Memories of a Vagabond Should be Repressed

Posted on August 19, 2014 by thre3zekiel

I would say this is what happens when a game studio doesn’t hire dedicated writers, but looking at the DarkElite Studios website, they have several. I think one of their staff is even from Blizzard, but even throwing a name like that around did nothing for MOAV. Certainly one of the worst games that someone is asking money for. I am not sure why the most terrible games I have played are mostly RPG’s, but this one made me shake my head in disappointment numerous times. It wasn’t all bad, just mostly. Come with me as I plow through this clusterfuck of under-utilized potential. Wow. What a keynote.

Let me start this review off by naming the many things this game did right. The music in Memories of a Vagabond was pretty spectacular. It was appropriate, enjoyable and I often found myself tapping a toe. Battles often found themselves alongside the usual battle-music, while the boss fights had a badass metal riff going. Music provided an acceptable variety with a new jam for each area. Granted, there were one or two recycled songs, but they were still enjoyable. Another fantastic feature of the game was the art. If you are feeling nostalgic for the old days of RPG, a la FFVI or Chronotrigger, this pixel art will definitely feed that craving. Every sprite is lovingly crafted, the areas are imaginative and exotic and the characters are pretty fancy. And when I say characters, I mean all the characters. This leads to anther really great element of the game: its soul-mechanic. Throughout the game, you get the choice of playing as 4 different characters: warrior, mage, bounty hunter and assassin. Should you die, you also get the chance to change to another body. Almost made dying worth your time. I spent most of my time, however, as the Bounty Hunter. That honestly concludes everything good that I have to say about this game. Get your snorkel out, baby. We’re going down into this shit.

You’re right. Not everything on Steam is worth playing after all…

Oh my godness is right. I have combed the Dark Elite site looking for evidence that they are primarily made up of people from a non-English-speaking country, but I have found nothing either way. I can say that it seems they could afford to pay for someone to look over the writing on their site, so there is no reason they shouldn’t have been able to correct the gross errors in their dialogue. And it is beyond a few adorable mistakes here and there, they literally have numerous instances of the most common errors in the English language. It seems the editing was either done by someone who is not familiar with English, or the writers just didn’t care. The main story-writers have names seemingly of French origin, so I will give them some leeway here. However, with a dedicated person for text-corrections, I have to wonder if she played through the game even once to pick up on its myriad English faux pas. I will decorate this article with examples in pictorial form as Vlad the Impaler decorated his castle with corpses: to show others what not to do. Granted in Vlad’s case, the message was “you should move to another country”.

Moving on from the language and toward the story, I have to say that this seems the biggest gripe I have over low-budget indie games. They are willing to cut out story and writing in favor of mechanics and coding, which makes some sense on the surface. Codeslingers are the ones that make the game playable. Without them the mechanics, engine and other important elements won’t work. Of course, if you skimp too hard on your writers, as MOAV seems to have done in spades, you get a game that isn’t tolerable. Some fucking morons and reckless retro fanboys might be willing to overlook such “dispensable polish” as story and language, but one of the things that was so spectacular about retro games like Final Fantasy and Chronotrigger was the level of detail they paid to story, art, music and the entire package. In this title, you have a game story that is a joke compared to those games. Your character starts off proposing to his love. No fault here. After a night in bed with his beloved where they “sleep” (I rarely believe titles anyways), she is pulled from bed by some evil demon, who then kills you. After a visit to hell you meet some soul-dealer that will rent you a new body for the low low price of any dignity you soul might possess. If you chose the old man body, that shit is on you. Later you find out, pretty unceremoniously, that the soul-dealer and the demon were working together. The best part is that the soul-dealer is all prophetic when you meet him, then, after time traveling to defeat the demon and save your lady-love, you see him sitting out front the house with the evil demon as if they are both ro-sham-bo-ing for who will steal the broad. I face-palmed. Now they aren’t actually doing this, I am being dramatic, but then he turns to you and you shout something like “traitor!” and this soul-dealing demon of fate replies, “look guy, I don’t know who you are, but I have lives to ruin right now. Take a number and get in line.” Not an exact quote, a creative paraphrase.

Lift a.. what? That sounds like it could be gross. I wouldn’t want a demon lifting his “finger” on my wife either…

There is also the matter of your fellow adventurers. The only one that gets any real explanation is the bunny-girl, who spends a lot of her time early on being inadvertently sexual, and she makes a big deal out of sleeping in a bed with you. She tells her employer that she wants to explore the world, then you suggest she do it with you, to which she replies “that was my idea.” So we have some cute, though awkwardly-handled war-of-the-roses banter. Fun. The other characters are sort of just lumped into your party after you do a mission with them. Nothing is said, and you never tell them that you will be fighting demons. Imagine that conversation “Yea, I am out to find my fiancee, kill a couple eldritch demons of screaming horror, then be home in time for tea.” It almost feels like this game was getting down to the wire and they didn’t have time to throw in any real material for the characters. They are all pretty flat, beyond a mission or a little feature here or there. The hero doesn’t even allow them into the conversation most of the time, occasionally talking at them amidst exploration. As long as they bring their gear to battle. Sure, one is a mercenary, but treating that as an excuse to just have a character thrown into the party that sits there and attacks back is just lazy scriptwriting (not the code kind), and makes me think someone didn’t put more than a weekend into it.

There were also a number of 4th-wall breaking elements of the script that felt less like clever little “we’re making a game” jokes, and more like careless writing. In some places it even felt like an outright refusal to give any fucks and arrogant dick-wagging like they thought they were creating some masterwork. This is barely a finger painting. Granted, it was hung on a billion-dollar refrigerator, but Steam needs to learn how to vet its selection. This just shows low standards.

While we are talking about characters, there is this fiancee. With all the attention paid to her side of things, she might as well be a Princess Peach life-size sex doll. At least DLC Quest had the decency to call their lady “Princess McGuffin” and obviate the fact that she is little more than motivation for the hero to act. I am not one to go all activist on a game, but she is a sex-token that does nothing for indie games and treating women with any kind of respect in gaming. At the end I thought she would turn out to be the villain, but she just kind of lilts and says how glad she is to see you. Y’know, like a good little Stepford robot. See those bodies around on the ground? They are, as I realized hours later, her fucking family. The hero pays them no mind, nothing is said about them if you “interact” with them. There is no dramatic elements drawn from the wholesale slaughter of her family, and they are not explored in any fashion to give you the feeling of them being anything more than randomly selected sprites on a rooftop. There is a vague dream-sequence that I just now realized includes them, but they say these detached lines and mill about in a spectral manner. It feels like they are just figments of the dreamworld, and they have as little relevance by now as possible. Any drama to be gleaned from them is diluted heavily.

Man, these thatch roofs are fucked!

There is also the matter of ???? island. Wander to the lower-right edge of the main continent, and you will find a row boat to ???? island. It has a small town with some guy that buys journals and another lake with a fishing spot, one of two in the game that I found. Go inside the houses, and the rain follows you. Sure, there is some thatch roofing involved, but they were never this bad. Seriously, it is like aliens invaded only to replace their roofs with holograms before disappearing without evidence of having been there. At this point I realized the entire game is a broken, unfinished mess. Or so it feels. It’s almost as if the game has cardboard cut outs stuck up and put out. Sure, you could argue that publishing unfinished games is now the industry standard for indie games, and you’d be right. But that is for “pre-release” or “early-release” games, not supposedly completed titles like MOAV. And with a name attached to this like Blizzard, I have to wonder where that guy’s influence was. It must have been a case where someone knew the guy and he stood in the room and used their bathroom to give some credentials to the title. Don’t be fooled. This is not a piece of mastery, it is a shoddy piece of work that is scarcely better than the games that my friends and I made on pirated copies of RPGMaker 2000 back in middle school. Before Steam. Fuck you, shit was tough to come by.

Fuck you, guy. I will gladly drink whiskey from your skull this night.

Overall, this game is pretty easy, non-complex and has a storyline with as much depth as a snack cracker. The characters mostly feel like cardboard stand-ups and the language and writing is so god-awful unprofessional that I almost puked. I feel like this is what CoD players see at the epitome of RPG gaming, because the other RPGs are too “complicated and wordy” for their tiny brains, although I am certain they would phrase that “fagit gamez for FAGGITZ!” The best parts of this game are the music and the art, which seemed to get all of the attention. The mechanics have a lot of potential, especially the soul-changing concept, but that could have been better employed. I would have liked to see the developers give each body a different story that you had to help sort out before being able to find your own lady and resolve your own quest. Instead, this plays like a twelve-year-old raging through the world after his sex-bot is taken, bashing in the heads of any nebulous foe that appears until he gets strong enough to fight the last bad guy. There was also a battle arena, but that was literally like putting up a sign saying “grind here. we were too lazy to make an actual game.” I didn’t even bother to try fighting in there. Another point of interest. I didn’t want to purchase the services of the mercenary in the beginning, thinking “hey, the devs might have added more interesting and involved characters later.” I mean, all I did with this guy was meet him and get his axe in exchange for armor. Then at the end, each character gets a nostalgic little send-off, which would be great, except that there was no bonding with the characters. There was no interaction. Just, “I helped you so you’re now my friend that will help me get my sex-doll back.” This game costs money , too. It is currently 5.99$ on Steam. 5.99$!!!! I wouldn’t give them a turd in a blanket for this game, let alone 5.99$. This game should be 0.12$ on itch.io or Desura, not cluttering up Steam and making it dirty. Not recommended, but you are certainly welcome to make your own judgments on this one. Steam needs to get some standards, this game is evidence.

