Game EXP: Layers of Fear VR (MQ2)

 

Layers of Fear VR

Release Date: July 9, 2020

Systems: HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, Oculus Quest 2, Meta Quest 2

Publisher: Bloober Team SA

Developer: Incuvo S.A.

First off, a couple of things to note about the above.  Layers of Fear VR is a VR port of Layers of Fear, developed by Bloober Team SA in 2016.  The port of Layers of Fear to VR was handled by Incuvo and released in 2020.  Secondly, I have previously played this game on Steam and the Nintendo Switch, so I knew, for the most part, what I was getting into when I started; I also briefly talked about buying the same game multiple times here.  I would not normally review a game for the third time, but this is the first time I have replayed a game for the first time in virtual reality, and because there were some noticeable changes to the game in the VR format that I feel that Layers of Fear VR deserves its own article.

This being the third time I have played various iterations of Layers of Fear and just as many Game EXP articles.  The first time I played the game was on my computer through Steam, and the second time was on the Nintendo Switch exclusively in handheld mode.  I wanted to pick this game up for the Oculus Quest 2 / Meta Quest 2 for all of the reasons that I talked about back in August.  I had read some of the reviews for the game on the Oculus store page and knew some of the graphical limitations and a few of the crashing issues and glitches, but I felt pretty confident that I was going to be playing a fairly stable game.

Going into the game, there were two specific areas that I was terrified about revisiting.  First, there was the bedroom for your daughter.  In both previous games I had played, this room was very unsettling because you were forced to be in this room as the only door in/out would lock upon entering, and you had to be in the room the whole time while events happening around you.  Things like a doll banging its head against a crib, toys rolling across the floor, a music box with a spinning light playing some creepy-ass tune.  There were also effects in the room that I was afraid was going to make me very motion sick because previously, the lights in the room would spin, followed by the game forcing the player to slowly spin (in the opposite direction?  maybe?) without the player being in control, revealing horrific changes to the room with each pass.  Spinning rooms and not being in control are great ways to cause nausea, at least for me, and especially in a VR space.  Thankfully, the developer who ported "Layers of Fear" took this into account and there was no spinning in the room apart from moving myself, and they managed to make the room just as terrifying.  Sure this room was different from the original game, but only in how certain mechanics operated, but I am glad that Incuvo did make the needed accessibility changes to make it playable for most players while still maintaining the original feeling and effect that Bloober Team had created for the room.

The second room that I was not looking forward to was The Painter's office which involves heights, both in looking up, and falling down.  Now I have played VR games involving heights (The Climb 2, Ultra Wings, Vader: Immortal) and there are times when you can "feel" the fear of falling a few hundred virtual feet.  I recall the first time I played through this area I fell a few times because I thought that was how you progressed through the towering bookshelves looking for the ringing phone.  I now know that you are required to fall at least two, possibly three times, and each time I hated it.  Granted it is not quite the same as jumping across a gap between cliffs in a canyon, but walking across pallets suspended from the ceiling while surrounded by Dali-esque bookshelves is still an unnerving experience.

The rest of the moving about in this environment, now created in a 3D space felt pretty natural even with accessibility modifications.  In some VR games I have played that require the player to move around a space, they have used a projecting/throwing method that projects a circle on the ground with a connecting line showing where you will move to.  In Layers of Fear VR, you move around as you would in any first-person game, but while you are moving, the sides of the screen darken and narrow, essentially giving you tunnel vision, and only keeping the area directly in front of your virtual eyes in focus, reducing the risk of motion sickness.  When you stop moving, your vision returns to normal without the darkened edges.  It did take a while (a few 15-30 minute sessions) to get used to this method of movement, although by the end of the game, I felt fine moving around without issue; at least most of the time.  Going up and down stairs did make me feel momentarily nauseous, but I had gotten into the habit of marching in place while walking and using stairs to help mitigate that nausea feeling; I am sure I looked ridiculous, which Conklederp and my parents could attest to. That includes putting your hand through objects like walls, books, windows, and objects looking oversized (enlarged to show detail?).  

For people who hang their experience on the world being 100% accurate, there are a quite a few immersion-breaking aspects to the game. First, I fully understand the difficulty of "clipping," when your virtual hand clips through objects because I feel like there is little that the developers can do to not have your hands move through objects that would not translate well visually and to the haptic controllers.  You could just have your hand not pass through objects, but that would be visually off-putting as you know your hand is still moving, but visually, it is static.  So instead you can move your hand through most things in the game world.  Your head, essentially being the camera, on the other hand, cannot pass through most objects, especially walls.  If you do try to pass your head through a wall, the game world will just "back up," rather jarringly, until the wall and your head are no longer clipping.  There were a couple of instances where my head clipped through a door that was either opening or closing, but that is likely due to the walls and doors being constructed differently.  Additionally, when reaching for dressers or cabinets with a lot of drawers, There was also one room and one hallway that did not have the correct image/texture behind the window and instead was a just solid bright fuchsia.  It was momentarily distracting, but only if I were to stare at out that particular window for more than a second.

