New distractions as time permits:
Gravity Rush and
Goat Simulator! Gravity Rush had me worried at first. Your character wakes up, confused, and you must explore the immediate area to trigger a sequence of events to get to the game proper. Problem is, for the entire sequence you cannot look around. The camera seems to be locked and hovers randomly to where you can't really look around to even begin to know where you're supposed to go. Eventually, I found a stairway to climb that triggered an NPC to appear, begging me to follow him to save his son. After following him around a bit (still unable to look around but to the direction you're moving), you come to the first real gameplay tutorial segment. Once the tutorial starts, you have normal viewing control.
Weird game. Your character has no idea who she is and there's this trippy black cat that follows you around, randomly vanishing into puffs of smoke only to reappear somewhere else nearby. Through the tutorial section, you're taught to levitate, target a flight path, and "invert" gravity to fall towards your target rather than down to where gravity would normally pull you. For example, if you levitate and aim to the side of a building, you will "fall" to the side of that building and land on your feet, parallel to the ground below, standing on the building's side wall. You can levitate, fly, and stand wherever you land for as long as your meter has color left. The longer you go, the more the meter eats away. It can be disorienting, but it's pretty interesting.
Budget seems as though it was low as they took a lot of narrative short cuts such as using comic book frames to handle the character dialogues. There are minimal textures, and the characters all have a washed out "flash" rendered effect similar to that of the movie,
A Scanner Darkly. Soundtrack, voice acting, environments, and the child-like approach to violence and the game world remind me a LOT of old PS Final Fantasy 8 (maybe 7 too). So if you're into either, you might enjoy this environment. I'm not sure how deep I'll get into this one, but it's a cute and charming novelty for now at least. Controls are wonky, but I expect that to smooth out with experience.
Goat Simulator huh. I've seen clips and adverts and always figured I'd try it out. This weekend I found two add-ons. One for an MMO sim and the other a Waste of Space sim. Both had hilarious trailers. I purchased both with a 75% off sale so each was like a buck and change. I did NOT realize that they were only add-ons, so ended up having to buy the game itself the next day. That was maybe 3 bucks more. Whatever. This game is ridiculous lol. Controls and rendering is about as good as ole Second Life was way back when, but the world here is livelier and, well, just more fun to run around as a goat knocking stuff over. That seems to be the only objective. Jump over things, knock things over, jump THROUGH things, climb things, and headbutt pedestrians. You get points for everything, and everything has a score title like "x10 for licking dumpster!" or "x2 for jumping on trampoline!" It's all very silly, but in a lovely waste of time kinda way. I have no purpose here, just run around and be stupid. I was laughing hysterically and I was totally sober.
In my first 10 minutes I found a warp to the Goat Castle where maybe 20 goat subjects bowed in my entrance before I jumped to the throne to declare myself Goat Queen. The throne was a grill of sorts, because it lit me on fire. Who knows. I soon warped back to where I was and noticed that I had a Goat Queen bone skull face mask. Checking inventory (yeah, goats got inventory, yo!), I also apparently unlocked a jetpack. Scrolling through, I noticed several skins available if I play the game and find the right whatever to unlock them. That should be fun. For now though, I have a jetpack and I'm flying chaotically around town busting up whatever and knocking my goat unconscious. Pretty great stuff for a few bucks.
Waste of Space (which is what I originally wanted)
Reply to Topic
