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ahoodedfigure

I guess it's sunk cost. No need to torture myself over what are effectively phantasms.

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When do Hubs Work?

By ahoodedfigure 11 Comments

Doomthief


I've been going back and forth between two games, both on the old XBox we have: Doom (Ultimate Edition and II, both emulated through the Doom 3 collector's edition), and Thief: Deadly Shadows.
 
Doom's been a breeze, and I'm still finding little things I never noticed before (or at least forgot). It's not a terribly complicated game, but couched in its linear find-the-key design is often some pretty non-linear level exploration that I can't get enough of. We don't really need to do it all scripted or all free-form, fellahs. Plenty of fun in the middle ground, too. I even managed to do the rocket bounce secret level in the third episode without looking up that I needed to do it, which was rewarding. I didn't bother with FAQs at all this time and stopped trying to OCD every little secret and item, which made me enjoy the game more. Now that I beat the first three episodes I might skip straight to Doom II. I tried the fourth bonus episode, and it's a bit too sadistic for my tastes.
 

Hubris

 
Most of my thought, though, has been on Thief 3. After listening to the podcasts I linked before that had interviews with former Looking Glass Studios members, I had a desire to play some sort of Thief game. Rather than fiddle with trying to get the older games to work, I figured Thief 3 would at least have a bit of pick-up-and-play value. I remember being a bit disappointed about its design differences from 1 and 2, so the past week or so I decided to start playing Thief 3 to see if those feelings still held, of if it was just a symptom of being too close to the original games.
 
Turns out, by and large, that while I enjoy some of it, I'm still disappointed in the same changes, both subtle and major (if you want a list, I can give it to you), to the basic design. One aspect that I didn't realize might bother me this time through is the hub. In Thief 3, you're given several missions throughout the game where you go to different locations, but eventually you wind up back in a hub area where you can fence your loot, buy equipment, and perform several mini-tasks. All these things are actually fine, but I think what it winds up doing is making the gameworld feel smaller. With mission-based gameplay, to me, the world feels massive. You may only see a small part of it through the missions, but you can imagine Garrett actually living in a vibrant world. It's sort of the same concept that makes radio compelling, since one's imagination has a better special effects budget than most game companies can manage.
 
Focusing on the hub puts up the same walls that a mission has everywhere, making his world feel small. Like I said, I like a lot of these teenie distractions, but one of the game worlds I like most is Thief's, where it feels like there's always more mystery and weirdness going on in the edges than any single game could ever address. By cutting into some of that and making it a bit more mundane (and at times repetitive ), I don't get as much of the feeling that I'm getting the highlights in this guy's life, which I think in games with a certain level of atmosphere is sort of the point.
 
Still enjoying it in a general way, despite the annoyances. I'm also challenging myself, in addition to setting the difficulty to the max like normal, to try to fence as little loot as possible, and to try to survive on what I find. I'm also trying to stay away from blackjacking unless it's absolutely necessary (outside of the prison, where I was feeling a bit vengeful on guards' brain cells).
 
Question I'm going to ask you this time is, when have hubs worked or not for you in games you've played? You think they have their utility sometimes, or are they just an annoying fad? I will say right off that it depends; I liked the hub in Ultima Underworld II as a sort of refuge from the cooler but more hostile places that you visit once you get past a certain point in the game. 
 
Lemme know how you feel if you wanna, and have a good weekend.
11 Comments

Demo Life

By ahoodedfigure 5 Comments

Good Old Demos (acronym is a coincidence, I assure you)


Now that it looks like I may have a working computer relatively soon which is about 6 years ahead of the one I'm currently using (even if it'll still be a few years behind average engines and the current racing models) it's lead me to reflect a bit on my PC gaming life.
 
I've experienced many games through their demos, sometimes exclusively. Games like Daggerfall and Ascendancy actually won us over such that we bought the full version, Doom and Thief as well, but there were many games I played only the demo or shareware chapter of. There's a danger when putting out a demo; unless it's sufficiently crippled you may satisfy the gamer playing it enough that they don't feel the need to get the full version (and that certainly happened to me a few times). Yet a lot of gaming purchases now are of the pre-order variety, where players don't even see reviews of games before they get the game itself, and they often wind up being impromptu beta testers for something they paid full price for.
 
