Stop making me read
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| Effffffffff this, I am making a sandwich |
I did not become a gamer to read
It is a fairly self explanatory statement, and call me old fashioned, but in my day, gaming was about playing games. But over the past two and a half console generations, the ole literary devices seem to be rooting themselves into the regular rhythmic thumping and button mashing of my favorite obsession.
The earliest offender, in my recollection, is probably one of my favorite game series of all time, Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls. Now being a role playing game, one can mosey amongst the fantastic environs of Morrowind, Cyrodil, and Skyrim collecting many a tome and scroll imparting the knowledge and lore of these rich worlds... but I am just as quick to toss them in the fire or sell them... they take up room in the inventory anyways.
Now you might be saying to yourself, "Dude, it's an RPG, what do you expect." Fair. I could choose to ignore all the books and the lore and the what have you, but it is part of the game mechanic. Your player levels up by reading books about various attributes. But beyond this, what else could Bethesda put into these games, if they were not populating all the books with incredibly lengthy and detailed lore? Perhaps, fixing their terrible animation and pathing system, or I don't know, one of the hundreds of immersion crushing bugs that crop up every time they release a game.
But what about something less RPG-ish and perhaps put out by a major main stream publisher? Take for example Assasins Creed IV: Black Flag, which I recently completed (review forthcoming), which has the audacity to encourage the player to pursue side tasks in the meta world, most of which reward the player with, you guessed it, written lore.
Now maybe it is because I didn't read most of the books I was assigned in school, or for one reason or another reading has always had a negative connotation with me, or perhaps it is because I am a clinically slow reader, but my thirty minutes of side questing is worth more than a character backstory writeup.
So let's jump forward to something more recent, Alien: Isolation. Basic gameplay premise is that you are on a space station where everything has gone sideways and there is an alien hunting you like the last piece of cake at the party. Your passage through the station is accented by the thrills and chills of the sci-fi horror as well as the illuminating pieces of plot provided by the in game characters, audio logs, and emails... or at least the 1979 impression of emails. At least in AI the writing was approaching something that was interesting; I would give it a glance or two, which is saying something, considering at any moment an alien could tail whip me through the spleen, causing a spontaneous jettisoning of the controller from my hands through the nearest window.
But let's be fair. Most in game text, lore, backstory, and what-have-you is written approaching a level that can only be described as creator sanctioned fan fiction. And that is not entirely the writings fault. Gaming, by its very nature, is a visual medium. Everything else you are doing in a video game is about 3,200% more fun and more interesting than reading some block of narrative that will come across as disembodied, unless you have read every other little scrap of cobbled universe building detritus that has floated your way.
How about this game makers, a truce. You will stop loading up the games I love to play (not read) with relatively trite and meaningless fiction and put it in a companion novel. If I like your game enough and want more, I will buy said novel, scouts honor(full disclosure I quit after my first year of Boy Scouts). From where I am doing mental math, that means you can get two sales out of me, just make a good game first!
Get Rocket League right now
This should be really easy for the people in the audience with a PS Plus membership (and frankly, if you own a PS3 or a PS4, there is no reasonable excuse not to have one), because it is a free download right now.
I am not going to blab on for too long about this game, other than to describe the premise. Mash together American Gladiators, Twisted Metal, and Soccer... that's Rocket League. Drive your car and boost, jump, and smash your way towards victory. It is such a simple concept, but it is executed so flawlessly. Your initial minutes with Rocket League will have you screaming, laughing, and all the wonderful things that come with a game evoking unbridled joy.
Don't believe me, strap on a few extra controllers and play split screen local multiplayer and see how long you go without fist bumping or shoulder bashing the person sitting next to you.
RL is a game that has totally nailed what it is trying to accomplish, there are no gimmicks or incentives (OK, you can get hats for your car). The only thing bringing you back is the sweet sweet rush of the five minute matches. Online or local, it is all good. Thank you Psyonix for giving me that old feeling of being a 12 year old gamer.
See for yourself with this gameplay from one of my early multiplayer attempts:
Alien: Isolation, or the agony of defeat
How do I put this best... Have you ever been in a relationship with one person, and wished you were with someone else? This might be the most accurate way to sum up my feelings on Alien: Isolation.
But before I get to far in the deep end, let's acknowledge a few of the things that encouraged me to finish this game, all 30+ hours of it. That's right this game is loooong, and I can't endorse that as something to scribble into the "pro column."
