I held on to this game a lot longer than most of the prior GameFly discs. I’ve had a massive backlog of games to play over the last couple of months. Plus this game has some “issues” that made me not want to power through it. I’m kinda glad that I did. Despite the bad parts of the game, the overall experience was worthwhile.

So here are the two main things that I did NOT like about the game:

1. The Story: Probably the primary reason I was so interested in playing this game was for the (supposedly) “adult” story. It does have some very mature themes, dealing with adultery, love, relationships and even a transgender background character. Sadly, at the start of the game, the main characters are presented as trite, one-dimensional, abusive, and unlikable. As the early game progresses, the characters develop into pointless cardboard cutouts that seem to serve no purpose other than to advance a high-school level “morality play”. (In actuality, “high school level” may be a bit disingenuous. It’s not to the level of “Did you SEE what she wore to the Prom? O-M-G I would have killed myself…” but it really isn’t too far from that.) Suffice it to say that I was extremely disappointed with the story.
   
   There are actually a lot of little side story characters that TRY to be interesting, but these poor sots are presents as so one-dimensional that they are forgettable fluff. In fact, the side-story character that was most interesting to me was Daniel’s wife, Anna, and she is only a side-story to one of the side-stories.


2. The Difficulty Level: Okay, I’m not a “pro” level gamer. I’m not handy with a controller. But I do know how game difficulty is supposed to go. Even in a very difficult game, there is an introduction level (or two) that teaches you basic gameplay, and then as the game progresses, new gameplay elements are introduced and the difficulty ramps up. The problem with this game is that the difficult does not ramp up evenly.
   
   The game has major levels called “nights”. Each night has one to four timed puzzle sections, followed by a “boss battle”. As new gameplay elements are introduced, the puzzle sections simply do not get any harder. Ever. Even though they are timed, I never once felt any time pressure to solve the puzzle elements of the game. In fact, It was not uncommon for me to be topping out each of the puzzle sections with half of the allotted time left over. Even in the later stages of the game, the puzzle difficulty simply wasn’t.
   
   The boss battles, on the other hand, start out at “very difficult” and by the time the player is on the fourth night, the difficulty is approaching “impossible”. (I should note that I played through the entire game on “Normal” difficulty.) And then, amazingly, the difficulty actually goes DOWN. Yes, once you pass the fourth night, the game gets easier to beat. I was barely getting past the first few bosses, but the later ones presented very little challenge.
   
   To really make things even more mucked up, the player can only change difficulty between nights, not between individual stages. When one starts a new night’s puzzle stages and finds them easy to finish, and then the boss fight at the end is maddeningly difficult, the only way to turn the difficulty down is to go back and replay all of the already-too-easy puzzle stages. Oh, and you need an old save file to restore from, because you can’t change the difficulty from a save in the middle of a night.

It’s so easy to focus on the bad middle parts of this game because they really stand out. Mostly because the end-game is actually very good. And not in a “game-ey” way. If this was a film, it would have fallen squarely into the “Oscar Movie” category. When the game reached its two final chapters, the simplistic and trite characters finally really got interesting and developed. And since the final chapters are long ones – between them they total seven stages long with three boss battles – there is actually enough time to add some depth to them. The story moves from being a teenage-level relationship story to a study of personal growth and mature awareness. It’s almost as if the final (good) bits of the story were written first, and then handed off to a low level intern to “fill in the opening bits” that ended up being the bulk of the game. It’s really a shame. I suspect by the time most people reach the end of the game they will have stopped reading the game text and watching the cutscenes, so they will miss out on some really good fiction.

There were a few little aspects of the game that were pretty neat and added a lot to the experience. One of these was little “bar trivia”. See, in the game, the main character spends a lot of time at a bar (I can relate to that at least!) and after he has had a certain number of drinks, the game presents you with some interesting little factoid about the type of alcohol he has been drinking. Another was the morality questions between each section. Even though some of these questions were quite laughable (Housekeeping? Really??) the game totals up the answers in an online database and then reports back how everyone else answered the same questions. it was fun and interesting to see how other players responded to some of the questions. More than once I was shocked or surprised by the outcomes.

Another really cute aspect of the game is a little mini-game within the game. It’s basically the same as the puzzle levels of the game, but with a small twist. Rather than being timed, the player is only allowed to make a set number of moves. The mini-game is quite fun and it’s really too bad that this puzzle element was not incorporated into the main game on one or two sections. Oddly enough, the difficulty of the mini-game is better tuned than the main game itself.

