Tag Archives: game reviews

Hard Rest: Blood, Fire, Twisted Metal

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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This is not something that should be stated lightly, so I understand to what I am committing myself.  This is the best game ever made.  It is at least the best game I have played since Half-Life 2, and almost certainly before it.  People need to know about it, and moreover, why I feel I can say that.

Take Bladerunner, add Half-Life 2, toss in a dash of Mass Effect and drop of Bioshock, and you are only part of the way there.  First, the game takes place in the cyberpunk city of Bezoar where the people live in fear of robots lurking just outside their walls.  These robots are sentient AIs that have a profound disdain for anything squishy and full of blood.  The only other people you see in this game, aside from a diabolical villains, are civilians getting ripped apart and thrown through the air.  When the machines invade the city, your character is sitting at a nondescript, roadside drinking stand sucking down some strong drinks.  It rains all the time in Bezoar, which is in Germany, and the streets are filled with explosive objects and devices.  Bezoar is apparently in Germany, but I thought the climate there was more akin to Pennsylvania’s.  You work for ‘THE’ corporation, though they never really say which one.  Seems as important as the name of the numerous slaughtered civilians, though.  You are a CLN Officer and you exist to protect the people of Bezoar, but mostly to destroy anything threatening them.  Now, I might add here that there is some seriously fucking dark snippets of humor to be had if you look for it.  There are sales consoles that try to sell you things and plead like a jilted ex-girlfriend about ‘how good you could have had it’ when you walk away.  They vend things like clones that will work for you until you want to go back to your job.  Then they will have the clone eradicated for you when you come back.  I feel bad for the cl0ne right before bursting into laughter at the thought of a being created to work for me, whose sole existence is filled with droll work that I don’t want to do and is then released of its duty only in its own summary execution.  Dark. Terrible. Unethical. Hilarious.

Now, the fun doesn’t even start there, technically.  The fun starts with the weaponry.  Imagine you are a GameDev and you want to put in an ass-load of weapons to use. Your team creates an array of cool guns, but you can only get, maybe, 10 of them in there. Not to mention, there is the frustration of having to switch between all those fucking things.  What did they do for the weapons? They took them and sorted them into two groups: matter weapons and energy weapons. As a result, you technically only carry two “guns”, but each gun morphs into five separate fire modes.  Watching the guns warp from rifle to shotgun to grenade launcher to RPG is a lot of fun, too.  Honestly, the graphics are very pretty, so you won’t be at a lack of eye candy.  So, you only have to worry about collecting 2 ammo types: blue and red. Blue for energy, red for mass.  Now, that’s not all, folks.  Getting bored with all the bassline weapons?  Go to an Upgrade Terminal and Spec those babies out! With some money system called NANO you are able to upgrade, no clue what it stands for other than making my shit cooler. You can get guidance mode for the RPG, x-ray view for the Railgun (which shoots through cover), make your rilfe fire more ammo etc.  There are 3 upgrades per weapon.  I loved the gravity field for the Grenade Launcher.  Sometimes you can suck two guys together and they smash into one another and explode.  AH! Fucking fun.

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Yo, dog. I heard you liked lasers..

Ok, so, something that bears noting.  See the GUI? Yea, that circular thing in the lower left-hand screen.  That is it.  No unnecessary visual clutter through the screen.  Just that sleek little reticule down there.  Occasionally, a face might appear telling you something about where to go or who to kill, and they’ll appear as holographic chat boxes. But it’s mostly just this.  The rest of the screen is used for watching your many enemies swarm at you by the thousands. And boy do they swarm!

