Clockwork Empires, Wondrous Melange of Steampunk Insanity and Bugs

Posted on October 14, 2014 by thre3zekiel

It should come as no surprise, since this game is currently in Early Access, that Gaslamp Games’ latest title is buggy, broken and incomplete as fuck. That being said, it is the most fun that I have ever had with a game this broken, and at some points I am having a hard time telling what is broken and what is actually supposed to be happening. Overall, if you have been waiting for a good game that well-represents steampunk, but you were wholly disgusted with Bioshock: Infinite, then this game is one you should consider after a long debate about whether Early-Access gaming is a worthy direction for the industry.

Clockwork Empires is a game with personality and a lot of bizarre quirks. You are a group of colonists starting a small colony of the Great Clockwork Empire – at least I think you are since this is never really specified, just referred to as “The Empire.” But fear not! This is nothing like sitting in a Jane Austin novel set on a frontier! You have to help your people to survive in a world of horrors! HORRORS!

So when you start, you’ll want to start assigning work crews by clicking the work crew button and deciding which people will do which jobs. Trust me, division of labor is a pretty important concept in this game, since it will dictate which jobs get done fastest. My opinion is that breaking things down like this bears some of the best results. 2 crews for farming and foraging. This is most important. Foraging is how you will get the initial glut of goods to sustain your people in the beginning and you’ll have some food from the Empire, but airdrops are too infrequent, sometimes inaccurate, to rely on. You have to get farming or starvation will set in briefly before cannibalism starts. These little bastards don’t even think about it either, they’re just like “What ho! I’m rather peckish and Nancy just died. Guess we’d best start rationing her out, hey chaps?”

Clockwork Empires 2014-10-14 10-47-07-71

Listen up, Steelwalker. You and your chaps will start looking for the best way back to the Empire, cause this place sucks!

After food income is determined, the next most important economy is the space economy. This is handled mostly by one or two crews that are set to forestry, mining and hunting. Forestry is a task that will have them chopping wood, removing terrain obstacles and other sundry natural objects. Hunting will make them a useful source of occasional food. The tasks I always break out are construction and workshop jobs. Now, in the outset you can easily group these two together since there will be no workshops in the beginning, you’ll have to build them. But if you keep your workshop crews constantly divided between construction and their workshops, goods production will go WAAAAAY too slowly. Eventually construction will become its own job and given that there are so few people for all the jobs, and the more people you get the more likely you are to starve, it is something that will have to be done in spurts. Of course, there are a few exceptions.

Exceptions are always important. In the very beginning, farms should be among your first things you create, but farms alone aren’t great for producing food. You’ll need workshops, and the two most used are the kitchen and the carpentry shop. The tutorial actually recommends you make the carpentry shop first, and they are right. The carpentry shop is where you will create planks that are necessary to build nearly everything else in the game. After the carpentry shop, get on that kitchen. Chances are that you chose wheat as your first couple farms. Great choice, but without a kitchen you can’t use the wheat you’ve harvested to make bread. Your people will die staring at sacks of flour.

Yes, just place that plaque of the imperial coat of arms above their dirty little workstations so they can look up at our ubiquitous hegemonic omnipresence at all times. Very good.

Yes, just place that plaque of the imperial coat of arms above their dirty little workstations so they can look up at our glowering hegemonic omnipresence at all times. Very good.

Construction in this game is definitely unique and undeniably irritating. First, you have to build on the grid, but the grid doesn’t run everywhere. Some areas are just not to be built upon. No real explanation, but I assume there is a ditch or unstable terrain there or something. Once you’ve cleared a spot to build upon, you now draw the outline for the building. It doesn’t always have to make sense and it is the most impressive feature of the game. You can make a thousand of the same building and each can be vastly different from the others. Once you’ve got your blue outline, you then place your modules. These are the things that give the buildings purpose and character. Some are required, in the above case a door and a worktable, some are optional and the rest are decorative. I like putting the massive bay doors on my carpentry shops. Just gives the impression of industry. And make sure you put one or two decorations. It might just be a game, but it’s the little things that give a sense of immersion. The most irritating things about the construction system is that you can’t add a few things in at the start and then finish up later. You are building everything that is going to be in that workshop for the rest of the game. That is irritating as fuck because gameplay develops as the player interacts with the game. It is just restricting and never shows any growth or development.

