Baud Attitude

One of the side effects of this year’s “clear out the backlog” project has been a new appreciation for bundled software.

Usually, if you get any software with a new piece of hardware (beyond, you know, the basic drivers and what-not), it’s, well, passable at best.  It’s “Photoshop Elements” instead of “Photoshop”, or a “3 level demo” instead of a full game.  It’s really there to make you want the Real Thing.

Having said that, I understand that Photoshop Elements is, yes, a fairly decent program.  I think my point remains clear. 🙂

Two of the games I’ve played this year came in bundles… and in both cases, they got shoved in a drawer and largely forgotten about.  The first was Deus Ex, and I don’t think I can express enough times how much shame I have for leaving THAT one unplayed for seven years.

The second was Giants : Citizen Kabuto, from Planet Moon Software.

I’ve heard the name a fair few times, but it’s kind of a nondescript name and it never excited my imagination enough to go and figure out what it was about.  Am I shallow? Well, yes, but I’m man enough to admit it in this case.

Even if I had gone looking for an answer to “What kind of a game is this, then?”, I don’t think I’ve have gotten a very satisfying answer, because it’s kind of a tricky one to categorize.  It’s got some shooting bits, some jet-ski racing bits, some real-time strategy sorts of levels, and several levels where you stomp around the landscape as a Big Damn Giant Monster eating people and crushing buildings with your butt.

Mostly, though, it’s very funny and also very British.  If you’ve never seen the point of that Douglas Adams chap, never cracked a Terry Pratchett novel, never watched a Monty Python movie… it might not be the game for you.

On the other hand, if you are “keen on” British humor and also like blowing things up Real Good, it’s a fun ride.  The single player campaign isn’t very long – it felt, just a bit, like a really drawn-out tutorial designed to get the player ready to jump into online multiplayer – but I don’t think it really needed to be stretched out just for the sake of being stretched out.

Two benefits to being this late to the party:

1) From looking at old reviews of the game, when it came out it was a bug-ridden mess and wasn’t really playable until they released several patches.

2) While it IS a remarkably pretty game for 2000, it’s showing its age a little.  There’s a community-done mod that replaces the default textures with new, hi-resolution textures and really pumps up the visuals.  It’s available at http://www.giantswd.org/.

Next up on the “play list”: Armed and Dangerous, the “spiritual sequel” to Giants.  I’ll be putting down the mouse for this one – I’ve got the Xbox version and from what I hear, there’s no real reason to track down the PC version.

I really did plan to get to sleep at a reasonable time last night, but I felt really close to the end of Psychonauts and decided to see if I could finish it.

And I did – granted, I was up until nearly 2AM, but it was worth it. The developers and artists really did pull off something extraordinary with the game worlds; every mind was different and bizarre in a truly appealing way.

I give it a solid recommendation.

That said:

Dear designers,

When you have put something in to your game and think to yourself “Wow, this is really hard. We should give the player infinite lives so they can try it over and over again until they get it right.”

…Take it back out. If you need to give the player THAT many chances, something is wrong with the design.

AND: If you do decide to put an “infinite loop until you get it right” segment in your game, DON’T have an NPC taunting the player with the same three or four phrases, over and over and over again.

FURTHERMORE: Don’t put the whole damn thing on a timer, where you can fail even if you get the platforming bits down right.

Meat Circus acrobatics bit, I’m looking at YOU.

After about try 20, I turned off the speakers and all was well again. After about try 50, I made it through, and from there it was only another 10 minutes or so until the end of the game.

I’ve never played Day of the Tentacle, or Full Throttle, or… well, I’ve never played any of Tim Schafer’s games, even though he’s one of those “name” developers that has a massive and vocal following.

On the other hand, I did buy his “Pyschonauts” a couple of years ago. It was one of those games that launched to massive critical acclaim and then wound up on the clearance racks inside of a couple of months… kind of like Beyond Good and Evil.

