To The Moon (And Back)

The future is a curious thing. How it will come to be, no one really knows. But many have tried to envision it. FreeBird Games' "To The Moon" is partially that. An envisioning of the future. But only partially, as the future is not really its focus.

Dr. Neil Watts and Dr. Eva Rosalene of Sigmund Corp are professionals who do what can be described as... well... different, or if you consider present day, downright impossible. You see, what these two are paid to do is grant the wishes of dying people, literally. Sort of. At least from the perspective of the dying man.

In the future described by "To The Moon", there exists technology that can probe into peoples' memories, and then rewrite them, effectively letting them relive their lives in their heads, the way they really wanted to, but failed to. But that procedure is so taxing on the human brain that it actually causes the person to die. As a result, it's performed only on people on their death beds, so as to allow them to die happily under the impression that they actually succeeded in life.

John "Johnny" Wyles is Sigmund's latest client. He has decided that he wants to have his memories rewritten and die happily. The two doctors walk through a digital recreation of Johnny's memories, trying to figure out how to help him get his dying wish, and also why he chose what he wished for. And what is it that he wished for? To go to the moon, of course. And it's upto the player to make sure that he gets there.


^ Sample from the soundtrack of "To The Moon": Laura Shigihara - "Everything's Alright"

"To The Moon" is not your typical PC game. In fact, it's not much of a game at all. It's not a movie, it's not a game, but something in between. First of all, the whole game is in 2D. You won't see mind blowing pretty graphics here. The world in "To The Moon" and the old man's memories are all rendered as a 2D world with an top-down camera view.

^ Top-down 2D world

In "To The Moon", the player controls Dr. Watts and Dr. Rosalene through several real world situations and through many memories belonging to old Johnny. Starting from his most recent memories, the goal of the doctors is to go all the way back to his childhood, so that they can influence his memories and make his dream come true.

Each memory you play has five "memory links" and one "memento". A memento is any object that Johnny remembers strongly as a part of his memory, and serves as a connection between two memories. Memory links are... let's say the fuel of a memento. In order for a memento to unlock the passageway to an older memory, you must find five orbs known as memory links. Those can be found among objects that Johnny remembers, and by exploring nooks and crannies of his memories. And honestly, that's all there is to the gameplay.

"To The Moon" is more of a graphic novel than a game. But that doesn't mean it's bad. In fact, "To The Moon" is a far more enjoyable experience than many single player games releasing these days. The reason is the solid story that the game tells, and the way it is presented. The journey you go on with the two doctors as they attempt to piece together the history of John Wyles and how they could help him get to the moon is one hell of a ride. One of the best stories told by a video game in recent years. The presentation of it as a whole, is top notch, with beautiful piano music covering many sections of the game, and that adds immensly to the atmospheric nature of the game.

"To The Moon" lacks gameplay features. It lacks pretty graphics. It's very short, clocking about 4 hours only. But even with all that, "To The Moon" is one of the best entertainment experiences I've had this year. If you love a great emotionally moving story, and can make do without pretty graphics and challenging gameplay (Oh, yes, this game literally has no challenge at all. It's as if the developers want you to be at ease and enjoy the show, and what a show it is.), you owe it to yourself to try "To The Moon".

Check out more details at the official site: http://freebirdgames.com/to_the_moon/

Battlefield 3 Single Player Campaign, First Impressions

NOTE: This is NOT a review, but my first thoughts upon playing.

First of all, I know that Battlefield 3 is basically a multiplayer game. But DICE has managed to push in what they call a single player campaign with it as well. But how does that campaign fare? Can it stand on its own? Facing a lack of good single player games on my platform of choice, PC, these days, I decided to take Battlefield 3's SP campaign out for a spin.

(It might be noteworthy that I prefer Rush to Conquest in terms of MP. I pretty much game by myself, and working with a team of strangers online for a Conquest match or other team-heavy type of game never works out. Just my preference. Hence why I prefer SP gaming in general. Playing with unknown people over the net never seems pleasurable to me.)

On with the show. Starting up the campaign, and I'm presented with a difficulty selection. I'm no FPS expert or masochist, so Normal it is.

Our story begins with the player character, later identified as a Sergeant Blackburn, somehow crashing through a window into a moving train, for some reason equipped only with a pistol. The actual introduction to the story starts a little while later when you come across what looks like a bomb in the train, and then the story moves to several hours earlier in the timeline, and Sergeant Blackburn is in some deep shit. The story is like that in Black Ops, only without the whole messing with the player's mind part. Blackburn is being questioned, and the missions he describes are what we play in the game. Simple enough, and serves the purpose of stringing a variety of missions together.

The first thing I noticed was that this campaign is really Quick Time Event (QTE) happy. Melee combat? What melee combat? Press SPACE when it tells you to, press LMB when it tells you to, yawn while you do, and your enemy is down. Sure, it works well with many other games, but with BF3, they seem out of place, and the fact that you almost can't fail these QTEs are also a contributory factor to my negativity about them.

The first mission (after the "prologue-ish" train section), Operation Swordbreaker is the only mission I completed so far. Went half way into the next mission, and then stopped for now. Main reason is that the game is boring. There's no incentive to move forward. And when you attempt to move forward despite that fact, you come across silly annoyances such as the game wanting to hold your hand through the simplest of things.

Eg1: You are crawling through a sewer with only a knife in hand. Suddenly, a rat pops up. You're ready to knife it, but you realize that you no longer have control of your character. The game takes over, aims the knife at the rat for you, and gives a too convenient button press prompt, and you just need to click the mouse and be done with the rat. I mean it's a simple thing. But why was that QTE necessary? Why did they want to focus on that rat so much? Sure, having a rat in a sewer brings up realism, but IMO, it's not necessary to focus so much on stabbing that rat, and it's not necessary at all for the game to do the bulk of such a simple task. The player should have been able to finish the rat off with a simple melee attack and be on his way. I know, just a small issue, but read on.

Eg2: You're in the midst of a heavy firefight, and a squad member gets shot. The others instruct you to move the injured soldier to cover. Should be simple enough. But once again, when you go near him, you lose control, and the game takes over. Keep pressing SPACE every two seconds, and the game carries the soldier for you. WTF? Why was a QTE needed there at all?

Keep in mind, these aren't the only ridiculous QTEs that you come across. Simply put, QTEs that add nothing to the gameplay, and weren't necessary at all. But they added those.

Now moving up to the next issue I faced. Ridiculous objectives. At one point in Operation Swordbreaker, the game instructs the player to pick up an LMG and mow down an oncoming wave of enemies. The LMG is at the middle of a metal bridge over a road. Go there, crouch behind a metal section, and start shooting. But in a little while, you're getting shot. Oopsie! Forgot that this is Frostbite 2 with realistic environment damage. That's okay. Time to run to a different cover point. Wait, WHAT? The game tells you to go back to the old spot. But why on Earth would anyone want to go back there and get shot? The game wants you to mow down the enemies while being shot. The game hates you and doesn't want you in the safety of cover while taking down enemies. The enemies aren't challenging, though, so passing that point (at least under Normal difficulty) was not a problem.

Moving on to the next mission, I faced the biggest problem yet. In the dark, I was moving below about three enemy soldiers, and decided to see if I could sneak past. I failed, and was shot in the back. Okay, time to respawn. But wait? What is this? I'm being respawned at the exact same point with those three guys BEHIND ME??

So, well, more to come, I guess, though I'm not sure. But one thing, I can say. If the rest of the game is like this, CoD4, CoDMW2 and CoDBO have much better campaigns than BF3. If you're a single player gamer looking to have few hours of military shooter fun, MW3 will most probably be the better choice. After all, it has to be. Because if it isn't, it's better to stay off both SP campaigns.

Prologue: Single Player Gamers, A Dying Breed?

Almost the end of the seventh console generation. Gaming has come a long way since its humble beginnings with the likes of Pong and PacMan. Especially PC gaming, with titles like Battlefield 3 offering almost life-like graphics to enjoy if one has a powerful PC. But is that where the evolution ends?

Not really. Gaming began as a social affair. Taking the examples mentioned earlier, Pong could originally be played as a game between two players, and PacMan was basically about beating everyone else's high scores. Not just those, but most arcade games were stationed as two machines next to each other so that two players could play with or against each other.

So when did this change? And did it really change? For some time, it sure did. With the advent of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) (or Nintendo Famicom in Japan), games that could be enjoyed fully by oneself started appearing. Classics like Mario Bros (though it had a two player mode, that mode was pretty much tacked on) and Final Fantasy are good examples.

Single player focused games gave a player an entirely different experience to those that were multiplayer focused. When competition was no longer a requirement, games became all about what I call "the journey to the end" of that particular game. It was about experiencing all that the game had to offer, and not about beating someone else at it.

As a little kid, I remember beating Mario Bros for the first time and feeling like a total badass. To me, that was way more fun than beating someone else's high score at PacMan. And lucky for people like me, this trend continued, and single player games continued to coexist with multiplayer games, and a big majority incorporated both modes. It is important to note that even mostly multiplayer oriented games like StarCraft had a solid single player section.

Fast forward several years, and we find ourselves in 2011. With the introduction of high speed internet connections, the world of video games has changed forever. Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) dominate the PC gaming market, and are slowly creeping into the console market as well. Gone are the days when one could choose from a hefty selection of single player only games. Multiplayer has taken over, with even originally single player oriented franchises such as Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect adding multiplayer modes to their later entries.

Why is this? Are single player only gamers slowly dying out? Are we really going the way of the dinosaur? Only time will tell. But what this blog attempts to do is review the latest PC and multiplatform (and maybe a few handheld games thrown in there in between) games in a single player perspective.

First up, Battlefield 3. My PC is downloading Battlefield 3 as I type this. The multiplayer beta was okay, but of course isn't what I'm looking for in a game. Many critics have given negative opinions on the single player campaign of Battlefield 3, but in their hurry to check out all the multiplayer options for their reviews, did they really pay attention to the single player campaign? I intend to find out the answer.