Category: Spel / Game

Under långa flygresor eller i hotellrum när man bekämpar jet-lag så passar det alldeles utmärkt att pyssla med ett lagomt komplicerat spel på surfplattan. BADLAND är ett sådant.

I BADLAND manövrerar man en rundlagd fågelliknande varelse genom ett landskap av faror. Styrningen är enkel och effektiv; trycker man på skärmen rör sig fågeln uppåt framåt, och trycker man inte så dalar den nedåt. Målet är att klara sig till varje banas slut utan att falla offer för roterande sågar, törnbuskar, laserstrålar och fallande stenblock, och att inte vara för långsam, eftersom världen hela tider rullar framåt. Längs vägen kan man plocka upp ett stort antal olika bonusar som bland annat ändrar storlek på fågeln, sätter snurr på den, gör den kladdig, ändrar tidens hastighet eller klonar fågeln. Alla dessa bonusar kan behövas för att komma förbi de olika hindren.

Spelet är mycket trevligt att titta på och att lyssna till. Bakgrunderna är snygga och väldesignade, och de ger ett visst djup åt det i grunden två-dimensionella spelet. Det är ett fint flyt i det mesta. Vissa problem man ställs inför är riktigt trassliga att klara av, speciellt med tanke på att man i princip inte har några som helst anvisningar till hur man ska lösa dem. Man får helt enkelt prova sig fram. Kontrollen är enkel, men den fungerar bra och det känns som att man har rätt god kontroll på navigeringen.

Grundspelet har 80 olika banor, och dessutom finns det 20 extrabanor att ta till om suget uppstår. Till varje bana finns det dessutom tre olika extrauppdrag, som exempelvis att klara en bana på ett försök eller att plocka upp alla olika bonusar längs vägen. Banorn innehåller tillräckligt mycket variation för att man ska spela vidare och försöka klara de olika uppdragen även när man har klarat sig igenom alla de olika banorna.

Det finns även ett samarbetsläge, där man hjälper varandra, och ett tävlingsläge, där man stjälper varandra, men dem har jag som ensamresenär inte haft tillfälle att prova.

Gomez lever ett lugnt och behagligt liv i en trevlig två-dimensionell by högt uppe i skyn. En morgon när kliver ut ur sitt lilla krypin så finner han i brevlådan att han har ett brev som väntar på honom. Det är ingen annan än Geezer, som håller till högst uppe i den lilla byn, som har skickat brevet. Han vill att Gomez ska komma upp till honom och hälsa på eftersom det är en mycket speciell dag idag. Äventyret väntar! Uppe på byns högsta punkt får Gomez en uppenbarelse där han varseblir en gigantisk kub i skyn, vilket måste vara en synnerligen förbryllande tre-dimensionell upplevelse för en enkel två-dimensionell själ. I samma veva begåvas han med en fez att förgylla huvudet med, och med vars hjälp han kan få nya perpektiv på världen: den kan ju studeras från inte mindre än fyra olika synvinklar. Tyvärr går något oerhört snett så att jättekuben havererar, men nu kan Gomez bege sig ut i världen för att med hjälp av sin magiska fez klara skivan.

FEZ är ett riktigt klurigt spel, betydligt klurigare än vad man kanske tror till att börja med. Det som verkar vara ett enkelt färgglatt plattformsspel med en bildvridningsgimmick visar sig innehålla en stor mängd småmysterier, koder, ledtrådar och märkliga abstrakta men betydelsefulla symboler. Papper och penna, och mycket klurande, behövs för att klara av de flesta problem man ställs inför.

Trots att jag anser mig själv vara duktig på problemlösning så fanns det ett par mysterier i FEZ som var lite för långsökta för att jag skulle klara av dem. Ett av dem verkar det som om ingen har löst på något annat sätt än genom att pröva sig fram med stort tålamod, i alla fall enligt de internetsökningar jag gjort. Det anser jag vara en god nivå på svårigheterna, även om det känns som att slå huvudet tålmodigt i väggen emellanåt. Trots att jag anser mig själv vara en usel plattformsspelare klarade jag av alla sådana moment i spelet utan alltför mycket bekymmer, förutom ett rum med stigande lava där det kändes som om styrningen med tangentbordet inte riktigt flöt på som det skulle. Spelet skulle förmodligen kännas smidigare att spela med en ordentlig spelkontroll.

Jag skulle också vilja leva som Gomez i en färgrann, och måhända något kantig, värld bärandes en magisk fez på huvudet och alltid redo att lösa nya problem. Tyvärr fungerar inte verkligheten på det sättet. Man får i alla fall vara glad att det finns spel som fungerar så.

A little autumn conspiracy is never wrong. In The 39 Steps Richard Hannay, the protagonist of the story, learns about an anarchist plot to destabilise Europe and initiate a large war. The setting at the beginning of the story is London in May 1914, so there are spies everywhere even where it is not expected. Hannay has to leave his home in a hurry when he realises that he is about to be framed for murder, or alternatively be murdered himself, and travels to Scotland to hide for a while.

The 39 Steps is not a game; it is a digital adaption of the well-known novel by John Buchan. The “player” makes no real choices in the game, but is instead allowed to uncover the story at his/her own pace. I found that I preferred to go through the story slowly, in order to fully enjoy the combination of the stylish game art and the moodful theme music, even though I found the voice acting sometimes very poor.

The art is really the selling point of this game. A large number of well made digital painting provides the backdrop of the story. These are all made without showing any living humans which provides a certain emptiness to the art. It feels as if life itself has abandoned the world during the build-up before the great war. When people are added to the art, they are only in the form of fuzzy ghostlike outlines adding further to the feeling of desolation. However, when the characters tell stories, they are in the form of quite funny-looking animations similar to clips from silent films.

The total experience is like reading an adventure book with nice art while listening to a soundtrack. That is a nice way to unveil a major conspiracy.

I have finally found time to play through Mass Effect, a game I bought more than five years ago. Now I am annoyed that it took so long time for me until I started playing it. It also took quite a long time for me to stop playing the game, about 40 hours of play to go through the full story. The reason is that it simply has one of the best storylines of any game I have played.

When humanity discovers a cache of technology on Mars in 2148, built by an advanced but extinct galactic civilisation called the Protheans, we are able to adapt and use this technology to perform swift interstellar travelling. It also means that we are able to join the inter-stellar community and its political system, with political manouvering on galactic level.

The story in the game starts 35 years later. The player controls a veteran soldier, called Shepard, who is sent with the experimental space vehicle to Eden Prime, a human colony planet, to retrieve an old Prothean beacon that was found during an archeological survey. When arriving at the colony, it is under attack from the geths, a robotic race, for reasons that are not clear from the beginning. From that point the plot uncovers bit by bit, and by the end of the game everything is on such a grand scale that it induces vertigo.

One really good thing in the game world is that humans really is a minority species on the galactic level. The 35 years of contact with the other civilisations are really nothing compared to the many thousands of years that the galactic council has been active. The other species do not trust the human newcomers, and we are to a large degree excluded from the inter-stellar political life. This true unimportance contrasts well with the tendency in many other science fiction settings to always put humans in the leading position of all significant activities. On the other hand, all species speak English, but I found no explanation in the game for this behaviour. Either they are only polite to the linguistically limited humans, or some kind of quick-translation technology is involved.

Another good aspect of the game is that the choices of the player matter to a very large degree. At the start of the game, the player not only choose a specialisation but also gender and background. These choices affect how the story is played out and how the other characters in the game interact with the player. In addition, there is a clever dialogue wheel used when talking with other characters, and the chosen dialogue options will also have impact on the game. All dialogues are made with voice actors, mostly with very good results. More importantly, fundamental choices have to be made at several points in the story which the player has to make without having all the facts clear, and then has to live with the consequences. This open ended story-telling is really what makes this game great.

To make up for the great storyline the game has a hopeless user interface. It is often needed to micro-manage the inventory, but there is no real inventory to manage. Instead there is an unsorted list of equipment in different categories that are not visible at the same time. In addition the large number of technical glitches that I encountered was really annoying. It is easy to assume that a game that was released on Windows in 2008 would have had sufficient time to be patched up to work flawlessly in 2014, but that is not the case here. About a dozen times while playing Shepard ended up outside the game geometry forcing a reload of the game. The sound effects in some of the areas were not functioning correctly.

Despite the technical annoyances, Mass Effect is a very good game. Knowing that there are two sequels to the game, there is a certain risk that I will play them as well at some time in the future.

It all begins when George is accompanying Nico to archaeology professor Oubier’s large Parisian mansion to gather information about a Mayan stone that she has found during her investigations. Suddenly George is hit in the head and rendered unconscious and subsequently tied to a chair. Nico is struck by a blown poisoned dart and then carried away. When leaving, the kidnappers make sure to put the house on fire and to let a large poisonous spider loose. All this is mixed with scenes from a human sacrifice (?) ceremony at a pyramide in central America. When George eventually wakes up, the game starts.

Broken Sword 2 – the Smoking Mirror: Remastered is an old game. The original version of the game (the un-remastered version) was released in 1997, and I enjoyed playing it on my PC already back then. Now I have replayed the game in a remastered Android version, and it is still enjoyable.

This is a point-and-click adventure game, which is a kind of game that transits very well to be played on touch-screen tablets. The problem solving is of varying difficulty, but the solutions are never too difficult or far-fetched in contrast to some other games of this age in this genre. The voice acting is good, and the musical score builds the mood efficiently. The cut-scenes are well done in a cartoon style but they progress in a quick tempo that do not correspond to the pedestrian tempo of the rest of the game. After some of the cut-scenes I was wondering what actually happened and why I ended up at this or that particular location.

The story in the game is almost completely linear, which helps when playing the game in the way I played it this time. I played it in many short sessions while cooking, eating, waiting and travelling and it is then convenient to not have too many simultaneous problems to solve in a game.

Even though I found the two heroes, Nico and George, very annoying I had to make sure that they would get out of all complicated situations alive to keep the world a relatively safe place, and to make sure that there is a third story of their adventures to be played.

I have played Bridge Constructor now and then during this summer. The game is a nice and simple way to waste some time. I have mostly played the Android version of the game, but I have also played the Windows version to a sufficient extent to be somewhat annoyed by the minor differencies between the two versions.

The story in the game is very straightforward. There has been a devastating earthquake that has destroyed the bridges on the islands of Camatuga and the player is in charge of their rebuilding. The problem for the player is that the available budget for the bridge constructions is very tight, so it is not possible to make too advanced solutions or to use the more expensive materials as much as would be ideal. After building the bridges, they have to be tested by letting some cars and/or trucks cross and if the bridge collapses a rethink the design is needed. When all bridges on Camatuga are functioning for trucks, the game opens up for tests using heavy tanker trucks on the newly constructed bridges, with an often sad and explosive result prompting a redesign of the bridges. This is actually the part where the differences between the two versions of the game are noticable. Several of my tanker-proof bridge designs on Android would fail in Windows.

Sometimes the statics of the bridge constructions seem a bit off with collapsing at unexpected places, but usually some engineering common sense and experimenting will solve the problems. It would have been nice to be able to play some of the levels with unlimited budget in order to test some truly exotic bridge designs, but the game is good enough as it is.

This is not a game to spend full evenings with because of its repetitive nature, but it is a relaxing game to play for a couple of minutes now and then. Quite a bit like sudoku.