While demos have still been the mainstay of the smaller game producers, thankfully some of the bigger companies seem to be moving back toward the limited demo model. It gives us shlubs a chance to try something before we buy it, since I think a game still has to be felt through the controls and experienced on your system before you really know if it's going to be worth it. When you have some lo-fi indie game it's usually guaranteed to work on some level, but with high-end stuff it's hard to tell. Games are part of what drive the hardware industry forward, so we wind up playing a bit of a guessing game; that, and many game producers wind up putting out faulty code now because of...  well, pretty much any reason is valid for at least one case.
 
So, in other words, once I get my computer running, and I imagine that'll be at least a month of hassle, I look forward to playing demos again. I feel like I went into hypersleep and missed some of the heavier cases of DRM fever, and some of the less demo-friendly years, to find something where you have old games and new ones existing side-by-side, along with plenty of demos.
 
Who knows, maybe I'll start having opinions about more games created in this millenium after a while.  Might even get a Steam account. Crazy. 
 

How This Compares to Other Trends in Free Stuff


Perhaps part of this micro-gaming for free thing is infecting online gaming, where more and more MMOs seem to be offering free modes with potential upgrades. This has the potential to be the same as a demo or shareware, but its reputation is different. Depending on how it's implemented, you can have games that don't really offer very much on the free side of things, and there's always the paid upgrade specter looming over everything you do. It's sort of like the analogy of a layer cake, where a demo is a tiny slice of the cake, but you get to taste most, or all, of the layers, while a free-to-play game with upgrades seems to be just a few layers, like chopping the cake in half. You get a lot of shortbread, if you're into that.
 
The challenge with micropayment services is to get past that reputation and provide a quality experience that you WANT to pay for (they still have to make money of course, Guild Wars 2 is sort of going that route beyond the initial payment to encourage people to pimp out their character with storage slots or whatever). I wonder if it should even out, to be about the same level of coin you'd expect to pay for any game with heavy production values, but sort of spread out over time. Even off-the-shelf games, with their DLC packs, are really just becoming hybrid experiences themselves.
 
My old brain still prefers the idea that you pay once for something and have a complete package that you can play through to the end and enjoy, like you might a stand-alone book. I might be checking out these free-to-play experiences to see if they effectively advertise themselves. It'll be strenuous research (not really), but at least it won't cost me more than what I pay to make a fully armed and operational PC. 
 
Made a list that includes the rare XBox demos I played.
 
Anyone have any decent free-to-play experiences? Demos and shareware are included in this, and the obvious abuses are excluded.
5 Comments

Puzzle Pirates

By ahoodedfigure 16 Comments

There are (at least) two kinds of puzzles out there. There's the kind you find in adventure games which often have a single solution, the kind where you struggle to figure out what the designer was thinking, or figure it out pretty quickly and move on. Then there's the stuff you find in PopCap games, Puzzle Quest, and the like, where skill is still a factor, but sometimes you can luck out, getting a bunch of combinations of fruit or jewels or skulls without really meaning to. One kind makes you feel dumber than you might be, the other makes you feel smarter than you are :)
 
After playing Gemini Rue, which wasn't terribly hard but still took some experimenting, I've been playing on the other side of the puzzle coin, specifically Puzzle Pirates. In PP you play a pirate who accumulates money (pieces of eight), outfitting yourself with clothes and gear, getting into brawls and swordfights, sailing aboard a pirate vessel, gambling, foraging for trinkets, and working as an artisan in shops. The trick is that all of these actions are performed through puzzles, each requiring slightly different skills. Carpentry is a bit like Tetris, where you have to fit five squares worth of panels onto holes in the sides of your ship. The better you do, the quicker it gets repaired from cannon blasts and general wear and tear. The bilge of your craft slowly fills up, and fills up quicker when you take damage, and that's reduced by a bejeweled-style matching game. 
 
Creating ship parts for shipbuilders involves shifting blocks to fit certain patterns, then matching those patterns in succession. Forging weapons and cannonballs has you hopping around a board represented by hot steel stamps on the background of a sword; whenever you land your smithy hammer on a symbol you have to move the amount of squares or the directions it specifies, and you try to make combinations of symbols while not falling into empty spaces.
 