The enemies come at you hard and fast.  The little fuckers have sawblades on the front of them or little helicopter bots and look like something a preschooler cobbled together.  Either that or they are exploding little balls.  They come at you in goddamn droves of whirring, clinking jumping metallic rage.  And they dodge your shots, too!  And even from the get-go they are pouring out of ventilation shafts.  Hitting these suckers with the shotgun induces an intoxicating bloodlust, too, where you storm around blasting through enemies with force.  But the bigger guys take serious firepower, and the mortar and the grenade launcher are your bestfriends for quite a while here.  The upgrade for the mortar makes a field surround anything caught in it, so you can launch electrifying shock ammo and singe their shoddy paint-jobs right off.  Or hit them with the aforementioned gravity shot and the large charging enemies are held in place as you launch round after round at them.  Later on you fight cops in flying cars that look almost spot on for Deckard’s squad car.  They can be a bitch to fight as they also come in swarms, but they are SO MUCH FUN to blow up.  There is even an achievement for blowing them up. There are many other types of bots to battle and they explode themselves sending scrap and screws ricocheting off of surface.  My best moment was when I launched a rocket (just after getting the RPG) into a crowd of the little guys down a narrow catwalk.  The whole group exploded and one came sliding out and stopped at my feet, dilapidated, then proceeded to explode.  I was in love.  Bosses in this are beastly, too, typically towering over you and reaching for you like a tiny, sociopathic CLN doll.

He followed me home, mom! Can I keep it?

He followed me home, mom! Can I keep it?

Also, explosions.  You will blow up more enemies than you will ever realize and bathe in the shower of their remains.  Cars, tanks, electronic fistures, lights, signs, cameras.. I mean, even things that shouldn’t be blown up were automated so you could blow them up.  Typically, enemies near explosions fucking die ( duh ) so there is usually never a short supply of shit to destroy. After periods of explosive dry spells, however, they typically make it up by filling a room with explosive objects and filling it with tiny, murderous robots.  These Devs must be spectacular lovers, cause they know how to give you just what you were thinking you wanted.  After the original game itself there are also MORE types of explosives added to give you a little diversity, too!

Now, the main character talks, so if you were expecting a silent-hero that you could fantasize about being, wake the fuck up, assholes!  Wake up and smell the cinders.  I love his dialogue because it reminds me of my all-time favorite character, Garrett from the ORIGINAL Thief series, not that watered-down Stephen-Russell-wannabe cocksucker they put in that monstrous pile of horseshit that came out a couple months or whatever ago.  I mean the crotchety, dry, sarcastic, antisocial prick that avoids the Keepers and all responsibility as best as humanly fucking possible. A guy just trying to pay his rent.  Well, Major Fletcher is a guy just trying to get back to his hard liquor.  The artistic cut scenes portray this well, too.  Each loading screen plays out across an animated comic strip that tells what is going on. Sure, the story is pretty piecemeal and at times a little uncertain, but Half-Life 2 made you have to read tiny scraps of paper on a board in a cluttered lab in order to ascertain a fucking inkling of what Gordon’s motivation for the wholesale slaughter of asthmatic aliens actually was.  For all we know, they might have actually been trying to save us from a polluted atmosphere and unlivable conditions. Either way, this main character talks during the game and gets you thinking that maybe you are just another voice in his head, which is a possibility since he straight up downloads people to his brain.  No big deal.

All told, this game is an adrenaline thrill ride that had me shouting, panting and wiping the sweat from my eyes.  I have never screamed fuck as much as when I was playing this game, but it drew me in. Deep.  It places a gun in your hand and points you at a seemingly endless stream of mechanical monstrosities.  Granted, you do kill flying cop cars at some points, but you never see the cops leading you to assume that they could just be symbols of authority with mechanized voices.  The lack of flesh in the rubble supports this theory.  At the start menu I found myself debating whether or not I should play since this game startles the fuck out of you and makes you feel the effort of blasting through a horde of terror-bots.  And at the conclusion of each playthrough, you stand victorious over the demolished remains of your foes, wiping a gritty mixture of their grease and your blood from your unshaven face.  Metacritic on Steam gave this game a 73 out of 100 for this title. I bought it thinking it would be some ‘ok’ level meh-coaster I would eventually wade through.  You assholes on the Metacritic are bastards who want all fucking FPS’s to be Call of Cuty or Halo.  You can all eat shit and die in a gutter.

There is always the one fucking thing that chaps my ass about a game, and this piece of gaming greatness is no exception. So what made it that much easier to mash robots into silly putty? Fletcher. Major Fucking Fletcher.  Whose goddamn idea was it to name this guy after Jim Carrey in Liar Liar?!  All I could think about was that guy with an RPG each time the corporate nanny-lady shouted at me.  I know, Fletcher is the last name, Fletcher Reed was the character in the movie. Well it all ends up being about the fucking same Mr. Logical Shitstain!  You’re running around with some big-brother-esque nanny lady in your ear screaming Fletcher stop talking to yourself!  Fletcher go kill the mad scientist!  Fletcher go order us take out! I mean, the least satisfying thing about this is that I don’t get to put my boot down her throat, but I fucking suppose they had to slide this one past some level of societal decency.  Unlike good ole’ Sin back in the day. I’ll just chuckle to myself psychotically now. Heh heh heh…

Personally, I preferred the red gun. More explosives.

