Newsgroup: it.comp.giochi.action
Titolo: Grow Home review

Eurogamer.
 
It can be hard to remember the precise moment that you fall in love 
with a game, but it's comparatively easy to remember the moment you 
realise - yes! - that the game you love is truly worth it. Night had 
fallen, and I was down by the shore, under the shadow of a huge, 
soaring vine. The sea was still - the sea is always still - but at the 
edge of the bay I could spy a cluster of objects bobbing around. Two of 
them in particular stood out to me: football-sized lumps of green 
stuff, glowing gently in the dark. That's the moment. I love Grow Home. 
And it's worth it.
 
I hope it's not a spoiler to say that when Grow Home's short campaign 
reaches its dizzying conclusion, you're left to explore the entire map 
and - if you wish - hunt down eight little doodads that have been 
freshly scattered over it as sort of a grand finale. The doodads are 
seeds, football-sized lumps of green stuff, and they could be anywhere. 
Six of them didn't give me much trouble, but the last two - one perched 
in a cactus, one rolling in the crater of an asteroid - got away from 
me. They really got away from me, actually: 2000 metres of getting 
away. They both ended up in the sea, and the sea in Grow Home is 
deadly. Uselessly, I watched them float about for a bit and then I 
clambered back to the spots where I'd found them. Safe bet, right? 
They're probably on a timer, and they're probably going to regenerate.
 
They didn't regenerate, though, not even when I saved and quit and then 
reloaded everything. Wait! Why would they regenerate? They're in the 
sea. Working a hunch, I went down to a quiet inlet at the heart of the 
map. I looked to the horizon, and then those seeds wobbled into view 
before brushing up on the sand. Of course!
 
http://youtu.be/-yNvcxR61MI
 
 
Systems integrity might not seem like the most striking element of a 
game's design, but it increasingly could be, and it absolutely gets to 
the heart of why Grow Home in particular is so special - why it's a 
children's game built with a real understanding of how a child's world 
should operate. Reflections has constructed this strange and wonderful 
curio around the physics-driven animation system that sees BUD, the 
game's robot hero, tumbling endlessly over himself as he goes about his 
job as a sort of extraterrestrial gardener. The game's central mission 
has him nurturing a vine up out of the golden earth and high into the 
sky as he waits for it to sprout seeds, but the fun of this derives 
from the gloriously physical way he interacts with the world, and the 
gloriously physical world that is always calling out for interaction. 
The physics gives the world a peculiar honesty, which is more fun than 
it sounds. This is a game you can trust.
 
A collection of weighted limbs and body parts drawn together by 
stretchy forces, BUD's part tumbling, staggering drunk, and part 
long-limbed hopping toad. What he really is, in other words, is a 
toddler: huge eyes taking everything in, a rocket strapped to his back 
in place of a rucksack that might carry a battered lunch box or a doll.
 
If BUD's a child, then Grow Home's single, varied, and wonderfully 
generous map is a garden for him to knock about in, and we all know how 
children feel about gardens. It helps that this one is magical: islands 
float in the sky, encouraging you to reach them, waterfalls send 
streams flowing swiftly into the abyss. You start this game on the sand 
and you end it poking around asteroids. In between lurk wonderful 
grottoes to uncover (it's a truly great video game moment when you 
stumble across your first), nutty semi-familiar wildlife to provoke, 
and crazy science fiction plants, some ready to snap you in half, 
others aching to blast you high into the air in a friendly stream of 
neon goop.
 
Like the creators of Mario 64, one of a handful of games that Grow Home 
can't help but remind you of - Crackdown is inevitably another - the 
developers realise that if you build the right landscapes, the fun will 
turn up. The second tier of floating islands is a case in point. 
There's a mountain range, with a snow-covered peak, and there's a hole 
through the centre of the earth where you can jump from rock to rock as 
water races past you. Towards the edge, the ground starts to fray 
rather playfully, gaping holes hidden by rust-coloured trees until 
you're jumping from one lonely spar of turf to the next. There's 
nothing you have to do here, as such, which suggests that everything is 
equally worth doing. I cleared the campaign in two hours, and you will 
probably do it even more quickly, but I've subsequently spent the best 
part of a day on this single chunk of real estate, and much more in the 
world beyond.
 
Tying all this together is the vine that BUD is here to nurture, a 
thick, coiling, muscular presence covered in little shoots that you can 
scamper on to and then trigger into growth, holding tight desperately 
as they race off into the distance. You can steer these sproutlings - 
the idea is to connect them to a series of glowing islands in order to 
send the main stem of the plant spiralling even higher into the sky - 
but they have a bit of personality to them, a bit of fight. What this 
means for the pace of the game is that every few moments, you're off on 
the back of a bucking bronco. What it means for the texture of the game 
is that there's an ideal balance between the world you're given to 
explore and the world you can create as you go. By the time the 
adventure was finished, I felt true ownership of the landscape. I 
hadn't built the waterfalls or scattered the forests over the rocks, 
but I had threaded the sky with a hundred crazy green highways, looping 
across empty space to connect boulders, or terminating, accidentally, 
in the middle of nowhere.
 
