Review: Song of the Myrne: What Lies Beneath

Sometimes I think that people playing PC are drinking the koolaide.  Everyone says it’s not about the graphics it’s about the gameplay.  This line relates to games that are very pretty but have shitty gameplay.  This line was never intended to describe games that has crappy graphics and plays really well, it was always a denouncing cry against really pretty games that don’t offer much.  The line was never intended to be a point where people should really aim for the bottom of graphics.

The game is the ugly side of the 8-bit world, Atari.  The beautiful side of the 8-bit world is, Nintendo.  The clear distinction between the two was that Atari required imagination to think of what you were looking at whereas with the Nintendo it was clear as day.

Here is Atari 1982.

Here is Nintendo, 1991.

Now here is Sony of the Myrne, 2015.

Use your imagination, because a lot of times figuring out objects will be easier said than done.  Sometimes you run into an enemy and it looks kind of friendly.  You walk up to it and punch it first to see whether it takes damage, because that’s the only real way to figure out what’s friend and what’s foe.

But that’s fine because the game has about 80 weapons you can use to test them out with.  Weapons can be found all over the game, but you can also craft them out of materials you can find.  Crafting was a really big sell in the game, but unfortunately it meets a weird balance.

Crafting hardcores want tedious crafting that gives insanely high results that flow into a game that will change over time.  Skyrim is a perfect example.  You level up your alchemy to make more powerful potions to help deal with the new threats. But maybe you choose to go the path of the thief and you get a different set of skills.  This game doesn’t have that sort of depth.  The crafting is casual and doesn’t have to be done.  The game can be completed without it making it almost pointless.

The crafting itself is rather simple.  You combine ingredients that you commonly find on the ground into an item, weapon, armor, or miscellaneous item.  Doing so raising your experience and thus raises your level.

Upon leveling up from combat and crafting you will gain a point that you can invest in one of three trees.  Investing in health gives you more health, magic gives you more mana, and stamina…. well I never did quite figure out what stamina was used for since I never once needed it.  However I did mistakenly invest two points in it, which made me feel silly.  I felt silly because by Level 6 I was finished the game.  That means almost 50% of my points were wasted with no way of refreshing it.

You’re probably thinking Level 6 makes for a short game, and you would be right.  The game has about 3 hours of gameplay.  When asked as to whether or not new content would be added to the game they said this:

“ I might add some content in the future giving the fact people seem to really enjoy the game. It wouldn’t be DLC but free updates because I’m not a big fan of DLC and I’d rather make a whole new game than selling little pieces of an “old” one.

I would be interested to add some co-op elements first (some simple one, like in Deathspank where the player 2 is really different than the first one, doesn’t have inventory, etc…) but I have to add gamepad support first (because aiming without the mouse is a pain) so it might take some time.

Then I’ll see how it goes from there depending on the time it takes and the funds I’ll have left after that.”

So it seems there will be no effort made to add more content to the game, rather add functionality to a game that people very easily finish.  It really does seem like the people who made this game have mixed up priorities.  The reason why DLC is so popular is because it gives people more stuff to do in a game.  Adding controller support only opens up the game to be played on consoles.

The game has a huge problem, it’s very fun… but there isn’t much of a game there.  A typical RPG is going to be between 20-100 hours of gameplay.  A 3 hour gameplay basically introduces you to the RPG elements and then ends the game.  It’s so poorly paced that any mistake you’ve made has a huge effect on the end of the game.

Review: It’s a Wipe

When you think of turn based RPG the first game that should come to everyone’s mind is Final Fantasy.  But why not think about an MMORPG?

It’s a Wipe takes all that you love about the Final Fantasy games, removes the story and replaces it with drama between your heroes.

The apt description of this game is the day to day management a WoW guild.  You have people apply for your guild and you have to select at least 9 players to raid with you.

Much like a real WoW guild you have a lot of bullshit.  Like not all classes are designed equally.  But you really should bring at least one of each because there are class linked loot that will drop.  That means often bringing a very underpowered raid in order to get the maximum amount of loot.

Then you have to deal with that other drama, some people get chosen for loot over others.  Yeah someone has to get loot and someone else isn’t getting loot.

The game uses a morale system to decide the general feeling of your guild members.  Like in a real guild, members will leave for a number of reasons. Just progressing is not enough.  People may have preset feelings like wanting to raid a lot, wanting to raid a little bit, wanting to get loot, not caring about loot, wanting to talk, not wanting to talk.

So in the instance of loot when you have two people who both want loot, one person will receive a +2 morale and the other will receive a -4 morale.  In this way the morale system is almost always working against you.  The game makes it very difficult to progress beyond the first few dungeons, as only the most elite can get that far.

