Legend of Grimrock

Legend of Grimrock hearkens back to classic dungeon crawl Apple II games - consider it the spiritual descendant of Wizardry, or the dungeons of Ultima and Bards Tale.

You play as a party for 4 convicts thrown into a dungeon that will serve as either your tomb or trials for your absolution.  Since it's not turn based, you are able to get away with slight cheats you would not be able to otherwise.  One such strategy would be strafing around a 2x2 grid attacking and retreating before the creature strikes back.

Much of the game appears to be governed by Zelda-ish type puzzles; find the way to open a gate, locate the key, trigger pressure plates in a certain order, etc.  This is what stopped me playing after 5 hours, there were far too many instances where I was looking for the hidden buttons or trying to figure out what door opened up when I triggered a lever - if it were a roguelike, I would probably still be in the depths.

When resting on levels, you occasionally are visited by a voice that hints at a greater story - all I really got out of it for as much as I played was "find me at the bottom of this place".

There is a development kit as well, and you are able to create your own adventures and a sizeable fan base building them.  This could be a great toolkit to realize some of the classic D&D modules.

Rage

"I expected more"

Rage is a game that seems more like engine proof-of-concept than actual game.  The gameplay is along the classic Doom style, you are blocked off to areas where creatures spawn and you shoot them.  The character animations initially look great as in they have very realistic texture mapping, but they animate like Chuck E Cheese animatronics.

After a fairly stunning opening cinematic, the story devolves into everything you would expect - nothing that you haven't seen before.  It's a bad offspring of Borderlands and Fallout - the world is very static, your interactions consist of picking up ammo or touching the door buttons.  You are a "vault survivor", you help wasteland establishments, unlock weapons and shoot enemies where the mission givers tell you to drive and shoot them.  There are allusions to "The Authority" - and indeed you eventually fight against some mutant troops and tougher humanoids, but there was no overarching terror, no amazing cinematics and nothing really compelling you to be mission bitch for these other survivors.

All in all I get the sense this a game to showcase an engine, and would have been a great vehicle for some other company to make a compelling game with.

Painkiller: Redemption

  

When the most recent Painkiller game released (Hell & Damnation), I bought the full franchise because it was like $2 more ... I have now seen the error in my ways.  There is only so far Doom nostalgia can take you.

The best I can say about Painkiller Redemption is "it's the last one I have to play before the one I wanted to play".  This is another mod-turned-release game, given a new soundtrack but is again just wave after wave of the same enemies you encountered in the previous games.  Though the pitch is that the music is "metal", it's not songs - it's more of a non-stop metal loop.   Dun-dun-dig-de-dig-de-dig .. Dun-dun-dig-de-dig-de-dig .. Dun-dun-dig-de-dig-de-dig .. You'd be better off putting on your own music.

I played on easy mode so I could side-watch the end of Supernatural Season 7, but even with this worthy distraction and playing on easy mode - I won't be playing past the first level.  There is a lot of backtracking and no real intelligence as to why/what spawnpoints were working or where you need to go. 

The Shivah

Oy vey!

Rabbi Stone is a depressed rabbi whose congregation is failing.  When a police officer visits and tells him that a previous congregation member was killed and left him a sum of money, he goes to sit shivah with the widow.  He also feels guilty for having kicked them out of the congregation 8 years ago, and finds a few clues that sets him on a path of the killer.

Much of the game play involves dialog choices and clicking on various room objects, there are lots of red herrings objects and dialog choices though.

All in all it was a well put together story of rabbi mafia.  It was difficult at times to see what to do, specifically when fighting the evil rabbi - but in general giving the "rabbinical response" was the best solution (answering with a question).

Game play was pretty boring, I probably wouldn't have bought it if I had spent a little more time investigating - even though it was only a two hour commitment.

Nier

Nier is a JRPG with a fairly interesting storyline and mehhh gameplay mechanics.  I love crazy plots, and this one ended up being really good - but the effort in backtracking through quest areas, the lamesauce "shades" instead of cool textured bosses, countless load screens, the amount of sloowww dialog you had to suffer though made me almost put this down multiple times - and indeed put me asleep more times than it should.  The save system forces you to be at a mailbox to save, so if you do fall asleep - you have to wake yourself up enough to backtrack or finish what you were doing.  That said - and like Dune, it was worth trudging through to get to the meat of the story.

This will be chock full of spoilers, so play this if you don't want to ruin the twists.

