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: Detective Grimoire

Adventure titles have certainly come along way.  Seen as a totally dead genre in the early 2000s they became completely rejuvinated largely in part because of Telltale Games.  But since then we’ve seen every single game’s maker out there crank out an adventure title.

Adventure titles have this odd problem where they need to craft an open world, non-linear, partially scripted, high quality experience.  In most games fully voiced content and custom animations would be seen as a bit of a luxury… but in this genre it’s a requirement to get in.

Detective Grimoire is an adaptation of a flash game of the same name.  It’s rather appropriate that adventure titles would show up in flash games because flash games are also all about high quality custom artwork.

Detective Grimoire is a murder detective… and there’s a murder in a swamp.  You need to interview all of the suspects, collect all the clues and put two and two together.  The game only has one mystery and promises (and gives) four total hours of gameplay.  Those four hours are mostly dialogue about clues and interviewing suspects.  There are 9 suspects total… including the deceased.

You can click on anything and Detective Grimoire will give you a comment.

Items are barely usable and there’s no real wonky combinations to work on.  The game only requires you to talk to suspects and remember enough details about them to continue on.

There in lies the problem with the games.  Adventure titles tend to lend to mass amounts of complexity that drive the player nuts.  They’re usually insanely difficult to figure out and you may have to take some time to think about it.  But with this kind of adventure title you simply have to pay attention to the dialogue.

The game offers enough complexity for a child, but not really for an adult.  It’s cheap which is good but I don’t know if you’d enjoy your four hours of play here.

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 #63: Trine 2

Well it’s a time for another indie hunk of junk.  I’m starting to get sick of the great Steam sales being crappy indie games that everyone pretends are AAA titles.

But wait, you say, it’s Trine 2.

Upon loading up the game I’m in awe.

Serious awe.

LOOK!

It’s actually an indie title with pretty graphics.

This is something I’ve wondered for quite some time.

And it’s a huge wonder.

Why is it that all these indie developers are developing gaming styles and mechanics people want… but then they make them look like this:

Yeah I get when you’re completely broke and it’s your first game and all.  But that’s not a real excuse when your game sells 2,000,000 copies at $20 a pop and you’re now sitting on a $40,000,000 budget for your next release… which ends up being the exact same crappy graphical style every time.

But Frozenbyte decidedly are doing things different, they’re taking all that money they made from the first Trine and investing it into actually improving the quality of their game.

I mean look at this in awe.

Here’s a 2D puzzler with AAA graphics.

But enough on that, on to the actual game!

The game has 13 levels with each being roughly about 20 minutes long.

The game has three heroes in it.

First is your wizard.

The wizard will build these blocks with cogs in them.  With further talents he can also make more of them and can also build a line shaped one.  This makes most puzzle solving very easy.

He also has the ability to levitate objects however he has no offensive abilities and is thus useless in battle.

Next up is our warrior type.

The only thing the warrior can actually do is attack with a sword, block with a shield and break stuff with a hammer.  As far as puzzle solving goes you’ll never use him, but whenever packs of goblins show up, heave ho!

Finally we have our thief…. I’m sorry enterpreneur class.

She can throw a whip up to tackle on to objects and swing around.  She can also fire arrows to break objects or hit enemies.

Once again, compared to the wizard her uses will be limited.

You switch between these heroes by pressing 1, 2 and 3.  You aim with your mouse and move around with WASD.  For modern platformers this will not be awkward and will be very common, for others it’ll take some getting used to.

The game is a co-op game that can be played 1-player.  A lot of times it is amazing how much easier it is to solve puzzles with a second person around.  A puzzle that might have you scratching your head is merely a matter of having a wizard elevate you on a box so you can get to a switch that was completely untouchable before.

Another element of the game that gets easier with a group is the gem gathering.

Gems are often acquired through jumping games, cross-character interactions and interactive environments.  The one above was obtainable by using the wizard to move water flow and the warrior to splash water off of his shield on a giant plant.

However if you had a team you would simply conjure a box, get your buddy on it and float him in the air to grab the gems.

Gems of course are used for leveling up.

The game features your standard talent tree prototype, but honestly if you even have half a brain you will assume the game is balanced around not having damage points in the warrior… and so you’ll just float all of your points into wizard conjuring.

It truthfully makes the talent tree kind of pointless.  Perhaps in its place there could have been automatic granting abilities over time since if you’re co-oping or whether you’re going alone… you’re only going to invest in one tree.

Since the game is balanced around only being able to conjure one object, the ability to conjure four with line and box shapes becomes insanely powerful for winning the game.

In fact… too powerful.

99% of the time that I was solving puzzles I was just crafting boxes and sticks to jump on.  Big puzzle coming?  No problem wizard will make some boxes and then we’ll rinse and repeat over and over again.

This is what it was like for about 80% of the game.  You could breeze through the game pretty easily on this basis.  For the other 20% (which 99% of people probably skip) there are complicated puzzles that actually do require all three heroes to do something.

