan - 1997 - PC/Saturn/PS1/Mobile

Anyone else remember this game? Riven was the sequel to the massively popular game Myst which launched in 1993. It was famously one of the first games to be released on a CD and helped to popularize the CD-ROM drive. I can't even believe Myst is more than 20 years old now. I can still remember playing Myst on Windows 3.1 and how frustratingly often it used to crash. Then Riven was released in 1997 and came on 5 CDs. You had to annoyingly keep swapping the CDs out as you explored different parts of the island. There's a lot of stuff like this about Riven that requires the player to have a lot of patience. Patience that I had as a kid, but has long since left me as an adult. It's kind of a shame because I'm pretty sure that if I played a game like Riven today, I'd push it aside after 15 minutes or so and move on to something else. While there are some technical limitations and some game mechanics in Riven that have not aged well over the years, there's also a lot this game does really smartly. It's a "slow burn" type of game. If you give Riven your time and patience, it will reward you with some amazingly clever puzzles and an unusual and immersive fantasy story. 

For those not familiar with the Myst games, they are point & click style adventure games. But not quite in the same way as the old King's Quest or Monkey Island games. They're no puzzles that involve combining items together through some absurd logic that allows you to progress further or whatever. In Riven, you're gated only by how much you've explored and how deep your understanding is about the island and its inhabitants. It's a game that does a beautiful job of communicating a complex story with few words and minimal cutscenes. The only cutscene you're given for quite a while is the game's initial opening cutscene, which really gives you more questions than answers. During this cryptic scene, a man teleports you to an island called Riven after giving you nothing but two books. You arrive in a jail cell on Riven where one of the books you were given is promptly stolen by a man who does not speak your language. The thief is then quickly killed by another mysterious person who sets you free, but not before taking the stolen book for himself. You're then free to explore the island and unravel the mystery of Riven. An intriguing open, no? What's in that book that's worth killing for? And who are these people who are so desperate to get it?

Riven's story is told through exploring the island, discovering its secrets and understanding the meaning and purpose behind them. Riven doesn't tell its story through dialogue or cutscenes as in most games. When you do watch a cutscene in the game, it usually only serves to confirm what you've figured out about the island already. It's never directly or clearly communicated to you what any of the character's motivations are or even why you were sent to the island in the first place. It's really up to the player to discover and understand the deep story in Riven for themselves, and this may have been the most satisfying part of the game for me. I think the best way to go about doing this is to always ask the question "Why?" when something doesn't make sense. A lot of the fun in this game is trying to form the answers to all of the questions the game gives based on what you know about the island so far. The developers did a fantastic job of being very deliberate with their world design. Nothing is there by accident or coincidence, nearly every object or structure in the game is meant to communicate something important to you. As you explore Riven, you'll encounter many mysterious machines and contraptions. Ask "What do they do?". "Who would have put them here?". If you think on these questions, eventually the details of the story will come in to focus.

The puzzles in Riven are given to you in a similar fashion as the story. The objective or elements of the puzzle aren't given to you explicitly, but rather communicated to you subtly through the environment and world design. It's definitely a game where you have to keep a sheet or two of handwritten notes while you're playing, which is something not many games do anymore. Some of the puzzles in Riven are downright brilliant. There's one amazing puzzle in particular where I can remember feeling so impressed with myself after I had figured it out. The solutions to these puzzles are really so satisfying when you finally figure them out. I'd challenge you to play through this game without looking any of them up.

Riven is not without its faults though and some of them are unfortunately due to this game's age. The game is first person, but it's not full 3D. It's essentially a bunch of still images that have been linked together. This, to me, really makes the game feel aged. A full 3D engine would do this game a lot of good. The game's pace is also incredibly slow and it can be very frustrating to be stuck in one place for a while and feel like you're not progressing. This will likely happen a lot in Riven which can be discouraging to players if they don't have a deep well of patience. There are certain puzzles in the game where Riven may have been to clever for its own good. The puzzle solutions are fair, but they're hidden so deeply in the game's world that they're not easily discovered without a very keen eye and extremely sharp mind.

Summary:
If you've got the time and patience and love puzzle games, mysteries or unusual stories, Riven would probably be a good fit for you. Just keep in mind that this game will probably show its age and you may also get stuck frequently while playing it. If you've never played a game in the Myst series and are curious, Riven is a great place to start. It's a refinement and improvement on everything that the first game was. While subsequent games in the series improved their audiovisual fidelity, they never quite recaptured the sublime story or brilliant puzzles that made Riven a great game. Also steer clear of Myst 5. That game is terrible. Rand Miller, one of the lead creative minds behind Myst and Riven recently launched a successful kickstarter for his new game, Obduction. It sounds like Obduction will play similarly to Riven and I'd love to try another game like this to see if I still have the patience for it. I'll be interested to monitor the development of Obduction and hopefully play it soon.

