17/12/08 So a Game will fall down if I Tap it?

Okay, just taking a short break from playing Psychonauts. I can see why that game is considered to be underappreciated.

Lately I've been leaching a few of the games available for free off the Gametap service. The way I understand it is that you pay for a subscription and then you can play any of the games available while that subscription lasts, but there are a few free games to try and entice new subscribers. It's not much of a pain. Logging in and working through the interface can take a minute or two, but that's not bad for some decent free games. Ads try to come up when I start a game, but fail for some reason, so I don't have to bother much with them.

The only thing that bugged me was an option (set by default) that downloaded enough to start playing, then downloaded the rest while you were playing. This bothered me, because I live in Australia, land of download limits, and a) it didn't show the full file size, b) I wanted to download during my off-peak download limit, and play without downloading during my peak limit. But I've sorted that out now.

So I've played a few games off Gametap so far:
Sam & Max: episode 4. I really love humerous adventure games like this, just need to find the full-season set on sale somewhere.
The classic arcade games, Metal Slug 1, 2 and X.
Second sight, A decent psychic 3rd-person action game (with a story!) that I'd never heard of before. Just think Star Wars with real guns & stealth, and you'll probably have a reasonable idea. Made by the same guys who make Timesplitters.
Mr. Robot, a 2D isometric puzzle-platformer with an RPG hacking system.
A few old fighting games, Samurai Showdown (seemed weak), and Last Blade (better, but sudden difficulty spike was a pain).
And now, Psychonauts.

In a while I'll start on Dues Ex and Hitman 1 (the sequels are available too). Tomb Raider Legends (I think) is also available, if I can spare the download. Of course, it's not all decent stuff. There's a lot of lousy-looking stuff that I'm afraid to touch.

I won't go all out with a detailed review, but I'll add a little note about Second Sight down here. They added one tiny little detail I found interesting. During one cutscene, a guard gets up from a computer, confronts the main character, and gets (unintentionally) killed. Then if you use the computer and one of the programs, you can see the guard was just having an IM conversation with his wife. A happy conversation. And now he's dead. and since you logged on as him to see the conversation, she starts leaving more messages. It's almost enough to make you feel guilty about all the killing. You could miss it easily enough, but it's such a creative little detail, I'd like to praise the developer for it.

17/11/08 - White Chamber

Pulled some free stuff off the net recently. Got the World of Goo demo. Sticky-structure-styling is fun, though watching things collapse can be a bit disheartening. Pretty nice.

Also a free game called The White Chamber. It's a point-and-click adventure, with a sci-fi, horror theme. When I say horror, it's more disturbing imagery than anything else. There is a slight tenseness, but the 'scares' were too obvious to actually be frightening.

The puzzles are simple and logical, so there's little reason to be stuck. The game is also very short, 20-30 minutes if you know what you're doing, so the main reason to play is the 'horror' and story.

The story uses the amnesiac start, but it's interesting. The thing that bugs me is that they don't really explain why we're seeing all this gory imagery. I mean is it a hallucination, or projection or what? I could make some guesses, but an explanation would have been nice. There are a few endings. A couple are dying ones, but they don't just appear out of nowhere, so it's fine. I got the 'good' ending on the first try, it wasn't really that hard. The 'bad' ending is probably more interesting, actually. It sounds like there are a couple more endings I missed, because I used a walkthrough from an earlier version (after first completion, of course).

The graphics were pretty good, the backgrounds had some nice detail, and things were appropriately disturbing when they were supposed to be. Some people might dislike the anime main character, but apart from a couple of cutscenes, there's not much else specifically anime, so it shouldn't be a problem.

There was voice acting, and it was decent for a free game. Could have done a little more with context, like make her sound scared when she examines an object that only appears straight after a disturbing scene, or just putting a bit more emotion to things in general, but that's probably nitpicking. Just to be clear, she does sound scared/surprised for some things. There were some nicely appropriate ambient noises, though.

Additional - Okay, so after checking out the site a bit more, I found some audio files, that gave a bit of a prequel story to the game. The voice actor was pretty good, and the story was decent. It did explain a few things about the game that had bugged me, but not everything.

11/11/08

Back to Lego Star Wars today. Played the special stage, but it's just a chance to collect large amounts of coins....I mean, studs. I also spent sometime getting the collectibles, and earned enough to buy a detector for them, but the detector is very limited, in that all it does is draw an arrow over the location of the collectible. This is fine if it's hidden inside an object I didn't think of destroying before, but if it's on a ledge above me, then it gives me nothing.

