Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Love is Over: Catherine


Catherine has been described as a “horror action puzzle game with social simulation elements”. What this equates to is an extremely odd, but enjoyable game.

What I Liked:
  • Plot
Vincent Brooks is a man seemingly floating through life. His girlfriend of 5 years, Katherine, is very much a “plan ahead” type of person, and wants Vincent to clean up his act, and marry her. Vincent himself is much more unsure of this, being comfortable the way things are.
One evening, after getting extremely drunk, Vincent finds himself waking up next to a blonde bombshell named Catherine, and from this point on, his world turns upside down. In addition to this, Vincent begins having horrible nightmares where he much run from horrific beasts by arranging and climbing a wall of blocks, which always leaves him extremely tired when he wakes.

Upon finding Catherine in his bed, Vincent prepares to fire his laser.
The plot itself is quite adult oriented, for a game. I mean this in the context that it is more complex than your typical “there are bad guys, shoot them” storyline. Nothing in this game is clear cut for you – choices you make for Vincent may seem one way, but affect things differently than one might expect.
Add the multiple subplots to do with Vincent's friends' relationships and you get quite an enjoyable plot.
  • Presentation
The game is initially presented as a television show, with the intro sequence briefly introducing the concept. Once this is over, you typically have a playable sequence in the bar (where the social simulation portion of the game is spent). Once the player leaves the bar, you end up in your nightmare realm, where the action puzzle game takes place.
These sequences are linked via cutscenes, occasionally as full blown 2D anime scenes, but more often using the in-game graphics (gloriously cel-shaded). If you don't like a cartoony art style, then you won't like the art here folks!
The presentation simply feels quite polished.
  • Music
The level music is an interesting set of remixes of classical music. While aficionados will likely think this as an absolute travesty, I found myself enjoying the remixes. Not a lot to say here though.
  • Gameplay
The gameplay whilst in the nightmare realm consists of pulling and pushing blocks in such a fashion as to allow you to climb the wall whilst being chased. More often than not, you are being chased by nothing at all other than the blocks simply falling away into nothingness. However, on the boss stages (which are all amazingly cool) you are typically being chased by a large beast of some variety, all relating to what's been on Vincent's mind during that day. For example, one of the more memorable bosses is a giant demonic baby – during the cutscenes for the day before this sequence, Vincent learned that Katherine was pregnant, hence the giant baby.

BLOCKS!
The bar gameplay is much more relaxed, allowing the player to immerse themselves in the world a bit more. You control Vincent in the bar, have some drinks and chat with the other patrons. You will receive text messages from both Katherine and Catherine, and get to choose whether to reply or not, and if so, how to reply to them. You select what to drink (and if you finish a drink, are given trivia about the particular drink), and when to go home. While it doesn't sound thrilling, I found that these segments of gameplay immersed me in the world more than any plain cutscene ever could.
  • Morality
Whilst I am usually a skeptic of moral choices in gaming (they have a tendency to make you either saintly or baby-eatingly evil, with nothing in between), it is somewhat well executed in Catherine. For starters, while you have a red/blue bar showing where on the spectrum you are when you answer a question or reply to a text message, it never tells you outright what the spectrum is until you finish the game. It's not a “Good/Evil” bar, it is a little more complex than that. However, it still is totally possible to game the system and force your way to a particular ending as a result. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, when you consider that there are 8 endings to view!
Eventually during the story, Vincent needs to make a decision about whether he'll stay with Katherine and break up the affair, or whether he'll go the other way. You never make this decision outright – the bar makes that decision for you, as it reflects Vincent's state of mind at the time. While this prevents you from saving before the key decision making point in the game (since said point doesn't really exist for the player), you still are able to at the very least get the broad spectrum of endings associated with the decision he came to in your game (since the Good/Bad/True ending is decided by how you answer the questions in the final area).

Catherine also thinks Vincent is single when she gets with him, further complicating matters.


I would also like to point out that a bunch of the questions it posed to me made me feel a little bit uncomfortable. Whether they were about things I had never experienced or even thought about in my life, or simply difficult questions is a tough one to decide. The theme of cheating on a partner, and the consequences of that made me feel quite uncomfortable at times playing as Vincent – and this is why the plot succeeds.
  • It's Different!
In a world of generic shooters, Catherine is a breath of fresh air. It's nice to be able to play something completely different from practically everything I have ever played previously. The last time I played a title that was so different from the pack (that was NOT an indie title) would be Mirror's Edge!

