In-game hack you can do to enable third-person camera!
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Tag: video games
“MarI/O” – how an evolutionary neural network learned to play Mario
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Minutes away from completing my first hitchhiker mission, playing for the first time since 1.x, this happened. Nooooo!
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Review of Just Cause 2
This review originally appeared on Steam. See more reviews by Dan.
You know the way that everybody plays Grand Theft Auto (at least, 1 through 3) or Saints Row at least once? That is: they ignore the plot and just zip around blowing stuff up? Well: Just Cause 2 is a game that you’re supposed to play like that. Sure, there’s a plot (and it’s as stupid as it is zany, all the way from pulling statues over with tractors through to the climactic fistfight on the back of a cruise missile), but who cares: you’ll spend your time using a hookshot to pull soldiers out of aircraft, steal the aircraft, fly the aircraft into a radio tour while you jump away with your parachute, all the while shooting, hacking, and slashing anybody that gets in your way.
It’s completely silly, the voice acting is almost as appalling as the scriptwriting, and the plot makes no sense. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t one of the most-awesome games ever. Play an hour or play 5 minutes: this game’s great for “dropping into” when you need a few minutes of quick destruction as much as it’s great when you want to execute a thought-out mission. And nowadays, it’s cheap, too – no excuse not to give it a go.
Review of Xenonauts
This review originally appeared on Steam. See more reviews by Dan.
The original X-COM series (Enemy Unknown, Terror from the Deep, and even Apocalypse) were among the most-immersive, deeply-strategic, and thematically-beautiful games of the 1990s. 2012’s reboot was fun, but it failed to capture the sophistication and complexity of the original: it lacked the ability to perform micro-customisation upon your soldiers (Want a strong guy whose job is just to carry ammo for everybody else? That’s fine!), bases (“Science” base at a secret location, surrounded by interceptor bases? No problem!), or mission strategy (Plan to fight a retreat back to the dropship, dragging the bodies of the stunned aliens with you for later research, losing the battle but advancing the war? Go on then!). And it suffered, for it.
Xenonauts, however, takes the genre back where it belongs: gritty, strategic, and with every game completely unique. More-impressively, it does so in a world that’s subtly-different from that of the original series: starting deep in the Cold War, and with aliens whose motivation and strategy is innovative and new, even to fans of the original series.
It’s not perfect: you’ll read science reports that make reference to weapons you haven’t yet invented, because you’re doing things in the “wrong” order… but at least the game lets you do things in the order that makes most-sense to you! I’d have enjoyed being able to use alien psionics against them, as you can in the original series (and even in the reboot), but (unless I simply missed out on the appropriate research opportunities), that’s sadly absent. And there are a few bugs, although I didn’t come across any game-breaking ones.
But what Xenonauts is is one of the best strategy games I’ve seen in recent years. Whether you loved the original X-COM series, or the reboot, or didn’t play either… it’s got something for you to enjoy. Go play it, Commander.
Hey, mods: how about a Lanius flair?
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Review of Gunpoint
This review originally appeared on Steam. See more reviews by Dan.
So much fun. A quick, silly, stealth-and-hacking romp through a ludicrous world of jumping, falling, leaping, climbing.
Review of BioShock Infinite
This review originally appeared on Steam. See more reviews by Dan.
Fun, beautiful first-person-shooter. I disliked Bioshock and I hated Bioshock 2, so I was glad to discover that Bioshock Infinite is not terribly like either of them, but is something else – something more fun – entirely. Playtime was a little shorter than I’d have expected for a game of its price, but it was still worth having.
If you haven’t played it, you should. Or failing that; wait for it to be on sale.
Review of Little Inferno
This review originally appeared on Steam. See more reviews by Dan.
This game was so much better than I anticipated. I was given it as a gift by my sister, who raved about it. “It’s okay,” I thought, as I stuffed things into a fire and watched them burn, “But is this all there is to it?”
No: there’s so much more. This is a game about materialism; about finding the courage to step outside your comfort zone… and, yes, about serial arson.
Go play.
I’m sure it doesn’t mean much to you, but finally making my first Mün landing means the world(s) to me.
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Review of Dear Esther
This review originally appeared on Steam. See more reviews by Dan.
Not so much a game as a semi-interactive ghost story in a beautiful, Source-powered landscape, Dear Esther is worth playing… so long as it’s on sale. The gameplay’s not long enough to justify a £6.99 price tag, and there’s almost no challenge at all in the gradual exploration of a Hebredian island and of the mind of the story’s narrator… but it’s still a great story.
Play it slowly. Take your time. Turn the lights off and have a glass of wine with this game. Make sure that you keep your eye on the screen, because there are incredibly subtle and short-lived elements that appear for moments, and then are gone.
But do play it. At least: if you can get it on sale.
My first thoughts on Outside.
This self-post was originally posted to /r/outside. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
I’ve been playing for a little while now, and here’s my thoughts so far:
- I love the open world aspects of the game; I’ve never played anything where there’s been quite so much freedom (especially when you’re just starting out). It’s taken a while to get used to the areas which are only accessible at certain times of day, though, like some of the shops. Also: the quest-givers who seem to give me the most money seem to want me to complete missions during the same hours that the shops are open, so I have to choose one or the other – what’s with that?
- Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck, but I’ve discovered that if you try enough things, eventually something will work. If you go around picking everything up, it’ll probably be useful at some point (but be careful because the NPC guards will stop you “stealing” things!), and you can sometimes get great results by using combinations of things (for example, I tried imbibing a potion of drunkenness and then wearing a traffic cone the other day, and I’m pretty sure it gave me an invisibility buff: no matter how much I sang, everybody ignored me!). Inventory management is a bit of a pain, but picking up a rucksack has really helped.
- Not so impressed with the NPCs. I’ve learned that the best approach to getting information and quests is to talk to everybody, but most of the people I talk to don’t want to say anything, or just repeat the same few phrases over and over (“Go away,” “Stop bothering me,” etc.). I’ve tried offering things for trade, but most of them aren’t interested in my traffic cone or my crayons or my rucksack: I’m honestly not sure what most of them are for!
- Anyway: I know that some of you must have been down this quest track, too – I’ve seen you wandering around wearing your traffic cones and carrying your rucksacks. So I’ll jump ahead a bit and save from spoiling it… Here’s where I’m stuck: I’m in the padded room in the hospital, and I can’t get past the boss of the doctors. I tried eating the crayons, to see if they’d give me strength (one of the NPCs here suggested it), but it doesn’t work. The doctors are a seriously creepy monster, by the way – they keep talking about you having “delusions” or something – but I’m sure there’s a way to get back to the main quest track. Any tips?
Review of FTL: Faster Than Light
This review originally appeared on Steam. See more reviews by Dan.
This game is just pure fun. It’s not easy, and there’s a lot of learning to be done, but it sort-of reminds me of playing NetHack for the first time, if NetHack were set in the Battlestar Galactica universe (or perhaps Firefly) rather than in the Dungeons of Doom. Seriously lots of fun, and great to “come back to”. You’ll never forget your first win.
I’ll never be good enough.
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I’ve got chests full of diamonds and a huge fortress of solitude in my singleplayer world. I’ve found the End Portal and I’ve got enough eyes to activate it. But why bother? Alone, I don’t stand a chance against the Ender Dragon anyway: I’m just not that good a player. And it doesn’t matter how much time I spend enachanting all of my stuff, it’s never going to be good enough.
So there’s no point. I’m sat here, alone, and I’m not achieving anything anymore. Sometimes I just want to delete the world and get it all over with. It’s not like anybody will miss me.
Fetch Quest
Commissioned, a webcomic I’ve been reading for many years now, recently made a couple of observations on the nature of “fetch quests” in contemporary computer role-playing games. And naturally – because my brain works that way – I ended up taking this thought way beyond its natural conclusion.
Today’s children are presumably being saturated with “fetch quests” in RPGs all across the spectrum from fantasy Skyrim-a-likes over to modern-day Grand Theft Auto clones and science fiction Mass Effect-style video games. And the little devil on my left shoulder asks me how this can be manipulated for fun and profit.
The traditional “fetch quest” goes as follows: I’ll give you what you need (the sword that can kill the monster, the job that you need to impress your gang, the name of the star that the invasion fleet are orbiting, or whatever), in exchange for you doing a delivery for me. Either I want you to take something somewhere, or I want you to pick something up, or – in the most overused and thankfully falling out of fashion example – I want you to bring me X number of Y object… 9 shards of triforce, 5 orc skulls, $10,000, or whatever. Needless to say, about 50% of the time there’ll be some kind of challenge along the way (you need to steal the item from a locked safe, you’ll be offered a bribe to “lose” the item, or perhaps you’ll just be mobbed by ninja robots as you ride along on your hypercycle), which is probably for the best because it’s the only thing that adds fun to role-playing a postman. I wonder if being attacked by mage princes is something that real-life couriers dream about?
This really doesn’t tally with normality. When you want something in the real world, you pay for it, or you don’t get it. But somehow in computer RPGs – even ones which allegedly try to model the real world – you’ll find yourself acting as an over-armed deliveryman every ten to fifteen minutes. And who wants to be a Level 38 Dark Elf Florist and Dog Walker?
So perhaps… just perhaps… this will begin to shape the future of our reality. If the children of today start to see the “fetch quest” as a perfectly normal way to introduce yourself to somebody, then maybe someday it will be socially acceptable.
I’m going to try it. The next time that somebody significantly younger than me looks impatient in the queue for the self-service checkouts at Tesco, I’m going to offer to let them go in front of me… but only if they can bring me a tin of sweetcorn! “I can’t go myself, you see,” I’ll say, “Because I need to hold my place in the queue!” A tin of sweetcorn may not be as impressive-sounding as, say, the Staff of Fire Elemental Control, but it gets the job done. And it’s one of your five-a-day, too.
Or when somebody asks me for help fixing their broken website, I’ll say “Okay, I’ll help; but you have to do something for me. Bring me the bodies of five doughnuts, to prove yourself worthy of my assistance.”
It’s going to be a big thing, I promise.