7. Afterfall: Insanity (PC)

This game received very little fanfare, and still doesn’t have an official support or community discussion forum anywhere online. It’s a damn solid third-person horror game, which clearly takes immense amounts of inspiration from the Dead Space series, especially in controls and user interface. The action is fun, the scares are scary, and despite some kinda lame writing, the story is actually pretty interesting. I look forward to seeing more from this studio.

Link: Afterfall on Gamersgate

6. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC)

I can think of at least a dozen close friends who would lovingly place this one at the top of their lists, easily, but for me, the end result of the game didn’t live up to the hype. The combat gets repetitive easily, and when you realize all the unpolished exploits that sit right in front of your eyes, it becomes difficult to ignore them, like a four-year-old pulling hard on your leg and begging for your attention the entire time you’re playing. Despite that, the exploration of the game is second to none, and I’ve paid more to MMOs just to wander around in that open beauty. I highly recommend the PC version, because as with all Elder Scrolls games, if you miss out on the mods, you are missing out on over half of the intended gaming experience.

Link: Skyrim on Steam

5. Dead Island (PC/X360)

While this game certainly did not turn out to be anything at all like that trailer, it did end up being one damn fun game. Two parts Borderlands, two parts Left 4 Dead, and a little dash of Grand Theft Auto thrown in for good measure, I had quite a blast running around on Bamoi Island and murdering zombies. While it certainly had its flaws, I found it to be a more effective zombie survival game than, say, the Left 4 Dead series. This was one of the first games I tested out with my new FragFX 360 game controller, and it worked so well that way that I ended up buying it a second time on the PC.

Link: Dead Island on Steam

4. EYE: Divine Cybermancy (PC)

This one really took me by surprise. One of my close pals recommended it to me, and I’m extremely glad that he did. This indie title is a first-person rpg-shooter hybrid, built in Valve’s Source engine. This game does not hold your hand one bit after you complete a very minimal tutorial mission, and I’m totally on board with that. There are so many elements to this game (hacking, leveling, cyberware, research, psi powers, etc) that new players to it will likely be very confused at the beginning. I was, and I almost put it away for good after a few tries. But I stuck with it and figured out “the trick” to it, and from then on it became one of my favorite all-time shooters on the PC. Best part is that it completely lacks a manual save function – in other words, your actions and decisions count, and when the shit hits the fan, you have to try and deal with it right then and there.

Link: EYE Divine Cybermancy on Steam

3. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (PC)

I was trying to think of a “I didn’t ask for this” joke, but the truth is, this game is exactly what I had been asking for for some time. Pretty much everything about this game blew my mind, and I devoured it hungrily and happily. Even the boss fights, which everyone else hates, weren’t enough to mar the final experience for me. Hardcore fans of the original game like to bash this one, but it’s hard for me to accept most of that bashing as anything other than grognardian teeth-gnashing. WHile the original had some important elements that were handled better that first time, this game stays true to its roots, and delivers one hell of a noir-esque cyberpunk ride.

Link: Deus Ex: HR on Steam

2. Dead Space 2 (X360)

Visceral Games somehow managed to take one of the most concept-perfect games ever (the original Dead Space) and make it even moreso. I don’t have a single complaint about this game. Not one. From the game’s fucking insane opening sequence to the very last line uttered in the game, it is action horror at its very finest, and I can’t begin to imagine how the upcoming third game could top it.

Link: Dead Space 2 for Xbox 360, on Amazon

1. Bastion (PC)

If you are a fan of Zelda-like game play, you are doing yourself a great disservice by not playing this game. I didn’t even touch it until the last handful of days of 2011, but that experience was enough for me to crown this my top game of the year. Everything about it amazes me, from the spot-on music to the story-meets-gameplay-without-pause narration, to the fun mechanics and the beautiful scenery.

Link: Bastion on Steam

Coming up next, perhaps a post on my favorite tabletop moments? Who knows…

The One-Sided Attrition Game

Tell me if you’ve done this before. You’re running through the war-strewn ruins of your Space Future Colony, flanked by gun-toting mercenaries. You just killed one a few moments ago, grabbed his almost-spent rifle, and have 17 rounds left with which to kill the guys now shooting at you. You take cover, hoping to wait them out. One by one they each take their turns popping out of cover and emptying a full clip of ammo into the other side of the wall you crouch behind. They duck back down, reload, and pop out to repeat the process. You count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… 27, 28, 29, 30 emptied clips. Okay enough is enough, so you pop out at the right times and cap them each with a skull-atomizing head shot, slowing down time for a moment so you can revel in each satisfying spleurgch! of victory. You rush over to their corpses, and check out their rifles which are identical to yours…

…only to find seven more bullets. On each of them.

