Category Archives: PC Gaming

Plague Inc: Evolved, Eradicate Humanity!

Posted on by thre3zekiel

PIE_Logo

 

So I wiped out 99% of humanity today and still fucking lost!  Plague Inc: Evolved is a game for the strategic mastermind in all of us.  Take control of an infectious disease, evolve and kill everyone ever known by everyone you’ve ever known.

This title starts out simple enough, but gives you an idea of the scope you are dealing with in order to get there.  Initially you can only control a bacteria, but later organisms include prions, viruses, nano-viruses parasites fungi and some things I have never fucking heard of.  You then name your virus.  In prior Plague Inc titles (previously known as Pandemic) I always named my disease something insidious sounding like Writhing Death or The Manacles.  I lost every time.  So one day I made a disease named Booty Shoe out of denominational ennui.  Booty shoe eradicated the world population.  So this one got to be Nut Slipper.  I started Nut Slipper out in Indonesia, and altogether solid start location for any disease.  It has ports for oceanic export, planes for aerial export and it’s a warm, moist climate, which puts it two evolutions away from stepping out into the greater world.  Plague Inc seems to have 3 phases of play.  It’s not actually a part of the game, but the way the flow of the game seems to develop.  I call these phases initial spawn, transmission and eradication.  In initial spawn, you get DNA points for evolution from a few gameplay milestones in the beginning.  This is where your disease starts in its natal region and starts to breed.  When you spread out little by little to people in your starting country, Indonesia in this case, you’ll see little red and orange bubbles appear.  Pop these for the DNA points to evolve your disease.

Exponential infection rates and the game gets excited over a few thousand? Psh.

Thousands of nuts are apparently warm and cozy. Why is this bad?

In Plague Inc, you don’t order your little bacteria where you want them.  Consider the game a simulation of the spread of a potential disease.  Your disease will spread on its own in an organic fashion across the various methods.  You control the disease by mutating it, granting it new characteristics along the way.  These characteristics fall into three categories: transmission, abilities and symptoms.  Transmission is how the disease is carried from one host to another.  These can be things like livestock, insects, air, water etc.  Being in Indonesia, I evolved air and water right away.  Now, the game also made it so that transmission via water would be hard off the bat for my disease.  Something about sanitizing boats.  But evolving that water transmission negated the effect.  Nothing would stop Nut Slipper from sailing the seven seas!  This brings us to where you are spreading to every country in the transmission phase.  You get DNA points for spreading to new countries and infecting large portions of the population.  People don’t need to know you are around yet, but you get the DNA points for infections.

Now one of the things that you get concerned about really fast is how well your disease spreads to other countries.  Does it like the climate?  How rapidly does it spread? Do they use class 3 or 4 antibiotics?  All legitimate concerns.  It used to be that getting your disease into Madagascar was a sure-fire win, but now fully infecting Greenland, Canada and other cold-climate countries is the true challenge.  Your disease will spread the slowest in these locations and if you get lethal too soon, you’ll kill the hosts before they can spread it to other people.  That is a no-go.

Only fifty-one percent of the world population is dead!? Time to step up my game.

Only fifty-one percent of the world population is dead!? Time to step up my game.

Once you have enough people eating, drinking and breathing in your disease it’s time to start the extinction of humanity!  This is my favorite part because once people start dying the music, which has sinister techno-ambiance, goes from ominous to downright fucking creepy.  It starts off with the EKG heart monitor noises woven into it just below audibility and the moves on to include some kind of sirens.  I think they might be the noise that ambulances make in countries not mine.  Ours are pretty obnoxious.  Either way, it moves on to people hacking and coughing and children singing ring around the rosey.  Awesome, ambient and creepy as fuck.

Now the extinction of humanity won’t be reached by making your disease resistant and transmissible alone, and this is where it gets tough.  In the eradication phase you get DNA points for wiping out populations and destabilizing governments.  Symptoms are the method for reaching these goals.  If you take symptoms too early in the transmission phase, your disease will be detected and cured fairly rapidly.  Take symptoms too late and you will not have enough points to develop the truly lethal symptoms.  Occasionally you will spawn random symptoms, but the game can be paused in order to devolve those and earn some DNA points.  With your bacteria, you want to aim for 70% – 79% of global infection to start taking symptoms, and when you take them take them fucking hard.  When I pump up the symptoms I will take them 3 – 4 at a time and let them go.  People start dropping dead faster than the game even knows how to react, and by the time the first death hits the news, hundreds of thousands are lying in their living rooms clinging fecklessly to their last breaths.  Even with Nut Slipper taking the world by storm, I was still greeted with this fucking screen at the end.

ninety-nine point nine percent of the world is dead and it is not considered a goddamn victory

ninety-nine point nine percent of the world is dead and it is not considered a goddamn victory

I am only partially joking about that, too.  I wiped out 99.9% of humanity and it was still not considered a fucking victory!  To give you an idea, the people who survived lived in Greenland, Canada, Italy and Sweden.  Everyone else in the entire fucking world was dead.  My problem was that I took symptoms around 65% world infection and killed all my hosts too fast.  I have no fucking clue how Italy, of all goddamn places, fucking survived, either.  I guess they didn’t go to the Olympics in London that year…   Granted none of them survived unscathed, but they survived.  One of the more fun features of this game is how you can make spectacular effects occur, like projectile vomiting, by combining various symptoms.  Projectile vomiting occurs when you have coughing and vomiting at the same time.  Once you have started to wipe out the population of planet Earth, people will start to do research in an attempt to survive.  This is signified by a blue plane that flies around.  You can slow them down by clicking little blue bubbles, too, but the best part is when you stop research by killing everyone in a country.  Then the country just goes dark as everyone slowly collapses.  This game is a tough one, but rewarding for the strategic enthusiast.  It can be gotten for 14.99$ on Steam and.. wait this is early access?  Well for an early access game, this one sure is well done.  Worth the money, in my honest opinion.  It also feels like one of those games that some people think might save the world by thinking about how to solve realistic problems, except in this one you are the problem.

Of all the things this game does right, there is one thing that still haunts my dreams.  The children.  When you start to go nuclear, as stated, you hear a group of grade-school children singing Ring around the Rosey.  I swear to fucking god this is the creepiest thing I have ever fucking heard in ever.  It is like the children of the corn, or some shit.  The music is fucking awesome, mind you.  That just enhances how creepy the children are.  They are like the fucking harbingers of the goddamn apocalypse!  I will be waking up in a cold sweat singing ring around the rosey tonight, I just know it.

 

The Parsnip Theory, Lunchroom Throwdown

Posted on by thre3zekiel

parsnip

 

If every highschool kid in the world could design video games, The Parsnip Theory would probably be the first game they make.  Though it has a few rough edges, its design and gameplay are certainly an experience worth a play, especially with friends.  It is a shareware game available at itch.io. One thing to keep in mind is that this game is in its alpha stages.  It is listed on itch so that people can test it, play it and enjoy it for what it is so far.

Turn-based strategy has many forms, some good, some bad.  Many involve alternate play-areas that allow you to play with armies as pieces on a Risk board, while still others give you a base to return to and beef up your troops.  Parsnip Theory is a simple game with one face: lunchroom mayhem.  Every time you play, you join a team of kids, who all look the same, and you start launching tomatoes at the other teams.  Controls in this title take a minute of fiddling to really figure them out properly, but they are intuitive and allow you to consider your moves like a chess player before you fully commit to them.  Each of your teammates starts a round with 7 moves.  Throwing a tomato costs 2 moves, each space costs 1 move to traverse and crouching is 1 move as well.  This means that, without moving, you can get 3 shots off per round.  If you have to move more than 1 space in a turn, you could end up losing 1 or 2 of those shots, so timing is a big part of this game.

My first couple runs of Parsnip Theory ended with my team as nothing more than gooey smears on the tile.  I would just charge out there, tomatoes blazing, and hope for the best.  Have you ever played XCOM?  Yea, you run out there guns blazing and your people will end up in the hot place really fast.  Parsnip Theory is no different.  Although the graphical style makes it tough to tell, there are tables in this lunchroom.  I would expect tables to stand out a little more, but these ones sort of look like drainage grates laid throughout the room that, for some odd reason, you are fully incapable of walking over.  These grates, however, are actually tables.  If you have your team members crouch behind them, you can use them as cover.

Move behind cover, Aaron! You're under fire!

Move behind cover, Aaron! You’re under fire!

