Lara Croft mourns her first deer kill, slaughters dozens more

I think I’m just about done with Tomb Raider. No, wait. I am done. Given the new low that I stooped to last night, it’s best that I just put it and its unlocked Trophies, as well as untouched online multiplayer aspect, behind me, orphaned on some storm-hidden, sun goddess-worshipping tropical island, one which, with any luck, I’ll never find again.

Tomb Raider‘s story came to a close a couple weeks back for me. I don’t remember the exact percentage number at the end of it all, but since then I’ve slowly been working towards that soul-settling 100%. Basically, nabbing all the leftover collectibles. Well, that’s not going to happen. Sure, I’ve upgraded all my weapons with every mod available, finished every optional tomb, collected every relic and document from every level that had ’em, earned all the ability skills, and done most of the GPS caches and challenges.

It’s that last mentioned category that will go incomplete, thus robbing me of a full completion rating. Oh well. The GPS caches actually end up getting marked on your map, making them easier to find since they are only glittering lights, but the challenges, which are things like “shoot down eight tiny wind chimes that blend in really well with the background” or “find 10 specific mushrooms in a forest filled with mushrooms” are not labeled on the map. That means you spend a lot of time running around the same environment, constantly clicking left trigger for Lara’s hunting vision in hopes of seeing something glow. At this point, I have two mushrooms left to find in the forest levels, and that seems like an impossible task–even with an online walkthrough–as I can’t tell which ones I’ve already collected and which ones are still out there, being fun guys.

But let me talk about earning salvage in a post-game Tomb Raider world. In order to pay for weapon mod upgrades, you need salvage, which is earned from finding crates of it in the environment, looting fallen enemy bodies, and skinning slain animals. However, the first two–crates and enemies–are quite finite once the game ends, with little to no respawning for both of them. This means that if you don’t have enough salvage by then, you’re going to have to grind for it, and the quickest and easiest animal to kill over and over again like some mindless sociopath are deer, the same forest friend that gave Lara Croft some minor heartache when she first had to kill the beast to feed her tummy.

Let me start at the start. Early on in Tomb Raider after acquiring the bow, Lara is given a quest to kill a deer, with the implication that she needs to do this to stay alive. To eat, keep her energy up, etc. She goes through the hunting motions and even apologizes to the deer as she guts it. This is supposed to be an emotional scene, but it quickly dissolves into just perfunctory videogame mechanics, as gutting the deer earns Lara both XP and salvage. Note, not food. The quest was for food, and the reward was other stuff. I’m not a huge fan of hunger meters–looking at you, Minecraft and Don’t Starve–as they constantly put pressure on you to always be looking for something scrumptious to keep that meter high instead of letting you just play the game, but here, where hunting is emphasized, it would’ve made sense to have Lara kill a deer every now–for hunger’s sake.

Anyways, since killing deer obvious meant nothing to Lara in the end, just a means to more skills, I took her down a dark path for my last half-hour with Tomb Raider. Back in the coastal forest sections, I had her running in circles, assault rifle at the ready, blasting deer to the ground with a single shot, sometimes  popping off a rabbit or two while waiting for the deer population to respawn. When ammo ran out, I took to practicing how far I could snipe a deer with a loosed arrow, as well as how high they could bounce into the sky once I got the “exploding arrows” perk unlocked. Evidently, kind of high.

This sort of obsessive, stalker-like hunting all became methodical, something which I think an archeologist would appreciate, approaching a task systematically, even if that task is basically slaughtering deer after deer after deer, and all for salvage, a secondary currency that lets her grow in power. Strangely, even after all the weapon mods were bought, Lara can still earn salvage, but that only makes the hunting seem even further without point. No thanks. I’m done voraciously knocking down digital deer, though I don’t expect their death-cries to leave my head for some time.

