Beaten: Reconstruction Zero: I Miss the Sunrise (on 6/3/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Reconstruction Zero is one of those games I randomly found while looking for good free RPGs. It really doesn't play like any RPG I can think of, and it deserves a good look if you are at all interested in interesting or unique RPGs. The story of the game itself is quite good, and I won't go into any detail on it beyond that for fear of spoiling anything. To put it quickly, the game manages to craft a wholly unique world and setting to house the great gameplay, and a story that really doesn't lend itself to many cliches.

The gameplay itself takes place in a sort of strategy RPG setup. You command fleets of various ships (all of them characters you recruit throughout the story), and arrange them in small groups to perform objectives on a larger map. When in combat, you have a few abilities based on the race of the character, as well as having it be important how close/far away you are from enemy ships (and allowing you to 'push' the field of battle to prevent turtling). Each ship is equipped with various pieces of equipment, such as guns and protective assets, which you design yourself through the games crafting feature. As such, the setup of your ships will change dynamically, allowing you to adjust them for new encounters or new tactics you devise. Each ship has three health bars (as seen in the above image). If any of them is gone, the ship is destroyed. At the same time, every weapon in the game drains one of those life bars for their own attacks, and does damage to one of the lifebars on the enemy ship with a certain damage type. As such, its nearly impossible to create a perfect defense for anything, and a lot of the game revolves around having a wide variety of weapons to make sure you take advantage of enemies weaknesses.

The game is very tactical, and it takes some getting used to, but you never truly feel the game is unfair. With the exception of some special events, I was able to figure out what needed to be done, reconfigure my ships, and get it done. It is certainly an RPG everyone should at least try, especially since its free.

I finished the game, but have some alternate endings and optional bosses to defeat.

Beaten: Sid Meier's Civilization V (on 7/23/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Civilization is one of those giants of gaming...that I've never had the privilege of actually playing until recently. To be fair, I wasn't much of a PC gamer in my youth, since my PC tended to be pretty low end, and console games were a much more consistent factor (didn't have to worry about the games running properly on those).

Civilization V for me personally, is a great game that I tend to get lost in for hours. I have put innumerable hours into this game, playing different Civs, different difficulties, trying for various achievements and the like. Even when I set it to the fastest game speed (which I always do), it will easily chew up a whole afternoon on its own. I only recently got the two expansion packs, which added whole new dimensions to the game. I can honestly say if you own Civ V, you need to get the expansions despite the price. It is more than worth it for the amount of extra gameplay they add to the base game. There really isn't much more to say about the game that others haven't, I can't compare it to previous games since I haven't played them, I just know this one is extremely addicting.

I have beaten it numerous times on various difficulties, though I am now just working my way up past the 'normal' range. I still have plenty of scenarios and other things to do to 'complete' this.

Beaten: Zombie Driver (7/7/13/)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Zombie driver is a strange little game, but I found it quite fun, once I got used to the camera style making me a bit ill. In all the game modes, you drive a car around a city, running over zombies while trying to reach certain objectives. It is very arcade-y in execution, which isn't a bad thing. It is quite fun to play for short stretches, and isn't too frustrating in any particular aspect.

The game helps the variety by having three game modes. Story, which has your character going through a fairly short campaign, rescuing civilians from places and doing side objectives to get new cars. It isn't too difficult, though the rarity of healing items makes some parts a bit frustrating as you really can't avoid damage from zombies at times. The only part I really struggled with was the last mission, where you have to race at blinding speed through the city with a time limit. It was very easy to make small mistakes and have to start over.

The small mistakes at  high speed problem also applies to Blood Race, which makes the mode itself a bit more difficult than it needs to be. It is very easy to get stuck on a piece of scenery and have to spend precious seconds backing out and around to get back in the race. Blood race mode has more than just racing though, though the other events are basically 'Go fast because of X', such as 'Go fast because you have a bomb on your car'. Overall though its still a fun mode to play, just might be a bit frustrating for me to ace it for completion.

