Here’s my thoughts on the other 4 games I got recently :
Songbringer. This game is nuts.
In the best way possible. It’s an action RPG very much like the original Legend of Zelda games, but with the accelerator pedal nailed to the floor. It combines fantasy with science fiction in a gloriously flamboyant way, and the whole thing has the feel of a crazy dream you have after spending a night playing Zelda, smoking weed, and pounding back 5 hour energy drinks.
You play a hapless spaceman who crash lands on a very strange planet. The first thing you see is a cave very much like Zelda’s famous “It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this.”, and lo and behold, there’s a sword in this one too!
Your faithful AI drone buddy asks you not to touch it.
You totally touch it.
Zappy things happen, and then you have one sweetass vibrating sword.
It’s all marvelously trippy, and for the most part the game is amazing. But I have to say, for me it has a potential deal breaking flaw :
It’s all done in a pixel-art type graphics style that is very hard on my eyes.
It’s like the whole thing is deliberately blurry, and my eyes keep trying to bring it into focus but of course, that’s impossible.
It’s all very impressive and cool looking, and I can see what they were going for, but as much as I want to play it, the eyestrain factor makes it not worth it.
So I have to give it a B+ recommend. For you, it might be A+. The game seems quite amazingly awesome to me.
But not to my eyes.
The Free Ones. Holy crapsticks, is this ambitious.
In this game, you’ve been a slave in the mines ever since you and your family were captured by slavers when you were 12.
You have not seen the light of day since then.
Then one day, you see a bird in the mine.
A bird? Where did that come from?
You follow it out to the outside world, get an awesome grapnel type device, and begin your rope-slinging adventure.
It’s very much like being Spider-Man, or the hero of my fave NES game, Bionic Commando, so you can imagine how excited I was to give it a shot.
And the rope and grappling hook action is certainly a lot of fun, but the game consists pretty much exclusively of figuring out how to get from point A to point B via grappling system, and I am not sure that is enjoyable enough for me to keep playing,
Which is a pity. The story is very well executed and original, and the game both looks great and plays great.
But endless movement puzzles seems more tedious than fun to me.
Oh, and you WILL die a lot. Don’t worry…. you will not have to start back from the beginning, just from the last time you were on solid ground.
In summation : A B- recommend. If you love the main mechanic enough to be happy using it in creative ways to overcome obstacles, this is the game for you.
For me, though, that is not at all a sure thing.
More after the break.
My thoughts on method
I will do the remaining 2 games tomorrow.
I have a troubled history with method as a concept and as a reality. Being a natural pragmatist, I have often looked down on method as something suitable only for people with narrow minds and no imagination who need a fixed method for doing things instead of tailoring the solution to the problem like all the cool kids like me are doing it.
“Method….” , as I have arrogantly declared in the past, “is crap. All that matters is results. ” And I have definitely looked down on people who are trapped in this school or that method or some other thing that keeps them from solving their problems because they are coming at it with entirely the wrong set of tools.
And I still believe that the best solutions come from my pragmatic, open-minded, and creative type thinking.
However, I recognize that not everyone can do it. My software does not run on other people’s hardware very well. And so while the opinions remain, the disdain is gone.
You do you, folks, and I’ll do me, and we will leave the dogma behind together.
And to be honest, for all my brouhaha, the truth is that I am not very good at doing things methodically. I have a lot of trouble translating someone else’s method into a set of instructions that I can understand and follow.
Turns out other people’s software doesn’t run well on my hardware either.
As a result, I have very little experience with doing things methodically. I have instead coasted along on my considerable intuitive intelligence and ability to grasp, analyze, sort, and retain information without the need for organization or methodology.
Which is great. Until I come across something beyond my capabilities. And then I am lost because I don’t know how else to do things.
That’s what tripped me up in the linguistic class from hell. My approach takes a certain amount of time and that’s not negotiable. As soon as the information starting coming in faster than that, I was totally lost, and had no idea how to find my way back.
A less gifted person would have been doing things methodically all along and so had numerous tried and true ways of catching up if they fall behind.
But mega genius me was fucked.
Kinda ironic, innit.
I am fairly certain I could learn to follow methods if I had a patient teacher and if I could keep my frustrations with how slow it all is in check.
I just have to remember to be humble enough to see that my way is not the only way and that there are people who can do things far beyond my abilities precisely because their way of doing things make it work for them.
And I could learn a lot from those “boring” people.
I just have to slow down long enough to listen.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.