Bonus Blog! The Testament of Sherlock Holmes

The Testament of Sherlock Holmes is surprisingly pretty and well presented for what most would consider to be a budget title.  It is truly a visual representation of a Holmes story.

I have to admit that I have been on something of a Sherlock Holmes binge.  The BBC hit "Sherlock" left me wanting more as soon as I finished watching the recently aired Season 3.  

So off I went to Steam where I downloaded and played The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, another traditional style adventure game.

While Broken Age can appeal to casual adventure fans, Testament takes a much more serious and difficult approach.  You really do have to solve these mysteries.  It also is more than just a point and click experience.  Combining items together, interpreting chemical test results, solving complex puzzles without an obvious solution (most of the time), using those clues to solve a deduction board, etc. make this game far more difficult.  This game will not have the broad appeal that Broken Age has.  You need some patience for this game and I imagine the pacing may be too slow for some.

I believe this game retails for $19.99, but at the time of my purchase I paid $4.99 for it on sale and for that price I was more than satisfied.  Visually, the game looks brilliant.  It has its presentation flaws, but nothing that makes it feel cheap.  The voice actors for Holmes, Watson, and the rest of the cast is great.  Certainly nobody in a video game is going to be like Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, but the actors here do a great job.  And the game has some length.  It took me about 10 hours to get through the game and given the difficulty I'm not too proud to admit that there were a couple times I had to look up where to find the next clue.

In my opinion, the game has a few too many moments where I felt like I was doing the right thing and perhaps I wasn't clicking on the exact right place.  It's a little annoying.  The game also sometimes forces you to use the ASDF keys to select between different options to click on, and I found it kind of clunky.  Some of the items to click on were also located in just strange places.  But these are obstacles that can be overcome.

If you like Holmes style mysteries, it's worth checking out.  But if you aren't into more difficult adventure games or the Holmes universe, it's probably one you should skip.  There are other games in the series as well that at some point I hope to try because despite its flaws, Testament was a very enjoyable experience for me.  

Broken Age. Old school adventure gameplay meets modern design and publishing. Also, my thoughts on Kickstarter.

This is the opening screen of Broken Age, where you choose which side of the story you want to experience first.  On the left is Vella and on the right is Shay.

Over the past few years, adventure style games have become much more mainstream, especially due to the mainstream success of Telltale's The Walking Dead.  By the way, if you haven't played that game and have any kind of console or decent PC, it's definitely worth playing if you have any interest in the series.

For those of you who don't know, Tim Schafer is responsible for Monkey Island, widely considered to be one of the classics of the genre.  Schaefer's company, Double Fine, launched a Kickstarter to create a new adventure game with modern graphics but an old adventure style feel.

So we have a genre that is resurgent, a developer that is respected by the industry and fans, and now Kickstarter, which has changed the economics of creating games that may not be as mainstream as the type of stuff that sells in a Wal Mart/Best Buy retail environment.  Not to mention the fact that smaller budget titles have become a staple in both the PC and console gaming over the past few years.

Without all of these things, a beautiful and artistic game like Broken Age would never have seen the light of day.  It really is a confluence of a number of different things.  I wonder if a game like this could have come out at any other time.

So now that I've talked about the circumstances surrounding the game, I'll talk about the basics of the game itself.  This is a game only on PC (for now) that tells the story of two characters.  Vella and Shay.  Shay appears to be in a ship that does nothing but coddle him as if he was a baby, and he desperately wants to have meaning to his life aside from the boring monotony he faces every day.  Vella is a girl who lives in a village and has been chosen to participate in the Maiden's Festival.  Everybody has a lot of pride in the Maidens, because when they are devoured by a giant monster named Mog Chothra, the village is saved because of that sacrifice.

Both characters struggle with their place in their respective worlds.  It's very easy for the player to empathize with them.  We have all felt at times that the expectations of society didn't actually make sense and yearned to break the mold for one reason or another.  I immediately connected with both characters and found them to be instantly likeable.  This is very important for an adventure game that is focused entirely on the characters' journeys.

