Dwarfs!? Man-boobs of Glory

Posted on September 16, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Tripewire, the same looney bastards behind Killing Floor and Red Orchestra, are the ones that made this game. It still has me scratching my head, but I try not to think about it too much. This game, like basically everything else they’ve ever made, is a lot of fun. It is sn RTS simulator that really lets you sit back, relax and control a colony of dwarfs. As per the usual mythology, these dwarfs all seem to be male, though the thought of a bearded woman just kind of creeps me out. Either way, you are talking about a magnificently man-boobed populace out for some digging! Check out more about the game on Steam or the game’s site!

Ale, Gold and a Pickaxe are the three things necessary to sustain life for a dwarf. These beardy little buggers probably eat dirt, since it seems to disappear and mysteriously produce gold. So the game starts with the town hall, which produces the only two types of dwarfs in existence, diggers and warriors. Your town hall sits on the only green patch of land in a massive cavern and just produces diggers via spontaneous generation, most likely using the combination of dirt, gold and ale. As each of these dwarfs magically appears, they begin wandering aimlessly around digging randomly with their pickaxes. At first the game feels like an ant simulator, but then you realize that these dwarfs have no real system and they live only to dig like robots and find shiny objects.

For the most part, this game is peaceful, but there are spontaneous issues you might experience like a subterranean version of Sim City. First there are the natural disasters: lava and water. Both of these have the same ultimate solution, but each poses its own version of the same problem: stopping the flow before it destroys everyone in your colony.

MUST FIND GOLD… MUST FIND GOLD…

That is pretty much a visual representation of what happens every time your dwarfs find water or lava. This is glowing and hot!… but there might be GOLD! The reason you don’t just stop them yourself is because you really don’t know, although the outward signs should be pretty obvious in real life. Of course, it’s a fucking game, so get over it. As your dwarfs dig out into the.. um.. earth.. they will find small pockets. These caves can contain nearly fucking anything: treasure, enemies, lava, water etc. When your dwarfs break through one of two things happens: something comes rushing out, or the digger goes rushing in.

Water is fast, and that is really the biggest challenge that comes with its discovery. Building a wall will be enough to block it off from the front, but a digger could still break through on another side and you’ll be right back where you started. To prevent this the game lets you solidify dirt into rock. With beer-magic, I guess. Once you build the wall, you have to solidify the dirt on all sides of a water cave. Once that happens, you have to blow a hole with dynamite in front of the wall because.. fucking… IT COULD STILL LEAK THROUGH OR SOMETHING MAYBE!!!! Not really, but that is how you effectively trap an underground lake. I thought that dwarfs might use it for plumbing or maybe making ale. Fuck no. They trap that shit off and never fucking talk about it ever the fuck again.

Next is lava, which poses its own collection of threats. Lava moves slow as shit, but it can burn through walls. Normally, when breaking through into a lava cave (after the unlucky digger has been burned to a cinder), I fill up the cave leading to the cave with walls. Why the fuck would I do this, you ask? Well, it’s not in case the digger gets wise and decides to run, though it might be fun to watch him shriek in horror as he realizes the hegemonic overseer has condemned him to death encased in liquid rock, that is not the case. The lava burns down the stone walls, and with the way the dwarfs randomly dig, chances are that the nearest other digger is miles away. I will need to buy him some time to get there and set off the dynamite to trap the lava. The best part is that you lose two dwarfs for sure when finding lava or water. One that finds it and the other that traps it, since the dynamite dwarf runs in like some kind of madman with a heroic martyr complex and kamikazes on it. I guess these dwarfs haven’t progressed past bite-activated igniting mechanisms.

That’s right. Dig to your death, you little maniac.

Dealing with random water and lava hazards wasn’t enough for the sadistic Tripwire team, though. They had to throw in some enemies because, realistically, what kind of game doesn’t have actual enemies? Well, aside from those super-boring simulator games. I gave up on humanity when I saw rock simulator. Anyway! There are goblins, too. They could be just one or two hiding in a cave, or you could find six of them. They are pretty easy to deal with though.

Your town hall will let you generate 8 warrior dwarfs, which you can allow to patrol around your town hall or you can divert their patrol to wander out into the caves. If they get too far out there and you’ve an impending attack, hit the bell to recall your little troops. A base-level dwarf warrior is usually enough to take on goblins one at a time, but if you have a tribe coming, get those fuckers back to base! If they destroy your town hall, that’s the end of the game! Of course, having eight little dwarfs can be limiting if you have a massive army of diggers wandering around an endless map. At that point, you’ll need to create outposts, which expand your warrior army by 4 more dwarfs. Doesn’t sound like much, but the outpost can also train them up so they’re powerful as heck.

Another main feature comes in handy when you discover a shaman, which is a giant goblin boss that has the power to summon goblin minions, perform cone area attacks and change the music into a doom dirge. Often you’ll have to create an outpost just to deal with a new boss. Once you have it in place and the warriors trained up, though, you can fire the whole squad out of a cannon on top of the outpost. This springs a little surprise attack on the shaman and they surround and annihilate him! Make sure you are quick to kill him, though, as he can summon up so many enemies that it becomes impossible to deal with, and you become overrun!

Kill them! Kill them all!

Other than that, this game is drawing arrows for retardedly simple AI and mining gold and minerals. It is a little on the simple side, but it is still a lot of fun. I often find myself wishing there were more to it than just all that, but the endless mode makes it a lot of fun. I feel like there should be a way to trade with other cities, or a way to contact the outside world. There are little objects that randomly appear, too, but it might be more fun if we could actually build a small city that had some purpose? Maybe go to war with some sissy dandelion-eating elves.. mimsy fuckers… If you really look at this game though, there is a dark undercurrent. Think about this a second. You are the dwarfs, living underground on the only piece of fertile land in this entire cave system. You have these goblin, which probably need to cultivate some mushrooms or something to survive, but your dwarfs can just eat dirt, as long as they have their ale. So you go on, killing the goblins and depriving their starving children of food until you have consumed everything. Terrible. Tragic. Oh, well! Let’s go dig for some gold and get wasted on ale! Definitely a lot of fun, and it’ll cost you 9.99$ on Steam. Worth it, I’d say, but I love dwarfs in general. So yea, a little bias there : P

Eufloria, Tripadelic RTS Invasion

Posted on September 14, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Eufloria is a game that defines some of my earliest days with indie games, and it’s far from showing its age. There are those who would have you believe that indie is a style that can be encapsulated in a game with a whacky storyline or super-artsy hand-painted backgrounds, but I call bullshit on that. You don’t have to put girls in cakes to make an indie game: what you need is balls. Eufloria shows a lot of that brazen attitude in the way it took a bizarre concept, ran with it, made it work and did the whole fucking job well. That is how you indie.

Eufloria is a game where you take control of an army of flying seedlings, and then impregnate various ‘asteroids’ with them. The key to this army is their flexibility. depending on the characteristics of the asteroid that spawns them, they will have a mix of 3 traits: energy, speed and strength. Depending on their combination of these traits, they will look different. If they have a higher strength, they will have a longer tail, of they have higher speed they will have wider tails and if they are energetic they will have longer beaks. Each of these traits translates into something completely different in game.

