PC: Killing Floor (co-op survival horror)

The word free has many meanings, usually associated with costing nothing and with nothing to lose. In this case, this game has cost me my time….and I want it back. Steam, the digital distribution service, offered a free weekend of the game Killing Floor. The Killing Floor was developed by Tripwire-Interactive and is a co operative survival horror game similar to Valve’s Left 4 Dead series. Luckily the genre is the only thing that is similar between the two.

You and a team of 5 other people must make your to various checkpoints and survivor a set number wave of undead mutants at each area. No story is included in this game and mainly consists of going from point A to point B following a distress call of the female gun merchant shouting “alright boys, come get me”. (What if we don’t want to come get you lady????)

The game consists of two game modes with solo and multiplayer options and comes with 9 initial stages and a host of different classes, characters, and Steam achievements. They also offer downloadable content which you can pay for if you wish to expand your game and experience (don’t why you would want to).

Graphics were dreary and well suited to fit the mood of the game but there was a massive amount of clipping through objects and physics textures were almost non-existent. During my game time our group can walk through some walls, doors, and clothes without any effect. The sound quality of the game was a big “meh”, soldiers had British accents and there was a light upbeat music to enhance the killing spirit of the game (the game just killed itself there).

It felt like Tripwire Interactive tripped to combine the game play mechanics of counter strike and Left 4 Dead. You can purchase weapons from the merchant at the start of each round and wave from the money you gain from killing zombies and also performing your job for the various classes (medics, commando, support, ect). Like I said above the main point of this game is to move from point A to point B surviving the waves of zombies. Zombies also come in multiple forms and flavors for those of you out there are still interested.

Everything looked good on paper but everything was poorly implemented. Frame rates were iffy and the controls felt stiff and it was hard to aim for the most part. No wonder everybody used the flame thrower, can anybody say “W” mouse 1, pyro? If you have the money, settle for Left 4 Dead 1 or 2 and forget about this. Otherwise I don’t know why you would be playing this game, for me at least, I felt like this was a waste of time to play and wouldn’t even want to think of paying to play of this quality.

-Bui

PSP: Mana Khemia – Student Alliance

Mana Khemia – Student Alliance was an RPG that made its debut on the PS2 and was later ported to the PSP. It is a JRPG in every sense with the voice-overs and the unique game play that it offers. You control the main character, Vaine, who has a mysterious past and his best friend is a cat he regularly talks to named Sulfur. Vaine is discovered by a professor from the Alchemy Academy and the game takes over from there.

As I turn on the game, I am greeted with the company logos and then a vibrant anime style opening. Loading screen appears which I assume will be one of many. Menu options at the beginning include: new game, load, options (volume controls, text management, and an option for jumpstart data). The option to install the jumpstart data into the psp memory stick is a plus. This game has a lot of data to process and this option saves a lot of UMD loading whether people notice it or not thus decreasing the amount of time the game displays the loading screen.

In terms of sound, this game like most JRPG games contains voice overs. SOME of the voice overs are fine and tolerable; some actors lack enthusiasm and of course in every game and anime series they always have their fair share of actors that take their roles a bit too far. You have your typical head strong support hero, the girly girl, and the snob…ect (nough said). The music emulates an academic atmosphere as it should and has a mystical “harry potter” like feel, and it suits the game well.

Graphics in this game are represented with 2-D character sprites that are able to roam the 3-D plane. A lot of the character sprites have a lively, bright, vibrant color to them adding to their personalities. Some of the backgrounds look too pixilated and there is a sense of motion blur when ever you roam the environment (which will be a lot).

The main bulk of the game will be attending various classes as Vaine and completing the assignments that follow the class. As usual the classes that are required will progress the story while the optional classes will serve as side quests. Most of the quest will be fetch quest (obtaining specific items for synthesis) or killing certain enemies. There are no random encounters in the game but the designers took a “Supers Mario RPG” approach where attacking the enemy before they attack you gives you an advantage of a first strike. Battles are regulated turn based where you are shown the order in which characters can perform their actions and on enemies chosen (no complaints here). When one does not complete the task assigned by the class consequences follow. Vaine then must serve detention and then redo the course that he has failed (just like in real life…kinda).

I just started this game and am only 2-3 hours into it. There are minor hic-ups every now and then from the internal loads within the battles and loading screens are a plenty but for the most part are short, again due to the jumpstart data. There is a deep item creation system and I find the assignments and quest given by the classes enjoyable for the time being. If you can stand loading screens and enjoy unique JRPGs with a lot of customization then I would recommend Mana Khemia – Student Alliance for you. If you are more of the impatient player and can’t stand minor nuisances then just forget about this and get the PS2 version if you are interested.

-Bui

Flash: Super Karoshi!

