X-Tactics, Genre Fusion By AAA Veteran Devs

Posted on August 13, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Generally, I like to promote games from indies in need, but this is a story too deeply bizarre and intriguing to pass up. Veterans of the AAA gaming industry have broken off and teamed up to create X-tactics (pronounced Cross Tactics), a game that will link gaming across mobile and PC platforms for an exciting blend. Honestly, the anime art might not be my usual bag, but the concept behind this game is so vast and exciting that only the Japanese are crazy enough to do it right. Ingress better watch out, shit’s about to get real.

First things first, who the fuck are these people? Our developer in question, GAMKIN, is the product of minds from Square-Enix, Sega and Capcom. Those names drop harder than Skrillex does his bass, but still it stands. This is a game that will be rendered by veterans from three legendary household names in gaming. Fuck. These guys got together in late 2013 and they have spent most of their time in Japan away from the warm lights of our hemisphere. Mostly they’ve been working with interactive children’s television and collaborating with local game schools to cultivate next-gen game devs. So these guys are legit philanthropists with a serious mind for our future. Now they turn their thoughts again toward gaming, and this beast, which they’ve gotten fully funded with 33 days left on their Indie GoGo clock, threatens some formidable levels of awesome. For a little perspective, the campaign launched on the 8th. This means they achieved their primary goal in just 6 days.

GAMKIN has a lot on their plate when you look at their plans. The platforms they will be releasing on include iOS, Android, Kindle (2014), PC, Mac, Linux and Google Glass (2015), and none of those are stretch goals. The features of the game are complex and paint an exciting picture of gaming interaction. First off, this is another genre-fusing game. Its main components are tactics, fighting and urban exploration, with a 50%, 25% and 25% split, respectively. In their own words:

When we set out to make X-Tactics we didn’t want to make just another tactical game, nor attempt to create some sort of perfect tactical game. Instead our goal as developers here is to create something new. We combined equal parts of tactical gameplay of classics like that of Final Fantasy Tactics and Valkyrie Chronicles, together with fighting game mechanics and aesthetics, like those found in the Street Fighter series, to create a new gameplay experience, that we at least have not seen done before.

– GAMKIN on Xtactics, Indie Go Go campaign

Now this doesn’t explain the other 25% of the game, but let’s stop a minute what this means for PC gamers, as PC and MAC will be options for the game. The game itself will use turn-based tactics to create a high-speed gameplay environment that focuses on treacherous close-quarters combat, as you might find in an urban setting. Your heroes won’t be able to take ridiculous amounts of damage to the face, so you will need to make quick moves and calculated risks to achieve victory rapidly. Failing to do so finds you at the business end of some purple alien’s psychic attacks…

… and that suit screams “business time”

Each battles takes up the full screen, and each mission will be comprised of several battles. With one screen active fights will be tightly fought, so bonuses like flanking, support, destructible furnishings in the environment and traps will give you a serious edge and change the battle’s dynamics every time you play. X-Tactics will also utilize an initiative system, which they compare to that of Final Fantasy Tactics, but I will translate that to the American readers: shit’s going to battle like DnD. Initiative will be based on speed and turn order will be thereby determined. This will also open up the ability for seasoned players to fine-tune their initiative-order to get their team members to unleash dual combos and team combos. Not to mention, enemies will come in waves each battle, so you really have to get that ass in gear and wipe out your foes before more arrive!

What does this all mean for mobile users? Honestly, this part looks to be the most exciting. GAMKIN is going to use GPS information to create a variety of missions that will allow you to defend your neighborhood, school or workplace from outbreaks and other dangers. Each character you have will even have locale-based storylines that will be unlocked depending on where you are, so the exploration is highly encouraged. Where this game will really shine is how it will use the GPS of your device to investigate your surroundings, reveal hints and uncover treasures. This will open up to more modular features where users can organize their own location-based events and treasure-hunts with friends. In addition to all this, the game will be sensitive to the time of day, moon cycles and even weather to unlock events, initiate outbreaks and influence character abilities. Having the mobile functionality will also allow for 4-player co-op missions, so you don’t have to be anti-social with this title. And for those of you guys who shelled out the outrageous amounts of cash to join in on the googe Glass explorer program, the team will also have a companion app that will assist with the urban exploration part of the game. If that isn’t enough, they will also be updating weekly with episodic content for the game, including missions, items and new heroes all at no cost to players. If they throw in anything else, my brain might explode.

O, no, wait. That's just my aunt's baking.

O, no, wait. It’s just my neighbors’ cooking.

This is all well and good, but what is the fucking story here? Well, it takes place in a story like our own, if our world was controlled by top-secret government agencies and secret societies. It isn’t, right? You’ll control a motley crew of secret agents, treasure hunters and adventurers that are working to keep the truth in check. This means you are more “Men In Black”, less “defenders of the people”. I expect we’ll likely be killing those free-minded liberators of information, and that makes me laugh with dark, dark relish (enjoyment, not condiment). And the game is perfectly ok with this. In fact, the creators have said that it will use dark humor and anime punk art styles to put a new spin on conspiracy theories and urban legends!

And this got funded seemingly over night. I have known about this game for four days, and it has already gotten its Indie GoGo funding, and they are into stretch goals. Literally, they got a money enema. They have 6 hunters with 2 more listed for stretch goals, including some badass ninja panda and a thick list of additional concepts. Go and check it out for yourself, and wait with bated breath for the release! Congratulations to these guys for getting their funding goals! Now get in there and see if we can help them meet a few more stretch goals!

A bit of gameplay for ya ; )

How Elysian Shadows Team Plans to Revive The 2D RPG

Posted on August 10, 2014 by thre3zekiel

In 1998 I spent my time roaming the castles of Thief: The Dark Project and watching The Matrix, but I also have a strong memory of hearing about this mythical console set to ride an eastern wind to our shores. Its name was the Dreamcast and it was Sega’s final all-or-nothing bid to take the game console market by storm. It had numerous features that were well ahead of its time. Unfortunately, it was too far ahead, like trying to explain electricity to cavemen. By the time the Playstation 2, Xbox and Gamecube were released, it was just a shadow of a memory from a glossy magazine page. After the Dreamcast, Sega didn’t die, it just slid out of the limelight and settled for publishing games instead of consoles.

