Monday, September 29, 2008

Legend of Kyrandia 2

(Warning: spoilers!)

Looks like the designers of the second Legend of Kyrandia learned half a lesson from the mistakes of the first game (two words: "everglowing fireberries"). This game has double the inventory space, and frequently purges unnecessary stuff, so you don't run out of inventory slots. And it only involves the insufferable Brandon during the intro, after which you take control of Zanthia. Her mission: having figured out why parts of Kyrandia are disappearing, she is sent to the center of the world to find an anchorstone which will presumably fix this.

But she can't just use a portal, unlike everyone else in the game, because she's out of blueberries. No, seriously. So it's off to a bunch of wacky adventures, including a game of Simon that you really need to write down the color order of and further fetch-and-deliver and interpret-these-instructions-in-a-punny-way-to-make-a-potion quests. All of which don't take all that much time, so at some point the designers apparently realized that the game didn't take long enough and added padding. So you get to pick up 6 coins for these guys. Then 6 other things. Then 6 more things. Then they tell you you could have just jumped in a vent -- but if you try that before they tell you, it doesn't work! Later, you get to make all the potions you've made again. All the ingredients are right there on a shelf, so it's clearly only playing for time, and probably also hoping to trick you into ordering the colors the same way as you did in the Simon game and two subsequent times, but here's a free hint: that is not it. Roy B. Giv is your friend.

The plot is so incredibly stupid I don't even want to begin to get into it. Wait, you want me to? Ok. Here's the twist: apparently this sorcerer exploded, and now his body parts are wreaking havoc on the world. As Rod Hilton might put it, "this actually f---ing happens."

Even with the artificial padding and pixel hunting it took me little more than three hours to finish the game (again, by walkthrough -- I'm not playing any of these old games without one). This was such an improvement over the first game that it's hard to put into words. Let's hope the third one is even better.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Dreamfall

I had actually started this after it came out but shied away from a particular action sequence in which one needs to sneak past or fight a number of trolls, and so the game lay around unplayed for almost two years before I gave it another chance. And boy am I glad that I did.

Dreamfall is the sequel to The Longest Journey, and I wouldn't recommend trying it without having played the first instalment: returning characters and concepts are only explained cursorily, if at all. Furthermore, if you thought The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King had a lot of endings, or if you hate cliffhangers, don't play this game, because it sure has a lot of endings, and all of them are cliffhangers. And the third part(s?) are nowhere in sight and unlikely to emerge in the near future.

Oh, and if you want to play this with the mouse? Forget it. Get a joypad (I used the Xbox360 one).

With that out of the way, what did I think? Dreamfall is an extremely pretty game with a very well-written storyline and a stupid tacked-on combat system that does little but suck (but also does not mar my enjoyment of the game all that much).

A quick digression about action sequences: I hate action sequences in adventure games. I'm an adventure purist, and had to force myself to finish Broken Sword 3: Sokoban and Broken Sword 4: Sneakasmatron. Space Quest 3 with its endless action sequences near the end, is still on my list of worst adventure games. I'm really bad at hand-eye coördination, and these sequences are therefore annoying stumbling blocks to me -- I had to play the fight at the end of SQ3 more than 50 times (if not a hundred, memory mercifully fails me here) before I got it. Therefore, if you include action sequences in your game, prepare to get a bucketful of hate from me.

I found the action sequences in Dreamfall to be unnecessarily tacked on, but even I could finish most of them on the first try. I have to label the combat system entirely broken. As long as you rush an enemy and keep hitting, they mostly just stand around looking stupid until they die, and you're never in any danger. When there are two or more enemies to fight, they will happily stand around awaiting their turn to be slaughtered. Why was this included at all?

The sneaking sequences make more sense, but here the other problem with Dreamfall comes in: the camera isn't good enough to support this fully. Fortunately, the other characters are all completely deaf, and the sequences are, again, pretty easy.

Lastly, there are "hacking" sequences, which are time-limited minigames. Also not very hard, also tacked-on and unnecessary.

The strength of the story absolves Dreamfall of all these problems. Even in the last fourth or so, where the game falls into the good old "let's make the player run all across the world to fulfil fetch quests" rut for a while, the story kept me going. The game is very cinematic and switches between three playable characters and in-engine cutscenes to create a "movie" experience quite unlike any other game before or after it. I can't really say much more without spoiling the experience, and in this case I don't want to -- go play and enjoy TLJ and Dreamfall.

Legend of Kyrandia

(Warning: spoilers!)

Wow.

Wow, wow, wow.

What an unbelievably awful game.

