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.