jack

Non-hugo games and comics

2017-07-12T22:03:32Z

Subnautica

This falls into what I'm starting to recognise as a category, computer games that are incredibly beautiful in multiple ways, but I play for five minutes and decide I don't have time to play properly. You crashland on an ocean planet, and oh my gosh, the water is so WET it practically comes out of your monitor. And warm and clear and inviting, with tropical reefs stretching endlessly.

The actual game is a bit like minecraft, find the right materials to feed into an emergency fabber to make more complicated tools to get more useful materials and components, until you eventually repair a distress beacon. (I don't know if that's all or if there's also underwater aliens or whatever).

Avatar on Wii

Rachel bought some old-ish games and it's been lovely to have something fun but simple-ish we can play together occasionally. One person controlling and one person kibitzing works surprisingly well, a lot is "what now" where having the trigger finger isn't the important thing.

It looks great, very avatar-y. It's not set at any particular point in the chronology but has a feel of an avatar well-respected but also young and unpracticed well. And your abilities work like that too: you have quite powerful abilities but you have to unlock them by levelling up, and they have cooldowns, so you feel powerful, but also like you can only succeed by being skillful, which fits the tone very well.

I have a few quibbles. The wolves appear intelligent to manufacture, or at least habitually carry, headbands of +2 armor, and yet not intelligent enough to avoid spontaneously attacking the most powerful humanoid bender on the planet. The avatar indiscriminately slaughtering wolves and taking their stuff seems tonally inconsistent on multiple levels. But that's computer games.

Also, Zuko can jump down behind Kitara and grab her and she's suddenly unable to fight back? Why didn't he try that on all the OTHER waterbenders there?

Flintstones comic

So... there's a gritty flintstones reboot. Except it's not *very* gritty. Not like gratuitous gore. But it deals with consumerism. And colonialism. And PTSD. And so on. I've no idea how this came about, but it works really quite surprisingly well. A few panels are incredibly biting. I loved the animals-used-as-appliances talking to each other, and calling the pet dinosaur a traitor.

On other occasions, it does veer a bit puerile, making simplistic jokes and criticisms of modern life that aren't especially telling. But worth reading some of.

Irredeemable

About a superteam where the most powerful superman-like member goes rogue and starts killing people, and everyone else has to figure out what they can do from there.

The worldbuilding and characters are pretty good -- it feels really LIKE famous superteams, while all the individual members are not knock-offs of specific characters from a single team, but embodying the *sort* of iconic characters that usually exist.

It's mostly about the characters, and what they do and their relationships with each other. There are quite a lot of *further* story developments of one sort or another, it doesn't just dwell on the premise forever with nothing evolving.

I've some quibbles. Things would drag on a lot less if people stopped going back and forth on when to try to contain someone and when it was necessary to kill them. And it's not a *lot* of sexism, but there's some.

comments

More Humble Games: Ninja Rabbits, Ninja Pizza and a Virus called Tom.

2017-03-17T19:42:33Z

Overgrowth (AKA the realistic ninja rabbit game)

Oh look! Cute anthropomorphic rabbits. This is going to be bloody, isn't it?

I only played a little of this. I love the basic mechanics. You control a humanoid rabbit walking around a 3d environment. AIUI, the characters are actually composed of separate limbs etc not just treated as a moving cylinder. You have a whole bunch of ninja moves, but they mostly depend on how you're moving and the attack button: like, "high kick left" is done by "move left and press attack". That means, it's easy to cause attacks to happen, and if you just want to spam *some* attack, it's easy to do so. But if you want to do specific moves which are necessary to the situation, or to roll with attacks and come to your feet, you need a bunch of practice. So there's an immediately apparent bunch of skills, not just "abilities which are unlocked".

It really feels like ninja combat: many enemies can be taken out in one punch, unless they block in which case you need to vary the attacks. Knives are dangerous: you need to knock them away, but can then roll to pick them up and have a big temporary advantage over one enemy.

Disturbingly, you get bloody as you get hit or cut. Not excessively for the amount of damage you've taken, but it's a real contrast to non-anthropomorphic-rabbit games, where you're usually immune and enemies usually go straight from "upright" to "shower of stars" or "shower of blood".

But I didn't put a lot of time into the actual game, so I don't know how it would be to play for longer.