Like little, zappy death bugs…

Each of those little flying things is a seedling, and they serve any number of functions from soldiers to colonization. When you send a collection of these little guys at an enemy, they will start zapping them with a little laser. No fucking clue how that works, I will get back to you on that. When you hit that button down there, they kamikaze into the asteroid and a tree starts to grow. Logical in a sort of odd way. As far as I have progressed, there are two trees: a dyson tree, which generates more seedlings, and defensive trees, which lob explosive pods. Planting a dyson tree will generate seedlings with traits mimicking those of the asteroid. Some important things to keep in mind on this point: speed seedlings are fast as fuck and are great for rapid reinforcements, strength seedlings are great for taking out enemies and defensive trees, energetic seedlings are great for taking over enemy asteroids.

Eventually, you will start dealing with enemies, and a fucking lot of them. They swoop in low and start zapping fucking everything, and you have to counter. Now, the way you direct your seedlings is by clicking and dragging. This will launch all the seedlings circling an asteroid at the target in an awesome attack formation that makes me want to turn on Flight of the Valkyries every time I do it. If you want to send only your fastest seedlings (in case you have to contact the Dread Pirate Roberts), you double-click and select the fastest seedlings. This will turn your cursor blue, for speed, and then you drag from origin to target. This can be done with any of the types.

Ba bada ba ba, ba bada ba ba, ba bada ba ba, ba bada ba ba, ba bada baaaa!!!!!

Reading the placement of the asteroids is important, too, because where you can go depends on which asteroids you control. Each asteroid has a range that you can fly from it to reach other asteroids. Once you get there, you’ll have to lay waste to the enemies like a swarm of genocidal gnats. The best part comes when you take the asteroid. To achieve this, the seedlings zap a tree until it explodes. They then fly down into the remaining roots to attack the core, where they fucking explode. If you have a fear of bugs flying into your ears and laying eggs in your head, this is not an okay game for you. I fucking love it, though.

The older your trees, the more seedlings or explosive pods they will generate, so size matters. Watching an old asteroid take hits is a bit gut-wrenching, but the respawn rate for seedlings is pretty good; I still recommend filling up the max tree level as best you can, though. Once you strike an enemy, they will ALWAYS try the fucking dick move and strike at the asteroid you vacated to attack theirs. That’s ok though, you can always pull a few from another location to clean those guys up.

So… whatever is on that rock is about to fucking die.

As you can see, the art takes a minimalist style, utilizing color to make the world feel warm and alive. Every time you start a level you will have a different color and each level has its own challenges to overcome. The way the colors seem to vibrate with life takes on a role of its own in the game though, and it really starts to feel more like a full region than just empty space. As you conquer and cultivate each asteroid, you can zoom further and further out to see all of what you’ve created, and the later levels get pretty expansive. The music combines with this warm sensation to create an ambient space of wonder and interest. This is like playing an RTS painting and each factor is shaped specially for the task. Despite feeling like you are a swarm of dust mites conquering the equivalent space of someone’s nostril, the game itself really has a life and style of its own. I would like to see some major fucking publisher with the balls to release this one. It’s available on Steam right now for 14.99$ and I recommend it highly. It is a magnificent game that really draws you in and challenges you, but in a soothing and enjoyable way that isn’t like every fucking RTS Blizzard made since Warcraft 3. It’s wonderful. Fucking play it.

Valley of the Dead Pre-Releases

Posted on September 9, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Before any gets clever, I am not asking about the dinosaurs; I am referring to a mass extinction event going on within the confines of digital media. Early Access games are out there and comprise a large part of Steam. I have nothing resembling exact figures, but it feels like there are at least 5 unfinished games on steam for every complete title. Want a more solid idea of how many there are? Early Access is its own searchable category on Steam. It contains such prestigious titles as The Forest, DieselStormers, Galactic Civilizations III and others. The three I will be discussing today are those shown above: Towns, Terraria and Stomping Lands

What is Early Access?

Once upon a time there was a magical viking who had an idea for a video game. You can mine and mine and mine, build a house, a fortress a town, farm, breed animals and fish. You’ll be able to use portals to travel to other dimensions and work magic. Monsters will come out at night, but you can defend against them! And in the End, you’ll fight a dragon! This game was slow to catch on at first, but once kids and gamers found it, they fell in love. It rapidly became one of the most popular games of all time, spanning generation gaps and giving everyone something they loved. This was the first instance of an unreasonably popular early access game. It was called Minecraft.

Since then a number of companies have vied to create an early access hit like Minecraft. Steam has been the most successful in its push, encouraging devs to submit their games for rigorous vetting by Steam’s community through Steam Greenlight. Once the games have been selected, they are allowed to provide an early version of the game at a reasonable price for purchase. This was awesome at first, but then Steam became progressively more inundated with games that aren’t finished. And worse than that, some games die in this public-run games incubator.

This is a brief description from Steam’s website about what early access is and here is a link to their complete explanation about what all of that entails.

Many people are familiar with this title. The idea is that you start a small, 16-bit town of sprite people and then guide these people through building a town. You can do all kinds of fun things from farming and animal husbandry to combating foes. You can also create a little stairwell down to the mines below. Of course, these mines are filled with all nature of foul monsters, so you need to attract heroes to your town to battle the enemies and delve deeper. By doing this you can get better materials to build with and make a fabulous town!

So how did it die? Sales. In a lengthy post on the Towns official forum, gamedev Moebius went into detail about why Towns is no longer being developed. Hardly news, this post goes back to May 2014 and details his reasons.

“When I signed up for working on Towns I was told that we sell a minimum of about x copies/month of the game. I agreed to work on Towns for 15% of what would remain after removing all the taxes and the Steam fee. Xavi and I agreed that this would be a fair amount, and I still think it is. After getting used to the source code and publishing the first new version of the game, we talked about the agreed payment and it turns out that the sells are getting down rapidly. So we are now selling less than a third of the x copies a month, loosing about 33% of sells per month.”

Yea, that is the most of it. The game wasn’t selling anymore and the most of the money to be made there was lost in the initial rush of sales. By the time Moebius was conscripted, it was too late. If you keep reading that little post by Moebius, down at the bottom they make some spectacularly upsetting statements.

“Xavi and I were talking about a possible Towns2. At the moment this is just in an idea stage and we can’t really say if he, I or eventually Ben have the time to create a Towns2. As faithful fans of Towns we would of course reward you in some way, when/if the new game is released.

“A new game will give us the following advantages:

we can implement all the cool things that are not possible at the moment due to how the core mechanics works in Towns 1

we can also rise attention as this is a completely new game and a successor for once great runnning game

this will also make it possible to have a financially sound basis for a long development of Towns2

“I want to end this post by thanking you for reading this and for all your support in these two months. Again I’m sorry that we had to pull the plug right here, but I sincerely hope you can understand why we had to make that decision right now.”

So let me get this straight. Not developing the game anymore because of a decrease in sales, so the money isn’t there. Got it. Now we are considering a Towns 2 as a sequel to this farce? What the fuck? I mean at least they were open about saying the idea is just a way to get more money out of the game, but how do you make a sequel to an unfinished game? Granted, there have been 2 updates to the game since this post, but they were the only two updates to the game since September 30, 2013. So fans of the game are left with an occasionally updated title that is a testament to what could have been.

