Tag Archives: pc gaming

Among the Sleep, Crawling in the Dark

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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My wife calls this the “freaky baby game” and not because of the baby.  Everything about this game is unnerving and it all adds up to an enjoyable experience in fear-inducing games.  My wife hates it when I play this in the dark cause she keeps having to run in and check that my screams are caused by the game and not something terrible… like a stubbed toe.  Those are horrifying.

If you come into this game off the adrenaline high that profoundly horrifying games like Amnesia produce, you will not be enthused.  I have to admit, I couldn’t play Amnesia.  It was that fucking freaky for me.  I quit playing only about an hour into the game, and I hadn’t encountered any enemies yet.  Among the Sleep was a much more accessible game for those who don’t want to pour hours into complex puzzles, creeping through terrifying dark castles and losing your mind.  Horror-lite, is the best term for this game, and I found it rather enjoyable.

Among the first elements of the game that you notice is the fact that you are a goddamn 2-year-old.  Your mom has you in a high chair, she’s feeding you cake, you play with a ball and you have as much control of yourself as a drunk muppet.  Not to disparage the game, it controls beautifully.  Toddlers on the other hand are called toddlers because they don’t have the basics of biomechanical locomotion down, yet.  Look down at your body, and you notice a tiny, onesie-clad body that takes haphazard steps.  Environmental manipulation is difficult at times, too.  You are a baby, after all.  Your tiny little hands grasp uncertainly at objects.  It is almost adorable.  Except for the fact that you are scared out of your shit trying to rationalize the world around you.  In the very beginning of the game your crib gets thrown across the room, spilling you onto the floor.  You spend some time crawling around, which lets you hide from foes and get into tight places, but you can stand up on your little baby-legs.  When you do, you move slowly, but you can run briefly before stumbling over into the crawling position.  Frequently, the game makes use of this by making you want to run so badly, but you can’t, you know, being a fucking baby and all.  Not exactly a Kenyan track star.  Also, you can hear the tiny little baby breaths and your character hides in the dark, sucking in air like a noisy little vacuum.  Another feature that highlights the fact that you are a baby is the esc screen.  Hit escape and you bring up your tiny baby hands to cover your face.

Remain still and the teddy bear will go away.

Remain still and the teddy bear will go away.

Early on you realize there is trouble in paradise, and being sensitive to everything around you, it shows.  Babies don’t know much, so they have to experience the world around them in terms of emotions.  Thus, when something scary happens, your screen gets dark and twitchy, like it’s being chewed on by a langolier.  This occurs early on when mommy answers the door.  You hear a male voice and then mommy starts yelling.  That’s when the screen gets all ugly, but mommy soon comes back and it’s all ok again.  She brings a present to you, which you get at later no thanks to your mother, and inside it is the scariest toy ever.  Your travelling companion is a terrifying possessed teddy bear.  At one point he plays with your train set and hides your elephant from you.  But I know the fucking truth!  That little bastard is possessed by a dark entity bent on turning you into a ruthless serial killer!  Either way, teddy is apparently your only weapon.  When you get scared, you have to hug him and he glows in the dark, like a carebear stare that is less powerful and gives your position away to enemies.

<THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD!>  Since this game only came out a few months ago, I have to do this.

While playing this game, you notice some really interesting tidbits.  There truly is something sinister lying just beneath the surface, and it isn’t just the spooky ambient soundtrack.  Anyone who watches Grimm knows that what people thought were stories are often used to represent something more sinister.  Although it might not be the fact that werewolves exist, fairytales like Grimm’s fairytales were actually mechanisms used to rise children in a time where they could have been ripped apart by wolves just outside of town.  No one would have noticed for a good few hours either.  So rather than saying “don’t go into the woods or you’ll get ripped apart by wild animals” they would probably say “don’t go in the woods or you’ll be eaten by a witch!”  This is much easy to offer to children than, you know, sheer abject terror.  This game uses the same vehicle to convey and otherwise occluded backstory.  Some guy brings a wrapped package to the door on your birthday and gets into a fight with mommy?  Yea, that was dad.  I guess they were having some kind of issues, so daddy doesn’t live at home anymore.  Later you go through this level with paintings on the walls, one of which features a woman and a well.  As you approach it changes from the woman coming out of the swamp toward the well, her standing at the well and then her drinking deeply from the well with water running down her dress.