The actual gameplay is simple.  Click on items to interact with them, drag items in your inventory to other items to try and use them together.  For example, use a screwdriver on a vent in order to open it and proceed.  Old school adventure games could be somewhat cryptic about this process.  You had a ton of items and things to interact with and sometimes the relationship between these items wasn't all that obvious.  I think at the time of Monkey Island, this helped add depth and value, but in a modern game this would seem annoying and monotonous.

Fortunately, Broken Age does an excellent job by not making it quite as simple as The Walking Dead, but simple enough that I didn't need the use of any hints from the Internet to find out what to do next.  There were only a few times where I needed to do some trial and error.  The puzzles required some thinking, but nothing too difficult.  At no time did I feel frustrated with the experience.  It felt modern.  This may turn off some people looking for that old school experience, but I suppose you can't please everybody.

As I alluded to before, the presentation of this game is incredible.  The art is very beautiful, the music has a distinct tone that changes as the story progresses.  Several characters in the game have well known voice actors like Elijah Wood (Shay) and Jack Black (I don't think I want to tell you who he is).  It even has Hwil Hwheaton...er, Wil Wheaton.

The bottom line is that if you are at all interested in games like Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, The Walking Dead, etc., you owe it to yourself to give this game a shot.  Right now, they only have Act 1 out, and Act 2 is going to come hopefully in the near future.  When I sat down the play the game, I thought I would play through just one character and stop, but I was so interested in the game that I went right into the second character despite the fact that I probably shouldn't spend so much time playing a single thing non-stop.  That's a credit to the story that does a great job drawing you in from the very beginning.

So buy it with confidence (or if you are like me, Steam Share it from someone else's library with confidence).

The other thing I wanted to write about in this post is the concept of Kickstarter and my ambivalence about it as a means for funding projects that fans want.

For those of you who don't know about crowdfunding, the idea is to decentralize financing for projects such as a game like Broken Age, or a movie, or a book...anything really that has enough interest from a fan base.  Kickstarter is a big name in crowdfunding, and most projects have incentives based on the amount of money fans give to the cause.  A small donation might entitle them to the completed product, and a big donation may entitle them to something special, like an autograph or a chance to meet the creator.  If you check out their website I'm sure you will get the concept quickly.

On first glance, this is a great thing.  I think most people agree that corporatizing of art can often lead to a worst product because of the desire of the company funding it.  A movie, for example, might have lots of product placements in it.  Or a character in a game might have to change because of some kind of political or social concern.  While some of these compromises aren't a big deal and may even improve the end product, it's easy to imagine that the vision of the creator can start to get lost with this kind of "interference".

Kickstarter removes that.  These projects have to be held accountable to their fans.  And this is both a good and bad thing.  It's good because creative people generally want to please their fans and fans want the creative people to put out the product they want.  But the problem lies with ultimate accountability, and this is what worries me about the future of Kickstarter as it pertains to games.

Broken Age is a brilliant piece of work.  Nobody can honestly say that Double Fine screwed their customers with this product.  Perhaps it's not perfect for some and maybe even some of the backers of the Kickstarter are disappointed, but they weren't ripped off.  They got a complete (at least Act 1) and polished game.  If it's not your cup of tea...well...you can't please everyone.

My worry is that eventually someone will take advantage of this system.  A group could raise millions of dollars via Kickstarter on an idea that seems appealing to the fans, but is ultimately not executed on in the right way.  Or maybe a game comes out and just has a million bugs that are never fixed.  I don't see how Kickstarter can guarantee the quality of these projects or that these projects ever reach the light of day.  At least with a preorder, the commitment from the fan is minimal.

So let's say a high profile Kickstarter project fails...will the community keep faith with the system?  Double Fine came through on this one, but if another company did it, would Double Fine's next crowdfunded project get the money it needs?  Would the taint of one failed Kickstarter hurt the entire crowdsourcing community?
A bank, investors, or a publisher can hold these developers directly accountable for their work and force deadlines and bring in additional resources if necessary.  But what can fans do?  Complain on a forum where nothing will really happen to address their concerns.  Also, there's nobody really making sure that the money that's raised to create is being used in a proper way.

