It is typically in my nature to write impressions or a review of a game, but Too Human is a bit of a different case. There are plenty of excellent things that the game did, but also there are plenty of areas that could’ve used some improvement, and will hopefully be worked on for the second in the trilogy (assuming the first does well enough for a sequel to come out and not have the Advent Rising thing going on).
Firstly, I’ve completed the entire single player campaign, and it was in fact a very great game. It was fun, and the story was enjoyable. Screw the scores, it delivered a fun experience very successfully. Silicon Knights did a very good job creating a unique control scheme for the title, as well as taking the monotony of constant mouse-clicking in your typical looting RPG into smooth combat. While there aren’t many particular moves available, they all become pretty necessary for survival, as well as vary the combat up. There is also so much loot in the game that it never gets tiring. It actually provides many rewards when leveling up begins to take longer, allowing your character to constantly become more and more powerful. It’s all a very rewarding experience. (more…)
There’s a series of videos posted onto YouTube called “Game OverThinker”, where a guy discusses matters of the games industry to various images. A few days ago he put out “Can it Happen to Us?“, where he compares the games industry to the comics industry. The idea is that comics originally focused on a young audience, though at some point their original readers had grown up. Around this time, Alan Moore and Frank Miller brought in Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, comics that were aimed towards the adult reader. They were violent, contained sexuality and possessed more complex stories than what you typically got out of a comic.
Since then, he states that the comics industry has taken the violence and the sexuality and pushed them into comics, aiming towards an older audience while abandoning the youth (as well as completely ignoring the complex stories aspect of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns). He looks at the comics industry as being in trouble, which it technically has been for a while. Or at the very least it hasn’t been selling as well. In the end, kids aren’t interested in comic books, and he blames it on the fact that they are primarily targeted towards an older audience.
He then ties this to the current video games industry. The most critically acclaimed games, as well as best sellers, of this day and age are most often M-rated titles made for adults and not children. The Game OverThinker states that games are, ultimately, toys and that the games industry could soon be seeing a similar end as comics have, where only the hardcore audience supports it.
In a lot of ways, the Game OverThinker is right in his comparison to the comics industry, but there is one vital area that he is wrong. Video games are not toys. I’m not going to say all of them are art, either, but they are very much an entertainment medium akin to books or film. They are certainly not toys, or at least not anymore.
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For years I’ve been told I need to read Watchmen, and when I saw the trailer earlier this summer I told myself “I need to read Watchmen”. This week I grabbed myself the graphic novel collection, read it, and loved it. It is the first piece by Alan Moore (what a hairy bastard) I’ve ever read, and it has urged me to go out and grab a copy of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as soon as I could. It’s such a great and well executed graphic novel, and there’s so much to say and discuss about it. I guess DC comics really does have more than Batman going up their sleeve, it’s just not in their mainstream super hero department.
However, since the trailer I’ve been hearing quite a bit of discussion and negative views on how well the graphic novel could transfer to film form, or people nitpicking over certain photos released (particularly seen on their Flickr account), etc. Now, I think this movie could do a fantastic job going from comic to movie, but then again, nothing has truly jaded me since I read The Lost World and then saw “David Koepp has some dinosaurs on a jungle and then a T-Rex in San Francisco and Steven Spielberg thinks it’s an awesome idea”.
To those who haven’t yet read Watchmen, note that there will be spoilers beyond this point, so I suggest you don’t read them unless you don’t care about that sort of thing.
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In case you missed it, I listed out four excellent shooters that could really go for a sequel or successor of sorts a while back. Planetside, Star Wars: Republic Commando, Aliens vs. Predator 2 and Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. This time I broaden the genres a bit and give you five games that should get sequels in some form or another. Hope you enjoy.
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So my job tends to be one where I might be busy one week, and then have nothing to do the next. To kill this time, I occasionally resort to webcomics. Now, I have tried reading through XKCD before, but the earlier stages of the comic were full of so much emotional bull and those “aww isn’t that touching/special?” sort of comics that just gave me a headache. It basically gave me a bad impression of it as a whole, and it wasn’t until I read the comic’s archives backwards that I had found the full and true entertainment value in it. I am now one of God knows how many readers because my first impressions were wrong.
I decided to try the same thing with Questionable Content. When it was new in 2003, a friend linked it to me. My impression of it was that it was Something Positive with more indy-rock and less hatred towards humanity. Oh, and there’s a total rip-off of GIR in there, too.
Yet as time went by, everyone kept on talking about how “amazing” and “hilarious” this comic was. It always blew my mind, because neither of these adjectives would be how I would’ve described it. My choice of words would have been “poorly written” and “not funny”. So I decided to give it another go, and to see if it changed. Unfortunately, that meant wading through 1200 strips, most of which honestly aren’t entertaining.
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