Double-Up Discussion: Catch Aliens, Free-Diving Hunter

Posted on September 3, 2014 by thre3zekiel

In the spirit of moving forward, it’s time to get back to the games. Today I will be discussing two iOS games because my wife would like her iPad back. Granted, there is a reason I haven’t been able to keep off the thing, and these two games are it. There is a lot I have to say about these titles, though so strap in. This might get a little on the long side.

First up is Catch the Aliens. Just from the logo here, you get a distinct sense of awesome. I don’t want to burst that bubble, but you do play glorified dog-catcher. That is alright, though, since the game itself is actually a lot of fun. There are two modes of play: Casual Level-Based and Competitive Endless. Now, these terms are advanced language, and in gamer-speak they translate to “singleplayer” and “multiplayer”. In what I am coining as the “singleplayer” mode, you play by yourself and clear a space station room by room. In the second mode, or “multiplayer”, you compete with friends on Facebook for scores.

Now, as you play, you are confronted with room after room of fairly cute aliens that scamper around and cause a nuisance. These guys vary in color and “ways they piss you the fuck off”. That second quality is key. Now, your method of controlling the alien-catcher is to sort of lean the idevice, like you are gingerly erasing an etch-a-sketch. If you don’t know what that is, your parents should be smacked. Either way, I was using an iPad despite the fact that this game was meant for an iPhone. That would make the game more responsive where I felt like I was wrestling a bull to the ground by its horns. It added to the game itself, but for quality performance I recommend something with a smaller face-area.

And stay in that bubble!

Despite all this, the game was still a lot of fun. Levels are small arenas with up to 4 aliens running amok, and you have to catch them by tapping them with your forcefield alien catcher. You tap them and BAM! instant bubble. Of course, if you are too slow to catch the others, they will free the ones you’ve already caught. This causes issues as you have three green dots at the top of the screen. Each time an alien is freed, the dots turn red. If they all turn red, you lose and have to restart that room. It gets frustrating, but there is a certain strategy to the game: yellow aliens just run around, kind of slowly. They can be caught last. The guys you want to go after first are the spitting purple aliens, which can pop bubbles from across the room, or the speedy green aliens. To catch the speedy guys, you’ll need a speed boost, or you’ll have to get on the inside of their turn out of a corner. The rest of them can be mopped up thereafter. There are also red aliens with horns that you have to tap twice before catching, but they aren’t too fast, just a little annoying and take a bit of time.

Now, accomplishing three challenges in each room grants you stars. These stars are required to progress to the next floor, each floor having more rooms than the last. The challenges are Life, Order and Sparkles. Yea, that sounds like the motto of My National Socialist Little Pony Party, but that’s because it’s not really called sparkles. That is just what I call it. See, when an alien is freed, you lose life. Hence, no life lost gets you a star. There is also a certain order you are “supposed” to catch the aliens. If you get it right, you get another star. Every time an alien is caught, it emits a cloud of little sparkles, which you then collect and store. Get enough of these and you will get the.. um.. sparkle star.

This game also has some optional in-app purchases, and I can see how extensive play would necessitate a high-level of skill or concession to buying your way up the spacestation. It isn’t in-your-face, but after each level, there are ads which take up the whole screen. maybe on the iPhone it would be less irritating to eliminate them, but on the iPad the word ‘iPad’ and the wifi meter get in the way of closing the ad. Grrr… Not blaming the developer on that one, I am the guy using the giant older brother of the device this game is meant for. The best part about this game, however, is that it is free on the app store. You can get to the game through Panipurisoft’s site. They also have a facebook page.

I think I downloaded a broken version of this game, because there were no in-app purchases that I could find. It terrified me. I sobbed-heavily with my new found freedom to PLAY A FUCKING GAME!!! It was majestic, it was awesome. Thank you. Thank you.

The game itself is pretty cool, too. When I was in the military, I knew a Hawaiian gentleman who told us about his exploits with free-diving. It sounded like he was evolving into a fish, honestly, and he has a general disdain for octopopuli. I don’t know how to pluralize that, so fuck you, english. Either way, it sounded like something intense and soothing at the same time. Now, that gentleman only dove with a snorkel and a knife. This game doesn’t have as much faith in your lung capacity. You have a snorkel and a speargun. Now, the much-needed tutorial feels a little basic, but it gives you what you need. The controls are wonky as hell, but they make sense, and once you get used to them, they react well and make sense. At first I was cursing mightily, but this game requires practice, honestly. Putting a little time in sharpened my aim with the speargun and honed my agility with the diamond.. space… non-joystick.. of mystical.. That thing! The fucking thing in the lower right hand corner! That is what you use to control your diver! JEEZ!

