Paul’s Preeminent PlayStation Plus Purge – Alien Rage

Hey, remember Bulletstorm? I do. Not immensely fondly, but it had a thing it was going for, and boy did it go for it. The parts I really liked about Bulletstorm were pulling off fun, nifty “skill kill” tricks with guns, whips, and kicks and getting big points for it, along with sliding around the open-ish environments. Well, Alien Rage–what a balloon-deflating name–is pretty similar to Bulletstorm, with a focus on earning points by killing enemies in more unique ways than simply shooting them in their faces.

Alien Rage takes place on an asteroid that humans and an alien species known as Vorus were jointly mining for Promethium, a highly efficient source of energy. After the Vorus turned on the humans and wiped the miners out, Jack, the player character, is sent to the mining facility to kill the aliens and destroy the facility. I’m sorry if you wanted a story with a little more depth to it, but that’s all I got. It’s basically a SyFy afternoon time-filler movie starring nobody you have ever heard of. Audio logs try to flesh things out, but there isn’t much to go off of from the start.

Well, obviously, Alien Rage is a first-person shooter, in which players fight through several linear levels, killing a variety of aliens. At the end of every few levels, you have to do battle with a larger alien in a boss fight. Players score points by killing a large number of aliens in a short period of time or by killing them in special ways, such as using explosions or getting sick headshots. These points can be used later to upgrade Jack–for example, by boosting his resistance to damage or increasing the amount of ammunition that he is able to carry. The better you do, the better you play. Jack can carry two weapons at a time, but also has a pistol with unlimited ammunition so you are never without a weapon. He can also use both human- and alien-manufactured weapons in the game, and alien weapons use a cool-down period instead of having to reload.

I’m playing on the “normal” level of difficulty and finding Alien Rage extremely challenging, only getting myself up to the third level. Actually, the “normal” difficulty setting calls itself “hard” next to the arrogantly named “challenging” easy level. Um, okay. There are frequently unpleasant areas that throw a ton of enemies at you at once. Now, they’re not really all that tough to kill and they’re dumb enough to round a corner in single file at you, but their weapons deplete Jack’s small health pool extremely quickly so if you aren’t constantly ducking in and out of cover you are going to go down swiftly. I’d complain more about this, but this type of challenge seems to be what Alien Rage wants and prides itself on, and that’s fine, I guess, but I’d prefer not to play a first-person shooter by inching myself forward at a snail’s crawl and having to replay entire chunks of fights over and over again.

Alien Rage also offers competitive multiplayer. There are two modes–deathmatch and team deathmatch–and a small number of maps to run around in though I couldn’t really get into any of these due to a lack of other people still playing this easily forgettable game today. Oh well, so it goes.

I truly don’t feel a lick bad about only giving Alien Rage an hour or so of my time and then uninstalling it from my PlayStation 3. It’s bland and generic and a bit too tough for my fingers. Good luck, Jack, dealing with the Vorus without me…you’re gonna need it!

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Oh look, another reoccurring feature for Grinding Down. At least this one has both a purpose and an end goal–to rid myself of my digital collection of PlayStation Plus “freebies” as I look to discontinue the service soon. I got my PlayStation 3 back in January 2013 and have since been downloading just about every game offered up to me monthly thanks to the service’s subscription, but let’s be honest. Many of these games aren’t great, and the PlayStation 3 is long past its time in the limelight for stronger choices. So I’m gonna play ’em, uninstall ’em. Join me on this grand endeavor.

2017 Game Review Haiku, #38 – Somewhere Strange

Strange alien world
Empty homes, forgotten shoes
Find answer, questions

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I can’t believe I’m still doing this. I can’t believe I’ll ever stop. These game summaries in chunks of five, seven, and five syllable lines paint pictures in the mind better than any half a dozen descriptive paragraphs I could ever write. Trust me, I’ve tried. Brevity is the place to be. At this point, I’ve done over 200 of these things and have no plans of slowing down. So get ready for another year of haikus. Doumo arigatou gozaimasu.

