Unbridled Shenanigans in the Dungeons of Dredmor

Posted on June 23, 2014 by thre3zekiel

In anticipation of Steampunk Empires by the same developer as this title, I decided to give another dungeon run, for old-time’s sake. Dungeons of Dredmor is another game that I wish existed when I was a kid. In a way, this game did exist when I was a kid, but this is a modern reincarnation of those games it takes after whose places it takes over. Surely, it couldn’t have existed when I was younger considering many of the elements of what makes this game fun, but that is ok. We have it now, so let the shenanigans begin!

Take Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Diablo, a dash of Lovecraft, and the combined shenanigans of Ghostbusters, Firefly, Monty Python and you are still only getting started. Dungeons of Dredmor is a pixelated masterpiece that splices click-to-kill dungeoneering with the humor of a by-gone era. Then they add in all kinds of fun and exciting features that make this a game you are sure to play for hours on end. Its pixel graphics and isometric view allow this title to have the complexity of gameplay that make it one of my top “do not uninstall” games. Its procedural dungeon designs, loot and enemies also make it fun in a way that only slaughtering hordes of monsters in a dark, dank dungeon can deliver.

When you start you make your character, and the options to do so are pretty mind-boggling. The three standard types of character are there: Mage, Rogue and Warrior. But every character you create will be a combination of all three, whatever the division of powers. As you level up, this division will fluctuate between the classes. There are 45 skills that you have to choose from at the start, after you iron out your difficulty setting. These range from polearms, shields and wand lore to archaeology, mathemagic and emomancy. I wish I had time to talk about all them, but I don’t. My favorite combination so far starts me off as a rogue that drives toward a magician as he levels. When you select your skills, you have to pick apart the grand list of 45 fucking abilities and whittle it down to your 7 favorite. At first you might pick all the neat ones, but that will get you killed. You might avoid crafting, but that will also get you killed. My favorite combination so far is definitely Staff-fighting, wand lore, fungal arts, alchemy, tinkering, rogue scientist and archaeology.

I like this combo because the abilities cooperate well. First off, I just like the staves. They tend to add defense and crushing, so it makes for a fun fight, if they get close. My main skill is wand lore. This is a tough one to focus on, though, because you will find yourself out of wand parts (and inventory space) by the 3rd level. So, you will need something to back yourself up when enemies close in. Fungal arts and alchemy work together well as alchemy lets you draw resources from various fungi that you cultivate on the bodies of the dead. This gets you a number of good secondary weapons right at the start. Tinkering is good, even if only for the bombs you can create. These fuckers will take out an entire room, and there are mines too, if that is what you’re into. Rogue scientist is a steampunk mish-mosh of tinkering, wand lore and alchemy that gives you some good hold-out moves and catches the bonuses of those three disciplines and lets you benefit from them. Archaeology is a good way to get some miscellaneous experience. Killing monsters is good and well, but I am not looking to be that guy that is grinding his ass off to get to a place where he can fight further down. To put it into perspective, using Archaeology I have gotten to level 9 and I just started floor 3. Yea.

These skills extrapolate out to the character’s 28 stats. Yea, 28. So, you can see how diverse in abilities you can make your character. My character is a rogue-based wizard, essentially, and as such has remarkable dodge and counter-strike. He also critical hits and gets haywire hits (magical crits) on a regular basis. Of course if he gets hit, he dies fast, but I can make life potions, cultivate healing shrooms and there is also food as a final fall back. I don’t like to let enemies get close enough to need fight hand-to-hand. But when I do, I beat them with a big fucking stick. Literally. That is what the animation looks like and I love it. Only thing about that I take issue with is I feel there should be a more face-crunching sound effect, you know?

… will it keep me safe?

Once you get down to the dungeons you will notice that there is a vast variety of enemies from diggles and undead aethernauts to evil vegetables and flying, spell-casting skulls. It is mind-boggling all the foes you will flay, but it never gets old. Especially when you hit the zoos. These are rooms filled wall-to-wall with enemies. They could be as small as a former monster-collector’s personal burial chamber or as vast as ancient cisterns. In the end, you will shit yourself when you bust the door down and pray you have some good AoE attacks. For me I blast them with my acid wands, save up my Odious Puffballs and toss in a couple acid flasks. Mosolov Cocktails in this game (basically molotov cocktails) also leaving a lingering fireball that other enemies walk through. Bombs will also help out and kill giant holes in the crowd, but it is seriously just a monster convention in there. IF you successfully complete the zoo without dying, you will receive a powerful loot item, too.

Each floor has its own theme, too, but you will always see the diggles. These little rubber-nosed bird-creatures are omnipresent in the dungeons, so Dredmor must’ve personally subsidized them. Either that or they breed like cockroaches and act like subterranean pigeons, infiltrating every crack and crevice they can find and reproducing like dirty, little, drill-nosed rabbits. Dredmor, in case I forgot to mention him, is the ultimate boss of the dungeons. I think I am supposed to kill him at the end, but I haven’t seen that guy yet. When the game first came out, you had to beat the game before you could load after death. Yep. So when you died, the game would delete all your save files for a specific character. It was infuriating, but the rush after getting to the lower floors was unparalleled. Today I was able to play after dying once, so either the DLC that was released allowed me this feature, or I beat down to a level where I could unlock said feature.

Who ordered the large anchovy pizza? Was it you Greg? You fucking DICK! We all agreed on pepperoni!

This game references almost every facet of popular sub-culture that it will make your head spin. It has more video-game/movie references than every season of Big Bang Theory and Family Guy combined, past present and future. There are Zelda and Braid jokes, Dragon Ball Z get one in, Firefly quotes echo through the dungoens, skill trees mimic the life and times of Indiana Jones, stats are named after Pirates of the Carribbean slang and I swear there are Monty Python jokes lingering around each corner. You spend your days counting Zorkmids and you character’s portrait even decays exactly as in the original Wolfenstein 3d at the same levels of health degredation. Conan the barbarian, emos, vegans: you name it. It’s fucking in there. There are also a number of puns that mostly only the British should get, but they’re obvious enough to be funny to us Yanks, too. Overall, this game’s treatment of sub-culture and popular culture references are so far-reaching, expansive and awesome that this really is a gamer-culture work of art. Every time I play, I find more references and jokes, too. It is truly remarkable.

Then there are the little things that fill in the corners of this piece quite nicely. Everything else is procedurally generated, why not the side-quests? You pray at the shrine of Inconsequentia, the Goddess of Side-Quests. Place your weapons on the Anvil of Krong for nice upgraded loot items. Gallivant through the hordes of monsters wearing a roadcone and liederhosen. I can’t say anything comedic. I don’t need to. This game is hilarious as hell all on its own. Play through this title and you will be equal parts amazed, entertained and pissed that you missed so much free time indoors. Buy Dungeons of Dredmor complete on Steam now for the summer sale! That shit only runs you 2.93$ for the DLC that isn’t fucking free! Just go get it. This is one that you’ll be glad you bought.

Among all the games I have played so far, this one shines on top of the pile like a star, but it still has its rough spots. What is it this time? I played this game for FOUR FUCKING HOURS and only got to the 3rd floor. You have to be ready to commit a good weekend to this game just to get far enough to even fucking smell Dredmor! I have owned this title for literal goddamn YEARS and I have played it on and off and never ONCE saw the guy. That fucking perma-death element went a long way toward keeping me away, but now that I can reload after death, I should be able to get that bastard. Of course now I feel like a piece of shit that can’t hack the lower dungeons without dying once! And what did I get killed by in my last play on that deep, dark level in an alternate dimension? Hmmm? A GODDAMNED BUFFED-OUT DIGGLE! The mickey-mousey comedic enemy of the ENTIRE FUCKING GAME! You have no idea how hard and loud I raged. I was in the army at that point and my roommates thought I was giving birth to a fucking watermelon out my ass. AGH! Whatever, I am killing me some fucking buff-assed diggles this time. Ain’t nothing gonna stop my fungus-eating, stick wielding, wand-sliging Titus Cezarius!

I have never felt more satisfied in this game than the first time I saw this screen, shaking and drenched with the blood of my enemies.