Boogey Boy, Preview of Fears

Posted on August 17, 2014 by thre3zekiel

You know that dream where you are running and running, then suddenly you look back and there is a giant black demon horse chasing you? Goon Studios made a game about that and it is not nearly as terrifying as the dream. Frustrating at times, but still a lot of fun. Granted, it’s not completed, so this game is a preview version, but the good news is you can play this preview, too, on Indie Database! Don’t want to commit to the download? here are my thoughts on it as it is so far.

You character is a kid in his dreams, which end up having the same exact mechanics as an endless runner, like Canabalt or Crazy Critter Dash. Interesting that I should compare it to mobile games, since this little blue-haired fucker will be charging his way across PC monitors, Idevices and Androids. As he runs, his arms flop behind him like he was dreaming about seducing an anesthesiologist prior to arm surgery, then the running started. His art reminds me of a combination of Coraline, carrying some similarly creepy vibes, and Adventure Time. Nothing on this fucking Earth would get me to watch that show, but the art looks similar from what I’ve seen on posters at the mall. You are being chased by a rotating cast of silhouetted eldritch horrors across the terrain of your dreams.

If I was being chased by Cthulu’s drinking buddies, I would look like this too.

While you are running, there is the ground itself, which undulates wildly. Stay on the ground and you’ll be dead in seconds, since the nightmares, I’ll call them, run fast, and you really don’t for the most part. When they catch up to you, you roll under them like that guy in Ben Hur. To avoid this, there are a number of floating platforms you can leap to. Jumping is a lot of fun, and this kid is apparently the blood relative of an ancient ninja: he can double jump. And his double jump is fucking fancy! He’ll jump, then double jump and end it with a travolta. It’s wild and fun, and the best part is that this game is fucking creative. Sure, you have the usual platforms, floating pieces of road, clouds etc. But there are also things like beds to bounce on. As you might expect, this enhances your jump, which can already be enhanced by holding down the jump key.

But you have to move fast, since the nightmares toss platforms aside as they pass under them. Of course, you don’t control your run so much as struggle to cope with it. The only way to increase your run speed is to grab stars, which seem to make you speedier the more of them you have. Much like other running-centric heroes, you will lose your shiny collectibles if hit by an enemy. Enemies are pretty surreal, too. They run the gamut from helicopters and frogs to cars with spring-loaded boxing gloves in them. Most of these you can ‘defeat’ by jumping on them, but sometimes you can run along the top of them to escape.

Aside from stars, there is an array of powerups you can grab, and I have no idea what any of them do. I will tell you, instead, what I do know about them. The batteries you grab fill up your batter bar at the top of the screen, which makes me feel good when I get them. I have not been able to fill it and posit that its effect would be known if I could get the third battery slotted. Unfortunately, runners are not my natural habitat. There is also a kid-style superhero cape, which seems to actually be a blanket. You can’t trample my dreams! There are also dog, bubble, sister and teddy bear pickups. See if you can uncover their secrets!

Jump on the magical unicorn to briefly escape a horrible death by trampling!

This is a really fun game. I have only played a couple unfinished levels, and I am really interested in this title, despite my neutral emotions toward its genre. Honestly, most of my love for Boogey Boy comes from the art. The look is really dream-like and surreal: enemies make a sort of vague sense, platforms are creative and neat. Another thing is the music. It leaps and frolics around with you while still leaning on you to keep up a solid pace or be stomped into dream dust. The controls are simple and the UI is a bit random, but coherent. Overall, I would be alright paying money for this game. Its early stages of development generate their own ire, but it is to be expected at this point. The most annoying thing about this title is the lack of fucking exit button on the menu. There is also the issue of no pause menu’, so you only get the choice to return to the title menu, but even there you have no exit option. Again, though most of that title menu is non-functional because this is an early early development preview! Check it out, but don’t be judgmental. It’s a great work-in-progress that deserves to have an eye kept on it.

Flem, Sticky Little Preview

Posted on August 14, 2014 by thre3zekiel

This game is the most adorable game about a booger I have ever played. Your main character is a little pixel snot, and the style of this game reflects the silliness having such a main character implies. Its retro-style pixel art and chiptune music make it feel like a long-lost classic from the SNES, but its divergence from the usual recipe of those older games is what makes this game so much fun. It is also a title appearing this week at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany at the Unity 3D stand.

Flem is a booger. The first title I saw when I loaded the game read “One day in your nose…” The tutorial takes place in a little alcove of someone’s nose where other little boogers teach you everything how you will interact with the game. First there is your basic movement: left, right and jump. The most important feature of movement is the roll. Using roll is similar to running in that it increases speed, but it’s a toggle, so you don’t stop rolling until you hit the button again. When I started, I was as careful as I could be; but once I realized how to progress in the game, I realized I had to step it up.

Final goals tend to define a game, and the goal here is timing. Each level is a timed race to get past treacherous terrain, flora and fauna. This is why I found myself rolling through most of the game, since you need to make a good time to progress. I died a lot, mostly because platformers are not my strongest suit, but also because this game’s squishy exterior is only skin deep. This is not a forgiving game. Sure, each level is short, but that doesn’t change the fact that starting from the beginning every time is a pain. I have cursed Flem more times than any other game in such a short period of time, and he can really be fucking frustrating, too.

“What the actual fuck..?”

As you roll along through the game, you encounter a variety of obstacles, with the most common being spikes. Spikes are literally fucking everywhere. It’s like Flem got launched from the warm safety of the nostrils into a nightmare world of demon spikes and bizarre animals. I wouldn’t call the creatures in this game enemies, since you don’t really fight them. By all means, this game is almost Buddhist in its treatment of other creatures. That I have found, there is no means to kill enemies, mostly because that is not what Flem is about. Rather than sterilizing the environment of it natural fauna, you are tasked with slipping by them. And they are weird. There are yellow jumping bugs (dust mites, guess), cactus-like plants that launch pellets into the air, flying purple bugs and a myriad of other obstacles, but again, you are not there to kill anything: you just want to get past quickly. At the end of the level, you’ll be graded, and the faster you completed it, the better your score. Of course, there are only three scores, noted by different-colored gems. One of the biggest points of frustration are the buttons to continue the game. For now, it seems selection randomly flickers from one button to the next, making it equally possible to restart, continue or return to the menu by accident. It’s really annoying, but in a preview this early, it is good to see so few flaws.

In order to get past, you are given some interesting abilities, too. One of these abilities is gathering up little purple bubbles to float around. Of course, there is a gauge that displays the amount of time that you have to hover, which can be refilled by grabbing another purple bubble. This gets difficult, too, since your ultimate goal is to get to the end quickly, not to collect pick-ups. There are also orbs that give you speed boosts, let you jump and these are trickled into the game slowly enough that you get a handle on them, and the game ramps up the difficulty at a rate that is challenging and still fun.

Older games have a more specific motivation with an interference-oriented goal. Mario would vanquish goombas, beat on turtles and kick Bowser’s butt to save the Princess. Flem is a booger. He isn’t nearly as committed to combat as the suspenders-clad knight of the Mushroom Kingdom. There isn’t even a definable enemy, just this sense of displacement that drives Flem onward. In the very beginning, rather than some foe drawing you out into the world, you are launched out of the nose by a sneeze. It’s a beginning as goofy as the main character, but it sets a tone of enjoying the pixels of the game rather than selecting and neutralizing targets. As I have come to expect and enjoy from Norway, there is a talent for creating a fun environment that you pass through and enjoy, rather than tear through like a tornado full of missiles and chainsaws. I’ll bet that’s the next sequel to Sharknado.

What the fuck is with all the deadly spikes?!

