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| Shareware Roundup: Love-it-Or-Hate-it edition. by Mischief Maker 3D 01/07/2008, 12:08am PST | ||||
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| Why do I like indie games so much? Mainly because that's where you see designers taking risks and coming up with new game ideas that usually fall flat on their faces but every so often result in something awesome. Here's a selection of games that you're either going to love or you're going to hate.
Depths of Peril So at first glance this is a 3D engine Diablo clone revolving around a barbarian city full of quest NPCs and item vendors located smack dab in the middle of an absurdly hostile wilderness. Thrust into this situation is your character who goes on randomly generated quests, gains experience, allocates points to a large spread of secondary skills, wears all manner of randomly adjectived equipment, hires computer-controlled hirelings who fight by your side, and marches into dungeon after dungeon to click a sizable menagerie of monsters to death. Pretty standard Diablo clone territory. Only here's the catch. It's not an RPG level treadmill, it's a strategy game. Your character is the leader of one of several gangs (called covenants) fighting for control of this barbarian city. Each gang has a "lifestone" that ressurects gang members who die at the cost of a few of its hitpoints. Destroy the lifestone, kill the entire gang. When you destroy all the gangs that are not allied with you, you win the game. You can recruit (and kick out) up to 5 additional members to your gang, but only one member at a time can go adventuring with you with the remaining members staying home and guarding the lifestone. Until you have a strong enough level advantage over an enemy (or big enough alliance) to put up a sustained assault against their lifestone and all the constantly ressurecting gang members protectiong it, you have a full suite of diplomatic options to deal with your rivals. Quests in this game give more experience than ordinary monster-mugging so it's a mad dash between you and your rivals to finish them first. At all times there are more quests than your single gang can handle on its own and the longer a quest is left uncompleted, the harder it gets, with monsters getting stronger, spies planting traps in town, and elites gathering a force of monsters to them until they begin making direct assaults against the city (and yes, all the vital vendors and quest NPCs can be killed permanently.) Since you can only take out one gang member with you at a time to take on quests, you have to decide whether to rotate members to keep their levels high, or just keep an eye out for higher-level characters to replace them with. And if a quest is really hard, you can ask another gang to send a pair with you to help complete it. Downsides include a terrible tutorial, item drops that are almost impossible to notice, save for a slight twinkling effect, and messy confusingly-drawn wall graphics in dungeons (turn the obacity on your minimap to max, you're going to live by that thing.) Probably the main thing that will decide you between loving or hating this game is the general breakneck pace of things. There is no time for dawdling because you're in a real-time battle for power against your rivals, and even when you're neck deep in monsters deep in a dungeon you constantly have diplomatic and strategic messages popping up and needing your attention (a high-level recruit just became available, do you put off finishing this quest to go try and recruit him, risking the quest becoming too difficult? An attack on an enemy gang is taking place, do you join in the fun in hopes of being the one to finish them off (and get a nice bonus) at the risk of leaving yourself exposed? Once a game is finished, you can carry your character and gang members into a new randomly generated city with rivals starting at the same level as you. Lugaru This is a 3D brawler with Ragdoll physics about Kung-fu rabbits. The quick and brutal fights (The knife stealth-kill is called "tracheotomy") and murder-revenge plot give the game a tone more decidedly "Watership Down" than Bugs Bunny. Most levels start out with you outnumbered and unnoticed by a group of patroling enemies. You can take advantage of this to take them out one at a time commando-style, or keep the fights down to manageable numbers, or just charge in and fight-away. The 2-button figting system is both the game's biggest strength and its biggest weakness. You have "attack" and "crouch/reverse" Depending on your movement and the enemy's action relative to you, hitting these buttons trigger different attacks and reversals. This allows for quick intuitive battles without complicated dragon punch input. On the downside, the move selection is pretty limited. For example, the roundhouse kick always goes to the right, so if you're fighting an enemy with a nice stone wall you'd like to ragdoll their skull into on your left, you're out of luck. Damage is never told outright, just hinted at by characters' body language, and effects like blurring the screen. I can't believe no one thought to use ragdolls in a fighting game before. If anything, roundhousing someone off a platform to crunch into a waiting cliff face 30 feet below is more satisfying than sniper rifling a guy off a watchtower. Critical Mass This is a turn-based spacefighter game. This was the inspiration for that Shadow Armada game I linked to a while back. You create a wing commander, spend resource