The Experiment

As someone who generally buys his games used, and who often is behind the curve by as much as years, I realized when started writing this blog that I would have to start buying games that people were actually faced with on store shelves. To this end, this week I went to a few electronics stores, and bought a game I saw on the shelves of all of them: The Experiment.

The Experiment, by The Adventure Company, is a game which places you in control of the electronic surveillance systems of a derelict laboratory ship, and gives you the task of helping a woman discover just what the hell happened there.

The entire interface is played out as an all-purpose security and intranet desktop application, which allows you to track the goings-on via multiple cameras, view the personal files of various employees, and turn on and off lights, monitors, and various other electronic doodads. and generally be the ghost in the machine.

Sadly, there's very little I can say good about this game. The voice acting is god-awful, the interface is clumsy at the best of times, and Lea, the woman you're following around, acts with exactly enough independence to make me want to rip my hair out by the roots. And I don't mean that in the "Oh dear, this puzzle is very hard" way, I mean it in the "Fuck's sake, why can't you figure out what I'm trying to tell you to do?" way.

Nearly every line of the script is as wooden as a tobacco shop indian, and from the first spoken line, you know your ears, and your sense of dramatic tension, are in for an abysmal experience. Worse yet, though her face has clearly been animated, when Lea inevitably spends a good long time looking directly at one of your cameras and talking, her mouth and face don't so much move, as fix themselves firmly into the expression of someone who's just spent seventy-two-and-a-half hours in a row watching nothing but sitcoms, and is now sitting in a pile of their own excrement.

Honestly, I didn't get very far into this before I quit. A time came when I was supposed to be finding something with the cameras, and the game wasn't exactly clear on where exactly that thing was, which wouldn't have been a problem, except that Lea kept giving me a reminder prompt that I was supposed to be looking for it, which was played at full volume regardless of which cameras I had activated, and repeated about every ten seconds or so.

Remembering this has me looking at the disc sitting on my desk, and considering microwaving it, so it can't be a bother to anyone else.

Sam and Max: Season 1

Based on the comics of Steve Purcell, Sam and Max: Season One is a series of six short point-and-click adventure games starring, eponymously enough, Sam, a big-gun-packing Bogart-esque dog, and Max, a hyper-kinetic kind of rabbity thing. Together, they form the Freelance Police, the worst nightmare of villians, crooks, ne'er-do-wells, and innocent bystanders everywhere.

Telltale Games has given the genre a much-needed facelift, bringing it solidly into 3D, fully voice-acted, full-color glory. They've also managed to remove most of the obstacles to the average person's enjoyment of the genre, such as tiny or difficult to find items, inventory item combination, and completely unintuitive solutions to seemingly simple puzzles.

Episodic gameplay is perfect for Sam and Max, it turns out. Each episode can be finished in about an hour, ideal for the casual gamer. In addition, the difficulty ramps slowly throughout, allowing the novice to slowly adjust to the style of gameplay, and the sense of humor of the designers. Each episode (except for the season finale) ends on an ominous note, which leads nicely into the next episode.

The character design is fantastic, and the NPCs are far more than the standard cookie-cutter obstacles, and watching the way they develop throughout the series is a joy. Throw in a couple of unexpected musical numbers, and you've got me pretty much enthralled.

Sam and Max: Season One is available in it's entirety from Telltale Games, for the PC, and as of October 7th of this year, will also be available for the Wii.

And now, Signifigant Links!

The Sam & Max Official Telltale Games Homepage
You can buy the episodes here, as well as a fair amount of other Sam & Max swag. Be sure to check out Abe Lincoln Must Die (epidode 4), which is being offered for free.

FreelanceSamAndMax
A YouTube user who's thoughtfully gone and uploaded the first three episodes of the ill-fated Sam and Max Fox Kids cartoon. Only 24 episodes aired before it was given the axe, and it's not quite up to the standard of the comics or games, but fun nonetheless. Incidently, you can buy the entire series on DVD for the low, low price of twenty-five American dollars at Amazon.

