August’s Gamer Banter topic comes from Cat @ carocat.co.uk and is: What is the worst game you’ve ever played?
The problem is that I’ve played a lot of really bad games. There was Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust, a game where I had to navigate around fart clouds while wearing a cactus costume. Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, a game so horrible it lowered my Intelligence by 1. Alone in the Dark, a game so bad it not only became unplayable, it actually went back in time and made all the previous entries worse.
But the worst game I ever played was Hellboy. Not the 2008 game, though that was crap too, 2003’s Hellboy: Asylum Seeker (original review here). Asylum Seeker was a PS1 port of a 2000 PC game called Hellboy: Dogs of the Night. Now, a 2003 release of a PS1 game wasn’t just coming towards the end of that console’s lifecycle, it was posthumous release. This should have been a huge warning sign, but I’m a big Hellboy fan.
Asylum Seeker followed Hellboy’s adventures in 1962’s Czechoslovakia. A brief bit about Hellboy: he’s a demon brought to earth by the Nazis, but adopted and raised by the Allies. He works for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, finding supernatural evils around the world and punching them with his Right Hand of Doom, an oversized stone fist.
Which was the first thing the game got wrong.
Combat was all kinds of terrible: lousy controls, clipping and poor collision detection, but the Right Hand of Doom was underpowered something fierce. One of the first battles was against a nurse (honestly) and she shrugged off punch after punch. Hellboy also had an oversized gun, but that fared even worse.
At this point, I remember few of the enemies, but there was one called the Zombie Champion. I don’t understand how zombies choose a champion and I wonder if term limits are involved or if it’s one of those lifetime appointments like the Pope or Supreme Court Justice. It’s never a good sign if mind goes to places like this in the middle of combat.
The game had pseudo-adventure elements, meaning that you’d spend a half an hour risking life and limb for an ordinary wrench, pick up strange objects and hope they’d pay off down the road and flip through occult books with the lame pun titles.
But the worst aspect of Hellboy: Dogs of the Night were the stairs.
If Hellboy came near a staircase he automatically walked up or down it – like some strange compulsion that came with his demon blood. Being a PS1 game, the act of traversing stairs was time consuming so it became really annoying when he’d repeatedly get sucked up a flight of stairs and you’d have to turn him around and march him back down – and then flee the area before he got sucked back up. Staircases off of narrow hallways became de facto minibosses, challenging the player’s patience and ability.
All of this combines to make Hellboy: Asylum Seeker (nee Dogs of the Night) the worst game I’ve ever played.
This post was part of Gamer Banter, a monthly video game discussion coordinated by Terry at Game Couch. If you’re interested in being part of this, please email him for details.
Metro 2033
Developer: 4A Games
Publisher: THQ
Platform: Xbox 360 (also PC)
Released: March 16, 2010
Test Freaks’ Freak Score: 8.0/10Nuclear war has driven Moscow’s citizens beneath the earth. Now the Metro is their home. Each metro station is its own kingdom; some are run merely by those seeking to survive while others have modeled themselves after Communist or Nazi systems of government. But fellow humans are the least of their worries.
The Metro is also home to the Dark Ones – monsters that could either be mutants created by radiation, the Metro’s original inhabitants or something worse. They’ve gotten bolder in their attacks and Artyom, the player character, must travel to the main station at Polis to petition for help. Doing so means crossing enemy lines and traversing areas overrun with Dark Ones. His journey will also take him to the ruined surface, where a working gas mask is all that stands between him and radioactive death.
Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter, but don’t approach it with a run and gun mindset. If you’re looking for a straight up shooter, there are better options out there, but if you’re looking for an immersive experience played out over the barrel of a gun, this might be the game for you. I say this as someone who felt like they were playing the game wrong for the majority of it.
To get the most out of Metro 2033 – to really appreciate it – you have to take on the role of Artyom. This means exploring areas, talking to people, and paying attention to the various tour guides you encounter in the Metro. My second tip is to consider whether violence is the necessary answer. Artyom has a very deliberate character arc which is easy to miss if you treat the game as a standard FPS.
But this is complicated by several factors. Metro’s morality system (it does have one) is hidden from the player so it’s not always easy to understand the results of your actions. And while many levels have a stealth option, Metro’s stealth mechanics are poorly implemented – one false step and suddenly every enemy in the area knows exactly where you are. Pure rage-quit material.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t times to simply open fire and Metro has a full arsenal ranging from slapped together assault rifles to silenced pneumatic spear guns. You’ll spend a lot of time scrounging for guns and ammunition, but dealers in the Metro station have better equipment if you’re willing to part with high-quality bullets, the game’s currency. And you’ll definitely want to have spare health kits and filters for your gas mask.