The available recruits in the game also does not fill up very fast.  If you’re losing guild members it will eventually become impossible to replace them.  The trek to the top is difficult and may cause you to re-try over and over and over.

And that’s when I knew I liked the game.  When I hate again and it’s arduously difficult, I just throw the game away because the problem is with the mechanics, not the game.  In this case I feel like the investment was worth my time.  I was uniquely interested in seeing what the end game looks like.

The game does have some things missing from the overall guild leading experience.  You’re not going to see the nerf and buff cycles that will cripple top tier guilds that stack their raids for success.  You’re not going to see the forum drama that occurs between developers and players.  You’re not going to see any sort of website index for community news and events.  You’re not going to see complicated looting systems.  You’re not going to see assignment of guild management.  You’re not going to have consistent events.

The game is very narrow in its scope.  It’s a Final Fantasy style game that has limited guild interactions.

For $5, This is a win.

Review: Barkley Shut up and Jam Gaiden

From Tales of Games is a free retro feeling RPG… about Charles Barkley.  This game is entirely free to play and available for download at their website.  As I write this they are working on a follow up sequel which will just be called Barkley 2.

If you’re one of dem there youngins you probably wouldn’t know that the 90s was the pinnacle of Basketball fever.  Everyone was wearing Jerseys not of their favorite teams… but because basketball jerseys were highly promoted by the gangster rap.

This was a sub-product of just how popular basketball was…. or at least how popular people thought it was.  The Air Jordan shoe was one of the most popular shoes of all time and people realistically thought it was because it was backed by Michael Jordan… as opposed to being heavily advertised by shoe companies and just overwhelmingly being a very good quality shoe.

The weirdest of the basketball 90s was definitely Space Jam.

This movie largely survives because Bill Murray gets pulled into it.  But it features a tonne of basketball players including Michael Jordan, Patrich Ewing, Charles Barkley, and Shawn Bradley.  The premise was that a bunch of tiny monsters wanted to take over the world of Loonie Toons.  The Loonie Toons challenge the monsters to a basketball contest, the monsters are finger sized so its seen as an easy win.  The monsters steal the “basketball powers” of popular basketball stars at the time.  Realizing they’re in trouble they summon Michael Jordan to help them win the game…. and of course Bill Murray.  Despite this movie being terrible in every way it did amazingly in theater, survives as a cult classic and has one of the greatest musical soundtracks of any movie ever invented.

Next on the ridiculous list is Michael Jordan’s own video game.

Often rated as one of the worst video games of all time (top ten worst list) this was a side scroller in which Michael Jordan would throw fire basketball at people.  Because Michael Jordan felt his image was so valuable he wouldn’t be in a single basketball game either than Larry Bird vs Michael Jordan 1 on 1 (which was just a shoot out for Larry Bird and Slam dunk competition for Michael Jordan) and wouldn’t be seen in an actual basketball game until NBA Street V.2.  By that point he sold his image to every single basketball game.

But of course this is all not as bad as Shaq’s game.

Shaqfu was also a massive failure.  It was a fighter game featuring the biggest man in the game against random enemies from an alternate universe.  It was a tie in with Shaq’s branding seeing as he was trying to be an action hero via Steel.

So yes basketball was really popular and the fact that if you grew up in the 90s and you actually played these games more or less goes to show exactly how popular these guys were.

So when this game states that everything in this video game is canon…. well you’d think we’re in a world of pain.

Initially you get a few laughs from the game.  It is making fun of all of these basketball games.

But eventually the jokes go away…. and you start to realize that among all of the ridiculousness there is a serious attempt at a story.

So you are Charles Barkey.

Yes the black bald guy with the pink shirt, yep Charles Barkley.  Charles Barkley of course did have his own game called “Shut up and Jam.”  It was a simple street basketball game.  Charles Barkley dunked so hard that he destroyed an entire city…. and after the great basketball player purge he promised to never play basketball again.

Michael Jordan shows up as  turn coat.

But once you get  passed all of the ridiculous elements of the game you actually find there’s a deep story here.  Charles Barkley is a single father and too proud to simply give up on his son.  Charles Barkley is also an angry black man always telling people off and getting upset with the world.

In this way the characters are more real and believable than most of the movies and video games based on a serious premise.

The only real problem with the game is that it has “in humor.”  In humor is a very weird and specific to all jokes are inside jokes… that is only jokes that people inside the circle will understand.  They’re most common in parodies and if you didn’t watch the original the parody is never funny.

Penny Arcade has this problem, they’ve developed characters and fans that they often just reference their own jokes.

So as an example you might have to know that Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley had this historic feud.  You might need to have watched Space Jam to get that its even a joke.