Virus called Tom

Hilarious setting, a mad scientist who sends an intelligent virus (you) to take revenge on a corporation who sidelined him. You slide around a grid, trying to rotate tiles so circuits become complete. Quite fun, but I didn't persevere.

Ninja Pizza Girl

You're a teenage girl delivering pizza by dodging, jumping, ducking obstacles. Each level has a few implicit challenges: first to complete it at all, and then collect all the items and finish with an excellent time, which unlocks stuff.

The banter with her father and little brother are funny, and generally uplifting: they tease each other a lot, but are quite good for each other.

You periodically meet rival ninja pizza deliverers, who function as enemies, except your character doesn't lose a life, instead, they're knocked off their feet, and tauntingly laughed at until they stand up, which is really quite emotion-provoking. And when you get a good momentum going, the screen lights up whizzy and rainbow, but when you're knocked over repeatedly, it goes grey and dull. Many of the unlocks are self-care things which make the world happy again.

comments

Social smartphone games

2016-03-16T16:35:16Z

Liv and I have been playing remote scrabble again a bit (if anyone else is interested, we're using Crosswords by Eric House), and I replied to a couple of drawings on Draw Something from a while back.

Are there other social games people play? I really liked about Draw Something (a) that it bounces back and forth with someone else and (b) each move is self-contained. I've tried to play board games on Yucata which is great, but once I've made a move, I find it really hard to do something else and not keep thinking about the game.

comments

Short reviews, games

2015-10-19T22:56:48Z

Machi Koro

What do you call board games with cards instead of a board, like dominion? I, in defiance of etymology and bowing to convenience, call them "board games", but I know that can be misleading.

Anyway, ghoti got liv this as a present and the three of us played once and it was really cute. It's like dominion in that you collect increasingly costly cards, which help you get MORE cards costly cards, building a small Japanese (?) town until you reach a winning condition. But in this case, instead of shuffling your cards into a deck and doing "choose five", it's like Settlers -- you roll a die (or two), and cards generate money if they have have the number shown (divided into groups of "get money if anyone rolls that", "get money if you roll that", and "get money FROM someone else IF they roll that".)

I've yet to see what strategies work, if it's broken in any way, but the mechanics seem really good: like dominion it's self-balancing in the sense that if one card is far-and-away too good you could remove that one. For now, all the supply cards are available each game, but you could easily do what dominion did and print expansions and play with a subset of the cards you think make an interesting combination. It would be even easier to make your own, if you wanted to, as there's no need for them to mix with the others when shuffled in.

Cut the Rope, for android

I played this all the way through and it is Annoyingly Addictive. Both in the sense of having good puzzles, where each set of levels introduces a new element, and spends enough time to develop it, but also judiciously re-uses ones from earlier when they'd make sense. It does well in making a reasonable variation in possibility from a small number of elements, that you spend time wondering "I know how all these bits work, how do they work together" not just "i have no idea, what am I obviously supposed to do here?".

But also in the sense of being cluttered with free-to-play addictive intrusive thieving level-up type stuff which undermines the gameplay.

Soul Hunters

Agh, I love the idea of this, it's a mash-up of Magic the Gathering and World and Warcraft and a 2-d beat-em-up -- you level up heroes with a variety of abilities in multiple different ways, and defeat levels (and various arena combats etc which I've not looked at) by having your heroes run through the level defeating three waves of foes, ending with dark versions of heroes. The heroes mostly fight on automatic, making the strategy focus on levelling them up, not fighting well, but there is the interactive component of choosing when to use their ultimate abilities, which charge up at varying speeds. And then they collect stuff, which helps them level up.

It does everything to present the _idea_ of strategy, with zillions of knobs you have to tweak. But most of them are not really decisions, just "click X to get Y". And it's crammed to overflowing with freemium stuff. I don't know if there is or isn't strategy at the higher levels, but I need to get out fast before I find out.

But it's a shame, because lots of little details are really well done. There are zillions of characters to collect (and alas way too many are over-sexualised) but the idea of mixing and matching them is intriguing. And I liked imagining them chatting over a camp fire. The elf-knight with the six-foot sword -- everyone has ripped off tolkien, but more for "elves which are good at everything, but especially forests" and less for elves who ride to battle in bright array. Where does he come from? Is there a knightly order? The floating purple death who grows to twice their height and eviscerates enemies with a giant glowing scythe, do they enjoy chatting to the others over dinner? Do they enjoy feeling a touch of camaraderie?

