Burnout Paradise: F = MA

I forgot to take a shot of the title screen, I guess this is an okay replacement

God damn do I love racing games.  You get to drive around in cars you'll never drive in ways you never will.  Which is probably a good thing that I keep it in the game because if Burnout is any indication of how that would actually turn out, I'd be dead inside of a minute and a half from smashing into oncoming traffic going somewhere between 50 and 80% light speed and coming to a dead stop in about .1 seconds.  What I do not like is racing "simulators", sorry Forza and Gran Turismo, it's just not as fun.

I'm always very torn when it comes to my arcade racers.  On the one hand, you have Burnout which features ridiculous game modes, crazy crashes and over the top everything.  And then you have Need For Speed, which focuses on real cars, customization and slightly more realistic racing.  In the end I guess Burnout is more "fun" and Need for Speed is more "compelling", hell I don't know, it's not like I'm going to stop playing either any time soon, so it's kind of a moot point really.

Burnout Paradise is kind of odd in many respects actually.  First and most odd, there's no speedometer.  That's right kids, no numerical indicator of speed in a racing game.  Well, at first I thought it was kind of weird, but the game has such a good sense of speed that I really never missed it except when I wanted to see how fast I could possibly get a car to go.  Second, racing is kind of only one focus of the game.  There's a lot more types of events than just "race", although I didn't really bother since the races are kind of what I was here for.  But the fastest car is no where near being the best at everything.  Try taking your track car out for marked man and you're going to lose very very quickly.  And finally, kind of in the same vein as the speedo thing, there's no way to switch the gear shifts over to manual.  But I kind of forgot about that after a while.

The races take a very open ended approach to the actual track.  You start at intersections and they tell you to go to one of 5 or 6 diffrent end points.  That's it, first one to make it there wins.  There's no road markers, no compass pointing you to turn which way, you have to make your own route.  It starts out pretty simple but the final set of races is really going to push you.  The other events are based around the same idea, there's no barriers anywhere ever.  You can go anywhere at anytime which can really screw you over if you're not paying attention.

There's a nice selection of cars although if you know anything about cars, it's going to bother you that they're named wrong and don't look right.  If you don't care too much about cars, a small hint, either a car in the game is directly based off a real world car, or is two different cars smashed together into a frankenstein car.  For example, one of the last cars you get, the "Carson GT 500" is actually the body of a Ford GT 40 and the back end of a Ferarri 360, even complete with Ferarri tail lights.  It only bothered me a little bit when I was looking at them in the junkyard, but once I got rolling it wasn't a big issue.

This one's based off a Supra

All in all a very solid game.  The controls are wonderful on a controller, I don't even bother trying to play racing games on a keyboard, so you're on your own in that department.  It's an EA game so of course they ask you to log into their servers to "post times" or whatever, but since it's EA the servers are down about 80% of the time, but it won't stop you from playing even if you haven't logged in so it was only a minor annoyance.  And it didn't have steam achievements, sad, but not actually important.  It's a damn fun game and my finger is still sore from mashing down the gas with as much force as my fingers could muster because, as everyone knows, the harder to press, the faster it goes.

Gunpoint: Super Pants

Yep, more indie bullshit.  I'd apologize but I've been lacking the time required to play a big title all the way through yet.  There's a couple in the wings, but I keep getting distracted by mid week sales of indie games I've been waiting to play.  SO HERE'S THE REVIEW AND YOU'LL LIKE IT DAMN IT!

Gunpoint is an indie, 2D stealth puzzle platformer with a cyberpunk, neo-noir setting and story.  And it's just plain, good fun.

It reminds me a bit of Deus: Ex in the idea that you are a cyber enhanced stealth agent sent out to solve a murder.  The story is pretty good, I like the way it's written and the characters seem much more real than they tend to in mystery stories.  You get to make a lot of choices within the game as you try to find out what happened and the game even gives you the option to shoot yourself in the foot at a few moments.

The story revolves around a private contracting agent, named "Conway" (I swear this is a "game of Life" reference, but it never just comes out and tells you) with super pants that allow him to do super human stuff like jump entire buildings, survive long falls and be a general badass.  He's generally snarky and funny depending on what dialogue options you follow and is a likeable guy.