There's one more problem, which is more of an ethical concern.  Double Fine obviously has limited resources and needs to be careful before investing their money in big projects, but there's plenty of reason to believe that groups who DO have the money to make these projects on their own could use Kickstarter not to create something out of nothing, but to mitigate their own risk of developing a failed project.  It really shouldn't be the fans that take the financial risk that a project fails, but the developing group.  Zach Braff tried to raise money for a movie, but why should anybody pay him?  He's a multimillionaire with connections to Hollywood elites.  He has plenty of other avenues to raise money besides his fans.  "Passion projects" are expensive...that's why they call them a passion.  If you are so passionate about making something, then you should be willing to take the risk to invest in it.  If I started a business on my own and I had no skin in the game, then a bank or another investor wouldn't want to help me raise money either.

So I didn't back this game, and to be honest I'm a little reluctant to back anything on Kickstarter.  As I see it, if I'm investing in something, I should get a return.  The only return you get on Kickstarter is a product, but if Broken Age becomes a huge commercial success, they will not be sharing in that financial success with the backers.  Frankly, if Double Fine is as successful with this game in the end as I think they might be, I think they owe it to their fans to go the extra mile and perhaps give extra content not previously promised or something else to make them feel even more appreciated.  The fans who backed this game deserve more credit than a free copy of the game because without them it wouldn't exist in the first place in the most literal sense.  They should share in Double Fine's success somehow.

I don't wish to dissuade anyone from using Kickstarter.  I think it's a brilliant concept and for the right people I think this is a way to utilize crowdfunding and allow small shops to compete with the big boys.  But over time I suspect some changes will have to be made.  It seems inevitable to me that Kickstarter will run into a major problem that will leave people questioning the service and the entire crowdsourcing paradigm.

This post turned out longer than I expected it to be, but as I was writing I found myself coming up with more and more questions.

Batman: Arkham Origins is all about context

Ambivalence would be the best thing to describe my feelings going into this game.  I knew that it was being developed by different people than the first two games in the "Arkham" trilogy, and I had also read a number of mixed reviews regarding this game.  After loving Arkham City, I was ready for more Batman brawling, stalking, and gliding.

Over the weekend, I finished up the main campaign and most of the side missions.  When this game came out, there were a number of reviews basically saying this is a lesser game than the previous two.  My opinion is a bit more nuanced.

First, you should understand how I played the game.  I played this game on PC via Steam, and it was played with a Radeon 7970 video card and a 27" 2560 X 1440 monitor.  This was not the experience I imagine most reviewers had who were stuck with Xbox and Playstation versions of the game that sound buggier and worse looking.

But at 1440p with a higher end video card, the game looked very sharp and ran fairly smooth with a couple minor tweaks.  It was certainly better looking than when I played Arkham City on Xbox.  I imagine a reviewer would probably be much more generous had they experienced the game the way I did.

There are problems with the game though, even though I was running it on a higher end rig.  There were a couple times the game crashed on me and I don't think it was my PC.  Also, I found the controls to be slightly worse than the previous games.  Not bad enough where I would be upset, but in enough subtle ways for me to have to note it in this post.  It was small stuff...it didn't feel to me like the counters were as accurate.  My biggest complaint with the controls are ground takedowns, which felt inconsistent to the point where I generally would not use them unless I was sure it would land.  It felt very weird watching Batman string together 30 hit combos and then do a ground takedown aimed at nothing.

Another criticism, if you can even call it that, is the overall lack of originality with the gameplay.  They didn't really do much to expand on the previous entries.  The crime scene scans are interesting but simple.  They also have a couple slightly different gadgets.  But I think if you had played Arkham City right before playing this, you might find that this feels more like an expansion than a new game.  Half the city is Arkham City, and the rest of Gotham is separated by an annoyingly long bridge.  The city itself is not as well designed as it should be for an open world.  Arkham City felt like you could really fly around anywhere easily.  There were times where I would go towards my waypoint marker and I would run into a wall because of these sometimes arbitrary roadblocks.

One of your new items is the Shock Gloves which you acquire later in the campaign.  Once they are charged up, they are devastatingly effective against enemies.  So much so that you can basically abandon typical fighting techniques the series has established.  Even though it makes the game easier, I did enjoy using this overpowered weapon when the crowds of enemies were particularly large.

