Category Archives: The Android’s Deranged Killing Spree (Action)

The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Skein Of Flesh (Stealth)

Dishonored. Also a TV show.

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Apologies for our lax updating lately, Pike and I have been completely engrossed in WoW’s Mists of Pandaria expansion. Contrary to our prior cynicism about WoW and Blizzard’s direction, and our nostalgic view of the Burning Crusade era, MoP is quite honestly the best WoW has ever been. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about, that’s just an excuse for being lazy.

In between long stints in Pandaria I’ve been putting some hours into some other games; XCOM I’ve already talked about, and I’m going to write something about The Walking Dead soon having just got it last week on the advice of my bro Barry Manilow, but today’s topic is Dishonored.

In Dishonored you are Corvo Attano, the strikingly handsome personal bodyguard of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin and her daughter Emily. Within a few minutes of starting the former is killed in front of you and the latter kidnapped, with Corvo arrested and thrown into prison for the foul deeds. So begins your career as a nightmarish magic assassin. Now, do you guys remember BioShock? Remember how it was hyped as a game with a huge variety of possible playstyles, but which really turned out to have only a tiny handful of situational options and tended to be very samey? Well, Dishonored is everything BioShock was promising to be; you truly do have a good array of tools and abilities to play with, and you can play in some dramatically different styles. Stealthy thieving pacifist, stealthy and precise assassin of your target and nobody else, stealthy murdered of everything, noisy murderer of everything, using or not using any of a half-dozen neat abilities. It’s a really neat mix.

What really sells it though is the world and level design. Both on the aesthetic level and in the literal “how things fit together” manner, Dishonored is a tour de force. The world works perfectly with your skills to let you explore in a way that never feels forced. When you use your skills in some creative manner you feel like you’re clever for figuring it out; routes are generally shown and/or hidden sensibly and you feel sneaky when you find them. The city of Dunwall, where the game takes place, recently underwent a whale-oil fueled Industrial Revolution, and is filled with all manner of devices relating thereto. It’s also beset by the “Rat Plague”, which is carried by the creatures and causes massive hemorrhaging. Upwards of half the city is dead of it, and when you see mounds of corpses disposed out, and entire districts abandoned, it’s a truly grim vision. All but the very wealthiest experience the troubles arising from this – you’ll see peeling paint and cracks in the walls of all but the most important buildings and those belonging to the very richest. It’s one of the most immersive and unsettling dystopian settings I’ve ever explored.


It’s also Asshole Simulator of the Year, for my money.

—

Now, to step away from Videogames for a moment, even thought Pike won’t give my head peace once she sees it. There is a TV show I would briefly like to mention. It is a show about superpowered people. But it is a show which is not about the powers, it is about the people. The powers are things to be dealt with, with realistic constraints that never seem like forced efforts to hamstring people but rather clever and logical downsides. The characters are amazing and you want to spend time with them, the show is witty and hilarious a lot of the time, but also dark as fuck at times. The show is called Alphas, and I would really quite like to see them make a Season 3 so if you like great TV go watch it and talk about it!

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Shower of Giblets (Hack'n'Slash)

Torchlight is a Great Little Game

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Happy weekend all!  Pike here.

I haven’t been posting much on this blog lately, and I do apologize for that.  The truth is that I’ve been having an obscene about of fun with the lastest WoW expac so I’m playing a lot of that.

Today, however, I thought I would give something new a shot and I booted up Torchlight, which I have somehow never played before.  And I promptly wound up playing it for the next few hours, because it was just that addictive.  For the few of you who haven’t played it, it’s an action-RPG along the veins of Diablo, and it is just wonderful.  You can pick from three classes and I promptly picked alchemist because the guy is wearing goggles, and I think I made the right choice.  I love hurling poison bolts at my enemies from afar, watching them all expire, and then going around and collecting all sorts of great loot.  It’s simple, straightforward, and a whole lot of fun.

Also, one of the questgivers is a steampunky robot.  I approve.

The sequel recently came out and I look forward to playing that as well, but for now I’m having a blast with the original!  Anyone who hasn’t looked into this series should really do so.  It is well worth the price!

