Mount and Blade (PC)

 

Introduction

The night is wet and cold. You’ve surrounded the city of Veluca with your group  of loyal and trusty warriors. You’re wearing the best armor and weapons money can buy and are the first climbing the ladder to mount the walls. You reach its precipe and get nailed with like, 6 crossbow bolts. What were you thinking? Never be the first over the wall– who do you think you are, Alexander the Great? I bet you thought it was so cool to have a giant axe and charge forward. Seriously, get a shield, it’s useful.

Pictured here are shields being useful. Do you believe me now?

 

History

Mount and Blade was developed by TaleWorlds, located in Turkey, and was published by Paradox Interactive, located in Sweden. You might know Paradox Interactive for Magicka, the Crusader Kings series, and Runemaster– these guys really like their medieval/fantasy roleplaying games. The game takes inspiration from games like Sid Meier’s Pirates! and Daggerfall. It’s meant to feel like the player is a vital character in a historical fiction novel.

Fun Fact:  The review scores for Mount and Blade varied greatly. Ranging from Eurogamer’s 5/10 to Gamepros 5 stars.

Mount and Blade was released on September 16th 2008. It’s competition was, Sid Meier’s Civilization IV (PC), Stalker: Clear Sky (PC), and The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (PC).

Oh man, check out those… 2008 graphics?

Compare that still shot with Stalker Clear, mentioned above and released in 2 weeks before.

 

Nostalgia

Game Mods. I remember seeing the guys at my college computer club playing this game and they all had all sorts of crazy mods for it. I’ve seen Star Wars mods where being wookie is just about wearing special wookie armor and all the swords were replaced with lightsabers. This game is easily modable and I think that’s a huge point for it. I know it’s no excuse for its lacking appearance and its semi-limited gameplay options but it is really cool. I’ll admit that I haven’t installed any mods for it but that’s not for lack of them. The internet is brimming with mods for this title and I urge players to seek out and try them.

Freaking skeletons. You can mod a skeleton army! Sign me up.

 

Gameplay

Mount and Blade is difficult to describe when it comes to its gameplay. It’s certainly a bit of a sandbox, there are any number of things the player can do. They can become a trader, become a bandit, a mercenary, a gallant  knight, a despicable scoundrel, the protector of a village, the lord of a castle, or try to take the world for themselves–key word ‘try’. The character’s skills are the main influence on what the player can do. If they want to make a character who’s good at trading it will behoove them to put extra points in trading or looting if they wanted to be a bandit for example.

Look at all these skills! They’re all also cleverly related to different attributes.

But if you want to do what the game “intends” you to do you’ll end up becoming the vassal to a king and conquering castles and cities… until he doesn’t shower you with the attention that a brave and valiant warlord deserves and has consistently given fiefs and castles to Lord Bulba and then you defect and he flips his shit and then you’ve got to flee to the nearby kingdom and hope they’ll accept you after to took over 2 of their cities… I think this one got away from me. But the point is that you can do a lot of things and you never know what’ll happen.

Maybe if you could extract your lips from King Ragnars butt then you might be able to actually accomplish something instead of having me do all your dirty work you stag bannered, stubble faced prick… I might hold a grudge.

Your path to success is based on the troops that you recruit. Each of the different factions has a recruit that can be upgraded into different units. And each factions troops lends themselves to different roles, certain factions have troops that a better suited to different tasks on the battlefield. In taverns across Calradia there are mercenaries and “heroes” to hire. Mercenaries are generic units that perform their tasks admirably but don’t excel in any real way. Heroes are characters that always get knocked out in battle and never truly die. They also can gain skills like the player can which allows very skilled heroes to contribute to each other’s skills, if applicable. These heroes also have opinions of other heroes and of the player’s actions. Some heroes revel in being bandits, other will leave the party if they raid too many villages.

 

The Gush

Do you see that face? That’s Jeremus and he’s the best hero money can buy, by which I mean he’ll join the party just to save peoples lives. How… Why? Because he’s a surgeon. I know medicine from this era isn’t great but Jeremus has got some good ideas and he just wants to keep people alive. He’s not too keen on bandits and imposing on villagers but he’s the only surgeon that needs no training.

