Tag Archives: Steam games

Gear Up for Comedic Carnage

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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

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

spidertank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smallworld, Better Than Pit-Fighting Midgets!

Posted on by thre3zekiel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dawg

 

 

Craft the World, Dwarven Shenanigans

Posted on by thre3zekiel

ctwlogo

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

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

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

Creepy wall face watches you sleep.

Creepy wall face watches you sleep.

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

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

problemsbelow

No, seriously, that shit happened to me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hoard, Blazing Fun

Posted on by thre3zekiel

hoardlogoHoard is a game that features fire, gold and glory!  With an original concept and fun, fast-paced gameplay, this title makes me want to replay for hours and hours.  It would also be excellent for LAN parties, if you’re into that sort of thing.

In Hoard you play none other than a real fire-breathing bastard (no not Bill O’Reilly): a dragon.  You are a force of nature, indiscriminate destruction and robbery are your forte.  When I started I made it a simple 1v1.  You always play against a competitor, which gives Hoard a sort of real-time board game feel.  The game is really simple, too.  Destroy everything and everyone you see and take their money. </end article>.. ok maybe it’s not that simple, but still, that is how it plays.

You start of with a distinct advantage, however.  You always start in the center of the map.  That makes it all the easier to venture to other regions and bring your booty back as fast as can be expected.  Once the game starts up, there isn’t much going on.  You have to burn some windmills and crop fields to get a start, but you build up fast.  You cannot be everywhere at once, though, even if there are 4 dragons in play, and a society quickly builds up around you.  Once a windmill has a few fields around it, carts start to wheel toward the cities, which can be burned and robbed.  The carts won’t fill your inventory up and a dragon has a golden lust of immeasurable breadth, so a few carts and maybe a mill will fill you up.  Get that booty back to your lair, too!  Other Dragons are just as hungry for treasure, and will attack you for yours.  Which is a good way to slow them.

Snow? Fuck that! My internal temperature melts titanium, mother fucker!

Snow? Fuck that! My internal temperature melts titanium, mother fucker!

You are an UNSTOPPABLE MENACE! At least until someone stops you.  And fuck me do they try.  At first it’s like, “awwww, so cute, they think they can win!”  Then it’s “O, fuck me, they are winning!”  Once you are defeated (usually by another fucking dragon) you have to fly back to your hoard to recharge.  This is an unfortunate necessity, but use it to your advantage.  Attack your enemies and send them back to their hoard, you can usually get a full trip done before they recharge fully.  Once you get the gold back to your lair, you drop it off, a little slower than I image you should, too.  I was left wondering if the dragon ate the loot and regurgitated it back up in his hoard.  Or maybe he just sits on the loot chest and picks it up with his sphincter muscles.  Heh heh, I heard a hundred people groan at that one!  Either way, the more gold you get the higher your level.  Yup, you level up, and you use those levels for one of four stats. Speed, Carry, Armor and Firebreath.  All pretty self-explanatory.  There is no perfect formula, there is just what matches your technique.  Like fights? Get armor and firebreath. A little extra speed to help with those close escapes, too.  Want to loot everything in the kingdom? Get more Carry, you’ll carry everything you can hold in your.. uh.. kangaroo pouch ; ).   But that isn’t everything! Shit man!

So, as you loot and pillage and burn, the timer, which I forgot to mention, is ticking down.  The further along things get, the more loot carriers level up.  First they are wagons, then full on carts then there are the royal carriages!  Now this is where things really start getting good.  You burn the carriages, they give you loot AND your very own little princess to take back to your lair to terrorize.  Yet, it gets better!  They send knights after you to capture the princess back!  Every single one drops a respectable sum, too, and when her timer runs out, she is ransomed off!  I swear these people must shit gold.

Gives new meaning to a butt-load of loot! Ha ha!

Gives new meaning to a butt-load of loot! Ha ha!

