The Walking Dead: 400 Days Review

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It seems a little odd for an episodic game to get an extra chapter after its final episode is released. The Walking Dead: 400 Days is a DLC that serves to bridge the gap between the original game and Season 2. It introduces several new characters who will appear in Season 2; they are playable in this DLC, but I do not think that they will be playable in Season 2.

There are five characters, and you can play their stories in any order. They all take place within a couple hundred days of the zombie outbreak. They also occur relatively close together, so some common characters and locations appear in multiple chapters.

Notably this pit stop diner

The decisions you make in each person's story determines the decision they make at the end of the episode. This in turn will affect where they are and who they trust during Season 2. Interestingly, almost none of the decisions from Season 1 have an impact in 400 Days, though they will undoubtedly have a greater impact in Season 2.

Obviously it only makes sense to buy this DLC if you are planning on playing Season 2. If you are as invested in The Walking Dead as I am though, it's pretty much a no-brainer and well worth the $5. I leave you now with some assorted screenshots.

Broken Age Act 1 Review

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If you've ever heard of a game being Kickstarted, you can thank Broken Age for it. It was almost two years ago when Tim Schafer decided that he wanted to make another point-and-click adventure game, and he wanted the internet to fund it. Needless to say, it was a resounding success, and for a while all we wanted to talk about was games on Kickstarter. The first half of Broken Age is out now, with the second half coming later this year.

The game is split into two different stories, with two different protagonists: Vella on the left, and Shay on the right. Once you choose one of them, you start their story, but you can switch between them at any time. I used this once when I got frustrated with a puzzle I was having trouble with.

Vella's story starts off in her village, which is made up entirely of bakers. Every generation they have the Maidens' Feast, where several young women are offered up to a big monster called Mog Chothra so it won't destroy the village. Needless to say, Vella is not thrilled about this and decides to fight back. Her adventure takes her to a couple of other villages, one that just had their Maidens' Feast, and another getting ready for its Maidens' Feast.

Shay on the other hand lives a pretty boring life: he's been living on a spaceship his whole life, and the simulation missions the ship throws at him have gotten pretty boring because they were designed for a toddler. Eventually he breaks out of this rut and discovers a whole new part of the ship that he has never seen before, and some real missions to embark on.

Visually the game is gorgeous. Everything looks hand painted, and in typical point-and-click fashion the camera is usually fixed, at most moving left or right as you move around the environment. There were a few places where I thought the textures looked low-resolution, but honestly it wouldn't have made much of a difference because of the art style.

Mechanically it plays almost exactly like a point-and-click from the 90's. Or at least that's what I assume because I wasn't doing much video gaming in the 90's. All of the "puzzles" involved finding a specific item or combination of items to use in a particular way in a particular place to solve a problem. Most times it was pretty clear what needed to be done, and failing that just a little snooping around would uncover the solution. There was that one time though where the solution involved going back and forth through several areas to get different items, and I completely did not understand what I was supposed to do. Yeah, I looked up the solution to that one.

One of my favorite things about Broken Age is the voice cast. Having people like Elijah Wood, Jennifer Hale, and Jack Black in the same game is delightful to my nerd brain. And Wil Wheaton playing a hipster lumberjack hiding from the talking trees was the best moment of my week.

It took me just over four hours to complete Act 1, and they left us on quite the cliffhanger. It's definitely worth getting now, because Act 1 is a good length to finish in one or two sittings. This is one of the few games I have played that is appropriate for both adults and kids, so if you are a parent check it out. It's a little hard to name a good price because I have no idea how good Act 2 will be; if it keeps up the quality that Act 1 had, I would say that $20 is a good price.

Dream: Thief Meets Outlast

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This dream pulls pretty prominently from several games, but not games that I have played a lot of.

It started off as a pretty close approximation of the upcoming Thief. I was sneaking around a large building, stealing coins that I found. I wasn't finding much in the way of valuable jewelry, and I soon found out why: this was a building where a group of slavers held people before taking them to market. Unfortunately I knew that I had no chance of freeing them, so I decided to make sure that their business wouldn't be profitable.