Toward the end of the game, you see mommy drinking from bottles (which litter the floor in another level) and she turns into a monster.  This made my jaw drop.  So apparently mommy is also an alcoholic and having some serious issues.  Considering your character stumbles out of a closet at the end of the game, I have to assume this means that the whole game is basically the result of child neglect by a irresponsible bitch that wants to keep the child away from a potentially loving father.  This is a little on the rough side, since a lot of single mothers work hard to ensure that their children get the best they can provide.  But no one is perfect, and some people outright deserve to be dropped off a cliff.

O, shit, mommy is drinking from the jack daniels well again!

O, shit, mommy is drinking from the jack daniels well again!

This game takes a real big adult issue and shrinks it down to a baby size.  It is really deeply affecting, especially since at the end, your mother is the one who rips the arm off your teddy bear, and you character still starts rubbing her head as she sits crying on the kitchen floor.  I cried a little, since this one hits a bit too close to home, having had a number of friends growing up who experienced something like this.  All told, this game is a true horror story that focuses more on the story elements and leaves those “terror from the darkest wilds” elements to more drawn out titles.  After all, how much can you really tell about the story of a baby?

Among the Sleep is a great title, but the thing that really got my gaul up about this title is the number of startle scares it gets out of you.  I mean you creep around a corner, BAM! chair flies at you.  Turn around and something behind you is moving by itself, or something flies out of a random hatch you didn’t know about.  STOP FUCKING DOING THAT!  Man, you’re gonna scare the shit right out of me!   I guess that is their fucking plan, though.  Bastards.

Viscera Clean-Up, Engagingly OCD

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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So this is what it’s come down to.  Viscera Clean-Up detail is a glorified janitor simulator in early access, but don’t close the screen yet.  You’re not exactly wiping some kid’s puke up off a tile floor or mopping up piss.  You are the guy that cleans up after the events of other video games and tragic events, but this seems to be made by a people who are disenfranchised with the world in general and are used to monotonous, soul-crush jobs.  Like the British.

Ultimately, this game is just like building a puzzle.  You are given a big mess to organize, and piece by piece you work the mess down to an easily manageable pile and then finish up.  Now, starting this game is a bit of a chore.  You begin and blood and guts litter the floor, are painted on the walls and the entire scene is a very “modern art in rouge.”  You have several very fucking important machines that help you get your job done.  First, there is the Slosh-o-Matic, dispenser of buckets full of water.  Then there is the furnace, it is the disposal method of choice for viscera both human and alien.  Then there is the What-a-Load container machine, which disposes containers marked with the “biological hazard” symbol.  And finally, the vending machine, which provides access to all manner of useful objects.

This game provides the all-too-realistic experience of being a janitor fitted with the cheapest mechanism for cleaning available in futuristic times.  By all accounts, you should have access to a fucking auto-cleaning zapper mechanism!  But the most high-tech device you have is the Muck-Guyver, which provides a radar “ping” that beeps faster and in a higher pitch the closer you are to a “mess.”  Way too many times have I finished cleaning up a section of a room littered with the remains of a scientist, used the Muck-Guyver and the region still came up hot.  I look on the ceiling and curse the gods, realizing that the some of a victim didn’t fucking reach the floor.  At which point you have to stack a bunch of boxes, or whatever environmental detritus you have available, and scrub the goddamned ceiling!

