It’s Steam demo time again again
Psychonauts: It’s a few years old, yeah, but I heard that Psychonauts was the previous game worked on by Erik Wolpaw, and that was enough to make me want to look into it. The demo opens with a long-ass cutscene that isn’t Portal-funny or OMM-funny, but has a few laughs. Then the game finally begins. That’s where the trouble started, since, as is my wont, I opened up the menu straight away, and I saw this and this. A whole screen full of goddamn collectables, and a scavenger hunt list. I would like to take this opportunity to announce to the world at large that I do own an N64 and I have played my fill of 3D scavenger hunt games. From now on I am adopting a policy of immediately ceasing to play any game that presents me with a scavenger hunt list.
Ceville: It’s an adventure game, yeah. I do at least one adventure game every demo roundup. This time, though, I’m going to change it up and actually say something nice about it. Insofar as the demo goes, at least, it’s light on the terrible adventure-game-ness and pretty heavy on the style and humour. Ceville himself is a fantastic character; the despotic ruler of a stereotypical fantasy realm. His dialogue and antics provoke a good amount of laughs, especially once the paladin Ambrosius gets involved. If the game can keep up the funny and keep down the bizarro adventure-game logic, it could be a good time. But it’s not worth forty bucks to me to find out. At half the price, I’d probably pick it up.
The Graveyard: It’s pretty common that I’ll refer to some stupid adventure game, or maybe the latest Final Fantasy bore-a-thon, as being completely without gameplay. In retrospect, that was probably careless of me, since it’s devalued the term; when I tell you that The Graveyard contains no gameplay whatsoever, you’ll just think I mean it’s like Xenosaga: Episode One, which in fact has considerably more gameplay.
Now, to be fair to The Graveyard, it admits right upfront that it doesn’t have any gameplay. That’s not a surprise. You see, this isn’t a "game" in any conventional sense — it tells you right there in the Steam listing that it’s "an experiment with poetry and storytelling but without words." If you’re not in the demographic that lame shit like that appeals to, this game is not for you. I, however, happen to be in the coveted "pretentious twits" group, so I went into this thinking it might actually be pretty good. Unfortunately, it isn’t technically solid enough to pull it off. The whole game consists of walking an old lady to a bench, sitting down, listening to a song, and then walking back out. It’s a bit difficult for it to develop a real mood, though, because the animations are so limited; when Nintendo wanted to make a brooding meditation on mortality, they had the balls to put Mario in it, and had you jump on turtles in front of brightly-coloured backgrounds while they lectured you on life, death, and the meaning of free will. Tale of Tales didn’t have that kind of testicularity, and just built a pretentious, brooding facade to mount on their pretentious brooding. But, as I say, the animation isn’t up to snuff; it would never occur to me to complain that Mario only has one walking animation that plays over and over again, but that’s because, when I’m playing Mario, I’m doing something other than just watching him walk. When you’re playing The Graveyard, you really aren’t, and so the fact that the old woman only has one looped walking animation, and the fact that her feet don’t quite match up with the movement, thereby giving her an odd "floating" appearance, and the fact that she doesn’t have a proper turning animation and just sort of rotates, and the fact that she loops one simple "looking around" animation through the entire duration of the song… well, it all adds up to being really distracting.
On the subject of the song, it’s awful. I mean completely, magnificently awful. The lyrics are in German, and for all I know it actually works in German, but the English subtitles are laughably bad. Not that either English lyrics or German lyrics seem to blend well with the description of the game as "an experiment with poetry and storytelling but without words" — It sure goddamn does have words. The song is so long and there’s so little else that it doesn’t just have words; rather, I’d say it’s completely dominated by words. Honestly, if the song didn’t have lyrics, the game would probably work a lot better. Though fixing the technical issues should also be a priority; at the very least, they should make it so you can’t walk off the side of the screen. If you do that, the camera won’t follow you, and then you have to blunder around blindly trying to get back. That’s just poor.
Planet Busters: What the fuck is this? Guitar Hero Tetris? I spent about two minutes fighting with the bizarre controls and then quit. So I don’t really know.
Mystery P.I.: The Vegas Heist: Much like Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena, which I discussed last roundup, this is basically Where’s Waldo with minigames. Samantha Swift’s visuals worked better for me, though. Also, some of the hidden objects in Mystery P.I. are just downright strange; I have no idea what a car suspension looks like, for example, and what they called a pylon doesn’t look a thing like any of the pylons I’ve ever seen. Not to mention sometimes they outright cheat — I was supposed to find a number 5 at one point, and it turns out that they were calling the S on the end of a sign the 5. That’s kind of bullshit. Even so, it was pretty fun, but I always liked Waldo.
Pizza Frenzy: Another Popcap game. This one’s about delivering pizza. You have to bring the right pizza to the right dudes before you run out of time. Like most Popcap games, it’s fun for a little while, but it gets really dull before too long. I understand that’s kind of the point, though. Also like most Popcap games, I’d pay five bucks for it, but at ten it just seems a bit too expensive.
Age of Booty: Capcom develops PC games? I didn’t know that. This is kind of a weird pirate RTS, and honestly it seems pretty repetitive and bland. The graphics and sound are appealing, and everybody loves pirates, but the gameplay appears to consist mostly of waiting for very slow things to happen.
Virtual Villagers — the Secret City: I don’t know quite what to think of this one. At first it frustrated me, since it seemed to take absolute ages for anything to happen, and there was fairly little I could do to influence things. After I got used to it, though, I began to realise that that was intentional; this is less a game than a virtual toy, and you’re only supposed to play with it every once in a while, while your villagers continue to work and improve while you’re not there. In that regard, it has some appeal. I might look into this one a little more.
World of Goo: The internet’s favourite indie game ever of all time. I didn’t love it. I mean, don’t get the wrong idea; it was cute, and it had some fun moments, but it seemed to rely a bit too heavily on really fiddly positioning and speed-mousing to suit me. You drag your goo balls around to make a big long goo ball chain, and then you connect it to the pipe and win big. Then there are different types of goo balls, and so on and so forth. Another game I might get into at half the price, but twenty bucks just doesn’t work for me. Of course, it was on sale this past weekend and I didn’t buy it then either, so maybe not.