So, I had the Xbox version, which set me back all of 10 bucks, and I played it once. Started the game, sat through the intro movie, ran straight up the ramp into the “Basic Braining” training mission, completed that, and saved.

It did not really hook me, and I never got back to it. I am bad like that.

Just recently, I spent another four dollars to buy the PC version of Psychonauts when I found it in a Big Lots. Not a bad use of four bucks, by the way – playing it in 1680 x 1050 with all the graphical bells & whistles cranked really puts the Xbox version to shame, and it has pretty decent joypad support.

(I have noticed that I have to keep two different joypads around – one Logitech 10-button dual-shock style controller, and one Xbox 360 controller. Games tend to have a default button mapping that caters to one or the other. Psychonauts, being a couple of years old, prefers the dual-shock style controller.)

After I finished Tomb Raider Anniversary, I decided I’d give it another try. This time, I didn’t rush things. I started the game, ran around the camp as best I could, talked to all my fellow campmates, dug up some arrowheads, did some random thingy collecting… my opinion of the game increased greatly, and it has continued to do so with each new level.

So I’ve got that as the top game in the queue right now, and I was thinking about putting Armed and Dangerous on the stack next, but I hear that Armed and Dangerous has lots of things in it that are much more fun (and it’s already a damned funny game) if you’ve played Giants : Citizen Kabuto first, and I got a copy of Giants : Citizen Kabuto bundled with a motherboard a while back… so my queue looks like this:

Psychonauts

Giants: Citizen Kabuto

Armed and Dangerous

I also have “Kingdom of Paradise” spinning in the PSP whenever I get a few minutes when I’m out and about. I haven’t progressed very far, but I’m liking everything about it except for the voice acting. It’s bad enough it got dubbed and there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn the Japanese voices back on; they went that one step further and made sure that, whenever a Japanese word is left intact in the English script, it’s pronounced as poorly as possible.

Lara Croft and I have a somewhat sparse history.  I owned the original Tomb Raider back when it was released for the Saturn, but never finished it, and then I bought and got crushed into pitiful defeat by the second Tomb Raider on the Playstation… and then I didn’t play another Tomb Raider game until the excellent “Tomb Raider Legend” on the Xbox 360.

That might have been the end of it, but they had to go and re-make the original game for modern systems and PCs… and they did it RIGHT, in my opinion anyway; they did change an awful lot of the game but they had the spirit of the original down perfectly.  The only thing I kind of miss – and this is the embodiment of masochism – is that they did away with the breakaway floors that would drop you to your death in the original.

I miss the spike pits.  There, I’ve said it.

The sticking point for me the first time around was the boss at the end of the Egypt level.  Never could manage to beat him.  In the remake – and I refuse to believe this is sheer chance, I believe that the developers at Crystal Dynamics did this solely – SOLELY – for my benefit – there is no boss at the end of the Egypt level.

That said, there is a platforming bit, a couple of levels later, where you are climbing a shaft with lava at the bottom and things flying at you trying to knock you into said lava and ruthlessly timed pole-swinging and wall-running elements.  After about twenty painful deaths at once particularly sticky bit, I went, humbled and angry, looking for sympathy and advice.

I did find that the section I was stuck on was universally considered the hardest bit of the game, which comforted me somewhat, and I found further that there were lots of people out there who had completed it and were glad to offer hints, explicit walkthroughs, and even video run-downs of how to pass this nasty tricky bit.

And pass it I did.  After that… smooth sailing: a couple of really quite entertaining boss fights, some tricky-but-never-impossible platforming and puzzle bits, and I was happily watching the end credits roll.

I have so many games in the backlog that getting stuck on a difficult one for any length of time seems a real waste, so I don’t finish many “hard” games.  I readily admit this.

Still, there’s a satisfaction that comes from actually sticking with a particularly nasty bit and finally overcoming it – yeah, I had to go and look up HOW to, and yeah, it took me a gazillion tries even knowing the trick – but, darnit, it feels good.

Looking forward to Tomb Raider : Underworld now.