So I’m playing Mass Effect 2 right now. I’m at the beginning of the final stretch. I have my entire team, I did all the DLC and I did all the loyality missions. Here are my impressions so far.

Unintentionally Hilarious Mass Effect 2 Trailer Screenshot

For obvious reasons I looked very carefully at the interface. There are a few minor quibs. But so far, every single point I mentioned in my interface article has been fixed and improved upon. I’m pleasantly surprised about that.

Another area that clearly received some massive improvements is the combat. Bioware were talking about this and they weren’t exaggerating. The powers of your members are useful and feel very distinct. They allow you to approach enemies in very different ways. There is more strategy to the combat due to cover mechanics and careful level design. Enemies come in waves now which makes encounters feel more dynamic. Most importantly, weapons are actually meaningful and different now. They is far less of them now too. I have only 3 different assault rifles now. But each one feels distinct. That’s very good.

The flipside is that with all the improvements in combat, the entire game is all about combat now. The story arcs in missions feel like from a porn movie but with fire fights instead of sex. Any intriguing setup inevitably leads to a prolonged combat sequence. There are no real exploartion, mystery or diplomacy missions anymore. In this one mission I was invited to take place in a trial. I thought “Finally! Some tricky negotiations in the midst of all this shooting”. But nope, it turns out the trial had me swiftly sentenced to fighting robots. *sigh*

Another problem with the story is some serious disregard to what actually happened in the first part. Former crew members seem oddly distant. Not even hugs and kisses from my former paramour Liara. A DLC patches that specific instance but the problem remains. There is lots of retconning concerning technology. Suddenly no healing and weapons have ammo? And nobody believes the Reapers are real even after the equivalent of a space-9/11? And suddenly there are these Collectors which we haven’t heard a single word about in the first part? And then it turns they are so SUUUUPER important? It seems like sacrificed a lot of potential for emotional bonds to make Mass Effect 2 work. Like the cyber-zombie commander Shepard, the story looks like some sort of haphazardly revived corpse. It’s Mass Effect alright. But it’s a very different Mass Effect. And there is a lot about it I don’t enjoy as much.

But luckily there are good parts too. The Garrus mission was the first one that connected with me emotionally. The Shadow Broker DLC not only fixed the treatment of Liara, it was actually amazing in general. The improved interface and battle mechanics will make it easy for me to see this through to the end.

Time for the second part of the Global Game Jam Cologne 2012 Round Up (Part 1 here). The Global Game Jam was mandatory for the Students of Cologne Game Lab so as last year, we had some student projects. Perhaps the biggest and most polished one was Sequpes, a project made by a group of 6 CGL students.

Sequpes – Sounds like a sort of seafood.

Sequepes is actually a very simple idea. It’s a sequencer and Guitar Hero combined into a 2 player co-op game. Or even simpler: it’s 2 player Simon Says. One player plays a tune. Another player has the goal of repeating the tune. Then, the first player needs to play the tune a 3rd time. If they play the tune flawlessly, it gets repeated over and over again. Then, the second player may add more notes on top of that tune. It’s already a familiar concept but the visualization uses a spinning circle that really nails it. The only thing left to do was to tweak the difficulty. Repeating the tunes was a bit too unforgiving. Otherwise, it’s a finish product I’d love to see released.

One of our students – Maren Keitel – ended up working on a project in collaboration with participants from outside of CGL. Together, they made Punxatawney Adventures.

Punxatawney Adventure – It’s Groundhog Day Gaiden.

It’s a simple 2D platformer based on Groundhog Day. This means that the main character is a Groundhog for once. But the gameplay also references the movie. So it’s actually quite Masocore. You die over and over again. Only when you arrive at the end of the level, you realize that you had to pick up a certain item at the beginning. The game somewhat lacks the polish of a professional Masocore title but I really like the Groundhog Day reference. And hey, it’s actually playable!

One game that isn’t quite playable is Internity by Martin Wisniowski, another Game Jam veteran and a good friend.

Internity – DNF

Sadly, this time around Martin wasn’t able to finish his game. He wanted to make a top-down shooter with proceduraly generated levels that react on the player’s behavior. But he was working alone and didn’t quite make it. On a more bright side, he wrote a really good recap of the Global Game Jam on his blog! Check it out.

One of my personal favorites was Nordic Bondage Hero Vikings. It’s based on a hilarious idea and it has some amazing polish.

Nordic Bondage Hero Vikings – Don’t worry. It’s nothing dirty.

To be honest, I may be a bit biased since one of the guys from the team was Michael Koloch, who is a really ambitious indie dev I met at various CGL events. The game is about two Vikings running away from a monster. They are tied together by a chain so they can’t get away from each other. The goal is to be a hero by dying an honorable death. You have to collect treasure or beer or kill enemies. Once you did enough of those things, you need to sacrifice yourself so the other viking can survive. It sounds weird. It is kinda is weird. But it is also quite charming. You know what? You can play it right now in the browser and see for yourself. Do it!