This may sound weird, but it feels integrated. Along with all of these piratey trappings you're encouraged to talk pirate talk, join crews, raid NPC and player ships for loot, build a mansion for yourself, and even become the mayor of a town and build businesses. The economy is a living economy, so you'll have the ebb and flow of supply, labor, blockades, and trading. It's really quite intricate, but all that's running underneath. You can just as easily hop in and puzzle away if you want.
 
It's one of the first major games I remember introducing micropayments. On some servers it's subscription-based, on others you get items by purchasing them with the standard currency and a secondary currency called doubloons. These doubloons can be earned without paying a real cent through the doubloon market, but as time goes by the prices continue to naturally inflate as people who are selling up their asking price and the people who are buying are forced to meet that price to get what they want. That's where the incentive to buy doubloons with real money comes in. Still, if you want you never have to buy one. It just takes a while to get some of the game's perks that way. Pretty much all that's required to invest is time, or you can play on a subscriber server, which gives you free reign for the basics but cordons off some areas and functions as subscriber-only.
 
The game has flaws, of course. Some of the puzzles that a player may not like to play are still necessary to run a ship, so if you find yourself serving on a vessel that needs, say, sailing as a skill and you hate sailing, you have to stick with it to earn your pay. Working together with a good crew is a blast, but you can get petty or lazy people who don't contribute very well, or captains who don't know how to run a ship right. There's also a bit of technical proficiency required for some of the higher ranks, and if you get a truly incompetent captain you may find yourself wanting to opt out of your current crew altogether and start afresh with another group. 
 
As with any MMO, a lot depends on the group you find. I managed this time to find a crew that seemed decent, although under-populated.  If a group is weak and not terribly good at recruiting, you may not see action on a fully-crewed ship, which can be a drag. It pays to research groups ahead of time before applying, jobbing as a mercenary until you're sure you want to join.
 
There's also an issue with the items you earn; some of which are hard to come by without investing a lot of time or money. In brawls and swordfights, you actually get an edge over other players. In more laid-back games like you find on Facebook, the competition is often indirect; you may not have everything that other guy has, but if you don't worry so much about competition it's not going to affect your own performance. In Puzzle Pirates' personal combat you're more likely to get swamped if you don't have the equipment. I've managed to defeat better-armed players before, but this may lead to frustration if you expect to come out on top through skill alone in PvP combat. If you play games like this with loot in mind, three really isn't so much of that. It's more about getting experience in puzzles, and earning reputation and gold.
 
Sometimes that reputation can come too easily, if you luck out on a puzzle. Other times you may be hitting your head against a puzzle that's a bit cruel with its distribution of colored blocks, which is familiar to anyone who plays the more luck-based puzzle games out there.
 
It's been a while since I played last, and things don't feel quite as vibrant, although it also seems like a lot of the spammers and jerks I remember have sorta disappeared. The biggest jerk I met during a marathon session yesterday was someone who kept going all-in at the poker table, or someone who whined about not getting to run the cannons onboard. There's plenty to do solo, anyway, if humanity is bugging you. In general it was nice to revisit the game. It's one of the few MMOs I've yet found that fits my style, giving my tangible rewards immediately when I do a clever turn at a puzzle, rather than my feeling like some unthinking cog in a machine. So, I guess on the scale of puzzles I started this article with, it's definitely not as lightweight as other puzzle games out there, and it certainly has its share of variety.
 
If anyone's played this, or tries it out, I'm curious what you think of it.

16 Comments

Scrounging for Crumbs

By ahoodedfigure 3 Comments

In the run up to a release we're looking forward to, we have basically two options. We ignore the press altogether, either because we don't want stuff to be spoiled or because we're not interested enough to waste time looking for every little tidbit scattered throughout a hundred different gaming sites (I wonder if it's really a hundred. Never easy to tell); OR, we try to soak up the gravy with our crust of bread, eager to learn every little thing about the games coming up.

The games industry, especially for the heavily promoted titles, often goes all-out for those of us who do the latter. When I was a kid there were shock ads in gaming magazines designed to make an impression more than actually advertise for the game (with the result that I stopped taking gaming magazines seriously and did my best to just ignore ads altogether. I thought they were ugly and boring; I wanted game screens and information, not some model's sweaty, backlit head or piles of intestines). Now fmv ads are pretty much the standard, since you don't need to go anywhere or buy anything to get them (except a computer with a fast connection and the processing power and hardware to crunch those HD movie files, of course).
 
