Simple art matches the simple gameplay

It seems I’ve got a full plate (maybe even a platter?) of puzzle games to work my way through this week, starting off the the pleasantly simplistic Chains.

Created by Ivan and Philip Traykov, Chains is something of a tech-demonstration for the game creation platform AGen, which they’re also currently developing.  The AGen engine’s aim is to make the integration of game code and hardware simpler for developers in a 2D environment.  As an advertisement it’s surprisingly convincing too, as the vector graphics do a good job of translating the sophisticated physics engine running behind the scenes.

But don’t let this talk of tech-demo and advertisement put you off, because these are only things that are going to be interesting to aspiring developers.  What should grab everyone else’s attention is the fact that Chains is a highly enjoyable puzzler game with a friendly price tag.

The game is a traditional colour matcher, that makes use of a series of different challenges to keep the gameplay fresh.  Each level spawns coloured bubbles that have to be chained (see what they did there?) together to clear and gain score.  There are twenty scenarios all up, from simple score chases to rather complex balancing acts and speed clearings.  Where one level might ask you to complete chains of increasing length, another level might set you the goal of creating an exact score using bubbles of varying size.

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Violet Summer ... or her ass at least

So I’ve been meaning to play Velvet Assassin for a while now, and before you all decide to heave rotten fruit at me let me explain myself.  Firstly because I’m a big fan of the stealth genre, and secondly (and probably more importantly) because the moment someone tells me a certain game is absolutely crap, I’m always curious to find out why.

And there was no shortage of people to tell me that this game was absolute crap.

But just like a car crash on a highway, I was compelled to slow down to take a look … once the price had dropped to around $20.

The game is “based on” the real life experiences of Violet Szabo (renamed Violet Summer in the game), an undercover agent for the British Special Operations Executive during World War 2. I haven’t personally read Young, Brave and Beautiful, the biography with which Velvet Assassin has taken it’s liberties, so I’m a little unsure as to the validity of claims that Violet once killed an entire squadron of sadistic Nazis wearing only a silk nightie.  I’m guessing that’s what Replay Studios are choosing to call “artistic licence”.

The plot is standard stealth game fare, so I can’t really rip into it for being too ridiculous. Violet’s missions usually center around a singular target that needs to be killed, which for some reasons necessitates the violent murder of every other soldier in a five kilometer radius. The missions are told in flashback, recalled by Violet as she lays in a coma on a French hospital bed. Every now and then you’ll regain lucidity long enough to overhear discussions about your eventual fate, but the majority of the game is spent inside the memories.

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And possibly insulted his momma!

Another month, and we’re once again back on the trail of the Devil’s Playbox in Sam and Max: They Stole Max’s Brain! And with a title like that, the plot should be somewhat self-explanatory.  Sam, having left to go to the bathroom at the end of the last episode, returns to find Max’s head swinging open and his brain gone.  Consumed by rage and noir internal monologue, it’s up to Sam to discover exactly what happened to his friend and dole out some justice in the best tradition of the Freelance Police.

Telltale have obviously been having a lot of fun with genre this season, and They Stole Max’s Brain is no exception.  The first section of the game is spent with a hard boiled cop-on-the-edge version of Sam, helping him shake down witnesses and uncover the identity of the parietal purloiner.  To this end the game plays around with the typical conversation structure, introducing a new “interrupt” system where Sam can threaten, accuse or press his suspects for important information.  While it sounds kinda cool, there isn’t actually much change to the game’s usual mechanics, as witnesses will tell you the important parts of their testimony in uninterruptable segments, then leave you to choose which interruption to use while they babble for a while afterward.

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Overlord is watching. He knows all your secrets.

I can’t help myself: I’m going to begin this review with a complaint.  Please bear with me.