While I was snooping around I heard someone coming. I tried to hide behind a rack of supplies, but it just so happened that she needed to grab something from that very same rack. Luckily she didn't sound the alarm because she hates the place as much as I do (don't ask me why she works there) and we discussed what we should do next. Just then a bunch of workers started filing in, getting in line for food. I suggested that we join the line to remain inconspicuous.

When the line reached another room, everything seemed different. Instead of wood floors and walls, everything was covered in tiles and there were computers. While everyone went over to see what the computers had on them, I continued down the corridor until I found a door. This lead to a room with an empty swimming pool, pretty creepy.

The next corridor was very narrow and had no branches. I suddenly got the feeling that I was being followed, but I didn't look over my shoulder to see what it was. I just started running, and I didn't stop until the corridor ended and I got to a room that looked more familiar: wood floors and walls, candles on the table, etc.

I'm glad that my body waited until I wasn't terrified out of my mind to wake up.

The Wolf Among Us Episode 2 Review

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It's been quite a while since the first episode of The Wolf Among Us came out, but I didn't mind much because the holiday season was right in the middle of that wait, and Assassin's Creed IV happened. On the other hand that cliffhanger was killing me.

This episode played quite differently from the first one. In Episode 1 the player was confronted with several binary choices that were clearly presented as important moments. Episode 2's choices were much more dynamic, taking the form of "how far are you willing to go to get the information you need?" situations. I prefer this new approach to player choice because it is less gamey and doesn't take you out of the scene to make your decision. They were pretty tough decisions too, because I was trying really hard to redeem Bigby but at the same time I really needed to solve the case. And some of the other characters pissed me off.

Another difference is that there are fewer fights in Episode 2. I suspect that this depends on the choices you make, but the way I played I only had to fight one person.

The focus of Episode 2 is gathering information and following leads, but it hardly ever had me looking around a room for clues. The information was usually gathered in conversation with other people, oftentimes in some form of interrogation. In terms of actual story, not much new happened; it was mostly piecing together what had already happened.

That said. the very end left us on another cliffhanger, one that will almost assuredly have a large impact on the story moving forward. I can't wait for Episode 3, and I hope they don't make us wait four months this time.

EDIT: you can now read my review of Episode 3.

The Lego Movie Review

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I wasn't expecting to see The Lego Movie because the trailers for it made it look like another generic kid's movie. In a word, they were terrible. However, some of my friends who had seen it came back gushing about it being the best movie they had seen in years. My impression of the movie was somewhere in between: it is definitely worth seeing, but in no way is it a must-see.

The beginning of the movie was pretty bland, and I found myself wondering how long until we were going to get to those emotional moments I had been told about (hint: those obviously come in the second half of the movie). I did appreciate the way that it made fun of the way people seem to mindlessly follow pop culture, listening to whatever songs are on the radio and watching the same TV shows as everyone else. It was like a hipster's worst nightmare.

The plot set itself up as a classic good-vs-evil story, but it ended up becoming an argument over how people should play with their Legos. The movie sets up the concept of following the instructions as the way the bad guys do it, while the "master builders" who take the pieces and come up with their own creations as the good guys. This left me pretty conflicted because I have taken great care to keep my Lego sets preserved over the years. Granted, I didn't just leave them on my shelf for my whole childhood, but after every battle I made sure to put everything back together the way they were supposed to be. Speaking of which, almost all of the Legos that I have are Star Wars sets, and I was pretty disappointed when they only received a small cameo in the movie.

Most of the movie was computer animated, but they went to great lengths to imitate the style and aesthetics of brickfilms. They even went so far as to make it seem like it was stop-motion and used miniature versions of sets to simulate distant shots, both of which were great touches. Because physics was a complete non-issue the action sequences were very over-the-top and a little hard to follow because everything moved so fast.

The thing that I got the most out of the movie was its great sense of humor. I laughed my way through most of the movie, and even the serious parts had just that little touch of silliness to keep my attention from wandering. The voice acting was also phenomenal, but with a cast like that I would expect nothing less.

Ultimately you will get the most out of The Lego Movie if you have a history with Legos. It was a good movie, but I'm not planning on seeing it again soon.