Gear Up for Comedic Carnage

Posted on June 22, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Of all the things I love in the world, I love free games the most! Now, it does bother me a bit when an indie game is free because it means, to me, that a developer is making little to no money on their title. This article is going to assume you’re poor like me. Granted, the Steam Summer Sale has made it so players can buy all tank parts and upgrades for only 8.99$, but the Steam Summer sale has sapped what petty funds I have, thus I am doing the old-fashioned way: guts and glory, motherfuckers! Starting from nothing, you will suck for a good fucking period of time. The base gear isn’t terrible, but relative to some of the one-shot-kill weapons that lie at the higher end of the damage spectrum, you will be using spit-balls. Each kill in the game gets you 30 xp, and for a while I thought the number of upgrades I could purchase was dictated by my level and xp. Fuck no! That shit is totally inconsequential. At some point I noticed a number next to a G symbol at the end of matches. For the sake of conversation, we shall refer to them as Gear Coins (GC). GC accrual seems to be dictated by your standing in number of kills versus the other players in a match. Each player gets an amount of GC relative to placement with highest being 4 GC. These coins let you buy propulsion units, turret chassis, hulls, decorations, support modules and, of course, the weapons. When you start off, your tactics will be those of a mouse with a toothpick attempting to stab a lion to death. You will wait until stronger players duke it out, and swoop in to make a kill or two before you are spotted and greased.

Of course, when you get the cash, you might want to invest in a new hull. Hulls cost 5 GC each, and they are the main body of the tank. The stats for hulls are Mass and Armor. Mass is important as too much will make you a slow, easy target. High mass will also give you fierce momentum, and could result in tipping your tank on sharp turns. Armor is fucking armor. More armor results in a tougher tank. usually it makes you less maneuverable, but after duking it out with these mass-monsters I can tell you this: the easiest way to defeat those players is with speed and maneuverability. A slugfest with one of them usually leaves you respawning.

Spider-tank, spider-tank! It can do anything a spider-tank does! Shoot some guys, stick to walls, hope to Jesus you do not fall, look out! Here comes the spider-tank!

Soon after you get a little tougher or a little lighter, you should really look into propulsion systems. Obviously, these systems are how your tank will be getting around the board, but use some imagination. Some systems use the standard treads, which make your character maneuverable and speedy. At times, they can be a little frustrating to operate, but you start with a pair of these and you acclimate to them quickly. Then there are the legs. As you can see above, these fuckers are fun. legs are considerably slower than other propulsion systems, but they enable you to get into positions that are hard to detect, and even harder to adapt to quickly. Finally, there are the hover systems. The one I took were the hover pads, and they look cool as shit! Unfortunately, you have all the limitations you would expect from hovering systems. It is tougher to stop yourself, you make wide turns, and generally have less armor. Granted this also makes you speedy and allows you to hover over water, which can be extremely helpful in maps with bodies of water. Everyone else sinks and drowns in water. You hover over water like canon-mounted Jesus. This makes unconventional strikes much more possible, which can bail out your teammates should you find yourself in a team match. These systems will affect your armor, mass and max velocity and cost 5GC.

Turrets are interesting. They can look crazy, with one basically being a fish. Yea, really. The main stat featured on this weapon-mounting part is the rotation speed. I bought a turret with good armor without consulting the turn radius. This left me with a turret that turns a bit slower than I like, but some extra armor. Since I use a minguns a lot, this can cause some issues with my accuracy, leaving my turret to catch up with my own mouse speed. Luckily, I can use the momentum of my tank to turn my body and level my weapon quicker, due to my hover pads. Support parts will also find their home here on either side of the main weapon, and sometimes above. Did I mention the ability to have multiple weapons? My new turret also let me attach a secondary weapon, but you don’t fire simultaneously. You have to select the fire mode. Turrets also affect mass and armor and are currently 4GC.

I came in playing deathmatch which is free for all, so not killing everything is sight took a little getting used too.. Even when they were the same color, and screaming at me to stop…

Support modules have a wide range of uses that let you customize how you will fight with your tank. You can get wings for a smoother landing, anti-gravity for a little speed-boost, lawnmower fans for that hover effect; if you have an urge or proclivity, the support modules will be able to serve it. These babies attach to your turret and add a little something extra to the style and design of your tank. None of them add anything extra to your tank (that I could find) but that doesn’t mean they won’t later. Also, you can get training wheels, for, you know, if your tank flips alot. Support Modules tend to cost about 5GC each. Flags and decorations are another extra little piece of the game that fall into the “shits and giggles” category. You know those little red flags that the “special” kid down the street had on his bike as a kid? Were you that kid? Now you can laugh in your enemies faces as you blast them apart with your little red flag on the back. You can also add a wind-up key to the back of your tank, for some kicks or add an ice-cream cone to the top to lure in the unsuspecting. Bwah ha ha ha! That’s not an ice cream cone! It’s a 50 calibur anti-infantry round! These items vary in costs. Samurai flag? 100GC, some items are only 1 or 2 GC, though.

The minigun's connected to the weapon chasis, the weapon chasis's connected to the tank hull...

The rocket-launcher’s connected to the weapon chasis, the weapon chasis’s connected to the tank hull…

Finally, we come to my favorite part of the game: your weaponry. I after some experimentation, I have found that I am deadly with the miniguns. When I installed my hoverpads, though, it made it tougher to aim with my guns and I had to change over to something explosive with higher damage. But the hoverpads made it easier to compensate for the lower rotation speed of my turret by fishtailing out of sharp turns. Of course, the turn speed on my turret was still a bit inhibiting, but I could mount a secondary weapon that could let me vary my attack strategy on the fly. Maybe get a shotgun attachment to supplement my minigun for when I close in on enemies? I never got a really good chance to experiment with a lot of the other parts, but I was only playing for about 3 hours. In that time I got enough GC to buy 1 new propulsion system, 2 new guns and 1 new turret.

Gear Up is a great title, but the graphics themselves warrant a moment to mention. They look really nice. Sometimes the bloom is a little bright, but everything looks really good. Its look has a sort of plastic feel that gives you the idea of playing with tanks in your sandbox as a kid. The fact that your tank can sport little wind-up keys and other fun things only further evoke this playful atmosphere while you blast foes apart. You won’t always win (in fact you won’t win much to start at all) but that’s ok, because the game itself just feels like a fun romp. It reminds me of Scorched Earth, the stationary tank-game that the Worms franchise was loosely related to. It is really just a fun way to waste some time with friends. This is sure to be a LAN party favorite. This game might be another pre-release title made possible by Steam Greenlight, but it’s worth every penny of.. O, yea! It’s fucking FREE! Yea, I would pay a couple bucks for this game, it is that much fun. Get more updates direct from Doctor Entertainment AB on their blog! I know I will be! I mean they were good enough to add a ticket to explain that the red rocket pickup increases your damage 50% and the blue armor pickup halves the damage you take when hit. This is clearly a group of Devs who care about their game and what their players think.

So with all the fun to be had here, what about the game pisses me off? I’ll fucking tell you! The power-ups! I am pretty fucking sure that some of them do absolutely fucking nothing. There is the ammo pick-up and the health pick-up. Those are obvious. I have also noticed it is a bit tougher to kill guys after they get the Shield power-up. But what they FUCK is with that red bullet? I mean, I don’t feel much more powerful after grabbing it, and it sure as shit doesn’t give me red tracers, so its nebulous effects are as indistinct as fly fart at a Dragonforce concert. And then there are the colors! O, boy I cannot tell you how many times I have gotten my ass nuked when I went after an ammo pickup rather than the health! O FUCK ME! I am a MAN! I tend toward COLOR-BLINDNESS! When I am speeding around the map trying to dodge the incoming rain of hellfire missiles, I don’t want to have to stop and contemplate which of the faint, holographic colors I am searching for in the MASSIVE BLINDING FOG OF BLOOM! Fo’ serious! O, well. Maybe they will make a sunglasses support module later on and that will help me see what the fuck is going on.

How to Survive, MacGyver vs. zombies

Posted on June 19, 2014 by thre3zekiel

By this time everyone is getting tired of killing zombies. From pixelation to paradise, we’ve all smashed more brains and likewise been ripped apart more times than should really be socially acceptable. Why is this? Well, zombies are safe enemies. They are person-like enough to be fun to kill, but are clearly monsters, so the deranged soccer-moms of America can’t really blame zombie-slaying for the downfall of western civilization. More safe than zapping aliens, as that would just be xenophobia and in some cases their belief systems are just echoes of our own xenophobic issues…<cough> Halo </cough> Yes, zombies are our little squishy rage receptacles, and H2S takes the love of zombie-slaying to isometric levels.

