The thing about Trials Evolution is that you can cheese your way through certain levels by stumbling past a checkpoint here and there. You feel yourself starting to lose control of the bike, you’re tipping over the handlebars after clearing a particularly difficult incline and you think you’re going to have to start over yet again. But wait! There’s the next checkpoint marker! You’re falling forward. Will you plant your rider’s face in the asphalt, or like a sprinter straining for the tape will you nose across the marker and turn it green before the crash indicator flashes? That’s not cheating. You take a fault and move on to the next stage. Not perfect, but legit. But sometimes…
The thing about Neosphere, this week’s Trials Evolution community track, is that it never let me cheese the checkpoints. Or rather, it didn’t let me feel okay about it. I’m thinking in particular about a checkpoint I call The Guillotine One. I crashed as I cleared that every single time because I just couldn’t finesse the throttle properly. The game, feeling sorry for me, let me continue as if I’d really cleared it, but deep down I knew I hadn’t. I’d cheesed it, and if a track is really good, you just won’t settle for cheesing it.
Neosphere was designed by DrittesAuge.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m pretty bowled over by Rebuild, a zombie apocalypse game recently ported from a web-based Flash game to an iPhone app. You can read my review of Rebuild here, and you can follow a game I’m playing in real time here. And now I’m bending developer Sarah Northway’s ear about the game’s history. She reveals connections to The Warriors, Day of the Triffids, and Faith No More; she tells you how close you came to having to play a tower defense game; and she reveals the life of an itinerant game developer.
Read the interview after the jump Continue reading →
Trials Evolution track of the week: Rainbow Road. Track designer: LatChoX. Difficulty: Medium.
I’m flying on this track. I’ve totally nailed the opening, where you immediately have to finesse the throttle so you approach that first trough with just enough momentum to be able to nail the first jump, but not so much that you smash into the incline. I’ve learned not to over-think the loop. I clear the track without a fault. Great. I’m flying.
On the leaderboard I’m somewhere past one thousand. What the hell?
I start thinking about parity. I’m riding a Scorpion 450cc. That’s the best bike I’ve unlocked so far, the best bike I can unlock given my license level. Am I supposed to put in more track time in the game before I mess around with the community tracks? No. That can’t be it. But still, I realize I’m running against folks with far better bikes. How am I supposed to compete with them? This doesn’t come up in LBP. In LittleBigPlanet, all sacks are equal. My sackboy is only limited by his human. Not so in Trials Evolution. Here we are also limited by our equipment. Ahem. At first I find this disturbing. Then I find it brilliant. There’s a sort of feedback loop here. A reason to return to the actual game beyond cosmetics. If I get more medals I’ll get a higher license and a better bike, and thus a better time on this community designed track. I start to see a beautiful back and forth.
Rainbow Road, you deserve to be featured on your own merits, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that our president’s announcement about marriage equality this week helped your chances. Politics aside, once I get a better bike, I will be back. You can count on it.
Rainbow Road was designed by LatChoX.
It’s not that I’m over LBP, but for the next few weeks or so we’ll be tooling around in a new community, the RedLynx community that is designing tracks for the Xbox Live game Trials Evolution. This game is my current addiction and I was pleased to find that it somewhat mirrors LBP in allowing its community to tinker with creating tracks and racing them. My favorite thing about LBP is the way its design community is structured, and while Trials Evolution is not remotely close to that level of robustness and accessibility, it’s fresh and doesn’t involve burlap. Sometimes you need a break from burlap.
So we start with my first track suggestion, Bridge Race.
After the jump, unabridged Continue reading →
While Fatal Frame 3 is of course the third in the series, it’s not necessary to play them all. Here’s what you need to know from the previous games: a magic camera busts Japanese ghosts.
But this is no Ghostbusters game. In Fatal Frame 3, the protagonist Rei has been cursed. Her curse caused a tattoo to slowly spread across her body. Once it’s complete, she is damned forever. Each night she dreams about the haunted Manor of Sleep. The secret to breaking the curse is somewhere in the manor. To make matters worse, Freddy Krueger rules are in effect: dying in the manor means dying in real life.
After the jump, I am afraid of some ghosts Continue reading →
4×4 from hell. I found this one quite by accident, stumbling into something called 3D FP House that was suggested under the Cool Levels header, but which was really just a demo. Luckily one of the rooms in the 3D FP House, the bathroom, had level links to the designer’s other work. Since I mentioned my occasional longing to return to Screamer 4×4 last week, I decided to jump into 4×4 from hell. So glad I did. While I find the lack of a scoring system to be irksome, I loved the shape of the world. It perfectly fits into the game I can’t get enough of right now. Another driving game.
Only this one is on two wheels.
After the jump, the jump Continue reading →
Although Monolith missed the mark with Fear, they came close to a bulls-eye with Condemned, a first person title with a focus on close range combat. You could pick up random items lying around to use against an army of insane hobos. The basic fighting system let you block and counterattack, which enemies could do as well. Fighting enemies was a chaotic in-your-face experience. Since different weapons had different attributes, you had to make sure you had the right weapon for the job. Larger weapons would hit harder, but were slower and harder to block with, for example. While there were guns available, ammo was always limited.
