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Dec 4th, 2016 at 22:34:13 - Depression Quest (PC) |
This semester I gave a presentation on gender and sexuality in gaming post-Gamergate, i.e., what has changed in response? I read more about Gamergate than I ever had before and figured I'd download the game that sparked the shitstorm. I'm all for interactive fiction and games thematically outside the norm, as is practically everyone who studies the medium. So one of my questions was simply, "Did I think this was a good game?"
My first point is, although this isn't a game by mainstream definitions, it's a game by academic ones. That was the first and main criticism of Depression Quest before sex and journalism ethics was brought into it. There's artificial conflict (between your character and him/herself and other characters), there are rules, and there is a quantifiable outcome where your depression exists along a continuum. There is a goal (manage your depression), a feedback system (the answers you select change the following scenes and your character's depression state), and you play voluntarily. Given that I'd read soooo many diatribes calling this not a game, I kinda thought it wouldn't be, but it totally is, though atypical.
My second point is that this is an important game. One way you can tell it is an important game is by the controversy it caused. People are having existential crises over games not looking and playing like AAA titles, which is bizarre in 2016. There are more indie games than grains of sand on the beach, man! Though one can easily imagine something more interactive to teach us about depression, this is a solid effort. I've recently played a game about a blind girl (Beyond Eyes) that provides some insight into that condition, and hopefully some empathy. I've played Papa & Yo about having an alcoholic father and child abuse. I have my students play Darfur is Dying to give them insight into life as a refugee in the Sudan. There's an app about everyday racism. There are so many important games that are not about shooting aliens or getting high scores. This is art that needs to be made and experienced. You can't convey in a painting what I just experienced in this simple text game about depression.
Intro matter aside, I do not have depression. I do live with someone who does. My favorite person in the world suffers from it. I see her in this game. But the game encourages the player to see themselves too. I relate to some of the social anxiety that the character deals with (being anxious at a party, avoiding socializing with strangers, wanting to retreat to a room and/or just drink a lot real fast to get comfortable around strangers). That stuff isn't abnormal. One difference is that a depressed person is often embarrassed or ashamed by their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, whereas non-depressed people usually aren't. My partner sometimes sleeps like she's dead, stays in bed half the day, thinks she's screwing everything up, avoids difficult tasks, has low self-esteem, even talks about killing herself when things get overwhelming. That's life. You draw support from your network. You see a therapist. You try to find things that are meaningful to you. You try to find things to look forward to. It's not always going to happen, but you keep working at it. It's important for non-depressed people to understand that you can't rationalize a depressed person's thoughts. I can tell my girlfriend all day long, "You are stressed out because you are sleeping until 3pm and then you don't have time to do anything, and it's making you more stressed out" and it doesn't matter. Depression isn't rational. And depression makes people spiral inward and downward.
The “quest” element in Depression Quest is thought-provoking, as I actively managed the character’s depression. That's the goal: get less depressed; manage it. It worsened to severe, but I got it back down to regular depression, and then to under control. Seeing a therapist helped in the game as in real life (luckily the character had a good therapist!). I usually couldn't pick the dialogue option that the real me would pick, but there was usually an option that's like a more resigned version of what I’d pick. Like, instead of “Just get out of bed and get ready for work. You’ll be late, but it’s better than not going at all!” I picked “I guess I'll get dressed and go to work, even though I'll be so late it won't be worth it.” There’s not that optimism, that positive thinking there. It’s more dread, futility.
After I completed the game and got the "good" ending where you are successfully managing your depression, I replayed making clearly terrible choices and predictably the outcome was terrible. I hated my job, my girlfriend left me, I made a scene at dinner, I'm terribly lonely, etc. I must be good at dealing with life since I made all the "good" choices in the game. Oh, I also like that you can get a cat, which again as in real life, helped the character feel less lonely (if your cat isn't an ass at least).
But does this sort of invalidate the premise of the game, that you can make choices that ease the depression? The game sort of undermines its own premise because you can easily choose the "correct" answers and get a positive outcome where the character manages their depression very well. I imagine this simply confirms for some people (who don't suffer from depression) the idea (that people with depression refute) that you can just think yourself out of it, which is problematic for developing empathy.
