Penny-Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3

I get pumped up about new releases on games, but I often have to pass them up.  I love a game that does something different, and when I see games like El Shaddai: Rise of the Metatron, Catherine, and Bastion, it appeals to me.

But sometimes, I like to see an excellent return to form.  I am a big fan of Zeboyd Games, creators of Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World, two great throwbacks to RPGs of old.  The first is a wonderful parody of games like Final Fantasy (note that Breath of Death I-VI do not exist), and the latter stands as an amazing rendition of a 16-bit SNES-era RPG.  Both games have hilarious stories, memorable characters, and skillful theming.  But most importantly, it avoids a lot of the problems that older RPGs seem to share.  I had to grind through a total of no levels in either game, and I didn't have to worry about healing my party with potions after every battle; you start out with full HP every time.  Your MP will dwindle, but with proper management, it won't be a game-ender.

One of the cool parts about Zeboyd Games, though, is that there is a noticeable jump in quality in between each game.  I played Cthulhu Saves the World first, and when I played Breath of Death VII, I was struck by the difference in graphics and writing.  It's not to say that BoDVII is bad by any stretch of the imagination, but the jump that was made from their first to second RPG is amazing.

This speech is a reference to Mother (Earthbound in 'Merica), and I love this joke.  This is Breath of Death VII.

Cthulhu finds the greatest treasure of all. 

Hey, speaking of RPGs, did you know the guys from Penny Arcade made two of those?  They and developer Hothead Games started the Penny Arcade Adventures series on May 21, 2008, which has one adventure so far, "On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness."  The first two entries were animated in 3D and you played as a regular guy whose house gets crushed by a giant robot.  At the persuasion of the narrator, you follow Tycho and Gabe through New Arcadia until you kill Yog Sethis, the god of mimes and the antagonist of the first game.  The first and second games are well-written, very aware of themselves, and extremely goofy.  It wouldn't be Penny Arcade if it didn't have those qualities.  And when the second game came out in October 2008, it seemed we were set up with a great potential for a nice, quick episodic game release schedule.  Kind of the opposite of the Half-Life Episodes.

In the games we are told that there are four gods fighting for power.  One had possession of the robot that crushed your house, and you kill it at the end of the second game with the help of Tycho's niece.  So we had a perfect set-up for a four game series, but the third game wound up in development hell.  Kind of exactly like Half-Life 2 Episode 3 (does our suffering please you, Valve?).

Then Penny Arcade announced that the third game was coming back with the help of Zeboyd, and I promptly lost any inclination I had at reasonable patience.  Zeboyd had already produced two of the best-written games I had ever played, and they teamed up with Penny Arcade.  So yeah, I was excited for this game.  It's one of maybe three games I've pre-ordered in my life.  

The game plays like a turn-based RPG from the SNES era, but with a bar up top that lets you know who's going to make a the next move.  Based on your speed (and that of your enemies), characters can pass each other on the bar, and judging the order from that bar immerses you in the battle system.  The game uses a Super Mario World-style overworld to get from place to place, and once inside a building, you enter a typical Final Fantasy-style top-down view of the dungeon.  What sells me on the game isn't the gameplay or the graphics (both of which are great, by the way), but the writing.  Even in battle, the enemies' names and descriptions were something to look forward to. The first two games were great, but this one carried a lot more weight as a narrative.  I cared about Tycho and Gabe in this game a lot more than I did in the first two because they were established as better characters.

Gabe in particular.

In fact, the end of the game stands out as one of the best endings I've ever seen.  It carries more emotional weight than any game ending (and for that matter books and movies) I've seen, and it carries that weight because by the end of the game, I cared about the characters and their choices.  I'll keep it spoiler-free, but just know that as someone who values stories, this one is easily one of my favorites.  I can't wait to see what's in store for the fourth game, and exactly unlike  Half-Life 2 Episode 3, I have a lot of faith that we'll get it sooner rather than later.

(Edit: I'm a big dummie; I couldn't pre-order it because I couldn't on Steam.  But dammit I would have if I could have.)

Darksiders

I picked up Darksiders because the department store at which I work is getting rid of their video games section.  We've had a lot of the same games since I started working there, so I keep an eye on whatever goes on clearance in the game rack.  I would have raided the skeletal remains of our video game sections if it weren't for the few hours I am currently working, so I narrowed it to a couple choices: Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Darksiders.  I've never played any of the other Deus Ex games (and I know that some people reading this didn't know there were other games), so I took my chance with the new IP, especially after I heard about how well its sequel is reviewing.