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.

Proteus

Ed Key, David Kanaga - 2013 - PC/PS3/Vita

This week, I played through Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and also the XCOM expansion, Enemy Within. Both are fantastic games, and I'd highly recommend either of them, but Aria of Sorrow is great for the exact same reason Symphony of the Night is great and Enemy within is great for the exact same reason XCOM: Enemy Unknown is great. I considered writing a more fleshed out review for XCOM since I did that one so long ago, but Enemy Within is essentially the same game as Enemy Unknown and I don't want to review the same game twice. Also Aria of Sorrow is pretty much the exact same game as Symphony of the Night, they just changed some of the character names and the castle is laid out differently. Just know that these games are totally fantastic and worth checking out. However this week, I think I'd like to talk about a little indie game I picked up for free on PlayStation Plus called Proteus.

I'm actually not even sure if I should be writing about Proteus on this blog, only because I'm not sure if Proteus qualifies as a game. This really raised the question of "What is a game?" for me even more than Journey did. At least with Journey, there was a definite end to the game. While the goal of the game wasn't directly stated, it was implied that you were progressing towards something by the various scenes and events in Journey. But Proteus has no end, no goals, no progress, no events or story of any kind. Now I'm not sure how you exactly define what a game is, or even if it matters whether or not Proteus is one, but for the sake of not being misleading, you might want to consider Proteus as an "audiovisual experience" rather than a game.

Proteus was created by just two dudes, Ed Key and David Kanaga. Development started in 2008 when David had the vision of making a unconventional and completely non-violent video game. Proteus was finally released last year and David certainly realized his vision. It's a very unusual game and there's certainly no violence. You begin the game standing offshore while staring at a very pixelated island. As you move toward the island, you'll realize that nearly everything on the island makes some sort of unusual synthesized sounds that all sort of meld together to make the game's soundtrack. The game will sound different depending on where you are on the island and what you're standing next to. For instance, in a forest, you'll hear the electronic purrs of all of the pixelated trees. Or on top of a tall mountain, the soundtrack may dim a bit and you'll hear only the quiet sound of the wind blowing. It's another game that you can just watch a YouTube video of and probably get the gist of it. Everything is procedurally generated, so the island is different each time, and everything is very pixelated and musical. It kind of feels like something that would belong at one of those "games of tomorrow" places at Disney World.

I hate to sound like I'm picking on the little guys, but Proteus is totally not my kind of game. The two things I love to look for in games are either a strong gameplay hook or excellent narrative. Most of my favorite games combine both of these elements to make a fun game that also tells an interesting story. Proteus has neither of these elements. There's absolutely no story, and there's really no gameplay either, at least not in the traditional sense of that word. I really did try to give Proteus a chance though, I tried to explore the island with no expectations and just enjoy the whimsical electronic music. But I just couldn't get into it. Sorry, Proteus.

Summary:
Proteus offers a very unusual and non-violent audiovisual experience. If that sentence sounded interesting to you, maybe Proteus will be your game. It certainly wasn't mine, but that's okay. If you're like me and you know that Proteus won't be your thing, Aria of Sorrow and/or XCOM: Enemy Unknown are excellently designed games that are boatloads of fun. Both are worth a look if you like Metroidvania style games or turn based strategy games.

A Story About My Uncle

Gone North Games - 2014 - PC

A Story About My Uncle is the first game from Gone North Games, a small indie studio based in Sweeden. According to their website, Gone North Games was founded by 9 students who have a passion for making games. Since it's advertised all over their website and apparently important to the developers, I'll repeat it here - A Story About My Uncle is a completely non-violent video game. This isn't really an entirely novel concept for a game, but it is unusual I suppose. For better or worse, most games do rely on some sort of violent combat as their main game mechanic. I do think it's cool that games like Gone Home or To The Moon are using video games purely as a story telling medium. But unfortunately, A Story About My Uncle doesn't tell a very interesting story. It is a pretty fun platformer though which is really what this game stands on

The game begins as you, the narrator, are reading your daughter a bedtime story. The entire rest of the game is played out as a flashback as the narrator recounts how he, as a boy, used to play with his uncle at his uncle's house. One day, the narrator's uncle went missing and you soon find out that he was transported to a distant magical world through some transporter device that the narrator's uncle invented. The game is a little vague on the details of how exactly this transporter was invented or how it works, but the narrator of course uses it to travel to this other world in search of his uncle. That's pretty much all the exposition you get. I mean that's it for the rest of the game. You meet some other characters and go to new locations, but the story never really progresses at all. You're just searching for your uncle the whole game. That's it. And then (spoiler alert) the game just kind of ends abruptly at a certain point and the credits roll. Nothing is really resolved and nothing really changes, just "The End". It was very anti-climactic and disappointing. It almost seemed rushed, like they might have been trying to go somewhere with the story, but had to cut a lot of it to meet deadlines or something like that. In any case, I somewhat ironically found the story in A Story About My Uncle to be underdeveloped and uninteresting.