And there's a plot, which is aggressively bland "fight dark version of heroes, now do that again in 20 different scenes, now do it while pursuing, now do it while fleeing, now do it in some other way which is mechanically exactly the same". It's like, someone mashed up every possible fantasy cliche and wrapped it around a scam, but they got people to polish all the bits of it enough really good ideas came squeezing out of the cracks...

comments

Resonance (Wadjet Eye Games)

2012-08-10T22:55:45Z

http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/resonance.html

I love the style. But seriously:

1. There are three cars here with at least seven mirros between them. I have a rock. The consequence for breaking off the wrong one to use as a periscope should be "my insurance premiums go up a bit" not "if you try to use any mirror except the one you're 'supposed' to use, you inadvertently don't smash it, but say 'I don't want to drive anywhere' instead".

2. There are four main characters, three men, and one woman. One is a physicist, one an undercover reporter, one a cop, and one had an abusive father. Can you guess which was which?

comments

Psychonauts

2012-06-21T09:54:33Z

Psychonauts is developed by DoubleFine Productions, which contains some ex-Lucasarts people, and recently made one of the most successful ever KickStarter projects.

The premise is the most awesome ever. You run away from the circus to go to a summer camp training kids to become psychic agents! The psychic ability is very well envisioned: it gives you some real world powers (psi punch, psi blast, levitation, invisibility, etc), but the main effect is being able to enter someone's mind. The mindscapes are very well designed, and really feel like the insides of different people's heads: an organised person, a paranoid person, a non-human person, etc, etc.

The dialog is smile-worthy without usually being laugh-out-loud funny, but I much prefer that to something trying too hard.

The gameplay is running, jumping, collecting stuff, with a bit of fighting, the 3d equivalent of a platform game. It's fairly well done, I was very happy to play through it (I'm about half way through).

Unfortunately some things do feel rather formulaic. Collecting mental figments is fun, because it's easy to get most of them, and if you're completionist, you can come back and make sure you get all of them. But there's too much different stuff you have to collect, most of which comes to the same thing, gaining levels, or going and trading it in for something else, which gains you levels, or buying something which lets you find more stuff which gains you levels. And a few things are somewhat obsoleted by stuff you collect later, which makes it very frustrating to see it, know you want to pick it up, but that it's not worth the time.

I think this is all genre convention for this sort of gameplay, but for me it somewhat ruins the immersion of the world. We're in the middle of a crisis of people having their brains stolen, the camp leaders have run off to deal with some other missions -- yet there's still someone hanging out in the camp store trading stuff you collect for stuff you need. Why hasn't he noticed the crisis? People's brains are very individual, but they randomly have three sorts of collectible hidden throughout. The slideshows you find about the person are very touching, but randomly having to switch to a different inventory item to collect different sorts of collectibles feels more like make-work and less like fixing someone's psychy by running around, which previously was handled surprisingly well!

Similarly, it falls into the trap of "make it too hard to get around, and then add a badly-justified teleport object to bypass all of the movement entirely." Seriously, you don't need an in-world justification for which keys to press to walk around, nor should you need one for short-cutting all the "run to the other side of the map".

The ideal is something like "you have a usual walking speed, but there's a special key which can whiz you straight to an area's exit if you can see it". That way (i) it's fairly transparent and you don't have to wait around and (ii) you get a sense of the distance you're traversing.

comments

Spacechem

2011-11-01T14:36:10Z

Space Chem is really awesome. Mobbsy first recommended it to me.

There are two little robot arms that manouver atoms around a grid to connect them together into molecules, which you control by putting instructions (turn, pick up, bond, etc) onto the screen.

Each level you have to produce something specific (eg. you get CH4 and H2O and have to make CO2 and H2) and in later levels you can connect several reactors together to make more complicated things.

At first, you just have move, pick up, drop, bond, input and output instructions, but later on you get flip-flops (which can be used to build more complicated loops), sensors (which branch to a different route if the corresponding square has a certain sort of atom in), fusers (which fuse two atoms into one with the combined atomic number) and so on.

The chemistry is at sort of GCSE level: the molecules are real molecules, with the correct chemical composition, but all the molecules are represented schematicly with right-angle single and double bonds, of up to a set number of bonds per molecule, rather than a more realistic 3d electron-shell based simulation. Which, um, is about right for me, although I imagine it may annoy some people.