DUN DUN. DUN DUN. dun-dun dun-dun dun-dun dun-dun dun-dun…. oh you get it..

Now, the rest of the game orbits you in the form of the admittedly cluttered UI. Starting top-left you have your level and lung capacity, bottom-left is the dive button over top the speargun trigger, center-right is a compass, further right is the.. ahem.. control reticule, tucked beneath the swim button. Top-right you see the UI toggle and then your score. Now, in a game where you swim with a spear gun, there should be no surprise you catch fish. Of course, this ends up being like a low-tech alien abduction to them as they are speared and wriggle around until you reel them in. The game process goes like this.

Just snorkeling here. Nothing to see.

You start in a third-person view. Pressing swim will make you move forward while you control with the reticule, roving for prey. Once you find a fish you want to go after, hit the dive button and slide down a little on the reticule. Maneuver yourself until you are heading toward a fish. As soon as you dive, a timer will come up on the screen, starting at the max for lung capacity. As you hunt your prey, the timer ticks down. If you let it tick out, you might black out before you can resurface, which freezes the game for a full minute, but it is tough to have it happen if you pay attention.

Once you start closing in on your prey, you will eventually see an exclamation point appear over their head. Hit the trigger! If you hit, you enter a battle-mode of sorts. During this mode, you have to hold the reel button, which replaces the trigger after firing a spear, while the fish is stationary. It will still be wriggling to get free, but it won’t be swimming around. If you reel in while it is stationary, its life (a red bar) goes down. If you reel in while the fish is swimming, your line’s strength (a blue bar) goes down. If your line loses strength, you lose the fish. Catch the fish and it adds to your score, and every 5 fish you’ll gain a level. Each level will grant you one more second of lung capacity and you will also gain better gear!

Now gear has some stats of its own. These are swim speed, gun strength, gun reach and … shaft speed. They are all.. pretty self-explanatory. Except that last one. I am sure it makes sense and I am sure it’s relevant. I have no idea what it does besides make me giggle incessantly. It doesn’t help that I leveled up a bit and got Depth Max brand gear which has a high shaft speed and makes my gun stronger and shoot further. I am so sorry it’s come to this. Ok, let me get control of myself.

The art of this game is fantastic. Each fishing area has its own challenges from increased depth to sharks. I tried hunting the sharks, but their only real function is pissing you off, since they can eat the fish off your lines. Fuckers. Lucky this isn’t FarCry3. I would C4 your ass in a heartbeat… But each area is unique and has a sort of excitement, like you’ve found another great hunting spot. The music is a sort of asian-keyboard reggae. It is relaxing and enjoyable, but it’s odd. Just listen to it, ok? This game is worth its 1.99$ price, and if you like those outdoorsman games by Cabelas etc., you should try this out for a fresh new take. I have never played a firt-person fishing game, but it is really fun. I just hope this doesn’t get bought out by EASports or something. They would fuck it all the hell up. Of course, this might be cool on a Wii U or something. The developer has a Facebook page here and a website, with free demo, here.

Ludum Dare, Indie Dev Explosion!

Posted on August 27, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Although I had a hard time finding anything about it on the Ludum Dare site itself, I have come to understand that the primary Ludum Dare competition occurs more than once a year: the current version being LD48. Founded in 2002, Ludum is a competition that focuses on rapid game development, and it translates from latin as “The Game Giving”. Other translators state “Providing patronage to a public duel” is a potential translation, but I don’t see anything but Game Devs here, so we’re going with that first one.

On the Ludum Dare website, it is said that “for many people, it can be difficult to find or make the time to create a game or prototype for yourself. We’re here to be your excuse.” And that is awesome, considering it also says they are “keeping things extra indie.” Honestly, they had me at hello, but extra indie? Exemplary. So LD serves as the proverbial grease in the joints of a game developer’s mind, giving them a reason to just create what they can and throw it into the mix, just to see what they can come up with. This is noteworthy, and it serves to challenge people to make something quickly; this most recent run of the competition taking place August 22nd – 25th. With only 3 fucking days to create a coherent and playable game, that is one hell of a challenge. And no one but gamedevs would be crazy enough to select Challenge: Accepted.

