Intermission: Humble Indie Bundle

Humble Indie Bundle is an interesting concept.

Essentially, you get a selection of indie games, and you get to choose how much you pay for it.

A friend sent me a Humble Indie Bundle gift... thing [I'm hesitant to call it a 'bundle'] which gave me access to all the games available.

So I did what any rational human being would do - thanked said friend and downloaded all of them.
Wait, except one. But I downloaded the rest.

So, lets go through the games the site has to offer;


Gish
Gish is a platformer where you control a 12 pound ball of sentient tar.

Gish was taking a stroll through the park with his lady friend before said lady friend was kidnapped and taken by this big... thing. It might have been an enormous blob.
Anyway, our titular hero jumps down into the sewers after his lady friend.

Story out of the way, it's onto the platforming, and I have to say the gameplay is really quite cool.

Gish can cling to walls, make himself extra slippery (to slide down small tunnels) and, through sheer willpower, make himself heavier to smash through walls. Because you can cling to most surfaces, though, it makes the platforming kind of interesting. They introduce spikes early on, and as Gish walks over them he takes damage. In order to get over the spikes, he has to cling to the ceiling.

Further on, Gish comes to a set of suspended blocks. If he's careful, he can make the blocks swing, cling under them and grab the coins that are below.

And because he can stick to stuff, he can grab blocks to maneuver onto a button.
Music's good too, but that's not terribly shocking because it's an indie game - the music's almost always good.

Of course, Gish isn't perfect. It doesn't you tell what to do or where to go, and the enemies can be quite unforgiving. But that could be forgiven because the game is essentially linear.


World of Goo

...is out next game. I must confess, I downloaded WOG because it was there. I already have the actual game, but it isn't that big and I reasoned it wouldn't make that big a dent in our 50 gig a month broadband plan.

Anyway, in World of Goo your goal is to reach a pipe. To reach said pipe, you must (usually) construct a tower out of goo balls. At first, it seems very straight forward, but as it introduces different types of goo it starts getting interesting.

There's usually only one way to complete any given level, but it's still cool when you figure out how to do it. And it teaches an important lesson about structural integrity.

Third up, we have...


Samorost 2

Said game is one by a company called Amanita Design, the same guys who did the game Machinarium, which is my favourite point and click puzzle game to date.

Anyway, the first level introduces us to the story (at least, the story for the first level). Aliens, while collecting fruit, have stolen some kid's dog. Said kid is the protagonist, and he takes off in his "house rocket" after the dastardly aliens.

Point and click games all have this problem where it's not immediately obvious what's clickable and what isn't, and the very first couple of screens for Samorost 2 illustrate that, but from then on it's reasonably easy to decipher what they want you to do.

Figuring out the puzzles will make you feel all clever and smart, and most of them are somewhat easy, if a little easy. At the time of writing, I haven't got to the second half yet.

It's an interesting world this game takes place in - apparently, you can breathe quite happily in space, and asteroids can actually grow grass and plants without having any atmosphere.

But who gives a damn? It's supposed to convey a sense of fantasy.


Lugaru

Game number four is Lugaru. Jumping right in, I get a flash of red screen and a massive black eye staring at me.
Not the best way to start off, guys. I feel like the thing before me has been freshly killed.

The tutorial showed me the ropes, as tutorials do - you play a anthropomorphic rabbit, and in most of the tutorial you spend your time fighting a rabbit illusion made of smoke.

The gameplay seems to be built around the combat, which is a shame, because exploration would have been a good direction to go in for this sort of game.

Combat can get hectic and panic-y, and whenever you're hit with a particularly hard attack and sent flying ragdoll style (which happens very often), you loose your weapon and the enemy can pick it up, meaning you spend most of the fight punching the guy to death.

Whats worse is that combat in this game is extremely unforgiving. When the enemy send you tumbling, they often hang around your ragdoll'd body waiting for you to get up and do it again, and with two or more enemies it becomes insanely difficult.

Worse still is that Lugaru lacks a quest log, or indeed quests at all. The map you see every time you progress to a new part of the game is pretty lackluster, and there isn't much of a ultimate goal hovering overhead, apart from "kill the bastard who betrayed your village".


Last up is Penumbra. My laptop can't hack it when he steps off the boat, so I'm currently transferring the .exe to my other computer. Give it a sec.
...
...
Here we go.

Penumbra draws you in. There isn't much doubt about that. The most interesting aspect of Penumbra so far is you need to really use the mouse.

For example, you need to smash a piece of ice that's frozen up a wheel to an underground bunker. You need to do a little bit of exploring to find a bunch of rocks.

In any other game, it would do the smashing for you. But in Penumbra, you need to heft the rock up using the mouse and smash down using the mouse too. Turning the wheel needs the mouse as well - you actually need to turn the wheel as opposed to just clicking on it.
You want to do a melee attack? You have to swing that bastard.
There isn't any hud either, deepening the immersion.

Once you figure out how to open the big steel hatch that was closed for a damn good reason, your taught about stealth. This means turning your flashlight off, something your not going to want to do.

You know something is out there. You just... can't see it. Or hear it.
It's the whole psychological horror thing - it gets into your head and screws with you. It makes you fear the slightest noise, the faintest flicker.

Did I mention your totally alone? No audio logs (yet), no NPCs, not even any monsters that you can see (so far). You are totally, completely alone.

In short, Penumbra isn't for those who consider themselves "jumpy". And even of you aren't, this game will make your skin crawl.

Death Knights and Music-sountracks

First things first, the frickin' Horse quest for the Death Knights.

Today just wasn't my day, I guess. I kept getting 'roped' by the stable keeper and forced off my horse and melee'd by him, and of course he had to be elite. Of course, you can't do it unless you've been spotted, so you have to do it juuuust in range and then sprint out and hope to god there are no Scarlet Infantry or Captians ready to give you a nice helping of Dazed (50% movement reduction).
I can't help thinking that Blizzard just made it unnecessarily difficult, unless I'm wrong and you can, in fact, evade that elite horse riding bastard.

And while I'm on the subject, what the hell is up with the outrageously high prices of the epic riding training? I understand that it was priced when Burning Crusade came out, and it was a pretty good guess that all those level 70's were brimming with gold, it those days are now over. I imagine most players will never see themselves riding their epic flying mounts, 'specially not in Northrend. Let's look at how much it costs, counting honoured reputation, to get the whole flying mount package.

assuming you have both previous levels of riding;
Expert: lvl 60, 225 gold. (remember, with honoured rep)
Artisan (epic): lvl 70, 4500 gold.
Cold Weather Flying (flying in Northrend): 1000 gold (cannot be reduced by rep prices).
The epic mount itself: 95 gold.
Total: 5820 gold.

That is a lot of gold, even for someone who works the auction house (not counting those people who are so good it at that they make thousands every day). The worst part is that Blizzard recently reduced the level requirement and price for ground mounts, but seemed to ignore the expert and artisan levels. Just seems like a bit much.

On a lighter note, I've been thoroughly enjoying the World of Goo Soundtrack, availible for download here. Well, not there exactly, obviously.
There are various flavours that accompany the WOG Soundtrack. Sometimes it's cheery upbeat music like 'Brave Adventurers' or 'Tumbler', sometimes it has a far darker, even sinister, feel to it like 'Screamer' or 'Cog on the Machine', the latter reminding me a lot of Pink Floyd. Sometimes it's slow, like 'Are you coming home, love MOM' or 'Threadcutter', and sometimes it's fast and extremely annoying, such as 'My Vurtual World of Goo Corperation'.
You also have tracks like 'Best of Times', which slowly morphs from slow song into the kind of music you hear at the end of a fantasy action movie, when the bad guy gets killed at the last minute by the broken and battered protaganist.

World of Goo

Now, before I start, let me clarify that World of Goo is actually a pretty good game. The puzzles are well put together and often have reasonably easy solutions, the soundtrack is brilliant, and it's got a charming feeling to it.
Having said that...

World of Goo: A review
So, I've been playing with World of Goo for a while, and I have to say first impressions where good. The puzzles where easy enough to understand, and the ever mysterious and (in my mind, anyway) morally ambiguous Sign Painter was a joy to read. His signs, that is.
But then I got to Fisty's Bog, and I discovered the true meaning of skill.
The idea behind Fisty's Bog is you have to build a bridge out of, you guessed it, Goo, to get across to the pipe to suck your remaining goo balls into. The fatal problem with this is that the floor is covered in spikes. No problem, you say to yourself, I'll just put these handy balloons to keep it from doing that, which would be fine if the ceiling wasn't covered with spikes as well. It's an uphill battle of balance, trying to make the bridge heavy enough so that the balloons can lift juuuuuust enough so that the bridge doesn't fall onto the spikes below, or the balloons don't fly into the spiky ceiling. I was nearly ready to give up when I finally got the bastard to work. Strangely the levels after it, even until the factory stage, are all pretty easy.
I say 'until the factory stage', because Mr. Fisty makes his debue again, only this time it seems the Scourge got him and now he's undead. The level is annoyingly tedious, and I ended up skipping it, so a little scaling back in difficulty would have been nice.

That's about the only criticism I could find for World of Goo. Obnoxiously difficult levels, and they're all few and far between. It's hard to find problems with a deceptively simple indie developed puzzle/platformer game, because there's really not a lot you can say about it. There's no dreadful voice acting, unless you count the goo balls themselves which sound like a bunch of extremely verbose mice huffing helium, there's no unnecessary RPG elements, and the soundtrack is brilliant, so you can't attack that.

Speaking of which, the soundtrack is probably my favourite part of the game. Masterfully composed, and some tracks remind me of Hanz Zimmer's works, Pink Floyd, the Toys movie soundtrack, and a few other's which I can't place.

Unfortunately, in some places, it's all let down by the occasional god awful level that makes you want to go to 2D BOY and ram the game disk up their @$#, but if you can look past that it's a charmingly creative game and I would heartily recommend it to anyone who isn't afraid of change from all the mainstream FPS games we see clogging the market.