🚀 go-pugleaf

Wow, it really is Autumn, isn't it? When November started it certainly
didn't feel like it - we were still getting warm-n-sunny 65-degree
days  - but these last few weeks have been grey, cold and dark. And if
the weather wasn't enough to keep us all inside, there's also the
pre-Holiday influx of new games to keep us all busy. 

So once again, it's time for this newsgroups monthly tradition of
detailing our play-lists for the last thirty days. Let everyone here
know what games kept you occupied as we edged ever-closer to winter. 

Here's my list.

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Short and Sweet
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* Resident Evil 6 (new)
* ADR1FT (new)
* Gears of War 3 (XBox350) (replay)
* Doom 4 (new)
* 35mm (new)
* Cities Skylines (replay)

TL; DR 
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* Resident Evil 6 (new)
I am generally not a fan of the Resident Evil series; both the
gameplay and storylines usually leave me underwhelmed. But far be it
from me not to give credit where credit is due; Resident Evil 6 gives
you /a lot/ of content. Its first campaign is probably as long as the
whole of Resident Evil 5's campaign, and you get three more campaigns
in addition to that (in fairness, the next three storylines are
shorter than the first, but it still an impressive amount). I also
enjoyed the characterization of the various protagonists; you are
introduced to each of them in a preceding campaign where they come off
as one-dimensional, but when you actually follow their stories you
realize there is some depth to them. The four campaigns intertwine in
an interesting way, although each has its own unique set of levels
that only briefly intersect at certain points. Lacking in any
eye-catching set-pieces, the maps themselves are well-detailed
(although the texture work could use some improvement), with good
variety in design, albeit as off-the-wall unrealistic as I've come to
expect most Capcom (and indeed, Japanese) games. Resident Evil 6 also
boasts an impressive variety of weapons and monsters.

But while the above makes for an impressive list, the game fails in
its actual gameplay. Its various campaigns offer some variety - the
first is a pretty standard survival-horror in the vein of Dead Space
or RE5, the second is more focuses on the shooting, the third campaign
requires you to focus on your character's mobility more and the third
has strong stealth elements - they all suffer from one common flaw: a
huge over-reliance on quick-time events. You can't cross a room
without encountering at least one QTE. They aren't even particularly
good quick-time events that require skill; they are either incredibly
easy (and thus pointless) or of the sort you can only master by dying
first because the game doesn't give you any time to see what button
needs be pressed before killing you. The developers also delighted in
over-using the tired mechanic of having you run towards the camera
while something deadly chases you from behind, complete with shifting
camera angles (and controls) just to make things even less fun. None
of these segments are difficult, and none of them are fun. The rest of
the game is fairly standard shooting, albeit with monsters that tend
to be a bit too resilient and with annoying multi-stage "puzzle
bosses" (complete with the dull-as-dishwater glowing-orange
vulnerabilities mechanic that should have been put out to pasture in
the Playstation era). And the less said about the ridiculous storyline
and characters the better; computer games may never win awards for
best writing but why is it that Capcom games always seem to pull from
the bottom of the barrel?

All in all, I found the technical aspects impressive but while
actually playing it I frequently found myself muttering "I hate this
game" when it forced an awful camera angle on me, or for its sluggish
controls, or when it dumped me into another dull quick-time event, or
even made me endure FOUR unskippable end-credit sequences. For all its
modern amenities, overall Resident Evil felt mechanically archaic,
like its developers were still stuck in the SNES era and hadn't
noticed that gameplay had evolved significantly over the past 30
years.



* ADR1FT (new)
It didn't really occur to me that ADR1FT (Adrift henceforth, because I
refuse to speak type like that any more) was a VR game; it really
wasn't advertised as such. Rather, I purchased it understanding it was
a narrative simulator (a.k.a., a "walking game", in the vein of "Gone
Home" or "The Stanley Parable"). But I guess it has to be judged
solely on its VR capabilities, because it is so lacking in everything
else.

Oh, I suppose the graphics are appealing, at least for the first five
or ten minutes. The problem is that there is almost no variety and
almost all the modules are introduced immediately after the game
starts. I very quickly got tired of slowly drifting through the same
crew quarters, computer rooms and gardens I had seen a dozen times
before. Ironically, there is no real narrative to this narrative game;
no characters (and hence no character development), no structure to
the story, no antagonist, not even a protagonist really. You muck
about slowly picking up audio-diaries that tell you the back-story but
it doesn't really matter since it plays no part in how the game ends. 

