Without Internet I Review: Virtual Families

You thought Virtual Villagers was bad…. Try Virtual Families and see how much worse it can get.  If you’ve never played either, you’re just that much better off.

From Last Day of Work Studios comes another great average terrible simulator.

In some ways they’re similar.  The collections are almost exactly alike.  You make so much money off of collections in this game that you might as well not even have a job.

So where do you start with this game.

Well, I’ll say it’s like The Sims… except if you wanted to play a game like The Sims… you’re honestly just better off playing The Sims.  This low budget alternative is boring, stale and gets old fast.

To start you can pick up your virtual adoptees (yes you adopt your family).  Early in the game you get an email from a woman (or man) offering to marry you.  Yes people send emails to marry, never having met it just happens.

So the game just runs right past the social aspect of this sort of game that made them so darned popular.

There is no neighborhood to manage, just your one home.

Get used to seeing this home… forever

Your one pre-built home has rooms that can be upgraded.  So there really isn’t a challenge to get money for the basics of life, you sort of just already start off with the basics of life.

Even your career is predetermined.  My virtual adoptee started off as a Pesto Sauce Maker at $15 salary.  Luckily the wife was a food critic at $60 salary.  Otherwise we would have never been able to afford the twins we had.

Yes Twins Basil

Twins

The act of having a child has nothing to do with a social dynamic.  You merely drop one person on top of another, they start to dance, and suddenly babies appear.

One of the massive problems with this game is that it doesn’t have any represented challenges.  The only reason you might want to stick around in the game is to buy groceries so they don’t starve.

Unlike in The Sims in which you have to leave your house and get to work on time, it seems all of the jobs in Virtual Families are all inside the house and done automatically sporadically.

Child labor in this game means making them find treasure!

Another odd mechanic to the game is Praising and Scolding.  Scolding is meant to deter future behaviors of a similar type and praising is to indicate an activity you wish for them to do more often in the future.

The problem ends up being that you’re not so sure what to scold.  It’s possible that napping, enjoying nature, watching TV, reading newspapers, brushing hair, and relaxing are all bad activities… but they seem normal to me.

In The Sims it seems like every single thing you did had a reward and the game was largely about balancing all of these things in your life.  In this game it’s not exactly clear what the game designer thinks is negative behavior and positive behavior.  When you see people slapping each other in The Sims it’s obvious what’s bad.  In this game you’re trying to formulate exactly how the game devs feel about poor behavior.

Overall the game is just insanely lackluster and boring.  The original The Sims is better than this game (having been released a decade or more ago) and you can most definitely splurge and be far more satisfied with The Sims 3.  This game isn’t even worth a toonie (that’s $2 American).

Without Internet I Review: Virtual Villagers

In journalism you are told to get the reader’s attention by providing important information first to get their attention.  So here it goes.

This game feels like it would be appropriate for Facebook or iPad but barely passes as a computer game.

There we go… you can stop reading… or you can find out why.

With amazing new graphics!

The simulator market, despite being very small is very competitive.  There are literally hundreds of simulators in development every year trying to take the top spot for the year.

You see, a really great simulator is an amazing game.  It is fun and everyone will play it for all of time.

An average or bad simulator is a very piss poor game of which people will get outraged and never want to play it again…. Virtual Villagers fits into this category.

Virtual Villagers has a very “The Sims” feel to it.  That is… if The Sims was a heaping pile of shit drenched in toxic waste and devoid of a will to play the game.  Instead The Sims is a masterpiece that is indefinitely addictive for all people and all age groups.

You start off with eight villagers.  Each villager will do a job.  As a restriction women seem to be the only ones able to give birth and thus become mothers.  The other restriction is that children cannot work.  Instead children collect artifacts that just don’t seem to spawn fast enough.  The other jobs include stone mason, builder, researcher, alchemist, entertainer, and farmer.

This is probably the simplest research tree I have ever seen…

It feels as if Last Day of Work (the publisher) didn’t really have a lot of work put into this.  They just continue to pump out various versions of this crappy game.