Being a confessed Skyrim aficionado, not afraid of minor spoilers in a game like that precisely because the game is a lot more of a personalized experience than something expressly linear (that, and I still love listening to the main theme, although I don't feel like charging into the mountains anymore to climb to a peak and scream into the howling wind-- which is a sign of progress, I think), I've been hitting the information trickles pretty hard trying to learn more about the game.  It's a bit exhausting, though.
 
It's especially frustrating when the trickle of information doesn't match your particular hunger. I can go weeks without bothering to read anything about any of the big-budget games I'm following, like Deus Ex, Rage, Prey 2, or Bioshock Infinite, but the mood will strike me and I'll watch all the footage I can. Then...  well, it's not like you can just force them to tell you more. There's only so much you can look up before you run out.  Why do I care so much, though?
 
It's pretty much because we get these driblets (made it up) in time-release capsules, largely dictated by the ad folks. By creating information scarcity, the theory goes, you increase demand. Yet often I find myself ceasing to care if I don't hear from someone in a while (or if I hear too much); with so many projects to keep track of, not to mention the retro, small company, and independent games I like to keep up on, my attention span can only hold so many things at once. It's almost like I hit information withdrawal for a time, reading old articles trying to pick up new information.
 
After a period of drought lasts long enough, though, I calm down. I look at the games I already have and realize I've been neglecting quite a few of them. I go through the arduous task of installing on these older machines, fix what's wrong, and start playing. If the game's great, or good enough, all these information packets about upcoming games feel rather empty. Like those dreams I was talking about, they're better in the head than they often are to play, and an imperfect game in my hands is worth a backpack full of promises. 
 
Finally played Gemini Rue, beat it, then played it again with the commentary track. Tried to review it two days ago, reviewed it yesterday, and didn't pay much attention to game media in the interim. Now I'm curious again, and so the cycle goes, but it was a nice vacation from game fandom...  you know, actually playing games instead.

3 Comments

Just Anachronistic Technology, or Something More Subtle

By ahoodedfigure 20 Comments

Steampunk.
 
The term seems to mean a lot of different things, when I've delved in deep. Some swear by the etymology, but there are some settings that attract that Steampunk name that ignore steam power, and frankly I don't mind if they do. Trying to shoehorn a specific thing into a setting just because it will lose the general label seems like an exercise in pleasing the pedantic. Argh, stupid genre fascinations!
 
Anyway, I tend to think of Steampunk as more AnachroPunk or something. Anachronistic touches to a world that is in some way more recognizable than it should be. Some things ahead, some things behind, alien but identifiable.
 
A writer said, and I'm sorry I don't remember who, that Steampunk as a genre has nothing to offer. Unlike science fiction in general, which is relatively unrestrained, and fantasy, which in the broader sense of the term is completely unrestrained, Steampunk has almost a fetishistic obsession with the specific, without a broader statement on society. It's all aesthetic and no substance, this person said.
 
I think you could probably expand this sentiment to the surface any genre (including literary fiction); it's just that other genres have had a longer time to flower. You do have themes which are ripe for deeper statements, such as an indirect comment on our world's dependency on mechanization, or, if you focus on the Victorian era style of Steampunk, our blindness to our own colonialist tendencies.
 
I have to say, I love it. It is, at its base I think, a merger of fantasy and science fiction that puts a rusty patina on technology, making it fit better into a world than having, say, magic and futuristic technology side-by-side (Shadowrun comes to mind as being a setting trying to do too many things at once). If Arcanum had been more future tech and less anachronistic tech, I don't think it would have been nearly as intriguing a world to explore (for as long as I managed, at least). There is also often a genteel old-worldness which disarms us, assuming it's not overdone, so that we're less likely to over-analyze people's behavior and accept that they're acting under some sort of cultural imperative that we don't quite understand (even though we may find that we understand it once the story's done).
 
