Thursday, July 29, 2010

Alan Wake DLC - The Signal




I loved Alan Wake when it was released a few months back (It fell between Really Good and Amazing) and getting the chance to play the first DLC episode for free due to a great early purchase deal made me remember all the things I loved about it and made it stand out.

"The Signal" take place directly after the end of Alan Wake. The "last time on Alan Wake" segment that starts each episode of the original game makes a lot more sense coming in months after the original as a quick TV-like means of reminding the player what the heck went on in those final moments. Alan spends the episode following the GPS signal (using his Verizon phone! Product placement!) put out by Bioshock afficianado Tom Zane through various landscapes ripped from the original game, each representing Alan's increasingly tortured psyche. Now, the idea of retreading tons of forest levels that you already played through in the original game sounds pretty boring; however, the designers at Remedy put some really fun twists on what could have been a painfully repetitive journey. For example, at one point Alan reaches a locked church which, in the original game, led to a standoff with the Taken (possessed townspeople); here, it leads to an exploding deer float, which attacks you, and a very fun experience blowing zombie villagers away with your flashlight and some well-placed blast furnaces.

Each section felt both familiar and fresh, reminding me of many of my favorite parts of the original while providing me with some new challenges. Some people really disliked the combat in Alan Wake in which our protagonist must burn off a layer of the oily Dark Presence from his enemies using a flashlight, flares, and flash grenades before finishing them off with some traditional weapons. I, for one, got quite a kick out of the combat: running and dodging towards the next light; dropping flares to slow an oncoming rush of enemies; flashing my light to stun my foes for that extra second needed to reload. If you felt the same way about combat in the main game, you'll enjoy this DLC just fine. If you hated it...well, you probably hated Alan Wake so why would you want to play more of it?


Some gripes though. Alan Wake had an awesome story and some very funny characters. Other than some cameos as cardboard cutout collectibles and a few funny exchanges with your agent, Barry, in dream-form, "The Signal" is a solo affair that only inches the game's overall story forward. Since story was one of the selling points of the main game, this does seem like a bit of an omission. There's a second DLC pack on the way and talk of a sequel. Perhaps "The Signal" will come together as a small piece of the larger narrative. Or maybe it'll just be a fun diversion.

So, for free, the episode is a cool redux of some of your old stomping grounds, as well as a few new places, giving you more opportunities to play in the world of Bright Falls and to experience the always creepy feeling stemming from running through the woods at night with killers on the loose. Reminds me of my childhood! For five to seven bucks, I probably still would have had the same amount of fun. It's more of a game I enjoy and to receive it for nothing is a great value. "The Signal" is Really Good.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Limbo




Though independent games have been around forever, the advent of online consoles has made indie games much easier to find and to acquire. Though there are hundreds of indie games released each year (check The AV Club's Sawbuck Gamer articles for a round up of some of the more interesting choices), only a few ever get widespread attention, usually due to some interesting hook. Months ago I had a chance to play Braid, a time-traveling Super Mario-esque adventure with a "brilliant" story. Though the gameplay was awesome, the story left me a bit...cold. Still, I had a great time playing it. So color me happy when a Braid-esque game, minus pretentious story was released. In the midst of downloading a bevy of Rock Band tracks, I made sure to download Danish developer PlayDead's Limbo, the first game of Microsoft's big Xbox Live Summer Games.

Limbo may remind those of you who played it of Braid, though instead of bright water-colored art and time-travel mechanics, Limbo comes in an entirely black-and-white world filled with a variety of crafty puzzles, creepy monsters, and a bunch of brutal ways to die. The story revolves around your search for your sister but other than the game description on Xbox Live and the five-second ending, you wouldn't even know that there was a story. While I typically dislike when games fail to provide a clear narrative, I could really care less with a game like this. Limbo plays a lot like many of the side-scrolling puzzlers of yore like Abe's Oddysee, Heart of Darkness (perhaps its closest relative), and Out Of This World in which a wall is put in your face every few steps and only through careful observation and manipulation of your surroundings can you proceed. Unlike some puzzle games, Limbo spends a long time making sure that every puzzle feels natural and you, as a player, are never forced to make wild guesses or to try to follow the designer's nonsensical logic. I only got stuck once in the whole game and the solution appeared so clear once I read it. Though not every environmental puzzle in games of this type is a winner, nearly every puzzle in Limbo is. Starting with some simple, "swing on a vine, push a box" puzzles, the game never stopped showing off its variety from puzzles with gravity to mechanical puzzles to some really weird puzzles featuring quick timing and a brain parasite...nothing you see too often! I played through the game in about five or six hours and never got bored.



