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Kneel before Cyberpunk Odin!

In this age of long preview cycles and aggressive PR and marketing campaigns, it can be easy for the video game hype train to go so fast that it flies off the rails. The bigger the game, the bigger the hype, and few titles can ever hope to live up to it. Too Human was a game built on over ten years of increasing hyperbole, and when the game was finally released in 2008 the backlash from gamers and games writers far outpaced the merits of the actual finished product. I’d much rather evaluate games based on their actual strengths and weaknesses as opposed to what they were expected to do, and getting far enough removed from the initial hype allows for that. No, Too Human couldn’t live up to its lofty promises, but it’s also not the atrocity that some people painted it to be.

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Nothing of import detected.

On this, the final episode of Backloggers Anonymous covering Too Human, we discuss the final two missions, the overall plot and story, and dig a little deeper into the issues we had with some of the choices the game designers made. Joaquim gives up on his quest for dragon armor, Julian explains his love/hate relationship with Denis Dyack, and I, now free from pain meds, discusses my difficulty understanding Baldur as a character. Finally, we say our goodbyes and offer our final opinions of our journey though Too Human.

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The first step is admitting you have a problem.

We call it our library, our collection, our pile of shame. They are games we meant to play, meant to finish, or even just meant to take out of the shrink wrap. We had to own them, had to experience them, and yet there they sit collecting dust. Gamers call it their backlog. We call it a problem, and we aim to deal with this problem one meeting at a time. 

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The studio that brought you Legacy of Kain and Eternal Darkness seems to be in trouble.

Embattled developer Silicon Knights has been pretty much out of the news for quite some time now. The company recently shipped X-Men: Destiny out the door with little hype or fanfare, and company front man Denis Dyack has been pretty quiet as of late. But reports that cite credible sources from within the company state that the Canadian game studio has had a round of massive lay-offs.

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I wish my power were to go back in time and not play it.

In the world of video games there are very few intellectual properties that will let you print money as easily as the X-Men line. The game only has to be the least bit decent to get a flock of mutie lovers to come running with cold hard cash in hand. Unfortunately the latest X-Men game was given to developer Silicon Knights which is keeping very much to current form in making games no one wants to play.

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