But as far as the deeper issues, this person may be right, that there hasn't, at least yet, been much insight into what these sorts of themes add, if anything.  Well, the more I think about this short film, the more I think there MAY be more potential than this person allowed. The themes are not new, and perhaps still not deep enough by themselves, but I don't think it would have had quite the same impact had it been set in a setting other than steampunk:
 
Take a look.

20 Comments

Bioshock Infinite Choices

By ahoodedfigure 7 Comments

It seems us plebes will get to see the full E3 demo of Bioshock Infinite, which is being released as part of a promotional program hosted by the game's lead designers. 
 
My impression so far of the game is that I love the art and character design, and the time period crossed with freakish transhumanism is certainly compelling. The skylines thing, while it looks exhilarating, also stretches my disbelief more than shooting crows at people. I imagine the dude's arm just tearing off if he falls from too high a height. And while it's easy to be cynical and say that it's either too different to hold the Bioshock name, or perhaps too similar not be a bit redundant, I have a tendency to just be impressed. Even if they didn't use the guy who voiced Garrett in the longer demo I saw, I'm still interested in learning more.
 
I find it a bit grating that your options actually pop up on screen, but I guess they wanted all the choices to be clear and immediate, making it more about deciding than figuring out what's possible. Not the way I'd prefer, but it's not like this is necessarily new, given the prior binary mechanic with Little Sisters. The choices, too, seem like they'll be a bit more nuanced, and it appears that they'll go beyond manipulating tears and picking upgrades out of a bucket, given that you can actually encounter factions doing their dirty work and decide how you'll interact with them. IF these choices compound into a bunch of interesting threads, it'll be pretty awesome, but the reasonable part of me knows that they have to keep the game's variables from going out of control, so as far as affecting the environment or storyline in adverse ways with lasting consequences, I have to wonder to what extent that will be possible in a game with this much production behind it.
 
It's good to see, or rather hear, that their sound design is still quite compelling. They spend just as much time working on the clicks and buzzes that make pushing buttons as appealing as slot machine designers imagine they do (in some idealized, alternate universe non-sadzombie casino.  Man, the real places are depressing). But the stuff that really makes my eyes widen are the crazy-ass monster sounds they put in there. There's something like the distilled fear of god in the bowels of those horrible groans.
 
I have to remind myself it's still a shooter, and in order for it to be a compelling shooter it'll likely have stuff that will make it feel a bit more like a shooting gallery and a bit less about exploration and choice, just to keep the action from getting stale. It looks like it'll be a balancing act.
 
An aside; when watching the demo for this game I imagined, in that idealized world where we don't know how a real game will play, I wondered how many people I could get away with NOT killing through the course of the game, and if that would even matter. Maybe Garrett's voice inspired me? I dunno.  By contrast, another combat-oriented game I watched just made me imagine all the cool ways I could take people down. When you emphasize choice in your game, it seems to beg for you to add more choices to the list. I'll be curious to see just how many choices in Bioshock Infinite are valid.
 
As always, I'm interested in hearing how other people's impressions of the previews mesh with their expectations, if any.

7 Comments

The Games I Have Yet to Play

By ahoodedfigure 15 Comments

I bought a bunch of new games earlier (I think I blabbed about all of them below so I don't need to say which), yet the games am I thinking about the most right now are the ones I don't have, especially if they're not yet released.
 
Why is that? 
 
I think when a game isn't in our hands, if not at least tried or seen in action in its final form, it is a bunch of potentialities. It could be anything right up until release, we think. Maybe this is why companies are so worried about appealing to people with those silly buzz words some of us have come to loathe. When we hear that a game we thought would be one thing turns out to be another, we might be so disappointed that we'll stop paying attention, even if, in the end, we might really love the game.
 
Right now, my imagination suggests to me all the fun I might have in Skyrim. These visions are balanced against possible problems, but it's easier for me to ignore potential flaws than to imagine romping through the fields looking to spot a moose.  I wonder if open-world games do that for me because I like running through them and making my own interesting accidents and discovering things on my own; others love games for their plots or their mechanisms, but just about everyone imagines what it'll be like before they play.
 