Your main “weapon” is a mop, so the Slosh-o-Matic isn’t just a funny little feature.  It is your main support element.  And don’t even think for five fucking seconds that this shit is all user-fucking-friendly!  Every time you hit the dispense button, there is a shot you will get a bloody body part instead of a bucket of clean.  This means it will drop out and splatter fresh blood all over the ground and the machine.  I like to imagine that this is because the machine is really a teleporter, and a careless technician just lost an arm or something.  A slosh-o-matic is necessary, though, as your mop gets dirty through usage.  You can only mop a heavily-soiled section of the floor for five mouse-clicks before you start just spreading the muck around, so you have to get a fresh mop bucket and rinse the mop.  One dunk only, though!  Your mop buckets will get soiled, too!  Dunk your mop in that and you will just be smearing a fine paste over surfaces leaving a trail like a snail on its period.  And watch your goddamned step!  Knock over a bucket containing ANY level of grime, and you will have just poured out a mess all over the floor again.  Prepare for agony.  My wife came in worried about me only to find I knocked over another fucking mop bucket!

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Dirty mop? Spilled bucket? This might end with suicide.

 

If your buckets get dirty, too, how the fuck are you supposed to clean for a protracted period of time?  In this space-age setting your company has resorted to the most sensible and fiscally responsible means of disposing of things: setting them on fire.  Apparently the Joker was right, everything does burn!  Even steel buckets full of fucking water!  Now, this is a little silly, but once you have mopped up enough blood and such to get to the bullet cartridges and organs lying in the open, how can you get them to the furnace reliably?  Why, you simply put someone’s assorted remains into a yellow bio-hazard bin and burn them, of course!  Bins are pretty sizable, too, and seating most of two people comfortably.  But be fucking mindful of your goddamned surroundings!  Have a bloody stub sticking out of the bin?  You will smear blood on anything it might touch.  Considering the fact that doors in this don’t open wide, you will end up scrubbing walls and doors a lot, too.  And don’t be that manly man that has to cram eight people, a thousand bullet cartridges, five soiled knives and a take-out box into one fucking disposal bin.  That shit will cost you!  Things inside the bin will get heavy for you and you will drop that shit.  Even if the bin isn’t that fucking full and you are hitting shift to go slowly!  Run with organs and you might as well paint everything red.

One thing that this game encapsulates entirely too fucking well is frustratingly tedious tasks.  So you have disposal bins, eh?  Here is a floor littered with a bazillion mother-fucking bullet cartridges.  Pick them up one at a time.  Scientists in this ripped apart by a blood-thirty alien?  Intestines will be scattered around like someone spilled oodles of noodles and you have to pick it up one greasy meat-tube at a time.  Then there are the distances they go to make this a challenge.  Aside from organs pouring out of the bin or bucket dispensers, should you step in a pool of blood, you will track blood everywhere across mom’s new carpet.  There is nothing more frustrating than realizing you just tracked somone’s DNA across your freshly-mopped floors.  And then there is the detail!  Yea, sure, anybody can scrub a few tiles and punch out, but if you just run through and opt-out of spot-checking your work with the Muck-Guyver, you’ll miss something.  One element I discovered was that sometimes blood will run into the fucking grout in the tiles!  And you’ll have to scrub that separately from the rest of the pool!  I am just grateful they don’t force you to go in there with a brush and scrub it out by hand.  Holy fuck!

At the top of the bin, Chad was really getting a-head!

Spacious enough to fit the extremities of several researchers comfortably!

Cleaning up the organs or dead researchers is only the fun part of the job, though.  You’ll find yourself cleaning up crumpled papers, soda cans and other office debris.  There are also other menial tasks to achieve, such as refilling wall-mounted medkits.  I mean, what research facility is complete without the easily-accessible medkit designed for dressing alien claw-wounds?  To this end, the vending machine is a must.  Of course, not all facilities are outfitted in anticipation of epic fight-scenes.  Some places are just dimly-lit and have naturally dingy textures.  In such situations, the vending machine will provide lanterns!  Of course, knock these fuckers over too many times and they explode leaving scorch marks all over the floor.  Vending machines will also offer any number of useless shit, such as pizza slicers and “wet floor” signs.  Granted, I think you get docked points if you don’t put down the signs, so yea.

