So I finished The Cave completely, and while playing that I came across a quote in it from the Bhagavad Gita, if you don't know what that is just follow the link. Instead of moving onto the wonderful DmC I ended up downloading a copy of that book and reading it cover to cover. That story is pretty fucking epic to put it mildly, and it got me to thinking, "Why hasn't India made a huge big budget blockbuster yet?" I went down a rabbit hole for about an hour reading about the state of Indian game development. The largest game I've been found to have been developed and published in India was a movie tie-in to Ghajini, which is a psychological thriller. The movie was highly successful, became the number 1 grossing Bollywood film upon release and currently stands still as number 7 highest grossing. The game though was a huge failure, apparently buggy and not promoted well. Sounds like movie tie in games here.
According to Sunil Kinshuk, which is sort of prolific indie game developer from India, there are about 20,000 game developers currently inside India as of 2011. He doesn't go onto talk about what they're doing but it's clear the vast majority are just outsourcers, with a much smaller number making mobile games. Since Ghajini The Game released and was a commercial and critical dud, the Indian market has more than doubled. All India really needs is one game to take off, the talent is there and the potential market is huge.
Before I'd read the Bhagavad Gita, my only knowledge of that epic was through Grant Morrison's 18 Days, which is basically the Hindu equivalent of Too Human and retells the Mahabharata in a future science fantasy epic. Presumably make it an RPG right? I don't know I'm rambling at this point but I just thought it would be cool to share the rabbit hole I jumped down with you guys. I want an epic Indian RPG where I can see a 10 minute summon animation of Karna or Ghatotkacha unleashing complete destruction, is that too much to ask for?
Since I'm basically still a fetus that was born only a year before Twin Peaks first aired on ABC, I had to watch it after the first air date. I bought it when it had it's first DVD release in 2001 on a whim because the internet seemed to be buzzing about it then. Ever since watching the show first 12 years ago it's occupied a special place my subconscious. From the low fidelity nature of the entire thing, to how that aesthetic plays off of how small the entire cast is for how big an undertaking the show ends up being. The only flaw in the entire two season run the fact that the story arc of Audrey and Cooper could not be extended. Now we know due to the fact Kyle MacLachlan was knocking boots with another female cast member at the time, which effectively ceased the opportunity for that originally planned story arc to happen. Inspite of this I can't be upset about it because it's an immaculate flaw for Twin Peaks to have because that's totally happens in the source material (soap operas) it draws from.
You think of all the stuff since Twin Peaks that draws inspiration from it, hell even Miyamoto,Takashi Tezuka and Eiji Aonuma cited Twin Peaks as a source of inspiration in various Zelda games. It's quite a show, I just watched it all again after the bombcast had their bit about it. The only plan of action now is to finally I guess play Alan Wake and/or watch the Deadly Premonition endurance run.
I know a lot of critics didn't like Fire Walk With Me, or didn't get, depending on who you ask (probably only me @Ryan and @Jeff ). Anyways what did you guys think of Twin Peaks? Twin Peaks discussion? Twin Peaks discussion.
Before Binary Domain graced Giantbomb with it's presence I download the demo. While playing through it with my girlfriend sitting next to me, I got to the part where Faye accompanies you on your first mission with her and Big Bo takes time to appreciate her assets. It left a really sour taste in my mouth because I could tell it made my girlfriend at the time feel uncomfortable. I turned off the demo and never looked back. That was until @patrickklepek spoiled the game on the bombcast Game of the Year deliberations, something that I read multiple users complaining about how he "said more than he should have" and "should have stopped with 1 or 2 spoilers". During the Game of the Year deliberations Binary Domain went on sale for 12.49$ on Steam for the winter sale, and after hearing what this game was all about I was on board fully, bought it immediately and just finished it last night all in one session.
