Gordon Cameron

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‘Song of the Deep’ Is a Gorgeous Underwater ‘Metroid’

Under the sea, under the sea... (Photo: Insomniac Games)

What happens when a big game studio goes small? We’ll find out later this year with Song of the Deep, a newly announced game from Insomniac Games, purveyors of huge franchises like Ratchet & Clank and the Resistance shooters.

Song of the Deep is significantly smaller in scope than those massive, 3D series. It puts you in the shoes — and submarine — of Merryn, a plucky tween whose beloved fisherman father fails to come home from work one night. Merryn does what any loving daughter would do in these circumstances: She cobbles together a homemade submersible and ventures forth into the deep to seek her departed dad.

Merryn’s quest will take her through gorgeous coral reefs, underwater caves, a vast Atlantis-like sunken empire, and other lovingly rendered locations. Technically speaking, it’s a “Metroidvania” (a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania, classic NES games that defined the genre) — a 2D scrolling action-adventure that emphasizes exploration.

Concept art of plucky protagonist Merryn. (Photo: Insomniac Games)

We got some hands-on time with Song of the Deep. Equal parts puzzle solving, raw exploration, and undersea combat, it’s easy to like. The art direction creates a compelling atmosphere with old-school parallax scrolling, subtle lighting effects, and handcrafted, watercolor-esque backdrops. As any game in this genre should do, it urges you forward with promises of new zones to unlock and hidden nooks and crannies to uncover.

Song of the Deep also marks a new direction for brick-and-mortar game retailer GameStop, which has signed on as a publisher. The deal will give Song of the Deep an opportunity to get some valuable shelf space in the real world, in addition to being for sale via download services like Steam and PSN. Also in the pipeline are merchandising tie-ins, including a storybook that will further elaborate on the adventures of Merryn and her sub. (A GameStop spokesperson insisted it’s “a very hands-off” partner, leaving all creative matters to Insomniac alone.)

Song of the Deep will launch in the second quarter of 2016 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

You can email Gordon Cameron here.

[gordoncameron42]

Review: Enigmatic ‘The Witness’ Is Big on Challenge, Light on Reward

Island of mystery. (Image: Thekla)

Jonathan Blow is trying to make me feel stupid. Scratch that — Jonathan Blow is succeeding at making me feel stupid.

Blow, an indie developer whose 2008 puzzle-platformer Braid dazzled gamers with its winning combination of devious level design, twee art direction, and somber emotion, is back with a new opus. The Witness is strange, austere, infuriating, and occasionally brilliant. Some are hailing it as a masterpiece.

I regretfully report that I am not going to be one of those people.

The overall concept recalls 1993’s seminal adventure game Myst. You wander an isolated island, encountering puzzles around every corner. There’s nobody else here. The atmosphere is mysterious, serene yet vaguely sinister. You solve a puzzle. You solve another puzzle. New areas are gradually unlocked. What are you doing here? What does it all add up to?

Answers are seldom forthcoming. In their absence, your imagination runs wild. You begin to see significance in everything. See how those clouds are positioned? See that pattern in the flower garden? It must mean something. But what? The game freely exploits that trick of human psychology whereby we interpret obscurity as profundity.

The puzzles themselves — nestled in terminal screens all over the 3D island — are almost shockingly low-tech affairs. The vast majority of them are small, two-dimensional, and mazelike, something that could just as well have run on an Intellivision as a PlayStation 4.

The puzzles are childishly simple at first, but they rapidly increase in complexity. The game teaches you to play it by introducing simple concepts and then building on these.

For example, you may be presented with a simple grid. On one of the squares is a particular shape. That shape informs, somehow, the way you must navigate a line through the grid. Once you’ve solved that, different shapes are introduced, or multiple ones combined, or new colors added. Bit by bit, you come to understand how these parts interact, and puzzles that once seemed insoluble start to become approachable. It’s like learning a new language; when it’s clicking, there’s the thrill of new knowledge gained.

But — in part because of the nonlinear structure of the setting — this training is inconsistent. You might stumble on a set of puzzles you aren’t prepared for, only you don’t know you aren’t prepared for them, and you’ll bang your head against the wall for an hour before retreating in frustration. The game, implacable, doesn’t care how much time you waste in this way.

Even when you solve a puzzle, your reward, typically, is just another puzzle. There are audio logs scattered around the island, but they aren’t positioned in such a way as to reward success — they’re just there. Maybe they mean something; maybe they’re just something Blow thought was cool and worth listening to. (One, for example, is an extended quote from the astronaut Rusty Schweickart.) The Witness is stingy with its dopamine drip. If solving each puzzle isn’t its own reward for you, it’ll be hard going.

Riddles within riddles. (Image: Thekla)

For the first few hours, there’s a subtle fascination in poking around The Witness’s beautiful, spooky setting. The bright, cheery colors provide an eerie counterpoint to the desolation and the vague sense that something has gone very wrong here. All around, you’ll find statues in strange poses, as if frozen in the middle of some activity. Are they merely sculptures? Victims of a calamity? What’s the backstory? Is there a backstory? These questions nudge you forward.

Unfortunately, the game eschews the conveniences that have become typical of the open-world genre. Fast travel is extremely limited; if you clamber up a mountain to try some puzzles and find yourself stuck, you’ll have to clamber back down again to try others. There’s no log keeping track of puzzles completed, nor any dynamic map chronicling which areas you’ve already explored.

You have to admire the singularity of vision, the austerity, with which The Witness is designed. It doesn’t seem to be trying very hard to entertain you, and that, ironically, adds to its interest — up to a point. After many hours of play with no indication that the game’s mysteries are going to be unlocked anytime soon, you start to wonder if all this effort is worth it. Die-hard puzzleheads will stick it out, but what about the rest of us? Do I want to put in the time necessary to master Jonathan Blow’s semiotic vocabulary?