Personally, I preferred the red gun. More explosives.

Story about my Uncle, Physics was never this fun

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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A Story about my Uncle is the story about how your uncle transforms you into a technological spiderman/rocket knight hybrid. But after playing this game for two and a half days, I realize that this was probably meant to be a little longer.  Exhilarating gameplay, story-driven exploration and a tender touch are what makes this game unique.  So that works to force you through the game faster than you might expect.  But what makes it fun it its blatant disregard for the safety of children and a solid understanding and complete dismissal of physics.  It almost feels like this game was made to showcase the physics engine.  Either way,  Newtown’s laws of Motion shall claim their vengeance!

So you start this game and you hear a father putting his daughter to bed with a story.  She won’t go to freaking sleep, so we have to play the game to make her.  Whatever.  Turns out that the father is your character and you are playing as his former childhood self.  You go to his uncle’s house only to find it empty.  As you look around, he tells his daughter about all the things he remembers that day.  Looking at maps, postcards, exploration suit that lets you fly through the air like a genie, teleportation pad that you use to travel to another world.  You know.  The usual.

Then you flip a switch and travel to a world with floating platforms everywhere.  After using your grappling hook to navigate some simple platforms, you get another crystal core for your suit and shit gets tougher.  You also see these frog people, which is cool, but they are really just a part of the scenery.  You meet one named Maddie, and she spends a lot of the game on your back, keeping you company, making side comments and occasionally taunting you.  My character says he wants to be careful not to bump her head, but I would be struggling not to whack her head on a rock purposely.  It’s ok, though, mostly she helps you keep from feeling like you’re playing Portal again.  Solitary, silent protagonist taunted and forced through a treacherous terrain.  Here, you are a winsome protagonist listening to the discussion between a father and daughter with frequent input form your travelling partner.  There is the matter of a couple turns of phrase that come out a little awkward, but those are so minuscule I doubt anyone but me will even notice that shit.

Eventually Maddie leaves you, and I have to admit that I missed her toward the end.  The most of this game is the nail-biting manner in which you travel from one point to another.  I am not a puzzle-game guy, but this was fun as shit.  Sometimes you can choose any of a number ways to travel toward your destination.  There are also little machines that you find, and you take their readouts, but nothing much is mentioned about them toward the end.  They aren’t easy to find, but getting to them is their own reward.  I couldn’t help but feeling a bit of excitement every time I landed with a satisfying crunch.  And with all the hang time you get while swinging by a glowing thread of energy, you sure have plenty of time to weigh the choices in your life that led you here.

You really have time to think while you pray you have the momentum to reach that platform...

You really have time to wonder if you have momentum to reach that platform while soaring through the air at ass-chapping speeds…

Another thing about this game is that you get a remarkable amount of upgrades.  Once you get the rocket boots, you are pretty much all set, though.  And another thing that this game seems to excel at is giving you awesome powers, allowing you to get used to them and then throwing insane obstacles at you.  O, you just got a handle on that grappling hook?  Good, here is a series of orbiting flying rocks to navigate!  You just got that long jump?  Ok, use your tractor beam to catch a rock at the end of your reach mid air after performing a long jump!  I almost shit myself a million times, but death in this game is more a relief from the white-knuckle feeling of flying through the air.  It’s not nearly as jarring as you expect falling from soaring heights into misty and uncertain depths should be.  That is good too, cause you’ll probably fall a few times.  That made it easy for me to feel like I wasn’t failing so much as learning what I needed to continue.  The game doesn’t make you feel like an asshole.  It just picks you up, dusts you off and says, that’s ok, we’re just having fun.  Not quite art, but definitely a cut above your standard game.