This game isn’t without its flaws.  Sometimes you’ll have an arm that will get jostled so bad in a disposal bin that it clips through the bin, painting anything it touches.  The bins are the source of a number of issues, as over-stocking the bins causes things to jump around in there like a bunch of nitrogen atoms under pressure.  I also found these strange “phantom pegs” that appear on the electrical cords for your appliances.  At first you might not see them, but if you splatter blood on them, they show up, sometimes only partially.

I guess this is more respectful than just dumping it all in the garbage somewhere.

I guess this is more respectful than just dumping it all in the garbage somewhere.

Aside from being the type of game a serial killer would jack off to, the most irritating thing about it is.. uh.. well I’ll tell you after I spend another 3 hours scrubbing out the toilets and transferring the wasted toilet paper left on the floor to a disposal bin.  Yea, it really is that much fun.  What kind of psychopath has fun in this, do you ask?  Anyone who gets satisfaction out of gradually turning a hopeless situation into an operational facility ready for the next batch of squishy and ethically-irresponsible researchers.

Skara, Shiney Pre-Alpha Preview

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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Skara: The Blade Remains is a game given the go ahead by the community on Steam Greenlight.  One of many worthy candidates for support, Skara attmepts to step in where many mainstream companies leave off.  Arena deathmatch games typically come with guns and grenades, but this title threatens to drop you into an ancient desert or a volcanic nightmare and wishes you well against the hordes of your foes.  The game looks great and the developer’s site gives a lot more regarding the story and world.

Among alpha-previews that I have played, this title has to be the most difficult to discuss in my fashion.  Primarily, I would ask readers to keep in mind that this game is not even up for sale yet.  It is not even close to finished.  The developers are working hard daily to ensure this game gets to a complete phase as soon as possible.  Having recently played the pre-alpha build, I am certainly excited, but not overly impressed.  If this game were to pre-release today, I would laugh loudly and call shenanigans.  But it is not, so I look forward to the game that the developers are working on, as detailed on their Greenlight page.

First, let me generally name some of the areas that the developers have to improve.  In a game with sword fighting gameplay, you want the character to attack well.  A third-person perspective is granted to the player, and this gives you a much better perception of the presence of your character than other games of a similar genre with their first-person views.  Now, being in pre-alpha, Skara’s animations are a little slow right now and this definitely comes out in the gameplay, making it difficult to maneuver, but it was funny as hell to watch my character swinging a longsword like it was made of white-dwarf matter.  I had to actually start my attacks at a distance in order to “spool up” the animation like it was some kind of minigun with one fucking shot.  Another problem with the animations is the ragdoll effect, but in this it should be called the invertebrate effect.  Upon death all the bones in a corpse seem to magically disappear.  Instant man-jelly style.   Now, one thing that I did notice about the animations while playing was fatalities.  Let’s fucking face it, a game like this is boring without a little extra in the awesome category.  I was able to perform two fatalities that really got me amped up.  I favored the civilized look of the Durno fighters.  They just felt better than the insane, cultist look of the Kharn savages.  I was able to get a few guys to a state of “finish him” dazed-ness.  Once there I ran one guy through and flipped him over my shoulder.  The second one I put a guy on his knees like a priest at a pulpit then proceeded to hack wildly at his muscular neck.  I imagine the head will fly off at the end once the game releases, but the chopping action just finishes the animation with the victim sliding to the ground.

Just wait right there, Shraka! I gonna keel you!

I’m not waiting here all night, Shraka.  Just get the attack over with already!

 

Arena fighters always need someoneto duke it out or there is nothing to play.  This game currently features the Durno (above left) and the Kharn (above right).  Looking at the models and textures for the races I can see why there are only two at the moment.  And why they turn into man-jelly on death.  The models and textures are detailed as fuck.  Light reflects from their clothes and skin differently and their armor and weapons gleam. It is really exciting to see.

