Today’s friday fun is Kickabout League, a browser (java) based arcade soccer game that’s great fun and evocative of old SNES soccer games of years past. It supports multiplayer and league play and it’s free, loads quick, and is super fun. Check it out! I’ve posted a video below to give a sense of how it plays:
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/zF3hrPzr9gA&hl=en&fs=1&
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Susan and I finished Dead Space on the PS3 last week. All in all it’s a pretty great game. I handled the controls while Susan played copilot, mostly because of her lack of familiarity with 3d gaming. We had a lot of pretty creepy fun playing through it. The game’s a 3rd person action adventure game which seems to be inspired by the Resident Evil series of games. In many ways it’s superior to most of the games in that series. It’s also clearly been influenced by the System Shock series and it has some light RPG elements in the form of suit and weapon upgrades.
Graphically the game is beautiful – in fact it’s one of the best looking games I’ve played on the PS3. There’s great use of light and shadow, very detailed textures, excellent models and animation, and great art direction.
Audio is similarly superb – it’s one of the best sounding games I’ve played on the PS3 as well and the voice acting was great.
Gameplay is a mixed but mostly positive bag. On the downside, the game’s fairly repetitive, and while the ship is realistic and the game breaks up the corridor crawling with some great action set pieces in very large spaces, there’s still a ton of corridor crawling and it can get old. The controls are tight but the weapons are a mixed bag – some seem much more effective than others no matter how you upgrade them and it’s difficult to know where to spend your resources effectively. The difficulty seemed pretty fair on medium. There are a number of physics and logic puzzles to work out, often while under fire from multiple enemies, and these were some of the highlights of the game.
The plot was just ok – it starts out like a riff on the plot from Aliens, with you and your crew dispatched to rescue an orbital mining operation that sent out a distress signal then stopped communicating, but it morphs into a muddle of religion, government conspiracy, double crosses, alien artifacts and a mutating alien lifeform that’s has some similarities to the one in the classic John Carpenter movie The Thing. It wasn’t bad by any means but by the end Susan and I were weary of it.
The game has one other superb attribute – it’s got one of the best interfaces I’ve seen in a game. Most everything you do and interact with in the game you do via a 3d computer interface that projects out of the spacesuit you’re wearing or out of objects you encounter. It’s really well done and I hope more games mimic it.
I picked this up used for $35 but would have been just as happy paying $60 retail for it – it’s a really great game and well worth a look.
Here’s a video to give you a sense of gameplay and graphics:
Soolin as I got ready to leave this morning
I finished Too Human on the Xbox360 over the weekend and thought it was just ok. It’s a 3rd person action RPG set in a riff on norse myths – imagine mixing cyberpunk with norse mythology, then add in pretentious dialog and overwrought acting and you about have it. I can sort of sum up the game by observing that every time you die a Valkyrie descends from the sky to carry you off to Valhalla. This takes about 5-10 seconds, is unskippable, and most times when the Valkyrie lands her legs are planted in the ground somewhere around her shins. In other words the game’s a bit buggy, lacks polish, and isn’t well thought out.
Aesthetically Too Human is a mixed but mostly positive bag, with decent character models, mostly good voice acting, great music, and epic scale levels. The levels are a bit sparse though, with almost nothing in the way of furnishing or details – just endless bland corridors.
The core gameplay mechanic is reasonably fun. It’s a bit novel too. It’s your basic action rpg – hit or shoot all the enemies then move on to the next group – but the combat is unique in that you sort of ‘slide’ from enemy to enemy using the right stick on the controller, and you can string together maneuvers. It almost looks like and feels like dancing at times, and you can spec your character such that the more combos you string together the faster things get, making it hectic, spastic looking fun at times.
Unfortunately it’s also poorly balanced, or at least it seemed like it to me. Possibly it was my character spec, but a couple of the bosses and areas had me dying repeatedly while others I breezed through with no difficulty and no deaths, including the final boss.
The plot is a bit of overwrought, forgettable nonsense, I stopped paying attention halfway through. Truth be told, I probably would have stopped playing about halfway through, figuring (correctly as it turns out) that I had basically seen everything the game had to show me, but I had heard it was a short game and figured I may as well soldier on. In the end it took me a bit under 12 hours of playtime to finish it. I only paid ~$12 for it and figure I got my money’s worth. There’s coop online multiplayer and maybe there’s some more fun to be had there too – I didn’t try it.
This was one of Microsoft’s big console exclusives and one of their Christmas games last year and as such it’s a bit of a disappointment – compared to games like Halo 3 or Uncharted this game is not nearly in the same league. It’s a bit of a shame too – the game ends on a big cliffhanger and it’s clear they wanted to do a sequel, and if they spent time polishing the engine and main gameplay mechanic the sequel could have turned out well. My guess is we’ll never see it.
Here’s a gameplay video to give you a sense of how it plays:
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/THd9mt1Kp8U&hl=en&fs=1&hd=1
and here’s the metacritic page for the game if you want to read some reviews (it’s averaging a 65/100 right now, which feels about right to me).
Check out the smile
If you’ve played any of the Battlefield series of computer or console games over the last 6-7 years and you have a Windows machine, you should check this out – they’ve launched a free, web-based version of Battlefield 1942 with cell shaded graphics that seem to be inspired by Team Fortress 2, a levelup system that sees you getting access to better weapons and abilities as you play, and an engine that can run on even the lowliest of machines. It’s a lot simpler than any of the other Battlefield games but it’s fun and free. Their business model is to try and upsell folks on buying chotkes for their characters. I wish them well, meanwhile I’m having a pretty good time with this without yet spending a dime. You can sign up here, and here’s a video to give you a sense of it:
Dave's Place/Metamusing 