Lara Croft and the lost artifact to lock away an evil entity

Little did y’all know, but while I was playing Tomb Raider, I was also playing Tomb Raider. Er, I mean…Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. Which is not like Tomb Raider at all. Not that the newest Tomb Raider was very Tomb Raider-y either, in all meaning of the name. Wait, hold up. This is quickly getting confusing. Okay, let’s start again then.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is a downloadable, top-down action game set in Central America that has Lara Croft on a quest for some lost artifact that potentially has the power to lock away an evil entity. Specifically, Xolotl, the Keeper of Darkness. Back in the day, Totec’s army was defeated when Xolotl used the mirror of smoke to unleash hordes of ghastly creatures. Totec survived and found a way to defeat Xolotl, imprisoning him in the mirror of smoke and becoming its immortal guardian in the form of a stone statue. In the present day, Lara reads of the legend and attempts to find it. After locating the mirror, a local warlord takes it from Lara and accidentally releases Xolotl. D’oh.

Rather than the series’ traditional third-person perspective, the camera is high overhead, like a bird, meaning Lara is maybe as tall as a toothpick now. Players control her by using the left thumbstick to move and the other thumbstick to point her equipped weapon in a specific direction, with right trigger to shoot. You can roll and drop bombs and jump and throw magical ropes that attach themselves to ceilings, and that’s kind of all the main moves you have at your disposal. Well, that is if you don’t have a friend to play with, as Guardian of Light is designed as a co-op experience, with a second player using Totec, the titular light-guardian voiced by Jim Cummings. Totec has a spear and shield, which play a big part in the platforming puzzles, but when you are going at it solo, Lara just has the spear itself. Despite Guardian of Light being given out for free to all Xbox Gold members, I was unable to find an online game to join and try out some co-op action.

Let’s talk about how the game actually feels when being played. Lara’s a speedy, gun-toting English archeologist. That’s one of the first things I noticed in Guardian of Light, that she’s extremely light on her feet, able to dive this way and that while still being able to shoot enemy spiders and demon-like creatures with deadly precision. Or as much as an Xbox 360 analog stick can give out. But still–she’s fast. Gone are the days of old, when running and jumping from platform to platform was like moving through water and you often spent more time lining up your jump than executing it. Jumping feels a bit clunky, and I never felt 100% confident when jumping from one platform to another. Same goes with using Lara’s rope to run up and along walls. Lastly, and this could just be my controller, but any time I had Lara running down the screen, like towards me, she would stutter and occasionally pause, which made this one puzzle involving spikes shooting up from the ground a real hassle. You gotta keep moving, Lara.

Right. Guardian of Light–I do like it. It’s certainly a different kind of game banking on the Tomb Raider namesake for interest. In truth, Lara could be replaced with anyone else, and that game would be just as good as it is now. Heck, put Indiana Jones in there, and you suddenly have a pretty good Indy game, not to be confused with a pretty good indie game.

However…I’m stuck. Sadly, it’s early on in Level 3: Spider Tomb. It’s just after that spike trap I mentioned two paragraphs up, with Lara stuck in a small room with, seemingly, nowhere to go. I tried throwing spears into the wall and jumping up, throwing her rope like a rabid cowgirl, but nothing worked. I just kept throwing her into a pit of death, lowering my score with each fall. I guess I’m going to have to grin and bear it and find a walkthrough, as there are still eleven more levels to go, and I do want to see more.

2014 Game Completed Comics, #23 – Tainted Olive, Chapter One “Shadow of a Choice”

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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.

This is truly Hideo Kojima’s legendary Metal Gear

Last year, I put myself to the task of completing five games that I’ve always wanted to see through to the end, but never did for a variety of reasons. I was able to beat three out of the five, and I still plan on at least giving Final Fantasy IX a solid go this summer, as that type of JRPG feels like the kind one plays piecemeal-like across some warm, sockless nights. I thought about doing another list like that again this year, but secretly I’ve had another idea in mind ever since I bought Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection 1987 – 2012 last fall and then never cracked its case.

