Author: Leprekawn

My god… so many games that I’ve put money into or want to put money into.

Elite: Dangerous sounds delicious.  I played Elite briefly when I was a but a small child with many dreams and little understanding.  I didn’t get into heavily as I just had no idea what was happening.  20 odd years later and I’m deeply excited to see this happen.  I’ve always remembered it as a complex game about space and trading.  Was I right? No clue, I’ve never gone back.  But I always look forward to a rebuild that looks great.

Legend of Dungeon I put money into, i’m a sucker for quality rpg dungeonish games.  I played the demo briefly and I can see a quality here that will be fantastic once it’s farther along.  If you remember Gauntlet, Castle Crashers, TMNT: Turtles in Time or some of the other early 90’s games you’ll understand the controls easily enough and perhaps even enjoy the approach.

Wastelands 2 is on my radar.  I gave them what it took to get a copy when it launches and I expect to be talking more come next summer.  I’m not normally into post-apocalypse games.  The time after The End is often boring, brown and full of zombie-mutants as though someone forgot to have ideas when building their game.  Wasteland hit many radars forever ago and I decided they had a quality idea after watching the introduction video on Kickstarter.

Numenera is probably not on your radar as much as mine.  My first love was Tabletop RPG’s and it’ll always be a love I come back to.  Monte Cook has been in the industry for nigh unto forever and his other projects I’ve enjoyed.  Numenera stands as an RPG approach to a world that’s seen many civilizations that came and went.  The ninth is the current one you play in, a realm of mystery as the previous civilizations projects or experiments still roam the world.  Also scheduled for sometime next summer.

Planet Annihilation is the last for now.  Real-Time Strategy games were frequent among my rommmates as the easy option for 3/4 person multiplayer.  We played them a lot and we played most of them.  PA looks to take the idea up a notch.  Why settle for smiting a bulding when you can drop a moon and obliterate a planet?  I was so tickled with excitement I barely remember giving them money.  But I’m getting emails about it so clearly I gave them something.

It was a conversation I had briefly.  Some friends I’m likely to invite here once I have something worth saying or reading.  But the conversation was rooted on the idea that there aren’t a lot of games that have cooperative multiplayer.  Local or otherwise.

I agreed and I still agree.  It’s been a rough idea for a long time.  My sarcastic words “What!? You have FRIENDS and want to PLAY with them? Bah!” have been with me for years and years.  I had four roommates and we played everything together.  Either, at the same time or in the same game.  Tricky for games like Skyrim, easy for games like Borderlands.

So I took to myself the challenge of sorting out my options and seeing what I can find to solve this query.

Expect more this month as I dig into blogs and comment on what’s out there.

This one will be short so you can get back to your lives quickly.  If you liked Skyrim, the open-world exploration and crafting and villain hunting and questing but were thinking: Gee, if only I had a gun.  Well, then Far Cry 3 might be for you.

Far Cry the first was hailed as a serious performance test on your computer.  It was developed for high-performance computers and low-end systems were wheezing to keep up with it’s vicious needs.  Far Cry 3 isn’t hailed as heavily as such a beast but I’d step into these waters carefully.  Far Cry 3 features an open world island where you’re completing tasks/quests for some local villagers to help fend off the encroaching pirates that have taken up residence.  You’ll harvest plant and animal for ingredients to health kits or grenade pouches, you’ll activate derelict radio towers and other esoteric quest to get access to weapons cheaper.  It’s a quest/adventure game set with modern terms and ideas.  Guns, boats, grenades, etc.

So if you liked Skyrim but wanted guns.  Or if you like the ‘roam and shoot’ options Fallout 3 provided but wanted more color or more gameplay then I think you’ve found your next time-sink.  This is an Ubisoft game and for reasons I won’t go into here I won’t be touching it.  But I will admit it’s right up my alley of shoot and loot and craft.  And it looks fun.

You would really think I’d be caught up to all the various high-profile games I’ve played in the last five years.

I’m talking about Dragon Age 2 today because I feel it warrants a brief discussion.  I liked Dragon Age for it’s approach to storytelling and prefer DA2 to DA1 because of it’s comparison to Baldur’s Gate.  If you were gaming RPG’s in the late 90’s, you’ll get what I’m talking about.  I liked Baldur’s Gate, don’t get me wrong.  But I liked the graphical and technical approach to DA2 more.  I liked that they deviated from making two games with similar designs.  That each game has it’s own story, mechanics and approach to the world themes they share in common.

Now, I went into DA2 thinking as many Computer Gamers would think.  Get the PC version, it’ll be prettier.

Was it pretty? Yes.  Pretty-er? I’m not so sure.  My roommate got the Xbox 360 version and I got to compare the differences first-hand.

I appreciated the interface on console more than I did on PC.  I was looking for a single character experience with sidekicks that I didn’t have to manage and a quick and easy interface for using my special powers.  If you’ve played Fable or Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning then you’ll pick up the controls quickly.

PC was great for allowing me to pause the game, move between my party members and setup actions before unpausing and moving on.  I liked it, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.  Hindsight being 20/20 I figured I’d share, in case you were considering picking through the bargain bin for something new to play.

I love strategy games.  They allow for a pacing and approach allowing you a chance to theorize and consider.  Not as frantic and panic stricken as Fighting games or Racers.

