Three day weekend...motivation depleting...almost gone...still haven't posted on the blog...must...hold...on...
Empyreal Nocturne is one of the most praised games I've come across so far, being the winner of the 2008 IGF student showcase. Let's jump right in and see if the prestige is deserved.
Remember a while ago when I said Descension was like Space Deadbeef on the ground? well this is pretty much that minus the ground, but with a third-person 3D perspective.
I'm real tired, so I'm going to pro-and-con this one.
It does genuinely feel good to destroy your opponents. Unlike Space Deadbeef and Descension, which use very hectic music loops and visuals, Empyreal Nocturne uses a very calming, grey-skies visual style and no music to speak of (which I'd normally complain about, but in this case it enhances the mood). It's a very Shadow of the Collossus-esque feel, which certainly isn't a bad thing.
Honestly there aren't really that many flaws with the game. I only have two real complaints. First, I don't know who on the dev team thought it would be a good idea to use "S" to dive down and "W" to pull up, but they clearly haven't played Starfox recently. It's backwards and disorienting, and it really breaks the flow. It's unchangeable, too, so you just gotta deal with it, junior. Also, I know they're trying to go with a solemn and quiet mood, but a tiny little sound effect to let me know when I've been hit would be nice. Maybe they tried that in an earlier build and found the sky darkening to be a good enough indicator of health (which, by the way, I love. I wish more games were creative about that kind of thing and didn't just resort to the 'let's make the screen grow red and pulsate' route.) or that hitsparks and sound effects would be too distracting. If so, I withdraw my critique, but it's still a little annoying to dodge enemy fire because it can get difficult to tell when you've been hit.
All-in-all, I liked Empyreal Nocturne. I'm not blown away by it, but it was a fun and interesting experience while it lasted. I'm feeling a bit generous today, so I'll give this game my seal of approval. Until next time, stay peaceful.
Links
ohmmmmm: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=382
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Edgy Rangy
You know that feeling you get when you look in the fridge and there are all these elegant foods from a party you had the night before? You got lamb chops, filet mignon, what have you, and you know it's all really delicious stuff, but for some reason you decide to reach for the lunchables and juice pouch behind the acai berry juice? Well if the DigiPen game gallery were a fridge, games like Dreamside Maroon would be small, not quite filling, but very elegant escargots; Crazy Cross would be the 32lb steak that you can't feasibly hope to finish till next December, and Edgy Rangy would be the lunchables. It's not elegant, it's not particularly tasty, and it doesn't quite fill ya, but for some reason it's just what you wanted.
I get the feeling that putting this game on my hard drive is going to lead to at least a few experiences much like the ones I have on occasion when starting up my Nintendo Wii. I came there to start up another intense session of Trauma Center: Second Opinion, but then I see Yoshii, which I bought on Virtual Console, and get the urge to waste a few minutes before wasting an hour.
In fact, Edgy Rangy is a lot like Yoshii, but not quite as stylized, not quite as challenging and not quite as intuitive. In essence, what I'm saying is it's not quite as good, but it does have a certain charm, to be sure.
Edgy Rangy is your typical block-stacking game. You try and stack 3 or more blocks of the same color to get points. Get enough points and you move on to the next level. The game comes with 2 modes, Classic and Relay. Do yourself a favor and go straight for Relay. Trust me, it's better. In relay mode, the blocks don't just disappear if you stack them appropriately, you get to farm them and eliminate them yourself with spacebar. It adds some much needed depth to the experience.
The little tray on which you stack the blocks moves far too slowly, and the game feel is unsatisfying as a result. The hitboxes are also a little imprecise, but easy to figure out once you get the hang of it.
This is a game that you will quit out of boredom, not because it got too challenging. After the third level, I'd say all the charm is gone. They try and spruce up the experience with bonus levels, but honestly they are just as monotonous as the main game.
Edgy Rangy isn't that fun and it certainly isn't anything revolutionary. At the very least, it's a good little appetizer that you can use to get yourself ready for the main course.
That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay simple.
