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July 8, 2012

Review – Quantum Conundrum

Review Quantum Conundrum
Conundrums exist all around us. Just this morning, I puzzled over a way to make coffee without getting out of bed – though maybe that’s more of a daily annoyance than a true conundrum.

The conundrums offered up by Kim Swift and Airtight Games tend to challenge players to navigate rooms of perilous lasers and other hazards in order to activate pressure switches to open the way forward. And the ludicrous scientific adventure that unfolds draws quick comparisons through the gameplay and Swift to Portal, which makes it rather easy to suggest that if you loved Portal, you’re in fine hands here.

There are plenty of similarities to discover whilst visiting the eccentric Professor Fitz Quadwrangle, voiced by Star Trek The Next Generation’s John De Lancie, who offers companionship with a disembodied voice that continually comments on situations and regales players with the history of the Quadwrangle family, as well as his own scientific accomplishments.

Key among the similarities are the aforementioned pressure switches that require the constant manipulation of recurring objects. Conundrums often involve finding the means to cross dangerous environments as well, continually mixing these two challenges to create rooms that do something familiar – find me wandering off to do something else until suddenly realizing the solution and running back to the computer to test my hypothesis.

Whenever a game gets under my skin that much, I figure it must be doing something right.

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July 6, 2012

Review – Gravity Rush

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 2:20 am

Review Gravity Rush
Sony Japan’s effort to leave an early and definitive mark on the Vita begins rather simply, asking players to poke the touchscreen of the hardware in order to nudge an apple. It isn’t long for breaking from the stem and falling to the ground, only to roll off the floating island where the tree has grown, falling to the unseen depths below.

If you enjoy reading into such things, there’s room to suggest that letting that forbidden fruit fall away without taking a bite invites the idea that the player should abandon knowledge, that they should forget everything they know before stepping into this gravity shifting playground – that this experience is unlike any other to come before it.

And I rather like this idea.

It’s certainly the type of bold statement one expects from Sony, and Gravity Rush does indeed fight to turn the familiar upside-down, creating a play space where the often wasted space above one’s head becomes as important as the ground beneath their feet.

But Gravity Rush is also a prisoner of gravity and circumstance, struggling with the structure of that space and occasionally bumping against the ever present walls that contain it, and further burdened by a need to justify the Vita release by making the most of hardware features makes for some hard landings here.

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July 3, 2012

Review – PixelJunk 4am

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 7:03 pm

Review PixelJunk 4am
Though very nearly missing the boat on the latest release from Q-Games, I’ve finally stolen time with the title in recent days, which has proved a curious and intimidating affair.

Setting aside the presence of a very helpful tutorial for a moment, there’s a point at which the player begins their first performance, where music tracks begin to play and the trippy visualizer takes over the television screen, and the terrifying realization that one must find a way to create can feel a bit paralyzing and confusing.

Not unlike a frightened animal, I began flailing my limbs, which armed with a PlayStation Move controller exposed the interactive potential to manipulate the audio. Initially, the experience is similar to prehistoric man striking at objects with a leftover dinner bone to find a marvelous world of sounds all around. As a modern man, armed with said Move controller, I was no less perplexed and fascinated by the possibilities – the great discovery of the potential to create coupled with the terrible burden of making some sense of the opportunity, emerging from the cave with fresh experience for the trouble.

While I’m fashionably late to the party, PixelJunk 4am has picked up a bit of a reputation for being a terribly difficult game to review – fair enough given that there is no scoring system or end goal in the traditional sense. But the actual playing of 4am isn’t nearly so hard to nail down, so maybe that’s a good place to start.

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Hands On with Project P-100

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , — Jamie Love @ 8:36 am

Project P 100
There’s a bit of a snipe hunt for the game that puts the Wii U in perspective and makes ownership mandatory, or at least that’s the vibe I get whenever gamers talk with me about Nintendo’s new hardware. Since the publisher recently held an event in Toronto to offer local press the opportunity to sample their wares from this year’s E3, I had the chance to revisit titles Nintendo is currently showing, still suspecting some surprise announcements before the launch later this year.

I can’t claim to have found a system seller in the mix, but a lengthy session with Platinum Games’ working title, Project P-100, did go a long way toward convincing me that the incentive for early Wii U adoption is materializing.

The game was stationed next to Pikmin 3, which made it easy to compare the surface play style as I took command of a squad of brightly colored super heroes from an angled overhead view. As with Pikmin, players lead their team into combat, commanding them to attack the various enemies encountered throughout the city. However, Project P-100 works to bring legitimate evolution to the familiar via the Wii U gamepad.

