Video Game Review: Outlast

I watched a couple of my favorite gamers/personalities on YouTube playing through the indie game Outlast and I was immensely disappointed.

Outlast is a horror adventure game where the player/protagonist enacts a reporter who secretly infiltrates an abandoned mental asylum at night. The goal is to find out whether the private research firm/think tank that recently took the asylum over was actually using the inmates for horrible, inhumane experiments.

Whenever a topic as banal as mental illness or a mental asylum is made the background for a horror game, you can spell out doom pretty much from the get-go. It's a cop out. It would be fun and interesting if the writers/developers would stop throwing up on the screen and think story and resolution out a little better. I saw nothing more than a whole lot of conjecture, religious superstition, and blood splatter and guts mixed all up in a shaker for good measure. *rolls eyes*

As the amount of body parts, organs, blood pools and splatter, and horribly disfigured characters increase exponentially as you progress, the storyline gets weaker and weaker until it's just a whisp of smoke by the end. *sad panda face*

As you progress through the "levels," question upon question keeps piling up around the player--much like the body parts and guts. It's almost like the developers focused on the great lighting, background graphics, and character schematics first, then left the plot until last--when most of the money was already spent.

If the visual and auditory assaults on the player are not enough to keep them entertained/hooked on this train wreck you can't look away from, they threw in little bits and pieces of information which made the player hope against hope that things would get cleared up in the end. Sadly, that "a-ha!" moment never arrives. There's no payoff.

If the gruesome sights were not enough to shock the young male audience who is obviously targeted for this game, there was a lot of full male frontal nudity--probably harping on homophobia, claustrophobia, and helplessness to kick off the cheap thrills and chills. Any game where the player is unable to equip and defend his/her character, is another clue that the game won't end well. The player is definitely being taken for a ride. And not a fun one at that.

I was really disappointed. This game had so much potential. First of all, this is an indie company, and these are getting some amazing games out lately. They really work on details and they're a joy to play through. The graphics and backgrounds were well designed in Outlast, but imagine if the developers had done their research and interspersed some real, historical, or medical material and information a into a real plot and story line. What a difference that would have made!

I hope that if there ends up being a sequel, it's a lot more well thought out. And a lot less ugly.

A Note on Gaming Consoles

Playing World of Warcraft last year and Minecraft this year has brought back some of the joy I used to experience as a teenager playing NES and PC videogames. I didn't realize how much I missed the graphics and visuals, and the great storylines. It's similar to reading an engrossing book, but for visual people: you're transported to another time and place and live through your character's eyes and actions.

The more Minecraft let's play videos I see, the more I want to create in my own creative Minecraft world. I love trying to build things that remind me of my old days of using 3D Architect and other similar desktop software back in the 1990s.

I've also started watching some other let's play and plain run-throughs for a variety of videogames. I've been thinking for some time whether I wanted to again enter the world of gaming consoles--my first and only console ever, the original NES, was bought in 1990 by my dad.

 I've been looking around and I think that purchasing a Sony Playstation 3 is a good idea--there are good games for driving, adventure, and first person shooter fans. They have a good, established online network, and they also are bringing out their 4th console so the third one might be a little cheaper right now (teehee).

I looked through XBox and Nintendo information, but to be honest, I love Sony and their laptops and televisions, and I think that using their console is a good idea--at least for me. I may think otherwise after I get the console and start playing, but for now it's a good bet for me after a little bit of research.

I reviewed a variety of retailer websites to see what the pricing structures are like. Bundles are great because they include the console and controller, as well as one or more games to get you started. The hard part was choosing whether I wanted a driving game or Assasins Creed! The retailers I checked were Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, Google Shopping, and Amazon Prime. I decided to get my console through Amazon Prime because it was two day shipping, no tax, and no shipping fee. It beat Wal-Mart's direct-to-home shipping total by at least $10.

So what am I going to do on my PS3 once I get it? I hope to do some driving games and maybe a first shooter. I have been really liking the Assassins Creed trailers on TV and on YouTube so I may try that as well. I've always been curious about Tomb Raider, so I may give it a whirl.

The good thing about playing games these days is that there are a ton of locations where you can rent games rather than making the purchase investment. If you don't like a game or don't really want to keep a game collection with limited space at home, you can just rent and forget about storage or feeling guilty about old unliked games.

There's also a ton of let's play and run-throughs on YouTube for a variety of games, so you can follow through another, more apt player's run and see if you want to follow suit. Some players give great advice and know tips and tricks that make a difference in your game play. These are invaluable resources.

I used to play a ton of PC games in the late 1990s and I am looking forward to enjoying again the distraction and engrossing graphics and visuals--hopefully good story lines too!

Minecrafting

Wow I haven't been on this computing blog for quite some time. One reason why I've been remiss in posting is that I've been preoccupied with Minecraft. Discovered on one of my high school friend's Facebook walls, I've not been able to pry myself away from this game for about a month now.

I can't believe how much fun Minecraft can be. It's a cross between two of my all-time computer pastimes: computer aided design and SimCity.

I only play it single player, after seeing some of the mischief that takes place in multiplayer servers. It can get a little creepy and alienating at times playing by oneself, but I like it because it's like a meditative practice.

I enjoy being able to build in creative mode more than I do playing in survival mode. The creepers, zombies, and spiders actually gave me nightmares the first week or so. They used to just pop up out of nowhere, and I didn't know a lot of best practices yet as I had just begun playing. Don't even get me started about exploring mines, jeepers creepers!

After devouring consulting innumerable Wikis and YouTube videos, I've learned a lot from others' successes or failures. I enjoy watching super builders' work, like the crowd that built the entire world from Game of Thrones. I guess I'd heard of Minecraft before, but never really researched it or thought much about it. It's quite an amazing piece of software.

I feel that Minecraft is a great creative energy outlet for gamer, artistic, and engineering types. For example, gamers can PvP and raid other's bases, artistic folks can construct to their heart's desire, and engineering kinds can develop amazing compounds to secure their home base and create feats of engineering with redstone circuitry.

I honestly have been spending WAY too much time on Minecraft and on Minecraft YouTube channels. I deleted the program about five times already to try to wean off of it, yet I always end up reinstalling it and playing again. I kind of feel bad about all the cool construction and worlds I developed, and which ended up being deleted. I must have built and deleted over dozen worlds by now. Keeping old projects can be a great way to see how far along one has come in technique and strategy. You can check out my recent world's construction projects in the images embedded in this post.

It's definitely one of my all-time favorite computer games, up there with SimCity and online architecture programs that I enjoyed in my teens and early twenties.

Tangent: Speaking of SimCity, a new one is coming out this month w00t!

WOW Update

I went back to playing WOW last weekend. This time on my mac.

I created brand new characters...

A night elf mage named Sharanka

and a worgen warrior named Rangashna

The Worgen landscape, mythology, and cinematics have blown me away. Love!

Learning: World of Warcraft

I've been hearing about World of Warcraft, or WOW as it's known by fans, since the late 90s. I finally downloaded the free US starter edition, got an account on US.Battle.net and have generally been kicking butt with my character since Friday afternoon.

I really like the graphics, the lack of gore, and the well-thought out user interface. I find I make progress by having a number of active quests and achieving one at a time and asking for more as soon as possible.

This game is better than the computer games I was used to in the early to late 1990s because there's no complicated gaming the game problem, where I could only make heads or tails by searching out a walk-through and cheat make my way out of the game. Easy finishes are not as fun.

Once you learn to pretty much take on whatever errand you can find, in WOW, you earn great experience points, money, and run into people who ask you whether you want to duel (WTF?! gimme a break!) or join their guild.

I have skipped out on interacting with others just yet, not only to help me focus on what I'm doing, but also because I'm leaving that for later, when I've learned enough about how things work. And have enough experience to be a useful duel partner or ally. I would rather make an educated guesstimate than go blindly and later regret it.

I've been reading the guide on the official website, see battle.net above, and also by looking up particular things on WOWWiki.

So far, I think I've done well in WOW Cataclysm. I created a Draenei Mage female in Baelgun. Her name is Slaeyra and she's already reached level 8. I also tried creating a warrior Draenei, but that flopped so I deleted the character.

If you're ever in our hood and see Slaeyra running off, do say hi ^^