Near the beginning of the game, the narrator discovers some magical super-bouncy boots and some magical grappling tether thing which serve as the game's platforming mechanics. I can't remember what the game actually called the boots and grapple device and I'm too lazy to look it up, but these definitely are what make this game fun and interesting. The boots allow you to jump crazy high and crazy far and the tether allows you to pull yourself closer towards certain parts of the terrain. Most of the terrain in the game is made up of small chunks of floating rock as shown in the cover art above, so the platforming can be kind of challenging in certain areas. Quick props to the graphic artists for this game, I found a lot of the floating terrain and world design to be really interesting from an artistic point of view. Very cool and imaginative artwork.

I prefer to play games laying down in my couch with a controller as opposed to sitting forward with a mouse and keyboard, even while playing PC games. So I'm not sure if it was just because I was playing with a controller, but there were some parts of this game that were really tricky to pull off. And I'm usually quite good at platformers. And that's fine, I enjoy a good challenge, but the difficulty curve with this game was a little wonky. There was one particular section near the end of the game that was insanely difficult, it probably took me 30-40 attempts to finally do it right. And then the rest of the game was mind-numbingly easy. My only other complaint, from a gameplay perspective, was with the level design. It was quite often not very clear where the game wanted me to go next, especially in the later levels where the terrain is separated by great distances. I had to jump around and try to grapple to things trail-and-error style until I finally found something that worked. The difficulty curve is forgivable, but in a linear platformer like this I feel like the player should always have a pretty good idea of where the game wants them to go next.

Summary:
It is definitely a flawed game, but if you like 3D platformers, you could do worse than A Story About My Uncle. It's got some really cool art design and fun platforming, but it has some design issues and the actual story might as well not even exist. It was also kind of short, I finished it in about 5 hours, but I found that length to be appropriate. All in all, not too bad for a small team making their first game. And as its developers insist, it's completely non-violent, if that's a selling point for you.

Goat Simulator

Coffee Stain Studios - 2014 - PC

I think there are pretty much two camps of people as it pertains to Goat Simulator. Those who think it's absolutely hilarious and those who get bored quickly while playing it and are slightly confused by the relative popularity of this game. I believe I fall in the latter camp. Just go watch some gameplay videos of Goat Simulator and you'll pretty much already know which camp you belong to without even having to play the game. I understand the humor though, and I get why people like the game. But the more I play Goat Simulator, the more I'm sure that I'm not this game's target audience.

Goat Simulator was a product of an internal game jam at Coffee Stain Studios. Some early footage of a demo of Goat Simulator was released on YouTube and the demand for a full game to be produced was very high. Because, you know, it's the internet. A full version of Goat Simulator was then launched on Steam earlier this year on April 1st. No really, it was. It's kind of an interesting game. It's maybe one of the truest sandbox games ever made. There's absolutely no objective. The entire gameplay of Goat Simulator relies on creating emergent humor through its admittedly broken physics engine. Have you ever been killed by a giant in Skyrim and seen this? Or seen the bizarre physics glitches in the FIFA or GTA games? The developers intentionally left these kinds of glitches in the Goat Simulator physics engine for comedic effect. And that's pretty much the game, just messing around with the physics engine in the game world. There is a scoring system similar to ones found in the old Tony Hawk skating games where points are awarded for doing various skating tricks. There's also some mini-missions and subquests, but it's pretty much just Messing Around: The Videogame

The aforementioned physics glitches in the Elder Scrolls, FIFA or GTA games are funny because they are unexpected and bizarre variations on our expectations of how the game should behave. In all of those games, there is (arguably) some semblance of realism or at least the attempt to make physics objects behave as they would in the real world. That's not really the case with Goat Simulator. I feel that the intentionally programmed physics bugs in Goat Simulator lose some of their comedic value because, while they still look ridiculous, they are completely expected by the player. You're not really expecting to headbutt a human NPC and have him just fall over. You expecting him to skyrocket unrealistically off into the horizon. And always having this constant expectation of humor somewhat diminished the comedic impact for me. I was almost disappointed when crazy stuff didn't always constantly happen while I was galavanting around in the game world. 

Summary:

If you're looking for an open ended, goofy sandbox game with ludicrous physics, Goat Simulator is your game. I didn't really enjoy it, but I'm also aware that this kind of game is not for me. It's obviously loved by its fans though, as it has tons of gameplay videos of ridiculous stuff on YouTube. I think a recent patch for the game added a couch co-op mode, which is cool. This is definitely the kind of game you'd want to share with friends.