Among the first things that I noticed when starting this game up is its insistence upon issues controls at me like I am holding an xbox controller. Also, it’s an isometric action RPG. Like Legend of Zelda with less magic, more zombies and gallons of blood. Your character of choice washes up on the shore of some island with a random asshole nearby coughing and gasping for air. Me, I would have just taken the stick he gave me and bashed his brains out with it. One less zombie to fight later, but it seems this game is more merciful than I am. You leave the guy to his fate. Christ. I would have taken the stick to the head option.

Also, after getting that guy some pain-killing plants to munch on, he gives you a stick. He even says you won’t survive without it! Lovely. Now the only thing keeping me from the precipice of doom is a flimsy piece of wood. You’ll use it initially to bash in zombie brains, then later you use sticks for crafting. Alongside some other detritus and pickups, you will find these floating books left behind by a mystical russian sage in a welder’s mask named Kovac. It is pretty clear that Kovac is a few screws short as he had so perfected the art of survival that he now writes manuals chapter by chapter and leaves them across the various islands you’ll explore. All this is done for the benefit of anyone else that might end up on his zombie-infested archipelago. O, yea, this takes place on some tropical islands, but don’t worry, there are no luxury hotels or rap-singers. Just a russian guy and some zombies. O, and the odd survivor or two.

She looks royally fucked. I met a couple gameover screens putting my back against a wall.

Probably the best element of this game is the crafting system. Your character runs around grabbing ~~items~~ pieces of useless junk, such as harpoon grips and air tanks, and uses them to build shotguns and pistols which fire screws, nuts and bolts. Hence why I reference the 80’s tv show MacGyver: the original “guy who could go into the woods with a q-tip and build a shopping mall”. My personal favorite was the boomerang made of two sharpened bones you tied together. That just screams terrible, messy death. Especially when you meet some of the bosses in this game. Shit, man! I was playing solo, but you can easily play a local game (on your fucking computer) and run around with another player blasting zombies. At some points you’ll be glad to have that other player. Numerous times alone at night I have had to flip around while fighting off a horde of zombies with just a bow to shine my flashlight at the night zombies, which hate the light. That stalls them long enough to kill a couple more enemies attacking your front. Such frantic gameplay, however, is easily avoided by bringing a buddy. Sure, there are other survivors in this game, but most of them are either content hiding on their personal island and writing manuals for everyone else or they die terribly. There is also the off chance they are just disabled, but yea, not helpful. One NPC that follows you around just seems to be the guy that knows where everything is. That’s Ramon, and he is obviously someone’s latino grandfather. A little on the stereotypical side, he calls you papa at some points and uses other spanish terms. It gets uncomfortable after a while.

Your character progresses to meet the challenges presented by leveling up. Each kills, direct or otherwise, gets you exp and those points get you skills, like making crossbows or better aim. There are skills oriented toward survival, too. Mostly oriented toward the necessity mechanics of the game. There are three things you need to do in this game: eat, drink and sleep. Neglecting any of them results in your demise. You can hunt wild animals, but carrying bloody predictably makes you a zed-magnet and you have to cook it before consumption. There are wild fruits, which replenish thirst and hunger but also give you diarrhea if you eat too many. Then there are the roots. You can find things like cassavas everywhere, but these are gross and replenish only hunger, but they keep you from dying and you can eat all of them with no negative effects. For water the game places freshwater wells throughout the game and allows you to fill empty bottles with the water, for drinking on the go.

Then there is sleep. Your character can only sleep at designated locations throughout the game. Little safehouses built by Kovac and out fitted with beds, a savepoint and a blaring loud siren. O, yea, this fucker goes off and attracts EVERYTHING in the vicinity. Not to mention the safehouse starts spitting out zombies at you, too! So you have to run around in circles zapping gut-munchers and praying you can survive. The third safehouse you come to was truly fucking irritating, too. I only have my little homemade pistol and a bow. I must have missed some goodies, though so I am heading back a bit to see if I can make a shotgun at least.

If that doesn’t sound frustrating enough, some of the fucking zombies have ARMOR on. Seriously! You can shoot them all you want with your pistol, but that shit ain’t getting through! For those guys you need to get out your bow, focus, woo sah woo sah and release. Meanwhile, a ton of little brainbugs or regular zombies (which get progressively harder to kill) are munching on your spleen. At some points the game feels more like a test of your ability to cycle through you inventory, but going into your inventory quickly became my method of choice as it pauses the game. I use this time to address issues of near-death, hunger or thirst. There are also zombies that explode, giant fucking run-for-your-life-and-hide-like-a-bitch zombies that take forever to die.

“You say ‘woo sah’ to me one more time, Jack, and I shoot you in the dick.”

Did I mention the natural problems you might run into while living in the middle of nowhere? You might get charged down by a wild animal defending the watering hole. Or perhaps you take a swim in a piranha infested swamp? Yep, the longer you stay, the more you realize this island was set up by a secret government organization to vet the pool of 80’s action hero hopefuls. There are all kinds of neat elements, though. You can pick plants and use them to make power potions, craft poultices for injuries and other neat shit. I would say get this game, but only if survival amongst zombies while building flamethrowers and crossbows intrigues you. As of this article, Steam has this game on sale for 3.74$. The DLC’s aren’t on sale, but altogether they cost only 8.94$, so this is definitely worth your money. The sale is only good until June 29th, 2014, though, so get on that shit!

The game itself tells you how many days you’ve survived, which is neat and all, but I cannot help but feel like this game was supposed to go in another direction. I have been right about this sort of thing before, too. It seems like this game was supposed to throw you into a nasty, rough environment and force you to survive on your own. No storytime, no Kovac and no one to help you but your own gut instinct. I also feel like they might have allowed you to build your own base at some point, but the game never gets there. Instead you just sort of run around picking up Kovac’s breadcrumbs and helping your mexican grandfather accomplish his dream of flying a plane.

There is one thing that pisses me off about this title, too. That being the zombie tropes. Every game that has zombies wants the game to get tougher than just making you fight the same bland living dead all the time. Sure, they could just make them tougher to kill, but without an external reason making them tougher to kill (ie armor or helmets) it is a little cheesy. Thus, since Left 4 Dead every fucking zombie killing game has had the same stupid fucking exploding zombies! Just change the fucking skin texture and hope no one notices. Then there is this large, pain-in-the-ass-to-kill tank zombie that charges you down. Seriously, people, if someone can’t get a little more original, I might just stop buying anything with fucking zombies in it.

Smallworld, Better Than Pit-Fighting Midgets!

Posted on June 18, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Originally a board game, Smallworld 2 is really just a board game on your computer. If you have played the board game, just imagine playing that game on your computer. That is this game. Go ahead. Just exit the webpage. Yup…. Ok, is he gone? Good. Now that it is just those of you who have never played the board game, let me tell you about this weid ass board game I found!

Essentially, it is 8 turns of mayhem during which you have to use several races to get you as much money as possible. Apparently all the creatures and peoples of this mythical land worship the same god: The God of Gold. I mean, you control numerous people across the ages and collect coins at the end of each turn. The winner has the most coins by the end. So, yes, ultimately it is a game about collecting more coins than two italian plumbers before the timer runs out.

First turn you pick a race, and each race comes with a little prefix. These can be things like hill, mountain, seafaring, imperial, diplomatic, etc. And each of these prefixes adds a special feature to the race to which it is affixed. Each race naturally has a special ability, so adding the two together can either seriously enhance or considerably weaken the clout of each race combo. This is honestly the biggest source of laughs and chuckles this game has to offer. When you get combos like beserk leprechauns or dragon-riding pygmies, you know there is something wrong with the world in that demented hilarity kind of way. Like sucking someone’s brains out with a swirly straw.

My first race combo was Spirit Humans. Humans just get you one extra gold for each farmland they end the turn holding. The spirit prefix makes it so that they add one race to the number you have in decline. What is decline? Well, I am glad you asked! You know how every absurdly arrogant prick you know has the same book about the rise and fall of the roman empire on his bookshelf? Well, this is the only game that gives that guy a semi-reasonable segue to bring up that book. As an empire rises, so, too, must it fall. When your empire goes into decline, the army tokens flip over and extras are removed from the board. Going into decline is useful and necessary. In an average session of Smallworld 2 you will have 3 – 4 empires. You will still receive 1 coin for each region held by a race in decline and you can have only 1 race in decline at a time. Unless you had a spirit race. Then you can have 2. That makes it a pretty useful little prefix to keep an eye out for.

Damned imperial pixies with their Death Star! There is no way to beat that shit!

