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Aug 6th, 2017 at 20:07:01 - Who's Your Daddy (PC) |
Ok so...I'd heard about this before, but some friends showed me another video about it and we decided it would be fun to play. Last Saturday, I paid $4.99 and downloaded Who's Your Daddy (no question mark in the title), a silly, stupid, buggy, funny, morbid two-player game. One player is the daddy and the other is the baby. The baby's job is to get into everything a baby shouldn't and kill itself; the daddy's job is to make the house safe and stop baby from dying.
Baby can do things like take pills, drink bleach, burn alive in the oven, steal daddy's car and crash it, eat batteries, etc. Daddy can prevent these accidents from happening by putting pills and deadly things in high places, locking all the cabinets, locking the oven door, following baby around to fish it from the pool if baby crawls in, etc.
And that's it. Pretty good fun for half an hour. There are some solo challenges to practice with each character and some achievements to unlock. You can also wear an assortment of hats and sunglasses. Yes, the baby can too.
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Aug 6th, 2017 at 19:41:31 - Dungeon of the Endless (PC) |
Wow, long time no updates. I haven't been playing much of anything for about a month. I am chilling in Montreal this week before a conference though, so I find myself playing some games instead of working on my conference presentation. I've officially retired Dungeon of the Endless, which a friend told me about at the tail end of this summer's Steam sale. Sounded cool, and I had some good times with it.
Dungeon of the Endless is a roguelike tower defense game. Interesting merger of two genres that works well. There is some threadbare story and some "narratives" between characters that play out in small dialogue snippets on the elevator between floors. Your ship crash lands and you have to escape the dungeon...But there are some characters who are jailors and others who are prisoners and a couple other types...including Team Fortress 2 characters for some reason. None of that affects anything.
You choose two characters to begin the game, and you start at floor 1, trying to work your way up to floor 13 (with the basic ship; you can unlock other ships that crash deeper into the planet, meaning you have to go up more floors to escape). You begin in a room with a crystal. This crystal is important. It generates a resource called "dust." With dust, you can power new rooms. So basically, open doors, acquire dust from doing so, power rooms. But it's infinitely more complicated. If you don't power a room, monsters might spawn there every time you open a door. Of course there isn't enough dust to go around. So you're going to have to build "towers," aka "major modules" that generate other resources and "minor modules" which are a variety of weapons, buffs, and debuffs.
Major modules generate three other important resources: industry, science, and food. Industry is what you need to construct modules. Science lets you research new and upgraded modules. Food lets you level up your heroes and heal them in battle. So be smart when choosing among modules to build. These resources also let you buy things from merchants, who will sometimes appear and charge one of the three resources seemingly at random for their items. If you don't generate much industry, you'll have a hard time building modules. Not much science, and you won't be able to upgrade modules very well. Not much food, and your characters will be lower level, which means they'll have lesser stats and fewer perks. Always a tough call!
So. How do you clear a floor? You need to find the power source for the crystal. It's hidden somewhere on the floor. Once you find that, you can carry it to the crystal and escape with whoever is in the room. I learned that the hard way one game where I escaped with no one but the hero carrying the crystal, and I lost all my party members. Terrible! As soon as you pick up the crystal power source, be warned that monsters will spawn from every unpowered room. So you need to power a path from the power source to the crystal and ideally power other rooms such that monsters don't catch you (you run slower with the power source) or don't make it to the crystal room.
Enemies are all different. Some go straight for the crystal; some attack heroes; some attack modules. You'll be fine until floor 6 or so, then different enemy types appear and you can't just stand in a room and kill everything.
You know what. I'm about halfway through describing all the systems in the game. If this sounds cool to you, pay a few bucks for it. I probably won't revisit it, and I never escaped, not even on Too Easy mode, but I had fun and found the game unique. Also I hope this was a decent primer on the "Endless" games, because I think I'm going to start Endless Legend next.
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Jul 1st, 2017 at 09:30:01 - The Cat Lady (PC) |
Interesting adventure horror game with great aesthetic. They accomplished a lot with the visuals and stock sound effects, and the score fits really well (even if the music doesn't fit my personal tastes). I didn't quite know what to expect when I began, but was pleased by how dark and depressing the game is. It tackles themes like suicide, murder, cancer, sexual violence, perversion, etc. You play as Susan Ashworth, a middle-aged single lady who commits suicide, after which she goes to some sort of purgatory where an old woman called the Queen of Maggots, who represents her depression, demands that she kill five "parasites" in exchange for immortality. Why she wants to be immortal I'm not sure, but I don't think she really had a choice in the matter. The immortality is necessary for her to kill the parasites because these are terrible people, all of whom commit some disturbing violence against her and/or other characters.
When she wakes up from her purgatory, she's in a mental hospital and is told that her daughter saved her life, which is curious because she has no daughter. Enter Mitzi, who becomes her tenant and friend. Mitzi is part of a sort of overarching narrative of this guy called the Eye of Adam (also the final parasite) who is living in their apartment building. The Eye of Adam is like an online troll who encourages people to kill themselves on suicide forums. I just read the story a couple weeks ago of the woman being tried for causing her boyfriend's suicide by urging him on, and this reminded me of her. Disturbing for real.
So that's the gist of the plot. Gameplay is super simple. You play with the four arrow keys and enter, so it's not a point-and-click style adventure game. They easily could have incorporated a mouse so you could navigate your inventory quicker, but the slower use of arrows to scroll actually fits the game's slow pace. When you're in front of an interactable object, it'll prompt you to push up, and give you options to examine, take, read, or whatever. If you push down, then it will scroll through items in your inventory. It's really simple. Out of either of those up/down modes, left and right walks. The puzzles make sense and follow normal human logic instead of convoluted adventure game logic. I only used a walkthrough one time, of which I am proud!