Many did not get to experience the Dreamcast, but for those that did, it was more than just a console, it was a lost piece of gaming history. Even today, developers are putting out titles for Sega’s last console, and the Elysian Shadows Team proudly stand among their number. Falco Girgis is the Engine Architect and Team lead, and he explained his motivation to me when I asked why develop a game for the Dreamcast in 2014?

” I found my way into the Dreamcast scene at around the age of 14. I had always loved video games, and I had done a little bit of programming, but when I discovered there was an entire community of crazy fuckers out there developing their own apps, emulators, and games for the console, and I had the opportunity to also do that without being part of a huge studio, I fell in love immediately. You have to realize this was before Steam, smart phones, or any kind of indie support on consoles. The Dreamcast allowed the average guy with a dream to develop for a platform. I taught myself to code just for that little white box. I fell in love with it, and what it represented as Sega’s last console.”

So, it was a console Falco loved immensely as a teenager and he learned to hone his craft on it. That just means it has a special sheen, right? It’s a dead console, though. So what? I was still wondering if there was even still an audience for the console as Mr. Girgis continued.

“It’s so underappreciated, and it innovated so much in gaming–poly counts in the millions, hardware support for bump mapping (PS2 can’t do that), memory cards with screens, online gaming. It also had an insane amount of AAA titles for a console with such a short lifespan. It really felt like Sega knew it was their last chance in the hardware market, and they poured their hearts and souls into it. For those of us who were able to experience the Dreamcast, it’s kind of an immortal thing, and it shows. Most of our money from our Kickstarter is from Dreamcast sales. There are still gamers everywhere who have not forgotten the Dream, and I have made it my personal quest to realize my childhood dream of releasing a game for the console.”

Honestly, I was taken aback. Jump over to their Kickstarter and tell me what you see. As of right now, I see 90,448$ with 760 backers. Doing the math, that would have to be about 119$ from each backer, and considering only 182 backers pledged 100$+, that means there is a formidable Dreamcast audience. Granted, some of those backers gave 1k$ – 5k$, so this game has a spirited group of supporters…

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

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

Everything I see on their page makes me flash back to the numerous hours I had when I discovered Chronotrigger, Secret of Mana 1 – 3 and (US) Final Fantasy 6 on emulators. There is a lot on that kickstarter page, but seeing everything made me wonder, what are they really trying to accomplish?

“Our overall goal is pretty multi-layered, haha! The biggest thing we wanted to achieve with Elysian Shadows itself was to reinvent the traditional 2D RPG formula in a manner that makes it new, exciting and relevant by today’s standards. We don’t want games like Chrono Trigger or Secret of Mana to be a thing of the past, and we certainly have not been too thrilled with the slow demise of the JRPG itself. Most of our team members can be quoted saying that they want to create the game they wanted to play most as a young gamer, including aspects of games that they grew up loving as children, and trying to use them to create a unique RPG experience that could appeal to an audience beyond just RPG players.”

“I have found myself,Falco, really wanting to make an emotional connection with our audience through ES. I want to create a game whose story and characters are relatable, and whose struggles are relevant to the lives of our players. I feel like this connection is really the ultimate goal of any form of art, and this is especially true for video games as they’re an aggregate of every other art form: writing, art, music, etc. I’m really an introverted guy who loves to play the outgoing extrovert, but I have very few close friends and I tend to not have much in common with most people. The older I get the more I feel like my contributions to ES artistically are some kind of attempt to connect with players and fans on a deeper level. I’m sure Freud would have a field day psychoanalyzing that.”

That really explains everything. Elysian Shadows is a collaborative piece of art interpreted through the hearts and souls of its creators. Each of them has something unique to put in and being indie developers lets them do this the best they can. And when you look at what it adds up to, you can’t help but feel the passion and love there. You can’t helped but be awed. Personally, I think it’s moving.

I love the shadows and how the game looks like pixelated life.

I really enjoyed taking in everything that Falco and the team were telling me, but what is the rest of the team like? What do they do and who are they?

“We have 7 team members total:

Falco Girgis

Falco Girgis is our engine and toolkit developer, and he’s also the one who developed the framework, allowing us to target so many platforms (including the Sega Dreamcast). He’s basically the team mad scientist. Falco loves the Zelda franchise, pretty much anything on the Dreamcast, and obviously all of the 16-bit JRPG classics.

Tyler Rogers

Tyler Rogers is the gameplay engineer, who basically takes the art, music, and levels then puts everything together into a cohesive gameplay experience. Tyler is very into Legends of Dragoon, Castlevania, and Final Fantasy tactics.

Daniel Tindall

Daniel Tindall is our web developer and level designer, and he has been very much a secret weapon for creating our Kickstarter and Steam pages. Dan’s favorite series is Metal Gear Solid.

Patryk Kowalick

Leandro Tokarevski

Patrick Kowalik and Leandro Tokarevski are our two pixel artists, both self-taught and classically trained traditional artists who decided to get into game development to broaden their horizons through pixel art.

Connor Linning

Connor Linning is our team rock star and audio composer, bringing with him a background in rock, metal, electronica, and survival horror music influencing his musical direction with Elysian Shadows. Connor is obsessed with the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series.

Eddie Ringle

Eddie Ringle is the team mobile developer, who has been the guy working on the OUYA, Droid, and even Google Glass builds of Elysian Shadows.

We aren’t just retro gamers either. Falco is totally into the new adventure-style games: Uncharted, Tomb Raider, The Last of Us. So good.”