So you’ve got the makings of a colony, and things are moving along. You’ve got your basic workshops, goods are moving and you’ve finally gotten a few bunkhouses up for the lower class and the middle class. You are going to start having issues. Most namely among these issues are the foes: cultists, fishpeople and all manner of eldritch Lovecraftian horrors. The best part is that the fishpeople will walk in at random intervals and menace your people. Sure, you can forage their eggs as exotic caviar, effectively eating their children as a delicacy; but cogs only know why the beasts so hostile, amirite?

Charles, gather the basket. I must defend the crown!

Charles, gather the victuals. I must defend the crown!

I haven’t really gotten very far with this game simply because it is so fucking broken. Don’t get me wrong, I love this game, but the level of incompletion and inoperability make this game absolutely frustrating to deal with. My biggest gripe is that saves don’t really seem to work. I have saved games and come back to them with varying degrees of success. Sometimes they work, other times reloading a save causes the game to utterly crash. If this were the only issue I would be less annoyed with the game, but sometimes it just crashes mid-game. All of my plays invariably end with a crash of some sort and then me sighing about everything that I didn’t save. Then I remember that the saves rarely even work and go play something else. Sure, you might be saying “But Crotchety, this is an early-release you ass-burglar! Of COURSE it’s buggy, they are still working on it!” Let me say this to you little shits, never judge anything by what it could be some day. That is how Hitler managed to convince people into the Holocaust. One day we’ll eliminate all the weaker genes in the human race and the world will be full of happy, healthy blonde-haired blue-eyed babies. Sure sounds nice until you remember you had to kill millions of people to get there. Also, the price of the game on Steam is 29.99$ AS IT IS! That is 30$ that would probably be better spent on a portion of Civilization: Beyond Earth.

Malfeasant clawbulb. Fucking.. what?!

Despite the issues, there are still a number of reasons to be excited about this game. There are some surprises like random crops growing in your farms, enemies and content updates. The art is nice and the music is fun. Every so often you will get drops and immigrants from the empire that will help your colony thrive, but there are so many bugs. I read about this game back in the April 2014 issue of Game Informer and getting ridiculously excited about what I was reading. Finally, a steampunk game full of cogs, gears and fishpeople and its an RTS!!!! The unfortunate fact is that this is a game whose release I am still waiting for. The best way to play these Early-Access games, in my opinion, is to buy it, play it a little bit to get the impression then let it sit for some months and let it get updates. Sure this suggestion might make developers nervous, but if you can’t release a full game, it is going to suck and hurt to play. Just like every time I have to be punished for not saving and, saving, have to be punished for buying the game early when my saves don’t load but, instead, crash the game. Well, at least the game is fun and quirky. Even the crash messages say “What ho! The game has crashed!” or some such irritating nonsense. If your game crashes, it shouldn’t be cracking jokes. This is where your skirt has blown up. Fucking apologize for your broken game.

The Best Rash I’ve Ever Had

Posted on September 17, 2014 by thre3zekiel

When I was a kid, my friend would come over with a copy of Road Rash for Sega Genesis. We’d race for hours while beating each other over the head with any number of clubbed and bladed implements. Ah, the joys of youth! It has been many years since and I hadn’t even heard the name of this spoken, and I had begun to wonder if it was ever real at all. I played Twisted Metal on the Playstation and any number of other games that tried to emulate it, but none that tried to recreate the balls-to-the-wall motorcycle racing gauntlet that was Road Rash. Then yesterday, it happened. I heard of a projecton Kickstarter that was to emulate this game, and it had already reached its funding goal. Its name was Road Redemption.

In this title, you will be playing a Katana-clad member of a mid-western America motorcycle gang. You have to move your way up in the ranks and take control of drug trading routes. It’s a visceral title that will actually hit harder than its spiritual predecessor. Thing is, it won’t be made by the same people that made Road Rash. In fact, a lot of these developers grew up playing games on the same systems I did, so they remember the good old days of games that make you earn their respect rather than the spoon-fed titles of today.