The shiny box didn't hurt, either.

An extremely basic outline of the story: The apocalypse is a party and War, one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, is getting things started right.  But while demons and angels fight in the streets, War notices that his three best buddies aren't laying waste to the world the way they're supposed to.  In short, someone started the apocalypse early, and War gets framed for it.  The game wastes no time in getting the destruction of Earth underway.  100 years later, War makes a deal with the powers that lie between Heaven and Hell: he'll find out who framed him, or the demons who now walk the Earth will kill him, filling his death sentence anyway.

So I played it, and during the entire first hour, I thought two things:

1. The colors and the presentation here are great, I love that it's not another Brown and Bloom fest.
2. I'm pretty sure I'm playing God of War.

Note that second one, because I don't mean it in a wholly bad way.  Any comparison to God of War is a good one, but I am saying that in combat, Darksiders doesn't really feel terribly different from God of War in any way.  Besides the specific combos and weapons that differ between Kratos and War, combat takes place at a pace almost exactly like God of War's.  War even has finishing moves like Kratos's, but they lack the quicktime events of the latter's game, for better or worse.

So after a flight on an "Angelic Beast" (basically a griffin that functions almost exactly like an Arwing from Starfox, barrel-rolls notwithstanding) I got to the first dungeon, the Twilight Catherdral.

I loved the look of it, and by this point of the game, I was pretty sold on the atmosphere of it.  I'm a sucker for Heaven vs Hell and Revelations-type plots anyways.  So I got in the cathedral and solve a couple puzzles, after which I quickly realized that this is a fire temple.

Someone got lava all up in this church.

Oh, and that sweet throwing blade War has there?  That's basically a Zelda boomerang.  It's badass in every way, don't get me wrong, but if you played Twilight Princess, you already have experience with the targeting system.  Later in the game, you find a hookshot.  Darksiders calls it the "Abyssal Chain," but really,  anyone who's played a Zelda game from the past decade-and-a-half knows it's a hookshot.  It functions exactly like the famous Zelda weapon, and it even has that same satisfying burst sound effect when you launch it.

Towards the end of the game, you find a neat little artifact that lets you open voids in two different areas.  You can jump into one void and come out the other.  The voids come out colored orange and blue.  Yeah, War finds a portal gun.  Aperture Science didn't manufacture it, but except for Valve's physics engine and one difference you need to figure out to solve a puzzle, the "Voidwalker" functions just like the famous gun from Portal.

The game suffers from some typical qualities of new IPs.  War can grab onto ledges and pull himself up, but half the time, it feels like the game is arbitrarily deciding when he can and can't grab onto something.  I made War take many a fall into the abyss because of this.  In a related problem, a lot of the urban environments can get repetitive and easy to get lost in.  This is something that is hardly exclusive to Darksiders, though.

Darksiders is like a patchwork of all the games I've been playing through this console generation.  This would be a bad thing if it didn't all work so well.  They've taken the best qualities from many different games, including the recent jump in voice acting and storytelling we've seen in games like Arkham Asylum and the Assassin's Creed games. It's like listening to a "best of" album from an amazing tribute band.  And as an added bonus, you get to play as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!  It's a fun ride, and if you find this game in a bargain bin, I can't really give you a good reason to pass this up.

B is for Bastion

Holy crap you guys.  Bastion.

So there was another Steam Sale where both Dustforce and Bastion were offered for about $5 and $7 respectively.  I was interested in both games, but as I believe I have established before, I am broke.

So broke I can't even afford to show this guy's face.

So I asked Facebook about which one I should get, and anybody who was even remotely interested in indie games recommended Bastion.  A couple people even chimed in that they heard the game was amazing from people who played it.  I remembered it getting some hype when it came out, but I had no idea if it was good or not.  So with my friends' recommendations, I bought the game.  I figured that I've spent $7 on worse things, so what was the risk of buying a game that is by all means critically acclaimed?