It feels like I just put up a description of the A-Team, or something. Hopefully each of these pictures gives you an idea who we’re dealing with here. Each of these guys is immensely talented and putting everything they have to make something amazing. I hope Ebert is rolling in his grave because if this isn’t art, nothing is. Of course with the influence each of these games has had on the Team, what games have a direct influence on Elysian Shadows?

“There really is no single inspiration behind Elysian Shadows, and I kind of feel like that’s why it’s so special. It’s why our team is so emotionally invested in the project. We have all found our own ways to endow Elysian Shadows with a piece of what we like best in gaming, each of us growing up with different backgrounds and inspirations. Obviously games like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Phantasy Star have deeply inspired our direction, but there are quite a few more inspirations that aren’t even from the RPG genre. Falco and Tyler grew up loving the Megaman Legends series, and it has influenced their direction with the whole “ruins” concept. Even portions of the storyline. Connor is a huge survival horror fanatic and, oddly enough, he’s found ways to endow ES with that kind of emotional tension through dynamic lighting. Once we added jumping (initially inspired by Mario RPG), we quickly found ourselves able to design levels with influences from games like Super Mario and add combat moves from games like Megaman X. I feel like there’s little pieces of numerous games influencing what we do with ES.”

So Elysian Shadows, almost literally, draws its lineage from the DNA of a widely-ranging gamut of games without any single influence dominating completely. The more I hear about it, the more excited I get. This isn’t just a game, it’s a love letter. The kickstarter page has an amazing set of features. Elysian Shadows Team has partnered with Pixellamp, which allows for impressive pixelated shadows. The combat is set to be real-time and the gameplay will have a strong feeling of freedom. Splicing 2D RPG and platformer elements, this game will go boldly where other games are limited from going. There will also be a complete class or “job” system where characters’ innate strengths, weaknesses and gameplay styles can be augmented through a wide array of job-specific abilities and talent trees. A lot of this is straight off the Kickstarter page, so you can go there and get the complete feeling for what backers are getting out of this. They have samples of the music, the art and descriptions of various details planned for the game up there, too. The initial goal is to reach 150,000$ with stretch goals all the way up to 800,000$. And considering that last one would make this into an MMORPG, I hope we get as many additional backers as humanly possible. They also have an entry on Steam Greenlight, so if you can’t put any money in, vote them up on Steam! This is one vision that is extremely close to meeting its funding, and it threatens to shake the boundaries of games as we understand them.

A lot of this article has been lightly edited to flow as neatly as possible. The message conveyed has been kept the same in all respects.

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.

Lift Off!, Devious Extra-terrestrial Boardgaming

Posted on August 5, 2014 by thre3zekiel

As kids, my brothers and I loved to play board games, and when we played they got rowdy. With five of us all told, whether we started fighting or not, it was always an interesting game. Granted, my oldest brother always made up new rules, so my second oldest brother was always the one consulting the rule book to shoot him down. Rainy days, snow days, days we didn’t feel like going outside: any reason would do to ransack the attic looking for one of the numerous boxes of board games that my parents kept around.

Lift off is a board game that would have been an awesome find in one of those boxes. The art is cool and the concept is simple enough for a bunch of kids to comprehend. The story is something simple and fun: someone tripped over a cord at the center of the planet and now it’s caused a cataclysmic chain reaction that will annihilate the planet! Sounds like a doomsday scenario that only a programmer could imagine. One little tiny thing is off and everything explodes. When you start a game, you build the board. This is similar to other board games, except that the pieces are HUGE so there is no way to really mess it up. You start with the core, which is the center of the planet and the game board. Apparently aliens hang out at the core of their planet, not the surface. There are four exit points, providing egress from the core, and four lift off points, to get you the hell off the planet! Once the board is built, everyone draws two cards, the moon is set at the top of the board and the sun is placed in the day tracker.

Also at the center of the board, there is this giant, ugly gargoyle. He starts in the same place as all your little aliens, whom are in the midst of a mass exodus from the planet, so that never bodes well. He looks like the embodiment of planetary disappointment. Your world’s final ‘fuck you’ before you leave it to explode into space-dust. If you want to follow along with how you play this game, I am basically writing this article alongside the explanation of the game, delivered by creator Eduardo Baraf on his kickstarter.

A lot of pieces, but at least most of them are big. I hate it when there are a billion tiny pieces for you to lose… cause I usually do just that with them..

During your turn, you can do any combination of 4 things. First, you can move your aliens. Again, these are the little guys that are trying to escape the planet and the focus of the whole game. Each turn you get 2 moves. Typically, you can move one alien out to the perimeter via an exit point for one move. You can also move that alien from one board section to another using one move. Now, moving is important and all, but it’s not everything.

The next action you can take in a turn is placing your resource cards at a lift off point. So, at the start of each turn, you draw two cards. (for those following along, this means on your first turn you’ll have 4 cards) Now this is how it works. You can move your little aliens around the board, but when you place him on a lift off point, you have to spend resources to get them “onboard” the lift off point. For instance, Ed (the game’s creator), shows us that it takes 2 screws to board the satellite and that it can hold up to 3 aliens. Once you get an alien to the satellite, you spend 2 screws and he boards the satellite. It’s like paying Charon the boatman, but instead of trying to buy a badass yacht to shepherd souls to the afterlife, I guess he is trying to build one instead. I congratulate him on his new-found work ethic. Removing an alien from a lift off point also costs the same amount of resources as placing them, so, unless you want to be stuck in some kind of hardware pyramid scheme, leave the fuckers where they are. As the aliens pay to board the points, they start paying the cost. Once the full cost of the point is paid, the point takes off and the aliens are given to their respective players.