Links
stackin blocks dum de dum: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24358
I get the feeling that putting this game on my hard drive is going to lead to at least a few experiences much like the ones I have on occasion when starting up my Nintendo Wii. I came there to start up another intense session of Trauma Center: Second Opinion, but then I see Yoshii, which I bought on Virtual Console, and get the urge to waste a few minutes before wasting an hour.
In fact, Edgy Rangy is a lot like Yoshii, but not quite as stylized, not quite as challenging and not quite as intuitive. In essence, what I'm saying is it's not quite as good, but it does have a certain charm, to be sure.
Edgy Rangy is your typical block-stacking game. You try and stack 3 or more blocks of the same color to get points. Get enough points and you move on to the next level. The game comes with 2 modes, Classic and Relay. Do yourself a favor and go straight for Relay. Trust me, it's better. In relay mode, the blocks don't just disappear if you stack them appropriately, you get to farm them and eliminate them yourself with spacebar. It adds some much needed depth to the experience.
The little tray on which you stack the blocks moves far too slowly, and the game feel is unsatisfying as a result. The hitboxes are also a little imprecise, but easy to figure out once you get the hang of it.
This is a game that you will quit out of boredom, not because it got too challenging. After the third level, I'd say all the charm is gone. They try and spruce up the experience with bonus levels, but honestly they are just as monotonous as the main game.
Edgy Rangy isn't that fun and it certainly isn't anything revolutionary. At the very least, it's a good little appetizer that you can use to get yourself ready for the main course.
That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay simple.
Links
stackin blocks dum de dum: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24358
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Ecliptic
Hey guys. For a multitude of reasons. I didn't really give Ecliptic the time it deserved. See, it's an RTS game, and as I've said before, I'm not a fan of RTS games. That combined with an unusually overbearing workload today and a general bad mood on top of a lot of factors lead me to quit the game after my first defeat, which came totally unexpectedly in the middle of the game where I thought I was doing everything right. Continuing would have caused frustration that I really don't need right now.
The problem I have with most RTS games is that they give me this worthless feeling like I should be helping the characters on screen rather than just ordering them to their deaths. A majority of the time, be it because of lack of virtual currency or resources or just waiting for x thing to recharge for y seconds, all I can do is sit back hopelessly and watch as my forces, my men, my only chances for success...are destroyed. Maybe this is a clever allegory for real life, but I play video games to escape from the monotony of the real world, not to revel in it.
See, this is why I liked Base Invaders so much. It let the player intervene without having to wait. It cleverly avoided generating that hopeless feeling through its game mechanics. Ecliptic, if anything, only accentuates the feeling more than other games by making no visible attempt to cover up the fact that all you can do is order men to stand in the line of fire.
Moving away from the tonal aspect of it, the game isn't that great from a design standpoint. The controls, while I appreciate their lack of need to explain themselves with some kind of map, don't give you the feeling that they're so inherently supposed to. What was the name of that feeling again? Um...oh yeah, CONTROL. Maybe if I had toyed around with it for longer I might have found some way to use the controls better, but I'm going to go ahead and fall back on the old "if the game doesn't intrigue me from the beginning, I'm not obliged to wait until it gets interesting" argument.
Aesthetically, it's okay...passable. I mean it's not ugly by any stretch of the imagination, but it advertises itself as having "cutting edge graphics technology." This isn't a very easy claim to substantiate when I can count the number of polygons on each character.
It's pretty clear that I was in a bad mood when writing this, so maybe Ecliptic isn't as bad as I think it is. All-in-all, though, I wouldn't recommend it even to RTS fans. If you are an RTS fan, chances are you've already purchased a Total War or Starcraft game and therefore have experienced far better than anything this game can muster up. There's nothing special about it. It's just another RTS.
That's all for now. Until next time, stay strategic.
Links
Total Wat, more like:https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25910
The problem I have with most RTS games is that they give me this worthless feeling like I should be helping the characters on screen rather than just ordering them to their deaths. A majority of the time, be it because of lack of virtual currency or resources or just waiting for x thing to recharge for y seconds, all I can do is sit back hopelessly and watch as my forces, my men, my only chances for success...are destroyed. Maybe this is a clever allegory for real life, but I play video games to escape from the monotony of the real world, not to revel in it.
