Balloon in a Wasteland is a mashup of tower defense and sidescrolling shooter. You face waves of enemies while you work to repair your hot air balloon in order to escape. In the meantime, you can upgrade weapons, build fortifications, sleep, or set traps.

Fun little game - I played it a bunch last night. At first, you’ll think it’s impossible, then you’ll try something slightly different and win.

Play Balloon in a Wasteland

I finished playing Heavy Rain on Tuesday night, and I’ve got to say that I loved it. It’s odd though - while I expected to want to immediately launch into a second playthrough as I did with Dragon Age, I’m finding that I’m content with the story I’ve chosen. Since so much of the game’s thrill is not knowing what might happen next, a second playthrough couldn’t compare to the first.

Heavy Rain’s story has been called ‘dark’ by some. And upon reflection, I suppose it’s hard to term a game dealing with the murder of children as anything else. But until I heard that, I hadn’t directly compared Heavy Rain to Dragon Age. A big part of the reason I loved Dragon Age was because it was a mature story. And by mature, I’m referring to more than just the sex and violence. I’ll grant you: Dragon Age may have had too much blood, and Heavy Rain may have had a bit too much nudity, but it’s more than just these that I’m referring to when I discuss the games’ maturity.

Even apart from the choices/consequences facet of the gameplay that I’ve already discussed, the fact that the game doesn’t pull punches, doesn’t ruin the surprises by heavy-handedly foreshadowing, and uses strong language and violence in the same way that non-broadcast shows like Dexter do works in its favor. The game isn’t for kids, and that’s not just because it has language and violence. It’s because kids wouldn’t necessarily appreciate the theme of fatherhood and be able to put themselves in a position to understand the gravity of the decisions you need to make in the game.

My compaints about the game are few. For one, while the quicktime actions in the game were intuitive, simple walking was very often the most challenging part. Even when the camera angles were good, it was sometime difficult to walk across a room in the direction you intended, which got very frustrating when there was time pressure. And when multiple actions were available, it was generally difficult to determine what action might result from pressing right and what action from pressing X. In cases like this, you were being asked to make a decision. For me, more often than not chance would decide, as I wasn’t sure what the result of a button press would be.

More and more as the game progressed, I realized how much work must have gone into the branching story. So many characters who influence the storyline heavily might have died. How differently would the story have unfolded without their presence?

I loved Heavy Rain. Even without any of the other factors, it’s a hell of a murder mystery.

I took an online survey recently about what kind of gamer I am. Turns out I’m a survivor/collector. I do remember specifically being asked a question about which of a number of options I’d most enjoy doing in a game and selecting “Fleeing from a terrifying enemy”. I totally admit to being a fan of survival horror games. But how many “terrifying enemies” really exist in games? I can think of so few that I could actually qualify as truly terrifying. Cracked magazine has a list, but I don’t think any of the ones they’ve listed really work for me.

I came up with three game enemies that have terrified me. Keep in mind that these are not video game chase scenes - that’s a different list entirely.

Fallout 2: The Enclave
Just after you help a bunch of ghouls repair their broken nuclear reactor, you end up in a chat with a member of The Enclave - an organization whose members all wear advanced power armor at a time when you may still be in leather armor. The following video shows the conversation. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem terrifying at all, but at the time when I was playing it, I remember thinking *oh shit* - *oh shit* …and yeah… this video is not safe for work. At all.

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: The Cyclops
In Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, throughout the course of the game, there are a few segments in which you fight a cyclops. They’re big, bad, and ugly. The guy fighting the cyclops here was all about showing how good he is at fighting it, so it never actually picks him up, but when that thing grabbed me, picked me up, and roared in my face, I think I may have screamed back at it in fear.

Resident Evil 2: the T-103
Yes - this is a game moment I’ve written about many many times before. It is simply epic. The following clip doesn’t do it justice, mainly because the guy playing obviously isn’t as scared as I was, and also because he hangs out in the inventory screen long enough to kill the mood. I didn’t stop to shoot at the T-103. I just ran my ass off.

Start watching no later than 7:30. You’ll want to keep watching until at least 9:30 for the good part.

This one made me laugh. I’ve got a lot of DS games on my list right now, but I might check this one out.

I have a special love/hate relationship with game demos. I love the fact that they exist. I tend to think of it as good omen for a game if the publisher releases a demo as opposed to forcing you to make your purchasing decision strictly off screenshots and online reviews. Kinda like how bad movies don’t advance screen for critics, to me the lack of a demo puts up a red flag. However, the one thing I hate about demos, is just how poorly they tend to represent the game they are selling. I suppose it’s just a limitation of the format, how can you really show everything a 20 hour game has to offer in fifteen minutes? Some demos for great games just left me cold, such as Batman: Arkham Asylum or Dead Space. The games themselves are exceptional but the demos just didn’t work well enough to make me say “damn, I want this game!”