The game purports to have eight different endings that vary depending on the answers you give during the game. (I only played it through once.) By the time I got to the end of the game I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted things to go. Amazingly, even though the game did not end the way I expected (or the way I wanted, for that matter!) I was very satisfied with the ending that I did get. It actually seemed to make sense and fit into the final characterizations (or at least how I imagined them to be) extremely well.

Overall, I’m glad I played it, but I wouldn’t recommend it to others.

As a gaming enthusiast, I have several gaming news aggregators on my RSS reader. I will typically scan through the headlines at least once a day and read articles that seem interesting to me. Now, I’ll admit that articles that mention new beta-test cycles will almost always catch my eye, but the truth of it is that I’ve grown tired of the current crop of “beta” tests that are little more than hype-generating marketing ploys. And it’s not like I don’t have enough games in my current rotation to keep me busy for the rest of the year!

But for some reason, an article about Hedone caught my eye. It came with a link to a “free beta access code” (as if the marketing department really had any intention of selling access to beta!) to a one-day, six-hour testing session. Karen was having some friends over for her Book Club at the same time as the event, so it seemed to make sense to try it out. I took the bait, grabbed a code, signed up for beta, and downloaded the client.

In a nutshell, Hedone is a FPS. It uses the unreal engine, and the graphics use a gritty, ultra-realistic style.

The game fiction/backstory is actually pretty good. Supposedly, in the not-too-distant future, some yokel figures out how to clone people and “copy” their memories into the new clone, granting a kind of immortality. The catch is that the copy has to be made within a few minutes of death. Completely ignoring the socio-political implications, and staying on the simplistic game writing track, this gives rise to a Blood Sport where contestants are killed, cloned, and killed again for entertainment value. The player takes on the role of one of these clones. It's not a BAD story, but, like too many other FPSes, the backstory and the gameplay are almost completely divorced from one another. Once you’re in the game, you might as well be playing Call of War’s Battlefield Fortress or any other FPS. The other big problem became apparent right away, but I didn’t figure out what it actually was until I played for a few hours.

See, the game is billed as a FPS-MMO. This means character advancement. In the game, your character doesn't really gain stats, but as you gain “fans” (XP) you unlock more powerful weapons and skills. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a “pro” FPS player. I can hold my own on most public servers, but real FPS players will wipe the floor with me. In my first dozen or so games I was running a K/D ratio of about 1:4. I chocked it up to inexperience with the game and trundled on. Eventually I unlocked the first weapon upgrade, a new machinegun. Suddenly, my K/D jumped up to 1:1.5! I was killing people in ¼ second if I got the drop on them. I was shocked how much more efficient the first upgrade was in terms of firepower. No more “spray and pray”. With the new gun it was more like pulling off short controlled bursts of fire. And this was the first upgrade.

As the night wore on, the total population of the game fell down to about ten players. It was me, one other newbie and several people who were level 30+. They had access to weapons and skills that I could only dream about. My K/D fell back down to the 1:3 range. I could still get kills, but it started being more about LUCK than about skill. Simply put, the power differential between the haves and the have-nots was too great.

I didn't look into the monetization strategy, but the game is pretty clearly set up for micro-transactions. I would suspect that they are going to allow players to buy in-game currency with real cash. (You can also gain this in-game currency, albeit very slowly, as you play.) This would solve the problem of high-level players dominating, but opens the door to the typical pay-to-win issue that plagues many F2P games.

The game is clearly still under development. There were only two game modes available: Team Deathmatch and Domination. The latter was a standard Control Point variant, one team attacking and one team defending for a specified time, with only two points that would periodically reset, and then the roles reverse for an identical time. There were only four maps, and these did double-duty for both modes of play. The maps seemed to be designed for different numbers of players. For example, the trailer park map was very small and cramped, and in a game with 16 people, there would be four or five firefights going on within my field of view. Whereas the warehouse map was huge and confusing and in a 6-player game, I spent more time looking for opponents than actually fighting. The lack of diversity in maps made the game feel very “samey” after only a handful of plays.

So, would I buy it? No, not really. Usually when I play a new game for the first time, I have this desire to learn more about it, at least for a few days. This one just didn't grab me. It doesn’t really have any stand-out feature that makes it more appealing than any of the other FPS games on the market (or even some that I already own).

If it were released as free-to-play, would I drop a few buck on upgrades to play on release? Again, the answer is no. Half the enjoyment of an MMO is watching your character advance in power. The game just isn’t interesting enough to me to want to pay my way to the top of the heap.

Overall, it was a fun little diversion, but I don’t think I’ll be going back. Unless the developers come up with a new hook, I doubt I’ll even be checking back for more beta events.