The idea is simple, but lengthy. Possibly even maddening. Basically, I’m going to play through every game in the collection in the order of release. That means like this:

1. Metal Gear
2. Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
3. Metal Gear Solid
4. Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions
5. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty HD Edition
6. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater HD Edition
7. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
8. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker HD Edition

Woah. Talk about a plunge. Some quick history is that I’ve played Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Metal Gear Solid 3, all of them at least once. I know for sure I’ve mucked around on several occasions with MGS2‘s opening tanker level, just to try things a few different ways. Other than that, everything else above has never been experienced. And it’s been many moons since I did play those previously checked titles, meaning I remember very little of the story, the gameplay, the secrets, and the surprises. I’m looking forward to revisiting and seeing these games for the first time, all of which is, I guess, fine preparation for Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

Anyways, I spent most of Sunday playing the original Metal Gear. I was confused, I was pleased, I was determined, and I befuddled from time to time. First off, to play Metal Gear in this collection, you have to load up MGS3‘s main menu and select it from there. Took me a bit to figure that out. Then, right from the get-go, I realized this was some different version, seeing at it starts you directly with Solid Snake swimming up to Building 1 instead of in the jungle. I know about the jungle level because of the Internet, and so I immediately went investigating. Evidently, there’s an NES version (jungle) and an MSX version (Building 1), and the NES release was produced without any involvement from series creator Hideo Kojima. In fact, Kojima has been quoted as calling the NES version “complete garbage” so I guess it’s better that the collection comes with the MSX edition instead.

Set in 1995, Metal Gear stars the newest FOXHOUND member, a rookie soldier codenamed Solid Snake. His mission is to infiltrate Outer Heaven, which is militaristic state founded by some “legendary mercenary,” and destroy Metal Gear, a mysterious weapon capable of mass nuclear destruction. That’s kind of it for story beats, and you’ll occasionally get some more info through Snake’s transceiver and meeting other people in the buildings, but it doesn’t add much detail to the overall plot. I do like that you eventually learn that Metal Gear is being built 100 floors below Building 3, but when you take an elevator to go fight it, you only descend like nine or ten floors. Close enough, I guess.

Right. Metal Gear. It’s a top-down action-adventure game that puts an emphasis on stealth–but not a requirement. Solid Snake can shoot guns as well as punch soldiers in the noggin, and these are his two offensive tactics through the whole game. He can also sneak past unalerted guards, which works too, until you get spotted, and then you have to fight or flee. You’ll explore buildings and floors, looking for clues and hostages to rescue; once you rescue enough hostages, your class star will increase, which allows Snake to have more health and hold more ammo. You’re always being steered in a specific direction, whether it is to find a certain level key card or an item to help you move to the next area, but I will admit I used a walkthrough in a few spots where I missed a certain item, like the enemy’s uniform.

Even here, in its earliest form, it is still quite rewarding to slip past guards or make it through an entire room unnoticed while still taking out every enemy soldier. This is only lessened by the fact that enemies respawn immediately after leaving and re-entering a room. All that work for naught. Or, if you really enjoyed it, well…do it again. Sometimes it was not worth the effort, and I found myself either running for the exit or punching every guard in the face with little care to alarms. The boss battles always appear intimidating, but there’s a pattern to look for, and they come with some killer chiptune tracks.

Alas, not all is amazing in Metal Gear, even in Kojima’s preferred version. Here’s the stuff I hated in list form:

• For some reason, Solid Snake has to take his gas mask off in gas-filled rooms to use a key card because there’s only one accessory spot to use, and you lose a decent sliver of health in this process.
• The portable transceiver is steamy trash. No one ever answers Snake when he calls, and if they do, they speak batshit or just repeat text even though I already found the item they told me to go find. What was the point of Diane?
• The checkpoint system is bonkers. Basically, it checkpoints every time you enter an elevator, but that’s it. You can “save” your data at any time through the pause menu, but if you die, you can’t reload to this save spot. Only the checkpoint. Thus, I don’t understand what the point of “saving” is. Thankfully, I played the game in a single sitting, so no worries there.
• I wouldn’t say I hated this as it helped me more often than not, but you can basically grind for ammo and rations by entering and exiting rooms over and over. Seemed like a silly oversight.
• Not enough reasons to use many of the items outside of their required spots. Like the bomb-blast suit or the cardboard box.
• There’s no way to know what key works on what door. You just have to keep switching between them until the door slides open. Not a problem early on, but later, after you have cards 1-7, it can be a nuisance.

