Tag: game analysis

Remember Me

27 April 2014 /

In the last few months I’ve picked up a fair few games for myself, as well as being given some. I’ve only just started catching up on this backlog, and the first one  I started with was Capcom’s Remember Me.

Remember Me is set in Neo-Paris, year  2084. In this timeline, memories can be stored digitally, medically traded and sold. This commodification led to the introduction of  Memory Hunters, elite agents who can steal memories; Memorize, a corporation using memory hunters to create a 1984-style surveillance state; and Errorists, a rebel alliance formed to take down Memorize.

RM is described as an action-adventure game, though in play it turns out to be a bit of everything- there’s combat, puzzles, stealth, collectibles, hacking, acrobatics, and even more combat.

The combat makes it very easy to see its a Capcom game, and its more involving than a typical action-adventure game- combos are built from unlocked special abilities (Pressens), meaning you can choose how you build your combos, speccing for increased damage, the ability to cooldown special abilities more quickly, or to regenerate health. However, even though you choose what abilities the combos have, what buttons are used cannot be changed- and seeing as the two combos given for the majority of the game are X-X-X and Y-X-Y-X-Y, actually using them is still quite repetitive.  A very nice touch during combat  is the background music, which turns from ambient noise to techno-ish when enemies appear, and also is at least partly linked to your fighting performance, getting louder when you land the last hit of a combo.

Continue reading

The Wolf Among Us

19 February 2014 /

Last month I posted about my liking for cel-shading. I already said I would play The Wolf Among Us because of that. However, I’ve also found two other very good reasons to play it.

In terms of game settings and aesthetics, I really like cel-shaded looks, cyberpunk looks, and Film Noir settings. The Wolf Among Us manages to wrap all of those things up into one distinctively-styled game, without it feeling like a mess or being over the top.

Continue reading

Mass Effect 3, Part 2

24 January 2014 /

As much as I’ve praised Mass Effect 3, one important thing I should mention about my experience with it is my experience with glitches. I have a tendency to cause bugs and glitches in most games I’m playing, even when other people playing don’t experience these bugs. When playing ME3, this ability is increased to weird levels. (It’s because of this game that my Xbox tagline is now “the accidental glitcher”). So I couldn’t really write about ME3 without explaining some of the strange things that have happened to me while playing it.

1)     One minor glitch is an unfortunate consequence of a useful part of gameplay.  Some multiplayer classes have stimpacks or temporary skill boosts that are accompanied by visual effects. For example, human Soldiers have Adrenaline Rush, which increases rate of weapon fire and damage – when this is active everything is brighter and colours are more saturated. Krogan characters have Rage mode, which tints the screen red to show their increased attack damage.

While these effects add a visual extra to the game, they are often inconsistent- sometimes the skill can be active without the visual effect, and other times the visual effect will remain even when the power isn’t active. Normally, these don’t cause too much bother: the only one of these that I’ve found annoying is the visual glitch caused by some of my favourite characters, the Volus species. Voluses (Volii?) excel in a pure support role, relying on their Shield Boost ability to refill their own shields and those of  nearby fireteam members. The “Volus glitch” comes from using this ability just as you’re about to die. At very low health the screen goes dark red as a warning, but using Shield Boost to recover your health often locks the screen onto this colour, which can only be fixed by losing health and shields again. This means it’s a lot more difficult to see what’s going on, which has caused me to die unnecessarily before.

Continue reading