Now, above you see my characters crouched behind a wall, waiting for that little blue guy to come out behind his wall.  What I didn’t realize was that he could see the guy up top, and  splattered him accordingly.  We still mourn the loss of Aaron.  But moving with cover is a good way to operate in this game.  If you can set up your team to ambush a foe coming around a corner, he might get one shot off at one of you, and the next turn he’ll get three more, but that’s it.  He won’t be able to get off enough shots to take down any of you, and you’ll have him splattered in barely more than one turn.  The hellish onslaught of tomatoes takes down 10 hp per hit, so you’ll likely take him out and have plenty of moves left that second turn.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you are in highschool with a bunch of fucking baseball stars.  These kids will lob a barrage of perfectly-aimed tomatoes at you from the other side of the lunchroom like a howitzer loaded with tomatoes.  The AI seems to favor taking advantage of long-shots at weakened enemies because you likely won’t see it coming.  The AI of this game, really, is way better at this than it has a right to be.  As I said, several times I played through and took out one or two enemies, and got smeared.  The AI wasn’t all focused on me, either.  The other teams were going back and forth at each other like nobody’s business.  They just managed to mop the floor with me every time.

Graphics in this game are acceptable, except for a few little issues here and there.  Sure the table don’t look like tables, but I rather enjoyed the look of my little team mates.  Sure, hair color and clothing is all the same, but after playing a few times, skin-colors are randomly assigned.  Also, your people all lack arms and legs, so their hands and feet hover in space where the ends of their extremities should be, Rayman-style.  The difficulty in this game was a little rough, but you learn the best way to battle your foes after a while, and it’s not too tough to adjust.  There are a few things that this game could benefit from: variety of attacks, the potential for someone to miss, some stronger graphical definition, but for a piece of shareware, this game is enjoyable.  I would advise playing it with some friends to get the most out of its gameplay.  The AI players are just a bunch of dicks.

Another feature of this game that my brother will discuss at greater length is the level editor.  Should you get tired of the single level of play in the game, you can always go and make more of them.  A level editor is always a good idea, and in a game like this grants players the ability to make it their own way.  You hate the lunchroom?  Fine, have a fucking food-fight in the art department, you damn lunatic.

We stand victorious over the blood.. err.. tomato-spattered lunchroom.

We stand victorious over the blood.. err.. tomato-spattered lunchroom.

Of everything I about this game, there is one thing that I HAVE to mention.  I do not under any circumstances recommend this to anyone with photosensitive seizures: you might not make it past the title screen.  The background is this warping, color-changing spaghetti (or something) that looks like one of the lunch aides slipped fucking LSD into the juice boxes.  In their psychedelic-induced frenzy these kids have taken to defending themselves against the phantasms of their own imagination the only way they can deign: by lashing out with salvos of edibles projectiles.  This is my story, and I am sticking to it, since the game itself doesn’t really have one yet.

 

Among the Sleep, Crawling in the Dark

Posted on by thre3zekiel

AtSlogo

 

My wife calls this the “freaky baby game” and not because of the baby.  Everything about this game is unnerving and it all adds up to an enjoyable experience in fear-inducing games.  My wife hates it when I play this in the dark cause she keeps having to run in and check that my screams are caused by the game and not something terrible… like a stubbed toe.  Those are horrifying.

If you come into this game off the adrenaline high that profoundly horrifying games like Amnesia produce, you will not be enthused.  I have to admit, I couldn’t play Amnesia.  It was that fucking freaky for me.  I quit playing only about an hour into the game, and I hadn’t encountered any enemies yet.  Among the Sleep was a much more accessible game for those who don’t want to pour hours into complex puzzles, creeping through terrifying dark castles and losing your mind.  Horror-lite, is the best term for this game, and I found it rather enjoyable.

Among the first elements of the game that you notice is the fact that you are a goddamn 2-year-old.  Your mom has you in a high chair, she’s feeding you cake, you play with a ball and you have as much control of yourself as a drunk muppet.  Not to disparage the game, it controls beautifully.  Toddlers on the other hand are called toddlers because they don’t have the basics of biomechanical locomotion down, yet.  Look down at your body, and you notice a tiny, onesie-clad body that takes haphazard steps.  Environmental manipulation is difficult at times, too.  You are a baby, after all.  Your tiny little hands grasp uncertainly at objects.  It is almost adorable.  Except for the fact that you are scared out of your shit trying to rationalize the world around you.  In the very beginning of the game your crib gets thrown across the room, spilling you onto the floor.  You spend some time crawling around, which lets you hide from foes and get into tight places, but you can stand up on your little baby-legs.  When you do, you move slowly, but you can run briefly before stumbling over into the crawling position.  Frequently, the game makes use of this by making you want to run so badly, but you can’t, you know, being a fucking baby and all.  Not exactly a Kenyan track star.  Also, you can hear the tiny little baby breaths and your character hides in the dark, sucking in air like a noisy little vacuum.  Another feature that highlights the fact that you are a baby is the esc screen.  Hit escape and you bring up your tiny baby hands to cover your face.

Remain still and the teddy bear will go away.

Remain still and the teddy bear will go away.

Early on you realize there is trouble in paradise, and being sensitive to everything around you, it shows.  Babies don’t know much, so they have to experience the world around them in terms of emotions.  Thus, when something scary happens, your screen gets dark and twitchy, like it’s being chewed on by a langolier.  This occurs early on when mommy answers the door.  You hear a male voice and then mommy starts yelling.  That’s when the screen gets all ugly, but mommy soon comes back and it’s all ok again.  She brings a present to you, which you get at later no thanks to your mother, and inside it is the scariest toy ever.  Your travelling companion is a terrifying possessed teddy bear.  At one point he plays with your train set and hides your elephant from you.  But I know the fucking truth!  That little bastard is possessed by a dark entity bent on turning you into a ruthless serial killer!  Either way, teddy is apparently your only weapon.  When you get scared, you have to hug him and he glows in the dark, like a carebear stare that is less powerful and gives your position away to enemies.

<THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD!>  Since this game only came out a few months ago, I have to do this.

While playing this game, you notice some really interesting tidbits.  There truly is something sinister lying just beneath the surface, and it isn’t just the spooky ambient soundtrack.  Anyone who watches Grimm knows that what people thought were stories are often used to represent something more sinister.  Although it might not be the fact that werewolves exist, fairytales like Grimm’s fairytales were actually mechanisms used to rise children in a time where they could have been ripped apart by wolves just outside of town.  No one would have noticed for a good few hours either.  So rather than saying “don’t go into the woods or you’ll get ripped apart by wild animals” they would probably say “don’t go in the woods or you’ll be eaten by a witch!”  This is much easy to offer to children than, you know, sheer abject terror.  This game uses the same vehicle to convey and otherwise occluded backstory.  Some guy brings a wrapped package to the door on your birthday and gets into a fight with mommy?  Yea, that was dad.  I guess they were having some kind of issues, so daddy doesn’t live at home anymore.  Later you go through this level with paintings on the walls, one of which features a woman and a well.  As you approach it changes from the woman coming out of the swamp toward the well, her standing at the well and then her drinking deeply from the well with water running down her dress.

Toward the end of the game, you see mommy drinking from bottles (which litter the floor in another level) and she turns into a monster.  This made my jaw drop.  So apparently mommy is also an alcoholic and having some serious issues.  Considering your character stumbles out of a closet at the end of the game, I have to assume this means that the whole game is basically the result of child neglect by a irresponsible bitch that wants to keep the child away from a potentially loving father.  This is a little on the rough side, since a lot of single mothers work hard to ensure that their children get the best they can provide.  But no one is perfect, and some people outright deserve to be dropped off a cliff.

O, shit, mommy is drinking from the jack daniels well again!

O, shit, mommy is drinking from the jack daniels well again!

This game takes a real big adult issue and shrinks it down to a baby size.  It is really deeply affecting, especially since at the end, your mother is the one who rips the arm off your teddy bear, and you character still starts rubbing her head as she sits crying on the kitchen floor.  I cried a little, since this one hits a bit too close to home, having had a number of friends growing up who experienced something like this.  All told, this game is a true horror story that focuses more on the story elements and leaves those “terror from the darkest wilds” elements to more drawn out titles.  After all, how much can you really tell about the story of a baby?

Among the Sleep is a great title, but the thing that really got my gaul up about this title is the number of startle scares it gets out of you.  I mean you creep around a corner, BAM! chair flies at you.  Turn around and something behind you is moving by itself, or something flies out of a random hatch you didn’t know about.  STOP FUCKING DOING THAT!  Man, you’re gonna scare the shit right out of me!   I guess that is their fucking plan, though.  Bastards.