I found Depression Quest a worthwhile experiment to click through. If you're curious, it takes like 45 minutes. Definitely made me think a lot more than I'd anticipated.
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Dec 4th, 2016 at 15:27:49 - Crypt of the NecroDancer (PC) |
Didn't think I'd finish so quickly after playing last time, but as with the other Zones, Zone 4 just takes some persistence. Learn the enemy's patterns, continue unlocking better weapons and armor, and eventually you'll get good enough to beat it. After you defeat the boss unique to Zone 4, you kill the NecroDancer, but there's a plot twist and the credits roll, but the story isn't over. You play through as two more characters to complete the story. I played through as one of them which took another hour (1 hour to play through with Melody vs the 9 hours it took to do one full playthrough the first time, haha). But I stopped there because all characters have their unique rules. The last character you have to play through dies if she gets hit or if she misses a beat. I think you can find health upgrades (I found a potion) and she comes with one potion (prevents death once), so actually you get one screw up before you insta-die. And you only have a dagger, no more weapons. Uuuh, I tried a while and think that's the skill cap that I don't want to bother surpassing. I watched a couple people beat it on YouTube and it is pretty incredible. You have to be absolutely perfect.
Aaaanyway, this game is brilliant. Everyone with the slightest interest in roguelikes or rhythm games should play. The rhythm-based movement is unique and the game is a blast to play. One reason I think I liked it so much (same with Spelunky and FTL) is that there's more emphasis on player skill rather than luck. If you die, you always know why. It's always your fault. The game is never unfair. I don't think I cursed once. You just observe your death, correct the error (you always made an error), and restart. I've said before that it's quite a sight to behold the game in action, and when you're playing and you're three or four floors down in a zone and you realize just how fast you are moving and thinking, you feel like a professional. A game hasn't made me feel this good in a long time! So stop reading and go buy Crypt of the NecroDancer.
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Dec 2nd, 2016 at 21:39:12 - Crypt of the NecroDancer (PC) |
Add this to the list of roguelikes that I enjoy! Alongside favorites FTL and Spelunky (neither of which I ever beat). Crypt of the NecroDancer is unique. As the name suggests, it’s part rhythm game. You move to the beat of different songs. Every enemy has a movement pattern in synch with the music too. So playing well is a matter of learning enemies’ movement patterns and then multitasking to move your character with the beat and kill enemies and avoid being killed.
It’s really quite amazing to behold the game in motion, and all the simultaneous actions you have to perform are surprisingly intuitive. At first I didn’t like the controls. They felt limiting. All you do is use the four arrow keys to move up, left, right, down. You automatically attack, and your attacks differ based on the weapon you have equipped. So for example, you begin with a dagger, which attacks one square in front of you. If you are next to an enemy, and you push in the direction of the enemy, you will attack. But now, I think the controls are very clever and I think they need to be simple.
There are a handful of different attack types (spears let you attack two spaces away, broadswords give you a wider attack so you attack in like a 1x3 line in front of you, etc) and various weapon types too (glass weapons can break, bloody weapons leech HP, the flail has a knockback effect, etc.). There’s also armor for the body, head, and feet, and a variety of magic rings and spells that you find in treasure chests, from blowing up walls, or purchase from the shopkeeper with the gold that enemies drop.
Diamonds are another currency and those purchase upgrades in the hub. You can unlock some NPCs in the first two zones (of four) who will sell you items for the global item pool (which you subsequently have a chance to find in chests). You have some control over this item pool later on and can actually spend more diamonds to take items back out. For example, I unlocked a mystery ring which I later found out makes the level really dark so I couldn’t see except right in front of me. That’s a recipe for disaster, so I paid a diamond to take it back out of the item pool so I wouldn’t get it again.
Each of the four zones has different enemies, and you can train in the hub against them. Spend diamonds at another NPC and you can unlock training grounds for minibosses and bosses! Very cool! The first few times I made it through the first zone and got to one of the random bosses, I died, and it was demoralizing to not have any clue how to kill the boss that I’d spent so long to reach. There are 5 random ones and some are more straightforward than others. I think I’ve beaten 3 or 4 different ones so far, and haven’t seen the fifth yet. But during levels, there will be up to like 10 enemies on screen at once all moving according to their unique patterns. It’s a lot to keep track of and training with each type helps predict their movement and makes staying alive in the heat of the moment easier. This becomes really important when bigger enemies like fire-breathing dragons or sirens that silence the music or giant bats that move at random join the fray because minibosses can really mess you up.