I guess I can understand why Microsoft felt the need to implement the Microsoft Points system to purchase DLC on the 360.  Among other business-case related things I guess credit card numbers and billing information can be hard to enter when you don’t have a keyboard.  But we PC gamers have been blessed with the alpha-numeric keyboard since the day dot.  So, Bioware, when you make us buy points to buy your DLC when there’s no practical / technological reason for making us do so, and then don’t even offer us the option of buying the right number of points for any given pack … yeah, it makes us feel kind of exploited.  Or at least, that’s how I feel.  Can you just let us buy our games like grown ups in the future please?  Not even a bunch of leftover points will make me want to download that stupid sunglasses pack.

Right.  I don’t actually feel any better for having said that, but I’ll move on regardless to the subject of today’s review: the new Overlord DLC pack for Mass Effect 2.  It’s about 1GB to download and will set you back 560 of the abovementioned Microsoft/Bioware Bison Dollars points.  Installation is dead simple, same as every other pack thus far.

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I get the feeling the name was just to throw you off the scent last episode

Do you ever have those heavy gaming months? You know, those months that leave you feeling bloated, tired and irritable for no reason after spending extended amounts of time in front of your screen? The months where you’ll find yourself uncontrollably weeping at the worst scripted cut-scenes, wearing white pants as you scoff Malteasers off your pregnant friend?

Well with the exception of that last item (my pregnant friend won’t visit) it’s been one of those months for me, and with a great bevy of AAA titles to work my way through it’s taken me this long to get around to playing the newest installment of Telltale Games’ new Sam and Max series: The Tomb of Sammun-Mak.

And after I’d blown the dust off my neglected PC and fired up the new episode (coal-operated computer), I had to curse my own foolish procrastination.

Sam and Max: The Devil’s Playhouse – Episode 2: The Tomb of Sammun-Mak is probably the finest piece of work Telltale Games have created since Chariots of the Dogs last season, and really manages to capture what we all love in an adventure game: puzzles, puns and … is there a ‘p’ word for time-travel?  I’ll get back to you on that one.

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The article title rhymes!

Let’s just get it out there: I’m not a puzzle gamer. They just shit me, I get frustrated and tend to start throwing things; keyboards, tantrums, etc.  But after picking up World of Goo as part of the Humble Indie pack, I’ve been secretly playing it whenever I can.

World of Goo is really quite good. The premise is simple: a bunch of goo balls need to get to the pipe leading to the next level. They can do this by building structures (bridges, towers) by joining to each other, and there’s different types of balls to play with (oh grow up!). Some are single-use: they can be placed in a structure, and that’s it. Others let you dismantle the structure at your whim, others stick to surfaces, others are like water and will ‘drip’.

It can be a bloody hard game at points. Unlike other bridge or structure building games, the goo balls have an amount of flexibility, so if the structure isn’t as strong as it needs to be, it will bend, flex and topple. And naturally, some levels have hazards that must be avoided: spikes, blades, and a range of other sharp pointy things. All of which will burst your goo balls, rendering your lovely bridge a little less structurally sound.

The difficulty of levels is a little inconsistent. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the alternating challenge means you get to do simple, fun levels in between the incredibly tricky ones. There are also a good selection of challenges to overcome. Some focus on structural integrity, building a large bridge in as few ‘blobs’ as possible or building a huge tower that, if you don’t place your goo balls properly, will send your tower toppling over. Others require very little building, relying on timing and simple shapes to get through the level.

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Curse that Ripper and his snappy dress sense!

Take the greatest detective known to fiction and have him investigate one of history’s most famous unsolved crimes.  A great adventure game should come effortlessly, right?  Unfortunately, things aren’t quite that … elementary.

A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Frogwares’ latest adventure offering Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper.  No, I hadn’t been hurtled a year back in time to when the game was actually released, more I was looking for a modern adventure game that hadn’t been brought to us via Telltale Games.

The premise is relatively simple:  Sherlock Holmes (rumoured pipe enthusiast and master of deduction) hears the news about the murder of a prostitute in Whitechapel, and decides to  “unofficially” assist the authorities in their investigations.  This lands him and his companion Dr. Watson right in the middle of the famous serial killings of Jack the Ripper.

See? Fiction and history are so easy to combine!