For me, the answer in the end was no. Too often while playing The Witness, I realized that there were a lot of other things I’d rather be doing than playing The Witness. I respect it; I admire it. I just didn’t enjoy it all that much.

What’s Hot: Haunting, enigmatic atmosphere; tons of challenging puzzles to solve

What’s Not: Challenges greatly outnumber rewards; core puzzle gameplay often more frustrating than engaging

You can email Gordon Cameron here.

[gordoncameron42]

Review: Harrowing ‘Darkest Dungeon’ Lets You Play With Madness

Fighting foul denizens in Darkest Dungeon. (Photo: Red Hook Studios)

Fantasy dungeons are, typically, unpleasant. They’re dark, smelly, and populated with abominations that want to kill you.

So it’s odd that most fantasy role-playing games feature parties of adventurers who uncomplainingly trudge through mile after mile of pungent sewage, swinging swords, and slinging fireballs until their last hit point is bled dry.

The makers of Darkest Dungeon have a different vision. This tactical RPG from indie developer Red Hook Studios, kickstarted in 2014 and just released after months of refinement on Steam Early Access, imagines parties of dungeoneers who feel mounting pressure until, one by one, they begin to crack under the strain. An expedition begun in optimism and camaraderie can end in selfishness, despair, and madness.

It’s a brilliant conceit, but the trick is in the execution. After all, if all you’ve done is turn morale or psychological stability into another hit-point counter, you haven’t really done anything at all. Darkest Dungeon doesn’t entirely avoid this trap, but its clever gameplay mechanics and formidable design will keep you trudging through dungeons for hours on end.

The psychological element is tracked by your party members’ stress level. Up to a point, stress is just like a shadow hit-point bar, vulnerable to its own array of enemy attacks and spells. But after a certain tipping point, your heroes will officially freak out and develop lousy new character traits like masochism, hopelessness, and selfishness.

These traits, in turn, trigger unpredictable character actions. A masochist might stab herself in the middle of battle; a selfish companion might grab all the loot in a treasure chest. Sometimes a party member will refuse a healing spell, or, despairing, simply pass his turn altogether. You’re not fully in control, and the higher the stress mounts, the more your protagonists develop twisted minds of their own.

Darkest Dungeon is tuned for gamers who like a challenge. Death is permanent — there are no resurrections or reloads — so you’ll need to manage a constant influx of new heroes in order to keep your dungeon-delving profitable. After a dungeon run, party members may be so stressed out that they’ll need to relax at a tavern or pray at an abbey for a week to recover their sanity. This dynamic creates a taut meta-game of trying to make sure the right characters are available at the right time for a particularly tough quest.

The seemingly straightforward four-versus-four tactical combat holds a surprising amount of depth. Character positioning is critical: All four stand in a line, and that order can make a huge difference. A party member may not be able to cast the same spell in the front as she can in the back. The various classes hold interesting strategic pros and cons too. My favorite is the jester, a nimble fighter who leaps around the battlefield, potentially unlocking powerful combos but occasionally messing up your party order in unexpected ways.

All of these mechanics are set into relief by first-rate art design. The characters and environments are rendered in gloomy drawings with just enough frames of animation to sell them. The style is gleefully Lovecraftian, at once creepy, witty, and unsettlingly funny. It sounds fantastic too. Stuart Chatwood’s music is suitably ominous, and voice-over artist Wayne June deserves special credit for his deep, Charlton Heston-esque rumblings as the ubiquitous narrator.

Darkest Dungeon stumbles a little in its interface, which initially feels needlessly complex and unintuitive. Obscure little icons litter the screen, but it’s not always obvious what they mean. The core mechanics could have done with some paring down too. Do there really need to be three different kinds of stress-relief buildings, each with multiple subdivisions? I’m still not sure what the difference is between the Cloister, the Transept, and the Penance Hall.

And although Darkest Dungeon becomes fiercely addictive, that feeling eventually wears thin. You tick off quests one by one, but it’s a long way to completion and few will have the patience to get there. There’s not much variety in enemy types, and the dungeons themselves are just abstracted strings of encounters.

But while it’s got its hooks into you, Darkest Dungeon exerts a powerful pull. Hear the chilling call of the foul, nameless catacombs, and dispatch your minions to their maw! They’ll be going mad, but you’ll be having a blast.

What’s Hot: Smart tactical combat, striking Lovecraftian style, innovative psychological gameplay

What’s Not: Messy interface, grows repetitive

You can email Gordon Cameron here.

[gordoncameron42]

‘Grand Theft Auto’ Studio Head Calls It Quits

Grand Theft Auto V (Photo: Rockstar Games)

You may not be familiar with the man’s name, but you probably know his work.

Leslie Benzies, the president of Grand Theft Auto developer Rockstar North, has departed the company after a 17-month sabbatical, reports Kotaku.

Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, Benzies came aboard Rockstar North predecessor DMA Design in 1999 as a game programmer. In 2001 he helped launch the seminal Grand Theft Auto III as the game’s producer, bringing the then-obscure GTA franchise into the third dimension and into the world’s spotlight. He went on to lead the development of all subsequent GTA games, and is credited as a lead designer on Rockstar’s acclaimed Western-themed game, Red Dead Redemption.

The media-shy Benzies presided over a development studio known for its thoroughness and attention to detail. “We don’t just go, ‘Here’s a mission, off you go,’” Benzies said in a 2013 profile for Develop magazine. “We spend a lot of time, make a lot of graphs and work out how difficult something is, what the reward is, how you might be feeling after that mission.”

Leslie Benzies (Photo: Rockstar Games)

“That last five to ten per cent of work on the game makes a huge difference,” Benzies insisted. “This level of perfection is not seen or understood in the majority of the industry. We can all make a car drive down a street in a game, but can you do it in style?”