All of the factions have grounding in different cultures of the time. Each one feels uniquely like themselves. It’s easy to identify who you’re fighting just by looking at their troops.

There are lots of different ways to alter the difficulty. From increasing the damage you deal to decreasing the damage you take to decreasing the general AI levels.

Being part of a cavalry charge is awesome and it’s something that not a lot of games offers.

Hold formation! Strike like a rogue wave!

I love the Nords, they assault castles and don’t afraid of anything.

I also love the Khergits, they are based on the mongols and that’s all you need to know.

The map is well decorated and looks like a real geopraphic location

It’s a pretty sweet map.

The interactions and dialogue of the heroes is really great. Hearing a superstitious and uneducated assassin accuse an engineer of black magic because he’s doing math in the sand is just hilarious.

 

The Kvetch

The music in this game isn’t very good. That’s all there is to it. It tries to have sweeping orchestral pieces but it’s plain to see it was made in some sort of program and not put together too well.

There’s only 1 different type of swing for every angle of attack. You’re always right handed and you can swing right, left, overhead, and stab and it’s always the same.

Cattle escorts. The cattle escort missions are the worst type of quests to get. They’re damn hard to control and it’s just tedious and not fun.

All the prisoners are only worth 50 denars because a Swadian Knight is just as valuable as a Swadian recruit.

The food system is really simple and seems merely ornamental.

 

The Verdict

This game is pretty good but after playing the sequel it feels incomplete. Mount and Blade: Warband has so much more polish and it really improves the games feel end experience. So I can’t recommend this, but only because Warband is better. Nostalgia status: Unblinded.

Next Week: Max Payne

Netstorm: Islands at War (PC)

I guess this is a game about… lightning. Great box, team.

In a world above the clouds people live on the scarce islands of land that float among the winds. This world is ruled by a cruel emperor and you are part of the revolution to depose him. You’ve been captured and imprisoned but you’ve freed your priest of the Furies and are ready to fight for freedom here and across the skies. Use your tactical acumen to place buildings, gather resources, and crush your enemies!

Did I say tactical acumen? I meant floating islands and buildings.

History

Netstorm was developed by Titanic Entertainment which, as far as I can tell, is comprised of 8 people and was published by Activision. A demo was released a month before it released proper and a simple exploit allowed users to unlock the full game with it. The game itself had bugs within, particularly in the multiplayer game mode. It was possible for players to force opponents to crash the game, securing easy victory. Both of these exploits significantly hurt sales. Activision kept the servers up until 2002 and now fans maintain enough servers to play online for diehard players.

The game is considered abandonware so downloading it is just a click away (http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/216/NetStorm+-+Islands+at+War.html).

Netstorm was released on October 31st, 1997. It’s competition was Curse of Monkey Island (PC), Colony Wars (PS1), and Age of Empires (PC)

There are also some 3D remake projects rolling around the web.

Nostalgia

Have you ever had to stop playing a game, or at least stop progressing, because there was one level you couldn’t beat? TV tropes refers to something like this as “That one level,” and Netstorm has one helluva “That one level.” It’s called The Noose and it’s a level with a big gimmick. The player’s starting island is surrounded by a special unbreakable bridge. The bridge has a few breakable segments but the rest can’t. The player can’t build bridges to the enemy island or nearby resource clusters so… how do get out? I didn’t figure it out for years. Apparently when a building is destroyed next to a bridge it breaks the bridge segments around it. So what you have to do is build a building next to the breakable parts of the noose and destroy those buildings yourself. But this is something that’s never explained in the game, it’s something that’s not even incidentally noticeable. I had to cheat to level select to skip it when I was a kid. It’s super annoying and it’s the first level of the second chapter.

Look at this nonsense! How is someone supposed to figure this out?

Gameplay

The game is about building buildings, building bridges, and building units to gather resources. Some buildings attack other buildings, other buildings absorb damage, and other buildings have other strange uses (Did building stop being a word?).  You can build bridges off of your island in order to reach resource nodes (Storm Geysers) and buildings.

