The 7th Day of Horror: Teleforum

 

Teleforum (PC)

Teleforum is a point-and-click analog horror game from Monumental Collab, who look like they have a fine knack for this sort of game. The good news for those still suffering from PTSD over the 90's era of pixel-bitching point-and-clicks is that this one is full of modern conveniences, so it plays well and I advise when playing that you mouse over everything, some stuff will trigger that you might not expect. I did a playthough and then handed it over to my son to do his own run; I have found that the boundless energy and optimism of youth will lead to unexpected results every time over the old jaded Gen X gamer. A single playthrough can be done in less than an hour (my first run was only about 35 minutes), but subsequent playthroughs yielded some interesting additional results I had overlooked, and my son unlocked several new achievements. Indeed, if achievements are a goal of yours, this thing is loaded with plenty of low-hanging achievement fruits.

The premise of Teleforum is simple: a reporter named Juliana and her cameraman (your character) are visiting the apartment of a fellow reporter Walter who recently killed himself following a grisly event at the broadcasting station. He brought a tape to be played, but a technical error prevented it from playing. Juliana wants to interview his widow, and see if she can figure out why Walter did what he did...and see if there's a working copy of the tape somewhere. Things get increasingly weird until at last the tape is available for viewing, and then things begin to loop, as your cameraman begins to sense that he's done this before... 

Teleforum is also adjacent to the hidden object subgenre which has recently evolved into horror with walking simulator elements, where you move through a familiar environment and then look for things that are different each time. Teleforum is more of a hybrid.....but subsequent playthroughs with different choices have yielded some interesting results that were not evident or accessible the first time around. 

While playing, I did start to think a bit about the book and film Ringu, which of course has a haunted VHS tape at the center of its mystery. Unlike Ringu, Teleforum provides a compelling mystery with plenty of hints, but offers few real answers. 

Ultimately Teleforum works well for having a 80's era analog setting, excellent creepy audio and a compelling short story with lots of variables within its restricted environment. It is also free on Steam, so there is that! I enjoyed it enough I purchased the supporter's pack. I give it a solid A, especially considering the price of admission.

Bonus Spoiler/Hint:

There are codes you need to find for hidden endings....

Digital Game Store Competition - Epic vs. Steam

Jim Sterling has a pretty good piece on the Epic Store and why it seems to be generating so much ire:



One item that isn't pointed out enough about the Epic Store is it's profit split with publishers.....according to reports, Epic is doing a 12% take with publishers, in contrast with Steam which is a 30/70 split. Gamers may be pissed off....but that's significant, and business owners (the publishers and devs of games) would be engaging in poor business practice not to take advantage of this. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole point of going exclusive with Steam for some of these larger publishers like Ubisoft wasn't to put a dent in Steam's stranglehold on the online market for this exact reason.

Gamers who recall 2003-2004 well as I do may also recall that all this row with Epic sounds an awful lot like the exact same fit people had when it was revealed that Half Life 2 would require the Steam store link to download. And while, as Jim Sterling points out, the Epic Store does not have even a fraction the features that Steam offers users....it was also true back in 2003 when Steam was revealed that Steam itself had no special features (outside of getting Half Life 2 to us on slow speed internet connections) and lots of disadvantages against a physical purchase in the store.

One thing Valve did offer through Steam back then was a clean storefront with a selection of games people wanted. It wasn't huge at first....but it was possible to actually find the game you wanted on Steam, and you didn't have to drive around looking through dusty bargain bins to located it. Cut to 2019, and suddenly Epic offers up a clean, simple (too simple) site with a limited selection of "curated" titles (special backdoor exclusive deals aside), and Steam is the digital version of the dusty bargain bin filled with trash that you wouldn't pay 50 cents for....and somehow, miraculously, Steam has managed to bury its own quality under mountains of digital detritus.

Steam could take this back from Epic. To do so, it needs to recognize that it's unmoderated wasteland of content is just not going to work anymore, but continuing to develop a reliable, feature-laden, community driven service that it has morphed in to over the years should be priority. Also, maybe find a way to compete on the price split, too....in the end, it doesn't matter what you have on offer if the publishers can get an extra 18% on their game's price by going with the competition.

Deathbat's Computer Gaming Predictions for 2019

This list falls in to two categories: the first is "industry changes" I want to predict (for fun). The second is "my own habits" I want to predict (also for fun). Here goes!

