Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

A recent Twitter conversation with Jonn Shute from How to Murder Time got me wondering about the current state of PS2 emulation. A quick google search revealed that the leading contender is a programme called PCSX2   which is a highly developed emulator that already works with over 1800 PS2 games. Impressively there are Windows Mac and Linux versions available. Disclaimer: The combination of hacking and gaming makes emulation a facinating subject but there are legal issues. You might feel that it is morally justifiable to emulate older systems and games that are no longer commercially available (abandon-ware) but I am not sure that a court of law would agree with you. In any case the PS2 only went out of production in January this year so even the abandon-ware argument is a bit unconvincing. The two main points of legal contention with regard to PCSX2 are the games themselves and Sony's PS2 bios. You can still buy PS2 games in second hand shops and on Ebay but the only legal wa...

After finishing Dishonored I got a notion to revisit an old classic: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic from way back in 2006. "Classic" is perhaps an exaggeration because the game got mixed reviews when it came out. Some reviewers praised it's innovative physics based combat others criticised its unimaginative story and repetitive game play. Replaying the game seven years later I can certainly see flaws. The voice acting is really dreadful at several important times and the writing in general is poor. The two main female characters in particular are awful. They are supposed to be sexy I think but are really just embarrassing.  Despite this I did enjoy replaying the game to the end and the combat is innovative and fun. It reminded me a lot of Dark Souls (high praise) where blocking and timing are everything. Sadly there is an overall lack of balance in the game which overshadows a lot of the combat. It is generally easier to kill an opponent by kicking them into an en...

I finished Dishonored last week and was very impressed. Highly recommended if you haven't played it yet. High points: Strong Storyline, Engaging gameplay, enormous freedom of action. Great set of skills and upgrades. Many ways to play and all of them enjoyable. Stealth in particular is very satisfying. Not so High points: Despite the freedom of how you go about them the missions themselves are linear.Rewards for sticking to one style of play may deter you from experiencing other side of the game. The ending(s) are a bit of a let down. To elaborate on the issue about people sticking to one play style: Dishonored follows the model of other Bioware games where the ending you get depends on the way you play. If you want a "good" ending you need to play non violently which more or less obliges you to play stealth. While stealth is well supported and enjoyable in the game it does mean that you miss out on a lot of the games weapons and power ups.

The new Xbox One is going to run a version of Windows. Good news for PC gaming? Surely that means that new AAA games will be easily ported to PC from the Console version. Well yes but it could also mean that you will only be able to buy those games from Microsoft's own App store. If that happens then say bye bye to the fierce competition between digital retailers that has led to so many PC gaming bargains in recent years. I have no doubt that Microsoft have long looked with envy on Apple's App store model where the only place to buy software is from themselves and they get the retail mark-up on everything that goes on the device. Microsoft could do that on their new console but I don't think they will for a few years yet because a lot of consoles still aren't  connected to the internet and bricks and mortar retailers still sell a heck of a lot of console games. In the PC world bricks and mortar retail is already dead. The vast majority of PC game buyers are buyi...

Over the last week or so I have taken finishing my gaming evenings with a short spell of Tell Tale Games  point and click adventure "The Walking Dead" . (My current main game is Dishonored but more about that in a later post). I am a fan of the recent trend for very strong story lines in games like Spec Ops: the Line , Max Payne 3 and Bioshock Infinite . The Walking Dead is a logical next step for me because it is acknowledged to be an episodic story first and a video game second. I have only played episode one so far and it has for the most part lived up to my expectations of being a very good example of comic book story made interactive. The biggest surprise for me is that some of the gameplay is more challenging than I expected. Its been a while since I played a point and clicker and I had forgotten about non intuitive puzzles that require clicking every item in your inventory with every object on the screen in the hopes of getting a result.  Walking Dead has a very ...

Spec Ops the line: pretty decent third person shooter with a very dark and disturbing storyline. All in all I found the experience to be well worth it.It may not reach the literary height of Heart of Darkness or the Cinematic brilliance of Apocalypse Now but it is nevertheless a fitting homage to those two forebears. To my mind this game handles brutality far better than Modern Warfare series. In Modern Warfare it always feels like brutality is just put in for shock value. In this game it is a serious attempt at storytelling. Note: I played this game back in January 2013 and wrote this snippet then but somehow never posted it. Posting now for completeness. 

