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.

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.

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.

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.

Daily Review: Avadon: The Black Fortress

Avadon: The Black Fortress

Daily Review

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: 3rd major story quest.


So, I never really got a chance to be a huge fan of old school PC RPGs. Mostly because I usually had a PC that lagged way behind what the current games were up to at the time, and if I was going to spend what limited funds I had on a new game, I would rather it be on one I knew would work (aka a console game). Still, loved the Baldur's Gate and similar series.

This game will definately not win awards for graphic design. You can see from the little image I grabbed for its label that the 3d graphics are about on par with...well, an old school PC RPG. Still, its fitting, and the game overall holds together really well so far. The writing and story is nice, it really doesn't dumb down the combat for you, although class advancement is pretty linear. You get one stat point, a specialization after a while which is just skill points, and 2 skill points per level. You have a skill 'tree', but they connect to each other and require each other so much you're pretty much going to use the whole tree anyway. Also, while the writing for the NPCs so far gives them fairly interesting personalities, since they have the exact same build type as you would have if you were playing that class, there is no difference between playing a main character fighter with the NPC mage...or a main character mage with the NPC fighter. I will be replaying the game at least once on higher difficulties and to nail a few acheivements, but not 4 times, especially since there's not enough difference to warrant playing every class.

As a note, I am playing this in a sort of self-imposed challenge. I'm on normal difficulty, but one of the achievements is to get through the entire game, and only bring along one companion on each journey. Notably after your first adventure or so, you can bring two, so I'm limiting my own party noticeably. Still, it hasn't adversely affected me too bad, and has actually kept normal mode challenging. It is nice to see everyone gets experience even when you don't use them, so if I did want to swap out the mage for someone else, I'm not screwed. The only major gripe I have is that any enemy with stun abilities will tear your face off if you regularly fail to resist them, since they manage to recharge them fast enough to keep you perma-stunlocked. This is actually how I died for the first, second, third, and fourth times, due to a side quest involving basilisks. Little ones were OK, got to the mother, combat starts, boom, entire party stunned with cone of effect, by the time stun wears off, stunned again. Insert facerape, game over screen, and thankfulness for auto saves, even if it was last map switch (and not sub-map switch).

New Games: Damn you summer sale

So yeah, the summer sale again tempted me, and I picked up two of the Indie Bundles they had for sale on steam. Dabbled in a few so far, so those that I've touched will get a short blurb as a partial review (or first impressions, rather).

 Looks like a space fighter sim, heard it was meh from a friend but will see for myself when I load it up

 Actually been playing this for a few hours, so far a fairly good old-school style PC fantasy RPG. Makes me wonder why more people haven't just worked out a low budget game with a focus on game play and story as opposed to graphics. We don't need them all to be Dragon Age.

 Haven't touched, will review when I do.

 Played one of the tutorials and a quick solo level. Since its multiplayer focused and I can never -find- people to play with, I'll take this one single player map at a time. (Counted as beaten for winning one map, will mark complete when all of them are gold medal'd)

 This was amazing fun at the start with how fast and tight the controls were, just need to sit down and blaze through it.

 No touchy, no idea.

 I used to play Red Baron back on my ancient PC, I dunno if my current PC can even run this.

 Zombies are getting a little played out, so this might be on the backburner for a while.

 Seems interesting, haven't touched yet.

 At first blush, this looks far better than Chantelise, but there are some control issues that are irking me so far, mostly where you keep swinging because of having to stop swinging, wait a second, then turn about to face the other way. Cute game though, has some personality.

 No touchy yet.

I bought these yesterday, gimme a break, can't possibly have touched them all.

Daily Review: Chantelise

Daily Review

Chantelise: A tale of two sisters

 

 

 

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Frustrated, 3rd Temple.

So, to start this off, I love Carpe Fulgur for one reason, the game Reccettear. It was an amazing little combination of dungeon crawler and shop...management...thing. The localization was great, the game had a lot of style and personality, and was a joy to play.

I know this one was made prior to Reccettear, and the company overall is a Doujin game maker (usually small group making games and selling them at conventions or over the internet, kind of like Indie game designers in the West, except with usually way less budget). Given the obviously low budget, I keep having this feeling I shouldn't be too harsh on it...but...

