Psychonauts for Windows
- ESRB Descriptor: Cartoon Violence Crude Humor Language
- ESRB Rating: T - (Teen)
- Publisher: Majesco
- Genre: Action Adventure
- Platform: Windows
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You'll Need a Psychonaut If You Want to Play This with Keyboard and Mouse
Pros
You will fall in love with some of the characters. Humorous and creative.
Cons
Very hard to control with a keyboard and mouse. Serious sound problems. Dated graphics.
Recommended it?
No
The Bottom Line:
The PC version is not the same great game that's on the Xbox and PS2
Two facts made me want to try Psychonauts. One: the game is made by Tim Schafer, the man behind one of my favorite PC games of all time: Grim Fandango. And two: people with a PlayStation 2 and an Xbox have been calling it the best game they've ever played. Well I don't own a PlayStation 2 or an Xbox, or any other gaming system. I've never felt the need to buy a machine made solely for video games when I have a computer to store my life in. So I decided if I was going to play Psychonauts, it was going to be the PC version. Don't make the same mistake as me. There have been rave reviews all over the place for Psychonauts, and they may be well deserved on the gaming consoles, but Psychonauts for Windows is clearly flawed.
The main problem is that Psychonauts is a 3D platformer game, designed for game controllers, rather than an adventure game (like Grim Fandango), designed for a keyboard and mouse. Controlling your character in Psychonauts is never easy on the computer and usually this is not an issue because the combat in the game is very easy but there are a few jumping puzzles that require rather precise movements; those are the moments that can get infuriating. Jumping puzzles are never fun, and I don't know why they keep appearing in games because the best you can hope for with them is that they are pointlessly easy. Unfortunately, the ending of Psychonauts features one long, difficult jumping sequence that made the final impression for the game one of extreme frustration.
My first impression of Psychonauts was also ruined by sound issues, a commonly reported problem for the PC version. Sound files would repeat itself over and over like a broken record and freeze the game while it was skipping. The partial fix to the problem, which I had to go to an online forum to find, was to turn off hardware acceleration for sound. After doing that, the sound problems became rare, but was bad enough on one occassion to actually crash my entire system - I'm not talking about the game shutting itself down, I'm talking about my computer shutting itself down.
But as continued evidence for Mr. Schafer's masterful direction and storytelling, I stuck to this game and played it to completion, a task that took about twenty hours worth of gameplay. Psychonauts is a story with a warm heart, and Raz, the main character, is full of charisma, wit, and innocence. He is ten years old and he escapes his life as a circus performer to check out a camp that trains psychic soldiers. At the camp Raz meets his future first girlfriend, Lily, and of course she gets captured and you must save her. The romance, with its almost Disney-like cuteness, is the only normal thing about Psychonauts and everything else is just absolutely psychotic.
Schafer is an evil genius as he once again puts out a game that is like no game before it. You start off exploring your summer camp and talking to an ecclectic bunch of crazy, and sometimes abrasive kids. And then you start fighting inside people's minds, hence the name Psychonauts. As you go psychonauting, you run into literal representations of mental cobwebs, figments, and emotional baggage. Each mind provides its own crazy settings and unique challenges. Keep in mind, Psychonauts is consistently funny, despite some very serious mental problems and troubled memories these characters have. The game deals with very mature themes in the most cheerful light possible. You want to enter every mind just to see how creative Psychonauts can get with its story.
But staying in a mind can get tedious. There are definite adventure gaming aspects to Psychonauts and some of the more enjoyable aspects of the gameplay is in talking to different characters to get clues and trying to figure out how to put your inventory to use in order to advance in a level. The platformer aspects of the gameplay are what hurts Psychonauts. The combat is incredibly basic. There is no AI to speak of - we are talking devolution into the days of Koopa Troopas, and the game aims automatically for you once you get close enough to fire something at the enemy. Most of the time, running into enemies is a good thing because killing them is easy and they give you health, ammo, and arrowheads (the game's currency) upon death. Dying is usually not a problem because you don't lose a lot progress and you start back at an autosave point. The save feature in Psychonauts is a scam because it just saves at the last autosave point. Where dying and the lack of a real save feature goes from a non-issue to a big problem is during the jumping puzzles, where losing even a little progress can make you want to pull out your hair.
The platform genre is a classical genre, and as such the graphics will not be revolutionary. The look of the game actually reminded me of American McGee's Alice, another game featuring bad jumping puzzles and interesting psychotic characters, but Alice is five years older than Psychonauts. It's supposed to be that the gameplay decides the worth of a platform game, but if that were the case Psychonauts would be pretty terrible. The truth is, even on the PC, Psychonauts is not terrible and the sheer amount of crazy things you can do, the crazy people you can meet, and let's not forget the opportunity to bust Raz's cherry make you want to trudge on in Psychonauts. Raz really is one of the most likeable gaming characters you'll meet, a rare ten year old boy with a heart of gold.