So the game is a kind of top-down action RPG, but angled so you have a diagonal perspective.  That sentence is a nightmare, so here's a picture:

You control a kid who has survived a disaster we only know as "The Calamity."  The world is in shambles, but something draws up leftover pieces of ground to make a path for you.  It's a very interesting take on linear gameplay, and you really know the limits of what you can explore.  This was nice for me, since I have that little voice that demands I explore every corner of the world for hidden items in every game I play.

But what really sold me on Bastion was the way they created their world.  As you play as The Kid, a voice narrates your every move.  It's not The Kid's voice, but a removed one, telling your story as it happens.  So as you come up to that plaza in the picture above, that voice asks, "That another survivor?"  Then as you enter, you meet that blue ghost and the voice answers its own question, "No ma'am, it's a Gasfella," naming the creature you just met.  The whole game is narrated like that, as if you were listening to an old man telling you a story by a campfire.  The narration goes on, even including tidbits of the war between the two nations of the game, Caelondia and the Ura.  It's really gripping, and I've never seen or heard anything like it.

The action part of the game runs very tightly, too.  The game features many weapons which support different playstyles, and are found throughout the game.  On the first level you play, you gain access to three: a hammer, a repeater, and a bow.  They have unlimited ammo, but you have to worry about reloading and making your shots count (except for the melee weapons, but duh).  So right off the bat, you have this chance to maybe not carry any melee weapons and fight a ranged battle.  Or maybe you like to get up-close and personal, so you bring a hammer and your fancy new machete to a fight.

This game is just polished to a mirror shine.  The music is incredible (you can get a taste of it here), and I bought the download for it just to be able to take it with me.  The art is beautiful, and it really brings this new world you're exploring to life, even in the throes of its death.

I really can't recommend this game enough.  You can buy it on Steam (for Mac and PC), directly through Apple through the App Store, on Xbox Live Arcade, through the Google Chrome web store, and a bunch of other options you can find here.   Take my word for it: this game is worth buying.

Fighting for the Skull Heart and Your $15: Skullgirls

It's rare that I get to hop on a game right after it releases, and I am glad that I chose to do that with Skullgirls this Wednesday.  It's a 2D fighting game, with the 2D part pulling double duty: it's a two-dimensional fighter with a 2D cartoon art style.

I won't dance around this: the game is beautiful.  I love the visuals, the music, the presentation, all of it.  The game's spirit is great, too.  The characters are memorable, and when they fight there is just enough "What the hell is going on?" to keep me interested without overwhelming me.  They also sit wonderfully on a vertex of originality, parody, and homage.  Peacock (my fighter of choice) is a wonderful example of this:

She's the one calling in a bomb flying an airplane.

Click the picture for full-size; the picture here doesn't do it justice.  You can look at her and see exactly what she's supposed to be: an homage to old-school cartoons.  The top hat, dress, gigantic bow, puffy-gloved hands, and blacked-out eyes all point to it without shouting it from the top of a building.  But look at her smile (a character in the game asks if she brushes her teeth with metal polish), combined with those creepy eyes on her arms and you can see a hint of something darker.

And then we see why her name is Peacock.

Same thing, full-size this baby up.

In her story, she is found near-death and given two parasites, the Argus (the eyes and peacock thing) and the Avery (a reference to cartoonist Tex Avery), the thing that gives her those crazy cartoon powers.  Probably.  It's not heavily explained.  I'm pretty okay with that, because it's one less thing to distract from the actual fighting.

And like most reviews for Killer 7 will show you, it takes more than a slick style and amazing art to be a successful game.  Unlike Killer 7, though, Skullgirls is getting pretty good reviews all around, especially for a new IP.  It has a small roster, but so did the first Mortal Kombat.  And Skullgirls comes equipped with two decades of fighting game experience (including knowledge of what works and what doesn't) with it.  I love the option of choosing a team of one to three fighters, something I remember from watching my much more skilled friends playing Capcom vs SNK 2.  Tight controls are absolutely necessary for any fighting game, and Skullgirls nails it; when you lose (like I do, a lot), you don't feel like it's the game's fault.  Unless it's the final boss, because GOD DAMN she lives up to the expectations of ridiculous boss fights set forth by the likes of Onslaught from Marvel vs Capcom and Gill from Street Fighter III.  And it feels very good when you win.  After thirty tries.  Not even playing on Hard difficulty.

Parasoul has elite guards whose specialties include diving in front of...bowling balls.

