Goomb Played! - The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

It's a wonder how a game like The Witcher 2 manages to be gritty and positively beautiful at the same time. Polish developer CD Projekt Red's newest role-playing game is set in a gorgeous fantasy world, lush with details, a strong lore and absolutely amazing characters.

No one is a hero in Geralt's group of acquaintances, including himself. He lost his memories and the only thing he's sure of is that there's trouble brewing and somehow his order, of the witchers, is involved. It all starts when a serial king murderer strikes where Geralt happened to be. Framed for the regicide, he's forced to prove his innocence and avert a global crisis.

For an RPG, The Witcher 2 plays extremely simple. You got three "evolution trees" which you can follow when you level up, in the form of alchemy, sword fighting and magic. Each of them is tied to an aspect of combat but also influence other key abilities, like crafting and the making of potions. Potions work differently and are only used before fights, when you enter Geralt in a meditation state, where not only you can drink these concoctions but also mix them.

The fighting part of the game is very basic and easy to handle. The Witcher 2 turns into more of a hack and slasher, although not as involved as God of War, for instance. Depending on your choice as a 'spec', your prowess with swords, magic or status effects is improved. Fights can quickly turn hairy since enemies swarm you at about every chance they get.

Role-playing is probably the best aspect of Garelt's adventure, thanks to some excellent dialogue and interesting quests. Sidequests are far from the usual fetch and destroy a certain number of enemies and manage to be important to the overall story. Sure, you will run into RPG tropes here and there, like the repeated monster contracts but even those are relatively varied and make use of more than just 'kill kill kill'.

A great presentation isn't the sole reason to jump into any game, although it helps a lot. The Witcher 2 is an absolutely gorgeous game. Environments are colorful and feel alive, even when you're sneaking through a cave. Geralt himself looks rugged, as he should look, like an aged warrior that's been on the wrong side of many blades, with scars to prove.

Music is superb as well. The score manages to be epic at just the right spots in the story or during action scenes and subtle at softer, calmer moments. When a character opens his or her mouth to speak, you're treated with very well performed voice acting. Geralt sounds just as gruff as he looks and dwarves... well, they sound like dwarves. Did I mention dwarves are the kinkiest race on the planet?

They sure are, thanks to how of a more mature tone CD Projekt Red takes in this game. Dialogue more than often turn sexual, with the constant use of the word "plowing", The Witcher 2's version of "frak". You get the drift, right? There's more than one instance of actual sexual situations too. While not nearly as intense as was hyped during this game's development, they are treated in a far less awkward manner than in a game like Mass Effect nor as say, interactive as God of War. They work more as cutscenes than anything though and don't particularly affect the story at all.

It's worth mentioning that this is an open ended game that features more than one path during the story. These forks in the road work a lot better than the usual karma options and they actually show unique facets of the story. The Witcher 2 demands a second playthrough as soon as you set your controller down if you wish to know the full story or see where a different choice in allegiance can take you, for instance.

The Witcher 2 is one hell of an RPG. While the combat can get mindless and cheap at some points, the story and atmosphere are just incredible. It's the type of game that will grip you. Simply put, if you got the machine to run this, you shouldn't miss it. |10

Goombd Watched! - The Walking Dead 'Mid' Season 2

When I think of zombie related fiction, my mind is always drawn to the human struggles. That's probably due to my "formation" in the genre, that comes from watching the George A. Romero school of movies, which for the beginning half were strongly tied to the deterioration of the human mind during a crisis and less of a bloody fest.

Thanks to that and my liking of comics - I'm no collector, but I dabble in them from time to time - it was an easy transition to make when I first discovered and started reading the 'The Walking Dead' book. At that point, the series was already well underway and thanks to the excellent pacing and captivating nature of Robert Kirkman's narrative, it didn't take me long to get up to speed on the story.

It was just as easy to transition to the TV show. Season one had less episodes and the comics' story was somewhat retold in a different manner. Some characters were completely new and the survivor group movement relatively different than what the book told, a big plus in my opinion. Friends were pretty divided, though. Some hated the fact that the show was so slow at points, or the lack of deaths and violence.

That sentiment carried over and grew quite a bit on season two. There were more episodes for the producers to work with and they obviously took their time building up the impending group conflict for the second half of the season, with characters evolving and adapting to the situation in a slower and more deliberate pace and for some viewers, that's just dull.


