Tales Of Monkey Island ep1: My old love returns

As a child born in the early 80’s with one of the first PCs in the house, I played all the classic games from that era. As some might say, the early 90’s were the golden age for adventure games and I think I’d have to agree. I played Loom, the two Indiana Jones games, the Dig, Full Throttle etc. So when I heard a couple of months ago that they were releasing new Monkey Island games, I like many other 20 somethings had a little piddle on the kitchen floor in excitement.

If nothing else, I’m going to buy the new Monkey Island games just to show my support. I’ve been waiting for a new game to play for the past 10+ years and the first day they released Tales of Monkey Island, Episode 1, I picked it up off Steam.

I’m not sure about the episodic format that Telltale and other developers like to use these days, I think I’d rather them just put them all together in one game. I’m not sure what it achieves, its not like you can buy the games separately. I now have 5 TOMI games in my steam list and I can only play one of them. I have to wait 5 months in order to play them all. If they needed more time to polish the games, I could’ve waited. As it is, I’ve paid them $35 for a promise. They get the money in advance and I get to wait for another 4 months.

Thanks to Rock Paper Shotgun for the collage of Guybrushes.

Any game that gets my wife half interested in playing is a winner in my book. To my surprise and pleasure, TOMI is one of the only games where she’s shown half an interest. She doesn’t like the pressure in games; doesn’t like time limits nor the threat of death. Even though it got terrible reviews, she really liked playing American McGee’s Grimm because there was no pressure and she was able to butt stomp and stink up children to her hearts content. As with all other MI games, there is no threat of dying so you can wander around reveling in the atmosphere that comes with any good MI game. There has also been several times that TOMI has made us both chuckle and that’s nice. Despite not being a multiplayer, we’ve been able to play as a team, solving the puzzles (not insanely difficult or frustrating) and enjoying the storyline (even though I had to give some back story as we were going along).

I didn’t really like the looks of the new Guybrush model but its growing on me slightly. The little goatee doesn’t do him any justice but thanks to Dominic Armato’s dulcet tones, Guybrush is instantly familiar.

The island was interesting if a little bit small, the characters were full of… character, but there wasn’t a three headed monkey to be found. I’m looking forward to the next one – there have been hints that some characters may appear who fans will recognize; including Stan and someone with a grudge and a sword (although that could be nearly anyone Guybrush has bumped into in the past).

America's Army 3 - Free brainwashing game!

When a game is labeled as “Free”, I can’t help but put my grubby little gamering fingers all over it. But it is really free if the game was paid for by taxpayer’s money? I’m not sure, but I do know that if my money has gone towards this game without my permission, then I have to try it. This is the case with the newly released America’s Army 3, a game developed by and for the US Army.

America’s Army 3 is a game designed to brainwash recruit upstanding American citizens into the Army by glorifying the life of a soldier. Now I’ve never been in any sort of military organization but I can imagine that they’ve tried to make this game as “realistic” as possible while making it seem fantastic to be in the Army. For me however, I simply found the main game to be slow, confusing and frustrating.

When you first load up the game, you create a soldier and just like in the real army, you have to go through boot camp. This involves all the cool parts of the army such as the assault course, weapons training etc. I can’t imagine that it would attract too many new recruits if the game shouted at you constantly and made you clean the floors (I’m assuming that’s what happens – if movies have taught me anything it’s that boot camp is no fun). As it happens, in game I found the training to be the most interesting and fulfilling. There are achievements for getting better grades in each of the training missions and it moves along at a reasonable pace, only interrupted by annoying hand painted cut scenes.

Once you’ve finished the training (or at least had enough for the time being), I found it difficult to work out what to do next. It doesn’t look like there is a single player campaign after training so you’re forced to play online multiplayer. Here’s where it really goes down hill. From this point on, it feels like a rushed game. The bugs and performance issues are tolerable in comparison to the pacing of the game. It is slow. You get within sniper distance of the enemy and from this point, you have to be really careful. It’s really difficult to find your enemy and when you do, it’s even harder to distinguish if the player is friend or foe. The only difference as far as I’m aware is that the enemy doesn’t wear helmets but I found it really hard to tell. So you spend all your time crawling and crouching from one hiding place to another, hoping that you’ll spot the enemy before he spots you, on your way to “I don’t know where”, only heading there because everyone else seems to be running around blindly too. If you get shot during any of this, you have to wait for one of the teams to win, either by reaching the objective or finishing off the enemy team. This could take 20 minutes! It’s not much fun spectating whilst every single player moves as slowly as you did when you were alive.