Lastly, for all you data nerds, my end game stats:

As they say, it’s not a stealth game unless you kill 319 humans. Probably a dozen dogs, too, though that data wasn’t tracked. Okay, that’s it. On to Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake next!

The Half-hour Hitbox: March 2014

Officially, March is the month that sees an end to winter…so why am I still so cold? Fact: I’m literally typing this intro text in front of a tiny space heater. Well, let’s not start deep-diving into things like polar vortexes and the death of the planet, but I’m really looking forward to spring becoming spring. For one, it means I’ll be able to play more console videogames since I won’t immediately crawl under the heated blanket every night after work just to stay warm. Two, well…um, I don’t know. I guess it just ultimately means I’ll have more time to play all them vidyagamez I have in my backlog.

Actually, there’s not too many games for this edition of Half-hour Hitbox. I’ve mostly written about the big games occupying my time this month–like Tomb Raider, Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy, and Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures–and I’ve only dipped my toes into a few other games over the last thirty-one days. This is me attempting to remain focused and dedicated to the task at hand, of beating more games than starting new ones.

Enough babbling, on with the list…

Hitman: Absolution

Remember all the trouble I had with Hitman: Blood Money? Of course you do. Well, thankfully, Hitman: Absolution plays much more smoothly than its older brother, but I’ve only gotten through the tutorial level so far. Again, there’s a lot of systems to play with here: you can be sneaky, you can be aggressive, you can be both, and you can be creative in all your approaches. I like that; I’ve always liked that. So long as thinking of an idea and implementing it via action buttons is, more of less, easy to do. That’s the ticket. The next stage up is the Chinatown one from all them demo trailers, and I’m eager to see what trouble I can get Agent 47 into next.

Dungeon Defenders

Well, it finally happened. I played Dungeon Defenders. See, I’ve had a copy on both Steam and PlayStation 3 for a long, long time now. Just sitting there, waiting. Making puppy eyes now and then as I’d skip past it to play something else. And then, this month on the Xbox 360, Gold users get a free copy of the game, meaning I now have three versions of it across all my current platforms. Alas, the game never looked too appealing to me, both visually and from a gameplay perspective, so I never made it a priority, but I figured enough was enough. I needed to know for sure.

Unfortunately, my gut instincts were right–this isn’t a game for me. It’s boring solo, consisting of just you setting up turrets and defenses, clicking start, and running around like a madman to keep on top of every situation. You do this for several waves until you win, and then you move on to a new area that, from what I can tell, while aesthetically different, plays just like everything else. Maybe I’ll try to see if I can join someone’s online game, but if not, I’ll probably end up deleting Dungeon Defenders. FROM ALL MY GAMING DEVICES.

Celestial Mechanica

In this collaboration from Roger Hicks and Paul Veer (animator of Super Crate Box), Earth was saved by celestial beings known as mechanians from complete destruction. However, since then, these beings haven’t been seen in like a hundred years. Naturally, in Celestial Mechanica, you play as one of these beings, exiled and now booted all the way down to Earth. Your mission is to get back…as well as try to sell some indie game soundtracks.

