Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 19

Game review: Level 22: Gary’s Misadventures for PS4

Level 22: Gary’s Misadventures is a “humorous stealth” (yes, both of those belong in quotes) game with some cute moments and several fun levels, but it’s also hindered but many dreadful levels caused by bad design. The premise is simple enough. Gary has partied too hard on his birthday, and waking up late the next day, he realizes he must sneak into work or risk being fired.

In this plot, Gary needs help from a master of slacking, so he calls Marty, who knows the company’s security and all the ways to exploit it. In return for helping Gary get to his desk, Marty asks Gary to find some of his prized toy collection, which was scattered all over the building after Marty got fired for destroying some office equipment.

Thus begins Gary’s ascent to Level 22, a trip that will take him up and down through the convoluted maze of his company, each floor starting and ending with a stairwell. Which, even being nice, is a perfect example of stupid video game logic. In every single real world building, the stairwell is a single continuous structure used primarily as a fire exit. Want to go to level 22 without being seen? Take the stairwell, because no one in their right mind is going to climb 22 flights of stairs when there’s a working elevator. But whatever, the building is set up by a masochist who hopes everyone dies in a fire. Let’s just run with that.

Unfortunately, the stealth aspect is almost instantly ruined by some of the tools offered to the player. For instance, in some levels, Gary picks up a newspaper to hide his face from co-workers. Note that without the paper, they can identify you from the back easily enough, but somehow, holding up a paper makes the back of his head harder to recognize?

Next is the donut, the only way to distract guards, which must be laid down on the floor within their line of sight. So of course many times you’ll lay it down, only to be seen and forced to restart the section. Or how about the coffee, which is used only to short circuit computers. Yeah, no one’s going to notice coffee dripping from their monitor and look around, are they?

There’s a box to hide in, because “hur hur Metal Gear,” but it only works on certain co-workers, while others can somehow see through it and recognize Gary. Because…reasons. Similarly, it’s possible to run past certain enemies who will see you, but won’t identify you if you don’t stop. In another bit of head scratchingly bad logic, it’s possible to stand directly beside someone patrolling the halls to bypass them. And if you really need to get rid of someone, slip some laxative in their coffee, which take effect immediately after they swallow it. Sure, makes sense.

About the only tool I found amusing is “the big book,” and that’s because when Gary first finds it, he says “with this, I can blackmail the executives!” Then Marty says, “Or you can use it to hit your co-workers and knock them out.” So that’s what Gary does, risking murdering his co-workers with brain trauma rather than just take the stairs.

Oh, and nobody in this building is actually working like in a real office. They go sit at their desk for two seconds and then get up and walk a little patrol route. Others will “cat nap” in such ridiculously short cycles that’s it’s extremely hard to move around them. Which is the point, I suppose, but it’s taken to such a ridiculous level that I spent a good deal of my time shaking my head at how goofy it all seemed. I mean, if these people are all such slackers that they’re never working, why should Gary have to sneak around them? And for that matter, how does EVERYONE recognize Gary regardless of their department?

Setting aside the silliness of the level designs, they’re not even all that good. Walking along a garage wall with numbers writing on it, it’s possible to make Gary walk under the painted numbers. Similarly, he can walk onto sinks in bathrooms or though certain filing cabinets because the collision detection is iffy at best.

One of the levels takes place entirely in the dark because…because a stealth game has to have a dark level, I guess. Even though it’s pitch black, a light shines around Gary because….reasons. Using the same logic, everyone can see Gary with the same visual range, and everyone is “working” despite the blackout. Does any of this make sense? NOPE. The whole thing is probably just set up like this to check off a box in some internal design document.

Then there’s the boss encounters, because of course there is, and all of these are terrible. I think the worst is the “Gnith” a giant man shoveling incriminating corporate documents into an incinerator in the basement. There are three incinerators constantly opening their doors on a timer, and to get past this boss requires sneaking around the light they cast to grab a bottle of “explosive,” turn on a steam pump to blind the Gnith, and then put the explosive in the bin of documents so that he shovels it into the fire and loses some health. In short, Gary murders a man to avoid being caught showing up late to work. OH HO HO, SO FUNNY!

I can’t think of much I liked in this game. The design is dumb, the jokes are lame, and the ending is painfully stupid. I give Level 22: Gary’s Misadventures 2 stars, and the only good thing I can think to say about it is that I’m glad I only paid 7.99 for it.

Game review: Teslagrad for PS Vita

Hoo boy, this fuckin’ game…there’s a part of me that wants to say something pragmatic and objective, like “Teslagrad is not a bad game, just a bad game for me.” But that’s because I absolutely hated playing it from start to finish. I want to be objective and pragmatic because the graphics are so pretty and the story is told without dialogue. That’s a nifty trick in an age when most games want to spend five minutes in intro cut scenes before letting you play. But the game DEMANDS perfection with every single puzzle. I remember reading early reviews that said, “This isn’t very challenging,” and now I want to scream at those reviewers, “As compared to what? Demon Souls?!”

So, the game starts off with an older man taking a baby to a house before time passes forward, and then an invading army forces the grown child to escape into a tower designed by the electrical equivalent of Rube Goldberg. This is the point at which I have to ask, “Does anyone ever build a tower that will kill them for failing to navigate the trip to their office?” FUUUUCK NOOOO THEY DON’T! The argument can’t even be made that this tower was built to defend some mystical treasure from distant enemies, because as the story plays out, it’s clear the “electromancers” were wiped out by their own allies. As it is, the first item, the polarity gloves, are right inside the tower. That’s some super duper security, mang.

AND YET, this ancient tower also contains automated puppet shows covering the history of these two factions. I’m trying to picture who had time to build that, and WHY they fucking built it. Like, “AAAAAH, OUR ALLIES HAVE BETRAYED US AND THE TOWER BURNS! WE MUST SET UP A SERIES OF ELABORATE PUPPET THEATERS DETAILING OUR HISTORY IN CASE SOMEONE ELSE COMES ALONG AND DOESN’T DIE IN OUR HUNDRED BOOBY TRAPS OF HOT ELECTRICAL DEATH!

