Here’s a few of the reasons why I’m excited by Maschine Zeit, and you should be too.
Good Scary Writing & Scary Good Writing
The best horror stories do not rely on jump-out in-your-face scares. They don’t base themselves entirely on bloodshed or gore. The effective use of stillness and partially illumination of the unknown cause for a much more tense and compelling atmosphere than the tactics employed by your local haunted house attraction. Maschine Zeit is definitely in the “stillness of the unknown” category. The writing and pacing sets the stage for the kind of flashlight-gripping terror that used to define the kind of storytelling experiences that would have Hitchcock nodding in quiet approval as the rest of the audience screamed bloody murder.
Characters That Are People, Not Just Stats
The character creation system, which I’ve tested a couple of times, has a flow to it that puts the personality of the character front and center rather than putting it behind a wall of statistics. While the stats are certainly there, Maschine Zeit again sets itself apart by actively encouraging players to min-max their characters. Instead of having player aim at being good at everything, this system ensures that the character can accomplish certain tasks with dramatic flair and apparent ease while other characters take on other roles. The shy, intelligent James Sunderland type might be good at figuring out puzzles but he’s not going to be as accurate with a pulse rifle as Duane Hicks. It might seem a bit counter-intuitive at first to players of other tabletop RPGs, but it fits right in with the atmosphere of the game and gets you into your character a bit more adroitly than sitting at a table rolling dice over and over again, praying to Gygax for the best stats possible.
An Apocalypse We Can Believe In
One of the best things that Maschine Zeit has going for it is the way its world is grounded in reality. Even as things begin to turn towards the surreal and supernatural, there’s a tone of voice that has the player thinking “Yeah, that could totally happen.” This grounding makes the events over the course of the game that much more visceral for the players. Combined with effective use of the game’s narrative structure and characters that feel more like real people than fantastical archetypes, this realistic foundation of Maschine Zeit’s world and its stories make for a unique and immersive tabletop experience that can be very difficult to find.
But find it you can, thanks to the genius minds behind Machine Age Productions. There are plans for us to play through a scenario tonight, and tomorrow might find me doing a postmortem on both how the game plays and how the characters fare.
Unless of course all y’all would rather I talk about Dan Brown or something.
I mentioned I’m playing Mass Effect again. In addition to highlighting just how uninteresting my hobbies can be, the experience allows me to more finely compare and contrast certain aspects of both games. The combat is the first and most likely target for such a comparison, as it’s one of the biggest problems people have with the second game outside of the scanning mechanic and the lack of exposed skin during the “romantic interludes.”
Combat in the first Mass Effect is, like the inventory system, ripe territory for micromanagement. Every character has a variety of powers that are mostly on separate cooldown periods. To effectively survive combat encounters with minimal expenditure of medi-gel or grenades, especially on higher difficulty levels, using the radial menu to pause the game, look around and target party members’ powers on specific enemies is every bit as important as making sure your guns have the right load-out. It’s a combat system that rewards preparation and planning. If you know there will be a ton of geth in a particular hotspot, load up on anti-synthetic ammo and be sure to have at least one tech specialist in your party to ruin the geth’s day by destroying their shields. Areas of rachni, thorian creepers or other organic hazards will require different ammo and a wider array of powers. And if you want a real challenge, try fighting without biotics. The ability to take an assailant off the ground with your brain or slam them against the wall as a killing blow are things you’re likely to miss when a geth Destroyer is coming straight for you.
Mass Effect 2‘s combat is a bit more straight-forward and faster paced, as I’ve mentioned. Like other third-person shooters, most notably Gears of War, just about every where you go in the Terminus Systems you’ll find plenty of chest-high walls. You survived a lot longer in the first game when shooting from cover, but you were also spending half your time in the radial menu. The sequel seems to want to limit the amount of power-picking, so while you do have more places to map powers (a definite improvement), you have fewer powers from which to choose. Shepard can have up to six, seven if you count Unity, while members of your party won’t ever have more than three. Sure, there’s less to keep track of, meaning you’ll be moving through combat a bit more rapidly and it adds to the overall action-oriented feel of the game. But I can’t help but feel that something’s been lost.
I’m not saying one method of combat is superior to the other. They both work, they’re both fun and neither feels completely out of place. To be honest, the only major difference is that combat in the first feels more like an RPG while the second is more shooter-oriented. Yahtzee accurately points out that gameplay is still ‘flailing about’ trying to strike the right balance, and the first two games lean just a bit too much in one direction or another. Again, this is not a complaint, merely an observation. I hope that BioWare keeps trying to find that balance for Mass Effect 3 and doesn’t turn it into Gears of War: Spectre Edition.