2017 Game Review Haiku, #3 – The Little Lifeform That Could

The smallest microbe
Grows into something grander
I wore hats, traded

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I can’t believe I’m still doing this. I can’t believe I’ll ever stop. These game summaries in chunks of five, seven, and five syllable lines paint pictures in the mind better than any half a dozen descriptive paragraphs I could ever write. Trust me, I’ve tried. Brevity is the place to be. At this point, I’ve done over 200 of these things and have no plans of slowing down. So get ready for another year of haikus. Doumo arigatou gozaimasu.

2016 Game Review Haiku, #65 – The Visitor

Ever see Slither?
This is that, with more clicking
Felt bad for the cat

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Here we go again. Another year of me attempting to produce quality Japanese poetry about the videogames I complete in three syllable-based phases of 5, 7, and 5. I hope you never tire of this because, as far as I can see into the murky darkness–and leap year–that is 2016, I’ll never tire of it either. Perhaps this’ll be the year I finally cross the one hundred mark. Buckle up–it’s sure to be a bumpy ride. Yoi ryokō o.

2016 Game Review Haiku, #37 – Saints Row IV

Earth is gone, POTUS
Out for revenge on Zinyak
Superpowers help

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Here we go again. Another year of me attempting to produce quality Japanese poetry about the videogames I complete in three syllable-based phases of 5, 7, and 5. I hope you never tire of this because, as far as I can see into the murky darkness–and leap year–that is 2016, I’ll never tire of it either. Perhaps this’ll be the year I finally cross the one hundred mark. Buckle up–it’s sure to be a bumpy ride. Yoi ryokō o.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified requires you to kill the Outsiders

There are four difficulty levels in The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, and they are as follows: Rookie, Squaddie, Veteran, Commander. The game defaults to the third one, Veteran, and I’m prone to playing games on their default settings, as I imagine this is what developers intend for players to select. That said, the naming convention here confuses me, as you’d think a veteran would be the harder difficulty since veterans have already gone through trying times while commanders are seemingly still in it, giving the charges; also, for some reason, I want to swap the order of Rookie and Squaddie.

Regardless, Veteran is pretty tough to play on, especially in the earlier sections, and I nearly gave up on the game as a whole because it is no fun restarting entire sections four to five times in a row, simply because your team now takes more damage easily and enemies absorb bullets like walking sponges with laser guns. Actually, here’s what makes this difficulty different than others:

Enemies are challenging and use different tactics. Companions, who are not healed in time, die permanently. New agents can be recruited only between missions.

Fine. Though I’ve not yet played XCOM: Enemy Unknown–it is still sitting quietly and patiently in my long string of PlayStation Plus titles, I understand that, similar to Fire Emblem: Awakening, permadeath is a big part of the gameplay. You name your characters, you grow attach to them as they level up and earn more skills, and then you feel it in your heart when they go down, down for good. I lost a handful of dapper dudes early on in William Carter’s quest to save Earth from alien takeover, but I did not shed a tear or even remember who bought the farm by the next level, considering you can just grab another generic soldier-man from the vault, so this difficulty’s impact of permadeath was not very impactful.

Okay, I’m getting ahead of things as usual. Plot summary time! It’s 1962, John F. Kennedy is President, and the nation is gripped by fear due to the Cold War. A top-secret government unit called “The Bureau” begins investigating and concealing a series of mysterious attacks by enemies from outer space. Gotta keep things hush-hush. The Bureau’s mission is pretty simple–survive, adapt, and overcome the enemy threat. Good thing that every soldier in The Bureau has superpowers, like lifting an enemy up and out from behind cover or creating a support drone from thin air or laying down a landmine from thirty feet away. I kid, I kid–after all, it’s just a videogame.

Here’s a lot of what I liked about The Bureau: XCOM Declassified: one of the earlier levels opens with a Connie Francis song playing, the infected people are genuinely disturbing to look at and listen to, you can wander the base between missions for side quests and extra bits of dialogue and collectibles, soldiers’ clothes can be altered in terms of cool colors, overall the experience has style, and totally dominating a group of enemies before they even knew you were there thanks to the aforementioned superpowers feels out-of-this-world amazing.