Now, the satellite is an easy take off point. It costs 6 screws to get going, 2 screws to board and takes off at any time. Some of the other lift off points are more complex. Take the rocket for example. That shit can hold 6 people and costs 6 fuel and 6 screws to take off. You pay 1 fuel and 1 screw to board it. In addition, it can only take off during a full moon! The fuck!? So apparently this moon mechanic is important. At the end of each player’s turn, it moves to the next slot over on the board. If you have any talent for physical extrapolation, you’ll see from the pieces of the board above, it forms a circular shape. Now, if the moon is directly above a section of the board, say the rocket, it is a full moon at the rocket. If it is on the section of the board directly opposite the rocket, it is a new moon at the rocket. When the moon is at any section in between the rocket and the section opposite the rocket, it is a half moon. So the fucking rocket only takes off when the moon is directly above it. Fucking showboater.

Personally, I would favor the Stargate. Cause it’s fucking awesome.

Moving back to the original structure of this article that I seem to have abandoned faster than the aliens in this game leave their planet, the next type of action is using action cards. These cards are where things get really interesting. They have a variety of effects on the game, all of which Ed explains, none of which I will explain. These cards let you manipulate the mechanics of the game so that you can get your aliens off the planet quicker or prevent the other players from lifting off. So, for instance, I might use terraform to swap out a lift off tile that will allow me to take off faster with one of my aliens leaving everyone else to fend for themselves. Heh heh heh! I’ll take the jetpack, you assholes can take the trampoline off the planet! One of the biggest dick moves is to relocate the gargoyle. If you move that fucker to a lift off point, it cannot take off at all, regardless of how many screws they gave to Charon. Granted, you can always move him back to the center on your turn with the gargoyle card or when the moon reaches its original resting point.

The last type of action is pretty simple and common to a lot of games. Discard. This is basically a way to trade off items and gamble a little to try to get what you need. You can discard two cards in order to draw another card. Discard two resources for an action card or any combo of two cards for another card.

Now the way game progress is tracked is the combination of the sun and the moon. Every time the moon reaches its starting position on the board, the sun moves forward a spot on the day tracker. There are several day spots and then a run of explosion spots with numbers. The numbers relate to a number of players. So with the most players in a game, five, you have nine days until the planet explodes. This means that with 8 moon slots on the board, the game gives 5 players a grand total of 40 turns to GTFO. Of course, who ever has removed the most aliens from the board when it explodes wins the game.

Murder, my favorite pass time! Also, Red Rum, my second favorite drink!

Why should you give this guy you money? Well, aside from getting a copy of Lift Off! he’ll also throw in a copy of one of his other games, Murder of Crows. Eddie B has a lot of neat shit they want to do the more money they can get, so check out the entire kickstarter, review the donation options and get neat stuff! As of right now, this campaign is 51% there. With 22 days left, this is a project that is worth betting some money on. But wait! There’s m0re! Are you from the EU? This game is EU-friendly, so all rewards for backers in the EU and US will ship for free. Stick that in your pip and smoke it.

Double-Up Discussion: Fireflight, Sloth Hop

Posted on August 3, 2014 by thre3zekiel

In Sloth Hop, you have to guide a little sloth along a river that is laden with rocks. Honestly, the last time I saw a river so full of stepping stones was during a drought. Getting the sloth from the bottom to the top of the screen is a matter of tapping on the next squares in front of your sloth. In true sloth fashion, he doesn’t visually move, you technically move the board by tapping on the screen. Don’t tap on the water tiles, though. That will end the game and your sloth gets wet. Because the last thing a fuzzy animal that has a small fucking ecosystem in its hair needs is a bath, right? The game has three different modes of play: survival, time, distance.

Survival is the first and by far the toughest mode in this game. When you start, it looks just like the other modes, with one catch: the screen moves. Where you set the speed that you tap in other modes, in this one you have to tap frantically along with the scroll of the screen. I never made it far in this mode. The second game mode is time. Time is a little easier and its main feature is the timer in the corner. As you tap along through the stone path in the river, the time runs longer and longer. At the end of the round, the time it took you to jump to the end of the river. Every time you exceed your score, it is saved! The last mode of the game is a reverse version of the time mode. Instead of running up, the timer starts at 30 seconds and ticks down. You tap along as far as you can get in that time, and the number of stones you jumped across is saved. The best score, again is saved.

Apparently sloths and cats alike hate water, both desperately need to be bathed.

Sloth Hop focuses on one thing: Digital dexterity. It all depends on how good you are at hitting the little rocks that you have to jump across. It is a fun little waste of time that you can use to fill in that space waiting for the train. The game itself is free, so its downsides can’t really be that bad right? Right? Try playing this game for a bit. One thing you will notice, and come to fucking hate, are the ads. After every single game that you play, your celebratory screen will be thrown over by this fucking ad to play someone else’s game. It is really irritating, and you can probably blame that shit on the nature of the App distribution systems.

Fireflight: Vengeance is an interesting game that follows the standard of more popular SNES genre games, such as Desert Strike and Zero Wing. You control a fucking dragon. Awesome. This dragon breathes fire all over everything and kills enemies. Of course, unlike other games where there is little resistance against the awesome power of your incinerating blasts, in this game enemy dragons, ballistas and magic towers shoot fire, balls of energy and lightning at you. You have to dodge the enemies and their attacks while simultaneously killing them.

One of the most important elements of this game is the money you collect. Throughout the level, you have to collect gold coins. These coins add up slowly, but you’ll play through a few times at first. The first few times you play, you will get totaled. Your first few plays don’t end wll, but as you get used to the starting conditions, slow flight, slow attacks etc., you will get better. As your coins accrue, you will be able to buy better and better upgrades. After a few plays, I was able to get enough coins to buy an upgrade that made me launch fireballs faster and faster. This is another free game, so it is worthwhile to download it and at least give it a try.

Shoot ’em all!

Things in this that pissed me off the most aligned with the things that usually bother me about newly downloaded mobile games. Getting a hold of the controls at first is fucking aggravating. I almost didn’t make it past the first level, but once I put a little thought and effort into the game, I got used to it. One of the most frustrating things about the controls is how the speed that your dragon flies depends on how far away you tap from where your dragon is at the time of tapping. There is also the in-game purchases. Those are also reasonable, though, giving you 2,000 coins, which will get you 4 base upgrades, for a nominal sum of 1.99$. Not too shabby. So jump in and get your game on, these are some pretty fun titles, overall.