And I wonder if this is a cousin to the thought process that makes things feel slightly less interesting once we learn the story behind them. As we drove up a winding road in Canada, we saw a huge swath of trees that had been largely burned into towers of ash. Knowing the reason behind the fire beforehand (I think I learned later that it was naturally caused) would have made me file it into one or more categories in my brain, and I might have more easily moved on to the other sights. But because it was still a mystery I was fascinated, looking at the details, trying to guess if it was lightning, or carelessness, or deliberate. There were stories there yet to be discovered.
 
The stories we get when we play a game are different (sometimes better, sometimes worse) than the ones we make up in our heads about it before we ever get our hands on it. They're definitely final, though, transferred from the realm of imagination to experience.
 
I've heard it said about movies and board games before, and I wonder if you think it might fit with video games, too:
 
The best game is the one I have yet to play, since it has all the potential in the world.
 
Anyone else imagine a game to be way more than what it actually turned out to be? Or were some of you surprised by how much better a game was than you imagined?

15 Comments

Looking at EVE as an Outsider

By ahoodedfigure 16 Comments


 This one wasn't set to music
 This one wasn't set to music
Being an EVE Online outsider I can only go by what people have told me. During the recent blowup I knew enough, I think, to understand the reactions of a lot of players, and I wasn't very surprised.
 
I think some depictions of this event, by people who are trying to cover the gaming industry as a whole, miss that there was a long history of disenfranchisement with a good chunk of the player base. Whether or not the disgruntled were represented those who blasted an indestructible monument as depicted on the right, or who pledged to quit immediately or in the near future in the wake of leaked CCP internal messages, an outsider can't really say, but to me it seemed like the end result of a long build-up, rather than something spontaneous.
 
What I've heard from many people is that EVE has exercised many changes to its core systems over the years in some areas, while wholly neglecting others, and in order to interest new people they've made moves, like Incarna, which not only took a step closer to having full virtual avatars for player characters, but also made moves expressly designed for improving the experience for the starting player, while different complaints from veterans aren't being addressed. 
 
Many felt used. Crazy prices on virtual clothes (with talk of expanding these micropayments to fundamentally game-altering mechanics), suggestions that the architecture of EVE was used in part to test systems for other games, courting new players at the expense of lingering issues, all these things don't really sound that bad in isolation, but I think when you combine them in a community that, while diverse, has a lot of pride, the kind of pride you have in any group of hobbyists who feel that their particular pastime has a good degree of uniqueness and vitality, you get an explosion. The protests have been spectacular, but not surprising, especially since I feel that the tone and sluggishness of the response from CCP was probably what really caused all of these end results, not the silly monocles.
 
EVE's style of play is definitely different, in a large part because it is so player driven, with major organizations being built by player agreement, and rising and falling based on mechanics supported through these agreements. The players pledging to quit reminded me of this, strangely enough. While some people might just blast that statue, others knew if they were going to strike at the heart of the new threat they were going to have to give up on their game. Maybe some will come back, maybe some never really were going to leave, and I'm betting some will decide to slip quietly away rather than post it in the forums, but:

In the leaked email that was often quoted, it was said that they should pay more attention to what players did than what players said. So, after having said so much, they did, instead.
 
If there's a better way to listen to so many players, I'm not sure what that might be. Not just paying attention to player actions, but something that takes into account some level of player decision and planning rather than reaction and clicks. Direct democracy, with a prioritization of requests based on popularity, might work, rather than posting and hoping to be heard, or waiting for sanctioned representatives to express their desires-- though without an open ballot, which is hard to collate, I wonder what sort of strange entanglements that might cause without a huge internal architecture to aggregate player wishes into something resembling a plan.  This blog, I think, is probably going to run into the same problem. I could depict these events in a way approaching coherence, but does it speak for every EVE player? Even a majority? Not likely.
 
It's impossible to escape the reality that this is a game, that these are paying members of that game, and that many are pissed (and I expect a backlash from players who want to work through it and keep playing, and still others who will just try to ignore the whole thing), yet as an outsider I can't help but look at this struggle as something much more fascinating than the practical part of my brain tells me it has any right to be. The more romantic side of me sees this as a glimpse at something larger that human beings are capable of in this environment of world-wide, instant connections. Or maybe these struggles are a hi-res, virtual mask covering the face of a very, very old conflict.
16 Comments

Impulse Buys and a Crystal Towers 2 profile

By ahoodedfigure 7 Comments

I have bought:
 
Magic Carpet
 
Ultima Underworld 1 and 2
 
Crystal Towers 2
 
I think that was it. 
 
The first two I got through GOG; I've played the first few scenarios of Magic Carpet and, despite the controls not appealing to me (I always wind up losing altitude which I have to make up for by flying at weird angles. It's the only flight game that has me wishing I could have up on the mouse actually mean up) I love the setting and the way magic works. If you've ever played Populous, it's reminiscent of that earlier Bullfrog title but you're in the middle of the world this time. My favorite spell so far is the one that lets you CREATE AN INSTA-FORTRESS FROM THE GROUND.  Nice.  The action can get a bit repetitive, when all you're really doing is blasting monsters, sources of energy, and rival spellcasters by clickin', but the setting and music goes a long way. I stopped playing this after I realized it was going to give me 0% for found spells in that ambiguous way that games do-- does that mean there was no spell to find, or that I somehow missed it? Is my game ruined because I didn't find the thing, since I can't go back to a previous scenario from my current game?  I still will play it some more, but I wonder if I should start over and be a bit more meticulous this time.

Crystal Towers 2 overview


Crystal Towers 2 has taken up the majority of my time. Rock Paper Shotgun brought the demo to my attention and I played the hell out of it. I fell in love with it, really, because it was the kind of platformer that keeps track of tons of different little tidbits, as well as letting you keep accomplishments even if you die before completing a level. There are no lives; you get endless continues, with only your willpower to finish a level or challenge being what keeps you from soldiering on. No grinding for lives is necessary.
 
The game resembles the old Sonic games in some ways, but the differences are such that it's almost a strong aesthetic nod to Sonic more than anything that actually has to do with gameplay. When your character gets hit, his health drops, and this health must be replenished by finding health vials throughout the level. Your character also has a magic reserve which you can use to cast various spells, some of which help you navigate the level, some let you attack certain monsters and bust through barriers. Both health and magic are limited resources which have to be managed. You don't have to think about it too much, but it pays to use spells and sacrifice health only when you have to, making this platformer more about thinkin' and less about diving straight into the level's maw.
 
Yeah, it's a platformer, with a style that reminds me a bit more of Commander Keen or Sonic than Mario, although not in the actual execution of the game mechanics. Your character's jump is strange, but easy to get used to, and the way the levels are designed you usually feel like you're given enough clearance for a jump assuming you were supposed to land it without spell assistance, so it's decent even if it's initially offputting. You hop on the top of many of the enemies to kill them, although some of them are immune to this kind of attack, and because you bounce after you kill an enemy, you can combine multiple hits to get points multipliers which can make your score skyrocket (and can assist in completing challenges). You [may] collect gems throughout the level which give you points (and 100 in a level give you a medal, although I'm not sure what medals are good for other than being proud), and if you're hit you lose half of the crystals (but unlike Sonic's rings, they don't count as health at all). There are plenty of secret areas and paths in each level which contain permanent health and magic capacity upgrades, new spells, rare items, and recipes for a crafting system you unlock later. These areas are sometimes only accessible through spell and ability upgrades, but unlike Metroidvania games, it's not as though you're absolutely stuck if you don't have item X.
 

Ze Challenge


Why I love this game so much, though, is that each level, once complete, has challenges which you can complete in the level you've just played. Rather than making this tedious, it's actually fun to have a different focus for the level. You already have come to know the basic layout of a given level, and you may have noticed certain enemies or suspicious clusters of gems, targets, or objects. The new task may have you interact with them in a certain way to achieve the goal, and you're usually immediately removed from the level once complete, so you (usually) don't have to worry about completing the level in addition. Some of the tasks include timed races to the finish, collecting a certain amount of crystals, earning a certain amount of points, taking out all of a type of enemy, AVOIDING what is normally a common task, or my favorite, completing a level backwards (among others). Each level has tons of challenges (unlocked linearly), and each completed challenge counts toward unlocking new levels. 
 
It should also be noted that for most location-oriented challenges, it will tell you where the nearest target is with a rotating arrow. This keeps it from being a painful hunt for most objects, and the few objects that are truly hidden are often in clever places that aren't too difficult to guess.
 
The drawback for this sort of system is that eventually you may reach a point where the challenges pile up such that none of them are particularly easy to complete. In any game you may reach a point where you're going to have to practice a bit to get better, but since Crystal Towers 2 gets you used to the idea that if you get frustrated with one level you can just go to a different level to try to beat another challenge, so it spoils you a bit; if ALL available challenges are a bit rough, you may be tempted to put the game down for a while, or focus on harvesting crafting materials. I have yet to reach a point where I felt like the game had reached an absolute halt, but some challenges are a bit grueling, and they definitely get tougher over time.
 
This is the kind of game you can play in short spurts, or marathon through it if you want. There's a hub that connects all the levels together, and there are things to discover in the hub as you unlock more powers and levels.  The game rewards experimentation and curiosity, so even though it's heavily challenging at times, it's my kind of game.
 
The demo is a good representation of what the game has to offer; the somewhat charming story at the beginning takes a minute or two to get through, but after that you will get a quick series of messages that will show you basic mechanics, and then you'll be shown to your first level. About the only thing that the demo doesn't show is how the difficulty ramps up in some of the later levels. You get quite a few levels and powers to mess with in the demo, and your saved game profile can import into the five dollar full version if you want it later.
 
Download the demo here. It has about 15% of the unlockable game content available, which suggests I have a lot more to explore now that I have the full version.
 
Any impulse buys you guys make recently?
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Strange Buys, Old Memories

By ahoodedfigure 14 Comments

There are a few cravings I have that follow the major waves of releases. Despite what Yahtzee said I want to play L.A. Noire, Red Dead Redemption is permanently on my yes list, Skyrim's hovering over my head, but other than those, most major releases don't feel like impulse buys for me, whether or not I really intend on getting them or just hoping the stars will align properly.
 
What I wind up actually getting usually falls into three categories (bullet pointed for those who can't stand any other method of listing. Poor guys.):
 

  • Finding old games that I'd transfered to CD-Rom
  • Finding games I'd thought I'd lost in a pile of nondescript, boxless CDs.
  • Finding games in bargain bins and on download services like Good Old Games.
 The latter seems to be the theme this week, as I bought Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, a city building sim/strategy game that I saw at the local Salvation Army for relatively cheap. Even had the manual so it was almost like my hand grabbed it, said "oh, Chinese stuff!" and bought it without my knowledge.  Haven't even gotten around to looking at how installing it yet, though. I guess I want to set it aside for when I feel the need to dive into a game that looks to be a bit involved, especially since I haven't explored Alpha Centauri enough to truly put it aside just yet.
 
Also, today Egge [inadvertently] brought to my attention the release on GOG of Bullfrog's Magic Carpet. 
 
Someone very dear to me who I've lately lost touch with first showed me the demo for this game way back when it was first released (because back then I was a bit of a gaming philistine who was totally into Doom and not much else (gross simplification, but I figure I can trash my own history for the sake of narrative integrity)). This dear friend was the same person who introduced me to Thief, which is now one of my favorite gaming series ever, but it took GOG's release and Egge's video to remind me why "Now Me" might find it intriguing. 
 
It looks like a very Populous-inspired system, but with some interesting direct involvement in the world that the god games don't quite have. That, and I guess I'm a sucker for mythical orient themes.  I would maybe be more interested if it was even more of a world-roaming sort of game, but I guess that would be asking a bit much of older computers to process. 
 
My finger is, figuratively, hovering over the buy button as I type this. I wonder if playing this game will, in some strange way, connect me to my now estranged friend. Probably not, but I guess it feels a bit like that anyway, if only symbolically. Lots of lost games out there, lots of broken threads. I wonder why the prior owner of Emperor got rid of it, and who they may have shared the game with, if anyone. Some of the best moments in my gaming life were when there was at least two of us hunched over the keyboard trying to figure things out, or playing co-op on a console. Gaming's become a bit more solitary; even with online capability you wind up being mostly alone. It's not quite the same, but I imagine at least younger folks get a chance to figure out obscure games together once in a while. 
 
I've never really been able to repeat that experience with any other medium. Even if old friendships fade or change, the memories of figuring out some weird piece of software are worth having, even if the software is long gone.
 
Anyone have any youthful memories of figuring out games in groups?
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