Runway to Rapture

Once again E3 has come & gone and once again it has succeeded in not making me care.
However I thought this was of interest:

 Original video located here. Accessed 16th June 2014

What could this be? It's hard to say as the people behind, The Chinese Room, said little beyond it's about the end of the world. But from the looks of it, it could be one of many things:

 - It could be a post-apocalypse game that eschews shooting zombies for exploring an abandoned world
 - It could be a religious themed game could, for once, be actually GOOD
 - Or it could be the next step in atmospherics.

However even if this game shows some potential at this early stage, there is no escaping that this is by The Chinese Room. And for the uninitiated, these are the same people who made Dear Esther, a game infamous for being all about wandering around an environment (however well-rendered) with minimal gameplay and a weak narrative. A game infamous for wandering abound doing nothing that some people actually hesitate to call it an actual game.
Therefore my interest is tempered with caution - and rightly so. I will not fooled by a trailer that shows footage rather than gameplay or what the game wants to accomplish.
Still, it may be tempting to think The Chinese Room may have learned from their mistakes and may have delivered an actual game, but what are the chances of that happening?

Need some Singstar lovin'

This is a video of Ever Lovin' Man. It is a song by an Australian band from the 60s known as The Loved Ones.

Original video located here. Accessed 13th June 2014

I'm posting this here because this would've been a lot of fun to do in Singstar and it fact that it never showed up on Singstar is a crying shame...

A cheat worth remembering

Everyone who grew up in the eighties and nineties era of gaming may know the Konami Code from Contra or the 'iddqd' cheat in Doom, but how many of you remember the cheats from Alien Breed?

Alien Breed was a series of games that originated on the Amiga but eventually found it's way to the PC - it also inspired a series of remakes that are currently available on XBLA.
But what I remeber about it were the cheat codes - not so much what they did but what had to typed out. And through GameFAQS I found them again.
So credit to Team17 - they may be cheat codes but they certainly have a sense of humor about them (that is sadly lacking in games since):

Seemed like a good idea at the time

Following on from an earlier post about Steam achievements, I've been doing some comparisons between the achievements scored in the games I've played against everyone else.
It was then that I saw a pattern emerging: It seems the most unlocked achievements are those that detonate certain progress through the game itself. But in the terms of progress achievements, it's the first in a series.
What this means that it seems that people got part way through a game before giving up and not bothering to go back and complete it.

To back up this claim, let's take a look at the following:

Eversion:

Gemini Rue:

Secret of Monkey Island 2:

The Stanley Parable:

True my claim may be BS as I've been relying on games I've scored perfects on to base this theory. And again this theory is BS as I too have been guilty of playing a game so far before giving up on it completely. And finally, I've included The Stanley Parable here even though the achievements in that game aren't really designed to be unlocked without some near -insane level of commitment.

However there is some weight to the theory that there are so many games available on Steam and many of which are designed to be played quickly without the need for a massive time investment. Thus, one can expect, in amongst the Steam users, that there are the kind of users that download a game, give it a go before deciding the game wasn't for them and give up on it and then move onto the next game.
Indeed, one can imagine this to be a side-effect of having so many games readily available: With so much variety, the time committed to a game is subsequently on the wane. After all, why spend hour on a game when something potentially better is within easy reach?

Still I would like to think that the people who played Eversion only to gave up were traumatized victims of being broken by the game itself.

Perfect Blue

According to my Steam profile I have, at time of writing, notched up seven perfect games. This means, for the uninitiated, that I have scored all the achievements that came attached to the game.

Not a bad feat I have to say.

This in turn makes an interesting contrast to the XBLA achievements: I have plenty of XBLA achievements to my name but no perfect games to speak of. What does this mean? Are the XBLA achievements too demanding? Or are the Steam achievements easier to get?

I think the Steam achievements are indeed easier to get – why, To the Moon has a grand total of one achievement and that is for beating it, thus setting up a perfect game in the bag. That is not to say that the Steam has its own share of demanding achievements – there’s plenty of Age of Empires 2 achievements that require fighting a thousand battles – but I have found that many Steam achievements require less effort than many XBLA achievements. Why is this so? One would think that the Steam achievements would offer some kind of fighting chance instead of being near impossible. And when a game offers an achievement that actually seems feasible of scoring, one would gravitate to the game and the platform it is offered upon. After all, if a game is worth the trouble of getting a perfect rating then it must be a pretty awesome game, right?

Still, there’s no way I’ll be fighting a thousand battles in Age of Empires 2. I do have a life you know…

War is Over

So as a new Star Wars movie increasingly draws nearer and the nerds have their wallets out (as always), I recently found myself trying to get my copy of TIE Fighter working purely to enjoy one of the many games that escaped my notice the first time around.

I didn't succeed which is indeed a shame because I heard a lot of good things about this game - in the form of fighting for the Empire in the name of Lawful Evil and the presence of the legendary Grand Admiral Thrawn. I guess the mystique surrounding TIE Fighter will persist.

What is even more bothersome is that the Star Wars Expanded Universe has now had it's throat slit in the name of new movies on the way. And so TIE Fighter will most likely join the rest of the EU to die. Therefore it seems doubtful that TIE Fighter will ever get an appropriate re-release. I suppose it would be too much to ask that this game gets dusted off for Steam (like Knights of the Old Republic did) or something, which is indeed a waste as I bet lot's of people would like to play TIE Fighter - whether it be for the first time or the five hundredth time.

To be brutality honest...

Much of the past week has been devoted to revisiting a classic in the form of Doom. So what's the occasion? Well, thanks to a certain game reviewer, I have been made aware of a mod called Brutal Doom. I've had a crack at it and have been significantly blown away by how dramatically Doom has been changed by this mod. Even more impressive is that it was the work of one guy.

But really I cannot emphasize how different Doom has become with this mod: Mouse aiming; Better weapons; the necessity of reloading; A jump function (A JUMP FUNCTION!!!); Marine NPCs; Finishing moves and so much more that talking about it seems awfully redundant.
Indeed it is fascinating on how this mod gives this a game twenty one years old a new lease of life.

Now whilst I have, over the past few months, been indulging in the miracles that the modding community can provide, this is however not the first time I've tried a FPS mod. That honor would go to Navy Seals Quake. Has anyone heard of this? I played this in high school - within a year of Quake's original release no less - and was impressed by the changes made. This involved the demons replaced with human enemies, a reload function and more emphasis on tactical action rather than brainless shooter action.

And much like Brutal Doom, I found Navy Seals Quake so much an improvement over the original game that it wasn't funny. You see, I was unimpressed with the original Quake - I saw it as Doom but with a new coat of paint what with the Demonic enemies, Hell motifs and puzzling level design. Thus I couldn't understand why many people at the time were turning cartwheels over it. Thus, coming across Navy Seals Quake I, and many of my friends at the time, found it far more appealing. Indeed, it should be noted that Navy Seals Quake eschewed the then mindless action trends of FPS and adopted a more realistic approach to the genre - well before Half Life took that concept and ran with it.

My general approach to mods is that they offer new content (but even that is a challenge trying to find some quality in amongst the mud) and they offer to correct 'mistakes' (if you can call it that) that hinder the original game. Indeed, having played Brutal Doom I'm now wondering how the hell I managed to get by on the original - which goes to show that sometimes a new coat of paint isn't enough and sometimes repairs made also be required to renew interest in an old game.
If anything I would rather play Brutal Doom than the latest incarnation of the Call of Duty series any day.