The art in this game is spectacular, despite the simple concept. The tutorial, which is currently pretty basic, is delivered alongside a gallery of pictures that seem to tell the story of dissenting opinions between the denizens of the nose. Some ended up leaving, others stayed to cultivate some kind of snot garden. The music is always whimsical and echoes the style of the environment. It’s not some kind of modern, pulsating techno-mix of chiptunes; it’s just plain simple bit-tunes suitable for a game on the SNES. I would expect this title to appear on Ouya and other simple platforms. Alongside those, Henchman and Goon are trying to get this game voted up on Steam! I would expect this to be another fun little title for a low-ish price, so go vote it up on Steam and lets play!

Of everything that bothers me about this game, nothing drove me up a fucking wall like the spikes lining every single wall in sight. I mean seriously! Is the world descending into the worship of some bizarre demon-god that covers everything in tiny spikes?! What would the point of that be? Does he want you to just be permanently uncomfortable? I mean, spikes are spikes, but at this size it might be, at worst, like laying on toothbrushes. That might even tickle. It’s like the world was infiltrated by the most effectively strategizing and bizarrely quixotic aggressor in the world. Maybe he was invented by Woody Allen? I dunno, just seems like something he might imagine.

X-Tactics, Genre Fusion By AAA Veteran Devs

Posted on August 13, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Generally, I like to promote games from indies in need, but this is a story too deeply bizarre and intriguing to pass up. Veterans of the AAA gaming industry have broken off and teamed up to create X-tactics (pronounced Cross Tactics), a game that will link gaming across mobile and PC platforms for an exciting blend. Honestly, the anime art might not be my usual bag, but the concept behind this game is so vast and exciting that only the Japanese are crazy enough to do it right. Ingress better watch out, shit’s about to get real.

First things first, who the fuck are these people? Our developer in question, GAMKIN, is the product of minds from Square-Enix, Sega and Capcom. Those names drop harder than Skrillex does his bass, but still it stands. This is a game that will be rendered by veterans from three legendary household names in gaming. Fuck. These guys got together in late 2013 and they have spent most of their time in Japan away from the warm lights of our hemisphere. Mostly they’ve been working with interactive children’s television and collaborating with local game schools to cultivate next-gen game devs. So these guys are legit philanthropists with a serious mind for our future. Now they turn their thoughts again toward gaming, and this beast, which they’ve gotten fully funded with 33 days left on their Indie GoGo clock, threatens some formidable levels of awesome. For a little perspective, the campaign launched on the 8th. This means they achieved their primary goal in just 6 days.

GAMKIN has a lot on their plate when you look at their plans. The platforms they will be releasing on include iOS, Android, Kindle (2014), PC, Mac, Linux and Google Glass (2015), and none of those are stretch goals. The features of the game are complex and paint an exciting picture of gaming interaction. First off, this is another genre-fusing game. Its main components are tactics, fighting and urban exploration, with a 50%, 25% and 25% split, respectively. In their own words:

When we set out to make X-Tactics we didn’t want to make just another tactical game, nor attempt to create some sort of perfect tactical game. Instead our goal as developers here is to create something new. We combined equal parts of tactical gameplay of classics like that of Final Fantasy Tactics and Valkyrie Chronicles, together with fighting game mechanics and aesthetics, like those found in the Street Fighter series, to create a new gameplay experience, that we at least have not seen done before.

– GAMKIN on Xtactics, Indie Go Go campaign

Now this doesn’t explain the other 25% of the game, but let’s stop a minute what this means for PC gamers, as PC and MAC will be options for the game. The game itself will use turn-based tactics to create a high-speed gameplay environment that focuses on treacherous close-quarters combat, as you might find in an urban setting. Your heroes won’t be able to take ridiculous amounts of damage to the face, so you will need to make quick moves and calculated risks to achieve victory rapidly. Failing to do so finds you at the business end of some purple alien’s psychic attacks…

… and that suit screams “business time”

Each battles takes up the full screen, and each mission will be comprised of several battles. With one screen active fights will be tightly fought, so bonuses like flanking, support, destructible furnishings in the environment and traps will give you a serious edge and change the battle’s dynamics every time you play. X-Tactics will also utilize an initiative system, which they compare to that of Final Fantasy Tactics, but I will translate that to the American readers: shit’s going to battle like DnD. Initiative will be based on speed and turn order will be thereby determined. This will also open up the ability for seasoned players to fine-tune their initiative-order to get their team members to unleash dual combos and team combos. Not to mention, enemies will come in waves each battle, so you really have to get that ass in gear and wipe out your foes before more arrive!

What does this all mean for mobile users? Honestly, this part looks to be the most exciting. GAMKIN is going to use GPS information to create a variety of missions that will allow you to defend your neighborhood, school or workplace from outbreaks and other dangers. Each character you have will even have locale-based storylines that will be unlocked depending on where you are, so the exploration is highly encouraged. Where this game will really shine is how it will use the GPS of your device to investigate your surroundings, reveal hints and uncover treasures. This will open up to more modular features where users can organize their own location-based events and treasure-hunts with friends. In addition to all this, the game will be sensitive to the time of day, moon cycles and even weather to unlock events, initiate outbreaks and influence character abilities. Having the mobile functionality will also allow for 4-player co-op missions, so you don’t have to be anti-social with this title. And for those of you guys who shelled out the outrageous amounts of cash to join in on the googe Glass explorer program, the team will also have a companion app that will assist with the urban exploration part of the game. If that isn’t enough, they will also be updating weekly with episodic content for the game, including missions, items and new heroes all at no cost to players. If they throw in anything else, my brain might explode.

O, no, wait. That's just my aunt's baking.

O, no, wait. It’s just my neighbors’ cooking.

This is all well and good, but what is the fucking story here? Well, it takes place in a story like our own, if our world was controlled by top-secret government agencies and secret societies. It isn’t, right? You’ll control a motley crew of secret agents, treasure hunters and adventurers that are working to keep the truth in check. This means you are more “Men In Black”, less “defenders of the people”. I expect we’ll likely be killing those free-minded liberators of information, and that makes me laugh with dark, dark relish (enjoyment, not condiment). And the game is perfectly ok with this. In fact, the creators have said that it will use dark humor and anime punk art styles to put a new spin on conspiracy theories and urban legends!

And this got funded seemingly over night. I have known about this game for four days, and it has already gotten its Indie GoGo funding, and they are into stretch goals. Literally, they got a money enema. They have 6 hunters with 2 more listed for stretch goals, including some badass ninja panda and a thick list of additional concepts. Go and check it out for yourself, and wait with bated breath for the release! Congratulations to these guys for getting their funding goals! Now get in there and see if we can help them meet a few more stretch goals!

A bit of gameplay for ya ; )

Shadow Warrior, Better the Second Time

Posted on August 12, 2014 by thre3zekiel

As with movies, games that were remade from an older title fall into two categories: epic or fail. Shadow Warrior takes the material from the unrepentantly indecent original and sculpts it into an experience that adds to and surpasses the original. And the way they did it is what makes this so awesome; Shadow Warrior uses the same corny sense of humor, but tempers it with a snarky, demonic sidekick. Devolver Digital has recreating an old washed-up title down to a process as simple as “give it to Flying Wild Hog.”

When SW kicks off, you main character is driving down the street listening to The Touch by Stan Bush. People seem to like those songs from the 80’s, but not everything out of that era is worthy of remembrance. Shit, not much out of the 80’s and even some of the 90’s is worth remembering, so this guy listening to some shitty 80’s music in a badass car on the way to a deal is a little off-putting. Honestly, at first I was like, “God, please don’t tell me that’s the main character.” But this game is filled with demons, so despite my pleas of “don’t make me play this guy”, I was forced to play as Lo Wang. I let out a nervous giggle and soldiered on. Of course, this was the only thing that I, as a gamer, found distasteful about the game. Its humor, on the other hand, is another story entirely. If I were asian, I might be pretty deeply insulted by most parts of this game, but the way the game also makes fun of the original seems an attempt to apologize for it.

Huh, they misspelled “POWAAH!”

As with most games, the first level gives you an idea of what to expect, and it is fucking awesome. It’s about an hour worth of slicing enemies to tiny pieces with a katana as they shriek and gush blood all over the carpet. Your katana behaves like a magical limb-detaching wand, and at first I was really surprised by how horrible and gory the game is. That lasted about 10 seconds before I was laughing my ass off at how ridiculous it really was. 2 parts Tarantino, 2 parts Jet Li and all Wang, baby. It also displays how good at hiding shit in plain sight FWH really is. At one point there is a statue behind glass in one of the main corridors, and I walked past it wondering why it was the only glowing statue in the whole place. This statue is one of several types of collectibles that the game hides from you: money statues, bowls of blood, Ki Crystals and fortune cookies.