There were several times I found that objects were a lot larger than they would normally be in a real space.  Things like dominos were the size of small books, spice jars the size of growlers, rings that might fit Andre the Giant, a pocket watch was the size of your palm, and an embossing stamp was about three inches in diameter.  Sure, these objects were ToonTown levels of large but their models were never created with the idea that they would be looked at outside of a 2D screen or by waving a hand up in comparison.  In the original game, the objects might have come across as slightly larger, but not this comically large.  Does this ruin immersion?  A little, but it was not often that I was going around comparing objects to my virtual hands and this would only come up when reaching for a letter or drawing to see if I could pick it up; which was actually quite frequent.  I also admit that I am the kind of person that is not bothered by this, so after I got used to some objects being larger than their real-world counterparts, I was quickly able to get over it and continue getting the metaphorical feces scared out of me.  

Lastly, and this is a twofer, you could not interact with all freestanding objects.  Like rolls of paper in drawers, books on bookshelves, and chairs, which is something to be annoyed with after playing the Penumbra series where you could interact with nearly everything, but like a lot of video games, there are some things that were never meant to be clicked.  Secondly, items that you can interact with, like bottles, and some items in the kitchen, those objects do not have sound when you place them down or throw them across the room.  I picked up a wine bottle and tossed it up in the air, and it landed on a table, rolled off, and landed on the floor without any kind of sound effect.  Sure a lot of these were immersion-breaking, but I am also more on the forgiving side, and I know that I am a little bit biased.

For those wanting to know how I finished the game, I got the "Loop" ending again.  For the third time.  I thought I had read that to get one of the "good" endings that you needed to avoid the rat drawings, and while I only picked up three (all by accident), I still had The Painter finish the painting of his Wife only to have it distort in front of his eyes and laugh at him mockingly.  The game then did an interesting thing in that it cut to as if I was watching a movie on a screen, as The Painter picked up the painting and threw it in a room upstairs with all of the other paintings of his Wife.  I think this cutscene was shown this way to reduce motion sickness since, in the original game, it shows you performing this action, but if it were to happen all of a sudden, at the end of the game with the computer taking control of your character, it might cause the player to feel ill.  Also, because it is a cut scene, you are not supposed to be able to look around, which inevitably the player would likely do, which would lead the developers to need to create that portion of the house at that point in time.  So instead, it was shown as a movie, removed from the player's ability.  I was fine with this.

[No, this is not the final painting]

I think I can say that Layers of Fear VR, is my favorite way to experience this game now.  Sure, I could play it on PC and the game would look better than it does in VR as the textures would be richer and everything that Bloober Team created for the game would be there, but being able to be in that mansion, after having already explored it twice and it still feeling new was an amazing experience.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Leave Me Be, With My Memories

Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 (NDS) - Atari Arcade - Gravity Games

I only say that this is a strange collection of games because I was not fully able to grasp the micro-mechanics for either.  That sentence might already spoil my verdicts, but if you are just here to find out those, you could just scroll past all of these words and see for yourself.  These two games were similar in that their core mechanic revolved around gravity and fuel management.  Taking into account how you use your fuel fighting either against the gravitational forces or finding a way to use them to your advantage.

Gravitar

As an arcade game, I would hate Gravitar.  I get the concept of flying a spaceship armed with a gun fighting off hostile alien ships while trying to pick up cargo from various locations each with its own different gravitational pull and differing landscapes and locations for each place on the map.  For me, Gravitar felt like a mashup of Asteroids and Solar Jetman, where you pilot your ship by moving forward, you rotate your ship on a 360 wheel, and you have to worry about gravity pulling you into environmental obstacles.  Oh, and you also have a fuel gauge to worry about; although I never lived long enough to find out what happens when your fuel reaches 0.  Presumably, you crash and the whole point of the game is to score as many points as possible before your fuel reaches zero.  I am positive though that you are able to refuel by making risky maneuvers to pick up fuel in out-of-the-way places.  High risk, high rewards.

You start the game with your ship flying out of a wormhole (it's a shining circle) near what appears to be a sun.  If you fly into the sun, your ship explodes, which should go without saying.  Almost immediately, two aggro alien ships fly out towards you and if you come into close proximity to one, the game does an immediate zoom-in and you engage in dogfight-like combat until either ship is destroyed.  Destroying the alien ships never felt difficult though, so either my experience flying an Asteroids-like ship paid off, or they are not designed to be a significant threat this early in the game.  