It can’t be the enemy who set all of this shit up because they wouldn’t have told the puppet show story casting themselves in such an unfavorable light. As it is, one of the bosses was supposedly a helper automaton made by the “electromancers” (Because calling them electrical engineers wouldn’t have be “magical” I guess?) So these super geniuses left the means to ascend the tower available to anyone, but none of this army of dudes could enter before, UNTIL one little boy did. Yuh-huh. So how is it that one of the bosses you meet high up in the tower is a decrepit old man who has none of these tools, but made the climb just fine without them? Maybe after building a puppet show, the geniuses also left a back entrance open that just had a plain old, perfectly safe elevator? I know, I’m overthinking this story, and it’s just a stupid premise meant to facilitate some deadly puzzles. But it’s really, REALLY stupid premise.

This tower demands such perfection to get anywhere, even before you get the dash boots and the cloak that lets you radiate magnetic polarities, that I have to ask how anyone ever survived their commute to work. But once you get those boots and the cloak, the game becomes a rat bastard BECAUSE doing the same thing over and over does not yield the same results. It’s possible to jump and use one polarity on the cloak from the same spot a dozen times and be shot off at half a dozen angles. So it doesn’t feel like precision platforming to me. It feels like blind fucking luck to get where I needed to be.

It doesn’t help that to get the good ending requires collecting 36 scrolls, and not a single one of these scrolls isn’t a pain in the thumbs to collect. Each time I finally got one, I would say something like “And fuck you, you son of a bitch.” I didn’t mean that for my character, but for whatever bastard thought this would be fun. That’s my biggest sticking point playing this, that I NEVER considered any of it fun. It’s all just a painful slog trying my patience. (And my husband’s who gets tired of my constant growling.)

So to me, it doesn’t really matter that the game is pretty. ANYBODY can do pretty these days. They can do it in 3D, in 2D with hand painted sprites, with pixels in 8 or 16 bit variations, or with voxels. Pretty is easy. FUN, that’s what a whole bunch of these games tend do gloss over in favor of being insanely difficult.

Let me give you an example. Near the end of the game, the character picks up a rod that can shoot lightning. They go into a fight with the final boss, but they’re not allowed to just shoot the fucker. NO! That would be cathartic after all the bullshit this game has thrown at the player. Instead, one must wait through a pattern of attacks where there is nothing to do but dodge for almost a full minute. Then, and only then, is the character allowed to shoot the boss. Once, in the ass. And then the pattern has to be repeated again, and again, and again. What the ever lovin’ fuck is wrong with the people who made this game?

I am struggling to find anything nice to say, and after wracking my brain, all I can come up with is that at least I could change the control layout to better suit my needs. That’s good because I could put the jump and dash where they were more conformable and invert the polarity of the gloves.

But, while that was a point in the favor of the controls, I have to take it away because trying to get my character to punch in the right direction was often agonizingly difficult. I might need to punch up to magnetize a block and punch left or right twenty or thirty times before I got the direction I needed. In the first boss fight, I could hold left on the D-pad and punch up and down until the block I was trying to magnetize shoved me off into an incinerator without me once hitting my target. This was aggravating because I had to hit 9 blocks to defeat this boss, and every single last block was a wrestling match with the controls. Oh, and did I mention that after successfully hitting three blocks and weakening the boss, the conveyor belt under the character moves FASTER?

Have I made it clear how much I hated this whole damn slog from start to finish yet?

So, yeah, I’ve deleted the game from my Vita and I regret not having a physical copy that I could stomp on, set on fire, and shoot with a gun at a target range. I give Teslagrad 2 stars and my undying hatred.

Game review: Hitman Go for Win Phone

Hitman Go needed time to grow on me, and for the first two “boxes” I was pretty bored with it. But the game keeps adding new ideas and raising the challenge until it becomes a fun sort of puzzler that crosses chess with assassination.

Even at the start, each level is visual treat, being designed to look like a board game with little plastic figures representing Agent 47, his marks, random guards, and even occasional bystanders. Each collection of levels is part of a box set, and given how each section is relatively small, I can almost see this game fitting into a real life box.

Given how pretty the designs are, it’s a shame that the game is so stingy about camera control. It is possible to nudge the camera a bit to get a slightly different angle or to zoom out, but that’s about it. This makes it harder to appreciate all the little details going on around the levels, which is a real shame when I wanted to look at some of the background antics. One airport level in particular had humorous depictions of baggage handlers using some…unorthodox packing methods. I wanted to zoom in on that, and it’s a shame that I couldn’t.

Worse, sometimes it would be nice to rotate the camera to observe the movements of guards, and the only way to do that was to zoom out. This presented its own problems. First, just pinching to zoom might require doing the gesture four or five times before the game recognized it and did what I wanted. Then once I got the screen zoomed out, actually moving Agent 47 became more fiddly, and again might need four or five swipes to get him to move. It’s not life threatening, unless the game randomly decides my stroke to the left was really up and sends my poor agent into a guard I was trying to avoid. But it did happen frequently enough to be annoying.

Setting that aside, once the game started adding more complex guard types and giving more routes to move along, I had quite a bit of fun trying to sort out what moves the game wanted, and in what order. Sometimes a patrol pattern doesn’t reveal an obvious weakness until you’ve banged your head against it for a few attempts. Then once you see a solution the rest of the level is much easier to dismantle.

Every level has 3 objectives, though they aren’t exactly mandatory to complete. You can do one on one pass and then do the other two in a second run if you like, and I liked that it didn’t demand perfection. Sometimes a level might task you to complete it in under a certain number of moves, and those could end up being the most tricky for me. But they were also the most satisfying when I finally worked out a solution.

