Summer Sale

I said in this post that I'll stop spending money on new games until I finish the one I already own but when I saw the games and discounts on the summer sale, the consumer spirit has taken over. Hey, at least I'm supporting the PC gaming industry, right?
I prefer GOG over steam so I bought most of the games on there.

System Shock 2 (GOG)

This one I used to own and I got about halfway through it when I  had to move to a new place and leave my PC behind Even tho I never finished the game, it's still one of my favorite games ever. It scared the shit out of me as a kid. I can still hear those psychic monkeys...

To The Moon (GOG)

To The Moon is an award winning story driven adventure game made in RPG Maker. One of the most moving video games ever.

A Bird Story (GOG)

A Bird Story is an indie adventure short, about a simple narrative taking place between the mix of a boy’s memories, dream, and imagination. The main character will be the next patient in To The Moon sequel.

The Last Door Collector's Edition (GOG) 

This is an episodic point and click horror adventure inspired by the works of  Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. It is intentionally pixalated so you can see what's on screen but you have to imagine the details and fill in the blanks so it's similar to imagining the scene while reading the books.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (GOG)

This is a horror adventure based on the short story by Harlan Elison. I've heard that the author was actually working with the team on the game and he initially wanted to make it unwinable.

The Witcher Enhanced Edition (GOG)

Never played any of the Witcher games before but I'm reading the books so I'm looking forward to play it.

The Longest Journey (GOG)

There are two worlds. Stark is a world of order, science and industry.  Arcadia is a place of magic and chaos. April Ryan is a "shifter" able to travel between these worlds and she is tasked with restoring the balance. I've seen some gameplay from Dreamfall, a sequel to this game. It reminded me of Fahrenheit and I loved it. But first I have to play the original.

Sin City 2000 Special Edition - Free
Battle Reals + Winter of the Wolf - Free
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky - Gifted
Divine Divinity - Gifted

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (Steam)

Got this game on Steam for only €1.49, 90% off. Totalbuiscuit said it is his favorite game ever, dethroning the original Deus Ex (which is my favorite game ever). So naturally I'm very interested. The game has innovative mechanics where you control 2 characters at a same time and their interaction is key to your progress. What makes Brothers great is the way it tells the story, using interactivity as much as possible. The game is fairly short, about 2 hours but it should be a worthwhile experience. This game is recommended to be played with a controller so I bought one just for it. It was a mistake but more on that later.

The Hat Man: Shadow Ward (Steam)

Shadow people creep me out more than anything and when I saw there's a horror game centered around them, I knew I had to play it. And it was a perfect time to get it since it was just 19 cents, 96% off!

Higurashi When They Cry Hou - Ch.1 Onikakushi (Steam)

Higurashi is a Japanese murder mystery visual novel. I'm not really into visual novel games but this one is supposed to be really good. So good that they made an anime series based on it and it became really popular.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut

I had a physical copy of the Augmented Edition but I've given it to a friend. Now I scored Human Revolution Director's Cut for just $1 on some charity site.


Humble Bundle:

Psychonauts - A wacky platformer by Tim Schafer's Double Fine studio.
Back to Bed - 3D puzzle game set in surreal art environment
Tengami - Beautiful looking game set inside a Japanese pop-up book.


And now something physical:

Local shop had a discount on everything so I picked up all Starcraft games: Starcraft + Brood War, Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty + Heart of the Swarm. I already had Brood War but I lost the key so I just god a new one. My laptop doesn't have a DVD drive so I had to get an external one. I have a full shelf of PC games just waiting to be played so this is gonna be very useful. I bought the cheapest gamepad with thumbsticks I could find just because I got Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons on Steam sale and the best way to play it is with a controller. I tested it a bit and it's terrible. The shape is nice but the buttons are unresponsive and there's a noticeable delay. I planned to use it temporarily until I get a proper Xbox One controller but I don't think I'll use it all.