There are some really odd things with occupations.

The first is when you select to make a person a “Parent” WINK WINK STAY AT HOME MOM, they seem to just go around and sleep with everyone.  Just frivolous society building right there.  OH LOOK A MAN PUT YOUR PEE PEE IN ME.

The builder profession wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact that there are only three buildings to build and only four buildings to repair.  It means this game has a most definite ending for the builder profession.  Worst yet it takes FOREVER to build something.  Two workers will spend about 8 actual hours on a single building… Jesus.

Also time in this game seems a bit wonky.  Like there is absolutely no consistency with time at all ever anywhere.  Some things, like fires run on real time.  Other things… like ages run on some other different time.  The ages are very slow, you’re looking at one year per hour with children being born at age 4 and having to hit age 18 to be useful…. Yep have fun playing this game for 14 hours.

Inside the lab researchers work on research

When a child hits 18 they gain all of the skills they observe from working professionals.  This means it’s important to keep kids on task with collecting artifacts and observing parents as opposed to running around and playing.

To make things ‘fun’ there is a tech tree.  You can choose to learn four different trades and choose one of two different religions.  If that doesn’t seem like a lot… don’t worry… its tones.  It takes about 10 hours to research just one of these bad boys and the most expensive one… takes 16 hours.

Another aspect of the game is collections.  This is the “filler” part of the game designed to have something for you to do while you are waiting.  You are warned if you wait too long the thing will just go away.  Artifacts can be turned in for Tech points to build up those ridiculous tech totals and Mushrooms can be brought in for your food which honestly… you usually don’t even need.

Finishing collections gives you a chunk of tech points and of course if you’re a true completionist you’ll have everything collected.  They all spawn randomly at all random times so if you’re dedicated for the cause, have fun sitting in front of your computer for the next 60 boring hours of your play.

I honestly just left my computer running at many points just so things would build, I had little interest in collections.  At one point I found out that you could minimize and continue playing the game in the background.

The only downside to leaving your computer running is that you miss out on artifacts (food specifically) and you’ll be hurting when you actually run out of food.  Food itself regenerates very slowly to try and encourage you into getting the food regeneration religion very early.  New sources of food are only unlocked by completing puzzles.

A final part of the game is puzzles.  Solving puzzles means taking random items presented and using them in concoction with performing a task.  As an example spearing a shark might give you access to shark meat, mystery solved!  The first one they show you is that if you smoke out bees you can steal their honey.

It seems near the end of the game it ramps up quite well and there’s a tone of stuff to do.  However I feel this game severely lacks in pacing up until that point and I’d never recommend purchasing this terrible game.

Thankfully for me it was included as part of a HP Games bundle and I was able to play this terrible game… so you wouldn’t have to.

Terrible Games #11: Leviathan: Warships

So upon loading up this game I get a little menu that pops up.  I decide to click on input and see what the controls are:

Well it turns out they are blank…. this probably won’t go well.

Next on the list of OMFG THIS GAME SUCKS I get to see this:

How could I be so foolish, you ask.  How could I not know this game was created by the single worst publisher on the face of the Earth, Paradox Interactive.

Paradox has their army of Euro nerds constantly defending them because some of their games are playable.  My response is Sword of the Stars 2, Gettysburg: Armored Warfare,

But this game is developed by Pisces Interactive, a studio I have never heard about.  So maybe I’ll give them one shot and then never play again.  They also made a pretty sexy trailer for this game.

So after getting past this I get to a user login screen…

Now maybe someone can explain why a $10 game needs a user login screen to me.  On top of that they want to register my email so they can send it off to all the hackers.  More than likely it is for future Paradox product information that I have no interest in. AND they want me to confirm with a validation code.  There is no copy and paste feature here so I have to alt tab constantly in order to get this thing inserted.

Okay so none of this has to do with core gameplay, it has to do with dodgey DRM related practices that make this whole process as obtuse for gamers as humanly possible, thanks Paradox.

