Steam Linux Sale: Two Weird Gems

Steam’s currently having a celebratory sale for Linux-playable games.

Of course, since all the Linux games are also playable on PC, it just means I get to trawl the collection and go bargain-hunting.

I want to highlight two gems that may be less obvious than things like FTL at 50% (still waiting for 75%, yarrr.)

Eversion

Bright and shiny colors? Jumping on little moving sprites to defeat them. Hitting little brick blocks with one’s head? I’m surprised it’s not Mario!

I’ve owned this for quite a while and rarely see it on sale. It’s going for two bucks, which I think is the perfect price point for the six or so hours you may get out of it (if you chase all the achievements.)

And even if you don’t complete the game, it’s worth two bucks to see the neat genre twist involved. (Assuming you are at least vaguely familiar with the platforming tropes of Super Mario Brothers – else it may possibly be lost on you.)

Suffice to say, things stay only bright and cheerful and kiddy and bright and bouncy for so long.

It’s like The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing for platformers, which by the way, is also a great read if you’re into dark and creepypasta stuff.

Fair warning: You have to be okay with the frustrations of platforming games – rehearsing pixel perfect jumps and getting one’s timing -just- right may be an issue in certain parts. And dying and being sent back to the start or the nearest checkpoint if you miss. Over and over if you’re having an off day.

I know I personally have trouble with getting the hang of the timing when just starting out, but get it down after a while. There is also one notorious spot in particular that causes immense rage and failure for quite a number of people – including me, and led to staring at video guides and trying it 30x and still failing. I got past it eventually and seeing the ending(s) and experiencing the whole game was worth it.

There’s a less graphically attractive free version floating about the web too, but I think for two bucks, it’s worth spoiling yourself with the full-featured version. The 8-bit style music’s pretty fun and fitting too.

Magical Diary

No, seriously, WHAT?

I know I’ve mentioned that I have a soft spot for cheesy casual games before, but this didn’t look like anything I’d be remotely interested in at first.

I don’t have a huge allergy to anime style cartoon graphics, but this game’s images are a touch on the amateurish side in places. Some characters look good/okay, and some look really strange to my eye.

Purely on principle alone, I don’t think I’d mind dating sims or visual novels but honestly have had very little experience with either genre.

(The closest to a dating sim I’ve ever gotten is an ADRIFT text/graphic adventure game called The PK Girl, submitted for the 2002 Interactive Fiction competition, which I found I quite enjoyed. It’s received some criticism for portraying things in a sexist light, but I was mostly more intrigued by the branching possibilities, multiple endings and ability to develop relationships with characters in an IF game, using a language that wasn’t Inform/Z-Code.

As for visual novels, Analogue: A Hate Story is about the closest I’ve gotten around to trying so far. Not bad if it’s on sale too, by the way.)

More of a buzzkill is the fact that it’s set in a magical school, and your protagonist is a magical student that has been raised as a Muggle (redacted for copyright reasons), unaware of her destiny until approximately high school age.

Your default character’s name starts out as Mary Sue (until you change it in haste.)

And you’ll even have a cheerful and helpful female professor as your ally, while there’s this sour-faced lanky, evil professor whom you smash into early on, whose life purpose appears to be making yours miserable.

*resists urge to puke at Harry Potter overdose*

For $25, or even for $15, I’ll never buy such a thing.

But you know, Rock, Paper, Shotgun has reviewed the game and been somewhat positive about it, and it’s now on 75% sale on Steam, making it a much more palatable $3.75…

… and there’s even a free demo.

Welp, the demo did its job really well on me.

I gritted my teeth through the initial overdose of sweet sappy cheesiness, smiled tolerantly at the most obvious tall, dark and arguably handsome stranger who showed up as the most likely potential boyfriend for my character, and to my surprise, found myself getting into the flow of the story, experimenting with various twists and turns and options, suspecting there was significant branching narrative potential here, and most of all, wanting the story to continue when I reached the end of the demo.

That is how you sell a game.

What I’m most impressed by is the multitude of scenes and occurrences that the writer(s) have concocted for the setting. No shortage of writer’s block here. Global school events occur over the course of the term. Vacations come and go. You’ll have the opportunity to develop relationships (not necessarily solely romantic ones) with a plethora of characters. Conflict and drama pop up everywhere, sometimes when you’re least expecting it. Time passes. Things change.

And ultimately, you do feel like you’re living the student life of the protagonist you’ve designed, and that there’s room to try another kind of protagonist for another replay at the very least.

What I would recommend is to at least give this game a chance. Don’t immediately judge it by its appearance. Download the demo to try it out – it will give you a good idea of whether you might like this style of game/visual novel at all.

