Author: Leprekawn

Once upon a time I didn’t have a PS3.  I didn’t care for Sony’s elitist objectives of owning whatever market they delved into.  I watched them sink Betamax in favor of their cheaper VHS, they suckered me in with the failed Minidisc and frankly I still think HD DVD should have won the war.  I mean, where Porn goes the world follows right? Right!?

Anyways, I didn’t have a PS3, I didn’t care.  Some games came out, some were hailed as ‘good’ and others less-so.  I still didn’t care.  And then something changed.  What was it.. oh right, I played Little Big Planet.  I fucking loved it.

So I got a PS3, my first game? Little Big Planet, of course.  But my second was Uncharted less than a month before Uncarted 2.  This is where i’m going to tell you Uncharted is a great series and worth playing or at least watching.  There’s a labor of love in how they made the game with all the little details that we’d normally take for granted.

Naughty Dog, the developer, is hard at work on the next project which I understand is carrying along a lot of the finer details they learned in their first few games.  Telling the story of a world post-apocalypse through two characters: An older seasoned man and a younger inexperienced girl.

Unfortunately there isn’t much to see or read at this stage, but that doesn’t mean what they’ve produced isn’t good.  In fact, what I’ve seen is quite excellent.  With an excellent track record I easily rank this one as a must have.

Googling this game can be rather challenging.

Fez is a platform puzzle game unlike any I’ve encountered yet.  You have a 2D perspective on a world you can rotate to walk around walls or circumvent the distance between platforms.  This leads to some devious maps and objectives I’ve yet to complete.

This is a game I’m taking my time with, the map is expansive, the locations sprawling and the design beautiful.  There isn’t a monster to stomp on, no boss fight to mark my passage.  Just spinning golden bits to collect.

And to top it off, there are hidden puzzles that don’t immediately present themselves to you or offer suggestions to their key.

It’s casual, it’s involved and I find it an excellent intellectual alternative to any of the more violent games at my disposal.  In fact, when the challenge and death involved in Dragon’s Dogma start to rub me raw, I swap games and let my brain wind itself around the puzzles in Fez for a while.

A great game for anyone looking for a brain-involved platformer.

In this post I’m adopting a different speaking direction where I don’t review the game and instead talk about what I like or differences to other games.  We’ll see how I feel about it as time moves on.

I have a special place in my heart for J-RPG’s.  The Eastern way of thinking forces my brain to examine it’s approach and develop new lines of logic.  A process I enjoy when given the necessary time to percolate.  I especially enjoy them when they don’t provide you the ‘minecart’ experience.  A process by which you mash the buttons and are given a whirlwind ride through the plot and world.  That gets old after a while.

So with some eager glee and a dose of masochism I picked up Dragon’s Dogma.  By all reports, a hybrid game with elements of Monster Hunter, Skyrim and Demon’s Souls.  I encourage you to look up those titles.  They’re each a quality piece on their own.

There are what I think three details that make this game challenging and good.

One) No fast travel.  Yep, you’re walking everywhere you go and then back home again.  There is a ‘Ferrystone’ you can get but they’re expensive.  Very expensive.

Two) Health doesn’t recover.  And I don’t mean ‘in fights’ I mean at all.  You need healing or product to recover lost damage.  Magic only goes so far, as each time you take damage you lose capacity on your health bar.  Say I have 1000 hit points.  I take a stab in the face from a goblin because I was screwing around, lose roughly 100 health.  I might be able to recover 50 points of that via magic.  The rest, lost.  Until I formally rest or drink some potions.

Three) Some monsters are more or less resistant to certain kinds of damage.  For instance, the Ogre is a cave dwelling badass that prefers chicks.  He’ll maul your female party members before focusing on your dudes.  And he’s -extremely- reisstant to physical damage.  For a low magic party, that’s challenging.  And it can take ‘a while’.

All in all it’s a quality title that I’m really enjoying with a minor amount of party management and a challenging game style.  I recommend it for anyone who enjoys 3rd person sword and sorcery games.

I’m beside myself with glee over how good this game is and it’s only in Alpha.

Endless Space is a 4x Space Empire game in the same style as Master of Orion 2, Sword of the Stars and a host of other turn-based games.

With one of the cleanest interfaces I’ve ever seen I was greeted with a simple tutorial page that explained the on-screen elements without actually forcing me into the first few turns’ actions.  Every new panel you expand into (Colony overview, military management, etc)

Exploration is handled by your fleets, ships bound together by bureaucracy.  They explore along system connection lines initially from star-to-star.  Each star made up of up to six planets, with varying values and resources.

Basic colonization is much like other games, a ship with the appropriate module flies to the system and then a simple administration click and shazam, your empire has expanded.  Unlike other games, however, you need not send multiple ships to the system to expand your colonies to the other habitable planets.  This is circumvented by civil works where the system resources contribute to placing a colony on the desired planet.

Each planet gets a single ‘exploitation’, a structure or service that takes advantage of a planets inherent traits.  These exploitations contribute to the four planetary values: Food, Commerce, Industry and Science.  Each system can accomodate their own improvements which often multiply planetary production.

Research is broken into four ‘webs’, independent of each other these webs show branching development options and not inter dependencies as I had expected.  Progression to the top-tier developments follows linear paths to the objective, often requiring you to pay closer attention and manually queue lower-tier improvements if you’re looking for a specific technology.  Many strategic or luxury resources are hidden behind research requirements before you can take advantage of them even though you can see some of them in the map and system views.

Combat is one of the unique elements of the game that I was pleasantly surprised by.  Automatic combat is handled.. automatically.  With the end-results of the engagement being tallied for your examination.  Manual like a half-step beneath that.  Broken into five phases, you’re allowed to choose strategies during the three middle phases.  Played like a simple card game, one strategy counters another and boosts or penalizes combat attributes.  Wonderfully set to a render of your ships vs the enemy, it’s all done inside of 2 minutes and you can move on to the rest of your turn.

I haven’t had a chance to poke too deeply into the game, with five races and an expected 8 by launch sometime in June, I eagerly await a final product.  It’s beautiful, well polished and easy to get into.  If you’re a fan of the 4x Space Empire genre, I highly recommend you get this.

Endless Space

I can’t argue with simple gameplay.  Usually it’s done to achieve accessibility over depth.  This in turn leads to replayability or the 36 hour wonder.  After which you’ve spent your 1-5 dollars and received your dosage of Fun.

Scramble with Friends reached that point with me, but it took time.

Game Dev Story got there a hell of a lot faster.  And I’m still playing, in pursuit of some elusive game awards.

I went from Friday evening to Sunday evening playing this game, in between eating/sleeping/showers.

You play the game from a management perspective, taking on the role of a game development business owner and two employees.  You use these employees to develop games, naturally.  Using training and leveling to unlock new genres, styles or even the opportunity to produce your own console, you build games that are reviewed by an unpleasantly hard to please review board and then off to sell.  The game is generous, all your games sell well.  Some better than others and once a year you get into a Game Awards Ceremony where the hot sellers in various fields of Art, Sound, etc are awarded trophies thus increasing your companies’ fame.

For it’s price I recommend it.  Any more and I might have passed on it and the house of amusement it provided me.

Game Dev Story

Ah, open world territorial mini-quest super hero games.  Why aren’t there more of you?

Infamous sets you as Cole, the unfortunate recipient of electrokinesis, amidst ruined Empire City.  The city didn’t survive the detonation of the device that created you so it’s up to you to cross the regions, restore power and services all while you pursue the agenda of your handlers.  You want out, they want information.  And thus a deal is struck.

The game play is fairly conventional, i’m not sure what I could say on it that would be insightful.  It plays much like Uncharted, with handholds and railings and ledges all with great abundance so you can scale buildings, climb light poles and rail-grind around the city on power lines.

As you progress through the game you’ll naturally encounter gangs, the native enemy element that makes your journey dangerous.  In the wake of the destruction, several gangs have taken control and you’ll meet them in spades if you want to go anywhere.  The upside, is that dealing with the gangs and completing side quests and main plot awards you with XP you can spend to upgrade your powers and unlock special abilities.

Backed by an alignment meter ranging from Hero to Infamous, you’re often faced with a choice that will help people or harm them.  While it allows for a more personal and customized approach, as many abilities can’t be used by good or evil, it doesn’t change up the dynamic enough in my opinion.  While I’ve had fun thus far, I can’t see myself playing a second time to see the other ending.

Mind you, my copy came free as a payment for the PlayStation Network outage of 2011, I recommend this to anyone who likes super hero action games.  There aren’t a lot of those that are worth playing.

And if you like the first, I’m told that Infamous 2 is more of the same with some new powers.