I'll probably call it quits with the game now I've got all the characters. Not sure whether to go onto the second one, it'd be a lot nicer with another player, but I'm not sure I'll ever get one.

Also played a little of the XBox version of Battlefield the other day. Can't really say I'm impressed so far.

05/11/08 - CNET top 25 flash games (5)

The continuity returns.

Bloons - Throw a few darts and try to pop as many baloons, I mean, bloons, as you can. Get enough and you go to the next level. The game does mix things up with walls, and a number of special bloons, like one the gives you a boomerang shot, or one that drops a spike-ball, or one that releases a pacman for you to control. Simple, and kind of fun, for a while.

Grow Cube - Ahh, a lovely peice of interactive artwork. There is a cube, and you have several objects to place. Each time you put down a new object, the previous ones will gradually grow and interact with the environment, causing interesting things to happen. The only thing you control, is what order to put things down in. Your goal is to put things down in the right order to complete the cube properly. I will say, you start with the man.
The game, and the others in the series, are very cute, and it's amusing to watch things come to life and interact. It can definately be addicting, tryng to figure out the order, but once you've got it, there isn't much to go back for.

Zuma - Another puzzle game. A line of orbs is circling around you, gradually closing in. Your only defense is to fire more orbs, matching them with 2 others to make a set, which disappears. It's another take on the tetris-puzzle genre, and there doesn't seem anything particularly wrong with it.

Vector Runner - A driving game using vector graphics. You'll automatically accelarate along a straight road, all ytou have to worry about is avoiding the randomly-generated obstacles & flash bombs, while picking up the point cubes.
The game does get hectic quite quickly. The vector graphics are clean, which is more important than being flashy.

Cursor*10 - An interesting puzzle of a game. You take your cursor, and try to find the exit of each room, you can also break other objects for points along the way, but you have limited time. However, at some point, you'll find it impossible to move on, wishing you had another cursor to help. And you end up running out of time. Then, it begins again, but what's this? Another cursor just moved, following the exact path you took last time. And that's how it goes: You go as far as you can, then do whatever you need to to get the next cursor through.
It was a little too frustrating for my liking,and I didn't bother to finish it, but it's definately an intreresting concept.

02/11/08

Played a little more Lego Star Wars. Collecting enough bits to get the last level item was a bit of a pain, because of enemies that never stopped respawning. but with enough patience, I got through it. So now the '?' door is open, though I didn't have time to go through then.

Seem to have gone off TF2 for a while, but that's fine.

26/10/08 - CNET top 25 flash games (4)

Maintaining continuity this time.

N - Run fast, jump off walls, and get to the door. That is the way of the 2D ninja. Though for some reason, these ninja have very short lives, but their lust for gold drives them onward, so be sure to get plenty on your way, to keep them alive that little bit longer. Of course, all the gold in the world won't stop a sudden death at the hands, or should I say euthanizers, of the various security drones.

I've played this game a while ago, and it was quite enthralling, trying over and over to get through a room alive.

Dino Run - Here we have a little dinosaur, and an oncoming cataclysm. You control the dinosaur. Guess what you'll be doing? Yep, lots of running. Unfortunately, the terrain isn't very flat, so you'll also have to do lots of jumping too. You're bigger than a few other dinos, so you can eat them, survival of the fittest and all that, but with the cataclysm, it is fast food, so it's best to do a [s]drive[/s] run-through. Eating enough dinos and eggs, and your dino can be upgraded.
It was kind of interesting, but the terrain got a bit too annoying for me.

Crimson Room - This is what's referred to as a 'room escape' game. It's basically an old adventure game, with a single location. Your goal being to get out of the room. I haven't seen these before, but the idea is easy enough to understand. I played through a few games in the series, and they seem to be quality, though there were some things that seemed a little too much, such as going to a website the game gives you for a code, and something else I won't mention, but it basically requires real-world information, but doesn't really prompt you into thinking of it. Still, as long as you know proper walkthrough conduct, these games can be interesting puzzles.

24/10/08

The series will continue later.

Well, after that blog where I said I'd ease up on TF2, I didn't play it at all until 2 nights ago, so that's about a week without TF2. Not too bad.

Also played a bit of SSB Brawl yesterday, got through Classic with the other Pokemon, so now I have all the character trophies, the only 'challenge' left that I can really TRY for is beating Boss battles on intense, and I got disrupted before I could go far with that yesterday.
I think it's either going to be Toon Link, or Charizard that I put through that, but it's probably going to take a few tries.