Gish is a beautiful platform game currently available on Valve’s Steam. You control Gish, a ball of tar, on his journey through the sewers and underground to save a girl. Besides the arrow keys, used for movement, there are four buttons; ‘a’ makes Gish sticky, ‘s’ makes him slippery, ‘d’ makes him heavy, and space bar makes him jump.
The stages and characters all use great art. At first glance, much of the game resembles Loco Roco, but the actual game is quite a bit different. There is a lot of detail in the environment as well as the enemies. Each new enemy I come across has me thinking how cute it is before thinking about how to kill it. Each world has a different theme and look to it, including a sewer, a hellish world, an Egyptian world, and an indoors world reminiscent of Castlevania. The ground, ceiling, and walls are all nice looking and thematic, and the background are quite pleasing. Besides the gameplay mechanics, I think what I like most about the game is the audio. Background music is great and fitting to the theme, while the sound effects are also awesome. The “splat” sound of squishing enemies always leaves me feeling happy.
The controls are a bit odd. Jumping feels clunky at first, but only before you learn how to correctly jump. Jumping from rest will hardly do anything at all; however, jumping while compressed (holding down, falling from a previous jump, etc) will yield actual jumping, the more compressed you are, the greater the jump. To get through small spaces, you will have to become slippery, and to drop through water, smash blocks, or refrain from being squished, you must become heavy. Stickiness lets you roll across the ceiling or up walls, although it’s tricky with gravity pulling you down. It also lets you grab blocks, usually used to press switches. In the later levels, you must master the ability to grab a block, roll until it’s above you, and jump to launch it through the air.
I’ve already played Gish for almost six and a half hours. To really get a feel for it, you would definitely need to give at least an hour. I’ve explained jumping, but you won’t truly get it until you play for a while. Gish won the Grand Prize at the 2005 Independent Games Festival; while I don’t know what else competed, I do know that Gish is a fun game with a twist on the usual platformer.
It retails for $9.95 on Steam but is only $4.95 until the Thursday, the 17th.

Portal has been out for months now, and I’ve been meaning to write about it since the day of its launch. The main point that I want to get across about Portal is that it’s one of the greatest games ever created. At the very least, tied with Tetris for best game.
First, the portal gun is just so cool. It has two modes of fire – blue portal and orange portal. Once both portals are placed, you can walk into one and come out the other. Your speed is conserved, which makes for interesting puzzles involving flying into one to fly out of another one. The difficulty curve of the game was superb. I never really felt annoyed at any hand holding, yet things were introduced one at a time so I never felt overloaded. By the end of the game, I was able to do very complex things with the portals that seemed impossible and amazing when I first saw them done in a trailer.
The atmosphere and plot are both wonderful as well. And yes, the game definitely has a plot. By the end of the game, other characters emerge as well. The way the plot unfolded was amazing, but I don’t want to say much about it out of fear of spoiling it. The game also slowly becomes a bit eerie in a very cool way. The music and sound is perfect for the game. The dialogue, while limited, consisted of each line delivering the perfect amount at the perfect time. Every element of the game was carefully thought out and placed exactly where it needed to be.
That leads me to my final point about the game: it’s short. Even without trying to fast, you’ll still complete it in about four hours. Many people have complained about this, but I won’t be one of them. As I said before, everything was placed perfectly. The game couldn’t be any longer. Sure, they could have just added more puzzle rooms, but as it stands, there weren’t any redundant puzzles. Each room introduced another part of the game. Adding more would have just made the game tedious. There’s nothing wrong with a short game. In fact, I wish more games would cut the crap out of them. I don’t want to collect all 150 stars or 200 emblems. I don’t want to play the same levels over and over again in Sonic and the Secret Rings with new tasks each time. I just want to play Portal.

When I found out that there was another rhythm game besides Elite Beat Agents, Ouendan, and Ouendan 2 for the DS, I was very excited. The music is nice, and the gameplay is actually very cool, but the song selection is limited, and all the quirks and character of the Ouendan series are completely missing in Ontamarama.
Unlike the quirky yet cool story in the Ouendan series, Ontamarama had an unexciting story. Ontama are small creatures that allow people to play music and conduct “Ontama battles,” which is some sort of aggressive music playing. Unluckily for the protagonist, someone is stealing all the Ontama; he wants them back. I know that no one expects there to be much plot in a rhythm game, but this isn’t what’s so bad. It’s the way the plot is presented. After chasing an enemy, the enemy says, “I’ve been under control,” and the protagonist says, “oh, okay!”