The last mode is slaughter, which basically gives you a circular arena and zombies to kill. Each wave you finish upgrades your car or weapons. Not too difficult, other than the exploding zombies, which like other modes, can take a huge chunk from your health if you run them over (you are supposed to run right beside them, so they explode after you're gone). Again, the mode is very short, so any frustrations are temporary.

I finished the story mode, and need to finish and complete both Blood Race and Slaughter modes, along with some achieves from the story mode itself.

Beaten: Endless Space (on 6/29/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Endless Space is a 4X game that I found last summer on sale on Steam, and while not the most ingenious or innovative game of the genre, it holds its own at least in my opinion, as an interesting diversion when I'm in a Civilization mood, but don't actually want to play Civ.

The same basics apply of course for any 4X game, you select how big your play field will be, how many players/AI, pick your race and what victory conditions you want, and then go. The game itself is set around various planetary systems that you work to colonize, building colony ships to get to new systems while exploring and finding your opponents on the map. On each planetary system, you will gain population, which will produce science, construction, money and food (FIDS is the in-game shorthand), which is used to help other aspects of your empire.This is generally improved upon by creating improvements in each system, which boost one aspect or another, though all of them having upkeep in the money department. Unfortunately, since you are supposed to rapidly expand as with any 4X game, this means a lot of the time you spend on each turn is building advancements in all the new solar systems to improve their output, so you spend a lot of time tabbing between systems, making sure they have all the upgrades they need (and remembering why you didn't make a certain improvement in a system, since in some cases an improvement would be terrible given the cost vs gain).

The combat itself is...more detailed than civilization, given that you can choose actions which have various rock-paper-scissors bonuses versus other actions, but it tends to only really matter when your military is very close in strength. You can actually custom create every ship your civilization makes, but most of the time you will make one or two designs, and just upgrade them as you get new technology. Nothing really heavily changes the ship designs later, other than the occasional space saving technology which you might need to slide in as it isn't an upgrade. In a long-term war with any other player, the combat gets very repetitive, as the AI will tend to send swarms of ships at you, even though they know they will lose.

The tech tree of the game is very deep and well laid out...which unfortunately means jack-all, since you don't really have any true choices in the tech trees. Each race starts with a basic tech already learned, which might save you a few turns learning it, and has certain special techs they learn higher up in the tree that give unique advantages. The trees are split into science (mostly new material discovery), war (duh), exploration (lets you colonize new planet types), and management (lets you have bigger fleets and lots of new improvements). However, there really isn't any strategy to your research or any true decisions to be made. No matter what strategy you are using, you need to research all the trees about equally. Choosing what to research first may give you a brief advantage in a certain area, and if you go deep in a tree you might get a heavy advantage with it, but the cost to your other research will cost you more in the long term. For example, if you are planning to conquer the galaxy you might think you need to research the war tree above all...which will bite you. You need to research management to field more than a few ships in a fleet and keep your people happy, and you need to research science to get materials that make those shiny new weapons, and you should research exploration to let your fleets move faster and give you more planets to work with. Spending 6 turns on a new war tech when you have a bunch of technologies that would only take one turn or less is a serious mistake.

Other than those quibbles, the game is fun, though probably decidedly average in the grand scheme of things. I tend to only boot it up when I want something Civ-like,  but don't want to play Civ.

Finished with normal AI, need to work my way up the AI difficulties.

Beaten: Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (on 6/27/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten

Unfortunately I don't have a lot to say about Episode 2. Not just because I finished it over a year ago, but because nothing about it really sticks out in the mind, other than the fact that it kept the story going for a bit more than the last episode. If you aren't interested in the continuing adventures of Gordon Freeman, episode 2 is basically the same game as episode 1 and Half-life 2, physics based shooting, aliens, rather smart AI for the human parts, and some decent set pieces that are fun/frustrating depending.

Really, no part of the game sticks out a lot in my memory, other than the last set piece, where you are defending the rocket installation from hordes of giant walkers that you can only destroy with bomb devices you attach to them. I must royally suck at this, or it was insanely hard compared to the rest of the game, because I found this part furiously frustrating, and had to crank the difficulty all the way down due to constantly being torn apart by all the mechs little friends. If I go through the game again, I'll likely need to look up what I was doing wrong, because it shouldn't have been that difficult.

