Baud Attitude

I have a friend who is a big fan of the racing genre and who has made several attempts, over the years, to hook me as well.

He has succeeded only once, thus far, with the absolutely brilliant Flatout: Ultimate Carnage, a game that kept me – to abuse a cliche – glued to a controller for a good couple of weeks.

I suppose that it really wasn’t a proper racing game, however, as the general idea in racing is not hitting other cars and fences and such, while the general idea in Flatout:UC was that driving a car through a shopping mall was a grand idea.

Need For Speed: Carbon, then, to get back to the subject of this post, is something of an oddity in that it represents the first time I’ve gone and sought out a racing game on my own, and also in that it’s more or less a proper racing game in that the goals in it are all organized around beating other cars to a finish line rather than beating them into submission.

There is a certain degree of destructive glee involved in running through bus stops and knocking over traffic signs and the like, I will admit, but it really isn’t the focus of the game.

I will admit that I am rather unqualified to judge it as a racing game. From a brief search around the Internet at large, I am given to understand that it is actually held in a certain distain by fans of the series, often pointed out as the point where the series Went Wrong. I cannot comment on this, nor will I look too critically at the plot, which revolves around your character – a once-infamous street racer, fallen prey to some as-yet-unspecified scandal, seeking to regain his reputation through a series of, uh, it’s a racing game so YOU guess how he needs to regain his reputation.

What I can say, however, is that it is quite pretty, even if somewhat mired in 2006-era graphical shortcomings like a lack of support for widescreen resolutions, and that being able to purchase a virtual version of the car I drive on a daily basis and drive it, again virtually, in ways that would get me arrested or – more likely – killed in real life, is a great deal of fun and well worth the meager price of admission.

In this, too, I suppose it differs somewhat from the traditional racing game career, where you start off with a terrible car and use it to earn as much money as possible so that you can buy a better car and repeat until you are eventually driving the sort of car that graces the bedroom walls of 12-year-old boys worldwide.

With this game, I started with a Mazda RX-8, drove it until I had the $30,000 needed to buy the Mazdaspeed 3, and plan to see how far I can get with it.

Oh, I did put flames on the side. That represents my sole concession, thus far, to the needs of my inner 12-year-old.

I like a little bit of fantasy in my first-person shooter, so I was quite looking forward to Legendary back when the first previews were released, back in 2008.  The idea of breaking open Pandora’s box and accidentally filling with world with monsters of legend, then shooting them, was quite appealing.

What can I say?  I played a lot of D&D when I was a kid.

Then the game actually came out and was roundly panned by reviewers, so I saved myself sixty bucks by not buying it, and then I just sort of forgot about it.

Recently, however, I was reminded of its existence by reading some online posts about the game and how, well, utterly disappointing it had been.

Thus reminded that this game did, in fact, exist, I decided that I would load up Steam and see what it cost.  My logic went as follows:  If it’s 20 bucks at full price, it will probably be discounted by 75% during the summer sale, and if it’s five bucks it will probably be worth trying out.

This happens to me quite often; I’m reading a discussion about games that turns to titles that were quite thoroughly mediocre, and I wind up buying the game in question just to see how mediocre it was.  I think this is probably a character trait that there’s a complex latin name for.

Anyway, it was five bucks at full price.  It will probably be even cheaper during the sale, but since I’d already decided upon five dollars as a fair price, I went ahead and bought it.

Then I took a couple of months getting around to it before finally starting it and finishing it over the course of three evenings.  I could easily have powered through it in a sitting if I’d been doing this on a weekend, the whole thing lasted about six hours start to finish.

I’m not going to lie to you, it lived up to the anti-hype.  I like me a good linear shooting game, but the sheer lack of mobility in this particular one sets new depths.  Your character is rendered utterly unable to move by the lowest of obstructions, you regularly drop down things with no way back up, doors close behind you, new doors open only when scripted to… It’s not Homefront bad, but it’s not great.

Thankfully, the creature design is pretty good and the atmosphere gets genuinely creepy at times, and this makes up for the silly level design.

So over six hours, you walk forward, shooting werewolves and fire lizard things and some annoying little ghost children with wings and claws that the game claims are taken from russian folklore and griffons and minotaurs and uh that is actually about the extent of the things you will be shooting, barring a couple of bosses.

I said that the creature design was good, not especially varied.

Oh, and you also occasionally shoot enemy soldiers.  They aren’t very notable.

From time to time, the walking forward and shooting things schtick is interrupted by one of two things:

1) Sometimes the path is blocked by fire and you need to go find a nearby valve to turn to put out the fire.  Generally this involves turning approximately 45 degrees from looking directly at the fire, noting the valve on the wall, and turning it.

2) Sometimes you will hit an access panel that you need to hold down the E button for like 20 seconds to open.

It’s not quite as bad as Heavenly Sword’s Hat Boxes, but it’s not exactly brain melting puzzle time here is what I’m getting at.

Also you will probably hit a bug just before the final boss where you get into an elevator and fall through the floor.  The game was released in 2008 and the graphics engine has problems when your computer gets too good of a frame rate.  There are a few workarounds for this bug, most of which involve limiting the frame rate in some manner.  I eventually hit upon one that worked, but this particular bug was teeth-grindingly frustrating until I found that.