See, this is why I liked Base Invaders so much. It let the player intervene without having to wait. It cleverly avoided generating that hopeless feeling through its game mechanics. Ecliptic, if anything, only accentuates the feeling more than other games by making no visible attempt to cover up the fact that all you can do is order men to stand in the line of fire.
Moving away from the tonal aspect of it, the game isn't that great from a design standpoint. The controls, while I appreciate their lack of need to explain themselves with some kind of map, don't give you the feeling that they're so inherently supposed to. What was the name of that feeling again? Um...oh yeah, CONTROL. Maybe if I had toyed around with it for longer I might have found some way to use the controls better, but I'm going to go ahead and fall back on the old "if the game doesn't intrigue me from the beginning, I'm not obliged to wait until it gets interesting" argument.
Aesthetically, it's okay...passable. I mean it's not ugly by any stretch of the imagination, but it advertises itself as having "cutting edge graphics technology." This isn't a very easy claim to substantiate when I can count the number of polygons on each character.
It's pretty clear that I was in a bad mood when writing this, so maybe Ecliptic isn't as bad as I think it is. All-in-all, though, I wouldn't recommend it even to RTS fans. If you are an RTS fan, chances are you've already purchased a Total War or Starcraft game and therefore have experienced far better than anything this game can muster up. There's nothing special about it. It's just another RTS.
That's all for now. Until next time, stay strategic.
Links
Total Wat, more like:https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25910
Monday, March 11, 2013
Echolight
I'll admit, I got a little worried about this game from the very moment I saw the two words "Singapore" and "Puzzle." Perhaps it's my deleterious American brain that renders me incapable of solving the simplest of puzzles, but the fact remains that I haven't had too much luck with DigiPen Singapore in the past.
Actually, beyond the whole "too hard to complete under my time constraint thing" I would say my experience with Echolight was...above average, to say the least. I may not be a very good puzzle critic, but from a game design standpoint, this game is very hit-or-miss, which is my favorite kind of game to nitpick.
Let's start with the flaws so we can end on a happy note. First off, the students who made Echolight seem to have skipped a few classes on proper tutorial design. Here's my theory on the subject: creating a tutorial is kind of like raising a child (in this case, the child is the player). It's true that you need some kind of structure to keep your kid within the realm of social acceptability. For example, you can't just let the kid do whatever he or she wants because he or she will soon realize that punching another kid in the face is an excellent way to obtain the lollipop he or she was previously holding. They need to know what's right and what's wrong in order to succeed. By the same token, you can't hold your child's hand too tightly, or they'll learn to hate the very idea of a structured society and devote the rest of their lives to bringing down the fabric of human civilization...erhm...or...in the case of video games, they'll just be really annoyed with the tutorial. Echolight takes the helicopter-parent approach and doesn't give you full range of the game's controls until it's showed you everything you need.
Everything else is really just a nitpick. The sound effect "you win" screen after each level doesn't really fit with the game's atmosphere, which hurts the flow a little bit, but there's nothing really in terms of core game design to complain about. That said, let's move on to the good stuff.
The level design is simple but good. It's a puzzle game, and every puzzle has a solution. More than that, though, the game has an open feel that not many puzzle games can pull off. It seems like every puzzle has more than one right answer, even if that's not the case. I didn't toy around with it enough to find out. I do know that the game trusts you to develop your own strategies, which is a big plus in my book. I nicknamed mine the "bulldozer" strategy because I eventually resorted to mashing the arrow keys in the direction I want to go so that the arrows I previously placed don't get in my way. I do this until I figure out what arrows need to be put where. The difficulty curve isn't insane and it rewards the player enough before hitting him or her with the really tricky stuff. The thing I like most about the game is the very concept. I've never seen anything much like it, and it's a bit too complex to explain here. The visual style is also pleasing to the eye. There's a definite kind of appeal that you get from gradually lighting up the world around you in a manner as festive as in Echolight.