Trine 2 Complete is hopefully the version you get.  With the DLC added in you are looking at about 12 hours of gameplay, compared to 6 hours of the normal version.

Trine 2 is definitely a hot shit game you should check out next Steam sale.

Review: Game Dev Tycoon

I really do try to stay away from indie games.  I feel that every time I play an indie game I risk getting burned on a bad investment.  Game Dev Tycoon from Green Heart Games is one that is not to be shucked.

Made by just two guys the game starts you off around the 1980s (beginning of video game studios) and takes you into the modern age, roughly 35 years pass.

You start off innocently enough in your parent’s house working from your bedroom.

This is not poorly researched.  Let it be known that in fact many developers DID start off in a bedroom studio.  Blizzard Entertainment (before they eventually were bought out by a publisher) started off as a three-man development team working from their home apartment.  They produced four games before they were able to afford to move out of that place.

So the basic game development board looks like this:

You pick a name for your game, you pick the Topic (Horror, Fantasy, Detective, Etc) the genre (Action, RPG, Adventure, etc.) and the platform.  At the beginning of the game it starts off with just the Commodore 64 and PC.  But by the end of the game consoles include all current ones, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Next (a future future console), PS5, WIUUUM (another future Nintendo console), the Ouya (which I guess is out), those 3d goggles everyone’s jacked about, and your own home console you make.

Topics all have to be researched, 10 points per.  This becomes important only if you are running out of creative options by nailing down too many easy games.

So development happens in three stages.  You move three different sets of bars to balance off the games in three ways.  Each game genre, topic and platform have specific needs and desires.  If you mismatch these you get bad sales, if you match them you get good sales.  Early on in the game it’s a lot of guess work in order to figure out what works with what.

Well now it’s time to make some games and the reviewers say….

Dammit….. maybe my next one will be better.

God dammit.  Why doesn’t this work!

The game explains to me this second game is not a hit despite getting all of the stats right because I’ve released two Future Realistic Disaster Games too close to each other and people don’t want to pay for the same thing twice.

That’s weird.

Because I’m pretty sure that’s EA’s business model with now 14 Call of Duties in 14 years.

Oh well.

Game can’t always get it right I guess.

It’s okay, eventually Post Apocalytic Disaster Game 3 does do well!

So after so many successes you move into a new office and can hire employees.

In this image I’m working on a game engine.  Game engines are designed based on research.  Maybe I’ll have someone research 2D Graphics, or Surround Sound, or Responsive AI.  I then combine these into a game engine.  These features cannot be used into a game until I develop them into a new game engine.

So the game gets this super realistic feeling that actual studios have.  They try and milk their engines for as long as they can befoer they go into development mode.

Building a game engine costs money per investment and costs the down time of not producing games.  So it’s a pretty risky thing in itself.

Eventually your studio expands and you get access to an R&D lab.  Here you can research AAA titles which offer insanely high pay outs but long production cycles, MMOs which have a maintenance cost but insanely high sales, and the Steam paltform which just gives you monthly income.

The other half of your lab is Console Development.

Yeah you build your own console.  I build the Troublbox.  The trouble is that you can’t actually beat this until the game ends.

Yes the game ends, well sort of.

You get this score screen that indicates how well you did and gives all sorts of interesting stats.  Alien vs predator was my most expensive game to make, Game #37 was my most profitable, Rape Ville wasn’t very popular (I wonder why), and Fantasy and RPG was my most common games.

The game is amazing and worth the buy.

That’s to say it’s not without faults.  It comes with a lot of the indie game faults that come with a limited development team.

The game is really short.  Most simulator games come with about 30-50 hours of gameplay packed into it and then a sandbox mode that keeps people occupied for an average of 200 hours.

This game will get you about 6 hours of gameplay and 10 hours to unlocked everything in the post-game.

It’s not the game concept that doesn’t work, it’s the pacing.  I spend an hour on Commodore 64 and PC and then I spend minutes on Playstation 2 and Xbox.  There’s so little time in between the consoles that you don’t even have time to develop for those consoles.

I actually got through the game with the score I did because I developed almost exclusively for PC and handhelds. It takes longer to produce a game… then consoles exist.

If the game was 6x as long it might all make sense.

The game is also DLC.  You can’t develop DLC in the game.

DLC is a very important innovation in gaming because it made it so you no longer had to fire your staff and you could keep them hired on to work on DLC.

The actual game cycle isn’t your full team working on a game at all times but instead part of your time working on the game and slowly moving up to a full team.

Even firing employees is pretty well stigmatized.  This is a staple of the video game industry.  They lay off half of their staff after every game comes out.  Currently there is a huge disincentive to lay off any employees.

This is because of the leveling up and development of your staff, which works well with the game…. but doesn’t allow for much disaster… something necessary in a simulation game.

Finally the game could also use an overhaul to add for extra development teams and multi-project management..  Once again this is not something they have.  Maybe one studio will work on a single AAA title.  But maybe also one studio will work on 5 small projects simultaneously.

Overall the game is worth your investment and the developers are worth supporting.  We look forward to more good things coming from Green Heart Games.