But you feel like you really need some more ammo right now, and you just passed a checkpoint, so you reload and try again. By this time you’ve memorized their patterns and you take them each out with expert efficiency. You run over to their corpses a second time, and a second time you find only seven bullets. Each. You can look at the physical remains of their corpses and see that they are wearing multiple bandoliers with dozens of ready clips, but you only get seven bullets.

Or four, if you’re playing on “hard” mode.

Space Future, Brown Apocalypse, and Hero War Land alike, they are all the same. Even when an enemy is fighting you with the biggest gun which uses the rarest and most expensive ammo, they will have an infinite amount of it until the moment you kill them, at which point they will magically have only just enough to let you fire it once or twice. The world’s industry has ceased to exist after the Nuke Explosion Bombs destroyed it, but your enemy has an infinite supply of bullets in his underwear.

The Big Problem with this is that it enforces an attrition game that only affects you. A newcomer to this type of game could easily look at his own limited ammo count and deduce that the same would apply to his enemies, but quickly realize that fairness only applies among those enemies themselves, with his own character’s life being one of constant suffering and statistical injustice.

Ranting aside, why is this? I’m thinking it’s largely due to a combination of two things: lazy game balancing, and insufficiently advanced game AI. The former is pretty obvious, but the latter might not be immediately apparent until you consider: what would happen if the player were allowed to force the enemy into an attrition game? The programmer would have to develop and then subsequently implement (and test!) an AI that can react to the fact that its ammo is nearing or has already reached exhaustion. At that point, what does the enemy do? Should it be programmed to run forward from cover, charging the hero’s covered position with a bayonet every time? Should it just sit there and do nothing at all? Should it instead be programmed to run over to some kind of base camp and restock its supplies before running back to fire ceaselessly upon the player once more?

It’s my opinion that most developers don’t feel they need to program such an advanced decision into their games because the ammo system already exists and “everyone does it” and expects it to be there. It’s a bit of mechanical hand-waving that everyone does, so much that it has become inextricably embedded within the shooter game genre, right there alongside infinite guard patrol loops, nonexistent radio status checks, and unsurmountable knee-high obstacles.

Ye Olde Ammo Pouch of Holding

Speaking of infinite bullets, when the hero is actually allowed to build up her ammo stores, where the hell is she keeping all of it? She’s running around in a catsuit, carrying only an assault rifle, and 600 rounds of invisible, weightless rifle ammo. I don’t need to really expand this point, as it speaks for itself.

Little Timmy’s Secret Collection of Guns ‘n’ Ammo

Later on in Space Future Fortress, you’re taking a shortcut through a residential area of the complex, and while cutting through an abandoned nursery you spot a twinkly out of the corner of your eye. The game’s HUD has illuminated a blue-and-green foot locker with Magical Flying Robo-Boy! stickers on it and a teddy bear on the floor adjacent, letting you know that this box can be opened for loot. Without skipping a beat, you bee-line for it, fling its top open, and discover another seven bullets for your currently-equipped gun. If it weren’t for little Timmy and his apparent fanboy obsession with guns, there wouldn’t be seven or less additional dead bad guys by the end of this game.

Video game designers really need to stop and just think for a moment about where they put their random loot drops. Years ago, playing Neverwinter Nights on PC, I lost track of the times that I would be running around the poorest part of a city, notice a lootable refuse bin, and pop it open to find anything from twelve gold pieces to a Wand of Horrible Death +5. The weakness of the random loot location-checking logic was astounding.

Shooters are no different. Ammo and loot drops can be found in the most bizarre places: plasma grenades in a child’s bedroom, throwing knives in a refuse bin, nuclear bombs in the bathroom of a fast food restaurant – although that latter one might actually make sense, in a twisted way. Now I’m hungry.

Exceptional Gems

All that being said, there are a few rare examples that spring to mind of games that do it right.

In the Dead Space series, ammo counting is integral to the entire game experience, and it works for three major reasons. First, being a survival horror game, limited ammo is crucial to making you feel like you are almost-but-not-quite helpless. Although it is guilty of Little Timmy’s Stash from time to time, the series does it well enough that it doesn’t ever break the mood. Second, another crucial mechanic of the game involves your ability to use non-weapon items and debris as weapons, and it’s so fun and intuitive that skilled players prefer the unconventional weapons to the game’s actual weapon-weapons. Third and most important, in Dead Space you are the only one in the game actually using ammo-requiring weapons at all. All of your enemies are monsters, none of them have guns, and thus you never experience any immersion-breaking infinite-ammo enemies.

