Shadow Covenant

“From Dust” is a different game… it was created by Eric Chahi, the mind behind “Another World”, one of my favorite games of all times (and one of the most influencial aswell).

At the high-level, it’s a god-sim in which you control a worm-thing that enables you to modify the environment around you. In the beginning, you can pickup sand and drop in other places, but as the levels progress, you get access to more elements (sand, water, lava) and the interactions of those elements. You have to use those powers to lead a primitive nomadic tribe to the home of the Ancestors.

The thing that’s more evident in this game is the physics…. It’s amazing:

Everything reacts physically as you’d expect, but it’s just gorgeous seeing the water flowing down and then changing the course of the river with some lava or sand. The effect of a tsunami hitting your village when it is protected by a “water shield” is epic, to say the least!

And it all looks great… one thing that really impressed me (although it might be simple in implementation) was the skin rendering of the characters… the parameters/textures of the skin shaders were just right, it seemed to react to light exactly as I’d expect.

The game is not without his faults… the AI is sometimes appalling, specially the path-finding, but those small glitches can be forgiven (although they become frustrating sometimes).

The game has a slow pace, almost zen-like and (for me) the correct length (although many people on the Internet have complained of the short length of the game – for me, if the game was longer, I’d be bored). And after you finish the campaign you also have some challenges, and some of them are just plain diabolical (in a good sense!).

Overall, this game reminds me of Peter Molineaux’s “Populus”, but with modern technology and reduced to the point of almost minimalism, and I believe is a must in any god-sim fan’s collection. Just make sure you choose the console version (PS3 or XBox360) over the PC one, if you have a choice… it seems the PC version is weaker than the rest! 9/10.

Just finished playing “Dark Void”… When it came out, it wasn’t something I really needed to play, but I found it on the bargain bin and decided to give it a try…

Rant number one: DON’T PUT SPOILERS ABOUT THE STORY IN THE FLAVOUR TEXT ON THE LOADINGS!It’s just stupid and kind of ruins the game for people that actually enjoy being “surprised” by the story.

Anyway, having finished the game, I can’t help the feeling that the game was rushed, which is too bad. Given more time, the game could have actually been very good, instead of just average.

From a game mechanics standpoint, the game is the usual fare of 3rd person adventure games, but with some nifty things. It has a “vertical combat” mechanic that is actually fun and interesting, in which your characters is dangling on ledges and such and has to fight enemies. The other one is the main selling point of the game: the rocket-pack parts.

Most of it feels solid, although the level design borders on boring sometimes. For example, the hangar part reminds of the obnoxious “Library” level on Halo 1, being too long and the same from start to finish, without anything interesting happening (besides killing hordes of enemies, of course).

But where this game fails the most in the story-telling… they’ve created an interesting premise, with a lore-basis that might have been original, and then ruin it with basic storytelling (with basic storytelling mistakes)…

In the game, you play as a hot-shot pilot that has to ferry his once-lover to some place, for some reason (yep, it’s that detailed) and instead get sucked into the Bermuda Triangle that leads the player to another world… Not to spoil the game for anyone, stuff happens there…

The basic plotline is paper thin, the cut-scenes are generic, converting what could be interesting characters into simplistic archetypes and hinting at a larger than life world outside, but never showing it, or letting it interfere with the game itself… Most of the game you spend your time going from place to place, doing things over a time span of supposed months, but nothing has actual bearing into your motivations… most of the time I didn’t know WHY I was doing things, although it was very clear WHAT I had to do.

And it’s a shame, really, because there are some visual details that are interesting (the Watcher’s “hair”, for example), but it gets lost into the usual “fight the minions of the real bad guys, which are actually robots because we don’t want to show blood”… and don’t get me started on the climatic finale, which the game has been gearing up since the start… it’s silly and inexplicable and introduces a plot hole the size of a small planet!

It feels like either the game was rushed, or without a solid direction from the narrative standpoint… the things it does badly (from generic characters with no charisma, to the use of the over-used Tesla as “science-guy”, the single black guy that speaks as if he’s just come from the middle of Africa, the pieces of “lore” that are dropped in the middle of the story, the list goes on forever) are basic ones that are covered in any narrative course!

And it’s too bad… the game disappoints because it has good concepts, we can see its potential and then it drops the ball almost continuously… 6/10

I’m a big fan of the first Deus Ex… it was one of the first games to feature “emergent behavior” as part of the design. You had the feeling that all the problems had different solutions, and you could tackle them in a variety of ways, much like pen-and-paper role playing games.

Then I watched “Deus Ex: Invisible War” turn a beloved game into a mockery of his former self, with huge amounts of bugs, silly AI, and a dumbing down of the overall concept (to appeal to more people, I guess).