Other than the amazing game design, the sepia tones are reminiscent of a silent film like "Nosferatu" with each new area from forest to dilapidated city maintaining a menacing tone due to the dark always surrounding you. I never would have thought a black and white game would get high praise for its graphics, but I found myself truly caught up in the world of Limbo. Stylized beats life-like every time for me. Though the graphics are very cool, there isn't much in the way of a soundtrack. A few small music pieces play during some game events, but that's it. Still, I suppose orchestral soundtracks wouldn't totally fit with the feel of the game and its otherworldliness.

Limbo costs about 15 bucks in Microsoft space points and only took me about five to six hours to beat. Sure, there are a number of secrets to look for (I found four all by myself!) and a big challenge of beating the whole game without dying more than five times, but once you've solved the puzzles, they're solved. Some might still give you trouble, but you could probably breeze through the game a lot quicker in a second or third playthrough. Still, I had an awesome time every minute I played Limbo. From gruesome death scene to gruesome death scene (and you will die a lot) I kept coming back for more. The game never felt frustrating and always came at me with something new and interesting. Limbo really wants you to have fun and to experience its clever puzzles, not to punish you or to waste your time. I made many good memories while playing this game; regardless of the cost to time-spent-playing ratio being a bit , high Limbo is an evening and a half worth of pure, unadulterated fun. Please play this Amazing game.

P.S. When I went to Wikipedia to find the developer's name, I saw some other reviews...which said many of the same things I said! So I'm either becoming as good a writer as some professionals or we are all hacks. Probably the latter.

Friday, July 23, 2010

The Crazies (2010)


I really love zombie-esque movies, even though very few of them are that good. Still, I keep trying; that's why I rented "The Crazies" remake. I had a fun time watching it while Facebooking about it. There's really a whole subset of TV and movies that have been made much better by my screwing around on the Internet, so this review might be more positive towards the movie then it deserves, but, oh well! Movies and art are subjective anyway!

Timothy Olyphant does an awesome job playing a small-town sheriff who balances just the right mix of bad-assery and normal guy-ishness, which is really nice to see. He quickly figures out that something's not right in the town when a rash of violent crimes occurs and tracks down the source of the epidemic to a crashed cargo plane. Soon the government arrives and its a matter of Tim breaking quarantine to save his wife, restrained due to possible contamination. The rest of the movie plays out like a pretty straightforward run from the "zombies" while dodging the government and slowly figuring out that there's no one to trust!

However, inbetween the straightforwardness are a LOT of really excellent scenes. Though you may have seen the car wash scene in the trailer, it's actually much cooler when the whole set piece is played out (and don't move your eyes until the excellent coda finishes) in context with the screaming nurse-friend, the kick-ass sheriff's wife (Rhada Mitchell), and the increasingly crazy deputy.


Additionally, many of the standard supporting characters (e.g., the deputy sidekick who may already be infected, the screaming nurse-friend) behave in non-cliched ways. For example, instead of turning on the protaganists when they begin to suspect him, the deputy actually tries to listen to reason. It's very sad to see someone realize that he's slowly going mad and having to try to make the best decisions he can to give his friends a fighting chance. And I'm shocked that more movies don't give their protaganists half a brain. Maybe in the 60's and 70's, heroes could spend more time dicking around with no clue that anything sinister is going on, but 30-40 years later I can't believe that the sheriff couldn't connect the dots with two weird crimes and a uniformed body in the swamp to figure out that something has contaminated the water. But Timothy Olyphant did! Thank you for allowing me to suspend some disbelief, "The Crazies".

So how do you rate a somewhat standard horror movie that takes some nice steps forward to freshen up the genre? I thought about an ok rating, but I had a nice time watching this film and was surprised that it did do a lot of non-standard things during its runtime. So, I'll be somewhat kind and bump up to a Really Good!