With my first ship, I kid you not, I flew into the sun.  I was not prepared for the strength of the gravitational pull of the sun when I started, also not being too familiar with the controls.  That being said, even during my seventh play during my 10 minutes, determining how frequently to use the boosters or flutter-tapping the boost on which planet/asteroid while avoiding turret fire was something that eluded me.  I just found the controls too finicky and maybe that is a fault of being translated to the DS versus an arcade cabinet and I might be tempted to throw 25 cents at a cabinet if I see it the next time I am in an arcade just to see the differences.  But that will probably be it as I just did not have fun even though I really like a lot of what Atari was trying to do here with multiple settings and objectives to complete in each setting and with what felt like an actual end-game goal and not just a high score.

Don't be fooled by my high score in Game 6 though, that was primarily from shooting down several UFOs, one turret, and actually managing to successfully pick up the ground cargo seconds before I smashed my ship into the planet.  I did not actually complete anything, and the lowest high score to get on the in-game list is 5,000. 

Verdict: No

• Game 1: 300
• Game 2: 400
• Game 3: 250
• Game 4: 650
• Game 5: 450
• Game 6: 1,050
• Game 7: 800

Lunar Lander

I am actually pretty amused by Lunar Lander, if only because the game feels like it's saying, "We'll just hand the landing duties to you because that's the most you can handle.  Maybe.  But you'll likely crash anyway.  Good luck Bucky!"  In Lunar Lander, your only task is to monitor the fuel, the vertical and horizontal speed, and the altitude while your lunar lander is pulled towards a landing pad precariously built in the middle of a lunar mountain range.  The controls here are pretty simple with the directional pad controlling the rotation of the lander and the stylus controls the throttle to direct the lander to one of the landing pads and to slow your descent.

Simple controls however do not equate to an easy game.  Of the six games I played, I successfully landed the lander zero times, and the game is very eager to tell you of your failures with reports like, "You just destroyed a 100 Megabuck Lander," "Auxiliary fuel tanks destroyed, 21 fuel units lost," and "There were no survivors."  The other difficult aspect of this game is that you only have 750 fuel units, presumably for each landing and if you use up all 750 units of fuel either from burning your jets while landing or crashing or destroying fuel tanks, and once all of that fuel is used up, your game is over.  Yes, you could probably crash half a dozen times on a single credit using as little fuel as possible on your descents, but once that fuel is gone, it is gone.  I do not know if you are awarded additional fuel points upon successfully landing your lunar lander, and that would make the most sense, but I could also see the game just wanting to see how many times you can successfully land with only 750 units of fuel.  Some people are just like that.

What I did not like about "Lunar Lander" was how precise you apparently have to be in your landing.  On Game 4, I was able to get my speed down to 5 (or it was at five when I crashed) and that was after cutting the booster when I looked like I was only a pixel or two off of the ground, and I crashed, apparently creating "a two mile crater" in the process.  Now that is some precise landing requirements that kind of took away all fun out of the game because I felt that there was some potential.

Verdict: No

A note on the scoring in Lunar Lander.  The game awards you points even when you crash, likely depending on how close you were to successfully landing, but unless you make a successful landing, you end up with zero points at the end of the game.  So the zero indicates that I was never able to land the lander, and the second number is the points that I apparently earned from crashing.

• Game 1: 0/15
• Game 2: 0/20
• Game 3: 0/15
• Game 4: 0/5 (Speed 5: You Created a two mile crater)
• Game 5: 0/10
• Game 6: 0/25

So yeah, I am apparently not great at games where the primary mechanic is gravity.  I was already a little afraid going into these two games knowing how much grief Solar Jetman gave me the one time I played it over two days back in the early '90s, and yes I have carried that with me my entire life for some reason.  I do think that Lunar Lander could have been a "Yes" verdict if the landing had not been so finicky because boiling down the part of Gravitar that gave me the most trouble into its own game could have been fun (in its own contradictory way).  

Next Friday (November 11th), we will have the final collection of arcade games lumped into a single article because I did not know what else to do with them.  Not that they are bad games at all, but how else would you categorize games like Centipede and Tempest?  

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

;asdklfj

MIDI Week Singles: "Paintings on the Wall Pt. 1" - Layers of Fear (PC, NS, & MQ2)

 

"Paintings on the Wall Pt. 1" from Layers of Fear & Layers of Fear VR on Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, & HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, Oculus Quest 2, & Meta Quest 2 (2016 & 2020)

Composer:  Arkadiusz Reikowski

Album: Layers of Fear Soundtrack

Label: Limited Run Games

Publisher: Aspyr, & Bloober Team SA

Developer: Bloober Team SA, & Incuvo S.A.

I just recently finished Layers of Fear VR on the Meta Quest 2 over the weekend (stay tuned!), and having already used the Main Theme from the original and my first playthrough of the game for a MIDI Week Single back in 2018, I thought that I would use "Paintings on the Wall Pt. 1" being a song that I know from the game, but I cannot specifically place when this song was played.  I feel like it was likely used multiple times.  The music in this game is sparse as it focuses more on the sounds of the mansion as it crumbles around The Painter as his mind degrades.  When the music does crop up in the game, with one or two exceptions, there is a sense of relief, that you can finally breathe and feel less tense, an effect that a lot of music creates on its own.

With "Paintings on the Wall Pt. 1" it still has that somewhat-calming effect in-game, that you feel like this is a moment to reflect on a revelation by The Painter or the player on something that just happened.  Out of the game and listening to the song on its own, the song takes on a similar but expanded view.  There are layers of reminiscence as I recall playing the game, both recently and as far back as 2017 when I first played it.  There are feelings of sadness about what happened to The Painter's family and the negative effect he had on their lives.  Then there are also the questions as to the mental state of The Painter, brought on through some combination of alcoholism and likely undiagnosed mental health issues (I am not qualified to make any kind of diagnosis based on the events in the game).  And on top of all of that is the fear I felt playing this game all three times.  The anxiety about walking down a hallway to find that the door I entered through is no longer in existence, of the fear of anticipating a jump scare as I reach down for a torn picture on the ground.  

All of this comes out in this song and is just another reminder of how this is one of my favorite video games.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Still Calm with My Mind at Peace

Game EXP: F.E.A.R. (PC)

 

F.E.A.R.

Systems: Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

Release Date: October 18, 2005

Publisher: Vivendi Universal Games

Developer: Monolith Productions
Time Played: 19 Hours, 54 Minutes

You can check out my First Impressions on F.E.A.R. here and I will try not to rehash a lot of what I said in that article, but there will be the occasional overlap because how could there not be?  The gist of this entire article, if you have no interest in reading my ramblings about a 17-year-old game, is that F.E.A.R. is not what I wanted it to be and that clouded how I felt about 80% of the game.  Going into F.E.A.R. I was expecting a first-person horror and psychological shooter.  What I got instead was a first-person shooter full of government and corporate espionage with a few horror and paranormal elements.  I mean, the concept itself is fully paranormal in that you are the point man (and referred to as such) in a military organization that investigates paranormal situations with your current mission to locate a man who is psychically controlling an army of bio-enhanced super soldiers and prevent him from doing any more harm than he has already done.

Going into F.E.A.R. with that mindset held me back from thoroughly enjoying the game because there was a lot that I did enjoy.  First, the combat felt great.  The "A.I." of the enemies was some of the more thoughtful that I have come across, at least to some extent.  There were a number of times when I recognized that the area I was in had multiple entrances and that I could easily be flanked if I did not quickly decide on a direction to go.  Enemies would often take their time, trying to flush me out by using grenades or peppering the area with enough gunfire which would cause dust to build up reducing my own visibility, forcing me to either hold my position or head out into the open and risk being shot.  However, because this is a video game that is meant to be beaten, the enemies were "programmed" to be loud when communicating with each other thereby giving away their position and sometimes their tactics.  Often after entering a new stage or after a few empty hallways, you would hear a static voice yell out "All teams check-in,"  "All clear!" and "Shut up!"

The stages themselves I have mixed feelings on.  If you were to ask me right now how many different locations there were for all 22 levels, I would tell you that there were four locations.  There is the starting warehouse building.  There is a corporate office building.  There is a rundown building in an urban area.  And there is an underground science lab.  That is a lot of levels to have in so few locations and with the exception of the urban area, which only comprised three of the levels and each of those levels was either in a different building, or multiple buildings while traversing through narrow alleyways and blocked off streets.  The rest of the game took place primarily in buildings, or at least it felt like it did.  There was very little change of scenery and at times I felt like I was playing an online multiplayer shooter a la CS:GO.  On one hand, I do appreciate that in the Armacham building levels (8-9 of them, so almost half of the game) I literally felt like I scoured the entire building as the series of levels starts you by dropping you off by helicopter on the near top of a building and you work/fight your way up and down most of the building, eventually exiting out through the parking garage.  Those areas I feel like could have been condensed into three levels, cutting out a lot of the wandering halls, killing off a group of enemy soldiers, searching through offices and cubicles, and fighting off another group of soldiers this one with a heavy on their side.  

There was some variation though between levels in terms of enemies as you did not fight the super psych troopers and their mid-level mini-boss tank variant.  A few times you ended up fighting Armacham security forces who at first seemed to be less armored (although they were wearing what looked like standard issue kevlar vests, and ball caps, but for whatever reason, their group tactics were less predictable than the Replica forces and I found that I was wasting more ammunition and using up precious health packs any time I encountered a group of them.  

At various levels midway through the game introduced ceiling-mounted turrets and heavily armored mini-mechs, REV6 Powered Armors, both of which were not overly difficult to take out, but just took a lot of bullets.  A bullet sponge if you will.  The REV6 Powered Armors were only slightly challenging in that because of the limited number of guns you could carry, three, if you did not have a high damaging gun like the [rocket launcher, laser gun], then you were really going to have a bad time.  I always tried to have my dual pistols, an assault rifle, and whatever heavy artillery seemed to have the most ammunition available.  Although if the game gave me the MOD-3 Multi Rocket Launcher leaning up against a wall and a stack of rockets on a nearby table, I could take the hint that I was headed towards something very heavily armored.  In the last third of the game, phase-shifting/cloaking Replica Assassins were introduced which were initially terrifying because I was not sure what was going on, but after killing the first one, I was able to make semi-quick work of the rest by way of either the assault rifle. The drones were similar in that after their initial introduction they were pretty easy to pick off by aggroing one at a time.

Granted there was quite a lot of exposition that occurred in these stages, either through chatter from members of your team not on the ground, or by logging into a laptop that was left out for you to find.  But you could just as easily blow through each stage without a care for the larger story being told and I do not think that would change at all how you might approach the enemies in the stage or your tactics.  This is partly a criticism of the game itself, but I also acknowledge that having story elements, not in the forefront and having some of them hidden as discoverables (something I have talked about in the Amnesia series as well) is a mechanic that I am not a particular fan of, but I cannot think of a solid solution apart from having all of this information presented during cutscenes between stages.

It was only in the last quarter of the game that the game took a hard turn and was closer to what I was expecting if not from the beginning, then at least for more than half of the game instead of less than 25%.  Without giving much away, the game did away with the traditional enemies with guns and instead threw hovering low-resolution ghost-like creatures at you which may or may not have been conjured into your mind from an outside entity.  Now, it may seem rather silly and very American to shoot a ghost with a high-powered state-of-the-art combat shotgun or a submachine gun, but when it works in your mind, it works in real life.  Plus the creatures were doing real-world damage to my person, and thankfully they only took a hit or two before they died/disappeared.  The downside to fighting noncorporeal enemies was that ammo was not being dropped and became a lot harder to come by, and I even swapped weapons out a few times as I had run out of ammo for one type of gun but found the corpse of an enemy with a different weapon with different ammo.  So what was originally a shooter, was quickly becoming a shooter with survival-horror elements

I wish that I had more to say about F.E.A.R. in terms of it being more than a decent first-person shooter with the occasional horror elements, a paranormal storyline, and great enemy AI, but that is really the gist of it.  It was a decent game, it just was not the game I was hoping it to be.  While I have the two expansions, Extraction Point, and Perseus Mandate, as well as the sequel, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, I am unsure at the moment if I will continue with the series.  It might all just depend on how long the expansions are and the sequel, and if there are more horror elements, or if those end up going out the window for just a straight action-shooter with a character who is able to slow down time.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
We're Screaming Without Sound

Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1(NDS) - Atari Arcade - Vector Tanks

Welcome to Part II of our look at the arcade games in the Atari Greatest Hits Vol. 1 collection released on the Nintendo DS in 2010.  For Part I covering Asteroids and Space Duel, you can check out our article here.  Now that I think about it, I do not think I will be doing these types of intros for every article because, by the end of this series, there will just be an entire lead-up full of games and hyperlinked titles, but maybe I will continue with the arcade games.  The article today will look at two games, Battlezone and The Bradley Trainer, which technically was not an arcade game, but it was heavily based off of Battlezone and it seemed more likely that it was not designed to run off an Atari 2600, so we decided to include it here as well.

Battlezone

I have played the real Battlezone arcade game a few times in my life and has always been a game that I end up playing because no one else is playing it and I am looking for something to play.  The presentation here is actually pretty nice and modified somewhat for the smaller screen.  The regular game gives you text in the upper left that tells you if are in range of an enemy and if an enemy tank is to your right or left, but as was the case with Asteroid, the text is pretty blurry and hard to read.  Thankfully, that same text is presented on the bottom of the DS screen in a large and easy-to-read font, so when you hear the alarm sounding, it is just a quick glance down to see if you need to steer left or right to find your target.

