Posts Tagged ‘PC’

Here I am again for another dip back in to the games 2010 that left a mark on me. It was a bad year for me, and while gaming was not to blame but it did provide emotional touchstones, both good and bad. These posts are not a summery of the year’s best games, nor are they in any order or relevance, they are simply the titles I remember and the emotions I will forever connect with them.

After a lifetime of sharing apartments and houses with friends and family I finally found myself alone. Indeed more accurately I found myself homeless, lost and emotionally empty. It is no exaggeration when I say that I was riding the streets calling friends to ask them for a roof for the night. Riding my bike through the dark night I called, and when someone finally I answered I went to his sofa.

I took comfort from having a friend willing to put me up, and in no small part I was relieved to have company. But my luck was not to endure so completely. Not that I was again about to find myself riding the streets looking for a room, but instead that my friend was to go on away for the weekend leaving me to fester in my own numb melancholy.

This would be a quiet moment for Blur.

Come that weekend, with nothing planned and little money, I found my options limited to the entertainment available in the apartment in which I found myself. Fortunately my friend was well equipped being a gamer himself. Surrounded by games I looked at what was on offer. I had some specific requirements for my selection, a title that I couldn’t taint for myself, which I could leave and never look back at if I had to, and something I would be able to just slip into the mindless repetition of. I picked Blur.

I don’t mean to suggest that Bizarre Creations street racing game is dull by calling it mindless, but like many racing games Blur’s controls are relatively simple (with a few easy to pick up tweaks) and demands replays and perfection of tracks to advance.

Zooming around the exploding colour filled tracks Blur felt surreal with its glowing HUD beneath my car, red and blue explosions filling the screen, but real cars and locations. The vehicles even handled in a manner more akin to a simulation than an arcade racer, but I was armed. Collecting Wipeout style weapons and blowing up part of Brighton or Tokyo in my attempts to gain an advantage over the other cars I found it possible to push to the back of my mind concerns about my life as I jostled for position up the pack.

Amazingly for this day and age Blur features four player split screen.

Sat on the sofa/my bed for the two days of the weekend, some two meters from the screen on which the neon racer was displayed, the flashing greens and pinks burned my eyes as they shoot past at incredible speeds. Tactics and strategies all bubbled in my mind as I fought for the required stars that would unlock advancement through the competitions. I played levels repeatedly, unwilling to move on until I had perfected it. Able to lose myself in this, my mind became slowly anesthetised. It was much appreciated.

Blur’s soporific effects remain with me. On my return to the UK I bought it again and still find it akin to a comfort blanket. I can sit and play, almost without thought, advancing or not with very little passion but none the less happy. Even abject failure elicits little more than a shrug from me as I happily… or at least contentedly replay the race.

I couldn’t honestly say if Blur is good game, or even a good racer. It certainly possessed more replay value for me than any games that could reasonably be considered its competition. But for me it is now more like medicine, a painkiller. A game I played with the express purpose of losing myself and then abandoning found a place in my heart from the medicinal service it provided.

Whenever I have been asked about my most anticipated game of 2010 is I have answered Dead Space 2. It is an instinctive response; the original was far and away my favourite game of 2008. While I feel the game didn’t need a sequel science-fiction survival horror titles prove a rare breed, so I take them where I can get them.

I felt a pang of disappointment and annoyance as I started watching E3 footage Dead Space 2. Isaac Clarke, the games protagonist, has changed. Gone is the clunky practical engineer suit, replaced instead by a more ‘edgy’ outfit. I was sad at the loss of the old distinctive look, worried the game was to be bleached it of personality to attract a wider audience.

New meaner looking suit just feels more generic.

Happily I was wrong.

Whatever the reason for Isaac’s new suit its existence soon faded as I watched the footage. New environments from the games terrestrial setting were on show, most interest of which was a church. A blend of gothic architecture and the games own derelict industrial style were obvious in the building, making it feel familiar but hinting at a diversity that was absent in the original.

New enemies (Necromorphs) of varying sizes were also on show. Attacking Isaac, some of these other otherworldly forms were reminiscent of spiders while others looked like small children with gaping tooth filled mouths. Foes approached in larger numbers than the original game, making pace appear more frantic, another shift in direction for the game I will reserve judgement on for now.

I am eager to jump back into Dead Space’s fiction to find out more about its mysterious parasitic Necromorphs and the delusional Church of Unitology. My only major disappointment from the news out of the show was that the release date has slipped to 2011, but at least it January.

Torchlight appeals to so many of my idiosyncrasies that I am bemused as to why its spiritual predecessor Diablo never appealed to me. Both offer lush fantasy settings and the draw of improved equipment with every vanquished foe that fuels my obsessive tendencies. Maybe I have simply matured as a gamer, or perhaps it is Torchlight’s refinements to the point-and-click, loot hording, action RPG genre that have me enamored.

Every change Torchlight has made to Diablo has focused on making it more appealing to newcomers. Most obvious of these changes is the appearance. A brighter palette, while remaining moody, adds lightness as do the exaggerated characters in the 3D world.

A distinct style made up of bold colours compliments the games mood perfectly.

Alterations are not limited to visuals; tweaks to gameplay also take center stage. Foremost among these additions is the inclusion of a pet. These little critters not only provide space for items and additional powers (cue skeleton summoning dogs), but also deliver the greatest innovation over Diablo, personal shoppers. Loading up a pet with unwanted loot will see them disappearing back to the town of Torchwood to sell it. It’s a tiny change, but one that released me from the burden of excess items, while stilling reaping some of their benefits.

At $20 it is hard not to recommend Torchlight. Accessible, dip in and out gameplay offers a fun distraction. Though the game is quite short the attraction of harder difficulties and increasingly powerful items prove a constant draw, for me at least.

Sometimes you need to reset the bar. As an informed gamer I find more and more that my definition of what constitutes average is slowly creeping upwards. Then Capcom’s Dark Void was thrust into my lap, and I found my equilibrium.

Conceptually Dark Void looked like a solid game. It threw me into a dramatic story, set in a beautiful world with interesting opponents. Add to this cover based combat with the ability to take flight at any time, courtesy of a jetpack, and developer Airtight Games should have been on to a winner. But these elements all combined to make and experience that define the term pedestrian.

See it looks fun, but the soul is missing.

Strangely nothing in the execution of Dark Void is wrong. There are no technical problems, mechanically or graphically, but it contains none of the magic that I seem to have begun taking for granted in my games.

I look to games with similar third person combat, such as Gears of War, and feel none of the spark that made them special. Like a gifted young musician copying their idol, the performance of Dark Void is solid in its execution, but lacks any of the soul that makes the original feel special.

Dark Void looked so promising in previews, but all the final product did for me was establish that good games really do possess a spark that raise them above the masses; a spark that no amount of technical talent or focus testing can substitute for.

Read more about Dark Void here.