First Impressions: Dead Island Riptide (PC)

This has been a combination of my experiences playing the game so far.

Images like these:

Coupled with frequent noises like this:

The noise that I recorded is only at 80 dB whereas it can jump at random (as if this isn't random enough) to 120 dB.  This is what I have read from various sources online as I do not actually own a decibel meter. No I do not have one on my phone.

My last session lasted an hour so that I could get an idea how often the screeching static noise would last and how frequently it would grace me with its presence, so in an unscientific manner, here is what I recorded:

7:07 minutes of no noise

0:43 seconds of noise

3:12 no noise

2:29 minutes of noise

0:26 no noise

3:38 minutes of noise

1:44 no noise

6:29 minutes of noise

1:13 no noise

5:21 minutes of noise

0:35 no noise

2:27 minutes of noise

0:02 no noise

0:03 seconds of noise

12:59 (unknown as the volume was turned off).

Týr knows why, but I've presently put five hours into this game even with the sound effects volume in-game turned down to practically nil and even then, the sound (120 dB) will still poke it's ugly head out of my speakers.

Last week (as 0f when I wrote this back in December) I contacted tech support at Deep Silver relating my problem to them to see if they knew what was going on.  I was then prompted to run a diagnostic tool and email them the results so they could have a better idea as to the specs of my computer and what I was dealing with.  I felt perfectly fine doing this as I did something very similar when I applied for the Elder Scrolls Online Beta request.  Within 24 hours I received a straightforward reply which suggested that I update my drivers, which I hadn't realized that I hadn't updated in a while.  So I followed the supplied links and was able to download three of the five drivers.  The two sound card drivers I was not able to download/install  as they are integrated drivers and even knowing the manufacturer and name, I could not locate the correct driver to download.

So I went back to the game with bright polished up video drivers hoping against hope that my problems were fixed.  The game played fine for about eight minutes before the screeching wail of dying souls and banished ear drums returned to mock my computer and mine own ears.  I played for maybe another 15 minutes before ultimately giving up.

I do not know if I will be going back to Dead Island: Riptide anytime soon as it is the only game that seems to have a problem with my apparently lackluster sound card.  Even games that have come out more recently than April 2013 have operated fine without any sound issues.  Maybe after I acquire my next computer (do not know what that will be) I will come back and see if my experience improves.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental

First Impressions: Unturned (PC)

Remember that article I wrote a couple of weeks back?  You know, the one where I talk about the number of Steam games on early access that fall under the "early access massive multiplayer online open world zombie apocalypse survival first person shooter" category?  There is a new game (new as of July 7th, 2014) that was released for free that popped up on the Steam front page a few days ago, and because I have almost no willpower and 640Gigs of spare hard drive space, I figured I could spare 200Mb.

Logo courtesy of the r/unturned sub-reddit

No, Unturned does not even have a "proper" logo.  Well, it does have a kind-of-logo that comes from the Steam store page, but it is not as interesting.

See.  I told you it was not at all interesting.  The game however is fairly interesting.  It reminds me of a mix between DayZ, Proteus and Minecraft; except that I have never played Minecraft (I know, I know), but I at least know what the game looks like so I feel somewhat educated enough to make that assumption.

But let us break down these comparisons.  DayZ:  In Unturned, you start out the game completely naked and depending on the difficulty setting, you either start out empty handed, or you start out with a juice box, candy and a flashlight.  In one playthrough (I died) I did manage to find some clothes at a laundromat, then I found a gun which I was able to use a couple of times before being mauled to death by a zombie.  Zombies also tend to congregate near objects of civilization be it a lighthouse, small towns, military installations or seemingly abandoned beach blankets and lounge chairs.  If the zombies do not kill you, over time, you become hungry and thirsty and I am assuming that you will starve to death or die from dehydration.  If you jump off from a high enough distance you can break your leg or if you step in a bear trap (that you just happen to recently set yourself) you will bleed out until you are dead.  See, a lot like DayZ.  The zombies are even attracted to the sound of gunfire, which is very annoying, although I guess somewhat realistic, depending on which zombie universe you are the most attached to.

Dying is something that I have become very good at in Unturned as well, regardless of the difficulty setting.  Even on "Easy" each hit from a single zombie does 10% damage, which does not seem like a lot unless you are being chased/mauled by a horde of zombies.  That is unless you happen to find a body of water to swim out into, in which case they will simply hang out in the shoulder deep water and follow your every move.  On an upnote, you are capable of swimming indefinitely, even with those stubby blocky arms.  