Viscera Clean-Up, Engagingly OCD

Posted on by thre3zekiel

vcdlogo

 

So this is what it’s come down to.  Viscera Clean-Up detail is a glorified janitor simulator in early access, but don’t close the screen yet.  You’re not exactly wiping some kid’s puke up off a tile floor or mopping up piss.  You are the guy that cleans up after the events of other video games and tragic events, but this seems to be made by a people who are disenfranchised with the world in general and are used to monotonous, soul-crush jobs.  Like the British.

Ultimately, this game is just like building a puzzle.  You are given a big mess to organize, and piece by piece you work the mess down to an easily manageable pile and then finish up.  Now, starting this game is a bit of a chore.  You begin and blood and guts litter the floor, are painted on the walls and the entire scene is a very “modern art in rouge.”  You have several very fucking important machines that help you get your job done.  First, there is the Slosh-o-Matic, dispenser of buckets full of water.  Then there is the furnace, it is the disposal method of choice for viscera both human and alien.  Then there is the What-a-Load container machine, which disposes containers marked with the “biological hazard” symbol.  And finally, the vending machine, which provides access to all manner of useful objects.

This game provides the all-too-realistic experience of being a janitor fitted with the cheapest mechanism for cleaning available in futuristic times.  By all accounts, you should have access to a fucking auto-cleaning zapper mechanism!  But the most high-tech device you have is the Muck-Guyver, which provides a radar “ping” that beeps faster and in a higher pitch the closer you are to a “mess.”  Way too many times have I finished cleaning up a section of a room littered with the remains of a scientist, used the Muck-Guyver and the region still came up hot.  I look on the ceiling and curse the gods, realizing that the some of a victim didn’t fucking reach the floor.  At which point you have to stack a bunch of boxes, or whatever environmental detritus you have available, and scrub the goddamned ceiling!

Your main “weapon” is a mop, so the Slosh-o-Matic isn’t just a funny little feature.  It is your main support element.  And don’t even think for five fucking seconds that this shit is all user-fucking-friendly!  Every time you hit the dispense button, there is a shot you will get a bloody body part instead of a bucket of clean.  This means it will drop out and splatter fresh blood all over the ground and the machine.  I like to imagine that this is because the machine is really a teleporter, and a careless technician just lost an arm or something.  A slosh-o-matic is necessary, though, as your mop gets dirty through usage.  You can only mop a heavily-soiled section of the floor for five mouse-clicks before you start just spreading the muck around, so you have to get a fresh mop bucket and rinse the mop.  One dunk only, though!  Your mop buckets will get soiled, too!  Dunk your mop in that and you will just be smearing a fine paste over surfaces leaving a trail like a snail on its period.  And watch your goddamned step!  Knock over a bucket containing ANY level of grime, and you will have just poured out a mess all over the floor again.  Prepare for agony.  My wife came in worried about me only to find I knocked over another fucking mop bucket!

vcdspill

Dirty mop? Spilled bucket? This might end with suicide.

 

If your buckets get dirty, too, how the fuck are you supposed to clean for a protracted period of time?  In this space-age setting your company has resorted to the most sensible and fiscally responsible means of disposing of things: setting them on fire.  Apparently the Joker was right, everything does burn!  Even steel buckets full of fucking water!  Now, this is a little silly, but once you have mopped up enough blood and such to get to the bullet cartridges and organs lying in the open, how can you get them to the furnace reliably?  Why, you simply put someone’s assorted remains into a yellow bio-hazard bin and burn them, of course!  Bins are pretty sizable, too, and seating most of two people comfortably.  But be fucking mindful of your goddamned surroundings!  Have a bloody stub sticking out of the bin?  You will smear blood on anything it might touch.  Considering the fact that doors in this don’t open wide, you will end up scrubbing walls and doors a lot, too.  And don’t be that manly man that has to cram eight people, a thousand bullet cartridges, five soiled knives and a take-out box into one fucking disposal bin.  That shit will cost you!  Things inside the bin will get heavy for you and you will drop that shit.  Even if the bin isn’t that fucking full and you are hitting shift to go slowly!  Run with organs and you might as well paint everything red.

One thing that this game encapsulates entirely too fucking well is frustratingly tedious tasks.  So you have disposal bins, eh?  Here is a floor littered with a bazillion mother-fucking bullet cartridges.  Pick them up one at a time.  Scientists in this ripped apart by a blood-thirty alien?  Intestines will be scattered around like someone spilled oodles of noodles and you have to pick it up one greasy meat-tube at a time.  Then there are the distances they go to make this a challenge.  Aside from organs pouring out of the bin or bucket dispensers, should you step in a pool of blood, you will track blood everywhere across mom’s new carpet.  There is nothing more frustrating than realizing you just tracked somone’s DNA across your freshly-mopped floors.  And then there is the detail!  Yea, sure, anybody can scrub a few tiles and punch out, but if you just run through and opt-out of spot-checking your work with the Muck-Guyver, you’ll miss something.  One element I discovered was that sometimes blood will run into the fucking grout in the tiles!  And you’ll have to scrub that separately from the rest of the pool!  I am just grateful they don’t force you to go in there with a brush and scrub it out by hand.  Holy fuck!

At the top of the bin, Chad was really getting a-head!

Spacious enough to fit the extremities of several researchers comfortably!

Cleaning up the organs or dead researchers is only the fun part of the job, though.  You’ll find yourself cleaning up crumpled papers, soda cans and other office debris.  There are also other menial tasks to achieve, such as refilling wall-mounted medkits.  I mean, what research facility is complete without the easily-accessible medkit designed for dressing alien claw-wounds?  To this end, the vending machine is a must.  Of course, not all facilities are outfitted in anticipation of epic fight-scenes.  Some places are just dimly-lit and have naturally dingy textures.  In such situations, the vending machine will provide lanterns!  Of course, knock these fuckers over too many times and they explode leaving scorch marks all over the floor.  Vending machines will also offer any number of useless shit, such as pizza slicers and “wet floor” signs.  Granted, I think you get docked points if you don’t put down the signs, so yea.

This game isn’t without its flaws.  Sometimes you’ll have an arm that will get jostled so bad in a disposal bin that it clips through the bin, painting anything it touches.  The bins are the source of a number of issues, as over-stocking the bins causes things to jump around in there like a bunch of nitrogen atoms under pressure.  I also found these strange “phantom pegs” that appear on the electrical cords for your appliances.  At first you might not see them, but if you splatter blood on them, they show up, sometimes only partially.

I guess this is more respectful than just dumping it all in the garbage somewhere.

I guess this is more respectful than just dumping it all in the garbage somewhere.

Aside from being the type of game a serial killer would jack off to, the most irritating thing about it is.. uh.. well I’ll tell you after I spend another 3 hours scrubbing out the toilets and transferring the wasted toilet paper left on the floor to a disposal bin.  Yea, it really is that much fun.  What kind of psychopath has fun in this, do you ask?  Anyone who gets satisfaction out of gradually turning a hopeless situation into an operational facility ready for the next batch of squishy and ethically-irresponsible researchers.

Skara, Shiney Pre-Alpha Preview

Posted on by thre3zekiel

skara

 

Skara: The Blade Remains is a game given the go ahead by the community on Steam Greenlight.  One of many worthy candidates for support, Skara attmepts to step in where many mainstream companies leave off.  Arena deathmatch games typically come with guns and grenades, but this title threatens to drop you into an ancient desert or a volcanic nightmare and wishes you well against the hordes of your foes.  The game looks great and the developer’s site gives a lot more regarding the story and world.

Among alpha-previews that I have played, this title has to be the most difficult to discuss in my fashion.  Primarily, I would ask readers to keep in mind that this game is not even up for sale yet.  It is not even close to finished.  The developers are working hard daily to ensure this game gets to a complete phase as soon as possible.  Having recently played the pre-alpha build, I am certainly excited, but not overly impressed.  If this game were to pre-release today, I would laugh loudly and call shenanigans.  But it is not, so I look forward to the game that the developers are working on, as detailed on their Greenlight page.

First, let me generally name some of the areas that the developers have to improve.  In a game with sword fighting gameplay, you want the character to attack well.  A third-person perspective is granted to the player, and this gives you a much better perception of the presence of your character than other games of a similar genre with their first-person views.  Now, being in pre-alpha, Skara’s animations are a little slow right now and this definitely comes out in the gameplay, making it difficult to maneuver, but it was funny as hell to watch my character swinging a longsword like it was made of white-dwarf matter.  I had to actually start my attacks at a distance in order to “spool up” the animation like it was some kind of minigun with one fucking shot.  Another problem with the animations is the ragdoll effect, but in this it should be called the invertebrate effect.  Upon death all the bones in a corpse seem to magically disappear.  Instant man-jelly style.   Now, one thing that I did notice about the animations while playing was fatalities.  Let’s fucking face it, a game like this is boring without a little extra in the awesome category.  I was able to perform two fatalities that really got me amped up.  I favored the civilized look of the Durno fighters.  They just felt better than the insane, cultist look of the Kharn savages.  I was able to get a few guys to a state of “finish him” dazed-ness.  Once there I ran one guy through and flipped him over my shoulder.  The second one I put a guy on his knees like a priest at a pulpit then proceeded to hack wildly at his muscular neck.  I imagine the head will fly off at the end once the game releases, but the chopping action just finishes the animation with the victim sliding to the ground.