So what bothers me so much about this game? The FEELINGS!  I mean, it’s sooooo cute!  You’re a kid looking for his uncle!  Adorable!  Even though the guy made a suit for you, something that places you in a remarkable amount of danger. Blatant disregard for your safety!  And then!  O, the way you let Maddie go off on her own?  And the ending? AH!  Fuck you Gone North Games!  Fuck you for making me… feel for the characters.  O, well.  Time to go back to the standard thoughtless murder of hordes of flat enemies that is standard fare for games these days.

Zeno Clash, Untamed WTF

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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Zeno Clash is what would happen if Guillermo del Toro dropped acid and wrote a videogame storyline.  This title is full of weird enemies, surreal visuals, somewhat disjointed story elements and a world so bizarre it defies logical explanation.  I tried to explain the game itself to my wife and she said it defines “what the fuck”.  Yet, everything I just described is merely the flavor of the downright bad-ass, knuckle-cracking time this game provides.

First, your character.  A human named Ghat that starts of the game having savagely disfigured a creature known as father-mother, the leader of a clan in this town. The town of Halstedom.  Father-mother’s clan runs the city alongside the Northern Gate Gang.  It seems like this place is a veritable hive of scum and villainy as nearly everyone is part of either the clan or the gang, and there are very few laws being observed to the outside observer.  At least, few laws outside whatever father-mother says.  This leads one to submit to the supposition that father-mother (henceforth FM) is the monarch of the town, or at least influential enough to be a sort of leader of Halstedom.  Not to mention, FM has his entire clan convinced that he’s their father and mother.

Now, why Ghat has decided to take on FM is beyond me, especially considering that FM is a 10-foot-tall peacock creature.  Regardless, he escapes Halstedom with his hide intact where Deadra, crazy-horny heartthrob, follows him and helps him in his journey.. by being as flighty as possible.  And by horny I mean she has enormous fucking horns coming out the sides of her head. No, seriously.

The horns must be great for extra doughnut storage.

The horns must be great for extra doughnut storage.

Now, I am not saying I would hide my sexuality from her in abject fear of her getting naked, but those horns would definitely do a number on my bedside table.  I, mean, she probably never goes indoors, for that matter, but they do come off once, if memory serves.  This being the only point where she is shown laying down looking dreamily into Ghat’s eyes.  She is very naive considering she follows a known felon, who may have killed the only being either has ever known as father or mother,  into the wilderness and away from the safety of the only home she’s ever known.  To her credit, however, she is handy with her sawed-off shotgun and has some nice legs.

Despite the weak central female character, whose only function is to harass Ghat about FM’s secret and stand defensively out of the way of fights, the game still delivers in the place that truly matters.  Gameplay.  And here I introduce Metamoq and the Corwids.  The Corwids are these guys Ghat describes enigmatically as being not insane, but having chosen to be what they are.  So, they are fucking insane and do everything from eat people to bang their heads on trees.  There is one guy that walks in a straight line and refuses to let anyone change his course.  You find him later dead when he met the only nemesis a nutcase wearing giant iron boots has: a tree.  And he runs into a fucking tree in a desert after making his way OUT OF A GODDAMN FOREST! Sorry.  That is in no way important to the plot, but it was one of many WTF moments in this game.  These not-crazy, but actually fucking insane, mask-wearing guys have some members that border on intelligent.  Ghat was a Corwid for a while, which is how he knows so fucking much about them.  Since each of them seems to really only do one thing, I am going to say Ghat’s “thing” was beating the fuck out of bitches with his bare hands.  He never says what inspired this ascetic lifestyle either, nor what he did before that.  At some point he meets Metamoq, a growly-voiced, mask-wearing, sentient booger that teaches Ghat how to beat people with his fists.