So how is the game like Proteus then?  Well, if the island in Proteus were populated with buildings and zombies, then I guess that comparison would make sense.  There is music in Unturned, albeit it is not interactive in the way that the music interacts with the environment or as peaceful or as calming.  But it is there and everything is all block-like.  So there is that.  Maybe I am just reaching for straws here, but that was what I briefly thought right before I was shown that I acted better as zombie food than a naked dude safely running around an island community.

So Unturned is still in alpha-release although the developer Nelson Sexton with Smartly Dressed Games does seem to update frequently and the game is free to download and play.  There is a pay option which could be seen as a way of helping to fund the game.  The $5 one time "Permanent Gold Upgrade" gets you your name in gold in chat, extra customizing options for your character (hair, skin, facial expressions), access to special servers [extra loot drops, double experience, suit and shades (clothing options)] and a sleeker UI; if that is your type of thing.

You know, for a game and article about zombies, I sure have done a great job not including many screen shots of zombies.  If that was something you have noticed, then I leave you with the following image of my last play/die through and encounter with a group/horde of zombies shortly before they mauled me to death.

I would be lying if I were to say that I have not become just a little frustrated with not being able to often survive long enough to pick up a weapon.  The last three games I played I was killed by no less than three zombies while trying to pick up Playthrough 1) Baseball bat, 2)Crowbar and 3) what turned out to be nails.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I am only playing a single player game, which might be because I have not figured out how to log into/host my own online game.  There is plenty of time to figure these things out of course, as long as I do not get eaten in the meantime.

Good day everybody!



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Touch My World With Your Fingertips

DayZ and the Unfinished Survival Genre

The survivalist horror genre, if it is indeed a genre, seems to be a big thing right now, either that or I just happen to like the genre enough to notice games cropping up here and there to think that it is becoming "a thing" in the video game industry.  And just to clarify, I am referring to "open world survival" games that center around your character surviving out in the big bad scary post-apocalyptic world where you have to scavenge supplies in order to survive from either zombies or the more deadly, other humans.  I do not plan on touching on the forebears of the survival horror genre (Sweet Home, Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, Silent Hill), so aside from their obvious name dropping, I will not cover those games here.

The games that I do want to cover are, coincidentally enough, are all "Early Access Games" through Steam.  Before I get down to it all, I want to mention that the only game that I will be bringing up here that I have played is DayZ as it was the first game I heard about in this genre back when it was still a mod for Arma II; yes, I intentionally made a hipsteresque comment.

To date, I have only managed to put in about two hours into DayZ, thirty of those minutes I put into the game just before writing this article.  The fact that I have not put as many hours into this game has made me a little sad.  Ultimately, the game that is available to play, albeit an early alpha build of the game, is not very fun.

I understand that the game is based heavily off of a mod for another game and that the game is played on one of dozens of servers with anywhere between zero and 30-50 other people.  In a game where the goal is to survive both zombies and humans, people are going to be very competitive.  In a recent podcast of The Patch, it was "reported" that there were certain aspects that were broken, such as people server hopping after looting an area and becoming overly powerful with respect to people, like me, just signing on.  

Somehow, not normal behavior for a zombie.

To date though, I have not run across any other survivors.  In my last playthrough, I ran across a total of four zombies.  No, make that five.  The first one beat/ate the crap out of me while I tried to climb a ladder up to a roof.  I later threw myself off the roof rather than go about a slow death bleeding out.  One zombie ran through the wall of a house and became stuck in the floor.  The other three mobbed me one after the other after I came out of a house.  The first I clubbed to "death" within a couple of hits with a massive wrench I recently found; the second took way too many hits and I then thought that I had to "target" the head, but that was not the case; the third kept chasing me into the house I had recently vacated before I could manage to close the door behind me.

I must admit though that the player is warned before each playthrough that the game is not complete.  The disclaimer states that "This game is in Alpha and will be for some time.  This means you will experience bugs, unfinished features, problematic design decision, and many more things that disrupt your game experience.  We will be working with the community to fix these. . . Above all, please remember that this game is not finished, and is a work in progress."  I think I may just give DayZ some time to work things out and check back every few months to see how the development is going.  Steam even recently updated their FAQs for Early Access games (possibly due to the Earth: Year 2066 debacle) to state that "You should be aware that some teams will be unable to 'finish' their game. So you should only buy an Early Access game if you are excited about playing it in its current state."

