2014 Game Completed Comics, #7 – Bad Dream: Butcher

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Every videogame that I complete in 2014 will now get its very own wee comic here on Grinding Down. It’s about time I fused my art with my unprofessional games journalism. I can’t guarantee that these comics will be funny or even attempt to be funny. Or look the same from one to another. Some might even aim for thoughtfulness. Comics are a versatile form, so expect the unexpected.

2014 Game Completed Comics, #6 – Falling Skywards

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Every videogame that I complete in 2014 will now get its very own wee comic here on Grinding Down. It’s about time I fused my art with my unprofessional games journalism. I can’t guarantee that these comics will be funny or even attempt to be funny. Or look the same from one to another. Some might even aim for thoughtfulness. Comics are a versatile form, so expect the unexpected.

2014 Game Completed Comics, #5 – ~airwave~ I Fought the Law, and the Law One

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Every videogame that I complete in 2014 will now get its very own wee comic here on Grinding Down. It’s about time I fused my art with my unprofessional games journalism. I can’t guarantee that these comics will be funny or even attempt to be funny. Or look the same from one to another. Some might even aim for thoughtfulness. Comics are a versatile form, so expect the unexpected.

2014 Game Completed Comics, #4 – Ys I

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Every videogame that I complete in 2014 will now get its very own wee comic here on Grinding Down. It’s about time I fused my art with my unprofessional games journalism. I can’t guarantee that these comics will be funny or even attempt to be funny. Or look the same from one to another. Some might even aim for thoughtfulness. Comics are a versatile form, so expect the unexpected.

2014 Game Completed Comics, #3 – Temple Run 2

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Every videogame that I complete in 2014 will now get its very own wee comic here on Grinding Down. It’s about time I fused my art with my unprofessional games journalism. I can’t guarantee that these comics will be funny or even attempt to be funny. Or look the same from one to another. Some might even aim for thoughtfulness. Comics are a versatile form, so expect the unexpected.

Gone Home to mysteries, answers, and everything 1990s

Breaking news: I’ve decided to do away with my gaming haikus, at least for 2014. Chin up, Mr. Sadface. It’s going to be okay. Really. I had a lot of fun writing them, but after two consecutive years of dipping my toes in Japanese poetry–well, if you can call 104 haikus a dip–I’m ready to try something else. Gotta keep things fresh. If you’ve been keeping up with Grinding Down over the weekend, then you’ll know what the long and short of it all is: comics. Yes, yes. Actual comics about the games I’ve played, and I really don’t know why it took me so long to combine these two passions of mine together.

Anyways, Gone Home gets the special honor of being my first completed game for 2014. Compare that with Yoshi’s Island from last year. That’s right. Go on. I dare you to compare the two. One looks like a drawing, and the other has you occasionally looking at drawings. Hmm. If you’ll recall, Gone Home was also my number one pick for the top 10 videogames I missed out on in 2013, but thanks to a recently good deal via the Humble Bundle store I was able to pick up The Fullbright Company’s debut for a sweet price, one that wouldn’t make me terribly irate if I discovered that the game didn’t work on my ASUS laptop. The good news is that, obviously, it ran just fine, even though it defaulted to the lowest of settings to do so and some of the textures looked a wee flat. Small quibbles aside, I absolutely loved it.

Gone Home‘s plot itself is pretty straightforward: it is June 1995, and Kaitlin Greenbriar is returning home to her parents’ new house in the Pacific Northwest after traveling abroad. She gets in very late on a rainy, thunder-laden night only to discover the house is completely empty, with a strange note on the front door from her sister, urging Kaitlin to not go digging around for clues as to what happened. Naturally, though, that’s exactly what you do, and the whole game is built around exploration and piecing together where Sam and Kaitlin’s parents went to. If I’m being honest and a little spoilery, that’s not at all what the plot is really about; in truth, this is actually Sam’s story, not Kaitlin’s, and there’s stuff about her parents to unravel, as well as what went wrong with the previous owners of the house to have it now deemed the Psycho House by other students at Sam’s school. Kaitlin is just a means to see all this unfold, and she is mostly non-reactive, save for a few text-only comments when finding items related to her parents’ sex life.

The game itself takes around two to three hours to complete, depending how thorough you search each and every room in the larger-than-life mansion-like new Greenbriar home. That said, Gone Home never wastes a single second though or pads out rooms with nothing that isn’t vital or important to the story-telling, and so you are constantly advancing, learning more and more. I found all this beyond exhilarating and couldn’t wait to see what was behind that closed door over there or what hid in the third drawer from the top, but only after I clicked open the first two drawers. You move with WASD, and zoom in for a closer look and pick up items using the mouse. Oh, and you can also fully twirl items around in your hand, to check out all sides, and you’d think there would have been more puzzles built around this mechanic, but Gone Home is actually not about puzzles–save for the few combination locks–and this mechanic exists more so to keep you in the world, prove that these rolls of tissue paper and printed books are real, that everything has a front and back and can be examined properly.