The game begins really slow, & the characters are all one dimensional, which in the beginning felt like a poor decision (ie Boateng's insatiable appetite to get it on) but towards the end of the game you find it was deliberate as a story telling device. The game's basically a big budget retelling of Journey to the West with the singularity as it's plot device. @patrickklepek was correct in saying that it's story does what Mass Effect tried to do better than Bioware, which for the hammy mess it is in sequences is a grand fucking achievement by all accounts. It's a game that reminds me why I used to love console gaming, for the days when Japan ruled the video game space. Sure it's broken in spots (the voice recognition stuff is bad) and approaches Nicholas Cage levels of hammy but the game also has a heart.
This is the part where I would like to publicly voice my disgust for the people complaining about too many spoilers on the podcast. I would have never played this game without knowing what this game was actually all about, and in no way did what @patrickklepek say diminish from my experience. This is why the crew needs the ability to talk about games while they're current. Binary Domain by all accounts was a sales failure. When you look at how much Sega spent making this game, selling a little under a third of a million on consoles is not good enough. These sorts of games need a platform for when the quicklook isn't enough, because that opening section is not indicative of what makes that game special. Binary Domain is the epitome of a B-movie in video game form. No other game in recent history succeeds in that regard, both in it's production to the reception from critics and the audience. It is endearing and should be played.
These sorts of games need a soap box, so many big budget games lack any sort of heart, and this game has it in spades. I wish I had known what this game was about sooner, I would have bought it full price. Instead I find myself buying multiple to distribute to friends. Sega deserves it.
Everybody alive? Holler if you're dead! 47 Comments
During the coveted Steam winter sale I noticed Analogue A Hate Story was on sale. Being a fan of adventure games of many ilk, I was casually interested but was reticent due to the art style. I've tried to give anime a chance, but unless there's some sort of science fiction element to that anime, it usually can't grab me. The great thing about Analogue is that it has that, set in the far flung future on a derelict ship having you conversing with artificial intelligence having the player solve a murder mystery. I did not know that Analogue had a science fiction element to it until reading Rock Paper Shotguns "Wot I Think" of the game, and when I read Giantbomb user@aurahack describe the game as Space Korea I decided to give the game a chance.
First off the thing I most like about the game is the Linux style command line. Which is funny because hearing people talk about the game after having S Ranked it seems to have thrown many through a loop. To me it was incredibly straight forward, which leads to the next thing I most like about this game. It's elegantly designed. Hands down this is probably one of the most elegantly designed interactive fictions I've played. The fact that text is broken up into an email system that is searchable, easy to catalog for future reference made the puzzles flow really well. I never hit a wall in the entire puzzle solving experience, due to it's design which is sort of why I played to get all the endings. In that way the game succeeds where many for me haven't, but it also leads to the problems I have with Analogue.
Many have showered Christine Love with praise saying here that Analogue has great writing, but I don't subscribe to this. To quote someone who is the master of detective novels, Raymond Chandler. "If all the clues are there for you to solve the mystery before the end, it's not writing, it's an exercise." I unlocked the admin password before ever leaving the first command prompt screen getting the third ending. In my experience, Analogue suffered from a dual problem of being too accessible, leading to me predicting the twist before it was actually presented naturally and frankly being a bit one note in many sections. Continuous thought running through my head while reading the wall of text broken down into bite sized chunks was, "Man I know the name of the game is Analogue but did Christine Love need to take every trope she could find from tv tropes?"
In the end, I had a great time with it, more than I ever expected which is a testament to how games as an interactive medium can succeed despite their stories. It doesn't matter that the writing is ruined by the interface, the execution was well enough to carry it to the finish. In 2012, social media like twitter is be used as a platform to stop us dudes from being so obsessively lame(as I would put it) towards our fairer sex. I'm specifically referring to the #1reasonwhy political movement, that Giantbomb's very own @patrickklepek covered for us. Analogue, you quickly learn is actually retelling the story of the subservient role women had during the Joseon Dynasty in Korea. When you come across that revelation Analogue missteps for me in the writting were alleviated, to an extent. I then felt good that an indie game developer, who happens to be a woman created a wonderful exercise in interactive fiction. It stuck out for me for it's elegant design, but it left me feeling good that a woman could really show off her game making chops. That's pretty awesome. In spite of me being no Otaku, and agreeing that in many cases anime may in fact be for jerks (I kid) Analogue is a progressive work of interactive fiction and I hope to see more from Christine Love.
