Bundle Boggle: Groupees' Bundle Yourself (Part 1)

Hey all. In lieu of any big ongoing daily series this year for Steam or Desura games (since I've decided to go back to the drawing board to be a little less predictable) I'm still going to run these Bundle Boggle features intermittently whenever an interesting Indie bundle crosses my path.

This week I'm looking at Groupees' current Bundle Yourself collection: a group of Desura games with some interesting concepts behind them. Of course, ideas aren't anything if you don't have the substance to back them up, and a lot of Desura-only games (that is to say, those that have yet to pass through Steam's Greenlight system, not that they make it particularly easy) I've played of late could only talk the talk. Still, these Desura bundles are always interesting games to blog about at the very least. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised by a few of them?

Bundle Yourself (It's Pretty Damn Cold) (The Weather I Mean): Part 1

Air Control

I'm a little lost here.

I'm sure many of you will recognize this game from a disastrous(ly funny) Unprofessional Fridays segment in which Drew unwittingly purchased what appeared to be one of his beloved mundane simulators only to be treated to something which was either an air commerce sim in which the player vicariously assumes the roles of a passenger, a flight attendant and the captain of an air liner, or some sort of student art project gone horribly awry. Perhaps both.

In case you didn't see the episode of UPF in question or lack the premium membership with which to do so, Air Control is an incredibly, nay, ludicrously rough approximation of an airline simulator with various stages of "interactive" "fun". "Scare quotes". The player is given very little instruction for each episode of the game, and all of them can be skipped by finding the nearest door or tapping a button if the player feels like giving up. Tantalizingly, there's often a few things you can do in each sequence which almost feel like objectives, such as collecting discarded seat cushions during one of the "flight attendant" stages, but the game doesn't deign to tell you about any of them, nor is it particularly concerned about keeping track of your progress if indeed there is any progress to be made.

It would seem the game is an extremely rough alpha currently, with a few abortive game modes provided to give players and investors an very opaque idea of the width and breadth of the eventual final product. Presumably these sequences will have hoity-toity elitist features like "goals" and "graphics" and "fun" implemented in a later build. As it stands now in its currently purchasable state, Air Control's good for a quick laugh, like Soda Drinker Pro, but unlike the King of All Fizzy Beverage Simulators AC doesn't appear to be in on the joke. Whether that makes it better or worse is entirely subjective. If the developer makes it through enough Unity tutorials to get the game in anything resembling a semi-coherent finished state, it may well end up being considerably less enjoyable than it is currently.

Really, though, who can even say with this game? Maybe I fell for some obtuse joke or elaborate scam by buying it, playing it, and subsequently discussing it on the internet.

(Also, in case you were wondering, the game does keep going beyond the screen Drew was stuck at: you play as a passenger and get to mess around with one of those seat terminals, pressing random buttons until you accidentally find a link to the game's Greenlight page. Great.)

Astro Emporia

Astro Emporia is a space-trading game deconstructed to its base elements. Unlike, say, Elite, which had you buying low on one planet and selling high on another in the midst of fun space battles with a fuchsia inter-dimensional alien empire, mining runs on asteroids and the occasional shoot-out with the cops once it became known you were carrying contraband across the cosmos, Astro Emporia is simply a ferrying simulator. Just the "buy low, sell high" part, in other words. If anything it's the old space trader model recontextualized as a mercantile puzzle game.

It's a simple game to understand, as long as you don't get intimidated by all the numbers and commerce factors, as everything is randomized to some degree. The planets you trade with, for instance, change their inventories, prices and preferred import products every turn, and it's down to the player's savvy and a certain amount of luck in order to buy a product at the lowest value and find a way to sell it off for a high profit as soon as possible. The whole game is simply buying and selling and choosing where to go next for some more exciting buying and selling.

There's a few intricating factors, such as how there's never a guarantee that the planet you're travelling to will be able to purchase your inventory (it needs to be on their list of items, which of course changes each visit) and there's also a gradually increasing loan you need to pay off eventually, though whether you cut deep into your early finances so you don't need to worry about it or wait until you're making so much cash that the loan becomes trivial even with all its accrued interest is down to player choice.

Despite these intricacies, I found this game exceedingly tedious. There are enough space trader games out there that manage to pull off a compelling economy to jump into like an interstellar Torneko Taloon, and includes a whole bunch of fun stuff like shooting things and exploring new star systems to boot. I cannot really recommend Astro Emporia, except perhaps to those who only play space trader sims for the dry import/export elements, and those people are probably far too deep into EVE Online to even reach at this point.

Hippocampal

I legitimately have no idea what this game is. Far as I can make out, it's a "satirical contemplative game" (their words, not mine) in which the player, as a vacationing astronaut, has to defeat an army of invading bug alien monster things. Or he doesn't. You can just faff off and do whatever if you'd prefer. If the game has a clear goal other than "collect some objects somewhere", I've yet to find it in any of its large labyrinthine hell-scapes. You spend time hovering through these areas with your spacesuit's manned maneuver unit's thrusters, but there's no apparent impetus to shoot anything or avoid danger (neither weapons or hostile creatures appear to exist).

The game's quite clearly an art game, of the type I saw a lot back when I covered the LA Game Space: deliberately obtuse and inexplicable (the tutorial even admits as much), the game doesn't particularly care what you do. Its mission statement appears to be a passive one of "make your own interpretation of what you're seeing and doing", as if the very notions of transparent goals and accessible gameplay were somehow offensive to true creativity within the interactive medium. They have a semblance of a point, of course, but I don't know many more "interactive art installations" like this I can take.

The game seems to have a lot of issues regarding its utilization of the Unreal Engine, though whether the intense slowdown and terrible texture popping is an intentional part of the "contemplative experience" or not is anyone's guess. Either way, I couldn't get too far into the game before the framerate bottomed out, and this happened minutes into every playthrough regardless of which direction I chose to arbitrarily float towards. Oddly, this problem only got truly untenable when colliding with a wall (well, the iron bars that make up walls) than when flying around the middle of an area with a thousand flashing billboards and bug monsters hanging around.

I ought to give the benefit of the doubt to the designers, in part because they were intentionally going for something unplayable and in part because someone with a better PC that can handle its framerate might get more out of it, but it's not a game I can really recommend. Or really call a game for that matter. It's definitely something, though.

(Currently rated 8.4 on Desura. There are times where I simply cannot fathom the human race. I guess the old adage of the art world still applies: either truthfully admit you don't get it or pretend with all sincerity that you do.)

(Equally possible that I'm just missing something. If anyone's made heads or tails of the thing, please feel free to leave a comment.)

Loot Hero

Loot Hero is an action RPG, though not exactly the most fully-featured action RPG imaginable. It's scarcely even a mobile game, in fact, or one of those free browser games you'd find on Kongegrate or Armor Games. The gameplay essentially boils down to holding down the button to charge forward with your lance. You'll automatically damage enemies, and they you, on collision. It's not unlike the sophistry of Half-Minute Hero's elaborate combat engine in fact.

In order to get past the bigger enemies, you need to purchase incremental upgrades for your hero with the loot you earn from running all these minions of darkness down. These range from such tactical options as Attack (do more damage), Defense (have less damage done to you), Critical (do even more damage, sometimes) and Speed (hurry along this whole fruitless endeavor).

The game isn't particularly challenging, nor does it require anything more than to hold a button down and occasionally run back and forth to grind a bit to be in a fit shape for some of the bosses. There's very little to the upgrades: everything but Speed just makes the game that little bit easier. Once the big bad dragon at the end of the game is defeated, everything levels up to match your level and you keep going from the start again.

From a certain perspective, Loot Hero is kind of a parody of the genre in the same manner that Progress Quest or Candy Box are. They recognize the tropes, boil them down to their core essence and lets you laugh at the futility of it all. Your little guy's sprite actually changes whenever he gets an Attack (weapon) or Defense (armor) boost, as if the additions you're making weren't simply buying a slightly higher number but actual new equipment with no-doubt exciting names like Adamantium Plate and Excalibur, or whatever the lance equivalent of Excalibur might be. So too do the achievements kind of give away the joke a little with how ludicruously grindy some of them are.

I don't wish to condescend if the satirical element was unintentional, so all I'll say is that the game is a very basic facsimile of an RPG that won't keep you entertained for more than ten minutes. The music and pixel art's pretty good though. That's not some condescending kiss-off either; I quite liked the way the little guys bobbed up and down and flew off the screen once slain, the amount of detail that went into some of the bosses, and the joyful little soundtrack is fun (it's also freely available for purchasers of the bundle, as one of the unlockable stretch goals).

The End!

Well, these first four games were kind of a wash, but I have high hopes for the next lot given what I've heard and seen. There's an interesting looking action RPG that's in Alpha, some sort of odd space game that superficially resembles Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, some kind of Super Monkey Ball thing with robots and a bizarre point and click adventure game. I'll have some first impressions of all those for you in Part 2.