Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Psyconauts and the terrors of Sloppy ports.

This is my first post about my pile of shame, there were a few problems with my copy of Psyconauts but in the end I beat it and enjoyed beating it too. Here are a few of my thoughts on the game.

The game that I am playing first is Psyconauts is the story of a boy that runs away from the circus to join a camp for psychics as lame as that sounds the game infact is one of the best poorly executed games I’ve played. Don’t let it fool you this game is ripe with crazy some times disturbing stuff, but sticking with it and its problem will make up for its bubble gum extiore and also shows why Tim Shafer is one of the most creature and funny guys in the video game industry. The sad part about the version I was playing is that something was lost in the translation from Xbox to the playstation 2 version; it seemed to be a sloppy port with all the problems that go along with the words “sloppy port”. The controls were muddy and some times it seemed like randomly hitting buttons was replacing any kind of skill at playing the game. The graphics were also really questionable at times and I still have no idea how I made it through the “through the eyes of the monster” chase sequence, infact that happened to me a lot while playing this game it seemed like it was apologizing to me at points; putting me on the right path through the more confusing points in the game. Which are problems most of the time but the quirky characters and levels were the reason that I kept on going and were pretty much the reason I kept playing it …well that and finishing my pile of shame. The characters are incredibly well thought out from Razes problems with his dads hatred for psychics because of the families past problems with them to Dogans tin fail hat that he wears to prevent him from making the other campers head explode, there a lot of love put into every character and it show thought out the game, each of them representing the different arch types of personalities. Raz himself is one of the best characters I’ve played in a game, he’s the loveable loser type that gets tossed into crazy sinerios and forced to deal with them. It seems like a lot of games that I’ve been playing or plan to be playing have that same type of character as the hero in them. But in this case the sinero unfolds as raz runs away from the Circus to go to Psychic camp, the problem starts when the brains of his fellow campers start being stolen. Which leads to some interesting levels as he works his way through the screwy psyches using his psycho portal to enters some of the characters minds and helps them deal with there mental blocks. The Psyche levels are where this game really shines, the levels themselves are just as interesting as the characters and telling you too much about they would ruin my favorite part of the game. So I’ll just give a small part of one of the levels, one of my favorite levels was the velvet painting in the mind of the artist, I love the contrast of the black background highlighted by the brite neon blues and pinks, not even the misplaced camera and the clunky platforming could have killed this level for me. This level reminds me of a stoners room full of black lit posters, I wish that this game would have been given a bit more time to cook cause the small things in it seem to make the big problems, even if I sound like I didn’t like it: I did enjoy playing this game. My hope is that Brutal Legend is a better put together game and really I’m pretty much ready to put down the money for it regardless of how it turns out I have a feeling Tim Shafter needs the money.

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