Monthly Archives: March 2015

25 Mar

Over the Line

I’m not a big fan of multiplayer shooters. I tend to spend most of my time either crawling through vegetation looking for a point of interest, or staring at the stats of the person who has just killed me and wondering what I could have done differently. It’s mainly a sad, contemplative experience, and it’s an experience I can easily attain by booting up various Battlefields, Halos, or Call of Duties that I own across multiple platforms. When I cracked the plastic wrap on Battlefield: Hardline, I resigned myself to another go on this melancholy merry-go-round.

Cop StuffI had heard only bits and pieces of the marketing for Hardline, but one of the things I’d heard was that they were going to deliver on a strong story for the single-player experience. I’ll admit that I scoffed. I’ve played my fair share of shooters, all of which have either complex stories based on a lore that I’ll never understand or essentially boil down to killing the right mans with a side of “isn’t war terrible” thrown in. While I’ve been impressed with level design and certain environmental moments that shooters have been able to present, the actual story, plot, and characters have always felt a bit amateur hour to me. Would Hardline be any different? Could it? Read More →

18 Mar

I Built This City

It seems odd to talk about a game that was actually released recently, because this blog isn’t supposed to be a collection of reviews. I’m not a game journalist; I’m a designer, and each entry is simply a short rambling of my thoughts on how a particular game works or doesn’t work for me. I also try – often poorly – to pinpoint any designs in the game that I feel are particularly strong or weak. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk a bit about Cities: Skylines.

Cities: SkylinesWait, wait, I’m actually not done with disclaimers. Before we actually dive into Skylines, I want to talk a bit about my relationship with SimCity, because I think it’s important. I’m not what you would call an “avid” SimCity player. Back in the day, when SimCity was a fresh new piece of intellectual property, I found the game and simulation to be hard and unforgiving. I would immediately spend all my money trying to build a city only to find out I was bankrupt and had to sit and wait for a few months to go by to get enough in the budget to build another power plant or police station or school. I was frustrated that the game let me believe I could run free with my city-building imagination only to smack me down with gameplay incentives to take it slow. Read More →

10 Mar

A Mighty Pirate

Let’s go back in time a bit. Let’s walk down memory lane, hand in hand with Telltale Games, to a time when they made point-and-click adventure games for the adventure game crowd. Before the Walking Dead became a storytelling hit that would forever seed the path of all their future games, before every game that came out of that studio was a fictional tour de force with heart-wrenching player choices with little of the adventure game puzzle-solving that their early work was known for.

A SwordfightPerhaps it was fate that I rolled Chapter 2 of Tales of Monkey Island (The Siege of Spinner Cay). I had finished Chapter 1 eons ago and enjoyed it, but had never ventured further down the Tales of Monkey Island path. Other shiny baubles had distracted me and I had never come back. So when Guybrush Threepwood’s exaggerated features and shiny face peered out at me once more, I was curious what I’d find when I returned to this past life, both for me and Telltale Games. Read More →

03 Mar

I Got 99 Spirits

A clarifying point, to start: I didn’t actually roll 99 Spirits. I rolled Tsukumogami, the original Japanese version of 99 Spirits. As the two games are very similar if not identical – other than language – I decided to play a game in which I could understand the story and instructions. And a good thing too!

Exposition!

Because wouldn’t you know it, one of the main mechanics of 99 Spirits is guessing words and had I been playing in the original Japanese, I would have done quite poorly indeed. What an odd creature 99 Spirits is. If you were to ask me who should play 99 Spirits, I’d be flummoxed. Let’s see if I can arrive at a good answer before I call it a night. Read More →