The Lamer Gamer

I’d already commented that it was unreal how I’d missed Dead Space when it was first released.  More unbelievable is that everyone I know managed to miss it too, one of them only picking it up right at the same time as myself.  Having mostly finished it now, it’s proven to be a breakout title for me, particularly in the horror genre.

Not only does the game look pretty, or at least pretty gruesome, but it plays real smooth.  I’ve gotten into the habit of installing all games to the HD, so the load times were quick for me.  Rarely, the Metroid-like doors don’t open until the room on the other side is ready, but that’s completely bearable.  The interface is very well thought out.  The communications, menuing, ammo, life and other displays are attached to your suit or float in the air via holographic projections, all in real time .  Most importantly, your interactions with the interface behave as if this were actually possible.  In that I mean it doesn’t pause the game, there are no separate menu screens, no reprieves, save for one oddity I noticed, when accessing the store you become invulnerable to the smaller enemies.  Helpful hint, don’t look at your map while being attacked.

Gameplay reminds me a lot of watching my little bro play Resident Evil back in the day.   Ammo is a lot less scarce (unless you’re me, and blow money on upgrades) and saves aren’t restricted, but a lot of that feel remains.  You can’t run that fast, and worse, if you do run away, they just follow you, quickly, sometimes popping through an airduct into you current location.   You’ve really got to make sure you go for the high damage limb severing shots and not just try pumping your target full of ammo.  Weapon diversity is good, but the best weapons is essentially the first one you pick up.  Occasionally one works better, but overall, go Plasma Cutter.  Upgrading the weapons is also a brief minigame (I’m being generous with that assessment, really it’s hardly more than figuring out an optimal path on the weapon upgrade grid).

I gravitate toward titles that spend a lot of time on backstory and the mythology of their own made up universe.  Dead Space is like a black hole in that way.  I love finding items, and Dead Space is chock full of collectibles (the logs) which fill in a ton of the story.  Beyond that there’s a ton of alien, (well it’s in English, but encoded) writing all over the walls that you could take the time to decipher if you wanted.  Really, there’s so much going on and in separate media too like the comics and anime that I’m sure I’ll never quite cover all of it.

Lots of comments I’ve read note that the game wasn’t scary, but I jumped, A LOT!  The environmentals are nerve-wracking, the sounds and score, the lights, the fact that some razor clawed monster just popped out of the wall behind me.  So you run, and everything calms down, then there’s some Lost type music which comes out of nowhere and suddenly a tentacle is dragging me down a hole.  I’m not typically a fan of the whole Survival-Horror thing, but Dead Space grabbed me.  Oh, and the ending, CREEPY!

One annoyance that I’m trying to get around is that this is yet another game which lets you unlock a higher difficulty, and worse has an achievement for it.  While it falls into my category of “Actual Achievement”, completing the game on “Impossible Mode” didn’t really appeal to me.   The storyline was compelling enough that I plowed through Dead Space in about 12 hours.  But on another playthrough, the story would be the same, and as far as I can tell there aren’t any other rewards for doing so.  I always went right to Legendary for the Halo games, it was challenging and provided some different (sometimes extra) cut scenes.  Maybe I’ll come back to this one later and go through Impossible, maybe not.  The only downside is the single player, single playthrough campaign.  Mass Effect handled that by having other classes, but that’s not a guarantee of replay value.  Anyway, that wouldn’t have worked with Dead Space given the plot, and I’m not faulting it really.

Bottom line, this game was SOLID.  4.5/5 easy. I loved playing it.  I’m sure there will be a number of sequels.  I can’t wait.

I’m not going to address the general makeup of Pikmin New Play Control, as it’s the same game as the original Pikmin.  So if you liked or disliked that, your opinion probably won’t change.  Mostly, I focused on the new interface.

It would be a bit of an exaggeration to say that Pikmin 2 was such a great improvement upon plain old Pikmin that it renders the original unplayable.  I am, however, forced to compare my copy of Pikmin 2 to Pikmin NPC in some ways because I don’t have a copy of the original any more.  There really wasn’t a point in having both once 2 was out.

While Pikmin 2 added a lot of gameplay elements (Louie, caves, purple and white pikmin), Pikmin itself remains a solid game.  Ultimately the gameplay really isn’t that different in 1 vs 2, but I find using the Gamecube Controller to be much more desirable.  Trouble is NPC (which is a poor reuse of an acronym to begin with) doesn’t really add a lot to Pikmin.  Throwing Pikmin feels much slower, probably because I can’t move my thumb as quickly when holding the Wiimote as I could with the Gamecube Controller, I suppose because the grip is odd.  The cursor looks/behaves in a way that I find harder to aim than it used to be.  By separating the directional and cursor controls, NCP adds some flexibility, but it takes right back in requiring the player to actually be more flexible to work other controls.  Not just the camera, but anything on the WiiMote D-pad.  It just feels awkward to use the down side of the D-pad (so as to mass direct all the Pikmin en mass), which like the camera controls I use quite frequently.

Oh, and let’s see how I stacked up guessing the control structure for Pikmin NPC

The original Pikmin controls and how I’d like to see them remapped (and actually were):

I believe that’s a failing grade for my psychic skillz.  I should have seen it coming but they really stuck with the same buttons.  This is probably a much broader design decision with the Wiimote/Nunchuck for overall compatibility, but specifically I don’t like how this works with Pikmin.  Maybe it was too much to hope about the whole shaking the Wiimote to throw the little suckers, but I’m bummed about that.

Pikmin NPC is a 2 out of 5,  especially at $30.  I already paid you $10-20 more than that for it the first time around, and it is in essence the exact same 8 year old game aside from the change to widescreen.