As I said, the game is slow, and expect a good deal of dialogue, sometimes dialogue that goes on for way, way too long. Most of the voice acting is fine, some is downright bad, and the audio quality varies. It sucks listening to Susan and Mitzi because Mitzi's recordings are more tinny and clearly sound worse than Susan's. Whenever a character raises their voice, it's totally unconvincing, almost like they were trying to record this in a place where they weren't allowed to be loud. Anyway, the dialogue itself is usually pretty good, ranging from poignant to a bit silly.
All in all, if you have the patience for a slow burning, macabre tale, this is a pretty good option.
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Jun 18th, 2017 at 21:16:35 - Friday the 13th: The Game (PC) |
Bought this at launch and was reminded of why I don't buy games at launch. A bunch of friends and I played the beta and, although it was buggy as hell, we thought it could be excellent. It's still buggy as hell. Sometimes it's brilliant and sometimes it sucks. A very mixed bag.
Friday the 13th is an asymmetrical multiplayer game like Evolve. One player is Jason and the others are camp counselors. Jason's job is to stalk and kill counselors; the counselors' job is to survive the 20-minute round, preferably by escaping in some way, but if you manage to hide for that long, good on you.
Jason gains new abilities over time. I cannot for the life of me remember one of them. I was only Jason twice in the beta and haven't gotten to be Jason yet in the full release (which sucks), so I'm not well-versed in how to play him. He can sense counselors by their movements and sounds, including breathing. He's got like a super sense ability that heightens detection, he can phase walk, which is going invisible and super fast, he can teleport, and it's the last one I can never remember. Jason becomes really, really powerful, which makes sense. You'll have different experiences (and chances of survival) depending on how good the Jason is. If the Jason knows what he's doing, you're probably all going to die. If the Jason sucks, the match might be boring. A decent Jason is best because he remains unpredictable.
As a counselor, you basically run through cabins looking for useful supplies. You have various ways of escaping: cars (requires a battery, gasoline, and keys), a boat (propeller, gasoline...keys? I was a passenger on an escape boat one time), you can call the police (must find fuse and repair fusebox, then find telephone), who arrive in 5 minutes and save you if you can reach them, and you can wait it out hiding. Ideally, the counselors work together to acquire necessary items to escape, but it's predictably difficult because not all players are alike. Also not all players have mics to talk, and no one types (if you even can). Also, in a brilliant move, you can only talk to counselors nearby (i.e., no one else can hear you) unless you find a walkie talkie, in which case anyone with a walkie talkie can communicate. You also have no map (just a local minimap) unless you find one. You also can carry weapons to stun and injure Jason, some first aid spray, and some other things.
Counselors also have to manage stamina (how long they can run). Even your standard, regular running depletes stamina, let alone sprinting. So you will have to slow down and walk or sneak or hide sometimes, which can be terrifying. And you have to manage your fear level. If you're in the dark too long, if you see Jason, or if you see a dead body, your character starts to lose it. I'm not exactly sure what the consequences of this are other than your character screaming (Jason can hear you) and being difficult to control for a little bit. If you turn on your flashlight or go hide, you will calm down though.
When Jason catches you, he has a ton of different kills he can do, including context kills (shoving you into a fireplace, tossing you through a window, etc.). You might be able to escape if you're lucky and/or quick and/or have a pocketknife. Watching Jason chase people around can be really entertaining. It's not uncommon that my favorite parts of the game are after I die and I'm spectating. Spectating is like watching a horror movie. I love it.
So that's how the game goes down. Unfortunately it's buggy as hell. I played two games tonight before the game froze and I couldn't make it close so I had to restart the computer. It doesn't play audio through my TV for some unknown reason. Sometimes it sticks on a black screen when you launch the game. People who play more report server and matchmaking issues. There are a thousand issues with counselor death animations and collision detection and all sorts of stuff. I was playing a couple days ago and a counselor was using the phone to call the police when he just like...fell into the wall and looked like he died (I think he disconnected), but he was in the wall. And the phone he was using was floating in midair. The person disconnected, or whatever happened, right when Jason smashed through the door, and Jason was pacing around trying to get to the body, but couldn't. We Instagrammed the floating phone.
It's a really simple game. When it's good, it's awesome. I've had some amazing matches and moments, like the time I learned I could re-start a crashed car. As I sped off in excitement, three other counselors came running out of the bushes yelling for me to stop. This one guy says "We can escape together!" So I stopped to let them all in as Jason materialized behind the car and grabbed one and killed her. The rest of us sped off. Jason teleported in front of us. I drove the car backward to an intersection and tore ass toward the exit. As I was almost there, Jason teleported in front of me again, but I lost control trying to go around him (he stops cars) and ran into a fence. He killed one of my passengers and the other two of us scattered. We were all laughing. It was great.
But when it's mediocre, which unfortunately is at least half the time, it's pretty boring. You can wait in lobbies and get in a game and poke through drawers for 5 minutes, get killed, and then either sit there spectating for 15 more minutes (or until everyone escapes or is killed), or you can forfeit your XP (which you use to purchase new counselors and Jasons with different stats, equipment, and special kills) and go ahead to another game. Like, sometimes absolutely nothing of interest happens for half an hour at a time. Oh, also the majority of people with mics are annoying as shit, which makes it really hard to overcome the dull times unless you just mute everyone.
I'll keep playing here and there probably, and they've released a couple patches, but there's a long way to go.
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