The official Torchlight website is here: http://www.torchlightgame.com/

And now, here is a cat picture, because it’s always time for cat pictures:

Cats are also the best choice of pet in Torchlight.
The Android Collects Random Objects (Adventure), The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Shower of Giblets (Hack'n'Slash)

Torchlight 2

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In between huge bouts of WoW and considerable addiction to FTL, I’ve also been playing the long-awaited release of last week, Torchlight 2. The original Torchlight was a widely lauded game, and rightly so, of the Action RPG genre – which is to say a Diablo clone. Indeed, Runic Games was formed partly by exiles from the Diablo 2 team and this shows in a variety of ways. I was rather late to the TL bandwagon but I had a blast with it recently, and the polish and love of Diablo was present there too. It wasn’t a perfect game, but I would argue it had shortcomings rather than flaws, and that these shortcomings were deliberate choices made in order to ensure a polished final product. Entirely reasonable and indeed much more commendable than overstretching limited resources and doing nothing properly.

Torchlight 2 however has had the budget, built on the success of the first game, to try to overcome those shortcomings and so far I have to say it looks as though it has succeeded fairly comprehensively. It’s a far larger game, with a much greater variety of locations. It has one more class, and all four classes seem somewhat more malleable in playstyle than the previous iteration’s. I will admit that I would have liked to see more classes still, and I’ve heard reports that the game isn’t properly balanced for every playstyle (e.g. berserkers can have an especially hard time, I hear, when enemy damage starts to ramp up). There are more items, more characters, more locations, just plain old fashioned more of everything, but in my own play experience the game’s polish hasn’t suffered for for the increase in quantity.

Sweetie Belle explains the appeal of ARPGs with commendable succinctness.

Bearing in mind I’m not tremendously far through the game yet, everything so far seems to sparkle with both polish and love and it’s just a really good, satisfying game that lets you carve through hordes of monsters in order to get experience points and loot. It’s not a complicated concept, but it is what we humans like, so it’s not like there’s much room for complaint about it.

The game also has multiplayer, the absence of which was by far the original’s greatest and most bizarre shortfall, but I’ve not yet had the chance to mess around with it. Pike and I are planning on some playing soon though so if anything about it is striking I shall report to you all.

The Android's Aural Receptors (Music/Sound), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

Goodnight, sweet prince.

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As you may have recently heard, SCE Liverpool – formerly known as Psygnosis – is being shut down. To anyone who grew up playing the games I did this is a moment for reflection and, yes, perhaps a little bit of mourning.

Psygnosis was founded in the early 80s in Liverpool, UK. It didn’t take long for them to get noticed because of games like Shadow of the Beast, but they really started to shine in 1991 when they displayed some seriously canny foresight by publishing DMA Designs’ Lemmings. DMA Designs, you may or may not know, went on to change their name to Rockstar. In 1993 Psygnosis was acquired by Sony, though they would keep the name for eight further years, and it was here under Sony that they made their real gems.

Wipeout was the flagship title for the Playstation One, and the then-impossible level of graphics and the cool use of contemporary music to race holy shit flying race cars certainly sold the console to me, and to a few of my friends. It was like nothing we’d ever seen before. It was also hard as hell, which was pretty great. They complimented this by retaining their publishing acumen to help games like Destruction Derby, and made the little-known but extremely silly and enjoyable giant mech game, Krazy Ivan. Later was Wipeout 2097, the best iteration of the franchise and an extraordinary game still worth playing today.

When I was a kid their owl logo gave me nightmares.

But it would be another year or two, in 1997, that Psygnosis put out the two games for which I will always remember them, despite the brilliance of Wipeout. Colony Wars and later in the year G-Police were both superb, amazing sci-fi games, the first set in space (and with a wonderful, narrated in-game encyclopedia) and the second on Jupiter’s moon Callisto. Both featured all the things you could wish for in such games; dystopia, violence, futuristic weapons and vehicles, and “The Tsar and his battle fleet saw everything… knew everything… punished everything“. That same year also saw the release of their weird, experimental game Sentient, which was one of the most unique games I’ve ever played.

When the 90s closed the spark seemed to have gone out of the company, and despite the great sequels to G-Police and Colony Wars they fell back on Wipeout games and on their Formula 1 line, all very solid but somehow never as impressive as taking chances on Lemmings or the Discworld point’n’click games. Still, they will be missed, and not soon forgotten, by those of us from that era who grew up with all these amazing games thanks to Psygnosis.