If you don’t know any of these things it just comes off as a really super serious story with real people instead of fakes.

Regardles, overwhelmingly this is a good game for anyone who enjoys retro style RPGs.  The game is excellent regardless of basketballers being a part of it.

Steam Sales Review #43: Breath of Death VII

I received this game for free after purchasing Penny Arcade’s Precipice of Darkness.  You may remember I didn’t give this game a particularly great review feeling it to be a little underwhelming and annoying.  So now for the second half of this purchase, Breath of Death VII (7).

This is a game that is purchasable on sale for the discount price of $0.99.  So the question here is, is this game worth a dollar?

Synopsis

Despite the name being “7” this is not a franchise, it is a single game of which there are no others.  The name itself is a parody to this style of games often publishing 4-5 identical games in a very quick time.  Very often these franchises refuse to explain to players much of anything and just presume that a player has a background understanding in Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, Megaman or any other mass franchise game.

The story begins innocently enough with the dropping of the A-Bomb.  Mankind is destroyed.  However the undead rebuild society and life continues as we know it.  Randomly we are brought to “Dem the Skeleton” who is a silent protagonist who can think but cannot speak.  He walks to a town where he meets a girl named Sara who is not only a mind reader but also recruits Dem to help her discover ruins.

From here the game takes the formulaic retro RPG format of continuing on a non-sensical random journey with no real story line.  Much like Precipice of Darkness the entire game is designed in such a way to make fun of retro RPGs that people seem to love for some reason.

Fight encounters are random.  This means as you move from space to space any space can randomly occupy a monster to fight.

The fight format involves selecting your moves and their targets.  After each round of battle you will get to select again.  However after every round the enemies become 10% stronger.  This means that tactics involving soaking damage and healing just do not work.

Every time you make an attack you build up a combo.  The idea is to continue chaining combos and then using a giant powerful combo breaking move to inflict serious damage.

The gear is the game is flat upgrade/downgrade.  There are is one armor slot and one weapon slot, very simple.

After gaining so much experience you get generic stat upgrades that make you stronger and able to take more hits.  You also get a single choosable upgrade that come in an “A” or “B” package.  Sometimes they are modifications to abilities and sometimes they are base stat upgrades.

The graphics style is 8-bit classic, so don’t expect anything flavorful from this game.  Everything is designed to look as much like Dragon Warrior as humanly possible.

There are tones of ‘in’ jokes designed for people who have played these games.  One of the first ones is in fact a joke about how many chests you will never ever unlock in the game.

Strengths

• Simple UI
• No Hand Holding

The UI to the game is insanely simple.  You will load this game up and you will understand what everything is for.  So many of these retro games try to be so obscure that they end up creating combat systems that simply do not make sense.

Boss fights can get scary when their power increases by 10% every turn

The game also has a total lack of hand holding, something that is common in modern RPGs.  In modern RPGs hand holding is often needed because the world is so massive.  In this style of game there is no need for hand holding  people should be able to rely on third party information from NPCs and the over world alone.

Weaknesses

• Not Really Funny
• Angering Combat System

There’s always that awkward moment when a game parodying retro games tries to be funny and everything about it falls flat.  This is the second game from Zeboyd I’ve played that really was not that funny.  I think it’s time for them to stop making fun of franchises (poorly) and start making some real franchises of their own.

The world is designed to look like Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy

The combat system in the game is very frustrating to work with.  The combos system is nice but breaks with the fact that healing is a combo breaking spell.  This means in battles in which you have your HEALER CLASS healing (because she does nothing else) every single round battles will take a long time and the enemies will eventually overwhelm you with powerful attacks.  Honestly with a 10% increase in damage per turn who thought it was wise to even have a healer in the game period.

Concluding Thoughts

I think missing from Zeboyd Games’ push into retro titles is that they really miss what was awesome about retro games.  I’d like to take this time to list out the things I feel that are awesome about retro games:

• Great Story
• Interesting Characters
• Simple Combat
• Elements of Discovery (Easter eggs)
• Challenges

I think the developers really miss out on the things that people love in retro games and instead made a game that had a retro feel in hopes that people would like it.  The real truth is retro games were good because that’s what we had.  If someone could make a fantastic game it doesn’t need to have that retro feel, it’s just an extra.

Steam Sales Review #41: Red Faction

This game was made 12 years ago and as a rule I’m happy a game that was made over 10 years ago even works on today’s operating system.

There are a few rules when looking at a game that is this freaking old.

The Brief: Reviewing a Retro Game

There are a few rules when looking at a game that is over a decade old.  Any game over a decade old is often referred to as a “Retro Game.”

The first of these rules is that you are not allowed to criticize the graphical style of the game.

