Top 5 Games of 2014

Now with 2014 almost over, it is time for the mandatory top games lists to be coming out of the wood works, so I figured "Why not" And with that in mind... let's go!

5. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

This game was very much different from the other “nominees” of the top 5 list you are reading right now. For one, it is a very much independent game and by playing it you can tell. The game pits you as a detective looking through a forested and backwater town with a visually stunning backdrop that hosts many murder mysteries related to the vanishing of a young Ethan Carter, who can share the mystical powers of the protagonist to see the supernatural. This power helps the protagonist unravel the mysteries that bring this game together.

Pros:

• Amazing visual quality and gorgeous scenery
• quality narrative that strays from the norm
• supernatural elements that boggle the mind and help deliver the narrative
• Non linear plot with many ways to experience the story
• Very adventurous and exploration driven story

Cons:

• Short narrative
• No tutorial and easy to miss plot points

4. Far Cry 4

Although extremely similar to it’s predecessor Far Cry 3, this game is still an amazing and explosive romp through the country of Kyrat that gets continually more and more crazy as you play it. The game also has one of the best villains of the year, Pagan Min.

Pros:

• Explosive gameplay with solid gunplay.
• Expansive and gorgeous landscape
• Multiple ways to dispatch of enemies and handle situations

Cons:

• Loose and simple plot
• Polarized and boring characters
• Similarities to Far Cry 3 go too far

3. Dragon Age: Inquisition

BioWare’s newest pseudo-MMO, Dragon Age Inquisition has a very elaborate and well written plot along with hours upon hours of gameplay and a huge assortment of characters and locations. The game has many choices in gameplay and narrative along with a massive variety in the ways you can play. Dragon Age keeps up to it’s predecessors massive narrative.

Pros:

• Massive and elaborate narrative
• Multiple choices throughout the game
• Huge variety in gameplay
• Huge replayability and hours of gameplay
• Living world with lots of side quests and ambient environment
• Well established world and locations

Cons:

• Less intense and cutting narrative than original
• Very centered and dependant on grinding
• Some very uninteresting characters and places.

2. Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

This game, although very similar to the Batman: Arkham series, has a diverse plot and interesting characters as well as the spectacular Nemesis system. The nemesis system allowing for several spectacular randomly generated enemies and many a replay.

Pros:

• Diverse gameplay with variety of features.
• Interesting plot
• Nemesis system allows for huge variety of enemies and massive amounts of fun
• Solid characters and well developed world

Cons:

• Similar features to Batman: Arkham fighting system
• Little diversity in side missions

read the review here: http://qtdoesgames.blogspot.ca/2014/10/shadow-of-mordor-breakdown.html

1. Wolfenstein: The New Order

Although many games were going to be put in this spot, I decided on Wolfenstein as the gunplay is amazing and the plot is fantastic. This game has some of the most insane and interesting gun controls in games today as well as a very diverse level design and some crazy moments in the plot as well as in natural gameplay.

Pros:

• Amazing gunplay and interesting weapons
• Diverse gameplay with many options for each situation
• Interesting and well written plot
• Keeps true to the originals
• Very high fidelity graphics with some spectacular set piece moments
• Intense amounts of difficulty

Cons:

• Slightly repetitive mission design
• Easy to predict plot moments

read the review here: http://qtdoesgames.blogspot.ca/2014/07/game-review-wolfenstein-new-order.html

And so with all that said, this list is not perfect, but it is what I thought were the five best games of 2014. If there were any games I missed or it was in the wrong order, please leave a comment below and let me know. And happy new year!

TellTale Game Of Thrones SpoilerFest

So with the recent release of Telltale's Game of Thrones hitting digital shelves a little while back, I figured I might discuss it in a Breakdown. Beware, I spoil everything you love in this post.Game of Thrones is most likely the more well known of the IP's Telltale has used since the success of the books and more infamously, the TV show, was the basis for the game. The story in the game directly parallels the TV show in the middle seasons and references several times the events of the TV show along with having several characters from the show, portrayed in Telltale style. The story does follow the classic Telltale style of narrative, which is make you feel as bad as possible, and then when you are finally starting to cheer up. make you feel more sad. It is really a a roller coaster of emotion that leaves you stunned and confused. Now with all these emotions and sadness, AND the fact that this is a completely narrative game means that there is spoilers so...

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR GAME OF THRONES AND GAME OF THRONES TELLTALE GAME AHEAD, DO NOT READ BECAUSE EVERYONE DIES!

Even with the boiler plate out of the way, I still feel I need to say just how many deaths and plot twists happen in this game. George R. R. Martin is infamous for his killing of characters and the Telltale game does not let up on the death. You play many characters in this game, those characters all revolving around the house Forrester in Game of Thrones, the banner men to the Starks. You play as Gared Tuttle, the squire to the lord of house Forrester, who was given a message by the lord on his last dying breath during the raid at the Red Wedding. This message then gets delivered to the squire's uncle, who is an advisor to the new lord, and another playable character, Ethan Forrester, who is a young boy who was abruptly given the title of lord. You have to make grave decisions, including choosing who will be your advisor and who you will ask help of, because you need to look after your house, which is in constant danger of being destroyed by other houses looking for power. You even need to ask help of Mira Forrester, who is currently in King's Landing being handmaiden to Margaery Tyrell, who is currently marrying Joffrey Lannister, the king of Westeros. With Mira you need to ask help and even have the option of stealing other people's things for profit all while staying loyal and impressing the other Lannisters (including Peter Dinklage) Really the whole game starts off on a sad note with the deaths of many characters and throughout the game you have the option of killing people and are sometimes forced to. This is all pretty tame by Telltale standards, since the Walking Dead had death galore. And just like the Walking Dead, the main character gets killed off as a plot point. Wait...

SPOILER ALERT FOR THE WALKING DEAD GAMES!

Sorry 'bout that. Well, anyway, at the end of the first chapter, the main competition of the Forresters and seemingly main antagonist to everybody Ramsay Snow, kills Ethan and takes his sibling hostage. This sets the tone for seemingly the rest of the game. The game does have the benefit of making none of the characters except for the ones who don't die in the show yet able to die at any point as they would in the show or books. With that said, it is very good to have previous knowledge of the Game of Thrones mythos before playing this game, as it both helps you understand the plot a little more and can give you possible foresight to the future plot points of the game (Joffrey is still alive for example) With all of that out of the way the game has a very solid and very compelling narrative that I personally enjoyed. The art style of the game is going for a more watercolor theme than the cell shaded normality Telltale is known for. This brings the game into the more uncanny valley territory where characters from the TV show don't quite look normal. it also brings a lot of graphical errors as the depth of field effects will often blur out and make the immediate background jagged and unrefined. This makes the game look a little rough around the edges but I feel the art style was more appropriate to the world of Game of Thrones.

All in all I would recommend this game if you have read the books or have watched the television show as it really draws from both sources and adds a whole lot to the narrative. I would say for the low price point it is worth the dough.

A Dark Room & Unfolding Games

You wake up. Your head is throbbing and your vision is blurry. You see a fire on the other side of the room you are in. You light the fire. This is the beginning of a great adventure.


A Dark Room by Doublespeak games is a very interesting beast. It is a game made for browser and iOS using java and HTML. The game is of a genre only known as a "folding" game. This means the longer you play the game, the more features and game play is revealed. The folding game genre is heavily reliant on waiting and slow progression mixed with eventual discovery to drive the player to continue playing the game. This makes the player want to play the game simply because they want to know what mechanic or feature is going to be revealed next. This is not unique to games as other games have attempted and very rarely successfully managed to make waiting interesting (Farmville, many Facebook and iOS games) but a folding game like A Dark Room doesn't try and make the waiting in itself exciting. In fact, it does quite the opposite. The game makes the waiting boring, agonising. The game makes you hate the waiting, but makes the end goal of the waiting, which is that primal discovery. Even finding just one little hint that there is something more than what you are currently playing makes the player anxious to continue. But I think I have reached the limit as too what I can talk about without actually talking about the story.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR A DARK ROOM AHEAD, READ AT OWN DISCRETION!

Like I said earlier, A Dark Room is slow. This isn't just in game play, but in story. The game reveals very little to you early on and continues with the mystery until the very end. The story told to you in the beginning is that you woke up in a dark room (surprise, surprise) with a burnt out fire and a mysterious woman. You light the fire and are immediately caring to the woman, in the same we she is caring to you. The woman tells you she can build things like houses and traps and you have to gather materials like wood and furs for her so she can build them. This introduces the new mechanic of gathering materials which has a progress bar that fills, allowing you to gather materials when full. When you gather the materials to build houses, people start to take residence in them, giving you resources over time relevant to what job they have in the village which you can assign to either a gatherer or hunter. By building traps you gain another progress bar to check the traps and gather furs. You eventually can build a trading post, which allows you to trade furs for other resources needed to build like scales and cloth. You are then able to build structures like tanneries in order to make leather and such. These structures give you extra job positions to give your villagers that have them use other resources like furs to make leather. You then are given the opportunity to buy a map in the trading post. Upon buying it, you are given an extra option that is one of the most fundamental parts to game play, exploring.

Exploring lets you venture out into the wilds around your village from a top down map view. You have a food and water levels that deplete slowly for every space you move, meaning you have to come back to your village or starve to death, In these wilds you are exploring are bushes and trees and paths, all displayed through ASCII art (using letters) and when you travel through the wilds, enemies will randomly attack you, sending you into combat. Combat consists of an RTS variant of turn-based combat. This once again constitutes the waiting mechanic as both you and your opponent have progress bars that can be tapped/clicked when full to attack (the opponent auto-attacks) This is the combat in the beginning, but you can eventually get weapons that do more damage, armour to take more hits, and water/food containers to travel further. You also loot enemies or building when finished with them. You take their items and can then use them. You have to watch out, though, because you have a very Fallout-type inventory that can hold a certain amount of weight, and better items tend to weigh more. This exploration mechanic is very important to the game as it allows you to know explore and discover at a more controlled pace. There is still a lot of waiting, but now you can explore the map faster or slower depending on how confident you are. The game now starts to expand on the narrative, not only revealing character traits of the protagonist through his interaction with the mysterious girl and his villagers (whom later he calls slaves), all the while giving you items that are very interesting and mysterious, but you have to wait to use them to their full extent

So I think I have competently explained the mechanics and narrative of this game. And in doing so I now hope to talk about the second half of the title, Unfolding games. I brushed over the subject before, but i want  to go more in depth in how these games vary from triple A games of today. The games that are released yearly, let's use the example Call of Duty, vary from unfolding games because of the differences even in the first ten minutes of the game. The first ten minutes of A Dark Room consist of huddling around a fire and next to no game play. The first ten minutes of Call of Duty is usually an action packed romp through whatever setting the game has chosen, explaining all of the game play features and narrative in one big tutorial. The tutorial is meant to tell you everything, so that the game can use the mechanics it's taught you and hopefully expand upon them. Unfolding games have no tutorial as the whole game tells you how to play it simply by throwing you in the game and expecting you to know. Yet while this works in A Dark Room, if the next Assassin's Creed did this it would be crucified. This is in part because an unfolding game gives you the game play in bite-sized portions, and the next AC game will most definitely have a million and one game play features. Yet I think that games with tons of features can learn to teach game play through game play instead of tutorials. in fact a good example of that is in Mega Man X, which you can watch here. The game doesn't tell you how to play so much as you figure it out in a learning scenario. This can be a great asset to games nowadays, as instead of a "Press A to jump" tutorial, games can learn to teach you fluidly.

So I hope this post was informative and makes you want to play A Dark Room. The game is on iOS and browser, and you can find the browser version here. So go check that out and hopefully have fun. And if you enjoyed this post, be sure to leave a comment below and tell me what you think of Unfolding games.

Spec Ops The Line & Ludo-Narrative Dissonance

Just about everyone who plays video games has either played or heard of the modern military shooters like Counter Strike that have been popular since the first Call of Duty released in 2003. Since then many games have expanded upon and, well to be honest, glorified the military as we view it today. We have seen the best of the military and just how powerful and action-packed it can be. But very rarely do we see the worst of the military, the things that we can only tell stories about. And even more rarely does a game pull it off without seeming "preachy" or "anti-government," So when a game like Spec Ops: The Line hit shelves it was a fresh look at an often overused subject.

In most people's minds, games where you shoot people like (Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc) the game usually gives you a reason either through the game play or the narrative to indeed, shoot people. The reason can either be "They are terrorists trying to kill innocent people" or even such things as "They killed your wife and family, kill them" but in any scenario you are usually the good guy doing the right thing by killing people. The main difference in narrative and game play that Spec Ops: The Line uses is that you are not killing people that are inherently evil or need to be killed, you are killing other soldiers in a scenario where only one of you will survive. This brings us to the plot of the game.