Super Karoshi, the sequel to Karoshi: Suicide Salesman, is a flash game where the objective is to kill yourself. Repeatedly. In various amusing ways.

I <3′d style=”font-style: italic;”>done with the game yet, hidden things that must be found, buttons that must be pressed in the right order…

But that could be said of both Super Karoshi and Karoshi: Suicide Salesman. What makes Super Karoshi more interesting is exactly what you would expect: Super Karoshi.

Super Karoshi is a powerup of sorts that makes Karoshi (which is what I’m using to refer to the avatar) invulnerable and gives him the ability to fly and break certain obstacles. (The best part being, of course, the Superman-esque costume and Super Saiyan hairdo.) However, Super Karoshi has to touch glowing green Kryptonite (I guess) in order to return to Karoshi to die and complete the level. This is further complicated by having to kill more Karoshis (who, Goomba-style, march back and forth) – you have to destroy obstacles at the correct time or else they’ll go in the wrong direction and notdie.

As much as I <3′d K:SS, I <3 Super Karoshi that much more – instead of having to keep a protagonist I don’t like, I get to plan the death of a protagonist I’m amused by. The blood and gore satisfies my need for destruction (it’s an element of fun! more on this in a later post, I hope) and the fiendishly clever puzzles keep me entertained (it’s another element of fun!).

-Hatz

Flash: Morningstar

I’m going to be looking atMorningstar, a flash game developed by Red Herring Labs – in fact, it looks to be their first game, too!

As a completely unrelated side note, my two main sources of flash games are Newgrounds and Kongregate, and if you want to be my friend on those, I’m “Flufflykat” on both ^^

But on to business.

Morningstar is a point-and-click adventure game. You play as a member of a crew on a spaceship. The opening cutscene shows your ship crashing on a presumably desolate planet, and your goal is to repair your ship and leave the planet…along the way, you’ll loot the corpses of your own crew, the crew of a ship that crashed on the planet before you, all while musing about the plot significance of certain statues and generally being creeped out (or I was, in any case).

Visually speaking, it’s not bad – in fact, compared to other point-and-click adventure flash games, it’s flipping fantastic. I could totally believe that I was looking at a spaceship, a desert planet, corpses, creepy statues…

I could totally have been immersed in this game (and suffering nightmares about death via radiation) were it not for that staple of all games with an adventure-esque component: the inventory. Progression from one subgoal to another and even from one area to another involved using inventory items in impossibly creative ways – it was impossible to use, for example, a long cable as opposed to a long rope to satisfy an objective, and I was occasionally relegated to straight up pixel-searching to find what I needed next. Eventually, I caved in to the crushing weight of confusion and opened up the walkthrough, a link to which the developers helpfully provided in the upper-right corner of the game screen itself – sorry hardcore purists; my brain just doesn’t operate like that.

But I did like this game, or what I played of it anyway – I’m ashamed but willing to admit that I stopped playing because I creep out easily, and I’m already having trouble sleeping after watching the first half of “The Orphanage.” The plot will suck you in and it’s quite difficult to tear yourself away. You don’t necessarily get attached to the characters you’re interacting with – it’s too short a game for that, I think, and they’re kinda needy and burden-ish and a bit of a hassle – I mean, heck, I wasn’t particularly attached to the main character either (I don’t identify with military personnel because I’m a nerd with no military ambition and very little desire to go outside on days when it isn’t perfect outside, and there was also a distinct shortage of estrogen in the game. Sure, no bewbies to distract the male populace, but also no females for me to sympathize with or even denounce as sexist hussy-ism. Sad face.

But the plot itself was strong enough to keep me playing long after I knew I should have turned myself away (hello, nightmares) and even now, when I know I shouldn’t play any longer, I am tempted to return and see just what plot significance those statues have.

(Also: the red herring in a box amused me – and I’m not sure if it was an easter egg or an inventory item I was totally supposed to use…comments?)

-Hatz

Flash: Little Wheel

Hatz here, back with another little flash game to review!

This time, it’s Little Wheel, a point-and-click adventure game fromOneClickDog. The premise of the game is as follows: there’s a world of living robots, but one day something goes wrong with the main power source. As the only robot to inexplicably survive the shutdown, it is your job to get to the main generator and fix it, using only your brain, your stubbly little robot arms (no legs! soo kyuut~) and your mouse-clickings.

It’s really an adorable game – you wouldn’t expect simple three-color graphics to be this cute, but it works really well here.

Unfortunately, it’s also not a very difficult game – all the things you need to click on are always surrounded by pulsing white circles, so a lot of the mystery I’ve come to associate with traditional you-need-to-pixel-search adventure games was gone, and with it, a lot of my amusement.

