Quick Fixes: Some games I've been touching on

So my issue lately is that I've been playing a few games in small amounts, and don't have enough thoughts on them to do a full on review post. Instead, I decided to cram a few into small little blurbs, with my thoughts so far about them.

A few missions in to this. It seems ok, though its clearly designed for controller use, despite only having 3 buttons you actually use during the game. At the same time, I just can not get my controller to synch up with the game ( a nice standard logitech controller), and thus I'm stuck using the keyboard. With the keyboard, the driving is all kinds of slippy-slidey, and I hurt myself more often than not slamming into objects because of the top down view and limited sight range. You really can't go that fast without slamming into something outright. The game itself isn't bad with the zombie crushing, but the controls and view distance really make it frustrating. You get guns and the like for your car, but its so hard to aim them properly while driving, I often just drive through zombies, then drive backwards and shoot at them.

I downloaded the free DLC "You have to name the expansion pack", which has added some more classes and a bit more variety to the game...and for some reason, wells that completely block hallways. Odd. Anyway, the game is growing on me a bit, I'm still playing with permadeath on because that is how I roll. Still, at the easiest setting, its very easy to get yourself killed on the first floor via bad luck...or on the 20th floor due to bad luck. Either or.

I actually played a bit of this, and I am on the second city. It seems more like a puzzler than anything else, figuring out how to destroy everything with limited tools. Still, the slowdown is horrendous on my computer, and large stages are all kinds of herky-jerky. I can run Dawn of War II with fairly nice graphics, but this thing bogs me down?

I'm actually a big fan of the Metal Gear series, I enjoy the stories and the boss fights are always a blast. My main gripe has always been the stealth elements are boring and tedious, with little midway between that and just dying. Crawling across a large map, inch by inch, stopping and starting to avoid patrols, is just tedious, and the shooting controls are often shoddy and make for poor fighting. This is...pretty much the same. The sneaking requires you crouch and walk slowly across areas, hiding when necessary. Too bad walking slowly requires you press your thumb ever so slightly on the PSP's tiny joystick, and hold it there for up to a minute at a time, praying you don't shift slightly further and accidentally run. The shooting controls are junk too, on the most natural setting you have to hold down the right bumper, use the camera controls to aim (which is the right buttons) and then press the down key to shoot...if you want to move while shooting, you have to use the joystick at the same time. I may fiddle with the control settings a bit, and there is a tiny bit of auto-aim, but dammit, if you don't have twin sticks, you need -way- more assist, or fewer buttons to press to hold it like this.

Almost forgot this one. Bought this a long time ago when I first got my PS3, and haven't played it in a long time. Finally started to sit down and play one game at a time, slowly learning the later stages (already have the first rhythms basically memorized) and earning more points for more lives. A simple game, I'll call it beaten when I finally beat all the stages, and complete when I unlock everything.

Daily Review: Dungeons of Dredmor

Daily Review

Dungeons of Dredmor

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Sigh, die and once more!

I've pretty much been only playing this game for the last few days. To its credit, it is low stress enough that you can do many other things and toss between it without getting lost. That is mostly the reason I am cutting it a lot of slack, it is a low stress game, but there are fundamental flaws...that at the same time don't stop it from being fun. Still why I'm rather torn about it, so I hate to do it, but: LIST FORMAT!

1) Ramping difficulty. To be fair, I'm playing it right now on 'small dungeons' where you have smaller floors but you get more experience per kill to even it out...because if you don't, you will literally spend hours on each floor. The game has about 20 floors from what I've gathered, and the furthest I've gotten is floor 10 or so. This was my most recent run, where I had maxed -every- skill tree of mine barring two (which were noncombat), and I had gear far and above what I was finding, sometimes double or triple enchanted. I had crafted nearly the best axe you could craft, and enchanted it, crafted nice plate mail, had it enchanted, etc. I got torn apart. You basically go from crushing monsters for several floors in a row, going even, then getting crushed...and I can't see that I was unprepared. I had much better gear than I would have had if I didn't pick blacksmithing, I was nearly max leveled, halfway down the dungeon, and getting near curbstomped?