Two of the bosses are most memorable. The first (and the first I encountered) is named King Conga. King Conga sits in a chair playing the music while a ton of zombies in conga lines dance to the beat around the screen. You have to figure out where they’re going (and they will step on traps that reverse their direction or make them confused and wander), avoid King Conga’s simulacra, and then eventually kill him. Blues Chess is interesting. The King piece is the boss on a chess board, and all the pieces begin at one side and you at the other. They move in rhythm as chess pieces move across the board, and they attack you if you’re in their line (bishop attacks if you’re diagonal, for example). So you have to strategically take out the pieces on your way to getting the king in the back. If pieces reach your side of the board, they turn into queens, yikes!
Last thing, you unlock different characters with different abilities. Cadence, the main character, is played normally, moving to the beat and having normal interactions with items. Others I’ve unlocked include Monk (he dies if he touches gold, but items at shops are free), Bard (enemies don’t move until you do; Bard is easy mode), one guy that has infinite bombs but can’t use other weapons, and a pacifist who can’t attack but the stairs to the next floor down are always unlocked (normally you have to kill the floor’s miniboss to unlock the stairs). There are achievements for beating the game with all the different characters, but my goal is just to do it on normal with Cadence! I unlocked Zone 4 tonight, which looks to be the final zone. I’ve gotten to floor 2 once. There are always 3 floors then a boss, assuming it’s the same for Zone 4. But Zone 4 is really difficult for now. Here's to practice!
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Nov 26th, 2016 at 15:29:25 - Shadowrun: Dragonfall (PC) |
I didn’t know anything about the Shadowrun universe before playing this, only that it was an old tabletop RPG with some video game versions. One look at the box art would label it cyberpunk, but it actually mixes fantasy elements too. Shadowrun has dragons and they do what dragons usually do: hoard stuff, kill people, lust for power. Really I’m rather ignorant about cyberpunk. If it often has dragons and spells and demons, sign me up.
So this crowdfunded game is an isometric strategy RPG a la Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, etc. It’s old-school in many ways and puts me back in the late 90s/early 2000s when I played all the old DnD RPGs. There’s no voice acting, but there is a ton of reading. I actually substituted this for a novel during the past couple months. Whenever I wanted to read, I’d play this instead. And the writing is fantastic, in terms of style, character development, quest design, and overall story. That was certainly the best thing about the game.
I’ll give an example. Early on, you get a mission to head into the sewers beneath the Kreuzbasar (the town/hub) and find out why there’s something wrong with the generators. You discover a bunch of ghouls, which are like sick/infected people who turn to cannibalism, living down there. This being an RPG, you can talk with some of them, and turns out they have a deal with a doctor in town. They keep the generators maintained and the doctor dumps body parts into the sewers for them to eat. The doctor got greedy and started demanding payment, so the ghouls quit maintaining the machinery in protest. So you’ve got to work this problem out. You can arrive at a variety of solutions to the problem based on how you decide to interact with the ghouls and the doctor (e.g., kill the ghouls, threaten the ghouls, threaten the doctor, help doctor reduce costs, etc.). This was one of the many surprising quests, and in this case I felt empathy for the plight of the ghouls, and for the whole rest of the game, didn’t like the doctor. This was partially character-self-loathing because he sold implants and my shaman character didn’t use implants because implants increase cooldown for spells or something bad.