There is a catch to this, however. Each objective gives one point, and later box sets have a certain point cost to unlock. This initially annoyed me, but after I went back and got enough points to unlock the next set, generally speaking the rest were easier to “buy” without having to do all of the objectives. I only had to do enough to unlock the next box, and that was two objective per level on average.

After playing through several levels where the point is just to reach a goal, Agent 47 closes in on assassination targets who are dressed in red, and there’s a little bit of variety in these assignments. Some might require you to sneak up on them and knock them out just like their guards, but others will require using a sniper rifle or some trick to reach them. One theater level had a mark parked under a chandelier, and I had to unlock a door leading out to a balcony with a gun, allowing me to shoot the chandelier support and bring the whole thing down on his fragile little head.

If there’s any weak points in the game, it’s in the music, which is…it’s not bad, but aside from the rendition of Ave Maria used during the assassination levels, I’d be hard pressed to recall the other tune used. It’s just there, not worth noting, except perhaps in a nit-picky review. Which is…right, let’s move on.

There is a strange bit of freezing and lag sometimes, possibly due to this being a Unity engine game, but unlike most Unity titles I’ve seen lag on, it’s not really all that harmful for a game like this. I can’t blame lag for my frequent deaths, as the guard was just standing there the whole time before I moved Agent 47 the wrong way. Still, it’s something else I thought I should mention.

Overall, I think it’s a good game, and one that’s totally worth the 4.99 I paid for it. There’s only 6 box sets in the game, and two of them are only 8 levels long. But it’s still enough content for a few days of binge playing, and good several weeks if you’re only playing in smaller doses in bank lines and the like. The later levels are tricky but not unfair, and I can see replaying the whole game over once I’ve had enough time to forget the solutions.

I give Hitman Go 4 stars and recommend it to fans of puzzle games. While I reviewed this on the Windows Phone version, I’ve also seen it’s been recently released on PS Vita, and it’s obviously already available for iOS and Android. So whatever your preferred flavor of mobile diversion is, you can find a copy if killing time by killing toy figures tickles your fancy.

Book review: Imp Forsaken by Debra Dunbar

I didn’t enjoy Imp Forsaken as much as the previous books in the Imp series, which is not to say that I didn’t like it, or that it’s badly written. There are a few things that rubbed me the wrong way, but I also recognize that they couldn’t be avoided given the way the last book ended. This is the logical continuation of the story thus far, and there’s no way to avoid the problems I had with it.

First of all, the book is slow to start. As I said, this couldn’t be helped because of how badly injured Sam was at the end of the previous book. Even with several time jumps forward, the scenes given “screen time” drag on without much happening until the middle of the book. It can’t be helped. I get that, and I understand why the story had to go here. I just can’t say I got much out of it.

The other problem is that there’s a sudden shift of perspective to a previously unimportant bit character. This is something that really bugs me, but again, it can’t be helped. Sam isn’t able to follow the story in progress back on Earth, and neither Wyatt nor Gregory are in the right frame of mind to be doing all this investigative work. So in comes Gabriel to provide some information that would have been impossible to convey otherwise.

The problem with Gabriel isn’t just that he’s an intrusion on what had been a series with a singular POV. He’s also a major asshole, a self-centered, self-righteous egotist who spends a great deal of the first half complaining about EVERYTHING. He hates people, demons, having to be outside of Auru, and even other angels for not being as pure and balanced as he is. He’s a real pain in the ass to read right up until the middle of the book, when exposure to physical reality outside of his precious sanctuary begins to educate him on how wrong he’s been for a long, long time.

And in this way, the story is pretty good. Once the slow parts are out of the way for Sam and Gabriel, both perspectives help show the full scope of the elves’ plans and who all is working with them on this. While Sam unravels the mystery one direction in Hel, Gabriel uncovers the other half on Earth, with neither of them communicating once. Somehow it all balances out in the end.

I admit, I had a huge concern that Gabriel would falter once he had all the information about the conspiracy. After all, the victims were demons, and he’s not exactly a fan of Sam or anyone from Hel. And yet, once he discovers what had happened to Sam and the plot she’d uncovered, he takes action in a way that shows how far he’s developed in a relatively short time. (We’re talking a few months, which for an angel who’s a couple million years old is an eye blink.)

There’s also one development hinted at early on that made me happy, and that’s the apparent bonding of Gregory and Wyatt. Their relationship had become something of a rivalry, but with Sam seriously injured, both Gregory and Wyatt seem to put aside their differences. Gregory even spends some time bonding with Wyatt by playing video games and eating chips. (You have to read the previous books to appreciate how huge that change is.)

This book concludes with a satisfying sense of closure, with the mystery solved and Sam reunited with Gregory and heading on her way back to Earth to see Wyatt. I’d like to say I’ll be reading the next book, Angel of Chaos, right away. However, there are two spin-off books that will need to be read before I can move on, both of them concerning Wyatt’s sisters. I’m intensely curious to see what’s going on with both these ladies during the time that Sam was too injured to leave Hel, and so despite my burning curiosity to see what’s next for Sam, Wyatt, and Gregory, that book will have to wait a bit.

Anywho, I give Imp Forsaken 3 stars, and I highly recommend that you read the previous books before picking this one up. It really helps to have already invested in the characters in the previous episodes, and also to see that the writing isn’t normally like this. It’s just that this book couldn’t be rushed, all things considered.

Game(s) review: Mommy’s Best Games Bundle for Steam

Explosionade is a featured game on Steam today, and under it was a bundle of four games from Mommy’s Best Games for 7.99. That many games for one dirt cheap price had me thinking “At least one of them has to be worthy of a review.” And it turns out, all of them are, with three being truly fun diversions. So today, you get FOUR reviews in one post. AREN’T YOU LUCKY!

(Hint: You are!)