Ludum Dare 21

So what happens when they get more than they expected? Pictured above you will see the games of LD21, during which Ludum Dare received 599 titles, pictured above. Now, think about that for a minute. Each of these games provide experiences that run from a couple minutes all the way up to some clever little 10 minute engagements, depending on how good you are at the game. Each title is played by the judges and the best ones are selected as the winners. So who are these judges? In an interview with the man behind the competition, Mike Kasprzak, he told me just how LD works.

We assign everyone a random subset of all games to judge. If you play a few dozen, a few dozen will play your game. The system is built to reward people that play games with attention by others that play games. As far as scores are concerned, once we have a couple dozen, it’s enough to estimate what the games average score will be. So we deal with the large quantity of games by not playing them all, but by playing some.

So the people judging the games are also people who submitted games, then the community votes up its favorites. This is a democratic process that would make the ancient Greeks and the Founding Fathers (US) wipe a tear of pride from their eyes. Of course, with every competition, there is a victor. Competitions reward winners in a variety of ways. So how does Ludum Dare reward its winners?

Wait… what?!

So wait wait wait.. You’re fucking telling me that the winners don’t get more than a hi-five and handshake?! Yep, that is what the man said. To give you an idea, some of these Indie Developers willingly commit hours to their games, eschewing sleep as long as possible just to get in the next couple lines of code. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying this is unfair. Devs submitting to LD know what they are up against and the rewards, and they do it regardless. And Ludum Dare grants these people a way for their work to be seen and their voices to be heard, which makes it all the more awe-inspiring that, come LD season, Twitter is flooded with bittersweet tweets from dedicated game devs. What Ludum Dare encourages is nothing short of remarkable.

If I wanted to submit to Ludum Dare, when would I do it? And how many submissions does Ludum typically get? Initially, Mr. Kasprzak told me they were getting just more than 100 submissions per event. Now? Well…

I heard a sound like a thousand shits being shat, and then… silence.

Of course, there are probably other contributing reasons.

Of course, I suggest that there are more reasons than just the number of events. Even if the same people were submitting for every event, if there were only 200 people in the first event, that would be 400 altogether. This year so far there have been about 2500 submissions per event. There is no expletive I can issues that adequately summarizes this. I would suggest that the increase of submissions is attributable to the fact that Indie Developers aren’t just on the rise, they are exploding exponentially. And I don’t mean spontaneously combusting, either, I mean their numbers are increasing at a rate comparable to an epidemic. Then again, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, and Mr. Kasprzak suggested his thoughts.

Like what? Like Unity 3D or Unity Marketplace or.. Yea, the list goes on like this for some time…

So this is clear evidence that gaming is starting to migrate away from the major industry and into smaller dev shops where real magic can happen. Away from AAA gaming and publishers, you have independent companies, which can be only a few people or fifty talented artists, which are developing games on their terms incorporating elements that they want. With no one else looking over their shoulder, they have the freedom and the drive to make the best games they can. That might slow down individual games; but considering the situation altogether, with so many indiedevs there are games constantly coming out. And they aren’t just crappy little games, either. Many of them are just as exciting as major industry games, if not more so.

So what are some games from Ludum Dare? I have played a few of them myself, and I have to say, they vary from one developer to the next so widely that I cannot comprehend having to choose the best one. But here are a few of them.

Fuel Runner

by Robot Friend Games

Casual bike ride with radioactive materials on my back

Fuel Runner is a game with a loud color palette and no sound. You start off planetside as a spacesuit clad bike-rider that jumps from one platform to the next. Don’t fall too far, or you’ll explode. Luckily you start from your highest-cleared platform. It is pretty easy, too, at least until you get into space. Then shit goes nuts.

Falling up.. AAAAAHHHH!!

Once you get outside the atmosphere, the platforms you are on become barriers of instant death that you soar past, floating away into the abyss. I haven’t made it to the end yet, but I cannot imagine this having a happy ending. Lots of fun, though! Lovely art, too!

The Static Speaks

by idovingx

This game is more of an interpretive piece. My young brother likes this band called 65 Days of Static. I asked him where the weird-ass name comes from, and he responded thusly:

“In the 1960’s the Soviets did this study where they tested the effects of white noise on participants. Unanimously, people started losing their grip on reality and began hearing and seeing things in the static that wasn’t there. The conclusion is that, given totally chaos the human brain tries so hard to recognize a pattern, that it starts to create one where there is nothing.”

