Tag Archives: Adventure

Dead Presidentes

I haven’t been doing a lot of gaming lately, period, due to work and other responsibilities taking up most of my time, and most of my tiny bits of game time have been spent with some retro titles I hope to review soon. That said, I have found a little time to play some new things.

After enjoying random bouts of trading off the controller for games she’s been playing, like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Grand Theft Auto V, my girlfriend and I decided to try finding something we could play together. I suggested she play through Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and that I’d be happy to hang out and watch since I loved the game and had only played it one time, and was curious to see how it might play out differently for her. Long story short, she had a great time and was interested in playing other Telltale games in the future.

“Clem is still in panic inducing constant danger.”

The Walking Dead: Season Two was an obvious choice for the next game. We decided to take turns playing the chapters while the other watched which worked out quite well. All in all, the game is more of the same as the first season. Not much in the way of pixel hunting and inventory puzzles, with dialog choices being the player’s main input into the game, plus the addition of occasional action (often quick time event based) sequences. As with the first game, where it really shined was with the story and character development. In fact, I have quite a hard time deciding which game I liked best – a problem I honestly didn’t expect to have.

Lee was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the first game, and likewise Clementine’s struggles are almost equally, if not equally, compelling. Season Two seems to be a little bit more willing to shock the player with unexpected plot twists and the occasional tragic death or random gory moment. While the first game had me invested in Lee and he and Clementine’s fates, the second one had me deeply invested in the story itself – I constantly found myself pining to find out how a foreshadowed event was going to play out, what the next twist would be, and eventually, how the game could possibly wrap up to a nice conclusion with the desperate situation the party eventually finds themselves in.

“Well, a wordy reply isn’t always required…”

I also felt like the fact that, unlike the first game, Season Two ACTUALLY effectively branches out into various different endings, was much more interesting and satisfying. The first was satisfying in its own way, don’t get me wrong, but overall the second season left me feeling unusually satisfied with my experience. The characters and story are well developed and the switch of lead protagonists to Clementine avoids feeling like it’s just a gimmicky cash grab after the somewhat unexpected success of the first game. Not at all. Awesome! While there doesn’t need to be a season 3, if there is they’ll have to make it look pretty disappointing to not have my interest.

For our next game I decided to pick up the console version of Diablo III – Diablo, you may remember, is a game series that I like a lot, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about the console ports of Diablo III, especially when it comes to same screen cooperative play. Unfortunately we haven’t had much time to try to play through it since we first picked it up so more on that one later, but at the same time we also randomly picked up a copy of Tropico 4 for the Xbox 360.

“Political prisoners in training.”

Tropico is a series I’ve had my eye one since the very first game was released. The concept is excellent – a SimCity like city builder game focused a little more on the social and political side of building and running a city, with the tongue in cheek twist that you’re the dictator of a tiny island nation very obviously inspired by Cuba. All the stereotypes are there – does El Presidente try to appease the USSR or the USA? Does he (or she) set up democratic elections, SET UP democratic elections, or simply assassinate any political opponents that come his way? Oh yeah, and let’s not forget rum and coffee exports.

This introduces all kinds of new challenges – since you’re an actual island NATION, not just a city, resource gathering and production are highly important, as are keeping the local political hopefuls and dissidents in check, and keeping the geopolitical powers happy with you too. Managing imports and exports, as well as immigrants and tourists, all while growing you country and your city. This lets the developers add all sort of systems into the game that can allow for some fun and challenging scenarios as you might easily imagine.

“Viva la stable economy!”

The port is surprisingly well done for a PC-centric strategy game ported to a console with a great adaption of the interface and controls to the Xbox 360 controller, and despite mostly just playing with the sandbox mode so far, both of us have sunk plenty of time into the game and enjoyed it immensely so far. The campaign offers the same gameplay but with a combination of specific goals and artificial adjustments of factions, events, etc. to mix things up a bit. I’ll probably end up picking this (and some of the other titles in the series) up on Steam at some point and playing it the way it’s meant to be played, but this has been a great purchase for something we just happened to pick up on a whim.