Another element that is important to arena fighters like this is easy navigation, especially as far as the menus are concerned.  There shouldn’t be a learning curve for the usage of the basic elements of a game.  When there is a menu to interact with, Skara makes sure it is easy to use.  The only two menus I saw, however, were the escape menu and the match menu.  When loading the level right now, there is nothing.  The screen is just a dead view on the map your anticipated match will be held. Once the game starts, though you have access to the match menu. The match menu is what displays when you hit the tab button in-game.  This is pretty simple and shows you how many kills you (in a deathmatch) or your team (in team deathmatch) have scored.  The scoring system is the Kills – Deaths equation, which I can get behind.  I played enough Unreal Tournament and grew accustomed to the simple systems of games past.

STBR

Best not ask the barbarians why they all have the same first name. Might insult their savage and unforgiving culture.

 

Now, everything that is wrong with the game can be attributed to the fact that the game is not ready for release, so it is missing a variety of important features, such as a tutorial area.  Tutorials on the operation of the battle combos would definitely be very helpful.  Looking at the explanation of the combos in the PDF that came with the game is a little on the confusing side.  Not because of the manual, that is simple.  Click this button, or press this series of keys.  Whatever, no sweats, man!  Then you get in-game and the ham-handed speed of the animations makes timing combos impossible for anyone.  Unless you are Miss Cleo or a Jedi..  then you can clairvoyantly intuit precisely when you need to hit the next key.  Otherwise it is a frenzy full of confused manipulation, like watching my childhood dog hump a pillow.

Of all things this game does and does fucking well are the sights.  Now, yes, I am very critical of graphics-heavy games with no other matter, but this is a game that is still in fucking development!  Cut me a goddamn break!  At one point the AI had a freakout session as I swung at it, and I think opted for self-preservation.  Either that or the guy was like, “fuck this!  If I die now, I want it to be a badass fight sequence!”  So he turns and runs up this tower, and I immediately give chase.  Bones of fallen warriors crunching beneath my iron-clad feet, I charge after my foe.  Bloodlust is coursing through my mind and bringing that coppery flavor thick into my mouth.  Each step takes me upward and he intermittently flags in stamina, coming into view only to catch a string wind and charge further.  I arrive at the top, only to lose my bearings.  Around me the winds howl and the glare of orange light as the sun reflects off the clay-shot fields of the moors.  Behind me my ambuscade foe howls and comes a hair’s breadth from burying the sharp end of his axe into my skull.  I dodge narrowly and heft my sword up, bringing my slice through his torso.  Dazed and reeling, the Kharn warrior blinks against the dazzling flash of my steel.  Only a blink passes and he opens his eyes to see the sharp tip of my sword pierce his chest.  Back my sword plunges until the hilt nearly touches his bulging muscles.  Kharnish men are brutal, and the warrior sneers and tries to grab my sword with his last breath, but I ram my shoulder into his sternum and twist my blade, flipping him into the air.  He lands with a sickening crunch on the stone behind me.

This is what is looked like in game, and the graphics supported every second of it.  You see a far-flung waste, venomous water gnawing at its shores and warriors struggling against death borne by other men.  I can only image that this game will get better, especially since it has been successfully Greenlit.  My biggest issue here is that the game isn’t fucking done, yet.  I played an unfinished game and honestly cannot wait until it is done, because a fantasy arena fighter would be so much fun to me.  The graphics and textures are gorgeous and the ambient sound is nice.  Perhaps the grunts and groans of the characters sound like they came out of a can, but the wind tearing at the dirt and slobbering waves on the shore sound magnificent.  Add in the ambient wildlife and you have a very graphically enticing world that utilizes the Unreal engine to stunning effect.  Now let’s get the rest of the game done, guys.  This one is set up to be really good.