This now brings me to the other games that I did not mention, but as I did mention, there seems to be a fair amount that fit within the DayZ model of open world survival and most importantly "not finished."

• 7 Days to Die
• Beasts of Prey
• Dead State
• The Dead Linger
• The Forest
• The Nether
• Planet Explorers
• Project Zomboid
• Rust
• Starbound
• Starforge
• The Stomping Land

A lot of these games tout their "procedural worlds," which makes me wonder if that means that the world is being constantly created while the game is being played and can be different on each playthrough or for different people, which is kind of what it is, in laymans terms.  Crafting is also a very big aspect in almost all of these games.  Be it crafting weapons, shelter, bandages or cooking food, "creating" is a big aspect here.  I cannot tell from the trailers of the above games if eating/drinking is or will be as important as it is in DayZ, where you can actually die from starvation and dehydration, but I would not be surprised if maintaining your health is another part of these games.

This looks to apparently be "a thing," an idea I thought about in the last couple of days due to Extra Credits' posting about the effects of future games from a generation who have grown up on Minecraft.  These series of games just might be the link between massive worlds where you build stuff to survive and the Left 4 Dead zombie action game.

But, they do not pay me to make assumptions.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

And I Believe In The Promised Land

Full Review: Deadlight (PC)

In-game time was 3h22m.
Play time was 7 hours, but I played about an hour of the first chapter again to show Emilie what the game was like.

I actually finished Deadlight about a month ago, shortly after posting my First Impressions, but have now finally gotten around to writing up everything that I want to say about the game.

STORY

Deadlight follows the character of Randall Wayne, a Canadian forest worker who is attempting to survive a zombie-like apocalyptic world set in 1986's Seattle, WA.  Raul Rubio, the CEO of Tequila Works, the company behind Deadlight, was quoted as saying that 1986 was specifically chosen because "if you think about it, 1986 was the year that had a lot of lunar events.  And if you put that with movies like First Blood and Day of the Dead, it's a strange mix and you can get a unique visual."  Other notable events that saw the light of day from 1986 was the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in January (which was mentioned in the game), Stephen King's IT was published, Halley's Comet is visible, the USSR launches the Mir space station, one of the reactors at Chernobyl "explodes," Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior) is released in Japan, Pan Am flight 73 is hijacked by terrorists, a 7.5 earthquake strikes El Salvador and kills 1500.  You get the idea, a lot of shit was happening which probably helped to "set the tone" for the game.

All of that aside, I didn't find the story overly original.  Randall is with a group of survivors and is searching for his missing/lost wife and daughter.  Don't get me wrong though, I was throughly engaged throughout the game, albeit a little confused at times as to how Randall knew where to go, but that is all explained by the end of the game.

The story is broken up into four chapters, the first is where most of the game mechanics and story elements are introduced.  It plays like a great traditional platformer.  The second chapter feels very different as it introduces a lot of puzzle elements that play a bit like Portal, but less fun.  This second chapter was where my fun level/interest took a bit of a dip as I was afraid that I was going to be playing this type of game the rest of the time, which I didn't want as I so much enjoyed the first chapter.  The third and forth chapters play more like the first chapter with some additional "actiony" elements as well as a lot of story elements that filled in blanks from earlier in the game.

One story element that I felt could have been done differently was Randall's journal.  When you start the game, you have Randall's journal which is a somewhat daunting 60 page book with some missing/torn out pages.  Throughout the game, you can find missing pages which don't seem to add too much in the way of critical character building information.  And the journal as a whole is, as previously stated, a bit daunting.  Each time I played, I would read a couple of pages then play the game.  I would have liked this element better if pages became readable throughout the course of the game either by letting Randall actually look at them (maybe because they were too emotionally difficult for him to read in the earlier stages) or by finding them as he finds the already missing/torn out pages.

Ultimately, I really enjoyed the story that was being told here.  While not entirely original as far as concepts go, the execution is what kept me engaged.

GAMEPLAY

As previously stated, Deadlight plays like a traditional platformer with an Xbox360 controller.  The left joystick moves you, the A button jumps, the X button attacks, and so on and so forth.  All of the actions are fairly intuitive, but the game does go through brief context sensitive moments when you first learn to use those specific buttons, such as sprinting or diving through walls while sprinting.

As is the case with most games, the one difficulty I had was the jumping from wall-to-wall maneuver, which is something that I've had problems with since the days of Super Metroid.  Something about jumping from one wall to another and pressing the control pad in the opposite direction then jumping again at the right moment has never been one of my strong suits.

