I played a game and I have an opinion.
| Title | Fallout 4 |
| Developer | Bethesda |
| Type | RPG |
| Platform(s) | XBox One, PS4, PC (reviewed on XBox) |
| Kelly Score ™ |
95 / 100 |
Fallout 4 has been out for over eight months now. Even for a procrastinator like myself, that is more than enough time to formulate an opinion. So now I’ll endeavour to document my thoughts on Bethesda’s latest open-world post apocalyptic role playing game
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| Title | Star Wars: the Old Republic |
| Developer | Bioware |
| Type | Massively Multi-player RPG |
| Platform(s) | PC |
| Kelly Score ™ | 95 / 100 |
Massively multi-player role playing games have, with very few exceptions, a standard motif. You create a character, complete a few “orientation” or introductory quests, and are then left to your own devices. Thousands of boring and repetitive quests combine with your character having complete lack of any perceivable impact or even place within the background story to encourage a kind of hamster like behaviour. You run in your little questing “wheel”, seeking levels or gear to help you continue to run in that wheel. Your long term goal: running in the wheel long enough and fast enough to eventually jump to the big, shiny end game hamster wheel of raid content. Raiding is where you get to spend all of your time staring at a wall, or the back end of some other person’s character, for hours on end as you beat some giant monster to get more shiny gear so you can do the next bigger raid. Most people don’t even read the story associated with each quest, and in many MMOGs that is a blessing: the stories are vanishingly thin and comically trivial. They have to be, since your character has no impact on the world whatsoever.
Star Wars: the Old Republic (SWtOR) breaks out of that motif. It plays more like a single player RPG, where your character is the hero of his or her own story. Other players and “group” dungeons (flash points, operations, and Heroics in SWtOR parlance) certainly exist, but the personal story your character is playing through is paramount. It is a refreshing and welcome change, even though the basic mechanics of the game are otherwise pretty traditional.
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| Title | The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim |
| Developer | Bethesda |
| Type | RPG |
| Platform(s) | XBox 360, PC (reviewed on XBox) |
| Kelly Score ™ | 98 / 100 |
I have played a few games in the Elder Scrolls series, and each successive one seems to be a little bit better- at least in my opinion. I played Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and now Skyrim. And, with a few caveats, Skyrim is basically the best computer RPG I’ve played to date.
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| Title | Risen |
| Developer | Piranha Bytes |
| Type | RPG |
| Platform(s) | XBox 360, PC (reviewed on PC) |
| Kelly Score ™ | 75 / 100 |
Risen is an old-school role playing game that does very little to make itself appealing to the more “casual” gamer. In terms of overall characteristics, Risen is similar to games like Oblivion- but whereas Oblivion tries to make it easy to progress and overcome your mistakes, Risen makes no such allowances. Interestingly enough, although I generally like “easier” games, I’m actually really enjoying Risen… on the PC. From what I’ve seen and heard, the XBox version should be avoided.
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| Title | Bayonetta |
| Developer | Platinum Games |
| Type | Action/Fighting |
| Platform(s) | XBox360, PS3 |
| Kelly Score ™ | 40 / 100 |
Action games are a genre that I really didn’t understand until I played Bayonetta. I could therefore say that the $60 I spent on this game was educational: I have been taught that I should not buy this kind of game. The kindest things I can really say about Bayonetta from my perspective are that the graphics are impressive, and the main character has one of the finest digital rumps in computer history.
If you generally agree with everything I say, you have no need to read further.
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Bayonetta: Everything that is wrong with this type of gameRead More »
| Title | Wet |
| Developer | Artificial Mind and Movement (published by Bethesda) |
| Type | Action / Shooter |
| Platform(s) | XBox 360, Playstation 3 |
| Kelly Score ™ | 55 / 100 |
The title “Wet” supposedly refers to the term “wetwork”, a word commonly attributed to cold-war era secret agencies and referring to assignments involving killing so intense that the workers hands become literally wet with blood. The game definitely has death and blood galore, with kill counts in the hundreds per chapter as the game’s female protagonist, Rubi Malone, slices, jumps, and shoots her way through room after room of “bad people”.