The art design in Metro 2033 shows a lot of thought put into what such a subterranean existence would look like. The various stations look appropriately ramshackle and they are populated with characters who aren’t clones. Level design is similarly impressive ranging from series of twisty passages to the ruined city above. There’s even nice differentiation between types of Dark Ones. My only complaint would be how dark some of the levels are, even with my fully-charged flashlight.
Audio is similarly impressive. Ambient music is haunting and in-game effects, like the howls of the nosalis or the sudden spray of gunfire are chilling. Best is the voice acting which is Russian accented without sounding like Chekov impressions.
To its detriment, Metro 2033 requires a lot from its players. As mentioned above, stealthy approaches can be infuriating and even basic combat can be frustrating. It didn’t take long for me to kick the difficulty down to easy and – even then – I saw my share of reload screens. However, playing through the game and replaying specific levels led me to truly appreciate what 4A Games has done here. In the end, I’d rather tough out an original game than play through a highly polished retread.
And I fell in love with the setting so much that I imported the original book by Dmitry Glukhovsky (translated). So look for that review next month.
Mass Effect: Redemption
Publisher: Dark Horse
Released: June 2010The Normandy is destroyed and Commander Shepard is feared dead. However his body, regardless of its condition, is the prize in a contest pitting the Illusive Man against the Shadow Broker. Between them is Dr. Liara T’Soni, formerly part of Shepard’s crew, who’s gone rogue to uncover the mystery surrounding Shepard’s disappearance.
Reading like a space opera with a noir twist, the Dark Horse graphic novel finds Liara at Omega, a massive space station in the Terminus system acting as the dark parallel to the Council-run Citadel. Here gangs rule, kept in check only by Omega’s pirate queen Aria. Like any good noir, it’s tough to tell who’s on which side keeping Liara (and the reader) on her toes.
If you wondered about Liara’s personality change in Mass Effect 2 and her obsession with the Shadow Broker, Redemption sets it all up. This is a Liara who blames herself for Shepard’s demise and who lashes out quickly and violently at anyone who gets in her way – displaying a range of biotic powers which would have been really useful in the first game.
The story is by Mass Effect 2 lead writer Mac Walters, making this more than a marketing tie-in and the art by artist Omar Francia and colorist Michael Atiyeh is impressive – especially the numerous action scenes and displays of biotic ability.
Did Terry Farrell (Jadzia Dax, DS9) ever hand out that $1M prize to a lucky Treasure Quest player? We’ll never know, but Rosalind from Girls Are Geeks won our scarf give-away!
As a 15-year-old, Benny Imura will no longer be supported by the town of Mountainside. Instead, like all adults, he must find a job to earn his rations. But faced with career choices like testing the fence separating the town from zombies or sitting in a watchtower all day, following his bounty hunter brother Tom out into the Rot and Ruin becomes his best option.
Tom is loved and respected by the town, but Benny remembers Tom’s actions on First Night and has hated him ever since. Besides, Tom isn’t anything like Charlie Pink-Eye or the Motor City Hammer, bounty hunters adored by Benny and his friends. But out in the Rot and Ruin, Benny learns Tom’s philosophy about zombie killing and fears that the real monsters might be on the wrong side of the fence.
Rot and Ruin continues the recent trend of imagining society in the wake of zombie apocalypse. In Maberry’s world-building, monks live in the wastes caring for zombies, scouting programs include intensive combat training and kids collect zombie trading cards. And, in spite of the threat of the living dead, Maberry also conveys the complications which simply come from being fifteen.
Jonathan Maberry’s Rot and Ruin is an expansion of his novella “Family Business” published earlier this year in The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology. What struck me then was his poignant take on zombies. This expanded version retains the poignancy, but also ups the action and horror quotient making this a page-turner, even as it becomes more grim and reflective.
This post was part of Gamer Banter, a monthly video game discussion coordinated by Terry at Game Couch. If you’re interested in being part of this, please email him for details.
Earlier on Twitter, I noticed that a lot of the people I follow are also quite skilled in the kitchen, leading me to ask:
Response was pretty great.
So my rough idea for this would be a collection of geek-friendly recipes loving collected into a PDF format (by someone with better layout skills than me) which could then a) be hosted by whoever wanted it on their blog/website and b) printed out and handed out at cons.
By geek-friendly, I mean stuff you cook for game nights, snacks which keep you up all night, cocktails which give you Rock Band courage, cookies shaped like the Death Star, etc.
Although I’m not seeing this as a moneymaking venture, I would want to avoid copyright infringement by having people submit original recipes — not things pulled from other cookbooks or lifted off the Internet.
It would also be cool if we called it the Necronomnomnom, but I’m flexible about that.