So let’s start with Explosionade, which I didn’t quite know what to make of at first, so I closed it and played the others before coming back around for a second attempt. It grew on me after the first few levels.

You play a stereotypical nerd given guard duty while all the “manlier” soldiers in your space army are planning a final assault on an alien base. Getting bored, Private Atticus looks inside the storage bay he’s guarding and finds a prototype mech that’s so sweet, he HAS to take it for a test drive. In the sewers. This leads him to finding a whole bunch of aliens. Let the butt stompening commence!

The controls are a little complex at first, but once I got the hang of them, I didn’t have any problems with “wrong button syndrome.” (And y’all know that’s a common issue for my dumb ass.) The mech has a jump, a rocket boost, and a weird kind of float/hover mechanic thanks to an energy shield that will temporarily block enemy fire before it overheats and needs time to recharge.

The levels are all a single screen big if you zoom out using Y on a game pad, but you can also zoom in to get in closer with the action. The platforming levels are one part shooter and one part puzzle, and that obviously is going to appeal to me, since I loves me some puzzle games. The boss fights are a nice change of pace and have a little bit of variety, so overall, I don’t have anything to complain about. The graphics are good, the music is great, and the action is engaging and fun. I’ll give Explosionade 5 stars.

(“WHAT?” you gasp. “An indie game Zoe didn’t hate? Quick, Satan, check the thermostat!” Well hold onto your butts, people, because this is about to become a double-love post!)

Game two in this bundle is Shoot 1Up, a shmup with a really interesting concept for your fighters. Instead of fighting with just one ship, you can collect a small fleet of ships to wreak havoc on the alien invaders trying to ruin your planet. Using the right and left shoulder buttons, you can make your fleet spread out and deliver a massive special attack, or you can condense them to fly all on top of each other and concentrate their firepower into one thick stream of hot sticky death. The catch is, by spreading out, you increase the risk of losing ships, which shuts down the special weapon for a short time. So you swap between a tight formation to dodge enemy fire and then spread out to deliver a massive super stream of whoop-ass. It is oh so satisfying to slip though a bullet hell stream and then erase every last alien sumbitch in a few seconds.

Partway through each level, you’re given a choice to keep flying straight up or changing directions. I’m not sure if there’s any reason to do so other than to add some variety to the game play, but I couldn’t really tell any difference from flying sideways or flying vertically.

The bosses are big and impressive, and the fights are blazing fast and fun. If I had a complaint about this game, it’s only that it’s all over a bit too fast. Still, for a game that’s 3.99, it’s a good deal that delivers fun for fans of bullet hell shooters. I’ll give Shoot 1Up 4 stars.

Next is Weapon of Choice, which may be my favorite game out of this bundle simply for the huge amount of variety found within. It’s another alien invasion, as MBG seems to love that trope, but this time the aliens are using some high technology to mutate the local animals into hideous monsters, some of which are HUGE. (And a few of which are indestructible, something I only sorted out after losing a few people. Whoops! Sorry, soldier lady. My bad.)

Instead of having just one character to go on this mission, you have your choice of several fighters, each with their own unique weapon. These aren’t your typical game guns, either. One lovely lady has a gun that fires a swirl of knife blades. One of her buff and dudely comrades carries a freaking jet engine that can launch you backwards into traps if you aren’t careful (and can help you reach higher ground if you aim it right), while another who looks like a Carl Weathers clone (from his Predator role, even) launches laser turrets that fire in whatever direction you hold the right stick. Regardless of who you choose, holding down the right trigger will activate an alternate mode of fire, which can be…interesting. (No spoilers, though. You should try everyone and see what they do.)

Death is handled in a weird way that I think is fun and funny. You don’t die so much as fall down with an injury, and you’re given the choice of who to send in and carry on with. The new player can then pick up one of the injured players. What makes that funny is if you drop more than one soldier in the same area, you have to choose which one to carry. The one you pick up will praise you, sometimes in a comical way. But the one you drop…man, some of their protests at being left behind are comedy gold.

All characters are also equipped with a “spider” backpack that allows them to cling to most surfaces and ceilings, so it’s possible to cover each level in any number of ways. The soldiers all have a double jump, but tapping the left trigger a second time causes each to activate a unique ability. I won’t spoil those either as they’re fun to discover on your own and decide which one you like.

But wait, there’s more! More soldiers to pick up and carry to the end of each area to unlock them for future missions and play-throughs, each with their own unique guns. More bosses, and more endings, too. From the first level, it’s possible to choose three branching stories each with their own unique ending. The levels the soldier goes to are also unique, with no monsters sharing levels no matter which path you choose. That’s a lot of variety for a game from an indie crew.

The catch, though, is that the branches are very short. It’s possible to play all of them in a little under an hour because there are only three levels no matter which way you go. It’s this game where my cries of “more” are particularly bitter precisely because I was having so much fun. I wanted there to be more to it, just to see what other wild mutants the makers might have come up with. I wanted to rescue more buddies and unlock new weapons and special abilities. Don’t get me wrong. What’s available is already impressive. I just would have liked to see this story given more time to develop because it’s easily the most interesting of the three invasion plots in the bundle.

I’ll give Weapon of Choice 5 stars, and I admit, for a cheap game, it’s certainly a nice surprise to find something so fun and diverse in such a little package.

Finally, though, there’s Game Type, which…I don’t hate it, but it’s probably the least interesting out of the bundle because it’s so meandering and pointless. I remember this game was MBG making a statement about how hard it is to find indie games on Xbox Live, but beyond that goal, it’s not very good.

The game starts out each time with navigating a series of panels made to look like the Xbox Live dashboard, with all its cluttered ads and crap. Once the game starts, it’s a side scrolling shooter that throws shit out with no coherent theme. Donuts and footballs players and cats and cars and multi-colored orange slices…it’s a mess. It doesn’t help that the special weapon the floating hoodie-wearing girl uses is dull looking. Each time she fires it, she shouts “Parkour!” As a joke it falls flat the first time, and yet it’s told with every button press. “Parkour! Paaarkour! Paaarkooour!” Great, got it, let’s move on.