On one of the recent "Games of the Year" Bombcasts, Jeff Gerstmann said that Mark of the Ninja feels like a game that in an alternate universe came out in 1993 on a SNES cart. Having not played Mark of the Ninja at that time, it got me more interested in that game than I had previously. Thankfully it was on steam sale, which I quickly snagged. Having just started Waking Mars, I decided to put Mark of the Ninja on hold. But what Jeff said continued to resonate with me while playing Waking Mars, in many ways for a completely opposite reason that Mark of the Ninja did for Brad Shoemaker.
To start off saying something positive before saying something negative, Waking Mars is a non-linearopen worldadventure game with a farming mechanic set in a mars cave that was for me evocative of a Stanisław Lem novel. Lem being the polish author of the highly coveted Solaris but I'm specifically referring to Eden. On top of creating a really weird world, they clash it with really fun sound track, that fits the player movement in each segment and funnier voice acting that was bad in the right ways. Specifically your A.I. buddy having the same voice of claptrap, and it's bad, but the game knows it's bad and jokes about it which was genuinely funny. I'm giving this small game a lot of praise, so let me turn the corner. It controls bad, on controller it's fine but on PC with mouse and keyboard it's bad and iPad it's abysmal so if you're going to play it I would say get the PC version and plug in a controller. On top of it not controlling quite the way you would like it, the animations just looks rough.
After I completed Waking Mars I put in Mark of the Ninja and it's the complete opposite. The animations and controls are incredibly tight. That said a lot of the other parts of the game aren't as memorable. Whether it's the music, the world you're doing your dirt in but that doesn't matter because it controls so well and the animation is impeccable. Shank looked great while it was animating, but this is the best looking Klei game I've played to date. Games from the 'SNES era' that were good for the most part had a very solitary focus due to their scope. Both Waking Mars and Mark of the Ninja feel to me like games from that era in that they set out to do one or two things well, and they do those things great. Going forward as the line between retail and downloadable games fade, and we embrace this pantsless games via download future it's funny how much the future looks like the past.
TheVerticalIntegration of Game Development & Consuming Games through the Endless BETA
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Vertical integration is usually term used in economics to describe the merging of similar but different businesses in the same supply chain to reduce costs & quicken the overall process. The most obvious example of this in recent history has been of course Minecraft, but in 2012 there were a lot of games as I made my Game of the Year list that I came across that followed this model. The one that made the cut was Endless Space. A reductive but apt description would be it is not dissimilar to Civilization V but in space, it has seen constant balancing. The game I bought upon release is a completely different game than when I first bought it, with more changes than I could list here. Not only has the game been constantly balanced but they've added content for free. An entirely new race has been added since release, one which the fans voted for. In an age where cosmetic DLC that does not add much to the game is the norm, here is an example of a game developer expanding the value of their game. Making smart additions that iterating on themselves and games in the genre, evolving their original product to being a much more appealing package.
The game pictured above, Proteus, has won various awards such as best audio at INDIECADE 2011 and was a 2012 Nuovo Finalist at IGF. In it's current version on their @dkanaga & @edclef website you can buy the game for $7.50, which is weird. It's reminiscent of a conversation Tested.com duo had with Adam Savage on their Still Untitled podcast about reading the script of a film before it's release for me. In game development just like a Tarantino film, the final product is often times improvisation of the original vision. Developers don't know how players are actually going to interact in their world, or with their game, and this testing allows the developer to understand how to improvise the development to better suit the game. Inversely it allows the gamer to see the evolution of the artists original vision. Just as in Endless Space, Proteus is a game that will feel as different a product could feel as it was when I first played it.