Octodad Review

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Octodad started out as a student project from DePaul University, and it got quite a bit of attention when it was released in 2010. A bunch of the students who worked on the original went on to form the studio Young Horses and held a Kickstarter to make a sequel. Several years we get to experience the fruits of their labor, in the form of Octodad: Dadliest Catch.

The premise is what makes the game stick out most: you play as an octopus who is disguised as your stereotypical suburban dad. Remaining unsuspected is the point of the whole game, but of course that goal is complicated by the control scheme. In some ways it is reminiscent of Surgeon Simulator 2013, but with more ragdoll physics. When you are controlling one of Octodad's limbs you really only have control over the tip of that limb; the rest of the limb and the rest of his body will flop around wherever they feel like. The only exception is that his feet remain planted most of the time.

Much of the game involves Octodad attempting to carry out everyday tasks, such as making breakfast, mowing the lawn, and shopping for groceries. There is a "suspicion meter" that goes up when people witness you do particularly clumsy things. It is extremely difficult to lose this way though, which makes the game even more absurd.

The larger threat is a sushi chef who appears to be the only person around who realises that Octodad is not what he pretends to be. He appears from time to time to try to expose or kill Octodad. When you consider that every other character is white and the chef is a pretty terrible caricature of a Japanese chef, the game seems incredibly racist.

Polygon had an interesting article about how Octodad can be considered a metaphor for those of us who live our lives concealing something from even those who are closest to us. Most people wouldn't think of this though, especially kids like my sister who would just be delighted by the slapstick comedy.

There were some extremely frustrating segments, such as going up some down escalators and running away from the chef while trying to perform other tasks. If you are easily frustrated, I wouldn't recommend Octodad.

The game was short, coming in at about two hours for my first playthrough. The only reason I can think of to replay it would be to try the coop mode, where up to four people control his various limbs. They also wisely included support for user-created maps. I've pretty much had my fill of the game though, so I probably won't try many of those.

My recommendation would be that you go and play the original student project and if you really want more Octodad then you can go and get Dadliest Catch. I still wouldn't pay more than $10 on it though.

Sherlock Review

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A lot of people complain about the unstoppable march of movie sequels that we have to put up with (how many Need for Speed movies are there now?) On the other hand most of us have at least one TV show that we keep up with, which is basically a bunch of short movies. I guess BBC decided to stop pretending because basically Sherlock is three 90-minute movies released a year. Except the years they missed, but give them a break.

I was a little apprehensive at first because as I've said before I haven't enjoyed a lot of what Steven Moffat has been doing with Doctor Who. In Sherlock's case however I think he knew what he was doing. It might have helped that they were adapting stories that already existed, but I haven't read them so I can't know for sure.

Being a crime drama it relies on big plot twists to keep us on the edge of our seats. I've gotten better at picking up on writing queues and predicting what will happen, so they aren't as shocking as they would have been to my childhood self. The thing that has kept me coming back has been the wonderful character interactions. It starts of course with Sherlock and John's bromance (just keep telling everyone you're not gay, John) but it extends to almost all of the other recurring characters. It's not surprising that Sherlock gets a significant amount of character progression by learning from John how to treat other human beings, but even relatively minor characters like Molly grew a lot over the course of the show.

The villains and antiheroes naturally had to almost be larger than life, because otherwise Sherlock's ability to discern the unknowable would never fail. Sometimes they went a little overboard though, and I had to make sure to remind myself that they were only human. Thankfully this didn't happen too often.

My biggest beef with the show is actually not a problem for the show at all. The people I have been watching it with have been mostly female, and a lot of them just melt when Benedict Cumberbatch does something adorable and/or sexy. He appears to be incapable of doing anything else, and I just can't compete. Seriously, one of them has a pillowcase with his face printed on it. I guess there's nothing to do but start running again to get my abs back.

Seriously though, you should watch Sherlock. It is well worth your time, and it doesn't take long to get caught up. The series seems to have been designed with binge-watching in mind.

World of Warplanes Review

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I don't often play online multiplayer, but when I do it's World of Warplanes. I'm way more amused by that reference than I should be.

I had been enjoying World of Tanks for a few weeks when World of Warplanes came out. Naturally I had to give it a try. The overall format is very similar to World of Tanks: you have a hangar where you pick one of your planes to take into battle; the battles consist of two teams of fifteen planes each; the battles last until one of the teams is eliminated, or one team has achieved air superiority, or fifteen minutes has elapsed.