And beat people he does.  This brings me to the best part of the game, its combat.  You can punch and kick people.  You can get super hard wind-up punches in.  You can dodge and strike ’em in the ribs.  You can even knee ’em in the face.  Much fun to be had.  You might expect a fighting game made with the source engine to be less maneuverable , or maybe generally difficult.  Not so, and the first-person fighting makes things challenging in a way that doesn’t make it less enjoyable.  Although this game holds a number of features reminiscent of older-generation fighting games like Double Dragon (ie slide-in versus screens and free-style fights and health bars), it fails to devolve into the button-mashing frenzy of those older games.  And you can’t just use the “powerful attack” all the time since stronger enemies will just dodge that slow-ass punch.  But timed well and as part of a combo, those attacks become devastating cards in a deck of whoop-ass.  I discussed this with my brother, The Game Pirate and he said it reminded him of a game we played on the Nintendo 64 called Hybrid Heaven, and equally WTF-inducing fighting game.  But where Hybrid Heaven focused on using the WWF’s finest spine-splintering attacks, Zeno Clash focuses more on its use of boxing-type moves.  When you get tired of fisting everyone in sight, you can pick up any of a number of imaginatively fucking-weird guns.  They are slow to reload and have shitty rate of fire, but this is a brawler at its heart, and even grenades are tough to use against enemies who do the logical fucking thing and run away.  They also tend to hide if you have a gun and favor moving through cover to get to your position, rather than making it nice and easy by running across the giant open field to get in fist-range.  Some of the boss fights All of the boss fights are weird, and most of this game will leave you scratching your head.  But don’t let that stop you because it damn well might.

So at some point you wander through a dark wasteland on the other side of a desert and find this guy named Golem waiting for you.  He calls you and Deadra by name and says he was left by a long-dead race of wise people.  Why everyone always thinks the “long-dead race of ancients who are wiser than us” thing makes sense I will never know. But if they were all that fucking wise, why are they ALL FUCKING DEAD?! Anyway, this guy has a human torso and a head, arms and feet made of blue playdough.  He follows you around and even helps you kill a blind assassin, who uses squirrels with parachutes and powder keg backpacks to kill you.  Then at some point he sits down and starts working on a fucking Rubick’s cube.

Big, strong AND he maintains his mental acuity

Big, strong AND he maintains his mental acuity

You bring him with you back to Halstedom and after finishing off FM, he reveals the secret FM has that Ghat is too much of a pussy to tell.  Y’know, that the father-mother guy everyone is defending steals babies from their beds and raises them as his own. Also, he’s a guy.  And he replaces the babies with baby pigs.  You even run into a woman that seems perfectly happy with a new baby pig, too.  Just bringing up baby Peter, or whatever.  Once FM lays dying, the big blue guy pulls out his Rubick’s cube and it starts to glow.  He says that he can help bring peace by bringing everyone in as part of a new connection that can never be broken.  Screen zooms out, you see this weird guy with a telescope standing next to a completed Rubick’s cube and everything ends.

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Shiny naked metallic dude, just looking at everyone else with a telescope like he has nothing to hide. Whatever, not the weirdest shit in the game so far.

Now, this guy looks remarkably like one of those metallic shadow zombies that infested the wasteland where you find Golem.  So part of me thinks his idea of peace is quite a bit more morose and sad than his words imply.  All that just makes me want to play the sequel even more.  Just bought it and set it to download.  No game has had me as excited to play as Zeno Clash has since Half-life 2, and perhaps Hard Reset, so hopefully the sequel upholds all these points while gracefully embellishing upon them and simultaneously polishing its rough-points.

So, given everything about this game and how much fun it is, what bothers me the most about it?  I have never said ‘what the fuck’ more times in more ways and for more reasons than I did while playing this game.  I mean, the blind assassin first shows up and fights you from atop the head of this floppy elephant/brontosaurus.

Is it just me, or does that thing have hairy testicle sacs hanging from various spots on its face?

Is it just me, or does that thing have hairy testicle sacs hanging from various spots on its face?

The whole father-mother thing.  Baby thievery being the basis for an entire city!  Using squirrels as purveyors of fiery death!  Giant horn-headed chick! Mostly-naked masked men dancing in the woods!  There is a point where a Corwid spins in circles and plays music while hopping on one leg!  Grenades are human skulls hollowed out and filled with explosives!  The only non-caveman humans in the game seem to be wearing rice paddy hats for no reason! Did I mention this game was made by a bunch of Chileans?  That rifle’s sight up there is a piece of wire! Regular-sized crabs spit vomitous goo!  The giant chicken-dragon also vomit green goo!  You can get a double-slingshot-crossbow as a ranged weapon!  The ammo for said crossbow uses rocks that have faces!  The faces have noserings where the trigger mechanism attaches!  Oh, that rifle is reloaded by inserting a long rod with an orange-hot end into a metal loop on the back of the chamber and shutting a little door with it!  This game deserves a what the fuck of the year award for the year 2009, when it was released.  Seriously.  I don’t think I will ever say what the fuck as many times in a row ever again.  Oh, right there’s a sequel.  The thing is, even this element of the game gives it a unique-ness that really cannot be matched.  You could say that anything this bizarre couldn’t be called ‘art’ or ‘artistic’, and it doesn’t really have a deep moral meaning outside of ‘beat up baby stealing assholes with your bear hands’.  But if you think bizarre cannot be artistic, just look at anything by Salvador Dahli.  How about all that crazy, though awesome, music out of the 1970’s?  (Pink Floydd, Led Zepplin, Jimmi Hendrix et al)  This game’s unique approach and winning gameplay are guaranteed to lock you in and wtf you until the games conclusion.  Which makes no more sense than nearly anything else about it. Surrealist art. Period.