The buildings and units you can build are limited by your knowledge. Then you need to build a workshop that correlates to the element of knowledge your building for and select it as one of the buildings that workshop is producing. If you don’t have the knowledge to build something then you’ll have to beat the level without it.

It’s less of a tech tree and more of a tech pile.

The four elements are Sun, Rain, Wind, and Thunder. Each element has a unique quality and theme. Sun buildings are simple but competent, Wind are quick and cheap but lack durability, Rain buildings are a little weird but useful, and Thunder buildings are incredibly powerful but are expensive and difficult to use.

Some advanced mechanics: Every building you destroy gives you a portion of its cost to you in storm power and the explosion can damage nearby buildings (Note: Defensive buildings don’t generate damaging explosions.) It’s cheaper to build more workshops of lower levels but that’ll hog your island space.

Space management can get a little crazy.

You claim victory over your opponent by immobilizing their priest, capturing him, bringing him to an altar, and sacrificing him to the Furies. It’s sort of interesting how you can be victorious without destroying your opponent’s stuff. It’s all about this one little vulnerable guy.

The sacrificial ritual has its own music and dialogue that all players can hear so everyone knows it’s going on.

The Gush

The 3D art for the encyclopedia’s models look really good. And each entry has a bit of flavor text that fleshes out the world. The humor in that flavor is dark but still hilarious.

The Nimbians are a people with a fully developed culture. Their art, government, and religion all serve the war they fight and their fighting serves their art, government, and religion.

I’m not sure if the soundtrack is dynamic but it certainly seems it. The beginning of each match has tranquil music that picks up as the buildings start going up, the lightning start arcing, and the whirligigs start their bombing runs.

The first two chapters of this game have a really great difficulty curve. They’re not too hard but not too easy either.

The opening cutscene for this game is surprisingly good.

GRAPHICS!

Every element has the same types of units but it’s incredible to see how little tweaks to their design can make them feel so different and unique.

This game can get incredibly chaotic, and it’s meant to. An enemy can sneak bridges behind your island and unload a pile of hurt on your workshops or other valuable structures. It’ll keep you on your toes to make sure nothing fishy is going on. The AI isn’t that bad but high level multiplayer can get dizzying.

I mean, what part of this seems difficult to follow?

The Kvetch

It’s sort of impossible to play the multiplayer anymore. Maybe I just couldn’t find a good server but there was never anyone else online. The multiplayer was supposed to be the big draw and it’s disappointing that it’s impossible to get a game going.

The Noose. (I’m still mad)

Some units and buildings just aren’t good… well… one is. The Arc Spire. It says it does 50 damage, more than anything else in the game! But it just creates a damaging wall between it and another Arc Spire, so an enemy has to be dumb enough to move into it or maybe it damages things structures between it too… I dunno. It just seems pointless.

The last chapter is ungodly levels of hard. It’s really unfun.

Dust Devils are generated by Dust Devil Generators. The generators can be destroyed, the Devils themselves cannot. I’ve played this game for years and still don’t know how to counter them effectively.

The Verdict

For the low price of FREE it’s simple to see why this game is worth playing. It’s got solid mechanics, fun flavor, challenging gameplay, and’ll entertain for a few hours at the least. I recommend this game without nostalgic interference. But when you get to The Noose, give it hell for me.

Next Week: Mount and Blade

Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi (Playstation 1)

Introduction

After the destruction of the Death Star Emperor Palpatine sends out the call to a hitherto-unknown character, Arden Lyn– Not Darth Vader, call someone we have no connection to and have never heard of. He orders her to go beat up Luke, Han Solo, Chewbacca, and Princess Leia. Arden also teams up with Boba Fett and some alien guys. Lyn is an expert in the galactic martial art of Teras Kasi, which everyone else has picked up pretty quickly to face her. It’s time for all these characters to rumble across the Galaxy.

This is Arden Lyn. How does she hold up that giant robot arm with her normal body?