Anyone that actually grew up in the 1990s is clearly going to sink into Gone Home a bit deeper than those that didn’t. The game oozes with the era, from magazines wreathed in pop culture icons to board games and mounds of VHS tapes of your favorite Saturday afternoon couch-flicks, like Blade Runner and just about every episode of The X-Files. In fact, Super Nintendo plays a wee part in the events that transpire in Sam’s young, blossoming life, and you can find various fictional cartridges around the house, some goofier than others. Regardless, the attention to detail is astounding and appreciated, especially for a game that’s all about looking and listening. I couldn’t listen to too many of Lonnie’s musical recordings though, sorry.

Many have complained about the bait-and-switch trick in Gone Home. It’s initially set up to seem like your typical ghost story: girl comes home on a rainy night to find her house completely empty of life. For most of the early rooms, you expect something spooky to happen. The TV to randomly flip on? A door to slowly creak open itself? The sound of footsteps overhead? But no, nothing like that happens ever, save for a single moment of pure genius that is logically explained so long as you found the correct paperwork earlier in the house. This is not a ghost story. This is a human story, and it is remarkable in its dedication to remain rooted in reality, one I think many can relate to on some level, whether it is with teenage romance, a failed marriage, not being good enough for your father, and so on.

I think Gone Home is both a great game and a very important one. If you haven’t played it yet, I highly recommend you do so as soon as possible. Videogame story-telling has a new measuring stick.

2014 Game Completed Comics, #2 – Disposabot

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Every videogame that I complete in 2014 will now get its very own wee comic here on Grinding Down. It’s about time I fused my art with my unprofessional games journalism. I can’t guarantee that these comics will be funny or even attempt to be funny. Or look the same from one to another. Some might even aim for thoughtfulness. Comics are a versatile form, so expect the unexpected.

2014 Game Completed Comics, #1 – Gone Home

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Every videogame that I complete in 2014 will now get its very own wee comic here on Grinding Down. It’s about time I fused my art with my unprofessional games journalism. I can’t guarantee that these comics will be funny or even attempt to be funny. Or look the same from one to another. Some might even attempt to be thoughtful. Comics are a versatile form, so expect the unexpected.

Pretty late to the Joker’s party in Batman: Arkham Asylum

Batman: Arkham Asylum came out in 2009 to nearly unanimous praise, and four years later, during a PSN summer sale, after consecutively not experiencing Rocksteady Studios’ take on the Dark Knight year after year after year after year, I bought it for a silky smooth $5.00. And then a couple months later, simply because everyone was getting back to praising the place where it all began after seeing how lackluster Batman: Arkham Origins turned out to be, I installed the game, booted it up, and saw the errors of my ways over these past few years. It’s more or less Deus Ex: The Bats Revolution.

First things first, the story setup: in Arkham Asylum, the Joker instigates an elaborate plot to seize control of Arkham Asylum and trap Batman inside with many of his incarcerated foes. Subsequently, the Joker also holds the power to detonate hidden bombs he placed around Gotham City before getting himself captured. Batman must now fight his way through the asylum’s loose inmates, save some named people, and put an end to the Joker’s plans. He’ll do this by playing detective, being sneaky, hanging from gargoyles, and punching rhythmically when the scenario says so.

Before I get into my impressions, here’s a bunch of silly comics about Bats from my recently completed 365 BAD COMICS project:

Right. Couldn’t resist the chance to shamelessly plug my art.

Anyways, I’m having a lot of fun in Arkham Asylum, and I’m only at a 14% completion rate. This is even more surprising when you realize that, as a superhero comic book character, I don’t find Batman very interesting. Definitely more so than Superman, but that’s it. Everybody else comes ahead. I’m more of an X-Men follower, but Bruce Wayne is kind of just a rich man in a costume beating up poor criminals with fancy gadgets and a throaty voice. I’m sure I just made a lot of people angry with that statement. However, all his toys do make for fantastic gameplay, which is what this game delivers on tenfold.

Batman is trapped in Arkham Asylum, which is actually called the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane and found isolated just outside Gotham City. Has hints of Alcatraz prison. You’ll come across good guys and bad guys as you move from building to building, all while the Joker teases you from afar, promising a party you’ll never forget. It’s a mix of open-world-like areas and more linear hallways and rooms, and I think it works great. You can explore a bit and find interview audio logs and Riddler trophies or you can stick to the pretty obvious path to see the story unfold at a healthy clip. I’ve done a little bit of both, but I think I’ll just keep pushing the story forward from now on, even though those Riddler trophies sure are dang tempting and do at least reward Batman with a pinch of XP. And you need XP to unlock gadgets, combat moves, and armor upgrades.

