Month: November 2010

Reaching back a few years, this game combines a bit of puzzle and strategy with a bit of wanton mayhem. Decent, better in the early parts, but not recommended given the better games you could spend your time on. For a flash version without the puzzler parts, you could try .

You are haunting the house. You get a variety of settings with some movie allusions, including Ghostbusters, Evil Dead, and the Blair Witch Project. You empty a sorority house and uncover murder victims. Some of these are straightforward hauntings: scare some people, built up so that you can use bigger scares, and empty the buildings. Some toss in wrinkles like wards or exorcists. The puzzle parts come from the less straightforward levels and from unlocking new ghosts. In some levels, you lose for scaring people away before they do certain things, and you may not need/want to scare anyone away. In all levels, there are a few captive ghosts you can rescue by solving their personal puzzles.

Those puzzles are usually solid. They will have multiple solutions, so there are several ghost powers that will work for each situation. For example, if you need to light a campfire to unlock a fire spirit, you could cause a cold front in the area so that humans will light it, or you could lure a human over and use another spirit to cause the entire area to burst into flames. Some of them are less flexible, and some suffer from the usual computer game puzzle question of “what was this developer thinking?” Other times, you might be doing the right thing but not enough of it, or you might be doing everything right but the NPCs are being randomly uncooperative. If you have played Majesty, you know this last factor: “no, walk over THERE!” As with many puzzle games, what you want is not so much a hint or a guide but rather someone who has already done it who can say if you are on the right track. But there might be multiple tracks, so all they can say is how they did it. This aspect varies between trivial and ridiculous, with a limited number of satisfying puzzles in between. Few of the puzzles are absolute roadblocks; you can skip unlocking ghosts, and you will get the tools you need from free ones.

The haunting is briefly amusing. Scaring people and having neat tricks is fun. Some of the scares double as puzzle solutions, while some puzzle tools have no scare value. Hounding one particular person through a building, or just cutting loose with everything, can be entertaining. It palls fairly quickly, however, because you are just stocking the building with scares and waiting for people to leave.

A mix of interesting and annoying, the game includes problem-solving challenges, random guessing, and free-form mayhem. The first is good, the second is a little too common, the third is less visceral and satisfying than I had hoped.

: Zubon

This First Person Something was released just before Halloween, and I picked it up on the Steam sale. I have played very little, stymied by the question of whether and how you can enjoy it.

A first glance suggested it as a cousin to TF2: cartoony graphics, first person play, over the top violence, kill your friends and laugh. It is cartoony, with a variety of B movie victims and villains. It is not a FPS because it is not really a shooter; there are guns, but you might instead kill people with knives or exploding sheep. It does not appear to be fast-paced action, with people bouncing around and shooting rockets. You move quietly and ambush people, but it is not quite stealth-based. It felt plodding.

It strikes me as unnecessarily complicated. I assume it becomes more intuitive over time. You have a health bar, but most things seem to one- or two-shot you. You also have bars for needing food, sleep, or a toilet, and although refilling one of those bars makes you vulnerable to being one-shot by anything. You start empty-handed and can equip weapons and murder aids, and you have separate buttons for switching items, equipping them, and using them. You may not always want them equipped, you see, because security guards will tase you if they see you armed. And you may want to change weapons frequently because there are periodic announcements about how the value of each weapon has changed.

There are several game modes, and maybe some are better than others. I presume the handling makes more sense with experience, and familiarity with the maps always helps. I have yet to see anyone else playing or talking about the game, and I doubt it will be all that exciting to go about stabbing computer-controlled beach bums and killer clowns. On the plus side, it has a manual.

: Zubon

The setting is usually a multi-player game with no subscription costs. Someone will log on and start chatting. Their immediate topic is how awful the game is and/or how it has gone downhill; games with built-in team-based voice chat are popular for this filibuster.

“You’re right. The game is awful. You should quit.” I just keep repeating it. Yes, since they put in that new item, awful, you should quit. Oh, and that cash shop, I know, awful, you should quit. That too, yes, awful, you should quit. I don’t think it works, but I have had someone switch teams on my TF2 server in less than 10 repetitions.

: Zubon

I rarely do that in games with paid subscriptions, since I do not want to deny the developers income if I think the game is worth paying for myself.

While I am on this kick of complaining about randomness, it is rather frustrating to be in situations where the computer can just decide that you lose. If you are playing Elements or Magic, it can give you no mana sources or only mana sources; you cannot really play, just sit there and watch perverse randomization happen. If you are in a dungeon instance with variation in the number or placement of enemies, you cannot do anything when two elite trolls spawn on either side of your healer and both crit him/her, queuing up the wipe before their spawning animations have stopped. You have all had things spawn literally on top of you the instant you hit the “make me vulnerable so that I can recover quickly” button.

And, given enough trials, you will see that happen several times a night. The degree of frustration is largely a factor of how big the stakes are when the computer sends you to jail without passing Go or collecting $200.

What is really chafing lately is that the anthropomorphizing isn’t true. The computer does not want to win. It does not care if you lose. That is a category error; a computer is not the kind of thing that wants or cares. It is still metaphorical speaking to say “the computer can just decide that you lose.” The computer can be programmed to perform certain behaviors or maximize certain outcomes, but unless the AI revolution happened while I was on break, it is physically incapable of giving a fig what the outcome is. You are not being randomly and perversely struck down for any purpose, or so that anyone else can win. It just happens.

Kind of like in meatspace. And, given enough trials, you will see it happen to every living being.

: Zubon