Here the Kharnish warriors allow a Durnovan man how to perform the Kharnish Hot Foot ritual, performed with axes and clubs by boys at age 4.

Here the Kharnish warriors allow a Durnovan man how to perform the Kharnish Hot Foot ritual, performed with axes and clubs by boys at age 4.

 

DLC Quest, Laugh Until it Hurts

Posted on by thre3zekiel

 

 

 

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DLC Quest is fucking hilarious.  Have you ever been frustrated by the fact that every MMO has microtransactions in it?  They no longer use the monthly subscription standard and just try to monetize it the best they can?  Some times they even go too far and make you buy gems or keys to make your game go faster or get you another useless item for your collection of pixel-itmes?  DLC Quest jabs angrily at this frustrating reality and makes you laugh time and again.

Literally this game has you start out by watching a bad guy take the Princess MacGuffin.  Yea, so already we can see that this is a classy title.  For those of you who are unaware, the MacGuffin, as detailed by Alfred Hitchcock, is the item central to the conflict of a plotline and everyone is usually looking for it.  Once you witness this, you have to start collecting coins.  These coins will be used later to pay for DLC.  DLC which unlocks functionally indispensable features of the game, such as music, animations and the ability to fucking move left.  After you get your Zoolander Syndrome sorted out, you are off to seek more coins so you can get to the end of the game.  Now, there are two “games” which are in pretty much the same program, so I would consider them all to be part of the same game.  Granted, they are listed as two separate games and plays, but the fact that the game is “released unfinished” with a “better expansion pack that you can get later” is just another jab at major industry methods.

Something amazing is always happening just over those mountains.

Something amazing is always happening just over those mountains.

The first “game” is over really quickly, but the levels can be a bit on the frustrating side.  I didn’t die once, but there is a lot of annoying jump puzzles and the only thing you get to kill personally are sheep.  After your horse saves the day, you then load up the second part of the game.  You adventure for a bit, and you have to discover who is behind disappearing villagers.  Of course, the villagers all live in what equates to a big hill, so there’s that.  You venture forth and discover a shepherd, whom you presumed dead, was behind the deaths this whole time.  His sheep were the ones you so heroically vanquished in the previous “game”.

Some parts of this game aren’t really played so much as watched.  There are a few cut-scene-esque sequences that showcase various types of player frustration as well as legitimate game sequences.  These cut-scenes vary from inability to maintain server connection to boss deaths.  I found myself laughing loudly at many of these as they are really relevant to the player experience.  This is a gamer/indie developer ranting about his experiences with mainstream gaming.

Don’t come at this looking for an excellent game.  DLC Quest’s primary purpose is to jab angrily at things they hate about the games industry and how they treat their players.  The game features themselves come in the form of a basic platformer, and most of the fighting is done for you.  In fact, the only boss you really defeat yourself is the very last boss in the second “game”.  I have no regrets about purchasing the game since it is available for 0.98$ on Steam.  Could you really justify being mad about a game that is less than a dollar, 2.99$ on any other given non-sale day?

Those coming at this game looking for an actual game are just a bunch of fucking assholes.  Sure, this game isn’t really what it makes fun of, but that is not the damn point.  If this game was a F2P mmo that made you buy DLC for everything, possibly still with in-game money, it would go downhill right fucking quick.  Some jack ass on Rock Paper Shotgun suggested this, but I think he needs to get his goddamn head checked.  That idea would never in a million fucking years work right.  At least not done by an Indie Developer.  And if they did it would end up literally being every bit as annoying as the games it is making fun of.  I mean this asshole wishes he could spend money unnecessarily on stupid shit in a game that makes fun of games doing just that.   It would make the satire less poignant and more self-destructive, making fun of itself in the process of bitching about the state of the industry.  To be respected as a satire, which makes it artistic, it should not be adding more shit to the pile of shit.  Sure, art is a powerful word to use for this game, but not every piece of art is fantastical and pretty.  Just look at Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal.  This game does its job well.  Sometimes I wonder where they find these guys.  DLC Quest as it is now is a satire showcasing the ways that gaming has pissed everyone off, and that is a message I can fucking get behind.