The follow contains mostly my personal opinion and can probably be disregarded.
The game Halo and I have something of a history.
I grew up with shooters in one hand and space flight sims & strategy games in the other. When I was fed up with the politicing of my AI opponents in Master of Orion and had rescued humanity from the clutches of the Kilrathi in Wing Commander, I fired up Wolfenstein 3-D or Doom. Now, neither of those games had anything approaching a complex narrative – “here are some Nazis/demons, go shoot them in the face” about sums it up – but this was long before motion capture, voice acting and model rendering had gotten to the point that video games could call their experiences “cinematic” with a straight face.
When I first played Halo, I liked it. I liked its control schemes, I liked its portrayal of the conflict between humanity and the Covenant, I liked the mystery behind the Halo itself, and I liked Cortana. Spunky AIs always appeal to me. Note that I’m talking about the single-player campaign, here. I did play multiplayer with a few friends, and was mostly reminded of deathmatches in Doom. I didn’t really see anything new other than the initial gee-whiz of the graphics. Still it was fun and hearkened back to simpler days when demons roared at me from within brownish spikey ghouls that seem laughably rendered by today’s standards. Even after a couple years, when I found out a place I was working was maintaining its own Halo server, I jumped in. Unfortunately, my boss never showed up – that guy needed a sticky grenade on his backside something fierce.
I played Halo 2 once, just to try and get the story. And while there were a couple “HOLY SHIT!” moments during the cutscenes, the gameplay felt vastly unchanged. Characters returned but really didn’t grow at all. It wasn’t necessarily bad by any means, it just felt like the story was beginning to take a backseat to the multiplayer. Again, it was fun to play split-screen with a couple of friends. But that was about the extent of my experience, and by that point, Half-Life 2 had come along and, in my opinion, completely blown Halo 2 out of the water.
I can’t come out and give a solid opinion on the Halo series as a whole, as I haven’t played Halo 3 or ODST. In terms of story and gameplay I have no idea how they stack up. They remain in shrink-wrap on the local GameStop’s shelf and I admit to a somewhat passing interest, since I do find myself curious as to the fate of Cortana and the experience of being an average Joe in generic space armor fighting the Covenant, instead of being a genetically engineered hyper-masculine superman in generic space armor fighting the Covenant.
Two things bug me about the Halo series that have nothing to do with the games. One is the parade of copies that have come in the wake of the franchise. Gears of War, Haze, Turok, and Too Human, just to name a few, all feature characters very similar to Master Chief: gruffly voiced manly men wearing futuristic (if not powered) armor, grimly facing down hordes of gruesome creatures, handfuls of hot heterosexual automatic fire in their grip. For the most part, though, I can ignore these things. I played a little bit of Gears of War 2 and immediately found myself wishing to play a different shooter with a more interesting premise, character or setting – like Painkiller, or BioShock, or Half-Life, or Mass Effect.*
But the advertisements for and attitude towards each new installment of Halo would have you believe that you will not have an experience even remotely resembling what you get out of that game. And that’s the other thing that really bothers me about the franchise. Call me out for being a dull gutless effeminate story-loving dweeb if you must, but the screaming cursing teabagging fist-bumping Beast-drinking backwards-baseball-cap-wearing hair-frosting (yet completely straight) core demographic of Halo’s multiplayer really turns me off of the game. I feel like I’m missing a point somewhere. Halo, to me, is a sci-fi shooter with limited weapons capacity, lots of guys in generic space armor and a couple of interesting weapons and maps. What’s the big deal? The story’s half-decent, the physics are all right, the weapons all feel very sci-fi and the vehicle sections are well done. Again, I’m only talking about the first two games here, so maybe the third one or ODST will suddenly start delivering Battlestar Galactica-scale narratives or reveal that Master Chief was a disenfranchised orphan who was driven into the Spartan program and defied the nay-sayers who said he’d never amount to anything by becoming the savior of humankind many times over. Or maybe both he and the story will remain on the bland side of things. I can’t say either way.
It sort of reminds me of a wine called Yellow Tail.