You may have noticed that each prefix and race has a number on it. Totaled together, those numbers indicate how many armies your race will start with at the beginning of its turn. Each turn your race will start from an edge and battle its way inland until it is no longer an effective way of doing business. At the beginning of each turn, generally speaking, you will get additional forces in the number of regions you possess with a given race. So, right off the bat, playing a race for more than 2 turns is a bad idea, unless it really isn’t.

On the topic of beserk leprechauns, that was my second race. They cut a bloody swath through the territories of the battle dwarfs and skirted around my former spirit humans. Leprechauns also have the added benefit of getting a pot ‘o’ gold on each region they own and, upon entering decline, each pot ‘o’ gold counts as 1 coin. Unless some asshole cuts a fucking path through your territory with his stupid ass hill vampires. Lame as fuck. He got 1 coin for each pot ‘o’ gold he captured. Same with the underground amazons. Bitches…

Flying Dwarfs. Isn’t the idea the same if you exchange ‘dwarves’ for ‘lead’? Nevermind. Lead is less stinky, less hairy and less alcoholic.

Fun to kill some time. And BOY do you have options on that note. I mean, you can watch the bots take their turns. I did once or twice. Then I found the ‘FUCK IT I HAVE A LIFE’ skip button. Then again, if you find yourself on your computer playing a board game by yourself you have the special kind of issues. Of course, this game has DLC’s which do exactly what an expansion pack for a board game would do: add more pieces to a game with way too fucking many pieces already. Luckily this is a virtual board game, which leads me to speculate this was the reason for making it a video game. You can find this title on Steam for 14.99$, the DLC’s total up at 10.97$ altogether. My special thanks to The Dead Sparticus for cluing me in! I guess I get so steamed up that I occasionally forget to mention where to get the fucking game!

Among the things that fucking anger me the most in this game nothing.. NOTHING angers me more than the fact that they have to put MOUNTAIN TILES on the MOUNTAIN REGIONS! They did this in the fucking board game too! Seriously! Like, it is a picture of mountains with a mountain tile made specially to display it is a mountain. And does this mean that no one can traverse this ever so superfluous terrain additive? NO! It just takes MORE FUCKING PEOPLE to take that shit! It is almost like those assholes over at Days of Wonder are trying to make trees a thing of the past or laminated cardboard into a new currency standard. GAH! I’m just going to leave this here..

Craft the World, Dwarven Shenanigans

Posted on June 16, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Dwarfs have always been the fantasy race I love the most. Long friends, strong hearts and a love of drink and mead! And this title is full of all the best parts. Battle bad guys, collect gold, dig mines and build to your heart’s content. This cartoony game will keep you crafting to the last! Another title in early access, yes, but it is a good time!

I’ve already placed time into previous plays in this game, but with its recent updates I feel it’s nearing a completed state and deserving of discussion. The first couple times I played it, I was quickly diced to ribbons, so I recommend restarting until you have a little bit of an elevated platform above your surroundings. Trust me, when night falls you will be glad you did! Upon start up, you have one dwarf that warps in through a portal, proving they are descendants of an alien race. You cannot move your stockpile nor your portal, hence the restart need to relocate your spawn. Once you have a suitable location, you just follow prompts and missions. These missions give you exp points, which help you to work toward levels. At each level, your holdfast gets another citizen, but be careful to keep them alive.

Your dwarfs do everything from mining and building to fighting and fishing. They gather resources, too, but you have to deliver all their orders yourself, making this a fairly active title. As you gather resources, you’ll get missions to start crafting things, and making new items is always a good idea. That’s how you’ll get armor and weapons! You also level up to get a smithy for advanced projects, furniture and building pieces. With these you can make some nifty living quarters for your dwarfs. One of your early missions also grants you with this bearded totem-face. That is what tells you how good their standard of living is, which is bullshit since the bastards are demanding as fuck! They need all stone walls and secured doors, hand-carven beds and the finest food cooked in the finest kitchen. But they build it all themselves (albeit under your strict direction), so I guess they deserve the satisfaction.

Creepy wall face watches you sleep.

As you can see, you won’t be starting off with five-star accommodations, but you work up to it. This fancy hole-in-the-ground establishment took a good hour in real life, a couple days in game, to create. But you really don’t get much time to wallow in the luxury of mud-lain floors. Soo enough you get to deal with all kinds of assholes. Actually, every night a parade of skeletons and zombies come walking toward you, since dwarf is apparently a pungent and delicious dish, and bust your door down! Not to mention ghosts start swarming all over your stockpile, and if you leave the stuff out too long, it get stolen by goblins. Yup! Little green shits, too! At some point after the third or fourth day, you’ll have a tribe of goblins spring up nearby, and where the skeletons use their shields to boost each other over terrain, goblins build ugly little stick platforms. So, it is in your best interest to build weapons and armor as quickly as you can.

In order to get all the materials necessary to move away from beating your enemies with logs while wearing lumber-plated chest armor, you need metal. Sure, you might have to buy some materials from the Ogre Store to grease the wheels at the start, but coin is not easy to come by, so it’s not the best long-term strategy. Dig deep and you’ll find nice-sized deposits of iron, gold, silver and even mithril! If that gives you a bearded little chubby, then you’re playing the right game. This one is all about getting materials and making shit with ’em. Of course, it’s not all gold, gems and berry sprinkles. Leave a mineshaft abandoned without lighting, you’ll find it over grown with snapping plant-life. Or maybe you’ll unwittingly spawn on top of a colony of psychotic fire-ants with a taste for leathery dwarf-flesh!

No, seriously, that shit happened to me!

You may also have noticed the skeleton timer up there, too. When that timer runs out after a good 45 minutes, all hell breaks loose. Alongside whatever other nocturnal terrors you cope with regularly, hell sends a warming party to drag you down into the pits of fire with them. Often a boss will come through, too. And walling off that side of your home won’t do shit, either. They’ll knock down doors, tear apart your ground-hatch; shit, they’ll dig through a stone wall to get at your sweet sweet dwarf meat. So the only recourse is to forge your way to victory. The above images, by the way. Those are from the first world in the campaign mode, and it’s on an easy difficulty. I have yet to get past it, but I am sure the next realm isn’t exactly a picnic in happy-land.

Along the bottom of your screen is the hotbar. You’ll be placing furniture, door, torches etc. out of this tray. Equip is how you get your dwarfs to wear their armor (as if the marching onslaught of demons wasn’t all too inspiring) and craft is where you craft. The crafting menu is pretty minecraft-esque, and you drop materials into various coordinations to assemble pickaxes, maces and everything else you can’t dig out of the ground. Of course, you just have to click on items in your stockpile to learn how to make them. Of course, blueprints of new items will appear in there depending on how far through the crafting tree you progress. Technological advances are separated into various types, typically designated by the primary material used to make the items. Moving up through the tree lets you go from sleeping on a bed of leaves to lodgings fit for a king. Not to mention increasing dwarf inventory size with back packs, making better foods to keep them fueled longer and healing them faster when they go to sleep. Aside from just the inventory size, each dwarf can learn different skills related to dwarf tasks. cooking, logging, climbing, swimming, hunting; you name it, there is probably a book about it. If there were female dwarfs, I might be scared what other books might get dropped. Good thing each dwarf is cloned by our alien gods.

Of course this is a developer manor, but I don’t have all the time in the world to dig stone. That shit is heavy!

Good for a return game after you get bored with a title you’ve been waiting to play for a year and a half, this one is always a good time. It gets a little frustrating at times, but the message is always the same: this is all about a good time and freedom. And after you build as far as you can? Just move on to the next world. Face greater challenges, fry bigger fish, make bigger castles. Whatever your cup ‘o’ tea, just make sure you defend the little dwarfs, cause as stinky as I imagine they are (you sure as fuck can’t build a bathtub) listening to their shrieks and watching their ghosts drift away is a little heart-breaking. Especially after you spend all that time and randomly-dropped occupation books to customize each dwarf. And for only 15$ on Steam, you can have your very own dwarf colony.

Many things bring forth my ire, and in this the little shit gets annoying. The dwarfs are like the ones from Lord of the Rings with a touch of Snow White’s infamous seven. These guys can make some bitchin’ armor and weapons, but as cool as they look, they sound like adorable, dirty, stinky teddy bears. Seriously. They say ‘ow’ when they fall down from climbing trees. They grumble and bumble and talk in Sims-style chat bubbles. But that’s ok. Just wait until it’s night and they’re asleep. They’ll learn why Maxis won’t let me play the Sims anymore. Just wall off the exits and put tapestries over the firepits and voila! Instant dwarf roast! Of course, even if fire mechanics in this game were advanced enough to do that, they would be the ones placing all the tapestries and walling themselves in like kool-aide sipping cultists complicit with the totem-god in their own mass suicide. O, well. You can’t torture all helpless little creatures under your command.

Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville, Post-Apocalypse Mayorship

Posted on June 14, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Ever wondered what it would be like to take the place of Rick Grimes or the Governor? How would you run things differently? What policies would your band of survivors have to get accustomed to? Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville is a series that allows you to decide just that. Lead your rag-tag band of survivors to take back the city from the dead. Fight the ravenous hordes, train your people in various skills and work to bring back the world of the living amidst the hordes of undead.

Developed across two previous titles by Northway Games, Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville is a title that I have been following for a couple years now. This latest incarnation is by far the cleanest version of the game, but because it is an early-access title, it is not without its issues. So don’t say you weren’t warned. Where previous games, available in browser or on iOS platforms, drove for a more serious tone with a soundtrack out of a horror movie, Gangs feels more like a video game. Rather than the realistic portrayals of survivors featured in Rebuild and Rebuild 2, Gangs uses vector graphics to portray its heroes. Personally, this makes it a lot easier to detach myself from them. If Rico Simms goes out for food and comes back holding his intestines, I will be more likely to just bury a hatchet in his head. No worries. That guy was annoying anyway. Though the characters are now a little more toony, this has allowed the developers to make the town itself look altogether better. Where before you had some simple doodles, now you have a more detailed and gritty map. Granted, sometimes the map feels more like a page out of “Where’s Waldo?” but that makes it fun and slightly nostalgic to pan the view and looks at your surroundings. One more major add-in for the city itself in Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville were rivers and coastlines. This way you can reimagine that famous trailer for another run-of-the-mill zombie-smashing RPG at E3 2014. Did you like this map? Good. Save the seed and you can regenerate it every time you play or take a random seed for endlessly replayable apocalypse action.

From dismal winter to decrepit post-apocalypse, the styles really inspire the creeping depression of being the last people on Earth.

Gangs of Deadsville also features other players. In Rebuild 2 you had the possibility of running into a gang called The Last Judgement Gang. They would frequently harass the colony, attack, steal food and generally provide villains for the player. As your colony grows, it eventually becomes evident that you have to deal with them, and this culminates in a final showdown of epic proportions. In Gangs, you get to deal with other factions. As of yet, the only interaction I’ve had was with this russian guy named Gustav. He always comes by and tries to get my people to gamble away precious resources, buy hookers and accept food loans. That guy is more of an annoyance, really, but if you piss them off enough, their faction comes crashing in guns-blazing. This isn’t the only other faction, but it is the only one I have met so far. You can also run into enemy NPC colonies that basically end up battling you for dominance. Instead of having a typical cut-and-dried enemy, now you have a real us vs. them feeling with a battle for survival with a group of people you might have been best buddies with in another life.

When I started Gangs of Deadsville, I was given the standard options: make a character, pick a profession set town parameters. As I clicked through the random name generator, I noticed a few fun monikers I might take on. Among them were Johnny Dangerously, Arma Geddon and James Tyberius Kirk. Clearly the character I was concocting was a man of honor. As if that didn’t make it obvious enough, the selection of former occupations is spectacular: politician, Police Officer and Doctor are fairly well coveted in the real world, but more realistically, you can choose to play as a Retiree or a Shop Clerk. Each occupation starts your leader off with an item and a bonus quality, which makes them unique. Being clever and dashing, I chose the Shop Clerk occupation, which made scavenging easier and got me better deals when bartering and trading. And of course, started me off with the tool most favored by shop clerks worldwide: a crowbar. I would have pick a backpack or a flashlight, but shop clerk comes with a crowbar. I mean, I am not disputing the realism of a game where you spend your time fighting zombies, but every self-respecting gamer knows that the crowbar is default weapon of the scientist. Jeez.

Reminds me of where my in-laws live minus the mindless, brain-eating hordes.. but then again, they do live in Jersey…

Each survivor has their own story involving things ranging from baking and homelessness to gardening and shoulder-lizards. As your people level you will choose news perks for them, skill enhancements, equipment etc. Equipment becomes important, too. While your main source of food should start off angled toward farming, you will still need to avidly scavenge for weapons, tools, ammo, fuel, building materials and an array of other goods that are hard to come by and expensive to purchase. And with other factions and colonies searching for the same goods, you need to move fast.

But dedicating your people to one set of tasks constantly will leave other areas of your colony neglected. There are 5 classifications that survivors fall into: defender (red), leader(blue), builder(green), scavenger(yellow) and engineers (purple). Each of them play an integral role in the sustenance, expansion and strength of your colony. Sure, everyone likes to kill zombies, but not all your survivors are good at it. Send a builder out with a hammer to kill zombies, and he can get small groups, but as the numbers of walking dead rise, they will only be able to support the real fighters. Likewise, an engineer might be able to lend a hand with manpower when expanding the colony into new sectors of the environs, but he is much better suited in a laboratory. This is where the leader of the town comes in handy. Sure, you might be a shop clerk, but you are a special shop clerk. You are able to use your leader for any task and level him up in all skills, while your other survivors only level in their specific skills. Of course, that makes it so that you are the only non-drone in a colony of ants, but as long as you address them with titles and call them specialists, they shouldn’t rise up in revolt. I mean, doesn’t “Rage Specialist” sound so much better than “instrument of my own vengeance and violent will”? Yea, I know, has a sort of ‘I respect your autonomy and special snowflake-ness despite the fact I control your every action’ feel to it. Just what you need in a leader of men and women.

Cause you also need to keep those fuckers in high spirits, too. Now the aforementioned hiring of hookers is a good way but costs food and the dignity of many people involved. A better option is to renovate a nearby bar or church and let your people spend time there. They can also do ‘time off’ missions in their quarters, but hanging out in a run-down apartment complex is only fun to a point. There is more to life than seeing how many birds you can hit with your spit from above. Trust me. Another neat feature of this game are the random events. People show up at your gates, animals might attack, someone might find a fucking raccoon in the goddamn shed. Whatever, the odd-ball and.. uh.. RANDOM fucking nature of these events adds a tangential factor to the game, making it feel like it takes place in a real and changing world.

Now, there are zombies in this game. Did I mention that? Ok, good. Pay the fuck attention. Now, when the game starts you have a few straggling zed-heads, which are easily dispatched by your survivors, builders, scientists, defenders alike. But as you progress, your people, who presumably haven’t showered since the fall of modern civilization and can be smelled in the next state over, attract zombies like North Koreans to a bulgogi buffet. Thus, the zombies start to shamble toward you in ever-growing numbers like the rotting parade of stank-sniffing gut-munchers they are. This means you need to seriously amp up your game if you don’t want to end up as fertilizer. Zombies aren’t the only way to die, though. Go ahead, rely on scavenging as your main food source. Your people will die THE DAY AFTER YOUR FOOD RUNS OUT! And your people might die on a mission, get caught up in a random event or just catch a mother fucking fever. Still more neat mechanics exist, like the ability to switch between real-time and turn-based strategy. Seriously, the problem is choice! So reach out, expand your reach and get that technology research moving! Did I miss that too?

So as you expand you will encounter labs and drive-in movie theatres and other neat shit. Now, you could ignore the messages and subtle hints, but as you move your game along, you can even get technology up and going again. Like, refrigeration, movies, PORN! Christ’s sake PORN man! Is there a more noble cause to reach back into the annals of knowledge left by the ancients?! O, yea, there is also the ability farm more efficiently, build better walls, kill zombies more effectively, but shit, man, who doesn’t like to watch other people fuck on film? It’s purely for research.. and morale.. and stress relief.. or something..

All-in-all, this game allows you to live the fantasy of leading people to salvation through a gurgling masses of horrifying flesh-suckers, and Sarah, the developer, has done everything to make this a title worth your time and money. The best part is that the game is still coming out with more content. I mean, that is good news to me! It means that if the game’s state bothers you, come back to it in a few weeks and there should be another update to explore.

"You, there! Peasant! Throw yourself in front of those zedheads so I can escape." You'll miss the days of just 'tripping the fat guy'

It says “kill 5.651153016444607 massed zombies”. Documentation of the last fucking time I ever let the engineering team go on defensive maneuvers.