I also apparently suck at magical exams and indirect, clever solutions, hitting on potential solutions a touch too late. This has earned me numerous detentions and demerits. Next game, I swear I’m making a sporty and physically inclined, direct magic flame-throwing protagonist instead.

The Very Long Night of Bruce Wayne

I’m a year late and a couple months short. I know, I know.

But I guess with the constant discounts, pretty much any gamer these days has an unplayed Steam games list, courtesy of their estimation of available time being somewhat greedier than reality.

Having -just- bought LEGO Lord of the Rings and played it up to the Balrog, for whatever twisted reason my mind decided that -now- would be a great time to finally get around to playing Batman: Arkham City.

So that’s what I’ve been up to the last couple of days while taking an extended break from Guild Wars 2.

(I see the end of Jan patch has hit, so that’s a good reason to jump back in the next few days to check things out. More thoughts on that later once I get the lay of the land again.)

I really liked how they depicted most of the iconic Batman universe characters. Ra’s al Ghul’s character design just screams ‘demon’ throughout.

I don’t want to write a review of Arkham City here – the metacritic scores don’t lie in that it’s generally agreed by most to be a very good, solid game.

I’ve spent around 26 hours in game, finished up the main storyline and most side missions but 3-4 and am currently methodically cleaning up the riddler puzzles left all over the place.

A couple are quite difficult and have been left for a later time, possibly to be looked up with a guide for a suggested strategy/optimal path, though how much help that’s going to be when muscular coordination is probably the main issue is still unknown.

I understand there’s a hard mode, as well as a New Game Plus mode for both normal and hard difficulties, but frankly, having seen it once before, it’s unlikely I’ll sit through it again. I already found normal difficulty quite challenging, a bit of a surprise since I recall having an easier time of it playing through Arkham Asylum. Either they jacked difficulty up across the board for the sequel, or I’ve lost the rhythm and timing of how to fight like Batman.

What struck me as the most surprising, and inspired this post, was how I kept thinking: maybe ‘sandbox’ ain’t that great, after all.

Let me try to explain. The thought requires some careful dissection.

It’s natural that I would end up comparing the first game, Arkham Asylum, with its sequel, Arkham City, while playing through it.

One of the things that captivated me MOST about Arkham Asylum was how phenomenally immersed I was in Batman’s world. I was Batman. Prowling around the asylum. In stealth mode smashing up thugs before they saw me. In straight beat ‘em up fights when I felt like it.

And the story never let up. It was a linear storytelling sort of game.

It’s the Spec Ops: The Line or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare type of deal. You have a map level or two – everywhere else is sneakily blocked off until later, you’ve got to go to those areas and trigger the next bit of story and have the next plot twist arrive, all the way to the end, pretty much. After which, you get to play achievement clean up if you so wish by going over all the maps with a fine tooth comb and all your gadgets to collect whatever trophy bruhaha you desire.

When the villains start monologuing, the story’s pretty good. It’s the supposed “open world” that gets to me.

In Arkham City, that feeling is somewhat… dispersed.

It’s not that there isn’t a main storyline filled with plot twists and interesting developments. There is. And it’s a good one.

It’s just… that I end up as distracted as a gerbil with ADD while running about the purported ‘sandbox’ of Arkham City (in the vein of sandboxes like GtA and its ilk.)

Instead of being focused on being Batman and singlemindedly following my goal of pursuing the heinous villain pulling the strings behind it all, I end up as Batman juggling phone calls from people as diverse as the Joker, Zsasz and Oracle, while stopping any street crimes I see, and those damn thugs just hit me so I’ll hit them back, and ooh, detective vision just showed me a camera so I better batarang it, and that shiny tripet of joker balloons, and there’s a Riddler trophy over there so let me stop to solve it because that’s one less to be back for later, and I’m really close to this TITAN barrel so I may as well make a short detour, dammit, that fucker SHOT me! Glide off, sneak back, silent takedown and take that, two bit thug. Some other guy is calling for help now – hang on, where was I again in the main storyline?

I mean, I understand that it’s nice to have that sort of freeform play experience where you get to make your own choices of what to do.

But in Arkham City, I don’t know if it’s just not that well done a sandbox, or if we’re just trying to kid ourselves because narratively, Batman is going to do it all anyway, right?

There’s no real choice per se, only the choice of what order to do it in. Batman doesn’t fail and have to live with the consequences. He doesn’t kill, the end. Or wind up with a hostage accidentally killed. He succeeds, full stop, or it’s game over, replay or quit the game. Ie. a more evolved form of the manual save/reload.