Game Type is the only one of the bundle I didn’t finish. I beat the first boss, a mockup of Long Cat protected by a floating desk who fires paw-prints and hairballs. Once that was done and the game just kept going through the same random enemies, I exited and closed it. It’s not something I want to spend time with, but I can’t say it’s a bad game. I’ve seen many Japanese shooters in a similar “style,” with a random assortment of enemies that have nothing in common with each other. I didn’t care for them either, but I’m sure someone out there considers them great fun. In any case, I’m giving Game Type 3 stars.

And so that’s three out of four games that I liked, and for the price, I think that’s totally fair. None of them have a lot of depth, and it’s possible to play through all of them in a single evening. But if you wanted something quick to pick up that’s mindless and fun, you can hardly go wrong with this bundle.

Book review: Vessels by Kealan Patrick Burke

Vessels is the last Timmy Quinn book that I will read, and also likely will be the last book I read from Kealan Patrick Burke. In a way, this bothers me because the first in the series, The Turtle Boy, was such a good introduction to the main character and his ability to give power to spirits thirsting for revenge. But the second book The Hides took some massive missteps for me, and Vessels doubles down on these problems while also making me aware of what’s truly missing from the series as a whole.

There’s no emotional investment in the characters. There never has been, but at least in the first book it was easy to miss because of how quickly the story unfolds. But with the second and third books, it becomes clear that far more attention is given to the locations than to any of the characters, Tim included. The writing is always good, but there’s loving attention to the details of the locales and homes that people inhabit, while the people themselves are so flat as to seem two dimensional.

Maybe I’m being unfair because these stories are all in a short novelette/novella format, but I still feel like these could have added a few more chapters to flesh out the characters, which would help build the mood and create some sense of dread. But after the first book, the sequels both have the exact same too fast plot. Tim goes somewhere to “get a fresh start,” and then bam, here’s a ghost. The only difference is that in the second outing, Tim’s parents forced this decision on him, and in the third, he’s making this choice on his own. I think this third story says Tim arrived a couple weeks back, but it skips the little bit of quiet time that could have been used for character development and moves right into the same haunting routine.

Tim has now grown to be a middle-aged man who rather than coming to terms with his abilities is still looking in vain for a place where no one has ever been murdered. This is a lost cause, really. The only way finding such a sanctuary would be possible is to journey to a place where humans have never been before and to live alone forever. Instead, Tim has opted to go to a remote island, and the story leaves no breathing room to get to know the locals before Tim is once again encountering angry ghosts.

The big question that had hung over the first two books is finally answered here, but not in any satisfactory way. It’s just touched on for a very brief passage, and then it’s dropped to move on to the next move to a “clean start.” There should be more to this moment, to Tim coming to terms with this thing that’s supposedly been hanging over his relationship with his father for years. But the whole thing boils down to a few quick lines of dialogue, and then it’s forgotten.

Another thing driving me bonkers is how Tim has absolutely no life to mention between these books. At one point a cop takes out Tim’s files to read about his past cases, but it’s only the events from books one and two in an extremely condensed form. This makes no sense. Tim’s supposedly famous for his abilities, and yet the only examples the cop can give from his past are the two we’ve already seen. Like, nothing else has happened to him in the last fifteen years? If that’s the case, why would he have spent so much time looking for sanctuary? No, of course something else happened, but building a backstory doesn’t seem important.

There’s a reunion with a previously mentioned character, and I felt nothing about this precisely because they were a name drop in the last book at best. So they’ve barely shown up when “Oh noes, they’re in danger from the ghost.” Why? It’s supposedly part of the plots that the ghosts only show up to get revenge on people who’ve wronged them. But this ghost is different. Why? Oh, “The rules are changing.” Why? Nah, don’t bother explaining this mess, let’s just go to another action scene.

This is the problem with all the characters. Here’s a name, and this is what they look like, and let’s move on to the “good bits.” When the shit hits the fan, as it is obviously meant to do, I feel nothing for any of these people. In this way, each of these books has taken on the feel of a lazy puppet show. The backdrops have been painted with exquisite care, laced with intricate props, and lit with great attention to every little shadow thrown. But for some reason the producer opted to use sock puppets with faces drawn in black fabric marker. It robs the story of any emotion or sense of urgency.

It doesn’t help that the ghost calling on Tim actually deserved their death. But as I said, in all this time, Tim’s never bothered learning anything about his abilities, so he’s always at the mercy of the ghosts. He’s a pinball, pinging off of ghosts and rolling away to strike another. He makes a bullshit speech about being an instrument of justice, but the ghost he’s enabling is–no shit, seriously–a child molesting cannibal murderer. The only way this dude could seem more evil is with a Hitler moustache or by rubbing his hands together and practicing a muah-haha kind of laugh. But so what? The people who had a legitimate reason for killing him are cast as a bunch of backwater assholes, the ghost is unleashed, and then it attacks Timmy. Why? Fucked I know.

I think the big reveal of this book was supposed to make me scramble to read the next in the series, Peregrine’s Tale, but instead, it made me debate giving up even though I was almost done. Of course what’s happening in this series isn’t some natural phenomena. It’s all being conveniently manufactured by someone else, and Timmy is just a reactive pawn in their plans. Despite having close to two decades of experience with these encounters, Tim is still just so helpless that his only alternative is to go seek out the source of these hauntings and…do what? Blubber and plead for mercy? I can’t imagine him doing anything remotely proactive at this point.

And…I don’t care to find out what he does next. I’ve never been given a chance to connect to Tim or to any of the people in this series, so the most vivid descriptions of attacking ghosts isn’t going to evoke an emotion in me. It’s an elaborately painted monster attacking a sock. I’ve read much better horror quite recently, and what made those stories effective at scaring or horrifying me was an established connection to the people being harmed. I have so little connection to these people that it becomes a farce, much like a familiar scene in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes:

“There’s a giant tomato.”

