Filed under: Games,Movies,Reviews | Tags: 1up, dead space, eurogamer, movie, videogames, videovista
The build-up to Dead Space has been a bit of a rollercoaster (albeit a very gentle one) for me. Despite my better judgement, the teaser trailer (all very generic Event Horizon-y) really interested me. A survival horror set in deep space? Yeah, sign me up!
Then the other trailers and previews made it look more like a standard Doom-style FPS, which is really not something I’m too enamoured of at the best of times, so my interest duly waned. And then I learned about the tie-ins: a comic and Dead Space: Downfall, a feature-length animated movie which ties in with the game, and I was interested again.
Then I read Eurogamer’s less than glowing review of the game, and once again my level of interest dropped. In a nutshell, Eurogamer’s stance seems to be “It looks good, and shooting things is satisfying, but the gameplay’s only just up to standard and it’s artificially lengthened and really it’s just a shooter rather than a survival horror.” And as all of those are Bad Things in my book, when I read the review, you could colour me ‘meh’.
But then I watched the 1Up Show (which features some remarkably impassioned defence of Dead Space, along with some pretty-looking footage) and read the 1Up review of the game, which mentions the same points as Eurogamer, but sees them defferently. After the show and the review, I was upbeat again.
But then…. Then I watched Dead Space: Downfall (I’m reviewing it for Videovista this month) and it’s turned me off the whole enterprise again. The film is designed to be ‘mature’ in the way that appeals to 14-year-old boys. There’s blood and bad language, and plenty of both, used gratuitously and often unnecessarily. But the interesting parts of the Dead Space world are barely touched on (and I’m almost certain they’ll be ignored completely in the game): the planet-destroying mining industry, the religious movement that opposes it and the way these fit into the wider context of humanity expanding through the cosmos.
Only time will tell though. Dead Space is out on Friday (October 24th) and I’ll be grabbing a rental copy as soon as I can, so that I can write a properly-researched review of the film. Expect an update then.
I was extremely sceptical about this when I downloaded the demo. It’s a console RTS where the primary control method is your voice. As we all know, voice control is useless. Have you ever tried one of those talk-type word processing programs? Say a sentence into a microphone, get a string of gibberish on your page. Or mobile phones: I’ve got a fairly snazzy one, but if I tell it ‘phone mum’, more often than not it tries to call Rob or delete Sam’s contact info or something. How the hell is a game going to work with voice commands?
Pretty damn well, it turns out.
Attach your headset to your controller, hold down the right trigger, give what is described as “a who, what, where command” (for example, ‘unit one, attack hostile unit three’), then release the right trigger and the clever game knows just what to do. Most of the time. Sometimes it gets it wrong, but by and large it’s spot on.
The demo’s a bit rubbish though. You get a single-player level, which is too easy for words: two columns of lightly-armored enemies are approaching Kennedy space centre, where a rocket’s about to be launched. You’ve got three units, and you’ve got to defend the rocket. It’s simplicity itself. Two of your units attack the larger column, the other attacks the smaller one. Then, when the smaller one’s dead, unit three goes and supports units one and two. Another wave of enemies approaches. Simply repeat the original strategy.
The level’s over in under five minutes, and I got an A ranking for it. Without really trying.
You can play a skirmish level on the same map against either a human over Live, or the AI, which is more difficult and diverting (took me 12 minutes. I still got an A though), but I’d have liked another single player level or two. Especially when the demo’s 1.6 gigabytes.
Definitely a game to look out for when it’s released, although I’ll want to rent it first to check out the single-player campaign. From the demo, it seems to revolve around a fairly cliched ‘unknown terrorists are launching multiple attacks against several countries!’ storyline.
And I still say it’s brilliant. The secret stars are bastards though: frustrating, sadistic and in a couple of cases, pointlessly long-winded. If you do collect them all, you can access an alternate ending, although I’m not sure how much it adds to the game. Certainly not enough to warrant collecting the stars just to see it. You’ve got to enjoy the game enough to find fun in the challenge. The alternate ending in itself isn’t a big enough payoff.