At most, you have the choice of incompletion. Perhaps I won’t be arsed to keep gliding about the city looking for assaults in progress to progress the little side mission bar until it’s done.

Yet, we as gamers can’t really seem to handle choices with consequences either. In other games, like Witcher and Mass Effect or what not, when faced with what seems to be an indelible choice that’s going to affect the storyline one way or the other, what’s the thing we most often do? Google it. Check the guide that tells you exactly what happens down either path, and pick the one whose plot you like best, or whose shiny reward is the most optimal (depending on your player personality and how important the game makes the reward.)

Which sometimes makes me think that linear story games have an elegant finality about them. I -finish- a lot more linear story games, and feel good about clearly finishing them. Bioshock, Portal, Heavy Rain, World in Conflict, whatever.

I’m still not ‘done’ with Assassin’s Creed (I’m way backward, I know), Prototype, a number of GtA variants, Saints Row 2, Red Dead Redemption and stuff like that. I haven’t picked them up in years, so I probably won’t get back to them any time soon either.

Mind you, this is already somewhat cleaned up. I’m on the third hostage of Riddler by now. There were a lot more question marks before.

Perhaps it’s just the Achiever part of me conflicting with everything else, I see a shiny icon on the minimap or the radar and I may as well check it out, or pick it up, or do whatever it is to pick up the shiny because it is there. And there are usually 404 or 606 of these tiny tasks to do.

Ironically, I never complete all of them either because the Explorer part of me is howling in fury by the 264th shiny and will sneakily divert my attention to the next shiny new game I haven’t played yet. The Achiever, who is somewhat simpleminded as these things go, promptly gets distracted by the next game’s 2 of 99 shinies.

Still, it’s a small nitpick in what is ultimately a good game – that I’m not as immersed in the Batman role, thanks to my metagame mind always counting and planning the next ‘task’ to hit.

A part of it could very well be the level design. I can’t walk six feet without stumbling across a green question mark. And that fact is even pointed out in some of the thug dialogue.

The city itself is not as varied as it could be. Or maybe one just spends too much time in the air above it.

Or it’s the fault of Detective Mode again. Late game, I spent more time in it than out. Practically every thug has a sniper rifle, assault rifle or shotgun, so you’ve -got- to see them before they see you.

It’s a dark, dismal, depressing, gothic prison with leaning buildings and lots of convenient gargoyles for Batman to grapple on to. I would have loved some really tall commercial skyscrapers like we see in the background but never get to ascend.

There are no pedestrians, no innocent passerbys to avoid, just thug after thug of one sort of another, and the harmless innocent NPC labeled ‘political prisoner.’

What is the point of immersion if it doesn’t even feel like a city to begin with? Just a concentration camp full of criminals to beat up?

I spy with my little eye, something beginning with “S.” Still more thugs.

Immersion is easier in Bethesda games like Skyrim, Morrowind, or even Fallout 3. There’s more of a sense of world, and it’s your own character you created so choices feel more meaningfully significant.

I did like the Catwoman ‘choice’ at the ending of her section though. I stood for a long time at the door to purported freedom and riches, feeling Catwoman’s conflict and eventually thought, well, what would Selina Kyle really do? And sighed, sashayed over to the ‘save Batman’ door, mourning the soon-to-be lost shiny stuff and headed out.

I hear the game will actually end there and show the dismal consequences of the other choice, before giving you a chance to retry and pick the ‘correct’ one. Which, of course, sounds a bit cheap on first hearing, but if you think of it as a automated save/load feature, then it’s not so bad. You could, of course, end the game there, but if you want to see the end of the Batman story then yeah, restart away.

Every time I play Catwoman, I feel the urge to go “Meow.” Surprisingly more immersed by her this time around. Maybe it’s just the ‘new and novel’ effect.

I almost thought we’d get to make THE ultimate choice of Batman at the ending of Arkham City. (I’m speaking in a roundabout fashion to avoid too many spoilers for those who are even further behind on their games than me. Probably not that many.)

The cutscene that took away that choice was somewhat disappointing. Narratively just, perhaps. But rather convenient.

I honestly wonder what difference it would have made if we did get to make the choice. If we chose to let Batman cross over that single line, ‘don’t kill’ and do it, why not? It’ll taint him into villainhood, sure, but what a fantastic thing to think and talk about, and the ending cutscene would still be the same.

And if we chose to offer mercy and spare the villain’s life in the end, ie. what true Batman would do, THEN show us the cutscene that takes the choice out of our hands.

That would have been fantastically poignant, methinks.