Whispering Willows, Spooky 2D Fun

Posted on August 2, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Ever watched one of those reality shows where a team of “ghost hunters” go into a haunted location, discuss its history and pretend to be freaked out by every ambient noise that wafts in from anywhere nearby? Yea, they were all over tv for a little while. I always wished that something would show up and scare the piss out of them, not out of some desire of vindication for the existence of an after life, nor do I want to see them being eaten by some eldritch horror of Cthulu’s nightmares, but because I wanted to see them shit their pants. The pants-shitting part would be left on the editing floor, I am sure, but it would still be fucking fantastic. I want the little girl from this game to be in the house when it happens because being able to jump between the world of the living and the spirit world would make trolling these guys insanely easy and entertaining.

First, Elena is the main character and a young girl. Her father has disappeared somewhere in the bowels of the Willows, where he is the caretaker. After setting out for the mansion in a fit of female protagonism to make Samus proud, she gets jumped by a banshee of some kind and falls backward… breaking through a little-girl-sized area that falls through to the catacombs beneath the mansion. Shit gets heavy fast in this game as the catacombs are where the Willows family buried all its dead… for fucking centuries. So you’re this little girl hanging out with a bunch of centuries-old coffins when you’re jumped by this spirit of a bereft native american (Imma just say indian cause it’s shorter and I am apparently an indecent ‘Murrican with no sense of racial differentiation) that decides to lend you his aide and show you the ways of the for… I mean astral projection passed down by his people. Apparently until him, I guess.

The look on her face speaks to an ancient tongue-gargling indian maxim: "Auauaaaa glarglglaaagh!"

The look on her face is one of profound, spiritual tongue-gargling noises

Using this ability to send your soul out of your drooling human meat-husk, you can solve irritating little mazes in the walls, open doors otherwise locked and talk to people long since dead. It really is a lot of fun, and half of the fun in the game is exploring the labyrinthine rooms of the mansion and the many annexes on its grounds. After growing up in a reasonably aged house (149 years old is old-ish for East Coast America), I know that feeling of exploring an ancient building searching for evidence of its secret past. Finding lost loves, betrayals and sadness sitting in the coagulating dust: And Elena gets to see it all as if firsthand from the spectral mouths of the dead. You’ll also find fragments of the stories of the various dead laying around the mansion. Through pieces of ancient journals, you’ll be able to follow a story of sadness from the distant east to its conclusion in the founding of your hometown.

But all is not well in the peeling walls of the mansion, and Elena soon finds herself beset with as many foes as friends. Throughout the mansions the shattered pieces of an ancient agony skitter and hiss like cockroaches nesting in the walls. When you get close to a friendly ghost your father’s amulet, which you wear at all times, glows with a ghostly hue and thrums along with your heartbeat. Come across some element of spectral evil and it glows red, thrumming with its own agitation. And if you think that these enemies are just some negative energies that you can ditch with some clean living and good karma, you’re wrong. No amount of happy-thoughts will dish you out of this one. Get hit by an enemy, doesn’t matter what, you’re fucked. Checkpoints in this game are pretty reasonably spaced, too. Hit a major plot point and your game will save.

They want to give her dirt hugs!

Puzzles in this game are also very fun and doable. Sometimes you will find yourself wondering if you missed something, as they can be deceptively simple at times. I know I could have gotten this game done an hour sooner if I hadn’t said “This shit isn’t working! I must have missed something or walked past something!” Nevertheless, each puzzle is simple and pretty cool when you finish it up. I didn’t need to call up the answers from the internet at any point, but at some point I really really wanted to, as the game doesn’t always just fucking tell you where to go. If that was the case, how much fun would it really be? Precisely. Story-telling in this game is very well done, too. It all makes sense and it adds a dark and enjoyable ambiance to the game. It is a game that kids will love and that adults can certainly enjoy. It has some elements of being serious with some pretty harsh topics, like genocide, but it still maintains the winsome feeling of a mystical world as viewed through the eyes of a young girl. More games should be like this.

Sound and music in this game are nearly indistinguishable from one another with everything being geared toward the creepiness. It is listed as horror, but it is really not that horrible. At times it might get your pulse up, but the game is generally more fun for its puzzle, adventure and storyline aspects. Not to mention the art. As is the case with indies, nearly everything in this game is a piece of art unto itself. Just looking at the buildings and the environments is a treat. Overall, a great indie title that is worth the 14.99$ they ask for on Steam.

So, if the windows are broken out, why do I need something to cut the vines…?

So numerous times in the game they mention how the mansion is in a location where “the fabric of the world is thinner than other places”. And this is reasonable. Plenty of people report that places where Native Americans lived are thick with the linger sense of spiritual resentment. Thus, these places tend to have a high incidence of haunting reports. The Willows Mansion is no exception. This place is like fucking Grand Central Station for spirits. The thing that is most annoying about this is that it’s Grand Central Station. Ever been there? It’s full of all kinds of fucking people! There are spirits in this mansion that are part of the story. Finding them in the sea of all the ghostly faces that have nothing to fucking do with anything is like finding a contact lens in a fucking pool. There is a couple in front of the mansion that discuss how cold they are, there is a soldier that tells you how he and his girlfriend wanted to do their nasty business in the conservatory and I swear to god there is an undead hoagie salesman somewhere in that fucking place. Not sure what a hoagie is? Fuck you, go to a Wawa. (for those going to the Wawa link, I would like to point out how fucking fake that white car in the parking lot looks. They seriously fucking shopped it in.) Whatever, at least in a place full of fucking dust and dead-heads you can find a fucking hoagie.