I'm not torn up about it nor would I go out of my way to try to change their minds. For me, the show is working extremely well, taking bits and pieces from the original source and coming up with its own identity. I never wanted to see frame-to-frame from the comic in film form at any point. That'd be just boring for this show. Sure, I'd love to see some things from the book pop up here and there, especially after the farm setting is done away with (if ever, in season two) but unlike die-hard fans that grope and moan about every single little detail that's changed in a comic book adaptation, I'm happy with what's being done with The Walking Dead.

Will people get what they want in the second half of this season? More guts and gore, tension and deaths? Probably. Would I like to see it done every single episode? Certainly not. This is a show that should go beyond just seeing people getting torn to bits all the time. I'm fine with the concept of grindhouse existing for horror flicks, but those are just that. Flicks. This is a TV show, it spans for much longer and there are only so many ways the same thing can happen before it just becomes dull. And so far, The Walking Dead is anything but that.

February 12th can't come soon enough!

Goombd Played! - Jurassic Park The Game

It is said that some things are just better left extinct. In the game of videogames, certain styles of game design can fall under that category. One in particular was born in the 1980s, with Dragon's Lair as its shining example. It showed how colorful and well animated games could look but how boring and non-interactive they could be as well. You could only guide the knight Dirk by pointing which way he should head and depending on your choice, he either lived or died. Since then, we haven't gotten hardly any games fully based on that concept. It was pretty much dead and buried after a few other disastrous attempts a few scant years later.

What we now know as QTE (quick time event) can somewhat be associated with that concept, although very rarely do we get to play games that are solely reliant on it. It's usually used as just a gimmick, a break between action scenes that more often than not tends to be plain irritating, demanding precise timing and in most cases, brain dead button mashing.

So it came as a surprise when Telltale Games, the people behind episodic games like Sam & Max and most recently Back to the Future The Game, announced that they had acquired the rights to the Jurassic Park film and would be making an adventure game that would exclusively use this sort of mechanic instead of giving direct control of characters on screen. The resulting works mostly well but isn't rid of a few annoying problems.

Similarly to Back to the Future The Game, Telltale's pick for a niche to place the story for Jurassic Park The Game is rather interesting. Rather than being a sequel to the somewhat lackluster Jurassic Park film franchise, Telltale's game is centered around a can of shaving cream. That can of shaving cream. Barbasol. The one Dennis Nedry, Wayne Knight's obnoxious computer hacker character from the first Jurassic Park movie tried to smuggle dinosaur embryos out of the island in but ultimately failed. His contact decides to send two agents into Isla Nublar in order to recover the prize and that's where the game begins.

Scenes play out and don't give you direct control on what's going on with the characters and the situations they are placed in. Instead, you're given the task of correctly (and timely) pressing the buttons shown, like a quick combination of controller buttons and analog stick tilts. For most of the time, the intensity and demand of what you have to press fits with the chaos that's going on, while in others, it's just frustratingly obtuse.


Telltale has managed to convey a sense of immediacy for what happens to the game's characters into the indirect controls you're given to do but sometimes the game's interface manages to do a great job getting in your way. The graphics and character animation do a great job of showing emotion (mostly of desperation, as it's to be expected when dinosaurs are trying to eat everyone) but in some instances, amidst all the action it becomes extremely difficult to see some of the prompts or get the timing wrong due to how often the indications on screen become obscured by the camera that is often shifting positions and moving along a predetermined path.

The timing in which to press the buttons was my most frustrating issue of contention with this game. I rarely reached a point where I just wanted to give up, due to how well the check-pointing works in this game, although some people might get turned off after seeing their unlucky fictitious friend get eaten due to a mistaken or missed input. Regardless of how forgiving the action is for most of the game, allowing a fair number of mistakes before slapping you with a game over screen, it's still disappointing to see it happen instantly in some of the more exciting parts of the game, in "insta-kill" mode.

If you persevere, though, you'll be rewarded with a surprisingly well developed story that is delivered in the confines of this four part episodic series. Telltale once again manages to develop an exciting plot that plucks an overlooked element off the movies, all the while creating their own original elements that perfectly fit in the mythos of Jurassic Park, something that both of the movie sequels failed to do. Two other islands? Really, Mr. Spielberg?

