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st33d · 3 years

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Status Report

As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten angrier - that’s what happens when your body starts failing bit by bit. I used to think that venting one’s anger was healthy. Now I know it just serves to justify further outbursts.

I have chosen to avoid memes, questions-for-clout, replying to non-mutuals, and dunking on products or people for the past year. There’s been exceptions, but most of the time I delete them soon afterwards. It’s not improved my tiny follower count but I think it’s been better for my mental health.

However it has meant a lack of updates. Time for a blog.

Unending

After many years of trying side projects of various widths, lengths, and heights, I’ve come to the conclusion that one’s side gig should not be a work of passion, nor an exercise in self improvement, but a towering edifice of mild amusement. Know this: Unending is a wholly insincere endeavour. I do not hope to win awards or expatiate on its nature. It is an attempt to work on something indefinitely without getting too bored. Red Rogue was the thing I was doing before I worked on something “important”. The real project would come after. And so this continued with every project afterwards, the focus not on what was in front of me, but getting it done and getting away from it. Now I know the true nature of finished games, they are never done, they never let you rest or ignore them. So I named this new game honestly: Unending. Even when ideas for mechanics have dried up, I may still be able to think of dungeons to explore in it. I will still make more games, more distractions, but Unending will remain true to its name.

Painting

I once set myself the task of making 100 surrealist pieces. I got to 68 before I stopped making art altogether. I needed a break.

I like surrealism. It’s the one kind of drawing / painting that I persist with because at the end of working on a piece I’ll see something new. Not a fantasy or a reproduction but a strange vision teased out of small mistakes or textures in the surface I’m working on. The Great Isolation of 2020 got me back into the habit via oil painting. Oils let you tinker with a piece for weeks at a time - a tremendously relaxing pastime. Perhaps in a decade or so I will finally have 100 surreals. Lacking a decent camera I have uploaded some basic shots of my efforts to Instagram for the time being.

Small Games

This year, like every year, I participated in 7DRL. Cardinal Ramship Pirate is a bunch of disparate ideas I crammed into one Pico-8 cart for better or worse. It seems to have been received well, but I think that’s because people don’t understand what makes it a bad game. The optimal strategy is to constantly swap your weapons for speed or damage and the level generation forces you to explore before serving the ending. I did the latter because I was running out of tokens (Pico-8 limits the amount of code you can write). A fair dungeon should not force you to run through pointless tasks before dropping the ending. To those who say they look forward to what I do with it next I say: it’s open source.

Flip Knight I made as a Christmas present to the internet. It was a nice break from Unending and a chance to muse about level design. There is a tiny speed-running Discord that sprang up in its wake. I am honoured, it was not my intent to warrant such scrutiny.

Roomba Quest 2 was my most obvious response to 2020. It is a somewhat personal work as my father is a fan of Stanislaw Lem and aside from His Master’s Voice, I found the book Fiasco to be one that stuck with me a long time. Like many of Lem’s books, it’s a tragedy about communication. I also got to comment on the band Nine Inch Nails who became increasingly silly as I got older. I feel for Trent Reznor who in his later years has had less excuse to complain about his circumstances, even though that’s the subject of most of his songs.

Lastly I should mention Mail Mouse - an attempt at a play by post roleplaying game. It’s the most wholesome project I’ve attempted. You play mice trying to deliver the post. There is no dice and no failure unless you choose to do so. It almost works, and I’m grateful to those players who let me test their patience as long as they could. I’m also grateful to Rolegate, a platform for play by post roleplaying that let me connect with people when my internet was extremely poor and I was advised to stay at home. Whilst everyone bemoaned their excess of zoom calls I had nothing but text. But text is better than nothing.

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st33d · 3 years

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All These Worlds Are Yours (Except Europa)

It’s been a while since my last CRPG report and I have played quite a lot of CRPGs in the meantime. I’m going to keep it brief. It’s by no means all the games I played over the past year or so, but it is all the games that are worth playing in some fashion or another.

Yet again I didn’t really bother to get decent screenshots so you’ll have to endure some tangentially related Shutterstock photos.

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk

It’s like Etrian Odyssey but made by horny 14 year olds. Monsters take the form of purple-black eyes that move only when you do. Colliding with them triggers a JRPG battle with your team. You must conquer around a dozen or so dungeons to defeat a mysterious evil whilst learning about your protagonist’s horny hubris.

I like how it automatically fills in the in-game map, only drawing tiles you have stepped in. Stairways also connect perfectly on most dungeons, leading to some detective work to solve them. The combat is passable. The story is PG13 with random suggestions of poop and sex without really showing any. It’s… a good game with a lot of simple mechanics that it layers up over time to make something quite complex. I really enjoyed solving the dungeons but it’s such a multilayered ball of weirdness that I hesitate recommending it.

Dragon’s Dogma

It’s like Skyrim but with less items, less map, and decent fights. Like, really decent fights. You can climb on the back of beasts and hack pieces off of them or shoot magic arrows that do a host of cool things. The story is pretty anime - I can’t get into why without some major spoilers. Safe to say that after the first (and honestly entertaining) chunk of the game you get an overlay of falling ash pinned to your screen and the monsters become hit point sponges. That’s around when I stopped playing because it felt like I’d reached “an” ending and the rest was about beating as many dead horses with whatever sticks I could upgrade enough to hit them with. Last time I fired it up I got in an hour long fight with an off-brand beholder that basically respawned all its limbs eight times because of its egregious hit points.

You’re joined by some enthusiastic AI companions called pawns who have no story and just kinda throw themselves at enemies whilst repeating the same phrases over and over. I’m not really sure if they’re a blessing or curse. The game overall is pretty jank with terrible traversal (don’t explore, the quests will send you to every corner of the map anyway - twice). Despite all my complaints it’s a lot of fun - at least until the 1st ending. It’s cheap and I recommend it.

Sky Rogue

It’s like a lot of aircraft dogfight games but a bit random. I’ve played this a bit on single player and it’s alright. However I have played many, many, missions in the 2 player mode with a coworker. It’s just very satisfying doing the whole Top Gun team thing taking on a bunch of enemy planes whilst working on upgrades.

Disco Elysium

It’s like Planescape Torment but without the tedious combat or problematic writer behind it. There’s a video of one of the devs explaining how the dialogue is laid out like Twitter in tabloid format for easy reading. This is revolutionary. I want every computer text game to use this format from now on.

I cannot stress how important it is to enter Disco Elysium unprepared. To have no grasp on just how far you will be allowed to explore, who you will meet, who you will travel with, or what you are expected to do. It is a game about amnesia and becoming someone new - if that is at all possible.

I have two pieces of advice however:

Don’t start with Psyche or Physique stats below 2, they’re both your health and the game will surprise you with damage to either in the most unexpected places.

Do every quest. Explore every nook and cranny. Not knowing is the very essence of the game. You’ll have lost that feeling after the ending.

I don’t need to tell you how good the game is. Just look at most reviews.

Everspace

It’s like Descent (that 1st person spacecraft game on the PSX) but in space and it’s a roguelike. Everspace has you mine, salvage, fight, trade, and quest - but you do it all from the comfort of a spaceship that has responsive controls and interesting weaponry. I had a lot of fun skulking round wrecks to salvage parts whilst avoiding patrols of hostiles until I had enough kit to take them on.

It has a substandard storyline but great meta-progression, asking you to grind cash from each run to unlock parts for a better ship on the next. I put in a great deal of hours into this game and I’m looking forward to what the studio does with the sequel.

Horizon Zero Dawn

It’s like Shadow of Mordor but good. My only major complaint was how constant use of the bow had the camera staying uncomfortably close to Aloy’s arse and burying itself in grass during frenetic combat. When the camera wasn’t trying to kill me the combat was astoundingly good. You fight lumbering robo-dinosaurs with special weak spots and various attacks. The quests are also good with a surprising amount of cutscenes and dialogue for a lot of completely optional content.

I was also amazed at how they managed to pull off an almost believable backstory for a world full of robot dinosaurs. Despite some frustrating combat encounters I had a good time exploring its large and very pretty world.

Pathfinder Kingmaker

It’s like Baldurs Gate but not as good. Only on my 3rd attempt at playing the game with the newly patched in turn based mechanics did it start to make sense. It uses Pathfinder’s rules which are deep and tactical - as tactical rules go they’re pretty good. However when those rules fly by at real time speed you don’t learn how opportunity attacks work (they’re more complex than modern D&D) or how to utilise charge and positioning.

The story is pretty forgettable and the encounter design is relentlessly dull. A lot of areas are just simply fight after fight after fight. In turn based mode the fights are pretty good but too many of them are identical. The ones that weren’t I found inscrutable and impossible to pass. If you like min-max fighting and little else then have at it - but I warn you that the UI is lagging behind most popular CRPGs. You can’t even check the world map whilst in a town.

Metal Gear Solid V

It’s like an RPG. Despite not having a main character with stats, in this open world game of hide and seek you kidnap soldiers who in turn become your stats. Through them you gain access to new abilities. Through them you are drip-fed the resources you steal, only becoming able to spend all that you’ve stolen by having enough accountants to do your taxes. It is a brilliant work of roleplaying economics and a thoroughly enjoyable open world game. One where I can completely ruin a mission yet chuckle at my attempts to save what’s left of my dignity.