So I was kind of divided about “Human Revolution”… on one hand, I hoped they would go with the legacy of the first one, on the other hand, I was fearful they would turn it into a cover based shooter like so many others…

Thankfully, they went with the better choice: Human Revolution follows in the footsteps of the first one, which is great news for everyone that loved it!

The game has plenty of faults (which I don’t remember the first having, but that might be the age-goggles speaking):

• Although this game is a prequel to the first Deus Ex, the game feels more modern that the first one, not just because of the graphics, but because of the general tech level of things… The augments seem more primitive than the first Deus Ex, but the overall environment seems more futuristic
• Loading times are huge (on the XBox, at least)… that might be mitigated by installing the game in the HD, but since I have one of those old XBoxes, I don’t have the HD for it and I’m not buying a new one anytime soon… This is very noticeable since you tend to reload a previous savegame to try to get through an area without being detected, which implies some trial-and-error…
• The voice of Adam Jensen is terrible… well, overall the voice acting is terrible… all characters seem to be stuck in just one emotion (whatever that one is) and it doesn’t match up to the graphics – for example, there was one woman crying and very disturbed by something, but her model was smiling! It didn’t seem the least bit distraught, and that kind of spoils the emotional bond… In the case of the main character, he seems to be pissed off at something, even when he’s trying to be empathic or nice to someone… It reminds me of someone that took lessons in the “Christian Bale School for Actors”… It was trying too much to be dark and gritty.
• The game world is too empty… You have great cities, loads of space for wandering, even a kind of sandbox groove to it, but nothing happens there… there’s just some side-quests (that are extremely linked to the game plot anyway)… I’d like to see more stuff happening; sometimes I’d wander around town and think to myself: “I wish there was some “clear the gang activity” quest here.”. I understand that the main character is probably too important for that (it would be kind of silly to have someone as important running errands), but if that’s a problem, maybe they should have built the game the other way around: start with an insignificant character that grows in importance.
• The main character was too dumb… There’s nothing worse than you having connected the dots for ages now and the main character still acts completely oblivious to the situation… Five or six hours into the game, you’d already have a good idea on who the bad guy was, but Adam would happily run errands for him anyway…
• Story was too convoluted… I know the idea is to build a good “conspiracy theory”, but it reaches a point where you can think of at least 10 different ways the “bad guys” could win without getting so complicated at it… Most of the game just seems like a prelude to the inevitable (and totally predictable) backstabbing…
• Worse of the worse: the boss fights were stupid… This is a game mainly aimed at stealth (at least for me), but the only way to defeat the bosses was by shooting… no smart thinking, no stealth, not intelligent use of the environment… Nope, plain old “shoot-the-bastard-until-he-dies”… This is particularly nasty if you (like me) haven’t invested in combat skills, preferring to spend your upgrades in hacking and stealth. This is a stupid design decision; it breaks the entire core of the game and just frustrates the player – it’s not a challenge if the game is actually cheating by design!

But… even with all these faults, it is a great game… It took me about 16-18 hours to finish (which is good value for money in this day and age of 8 hour games), without me ever thinking “Will this never end?!”… Good area design, with plenty of options and choices to go around, depending on how you like to play (could have some more stuff for the hacker-ish)

If I notice all those problems in the game is because I feel the game could have been much more, but what it is is enough… Hopefully this will not be the end of the saga, and I wish in the future someone does a kind of cross between Deus Ex and the sandboxing of GTA (that would be totally sweet!).

Special mention to the music of the game… although it’s a complete rip-off of Blade Runner’s OST, it’s very good at establishing the mood…

After playing this one, I just feel like making a cyberpunk game and listen to some Billy Idol’s “Cyberpunk” album, while reading some William Gibson…

Overall, it’s a 9/10 game, for those that like scores!

Everybody that knows me know that from time to time I get this urge of making a space opera game… The actual form of that space opera varies, from “Star Control 3 type”, to “Geometry Wars in real space”, to strategy combat, to more action-oriented, sometimes going on planets, other times in outer space only… All of them feature wandering about space, giving it a sandbox feel.

I usually spend some time day-dreaming about it, designing it in my head, etc… then some other more feasible project comes along and I forget it.

But one thing I always tend to get stuck in my head is a big problem: space is empty… Real space is boring,

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Today it’s “Talk like a pirate day”, and a friend of mine reminded me of an Easter Egg we added to the unreleased game “Blitz and Massive”…

The game, on every 19th September would activate the “Pirate Talk” mode, which would add some phrases to the dialogues, and change some other words to match pirate talk:

One of the many Easter eggs we’ve built into the game…

Shiver my timbers!