Unfortunately, there’s more to dislike than like here, and the set difficulty really put me off for a while, but a lot of that was my stubbornness to stick with it. Still, after leveling up a few soldiers and learning what abilities/combos worked best (I was a big fan of a support agent and engineer agent helping Carter out), I was doing just fine through the last two-thirds, only occasionally surviving a firefight by the skin of my teeth. Until the final fight that is, which ultimately required I used a whole different cast of characters since some abilities are better than others during the final mission’s onslaught of waves. A big bummer. That said, your companions are complete dolts and require an extremely high level of babysitting, to the point where you spend more time pulling up the companion wheel and issuing commands than firing your gun at the distant enemies. It gets even more tiresome the minute one friend goes down, as everyone needs to drop everything to revive them ASAP.

However, in the end, it just wasn’t a ton of fun to play, and perhaps part of that is, despite being a rather new genre from last generation, I am not extremely excited by cover-based shooters mostly because they are highly predictable. There’s a post about this growing in my drafts folder, as games like Mass Effect and Gears of War make it crystal clear when a fight is about to go down. You know this because you’ll go down a tight corridor or hallway and emerge into a larger space, one dotted with walls and other means of cover. Alas, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified does this every time too, with maybe one or two spots where it caught me off guard. The story implies that you’ll be doing a lot of “covering up,” but only a few missions or dialogue choices talked about this, with a lot of the story simply being kill aliens, destroy their technology, and save the humans. Perhaps I’ll enjoy XCOM: Enemy Unknown more, whenever I get around to it.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #37 – The Bureau: XCOM Declassified

William Carter must
Destroy the Outsiders threat
Tactical shoot, hide

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From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

There’s always A Place in Space for shooting aliens

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number just came out, and while I’m definitely interested in more chaotic, gun-tossing mayhem set to electronic beats that thump deep in your chest, from the coverage I’ve seen of it, the game doesn’t really seem to be that much different from the now cult hit. Which means I can wait, there’s no rush. If anything–if the itch becomes too strong to resist scratching–I can simply return to the original game on either Steam or PlayStation 3, as surely I haven’t seen everything there was to see, especially when you consider I went through the trippy tale of revenge wearing nothing but the “doors kill” mask.

Or, if you prefer blowing alien monsters into piles of bloody mush rather than nameless goons at a strip club or seedy apartment complex, there’s A Place in Space, another high-listed entry from Ludum Dare 31. You all remember me dipping my toes into this jam competition’s creations with Kram Keep from a few days ago, right? Right? Well, good. Glad to see your collective memories are in fine shape.

There’s no story here, and there doesn’t need to be a story. Keeping with the jam’s theme of “entire game on one screen,” you move a little, gun-toting astronaut warrior between blackened out rooms, blasting everything that moves until it stops moving, opening the door to the next room. Rinse and repeat, moving clockwise around the same set of rooms, which are randomly generated a la The Binding of Isaac when you step on in. You use the WASD keys to move around and the mouse to both aim and fire whatever gun is currently equipped. The miniscule and crudely pixelated astronaut can only take so many hits from enemies, which means you definitely don’t want to back yourself into a corner. As you create pools of bloody mush, you can also pick up health refills and new weapon types, which immediately change how you both fire and play, just like in Contra.

A couple of problems I ran into, and these might only apply to me, as I’m sure I’m using the worst browser ever designed for Internet browsing. No, I won’t tell you what it is. Whenever I was in the bottom two rooms and tried to walk my astronaut up using the W key, the entire page I was on would shift up, cutting off half my view and forcing me to quickly use the mouse to scroll it back down. When this happened in the middle of a tense shootout, things often didn’t go well. Also, for some reason, every death caused A Place in Space to crash, which wasn’t the biggest deal since it only took a quick refresh to get back into the groove of things…but still. Lastly, and this is more of a nitpick than anything, there didn’t seem to be any way to know how long power-ups lasted, whether it was for a specific number of shots or only for one room; it would certainly help with planning the next room’s attack to know whether I’m going to lose that laser beam add-on early into the skirmish or not.

Give A Place in Space a try in your browser, and I guarantee that you’ll do at least a few runs in a row. If only there was a more killer soundtrack to go along with all that alien monster killing. If only.

2012 Game Review Haiku, #35 – Red Faction: Armageddon

Corridor after
Corridor of aliens
To boringly shoot

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For all the games I complete in 2012, instead of wasting time writing a review made up of points and thoughts I’ve probably already expressed here in various posts at Grinding Down, I’m instead just going to write a haiku about it. So there.

It’s the end of SR388, and Samus Aran blew it

Two things happened last night, and both were pretty spectacular: first, Tara and I finally began watching Downton Abbey, and second, I completed Metroid Fusion. Now while I’m sure you’re all dying to know a latecomer’s thoughts on the first episode of season one (awesome!) and who my favorite character is so far (Lame Bates!), I’ll save that topic for another time, perhaps another place. After all, this is Grinding Down, a gamer’s guide to nothing, and so we should talk about the final bosses in a videogame more than the bosses in a fancy, named estate at the risk of being lost.

After the credits for Metroid Fusion rolled and my breathing returned to a normal, healthy pace, some stats were presented. My logged time said just under five hours total, and I collected 45% of available items. I know for a fact most of the missed items were energy tanks, which probably could’ve made life in outer space a wee bit easier given just how much damage Samus takes from a single hit. Oh well. The Internet says that you can beat the game with 1% items found, but I dunno about that. I guess all you need is missiles in the end. But that recorded time of 4 hours and 55 minutes is not an accurate telling of just how much I played this game. Since time played is lost after you died, there’s no true way to know, but I’d wager it took me more around eight or nine hours to get through. Most of the bosses towards the endgame required multiple–and I do mean multiple–attempts just to learn their pattens and an attack plan.

So, let me be frank: I did not enjoy this game. It is extremely difficult and eventually became, in my eyes, masochistic. I was not reminded of my sweet, savory time with Super Metroid. Somehow, I kept coming back to despite the beatings it would deliver to my hands and eyes. On the surface, it didn’t appear any more difficult than Super Metroid was, but Metroid Fusion is more like the original game than anything else, with health quickly deteriorating and not as much chances to refill it as on other adventures. It’s extremely linear, so there was no fear of getting lost, with a non-playable cybernetic entity dishing out objectives one after the other. That part was weird, but fine, as it kept Samus (me, really) on a path. Unfortunately, that path is littered with boss fights that empty your heath extremely fast and require really quick response time, a thing not entirely possible on a Nintendo 3DS. I think a GameBoy Advance might’ve been easier for the controls, as the shoulder buttons on the 3DS eventually cause pain if you hold them down too long, and for launching missiles, you have to hold them down. So there was that.

I’ve kind of already forgotten what the story was. I mean, yeah, there’s this planet SR388, and on it, Samus discovers a parasitic organism called X that is wreaking havoc. Large portions of Samus’ suit were removed, and so she must recover them and investigate what the X is up to. Eventually you learn that the X has created a clone of Samus called SA-X, and it is hunting her. After a while, deception and betrayal happen, and there’s some reflecting on a man named Adam who appears in another Metroid game I’ve not yet played, weakening its impact immensely. And then the final level has you running against the clock to escape the planet before it explodes, just like in Super Metroid. Just like in Aliens.

And that’s where I was roadblocked the most: the very end. You have four boss fights in a row, with no opportunity to save once. It is pure evil. Designers, don’t do this. First, you fight the SA-X, which goes through three forms, the first of which is so fast and deadly that you could be without any health for the final two forms, making them even harder. The second form is easy to defeat thanks to a glitch I discovered; if you hop up to the top left platform, charge your beam, and shoot downwards, it’ll hit the SA-X, and the beast can’t reach you. After that fight, you start the 3:00 minute countdown and have to make your way back to your spaceship. Naturally, when you get there, the ship is gone, replaced by another boss fight. It swipes at you and a mini-scene involving the SA-X plays out–all while the countdown keeps going. By the time you get control back you have just over a minute or so to defeat it, and it’s not a quick kill. In fact, one attempt saw me kill the final boss with 8 seconds to go, only to realize in horror that the ship took somewhere around 10 to 12 seconds to pop back up and save Samus. That game over screen nearly broke me.

With Metroid Fusion now defeated and done, I feel better about moving on to some of the other 3DS Ambassador titles I got for free for being an early overpriced Nintendo handheld supporter. Like Yoshi’s Island or Fire Emblem. Not both simultaneously, mind you. I’m trying to complete one at a time, otherwise all that happens is I play a little here, a little there, and drop both of in the Abandoned Bin and forget about them for way too long. We’ll see where I go from here; I mean, it can only be up.