If you read about Jack the Ripper in school, then you’ll notice a whole cast of real life Ripper suspects crop up during Watson and Holmes’ investigation, although most of them are discredited as actual suspects quite quickly.  A few are most likely only mentioned to bolster the suspects board on the Baker Street wall (artist Walter Sickert, for example), but it’s nice to see that Frogwares had no qualms with setting up a host of era specific character for players to enjoy.

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Those Telltale types certainly know style

It’s a brand new year, and Telltale has turned loose a brand new season of everybody’s favourite dog and rabbit crime fighting duo.  The newest addition to the adventure library is entitled Sam and Max: The Devil’s Playhouse, and the first episode The Penal Zone was released mid-April.

My inner-child loves the fact that adventure games are making a slow but steady return to the gaming landscape, but Telltale Games faces the same challenge every time they release a new game: keeping things fresh.  After all, we can gush all we like about a game’s writing and sense of humour, but if it turns out it’s just the same old game repackaged then interest is sure to dwindle.  Even for someone with their nostalgia goggles strapped on as hard as I do.

So it’s nice to see that, with a certain level of respect for the format, Telltale Games has begun to experiment with their usual gameplay style.

From the get go, The Penal Zone aims to show off these new elements.  Our heroes begin the game trapped in a cell by interstellar outlaw General Skun’ka’pe, a militant baboon with dreams of galactic conquest.  To achieve this end he’s scouring Earth for the Toys of Power, objects of terrifying psychic power, two of which just happen to have fallen into Max’s possession.

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Scantily-clad girl, big ugly guy, scrawny little guy. Yep, itsa RPG!

Welcome, dear RPG traveller, to the town of Tristram.  Shit, sorry, I meant Trinsic.  No, that’s wrong too.  Better compose myself.  Right, got it!  Welcome, dear RPG traveller, to the town of Torchlight.

Torchlight is a top-down action RPG from Runic Games.  You start by picking a character from either the destroyer (warrior), vanquisher (rogue) or alchemist (mage) classes.  Then you choose a pet (cat, dog or “invisible pet”*) and you’re off adventuring!   Torchlight is a remote mining town, and there’s something shifty going on inside it’s mineral rich caverns.  You’re given the job of finding out what that might be.

Control of the game is straightforward.  If you want to walk somewhere, you left click there.  If you want to kill something, you left click on it until it dies.  If you want to cast a spell, you right click on the spot you want to cast it.  Numerical shortcuts can be set for potions, spells and abilities too so in no time at all you’ll be wading through paths of dead critters.

Your pet helps you out a little in combat and in other ways that we’ll get to in a bit.  During your adventures you’ll pick up fairly standard bits and pieces of kit – better weapons, armour and items.  The game is set in some kind of gunpowder age so in addition to swords, axes and bows you also get to play with ye olde style pistols and muskets.

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Take notes, kids, we're only 13 years away!

It’s amazing what one option can do to change your perception of a game.  For the recently released Metro 2033 from Ukrainian developers 4A Games, that option is a Russian language track.

I should probably explain.  My Metro 2033 review was supposed to be finished last week, and while I undoubtedly enjoyed the game, I’d drafted a whole section around the game’s voice acting and how unimpressed I was with the English dub.  So two playthroughs completed, all in English, and I figure I’m ready to complete my write-up.  Then, thanks to a heads up from several people online, I discover that this whole time the game has had the option for Russian language audio and I’d never seen it, thanks to never staying in the Main Menu and a particularly unhelpful game manual.

And with this one toggle, Metro 2033 has gone from being just alright to atmospheric brilliance in my books.  Why?  Well, let’s elaborate…

Metro 2033, based on the novel of the same name by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky, is set in a post-apocalyptic Russia where humanity has been forced to take shelter inside the Moscow train system to protect themselves from the nuclear winter playing out on the surface.  The protagonist is a young man named Artyom, who sets out to save his home station of Exhibition from the attacks of an unknown enemy, referred to only as “the Dark Ones”.  To do so, Artyom must make his way through Moscow’s radiation infested tunnels, fighting to survive against both metro mutants and other survivors alike, decipher the Dark Ones’ goal and cobble together a workable defence.

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