It also fails to stick the landing. At around the 20th mission the game starts committing to its plot and the rot sets in. Bit by bit it becomes worse to play. There was trouble at Konami when the game was made and it feels like the end of the game was hit the hardest. This was the part that was tested the least and had the worst ideas thrown into it. Metal Gear Solid V is still worth it for the 1st half of the game.

Final Fantasy 8

It’s like the other Final Fantasy games but poorly paced and balanced. The junction system is incredibly interesting in that it tries to sidestep the whole issue of items by gluing your characters to guardian angels. It’s built in card game Triple Triad is simple and engaging. The story is kinda interesting with some time travel shenanigans going on...

But it’s pacing is dreadful with endlessly copypasted rooms. The magic draw system is miserable (and yes I know you can get GFs to convert items to magic but then it’s more tedious busy work to upscale all the magic into something work attaching). The world map is shockingly empty. And the characters are just yawn, yawn, yawn.

Pick it up on sale.

Torchlight 2

It’s like Diablo 2 but not quite as good. Still worth playing though. I got it on the Switch and found that playing it with a gamepad was a pleasant experience.

It has a few balance problems with the Engineer class being ridiculously overpowered compared to any of the others (and way more fun). And there’s some annoying bugs that prompted a few reloads. Still pretty entertaining however.

Pokemon Shield

It’s like every other Pokemon game (surprise surprise) but easier. As much as I like how they’ve removed a lot of busywork from this entry, it makes it feel like the only challenge in the previous titles was the busywork. When really it was the busywork that held you back from just kerb-stomping everything in your path.

It’s not until the final DLC that you’re given some pokemon that are needlessly tedious to catch and some group battles using randomly selected pokemon that test your knowledge of the game’s systems. The only real challenge in the game is in the online multiplayer against humans where your pokemon level is normalised and encyclopedic knowledge of the title’s history is required.

My internet is terrible so the online gameplay is dead to me. It’s a very fun game, but also a very disappointing one.

Burnout Paradise

It’s like a sandbox game for cars. Except that you’re not really driving a car, it’s more like you’re driving a bobsleigh with a rocket attached to it. Unlike most driving games you aren’t given terrain that slows you down. Even if you hit a wall you’ll skate off it so long as you collide sideways. The game just wants you to drive like an arsehole and go faster and faster - to the tune of Epic by Faith No More (literally).

I mean yeah, it’s not an RPG by any stretch but it’s one of the best sandbox games I’ve played. Even when you’re not doing a “mission” you can just drive around the city finding back alleys and ramps to fly off of. It’s just a massive playground with very little negative feedback.

Cyberpunk 2077

It’s like a bunch of different games you’ve played before but not quite as good. The story is the best bit. I really liked the characters I got to hang out with. I guess I would have enjoyed the gun fights if I hadn’t been playing Doom 1 before I played it. And I would have enjoyed the stealth if I hadn’t already played Metal Gear Solid V with its superior A.I. It has cool Obra Dinn style brain movies to explore for detective work but I enjoyed the spectacle of them more than the execution (though I did enjoy them more than Obra Dinn which I found tedious to navigate or understand).

I saw one review say it was the most backwards view of the future. Not imagining what could be but endlessly paying homage to cyberpunk stories of the past.

I see other reviews say play it when it’s fixed. When the myriad of bugs (and I experienced enough to impact gameplay) are solved.

I say play the sequel. It’s worth experiencing but there’s too much going on that’s playing catch up to other titles.

Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate

It’s like Rogue. I first played Shiren 2 on the Nintendo DS and was amazed by its deep systems and story meta progression - various tales progressing in the game only after each death and subsequent replay.

This entry is technically Shiren 5. Holy shit the content in this thing. There are 15 optional dungeons with different rules. Over a hundred block pushing puzzles using various mechanics of the game that you can just walk up and play in the 2nd village you enter. A minesweeper minigame. Loads of tutorial levels. All of these give you rewards which you can take on your main adventure which is a wholly different set of dungeons. I’ve unlocked several companions to adventure with and the game is hinting there are even more later on. It is obscene the amount of value there is packed into this title. And it’s fun. A little unfair at times, but as with all roguelikes the later depths require knowledge and a lot of caution. Strong recommendation for roguelikers.

Dicey Dungeons

It’s like Dream Quest but with dice. I played the prototype of this at the 7DRL after party. Terry was quite bashful about his creation and didn’t want to submit it. I honestly didn’t see why he shouldn’t as many of us had made far worse in the past.

I put off playing this until it finally landed on the Switch as complete as any roguelike can hope to be. It’s quite different to Dream Quest in that it requires a bit of math to do well in. If you’re not prepared to do basic sums then it’s hard to make progress. Also unlike Dream Quest it’s very balanced. There’s definitely some cheesy tactics you can pull off to get cheap victories but not without some thought and planning.

In a sea of deck building roguelikes, Dicey Dungeons is quite simply refreshing. There’s a lot of good ideas in here you won’t see elsewhere - give it a go.

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st33d · 5 years

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I’m not bored of RPGs

I would prefer to take my own screenshots but Steam has given me a big update queue and getting shots off of the Switch is a different kind of chore. Instead I will be using appropriate pictures of cats I found on shutterstock.com.

Pillars of Eternity 2

Almost all isometric computer roleplaying games are broken into islands. There is a campaign map operating like a vast sea, and within that sea one visits small places with a clearly marked border. Instanced dungeons where a poor laptop can muster a fireworks display for your heroes.

How refreshing that Pillars 2 leans into that. Islands within islands. Thematically a voyage across the sea, replete with sea shanties. I applaud the structure of this game. It is a delight to discover remote islands that hold illustrated text adventures in addition to the meat and potatoes combat.

And the combat really is meat and potatoes. You get to choose two professions, allowing really dumb combinations like my paladin who had to choose between summoning bats or tanking the front line. The benefit of all this is that you can find ways to entertain yourself if you get bored of all the murdering. I avoided the ship to ship combat as it is a weird mini game that I don’t like. You can largely do without it, and if you make enough allies during the main quest you can get to the final battle free of cannon balls or uninspiring melee.

The main story suffers from trying to have a connection to the first game. I really would have preferred to tackle this adventure without that baggage. When I go off the beaten track the game is a lot of fun. Fortunately the open sea has little in the way of tracks. It is a game weighed down by hubris and experiment but still manages to tread water in a sea of similar titles.

Tangledeep

This is a mostly classic roguelike. I say mostly because it has some very linear boss fights you’re forced to repeat, and it offsets the lack of a hunger clock by just dumping more monsters into a level. By “dump” I mean they’re just new things there without any logic or tactical threat.

However, Tangledeep has a lot of nonsense you can get up to: You can summon plant monsters. Multiclass into a soul drinking summoner. Plant trees. Keep pets. Visit bonus dungeons. Make food (mostly curry). There’s other stuff too, I just kinda lost track.

I got invested enough to come up with a specific build. One that would summon lots of monsters and teleport around the map with a combination of skills I’d pick up from two of the fighting professions. Eventually I died and I couldn’t imagine playing a different style of character. The new classes I was unlocking weren’t offering new pets or movement skills so I haven’t played since.

I enjoyed my time with Tangledeep a lot. Mining the powers from all the classes was a fun project to play out during the delve. Had I survived I’m sure I would have engaged with all the other features the game has. I want to say you should play the game without permadeath, because the structure doesn’t reward it. I think one should play their first game with permadeath on to get to grips with using skills, then turn it on to start a new game. Picking classes in the right order and taking only the skills you need. The game kind of expects you to do this by offering a tougher dungeon on future play-throughs. Some solid fun to be had here when you figure out what settings you should turn on and off. The developer has been kind enough to offer a lot of them.

Devil May Cry 5

Okay, it’s not an RPG but it’s really good. A pure expression of joy in videogame form. It dares me into thinking it’s gone too stupid, but then yes, yes I really do need to cut down this boss with two motorcycles, it’s the best tactical option.

I’m too old and slow for these sort of games and yet DMC5 encouraged me instead of frustrating me. From fans of the series I’ve heard it does its forebears credit. One can only hope that its creators have more games like this to share in the future.

Final Fantasy X

I’ve stopped at the Blitzball tutorial, I do not want to play this mini game. I don’t like any of the characters in this game either. It took The Witcher 3 about eight hours to win me over, which is kind of acceptable in a huge RPG. But I’m not even meeting NPCs that I like.

I’ll have to come back to this one.

Final Fantasy XII

Constraints do interesting things to games. In FF12 we have what wants to be an open world MMO type of game and it thinks it’s running on a Playstation 2. So the whole world is broken into islands.

Sounds like an isometric CRPG to me. It even leans into that constraint, creating strange geometries to navigate with a pace to encounters that you don’t really see in modern sandbox games. In an open world there must be empty spaces. To create immersion and to allow monsters to chase you for a reasonable distance before giving up. You need boring bits. FF12 removes those boring bits, creating a world that feels like a traditional dungeon on a massive scale.

Then it puts those boring bits right back in. All the way in.