Who says real badasses never look back at an explosion?

This looks like a title that will take esports to an awesome new level and bring people away from their Xboxes and Call of Duty. You’ll earn money by racing, sure, but if I can wield a shotgun on a motorcycle, why would I just want to race all the time? Luckily there will also be assassinations, robberies and other challenges. Getting the goods will allow you to level your character, buy better hardware and upgrade your bike so you can really take on the tough guys.

The storyline is a sort of made-in-America Mad Max routine. You are part of stated motorcycle gang in post-apocalyptic mid-west America, and the country is run by a ruthless dictator. You gang-leader decides that it would be a great idea to ride into the capital with the intent of killing the dictator. I guess it doesn’t go too well, since the game description implies heavily that shit hits the fan for you and everyone you know. You then have to track this guy down and, pending his judgment at the gang’s hands, decide what to do about the whole dictator situation.

Flying blurry men never did know how to ride bikes well…

One of the more vague features of this game comes with the life-system. There will be no extra lives, but the experience, gear and upgrades you earn should stick with you. What does this mean? Fuck if I know, but I guess you have a lot of family members who are willing to step up and take over your cause. You’re probably from one of those massive Irish-Catholic families you see all over television. What’s more is that multi-player mode will be all about you building your gang and then taking to the internet where you will join up with or against your friends. Hey, competition is just as much fun as working together, sometimes. Personally, I cannot wait to throw someone under a bus.. fucking literally!

The best part about all of this? Road Redemption comes out tomorrow on Steam as Early Access. So get those bike helmets ready. We’re info for one hell of a ride. Get ready for the best rash you’ve ever seen!

Valley of the Dead Pre-Releases

Posted on September 9, 2014 by thre3zekiel

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

What is Early Access?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A new game will give us the following advantages:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuclear Throne, SHMUP Both Exciting and Frustrating

Posted on August 23, 2014 by thre3zekiel

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

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

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

I brought marshmallows, but they upset Melting.

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

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

Did I just see Beetlejuice?

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

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

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

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.

Black Ice, Warning: Incoming Game!

Posted on July 23, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Remember those days when we imagined all the different ways that life would be different inside a computer? Any male product of the 1990’s would remember Reboot: a show whose name is invoked, intentionally or not, when an old series gets updated and made dark and gritty. It was about the denizens of a cyberworld inside a computer where things were fine and happy until some jerk decided to play a game. If that were the case, my computer’s inside city is a post-apocalyptic nightmare ruled over by the churning wheels of a citizen-rending machine known only as Steam. But before all that happy-go-lucky bullshit there was a guy who envisioned a world destroyed by cybernetics and supercomputers. Where the ultra-wealthy elite do as they please with the world, ruling from corporate arcologies where they look down and see an infinite sea of light reflecting the scintillating beauty of the stars above. This vision of the future, as seen in Bladerunner and Shadowrun, is called cyberpunk. Black Ice takes place in the minds of those called hackers, and it is a love letter to that vision of a future age. Garrett, the developer behind this game, shared some of his own thoughts on the inspiration driving this title.

Black Ice was inspired by many things, but mostly Neuromancer by William Gibson and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. I wanted to experience the hacking as described in Neuromancer, but I also wanted to find cool loot and blow stuff up. I think it’s obvious that I took a lot of inspiration from Diablo 2 and Quake 3, but I also looked at things like the Android: Netrunner card game and older games like the original Rise of the Triad. I want you to feel dread at what’s going to come out of these servers, to risk it all for the potential of awesome loot. I want you to feel great because you found an awesome ability combo and are wrecking servers that used to give you trouble. I want you to feel OP.

– Garrett, Developer, Black Ice

Jacking into the Supermesh can be a bit overwhelming at first, since you start the game at level 0. The game is far from perfect right now, but it has a good thing going. Check in options that you have the tutorial activated your first run. It will give you an idea where to start, level you up and secure you some first-level loot as well. But after running the tutorial once make sure you don’t have it active anymore, or else it will run every time you play. Irritating. Sure, in most versions of a cyberpunk future you are dealing with a massive computer network cybercomplex known as “the matrix”. Gibson used it, Shadowrun uses it, the Matrix used it: at this point the matrix is an irritating trope, so I am glad someone saw fit to call it something a little different.

