I still get a thrill when free games come pouring through my letterbox but there is a downside to reviewing games. Actually there are a few reasons that it occasionally sucks. First off sometimes the games you get sent are total turkeys. In April I got sent a bumper load of turkeys. My first review for Boom Town was Stormrise and despite having the Creative Assembly (Australia) name on it, the game was a real-time strategy disaster for the PS3.
I also got sent Gobliiins 4 an inane, antiquated point and click adventure for the PC which was painfully bad. If you’ve been reading the blog you’ll know my opinion on point and click adventures.
As if they weren’t bad enough another game that landed on my doormat was CID the Dummy for the Wii.
I always feel a bit bad for criticising games, I know how it feels from the development side and a bad review can be seriously dispiriting if you’ve worked on a project for months or even years. The thing is you have to be honest, I always try to imagine how I would feel if I actually spent money on the game in question and having bought several terrible games over the years it never fails to piss me off.
You also have to actually play through the game in order to give it a proper review and that can be hard going. It takes willpower to keep playing something you are really hating but then that’s another thing that stirs up the vitriol.
Even when you are playing a game you enjoy, the pressure to hurry up and finish it can be annoying. You’ll find yourself thinking about what you are going to say instead of just enjoying the game. At the end of the day it comes down to opinion, there is no real evaluative standard that can be applied across the board.
Tags: cid the dummy, gobliiins 4, reviewing games, stormrise
Posted in Games, PC, Playstation 3, Wii | 2 Comments »
If you are a fan of zombies, as all right thinking people are, then you’ve probably already bought Left 4 Dead. If it somehow escaped your radar then now is the time to check it out. Valve are offering a 24 hour free trial starting this Friday. You can pre-load now so you get maximum play time to try it out. It includes the new expansion.
The co-op mode is great fun but you can play solo as well if you prefer. It is well worth checking out so get ready to stomp some undead corpses.
Tags: Left 4 Dead, zombies
Posted in Games, PC | No Comments »
Been playing a bit too much Empire: Total War and it is seriously awesome. You can check out my Empire: Total War review. Not only have they added naval warfare they have also padded out the turn based strategy and campaign map. With a tech tree and more building options it is creeping closer to Civ with each iteration. When it comes to RTS the game-play is unsurpassed although this release is surprisingly buggy compared to the rest of the Total War series.
I also did a guide to land battles which have changed a little bit with the inevitable focus on artillery and riflemen. Having recreated the British Empire I’m moving on to other factions now. If they can get some of bugs fixed up it will be the best strategy game ever released. The problem is the game is damn time consuming and I have a stack of other titles that need some attention. This is the reason I stopped playing Football Manager and the Civilization series.
Tags: Empire: Total War, real time strategy
Posted in Games, PC | No Comments »
Tycoon games or management sims are a lot of fun. They are a genre that my wife will happily play with me whereas anything football related, anything that involves shooting people in the face, and anything with a focus on driving at high speed tends to bore her. We’ve played so many over the years that I thought I’d write an article on my top ten tycoon games.
Unfortunately it is a genre full of really awful, badly designed and quickly churned out titles. In fact I struggled to find ten that I would actually recommend. I even included a section at the end highlighting the ones to avoid. The balance between fun and work in a tycoon game is tough to achieve, it needs to be a challenge but if you get the mix even slightly wrong it can quickly become impossible.
The sandbox nature of these games is initially a big draw and there is always a drive to develop and build new buildings but once you have tried out all the content the lack of a focus can become a big problem. Sim City is a great example, in fact Will Wright struggled to get it made because it had no end point, no actual aim. I have to admit I always got bored towards the end of a game of Sim City, once the shining metropolis reached it’s peak there was usually an immediate realisation that I’d just wasted hours and now all there was to do was to wreck the city I’d so carefully built up.
For most tycoon games they include a progression of some kind, a series of aims to achieve and if they get the balance right on these it can be a great deal of fun. However few titles are big or interesting enough to tempt me to play their sandbox mode, without an aim it just becomes boring immediately. A great example is Casino Empire which is a simple tycoon sim challenging you to build a Vegas casino. There isn’t a great deal of content or depth but the single player progression is really well balanced so you can spend a few hours on it without having to replay a difficult level. There isn’t enough to the game to encourage sandbox play but the single player challenge is satisfying, the trick is to have you complete the level just before you run out of time, maximum satisfaction seems to come from doing it by the skin of your teeth.
Another problem with most management sims is the standard of the AI. You hire all these staff and they refuse to see the pile of litter at your front entrance and instead clean the same spot over and over. I remember playing Theme Park and regularly finding all my janitors in the same top corner of the park. The sound of thousands of visitors constantly puking was also pretty grating. Sometimes you reach a point of momentum in games like Theme Park where you simply don’t have the resources to pull things back and the downward spiral is inevitable and unstoppable. It can be a seriously annoying feeling in tycoon games when you realise a restart is your only viable option.