FF12 is a real-time game. You assign commands and your heroes act them out. You can also set your heroes on auto pilot. The game lets you buy more specific commands from shops, allowing you to create an undying death machine out of your party. This starts out really fun. You unlock abilities on your character’s skill-tree-board-thing and continue to tinker with the death ball. But even though you’ve unlocked an ability, you have to first find it in the dungeon world. And some of the ways you find them are bullshit. Be prepared to walk in and out of an area to dice roll a boss fight into appearing (not a bug - that’s what you have to do). Be prepared to navigate a dungeon that has a 42 minute explanation on youtube (and it’s been edited). Be prepared to find Dispelga on route to a boss and only find Dispel after you looked it up on a wiki (it’s in the corner of a really easy dungeon that I already cleared). Unlocking abilities this way sets expectations. I know I’m missing something and I’ve paid to unlock it - I’m committed. As I got further into the game’s list of status effects and party buffs my frustration grew.

The story has a cast of amiable characters struggling against occupation by the Empire. It’s alright. I remember all their names but couldn’t honestly tell you how I got to where I am or what started it. In a game which is largely about exploration it works pretty well as a backdrop.

It’s a very unique game. A hybrid of MMO and isometric RPG made from the JRPG mindset. The modern ports of the game feature fast-forward buttons that apologise for the self-indulgences taken in its original form. It is a decent thirty hours of fun and a further ten hours of not much fun. I certainly recommend it to roleplaying game enthusiasts, but with caveats for completionists.

World of Final Fantasy

I experienced Pokemon Red on my then-desktop-PC whilst listening to the album Gran Turismo by The Cardigans. I couldn’t stand the high pitched beeps of the menu so I preferred to listen to the latest CD I had. The song Explode is burned into my mind next to stamping on a monster’s head and stuffing it into a ball. It’s not something you need to know, but I thought I’d tell you about it.

The conceit of why you are stuffing classic monsters from Final Fantasy games into balls prisms does not need explaining. Nor does one need to know why the two main characters help form two stacks of three creatures. Who cares why these stacks combine the powers of those within to create a hybrid JRPG avatar.

World of Final Fantasy cares. Oh boy does it care. There’s not a single button on my gamepad this isn’t getting away without two minutes of banter between the characters to explain it. Cutscene after cutscene rolls by. They often come in pairs so I pause and skip ahead just in case. Even after you complete a cutscene the characters lock out the controls and have a jolly good chat about what they’ve just seen. In its defence it lets you skip being waterboarded with the story and run the game at what feels like 1.5x speed. But there’s still a lot of busy work when it comes to skipping cutscenes. There’s loads of them.

I really like the combat. That is, I really like it when I have a monster that does the right colour damage for capturing a new monster. It’s a refreshing take on Pokemon that is utterly wasted on the Final Fantasy franchise, but I guess it needed the brand for this weird game to even exist. If you like the combat you found in Pokemon and want something with more nuance and challenge then you should pick it up and skip those cutscenes. If you need some story to wash it down with and don’t like a shockingly linear campaign map, then perhaps put it off for a while.

7DBL (7 Day Broughlike) Challenge

I’ve often been accused of making a Broughlike. To make a game that reminds you of Michael Brough’s work: A small grid with a turn based avatar that can cast spells. I’ve often refuted this because I tend to avoid having spells in my games. There’s just never a nice way to do the UI. Us iPad owners are fine, phone owners less so, desktop users get lots of keys to press, and hooray for gamepads if they aren’t awful for any type of menu.

Those more patient than I have stepped up to the challenge. Echoing the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge (7DRL, of which I am a yearly participant) developers across the globe attempted to make a small grid with a turn based avatar that cast spells. In 7 days. They also scheduled this challenge right before the gaming event called E3. Much like the 7DRL always gets scheduled before the gaming event called GDC. We can’t have a game jam making niche games and let reporters have time to talk about it. That wouldn’t be the done thing.

The results are above average. I say this coming from the 7DRL which is generally average, equal parts good and bad. The games produced in this jam are mostly good. There’s a few which clearly aren’t finished, and yet they show a great deal of promise. Even Brough himself submitted a game, one which is quite accessible and fun. Highlights for me included controlling a rather awkward squid that had to shoot in order to turn and a one dimensional roguelike that adds depth by throwing your weapons.

I hope they do it again next year.

My RPGs

I released my roguelite runner Bump 2 for the small audience that appreciates it. It’s one of those games that really appeals to a handful of people, and not to others in the slightest. In homage to my own select tastes and to unjinx my collection of unfinished projects, I resolved to make Bump 2 into its best form before walking away from it. And so I did.

I’m currently working on Kobold Dungeon Tester. This is my 4th (5th if you count Roomba Quest) interactive text project. I twice tried to write a novel in my youth and this project feel like a penance for my failures. Normally I would move on, satisfied the base idea works, like a puzzle, or a high score. A few kind words have convinced me that this one is different - it’s a story, it needs an ending. I shall try to finish it as best as I can.

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st33d · 6 years

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Late RPG

Wait not for the sale.

Wait for the patches. Wait for people to stop gushing and go, “but this bit was shit.” Wait for the FAQs to be finished. Wait for the YouTubes.

Then you can experience the game as a classic. One you can enthuse to your colleagues and hear the reply, “yes, yes, we all played that last year. Where have you been?”

Fallout 4

Woof

Dogmeat stands looking proud among a patch of radioactive barrels. He’s found loot. Yeah, I’m not getting that. He’s a dumb beast but I find him to be a good roleplayer.

I grew up with dogs, they’re not smart. Dogmeat is also not smart, and I refuse to upgrade him to one of the other companions. If I want some idiot running in there and causing trouble, it makes more sense that it was that dumb dog. Aw what now boy? No, no not that way dog. Get on the damn lift dog, no, no there.

Good boy.

Dogs and their relentless optimism are good company when you’re a crazed bag lady collecting everything not nailed down. I have a dead husband I never loved and a missing baby I didn’t want. I seem to have lucked out - dumped into a big rubbish tip where everyone is too stupid to have ransacked it decades ago.

I’ve gained this strange super power, I see numbers on people’s limbs and selecting them will sometimes let me shoot them. I flash this ability constantly so I can see enemies I should not see. Why doesn’t everyone here have this power? Honestly, I don’t know why they haven’t just hacked the damn Pip-Boy off my arm already.

I’m also crazy proficient at DIY. I’ve made some cabinets for my loot. I should really make a kennel for the dog. Other people have noticed my DIY skills and want me to build settlements for them. That’s what my dead husband was into. I thought I was getting away from that sort of thing. I’m happy being a crazy bag lady with a dog, leave me alone you idiots, it’s not DIY if someone else does it for you.

This strange world has been fun to steal from. So full of little details with so much junk. I’m not really good with guns so the super powers are neat too. It’s sad that the dog has been the best creature I’ve met in it, but I guess you can’t expect too much from a junkyard.

(Shout out to Worthless Bums for recommending this. I wrote this before that Waypoint article and it’s going to look like I’ve just cribbed his play style. But no, I was like this in Skyrim too, I even wove my mastery of glitches into the narrative of my magic. As a mage I had after all pierced the veil.)

Nier Automata

This game thing is a hack and slash brawler / shmup / RPG that turns into an okay shmup and a boring shmup and back again. That you play once, then again (but with exposition and boring shmup), and then an anime apocalypse boss rush. Its appeal is fragmented.

What the hell is it with Platinum and waist high railings that super soldiers and ninjas cannot jump over? You'd think they would've figured this out by now. This particular feature in combination with Yoko’s classic camera shenanigans caused me to play Route A in great detail. Some it is really good, you can make use of sword combos for shortcuts. Other times I was treading a circle of misery in search of a gap along the invisible wall.

The hacking mini-game. They do some nice arty things with it, but the meat and potatoes game play is so unrelentingly average that I came to despise it.

The quests are... ookay? It’s like the kick off for the quest is always bad. Fetch this, go there, fight that. However the story on the journey is great. Whilst one could argue it’s poking fun at bad quest design, I’ve seen bad quest design poked at better by West of Loathing.

The combat. Bloody hell. The analogue sticks on my gamepad have partially disintegrated. I’m not even joking. Standard Platinum dodge-combat with guns on top. They lay it out to make you choose between ranges but hell-no-my-right-hand-is-a-dancing-spider. DPS all the way. Bonus points for using the fact you play a robot with the skill trees. You effectively buy slots and can plug in whatever you like. This is kinda like Captive, an Amiga era dungeon crawler where you controlled robots - the upgrade system was total capitalism. Get money, buy bigger arms and magic chips. In Nier Automata you’ve got a simpler linear stack that you can defrag when you put in larger chips. A skeuomorphic design that I wouldn’t mind being awkwardly shoe-horned into other games.

The music. Perfect. If you listen to the previous game’s soundtrack (Nier) it goes up a level when you hear all the kindly music transform into the next game’s boss fight music.

Whilst I’ve so much ire for the hacking mini-game that I don’t want to plough on with endings D to Z, I did have a lot of fun. When the game stops being a dick it is truly fantastic. Enough to make me trawl through videos so I can hear the rest of the story without playing the hacker character. An eccentric game I remember fondly but don’t want to hang out with.

