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    Dorfromantik (PC)    by   dkirschner       (Mar 24th, 2024 at 19:54:36)

    Got this for free at some point and decided to give it a shot since it is well-reviewed and seemed like something outside of my usual. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It looks like a casual city-builder and mobile game. It’s definitely casual and definitely a builder of sorts, but it’s more of a puzzle game than anything.

    Your goal is to place various sorts of hexagonal tiles to build a landscape. Tiles can have, on any of their six sides, water, trees, grassland, fields, houses, and railroad tracks. You can rotate tiles and, ideally, match like sides. This nets you points. Not matching sides doesn’t net you points. You need points in order to get more tiles. If you run out of tiles, it’s game over. So, you have to strategically place tiles such that you maximize aligning edges with the same properties.

    To complicate this, some tiles have “quests,” which require you to string together x number of trees, houses, railroads, etc. So then you’re not simply matching sides, but you’re also trying to cluster certain types together in certain places depending on which quests you get.

    I found myself lost in it before realizing that I was almost out of tiles. I refocused and hit a stride, getting achievement after achievement for making long railroads, villages with tons of houses, etc., and built my stack of tiles back up. However, I have realized that if you don’t match like tiles early on, you’ll be disadvantaged later because you are “missing out” on points that you would have earned had you been more careful, and it will be difficult to “fill in” gaps that you’ve created. Another thing I realized is that you can’t “branch out” too much. You’ve got to remain clustered. If you branch out too much, then each tile you place can’t generate many points. It’s 10 points per matched side, so if you’re just like building a river straight out, each tile is only netting 10 points. If you are more clustered and placing each tile next to two or three others, then you’re getting 20 or 30 points per tile, and generating more tiles. It’s an interesting balancing act.

    There is no story; it’s a sandbox. There is infinite replayability to chase high scores and achievements. I’d be interested in giving it another shot and doing better, but I think I did really well for my first try. Maybe I’ll keep it on hand for a relaxing puzzle game. But I’ve got other stuff to get to!

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    Trials of Fire (PC)    by   dkirschner       (Mar 24th, 2024 at 16:38:43)

    I shouldn’t have purchased this. I must have been on a card battler kick, probably when I was playing Slay the Spire and Monster Train last year. There’s nothing wrong with Trials of Fire; it just doesn’t have the personality or the pizzazz that better card battlers have. In fact, playing it after Wildermyth, it comes off as a way less interesting take on the card battler/tactical RPG genre, and I can’t help but compare the two. The main difference, of course, is that Wildermyth has no cards; it’s a tactics RPG with procedural storytelling and character development that was really, really cool. Trials of Fire doesn’t have anything that is really, really cool. Trials of Fire has:

    - An overworld that manages to be duller than Wildermyth’s. The landscape is drab, and you just move around following a quest arrow, stopping on whatever blue question marks are around to try and find crafting supplies, food, obsidian (money), equipment, followers, battles (which is how you level up), and so on.
    - A stamina bar that means you have to rest and eat food. Resting or dragging food onto a character is also how you recover health lost in battle or through random events. As your stamina drops, your characters get stuck with debuff cards in battle, so you have to stop to restore stamina.
    - Time management that is not as interesting as Wildermyth’s. You have to make progress toward the golden quest arrow on the edge of the map, and if you are too slow, then your morale drops. If it drops all the way, it’s game over. So you are basically balancing your morale with your stamina and trying to keep your characters’ level high enough to win combat encounters (i.e., since combat is how you gain XP, you have to stop and fight to level up, but can’t stop too much lest you spend too much time fighting and your morale drops). This was less interesting than the incursion and enemy strength timers in Wildermyth.
    - Cards to collect and upgrade. Upon each level up, you can replace one of your existing class cards with another one, or choose to upgrade an existing class card.
    - Equipment to wear and upgrade. Equipment can be upgraded with crafting supplies when resting. Each piece of equipment bestows various cards on the wearer, and upgrading the equipment upgrades its cards, which is cool.
    - Unlockable character classes that can level up to award more class cards. The classes level up after a campaign, and I suppose that newly unlocked cards are available in future campaigns.
    - A bare bones story, random and generic events, simple quests, all of which totally pale in comparison to Wildermyth’s (and most other games).
    - Characters with no personality whatsoever, such a stark contrast to Wildermyth.
    - Bosses that pose a real threat!