Spacebase DF-9, Everyone dies the first time

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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Or at least in mine they did.  Granted that was 2 or 3 alpha patches ago, but still, it is pretty fucking likely.  The concept is this: you build a spacebase.  To start you pick a sector of a spiral galaxy, like our own, and launch a pod out there.  And when I say ‘pick a sector’, I mean it.  You have this yellow glowie cross-hair that you guide along the picture of a galaxy as the readout relays four points of information: Stellar density, which controls how much matter is present at the game start and how often meteors hit your base, Warpgate Proximity, which dictates how often you get visitors to your base, Threat Level, which is how likely you are to get boarded by pirates and Magnetic Interference, which is how often derelict ships will randomly spawn outside your base.  I always tend to choose a sector with a decently neutral standing in all four, so I can get a well-rounded Spacebase experience.

Now, I say you’ll probably die the first time, and it isn’t my lack of faith in you.  But the help prompts that teach you what to do take a second or two to read and there are a few of them.  By the time you realize you can hit the spacebar to pause it and still dictate orders, there is a good chance 5 of the 8 minutes of starting air in your citizens’ space suits will have run out as your citizens marvel at the star-strewn void.  From there it is a trainwreck on a timer as you struggle to understand and then implement what you need to do to actually get a jump on things.  Like the developers were like, “Heh heh, wait two prompts before mentioning the air supply” so they could imagine you going “Oh, fuck, we need to breate!” and building a slapdash airlock with duct tape.  My first time I was enjoying the setup of corridors between rooms before everyone suffocated.  Then I said, O! I can make oxygen recyclers!  Now worries, though, it doesn’t take away from all the fun of it!  Just takes you out of the game a second so you can admire the amazingly sarcastic humour of the developers as the “Spaceface” logs the citizens issue range from whimsical to darkly hilarious while their faces turn blue.  I get the feeling that this game was made by Brits, cause the witty sarcasm comes into my head in an english accent. Just seems to fit.  Also, don’t forget, that the little box you guys were shipped out to the ass-end of the black in can be torn apart so you can build a closet.

Once you get your guys doing push-ups in a fresh, new artificial environment, however, you’ll see just how important that little bit of matter really is.  I mean, if you picked anything below neutral for Stellar Density your miners have to float like turd nuggets across a toilet bowl to get to the nearest asteroid.  Quite entertaining.  So you get your mass factory up and running, miners mine, security patrols, builders build and you still have aimless morons doing calisthenics in the life support room.  Well, sleep turns out to be important.  Oh yea, there is food too, but early on you learn that you can put food replicators in every room and to get fresh food, you need like everything else you can possibly build beforehand.  So, you get to watch your matter bounce a little as people eat food made out of space rocks.  While this happens, your proximity to the nearest warpgate becomes apparent as every asshole within a hundred lightyears comes by to sample your nutrient paste. No, that is not a blowjob joke.  Also, derelicts appear out of nowhere that might harbor bugs, killbots raiders and god knows what else.  Hopefully you’ve recruited someone that can shoot a gun or it’s rock-paper-scissors among your dumbass security team as to who goes into the dark foreboding derelict vessel first. And, while you can see everything on your base, derelicts appear as black, sharp-edged geometric shapes that might actually be leftovers from videogames of the last century.  Should you have gotten a higher Stellar Density you’ll be thrilled with all the building materials, right up until you get bombarded by space debris every twenty minutes.  No worries, though.  When it happens a large target comes up a good time before the debris hits so you can get any citizens out of there.  Granted, if they’re sleeping in a room that gets hit, you get to watch them wake up halfway through the event in a room full of smoke and alarms… if you built the alarm panels.  Either way, they are going to be running out of there looking for the fire extinguishers… if you built them.  Heh heh heh…

Putting out the flames.. with LASERS!