Yeah, the game is fundamentally flawed. Now, do note that I only paid 4.99 for it on Steam due to the summer sale, and I do realize that its maybe a 5 hour game including all the extra stuff. That doesn't bother me. The areas where you would think a low budget game would fail (graphics, voice acting, writing, being glitchy) don't bother me, the voice acting (while japanese) is good, the graphics have their own appeal, and the game runs fine on my system.

All the same, it was not worth the 5 dollars I paid for it. A solid 5 hour game would be worth more than five hours if done right of course, but the game design of it falls apart rather quickly. The magic system looks like it has depth. Pick up gems, channel one or many into different spells, lob them, mixes well with the fighting. However, since you can't control which gems you use, always last grabbed first used basis, the spells you actually get are entirely random, and at times useless. Need a ranged spell to use against that bomb? Too bad, you just picked up two earth gems and there are none left in the entire stage. You get to eat 40 damage. Need a heal? Oh well, the water gems you picked up weren't one after the other, so no heal for you.

I am a completionist, my end goal is to fully complete every game I own. This game doesn't have a lot to complete, there are hidden treasures on every stage, that you have to complete some strange requirement to get to pop up. Get them all, and you get access to a hidden stage. Once I knew this, I decided to just read the spoilers to find them, no sense going through the game twice. Too bad the game declaring them 'cleared' is buggy. It is entirely likely to go through an entire stage, having to kill every enemy and clear the requirement, getting the treasure, popping back out, and...not cleared. This has happened to me twice on a bonus stage, which easily takes 14 minutes or so to clear each try, I still don't have it cleared. You get the treasure again if the game bugs and doesn't credit you with it, so its free cash or HP, but the fact that I'm accidentally abusing this bug, getting way more HP and cash than I should, and still heavily struggling with imbalanced monsters is not good. (As a side note, the items you find are at the same level as the dungeon you get them in, so you are balanced to get these first play through...just not 5 of them)/

Once you get to the second temple, you realize the rhythm of the game, which is: Go through the dungeon floors, get as far as you can, die, start over, skip all the floors you completed by running as fast as you can and avoiding enemies, complete another floor, die again. Rinse and repeat till you get to the boss, which becomes dash through the entire stage, try the boss, die, repeat until you actually kill the boss. Yes, you keep all the cash and items you find...but since there is no experience or level up system, and the only way to permanently raise your stats is gear or the HP items, there is no incentive to waste HP killing enemies for their piddly cash drops. The only good source of cash is sellable items, which for some reason they made depreciate in value for each one you sell. So that random treasure that pops out of the monster starts out valuable...and two dungeons in, now is selling for 500 when items are 20-40k or so. The only appreciable way to get cash is the above stated...abusing the treasures that don't show as cleared, selling them for 50k or so to buy 20 more HP.

In game, you get so many gear slots, based on where you are in the game, maxing out at 5. These can be used for anything from stat boosters (plus attack, plus magic, plus defense), to new abilities (auto-gem pickup, air-dash). However, given this is the -only- way to increase your stats other than HP and to acquire those needed abilities, the limited slots soon become a major annoyance. Do note, in one room of a dungeon (containing upwards of 30 monsters), you can easily have monsters who are resistant to magic, resistant to physical, and deal magic and physical damage. If you don't have a shield, you have practically -no- physical defense. If you don't have a charm, you have practically -no- magical defense. There is no way to have everything you need and the abilities, so either you constantly switch gear (which you can't do on time attack retries), or eat 40 damage from each attack that you're not defensive against. Add in a rather floaty control system, enemies who have purely annoying abilities, and a camera that while controlled, is sticking way too close to your heroine to dodge anything coming from behind, and you get frustrated fast.

Still, I plan to finish and complete this game, the writing does have a lot of personality, but I really wouldn't recommend paying more than a dollar or so for it. Also as of note, though this seems normal for the developers games: You need a USB controller. Full stop.

Daily Review: The Binding of Isaac

Daily Review

The Binding of Isaac

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Beaten
Currently: Beat the game for the first time with Isaac, know I still have way more to go.

