Games of 2011: Puzzle Agent 2

Notice the headless agent on the left

(This is a cross-post of my review on Pixeldom)

     The original Puzzle Agent was a pleasant surprise. It used a fun art style and "Professor Layton” gameplay to tell a hilarious story about the insane town of Scoggins, MN. The sequel changes very little but, instead focuses on carrying the plot to it's epic and absurd conclusion.

     The game is simple. It's a traditional point and click adventure game that has you visiting different locations and speaking to people in order to solve a mystery. Frequently throughout the game you will be tasked with solving a wide assortment of brain teaser puzzles in order to move the story forward.

     The only complaint I can think of is how the game hits a running start and fails to fill in the blanks for any new players who may have missed out on the first game. Luckily, if you purchase Puzzle Agent 2 on Steam right now you will receive a free copy of the original game for free. It's also only around 2 and a half hours long.

Super Mario With Realistic Sound Effects

Back Log - Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

(I'm making it a habit to post something about each game in my Back Log after I complete it)

Compared to Red Dead Redemption, these horses look like shit.

Assassin's Creed 2 was my favorite game of 2009. And even though I wasn't very interested in the multi-player addition, the idea of another AC game a year later was very exciting to me. After a bit of a slow start I found myself getting sucked back in to renaissance Italy.

Brotherhood is built on the same foundation of the last game. Instead of jumping around different cities across Italy, the entire game takes place in Rome. By limiting the game to this one location, the dev team was able to expand all the property management and economics that was only available in the Villa in AC2 to the entirety of Rome. This way the majority of my time was spent renovating store fronts and expanding my influence across the city. By the mid point in the game I was so wealthy that price was never an issue when shopping for gear and paintings to fill the show rooms in my head quarters.

The combat was simplified and sped up to allow more intricate execution animations and quick combo chains. So, instead of patiently waiting for a chance to counter each enemy, I was executing entire groups within seconds of combat beginning. From a challange perspective it appears the game has gotten easier. But never before has Ezio looked like such a badass.

The major addition is that of the assassin's guild. throughout the game I stumbled across Borgia guards harassing a citizen. After I was able to eliminate the guards I had the option of recuiting the humble civilian to joining my guild off assassin's. Once my guild had members i could access a system of menues through any birdhouses around and give my assassins missions accross all of Europe. Once sent out on assignment, the guild member was not available for an alloted time and when they sucessfully returned they were rewarded with XP and I recieved some cash. All of my assassins would be able to unlock weapons and gear options as they leveled up.

When my assassin's werent out killing foreign nationals or liberating opressed villages i had access to them at any time. whenever i was in view of enemies i just had to press a button and they would appear from roof tops, door ways, or ride up on horses and take out the target only to dissapear into the shadows moments later. this became a huge part of my strategy for the bigger missions like destroying Borgia towers.

The Borgia towers are spread out all across Rome. they are full of enemy soldiers that would attack me as soon as I entered the area. I had to enter the area and eliminate the head guard before i was able to scale the tower and set it on fire. It wasn't until this was done that I would be able to claim the businesses in the surrounding area to build up my cash flow. I started to develop a routine of recruiting assassins, leveling them up, taking out a Borgia tower, and then buying all the store fronts until i had to do a story mission to open up more towers. This process never really got old.

I can't really go into too much detail about the story mostly because I didn't care. The Ezio story thread reached the conclusion that I wanted at the end of 2. Fortunately, Desmond's present day-ish story goes through some very exciting twists and turns. And I am now even more excited for what's to come in the next installments.

Demo'd - Dragon Age 2

I invested an unhealthy number of hours into Dragon Age: Origins. My anticipation for Dragon Age 2 is off the charts so I jumped at the opportunity to download the demo. Though short, the demo did a good job at presenting almost all the changes to the formula while also showing off some potential problem areas.

I played the PC version of the demo which I downloaded off Steam. From the very beginning of the demo there is a noticeable hitch that occurs every time the camera angle changes during a cinematic. That could either be due to my PC not being up to snuff (Unlikely, but plausible) or a bug that wasn't yet fixed before the demo was made. Either way, I'm not too worried about it.

While watching the opening cinematic I was able to form a first hand opinion of the most obvious change from the first game, the new art style. My opinion...I like it. The story in DA 2 is presented in flashbacks from the perspective of a third party character so it makes sense that everything is a little exaggerated. It's a smart visual reminder that story tellers have a tendency to embellish in order to make a story more interesting. While at first glance the new art direction might seem jarring, once you get into the core game there is enough familiarity there to make Origins players feel right at home.