I am pretty sure this title is older than Towns, but there is a reason I am listing it here. Terraria is a game where you build 2D houses and dig in the ground for stuff. At night evil monsters come and try to kill you. God what the fuck is with all the similarities here…

Back in 2012 the developers of Terraria declared the game had received its final update and that it was “time to move on”. In this PC Gamer article, it is explained that one of the developers even went to work on Starbound with Chucklefish, which, for lack of a better term, is Terraria in space. In my opinion, it seems like CF stole the developer for this game to prevent it competing with their own game. Shady horseshit. Despite the developers apparently jumping ship, the game is still receiving updates on the Steam store, which makes it seem like the whole “boo hoo we’re ending the game” thing was a cry for help.

Now we’ve got this game, The Stomping Land. I was originally planning to review this game, but I spent hours in-game and realized how much it sucks when you play it alone. To give you an idea, when I first came in, I was a naked caveman. I was on a beach for about a couple seconds when an idiot burst out of the underbrush riding a raptor and hurling bolas. Someone else was trying to stop him from killing me, and I managed to use the terrain to conceal my escape. Crafting was boring and you couldn’t stash your shit except in a box, which you dragged along behind you. It was utterly unfinished, and now I read THIS horseshit.

Apparently the game has gotten no updates in months, which really got Kickstarter backers nervous. The company also went radio-silent for a while too, but they came out and said that they were switching to Unreal 4. That is not so bad, but with the game itself being pulled from Steam, everyone with that game in their library – myself included – shat many bricks of frustration. Of course, before Alex Fundora, SuperCrit founder, announced the engine change, he effectively disappeared for two months! Tumultuous, scary shit.

So what does all of this mean for Early-Access games? Tread lightly. Many of these games are financially on the ropes as it is, so a heavy measure of trepidation is urged in investing. Buying these games isn’t you standard I give you money you provide a product, it is literally a form of speculation similar to stocks trading;. Certainly it is not nearly as volatile or risky, but you might not get your 20$ for that game back, nor might you get a finished game. It might be a sign that all of these games attempt to emulate Minecraft’s basic structure despite adding new elements to their games. Just like so many other MMO’s attempted to emulate World of Warcraft’s success and died trying. In some of these instances you even have games that died and came back from the dead, which gives a new meaning to the term “zombie-game.”

I spoke briefly with my friend Dave about these types of games and he echoed the same frustration that many long-time gamers feel. When you buy a game, you want a finished product. You don’t want to play a game up to the point where the bugs are too much to handle and then have to put it down. Sure, there will be more content later, but it will trickle in; then you’ll log on each time to experience that new content, effectively experiencing the finished game in pieces until the finished product feels as worn and old as the other games in your library. It is irritating and many of us just want to play a finished game.

Some people seem to be over Steam Greenlight and similar services altogether, but just how many I am not sure. VG247 had a pretty interesting article back in January 2014 about Greenlight closing, which might not be the complete answer, but I am not sure that too many people would be upset about it. What are your thoughts about early-release games? Join me in a discussion about it on Crotchety Gamers United!

Obludia, Story of a Dungeon-Running Madman and His Little Dog Too!

Posted on September 4, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Demon are among the safest enemies to place in a videogame. They are a generic representation of evil and they are often pretty ugly, so you don’t even have to give them red blood. Demons can be smacked, berated and blamed for all the problems in the game because, simply stated, many people do the same thing in real life. Obludia is a game that embraces these old-fashioned theories, employing a retro arena-shooter aesthetic to make you rage with overpower fury.

Now, before you grab Satan by the balls, you have to set up controls. This is something I am becoming more and more frustrated with, and maybe it’s because I still have to install the appropriate software, but the standard for gaming right now is to use the mouse and keyboard or the Xbox controller as input. Personally, I prefer the DualShock4 since I plan to get a PS4. This is not supported by most games, especially indie games. The simple fact is, it likely takes extra time to code in and the xbox is a microsoft product, so I surmise that means the Xbox controller is more natural for the PC to pick up and easier to code for. I am not a developer, but can’t people at least start adding it as an update later on? Moving on.

Uhh… hey guys! Is this the place for synchronized chanting practice?

You play the role of a masked, fedora-sporting bandit (?) whose sole purpose in life is to kill and plunder. Then again, you spend most of your time swatting flies and killing rats that it feels a little more like a crossbow-wielding extermination service. Granted, you also have a fair number of zombies, blobs and other classic enemies. Fans of Smash TV will likely enjoy the hell out of this title. Your numerous weapons all have a particular poor-man’s Van Helsing feel. They are a sword, crossbow, pistol, shotgun, machinegun, mines, TNT and magic. Though I’ve had trouble getting the magic to work properly, this is mostly because I spend a lot of time avoiding enemies. I consider TNT to be pretty magical, though. One of the biggest issues with this game is that you have to sort through your weapons in one direction. You scroll through by rolling the mouse wheel one way, but backing it up doesn’t scroll your weapons back. It’s frustrating and requires me to pay too much attention to my current weapon.

Again, while enemies start off basic and typical, they slowly ramp up in difficulty. The challenge is the number of foes you face. In an arena there will usually be four doors that will spew enemies into the room. Sometimes one is boarded up, sometimes there are only two, but they typically come from all directions in droves. Luckily, there is help.

First there is the shopkeeper. Now, I am not sure if he eats bean burritos all the fucking time, but his standard animation has him squint before farting every couple second. I shit you not, he must shit his pants. Couped up in a small, windowless dungeon room full of enemies is likely just baking that shit into the walls. And there is a shop every 3 – 5 floors, too! And you go down, not up! That means these burrito-munching cretins are farting up a storm with the reek permeating upward through the dungeon. I cannot imagine the smell, but now I know why the main character is wearing a mask, although he should probably have sprung for an oxygen tank instead.

The shopkeepers each have a shop full of breakable items, so even if you don’t have much gold when you get there from slaughtering foes, you can get plenty on arrival. You can even stab the shopkeeper with your sword until he farts out a modest pouch of burrito-money. That’s right, we’re trying to save you calories you nasty fucker. The first time you join Bob the Shopkeeper, he has a dog named Kiwi. Adorable. Grab Kiwi, cause you’ll need him. In a fight Kiwi will grab money and drops and bring them to you, once you start getting hit, Kiwi loses his shit like the incredible fucking hulk, grows Popeye arms and starts man-handling enemies. This phenomenon is seen in the above screencap. I guess Kiwi thought Bob’s farts were suffocating the character.

There is also a little bat in a cage. If you free him, he’ll follow you around and fire a purple.. uh.. bat fireball at enemies. I guess the little guy was some kind of mage leftover from a race of super-intelligent, mystical, pacifist bats that once inhabited this dungeon. Or a game mechanic. That’s also possible, I suppose.

So THAT’S where all the extra-bean burritos went!

Another noteworthy feature of Obludia are the bosses. They are inventive, difficult and remind me of every boss in A Link to the Past. Honestly, though, they are tough, and you need to employ all of your skills running around like a terrified maniac launching TNT and firing shotgun rounds at these guys. I didn’t have many issues with Obludia outside the lack of DS4 support, somewhat slow character movement and frustrating inventory mechanics.

In order to remedy some of those problems, there are a number of pickups that you can get to accommodate. There is the berserker doll, which makes you slap on some woad and go ballistic. You shoot faster, swing your sword harder and take on a generally more sociopathic demeanor. Pickup the wooden cross to kill everything in the room or you can grab the swift feet pickup to run much faster – great for enemy avoidance. I don’t know why the main character can’t just do more squats, but hey, whatever works.