In short, Skullgirls is a very good fighting game with a style that sets it apart.  The all-female cast (it's called SkullGIRLS for a reason) of unique characters and the hand-drawn art style makes me want to keep coming back for more and more.  I have a couple issues with the online mode, but that has more to do with my internet speed and the fact that no one wants to play with someone with my ping.

Should you buy Skullgirls?  I'd say yes.  At $15, it's hardly a life-changing purchase, and this is quality gaming for a budget price.  If you like fighting games or want to get into them (their training and learning mode is very welcome), I would like to point you in this direction.  It's a much cheaper investment than Super Street Fighter IV Ultra Turbo Director's Cut Arcade Edition and Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, and while I take nothing away from those games, both of which I love, I have no hesitation in naming this as my new fighting game of choice.

Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV, and the Attraction of Difficult Video Games

I'm checking my Steam stats right now because I would hate to be inaccurate.  On my Top 10 games as far as play time, Super Meat Boy is in fourth place at 28.5 hours, Cave Story + sits in sixth place with 21.7 hours, and VVVVVV is in tenth at 15.8 hours.  My complete list (including my shame at not having played some of those games yet) can be viewed here.

So why talk about these games?  Well, I recently picked up (downloaded) a copy of Tough Sh*t, Kevin Smith's new book (Kindle copy for me) about how shitty life is.  Just kidding.  Kind of.  But in between the good life advice and cum jokes (there is no shortage of them here), I read a detail that hit home for me.  This is kind of odd, because I listen to SModcast nearly every week and I've heard this story a couple times, but reading it made it click differently I suppose.  The short version goes like this: Kevin Smith hit a funk after Zack and Miri Make a Porno did... less than spectacularly in the box office.  He locked himself away in his office, smoking weed and watching a collection of unwatched DVDs that would likely make many gamers look like amateurs.  

Hmmm... Something doesn't quite seem right here...

In his pot coma, he watched a box set of DVDs called Hockey: A People's History (I think I'm linking the right one).  And for about 10 pages or so (I'm reading on a Kindle, so your so-called pages are irrelevant to me) he goes on about hockey and Wayne Gretzky with such fervor that Jesus might be asking Zeus where he hid those lightning bolts for a smiting.

It isn't the weed I related to (never smoked in my life), nor the idea of watching a box set of sports history, which sounds just... long and never ending.  I've been to like two hockey games in my life, and while I had fun, I can't imagine watching THAT MUCH HOCKEY.  But I did relate to experiencing that one thing that just clicked.

In my younger days, I was practically raised by a Super Nintendo.  Not because my parents were neglectful or anything like that, just because I loved playing video games.  But I was like five and had no subscriptions to magic video game magazines, and the internet was just crawling out of its dial-up phase to get to a place where you could have something as potentially unpopular as a blog, especially about video games.  So my parents bought mainstream Super Nintendo games for me.  Luckily, they were almost always great: Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, Mega Man X, great stuff.

Pictured: A video game hall-of-famer.

And that last game I mentioned is important.  Even though I would miss out on crazy-good games like Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid, Mega Man X was the game that set the tone of a lot of my life.  I was playing Mega Man X with our neighbor, a fourth grader, while I was in second grade.  I looked up to him, probably because he was older and more experienced than I was and he could kick my ass at Chess, a game which I love and have never been good at. So we were playing Mega Man X, specifically Storm Eagle's stage.  I can go back and play that level over and over, get every hidden item, and overall wreck Storm Eagle now, but then?  I was having a really hard time with it.  I had heard a rumor that there was a helmet upgrade for X somewhere in the level, and I was searching and searching for it.  I don't remember the details of the conversation, but what stuck with me was this generalization he told me: "The harder a game is, the better it is."  And me responding without even thinking about it, "Yeah, definitely," representing maybe one of my two (three, tops) moments of stupid bravado in my life.

That conversation stuck with me though, at first to live up to it, but later because I began to feel it become more and more true.  So let's fast forward to today. Super Meat Boy is a whole new level of difficult.  If you play each level just right, you can beat just about all of them in under 30 seconds.  Hell, I'd wager that you do a majority of them in under 20.  Each level is a small puzzle that you need to solve, working your way up to get to the end in the most efficient way possible.  But there is a difference between this game and other puzzle games like Portal 2.

