11: Fast and Furious - The Game

Back when the first Fast & Furious Movie was the hot new shit in cinemas it suddenly became cool to seriously rice out. Let´s just hope that this trend will never come back. EA being EA of course decided to use this sudden horrible taste in car modification and combined it with their most popular Racing Franchise and the result was Need for Speed: Underground. And I love it. Why? Because it is a frikkin great game once you managed to llok beyond all the rice. The heart of the game is the Underground Mode where you are presented with 111 Events that you have to win in order to unlock better cars, more and more tasteless mods, performance upgrades and money to buy all this stuff. When your start the game you get a short, 2-Lap Chance to drive something faster, after that you have to buy something much more boring like a Dodge Neon or Golf Mk4 and with that you have to win illegal races in the fictional Olympic City. Even though the city has a network of roads, many tracks even sharing the same bits and pieces, you can´t drive around the city freely. On the other hand this allowed the developers to put much more details into the surrounding world and as a result the visuals somewhat still hold up today, the fact that the entire game is at night and on wet streets only helps to keep the visuals from looking too boring. Racing is done either and circuits with multiple laps or on point-to-point tracks with variying amount of traffic. Other than that you get Drag Racing wich forces you to use manual shifting and similar to the races you have to deal with random traffic. Drift Races are done on clodes off circuits, so you don´t have to bother with traffic, even your opponents are only represented by their score and not on the track itself. Every once in a while you get the chance to win special, unique parts in a time trial, in these you have to beat a certain time on one of the point-to-point tracks.

At least in the first 2/3 to 3/4 of the game you don´t have to worry too much about your actual opponents since they only get challenging closer to the end of the game. That´s at least if you are like me and you play a lot of racing games. The rendom Traffic can cost you few races though since these bastards can come out of nowhere and sometimes are even placed in a way that you will hit them no matter what when you follow any sensible racing line. Being a Need for Speed game the handling model is very Arcady, but it is always controlable and if you like you can turn off a stability control wich allows you to drift much more easily outside of the actual drift events. The Soundtrack is great mix of Hip-Hop / Rap, Rock / Metal and Electronic Music and you can decide wich tracks you whant to hear and if you whant them in Races, Menus or both. Overall it is a great game and still worth playing even almost 15 years after it´s original release, but you really have to either for whatever messed up reason like all the rice in this game or you have to be able to just ignore it, using the bumper view helps a lot with the later. And before someone asks: I am one of the few people that actualy thinks that the Original Underground was better than the 2nd one, mostly because I think that the open city in the sequel felt a lot like filler content between the races, especialy since all the visual and performance upgrades where spread across 4 different shops. The Original just feels much more Streamlined in many places.

05: I´m doing Science!

Somewhat similar to the original Doom a little First-Person Puzzle game called Portal has grown to be a regular game to play through over the years and so far it still remains to be fun. Sure, by now I know the solution to all the puzzles from memory and I got promised cake every time and never got it, but GLaDOS is always capable of getting a smile on my face and that´s what I like this game so much. The Developers of Portal where hired by Valve after said Students created a short Proof of Concept game called Narbacular Drop wich already features a lot of the concepts later used in Portal. The Player wakes up in a glass chamber, a really catchy tune playing on the radio, a timer on a wall is counting down from 60 Seconds and a computerized voice welcomes you to the Aperture Science Enrichment Center and you now have to find your way through 19 Test Chambers using the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device and you are promised a cake at the end of the last test. The first few Test are designed to ease you into the concept of how the Portals work and what effect they have, or don´t have, on your movement. At first you can´t even create Portals yourself wich is quickly changed and you get your first version of the Portal Device wich is limited to creating blue Portals and after learning a few more tricks on how to use Portals properly you get upgraded to the full device and you are allowed to create both the blue and orange Portals and the real fun begins. You can create Portals on any non-metallic stationary surface that is large enough to have a Portal on it. If the surface moves your Portal on it closes itself.

Aside from the rules for the Portal placement you don´t have to worry about much, you don´t take fall damage, brownish-green steamy stuff will kill you as will electro-ball thingies that are needed to power a platform or lift. In the beginning all this testing seems to be mostly legit, however the computerized voice glitching out and not knowing your name or where you come from seems a bit off and while avoiding a whole bunch of turrets you begin to get that wierd feeling that you where never supposed to leave this place in one piece. This might be because GLaDOS, that´s the AI that is talking to you throughout the game, went bonkers at some point and tried to kill everyone inside the Enrichment Center by flooding it with a deadly gas and aside from GLaDOS herself the place seems to be abandoned but for reasons never explained left powered on. In the end you are able to shut down the AI by using brute force, your escape however, well, that´s another thing. And I won´t say anything about it. For the most part you won´t really notice much of the Soundtrack, but it is great stuff and the Credits Song "Still Alive" is probably one of the best known pieces of music ever created for a video game. Portal is a masterpiece in gamedesign and it teaches how it works without an obvious, forced tutorial, the humor is amazing and you should play it!

02: I´m a terrible Badger-Mom

The giant sea that is the Indie-Segment of gaming is home to a lot of unique, little games that the huge publisher would never pick up, however thanks to Digital Distribution these games don´t need a big publisher, or any publisher for that matter, anyway. And even though Steam features a whole bunch of great Indie games I still think that Itch.io is the much better Plattform when it comes to the really good stuff. Just go to the Itch.io site right now and play Right Click to Necromance, play some Powerwolf Songs in the Background and then come back and tell me how great that experience was and how much you got your ass kicked. Today´s game also falls in this "unique and great idea"-category and even though I really wanted to like Shelter it didn´t appeal to me. You play as a Badger-Mother that has to protect and feed her 5 cubs while they move through the wilds, avoiding Birds and various natural dangers like a Forest Fire and Wild Waters. And I really like the sound of that idea, but sadly it is executed in a way that it left me with a mere `meh´ at the end. The main reason for this is that the game failed to make me care enough if all cubs would make it. Sure, your mileage might vary here a lot, but for a game about a Mother and her Children it is a bit wierd that you don´t get any reaction from the Mother when one of the Kids dies, heck, I only know for sure where and when I lost one of them, and from the other two that died on my run I have a slight idea for one of them, but the third one just vanished into thin air for all that I know. In Addition the game fails to give you a reason why the Badgers even left their nice, little dirthole at the beginning of the game in the first place.

Gameplay itself is very simple, and for this game that´s absolutely OK in my book, your main focus is to gather food for the kids, for this you have to run against trees for apples, pull some carrots and other stuff out of the earth and catch a few smaller animals like frogs every now and then. However you have to make sure that each of the 5 cubs get´s enough or they starve (wich might have happened to the one that just disappeared suddenly now that I think about it) or they could end too weak to deal with hazzards if they didn´t get enough food to grow. With the Birds you can usualy take your time since they can´t find you when you are hidden in high grass, and because the game is nice enough to show you the shadow of the birds you can easily plan your movements. The other hazzards like the rushing water and the Forest Fire have either a very easy to understand patterns and / or are easy to avoid anyway. Only the section where you have to avoid the Fire and a Bird at the same time could end up a bit dangerous for your family. And that´s really it for the main game mode, and the optional "Nurture" Mode doesn´t add that much. In this Mode you once again play as a Badger Mother and like in the main mode you have to feed and raise your 5 cubs. However this mode takes place entirely in the first area of the main game and you have to come back to this mode each day to gather more food. When the cubs get big enough over time they will leave you to start live on their own, in the end, it´s only you that is left. And yes: This mode requires you play it for a few minutes every 24-ish hours or so.

From a artistic point of view this game is beautiful. The low-poly models and environments combined with the fairly low-res textures with only little details and the pale color palette end up looking really great, in fact it looks much better than it probably should. Add great nature sounds and an beautiful Soundtrack and you have something that really stands out between all the Pixel Art Retro-Inspired games that the Indies love to do. It´s a real shame that I don´t like the game itself enough to play it again just because of it´s visuals and atmosphere. Maybe Shelter 2 or the Spin-Off Paws are more my cup of tea, but I won´t touch those anytime soon after this disappointment. It´s a nice game to distract animal loving children for an hour or two, it´s violence free (at least on a graphical level, there are still animals dying here) for the most part it very calming, however it fails to deliver any emotional impact that the loss of a child should have, and in this case this one reason is enough for me to not recommend this game, especially not for the full asking price.