“I didn’t knew they grew so big.”

“I wonder where it’s going…they got little Timmy.”

“Poor Timmy.”

“They e’t him all up.”

And that’s about how I feel reading the “scariest” moments of this book. Oh, the ghost done attacked Timmy Quinn…poor Timmy.

I give Vessels 2 stars, and I’d only very tepidly recommend it to folks looking for something to read after finishing the latest Odd Thomas book or looking for something as a slightly scarier alternative to The Ghost Whisperer.

Game review: Bionic Command: Rearmed for Steam

Bionic Commando: Rearmed has been one of those games that I was reluctant to play after suffering through the train wreck that was the 3D “sequel.” But I wondered, “How bad could it be?” Pretty bad, actually.

Well no, that’s not entirely fair. Certainly, many levels remain mostly faithful to the original NES game, although GRIN felt the need to add secret areas to uncover and upped the difficulty in many places. The dialogue of the original game was pretty bad, so I can see why they might decide to make changes to that, but I’m not fond of the “wacky” tone of the new material. This is a game about resurrecting Hitler in a bid to take over the world, after all, so why did someone feel the need to lighten the mood with bad comedy? (And it is bad, with not a single joke being even remotely funny.) Of course, since this is using the same engine that made that 3D turd, there had to be dialogue added to remind you about Rad’s “missing” wife. (Thanks, guys. I’d almost blocked that idiotic memory out.)

There’s other changes that I’m not sure how to feel about. In the original game, killing enemies would make them drop green bullets, and after collecting enough of these, the player would earn one hit point. Now there’s a health meter given right away, and instead of dropping bullets, the enemies drop points for some scoring system that I don’t even know where to look to find it. In the NES game, you could only go into each level with one item, but in the new game, all weapons and items are worn at all times, and you can swap weapons on the fly. Someone decided to add grenades to the game, making it possible to blow up enemies hiding behind obstacles or lurking on the floor below. The barrels that the enemies hide behind can now be picked up and thrown. Oh, and replacing the wiretapping option in each communications station is a hacking mini-game. I don’t hate it, but it’s another arbitrary change that makes me ask “Why?”

Someone just coming into this without ever playing the original might not see why this is a big deal and I suppose that’s fair. But for me, it just feels like too much was changed just for the sake of changing it. It’s not broke, but let’s fix it anyway. About the only change I did like was that it’s possible to save and exit the game without losing progress. Back in the day, you had to sit down and commit to playing the whole thing in one run, and that could be a heck of a slog, especially if you had some bad luck and had to start over.

There’s a change to the bosses, too, and while some were admittedly better than the repetitive original versions, there were several that I had to wonder what the point of them was. One required blocking attacks with the bionic arm, a process that was tedious and annoying because the analog stick and D-pad both had a tendency to send the arm flying out in the wrong direction. Another requires hanging off of a hovering cockpit to drag it down to an electrified floor while shooting drones. Why? This makes no sense. Yet another is this giant tower tank that’s defeated by loosening three bolts so that the pilot ejects himself from the cockpit during an attempt to ram Rad. Bwuh? Again, I understand that the original fights at the end of each level could be repetitive, but the bosses replacing them are kind of pointless. And if they felt the old bosses were too repetitive, why do I have to face all these dudes twice?

The most baffling change for me was the final boss. In the original game, there was this rolling tank that you had to climb and swing around on to reach the only vulnerable spot. It was the culmination of all the skills I’d practiced throughout the game, and it felt right, at least to me. But in the reboot, there’s only a fight with a helicopter aboard a floating airbase, and instead of swinging to find a weak point, you have to block incoming missiles until the copter flies closer before firing guided missiles. You only unlock the new missiles moments before this fight, so there’s no practice using them, and really, nothing about this that feels like it’s part of the game I’ve been playing for the last five hours.

That’s how I feel about a lot of the changes, that they’re just arbitrary ideas tossed out because “newer is better.” Certain enemies get swapped out for droids, apparently just to give a reason for the use of the new plasma rifle. Secret areas are added, and all the weapons have hidden upgrades for some reason. Lots of new weapons are added, and most are just gimmicks. There’s a “vector” cannon that fires reflecting shots for angled attacks. Why? I dunno, just because I guess.

None of this serves any purpose other than to be different, and I don’t get the point. Bionic Commando was one of the most unique NES titles to come out, and while the dialogue wasn’t great, the game play style has never been recycled in any other title so far as I know. It didn’t need any changes to be fun. All it needed was a little HD polish and maybe a script update. This…it’s disappointing for me, someone who’s been a fan of the original game since I was a wee child. This isn’t just nostalgia and half remembered details talking. I’ve played the NES version multiple times over the last few years, both on old consoles and on emulators. It’s just so much fun that I have to go back and play it over and over. This…this isn’t what I was hoping for.

It doesn’t help that the graphical upgrade has also created some glitches and randoms screen tearing. On a few levels, it got so bad that I had to shut down the game, and then shut down the computer and restart to correct them.

Even so, I’ll give Bionic Commando: Rearmed 3 stars. It’s not a bad game, and I’m sure someone approaching it who’s never seen the NES version will have a lot of fun with it. But a lot of the changes made rubbed me the wrong way, and that brings down the score a bit.

Game review: Hell Yeah! for Steam

Sega is giving away some older games on Steam in a bundle, and Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit is the only one in the bundle I haven’t played before. As it’s free, this will temper my review somewhat. Man, what a festering bowl of dog snot. I KID! But seriously, this game was very much a mixed bag for me, with lots of stuff to love, and almost as much to hate in equal portions.