Industry Predictions for 2019:

1. Epic Games will get some legs

Steam has been dominating the PC marketplace online for a decade and a half. It has in the last five or six years become well known for being an immense pit of despair when it comes to shopping for games, thanks to a series of increasingly poor policies on what games they would allow on their platform; short version is; too much garbage, and too hard to sort through to find the gems. They have in recent months gone to great lengths to try and refine their store....but I suspect for many it is too little, too late.

So with that in mind, Epic Games now has its own game store, and while it a bit anemic it does have some gems. More importantly, it has Fortnite for PC, and is therefore essentially already installed on millions of PCs. I've already grabbed the free copy of Subnautica and will likely look to future purchases depending on how things develop. Epic is poised to conveniently be a major contender to Steam right out the gate, all thanks to Fortnite. Remember when Steam ended up on all PCs thanks to Half Life 2? Yep.

2. The Next Call of Duty will have a Campaign 

The rationale is that Activision wouldn't have more than one of its three studios developing CoD games try a Battle Royale mode, and that they also would be suspicious that this isn't just a fad right now, or possibly that they are too late to market. Therefore, based on their traditional design schedule, I predict that the next Call of Duty from Infinity Ward will probably be a conventional offering with a campaign, and also I bet it's either a sequel to Modern Warfare or Ghosts (shudder). Probably the former.

3. Bioware will announce a new Mass Effect or Dragon Age game this year.

This doesn't seem far-fetched, but I bet when they announce it the reveal will include a lot of apologetic marketing to appease the disenfranchised fans and also that the actual release date will coincide with the next generation release of game consoles.

4. Fortnite will be replaced by some new hotness......in 2020

We'll see the manifestations of this sometime in 2019, and Fortnite will continue to do fine, having captured it's market share, but I have a seven year old in the house and I can see how this sort of thing works; the millions of kids playing Fortnite will eventually get tired of it and force their parents to find some other video game to babysit them. You'll know Fortnite has descended to the realm of "popular has-been" when the twitch streamers start playing As Yet Unreleased Hotness X.

(Yeah this might contradict prediction #1 above but I say no! The new hotness could after all manifest on Epic's own platform).

5. There will be a new Alien Game announcement (and possible release) this year

The official channels are hinting at it, but unlikely we will see a movie release until Disney finishes carving up Fox's corpse, so I bet the hints are about new tie-in material, including a game. A game has been mentioned in 2018 titled Alien Blackout, but I bet thanks to CoDBlops4's mode they will have a different title when it is properly announced.

6. Ubisoft may actually give Assassin's Creed a break this year

This actually seems unlikely to me, but if Odyssey didn't sell well then I get they give a two year hiatus to the franchise again to let it rejuvinate a bit....and with any luck they fill that gap with a new Watch Dogs game (but I predict that won't happen....maybe by March 2020?)

7. Another obscure corner of gaming from around 1998-2005 will come back in style

Here's the rationale: as computer and video gamers move into their early thirties they tend to start pining nostalgically for the games they loved in their formative years. This is a similar phenomenon to what happens in tabletop, but I don't think tabletop gamers start doing this until their forties or fifties (when the kids are off to college, usually)....but video games ellicit a different response, especially for thirty-somethings who suddenly find that their dexterity, time, and ability to dedicate dozens of hours a week to gaming are all on the wane. Usually, a baby is in the mix and the desperation is for a game, some game --any game-- to play between diaper changes. The Switch understands this!

But the current crop of thirty-somethings in 2019 were around age 10-15 during their formative period, which was dominated by PS1, Dreamcast, early Xbox and Nintendo64. At least part of the current trend is to pop out retro consoles, usually in miniature (easy to hide/store in apartment) filled with memory-laden titles. Sony recently released and semi-botched their own effort, but not really; this is the generation that started with polygon-based gaming that looked amazing for its time, but has aged incredibly poorly (and quickly). As a result, they want to play games like they remember......but they will also want it to look better.

Most subgenres and types of gaming from 20 years ago are still around....so what game type is due for a revival? My suggestion: Myst and Riven style games! We've had a lull in pixel bitchers for a while, and the current trend is for very user friendly titles ala the late Telltale Games' titles. I bet we start to see a new crop of "Souls Like" Myst-inspired titles soon.

(Out there, but if there's one trend you can always predict in gaming it's that diehard subculture that needs games to punish them or they can't tell if they are having fun!)

Consider that last one my "really weird prediction."

Now for Deathbat's Personal Predictions:

1. I will finally catch up on Assassin's Creed games. I will complete Syndicate, Odyssey and Origins in some order at last. Unity's sour taste is at last out of my mouth.