The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Sleeping Dogs

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Here’s a game I’ve been playing a lot over the last week or so. Sleeping Dogs began as True Crime: Hong Kong, which wasn’t tremendously promising because True Crime was never a very good series in my eyes. But after much kerfuffle, being dropped by Activision and then picked up by Squenix, and being renamed to Sleeping Dogs, it managed to come out. Anyone familiar with vaporware and the like will know that commendation must be given just for getting a working game out the door after that; what’s all the more surprising is that this game is damned good.

You are Wei Shen, a cop on loan from the San Francisco PD to the HKPD in order to go undercover and infiltrate the Sun On Yee, a large and powerful branch of the Triads. You do this through basically being a far greater threat to stability, the innocent, or the police than the Sun On Yee ever could. It’s great! The game features fairly typical free-roam gameplay on the surface, but it has a lot of polish and features inspired by other games. For example melee combat, which is by far the mainstay of combat in this game, with guns and shootouts being somewhat rarer than is common in the genre is similar to the Batman: Arkham games, whilst there’s a lightweight implementation of freerunning that, when done properly by you, makes getting around on foot through Hong Kong’s dense urban maze a good dear smoother and quicker. If this sounds derivative or shallow then I’m here to reassure you, because the game may take inspiration from other places and it may not implement any one thing with the same depth as its inspirations, but everything works together so well that you’re going to be enjoying yourself pretty much no matter what part of the game you’re partaking of.

The story – so far at least – is surprisingly well-realized, with some great characters who you grow rather attached to before terrible things happen to them. The voice acting is especially brilliant, with a mix of Cantonese and English that is quite unique and fascinating. On that note I’ve never been to HK but this game really sells the atmosphere like few others do; the look, the sound, the music, everything is pitch-perfect and makes you feel like you’re there, even if you’ve never been. (And I’ve seen people who have been there say it’s a pretty striking representation.) The only real downside of the game is that the city is fairly small, but the extent to which it feels small varies considerably. They used a lot of tricks to make it seem bigger than it really is, and for me it works great because I’ve never yet felt at all confined. And what is there, generally speaking, is absurdly detailed.

Pic entirely unrelated, we just find it hilarious here at The Android’s Closet.

The music deserves a special mention. There are some absolutely great tunes in this game, and it definitely features the best (and best-named) classical station I have ever heard in any such game, Boosey & Hawkes. Tell me that’s not the best possible name for a radio station. And rolling through a nightclub, screaming people everywhere, having a shootout while Hudson Mohawke’s FUSE is blaring out? Baller as all hell.

So if you’re looking for an open-world crime game you could do a lot worse than Sleeping Dogs. It’s not just a game that escaped from development issues to be released; it’s a game that did that, then both shed a rather ropy pair of predecessors, and then came out to be seriously impressive. I challenge anyone who plays it to refrain from starting to use Chinese words.

And in closing, Activision can eat all of the shit.

The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Distracted Boss (Casual/Flash), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Thinking Cap (Puzzle)

Orcs Must Die! 2

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I’n honestly not sure whether having that “2” after the “!” is sending my sperging into overdrive or is tickling my fancy, but there you have it. Good game though.

Well that was a short review.

Okay okay seriously though! I picked up the original OMD! in the Steam Sale recently and it was something I really fell in love with very rapidly. It’s not a complex game in principle; in fact the title pretty much sums it up. It’s a quasi tower-defense game, setting up traps and guardians like archers to prevent Orcs and their assorted allies from reaching the ‘Rift’. The twist is that you aren’t a detached overseer, you’re a character down in the trenches and you can run around fighting the Orcs yourself as well as having all the traps doing their thing.

It is, in short, the bastard love-child of Kagero: Deception II and Tower Defense. It’s from a small studio, and in a couple of ways this shows in the sequel, but overall they have made some very solid improvements to the game. There is an array of new traps and tools to use, the new Sorceress character has a rather different playstyle from the War Mage due to her charm ability, and there are of course new traps and levels. Perhaps my biggest negative mark against this game is the small number of the latter, but it is redeemed somewhat by both the Endless and Classic modes, the former containing some levels that aren’t in the story and the latter being levels from the first game that can be played now with all your new toys (though only if you own the first one).