The music is enjoyable, and not ear-grating at all. The sounds are a menagerie of old-school game sounds, but the graphics look more like a flash game off of Newgrounds. Indeed, the game itself has a “new-retro” feel that is definitely appealing. To make this a really awesome play, however, some serious dusting up would need to be performed. One peculiarity is that the game starts in windowed mode which can be changed to fullscreen. I would have no desire to put it in windowed mode if it wasn’t so irritating to fucking exit the game. Seriously. Fullscreen it then exit the game. There is a “thanks for playing” screen that makes you look at it until it disappears, and it is there for what feels like too long. We see the words, enjoy the ambiance and get the gist. Thanks. You’re welcome. Can I move on dammit? It just makes the game feel like a overly-attached girlfriend that is like “WHY ARE YOU LEAVING IF WE BOTH APPRECIATE EACHOTHER SO MUCH!?!?!?!?” I know it is a fairly trivial thing, but it does get irritating when you want to rage quit a game and can’t just log out from fullscreen mode rapidly. Honestly, simple solution. Cut five seconds off it. Done. Otherwise, go buy this game if retro arena-shooters are your thing. It’s fun, has a heightened sense of gaming tension and a sort of humor that permeates the game like Bob’s bean-burrito farts. 8.99$ on Steam feels a bit much, but they seem to be making regular updates to fix issues with the game, so hopefully the price will encourage the devs to make necessary changes, and maybe even add a little extra content!

Elysian Shadows, Preview of 2D Paradise

Posted on August 26, 2014 by thre3zekiel

You backed it on Kickstarter and now it’s happening. We were excited about the mechanics, but what about the elements we’ll all fall in love with? Who are the characters? What are their struggles? What is their world like? I wanted to know, and Falco Girgis and the Elysian Shadows Team agreed to tell me. So what’s behind the game? Find out with the Crotchety Old Gamer!

I am excited as anyone about playing this game, but who will be our window into the world? Who is the main character of Elysian Shadows, and what drives him?

“The main protagonist of ES is named Julien. He is the son of two famous “diggers” who were well known for their research of the ancient ruins scattered throughout the land of Elysian Shadows. Julien grew up traveling with them on numerous expeditions and learning about the different ancient cultures of the past. He was well on his way to following in their footsteps as an accomplished digger, when the two mysteriously wound up missing during an expedition. An adolescent Julien was then sent to live with a family friend, the local museum owner, where he grew up despising the ruins that claimed his parents. Rather than exploring them with a passion and thirst for understanding as he had in his youth, he now scours them for a means to survival, plundering and looting their treasures just to make ends meet.

Julien has virtually no motivation to take part in the party’s quest in the beginning. He is thrust into the action by necessity rather than choice, and it’s initially the other party members who drag him along on the journey. For Julien, this is a quest of personal growth. It’s him having to come to terms with his traumatic past and face the ruins that caused him so much pain, and his struggle to reignite a long-lost passion that died along with his parents. Julien’s character represents crawling back up and trying again after suffering an extreme loss or emotional defeat. Whether this be a metaphor for learning to love again after heartbreak or learning to try again after seeing your dream project crushed on Kickstarter. Heh heh.”

Julien and the other diggers have to rely on physical weapons when excavating ruins because magic is a power reserved exclusively for the religious. While the technology for Julien’s time is not particularly advanced by today’s standards, many of the weapons and artifacts the player encounters within the ruins from civilizations long past are far more advanced than those found in his own time. The diggers and the scientific communities rely on these kinds of manufactured and uncovered weapons for combat while the religious are strictly magic-users. But what if Julien and his friends somehow discovered a way to use magic as well?”

Dark, mysterious caverns where treasures and danger abound…

Julien, like most people, is dealing with a secret pain. His struggle might be unique to himself, but each of us has our own climb from the bottom. Each of us has a cave of terrible darkness and untold treasures unique to our souls that we must brave before we are free to be who we are. Joseph Campbell wrote Hero of a Thousand Faces, which concerned itself with the way characters like these resonate in each of us. What about the world, though? What is the story told by the world Julien and his people will inhabit?

“Elysian Shadows is a world caught in constant conflict between magic and technology. Magic is associated with faith and the religious. Technology is associated with scholars, scientists, and explorers who have turned away from The Creator’s divine gifts in an attempt to better understand the world around them. The technologists are seen as heretics, while the religious are seen as sheep, following blindly. Julien and Eryn, who both work for a museum, are sent on an expedition to uncover a valuable artifact for a new exhibit. The two quickly find more than they bargained for in the ruins. They stumble upon a discovery that thrusts them into the middle of this mounting conflict between magic and technology, forcing them to unlock the mysteries of ancient civilizations and prevent their own people from sharing this fate.

The storyline of Elysian Shadows was heavily influenced by the moral dilemmas of our own technologically advanced society, especially with recent advances in bio-engineering. With stem cell research, cloning and the human genome sequence, science challenges religion on a fundamental philosophical level. Science is beginning to encroach upon powers that many people argue are reserved exclusively for God. Do we have any business modifying our genetic make-up? Is it moral to alter a fetus before its birth? Is it wrong to artificially produce life in a laboratory? Science claims that these advances could drastically benefit all of humanity, while religion claims that we are meddling with things that we have mo business meddling with. We wanted to create a story that was more than just a superfluous JRPG experience. We wanted something that would make the player think; something that would engage them intellectually and emotionally.”

Lovely vistas!

Elysian Shadows seems like it will strike a chord that resonates with our own lives, possibly even a few nerves, but who would we be if art never asked hard questions? And how we answer these questions are part of what make us individual from one another. Our varied ways of thinking and how those come together for a common goal are part of what has made America what it is today: a center for all people to share ideas freely, and sometimes those ideas reach back out to the people that created them. So how will the characters accompanying Julien contribute to the game?

“Julien is initially accompanied by the lead female protagonist, Eryn, who is a tech-savvy university student. Eryn helps her father run the local museum, showcasing various exotic and mysterious artifacts from the surrounding ruins. While Julien’s past has rendered him jaded and disinterested in discovering the secrets of these ruins, Eryn explores them passionately in hopes of uncovering their secrets often dragging Julien along for the ride. She is a strong-willed tomboy and often the most level-headed and responsible member of the party with a ruthless pragmatism.

The two adventurers find themselves in the company of one of Eryn’s professors after his lab is ransacked and his research is destroyed ( presumably because he was getting too close to a breakthrough with his work ). While Professor Rand is brilliant, he’s also infamous for dysfunctional antics and living a life of excess. His peers in academia generally disapprove of his hedonism, but they are often forced to concede to his genius and gift for piecing together puzzles. Rand serves as a non-traditional guide for the party, and he is well-versed in the ancient ruins and their technology. Unfortunately Eryn finds herself having to guide Rand just as much throughout their journey, keeping his arrogance in check and ensuring that his decadence doesn’t get the party deeper into trouble along the way.”

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

There is a big adventure out there for us

Allies and enemies and what separates the two is a major point of reference in how each of us live our lives. It says something about who we are and what we want. Note that Julien is already surrounding himself with those that spend their time largely concerned with the ruins, the very thing that he blames for the loss of his parents. This means that, despite his feelings on them, somewhere they are still very much a part of him, maybe even one he wants to love again as it would be the only emotional link back to those happy days of youth exploring with Mom and Dad? Eventually he will have to face those emotions, and his friends will be the ones to help. So, what about the game itself? How will each of these characters actually work together? I was allured by the claims to an inventive new system for skills and jobs – How will these systems work and how will they be reflected in each character?