All-in-all, I had fun with Echolight. If it weren't for the crappy tutorial, it would have easily gotten my seal of approval. If you don't have the patience to learn a new concept for a game, skip it. If you do, I think you'll find Echolight to be charming, innovative and fun. Until next time, stay shiny (I get to use that one a lot...I might just make it my sign-off).
Links
Rollin around at the speed of sound: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25438
Actually, beyond the whole "too hard to complete under my time constraint thing" I would say my experience with Echolight was...above average, to say the least. I may not be a very good puzzle critic, but from a game design standpoint, this game is very hit-or-miss, which is my favorite kind of game to nitpick.
Let's start with the flaws so we can end on a happy note. First off, the students who made Echolight seem to have skipped a few classes on proper tutorial design. Here's my theory on the subject: creating a tutorial is kind of like raising a child (in this case, the child is the player). It's true that you need some kind of structure to keep your kid within the realm of social acceptability. For example, you can't just let the kid do whatever he or she wants because he or she will soon realize that punching another kid in the face is an excellent way to obtain the lollipop he or she was previously holding. They need to know what's right and what's wrong in order to succeed. By the same token, you can't hold your child's hand too tightly, or they'll learn to hate the very idea of a structured society and devote the rest of their lives to bringing down the fabric of human civilization...erhm...or...in the case of video games, they'll just be really annoyed with the tutorial. Echolight takes the helicopter-parent approach and doesn't give you full range of the game's controls until it's showed you everything you need.
Everything else is really just a nitpick. The sound effect "you win" screen after each level doesn't really fit with the game's atmosphere, which hurts the flow a little bit, but there's nothing really in terms of core game design to complain about. That said, let's move on to the good stuff.
The level design is simple but good. It's a puzzle game, and every puzzle has a solution. More than that, though, the game has an open feel that not many puzzle games can pull off. It seems like every puzzle has more than one right answer, even if that's not the case. I didn't toy around with it enough to find out. I do know that the game trusts you to develop your own strategies, which is a big plus in my book. I nicknamed mine the "bulldozer" strategy because I eventually resorted to mashing the arrow keys in the direction I want to go so that the arrows I previously placed don't get in my way. I do this until I figure out what arrows need to be put where. The difficulty curve isn't insane and it rewards the player enough before hitting him or her with the really tricky stuff. The thing I like most about the game is the very concept. I've never seen anything much like it, and it's a bit too complex to explain here. The visual style is also pleasing to the eye. There's a definite kind of appeal that you get from gradually lighting up the world around you in a manner as festive as in Echolight.
All-in-all, I had fun with Echolight. If it weren't for the crappy tutorial, it would have easily gotten my seal of approval. If you don't have the patience to learn a new concept for a game, skip it. If you do, I think you'll find Echolight to be charming, innovative and fun. Until next time, stay shiny (I get to use that one a lot...I might just make it my sign-off).
Links
Rollin around at the speed of sound: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25438
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Echo
Oh how I love the feeling I get when the blog reaches another letter. Oddly enough, getting to "E" isn't the only milestone in my little project this time around. Echo is the first FPS game on my list. Make no mistake, though, Echo is not a typical FPS game. No, typically, FPS games are fun...
Ok, so there are a few things that I like about Echo. If you press "esc" it takes you to a kind of interactive options menu where you interact with nodes by shooting them. I wish more games would implement that. There's not even any deep reasoning for it. I just think it's cool.
Also, I like the way everything is conveyed. You experience things by doing them and it's not confusing. The game never feels the need to say "hey, listen. Jump on that plant." It trusts that the player will look at the plant opening with the little circley thingies coming out of it and infer that he or she is supposed to jump on it.
Too bad that's pretty much the extent of the stuff I liked about Echo. The rest of it annoyed me.
First off, I'd like to speak directly to all who hope to go into a career in sound mixing. Please don't make the sound effects so obnoxiously loud. They should be about as loud as the music. When you kill things in this game, they release a hissing sound that hurts my ears.