Update

It's hard to keep up with gaming when you work 13 hours a day. There hasn't been much progress with Mortal Kombat II. I haven't beaten the game with a single character yet but I got better with Liu Kang adn improved my timings. There are total 13 opponents to beat and on my best try I managed to beat 8 of them. I laugh every time someone says Dark Souls is hard. They clearly haven't played Mortal Kombat vs AI. I was close to the end in Heart of Darkness when the game stopped loading and I found out the disk was damaged. I got a replacement CD so I'll finish that one soon. Life Is Strange should be a quick one too. I actually already finished the leaked version of episode 2 so I pretty much know everything that is going to happen but I'll play through it again since this is the proper finished version. It's gonna be interesting to see what has been changed and what little details have been added. Aside from these 3 games I'm planning to start a lot more. I've been playing a little bit of HeartStone so I'll add it on the list and set some goals for it. I bought all Starcraft games during the sale discount so I'll play a lot of those, starting with the original naturally.

Life Is Strange Episode 1: Chrysalis Finished

Game: Life Is Strange Episode 1: Chrystalis
Release Date: 2015
Platform: PC
Date Started: February 7, 2015
Date Finished: February 9, 2015

Conditions: Finish the episode ✓ 
                     Collect all photos ✓

Haven't updated this blog in a while. I finished this episode way back in February but I was very busy and couldn't find the time to write about it.

Life Is Strange is an episodic high school mystery drama with a touch of supernatural. The story follows Max Caulfield, an 18 year old girl who returns to her home town Arcadia Bay after 5 years in order to study photography at an elite private school Blackwell Academy.  She plans to reunite with her childhood friend Chloe with whom she lost contact. Things become weird when she whitenesses a murder in girl's bathroom, which somehow triggers her ability to rewind time. This is just the beginning and soon you will be solving mystery of a missing girl, encountering spirit animals and getting tornado visions while trying to balance your daily life at school. The story isn't afraid to tackle such topics as bullying, drugs, rape and teen pregnancy.

The game looks beautiful and feels very cinematic. Hand painted textures combined with a great use of lightning give it a very distinctive visual style. The only thing I could complain about is Max's hair- it can look very solid, almost like plastic...or chocolate. The character's eyes can be quite weird looking in some scenes as well. I've played the game on medium setting so keep that in mind while looking at screenshots.

Some examples of great lightning that sets the atmosphere

This action will have consequences

The games's strongest selling points are the choice/consequence system and the time rewind mechanic, which often go hand in hand. You can make a decision, observe short term consequences and then rewind back and try something different until you settle for a choice that appeals to you the most. Even so, it is still hard to make a decision because most of the time there is no clear right or wrong answer and you don't know which decision will bite you in the ass later down the road. The choices are nicely balanced in that way. What I didn't like is that the game straight up tells you "This action will have consequence". When I play I want to be under the illusion that all my actions could have consequences. These messages, which cannot be turned off, break the immersion. The time rewind mechanic is fairly well implemented into gameplay and the rewind effect looks visually impressive. There are some limitations (checkpoints) on how far back you can rewind but that makes sense in the context of the game world since it's implied that Max gets hurt by using her power too much. I wish there was a hidden rewind meter that would take away your health and prevent you from abusing time travel too much. The power itself and the way it works is a bit inconsistent. The first time Max uses her power and rewinds time in the bathroom, she finds herself sitting in class a few minutes earlier. But whenever you rewind the time during the game, she remains at the exact same place while everything around her changes. This basically gives her a power of teleportation but non of the characters seem to react when suddenly Max appears beside them even tho she was nowhere near a second ago. I guess we are just supposed to ignore it because it works well for the puzzles...