The gameplay is dull, even for a "walking sim". Because your
air-supply doubles as your thrust (and because your space-suit
apparently has all the ruggedness of a wet tissue), I was forced to
fly at the slowest possible pace, every now and again grabbing an air
canister to restock my supplies. You bob about from the center of the
space station out to its outermost points and then back again,
essentially pushing the same buttons and repeating the same task four
times. The only real difference is the amount and type of debris that
is littered before you (a genuine hazard to anyone wearing a spacesuit
made out of Kleenex). It's dull and made unnecessarily confusing by
the fact that your way-point's only show up for five seconds at a time
and only when you are practically on top of them anyway. 

Possibly if I owned a VR headset (a waste of money, I've decided) the
experience might have been different... but I don't think so.
Certainly the 6-degrees of freedom would make for a nauseating
experience that some might find enjoyable, but even so I think the
lack of any real progression or any interesting goal would make even
the most dedicated VR-head get much enjoyment from the software. It's
a shallow and empty adventure no matter how you experience it. 



* Gears of War 3 (XBox350) (replay)
I didn't play Gears of War 3 out of any great desire to play Gears of
War 3. Rather, I wanted a game that was rather straight-forward and
simple, something I could whip through fairly quickly so it could be
added to the monthly play-list; and also a game I' could play on my
XBox so I wouldn't feel like I had wasted hundreds of dollars on the
device. It just happened that GOW3 was one of the first games I came
across that fit those criteria.

It is not, per se, that there is really anything /wrong/ with Gears of
War 3; it ticks all the expected boxes for a modern FPS. But it is so
flavorless, lacking any real character of its own; it is a one-note
game featuring improbably bulky examples of angry machismo facing off
against shallow villains who might as well be grey cubes for all the
detail they are given. The monsters exist solely to be shot, and the
protagonist is there only to shoot them. Stripped down, it is
mechanically the same game-play as Space Invaders and I suppose if
that sort of condensed experience appeals to you it is a good game,
but I prefer a somewhat less threadbare experience; something I'll
actually remember ten minutes after I shut down the console.

I'll grant that some of the architecture and detailing in the levels
is impressive, not that the game gives you any opportunity to linger
and enjoy the visuals. Unfortunately, that's about the best I can say
for the game; GOW3 lacks any interesting set-pieces, with one battle
running pretty much into the next without much difference between
them. In fact, except for the addition of a little bit of green, I'd
be hard-pressed to correctly identify whether any scene takes place in
this game or the previous two iterations of the franchise (which were
uniformly grey and dull). 

Still, I was looking for a basic shooter and I suppose that Gears of
War 3 satisfied me in that respect; it's not memorable, but it let me
while away a few hours. That's about as good a recommendation as I can
give it.



* Doom 4 (new)
If Doom 3 was a reboot of the original Doom, then Doom 4 (or Doom
2016, or DOOM, or whatever I am supposed to call it) feels like a
reboot to Doom 2. For all its gory and fast-paced action, the first
Doom game was equally drenched in atmosphere; with its (at the time
very sophisticated) lighting effects, it was at times a genuinely
creepy game, with moments of quiet suspense that inevitably lead to
balls-to-the-wall gunfights as soon as you crossed some invisible
trigger. Doom 2, on the other hand, forsake much of this flavor in
favor of gimmicky levels and a focus on the gameplay. Personally, I
consider the former the better game, but I can understand the appeal
of the second.

Doom 4 is not without its own character and mood, but it is obvious
that such played second fiddle to the combat. The story is shallow
even for a Doom game (although interestingly, it appears to be a
sequel of sorts to the first game), and its environmental design never
seems to stretch much beyond the basic "hi-tech base covered in blood"
motif. It's all very well detailed, but not particularly imaginative
and it would have been nice to see the developers stretch a bit beyond
those tired tropes that have been carrying the game since 1994.

 Instead, they focused on refining the gameplay, and I'm not sure it
was to the game's advantage. In order to make the game play "faster",
they added in a "glory kill" system (essentially, a coup de grace
melee attack) which is the primary way of earning ammo and health
pick-ups. Unfortunately, melee combat in first-person shooters
generally sucks and it isn't any better in Doom 4; the only difference
is that it is mandatory in this game if you don't want to die. I was
never comfortable with the system and made as little use of it as I
could, finding ranged attacks both more effective and less dangerous.
Oddly, I found that while the glory kill system made the combat feel
more hectic, it did little to speed up the game (much of which was
slowed down by the inevitable after-combat crawl for power-ups and
secrets).