One thing that really got my gall up in this title was the goddamn background!  Just look at it up there!  Something fucking AMAZING is happening back there.  I tried many times to get through incomplete sections of the levels or sneak past the coding, but that shit didn’t fucking fly.  I should be able to explore, man!  This is why I hate playing platformers and 2D games in general.  I am only getting an idea of what happens on this lush and interesting environment along a set, linear path!  Is there gold back there?  Is there a sexy, drunken french orgy/rave party?  I want to see that shit!

Pseudo “Game” Art: Proteus

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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Calling Proteus a game is incorrect.  All you can do is walk around, look and listen.  This game has existed long enough, however, where I do not feel at all bad about telling you everything I experienced in it, because let’s face it, it was fucking weird.

When you load up the game a screen like that above will appear.  You click the island to start and dive in.  Every time you start up Proteus, the island is different and you are offshore a good distance.  After the long swim (which feels like it is supposed to build anticipation) you come to shore and you start to get an idea what you just bought.  Everything is in saturated colors and the visuals make Minecraft look like a graphical powerhouse.  Everything is in these bizarrely basic Atari-level graphics.  But that is not the cool part.  Obviously.  What’s so unique about Proteus is that it is about wandering around and discovering.  The things you discover aren’t cool loot or terrifying enemies, they’re sights and sounds.  Strangely, at a lack of other stimuli, you then start to react to the game emotionally, which makes it a more deep and tactile experience.

I came ashore in Proteus and there were a bunch of pink trees with leaves falling from them, which made a beepy drifting noise as they fell to the ground.  Walking further I found a frog and chased him up a hill where I found the ruined towers.  This tower had a weird chiptune bag-pipe music.  That’s the best fucking way I can put it.  Walking up to the thing I noticed my screen blink black.  When I turned around, I was elsewhere on the island.  I stepped away from the imposing broken-looking structure and found a path, which bordered a forest.  Just inside the forest was a flock of birds that bloop when they peck the ground.  I figured they must be chickens.  If you walk too close to them, they’ll chirrup before skittering off, tinkling the whole way.

I walked along the path and found nothing of particular fucking interest.  By this time it was getting late in game, and my natural gamer instinct kicked in.  “Fuck!  The zombies are going to eat me!” but the game lilts softly as night falls, making comforting and sleepy noises.  Really pretty, and no zombies came out looking for my brains.  I’ll tell you what I did find, though.  Fireflies!  I heard weird little bloops that came and went and looked around only to find little lightning bugs flashing here and there.  I wandered around for a bit and saw some sparkles like falling stars in the distance, spinning and writhing.  I got there and found a mass of spinning sparkles.  As I entered the circle, it condensed and formed a portal.  Already time was flying by around me, so I stepped inside the portal.  I was at the same place, but it was a little different.

 

Ooo! Sparkly!

Ooo! Sparkly!

So after wandering around more I found a circle of totems, these made a low whirring noise and the stars pulsed wildly like they were exploding then retracting then exploding again.  Eventually this stopped and a storm rolled in.  Nothing in this game seems to follow any kind of logical sense, though.  There are simple effects and things that react to your presence (standing stones that shoot sparks and make a noise as you walk by, animals to chase) but nothing all that interactive.  At one point I went through the portal and came out into a sad autumn land with a graveyard.  Seriously.  I am pretty sure it wasn’t there before, but it had a bunch of sparkles everywhere.  I also noticed that clusters of sparkles would pulse into existence, then disappear.  When I left the graveyard to search for the portal again, I saw ghosts playing peek-a-boo with me behind trees.  Weird.