“It’s actually a mixture of two different systems. We ran into a kind of design dilemma early on when we were dreaming up skills and abilities for characters. On one hand, we wanted each character to have their own unique feel and play style. We didn’t want every character to feel completely interchangeable, and we wanted to give each their own innate strengths and abilities. But on the other hand, we are huge fans of job and class systems, and party customization is something we very much wanted to do with Elysian Shadows. We really wanted to give the player the freedom to customize their party as they see fit.

So we wound up with a hybrid system where each party member learns their own unique set of skills and abilities during combat and storyline progression. They each have their own unique skill trees and pools that are independent of the other characters, which is how we intend to make our characters unique and interesting. Then each party member can be assigned to a certain class wherein they unlock class-specific skills and abilities. This allows the player to really fine-tune their party, offering a considerable amount of strategic freedom within the combat system, while still allowing us to create unique and interesting characters.”

Giant swords and power help, too!

This means the class you choose for each character determines what role they will play, and allows you to dictate how the party reacts to challenges. Alongside this, one character might have access to certain elements within there skill tree that other characters simply cannot get to – the same way Falco and myself might both become developers, but we would end up using those skills to completely different ends and learn different, though equally useful, methods of making games. Well, damn, I am glad I contributed to the Elysian Shadows Kickstarter! Of course, there are still 5 days left to contribute to the ES Kickstarter, but what about those that miss the opportunity? How much will they have to pay and what outlets will the game be available on?

“Since we’re targeting so many different platforms with completely different indie markets and economies, we can’t really set a fixed price point across each. The price of ES will most likely be adjusted so it’s comparable to other indie games available on each platform. Currently, digital copies of ES for Steam and OUYA can be preordered for $15 through our Kickstarter. This also includes our development tools, ESTk and ESGamma. The standard edition of Elysian Shadows for the Dreamcast will be $49, which includes a professionally produced jewel case, color instruction manual, and pressed disc thanks to our publishers at Watermelon Corp. The game will look like a 100% legit Dreamcast release picked up from a commercial retailer back in 1999. You will also be able to choose between PAL, US, and JAP style packaging so ES will match the rest of your DC collection no matter what region you’re in!”

Painstaking attention to detail, thorough skills and class systems, complex characters and a complex storyline balancing the the beliefs of a world against the pain of one kid: Elysian Shadows is going to have something for everyone, and a little extra to boot. I have never been this excited for another modern retro game; not Shovel Knight or any other mainstream title. Elysian Shadows, however, is more than just a modern retro 2D RPG: it is our modern 2D RPG. More than just this game, I look forward to the ripple effect that this game will create and how that will resonate across the industry. Here’s to hoping it contributes to some interesting developments all the way around. But whether or not it does, either way, it’s going to be an awesome game! As always, you can check the Elysian Shadows website for more about the game!

Haunt the House: Terrortown, Murderous Spiritual Mayhem!

Posted on August 24, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Not since Haunting starring Polterguy has there been a game this indirect about its approach. In Haunting, you play a ghost who was recently rendered spectral by a careless family of fucktards that killed you while skateboarding, so you make it the purpose of your afterlife to rectify a vendetta against them. Terrortown’s ghost is more of a motiveless malignancy that likes to kill people and scare the ever-loving piss out of them. At least Polterguy had a purpose, granted his manifestations were exceedingly more graphic. But he never killed anybody! This adorable little ghost has a bloody, murderous core. No wonder it can’t move on.

Everything in Terrortown starts in the clocktower in the middle of town, where the ghost lives. After a brief tutorial on possessing and manipulating objects in the environment, you are set loose on the town like an apple-cheeked Mongol set on destroying families and lives. A couple things of note in the clocktower, though. During the tutorial, what they teach you possession with is a bell, of which there are nine, plus the one you possess. There is also a large, out-of-focus painting that looks like it was painted in a JRPG with the bloom turned down. More on these later.

The adorable little tent is where the ghost hatches his devious and bloody schemes.

Calling this game a puzzler is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion, since the only puzzle you are solving is how you will drive terror into the hearts of the town’s citizens. I would call this more of a strategy game, considering you are tasked with manipulating circumstances and individuals to reach a specific outcome indirectly. The ghost in this uses possession to its advantage. By possessing the various elements of the environment, you are able to manifest the fears of people in the things around them. Now the things you can make people see depend on the level of fear in the atmosphere. At the base level – relaxed – everyone is milling about in “thumbs-up-asses” mode. Starting from relaxed, you will only be able to move furniture or swing chandeliers, rattle bars, etc., but once you start to creep people out, the fear level rises. Increase it to perform higher profile scares and soon you will have people leaping out of windows to escape the house.

Once you have the fear levels up to fever-pitch, people are twitchy if not outright terrified. You are performing bizarre and ostentatious scares, people are running around terrified and the general populous is jumping out of window to escape. Revisiting the bells in the clocktower, each level has a few haunts that get bloody. Several people in the game are asking for it, seemingly pretending nothing is going on, and the scares you perform near these guys get them fucking killed. This is where the ghost gets murderous: it’s already sucked the happiness and fun out of a room faster than Carl Sagan at a confirmation party, now you’re going in for the kill. Each person you assassinate gets the esteemed position of haunting the fucking belltower with you, circling a bell themed after their purpose in life to haunt them forever. How wonderfully sadistic.

That’s right, shifty motherfucker, just mind your own business.

The goal of this game is to get everyone out of the public places. Once this goal is accomplished, you win! Seriously, though that is it. There are 4 locations to haunt and you are done. This is a little frustrating, but I get the feeling there is more to come. At least there better be. Even though the game is 4.99$ on Steam, I have played other, cheaper games that are, in fact, full and finished. Don’t get me wrong, this game is great, especially since I was such a big fan of haunting on Sega Genesis, but it literally feels like you finish the first level and it’s over. I have had farts that lasted longer than this fucking game, regardless of how awesome and adorable it is. The only thing that takes a long time to finish with this title is figuring out who the last fucking person in the goddamn museum. I had to look up a walkthrough to figure that shit out. Overall, it is a fun game and worth some money, but until they add ore content to the title, it will always feel short and incomplete. And if they charge for DLC, I will pitch a bitch fit.

Nuclear Throne, SHMUP Both Exciting and Frustrating

Posted on August 23, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Vlambeer is a Dutch game developer, and their stylish little Shoot-em-up, Nuclear Throne, is on my list today. Better known for their works published through Devolver Digital, I am curious to see what their independently published projects look like. While this title needs a little time to grow on you, it still has a certain charm and will definitely appeal to lovers of SNES and NES shooter titles like Smash TV and Contra. Be warned though, this game is hard as fuck.

When you start up Nuclear Throne, you’ll be greeted by a badass theme that sounds like a fusion of western-style acoustics with post-apocalyptic metal influences. It stopped me more than once at the above screen, and almost seems too awesome for this game, but it blends with the style perfectly and given what the game goes for, it is definitely perfect. It’ll fill your ears and get you pumped up as you choose a character in the select screen, which portrays them all sitting around a campfire while one plays the guitar.