When you start a game, you chose your role. If you pick one of the squad leaders, you have to specify orders. This game would probably be much easier if everyone used voice comms and really treated it like a team exercise, unfortunately everyone runs off and does their own thing (like in nearly every other game on the internet). If you’re lucky enough to get the sniper role, you have a massive advantage as you’re the only one who can see more than a couple of hundred yards. If not, you’d better be careful. In my first 10 games, I think I killed one guy and got killed in nearly all of them. Yay me!

Ghostbusters - No PC Multiplayer

As a kid born in 80's, Ghostbusters to me is almost it's own religion. I owned both Ghostbusters 1 and 2 on VCR (that's like a DVD to those of you born in the past 20 years), watched all the cartoons and even owned a few action figures. I specifically remember an Egon toy with tentacles coming out of his helmet. I remember waiting for weeks for it, eventually finding it at Argos.

So when news reached my ear holes of new ghostbusters media coming out in my twenties, it was wonderful. I am the exact market for new ghostbusters stuff. And when I heard that the entire cast would be providing voices, well words can't explain.

So anyway, I've been keeping half an eye on the Ghostbusters game for a while, hoping that it might be OK and not just a cash crop. It actually looks pretty good. Then today I read this article: BigDownload.com. This just makes me so angry. If you read between the lines, it looks like it says "We are concentrating on the console versions for our game and if you intend to buy it on PC, you dont get half of the game. Sorry!". If you read it closer, it looks like this; "If you play on the PC, this game was an afterthought, don't bother getting it". OK, so maybe I'm being a little harsh but it makes me mad. Partially understandably, it must be a money thing. They think that they'll have more sales on the consoles and dont want to invest the time and effort to implement the multiplayer on PC. I really think that it should be easier to implement on the PC but what do I know? It would've even been acceptable to hold back the PC release until this part of the game was in it. Not a perfect solution by any stretch of the imagination.

Part of me wonders what we'll be missing out on. I've seen trailers of the multiplayer in action and it looks like co-op. That could be promising, sort of like a Left 4 Dead game but with ghosts and proton packs.

I'm probably not going to get it. If the developers (Terminal Reality) aren't interested in making the PC game all it can be, then I have no interest putting my money in their hands. Besides, there are just too many awesome games out there that I still havent played and would rather invest my hard earned cash in.

Team Fortress 2 - Better late than never!

I've been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 recently. Frankly, this surprised me a little.


I'm a cheapskate and where ever possible wait to buy games until they drastically reduced in price. That way it gives the games time to mature (patch up) and I can feel the buzz that games get if they're any good. Well I've known the Orange box was pretty special for awhile and well worth the $30 price tag but I just never got around to picking it up until a few months ago. Even when I did, I went through all the single player games first; Half life episode 1 & 2 and Portal.

I barely touched TF2 even once I had the games on my steam list, with the feeling that I'd been out of the gaming loop for so long that I'd have trouble getting into the game and community. Especially because there is such a large community of mega-hardcore players of this game. To some extent I had that problem for a while but at the end of the day, it's just like any other FPS. I had a couple of "n00b" calls when as the heavy I couldn't defend a the last point on an assault map in a one vs one scenario, but generally, people didn't notice that I was a TF2 newborn. In fact, a couple of times I mentioned it in chat to ask for advice on the easiest classes to pick up and play and people were pretty good about it.

Anyway, a few weeks before the Sniper vs Spy update came out, I played with a friend online for about 6 hours straight and I was hooked. I've been playing pretty much as my game of choice since then. And as it turns out, I'm not bad at it. I'm by no means of professional-gamer quality but I put up a fight well enough. I've come top 'o the charts a couple of times and if you're wondering, I have no class of choice particularly. I do best with the Heavy, Demoman, Pyro and Sniper and although I'm crap at them, quite enjoy the Spy and Engineer.

Hello and welcome

Hello!

This blog will primarily be all about my gaming life.

I'll do some "reviews" (notice the quotes, I'm not a games journalist, they'll just be my opinions), stories produced in game and just general observations of the games I'm currently playing and games I've got my eye on.

I'll mostly be writing about PC games as this is my platform of choice although I'll occasionally mention non-PC games but only because I like the look of them and wish it would come out for the PC. I do own a Wii but haven't played it for a while.

Hope you enjoy reading. See you in the next blog!

Pani