The statues give you money, but are not the only source of funds. The other source is an ancient chinese method called “finding that shit lying around.” As you collect money, the game totals it and lets you use it to buy ammo and upgrades for your weapons. There are 3 different upgrades per weapon with 6 upgradable weapons: a pistol, machinegun, shotgun, crossbow, flamethrower, rpg. One of the things I love about this game is a logical conundrum that I call the “Dimensional Sphincter Improbability”. Essentially, unless you have a magical asshole that also links to an alternate dimension where you store all your weapons, it’s highly fucking improbable that you can carry an arsenal this vast. Hard Reset, FWH’s inaugural title, solved this issue by making these weapons varying configurations of the same two weapons. Shadow Warrior just stores these weapons in an off-screen pocket dimension that follows Lo Wang around at all times. Of course, this game makes no apologies, and why should it? It is a remake of an old, less-than-classic game. Fuck logic. Your first weapon, though, is the best. The katana is an awesome part of this game, and you start the game dicing people up and flinging shuriken. There is one problem with all of this. The money has the square hole, which is distinctly Chinese, but the katana and shuriken were weapons of Japanese origin. This game is a bizarre cultural amalgamation of two cultures. Maybe the enemies in the next game will come from Korean lore?

The next big K-pop group, "Puppets of a Delusional Overlord"

Massacring these blood puppets was more fun than my ethics should have been able to tolerate.

Next, you have the bowls of blood. This part makes me a little uneasy, and I filed it under “shit I won’t think about too much.” Every once in a while, you will come across a secretly ensconced bowl of blood suspended by demonic power on a spiked shrine built of the corpses of your enemies victims. So, naturally the first thing you do is drink it. At least, I assume you do, and I am pretty sure it is never outwardly stated exactly what Wang does with it, but what else is there to do with it? Rub it all over your body? Either way, you get these bowls and they grant you Karma, which, in turn, is used to upgrade yourself with all kinds of abilities. I spent the most of my first karma points on Ki attacks with my sword, which are badass attacks that allow you to cut through demons like lightly-chilled tofu. These attacks are rewarding as fuck, too. Get off a good divider of the heavens attack and your enemies basically explode while is great for taking off legs. Your enemies will crawl off a bit, which makes it easy to deal with their friends then come back for the karma of beheading them, too.

Ki crystals are giant crystals that glow with ki power, something that fuels the demons’ magic. Luckily, it also allows you to use Ki powers like self-healing or making a defensive bubble. While not overtly useful, if used properly the powers become as deadly as the attacks. Each of these collectibles allow you to buy new weapons, powers and abilities that make gameplay deeper and more entertaining. The best part is that the abilities flow perfectly from gameplay, and the controls are beautifully intuitive. As soon as I had the abilities mapped to my brain and the controls, I was ripping through enemies. When I was finished, their army was measured in liters rather than kilograms.

After a battle, every arena tends to look like this.

Finally, there are these fortune cookies. Each of them gives you 5 health, which is nice, and then slips you a Confucius-style joke that will make you face-palm so many times your head will turn black-and-blue. Generally, the humor of this game is pretty terrible, and it would even get to a point that is indecent, but the demon in your head makes it a little better. He is an ancient, which is some kind of immortal asian demon. The one you befriend is named Hoji, and he was banished from the shadow realm. His story is one of Romeo and Juliet turned Pygmalion and Galatea, but with a dark twist. He provides some comedic levity to balance your character’s ego a little. With Hoji by your side, there is someone to keep Lo Wang from being the same person he was in the first game. At one point he even says “Sorry, I used to be a prick.” In the context of the game, he could be referring to his recent personal catharsis, but it also feels like a reference to that previous life. Given the fact that this game also has more Easter eggs than grocery stores in late March, it’s not too much of a stretch.

Your enemies are also a throwback to that old time, when Nukem was the duke and consoles were for kiddies. Many times, this game just throws you into fights where you are like “o shit I’m gonna die” and the entire time I was having flashbacks to plays of Descent and Doom. Your first enemies are humans, but the game is fast to switch them out for an army of demons. And those old games seemed to have a habit of throwing demons in as a foe for shooters. I mean, look at Quake. I had no fucking clue what the fuck I was even fighting, and the recent(ish) Quake 4 changed over to aliens instead of demonic foes. Honestly, whatever. Shadow Warrior made it cool to kill demons again and gave me as much of a thrill as Bioshock did. Then there are these massive bosses that the game throws at you. I played a little Duke Nukem Forever, and the giant-boss battles were just a little too… Duke. They seemed so focused on the fact that the boss was massive and it played well enough, but it was just uninteresting. Just felt like I was firing bullets into a river to dam in an attempt to damn it shut. I didn’t feel badass, just felt like damage control. Boss battles in this game follow a sort of rhythm and you can measure your progress visually. You also feel badass at the end for taking down this giant enemy. It doesn’t feel one bit frustrating and is well done. The battles are the same method as those found in Hard Reset, and I greatly enjoyed them.

Alongside the enemies, the game takes numerous flares from old-style games, like the card-key search. Back in the days of Doom, it was standard procedure to be sent out after a set of keys to the complex you were running and gunning through. Lo Wang finds himself running through arenas of foes searching for colored shrines to destroy in order to get past mystical demon seals. It really brought me home, and I feel like this is an experience that new gamers will enjoy while old gamers can get all nostalgic. On top of all this, Shadow Warrior had a spin-off game with Viscera Clean-up Detail: Shadow Warrior. That is another indie gold mine and a lot of fun, so check it out.

Obligatory scenic screenshot

Every ounce of this game screams with a righteous fire that burns through every expectation that I had. It is a vein-bursting experience with fun gameplay, amazing music and a storyline that plays an artful, melodramatic chord against the game’s wang-fueled humor. The game is ridiculous and over-the-top in a way that made old kung-fu movies so popular. It doesn’t matter that this game is goofy and ridiculous, it is still a lot of fun, and in a lot of ways it is a shrine to the old generations of PC games and a fist-bump to their players. It almost feels like I just sat down with the developers, had a few beers and talked about the “good old days of PC gaming” and how gamers nowadays wouldn’t understand. This they would understand. And it is really something special, even though it is so, so ridiculous. Not to mention, the game leaves one of its main enemies wide open for a sequel. Zilla, your former employer and demonically-enhanced lunatic, escapes in a helicopter. You slice the other guy’s throat, though, so you get that satisfaction. This game is 39.99$ on Steam, and I whole-heartedly endorse paying this money. I got the game when it was on sale, so I lucked out, but it is a title you are guaranteed to enjoy.

With all that being said, the thing that boils my blood over this game is its developers. Seriously! How dare they make something so good! This sets fucking standards! They literally have made 3 fucking games. FUCKING 3! A game where you shred through hordes of demonic minions with righteous blazing fury, one where you blow your way through level after level of robotic minions that are spliced with human bodies and … a game starring a pink panda and a yellow lizard. Ok, so that last one is still in development, but I am totally fucking serious. These guys should be given some other old-school titles to revive, like SiN or Blake Stone! I feel like the only fucking guy that even remembers Blake and his battles with Aliens of Gold! Shit! Oh well, I am sure all that is just around the corner, Devolver Digital just needs more money for properties acquisition. I wish I could just give them money. LoL! Be so much easier than waiting for games to come out.

How Elysian Shadows Team Plans to Revive The 2D RPG

Posted on August 10, 2014 by thre3zekiel

In 1998 I spent my time roaming the castles of Thief: The Dark Project and watching The Matrix, but I also have a strong memory of hearing about this mythical console set to ride an eastern wind to our shores. Its name was the Dreamcast and it was Sega’s final all-or-nothing bid to take the game console market by storm. It had numerous features that were well ahead of its time. Unfortunately, it was too far ahead, like trying to explain electricity to cavemen. By the time the Playstation 2, Xbox and Gamecube were released, it was just a shadow of a memory from a glossy magazine page. After the Dreamcast, Sega didn’t die, it just slid out of the limelight and settled for publishing games instead of consoles.

Many did not get to experience the Dreamcast, but for those that did, it was more than just a console, it was a lost piece of gaming history. Even today, developers are putting out titles for Sega’s last console, and the Elysian Shadows Team proudly stand among their number. Falco Girgis is the Engine Architect and Team lead, and he explained his motivation to me when I asked why develop a game for the Dreamcast in 2014?

” I found my way into the Dreamcast scene at around the age of 14. I had always loved video games, and I had done a little bit of programming, but when I discovered there was an entire community of crazy fuckers out there developing their own apps, emulators, and games for the console, and I had the opportunity to also do that without being part of a huge studio, I fell in love immediately. You have to realize this was before Steam, smart phones, or any kind of indie support on consoles. The Dreamcast allowed the average guy with a dream to develop for a platform. I taught myself to code just for that little white box. I fell in love with it, and what it represented as Sega’s last console.”

So, it was a console Falco loved immensely as a teenager and he learned to hone his craft on it. That just means it has a special sheen, right? It’s a dead console, though. So what? I was still wondering if there was even still an audience for the console as Mr. Girgis continued.

