Year: 2013
Genre: Action-Adventure
Website: http://www.ittledew.com/
Shane:
- Platform: Android
- Hours logged: 4.5
- Playthroughs: 1
- Rating: 4/10
Notes and Discussions:
- Shane (9/16/2014): This was a pleasant game, vaguely reminiscent of 16 bit Legend of Zelda.
Hehe... That is a lie actually. This game is a direct rip off of Legend of Zelda. Therein lies much of it's charm. And charm was exactly enough to get me through the game.
The puzzles were easy enough to do with a toddler in my lap yet difficult enough to be fun. Or they WOULD have been difficult had I not grown up with exactly this type of block pushing puzzle.
The enemies were varied, which is nice. They had the standard progression, just dumbed down a bit. Two of the mobs are also puzzle pieces, which isn't new to the genre. Having to position these creatures didn't screw up the gameplay that much as it so often does.
I also like that the hero in this game is actually a heroine. That satisfies both my desire that women gain better representation in the video gaming world, and my nerd rage over people miss-identifying the hero of the Legend of Zelda games as Zelda. For some reason having a female lead in a Zelda clone just feels appropriate.
When all is said and done, I won't be playing it again but I am glad that it exists.
Year: 2012
Genre: Puzzle, Action-Adventure
Website: http://epic.drawastickman.com/
Shane:
- Platform: Android
- Hours logged: 5.0
- Playthroughs: 1
- Rating: 2/10
Notes and Discussions:
- Shane (9/16/2014): I made it through this one after putting it aside for several months. To be honest, I never really thought of this as a game. Throughout, this one felt like a proof of concept for a neat technology (namely starting the "game" by making the user draw two stick figures, which then serve as both a character and the player's avatar, with individual limbs moving as if walking), more than a polished offering for a puzzle-loving crowd.
Many of the levels in this game have multiple ways to complete them. Usually, I enjoy having more content to work through but everything here was...well...clunky. The screenshot I selected even shows some of the awkwardness. My avatar is stuck behind a rock. I am mildly annoyed to have to see this now as I type it.
All of that aside, the concepts that were being played with were reasonably neat. If these things made their way into a more polished game, I would be happy to play it.
Year: 2009
Genre: Action-Adventure
Website: http://rocksteadyltd.com/#arkham-asylum
Shane:
- Platform: PC
- Hours logged: 17.0
- Playthroughs: 1
- Rating: 5/10
Lee:
- Platform: Playstation 3
- Hours logged: 19.0
- Playthroughs: 0
- Rating: 7/10
- Platform: PC
- Hourse logged: 2.0
- Playthroughs: 0
- Rating: --/10
Notes and Discussions:
- Shane (8/25/2014): This game took me a long time to finish. Seventeen hours of actual play time are logged, but what is more interesting for this game is the delta of start time and when I officially scored the playthrough. Things that happened in my life while I was playing this game:
I got engaged, I got married, my wife got pregnant, kid was born, sold two houses, bought one house, quit a job, started a job, got laid off from job, kid turned a year old, lost 25 lbs and...some other stuff.
This felt from the beginning like a game that I SHOULD just sit down and play in one sitting. I should have gotten into the story and found all of the trophies and tapes and whatnot. The story has a narrative that you can follow from end to end. It is a familiar story and is exactly what should be in a Batman story.
So why did it take me in the YEARS to finish it? Some possible answers lie within the list I provided earlier but other thoughts are within the game itself with an ALMOST sandbox style that lets you do a lot of exploring throughout the map but the barriers between "zones" (as we will call them) break up the flow of travel so much it was hard to remember where I was trying to go. The first ... most of the game I guess is set up with you learning the island. After that you can go where you want but at that point...I guess I didn't care.
Another point could be the slow introduction of tools to both aid combat and allow you to explore new spaces. It stopped feeling like a real accomplishment when I was given a new toy, instead I found myself a bit angry that I was going to have to go back through everything that I had done before, using these new gizmos in order to find the "secrets" hidden throughout. This felt like grinding with a side of hand holding in a way that I don't respect out of a story.
I was going to add the gameplay style to my list of negatives but I decided against it. Instead I will use it to start off the list of things that I liked about the game. The gameplay was set up to be accessible on a console. As I was playing it on a PC I found myself with a higher level of control than what I feel was expected when the controls were conceived. While this did leave me some frustrating moments as I aimed a batarang at a set of rattling teeth only to have the auto-aim jump around the screen like a caffeinated squirrel... I guess I was mostly bored. There were no points of the game that required precision. Even combat could be completed by doing batrolls all around the stage while clicking furiously on the mouse. Hell, they gave me other combos that I was allowed to do (some kind of shift + right click thing to down an opponent more quickly), I never felt the desire to actually learn when to use them.
I liked seeing the Batman villains. I guess. Mostly. Well...I guess I liked it, but I have never really cared that much about Batman, so it didn't feel like a walk down memory lane as much as a chance to learn more about these DC properties. I guess that makes that a net gain for the game...
There IS one thing that I can celebrate here without hedging. That thing is Motherfucking Mark Hamill as The Joker. (A friend included Kevin Conroy when he was singing the praises of the voice talent and I DID love his work but I didn't watch the old cartoon that often as a kid so the nostalgia wasn't quite as strong for me.) Mark Hammil's work in this role was PERFECT. He WAS the Joker. Not the amazing and more realistic version that we saw in the Dark Knight trilogy, but the one that I want to remember, with the purple pants and the non-angry, non pee-my-pants-scary MADNESS that is best done by that character. True Chaotic Evil.
OK. Wall of text done. I wanted to love this game more than I did. I have the next two sequels in my Steam library, and I am not looking forward to hacking through them.
- Lee (8/25/2014): Great. Thanks, Shane. Your post has me looking drearily down the barrel of having just started another playthrough attempt (on the PC this time) of this game. I'm skipping all of the bonus content, puzzles, and other bullshit, and I'm finally going to log a PT of this game. It is fascinating that we shared a similar experience with this one. I'll share more of my thoughts soon...