Finished it on the easiest difficulty, so to complete would have to crank it up some, along with completing various achieves and challenges.

Beaten: Portal 2 (on 6/24/13)

System: PC
Status: Beaten (on 6/24/13)

Portal is one of my favorite puzzle games, for the sheer basic mechanics and taking the puzzles as far as they can go with those mechanics. Portal 2 really doesn't change the mechanics much, other than adding some gels at about the midpoint of the game that add new dimensions to the physics puzzles. However, Portal 2 definitely focuses more on the story aspects, where the first was pretty limited to voice overs, 2...still does voice overs, but its  more in depth, with many voice actors and more of the same dark humor.

Overall, the game is better and somewhat worse than the first game. The new gels add new dimensions to the physics puzzles, but in the end it really doesn't change the dynamics too much, and in the end, they are kind of forgettable. The story is definately the best part of the game over the original, but with a longer plot, the game does start to drag a bit, and some of the puzzles end up being a bit unintuitive, a problem I never had with the original.

Still, the gripes with the game are nitpicking, overall it is amazingly fun to play and I highly recommend anyone who can to do so.

I finished the main story, which leaves the co-op things, and small achievements in the game itself.

Completed: Borderlands (on 6/22/13)

System: PC
Status: Completed (on 6/22/13)

Borderlands is certainly a well reviewed and looked at franchise, so I doubt anything I say will be too new to people looking into it. On the surface, it certainly fills a niche that feels like it needs to be filled, an FPS RPG with randomly generated/dropped guns and equipment. The game fills that niche very well, and the game has a very unique sense of humor to it. It does an extremely good job at characterization of the world of Pandora, and I tended to mostly play through just to see what the next crazy thing to happen was.

Where the game does tend to slow down is the combat itself is very samey for most of the game. No matter what upgrades or new skills you get, they tend to not change the basic game mechanics very  much. You'll run up to an area of huts and houses, enemies will spawn from doors or be standing around, and you'll find cover, trying to get headshots for criticals or using your class skill to do extra damage, and the enemies will die. The strategies the enemies use change a bit, mostly when you get to the Crimson Lance enemies, or in the expansions, but most of the time you're fighting bandits, and everything tends to go the same way. You're not relying on your own skills too much though, as a huge factor is what gear you get in random drops, and sometimes you'll be scraping by on a too-low level gun, or find one that is so much better than your others that you'll only be using that gun for a long damn time.

Still, that was a long paragraph that basically boiled down to me as "I needed to take breaks from the game at times." It is still an amazingly fun game, it just tends to wear on you a bit when you go from place to place shooting the same guys. The personality of the game goes a long way to alleviating the annoyances.

The game and all of its expansions are completed, finished on second run. Don't have all the achievements, but many of them require multiplayer on the old Gamespy network, so...no dice there.

Beaten: Star Wars: Dark Forces (on 3/30/13)

System: PC (via DOSBox)
Status: Beaten (on 3/30/13)

For a while in the spring of 2013, I started on a small retro-PC game spree, mostly kicked off by a list of worthwhile DOS games I found (Link). I actually for a while was seeking to mark most of them off as played and beaten, though a few of them are not my sort of game at all, or are so dated compared to modern versions I likely won't bother. Dark Forces was one I actually got through, and have been meaning to ever since I bought it at a flea market in ages past...and it wouldn't run on my PC.

Dark Forces holds up in some aspects ok, it is still a decent shooter, and the story itself holds well as a Star Wars story, though not so much as some other games set in the universe (Force Unleashed, etc). However, a lot of the levels suffer from rather unintuitive design choices, and though you have multiple 'lives' so to speak, you'll find yourself save scumming so you don't waste them and ammunition, since often the stuff you need to get through a level are through tricky jumping puzzles, or completely strange and seemingly suicidal paths. This game has a lot of issues the original Half-Life has, they wanted to do something more, but the controls and design don't hold up to it.