My favourite game that fits this genre from recent years is Lionhead’s The Movies. It worked as a beautifully well made management sim but it also allowed you to craft your own movies with a reasonable level of depth. It managed to create the feeling of a single player progression with the passage of time and periodic awards ceremonies but it also gave you a sandbox feeling because each time you played key details would inevitably turn out differently.
A number of tycoon games that make it on to the shop shelves are actually hopelessly broken. They have a level which defies logic or an economic imbalance which makes the progress too slow to be engaging or too fast to keep up with. Getting the design right is definitely a tricky prospect.
Given that the demographic for tycoon games is much more mixed than most genres, they attract old and young, male and female gamers, it is something of a surprise that there aren’t more big releases. Sadly The Movies was considered a commercial failure. They now seem to have become the preserve of small developers who often lack the resources to make them properly and the result is sub standard clones of better games.
They are also scraping the bottom of the barrel for subjects, in the last couple of years there has been Beer Tycoon, Fish Tycoon and worst of all Game Tycoon. Yeah that’s right a game about making games except they obviously don’t know how to make games because Game Tycoon is a big pile of embarassing awfulness.
Tags: Casino Empire, management sims, Sim City, The Movies, Theme Park, tycoon games
Posted in Game Design, Games, PC | No Comments »
I got sent a point and click adventure game to review the other day. It was developed by a German company called Realmforge and against stereotyping they included a lot of humour but it got me thinking about the genre in general. The game was called Ceville and while it was well made it featured exactly the same game-play I remember from the old classics. The genre has been frozen in time for over two decades now. If you read my Ceville review you’ll see I’ve been quite kind because it achieves what it sets out to do but to be honest I don’t want to see a revival in the point and click genre because the game-play is terminally boring and utterly flawed.
If we go back to the eighties you’ll remember one of the most popular point and click series ever, the Monkey Island games from LucasArts. They had a great cartoon art style, touches of humour and some classic corny characters and they ended up serving as a blueprint for a lot of games that came along after, in fact you could feel their influence on Ceville.
I think the Myst games improved on the format with some genuinely engaging puzzles. The first Myst came out in 1993 and it actually went on to be the best selling PC game of all time until The Sims was released. Myst is a clever design and it draws you in because it leaves all sorts of unanswered questions, inviting you to dive in and explore for yourself. This game is actually used in Primary schools now to engage the kids and get them thinking creatively. I went out to a school recently to talk to them about the games industry and they were all captivated by their Myst project despite having all the latest PS3 titles at home.
The Broken Sword series were also good point and click adventures although they seemed to lose their way when they attempted to make the leap to 3D. Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars was a great game with a historical setting and some nice touches of humour but I remember playing the third one, The Sleeping Dragon on the Xbox and just hating it.
In the late 90’s there were a couple of point and click adventures which I enjoyed up to a point. Blade Runner from Westwood was a decent game and it actually made the transition to 3D successfully. Although as a big fan of the film I’m sure a lot of the appeal was just the fact I could play around in the Blade Runner universe. You could even use the zoom in and look round corners photo enhancer Deckard has in his apartment.
The following year in 1998 LucasArts did it again with Grim Fandango which was like a film noir adventure in the underworld. Sadly it was a commercial failure despite being beautifully made, something which perhaps hinted that the point and click genre was past its sell by date.
There are still a surprising number of point and click adventure games being made and many of the old classics are popping up on handhelds now. I get the appeal, you have something which offers a complete alternative to action dependant gaming, you can play at your own pace and if the humour and puzzles are done well they can be a lot of fun.
The trouble is they all suffer from the same flaws. Every point and click adventure game I have ever played has a puzzle in it which defies logic and the only way to solve it is to randomly try every piece of junk in your inventory until you stumble on the right solution. Going round in circles waiting for the next exit to reveal itself is something that drives me mad, I am not a patient gamer.
I also think the dialogue in most games is awful and this genre is no exception. Having to sit through years of it can be enough to send you to sleep and what is the deal with conversation trees which appear to offer choices when you can actually end up clicking on every question? All the fun of selecting your own order for a list, surely there should be an effect to the choices you make with conversation selection. In good point and click adventures there is but in many they seem to have forgotten the purpose.
This also applies to the linearity in general. Games are definitely more fun when there are multiple solutions to a problem but this is tough from a design point of view and if you want multiple routes you often need to produce more content which can be a strain for developers on tight budgets.
Anyway I think I’ve had my fill of point and click adventures. Like the platform game-play of Manic Miner or Attic Attack I spent so long playing them when I was younger that the appeal has completely worn off. Let them rest in peace.
Tags: Blade Runner, Broken Sword, Ceville, Grim Fandango, Monkey Island, point and click adventures
Posted in Game Design, Games, PC | 6 Comments »