2. I will enjoy The Divison 2 for a bit but will find it less endearing than the first if Ubisoft doesn't up the ante on the story component (which I bet it instead focuses on multiplayer).

3. I will buy the next Call of Duty because it adds the campaign back in, but then fails to innovate (so far only Infinite Warfare made any headway in innovation) and I will again feel had.

4. I'll be sick to death of Fortnite by March but will still play it with my son out of paternal duty.

5. I will finish The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, sometime this year. Possibly in the last week of December 2019....knowing how I roll....!

Maybe some movie predictions next!

Review: Conarium - A Lovecraft Adventure that Won't Drive You Mad (well, it will, but in the good way)

I actually snagged Conarium prior to the recent Steam Summer Sale so this has been sitting around for me waiting to get to it. I bought sight unseen, after reading it was a hard Lovecraft-inspired tale with direct influence from At The Mountains of Madness. Enough early Steam reviews suggested it was not horrifyingly bad....that was enough for me.

Well, my hunch paid off. This was an incredibly good game, a Lovecraft tale of horror, discovery, mystery and exploration all in the name of discovering that our frail mortal coils cannot handle the truth.

Conarium's tale is of a man...Frank....and Dr. Faust (aptly named, I must say), who have been part of an expedition to Antarctica funded to (among other things) investigate the antediluvian ruins of a lost age, one which you might imagine is the tip of the proverbial iceberg on what can be found in a Mythos Antarctica.

Besides the ruins, Frank is part of Dr. Faust's mysterious experiments with something called a Conarium. Coupled with a strange mixture of halluinogenic derived from salv divinorum, he and several others (it is implied, at least) have been inducing out-of-body experiences in a fashion which Lovecraft fans will quickly realize is resulting in events not unlike what we have seen in some other tales (such as "From Beyond.")

Frank begins his journey waking up in what appears to be a largely abandoned research base, with no memories (it just wouldn't be an adventure game with memories!) and a serious mystery to uncover as to where everyone went. As he dives deep in to the rabbit hole things get progressvely weirder and more disturbing, until ultimately his very life as well as sanity are both tested.

The game has some tried and true elements of the genre, such as: protagonist with amnesia, everyone is missing, and (most of the game) it's focus is on ambiance, horror, mystery and exploration.....but later on some very unexpected and horrifying threats emerge which will take hardcore fans of this genre by unpleasant surprise. Without giving anything away (spoilers by inference ahead) let me just reassure you that when "that time" comes run in a long, wide circle and be persistent.....run to escape and get out the way you came in, and be ready to do it twenty times in slightly different patterns until you do it right. It took me a while, but I got it....so can you.

Aside from that moment of hardcore action terror, the game is otherwise very consistent with its exploratory/mystery nature and is shockingly good at building slow, horrific ambience. It is also surprisingly stingy in its actual use of Mythos lore and creatures....we get interesting hints, glimpses and momentary, terrifying moments of certain things, but nothing in such an over the top manner that you are left feeling saturated. The ambiance must be good....my son was sleeping on the couch and woke up to tell me the game noise was making him scared (headphones went on around that point).

Overall I spent a bit under 6 hours playing the game and at the current price of $20 I'd say it was well worth it. If you love Lovecraft's Mythos, and you love adventure games, then this is a must have. A+

Five Spoiler-Filled Comments (you have been warned!):

1. If you get stuck this guy did a great speed-run which doubles as a good FAQ.

2. If you're wondering about the Mountains of Madness elements: the game focuses on the idea that long after the Old Ones departed earth and left their immense ruins, the serpent men created a necropolis to worship and revere them, and traces of the memory of this old empire of serpent men survived in surviving outlier colonies to be discovered. This game explores that idea in great depth.

3. The Conarium device of the game is stimulating it's namesake, the pineal gland, to allow its users to see into the other realms of space-time...and of course something else can see them back. There is one sequence which strongly suggests that this "thing" which can see back is what killed the Mad Arab (without actually stating such).

4. They were incredibly restrained in their use of the shoggoth, and when one does pop up...hoo boy, it was both a surprise as to where and a shocking moment (run!).

5. Frank's last name is Gilman. Siggghhhhhh. Very Lovecraft, Much Mythos. But yeah, almost as bad as putting Lovecraft into a game as himself....the game does not do the latter. In a weird inversion though Frank's last name does not appear to be relevant, and it is nowhere (in my playthrough, anyway) suggested he is from a small New England coastal town with exotic genealogy (Though I think the inference is that this is probably why his forays with the conarium machine worked where it failed for others).