Also, the sight of shooting projectiles is so jumpy that it hurts my eyes. This isn't helped by the neon visual style. So far, my only senses left unscathed are touch, taste and smell. At least the control setup is comfortable (and I would find it very impressive for the game to harm my senses of smell or taste).
I also hate how the game wrestles control from you every 2 seconds. Again, I think it's good that the game trusts me to make inferences, but come on. Yanking the camera from me to show me some unexplained phenomenon that makes no sense to me and that I end up skipping anyway is just not polite, and this game does it every thirty seconds!
Ehh, I'm getting tired. One more rage point before I sign out for the day: I have no idea what I need to do to beat this game. As far as I can tell, the enemies spawn infinitely and there are no targets other than the enemies. It seems like the only ending to this game is a big fat "Lose" screen. That's not a bad thing, and in fact that kind of structure has vastly improved games like Missile Command (I learned that from watching Extra Credits. Have I mentioned I like those guys?). Thing is, Missile Command scores you. It gives you some kind of sense of accomplishment. Echo does not, and honestly, the rest of the game is way too vague for it to fall back on the "artistic statement" argument.
That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay bright.
Links
pew pew screeeeaaaaaaiiiiiieeeeieieeieiiiieeeeegh: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=18585
a much more entertaining thing that I alluded to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQJA5YjvHDU
Ok, so there are a few things that I like about Echo. If you press "esc" it takes you to a kind of interactive options menu where you interact with nodes by shooting them. I wish more games would implement that. There's not even any deep reasoning for it. I just think it's cool.
Also, I like the way everything is conveyed. You experience things by doing them and it's not confusing. The game never feels the need to say "hey, listen. Jump on that plant." It trusts that the player will look at the plant opening with the little circley thingies coming out of it and infer that he or she is supposed to jump on it.
Too bad that's pretty much the extent of the stuff I liked about Echo. The rest of it annoyed me.
First off, I'd like to speak directly to all who hope to go into a career in sound mixing. Please don't make the sound effects so obnoxiously loud. They should be about as loud as the music. When you kill things in this game, they release a hissing sound that hurts my ears.
Also, the sight of shooting projectiles is so jumpy that it hurts my eyes. This isn't helped by the neon visual style. So far, my only senses left unscathed are touch, taste and smell. At least the control setup is comfortable (and I would find it very impressive for the game to harm my senses of smell or taste).
I also hate how the game wrestles control from you every 2 seconds. Again, I think it's good that the game trusts me to make inferences, but come on. Yanking the camera from me to show me some unexplained phenomenon that makes no sense to me and that I end up skipping anyway is just not polite, and this game does it every thirty seconds!
Ehh, I'm getting tired. One more rage point before I sign out for the day: I have no idea what I need to do to beat this game. As far as I can tell, the enemies spawn infinitely and there are no targets other than the enemies. It seems like the only ending to this game is a big fat "Lose" screen. That's not a bad thing, and in fact that kind of structure has vastly improved games like Missile Command (I learned that from watching Extra Credits. Have I mentioned I like those guys?). Thing is, Missile Command scores you. It gives you some kind of sense of accomplishment. Echo does not, and honestly, the rest of the game is way too vague for it to fall back on the "artistic statement" argument.
That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay bright.
Links
pew pew screeeeaaaaaaiiiiiieeeeieieeieiiiieeeeegh: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=18585
a much more entertaining thing that I alluded to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQJA5YjvHDU
Duality
Duality is a first person 3D platforming puzzle game that focuses on solving puzzles by taking advantage of seamless dimensional rifts." You mean...portals? Oh dear, it's going to be one of those reviews, isn't it? I thought I had my obligatory "this game is trying to be Portal review with Crystaline. Well who knows, maybe this game will turn out to be original after all.
...nope.
Oh okay, fine, it's not exactly like Portal. It also features dual-world gameplay (hence the title) so yeah nothing really too original to be seen here. Oh well, just because the game's not terribly interesting doesn't mean it's not fun, right?