Let’s start with the premise. Hell is now run by a dead rabbit, Ash, who has deposed his father for control of the realm. Given how little Ash knows about his own kingdom, and how so few of his subjects seem to respect his authority, I’m going to guess he hasn’t been in power long. But this is just a guess, as the story is ambiguous on that point. In any case, Ash gets caught taking a bath with a rubber duck, and fearing what this might do to his reputation, he sets out to kill every last demon who has seen the pictures online.

So far, so wacky, and the various worlds that make up hell are no less crazy. There’s almost too much going on in the design, although there’s only a few places where it becomes so distracting as to be a problem. In those cases, it’s because the design is in the foreground, hiding Ash, several enemies, and their projectiles. This makes it really hard to know which way to move to dodge, but thankfully, it doesn’t happen very often.

The demons that Ash splatters can be found on an island accessed from the main menu, and they can be put to work to make items or mine money for Ash. So they’re not really dead, just momentarily inconvenienced. Which is kind of cute in my opinion. Then again, I’m a fan of horror movies, so my definition of cute can be a bit warped at times.

The music is really good, with only one level being the exception, and that level’s music is intentionally bad, a happy song that gets on the nerves about two seconds after it starts. But as I said, it’s intentional, and even Ash walks into the level and screams “WHAT. IS. THAT?!” As to the rest of the soundtrack, it’s all really good stuff. I could put on my headphones, put the controller down, and just listen to the tracks loop for a while without feeling the need to stop them.

Remember that there’s a hundred monsters who saw those pics? Well they’re all unique. Yes, there’s some canon fodder clones for each level, but even those cookie-cutter monsters have a lot of variety. This is one of the most diverse, widely populated games I’ve seen in a while. All the enemy designs are fantastic, with a comically cartoonish flair that I thought was really well done and works well with the wacky premise.

Adding to this diversity is a wide selection of weapons, all of which have unlimited ammo that may run out, but just needs a few moments to charge. There is an exception to this in the grenades, but I honestly almost never used them aside from one or two random places. The rest of the time, I was gleefully swapping between missiles, a gatling gun, and a shotgun. Once I discovered that the shotgun was even more effective at clearing obstacles than the drill, it practically became my default weapon. But then there would be a certain enemy who I would feel needed to be taken out by something bigger, and then I might whip out the bazooka. (which is such a fun word to say out loud, by the way. “Here, take this bazooka.”)

And if you get tired of looking at Ash in his default state or his unmodded moto-drilly-saw-wheel of dhoom, you can unlock customizable options for both. Some are found as secrets in the world, some are bought in the shop, and a few are given away to help Ash progress in certain areas. (These are still in the shop, but have no cost.) It’s just another layer of options in a game full of great choices.

I’ll even praise the boss fights, something I’m not usually a fan of. And yeah, there’s a couple of bosses in this that I didn’t care much for, but the vast majority gave me enough breathing room to sort out their patterns, and most also could be taken down with many different methods. So they’re tricky, but not so much that most players won’t be able to find a way around them.

It’s a damn shame then that the controls are such a pain, and that the gameplay is constantly marred by QTEs. As the quick time events are easier to explain, I’ll cover them first. With each unique monster you kill, the game pops up one of many mini-games, most of which are QTEs. If you fail them or just take too long trying to sort out what the game wants from you, you will fail the mini-game and Ash will take damage. The monster he’s facing will get some health back, and you get to try again. UNLESS you had low health and failure kills Ash and sends him back to a checkpoint. With the way checkpoints are sporadically set up, this could very well mean a long, long walk back to the monster. Oh, and checkpoints may or may not restore Ash’s health, so it might be possible that you need to walk Ash back to a nurse’s station for a blood donation, and then walk all the way back. I’ve done this way too many times over failed QTEs, and it’s a massive pain in the ass.

The controls are a little more tricky to explain, because quite a lot of the time, they’re okay. They’re not great, but they’re not bad. Weapons are aimed with the right stick and fired with the right trigger. The right trigger also activates a drill function. This is fine most of the time, unless the game suddenly decides that Ash has to jump and fire or jump and drill. This is because moving from the buttons to the stick and expecting anything resembling accuracy is…well, it’s not happening, at least not for me. So when I had to do either of these, I ended up having to spend a long, long time wrestling with the controls.

The same is true of the dash ability earned a bit later in the game. The initial instructions say to hold the left stick and left trigger to activate it. This is inaccurate. To activate dash requires holding the left trigger, and then selecting a direction with the stick. Letting go of the trigger before the charge is complete makes the dash fizzle out, and releasing both the trigger and the stick at the same time often results in Ash flying off in the wrong direction. Again, for the most part, there’s not many places where you don’t have time to stop and aim. But the few times that the game wants to rush this technique, it gets ugly for me and draws out a single moment in the game into a much longer process, one that will often involve dying and backtracking from a distant checkpoint while cussing the whole way.

Of these two problems, I really think the QTEs are what killed my enthusiasm for this game more than the controls. It doesn’t help that with higher levels, some of the mini-games move faster or have more button prompts in a much shorter span of time. so the higher I got, the more often I was failing the QTEs, dying, and backtracking. I really would have enjoyed this game a lot more if they’d done away with the mini-games and just given the 100 peeping monsters more hit points.

There is one other problem that comes up infrequently, and that’s when the game sometimes decides to strip Ash of his weapons and vehicle for a “puzzle” section. These make a nice change of pace by themselves, but there were a few jumps that had to be damn near pixel perfect, and that led to some of my most flustered moments while playing. In one example, I had to douse Ash in honey to get a giant bee to follow him to a vent spewing acid. Even just saying that, it sounds like wacky fun, right? But there’s a jump involved that has to be perfect, and if you miss it, the bee will slap Ash around and kill him, and then it’s a very long walk back from the checkpoint. This happens in a few other places as well, and it’s not so much the need for perfect timing that’s demoralizing. It’s the lengthy and brutal punishment for failure.

