On 30/08/2011 03:20 PM, Mike the Elder wrote:

>


> games where your two options are to either make thirty-seven consecutive
> perfectly timed jumps in insanely rapid succession or to just walk away.

Bastion doesn't have tedious jumping puzzles. Indeed, you can't actually 
jump!

For the most part, the game seems to involve casually strolling around 
picking up items and exploring the world. Usually hostiles come in ones 
and twos. Occasionally a whole bunch of them jump you at once, and then 
things get kinda frantic.

The game seems to be fairly forgiving though. If you fall off the edge, 
you don't actually die, you just lose a chunk of health. You can press a 
button to drink a potion (if you have any left) that heals you. And if 
your health actually reaches zero, you don't die outright. The game lets 
you continue, putting you back to maximum health for another go. It only 
lets you do it a few times though. (I'm not sure how many.) Fail that, 
and you have to start the whole level again. I've only had to do that 
twice or something, which isn't bad considering how many levels I've 
completed.

Then again, I'll let you know after I've /completed/ the thing. ;-) I 
don't know how long it actually is, nor how hard it gets. My impression 
is that I'm still quite near the beginning, but I don't know for certain.



> to recommend for a while. The last game I played with any real enthusiasm was


I used to very much enjoy The Settlers. I haven't played that for ages 
though... (The last one I bought stopped working when my PC went 
dual-core. I gather the series has since taken a rather different 
direction.)

If I haven't mentioned it already, I'll mention Space Chem again. Pure 
puzzle solving; wire up a circuit and check that it works correctly. 
That's all there is to it. I forget the price, but I think it was, like, 

smooth difficulty curve. I never finished it due to the later puzzles 
becoming too mind-bendingly hard. It /was/ very enjoyable though.

> 2. Good value for price.  Cheap is good and free is better.  For $20.00, I want
> a game to be pretty clever. For $40.00, I expect VERY clever.  For $60.00, we
> had better be talking epic.


that's fine.








> 3. One or more of the elements I find entertaining: decent strategy and tactics,
> challenging puzzles to solve, interesting stories to play through, opportunities
> to DESIGN a character with an individual identity and personality.

Have you tried Psychonauts? ;-)

Mind you, that game is infuriatingly fiddly to play in places. It starts 
off laughably easy, but around about half way through the difficulty 
suddenly sky-rockets, and in one or two places it just becomes an 
exercise in frustration. It /does/ have some of the best story delivery 
I've ever seen in a game, however.

The game features, in no particular order:
- A telekinetic bear.
- A dentist who harvests brains.
- A trench-coated government agent who disguises himself as a housewife 
by brandishing a rolling pin and talking disjointedly about pies.
- A level where you rampage around Godzilla-style, terrorising a city of 
talking fish.

To say that it's "imaginative" is an understatement...

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