Combat requires rhythm and reminds me of what the Assassin’s Creed series has been doing as of late, with countering attacks simply keeping the flow going so you can chain together attack after attack for bonus XP. Personally, I’ve tried getting through most scenarios as a silent pounder, loving the inverted takedowns from gargoyles. But unfortunately, you can’t play the game the whole way in that fashion, especially when boss fights pop up. Detective Mode really helps, which makes enemies appear as visible skeletal frames on the map, so you know exactly where everyone is. Reminds me warmly of the good times in Deus Ex: Human Revolution–see: not the boss fights–of sneaking through vents and using the augmentation that lets you look through walls for enemies.

So call me surprised. Call me stupid. I wish I had started playing Arkham Asylum a long time ago, but I’m pretty okay with seeing it now and enjoying a slower pace through the halls of this creepy psychiatric hospital. I might be late as frak to the party, but I’m still celebrating.

The sky’s the superpatriotic limit in BioShock Infinite

The way my brain works, I can literally come up with any excuse to buy a new videogame. The latest? Well, I’m trying this juicing fast thing for a few days, and the worst days are generally the worst, which I planned ahead for and made sure were on the weekend where I could hide out at home and crawl into bed if the hunger troubles growled too loud. I figured I could also use something new to play on either the Xbox 360 or PS3 as a way to distract myself for several hours. And so, on my way home from picking up more green groceries, I snagged a copy of BioShock Infinite and immediately flipped the cover art from macho-man-centric to art deco. I kinda wish all game boxes came with reversible cover art.

Anyways, before I get into Infinite, let me talk a bit about the original BioShock, a game I came to late that I can appreciate, but had a lot of trouble playing. I found Rapture and its inhabitants to be frightening; no, really. The creaking of floorboards, everything wrapped in shadow, the way voices of enemies would find me in any corner–gah, I can’t. It made for slow playing, as I was continuously anxious about moving to the next location, especially once I got the ability to turn invisible when standing still. But I did eventually soldier on, comprehend what the Internet had been talking about, and finished the game. Never even picked up BioShock 2.

However, the look of BioShock Infinite is too good to ignore. We are no longer deep underwater; in fact, just the opposite. The city of Columbia, which separated itself from the United States for reasons, floats high in the sky among the clouds. Buildings bob up and down, and zeppelins move to and fro, with streets disconnecting as sections of the city move around. Mechanical skylines allow for speedy travel, too, if you’re into high-soaring sensations. You do go inside places as well, but nothing so far has been as stunning as throwing open a door and walking over to a balcony and just sitting the world below, opaqued by a layer of clouds.

You play as Booker DeWitt, a less-than-good man who is tasked with stealing a girl from a locked tower in Columbia to wipe away his past crimes. What his past is all about is a mystery, as is the girl who he is off to steal; her name is Elizabeth, and she has the power to open “tears” to other realities. Stealing her from the tower happens relatively early in the game, and the plot only becomes more complicated from there. In honor of spoilers, I won’t say much more about it just yet though the racial themes presented throughout make me very uncomfortable, much more than the religious elements.

Story aside, BioShock Infinite is a videogame, and just like in the original game, you have magic spells in the left hand and guns in the right hand. At this point, I have four spells unlocked–now called Vigors instead of Plasmids–and my favorite is naturally Shock Jockey, which sends lightning into an enemy, temporarily stunning them just long enough to get popped in the face with a gun. Weaponry is rather standard, with pistols and shotguns and RPGs, and I’ve been most comfortable with smaller guns, relying more on Vigor powers to take dudes down. The Possession one is also great for turrets or the larger-than-life Patriots, letting others do Booker’s dirty work.

I’m enjoying the game despite the turmoil it puts in my non-superpatriotic heart, and a part of that has to do with the fact that, thank Comstock, it’s not very scary. The old-fashioned music and art style puts me at ease, as does being out in the beautiful videogame air, swinging wildly on the skylines. I am definitely taking my time as there is a lot to grok in Columbia, from posters to shop windows to audio logs and those movie things that I can’t recall the name of. It all exists for a reason, to make a world whole. Most fights so far often take place in well-lit areas, and I’ve done absolutely zero crouching, just confidently tossing open doors and seeing what’s on the other side. However, sometimes the movement of the vendor robots freaks me out if I turn around and don’t remember they are there. That said, nothing to keep me at bay here.

I’ll be back later to talk more about BioShock Infinite. Especially that lottery scene.