Above you will see an excessively accurate detail of how many massed zombies those guys were fighting. Evidence of the only thing that truly angers me about this game. Bugs. Of course, this is a PRE-RELEASE title available on Steam through the combined auspices of Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter. But that does not make it any less fucking frustrating when you have a memory error appear on your screen after about an hour and a half of non-stop gameplay. I mean I can’t even fucking binge-playon my favorite goddamn game! If I want to waste HOURS of my fucking time murdering zombies and micro-managing my people’s lives, I want it to be uninterrupted by binge-halting errors. The base game is $14.99, but fuck that. Don’t do that to yourself. You WILL love this title. Just spring for the extra 10$ and get the deluxe edition. You can even download that AFTER you decide whether you like the base game or not as it is listed as DLC! This DLC will bring you some neat art and such later, but will also grant purchasers 5 extra professions, each with their own unique item. So, you’ll be cursed with more fucking choices! And if you’re into that whole ‘instant-gratification’ thing, the DLC ‘deluxe’ version will also give you Rebuild 1 and Rebuild 2 in all their formerly browser-embedded glory. That way you can formulate your strategies on the earlier (but by no means easier) games. So go on Steam, and throw 24.99$ at getting this title moving. Its end state will be a title to make Sid Meier jealous. I mean, seriously, that guy is probably like making a title called Sid Meier’s Zombies! Too late, ya bastard! Too fucking late!

You can find more from Northway Games here, follow the development of the Rebuild Series here and check out another title by this development family here.

Hoard, Blazing Fun

Posted on June 11, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Hoard is a game that features fire, gold and glory! With an original concept and fun, fast-paced gameplay, this title makes me want to replay for hours and hours. It would also be excellent for LAN parties, if you’re into that sort of thing.

In Hoard you play none other than a real fire-breathing bastard (no not Bill O’Reilly): a dragon. You are a force of nature, indiscriminate destruction and robbery are your forte. When I started I made it a simple 1v1. You always play against a competitor, which gives Hoard a sort of real-time board game feel. The game is really simple, too. Destroy everything and everyone you see and take their money. </end article>.. ok maybe it’s not that simple, but still, that is how it plays.

You start of with a distinct advantage, however. You always start in the center of the map. That makes it all the easier to venture to other regions and bring your booty back as fast as can be expected. Once the game starts up, there isn’t much going on. You have to burn some windmills and crop fields to get a start, but you build up fast. You cannot be everywhere at once, though, even if there are 4 dragons in play, and a society quickly builds up around you. Once a windmill has a few fields around it, carts start to wheel toward the cities, which can be burned and robbed. The carts won’t fill your inventory up and a dragon has a golden lust of immeasurable breadth, so a few carts and maybe a mill will fill you up. Get that booty back to your lair, too! Other Dragons are just as hungry for treasure, and will attack you for yours. Which is a good way to slow them.

Snow? Fuck that! My internal temperature melts titanium, mother fucker!

You are an UNSTOPPABLE MENACE! At least until someone stops you. And fuck me do they try. At first it’s like, “awwww, so cute, they think they can win!” Then it’s “O, fuck me, they are winning!” Once you are defeated (usually by another fucking dragon) you have to fly back to your hoard to recharge. This is an unfortunate necessity, but use it to your advantage. Attack your enemies and send them back to their hoard, you can usually get a full trip done before they recharge fully. Once you get the gold back to your lair, you drop it off, a little slower than I image you should, too. I was left wondering if the dragon ate the loot and regurgitated it back up in his hoard. Or maybe he just sits on the loot chest and picks it up with his sphincter muscles. Heh heh, I heard a hundred people groan at that one! Either way, the more gold you get the higher your level. Yup, you level up, and you use those levels for one of four stats. Speed, Carry, Armor and Firebreath. All pretty self-explanatory. There is no perfect formula, there is just what matches your technique. Like fights? Get armor and firebreath. A little extra speed to help with those close escapes, too. Want to loot everything in the kingdom? Get more Carry, you’ll carry everything you can hold in your.. uh.. kangaroo pouch ; ). But that isn’t everything! Shit man!

So, as you loot and pillage and burn, the timer, which I forgot to mention, is ticking down. The further along things get, the more loot carriers level up. First they are wagons, then full on carts then there are the royal carriages! Now this is where things really start getting good. You burn the carriages, they give you loot AND your very own little princess to take back to your lair to terrorize. Yet, it gets better! They send knights after you to capture the princess back! Every single one drops a respectable sum, too, and when her timer runs out, she is ransomed off! I swear these people must shit gold.

Gives new meaning to a butt-load of loot! Ha ha!

Level up, grab as much gold as you can and when the timer runs out, the scores are tallied to see who was the biggest fire-breathing badass in all the land. Does it matter that you can burn trees down with your fire? NO! FUCK no! But as a dragon, isn’t burning trees going to be your first go-to on list of things to test out? I know it was mine! Psh, burn that leafy little bitch. Now, you see in the right side of the picture just up there that little Stonehenge-looking thing? Yea, that is your new best friend and worst enemy in this game. Every so often it belches out little powerups that spin in the air like little, sexy pinwheels. Grab that and you might move faster, spit fireballs, breathe ice or some other cool shit! But if your enemy gets it? FUCK! Get that shit, don’t let that miserly prick get it. Just don’t.

What did I miss? Castles, villages, windmills, crops, knights, archers: in this the Joker was right. EVERYTHING burns. O! DLC. You don’t think all this is enough? Dynamite Roll! was the first DLC featuring bomb carts, which you light and they explode to kill things nearby. That includes you so, mind the gap. Sometimes cash crops will appear that give extra cash. And bell-towers in towns provide heal power-ups, and that is useful as fuuuck! More achievements and more maps in this baby, too. Then there is the Flame-Broiled SANDwich DLC which takes things to a whole new level, or rather, landscape. In this one the game flies over to the mystical sands of a desert continent. Everything looks all cool and middle-eastern, and generally speaking, it looks fucking awesome. Buildings, castles, enemies. Fuck, I need to buy this DLC as soon as I get some cash. And with the total package of everything being $11.49 on Steam, you best believe it is worth the dough!

With all the flying and burning, there has to be something about this game that burns my biscuits. Well, there fucking is! Each playthrough takes only ten minutes, so naturally, this is a game you could play once before work to get a game fix in, right? DO NOT UNDER ANY FUCKING CIRCUMSTANCES PLAY THIS SHIT BEFORE GOING SOMEWHERE IMPORTANT! You will play through hours in this game before you realize just how much life you missed! Seriously! Don’t believe me? Play it! Each match is just such an exhilarating whirl that you will play another, and another, then you’re 35 and still in your parents basement! Agh! Luckily, I only got to 27, so I still have some good years left, but FUCK that was close! Also, those pricks on the Meta-Critic gave this a fucking 65. A SIXTY FUCKING FIVE! This is fun, graphics are respectable and it does its job. It’s like they focused on the one thing that this game lacks, which would be any fucking story. But you’re a goddamned dragon! What story do you need?! Fuck those assholes. They deserve to fester in a dragon’s asshole for a bit! Give them an idea of what shit really looks like!

TerraTech, Constructive Preview

Posted on June 8, 2014 by thre3zekiel

TerraTech is a game full of potential, which will be appearing at E3 2014, and I am hoping at IndE3 as well! It is a solid concept built from the dirt up in Unity3D, and, of course, this game is an Alpha Demo, so please leave the screenies alone. They were on the highest possible graphics setting.

TerraTech is like a combination of lego and erector sets where you start with a few simple pieces. You gain more pieces by roving the surface of the alien world mercilessly destroying the cockpits of other vehicles. In the beginning you have your cockpit, a body piece, a machinegun and some wheels. The pieces are dropped on you like, fuck, here, whatever. I laughed. So I am driving around and I see some asshole with a couple wheels and a drill. So, I naturally did the first thing you do when meeting other people: level your machinegun and prepare for battle. After nuking his cockpit and leaving their corpses exposed to the extra-terrestrial atmosphere, I took their drill, which I affixed with a blue building beam (Psh, I ain’t fucking going out there!). And I went off to drill some rocks. After some drilling and a few battles, I realized that a tractor beam piece was used to pick up raw materials and parts. Now I am that guy driving around with a whirling ball of resources and parts just chillin’ there, not in any kind of use. Then I killed an automaton and found an AI interface. Pretty useful. That let me make an AI that would drive into trees and turn a little bit when fired at. Eventually I saw this big asshole that had some neat yellow parts I wanted, so I killed him and took his pieces. I am now the lord of the big alien world. That is until some dick drives up out of nowhere and levels me, scattering my parts everywhere.