I finished the game on normal, which leaves the harder difficulty for completion...which will be a long time in coming, that final boss is an asshole. At least you can replay individual levels on the higher difficulty, so when I get back to it I can check off levels.

Beaten: Half-Life 2: Episode 1

System: PC
Status: Beaten (on 2/11/13)

Now this is more like it. Half-Life Two is a major step up, and the episodes after do so much to improve on what they do with the story telling and action scenes. Half-life is a series that puts a lot of emphasis on set pieces, and this game has plenty of memorable ones. The main issues with the episodes being that they are well, episodic, and thus short. My only complaint with the half-life two line is the rather strange streaming content they do to make it run smoother, which causes my PC all sorts of headaches. I typically have to exit out after an hour or two of playing to let it clean itself out of memory, otherwise I get tons of stuttering. Have yet to find a way to fix the issue.

Beaten: Half-Life

System: PC
Status: Beaten (on 2/8/13)

Let's face it guys, fifteen year old shooters do not usually hold up well...and this one especially does  not. The game was groundbreaking in its time for how it approached storytelling, and the AI for the humanoid enemies not being as dumb as a box of rocks. However, this game has basically no indication of right path vs wrong path, or really what you should be doing/where you should be going next. That wouldn't necessarily be so bad, except that a wrong decision that you survive making can truly screw up your game. For example, for the longest time I was stuck in the launch center, where large tentacles swing at you when you run through. If you run through and go to the wrong place, or think that you could maybe kill one of them, you waste a lot of supplies doing so. I had to read a step by step fact to get any idea what I was supposed to do or where to go.

The platforming in the game is atrocious, and made only worse when you get to the end. Someone apparently thought a game with terrible jumping mechanics deserved an entire alien world where you have no indication which way to jump, and the slightest mistake kills you. You're not even sure whether you should save after each jump, as it might mean you saved in a spot where you are now stuck and have to die. I do not feel the least amount of regret in admitting I cheated my way past the last section of the game, as it very nearly ruined what little appreciation I had for the game. Thankfully, the sequels got way better.

11/17: Quickfixes

Unfortunately, I've been stuck in one of those moods where I really can't get anything in particular done, so been pecking at a few games idly.

Name: Beyond Good & Evil
System: PS2 (Playing on PS3)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Just finished the second story dungeon.

I feel really bad that I've never gotten to this game before, especially since I know it to be a solid game the few times I've booted it up and played it for a while. It also wasn't a big investment, and a great deal since I snagged it for 6$ from a Gamestop, like most of the later additions to my PS2 collection. I really have no complaints other than the strange graphical glitches that happen occasionally, which I have gathered come with the PS2 port of the game (and the PS3 may be making worse, I don't remember my PS2 doing the weird thing with the water). Overall the gameplay is solid, the partner system is fairly well implemented, there's nothing overtly annoying about any aspect of the game. The Pokemon Snap-like camera subquest is actually really fun, though once you get the radars that tell you where the animals you don't have are, it becomes rather trivial. Still, it seems a game that is full of collection sidequests, where the designers did their best to make sure they were not frustrating, which is always a good idea. Just need to put a few more hours into this and I can probably tick it off my completed list rather quickly.

Name: Wolfenstein 3-D
System: PS3
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Finished Episodes 1-3 on 'normalish' difficulty.

An oldie that I never got around to truly playing other than the horrendous SNES port I rented a few times back in the day. The PSN port does a pretty good job of capturing the game without mucking with it really at all. They even left in the old text screens after each episode advertising the next...along with all the cheesy text detailing you 'kicking Hitler's skull off'. Fun. My wife has all sorts of trouble watching me play this, and I have some issues as well, the game is smooth except when you start to turn (strafing and the like), where it gets a bit herky-jerky, and tends to give me motion sickness a bit. The damage also seems way out of line for the enemies even on the lower difficulty I'm on. One shot from pretty much any enemy can nearly kill you...or just nick you, and there doesn't seem to be much reason for the differences, not range or if you were moving or not. Still, the game is loaded with ammo (and all guns use the same type), along with plenty of health, so its really not that difficult. Taking it easy though so I don't make myself sick with the herky-motion. Twin-stick controls I think are the best way to play these old games though, its even how I prefer to play the original Doom 1/2 games now.