What I Hated:
  • Schizophrenic Difficulty
The block puzzles difficulty ranges from absolutely trivial to hair-tearingly, insanely difficult. I found that certain block puzzles held me up for ridiculous amounts of time (I was stuck in a 5x5 confinement of blocks for over an hour – and considering that the floor falls away consistently, this also means many, many continues were used up here). On the other hand, certain puzzles were also seemingly too easy. 

You will see this screen a lot, but now's not the time to be dead!
Obviously, early puzzles should be easier than the later ones, but this is not what I'm referring to. I found that the final boss encounters were much easier than some of the “regular” puzzles I had encountered in chapters gone by!
As frustrating as this is, its certainly not a deal-breaker.
  • Australia Doesn't Get Nice Things
As I have mentioned in prior posts, Australia is not allowed to have nice things. This includes Catherine. To get a hold of a copy, you will need to import. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is something worth mentioning, since certain people are unwilling/unable to import games, and one cannot simply walk to the games shop and pick up a copy.

~~~~

Catherine is an interesting title that, while it may not appeal to everyone, is definitely worth a play to anyone after something a little different. Those who immediately look at it and think that its not worth playing must truly be jaded. Or scared to try something that's so far removed from the umpteenth WWII shooter.

On a side note, the voice actor list reads like a who's who of English anime/game voice actors. Vincent is played by Troy Baker – who played Snow in Final Fantasy XIII, and Yuri in Tales of Vesperia. Catherine is voiced by Laura Bailey (or Lust from Full Metal Alchemist, Chun-Li from Street Fighter 4), and many other recognisable voices.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Silent Hill: Homecoming


Development duties for Silent Hill 5 were handed over to an American company. While I question the wisdom of such a move, it did result in a Silent Hill game being made, so I suppose that's something. More details below.

What I Liked
  • Despite the Americanism, its still Silent Hill
While the development duties changed hands, this time allowing the Americans to play with a Japanese franchise, seemingly with the aim of ramming it into the ground as quickly as possible (which mirrors my opinion of the Devil May Cry reboot, oddly enough) it remains “Silent Hilly” enough to tolerate. While the by-now-overused nurses appear a lot, and Pyramid Head is wrongfully used in the name of fanservice, the puzzles and the general feel of the game still screams Silent Hill at you. From the fog, to the way almost every door is permanently locked.
Although, admittedly, this one is much more linear than prior Silent Hill games!
  • UFO Ending tradition remains strong
Silent Hill has always had a tradition of having multiple endings – one always being an ending which involved UFOs and aliens. This is the secret ending, usually requiring multiple playthroughs to find.. Apparently, in Homecoming it isn't quite so secret. It's also, by far, the most interesting ending of the five (which is quite sad – the other four endings, while more serious in tone, also weren't interesting in the slightest).

What I Hated
  • Dodge ability works only half the time
One of the big new features that was advertised for Silent Hill: Homecoming was a revamped control system, including the ability to dodge. The game now controls much more like a third person shooter than it used to (though having tanky controls was arguably part of the thrill of Silent Hill).
However, I found that more often than not, the dodge button would simply fail to operate correctly. If you touch the dodge button as you were being attacked, you would either get a last second dodge (which meant a parry if you held a melee weapon, or taking a hit if you were holding a gun), or simply not move at all and take a bladed arm to the face!
No, to dodge properly in this game, you must press the dodge button a second BEFORE the attack goes through. The monsters telegraph their attacks to a degree, in an attempt to lessen the deadliness of this issue, however it is difficult to tell between a tell before an attack, or just a random shudder from the monsters, due to their mutated nature.
  • Pyramid Head does not belong here
Pyramid Head was an important part of Silent Hill 2, symbolising James' sexual tension, as well as punishing him for his misdeeds by chasing him around and generally scaring the crap out of the player. However, it is simply that – a punishment for his sins.
While Alex in Homecoming has his own issues to come to terms with, it feels wrong to have Pyramid Head appearing here. For starters, he appears and simply walks away, opening a path for you to progress. Later on, he kills a plot-integral character right in front of Alex. This isn't right! It just feels like a fanservice issue, rather than an actual need to use him. Much like how he was used in the Silent Hill film.
  • The game is almost over before you enter Silent Hill
You spend a total of 3 chapters of the game in Silent Hill. For a Silent Hill game, this feels kind of weak. Isn't the point of Silent Hill the fact that weird stuff is going on in the town? Admittedly, by the end of the game, they do explain why it spilled over into Shephard's Glen, but it still feels slightly off to me.