While it's a little annoying that you don't get to guide much of what happens in the story, it's mostly up to you to uncover additional tidbits of background information on characters and the Jurassic Park canon. They're hidden behind certain dialogue choices and button prompts that can be easily missed if you aren't looking. The overall script is set, though. Certain character deaths, for instance, are written from the beginning and happen regardless of how perfectly you execute action sequence button prompts. The way you get to certain points in the plot can somewhat differ but it's nothing dramatic or short of a few extra bumps and awkward falls on the way to an objective.

It'd be easy to classify Jurassic Park The Game as passable if the scope of comparison was focused on action adventure games like Uncharted. But as an adventure game that strips the 'point' out of 'point and click' and replaces the 'click' with button prompts, analog stick movements and a few cases of insane button mashing, it works relatively well. You're still picking dialogue choices, examining items and solving a half of a handful of puzzles, even though most of what you do is firmly strapped in on a story that moves along a pre-determined track. Jurassic Park The Game might not be one of Telltale's best titles, but it's certainly the most unique of the bunch. |6

Goombd Played! - A World of Keflings DLC: It Came From Space

The concept of playing a game with absolutely no confrontations and violence might seem foreign to many videogame fans. Killing and being victorious over your opponent always seems to be the goal of just about 90% of all games. Luckily for us, the 10% left sometimes turn out to be amazing. That's the case for Ninja Bee's A World of Keflings.

I already made a case about how much I love that game a while back, when it was released as part of the Summer of Arcade promotion that Microsoft likes to make during U.S summertime. It's an absolute blast putting together your own towns and not have to worry about anyone coming around to demolish it. It was truly a "busy busy bee" game.


So it comes as no surprise that we're getting to play a set of DLC for that game, a little more than a year after its release. It Came From Space features a whole new set of blueprints to build, a new environment to pluck resources from and a handful of crazy characters to laugh at. As the name suggests, this DLC is centered on aliens. They crashed on the Kefling world and lo and behold, it's up to you (mainly, your Xbox Live avatar) to help them get back home.

Luckily for your E.T friends, all of the materials they need happen to have come along with their ship. You'll get things going by putting some of them to work and harvesting the base items like bars of radioactive materials, wood and clay but soon enough, just like in the original game, you're steered towards turning these into more specialized materials.



The gameplay structure It Came From Outer Space follows is right on with what we saw in 'Keflings. Those base materials are harvested into a single building at first and from there, you expand and build new structures as objectives are met and blueprints are learned. This time around, though, there's a catch. Some of these buildings are living beings and can be mutated into other types of structures. This might sound pretty complicated, but it's really not. You basically build the core structure and feed it a carrot filled with alien mutagen. Mutated buildings can then produce other types of much needed raw materials.

Another new type of unit introduced in this DLC is the robotic minion, which already starts out at high levels on just about every job you could put him to. And you'll need to put him to work right away since he's the only one capable of handling the nuclear materials and junk parts required by your schematics.


As you might have picked up by looking at these screenshots, there's only one environment to play in It Came From Outer Space. It's relatively smaller than the usual A World of Keflings stage and takes about as long to play through as well. You're likely to take around 2 hours to complete all the objectives and get every achievement, but there are incentives to keep building even after the story is done.

There are plenty of good reasons to pick this new DLC pack up. It's charming to no end, brimming with the sort of personality we've seen in previous Ninja Bee games and the pokes at science fiction tropes are hilarious. The writing is quick and witty and just like A World of Keflings, it's very reverential to pop culture and loves to make fun (in a fun way) of the tenets of videogames. It Came From Space is a great excuse to pop A World of Keflings back in, no probes abo...er... doubt about it! |8

Goombd Played! - Swarm

If you've grown tired of keeping your Lemmings alive all the time, Swarm might turn things around for you. In Hothead Games' departure from the adventure genre, you're rewarded for being sadistic. In fact, the more evil you are to your poor, hapless blue minions, the bigger, baddest, best score chain you'll get. Points are good, right?

Yes they are. You'll need plenty of those. Swarm's levels are only unlocked once a minimum cap is reached. Points are earned by collecting strands of DNA, killing Swarmites (it's what these lovable blueish guys are called) in creative/evil/fun ways and by being quick about it. Things aren't that straightforward though. Traps and puzzles liter your way and thanks to a smart implementation of direct controls, there's hardly a point where the game itself turns out to be an obstacle.