All of this would be useless if you couldn't get around, and here's 
where BUD emerges as the centre of the experience again. Taking a leaf 
from games like QWOP or Surgeon Simulator, an initially bewildering 
control scheme sees you directing the tiny red robot around with the 
stick, and then using the triggers or the bumpers to control his left 
and right hands, grasping and ungrasping as you apply and release 
pressure. Unlike QWOP or Surgeon Simulator, though, this is not a 
system in place to create a comedy of cruel awkwardness. Practise your 
pincering and you can move through the world with real skill, each 
grasp, each grip, making this colourful low-poly landscape one of the 
most tactile playgrounds in video games, and bringing the map's highest 
spaces within reach.
 
It's utterly empowering, and the controls, working with the physics 
simulation that gives the game its sense of trustworthiness, ensure 
that Grow Home is the best rock-climbing game I have ever played. I've 
spent hours scampering under cliffs, hanging by a single limb, snapping 
a screenshot and then moving on. What initially drives your exploration 
may not be anything particularly special - for the most part you're 
trying to nurse that central vine, or you're scampering around to 
collect 100 shards of crystal that unlock power-ups lfor your jetpack - 
but the sense of movement is so gloriously real, so uncompromised by 
trickery, that traversal is ultimately its own reward.
 
There's more, of course: witty, evocative audio that sees BUD squeaking 
and chattering like a 56k modem while the vine creaks and rumbles to 
itself beneath him, ominous and organic. There's the art style which 
uses simple colours and those low-poly models to create a world that's 
beautiful, playful, and also filled with the information you need to 
navigate it safely. It offers the cheery geometrical intricacy you get 
in the planes that make up a crumpled ball of paper. There's just 
enough threat, with a few dangerous plants and a fall that will kill 
you unless you grasp hold of something before hitting the ground, and 
there's a gentle upsurge of skymindedness that gathers force as you 
unlock more jetpack power, or tame plants that allow you to glide, or 
to fall at your leisure.
 
Mostly, though, there's the wonderful sense of generous, open-ended fun 
that comes from the convergence of physics and a vertiginous 
playground, that comes from a game that I suspect has built itself 
outwards from its central character, one entertaining decision at a 
time, with no thought for how this will fit into a tidy framework. 
Climbing and collecting - that's a lot of Ubisoft games these days, 
right? But Grow Home feels like it's from the Ubisoft that gave us From 
Dust. (It doesn't hurt - although it is surprising - that it's actually 
from the Ubisoft that gave us the relentlessly upbeat Driver: San 
Francisco.)
 
Free from the claustrophobic Fordism that increasingly robs series like 
Assassin's Creed of their sense of wonder, this is a game that's taken 
shape at its own pace, and that has been allowed to find its own voice. 
Pick a point to aim for and jump. Jump!

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Ora traduci tutto!
-- 
R&G

R&G ha usato la sua tastiera per scrivere :

Es kann schwer sein, den genauen Moment, dass Sie verlieben erinnern
ein Spiel, aber es ist relativ einfach, sobald Sie erkennen, denken Sie 
daran ja! Dass das Spiel, das Sie lieben ist wirklich gelohnt. Es war 
Nacht geworden, und ich war unten am Ufer, im Schatten einer großen, 
steigenden Rebe. das Meer war immer noch - das Meer ist immer noch - 
aber am Rand der Bucht, ich könnte.
 
Spion eine Gruppe von Objekten rund schaukeln. Zwei von ihnen 
insbesondere stand zu mir: Fußballgroßen Klumpen von Grünzeug, sanft 
glühenden in der dunkel. Das ist der Moment. Ich liebe wachsen Start. 
Und es lohnt sich.
 
Ich hoffe, es ist kein Spoiler zu sagen, dass, wenn Wachsen Startseite 
kurze Kampagne seine schwindelerregenden Schluss, so Sie sind links, um 
die gesamte Karte zu erkunden und - wenn Sie es wünschen - die Jagd 
nach acht kleine Doodads, die frisch über sie als eine Art a zerstreut 
worden sein große Finale. Die doodads sind Samen, Fußball großen 
Klumpen von Grünzeug, und wo sie sind. Sechs von ihnen hat mir nicht 
viel Mühe, aber die letzten 2-1 in einem Kaktus gehockt, eine voll in 
den Krater eines Asteroiden - bekam von mir weg. Sie haben wirklich weg 
von mir, tatsächlich: 2000 Meter immer weg. Beide landeten im Meer, und 
das Meer wachsen in Haus ist tödlich. Nutzlos, sah ich sie zu schweben 
ein wenig, und dann kletterte ich zurück zu den Stellen, wo ich sie 
gefunden. Sichere Sache, nicht wahr? Sie sind wahrscheinlich auf einen 
Timer, und sie sind wahrscheinlich zu regenerieren.
 