Level up, grab as much gold as you can and when the timer runs out, the scores are tallied to see who was the biggest fire-breathing badass in all the land.  Does it matter that you can burn trees down with your fire? NO! FUCK no!  But as a dragon, isn’t burning trees going to be your first go-to on list of things to test out?  I know it was mine!  Psh, burn that leafy little bitch.  Now, you see in the right side of the picture just up there that little Stonehenge-looking thing?  Yea, that is your new best friend and worst enemy in this game.  Every so often it belches out little powerups that spin in the air like little, sexy pinwheels.  Grab that and you might move faster, spit fireballs, breathe ice or some other cool shit!  But if your enemy gets it? FUCK!  Get that shit, don’t let that miserly prick get it. Just don’t.

What did I miss? Castles, villages, windmills, crops, knights, archers: in this the Joker was right. EVERYTHING burns. O! DLC.  You don’t think all this is enough? Dynamite Roll! was the first DLC featuring bomb carts, which you light and they explode to kill things nearby.  That includes you so, mind the gap.  Sometimes cash crops will appear that give extra cash. And bell-towers in towns provide heal power-ups, and that is useful as fuuuck!  More achievements and more maps in this baby, too.  Then there is the Flame-Broiled SANDwich DLC which takes things to a whole new level, or rather, landscape.  In this one the game flies over to the mystical sands of a desert continent.  Everything looks all cool and middle-eastern, and generally speaking, it looks fucking awesome.  Buildings, castles, enemies.  Fuck, I need to buy this DLC as soon as I get some cash. And with the total package of everything being $11.49 on Steam, you best believe it is worth the dough!

With all the flying and burning, there has to be something about this game that burns my biscuits.  Well, there fucking is!  Each playthrough takes only ten minutes, so naturally, this is a game you could play once before work to get a game fix in, right? DO NOT UNDER ANY FUCKING CIRCUMSTANCES PLAY THIS SHIT BEFORE GOING SOMEWHERE IMPORTANT!  You will play through hours in this game before you realize just how much life you missed! Seriously! Don’t believe me? Play it!  Each match is just such an exhilarating whirl that you will play another, and another, then you’re 35 and still in your parents basement! Agh! Luckily, I only got to 27, so I still have some good years left, but FUCK that was close! Also, those pricks on the Meta-Critic gave this a fucking 65. A SIXTY FUCKING FIVE! This is fun, graphics are respectable and it does its job.  It’s like they focused on the one thing that this game lacks, which would be any fucking story.  But you’re a goddamned dragon! What story do you need?!  Fuck those assholes. They deserve to fester in a dragon’s asshole for a bit! Give them an idea of what shit really looks like!

 

Solar 2, Voyage in the Cosmos

Posted on by thre3zekiel

solar

 

It seems Neil deGrasse Tyson was a GameDev before hosting Cosmos because this is the kind of game I imagine him sitting in his underwear, playing between shoots in his dressing room.  Solar 2 was so much fun I bought it on Steam and later on my Xbox 360. Yea, still have that thing.  But Solar 2 is a brand new take on a video games altogether as you play a well-organized collection of sometimes intelligent matter rather than a brainless lump of meat swinging a sword.

Saying that you play a solar system in this title would be like saying you play the strongest warrior in all the land in Skyrim; you eventually get there but there is quite a bit you have to do on the way.  When you start the game, a quote from Carl Sagan appears “if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you’d have to restart the universe” followed by what is supposed to be the big bang.  When the screen fades in, you control a cold lump of dead rock floating in space.  You are an asteroid.  Your goal?  Fly through space like potato with a deathwish and crash into everything else.  Eventually you get enough mass and become a planet.  And your planet can cultivate life!  My little inhabitants built a massive world barrier to protect me and followed me around, blasting asteroids.  That was cute at first, but I found myself outpacing them so I could absorb more asteroids and become a star.  From there I started drawing planets into my orbit and cultivating a whole system of life!  Fuck yea!

And then some other asshole system with a fucking BINARY GODDAMN STAR bumbles along and is like, “O, were you using this?” and smashes my planets to smithereens.  As a system, you take up a good bit of space and larger systems might not be visible onscreen until its too late.  I was naming those planets, too!  Coming up with stories about its people and civilizations etc.  And then some asshole bumbles along and just blow them up by accident!  And to add insult to injury that system’s life, colored red at this point, started attacking the life on my only remaining planet.  I got a good distance, but the fuckers decimated the planet, blowing it up altogether.  I was lucky to escape with most of my protons intact.

O, hi. Nice to meet you. Fuck yourself and die!

O, hi. Nice to meet you. Fuck yourself and die!

So I said fuck it, I will become the biggest fucker out there.  I spent hours building a massive binary star system with nearly twenty planets and all kinds of other life etc.  I went and found what looked similar to the earlier system ( I doubt it was, space is fucking huge ) and ripped him apart.  And afterward I avenged my fallen inhabitants by chasing down the retreating solo star ( I raped it so hard its other star blew up ) and turned it into space dust.  I was so pleased with this that I fist pumped… and accidentally hit the ctrl key, absorbing all my celestial bodies and going supernova.  I was a black hole.  Fuck. Yes.  The most powerful and terrifying force in the galaxy, mother fucker!  On Cosmos they said that my mass is so great that my gravity warps time.  Bad. Ass.

Don’t want to be a goober and absorb the entire galaxy? Fine.  There’s missions.  In the tutorial, some face that looks like the above version of a god Giorgio Tsoukalos might worship pops up to guide you.  He tells you how to move, absorb matter, grow and that you can do his missions.  He’ll reward you at the end.  So you go do missions, like destroying rogue ships, luring them into enemies or playing “don’t die when I spawn missles on either side of you”.  Fucker.  And these are just the asteroid missions.  There are also missions to play as a planet and star.  I can only assume that there are missions for each major form as well, as I have not gotten to the end of this game.  But with how hard and long it is, I might as well run to the end of the fucking universe.

While playing the music is an ambient flow of particles through the void that soothes and hypnotizes you.  Then once you become a star with planets and such, you star to feel more and more drawn in as you watch them swing around in their orbits like a divine clockwork.  The visuals are nice, but nothing too spectacular.  Background is space punctuated by stars and nebulas.  Overall it is cool and fun, but once the charm of being a system wears off, the game can get a little boring.  And then you might fall asleep.

So what pisses me off about this game? God.  That guys is a fucking prick in this game! I mean who wants to play “don’t die when I spawn missiles on either side of you” with a fucking asteroid?  Seriously?!  And he is smiling widely as he says it.  At least that is what it looks like.  He could be shitting. Smug fucker.

missiles

Hard Rest: Blood, Fire, Twisted Metal

Posted on by thre3zekiel

HRlogo

 

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

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

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

plasma

Yo, dog. I heard you liked lasers..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personally, I preferred the red gun. More explosives.

Personally, I preferred the red gun. More explosives.

Blade of Rage, Scorching Preview

Posted on by thre3zekiel

BORheader

 

Ready for Rage? An indie title currently vying for votes, Blade of Rage is a throwback to RPG’s of a bygone era, but with a few slick surprises.  If you remember hours of play time with the early Final Fantasy titles or got down in the dark place with Avernum: Escape from the Pit, then you’re the target audience.  Your main character is a spell-sword called Rage the Blade, and alongside his travel companions, Gudu the Groundbreaker and Vespa the Viperess, you get some serious slaying going on.  I’ve just played through the alpha demo and I’m ready to grab a handful of steel and start Ragin’!

After contacting the sole developer, “Lone Wolf” Don, I downloaded the alpha demo and got playing.  A few minor adjustments for my personal play-style and I was off to Oswar.  Now, if you go into this adventure expecting the standard fantasy RPG romp, you’ve got another thing coming.  I went up against my first few foes and nearly got my ass handed to me.  So up front this game has you on your toes.  Not to mention, the enemies can take a beating.  At first I thought “Oh, shit! How am I supposed to win this?” but then I got a handle on the abilities of my team mates and started laying my foes out.  Immediately I was taken back to that “front lines” fantasy rpg feeling.  I was Rage, a spell-sword issuing orders to each of his comrades.  And that is how it feels.  Every fight, every time; you are thrown into a dire struggle against vicious monsters hell-bent on your destruction.  If you attack when you should have blocked or used a Cureall potion when you should’ve cast cure, you’re going to feel it.  If not sooner, then later.

One of the features of this game is the ability for the player to choose whether to experience random encounters or not.  Anyone who has played through Final Fantasy will know that when you are low on health, potions, money and mana, the last thing you want on the way to the inn is a horde of zombies harrying your escape.  This toggle feature allows you to slip back to the inn for some much needed R & R.  I know I needed it one or twice, and I am not afraid to say it saved my ass!

So, after taking shelter in a ruin, I was off to find the Stone’s Throw Inn, when I happened across a dwarf.  I helped him out of his predicament and found another feature of the game that made me giddy. When you play a video game, you want to slip, if only for a minute, into the skin of another person.  And I don’t know about you, but I want that someone to be considerably more badass than I am!  That being said, Battle Action Response allows you to take full control of the fight rather than letting the computer roll out the results.  So, when you dictate your fighter to take off someone’s head, you just tap the action key at the right time and you can get off a little extra damage and the increased chance of a critical hit.  That might not sound all too crazy at first, but, trust me, when you start getting off critical hits and extra damage, you’ll feel the thrill of battle like you’re swinging the sword yourself.

Later on, my new travelling companion in tow, I was venturing through a dark and deadly forest.  Suddenly some spiders jumped out at my crew and ate a deer that wandered onto the path.  After laughing furiously, I realized that a battle was about to commence.  Suddenly a bar appeared with a sliding sword icon.  Recalling the game’s briefing on the Battle Advantage feature, I prepared for the fight.  With Battle Advantage turned on, you can get a chance to attack first in the fight, as long as you can press the action key in time.  Though my bellowing laughter left me slightly flat-footed, I was still able to secure that pre-emptive attack for my adventurers.  It has little elements like this, which, when added to games, make for a more immersive and entertaining adventure for the player, and this game certainly has the player in mind.

Giant razor sword of death! I choose you!

Giant razor sword of death! I choose you!

Another surprising element in this game is the ability to fast travel, and for those of you rolling your eyes and saying something about “Elder Scrolls”, shut your damn mouth!  Fast travel in this is quite different.  A world map appears and you move your character from one place to the next rather than walking them through every twist and turn of the forest.  Similar to the Final Fantasy world map travel when you have a Chocobo or an airship.  And as in The Elder Scrolls, you’re unable to use this view to get to places you haven’t been yet, but once you’ve traveled there, it’s fair game.

Aside from that, the art for the game is enjoyably original, the animations are flashy and fun and the music had me jamming along at some points.  In a boss battle the music started as the usual fight song but then the music died off after a bit.  At first I thought it was just Alpha-tester’s blues, but then that shit came back and it was rowdy!  I started jamming out as I dealt out heavy crits and killing blows.  The background even started to oscillate a bit, adding a little more tension to a fight with a fearsome foe.

 

Come to the Stone's Throw Inn: we won't throw a rock at your head!

Come to the Stone’s Throw Inn: we won’t throw a rock at your head!

Games like this are a refreshing part of the indie gaming scene and are an example of why I love Steam.  Steam via Steam Greenlight gives solo developers the opportunity to share retro-gaming experiences with fresh new stories in a format we’ve come to love and respect.  Without Greenlight, a number of worthy experiences would never even have the chance to see daylight, and this is one I hope gets voted up into release.  Granted, as an alpha demo, it isn’t without its issues, but there are more highly esteemed games with developing teams selling their games before they’re even finished.  With one man spinning this thread before our very eyes, it’s clear that this game is a work of heart.  Interested in learning more about Blade of Rage? Go to the Blade of Rage website or the Steam Greenlight BoR page and unleash your Rage!

Every gem has its flaws and there is one big flaw that I have to address here.  I am violently opposed to the game’s treatment of Dwarfs!  That’s right! Dwarfs!  First off, this token-racial character isn’t even a full-fledged Dwarf!  He’s a half-breed human-dwarf, not that there is anything wrong with racial mixing, but he spends the rest of the game trying to make up for that fact!  He says ‘lad’ and ‘arse’ and even seems to worship a goddamn rock!  Dwarfs might live and work and play underground, but worshipping rocks?  Reminds me of a racially distinct first for a major game franchise involving animal slavery… Just call him a stunty, you rat bastard.  Rage would be the name of my life, not just the name of a game!

Story about my Uncle, Physics was never this fun

Posted on by thre3zekiel

a-story-about-my-uncle-artwork-1

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rust, Naked and Scared Shitless

Posted on by thre3zekiel

Rust

 

Garry Newman, the same person at fault for Garry’s mod, is the brains behind Rust, another in the line of games that wish they were Minecraft.  But where in Minecraft there is some sense of decency and still an air of fun for fun’s sake, Rust plunges you naked and screaming into a world that suffers from griefer syndrome.  Before I go off on the playerbase, the game itself is actually quite fun, for a pre-release.

First, you start naked, and who doesn’t like to be naked.  At least it is fun until the sun goes down, then you realize what this game is all about.  If a game about digging in the ground and building is called Minecraft, a more appropriate name for Rust might be Mancraft.  Aside from a free-flailing dangle-down, your inventory includes a rock, a torch and some bandages.  Of course, the bandages don’t heal you, just stop bleeding.  So when you are randomly spawned and an asshole with a fucking pistol chases after you shooting for kicks, your best defense is to fucking run for cover.  I recommend loosing him among rocks, but he’ll still get you with a shot or two.  The bandages help there.   So once it gets dark, you’ll say “Good thing Garry gave me this torch!” but that shit is like herpes, keep it to yourself or someone will cut your dick off.  Take out that torch, O, naked wonder of human deduction, in the middle of nowhere in pitch darkness and what do you become?  A blazing goddamn beacon of newb-dom.  If you have the presence of mind to try gathering resources upon being thrust into a new world, as nearly no one fucking does, you might have some resources, and that is all the reason most people have to cut you open.  For the rocks you were keeping in your bunghole.

So, it should come as no surprise that God’s own multi-tool, a fucking rock, is the most useful thing you begin the game with.  By all means, swinging this rock becomes a sort of divine experimentation when you begin as you try to gain resources.  Look in your crafting section and you might see things you can make and things you need to make them.  Rocks and wood are among the most necessary base materials.  Now, for wood you just hit the rock on trees.  If you find a wood pile, even better.  But when I was looking for rocks, I felt like Christopher fucking Columbus exploring the Atlantic ocean: lost as a cumshot in a snowstorm.  There are TONS of fucking rocks around, especially near the mountains, so you might try harvesting them.  Those are, however, scenery and you are running out of time.  So it is a rock-bashing experiment until you realize which rocks you need.

Do you really need to ask me how it's hanging?

Do you really need to ask me how it’s hanging?

So, if by some fluke of merciless fate you spawn during the day time and you were blessed with ample time to figure all this out and get the necessary resources, you might just be able to survive.  Did you go looking for food too? O, yea, forgot to mention that.  You have a hunger bar that depletes over time, and the more active you are, the faster it goes down.  So that shit goes down but fast when you start just about fucking anywhere naked.  Basically, unless you lay your ass down and prepare for death, your health bar depletes faster than you realize.  Now aside from the locations where prepared food can be found (and those are usually camped by tuna-eating lunatics with hatchets hoping for the last chocolate bar on Earth) you have to take that rock, which is a more reliable inanimate best friend at this point than the companion cube, and chase down chickens, pigs or deer.  Should you be the asshole undaunted by the challenge of running around in the open naked whacking deer with a rock, you find the reward is… chicken.  Wait, what?  Yes, everything you kill provides, for the moment, little, raw chicken cutlets.  Eat up! And promptly spew your guts out, because somebody just had to make it realistic and give you salmonella poisoning!  I swear to god, people – including me – are paying money for this.  So, once you have your materials and chicken, you can build a little campfire and get cooking.  It’s a good thing they didn’t include stomach grumbling noises for all the players on the island or it would sound like you were constantly being stalked by ninja whales.

By this time, it is likely the middle of the night and you have died at least three times.  Aside from hunger and salmonella, which is shown above by the green health bar, you will get cold.  At the time being, campfires are the only thing that can warm you up with torches and furnaces expected to do this as well in later updates.  At night is when the scary things come out.  During the day you have bears and wolves to contend with.  Originally it was zombies, but the devs thought this enemy was just too played out.  So they went the realistic route and make it so that you have to outrun bears and wolves that will maul you to death, slobbering over the idea of gnawing on your femurs.  The scary things I am referring to are the other players.  And these assholes are relentless.  I have played a number of servers that advertise their friendliness to noobs and ‘outlaw’ the killing of nakeds.  This just amounts to bandits not killing you on sight every time.  Sometimes they will see you, follow you a bit and then kill you.  And I have run into groups of players that rove and hunt noobs and still others that just kill whoever they feel like at that moment.  It’s like a page out of The Lord of Flies without the little boys.  That would end in rape, given the mentality you’ll regularly see.

But that really is the fun of the game.  That and building houses out of foundation and wall segments.  You can customize your own little mansion on a mountain, craft a rifle and start taking potshots at people wandering by.  You’ll probably be killed by someone doing just that during your first days.  Survival against all odds.  Every once in a while, as if the game wasn’t brutal enough, an airplane flies by and performs an airdrop.  This makes me laugh.  It’s as if civilization knows were here and, not only do they not care, but they are throwing finite amounts of supplies down at us and watching the battles ensue.  Did I mention areas are randomly irradiated? Yep, usually around where there is pre-packaged food.

just wait 'till I build an RPG launcher, you smug sons-of-bitches.

just wait ’till I build an RPG launcher, you smug sons-of-bitches.

So what pisses me off the most in this game?  Aside from everything else in this game that makes no fucking sense ever again, one thing that stands out are the visuals.  They developers put a lot of time and effort into making the game pretty.  The trees are variegated enough that you feel like you are in a  forest.  The grasses look like fields of gently-waving grass.  I mean, everything looks very very nice, so you get that ‘beauty of nature’ fix before dying a brutal death at the hands of almost anything within sight-range.  It’s like somewhere above the trees you can hear a melody soft and sweet that is clipped short by the gunshot travelling through your skull.  One of the most frustrating things about the game is that it is multi-player only.  You have to go find a server and deal with it.  There is no ‘remember your first game of Rust’ discussions on the Rust forums.  That shit reads like  a PTSD support group.  The benefit, however, is that all servers are using the same map.  No procedurally generated randomness to contend with here, so if you find a great place to build your house, you can fight over the same beachfront property with other people on another server.  Ain’t life grand?

Can you spot the socio-pathic, hatchet-weilding psycho?

Can you spot the sociopathic, hatchet-weilding psycho?

All-in-all, it’s definitely worth playing, especially for the $20 asking price on Steam.  It’s a bit of a niched game that caters to the “minecraft isn’t realistic enough about survival” crowd.  Weird that such a deranged genre would arise from such a harmless source material.  Well, as harmless as any source-material where zombies chew on your bones at night.

Zeno Clash, Untamed WTF

Posted on by thre3zekiel

ZCheader

 

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

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

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

The horns must be great for extra doughnut storage.

The horns must be great for extra doughnut storage.

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

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

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

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

Big, strong AND he maintains his mental acuity

Big, strong AND he maintains his mental acuity

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

Endingcredits

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

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

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

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

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

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