Grappling Hook is 50% Off This Weekend

The über-talented Christian Teister of Speedrun Games is having an epic sale this weekend of his cool game, Grappling Hook. Get it this weekend, because Monday it goes back up to the already reasonable price of $19.99.

Matt enjoyed the game and you can read his review if you need some convincing, and you could play the demo.

In other news I started playing Magic and it’s awesome.

- Kyle

Christian casually emailed me and told me about the promotion so good game get! is not receiving any revenue from the game or Christian. As always, GGG! is Ad-Free.

home

My grandfather and grandmother are extremely ill. My Mom’s father, and my Dad’s mother, and while they both still live at home, they could supposedly use the care and expertise of a nursing home. Nobody wants to go to a nursing home, and you hear horror stories and great stories of old loved ones adopting to a new lifestyle with new friends, activities and what not. It’s especially good for them if family visits them often, but then again, maybe that would depress them.

I can’t possibly get inside the head of my grandfather but I know his pain is more than just his failing and ill body, it’s the fact that he can longer function on his own and that he is slowly or quickly dying, whichever is the speed, it’s still an awful fate to face, regardless of when it’s going to happen.



Stephen Lavelle dropped an art game called Home last Saturday that addresses how pathetic one may feel when going to a nursing home, and even more heart-wrenching, the protagonist is not bitter and in fact is overly positive for someone in his situation. The game plays out with you the player addressing the protagonist’s needs by moving him through the world to food, a toilet, a nurse, and a bed. Each of these interactions will increase different stats on the old man. He’s not hungry when he eats, and he’s happy when he interacts with a human. After your first night, things aren’t so wonderful and soon it becomes overwhelming to help keep track and satiate the old man’s needs. The game compensates for your inevitable inability to be responsible for the old man and slowly your responsibilities begin to decline, leaving medication and diapers to take care of the old man’s simple, yet hard to fill needs.

It’s depressing, you can’t win, you can’t lose, you play it, and then it’s over. Home pushes the game medium to the uncomfortable realm of forced inter-actual narrative. Uncomfortable for it’s subject material and the things you are forced to do to finish such a game. You can always exit, but watching accidents and misery is just too interesting for us to switch off sometimes. It’s like the most depressing Gigapet clone ever created. Cruel, right? The sum of all things in your life surely end up being more than this, but perhaps it’s not something to dwell on too much, and is it something we should accept?

You can download and play Home, here.

- Kyle

Trine

Before I wrote this post, I decided to do something I hadn’t done yet with Trine - which is to go check out it’s Meta Critic score and surprisingly it did great and at the time of writing this has an 82 with generally favorable reviews.

Fellow gamer, let me tell you, do not pay twenty dollars for Trine. Save your Playstation Network money in your wallet for something else.

In case you’re wondering what Trine is, let me explain. It was meant to be this beautiful medieval platforming game where you co-operatively played with one or two other players. You all have different powers and use them to help each other manipulate the level and pass through it. It’s quite cool, and the gameplay videos I watched before purchasing the game sealed the deal with me.

However, my girlfriend and I have been playing the game and it is so buggy, so unplayable at times, and so absolutely frustrating that it’s the first game I’d consider attempting to get at least a partial refund from Sony for. That is, of course, impossible, and I’m stuck with the purchase. Why can’t you return games if they’re shit by the way? You can return almost anything else if something is wrong with it, and I’m positive that something is wrong with Trine.

Now, what if all those fancy pants Meta Critic reviewers are right and Trine is awesome and I’m really terrible at video games. Sometimes I do wonder.

We have seen boxes fall through solid floors, enemies jump on our heads and send us flying into a bottomless pit, a stupid ass fucking Knight that can’t swim, and a game that doesn’t regenerate objects that may have been destroyed or lost if you die and respawn, and even worse, a game that actually has a menu that fucking freezes up and requires multiple button presses to escape form. It is the worst game I’ve played in some time.

The platforming and combat components are terrible and EXP is given out with fucking phials of green potion instead of automatically assigned to whoever made the kill, and the only enemies in the game are skeletons, big skeletons, fat skeletons, and un-balanced swarms of bats which will ruin you especially if you’re the wizard and have no physical attack whatsoever.

Jumping in the game is awful, and I assure you that the platforming of the ancient Mario Bros. is substantially tighter than this train wreck of a game.

Such potential Nobilis, what the fuck were you thinking? Did you play your own game, and also what copy did you send to the press, and what copy did Sony release on the PSN?

- Kyle