That perfectionism paid off. For the past 15 years, Grand Theft Auto has been gaming’s crown jewel, with each iteration garnering outrageous sales and critical acclaim despite outcry over its violent content. Benzies himself was honored in 2005 with a BAFTA Special Award and was inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in 2014.

Rockstar North veterans Aaron Garbut and Rob Nelson will helm the studio moving forward, but no one knows what Benzies is up to next. We’d say he deserves a long vacation, but it looks like he’s already in the middle of one.

You can email Gordon Cameron here.

[gordoncameron42]

Meet CleverPet, the Electronic Game That’s Like ‘Simon’ For Dogs

It’s 3 PM. Do you know what your dog is doing?

If the folks behind CleverPet have any say, she’ll be happily at home, whiling away the hours with her very own game system.

The device, which has been Kickstarted to the tune of $180,000, looks like a doggy dish with three paw-friendly touch pads on its front. It’s programmed with a series of games – introduced to your pooch in order of increasing complexity – that involve pressing certain pads in a certain order. When a sequence is completed successfully, the device releases a tasty food pellet. It’s not unlike the classic game Simon, but tuned for a canine brain.

CleverPet’s makers assert that the game is beneficial to your pet’s health. “We’re driven by compassion and curiosity to find a way to care for pets when they’re alone,” says co-founder Leo Trotter. In his view, a more engaged pet is a happier pet, and a happier pet is a healthier pet.

The device, which has just been awarded first prize in CES 2016’s LaunchIt competition, will retail for $299. If you’re intrigued, move fast: preorders are discounted by $30 until January 10.

As this 12-hour time-lapse video shows, CleverPet has the potential to be pretty addictive. Pet owners might fairly wonder whether overuse (and subsequent oversnacking) could offset those mental-health benefits the creators tout. I mean, think of it: dogs up at all hours, sitting slavishly in front of an electronic gizmo? Who do they think they are – humans?

(It’s not clear whether CleverPet works for cats — but, then, the felines seem pretty capable of amusing themselves with human-targeted videogames.)

You can email Gordon Cameron here.

[gordoncameron42]

7-year-old Racks Up $5,900 in Bills Playing ‘Jurassic World’ on Dad’s iPad

Jurassic World’s microtransactions. (Credit: Universal/Ludia)

“Life finds a way,” quipped Jeff Goldblum in the original Jurassic Park. So too, apparently, do app-addicted tykes.

U.K. resident Mohamed Shugaa was shocked last month to discover that his 7-year-old son had spent over £4000 (roughly $5,900) in microtransactions for the iPad game Jurassic World.

Developed by Ludia, Jurassic World combines elements of tycoon games and Pokemon-style battlers. You’re tasked with building a dinosaur theme park, breeding and hatching dinos, and then sending them off to fight. Initially free to play, the slickly produced app quickly lets you know that you can speed up production and acquire more beasties by purchasing virtual Dino Bucks via your iTunes account.

Credit: Universal/Ludia

Evidently dizzy with dino power, Shugaa’s son rang up 65 transactions’ worth of Dino Bucks in mid-December before his dad found out about it. A shocked Shugaa contacted Apple’s customer support and obtained a refund, though Apple’s official policy is that parents should closely monitor children’s use of iTunes accounts and avail themselves of the available restriction tools.

This is good advice. The ethics of the free-to-play, microtransaction-based business model remain a subject of debate, but it doesn’t look like Dino Bucks, or Smurfberries, or Gold Bars, or a billion other virtual-currency variants are going anywhere anytime soon. Parents, you have been warned.

(Via Metro and PCMag.)

You can email Gordon Cameron here.

[gordoncameron42]

How to Make Your Own Video Game

If you’ve played games long enough, you’ve surely thought, “Hey, what if I made a game?” Problem is, you don’t have a fancy computer science degree. You don’t know JavaScript from Fortran, and you wouldn’t recognize an art pipeline if somebody hit you over the head with one.

Making games isn’t easy. It wasn’t easy 35 years ago when Warren Robinett was writing machine code to cram Atari 2600 Adventure into 4 kilobytes of memory, and it isn’t any easier now that 300-person teams are spending millions to create incredibly complex 3D worlds with the latest in bleeding-edge graphics and animation techniques.

But if you can set your sights a bit lower than Halo 5, there are tons of resources out there to help you turn your playful dreams into a reality. These days, game-making software is practically a cottage industry. The first thing to do is find the right tool for the job. Start with these five.

Boldly going where better game designers have gone before. (Credit: Gordon Cameron)

1. GameMaker: Studio

First released in 1999, this is the granddaddy of modern game-making software, and its popularity is easy to understand. A no-frills interface will make anyone familiar with Photoshop feel right at home, and it combines tremendous depth with a huge community of users. The answers to many GameMaker questions are just a quick search away. Plus, the community forums are full of helpful veterans.

At its core, GameMaker is built for two-dimensional gaming. The toolset lends itself most naturally to classic genres such as platformers and scrolling shoot-em-ups. Go through one of the first tutorials and you’ll quickly author a simple shooter that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s played the classic arcade game 1942.

Some may be turned off by GameMaker’s old-school vibe, but I found it a powerful, surprisingly simple introduction to game design, partly because it forces you to confront fundamentals. What exactly is happening when one object bumps into another? If your character “shoots” a gun, what does that mean in terms of graphical sprites placed along X/Y coordinates? How many frames are in your heroine’s animation, under what conditions does her image flip horizontally, how high does she jump, and how much control do you have over her while she’s in midair? Answering these questions may seem tedious, but it can be exhilarating once you dig into them.

If you do want to write code — or better, yet copy and paste someone else’s — GameMaker accommodates that with its proprietary language, GML, which can be integrated with the mostly drag-and-drop interface.

Price: $99 Sample Game: WizardWizard

Download a free trial version of GameMaker

2. Construct 2 

Construct feels like GameMaker’s younger, hipper, and pricier cousin. Released in 2011, it does a lot of the same things GameMaker does, but in different ways.