Just wait right there, Shraka! I gonna keel you!

I’m not waiting here all night, Shraka.  Just get the attack over with already!

 

Arena fighters always need someoneto duke it out or there is nothing to play.  This game currently features the Durno (above left) and the Kharn (above right).  Looking at the models and textures for the races I can see why there are only two at the moment.  And why they turn into man-jelly on death.  The models and textures are detailed as fuck.  Light reflects from their clothes and skin differently and their armor and weapons gleam. It is really exciting to see.

Another element that is important to arena fighters like this is easy navigation, especially as far as the menus are concerned.  There shouldn’t be a learning curve for the usage of the basic elements of a game.  When there is a menu to interact with, Skara makes sure it is easy to use.  The only two menus I saw, however, were the escape menu and the match menu.  When loading the level right now, there is nothing.  The screen is just a dead view on the map your anticipated match will be held. Once the game starts, though you have access to the match menu. The match menu is what displays when you hit the tab button in-game.  This is pretty simple and shows you how many kills you (in a deathmatch) or your team (in team deathmatch) have scored.  The scoring system is the Kills – Deaths equation, which I can get behind.  I played enough Unreal Tournament and grew accustomed to the simple systems of games past.

STBR

Best not ask the barbarians why they all have the same first name. Might insult their savage and unforgiving culture.

 

Now, everything that is wrong with the game can be attributed to the fact that the game is not ready for release, so it is missing a variety of important features, such as a tutorial area.  Tutorials on the operation of the battle combos would definitely be very helpful.  Looking at the explanation of the combos in the PDF that came with the game is a little on the confusing side.  Not because of the manual, that is simple.  Click this button, or press this series of keys.  Whatever, no sweats, man!  Then you get in-game and the ham-handed speed of the animations makes timing combos impossible for anyone.  Unless you are Miss Cleo or a Jedi..  then you can clairvoyantly intuit precisely when you need to hit the next key.  Otherwise it is a frenzy full of confused manipulation, like watching my childhood dog hump a pillow.

Of all things this game does and does fucking well are the sights.  Now, yes, I am very critical of graphics-heavy games with no other matter, but this is a game that is still in fucking development!  Cut me a goddamn break!  At one point the AI had a freakout session as I swung at it, and I think opted for self-preservation.  Either that or the guy was like, “fuck this!  If I die now, I want it to be a badass fight sequence!”  So he turns and runs up this tower, and I immediately give chase.  Bones of fallen warriors crunching beneath my iron-clad feet, I charge after my foe.  Bloodlust is coursing through my mind and bringing that coppery flavor thick into my mouth.  Each step takes me upward and he intermittently flags in stamina, coming into view only to catch a string wind and charge further.  I arrive at the top, only to lose my bearings.  Around me the winds howl and the glare of orange light as the sun reflects off the clay-shot fields of the moors.  Behind me my ambuscade foe howls and comes a hair’s breadth from burying the sharp end of his axe into my skull.  I dodge narrowly and heft my sword up, bringing my slice through his torso.  Dazed and reeling, the Kharn warrior blinks against the dazzling flash of my steel.  Only a blink passes and he opens his eyes to see the sharp tip of my sword pierce his chest.  Back my sword plunges until the hilt nearly touches his bulging muscles.  Kharnish men are brutal, and the warrior sneers and tries to grab my sword with his last breath, but I ram my shoulder into his sternum and twist my blade, flipping him into the air.  He lands with a sickening crunch on the stone behind me.

This is what is looked like in game, and the graphics supported every second of it.  You see a far-flung waste, venomous water gnawing at its shores and warriors struggling against death borne by other men.  I can only image that this game will get better, especially since it has been successfully Greenlit.  My biggest issue here is that the game isn’t fucking done, yet.  I played an unfinished game and honestly cannot wait until it is done, because a fantasy arena fighter would be so much fun to me.  The graphics and textures are gorgeous and the ambient sound is nice.  Perhaps the grunts and groans of the characters sound like they came out of a can, but the wind tearing at the dirt and slobbering waves on the shore sound magnificent.  Add in the ambient wildlife and you have a very graphically enticing world that utilizes the Unreal engine to stunning effect.  Now let’s get the rest of the game done, guys.  This one is set up to be really good.

Here the Kharnish warriors allow a Durnovan man how to perform the Kharnish Hot Foot ritual, performed with axes and clubs by boys at age 4.

Here the Kharnish warriors allow a Durnovan man how to perform the Kharnish Hot Foot ritual, performed with axes and clubs by boys at age 4.

 

By Your Powers Combined, I am Indie Team Up!

Posted on by thre3zekiel

itulogo

 

Since Captain Planet can’t help us anymore, it is up to us to fend for ourselves in this crazy world.  But none of us have powers as strong as Captain Planet’s, even if Independent Game Developers are capable of some pretty cool things on their own.  Many IndieDevs are solo men or women sitting in their basement coding, more still have a small team of about 6 people.  Some IndieDevs are entire companies, but still the process can be a difficult slog through treacherous terrain.  Indie Team Up is, luckily, one of those awesome things that some GameDevs did has the potential to make life easier for everyone involved.

The idea of the upcoming service is to link IndieDevs together so that we can help each other move the development of games forward.  Another feature of this is artists.  How many times have you been sitting there wishing you had artistic talent outside of coding?  Or needed a composer just to drum up some music?  Perhaps you need a writer to spell check, edit and hone your dialogue?  Indie Team Up will have that, too.  So who are these people with the drive, passion and vision to make this happen?  What is their motivation and what are they going to get out of it?  Just follow the bouncing ball.

Between the two of them, Colleen Delzer and Justin Hammond are the evil geniuses bringing this community to life.  Both are dedicated IndieDevs, and both of them have other things in their lives that require their focus and attention.  During our interview, Colleen had chicken in the oven for her family.  This code-slinging mother of two spends everyday making games with her husband.  Indeed, she is half of Adversary Games, a company Co-Founded with her husband.  Colleen attended the University of Advanced Technology and, only two years into her studies, she was picked up by Realm Interactive.  A year later Realm couldn’t find a pusblisher, so Colleen sought new work outside the industry.  That lasted about 6 years until she was hired at Game Center Group.  There she did game QA, game CS, web coding and design, but her true creative desires drove her to make games.  Listening to the voice in the back of her head, she read some C++ books cover to cover and founded Adversary Games with her husband.  And they manage well enough to make the Indie Team Up a reality.

When I asked Colleen to explain the Indie Team Up to me, she explained, “There are a lot who would love to help out GameDevs but don’t know how to ask, and a lot of GameDevs want help with an idea but don’t know where to turn too.  The role of Indie Team Up is to connect the two!”

In a culture that is so focused on excelling individually, Indie Team Up has a different plan, “Our mission is to help bring the ideas of Independent Developers to fruitation and to cultivate a spirit of collaborative assistance.   And to say, Hey! It’s ok to ask for help!”

And many in the IndieDev community agree.  Indie Team Up is a burgeoning hashtag that is tearing holes in the twitter-verse.  “It only started on the 15th of June, and I really wasn’t thinking it was going to take off like it did!  But we are really trying to help people collaborate to make their projects a reality.”

So where does an idea like this originate?  The ITU team has a good heart and the skills to bring the Game Dev community closer together, but it seems this is a movement born out of frustration. “Several people asked if I could use help with development, which at the time I didn’t.  I felt bad turning people down because it seemed they really wanted to help someone. I thought that Indie Team Up could be a way were they could help someone in need.  An avenue for them, if you will”

ITU is an idea from the heart of its creators, helping them tap into their own creativity and allowing them to give back to the IndieDev community.  “I guess it’s an avenue for me as well.  I really love helping people, just wasn’t sure on how to do it.  So, I guess this is my chance. ^ ^”

If Colleen is the caring mother of the ITU team, Justin is certainly the dedicated father.  With C++ as his first language, possibly prior to English, he is a self-taught programmer and later sought to legitimize his knowledge by attending school.  Though he has yet to finish his degree, his reasons for taking his time are certainly respectable.  Having served 5 years in the Army of the United States of America, Justin spent 2 tours in Iraq.  He is proud of his time in the military, but he’s glad to spend his time with his own family now.  Justin is a husband of 7 years with a 3-year-old daughter.  He devlops games under the moniker Black Module Studios and  has some of his work on Kongrerate as well.  Of course not every project goes as planned and sometimes you just have to roll with the punches.  Justin also helped develop a voxel framework that is featured on the Unity3D asset store for 40$, which started as a game.  Unfortunately he and his team at Black Module had to shelve the idea until they have the resources to complete it.