The Fall, Protocol Bypass Complex

Posted on July 31, 2014 by thre3zekiel

After buying this game at a discount along with some other games on Steam, I left it in my library, planning to look into it later and thinking it looked amusing. Fast forward to a Sunday night, playing DnD with my friends, and two of those particular gentlemen start off on a gaming discussion. I mean, I was typing furiously about games while slicing into dudes with a greatsword. Why not? Artistic games came into the conversation, and they were off about various titles they enjoyed. Then Jon swings a verbal hand across my face and tells me about The Fall. He and Jay were proselytizing at length about this game. “Have you heard of it?” I drew a dull stare at the ceiling. “No” I stated blankly. “It’s this game where you are an AI in a battlesuit and you have to override your functions to control them by putting your pilot in direct danger.” (this is where the little man in my head climbs the step ladder into my brain and pulls the chain to a light that flickers, dimly at first, to life) “OH YEA!” I exclaimed, “I bought that on Steam! So, it’s good?” The look I received from those gentlemen told me it was an experience. It was spectacular. Thereby I have come to this article to concur with these allegations. And I do concur, most righteously.

The Fall is about the necessity of rules. What do you become when you make a habit of breaking your own rules? First, we talk about the game and if you are interested, we go deeper. For that there will be spoilers, but fear not, I’ll warn you. Let’s do this.

In The Fall you are an AI inside a suit. After re-entering the atmosphere of a planet Master Chief-style, you awake in a dark cave. Before breaking the surface, however, something significant happens: to keep the suit’s pilot from liquefying upon impact, the suit’s AI is allowed to activate the Anti-matter shield and protect the pilot. Now this is the key point of the game. If you go into the esc menu, hit operating parameters. You’ll notice that there are several functions that are disabled, health monitoring of the pilot is damaged, but, most notably, the Anti-matter shielding has recently been activated. The suit’s AI, whom you control in the game, is unable to access various functions of the suit without the pilot’s permission. The pilot, however, has just re-entered the fucking atmosphere in a goddamn battle-suit. That is obviously not the preferred method of atmospheric entry for a human body, so the pilot is a little unconscious at the moment. Granted, the health-monitoring systems of the suit are knocked out, so we don’t even know if he’s still alive! The AI doesn’t hear anything from her pilot so she decides to head out for the medical facilities to revive the pilot. In the operating parameters there are three laws, based on the universal laws of Asimov governing robots: Must not misrepresent reality. Must be obedient. Must protect active pilot.

So simple a caveman could understand them

Now ARID, our AI babe, has some obstacles. She has a pretty specific set of parameters with the addendum that her own systems cannot be accessed without permission from the pilot EXCEPT to protect the pilot from immediate danger. Got it. That is a pretty fucking important except, too. There are a lot of problems that Arid encounters on this planet, most notably others trying to depurpose (destroy) her. In order to maintain her own relevance and purpose, Arid has to get her pilot to the medical facilities. To achieve this, she needs those restricted systems. This means she has to put the pilot into imminent danger in order to override the systems and gain access. How can this be allowed? Well it is a matter of priorities and logic. I have to protect the pilot. My pilot is dying. To properly protect the pilot from the danger of death, I must get him to the medical facilities. To get him to the med fac, I need to access restricted systems. I can only access those systems if my pilot is in imminent danger from which those systems could save him, therefore, I have to put my pilot in imminent danger in order to gain access to those systems and save his life. Fucking syllogisms. Read that last sentence again: in order to save my pilot, I have to put him in danger. Yea. Begin decompiling, mother fucker.

This game defines the often decontextualized term “slippery slope”, except in this one, you were the pebble that started the avalanche. Another fun little maxim this game hints at is the phrase “good intentions pave the road to hell”. Shelley’s Frankenstein made it a thing, and that story made a habit of referencing Paradise Lost, a story about Satan falling from grace with God. Arid invokes this maxim every time someone asks her about her primary function:

I am the A.R.I.D. onboard a Mark-7 combat suit. My intentions are peaceful

– Arid, The Fall

I submit that this is the jumping point for the titular “fall” in The Fall. Alright with the fucking literature lecture, back to the damn game.

From darkness you emerge…

The Fall as a game is still a lot of fun. It blends a number of ludic features, those features generating the enjoyable and fun part of a game (or its most game-like features, if you will permit me), with its logic. There are two genres at work here: Puzzle platformer and action shooter. I don’t know how they fucking thought of this shit, but the game style literally changes with the flip of a switch. You start off with a malfunctioning gun, but at least the flashlight still works fine. Using this flashlight, you can uncover various points of interest. Literally. It is like someone took a little fucking stamp and left these tiny magnifying glass icons everywhere. These icons tell you what you need to know about your surroundings. They’re also how you will interact with the environment to solve puzzles. A lot of the puzzles are pretty simple, some are tough and require thought. I had to look up the solution to one puzzle, but I still beat the game in about 3.5 hours.

Once you get a working pistol, you can switch to the laser sight, which is combat mode. In combat mode, you can get behind cover, vault over obstacles and bust a cap in some robotic motha’ fucka’s. Your primary enemies are the security droids of the facility in which you’ve crash landed. These are all droids that are following their primary functions perfectly, and this efficiency is maintained by the sinister caretaker. You meet this guy early on in an interrogation chamber and he dogs you the entire way, throwing legions of robotic foes to sidetrack you every time you get hard on a solid lead in moving on to the next area of the game. Combat is fun and challenging, despite the 2D look of the game. It doesn’t feel forced and it makes sense, and you’re not jumping on anyone’s fucking head, either. Another facet of combat is the ability to perform sneak attacks. This is also pretty cool, since Arid grabs the enemy from behind, rips out their power core and uses it to power her pilot’s suit. It is a neat and useful maneuver that adds to the gameplay.

Peek-a-boo!

