Mark Danger Chen

[Edit: Aug 29, 2007] For some reason, this page is my most popular page! I figure I should update it and write a bit more about each game if I can. New to this list are DS games and PlayStation 2 games (since Jen Stone, my old adviser, gave me hers when she left!).

Summer 2007:

• PC:
  • Tomb Raider: Anniversary - not as good as Tomb Raider: Legend. For some reason I think Legend had me much more interested in the story. I was able to watch the documentary on the second DVD that comes with the collector’s edition, and that was pretty good, actually.
  • World of Warcraft - this thing will never die… Stopped raiding for the time being to concentrate on grinding for gold and rep to get an epic flying mount.
  • Sam n Max season 1 - I *almost* got a GameTap subscription when the episodic Sam n Max sequel started last year. Being a huge fan of the original comic book, the cartoon, and the original LucasArts game, I was really excited about this. But I just didn’t have time, so instead waited for the whole season 1 box set. Get it! It is good (though Robin and I have only played the first 3 so far).
• DS:
  • Pokemon Diamond - not actually that good, imo. Kind of boring… and the idea of collecting them all just doesn’t appeal to me.
  • Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales - the beginning seems pretty fun. Haven’t gotten very far yet. This would be a great entry game for newbie gamers, I think. It’s cute and features little mini-games.
• PS2:
  • Dragon Quest 8 - This is an excellent console-style RPG with some good humor thrown in. I can see why Japanese productivity slows to a crawl any time a new Dragon Quest game comes out.

Spring 2007:

• DS:
  • Etrian Dynasty - One of the dangers of playing a pirate version of a game is that sometimes near the end, the game will bug out and you can’t really get any further. (Please take this as discouragement for piracy.) It was fun drawing maps. I might pick it up once I get more than student wages.
  • Contact - ditto
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - I love the Phoenix Wright games, though, I felt like the last scenario of the first game was tacked on as it involved a whole bunch of different supporting characters .
  • Phoenix Wright 2: And Justice for All - Good game, but not as interesting as the first because it wasn’t new anymore and they didn’t add new things, really. The 3D CSI-type stuff was fun, but it only appeared in one of the episodes… :(
    
  • Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime - What a goofy fun little game!
    
• PC:
  • World of Warcraft - mostly raided Karazhan during the spring quarter…
  • Lord of the Rings Online - Very fun game that emphasizes story more than loot (for a nice change of pace from WoW). I have an active subscription here, but unfortunately no time to play… :)

Winter 2007:

• DS:
  • Final Fantasy 3 - This DS remake got me interested in the rest of the series, but I haven’t yet checked the rest out.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap - fantastic GameBoy Advance game. I wrote about it in my general exams.
• PC:
  • Runaway 2 - much better than the first!
  • Neverwinter Nights 2 - I got this hoping the multiplayer would be fun, but it sucked! The main story was fine, but the coop implementation was really tacked on.
  • World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade! stuff is actually pretty fun and breathed new life into the game. Unfortunately, the 10-man raid Karazhan pretty much killed cross-guild endeavors and served to insulate groups of players from each other.

Fall 2006:

• DS:
  • Advance Wars: Dual Strike - my first game as soon as I got the DS. I love tactical combat games, and this was well worth it.
• PC:
  • World of Warcraft
  • Gothic 3 - not as good as the second… or at least, I dunno… maybe Oblivion raised the bar. Ya think? :)

[Edit: June 15, 2007] Wow… a whole year went by and I didn’t update this page! Uh… I’ve been preoccupied with caring about people… but I’ll update this soon. Promise.

When I first started grad school, I was trying to catalog the games I’ve played by quarter. There was a lapse during 2005, mostly due to the all-consuming World of Warcraft, but I’m going to start again and also try to fill in retrospectively. Some of these games I’ve finished to completion, some of them I’ve played about 10 hours. There are some games I’ve played for an hour or two which I have not included. Note that all of these games are PC games. I didn’t include the many boardgames I’ve started to get into nor the fact that I bought a Nintendo DS in August 2006.