I claimed I was going to write a big long post about Braid being art (or not, whichever the case may be), about the story and about what Braid’s done for gaming. Actually, though, there’s no point. It’d be pretentious of me and it’d really only serve as a self-congratulatory “see, I can write pseudo-academic waffle with the best of them” post.
I do still want to say a few things about the game, but I’ll keep them short.
If you haven’t played it, you really should. It’s expensive, as Live Arcade games go, but it’s definitely worth it.
It’s very clever. It merges platforming with puzzling well (though it’s not the first to do that by any stretch of the imagination) and the time-reversal gimmick is very effective, as is the evolving way in which it’s used.
It looks and sounds fantastic.
The story is very interesting, with multiple layers and several equally-valid interpretations. And although it’s actually quite predictable in its structure (start at level 2, play through 3,4,5 and 6 before moving back to 1 for the big reveal) and its surface interpretation, there’s so much under the surface that I didn’t mind. The story is also well-integrated into the game, no small feat considering it’s told through text boxes.
Overall, I’d recommend this to anyone who’s interested in gaming beyond just shooting things or playing on plastic guitars. I’d much much rather buy four or five games like Braid than one like Gears of War 2 (though I’ll no doubt end up picking that up too, at some point).
Embarrassingly, I completely missed this. Only learned about it today. Introversion Software have a new game out! Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest was released on September 19th, so I’m rather late to the party here. Admittedly, I was on honeymoon when it came out, but I had no idea it even existed! And since I’m a fan of Introversion’s games, that’s a poor show on my part.
Multiwina is the sort-of sequel to 2005′s utterly brilliant Darwinia: a stripped-down RTS in which a virtual world populated by little flat stick-men has been infested with nasty viruses and it’s up to you to get rid of them all and return Darwinia to its utopian state.
Multiwinia takes place after Darwinia was saved from the viruses. Now the Darwinians have split into different tribes and are waging war on each other. It’s up to you to take control of one of the factions and beat all the others!
Except…
The story only exists on Multiwinia’s website. The actual game is story-less. It’s a collection of multiplayer game modes (King of the Hill, Domination and so on), with up to 4 players. You can play all of the maps in singleplayer mode, with the computer AI filling in for human opponents, but there’s no ‘Campaign’ mode. That’s a shame, in my opinion, since I’m not much of a multiplayer gamer. I really only play singleplayer games, and a ‘beat one map to unlock the next’ progression model, with a story attached to the maps would have been a dream come true. Of course, it would really have been an expansion pack for Darwinia if that was the case, but that would have been no bad thing.
Also slightly disappointing is Multiwinia’s interface. It’s very easy to navigate, which is excellent, but Darwinia had geeky in-jokes (such as fake pirate intros of the sort that I remember from my C64 and Amiga-playing days), and a nice sweeping cinematic camera intro, and the front-end was just a map of the Darwinia world, with available locations highlighted. It had charm. Multiwinia feels a bit soulless. Flat, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Of course, that’s all window-dressing, so to speak. The only real important thing is how Multiwinia plays. Luckily, it plays brilliantly. I’ve been glued to it all morning. It’s a really stripped-down RTS (hardly any unit types, no resource management, no possibility of tank-rushing or turtling) in which you just fight the other factions. You’re in battle within seconds, and the fighting just continues until either time runs out or the other players are wiped out. It’s frenetic and brilliant for it. It’s got definite just-one-more-go addictiveness, and for £15 you’d be a fool not to buy it. It’s also pretty forgiving in terms of system requirements:
- 2.0 GHz CPU
- 512 MB RAM
- Windows XP or Vista
- GeForce 6200 or Radeon 9600 series
- Internet Connection for multiplayer games
And it only takes up 62 megabytes of hard drive space!
The honeymoon is over. And it was brilliant. If you’ve never been to the Highlands and Islands of western Scotland, you’re definitely missing out. You should go. Go now!
So, lots to do, now that I’m back. Braid to finish, for one. Stories to redraft, and write, and submit, for two, three and four.
Also coming up soon: finishing the site’s redesign, and restarting the exercise bit of it, as I’ve put on a not-inconsiderable 3kg since the wedding. All that lovely seafood and cosy tea-rooms with delicious home baking! Mmmm, cake.
Stay tuned!