However, it's a surprisingly really good introduction to programming! The constraints you're under are somewhat artificial (any real program would have variables and conditionals sooner), but the feeling of building a complicated system with the pieces given is really, realistic :)

Eventually I realised synchronising the two manipulators was almost too realistic, it started to feel like work :) It's not just a matter of timing them to make them accurate, because each manipulator can be slowed down if a molecule is slow leaving the reactor or a new molecule is slow entering, so they have to be synchronised with special instructions, and what works on one page where the inputs come in predictably fails miserably where one of the inputs comes from another part of the system and may be slow.

It's a spiritual successor to the Codex of Alchemical Engineering which was a similar idea but based on manipulating classical elements in a pseudo-alchemical way. Which was really interesting, but often annoyingly clunky -- manipulators would tesselate badly and often collide, and the rules of how the elements were modified felt a little arbitrary. Whereas Space Chem massively updates the interface to make it feel "swooshy" and it's a lot easier to use: I think it's both more powerful and less clunky.

comments

Dominion Cornucopia

2011-07-27T10:02:09Z

Last night we played dominion cornucopia and of the starting layout of kingdom cards, all were fairly useful 3- and 4- cost cards (except mine), including village (+2 actions) and several +1 action cards, and included black market (allows you to buy some kingdom cards not in the initial layout) and young witch (adds an extra kingdom card to the initial layout) and tournament (which allows you to gain one of five ridiculously powerful cards) and Fairground (victory card worth 2 for each 5 unique cards in your deck).

So for the first, and probably last time ever, I had a dominion deck with 20 unique cards. Copper, silver, gold, two curses, one estate, one duchy, three provinces, five fairgrounds. One (or two) each of: village, menagerie, fortune teller, chancellor, black market, horse traders, young witch, tournament, remodel, mine. Bag of Gold from tournament. And Festival from black market.

Which makes all the fairgrounds worth eight each, more than a province, which I never expected to pull off. If I'd had the courage of my convinctions, maybe I should have bought fairgrounds over provinces even when I eight cash to spend. Except that then, without provinces you can't win the tournament, so I would probably have been stuck on 19 unique cards. (I never had the opportunity to buy fairgrounds and a 3-cost in the same turn or I would have done so.)

comments

Games evening

2011-06-01T08:41:14Z

Cured four worldwide diseases✓

comments

Solium Infernum

2010-12-15T21:35:19Z

http://www.crypticcomet.com/games/SI/Solium_Infernum.html

I've been playing Solium Infernum. I was first linked by pjc(?) to the awesome write-ups on Rock-Paper-Shotgun diarying several players progress through the multiplayer game, and the growing tensions between them.

You play a noble of hell, scheming to replace Satan as the new lord of the pit. You manoeuvre to expand your lands, but the winning is determined not by territory but by prestige, which is given from controlling certain places of power, but also by making successful vendettas, successfully insulting rivals in parliament, etc, etc.

What I find exceptionally cute (and by "cute" I mean baroque and infernal) is that you obviously can't just out and start a vendetta against another fiend. Oh no, of course not. First you have to justify it by making unreasonable demands or insulting them in public (wagering prestige depending whether they cave in like a whiny little baby fiend, or indignantly refuse), and use that as an excuse to execute a vendetta -- little border war: you fight for N tuns to capture a certain number of hexes, or a place of power, or defeat one of their legions, etc).

You can defeat someone militarily, but you can't defeat everyone militarily, because you can't depart from the rigid etiquette of hell. If you just attacked someone without a laboriously manufactured excuse, you would be outcast and everyone would turn on you. So your little border skirmishes can't actually destroy a player's stronghold until you've completed three successive vendettas and thus manufactured sufficient excuse to declare a permanent blood feud.

But what metaphorically kills me is that there's no details to the absurd demand. You assume you trot out some obscurely justified point of theology to justify your demand, or perhaps point to your genealogy as an excuse for why they were rightfully yours. But it's not specified, you just make "a demand" :) It's like, you know, diplomacy.

This also means it may be prudent to demand a few things off your neighbours, whenever you think you can get away with it, even if you're generally getting on ok with them, because you never know what you may get. But also that if everyone throws your demands back in your face at once, you may have to swallow some of the insults, because you have a very limited number of legions (typically 1 or 2) and can't typically prosecute more than one war at once.