In another interesting similarity to Doom 2, Doom 4 also featured a
tremendous amount of platforming. It wasn't any fun back in 1996, and
it hasn't improved an iota in the two decades since. I was
flabbergasted at how much jumping over bottomless pits this game
contained, since first-person platforming is almost universally
loathed; it just seems such an unusual addition.

I was not particularly impressed by the graphics. Don't get me wrong;
Doom 4 is a pretty game, but Id's tech has been the benchmark against
which other engines and games are measured. Doom 4, on the other hand,
was only average in appearance; there are far prettier games on the
market. Having said that, Id does deserve kudos for how well it
OPTIMIZED that engine; even running on a three year old GPU (and a
five year old CPU), the game ran at a constant 60FPS with almost all
the settings on Ultra. 

In the end, I found Doom 4 a mixed bag. Like Doom 2, I can understand
its appeal to some people, but it felt far too one-dimensional for my
taste; even Doom 3 - for all its problematic monster closets - felt a
fresher and more interesting game. 



* 35mm (new)
For all that I am constantly disappointed by the genre, I keep giving
these so-called "narrative games" another chance. That's because when
they work, they can be very powerful experiences (if only for the
single pl ay-through). Unfortunately, Sturgeon's Law applies and
narrative games that "work" are far and few between.

Still, I was hopeful for 35mm. It had an interesting post-apocalyptic
setting and was developed by some Russians, masters of the hopeless
tale. Yet even before I began my quest there were hints of problems to
come.

The most glaring - but not the most serious - was the awful
localization. Although I can forgive the lack of English dubbing
(personally, I found the game more atmospheric in Russian), the
English subtitles were rife with typos and misspellings. It made the
game feel amateurish and consistently pulled me out of the experience.
There were even several typos on the main menu screen. 

The gameplay mechanics were poorly explained; what was the goal? Where
was I going? Did I need to manually eat the food I was collecting? Why
is the screen going blurry? The actual gameplay was little better;
like most narrative games, it consists of trundling slowly across the
landscape and interacting with the environment to progress the story,
except those interactions were far too infrequent to keep up interest.
The grey and unsaturated environment, at first so appealingly
atmospheric, quickly turned dull and - eventually - so dark it was
difficult for me to make out my surroundings (even with the brightness
turned up both in game settings and on the monitor itself; it made
Doom 3 appear brilliant in comparison). The puzzles were annoyingly
random or trial-n-error, and the payoff was unrewarding. The world
looks open at first, but is surrounded by invisible walls that hem you
in to the straight and narrow.

The end result was a narrative game that lacked both a compelling
narrative and interesting (or any, really) gameplay. It didn't even
benefit - as did the Vanishing of Ethan Carter - from breath-taking
graphics. It was a literally lackluster game made by a team who
thought a dreary atmosphere was enough to carry a game that lacked an
engaging story, world, gameplay or technology. Well, it doesn't. 


* Cities Skylines (replay)
I don't have much to say about Cities: Skylines' gameplay because,
honestly, it isn't that much advanced from SimCity 2000, which was
released 23 years ago. That's not a bad thing, of course; SimCity 2000
was a seminal game and it's just as fun to play today as it was back
then. It is somewhat disappointing, however, that the genre hasn't
significantly advanced in two decades, but credit to the developers
for matching that classic gameplay.

I could say a lot more about the graphics though, because man is this
game gorgeous. I caught myself firing up the game a number of times
just to look at my cities, which are even more gorgeous with the
"After Dark" DLC. User-created mods only increase the beauty even
more.

Of course, that's also the biggest weakness of this game; that the
developers are either charging for features - weather, disasters, a
day/night cycle - or depending on end-users to mod them in when they
should have been part of the base game is sort of disgraceful, and I
can't honestly recommend the game until the inevitable
Game-of-the-Year edition is released that includes them all in one
convenient (and affordable) package. While I understand the developers
are a small cash-strapped independent team, this is the sort of sad
nickel-and-diming that should never be encouraged, no matter how good
the base game. 

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And that's me, for this month. A mix of new and old games, generally
impressed on the technological front and disappointed by gameplay and
setting. Alas, that's more and more the usual for games these days...

Anyway, enough of my muttering. Now it's your turn: 

What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2016?