That's the smug son of a bitch driving through my pieces.

That’s the smug son of a bitch driving through my scattered pieces

I was not unreasonably frustrated, so I went on to see what else this little demo had in store. Turns out there are some other really nifty modes for this game. The first I saw was Rocket Mode. That sounded badass as hell, so I clicked it. I was greeted by an orange desert and what looked like a two year old overturning a giant bucket of legos. My eyes instantly lit up like fireworks and I went to town, baby! When I was a kid, my parents wouldn’t allow us to have legos for two reasons. I have 4 brothers and that shit is fucking EXPENSIVE. Not to mention we scattered toys with impunity, and my mom did not want to fall victim to the natural predator of bare feet – lego blocks.

This mode is a ton of fun. They dump out a ton of blocks and say “have fun!” like a dismissive parent that just wants to watch football in peace. I am happy to let him go, cause I have some wings, there are repulsors, some wheels ( those are remarkably important for a flying vehicle I find ) rockets and rockets and rockets and fuel tanks and rockets. Now, they give you some advice. Don’t put too many fuel tanks on or it will be too heavy to fly. I nodded absently and started throwing things on like a kid on Christmas. After about twenty minutes of sorting through the disheveled heap I cobbled together what I thought seemed a craft fit for flight.

To the moon! Won’t be tough since we start on Mars, methinks. Mars has less atmosphere so.. ah fuck it..

I know right? Badass! Upon finishing I hit shift and let it rip! And it flew like a broken-legged seagull that ate a rock. It was funny as hell though! It dragged through the sand, did a backflip. I imagine the little engineer inside must have gone to Space Camp as a kid, gone to Space College and even manned the centrifuge only to end upside down in the orange sand like “This is what I’ve become”. LoL! This was a difficult task, though. I tried a few times and still could not get it right. This is why I am not a goddamn engineer.

After my aeronautical failure I turned to Checkpoint Mode. Again I was greeted by the joy-inspiring avalanche of blocks. This time I noticed two GIANT sets of wheels. This opportunity would not go unaddressed. I immediately set to work placing my cockpit atop a massive yellow block with giant wheels and covered it with as many fuel tanks as I could get. I would need them. For propulsion I covered the backend of this baby in as much fuck rocket engines as baby-Jesus could pour from the heavens, and thus did I rock most righteously. Immediately I flipped on the CD player, popped in some Hendrix, closed the blast shield on my helmet and engaged.

‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky!

I threw the wings on there because fuck you it looks awesome. Ha ha ha! I enjoyed the hell out of this mode. Granted, steering this beast was like trying to turn the Titanic by paddling with Q-tip, but I didn’t have to worry about trees! I just hit the nitro and flattened the fuckers! Rocks, on the other hand, still provided a challenge, and as you can see Ethan, Reece and Stephen did not feel threatened. That’s ok, though. My rig would probably blow right through whatever dainty little maneuvering craft they made. I bet they used the tiny baby wheels, too. Heh heh.

So what about this game pisses me off? I’ll tell you! The rockets! I need more fucking rockets! Seriously! I could have gotten at least thirty more megatons of propulsive force on the back of that baby! The opportunities I missed! Ah, well. This is an alpha mode, so I bet the Devs are preparing a mode for me where I have to attach as many rockets as possible to the back of a cockpit with wheels. Then I can launch it into the horizon!

Solar 2, Voyage in the Cosmos

Posted on June 7, 2014 by thre3zekiel

It seems Neil deGrasse Tyson was a GameDev before hosting Cosmos because this is the kind of game I imagine him sitting in his underwear, playing between shoots in his dressing room. Solar 2 was so much fun I bought it on Steam and later on my Xbox 360. Yea, still have that thing. But Solar 2 is a brand new take on a video games altogether as you play a well-organized collection of sometimes intelligent matter rather than a brainless lump of meat swinging a sword.

Saying that you play a solar system in this title would be like saying you play the strongest warrior in all the land in Skyrim; you eventually get there but there is quite a bit you have to do on the way. When you start the game, a quote from Carl Sagan appears “if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you’d have to restart the universe” followed by what is supposed to be the big bang. When the screen fades in, you control a cold lump of dead rock floating in space. You are an asteroid. Your goal? Fly through space like potato with a deathwish and crash into everything else. Eventually you get enough mass and become a planet. And your planet can cultivate life! My little inhabitants built a massive world barrier to protect me and followed me around, blasting asteroids. That was cute at first, but I found myself outpacing them so I could absorb more asteroids and become a star. From there I started drawing planets into my orbit and cultivating a whole system of life! Fuck yea!

And then some other asshole system with a fucking BINARY GODDAMN STAR bumbles along and is like, “O, were you using this?” and smashes my planets to smithereens. As a system, you take up a good bit of space and larger systems might not be visible onscreen until its too late. I was naming those planets, too! Coming up with stories about its people and civilizations etc. And then some asshole bumbles along and just blow them up by accident! And to add insult to injury that system’s life, colored red at this point, started attacking the life on my only remaining planet. I got a good distance, but the fuckers decimated the planet, blowing it up altogether. I was lucky to escape with most of my protons intact.

O, hi. Nice to meet you. Fuck yourself and die!

So I said fuck it, I will become the biggest fucker out there. I spent hours building a massive binary star system with nearly twenty planets and all kinds of other life etc. I went and found what looked similar to the earlier system ( I doubt it was, space is fucking huge ) and ripped him apart. And afterward I avenged my fallen inhabitants by chasing down the retreating solo star ( I raped it so hard its other star blew up ) and turned it into space dust. I was so pleased with this that I fist pumped… and accidentally hit the ctrl key, absorbing all my celestial bodies and going supernova. I was a black hole. Fuck. Yes. The most powerful and terrifying force in the galaxy, mother fucker! On Cosmos they said that my mass is so great that my gravity warps time. Bad. Ass.

Don’t want to be a goober and absorb the entire galaxy? Fine. There’s missions. In the tutorial, some face that looks like the above version of a god Giorgio Tsoukalos might worship pops up to guide you. He tells you how to move, absorb matter, grow and that you can do his missions. He’ll reward you at the end. So you go do missions, like destroying rogue ships, luring them into enemies or playing “don’t die when I spawn missles on either side of you”. Fucker. And these are just the asteroid missions. There are also missions to play as a planet and star. I can only assume that there are missions for each major form as well, as I have not gotten to the end of this game. But with how hard and long it is, I might as well run to the end of the fucking universe.

While playing the music is an ambient flow of particles through the void that soothes and hypnotizes you. Then once you become a star with planets and such, you star to feel more and more drawn in as you watch them swing around in their orbits like a divine clockwork. The visuals are nice, but nothing too spectacular. Background is space punctuated by stars and nebulas. Overall it is cool and fun, but once the charm of being a system wears off, the game can get a little boring. And then you might fall asleep.

So what pisses me off about this game? God. That guys is a fucking prick in this game! I mean who wants to play “don’t die when I spawn missiles on either side of you” with a fucking asteroid? Seriously?! And he is smiling widely as he says it. At least that is what it looks like. He could be shitting. Smug fucker.

IndieDevs and IndiE3, Hope for Gaming Future

Posted on June 7, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Art by @hellomavw (via Twitter)