See, In Portal 2, an excellent game, when you solve the puzzle, you can move on.  Now this has some exceptions and I am overgeneralizing like  madman, but at its core, you are trying to solve the puzzles that GLaDOS has put in front of you.

Alternate Box Art

In Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV, you are similarly given a puzzle.  And that puzzle in Super Meat Boy?  The one that you should be able to beat in 20 seconds?  It can take you hours to execute it correctly.  Every course (SMB) and room (VVVVVV) presents you with a simple puzzle.  We'll look at an example using a VVVVVV screen.

At this point in the game, you know that those lines reverse gravity.  Now, since the whole game works around that mechanic, you know that you need to reverse gravity from the starting point and then pass through each line without hitting the spikes.  It's a pretty simple puzzle.  But the game says "Oh neat.  You know what to do.  Now let's see you do it."  Mess up the timing even a little, and you'll go straight for the spikes.  Move too slow, spikes.  Move too fast, spikes.  And this is a pretty easy room for VVVVVV.  Now let's take a look at Super Meat Boy.

As you can see, this is a fancy pants visually-appealing level in Super Meat Boy, but with the magic of Microsoft Paint, I can highlight the hazards and the path towards victory.

The blue circles indicate saw blades, which will kill you, the yellow indicates rolling lava balls that bounce and roll like barrels in Donkey Kong (which will kill you), and the green is Meat Boy and the path you have to take to get up and save Bandage Girl.  And because Team Meat is a sadistic duo of death and sadness, pretty much everything is perfectly timed to kill you as you make your jumps.  Those two saw blades in the middle move, too.  Like I said about VVVVVV, there is a puzzle to be solved here: "How do I make it to the top?"  The solution is easy to say: "I jump past the saw blades, dodge any lava balls, and wall-jump my way upwards until I get to Bandage Girl."

I played that level for sessions of about a probably an hour each over the course of multiple days.  When completed, it took me about 9 seconds to beat for the first session, and about 15-16 seconds if I got the bandage hidden in the middle of the level.  This level wasn't even 100% necessary to beat the game; it was in the optional Dark World.

Hell, that's another thing worth mentioning.  I beat Super Meat Boy a long time ago.  I defeated Dr. Fetus and saved Bandage Girl (this all must really sound weird if you have no familiarity with the game).  I took a screenshot of my victory on September 28, 2011.  According to most measures of winning games, I was victorious in the story mode.  The Dark World offers levels similar to the regular Light World, but increases the difficulty.  You'd be shocked at what the addition of two more saw blades can do to your perfect run.  And yet I can't stop trying to beat these levels.

Part of it, I think, it the promise that I can beat them.  These levels were designed as part of a video game which is meant to be completed, so there  HAS to be a way I can.  Even more diabolically, Super Meat Boy gives you a Grade A+ for beating it under a certain time.  So now you have an already notoriously difficult game telling you, "Yeah, that was pretty hard, but that guy over there did it in nine seconds."  And so my inner ghetto goes AWW HELL NAW and has to beat them.

And I think that's the key of it.  We see this thing that says, "This other guy did better AND I THINK HE JUST SAID SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR MOM."  And you aren't going to take that lying down.  After probably a thousand deaths, I beat Super Meat Boy.  The same figure goes for VVVVVV; I died with a three-digit number, but just barely.  I clocked in my first playthrough of VVVVVV with 998 deaths.  About 200 of them were made because a shiny trinket (a collectible which might not even do anything) was placed in front of a tiny wall.  A nearby computer monitor said that no one would be able to get that trinket, and I was committed from there on.  There was NO WAY some punk ass monitor placed by a Swedish video game maker was going to get the best of me.  An hour of flying through about six rooms, landing on a disappearing platform, and going BACK through those rooms in one jump with hundreds of deaths later, I had my trinket.  It was glorious, even if I was the only one celebrating.

I lost many hours of my life fighting this block, and it was worth it.

In video games, we can be David fighting Goliath.  And the bigger Goliath is, the greater the glory.  Kratos fighting Kronos was an incredible fight in God of War III, but Captain Viridian vs. the four-pixel high block might be the most epic battle I have fought.  And I came away victorious.  One of those Vs has to stand for Victorious.  And if it doesn't on your game, it does on mine.

Oh, but Cave Story can suck a dick because goddamn that last level to get the good ending is hard.  My soul breaks every time I play it, which is pretty goddamn often.  It's like a spicy food challenge; you know it's going to be awful, but you suit up and fight because you JUST might be able to beat the odds.

