Author: Bert

Allow me to give you the lamest shock ever: I’ve played pretty much every Zelda game. I kicked blue knights’ ass in Adventure of Link, I spanked the Dark world and Lorule, showed the underwater Hyrule who’s boss and went back and forth through time more than I can remember.

But I have never. Ever. Ever. Played Majora’s Mask.

Which is weird, because I absolutely adored the concept: A compact world where you get three days to do as much as you possibly can before the moon crashes onto the earth and wipes everything out, forcing you to turn time back to the beginning.  (I don’t watch Doctor Who, but I think wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey is in order.)

It just never happened.

Until the most elementary schoolish thing happened: I got it for my birthday. It was wrapped and everything – I can’t remember when I last unwrapped a video game! Hell, I didn’t even know they still came in boxes!

So I’ve been plowing through Majora’s Mask. And loving it.  Dark, twisted, hilarious… And an absolute blast to play.

Thanks, friends, for knowing that you’re never to old to feed your inner child.

Double Fine rereleased Grim Fandango!

Now, of course, you might not be a huge nerd like me, so this might just be five words, four of which make no sense – but to me this is a pretty big deal. Grim Fandango – a Lucasarts adventure game from 1998 about crime and corruption in the land of the dead – was a huge part of my youth, one I couldn’t experience anymore because the damn thing wouldn’t run properly on modern PC’s.

A brief story sketch: In this game, you take on the role of Manny Calavera, a travel agent in the land of the dead – a place all souls must traverse before reaching peace in the ninth underworld. You follow him on his epic journey looking for a woman named Mercedes Colomar, whom he erroneously gave the wrong travel package – and as you do, you uncover a network of organized crime. The game is filled to the brim with film noir references and spectacular writing. It’s safe to say Grim Fandango remains, to this day, the best-written adventure game, with strong dialogues, amazing characters and a story concept that manages to be witty and dramatic at the same time.

Yet knowing what happened between 1998 and 2015, Grim Fandango feels like an oddity. It was a expensive production, one that flopped financially, and that put the final nail in the adventure game’s coffin. People were done with adventure games – the move in the three-dimensional worlds created much more exciting ways of interaction, and adventure games started to feel stale and weird in comparison. For all the praise I’m giving Grim Fandango, upon replaying it I cannot help but facepalm at some of the puzzles. I mean, come on, what the hell is this supposed to be:

It reminded me I played the game with a walkthrough back in 1998 – there’s just no fun in figuring this kind of random stuff out. One particularly vexing puzzle later in the game has you combining random pieces of dialogue from different people into a date, which you need to get a certain item. There is nothing in the game that nudges you towards the right solution.

That said, I’m incredibly happy Grim Fandango was rereleased. It’s a true classic, a somehow timeless piece of art that showcases an era, and the height of a genre that was inevitably on the way out. You can get it on GOG.com, and you really should.

Lot of stuff happening at the moment. Writing, reading, planning… It’s kind of crazy. Yet admidst all this chaos, I still find time to play a game — in this case, Wolfenstein: the New Order. And it’s pretty brilliant.

We all know Wolfenstein from the first person shooter that changed the world back in the nineties. Suffice to say the franchise has fallen from grace since then — that is, up till now.

I don’t want to spoil too much, but New Order takes place in an alternate universe where Nazi Germany dropped an atomic bomb on Manhattan and in doing so, won World War 2. From this general idea stems a dystopian world in which the Nazi ideology is taken to its horrible extreme.

The thing is: We’ve seen this before. There’s tons of movies in which the Nazis are made into a depersonalized science fiction-like threat. In that aspect, New Order is no different: its world is grey and menacing and its inhabitants stereotypically amoral. Yet New Order does something right a lot of other games do wrong: It creates a compelling main character in B.J. Blazkowicz.

Blazkowicz (voiced by a downright amazing Brian Bloom) is a seriously troubled character, haunted by the demons of war – and amidst the gargantuan action pieces, the game takes its time to let the character breathe. He whispers to himself. He starts a tragic wartime relationship. And whatever he does, the game never gives him a break. He’s the essence of a tragic character.

In this way, the game reminds me of the excellent Spec Ops: The Line. Yet whereas The Line was pretty balanced in its evolution from heroic shooter to apocalypse now, taking baby steps and then chucking us head-first in the abyss, New Order takes a different approach: It nearly suffocates us with its horribleness and then lets us catch a breather — before starting the whole process over again.

The game’s out on Steam and on pretty much every console. I recommend the international version, which switches between brilliant directed German, English and Polish as you blast your way through Europe. Plus, the German language version is obviously censored – albeit slightly.

Oh, right, the whole gameplay with shooting dudes thing is also done quite well if you’re into that sort of thing. But who cares about gameplay anyway…?