kjorteo | Entries tagged with 2017 abandoned

Just doing some bookkeeping here. I haven't actually picked this game up and tried it again recently; I'm just making this entry to make the abandonment official. Technically I started it in the past, it was on "I should try that again one of these days" status, and then conversing with

xyzzysqrl convinced me that, no, I shouldn't.

Broken Sword is a game about about Nico Collard, a French writer investigating a murder with conspiratorial undertones. The situation turns increasingly grim as she gets closer to uncovering things she shouldn't, but throughout it all she remains a cool, poised, witty, and enjoyable heroic figure.

Oops, excuse me, sorry.

Broken Sword is a game about George Stobbart, an American on vacation in France, who wrong-place-wrong-times himself into being the star of this investigation despite being a flirty, air-headed obnoxious tourist. His job is to bumble his way around the screen and make you wish you had Nico back.

Wait, no, one more try.

Broken Sword: Director's Cut is an enhanced remake of the first Broken Sword game (Shadow of the Templars.) It has been compared to the enhanced edition remakes of the original Star Wars movies, in that it takes a cherished property and completely butchers it in an attempt to add new content that no one actually asked for. The original game is a George Stobbart vehicle, with Nico as a supporting NPC who may eventually become more of a central character around Broken Sword 3 or 4. Director's Cut went back and added an expanded prologue and a few interstitial scenes where the player temporarily plays as her, though the actual game which is still about George.

I didn't know any of this, because I'd never played a Broken Sword game before. Everything I just said about these two is secondhand info I passed along after

xyzzysqrl explained this all to me. (I still don't know anything more than what she told me and thus what I've repeated here, so no spoilers please.)

Extra Nico is well and good. Nico is awesome, and the Nico-led prologue was my favorite part of how far I got in this game. The problem is that they made her great at the cost of completely assassinating George's character. I was able to confirm this after Sqrl pointed it out by looking up YouTube longplays: they rewrote George's dialogue to change him from slightly naive yet still likeable hero type to self-centered dumbass.

I had previously shelved this game over the sense of disappointment over going from an awesome Nico-led prologue to "awww you mean now I have to play as this dork?" Seeing those two videos side by side was what convinced me not to go back and try the Director's Cut version again. Shadow of the Templars, for as much as Director's Cut clearly wishes it weren't, is still a George Stobbart game. The Nico scenes don't actually go anywhere, because they can't; the story is pretty firmly set with George's plot and with where things pick up in Broken Sword 2, so there really isn't a whole lot of room to invent anything new for Nico to be up to in the meantime. Instead, they basically sacrificed George for nothing, and then left you stuck in the ruins anyway. "Haha, isn't Nico just better than this version of George in every measurable way?" this game asks. "Well, too bad; this is still Broken Sword 1 and you still have to play as George, even though we made him an insufferable dipshit now."

What I'm saying here is that this game feels like it was written by Nico herself after a messy breakup with George, as far as which one is painted in the better light. It's a very Emmet and Wyldstyle relationship, even down to the fact that Emmet is still the hero anyway and that's bullshit. And the worst part about it all is that the ploy worked; I definitely love Nico and hate George now. And that's... unfortunate. It wasn't supposed to be like this, probably. (Other Broken Sword fans in the audience please confirm.)

I do still intend to give this overall series another chance someday, but I'll be going back to the original version when I do. Not because of purism or anything, but because if you're going to make me play through two or three Broken Sword games before I actually get Nico, the least you can do is make George tolerable until then.

Crossposts: https://teogames.livejournal.com/51953.html

Oh yeah sometimes I play games besides Pokemon, and I'm still doing that book report thing.

xyzzysqrl brought my attention to a very cool-looking light beam puzzle game on Steam. She then pointed out that there are other games like that if I'm curious, and oh hey Chromatron is free. (She then also added, "You can see the, uh, production value difference.")

Okay but fuck Chromatron, though.

I'm sorry. I try really hard to persevere in puzzle games. I never said that I'm the undefeated Godlike master of all things puzzle, and I break down and have to use hints just as much as the next person, but I at least like puzzles and don't like to admit when a puzzle game is just too much for me. I try not to let it come to that point. Even if it ends with a COMPLETE entry about "Okay I did beat this but in retrospect here's a whole big essay on all the parts that were bullshit," I at least try.

I've beaten every game Qrostar has ever made. I've made it through SpaceChem and TIS-100. Not this one, though. I think Chromatron may be the first puzzle game I've played since I started this whole game report project that ended prematurely in a huff of "No. Fuck this."

I mean, the tooltip/tutorial/new concept writeup for level 29 reads: "When a quantum-entangled beam goes through a splitter or another quantum tangler, the quantum wave function collapses, and the two beams are no longer entangled." This is a new mechanic the game is trying to teach you. For level 29. There are 50 puzzles in the first game, all told.

No.

No, I refuse. I did 1-30 (minus one or two that required giving up and looking up the solutions along the way) plus 34. That's enough.

Honestly, this is... not a bad game in itself. The aesthetic is pure Windows 98 Chip's Challenge but it works and looks fine. The mechanics are smart, clever, and well thought out. They're too smart, is all. I am not the right audience for this game. I was a solid D student in almost every STEM class I ever took. This game hinges puzzles on your ability to think in terms of "Oh, yes, I know exactly how white beams of light split into red/blue/green at precisely the angles I need based on what angle they hit the prism, and all I need to do is recombine two of them to light the cyan crystal and then quantum-convert the split offshoot of one of them to change its color (leaving the other as-is) to light the magenta crystal." If that sounds like your kind of game, this is a great game.