Summer 2006:

• Beyond Good and Evil - This was really good! Unfortunately, the mouse Y-axis could not be inverted without ALSO inverting the X-axis. WTF? But, it made me think about why I play inverted, and I visualized a hand on the back of my head moving my head up and down, but since this conceptualization didn’t work for the side-to-side motion, I was able to retrain myself into thinking of a hand moving around on the top of the monitor instead. In other words, this game got me to break my inverted Y-axis preference of 18 years.
• Tomb Raider: Legend - Just for kicks, I also tried Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness… for about an hour. Man, that game sucks. The controls mean everything in a game like Tomb Raider. Legend was quite good.
• Runaway: A Road Adventure - Read my take on this game.
• Broken Sword 4: Angel of Death - Great start, horrible ending.
• Warlords IV - For some reason, my memories of playing Warlords II with dormies can never be recreated… Those were good times. The fourth version of the game itself is better than the second, but social context matters, and I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to recapture that moment.
• Darkstar One - Soooo linear. Read more.
• X3: Reunion - Soooo buggy. Read more.
• The Ur-Quan Masters - A friend of mine tipped me to an open source port of the original Star Control 2. OMG, this game is good. If you haven’t played it, do so. The characterization of different alien races is hilarious and imaginative.
• MechCommander 2 - Also released to the open source community. I used to play BattleTech in high school (and BattleDroids before that).
• Escape Velocity Nova - Decided to finally check out what Mac gamers keep saying is a great game. It is.
• Sword of the Stars
• Nancy Drew games

Spring 2006

• World of Warcraft
• Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Easily the best single player RPG in a long time. I don’t agree with Jon Goodwin’s statement that it is linear.
• The Godfather
• Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - This is the second time after several years that I’ve tried playing this game but only getting so far… As soon as I hit Vivec, I am overwhelmed at the size of the city and how many NPCs there are and trying to find the few that actually have unique conversations.
  
• Dreamfall: The Longest Journey - great story but it relies on cut-scenes which were unpolished… Also, ends in a cliff-hanger which I think is dangerous for adventure games.
• Hitman Blood Money - I’ve always loved the Hitman series. The best one was Silent Assassin, though (see my comparison between Hitman 2 and Splinter Cell). I thought the story about how 47 wanted out of the business but was forced back into it by trying to save his friend was a great one even if cliche. Contracts, the third one, wasn’t as interesting because it was basically all flashback. And now Blood Money is essentially all flashback too, or maybe you could say the funeral interstitials are flashfowards. Either way, I think showing us where the end is in a game isn’t as effective as it is for TV and movies since player control and dependence is counter to predestination.

Winter 2006

• World of Warcraft
• Gun - played this to see what the controversy was about. People saying that this game should be banned for its portrayal of Native Americans are overstating things… They are portrayed as two-dimensional, sure… but that’s pretty much describing all humans in almost any computer game. The fact that some of them are bad guys has to be taken in relation to the fact that a whole lotta white guys are bad in this game, too.
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
• XIII - I played this game to see if it was a viable game for deaf people to play since sound effects are represented visually because the game uses cel-shading and onomatopoeias for sounds (”tap tap tap” for footsteps, eg). I think it would be hard since a lot of the sounds AREN’T represented visually, but it’s still a fun game.
• Space Rangers 2
• Galactic Civilizations 2
• FEAR
  
• Dungeons & Dragons Online - The dungeons are amazingly well-crafted. The outside world isn’t.