Yellow Tail is a mass-produced wine specifically designed to be sold at a reduced cost and be more palatable to most pedestrian drinkers than those who have discovered a particular pinot or cabarnet that they enjoy. I’ve tried Yellow Tail, and while it’s drinkable, it isn’t as good as wine from a vineyard. The advertisements for it, on the other hand, would have you believe that Yellow Tail is the sort of wine that tastes delicious, leaves you plenty of money for expensive aperitifs and will probably get you laid. Based on this scheme, Yellow Tail rakes in the cash, much like Halo does.
The original Halo did its shooting very well, had great vehicle sections that were fun to do with others and even had something resembling a story to tell. I feel that as the series goes on, there’s less story happening while the amount of gameplay and features remain largely the same. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t stop Halo in general and a generous portion of its fanbase from bothering me. Maybe if I pick up the Halo games for my wife and take some time to play them myself again I can form a more solid opinion on the matter. But that’d require money. And I need my money for other things.
Like food.
And Assassin’s Creed II.
* I know both Mass Effect games are more RPGs than shooters, but they still have solid sci-fi shooting action. And while Shepard and his team tend to wear space armor, especially in the first game, the characters have at least a little depth to them.
(NOTE: May contain minor spoilers. Readers be ye warned!)
Subtitled THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL. (Right, Harbinger?)
Here we are, at last. I know quitea fewpeople have already played and reviewed this game. Some are even playing it again. I actually went back to the original game to start a new playthrough to span both games, and while I know there will be some repetition in dialog and encounters, the story’s solid enough to withstand repeated playthroughs. That’s more than you can say for a lot of games out there today. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Mass Effect 2 opens with a shocking curbstomp battle between Commander Shepard’s intrepid vessel, the Normandy, and a mysterious attacker that can see the plucky ship despite its stealth systems and blasts through its defense systems like they weren’t there. Shepard manages to get his crew to safety before he’s blown out to space and dies. The pro-human semi-terrorist “by-any-means-necessary” organization Cerberus scrapes Shepard off of the nearby planet’s surface and spends two years resurrecting him. The Reapers, extragalactic Big Bads introduced in the first Mass Effect, are still a major threat despite the government’s denial of their existence. They’re not helping humanity in the disappearance of their colonies, either, so Cerberus turns to the reconstructed Shepard to undertake a suicide mission through an unexplored mass relay to uncover the source of the abductions and send back more information on the Reapers. Because who better to send on a mission where everybody’s likely to die than someone who’s been dead already?
Stuff I Didn’t Like
We got this instead of a vehicle. I hope you’re all happy.
Wait. Shepard dies? He wasn’t in a coma or suspended animation and presumed dead by the galaxy at large? I found that to be a little far-fetched. Sure, technology in the future depicted by Mass Effect is pretty advanced, and being rebuilt by Cerberus explains why you can implement so many cybernetic upgrades to Shepard as the game goes on, but the whole resurrection angle pushes the limits of believability. Shepard doesn’t really seem that bothered by it, either – there’s no crisis of faith or any real rumination on what thoughts are evoked by the experience of coming back from the dead. Even the more spiritual team members don’t think to ask, which would have been a good opportunity for the player to do a little role-playing in choosing to start a deep theological conversation, or give a Renegade-oriented “None of your damn business” response.
Oh, and the story problems don’t end there. We do learn more about the Reapers, as to what motivates them and why they do what they do, but it still doesn’t explain why it wasn’t explained to us previously. Did Sovereign go for a stream of verbal crap in the style of Matrix: Reloaded‘s Architect just to mess with human heads, or was it embarrassed that the motivations of its supremely powerful machine-race were so basic and organic-like that it needed an extra layer of obfuscation? Or had the writers not figured it out yet themselves at that point? Maybe they had but they wanted to keep us guessing. Don’t get me wrong, the writing in this game isn’t bad, not by a long shot. More on that later.
The only other major insurmountable problem I had beyond the story issues was the scanning mini-game. I touched on it previously and it appears that my initial assessment was on the money. Here it is again to save you some time:
Some of the complaints about the Mako sections of the first game were their length and tedium. Scanning in the sequel takes just as long and… is just as tedious. Another Mako complaint is, obviously, it’s handling. So if scanning is meant to be an improvement over the Mako, the controls should handle smoothly and be a delightful diversion from ducking for cover like we’re playing Gears of War, right? Sorry, that’s not the case here. The reticle moves slowly over the surface of a world when you’re scanning, and unless you want to risk missing a particularly rich pocket of Element Zero, you need to drag it across every square mile of the planet’s surface.
