King Haddock 最近的評論

Oh my goodness. Talk about major time nostalgia moment.

Out of all the games I played in childhood, Commander Keen was probably what I spent the most hours enjoying. It didn't matter as the games became increasingly "older" - they NEVER became outdated to me - and thus I played and beat all the episodes again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and... well... AGAIN.

While I am disappointed that this "complete" pack lacks my all-time favorite Keen game (Episode 6: Aliens Ate My Babysitter) as well as Keen Dreams, I cannot complain to the fact that buying this provides me access to most of Keen's adventures. From the gameplay I have done so far, it works well enough on my system, beyond a few minor visual jitters that shake the screen from time-to-time.

The later episodes (everything in Goodbye Galaxy!) are far more fun, in my opinion, than the first three, but all of the games have appreciable and enjoyable elements. The first few games sometimes suffer from clunky controls and frustratingly challenging segments in gameplay, while the latter feel a lot more organic on the hand of the player, and can be set at easy/normal/hard levels that are appropriate to players' experience. I also feel like the aliens' designs, appearances, personalities, etc. become more lovable and memorable as the adventures continue, but maybe that is coming from the bias of loving Episode 6 the most, then 5, then 4.

While there is a story behind Commander Keen's adventures, I wouldn't say that story is ever the central part of playing the games. You might know you're saving the Oracles, you might know you're saving your babysitter, you might know you have to destroy That Huge Dramatic Machine at the end of Episode 5, and you might know that the Vorticons should be defeated before they mess up everything... but even with a perfunctory understanding of the plot, that's enough to have fun. There's not much more to the plot than basic concepts, anyway. I believe when I was young and first playing the games, I didn't even KNOW what I was doing... I was just pogo-sticking my way through levels and having a good time. It's true I am someone who prefers games for the storytelling, but I'd still argue for Commander Keen's incredibleness for eternity... maybe because of my personal sense of nostalgia for this staple game... maybe because it still provides the player imagination into a world of fighting aliens... maybe because the games are just FUN TO PLAY and a deep storyline isn't needed (for me personally) to enjoy myself.

I would recommend these games, especially episodes 4-6 and Keen Dreams, to any of my friends, regardless of whether or not Commander Keen was a part of their childhood.

Melody's Escape is my go-to rhythm-based game for relaxing and unwinding. I love being able to listen to any song in my library while playing a visually beautiful game, where my character walks, runs, and flies past colorful obstacles.

The visual design is artistic and engaging, the controls are pretty good, and the game tends to do well coordinating obstacles to the beat. While song analysis isn't always perfect for beat coordination, it does a strong enough job that almost any song I put in will coordinate well; outside of something like Classical pieces, it's rare for a song to feel frustrating or "off."

All difficulty settings are perfectly doable. There will be some variation in HOW difficult a song is, even within one difficulty setting. Anymore I only play the hardest difficulty setting - Overload - and wish there were even one step harder. However, I'm probably in the minority for wanting a harder setting; Overload DOES take some time and training to get to that level.

For people who like to unwind listening to music but want a little extra to do with their hands, Melody's Escape is a great choice.

Undertale is a game I went in with very low expectations but came out obsessed.

I had seen the hubbub arise when the game was new and first gained a following. I saw posts overtake my dashboard on tumblr and several of my friends fall down the hole of addiction. One of my close friends played a number of tracks from the OST to try to pique my interest. At first I felt uninterested and uninspired to even check out the game, let alone play it. However, several of my friends who have very similar tastes in storytelling and gameplay were urging me to play the game. I became interested, and lo and behold, a wonderful friend purchased the game for me.

Playing blind, I completed the entire game, both the True Pacifist Routes and Genocide Routes, in a week.

The first playthrough took me 16 hours. I can get through it in 3 hours now. I'm still playing the game, still enjoying it, and I have played over 143 hours to count since I received the game three months ago.

I am still obsessed with Undertale to this day. It is a game that is very enjoyable, very impacting, and resonates with the heart. There's a reason I call it one of my all time favorite games and all time favorite stories.

Do not be deceived by the game’s first hour of play. The RUINS, where you begin playing, is not very interesting to a first time player. Until you get to know her and finish the entire game, Toriel acts much like a simple tu-TORIEL. For me, I did not find that part of the game impressive at all for my first runthrough. It was only as I continued forward that I got sucked into the world of Undertale. As simple and basic as the game seems as first, I assure you, it will get far more complicated and far more engaging to the player.

Do not be deceived by the game’s graphics. While they seem so simple, basic, and uninteresting at first, the more you play, the more you will be able to appreciate the visual beauty of the screen. There is a lot of thought and design in the pixels. There are beautiful color palates, downright gorgeous rooms, and gloriously beautiful moments in the later battle sequences.