  • Plot feels empty
Silent Hill plots are typically heavy on symbolism, and light on straight logic. Things tend to not make sense until quite late on in the game, and even then take some thinking (and possibly reading of other people's opinions) to realise what's going on.
However, Silent Hill: Homecoming does not have this. The game feels fairly light in plot until the last few chapters – and even then a lot of what takes place doesn't require any thought at all to decipher what went on. Particularly since it falls into the trap of having the “bad guy” explain their plan to you (while you are tied to a chair in a scene reminiscent of a Bond film).
It is very much a Hollywood attempt at horror in this manner, where the plot must be explainable in words with less than three syllables in them, for fear of losing sales (and therefore money) due to requiring too much thought.

In conclusion, while the game was tolerable, that's about all it is. It really pales in comparison to prior Silent Hill titles. Hell, it pales in comparison to the title immediately following it (Silent Hill: Shattered Memories – the retelling of SH1 which takes the plot of that, and remixes it so it goes in a completely different direction. While not an amazing game, it was fun, tried something different, and feels like it may be the beginning of an alternate history SH series).
Silent Hill: Homecoming is a completely forgettable experience, and altogether skippable. Don't waste your time.

Also, I got the good ending. After watching the other endings on YouTube, I would have preferred any of those, because things actually happened in them. Aren't we supposed to be wanting the happy ending?

Monday, August 1, 2011

Maccas Monday - Attack of the Killer Truck of Doom!

When i was working at McDonalds, I was consistently given the "Walkers" shift. This amounts to accepting a delivery of stock, rotating the stock that's already stored in the freezers and other stock areas, organising it into a logical order, and putting it away neatly. I was given this shift often, because I was apparently quite good at it.

I suppose all that time playing Tetris paid off somehow.

Aside from the usual woes of the delivery, such as management ordering more stock than is physically possible to fit on the shelves while still following legal regulations as far as safe stack heights are concerned, one particular delivery sticks in my mind far more than the others. Though simultaneously, far less as well.

The delivery had been taken, and all the boxes counted up. It turns out that we were missing about four boxes of tatsoi lettuce - the "fancy" (read extra leafy so they can get away with putting less on a burger) lettuce used for the crispy chcken burgers (and the Angus burgers). The delivery driver, Tony, decided that we should check the other stores' orders on the truck. Sometimes the idiots who put the stock on the truck mix the orders up.

I went to assist him in taking a look. The back door on the truck was a strange kind of latch (which I'd seen before on my father's truck), where there was a lever in a holder. Raise the lever and pull it outwards to open the truck door. Unfortunately for me, the lever got stuck in the holder, so I started hitting it, to make it move upwards, and therefore open the door.

With my amazingly bad luck, the lever finally flew upwards. It also flew outwards, straight into my nose, knocking my backwards a few steps, and sending my glasses flying a few meters away. After retrieving my eyes, I realised that my nose was bleeding, quite heavily. I (somehow) calmly acquired some paper towel, and proceeded to sit in the crew room, plugging my nose with it to wait for it to stop.

Then I woke up, on the floor, with a co-worker's crotch in my face. When he realised I was awake, he hurriedly moved (I think... uh hope? that he was simply laying me down properly, but from an awkward angle) to reveal about 12 more faces standing around. My first question was "Why are you teabagging me?", which was quickly followed by "Where am I?"

About 15 minutes later, an ambulance arrived. The lady from the ambo woke me up (I had passed out again, by this point) and tried to move me. I then woke up again, to a lecture along the lines of "If you do that again, I will leave you here". Apparently, I had passed out again, and almost hit her in the face! Apparently, she took this matter personally... because I was totally in control of my actions at this point -.-

Eventually, they got me to the hospital, where I awaited a doctor. Five hours later, I saw a doctor, who determined that I had a mild concussion, and had somehow not broken any bones. If the lever had hit me a little to the right, I would have broken my nose. Left? Cheekbone. up would have been glasses/eyes, and any lower and I would have lost teeth. I was amazingly lucky.

A few days later, I was back on the job - the next shift being taking the delivery again.

A few weeks later, the regional manager took me aside, and blasted me for attempting to help the truck driver. Apparently its not my job to help people who are helping me do my job. Yet another reason why McDonald's is a trap!

And for the record, our lettuce wasn't on the truck.