One of Construct’s interface innovations is the “Event Sheet,” a separate tab that aggregates the game logic and instructions running in the background. While there’s nothing here that can’t be executed in GameMaker, the different presentation may be easier for some users to get their minds around.

Which program you prefer will largely come down to personal taste. I gravitated toward GameMaker for the simple reason that it was less picky about which sorts of audio files it was willing to import for sound effects and music, plus the full version is $30 cheaper. But both feature plenty of depth, have a manageable learning curve, and will be especially congenial if your design ambitions skew retro.

Price: $129 Sample Game: The Esfaralante

Download a free trial of Construct 2

Nightmare fuel. (Credit: Gordon Cameron)

3. GameGuru

If you’d rather dive face-first into the third dimension and starting whipping up a crazy shooter, GameGuru might be right for you. Think of it as a stepping stone to more sophisticated 3D level editors like Unreal Engine 4 and CryEngine. It’s limited, but you can start creating stuff fast.

Within about ten minutes of first booting up GameGuru and barely glancing at the documentation, I’d built a simple outdoor level containing trees, buildings, enemy soldiers, a zombie, and a medieval barbarian. And a trio of psychotic, laser-wielding rabbits. Horrifying! It’s a rush to be able to dive so quickly into a world you’ve just painted.

The flipside to that, of course, is that a great deal of work has already been done for you in advance by the GameGuru folks. It’s their version of a shooter interface, their version of an ammo/health counter, and their version of how an enemy soldier behaves. After all, you can’t have it both ways: if you want to throw together a first-person shooter in a hurry, you need to rely on someone else to lay the groundwork for you. Much of GameGuru’s content can be customized, but understandably, it takes significantly more technical expertise to do so.

GameGuru is such a new program that it doesn’t have the wealth of add-ons, documentation, and veteran users that distinguishes, for example, GameMaker. Still in Early Access, it’s got only a fraction of the features that, its makers claim, will eventually be available.

Price: $20 Sample Game: There’s not much out there yet in a finished state. But the GameGuru Developer Blog highlights promising works-in-progress from fans.

Download GameGuru (no free trial, sadly)

4. RPG Maker

Prefer old-school role-playing games? RPG Maker is your jam. Dating to 1988, this venerable series gives you a complete tool set to create maps, specify character classes and skills, script encounters, and tell for the umpteenth time the tale of a young hero from an obscure background who is called upon to save the world.

Like GameGuru, RPG Maker is initially a blast: You can create an environment, drop a character into it, and try it out in minutes flat. Dig into the tutorials, though, and you’ll see there’s a lot of depth here. It turns out making an RPG is about more than just painting happy little trees all over your hand-crafted mountain village. It’s about databases. Databases! Character classes, skills, weapons, armor, magical items: Each one must be named, given characteristics, given an associated graphic, and cross-referenced based on who can use what and at which level. And we haven’t even gotten to the monsters yet.

Even if its cutesy aesthetic isn’t your cup of tea, RPG Maker will give you a powerful insight into the kind of background work it takes to make a good role-playing game. All without a line of code written.

Price: $69.99 Sample Game: Aveyond: Lord of Twilight

Download the RPG Maker free trial.

(Credit: Twine)

5. Twine

Twine isn’t conventional game-making software, strictly speaking. It’s a program that lets you quickly and easily create web-based, “choose-your-own-adventure”-style interactive fiction. A simple browser-based interface lets you click and drag different sections to create a complex flowchart. Each section is a standalone page, describing whatever you wish, with as many branching paths as you desire.

The dividing line between a “game” and “interactive fiction” is a fuzzy one, and open to debate. What’s significant about Twine is that using it forces you to confront the very particular problems of branching-path storylines. How do you strike a balance between imposing your own will on a player’s experience, and allowing them the freedom to make and own their choices? Can you come up with outcomes that are equally satisfying whether there are three different endings, or a hundred? Such questions are a part of designing all but the most linear games, and Twine provides a great sketchbook in which to work them out.

Alternatively, if you consider rich interactive fiction an end until itself, there’s no easier program on this list to use. And best of all, it’s absolutely free.

Price: Free! Sample Twine: Swan Hill

Get started with Twine.

You can email Gordon Cameron here.

[gordoncameron42]

Review: Homeworld Remastered Collection

https://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/review---homeworld-remastered-collection--tastefully-preserves-a-space-epic-220341958.html

[gordoncameron42]

Review: Sid Meier’s Starships

https://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/review---sid-meier-s-starships--goes-where-other-games-have-gone-before-225855143.html

[gordoncameron42]

Behind the scenes: Warren Robinett and ‘Adventure’

https://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/duck-dragons-and-easter-eggs--how--adventure--changed-gaming-002808828.html

[gordoncameron42]

Review: Apotheon

https://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/review--beautiful--apotheon--is-a-playable-grecian-urn-002401579.html

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Review: Evolve

https://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/review--absorbing--evolve--is-fit-to-survive-002334012.html

[gordoncameron42]

Review: Absorbing ‘Evolve’ Is Fit to Survive

Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are tells us that inside everyone is a monster trying to get out. But unleashing that monster can be a messy prospect. What’s a stymied inner child to do?

Play Evolve, maybe.

The new shooter from Turtle Rock Studio, creators of the Left 4 Dead games, builds on its predecessors’ co-op multiplayer gameplay, but adds a fresh, asymmetric twist. Instead of a team of humans pitted against multiple zombies, this time it’s four hunters against one very large, very disgruntled monster. Which side you choose to play is up to you.

Though the humans-versus-monsters theme is similar to the classic Half-Life mod, Natural Selection, Evolve is very much its own gigantic beast. A few kinks aside, Evolve is a tight, absorbing mixture of cooperative and competitive gameplay, and seems likely to be the multiplayer shooter of choice for quite a while.