Finally I entered the portal again and came out into a desolate snowy waste with dead trees and over cast with clouds.  It began to snow a little, which added some sound.  There was very little, and this took away most of the fun of the game at this point.  I went around and there was very little of interest, so I looked for the totems again.  I couldn’t tell if it was night or day, since the sky was blocked out.  I felt claustrophobic too, and wanted to get above the low-hanging clouds.  When I found them, the totems were emanating a weird chanting noise.  Suddenly I began to float upward.  The chanting got louder.  I saw the mountains, a huge fucking tree I found earlier and went to those landmarks, but I kept moving upward.  A couple falling stars whished past me as I drifted up and up toward the moon.  Finally my eyes began to close slowly until the screen was black.  And the title screen slowly loaded up.

I have to assume this game is some kind of weird analogy for life, you start off fresh and new and everything seems to be in a state of springtime.  You step into the portal and time whooshes by and then it is summer.  Summer is full of more weird shit, there are some bees and the sun is pulsating hotly.  Step into the portal again and it is autumn, the world is full of trees dropping leaves and death.  There are spirits and ghosts and I even found a graveyard.  Step in again and the world is dead.  You find the place of passage and you pass through the clouds, out of sight and into the heavens.  Yay, fun.  I wish I had dropped acid or ate some ‘shrooms.  Might have made the game that much more enthralling.  Of course, I would be the fucker to find the only way to fucking die in a game about looking around and listening to everything.  If you want to play this game, it is available on Steam for 3.99$ due to the Steam Summer Sale.

It is hard for me to recommend that anyone else buy this game.  I liked it, it definitely made me feel something different.  But this is not something for standard gamers to buy.  It is weird and experiential.  You will find things in here that are neat and fun.  Everyone will feel something about this game, whether it be hatred or ecstasy, but to say it is a good game would be a vast overstatement.  Art is to be looked at, enjoyed and explored, and with more than just a few key clicks.  Don’t buy this game if you are looking for a fun little game to waste some time with.  This is not that.  It is more like a visual and auditory vacation from everything else that leaves you on one side of a massive wall or the other.  Do not buy this as a game, buy it as a piece of art, for it is to be enjoyed lightly, perhaps over a pipe of some strong weed.

Whooshy comets go whoosh!

Whooshy comets go whoosh!

In a game with music and bizarre visuals where I always had one eye-brow quirked, I still found something to be angry about.  And that is the fucking reviews on Steam.  Seriously!  It is like everyone is taking some fantastic drugs and loading this baby up!  Everyone seems to agree this is a game you come into just to wander around and enjoy being away for a while.  You get sent to a pristine island of singing things and happy-happy times!  Not to mention, this game has better scores than games that work harder and give you more.  But I have another theory!  This game is actually the waiting room that demented gods send their human sacrifices through! Each day in game is how long it takes in the real world for them to send another one through.  And at night you are sent to the next level of this insane purgatory!  Finally at the end, you are so bored out of your mind that you are happy to let the world melt away and drift into the air to be consumed – mind, body, spirit – by your god(s).  Take that, you hippy-ass art-as-experience pricks.

Unbridled Shenanigans in the Dungeons of Dredmor

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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

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

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

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

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

levelup1

… will it keep me safe?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Gear Up for Comedic Carnage

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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

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

spidertank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Survive, MacGyver vs. zombies

Posted on by thre3zekiel

how-to-survive-cover

 

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

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

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

againstwall

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

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

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

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

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

"You say 'woo sah' to me one more time, jack, and I shoot you in the dick."

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

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

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

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

Smallworld, Better Than Pit-Fighting Midgets!

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flying Dwarfs. Isn't the idea the same if you exchange 'dwarves' for 'lead'? Nevermind. Lead is less stinky.

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

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

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

dawg

 

 

Craft the World, Dwarven Shenanigans

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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

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

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

Creepy wall face watches you sleep.

Creepy wall face watches you sleep.

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

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

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No, seriously, that shit happened to me!

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

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

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

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

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

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