More soon!

Screenshots stolen from random filthy capitalist pigs!

X-com Versus the Zombie Menace!

Brace yourself for another shocking tale of my crippling case of backlogitis…

I pre-ordered XCOM: Enemy Unknown for PC back in 2012, anticipating the ever-loving fuck out of it after not having a turned based tactics game come close to the experience I had with the original X-COM back in the 90s, and here I am, finally playing the goddamn thing just after the release of its expansion pack over a year later… and I’m playing the Xbox 360 version to add insult to injury. I’m goddamn despicable.

The decision to go with the console release of XCOM: Enemy Within came about because I had never purchased the game on console and had heard repeatedly from various sources that playing with the controller was fine. Not only fine, but a lot of people preferred it to keyboard and mouse. Yes, even PC gamers. At first I found this unfathomable but I eventually accepted that it might just be true. This is 2014 after all. When Enemy Within was announced I figured it was my opportunity to pick up the complete “commander edition” version of the game in one package and play from the luxurious comfort of my couch. My only disappoint with this decision is that now I’m sure I’ll play through this game several more times in the future and when I do it’ll be on PC, so I’ll need to pick up another copy of the Enemy Within expansion pack regardless. Ah well.

“MEC troopers, never leave home without ’em!”

So yeah, I’m not going to go into why I loved the original XCOM: UFO Defense because I plan on putting together a retro review of it sometime in the next 20 years. Let’s just say that several aspects of the game struck me as more or less perfect and I wanted another experience that recaptured its glory. I watched all of the discussion regarding the various spiritual successors but always passed, played some other games inspired by its mechanics (such as Silent Storm, another game I need to revisit and review) but never got too far into any of them, and when I heard about XCOM finally picking up a biggish budget sequel I was thrilled. Finally, when the Firaxis game was announced and the first details were released I was quite hopeful that they’d finally put together a worthy sequel.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown isn’t really a sequel or a spiritual successor, but a full on, faithful re-imagining of the original game, updated with modern mechanics and presentation. While that sounds like a description for any update of an old game, it’s really quite literal with XCOM. It’s like they made a check list of everything that made X-COM “X-COM” and put it into this new version, only changing and (usually somewhat modernizing) the systems underneath to make the still very customizable, and still very brutal game more accessible in today’s market. To put it another way, it is almost as if the 2012 development team took the original design documents and concept art and made a new game without much knowledge of the previous one. Sure, a lot of the little details about how the mechanics work and whatnot are all quite different but on the surface it’s the same damn game. At the risk of losing some friends here, I’d even dare say that this new imagining of XCOM might even be better than the original in many aspects. It’s just that goddamn good! Awesome, dynamic squad based tactics, persistence through leveling soldiers, strategy via managing the XCOM program and researching technology trees on the geoscape. It’s all here!

Despite what the suits back at base, sometimes you just HAVE to use high explosives.

“Despite what the suits back at base say, sometimes you just HAVE to use high explosives.”

I played through the entire long campaign with the worthy additions of Enemy Within and the other DLC, and despite only playing on normal difficulty I still found the game to be challenging at times and damn rewarding to boot. I tried to avoid “save scumming” but there were a few times where I reloaded to avoid losing senior soldiers… oh, and I abused the hell out of it to beat that damn whale mission. The Xbox 360 build had a couple of hard locks and other odd bugs but nothing to truly ruin the overall experience. I could go on and on about this game, and if I had written about it while playing I probably would have, but for now that is all I want to gush over it about. Perhaps more the next time I decide to play through?