The action’s set on the far-flung world of Shear, where human colonization efforts are being hampered by unforeseen environmental factors – like 15-foot goliaths snacking on the pioneers. The solution? Send in a team of wisecracking monster-hunters to save the day, of course.

The setting lies somewhere between James Cameron’s Aliens and… James Cameron’s Avatar: grungy off-world colonies, incredibly hostile local fauna (the flora ain’t so nice, either), and working-class mercs whose personal style is midway between U.S. Marine and Hell’s Angel. The folks at Turtle Rock glide easily on the back of familiar sci-fi tropes, giving us just enough atmosphere and backstory that we can quickly forget about them and focus on the mayhem.

Evolve is all about the multiplayer; there’s no real single-player campaign, though it’s possible to play all the game modes with bots if you want some low-pressure training or just don’t like people very much.

There are four core game modes. The first and most basic is “Hunt,” in which the Hunters must track down and destroy the Monster as quickly as possible. The longer the Monster lives, feasting on other animals and gaining strength, the tougher it is to put down. “Nest” has the Monster trying to stop the Hunters from destroying its eggs, while “Rescue” is a sort of mirror image of that: this time it’s the Monster on the offensive, going after human survivors the Hunters are trying to shepherd to a safe extraction point. Finally there’s “Defend,” in which the Monster (accompanied in this case by some smaller Monsterlets) tries to destroy a number of generators the Hunters are protecting.

These modes can be played individually – a single session usually runs in the 15-20 minute range – or they can be strung together in a longer mini-campaign called “Evacuation.” Here, the outcome of each battle affects the next one. If the Hunters failed to stop the Monster from taking down a power plant, for example, the weather control might go awry, causing huge carnivorous plants to run amok in the next mission, making life that much harder for Team Humanity. There are tons of these modifiers, lending a needed boost of randomization to the game.

There’s plenty of variety in the roles you can play. Hunters can choose from one of four classes – Assault (the main damage dealer), Heal (keeping others alive with a sort of medical beam-gun), Support (cloaking your team when things get rough), and perhaps the most interesting, the Trapper. The Trapper has a critical role, erecting mobile force-field arenas to keep the Monster from running away. That’s right - if you’re on the human side, you actually want to stay up close and personal with this beast.

The gameplay is slower and more strategic than you might expect it to be. It’s not just a slugfest; a substantial chunk of life as a Hunter is spent simply trying to find the Monster. Conversely, if you’re playing the Monster, it’s often to your advantage to lie low, munching on smaller creatures until you can (ahem) evolve to subsequent stages that will strengthen you and give you more skill points to distribute into your various abilities. The Monster leaves footprints, except when it’s sneaking around; nearby birds will scatter at its presence, alerting the Hunters. There’s a lot of cat-and-mouse here; too much, maybe, for impatient gamers.

Evolve doesn’t give you all its toys right off the bat. There are three distinct characters per class (a total of 12), each with different weapon loadouts and abilities. Only four characters are open at first, requiring players to grind through matches to unlock more. Of the three currently playable Monsters, you only initially get access to the first, the Goliath. The other two – the slippery Kraken and the scary Wraith – require grinding as well. (There’s also DLC on the way this spring, including a fourth monster, the gigantic Behemoth.) There are player perks you need to unlock, too; the longer you play, the more options you’ll have to customize your characters.

All this content-gating is a bit annoying when you’ve paid full price for a game, but the progression curve isn’t too steep, and you can think of it as a sort of training mode that gives you some time to acclimate to the basics before adding more layers of choice and complexity.

This sort of thing requires a fine balancing act, and while Turtle Rock does an admirable job, it’s still a work in progress. Out of the box, the Wraith seems overpowered compared to the other monsters, its warping and ‘decoy’ abilities making it particularly tough to pin down. And all Hunter roles don’t seem equal, at least as far as fun is concerned. Support ends up feeling a bit like a fourth wheel: the core ability seems more like an ‘oh, crap’ button than something essential. Turtle Rock missed an opportunity to provide more varied, situational options for buffing your teammates.

But kudos to the developers for coming out the gate with strong and stable multiplayer matchmaking. There are already plenty of people playing, and it takes only a few minutes to get into a game. You can select, in order of preference, which role you’d like to play – a good compromise that respects your choice but doesn’t leave you waiting around all day if nobody happens to need your preferred role.

Still, this isn’t a game that lends itself well to casual, drop-in-drop-out gaming. With so few roles to play, you can’t hide away in anonymity as a Hunter – you’ll have to do your job well or you might earn the scorn of your teammates. The best experiences come from playing with people you already know, and you’ll have to put in some practice to develop your skills. I can see Evolve growing less newbie-friendly as time goes on, and even on launch day a lot of the player population (some of whom had no doubt been beta testers) already seemed jaded and judgmental.

But all in all, Evolve is a smart, engaging game. If you’re not a fan of multiplayer, it won’t be your cup of tea, but if you like to mix it up online – and especially if you’ve got a tight group of buddies to game with – you’re in for a good time. Let the wild rumpus start!

What’s hot: Tightly focused design; Triple-A production values; Solid and stable multiplayer

What’s not: Lingering balance issues; Some content siloed off at purchase; Limited single-player experience

You can email Gordon Cameron here.

[gordoncameron42]

Review: ‘Grim Fandango Remastered’ Reanimates Some Really Funny Bones

One of the best games ever made about the afterlife has finally got one of its own.

After lying dormant for 17 years, Tim Schafer’s seminal 1998 adventure game Grim Fandango has returned to the land of the living — a place where its cast of skeletal rogues and ne’er-do-wells would hardly feel at home.