Inside that genre you could ask me about almost any title and if I haven’t played it I’ve played something similar.  Whether or not I heard about it is another matter.

Mid last week I picked up a free smartphone game ‘Tiny Tower‘ also available on iPhone (more on that in a moment).  Tiny Towers sets you in a managerial position of operating a highrise starting with the first floor.  The lobby is in itself nothing special as I started on Android.  As a casual game it’s pretty solid, much akin to Game Dev Story what ate my weekend some months back.  You make income from tenants living in your residential levels to work in your various merchant levels.  Each floor you add gives you space to fill with merchants as you wish, each tenant working in a store unlocks the ability to ‘stock’ an additional commodity.  Stocked commodities sell, earning you cash you use to buy more levels.  Each floor can have one of six options, each option having many many variations.

Your tenants each have their own array of stats indicating where they’d best be situated and a dream job.  Placing a resident in their dream job does two things.  One, you get paid 2 Bux you can use to speed up stocking or trade for cash.  Two, one of the three commodities gets doubled for it’s output vastly increasing the profit margin from restocking fees.

Many of the concepts will be familiar to anyone who’s played a mobile/facebook game in the last three years.  The concepts of Do x, Get y are very similar.  It’s the Magic Money approach that caught me off guard and keeps me playing.  The Bux you earn from various tasks ‘can’ be bought with real money as with many games.  But they can also regularly and easily be earned by just playing the game.

Visitors will show up periodically including VIP’s that reward you in cash or Bux for helping them get where they’re going.  All in all, I can play this like a Facebook game and plug in for five minutes every hour or so.  Or I can keep playing, sending visitors along their way and making progress as I go.  That being said, I’ve logged more hours in Tiny Towers than I thought I might.  I had fun and for ‘Free’ I can’t suggest anything other than Try It Out.

XCOM has a rich and well respected history as turn-based strategy with strong combat themes.  The core idea is that aliens are attacking Earth and you’re the only line of defense.  I haven’t actually played the latest incarnation but everything I’ve read and seen suggests it’s a quality addition to the XCom lineage.  A word of caution, XCOM is and has always been a strong mix of Long-Term strategic resource management and Tactical effort.  From my understanding this isn’t a ‘fast’ game.

Summer was an ugly dry-spell for gaming as my interests are highly focused.  I played a significant amount of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning after the parent studio closed shop.  It was in the news, you can google the closure and read all about it.

I saw the closure as an opportunity to strike early and fast.  And so I bought a copy of KoA: Reckoning at barely under release price new.  I bought all of the extra quest DLC, hoping to avoid any future cutoff on account of the studio closure.

And then I played for nearly a week straight.  My girlfriend went out of town to visit family and so I spent more time focused on it than I might have normally.  Anyone who liked Fable but had some second thoughts I will heartily recommend to this game.  It’s great, it’s that single person quest game in a style similar to Fable but without some of the naggling mechanical breakdowns.  And sweet mother of god.. it’s long.  40 odd hours in and i’m only maybe 2/3 through the main plot and some of the side quests.  I wholly expect another 10 or more hours out of clearing all the major milestones.  This is a great game with crafting, questing and boss-style fights.  An Xbox exclusive, definitely worth checking out.

Late August saw the release of Guild Wars 2 which I already talked about.  I’ll just take this time to say it’s worth it.  If you like MMO’s, are tired of the classic quest grind but still want that fantasy ‘save the world’ experience, then this is for you.  I’ve invited a number of my friends to play and all my mmo-centric fans are enjoying it.  It’s a highly social game, rewarding you for helping players from a defeated state and for assisting them in combat.  Nobody’s penalized for partying, no xp share fractionalization for joining up with your four chums.  I’m still up to my eyeballs in thrill for the game even after three weeks of exposure.

Mid September saw the release of Borderlands 2 which is challenging FTL for what scraps of attention Guild Wars 2 is leaving behind.  Borderlands 2 is a FPSRPG.  That is, you shoot guns and do quests and get xp from the First-Person perspective.  And boy howdy does it have guns.  The first game had a randomization system proving that no two guns will ever be exactly the same.  Story tells that the sequel only does it better with refinements to this and other systems streamlining an otherwise well-structured system.  More of the adolescent humor dotted with quality plot development. This is the B-Movie Action Flick you’re going to go see with your friends even though you know it’s just going to have big muscles, guns and explosions.  You know what you’re getting in Borderlands 2 and dammit, I want to play.  But I’m holding out, Borderlands 2 is a co-op game and there’s no good reason to play alone if you don’t have to.

FTL is a space strategy game in the likeness of Rogue and Rogue-clones.  You have a ship, a crew and a series of random events based on where you send your ship.  At a measly 10 bucks I tried it out on a whim since I passed on the Kickstarter they ran several months ago.  I’m amazed and pleased.  Simple gameplay with a structured plot you can replay to experience random events every time.  A game I can pick up for five minutes and not spend 2 1/2 minutes just loading.  More of an rpg than really a space game, your crew gains xp, fights off boarding pirates and aliens and douses fires when necessary.  I recommend checking youtube as the screenshots don’t really do it justice.  And for my strategy/rpg fans surely you should give this an extra close look.

And that, was Summer 2012.  If nothing catches up to me in the interim, we’ll be talking again near the end of Fall.

-Mercator