After the jump, hobo with a wrench Continue reading →
Amnesia: The Dark Decent is a critically acclaimed game from Frictional Games, the makers of the Penumbra series. It completely failed as a horror experience. Every time I read that someone couldn’t finish or play Amnesia because they thought it was too scary, I mutter “lightweight” under my breath and laugh evilly for a few seconds. Amnesia has problems with design and tone. This isn’t the first horror game to remove combat, but it is the poster child for it.
After the jump, pacifist horror Continue reading →
Survival horror did not take as well on the PC compared to the consoles. Only a few PC games could be considered horror. The System Shock series, for instance. The Thief series featured scary sections, but they weren’t designed with horror in mind. In 2001, with help from horror writer Clive Barker, PC gamers got an amazing horror title to call their own.
After the jump, a double barreled family therapist Continue reading →
Following the resurgence of the survival horror genre with Resident Evil, other developers attempted their own horror games. The first Silent Hill was compared to Resident Evil, as it shared the gameplay and basic combat system. However, the sequel for the Playstation 2 not only elevated the series to stand on its own, but also delivered one of the most atmospheric (and arguably disturbing) games around.
After the jump, trying to make sense of that image Continue reading →
Every six months or so I bug Tom to resurrect a game at our weekly gaming night, Shoot Club, because I have fond memories of being good at it. Usually it’s some old Half Life mod where you get insta-kills with the crowbar in death match. Or Screamer 4×4.
“What’s that motorcycle game I totally rocked last year? The one with the cool physics?”
“Trials HD. It wasn’t last year. And you didn’t rock it.”
I totally did, and since I’m annoyed with LBP this week for screwing up my home network with its [failed] updates, I’m just going to give some love to that game’s successor, Trials Evolution, which I played for the first time last night. This works out just fine since the motorcycle game and the sackboy game use some of the same muscles. There was a particularly sweet moment when I had to negotiate my Scorpion over two giant rotating gears, and somehow I cleared the obstacle without a fault on the first try. “How did you do that?” It was more of an exclamation than a question. I was surprised too until I got to the end of the track and realized I was using skills instilled in me by LBP. Jumping. Balance. Timing. So, thank you Sackboy, but you’re in the doghouse this week in favor of Trials Evolution.
If we’re going to look at the horror genre, of course we have to start with the one that started it all: Resident Evil. Old school purists might call me out over that, citing Alone in the Dark as the first survival horror game. Even older school purists might cite Sweet Home for the NES. Regardless, just as Capcom changed the action genre with Devil May Cry, the same is true for survival horror with Resident Evil.
After the jump, got a light? Continue reading →
My appreciation for the horror genre has changed over the years. When I was younger, I was a huge baby, afraid of the dark, needles, bugs, and so on. When I was four years old, I couldn’t play the Adventures of Lolo because one of the characters scared me.
But I haven’t felt fear in a long time. Two leg surgeries and chronic pain are an excellent one-two punch to being scared of things like videogames. I’ve been trying to find a game that can scare me for the last few years. Nothing has managed to do the job.
After the jump, I’m going to dropkick some skeletons out of my closet Continue reading →
The Assassins Creed games open with a hand-wringing disclaimer about how all world religions are equally valid and Ubisoft intends no offense based on anything it depicts. Which turns out to be pretty much nothing of consequence and, hey, look, you can climb this building! Action games keep you too preoccupied to think about being offended until they stop and intentionally offend you to make sure blogs talk about them. I think the last time I considered someone might actually be offended by an action game was when I found out several months after playing Prey that the lead character was supposed to have been Native American. Maybe some folks would object to the “native” class in multiplayer Call of Juarez bringing a bow to a gunfight. But no one plays that game, which raises the question, “If someone programs an ethnic stereotype on an empty server, will anyone hear it?”
After the jump, the games that can only offend people too smart to get offended Continue reading →
A couple of months ago LBP came up with a new invention called Attract-o-Gel, a substance that enables your sackboy to walk on walls and ceilings. I rejoiced, hoping this would mean less of those hanging-from-the-ceiling elements I so hate. R1Grip, swing, release-and-quickR1. R1Grip, swing, release-and-quickR1. Ugh. So tedious. Attract-o-Gel to the rescue!
Except, not. It’s too easy, and unfortunately too many community designers use it as a crutch. Because of that I came to despise it. But it was a new tool, and designers, they adapt.
Designers like EDOGAN1, the creator of Rapunzel’s Rodent Problems, for example. Yes the level is so dark in parts that you can barely see what you’re doing. Yes, Rapunzel looks creepy and talks too much. And yes, your sackboy’s main ally is a hair vermin that is freaking out the teachers and parents of elementary students everywhere. Just typing that is creating a phantom itch on my scalp. Ignore that and dial down your squick, because someone just figured out how to make Attract-o-Gel a worthy LBP tool.
That, and decent level music. Well done.