Never heard of IndiE3? I don’t blame you. 24 hours ago it was an itch that creator TJ Thomas ( @TRONMAXIMUM ) finally located and scratched like a furious demon with poison ivy on his balls. Yesterday it was nothing. As of typing this sentence, it has gained 593 followers on Twitter and attracted the imaginations of Indie Gamers and Indie Developers alike. The feed is buzzing with contributions from artists ( as seen above ), writers and statements from its creator. But why does anyone care? Why should any single fucks be given? Here’s why. On an article written yesterday on Kotaku, Jason Schreier set out to explain why being a Game Developer sucks worse than you might think. Imagine working a job for a major company in its field, and suddenly, you’re not getting paid. A month later the company NO LONGER FUCKING EXISTS. As Jason describes, this was all too real for developers of 38 Studios. He then lists dozens of companies that have had layoffs, some in the thousands. It’s too easy to look at this and run into the streets naked proclaiming the death of gaming altogether. Granted, it shows the volatility of the industry, but there is a measure of security in being a developer for a major company. I mean, all things considered, it must be worth it if the game is making millions of dollars American, no? But if your game tanks or is delayed, you’ll likely be fired. And if your tanked game is the sole hope upon which the company is depending for its next big break, that whole company is fucked. The article tells us that Over-Saturation, the over-hiring of staff to hit strenuous dead-lines, and corporate financial strategizing are often to blame. It blatantly says “Priority number one for [major publishers] is keeping shareholders happy, which means showing big numbers on their earnings reports every quarter” in the article. They’ll fire people just to save fucking money. As you might have guessed, major companies like EA and Activision put the priority of returns WAY over any value in personnel, or even their fucking customers. As long as their games are bought, they couldn’t give a single flying apeshit about anyone but their shareholders. If they saw this they’d panic for their bottom lines and run to the presses to denounce me (or promote me as strategies permit would best suit the situation) and apologize to everyone. They would lament for the travesties they lay on developers and maybe even send them a fruitbasket. But in the end, we can generally assume that is just to serve the benefit of profits. And the bastards go ahead and try to make it look like they give a crap about the little people by featuring a small handful of Indie Developers at E3 2014 and act like they’ve broken through some vestigial preconception established by a cruel and uncaring society. A society that they happily feed into with their hype and PR etc. And why the fuck not? It makes them hundreds of millions, even billions to maintain the status quo. It’s like they think Indie Game Developers are a social group experiencing discrimination. What they don’t realize is that Indie Developers are rising and becoming their own factor. Valve already took the first steps in making Indie Gaming a movement when they released Steam Greenlight back in August 2012. While it is not perfect (and I mean really not perfect), it’s still miles better than anything anyone else is trying. Like Apple. For most developers being on Itunes is like buying a damned lottery ticket. Greenlight even makes me feel warm and fuzzy toward Valve. Many developers, like Lorne Lanning of the Oddworld series, seem to agree that contracting syphilis would be preferable to working for major game developers and going indie is the cure. I mean, Lanning was quoted thusly in an interview with VG247 regarding the release of his new indie title, Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty and his feeling of releasing games retailside :

“Fuck that business. I don’t want to play with that business, because it was a losing business,” he lamented. “I just don’t want to go back and play the old [publisher] game. I’d rather not make games than go fucking be a slave for public companies who care more about their shareholders than they do about their customers. “Why did Battlefield 4 ship? You know that team was crying. You know that team knew that game wasn’t ready to go. You know that team fucking spent a lot of sleepless nights building that shit out to look as good and play as good, when it was able to be experienced, being played as they were intending it to be played. Someone made a decision that the shareholders are more important than the customer. And we see a lot of that. How do you blow that? How do you take that fucking jewel and ship it with dirt all over it?”

– Lorne Lanning with VG247, Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty – “it’s not a fucking HD remake”

Divesting the major game development scene for the indie scene is not a move everyone makes. There is a section in the Kotaku piece where a guy doing QA for a porn company talks about how he hates his job now, but losing development jobs again and again was still not a better option for him. He has a life and a family, you know?

Arinn Dembo, developer for Sword of the Stars with Kerberos Productions ( @Erinys via Twitter ), replied to a request for input from a major developer gone rogue and was able to corroborate some of what others were saying, specifically about the volatility of the industry. She spoke from experience, having worked for Sierra in her early days as a dev.

“Sometimes it’s not just that the industry is volatile. It’s outright toxic.” For Arinn, the license to freedom was just too attractive to pass up. Her motivations to move on to Indie Development were clear. “I had two reasons. One: I wanted to stick with my team. They were and are the best human beings I have known. Two: I couldn’t resist the unprecedented, unrestricted Creative License to Kill that I’d have in the SotS verse.” Her thoughts left a lot to think about, and sure enough she left with one classy line that I think describes the overall Indification of Gaming succinctly…

Kerberos currently has Kaiju-a-Gogo (yes, the Pacific Rim Kaiju) listed on kickstarter! Support them NOW!

With all that in mind, Indie Game development is no picnic in the park. It’s a picnic in a desert where you have to trudge for miles before finding a nice, shady spot to sit down. It’s full of pitfalls, pain and anguish that can only be braved by the truly dedicated. And Indie Developer, Clay Hayes (@RNassassin via Twitter), agreed to describe the life of an Indie Game Developer for me. Under the name Bloodshot Games, Clay is the sole developer working on the Third-person Shooter/Stealth game, Redneck Assassin. He tweeted a message for Indie Developers, which I thought described Indie GameDev life with vibrant emotion.

In an e-mail correspondence, Clay revealed to me some of the strains that Indie Game Development is placing on his marriage, considering he has been on development of Redneck Assassin since May 2013, Mrs. Hayes must be a saint. “My wife is always upset with me cause I’m never home for the dinner she cooks. My diet consists of Red Bull and SoBe green tea. Occasionally MacDonalds and Top Ramen.” I ate more than that in college. But Clay also faces mounting occupational difficulties. “The title has been pushed back several times now. I’m shooting for January 2015, after the Christmas game rush. It’s most challenging doing EVERYTHING. Art, code, design, animation, pr and administration; I’m seeing teams of Indie [Developers] literally pass me by on development progress. It’s not hard to keep up, it’s impossible. So, if you are a solo Indie[Dev], DON’T compare yourself to teams. It’s an ice-skating uphill battle.” And Redneck Assassin faces further challenges in the industry. “Apparently Redneck Assassin is an offensive title and Apple will not allow me to have the term ‘redneck’ in my game.” So after all that, Indie Developers get to face rejection on the basis of a term that refers to a group of people synonymous with Confederate flags on raised pick-up trucks. Apple can suck a dry, dirty dick. Clay is looking into featuring Redneck Assassin, in all its man-hunting glory, on IndiE3 with a possible demo version. Clean of any of Apple’s clutches as “Apple is bitches about sharing works-in-progress.” But despite being a hard path fraught with difficulty, I fully believe that Indie Gaming is developing into a counter-culture that has the potential to become greater than mainstream gaming. First, Indie Games are able to experiment in ways that major game companies simply cannot. Looking at games like A Clumsy Adventure by Excamedia, which fuses elements of retro games with modern games, or Concursion by Puuba Games, which fuses platformer, shooter, hack-n-slash, jetpack and maze racer/puzzler games into one. Major game companies simply couldn’t market games like these to wide audiences, mostly because they wouldn’t know what to fucking do with it. There are so many more games like this, that it boggles the mind, but they are out there. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known as E3, is where major gaming companies go to touch each other in front of the media, unveil new ideas and the future of gaming, and generally drum up as much hype as they can in a few days. It’s like the World’s Fair for gaming. Originally, anyone who could afford the ticket prices could enter, but in 2007 E3 closed to the public, reverting to its original “industry-only” format. Well, as stated earlier, they invited a few Indie Developers and decided to call that fair. Honestly, the number of Indie Developers is staggering, so how do we keep track of all them? Wikipedia’s List of Indie Game Developers compiles many, but not all of them. How can we hear about the newest in gaming innovation on the Indie side? Well, the man wants you to think E3 has that too now, but Indie Gaming is so much more. Which brings me back to IndiE3. Basically, this site was nothing as of June 5th, but literally overnight it began to establish a formidable following that continues to grow. While I was writing this article, which honestly took me all night, it grew to 611 followers on twitter. IndiE3 represents more than just a place to go, it is OUR place to go. The Cyber-event will take place June 9th – June 16th with various “channels” that you’ll be able to watch as the event proceeds. Opening day will include live panels (they’ve received support from Indie Haven and The Spawn Point ), ranging from indie game coverage, design manifestos, to round-table discussions and lightning talks submitted to IndiE3 and seen live only at hitbox.tv. June 10-14th will feature the official IndiE3 Game Jam, hosted by Game Jolt! You create the games at #IndiE3. They’ll also encourage developers to sell their IndiE3 games as well. June 15th, they’ll collect the Game Jam games and show them off all day. Numerous streams and game tournaments will run throughout the whole event and Warp Door will have their own channel/booth to show off various unique little games. I hope this event plays out to be as much fun as it seems like it will be. Although they are billing themselves as E3’s rebellious little brother, this event seems best attended with E3 playing (possibly on mute) on your television in the background. I will leave you with TJ Thomas’s very own words on IndiE3. There are more intriguing thoughts and motivating words on the IndiE3 Project’s Twitter feed. Check it out for yourself. Thanks to @ttl_anderson for the use of his small logo for the tweet link.

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The Crotchety Old Gamer

An irate gamer's blog

Category Archives: PC Gaming

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Solar 2, Voyage in the Cosmos

IndieDevs and IndiE3, Hope for Gaming Future

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