Diddy Kong Racing

Rare - 1997 - N64/DS

I unfortunately recently lost a family member who was very important to me. I don't think this person quite had the intense passion for gaming that I do, but he was always down to play whatever I was into at the time, and that was awesome. I was trying to think of just one game to pick that we shared together growing up, but there were so many. I can clearly remember Christmas of 1997 when I first got my N64 with Diddy Kong Racing. I don't think I've ever been so excited in my life. I was pretty much this kid. I remember all of the sleepovers we had in the following weeks where we played battle mode and co-op and took turns trying to beat the various bosses in this game. Good times. Good memories. I'm sure you've got much better things to do now than read video game blogs, but in any case, Jay Wolf: This one's for you.

So usually when I write these reviews, I'm either reviewing a game that I've played so many times that I've committed it to memory, or it's a game that I've just finished and it's fresh in my mind. Neither one is really true of Diddy Kong Racing for me, but I played it a ton when it came out and I replayed it about 5 years ago in college. I'll be drawing on old memories for this one, so if I exclude a few details here and there, forgive me. Okay one quick thing before I begin: Is it just childhood nostalgia or did some of the best games ever come out during the N64/PS1 era? Ocarina of Time, Super Smash Bros, Tomb Raider, GoldenEye, Final Fantasy 7-9 etc. It's not just me, right? These are HUGELY influential games. I'm not saying Diddy Kong Racing quite belongs with these titles, but I feel like even the "B" games from this era are better than today's "B" games, no?

Diddy Kong Racing was released for the Nintendo 64 in November of 1997. It was actually developed by Rare under the title Pro Am 64 and had absolutely nothing to do with any Nintendo characters until Shigeru Miyamoto saw the game and, at the last second, suggested adding Diddy Kong as the game's mascot to try to boost sales. It worked, and Diddy Kong Racing became one of the best selling N64 titles and was later remade for the Nintendo DS. This was actually also the debut appearances for the Rare characters Banjo the Bear and Conker the Squirrel who went on to star in Banjo Kazooie and Conker's Bad Fur Day, respectively. Both of those games were also pretty awesome. It tickles me quite a bit that Conker, the mischievous, foul-mouthed alcoholic squirrel got his start in Diddy Kong Racing, a game marketed for kids with an "Everyone" ESRB rating.

I don't normally care for racing games. Especially the ones that try to be hyper-realistic. I went over my feelings on realism in sports games in my Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball review. I like racing games like Mario Kart or Diddy Kong Racing that add excitement to racing games by adding weapons and ridiculous hazards and absurd level design. I'm sure racing purists will disagree, but these games are my jam. The main way Diddy Kong Racing sets itself apart from Mario Kart 64 is with multiple vehicle types. Not only are there cars, but planes and hovercrafts are selectable on most levels as well. Hovercrafts are a little harder to control than cars, but there may be shortcuts in some levels accessible only by hovercraft. Or you can choose to take to the air, but doing so may require some finesse and skilled piloting in close quarters, plus planes have slow acceleration, if I recall correctly. In addition to the variety of vehicles and weapons, there are some cool secrets with the game that reward skillful technical play. Pro tip: Take your finger off of the accelerator when going over a boost. You'll go faster. Or if you're really good, power-slide into a boost while driving a car AND take your finger off of the accelerator. You'll go crazy fast. You can also optionally try to collect stray bananas while racing to increase your top speed. The neat little tricks like this add polish and depth to the game.

In addition to just racing with friends, DKR has a pretty cool battle mode. I'm not sure I like it as much as Mario Kart 64, but it certainly feels more customizable and fleshed out. In addition to a deathmatch mode, there's a sort of capture the flag mode where you compete over possession of certain items and try to bring them back to your base. DKR also has a pretty excellent single player adventure mode which is definitely better than Mario Kart 64's single player. Instead of just racing track after track, DKR's single player combats repetitiveness by offering different challenges for you to complete like collecting hidden coins while racing or defeating super-fast bosses in races through special tracks. Exploring the race tracks and the "hub world" that connects them is highly encouraged and the game world is pretty interesting and well designed for a racing game. There are some cool unlockables and secrets that can only be found through careful exploration. And the soundtrack. Oh, the soundtrack. Even after not playing this game for many years, I can still whistle along to all of the catchy tracks. David Wise, the Donkey Kong Country composer, returned to work his magic on the DKR soundtrack. Pirate Lagoon, Frosty Village and Ancient Lake are some of my favorites.

Summary:
If you like the Mario Kart games and are looking for something similar, check out Diddy Kong Racing. The single player is a little more fleshed out than Mario Kart's and I believe you can actually play some of the single player missions cooperatively with two people, if memory serves. I've never played the DS version, so I can't vouch for that. But if you can dig up an N64 and a working copy of this game, you're in for a good time. It's an extremely solid and polished racing game.