Well it's not boring, so that's good. The levels are largely linear, leaving little room for the player to get lost. The mechanics are functional and intuitive, the 3D world is really pretty and the music is enjoyable, especially when it fades from Dark World to Light World. That said, why am I not particularly enthusiastic about this game? It would be because there's simply not enough ingenuity or fun to be had to justify the little quirks about this game. The little things nipping at my heels would be perfectly acceptable if there was some sort of larger payoff, like if they were scraping the dead skin off my heels and making me look young again. But as it stands, they're just pesky little annoyances that I'd rather kick into the next dimension.
For one thing, the bridges that you have to make for yourself are conveyed very poorly. They're made out of glowing orbs that all form together to make one circular disk. The problem is that it's impossible to tell at first glance where one disk begins and the other ends, leading to several moments like this:
This one in particular tricked me into falling into the lake below, which instantly teleported me to the beginning where I had to undo all my progress just to redo it again in. Yeah, it's one of those games...
Another thing that grinds my gears is that in the third and final level, these moving portals are introduced. They are never referred to again and they're completely obnoxious. They don't add any level of challenge or depth, they just make you play the game at the game's pace, which is really annoying. Remember Super Mario 64? That game knew how to implement moving platforms. The player had to calculate the right moment to jump in order to progress. It was challenging and fun. The moving portals in Duality are neither of those.
And why is it that in the first 2 levels, the Light World's water turns into the Dark World's lava, but in the third level it's always water? This whole game just feels a bit unfinished. Not the broken kind of unfinished like Sonic '06, but the annoying "beta-build" feel that makes it seem like you're playtesting rather than playing.
Duality isn't terrible. It had potential to be cool, albeit not very original, but it blew it with clumsy design. The game as a whole isn't really that challenging. All the puzzles are very simple, even the last one. I was able to blow through all of them without even thinking, and I'm not usually very good at puzzle games.
Cool concept, sub-par game. That's all I got for now. Until next time, stay bipolar.
Links
more like Poo-ality...heh: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=11752
Saturday, March 9, 2013
DROP
Boy oh boy I'm tired. It's a good thing DROP isn't a very complex game, because my mind is in no shape to delve into the intricacies of the video gaming medium right now. Luckily, all I have to do is review a game about falling down a pit and avoiding stuff.
That's it. That's all there is to it. Simplicity is bliss, as they say, and if that's the case, this is the most blissful experience you're gonna get.
to be fair, you're also given a few shields that you can activate with LMB, which do enhance the gameplay experience. It's all about making split-second decisions, this game: "Do I use up a shield to keep my streak going or do I save the shield and try and move the mouse precisely enough to avoid this onslaught of obstacles?"
That quote is pretty much the entire review of the game in a nutshell. Essentially, I think what the creators of this game tried to do was to pack as much content as they possibly could into the smallest possible package, hence the achievements, streak bonuses, shields, variety of obstacles, etc.
It's a fun game, but there's not much to it. Yep, it's one of those games. It wasn't quite fun enough to get my seal of approval, but it's an amusing, low-intensity game that you can keep in your start menu to play while your YouTube video buffers.
Links
CANNONBALLLLLL: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24357
That's it. That's all there is to it. Simplicity is bliss, as they say, and if that's the case, this is the most blissful experience you're gonna get.
to be fair, you're also given a few shields that you can activate with LMB, which do enhance the gameplay experience. It's all about making split-second decisions, this game: "Do I use up a shield to keep my streak going or do I save the shield and try and move the mouse precisely enough to avoid this onslaught of obstacles?"
That quote is pretty much the entire review of the game in a nutshell. Essentially, I think what the creators of this game tried to do was to pack as much content as they possibly could into the smallest possible package, hence the achievements, streak bonuses, shields, variety of obstacles, etc.
It's a fun game, but there's not much to it. Yep, it's one of those games. It wasn't quite fun enough to get my seal of approval, but it's an amusing, low-intensity game that you can keep in your start menu to play while your YouTube video buffers.
Links
CANNONBALLLLLL: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=24357
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