Stupid puzzles

The puzzles are badly constructed and unrealistic. For example, there's a part in which you have to get tools but they are on top of a washing machine, just out of your reach. The first thing that came to my mind is to take a crowbar that was lying on the table right next to it and knock it of. But the game won't let you to do that. The correct and only way to solve the puzzle is to turn on the washing machine, which then starts to shake and the tools slide of. Max won't catch them as the fall behind the table so she must rewind again and put a cardboard under so she can pull it out after the tools land on it. Incredibly complicated process for such a simple task. It feels very "gamey". How did she even know the washing machine would vibrate so much? I wish there would be multiple solutions to solve problems in the game. I think there's a lot of wasted potential there. Multiple solutions worked so well in Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy).

Just out of reach

When it comes to interactivity, the game gives you enough things to examine and read through, actions to perform and characters you can talk to but I wish they went a step further. For example, you can ask a girl to remote control her drone. When you do, you get to see the point of view of the drone flying around a schoolyard but wouldn't it be cool if you could actually fly the drone yourself? Max is a passionate photographer who often takes photos with her Polaroid camera. I really wish photography was implemented into the gameplay in a way players could take pictures manually. During the game Max receives text messages on her phone, to which she automatically responds. I think it would be great if we could sometimes choose an answer,  just like we can during the dialogue. Max's diary is a really cool little feature that can be accessed at any time. It changes automatically based on your actions and you can read through it if you need a recap or just want to delve deeper into her mind.

Characters, acting and writing. Are you cereal?

I like character designs in the game but Max doesn't look her age. She is supposed to be 18 yet she looks 14-15 at most. Her childhood friend Chloe isn't very likable. Actually most of the characters act like dicks towards you without any reason and only after using your power you can befriend them by telling them exactly what they want to hear. But do I really want to hang out with these guys under those circumstances? Only Dana and Warren were nice to me. Kate is supposed to be my friend but during the first interaction she just tells me she wants to be left alone. Not the greatest first impression. The one character I really love to hate is Victoria Chase. She is a bully with an entourage of mean girls that seem to follow her every command and laugh at her jokes. A lot of characters may seem like a stereotypes but Dontnod has addressed that by saying they are using established character types and evolving them outside of the boundaries of those clichés by putting them on completely unexpected paths. So I'm looking forward to see how will they develop them during the rest of the season. The voice acting is mostly good but a lot of side characters are voiced by the same actors and it is noticeable. The actor who voiced Max's friend Warren is the most annoying and he got to play a few other characters and you can tell right away it's him. The lip sync is terrible but it didn't really bother me throughout the game, until during the final scene where it is especially noticeable and takes a lot of impact from the ending because the voices seem disconnected from the scene. A lot of people complained about the writing and the overuse of the word "hella". Hella is apparently a NorthCal thing so it's actually accurate considering the setting of the game but the dialogue can be quite cringey at times.

Who's laughing now? Got my revenge on Victoria

Some stats: photo album and choices (Spoiler warning!) Collected all the photos in the first episode.

What really stands out is a great soundtrack composed by Jonathan Morali of the band Syd Matters. It features 2 of their songs among other licensed tracks (PJ Harvey!) and sets the mood perfectly. Life Is Strange may seem very familiar, even cliché at times but only compared to movies and TV series. Compared to other games it's very unique and there's nothing quite like it.

+ sense of mystery + balanced choices + soundtrack + perfect length + there's nothing quite like it

- cringey dialogue and writing at times - bad lip syncing - same actors voicing multiple characters

8.5/10

Next to play: Life is Strange

Game: Life Is Strange
Release Date: 2015
Platform: PC

Conditions: Finish all episodes
                     Collect all photos







Life is Strange is an episodic adventure game by Dontnod Entertainment (known for Remember Me). There will be 5 episodes total.

What do I expect?
I have mixed feelings about this one. The game seems unlike any other yet at the same time everything seems so familiar to the point it screams cliche. It almost looks like the devs looked at the movies, asked themselves "what is indie?" and put it in the game. I imagine it will play in similar way as Dreamfall but with higher emphasis on choice and less on the puzzles. I'm hoping for a lot of interactive elements and choices that actually matter and affect the story. This will be the first non-retro game I'll play in a very long time.