Dream Quest

It’s a turn-based dungeon crawl that works almost like Desktop Dungeons. Each fight turns into a card game where you and the monster play cards that deal damage or cast spells. In the dungeon are shops and treasure that give extra cards.

From the word go you’re assaulted with some hideous artwork and brutal difficulty. Some of it blatantly unfair. The UI is a challenge to figure out.

Only on replaying Dream Quest does it slowly reward you. Its achievement system doles out new cards, far more powerful than what you had before. You also accrue points for every futile attempt and can use them to pay to skip achievements. When you get bored of one class you play another and find out that it’s now wearing boots when it kicks arse.

I’ve still not completed the game, only getting as far as level 3, yet it keeps unlocking more classes and more cards. The unfairness is gone, but mostly that’s a fault of the terrible UI - once you’ve learned where bestiary is and figured out how certain monsters play, the variables become constants. The ramp leading to terra firma is pretty nice. Like this car crash of UI lays just enough problems in your path to balance out the pacing.

I believe that artists don’t create, they discover - the creator stands at a vantage point and shares their vision. This is why the artist loses ownership of their work. This is why some of us are blind to the masterpieces we could create. And this is why some guy with his dodgy art has ironically seen something beautiful and shared it with us. Everyone, you gotta see this.

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st33d · 6 years

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More RPGs...

Can’t get enough of them. I asked around, got some recommendations and I played them. Someone even sent me a Steam key, a partially successful attempt to sway my opinion. I also played some roguelikes, they count as RPGs too.

Tyranny

I received an unrelenting slew of recommendations for this. Sadly I found it so boring I couldn’t get out of the 1st area. Planescape Torment lays it on thick with the text, but it’s worth reading. I want to ask characters more questions because they’re so damned interesting. In Tyranny it’s just info-dump after info-dump about the complexities of working for the bad guys. Do you take the fascist option or the anarchist option? Which cardboard villain will you be forced to side with? I played through the opening areas several times to try and get into it but I got so bored I ended up just mashing through the dialogue trees - which Tyranny will punish you for. Saying the wrong thing at the wrong time causes shifts in alliances, so you’re forced to read and read and read. I carry a Kindle with me at all times, I am a glutton for text. It is not the amount of reading that makes Tyranny a chore to play, it is simply that I find none of it interesting. It also does that real-time-pause-combat nonsense that made me stop playing Pillars of Eternity. I’m the only person I know of that doesn’t like this game so by all means check it out.

West of Loathing

Well they gave me a Steam key when I was asking around for RPG recommendations on Twitter, so I thought, why not? It has an approach to humour that reminds me of Tim Vine’s stand-up routine. Carpet bomb them with jokes - just keep dropping them, eventually some will hit. Your mileage may vary on this approach. A torrent of dad-jokes helps pave over some of the more confusing aspects of how the RPG mechanics work. It’s all very simple yet wonky JRPG stuff with some positional mechanics thrown in. Like most JRPGs it’s very easy to get in a rut and not be effective but there’s helpful grinding locations where you can beat up hell-cows to catch up with the main plot. I got through 2 acts of the game before running into some obtuse math puzzle that stopped me from progressing. I spent a whole two hours trying every possible combination before giving up on the quest that was stopping me from getting to the next area. I went to do some other areas to let off some steam and ran into another maths riddle just like it. I’ve not played since. I don’t mind some of the cryptic adventure puzzles the game has but I draw the line at maths riddles. I’ve no intention of looking up an FAQ to get past it either - running into yet another maths riddle would really ruin my day. By all means check it out, it’s quite a pleasant adventure game. If you hate maths riddles as much as I do, maybe wait for a sale or start asking around on Twitter for RPG recommendations.

Grim Dawn

By the Titan Quest devs you say? Well, I couldn’t get into Titan Quest, so I avoided this for some time. But I got to the end of Path of Exile and discovered my rave-mage was ill suited for their end-game content, so why not give it a try? My first impressions were favourable, it’s a nice little romp through a very detailed map. You’re gated by certain quests and barriers that require certain items - no teleport skills in sight. The skill progression is a bit underwhelming. There’s such a lack of feedback from some skills that the only indication an effect is underway is evidenced by damage numbers spilling out of their wounds, something that ruins the immersion after so much work has been put into the scenery. Skills are also restricted by requiring you dump skill points into a mastery track that doles out boring flat bonuses that have no perceivable effect on gameplay. There’s more skills you can get from items with a tedious twist on Diablo 2′s sockets, most are boring. And there’s shrines that unlock points for passive skills that do things like summon skeletons you can’t make out against the background so it feels like a waste. It’s so strange that they made the character progression such an awful mess but the actual loop of crashing through waves of monsters is reasonably fun. Grim Dawn is for the most part a decent piece of entertainment with some dumb design choices. I recommend it to ARPG fans who will be patient with its flaws.

Cinco Paus

It’s a good game. Okay? There’s no need to convince me otherwise. However, what doesn’t work with my sort of brain is that Cinco Paus is a game about secrets, it is not a game about discovery. I played many, many rounds of this game and unlike others I have learned no Portugese, discovered no secrets, nor lasted more than 3 games in a row. I often die without understanding why. When I have read FAQs on the game I understand even less on account of certain things being triggered by certain positions or directions and I’m looking at those weird little icons thinking, “how the hell are you supposed to figure that out?” To put my design-snob hat on for a second, I see the connection between the Nandos font the game uses and Portugese, but I don’t see connections between anything else in the game. I’ve been to Portugal and its most notable feature was an obsession with football and an abundance of red clay that was incorporated into all of the architecture. Neither of which are in Cinco Paus. It’s a scrappy design choice, not a thread that will undo the knot when you pull it. What’s wrong with scrappy choices you say? (As I wield a rock in the most fragile of glass houses.) Nothing, I quite like games to be scrappy, it’s just that in this instance it put a barrier up between me and the game at large. I’ve discovered absolutely none of the secrets in Brough’s other games, so it’s of small surprise that when he serves up a game suffused with them I’m unable to persist with it. Maybe you will fair better, I am after all a bear of little brain.

7DRL

It was not, sadly, the waves of shoot em ups that even I joined in on making that were the stars of 2018′s 7 Day Rogue-Like challenge. That honor I feel goes to the quasi board game roguelikes. At the 7DRL after-party, graciously hosted by Darren Grey, we got to try Terry Cavanagh’s reinterpretation of Dream Quest that uses dice. It makes me want to check out Dream Quest as it was quite fun despite a few bugs. Dream Quest, putting it mildly, is fucking hideous. Like it hit every branch on the ugly tree and then got impaled on the tree for good measure. It’s also highly recommended, so I guess my next RPG round up will have something to say about it. I also liked the simplicity of watabou’s Patient Rogue - a very simple take on card-solitaire. It has a few dumb UI choices, but overall it’s quick to pick up and offers an engaging challenge with very few mechanics. I also recommend sticking with Greedy Warlock until you figure out how to play. It’s very confusing at first - you are given a hand of cards you must play out all the effects on. It’s not clear how to move through the dungeon, you have to play the Adventure card to gain 2 move points to do so (if they’d just called it Move I would have spent less time being frustrated). Other cards will give you mana (??) to spend in the shop for better cards or deal damage to you based on how many danger cards you’ve been forced to play. (Note there’s a trend in misuse of names for things that makes learning the game harder than it needs to be - just try to ignore it.) So the objective is to play cards in the right order that will let you dive deep into the dungeon, get gold, and get out without drawing too many damage or danger cards. Quite a fun game once you get the hang of it.

Corollary

As always, I am an awkward little princess when it comes to my preferences. No matter how many mattresses beneath me, not only can I feel the pea, but also which of the bed’s legs are too short. If your tastes don’t align with mine - do check out the games that gave me trouble and think twice about the ones I recommended.

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st33d · 6 years

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Six Match

youtube

When I worked as a clerk for the now defunct M&W, one of the pithy phrases pinned to the staff room wall said:

Only 1 in 10 people complain.

The subtext being that the other 9 just don’t come back, treat each complaint like 10 complaints.

Which I guess is how I’ll be treating these survey results. There’s not a great deal of Six Match players. Whilst the players are enthusiastic, they’re certainly not numerous enough to pay for the Mac Book Air I bought to release an iOS port. Most aftermath blogs of my contemporaries speak in terms of 1000s of players before casually mentioning their next trip to the 4 corners of the world. I have dozens of players for my games and no desire to travel. I release games when I’m bored of working on them, not when they’ve been polished down to something that appeals to the greatest number. I’m a purveyor of kink, no cans of Ubik can be found amongst my materials.

Hence the survey. How kinky are Six Match players, and what can I afford in development time to appease them?

Android and iOS numbers are unsurprising. But people are still playing the browser version of the game. I’ve no intent of bringing the browser version up to date, but I guess I should supply people with a desktop version of the game. One they can play windowed.

See, a desktop version it is. A Switch port is more taxing than most would have you believe. Nintendo are fickle mistresses, demanding marketing materials tomorrow when they deign to make use of you. It could be worth while, or it could be another Macbook Air’s worth of deficit for the dev kit. I own no Playstations, but I thought I should ask - I guess it depends what sort of indie-program they’ve got going but they’ve given up on Vita, so maybe not. Ha ha, poor XBox. Ho ho, piece of toast. The “other” selection didn’t specify.