The game is independent, produced by one guy (excluding art and suchlike), although priced comparatively expensively for that (£25), but cheaper than big commercial titles. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading the RPS diaries to see if you like it, and trying the demo which lets you play the first 25 turns.

It's very pretty, but full of baroque details. For instance, all the legions, heroes, artefacts, etc, are unique: sometimes you need anything that fulfils the general roles "fairly cheap cannon fodder" or "total beast" and sometimes you need something with some specific detail that fits with what you already have. Lots of UI, while not bad is not perfectly optimised. And the first one or two times you play, you'll end up screwed by misunderstanding some ramification of something, but that's normally recoverable -- just remember that at any time something bad might "just happen" to your best advantages.

Where it excels is a multiplayer (asynchronous) game. The AI is good enough to have great fun learning the mechanics and experimenting, but I hear doesn't really give the flavour of independent antagonistic opponents.

I'll describe my first game in the comments. Did anyone play it multiplayer when it first came out?

comments

Wii Sports

2010-01-10T23:35:32Z

I posted almost the same thing about Wii Sports before, but I think I'd actually really, really, enjoy a mode where you could just practice hitting the ball in different ways as many times as you want, without having to go back to the beginning every time you make a mistake.

comments

Play Magic

2009-12-16T16:09:45Z

Notwithstanding strong feelings by people who don't like the game, I started playing some Magic:TG at alextfish and woodpijn's games evening, and with livredor, but would like to test out some decks on some other occasion; would anyone like to join me to do so?

comments

Recent freeware platform games, An Untitled Story and Eversion

2009-10-20T14:23:32Z

I recently played two games linked from http://www.toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?FreeGames which I really liked.

"AN UNTITLED STORY" platform adventure from Matt Makes Games

An Untitled Story is the sort of platformer I really like. You start off just exploring and it slowly gets harder and harder and you collect extra life and extra abilities (but in a deterministic fashion, unlike computer-roleplaying-games). You start off as a formless egg, able to jump slightly and that's it, and end up with more than 500 life and 50 unique abilities.

The graphics are really simple, but elegant: like a small child would draw, if it were then made really really good.

Toward the end it gets really hard. And there are specific save points, so you have to get used to going away and coming back calm to do the difficult bits, especially when there's no save point DIRECTLY BEFORE A BOSS.

Links:
Review and description: http://www.gamemakergames.com/?a=view&id=6278
Home page: http://mattmakesgames.com/games.php
Walkthrough: http://helixc.dabomstew.com/index.php?action=printpage;topic=4727.0

Alas, I got nearly to the end and found a bit sufficiently difficult I didn't continue. Now I just want to get it out of my head.

Eversion

See Alex's review of this (and some others) here: http://alextfish.livejournal.com/8791.html

It's quite short, but fun while it lasts. It starts off as a happy shiny grass-trees-sun cutesy platformer, and then gets lovecraftian, and the hell-like levels are really, really, really creepy. The interface is interesting: you flip between different modes during the level, which affects where you can get to.

comments

Dominion

2009-07-15T06:53:45Z

I went to games evening and mostly played Dominion all night. I'd seen it before, and it was very popular, but always want to pick up new games slowly, so hadn't tried it. However, it actually is easy to pick up.

It's is hard to describe[1]. You have a deck of special cards consisting of money, action cards (eg. "draw 2", "play another two action cards," etc), and victory cards (that have no in-game effect, but at the end of the game you win for having the most of them). You repeatedly cycle through your deck. Each turn you draw five cards and play/discard them[2]. When you've drawn everything, you shuffle your discards (and new cards you gained) back as your new deck. The first two turns, this happens exactly every two turns.

The aim[3] is to play money cards to get more interesting cards in your deck, which hopefully synergise with each other a little bit, eg. to allow you to repeatedly draw more cards until you have a hand full of money, play something else useful, and then buy something expensive (one of the big victory cards).

Because you start with five cards each turn, you need a sufficiently high density of interesting cards, or you'll fizzle by drawing a few victory cards that don't do anything, and a few small amounts of money.

Each game starts with a different selection of ten possible action cards available to purchase, so each game you have a slightly different strategy, and sometimes it's more interactive and sometimes not interactive at all.

[1] Unless you're a Magic player, when it's "like building a magic deck, but interactive and fun" :)
[2] Non-respectively, for pedants :)
[3] That's the aim. The justification is to score points with expensive victory cards. A pedant might have said "means/end" not "aim/justification" :)

comments