Towering cybernetic arcologies etched with fluorescent dreams and backlit by scintillating points of data

Once inside the supermesh you will see block after block of fluorescently lit data archives. These are the servers. Each one is owned by a company or organization and each one holds a dark secret and terrible power, and you can read about them on their little terminals. But don’t get too distracted; there is a lot to get a hold of. Each attack you possess costs you RAM. Think of RAM as stamina in other games: every action you take aside from pressing ‘wasd’ costs RAM. Sure, your RAM replenishes but how quickly depends on your talents. You also have a health bar, experience and an actions hot bar. You can slot actions into your left/right click and numbers 1-5. You will also be able to slot abilities into spacebar and shift. While I went with the age-old gaming medium of shift to run, space to jump, you will certainly have options open as you can slot any ability anywhere. You could have 6 different types of lasers, an icebreaker and a rocket pack and play the whole game that way. Your arsenal depends on your hacking style.

Each of your attacks and abilities is governed by a talent. This is like the character sheet for your standard RPG, but this one is a bit more extensive. There are a lot of things to consider while you are running the supermesh. You have your hacking talents ( hack speed, hack time, hack range) which govern how you attack servers. Increase your hack speed to speed up your hacks. Decrease your hack time so there is less time on the clock when you start the hack. Increase hack range and you get a larger playing field. Now, when you hack a server, you run up to it and activate your icebreaker. Why the fuck is it ice? What is with all the fucking ice?!?!?! Is it cause the ground is light blue like ice or something? No. Fuck no. Those playing Shadowrun are aware that each server deploys Intrusion Countermeasures to detain or kill anyone trying to gain unlawful access to the data on the server. Your icebreaker lets you tunnel into the server and gain access in a matter of seconds. In the meantime, you have to deal with Black Ice, the ICs designed to kill the operator. These are what you shoot, nuke and destroy in the game. You main enemies.

Your next series of talents are what I have dubbed your general talents (Movement speed, Loot Find, RAM, Health) these let you do various things, mostly self-explanatory. You want all of these increased as much as you can get them. Some items increase your RAM incrementally or by a percentage, each is displayed separately. Your next round of talents will be your combat talents ( attack speed, accuracy, critical hit chance, weapon damage, weapon range). Again, all self-explanatory. The last round of talents are really just secondary combat talents (Damage returned, chance to pierce, drunk projectiles, knockback power, homing, chance to ricochet, damage reduced, chance to colorize, RAM returned). A lot of your talents cannot be increased by level, so watch what items you slot. You don’t want to give up an icebreaker that has a nice range if you really need space to move!

When you see this fucker you better run. It's a shark that fires missiles out of its jagged-toothed mouth.

When you see this fucker you better run. UFO shark is gonna shoot you with missiles!

Some points to consider while leveling up. While having an ass-load of RAM is good, some abilities will reduce your RAM by a percentage. This means the speed you’ll run out of it will not change ever. So the best stat to level up if you want a good bit of RAM every time you hit that button would be RAM return. This will increase the rate that your RAM bar refills. There are a lot of talents in this game, so don’t be afraid to experiment with each of them.

Personally, I did a lot of experimenting with ways to play this game. For example, nothing is more annoying in battle than being unable to find the attack you want right before some cyberweb crawler leaps at you and takes you out. This is frustrating. So I arranged my abilities and weapons so my attacks would be easier to access. In order to activate my icebreaker, I have to hit 5. Essentially, I cannot hit that button by accident. Your supermesh cybercity will be arranged so that a level 300 server is just next to the level 80 server I want to hack. If I am finishing off the target server and accidentally attack the level 300 server just next to it, I might get my bits scrambled before I can exit the hack range. I have had my bits scrambled a lot, and every time that happens you lose bitcreds, in-game money. So placing my icebreaker in a tough to hit spot helped me stop doing that shit.

Another fun fact you might notice while playing is that you can crack multiple servers simultaneously. This helped immensely when I was level 50 – 70 and was getting bored. Cracking one server at a time is a slow leveling process, and you have a long way to go until you can attack your final server, the aptly named Finality, Inc. It is the giant silver server guarded by a roving warship of doom, called a S.H.A.R.K. and topped with a spinning cybernetic skull. Can’t miss it. Anyway, being able to take several servers at once gave me the ability to level fast as shit. I got from level 51 – 80 in a matter of hours; each server provided a healthy boost of around 1000 exp. Activating several servers simultaneously allowed me to create a giant Venn Diagram of death. Pure magic.

Enemies in the red, orange, blue field are assholes that don’t like video games. I nuked them with a logic firebomb.

However, I still wasn’t leveling fast enough. I got frustrated and went to the store to sell a fuckload of goods. After cracking a few hundred servers, you inventory gets a little full. So you go to these giant solid-colored store servers. I hadn’t bought anything until level 47 and boy was I surprised when I did. I realized that I could buy some crazy missile attack that allowed me to blow up anything in sight. I also got a secondary, slow-firing shotgun attack that fired missiles instead of pellets. That shit hurt a lot. Now I was cracking 2 servers twice my level. At my best around level 50 I was able to take down a level 110 server and a level 160 server at once. Anything more than that and it gets really dicey. These attacks even let me take on the dreaded sharks, and that got me even stronger weaponry, since Finality Inc is a level 500 server.

Now I am pushing level 99 and I am able to take on three level 150 servers at once, but I generally just take a level 175 server and a few smaller ones with it. An important factor to note in server crashing is that when you attack more than one server at once, each server’s ICE will attack the others. This means that if you grab a spam server, all the other ICs will be bogged down trying to fight the little guys. Most other servers will kill off a spam server for you, and you can just watch. Granted, you would normally get experience per kill. If ICs kill eachother, you get nothing for it, however, you will still get the exp when the server goes down and the loot inside. But this means that you can use two or three larger servers against eachother, but be careful! Each server is killing each server and any IC not engaged in combat will lock into you if close enough, so it is best to keep within the range of enemies you can feasibly take down. I still shy away from servers at the upper 200 levels. Utilize these tactics well and you will turn all your enemies into a neat little pile of cybernetic death confetti, just make sure not to get your bits scrambled in the process.

It's like a party for you imminent demise! YaY!

It’s like a party for your imminent demise! YaY!

Black Ice is a great game, but it is in pre-release status, so it is far from perfect. It has a modern-classic feel to it, though, and will definitely get you back to reading some Neuromancer. It is available on Steam right now for a cool 9.99$. Not bad considering it is a good time. At the moment you’ll be plowing through servers like you’re some kind of bit drinking data vampire after a camping trip in the Australian outback, but it is a lot of fucking fun. My favorite thing is standing on top of a server, looking out and seeing the ghostly outlines of the numerous servers I’ve crashed. Sometimes destruction is its own form of creation. This is another game that includes a photo-sensitive mode designed to aide those suffering from light-sensitive seizures that still want to enjoy it. For those that care, this one is firmly planted in my favorites on Steam.

I was driven up a wall by one thing in this game, and it wasn’t the web crawlers. The thing about this game that got me so frustrated is the distinct lack of anything. It is a lot like being in an actual server: lights, a droning noise some soundtrack but there is no life! Can we have the game elements of this one already?! I mean I don’t want to go trade war stories with Mr. Rodgers or anything, but when I am cracking servers just to have someone to associate with, you know there should be a little more variation. Whatever, maybe I can just go hang out at Finality, Inc. Live every week like it’s shark week!

Viscera Clean-Up, Engagingly OCD

Posted on July 6, 2014 by thre3zekiel

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!

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.

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.

By Your Powers Combined, I am Indie Team Up!

Posted on July 2, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Since Captain Planet can’t help us anymore, it is up to us to fend for ourselves in this crazy world. But none of us have powers as strong as Captain Planet’s, even if Independent Game Developers are capable of some pretty cool things on their own. Many IndieDevs are solo men or women sitting in their basement coding, more still have a small team of about 6 people. Some IndieDevs are entire companies, but still the process can be a difficult slog through treacherous terrain. Indie Team Up is, luckily, one of those awesome things that some GameDevs did has the potential to make life easier for everyone involved.