– Brother Jeremiah on 65 Days of Static

Now, The Static Speaks takes on a creepy aspect that makes me wonder where this is going. This game takes the form of a first-person adventure game. It is short and creepy with vaguely depressing titles in a twitchy font. You wake up from a weird dream, watch static on the TV, a door appears, you die (?) in a bathtub and the house flies apart. Then it cuts directly to you hovering in space surrounded by tv’s broadcasting static with a weird blob above you. Select a tv and it’s over. I ended this, said “WTF?” tried it again, and realized I had done it right.

Watch the tv closely when you play…

Hip Hop Planet

by SnoutUp

Snout up has shown a love for the use of vector graphics, and has made some downloadable apps, as well. His Ludum Dare entry is a fun little arcade game featuring a spunky little character that jumps between planets collecting diamonds. Hit the up button once to jump, twice to jet-pack. Let and right moves you around a planet and spacebar lets you change the rotation of the planets. Avoiding obstacles, you have to collect all the diamonds you can! When you jump to another planet, the background changes to resemble your current planet! Get your best time, or just beat this challenging little play! It is a fun and addictive little game that reminds me of some fun times with gaming, down to the sounds it chose. Add in a jazzy, 16-bit hip hop theme and I would pay some money for this!

On this planet, every week is shark week!

There are so many talented devs submitting games to this competition, it would be a crime for you not to go there yourself and see what they have to offer! The timer says there are 19 days left to try them out, so get on over there! Of course, Ludum Dare doesn’t exactly make a lot of money, and is sustained by the contributions of its supporters! Please get on over there and make a contribution if you can! Ludum Dare helps developers to explore creative concepts that they might otherwise never get the chance to explore, so whatever you can contribute would be greatly appreciated by the entire Indie Gaming community. If you can make a contribution, tell them the Crotchety Old Gamer sent you!

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.

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.

Double-Up Discussion: Freaky Dragon, Shurican

Posted on August 16, 2014 by thre3zekiel

This title, by Freakout Games, is more than a bit unhinged. First off, the dragon looks like Barney raped Spyro, and it can barely stay aloft with those tiny wings. You tap the screen to fly, so it’s another flappy-style game. Its art is rather nice and the music is fun, considering it is only one track, but there is still much that will anger you about the game. The most entertaining feature of the game is the least utilized: if you play a dragon, even a pink polka-dotted purple dragon, you’ll generally want to breathe some fire. Freaky Dragon opts out of this, making you spent the better amount of time dodging obstacles. After a solid couple hours on this game, I didn’t use my fire balls once. Next, in-app purchases. I cannot emphasize how much I hate this standard of the mobile gaming industry. Every time you die, the game suggests you might revive the dragon and continue if you have eggs, pictured above. Not enough eggs? Buy some with real money! Thanks, but no thanks. If I play this game anymore I might just end up snapping my phone in half. This game is free on Google Play.

Certainly the better of today’s games, Shurican is another flappy-style game starring a ninja. Good start. Every time you tap the jump button, he slashes. Double jump and he throws a Shuriken. Hold your finger a second and release for a charged slash. There are two play modes in this game. Challenge, which takes place on the same board, and seems implied to be finite. You are scored by percentage completed. To date, I have gotten 44.15% completion. I have never made it to the end, but the other game mode is called endless. This one is point scored and starts a new level every time. The points are gained each second you survive and from killing enemies. My best score is 216 points. Both modes pit send the ninja down a constantly scrolling corridor of death, dodging buzzsaws and slashing at demons. It is challenging and fun, refusing to take itself seriously.

The art comes from simple vector graphics and it’s bloody as hell: your ninja spews blood everywhere and explodes upon death like a robot. The music goes with everything else in this game: heavy techno-rock that says “ninjas, demons, explosions… why not?” There are small ads that display across the top of the screen when you die, but they don’t slap you in the face and it is difficult to accidentally hit them. Enjoyable, well-made app that is considerate of its players. Add to that it is free on Google Play, and I would recommend this to mobile game fans.

Shadow Warrior, Better the Second Time

Posted on August 12, 2014 by thre3zekiel

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

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

Huh, they misspelled “POWAAH!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obligatory scenic screenshot

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

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

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

Posted on August 10, 2014 by thre3zekiel

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

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

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

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

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

Blizzard called, they want their orc barracks back.

Blizzard called, they want their mercenary camp back

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

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

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

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

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

The Forest, Sandboxing With Naked Cannibals

Posted on August 7, 2014 by thre3zekiel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reus, Sandbox of Giants!

Posted on August 6, 2014 by thre3zekiel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greedy little bastards…

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

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

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The Crotchety Old Gamer

An irate gamer's blog

Tag Archives: game reviews

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Reus, Sandbox of Giants!

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