I JUST GOT HERE THERE ARE SO MANY DEATH SPIKES HELP :(

Freddie's Best Value Games List 2011-Style!

Something that is kind of dear to me right now is saving money.  Mostly, this has to do with my state in life right now, where college loans are devouring about half of my hardly disposable income (depending on the hours I get per week at my job).  I do, however, try to stay on top of these fantastic devices called video games, which are notorious for being quite expensive.

On launch day, most PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 games run around $60, and Wii games follow up at $50.  Depending on the game, some might release for as low as $40, which is remarkably low for a high-profile release.  Indie games, being developed largely by smaller studios, tend to retail for about $15.  This makes indie games much more viable for people in a tight money situation except for one major problem: because so many are unknown to the public, it can be hard to find a solid recommendation.

So this is for all my poor homies out there who'll sacrifice eating ramen for a week to save up enough money for a new game (or maybe they just eat a lot of ramen; gamers are not a remarkably healthy bunch).  I'm listing games that I have been playing last year (some into this year) based on their price and how long I have been playing them.  I heartily recommend any game listed here, and in fact encourage you to purchase them if you get the chance.

Heed my instructions and you can feel like this every day without purchasing this game, which would make you feel like the opposite of this.

Firstly, we have my #1 Value Game for 2011, But Probably Ever: The Binding of Isaac.  You may remember it from that time I ranted about it for waaaay too long.  You can read it here if you so wish.  But let me update it with this:  I purchased this game in a Humble Indie Bundle for $5.  The game's full price is $5.  With the (amazing) soundtrack, it's $6.  I have played this game for 61 hours now, and there are still a couple of power-ups I haven't reached yet.  Objectively, this means there is still more for me to explore in this game after a little more than two and a half straight days of playing a $5 game.

The best value in gore around.

Nextly, we have Cave Story + which comes in at $10 on Steam.  So here's the thing, if you play through it once, you may not get a huge value out of it.  It's a little short and the way to the hard mode is paved through  frustration and sadness.  But if you're up the the challenge (and for restarting your game over and over for the super hard ending) Cave Story offers excellent Metroid-style shooter/platformer gameplay, a solid story, and most importantly, bunny people that go into a rage when they eat a certain plant.

Oh and puppies who sit on your head.

Team Fortress 2 is a given because it is FREE YOU GUYS FREE OH MY GOD IT'S SO GOOD. (It came out in 2007 but it updates pretty frequently so that counts.)


Cthulhu Saves the World.  For a certain amount of you, reading those words has made your brain say "Who do I give money to in order to put this game on my computer!?"  And the answer is Steam or the Xbox Live Marketplace, but we'll get there.  The game runs like an old Final Fantasy game, complete with 16-bit graphics and the "Attack Magic Item Run" type of menu.  It's a very solid RPG that doesn't quite break the mold of "Healer Fighter Thief Mage," but it does bend the molds of each class.  The main draw here, though, is in the story and the writing.  It's very easy to sigh and be cynical about a game that takes Lovecraftian mythos and attempts comedic writing.  The jokes might be lame, or dumb, or the characters might be flat.  I had those same fears.  They were assuaged about the first ten minutes into the game.

And the minute you see this in a game, you know your money was well-spent.

Finally, a game that you can probably grab for a reduced price online if you look hard enough, Skyrim.  Now, unfortunately, I cannot personally attest to the game, as I have not played it.  I know many people who have, though, and I have never heard the complaint, "It was good, but it's just too short."  It's a game to get lost in.  If you have money to invest in a game that you know you are going to be playing for a long time, Skyrim appears to be the way to go.  Even a full-price game seems to be a value in terms of money-to-gameplay hours, and that is amazing for a game that does not rely on multiplayer to provide hours.


Now, all of these are clearly subjective reviews.  I can't guarantee you'll like these games more than I could any other game.  But based on the money I paid for them combined with the fact that I loooved each of them, I can suggest them as things to look at.  Besides, most games have free demos available so that you can get a feel for them before you buy them.  I highly recommend looking into each of them.