You start by defending your daughter Yonah from a shade attack, but things go wrong as she invokes the help from a mysterious book.  Cut to 1300 years later (yes) - and you are in a town with your daughter who is sick with this shade-scum stuff and you befriend a floating book who becomes your magical fount called Grimoire Weiss.  Through a series of not-so-interesting missions that essentially boil down to "find the big shade and kill it", you meet your other party companions - Kaine (foul mouthed, scantily clad chick) and Emil (emotional 12 year old with Medusa powers).

When fighting off a giant shade that attacks the town, Kaine sacrifices herself to be turned to stone in order to block a shade behind a door and your daughter is kidnapped by The Shadowlord.  

 Cut to 5 years later (I assume you've been searching the whole time for clues as to where Yonah is), Emil finds some obscure letter on how he can unpetrify Kaine, but becomes a freakish skull boy in order to get the power to do so.  Back on your main quest, and in typical RPG fashion - you collect the keys to enter the Shadowlord's lair where you fight Devola and Popola - the town main quest givers and your previous helpers.  In the course of defeating them, they reveal what's truly been going on.  The shades you've been killing are the last vestiges of humanity that have been corrupted, and everyone "alive" is a vessel waiting for the reunion with these souls that have over time unfortunately developed a sense of self and purpose.  The shade that has infected Yonah is the actual Yonah, and the Shadowlord is you - trying to reclaim their bodies.

When you defeat the Shadowlord in combat, Yonah-shade stops you and runs to her father saying there is another girl inside that misses her father as well.  She sacrifices herself, you execute the Shadowlord and presumably live happily ever after.

In new game+ you are given additional cut-scenes to humanize the shadow creatures you must destroy.

Magic 2014

I've played magic the card game like a fiend, starting when the comic book store I frequented talked me into buying a few beta decks.  It depresses me somewhat when I search ebay and see what an alpha black lotus can go for these days, I had three (one mint).

This game relies on that nostalgia though, there is no story or incentive - just a few dialog blops telling you who you need to attack next. The interface works well, and might be a great vehicle for playing other humans.  I only played the computer opponents, who each had a perfectly crafted themed deck.  Most took two games to beat, the first to see how their cards combo-ed together, but the AI was pretty basic - focused mainly on performing the 'trick' to their decks and never reacting to the style I used the entire game built on the starter deck, a green trampler.

Was it fun?  "Sure" - I suppose now that I've beaten all the main players, I could try and beat each of these opponents with the different themed decks I unlocked.  ... Nah.

As a vehicle to multiplay with other humans, this game is probably good. -- personally I would love to have constructed one of the great old decks I had played in the past.  But I didn't want to buy or spend 100 hours making them, so I'm done and uninstalling until 2015+.

Assassin's Creed 3

I have a long history with Assassin's Creed, I'm a huge fan.

I use it to describe what can be done in a modern game, how you are doing more than playing - you are a participant in a digital book.  I describe with great enthusiasm the moments where I climb a tower to rescue someone, only to find you have been tricked and she is actually about to be hung in the courtyard - how I turned around and leapt from the heights with chills and a "NOOOOO!!" to come save her.

A.C.3 tells a few stories.  First you play as Haytham through some introductory missions, who you later learn is a Templar - and then as Kaniehti:io, his illegitimate Indian son who trains as an Assassin.  The story follows the early America's with the Templar's siding with the British, and inspiring Kaniehti:io to revenge by burning his village.

The game does a good job in pointing out that no side is really "pure", the Assassin's want freedom - the Templar's want order and control.  You see evils done by both sides, and Kaniehti:io teams up with his father at some points when they have common cause to do so.

Also interwoven through the game are missions with Desmond to retrieve power supply modules to fuel the complex they have found and eventually open "the big blue door of energy".  As he travels through the area, Juno the hologram speaks with him about all the attempts they made in the first civilization to try and deal with a massive solar storm that threatened the world.  Nothing they tried worked (without "too obscene a cost"), the only semblance of surviving was to build themselves into a computer matrix to warn future civilizations.

Apparently this massive energy surge was going to happen again, because Desmond chooses to sacrifice himself (the obscene cost) - to restore Juno, despite warnings that she has a more nefarious purpose.  Juno is somehow now able to shield the planet from the cataclysm, and then apparently go dominate all mankind or something.

At times I felt like this game dialed it in as far as actual gameplay is concerned, there WERE fun missions - but oftentimes my mission was simply "Travel from A to B to get your next cut scene", or my personal favorite "kill this rabid dog standing here."