points on your choice of fighter and those of your wingmen, then go off on hundreds of random missions, gaining rank and resources that open the door to better ships and more exciting missions. The control is simple and elegent. Turns represent 2 seconds of realtime. There is an arrow stretched out in front of your ship every turn. By stretching and bending the arrow, you determine the speed and turn of your ship and determine the position it will be in 2 seconds later. You select missiles from your magazine which fire (in order) over the next turn. There are 6 color-coded types of missiles with different payloads and tracking characteristics. In general these are fast but easy to dodge, like Ace Combat Missiles, instead of relentless X-Wing missiles. Playing this game made me really appreciate that Israeli Air Force motto "Speed is Life" because while collisions do no damage, they do drop your speed to zero, taking away your dodging ability and guaranteeing your doom. Damage is measured in individual components being knocked out with noticable changes in handling and attacking ability resulting. Sensors and stealth components play a big part in this game since they determine how close an enemy ship needs to be for you to get a visual on them (your whole wing shares intel.) The love/hate divider for this game is the fact that only one missile type differentiates between friend and foe, the other ones track the nearest ship regardless. This can result in you accidentally blowing up wingmen and vice versa, but considering wingmen and enemies aren't busy racking up friendly fire themselves, it's clear that it's not an AI issue but the player who has to adjust. The biggest downside to this game is the incredibly bad production values (it was originally made for windows 3.1) This game like X-Com, goes in that rare category of turn-based games with nail-biting tension. Virtual Villagers I'm assuming you can love this game. Gametunnel ranked it their 2006 Sim Game of the Year. I have seen retail copies of this game and its sequel in stores. Someone out there loves this game. Not me. This is quite possibly the worst videogame I have ever played. The premise is you have a small band of polynesian volcano refugees who have landed on a deserted island with the remnants of a lost village. It's up to you to assign them tasks and solve the puzzles of the island to help them survive and create a thriving village. Game time passes in real time (based on the system clock) even when you're not playing. So the island is a square clearing 4 screens in size with various items and areas you can have your villagers interact with by dragging them on top of it. You can drag a villager on top of a berry bush and (provided they succeed in learning) they will begin picking berries and slowly (and I mean slowly) improve their "farming" skill. Unfortunately, the berry bush only has 2000 berries and does not grow new ones. What will you do for food once the berries run out? Can you drag your farmer onto the plot of already-tilled earth to grow crops? Onto the sea to fish? Not yet! Those are level 2 and 3 farming, respectively, and you need research points to unlock those! How do you get research points? Well there happens to be a table on the island with some stone test tubes and coconut beakers that you can drag a villager onto where they will make clinking noises and make all of 2 frames of animation with their back to you, and SLOOOOOOWLY accumulate research points. The cheapest of skills cost several thousand research points and will take hours to reach. So it's a game about waiting. Then 4 hours later you load the game to see how your villagers are doing. The game gives you a random scene (entirely in text) in which you make one of two choices, one of the answers resulting in the death or at least severe crippling of one of your villagers. Then once that's over you see your village, andit's a fucking mess. Only half the villagers are still doing the jobs you gave them, the other half is wandering around looking at butterflies or some such bullshit. Meanwhile the food is almost gone and you don't have nearly enough research points to unlock crop farming in time. So you have to grab all your lazy stupid villagers back to their jobs in the hopes of surviving the upcoming famine. Checking online walkthroughs confirmed, even on easy mode, you need to keep a close eye on your villagers to stop them from slacking off. So it's a game about not only waiting, but aggressively micro managing while you wait and the game randomly kills off crucial villagers dooming the entire game you've just been playing for a week. And the graphics are incredibly ugly. Not only is the island drab, boring, and blatantly compartmentalized like a cubicle farm, but the villagers themselves look like what you'd get if a superdeformed anime character fucked a muppet. And not to spoil anything, but the puzzles, especially the late game ones, are Sierra Adventure game counterintuitive. But for whatever reason, enough people like it to make it an indie success. If you're a big fan of work-intensive tedium and already have a full-time data entry position, knock yourself out. Magi The premise of this game is a series of annual ritual combat fights between wizards in preparation for the inevitable battle against the angel of death in the hopes of winning and achieving immortality. Gameplay is like a real-time version of Magic the Gathering with channels being opened to give access to higher-level spells and enhance lower-level ones, direct damage spells, shield/buff spells, creatures to summon, and curses to case at one another. Every spell in the game is unique and has a purpose, there are multiple viable strategies, and even if you louse up early on in the fight, it's possible to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. On the downside, while there are some nice particle effects flying around, the graphics consist of two motionless poorly-draen 2D wizards facing each other in the middle of a dark room with circles on the floor. Mixing the fun of character customization, and increasing power with all the nerdy dungeons and dragons spell min/maxing schemes of our youth, and playing with a fast and elegant mouse-driven interface. Battleship Chess A new(er) game from the maker of Starships Unlimited. Like the namesake says, it's an odd mix of "Battleship" (your ships' guns shoot farther than their visual range and can fire blind in hopes of uncovering hidden enemy ships,) Chess (Position Control, different ships have different functions, move only one piece at a time) and hardcore grognard wargames (Incredibly detailed ships, down to the gun size, armor thickness, and effect of relative ship angle on to-hit odds.) The result is a WWI naval war game that takes the best parts from casual board games and hardcore war games and throws out the rest of the garbage letting your focus on position and tactics and picking the ammo just strong enough to penetrate the target's armor without sacrificing explosive effect. The only-one-moves-at-a-time mechanic means that traditional naval tactics are out the window, but the different ship types still retain their traditional function. The game lets you play over 5 different "chapters," each introducing a new ship type (Chapter 1 Armored Cruisers and Pre-dreadnoughts, Chapter 2 adds Dreadnoughts, 3 adds Battlecruisers, 4 destroyers, and 5 submarines). Really this is a goofy means of offering a tutorial because at anything below chapter 4, the game is just a dull slug-fest. Victory is based on total points gained for doing damage to the enemy fleets so often it's better to retreat when you're ahead and deny the enemy the chance to sink a damaged ship of yours. On the downside, like all apezone games this game has terrible instructions (I learned more about how to use these ship types from their individual wikipedia entries) and lots of strange quirks (Instead of hitpoints, ships have damage points that start at zero and otherwise act like inverse hp). The barebones 3D engine makes all the ships look the same, so get familiar with the 2-letter abbreviations for ship type that show up when you mouse over these ships. And worst of all, the ability to choose your fleet and assign upgrades is very slowly unlocked over the course of play and those upgrades that are divvied out by the computer sometimes make no sense at all (like giving bigger guns to a submarine). Just like Starships Unlimited did for space 4X games, Battleship Chess takes all the good part of hardcore naval wargames, and leaves out or minimizes the boring stuff Global Defense Network I've always been interested in games that incorporate music into their gameplay, especially those that break away from the Falling Bars game of Simon gameplay to do something new with the music. Global Defense Network attempts something different with wonderful and terrible results. This is a gallery-shooting game where you shoot at abstract shapes while techno music plays in the background. The first thing you will notice is that your gun seems to only fire sporatically. Then frustration turns to realization when you realize your gun reloads in time to the music and the targets appeal in time as well. For the highest score, you must get into the rhythm of the game to catch the targets in time to get the crucial "clean section" bonus necessary for huge score chains. It's a game where getting pumped by the music is a key gameplay mechanic and when it's on it's a fantastic experience. Unfortunately, that only applies to when it's on. For at least 1/3rd of the songs in the game the author seems to have lost sight of his own game. Sometimes targets don't appear in time to the beat. Othertimes they appear every sixteenth note and it's impossible to get them all. The third song on the demo is the only one that really gets it right, in my opinion. Another problem is the weapons. There are 5 in all with numerous secondary weapons, but only the lightning gun fires instantaneous projectiles. The targets appeal in a 3D shooting range, sometimes moving through all 3 axes, and are nearly impossible to hit with a finite-speed cannonball (this game supports 3D glasses, not red/blue but those expensive electric lens ones from way back) and the timing of shots at targets at multiple ranges ensures that the shooting to the beat mechanic is lost with anything but the lightning gun (except possibly the missile launcher). Note that if you have a decent sense of rhythm, you will murder the built-in high scores. This is a game easy to love and hate. When it's on it's amazing, when it's off it's a frustrating waste of potential. |
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Shareware Roundup: Love-it-Or-Hate-it edition. by 01/07/2008, 12:08am PST  Magi by 01/08/2008, 12:21pm PST There is a big update coming on the 14th. NT by 01/08/2008, 12:23pm PST OMG, it was made by beautiful teen boys. *throb* NT by 01/08/2008, 12:31pm PST And it is most excellent by 01/15/2008, 9:21pm PST Re: Magi by 01/15/2008, 10:17pm PST |
