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2011 GYiR: Duke Nukem Forever

If there is one thing that will end up in the history books of video games for this year, it’s the fact that this was the year that Duke Nukem Forever was finally released. Yes, after over a decade of waiting, we finally got to see the glorious return of Duke in June of this year. People preordered it, were all in suspense and in anticipation for it, and when it finally came out there seemed to be a universal opinion of it:

It sucked.

Well, sucked is putting it very harshly. It certainly wasn’t going to live up to eleven years of anticipation, but nothing would have. It probably only ended up with a couple of years of actually development time at most, and it had passed hands so often that it was going to end up with too many cooks spoiling the broth, so to speak.

I ended up buying it during the Steam sale, as it had dropped to half price by then. I actually finished it a few weeks after buying it, and honestly, it’s not as bad as people say. Sure, you can literally slice the game in sections and see the development cycle of it, but it is still a very fun game to play. Duke’s character is still as funny as it ever was, and the lack of a good story makes it more about shooting aliens in the face than it is about morality and all that jazz.

It’s not anywhere near a game of the year contender, but it’s worth picking up. Any fans of either classic FPS’ or of hilariously misogynistic* quotes will get their money’s worth out of the game.

*Note that I do not condone misogyny in real life, but as long as it’s in good humor or an inside joke between people, then it’s fine. Just don’t go up to a stranger on the street and ask her to make you a sandwich.

2011 GYiR: Terraria

“But Patrick!” I can hear you saying already, “You said this game wasn’t that good, had a terrible learning curve, and basically implied that it wasn’t fun!”

Well, I’m an idiot and I take it back.  While the first playthrough of the game is really confusing and admittedly not that fun, wait a month (Which, by then, an update should have come out to add more content), start a new character on a new map, and gain a real appreciation for the game.  That’s what happened to me – a month or two after I played the game and was left unimpressed, I ended up playing it on a trip up to Moose Jaw, and was able to fall in love with it then.  They had updated it to give decent items early on through randomly generated chests, as well as adding a couple of new enemies and potions as well.  The game still kind of had the same difficulty curve, but a better understanding of what to do and a knowledge of what you’re seeking out made it much more enjoyable this time.

Even better, this is the game that keeps on giving.  This past month, they released a major expansion pack update to it that adds on to the most lacking part of the game – the end.  Now, instead of having that difficulty trail off, you can activate “Hardmode world” which gives you stronger enemies, stronger bosses, and a brand new set of weapons and other items to craft.  I’ve been playing with the new things for over a week as of the time of writing, and I’m both still finding new things every time I play, and still have yet to try even touching any of the new bosses.  Yes, this game is fantastic.

I’m avoiding the obvious correlation to another game of a similar style, mainly because I haven’t played that game’s new updates in the past couple of months, but this is a game that is now very worthy of not being called a clone.  In the fork of the gaming road where creative and adventure diverge, this one has happily travelled down the latter without apology, and if there weren’t so many other titles out this year it would have easily been a contender for game of the year awards.  Still, it’s a game that you can’t go wrong with for $10.

2011 GYiR: Alice: Madness Returns

It’s no secret that I love platformers, as could be witnessed by last year’s feature. So, when I saw an Alice in Wnderland game that looked to be a very interesting platformer, I was sold. But, after a friend played it and said it probably wasn’t worth $50 new, I patiently waited until it went cheap to pick it up. After playing it, I will say I loved it, But will admit it isn’t worth more than $30 or so.

To start off with, this game is another shining example of the Unreal 3 engine at work. I know some people hate it for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, but it simply is so versatile and stunning that it can do beautiful looking game like this, ranging to things like the cell-shaded Borderlands. This game is incredibly beautiful, and the range of environments in this game are part of what make you want to keep on playing.  You go from a land in the sky where cards fall to create a path for you, all the way to a very Asian-inspired world filled with Oriental folklore.  The graphics designers in this game really need to be applauded, and if you want an idea of it you can simply check out some screenshots for yourself (Taken from a friend playing this game before me)

The story is dark and twisted, the combat is actually well done (aside from minor complaints with the camera), but repetitiveness of the game is where it’s fault lies.  Most of the fault becomes apparent by the last chapter, where you are stuck in a very long chapter that is quite possibly the least imaginative of them all, making the end start to feel like a bit of a chore to finish.  It’s a fairly long game in length, which five main chapters being about three hours long each.  So really, you’re in each world for about an hour and a half as there are two environments per chapter.

