The next game I will be playing through is another First-Person Shooter, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.
Originally released on October 14th, 2014 (which was also my 32nd birthday) The Pre-Sequel is the third game in the Borderlands series and is called such because it takes place between the first and second games, hence a Prequel to BL2 and a Sequel to BL1. It also was not developed by Gearbox Interactive, the development team of the first two.
As of writing The Pre-Sequel is sitting at a "Very Positive" rating on Steam with 80% of the 9,642 reviews giving it a thumbs up. I seem to recall some early reviews saying the humor doesn't quite hit the same as the other two, that it's trying too hard to be as off-kilter as Borderlands 2 which itself was already trying a little too hard to be bonkers.
I bought the game on March 19th, 2016 because it was the first I had learned of the new "Complete Your Collection" bundles on Steam that gave a proportionally bigger discount based on how many of the bundles games you already own. I got the Pre-Sequel for $4.80 as part of the Borderlands Triple Pack because I already owned BL1 and BL2.
I've enjoyed Borderlands 2 very much, with approximately 92 hours played since I bought it in 2012 it is the game I've played the second longest with Skyrim beating it by less than 3 hours of play time. I don't know that I will care for the story, the ad copy says it's all about Handsome Jack's backstory and I'm rather lukewarm to his character; as Yahtzee Croshaw said in his BL2 review on Zero Punctuation Handsome Jack spends far too much of his time talking reminding you of how evil he is.
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Thursday, June 22, 2017
Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter Impressions
Late post as I've been incredibly busy for the last two weeks and have had barely any time to play.
Anyway, Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter.
It absolutely lives up to its claim of bringing back the gameplay of the 1993 DOOM. Frenetic is how I'd describe my experience so far. After a paper-thin opening crawl over a starfield that pans over to Earth, the game throws you into the opening stage that's reminiscent of an Egypt-themed Unreal Tournament level and starts throwing enemies at you in waves that are fairly manageable for the first half. As the game progresses, very quickly the number and diversity of enemies are increased to where you have to bounce around trying to dodge all the pounce attacks and slow-moving bullets careening across the room.
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| Here is the first enemy you are up against. Yes, he is holding his head in his right hand and there is a circular saw blade embedded in his neck. |
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| This guy is a mini-boss you meet just outside the last area of the first level. |
The pace is very hectic, and I've found myself worn out after just under 40 minutes of play and dying a couple of times some way into the second level. If I had a lot more experience playing arena shooters I think I could handle the gameplay better.
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| There is a certain humor in the game, for example after this stone sphere comes to rest Sam whistles the first couple bars of the Indiana Jones theme. |
For my recommendation, if you like arena shooters and the pace of games like the 1993 DOOM and 1996's Quake this will definitely satisfy you. Since it appears the Serious Sam series is complete, the whole shebang is available on Steam and on sale fairly regularly. In the current Summer Sale 2017 the Serious Sam Complete Pack is 92% off at $11.89 which is about $2.50 less than what I paid for the at-the-time Complete Pack 5 years ago.
Thursday, June 15, 2017
Playthrough 008: Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
The next game I will play is Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter.
Released on November 24th, 2009 Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter is a remake of the first Serious Sam game. As of writing the overall rating on Steam is Very Positive with 93% of users giving a positive review. I bought this during the Steam Winter Sale of 2012 as part of the Serious Sam Complete Pack because it looked like a really good deal.
I'm looking forward to running around in this because when it first came out Serious Sam was billed as a throwback to the maniacal pace of early shooters like the first DOOM and Quake. I haven't played much of any of the Serious Sam games, I've put in about half an hour into Serious Sam 3 and about 20 minutes in Serious Sam Double D XXL which is a weird 2D platform shooter.
Released on November 24th, 2009 Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter is a remake of the first Serious Sam game. As of writing the overall rating on Steam is Very Positive with 93% of users giving a positive review. I bought this during the Steam Winter Sale of 2012 as part of the Serious Sam Complete Pack because it looked like a really good deal.
I'm looking forward to running around in this because when it first came out Serious Sam was billed as a throwback to the maniacal pace of early shooters like the first DOOM and Quake. I haven't played much of any of the Serious Sam games, I've put in about half an hour into Serious Sam 3 and about 20 minutes in Serious Sam Double D XXL which is a weird 2D platform shooter.
Thursday, June 8, 2017
Bionic Commando: Rearmed Impressions
Hoo boy, this is a tough one.