I can only guess that future sequels might have been hard to plan for if Batman made that kind of irrevocable decision at the end of only game 2.

Spec Ops: The Line – Random Thoughts

Just finished Spec Ops: The Line.

Wow.

I’ll try to avoid spoiler-ing anything here, because the game is indeed worth playing through for the atmosphere, the moral dilemmas set up in individual scenes, and some thoughtful thematic questions raised about war and what can possibly happen to soldiers and civilians in a situation where there are no clear-cut “good” choices.

Some of my screenshots are from later parts of the game, but I have tried to put them out of any kind of context whatsoever.

Just be warned that its overall theme is pretty much… War is hell.

Laying on the symbolism a bit thickly, are we?

And war, war never changes… (To quote another neat game.)

How to describe it then?

Narrative-wise, there’s a touch of Planescape: Torment with, unfortunately, a lot more plot holes and significantly more linear railroading. There’s some Heavy Rain flavor in one or two scenes, (no QTEs, don’t panic,) but I wish there was more.

It’s not Heavy Rain. I swear. There’s a certain eerie similarity of beard and likeness, perhaps.

One of my nitpicks is that in certain scenes, you are forced by the game into taking certain actions, or else the game simply doesn’t progress. I’m not so fond of that kind of narrative, it’s a bit of a lazy cop out. As gamers, we tend to do whatever the game requests us in order to see the end. Playing with moral and ethical questions regarding something the game railroaded us into doing… well, it’s a bit of a cheap trick in order to reap emotional impact – sorta like how horror game tropes are always play with lighting, play with pacing, play with scary sounds and flash something HORRIBLE onto the screen for a split second. Yeah, it gets a reaction out of us, but it’s been done.

It was interesting to observe my reactions as I played through the game. Knowing it was a game about morality, at first, I tried to be very careful about my actions. I never fired first. I waited for people to shoot at me before firing back in self-defence.

One of the nicer minor vignettes near the beginning with some moral implications. They’re not actively opposing you. Do you kill them in cold blood? Order your squad to do it for you, so your hands aren’t personally dirty? Or do you give them a chance to fight back by alerting them then shoot them while they’re holding a firearm pointed at you? Don’t think sneaking past peacefully is an option in this game though.

I even managed to avoid killing a civilian, who in one of those cheap-ish designer tricks does a sudden jack-in-the-box act in front of you, and you’re carrying a loaded gun in the midst of a firefight. (It was a near thing the first time though, I fired bullets into the floor near their feet from a combined sheer reaction of EEP and WAIT, NOT-TARGET, which was kind of fascinating to have happen.)

I like what they’ve done with this option game-wise. Sometimes when you shoot enemies, they don’t die immediately, but are still alive and may shoot back. Or simply lie there groaning.
You can choose to kill them. And opposite to Bioshock, where the goody-goody path is the obvious optimal choice in the long term, here, you get an in-game reward of ammo for the guns you’re currently carrying – as well as a violent execution animation sequence.
There was also a neat touch where the executions appeared to get more brutal after certain plot points, as contrasted with the start of the game, reflecting the state of mind the main character is in.

Unfortunately, after a couple railroading tricks where the main character acts in a way beyond my control, I started to sense that there was a narrative ride we were being sent on, like it or nay, and it began turning into a problem-solving exercise of getting to the next plot checkpoint, since I didn’t have any real options until I got to certain scripted scenes where I could choose stealth/shoot or one of two or three possible paths through a moral dilemma.

I would have much rather been faced with situations where there are no good choices, and you simply have to take one based on the available information you have, and deal with the consequences of your possibly failed intentions. (There were a few places in Spec Ops where they did appear to be trying for this, which was nice.)

The other nitpick is the story unravels a little at the end to become extremely ambiguous and open to multiple possible interpretations. Minor spoiler warning: It’s basically the ol’ unreliable narrator gimmick. Anything and everything might have been a dream after all. Oh, don’t get me wrong. The multiple endings end rather artistically. It’s not at all as bad as Indigo Prophecy where you end up going “da fuck?” after a certain point, but there’s a teensy degree of it where you’re still left trying to glue several story threads together attempting to have it make unified coherent sense. (I haven’t quite accomplished it, to be honest.)

That said, it’s a shooter that attempts to tell a very -different- kind of story about war.

If only for that, playing through the experience is worth it.

But I bought the game though. So I may as well play it to the bitter end, rather than choose not to play, eh?
Still, in a sea full of shooters who don’t even bother to reflect on deeper themes of war, a slightly incoherent, forced perspective commentary is better than none at all.