That leads me to the Don't Stave. That new Klei joint, a game you may all have seen via quicklook or heard on the bombcast seems to be pushing this model to a welcomed extreme. Patches are regularly scheduled each week, with sweeping changes to balance each time new content added. It's unknown if more developers would adopt this model, the logistics are weird, but with the rise of kickstarter and pay less for early access, one would think it's the future.
Adventure Games: Old Trends New Again
In 2010 and 2011 two games were released in each of year, Heavy Rain and LA Noire, which sold okay. Whether they were commercial successes is unimportant here, the fact that huge budgets were being spent on Adventure games rejuvenated the rest of the genre. In 2012 there are many more adventure games than usual. The obvious popular choice being The Walking Dead, despite it's technical issues I enjoyed it immensely. Aside from The Walking Dead we had a plethora of classic puzzle style adventure games. Really there are more than I should list but of what I've played, Yesterday, Botanicula, A New Beginning, and the opening of Primordia, I can say this is the best year for Adventure games of the classic puzzle variety in a long time. Much of that may be due to the rise of Steam and iPads. A lot of it may also be due to the larger budget games bringing new fans to the genre. Either way the market is saturated.
In related trends 2012 has seen a surge of first person graphical adventure games. From aforementioned Proteus, to the uncanny Miasmata and ghastly Dear Esther. These games really created worlds worth sauntering in. Much like the model of the endless BETA, it is unknown if this will see if this trend has staying power. These games all astonished in some way, having those slack-jawed eyes widening sense of wonder moments that I couldn't remember having in games since I had first started playing them. Thinking back this is the most baffling trend due to the unknown of whether it's commercially viable or not, but it is the trend I would like to see more of.
Starflight 2 Trade routes of the Cloud Nebula: Due to the magic of Good Old Games I have been able to play this Amiga classic. Gary Whitta'sComputer Gaming World said that it was "a universe with so many cultures, personalities, options and plot twists that it is easy for players to suspend their disbelief." In 2012 that statement held true for my experience. It's a space opera farce without being a ripoff of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and was by far the funniest game I've played all year.
Largest Disappointment of 2012
The Walking Dead: This was one of the best games I played all year, also most infuriating due to the fact I was one of the countless people with the save game bug. Every episode Telltale would tell me the problem was fixed, and every release of a new episode would corrupt my save file. This is an insurmountable disappointment, in a game that probably had the most empowering female character I've come across in a game. I love adventure games, Grim Fandango is my all time favorite game but Telltale ambition continues to outpace their technical expertise and it's hopelessly frustrating. Having to replay that first episode 5 times because they couldn't fix their save system lifted the curtain and destroyed their artifice they created.
2011's 2012 Game of the Year
Portal 2: There is something relaxing and melodic to solving a Portal 2 puzzle, and with the Perpetual Testing Initiative I dropped about forty plus hours solving these puzzles in 2012. Even though there's a threshold for how far you can take the map creation, I was continually surprised at how creative folks were with such limited tools. Portal 2 sent me down quite a rabbit hole in 2011 with it's story but in 2012 it sent me down a rabbit hole for entirely different reasons and I am forever thankful to Valve for extending the life of their game with such a robust tool.
To put it frankly, in my experiences, there was no game in 2012 I played with a higher volume of banana riders. While I may chalk this up to the reverence people had for the original, I really believe that by design the game attracts a helpful community. Not once did I hear someone complain about kill death ratio, the commander was scolded but it was always done so in a genteel fashion. That's an accomplishment. Aside from the community being great, the game somehow for having two widely differently playing races feels balanced, which is crazy to me.
Unlike The Walking Dead, FTL to me was the most infuriating game I've played all year, but in the best possible way. While I do enjoy rogue likes, I don't enjoy them as much as many of the fans of the genre do. It's a rather exclusive club, and increasingly naval gazey genre. Pot shots aside, the game is the exception to that rule. Its not so much hard as it requires a zen amount of patience.
This game has the best game soundtrack of the year hands down. Match the banging soundtrack with the Warioware gameplay and you got yourself quite a package. There isn't much more to say about this one other than, go experience it for yourself. Remember when in doubt, kick it.
This game created a group of millennials that at the offset I hated with a passion, and three excellently voice acted islanders which by the end of the game gave me quite a bit of Stockholm syndrome. The story was stupid, but the characterization was excellent, and at the end of the day I had a lot of fun just playing with the open world. Like the time I was sent flying off a mountain, did a 360 flip onto a water buffalo, jump out of the truck only to see it continue to roll and flip until it exploded killing a Tapir. I could go on, there were many of these but you get the point.
This wasn't just a modification to the original Half Life, it was an homage to it. Often times in mods that revise the graphics of the games I once loved, I end up longing for the original out of nostalgia for the experience I had originally. Black Mesa was a new experience for me but at the same time was familiar.
My most recent finished game on the list having just finished it last night, Miasmata is a stunning game. Much like Anno 2070 in 2011, the complexity of the systems required to master it had me jotting down notes in my notebook. I can say as someone who goes backpacking, and is a huge fan of the works of John Muir, Miasmata is wonderful. While playing the game I was reminded of the parable of sauntering written by Muir, and despite my illness I made sure to saunter through the island consuming all there was that it had to offer casually. The patience this gave me allowed me to get over my initial panic of my first encounter with the monster and the game opened up for me past this point.
I'm just going to quote my original Steam recommendation monologue I created in my head while playing here:
"We are the all seeing race of Amoebas, our cosmopolitan adaptation favoring progress through diplomacy and trade with all organisms make us the premier proprietors of peace in all the known galaxy. Our neighbors predisposed towards destructive consumption & expansion through violence will meet a cleansing by our hands and the hands of our confederates."
If that monologue sounds uninteresting to you then I can't recommend this game.
Even though the reveal of the Leviathans is STRIKINGLY similar to another race in a science fiction trilogy I love, I almost don't care because Mass Effect 3 gave me a high budget Hollywood style vision of that concept. Whether it's hearing Javik be racist to every species except for the Krogan, giving Grunt his fucking due. Seeing this scene while playing From Ashes after I had kept EDI and Javik on every mission was fucking mind blowing. It was that moment where I paused the game, and yelled out into an empty house, "WHAT THE FUCK!" Much like Grunt and Legion from Mass Effect 2, they were the characters I built an emotional bond with. Seeing them get into it in this way was incredible. Aside from that this game mechanically plays much better on a PC with mouse and keyboard than it's predecessors, and the multiplayer is exciting. It sucks that many of you probably didn't play Mass Effect 3 with the DLC prior to the ending, but I did and only the foolish mourn the loss of innocence.
In a world where gross enjoyment determined everything, Super Monday Night Combat would have won for 2012 handily. UberEnt took two of my favorite games DotA and Team Fortress Classic, and said how can we merge these two concepts. The result was a game that I dropped three hundred plus hours on. Unlike Natural Selection 2 this sort of game does not by design attract friendly players. This is the nature of the beast and I was able to get over this in part due to the fact the skill ceiling for me felt incredibly high. If more people played the game regularly I would still be playing it but as more shooters were released the community shrank.
I'm going to preface this by saying I am a huge fan of Hong Kong New Wave cinema, I own all the subject material that Sleeping Dogs pays homage to, and I can say as a huge fan of that Sleeping Dogs feels genuine. Many reviewers point out the drastic change in tone in the story(and gameplay switching to guns) half way through the game as a negative, to put this into context. Sleeping Dogs starts with the pacing of a Johnnie To film, then quickly transitions to being more in line with a Chow Yun-Fat film. I not only didn't mind this but I understood the design decision, and loved it for this. This accompanied by all the smart throwbacks in gameplay to what made Bully great, Sleeping Dogs was a wonderful game that everyone should play. Thanks Mike Skupa, I'm glad you got to make a spiritual successor to Bully.
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