Justin’s biggest priority as a Co-Founder is the development of the Indie Team Up website and shared his origin story as the ITU Web Developer. “Web development just sort of came naturally, as I love spending time on the internet, and I could program, so I just picked it up.”

And he puts a lot of time into the website, “It’s really only been about a week, so I can’t give an average yet.  Although I’ve spent at least 25 hours this past week on design.”

But hard work is worth it when the product in mind is rewarding and extensive. “At a high level, [the Indie Team Up website] will allow users to showcase themselves and search out other people or teams to join. Teams will also be a large part of the site as teams will be able to search for users with the skills they need to complete their projects.  There is a heavy emphasis on discoverabilty.  The goal is to make it insanely easy to find people with the skills you need, or projects that you want to work on.”

The team has some really interesting plans, too, to integrate with a number of other community-organized projects.  “Something else that we hope for is some integration with game jams.  This was actually a personal idea of mine, as I always have trouble finding people to work with when Ludum Dare comes around.  We still need to organize something with the hosts of different game jam events (Ludum Dare, #1GAM, etc.) but we are very hopeful.  At the very least, we’ll have a section of the site dedicated to short term projects, such as game jams or other events.”

Indie Team Up has a list of problems it aims to solve, and Justin was eager to expound up them. “Because the internet is so large, it can be difficult to find people that 1) have the skills you don’t have, and 2) actually want to be part of what you are doing.  We aim to solve those issues by having a centralized place to find other indie developers.”

Among the goals for the ITU site are integration with its existing extensions, “The site will tightly integrate with the hashtag and facebook page, so that when people post their, it is right on the site. It won’t just be a direct feed though, as we are already having people ‘misuse’ the hashtag.”

I even suggested that there be a showcase where ITU displays some of the projects it helped match-make with the approval of community members.  He laughed and mentioned that he and Colleen already have a plan in the works for just such an idea.  The ITU team has even had its first victories, which Justin shared. “One of the first days after #indieteamup started, we helped an artist find a team and are flying him to PAX.  That was a very happy moment for us, being able to see what we are doing actually help people to achieve their goals.”

The Indie Team Up is a project that has a lot of goals.  My first thought is to worry that the team is reaching a bit, but they have a well-coordinated group of members outside of its founders.  When I spoke with Colleen about the origin story of the ITU itself, she mentioned it felt serendipitous, even fated.  As if the IndieDev community has been looking for something like ITU for a long time.  ” They just stepped up and asked.  Justin was pretty much like ‘hey I plan on making a site!’ As well as the bot guy and the app guy.  For instance, I did want to make a bot so I asked White Llama how to create one. The same day the bot guy 0x0 tweeted to me that he was interested in making one.  I DM’ed White Llama, and I did tweet that there should be a more organized way for #indieteamup users to connect.”

0x0961h confirmed this story from his end in an email correspondence with me. “I was scrolling through my Twitter timeline and saw this new Twitter thing, that Colleen was kickstarting.  I thought that it was actually a very awesome idea for the whole indie community, for people who are desperately looking for a team during jams.  Plus, I always liked One Game A Month’s bot and always wanted to make a Twitter bot myself. So I threw some code into IDE, made it work and contacted Colleen. She approved the bot idea a-a-and here I am.”

As the Bot Developer, 0x0961h has the task of maintaining what currently represents the Indie Team Up initiative on the internet. “I made a web application that once in hour receives tweets with hashtag #indieteamup and pick 10 (or less) tweets to retweet. Simple enough. My current mission is to maintain it and implement new features for it. In one of future updates, for example, bot will start looking for speacial hashtags (e.g. #LFA for “looking for artist” or, maybe, more “Reddit-ized” variant of tags: #AW and #AH for “artist wanted” and “artist for hire” respectively) and give priority to tweets with them, not just every single tweet with #indieteamup hashtag. The goal is to make Twitter bot useful tool for, well, “teaming up” and not “just another useless spam twitter”.  Now it just retweeting tweets with #indieteamup, but after site launch, I think, it’ll have few more functions, like, automatic posting “looking for/for hire” stuff from sites, maybe week highlights. It should become more clear after launch.”

0x0961h is experienced with the frantic days leading up to game jams and the search for individuals useful to a specific project. “All my previous games are jam entries, so they are not so polished, not so long, not so narrative-driven.”

But he is currently in the process of making something new that will follow along the lines of a true game release. “I’m developing a… well, I call it a “Big Project”.   I want to make something, you know, “big”, pretty looking, so I won’t be blushing in shame before and after sending it to Greenlight. No details for now (mostly because I don’t have a single clue where my concepts and ideas will lead me), but I want to make a puzzle. I hope one day I’ll be able to finish it and actually release it. :)”

Despite his modesty, 0x0961h has a number of projects that made it to itch.io and even a prior Greenlight submission for a game on Steam.

Justin was able to further detail the origin story “Colleen was talking to @0x0961h (I believe) on twitter one day, and they wanted a place to find other indie game devs, then Colleen suggested #indieteamup, and @0x0961h set up a retweet bot for it (@indieteamup).  I noticed this conversation and told Colleen I was going to make a site for Indie Team Up as I knew that permanence would be an issue, what with how quick tweets can go by.”

And so Indie Team Up was born.  But where is it going?  What happens when you can’t get to a fucking computer and you have to make immediate contact with everyone involved in your project in the heat of the moment? Well, simmer your skettios, there’s an app for that.  Or, rather, and App Developer for that.  Yep.  Indie Team Up has a mobile division, and they’ve chosen to collaborate with another development team from Pakistan to do it.  After speaking with them on the topic, I am really excited to see the results. “We, BugDev Studios, were looking for an artist to team up with on a few projects, one thing lead to another and we found #indieteamup. I was pleasantly surprised by Colleen’s enthusiasm of the idea and felt that the need was real and when we had a chat we knew we had to make this happen.”

The main man behind BugDev studios, Usman Cheema, was happy to give me a little bit of his background as well. He graduated in 2012 in Computer Science from a Lahore University of Management Sciences. He loves the intricate systems games offer for players to experience, used to play DOTA and AOE 2 alot around my graduation and I think these two games are what got me interested in game design. After being repelled from game design schools by financial limitations, Usman joined a local game development studio named Tintash. He worked there for two years in multiple roles and recently quit to start BugDev Studios full time with a team of like minded individuals. “At BugDev Studios we aim to develop creative, out of the box games, currently focusing on hand held devices as out target platforms. I have worked on Itsy Bitsy City at Tintash and Crazy Hexagon as an independent project with fellow devs (both available on Google Play). I like to read and write about games and psychology and take course on Coursera in my free time.”

As stated, Usman is part of a three man team that is working on the app. ” I am part of a team with two engineers [Aqeel Raza (@AqeelRaza2) and Abdul Aleem Khan (@aleemkhan001) ] who have experience in game dev, web development and app development. We will primarily be handling app development of the project. I will also be pitching in with user experience and feature design of the website.”

Though the app is too early in development to expound upon specific features, BugDev studios was able to provide some information about the app’s functionality. “The concept of the project is help out independent developers working in game devevlopment to find like-minded individuals with specific skills they need. The app will be designed to mirror the website’s capabilities, more or less.  So, the website is something really needed right?  The app is visualized as a mobile version of the platform, making it easier for our users to interact with the platform on the go.”

Indie Team Up is a community of IndieDevs created by IndieDevs.  What are your skills and talents?  What prior work have you done?  Want to break into the gaming industry, and help some independent developers along the way?  Keep and eye on #indieteamup and use the hashtag to connect with other developers.  I would like to nominate this song as their badass theme song because these guys are IndieDev superheros.  Like a bat signal in the night sky, this team of dedicated developers will see it and help provide you with the key ingredients necessary to get your project finished, and well.

All of the quotes included in this article are modestly paraphrased for spelling and accuracy.  This is what the individuals involved said, but it has been arranged so that it all flows together nicely.  What? You thought I got everyone in a room and had an interview?  That shit would take hours!