It’s a tr… oh you know where this is going, finish the line yourself!

It certainly doesn’t revolutionize the series, but it is a very solid sequel that I’ve already played even more than the original. Endless mode is especially compelling, and the new mix of traps, environmental hazards, and enemies means that although the game isn’t really difficult most of the time, getting 5-skull ratings on some levels requires some calculation and thinking on your part. Another change is that doing levels again nets you more skulls, so you’re not limited like you were in the first game, but it will still take some time to get everything up to where you want it, upgrades wise! (And the upgrades are far more involved this time around, replacing the Weavers entirely). A worthy sequel to a great game? That’s really all we can ask for!

Buy Orcs Must Die! 2 if you enjoy quick, fun blasts of cartoonish violence and one of the better protagonists of the medium in the form of the War Mage.

Oh and there’s co-op too if you’re one of those freakishly disposed people who has friends.

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Mass Effect 3

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Well, it’s time to eat my words. I’ve been playing this since getting it on Friday (Thanks to the bizarre insistence on releasing games on a Friday here in Blighty) and I have to say, my impressions from the demo were pretty incredibly off the mark. This game is amazing so far. Weirdly the intro section is still very lightweight and relatively poor, and as you may know there is a HUGE backlash at BioWare regarding the very end of the game (I imagine I’ll write a post about that specifically at another time), but everything between that is solid gold.

Also, and very surprisingly, multiplayer has turned out to be very enjoyable as well. When I first heard they were including it I was surprised and dismayed – it seemed like a game where a tacked-on multiplayer was inevitable, and would take resources from other aspects, but it works very well and is very much a great way to spend some time with a couple of friends. The form it takes is that of a co-operative mode of up to four players, lasting for eleven rounds (Of which the final is to escape the area). On rounds three, six, and ten, you’ll have special objectives to meet; kill particular enemies, or defend a specific room, for example. Success gives great rewards whilst failure ends the mission there and then.

It doesn’t quite reach Gears of War levels of desperation and panic, but it is still excellent, as I said, and fully worth investigating if you’re not convinced of its merits so far.

Going back to single player now, the game isn’t without its flaws. Most specifically to me is that some of the choices from ME1 are handwaved away (One specific choice which should have significantly changed things here made me a bit annoyed when I saw it was ignored). Nonetheless things from ME2 are much more closely tied into this game and I’ve already had a notably different experience from friends at some parts. The spread of enemies is very narrow, but the ones which are there are extremely well-designed, detailed, and superb to fight.

Why does she need a gun? She can just stare a Reaper into going home.

The voice acting and writing is, for the most part, very good as well. My character is FULL RENEGADE and has been since ME1, but everything I’ve seen has been done well as a renegade – my choices are very rarely, if ever, needlessly unpleasant or cruel. They are, rather, cynical and stern, and the series has definitely come a long way in making these choices seem immediately serious and consequential. The ending, of course, destroys all this entirely, but that’s an aside. My character has done some truly atrocious things in this game and yet it makes sense and has had positive effects.

In short, my mass is once again erect.

The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action)

Assassin’s Creed 3

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I’m not gonna lie: I never got around to playing much of the Assassin’s Creed series. While the premise looked interesting, it was never quite interesting enough for me to give it a shot.

Then Assassin’s Creed 3 was announced.

For starters, it takes place in colonial America. For those who aren’t aware, I am a major sucker for anything that takes place during this time period.

Look at this. LOOK AT THIS. I want to run around here forever.