The reason why games are not made with this graphical style anymore is because better stuff is available.  We could believe if this game was made today it would be much better looking… which of course its many sequels were.

People who tell you that Goldeneye’s graphical style is dated are really missing the whole point.

Just because you’re a civilian does not save you

A second thing is we cannot fault the game for missing features that simply did not exist at the time.  However we are allowed to note that these features are not there but not use that against the overall scoring.

If we are going to criticize a lack of a feature a reader ought to demand a reference to a game earlier than this one that has it.  It has to be remembered that a game made in 2001 has to fit on an N64 Cartridge or a PS2 CD.

As a final rule game length cannot be a key factor in the purchase.  Pre-Half Life 2 all games were under an hour in length and games really never got a strong story basis until then.  Today we expect 20-30 hours per game.  Red Faction was 5 hours long and is fine for when it was released.

Synopsis

So given these retro rules established there is not too much to talk about the game.

This game pre-dates the world in which you could only carry two weapons… so yes you can carry all of them.

Each weapon has a secondary feature to it.  The sniper rifle is the only one that can be manual zoom aimed.  The pistol gets a silencer (even though there are no stealth mechanics), and most other weapons are choosing between single fire and rapid fire modes.

There are four types of weapons, melee weapons (including the flame thrower), short arms (including sniper rifle), heavy (including assault rifle), and explosive which includes C4 and rocket launcher.

Rocket launchers and C4 are very key in this game because Red Faction is the first game ever made to have destructible elements.   Not only could you break stuff but breaking stuff is often required to move forward in the game.

The secondary function of the sniper rifle is zooming

All of the good guys are dressed in red and if you save one they’ll join you as an ally and show you where to go.

The blue guys are bad guys and will shoot you on sight.

Each section of the level opens as you enter it.  The game would be considered to be non-linear for the time for the number of rooms and paths you can choose to complete the game.  There are many elements however that are non-linear.

There are no tips or map tips.  Everything has to be figured out on your own… and there’s a lot to figure out on your own.

There is an odd part of the game where a voice confirms your direction but does not lead you where to go.  So you have to keep guessing where you have to go until you get it.  This adds a little more play time for your first playthrough.

Strengths

• No Hand Holding
• Refreshing Guns

It’s actually refreshing to play a game that doesn’t hold your hand every step of the way.  This is a game that is designed for you to look around a room and try and figure out what you’re supposed to do.  For a lot of people this will be a weakness but to me the way it is designed is good.  The rooms are small and it’s about what paths you take in a small atmosphere.  If this was a world as big as Skyrim of course I’d hate it.

Saved red suited men become allies

After about a decade of only being allowed to have two guns it is quite refreshing to get a full cache of weapons to choose for the appropriate situation.  The weapons are designed situationally and no there isn’t real gun balance there will be appropriate times for choosing a shotgun over an assault rifle.

Weaknesses

• Non-Linear Elements
• BROWN
• Old Bugs

There are two features that just do not go well together.  The first of these is saving the game, the second is non-linear elements.

If you save at one point and you don’t have enough explosives you simply cannot continue.  This happened to me twice.  This means without knowing about the need for an explosive… you might use them all up and not have an opportunity to collect more.

I waited here for an hour hoping something would happen…

The game unfortunately puts you into this awkward situation in which you’re completely stuck by shutting down previous open world elements of the game with fixed doors.

Did I mention this world is BROWN!?!?  I know that this game is undergroud but dear god is this game so very brown.  It might be a problem with the design choice but no there is nothing in this game but BROWN BROWN BROWN.  Even the underwater elements are pretty brown.

I should also note the game still has all of the old bugs the original game had… it just never got patched ever.  The most infamous of these bugs is when you Alt+Tab you cannot get back into the game without first closing off the game and restarting the game.  It sure as hell makes it hard to cheat and look up a gamefaq.

Concluding Thoughts

The problems with the game are not based on how old it is but some design choices.  It took me 10 hours to finish a 5 hour game simply because I kept getting stuck without explosives at points that required explosives but gave no access to it.

I’d probably never play it again and would not recommend it as a purchase.  Maybe if THQ breaks up Red Faction will be offered as a freeware license.

Climbing messes with your head sometimes

But in light of that it is important to note that Red Alert is a groundbreaking game.  It did give us destructible and manipulate objects long before the existence of Half Life 2.

Playing Red Faction is similar to playing Mario Brothers 2.  It isn’t going to be a very fun experience compared to modern games and you’d only play it for the nostalgia.

To close out this review I should mention that back in 2001 I downloaded a demo for Red Faction in which I got to play the very first zone of it.  After playing one zone of it I was unimpressed by the offerings of the game and decided not to purchase it.