Well, see you around, little buddies.

ADOM: Ancient Domains Of Mystery

My inaugural review is for a game which has, sadly, a limited appeal. Don't take this to mean that it's not good - it's one of the most in-depth games I've ever played, not to mention one of the most challenging.

If the word "roguelike" sounds familiar, you've probably already heard of, and even played ADOM. If not, and if you're under the age of 30, then there's a whole slew of games out there you've never experienced, and unless you keep a fairly open mind, a whole slew of games you never will experience.

ADOM is, in my humble opinion, the best of the bunch. A fantasy adventure game wth randomly-generated dungeons, thousands of items, hundreds of race/class combinations, bunches of quests, secrets, easter eggs, and one cute white puppy. There's really only three problems, as far as the average gamer is involved:

1. The "graphics" are ASCII text. Your character is an @. A goblin is a g. And so on.

2. There are a LOT of commands to remember. Most keystrokes are valid commands. There are commands to wipe your face, and clean your ears, among other things.

3. Death is forever. Your character must survive the entire game to win. Expect this to take weeks or even months of casual playing, if you ever manage it at all.

Personally, I don't find any of these things to negatively impact my gaming experience. The ASCII text graphics means the game is wicked small. They also allow me to imagine the action in my own way, and as The Maxx once said, "The shows in my head are almost always better."

The large number of commands means that at any given time, there are many choices you can make to attempt to ensure your character's survival. Some otherwise very difficult monsters can be dealt with by giving them certain items. Even the seemingly extraneous commands have uses in certain situations. For instance, you can deafen yourself by shoving beeswax in your ears, but your earholes aren't an inventory slot, so removing the beeswax requires cleaning your ears.

As for the death thing, I find that the tendancy of gamers is to take risks in fantasy games that are reckless, based on the idea that they've just saved, and therefore if the risk doesn't pay off, they can always reload, and suffer no loss. Permadeath makes you slow down, take measured risks, and seriously consider things like whether or not that super-heavy armor is worth it, considering how much it's going to bog you down and how will you carry that AND all your spellbooks, and still have room to keep yourself fed, and what about this hammer? It's not been identified yet and... Yeah, you get the point.

ADOM features a detailed skill system, special class powers unlocked at milestone levels, a feat system not at all unlike D&D's, and several endings, based on a number of in-game factors, plus, it's a 100% free-to-download-and-play game. If you give it enough time, you'll get pulled in, I damned near guarantee it.

Hey, look! Links to stuff!

The ADOM Homepage
Here you can find the pertinent download for your operating system, The blog of the author, Thomas Biskup, and some fan-art. Also contains stuff about JADE, the sequel to ADOM which will NEVAR BE RELEASED.

The ADOM Guidebook
The most comprehensive collection of information on ADOM the world has ever seen. While it's an incredibly useful collection of information, it IS spoiler-tastic. Many people find that much of the fun in roguelikes is the slow discovery of differant aspects of gameplay.

OK, until next time, keep playing games. I will.

Hasty Plays Games

Hey kids, I'm Hasty Lumbago, an avid Video gamer since the mid-eighties. I've become pretty opinionated in all that time, and I've played more games than I care to count.

Honestly, my friends get pretty sick of hearing about my latest gaming exploits, and many of them have suggested that with all my ranting and rhapsodizing about games I've been playing, I ought to join the rest of the blogoshpere and start reviewing games on the internets.

So here we go. I've got a few reviews lined up for today, and over the next few weeks, I hope to expand my library to include quite a few games, both new games, and older ones that you might have missed out on.

Incidentally, I'm trying to do this for a living, so if you'd like to do something that will help a starving geek, go ahead and click through some of my banner advertisements. Or you can be one of those awesome people who donates via pay pal. Seriously. I love those people.