Post-Mortem Steam Winter Sale Reviews Part II

As always: these reviews reflect exactly as much time as I needed to understand what a horrible mistake I had made. I am curious is Steam gets mad at all of my refund requests....

Blood & Bacon

A farmer impaled on the wall of his barn hires a skeleton to take out an army of invading mutant swine. It's notable for being a one-man effort, and I suppose it's also notable for being "one of those Steam games"....which is to say, one of that endless horde of garbage that makes browsing for good stuff on Steam such a laborious chore these days....but with the caveat that a lot of people seem to like this game. In defense of B&B it is playable, and can be fun if you like Serious Sam and classic Duke Nukem type stuff....I guess.....but honestly? I am about 32 years too old to play this crap.
Verdict: I paid 99 cents for this and I want my money back, but I can never recover from the shame of having bought it in the first place.

Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex

Twitchy free to play shooter that no doubt has some insidious buy to win mechanic behind it, but I wouldn't know because the herky-jerky FPS controls and constant brutal sniper shots to the head left me less than interested in pursuing this one. I'm not even sure it's worth investigating for anime fans of Ghost in the Shell.....at best it's what you stick your teenage son on to keep him occupied (just make sure he doesn't have your CC number handy).
Verdict: nothing gained, nothing lost. I now return to the much, much better Warframe.

Shadows Peak

A lot of effort was put into making a spooky island with a weird mystery for you to explore in this combination puzzle/atmospheric horror/walking simulator but somehow it all falls flat and in the end feels neither spooky, nor puzzling nor horrific.....just annoying.
Verdict: the nice graphics don't make up fore the subpar experience. 35MM was actually a better game for contrast.

Salt

Of the four games in this round of "What Steam Regurgitated This Sale" Salt is the most palatable, and I am both keeping it and planning to play it more soon. The simple but effective graphics work well, as you play a stranded sailor on an island who must fix a raft and start exploring one island after the next. You find interesting written pieces of the tales of those who came before, implying a more interesting story to be found. It's main fault is that it's a bit slow (to start, so far) but I can see the promise.
Verdict: not bad for yet another permanent Early Release survival game. I plan to continue exploring this one.

How Steam handled the removal of an offensive title...and then put it back

A few days back I posted some thoughts on Onebookshelf's decision to kick the "Gamergate Card Game" from their online stores. Not long after this incident an interestingly similar situation arose with Steam and a game called Hatred. No links to the game, Google it yourself (I found it a disturbing mess).

Here's the scoop:

Steam banned a game called Hatred from its Greenlight section, for much the same reason initially that Onebookshelf banned the Gamergate Card Game (topical and offensive, apparently a bad mix). Shortly thereafter Gabe Newell himself came out and reversed the decision,  stating that it was not Steam's job to act as a gatekeeper of content. Specifically, he stated (from PC Gamer):

"Yesterday I heard that we were taking Hatred down from Greenlight. Since I wasn't up to speed, I asked around internally to find out why we had done that. It turns out that it wasn't a good decision, and we'll be putting Hatred back up. My apologies to you and your team. Steam is about creating tools for content creators and customers."

This is interesting to me because it implies that Steam is very much aware of the fact that they are a platform of delivery of content....a mediator...between the publishers and the consumers. They are not the ones who get to decide what publishers can sell, and have even set up tools (such as Steam Greenlight) which let publishers pitch ideas and the consumers vote on what they want to buy. If a game like Hatred has no market or interest, it will presumably wither and die at that point, without Steam ever having to apply any ethical oversight at all....leave it to the consumer. And of course, if it does get Greenlighted then it is clearly sufficient for those who wanted to back the game that they now can --and it means that those in the crowd like myself who wouldn't touch this game with a ten foot pole are now free to ignore it and vote with our wallets by buying other, better games elsewhere.

I haven't particularly been fond of the end-product of the Greenlight process because it has led to a torrent of "early access" titles on Steam that are, indeed, largely unfinished and rarely worth paying for if you're not in the business of being an unpaid QA tester with almost zero presence to the development team. But that said, I think I do like the Greenlight process as it works here.

Unfortunately the business model for Onebookshelf wouldn't likely support such a structure....which might end up feeling like a weird cross between a retail outlet and Kickstarter if they tried, most likely....but the principle holds well. Wouldn't a title like the Gamergate Card Game have been better left for sale, to be soundly beaten about in bad reviews and comments on its page rather than removed from sale?