I really think having not played the original NES version has completely eliminated any nostalgia I could have for this remake. The control scheme is really hard to wrap my head around: there is no jump. A 2D platformer with no jump. What the hell? The only way to hoist yourself over any waist-high obstacle is to grab above you--at an angle--to pull yourself into a Tarzan swing which you may or may not launch out of depending on how long the game engine thinks you've held down the direction key for.
That is chief among my issues with this game, a fundamentally different control scheme which goes entirely against the rest of the last 30 years of platformer games I have played. Sure, it's striking out into new territory, but Christ is it hard to get comfortable with. So far with just under an hour of playtime I'm already wanting to be done with it.
Functionally, the game is good. Aside from the Tarzan-swing and release, the controls are snappy and responsive. The graphics are good enough, the camera is zoomed out very far in order to allow you to see the areas of the level you need to get to so the character models aren't that detailed. The music is, ah, early 2000s generic techno; advertisement background music, basically. No one's going to go out of their way to buy the soundtrack, if you know what I mean.
The first level is rather simple, but it is meant to be an "on the job training" so to speak for the players who don't bother with the Level 0 training mission, or the basic tutorial from the main menu. There's an intelligence hacking minigame that's a rather interesting puzzle. It's a 3D version of the ice block puzzle you see in lots of adventure-type games. In hacking, you have a wireframe cube that contains some number of red cubes, a green cube, and your yellow orb that you have to navigate from the starting point to the green cube. You do this by rotating the entire structure so that you can aim the orb to the next red cube, you can only send your orb moving forward in one direction until it is stopped by something else and if it flies out of the wireframe you fail the puzzle. I found that with the first two hacking puzzles I had to study them to figure out the route I needed to take because there are several dead ends.
There's another minigame you can play at friendly bases which are Challenge Levels. These levels really put you to the test of how well you know the movement system with many of them being Super Meat Boy or I Want to Be the Guy levels of brutal. Going through some of the earlier Challenge Levels did help me get better at maneuvering with the grapple arm, however the dropping straight down off of platforms with no sideways momentum is still rather jarring when I'm trying to move in a downward direction.
In revisiting the game again I found a weird issue with the control configuration. I initially began playing it with keyboard bindings because Steam Big Picture mode warned me against using a controller--the game was published on Xbox and PlayStation so of course it supports controllers--but later on I loaded it with my controller anyway. Now coming back to it again I cannot switch back to keyboard input, it's "stuck" on controller bindings.
At the end I'm feeling moderately to very unsatisfied with the game. I'm sure it's faithful to the original, they seem to have worked very hard to have callbacks to it in the feel and behavior. But as I said in my introduction last week I've never played the original so I have no nostalgia for it and the unique gameplay has been uncomfortable.
At $10 on Steam I don't recommend buying it, even bundled with the 3rd-person "modern" sequel for $15. Maybe when it's on sale for $2, but unless you loved the original NES version and would like to play it with graphics like This War of Mine I don't think this is one to seek out.
I really think having not played the original NES version has completely eliminated any nostalgia I could have for this remake. The control scheme is really hard to wrap my head around: there is no jump. A 2D platformer with no jump. What the hell? The only way to hoist yourself over any waist-high obstacle is to grab above you--at an angle--to pull yourself into a Tarzan swing which you may or may not launch out of depending on how long the game engine thinks you've held down the direction key for.
That is chief among my issues with this game, a fundamentally different control scheme which goes entirely against the rest of the last 30 years of platformer games I have played. Sure, it's striking out into new territory, but Christ is it hard to get comfortable with. So far with just under an hour of playtime I'm already wanting to be done with it.
Functionally, the game is good. Aside from the Tarzan-swing and release, the controls are snappy and responsive. The graphics are good enough, the camera is zoomed out very far in order to allow you to see the areas of the level you need to get to so the character models aren't that detailed. The music is, ah, early 2000s generic techno; advertisement background music, basically. No one's going to go out of their way to buy the soundtrack, if you know what I mean.
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| This is your typical start of a level: you parachute in and enter whatever location you've landed in,. You can see the level map in the lower right corner, that's a poster in-game rather than an overlay. |
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| This level is pitch black until you've collected the Flares upgrade at one of the friendly camps on the way. I got about halfway through by muddling along in the dark the first time but it wasn't pleasant. |
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| This level is a sewer, I am riding this purple slime ball wherever it is taking me. My only recourse is either to grapple out of it or the slime rolls over a fan like the one to the right. |
The first level is rather simple, but it is meant to be an "on the job training" so to speak for the players who don't bother with the Level 0 training mission, or the basic tutorial from the main menu. There's an intelligence hacking minigame that's a rather interesting puzzle. It's a 3D version of the ice block puzzle you see in lots of adventure-type games. In hacking, you have a wireframe cube that contains some number of red cubes, a green cube, and your yellow orb that you have to navigate from the starting point to the green cube. You do this by rotating the entire structure so that you can aim the orb to the next red cube, you can only send your orb moving forward in one direction until it is stopped by something else and if it flies out of the wireframe you fail the puzzle. I found that with the first two hacking puzzles I had to study them to figure out the route I needed to take because there are several dead ends.