One simple thing I recommend you do if you want to try Psychonauts for Windows is to get a USB game controller. If you're accustomed to playing with a game controller, and you have one, then I would strongly urge you to give Psychonauts a try; it is one wild ride created by a man with a miraculous imagination. I, however, have never really used a game controller before, so getting one probably wouldn't help me. The mouse and keyboard is not the way you want to control Raz in Psychonauts - he deserves better - and so, on my configuration, I reluctantly cannot recommend this game.
The main problem is that Psychonauts is a 3D platformer game, designed for game controllers, rather than an adventure game (like Grim Fandango), designed for a keyboard and mouse. Controlling your character in Psychonauts is never easy on the computer and usually this is not an issue because the combat in the game is very easy but there are a few jumping puzzles that require rather precise movements; those are the moments that can get infuriating. Jumping puzzles are never fun, and I don't know why they keep appearing in games because the best you can hope for with them is that they are pointlessly easy. Unfortunately, the ending of Psychonauts features one long, difficult jumping sequence that made the final impression for the game one of extreme frustration.
My first impression of Psychonauts was also ruined by sound issues, a commonly reported problem for the PC version. Sound files would repeat itself over and over like a broken record and freeze the game while it was skipping. The partial fix to the problem, which I had to go to an online forum to find, was to turn off hardware acceleration for sound. After doing that, the sound problems became rare, but was bad enough on one occassion to actually crash my entire system - I'm not talking about the game shutting itself down, I'm talking about my computer shutting itself down.
But as continued evidence for Mr. Schafer's masterful direction and storytelling, I stuck to this game and played it to completion, a task that took about twenty hours worth of gameplay. Psychonauts is a story with a warm heart, and Raz, the main character, is full of charisma, wit, and innocence. He is ten years old and he escapes his life as a circus performer to check out a camp that trains psychic soldiers. At the camp Raz meets his future first girlfriend, Lily, and of course she gets captured and you must save her. The romance, with its almost Disney-like cuteness, is the only normal thing about Psychonauts and everything else is just absolutely psychotic.
Schafer is an evil genius as he once again puts out a game that is like no game before it. You start off exploring your summer camp and talking to an ecclectic bunch of crazy, and sometimes abrasive kids. And then you start fighting inside people's minds, hence the name Psychonauts. As you go psychonauting, you run into literal representations of mental cobwebs, figments, and emotional baggage. Each mind provides its own crazy settings and unique challenges. Keep in mind, Psychonauts is consistently funny, despite some very serious mental problems and troubled memories these characters have. The game deals with very mature themes in the most cheerful light possible. You want to enter every mind just to see how creative Psychonauts can get with its story.
But staying in a mind can get tedious. There are definite adventure gaming aspects to Psychonauts and some of the more enjoyable aspects of the gameplay is in talking to different characters to get clues and trying to figure out how to put your inventory to use in order to advance in a level. The platformer aspects of the gameplay are what hurts Psychonauts. The combat is incredibly basic. There is no AI to speak of - we are talking devolution into the days of Koopa Troopas, and the game aims automatically for you once you get close enough to fire something at the enemy. Most of the time, running into enemies is a good thing because killing them is easy and they give you health, ammo, and arrowheads (the game's currency) upon death. Dying is usually not a problem because you don't lose a lot progress and you start back at an autosave point. The save feature in Psychonauts is a scam because it just saves at the last autosave point. Where dying and the lack of a real save feature goes from a non-issue to a big problem is during the jumping puzzles, where losing even a little progress can make you want to pull out your hair.
The platform genre is a classical genre, and as such the graphics will not be revolutionary. The look of the game actually reminded me of American McGee's Alice, another game featuring bad jumping puzzles and interesting psychotic characters, but Alice is five years older than Psychonauts. It's supposed to be that the gameplay decides the worth of a platform game, but if that were the case Psychonauts would be pretty terrible. The truth is, even on the PC, Psychonauts is not terrible and the sheer amount of crazy things you can do, the crazy people you can meet, and let's not forget the opportunity to bust Raz's cherry make you want to trudge on in Psychonauts. Raz really is one of the most likeable gaming characters you'll meet, a rare ten year old boy with a heart of gold.
One simple thing I recommend you do if you want to try Psychonauts for Windows is to get a USB game controller. If you're accustomed to playing with a game controller, and you have one, then I would strongly urge you to give Psychonauts a try; it is one wild ride created by a man with a miraculous imagination. I, however, have never really used a game controller before, so getting one probably wouldn't help me. The mouse and keyboard is not the way you want to control Raz in Psychonauts - he deserves better - and so, on my configuration, I reluctantly cannot recommend this game.