Steam Summer Sale in Full Swing

It started a few days ago but the Steam Summer Sale is once again upon us. It's not as exciting as it used to be....they sort of got all my money (and I got all the games) a long time ago. Now, games worth getting are still too pricey to be "deals" and Steam's array of new content seems to waver between trash that even Gamersgate is apologetic for and an endless array of risky-business "Early Access" games that seem to be stuck in development hell --but which I feel is a variant of the Kickstarter program, which boils down to this: once you have suckered someone into buying your unfinished product, what's your incentive to complete said game? That aside, there do seem to be a fair number of early access games that look like they are making progress....tempered by those that don't.

As a rule I've been careful to avoid early access games, as I'm not a beta tester and I don't like messing with unfinished product unless I'm being paid for it (I actually did get paid for it once, when I worked for two excruciating weeks at Nintendo in Bellevue, Washington as a QA tester).

But.....I'm breaking my rule on a few hard to pass up Steam sales this time. I grabbed Nether (despite some suggestions in the forums that the game is vile, it sounds more like its a PvP game with some disgruntled buyers who didn't realize that), as well as StarForged (loading, will let you know what I think). There may be a couple more. Project Zomboid came and went on its sale, but I'm sure it will be back and I may take the plunge. If the price is right, I'll risk "early access" territory for a chance to try out these sandbox survival games.

I also picked up Betrayed, which is a fascinating game and also an example of a successful escapee from the early access pit. The game is a cool, polished experience and worth the price of admission if you snag it on sale. Betrayed places you on an island, sometime in the seventeen hundreds by my guesstimation, surviving on an island of ghosts, mysteries and mad zombie spaniards. It's a very atmospheric game that utilizes black and white visuals with occasional colors (reds mostly) to create a unique experience (though a color slider lets you add color to the game if you really must). Worth checking out.

Aside from that, I picked up Insurgency and the remaining Saint's Row IV DLC content I didn't already own. My wife and I actually played some SR IV co-op last night.....it wasn't as exciting as we'd hoped, if only because the missions for co-op only were basically cat-and-mouse or pvp games, and she's been playing a lot longer than me so her character just kept mopping the floor with mine.

Not sure what else I'm going to grab this time around.....the pool is ankle deep for me now; I own too  many games on Steam already and lack the time to play any of them. The few AAA titles coming out this year are all optimized for machines greater than mine so it's easier for now to pick them up for the PS4, which will give them a fairer shake than my PC can. I may need to consider upgrading sometime soon....!

Steam Summer Sale After Action Report: Sleeping Dogs, Van Helsing and Borderlands 2

The Steam Sale ends today, and with it I came away with a few gems worth mentioning...

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

Just as I was getting ready to fire up Diablo III again to see if the itch I had for an isometric ARPG could be scratched by repeating the D3 content one more time, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing comes along and says, "We know what you like best about Torchlight II and Diablo III, and we have merged it all into an unholy concoction of villainous joy, right here! Also, offline and co-op play.Seriously, check us out." It was a chatty game.

Either way, it's also a very good game, and it really does fill a much-needed post-D3, post-Torchlight era niche that has been largely vacant since those two games came out and demonstrated that the era of the ARPG is far from over.

Van Helsing is very polished, at least as I've seen so far. It's graphics are crisp. The voice-overs are well-done, the plot is well-presented and sometimes takes a moment to slyly wink at the fourth wall of computer games, and it is just generally feels good, something that a surprising number of ARPGs fail miserably at.

Bottom line....if you've been jonesing for an ARPG experience that riffs off of what the Big Two have done, and manages to blaze its own trail in the process, then you should check it out.

Sleeping Dogs

In fair disclosure I owned the core Sleeping Dogs title prior to the Steam Sale, albeit purchased from an older Steam Sale. What I hadn't done until now was play much more than the main intro/prologue sequence and then set this one aside for other more pressing games. When I recently realized that I really enjoyed Saints Row 3 for its bizarreness, I also recognized that the vast open-world (open city?) zones of SR3 were actually a big component of the draw. It was then that I remembered I had a few other games that did the same thing, and after downloading those games I realized most of them were either too old and crusty or too obnoxious (never liked the GTA style) to enjoy....but Sleeping Dogs was an exception.