Surmounting these pebbles on the road, though, is another matter. There are various ways to use your little army of 50 Swarmites. They aren't as useless as Lemmings that simply walk one way or the other. They're obedient. You give them an order, they do it. Want them to stack on top of each other? Done. Jump over a chasm? Pff, easy. All these actions are mapped to a few button combinations and are unlocked the further you progress in the game.

Swarm is the type of puzzler that likes to throw new things your way every so often. New moves become available as you make your way through new stages. You're also awarded with medals the more you murder your blue victims too. These medals can then be upgraded the more kills you achieve on a particular style. Unlocking all is a matter of thoroughly exploration and discovery, and it's probably one of Swarm best features.


I'll admit (admissions are a part of Goombd!, after all) - I like to earn achievements and trophies. I don't particularly go out of my way to win them, though. I dig hunting when they make the game more fun and interesting, which is the case for Swarm. Going after them is an added layer of challenge and will demand nearly perfect results on all stages.

It also helps that Swarm is a pretty game. The Swarmites look like "claymated" and deaths would look adorable if they weren't so gruesome. Okay, I'll say that they are really darn cute. You never see any blood, though, so if you're into that, you won't find it here. You will, however, see plenty of blue. All over the damn screen.


Swarm is the type of game that could easily take you just a few hours to make it to the credits. That's just the beginning of it all, though. Getting all medals, awards, best scores and unlockables can easily quadruple that amount of time, if you are looking for replayability. And who wouldn't? Swarm is a blast. Or a jump in a vat of acid. Or a blue-tinted barbecue. You get the drift! |8

Goombd Played! - Eufloria

If you're anything like me, you're awful at real-time strategy games, the RTS, like all the cool kids like to call them. Maybe it's due to the unrelenting nature of having to make split second decisions, the stress of having thousands of virtual lives in your hands at all times. I'm just bad at them. I take too long to do the right thing at the right time. When it's time to attack, I'm still building my base, carefully placing my units around the base and when it's time to turtle up, hey, I'm mounting a thousand marine death-to-the-scourge single file attack force.

Regardless of what type of RTS player you are, you ought to give Eufloria a go. I might be wrong when I call this game a RTS, but it's the closest comparison I could muster. It's on a league of its own, in more than a single aspect, really.



You're not in control of armies of orcs or anything that you might associate with war. Helping along a plant empire colonize asteroids is Eufloria's push for a story. Starting out with little seedlings, you're tasked with exploring space and finding patches in which to sink the roots of your civilization in, quite literally. Early into your journey, though, you discover that not all is quite as it seems when opposing seeds races start competing for fertile ground.

Despite its incredibly simple art style and gameplay, Eufloria packs a lot of depth. It slowly takes you through the core elements of getting a game going, like planting a tree so more seeds are produced. From there, after a few slowly paced missions, you're in control of hundreds of units. Unlike other games that have you micromanaging lots of things at once, though, Eufloria's simple and extremely effective control options make it easy to keep track of just about everything. All it takes for an order to go through is a click or prolonged drag of a mouse (or in my case a single or extended PlayStation 3 button press) and off a group of seeds goes or a tree gets planted.


Due to the easy going but at the same time fast nature of Eufloria, even when I failed I never got frustrated and felt the urge to give up. It's incredibly quick to get things going again, rebuild an "army" and try to take on a challenge again. And if you don't think things are moving fast enough, a speedier game option is just a menu away too.

Aside from the story mode, you have the option to dive into special challenge levels that work like tests for everything you learned. These rank you in a variety of ways, not just for how many points you score, but for how fast you finish the stage and how efficiently you've done so, counting how many units you've built and lost.


There isn't an option to play this online, though, so you're locked with dealing against a moderately calm and pacifist computer controlled enemy. The A.I. won't completely destroy you by attacking as soon as you discover an opposing asteroid but it's not a pushover either. Maybe it's due to how bad I am in this sort of game, but I found myself having just the 'right' amount of challenge with Euflori and for that I'm thankful. I can appreciate a huge hardcore RTS game like SHOGUN2 that offers so many options, tactics and the whatnot, where I can just about finish the earliest of portions in a campaign mode before getting overwhelmed.

I'm just happy to claim that I have a RTS game I can enjoy without getting stressed over the many aspects of managing an army. I can simply click away and point my little friends towards an objective, hoping that they'll be successful. In the middle of all the explosions, deaths, blood and gore that we're so used to seeing with games nowadays, a "little" and simple" game like Eufloria has a reserved spot in my list of favorites any day. |8