After the intro you choose a character. You have to play as a human, which is fine with me since I tend to pick a human character in most fantasy games. So, the only real options are gender and class. The classes are the same as in Origins (Warrior, Rogue, or Mage). I of course, chose male warrior (some thing I also tend to choose in these types of games).  From there you are sent to a customization page and given absolutely no customization options to choose. This was both disappointing in that I didn't get to see what options were available, but also surprising since I was not aware that you could change your physical appearance at all.

Once the game proper begins I was thrown straight into the combat which has been noticeably sped up. The animations were so quick that I actually had trouble clicking on enemy's to attack them. Instead Hawke (the main characters name) would go stand in the spot that the enemy was when I tried to click on him. when I was able to click on an enemy Hawke would quickly charge up to them, closing the gap. The action is really fast compared to Origins. And the violence has become cartoonish and over the top. Enemy's torso would explode into geysers of blood after a quick spin of the blade. This got toned down after the narrator was called out for exaggerating a bit too much.  But for the duration of the demo I found the hyper-kinetic action and overall speed of combat to be kind of disorienting.

The controls are essentially the same. WASD controls movement or you can left click to move diablo style. Holding down the right mouse button controls the camera. You can zoom in and out with the  scroll wheel. And the space bar pauses combat. All the same information is displayed across the bottom of the screen only in a new angular visual style. you still click on enemies to initiate combat and click on powers at the bottom (or use hot keys). I was locked out of the inventory for the demo so I didn't get to see what changes they made there. Leveling up seems fundamentally the same. The UI is more stylish and the abilities are separated into multiple branching trees rather than they straight forward progression from the last game.

Although the lack of different playable races doesn't effect me, I can see that being a big factor in others picking up the game. But from my experience with the demo, Dragon Age 2 looks different and moves much faster but plays the same as Origins. So I know I will be picking it up when it releases on March 8 (The day before my birthday... just sayin') I think I'll download the 360 demo just to see if the combat changes translate to a better console experience which is what I think was Bioware's plan.

Blind 23 Year old Completes Abes Exoddus based completely on sound

Oddworld.com has a full interview with Terry Garrett about how he completed Oddworld: Abes Exoddus by listening to every sound in the game. Check out the video below where Garrett explains how he achieved this impressive feat.

This is Just Wonderful

Back Log - Red Dead Redemption

(I'm making it a habit to post something about each game in my Back Log after I complete it)

Gorgeous 

I decided to start my "Quest to Conquer my Back" Log with a bang. Red Dead Redemption was the last game I pre-ordered and I remember rushing home from work to play it. I got about an hour in and passed out, but what an hour!

I spent time over the next week or so picking up the occasional story mission, but mostly just hunting and picking flowers. The world Rockstar created was the most beautiful piece of digital art I had ever laid eyes on. But, as was the case with me I got distracted by other shiny, new games that came out after that (plus my roommate kind of hogged it for a while) and it eventually collected dust on my shelf. I never even made it to Mexico.

So when The new year rolled around and I made my resolution to "Conquer my Back Log" (That seems more and more dirty every time I type it), RDR was the first game that came to mind. I don't know how I managed to stay away from this game for that long. As soon as I fired it up I was immediately reminded of how amazing this game looks. The combination of great texture work and lighting is really hard to top. And I don't think I'll ever be able to look at another video game horse with out thinking it looks like garbage.

All that gushing aside, about halfway through I was reminded of the fact that I kind of don't like open world games that much. I rushed through all the Grand Theft Auto games just so I could see the end of the main story line and then I shelved that shit quick. I've always gotten frustrated when the rest of the world interferes with me while I try to complete mission objectives. This frustration goes as far back as Tony Hawk's Underground. Red Dead Redemption is no different.

For the record, I really liked this game. I do not regret playing at all. But, I'm not gonna lie, I cursed a LOT throughout my time with it. Every time a cougar killed my horse and then me while I was chasing down a bounty, when the cover system would flip out and get me killed, or during the entirety of the train escort mission, expletives went flying. It got to the point that went into GTA mode and just rushed through the story missions so I could see the ending that has been talked up so much across the internet (Which is awesome BTW).

It's no surprise that I got frustrated with a Rockstar game. I should have known better than to expect otherwise. But that being said, had I finished it sooner this would have easily been on my top 10 list (which is also no surprise as it was featured in over 25,000 peoples list on Giant Bomb alone). One thing is for sure. I think I'm gonna wait before I tackle another open world game.