I’m giving Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit 3 stars. This could have easily been a 5 if it was closer to a standard platformer. But it goes a bit overboard trying to pack more wackiness into the monster kills with the mini-games, and in my opinion, it didn’t need them. All it really needed was a few tweaks to the controls and it could have been perfect. As it is, I would find myself hard pressed to want to play this again. It’s cute but annoying, kind of like the theme song to the “Happy Cute” world in this game.

Book review: Flawless by Sara Shepard

When I said I couldn’t wait to read Flawless after finishing Pretty Little Liars, that wasn’t empty words. I just finished posting my review before I got the next book and started on the first chapter. Now that I’m done, I’d very much like to buy the next and keep going. But I can’t, because I’ve spent my limit for the whole month already and have to wait until next month. And okay, I have lots of other books I can read in the meantime, but I really want to keep going with this series.

I can’t help but feel for all four of these main characters even when they’re behaving badly. Emily’s in denial about her sexuality and is making some bad choices that can only come back to burn her sometime soon. Hanna’s paying for her actions in the previous book, but set on a crash course that may lead back to bulimia. Spencer’s still trying to keep her affair with her sister’s ex a secret, even as this is having an impact on her schoolwork and life at home. And Aria is leaving a family secret festering until it can’t be hidden any longer. All of this is merely side dressing to the central plot of A and their merciless manipulations of the four former friends.

And they are still former friends, with each girl unwilling to share her secrets because of fear of rejection and abandonment. This is the part that rings most true for me, having dealt with blackmail at a very early age. The threat of exposure is so frightening that no one can be trusted, even those who seem closest. It doesn’t help that for each of these girls, there’s someone that they feel they can trust who ends up betraying them.

If anything, it’s the fear that’s making them more self-destructive, and that too feels very authentic to me. Part of me is exasperated because “Why don’t they just tell each other?” But there’s another quieter voice that insists, “You know all too well why they can’t.” And I do; I really get it. So I understand why Emily is in the closet, why Hana can’t talk to the others or to her best friend Mona, why Aria can’t talk to her parents, and why Spencer can’t just tell the others what she knows about Alison. I get it, so all I can do is watch these four crash and burn, manipulated by someone who is enjoying watching them flail.

Near the end of the book, Spencer thinks she knows who A is, and she gathers her friends, possibly too late, it might seem. But A isn’t who she thinks they are, and instead, another body turns up while more taunting messages keep pouring in. So who is A? If it isn’t Alison or anyone connected to her, how do they know so much about Alison’s friends?

I’m sure the answer won’t be in the next book, but at this point, I wouldn’t be reading it for a revelation. I like…no, I love these four characters, and I want to see what happens next, even if I have a bad feeling things are only going to get worse for all of them.

I’ll give 5 stars to Flawless, and as soon as I have some money free to buy more books, I’ll be eagerly snapping up Perfect and digging into its dirty little secrets.

Book review: Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard

This review is taking place near 4 AM after several chants of “one more chapter,” so if it gets a little muddled, that’s sleep deprivation. I got Pretty Little Liars because it was supposed to be outside my comfort zone of fantasy and horror. Turns out it’s an older comfort zone, something I haven’t read since my early teens. It’s one part soap opera with one part mystery, and I really can’t wait to read the next book in this series.

The first chapter was a little slow as a start, but from then on, my only constant thought was “GOT-DAMN! WHERE WAS THIS KIND OF BOOK WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER?!” I mean, sure, I’ve read similar stories in my teens, but those were always about do-gooder teens who were trying to solve some mystery. Think Nancy Drew, but with some PG-13 snogging on the side. But this…these main characters are the bit characters that those old books always held up as the worst examples while the narrator suddenly aged twenty years to lecture, “Kids, don’t be like this or you’ll end up a useless nobody.”

There’s affairs with older guys, teen drinking, pot smoking, bulimia, shoplifting, and repressed lesbian desires. Oh my gosh, I’m fanning myself and trembling with barely contained excitement. It’s like someone heard all of my teenage complaints “where are the characters like me?” These young ladies are everything I ever wanted in my fiction, and then some.

But let me back up. The first chapter, the slow one, gives an introduction to five friends; Emily, Hanna, Aria, Spencer, and their undisputed leader Alison. From the start, it’s clear that these friendships have become strained, but at the start of what could turn into a defining argument, Alison leaves and just disappears.

Three years later, the remaining four girls are now estranged from each other, and each are dealing with their own personal soap operas. Hanna is focused on maintaining her perfect image after using bulimic purging to get her weight under control. Aria, freshly returned from Europe, has fallen for a hot guy who just happens to be her English teacher. Spencer is cracking under the strain of all her school obligations when she falls for her sister’s boyfriend, again. And Emily is sent to welcome the new family moving into Alison’s house, only to find herself falling for her new neighbor Maya.

But these personal dramas all become linked by one common theme, a series of messages from someone signing their messages with a single letter, A. Is it Alison? Or is it someone else who is impersonating her? A knows things that only Alison knew, and with every message, the four former friends struggle to guess who might be behind these ominous taunts. And yet, they can’t talk to each other. The past is such a heavy burden on them that they each must deal with the problem alone.

The book ends like a schoolhouse special, with each of the girls’ private lives exploding in spectacular fashion. This is where the old books I knew would get around to the loudest lecturing, but not this book. No, this book pulls off a devious little twist that both reunites the four friends and leaves wide open the central question: who is A, and how do they know so much about Alison’s friends? There’s other questions left open as well, dark events only mildly hinted at in this book. As I close the back cover and set the book down, I feel desperate to know the answers to all these questions, and to find out how each character digs their way out of their private circles of hell.

I give Pretty Little Liars 5 stars, and while it’s not normally my habit to pick up the next book in any series right away, I might just have to hunt down Flawless in the next few MINUTES. I NEED to know what happens next.