Page 8
THE LAST FRONTIER
The Clarion \ April 29, 2011
The best games... that I have ever played
By Alex McCracken
Staff Writer
We continue this week with a continuation of
“The best games ...that I have ever played. ”
Look for another installment in next week’s
Clarion.
“Torchlight”
Game budgets and studio sizes liave gotten
out of control. It now takes literally millions
of dollars and hundreds of people to make
a Triple-A title with the vast majority being
paint-by-numbers military shooters and high
fantasy rpg’s with embarrassingly cliched art
direction.
Here’s where a little gem like this blew me
away. For one, it was developed by under thirty
people and twelve million dollars. That in of
itself is absurd, but the fact that the art style pops
and the game play keeps you hooked for hours
after you know you should have stopped playing
makes it one of my personal favorites.
The game basically is all about three things:
kill’n monsters, get’n loot, an’ get’n better loot.
There is much more under the hood than this,
but what I’ve mentioned above is what the folks
at Runic Games really nailed and among their
accomplishments is the vast range of appeal
it has.
Do you want to obsess over your weapons
and armor; memorizing and calculating all the
little perks and quirks within to best confront the
next passageway? There’s more than enough for
those kinds of folks, like difficulty levels and
massive walls of statistics.
What if you just want to toss back a few
beers, wail on some zombie dwarves, and find
pretty candy colored loot? The developers are
already way ahead of you by making all the cool
stuff you find as visually satisfying as they are
powerful.
If you’ve never touched a role playing game
before in your life, honestly good for you, then
this is a fantastic place to get started. But if your
expectations for the genre have been grinded
down to nub by now, its immediately likable
breath of fresh air.
“Torchlight" is available for $15 on STEAM
and Runic Game s web site
“Metal Gear Solid 3”
I bought this game several years ago with
absolutely no idea what to expect, except
the drenching torrent of praise and awards
the gaming press kept throwing at it. Now
expectations like that are a bad thing to have
for any new experience, but you know what?
It achieved and exceeded everything I wanted
from a video game literally two thirds of the
way through. . . I was blown away.
You are a paratrooper infiltration specialist
working for a branch of the US. Government.
It’s the late sixties and Johnson has assumed
the presidency.
A radical wing of the Russian communist
party has absconded with several warheads and
a prized physicist, and Khrushchev himself is
backing the American effort to bring all the
precious cargo back.
It gets so much more complicated from there.
In fact, it collapses under its own weight just
a few hours in. But the game is so long, yet
so dynamic and refreshing, that you really
never have a chance to pick your head up and
criticize it.
It’s a stealth game that, in a way, lets you do
whatever the hell you want. You want to walk
around a sandy cliff face in a cardboard box?
Well then you go ahead. You want to whip out
an ak-47 and lay waste to all that stand in your
way? Then have at it. You want to make it
through the entire twenty hour campaign with
a tiny tranquilizer pistol? The
developers aren’t there to judge.
What they are there to do is
give you the most entertaining
sandbox for your inner cigar-
chomping ninja-spy to play
with. The aforementioned guns
blazing approach, while initially
entertaining, becomes obsolete
once that game teaches you just
how phenomenally stupid that
approach is.
It doesn’t force you to play
a certain way, it shows you by
smacking you down and letting
you leam from your mistakes. For
a game that’s seems to be all about
killing, it’s not, stealthy pacifism
is not only the smartest strategy,
it’s almost always the most fun.
Snake Eater is available for the
PS2 in almost every PS2 bargain
bin in the country.
“Devil May Cry 3”
I’m letting y’all know ahead of
time, that when trying to finish
this game on easy mode . . . it’s
ok to cry. I’m just not making an
obvious pun. This game is so hard,
so maddeningly difficult; yet so
beguiling and visceral. That you
will cry salty, painful tears at your
incalculable failures while never
backing down from its challenge
to try again
You play as some white haired thirty something
named Dante who owns a devil hunting agency
that gets jumped by said devils on his way out
of the shower Dude barley gets a chance to
grab his coat.
But story is actually pretty damn good
considering I’m leaving out a fair amount of
nuance. But that’s the dead last time the word
“nuance” deserves to be anywhere near this
review.
You run around a post-apocalyptic city killing
billions upon zillions of demons and collecting
various weapons and cash. The cash you use to
upgrade your stuff, the weapons you use to keep
from being mauled to death by the seven deadly
sins, the various types of demons correspond
with one of each.
It’s incredible length, multiple difficulty
levels, oodles of upgrades and secrets as well
as it’s rock solid combat fundamentals make it a
blast today even six years after it’s release
DMC3 is available right next to Snake Eater.
. . not really, but in the same general area
WANTED
Staff members to write, report, photograph, draw,
edit, and sell advertisements for the student news
paper.
The Clarion needs your help! As a volunteer staff
member, you can
• Earn academic credit in COM 106
• Get a cool T-shirt for a job well done
• Looks good on a resume
• Automatically be a member of the Clarion bowl
ing team: The Pinatrators
• Have your voice heard around campus
• Think of something funnier for the "Wanted” box
• Reap financial rewards for serving Brevard Col
lege
Staff meetings are open to all
Fridays at 11:30 a.m.
in IVI-G 102