"But Freddie," I hear you asking (I am a little psychic) "I don't know very much about computers or video games, how do I find these wonderful treasures you have shown me?"  Well, Mystery Reader, first I suggest you download Steam.  It's a free service from Valve, a video game developer, that allows you to digitally download games straight to your computer rather than deal with any physical media.  That in and of itself is pretty awesome, but the sales these people have.  Good lord.  I can only suggest to you that you set aside some money for games and remain stalwart in that decision.  $20 bought me 8 games in one sale.  It's scary.  I still haven't played some of them.

Terrifyingly accurate.

There's all that and the fact that occasionally these games are only available via Steam.  I know this to be the case with The Binding of Isaac.

Another route to take is through consoles.  Xbox Live and Sony both have marketplaces where many great games get overlooked.  Cthulhu Saves the World, for example, is ONE DOLLAR ARE YOU SERIOUS!?  I paid triple that amount and thought it was great!  One dollar.  That's all you need to pay to play an amazing game.  If you have an Xbox 360, pick it up.  Some fast food hamburgers are more expensive than that.

There are a couple of other ways to get some great games that I would be very sad to forget.  One is in offers like the periodic Humble Indie Bundles which are offered from time to time.  You can pay what you want for a number of great games while helping charity.  I really can't endorse it enough.  In fact, as of this writing, you have a week to purchase a super duper Android bundle.  Get on it!  The other way notable way to get some amazing prices on top-notch games is through Steam's sales.  There has been a history of a Summer Sale and a Christmas-Time Sale which is the bane of wallets everywhere.  With some self-control, though, you can come away with some solid games at an excellent value.

Any Questions? Recommendations? Strong Objections to any of my choices? Wanna say Hello? Leave 'em in the comments!

Edit 2/7/12: Oh my lord I forgot Minecraft!  I've been playing since it was in Alpha, and I forgot that it officially released in November.  Before I go lock myself in the Shame Chamber, let me explain something.  Minecraft is great.  It's not a game as much as it is a toy, really.  The game just drops you in a world and leaves you be.  You can punch trees to get wood from them, then make a pickaxe to get rocks and make a better pickaxe, and, well... no one has really told a Minecraft story more typical and wonderful than Yahtzee.  Watch the linked video, and you have a solid explanation of why Minecraft has made Creepers (called Suicide Shrubs in the video) famous.  Then buy the game and learn to fear them.

I always break the world's water physics, though, so squids normally just fear me.

Free Fallin'!! (A Skyward Sword Review)

Okay.  I just beat Skyward Sword. Just... let me get myself gathered up in order to write this.


HOLYCRAPTHATWASSOGOOD I CAN'T EVEN BELIEVE ALL THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED...GAAAAHHHHH


Okay now that that's over.  When I brought the game home and played it, I wrote down some of my reactions to some of the moments in the opening part of the game, and I'll be peppering them through this review as the become appropriate.


Before that, though, I'm going to cut right to the chase. A lot of people have been throwing things around along the lines of Skyward Sword being the single greatest Zelda game ever.  Now look, this might change in the coming years as the newness of the emotions presented by this game fades, but I might call this the single best Zelda game ever made.  The ONLY game that makes me question that title is Wind Waker, which up until now, was by far my favorite in the series.  Now the two are very, very much on the same platform with each other, and at the moment, I think Skyward Sword edges it out because of the system it was made for.

Quote from First Day #1: "Okay, I just did the obligatory practice training for the game.  Combat feels great.  I can’t wait to try it on some monsters."

No you cannot wait, past-Freddie, because fighting monsters feels great.The motion controls are spectacular.  Fighting with the Motion-Plus is unbelievably satisfying, because you are doing so much more than just hitting A to swing your sword.  YOU are swinging your sword.  You have full control over the direction that you swing it, and this is important because your enemies know how to block your swings.  Not only that, but they can counter if you don't strike them properly, and that prospect is terrifying for someone just learning how to fight.

Quote from First Day #2: "Oh my God I am way too impressed by looking around.  This is my first Wii Motion-Plus game, but I feel so in control of my every movement that it’s hard not to get ridiculously excited."

Maybe that needs a little explanation...  When the game first starts, you wake up in Link's room at Skyloft's Knight Academy.  As i got out of bed, I acquainted myself with the speed of Link and tested some of the basics out.  I entered the first person looking-around mode that we have seen in many third-person adventure games since Super Mario 64, where you stand and look at your surroundings with a 360-degree camera..  Using the Wiimote to look around the room, I found myself subconsciously wanting to use the Nunchuck to look.  I tried it out, and Link started moving while still in the first-person mode.  I was floored.  So much so, that I wrote this down.