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| Here is one of the hacking puzzles. You have 2-axis control to rotate the cube and the yellow ball will move in the closest approximation to straight forward. The blue cubes are transporters: you enter one and exit the other in parallel going in the same direction. |
There's another minigame you can play at friendly bases which are Challenge Levels. These levels really put you to the test of how well you know the movement system with many of them being Super Meat Boy or I Want to Be the Guy levels of brutal. Going through some of the earlier Challenge Levels did help me get better at maneuvering with the grapple arm, however the dropping straight down off of platforms with no sideways momentum is still rather jarring when I'm trying to move in a downward direction.
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| This is one of the more difficult Challenge Levels titled The Lost Hope. The floors and ceilings are spikes and you have to grapple the white scaffolding to change direction. So far I've made over 40 attempts and none have succeeded. |
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| There one more game mode that I don't know if it's in the original. This is top-down like Ikari Warriors and happens when your helicopter collides with any of the enemy convoys that are moving around the overworld map at the same time you are. |
In revisiting the game again I found a weird issue with the control configuration. I initially began playing it with keyboard bindings because Steam Big Picture mode warned me against using a controller--the game was published on Xbox and PlayStation so of course it supports controllers--but later on I loaded it with my controller anyway. Now coming back to it again I cannot switch back to keyboard input, it's "stuck" on controller bindings.
At the end I'm feeling moderately to very unsatisfied with the game. I'm sure it's faithful to the original, they seem to have worked very hard to have callbacks to it in the feel and behavior. But as I said in my introduction last week I've never played the original so I have no nostalgia for it and the unique gameplay has been uncomfortable.
At $10 on Steam I don't recommend buying it, even bundled with the 3rd-person "modern" sequel for $15. Maybe when it's on sale for $2, but unless you loved the original NES version and would like to play it with graphics like This War of Mine I don't think this is one to seek out.
Thursday, June 1, 2017
Playthrough 007: Bionic Commando: Rearmed
The next game that I'm playing is Bionic Commando: Rearmed.
First released on August 14th, 2008, I bought it as part of the Humble Capcom Bundle in October, 2015.
This is a remake of the NES side-scroller Bionic Commando which is kind of like Contra but with a grappling hook. I never played the original, so this will be a new experience for me. The description copy claims that this version has a "2.5D" world, which is odd because the original was straight 2D, and 2.5D typically means there are several "lanes" that you can switch between while moving left and right. We'll see if there's free movement around the platforms and how that affects aiming the grappling arm.
Currently the overall rating on Steam is "Mostly Positive" with 76% of reviews rate the game positively, we shall see how feel about it after my play session this weekend.
First released on August 14th, 2008, I bought it as part of the Humble Capcom Bundle in October, 2015.
This is a remake of the NES side-scroller Bionic Commando which is kind of like Contra but with a grappling hook. I never played the original, so this will be a new experience for me. The description copy claims that this version has a "2.5D" world, which is odd because the original was straight 2D, and 2.5D typically means there are several "lanes" that you can switch between while moving left and right. We'll see if there's free movement around the platforms and how that affects aiming the grappling arm.
Currently the overall rating on Steam is "Mostly Positive" with 76% of reviews rate the game positively, we shall see how feel about it after my play session this weekend.
May Game Purchases
Here are the games I purchased in May.
Humble Very Positive Bundle
- Super Mega Baseball: Mega Innings
- Deadly Tower of Monsters
- Hacknet
- Crashlands
- UnderRail
- Stephen's Sausage Roll
- Curious Expedition
Humble TinyBuild Bundle
- Divide by Sheep
- SpeedRunners
- Party Hard
- Final Station
- Cluster Truck
- Guts and Glory
- Streets of Rogue
Humble Indie Bundle 18
- Ziggurat
- Windward
- SteamWorld Heist
- Kentucky Route Zero
- Beholder
- Goat Simulator GOATY Edition
- Owlboy
- Neon Drive
Free Games
- Rising Storm GOTY - Humble Store Promotion
- Starpoint Gemini 2 - Steam Store Promotion
$38 spent on 22 games plus 2 more on promo, Steam retail value of $405.51. So a savings of nearly 91% over retail, which is about par for the course. This brings my Steam-reported game library to 1,045.
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