 

History

This game was developed by Lucas Arts– A Star Wars game developed by Lucas Arts, what are the odds? The reviews for this game are really mixed, but mostly on the negative side. The most common complaints were that Lightsabers did not remove limbs on hit and that characters were grossly imbalanced– but I’ll get to that later.

It introduced three new characters to the canon, A Tusken Raider named Hoar– yes it’s pronounced how you think it’s pronounced, A Pig Man guard from Jabba’s Palace named Thok, and Arden Lyn herself. Although they didn’t receive much, if any, backstory in the game they were fleshed out in the expanded fiction later on down the line. Arden Lyn and Teras Kasi actually became things that were acknowledged and vital to the canon.

Fun Fact: Teras Kasi is Finnish for Steel Fist.

Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi was released on September 23, 1998. It’s competition was Fallout 2(PC), Caesar III (PC), and Crash Bandicoot Warped (PS1).

Say what you will about choosing these races, I think they’re who the fans were dying to see guys brawl.

 

Nostalgia

Did you ever like a game that turned out to be totally bad? My father and I loved this game. It united our love of Star Wars and his desire to not play a game that took a long time to beat. I tried playing every character and he would only play Luke, he wanted to be the Jedi hero so that’s who he played. I’d try to sneak the difficulty higher when he went through the arcade mode to see him get frustrated or rise up against opposition.

But looking back on the game now I had no idea that the reviews for it were so bad. I thought this game was awesome, there were a lot of frustrating things but as a kid that didn’t play it competitively those problems didn’t come to light– Except for you Hoar, I’ll never forgive you.

I’m looking at you, you sandy bastard.

 

Gameplay

Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi is a fighting game, so it’s all about learning combos and using moves that are effective against your opponent’s moves. This all being said the move lists are only in the manual.

Every time you deal or take damage it fills your character’s power gauge. This power is measured from one to four bars and certain moves use this power gauge. Finishing moves us it all and devastate your opponent with an incredibly impressive attack.

There’s also a stun meter under each character’s health bar and I have no idea how it works.

Some characters have weapons that they can use. Luke’s lightsaber and Hoars gaffi stick are really cool to use but Chewbacca, Han, and Fett only get blasters that aren’t incredibly useful. Their ranged attacks have such a long charge time that it’s easy for other characters to close the gap and deck them in the schnoz.

The Gush

Playing as Luke Skywalker and fighting Darth Vader in a fighting game lightsaber duel is fun no matter how bad the controls are.

For the playstation 1 this game looks pretty good actually. The fields and arenas are good depictions of their settings, except for maybe the Hoth map.

Oh look… whiteness and snow.

The game has some fun and silly cheats like big head mode and tiny fighter mode.

The Kvetch

If you lose the manual you’ll lose the game. And when there are two players and only one manual, it turns the game into a pause-fest where each player is trying to remember or get the manual to figure out what to do. Most games have a move list available from the pause menu, this is not most games.

There are also certain moves that aren’t in the manual but are only in the strategy guide. Because gating moves behind a 20 dollar pay wall is fair, right?

The control input is kind of clunky. There are times where I SWEAR I’m pushing buttons, and the game recognizes it in practice mode, but I still don’t attack properly.

Or maybe the game is just glitching out.

The game only has 8 characters but it does have four unlockable characters. Unfortunately all these unlockable characters are just pallet swaps of other characters, they look different but have the same moves. With the exception of the incredibly hard to unlock, Mara Jade. She’s actually worse than Luke in every way– her healing move heals the opponent too! Bug or feature? You decide!

Oh… Stormtrooper… just what I wanted.

Some finishing moves can miss and other can’t, missing your finisher can be really disappointing especially when your opponent can’t miss theirs.

Animations are repeated a lot, especially with winning and losing taunts.

It’s ungodly hard to unlock Mara Jade in this game. You have to put in a cheat and then beat some enemies on the hardest difficulty level. A CHEAT is necessary to legit unlock a character, because fairness.