For about a decade I maintained a monthly subscription to a PC gaming magazine called PC Zone . Perhaps my favourite bit of the magazine was their list of essential PC games. This buyers guide changed format a few times over the years but the basic principle remained the same. It was a ranked list of essential PC games classified by genre. The genres included Shooters, RPGs, God Games, Space games (for a while) and a few others I can't remember. There were about ten games in each category. For several years this list was a cornerstone of my PC gaming. I strove to acquire and play every game on the list in the categories I was interested in.  I even tried to get the top titles in those categories I wasn't so enthusiastic about. I miss that list because gaming seemed much simpler then. I could play perhaps ten games and consider myself an expert on shooters or RPGs or whatever. Once a game got on the list it usually held its place for some time so this was an achievable goal...

I enjoyed Max Payne 3 although I am not sure it is fair to call it a game. Interactive movie might be a more appropriate title given how little control you actually get over your characters actions and how much time you spend watching the game story unfold in cut scenes. You literally spend most of the game watching your character go through a series of long cut scenes interspersed with brief hectic firefights. This actually sounds worse than it is because the story is actually very good, the characterisation is very good and the cinematography (if that is the correct term) is also very good. You could watch this as a movie in its own right. I have previously criticised shooters like the latest Medal of honour and Call of Duty games for restricting the players freedom too much. However Max Payne 3 does this far better than those games smiply because it is a better interactive movie. In terms of story telling it is up there with Bioshock infinite. A huge factor is that we finally see...

I stumbled across OpenTTD a couple of days back and the game is wonderful. This is an open source success story with a large active community of developers and players that have re-imagined and expanded upon Chris Sawyers 1995 classic game . Coming straight from the flash and polish of Max Payne 3 (of which more in a later post)  it was quite  refreshing to see a game that solidly votes for substance over style. This world building game has huge complexity with many many layers that I haven't begun to understand yet. For example: I am trying to grow a town in the desert. Turns out I need water and food, which makes sense. Water comes from a nearby water plant so I build a road and send some trucks for it. Food comes from a food processing plant but that in turn needs maize and fruit. These are too far apart to reliably transport by road so I need to build a network of railways to ferry all this stuff about. To speed things up I want to run multiple trains on the tracks bu...

The optional Deposed King is one of the hardest bosses in Darksiders II. I stumbled across him first at level 13 and was soundly defeated and I didn't eventually overcome him until level 17.  He is not a very complex boss. Most of his attacks are slow and easily avoided but he hits very hard and one particular hammer attack leaves you frozen for about 10 seconds while your health drains away at an alarming rate. Even one of these can be enough to kill you so there is absolutely no room for error as you whittle away his large pool of health. This is the source of the difficulty and frustration with this encounter. You spend a long time getting his health down only to die because of one mistake. Anyway the simple hint I have is to stack resistance gear. Gear in Darksiders II has two mitigation factors:  defence, which protects against most normal attacks and resistance, which protects against elemental attacks. Defense is more generally useful so you have probably maximised tha...

I re-subbed to EVE yesterday and spent two hoour in game without getting even a single frigate out of the dock. The game has been in the news a bit lately with their annual fan fest in Reykjavik. I am also aware of forthcoming changes in skill trees that make it very beneficial to skill up destroyers and battle-cruisers before the next patch so I decided to buy a months sub to finish off the training needed. This is perhaps not the best motivation for returning to a complex mmorpg and indeed I am at a bit of a loss to decide what to do with my month of play time. Implementing my skill training plan took about an hour - downloading the latest version of EVEmon , setting up APIs and ensuring that I can get the skills required before the patch deadline. After that I decided to play around with some frigates partly because there has been some significant changes to frigates since I last played and partly because frigates are cheap to lose if I screw up. The once humble Slasher seems to b...

My late father always carried a penknife (pocket knife). He was a practical man, a carpenter by trade who later started his own building company and he firmly believed that every man and boy should carry a handy knife. I was seven or eight when he brought me into one of those wonderful old tobacconist shops to buy my first penknife. Even though that shopkeeper convinced him I was too young for such a sharp implement I acquired one soon enough and obeyed his tenet of carrying a penknife through most of my school days. I remember it being somewhat unusual even back then for a middle class urban kid to carry a pocket knife. This was back in the days before high tech pocket multi-tools had come to Ireland so I mostly recall my father carrying a simple single bladed knife. He used it for everything. The same blade that cut carpet tiles served to peel the apples that my father loved to eat.  It never seemed to do him any harm. My father is dead almost twenty years now and I have a s...