Wow, I don’t have a lot of good things to say about this, really.  I did finish it, so that’s a mark in its favor, and it has a couple of deeply satisfying moments involving rocket launchers and mythological beasties, and really it deserves some points for just trying to break out of the mold.

I guess I’ll sum up:  It’s worth five bucks and six hours of your life, and what more can you say for some games?

I happened to find a copy of Need for Speed Carbon yesterday, a game that is significant to me only because it happens to have the car I actually drive on a daily basis in it.

Well, technically, I have a 2007 Mazda3 hatchback and the one in the game is the 2007 Mazda3 “Mazdaspeed” variant but it’s close enough.

As a bonus, it actually seems like a pretty decent game.  I haven’t played a Need for Speed game since the original, and they seem to have come quite a way since the days of CGA graphics.

Anyway, I couldn’t find a custom icon for Steam’s grid view, so I spent a couple of minutes tracking down a picture and resizing and cropping it appropriately and then I thought I’d put it up here in case someone else happened to have this same very specific need.

… I recognize that this somewhat falls under the category of personal responsibility and so on and so forth, but if it isn’t too much trouble, would you consider adding a clock to the interface of all your games from this point forwards? I would appreciate it and I’m sure that my boss would as well.

In somewhat related news, after finishing the “adventure” mode of Peggle Deluxe and feeling like I’d kicked that particular monkey, I realized that I’d bought the game as part of a bundle that included the sequel, Peggle Nights.

…

The hook in Peggle Nights is that you’re seeing the secret dreams and aspirations of all the wacky characters from the first game, and it’s a pretty amusing hook. The lobster character, in particular, easily the most annoying and most useless in the first game, has the most entertaining fantasy – destroying Paris as a Godzilla-sized crustacean. It almost makes up for the five levels you have to suffer through with him again.

As for the game, well, nothing much has changed. You’re still bouncing balls off pegs in an effort to clean the board, there’s still an element of randomness that can infuriate at times but means that you pull off some stunningly unlikely shots at others, and it’s still basically a digital sugar rush.

The last level is perhaps just a little TOO dependent on luck; it has a design where almost every peg on the board is deliberately occluded by barriers and actually aiming at anything turns into a matter of needing to make bank shots off said barriers and off the walls.

That said, and coming back to the reason for this post’s introductory paragraph, it kept me plugging away until nearly one in the morning without realizing I was doing so, so I can scarcely complain.

Anyway, with both games triumphed over, I can get back to trying to recover the last shreds of my dignity by playing something with explosions and improbably dressed women, though hopefully not something where the improbably dressed women are what is exploding.

I have to say that, because yesterday I was a gibbering ball of jelly.

Amnesia has this … reputation.  It’s one of the few games that is generally considered to be genuinely frightening by even the most jaded fan of the genre, and it’s one of those games that people dare each other to play in a dark room with headphones on.

I bought the thing during Steam’s 2010 Thanksgiving sale and honestly haven’t had the guts to give it a try since.

With the recent Humble Bundle putting a spotlight back onto Amnesia – and four other excellent games – however, I decided that, reputation be damned, I was going to strap on a headset, turn off all the lights, and play it from opening to credits in one sitting.

For the record, I lasted almost three hours at this.  After one particularly unnerving sequence involving water, boxes, and splashing – and here I am being deliberately vague, but once you play it it will make sense – I needed a bit of a walk around in well lit rooms before going to bed.

Nonetheless, I was back at the keyboard the next afternoon, headphones on and room lights off.  We won’t mention the considerable amount of ambient light in the room, as it was tragically unavoidable and gentlemen do not point out these sorts of things.

Seven hours later, and well after the point where the ambient light had faded into dusk and then full-on-night, I was done.

I do believe that there is a point where one becomes just a little desensitized to being brutally killed over and over again in ways one is hopeless to defend against.  There’s a segment late in the game where you are searching, in a room where you have nearly zero visibility, for items to complete a puzzle while at the same time being hunted by creatures who seem quite unimpaired by the lack of light, and that segment alone was responsible for at least a dozen deaths in the space of a very few minutes.  After that many short bursts of terror, I didn’t have the energy to be frightened any more.

I was still quite able to be disturbed, however.  A good deal of the last part of the game involves exploring various torture chambers, and the writers seem to have delighted in unearthing the most brutal of the various ways in which humans have, over the centuries, been quite keen on causing other humans a great deal of pain.  I’m not certain that everything was historically accurate but it all had the ring of truth about it.

Leaving the atmosphere aside, the game has a control scheme that adds nicely to the general feeling of being helpless and hunted.  Your character has direct control over most items in the environment.  That means that, for example, if you run up to a door, you need to grab the door and swing it open – there’s no “press A to open door” button.

So, to continue the example, should you be being chased through dark halls by something nasty and you run up to a door,  grab it, and realize that it opens towards you so you need to back up to open it, meaning that you are backing TOWARDS the thing that is chasing you, that is a very intense sensation.  It’s just cumbersome enough to add extra tension without stooping to the deliberately-obtuse tank controls favored by some survival horror franchises.

Highly recommended.  Buy it, install, turn your lights off and plug your headphones in and immerse yourself, it is a glorious thing.