The storyline will cause you to push on to the end, but fairly begrudgingly by the end.  It’s a shame, because otherwise it would be a great game to replay.  Otherwise, it will most likely be a one-time playthrough, but one that is worth your time.

2011 GYiR: Hydrophobia Prophecy

While originally an indie title that for most people would end up in the “List of decent games that deserve a paragraph at most”, the history behind this game is worth an article, and it serves as a good example of what developers need to do as opposed to what people have done to reviews this year.

This year, more than I can remember anyways, reviews have started to become meaningless.  Why?  Short story: reviewers have given games scores that reflect that the game is perfect when it isn’t, and thus making scores like 10/10 seem more like a decent game than a perfect game.  Long story?  Well summed up in this seven minute long, NSFW video:

Well, even though the story of Hydrophobia happened before this, it’s tale is still redeeming.  However, the start of the story isn’t very happy.  Late in 2010, the game released to incredibly mediocre reviews.  People complained the game was confusing, poorly designed, and the reviews reflected it.  In most cases, this would have just been water under everyone’s bridge (Pun intended), since this was a first time developer trying something new that happened to fail.  However, in this case, the developers decided to go around saying that certain reviewers “played the game wrong”, resulting in the bad reviews.  Yikes!  Now, I’m no expert, but typically if you’ve made a game yourself and haven’t made it clear enough how people need to play it, then your game deserves a bad review and as little attention as possible.

So, all that said, you’d think that this would have been a sad tale with a terrible ending to a bad game, but instead, a miracle happened: the developers read the reviews, looked at the positive and negative points of each, and set out to make a patch to improve the game.  In the span of a couple of months, they were able to create a patch to make gameplay clearer, more enjoyable, and fix a lot of the problems the first version had.  And it worked!  A couple of sites did review the patch, and gave it much more favourable reviews.  After all that, they looked into  creating another version for PC and PS3 with some new content, and all the fixes from the earlier version, and Prophecy was born.  And, having played it all, it’s a very fun game.

It’s not perfect by any means: if anything, my biggest complaint is the same as Mirror’s Edge in which it needs to make up its mind between platforming and shooting.  But, the innovative feature in the game is fascinating enough to play through this short game.  Put simply, the water physics in this game are both beautiful and functional.  Most games strive for one or the other, but none come close to this one.  Fighting your way through strong currents of water have never been as interesting as they’re made to be in this game.  Sure, the boss is a little on the uncreative side, and you need to suspend disbelief on how you get the last ability in the game since it’s not explained well, but they manage to find enough to do with this water engine that you never get bored.

It’s short, it’s cheap, but it’s such a fascinating story and a very competent game that it’s worth a look if you haven’t already.

2011 GYiR: Portal 2

The original Portal was a classic.  While a short game at only a couple of hours long at most, it did everything right.  Gameplay never got repetitive, storyline was short but very well written with nothing overused, and it left you satisfied, while maybe wanting a little more.  So, when a full-fledged sequel to the game was announced, everyone seemed happy. After all, more of something people loved is generally always a great idea.

Well, it was, but it wasn’t perfect, nor did I find it as good as the original.  Is that bad?  Not necessarily.  The game had more of the humor people loved, and the storyline was incredibly amusing and well written again.  The gameplay added more elements in a very natural way to make everything feel new, but not confusing you.  Where the fault is held is in a lot of the stop-gap gameplay betweenthe major chapters, and the to-a-fault dumbing down of a lot of the challenges.  A good fifth of the game was spent in very large environments, you played the fun game of “Find the small white patch in a sea of non-portal walls”, which became very tedious very fast.  Those segments lacked in story, and they lacked in fun.  As for the real challenges, you can tell they did a lot more playtesting on this one, because the puzzles are linear to the point of any thinking outside of the intended solution won’t work.  I may be a bit of a puzzle game snob, having spent a good few years involved in a puzzle game community, but linear puzzles suck.  It’s great to find unintended solutions to puzzle and laugh in the face of its creator!

But, after all, I did leave the game with a positive feeling.  I feel like they’ve ended the series up with the last installment, which is a good thing since doing a “three-quel” tends to be much harder than doing a sequel.  This, of course, explains why Valve has never made a game with a three in it, of course.