Another difficulty I had at two areas in the game was timing my jumps from the ground to a fence, flipping over and jumping off, all while being shot at or avoiding falling debris.  This happened at the end of Chapter 1 and the beginning of Chapter 3.  Failing at said tasks would always lead to dying, which is something that you will have to become very comfortable with as it will happen often; not quite as often as in Altaïr's Chronicles, but it will be fairly often.

GRAPHICS
The graphics for Deadlight are what sealed my interest with the game.  A zombie apocalypse platformer set in 1986 Seattle about a man searching for his wife and daughter aren't the things that initially grab my interest senses, but these kinds of visuals:

Running through a building with Shadows approaching from the background.

Leaping from a platform over a barbed wire fence to land on an adjacent roof.

Walking through a park in downtown Seattle, WA.

The graphics are gorgeous.  Randall is backlit for the majority of the game although there are some details that peek through when he is closer to the camera/foreground.

There were a couple of instances, two come to mind, where I was unsure as to what I was supposed to be doing because I could not recognize certain elements in the environment.  In both instances, I was supposed to grab on to a piece of ceiling in order to climb to the platform above my character.  While I did realize that jumping was the key, I did not know that I, for example, had to knock something loose in order to make the platform accessible, or something similar.  In one of these events I resorted to looking on youtube to find out how to access the next platform/area.  I could probably just blame myself as needing to take a break and over thinking either the game mechanics or the puzzle itself.

SOUND & MUSIC
The music for Deadlight was composed by David García Díaz and is  very somewhat minimalistic, in that I cannot recall any memorable thematic elements.  There weren't any John Williams or Nobuo Uematsu type themes running through the game, so you're probably not going to be humming the music and you walk down the street.  Those themes are not for this kind of a game, even one set in 1986.  In another game, you might have bits of music from that era playing in the background or out of stereos or cassette decks.  The music in Deadlight is there to help set and maintain the mood of the world.  I didn't find the music obtrusive, even when the music became more dynamic when Randall was being attacked by Shadows.

The themes that are present in the game though are haunting and beautiful, but not heavy handed.  You can get a sense of both the hope that Randall will be successful in his quest and yet there is also the despair that he will find what it is that he fears most.  It's just well composed music that you might expect to find from a big budget movie studio that knows how to do a zombie apocalypse film.

FINAL THOUGHTS
In the end, I spent a total of six hours with the game although it only took me a total of three hours and twenty minutes, if you do not take into account all the dying and the three times I had to restart Chapter 3 because the game crashed (fell through the world), I turned the game off before reaching a mid-level checkpoint and my final run though.  After a single playthrough, achievement-wise, I completed 74% of the game, which I find is a testament to how much of the game I was able to complete/experience without (much) assistance.

There were only a couple of spots that I found to be difficult, but every game is going to have moments like that.  I did like that there were no bosses because that's not the kind of game this is trying to be.  I know some people will scoff at the short play time, but that's just the kind of game this is and if you also take into account that it's the first game from this studio, it's a damn fine game.

One last little tough, was that as you make your way through the game, you unlock artwork from both pre and post production.  Basically just a bunch of little tid-bits that I love about DVDs and something that I wish more video games would do for their audience.  There are even a couple documentaries that I have yet to watch, but there are a handful.  These are the little things that I really appreciate.


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental

P.S.  Sorry I do not have any really actiony shots as I was too busy playing the game and Conklederp wasn't around to act as camerawoman while I was playing.  Just go and watch the trailer that sold the game to me and you'll get the idea.  I can also promise that everything in the trailer is actual game footage (except the blurbs from various gaming sites), even the occasional bits where the action slows down while you're jumping/falling.

Full Review: Dead Island (PC)

What says "Christmas" more than being on a tropical island?  How about killing thousands (my total came out to 3,641) of zombies and their ilk?  That's where we will spend our post (albeit a day late).

50 hours, 38 minutes later, roughly, I completed the main campaign for Dead Island, playing as the fallen copper, Purna.  For my First Impressions of the game, you can read about that here.  This however will be the more traditional full-on-review.

STORY

As I mentioned in my FI, not comparing the game to the announcement trailer from 2011, the story in the game is somewhat lacking.  The game opens with your character waking up after a night of partying/binge drinking while on the fictional island of Banoi, off the coast of Australia/New Zealand/Papua New Guinea, hence all the Australian-esque accents.  When you come to, everything has gone to shit.  Zombies have very well established themselves as being a part of this island world.  It really feels like something that would have taken at least a couple of days to happen, but it appears that events happened only over night.