Name: RetroMUD
System: PC (Portal GT client)
Status: Null
Currently: Levelling up my Fallen alt, trying to get my Psi main money to train.

A real oldie for me, and a classic MUD, though the player base has shrunk in recent years due to a good solid year or so of crashes and unstableness. The core of the game is still great, with numerous classes, lots of options as to how to build characters, and all around freedom to do what you want. The community is always great for the game, and half the fun is chatting with the good people there. I really can't review the game much more than that, especially since a lot of it is personal experience, and not many people play MUDs anymore. Still, if I'm not playing something else, I'm playing this, much easier to cram in an hour or so of farming now that you don't have to worry about putting your gear in boxes if you carry it around.

Beaten: The Witcher Enhanced Edition

Beaten

The Witcher Enhanced Edition

System: Steam
Status: Beaten
Currently: Just beat normal difficulty.

This may be an oddity considering my previous posts where I mostly nitpick games, but I truly have nothing negative to say about this game. It is a well balanced game, the story itself is well done gothic horror, and the only issues I had were more with my poor PC than the game itself (crashes, herky graphics, etc).

I can unabashedly recommend this game, mostly due to the fact that it feels like an old school PC RPG, difficult but not overtly so, with a well crafted story and a well balanced combat system. I was playing on normal mode, so the enhancements that make up most of the back end of your character creation were helpful depending on what you focused on, but not entirely necessary. I drank a few boosting potions and used weapon boosts before the last fight, and having done nearly all the quests, I curb-stomped the final boss(es). Through most of the game though, one boost or so is enough to get you through difficult fights, with none really required for standard groups of enemies. The chapters do have a sort of progression, though its hard to tell until you walk to do a quest and get slaughtered, but essentially there are a set of easier quests, and harder ones, and you should do them in a big chunk of each to get through. The game is set up so that if you skipped some stuff in an earlier chapter, you aren't screwed, you just have to focus more on the easy quests for the next chapter first. There never felt like there was any object that if I missed it I was screwed later on, it just made it easier...which is perfect, though I still felt I had to do -everything-.

The only downside of the action combat system is there really isn't much variety or strategy to the actual combat. Occasionally you might have to switch stances or swords mid fight, but usually you can go wading in. Victory is more determined by your prepwork than any actual skill in the combat, though if you constantly screw up timed clicking you might have issues. I can gather hard mode puts even more emphasis on prep, given the descriptor even states 'You will have to use alchemy to survive'. Should be an interesting challenge when I get around to it, but that won't be anytime soon. Long PC RPGs take it out of me.

Post-Move Quick Fixes

So yeah, moving really puts a kink in your gaming schedule. It's also really hard to play enough of one game to come up with a full post for any one in particular. To get back in the habit, here's some quick fixes for what I've been playing:

 

Man, I really want to like this game, mostly because of its status as a classic, but its getting really hard to keep playing this and even finish it with how bad its getting at times. I've never had to check a FAQ for an FPS game before, but I have to do it near constantly with this one. One moment, you're supposed to avoid a mined area, and the next a guy with a shotgun near one means 'clear it out'. There is almost no intuitive 'you should go here next' going on, and choosing wrong could either waste supplies (some of which you -need- to keep going), or get you some more depending on your luck. The movement is still slippery, and yet at the same time I keep getting caught up in corners. To top it all off, the game itself uses a weird memory load procedure, and thus my playtime is entirely limited to when it starts to get jerky, then I have to either quit out and reload, or just stop for the night. The bugs are really getting bad, I'm at a point where you need to cross in front of a sniper, so obviously you're supposed to toss a grenade up into his nest (his netting for some reason is bullet proof). Except A) Gordon tosses like a girl and its near impossible to get any distance on the grenades, and B) A total of 8 grenades went in, didn't explode due to some bug. This is about where I stopped.