This is interesting as I set up Six Match for same-board-multiplayer, but perhaps people mean networked multiplayer when they say they want separate boards. Which would be impossible - I’d have to pay for multiplayer servers and maintain them. I meant local multiplayer. Separate on the same screen is possible, though a bit taxing to set up.

A strong call for customisation here. I think that’s a reflection on everyone’s experience with multiplayer options.

If Six Match ever finds a publisher, then a quest mode is a good pitch for turning Six Match into a multi-limbed beast of gaming. Whilst I work alone I shall leave space for it, but I won’t be actively pursuing it.

Bugs and Features

I have paraphrased these quotes to protect and condense identities.

Help button sometimes shows a false path when it should have shown a bomb

A bug that has been seen multiple times in the wild with no known cause. I’m going to need to rebuild the Help button to fix it, but I’m already considering buffering the call to help so the guide allows you follow it to the end instead of demanding you memorise it. Hopefully this will illuminate the cause of Help offering a false path.

Help button gets in the way

The pause button hides when you tap outside it. I’m going to do similar for the Help button - letting it return at a pace that reflects checking your score / hand.

Hold swipe to move is bad.

My fingers have crappy joints and I have dry skin. It hurts to keep swiping. But I can add a toggle to settings for you.

Didn’t report achievement

It saves achievements so it doesn’t spam the servers. I’ll get it to phone home your score and saved achievements on the title screen in future, just in case your internet is not working.

Put the high score on the menu screen

Sure thing.

You need to fix your ad strategy.

But if I fixed it, it would be annoying, and I wouldn’t want to play my own game.

Blocks are bad. I want the game to end / play differently.

Six Match has no win-state and is technically impossible to fail at. It’s not a game. It is a series of micro-puzzles, overlapping, stacking, and going on seemingly forever. The central appeal of it isn’t the destination, it’s the journey. And that journey concludes by petrification. It is beyond my technical ability to see any other destination. I have some ideas for turning to stone being more colourful, but stone is all I see for now.

But I can respect that some may prefer a version of Six Match that didn’t end. One without blocks, one without skulls, or one without the pushing rows mechanic. I have in mind a custom board mode. It wouldn’t be able to report a score, but it would allow people to customise Six Match. Let them play forever if they wanted. I would likely roll multiplayer into this, so you can battle or toil with friends on a board of your choosing.

Add a portal block

Yeah. I’ve played Candy Crush too. What a great fountain of bugs this feature would be. Maybe.

Music

Good little devs that go to heaven, pay their musicians. Hence no music at the moment. Perhaps if Six Match’s fortunes change.

Enemies

If quest mode is a thing, then sure. But not in the high score game.

Skins

If I ever get to work with an artist on the game, I’m sure I will try to offer a variety of looks.

A story

Mr Swap-With-Coins is the spirit of Ayn Rand whose penance in Hell is to destroy capitalism 3 coins at a time under the guise of a video game character devoid of meaning. She toils endlessly at her sisyphean labour, but there is no victory to be savoured. This is Six Match, she cannot win.

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st33d · 7 years

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Sandman

I’ve tried a lot of sandbox games over the past year. Mostly driven by acquiring a PC and leaving my Mac to its scheduled obsolescence. Playing games on a Mac is like playing Doom on a calculator. You celebrate that it works, it actually works, but it usually fails to be more than a proof of concept. When I switched back to a PC I discovered an entirely new realm of stubborn design. At least it wasn’t getting slower with each update and it deigned to play all manner of toys. Being quite turgid for roleplaying games I set about catching up with every RPG the Mac had denied me and checked out some more for good measure.

A common feature I discovered in many of these games is what I call the Back Breaker. You lift the game up high, then crash it down over your knee, broken. You are now free to explore the game how you choose - all of its secrets are laid bare. A lot of people get very upset at the inclusion of Back Breakers in what they hope will be a game with an ever ascending skill requirement. The notion that the audience is primarily there to explore is an insult - where, they ask, is the game? Personally I like this feature, I like that the end game is to become a god. This is why a lot of you will disagree with my assessments.

Skyrim

The sticking point for many people with this one is the combat. It’s dour grey-brown landscape invites a comparison to Dark Souls (I’ll get to that one in a bit) so people like Matt Lees will remark that Skyrim is an inferior counterpart. If you’re looking for tight combat in Skyrim, then like a 1st edition iPhone 5, you’re holding it wrong.

It insists you take it seriously over an unskippable introduction to the most tired hook that any roleplaying game can throw - the prison break. After shaking your screen as hard as it can with an assault by a dragon you are thrown into a scant and confusing interface in a land of ugly robotic people who are super fussy about what time they’re willing to sell things. On my 1st playthrough it got dark, so dark I couldn’t loot the mages I was killing for their expensive robes. I quit and rerolled a khajiit, purely because the wiki told me they had nightvision. It wasn’t until much later I discovered that there were many means of creating light, some of them causing fantastic AI behaviour (I nicknamed the spell Magelight; aggro-ball). Some short way into the terrible main quest line I thought, “sod this”, and went in search of the mage college to learn how to blow things up like some of the monsters were doing. This haphazard adventure was some of the best gameplay I’d ever encountered. A scared lowly girl-cat, picking her way through a hostile landscape in hope of learning real magic. Typical that when I finally arrived at the college I encountered the first blatant design wall in the shape of an unclimbable pillar that the college sat on. I barely had the mana to cast the spell that would prove me worthy to train there. A few hours later I was the archmage of the college. It would take many more hours before I mastered glitch-riding: taking the cereal box collision space of my horse and rubbing it against the prettiest parts of the scenery until it yielded to let me ride vertical. Out of the many hours of play the only real low point was getting turned into a vampire, I had to look up a wiki on how to cure it and reload many times because the quest to stop vampirism is broken.

There are many Back Breakers in Skyrim - I chose twin dremora lords that I chain-summoned to lock up the AI. But truly it is Skyrim’s pretty mountains and their unresolvable collision meshes that are the best. Only after hours of play does one develop an art for sniffing out details that defy edge-case-programming. Skyrim is a perfect mess. I know why they keep re-releasing it, they got lucky. One need only play the Dragonborn DLC to see Skyrim at its worst. It is a hard game to recommend, for it is not really a game, it is a thing both ugly and beautiful.

% out of 10

The Witcher 3

“Stick with it”, they say. Few games deserve such an epithet as this one. The controls are fiddly. One’s inventory is so dense with options that I didn’t realise that my potions refilled themselves until I’d nearly finished the game. After which my character sported full-body-priapism as I quaffed every decoction available. The turning point from hating this game to loving it was a side quest where a character caught Geralt off guard when being subject to the witcher’s advice - the townsfolk declared him a freak not because he was like Geralt, but because they were intolerant of homosexuals. I then got drawn further into the man’s drama. Every single story this game presents is trying to be Not So Simple. It’s a manifesto that leaks into the game’s bestiary that tells you not only what a monster likes for dinner, but your best tactics for killing it. But then, it’s Not So Simple as killing a monster, there is always another layer to each story.

It took at least three score hours of gameplay before I started skipping some of the many cutscenes. One of them was the infamous sex-on-a-stuffed-unicorn. It was a fault of the main storyline being so lackluster. I never really cared for Ciri, I found her even more fiddly to control than her tutor. But the extra layers that surround it: the Bloody Baron, stupidly shagging Keira Metz, the numerous detective scenes - they all carry this game. It is a shame it takes a few hours for it to reveal itself.

I must commend the map design for being sensible enough to be broken into several parts. You first explore a tutorial village before moving into war torn Velen and its haunting soundtrack. Here you work until you can gain passage to the north, the islands, and your home. Many sandboxes simply give you one map to conquer and contort it to stop you wandering into the final challenge. It’s refreshing to move on to a clean map, full of new challenges and surprises.

I couldn’t be arsed to play Gwent.

Trophy out of Archgriffin

Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This game has three stages: Delight, Depression, and Exploration.

Delight

Oh wow, there’s so many things to do. And so many things interact with one another. The sense of discovery comes not only from reaching new locations, but also finding new ways for elements to interact. Of course wood burns. Of course burning creates an updraft. Of course metal conducts electricity. Even after many hours of play there are still new things to find. So strange that the game is as dense as it is... empty.

Depression

Ugh, I don’t have a horse and I’m in yet another blank area. Ugh, I lack just enough stamina to climb this mountain, I’ll have to start all over again. Ugh, I can’t stay in this area because I take damage and the food I eat to stop it only lasts ten minutes. Ugh, I complained about all of this online and everyone keeps saying, “I don’t have a problem, the game works fine for me, Git Gud.” As often as I meet people who have played this game in excess of 100 hours, I also meet people who have played it for less than 10. If you are unlucky, if you don’t make the right connections, if you don’t stumble upon the right thing, this game is truly depressing. Made more so by the amount of people who cannot fathom why anyone would have trouble with the game. And yet there are many that do. It is not really that they need to be better at games, it is merely because they have not found the Back Breakers. Or worse, they do not appreciate them.

