First Impressions: BIT.TRIP RUNNER, Super Meat Boy, Team Fortress 2 & Penny Arcade's On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness 3

Now there's a mouthful.

I've been playing a lot of games recently since I picked up a controller for PC gaming.  Oddly enough it's an Xbox 360 controller.  Odd because it's me and I don't particularly like Xbox (I personally see it as the Sega of the Console Wars Era), but their naturally USB controller and it's a Microsoft product running on a Microsoft operating system, so I thought, why not.  Anyway, onto the games.

I remember first hearing about this game from Dr. Potts when he did one of those "30 Days of Gaming" posts on facebook, of which I did one as well.  Then I saw it in one of the Humble Indie Bundles, again which Dr. Potts got for me, which I previously mentioned was how/why I got a Steam account.  Anyway, my thoughts on BIT.TRIP RUNNER.  I really like it!

I can't state that enough.  It's an amazing combination of side scrolling, rail-platformer, rhythmesque-type game.  Basically you play as Commander Video who hearkens back to a style reminiscent of Atari 2600 characters.  You run, jump, spring board, slide and kick to the sounds of 16-bit-ish style music that progresses and develops as the level progresses and as you collect speed boosts.  It's a really fun and incredibly frustrating game.  In one sitting, it took me an hour to complete a level, albeit the longest level in the game.  Then, when I showed Conklederp how hard the level was, I beat it in less than 10 minutes.  There's just something about how the music develops over the course of a level that is a real incentive to not "die" and be thrown back to the beginning of the level.  Anyway, ti's awesome.

Currrent Time Invested:  5 Hours

Super Meat Boy is another game that I received from Dr. Potts in the Humble Indie Bundle.  Again, SMB is a platformer with a penchant for completing levels as quickly as possible.  There's even a timer that counts to a hundredth-of-a-second.  That's how frantic/fast this game can be.

For the most part, I thought I was doing alright, until I watched one of the trailers and that got me a little discouraged.  I don't think I'm that "agile" and "quick" for this type of a platformer, but that's not going to keep me from playing a couple of levels every so often.  So, due to my lack to pretty-word-forming, I just recommend watching one of the teaser trailers which gives a great example of how the game plays.

In game, I've made it through only 19 seconds of this trailer.  And the first 4 seconds aren't even game play.

I do really like that whenever you pass a level, the game shows you a compilation of all your failed attempts to pass that level along with your successful attempt, all stacked up on each other.  Depending on the difficulty of the level, it could end up looking like a mass suicide cult on acid.  To sum up:  this is a really fun/infuriating game, although I don't know if I'll be "able" to finish (not "complete") it.

Current Time Invested:  70 Minutes

If you haven't already figured out, I'm pretty late when it comes to specific games, especially PC gaming.  Again exemplified by the fact that this game is 5 years old and I'm just starting to play it now; or well, late last week.  Early last week, I couldn't even tell you anything about the game except that it was an FPS, there was a Tank with a huge gun, and a Medic that always seems to be behind him.  In it's most basic form though, Team Fortress 2 is an FPS with character classes.  I think that's a really awesome concept that I haven't seen in FPS games before.  There's no campaign mode, from what I can tell anyway, only multiplayer madness, which I was a little surprised about and something I'll have to get used to.

So since this game is 5 years old, there's no sense in me going into specifics about the game that pretty much everyone seems to already know about.  Everyone except this guy!  Which is cool.  I don't feel shamed.  It's a fun game that I'll continue to play, as long as people aren't bigotty-ass-hats when it comes to shit talking.  Shit talking is fine, just don't be an annoying 10 year old bigotty-ass-hat about it.  That's all I'm asking for, just a friendly game where we can try and kill each other like civilized people.

Current Time Invested:  2 Hours

So out of the four games that I've been dipping my toes into, with Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3, I've sort of dunked my entire body in and only occasionally come up for air.  As of the writing of this, I've put in 8 hours of game play and I feel like I might be halfway through.  Maybe.  I'm not sure.

Precipice 3 continues with similar themes and styles of game play that were present in the first two installments, although there seems to be a serious lack of Fruit Fuckers in this game, but I think that was explained in the end of Precipice 2.  Either way, my reasoning for feeling that I'm at least half-way through the game is that since there are a pre-set number of enemy encounters (enemies are visible on screen), which means there's a pre-set amount of gold/gil/$ available and I just bought the highest level weapons for my party.  Maybe I'm farther along than I thought?  I hope not, because I really like this game, but since it's made by Zyboyd games (the same people who did Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII).

There's a lot of references to previous RPGs of the NES genre such as Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and there's a music cue that I swear sounds like the "Overworld" theme from Ultima III: Exodus, but maybe that's just me.

Current Time Invested:  8 Hours

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
The Parts of My Brain Fighting for Control

Also, this game comes out (again) in 11 days.
It will consume your life (again).

Exploring A Different Side

I feel it somewhere...... and it mostly seems to be this "feeling" in my chest.  Somewhere just below the region of the heart, but not the area of the heart itself.  It's like there's this force threatening to take over.