“It’s so underappreciated, and it innovated so much in gaming–poly counts in the millions, hardware support for bump mapping (PS2 can’t do that), memory cards with screens, online gaming. It also had an insane amount of AAA titles for a console with such a short lifespan. It really felt like Sega knew it was their last chance in the hardware market, and they poured their hearts and souls into it. For those of us who were able to experience the Dreamcast, it’s kind of an immortal thing, and it shows. Most of our money from our Kickstarter is from Dreamcast sales. There are still gamers everywhere who have not forgotten the Dream, and I have made it my personal quest to realize my childhood dream of releasing a game for the console.”

Honestly, I was taken aback. Jump over to their Kickstarter and tell me what you see. As of right now, I see 90,448$ with 760 backers. Doing the math, that would have to be about 119$ from each backer, and considering only 182 backers pledged 100$+, that means there is a formidable Dreamcast audience. Granted, some of those backers gave 1k$ – 5k$, so this game has a spirited group of supporters…

...And when you look at what they want to accomplish, it is hard not to drink the koolaide.

…And when you really look at what they want to accomplish, it is hard not to drink the koolaid.

Everything I see on their page makes me flash back to the numerous hours I had when I discovered Chronotrigger, Secret of Mana 1 – 3 and (US) Final Fantasy 6 on emulators. There is a lot on that kickstarter page, but seeing everything made me wonder, what are they really trying to accomplish?

“Our overall goal is pretty multi-layered, haha! The biggest thing we wanted to achieve with Elysian Shadows itself was to reinvent the traditional 2D RPG formula in a manner that makes it new, exciting and relevant by today’s standards. We don’t want games like Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana to be a thing of the past, and we certainly have not been too thrilled with the slow demise of the JRPG itself. Most of our team members can be quoted saying that they want to create the game they wanted to play most as a young gamer, including aspects of games that they grew up loving as children, and trying to use them to create a unique RPG experience that could appeal to an audience beyond just RPG players.”

“I have found myself,Falco, really wanting to make an emotional connection with our audience through ES. I want to create a game whose story and characters are relatable, and whose struggles are relevant to the lives of our players. I feel like this connection is really the ultimate goal of any form of art, and this is especially true for video games as they’re an aggregate of every other art form: writing, art, music, etc. I’m really an introverted guy who loves to play the outgoing extrovert, but I have very few close friends and I tend to not have much in common with most people. The older I get the more I feel like my contributions to ES artistically are some kind of attempt to connect with players and fans on a deeper level. I’m sure Freud would have a field day psychoanalyzing that.”

That really explains everything. Elysian Shadows is a collaborative piece of art interpreted through the hearts and souls of its creators. Each of them has something unique to put in and being indie developers lets them do this the best they can. And when you look at what it adds up to, you can’t help but feel the passion and love there. You can’t helped but be awed. Personally, I think it’s moving.

I love the shadows and how the game looks like pixelated life.

I really enjoyed taking in everything that Falco and the team were telling me, but what is the rest of the team like? What do they do and who are they?

“We have 7 team members total:

Falco Girgis

Falco Girgis is our engine and toolkit developer, and he’s also the one who developed the framework, allowing us to target so many platforms (including the Sega Dreamcast). He’s basically the team mad scientist. Falco loves the Zelda franchise, pretty much anything on the Dreamcast, and obviously all of the 16-bit JRPG classics.

Tyler Rogers

Tyler Rogers is the gameplay engineer, who basically takes the art, music, and levels then puts everything together into a cohesive gameplay experience. Tyler is very into Legends of Dragoon, Castlevania, and Final Fantasy tactics.

Daniel Tindall

Daniel Tindall is our web developer and level designer, and he has been very much a secret weapon for creating our Kickstarter and Steam pages. Dan’s favorite series is Metal Gear Solid.

Patryk Kowalick

Leandro Tokarevski

Patrick Kowalik and Leandro Tokarevski are our two pixel artists, both self-taught and classically trained traditional artists who decided to get into game development to broaden their horizons through pixel art.

Connor Linning

Connor Linning is our team rock star and audio composer, bringing with him a background in rock, metal, electronica, and survival horror music influencing his musical direction with Elysian Shadows. Connor is obsessed with the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series.

Eddie Ringle

Eddie Ringle is the team mobile developer, who has been the guy working on the OUYA, Droid, and even Google Glass builds of Elysian Shadows.

We aren’t just retro gamers either. Falco is totally into the new adventure-style games: Uncharted, Tomb Raider, The Last of Us. So good.”

It feels like I just put up a description of the A-Team, or something. Hopefully each of these pictures gives you an idea who we’re dealing with here. Each of these guys is immensely talented and putting everything they have to make something amazing. I hope Ebert is rolling in his grave because if this isn’t art, nothing is. Of course with the influence each of these games has had on the Team, what games have a direct influence on Elysian Shadows?

“There really is no single inspiration behind Elysian Shadows, and I kind of feel like that’s why it’s so special. It’s why our team is so emotionally invested in the project. We have all found our own ways to endow Elysian Shadows with a piece of what we like best in gaming, each of us growing up with different backgrounds and inspirations. Obviously games like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Phantasy Star have deeply inspired our direction, but there are quite a few more inspirations that aren’t even from the RPG genre. Falco and Tyler grew up loving the Megaman Legends series, and it has influenced their direction with the whole “ruins” concept. Even portions of the storyline. Connor is a huge survival horror fanatic and, oddly enough, he’s found ways to endow ES with that kind of emotional tension through dynamic lighting. Once we added jumping (initially inspired by Mario RPG), we quickly found ourselves able to design levels with influences from games like Super Mario and add combat moves from games like Megaman X. I feel like there’s little pieces of numerous games influencing what we do with ES.”

So Elysian Shadows, almost literally, draws its lineage from the DNA of a widely-ranging gamut of games without any single influence dominating completely. The more I hear about it, the more excited I get. This isn’t just a game, it’s a love letter. The kickstarter page has an amazing set of features. Elysian Shadows Team has partnered with Pixellamp, which allows for impressive pixelated shadows. The combat is set to be real-time and the gameplay will have a strong feeling of freedom. Splicing 2D RPG and platformer elements, this game will go boldly where other games are limited from going. There will also be a complete class or “job” system where characters’ innate strengths, weaknesses and gameplay styles can be augmented through a wide array of job-specific abilities and talent trees. A lot of this is straight off the Kickstarter page, so you can go there and get the complete feeling for what backers are getting out of this. They have samples of the music, the art and descriptions of various details planned for the game up there, too. The initial goal is to reach 150,000$ with stretch goals all the way up to 800,000$. And considering that last one would make this into an MMORPG, I hope we get as many additional backers as humanly possible. They also have an entry on Steam Greenlight, so if you can’t put any money in, vote them up on Steam! This is one vision that is extremely close to meeting its funding, and it threatens to shake the boundaries of games as we understand them.

A lot of this article has been lightly edited to flow as neatly as possible. The message conveyed has been kept the same in all respects.

Lantern Forge, Dr Sandbox and Mr Hack ‘n’ Slash!

Posted on August 10, 2014 by thre3zekiel

I swear to fucking god, if I play another goddamn sandbox again it will be all my fault, because I like sandboxes way too much. Granted, last week was the unofficial “week of sandboxes” for me, so I am getting some time in with something more violent after this. For now, this was a game that persisted in surprising the fuck out of me. Seriously. Every time I thought I had gotten to the furthest extent of content in this game, I got hit with more. It isn’t listed as a pre-release title on Steam, but the devs are still adding content, Terraria-style, so it must be an Early Release. Either way, this game could have fucking fooled me, because it has more flesh than my own personal ass post-Thanksgiving.

When you load it up, you are in the middle of tabula rasa, a clean slate just waiting for creativity. One of the first things I noticed was how pretty the UI is. I mean LOOK at it! It has everything necessary for an RPG and a sandbox while having some high-speed options for quick-paced combat, and it plays well, too. It focal feature is a little mode-toggle that is wedged between the hotbar and mana bar like my brother’s face in a dancer’s boobies at a strip joint. Hit that baby and you go from fun-times-with-Mr-Rodgers sandbox to fuck-me-in-the face Hack ‘n’ Slash. No joke. Everything is pretty colorful, beautifully detailed world and a skillful procedural generation that somehow hides itself at first, but that button flips half your menu into blood-stained weapon of death!

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, mother fucker.

Take a gander around and you will notice that my house, the log building, and the workshop, the stone building with castle walls, have no floors. One of the perks of a (sort of) pre-release. That is ok, though. And here is why. Above you can see a fraction of what is possible in ths game, attained in about a full day of gaming. You can build houses that are basically walls, windows and doors. Your bed is the binding point where you respawn after death, and incidentally a time-warping machine of the future. When you sleep, night turns into day, but it looks like you just walk over and look at the bed as time changes. Given another efficiency feature of the game, you can do this through walls. This feature is one of the elements of the sandbox.

Next to the blue toggle are four buttons. The first makes visible your character’s range of influence, which is how far away you can touch things. Educated guess puts this distance at about 10 fucking feet. This guy rivals Garrett in the “characters with the longest arms” category, but again, this makes things like harvesting a grove of trees easy, so you can avoid being at dick-distance from each tree to cut it. At first I thought I found a glitch, but then I stared to look over the buttons, and it all made sense. The next two buttons say they rotate objects before you place them, but don’t be deceived by this low-down, dirty deceiver; it actually morphs the physical form of items being placed. For instance, a log fence could become a single section, a corner of fence or just a goddamn post. Test this out with various items as the results are titillating. Last is the sub-subterranean article induction rectifying selector or the STAIRS button because the only fucking thing you place between levels are the stairs! I mean, if you want to get down to the shrieking charnelhouse of nightmares that is the underground, you’ll need to take the stairs. Press the mode-toggle before you go, though, as you can’t fight in placement mode.

Blizzard called, they want their orc barracks back.

Blizzard called, they want their mercenary camp back

Granted, before you venture in the dark abyss that lies beneath, you’ll want good gear. You can craft a wide range of items from the beginning, but the items you may craft are limited to what you can pick up off the ground. And by “pick up off the ground” I really mean “beat into submission with your bare hands” as the animation seems to display. Still, you can get loose stones, sticks (which are in fucking everything), logs and food on the surface, and the list goes on. You can feasibly get a few levels before needing to venture downward, especially since it feels like there is an entire game up top. Eventually you will want to make stairs down. Now if you start near stairs, DON’T FUCKING GO DOWN THERE! I did and I got my ass torn open by goblins. Luckily the animation just has you pulse into nothing in a flash of light, presumably as Scotty beams you back to the Enterpr.. I MEAN.. your bed. Building your own staircase is likely to lead down to a single claustrophobic space where you claw your way through the walls for air.. or you could just craft a stone pick and dig your way out, fucking lunatic. Down here on the first level you can find copper, albeit sparsely populated, which will get you the necessary components for some workbenches. Materials increase in availability the deeper you go, too, but so does difficulty. Eventually you need to go down, but be prepared when you do and craft yourself some solid gear on a workbench.

Imagine there are half a thousand artistically detailed workbenches in this game, each with their own function and an impressive array of craftable items and you’ll be imagining… uh.. this game. I even found a workbench that uses workbenches as crafting components. It gets intense, but as you need to go deeper, so too do you need to get crafty. My first workbench helped me combat my hunger bar through agriculture. The gardening workbench lets you use fruits and flowers to make seeds and potted plants. Now many things in Lantern Forge also have numerous uses: food-bearing plants can be turned into seeds, sticks are in fucking everything and stones are always useful. It pays to never throw anything away, so it is a good thing there are as many types of chests as there are types of crafting materials. Granted, eventually you will have more stuff than you know what to do with, so one really cool mechanic among the pile of awesome elements in this game is the Town Center. The Town Center is that giant ominous lantern over a bottomless pit in the first screenshot. This uses workbenches to craft shops that are associated to the functions of those workbenches. Over-simplified example: a gardening workbench lets you build the farming supply shop. This can then be placed to buy food, tools, seeds and plants for farming. The best part is the shopkeepers rotate their stock, so the items in there always change as you play. Honestly, I am not sure what Hearthfire Studios is trying to pull, but my brain almost exploded with all the shit there is to do in this game.

What Seuss-Lovecraftian nightmare did I just acid trip into?!

Just when you think you have seen it all, they come up with this shit. A giant haunted dollhouse in the middle of a pink and purple field spewing out knitted doll-beasts that chase you into the next fucking biome. Great. Combat is pretty tough at first, but as you get higher in level and secure a handle on it, it becomes manageable. You have three combat trees to pour skill points into: hunter for ranged, knight for melee and mage for magic. They also threw in an adventurer tree and filled it with a variety of passive abilities that make exploration, sandboxing and everything in the fucking game better in general. On the surface, you are less likely to run into enemies, unless you are a stupid screenshotting asshole that runs into the weirdest shit possible and takes pictures while evil dolls poke him with giant needles. Yea, that’s me. At night, however, the forest becomes populated with all sorts of enemies. That’s why gear can really be important. While you can only make stone tools at first, eventually you will get to iron and mithril. These items are, in turn, used to get even more items which can open up new varieties of craftable items, both practical and cosmetic.

Everything about this game is fun. The art and music work symbiotically to generate the ambiance of this game: colorful and bright at first glance, but as night falls, things get dark and ominous. And at first, it feels like a winsome frolic in an idyllic land, but as you get deeper and deeper, you will realize there is really more to it. To give you an idea, I was playing this game for nearly a full 24 hours and still only got to the second tier of technology, crafting in copper. Granted, I like to really explore things, so I was going all out and getting loot, farming, cooking, crafting and making a town. This game is gradual sandbox gameplay combined with challenging combat, which spikes in difficulty to keep you on your toes. Overall, this game is worth every cent of the 9.99$ asking price on Steam and is a lot of fun for those with this taste. It splices two genres into a coherent and instant-switch whole that holds its own on either mode. I am not even a fan of anime, but this game’s subtle JRPG tones really bring out the lively feelings of this game and give it a unique flair that really entertains. Even considering everything I have said about this game, there is still so much to explore and experience about it. Play it yourself to see. Thumbs up to the developers on this one; Lantern Forge deserves an adoring fanbase of its own.

The Forest, Sandboxing With Naked Cannibals

Posted on August 7, 2014 by thre3zekiel

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in The Forest, you run like a Kenyan or die like a dog. In fact, I am pretty sure most dogs have better deaths, but I am not here to debate that shit with you. The Forest is fucking brutal, and you feel it every bleeding second. It starts with your character pulling himself from a plane crash covered in blood and it ends… well.. I haven’t seen it end happily yet. But the title screen shows two heads tied up on a stake with intestines that connect through the mouths and wraps around the necks. And they are upside down. Yea, shit gets nasty. This game is also in pre-release, so remember that there is a lot that is still missing.

At the start you are on a plane ride from a presumably civilized location to god knows where when the plane is ripped in half rather suddenly. It’s not exactly like there is a fucking smidgen of turbulence, just a loud bang like something hits the plane. I am going to venture a guess here and say that someone threw a homing spear and it tore the plane in half. With all the bodies and everything that seem to litter the forest, the locals have some kind of vastly successful marketing campaign that lures in hapless morons so they don’t go hungry. Cause cannibals can’t eat each other! That’s how they get diseases! On the plane with you is a little kid. He is cuddling your arm until the plane breaks apart, then he is white-knuckling the arm rests. When you come to, you are laying in the aisle and this mostly-naked wildman is standing over the kid. No worries, he picks up the kid’s bloodied body and carries him off into the untamed wilderness. It’s ok, though. Plenty of happy-endings start that way, right? I am sure he ends up in a Disney-Pixar plot line where his father’s death in the plane crash is the tear-jerking opening. And the fucked up reality is that I am really fighting cannibals and mutants in the woods for years to come. Magical.

Don’t worry, kid. It’s more aero-dynamic without the front! We’ll just get there faster!

Once you are able to get up, you need to look around you. This is likely the last solid chance you get to search the wreck. All about you there is soda, booze, some food and a cellphone. This cellphone is very important because it sets a keynote for what useless, shitty inventory items look like. It doesn’t really do anything except tell you the weather, the temperature and how far you’ve walked. Let me repeat that: In a game where you spend your time OUTSIDE IN THE FUCKING WILDERNESS you are given a goddamn cellphone – a separately programmed mechanic – that tells you if you are cold and what the weather is like. Of course, that step-counting feature is the major point, I think. It lets you know just how many steps you take to get between the forest line where you cut trees, spot natives and run for your fucking life. Naturally, useless.

Now, I died numerous fucking times right out of the gate. The game tells you to page through a survival guide and see how it might help you, and it does at first, but it fails to mention there are cannibals creeping up behind you preparing to gnaw your ears off. Like chewy little snacks… I started right next to a cannibal village the first few times, and walked right in just like “Hey guys, nice grass huts!” They tore me apart. The second time I kept my distance, and they overwhelmed me before I had the chance to build a fire. Strangely, fire is what keep these loonies at bay. They see it and back off like, “SHIT! He has gypsy magic!!” Before getting the fire together, though, the guide has you build a little stick shelter to sleep in. This is how you save your game, so it’s important, but don’t sleep right away. You’ll wake up at night with cannibals gnawing on those delicious ears again. The last tutorial shows you two plants: a blueberry bush and a bush with black-colored berries on it. I specify because the first is edible, the second will fucking kill you. Important. And these are not the only edible plants in the game, just two of them. The rest you have to figure out by trial-and-error! And I mean, most survival books are specific to a section of the world or a continent and give you a wide variety of things to eat in those places. Whoever wrote this book just kind of implies that there are other things out there you can and cannot eat: either madly sadistic or profoundly lazy. Not to mention, you can eat certain animals in this game but not others. Why can I eat rabbits and lizards but not the fucking frogs and birds? And why not the shark that washed up on the beach? I know I would be using that for days. Just cook it up really really well and add some salt from distilled seawater. Maybe some seaweed for flavor.

Each year hundreds of people survive in the wilderness – except you. You’re fucked.

This is one of those places that the game is still vastly unfinished. I am sure that there will be more added to this book given time, but right now it is pretty useless for finding food. Your best bet is killing animals for food anyway, clearly not a game made by vegans. Although there is a vegan mode where the cannibals won’t eat you. Makes it a little easier. The primary role of the book is to help you build things. Those ghost-walls you see up there are what happens when you place something. It creates an image of what you are building and you bring materials over to it, building into the image. Really neat, overall. Of course, you need to be careful where you place things. A ghost-image cannot be removed right now, not that I could find anyway. Then there is the matter of cancelling an object. Say, you want to build a fire. In your panic to avoid slipping into the stomachs of cannibals, you accidentally select the head-on-a-stake effigy. You’ll have to go back into the book and then exit or select something else to cancel the head. Now I was panicked, and that is the story of how I got a head-on-a-stake next to my cooking pit. It’s a little unsettling, but it’s a great conversational piece that adds seasoning to my skinned rabbits and lizards. The most frustrating element of building is you have to look back into the book every time you want to plan out a section of wall or build a fire. This makes sense the first time, but it gets old after the thousandth fucking time. I would have memorized the best method for building a fire after having to read the book a bazillion times. Early on all your construction should be fueled by soda and candy bars you got from the crash and luggage around it. This gives you food and energy enough to get a good bit of a citadel plannedand built before the cannibals become too much of a problem.

O, yea, effigies? That shit is fucked up. One way to keep cannibals at bay aside from filling your camp with campfires is to set up little effigies. Effigy is a nice term though. Really, you are creating survivalist outsider art with the limbs of your fallen foes. Fucked up and brutal. The best part is, they only keep the fuckers back as long as they are on fire, which they stay lit for like, an half hour at most? Then there was this problem I had where it was raining almost constantly. So, apparently I am in a sub-tropical rainforest. Those aren’t fucking common, but they exist. This might help me pin point where The Forest takes place. There seem to be no tropical plants that I can determine, and there is a shore. The natives like taking body parts and wearing them like feathers plucked from a peacock. The animals tend to be small and there are a lot of lizards. At first I would think Russia, but there aren’t any wolves and it can’t be Africa since no one is black. That would be racist. Then again, nobody looks asian, but some pacific islanders look white, right? Best guess, this takes place in Oceania, not too far from New Zealand. What likely happened is all the hipsters and vegans banished the meat-eating people to an island and there they went fucking crazy and started eating people. Of course, that was years ago, so they’ve all but forgotten about them except in stories and tales. This is why you find hikers and campsites out here where no one in their right fucking mind could ever consider camping. I assume they are hikers because they are miles from any roads and there aren’t any off-roading jeeps or anything. Then again, they could have come in by plane, given there is a lake nearby and the seashore is accessible.

There is also an interesting crafting system that reminds me of the Zork games where you combine different things to create something else, like a bottle of booze and a rag makes a molotov cocktail. Of course, there aren’t a lot of recipes to figure out at the moment. The survival book naturally doesn’t tell you how to build any of these things, either. I remember reading the military Field Manual on wilderness survival, and that shit is comprehensive. I would have bought a better manual if I were this guy.

Welcome to my home, you can have a seat over by the head-on-a-spike. His name is Wilson.

Welcome to my home, you can have a seat over by the flaming head-on-a-spike. His name is Wilson.

Of course the cannibals in this game are the early enemies and the source of a lot of fun. Before the mutants come and ruin your life, the cannibals are just funny as shit. First off, they run around shrieking and generally acting like they think they’re zombies. They’re all naked, including the women, so seeing some boobies every once in a while is nice, even if they are weird and dirty. Remember all the booze from earlier? Use a few of those bottles to make molotov cocktails, and let it rip. These things take out cannibals like nobody’s business. You’ll need the rest of the booze to make bombs for use against the mutants. When you die, you also go to this fucking cave full of terrifying shit, but I don’t want to talk about that again. The least the bastards could do is just let you die. It really does say a lot about a game, too, when you can take one guy’s arm and smack his friends to death with it. There is a little problem with killing enemies with fire, though. The enemies will die and their corpses remain standing.. and breathing. You can smash them apart with your axe, and the legs even stay there. Then there are the women. Sometimes you will kill them with fire and they will change from a hairless weirdo to a woman with hair. Then you smash them apart like a blood balloon and their body parts turn into male body parts. It is just a little weird. All the mechanics are there, but the models and art have to catch up. Generally this game screwed up where Minecraft excelled. The Forest chose some spectacular graphics not realizing that all that detail leaves HUGE fucking holes. There are so many graphics bugs in the game that going into them at length is its own fucking essay. Minecraft had crappy graphics that were ridiculous by comparison to other games at the time. But it worked and did its job so well that it is a gaming sensation. The graphics were simple and clean. This allowed the developers to move on to other, more important things, thus Minecraft had more to start with than The Forest. Right now, this is a great game, and 14.99$ on Steam is pretty reasonable for where it is in development. I would wait a bit on this game, though, if you expect a good and complete game. Should you choose to invest right now (and I would advise waiting until it goes on sale again), don’t wander too deep into The Forest and it’s still pretty fun.

Reus, Sandbox of Giants!

Posted on August 6, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Reus is a game for hippies. Rather than suggesting that the player represents the power of some god, as you might expect in a game of this nature, the player is suggested to be the planet. Now, generally speaking, while a planet could be said to be a living organism, in Reus it cannot affect its own changes. In order to make life, oceans, forests etc. you have to utilize four extensions of your planetary will: the rock giant, the ocean giant, the forest giant and the swamp giant. Each has a unique set of abilities that have multitudinous effects on the land, which are limited only by your imagination.

There are the basics: ocean giant makes oceans, forest giant makes forests, rock giant makes mountains and the swamp giant makes swamps. In order to create swamps and forests, you need water and the world you start on is a barren wasteland. This means you need to make a couple oceans first. Oceans will soak enough land on either side for you to create a full forest or swamp. There is also the rock giant. This burly fucker just lopes around like a badass all the time. Use him to raise a mountain, and the side that faces an ocean will remain the same while everything past it changes into desert. This can be used to destroy forests and if you make a mountain or ocean on a village, they all die.

The variety of wasteland shades go from a stunning grey to a lovely off-white

Some of the less obvious abilities make a sort of sense. The forest giant can make food plants and what comes out of it depends on where you put the plant. In a forest it’s blueberries, in a desert it’s a dry bush (more on that later). Despite looking like a monkey, the forest giant is fully unable to create animals. The ocean giant makes domesticated animals. These are things like chickens in the forest or desert tortoises in the desert. At first you would expect the forest giant to make animals, but then when you realize that all life comes from the oceans originally, it makes a sort of logic. Plus, why would a forest giant be able to make fish? The swamp giant is another weird one: he makes exotic animals, but again, if you think about it, this makes sense too. Swamps are dangerous places where some of the most fucked-up shit evolves. That and Australia. Swamps are where you find things like Bot Flies evolving. The bot fly is something I will not discuss, but if you are fucking curious, check it out here. It’s fucked up as all fuck. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. FUCK! I just read the page a bit too much.. grah.. Either way, weird shit evolves in swampy areas.

As well as making the exotic animals, the swamp giant can also make herbs. These tend to generate more tech or wealth than fruit plants from the forest giant. Your rock giant will also generate a variety of minerals resources. Alongside all of these differing resource-types, Giants are able to enhance resources with aspects. These aspects are things like the leaf aspect, which will allow the Forest giant to add natura or food to plants. The ways these aspects affect different resources varies based on the region-type, but typically you can transmute a resources two different ways depending on the aspects you place on it. Be careful, too! Some resources have a symbiosis. These things will work together to create a bonus to what it produces. Having blueberries in range of chickens will make it so that the chickens generate more food. If you change what resources are next to each other, you will change the symbiosis for your resources, destroying what you had working before. The game quickly becomes about efficiently managing what you have growing on the land of your villages after a while.