To cross another one off of my pile of shame, I finally played through the first of Telltale’s The Walking Dead seasons. Being both a fan of the show and of adventure games in general, I’ve been wanting to play this game since I first heard about it and since then I’ve only heard more and more good things. Are they true? Yes, mostly…

“I wanted to post an example of TWD’s excellent, well written dialog system. So, yeah…”

The Walking Dead is a classic adventure game in most respects. Sure, the UI is stripped down and most of the puzzles probably barely qualify as being such in the traditional sense, but at its core it still plays unmistakably like the graphical adventure games of old. While there is still a lot of environmental exploration and “pixel hunting” for items, the items mostly serve to move conversations forward and add the occasional context sensitive action – there’s no tedious inventory management and item combination voodoo to deal with at all. The core of the gameplay instead focuses around the conversation choices you make and how those choices affect your story – who is in your group and how they feel about you, which in the end largely comes down to differences in dialog. That sounds a little simple but it works surprisingly well and while the ultimate outcome is more or less the same, your choices at least feel like they carry some real weight.

Not everything works well though. The action sequences are pretty much all god awful. I was almost shocked to even see them here at all – people have been complaining about crappy action and arcade sequences in adventure games since the 1980s. While there’s some variety there, mostly my problem with them has to do with my second complaint: the engine is pretty bad. There’s all kinds of issues: long loads, flickering, clipping, and general bugginess. It just generally feels clunky. This only really started to affect my enjoyment of the game when it came to those action sequences, especially when they resulted in a sudden death or fail condition. That leads directly to the final point, one I really wasn’t expecting, but instant deaths/fails galore! Really? I’ll fully admit that I’m a Sierra apologist but I thought the dudes at Telltale were big LucasArts fans. I figured they would detest this kind of thing. Ah well, at least they’re generous enough to automatically restart the gameplay right at whatever sequence killed you.

Home improvement time!”

Anyway, back to the good. The hand drawn, graphic novel inspired art style is good (sometimes even strikingly beautiful) even if the engine and some of the animation lets it down a bit. The voice acting is mostly fucking brilliant, with the main cast being among the best I’ve heard in a game. Telltale absolutely nailed the desolation, the desperation, and the overall feel of The Walking Dead setting too. Finally, the writing is great. I quickly found myself caring about the characters and, probably more telling, when I think back on my jaunt through zombie infested Georgia, I remember it more like I had read a novel or watched a good movie than I had played through it in a game. The more I ponder it, I’d have to chalk it up to a tricky combination of the basic setting and plot, the character development, and the agency the player is given behind how the story appears to unfold. It’s not just an infatuation with the excellent Lee and Clementine either, even the tiny stories from the 400 Days episode made an impact.

If you’re a fan of the Walking Dead show and/or comics and don’t completely detest graphical adventure games, please do yourself a favor and put this on your wishlist if you haven’t already played it. It’s brilliant. I played through the aforementioned “400 Days” extra episode and can’t wait to play through Season 2 when it is finished being deployed later this year.

Screenshots are PC not Xbox 360, as I swiped from the Steam Community. Thanks, glorious PC gaming master race!

SpaceVenture Ho!

With all of the recent Kickstarter madness going on the Two Guys From Andromeda, AKA the alter-egos of the creators of Space Quest, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, have teamed back up to create a spiritual Space Quest sequel currently titled SpaceVenture. I’ve not really talked about it or reviewed it on here yet but Sierra’s Space Quest series is definitely one of my all time favorite, if not my absolute favorite, classic adventure game series so you can bet your ass I pledged to this project! I’m genuinely excited about the possibility of another fun, sarcastic sci-fi parody adventure being in my future. That said, the Kickstarter project is currently about half way through and has only raised about half the money it needs so far. I’m fairly sure that like most of these projects it’ll wind up pulling through in the final days but regardless if you love adventure games, particularly the Sierra classics, give these guys some support!

As an aside, I also pledged to the Leisure Suit Larry reboot Kickstarter. While never favorites of mine, those games really get a bad rap from people who’ve never played the originals and have some major misconceptions about the series as a whole.