Halloween Challenge 2012 Part 2

Halfway through this and this time with a lot less zombie based games! One still managed to get through however. Again, I've got to reiterate that overall this challenge was a bit of a let down. Most of these games ended up disappointing me, in Part 2 of my thoughts on these games I kind of knew I wouldn't really like these titles quite as much, with one big exception. I don't know what else to say to preface this, so I suppose I'll dive right in.

Atom Zombie Smasher (PCDL)

I'm going to rant a bit about the Humble Bundle and the others that followed afterwards for about a paragraph, please bear with me. I got suckered. After the first Humble Bundle I was star struck and pretty much just bought all of the indie bundles that came out. If you check out my backloggery you'll see just that. It's sad because really I didn't want a lot of these games. Or in some cases just wanted one of them and got a lot of other games. So now my steam client is flooded with little indie titles I'd never heard of and have no interest in. And in some cases have no interest in them after playing them. Enter Atom Zombie Smasher.

I understand the basic appeal of this game, but it just isn't there for me. You get an overhead view of a city, zombies are out and they're hunting the few humans left. You're tasked with saving as many people as possible with a helicopter. It's a strategy game with a bit of tower defense thrown in. I suck at tower defense games. On normal difficulty I failed almost immediately. Except failure isn't met with a game over, but with getting slowly more and more crippled until winning is just not possible. I had to set the game to it's easiest settings to get anywhere in this game.

It felt as though I was missing something, but I can't really think of what it might have been. Aside from just not understanding a good winning strategy. Regardless, it's just not for me. It's an interesting idea, but I can't recommend it without warning you to check out a video or a demo, if one exists. I commend what it tries to do, but concede I'm just not the right audience for it.

The Binding of Isaac: Halloween Update (Steam)

Every once in a while I hear about a game and immediately I know that it was made for me. This is one of those games. From the creator's of Super Meat Boy came a Zelda influenced, roguelike inspired game with some basic shooter elements that twisted a story from the bible? Yes. Please. When it finally came out it was amazing. Aside from the fact that it was developed in flash and there is a myriad of, mostly minor, problems stemming from that.

This is another game that is kind of iffy counting it towards unbeaten games, as I'd played the main game to death. And in fact most of the other update and expansions material. Yet I never had fought or beaten Satan who is possibly the most fitting final boss for a Halloween based gameathon.

I really don't know how to express my love for this game. It plays so well, you can run around a room dodging enemy attacks while hitting them with your own. Everything is randomly generated, and you don't get to continue after dying, instead having to start another "run". These are the roguelike inspired bits, and they work here so well. Some people might get frustrated that they lose their characters, but the game is built around this idea. The game is short, though each update added a bit more content after the final boss but is still beaten in a pretty short amount of time. Shorter still if you die prematurely.

It's all about the discovery of items and what they do and the amazing badass feeling of getting through a room crowded with enemies undamaged. It's such a rewarding experience. After you beat the main game's boss you have the option to ascend to heaven or to descend to hell, or Sheol. The latter is the path you take to face Satan, obviously. It ups the difficulty a bit with more ferocious monsters to face and the Lucifer is no slouch as a boss. It's more of Isaac, one of my favorite games, so of course I'm going to love and wholeheartedly recommend this. The update is free so long as you have a copy of the game which is dirt cheap. It's also being remade, which also looks really cool.

A quick word of warning though, this game doesn't pull any punches and the easily offended might want to steer clear. But if you can manage to turn that part of your brain off (or are a normal person and don't freak out over nothing) and just enjoy the game for what it is there's an amazing experience awaiting you.

F.E.A.R. (Steam)

You got to understand, FPS games just aren't my thing really. I can get into them, enjoy them and beat them. But when it comes down to it I'll take an RPG or a Platformer over them any day. That being said this game is interesting. It tries to do some scary stuff but that ultimately fails, sorry but jump scares just aren't a legitimate form of horror. And honestly the whole game world changes when the horror aspects come in to play, and anyone paying attention will quickly realize there is little to no danger in these parts. I found myself feeling ironically relaxed during these sequences knowing that at least I won't get attacked.

