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Jul 18th, 2016 at 15:47:29 - Dungeons of Dredmor (PC) |
I played the tutorial and thought I'd soon get to this 8 months ago now! That's what happens when I get the bright idea to play a game at work. It doesn't happen. Except today. I re-played the tutorial, and played a couple games of Dungeons of Dredmor. Long story short, I died a few times and got bored.
Dungeons of Dredmor is a funny roguelike. It parodies all manner of RPG mechanic and trope. For example, you get quests by praying to shrines of Inconsequentia, Goddess of Sidequests, and they are utterly ridiculous stock fantasy stuff like "Azanoth the Usurper must die! And when you kill her, take the Ring of Fancy Runes and return it to Mrrgl the Mermaid in the River of the Merfolkian Peninsula." Then I think Azanoth or whatever item you need spawns in the level and you can happen upon completing the quest.
Weapons, armor, other items (and there must be hundreds), spells, etc., etc. all have silly descriptions that made me laugh plenty. Character creation is pretty wide open. There are like 100 perks you can choose, from like Swordsman (good with swords) to Pirate (you get a high Caddish stat), to Communist (this is hilarious; I leveled up enough to get the "Dialectical Materialism" feat, which gives you random Communist skills for a while). You choose like 7 or 8 perks, so there is a huge bunch of types of characters you can create. I chose pretty basic ones at first, then goofed around with some sillier sounding ones.
So you enter the dungeon, move square by square on the grid, find treasure, and kill monsters. Basically. It's a roguelike, so duh. Each square you move technically is like a turn, and enemies will take an action when you do. There are a bajillion items, and your inventory will fill up quickly. This was a source of frustration for me because you find so much shit all over the place. I started ignoring all reagents, then ignoring food because I was gaining levels and getting way strong for where I was and didn't need it. So it turned into pixel hunting on the ground and tedious inventory management after a little bit. You can sell items and buy more at stores and vending machines.
There are all sorts of other wacky things in the levels that I found. There are satanic transporters that teleport you around the level; there is a shrine to some fish god where you can make offerings of fish; there are statues of Dredmor (the titular big baddie) that you can smash for XP; there are tons of treasure chests, crates, and barrels to smash for loot, and more. If you like loot, you'll like this game. But you have to like to micromanage it a lot too...
I quit in the end because I found a set of "wizard keys." Intrigued, I used them and they whisked me away to my own private realm. I couldn't figure out exactly what to do there. There was a portal control, so I clicked it. It prompted me to type a name in, so I typed Aa and a portal opened. I shouldn't have done that because I got teleported to what I later learned was "Diggle Hell" and promptly massacred. The enemies usually aren't too difficult or unfair, but what the heck?! Why did I get teleported to Diggle Hell with overpowering enemies? Well, if I were to play again, I'd avoid messing with that teleporter.
When it comes down to it, there are much better roguelikes out there. Dungeons of Dredmor is fine, and I really like the humor, but if I want to die repeatedly, I'd rather do it in Spelunky or FTL. Glad to finally get this out of my backlog.
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Jul 12th, 2016 at 19:59:31 - Return to Castle Wolfenstein (PC) |
Ugh, 15-year-old FPS. It was fun for a while, but after 2 hours, it's just turned into me save abusing. Kill a room, save, kill a room, save, die, reload, kill an enemy, save, die, reload, etc. The story is ridiculous, as Wolfenstein should be, and it's way more difficult than I thought. Maybe I should have put it on the easiest difficulty. Oh well.
All the guns so far feel about the same to shoot. You just run and jump and crouch. No cover at all. The AI is really dumb. They'll just charge straight at you, run out of cover and stand there, and so on. I think that's why it's hard in part is because there's nowhere for me to run either in some of these open areas. And they hit hard, and there isn't a lot of health or ammo lying around. I had to use an ammo cheat!
I also had to use a health cheat once! I'd saved the game before this door, and when you open the door, you get hit with a sniper round for 20 damage. I had less health than that and so I died about 20 times before I got pissed off and looked up cheats. The funny thing? After I used the health cheat, I ran through the door, and the sniper didn't shoot. Funnier thing? I ran back that way after hitting a dead end, and got sniped and died. But thanks to the health cheat, I hacked my way past the sniper again.
Right now I'm fighting some super female soldiers and they are kicking my ass too. There are three of them in a big open room and I just can't handle them. I mean, more practice, sure, but I'm not having fun. I'm sure this was great in 2001, but not now. The game feels soooo dated. At least it's not like when I tried to replay Duke Nukem and realized that it was made before you could look up and down in FPSes. Haha, that sucked.
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Jul 8th, 2016 at 19:51:43 - Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (PC) |
Played this a long time today, but am going to retire it. I think I bought it like 4 years ago, but I could never get it to work on Windows 7, even with patches and community support, on my old machine. Installed it on a whim the other week, and it works fine on this machine with Windows 8.1. Definitely glad to have played it. A beautifully flawed game.
The game's version of Los Angeles is super grim. Story NPCs are great characters, from Smiling Jack to the split personalities of the night club owner in the first hub (I didn't realize she was a split personality until 1 second before it was revealed; I thought the game was glitching and/or one of the characters was being silly and dressing the same as her sister) to the college-educated anarch in Downtown. The story is engrossing as well, enjoyed the quests, tracking people down, planting some explosives, learning about different vampire clans, etc. There is a ton of potential to explore vampire fiction in games and not have it be like Twilight.