This has been a constant sticking point with me and demos for a while. At least it was until I played the God of War III demo last week. This, gentlemen, is how you create a demo that not only left me pining for more action, but so thoroughly convinced me of GoW 3’s awesomeness I’d have ran out that instant and bought the game if it were available.

The demo is perfectly scripted. It’s probably representative of the first 15 minutes of the actual game, but it hits a number of marks that need to be present in a great demo. First, it introduces you to the core gameplay in a way that is easy for newbies to the series but also serves as a great refresher if you’ve played the first two games. It doesn’t babysit you at all, but teaches pretty much everything you’ll need to play the full game in just a few minutes. Second, the action never lets up. The pacing keeps you constantly moving, fighting, and gazing at the insanity all the way up to the dramatic conclusion. I don’t think I’ve played another demo that felt so much like a polished mini-game the way that GoW 3 does.

So there you have it demo people. Make your demos as exciting, polished and well paced as God of War III’s and you will sell lots of games. You have my Personal Guarantee!™

Ham Sandwich RPG is a fun little game put together this summer in a 48 hour game competition. Craig Stern and Tyler Schmal did a good job with it, although I never could get my hands on the power of love. Maybe I should ask Huey Lewis.

Download Ham Sandwich RPG (requires Adobe Air)

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss the games that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I’m a self proclaimed pack-rat and collector, but if I ever had to sell my gaming collection to feed my family these are the games I’d hang onto. If my wife let me, anyway.

I never realized it until I played this game, but I’m a sucker for SRPGs. I’ve always had a soft spot for turn-based RPGs but the slightly puzzle like structure and chess piece maneuvering of a good SRPG will keep me utterly enthralled. Jeanne D’Ac was actually the first game I bought for my shiny new PSP two years ago, and thankfully I got enough quality gameplay out of it to tide me over during the initial lull in games the little system suffered at launch.

Jeanne D’Arc had all the hallmarks of a good RPG: the underdog heroine fighting for all that is good and pure, the wolfish rogue destined to win her heart, the loyal warrior protecting her back, etc. However, this game tossed up a few unexpected twists that really kept me pushing through to see how the story would unfold. And all along the way it did so with excellent hand drawn graphics, some sweet anime style cutscenes, and still some of the best SRPG battles I’ve ever played. I still replay this little handheld gem, there is an entire post-completion dungeon to finish with über gear and a special unlockable character, whom I really missed when I lost her in the main storyline. Whenever I travel with my PSP, this game travels with me.

I’ve been playing Heavy Rain now for two evenings, and I’m probably 5 or 6 hours in. Before they made Heavy Rain, Quantic Dream released a game called Indigo Prophecy, which I absolutely loved despite the game’s severely flawed denoument. I can say now that although Heavy Rain contains no science fiction beyond some advanced technology that likely doesn’t exist yet, the same basic feel is in place: what Quantic Dream terms “interactive fiction”. I’ll try to lay out how I feel about the game in an entirely spoiler-free way.

But what’s struck me most about the game up to this point is the notion of consequences. In most games, the sole consequence is death. Your character dies and you reload. But imagine for a moment that you couldn’t reload. Imagine that the game could continue after your death. The only game that I’ve ever played with any kind of similar system was Ultima III, back on my Commodore 64. In that game, when one of your characters died, the game would immediately save the character’s death to the floppy disk. In Heavy Rain, the game constantly saves your progress, your decisions, your advancements, and your failures. And it makes the consequences of failure far more severe than in any game I’ve ever played. Your decisions are irrevocable, your failures final.

Last night, I was dealt my first major failure in the game. The character didn’t die, but having experienced what that character has gone through, I know for a fact that he’d rather have died than failed. But no - that isn’t quite right, because if he’d died, he’d have failed, and the consequences of that failure would remain despite his death, so he had to survive in order to succeed. But he did not succeed. And I felt - through him - what it’s like for a man to throw himself heart and soul at something and fail. In Heavy Rain, like in real life, there are no retries. And I find that I love that. It’s just a game, and I love when a game makes me feel something, even if that something is a total sense of defeat. Just as long as I’m not expected to retry until I succeed.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that Dragon Age: Origins is the best game I’ve played in years, due primarily to the writing. The storyline and the characters are absolutely stellar. But as good a job as Bioware did with the game, I can’t claim to have loved everything they’ve done. Let’s take a quick look at the IPs Bioware has created over the past decade or so.

1998: Baldur’s Gate
The IP that put Bioware on the map is arguably still the best series they’ve ever produced. While in my opinion Dragon Age’s setting, storyline and characters surpassed those of Baldur’s Gate, there are still many things about Baldur’s Gate that remain superior: exploration, class and spell selection, and available PCs to name a few factors. There’s a reason that Baldur’s Gate remains a legendary name and a gold standard in RPGs.

2002: Neverwinter Nights
Without a doubt, the strongest feature of Neverwinter Nights was the Aurora engine’s make-your-own-adventure toolset. Many things about the Neverwinter Nights game engine bothered me, and despite completing the included single-player adventure, I never loved it.
I hated the fact that you couldn’t control an entire party of adventurers. Although I spent countless hours with the Aurora toolset, it never changed the fact that Neverwinter  couldn’t hold a candle to Candlekeep. I never played Neverwinter Nights 2.