 

AAARRRGGH! Heart of Darkness disc 2 won't load

MFW the game stopped loading

I'm about halfway through the second disc (out of 2) and the game just wouldn't load past the certain point. Tried it like 15 times and it freezes at loading screen every time. I let it load for 30 minutes and nothing happened. I'm so fucking pissed right now. I'll have to find a new copy. Too bad, I was just about to beat the game.

Next to play: Heart of Darkness

Game: Heart of Darkness
Release Date: 1998
Platform: Playstation

Conditions: Finish the game on a medium difficulty









What do I expect?
I already know what to expect since I played the game for some 40 minutes after I bought it. And even before that I knew I should expect gruesome death animations and high difficulty. What I didn't expect is to lose my gun (shown on the cover) after the opening 5 minutes of the game. I thought I was done for when my only weapon was eaten by a giant monster after barely surviving an attack by a mob of shadowy creatures. Fortunately there wasn't any combat after that point and I had to evade the enemies through platforming. What really puzzles me is decision by the developer to make the first 2 minutes of the game way more difficult than anything that comes after. I could  almost see angry kids throwing controllers in rage and never progressing beyond that point. The only logical explanation I can think of is they wanted to have a shooting section in the beginning to draw the players in. I don't think it worked out well but let's start from the beginning.

Heart of Darkness is a cinematic platformer by Amazing Studios, supervised by Éric Chahi who is known for Another World. And just like Another World, Heart of Darkness has exceptionally good character animations and beautiful backgrounds. The game has that Oddworld visual style that doesn't age and looks just as good today as it did when it came out. It also reminds me a lot of Mighty Max cartoon. The game doesn't just look cinematic, it also sounds like it. It features a score by film and television composer Bruce Broughton. I'm really looking forward to hearing more of his music in this game since he did the theme for the movie Homeward Bound, which was one of my favorite childhood themes and I still love it. The high difficulty is balanced by unlimited tries. Sometimes it's worth to die just to experience the crazy death animations and the game won't punish you for it. It will just set you a single screen behind. For some reason Heart of Darkness didn't get the greatest critical reception when it came out (it received fairly good scores around 70%) nor it was very successful commercially. Time to delve into this cult classic to find out why.

Game facts

• The development began in 1992. The game was planned for PC, 3DO and later for Sega Saturn. It was finally released in 1998 but only for PC and Playstation
• Final FMV sequence of the game was done in 3D and the game came with a pair of blue/red 3D glasses
• PC version only supported 256 colour VGA graphics while Playstation had 16 million
• Game Boy Advance port was announced 2001 but never came out
• Over 30 minutes of FMVs
• Main character has a dog named Whiskey
• The game was rated E for everyone despite having gruesome death animations. Someone wasn't paying attention.

Update / removing one game at a time rule

Haven't updated this blog in a while. Still haven't bean able to beat MKII with a single character. Honestly it felt impossible at times and I was thinking about lowering the difficulty to very easy. But once I played on easy, I was breezing through the enemies without any problem whatsoever and it didn't feel fulfilling at all, it felt like cheating. so I decided to stick with normal mode and in the meantime I learned some juggling combos with my current character Liu Kang and the game suddenly doesn't feel unbeatable.

  Removing rule 2 - one game at a time

When I started this blog I set some basic rules for beating the games. The second rule was one game at a time- I have to finish the game before moving on to the next one. I set this rule because it would allow me to completely focus on one game since besides playing it I also like to research it's development, put it into perspective and see what made the game special at a time it came out etc. Now I decided to remove this rule because of various reasons. In 2014 I have only finished a single game - Mortal Kombat. It took me 7 months to beat it and then I got stuck on it's even more difficult sequel. I get tired of playing MK after 2 games in a row so now I could play something else in the meantime. I also want to play new games along with the old ones and there are times when I feel like playing a specific game or a genre. I'd like to play horror games during the Halloween for example. So removing this restricting rule allows me to do all of these things.