Quick thoughts on recent games

I'm far behind on posting, so let's start clearing out the backlog with a mini-review lightning round.



Every Extend Extra is a shooter where the goal is to blow yourself up. You're given a stock of ships, replenished one at a time as certain point totals are met, and are sent into the enemy swarm with the goal of taking out as many foes as possible with each suicidal denotation. (Don't fret - it's from the minds that made Lumines and Rez, so you're dealing with abstracted shapes instead of kamikaze pilots.) Gameplay survives on the hectic - explosions chain outward as the ships in your blast radius detonate and take out their kin in turn, so you'll need to put yourself in the thick of it (and collect as many enemy-attracting powerups as possible) to get enough 1-ups to make it to the end of the level, which comes only when you explode enough enemies. A time limit, however, assures that you can't dawdle too long to line up the perfect "shots." The game never pushes its ArtStyle aesthetic or the unique gunless mechanics of its gameplay very far, though, and a couple ancillary irritants - there's no means of telling how long your invincibility lasts when you respawn, and the multi-chain hits you need to fell bosses don't count if the bosses are touched directly by the explosion of your own ship - exacerbate the frustration. The devolution of later boss fights into bullet hells didn't charm me, either. An intriguing idea that didn't build enough on its flash-game origins. For a more successful sideways take on the shooter, get the DS Big Bang Mini.



Maxis always referred to its early Sims titles as toys instead of games, an appellation I think very much applies to Home, a homebrew adventure designer Benjamin Rivers is selling all on his lonesome for a paltry $2. It claims to be horror, but it isn't really - it's more an examination of storytelling in games and how it interacts with gameplay. Devoid of saving and engineered to be completed in one 2-3 hour gameplay session, Home is designed around its replayability - you're supposed to make different choices each time through and see how they affect the endgame. For me, the big draw was the art: large pixels with simple but effective animation and good use of color for lighting and shading effects. The controls, like everything else about the presentation, are deceptively straightforward and user-friendly, and effective use of ambient sound helps provide good atmosphere throughout. Despite this, I think the end amounts to less than what the build-up promises - but I like the graphical style, I like the distribution method, and I would really like to see more from this creator, so I suggest hitting up the site and checking it out.



One of the big limitations of RPGMaker games is that they tend to have no design sense, as the creators are assembling their titles from off-the-shelf parts and you spend the games staring at the tile sets playing guess-the-16-bit-RPG. That idea's turned on its head in Ib (pronounced "eeb"), a survival horror title all about art - the titular nine-year-old protagonist is on a visit to the local gallery when the lights go down, the visitors vanish, and she's stranded in an eerie otherworld where the exhibits have turned hostile. Foremost among Ib's achievements is that it passes the acid test so many other horror titles fail: is it scary? That's where Ib cashes in on its setting, as horror rides on imagery more than most genres, depending on nightmarish visuals that linger in the recesses of your memory; Ib provides horror with shocks and surprises and omigod-omigod-get-it-away moments, all nimbly done, but also with inventive, stylishly-conceived creatures that rank among horror's most haunting bugaboos.

The gameplay end of the bargain shouldn't be undersold, though; it's accessible and user-friendly and balances the quick-trigger survival-horror, slower-paced puzzle-solving, and unnerving roaming-around-and-looking aspects quite well. Also welcome are the frequent save points: you're never set back that far, which allows the developer to be a little bolder with the environmental hazards. True, the endings are a bit lackluster, and a few of the hoops through which you have to jump to get the best one are kind of unclear (when it's available, use the Talk function a lot. A lot. A loooooooooooooot). Also, the artist's drawing skills (not pixel art; actual anime line art) are rough in the couple stills that require them, but that doesn't matter much in the long run at all. Ib's mechanics are strong and the visuals memorable and it told a story with characters about whom I cared. I want more of this.
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Eternal Darkness roundup

All right, I just finished Eternal Darkness tonight, so let's get that out of the way, too. Actually, let's get this out of the way beforehand: Eternal Darkness isn't scary. It's "horror" in a drugstore-Halloween type of way, with neon glowing Evil Magic and Count Chocula laughs and what have you. The game's much-hailed "sanity effects" (where your character starts hallucinating once they've seen enough eldritch horrors, which sometimes manifests in faux technical glitches like your GameCube pretending to turn off, etc.) are the best effort to that end, but while they're novel surprises, I didn't really find them scary. I called the game "grade-A stupid" when I started it (and semi-abandoned it) a couple months ago, and while it gets better in its second half as the locations get more interesting and the plot starts to offer something in its vignettes beyond "protagonist attempts to stand against darkness but fails and is killed in an anticlimactic fashion," it's still all kinda...well, goofy. I mean, the ship sorta left the harbor after the scene where the game's Cthulhu-alike ordered a hit on Charlemagne by name - maybe it's me, but I'd think an extradimensional superbeing beyond time and reason would be a bit above meddling in Western European politics. (Then there's how that level's main objective is to warn Charlemagne of a murder plot against him - by hunting down the key to the plain ol' wooden door to his conference room, a door that's so thin you can hear Charlemagne talking on the other side. You can't use your protagonist's broadsword to break the door down? You can't shout?!)

The gameplay, while rich and well-thought-out with its three status meters and tons of spells that you need to use liberally throughout the game, kind of contributes to the problem. In Resident Evil, you can never be sure from where your foes will pop up next or even if they're truly dead when you appear to kill them, and you're usually desperately low on ammo and resources. In Silent Hill, you're constantly outclassed and can't fight worth spit (which is largely a genuine gameplay problem but does add to the tension in the early going). Here, you've got so many options and wards and protections at your offensive and defensive disposal that you never feel really desperate, really unassured of your own survival. I mean, there're places where you can be stuck or have trouble getting past a certain enemy or take a chunk of damage if you forget to cast your walking-tank spells, but there're a lot of buffers between you and death, and you never have to worry over your meager remaining bullets because they might be your last.

I'm lukewarm on Eternal Darkness, but I have to say that it's an ambitious game. It's not a case with me of "you like that? REALLY?" as per Earthbound. There's a good amount of depth to the gameplay, as noted, and production values are high, with solid voice acting and some striking archaeological & architectural tableaux in the last few chapters. I appreciated, too, how the game centered around a few locations but built on them and showed different sides of them as the centuries elapsed and various routes within were blocked off or extended or changed - a musty temple takes on a different character covered in vines and reclaimed by nature, etc. I think there could've been more variety in protagonists for a tale that spans the ages - out of twelve characters, we have a grand total of three who aren't white and two who aren't male. I suppose the scenarios they envisioned limited the protagonist demographics somewhat, but come on, throw us a bone, here. (Also: projectile weapons are hilariously bad, as you need to target weak points to fight the big monsters effectively and the guns, for some counterintuitive reason, just aren't good at that. You do have a satisfying range of melee weapons, though, all of which handle suitably differently.)

Favorite chapter: probably Edward's; I thought the game's R'lyeh was effectively foreign and humblingly huge yet boasted a suitably strange beauty, and there was a good assortment of stuff to do. Peter's never got a chance, really, because my game stopped letting me save for some reason a quarter of the way through the chapter, which was particularly frustrating for such a combat-heavy level. I gather this was a glitch but am not sure.

The end fight was great. I'm a sucker for those FFIV-esque "fallen allies come back to lend you their power" endings.

Final time was a bit over 14 hours, which I gather is a couple hours over the average. Overall, it finished better than it started, and I can't get on the "all-time classic" or even "recommended" train, but it does have more meat on its bones than it initially let on.
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