I really enjoyed the game mechanics. “Unfilled” notes slide across the top of the of the screen. There are four kinds of notes, each associated with their own color and D-pad direction. When the note reaches the little circle on the left, you have to press the note’s corresponding direction; However, there’s a catch: These unfilled notes can’t be pressed until they become filled. To press them, they have to be filled. Under the sliding bar, Ontamas appear and move about the screen. When you touch an Ontama, a note of the corresponding color becomes filled. What’s so interesting about this is that while watching the notes stream across the top (sometimes in rapid succession), you also have to watch for all the Ontamas and tap them quickly enough to fill the notes. Very demanding, and very fun. Luckily, you have three “blows.” When you blow in the mic, it’ll clear all Ontamas on the screen.
I still think that the corny plot elements were by far the biggest downside of the game, but there is one other. There are twelve main songs in the game. It takes about an hour to beat the game. The songs are still fun to play afterwards, but I only thought one song was really memorable. The character art is horrendous, but the Ontama sprites are quite cute. If you really like rhythm games, then this game is probably worth $20. If you’re looking for an Elite Beat Agents replacement, don’t look here, and if you don’t really have an opinion about rhythm games, then this would probably just be a waste of your time.

Hellgate: London is a blend of Guild Wars, Diablo, and, indirectly, World of Warcraft (due to Guild Wars already borrowing form it). I had been looking forward to it for sometime basically because of what games it was similar too. I’m a big fan of Diablo and to a lesser extent, Guild Wars and World of Warcraft. After finding that a PR company was attempting to pay for positive reviews of the game, I became skeptical of all the positive hype I had heard. In fact, I still am skeptical of all the positive reviews I’ve read after playing the game.
Hellgate: London takes place in the future after the world has been invaded by demons. It plays a lot like Guild Wars with a third-person view and minimal HUD. There are a couple servers, similar to World of Warcraft, with characters being unable to be played in multiple servers. However, there are very few (three I think, with one being a test server). In each server, there are a few, although I don’t know how many, instances of each town or outpost. I do not know how to switch freely between them, but you can make portals to party members, allowing you to travel to their instance. This resembles Guild Wars’s districts feature, although there is no menu in Hellgate. Also like Guild Wars, when you leave a city, you are in an instance with only yourself and your party. Most characters only have a few skills they need to use, and characters can never have the number of skills that’s normal in World of Warcraft. The attribute system is similar to Diablo II, but I like the twist that each individual item requires a certain number of stats to use it, and this requirement stacks with other items’ requirements. In other words, if you have 30 strength and two weapons that each require 20 strength, you will not be able to use both at once. The game’s skills use a tree system like that of Diablo II. Rather than fighting a couple monsters at a time like in Guild Wars or World of Warcraft, you fight a huge amount at once, as in Diablo II. Also similar to Diablo II, Hellgate is a clickfest, without the “attack until enemy is dead” features of Guild Wars or World of Warcraft. Hellgate: London also borrows one feature from World of Warcraft that I’m very pleased with – jumping. It’s just fun. The game severely lacks of emotes though. While I wouldn’t think they were that important, I got very used to using them. I think World of Warcraft does emotes best. Not only can characters in Warcraft do a wide variety of actions, they can target other people for their actions. Hellgate: London really needs this feature.
The story is interesting but could definitely be better. Demons begin to invade London, and mankind quickly learns that conventional weaponry is ineffective. Luckily, the Templar, living in secret, underground complexes, have been training for thousands of years to battle the demons. They are joined in their efforts by the Cabalists, those who seek to control the demons, and the Hunters, who use modified projectile weaponry to hunt demons. After most of the Templar forces, who lead the battle, are lost, you play the a pivotal role in attempting to find and exploit a weakness in the demons’ onslaught. The story is very good in the graphic novel and novel but is told rather slowly through the game. There are occasions where you lose control of your character to see the story continued, but usually the story is pushed further through quest dialog.
Let’s discuss the bad before the particularly good. The installation of the game took a long time. You have to make an account in the installer in a frame that loads the official site. During installation on launch day, the site was having a lot of problems, sometimes logging me out or not refreshing correctly. When I finally got into the game, I found that after typing my user name and password, I can’t simply press enter, I have to use my mouse to hit the enter button. Then, after a good minute of loading, I get to the character select screen. Afterwards I get to sit through another loading screen while I wait for the game. I understand that the information needs to be loaded, but I really wished they did some things better. Other games do not take that long to load character select. I’d think they could speed it up by loading my character list and allowing me to see this list before loading character models. Also, Guild Wars allows you to log out fully or log out to the character select screen. This would be nice, but Hellgate makes you log out completely.