I took advantage of the Steam Summer Sale to snag all the DLC for Sleeping Dogs, which includes a range of additional suits, scenarios and content for this bizarre and fun romp through a Chinese Metropolis, a setting which has been loving crafted in great detail....the city of Sleeping Dogs is so well done, in fact, that I've enjoyed just wandering around to see the sights and explore. It's really very impressive. The fact that it has a compelling and very well acted principle storyline, mixed with a metric ton of amusing side quests is just icing on the cake. The main character is an undercover cop, which means you can play the game with the safe sense that you can become a vile bastard if you wish, but you're not starting off as one.

If you like the concept of an open-world exploration/sand box GTA title, but wanted it to have a more exotic location than Liberty City and a more empathetic character than some cheap con, Sleeping Dogs is for you. It even has some trippy alternative costumes, nods to Hong Kong cinema and wushia action, and an occasional wacko scenario that almost makes Sleeping Dogs as bizarre as SR3 at times. Almost.

 Borderlands 2

I began to suspect that Borderlands 2 had something more to offer than its predecessor when my wife, a largely MMO-only enthusiast, kept playing it. She's been playing B2 on and off now since it came out last year, actually. Obessively, even. And even more amazingly, her other MMO cohorts all join her regularly for their crazy romps through the landscapes of Pandora. My wife bought B2 for me last week during the sale, and I subsequently snagged all the DLC (the only time it makes sense to buy DLC: Steam Sales).

I have played a few hours now, and can state the following: if you, like me, had various issues with the original Borderlands, those issues are all resolved in B2. My issues with the prior game included: great lead in, followed by unfulfilled promises of and sort of meaningful or engaging story and characters and a general annoyance at the vast array of completely random guns. I had other issues, but those two were what made it less satisfying to finish the game for me. B2 immediately demonstrates more attention and effort to story, doing a great job of punching it up, a lot. Likewise, it's got a reinvented inventory system that at least makes figuring out what gun is worth your time a bit easier. Will it sustain through other gripes I had? Time will tell, but those two fixes right there are making B2 an immensely more entertaining experience already.

Also, if you (like me) couldn't muster the energy to finish the original, be assured that while this is a direct sequel, it focuses on new characters and so far I have found nothing which suggested I should have survived through the end of the first game to understand the second at all. In fact based on what I've read, the original Borderlands had a pretty basic and uninteresting ending (spoilerish alert: they find the vault, open it, and a tentacle monster comes out, the end). B2 starts some time after that, but then adds lots of new reveals that would never have been seen in the threadbare storyline of the original.

Forgotten for a Reason...

Solitary Winner so far of the "Steam Pile of B-Games Backlog" Event spurred on by the fact that I have forgotten how to utilize my free time when I have it, thanks to my wife and child being on vacation!

So in a follow-up to my Wednesday blog (the "forgotten games" I re-downloaded to give a second shot) I am remembering why a lot of these are forgotten. Heh.

Kane & Lynch (both of 'em)--difficult to want even try to play when a monumentally better game in the form of Max Payne 3 exists. I got past the point I was stuck on in "Dead Men," the first one, and it just got worse from there. #2 could be better for all I know (I doubt it) but #1 makes me not want to care. The game feels like it had a crew who really cared about the story and voice acting, at odds with a design team for gameplay who couldn't be bothered to fix the game's many weird issues and poor design features. These games taught me an important lesson: don't play crap if you don't have to. Life's too short.

Warhammer 40K Space Marine--this game looks and feels like something I should like and I even found the jetpack, yet I was overwhelmed with ennui as I played and the only satisfaction I got was in once again uninstalling it. Weird.

The Haunted: Hell's Reach--I like this game, but its a hollow arcade experience solo, and in order to properly enjoy this I need other friends who own this game, which I do not. Yet again I marvelled at how clean an experience it is, and how it would be so much better if the game even offered a semblance of story or direction to keep the solo player motivated. Uninstalled once more.

Homefront--As I slogged through this marvelling at the terrible pacing, poor storytelling and ridiculous level of on-rails shooting thinly disguised as "open" by letting you walk left or right while waiting for the NPCs to do stuff for you (like, say, open doors and stuff) I realized I'm getting really tired of this sort of game. In fact, I realized I was feeling the same way about Warhammer 40K Space Marine earlier....trying to rocket jump and realize I was doomed as usual to rocket jump in the highly confined space the game would allow was a reminder that none of these games were designed by Bethesda. Uninstalled! If steam had a trash bin I'd be chucking it, if only to insure I don't try reloading in the future.