I also found it strange when Batman could climb or grapple some objects but not others, and it didn't seem to make any sense to me.  In fact, there were rooms where one object was climbable, and another object that was exactly the same wasn't.

The story is great.  Obviously with a series like this they get a little creative with how Batman meets all of these super villains in order to create an origin story, but I still found the story to be creative and interesting.  I've heard some people call several of the villains second tier.  I disagree.  Batman in many forms has always had the classic mega villains like the Joker, but also the more obscure but still interesting villains that to me always added texture to the story.  Arkham Origins, in my opinion, does an excellent job balancing it out.

I can't speak to the console experience, which is no doubt worse in most ways, and I would be inclined to only recommend a purchase if it was discounted...perhaps for $20.  But I recommend the game overall if you are interested in Batman.  Despite my criticisms of the gameplay, I was still drawn to the experience enough to put in about 14 or 15 hours.  If I had played Arkham City less than a month before, it stands to reason that I may not have felt as positive about it.  There's no doubt that I played the "best" version of the game as well.

Since my last post about Dark Souls I've also completed Ghost Trick and The Testament of Sherlock Holmes.  I've also put additional time into Fire Emblem: Awakening and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (the PC port).  I'm sure I'm overlooking other things as well.  Hopefully this week I'll post some more of my thoughts.  Comments are welcome as always.

I have vanquished Dark Souls!

Sorry to anyone reading about the slow level of posting over the last few weeks.  Towards the end of the year I took a vacation, which means that I wasn't writing much but more importantly it means that I got to play a lot of different things that I can write more about into the future.

Which brings me to Dark Souls.  Once I started my vacation on the 20th, I put some consistent time into Dark Souls until a few days before the New Year.  As my vacation ended, Dark Souls got my exclusive gaming attention.

I actually got to a point where I was close to quitting the game.  There are going to be spoilers in the rest of this post, so be warned if you care about that kind of thing.  In Dark Souls, some people consider reading spoilers or guides to be not in the spirit of the game, which I tend to agree with for the most part.  I did use the Internet to look up non-spoiler related issues.  For example, I wanted to know if a weapon looked like when it was fully upgraded before I wasted crafting resources.  I suppose some people might consider that "cheating", however, I put so much time into the game that I felt like it was just a smart way to not waste time grinding for souls/resources that are needed for crafting.

Anyway, I almost quit once I reached Blighttown.  Once I got to a particular bonfire, which again are used to "save" the game and checkpoint your progress, I died repeatedly trying to make my way down some narrow pathways and ladders to the swamp.  My character just wasn't strong enough.  I was getting overwhelmed by enemies that were not difficult on their own even if they needed 4 or 5 hits to kill, but when 3 or 4 of them confront you on a narrow pathway there just wasn't enough space for me to operate and manage the enemies coming at me as opposed to either knocking them out with less hits or managing one at a time.

But as my title says, I beat the game.  In fact, Blighttown is fairly early in the game.  For anybody who is looking to play Dark Souls you have to realize a few things.  The first is that sometimes you need to know when you are outmatched.  If you aren't hurting enemies enough, or feel overwhelmed, or just frustrated you first need to stop playing the game for a while.  Just take an hour to back away.  Also, if you can manage to draw enemies out one at a time that's a huge help. 

What I did in this particular situation, and a few other parts where I felt underpowered, was just back off and explore a different area.  I tried to find more gear, maybe gain a level or two, and most importantly upgrade my armor and weapons to be more potent.  So when I went back to Blighttown, I managed to kill the same enemies in 2 hits and had a bit more flexibility dealing with the problem of getting down to the swamps so I could fight the boss, Quelaag. 

This was extremely important to deal with.  By finishing that area, I managed to ring the bell "down below" and unlocked Sen's Fortress (a tricky area with guillotines) and Anor Londo, which may be the most important area in the game.  Anor Londo has a couple very hard parts.  One part features archers that attempt to knock you off of a very narrow ledge.  I managed to get through that after dying about 5 times, which believe it or not is pretty good considering the difficulty of that particular sequence.  Also, the bosses, Ornstein and Smough, were both difficult but certainly fun.  Probably the best boss music in the game (there is a lot of good music).  You have to fight them both at once, which makes it tricky, but like most bosses patience is key.  Only attack or heal with Estus Flasks when you know you have the time to operate without being attacked in the open.