Since I live in a multi-system household, GameFly is working out great for me. The latest game I’ve finished is Ghost Trick: Phanotm Detective. This wasn’t one my top picks, but apparently I have a bunch of really popular games on my Queue, so I got this one, which was eighth or ninth on my list. That’s okay though, because I wouldn’t have put it on my list at all if I weren’t interested in playing it.

I first discovered this game nearly a year ago. See, as a gamer I follow a lot of gaming blogs and gaming news aggregators. Last year, the publishers of this game put out a flash-based demo that is the first chapter of the game. (The demo is available for play here.) I played the demo and thought it was a clever puzzle-game concept. And it really is. The mechanic is very easy to figure out and well implemented.

As my friends know, I’m not much of a “story” guy, but the story in this game is presented in bite-sized chunks. I’m easily annoyed by games that force you to click through 25 minutes of exposition in order to get to an action/puzzle/challenge level that takes 45 seconds to complete. In my opinion, if I’m spending more time reading about the game than I am actually playing the game, then, quite frankly, I’d rather just go read a book. It’s a very rare game that has a compelling story that even comes close to even a poorly written book. So I was very happy to find that even the longest clicky-story parts of this game were only a few minutes long. About half of the story is actually told as part of the puzzles. And, to be honest, the pace of the story really does a pretty good job of keeping the player interested. The basic “murder mystery” is introduced in the first chapter, using gameplay elements. After that, it’s pretty much got your attention for the duration.

The downside of this is that there really is only one story. The replay value of this game is virtually nil. There aren’t branching paths, and the choices you make don’t affect the storyline at all. Either you solve the mystery, or you don’t continue the game. Sadly, this lack of replay value is also true in the puzzles. While many of them were challenging and some were real head scratchers, once you know the solution, you know the solution. There is only one way to get past each puzzle. Even later in the game where you have three different ghost abilities, and have to use different abilities at different times or places, there is still only one way to get past each puzzle.

Despite the linearity of the story and puzzle elements, some of the puzzles are extremely difficult. Some of them are timed – the game has a clever “four minute” mechanic – and some rely on you moving to a location or interacting with an object that is only available for a split-second. For example, one puzzle required me to wave a flag to stop a pitcher of water from falling. If I waved the flag a second too soon or a second too late, I would miss the pitcher and it would spill. This made some puzzles very difficult to figure out since the window of opportunity was sometimes very small. In other cases, the complexity of the puzzle required multiple retries. In one particular puzzle, I knew what I wanted to do, but getting my pieces in the right position to affect the game object in the way I wanted took nearly a dozen attempts.

Luckily, the game offers infinite retries. In most cases this was a boon, keeping the game moving even when I failed. For long, complex puzzles, the game has a kind of “mini-save” checkpoint at various points in the puzzle and if you are forced to restart (due to missing one of the aforementioned short windows-of-opportunity, or simply failing the puzzle) you don’t have to redo much of the puzzle. In one case, the dialog during the puzzle was long and annoying and I had to wade through it a handful of times. This only happened once in the entire game.

The game only autosaves at the conclusion of each chapter, but it does allow manual saving at any point. I played it through without ever powering down (over the course of 12 days). I would estimate that the average player will get about 20 hours of play. A skilled puzzle-player (which I am not!) will probably finish it in half that time.

The denoument of the story is quite satisfying, even if it is somewhat predictable and a bit drawn out. The final chapter got a bit long on exposition, as if the writers were getting frustrated by not being able to put in tons of text within the game and finally convinced the producers to allow them some free reign. Of course, by the time the player reaches the final chapter they are most likely willing to sit through a few dozen screens of text to complete the story arc.

Graphically… well, it’s a DS game. If you’re looking for high-definition 1080p graphics on the DS, you’re insane. Generally the graphics made sense and never once did I say “That’s a WHAT?” due to pixelization or low-resolution. I suppose in the grand scheme of things, that equates to very good DS graphics.

Overall it was a fun, fast little romp. I gave it an 8 out of 10.

We discovered Thunderstone at PAX Prime this year. Having played Dominion and Ascension before, the concept of a deck-building game was not new to us.

In case the reader is not up-to-speed on this concept: Basically it is a card game similar to Magic: the gathering, but with three important differences

1. You don’t buy expansion packs. All of the cards come in the box.
2. You build your deck as the game progresses.
3. You don’t battle each other directly.

All players start out with a very small, identical deck of weak cards. You shuffle these and draw a hand of random cards from this starting deck. Everyone has the same cards on the first two turns, but because they are randomly selected, there are going to be slight variations. You use the cards in your hand to “buy” additional cards from the table, which go into your deck and will show up in subsequent hands.