The game’s status as a masterpiece has been cemented by time. It’s viewed as a pinnacle of the adventure genre, and it’s one of the reasons we rated 1998 as the greatest year in video game history. But for a long time, it’s been difficult to play the game on modern systems. That’s no way to treat a classic: It’s like if it were impossible to find a playable video recording of Rear Window or if The Great Gatsby had gone out of print.

The new Grim Fandango Remastered ($15 for PC, Mac, PS4, PS3, and PS Vita) redresses that injustice. It also presents two questions. First, how does it hold up? And second, are its extra goodies enough to justify a purchase for players who’ve already clocked plenty of hours in the Department of Death?

As it turns out, Grim Fandango is still a good — often great — video game. But the years have been kinder to its artistic components — story, art direction, writing, audio — than to its gameplay and interface.

For those who didn’t catch this classic the first time around, Grim Fandango puts you in the shoes of Manny Calavera, a down-on-his-luck Grim Reaper/travel agent tasked with ushering newly departed souls to their destiny in the afterlife. When Manny falls in love with a beautiful client, he’s drawn on an adventure that will take him from the offices of the Department of Death to the exotic port of Rubacava and beyond, encountering various lost souls and eccentric demons along the way.

The star of the show is the visual style, which mashes together all sorts of disparate elements — Día de los Muertos costumery, art deco, Aztec sculpture, film noir, movies like Casablanca and Vertigo — yet somehow keeps it coherent and unified. No game before or since has looked like Grim Fandango: It’s absolutely unique. Allowing for the technical limitations of its time, it looks good enough to be a movie. This is Pixar-quality design in a 1998 adventure game package.

The writing and voice acting are first-rate, too. Tony Plana brings a resigned grace to the voice of Manny and is ably assisted by supporting players like Alan Blumenfeld (gigantic mechanic Glottis) and Patrick Dollaghan (Manny’s annoyingly alpha co-worker Domino). The dialogue is sharp, clever, and breezy, winking at genre clichés while moving the story along briskly.

Though the graphics have been tweaked a bit (Manny looks better, the backgrounds do not), the audio gets a much more thorough treatment, as the game’s terrific score was rerecorded by a live orchestra.

Games aren’t all sound and visuals, though. Grim Fandango belongs to a tradition of adventure game design that can be traced back through Schafer’s equally loved Monkey Island games, Sierra’s seminal King’s Quest franchise, and even Infocom’s text adventures of the early 1980s (think Zork). To say that these games are hard doesn’t quite cut it. It’s more that they’re hard in arbitrary ways, requiring players to get in sync with the designer’s twisted inner sense of logic.

Solving these puzzles is, as Salvador Dalí once said of painting, either easy or impossible. Forget the slow, methodical ratcheting up that teaches players the game mechanics. Grim Fandango is tough from the outset and periodically gets insane. Many players will be forced to consult a walk-through to complete some of the game’s head scratchers, and that always leaves a bad taste.

The awkward interface doesn’t help either. In a way, this 1998 game has a more primitive interface than its 1980s forebears. Playing Zork, I could type something like “pick up the letter and put it on the table” and the game would understand that. But with Grim Fandango, you have to figure out how to boil your actions down to an extremely simple vocabulary of click options that’s mostly limited to “use,” “pick up,” and “examine.”

Because the game was made in an era before its lavish locations could be rendered in real-time 3D, all of the settings are static, viewable only from predetermined angles. This can make moving around disorienting, as the camera abruptly switches perspective (sometimes even within the same room, depending on your location). The camera choices seem to have been designed for visual impact more than for user convenience. And when you enter a new area, you’ll likely fall into the habit of hovering your pointer around the screen until it changes, indicating something you can interact with. That’s playing the interface, not playing the game.

Still, flaws aside, the puzzle solutions (when reached honestly) impart a hefty dopamine drip, and you’re tugged onward by a desire to see what new locations and characters the designers have in store. You find yourself drawn back to Grim Fandango even when you know it’ll bring frustration.

The Remastered version delivers some nice extras, too. The director’s commentary, featuring lead designer Schafer and several members of the game’s original team, is full of interesting details about what inspired particular design choices in the game. It’s also refreshingly not dumbed-down. These are professional game developers talking in their own lingo and not bothering to slow down to make sure you can keep up. For would-be game-makers and big fans of the game, it’s a must-listen. There are also about a hundred pages of original concept art to flip through, though you’ll need to complete the appropriate levels to unlock them.

Bottom line, it’s a very good thing that Grim Fandango Remastered exists, and not only for the historical interest. If you can tolerate the interface annoyances and occasionally obtuse puzzles, it’s unequivocally worth the $15 asking price, a singular experience that fans of adventure games shouldn’t miss. Here’s looking at you, Mr. Calavera.

What’s hot: Unique; impeccable design, story, and voice acting; informative developer commentary

What’s not: Clunky interface; arbitrary puzzle logic

You can email Gordon Cameron here.

[gordoncameron42]

Review: Inspiring, Complex ‘Elite: Dangerous’ Sometimes Wobbles but Often Soars

It could be argued that one of the reasons video games were invented was so that people could pretend to fly spaceships. So it’s odd, and even a little troubling, that such games seem to be few and far between these days. Frontier Developments, the makers of the just-launched, Kickstarter-funded Elite: Dangerous, hope to get us back on track.

Elite: Dangerous is a direct descendant of the groundbreaking 1984 space simulation Elite, which geriatric folks who once owned a Commodore 64, an Atari 800, or (in the UK) a BBC Micro may fondly remember. Co-created by David Braben, Elite accomplished more than primitive wireframe graphics and 8-bit processors had any right to do, rendering a vast 3D galaxy in which to trade, pirate, and bounty-hunt your way to fame and glory. Elite not only took space gaming to a whole new level — it also arguably invented the open-world genre, a feat for which we named it one of the 10 most influential games of the 1980s.