Putting out the flames.. with LASERS!

 

No. The fire extinguishers don’t really fire lasers.  So the key here is anticipation.  If you get your food replicators in early, you can keep them alive long enough to get them a pub and real food.  But that leaves some other frustrating issues.  Remember, though, this game is in Alpha!  If you are easily frustrated by bugs, just walk on by the window.  One of the biggies I have noticed is that it takes a fucking army of technicians to keep everything in working order.  And even then someone might neglect to fix the airlock doors allowing everyone to get sucked into space and die.  And the technicians won’t really fix it that much.. like 5%!  And they still walk away from that shit for a cold beer like “Well I have done my civic fucking duty for the next twelve hours!  Nothing bad will come of this!”  They have tweaked it in some recent Patches, but it still feels like it takes half the fucking population to fix all the gear you have onboard.  Then there are the stupid ass ways people can die.  Like, are you pissed that you built a room shitty and just want to tweak it?  Better get everyone out first!  The builders will demolish a wall with a non-suited person in the room, sucking out all the air in the process.  Your citizens will run around like lunatics and either a) run out the door to safety or b) dive out the breach into the frigid embrace of their own demise. I mean, the bodies don’t even stick around so you can harvest matter!  Although, if your people die onboard (i.e. eaten by space bugs, killed by robots, build themselves into a room you forgot about and starve to death) their corpses just lay there as a grim reminder to all the others where it’s all headed. No morgue or medbay.  Just pile the empty husks of your departed friends in the middle of the room.  Your can’t even send them out the airlock.  Me I’d want to eat them since you can’t raise any kind of animals onboard. Protein intake would be relegated to plantlife and your own ejaculate.  But, hey, you can have a gym and videogames on the spacebase, so it’s not all bad!  This is a fantastic example of a pre-release bonanza.  The game is broken in ways. Many real and funny ways.  Sure, you cleverly developed this habitat specifically for your various human and alien citizens.  Now watch them all die in bizarre and horrible ways.

The thing that really really pisses me off about this game isn’t the glitches, though.  It’s the fucking weird ass naming conventions!  I mean this race of.. err.. space chickens…(?)… have names like Jeff 52938442. Yep. Luckily you can rename them, but when someone befriends the newly christened Jeffarious, it’ll say friends with Jeff 52938442. Yep.  Annoying.  There is also the matter of personalities.  Each citizen has their own individual personality! Yay! They’re special!  These personality traits dictate what job they will be happy in the longest.  And NO ONE is happy as either a builder or a miner long.  Regardless of how good they are at it.  It used to be that this would lead to depression and eventually someone would “forget they were out of air” outside and suffocate to death. Then their friends would fall into depression and stop eating, then die.  Eventually the whole base became a noncommittal, Sam Neil-less emo redux of Event Horizon.  But with a fix, now we can move on after a death and maybe only their friends will jump out the airlock doors.  Unfortunately, this means the state of the game as of this post boils down to a constant juggle where you want your people to be happy and do ‘fun’ jobs, but need to get shit done and have to force unskilled morons to do hard labor for a couple weeks at a time.

Overall, if you like simulations, laser battles and sci fi games, this is a great buy.  A little pricey for an alpha game at 25 dollars American on Steam, but it’s Steam.  If you are that stingy, just wait until it inevitably goes on sale.

Endless Legend, Strategic Addiction

Posted on by thre3zekiel

header I am currently in the midst of playing a game that is in Pre-release status on Steam.  It is called Endless Legend and is like  Civilization plus Lord of the Rings on LSD.  What do I mean? Well, my favorite race to play as is not the human race, called Vaulters in this series, but this race of Twi’lek/elf hybrids they are calling the Wildwalkers.  That is not what is bothering me, though.  I like this game so far.  It reminds me of Warlock : Master of the Arcane, but serious and sad in a way.  The visuals are bizarre, though, and lovers of traditional fantasy might quirk an eyebrow.  Resources to be found range from simple titanium to massive beak-shaped fungal grows that hum with music, spew steam and make a fabulous loaf of bread.  No, I’m fucking serious. Click for full size so you can read the description on the left.   mycordia