However, the gameplay is pretty sluggish, essentially being a vector first-person shooter.  Your tank cannon can only fire one shot at a time and you cannot fire again until your initial shot has faded into the background.  I set the controls to simple, which had my driving the tank with just the directional pad rather than forward/back with the directional pad and left-right with the Y/A buttons, but even then, being able to accurately hit enemy tanks and the faster moving UFOs can be difficult.  And then you have the enemy tanks that actively hunt you and while trying to turn the tank to find out why your alarm is blaring at you.  I can only imagine that the two tanks are just driving in circles around each other a rather hilarious sight from an alternative camera angle.  There were also several times that upon respawning, the alarm began blaring immediately and I was shot less than five seconds later.  I understand the game, I just do not think that I am a fan.

Verdict: No

• Game 1: 11,000
• Game 2: 4,000
• Game 3: 12,000
• Game 4: 4,000
• Game 5: 9,000
• Game 6: 4,000

The Bradley Trainer

Well hmmm.  I am not really sure how to approach this one.

The Bradley Trainer (aka Army Battlezone) was a modified version of the arcade game Battlezone, a tank first-person shooter where you attack other tanks, but also alien UFOs while driving around in a mountainous and volcanic landscape.  In The Bradley Trainer, you are the gunner in an unmovable tank (sort of) and can only rotate your gun turret but can also change the angle of your cannon.  You also have more firing options such as different types of guns [7.62 mm machine gun, high explosive (single shot), Armor-piercing (slow fire), TOW missile, and a couple of others].  You can also affect the range of your shots as well as zooming in your camera/periscope to see further away enemies, which in this game appear to be only other tanks and helicopters.

Now, because you can only rotate the cannon and not move forward/backward, one would assume that the enemy is not going to be a crack shot and mercilessly hunt you because you would need to be a quick shot on hitting enemy tanks the moment they are in range along with shooting down helicopters.  Helicopters are fast.  But unlike Battlezone, there is no visual indication when you are within range.  Because of the increased complexities in this game, taking gun type, enemy range, canon angle, and enemy type into account, this was not designed as a 25-cent arcade play and a person coming into this game would need more of a primer than walking up and plunking down a quarter.  And without knowing how all of the components in the game worked, I found myself pretty lost as far as what I could do and why I was unable to destroy a tank at point-blank range while seemingly unloading round after round of Armor-piercing single shot into said tank.  Were the 'plinking' sound effects telling me that I was hitting the tank or that the armor-piercing shells were not doing their job?

But hey, I did manage to (somehow) shoot down a helicopter that nabbed me 100,000 points and I have visual evidence of my score.  But I also just sat there after playing for 10 minutes without taking a hit, waiting to die so that I could record my high score, but for whatever reason, there was no return fire.  So I powered down the game feeling a bit indestructible, but still a bit confused.  I get why this game was included, and I am glad that it was for historical game preservation, but it would have been nice to have a manual included for the complexities in this game as well to know what anything does.

Verdict: No.

Game 1: 100,000.

So those were the two tank games that used vector graphics, neither of which grabbed my interest beyond what I played here.  Although, even though I gave Battlezone a "No" vote, I could actually see myself coming back and playing it while playing other Atari arcade games in this collection.  But that was the presentation here as I will definitely play Battlezone if I see it in an arcade because I think it just works better as an arcade game with the pedals and the tank-joystick throttle thing.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
No Energy for Anger

MIDI Week Singles: "The Parish" - Left 4 Dead 2 (PC)

 

"The Parish" from Left 4 Dead 2 on Windows, Xbox 360, OS X, Linux (2009)
Composer: Mike Morasky
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Valve
Developer: Valve

We had previously used this theme, first written for the first Left 4 Dead game, back in 2015.  In Left 4 Dead 2, each of the different geographical locations had its own take on the Left 4 Dead theme.  Maybe the fact that I play trumpet really draws "The Parish" theme to me more than some of the others?  I also really appreciate a trumpet playing a dirge-like song and not something closer to Arturo Sandoval.  Similar to what I said seven years ago, I think a lot of what draws me to this motif is that is just so hum-able.

Just a great song that invokes both nostalgia and fond memories (for when I first played L4D2 at PAX09, when I first played it with Beardsnbourbon later that year after he got it for Xmas on the 360, and I spent a minute or two remapping the controller to be closer to Solitaire 1.2 or the countless hours (66.4 hours I spent playing solo and online with SnikiTiki and Coolman after moving to Oregon).  

Plus it is an excellent and slightly creepy song appropriate for the season that I wished lasted longer than a minute-and-a-half.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

The World is Unaware

Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 (NDS) - Atari Arcade - Asteroid-Like

This first selection of games I grouped together because one was Asteroids originally released in arcades in 1979, and the other is Space Duel released in 1982, a semi-sequel of sorts to Asteroids as it played nearly identical although there are a few cosmetic differences, and one major difference that I will get to later.  In these games, you pilot a spaceship and shoot incoming objects that break apart into smaller pieces multiple times getting progressively more difficult to shoot as well as having smaller and faster-moving objects on the screen that you have to keep track of and dodge.