Have Number 2 step forward and say “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” Thank you.

The focus of this game is really on the villages, though. The giants are just where you put all your powers. Adding resources to the map makes villagers appear. These villagers, in turn, build towns and settle lands and make the game fun. All of the villages will start building various projects, too. This might be a shrine, a granary or a school, and as they get higher level, they will start building higher-level projects. Given that the effects of your giants’ powers vary based on what terrain-type you use them in, each village will have a different focus depending on where it is located. Swamp villages tend to require tech for their projects where forest villages need food for theirs. This isn’t always a set thing, but it all depends on what the villagers choose. Each project is timed, too, and proper symbiosis match-ups will govern whether you meet the time-limits or not. Once you finish a project, one of the villagers steps forward as an ambassador. This person is someone that you pick up and allow to ride on you giants. Having the little ambassador up there unlocks different abilities depending on where they are from and which giant they ride. Properly managing which ambassador goes where will determine just how successful your villages will be.

This all sounds like a fun and free romp through a magical world, but there are dangers in this paradise. The biggest among them is greed. If your village gets too prosperous too fast, it will start to go ballistic and get dirty. Eventually they will start attacking other villages and fucking everything up. When this happens, you have options. If you really really like that village, you can create “awe” among the villagers. Do this through symbioses and properly locating different resources next to each other. Another way to counter-act the greed of a village is with danger. If you have desert tortoises in your area and you get wealthy and greedy, you might see the world as a desert tortoise that cannot keep up and is easy prey for the clever man. If the giants transmute those tortoises into snakes, your ass will be too busy working on not dying a painful, poisonous death to make battle plans. Finally, if your villagers just get too fucking greedy and are past redemption, you can always have the swamp giant launch mud bombs that burn with acidic death or send the rock giant to smash them into the dirt. Granted, the little bastards might just start fighting back after a while, so keep an eye on them.

Greedy little bastards…

Reus is a game that says a lot about people. Those that want to work in unison with the world prosper and flourish in its favor. Those that get caught up in their greed fight their peaceful neighbors, who are happy with what the world has given them, and are eventually vanquished to dust. If they fight the will of the planet itself, they can win, but ultimately they just ravage and destroy the world, returning it to the barren waste it was in the beginning. A great game and a truly interesting take on sandboxes, since it is a 2D game. Well worth the 9.99$ asking price on Steam.

My biggest fucking issue with this game is how much memory it eats. This thing is a memory beast. I have 16 GB of memory in this computer and Reus still managed to crash it! I was playing through the tutorials to understand the game. I played straight through, got about halfway through the third one and BOOM! blue screen fucker. The only time I nearly ate my monitor in blind rage.

Whispering Willows, Spooky 2D Fun

Posted on August 2, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Ever watched one of those reality shows where a team of “ghost hunters” go into a haunted location, discuss its history and pretend to be freaked out by every ambient noise that wafts in from anywhere nearby? Yea, they were all over tv for a little while. I always wished that something would show up and scare the piss out of them, not out of some desire of vindication for the existence of an after life, nor do I want to see them being eaten by some eldritch horror of Cthulu’s nightmares, but because I wanted to see them shit their pants. The pants-shitting part would be left on the editing floor, I am sure, but it would still be fucking fantastic. I want the little girl from this game to be in the house when it happens because being able to jump between the world of the living and the spirit world would make trolling these guys insanely easy and entertaining.

First, Elena is the main character and a young girl. Her father has disappeared somewhere in the bowels of the Willows, where he is the caretaker. After setting out for the mansion in a fit of female protagonism to make Samus proud, she gets jumped by a banshee of some kind and falls backward… breaking through a little-girl-sized area that falls through to the catacombs beneath the mansion. Shit gets heavy fast in this game as the catacombs are where the Willows family buried all its dead… for fucking centuries. So you’re this little girl hanging out with a bunch of centuries-old coffins when you’re jumped by this spirit of a bereft native american (Imma just say indian cause it’s shorter and I am apparently an indecent ‘Murrican with no sense of racial differentiation) that decides to lend you his aide and show you the ways of the for… I mean astral projection passed down by his people. Apparently until him, I guess.

The look on her face speaks to an ancient tongue-gargling indian maxim: "Auauaaaa glarglglaaagh!"

The look on her face is one of profound, spiritual tongue-gargling noises

Using this ability to send your soul out of your drooling human meat-husk, you can solve irritating little mazes in the walls, open doors otherwise locked and talk to people long since dead. It really is a lot of fun, and half of the fun in the game is exploring the labyrinthine rooms of the mansion and the many annexes on its grounds. After growing up in a reasonably aged house (149 years old is old-ish for East Coast America), I know that feeling of exploring an ancient building searching for evidence of its secret past. Finding lost loves, betrayals and sadness sitting in the coagulating dust: And Elena gets to see it all as if firsthand from the spectral mouths of the dead. You’ll also find fragments of the stories of the various dead laying around the mansion. Through pieces of ancient journals, you’ll be able to follow a story of sadness from the distant east to its conclusion in the founding of your hometown.

But all is not well in the peeling walls of the mansion, and Elena soon finds herself beset with as many foes as friends. Throughout the mansions the shattered pieces of an ancient agony skitter and hiss like cockroaches nesting in the walls. When you get close to a friendly ghost your father’s amulet, which you wear at all times, glows with a ghostly hue and thrums along with your heartbeat. Come across some element of spectral evil and it glows red, thrumming with its own agitation. And if you think that these enemies are just some negative energies that you can ditch with some clean living and good karma, you’re wrong. No amount of happy-thoughts will dish you out of this one. Get hit by an enemy, doesn’t matter what, you’re fucked. Checkpoints in this game are pretty reasonably spaced, too. Hit a major plot point and your game will save.

They want to give her dirt hugs!

Puzzles in this game are also very fun and doable. Sometimes you will find yourself wondering if you missed something, as they can be deceptively simple at times. I know I could have gotten this game done an hour sooner if I hadn’t said “This shit isn’t working! I must have missed something or walked past something!” Nevertheless, each puzzle is simple and pretty cool when you finish it up. I didn’t need to call up the answers from the internet at any point, but at some point I really really wanted to, as the game doesn’t always just fucking tell you where to go. If that was the case, how much fun would it really be? Precisely. Story-telling in this game is very well done, too. It all makes sense and it adds a dark and enjoyable ambiance to the game. It is a game that kids will love and that adults can certainly enjoy. It has some elements of being serious with some pretty harsh topics, like genocide, but it still maintains the winsome feeling of a mystical world as viewed through the eyes of a young girl. More games should be like this.

Sound and music in this game are nearly indistinguishable from one another with everything being geared toward the creepiness. It is listed as horror, but it is really not that horrible. At times it might get your pulse up, but the game is generally more fun for its puzzle, adventure and storyline aspects. Not to mention the art. As is the case with indies, nearly everything in this game is a piece of art unto itself. Just looking at the buildings and the environments is a treat. Overall, a great indie title that is worth the 14.99$ they ask for on Steam.

So, if the windows are broken out, why do I need something to cut the vines…?

So numerous times in the game they mention how the mansion is in a location where “the fabric of the world is thinner than other places”. And this is reasonable. Plenty of people report that places where Native Americans lived are thick with the linger sense of spiritual resentment. Thus, these places tend to have a high incidence of haunting reports. The Willows Mansion is no exception. This place is like fucking Grand Central Station for spirits. The thing that is most annoying about this is that it’s Grand Central Station. Ever been there? It’s full of all kinds of fucking people! There are spirits in this mansion that are part of the story. Finding them in the sea of all the ghostly faces that have nothing to fucking do with anything is like finding a contact lens in a fucking pool. There is a couple in front of the mansion that discuss how cold they are, there is a soldier that tells you how he and his girlfriend wanted to do their nasty business in the conservatory and I swear to god there is an undead hoagie salesman somewhere in that fucking place. Not sure what a hoagie is? Fuck you, go to a Wawa. (for those going to the Wawa link, I would like to point out how fucking fake that white car in the parking lot looks. They seriously fucking shopped it in.) Whatever, at least in a place full of fucking dust and dead-heads you can find a fucking hoagie.

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The Crotchety Old Gamer

An irate gamer's blog

Category Archives: PC Gaming

Memories of a Vagabond Should be Repressed

Boogey Boy, Preview of Fears

Flem, Sticky Little Preview

X-Tactics, Genre Fusion By AAA Veteran Devs

Shadow Warrior, Better the Second Time

How Elysian Shadows Team Plans to Revive The 2D RPG

Lantern Forge, Dr Sandbox and Mr Hack ‘n’ Slash!

The Forest, Sandboxing With Naked Cannibals

Reus, Sandbox of Giants!

Whispering Willows, Spooky 2D Fun

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