Enough of the vagueness.  I've always considered myself to be a Console Gamer and in all respective purposes, I have been and still am.  Sure, I've enjoyed playing computer games, but they were never "very" current/cutting edge/ AAA rated/level  games.  

And now, some history of my computer gaming-ness:

The first computer game I remember playing was on a color screen in kindergarten (1985-86), which must have been something special, probably something akin to an Apple IIGS.  It was some Disney point and click game, similar to Shadowgate in that it was a "point-and-click" adventure that involved Mickey Mouse and outer space.  Then in the third grade (1988-89) we had an Apple IIe computer, which is where I was introduced to "classics" such as The Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Lemonade Stand and Where in the World/USA is Carmen San Diego; these games were all on a monochrome black and green screen.  Sometime around 1991-92 (I don't remember exactly), our family got our first computer, an Apple IIe with a duel floppy drive.  [I believe we received/bought this system (as well as a dot matrix printer) from my aunt and uncle after they upgraded].  The games that came with this computer, from what I remember, were The Hobbit, some kind of Olympic game that may or may not have been Olympic Decathlon from Microsoft, some kind of graphics / drawing program that I was never able to make any sense out of and your basic word processing and spreadsheet program.  Most likely there were some other programs, but I can' remember anything else.

This computer we had until sometime around 1995 when my sister used some of her high school graduation money and bought herself an Apple Macintosh Computer; I believe it was a Macintosh 5215CD running the System 7.5 OS (To add, we had, I think, 8MB of RAM and a 500MB hard drive).  The few games that we had for this computer were Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and The Oregon Trail II.  Again, we probably had some other games at that time, but I don't recall what any of theme were.  Since it was primarily my older sister's computer (which was in my parent's room for whatever reason), I was mainly able to use it for homework assignments, and not too often then.  My letters to colleges when I was applying in 1997, I typed them out on one of our families two typewriters.  Don't get me wrong though, I'm not knocking my upbringing or our lack of serious computing power, I'm just trying to tell a story.

It must have been when I was a junior in high school (1996-97) that I was introduced to Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, with an online demo (we had a 28/8 modem, recently upgraded from a 14/4).  It was the very definition of awesome computer gaming.  Shortly after playing the demo numerous times, I went out to Target and bought the Warcraft Battle Chest, which contained Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, and Warcraft IIx: Beyond the Dark Portal.  I played the ever-living shit out of these games, although never completing either the Orc or Human campaigns in Warcraft II or IIx.  I spent most of my time using the level editor, trying to perfect how the computer controlled its characters and how to create a compelling story.

In late 1998, I bought a Compaq Presario laptop, partly because I wanted a computer that was separate from the one my sister had bought then taken with her that year to SDSU, or maybe she bought another computer for herself and left the old one with my parents; I think that's what happened.  Either way, I wanted my own computer.  Shortly after I played quite a bit with the Diablo demo although never got around to buying the game.  I did buy the PC port of Final Fantasy VII, being the avid Final Fantasy fan, it seemed only natural. Within a year, my computer began experiencing odd issues when I tried installing a DOS D&D game; it was never the same after that.

Jump ahead to around 2002 when I was introduced to Baldur's Gate from my friend Dylan; this was on a Dell something-or-other.  That's all I'm going to say on that, as anyone whose ever played will know how much it can consume your life.  I also went through the sequel Baldur's Gate II: Shadow's of Amn, although I felt it was too linear and it didn't pull me in like the first game.  Then, in 2003, I purchased Neverwinter Nights, which was about the limit of gaming that my then Dell something-or-other (but better than the previous Dell that I had bought with an ex-girlfriend) could play.  I played this quite a bit as well, purchasing the physical expansion packs and like with Warcraft II, tried making my own games/stories.

This was really it for computer gaming until more recently, as in 2006-7 when I played the Bioshock demo on my roommate's (Vorlynx) computer.  I also got through Doom III on Vorlynx's gaming computer back in 2010 before I moved up to Portland.  With my previous netbook, I mentioned in a previous post, that I'd been playing Diablo, Diablo II, Plants vs. Zombies, and Portal.  I got about halfway (maybe?) through the first Fallout game, although I got to a point where I didn't know where I had to go or what to do.  With all this in mind, I've never really considered myself a PC gamer.

Now I have a newer-ish computer (Lenovo Ideapad Z575), I have a Steam account with over 20 games, some from Dr. Potts while others I bought because they looked awesome and pretty (Dear Esther), with Dear Esther and Portal 2 being the most recently released games.  Most of the purchases have been when Steam has a weekend or daily sale with a game being 50-80% off.  

I now have a computer that can handle newer-ish games unlike my consoles, the newest of which is the Nintendo Gamecube.  I do, however, as previously stated, play the DS and PSP a lot and would count those as my primary source of gaming.  I also just bought a Nintendo 3DS last week and am loving the shit out of it

I don't really consider myself a PC gamer, although I'm starting to feel the pull.  And the pull is quite strong.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

The Grass Is Just A Different Shade Of Green