The reason Anor Londo is so important is that by winning a very large breasted princess named Gwynevere (I hope I spelled that right) gives you the Lordvessel, which essentially opens up the last major act of the game.  It also allows you to warp between certain bonfires.  Warping is extremely helpful both to farm souls/items and also proceeding in the game.  Once I finished Anor Londo I was able to warp back to Firelink Shrine (the beginning of the main game) and...discovered the fire was out and the fire keeper was killed.  Back in Anor Londo I had to use a stone to invade a world inhabited by her murderer, who I killed, allowing me to restore the Firelink bonfire.

From there, I actually did some backtracking.  I went to Darkroot Forest/Basin and killed the wolf Sif (pretty cool looking boss), and the Hydra.  I also went to the Catacombs and eventually managed to kill Pinwheel, which allowed me to kindle my bonfire more for extra Estus Flasks...another extremely useful tool.

The game then moves on to the final four souls you have to collect in order to face Lord Gwyn.  You have to kill four bosses (plus a couple extra on the way) in the form of Gravelord Nito in the Tomb of the Giants (a completely dark area below the catacombs where you have to navigate with very limited visibility), The Bed of Chaos in Lost Izalith, Seath The Scaleless in the Crystal Cave (after navigating through the Duke's Archives where you have a forced death against Seath the first time you fight him), and finally the Four Kings in the Abyss (after navigating through New Londo Ruins).  For me, none of these bosses were too tricky by the time I got to them.  I think I benefited from not knowing where to go, because as a result I found more gear, leveled up more than I probably needed to be, and had a bit more room to operate.

There's also the DLC in Darkroot that I took on.  This appears to be completely optional, but has three more bosses including Knight Artorias, which is one of the most interesting characters I found in the game.

The game ends in the Kiln Of The First Flame, where you take on Lord Gwyn after going through a few Black Knights.  It took me a few tries, but I eventually beat Gwyn once I memorized his patterns.  As a mostly melee character, I found him to be tricky.  He is very quick and his attacks impact your stability in a major way, but if you are patient you can get through it. 

While it may not appears to have it on the surface, Dark Souls has some significant story choices that lead to some major ambiguity as to what is good and evil.  As I played the game, I thought I was taking the good path.  Kingseeker Frampt told me at Firelink that I was the successor to Lord Gwyn.  Sounds good, right?  And some of these bosses look pretty evil, right?  And that lady in Anor Londo with the big boobs can't be evil.  Well...I'm not really sure.  You have a choice in the end to sacrifice yourself for the fire and allow the age of the Gods to continue, or you can let the fire go out, let the world go dark, and let the age of Men begin.  So what's right?  Giving Gods who are dying a temporary lifeline?  Or ushering in a new era for Men, but leaves the world in darkness?  I don't really know.  Perhaps these questions will be answered or at least these details may be elaborated in Dark Souls 2.

Now that I'm finished, I have to say that Dark Souls is one of the most personally rewarding experiences I have had in games.  While the PC port is, frankly, broken, once I modded it I found it to be one of the richest explorations in any RPG.  The fighting is tight and really forces you to learn the mechanics.  The bosses are interesting and unique.  The setting and presentation are top notch (aside from glitches...the actual art and lore I find fascinating).  And of course it kept me busy so it's a great value. 

But it's not for everybody.  If you don't like to have to focus, or learn too much, or if the idea of repeating sections after dying is unappealing, you just won't like the game.  I don't think that's a knock on the game.  It does what it sets out to do.

Now I'll be moving on.  I do have Demon Souls on Playstation Plus that I can play on my PS3, but I doubt I will play it.  It's a much older game and with Dark Souls 2 coming out soon I can't see myself investing much mental energy in that.  It's probably wiser to take a break from this kind of thing until the new game comes out.

That's all I have for now.  For my next entry, I plan on discussing The Stanley Parable and how it compares to another interactive story, Gone Home.  Thanks for reading.