Secondly, the interface is awkward. There’s a little icon that changes color when you receive messages. You either have to click this to make the chat window appear or press ‘~’. Most people I know didn’t even know you could press ‘~’ to open it. This is a problem because using the mouse is very annoying. Because the game uses the mouse to look around and the left and right mouse buttons to shoot, to use the cursor, you have to hold alt. Yes, that’s everytime you want to use the cursor unless in a menu. The cursor also feels like it’s “gliding” on ice. It slows down as I stop moving the mouse and speeds up at the beginning, making it hard to be completely accurate. There’s a slight lag with the mouse, which actually doesn’t occur on a better computer I tried, but still, the lag with my 1.9 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, 128 MB GeForce Go 6600 is annoying. I realize the computer isn’t exactly up to gaming standards, but I think it should be able to handle mouse movement. The worst part of the interface is that things seem to get stuck. If someone invites me to a party while I’m in my inventory panel, I can’t click ignore, deny, nor accept. Closing the inventory screen doesn’t rectify the problem either. I have to log out to force the window to go away.
There are also a couple gameplay issues. Firstly, I get stuck way too often. I get stuck probably once an hour or so. Luckily, typing “/stuck” will warp me to the beginning of the instance, but still, this is annoying also. Similarly, sometimes, especially in towns, I will suddenly appear at the entrance to the zone. In towns this seems to happen to everyone at the same time, causing everyone to be standing at the exact same location. What’s more annoying is that if I teleport while using my stash, the stash will still be open; however, I won’t be able to move things around in my stash because my character’s no longer near it. Of course, being that my inventory window is up, I don’t even notice that I teleported.
The worst error in the game is that sometimes when changing zones in an instance, a player will sometimes not be able to see the other player in his or her party. I’ve only been in parties of two or three, but I know that sometimes a player won’t see others but will be able to be seen, and two players won’t be able to see each other at all. Despite of this, they will still be in the same instance because one player’s shots will be seen by the other, monsters will be seemingly fighting thin air, the “invisible” player’s summons will be present, etc. I don’t really know a way to fix that problem.
There are some positives though. Most obviously, the game looks great and sounds nice. The graphics are very nice. A dark, horrific setting in an action-RPG with this level of detail is new and not what I’m used to compared to other MMOs. The music is very fitting for the action-packed, eerie setting.
What I like most about the game is what’s referred to as the mini-game. In the bottom-right corner are three icons that represent tasks the player must complete. These are either to find a certain number of a certain type of item, complete a certain number of quests or primary quests, kill a certain number of a certain type of monster, or kill a certain number of enemies with a particular type of damage. When all three of these tasks are completed, a small jingle will play, and the player will be rewarded with some drops of moderate quality. Plus, the jingle that plays is very catchy, a reward in itself! The second interesting game mechanic is the weapon upgrading and damage types. First, weapons have can either do direct damage, splash damage, or field damage. Direct hurts only the enemy you hit. Splash hurts the enemy and surrounding enemies. Field damage creates a field on the ground that hurts enemies that walk through it. There are also five types of damage – physical, fire, electrical, spectral, and toxic. Weapons have upgrade slots of different types that allow them to put upgrade components in them. This is similar to upgrade parts or runes in Guild Wars or sockets and gems in Diablo II. These can be removed cheaply without worry of destroying either the upgrade components or the weapons, leaving the player free to upgrade items in this way without worry. These upgrade components affect your luck, damage, critical chance, critical damage, type of damage, chance to inflict status effects, etc. You can also upgrade a weapon using “parts” found by dismantling weapons and armor you don’t need. I choose to dismantle everything I don’t need rather than sell. Upgrading in this way raises damage. The final way to upgrade a weapon is to augment it. You can choose to add a common, uncommon, or rare attribute to a weapon, each category costing more than the previous. I have heard that you can only add five to each weapon so it’s better to add rares, although this is very costly. These can do a wide variety of things to a weapon.
Personally, I like to try to make a weapon, if two-handed, or two weapons, if dual wielding, that do all five types of damage. This is done by adding upgrade components of each type. After creating the perfect weapon, you no longer have to switch weapons to complete the mini-game. This upgrade system is very interesting, giving different ways to upgrade weapons. Because some cost a lot of money and some very little, it allows you to upgrade weapons even if you’re low on funds or, on the other hand, to upgrade it in a different way if you have the money but not the components or parts.
All in all, Hellgate: London is nothing new. It definitely doesn’t have the polish of the three games it resembles. However, if you liked those games, you’ll probably like this one. It does put twists on the old formulas with the features I talked about above. Hellgate: London will not be as memorable as Diablo II, Guild Wars, nor World of Warcraft; however, sometimes you need to mix things up, and you can’t keep playing the same games forever. It’s a nice addition to PC action-RPGs.
Although I do have to admit, I think what I’ve liked most about Hellgate: London was the novel and graphic novel.
I’m Anargirou, Adios, and Ganelon on Shulgoth. Look me up! I’ve also posted this review on GameFAQs.