Ben McLean legutóbbi értékelései

This game's awful colors burned my eyes

Jet Island is probably the single best PC VR experience available for anyone who isn't concerned about motion sickness. If you have a VR stomach of steel like me and you only get to try one PC VR game, try this one.

AUTISM

THE GAME

There's about five hours of gameplay here in a similar vein to the Talos Principle. If you liked the Talos Principle then you'll probably like this one.

I was a bit annoyed when the game dragged the politics of demanding that the U.S. adopt nationalized healthcare kicking and screaming into the middle of my scifi in an extremely ham-fisted way, but the game's still good despite that.

Broken Reality is OK. I don't think it's going to rock your world or anything but it was fun. There are a few really frustrating parts where you get stuck and it seems like you've done everything only you haven't which seemed to give the game a higher frustration level than it could/should have had. But it wasn't bad. There was a basic competence shining through most of it.

GNOG is a wonderful 2 hours of seated VR puzzles with nice music. It has the quality you'd expect from having played other Double Fine titles. Please make Brutal Legend 2.

I think this game is broken.

... oh wait, it's supposed to do that.

Godot is the game engine I currently recommend for beginners and experts alike. You probably won't see much time in my usage of the Steam version though because I'm usually on a cutting edge beta since I need all the latest features for VR programming.

The Magic Circle was great. As a social satire, it takes aim squarely at video games from a well-informed insider perspective and neither the developers nor the fans are spared. It could have been improved if it also included gaming journalist shills and evil mega-corporate publishers as well, but for what it is, it did a great job.

The best part is towards the end (stop reading if you want to preserve the surprise) in which you're challenged to create a linear game for a simulated player to experience. I'd like to see this system built out into a full featured game development simulator: one that balances its design to focus as much on the creative aspect as the business aspect. (where Game Dev Tycoon was pure business) The goal of keeping the simulated player's engagement as high as possible by providing variety with highs and lows is great, and it could be turned into a fun and challenging game if it was also paired with a system that mandated variety (by requiring sequels to have a certain percentage of difference from the original) and problem solving (by periodically placing random, arbitrary restrictions on the design) to succeed. That's something I'd actually be interested in playing more of. Sort of like Dungeon Keeper.

But The Magic Circle isn't Dungeon Keeper. It is at its core a narrative experience and the narrative was sufficiently engaging to earn this title a recommend from me. Expect 2.5 hours of gameplay for the main story, plus some extras to track down and achievements to unlock if you have autism or OCD.

This is basically a 90 minute tour of "Things A Beginner Can Do With the Source Engine" with a voiceover trying to give that stuff some context to make it seem significant when it's not.

But as walking sims go, this one is better than some others I've seen. The voice acting's not too bad and the game's not political like Gone Home, which is a good thing IMO. The main problem with Beginner's Guide is that it just seems aimless. The voiceover guy spends alot of time trying to convince you that these game demos you're seeing are significant somehow, but after going through the whole thing, I'm just still not sold on the idea. If there was some secret mystery to uncover or if this game was trying to say something serious and worthwhile about depression then maybe that would've been better but this just seemed like ... why? Why should I spend money and time on this instead of on something else?

The Stanley Parable was clever because it combined humor with a subtle commentary on video games as art. This has no humor and it's ultimate message of, "People don't really understand each other" isn't developed very well. There's a moment in Beginner's Guide (spoiler alert for all zero people who care) where the programmer leaves angry messages in the game directed at the narrator, and that might be interesting if this was a horror game and the programmer was threatening him or something, but in the context of this artsy fartsy navel-gazing walking simulator, it just doesn't work.