Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I just got Chloe a date with Doug, and now I’m manipulating the emotions of a high-school Prom judge. This is sick. Prom Week’s plots are raging, emotional torrents of cruelty, humiliation and, if you’re inclined, affection. If you’re old enough to look back on youth as a learning experience, making a teenager insult someone so their enemy becomes your friend has that horrible air of familiarity to it, but one that you can eventually (hopefully) look back on as an ugly fact of life. I like Prom Week, but there are times when its social strategy just made me feel bad about myself.
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I don’t drive. I get scared just pondering what arcane knowledge is required for a gear change (seriously: how?). I’m unable to appreciate the basics of realistic car physics, and I can only turn in a serious racing game when the side of the track is pushing me in that direction, scraping off adversing slogans in a slow, spark-filled cornering manoeuvre I like to call “The Pearson Gambit”. I need something unsubtle and exaggerated. So I’ve spent a few hours with Insane 2, the car basher that surprisingly appeared on Steam this morning. I have some thoughts!

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Last year there were a couple of games that brought up the question of what actually counts as a game. One of them shouldn’t have, because it is – Modern Warfare 3 (the nuance of “un-game” is lost on the world, sadly). The other was To The Moon, which occasionally teetered on the edge of that which people were willing to tolerate. The debate is mostly unhelpful – it generally comes down to a person’s expectations of the game, and those not being met. I found MW3 to fall far short of what I would expect of an FPS, and not fill that absence with anything new, meaningful or worthwhile, thus my condemnation. To The Moon replaced a perception of choice with wonderfully vivid narrative, deep characters, and an exploration of subjects poorly explored by any medium, let alone gaming. So where does that leave Katawa Shoujo?

It’s a visual novel, a format with which I’m not overly familiar. But heck, I like a novel, and I like pictures, so let’s see where this takes me. This is not a review, it’s an account of my experience of playing the game/reading the novel.

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I am responsible for many of the smaller craters that mark the moon’s surface. It’s true! I’ve been playing Lunar Flight, the modern take on Lunar Lander that I first spotted way back in 2011. Turns out it’s a simulation of me panicking as I hurtle toward the ground, upside down, beginning to rotate wildly in the hope that the motion will somehow cause me to skim off the rocks and bounce to safety. It doesn’t. It’s not an intimidatingly hardcore simulation but it is a lot less arcadey than I expected it to be. The beta, which feels remarkably complete, is available to those who donate $5 or more. More thoughts follow.

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I’ve been playing The Wreckless on and off throughout the day, and during that time there have been moments when I’ve thought – “holy crap, this is the answer to my TIE Fighter cravings”. Hopefully that’s enough to send plenty of people scurrying off to download the demo immediately. I’ll move onto my reservations later but I’ll leave them to one side for now because this is an honest-to-goodness space combat simulator, with simple controls, physics that allow for drifty dogfights and lasers that light up the dark void with their scorching fury. YES.

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Afterfall: InSanity is an independently developed, Unreal powered third person action-horror game. It’s available to preorder for a mere $1 at the moment, but unless 9,980,000 more copies are sold before release on November 25th you’ll rather dubiously end up paying the full amount of $33.90. I’m not making that massive figure up by the way, though I am rounding it to the nearest 10,000. The $1 will go to charity at least. So, fancy donating some money? Good on you. There’s loads of charities out there. But I’m here to tell you about the game.

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The Diablo III closed beta has just begun, and we’re fortunate enough to have access to it. (Which is a shame, as I was supposed to be getting married on Saturday.) So I’ve of course put aside that silly plan of going to sleep and blitzed through the first couple of hours to bring you the very earliest of impressions of what’s on offer.

I’m writing this as someone who played Diablo 2 long ago, thoroughly enjoyed it, but never obsessed over it. And certainly only ever played solo. (Which may well describe my life after this weekend if I’m not careful.) Here I’m going to give you my initial reaction to playing the third game of the series, tonight.

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Dead Island was released (in some manner) in the US yesterday, and arrives in the UK, once it’s painstakingly paddled across the massive oceans of the internet, on Friday. I’ve been playing it for a long, long time, and yet still haven’t got anywhere near its ending. And as such, even though I’m about to tell you Wot I Think, in the interests of probity will offer you my Impressions.

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Hot damn! Now that did the trick. I’m prone to worrying about what game I should play right after finishing something great. It’s a science, like which album or song do you play right after something that’s lifted your spirits or got you in a singin’ mood. You don’t want something that’s going to shut you up. It’s the same with games: picking the wrong bet as a follow-up can sour the experience, or at least fail to take advantage of my mental momentum. My mood could be ruined. I could be left adrift for a few days, every game seeming strangely unappealing. Last night, I got it right – following up Deus Ex: Human Revolution with the Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine demo. Hot damn. Aside from the whole machine-assisted warrior element, these are two very different games. After some 30 hours of sneaking, hacking and pondering in DX3, mindlessly eviscerating Orks by the dozen with a Power Axe was exactly right, exactly the coda I needed.
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