Throughout the game you are able to locate articles titled "Facts" although accessing them is something that I was unable to easily figure out.  You also find audio recordings left by a journalist.  At first it seems plausible that you just happen to be following the exact same path as this journalist-man, but when you find the last recording, why he is "there" doesn't make any sense.

There were some story elements told through cut-scenes that also didn't make much sense.  Thankfully this game didn't use cut-scenes to tell the story of the game (as if you were playing a movie), but were mainly used as transitions between pseudo-key events.  Even then, there were a couple of times when I felt that the cut-scenes were revealing information that I felt like I was supposed to have known earlier or would leave me confused as to what just happened.

Throughout the game, you travel between the beach side resort area, downtown Moresby, the jungle, laboratory facilities and an offshore prison.  The frequency of changing locations is nicely paced.  There's the first stage of getting used to an area, the second stage of being familiar enough that you know where you're going and the final stage of being tired of said area and wanting to go somewhere else.  Then there's the nostalgia factor when you revisit a previous area and you're happy again.  This is done very well here.

The game ended with a boss fight that also didn't make much sense.  It felt like it was tagged on at the end to give the game a Resident Evil feel to the end after the game was finished and some executive/producer said, "There's no boss fight?  Throw in a monster that we haven't really seen yet and have it be that guy.  Now rewrite that one part in the game so it makes sense why he's a bad guy, ignoring the 90% of the game up to that point."

GAMEPLAY

As previously stated, the controls took me a little bit to get used to, having just come from playing Left 4 Dead 2 and being familiar with that control setup.  The keyboard layout was "relayouted" and axis' were inverted and all was right as rain after an hour or so.

Now, I'm sure that somewhere online there are FAQs about how to properly build your character.  Yes, build.  Dead Island is an FPS with RPG skill tree elements.  As you kill zombies (and the occasional human with a gun), you gain experience points and level up.  When you level up you have three skill trees that focus on either special attacks,  or increasing HP, types of loot drops and increasing the integrity of weapon customization.

I already stated that I felt that certain aspects of Dead Island felt like it played like an online game, a claim which I am able to make not having played m/any online games.  But the fact that there were times when I would get mauled by one or two zombies (walkers, infected) and die very quickly, only to respawn seven seconds later.  I stand by my assertion that death wasn't something so much as something to be feared as it was something that was a great inconvenience.   During the final boss battle, I stopped caring about using my health packs as I knew that I could get a couple shots in with the shotgun and do a bit of damage before I died and especially since the boss did not regain any noticeable amount of health whenever I respawned.  I was basically an immortal god who just lost consciousness frequently.

GRAPHICS

I had no issues with the graphics.  There were two cut-scenes that skipped a bit, but nothing too distracting.  Overall, the game looked really good.  I wasn't going in expecting life-like semblances of limbs strewn about the place.

Regarding the zombies and their types, with the exception of the Butchers and Tanks, I felt that there was enough variation in who I was killing.  I liked that I didn't feel like I was killing the same five zombies over and over.  Also, depending on which area you were in, the clothing changed, although sometimes heads were reused, but that didn't bother me.

SOUND & MUSIC

I was very pleased with both the music and the sound effects used in the game.  Specific zombie growls were easily recognizable and when wearing headphones, it was a lot easier to tell from which direction the attacks were going to come from.  There was one particular sound effect that was never explained, which I kind of like, but at the same time, I wish that I knew what was going on.  Throughout the game (I think it was present in all areas) there was the sound as if a zombie (possibly a Thug) was being broadcast over a loudspeaker, possibly after having it's legs cut off.  I found that this sound was occasionally unnerving especially while trying avoid large groups of zombies.

FINAL THOUGHTS
I think it is safe to say that I enjoyed Dead Island as I spent 50 hours playing the game.  There were times when I got frustrated with the frequency of dying and respawning seven seconds later and felt as if I should be playing with other people online, combined with the 164 times I died, that works out to dying every 18 minutes.  At times, the game really felt like it was a mash-up of Skyrim and Left 4 Dead 2, which are two games that I really love playing and Dead Island did both of those games successfully, and while not a perfect combination of both games, it certainly achieved its goal, despite the weak ending.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Destination Chaos

Full Review: Organ Trail - Directors Cut (PC)

First off, I'm going to have to try very hard not to inundate this post with pictures every other paragraph, but I will be putting up a handful of pictures, because it'll help illustrate some stuff.  And now, a picture of a station wagon fording a mob of zombies:

Professional Driver on a Closed Course: Do Not Try This at Home.