Where to begin?  Halo Wars is both pleasantly surprising and underwhelming at the same time.  The controls work better than in other console RTSs that I’ve played, but they’re dumbed down.  There is a nice amount of material for those who are really in to Halo.  Gameplay is fun, but fairly one dimensional.  Strict RTS fans will probably be disappointed.  Even so, Ensemble Studios in its swansong, did right by the franchise.

Halo fans are treated to a short story from the universe, with some nice Spartan-II porn FMV sequences.  There are also an number of unlockables between Skulls and Black Boxes.  Each of these adds something else to do during a mission other than kill baddies.  The Black Box elements add to a Halo Timeline in the main menu which is fun to look at, but I can’t say if it contains any in-universe  material I wasn’t aware of already.

Gameplay is easy to pick up and the economy is simple to manage.  Even so, there are a number of tricks to making everything work better, and getting off to a running start.  I took a long time researching all of the tech tree the first several missions before I’d do much else, that can take some time.  Most players will probably focus on one or two types of units.  Combat was supposed to have a rock-paper-scissors mechanic, but the focus seems to be on groups of vehicles, and that’s all I needed to finish levels.  Aside from on Legendary, I didn’t need more than 3-4 Scorpions to carve a swath through most maps.  In that way, I didn’t feel there was a lot of balance.  I have a feeling that this is more of a failing of the AI, than the game design.  Humans will no doubt perform better on the other end of skirmish.  Still, Scorpions win out overall I think.  The other option is Uber units, which I’ll pick up on later.  Spartan-IIs were an obvious but well thought out and useful unit.  I never found the Spartan Laser to be easy aiming in Halo 3, but the can’t miss nature in this game makes it fun to see used.  Their carjacking ability is also amusing, especially in what time I devoted to limited multiplayer.

The UNSC campaign has a nice pace and decent variations on the somewhat limited scope of play.  You’re introduced a little slowly to all the goodies, which I feel could have been left in the Tutorial.  The maps are beautiful and of reasonable size, nothing on the scale of what you saw with Supreme Commander.  But right there, that’s the end, the UNSC campaign feels a little short.  There is no Covenant campaign, which I have to say is a pretty big bummer.  So for the Covenant, it just means you’re limited to skirmish games.  The Flood is not a playable faction.  I can see why that’s the case, given how The Flood is presented.  So playing against Flood units, particularly buildings ends up being hard to figure out as their structures don’t follow the same template that the UNSC and Covenant do, nor are they covered in the manual. I suppose it doesn’t matter as you just end up killing everything anyway, and generally shooting at whatever is shooting at you.

When the demo came out I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the controls were, but after playing for an extended period of time I do find them lacking.  The selection tools are very usable.  Local and Global select work for the Halo Wars.  Painting while holding down (A) is a bit of an art.  Typically, I tried to select all and then (RT) to the type I wanted.  The unit AI is touted in the in-menu crawl, but units don’t do simple things like engage the most appropriate target in the rock-paper-scissors way.  The special ability controls (Y) were glitchy in my opinion. It feels like the timer is triggered immediately rather than on weapon release.  Having no defined grouping ability is a pain.  The sub-select mode on Right Trigger while I made use of it, wasn’t as helpful as it could have been.    Largely this means either A) unit spamming, or B) Uber unit massacre.  I chose B.  

Wandering around the board with either a bunch of UNSC Vultures, or a Scarab is a quick way to clear out enemy units.  I felt like it was too easy to build Vultures, perhaps only slightly harder to build Scarabs.  What it took to build a Krogoth in Total Annihilation felt like years, this is like seconds, well minutes.  In that way skirmish games are probably meant to be fast.  So I wouldn’t expect hours long standoffs like you’d have in TA or Starcraft.  

Numbers wise it’s a 3 out of 5.  If you’re not a Halo fan, I don’t know why you’d be interested anyway, but it probably only loses half a point.   There was a lot of room for improvement, but I dare say there probably won’t be much in the way of updates or sequels.  I really would have loved there to be more, but there wasn’t.  I’m going to try devoting some extra time to online play, but I wasn’t crazy about  it the first time.  2nd time is the charm I hear.

A Kingdom for Keflings is a good cross-over kids game that proved to be very entertaining, amounting to around 20-25 hours worth of play time for roughly the price of a movie ticket.  If Pikmin spoke to you, Keflings is for you, though that’s not to say there’s a real comparison to be made between the two.  To put a label on it, you’re looking at a lite God game, sort of a Black and White without adversity. You play the part of a friendly giant, depicted by your NXE Avatar or one of a few existing models.   These little villagers called Keflings need some direction, so you set them working on harvesting and hauling materials, while you follow specific blueprints to construct buildings out of conveniently generic building parts from one of many workshops.

While the game is perhaps overly repetitive, from the music, to the method of constructing a building, to unlock another blueprint, to build another workshop, to build another, more complicated building, ad infinitum, it’s still rather soothing.  The constant cycling nature of Keflings makes it rather simple to pick up and plod your way through, but it also requires breaks, as it can start to feel like work.  You have the option of following the questy nature of the game or playing in Sandbox mode, where you start with all the buildings and workshops as well as unlimited resources.  Trouble is, that you’re limited to building decorations in Sandbox, and it’s not really that much fun or added value.

Co-op Multiplayer ended up near doubling Keflings’ value for me, as I ended up nearly replaying the entire game with a handful of strangers.  A serious downside to multiplayer is that split-screen isn’t an option, so it ends up being a little disappointing when you’d like to have more than one player on a single console.

All in all, the Keflings is a 3 out of 5.  Cute and intensely amusing, but with little replay value.  Some new blueprint DLC, or competitive multiplayer would do a lot to rectify that.