Shooting Things

Well, I think I've now given the new computer a nice, intensive breaking-in. A friend of mine came over this weekend, and we ended up spending all night playing the Farscape computer game. (Insert your own cancellation-of-Farscape rant here; I'm getting tired of doing it.) We actually made it all the way through, too, although I mainly credit my friend with that accomplishment, as she did most of the actual playing. (As opposed to back-seat playing. As in: "OK, now you should give John the gun because Aeryn's better at hand-to-hand, and, look, you could lay a trap for the bad guys here and..." Frankly, I'm amazed that she never once told me to shut up.) Also, she's far less inclined to just give up when the game starts to get difficult, and thus actually does tend to finish games, unlike yours truly.

As for the game itself, I have rather mixed feelings about it. We did have enough fun with it that I'd have to say it was worth what I paid for it, just for the one full day of entertainment, but there are several things about it that are kind of annoying. For one thing, it's really difficult to navigate. You're provided with a map of your immediate area, but it's a pretty confusing map. And rotating the view of your characters is far too easy to do by accident, and often far too difficult to do correctly when you actually want to. It's very, very easy to become completely disoriented (especially for those of us with no sense of direction, who disorient easily), and, especially on the earlier levels when you're still getting the hang of reading the map, the result often is that you end up doing a lot of very lost wandering-around in the invariably very big, very maze-like environments. Which can get pretty frustrating and/or boring.

It also is pretty much entirely an action game where you just go around shooting things, which doesn't seem to me to be very much in keeping with the spirit of Farscape, even if the show has featured the occasional truly spectacular firefight. I might have expected a Farscape game to be more of a puzzle-oriented adventure game than a shoot-em-up.

Except for that, though, I'd say it does capture a number of elements of the TV show pretty well. A number of canonical bad guys show up looking, sounding and acting as they're supposed to. And the characterization of the regular characters is spot-on. I love the way Chiana will insist on going off by herself in the town marketplace, for example, and then show up later with a weapon she "found." Or Rygel volunteering the group for a combat and then immediately buggering off to a place of safety with a cheery "good luck!"

Some of the environments are fairly cool, too, even if you do get tired of wandering around them after a while. And, once you get far enough that you can afford the really big guns, you can have a lot of fun shooting things. Well, I must admit, I did, and I'm not even generally the "I love to shoot things" type.

Anyway, there ya go, my first game review.