The control scheme for mouse and keyboard is quite simple: point the camera in the direction that you want to go, and your pilot will figure out how to go that way (it's very similar to Freelancer, if you can remember back that far.) Joysticks are supported, but I don't know anyone with one of those so I can't try it out.

I took some footage of my first day in the game, which was amusing. Since pretty much everybody was a noob, there were a lot of deaths due to head-on collisions. Note: I have improved a lot since then.

Because the game is still very new, the tech trees are pretty sparse. Most of them branch once at the beginning and are linear from there. They are continuously adding planes, and the German tech tree is halfway respectable now. My favorite plane is unfortunately still missing: the P-38 Lightning. Initially this limitation prevented me from getting into the game as much as I had gotten into World of Tanks. However, I have come to appreciate the fact that World of Warplanes is more fast-paced, and it turns out that I am better at Warplanes than Tanks; so I have started playing Warplanes more often.

I would definitely recommend World of Warplanes to anyone who wants a game that they can either pick up for a few minutes or dive into for a few hours on a regular basis. And the fact that it is free doesn't hurt at all.

Steam In-Home Streaming First Impressions

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The best way to explain Steam's in-home streaming is to quote Valve directly:

Any two computers in a home can be used to stream a gameplay session and this can enable playing games on systems that would not traditionally be able to run those games. For example, a Windows only game could be streamed from a Windows PC to a Steam Machine running Linux in the living room. A graphically intensive game could be streamed from a beefy gaming rig in the office to your low powered laptop that you are using in bed. You could even start a game on one computer and move to a more comfortable location and continue playing it there.

In-Home Streaming is in beta right now, so I decided to test it out using my roommate's computer. We're both running Windows, but his computer is significantly less powerful: he has an i5-3330S with 8GB RAM, and I have an i5-3570K, a GTX 670, and 16GB RAM.

The first step was to make sure both computers are using the beta version of Steam (they already were.) Then I logged into both computers using the same Steam account. Both computers popped up with a message saying that they were ready for in-home streaming. I decided to test it out with games that a) were too graphically intense for Declan's computer, and b) were only installed on my computer.

First up, I tried Batman: Arkham City. It looked really good and I didn't detect any lag. However, I quickly remembered that I had gliding and grapple hooking set to my mouse's thumb buttons. Since Declan's mouse doesn't have those I couldn't move around very quickly or gracefully.

Next I tried out Borderlands 2, and I took a quick video of it. Naturally, that means that I was playing one-handed, so again it wasn't graceful. It's worth noting that although both computers display the game on their screens, only the computer that is receiving the stream outputs the audio.

Next I decided to try to break the system. I had read that when a computer is being used to stream a game to another computer, it can't be used for anything else. On a hunch, I Alt-Tabbed out of the game on my computer. Both computers were then displaying my computer's desktop environment. It was essentially just a remote desktop connection, though the only way to get out of the game is from my computer.

So there you have it, Steam in-home streaming works as advertised! Of course, it's only useful to those of us with multiple computers in their house, and I have no idea how well it will work on different routers. I think it would be a very good move for some company to come out with a Steam Machine as small and cheap as possible, with the intention of taking advantage of in-home streaming. It would be like the Chromecast of gaming, and we know how well the Chromecast sold.

World of Tanks Review

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During the computer science club's LAN party last semester I was introduced to World of Tanks. I have to admit that I don't play many multiplayer games, but this one had me hooked pretty quickly. I like the feeling of power and weight you get when driving a tank around and firing those gigantic cannons.

As with any game I started out as a pretty big noob, but thankfully I had an experienced player there to give me some pro tips. Those mostly consisted of "find a nice bush to hide in until an enemy is stupid enough to expose themselves; then shoot them." So yeah, it often ends up being a pretty campy game, especially on certain maps with gigantic no-man's lands in the middle.

Come out and play.

