Posted in Game of the Week

For some reason, I always play games long after their release date. So while the rest of the world already has played through Everyday Shooter, I am in the middle of level 4. I absolutely love the music in Jonathan Mak’s game. This is lofi guitar heaven. It feels like Lou Barlow is coming around the corner and starts to sing at any moment. Or like an Appleseed Cast album that has not been released yet. I’ve tried for too long to convince friends that video games can be a medium of expression. Next time I will just let them play this game.

We certainly need more beautiful designed games. I don’t mean games that look good from a technical point of view. The notion that the graphical quality of a game can be measured in numbers is still common sense amongst a lot of people. From this perspective every new game has to raise the bar towards graphical realism. This is of course plain wrong. Instead, every game needs a distinct personality. Like Ether for instance – an atmospheric, physics-based Half-Life 2 Mod developed by Brown Dyed Hotel, a group of swedish students from Campus Karlshamn of Blekinge Institute of Technology. I only played it for several minutes at the Swedish Game Awards Exhibition, but I was immediately captivated by it’s beauty and I encourage everyone to check it out for yourself.

A while ago I bought a used PS2 to play a bunch of games that I had missed so far and that I thought I would enjoy playing. One of them was Rockstar’s Bully (named Canis Canem Edit in Europe). It got a lot of positive reviews in the gaming press and playing a troublesome schoolboy sounded like an interesting game idea which got me very excited to play it.

The actual experience of playing Bully makes me feel like being in the office doing overtime on a sunday working on a PC that crashes every 10 minutes. The number of good ideas and intentions in this game equals the number of moments of pure frustration. I consider the mission system one of the biggest flaws of the game. Like in GTA you progress through the game by completing missions – if you fail a mission you are forced to do it over and over again.

A typical mission looks like this: Escort a school kid that is threatened by some bullies to his locker so he can return his borrowed books to the library. Ok, this could be a challenging, interesting task inside a video game, but:

The school kid will follow you at a really slow pace, while you have to lead the way. Due to a seriously unclever positioning of the camera, you can’t see where your fosterling actually is and therefore you can’t protect him from getting beaten up. On the way to the locker he needs to go to the bathroom, so you need to escort him there first. The target location is indicated by a symbol on the in-game radar-like map. Once you are actually there, you realize this is the girls bathroom and your friend will not follow you in there. Of course there is also some arbitrary timer running out, and you are just wondering if a single person has actually tested this or any of the other missions before the game was released.

There has not been a Game of the Week post on my blog in quite a while, mainly because I simply have not enough time to play a lot of games anymore. I already was happy that Valve’s Portal was kind of compact, time-wise. Play You Have To Burn The Rope and guess how happy I was to play this little diamond. Be warned, it’s an intense experience.

Surprisingly, Valve’s Portal (part of The Orange Box) did run quite well on my low-end PC. While some people complained that it is too short, I am actually happy with the fact that you can play through it in one or two sessions. I just don’t have as much time to play games as I had as a kid anymore. However, Portal is actually longer than you’ll think at first, and it does a good job in playing with your expectations through the whole game. The puzzles are mind-bending and challenging, but never unfair. A slight motion sickness might occur, though. I am also going to spoil that the end boss is really really cool. But you’ll properly have played it already.

Do you remember the feeling of immersion that you had when you played Half-Life for the first time? I just finished playing the 15th Anniversary Edition of Eric Chahi’s Another World (named Out of this World in the US) and I had quite a similar experience of being sucked into an atmospheric game world. In both games you play a scientist who has to learn how to self-defend against other species because of a failed scientific experiment.

While Half-Life is the effort of Valve’s great team work, Another World was almost done completely by Chahi himself – an exceptional talent in programming, art and design. The Anniversary Edition includes a highly interesting Making Of video presenting the little secrets and tricks of his game development process.

Compared to todays standards Another World is both quite short and really hard. Be assured that you will die a thousand deaths and that you’ll need to replay a bunch of levels many many times. It does not help that in theory the controls are elegant and simple, but sloppy and unforgiving in reality. Of course, Another World is one of these precious gems in gaming history well worth the struggle playing through it.

Pixeljamgames – the creators of the superb Gamma Bros – just released Ratmaze 2. You are playing, well, a little rat inside a maze. The goal is to collect as much cheese and other types of food inside the maze until the time limit runs up. Each time you collect a food item your score increases and you get some extra time as a reward. The tricky part is that you cannot see the complete maze all at once. You can however choose to enable or disable scrolling in the settings of the game. (Enabling scrolling makes it a little bit easier since you can see which rooms adjoin.) As a secondary task you can also try to collect the bonusletters R-A-T-M-A-Z-E hidden in the maze which involves some physics-based puzzles with marbles. Give it a try, it’s a very nice game to play on a rainy sunday like today.

The most games I currently play on my Nintendo DS are actually GBA games. So, why am I living in the past? Basically because the GBA has some very original titles. Well, at least in Japan. One of these wonderful games that you can’t buy in Europe or in the US (for whatever stupid marketing reason) is Rhythm Heaven. It’s essentially like Wario Ware except that you have to press the buttons in rhythm of the music instead. It’s a simple concept that will keep you entertained for quite a while. There are six varied stages with five levels each and a remix level at the end of each stage. The music is ingenious and catchy in a way that it makes you sing-a-long. Forget the music games you have played before, this is the real shit!

The platformer Qwak was first released in 1993 for the Amiga (and later for the CD32) by british developer Team 17. This great little gem shares it’s game mechanics with arcade classics like Bubble Bobble or Parasol Stars. It’s super-fast and pretty damn hard. Unfortunately at the time it came out the Amiga was already on it’s way down, so a lot of then Amiga owners will not have played the game. Which is a shame because Qwak is one of the best playable Amiga games out there. The good news is though that the game’s designer James Woodhouse has ported the game over completly to the Gameboy Advance. There are only 300 (homebrew) copies of the game, so make sure you order it for £15 including shipment as long as it’s available. And if you don’t believe me that Qwak is that great, download the demo for your PC first.

So … I try to get in the habit of writing some sentences about one game that I like each week. Let’s start with Cave Story which is a free Japanese platform/adventure game for PC and Mac developed by Studio Pixel.

In Cave Story you are playing a young boy who wakes up in a cave but by mischance cannot remember how he’d got there or who he is. While exploring large underground areas and talking to unique characters you unfold the weird but still enjoyable story. You’ll need good reflexes and button-smashing qualities since a lot of baddies seek your life and it can get quite hectic especially later in the game – not to mention the very challenging boss fights.

Overall, Cave Story delivers so much more than you’d ever expect from a freeware game. The cute graphics are lovely, the controls are accurate and the soundtrack adds a lot to the atmosphere of the game. All the details are perfect. Go and download it now if you have not already played it.