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July 1, 2012

Review – Adventure Time – Legends of Ooo: Big Hollow Princess

Filed under: Reviews — Tags: , , , , , , — TJ "Kyatt" Cordes @ 11:02 pm

Review Adventure Time Legends of Ooo Big Hollow Princess
Adventure Time is a series that is simply begging to have a videogame based on it. While we’re all hoping that the upcoming Adventure Time game for the DS and 3DS is going to be the hyperactive maelstrom of colourful action that allows you to use your shape shifting dog as a veritable arsenal of weapons and gadgets, in the meantime, we have… an iOS point and click adventure game based on Finn, Jake, and the other residents of Ooo.

Adventure Time – Legends of Ooo: Big Hollow Princess has Finn and Jake putting away their golden swords and magic powers respectively, in order to run around the Land of Ooo, constructing the titular Big Hollow Princess, a Trojan Horse of sorts used to sneak into the Ice King’s fortress in order to save some real princesses.

While I’m not entirely excited about the game’s choice of genre, the plot still manages to capture the spirit of the show, as well as its appearance; Finn and Jake’s noodle limbs may be flailing around running on a series of simple item retrieval quests, but they’re still flailing around, and as I’ve stated before, an hilarious walking animation can redeem almost any adventure game.

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June 28, 2012

Sweet’N Low – Down on the Farm

Filed under: Editorial Rants — Tags: , , , , , , — Jamie Love @ 12:44 am

The Walking Dead chapter 2
I’m not entirely happy with the choices that I made whilst stumbling through the second chapter of Telltale Game’s The Walking Dead series.

An awkward feeling lingered after I put down the controller, thinking back on being directly confronted about something I’d decided to say about another member of the group, moments where I could have reacted more quickly to help, and making a hasty decision that caused Clementine to witness a violent act by my own hands. But this isn’t the typical groundhog day situation where I feel obliged to go back and live a more ideal day, because there are no ideal choices to be made here, only the constant pull between survival and my own humanity – the core of the source material that Telltale does such an exemplary job of capturing, so that all one can do is take a deep reflective breath after the experience draws to a close.

I’ve spent countless hours living the virtual lives of others and making decisions for them. And while that process has strived to become less black and white in the gaming medium, The Walking Dead hits a nerve of discomfort for me that seems to speak to how it is raising the bar, not just because there are no right or wrong decisions here, but because these are decisions I’d simply rather not have to make – I suppose this is another instance of being confronted with the downside of that being an adult business.

I still catch myself trying to outthink the process, searching for some ideal solution for each point of conflict, but the chaotic nature of the zombie apocalypse works well here to force more heated reactions that I can’t entirely explain my rationale for, which seems a bit more honest in capturing what really sucks about making hard decisions – living with them afterwards.

Elsewhere, Telltale continues to surprise me with a level of more direct interaction that convinces the idea that The Walking Dead is a game and not a visual novel. Action sequences continually arise, using quicktime prompts and some hectic windows of reaction time that certainly played a part in influencing several of those uncomfortable decisions. The greater stress remains the fight to maintain the group rather than fending off the zombie horde, convincing me that Telltale’s shtick was the best choice in trying to capture the franchise for the gaming set.

As with the source material, I only wish the constant tension didn’t remind me how impossible it is to keep everyone happy, and maybe how spending too much time with anyone inevitable discovers some bumps in the relationship.

The most interesting bit about making decisions here remains the way the reactions of others to one decision influences how I approach each new situation. I can’t recall ever making a decision within a videogame based on feeling bad about how the last one might have made me look. I suppose that has me slightly dreading where my decisions might lead me in the next chapter, but I can’t deny that I’m several shades eager to find out.

June 23, 2012

Extra Credit – Cutting to the Heart of Lollipop Chainsaw

Pop Lollipop (by Shaun Hatton)
I tend to love and gravitate toward games that are divisive amongst the gaming community rather than those that garner more universal critical acclaim, and the most recent example of this is Suda51’s latest masterpiece, Lollipop Chainsaw, earning plenty of my love while also cutting some sharply divided opinions from the community.

But any art that sparks such differing viewpoints will forever be more interesting than art that everyone can agree upon, and thus has the potential to live longer through discussion and debate. When it comes to art that exists in part as a reflection of a variety of past works, enjoyment can come not only from the piece itself, but also from appreciating its references and inspirations.

Grasshopper Manufacture, Kadokawa Games, and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment have pooled their creative efforts to bring the world one of the most thoroughly enjoyable pieces of entertainment I’ve experienced this year and, if talking exclusively about games, even this console generation. But appreciation of a game in a vacuum is one thing – appreciation of a game in context of existing pop culture is something completely different, and quite frankly, is where this game shines.

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