I guess stinky Cthulu bread would’ve been a weird name for a resource, but I’d be surprised if that stuff doesn’t give you explosive diarrhea that shrieks to the tune of Night on Bald Mountain.  Also populating this world are various minor races that have original names… but end up being.. o, I dunno, fucking Dwarfs wearing skull masks, mortally obese combinations of orcs and trolls, centaurs with weird-ass armor etc.  Now, non of this is really an issue.  Many games either create played-out experiences in “fresh, new” environments that end up feeling like something Gandalf was working on in his free time between helping dwarfs slay dragons and setting up the downfall of the Dark Lord.  But this takes some known fantasy conventions, warps them through a parallel dimension and places in your hands.  Granted, there are only four races as compared to Endless Space, a scifi game by the same people, which has 12 races… O, fuck me!  So.. the Vaulters exist in Endless Space, too.  Just so happens that they are originally from Auriga, the world in which you vie for dominance in Endless Legend. Fun.  Anyway, fun game, but my biggest problem.  I started the game and had 3 minor faction towns near mine.  That was ok.  I subjugated the fuckers and made them into my flying bitches.  Not to mention these Haunts, as they are called, are scary as fuck! So, I imagine my enemies screaming their guts out in a combination of horrific fear and profound pain as my haunts literally rip their guts out. Morbid, I know.

Aside from actually stunning visuals, this game has an AWESOME GUI.  Did I just type that? Whatever.  I am in love with the UI.  It is easy to pick up on and learn.. which is good since the game has no tutorial as of yet.  And besides that has intriguing story wisps, which is what I would call it.  There is no real solid story, aside from the brief description of your empire and the weird sermon of the world-generation screen.  The music is fantastic.  It is a lilting fluorescent play and sometimes I find myself just staring at the screen, listening.  Sometimes sad, often that fantasy fanfare badass-ness tears through.  Sometimes both.  It inspires a sort of nationalist fervor for my totally fictional fantasy empire.

My biggest issue is this problem I have with all games like this where I get to pick where I can start.  That is all the game comes to be about for me.  I deleted my first game cause I couldn’t restart and felt that one of my cities could have been better placed… three hexes over.  I have since restarted.. um.. forty-some-odd fucking times and counting.  I remember a time when I didn’t care where my towns were and resources didn’t matter.  I think that was in Civilization 4.  Another reason I adore games like Medieval Total War where the cities are where they are and do NOT fucking move!  But give me the choice to pick where I want the city I start from and it gets to a point eventually where I have to resign and abandon what original excitement I had for the game.  fml.  Eventually I give myself parameters.  “If I have three minor faction towns in my region this start, I can just play, I don’t fucking care if they are giant spider ladies or stupid hydras” and I have only had three in my starting region once.  When I first started this game.  I also tried “if I can research my first technology, which will inevitably be search party, in a relatively quick time, 3-4 turns, this start, then I will roll on with the game.”  But that shit is an even more slippery slope and I get to where I am micro-managing my resource starts every time.  Like I cannot place a city unless it has good science, food AND cash.  But usually if you get a good science start, your food will suffer, if you get a good financial start, your science or production might suffer.  I am convinced that majestic and beautiful as this game is, I might not be allowed to play it simply because I get WAY too focused on the “shit that shouldn’t matter so much” category.  The best part is that the game has a procedurally generated world. That is, every time it’s fucking different! Worst part is, I go to walk away from the game, right?  Play some New Vegas, maybe Hard Reset? NO!  My brain looks at those titles, recalls the awesome moments in each of those games and says “Yea, but can you mold your own empire of weird-ass fantasy people from the dirt up?” Fuck you brain, that is not the point.  So I begrudgingly click play on the same game again and fiddle with some starting elements to hopefully “recapture that first-time feel” and get a good start again.  Which doesn’t happen.  The only hope thereafter is to try to distract myself long enough from the starting elements with a sort of story about the beginning of our empire long enough to get me on track and building enough of an army to kill a buncha guys.  O, well, I mostly wrote this because it is a fun fucking game and I needed something to do to get me away from the game again before it eats up the rest of my night.