Do not be deceived by the basic MIDI soundtrack. As a trained music composer, at first I thought this music was very uninteresting. However, the more you play, the more charm the melodies give you. The more they get stuck in your head. The more you fall in love with them. The more you realize the music that was composed was EXACTLY what needed to be composed, and that they actually have very good form and compositional structure.

Undertale, in truth, is much more than meets the eye, ear, and first impression.

It’s a story beautifully told and full of impact.

This is a game that is full of charming and endearing humor. The terrible puns, the trolling teases, the ridiculous situations, the tongue-in-cheek, the irony, and the fourth wall references all combine into a distinct, lovable sense of comedy. This is a game that will make you facepalm, laugh, and at times howl in amusement.

This is a game that is full of lovable, three-dimensional characters. The characters are so three-dimensional and interesting that, with every playthrough, you learn something new about them. A bite of an implied backstory. The motivations behind their actions. The depths of their hearts. Their likes and dislikes. Their characterization. Their penchants, their tendencies, their manners of speech. Some stories have boring characters, some stories have interesting characters, and some stories – like Undertale – have living, breathing, lovable, unforgettable personalities.

This is a game that dives into the depth of the heart and explores the soul. Though there are many lighthearted moments in the game, it also is incredibly deep and full of mature concepts. It is a game by which a player can question morality or feel encouraged about the goodness of kindness. It is a game that demonstrates the power of love and the horrors of hate. It shows the meaning of forgiveness. It explores trauma, even gets into very solemn moments about depression, suicide contemplation, and handling a genocide. The game can go into many serious concepts while bringing the story, at the end, to a resolving and encouraging finish.

This game breaks some unexpected gaming boundaries. The fourth wall is something most people have never experienced the like before. The game CHANGES based upon your decisions – and even going back to a previous save file won’t be enough for you to escape your actions. The fourth wall is integrated into the very lore of the game, and there are moments that will legitimately surprise blind players because you do not anticipate some of the plot twists.

Frankly, this is a game that is very well-written from a literary perspective. The story’s trajectory is nicely balanced. Information and experience collide and slowly build up to surprising reveals and connections you never would have anticipated. In the game, you think you start with a simple journey. By the end, you are bawling from emotion at the experience.

This game is a true journey.

This game has everything I could want. Great, catchy music. Beautiful visuals. Entertaining humor. Heartwrenching pain. Memorable characters. Great representation of many types of individuals. A cool setting and world. An engaging and well-written storyline. Fun gameplay experience. Challenges. Depth, maturity, grit, encouragement, cheer, hope. A lot of hidden secrets, areas to explore, and juicy information to uncover for the truly dedicated player. Lore that brings you a lot of knowledge, but also leaves hoards of room for theories and discussion.

Please, if you haven’t already, go play Undertale. If you are someone who is at all interested in games with good stories, then this is meant for you.

I assume most people who are reading this have been spoiled on some aspects. For those of you who haven’t, I will only say one thing, if you want to have a little guidance (this is the guidance I got before playing and I think it was worth it to hear this): the best gameplay experience for first-time players is to start with what the fandom called the “Pacifist Route.” Don’t kill anyone. Play to the end. Then, when you have done that, do what the fandom calls the “Genocide Route.” Literally obliterate everyone in every area of the game before going forward; seek out every possible monster that lives there; make sure you see the line “But nobody came” before transitioning from one location to another. See what happens. Be patient and have FUN with those incredible boss fights.

And above all, my friends… stay DETERMINED.

So this is coming from someone very integrated in the HTTYD community (kingofthewilderwest), so bear that in mind with my following review.

Although I play School of Dragons on a fairly regular basis and don’t think poorly of the game, I will be honest: it is not the best game out there. Though I am hesitantly selecting "RECOMMEND," it is only with a lot of qualifications that I am giving the "recommendation". I imagine most people will not like the game, and I would only recommend it to certain people for certain reasons.

Its problems, in brief: the game is fairly simplistic and the quests are not at all challenging to complete (well, nothing is hard to do in SOD). The quests, because they are so basic, quickly feel like the same-old same-old. Many of the quests and conversations are geared toward children with some aim of education, so you will receive more than your fair share of educational overviews of glaciers, fish facts, evolution, prisms, and lots of ecology. The graphics are very poor and there are many mistakes with solid object collisions. Most of the side games are not too interesting, and are at best not very special. Loading time can be slow for the game, even for those of us who have good gaming computers and a great internet connection. The chat system has so much unnecessary word censoring that it is enormously challenging to communicate in English (you can’t even type numbers without being censored), and I cannot say a word to people in Spanish to converse bilingually. Members get a lot of wonderful cheats but it’s not worth the price paying for it. Last but probably most frustrating to players of SOD… the game is **extraordinarily** prone to bugs and errors to the point there is always some constant Thing that needs to be fixed.