I had thought the Kyrandia series was well-regarded and well-loved by adventure gamers; after all, it made it into ScummVM, right?

Wrong.

When the main character, Brandon, isn't being as incoherent as a Markov chain generator, literally every single thing he says that is obviously intended as a "quip" makes me want to slap either him or whoever wrote this drivel:
"When I find a merchant... I'll buy a new pair of socks!"
Yes, he actually says that. Out of the blue. Fortunately, he's hit on the head by a branch right after. The only moment in the game I genuinely enjoyed.

Objects drop randomly in the game world. There's an inventory limit. There's no indication of which items are and aren't important, or when they will be. You can destroy objects you'll need later permanently and will have to re-find them (I think you can; or maybe the game is unwinnable). There are endless fetch-quests taking you, of course, across the entire world to get item A for person B. Oh, and also get item C. And item D. No, I couldn't have told you that the first time, why do you ask?

There's a maze. It's not just a maze, though: you need to light it up. There are bushes with berries that provide light. Except, each time you change the screen, they grow one step darker, until they go out entirely in the fourth. Of course, if you drop them on the floor, they provide light eternally. This is not just aggravating but also nonsensical. Even with a walkthrough this maze takes forever. And, of course, you have to traverse it multiple times. 

There's a bit where you have to make potions. You need two ingredients for each potion, and of course they come from entirely different parts of the game world. There's a number of basic potions you can make, and then you need to combine two basic potions to make more powerful potions. You don't know which does which, and you don't know which you'll need, or how many of them. Gathering the items required to make them takes forever, and even foreverer thanks to the inventory limit. Oh, and of course the place where you mix the basic potions and the place where you turn them into the potions you actually need are not the same location.

Oh, and of course Brandon is actually a prince. Then the king.

Were gamers this much more patient? Am I misguided in thinking that people liked this game? Is it impossible to microwave floppy disks? Because a good microwaving is what this game deserves.

I talked about finishing this to a friend. "F**k that game forever," he said. 

I agree.

Dragon Lore

Awful graphics, entirely unhinted story, and only one incoherent walkthrough available on the web. Suffice it to say I gave up very quickly and will not revisit.

Dragonsphere

(Warning: spoilers!)

Microprose's Dragonsphere is not a good game. The puzzles are hair-raisingly illogical; I had to play the entire game with a walkthrough and have no idea how many of these puzzles are even remotely solvable without endless trial and error.

The story begins cliché enough: you're this prince, there's this evil sorcerer, he's been imprisoned. You have a Dragonsphere, which shows how strong the prison of the bad guy is, and it gets progressively weaker over the course of the game.

I should say "over the course of half the game," really. When I started playing the game, I noticed a few odd things about this prince I was playing -- he seemed like a mannerless oaf, very much not the Graham of King's Quest.

And, as it turns out, you don't actually play the prince. You're a shapeshifter, a race feared and/or hated by many in the kingdom, and after you finish off the bad guy roughly 2/3rds through the game, the queen and the prince's traitorous brother have no more need of you. An interesting twist in what would have otherwise been a straightforward paint-by-numbers fantasy adventure, but the awfulness of the puzzles and the completely unnecessary inclusion of a luck-based game you have to win roughly 20 times as a filler still makes me put it firmly in the "mediocre" category.

The Neverhood

The Neverhood was the first game I attempted to finish. Unfortunately, there are bugs -- I'm not sure if they're in the actual game, or if they're caused by emulation, but when you save a game then restore later, all the puzzle solutions you've already seen are reset to a new configuration. This meant I couldn't finish the game with the notes I'd made and, while I liked it, I didn't like it quite enough to go back and re-play it from the start in a single session.

The game uses claymation for everything and switches between third and first person view depending on whether you're in a puzzle or a travel area. Unfortunately, there is a massive amount of dead space to cross and re-cross and re-re-cross and re-re-re-cross and it gets old quick, and then there's the hall of records, which is like 35 screens of multiple columns of text giving the entire backstory of the game, and the game requires you to traverse all those screens to the very end to pick up an item and then all the way back. If there's a more blatant filler in any game, tell me right now so I can avoid.

The puzzles usually also require travelling to some random location on the very other end of the world, then coming back. It's too bad, because the game is prettily made and funny, but there's no meat there, it's all filler.

What is this?

Recently, while mulling over a bunch of possible adventure game purchases, I suddenly thought hmm, I have so many unplayed adventures still sitting around, perhaps I should try some of them before buying even more?

And so, a purchase moratorium until I've tried and/or finished at least a few of them, and this the chronicle of my playing.

The full list of games (bold played, otherwise unplayed) resides here.