As I come to the end of this my first year of University, I thought it might be nice to take a look back over the year and see how I look at things, games in particular, with everything I have now learned.
The first thing I've noticed is that I'm far less forgiving of the games I do buy. Not having that second income has meant that I have had to consider every potential game purchase very carefully. This has meant that I haven't purchased much in the way of AAA titles this year. Mostly because of the high cost of these games when they first come out. Instead, I've picked up mostly older titles that have been either on sale or in bundle deals.
The first of these was Assassins Creed I and II that I picked up in a 2 for 1 bundle. I was really impressed with the setting for ACI, I mean, how often do you see a game set in Syria? Unfortunately I seem to have an issue when I try to load into Damascus and everything crashes, so that's where I've left it. ACII I had all sorts of issue getting it to work. In the end, Uplay came to my rescue (I know, how often have you heard something positive about Uplay?), and I was able to download a version of ACII that works. I've enjoyed playing ACII so far. The combat is more fluid and dynamic than the first one, and the setting is rich and detailed.
After getting these first two AC games, I also picked up a copy of AC: Revelations. I loaded it up and was greeted by the sight of a much older Ezio (the protagonist from ACII). I did a bit of searching and found out that this is the third of the games to feature Ezio, the one in between AC: Brotherhood I then also picked up but I haven't gotten to play that one yet. That's what the Christmas break is for.
Steam has been the godsend for gaming for me this year. I've picked up a couple of full price games, but most have been when they have been on sale. Looking at the choices of the games I've picked up there some obvious ones and some not so obvious. The Witcher and The Witcher 2 I got for the bargain basement price of about $7 in total. Impossible to go past at that price. The first one is quite well done, but there are some frustrating parts - the amount of back tracking you have to do with the quests and the fact that NPC's are shown to have a specific location but aren't there. Combat seems to go from staggeringly easy to impossible at times. One part of a quest has you fighting a demonic hound. Up until that point, nothing has really given you to much in the way of trouble. This hound takes you apart in very short order. Strangely enough, when you reload, the fight is at the same level as things have been previously. From the people I've spoken to, this is something that they have all found, so it seems there is a bug in the code somewhere that increases the difficulty of that for some reason when it is first loaded.
Shadowrun Returns I picked up early in the year. I'm a big fan of the cyberpunk genre in general, and have played both the CyberPunk2020 and Shadowrun tabletop RPG's. I prefer Shadowrun as I really like the mix of high tech with the fantasy style. When the expansion got released Shadowrun: Dragonfall), I picked up a copy of that as well.
I've always been a big fan of RPG's. The amount of time I've sunk into things like Dragon Age and Mass Effect are a testament to that. So I added to my RPG collection with some Steam sale goodness. To sate my Cyberpunk/Sci fi desires, I got Mars: War Logs, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Remember Me and most recently Hydrophobia Prophecy. I also picked up Tomb Raider (the new one) as well as Lara Croft: Guardian of Light. Of these, Deus Ex, Tomb Raider and Hydrophobia are yet installed (the joys of having to juggle the monthly data cap.
Mars: War Logs is an interesting game. It certainly has a much grittier, darker tone to it, and the language used, while blue at times, actually fits with the character who is saying. For example, an engineer who is trying to fix something and swearing at it, "Come on you fucker, work", for example, really does fit well with the tone of the game. Sure, there are some of the usual issues of having to backtrack with quests, but overall it's a quite well thought out and executed game with an interesting and engaging main character, Roy, who is more than he seems.
Remember Me is another Cyberpunk/Sci Fi title, and one of the few that has a female character as the protagonist. The story is in my opinion quite well done, with a few little twists and turns along the way to keep you thinking. The major complaint that people seemed to have with this game is that the combat was frustrating and the camera caused a lot of issues. While I haven't found the combat to be that bad overall, the camera has been a frustration from time to time. But the thing I love about Remember Me is the environment. Neo Paris is amazing. It's a great pity that Remember Me hasn't gotten better reviews as I think it's a much better game than they would lead you to believe.
Lara Croft: Guardian of Light I picked up on sale as well. I'd spent some time reading and looking at this title and in a lot of ways, it gets to the core of what a Tomb Raider game is. It's puzzles, it's traps, it's thinking on your feet and on the run. I'm up to the last chapter on a single player game and it's been really enjoyable. There have been some little frustrations with having to get something dead right else you end up dead dead and have to start the section over again, but that is not a fault of the game, I believe that's more the fault of the player in this instance.
The last 2 purchases I made were Transistor and Contrast. Transistor is from the same developers that made Bastion. I played the demo of Bastion and while it was very well done, it just didn't get me enough to buy it. Transistor on the other hand? I saw some of the artwork and it was just so unique. One of the only games I payed full price for this year and it was worth every cent. It's not very long and it's very linear, but the environment, the voice acting, the sound track, it is simply beautiful. From a mechanics and gameplay aspect, they haven't done anything really new or groundbreaking, but what they have hangs together so well that it doesn't need these things to lift this game up from the everyday to the wonderful.
Contrast is another game in a similar vein. Instead of being a cyberpunk though, it's art deco, set in the 1920's, but like Transistor, the environments are wonderful, and so is the soundtrack, all beautiful jazz. This is a game you could just sit and listen to and not play it! But playing it is just as enjoyable so far. They have a nice mechanic in that the central character (Dawn) can move about the city normally, but up close to a well lit wall, and you can jump into your shadow and move in those 2 dimensions. This is necessary in order to make your way from one area to another, but the story is largely told by the "shadows" of the other characters that populate the story, and I have found that to be quite and effective way of having the narrative play out.
The one black mark in my game purchases this year has been Darkout. A procedurally generated world, one you have crash landed on, and in my case, one I'm never going to be able to leave. For some reason, it seems that this game has an issue with my video card. It requires OpenGL which my card supports, but during world generation the whole thing crashes. I'm not the only one who's had this problem and so far, support haven't done anything at all to attempt to rectify it. Interestingly, I can run this on my media centre PC which runs an AMD card and not an Nvidia one. I'd like to give it a proper go, but at this point I've consigned it to the "Hidden Games" part of Steam so I don't have to look at it.
Time to go back to playing in the shadows now...
