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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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    Killzone 3 (PS3)    by   dkirschner

    Very good, high production value. Gameplay a little disjointed, action/story somewhat over the top. Fun! ------------ Not as great as 2, but still good!
    most recent entry:   Tuesday 8 October, 2013
    Killzone 3 refines the gunplay that I felt was already excellent in Killzone 2. By "refinement" I mean it is more sleek and feels like every other AAA FPS in the 2010s. Killzone 2 had no auto-aiming and felt a little old-school in the gun department. I appreciate the crispness of aiming in 3, but it does feel like it bent to conformity. I think that's a big theme in the game's design, is just bending to what's hot. This involves a lot of Gearing like I talked about in my Killzone 2 entry, which is odd because I thought Gears of War was very unique. Maybe I should call it CoD-ing. I dunno. Either way, the production value was ramped up even higher. The game looks amazing and sounds great too. The "stealth" part through the Helghast wilderness was a visual wonder.

    The story took a turn for the better too. There's more they try to tell in this game, which made it a little more interesting. You get to see some of the internal conflict in Helghast high command. Killzone 2 had these out-of-place Soviet-style propaganda posters up all over the Helghast city. They were weird because there wasn't really anything Soviet about the Helghast besides that they were very militarized. Like, no communist-leaning ideology, and I don't think they needed propaganda because everyone seemed to be on board with being a completely militarized society. Anyway, in Killzone 3, you meet the Helghast high command, or Senate or whatever they are called, and they are designed to look exactly like Nazis or Soviet-era Communists. I think this is silly more than anything since the society still has nothing to do with Nazism or Communism. One of the members even had a Hitler mustache. Go google pictures of the Helghast senate to see what I mean. Questionable artistic choices aside, their internal politics add a little depth to the story and that was a good thing.

    They tried to tell more narrative with your squad too, not in the sense of backstory or anything, which I think is a shame and something that I would have WANTED them to do like Gears of War, but in terms of the relationships between the characters and having them display more emotions and things. This was still welcome, like Rico expressing regret for spoiler spoiler and Narville finally admitting his plans aren't always correct and letting Sev and Rico gung-go it. The only problem with this approach is that sometimes it interrupted otherwise exciting gameplay segments with cut scenes. I only didn't like this when those gameplay segments were too short. Other times it was fine, but the length of gameplay segments/frequency of cut scenes was disjointed.

    Another aspect of the game that made it feel disjointed were many of the "gunner" segments. These were the times when you get in a vehicle that is 100% on rails and you just aim and shoot at things. This actually happened a lot and, while visually and kinaesthetically pleasing, was just sort of lame because you can never actually drive the vehicles and you have no control over anything in the segment except shooting at things. And all the weapons for all these vehicles are the same. Left trigger fires missiles or rockets. Right trigger is the machine gun. These didn't even have to be in the game. They just felt tacked on, there because they had to be because gunner segments are cool and that's what Call of Duty does. Since they did put them in, they should have been more open-ended and given the player more control over driving at least, or changed up the weapon types or something to add variety. There were also "did it because we have to" style stealth and horror elements. One level in particular has you stealthing through a gorgeous Helghan environment sniping and stealth-killing (another addition to the game, Gearing) enemies silently by pressing L1 when you get near them. Very out of place gameplay in the context of the rest of the game. The horror bit was lame too, felt forced, and reminded me exactly of when you go in the refinery or whatever in Gears and find the mutated spider thingies...what a coincidence, you're also in a refinery here and find mutated spider thingies!

    There was *slightly* more gun variety in Killzone 3 than 2. They added some type of energy gun that was fun to use and...I think the bolt gun was new. They also let you detach machine gun turrets and carry them around, which was sweet. You can carry 2 primary weapons in Killzone 3 instead of K2's 1 primary. So you can always have 1 "heavy" weapon like the machine gun turret or sniper rifle and 1 normal weapon like a submachine gun or assault rifle, and then of course the pistol. This was an obvious improvement from Killzone 2 because you could switch weapons on the fly and expand your tactical repertoire to deal with a variety of situations.

    Unfortunately though, again, there isn't much enemy variety. You fight all Helghast soldiers with different guns. This time there is a melee version that rushes you, some with lightning guns and one with a jetpack. Oh, by the way, I was excited to be able to use a jetpack. I think it was a feature on the box. You only get it for one level! It was lame. They also had tiny bits of levels with low gravity, which was also poorly done. Anyway, jetpack enemies. There were like no boss fights in the game, which was disappointing. There was a giant segment where you take down a big walker but it wasn't that great. Toward the end of the game, the levels get very corridor-y. You just go down corridor after corridor after corridor and fly an underwhelming spaceship gunner part for the finale. It was in the corridor-y parts that they bring the low gravity trick. The low gravity trick could have been cool if it was used for anything at all, but it wasn't. Enemies don't take advantage of low gravity and neither can you. If you jump you just float up in the air, a simple target for enemies to shoot down. Yet when your AI teammates jump, they don't float. Hmm. Enemies also float when you kill them, for whatever reason. Alive - grounded. Dead - float. Huh?

    Oh yeah, before I forget, one more Gearing thing. You can revive your AI teammates and they revive you too. This was sort of stupid because half the time they wouldn't revive you and half the time they would. When they won't, they say things like "There's too much enemy fire" and "You're too far away." Most of the time I argue they definitely could reach me if they'd just run and do it. Then sometimes like they wouldn't revive you if they'd recently revived you and other times they'd do it 3 times in a row without a problem. I didn't like that there were no hard and fast rules so that I never could guess very well whether or not I'd be revived. Anyway, not that huge a deal.

    Last thing I'll say to wrap up...the end sucked. It ends abruptly, no epilogue or anything. After a trilogy of games, I expect an epilogue or some wrapping up or something. Then there was a little part in the middle of the credits that I won't ruin, but was just dumb.

    Killzone 3: fun game, worth playing especially if you like the series. Beautiful game. Killzone 2 is the better one. Read there's a sequel for PS4 on launch. Wonder how it'll compare?

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