We tried out the base game at PAX and really loved it. It was much more immersive than Dominion; it felt like you were actually doing something. Rather than just buying victory points, you were building an army of heroes to go into a dungeon and kill monsters (which are worth victory points). And it felt “cleaner” than Ascension; you only had to deal with your own hand and not with lingering effects from other players.

We played several rounds at PAX and purchased the second “base” set Thunderstone: Dragonspire there. It’s technically an “expansion” for the game but it includes all of the base cards as well, so it is a stand-alone game in its own right. When I unboxed this game (a while back I was quite confused by some of the stuff that was included. Since this was basically the “not really, but sorta second edition”, the publisher included a LOT of cards that were corrections for the prior games and not intended to be used in this stand-alone game. This confused me at first, but after going through each and every card, I sorted it out and set aside the unused cards.

Anyway, this weekend we played our first game of Dragonspire. When we bought this game one of the things we asked for was that there be more “chain” cards. One of the things that made Dominion fun was the ability to play a card that gave you additional actions, or draw and play more cards per turn. Well, Dragonspire has that for sure! A normal turn in Thunderstone is six cards. During one turn in Dragonspire, Kyle has nearly TWENTY cards on the table (nearly his whole deck!)

Unfortunately, three Bad Things™ happened during this session that really detracted from the game:

1. A really bad random draw. One of the really cool things about Thunderstone (and especially Dragonspire) is that most of the cards have some really cool synergies. For example a Fighter hero that wields an edged weapon or a Wizard hero using multiple spells will get bonus attack power; or a weapon that “saves” a hero will allow you to use a different item that gives a combat bonus and would normally kill one of your heroes without the drawback; or a hero type that gets a bonus from other non-hero cards in your hand. These kinds of synergies make every game of Thunderstone really a unique experience. The problem is that when you randomly draw decks, sometime you end up with cards that DON’T synergize well or at all. For example, you might randomly draw four Wizard hero types, and only have edged weapons available to buy. This really slows the game down because players are not able to quickly grow powerful heroes and/or abilities and as a result can only kill the weakest monsters. This is exactly what happened, so our game lasted nearly four hours, the last two hours of which were painfully boring.
   (It’s worth noting that I’ve since discovered an online “intelligent” randomizer tool that specifically will not allow those sorts of combinations from occurring. We will be using this next time!)
2. Low value cards. Normally, the decks available to buy are mixed in price form dirt cheap to hideously expensive. Sometimes there will be a cheap card that lets you either take a gamble and possibly get a higher priced card, or a trade-in card that lets you make more money when it comes back. For this game, we were all gold-poor so instead of buying heroes in the first couple of hands, the hero decks were mostly full all the way to the end of the game. In fact, of the four hero types on the table one of them still had level 1 guys showing, and none of them had advanced to level 3! Mostly because no one could afford to buy them.
3. A really bad shuffle. This was seen in both the drafting phase (we got the first three monster groups alphabetically) and in the dungeon decks. The monsters came out of the deck, practically in order! First we fought a wave of Fire Elementals, then we got Humanoid Bandits followed by a few Dark Enchanted. This added to the slowness of the game because the Bandits required that you have three, four or five heroes in your hand. And (as I mentioned) we were gold and hero-poor. It was a minor miracle when someone had three heroes in a hand. Pretty much those cards were cleared just by attacking them and losing, just to push them back into the dungeon.

Despite these drawbacks, the game was still interesting to play. I really enjoyed the theme or the dungeon crawl. I lucked out on one of the first hands and was the first player to buy a hero and a giant sword; rather than building a “fun” deck with chained cards and weird effects, I was focusing on a utilitarian “get to the end” deck and trying to synergize my hands as much as possible. I took an early lead, but stalled out in mid-game with several bad hands in a row. And by then the dungeon was locked in Bandit Mode and I had concentrated on building two strong heroes instead of the required three/four/five heroes needed to defeat those buggers. And when our dungeon’s only “trick”, a Guardian, popped up, we were all so battle weary that no one even wanted to deal with it, so rather than deal with it, we just pushed it to the bottom of the deck right away.

We played Thunderstone at PAX with three people and a second time with four people. This session was with five players. As you add more people around the table the pace of the game slows since you’re more-or-less doing nothing but spectating during other people’s turns. I felt like the ideal number of players is three, but four is manageable. I’ll probably try to limit it to three or four next time we play.

