Portal 2: First Thoughts

So I bought Portal 2. Still making my through. Some early impressions:

-Solid writing, although most of it has been spoiled for me by the internet parroting it all.

-I was seriously stuck dead in my tracks during one puzzle for about half an hour. And I figured it out right before I was going to surrender and look up the solution online. Figuring that out made me feel a lot smarter than I really am. Very few games have accomplished this. Most veer wildly too far into frustratingly vague territory, where you're punished simply for not having a psychic link to Tim Schaefer's schizophrenia.

-I miss when Chell was a person of colour, instead of a plastic-surgery-riddled Strong Female Character. Considering you're not even supposed to see her, and she's not even on the box, that's pretty disappointing that they would whitewash her just to appeal to a "wider audience".

-When I "rescued" the turret and brought it through the field that destroys anything you carry through it, I felt so bad I restarted from the last checkpoint and just left it before that part, intact. Just so it would "survive" my playthrough. It takes a very special game to make me care that much about the soulless robots shooting at me.

-The fat jokes get old, fast. 

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~A.H. 

 

Like Rogue

I like the idea of proceduraly-generated content in games. Especially where that's the main focus the game is built around. Every room being completely different and having different monsters and items and such every time. Sounds exciting doesn't it? Each experience a little different from the last? So why are so many people who try to pay homage to those games so bad at it?

What I'm seeing in the games that say they're inspired by "Roguelike" games is unflattering and sloppy. Without fail, games like Spelunky and Binding of Isaac mistake giving the player nothing to work with as "challenge", or "difficulty". It's not challenging in BoI when there are dozens of treasure chests and treasure rooms I could use to upgrade my character to stand a better chance... but the game doesn't give me any keys to unlock them. It's not "difficult" when Spelunky makes it so I need bombs to progress when I don't have any. Or making you find treasure to get money to buy items, and then not putting in any shops, anywhere.

That's not challenge or difficulty. That's being a lazy, cheap-ass game designer.

I only got this far because the game was suddenly very generous with its' powerups early on. Luck should be a factor in a roguelike game, but it sucks the fun out of it when it's all about luck, and nothing I do to improve will have any say in what happens.

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Valve: "Sweat Box"

Valve tests Left 4 Dead to see how much you're sweating during play, as if that could be useful information in any context. Is this related to that Director stuff, where the game makes itself more difficult depending on how "stressed" you are(despite the fact that it has no way of knowing that unless you literally hook yourself up to it)?

Let's say they used this sweat information in their games, and it would alter itself depending on how much sweat you've accumulated. What if they're just playing on a hot day in a room without air-conditioning? What if they're playing in the winter? Instead of designing encounters around nebulous, unrelated bodily functions, why don't they base the in-game difficulty on how much health and ammo your team has? What else have they got planned? Will they patch the game so that it spawns a Smoker every time I really have to pee? How is this making their games better?

This is why Left 4 Dead sucks out loud. You can't make the game harder or easier depending on how stressed out you think I am. But you can use the same information I'm using to determine how stressed I should be. Things like Health, how many team-mates are still alive, how much distance I have to cover to get to the safe room, whether or not I have first or second-tier weapons, whether I have a lot of pipe bombs or molotov cocktails or none, etc.

You wouldn't believe how many times I was playing this game limping, on my last hit point, with only one team-mate left alive, both of us down to our pistols, and the game decided I wasn't "stressed" enough. So they put a Tank in front of the safe room.

These idiots are not seeing the forest for the trees.

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~A.H.

Impulse

So a whole bunch of Valve games are coming to Gamestop's "Impulse" online service. But here's what it says at the bottom of the page announcing this:

"All Valve titles require the Steam Client to install and play."

...What?

"Steam" is the online service thingy that Valve uses. There is no point in buying this on Impulse and giving Gamestop money if I have to open up Steam to use these games anyway. I can just buy those things on Steam.

Are ALL decisions in video games made today by a man freebasing moon dust and slamming his dick against a Speak-And-Spell, and then obeying whatever monotone commands it issues?

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~A.H.

Left 4k Dead

See, I've always thought the concept of Left 4 Dead was a solid one, it was just really, really, really badly handled by Valve. Thankfully, one of the guys behind Minecraft took the same concept, and made a much more harrowing experience out of it.

And it's 4k in size. Turns out all of the polygons in the world can't cover up the smell of shitty game design.

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~A.H.

Origin, Dragon Age

Okay. This one's going to require a bit of a history lesson. There are 3 major players in this story:

EA, Bioware and Valve.