 

Concursion, Genre-Fusion Salad

Posted on by thre3zekiel

concur

 

I imagine the discussion at Puuba Games when this game was thought up went like this:

“We want to make a game, and have decided it will be a platformer, now Bill…”

Dave jumps in,  “Whoa whoa whoa!  Who decided on that?  I wanted to do a fucking fighter, like double-dragon!”

Bill cuts off Dave “O fuck that! We agreed last week at Chi-Chis that we’d be doing a damn ninja game!  Shinobi redux bitches!”

“And most of us were trashed on tequila and margaritas!  No, last week beforehand we decided on a space shooter!”

Sam cuts in angrily, “What!?  But the indie scene needs my ideas for a non-violent ambient space explorer!”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               – Puuba Games Board Discussion, probably

On the battle raged for 6 days, 7 nights and on the 7th day, everyone said fuck it! and they each started their own games.  Little did they know, this was Dave’s plan all along.  He wanted everyone to do what they were good at in order to make this game.  You’re a devious mother-fucker Dave.  Devious.

Concursion literally takes 6 different games, disembowels them like digital legionnaires and squeezes them into a bizarre game smoothie.  Don’t believe me?  They brag about it on their fucking site.  Now, the game starts off as a platformer with the usual platformer issues.  Dark Lord Bignbad has captured the princess… Honey Drop.. Honey Bum..(?).. the princess yet again, but this time he shatters some crystals, rending the world and various others.  Your character just shows up at the castle, presumably because he’s a horny (-ed) viking, and sees that she isn’t there.  You then chase after the princess’s hand maiden, who it seems was included as a bad-ass lady character because in a kingdom with no other visible rulers, theirs is still a princess.  At least I don’t think there are other rulers, but if there is a king and queen, it was real shitty of them not to show up at the scene of their own daughter’s kidnapping.  Anyways.  Puuba Games essentially does with Concursion what Irrational attempted with Bioshock Infinite, but does it better and to greater efficacy.  Sure, it is not as sparkly as Bioshock was, but I never once said, “God this game looks great, but where is the game material that I was expecting to enjoy?”  Concursion delivers on all of its promises, whether you like it or not.

In the platformer you play a little red viking that seeks to save the land.  Of course, when your happy ass crosses realms you change into the hero of that realm.  It’s pretty fucking awesome.  So one minute you’re a little red viking and the next you are a ninja, double-jumping and deflecting shurikens.  Cross over into another realm and you man a spacefighter, and another still has you don a jetpack and spacesuit.  Watching the transition is a little bit jarring, but as you play each genre-realm, you become associated with the capabilities of each character.

They have great dumplings in this swirling vortex of universe-rending power.

They have great dumplings in this swirling vortex of universe-rending power.

Transitioning between worlds also grants you certain abilities.  Jump in the platformer, transition into ninja, now you can double-jump that pit in time to survive and go platforming again.  Even the bad guys transition sometimes, but it is really funny to see a dopey dragon-dog transition into a flying hunk of rock and vice-versa.  Those bastards over at Puuba also made mastering these transitions essential to obtaining the key to patching all the holes.  See those little green shards at the top left of my screen there?  Yea, those little fucking things.  At first you are getting them like it’s you’re job, but the difficulty of the game increases steadily, so each level makes it tougher and tougher to get the damn things.  I can already hear the howls of completionist rage.

I am not a platformer pro, either.  I bought Braid, found it insanely too tough and quit playing.  Sure, it’s artistic and mopey and wrist-cuttingly emo, but this is not Braid.  This game is also artistic, in its own way.  In a way that reminds me of Mega Man.  Seriously, this game’s music is the type that I love to hear.  It is full of energy and fun.  I actually alt-tabbed the game so I could listen to the theme music of the Intro level.  Don’t you judge me, play the game and listen for yourself!  Music in this game is also as much a part of the game as the mechanics and the graphics, too.  Each realm has its own version of the same music in each level to which it transitions.  It seems Puuba put some serious ass into this game as the only way I can imagine doing this is to make several versions of the same soundtrack and making the game change the place in the soundtrack upon transitioning.  And in case you are wondering, this takes about a fraction of a second.  It is seamless and really neat.  Even in places as above, where you will transition three times mid-jump, the game alters the music as you pass through those vortices.

The soundtrack here must be titled something like "the finality of laser-induced death"

The soundtrack here must be titled something like “the finality of laser-induced death”

Concursion’s difficulty has a good rising curve, but after a point I got to where I was cursing my ass off.  It really brought me back to my roots on the Super Nintendo with Mario or the Commodore 64, trying to make the Hulk cry for mommy before the dynamite he had strapped to him exploded.  It is the most fun game I have ever sucked at in every possible way.  Real platformers would be facepalming and tearing the controls out of my hands.  But the way this game has you doing things that are hard as hell to awesome and encouraging music is really fun.  I mean, every scenario they put you in, whether you are attacking shuriken-flinging wall-ninjas or dashing for your life from a player-seeking angry spike ball, the music is perfect for the level.  Any of you that have a child inside you not due to a heavy lunch will want to go get this and relive your entire childhood gaming experience in one game.

Some of the levels are done up in vector graphics, some are your pixel-art, if you’re into that.  But all-in-all this game rocks.  There is even a little humor in how the game teaches you how to play.  Like, did you know that ninjas could historically perform a double-jump?  I can just imagine that showing up in one of those highly questionable History Channel shows.  And once you are done running all over the place, the game lets you jump under a discoball for your own personal pelvic-thrust party!

If you would like to buy this game, aptly described on Steam as a difficult indie action platformer with a great soundtrack, it runs 11.99$ on the aforementioned gaming service or 16.98$ for game and music.

nntsss nntsss nntsss

nntsss nntsss nntsss

Absolutely one of the most fun platformers I have ever played, including in comparison to the classic ones.  But the thing that pisses me off about all of this is how hard I suck at platformers!  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love gaming, and I played more Super Mario Brothers than any one person should have as a kid with 4 brothers.  But I was the one that passed the Sega controller during rocket-knight adventures so my brother could teach me how to rocket-jump!  I played the first level after the intro in about 3 minutes and 30 seconds.  When you play that level, you will be astounded by how hard I truly suck.  Please don’t hate, we all have our strong suits and I am not the Jack of Platformers.

World War Machine, Earth-Rending Preview

Posted on by thre3zekiel

wwmlogo   So Square Enix has its own crowd-funding site, called the Square Enix collective.  Being removed from most mainstream news, I was unaware.  World War Machine is a title off that site, which sadly did not meet its fundijng goal of $50k.  Its creators, however, seem unfazed by this, and continue to promote the game accordingly.  It did manage to score $12,382 of its funding goal, though, so cheers to that.  After playing the pre-alpha demo of the game, I am impressed and I hope these guys somehow manage to pull it out of the fire.  Looking at the game on the developer’s site, it is something to be excited about.

World War Machine is a transhuman post-apocalyptic game that takes place after humans have thoroughly fucked up the world.  After a mass extinction event wipes out all organic life from the Earth (which you know happens from time to time if you watch Cosmos) humanity has changed drastically.  We used to be “fleshy meatbags full of sloshing” according to HK-47.  Sensing our impending doom, humans started downloading their consciousness to a computer.  Because, you know, even if our bodies die, it’d be cool to allow something of us to survive, right?  Nothing could go wrong here.  Except that the nodes that house our AI’s are damaged from the cataclysm, fragmented and separated.  Some of us forget who we were and our purpose becoming confused machines roving the decimated landscape.  You play one of those who remembers our past and fight to preserve the memory.  See, the other machines don’t know about the past, but somehow you do. In the demo, I had a level 10 machine.  You are basically a mini gundam ( or Jaeger ) and you fight against the damaged intellects of the other nodes, which house the human intellects.  The fight has been raging for centuries and finally one of the machines remembers.  This seems like you.  Now, the pitch suggests that the team here, Tuque Games, wants players to slip in and out of co-op seamlessly to take on group missions then revert to solo missions.  Missions will have a lasting effect on the world war itself, as well.

Did I mention that the concept art is cool as shit?

Did I mention that the concept art is cool as shit?

That is actually a look at your character in the concept art.  And given some of the differentiation visible between the player concepts on the WWM site, character customization seems to be part of the plan.  Whilst I was in the machine shop menu, I noticed something confusing about the character.  It is a machine, sure, but it looked bizarrely organic.  Now, this is not to say that it has fleshy bits.  It doesn’t.  But there are subtle little features, like wraps around the exposed joints and pieces of wreckage made into a front-plate, that make it look like a cybernetic lifeform evolving on its own in a post-human world.  All of the machines have this look, too, from the mongrels that run and kamikaze on you to the snipers and “reaper” artillery bots.  There is a lot more to this game than you’ll notice at first, for sure.