Exploration

After needless hours of collecting (grinding) you find yourself in possession of armour. You upgrade the armour again and again and suddenly the cloud of depression is lifted (if it was ever there). You are free to explore any edge of the island, you simply need to wear the right threads. At this stage of the game you have found many secrets but still keep finding more. Korok seeds, the OCD baiting puzzles, become a delight to find. It’s hard to remember the game ever being frustrating, but it remains in the back of my mind. Zelda BotW has a hump, a hump that some people will feel very aggrieved to surmount. Do not be surprised when you hear of someone bouncing off this game - it really is torture for people with precious little play time or patience.

Perhaps I should say something about the shrine dungeons or the 4 beast dungeons. They exist. There, I said it.

96 out of 120

Path of Exile

I tried this many years ago on my Mac using some sort of Windows executable wrapper. It did not work. I tried again when I got my new PC, I was underwhelmed. I tried yet again two weeks ago - holy shit this is the best action RPG I’ve ever played. The fact that it’s also free is sort of a weird blessing. You can only buy cosmetics and extra slots, so it even has a total lack of pay-to-win going for it. At least they get to keep expanding and updating it, which is probably why my recent play through was so smooth.

Diablo 2 is one of my all time favourites. It’s a concise loop of murder, loot, sell. But not without flaws. It has cruft, tedium, and imbalance in spades.

Path of Exile shuffles the formula and bets the whole thing on loot. Skills are loot. Money is loot (you pay with scrolls and item modifying tools, no gold). Equipment is loot. Yet playing it like Diablo is quite a silly thing to do - you get almost nothing from items you try to sell to vendors, so you no longer make trips back and forth with junk items. Leveling up is spent on a massive passive skill tree shared by all the classes, so the game sees no need to forestall leveling because it’s not the gatekeeper of mechanics. The items are. This occurs by way of gems that you socket into items, a bit like Diablo 2 and 3, but instead of boring damage bonuses you get entirely new mechanics. If you play with several characters in the same league they can share these items as well (providing they are strong enough to wield them). A mere ten levels into the game I had a full on rave of undead surrounding my witch character like she was the hottest new DJ at a halloween party.

I refrained from playing on hardcore because the game is online only and my internet sucks, but the game does boast a challenge that is mandatory hardcore. A multi-part dungeon that rewards you with a new section for your skill tree. Complete it without dying and you get to specialise. This is further complicated by deadly treasure rooms you must salvage keys from in order to unlock the many chests at the end. This was quite an exciting challenge with real stakes and real swearing when I let my greed get the better of me.

So what of its flaws? It takes a few goes to shake off the Diablo conditioning, so it’s not until you hit act 2 and try again from scratch that you figure out a strategy for building a character. The passive skill tree has a handy search feature and after I typed “minion” into it I was determined to carve a path through the best parts. If you don’t plan your route, you miss out on your mana rocketing back to full, your health restoring, or in my case: zombie disco. It’s online only and if you insist on playing over the weekend it can be a very choppy experience. The chat is a sewage pipe, a stream of edgelord douchebaggery. Go into the options and turn it off. I’ve yet to meet anyone that wants to form a party and every time I look at it I’m certain I don’t want to. There’s little to say of the story, it’s not bad though. I appreciate that it doesn’t try to get in the way like Diablo 3′s did. Perhaps if they had taken their loot thesis a step further they could have buried it in the game’s items. Then all this hoarding would have expanded into something like an archaeology dig. A missed opportunity.

O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O out of Shiny Armour

Shadow of Mordor

It’s quite cool and exciting to begin with. We’re in Mordor with lots of grim orcs and cool cutscenes, and... is that a bush? Oh okay, it just popped into existence. Nevermind. Well at least sneaking around is fun... my finger hurts a lot though because they want me to hold down the trigger button for ages. Yeah, ganking orcs is cool, it’s real fun shooting them in the head... oh, I have to do these crappy sword fights where I only press two buttons throughout the whole thing.

This game is like someone who seems fascinating and pretty from afar, but soon as you talk to them at length you begin to realise that they’re quite boring. They just say the same thing over and over. It’s a sausage party that gets slowly more off putting as I play. The developers don’t even seem to know that women exist outside of being trophies or reasons to be angry about stuff. The main draw in this game is apparently the battles with the orc leaders, which I found to be the most boring part of the game. I hated the sword combat and it kept dragging me back to it. After doing every arrow and dagger challenge I could find on the map I left the game and never played it again.

Gollum out of Mordor

Dark Souls

in my game Ending I structured the second level so that the player would step forward and get a slap to the face in the shape of an unfair death. This was my opening salvo, death is your education. So after persisting with Dark Souls I’m somewhat nonplussed. I get it. By repeatedly killing the player they form a mental map of the area. By repeatedly killing the player they encourage experimentation.

Except that this doesn’t always work. There has to be some investment on the behalf of the player or this magic completely fails. If the player feels like they can walk away, they will. And they do. It’s why I believe Dark Souls is such a hit with game reviewers, they are beholden to persist, and in doing so the game makes a believer of them.

I on the other hand couldn’t care less. A tedious march through the same janky fights to get to the same boss I still don’t understand is nothing more than that. I tried a variety of combat techniques, from trying to interrupt attacks, to blocking, to evading, all of it very unsatisfying. What little progress I made illuminated the premise, to internalise the map and hone my skills, but I was not impressed. I enjoyed not one second of it, I only endured. I experimented and I explored, but never was I delighted.

The very worst thing that Dark Souls has given us is complacency towards killing the player. I have heard designers remark that it didn’t matter that the player died in that spot in their game because Dark Souls kills the player all the time. It makes me want to shake them. Dark Souls does not kill you all the time, it kills you for a specific reason. See, I get it, I get Dark Souls, I just don’t enjoy the combat.

Soul out of Estus

Divinity Original Sin 2

I had the worst time with Divinity Original Sin. My two characters insisted on bickering and ruining every conversation - no matter how many times I reloaded a scene they would find a way to trash it. I eventually found myself locked out of every quest in the game and unable to fight my way past monsters higher than my level. I was playing the game to forget about a failed relationship where my ex would find excuses to start arguments. It was about as bad an experience playing a game I could ever hope for.

To say the sequel is an improvement is true. To a point. Somehow I’ve done it again and gotten trapped in an area with no quests to advance and monsters too powerful to fight past. I’ve muddled my way past some really irritating quests with obtuse requirements that I’m told can be solved in many ways. Except that when you fail to chase a particular lead it’s really frustrating to have to try a dozen different tactics to shake out a solution. It feels like I’ve picked up my PC and I’m rattling it over my head until the game agrees to let me move on. People keep telling me I can solve situations in dozens of ways, but all of them seem very specific and very intent on being a dick about it.

The combat is as amazing as it is chaotic. Environmental effects are at the fore, making it feel very D&D-like as you slow people down with oil and then ignite the oil and so on. The story I felt was okay, but the tone is all over the place, making it impossible to give a shit. Some nice touches with elves gaining visions from eating flesh and anyone can choose perks for talking to animals - but I found it more infuriating than cute after searching an entire island to solve a riddle, only to have a rat explain to me that I had to talk to some NPC again in order to shake, shake, shake out the solution. For every ounce of fun I got two ounces of frustration and misery.

1 out of 2

Dungeon World

Out of all the table top roleplaying games I’ve tried, this one was the most robust for casual play. Especially seeing as roleplayers are the most unreliable people on the planet. The resolution system it employs forces a plot twist every time you use it, so it’s impossible to plan anything. It’s not for everyone, you end up with a very gonzo story without the fiddly depth that other roleplaying games manage. On the other hand it’s a dream to be the Games Master and watch a story unfold instead of meticulously planning it and seeing a conclusion land that tears apart your ideas instead of adding to them. I wrote a full guide of how I run this game over here. The campaign is effectively a sandbox, I let people explore and fill in the map as we go - which is why I mention it. I’d like a computer game that approached it this way, not like Dwarf Fortress where a randomly generated overworld is dumped on you. Instead I’d like a piecemeal discovery of the world, one that reacts to the tensions you’ve created. Perhaps I’ll have to do it myself.

Story out of Players

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st33d · 9 years

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Red Rogue 1.0.7...

...

Hello again.

This past year I’ve been convalescing. I had put myself in a position where I was receiving a lot of advice. The result was that I was patronised to a pulp. Too much advice makes you feel like no one likes you for what you are. So it was harder than usual to be around people. Tabletop roleplaying games has been a big part of my recovery. It reminded me I’ve my own roleplaying game to finish.

I can hear my old PC from where I sit typing this on my Mac. Whirring away like some small hovercraft. I can’t compile Flash on the Mac - the toolchain is a mess. So I’ve been sitting on my bed after heaving several kilos of Asus on to my lap before debug, debug and debug. But here we are, ever so slightly more stable. So what’s new?

Various serious bugs have been fixed.

Added an option to turn off screenshake in settings.

Added option to select any of Nathan Gallardo’s excellent music to listen to from the soundtrack

Weapons now have Slash, Pierce or Crush effects. Slash weapons allow the a chance to pass through an enemy when you hit them. Pierce weapons can do the same. Crush is sort of an added knockback effect. I added these to emphasise Red Rogue’s focus on blocked paths. Other roguelikes are often about avoiding conflict, whereas in mine it’s impossible to do so.