The game play is just lovely.  The 2D setting makes the puzzles tie really nicely with the stealth.  Of course, you can just try to do the whole thing ham fisted, but one shot from a guard will take you out, so the stealth way seems to be the best way.  The levels, up until near the end where they get much larger, can generally be contained within just one screen.

And it may seem that this would make the game too easy, but the puzzle element really sold me on this sort of view.  The puzzles revolve around your ability to remotely rewire circuits within a given building.  You get upgrades that allow you interact with secure circuits, provided you get to the junction box, and ones that allow you interact with more objects in the world, like guard's guns, for the price of consumable resources.

The puzzle and the stealth fit together very nicely.  They play off of each other and holy hell is it fun to set up a really complex trap and watch it go off seamlessly.  But the puzzles don't detract from the stealth gameplay and the stealth gameplay doesn't erase puzzles from the game.

The game is rather short, but it does allows you to replay previous missions for better ratings after you've completed the story and several of the levels are really going to test the skills you've learned, particularity the final level.  I think it took me 15-20 tries to figure it all out. I played through the whole thing in one sitting because it was just so engrossing and I wanted to see what was next.  And if that hasn't sold you on it, there's a level editor so there's essentially no end to the game, just an end to the story, which you can replay and find other endings or missions you missed the first time.  It's damn good.

I did not "fall", I "jumped" form that third story window...

Minecraft is a terrible game

I do believe that title will piss off at least half the internet, but it doesn't stop it from being true.  The echo chamber in gaming can be deafening sometimes.  Dissenting opinions are often buried and good press has such a spotlight cast upon it that I'm worried it might melt.

Unfortunately, this isn't' going to be as pretty as some of my other reviews.  I have no screenshots this time around, partially because I forgot to take them and mostly because they can not convey the points I will be making.  I've spent the last week playing Minecraft (kind of) and as I was about to boot it up today, I came to this conclusion.

Minecraft is the poster child for horrifyingly bad development.  Patches were oddly spaced, inconsistent, added very little and the whole, "beta for 3 years" thing lost it's charm about two weeks in.  Major issues were overlooked  and instead astroturfed over by new content that sometimes fit int the game as well as something fitting into something terribly, I can't have clever metaphors all the time.  The end product is an unstable resource hungry beast with a plastered on facade of a "game" tacked onto it. 

Vanilla Minecraft is beyond dull.  It takes about two worlds and 30 hours of gameplay to get completely sick of the content.  Mining quickly becomes a chore and there's very little payoff at the end.  You build a house, a cave fortress, save up enough diamonds to build the tools the armor and the sword, level up so you can enchant them and then fight a tacked on boss and then you're done.  That's it.  There's not a story, there's not a conflict, you basically kill the dragon for the sake of killing the fucking dragon.  However, I have lost this week of my life to Minecraft because of what it is actually good at, being a boilerplate.

The modding community of Minecraft snatched away a disappointment and turned it into essentially the game I've always wanted since I was 8.  The mods are so good and make up for so many of the shortcomings of the game it's changes my opinion from "The reason not to donate to a non-finished product ever" to "Probably the best sandbox game that may ever exist."  I've been playing Tekkit.

For the uninitiated, Tekkit is the most overtly complex, confusing and most amazing collection of mods that has ever blessed gaming kind.  Tekkit takes Minecraft and takes it to the end that it should taken, complete mastery over the world.  You start out just the same, with nothing, punching trees apart and you end up playing with quantum mechanics, building oil rigs, regulating nuclear reactors, automating mining operations and flying.

It's about the most addicting thing I've ever played.  There's always something to do and it solves all of the really frustrating parts of Minecraft, you always wished you could just fix.  Massive construction projects can be automated and done in 1/10 the time, furnaces no longer need to be baby sat to get the most out of your fuel, items can be automatically sorted and there's finally something to do with all that fucking cobblestone you have.  It's just so damn enjoyable.  The game manages not to hand you that much so everything you build makes you feel accomplished and by the end of everything, provided you ever get there, you're living in modern society, you have command over the world.  Want to build a 64x64 underground base that extends all the way to bedrock then surround it with diamond block?  Totally doable provided you've done the leg work.  But you won't be digging it out yourself, you won't be tiling it yourself so you can focus on what style of comlumn best compliments your gaudy new underground lair.

Vanilla Minecraft, still terrible.