Overall, I would say that we’ve played worse games. It certainly wasn’t a session that is going to have the players clamoring for more. The player who ended up winning (Wyatt), won by a landslide victory. He ended the game with over double the next highest score. And one of the players only managed to kill three monsters. I think with a better draw and more randomization the game would have been much more fun. I’m actually looking forward to giving it another try. At our next party.

The second game I've gotten from my new GameFly account has been Heavy Rain. I actually have had this one for about a month, but I loaned it out to my good friend Colby at my office for a few weeks before digging in to it. I finally finished it today.

I'm not big on the writing in most video games. I have a long running "discussion" about the storylines in single-player games with another friend. He feels that video game stories are engrossing and force the player to make difficult decisions. I thinks that's a load of crap. I've NEVER felt like any decision in a video game was going to have any real effect, even in the game. After all, if I make the wrong choice, its just a reload away to back up and try again.

The counter argument to that is that in a "good" story, the fallout from the choices you make early in the game wont be known until much later, when it's far too late to go back and change them. Fine, but you know what? It doesn't matter. Even if a bad decision in chapter one would put my character in an unwinnable situation, the game HAS to let me keep going. I know that it is just a game and even though I'm "driving" the characters, the game HAS to let me get to the end. So armed with that knowledge, I stop caring about the "hard decisions" and "moral dilemmas" that an RPG will present.

Heavy Rain is not that kind of game.

First of all, the genre isn't high fantasy, post apocalyptic sci fi, or even adrenaline filled action. It the story of a father who has had his son kidnapped by a psychopath and what he is willing to go through to get his son back. (Hint: it's some twisted fucked up shit.) The characters are well developed and believable, which really allows the player to care about them. The storyline has a few predictable elements, but as a Murder Mystery, it feeds you enough condemning evidence that you start to question your predictions (which are probably right). The decisions you make in game are true moral dilemmas that have real lasting effects. It is entirely possible for you to make a choice that will literally result in one of the four main characters getting killed. Forever. Like when you are being chased by the police, do you allow them to capture you or do you jump off a three story building to escape? You know you're innocent, and the jump might kill you; but the police think you're guilty and might shoot you unless you get away.

The catch of course, is that if you choose the wrong path, the game actually kills that character off. Often brutally and graphically. The story keeps going, but if the character is integral to the story-line, you simply lose the game. Period.

One of the first things I noticed about Heavy Rain was that, unlike typical RPGs where you can exhaust dialog trees and learn everything about the game, most of the time you are put into a branching situation, whether it be dialog or action, you only have a limited number of "turns" before the game moves you on. So, for example, say you're asking someone about something in their past. You have four basic things you can ask about and each of those items may have two or three followup questions. But after you ask three questions, the other character gets a phone call, makes an excuse and leaves. Even if you didn't ask everything. In this way you really DO need to think like you're trying to solve a mystery.

Playing with the Move was very natural. The actions on-screen and the actions with the controller were very similar. Enough so that it really felt like I was controlling the characters. For example, to knock on a door, one would hold the Move upright, lift it about 6-inches and then thrust it forward, approximating the same hand-motion that you would make knocking on a door in real life. Fight scenes would flash motion cues on the screen for about 1/2 second. For example, if the character needed to doge right, it would show a right facing arrow. If you completed the cued action fast enough, the character would react properly and dodge the punch/bullet/knife/whatever. If you "missed", either by moving the wrong way, hitting the wrong button or not reacting fast enough, the character would react incorrectly and get hit. Sometimes fatally.

The same also applies to dialog timing. If you spend too long trying to decide what to say or ask, the game just moves you along as if you said *nothing* and you miss out on any information in that dialog tree! This makes the mystery even more compelling. It feels a lot more like real life, where there are things going on that may not be related to the core story.

The story is EXTREMELY compelling, easily on par with a dramatic movie or a complex book. Even if this had been a non-interactive experience, it still would have been a good story. One of the bonus features that is unlocked during play is a 4-minute tech demo. Even that little vignette was worth watching and it was literally just a short film. A story of love, betrayal, despair and ultimately revenge... in less than 5 minutes. Let's just say the writing is well done and leave it at that.

During my play session, I "lost" two of the main characters at various points in the game. I reloaded those segments and worked like hell to keep the characters alive to the end of the game. By the time it wound to it's conclusion, I had (as they say) "investment" in these people. I played through the final action sequence at least ten times in order to get through it with everyone intact. I tried. I really tried. I was not able to achieve that goal. So close...

If you have a PS3, and haven't played this game, you need to get it. Now. If you don't have a PS3, it's worth borrowing one from a friend to play this game. I play a lot of games in my life, and Heavy Rain is one of the top ten games I've ever played.