So that’s it for part 2. But there is still more to come! Tune in tomorrow for part 3.

This time on the Monster Hunter Podcast: A Bag Full of Crabs. We embark on some quests in Monster Hunter Freedom unite and find a whole herd of Turkeys. See what I did there?

Get the mp3 of the episode here.
The RSS Feed is here.
Get us in iTunes here.
Visit the SocialDissonance Website!

Enjoy!

I have created a new micro-game. It’s called Story Essay Cat and it took me just 3,5 hours to develop.

Click here to play.

Story Essay Cat is a full-fledged cat writing simulator with social media integration. Now you can pretend to be a cat writing a story essay. And you can share your #catstory with your friends.

Perhaps some backrgound info is due. The game was created as part of a seminar I conduct at Cologne Game Lab. We are preparing ourselves for the Global Game Jam. So I torture my students with the task of creating game prototypes on very tight time constraints. And of course I participate too. This is where the game was created. In this cycle, the task was to create a game inspired by a Captcha word combination. I got “Story Essay Cat”.

You can play the game at http://www.gamedesignreviews.com/storyessaycat/ or over at Konregate. Feel free to tweet about it loudly and proudly.

P.S.: Mad props to NORA the cat for providing the soundtrack. I hope you don’t mind me using your tune, NORA. I’m a huge fan.

I recently finished Catherine. At least I declared for me I did. Normally, I would attempt to get at least the majority of the achievements. But after witnessing all the endings, I decided to draw the line. The Babel challenges turned out to be a painfully difficult even on the easiest stage. The babel mini game was amusing but at 64 stages, it’s overstayed it’s welcome well before I could get trough them all.

Nothing to gloat about.

As much as I liked the idea of Catherine, the actual game failed to deliver on it’s premise in many ways. The refreshingly serious topic is treated in disappointingly shallow way. It depicts women as well as men in a single-minded fashion. The resolution of the conflict is left to super-natural phenomena rather than to consequences of actual character development. The puzzle gameplay is almost completely divorced from the narrative. What’s worse, the game concentrates on the gameplay a lot. And that’s precisely what is least engaging about Catherine.

I also wanted to mention the endings as an extension of what I already wrote about. For some reason, multiple endings are still this wicked beast that no developer seems to have tamed yet. Catherine is no different. There are 8 different endings. They can be divided into 3 types: “Catherine”, “Katherine” and “Freedom”. Each type has a “Bad”, “Good” and “True” variant (with one exception: “Freedom Bad” is missing). And really, if you think about it, there is only one ending worth having:

• Katherine Endings were probably the most satisfying ones. They all show Vincent explaining the situation to Katherine and asking for a second chance. Surprisingly, I found the “Katherine Good” ending emotionally more effective than the supposedly more desirable “Katherine True”. In the good ending, you see a glimpse Katherine and Vincent having a pleasant, more natural interaction. Throughout the game, Vincent is having a perpetual “we need to talk” situation with Katherine. Katherine herself seems like a very unpleasant, stuck-up character. The good ending alleviates this to some extent which feels cathartic. The “Katherine True” ending does resolve a major mystery about a supporting character so it’s nice too. The “Katherine Bad” is just shit tough. Katherine dumps Vincent. Congratulations, you just wasted 15 hours.

• Catherine Endings are the comedy endings. No matter if bad, good or true, they are all supposed to be funny. The “Catherine True” ending is perhaps the most wacky ending in the game. The problem with them is that Catherine is not a particularly funny game. The topics in the game seem rather serious in nature. There are some humorous moments but the conflict at the story’s core a mature one. So having a wacky comedy ending seems just dishonest and unsatisfying.

• Freedom Endings are for the middle ground. You get these if you haven’t maxed out your freedom vs law meter in either direction or if you answered the final questions in an ambiguous manner. They depict Vincent transcending the conflict and just ignoring both women. Like the comedy endings, they feel dishonest. The entire game is hammering the Catherine vs. Katherine dilemma after all. It begs for a proper resolution. To add insult to injury, if you answer the questions in an honest fashion you are bound to end up somewhere in between. Relationships are a complicated thing with multiple viewpoints after all. And especially by the end, even the questions themselves outgrow the simple-minded law/freedom dichotomy. “Is it easier to love, or be loved?” or “Which is harder: lying or being lied to?”. If you care about the questions you won’t max out your score either way. And that’s where the game delivers you the lazy cop out ending.

Catherine is a good way to learn from because it is so broken in so many ways. The law/freedom dichotomy favors min/max grinding rather than emotional involvement. The endings reflect that and the OCD treatment of gameplay echoes the idea. The endings also betray that the game’s wasn’t actually written with multiple endings in mind. All the dozens of choices you make in the game all boil down to 1 or 2 genuinely satisfying endings that really feel like a good story arc. The rest of the outcomes seem an afterthought. And with that, I think it’s fair to file Catherine as a interesting case of not living up to it’s own premise on multiple levels.