kane_magus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kane_magus) wrote2009-01-10 09:17 pm
kane_magus) wrote2009-01-10 09:17 pm
Entry tags:
A Vampyre Story
I mentioned it earlier, but I finally got this game a few days ago and just finished it tonight. (And no, this is not why I stayed home from work, because I didn't get it until I went out for food on Thursday evening and checked the mail on the way back in.)
First things first: if you like old-school, point-and-click adventure games, particularly ones like Monkey Island, Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, and such, then you will probably like this game too. I would definitely recommend it.
With that out of the way, here's some more in-depth discussion and a few nitpicks of the game.
There is an inventory feature used in this game where, for some items, instead of picking up the item and carrying it around with her, Mona (the main character) would instead carry around the "idea" (all blue and translucent) of this item. For instance, instead of carrying around a heavy mace all the time, she would "keep it in mind" in case she needed to use it later.
First nitpick. Now, on the surface, this seemed pretty cool and a bit more realistic. In practice, it quickly became annoying. Why? Because when you finally found a place where you needed to use the item, instead of simply using the item, they would actually show Mona going back to the room where the item was, picking up the item, and then going back to where she planned to use it. Thankfully, it was just a bat-transformation teleport directly to the rooms in question, rather than actually walking, room-to-room, back to the item, which would have been utterly ridiculous, but it was still rather annoying even so. Later on, when you had to combine two of these idea items into a third such idea item, when you finally used that one, you had to watch her go back to two separate other locations to pick up the two previously remembered items, and then come back to the third area where they were meant to be used. Again, it was a cool notion at first, but in practice I kind of just wish they'd gone with the standard practice of actually picking up everything that isn't nailed down and carrying it around with them. Or, at least, just do away with the unnecessary showing of going back to retrieve the item, because that was the annoying part.
The concept of these "idea" items worked much better when using Froderick, the bat companion, with other items in the inventory, in that you would get a new third item that was the idea of him using the other item.
Second nitpick. Right-click was used to bring up the inventory, but it was also used to fast travel to a different area if the cursor happened to be over the hotspot for an exit. Several times throughout the game, I would be trying to bring up the inventory, but would accidentally leave the area and have to come back due to my mouse ending up over an exit hotspot (due to that being where it just happened to be after clicking one of the action buttons or something). It was rather annoying.
Third nitpick. Probably 70-80% of all hotspots in the game have several lines of rather amusing dialog between Mona and Froderick for each action available, those being examine, talk, fly to, and use/take/touch/push/pull/etc, as well as using the Froderick inventory item. By the way, the fly to option is when Mona transforms into a bat and, well, flies to the hotspot, but the vast majority of the time there's just some sort of banter between Mona and Froderick about why she won't fly to whatever. Now, here's my actual nitpick with this. After being trained early on to click every single action and the Froderick item icon on every single hotspot in the game in order to hear some bit of story or pop culture reference or some other bit of amusing dialog, whether that hotspot ultimately ended up being useless or not (most of them are useless, aside from as dialog generators), it got somewhat annoying when, later in the game, more and more of these hotspots seemed to just use the generic "I can't really talk to that" or "Flying is so overrated" or "I can't use Froderick with that" throw-away lines attached to them.
On the bright side, simply pressing the Tab key will highlight all of the hotspots in a given area, so there's no pixel hunting. At least, the ones that are visible from your current vantage point, as you may need to move to either edge of an area to get the camera to scroll around so that more of them become visible. This tripped me up early in the game, in Mona's upstairs bedroom. Had I not just recently played Simon the Sorcerer 2 (I still haven't finished that, come to think of it), which had the same feature, I would have found it to be all the more neat. However, it's rather... daunting when you first go into a new area and see a dozen or two hotspots appear, most of which are just there for fluff. In fact, this is the exact opposite problem from Simon the Sorcerer 2, when you would enter a new area and be largely underwhelmed by the mere three or four hotspots at most that would usually be there.
Finally, the fourth nitpick, possibly the biggest one. The game ends on a frickin' cliffhanger. Apparently, this game is the first in a three part series, which I found out afterward. Nothing that I recall reading about this game prior to getting it seemed to mention this fact, but when I started the game and it had a "Chapter One" subtitle in the opening credits, which again isn't anywhere on the game box itself, it raised an eyebrow. Sure enough, "Mona and Froderick will return in A Vampyre Story 2" greeted me at the end of the credits. As long as they actually make the subsequent games, this won't be much of a problem, aside from the wait time, but... Gabriel Knight 3... Shenmue 2... much gnashing of teeth. (EDIT) And, of course, the sequels never got made, in this case. *weary sigh* (/EDIT)
First things first: if you like old-school, point-and-click adventure games, particularly ones like Monkey Island, Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, and such, then you will probably like this game too. I would definitely recommend it.