That was then; this is now. The new Elite is a strange beast. It takes full advantage of modern game technology to create an enormous, explorable universe and vistas of stunning beauty, but is often hamstrung by atavistic approaches to documentation and tutorials, as well as a palpable feeling of being unfinished.

The most important thing to understand about Elite: Dangerous is that it’s a true space-flight simulation. Its core design mandate is to create the illusion that you are the owner of a spacecraft. You’re always in its cockpit, and you have total control over what to do with it. Not much is automated.

Want to travel to a space station to trade some goods or pick up a mission? You’ll have to fly to the station, approach it, contact it, request docking, wait for confirmation, and then carefully guide your craft onto the designated landing pad (making sure to have the correct orientation as you do so, or the dock won’t “take”). Miss any of these steps, and at best you’ll be stuck in space, locked out of the station; at worst, the station will open fire on you and blow you up.

If you play much Elite: Dangerous, you won’t go through this process five or 10 times. You’ll do it hundreds of times. (Eventually, you can buy a docking computer to automate some of these steps, but it’s not all that reliable, and you still have to watch everything happen in real time.)

Fortunately, there’s more to flying your ship than just docking. The galaxy offers ample ways to find trouble, and it’s not too hard to get into a scrap with other spacecraft. Dogfighting is one of the areas where the game really shines. If you use a joystick (and I highly recommend doing so), the flight model just feels right, and there’s great pleasure in pitching and rolling your way through a battle as you struggle to keep enemies in your crosshairs.

Innumerable little details — from the time-delay as your weapons deploy, to the shaky gimbal-targeting on your cannons, to the various hydraulic sound effects and insistent warning chimes — add to the immersion. In one battle, I had to cut and run, and then limp to the nearest space station with my cockpit shattered and less than a minute of oxygen remaining. It’s gripping stuff.

The meta-game that gives you a reason for all that flying and shooting is more of a mixed bag. There’s not a lot of story here, although Frontier Developments claims that story-based missions are beginning to be implemented. Mostly, you have to come up with your own purpose, usually by following the basic idea that you need to make more money so you can buy better stuff. That openness is not necessarily a flaw — to some, it’s even the game’s crowning glory — but it means you really have to make an effort to get interested in what’s going on.

And there’s an enormous amount going on. Elite: Dangerous contains 400 billion star systems derived from accurate astronomical data, all moving and orbiting realistically. But to many gamers, this detail will be almost invisible. Traversable planet surfaces are supposedly going to be added in the future, but they’re not here yet, so I can’t review them. For now, one space system looks rather like another; you really have to make an effort to appreciate what’s been put in front of you.

Speaking of effort, Elite: Dangerous has one of the steepest learning curves I’ve encountered in a long time, and I say that as someone who spent countless hours playing the original Elite on a Commodore 64. In what may be an unfortunate trend for Kickstarter-funded games, the documentation is largely crowdsourced, consisting of innumerable fan-made YouTube tutorials and various guides and FAQs scattered around the Web. In-game tutorials are fragmentary and extremely selective in what they teach you. There’s plenty of information out there, but finding the knowledge that’s relevant to your situation is not easy. I hate to say it, but I missed the 300-page manual that would typically come with a game of this nature. It may have been a doorstop, but at least it was all right there.

The game’s also quite buggy. Server connection errors are frequent, even if you play in the “Solo” mode where you won’t encounter other players. Minor annoyances — waiting outside a space station and getting a repeated “Docking request denied” message for no reason, for instance — are myriad. On one occasion I was inexplicably unable to turn in a mission I’d spent the previous hour trying to complete. On another, I bought a hardware upgrade and mysteriously wasn’t charged for it. (OK, that one was kind of nice.) Sometimes you’ll go into hyperspace and stay there forever, with escape possible only by activating your emergency Ctrl-Alt-Delete module.

Still, there are moments of absolute inspiration to be found here. You might be quietly mining asteroids in the vicinity of a massive roiling star and suddenly have your breath taken away by the sight of the space rocks slowly rotating in the cold, eerie silence. While docking at a space station for the hundredth time, you might peer around at the majestic structure while other ships cruise by, bound for parts unknown. At its best, Elite: Dangerous evokes a stately elegance reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. If that’s your thing, and if you’ve got the patience for it, then climb on in. The vacuum’s fine.

What’s Hot: Gorgeous graphics; rock-solid combat system; sense of wonder

What’s Not: Lousy documentation; frequent bugs; punishing learning curve

You can email Gordon Cameron here.

[gordoncameron42]

WATCH: Heroes Fly, Dinosaurs Stomp in This Amazing ‘Scanimation’ Video

What you’re about to see is scan-tastic. You might even say it’s scan-dalously good. OK, we’ll stop. But seriously, this is cool.

Two years ago, Web video illusionist Brusspup created a series of animations using a technique called “Scanimation.” It’s a clever concept in which a single image contains within itself several different frames, which can be “unlocked” in sequence by passing over it a transparent overlay printed with fixed-width bars.

Not content with his first go-around, Brusspup has created a new series of animations, based on the same technique but more sophisticated than before. His new batch incorporates perspective tricks that create a powerful 3D illusion.

Keep in mind, there’s no CGI going on here. What the camera sees is what the naked eye would see as the overlay is passed over the image underneath. It’s a wonderfully low-tech effect. And if you’re feeling ambitious, you can try to make your own.

You’ll find more of Brusspup’s videos on his YouTube channel.

You can email Gordon Cameron here.

[gordoncameron42]

Review: ‘World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor’ Can’t Teach An Old Orc New Tricks

The quest for question marks continues.

If you’ve played World of Warcraft, you know what I’m talking about. As you wander through the game, you find characters with exclamation points hovering over their heads, dispensing quests that, when completed, turn the exclamation points into question marks. The yellow “?” is one of the stars WoW players steer by, promising a brief dopamine rush as each quest is turned in for some quantity of gold and experience points and, if you’re lucky, a Cool Item to equip.