Then, they started announcing several tantalizing details. Here is some select information from Game Informer:

  • “You will see the great fire of New York. You will visit Valley Forge as a location that is currently occupied by Washington’s forces. You will visit these places in the moment that they were important, and hopefully, experience the reason why we know where they are today. That’s the goal.”
  • Not all the Colonists will be cast as good people, and not all the British will be cast as evil oppressors. They’re trying to focus on how both the Assassins and Templars viewpoints exist in a gray morality as the Templars really believe they’re saving the world.
  • The wilderness traversal plays a big part in the gameplay in the Frontier, allowing you to use trees, cliffs, ledges, and more to set up kills and combat.
  • The world changes as time passes, so a field where a battle happened in one year may just be a series of empty encampments a few months later.
  • The entire world will change with seasons, so the cities and the wilderness will all exist in both Summer and Winter settings.
  • In the winter, soldiers will move slowly and stumble about in the snow, and lakes and rivers will freeze over allowing you to go new places. This gives Connor an extra advantage since he can still use the trees and wilderness pretty effectively during this time of year.

This is just a small sample of the stuff they’re talking about.  Now I don’t know about you guys, but when you take all of the above stuff and toss it in a blender with some delicious Redcoat uniforms, you get Pike throwing her wallet at the screen and wondering why nothing is happening.

Who else is excited?

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action)

Disappointment and Regret and Addendums

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Being a bit slow (due to playing a stupid amount of Paradox games) to get around to it, I just played the Mass Effect 3 demo. You may recall I recently said I was determined to see this through even if I wasn’t tremendously hopeful about it, but I’ve just cancelled my preorder on the ‘strength’ of the demo. I’ll get around to it sometime, I’m sure, but I’ve got no desire to pay a bunch of cashmoney for something so strikingly mediocre and unenjoyable.

Oh don’t get me wrong, seeing old faces like Wrex, Garrus, and Anderson was great. The Reapers attacking Earth looked pretty cool too (Though there was no sense of impact or weight to it; more on that in a moment), and I approved of… well actually no, those two things was about all I approved of. Everything else was standard and run-of-the-mill at best.

The controls are floaty and don’t respond as I wanted them to. Maybe I’m just getting too old for this, but I distinctly don’t remember having similar problems with 1 and 2. Here though I kept trying to do one thing, and another thing happened, such as diving out of cover into the open. Cue death of Shep. The graphics seemed weirdly low-res, maybe it was just to save space for the demo download but it wasn’t impressive. The weapons and combat is some of the most lacking in impact and weight since I played BioShock, a game that managed to make crushing skulls with a huge wrench feel uninspiring. And that was really the heart of it; everything else I could tolerate or forgive, but the combat was just so completely meritless, so downright unenjoyable, left me feeling so detached and removed from the action, that I just don’t think I can bring myself to play this anytime soon.

It does not, in short, make my mass erect.

Edit:

Last night I went and gave it another try, and I’m going to have to admit my judgment was a little premature. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still seeing quite a few problems, but the gameplay itself was definitely quite a bit more enjoyable now that I’ve played around with a couple of classes. In previous ME games I could grab any class and have a great time; that seems not to be the case here.

The Android Collects Random Objects (Adventure), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Boss Fight of the Year

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Having finally bothered to set aside some time to play through Batman: Arkham City, I have to say it’s a fantastic game whose story (Or rather the last fifth of the story) is a little bit of a letdown, but that doesn’t bother me because holy. Christ. This game has one of the best boss fights I can ever remember enjoying.

Also dat voice HNNNNNGGGGGG

The fight with Mister Freeze is superb. It is brilliant. It is genius. I’m almost tempted to leave it there because saying almost anything could begin to spoil things, but that would make for a rather short blog post so I’ll take that risk. The core of the fight is that Freeze’s suit is a giant-ass super-awesome thing that even Batman can’t damage directly, because if he tries Freeze will just shoot him with his ice gun or something. (I want an ice gun.)

So you need to figure out how to attack him. Only here’s the thing; everything you do he will adapt to. You cannot use a single tactic more than once, because he will sabotage anything you could use to repeat it. This is not a gimmick or anything, it is brilliantly executed and it genuinely felt like I was in a battle of wits to try and figure out new tactics to try against him, whilst he was hunting me down and I was trying to avoid him. It took me several goes to win the fight, and I did not mind one bit. In fact I loved every second of it. It is, for my money, a quintessential example of how to stage a boss fight. He is entirely unique in the game, requires a wide array of Batman’s abilities, and engages the player completely. Every other developer should take notes on how this whole thing is conceived and formulated.

So I’d like to throw the question out there to y’all about this topic. What are some bosses you’ve found particularly enjoyable and engaging in your gaming?