Atmosphere out the wazoo
It's got it. The effect wears off after a while (more on that later)... but there are some effects that continue to impress as you go through the game. Whether it is the superb use of directional audio, the lighting, or the slight film grime that glosses over the entire frame, the game takes great strides to put you in the world of a space-horror film from 1979. It is hard not to be drawn into Sevastapol Station (where the game takes place, primarily) and feel your heart rate elevate while trying your best to go un-noticed and accomplish your next objective. The music pitches, the Xenomorph (Alien) growls, and stomps, and clambers, all to a cacophony of nerve inducing racket against the otherwise stoic audience of beeps and hisses of the station's systems. If you can allow your sustainable disbelief to wander the halls of Sevastapol, it will gladly take you in.Expect failure, hope for success
Oh yeah. This game is hard. Like really F&*#ing hard! I had to put the game on easy just to get on with it (an experience which seems to track across the internet pretty consistently). And here is my argument for playing on easy. You will still die a lot, but not so much that the suspense and terror of your situation will be lost. When I was playing on normal (I shudder to think what Hard is like), I would die so much that the game became comical and any level of suspense or horror, just went out the door. I guess what I am trying to say, is get used to seeing these a lot: |
| There is no autosave feature. These little things are your new best friends. |
Old school survival, almost
There are definitely some themes here that run deep in my own personal gaming history. Namely Resident Evil's sense of inventory management, crafting, and progress saves. Now I don't think you could argue that AI approaches the level of severity or choice that is experienced in the original RE, but the similarities are certainly present. Unfortunately, as the game wears on, as is usually the case, I found myself flushed with items and ammunition, diminishing the need to make any really hard choices with how to overcome obstacles. This could be an effect of playing on Easy for the later two thirds of the game, but I can not be certain. Once, as a player, I was saturated with ammo and items, I just started to Rambo my way through the game, which while satisfying after hiding and running so much, does change the dynamic of the game for the negative.
Expect to wait
The AI of the Xenomorph is good. Like really unbelievably good. Goof up just a little bit and that freaking alien will be right on top of you. The translation, expect to spend a lot of your time in AI waiting in lockers, or cabinets, or under tables, or behind crates, or in dark corners, or... well you get the idea.
Rinse and repeat
I mentioned earlier that this game is long. While in most cases, not a bad thing, here I feel that it works to quite the opposite effect. As the game drags on, you will find yourself in familiar patterns, such as:
- Check map for waypoint
- Move towards waypoint
- Survive
- Do arbitrary thing that is required to progress
- Save
- Repeat
This gameplay loop is easily ignored in the early moments of the game, when things are more focused, and you are still distracted by learning the alien and absorbing the environment, but once you pass the ten hour mark, you just start going through the motions. From a game design perspective this is very lazy, and makes you wonder if there was a core requirement passed down from on high that the game must hit a certain hour mark to ship. This feels to permeate a lot of decisions, from the objectives, backtracking, movement speeds during EVAs, and many other more nuanced decisions, and inevitably is the biggest negative that I can throw on this game... but it is a big negative.
The grass is always greener...
So then who is this other person, or rather game, that I wish I was with while I was playing AI? Well, there is one game that in my opinion defined the first person stealth-action adventure genre. That struck that perfect chord between gameplay, story, atmosphere, and location... |
| Hail to the king, baby. |
There are probably a strong handful of people that would throw the Thief franchise out into the ring at this point, and I am sure that is a fair thing to do. But admittedly I have never played Thief. It is on the "To Do" list.
Wrap it up already
Who is this game for:
- Anyone that likes stealth games
- Anyone that likes the Alien franchise
- Gluttons for punishment (playing on Normal or harder)
Who should avoid this game:
- People looking for a quick fix
- Folks looking for a deeper and more meaningful story
- Thirty year olds who still sleep with the lights on
Final Appraisal: Buy
All negatives aside, there is something about Alien: Isolation that is undeniably entertaining. Maybe it is living inside the 1979 sci-fi aesthetic, or perhaps it is the extremely polished Xenomorph behavior and AI, or those moments of escape and relief punctuated by the awe of being inside a living space opera that just make it hard to write this game off. Whichever way you slice it, I think it is fair to say that at this point in the games lifecycle, it is hard not to recommend. As of writing you can pick up AI for anywhere in the $20-30 range.
Amazon: http://amzn.to/1M2GhbE
What the hell. Let's start a gaming blog.
So whats the angle?
Great question. We probably don't have one. But read on and maybe we will figure it out.
Not being part of the mainstream gaming journalism illuminati, we will not be reviewing pre-release games, or going to big launch events, rather taking the industry in as we all do, and providing our own unique outlook on news and the games we are playing.
What does this translate to? Well in any meaningful approximation, probably not a lot. Our grammar is poor at best, and we are not industry insiders, so we will not be reporting anything you probably don't already know. But how is that any different from games journalism already...
So Day Old Donuts... what's with the name? First, allow us to answer your question with a question of our own, "Have you ever eaten a donut you did not like?" Now that we have established this appropriate equilibrium between ourselves and you the reading public, Day Old Donuts, in summary is a reflection of how this blog will run.
Games
We will be reviewing games as we play them, which is to say, at a normal human's pace. We frequently will be reviewing games months or years after they have been released (exceptions will be made on a case by case basis).
News
Probably what we feel is one of the better qualities of being "Day Old" is that we will be summarizing the week in gaming news. Why weekly? Because you don't need to know about the 52 mundane pieces of PR canon fodder that spew forth from the Reuters boxes on a daily basis, largely to do with pre-order bonuses. News, in our eyes, is just that. Legitimate and meaningful industry news and high octane, snark-based, analysis of said news.
Potpourri
This is a new venture, and with any such enterprise, the road lay open ahead of us. We look forward to the adventures to come and the missteps, lessons learned, and failed attempts that will define what this blog becomes.
So in conclusion, and to quote Spaceballs, "If you can read this, you don't need glasses."
Welcome and game on,
Cameron Rains
Editor-in-Chief, Day Old Donuts
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