Fall 2005 (from memory)

• World of Warcraft
• Neverwinter Nights: Kingmaker
• Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy)
  
• Still Life - which I thought was the best adventure game of 2005, better than Fahrenheit. Still Life had a better story and the CSI-like stuff was fun. Fahrenheit had really innovative gameplay but the story fell apart at the end.
• Syberia 2
• Moment of Silence
• X-Men Legends 2
• Fable - “heeero” “ooo, Maleficus” hahaha

Summer 2005 (from memory)

• World of Warcraft
• old Lucasarts games (Loom, Zak McKraken and the Alien Mind-Benders, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Maniac Mansion Deluxe, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Escape from Monkey Island, Full Throttle)
• lots of other old school adventure games (Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword I and II)
• indie Adventure Game Studio games
• Discworld 2
• Discworld Noir - Really compelling story, and I love how each place is revisited after The Change.
• Martin Mystere
• Metal Hearts - was hoping this game would feed my Fallout need, but it sucked.
• Hitman Contracts
  

Spring 2005 (from memory)

• World of Warcraft
• Need for Speed Underground 2
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
• Thief 3
• LEGO Star Wars
• Psychonauts - Wow. Tim Schafer is God.
• Knights of the Old Republic 2 - Unfortunately, it doesn’t live up to the original, but it is still a good game.

Winter 2005 (from memory)

• World of Warcraft
• Freelancer - I played the demo and assumed to save space for the demo they had all the NPCs have the same voice and character model. Apparently, it’s just how the game is.
• The Sting! - You’ve probably never heard of this game. Check it out. A play/pause plan (kind of like RoboRally) heist game. It is pretty neat.
• Evil Genius
• Chaos League - I love the board game Blood Bowl and this was a pretty fun computer game in the same genre.
• Pirates! - Wow, this game is addicting… I had to uninstall it to force myself from playing.

Fall 2004

• Rome: Total War
• Kingdom of Loathing
• World of Warcraft
• Baldur’s Gate 2 - My friends and I decided to play this coop style, but after a month, WoW came out and all else was left by the wayside.
• Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines
• Half-Life 2

Summer 2004

• Planescape: Torment - An RPG driven by dialog. Really well done. I wish all NPCs were given this much back story to explore.
• Gothic 2 - Fun game! Overlooked.
• City of Heroes - The quests were cookie-cutter, random but jumping around and designing superheroes was great fun.
• Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns - Why can’t other RTSes have units which think for themselves??
• Baldur’s Gate 2 - decided to replay one of the best RPGs ever. What is so good about it, It think is that each character class has its own subquests and that each quest and story was very compelling and offered interesting moral and ethical choices.
• Far Cry
• Kohan 2: Kings of War
• Codename Panzers
• Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War
• Rome: Total War
• Kingdom of Loathing

Spring 2004

• Neverwinter Nights
• Star Wars Galaxies
• Call of Duty
• Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield
• Planetside
• Lineage 2 beta - The first thing that happened to me after leaving the starting building was get ganked. Not fun.
• Lineage - The games reading group at UW College of Education decided to play this game together, but we found it too difficult to meet up in-game and dropped it.

Winter 2004

• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - This game changed my graduate school trajectory and put me on the PhD track.
• Deus Ex: Invisible War
• Neverwinter Nights
• Horizons: Empire of Istaria - No one else I knew was playing this, so I had no reason to stay.
• Star Wars Galaxies - The friends I play online games with and I decided we would try to make money in SWG. It didn’t happen since the game was devoid of soul, but I didn’t predict well and got a 6 month subscription. I only played for about 2 months.

Fall 2003

• Icewind Dale 2
• Heroes of Might and Magic IV
• Silent Storm - My favorite genre in the 90s was turned based squad-level tactical combat. Games like X-COM and Jagged Alliance were great. Silent Storm was great, too, but didn’t flow as well.
• Hidden and Dangerous - This was released for free and 3 of my friends and I played it coop style. Great fun.
• Hidden and Dangerous 2 - Stupidly, the developers didn’t include a coop mode for their sequel. WTF?
• Call of Duty - I had the most visceral, heart-pounding experience ever in this game’s team vs. team mode.
• Neverwinter Nights
• Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates - fun game but didn’t draw me in for longer than a couple of months… I think because it seemed like a bunch of people doing their own thing, where there really was little collaborative play. Too bad, I bought Robin and me year-long subscriptions.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic