Shadow Protocol, Super-Techno Euro Spy

Posted on October 4, 2014 by thre3zekiel

I am generally not a fan of mobile games, but some devs have really been killing it lately. Seriously. First I discovered Henry Sorren and his horror series, then there is Goodnight Games and this remarkably sweet piece of iOS entertainment. I grew up playing games where stealth was a challenge and not a super-power, and this game just feeds that sense of profoundly badass precision tempered with a tension I rarely see anymore. Come disappear into the shadows for a while. I promise you’ll enjoy it.

In this iOS title you play a member of M.O.T.H., a super-secret organization so shrouded in mystery, not even the game explains what it stands for. You are a covert operative trained to get in, get the intel and GTFO before the bulldogs catch on to your presence. In this, as with many other stealth-based games, a main focus of the game is the gear. Primary among your kit is that black alien suit you are wearing. It allows you to melt into the shadows, avoid detection and be generally ninja-like. When you are in the shadows, you are completely invisible and the music reflects this by going all enigmatic.

Another important piece of gear is the hacking device, and it’s what you use to obtain the most important plot-progressing pieces of the game. Throughout the game there will be terminals to hack, which will give you pieces of intel – usually objectives – and can also grant you access keys to doors. These doors will be a bland white color. Other doors seem to have been purchased from the 90’s era FPS games, as they are activated by keys matching the color of the doors themselves. I didn’t have an issue with this at all; in fact, I found the keys an endearing element of the game, lending a nod to older games and utilizing the game’s isometric view to the best of its coded capacity.

Be a spooky shadow-ninja

Another piece of gear is the smoke bombs, which you will use to get past certain types of guards. Generally, you can avoid the patrolling guards by staying out of sight until they pass then dodging past them toward your goals. Cameras are pretty easy to avoid just by going into the shadows. You can even move around in the shadows, you won’t appear on the camera at all. I guess the villains were too cheap to afford motion-sensors. Better to waste the funds on stupid muscle. That always works out well. The last type of guard is a little something of a dick. This guy sits in one place, usually guarding a door-key. To move these jerks, throw a smoke bomb and slip past them, getting the key and gaining access.

Guards can be a little easy to get past at times, providing little more than a momentary obstacle, but they all have little surprises here and there. The patrolling guards will look to the sides, rather than just in front, finding you just around that corner you thought you were safe beside. Some of the guards go outside the methods you trained them on, so stay on your toes. There is no telling where the next guy will be and how resourceful you’ll need to be to get past him. It can be aggravating at times, but for fans of challenging stealth it is worth the play.

Of course, not every situation permits passive avoidance, and there are situations in this game that warrant a more proactive approach. Before you Assassin’s Creed nuts start going all Altair on these guys, you have no lethal weapons in your arsenal. All you have is a whip and a taser. The whip has a slight chance of render enemies unconscious for a second, but there is also the chance that they might just come running after you; since the latter option is far more likely, you won’t be using this much. Some guards will only move if you try using this thing, so it becomes a necessity in some levels. The taser is the most proactive item you have, and this disables your enemies long enough for you to get away… so about 3 fucking seconds. Using the whip will only disable enemies for 1 second.

…because guards are among the most intellectually superior creatures on the planet, right?

The controls are pretty intuitive, though they can be frustrating at times. You move via the touch-screen joystick that many iOS games use, and I have had many a time where I was playing too fast and I went the wrong way… in front of a camera. Items are deployed by hitting the corresponding button on the menu at the right side of the screen. Most of the items you just tap once and they’re used, but the hacking tool has to be held while a bar fills, hacking the terminal. This can be infuriating as sometimes you have to do this before the guard gets back from staring at the wall for a few seconds, other times before a camera moves painfully slow into view.

The art and sound of this game surprised me, and were amazingly superior for an iOS game. It looks and plays like a lost SNES title with art that is fitting and very enjoyable. Characters walk and move smoothly and scenery is good. Sound is enjoyable and helps to create the necessary tension that a game like this desires. Everything comes together here to create a fun and interesting play, and it has a story that is frankly too good for the standard mobile fare. Add to that the fact that this game is a fucking challenge? Yea, it’s a good play, for sure. Seriously, though, the game goes from a pretty moderate walk in the park to “Oh my fucking god how did I even clear that goddamn level?!?!” in a few short (ish) levels. All this, and the game itself is only 0.99$ on iTunes and the App Store. I recommend this for iPad, but it is likely still very playable on other idevices. Want to watch the trailer? Here you go.

Slaughterball, Bloody Freaking Fun

Posted on September 30, 2014 by thre3zekiel

Recently, thanks to Erik at Frog the What games, I had the chance to play through a two-man game of Slaughterball. It is an inventive and exciting game about a futuristic game, based on handball and combined with genetic mutants and freaks. These people have been altered by companies to run faster, hit harder and have keen senses. It’s almost like someone tried to create a human “master race” through genetic alteration, but all they managed was a really badass football team. This game is up on kickstarter and they’ve been funded to their first stretch goal! Get in there now and you can still get some serious early-backer swag! You can also head to the Slaughterball website to get some more information about the game itself!

Yes, that team looks just like a bunch of orcs.

My favorite part of this game is how everything feels like you should be narrating it with an announcer’s voice, and this is what I did. It was legitimately one of the most entertaining times I have had sitting on my friend’s floor, playing a game. As it went, we chose one of the four teams that came with the review copy. I favored the spartan-themed Swords of Damocles whereas my friend went with the buxom Valkyries. Now the pieces on the board are referred to athletes and the people playing the game are coaches, which makes sense considering either could feasibly be labeled “players,” so they opted to eliminate that distinction altogether.

Each athlete has 5 stats: accuracy, agility, brawling, speed and toughness. Accuracy shows how good they are at throwing the ball, so when throwing the ball at a goal, you get the number of your accuracy worth of murder dice to roll. I call them murder dice because they are covered in knives and skulls. The more knives you get, the better you roll, so get knives. To get the shot in, you have to get a number of knives equal to or greater than the shooting distance in squares between the shooter and the goal. All of the tests work similarly with one stat giving you a number of dice and then another being the stat you roll against for the opposing athlete or just quick checks to see if you make a goal or pick up a ball mid-move.

Once you have your team selected, you have to place the little guys and gals on the board. Everything is pretty well explained, though. Once you’re all set up, it’s time to play. Now each team’s turn encompasses three phases: draw phase, onslaught phase, cleanup phase. The first phase is where you can discard any number of cards and draw more. This allows you to mix up your strategy at a moment’s notice and keeps you from stagnating in actions. There are a lot of cards, don’t be afraid to ditch the ones you have for something better! During the onslaught phase, your athletes can move, chop (attack, basically) and pass or shoot the ball. Moving and passing or shooting the ball are all pretty self explanatory, but chopping is where you use your athletes to attack the opposing athletes.

Successfully chopping the other team’s athletes is a good place to start really doing damage. When you chop, it incurs a DnD-style chop test (with the brawling stat) which you roll the murder dice for. For our game, both teams’ razors ( the skinny, accurate, fast ball-shooter) ended up in the slaughterbox, which is sort of the game’s hospital. Except instead of healing the athletes, they are allowed to just lay there bleeding while kids and viewers throw popcorn and ice cream cones at them. Getting off a chop attack will successfully down an enemy and, usually, score you points! Getting off more chops while they are down will get them injured, slaughter boxed, possibly penalized…. and more points!!!

That’s not a scar! I’ll show you a scar!

When you start the game, the goals are closed and the ball shoots out of a ball-port. These blast the ball high into the sky, at least in my mind. The athletes run in, grab the ball and then run into the meat grinder at the center of the board. Wait…. fuckawhadinnabaht!?! No, they aren’t running headlong into a literal meat grinder like ball-playing lemmings, they are running into a section in the center of the arena filled with skin-slashing spikes, sandpaper carpeting and possibly demotivational posters. It’s like the chokey for genetically-engineered athletes. The best part is that you get extra damage on opposing athletes for knocking them down in the meat grinder.

Once someone runs the ball into the meat grinder, all the goals open and you can start making shots. Keep in mind that any time you don’t run open goals or make a shot with the ball, anyone with the ‘Shot Clock’ card can use it to get an athlete in the penalty box, redeploy the ball and get a little edge over your opponents. The structure of the game allows you to get some serious synergy, too. During your onslaught phase, you can select three different athletes (indicated with the onslaught tokens) to make two moves each. These can be used to run, chop, pass and shoot, as stated. A lot of times I would use one player to run, grab the ball, throw it to another athlete who would run it to the razor or shoot. My buddy Dave got two goals in the first round of the game this way. Granted the ball practically deployed into his hands, but you roll a die to determine which port it comes out of, and the dice are always in that guy’s favor. Gameplay is fluid, thrilling and fun. Mostly fun.

So my master plan to get and score with the fucking ball didn't work. Risk in this game is not usually worth it, unless you have the cards to back it up.

So my master plan to get and score with the fucking ball didn’t work. Risk in this game is not usually worth it, unless you have the cards to back your strategy.

Notice the letters in different shapes on the athletes’ cards. These show the different types of athletes. Int he actual game there will be lovely plastic pieces that have differently shaped bases, but the review copy had these useful proxies. There is the butcher or ‘square B’. This is a big fucker that will chop anything and often ends up in the penalty box when you can get the card. You’ll have one on your team. The razor or ‘circle R’ is a lithe and speedy little fucker with four-arms who can move like nobody’s business. These guys make a lot of the shots.. at least until they end up in the slaughter box. You also have one of these. There is also the cleaver or ‘pentagon C’. These guys are pretty good defensive athletes. They have decent accuracy, agility and speed, but they aren’t much for brawling and chopping. This means you can use them to run the ball and score pretty well if you lose your razor. Then there are the slashers. These guys have higher toughness and brawling than your slashers, which makes them decent for defense. These guys will be good at carving (providing interference for athletes running the ball) and generally defending the guy running the ball long enough to get a score in. They are a little slower, less accurate and agile than the cleavers.

Big surprise.. butcher in the penalty box…

I may have mentioned that there are penalties and fouls that you can call. I love the way the rules are explained for this in the game. A great way to look at the rules is like the truth during a great story: never let either get in the way of a great time! This means that the referees of the game are all but fucking terrified to step into the arena. I would be too with these genetically-altered freight-train people charging and chopping each other all over the place! Each team looks like a scarier version of the Monstars from Space Jam! Fuck! So there are penalty cards, which can be used to call fouls. This represents a time when a referee was paying attention long enough to call a foul on a player, likely getting himself side-lined to the slaughterbox in the process. The thing is, violence is one way that the sport itself is so popular. These athletes knock eachother down, injure one another, rub eachothers’ faces in the meat grinder etc. all for points and the entertainment of fans. It is like soccer would have been in an ancient roman gladiatorial arena and it is brutal, spine-shattering fun.

One thing that I wanted in this game, which really disappointed me, was that there seemed to be no option for a “fantasy football” league. You know, an option that would let you alter the stats of your team, name your athletes and get more into it? I told this to Erik, the game’s creator and he said this:

“In league mode you can design your own roster, picking which athletes are on your team, you can spend winnings to increase your traits and skills. However, there is no build from scratch mode in this release. That’ll be in the next Kickstarter. ;)”

Back this game NOW!!!!! This is going to be something awesome that we nerds can have for our own! It will be a sports game that will allow us to weave in our love of football, american football and other sports that will allow us to make our own teams, then compete on a larger level! I can see this game being the next big international board game, like Warhammer.

I was playing this game and just imagining the athletes in the arena, I want to see this game turned into a show on adult swim. Seriously, think about it. The world has enough personality, there are several layers of conflict (athletes against eachother, teams and their coaches, all the athletes on the board and the referees, the fans and the referees), and you can throw in the TnA of the cheerleaders (available as an extra purchase on the Kickstarter) to make it a great show with an an amazing world. On top of all that, it would be EXTREMELY relevant considering all the violence in sports these days and it already has a nice fanbase going. For now, this is just an awesome game, and I am still hotly debating backing it although I can’t really afford to right now. I mean, look at this game! I only played a scrimmage, although I wanted to get a larger game going. It is a great time and it allows you to fuck with the rules, bullshit and not get too upset over getting screwed. You’ll be screwing up the other player at some point, too. Sure, they are already backed, so let’s work on getting those stretch goals met!

EDIT: I recently caved and contributed 110$ to this campaign. I got the early razor and the cheerleaders! Ra ra! EDIT EDIT: I just bumped my backing up to 180$. The things that made me do this was the fact that I was already at 150$ due to add-ons. I also wanted to get my mitts on the extra team that was unlocked (Fury) and I wanted to get two teams’ cheerleaders! Sis boom ba! EDIT EDIT EDIT: Yea, changed it again.. hopefully the last.. 230$ now so I can get my name on a card and a couple of cheerleaders teams! WOO TAH! ED.. oh you get the idea.. So I caved and I went for the Hall of Fame backing. 480$ for my name and picture in the game as well as the cheerleaders and every perk from the Butcher level. I guess I will be really abstaining from backing people for a while! X P!

The Secret Cove, Former Deckhand Gone Indiana Jones!

Posted on September 24, 2014 by thre3zekiel

I was looking over this game and deciding whether or not to back it on Kickstarter and decided I would let me wife, the more casual gamer, decide whether we would back it. She likes to play games like this on her ipad, and I figured, since it is her area I would let her do the honors. She watched the teaser video and her face started to glow so brightly I needed to don my shades. She practically ripped the mouse out of my hand so we could back it!

The Secret Cove starts as all respectable adventures from the UK start: a night of drunken reverie in a pub. On this particular night you listen to some fishermen tell the tale of a lost smugglers’ treasure, so you decide to go all Indiana fucking Jones and look for it. You wake up on a beach (I’d wager your butt hurts from a forgotten debacle with the fishermen) and your character starts to analyze his life and wonder where he went wrong. After all, to end up an out of work deckhand he must’ve missed a good pointer somewhere. At least your house is nice.

The boarded up window is a conversation piece…

Well, fuck it’s a lot better than the house I don’t have. Either way, your character sets out to uncover the lost smugglers’ treasure. Throughout this sleepy little fishing village you’ll find connections to witchcraft, smugglers, intrigue and mystery. The world in this will be non-linear. Have you ever played an adventure game? Often they more or less leave breadcrumbs along a specific path that leads your through the plotline of the game. You don’t really take part in a developing story as much as you are a sightseer on a virtual tour group of yourself. The Secret Cove will be a large and open world composed of about 100 scenes you can interact with. As you progress, more and more of the world becomes accessible.

Fuck! I knew these ancient binoculars were a scam!

An interesting feature is that the puzzles will remain as relevant to the real world as possible. I remember playing a game where I had to tie a rope to a sword to create a sort of grappling hook style device so I could climb up out of a subway. It wasn’t exactly intuitive. Granted, that was a comedic adventure, other adventures I have played impeded progress just by making puzzles backward and non-intuitive. When that happens it makes the player feel cheated and a little stupid. These devs have decided to go with puzzles that are difficult and still make fucking sense to the character. Like welding metal together or fashioning a crowbar in a town with no Home Depot (hardware store). The game makes sense and it is all relevant to the work of a British deckhand. Well… former deckhand turned rogue archaeologist. Another thing to consider is that some of the puzzles will be inventory-centric item combining puzzles similar to those found in Zork. These are fun and you end up with a lot of items one you, but it is fun knowing that you had the answer in your backpack the whole time!

Perfect! My robot penis is complete!

This dev duo known as Cheeky Sprite Studios is working hard to make this game, and they’ve even enlisted Richard Douglas, professional composer, to work with them. That soundtrack is available as a backing incentive, too. Their long list of incentives includes things like getting into their credits, having your name etched on a cave wall, the game (duh), artbook, soundtrack and much more. Want a little taste of what the game will feel like? Check out The Secret Cove’s website! Part of these types of games is getting associated with another lovely locale, and this is no different. The secret cove will feature locations and scenes from well-known Cornish towns and landmarks like St. Ives Wharf, Padstow Harbour, Minack Theatre, St. Michael’s Mount, Eden Project, Lost Gardens of Heligan, Tintagel Castle and many more.

They have some pretty neat stretch goals involved, including getting this game on Steam Greenlight and having artifacts that will give you something on their website, so come join us on an adventure! It’ll be a lot of fun, and I promise you can bring a bag of wheat thins to snack on.

Spice Road, Culturally Confused Economic RTS

Posted on September 23, 2014 by thre3zekiel

If you’re like me, few things give you greater happiness in life than looking down on an anthill and watching them run around collecting food, attacking other bugs and working the land. Occasionally it’s fun to spit on them or zap them with a magnifying glass, but even that is just to see how their society absorbs the blow. Spice road is a game that allows you all the fun of watching an anthill, except that the anthill is full of people and they are establishing a regional trade-network.

To further enhance the insect-oriented analogy, the game regularly quotes economic magnates such as Donald Trump, Lee Iacocca and others. This gives you the feeling of being a money machine without having the crappy toupee. If you have a toupee, you have my sympathy. When you start the game, you are looking down on a region that is clouded by fog and filled with possibility. Your initial task will always be to establish a town, which will be your primary base of operations. City-building is a major part of this game, and it is a lot of the fun. As you build your towns bigger and bigger, you will have more people come to live in your town. Pretty basic shit, really.

Aw, fuck no. I am not going into the mysterious clouds of fog! There could be naked cannibals in there!

Some of the first things that you will build at any settlement will be houses, for the plebs, and scout camps, for innocent exploitation. On the region screen, you will see your scouts appear as little blue bullet-shaped things. While your scouts meander the terrain, they will discover resources, which appear as white diamonds. As you uncover these resources, you will be able to establish more and more resource buildings. Now, having fucking resources is great, food gets you more people and makes them happy, alcohol lets you get drunk at the saloon etc. You will be able to manufacture goods from ores you mine and have a full, booming industry. The thing is, you are in this game to make some serious fucking money.

This is where trade routes come in and make things more interesting, simultaneously making your settlements much fucking weirder. To start trading, you have to build “trade route” buildings (The names of buildings in this game are pretty abysmal but it is still fucking fun). Setting up the trade routes will allow you to trade with foreign trade routes (they appear as white arrows on the edge of the region map), other towns you may have set up or other factions. Sure, you can set up a town and make that your only area of operation in a region, but that makes things a little lame. If you limit yourself to one town, that limits how much money you can make. Not to mention, if you can get closer to the foreign trade routes, you’ll have a significant advantage over competitors. And on top of that, controlling a majority of resources in a region will (fucking obviously) give you an undeniable trade advantage over competitors. So getting a couple towns, maybe even just a small trade camp or two alongside your towns, will put you above the competition.

Yes! Make me money!

Now, not everyone is capable of building a massive trade empire and making money appear out of nowhere. There are some men who just want to watch the world burn, which is where bandits come from. These guys are fucking annoying, and they will attack your trade caravans. First, you have to find them, which can be quite a fucking chore; but if you have little angry-colored arrows going after your trade caravans, all you have to do is build a few extra scout huts and they will locate them. All finding them will facilitate is a solution. You can pay them off, but as you make more money, these parasites will want more, so paying off a bunch of bandits all the time is not a long-term solution.

Eventually you want to cut their throats and leave their corpses in the sand for the vultures to feed. You can build a number of public-order buildings like armories and watchhouses to keep your citizens in line; but to deal with external threats, you’ll need to construct a few barracks. These babies create expeditionary forces that you can use to guard caravans and murder bandits. Once you have a few of them built, you can go to the region map and select the bandits’ camps to begin negotiating with extreme prejudice. This is also the final solution that you’ll end up employing with competing trade-nations, because no one likes to share profit!

The goal is to not have your soldiers turned into bones. That is bad…

Meeting some of the goals set out for you in the campaign is difficult, but once you get the hang of it, the game is a lot of fucking fun. You can build a vast empire that encompasses and entire region and vie for control of trade routes, like a true imperialist dog! You’ll also be able to unlock new buildings and upgrade your existing buildings. For those more keyed up by micromanagement, you can go into each caravan, see its trade statistics and monitor the number of camels in a caravan to optimize the amount of money you are making vs. how much you are spending to get your camels out there. Chaining trade across a region also becomes useful as having a smaller town is good just to get your main town into contact with a closer trade target and so you can trade across undiscovered areas. There is a lot to do in this game, and it is a lot of fun for anyone looking for a great economically-driven RTS. Combat is an option, but not the main thing.

Looking at the title of this article, you might be wondering what the fuck this game has to do with cultures. Take a closer look at your town once you get it decently-sized. Looks neat, huh? Nations are mostly named after european powers like Burgundy and Moldovia.. You know, all the really important trade powers of their time. The buildings that you use for trade routes look like these middle-eastern spires from downtown Baghdad and then there are these old-timey, wild west saloon that you build for your peoples’ recreation. The town hall looks like a plantation from 1880’s Confederate America whereas the religious shrines are either little Ottoman-domed structures or Christian chapels. Each settlement looks as culturally tangled as a set from Firefly so that you think one half might initiate a Jihad on the other half at any moment. I was confused and a little terrified, but it just looks like a lot of ideas came together to make this game happen. This is the only thing is suffers from is a serious thematic disparity. If everything were added together and you told me this took place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and made things look like that, it might be less confusing. But as it stands, it seems to be pulled between some kind of Age of Exploration and Age of Imperialism discussion with wild west tossed in there somehow.

Dammit! Where is the level tree for nukes?!

Dammit! Where is the tech tree for nukes?!

Overall, if you are the type of person that likes to win an RTS through economic dominance and politics, this is a game for you. There are a lot of features that add to the combat aspect, but combat is not directly controlled. There is equal development to the city-building, economic and political aspects and it constantly allows you to find ways to make money. The art is a bit on the minimalistic side, but enjoyable. Music feels a little generic, but the overall design of the game itself feels and looks clean. One feature of this game is that it eases you into the greater game fantastically. It is complex and easy to fuck up, and the game itself gives you a number of goals and levels to screw up before you get to the game itself. Steam will sell you this game for only 19.99$ and I will tell you, it is worth it. Check this title out, it was a lot more fun than I expected it to be and is worth a few plays!

Double-Up Discussion: Taekwondo Global Tournament, Bucketman

Posted on September 10, 2014 by thre3zekiel

It is starting to happen. Games are coming out on mobile platforms that aspire to be more than just quick little solo challenges. Mobile gaming is starting to earn its stripes as a “real gaming” platform. Don’t believe me? Check this game out. It’s based on the ancient Korean martial art, and it utilizes the fighter concept to pit players against one another. It is still deep in development, if you go to the game’s website, you can sign up to receive updates about its release!

So right now you get to choose between four character, two male and two female. There are also two different arenas to battle in, but the “space” in the arenas are pretty small. Really the goal is to get up on your enemy and deliver blows to their helmet or to their waistband. This scores you a hit and lowers their health. There is also a stamina bar that lowers depending on how many moves you do, and attacking and blocking will lower it briefly before it refills.

I can see you stepped in a poop…

Controls are simple, back and forth arrows allow you to scootch in close to your enemy. Above those there is the block button, which makes your character drop their shoulder. There are two attack buttons, a low and high attack. Low attacks are aimed at the waistband while the high attack is aimed at the head. Experimenting with the attacks in combination with the move buttons causes your character to perform a variety of different style attacks. It is a lot of fun. It is pretty fast-paced and a lot of fun, even though there were only two different arenas that I could choose from: Dojang and Iran.

The background and art of the game is rather stunning for a mobile game. Taekwondo Global Tournament really took me by surprise! Right now there is no sound, but with the attention being paid to the rest of the game, I don’t doubt that it will be spectacular when it’s released! You can watch the teaser on you tube!

Bucketman is a bizarre game that takes the location information about your neighborhood and turns it into a game. Just the introductory levels, which all take place in Palo Alto, California, are frustrating and difficult, but the game has its charms.

The story is that there are Artificially Intelligent Vehicles, or AIVs , roaming the streets and you have to take on the form of a sentient bucket to stop them. Probably related to the Kool Aide Man. In this battle for chromatic dominance, you control your bucketman with a concentric joystick pad. You can also jump over the AIVs and there is another button, but I was having some trouble getting to the use of that thing. It is a fun game, though a bit trying on the patience.

The game gets more and more complex as you play, and the goal is to battle it out with the AIVs. You collect different color paints to raise your stats, such as walking speed and air-time for your jumps. An easier way to put is you can get more ups so jumps last longer. There is also water that you have to collect throughout a level, which comprises the main goal and gets you more time. So run around collecting more paints and waters. You can also buy more paints and such with in-app purchases, but they are pretty well hidden in the menu, almost as if the developer is ashamed to ask. But no worries, it isn’t in your face or forced, so it makes me feel really good about these guys. You can get this app free on Google Play!

Bucketman is a great location-based game that deserves some credit, even if the concept is bizarre and the story is goofy. I mean who would believe that Google cars could take over the world..? wait a minute…

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!

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

Posted on September 3, 2014 by thre3zekiel

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

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

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

And stay in that bubble!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just snorkeling here. Nothing to see.

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

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

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

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

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.

Whispering Willows, Spooky 2D Fun

Posted on August 2, 2014 by thre3zekiel

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

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

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

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

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

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

They want to give her dirt hugs!

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

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

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

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

The Fall, Protocol Bypass Complex

Posted on July 31, 2014 by thre3zekiel

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

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

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

So simple a caveman could understand them

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

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

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

– Arid, The Fall

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

From darkness you emerge…

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

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

Peek-a-boo!

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

A lot of Jesus imagery in this game…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am bound by nothing…

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

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

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

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The Crotchety Old Gamer

An irate gamer's blog

Tag Archives: RPG elements

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