Basically, we have a Metroidvania action-platformer here, that starts pretty slow. I mean, you can’t even jump at the very beginning. Gameplay involves exploring and solving large environmental puzzles, with checkpoints for deaths almost non-existent, making for frustrating rooms when spikes and lasers are the main adversary. I played for a little bit and got a few powers, but eventually closed the window to do something else. Perhaps I’ll return to this Earth some other time in the future…

Polar Escape

A very short “escape the room” adventure game, wherein you’re stuck somewhere cold–maybe Alaska given I saw a poster for The Thing above the bed–trapped inside a four-walled room. The puzzles are all extremely logical, like using a hose on a tank of gasoline to extract the gas to power the generator, and the only hiccup I ran into was figuring out the secret code that unlocked one of the lockers. Once I got through that, the rest of the items get used one after the other in the most obvious of ways. Wasn’t really expecting much here, but Polar Escape didn’t impress me at all in the end. Also: could use some editing.

2048

Over the last few days, I’ve read a decent amount about the popular puzzle game Threes. As well as 2048, a clone that is also experiencing popularity. Alas, given my Windows 8 phone, I can’t play Threes, but I was able to download 2048 and see what all the fuss is about. You basically slide tiles around to combine numbers in hopes of reaching a big score and creating a tile with the number 2,048 in it. I’ve not done it yet, but it’s surprisingly addictive and easy to get into. I can only image what Threes is like then, being the original idea. We’ll just call this another good killer of five to ten minutes, something to play while waiting for the teapot water to boil.

Hexic

When I first got my Xbox 360, I only had two retail games for the longest while–Fable II and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I’d come home for lunch a lot and want to play, but didn’t have the allotted time for either of those two titles. Then I discovered that the Xbox 360 came with some arcade games pre-installed on it, with one of them being Hexic HD, a title-turning puzzle game that, despite its appearance, was deceptively difficult to master. And now you can play Hexic on your Windows 8 phone…for free. Uh oh. These last few months have shown us the truly nasty side of free-to-play games.

That said, I’m not even through the tutorial yet, so I have no idea if this game gets free-to-pay gross. It might, it might not at all. At this point, it’s just teaching me the basics that I already know while introducing special power-ups and moves to help clear the board faster. This reminds me greatly of what Tetris Blitz did, wherein you have Tetris, but also a handful of probably unnecessary and overpowering special items that, naturally, can be purchased with real money. I do like that there’s a tile with a single eye talking to you, calling you “a human”, and the presentation is quite nice, though some text can be a little small at times.

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The Half-hour Hitbox is a new monthly feature for Grinding Down, covering a handful of videogames that I’ve only gotten to play for less than an hour so far. My hopes in doing this is to remind myself that I played a wee bit of these games at one time or another, and I should hop back into them, if I liked that first bite.

2014 Game Completed Comics, #22 – Don’t Drink the Pink

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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.

In search of imaginary elephants in Don’t Drink the Pink

Don’t Drink the Pink doesn’t do much overall, but it’s still an effective slice of weird pointing and clicking, certainly inspired by that rather infamous intoxication sequence from 1941’s Dumbo, wherein Dumbo and Timothy accidentally drink from a bucket filled with champagne and then begin seeing dancing, singing pink elephants, a moment I’ve still not come to terms with some seventy-three years later. It was made for the January 2014 MAGS competition “Something Cold, Something Burrowed, Something Pink” and is self-described by its maker(s) as “a simple story about a man, few pints of pink and occasional elephants.” You still following?

It opens with you passed out in the snow. After you’ve awoken and prayed to the god of forgiveness that you didn’t do anything stupid during your time of unmemorable drunkenness, you begin exploring the world. Alas, it’s pretty much Hoth. Or the planet Winter from Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Y’know, cold and white and not brimming with signs of life. That is until you come across a simple hatch, which brings you to a small bar selling Pink, a mysteriously powerful drink. The bar itself is not too lively; besides the bartender, there’s two other patrons, one of whom is passed out as well. It’s up to you to mingle and find out what happened last night and why you were outside, all alone in this snow. Naturally, this leads to you on the hunt for a pink elephant.