Which isn’t to say I wasn’t amused – oh, no! Though finding the solutions was no more difficult than clicking on the right highlighted items in the correct order and perhaps moving about a bit, the solutions themselves were clever, innovating, and all-around amusing.

I do wish it had been a little longer…or a tad more difficult.

Ah, if only.

But it was cute! ^-^

-Hatz

PS1: Final Fantasy IX – Hatz

The core mechanic of the field of FFIX is centered upon exploring areas and interacting with as many of the objects and NPCs in said areas in order to advance in the game. The core mechanic of the battle system of FFIX is a pseudo-standard ATB system, where one must wait for ATB bars to fill completely before one can even consider executing a command.

There’s a lot of land to explore in FFIX, with something like three (or four?) continents, many cities, villages, and kingdoms, and some sort of Mooglecity in the sky open to exploration. Of course, with this large amount of explorable-area comes a veritable hoard of treasure chests and [horde of] monsters and bosses with extremely rare items obtainable solely through stealing (or through that arduous path that is looking for chocographs), upon which some people will insist upon gathering in their entirety.

It is the storyline of the game that is brought to its forefront, however (which is not at all unusual for a Final Fantasy game). It’s a pretty good story, with few cliches and some nice twists and plot points that change depending upon the player’s choices throughout the game. Supplementing the story is a collection of puzzles ranging in difficulty from the barely-considered-a-puzzle to the fiendishly difficult. There are also several skill-basedminigames, all of which are difficult to truly master but fulfilling to try.

There’s also enough mass destruction and chaos to sate the most bloodthirsty of players – you’re just not allowed to actively participate in the mass destruction (or chaos). It’s nearly impossible to achieve full immersion in the game, as interesting as it is, simply because it’s not that interactive – the choices you make in the game have little noticeable bearing upon the outcome of the game.

There is, as well, very little to no social interaction in the game, as it is mostly single-player. It is possible to have two people playing, but the second player would be allowed to participate only during battles, which can be counter-productive.

The graphics in FFIX are much better than Square’s previous attempts at 3-D modeling in animation and gaming (FFVII, FVIII). However, the game isn’t really fun enough to back up those graphics. There are only so many times one can hunt ceaselessly in (yet another) futile attempt to master certain abilities. There are only so many times one can forgive Garnet’s borderline-emo mentality (slit your wrists and be done with it, kthxbai). There is, however, a near-infinite number of sentences I can write aboutFFIX that start with ‘There are only so many times…’ Two major detractors from the game are the sheer length of it – which is considerably longer than the combined attention spans of me and most of my friends – and the fact that it is yet another Final Fantasy game (fanboys and fangirls, plz to not bekillingz me), which, though all are interesting, become more and more similar to each other by the day (with the exceptions of X and X-II, which are odd, and FFVII, which is awesome). There are only so many times, after all, that you can go through the same attack-attack-heal-magic-attack-attack-heal-magic-occasional-trance-or-summon routine before forgetting to save (or missing the save points, there’s so few of them), falling asleep, and dying.

PS1: Final Fantasy IX – Bui

Final Fantasy, one of the most highly acclaimed RPG (role playing game) series gives its final game for the classic Playstation One in the form of Final Fantasy IX. For those unaware of the Final Fantasy franchise, it is famous for being story driven and its beautiful musical scores.

In this game, the player takes control of the character Zidane who part of a traveling musical troup that plots to kidnap the princess of the kingdom of Alexandria. I will not go into detail with the story line but it does consist of a lot of twist to keep the player interested. Also to note, there are multiple characters the player will control and each of them have their own story but then blend together well in the end.

The cinematic for this PSone game are amazing for its time (smooth and vibrant colors) where graphical development was limited. The characters are presented as 3-D figures walking on hand drawn backgrounds. In terms of sound, there are no voice-overs in this game but has an amazing musical score which suits the mood and situations that the characters are caught in.

The game play in FF IX follows most traditional role playing games. There are random battles in the field and the fighting and actions are menu driven. Basically select the action or skill then the enemy and watch as the battle unfolds then repeat. The one thing that sets this game apart from its predecessors is the ability system. Every piece of equipment in the game has abilities for a character to learn. In order to fully learn that ability they need to have it equip and go through various battles to earn enough Ability Points to fully learn it. This is a bit tedious yes, but more so rewarding in the long run.

It took me roughly 36 hours to complete this game and the overall experience was enjoyable. Though the PSone has Final Fantasy VII and VIII, IX seems to be overshadowed. Final Fantasy IX brings a more traditional feeling to the gamer bringing them back to its original roots of medieval-ish fantasy land. I can firmly say for anyone that enjoys the final fantasy series and traditional RPG games, this PSone classic should not be missed!

-Bui