Each of the characters has its own benefit and special move, which is activated by right-clicking, but be careful since some characters have cons. I will list them in order. Fish is a fishman who gets more ammo than the others and can dodge roll. Dodge roll is really useful in situations where you need ammo and have to traverse a field of fire to get to it. Crystal is a sentient crystal that has extra HP and can morph into a giant crystal for increased defense. Later, crystal can get a teleport ability with this. Eyes is a blue alien-looking creature that can see in the dark and pulls pick-ups toward him with telekinesis. Melting is.. uh.. a sort of amorphous creature. He has shit HP, but gains XP faster than the others. After death he can also use explosive revenge, but I found that thoroughly fucking useless since there are no extra lives. Plant is a plant that moves faster and can grow snares to slow enemies. Y.V. is a one-eyed triangle reminiscent of illuminati symbolism that gets a higher rate of fire and can use an ability called Pop pop. I tried using it, but I couldn’t figure out what it does. Steroids is a muscle-bound character who starts loaded in each new level is less accurate, but can dual wield similar weapons. Robot is a robot and he gets better tech drops and eats guns. Eating guns is one of my favorite abilities by far. Chicken is a samurai-chicken that starts with a katana, is hard to kill and makes everything go into slow motion upon right-click. Once chicken gets to 0 HP, his head flies off and his body can keep shooting until it dies, too. Gruesome, but kind of funny. I also managed to unlock rebel, who has extra defense and can call allies into battle in exchange for HP. There is one other character I was unable to unlock.

I brought marshmallows, but they upset Melting.

After selecting a character, you are thrown right into a chaotic arena full of enemies. At the start you get a simple revolver to suit your slaughter-oriented needs, but that will be quickly replaced by a vast array of weapons from a screwdriver all the way up to a flame shotgun and more. Grabbing a melee weapon in a “shoot-em-up” might seem like bringing a screwdriver to a gun fight, but that is only because it’s exactly what you’re doing. In Nuclear Throne, however, it isn’t such a bad idea, really. I mean, you don’t have to reload melee weapons, so if you are working with a character that has comparably lower ammo, it might not be bad to have up your sleeve. Your inventory, however, will only accommodate two weapons, so choose wisely. Luckily, some weapons draw from different ammo types, but given all the ammo drops look the same, there is no telling what you pick-up. Since there is no weapons inventory screen or anything more complex than weapon 1 and weapon 2, there is no way to tell how much of each type of ammo you have. It can be a bit frustrating, but it doesn’t fucking care. The weapon mechanics in this game are intentionally bare-boned so you don’t have anything to distract you from the HORDES of fucking enemies that want to wallow in your blood and render your corpse a charred shell.

Tearing through hordes of enemies is fun, but, as I said, you will want to mix it up. New weapons do just that, and they come in a healthy variety, packaged in chests throughout the game. Walk over a chest and it pops open, press ‘E’ to equip a weapon. Experimentation will help you survive in this, but watch your ammo. Aside from just chests, there are also EXP canisters. Originally I thought they were giving me ammo, but they leave a bunch of green shell-looking objects. Everyone drops these, but noticing they did nothing for my ammo supply I wondered what the fuck they were for. Eventually, I leveled up after collecting the green bits, so that solved that fucking mystery quicker than a bunch of stoners with a microbus and a mutated, talking great dane.

Did I just see Beetlejuice?

Between levels of play you will level you character by choosing a new benefit. Sometimes these give you more ammo, help you heal, make you faster etc. The best ones, however, enhance your special ability. Personally, I like guns for breakfast, so I choose Robot fairly often. Taking the appropriate skill will allow you to gain more nutrition from guns, healing you more and, I think, providing more ammo. Each of the skills follow, too, but figuring out the related image is, at times, a matter of artistic interpretation. The spinning black and purple vortex you see isn’t the door to Narnia, by the way. Once all your enemies lie beaten and broken, a sucking hole pops up and whisks you off to the next level. This can be frustrating, so I advise exploring the level as much as possible before killing everybody since this can prevent you from finding all the pickups in the level. Missing XP canisters can seriously debilitate you for future levels, and dodging bullets becomes half the focus of the game.

Murder on a massive scale is often one of the best things to happen in the dark!

This game is hard as hell and I couldn’t find a variable difficulty level. Your choice of character will dictate the level of the challenge, but the massive number of unrelenting enemies make this game truly challenging. Factor in the drop-off of everything you might accidentally miss after killing the last enemy, and you can see how I only made it up to level 6 after hours of play. A lot of restarts, yes, but the game makes it easy to restart with the same character, so this is not one you are meant to beat in one sitting. After drilling away at it, you will find combinations that work for your style of play and get you further and further. The most aggravating element of this game is the fact that there is no fucking save! Initially I was mad and wondering why the fuck you would damn your player to infinite restarts, but then I remembered that Dungeons of Dredmor originally had you play through the entire game before you could reload from a death. Granted, you could at least save after you exit, but when you died your saves were all deleted. Nuclear Throne doesn’t even possess that decency, and feels like a really well put-together flash game, which makes it a little more disappointing that it appears on Steam. It is fun, though. Overall, a good game, just a little too aggravating and definitely a title made for those who got through any of the original Contra games solo and without cheats. It also has a unique charm that cannot be denied. Its graphics are fun and don’t lend themselves to over analysis. They harken back to the old age of 8-bit gaming where it was difficult to even tell what you were seeing at times, but it doesn’t detract from gameplay. Gameplay is smooth and fast-paced, if missing any form of gaming respite. Since it is early-access, I can definitely say that this is a game worth buying at its 12.99$ asking price, even if just to see where they end up going with it.

Why is Bojan Brbora Merging Film and Gaming?

Posted on August 21, 2014 by thre3zekiel

At the end of July I reviewed 4PM, a game that you might say takes games a little too far. Receiving mixed reviews, this game boldly stares down such topics as alcoholism, adultery, drunk driving and suicide. While I can say that topics with this gravity don’t typically feature in games, it is a trend that is on the rise. Today Bojan Brbora, the serbian cinematographer behind 4PM, discusses his motivations with me and sheds a little light on what is driving this dramatic explosion of artistic games.

For those not entirely familiar with Bojan and his work, he gave a little personal background:

Cinematography used to be my full time job up until two and a half years ago, when I came to the UK from Serbia and earned an MA in Game Design at the National Film & Television School. This is where I made 4PM, as well. I worked full time in the Film industry back home for about 8 years before deciding to take a break and learn this new medium. Currently I try to split my work 50/50 between Film/TV and Game Design, and I am quite keen on continuing to work in both areas. The projects that I mainly seem to work on are drama related, which is probably why 4PM is in the same category.

So Bojan has years in the Serbian film industry, but what would make someone take the step into gaming directly from film?

Around three years ago during slow periods, I was playing things like Mass Effect and Deus Ex and realised how much I had grown attached to the characters, especially after making choices and changing their path in the story. I really felt like I was participating in the narrative, and being responsible for what happened on the screen; something which you rarely get in other media. I thought this was really interesting. What if one applied the same thing, but created a more contemporary and contextually relevant narrative? Since this isn’t commonly done, I decided to give it a go and signed up for the course here in the UK.

(beware of spoilers) In 4PM you play as a reckless alcoholic named Caroline, who is grieving over the loss of her father. Granted, she is personally responsible for his death due to her inebriation at the time of the car crash. After another rough day at her soul-sucking deskjob, Caroline decides to sneak down to the bar for a drink. On her way, she runs into a man who throws her a listless glance and continues past her to the roof. You then get to decide to follow or go to the bar. Following him you can learn the truth about yourself and save him. Going to the bar gives you a front row seat to his suicide, as he lands on a taxi parked in front of the bar. Atop the roof Caroline learns that recently she has been having an affair with a married man – the jumper on the roof – whose wife is leaving him. Despite Caroline failing to remember any of this, she does have moments of recollection where the past comes trickling in to haunt her. On that rooftop she faces down herself, the truth of what she has become and where she wants her future to lead.

