Insecticide part 1

Picked this up off steam this weekend. Its from Crackpot Entertainment. The fourth Lucasarts adventure days splinter group. The leads are Mike Levine (the art director from a lot of the older games like Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Sam & Max Hit the Road) and Larry Ahern the designer of the 3rd monkey island game; The Curse of Monkey Island. I had high hopes. Insecticide has some imagination behind it and there probably is a decent game in there trying to get out. The world at the early dialog are engaging. I want to like it. Its just hampered by so many issues.

The controls are very clunky and can’t be configured at all.
It tries to be both an adventure game and an action game and does neither very well. In the past, this was almost acceptable but its been proven you can have a decent action adventure game. oddly enough, while the DS version was a decent adventure game with crappy arcade segments, the pc version is a decent action game with crappy adventure segments.
You can only save at the completing of the level.
The videos are super low res and highly compressed.

I will play and finish it, but I really wouldn’t recomend it to anyone. Even at the $15 price.

So is the DS version worth playing?

I was thinking of buying this. Thanks for saving me money.

Things aren’t going so well for Gameock, are they? If your platform as a publisher is “we leave control of the games to the developers, so that as a publisher we don’t fuck things up,” and they still can’t put out games that are any better (or even noticably different) from what a more mainstream publisher does, well, what market niche does that leave them, exactly?

Insecticide is one of those really frustrating games. Really nice world. Good sense of character. Decent production values. Makes Psychonauts look like Super Mario Galaxy. The adventure bits on PC are really fiddly and claustrophobic too.

Don’t know about the DS, but I was really disappointed by the PC one.

I see this type of thing around here fairly often. Would you really base your purchasing decision on the opinion of one gamer?

Utterly conventional platformer with a somewhat charming wrapper, resulting in overlong cutscenes. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Don’t take my word for it.

If he’d written something like ‘Insecticide sucks’ then I might have dismissed his opinion. Since he described the faults of the game in what seems like a balanced manner why shouldn’t I.
If they bothered with a demo I might have tried it anyway, but since they didn’t I see no reason to risk 15$.

People make purchasing decisions based on zero outside opinions all the time… Plenty of decisions are made based on box art or title alone. I don’t see how adding one more bit of information suddenly invalidates the conclusion.

True, but that’s not necessarily a good thing, now is it?

To each their own I guess. The thing is, marxeil indicated that he was thinking of buying this game. I don’t know what his reasons were, but I assume it’s because he thought it might be a fun game. To then decide to not get the game based on the opinion of just one gamer seems a bit odd to me.

Not to rag on Rob, but some of the stuff he described was rather subjective. For example, he says the controls are sluggish. But what does that mean? I could say the controls are sluggish in Battlefield 2, but are they really? Compared to what? Compared to Quake? Sure. But the slower controls are by design and not a bad thing in mine and many other people’s opinion.

I could list plenty of reasons why someone shouldn’t buy a game like, say, BioShock. Most of it would be pretty subjective. And, fortunately, for its legion of fans, mine wasn’t the only voice to be heard when it came to judging the game’s quality. We all have our opinions afterall…

I guess you are right, and I shouldn’t make a decision based on a single opinion. Since others here gave the same opinion the question is moot - no sale.
Oh - and I thought of buying it because the screen shots reminded me Psychonauts.