On the topic of enemies, one of the things I noticed is that they come out of the fucking woodwork.  They squeeze through cracks and doorways in the walls, they pour out of ruined buildings… hell! I was walking along when a chunk of the road imploded and enemies came flooding from the crevasse!  The mission in this demo was simply to get to the other side of the map, but that shit was hard to fucking tell!  Not because there was no explanation.  It clearly said to find the other outpost.  Sure there was no “arrow” but fuck, man, I couldn’t exactly try to go through a mountain of rubble!  What I mean is the level was more vast than I expected from a demo.  Every time I played (and I played several times) it was like I was finding another side path off the one I started on.  Not to mention hidden husks.  You can find shattered robot husks that house materials for crafting.

These stashes were usually hidden, but the nature of the engine lends itself to finding these pretty easily. Breaking things is fun to do.  Simple fucking fact.  This game allows you to destroy nearly fucking EVERYTHING!  If you can shoot it, you can break it.  I found myself demolishing walls, ruined buildings – you can even destroy the rubble!  Fucking seriously!  Too much fun with that, actually.  This is how the game makes it easy to miss stashes, if you aren’t attentive.  You could walk past a destructible terrain and miss out on some cool loot.  And loot in this game ranges from crafting items to weapons and cosmetic items.  I went into the machine shop, which is the crafting screen, and I was able to build some fun things.  You collect a variety of Spec Files from fallen enemies and then find the components to complete the blueprint.  These components are things like plastic and metals and can be found by killing enemies and destroying the props and terrain.  And trust me, one you blow up your first taxi or bus you’ll want to get more of them.  Of course, being a robot, you can tell which terrain pieces have something inside that will be useful.  I just had WAY too much fun destroying things.  I made a cape, which hangs from my character looking badass and tattered.  I also made a few weapons

wwmrkt

BOOM! Ha ha ha ha!

Weapons in WWM come in a variety of flavors: MG class, RKT class, SHTG class, MTR class, ATL class, Rail class.  MG class is your standard machine gun.  This fucker spits out bullets and most enemies will have them.  Luckily, you don’t just walk into the bullets like they do.  Not to mention you can widen the spread as you level up.  RKT is your rocket class weaponry, and these were fun.  Above you see the player blasting enemies with the standard locking missiles.  In the demo I got to try out the mouse-guided missiles!  Those were a riot.  SHTG class is a shot gun.  This sprays a wide burst of firepower in front of you.  I attached it to give my secondary a little more punch!  MTR class is the mortar.  This was awesome, but had a lower damage.  The ATL, however, is fucking scary as hell.  This artillery class weapon fires high, so you have to plan your blast pattern, but it is worth the wait.  The rounds are high explosive and wipe out even the toughest bosses in a short (ish) time.  The RAIL class is the only type of weapon I didn’t get to experiment with.  This beast looks awesome, though, as I fought a few snipers that had it.  The thing passes through terrain, enemies and basically everything the magnetic projectile hits.  Thus, this would be my favorite weapon to destroy terrain with!  One of the cool things I discovered is that you can attach multiple weapons to your body at higher levels.  This allows you to fire a shotgun, ATL combination, for example, that will nuke anything close.  And you have three firing modes (for each mouse button) to choose from! So you’re all kitted out with an arsenal of explosives and guns to make a redneck feel uneasy.  But your vortex of vicious projectiles isn’t at its limit.

You also get powers to choose from.  We had access to them all, but among them a few really caught my eye.  First off, there was ultra-velocity, a mega-man super dash that lets you render enemies into tiny bits of scrap.  Another fun power is the EMP.  This will release a massive bust of electro-magnetic power that will stun most enemies.  Makes it a whole lot easier to deal with hordes of mongrels when they can’t even move.  Then there is my personal carnage-wreaking favorite.  Orbital strike.  This is every bit as much fun as you might imagine.  A laser centers on an area then blasts everything in its radius with a fucking cataclysmic death beam turning everyone into a thin vapor with a faint hint of ozone.

"Oo, look! It's shine.." -Bob 3428's last words

“Oo, look! It’s sparkl..”
–Bob 3428’s last words

Now, that is not the end of it.  You can level up, as stated.  I did not see too much of this, as I was level 10 when I got there.  Leveling seems pretty straight forward.  You get points per level and allocate them to your stats per level.  These stats are Weapon System, Operating System, Protection System, Sensor System and Mobility System.  Now, weapon system is pretty self-explanatory.  This is the power and efficiency at which you use your weapon.  Higher weapon system = more dead bad guys.  Then there is the Operating System.  This seems to be the equivalent of intelligance and govern recalculation, knockback and use count.  Use count seems to be the number of times you can use perishable items and knockback looks like it is either how far you knockback enemies or how well you resist the knockback of others.  Then there is recalculation.  Your guess is as good as mine.  Protection systems are fun, and govern your shields.  How well can you take damage?  Well, you want to be able to take a rocket or three, but let’s face it, you won’t be standing long if you take too many shots in the face.  Then there is the sensor system.  Now, this seems weird, but it is how well you can perceive the world around you.  You’ll have your minimap, right and you are constantly emanating this radar “ping”.  Now, when you ping, enemies will show up on your minimap as the ping hits them, got it?  The higher your sensor system, the faster you’ll ping, the further you can see, the longer you’ll see enemies on your minimap before the next ping goes off and the faster the ping will travel.  Granted, at higher levels, I hope the ping isn’t a constant, ear-splitting pain that just hisses in your ears fueling the rage that drives you through hordes of robots.  I am sure they have it under control, though.  Then there is your mobility system.  This governs your movement speed and how much you can carry in your inventory.  Now, the inventory is a perk all of its own, but speed makes sense in this game more than just the obvious.  Some enemies are slow-moving, but come in fucking massive waves that don’t seem to stop.  You will want to literally dance circles around them as you fire into the crowd.  It will keep you alive longer. Alongside the stats is the ability to overclock your character.  You can pick a single stat and each time you hit the button, your character will get a temporary boost to that stat.  Now weaponry makes a lot of sense, but what about a boost to ping?  Maybe you boost your speed to run away from a horde of mongrels?

There is a lot more to this game than will immediately occur to you, and I am finding new things every time I play. It bothers me that World War Machine did not reach its funding, but I admire the spirit displayed by Tuque Games.  Hopefully they will be able to find a way to make the game.  Perhaps do a pre-release and add content as it progresses?  I don’t know, but I sure do hope to see this title soon.  That is really the one thing about this game that pisses me off the most, too!  I am worried that it will just be another piece of vaporware.  A great demo in my Steam Library that collects electronic dust with my other favorite forgotten titles, like SIN Episodes or the original Thief series.

Want to know more about the game?  Check out their site.

DLC Quest, Laugh Until it Hurts

Posted on by thre3zekiel

 

 

 

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DLC Quest is fucking hilarious.  Have you ever been frustrated by the fact that every MMO has microtransactions in it?  They no longer use the monthly subscription standard and just try to monetize it the best they can?  Some times they even go too far and make you buy gems or keys to make your game go faster or get you another useless item for your collection of pixel-itmes?  DLC Quest jabs angrily at this frustrating reality and makes you laugh time and again.

Literally this game has you start out by watching a bad guy take the Princess MacGuffin.  Yea, so already we can see that this is a classy title.  For those of you who are unaware, the MacGuffin, as detailed by Alfred Hitchcock, is the item central to the conflict of a plotline and everyone is usually looking for it.  Once you witness this, you have to start collecting coins.  These coins will be used later to pay for DLC.  DLC which unlocks functionally indispensable features of the game, such as music, animations and the ability to fucking move left.  After you get your Zoolander Syndrome sorted out, you are off to seek more coins so you can get to the end of the game.  Now, there are two “games” which are in pretty much the same program, so I would consider them all to be part of the same game.  Granted, they are listed as two separate games and plays, but the fact that the game is “released unfinished” with a “better expansion pack that you can get later” is just another jab at major industry methods.

Something amazing is always happening just over those mountains.

Something amazing is always happening just over those mountains.

The first “game” is over really quickly, but the levels can be a bit on the frustrating side.  I didn’t die once, but there is a lot of annoying jump puzzles and the only thing you get to kill personally are sheep.  After your horse saves the day, you then load up the second part of the game.  You adventure for a bit, and you have to discover who is behind disappearing villagers.  Of course, the villagers all live in what equates to a big hill, so there’s that.  You venture forth and discover a shepherd, whom you presumed dead, was behind the deaths this whole time.  His sheep were the ones you so heroically vanquished in the previous “game”.