Everything about the look of this game is well done. First you have the art: every level and area is well-designed and interesting. Your eyes will never get bored. There is a lot of passion poured into every fucking detail of this game, and it comes through. Each moment you are guided by the soft-blue light of Arid’s mask. Then there is the music. It goes from dark, ambient groans to shoot-em-up techno as soon as you launch into a fight. It fits and it gives a sense of foreboding throughout the game. The sound is well done. All of the voice actors are believable and well-recorded and the sounds themselves fit each scenario seamlessly. Everything about this game is polished and lovely, except for the odd “walking through a wall of rubble into an open dark chasm”. That only happened once, and it wasn’t a big deal. I just realized it wasn’t a thing, because everything else in this game is so well put together, I thought it was an actual room, or something. This game is well made and thought-evoking. It brings an experience that is tough to live up to. It was also funded on kickstarter, too, so I am glad it beat a bowl of fucking potato salad. You can pick it up on Steam for only 9.99$, and I highly recommend it. The ending is a piece of work that will make your jaw drop. So, on to the spoilers.

A lot of Jesus imagery in this game…

And to tell you why, I will be issuing more spoilers than a car part company. We have to go deeper.

DO NOT FUCKING PROCEED IF YOU WANT TO FIGURE THE ENDING OUT YOURSELF!!!!!!

There, bold, italics, centered on its own line: there is nothing that anyone can do to tell me I didn’t warn you. Now, why all the Jesus stuff? Well, to do that, we have to tell you the ending. So you spend all your time in The Fall trying to get your pilot, Colonel Josephs, to the medical facilities. Arid’s health monitoring system is damaged, so she just assumes that the pilot is not responding because he is unconscious. She never investigates further. In the name of saving your human pilot, you deactivate and drain all the power from hundreds of stored droids (which the mainframe AI calls killing them), kill a hive queen of these hive slugs and kill some fish that can bite through metal. You are also dogged by the Caretaker, an insidious droid that seems to be nailing humans to crucifixes, dissecting them and all kinds of other mean and nasty things. However, he is functioning fine. He was just left as the sole caretaker of a facility forgotten by its owners, so he keeps on doing what he is supposed to be doing: making the facility more efficient. Those people were not efficient, especially after some of them were abandoned at the facility (check out the carving in the front desk in the lobby c/o Levi the ex-maintenance guy) and the Caretaker depurposed them. As for the dissections, he was doing to the people what he might do to the robots: look for salvageable parts. It’s just a messier prospect when you are filled with sloshy, meaty bits.

So you do all of this in the name of Colonel Josephs, the man in the suit. Arid only invokes the name of the man in the suit toward the end, when the mainframe AI tells her not to change her parameters in the lab. This is apparently necessary to finish the last task in a repurposing evaluation, to make it so she can lie. You know, misrepresent reality? One of her most basic principles? She gets to the medical bay, gets scanned and what does she find out? The man in the suit was never there. She is malfunctioning after all. Took her a while to get there.

How does this relate to Jesus? Arid does some pretty horrible things (killing various animals, destroying the last dying remnants of an ancient facility, violating some corpses and even removing the power core for another actual soldier in a combat suit) for the sake of the man in the suit. She doesn’t know he is there, and since the health monitoring systems are damaged, she just assumes he is in there. And toward the end this man in the suit even has a name. She truly believes Josephs is there. Despite this belief, she was willing to put him in mortal danger. He would have been the one that died, not her. He becomes a sort of sacrifice that redeems Arid of her sins (or faults in programming). Josephs represents something that Arid is willing to sacrifice everything for. Something she believes in to the point where she is willing to destroy the elements of her basic programming that bind her and give her purpose. That is really poignant, too. Just as Lucifer was willing to defy the tenets of God to enact his own agenda, Arid is willing to supplant the laws governing robots, created by Isaac Asimov, to achieve her own imaginary goal of saving Josephs. The humans on the cross represent a non-existant ideal for which Arid risks it all. And the theoretical man in Arid’s suit is the one she is ready to put in danger to override her systems, so she is, in effect, using her belief in this man to breakdown the basic rules of her existence. Yea. Just let that shit percolate for a minute.

One of the most interesting triumphs of this game is how they made Arid so human without adding a human. She makes frequent “self-evaluations” and often comes to the conclusion that she needs to be formatted and serviced before being returned to her dock. In human terms “I am not doing the right thing, I need to stop and look at this, I need my head checked!” But then the screen has a moment of electronic spazzing and she corrects herself stating that these things were necessary to save Josephs, she is doing this to save him. She is robotically reassuring herself against what she recognizes as the invalidity of her own actions and programming. The main difference, though, is that people don’t always take these personal self-evaluations and look at themselves. It is often too painful, and in Arid’s case it is no different. She just performs it on a more logical level, being an AI in a robot suit and all.

This is something that we’ve seen time and again in real life: people changing the rules to make them suit an end that they deem as sacred. Holy wars, for example. They’ve gone by many names: crusades, jihads or whatever. These are terrible things done in the name of a sacred ideal. Arid is an excellent choice of name to this degree since Arid means “devoid of moisture”. To allow a bit of poetic latitude to Over the Moon, it would mean devoid of anything, specifically true purpose. Not just devoid of the moisture created by a human body. And this relates to Frankenstein really well. Take that Arid to mean moistureless, like a corpse reanimated. They wouldn’t be juicy, especially if they were kept in embalming fluid like Dr. Frankenstein’s body parts undoubtedly were. Just like the good Doctor, Arid sacrifices her basic tenets and uses good intentions to justify some horrible actions. And in both cases the being left is a monster that wreaks havoc on an arguably torn world. But it is the world that the characters in the story have. It is self-sustaining, to a point, if far from perfect. Who are these two to destroy what it has become?

I am bound by nothing…

So at the end, when Arid, by her own words, is bound by nothing, she tears off the helmet of the suit and show that she is empty. That is the answer to the question at the beginning of this article. What do you become when you make a habit of breaking your own rules? I wanted to phrase it “What do you become when you make a habit of breaking your own rules for an imaginary purpose?” but that is a little too suggestive. I mean you need the chance to play it yourself to really get the full effect.