Mass Effect is a shooter that eschews traditional ammo counts, replacing them with a weapon heat-venting system that is actually embedded within the game setting’s canon. All weapons have infinite ammo, and they just need time to vent their heat buildup between volleys. It works wonderfully, so well that it was a bit mind-blowing that Bioware decided to revert back to Ye Old Ammo Clips for the game’s sequel.

End This Now

It is my belief that the insistence upon repeated implementation of ammunition conservation in every new shooting-based video game released today is a clinging-on to obsolete methods of design from The Past (TM). Developers, if you insist upon enforcing this antiquated mechanic, then please at least put some real actual thought into its development, and balance it out with the rest of your attempts at game immersion. You put all this effort into nifty HUDs, smooth water effects, complex blood splatter, and realistic wound physics, but then you go and waste it all by grandfathering in the immersion-destroying thing that is the current default ammo system.

By not re-tooling and creatively balancing this, you are merely parroting what you perceive as mechanics that contributed to the successes of titles that have come before you, unaware of the sheer lack of worth that these mechanics imbue within your product. Just ditch it entirely and let your game’s other mechanics shine more brightly – and let me assign that reload button to something more useful.

It’s also been a while since I’ve had a Friday night so wide open and free to dedicate to the pursuit of purely nerdy pleasures. I must have spent full-on weeks of my youthful life plowing intensely forward through each of the many Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. Tonight, I shall try and recapture this experience, only this time in Ancient Japan.

I’ll try and remember to post more about it during and after tonight’s experience.

As far as my table-topping goes, I’m in the middle of at least two games, with two more on the horizon. First is my Old School Palladium Fantasy sandbox game, which has had four gatherings so far and seems to be maintaining everyone’s excitement pretty nicely. This game is really doing a good job of reinvigorating me, both as an arbiter of events and as a creator of spontaneous content. I haven’t run this seat-of-the-pants in a long, long time, and it is quite simply titillating my gamer imagination. I go into each session with a mental picture of all the events happening in the world within a 20-mile radius of where the characters are, and as they move around, those events progress of their own accord. So far, the players have managed to hit up most of them quite nicely, and get themselves directly involved of their own volition. It’s wonderful.

Next is the Song of Ice and Fire game (loosely using the system, of the same name, by Green Ronin), for which the Torch of Arbitration has been passed on to my pal Sixten. We kicked of the new chunk of the campaign a coupla weekends back, and it looks like the next session is this coming weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Also this weekend is a meet-and-greet session for potentially starting up a new Unknown Armies game. I don’t have much to say about that one just yet, because we haven’t discussed it as a group, but I want to see a story of normal folks from different walks of life brought together by mutual exposure to the Occult Underground. More on this as it unfolds.

Further down the road, probably after the Palladium games comes to its natural end, I’ve got an idea to try a Shadowrun variant in which all the magic is removed, and replaced with simple conspiracy. Magic has always been my biggest complaint about Shadowrun, as it just never seemed to fit right. I was introduced to the setting during the transition from First to Second Edition, and the art back then (some by the always-amazing Tim Bradstreet) depicted a far grittier thing than the more fantasy-inspired Shadowrun of today. Old School Shadowrun was like Ghost in the Shell, while modern Shadowrun feels more like Cutey Honey. My thought now is to remove all the magic from the setting, and replace it with mostly-unexplained conspiracy. Like the Great Ghost Dance, for example, wasn’t a magical event. For some reason a call came in from High Command to just let them go, and the US forces complied – and to this day, no one knows why. And Saeder-Krupp isn’t ruled by lofwyr, but merely an entity known as The Dragon. Is it a person? An AI? A cabal of conspirators? Something else?

All this Shadowrun-minus-magic is in my head thanks to my current obsession with the new Deus Ex: Human Revolution game, of course. Very few games have ever affected me as deeply, or tickled that Fun Spot so furiously, as this one. I’ve been taking a primarily non-violent, stealth-based approach to this game, but the story is so good and the characters so realistically portrayed, that there have been moments where in-game narrative events have successfully swayed my decision. “Fuck. That.” I’d say aloud, before switching from trust stun-zapper to armor-piercing guns and brutally taking out every last motherfucker in the room as an act of revenge that I didn’t know I wanted until only seconds before. The character Jenson radiates this almost-tangible aura of cool boredom that personifies him as the ultimate Gibsonian cyberpunk bad-ass. Every inch of the game emanates a complimentary coolness and enforces a setting-appropriate dirty dismalness, creating what I feel is the most amazing cyberpunk gaming experience to date.