Given the gravity involved, I wondered at the inspiration behind the narrative Bojan concocted to accomplish the task he set out for himself. His answer sounded like the beginning of numerous indie films.

4PM started out as a situation, a meeting of two strangers on a rooftop at sunset with some sort of mystery element bringing them together. Extra tension was provided by having one character on the ledge, ready to jump. It was a very simple setup, from which I wanted to expand and see who these characters are, and why they are really there.

A very humanizing situation

So why create a game that is more a dramatic narrative than an actual game?

I think the reason why I made more of an interactive story than a game is because I really wanted to expand what the medium can do and try to attract people who are not gamers; hence the removal of most classic game elements and introduction of film language, which is more recognizable and an easier transition for most people.

Bringing non-gamers into a game like this is a challenging task. Interactive media are the only ones in which you take part in a story, driving its significance deeper into the player. Each action taken in-game is part of a developing story, which makes the internalizing of story elements that much easier via Suspension of Disbelief. Such internalization is made even easier by games since the player doesn’t just see it happening to people on the screen, they experience it happening through their decisions as they play out via the avatar of their own conscience: the primary character of the story. Of course, if the end result doesn’t accurately detail what the player might be working toward, the story could be rejected outright. So, what this cinematographer proposes is an immeasurably more difficult task than what film sets out to do: film shows you a story and ask you to think, such games challenge you to live a story and see where your decisions lead it. This process is profoundly more difficult since the interaction between game and player is exceedingly more intimate than that between film and viewer, and the interaction itself largely occurs in the mind of the player.

So this becomes a natural obstacle for the creation of such narrative games, making the player navigate events and emotions that they might altogether avoid themselves. But as movies challenge viewers to place themselves into a character and understand the context of their lives, so, too, does 4PM. You wake up in bed as Caroline, and her life and decisions become post-it notes and empty bottles on the floor. Her life becomes yours for a short time and learning who she is becomes a large part of the curiosity of 4PM. Then, by making decisions that control Caroline, you adopt her as the chosen form to explore the story. And it is a tragic story. So why make a game that is this tragic? Is there a greater message here?

Through developing the details of the story with my writer, Stefan Kaday, something kept pulling us down this very dark path and outside of just typical thriller material. We stumbled onto some very real and difficult themes, but in my view, this could only be a good thing as it felt like something novel; a place where few games want to go. It is a difficult thing to research, as nobody really likes talking about things like alcoholism, guilt, suicide and compulsion, so most of the conversations with people that had gone through them had to be indirect and were quite often emotionally draining. I don’t believe 4PM has a direct message, it is more an exploration of how complex human relationships are and that a lot of us suffer every day, but we rarely face or talk about this due to some ridiculous social stigma.

Pick your poison

So the nature of the game itself is its topic: exploration of these themes rather than a judgment on them. The player decides the path that Caroline takes, and decides what they see. Therefore, it is ultimately the player that dictates the message conveyed by the narrative. For this reason, 4PM was victorious in its task.

Games like this are not uncommon, though, and have recently been cropping up everywhere: Depression Quest, Papers, Please and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Bojan was happy to provide his thoughts on the rise of the dramatic narrative in games.

It is a sign of the medium finally growing up and having a big niche in serious, adult themes. This is a good sign, and I hope developers continue to do more projects relating to real world issues, though there is still quite a bit of work to do in making these experiences more subtle and entertaining to a wider audience. This is only a matter of time though, and I am sure the next few years will bring some ground-breaking work.

And that is solid logic. People seem to be buying these games, so it would follow that more of these games are forthcoming. Can we expect more of these games from Bojan Brbora?

I am currently doing some work for other people to survive in the UK. I also needed to take a break from being in charge of absolutely everything on a project, as it left me psychologically drained. I am developing a few ideas and prototypes, though, and VR seems to be quite an interesting new platform, one currently worth exploring. I’m also working on some film ideas.

Games, of course, take a team of developers given the enormity of their content. Who were the people on 4PM’s team?

While this was essentially a one-man student project, I did work with a few people from the film courses to make the project really unique. Stefan, whom I already mentioned, fleshed out the story and plot, wrote the dialogue and served as an excellent fresh pair of eyes and counterweight to my crazy ideas. Neo Peterson was instrumental in filling out the world with sound and audio atmosphere. Terence Dunn was the main music composer, and did an amazing job putting together the orchestral and some electronic pieces. I am also very thankful to the guys from “Kazoo”and “et_” for letting me use their music as it plays a huge part in making 4PM what it is. These are all extremely talented and kind people, and I look forward to working with them again in the very near future.

What was you favorite part of developing this game?

My favorite part of creating this game was working with other creative people, bouncing ideas off them and learning these complex, new tools to make the project happen. It also brought me to a new country, where I met so many new, talented people and expanded my horizons.

Games like this really have the potential to make games something more, and help us explore our world in ways we never expected. Although some dissenters fail to visualize the potential of such experiences, games are moving into the realm of true art, a modern art that is just as powerful and relevant as any film today. Bojan had some final thoughts to leave readers with regarding this.

I would like to urge people to support projects like these, both socially and financially, as it is the only way to move the industry forward and avoid stagnation. They are currently experimental, and rough around the edges, but the end goal is something spectacular, so we really need your support.

Hopefully we can develop these games into something spectacular. 4PM is available now on Steam for 4.99$. Thank you for reading.

Please note that material has been lightly edited for flow and coherence.

Zeno Clash 2: Much More ‘What’, Equal Parts ‘The Fuck’

Posted on August 20, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Zeno Clash 2 is a perfect example of what happens when an imaginative group of talented developers find a publisher and can make a game the way the always wanted. Granted, it is fucking bizarre as pink dancing hamsters in tutus tearing apart two cows having a threesome with a Scottish midget, but there is just as much fun and blood involved as the above description. This game is fun. It is a ton of fucking fun heaped into a bizarre surrealist world and topped off with guns. Not to mention, the storyline is interesting as fuck.

So Ghat makes his comeback in this sequel by doing the opposite of what he did in the first one. Literally, the fucking opposite. Where before he was trying to kill father-mother and break up the family in order to avenge FM’s baby-thieving, now he is trying to save FM from a much-deserved ass-kicking and reuniting the family. I honestly think this guy just likes to fucking beat shit up and kill motherfuckers. I mean, that is what he did as a Corwid, and he hasn’t changed anything but the fact that now he no longer wears a mask. I would hypothesize that this shows that Ghat is willing to face who he is and give into his dark, true self, but that would almost be too fucking involved. I think he just likes to fuck shit up.

City of Halstedom, pronounced Hal-stom. See also churning homestead of wanton fucking insanity.

Halstedom has been taken over by the North Golem, Kax-Teh. You know, the guy you brought to Halstedom to deal with Father-Mother? The North Golem, the guy with the Rubick’s cube from ZC, has built a jail, the colonnade-adorned head building, to incarcerate criminals in the town. Makes sense, guy’s a natural fucking philanthropist. Except one thing. These people have no idea what this concept of “law” is. It is literal anarchy. Whoever wants to rule can, if they can get enough support from other thugs and people in the area. So he is literally forcing these foreign concepts of law and order onto a city of people that have trouble with the concepts associated with a can-opener. They are children, and he is ruling them with an iron fist from his head-palace using concepts none of them can understand. Very little about any of this makes much sense.