Some characters are unfairly good. HOAR RANT ENGAGE! Hoar has one special move, just one. It’s called the whirling dervish and it makes him spin around and hit the opponent 12 times or something. If he hits you with it, it’ll only stop when the move is over. It’s hard to dodge, deals a bunch of damage, and it’s just the same thing over and over again. It’s also his finisher, the only big difference being that the non-finisher version does less damage. Fighting this guy is a nightmare because two Whirling Dervishes will knock you out and using him feels like cheating because you knock out the opponent in two moves. But the only way to beat him is to play as him, you have to get on his level, stoop so low, to defeat the game.

This is what the dark side really is. Winning at any cost, ignoring fun and choosing victory.

 

The Verdict

I know I’ve complained a lot about this one but I can’t bring myself to hate it. Maybe I’ve succumbed to the dark side of Hoar’s spinning assaults but I just love having this fight…

Show me another game where I can face my father, playing as Darth Vader, as I play Luke Skywalker? Didn’t think so.

Next Week: Netstorm for the PC

Chrono Trigger (SNES)

Introduction

Chrono is a fatherless young man (Who doesn’t speak, has spiky hair, and a modestly sized sword)– and you know what that means, he’s the main character of a JRPG– who is going to the Kingdom’s Millenial Fare. He meets a boisterous young girl and goes to meet his best friend, Lucca. This is a JRPG and Lucca is a young woman wearing goggles so she’s got to be a super genius capable of constructing hyper-advanced technology. And this happens to be the case. When Chrono’s new friend tests the teleporter her strange pendant– which couldn’t be of vital importance– has a strange reaction to the machine and she disappears. As it turns out the pendant turns the teleporting machine into a time machine. More time portals open up during an adventure that leads Chrono and his friends through all of time.

“Lucca, is this thing safe?” “Of course, it’s completely untested and might turn your friend inside out but that’s what science is for.”

 

History

Chrono was made by Squaresoft by a team lead by Hironobu Sakaguchi, you might remember him from my Final Fantasy VI entry because he lead that team as well– and all Final Fantasies before it as well. They didn’t always plan for the game to be about time travel but when it was mentioned by an uncredited employee the team jumped on the idea except the head writer, Masato Kato. The sheer taunting weight of causality and the infinite ways that a player’s choices could alter the flow of history turned Kato off to the idea. That is, until Kato thought about multiple endings to the game based on those choices.

The endings of Chrono Trigger are so big there’s a meme for it.

The game was translated by, Final Fantasy IV and VI translator, Ted Woolsey. They only gave him 30 days to translate all the dialogue. He was only able to accomplish this by using strategy guides and other sources to give him a better grasp of what the translation was supposed to be. The English translation also has dialogue that totally changes the nature of the villain. Perhaps it was a mistranslation, perhaps it was Woosley’s own spin.

Fun Fact: The art was design by Akira Toriyama, the guy that made Dragonball.

Fun Fact: This game was planned to be a part of the Secret of Mana series.

Chrono Trigger was released on August 22nd 1995 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s competition included Comix Zone (Sega Genesis), I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream (PC), and Twisted Metal (Playstation).

Nostalgia

What ever happened to game over screens? The most recent game I can think of that had a real game over screen is Metal Gear Solid 4– which was punctuated by a montage of the game’s events culminating in an image of Snake saluting.

The final fight throws a curveball at you, changing “exit” to “exist”. Selecting exist triggers dialogue from the final boss who shouts, “It’s not over yet.”

I mean, this is the era of game over screens that could crush the soul of a young gamer that just wanted to save the day or defeat Jason Vorhees.

I’m not kidding. This is the game over screen of the Friday the 13th Nintendo game.

But Chrono Trigger goes a step further.  It has a whole game over cinematic. We get to see the final boss begin his march to eradicate all the life on the planet. All of the planet’s denizens work together to fight against the fearsome being. This is all Earth has to offer and it’s not enough. It’d be like if the Last Alliance of Men and Elves went to Mordor and Sauron was reading a magazine and proceeded to beat them all silly and conquered Middle Earth. After all that we’re treated to this.