Going back to the subject of Tabletop gaming for a monent, I want to take a moment and talk about two services which have revolutionized my game-scheduling: Agree-a-Date and Doodle. These are online tools that allow you to send out a poll of sorts to a group of people, letting them pick which of the arrayed dates are best available for their attendance. As an adult with a full-time job, an active social life, budding romances, and other hobbies, this makes scheduling gaming sessions much, much less of a headache. I’m moving away from Agree-a-date towards Doodle, because it’s less restrictive and not constantly advertising itself to me. But aide from that, Agree-a-Date has served me very well for small-gathering social functions.

I’ve recently set up a profile on RPGGeek, and have begun posting my plays there. Feel free to friend me.

Finally, the current design project codenamed Hagakure 66 has had some great new developments. I can’t share them just, yet, however. I want the revelation to be damn awesome. It’s on its way, though, most definitely.

A while back, the Capcom game Dark Void went on sale for pretty cheap via the OnLive system, and I jumped on it. I’d played the original demo at PAX that same year, and I’d been wanting to give the full game a try for a while. I wasn’t disappointed, either: despite some fairly scathing reviews, I find Dark Void to be a pretty awesome action game. It’s more or less The Rocketeer, and I effing loved that movie.

Unfortunately, a critical game-crashing error has consistently plagued me at the very end of the first episode of the game (out of three). The error happens every single time I activate a crucial mechanic in the game. In fact, there’s no way to avoid the error, as that crucial mechanic is required to advance a certain scene and complete the end of the first episode.

Trial and error and a whole lot of guessing have led me to believe that the error is exclusive to the use of a game controller in that scene; mouse and keyboard work fine without issue. This wouldn’t be a huge deal for me (being a mouse-and-keyboard shooter fan on PC) if it weren’t for the fact that Dark Void is a much more enjoyable console-and-couch experience than a PC one.

The error is specifically limited to the OnLive platform, and their service team has been on the frickin’ ball with helping me resolve this. Believing it might be an issue specifically related to my own unique user data, the support representative assigned to the case even went so far as to play through the game from the beginning all the way just past the point that was blocking me, and then replacing my save data with his own. I would do terrible secret things if I were able to land a job that let me play video games in order to help out customers, all as part of a day’s work.

The error persists, unfortunately, but I can bypass it using the mouse and keyboard, for now. But their tech team continues to work on it, their support rep continues to communicate with me, and their response time and service level continue to wow me.

I’m impressed. Service teams today rarely do that for me.

A couple of months back, I jumped on a special wherein you pre-ordered the game Homefront, and they sent you both another game and one of their special MicroConsoles for free. I cared (and continue to care) nothing at all for Homefront, but the bonus game was the amazing Metro 2033, and the console itself was woth $99. Getting all this for $49 was quite a steal. I continue to play the console regularly, enjoying games like Arkham Asylum, Borderlands, Just Cause, and more, without a single hitch in gameplay.

Well, they have just today announced the exact same deal, only this time it is for the upcoming game Red Faction: Armageddon. If you preorder it for $49, you get the game when it comes out, immediate full access to Red Faction: Guerrilla, and a free microconsole and controller. I have been planning on getting a second controller anyway for the exact same price alone, so this deal I immediately jumped on.

I definitely encourage you to check this one out. It’s an extremely portable full current-day gaming platform, and the array of games is quite impressive. I’ve yet to be disappointed. Plus, since the controller works with your PC, even if the game and system go bust you still have a nice controller left over. On top of that, it really is the only way I have found so far to “rent” new, full PC games and try them before you buy them.

Here’s the Link to the promo (and no, it is not a user referral, if that matters)

Years later, there’s very little that I recall from its pages, but one bit of it still sticks with me today: customers are more likely to spread the word about an absolutely terrible experience than an absolutely amazing one. Sadly, this is the case today. I’ve recently posted my very first review on Amazon, and it’s pretty negative. It’s about a subject that I love: Dead Space. Particularly, it’s about the atrocious work of animation that is Dead Space: Aftermath.

I’ll spare the details here, and instead just link you to the actual review.

The other is Rogue Survivor, a rogue-like zombie survival game. It, too, is pretty damn great.