Now one thing the scanning mini-game does well is convey the feeling that one is in space. And I don’t mean it hearkens to Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica. No, it hearkens more to 2001: A Space Odyssey or video recordings of NASA operations. That is to say that it’s lengthy, quiet, procedural and really rather dull.
Stuff I Liked
“Gosh, I hope you weren’t fond of your face, buddy.” *ZAP*
Let’s move on to better news. The other major complaint about the first Mass Effect was the inventory system, which stuffed your interstellar backpack with a plethora of ultimately useless junk that you then needed to sell one at a time to the nearest vendor. BioWare tossed that stuff into the Mako when they shoved it out the airlock, and the system of managing equipment in the sequel is extremely streamlined. Rather than switching weapons, you upgrade the models available to your team members. While these upgrades must be purchased with resources gathered by the aforementioned scanning malarkey, you won’t be thinking about that tedious stuff as your new Normandy takes you from one gunfight to the next.
Speaking of fights, the combat system in Mass Effect 2 is also somewhat streamlined. You can map more powers for easy use, you don’t have quite as many to manage, squad commands are broken a bit more easily and fights are bit faster-paced. The measures of protection on your foes, as well as their scale, can vary from encounter to encounter which can lead to breaking up the monotony of the cover-based shooting. The multiple map buttons mean you can address a particular enemy’s defensive measure at a moment’s notice, provided you don’t just pound them into submission with a stream of mass-accelerated death or your favorite physics-altering biotic ability.
Like the previous game, this one is rendered very well, with the environments and technology providing a great sense of immersion. The voice-acting, for the most part, also draws the player into the experience, as they travel from one exotic locale to the next to recruit members for Shepard’s suicide mission. And being able to customize your armor’s look was a nice touch, along with the fish tank & Space Hamster you could add to your cabin on the Normandy.
Stuff I Loved
Thane: “Shepard, what is this ‘DeviantArt’ site you sent me?” Shepard: *whistles innocently*
BioWare might be a little shaky in the story department, but one of their strengths is their characters. Mass Effect 2 gives us a diverse, interesting and well-written cast, from the penitent and quiet assassin Thane to Subject Zero, who uses aggression and profanity to conceal a deeply wounded soul. The conversations Shepard has with these individuals give the game a surprising amount of depth for what could easily have been a Gears of War clone with a few RPG elements. While this might come as no surprise to long-time fans of BioWare’s games, the purchase of the company by EA could have caused some concern. However, as much as EA might mess with other aspects of a game – DLC or DMA or some other acronyms – it appears they’re leaving the story alone, and thank the Enkindlers for that.
Being able to import your Shepard from the first game gives the experience a fantastic sense of cohesion and immersion as well. It’s surprising the amount of continuity exists between the two games, from the outcome of major events to minor encounters you frankly might have forgotten about in the intervening years. Returning characters are a welcome sight, even when they’re hated foes and especially when they’re beloved party members. There’s a real sense that time has passed since the end of the first game, and every life you touched then, even in passing, has been changed because of your influence for better or for worse.
The last thing that really made this game enjoyable for me was the changes to the conversation system. It’s been said that quick-time events should be an integral part of gameplay and not thrown in arbitrarily. The Paragon/Renegade interrupts are not mandatory for you to finish a conversation, but setting one off not only flows well with the conversation but often yields pretty spectacular results. On top of that, conversations in general flow more naturally, with characters moving as they speak, camera angles changing dynamically during conversations and subjects reaching far beyond the usual “What did you think of the last mission?” or “Do you think I look cute in this armor?” fare.
Spoiler
“I believe the organic saying is: ‘BOOM. Headshot.'”
Bottom Line: Are you a fan of the first Mass Effect? Buy this game. Do you like sci-fi shooting action? Buy this game. Looking for a relatively decent story with solid, well-rounded characters? Buy this game. Got a void in your life that only a Space Hamster can fill? Buy this game. Have I made it clear yet? No? Go buy Mass Effect 2. It’s well worth the money, the time and the frustration of the scanning mechanic. Hell, I plan on playing it again, not once, but at least twice. I mean, we’ve established previously that I’m pretty damn dull, but at least something like this is more exciting than Star Trek Online:
The first of many sword-in-the-ground opening screens.
I cherished my golden cartridges as a child. The original Legend of Zelda was one of the first Nintendo games we owned and I played it like it was going out of style. My sisters and I mapped out every dungeon for each other, as this was back in the days before GameFAQs or the Internet or internal combustion. It was innovative and challenging, and when a sequel was announced the children in the house were understandably excited. This was, as I’ve intimated, a more innocent time before I realized how disappointing sequels could be when they simply retread the ground covered by the first installment – but even now, I’d have been impressed by it.
Ten-year-old me: “This is a Zelda game? GNARLY!”
Instead of rehashing the top-down interface of the first game, the designers took it in a different direction, a similar direction to Castlevania. The Adventure of Link is a side-scrolling adventure-RPG, full of the familiar foes from the first games seen from this new perspective. I had no idea moblins were taller than Link. Anyway, replacing the sub-items such as the boomerang and bombs is a magic system, and Link has moves at his disposal other than “slash” and “toss my sword with power.” Other than that, there’s dungeons that need to be conquered in a specific order, a mysterious Big Bad at the end of it all and a damsel in distress named Zelda who needs rescuing.
Stuff I Didn’t Like
Wait, what? Already?
There’s a ‘lives’ system. It’s perhaps the most frustrating thing in the entire game, considering that neither the first game nor any one following had one, for good reason. In the first game, when Link got rocked, he’d be sent back to the beginning of the dungeon or the starting point in the overworld map. Here, there are ‘checkpoints’ that exist within the dungeons and the overworld encounters that will put you back to the start of the current room or scene. But being sent back to that checkpoint after stabbity death or being set on fire costs you one of your three lives. Once they’re gone, the game is over and you have to start from the beginning. While you’re able to continue so you don’t lose special items or experience gained, spending hours slogging through mazes only to lose your last life just as you’re about to down that frustrating boss can require a herculean effort to choose “Continue” instead of “Fuck This.”
You can find little 1-Up dolls scattered throughout the world to help the lives situation, but there are two problems with this. First of all, unlike the heart and magic containers that permenantly boost the amount of life or magic you have, the 1-Up dolls do not permanently increase your total number of lives. They just give you an extra life to be snatched away by a jerkass Ironknuckle or a misjudged jump. Secondly, some of the dolls are on obtainable after a long sojourn across the world and fighting legions of creatures that might possibly lose you one of your lives anyway. So these, like the lives system to which they are related, are completely arbitrary.
Stuff I Liked
I hate fighting Ironknucles. I don’t hate them, just fighting them.
This game is challenging. The Ironknuckle enemies in particular can be a real struggle, and in some case come across as more challenging than some of the ‘boss’ characters. There are a couple bosses you can defeat just by jumping repeatedly on their head (provided you have the ‘downthrust’ maneuver) and Ironknuckles will just raise their sheilds as you sit there hopping up and down on them like a flea on a hot griddle. What I like about these foes and the overall difficulty curve of this game is that it’s consistent, gradual and, as I said, challenging.
Like the previous game, the ‘temples’ are laid out in a fairly linear fashion that help you figure out where to go next. The map is vast, and the environments are varied but it doesn’t get confusing. Like many modern games, the optional items (‘side quests’ if you will) require a little digging, but the construction of the temples and their connection act as a guide on their own without the need for a FAQ or online guide – neither of which existed in 1989.
Stuff I Loved
Yes. Yes you are.
This was the first Zelda game and one of the first console RPGs to have NPCs that gave information, support and even quests as you progressed through the game. Instead of defeating just destroying monsters to earn new powers, you need to do some tasks that might seem menial to learn new magic spells. Some of the inhabitants of the town are interested in helping you while others just want to go about their business. And some young ladies even invite Link into their homes to restore his health. Of course older women do it too, so it’s not as sexy as it sounds.
There are some good musical bits in this game, for a relic of the 8-bit era. The temple music in particular stands out. It’s been recycled a couple times for the Smash Brothers franchise, and it’s some of my favorite music from the Zelda series.
Despite being laid out completely differently from the original Zelda, it feels like high fantasy adventure through and through. It established a lot of the tropes similar games follow to this day, and actually holds up after all of the years. I recently fired it up through the collector’s edition on the GameCube, and it wasn’t just nostalgia that had me enjoying it. To this day, it’s a solidly built, engrossing, challenging and very fun game.
Bottom Line: If you find yourself frustrated by the convoluted plots and overhyped CG of modern games, fire up the Adventure of Link. It’s a refreshing trip down memory lane that’s still a blast to play.