As the screeching cry echoes throughout the cosmos the planet turns grey as all hope is dashed and all life is extinguished.

 

Gameplay

As a JRPG, combat is not what this game is all about. The design still supports fun combat though by introducing character techniques and the positions of enemies. Techniques aren’t just magic, Chrono has an ability where he spins his sword around dealing damage to an enemy and all nearby enemies. Some techniques hit single enemies, all enemies, or enemies in a line. This gives the player more to do than just select Attack over and over again. Watching the ways your enemies move can also give you a crucial advantage.

The plot leads our dear characters to the far future to the end of time, and the far past to the dawn of man. At the beginning the player has very few portals they can go through and few times they can explore but as the game opens up more portals make themselves apparent and eventually the player can travel through time at will– If that’s not awesome then I don’t know what is. The interactions between the time periods can be as subtle as the way the continents move or how taking a treasure chest from the past makes it empty in the future.

And the plot is really what this game is about. It’s filled with double crosses, misconceptions, and the will to persevere. It’s an absolute joy to play through with more than one moment that filled me with so much pathos that I had to save the game and put it away for the night.

It’s plain to see how the continents drifted between 600 AD and 1000 AD.

The Gush

New Game +. All I’m gonna say– alright not really. After you beat the game you can start again with all of your levels and items. Now you can beat the final boss at different parts of the game and defeating him in each chapter unlocks a different ending.

The music in this game is some of the best I know. It so well represented the characters and emotions of the scenes that I was utterly enthralled.

Time travel can be confusing. But when I got lost I can just go to the End of Time and talk to the old man there and he tells me what I was doing. Leaving an RPG is the kiss of death for it, it leads to a lot of “Where was I going? What was I doing?” But this guy will put you right back on track.

Also, the design of The End of Time is just incredible.

Most games have side-quests as things that are either too difficult to find or finish. The Chrono Trigger map is so compact across the time periods that it’s simple to see all the areas that are available to explore. And the interactions between them isn’t spelled out but it’s simple enough for the player to think “Time to go back in time and save the day!”

This game has 6 characters (And one secret one– shut your gob! No secrets here!) and they all get closure by the end of the game. Final Fantasy 6 was 9/14 but this one is 7/7 on the character closure scale.

There’s something about seeing all of the characters resting on the trail like this.

The multiple ending in this game are an interesting look of how history would have evolved if the player hadn’t altered things. How did Magus originally get defeated? What happens if no one helps the prehistoric people fight the reptites? What do the developers think of the game? A different ending answers these questions.

I’ll admit it, I’ve beaten this game three times and I still don’t know how to beat the final boss. I just fill him full of damage until he dies. But considering the unknowable nature of Lavos I think this is a very befitting way to fight the creature. It’s anatomy is so far beyond our understanding–or mine at least– that all I can do is whale on him until there’s nothing left.

“What? How do I? Fuck it. I’m gonna hit it until it stops moving and then I’m going to light the rest on fire.”

The characters are all dynamic and interesting. They all have interesting traits and motivations. They’ve all got something that holds them back and, at the same time, leads them on this journey to discover a way to overcome well… except…

 

The Kvetch

… Chrono. He’s a silent protagonist with no character except what the player invests in him. I’ll admit, the Millenial Fare and the subsequent trial gives the player a powerful opportunity to figure out who Chrono is and, by extension, who they are. Because Chrono is just a self insert for the player. We’re supposed to be Chrono but there aren’t a lot of decisions like the ones in the fare that allow us to flesh out who Chrono or we are– and what if I don’t want to be a red haired messiah analogue?

Also some techniques are hard to aim.

The Verdict

I had to dig, and I mean really dig, to find one complaint with this game. It’s great, it’s simply great. I can’t recommend it enough. If it seems like something you’ll like then you’ll love it. I’m not even Nostalgia blind for it. I didn’t play this game until I was 19, and maybe 5 years is enough for me to get into my rocking chair and declare it “the best game ever” but I don’t think that’s the case.

Nice work every sprite in the game.

Next Week: Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi