Psychonauts
Mostly retreated from the intarwebz for a few days. I haven't played any games in a while besides little bits of DS games while riding the train, so I sat down and plowed through Psychonauts.
Psychonauts is an awesome game, and absolutely deserving of all the praise it gets. Any game that involves brain-stealing dentists, playing Godzilla in a city of talking fish, and setting squirrels on fire has some automatic win right there.
Basically, you play a kid acrobat named Raz who runs away from his home at the circus to join a summer camp for psychics. In no time flat, he has to stop a plot for world domination by unravelling what's happening at the camp and jumping into the trippy, often batshit crazy minds of other characters.
The gameplay itself isn't anything you haven't seen before, but the story is fabulously bizarre and interesting. The characters are all well developed. The dialogue is clever and occasionally hilarious. And the level design in the mental worlds is on so much crack. Wonderful, crazy, funny, disturbing, and occasionally downright freaky. (OMG THE RABBITS.)
If I had to complain about anything, it'd be that a few things are really oddly ignored (you only fight Nightmares TWICE? WTF?). And of course, there's the same thing that everyone who's played the game seems to mention: THE MEAT CIRCUS IS SO FUCKING HARD. You spend most of the game breezing along at about a medium difficulty. Not stupidly easy, but not so hard that you'll be dying constantly unless you have trouble figuring out the trick to beating certain bosses. Then you get to the Meat Circus, and it's like the game suddenly HATES YOU PERSONALLY. It throws you into a protect-the-NPC mission, insane jumping puzzles, and an escape-the-rising-wave-of-death race against the clock. All ONE AFTER ANOTHER, broken up only by a few boss battles. Argh.
Anyway. Other than the veeeeeeery last section of the game being guaranteed to make you want to throw your controller (or in my case, laptop) at the wall after you fall to your death for the hundredth time, it's lots of fun. Give it a shot if you get the chance. The story and weirdness are worth it.
Off to make dinner and watch Doctor Who before my parents call.
Psychonauts is an awesome game, and absolutely deserving of all the praise it gets. Any game that involves brain-stealing dentists, playing Godzilla in a city of talking fish, and setting squirrels on fire has some automatic win right there.
Basically, you play a kid acrobat named Raz who runs away from his home at the circus to join a summer camp for psychics. In no time flat, he has to stop a plot for world domination by unravelling what's happening at the camp and jumping into the trippy, often batshit crazy minds of other characters.
The gameplay itself isn't anything you haven't seen before, but the story is fabulously bizarre and interesting. The characters are all well developed. The dialogue is clever and occasionally hilarious. And the level design in the mental worlds is on so much crack. Wonderful, crazy, funny, disturbing, and occasionally downright freaky. (OMG THE RABBITS.)
If I had to complain about anything, it'd be that a few things are really oddly ignored (you only fight Nightmares TWICE? WTF?). And of course, there's the same thing that everyone who's played the game seems to mention: THE MEAT CIRCUS IS SO FUCKING HARD. You spend most of the game breezing along at about a medium difficulty. Not stupidly easy, but not so hard that you'll be dying constantly unless you have trouble figuring out the trick to beating certain bosses. Then you get to the Meat Circus, and it's like the game suddenly HATES YOU PERSONALLY. It throws you into a protect-the-NPC mission, insane jumping puzzles, and an escape-the-rising-wave-of-death race against the clock. All ONE AFTER ANOTHER, broken up only by a few boss battles. Argh.
Anyway. Other than the veeeeeeery last section of the game being guaranteed to make you want to throw your controller (or in my case, laptop) at the wall after you fall to your death for the hundredth time, it's lots of fun. Give it a shot if you get the chance. The story and weirdness are worth it.
Off to make dinner and watch Doctor Who before my parents call.