The idea of the upcoming service is to link IndieDevs together so that we can help each other move the development of games forward. Another feature of this is artists. How many times have you been sitting there wishing you had artistic talent outside of coding? Or needed a composer just to drum up some music? Perhaps you need a writer to spell check, edit and hone your dialogue? Indie Team Up will have that, too. So who are these people with the drive, passion and vision to make this happen? What is their motivation and what are they going to get out of it? Just follow the bouncing ball.

Between the two of them, Colleen Delzer and Justin Hammond are the evil geniuses bringing this community to life. Both are dedicated IndieDevs, and both of them have other things in their lives that require their focus and attention. During our interview, Colleen had chicken in the oven for her family. This code-slinging mother of two spends everyday making games with her husband. Indeed, she is half of Adversary Games, a company Co-Founded with her husband. Colleen attended the University of Advanced Technology and, only two years into her studies, she was picked up by Realm Interactive. A year later Realm couldn’t find a pusblisher, so Colleen sought new work outside the industry. That lasted about 6 years until she was hired at Game Center Group. There she did game QA, game CS, web coding and design, but her true creative desires drove her to make games. Listening to the voice in the back of her head, she read some C++ books cover to cover and founded Adversary Games with her husband. And they manage well enough to make the Indie Team Up a reality.

When I asked Colleen to explain the Indie Team Up to me, she explained, “There are a lot who would love to help out GameDevs but don’t know how to ask, and a lot of GameDevs want help with an idea but don’t know where to turn too. The role of Indie Team Up is to connect the two!”

In a culture that is so focused on excelling individually, Indie Team Up has a different plan, “Our mission is to help bring the ideas of Independent Developers to fruitation and to cultivate a spirit of collaborative assistance. And to say, Hey! It’s ok to ask for help!”

And many in the IndieDev community agree. Indie Team Up is a burgeoning hashtag that is tearing holes in the twitter-verse. “It only started on the 15th of June, and I really wasn’t thinking it was going to take off like it did! But we are really trying to help people collaborate to make their projects a reality.”

So where does an idea like this originate? The ITU team has a good heart and the skills to bring the Game Dev community closer together, but it seems this is a movement born out of frustration. “Several people asked if I could use help with development, which at the time I didn’t. I felt bad turning people down because it seemed they really wanted to help someone. I thought that Indie Team Up could be a way were they could help someone in need. An avenue for them, if you will”

ITU is an idea from the heart of its creators, helping them tap into their own creativity and allowing them to give back to the IndieDev community. “I guess it’s an avenue for me as well. I really love helping people, just wasn’t sure on how to do it. So, I guess this is my chance. ^ ^”

If Colleen is the caring mother of the ITU team, Justin is certainly the dedicated father. With C++ as his first language, possibly prior to English, he is a self-taught programmer and later sought to legitimize his knowledge by attending school. Though he has yet to finish his degree, his reasons for taking his time are certainly respectable. Having served 5 years in the Army of the United States of America, Justin spent 2 tours in Iraq. He is proud of his time in the military, but he’s glad to spend his time with his own family now. Justin is a husband of 7 years with a 3-year-old daughter. He devlops games under the moniker Black Module Studios and has some of his work on Kongrerate as well. Of course not every project goes as planned and sometimes you just have to roll with the punches. Justin also helped develop a voxel framework that is featured on the Unity3D asset store for 40$, which started as a game. Unfortunately he and his team at Black Module had to shelve the idea until they have the resources to complete it.

Justin’s biggest priority as a Co-Founder is the development of the Indie Team Up website and shared his origin story as the ITU Web Developer. “Web development just sort of came naturally, as I love spending time on the internet, and I could program, so I just picked it up.”

And he puts a lot of time into the website, “It’s really only been about a week, so I can’t give an average yet. Although I’ve spent at least 25 hours this past week on design.”