The game is soooo reminiscent of Deus Ex, it's crazy. It looks similar, the atmosphere is the same, the movement and combat feel similar, similar sinister story, etc. As I thought about Deus Ex though when I replayed it years later, Vampire is showing its age. The graphics are still okay, and the art is good so it's nice to look at, but the combat suuuuucks. I mean, the ideas are cool. You get melee weapons, guns, and vampire powers. I can throw a swarm of bats at people, go invisible, and call on super strength, all very handy. But getting into fights is just a clickfest hoping you drain their life before they drain yours. Also interacting with objects in the environment is finicky. Sometimes the interact icon just doesn't show up, other times you can't click on it. Irritating.
It would be cooler if there were more of a traditional action RPG or adventure game skill tree. They sorta mapped D&D rules onto character creation and stat management. You get some starting feats, points to put into various attributes, which raises the value of skills. If you have played D&D, it's nothing you haven't seen. But I think it works to the game's disadvantage because your character doesn't noticeably improve much. The D&D system for CRPGs works so well because it's usually with squad-based games. You have four or five characters you're managing, and you're learning more spells and doing more micromanaging, seeing improvement in how skills and abilities interrelate as new enemies and situations are tossed at you. In this game, combat is just always me running around clicking left mouse to attack until someone dies. I can stealth in the beginning and get some stealth kills, sure, and I can toss some bats or use my super strength, but I'm still just clicking madly. It's lost its charm quickly, which is too bad.
Another way it's showing age is that, although the NPCs are neat and the dialogue is excellent, they don't feel very interactive. They're information dispensers. Vampire came out in 2004, so we hadn't seen any Mass Effects or Dragon Ages. More interactive NPCs were just around the corner for the most part, NPCs who seemed to KNOW you and your character and seemed to really be invested in what happened, or in what you said to them among the various dialogue options, or who frequently did things with you.
So anyway, I did enjoy this for the most part, but I get the gist of it, and I think I will use Vampire as the excuse to play a string of older games I have lying around on Steam.
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Jul 8th, 2016 at 08:58:45 - Apotheon (PC) |
Apotheon is an excellent 2d action/action-RPG/metroidvania game from, and I was surprised, the same devs who made Capsized. I really didn't like Capsized. But, I see similarities in the movement and combat here. Apotheon's loose, sort of floaty movement works well. You pick up a lot of different weapons of several types (spear, sword, club, ranged...) and generally swing it wildly while moving back and forth and jumping up and down. You've got to actually connect the weapon to the enemy for a hit, so for example, you'll miss a lot because enemies will hug you. Solution? Jump up and swing downward, switch to a dagger (which hits right up close), roll away and then attack, etc. The fighting can be pretty hectic, and it's definitely a lot of fun, kept me thoroughly entertained.
There are also a ton of items, including bombs, potions, "bone dust" that summons skeletal warriors to fight with you, and all manner of special items that permanently enhance attack speed, amount of health and armor restored, etc. Consumable items are created via a simple crafting system. Weapons and armor and other things can be purchased from a few vendors (though I never purchased anything except recipes to make potions), and you can upgrade your skills with each weapon type at a trainer. It is really expensive to upgrade weapons all the way! I think they can all go up to level 4, though I only leveled them to 3 (and one to 2 only).
Despite the hectic combat, the game is easy on standard difficulty. You could definitely bump it up to the other option it gives you. I died maybe twice during the whole game, though I did *almost* die a lot. Once your health hits 0 or 1, you get like a second chance kind of thing. If you get hit one more time, you'll die, but I almost always had time to drink a health potion, of which you will never run out.
Enemy types don't vary too much, and you could probably criticize Apotheon for lacking some diversity in combat. I mean, the weapons really aren't *that* different from each other. And the enemies are mostly just humanoids with the same weapons you have. Sometimes you fight a large cyclops, or a wolf, or an underground demon thing. Some enemies fly near the end of the game. Boss fights were pretty fun. My favorite was (I forget which god--oh yea, this is very God of War-ish. You kill all the gods of Olympus for revenge) the one where you mount a horse and chase after the god to try and kill him on horseback. You never ride a horse otherwise in the game, but it was fun, so I sort of wonder why they didn't incorporate it more.
One great thing about Apotheon is the exploration and incentive to do so. There are all sorts of hidden hallways, floors you can destroy with bombs, doors you can pick with locks. You can collect tons of cool weapons, even some rare items granting permanent bonuses, and the best, upgrade armor for free. Usually you would purchase armor upgrades like you would purchase weapon skill upgrades, but there are these special lockboxes hidden around that sometimes contain armor upgrades. You feel really lucky and accomplished when you find one. There are also various doors where you need a specific key or item to pass, as well as hidden quests you can find that will give you some instruction or puzzle to solve, such as assassinating 5 people that Hermes was supposed to kill but didn't, or following clues to a sunken treasure in Poseidon's realm, or hunting three unique animals and then finding the doors that their trophies unlock. It's great stuff, and I poked around in all the nooks and crannies looking for secrets.
As mentioned, you will kill god after god as you obtain their items and powers. Each god's realm is unique, and this was a huge strength of the game that kept things from feeling repetitive. You'll have quite different types of objectives in each realm. My favorites were the more puzzle-oriented ones for the most part. There was one with these three concentric rotating structures, and you have to make your way to three different doors (one in each structure) as they rotate. It was a nice platforming challenge. In another, you had to use ranged weapons to hit switches (some of which you couldn't even see) throughout the level to open doors. It was like taking a ton of trick shots and practicing aim, very cool. In another, you've got to raise water levels to navigate the level, while fending off mermen. Really really liked the level designs and varied objectives.
Finally, one must praise the clay pottery art style which is absolutely beautiful and looks fantastic in motion. The music is also perfect, rising with the action, drums pounding for boss battles. I don't know what else to say except the visuals and audio are damn near perfect.
So, really fun game. Some people disliked the controls and/or combat, but I liked them. Great exploration, lots of secrets, decent story, recommended.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jul 8th, 2016 at 09:03:57.
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