You have four main story characters on your team (Dietrich, Glory, Eiger, and Blitz), plus a dog you can get, plus several other shadowrunners you can hire on a mission-by-mission basis. Each main character has a meaty backstory that unfolds over time and culminates in a special mission. Glory’s was phenomenal. She’s gotten tons of cybernetic implants, is distant, cold, and carries a weight on her shoulders. As you press into it, you discover that there’s basically a sinister demon/spirit/thing that’s got a tight hold on her, and she removes pieces of her body for implants to cut it out of her and lessen its influence. Cool. Then you find out how it got there. Long story short, she got lured into a cult with a charismatic leader who drew power from this demon. Charismatic leader started becoming reliant on the demon and losing control himself. Glory, having been party to numerous atrocities with the cult, was able to run, but not able to escape the far-reaching influence of the powerful demon. Your character quest involves returning to the cult’s compound and resolving the situation, again in a variety of possible ways.
I pissed off Dietrich early in the game by not taking him on a mission and he literally refused to talk to me the entire rest of the game in the Kreuzbasar. So needless to say I didn’t see his story unfold. Oddly though, he would talk to me during missions like everything was normal; he was only mad in town. I never hired a mercenary; there was no need. My team was pretty well rounded.
The combat was fine. Not great, not bad, but served its purpose to move the story along. At times, I felt overpowered, and at times I felt that my main character was bad. I unknowingly duplicated Dietrich with my main character; we were both shamans. I spent a lot of time hiding in a corner, casting buffs every so often. Haste is the best spell ever. By the end, I could increase a party member’s AP by 2 for 3 rounds. I always cast this on Eiger, who is a weapons specialist, so she would fire off five rounds from her sniper rifle and often killed 2 enemies on her turn. The Slow spell was useful in a mission where I had to catch a fleeing bad guy. I kept chasing him and running into tons of enemies, then tried to use Slow one time, and I caught him immediately. Ha! If your main character dies, you have three rounds to revive him; otherwise, it’s game over. So keeping him alive was a priority, and I had to start pumping upgrade points into health so that he would quit getting two-shot. Blitz wasn’t terribly useful in combat, but Glory was. She is a close combat specialist and had several moves with stun effects. So I’d run her around the battle stunning enemies while everyone else focused on killing the others.
There is a special type of combat that occurs in the matrix. If you have a decker, he can “jack in” to the virtual world and hack security cameras, steal pay data, and all sorts of fun stuff. But the combat in here was really boring, and I’d avoid jacking in if I didn’t need to hack a door open or something. You can only send a decker in, so Blitz just goes in by himself and fights essentially the same type of enemy over and over every time.
I actually stopped playing in part because of the matrix…and in part because there was a stupid wave level…and in part because the game froze on a save and I lost a couple hours of progress on said wave level that I didn’t want to do over. In this mission, you are either freeing/killing an AI, so of course you have to jack in. While you are jacked in, you can activate one (at a time) of two sets of security turrets. Back in meatspace, waves and waves of enemies pour in while you try to defend the mainframe as it runs its freeing/killing sequence. So you have to manage your squad defense while running back and forth activating turrets in the matrix. It’s far less exciting than it sounds. Anyway, I manually saved when I was near the end, and it locked up. When I restarted the game, all the save games going back about two hours had wiped. Awesome.
I finished watching on YouTube (which turned out to be like 2 more hours of reading, wow). I was getting tired of playing the game anyway. Like I said, story = great; combat = mediocre.
There were some other annoying design issues. One was with the inventory system. Before each mission, you choose the loadout for each character. During missions, you find items, but you can’t trade items with teammates. Only the main character can pick them up. If he can’t use them, he can send them back to base, but can’t give them to a teammate. Why?!? In some runs, there will be like 10 items to pick up. They all just go straight to your stash. Even in the final mission there is tons of stuff to pick up, but like, you can hold 5 things only, and it’s the last mission of the game, so you’ll never see your stash again, so almost all of those items are wasted.
The other issue is that you can’t use your teammates to do things like hack doors or use a skill or talk to an NPC (outside of combat). You can only use your main character. So like, the other characters have their various statistics and abilities, and I have a decker right next to me. Why can’t I use them!? It seems like if anything, you should be able to do it out of combat, but not in! And if you can select other teammates to use their abilities in combat, why can’t you choose to trade with them in combat? Doesn’t make any sense.
Overall though, enjoyed playing Shadowrun: Dragonfall. I don’t think I’ll play Hong Kong or any others until they fix some of these issues and make the combat more fun. I’d love another great story and romp through this universe, so I hope these systems do continue to get updated.
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