Category: Video Game

I have an unusually hard time verbalizing the name of this game.  As though the mashing of words is an archaic tongue-twister.

As I play I keep making comparisons to other games it seems to have borrowed from.  Many good ideas revised slightly and remixed into an interesting RPG experience.  If i had to compare it to three games in particular I’d have to say: World of Warcraft, Fable and Darksiders.

The art style is bright and varied, the faerie forest is vibrant while the obligatory spider forest is darker.  It has an animated styling reminiscent of cartoons much like World of Warcraft or Darksiders which I prefer over the hyper realistic styling of Dragon’s Dogma and other games.  There’s only so much gritty grey and brown I can stare at before I start to long for flowery fields and brightly decorated dungeons.

You take the role of the ever-silent protagnist in talking scenes as you ask questions and persuade uncertain villagers.  While your opponents appear to have full voice dialog, you are sadly silent through any of the exchanges.  Rarely a cry of pain or a grunt of exertion.  One place I thought this could have been a lot better and likely would have been given more time.

The plot if fairly contrived as are most games, where the protagonist is that one person ruled by exception.  Though not as bad as some games <cough> Fable 3 <cough>.  Though it’s not nearly as linear as other games and so I was able to wander in the woods for nearly three hours last night before I decided it was time to move on.  In that time I completed five quests, joined a Fae house and enlisted in a mercenary company.

Combat isn’t as fluid as I’d love to see, but still varied enough that I can blend magic and swordplay around a bowyer, should i like.  Personally I’m banking on the Battlemage as I’d like to see this “Blink” power they’re advertising in action.  Combat is largely driven by conventional attacks, special abilities and spells.  Varying your attacks can net you bonus experience and periodically you can unleash a ‘fateshift’ where you move faster than your foes and can eliminate them in a Finisher that provides bonus xp.  I just use the power to put the hurt on particularly hard bosses.

The world is expansive looking with little nooks and crannies filled with loot, hidden chests, secret doors, pickable flowers for alchemy and a host of side quests.  Some of the quests come from a discarded note you might find in the town graveyard and another from a wandering wolf-turned-man.

KoA:R (as it’s known) is an interesting gem worthy of giving a play through.  I’d immediately recommend it if you like RPGs and need something to do with the rest of your summer.  It doesn’t appear to be a brief adventure, though I’m having fun.

 

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The Secret World launched today, July 3rd.  I don’t plan on playing what with Guild Wars 2 around the corner and other reasons.  Those reasons being a standing World of Darkness game on Friday nights with my girl and a friend.  Though, if i didn’t have a running WoD game, I’d largely view Secret World as a great analog to some of the ideas.

If i do play, it will be after a requisite 3 months.  This is the minimum bar for any MMORPG that comes out.  This clears several key problems in new MMO properties: The Wave, The Bugs, The Game.

The Wave – Every MMO gets played by a number of people.  The question is how fast they digest the content and move on.  Ever been to a new restaurant in your area?  Even something as rudimentary as Krispy Kreme can draw lines for days on end leaving you with very rare opportunities to visit the new operation.  You see the same phenomenon in MMO’s where hundreds or thousands of players will assault the hapless rats gathered at the gates of the newly envisioned castles and will proceed to pick clean the questing fields of their native berries and wolf pelts.  If you wait a week, you see less of them.

The longer you wait, the smaller the number of people dwindles to a mere shadow of it’s former chaos.  World of Warcraft is a prime example.  Even in this day, some ten years after it’s release you’ll find people rolling new characters or progressing through the quest content at their own speed.

The Bugs – Every game, console or PC, suffers from bugs at launch.  It’s inevitable.  What surprises me is the Beta-Version experience.  Many games are left in a semi-unfinished state left for the eager fanbase to discover what game breaking imbalances or bugs ruin the experience.

It almost never rewards a player to pick up an MMO in the first two weeks.  My first week with EVE Online was met with frequent crashes.  I docked, crash.  I undock, crash.  I could fly around for minutes or hours without issue, but the moment I touch a station to escape or enter the cold vacuum of space – BOOM – Down goes the client.

The Game – Every game comes out with a laundry list of visions and ideas they hope and hoped to achieve.  Almost no MMO achieves the full list.  This gets whittled down over time and development, changed from broad strokes to smaller more precise ideas.

In some cases classes get rebuilt, powers redefined, environments revised.  Few games do this often, World of Warcraft one of the few that regularly changes how the various classes play and one of my chief arguments against playing for any lengthy period of time.

The Solution – So my solution in all it’s simplicity is merely to wait.  I wait roughly 3 months, see what comes down the line.  See if a game falters radically, collapsing under the weight of it’s lofty but unmanageable ideals.  A significant number of players will pick up a game for it’s included complimentary period, a commitment of purchase but not one of subscription.  I’ve done this myself, interested to see how a game pans out but disinterested after the experience.  Much like a trial period only significantly more expensive in the case of new games.

So in this endeavor I dodge a horde of new players competing for the same resources, I escape game and character breaking bugs and I get to see what gets added in post-launch.  It’s not foolproof.  City of Heroes radically altered power structure several months after launch.  Enough so that while I like the new changes, I’d rather have not been around before hand.

With all that in mind, I -will- be playing Guild Wars 2 at launch and I welcome anyone who cares to come join me.  Send me an email and I’ll coordinate server/guild information.

-Mercator

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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