Nevertheless, I still play the game. With this extremely large and diverse list of negatives, you probably are wondering why I even bother.

As someone who is integrally involved in the How to Train Your Dragon community, School of Dragons allows me a way to fly on the wings of a dragon and interact with many other individuals who share the same love and live in the same fandom. School of Dragons allows you to customize a Viking of any race or skin color, get yourself a dragon of any species or color you can imagine, and fly around a world of many islands. Frankly, so long as you have the money to buy more stable rooms, the number of dragons you can own is freakishly high. School of Dragons recently has been expanding the number of islands, locations, and quests you can check out, and the expansions have been fun to see. You enter the world of HTTYD. Though the graphics are limited, there are some beautiful views you can appreciate, and it’s great to be able to boast about your own dragons. There are always people present playing School of Dragons. You can race each other for trophies, join a clan, and try to get your clan to rank higher than other clans by the number of trophies you have – that’s sort of cool! And even if you are not a member, if you log in frequently enough, you can eventually collect all the features that the members have, such as the expansion packs to new islands and adventures.

Last, and the reason I chose to join School of Dragons, is that you get a little larger taste of canon. People can debate about what is and isn’t canon in the DreamWorks HTTYD franchise, but School of Dragons is an official game, and there are a few extra tidbits about the characters you can learn by going on quests. You can learn the ingredients of yaknog. You can learn the names of some of Fishlegs’ and Snotlout’s relatives. You gain a lot more access to many more dragons than you ever see in the movies and television series. These are usually just small tidbits of information, but they’re still an extra fun fact to include in your dragon knowledge.

To people who contemplate playing School of Dragons, I would say that it’s good for some casual fun. It is not something that is addicting, but it is something that can be relaxing and fun from time to time. If you can go in with that sort of casual mindset and chill expectations, it's something that can provide some entertainment. Instead of being frustrated at bugs and poor graphics, one can focus on the positives that School of Dragons *does* provide, such as allowing you to fly around Dragon’s Edge or race other players in dragon races. For people who aren’t prone to complaining, and for people who really love How to Train Your Dragon, you can perhaps check it out. It’s not like the game costs anything. At worst, you lose an hour of your life, you delete the game from your system, and you go on living without any trauma done. At best, you get to have a little fun riding dragons in a world that has captivated the imaginations of people around the globe.

There's a reason I have over 150 hours on a game that only takes 30 hours to play. There's a reason those hours keep mysteriously growing on my Steam account. That should say enough for you.

Suuuuuure, I could write deep analytical novels about the game's characters, the emotions, the setting, the story, and why Mass Effect is my favorite video game franchise. Or I could talk about the pros and cons of the mechanics system and gameplay functions. But so much has already been said about the Mass Effect series in terms of recommendations, and I doubt that in this space here, I could offer any completely new perspective. Mass Effect 2 isn't a new game; you'll have heard about its pros and cons already. I'm ALWAYS happy to chat in-depth about these games, but I feel no need to give a review to something that has already been thoroughly reviewed and understood by the gaming community! So, with that said, I... should go.

I don't know I can say anything new about ME that hasn't already been said. It's a popular game series, the first one is over ten years old, and there are going to be more than enough reviews on here already that discuss its pros and cons. People will be bringing up how the first game has too much inventory management, or how levels progression is a little uneven (starting with too low of skills then gaining ground too quickly), or how solid characterization and story feels in ME 1 compared to others in the Shepard trilogy.

That being said, I still can't help but speak up and say: yes, these games are incredible. Yes, these games are worth being played. Yes, these games are worth talking about.

You can go to other reviews if you want to know how well the controls handle and other such game mechanisms. For me, it is sufficient to say the game is incredibly fun, and while aspects like inventory management might not be perfect, it never detracted me from my overarching, overwhelmingly positive gameplay experience. So I'm not going to talk about controls and graphics and the like. I'm going to talk about what means the most to me about the ME series: the story.

What makes the ME trilogy my favorite video games ever played is story. Don't get me wrong - I have a whole lot of fun shooting things. But there are lots of shooter games. That's not what makes ME special. What makes the game special is its characters, its plot, its world, its emotions. I consider ME an incredibly powerful story, perhaps even ranking amongst some of the most impacting stories ever told.