Some parts of this game aren’t really played so much as watched.  There are a few cut-scene-esque sequences that showcase various types of player frustration as well as legitimate game sequences.  These cut-scenes vary from inability to maintain server connection to boss deaths.  I found myself laughing loudly at many of these as they are really relevant to the player experience.  This is a gamer/indie developer ranting about his experiences with mainstream gaming.

Don’t come at this looking for an excellent game.  DLC Quest’s primary purpose is to jab angrily at things they hate about the games industry and how they treat their players.  The game features themselves come in the form of a basic platformer, and most of the fighting is done for you.  In fact, the only boss you really defeat yourself is the very last boss in the second “game”.  I have no regrets about purchasing the game since it is available for 0.98$ on Steam.  Could you really justify being mad about a game that is less than a dollar, 2.99$ on any other given non-sale day?

Those coming at this game looking for an actual game are just a bunch of fucking assholes.  Sure, this game isn’t really what it makes fun of, but that is not the damn point.  If this game was a F2P mmo that made you buy DLC for everything, possibly still with in-game money, it would go downhill right fucking quick.  Some jack ass on Rock Paper Shotgun suggested this, but I think he needs to get his goddamn head checked.  That idea would never in a million fucking years work right.  At least not done by an Indie Developer.  And if they did it would end up literally being every bit as annoying as the games it is making fun of.  I mean this asshole wishes he could spend money unnecessarily on stupid shit in a game that makes fun of games doing just that.   It would make the satire less poignant and more self-destructive, making fun of itself in the process of bitching about the state of the industry.  To be respected as a satire, which makes it artistic, it should not be adding more shit to the pile of shit.  Sure, art is a powerful word to use for this game, but not every piece of art is fantastical and pretty.  Just look at Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal.  This game does its job well.  Sometimes I wonder where they find these guys.  DLC Quest as it is now is a satire showcasing the ways that gaming has pissed everyone off, and that is a message I can fucking get behind.

One thing that really got my gall up in this title was the goddamn background!  Just look at it up there!  Something fucking AMAZING is happening back there.  I tried many times to get through incomplete sections of the levels or sneak past the coding, but that shit didn’t fucking fly.  I should be able to explore, man!  This is why I hate playing platformers and 2D games in general.  I am only getting an idea of what happens on this lush and interesting environment along a set, linear path!  Is there gold back there?  Is there a sexy, drunken french orgy/rave party?  I want to see that shit!

Pseudo “Game” Art: Proteus

Posted on by thre3zekiel

proteuslogo

 

Calling Proteus a game is incorrect.  All you can do is walk around, look and listen.  This game has existed long enough, however, where I do not feel at all bad about telling you everything I experienced in it, because let’s face it, it was fucking weird.

When you load up the game a screen like that above will appear.  You click the island to start and dive in.  Every time you start up Proteus, the island is different and you are offshore a good distance.  After the long swim (which feels like it is supposed to build anticipation) you come to shore and you start to get an idea what you just bought.  Everything is in saturated colors and the visuals make Minecraft look like a graphical powerhouse.  Everything is in these bizarrely basic Atari-level graphics.  But that is not the cool part.  Obviously.  What’s so unique about Proteus is that it is about wandering around and discovering.  The things you discover aren’t cool loot or terrifying enemies, they’re sights and sounds.  Strangely, at a lack of other stimuli, you then start to react to the game emotionally, which makes it a more deep and tactile experience.

I came ashore in Proteus and there were a bunch of pink trees with leaves falling from them, which made a beepy drifting noise as they fell to the ground.  Walking further I found a frog and chased him up a hill where I found the ruined towers.  This tower had a weird chiptune bag-pipe music.  That’s the best fucking way I can put it.  Walking up to the thing I noticed my screen blink black.  When I turned around, I was elsewhere on the island.  I stepped away from the imposing broken-looking structure and found a path, which bordered a forest.  Just inside the forest was a flock of birds that bloop when they peck the ground.  I figured they must be chickens.  If you walk too close to them, they’ll chirrup before skittering off, tinkling the whole way.

I walked along the path and found nothing of particular fucking interest.  By this time it was getting late in game, and my natural gamer instinct kicked in.  “Fuck!  The zombies are going to eat me!” but the game lilts softly as night falls, making comforting and sleepy noises.  Really pretty, and no zombies came out looking for my brains.  I’ll tell you what I did find, though.  Fireflies!  I heard weird little bloops that came and went and looked around only to find little lightning bugs flashing here and there.  I wandered around for a bit and saw some sparkles like falling stars in the distance, spinning and writhing.  I got there and found a mass of spinning sparkles.  As I entered the circle, it condensed and formed a portal.  Already time was flying by around me, so I stepped inside the portal.  I was at the same place, but it was a little different.

 

Ooo! Sparkly!

Ooo! Sparkly!

So after wandering around more I found a circle of totems, these made a low whirring noise and the stars pulsed wildly like they were exploding then retracting then exploding again.  Eventually this stopped and a storm rolled in.  Nothing in this game seems to follow any kind of logical sense, though.  There are simple effects and things that react to your presence (standing stones that shoot sparks and make a noise as you walk by, animals to chase) but nothing all that interactive.  At one point I went through the portal and came out into a sad autumn land with a graveyard.  Seriously.  I am pretty sure it wasn’t there before, but it had a bunch of sparkles everywhere.  I also noticed that clusters of sparkles would pulse into existence, then disappear.  When I left the graveyard to search for the portal again, I saw ghosts playing peek-a-boo with me behind trees.  Weird.

Finally I entered the portal again and came out into a desolate snowy waste with dead trees and over cast with clouds.  It began to snow a little, which added some sound.  There was very little, and this took away most of the fun of the game at this point.  I went around and there was very little of interest, so I looked for the totems again.  I couldn’t tell if it was night or day, since the sky was blocked out.  I felt claustrophobic too, and wanted to get above the low-hanging clouds.  When I found them, the totems were emanating a weird chanting noise.  Suddenly I began to float upward.  The chanting got louder.  I saw the mountains, a huge fucking tree I found earlier and went to those landmarks, but I kept moving upward.  A couple falling stars whished past me as I drifted up and up toward the moon.  Finally my eyes began to close slowly until the screen was black.  And the title screen slowly loaded up.

I have to assume this game is some kind of weird analogy for life, you start off fresh and new and everything seems to be in a state of springtime.  You step into the portal and time whooshes by and then it is summer.  Summer is full of more weird shit, there are some bees and the sun is pulsating hotly.  Step into the portal again and it is autumn, the world is full of trees dropping leaves and death.  There are spirits and ghosts and I even found a graveyard.  Step in again and the world is dead.  You find the place of passage and you pass through the clouds, out of sight and into the heavens.  Yay, fun.  I wish I had dropped acid or ate some ‘shrooms.  Might have made the game that much more enthralling.  Of course, I would be the fucker to find the only way to fucking die in a game about looking around and listening to everything.  If you want to play this game, it is available on Steam for 3.99$ due to the Steam Summer Sale.

It is hard for me to recommend that anyone else buy this game.  I liked it, it definitely made me feel something different.  But this is not something for standard gamers to buy.  It is weird and experiential.  You will find things in here that are neat and fun.  Everyone will feel something about this game, whether it be hatred or ecstasy, but to say it is a good game would be a vast overstatement.  Art is to be looked at, enjoyed and explored, and with more than just a few key clicks.  Don’t buy this game if you are looking for a fun little game to waste some time with.  This is not that.  It is more like a visual and auditory vacation from everything else that leaves you on one side of a massive wall or the other.  Do not buy this as a game, buy it as a piece of art, for it is to be enjoyed lightly, perhaps over a pipe of some strong weed.

Whooshy comets go whoosh!

Whooshy comets go whoosh!

In a game with music and bizarre visuals where I always had one eye-brow quirked, I still found something to be angry about.  And that is the fucking reviews on Steam.  Seriously!  It is like everyone is taking some fantastic drugs and loading this baby up!  Everyone seems to agree this is a game you come into just to wander around and enjoy being away for a while.  You get sent to a pristine island of singing things and happy-happy times!  Not to mention, this game has better scores than games that work harder and give you more.  But I have another theory!  This game is actually the waiting room that demented gods send their human sacrifices through! Each day in game is how long it takes in the real world for them to send another one through.  And at night you are sent to the next level of this insane purgatory!  Finally at the end, you are so bored out of your mind that you are happy to let the world melt away and drift into the air to be consumed – mind, body, spirit – by your god(s).  Take that, you hippy-ass art-as-experience pricks.