So my friend recommended this to me a while back, but I didn't pick it up till the summer sale had it and the DLC for cheap. Picked it up today, and it was refreshing to play a rogue-like again. That is basically what this is after all, sort of a Legend of Zelda / Twin Stick Shooter / Rogue-like hybrid. Very fun, and at the same time difficult, but never unfairly so, which is a good balance to strike. The unlockables keep coming at a steady pace, so you're getting new items or characters for the dungeon consistently, and each time you beat it you unlock something new.

The gameplay is solid, though it takes a bit to get used to 'nudging' your bullets off center with movement. There's also little description for the items, so you either have to hit up the wikia or figure out what they do through trial and error (and some you really can't). Still, it is based on rogue-likes, so that is to happen, the trial and error gameplay and finding a style that fits you is part of the genre.

The main thing that might (and will in the case of Nintendo considering it for the DS and turning it down) turn people off is the visuals and the story. Piles of feces, tortured children, gushing blood, bosses that are taken from rather unsanitary body parts, the whole thing feels very juvenile even if most of the story and characters are biblical references. You can see the fact that the designers were doing flash on Newgrounds before this, it shows through easily in the game. The game itself is still coded in flash, so I had some slowdown issues for an otherwise pretty mundane game, and I know others have issues with making it look pretty and not have slowdown, even on high end PCs. I still recommend playing it full screen with as high of a resolution as you can, it makes the game play easier when you can see the bullets.

Daily Review: Half-Life

Daily Review

Half-Life

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Silo area

I suppose it is only natural when you go back to a much older PC FPS that you run into things that will just irk you, especially if you've played the later ones. To be honest, I've always heard great things about Half-Life, but never being a bit PC gamer nor an FPS player, I never really picked it up. The summer sale on Steam was a great opportunity to do so.

Admittedly, I'm probably not even halfway through it, but it has aged...eh, fairly well. The controls are floaty, which is very bad in a game where they put so much emphasis on proper movement, jumping, landing, and not getting electrocuted or falling to your death. The environment has killed me far more times than the enemies. The use of 'cat scares' is so overdone at this point, but I suppose it was fair for its day, and the graphics still do a passable job of communicating what needs to be communicated.

My main issue is at times you can't tell where you're supposed to be going to progress, or if you're currently on a branch with extra ammo...or completely lost. Several times so far, I've gone down a branch that made every indication of being a main route (dialogue from enemies and a new area you hadn't been to yet that you could see), but had to backtrack for a minute or so and take another branch to actually continue. I'm currently in the Silo, which apparently you are supposed to test fire the rocket engine. I spent a few minutes around the fuel area, wondering why I couldn't go anywhere, till I finally took another path and turned on the power...and now am rather stuck trying to find the oxygen area since I still can't go to the fuel area. Each time I leave one of those areas of course, the big baddie with the grasping claws kills me several times trying to go through the middle, and I waste more ammo knocking it down for a few seconds to get clear. Putting it down for now to take a little break.

Backlog Update: New Games

Ah, the problem with summer every year is that steam does those little summer sales...and I, as I'm sure most gamers do, snatch up all the games I've been wanting to buy but was too cheap to do so earlier. This of course, adds a whopping list of new games to my backlog, and only exacerbates the issue.

Here is the list of games I have added to my backlog:

Chantelise: Played Recettear, loved it, I know this is the game made before it (albeit translated later) and not as polished, but probably will love this too (still need to fully complete Recettear, but lost all the data when my PC crashed)

Half-Life: Was never much of a PC gamer, due to always having an old PC that couldn't support most games, so I actually played Half-Life 2 before I even bought this. Still, playing it right now, seems to be holding up. The AI is outsmarting me at least.

Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and 2: We'll see how these turn out, I know everyone is constantly clamoring for Half-Life 3, but I've never been a big FPS gamer.

Mini Ninjas: My wife actually nudged me to purchase this a while back, I just forgot to add it to my list.

 Portal 2: Original is a classic of course, so I'm sure I'll enjoy this one too.

The Binding of Isaac: A good friend is always raving about how good this game is, and it does seem up my alley.