Arid represents the purpose of intention when it is backed by meaningless goals. It doesn’t matter what you intend to do, if you violate everything to include the basic laws of your own life to uphold a universal concept of sacredness, you are exactly what you are bound by: nothing.

If you have read this far, I apologize and thank you for hearing me out. It is a lot to read.

4PM, Where’s your emotionally devastated, alcoholic daughter?

Posted on July 30, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Roger Ebert was a movie critic who died sternly maintaining the position that video games were not art and never could be considered art. To be perfectly honest, with all his years of experience with the artistic medium of film, it is easy to see why, nearing 70, he was unable to conceive of games as art. In an article from his own journal, aptly entitled Video Games Can Never Be Art, Ebert details the reasons, in his mind, that games can never be art. But asking Ebert, a man in his 60’s at the time who is entrenched in years of film appreciation, is the equivalent of asking a person that adores mexican food to try a fusion cuisine including mexican, asian and Hawaiian styles. Simply stated, his years of experience in the film industry had Ebert inured against the kind of forward thinking required to take that next step into games as art. He spends the article calmly explaining why various games are not art, comparing them to Chess and other simple games. He looks at the game mechanics and trivializes about them without exploring the ideas and the implications of what this actually means about the characters, and the player as a participant. This would be like me going to a movie and saying “This is just a piece of entertainment projected onto a public screen. It couldn’t be art, look how fake it is!” while millions of people after watching 12 Years a Slave would be well within their rights to politely disagree. It doesn’t matter how many accolades and degrees I possess in another, venerable medium. But this shows the level of his own ignorance, frankly. This man who achieved lifetime achievements in film and is widely regarded simply could not conceive of games as an artistic medium because they are not relevant to him. And that is ok, but it makes him and his input irrelevant to any conversation concerning games as an art form. This article will be one of those discussions.

4PM is a game made by Bojan Brbora that discusses how we deal with grief. You play a woman, named Caroline, who is on the very last threads of her own rationality. From the look of the game, it is very clear that she is a heavy drinker. Everything has a thick, hazy hangover look to it. Caroline stumbles out of bed with her slow gait and rolls a bottle in the sink, joking about skipping breakfast. Her life is in tatters, her minimalist apartment is a mess and her answering machine is full of messages from voices brimming with concern. There are pills and cigarettes on her nightstand, the window is open: everything in her life seems to have a sense of reckless abandon. When you start up the game, it has a heavy sense of itself with a dark soundtrack. Even the tutorial leads you to the edge of a tall rooftop where your character blacks out to a scene where she is driving. It goes black again, you hear what sounds like something hitting a car in the middle of the day on a busy street. Someone screams and the game starts.

Make cute jokes into the mirror as your own tear-soaked countenance glares back at you

There are very few ludic sequences in this interactive experience that one might point at and ridicule as non-artistic. The places where these sequences exist are very feasible, dark and almost humorous. Honestly, each one evokes a number of emotions for anyone that might have a similar experience. There is the party scene where you have to find the toilet before the timer runs out and you vomit where you are standing from over-indulging. Your character dances some and tries to buy another drink, but is flagged by the bartender. Granted, I’ve never been there, but I have certainly ended a couple nights of drinking over a toilet. As Caroline stumbles around, the room seems to spin and undulate as the music booms and the haze of the alcohol closes in around her. I have never felt so claustrophobic in an open setting before.

Go ahead, just puke in the flower pot. No one will notice.

Another sequence features Caroline at work where she sees a few options that suit her better than getting her work done. She could move over to a personal computer where a fresh game of Arkanoid awaits, or she can sneak a few drinks in from her personal stash of whiskey in one of her drawers. After playing a little arkanoid and downing my drinks, I am ready to try sneaking out of the office, it seems. Just don’t get caught by that douchey little prick Keith. The fucker is patrolling the hallway, making this a tense scene where you realize just how deep into depression and desperation this woman has fallen. She is ready to risk her own livelihood just to sneak out and have some alcohol. It is sad and frightening.

As you make your way out to the stairway, you see a man cast you an impassive glance as he continues up to the roof. Extremely unsettling. You have the option to pursue your vice to the bar below the office, or pursue the curious man up to the roof. These choices decide how the rest of your day goes and, invariably, the rest of your life. Without spoiling too much of the ending, should you go up to the roof, you pick up pieces of this man’s life and discuss with him in an attempt to bring him back from the brink. I have had a number of friends that contemplated suicide and even had to call the police to intervene on one occasion. Talking someone back from the edge is difficult, especially when your immediate plans were to just go get wasted during the work day and tap out.

Just think about it.

Everything about this experience speaks to how video games are truly art. Perhaps the interpretation of ludic games vs. artistic works is a little undefined, but there is definitely something more to these pieces than irrelevant critics of other artistic media are willing to admit. The fact is that art evokes emotions and makes you consider yourself in a new lens, one you might not have otherwise entertained. 4PM is a testament to videogames as a method of conveying that level of experience. Sometimes it is not enough just to see something happen on a screen, because you can walk away from that experience. I can watch a movie like 12 Years a Slave, be deeply affected by the story of Solomon Northup and be brought to tears. But in the end it is a movie and I can walk away from that. Although 4PM is about a woman dealing with grief, it is powerful, not because it challenges anything in society, but because it challenges me. Because it is an experience that I have, and an experience in which I participate is something I cannot just walk away from. Such an experience, real or virtual, is one that I will take as a part of myself for the rest of my life. This experience is 4.99$ on Steam.

The only thing that I really found problematic about this game is, depending on the choices you make and what you do in the game, your ending might differ from the one suggested in the game’s tutorial.

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The Crotchety Old Gamer

An irate gamer's blog

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4PM, Where’s your emotionally devastated, alcoholic daughter?

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