One of the reasons that I don't enjoy League of Legends as much is because the games typically last 30-50 minutes; I often don't have time for that, and even when I do I usually get bored with the game before it's halfway over. World of Tanks has a time cap at 15 minutes, and the games are usually much shorter than that. Plus, if your tank gets destroyed before the end of the game, the best thing to do is return to your garage and pick another tank to go into battle with. I appreciate this rapid turnover and overall respect for my time.

Because the game has been out for a few years, the tech trees are very fleshed out. They look pretty daunting at first, but it is nice to have a lot of options available. I am currently making my way through the American tank destroyers and the German SPGs. The game plays very differently depending on what kind of tank you are using. I've been enjoying the tank destroyers because they work best when I let someone else go just ahead of me, and then I shoot whoever shoots at them. The SPGs are artillery that essentially act as snipers. They get a top-down view of the map, but they can still only see enemies that their teammates relay back to them.

Even though I don't have any friends who play on a regular basis, I am having a good time with it. It doesn't hurt that it is a free-to-play game. I've heard that the model used to be pretty close to pay-to-win, but they have since cleaned that up. You can pay for paint jobs, more slots in your garage for tanks, and experience. But those things won't guarantee you win, since the game places you in games against people in the same tier as you. It also encourages players to come back every day by offering double experience on your first victory of the day. At the very least you should play it so I have people to play with. Pretty please?

Ingress Review

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The last few years have taught us something about mobile gaming: it's really easy to make a terrible mobile game. They either try to be a big-budget third-person action game and absolutely fail, or they are casual freemium games that try to bleed you dry by giving you customization options or making you wait a long time before you can perform the next action unless you pay real money. Ingress is neither of those; its gameplay is based around using the capabilities found only in smartphones, and it is completely free. You couldn't spend money in this game even if you wanted to. In one sentence I would describe it as the perfect mobile game.

Ingress is a strange game to describe, because there aren't any like it out there. It is technically an MMO because there is a persistent world that changes as the players perform actions withing it. But it is also an augmented reality game (though not the kind where you wear glasses that overlay objects onto your surroundings). Ingress is a game that uses your real-world location (based on your phone's GPS of course) to determine where you are in relation to in-game objects. Obviously you must be near these objects to perform most actions with them. It might be easier to describe the backstory of the game before I get deeper into the actions you can perform in the game.

Back in 2011 Google started a viral marketing campaign called "What is Niantic?" where a supposed investigator started leaking information about the "Niantic Project," a mysterious branch of research apparently happening at CERN. Over the course of a month they revealed that they had discovered a substance called Exotic Matter, or XM. This XM has been leaking into our world from another dimension throughout all of human history, and it has the curious effect of encouraging creative thought and intense concentration. Because of that many scientific breakthroughs, great works of art, and religious sites are located near the places where XM leaks through the most. These locations are known as portals.

Soon after this discovery, the technology used to scan for XM was leaked to the public (read: the game was released.) Two factions emerged. The Enlightened want to use XM to continue furthering human knowledge and technology; the Resistance believe that XM is dangerous, and that beings from another dimension called Shapers are using it to influence our thoughts. I of course joined Enlightened, but you should join whichever team you align with.

Now we get to what the players do in the game. The ultimate goal is for your team to control a majority of the world. This is done by creating control fields, which are created by connecting portals that your team controls. Any triangle created is a control field, and no links can cross each other.

For example, the University of Minnesota Morris campus is covered in green because we pretty much only have Enlightened players.

The Twin Cities campus is a slightly different matter.

The green portal I am next to was blue until I attacked it and took it down. The game never shows you other players, so you cannot attack them.

In order to get the items that allow you to claim and attack portals you hack the portals. The higher level the portal is, the higher level the items you will get from it. And of course virtually all of the actions that you perform in the game use up XM, which you collect as you walk around.

Ingress is a game that is best played with friends. I have gotten a few of my classmates to play with me, and we have a good time going out to town to capture and connect portals. It's also a great excuse to get outside and see some interesting buildings and statues, since portals tend to be located at those kinds of places. I find it odd that they decided to bring the game out of beta during a very cold winter, when most of us would rather stay indoors. However, once it warms up again I will be out there on my bike blanketing the neighborhood in green.

If you live in a large urban center, expect there to be a fairly large player base and a high turnover rate of portals. If you are in a rural area you might find yourself the only person in town who plays. However, this allows you to create large fields that last longer because there is nobody around to take them down. My proudest moment so far was when I connected Morris, Glenwood, and Alexandria to make this sucker:

If I have convinced you that Ingress is worth playing (and it totally is), you should watch these two videos that recap the major events of the first year of the game.

Dream: Real Robots!

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I had a brief dream last night where I was with a bunch of camp staff preparing some patties with rice on top (don't ask me where that came from, I have no idea what they were) for the Cub Scouts. While we were doing that one of the other staff was showing us a series on YouTube. It seemed very similar to those trailers for Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon because it was a cartoon with lots of black and neon pink, and I distinctly remember hearing the same narrator's voice saying "In the forests outside of the apocalypse..." while the camera dramatically zoomed in on a base. The base's commander is standing on a balcony looking out over the forest, and he yells "Don't you know what we're dealing with?? Robots! REAL ROBOTS!!" The inflection for this came straight from this line (3:31 since the link refuses to start at that point in the video).

Seriously, there's something wrong with my brain.

A Game of Thrones Review

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This post is about the book, not the HBO show in case you were confused. And yes, I started reading the book because I have heard great things about the show and I am a literature snob, so I have to start with the books.

I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting, but A Game of Thrones wasn't it. And that isn't a bad thing! I'm used to fantasy that either has a lot of magic, dragons, elves, and the like or fantasy that has none of that. The world that George RR Martin presents is one where those fantasy elements used to exist in abundance, but have since withdrawn to the edges of the world. Don't worry though, it looks like the overall story of the book series is going to be magic trying to make a reappearance in the world, and how the people of this world deal with it.

I also was not expecting the perspective to change every single chapter, or for many of the protagonists to be children. It makes sense though, because it would have been impossible to tell a story on this scale without using many characters for perspective. I also get the sense that the timeline of the book series is a long one, and pretty soon these children will be adults making important decisions that will affect the shape of the politics. Oh, and have I mentioned that the politics here are very strange?

I found that I quickly placed most of the characters into two categories: those who I absolutely loved and rooted for unconditionally, and those who I absolutely despised and wanted to die. I think that this was exactly Martin's intention, and normally I don't hold to that kind of polarization. But he does it so well that I don't care!

I'm looking forward to plunging into the rest of the series and getting started on the show as well. If you are interested in reading it, now would be the time. The longer you wait the more likely it is that someone will spoil something for you, as they did for me. Some friends are the worst.

Assassin's Creed IV: Freedom Cry Review

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One of the more interesting characters in Assassin's Creed IV was Adewalé, a former slave who becomes Edward Kenway's quartermaster for most of the game. He seemed to have his head screwed on better than Edward, and he actually cared about doing the right thing.

Freedom Cry takes place after the events of the main story, and Adewalé has joined the Assassins. However, he is shipwrecked near Port-au-Prince. As we know from our vast historical expertise, Haiti would eventually be the site of the only successful slave revolution; however that isn't until around 70 years after the events of this DLC. Adewalé initially wants to get back to the Assassins and continue his current mission, but he is convinced to stay and help free as many of the slaves as possible and plant the seeds of revolution.

The side missions found in the main game are replaced by various types of slave-freeing. Liberating plantations, interrupting auctions, intercepting convoys, and stopping beatings are a few of them. The game keeps track of how many people you have liberated to determine what upgrades are available to you in the shops. When I first saw that I needed 300 slaves to get the upgraded machete I was worried that they were just simplifying people to currency. However the game explains it as "the more people are living in your secret community of liberated slaves, the better resources are available to you" which does make sense.

The story was definitely more engaging than the main game's story, and thankfully it had more to say than "slavery is bad" which would have been a really easy crutch for the writers to fall on. There was even an emotional moment that really hit me and made me feel powerless and angry. "All the feels" as they say.

Even so, I had the most fun when I was doing what I wanted to do, which was a lot of the open-world side activities. The world was not very large; Port-au-Prince was the only city (and it was a pretty small one) and there is a modest bit of ocean to plunder. It provided me with about seven hours of enjoyment, which made it worth it for me, but this is by no means a must-buy for everybody.