Hey guys. No major theme this week, just going over some miscellaneous stuff. Just like the title suggests, in fact. As usual, anyone who wants to skip the words and go straight for the comics can scroll to the bottom. Anyone who doesn't want to see the words or the comics can go.. watch some Quick Looks? I guess? What do people usually come to this site for? Go do that, with my blessing.

Fixing Things

So the two new games I played this week were Red Faction: Armageddon and de Blob 2: One's a disturbing, future-set action game with strong themes dealing with guilt, redemption and the perils of terrorism from a militant cultist cabal, and the other was some shooter set on Mars. Though clearly very different games, I did find two things they have in common: Magnets and fixing things.

Magnets are a little dull to talk about though. I mean, how do they work, am I right? "Poles attract", that's what she said? Sigh. Screw magnets. They were the best things in Red Faction: Armageddon though: I actually put the difficulty down so I could hurl enemies around with the magnet gun without worrying too much about getting shredded because I was supposed to use real guns on everything and play it like the horribly generic TPS game it was trying so hard to be.

The other theme, and one that recalls Dr Breen's conversation with Gordon Freeman as the latter was on his way to ruin the former's shit, is that both games deal both with the common video game theme of destruction and its less frequent opposite aspect of reconstruction: RDF's best new gimmick (I.e. one of the few that weren't carried over from Red Faction: Guerrilla or is a spiky alien/new gun, which make up most of the additions) is that the main character could use his magic.. sorry, nanotechnology glove to rebuild structures that he had either destroyed, or come across in a pre-dilapidated state. Unfortunately, despite a few forced sequences ("The bridge is out! Oh no!"), there's rarely an opportunity to use this feature in an interesting way - It's really just a way to fix the linear critical path of walkways in case you broke any of them. Kind of a shame, because the times where you're fixing something important could've been explored further in a proper sandbox like Guerrilla. It does make those annoying "protect X from damage" missions slightly more bearable if you can repair them along the way.

Similarly, de Blob 2 is all about "fixing" Blob's world by restoring colour to the surroundings. Buildings are filled in with colour, propaganda posters are replaced with vibrant murals, trees go from barren to blossoming, and so on. Any given sequence will tend to culminate with hitting the "Transformation engine", changing an enemy's stronghold into something far more innocuous. Kind of like the end of The Yellow Submarine, even. It's an addicting feeling, as you go from lifeless black & white streets and structures to almost garishly brightly-coloured locales with dozens of partying blob things, the music quietening down to a whisper and building up again as you restore more of the immediate neighborhood. It makes for a very enjoyable and good-natured experience, which is perfect if you just spent 10 hours playing a dour sci-fi shooter with ugly, spiky aliens. For example.

PAX

Ironically, the most exciting news came after PAX - that would be the Persona announcements - but it sounded like a fun time for anyone who went. I want to especially thank anyone who liked the comic I made for it: I had intended it become a small part of a larger community feature on everyone's PAX experiences, but it seemed no-one else was willing to send the interns their PAX community content. It's a good thing I have no sense of shame.

PAX, to me, seems to be becoming more like an E3 for the Indie game circuit, but I can't say I saw anything that wowed me. Besides that Antichamber game, which looks completely bizarre and obfuscating and I can't wait to try it, the rest were either out already or explored the same old themes of 2D platformers with weird physics gimmicks, tower defense and a word fighting game that looks amazingly similar to those Bookworm Adventures games that PopCap put out a while back. Which brings me to...

AV Club's Sawbuck Gamer

The Sawbuck Gamer feature, run every two weeks (or a fortnight, as we say over here in jolly old "we have more words for things, y'all" England) on the AV Club, is perhaps one of my favorite articles from that site, or from any site for that matter. Each article highlights a handful of very cheap or free games - found across the internet, mobile phones and other downloadable marketplaces - with brief descriptions and ratings and a link to the program for people to try out. It does strike me as a little pointless that they highlight games they don't find very good, rather than letting them slip past a wider audience as nature and the will of the internet had intended. The games they do like, however, are generally worth tracking down. The article I linked to has two gems in the Tanooky Tracks point and click puzzler and the genre trope defying Experimental Shooter, very reminiscent of those excellent achievement-parodying games with the tiny elephant.

It's something I wish Giant Bomb had their own variation on, because they've demonstrated - both with their heavy coverage of the making of Bastion and the fact there's such a strong community spirit here - that they're keen to do more for the little games out there that need some attention. My slightly snarky comments about the PAX 10 aside, there are some truly imaginative Indie games out there that the major gaming sites are happy to skip over as they offer no lucrative site-sponsoring bonuses. I appreciate that it's yet another thing that Giant Bomb doesn't have the manpower to cover, though. Maybe get one of the Kingterns on it after the Fear Gauntlet ends.

Bonus Comics

Deus Ex

de Blob 2

Red Faction: Armageddon