Asteroids

I've never been a huge fan of Asteroids in any form, mainly because I was never great at controlling the ship with its sliding about advancing behavior.  Most of the time when I would play this, I would just spin in one place and shoot until I lost all my ships.  This time around I legitimately flew the ship, avoiding the asteroids and trying to shoot down the alien ship when it came on screen, usually dying to the smaller ship as it has better targeting than the larger ship.  I actually found myself thinking, "I should have been able to avoid that UFO shot," or "one more game and I could probably beat my high score." The graphics on the New 3DS screen, while larger than that of the original DS, are still a little blurry, especially the "1979 Atari Inc" at the bottom of the screen, but Asteroids is not supposed to be a hyper-defined game, so it is kind of forgivable.  

I played the game using the simplified controls.

Verdict: Yes.

• Game 1: 5,400
• Game 2: 4,800
• Game 3: 6,250
• Game 4: 4,850

Space Duel

Outside of this collection of games, I do not recall ever hearing or seeing anything about Space Duel, and I do not recall ever seeing it in an arcade so I was not sure what I was getting into when I started.  As it turns out, Space Duel is similar to Asteroids in that you control a triangle of a ship that can rotate 360 degrees while firing a rear thruster to propel yourself and shoot at colorful asteroid-like objects spinning through space.  Occasionally, an aggressive ship will come into the screen firing at you while you try and shoot and avoid the floating space projectiles.  There are also these + shaped objects floating around that change color when you shoot them, but I did not notice my score increasing when they were shot, so they might just be indestructible objects to make the game a little more difficult.

One key difference between this and other Asteroids-like games is that you have a shield that can be activated with the press of a button. There is a limited amount of shield you have, decreasing in brightness the longer you use it or if it is hit by enemy fire.  This mechanic I really liked because it took a lot of the pressure away from the all-too-often one-hit-kill mechanic as it does not punish the player for not flying well if they remember to tap that shield button right before slamming into an obstacle.

The other differing mechanic in Space Duel is that you have the option to have a second ship connected to your primary ship by a tether.  This second ship does give you an additional gun to hit more targets, but in turn, it is another target for obstacles and enemies and if one ship explodes, then your primary ship explodes too.  It was challenging for sure, but I found that I liked the single-ship better and less aggravating.

Space Duel really felt like the next evolution of Asteroids with the inclusion of the shield, the multi-colored asteroid objects, the aggressive enemy ship, and the indestructible things that fly through space.

I played with simplified controls because I was already familiar with the layout and figured why mess with a good thing?

Verdict: Yes.

Game 1: 5,610 (single)

Game 2: 8,860 (single)

Game 3: 7,750 (dual)

Game 4: 7,770 (single)

I think this is a pretty strong start to our series.  One a classic arcade game that I was already familiar with, the other a completely new title, and both games surprised me in how much I ended up enjoying them.  But if you are looking for reviews that are not all sunshine and pixelated rainbows, there will be a couple of articles where nearly every game I bring up received a "No" verdict from me.  You will just have to wait and see.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Wandering on a Sunny Afternoon

MIDI Week Singles: "Lure of the Maw" - Little Nightmares (NS)

 

"Lure of the Maw" from Little Nightmares on Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Stadia, iOS, and Android (2017 - 2022)
Composer: Tobias Lilja
Album: Little Nightmares Original Soundtrack
Label: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Developer: Tarsier Studios

It is kind of hard to have melodic and memorable music in a horror game, but thankfully a lot of that melody can be found in the title music whereas a lot of the in-game music exists to create atmosphere and uneasiness.  "The Lure of the Maw" is that kind of title music for Little Nightmares that not only grips you but also contains motifs from other areas of the game, giving you a sense of what to expect on Six's journey.  The song starts with a child-like piano tone that is used in a lot of the songs from the soundtrack, such as the Hunger themes, and the song "Prison Toys", as throughout there is also Six's Theme and the lullaby theme at 0:49, although played much slower here.  

I just find "Lure of the Maw" to be a great introductory song to Little Nightmares and for me, the song does exactly what the title says, it lures you into the dark and ambiguous world of The Maw.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
And I Can't Let You Go

The Nintendo Switch and The Steam Deck

Just a quick heads-up before you get to the end of the article and call foul.  This is not going to be an article comparing the specs of the Nintendo Switch to the Steam Deck; I haven't even written a First Impression on the system yet, which I will get to when I publish that article in the coming weeks.  This will not be an article claiming that the Steam Deck is a Switch Killer.  There are not going to be any side-by-side comparison videos showing the same game running on both the Steam Deck and the Nintendo Switch to show how one system is better than the other.  This article exists so that I can write out my thoughts about the Steam Deck and the Nintendo Switch, how I tend to play video games of late, and what my thoughts are on purchasing and playing games on both systems.  And maybe if we are lucky, we might be able to solve this whole time management thing.

So I bought a Steam Deck, or as the Steam Deck goes, I pre-ordered it back in March after being on the fence for a while, but I figured that if I did not end up wanting to make the purchase, having an additional $5 in my Steam Wallet would not be a bad thing.  But as weeks and months went by, I felt that it was more something that I wanted because of how much I have loved playing the Switch and having a handheld computer capable of playing Steam games (and potentially games from Epic and GOG will little issue).  I had been a little worried that the Steam Deck might pull me away from playing the Switch, and while I have only had the Steam Deck for a few weeks, I have already removed a couple games from my Switch Wishlist and added more games to my Steam Wishlist.  Most of the games that I removed were games that I already had on Steam and had either not played them yet, believing that I was more likely to play them in handheld mode than I was to boot them up on my computer, or games that are either verified or playable that I do not have for either system.

This is really the biggest difference between the two systems though even when the game is available on both systems I still have to do additional research to find out if it is playable on the Steam Deck.  At least right now, when release dates and systems games are being released, there is no specific indication or logo when a game is released on Steam if it is also Steam Deck compatible.  Even on games that are available for pre-order on Steam like the Dead Space remake or The Callisto Protocol, there is no indication if they will run on the Steam Deck.  So when Octopath Traveler II says that it is being released on the Nintendo Switch and Steam, right now I do not know if it will run on Steam Deck.

The Steam Deck does offer a unique situation though, something that any console, as far as I am aware, is unable to offer.  If I buy a game on Steam (or GOG, Epic Game Store, Origins, etc) I will "forever" have access to that game for as long as I have access to those accounts.  After I replace my current laptop, those games will still be tied to my account when I install the client and I will again have access to all of those games.  When I buy a game on a console, it is tied to that console, for the life of the console.  I am also limited to the hardware for that particular console, which is different than the Steam Deck, because after it (eventually) dies, I can still access every game that I may not be able to immediately play on the Steam Deck (or my current laptop for that matter) I bought on that system because they are tied to my Steam account, but again, not all games are "playable" on the Steam Deck.  I had a similar predicament crop up a while back.  A game I had backed on Kickstarter sent out their backer surveys to find out which system I wanted the digital copy of the game on.  When I backed the game, I had thought that I would want to play it on the Switch, but now that I have the Steam Deck, I am unsure if I want to pick up the game on Steam instead, again because I do not know if the game is or will be playable now, in the future, or ever.  But it will 100% be playable on the Switch.

And then the question about physical games comes into the equation.  One of the main reasons I like to purchase physical games is to have a physical copy.  With that physical copy, I can loan it out to friends who have either not played the game before and are wanting to try it out before buying it for themselves or just play the whole game.  I still love the idea of a friend borrowing a game.  And so there are games that I do not have for either system, like Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 & 2, Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, or Octopath Traveler II that I could see lending out.  Do I forgo that ability for the few times I do lend out Switch games or do I have that game tied to my Steam account?  And sure, there is the Switch Tax as games go on sale via Steam more frequently and often with a steeper discount than they do on Nintendo systems so would I pay a premium to play on an older system to show support to the developer/publisher/platform?  More and more questions.

I do not feel, right now at least, that the Steam Deck will take over as my video game system of choice because there are still exclusives coming out on the Switch that I want to legitimately buy and play (as opposed to emulation).  Each system currently and for the foreseeable future has its place.  For digital-only games that are more graphically intensive such as DOOM: Eternal or Resident Evil VII, I will likely lean towards the Steam Deck whereas for games that I do not have as much of a pressing concern about the graphics like Octopath Traveler II I will likely lean more towards the Switch.  For games that I want to share while I am playing and ease of pulling pictures, I might lean towards the Switch (because right now I cannot post pictures to Twitter directly from the Steam Deck, and admittedly I have not tried to download pictures from the Steam Deck to my computer without first publically posting them from my Steam profile).  I am sure that there will be additional difficult decisions in the coming months as more games receive their green checkmark from Valve and as I figure out how I fit the Steam Deck into my playing of PC games from other clients and just off of my laptop because for the foreseeable future, I still prefer mouse and keyboard when playing first-person shooters..

So for now, I am very much enjoying playing both Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin on the Steam Deck, and Kingdoms of Amalur: ReReckoning on the Switch.  They are not adversaries, but companions, and I currently refuse to see it any other way.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Think of the Boat as a Metaphor