With FM behind bars, you would assume that everything should be alright in the world, but Ghat is a more motiveless malignancy than Iago, so he gets tired of starting bar-fights all the time. Luckily, Rimat, a woman wearing a rice paddy hat from FM’s family, decides to start some shit. See, after everyone found out about FM’s treachery and baby-stealing, the North Golem told them who their real parents are and where they could be found. Many went to him, but a few did not. Rimat was one of those who didn’t. Her opinion was that you cannot change the past, so she cannot change the fact that she was raised by a giant, hooded man-bird. And, honestly, she has a compelling point. This is something that many adoptees have to come to terms with, but Rimat, given the chance to go back to them, prefers to stay with the familiar. She chooses to stay with those that she grew up with. Very interesting. So together with Rimat, Ghat helps to break FM out of jail and seek out the various members of the family.

After they’ve found all their brothers and sisters, they then turn their goals against the golems. As it turns out, the golems are just the servants of some infinitely wiser entities, and they were put in place to keep the Zenos from leaving their land of Zenozoic. The term “zenos” is used to describe anyone from this place, too. I would want to keep these guys out of my backyard too. I mean fucking look at them!

Ugly is a polite term for these people. I mean, the police force wear flour sacks on their heads leaving you to imagine the horrors beneath!

Above is one of my favorite features of this game. Normally, the gameplay is something like a free-roaming RPG, but there will be these areas where you’ll be pitted against a ton of enemies. Unlike other games such as Half-Life 2 or any FPS by Flying Wild Hog, these arenas are not resolved with a sword or by gutting people with a machine-gun. These battles are most often resolved with combo attacks and flying double-fist strikes. Massive battles like this are resolved like street thugs would back in the 1920’s: Everyone has a nasty brawl and the victors are the ones who are right. Sometimes you will have some assholes sitting back, picking people off with a rifle or a grenade launcher, but hit them hard enough and they will drop it. Of course, if there are weapons like rifles and grenade launchers, why even get into pitch brawls like that? Simple, the guns in this game are few and far between and there isn’t oodles of ammo laying around. It’s actually somewhat realistic in this way. Of course, why not grab a club? Those are around too! This game forces you to deal with someone via fisticuffs. Weapons that you have to strike someone with, including guns without ammo, will break and shatter. The most reliable way to deal with your issues is to beat them to a bloody pulp with your bare hands, as God intended.

The landscapes in this game are absolutely magnificent and always always always have elements that make you curious, intrigued and outright confused. As you wander these landscapes, you might be wondering if you are on Mars. Actually, the game gives you ample reason to believe that it might be Earth, but the game has numerous regions. Each region can be explored and explored freely. Some are more open than others, but each area has its own unique look and feel, and each area has its secrets and stashes.

The two-headed monkey riding on the back of a fire-spitting vulture made the muculosaurus in the desert seem low-key.

The two-headed monkey riding on the back of a fire-spitting vulture region made the muculosaurus in the desert seem low-key.

Two features adding to this are stashes and skill points. Stashes are places where you can find items (food to heal, totems to fill the special attacks meter, weapons etc) which fulfill a variety of uses, mostly combat-oriented. These stashes look like giant, horned clamshells and function much the same way as chests. The art director for this game should be drug-tested hourly.

The other feature are the skill point totems. These appear as skulls hanging from a crude stand and can be found nearly everywhere. A couple time I revisited regions only to find a new skill totem that wasn’t accessible without equipment I found elsewhere. These totems are well-hidden too, almost as if they hired someone from Flying Wild Hog to put in the secrets. When you interact with these totems, half the present skulls disappear and you get points equal to the number of skulls obtained. Once you have the points, you can go ahead and start pouring them into the various skills: health, stamina, strength, leadership. Health is health, stamina dictates how many punches you can throw before getting weak, strength is how hard you hit. Leadership is the most interesting skill, though. Throughout the game, you will switch out between various characters that will help Ghat and Rimat on their journey. The higher your leadership, the more powerful the allies that you can recruit to your quest with you. These guys are useful, too, especially when you find yourself suddenly confronted with a massive mosaic of faces as seen above. You will be fighting ALL those fuckers, often in close-quarters. With little space to run and twenty mother-fuckers trying to kick your ass, you will need some friends to mix up the melee. I poured nearly all of my points into leadership.

The skills are accessible from the map screen, where you can also find some collections. There are a variety of things to collect, all of which are random and make little sense. They are a ton of fun, and when you play, you’ll likely see how they add their own pieces of flavor to this game.

Make a left at the canyon filled with testicle-chinned shrimp, pass by the butthole-licking tribe of barbarians and we'll arrive at the city of mechanical, two-headed monkey people. Remember to pack sandwiches!

Turn left at the canyon of testicle-chinned shrimp, pass foot-collecting barbarian tribe and arrive at the city of mechanical, two-headed monkey people. Remember to pack sandwiches!

Do not play this game thinking you will not be saying “What the fuck” every five seconds. This game is just as whacky, if not moreso, than the first, but its gameplay is memorable and awesome. I honestly hope they take this formula and apply to a remake of Double-Dragon or Final Fight. Can you imagine what it would be like to have a fighting-style free-roaming first-person RPG like this one in a vast post-apocalyptic, future cityscape where gangs tear eachother apart? You could have some guns in there, but they might be so rare that they are almost a form of currency, so battles are largely solved with blades and fists. Just food for thought to give Ace Team. This game itself is a hell of a thing though. It feels like the greater narrative of morality and law being waged by the golems is the true story, and the rest of the world is made to be ridiculous so a seeking mind is almost forced to latch onto the golems and interpret their story. Then Ghat comes in and fucks shit up, believing, I guess, that true freedom requires the death of law. Whatever you glean from this game, it is likely to be memorable. And the best part is that its Special Edition currently on sale for 2.99$ on Steam, although it is deserving of every cent of the 24.99$ usual asking price. Go get it now! Seriously! It’s fucking awesome!

Memories of a Vagabond Should be Repressed

Posted on August 19, 2014 by thre3zekiel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man, these thatch roofs are fucked!

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

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

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

	thre3zekiel on Gone Home, Manifesto of Modern…
	Orange Jews on Gone Home, Manifesto of Modern…
	thre3zekiel on Gone Home, Manifesto of Modern…
	Orange Jews on Gone Home, Manifesto of Modern…
	IndieDev Spotlight:… on Why do they fear indie ga…

The Crotchety Old Gamer

An irate gamer's blog

Category Archives: Steam Games

Dwarfs!? Man-boobs of Glory

Eufloria, Tripadelic RTS Invasion

Valley of the Dead Pre-Releases

Obludia, Story of a Dungeon-Running Madman and His Little Dog Too!

Elysian Shadows, Preview of 2D Paradise

Haunt the House: Terrortown, Murderous Spiritual Mayhem!

Nuclear Throne, SHMUP Both Exciting and Frustrating

Why is Bojan Brbora Merging Film and Gaming?

Zeno Clash 2: Much More ‘What’, Equal Parts ‘The Fuck’

Memories of a Vagabond Should be Repressed

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: