Lately it seems, lots of fantastic games are coming out one after another. I wanted to dig into a game this weekend and it was a tough choice. I had 5 or 6 great indie and remaster titles I was weighing as options, most coming out for 15 - 20 bucks. I chose Hollow Knight - it was my "must play" out of the bunch. Unfortunately, after installing and getting the popcorn going, my girlfriend and I settled in to a new game, only to watch freezes and strange bugs ruin the experience. Every time I attack anything, there's a second of freezing. When I go into a new room, even in the same area, the loading times are atrocious, and nothing but a black screen for 7 or so seconds. These two small bugs make the entire, beautiful, sprawling game unplayable. Also, I'm without a game this weekend because I blew my money on this gorgeous and unplayable game. Find a forum where people have the same problem, and all the responses are "I'm not having any issues with that..." etc. I don't have the time or inclination to research patches and contact support and do re installs for hours. I gave it an hour of work but.... yeah, look, I get into games to ESCAPE tedious bureaucracy like that. This is a wider criticism, but I think the games industry has problems with mob mentality. I've played many games made with Unity, and they all have issues with feeling SOLID. And yet, criticism of Unity are always accompanied by the same old mobs of Unity snobs defending it for.... reasons. No room for a mixed opinion with ideologues. Many modern 3D games feel.....soft. And despite years of higher fidelity, a sphere made of polygons is still just weird looking. There's this weird delay in everything - responsiveness and robustness has given way to overblown particle effects, cheap looking paper walls, and shiny wet rain effects. In the days of Mario World, I felt a visceral, immediate response when I pressed that jump key, satisfying as playing a note on a piano. There wasn't a single issue with performance drops or stuttering frames. This is the most important thing to me in games, a feeling of perfect connection to the game world. I actually think it's at the foundation of what a game is - a set of rules that reward or punish you for your actions, without randomness. Something about our overwrought, 3D-obsessed, particle effects obsessed ethos has created games and a community which has lost it's way. Ultimately I'm just saddened that I can't enjoy this masterpiece.
I have extremely positive memories of MDK2. I thought I would pick up the original, and after five or six frustrating starts, I'm annoyed enough to write a nitpicky review. Firstly, I was hit with some issues with this gog/pc version. The screen wouldn't stretch/fit to be truly fullscreen, so my game screen is smaller and with an annoying border, which changes colors randomly. Distracting. Also, the controls were annoying to map, but that's pretty par for the course I suppose. I was using a gamepad and got the controls pretty tight, although it is odd to not be able to move the camera around, as we're probably all used to by now from modern games. Often the camera sits almost on the ground. You can save I guess? Now I'm seeing you can save by pressing F2 on some of these comments. In fact, I probably would have looked harder for a 'save' function, but everyone was saying 'you can't save' etc... Would have been good to know. I was waiting for a checkpoint that never came. I got pretty darned far, 30 minutes or so into the level, and died a cheap death and had to start all over. That's usually forgivable, but I didn't even know what killed me. Sometimes guys with nukes just run up and completely end you. But I did the same thing FIVE times. I got to the same general area and died cheap deaths of various kinds.... like, I would have 80 health and then just DIE somehow....and then on "continue" the game would start me at the beginning, minus the intro sequence. What? In my opinion, the game just gets so tedious, especially the zoom/snipe mechanic. Granted, I played the first 30 minutes over and over, but.... I'm done. Wish I had bought something else.... just my opinion.
I'd never played this, even when these types of adventure games were less of a rare animal. It surprised me with it's intense and unrelenting charm - I profoundly LIKED being in the weird world the game presents, and I LIKED meeting all the characters. I even liked the little "shrugging" animation of the main character when you try to execute something that doesn't work (which happens often). After giving Gemini Rue a play recently, that fact was refreshing: in Gemini Rue, the character demeans the player often for not doing the correct action - but in these games, the "correct action" often amounts to "what am I thinking", and can be totally arbitrary - but when your characters and game world is relentlessly likeable and fun, you can forgive it! Another thing this game does well is the exploring. There are lots of interesting new areas, and it understands the true payoff in games like this - getting into a new area and getting to explore. I had to look up a walkthrough for two or three bits, which were annoying - don't give the player a metal bar AND a wrench when it just means you have to try TWO objects out on everything because they often do the same thing. One door in the game is locked - Foster, the protagonist, comments that the lock on the door is one of the old fashioned kind. I figured that explicitly meant DON'T try the digital keycards on the lock.... I would need another old-school type key or something. But no, after 30 minutes of wandering around, it turned out he uses the keycard to pick the lock.... seriously? There are one or two misleading puzzles like that which are arbitrary and flow-killing.... ...but the game nicely picks up pace as you progress. That was a great feature as well - the huge payoff as you advance the levels and story. Excellent, unique, fun game. It shows exactly what's wrong with some of these modern, nostalgia based games like Gemini Rue - they forgot to be unique and charming, and, you know, FUN. Jump in!
I've put quite a few hours into Gemini Rue so far. My opinion of the game seems to differ significantly from those from people I see around the web. People are divided about the graphics - which is silly. The graphics are great. I have no problem with pixelated or "old-school" graphics done right, and these are really amazing. My main complaint is that the game seems to exist mostly on nostalgia. It seems like it wants to remind me of games past, and impress me with its modern take. But that's completely different than actually giving me an atmosphere that sucks me in on its own. The game is by no means offensively bad - but I found many of the puzzles and the main story to be mostly predictable and tedious. The voice acting goes for cliche Alec Baldwin impressions over originality. Going through doors is tedious and inconsistent - sometimes you have to open and then awkwardly find the right place "beyond" the door to click to leave, and sometimes opening the door just lets you leave. Sometimes the door just opens for you. It seems like a small thing, but there are oh-so-many doors and it becomes an annoying design problem. I don't enjoy the apartment building settings, which all look the same, just tedious amounts of walking up and down stairs, etc. Many of the puzzles in the "rehab center" became tedious. I have no desire to learn some intricate system of pipes etc. There's lots of tedium - and honestly, I'm not that driven to complete the story. I don't feel like I'm exploring a new place - at first, I got that exploratory buzz - but then you've seen the whole setting, and spend the next couple hours of gamplay revisiting the same places.... grey brown rooms after rooms... The inventory can only be looked at by awkwardly right clicking ON an action object in the world... this seems weird, and no button to bring up inventory, at least that I can find in the menu. These kinds of design problems... seems like GR exists on nostalgia mostly.