Quote from First Day #3: "WHAT I AM MOVING AND LOOKING AND MOVING AND LOOKING."


Note that I also said that out loud.  I was discovering this incredible game little by little, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that I was learning a completely different playing style than I was accustomed to.  See, many of the Wii games I have played, even the greats like Super Mario Galaxy, could have been Gamecube games.  They had some new features, like Galaxy's way of collecting the star bits, but the core of the game was running and jumping the same way that we have been doing since 1985.  Even Wind Waker, the game I previously held as my favorite Zelda game, played very much like Ocarina of Time before it.  In short, if we took graphics and processing power out of the equation, I could have played those games on any system which came before this generation.  Skyward Sword changed that for me.

And not just because of this BITCHIN controller.

The combat was the core of this game.  Remember in just about every Zelda game ever where you used the item you got in that dungeon to kill the boss of that dungeon?  I think that happened once, maybe twice in Skyward Sword.  You seriously have to brush up on your combat skills, because the focus has shifted away from Link's gadgets and made its way to Link's constant companion: his sword.  You better hope that all the fighting you're doing makes you better, because even the bosses can and will block most of your strikes.  Flailing isn't an option; you need to make precision strikes.


Quote from First Day #4: "Link, I believe you will be friendzoned for eternity. But D’aaaaaawwwww Link and Zelda are adorable.  Seriously, the characters are so full of expression, it’s great."


The entire world of Skyward Sword is one of the most compelling game settings I have played in.  Skyloft, the main hub of the game, is a lovely little community, and each of the characters has a lot of personality.  There is so much detail that it really reminds me of Majora's Mask, a game which was almost 90% side-quests for the people of Termina.  Even the shopkeepers had prominent roles in side-quests, and Skyward Sword continues that in a slightly less overemphasized fashion.

Skyloft is no Clock Town, but they are similar in all the best ways.

Every character is visually unique, too.  I noted in my E3 Blog that Zelda took me aback a little: 

But the art style gives these characters a great array of emotions.  Link carries a lot of expression in his face, which really carries his role as a silent protagonist.  One character that seems like a throw-away bully in the opening keeps a larger role than you would think, and eventually becomes a welcome sight.  Fi, your new companion, carries zero emotion, but is visually striking compared to the dots that normally represent your companions.

She's also like, a robot spirit thing, so the emotionless thing is excusable.

Quote from First Day #5: "Okay I have to stop talking because I want to stand and play this game.

[2 minutes later]… Okay minimize talking.  I love the music."

This should be no surprise for Zelda, a series with such a beloved soundtrack that my special edition came with a 25th Anniversary Symphony CD.  The music still carries the high standard set by Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess.  

Quote from First Day #5.5: "…and the phrase 'slickest pompadour in town.'"

Comedy and ridiculousness are in full effect, and there are a couple of moments in the introduction of the game that almost break the fourth wall.

If your first response isn't "OH NO THE OWL'S BACK!" you need to replay Ocarina of Time.

Thank you for reminding us again, Nintendo.

I could keep going about how great an experience this game is for much, much longer, but I'll try to hit all my other points quickly for the sake of article length.  The flying feels very nice, especially when you figure the damn system out (I missed an important line of instruction, but found what i was missing anyways).  Jumping from your bird and going into a free-fall to the world below is exhilarating.  The set-pieces of the game are amazing, too.  When you stand back and reflect what you have just done, it's hard to not be amazed.  The final battle blows away any other final battles I have been a part of, in terms of what I did and in terms of the set-ups leading to them.  The story is incredibly well-paced and moving.  At one point, I welled up about as bad as I did to the opening sequence of Up.  Well maybe not that bad, but pretty damn close.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword might be my favorite entry in the series.  It has so many moments that had me floored that it's hard not to compare it to a game like God of War or Bayonetta in terms of amazing moments.  The difference, I found, was the way that I connected with Link because of the Motion-Plus.  I fought the monsters.  I found the Triforce.  I braved diabolical dungeons.  I saved Zelda.  If Skyward Sword had come out at the beginning of the Wii's cycle to show developers how it's done, I feel like we may be looking at a very different world of gaming for this generation.