Horrors spawn as the level is explored. The last version rewarded Scrubbing - tediously scraping the entire level clean of content. It’s not that I felt this should be punished. It just wasn’t challenging - I felt the dungeon should at least fight back against you mastering it.

Numerous extra bits of code to make the Android tablet version work were added. Your mileage may vary on these - I’m afraid I’ve done the bare minimum for Android but may revisit it after I’ve had ample feedback.

Changed gender of vampire to female. Even though the main character is a lady, the roster of characters is still a sausage party. Game worlds feel artificial enough without depriving them of women.

Added a new bonus weapon: The Sarkeesian. When you attack a male monster with it, it gets transformed into a female monster... For better or worse I cast Red as a woman because I was bored of casting men in the lead role. So I feel like that’s a thing, that she was a woman for the sake of being a woman. I believe it was a positive change, even though gender for gender’s sake is not a compliment. As this is a part of Red’s identity, you can now do what some people fear will happen to all videogames: throw a feminist icon around to take away all the boy’s willies.

I hope you all have fun with the latest version. Above all, I hope it doesn’t crash.

redrogue.net

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st33d · 9 years

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st33d on Twine 2

If you hadn't heard already, Twine 2 was released and I made an adventure in it. I mostly make puzzle games and platformers but I was inspired to do another Twine by Inkle's Sorcery! which I had a great time playing. (Pity that their Inkle writer is too bloated to use on a tablet.) A few old hats have asked me how it compares (seeing as I've already made a game in Twine 1) so I thought I'd give you all a write up. I don't know the creators of Twine 1 or 2 personally, and it will show.

What's a Twine?

Ah yes - some of you may need a preamble.

Twine games are like those Choose Your Own Adventure books of old, but you get to play them in your browser. So rather than thumbing through pages to find out where your choice leads next, you get to simply click on an option and get back to the plot. You can make a Twine game very easily with the Twine editor:

It's the simplest of game formats - you pare down a gaming experience to a few states (still more complex than a quicktime event though). You also get an opportunity for great story because you fundamentally experience it like a book.

There's lots of of Twines out there for you to try - a couple of favourites: If you want a smartly written adventure game (with a side story that bares its soul on the escapism of games of our youth) then try Porpentine's Ultra Business Tycoon III (you'll need this to finish it). And an excellently disturbing tale can be found in Michael Lutz' My Father's Long, Long Legs - don't read before bedtime.

Anyway, back to the central question:

Is Twine 2 any good?

Yes! It runs completely in the browser now. This means you can work on lots of different platforms - even tablets, though with some caveats for the latter. Projects stay all stored in the browser's cache (actually having a list of projects to choose from is a big upgrade) and you can save out a compressed archive to load up in any browser. The interface looks all swish and designery with a cyanotype motif to the passage workspace - a passage being a node in the story.

It sort of reminds me of blogging - because of course you don't get those pop up windows for editing text like in Twine 1. Instead you get a Tumblr style window to type into which... almost works. You can set a custom launch point, start a story from any passage to debug it and micro manage passages much easier. The CSS and Javascript hackiness is now relegated to the menu bar so it no longer feels like you're doing something unnatural when you're customising the story. The language (or languages) to write Twine has (have) also been given an overhaul. There's still the familiar Sugarcane format - now Sugarcube - and Leon Arnot's Harlowe, which is a new way to write Twines with far more fidelity than possible before. There's also a minimal version called Snowman which allows you to use Javascript (but you could use Javascript before you say - we'll get to that). Those are just the most salient features.

Wait a minute... Caveats? Almost works?

Ugh. Yes. It happens to them all. Don't get me wrong, we're not in MonoDevelop for Unity territory here, it's not batshit insane with no hope of ever being fixed. But it does have bugs. Sometimes a passage goes walkabout in the layout when you return to the project. Sometimes one of the languages has an error in it and you have to go on the forum to beg for a fix (like all other languages - ever). There are also some design decisions here that are hard for me to wrap my head around as well, like Harlowe.

What's up with Harlowe?

How do I feel? I guess friend-zoned is the most accurate way of putting it. Harlowe does something amazing with writing Interactive Fiction that Twine 1 doesn't. It lets you spin on a dime. Mid-sentence you can branch out into many timelines - it takes the concept of passages and allows you to make passages within those passages called "hooks" using a simple markup of square brackets. You can then manipulate them with dollar prefixed variables and macro commands followed by a colon in parenthesis. Most of the endings to my last project had multiple endings within the endings because of actions you took before. Rather than repeat myself in a new passage I was allowed to make lots of subtle changes smack bang in the middle of a block.

You couldn't do this in Twine 1, the formatting was designed to break everything into paragraphs. It took the Choose Your Own Adventure format and rigidly stuck to it. I even blogged an extension you can use to get around it. This was an idea I had after fruitlessly asking Cara Ellison for help on how to do it... because I was too scared to ask her to critique my boob jokes in the Twine I was writing at the time. It had never occurred to her the need to do this (sentence manipulation, not boob jokes). And I guess it doesn't occur to most Twine 1 users because the tools aren't there. Harlowe I think can change that.

But you can't customise Harlowe like you can Twine 1.

And that is the point where I want to grab Leon Arnot by his figurative lapels and shake him furiously whilst screaming, why?

I don't know the roadmap for Harlowe. I think it's great and I can't begin to imagine how I'd go about programming such a language myself. But it comes with the shortfall that you may hit a point where you say - "but I want to do THIS." And at the time of writing it won't hear you. You can't add some Javascript to the page to fix it. I've tried with some success but it's a very ugly solution and it's pretty flaky.

Do try Harlowe, but don't get attached, he may not put out.

So Sugarcube?

If you're familiar with writing for Sugarcane then this should be up your street. The author is very active on the forum and has also posted some sweet hacks for people hitting the wall with their ideas. I haven't had the chance to properly try it because it didn't exist for Twine 2 at launch and it took me a month and a half of spare time to write the Harlowe piece. You should be okay though, it looks like the right choice for large projects that want customisation.

What about Jonah?

Good question. No sign of the loo-roll feed of text that was the Jonah format. I played some very good Jonah Twines so its omission from Twine 2 is glaring. Let's hope someone contributes a Jocube or Whale to the languages - that would be lovely.

I remember you about to complain about the Tumblr window?

Yes - the Javascript and CSS input is very flaky on iPad, to the point of being impossible to edit at all. On Android it mostly worked but still bugged out placing the cursor. Editing passages was mostly okay. I think it's the code highlighting it tries to do for CSS and Javascript that buggers it up.

iPad? Android? Wat?

Oh ho! Yes. I haven't introduced you to my writing machine yet:

A Nexus 7 in a Belkin keyboard case. I worked on iPad with a keyboard for a while but unfortunately Twine 2 on iPad currently cannot load archives - because Apple. You can save out to an app like Dropbox or Google Drive however. So I finished the project on the new Nexus and keyboard I'd recently bought - which is altogether a much more seamless experience.

This I think is Twine 2's greatest feature - comfort. Being able to curl up on the sofa and just have ideas whilst you type. Being able to pull your Twine out of your bag and make adjustments when you think of something new. Being able to sit down in front of any computer with a browser, anywhere, and make Twines. Not simply empowering those who've not made a game before, but anyone with the barest of means.

It's not original. Puzzlescript did it. Wonderfl did it. But it's great to see Twine get on board and lowering the barrier to entry.

So should I use it or not?

Definitely. I have my reservations, but they pall in comparison to the issues of other game making platforms. Give it a go, and if you get stuck with your Harlowe syntax, I may be able to help you out.

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st33d · 9 years

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Clockwork - A Twine 2 Story

"Oh no, Aaron's writing again."

Oh fuck off, I like writing. I've lead a miserable and lonely life so I don't have many stories in me or enough social skills and travels to make many up - but it's still something I enjoy. So when by chance a story or article does pop into my head I will indulge.

I had that chance recently upon hearing of Twine 2's release. I will do a write up on it later.

"Oh awesome, I bet it's some clever puzzle thing of a Twine instead of being a bit arty or gay like the others."

No, it's pretty much all story. If you're expecting my usual brand of clever then you're going to be sorely disappointed. And if you don't like sci-fi you probably shouldn't bother.

Play (or more accurately, Read) here.

Since I still believe in open source - here's the archive for Clockwork. Load that into Twine 2 and you can see how it was made.

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st33d · 9 years

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Hi. So, i got red rogue to work on android using swf player and adobe air; but there is one problem is that the game covers only 1/4 size of the screen, which makes it really small even on a tablet. Going to fullscreen in options disables controls entirely, which is really sad. Is it possible to do something about this ?

Well, the source code is on GitHub. My guess is that it uses the old fullscreen code which only allows limited inputs. You'd have to compile it for the latest flash player and change any bits that call flash's fullscreen stuff to the new and decent stuff. Sorry I cant be of more help. Haven't worked on it in years. Good luck, and if I find the time I'll try do an update with swipe controls.

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st33d · 10 years

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Things I'm Making and Games I've Played

I'm making:

Credit Crunch

I've got Vines of this going back to February. For those not up to speed, Credit Crunch is a character based match-3 game I'm making independently. You move a character on a match-3 board to shuffle coins and match them to collect them. Most of the work I've been doing is based on flexibility of play styles and arcade feel. This especially includes multiplayer. I've just managed to get the level editor functional and the website will be my next priority. Watch this space...