This is almost entirely a guilty pleasure now, considering how long I have to get to 'complete' status and how random any progression is. Still very fun and challenging though. Trying to get through the challenge mode so I can have some more options in the main game. As with all rogue-likes though, I feel bad playing them because it is never definite progress. Means the game is truly fun though.

I actually beat this game a long time ago, but 'beaten' for it is only beating the Elite 4 the first time, and there's so much more to do. Over the past two weeks, I basically beat all the Kanto Gym Leaders, beat Red (the hardest match in the game), and re-challenged the Elite 4. That leaves re-challenging the gym leaders, which is a pain due to them only being available to get their numbers at a certain time...then you can only challenge them again at another time. I may just sit for an evening and screw around with the DS clock so I can finish it. Other than that, need to snag all the legendaries and I can call this complete.

To this games credit, its a near perfect mobile game experience. You can pick it up, complete one or two missions, save, put it back down, and when you next pick it back up you really don't have to remember where you were. I'll do a larger one on this one later because there's far more to cover, but essentially they improved on everything from the first game, removed a lot of the annoyances, and made the class system more intriguing (and way less broken). Still some small little quibbles, but I've been enjoying it. Mostly doing sidequests, I -think- I'm almost finished with the story, based on the quest list.

I actually try not to mention this one, and I'm kinda avoiding doing a full review since so much has already been said and its constantly changing still. I do have to say though, I love this game. There are minor quibbles, but I do truly enjoy booting it up, killing some monsters, having shinies drop (even if they end up not being upgrades), then logging out without any requirements to log back in. I put it down for a month or two, picked it back up recently, and had no problems swinging back in. I think its going to be a 'pick up at patch to see whats new' for most people though.

Completed: Dawn of War II - Retribution

Dawn of War II - Retribution

Completed

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Completed
Currently: Finally finished Extra Hard

Overall, I really liked this game, though looking back on it, I find it hard to recommend to others. The game itself is fairly good, though the single player campaign is definitely lacking.

It is worth playing once of course, the semi-RPG system to it keeps using the same heroes through multiple missions in a squad format interesting. Playing it more than once though, to do the different races definitely exposes issues with the game overall. The campaign is very short, and yet the different races really don't have a different campaign. The Space Marine campaign was clearly intended to be the main campaign and probably the canon one, and all the other campaigns follow the same missions, with minor differences. In essence, if you want to see every races ending, you need to beat the game six times, which means the same missions, same bosses, everything. The minor differences between the races alleviates it somewhat (the orks were notably fun due to their sense of humor), but they also highlight how unbalanced it is. I beat Extra Hard with the Tyrannids, mainly because they are clearly broken. You only get one hero, and their units are far more expensive in terms of resources, but they steamroll through every mission in the game very quickly.

Quickly is a debatable phrase though. The missions take forever to crawl through, since in essence after a point, your strategy is 'build the biggest units you can, roll to the next spot on the map, build more'. It may be a factor of my computer, but the loading times for some maps were utterly atrocious, and the unloading times were even more so. These two factors together mean you'll spend a lot of time going through the campaigns to do the same missions. The only factor that kept me from completing it much earlier is just how dull it gets to do the same missions over and over, and how long it takes.

The only thing I can really recommend (take note I have never even tried the standard multiplayer), is the Last Stand mode, where you team up with two other heroes and take on hordes of enemies, getting exp and wargear as you go. They realized this was probably the best part of the game, since you can buy that part as a stand alone. I would recommend that part of the game more than the overall, unless you are heavily interested in Warhammer. Its hard to recommend the main game over something like Starcraft 2 though. At least they finally got away from Games for Windows, which is the reason I didn't buy the first two packs of Dawn of War II.

Quick Fixes

Not that many this time around, just two, but I don't have quite enough to say about one or the other to make a Daily Review.

