Quick Review: Machinarium
I posted a tweet the other day about how you should check out Machinarium if you like atmospheric music, point-and-click adventures, or puzzle games. I thought I’d touch on a few more details in a quick blog post.
First thing is first though: if you have any interest in the game, check out the demo on the website. It covers the first few stages, and gives you a pretty good indication as to what the rest of the game is like. It’s the best way to decide if it’s a game you’d be interested in. For me, it was well worth $5 – if for no other reason than to get the soundtrack.
Music
Which leads me to my favorite part of the game: the music. As I mentioned in my tweet, it’s very atmospheric. It sets the mood of the game more than providing actual background music – although there is some of that as well. As you can imagine, it’s inspired by machines of old, which the game also seems inspired by. It works really well.
Gameplay
If you know what a point and click adventure is, you know what is involved with Machinarium. The game consists entirely of moving from one location to another, discovering secrets, and solving puzzles to open the path to the next location. The puzzles, and the presentation of the puzzles, are very clever. Sometimes what you need to do is obvious. Sometimes it requires a lot of trial and error until you discover the one little secret that you forgot. And other times, you hit a brick wall and really don’t know how the pieces fit together. (Sometimes, literally. You have an inventory of items you collect, which you can use to solve puzzles. Those items can be fastened together to create a new item, too.) In cases where you are stumped, the game gives you two helping hands. The first is a simple pictorial hint, which you can use once per location. This gets progressively vague as the game goes on. The next helping hand is a complete walkthrough. To get to it, you play a simple, sometimes challenging mini-game. Once unlocked, it shows you the progression of what needs to be done in your current locale, in comic-book, pictorial form. The interesting thing is that it ONLY shows you the current location – it doesn’t tell you how it relates to stuff you need to do in other locations.
Story
The story so far has been the weakest part of the game. You aren’t explicitly told what you’re trying to do, although pieces start to fill in as you progress. There is no dialog in the game, just pictures in thought bubbles. It’s a cute presentation, and it’s interesting to see how well the story is told within these limitations. But it has not been my driving force for continuing to play.
Other
This is a flash-based game, so it runs on any platform that supports flash – Windows, Mac and Linux. Saying that it’s “flash-based” carries certain negative assumptions with it, but it’s actually very well implemented. This is how flash SHOULD be used. I’m impressed.
Later on in the game, the puzzles become a little bit trickier to figure out, but it never becomes impossible – and, of course, you have the walkthrough to nudge you in the right direction if you truly get stuck.
All in all, it is a very charming game, and worth your time to experience. At least try out the demo. I bought the game on sale for $5, and that was primarily for the soundtrack. But now I’m playing the game too, and I’m enjoying it.
MacBook Pro – One Week Later
A week ago today, FedEx dropped off my shiny new laptop, direct from China. Since then, I’ve been hurriedly prepping it and setting it up to see how well it would fit into my digital world – especially since that world is mostly Windows-based.
The “too much text, didn’t read” version is that Windows 7 and Mac OS X coexist very nicely. There are certainly frustrations in doing so, however – you have to be willing to work through the issues. I also don’t think MBP is the ideal solution if Windows is the only operating system you plan on using. But as a laptop, the machine is stellar. And for running both Windows and OS X, the choice is obvious (not that there is much of a choice). Read on for the nitty gritty.
Prince of Persia
Since there was no demo of the game available on XBL, I figured I would rent it to try it out. The reviews sounded promising, but I’ve put too much stock in reviews in the past only to get burned. So renting seemed like a good solution.
I’ve actually enjoyed the game quite a bit. I suppose I should mention that this game is fundamentally different from all the previous games, so that may upset some. I haven’t played the earlier games, so it hasn’t bothered me so much. But having said that, if you keep an open mind, and treat this game more as an “inspired by” than a sequel, it has its charms.
Also, if you’re looking for a challenge, this game isn’t it. I tweeted a few days ago that Prince of Persia is like “Assassin’s Creed Lite” — and that still is my feeling. It’s as if they took the essence of Assassin’s Creed and boiled it down to its essential parts. Your character can do a lot of acrobatic moves to get around the game world. The battle system is essentially comprised of a series of buttons that you press together to form combos. The music is beautiful and non-invasive. In certain environments, the sounds are atmospheric and realistic. And it’s easy.
The only thing that seems to be a little light (i.e. disappointing) so far is story. There are two main characters, and, at the moment, are pretty much the only humans in the game. All dialog is between the two, which is all at once entertaining and annoying.
On a purely sensory experience, Prince of Persia seems worthy of a purchase if the game is on sale. It may just be that I haven’t played far enough into it, but if I use other reviews as a guide, then it would seem like the game does lack some depth. But, you know, I like beautiful, immersive games. And so far, Prince of Persia has delivered that nicely.
Thoughts on GTA IV
It wasn’t that long ago that the following thought entered my head.
“Wow. I might actually finish a GTA game.”
You see, I never got too much into the GTA series. And Lord knows, I tried. GTA III, GTA III: Vice City, GTA: Liberty City Stories — I played them all. Or rather, I played them for a couple of hours, which is about how long it took to get to an “epic” mission, which would be too difficult for me to complete. At that point, I would switch to just taking advantage of the open environment these games drop you into — taking on the taxi cab missions, for example. Or doing what I could to attract police attention and then attempt a daring escape. But those things only hold your interest for so long.
So you might be wondering why I kept buying the games. Well, I rather naively thought that each version would somehow fix the annoyances of the earlier versions. But more than that, I liked the concept of the games, and appreciated the work that went into them. I wanted to progress, I wanted to enjoy them. But I kept running into a brick wall.
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