So please use the comment box for:
1) General brainstorming.
2) Letting me know you want to be part of this (you have a recipe, want to design the cover, have thought of a better name/better distribution method, etc).
3) General messages of support. :)
Also, please RT this, FB it, and send this directly to people who want/need to be involved.
When I started this article on Wednesday, my hope was to nudge readers to pledge money for Natali’s UberDork Café. Her goal was to raise $5000 through Kickstarter to start a family-friendly café with a game room and classroom. UberDork Café would support local vendors and artists, but more importantly it would support Milwaukee’s geek community, starting with her two daughters.
But last night things changed. Last night, Natali sailed past her goal and she’s currently at 112%.
I’m proud to be part of this, humbled by the number of people willing to make someone’s dream come true and I don’t have the word to describe how I feel watching this unfold as a shared experience through Twitter. It’s like the taupe or mauve of emotions, or some other color I can’t identify.
However, I’m also realistic. $5000 is a good start, but she’s going to need more money. And since there are still 25 days left to give, I decided to still run this interview with her about UberDork Café and her reasons behind it.
Game Couch: Hi Natali! I guess we should start with the idea behind UberDork Café.
Natali: I am an ambidextrously-brained geek girl who just happens to be a single mom to two geekling girls. When trying to find new, fun things for us to try or places to go, I noticed the pickings were super slim. It got me thinking about what it was like being a geeky kid growing up and made me realize that the majority of our geeklings and even us as adults are really limited in places to go that really get us. That got me thinking about what the ultimate place would be for us. After I came up with it, I realized that unless someone actually created it, it may not exist for quite some time. So, I figured why can’t I be that someone?
Game Couch: I think that’s why I believe in this so much. A place like this would have had a huge impact on my life. But why would anyone not living in Wisconsin want to support this?
Natali: The simple answer is: this is just the start. I’ve had so many people tell me how much they wish a place like this existed near them. So much so that it has been added to the business plan- to open other locations across the… well who knows maybe world. :)
Ultimately though, the reason I think it is so important is what it stands for. UberDork Café is not just about a place you can go hang, grab coffee, game with your friends, listen to a lecture from a guest comic artist or throw your 5-year-old a build your own robot birthday party. It’s about a symbol of our community. Our community is strong but hidden- in back rooms of game shops, in basements with controllers in hand, behind computer screens with the online community we seek solace in.
What if there was some place to go do all of that while surrounded by people that got you? What if there was a place where geeky kids could go hang and meet other kids instead of avatars? Where people that believed in them so much that they might have a chance at a scholarship to go build the best video game ever or gadget that would save lives? What if we could all go someplace where everyone knew our gamertag? Or what a Dalek is? Or peacefully argue whose ears are more awesome- Spock’s or Yoda’s? Where we could wave our lil geek/nerd/dork flags high and proud?
But that all needs to start somewhere. Why not here? :)
Game Couch: What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned from the Kickstarter campaign?
Natali: There are two huge things that I have learned.
The first is that I was absolutely right about my community. The amount of love and support I have gotten from my geeky peeps is overwhelming. I have cried move over these last couple of weeks than I can remember. And they have all been tears of joy, pride and gratefulness. We are a tight group that love and support each other. That love meeting others that are like us and extending the love and support to them. That together, there isn’t anything we can’t accomplish.
The second was how much UberDork Café is really needed. It’s a bit more of a sad lesson. After I launched this campaign, people started reaching out and telling me their stories. About how they’ve always wanted to go to a Con, but never had anyone to go with them. About how many hours they’ve spent online with the community they’ve met because most of the people in their lives just don’t get them like their online friends do. About how they could never tell their other friends they camped out at GameStop for a midnight new release. How they often wonder what they would be like if their childhood was different- if they didn’t have to change on the outside to fit in or if they had other people that believed in their geeky dreams and aspirations.
Game Couch: After the end of the Kickstarter campaign, Friday, August 13th, what happens?
Natali: Phase II kicks in. Clearly it takes more than $5,000 to open a place like this. The money from Kickstarter is a huge part in getting all the lovely little business details in order and having money to secure location. More funds will be needed to obtain equipment, supplies, etc. The raising of those funds is already being worked on due to more amazing support from my geek community. I can’t tell you how excited I am for when I can finally announce what it is!!! :)
But the worst game I ever played was Hellboy. Not the 2008 game, though that was crap too, 2003’s Hellboy: Asylum Seeker (original review here). Asylum Seeker was a PS1 port of a 2000 PC game called Hellboy: Dogs of the Night. Now, a 2003 release of a PS1 game wasn’t just coming towards the end of that console’s lifecycle, it was posthumous release. This should have been a huge warning sign, but I’m a big Hellboy fan.