 So this kind of came out of left field, but I hit the fortune cookie option on the Backlog, and it gave me this. My wife bought it a while back from a Gamestop for about 5$, and neither of us have really touched it. Quick thoughts on it though: The art style is beautiful, the sprites on 3d backgrounds actually work really well, and the art in the battles is very well done. Not quite Valkyrie Profile 2 level, but hey. Another thought is that I'm really enjoying the alchemy system, since its mostly collect recipes, have the other character craft it, then you can make them with mana from then on. This means that healing potions almost never run out, since they need just 1 Wood mana, which you can get from anywhere. I have 99 of several items just to not let my mana go to waste. The combat system itself is rather fluid, though for some reason seems to have brief load times mid fight, as in a half second or so. Not a major deal, but it does make the otherwise fluid action kinda herk at times.

The title of the game is "God Catching Alchemy Meister" or Kamidori Alchemy Meister (kinda prefer the latter since the direct translation is silly), and yeah, its a great game. I'm always a sucker for strategy RPGs with very in-depth aspects of crafting and character building. This doesn't have so much on the character building, kinda leaning towards Fire Emblem in that they just level up, gain stats, and go from there. The main heroines get outfits you can make that radically change their stats and skills, and the main character gets far more customization through his menu, but mostly its just swapping gear. Still, the strategy aspects of crawling around the maps and fighting monsters, and collecting materials to make new items is pretty fun. The game is split up into chapters, and they do warn you when you're about to change chapters since you can miss out on quests. All the quests tell you what chapter you fail them on too, which is very conveinant. The only thing you'd have to look at a guide for is the level certain characters have to be at to get events. Of course, being a strategy RPG with set characters...some are rather useless or ungodly slow, and very hard to level to get those events (in this case, mostly the earth elemental Aht since she only moves 2 spaces). Also, yes, it is an adult eroge game. Doesn't change the fact that the game itself is damn good, dirty pictures or not.

Daily Review: Swords and Soldiers HD

Daily Review

Swords and Soldiers HD

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Beaten
Currently: Just finished the campaign.

So this was a short and quick little game, definitely what I would call bite sized. It has multiplayer elements, but I definitely can't see myself playing them. I'm actually debating to just call this completed, since all that's left otherwise is achievements, which I can't fully complete since I won't play the multiplayer. Either way, this will be my only post about it.

The game is pretty straightforward, and reminds me of numerous flash games I've played before. You create troops, they walk right until they run into enemies and die. Your objective is to usually just destroy the base on the other side of the map, building certain combinations of troops to overcome what they're sending you. It is a very simple design, which isn't a bad thing, once you get the hang of the game the difficulty curve is nice and even right up until the end of the campaign.

There are three 'races' to play, though the differences are there, in essence all you need to learn is which units are best against whatever race you're playing against, and make them over and over. If you play Aztec, you want the priest to make zombies and the melee dudes to rush in. If you play China, you want the old men to instakill anything, and a mix of warriors and rocketeers. If you play Viking, you make regular melee and ranged and just lightning bolt everything else. Other than just clicking the buttons to create the units and occasionally casting spells to help them work through blockages, there's really little strategy to it. Some of the campaign missions throw weird things at you, but after you overcome them, it boils down to the same thing.

The campaign is 30 missions, and can be completed in one sitting if you're determined, two if less so. There are three challenge maps that just serve to get achievements, obviously a skirmish mode and the multiplayer. They really think that people will play the multiplayer, because the campaign bugs you to go play it...every three missions. Seriously.

If you see it cheap on steam, it might be worth picking up, but if I had the choice to buy it individually I wouldn't even bother. I got it as part of an indie pack, and the other games made up the value, not this one.

Daily Review: Q.U.B.E

Daily Review 

Q.U.B.E

System: PC (Steam)

Status: Unfinished

Currently: Sector 5

Just some quick thoughts on this game, its obviously rather short and probably will only do one more post on it when I finish it.