But hard work is worth it when the product in mind is rewarding and extensive. “At a high level, [the Indie Team Up website] will allow users to showcase themselves and search out other people or teams to join. Teams will also be a large part of the site as teams will be able to search for users with the skills they need to complete their projects. There is a heavy emphasis on discoverabilty. The goal is to make it insanely easy to find people with the skills you need, or projects that you want to work on.”

The team has some really interesting plans, too, to integrate with a number of other community-organized projects. “Something else that we hope for is some integration with game jams. This was actually a personal idea of mine, as I always have trouble finding people to work with when Ludum Dare comes around. We still need to organize something with the hosts of different game jam events (Ludum Dare, #1GAM, etc.) but we are very hopeful. At the very least, we’ll have a section of the site dedicated to short term projects, such as game jams or other events.”

Indie Team Up has a list of problems it aims to solve, and Justin was eager to expound up them. “Because the internet is so large, it can be difficult to find people that 1) have the skills you don’t have, and 2) actually want to be part of what you are doing. We aim to solve those issues by having a centralized place to find other indie developers.”

Among the goals for the ITU site are integration with its existing extensions, “The site will tightly integrate with the hashtag and facebook page, so that when people post their, it is right on the site. It won’t just be a direct feed though, as we are already having people ‘misuse’ the hashtag.”

I even suggested that there be a showcase where ITU displays some of the projects it helped match-make with the approval of community members. He laughed and mentioned that he and Colleen already have a plan in the works for just such an idea. The ITU team has even had its first victories, which Justin shared. “One of the first days after #indieteamup started, we helped an artist find a team and are flying him to PAX. That was a very happy moment for us, being able to see what we are doing actually help people to achieve their goals.”

The Indie Team Up is a project that has a lot of goals. My first thought is to worry that the team is reaching a bit, but they have a well-coordinated group of members outside of its founders. When I spoke with Colleen about the origin story of the ITU itself, she mentioned it felt serendipitous, even fated. As if the IndieDev community has been looking for something like ITU for a long time. ” They just stepped up and asked. Justin was pretty much like ‘hey I plan on making a site!’ As well as the bot guy and the app guy. For instance, I did want to make a bot so I asked White Llama how to create one. The same day the bot guy 0x0 tweeted to me that he was interested in making one. I DM’ed White Llama, and I did tweet that there should be a more organized way for #indieteamup users to connect.”

0x0961h confirmed this story from his end in an email correspondence with me. “I was scrolling through my Twitter timeline and saw this new Twitter thing, that Colleen was kickstarting. I thought that it was actually a very awesome idea for the whole indie community, for people who are desperately looking for a team during jams. Plus, I always liked One Game A Month’s bot and always wanted to make a Twitter bot myself. So I threw some code into IDE, made it work and contacted Colleen. She approved the bot idea a-a-and here I am.”

As the Bot Developer, 0x0961h has the task of maintaining what currently represents the Indie Team Up initiative on the internet. “I made a web application that once in hour receives tweets with hashtag #indieteamup and pick 10 (or less) tweets to retweet. Simple enough. My current mission is to maintain it and implement new features for it. In one of future updates, for example, bot will start looking for speacial hashtags (e.g. #LFA for “looking for artist” or, maybe, more “Reddit-ized” variant of tags: #AW and #AH for “artist wanted” and “artist for hire” respectively) and give priority to tweets with them, not just every single tweet with #indieteamup hashtag. The goal is to make Twitter bot useful tool for, well, “teaming up” and not “just another useless spam twitter”. Now it just retweeting tweets with #indieteamup, but after site launch, I think, it’ll have few more functions, like, automatic posting “looking for/for hire” stuff from sites, maybe week highlights. It should become more clear after launch.”

0x0961h is experienced with the frantic days leading up to game jams and the search for individuals useful to a specific project. “All my previous games are jam entries, so they are not so polished, not so long, not so narrative-driven.”