I’m all for a bit of mindless violence in my games, particularly when the main character is a sexy but psychopathic woman, but somewhere along the line Wet becomes… boring, and worse: irritating. It is telling that I had to force myself to finish the game- I wanted to call it quits several times after the midway point of the twelve to fourteen hours of playtime I got for my money. This is unfortunate, as there are a number of good ideas in Wet- sadly, it feels a bit like there were one or two hours of good ideas cut and pasted a dozen times to fill out the game.
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There was a series of games I played many years ago. In these games, I was injected into a world where giant robotic machines cut lumbering, awe-inspiring paths of destruction through cities and each other. That was the universe of BattleTech and the MechWarrior game series, and it was good.
Unfortunately, the MechWarrior series came to an end some years ago- the last “real” MechWarrior game was MechWarrior 4, which came out in the 2002 timeframe. The good news: a new MechWarrior game is coming sometime in the next couple of years. And if the video (see below) is any indication, the makers of this “reboot” understand at least a little about what made MechWarrior fun.
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| Title | Fallout 3 |
| Developer | Bethesda |
| Type | Action RPG |
| Platform(s) | Xbox 360, PC, PS3 |
| Kelly Score ™ | 95 / 100 |
Fallout 3 is the third chapter to the Fallout series of games, brought to life by Bethesda rather than the original developers Black Isle/Interplay which went bankrupt before they could release their version of this episode. Bethesda started over from scratch, using the same underlying engine as was used in Oblivion, the most recent episode of the Elder Scroll series.
It is important to note that I have never played any of the previous games in the Fallout series. Set in a post-apocalyptic world with a rather unique blend of idealized American 1950’s “better dead then red” culture and high-technology/cyberpunk, Fallout’s strengths have always been providing players with a massive “sandbox” game world combined with a somewhat twisted sense of dark humour.
The fans of the original episodes have been rather critical of Fallout 3- it is, after all, a quite different game. I have played the game without any preconceptions, and can personally say that it is an exceptionally enjoyable and deep experience. It may not be the same game as the older entries in the series, but it stands on its own as a worthy adventure in its own right.
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| Title | Spore |
| Developer | Maxis/Electronic Arts |
| Type | Strategy |
| Platform(s) | Mac, PC |
| Kelly Score ™ | 50 / 100 game; 85 / 100 toy |
Spore is the new creation by game “God” Will Wright, the genius behind the SimCity and The Sims. The man is recognized as a computer gaming visionary, and Spore is considered by many to be his crowning achievement: Will himself called it “Sim Everything”.
I wanted to like Spore, I really did. I tried to avoid the hoopla associated with it so I wouldn’t build up a lot of expectations. Anticipation has been building for years now, so that avoidance was challenging. Perhaps in part my success was helped by the fact that I’m not really that huge of a fan of either of Will’s previous franchises, SimCity or The Sims. I enjoyed SimCity in a couple of incarnations, but would never likely rate it above a 7 out of 10 on my gaming goodness scale. I guess I prefer games with some kind of objective rather than more open ended simulators. And Spore continued my pattern of not really liking Will Wright’s games that much… without even the redeeming “simulator” qualities I’d found in SimCity. But I can certainly perceive what attracts others to these games, and thus my double-barreled score for Spore. One score as a game, and another score as, for want of a better word, a toy.
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| Title | Age of Conan |
| Developer | Funcom |
| Type | MMOG |
| Platform(s) | Windows PC |
| Kelly Score ™ | 95 / 100 |
I’ve been playing massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) more or less since the genre got its name: about 1996. In that time I’ve played at least ten different games of this type: I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the horrendous. And I’m aware that MMOGs face a tremendous challenge beyond just the initial appeal of the first few weeks of play: they have to somehow capture and hold the players attention for years. And when those years have passed, it is nearly invariable that even the best game will end up being remembered by its flaws and disappointments rather than its strengths.
Thus it is that any review of a MMOG is purely a “point in time” perspective. And at this point in time, after about two weeks of play, I can say that Age of Conan is a brilliant game. I can not remember a MMOG that, from day one of its launch, performed so well or impressed me so much.
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