There is one winner so far, though:

Red Faction: Armageddon--if you pretend like it has Absolutely Nothing to do with the previous Red Faction titles its kinda fun, as you watch the clueless and accident-prone Darius Mason stumble blindly through an alien invasion from Mars's core. Pretending its not part of the Red Faction universe goes a long way toward ignoring the many, many confusing questions and plot holes such an association raises. If you assume that it takes place in the Space Ghost universe but with better graphics then it even seems to be kinda coherent and well reasoned. Yay! I shall keep playing this one too, until the ennui sets in, I imagine.

Okay, so I'm not totally done with rechecking discarded games in my Steam Pile, but I do think I've re-evaluated the effort I'm putting into them. Think I'd rather focus on Guild Wars 2, Mass Effect 3 and Max Payne 3 instead.

Darius Mason: he's a winner at being a loser

I just realized I like RF:A because it provides a distinct character, and even if I don't identify with him, he comes off as kinda fallible, like he's not really that amazing, he's just cursed with being in the wrong place at the wrong time....a lot. By contrast I wanted to like Kane & Lynch because the characters were interesting, but the game kept getting in the way. And as for Homefront, the protagonist was effectively inscrutable and appeared to have no voice or opinions whatsoever, no matter what sort of heinous atrocity was transpiring in front of him. I guess Homefront wants that character to be a cypher you can project yourself into, but the game's on-rails heavy-handed control of story direction prevents you from ever feeling like you're on anything more than some sort of acid-tripping slasher-flick adult ride version of Disneyland. And as for Warhammer 40K...I kept wondering why these dudes wouldn't wear their helmets. I mean, it's not like they're freaking Gears, amiright?!?!?

Left 4 Dead 2: Cold Stream DLC

The new Cold Stream DLC for Left4Dead 2 has just been released: all four original campaigns from L4D1, the new Cold Stream campaign, and apparently 20 fan-made campaigns (I'll have to check that out asap). I mean....if there's anyone who doesn't have this, now's a good time. 75% off on a midweek Steam sale right now.

That is a lot of quality zombie survival horror FPS action for $5.



If anyone gets this and wants to play send me a message on Steam. I think you can find me by my handle, which is: Camazotz, Lord of Xibalba

Steamrolling through Steam. Also, Juno Reactor

I came across Boathammer, in which boatorious is attempting to dedicate 6 hours to each Steam game he owns, and he owns something like 70 of them. This seems like a great idea....on the surface.
I own 412 games on Steam last time I checked. I don't think I could pull the same stunt off, as a massive number of those games come from bundle deals that I couldn't resist simply because I only wanted to get the 2 or 3 games in the pack that separately cost more than buying the pack on one of Steam's holiday sales. Also, because some of the games I ended up with over time are just hideous. Atrocious. Painful to play. Finally, and it goes without saying, not all games are worth 6 hours of time. And a few are worth a lot more.

I also have a bad habit of contributing to indie bundle deals; and those "pay what you want" indie deals. Which means I have accrued a large number of indie titles, but have also found that I have enjoyed maybe less than 10% of them in a meaningful way, and found most of them to be either drek or at best mildly entertaining for 5-10 minutes.

So yeah, I thought about doing something similar to what the guy in the blog is doing, then came to my senses.

But enough of Steam and computer games! Here's some more music:

Inca Steppa by Juno Reactor, my all time favorite professional techno group, going on 20 years now:

Steam Box? Also: The fine art of focused storytelling vs. the problem with sandboxes; or, Metro 2033 vs. Dead Island

 First off, this story has me interested: apparently there's more than a little reason to believe that Valve is looking at a dedicated PC design with console features. At first I was thinking, "whatever, I've got my PC at home already," but I concede a few ideas sprung up which make the concept more tantalizing. Notably:

More games that normally only see life on consoles could come to a dedicated "Steam Box," as the design intent behind a console (dedicated architecture) would hopefully lure some of these console-only designers over to offering up ports on a Steam Box. And no I am not a PC elitist who likes to bitch about "console babies." There are plenty of console-only games out there I'd love to be able to play without buying a Wii or PS3. Unfortunately it probably won't help with the 1st party releases designed to sell systems (Gears of War, Halo...the two I care about in this case) but maybe games that normally never see life on the PC would get a chance this way. Maybe. (And also probably a flood of console shovelware too, I am sure...)