Systeme Integrität möglicherweise nicht wie das markanteste Element von 
einem Spiel-Design erscheinen, aber es kann immer sein, und es ist 
absolut trifft den Kern, warum wachsen Startseite insbesondere ist das 
Besondere - deshalb ist es ein Kinderspiel mit einem echten Verständnis 
davon, wie gebaut Welt eines Kindes sollte funktionieren. Reflections 
hat diese seltsame und wunderbare Andenken rund um die Physik 
gesteuerte Animationssystem, BUD, das Spiel der Roboter Helden sieht, 
Tumbling endlos über sich selbst gebaut, als er über seine Arbeit als 
eine Art außerirdischer Gärtner geht. Zentrale Aufgabe des Spiels hat 
ihn pflegen einen Weinstock nach oben aus dem goldenen Erde und hoch in 
den Himmel, während er wartet, Samen zu keimen, aber der Spaß von 
dieser leitet sich von der herrlich körperliche Art, wie er mit der 
Welt interagiert, und die herrlich physikalischen Welt, die immer den 
Aufruf erfolgt für die Interaktion. Die Physik gibt der Welt eine 
besondere Ehrlichkeit, die mehr Spaß als es klingt. Dies ist ein Spiel, 
das Sie vertrauen können.
 
Eine Sammlung von gewichteten Gliedmaßen und Körperteile dehnbar Kräfte 
zusammengezogen, BUD ist Teil Taumeln, Staffelung betrunken, und ein 
Teil mit langen Gliedmaßen Hopping Kröte. Was er wirklich ist, mit 
anderen Worten, ist ein Kleinkind: große Augen, die alles, eine Rakete 
auf dem Rücken statt einem Rucksack, der einen verbeulten Lunchpaket 
oder eine Puppe tragen könnte geschnallt.
 
Wenn BUD ist ein Kind, dann wachsen Start-Einzel, abwechslungsreich, 
und wunderbar großzügig Karte ist ein Garten für ihn etwa in zu 
klopfen, und wir alle wissen, wie Kinder über Gärten fühlen. Es hilft, 
dass dies eine magische ist: Inseln schweben in den Himmel und 
ermutigen Sie, sie zu erreichen, Wasserfälle senden Ströme schnell 
fließt in den Abgrund. Sie beginnen das Spiel auf dem Sand, und Sie 
beenden stochern Asteroiden. Dazwischen lauern wunderbaren Grotten zu 
entdecken (es ist eine wirklich große Videospiel-Moment, wenn Sie in 
Ihrem ersten stolpern), nussig halb vertraut Tier zu provozieren, und 
verrückte Science-Fiction-Pflanzen, einige bereit, Sie in einem halben 
Snap, andere Schmerzen, Ihnen zu sprengen hoch in die Luft in einem 
freundlichen Strom von neon goop.
 
Wie der Schöpfer von Mario 64, eines der wenigen Spiele, die wachsen 
Start kann nicht umhin, daran erinnern, - Crackdown ist zwangsläufig 
eine andere - die Entwickler wissen, dass wenn Sie die richtigen 
Landschaften zu bauen, wird der Spaß auftauchen. Die zweite Stufe der 
schwimmenden Inseln ist ein typisches Beispiel. Es gibt eine Bergkette, 
mit einem schneebedeckten Gipfel, und es gibt ein Loch durch das 
Zentrum der Erde, in dem Sie von Rock springen als Wasser Rennen 
Vergangenheit rock you kann. Zum Rand hin, beginnt der Boden zum 
Ausfransen eher spielerisch, klaffende Löcher durch rostfarbenen Bäumen 
versteckt, bis Sie von einem einsamen Holm Rasen zum nächsten springen 
sind. Es gibt nichts, was Sie hier tun, als solche, was darauf 
schließen lässt, dass alles gleich wert, haben. Ich machte den Feldzug 
in zwei Stunden, und Sie werden wahrscheinlich tun es noch schneller, 
aber ich habe dann verbrachte den größten Teil des Tages auf dieser 
einzigen Stück von Immobilien, und vieles mehr in der Welt jenseits.

Nel suo scritto precedente, DLL ha sostenuto :

hai appena fatto piangere un ruggero
 
 

 Mario 64
 
questo si capiva uguale
 
 

Connor MacLeod ha usato la sua tastiera per scrivere :

"Cosi', per la legge del contrabbasso nel culo, vuoi il contrabbasso 
non solo nel tuo, di culo, ma anche nel nostro, per permetterci di 
godere delle inculate come godi tu, perverso masochista statalista e 
talebano vegetariano."

 hai appena fatto piangere un ruggero
 
LOL