Mega-ZBlog

I got some good games this Christmas and birthday, so I want to recommend a few:

Mirror’s Edge

This game was a lot more fun than I thought it would be, and it ended way too soon for my tastes.  Faith, the protagonist, is crazy at parkour and most of the functionality is accessed through two keys, plus your directional movements.  A helpful tutorial helps you begin to master them.

This has got to be the most fun I’ve had in an First Person game without Shooting (I went the pacifist route).  The game also managed to end with the world worse than it started out, which sorta was disappointing, but you do accomplish what you set out to do and the last “boss” was fun.  Can’t wait for the rumored sequel…

No windowed mode though, and I had a couple problems with the game but I was able to fix them.  If you find yourself stuck at a perpetual loading screen, validate your game cache in Steam and that may help fix it (CD users would want to reinstall for the same effect).  I also had a problem with a hanging looping opening cutscene, turning hardware acceleration down in DirectX Diagnostics (dxdiag.exe) fixed that right up.  Probably should have done that sooner since my sound hardware doesn’t support acceleration anyway.

Unfortunately there appears to be no user-made levels or official SDK.  Sad, I’m sure they would be great fun.

Beyond Good & Evil

A pure adventure game, lots of fun.  Collect these things, take pictures of those things, go through the main quest, do side quests.  Every piece of this is fun.  The story is your standard conspiracy theory, and at the end you go to the moon and blow up the evil space alien.  Oh, and you discover a dark secret about yourself.  Fun fun fun!

And there’s a sequel in the works too! 🙂

Had a weird technical quirk where running the game would cause Steam to get caught in an infinite loop but restarting Steam cleared that right up.  Also disappointed in no windowed mode, and it doesn’t properly paint the background in non-4:3 modes causing screen glitches.  Voice syncing problems too.

Also for some reason a new window opening (such as, say, getting an IM) causes both of the above games to minimize.  Bah!

Braid

I can only describe this as a “philosophical sidescroller”.  Haven’t beaten it yet, but the puzzles are already mind-wracking and fun.

No problems getting this to work, huzzah for indie games.