For me, though, I've reached the point where I'm comfortable leaving this to my smarter friends, the ones who actually enjoy dealing with this kind of nonsense. I'm done. I'm tapping out.

Crossposts: https://teogames.livejournal.com/49739.html

This is mostly just behind-the-scenes recordkeeping, but technically I officially crossed something off the list which means it gets a post.

Last Dream is a fine game--in fact,

xyzzysqrl just beat it and did a lovely writeup of it. I concur that it's great, and I'm not even abandoning it for anything it did wrong, but....

Actually, I may as well take the time to coin/explain a term while I'm here, since I expect this will not be the last time this happens.

When Style Savvy: Trendsetters for Nintendo DS came out, I was in love. I hadn't played that series before but it was just so me in every way. I got a good ways into it... then other games came out, I got sidetracked, and it sort of faded back into the background with a half-done save file, as is usually the case for most things I play. I always wanted to go back to it someday....

Then Style Savvy: Fashion Forward for 3DS came out.

Style Savvy isn't exactly Final Fantasy: (with the exception that I actually kind of am embarrasingly into where Fashion Forward's story is going,) you generally don't play a Style Savvy game for the riveting plot specific to that particular game. Moreover, a game is going to look much like the older ones except with some improvements. Trendsetters was a fine game, I had a blast with it while it lasted, and my abandoning it was through no fault of its own... but I knew I would never touch it again, because if I really wanted to play Style Savvy, I could and probably should just play Fashion Forward instead. You know, get the new and improved version if I'm going to be playing more or less the same thing anyway.

There are some series I will zealously and perhaps irrationally insist on doing in order--I won't play Wright v. Layton until I finish Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, which I won't even start until I finish Professor Layton and the Last Specter, which I won't even start until I finally dust off and get through my half-done file for Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. I stuck to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness even when Explorers of Sky came out because I was already like a million hours in and didn't want to start over. Sometimes, though... sometimes you see something like Last Dream: World Unknown coming out soon, and you just have to give the original Last Dream the Trendsetters treatment.

Crossposts: http://teogames.livejournal.com/44540.html

Oops, I swear none of this Megazeux stuff was supposed to happen. I just got a couple of the top rated games on DigitalMZX along with Megazeux itself in case I ever wanted to learn/get into Megazeux someday and reverse-engineer anything at that point. Then I went through the ones I downloaded with the intention of peeking at them just long enough to establish what kind of games they even are, before filing them away somewhere for the far distant future. Somehow that led to me accidentally beating Caverns of Zeux and briefly being sucked into this one. It ultimately wasn't my thing and I'm not going to finish it, but technically I spent longer on it before reaching that decision than I did on MANOS, so I guess it deserves a write-up too.

So Thanatos Insignia is an overhead action game that plays kind of like someone made Operation Logic Bomb in Megazeux, paired with single-screen narrations between each level about someone in the hospital trying to use some fancy computing system to model human behavior and solve why violence exists, slowly becoming more obsessed with using the system and becoming more antisocial themselves in the process. Also the levels have random and really unfitting J-pop music, I guess in case you want to feel like you're shooting aliens while playing DDR.

I wasn't really feeling the gameplay, but the story segments interested me enough to keep going... right until I got stomped by the boss of level 12 (who fights to the tune of GIGA PUDDING for some reason.) I forgot to save and I really didn't want to go through the first twelve levels again, so I poked around the data files until I found where it was storing the story bits, read through those, and called it good.

I was wondering if this game was eventually heading toward some sort of point with juxtaposing the narrative of questioning the human nature toward violence in between levels of pure "gun down every bad guy that moves" but if it did, I didn't get that far and it wasn't in the story files.

Oh, well.

Still a technically and visually impressive, well-made game if this genre speaks to you.

Crossposts: http://teogames.livejournal.com/43681.html

Because if I'm stealing

xyzzysqrl's COMPLETE record-keeping concept, I may as well steal the NOT COMPLETE side too. I have a zillion games in the backlog, some have been languishing almost as long as I've been alive, but I do feel the need to make special record-keeping note of the ones where I tried them and now (just like the COMPLETE entries) I am done with this game.

So, what's the first official failure of this project? Well, I almost didn't bother counting this one because I NOPE'd out of it in under ten minutes, but... well, that's about how long Essence.exe would have been if I hadn't gotten stuck, and that one got a COMPLETE entry, so what the hell.

MANOS: The Hands of Fate is a tongue-in-cheek indie game based off the infamous Mystery Science Theater 3000-featured movie of the same name. Apparently they throw in some other MST3K miscellany to pad things out (there's a boss fight with Ro-Man from Robot Monster according to this trailer?? Geez, I didn't get that far.) It's just... well....

1) I got the Android version as part of a Humble Mobile Bundle and the controls are hideous. See the left, right, B, and A buttons on the corners of the screen in that trailer? Using your touch screen, use those to... look, I know you can't exactly have an actual controller on a smartphone game, but this just does not work. At all. Not even in the best of times (I kind of gave up on Anodyne and the mobile version of Another World years ago before starting this write-up project, for much the same reason,) but especially not during a hectic boss battle when the A "button" is right next to my phone's actual built-in "pause and switch between apps" button.
2) Even if the controls themselves weren't an issue, your character is clunky and hard to steer, and a lot of enemies and projectiles feel literally undodgeable as a result. I'm not against brutally difficult 8-bit games, but I am against fake difficulty.
3) All this for what basically feels like "MST3K was great, right? LOL?"

In conclusion: Nah.