Organ Trail - Director's Cut is an awesome game and I would say "primarily if you were alive in the 80's and played Oregon Trail on an old black and green computer", but this game is so much fun that it probably doesn't matter which decade you hit puberty in, it's a really fun game.  Unless you only like games that have cutting edge graphics, spoken dialogue and requires the use of at least ten keyboard buttons or a gaming controller.  If you're one of those people, keep reading and send me your rants care of "I don't."

That being said, here's another picture, this one of your station wagon at the beginning of the trip:

It's not a spoiler if it happens in the prologue.

If you don't know the "dysentery" reference, then you truly haven't lived.  Or had dysentery, which I thankfully haven't as it doesn't sound all that fun.

So Organ Trail - Director's Cut, a game from The Men Who Wear Many Hats is a brilliant parody of the Oregon Trail computer game  by MECC, specifically the version that came out in 1985 for the Apple II.  Everything from bringing along supplies that fit in with a zombie apocalypse road trip (fuel, food, ammo, car parts, et cetera) have been included to mimic the original supplies (oxen, food, ammo, wagon parts, et cetera).  The story for the game is pretty simple too, if you haven't already figured it out.  Zombie apocalypse throughout the United States.  You hear that there's a "Safe Haven" somewhere on the west coast (and the location is about where Oregon City is actually located).

Upon my first playthrough, the biggest problem I has was how to shoot the gun.  I should also mention that the controls for the game are somewhat simple, despite the contradiction with the previous sentence.  Most of the game is played with the mouse, pointing and clicking.  During scavenging excursions, you move around with the WASD keys although the game allows to be played with only the mouse, but I've refrained as I like the handling of the WASD keys.  The firing of the gun, again, is where I had the most difficulty at first.  The game tells you that when you want to shoot, you have to "pull back to aim - release to shoot," which itself sounds pretty intuitive, but I couldn't get the hang of it at first.  Here's a handy picture with notation on how shooting works:

It's a quick diagram, not an instructional diagram from the NRA.

So you have to click in front of you and pull back until the arrow is behind your character.  You then aim as if you were steering a boat, in that left is right and right is left.  It's like you're holding the butt of the gun and aiming that way instead of moving the barrel.  On my second playthrough though, I felt a lot more comfortable with aiming and shooting.  So much so that I felt I could go up against Medium level of zombie activity and hold my own.  The second time I was able to make it as far as Safe Haven although I died in the final encounter/challenge (no spoilers).

The entire game took me about two hours from start to finish, although a large part of that for me was spent on the side of the road waiting for someone to show up and trade me anything I had for some fuel, which I had run out of.  No, I wasn't an idiot, but there were some random encounters where I lost fuel, such as "A fuel can went missing" or something along those lines.  And for random encounters, there are all sorts to be had.  From coming across tombstones along the side of the road, helping (or not) stranded survivors or people farting in the car.  

There are also plenty of pop culture references to various zombie fare media.  From Evil Dead, Left 4 Dead, Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead (only to name a quick few), the game has a great sense of humor and knows their audience.  And you may have also noticed in the farting picture that there's the Twitter logo in the upper right hand corner.  Anytime during the game, you can tweet (from your own Twitter account) what is happening.  I found this to be a smart marketing strategy, especially over this last weekend at PAX East, of which Organ Trail was part of the PAX10, a group of independently developed games picked by Penny-Arcade to showcase during the expo.  It'll be interesting to see how long tweets from the game will be made within the next year.

I feel like I can't do a review of a game without talking about the music, which in Organ Trail was composed by Ben Crossbones.  The music for the most part is what you would expect to hear from a mock up of a 1985 computer game.  I say "for the most part" because the songs start off with standard chip-tunes style instrumentation (bleeps, tones and static sounds) and after about a minute, a more MIDI sounding bass and drums will come in, if anything to remind you that you are not in fact, living in 1985, but 28 years in the future.  Yes, it's been that long.

If you haven't guessed already by now, I highly recommend purchasing this game.  If you are in lack of funds, you can always just visit The Men Who Wear Many Hats' website where you can play a free flash version of the game.  The controls and some of the place/location cards are missing and the set up is all keyboard based, but the heart of the game is still there.  Plus it's free so it's kind of hard to gripe about a free version of a great game.  And while you're there, you can also check out some of the other games that TMWWMH have come out with over the years.

Have at.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

We'll Be Together Again

Or maybe not. . .