You start off being prompted do you wish to play the tutorial, the answer for this kind of game is always, NO, I don’t… but I will anyway… in case it’s actually complicated… but it won’t be.

So upon clicking on tutorial it leads me to this screen:

Unfortunately all the buttons are greyed out and nothing can be selected…. I restart the game hoping I’ll actually get to play.  So I load it up and it gets stuck on here:

And it gets stuck here.  Yes Paradox we are aware you make shitty games.

So 30 minutes into gameplay and I haven’t played a game yet.  It continues to freeze up at various phases.

So after this is all done I can finally play the game, yay.

So you control a fleet (one ship is a fleet!) of ships.  Each ship when you click on it will display it weapons.  Each weapon has an aiming direction.  So the portside guns can only fire portside, the broadside guns only fire broadside, the forward guns only fire forward and the aft (rear) guns only fire behind you.  This means that in combat you will need to rotate your ship around a bit to fire off multiple guns.  Alternatively if your opponent moves around you, you will fire off guns.

The guns do fire off automatically and the only point in choosing what to fire upon might be so that you hit one ship over another. But since you are fire to a region instead of at a ship you are most likely almost always going to miss because except for AI, no one just sits in position… unless their rotor is down.

For funzies you’ve been given a force field you can deploy on one of the four flanks of your ship.  It lasts one turn and can soak all the damage.  It has a cooldown and can be used about every three turns, once again for funzies.

Other funzie features include invisible mines and stealth.

Navigation is controlled by dragging a green arrow to go forward or a orange arrow to go backwards.

Both players do their turns simultaneously.  This can be compared to a turn based game like Civilization in which both players go one after the other.  This format wouldn’t work well because it would mean whoever goes first gains a serious advantage… except they don’t since guns all fire automatically anyway.  The downside is that the actual strategic elements of turn based combat get ruined and truthfully this game could have just been done in real time combat.

So the game has a 3 mission tutorial in which you go through the painstakingly simple gameplay and a 9-mission campaign.

The 9-mission campaign is really hard.  I mean really really hard.

Turn based games are known for having insanely hard campaigns, but this one is super hard.  It almost feels like you need a second player there because of how hard it is.  Which you can do, co-op campaigns.  Unfortunately just not enough people play this game to do this.

On the plus side the game is cross-platform between iOS, cellphones, and PC.  On the downside the games actually take too long to be a very good iOS game.  The multiplayer lobby must be confusing on the iOS side because any time I get in one I sit there with Ready clicked for about 30 minutes and then nothing ever happens.

Turn based combat just got sexy

There’s also something REALLY weird about the actual lobbies.  I was able to start up no less than 14 lobbies simultaneously until I realized that I had to individually “Discard” each game.  Once again I think this is something for the app side but it just doesn’t make sense on the PC side of things.

I think this is another terrible Paradox Interactive game and no one should buy it on the PC.

As for the tablet and smartphone.

I wanted to see if this game was available on Blackberry and it is in fact not.  Overwhelmingly smart phone and tablet apps are super expensive for what you get.  Angry Pigs (that’s all Blackberry has) cost about $10.

Unfortunately one of the odd features of the game is an always on DRM.  This normally doesn’t have any effect on me because I have great Internet but I could see how this might be a problem for tablet and cellphone owners who pay tooth and nail for bandwidth.

But like I said, had I not had great Internet… I wouldn’t have noticed it.

So one day my Internet was particularly slow, my provider was doing an upgrade on my service and strapped me with low quality Internet.  Boy was it ever noticeable.  Everything was slow.  Turns took forever because they had to be recorded online first (in single player). Shields seem to work forever or never.  There was even a weird glitch in which shields would block all four sides.

So I’m playing the campaign and suddenly this pops up:

So no I do not recommend this game for PC, and I suspect it won’t work that much better on a tablet.

THE PARADOX BOYCOTT IS STILL ON!!!

A Daft Review: Shootmania Storm

Every now and then a game comes out that is so awful and so terrible you are lost for words.