2) Healing, utter lack of. This probably contributes to the above. The main methods of healing in the game are regeneration boosting and a rare healing potion. Be aware, you really can't craft potions unless you pick that as a skill tree, which forces you to not choose another tree. My selections end up being lots of survival based ones (armor, shields, blacksmithing, berserker) and attack boosting (axe, berserker, blacksmithing (whee double duty), and gear gaining/xp boosting (burglar, archeologist), so you can't be expected to always pick potioncrafting. I found maybe 2 actual healing potions over 10 levels, and they only healed 25 or so out of 120HP. The regen boostings come in either food (which only gives you 1 per round), or again, potions. So you can easily recover your full hp, but if you're in combat and you're getting whalloped on, you really don't have what we termed when I played WoW, an 'Oh shit button'. Admittedly, again that could be build, but when I switched it up, I still didn't have anything that could easily get me out of trouble that's not a very rare item.

3) Dullness. You open a door, its a monster zoo! 30 someodd monsters wanting to chomp on your arse! Which basically means....20 minutes of clicking on monsters. Either you're overprepared and you're going to smash them handily, it just takes forever, or you're going to die. There are spells, but most seem either preparatory, or attack oriented. Which when you're playing the mage, means the same thing except added annoyance of taking way more damage.

Basically, my main point is, if I'm a build that is built around heavy armor, heavy weapons, and lots of HP...and in the best gear you can expect to have for the floor...I shouldn't be handily smashed and have nothing I can do to stop it.

Or I could suck at the game, who knows.

Daily Review: Dungeons of Dredmor

Daily Review

Dungeons of Dredmor

System: PC (Steam)

Status: Unfinished

Currently: Getting various achieves through the runs. 

Honestly, I am a big fan of rogue-likes in almost every incarnation. Western styled ones patterned after Nethack or Diablo pedigrees, Eastern styled ones ("Mysterious Dungeon" games), any of them tend to bring out a lot of love in me. The imposed difficulty of every death being permanent, and reaching the end being a true challenge instead of trial and error brings out a lot in me. Of course, the flip side of that is with permanent death, you can play for five hours...and make zero progress due to a stupid mistake. Which is very bad for my attempts to reduce my backlog.

Dungeons of Dredmor has some issues that at first put me off. The main of which is that when I started up the game, the first screen was difficulty (not a big deal), smaller dungeons (OK, that's fine), and permadeath (Wait, what?). That's right, Dungeons of Dredmor (for the rest of this labelled DoD), is a rogue-like that lets you save, and load if you die. Hence....not a true roguelike. That almost made me put it down right then and there.

When I got to playing it, the game itself was very solid. Select class trees at the start (wide variety and you get to pick several), and off you go. There is significant crafting if you select one of the trees, which does quite a bit to nix some of the randomness that also goes with roguelikes, but its within acceptable bounds. The limited inventory keeps you from keeping everything in hopes of crafting it later. The game does have a severe lack of healing items. Most of it is garnered from food, which only heals 1 HP per round, for as many rounds as the food gives you. Healing potions are very rare, which means you have to be ready for each encounter or they will kill you because you can't just chug potions. Some of the classes do more to help with the randomness, for example, archeologist lets you sacrifice useless artifacts for free xp, and so I select it nearly every time.

The game play is solid, I do highly recommend picking smaller dungeons....otherwise they are just mind numbingly huge and painful to crawl around on each floor. The small dungeons feel more 'right', and you don't have to stare at the same enemies and tiles for a good hour (and yes, one large dungeon floor did take me nearly an hour to explore by itself). I personally have been playing with permadeath on....it is a rogue-like after all. That and winning with that will feel more solid, and net me two separate achievements. Some of the achievements are silly, like dying to the weakest enemies, or random silly enemies. Mini-quests do vary things a bit, as well as random events like zoos. Overall, it was worth the purchase, and is a slower less stressful alternative to Binding of Isaac.