Ending

Did some levels, lost some levels updating my iPad. I tried seeing if I could get more out of the 7x7 pixels but it's just confusing - making it impossible for colour blind people isn't an option. I think people need to forget about Ending for now or at least give me enough money so I can spend time rebooting it in a massive way.

Red Rogue

It warms my cold black heart to at least room temperature for the cult-praise this game gets. It serves as a reminder that you don't have to be perfect to receive love. I would like to do update 1.04 sometime soon, I'm waiting for the right opportunity. Doing the bare minimum to port it to a touch-screen might be a good start (it will probably only run on new tablets), as well as perhaps an optional food-clock. Don't hold me to it, you'll only put me off.

Nitrome

I've been making more puzzles at Nitrome lately. There'll be a new one I've made for mobile quite soon as well. Here's some teasers.

I've played:

Desert Golfing

I'm in the 3000s now. The thing I like the most (of the many things I like about it) is that I can be ill or tired and Desert Golfing won't stress me out. It's gloriously Zen. I'm looking forward to meeting the haunted hole. I want to use it to troll my flatmate.

Final Fantasy Dimensions

I just basically wanted some light RPG action on my iPad. Something a bit less fleshed out than the usual JRPG fare. Chaos Rings seemed to be that but when it's not being brutally linear it's just a fuck-you maze with shit puzzles in. Dimensions on the other hand scales it back by trying to be an old school JRPG. I like it. The controls are shit and the price is ridiculous when compared to the content you get from other premium games, but still, I kinda like it.

It would only let me choose 6 letter names. So I threw a tantrum and named my heroes cunt, fanny, twat, minge, cock, wang, dick and, and I can't remember.

Captive

Helm at work was kind enough to help me out with the ROMs for this. It's like pulling teeth trying to get a setup to play the ancient Legend-of-Grimrock-like Captive, but boy is it good. It's also bad. Terrible in fact. It's the random level generator (which sort of isn't random, you could compare it in fact to Desert Golfing, which is also procedural). It creates amazing puzzles but also vast tedium. Not tranquil tedium, just lots of getting lost and repetition. But the game mechanics are brilliant - everything costs money, everything you kill drops money. You get damaged? You have to pay for it. It's like American health care - it's only when you forget how evil it is that you realise it's an amazing game system: Shall I repair my leg? But then I can't buy that new shotgun. I've taken a break because grid maze games create naturally occurring jump-scares. I aim to come back and complete it though, there's only 65,000+ levels.

Monument Valley: Forgotten Shores

There's parts of Monument Valley which are, simply put, static quick-time-events. Minimal interaction, maximum cinematics. I think this is basically the inverse problem I find with Naya's Quest. In NQ the trial and error part of the perspective mechanic is exposed so hard that it has a punitive checkpoint system to penalise exploring it. Forgotten Shores is then a more balanced approach with an unexpected amount of charm. I really enjoyed the twisty level, the waterfalls and the head-fuck Escher doorways stuff. And the thief. It's good, go get it.

Candy Crush Soda

Jesus Christ this is difficult. I'm at level 13 and it's already balls hard. I like the new combos. They almost had me impressed with the bubble bears, but I realised it's just an inverted ingredient drop over several screens. Treasure-hunt-bears are a really cool idea. You're basically matching all around to find the hidden bears under the ice. Definitely an idea I'll be stealing for Credit Crunch, along with homing-missile-fish. If you like Candy Crush, give it a go, it's more of the same.

26 moves my arse.

Retry

I was apprehensive about this one after the amount of booster-bait in Angry Birds but @docky said something good about it and that boy hates so many games it's a wonder he bothers to play any at all.

So, is it any good? Well despite a bit of F2P bullshit, very. You have this risk / reward thing where you collect coins and bank them by touching down on any runway (banking survives death, which makes coin farming waaaay too much fun). All runways beyond the 1st are locked so you have to weigh up the odds of surviving to the finish or leaving with less coins for harder levels. It sort of makes me wonder why they sell coins in the game for money. Collecting them with some acrobatics and landing a bank is the best bit.

Anyway

That's what I've been up to. Look after yourselves.

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st33d · 10 years

Note

How did you get your Red Rogue game to be a standalone executable on Linux and Mac and Windows? Thanks!

Adobe removed the ability to make apps and executables in Flash Player 11 or something. Right around the time they ditched Linux. So I published it for Flash Player 10. Go to Adobe's Flash Player Download page:

https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

Go to the old versions and look for a standalone Flash 10 player (maybe 11, if you find out, let us know). The standalone bit is important. It means it runs on your desktop. Use it to open your swf file. In the menu there should be an option to save a projector. You will have to do this on each operating system to get each version.

Does your project use Starling or features recently added to Flash? Well fuck you! You now have the option of either bundling it with Adobe Air or porting it to Haxe - I'm told the latter has better support.

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st33d · 10 years

Text

Everquest

All of my MMO characters are named Crowleyson. All of my RPG characters are named Crowleyson. Their namesake is Crowley, the new god of murder.

My Baldurs Gate 2 character Crowley was an evil elf cleric. He surrounded himself with champions of good, destroyed all of his competition, and at the last moment betrayed his companions to become the new god of murder. He is absolutely the best role-playing game character I've ever played. The designers of Baldurs Gate 2 had a penchant for throwing undead at you. Normally you could level the playing field a bit by destroying them - but an evil cleric can control the undead instead of destroying them.

"Tremble before my army of undead!"

"I think you'll find that's now MY army of undead."

The perfect end to it all was the fight against Amellyssan the high priest of Bhaal. Cleric versus cleric. She didn't stand a chance.

During a summer break ten years ago, as I was studying art and unaware of a future career in games, I decided to try out Everquest's ten day trial. I had time to kill. I wanted to play something like Crowley again - but the name of course was taken. So I chose to give Crowley a legacy: Crowleyson.

Everquest's appeal to me at the time was its broken-ness. Like the ability to control undead in Baldurs Gate, there were these loop-holes that allowed one to seemingly cheat at the game. A favourite was mining goblin heads. For some inexplicable reason, the heads of goblins could be sold for 4 platinum pieces. (They've now been nerfed to 1 silver piece). Every now and then I'd trek out to do a bit of goblin fishing and I'd find some bastard sitting cross-legged, camping out the spot where they respawn. He knew the trick as well! I'd be forced to come back later when the servers weren't so busy. Not everyone knew about this "feature", it was something I'd picked up in chat.

And chat was something that happened more often than it does in World of Warcraft. In WoW the spells you cast upon one another are depressingly short in duration, making them useless outside of combat. In Everquest you would get buffs that would last ten minutes to an hour - this resulted in a trade of favours. You might travel for a while and meet a shaman - I would cast a shield upon him and he would grant me speed, letting me explore vast regions of the game. A lot of conversations would come out of this casual altruism.

Another oddity of Everquest that was quite funny was monster trains. If you were fast enough you could run through an area full of enemies and collect a conga-line of mobs. This happened to me once in a high level area I was simply exploring. I sped through the map trying to find the link to the next area screaming, "TRAIN!" The odd person would be foolish enough to try and help and be beaten to death by a Vishnu of stacked monsters demonstrating the game's disdain for collision physics.

At the end of the trial I set out into the training grounds and found a party of players preparing for a fight. I explained that whilst I'd had fun, I couldn't afford the subscription and had to leave. I gave them all my possessions and logged out for what I thought was the last time.

Today I logged in again. It's testament to Sony Online Entertainment's customer support that they found the server Crowleyson was sleeping on. I downloaded the client and logged in.

The server once teeming with activity was empty. I remember having such a good time way back when, but Everquest unfortunately has an impenetrable interface. I can't just dip in again. My chat window only repeats that I am without food and water and that I'm hungry and thirsty. I do not know what this means, what effect it has on gameplay. I buy some mead from a shop and drink it - the chat window reports that my alcohol tolerance has improved - then it tells me I'm still hungry and thirsty. Whilst I'm glad to see a digital relic of my past has survived, the world he inhabits is a bleak wasteland. No doubt other players have all moved to another server, but it is still very sad to see the one I used to hang out on so empty. I take screenshots and leave.

I even looked up the Big Fat Fony Report to supply a video to go with this article that I had once seen. MikeB no longer does the BFF Report - he's still active on YouTube but the end of his series only seems to underline that people have moved on. Everquest Next is on the horizon and there is no need to penetrate the wall that is Everquest's interface anymore.

What I wanted to say in this piece was the too-long anecdote about why I am "Crowleyson" and how important it is in any multiplayer environment that we have a way of interacting other than chat. The free-flow of items and ability to cast long lasting benefits on each other made Everquest the most warm and inviting of MMOs I've ever played. These features are curtailed in other MMOs for fear of abuse - but what that does is make the experience insular. You have to stay in range of someone to feel their benefit. There might well be these features that I'm not aware of but they aren't so immediate and obvious. I'd like to see more of this sort of thing.

However I've also learned a lesson about the fragility of MMO communities. There are many Crowleysons now - Crowley has left spawn to follow him much like Bhaal did. None of them are quite so special to me as the first. But he and his world must be left to rest in peace.

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