Shootmania debuted in June presented by ultra-popular Youtuber Toby Turner and a representative from Ubisoft.  It was presented as an eSport platform.

They presented an eSports viewer that seemingly does not exist.  Upon death you get this odd little view where it is centered on the map.  You never seem to be able to follow people’s first person cams and generally get awful vision.

So right off the bat the game fails on what it is sold for, eSports.

But there comes more problems with the design.

#1. Two Hit Kill

Being two hit killed means that you die very quickly.  Without it regenerating the goal of the game becomes killing as many people as possible as opposed to preventing death.

Without a way to regenerate health in any way it removes the strategic element to being a shooter and emphasizes too much just randomly firing each other.

#2. Bad Map Designs

In a game where you have only two hits you would expect to have some completely awesome escape routes available.  Instead most maps lack a lot of walls and allow for you to be flanked too easily.

In my gameplay experience tunnels represented a problematic scenario.  Basically upon entering a tunnel it meant you could be targeted from two sides through a narrow corridor in which it was very easy for you to get hit.

It’s not like pushing someone into a tunnel is even a strategic move since it just opens yourself up to getting killed or having your kill stolen by someone else.

There’s also all sorts of odd triggers.  One can launch you in the air so that it’s just a little off of getting to where you want to go without specifically timing a jump.

Another makes you move super fast in which it runs you into a narrow corridor… once again no real strategic advantage there.  Possible that you could use it for running away… but it just allows you to run away while running into someone else.

#3. Customization

A big sell on this game is that you can build maps and eventually if maps become popular enough they can become official maps.

But besides this it’s amazing how little development went into customization of load outs. After playing for four hours I was given a global ranking, but no access to different weapons… just the same stupid rail gun.  If I played the 3v1 mode I’d get a rocket launcher.

It seems weird that a modern shooter would launch without having more than one stupid weapon.  And I do mean stupid.  It feels like you are just shooting people with laser dodgeballs with how little they shoot.

There are no grenades or secondary weapons.

It might as well just be Portal with how little options you have with your weapon.  But truthfully even the Portal Gun allowed you to do more than this.

Overall I feel the game is priced appropriately because there really isn’t much to this game.  If the mega game producer Ubisoft wasn’t behind this it wouldn’t have any sales or any fans.  It’s a game no one asked for… and no one will be playing after a month.

Telltale Games Review #3: Telltale Texas Hold’Em

When I purchased the entire Telltale Games library off of Steam I received this game as well.  I adamantly installed it thinking… wonder what kind of twist Telltale would put on Texas Holdem.

As it turns out…. none.

There is one button “Start Tournament.”  There are no options to adjust difficulty or who you play.

You always play against the same four people.

So let’s introduce our players!

We have the OLD GAY GUY!

We have the CAT BURGLAR!

WE have the SURFER DUDE!

And we have GRANDMA! (her name is literally grandma).

And our final player is you “THE PLAYER!”

Yeah the game is so low tech you can’t even name your own player he is just forever called by the announcer by the name “THE PLAYER” for all of time.

Texas Holdem has some basic rules.

Each player gets two cards.

A round of betting occurs.

The dealer lays down three community cards.

A round of betting occurs.

The dealer adds one more community card.

A round of betting occurs.

The dealer lays down a final community card.

Final round of betting.

With the community cards you need to make the best poker hand with your two cards and the community cards to form a five-card hand.  If you live under a rock and don’t know poker hands (or you have boobs) follow this link.

Before each play each character will say something annoying, you quickly learn to skip their annoying dialogue.

Once a player is out of chips they are eliminated.  The goal is to eliminate everyone.  Once everyone is eliminated… you can start over from the beginning.  Yeah there’s actually no getting around it, the game is worth one play of which it took me only 20 minutes from start to finish.

Overall this game is very bad and I would avoid it at all costs.  Gambling games require a sense of continuity and advancement, something this game lacks.  It’s not fun, it’s short, and there’s nothing significantly different about this game.

In short,

Don’t buy it

THUMBS DOWN!!!