But he is currently in the process of making something new that will follow along the lines of a true game release. “I’m developing a… well, I call it a “Big Project”. I want to make something, you know, “big”, pretty looking, so I won’t be blushing in shame before and after sending it to Greenlight. No details for now (mostly because I don’t have a single clue where my concepts and ideas will lead me), but I want to make a puzzle. I hope one day I’ll be able to finish it and actually release it. :)”

Despite his modesty, 0x0961h has a number of projects that made it to itch.io and even a prior Greenlight submission for a game on Steam.

Justin was able to further detail the origin story “Colleen was talking to @0x0961h (I believe) on twitter one day, and they wanted a place to find other indie game devs, then Colleen suggested #indieteamup, and @0x0961h set up a retweet bot for it (@indieteamup). I noticed this conversation and told Colleen I was going to make a site for Indie Team Up as I knew that permanence would be an issue, what with how quick tweets can go by.”

And so Indie Team Up was born. But where is it going? What happens when you can’t get to a fucking computer and you have to make immediate contact with everyone involved in your project in the heat of the moment? Well, simmer your skettios, there’s an app for that. Or, rather, and App Developer for that. Yep. Indie Team Up has a mobile division, and they’ve chosen to collaborate with another development team from Pakistan to do it. After speaking with them on the topic, I am really excited to see the results. “We, BugDev Studios, were looking for an artist to team up with on a few projects, one thing lead to another and we found #indieteamup. I was pleasantly surprised by Colleen’s enthusiasm of the idea and felt that the need was real and when we had a chat we knew we had to make this happen.”

The main man behind BugDev studios, Usman Cheema, was happy to give me a little bit of his background as well. He graduated in 2012 in Computer Science from a Lahore University of Management Sciences. He loves the intricate systems games offer for players to experience, used to play DOTA and AOE 2 alot around my graduation and I think these two games are what got me interested in game design. After being repelled from game design schools by financial limitations, Usman joined a local game development studio named Tintash. He worked there for two years in multiple roles and recently quit to start BugDev Studios full time with a team of like minded individuals. “At BugDev Studios we aim to develop creative, out of the box games, currently focusing on hand held devices as out target platforms. I have worked on Itsy Bitsy City at Tintash and Crazy Hexagon as an independent project with fellow devs (both available on Google Play). I like to read and write about games and psychology and take course on Coursera in my free time.”

As stated, Usman is part of a three man team that is working on the app. ” I am part of a team with two engineers [Aqeel Raza (@AqeelRaza2) and Abdul Aleem Khan (@aleemkhan001) ] who have experience in game dev, web development and app development. We will primarily be handling app development of the project. I will also be pitching in with user experience and feature design of the website.”

Though the app is too early in development to expound upon specific features, BugDev studios was able to provide some information about the app’s functionality. “The concept of the project is help out independent developers working in game devevlopment to find like-minded individuals with specific skills they need. The app will be designed to mirror the website’s capabilities, more or less. So, the website is something really needed right? The app is visualized as a mobile version of the platform, making it easier for our users to interact with the platform on the go.”

Indie Team Up is a community of IndieDevs created by IndieDevs. What are your skills and talents? What prior work have you done? Want to break into the gaming industry, and help some independent developers along the way? Keep and eye on #indieteamup and use the hashtag to connect with other developers. I would like to nominate this song as their badass theme song because these guys are IndieDev superheros. Like a bat signal in the night sky, this team of dedicated developers will see it and help provide you with the key ingredients necessary to get your project finished, and well.

All of the quotes included in this article are modestly paraphrased for spelling and accuracy. This is what the individuals involved said, but it has been arranged so that it all flows together nicely. What? You thought I got everyone in a room and had an interview? That shit would take hours!

Gear Up for Comedic Carnage

Posted on June 22, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Of 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.

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 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.

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The Crotchety Old Gamer

An irate gamer's blog

Tag Archives: pre-release

Clockwork Empires, Wondrous Melange of Steampunk Insanity and Bugs

The Best Rash I’ve Ever Had

Valley of the Dead Pre-Releases

Nuclear Throne, SHMUP Both Exciting and Frustrating

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

The Forest, Sandboxing With Naked Cannibals

Black Ice, Warning: Incoming Game!

Viscera Clean-Up, Engagingly OCD

By Your Powers Combined, I am Indie Team Up!

Gear Up for Comedic Carnage

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