The first time I played ME 1, I remember having some slight challenges integrating into the universe. A lot of information about the universe is dumped upon you in a short amount of time. I would not say it is overwhelming, but it is something that, at least for me, was initially hard to keep everything straight. On my first mission, I already had to juggle information about geth and spectres and the Alliance and turians and human colonies like Eden Prime - and what was this about some Prothean ruin and what did it have to do with galactic matters? That said, I don't know how they could have handled information distribution any better, and one does find oneself emerging into the game, its world, and its lore seamlessly over the course of gameplay. You do successfully integrate into the world, and once you do, you become lost in it.

One of the things I appreciate most about the ME trilogy is that nothing is truly superfluous. Sure, there are side missions galore that seem to have nothing to do with the main plot. But I am impressed as a storyteller. Seemingly unrelated side missions tie into the overarching plot of the trilogy. By the time one enters ME 3, you realize that nothing introduced has been random additional information. Even simple events in the side missions get some growth, development, storytelling, and resolution. It's very satisfying to experience. You don't just meet some random guy Conrad Verner. You see where he ends up. You don't just help Rita's sister Jenna in the first ME game. You see her again. You see where she ends up. You don't just stop some random rogue VI on Luna. You see where even THAT ends up, too. Everything all ties together for the final efforts of the third game - and the way these get wrapped up gives a satisfying sense of closure, of completeness, of storytelling done right with a lot of careful precision and attention to detail.

That's only the side stories.

ME's main story is one that resonates with the heart. I feel that, of all the games in the Shepard trilogy, the first Mass Effect game has the best-structured story. The plot arc and its execution is impressively well-formed from a storytelling perspective, resulting in a narrative that is cohesive, memorable, and satisfying to experience. It is a well-formed adventure, making every step of the journey, start to end, engaging, enjoyable. Many stories have hiccups along the way, some portion of the story that does not carry through as well as the rest... but I feel as though ME 1 is solid from the second it starts to the second the story concludes.

As far as world-building and characterization are concerned, the first game is the least developed. Part of that's just the nature of being the first game, though - its purpose is to establish the story and characters; the other two games can then grow from it. I like to say ME 1 is best for plot structure, ME 2 best for characters, and ME 3 best for emotion. The player falls deeply in love with all the characters during the ME 2 missions, but might not be QUITE as gripped by the team in the first game. You are only just meeting the team, only just getting to know them, only just forming bonds with them. I still don't think the treatment of character is BAD in the first game - I did find myself latching onto Kaidan, Wrex, and Garrus readily enough in the ME 1 missions - and I did find myself quite emotional about certain impacting moments with characters - but character interactions only improve as the story continues. You don't *quite* get the howling-with-laughter moments in ME 1... but the first game is important for establishing these characters, helping you see how they tick, and helping you charge through Citadel space in an unforgettable adventure. You still have good times talking to the characters! You still can feel the essence of their personalities. You care about them by the time you get to Virmire! You still walk away from the first Mass Effect game feeling as though your experiences were memorable with the characters you met.

And by the time of ME 3? These characters resonate deeply within you; they are extremely three-dimensional, to the point they feel real.

An unforgettable story is part of the legacy of the ME franchise. It feels AMAZING stepping through ME 1 and ME 2 as a galactic hero. And then there are the characters - another astounding legacy of the ME franchise. The last thing that makes these games a sample of the finest storytelling is that the decisions you make critically matter.

As you're all going to know, RPGs allow gameplayers to make decisions that affect the outcome of your adventures. The ME trilogy is a series where your choices make *critical* differences... these are high-impact decisions, and what you choose profoundly alters your experiences in the game. Squadmates live or die depending on what you do. Civilizations could fall if you make the wrong move. These are not light choices to make... you CAN lose your teammates... nobody is safe. That level of high-stakes decision making is what makes the games so powerful to play. You are fully immersed into the world and what you do profoundly MATTERS.

The more I learn all the options you can select, and all the ways in which the story alters itself based upon your decisions... the more I'm in awe. I don't know that it's anywhere close to possible to experience all the ways the trilogy can go. The writers think of everything - if you romance X character in ME 1, then Q character in ME 2, then return to X in ME 3, and take them on Z mission, there will be unique dialogue. If you lose V character in ME 1, don't make W action in ME 2, lose R character in ME 3, and gain # amount of reputation points... then someone else might live. Who lives, who dies, who comes back into your life, how they come back into your life, what they say, how they say it, what they do, why they choose to do it... everything from the tiny-little-details (whether or not they sang a song to you during freetime) to the big impacts (like whether or not they even lived) is all accounted for and integrated into gameplay.

Maybe I can't say anything profoundly *new* about ME, but it's still worth saying. Of all the games I have played, of stories I have experienced, few have come remotely close to the immersive, engaging, and emotional world of ME. I could not recommend this story enough.