Portal comparisons are obvious, so I'll avoid them. Suffice to say its a rather simple puzzle game in a first person engine, where you control various cube objects to get through each area. Each color has a set function, that you learn rather quickly through trial and error, and each puzzle gets slowly harder. Rather standard. The atmosphere is nice, a wierd grey-tone broken up by the colorful puzzle pieces that kind of reminds me of a children's playset at times. The addition of new elements is gradual enough that you never feel there's a huge jump...except for my one major gripe of the review so far.

When you get to sector five, you can tell rather quickly that its a one trick pony that is more annoying than challenging. Sector five is dark, and after the second or third puzzle, you can only work elements you have 'turned on' by hitting their power switch for their color. Essentially, this means you can't see anything but the currently on elements, and have to swap which ones are on to work with them. Given you have to move green pieces through the area and thus have to constantly check their location by turning that part on...this is really annoying. It adds nothing to the difficulty of the puzzles, it just makes you constantly have to turn the pieces on and off to make sure you didn't screw it up. If it was lit, it would be like the puzzles in the area right before it (albeit without the timing elements for obvious reasons). This entire sector is more frustrating than anything else, and really jerked me out of what had been a fairly simple and fun game.

I'll get back to this later and finish it, but gah, what a terrible design decision.

Daily Review: Avadon: The Black Fortress

Daily Review

Avadon: The Black Fortress

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Beaten
Currently: Just finished normal mode. Need to play on harder difficulties to complete.

So, finally finished this game after working on it all week (hence the lack of posts, didn't want to post about it till I finished up the last bits.) My thoughts are still unabashedly positive about it, it is a more than worthy game to purchase, especially if you like old school PC RPGs, and was a fun adventure game I will probably play again. It did have some flaws, though they were minor.

The first major flaw is the bossfights are...well..boring. Either the boss is far too easy and you overpower them rather quickly, or they come in two flavors: Minion deluge, and way too much HP. Due to the battle system's style (which I liked overall), there's really not much variety in the boss fights. They will throw around some buffs or debuffs you can't really do much about unless you want to waste a turn you could be doing damage, and you wail on them. If they have minions, you either ignore them because they don't do enough damage to be a pest and just make it hard to move around, or you have to track down the one minion shielding the master, then wail on them till it is resummoned. This is not a major problem in and of itself, except that due to the class system being rather limited (you advance, get some skills through a tree), your skill choices are at most 8-9 skills, most of which are variations of AoE damage or some status. So pretty much every boss fight runs down to whether or not you can deal damage faster than they can.

The other major flaw is the game seems seriously weighted towards the difficulty being foes dealing a lot of damage, getting a lot of attacks, and swarming you. Admittedly, while only playing on normal, I was going for the achievement where you only use one ally (instead of two) throughout the entire game. My partner for this was the mage, who I thought complimented my main character (warrior) rather well. The warrior class once you get to a point if you build it well...is near indestructible. I had over 80% or so damage reduction to most things, parried/dodged most attacks, and had a good chance to just start regenerating whenever I got smacked.  The mage was great at dealing damage, but couldn't take many physical hits, and with the abundance of archers, she often went down like a wet sack. This usually left my warrior to slowly slaughter every single enemy, so I could leave combat and have her auto-revive (still got the achievement for no-revives too). As it stands, I can't see how you could ever play this game without using the warrior, every enemy gets 2-3 attacks or turns to your one, constantly buffs themselves and their friends, and deals enough damage to take out the squishier classes in a single turn if you're unlucky. What makes it worse is that with the daze and charm spells being thrown around constantly, you can be either chainlocked/stunned for the entire combat and just die...or your warrior gets charmed and murders your other party members brutally, leaving him to solo the encounter. Again.

Still, with those two flaws being apparent, I will still be playing it again on a higher difficulty later. For some reason, the game reminded me of fallout, mostly due to the high amount of personal choices you were allowed to make, and how they actually affected things later, including little blurbs at the end talking about unresolved quests or changes you made to lands for the better. They definately put a lot of work in making you feel that all these grey and grey choices you make in the game actually matter to various characters, and not making you feel like you have to take a quest you think is wrong to max out your level.

A very well done game.

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.