2003: Knights of the Old Republic
Hailed by many as a better Star Wars story than George Lucas’s prequel trilogy, KotOR was met with much acclaim. But the lackluster combat was so very similar to the combat that had annoyed me so much in Neverwinter Nights. Although I appreciated the story, and very much enjoyed The Big Twist, the black and white good versus evil choices that determined your alignment on a very one-dimensional scale never struck much of a chord with me. I never played KotOR 2.

2005: Jade Empire
I enjoyed the gameplay of Jade Empire more than I had Neverwinter Nights or Knights of the Old Republic. It had a single-companion mechanic very much similar to Neverwinter Nights’s and a good guy/bad guy gauge similar to that in KotOR, but the combat was twitch-based. Sure, there were RPG aspects, but I got to manually jump, punch, kick, and dodge. I’ll grant you that by this point, the conversation system in Bioware games was getting very much same-old-same-old, but with much of the remainder of the game working so well, it was easy to overlook the staleness of the conversation mechanics. And Jade Empire had a storyline better than any of the previous Bioware games. Jade Empire 2 would be very nice.

2007: Mass Effect
TO hear some speak of it, Mass Effect was the second coming. The premise of a race of super-machines threatening humanity sounded absolutely fantastic. What we got in reality was a shooter that didn’t feel much like a shooter. It had a somewhat innovative conversation system, but the same black and white good vs evil mechanic that had bored me in KotOR was replaced by a black and white paragon vs renegade system. And the closest to unstoppable robots we ever got was the geth, a robotic race of utterly unremarkable peons for the PC to shoot at. Oh, and for some reason they could put people on giant spikes in order to change them into zombies. For some reason. I’m not in a hurry to play Mass Effect 2.

2009: Dragon Age Origins
Where to begin? Bioware took the one game they’d made which had been absolutely fantastic (Baldur’s Gate) and they did what they could to make it even better. And I’m not just talking about better graphics.

Firstly, the system of game mechanics. In the past, they’d used Dungeons and Dragons rules. Baldur’s Gate used 2nd Edition rules. Neverwinter Nights used 3.0. The current D&D ruleset is 4th Edition, and it’s dog crap. Bioware made the decision to create their own rule system, and I couldn’t be happier with it. It’s very different, but it’s probably my favorite RPG rule system other than Fallout’s SPECIAL system.

Secondly, they took that tired old black vs white good vs evil character alignment system and trashed it. In its place, they set up a system whereby each of your NPCs will have a different opinion of you based on their own values and their opinions of the various decisions you make throughout the game. It may sound like a small change, but in practice, it’s hugely different, and aside from making the game deeper, it leads you to care about the characters with whom you travel.

2011: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Oh, good. Another MMO. Based on a game that everyone other than myself loved. I’m not particularly interested.

I just got my first platinum trophy today for finishing every achievement in Trine.Working my way through every experience vial in the game was the part that took the longest, and I’ll admit: I had to consult a few online guides to find a few of the more cleverly hidden ones. But this is the first game I’ve ever gotten 100% completion on other than the Steam achievements in Plants vs Zombies. I’ve got some thoughts on a few of the trophies in Trine.

All Boxes and No Play
Achievements like this one are just a bitch. Creating 500 planks takes a good 20 minutes of annoying rote repetition. If I weren’t interested in having a platinum trophy, I’d never have done it. What a serious pain in the ass.

Master Ninja
I never thought this would be as hard as it was. Perhaps the game is buggy, but I swear I had the thief swinging seven times in a row and never got the trophy. This was the second to last trophy I picked up. In the end, I just swang back and forth under a bridge for ten minutes or so every so often. Usually, after 10 minutes of swinging, I found I’d gotten no trophy, so I’d just continue playing. And swear a lot. But eventually the game decided to recognize that I’d gotten five consecutive swings.

Better Than The Developers
I have a love hate relationship with the Tower of Sarek. At first, I totally hated it. But when I decided to try to get through the whole level without a single death, I steeled myself to the experience and forced myself not to get frustrated after my tenth death. Then, I started getting better at it. Soon, I could get through the majority of the level 90% of the time. I found that there were only two parts that were really hard. Firstly, a spinny platform onto which the phantom summons a box, making it spin. You can see that at 1:17 in this video. I eventually got to the point where I could shoot that box with a fire arrow before it made the platform spin, but it’s harder than it looks. The second hard part is at around 1:41 in the same video. Making a triangle platform with the wizard and getting it to be stable may be easier on the PC version of Trine than it is on the Playstation.

The fact that I actually enjoyed going through the Tower of Sarek as many times as I did is very interesting to me. Repeating a 90 second portion of a game over and over until you get good at it is such an old school concept in gaming, and it’s been many years since I’ve done it. It may not be the last time.