As you get one step closer to answers, your Pink-O-Meter also increases with each drink of Pink you acquire and down. This means the character is getting drunker, sloppier as he plays, forcing you to second guess every word and action that unfolds. Thankfully, you who is playing the game can solve many of the puzzles in a sober state through simple deduction, as there are only a few areas to explore, a handful of items to use, and so many characters to interact with. That said, the puzzles are still pretty clever for how quickly the game was put together, accompanied by jaunty blips in the limited soundtrack that feel like tiny rewards all on their own.

Again, there’s not much to Don’t Drink the Pink, but it’s still a solid, fun fifteen or twenty minutes of clicking around and discovery. I’d have like to have seen more detailed environments and dialogue trees, but there’s still enough here to sell the story and get the job done. Kind of like of Scaling the Sky ends, everything comes full circle in Don’t Drink the Pink, meaning you could potentially play it on end eternally, but you really need only one go to see everything here. Besides, clearly, too much Pink is not good for you.

Problem after problem in Wallace and Gromit’s new indoor holiday resort

I don’t know how to get into this post without spoiling the ending to the first episode of Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures, so if you are interested in seeing how Wallace and Gromit solve the problem of giant bees invading the neighborhood…well, don’t read any further. No joke. The next paragraph is going to lay it all out. Stop now, if you are behind the times like I am, catching up on these jaunty, whimsical 2009 point-and-click adventure games from Telltale Games. All right, here we go.

So, at the end of “Fright of the Bumblebees,” Wallace comes up with a way to counteract the hyper-powerful growth formula he fed to his flowers to make the bees happier, but resulted in them also growing to extreme and deadly sizes. You don’t play an active part in this puzzle solution after taking down the large Queen Bee, just see the outcome, which has Wallace coming up out of the basement beaming with excitement over his discovery. Unfortunately, in his journey to make the bees smaller, he has also shrunk himself down in size. Immediately cut to some bouncy, knee-slappy music and then the credits.

In my mind, since Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures is billed as an episodic adventure series, I figured that the second episode “The Last Resort” would pick up on this zany plot twist and steer the story in its respective direction. Nope. It’s a whole separate story, and the second episode opens some time after Wallace shrunk himself, now back at his normal size with no comments on the matter. Huh. I found this really strange, and I guess we can blame The Walking Dead for its dedication to keeping everything connected from one episode to another. Granted, there’s still a loose connection to the previous events.

In “The Last Resort,” using the profits from their now-saved honey business, Wallace prepares to take Gromit to Blackpool for a little vacation time. Alas, the stormy weather both spoils their plans to hit the beach and creates a small flood in the cellar. Wallace comes up with the idea of converting the water-logged cellar into an indoor holiday resort for the rest of the townsfolk. If you build it, they will show up, and they do, but many are unhappy for various reasons, and Wallace makes it his personal mission to make everyone’s stay at West Wallaby Waterworld the most pleasant ever. Later, Ms. Flitt’s maybe-boyfriend Duncan McBiscuit is mysteriously injured, and no one is allowed to leave the house until the culprit is caught.

Gameplay-wise, nothing has changed from “Fright of the Bumblebees” in that you still both control Wallace and Gromit at different parts, walking around the environment with WASD or arrow keys and clicking on items to pick up/examine. There’s no item-combining; you just select an item from the inventory and use it on what or who you want. Something I never did in the previous episode that I discovered this time around was hitting the tab button, which highlights everything on a screen that can be interacted with. That’s neat, though it’s pretty obvious what items and people can be interacted with within a single scene.

I’m nearly done naming Duncan McBiscuit’s attacker(s) and proving it with hard-steel proof, but at least I know that episode three “Muzzled!” will only be loosely connected to whatever unfolds from here onwards. Regardless of that, I’m still enjoying the bombastic stories and silly character motivations and plan to see this whole series to the end. Truthfully, I just can’t get enough of Gromit staring into the camera, shaking his head.

2014 Game Completed Comics, #21 – Thomas Was Alone

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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, #20 – Spelunky

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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.