WARNING--- SPOILERS FOR SPEC OPS: THE LINE ---WARNING

The plot of Spec Ops is very similar in structure and delivery to most modern military shooters that we have today, but the story itself is very different. You play as Martin Walker, a Captain in the American military who has been sent with a squad of two other people to rescue Colonel John Konrad and the "Damned 33rd" Battalion that was trapped and presumed dead in Dubai, where massive dust storms have destroyed and collapsed most of the city. Once you enter the city you find insurgents that attack you, forcing you to kill them, moving forward to try and find the 33rd. You do find the 33rd, who have declared martial law and have started killing civilians and have engaged in a war with the CIA sent previously to rescue them. With this discovery you also find Konrad, who is leading the 33rd and overseeing their war crimes. Walker and his team end up in the middle of the battle between CIA and the 33rd, being forced to kill American soldiers in order to survive. Walker then starts experiencing hallucinations and in fact has hallucinated most of the events of the second half of the game. During these hallucinations it is revealed in fact that Walker has regretted the actions he has taken and that he is as much to blame for the deaths of civilians as the 33rd is. The game manages to perfectly deliver the story and makes you feel horrible for the actions you are taking. There are also decisions you must make throughout the game that revolve around either saving civilian or military personnel, and makes you question who's life is more valuable if both are innocent.

Now that I have recapped the plot, I can finally talk about the main point of this post, or in other words, the confusing term in the title, Ludo-narrative dissonance. This may sound like a word only meant in a university Language Arts term paper it simply means a conflict between a game's plot and its game play. This term is mainly used in a derogatory connotation, as in when a game mechanic or level directly contradicts the plot, pulling you out of the game and ruining immersion. I, however, would disagree and say that the ludo-narrative dissonance in Spec Ops: The Line actually immerses the player more, as the game's plot actively makes you feel horrible for slaughtering soldiers, whereas the game play promotes the killing. The way that the enemies will swarm in waves like lambs to the slaughter, and the tool tips on loading screens tell you things such as "enemies will only drop their weapons when executed" or "grenade launchers can kill several enemies in one area" suggest that the game indeed wants you to kill the enemies and use the most brutal ways to do so. This is very interesting that a game would specifically contradict itself in order to drive its story home.

 The enemies in Spec Ops: The Line are very different from other enemies, not only in the way that they are told through the story, but how they are presented through the game play. The soldiers you are fighting, as I have explained several times, are soldiers. And while they are fighting you and you are killing them, they are not enemies. Think about other FPS military shooters. Who are the main villains in these games? Middle Eastern terrorists, Russian terrorists, or Chinese/Korean terrorists most of the time. Can you see the pattern here? I talked in the beginning of this post about how most modern shooters give you a reason to kill the enemies you're killing. The way that they do this is by demonising and dehumanisation. This is because for a player to want to kill someone, they have to believe they are doing the right thing by doing so. Demonising is making the enemy seem evil in some way so that the player feels they are eliminating evil, making the player inherently good. Dehumanisation is making the enemy not seem human or trying to remove sympathy for the enemy, so that the player doesn't question why they are killing the people they are killing. This isn't just in games however, even way back in WWII and many other battles in history, both sides have to both demonise and dehumanise their enemy in order to make their soldiers actually want to fight. Even in modern America, the government is associating these Middle Eastern extremist groups as evil so that people will want to join the military to stop this evil. This is the same as in just about every FPS. The thing that truly separates the enemies in Spec Ops from normal FPS enemies other than the narrative constantly telling you "killing people is bad" is that in most combat situations in Spec Ops, you are the one to shoot first, often hearing enemies having casual dialogue or in the first level just trying to talk to you before you end up firing upon them. This not only drives that you are the instigator, but makes the enemies have entirely different motives to fighting you. They are trying to kill you not because they are evil, but because in their eyes you are evil and they are simply trying to stay alive. This brings me to the sentence that might just summarise the last several paragraphs of writing you have had to wade through. "Evil is in the eye of the beholder" This is saying that in Spec Ops: The Line, there is no clear enemy, as you are as evil to the enemies as they are evil to you. It is not a battle of good vs. evil, it is a battle of two equally flawed and equally righteous in their cause enemies.

After having read this, I hope that i have at least piqued your interest in Spec Ops: The Line as it is a very good game. Many people will say that the game is bad either because of the game play or the way the story is conveyed, but to anyone who has played a modern military shooter, it takes the genre and flips it on its head. This is why I would highly recommend Spec Ops: The Line to anyone looking for a story that can truly show you the horrors of war and it's consequences.