    Regarding the latter, at the end of each quest stage (there were three stages in the quest campaign I played), there is a boss battle. The first two of these were easy enough, but the last one just about killed me. It was a dragon with 90 health (double the previous boss). It killed two of my characters, and only my hunter remained. My hunter had like 13 health and 11 armor, and the dragon was at about the same. My hunter was also backed into a corner, and in one more turn, the dragon would have moved in melee range and my hunter would have been stuck (you can’t use ranged attacks in melee range of your target). But I drew like the perfect combination of cards, did double damage with my first attack and then my last card did x damage, and if the target was then below y HP, it automatically died. Well, the math was perfect, and I killed the dragon. If I had drawn different cards, the dragon would have killed me. Intense for sure, but what the hell! The difficulty came out of nowhere in the last battle. Battles are not repeatable, by the way. If your party wipes, it’s game over and you start the whole campaign over. I would have been pissed, because, like Wildermyth, these campaigns are not short.

    Upon winning, your classes level up and you unlock some new cards for each of them. I unlocked a new class for achieving something or other. Then you just go back to the menu and start over with another quest. Wildermyth has that cool Legacy system with persistent characters that grow over time, but there’s nothing like that here. Given that the storyline for the quest campaign I did was so generic, I’m not motivated to play another one (and there is only one more story quest, then the others are like roguelike situations where you just play with daily modifiers or create custom campaigns or do a seasonal challenge or whatever). There are surely a bunch more cards to unlock, and there are 9 classes in total to unlock (for completing x quests, for killing y bosses, for spending z crafting materials, etc.), so there is more to do in terms of progression. But it’s just not that compelling! Again though, nothing is bad about the game, but man, I guess it’s just rare that I play something that is so disappointlingly generic.

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    Galactic Quest + Atlantic Quest (DS)    by   jp       (Mar 24th, 2024 at 13:19:19)

    This is a 2-in-1 game collection of match 3 games that, as far as I've played each, are exactly the same in terms of gameplay even though the story and art is completely different.

    The one notable thing about these is that it's a match-3 game that supports three different types of matching which you can switch between whenever you want. It's interesting because it means it's a lot harder to get stuck, and that you have to think in a few more ways in order to identify matches and such.

    The three ways to match are:
    1. Typical swap two tiles to make a match
    2. Connect three tiles orthogonally to make a match
    3. Tap on group of tiles that are orthogonally adjacent to each other to make a match.

    There's overlap between the three modes, of course, and in the 3rd one matches don't happen automatically when new tiles drop to fill in the space of tiles that were removed due to a match. So, there's an interesting effect that happens when you've made a match in the 3rd mode and then switch to the 1st mode! You can get a lot of tiles to auto-match and disappear if you've left the board with lots of groups of 3-in-a-row.

    Other than this little wrinkle, which was interesting to be fair, there wasn't much else to note in either game. There's trophies and interstitial puzzles to play between every 10 or so match-3 levels, but it's pretty light on everything.

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    Super Princess Peach (DS)    by   jp       (Mar 24th, 2024 at 13:12:25)

    Made it all the way to the final boss fight - against Bowser, obviously? - but I've struggled enough with it that I decided to call it a day. It's a multi-stage battle that, as far as I can tell, requires you to use your rage ability. That's ok, except that it's hard for me to recharge it during the battle so it's a bit more frustrating than simply having to learn attack patterns and dodge attacks.

    Now that I think about it, I might be "underpowered" for the end? There's lots of things I could have purchased but have not and I don't really feel like returning to old levels to "farm" them, so I feel it's better to simply move on.

    And this is a strange thing to say about a Nintendo game! (that it's grindy...)

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    Flower (PS4)    by   dkirschner       (Mar 21st, 2024 at 13:13:56)

    Played this after Journey, knowing that it was the same studio’s former game. I see the DNA in the aesthetics. It’s visually striking, with an emphasis on the musical score, which harmonizes as the player guides their flower petals through other flowers in the levels. Basically, you control flower petals, first a single petal in each level, and then a “swarm” of them by the end of each level.

    Early levels are really peaceful and serene. You’re floating through grasslands, intrigued by the beauty of the surroundings and the fact that you’re bringing life and color. At the end of one early level, you “enliven” a big old tree, which grows and blooms. It’s all very majestic. The first half was the best.

    Later levels change the tone significantly, as you float through areas that are like cold, dead, electrical grids or something. There are lots of power lines and electrical towers. It’s all very grey and drab. Gone is the color of the first half of the game. Touching towers can shock you, so you have to slow down and navigate between the metal to touch the flowers beneath them. Navigating the petals could be tedious, like when you miss a flower and keep circling around trying to get it, or in this later level when you’re trying to slowly creep through electrical towers. I was often unclear as to the “hit boxes,” for lack of a better word, of my petals and the other objects, which is why I’d miss flowers I thought I touched, or get shocked when I thought I’d avoided a tower.

    Anyway, the last level is like a triumphant return of nature to the gray city-scape, smashing through the electrical towers now. Take that, cities! Take this, industry! Eat dirt, electricity! Flowers rule! I did enjoy the revenge of destroying electrical towers. Interesting game for sure, and haven’t played anything quite like it, but the experience itself wasn’t as captivating as Journey’s was.

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    Dynasty Warriors 4 (XBX)    by   Vayle

    No comment, yet.
    most recent entry:   Wednesday 5 March, 2008
    GAMEPLAY

    The second time around, I played with a friend, choosing the option to play cooperatively. This game is designed nicely for two people to play together. While the players are on the same side, there is still a feeling of competing with each other. The main reason for this is because there is a number in the corner of the screen keeping count of how many kills each player has gotten. Thus, each player contests to have a higher kill count than the other. Also, the game encourages more than one player by adding another bonus to the Mousou attack. If you and another player are near each other and both have full Mousou bars, then if you activate it at the same time, you both release a more powerful Mousou attack, doing tons more damage for a longer period of time. These were the main things that made two-player mode that much more fun for me.

    The game is constantly feeding the player rewards as well. Some of them are small and simple rewards of glory, such as if you've killed a specific number of people (50, 100, 200, etc) or if you killed a named officer, the sound effect of a crowd cheering plays and an allied general will shout their congratulations. Others are bigger, where at the end of each level, experience is tallied up for how many people you got and officers you took down, which causes you to level and gives you more attacks for your combos. Your bodyguards can level up as well, allowing them more access to different weapons and making it so you can increase there number, from 2 up to 8. As you complete more levels, you can also unlock new characters; in fact, practically every two levels, two or three more people are made available to play. This constant positive feedback is definitely part of what makes this game so addicting.

    The game also allows a fair amount of customization. Beyond being able to chose from dozens of different characters once you've unlocked them, you also get to chose what to equip your character with. These items have to be unlocked first as well, either by destroying boxes or through finding all named officers and killing them for loot, but once you have them, you have your fair amount of choices. You can choose several different orbs - which are weapon buffs - that can either do extra damage, freeze your enemy in place in a block of ice, and a lot more. You can choose what artifacts to where, which can increase your life, mousou bar, defense, jump height, speed, and so on. You can also chose what mount to start with, be it a horse or an elephant. Depending on what you equip often effects your style of play, thus it makes you feel like you have more control over the power of your character. I often change what I equip to my hero from level to level to see what the outcome is. Plus, I am encouraged to always explore each level thoroughly to see what new items I can discover.

    DESIGN

    While I have really enjoyed this game so far, I can tell it will eventually get repetitive. Though I can tweak my character quite a bit, that does not change the fact that every level is 90% the same exact thing from the last. You kill hordes of soldiers and a few all-powerful generals here and there. The goals vary a little, from killing the main baddy on the opposing side to protecting your own leader to defending an area for a certain amount of time. Also, there are a few random events here and there, like a triggered ambush or the boats your fighting on are set on fire. However, when you get right down to it, it's still just the same thing over and over again. The designers did a good job of packaging it, making it so it hooks the player in quickly, but it'll wear off eventually. It would have been nice if they had found a may to make each level feel a little more different from each other or make the events have more of an impact.

    I don't think they handled the story-telling very well. Most of the narrative is handled with tiny text scrolling up the screen in between each level and a screen shot of some place or person. It's probably talking about which army is advancing on which, but I am not certain, because I don't bother to read it. I don't really feel drawn into reading it because it is handled in such an unappealing way. Like I said, the text is tiny, and there's a lot of it. It just does not flow well with the rest of the game, when you've just completed a tough level, slaying thousands of enemies, and then being forced to slow down to read. They do, however, have a few cutscenes to introduce characters here and there, but they are short and often don't make sense. It may be because of the fact that I did not read the text, but I also think the cutscenes themselves were just not scripted well. I will say that they were beautifully rendered however.

    I do like how much thought they put into making each character fairly unique. With dozens to choose from, it's nice to see that each is not a repeat of one or another, even going so far as to have their own personalities. Each one looks entirely different from the other and you can unlock about 6 different costumes for each of them. They all have their own fighting styles, which is quite apparent and does not even depend on what weapon they have. For example, two men carry one hand swords, but fight entirely differently from each other, one swinging heavily and resheathing his weapon in between each attack while the other slices his gracefully through the air in an almost artistic manner. A different voice and different phrases are shouted by each character as well, giving each of them a distinct attitude. Each character belongs to a faction as well, so even choosing a certain character can give you a fairly unique gameplay for that specific character. True, the amount of flexibility is limited, for they all play the same maps. However, depending on the character you chose, it will start you off fighting for different armies and different objectives. You could play one character and have your goal be to kill a certain warlord, and then chose a completely different character afterwards and be given the goal to protect that vary same warlord.

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