With that out of the way, here's some more in-depth discussion and a few nitpicks of the game.
There is an inventory feature used in this game where, for some items, instead of picking up the item and carrying it around with her, Mona (the main character) would instead carry around the "idea" (all blue and translucent) of this item. For instance, instead of carrying around a heavy mace all the time, she would "keep it in mind" in case she needed to use it later.
First nitpick. Now, on the surface, this seemed pretty cool and a bit more realistic. In practice, it quickly became annoying. Why? Because when you finally found a place where you needed to use the item, instead of simply using the item, they would actually show Mona going back to the room where the item was, picking up the item, and then going back to where she planned to use it. Thankfully, it was just a bat-transformation teleport directly to the rooms in question, rather than actually walking, room-to-room, back to the item, which would have been utterly ridiculous, but it was still rather annoying even so. Later on, when you had to combine two of these idea items into a third such idea item, when you finally used that one, you had to watch her go back to two separate other locations to pick up the two previously remembered items, and then come back to the third area where they were meant to be used. Again, it was a cool notion at first, but in practice I kind of just wish they'd gone with the standard practice of actually picking up everything that isn't nailed down and carrying it around with them. Or, at least, just do away with the unnecessary showing of going back to retrieve the item, because that was the annoying part.
The concept of these "idea" items worked much better when using Froderick, the bat companion, with other items in the inventory, in that you would get a new third item that was the idea of him using the other item.
Second nitpick. Right-click was used to bring up the inventory, but it was also used to fast travel to a different area if the cursor happened to be over the hotspot for an exit. Several times throughout the game, I would be trying to bring up the inventory, but would accidentally leave the area and have to come back due to my mouse ending up over an exit hotspot (due to that being where it just happened to be after clicking one of the action buttons or something). It was rather annoying.
Third nitpick. Probably 70-80% of all hotspots in the game have several lines of rather amusing dialog between Mona and Froderick for each action available, those being examine, talk, fly to, and use/take/touch/push/pull/etc, as well as using the Froderick inventory item. By the way, the fly to option is when Mona transforms into a bat and, well, flies to the hotspot, but the vast majority of the time there's just some sort of banter between Mona and Froderick about why she won't fly to whatever. Now, here's my actual nitpick with this. After being trained early on to click every single action and the Froderick item icon on every single hotspot in the game in order to hear some bit of story or pop culture reference or some other bit of amusing dialog, whether that hotspot ultimately ended up being useless or not (most of them are useless, aside from as dialog generators), it got somewhat annoying when, later in the game, more and more of these hotspots seemed to just use the generic "I can't really talk to that" or "Flying is so overrated" or "I can't use Froderick with that" throw-away lines attached to them.
On the bright side, simply pressing the Tab key will highlight all of the hotspots in a given area, so there's no pixel hunting. At least, the ones that are visible from your current vantage point, as you may need to move to either edge of an area to get the camera to scroll around so that more of them become visible. This tripped me up early in the game, in Mona's upstairs bedroom. Had I not just recently played Simon the Sorcerer 2 (I still haven't finished that, come to think of it), which had the same feature, I would have found it to be all the more neat. However, it's rather... daunting when you first go into a new area and see a dozen or two hotspots appear, most of which are just there for fluff. In fact, this is the exact opposite problem from Simon the Sorcerer 2, when you would enter a new area and be largely underwhelmed by the mere three or four hotspots at most that would usually be there.
Finally, the fourth nitpick, possibly the biggest one. The game ends on a frickin' cliffhanger. Apparently, this game is the first in a three part series, which I found out afterward. Nothing that I recall reading about this game prior to getting it seemed to mention this fact, but when I started the game and it had a "Chapter One" subtitle in the opening credits, which again isn't anywhere on the game box itself, it raised an eyebrow. Sure enough, "Mona and Froderick will return in A Vampyre Story 2" greeted me at the end of the credits. As long as they actually make the subsequent games, this won't be much of a problem, aside from the wait time, but... Gabriel Knight 3... Shenmue 2... much gnashing of teeth. (EDIT) And, of course, the sequels never got made, in this case. *weary sigh* (/EDIT)