Gameplay wise this one is solid. It's nothing amazing, but it works well and the kick animation was incredibly satisfying. In some of the early levels I went around just kicking everyone to death. The game itself is pretty standard FPS affair aside from the aforementioned horror bits. You run around some generic looking business suites, you crawl through vents, you shoot bad guys, you turn valves to access some new path, etc. There was one feature that I think was meant to be pretty heavily utilized, but I didn't use it often aside from some of the bosses. Basically you could enter a bullet-time mode where everything slows down to improve your reaction speed and hit fast enemies or dodge bullets. I don't know about when this came out, but it's been done to death now. It's not a bad feature, but it's certainly nothing praise worthy.

Extraction Point/Perseus Mandate (Steam)
Here's the last of my phoned-in entries. I counted both of these as separate games as steam divides them up separately. I didn't mention the plot at all above, but I really don't remember it. You work for some anti-supernatural police squad who's charged with the clean up of some some experiments that led to either super powered psychic soldiers, or pissing off super powered psychic soldiers. The details a bit fuzzy to me, which is definitely a downside to a story driven FPS. The idea was interesting, but the execution was off. Your buddies will radio you sometimes and reveal some plot or tell you why you need to go somewhere, or alternatively the main bad guy well dunk you into the "horror" segments and say some cryptic shit to get a rise out of the character. Hallucinating in games is awesome, but this one was just lacking that oomph.

These control just like F.E.A.R. but they're a lot worse than the main game. Firstly the plots are weak, so weak that the developers of F.E.A.R.'s sequel disregard them entirely. Secondly they feel like long enemy kill fests. I just felt frustrated and annoying going through these and forced myself through it more than genuinely wanting to see either what happened, or to experience the fights.

I do recommend F.E.A.R. but the expansions are wholly unnecessary. And that's a pretty light recommendation. Are you bored and already own a copy of the game? Yeah, pop it in. Is it on sale? You might want to pick it up. Don't go out of your way for this one. I haven't played the sequels, but I don't think they'd be a super drastic improvement.

Haunt (Kinect)

For some reason this game was free at some point and since I bought a Kinect on a whim to play through Gunstringer and Child of Eden at some point I decided to download it. Most of my memories of this game come from the struggle to beat it before the end of the night, it even froze at one point. I managed to beat it in time though. There are a few things you have to take into consideration about this game first. I live in the second story in an apartment so jumping was extra annoying, faking a jump is kind of awkward. Plus dodging didn't always register due to the cramped play space. Walking was pretty annoying. Basically all my major grievances with this game stem from the Kinect. Which a piece of technology that just isn't ready yet.

As for Haunt it wasn't half bad. It comes across almost like something Disney would put together. This definitely won't scare you or haunt you for days to come, but it's not a bad looking style. The gameplay is pretty straight forward. You work your way through three levels interacting with various objects and trying to solve pretty straight forward puzzles. Nothing mind blowing, and for a free game it kind of shows off what the Kinect can do.

Honestly though, the Kinect is just awful. I don't get why game companies don't utilize controllers mixed with Kinect functionality more often. Walking in this game has you literally walking in place, and you wind up just kind of flailing your arms around to interact with things. Sometimes ghosts show up and you basically just have to dodge, duck or jump out of the way of their attacks and wait until you can hit them to beat them. Again, all this could easily be done with a controller and could be made a lot more enjoyable. There was one part of a puzzle where the game just didn't register my attempts to activate a switch, this shouldn't happen.

I can't really recommend this game at all, but I don't condemn it either. I haven't played enough Kinect games to say if this is one of the best showings of it's functionality, but it works well most of the time. It was kind of perfect really. To be rushing to finish this not very good game as the cherry on top of my Halloween of disappointments.

Experiencing different games and feeling compelled to play games made up for my disappointment with some of the games I played, so it was a worth while endeavor overall. Next year I'll hopefully find a better selection of games to play to celebrate the Halloween season. In the mean time though I'm trying to think of some other theme to base a challenge around, it really helps to unclog the backlog.