Alongside the Quest for Question Marks is the Battle of the Hotbar. That’s the one where, in the midst of fierce combat, you stare at the bottom eighth of your screen, a bar crammed with buttons representing your character’s skills, attacks, and spells. Occasionally you’ll look at the meticulously animated monster you’re fighting, but that’s only when your abilities are on cooldown (i.e., unavailable).

I should interject here that I adore World of Warcraft. It’s one of my three favorite games of all time, and for me “all time” stretches back to about 1977. So, as a feral druid named Powhatan, I willingly Shredded and Ripped and Ferociously Bit my way through all the quests and enemies in the newly released Warlords of Draenor expansion. But it all felt a bit dated — clunky, even. At its core this is a game from 2004, reflecting the state of the massively multipayer genre at that time. Despite the fresh coat of paint, it’s still that game.

As with every expansion, there’s a sizeable chunk of WoW players for whom the purchase of Warlords of Draenor is a foregone conclusion: They’ll buy it, play the heck out of it, and complain about the things they dislike. But if you’ve been out of Azeroth for a while, is there enough here to bring you back?

Kinda.

If you enjoy the core gameplay of WoW and its expansions, you’ll get plenty of it here: 10 new levels (to a cap of 100), seven new zones (not counting the as-yet-unlocked Tanaan Jungle), hundreds of quests, and eight new dungeons. If you’re expecting something fresh, though, you may be disappointed. You’ve been here, and you’ve done this.

The storyline propels your character into an alternate version of Draenor, the Orc homeworld. WoW players last saw Draenor — or what was left of it — in the 2006 expansion The Burning Crusade, where it was blasted into fragments and renamed Outland. In the new parallel timeline, though, the old Draenor is still intact, and populated with legendary Warcraft heroes such as Gul’dan, Durotan, and Archmage Khadgar. You’ll fight alongside (or against) them as you unfold a complicated storyline involving the Iron Horde, a united orc army that threatens to sweep over Draenor and beyond.

To be honest, it’s hard to get too excited by the plot. For all of Blizzard’s deservedly great reputation for making quality cinematics, they’re not the best storytellers around. The narratives in WoW have always worked best when viewed peripherally, as a colorful backdrop to all that button-mashing and quest-gobbling.

And the visuals here, as always, are excellent, from the newly updated models to the gorgeous backdrops featuring enormous mushrooms, windswept tundras, and fecund jungles. This is a Technicolor fantasy world drawn with dreamlike vividness. Subtlety isn’t in the playbook. Thumbs up, also, to the score by Russell Brower, which at times catches you off-guard with moments of beauty that make you want to stop playing and just listen.

Many of the previous expansions’ refinements are still here, for better and for worse. The streamlined talent system from 2012’s Mists of Pandaria is present, and it feels too cookie-cutter in the character customization it offers. The dungeon-finder tool lets you find a party in a matter of minutes, but your new buddies will rush through content like they’ve double-parked their kodos outside. You might as well be playing with bots.

The big new gameplay gambit is your character’s ability to build a stronghold on Draenor. Through rudimentary “command table” and “drafting board” interfaces that self-consciously echo the Warcraft series of real-time strategy games, you’ll be able to place buildings in your base, upgrade them, and send recruited heroes on various quests to acquire resources and gold. (These missions, mind you, take place offscreen — you wait around for hours and then are told of the result.)

It’s one of the bigger changes we’ve yet seen to core gameplay, and there’s a strong novelty factor. Waiting for missions to complete adds yet another hook to get you logging back in, but the whole time-elapse mechanism is eerily reminiscent of penny-pinching free-to-play titles, and you wonder whether Blizzard is planning to introduce some “reasonably priced” speed boosts down the line.

A problem with the Garrison system is that you don’t have enough control over what goes on in your base. The buildup process is painfully slow at first. The follower missions aren’t playable, and there’s a very limited number of spaces in which to place your garrison’s buildings. And the game isn’t great at teaching you how it all works — where to get plans for new buildings, how one type of plan differs from another, and what the benefits of each building are. The confusion engenders hesitancy, and it’s deflating that when your character is nearing Level 100, her stronghold is still a pretty rudimentary affair.

Perhaps in the endgame, a fully unlocked garrison allows a genuinely deep and rewarding experience. But it’s hard to get too excited about something that barely shows its potential in the first 25 hours of gameplay.

Quest design is a mixed bag. A few are inspired, such as one involving the Raven hero Terokk, in which you explore ancient myths by reliving them through Terokk’s eyes. There are also some nice setpiece battles that flow seamlessly into cutscenes to advance the main storyline. But most zones dole out the usual mix of quests: Go find X of some object and click on them while also killing Y creatures that happen to be wandering in that area. Granted, it would take almost superhuman skill to come up with hundreds of equally fresh, entertaining quests.

Draenor also includes a dedicated new player-vs.-player zone called Ashran, which features a never-ending battle between Horde and Alliance. So far it’s a disappointment: Population imbalances on many realms make it practically unplayable for one side or another, and cross-realm instancing, which might fix this, has yet to be implemented. In time, it might work well enough, but for now it feels a little broken.

The deeper issue with Warlords of Draenor is that this is a 10-year-old game with 10-year-old gameplay, albeit dressed up with better graphics and a smoother interface. It’s just not as engaging as it used to be. For those with a deep investment in the game — particularly a social one — most of Draenor’s level 90-100 content is just a brief rite of passage before the months-long endgame of PvP and/or raiding. For the rest of us, it’s a bittersweet experience, evoking old pleasures, delivering the reliable Blizzard polish that’s easy to take for granted, yet reminding us that maybe there’s a reason we’ve moved on.

What’s Hot: Dependable Blizzard polish; oodles of new quests and locations; novelty factor of Garrison gameplay

What’s Not: Blah quest design; Garrison gameplay too restrictive; feels as old as it is

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