It would open up my Steam account to a console that is optimized for sitting on my comfy sofa couch in front of my 55 inch screen TV. Admittedly, I can hook my PC up to my big screen TV right now and play games, but I've found that this experience is not at satisfying as simply playing with the Xbox on the big screen (and don't even try to get any real work done this way!) So for the sake of design and convenience, why not.

It might have a chance of dethroning Microsoft and Sony from their console pillars. I'd like to see that just for the hell of it.

In Mother Russia, Pip Boy Wear You!

Okay! So anyway, as of today I am at last 92% finished (according the the little meter) in Dead Island. By the time this sees print I should be done with it and probably experiencing the agony of poor design that is allegedly found in the Ryder White DLC. We'll see. I also finished Metro 2033 this weekend, even with a baby sitting on my knee staring intensely at the screen while I blew up dark one amoebas (and crying ceaselessly if I tried to put him down; I have no idea why this kid was so fascinated at watching Metro 2033, a game I felt rather nervous about playing with him even being in the same room. Hmmmm definitely my child, though)

Dead Island and Metro 2033 are both amazing games. Both have some weaknesses, but their strengths overcome those, for the most part. Moreover, I look forward to the sequels, because unless suits and marketing start meddling in these games the sequels should only get better. But it was interesting to realize that Metro 2033 was ultimately a more satisfying experience, albeit frustrating at times, if only because it was semi-linear (providing linear levels, but with a modest range of options in how to complete each level) and as a result Metro 2033 was able to focus heavily on mood, atmosphere and integrated story telling. When I got to the end of Metro 2033 I felt like I had experienced a meaningful and coherent story arc.

Although I won't be done with Dead Island until tonight, I have to say that the game's efforts at atmosphere and immersion, while excellent, nonetheless began to wear on me toward the end. The game did mix it up....just when I was starting to think that the second act in the city would never, ever end, suddenly I'm in the Jungle, and then I'm in a research facility, and next thing I know I'm exploring ancient Maori cults on the island. Despite this, and perhaps because of the finsl prison level, I still felt like the game's sole purpose was to exhaust the hell out of me while keeping me in a perpetual state of mild confusion. I think it's because while the game's efforts at creating a sort of sandbox zombie apocalypse environment for me to explore are impressive to experience, I absorbed almost all of that ambience and got my fill of it in the first 12-15 hours of the game, before I'd even penetrated the second act. So by the time I reached the fourth act, I had lost any connection to the "setting immersion" element it had early on, and was no firmly wrapped up in the "gameplay element" which honestly gets a bit redundant. See zombies. Kick them down, hack them up, move to next group, click on quest goal, repeat.

Also, Dead Island could have benefited from not having constant, unending respawns MMO-style...

It doesn't help that Dead Island's ability to tell a story is a shoddy mess. The vast plethora of side quests are, while appropriately narrated, almost entirely disconnected from the player character and consist almost exclusively of fetch quests, occasional escort quests, and periodic "clean up" quests, all thematically at odds with the ragtag gang of four that the story is supposedly about. Of the four possible player characters, only the asian gal really strikes me as a "do-gooder," the other three are hard-as-nails amoral survivors with personal agendas that never really get directly addressed throughout the storyline. Worse yet, whenever the game does have a major cutscene or story event, apparently Dead Island was designed under the expectation that at all times you would have all four characters represented, so these storylines are jarring when you see all four protagonists engaging in discourse about a situation or taking action, then the cutscene ends and its back to just you in a solo run or maybe one or two other co-opers.

Despite the lack of coherence in the storyline, and despite the fact that every damned side quest in the game is an annoying and irrelevant sidetrek that only the most lawful good of paladins would bother with ordinarily, Dead Island does have a story, and its a rather interesting one when taken as a whole; the problem is that the developers of this game clearly are not used to the optimal way to stitch together a coherent plotline in a sandbox environment. I'm no authority on the GTA series of games, but it does seem to me that Rockstar has this sort of approach down to a science. Just play Red Dead Redemption for an example of how to do this very well. In fact, for a full-on zombie experience with coherent storytelling get the Undead Nightmare DLC for some wild west zombie action, too...

So in the end, Metro 2033 was much shorter than Dead Island, but was rewarded with a more focused and coherent storyline and an experience that never got old because it used its set pieces and interesting bits to great effect. Dead Island in turns has felt like someone did not edit a film, and instead released several dozens' of hours of raw footage through which I have been methodically watching, at once fascinated, bored, energized and irritated with occasional brilliant moments shining through.

Carmen Sandiego, Where Are You?!?!?!?