You from the future bursts through the wall of your home with a giant laser cannon. You know it’s you from the future because the first words out of his mouth are, “I am you from the future. There’s no time to explain.” And before he can say another word he’s grabbed by a giant crab and drops his cannon. You take it upon yourself to travel through time… a lot and save yourself — I mean you from the future. And other yous from other futures or something. Just jump around and shoot your cannon all over the place in this puzzle platformer.
Everything you need to know right here.
History
No Time to Explain started out as a flash game on Newgrounds by Tom Brien. After it garnered a couple of thousands of plays Brien contacted Alex Nichiporchik and formed tinyBuild Games to make a larger full release. They started a Kickstarter to fund this full version and they raised $26,000 — $19,000 more than their $7,000 goal.
No Time to Explain was released on August 15th, 2011 and a Remastered version was released on July 17th, 2015. It’s 2011 competition was Bastion (PC), From Dust (PC), and Temple Run (iOS).
Experiences
This game is I Wanna Be the Guy lite. If you’re not familiar with the masochism simulator of a game I Wanna Be the Guy is then all you need to know is that it’s hard. Although No Time to Explain can be quite difficult it’s never unfair. As a platformer puzzle game with plenty of checkpoints it’s totally possible to brute force a solution and continue on. The game just keeps getting sillier and sillier, I keep playing just to see the crazy stuff that’s gonna happen next. the plot is incredibly difficult to follow because they game takes full advantage of the multiple universe and time travel heavy setting it takes place in.
Gameplay
You play as a dude using a laser cannon as a jetpack who uses it to travel through time. If that doesn’t grab your attention right there then this game has got nothing for you. Each level requires you to go through a bunch of obstacles that become increasingly difficult to navigate in order to reach a time portal that leads to the next level. These obstacles range from spikes, to water, jump pads, to walls that can only be destroyed by lighting them on fire with your own flaming body. Every world has got a boss and this game has got some crazy bosses.
This used to be strange, now it’s just Tuesday in the Multiverse.
The game’s challenge isn’t too punitive. Every time the character touches a stable section of floor it acts as a checkpoint in case they die. Falling into a bottomless pit or getting extremely dead — like immolating oneself — will restart the level however. The Remastered edition has sharpened the graphics and sound. It’s also added a lives counter to boss fights and lowered boss health. This is a mixed blessing as some boss attacks would kill the player and others would simply return them to the nearest stable platform in the classic version. Which would lead to situations where the player would dive toward attacks that wouldn’t kill them so it wouldn’t reset the boss’ health.
If you’re looking for an even greater platforming challenge then you can look for hats.
The Gush
This game has got variety. Just after the point I’m comfortable or bored with a certain playstyle the game throws something crazy at me.
Bullet Hell section while riding on a thief version of you shooting a dinosaur from the dinosaur universe? Very yes.
The movement mechanics change as often as the playstyle. One second you’re using the laser cannon and the next you’re playing a crazy psychic version of you that can move himself with his mind.
The plot is delightfully campy — fully equipped with an evil version of you with a goatee. It’s a little hard to follow with all the time travel shenanigans but even after I got lost I knew who the bad guy was and I knew enough about what was going on to keep playing.
It’s got Giant Enemy Crabs! What could possibly go wrong?
The Kvetch
You have to fire the cannon at the right time during a jump to get the maddest ups. Sometimes I can’t get the timing right when I’m almost damn sure that I am. Maybe I’m getting mad at video games but it’s really frustrating how small the sweet spot is.
The game can kinda drag a little bit. It’s great for short bursts but I’ve never been able to marathon this one — I know, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
The Verdict
This game is a tight package. It’s $15 on Steam and I love it to death but I’m not sure it’s worth the price tag. It’s almost there, almost. Catch it on Steam when it’s 20% or something. The controls are a little wonky sometimes but the plot is wonderful, the music is catchy, and the core platforming is to die for. I recommend No Time to Explain.
Have you ever had a nightmare? What was it that was chasing you down the halls of your mind? Was it a vampire, a horde of zombies, maybe a werewolf, the ghost of a bitter relative, the Boogie Man? The World of Darkness is a place where a bad dream of these things would not be ill-founded. A world where all of these monsters are quite real in the modern day — well the jury’s still out on the Boogie Man– and they hide from humanity while preying on it. You play as a newly turned Vampire, thrust into a world of generations old politics, rivalry, and violence in the city of Los Angeles. You’re a pawn in a greater game to the elders, just trying to survive. Fight, feed, use your sweet vampire powers, and figure out what is going on in Bloodlines.
History
Strap yourselves in because this one’s a doozy. Bloodlines was published by Activision and developed by a little studio called Troika Games, development began in 2001. Troika wanted to make a first person RPG, thinking that the genre was going stale, and Activision wanted to make the most of the Vampire license they had acquired from White Wolf in ’98. Development began with 5 developers, 27 others, and no head writer — they wouldn’t get a writer for about 9 months.
And the writer paid off with dialogue like this.
Troika began debating whether to make the game 3D or not. At the time Valve was working on their Source Engine for Half-Life 2. It would be fully 3D and have all the bells and whistles but it wasn’t done yet. Despite it’s incomplete nature Troika gambled on using it. This lead them to finish incomplete sections of code themselves with only Valve to go to for technical support. Because Valve was making Half-Life 2 in the Source Engine, Troika was forced to put off Bloodline’s release until Half-Life 2’s released. Further delaying things, Valve suffered a security breach that lead them to put more security into the engine. Leading Half-Life 2 to delay, which lead Bloodlines to Delay.
The scope of the project continued to grow. Every new system introduced additional models and animations for the characters. Most games have a static 10-20 models whereas Bloodlines had over 150 characters and almost 3000 animations for them put together. Levels were designed and then scrapped. The game planned to launch with a multiplayer mode but that was also scrapped for time. The game’s development dragged for so long that the team put off finalizing things because they didn’t know when the deadline truly would be. Things were further slowed as every decision had to be approved both Activision and White Wolf.
When Activision put their foot down and set a deadline Troika hadn’t even begun testing yet. Troika also didn’t respect the deadlines because they knew that Activision wouldn’t let this money go to waste. The money Activision offered to finish wasn’t enough to pay the whole team and some employees took pay cuts while others worked for nothing to push the game as close to completion as they could. The game released on November 16th, 2004 in an incomplete, untested, and unpolished state. Creative Director, Jason Anderson said that only 2 months of its 3 year development wasn’t spent in overtime.
It’s competition was Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS2), World of Warcraft (PC), and Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (Gamecube, PS2, and XBox)
Experiences
I can’t think of a game that I put more into, from a technical perspective. I can’t think of another game that was so broken that I also refused to abandon. I was playing this game when it chugged on my 1999 Compaq and I gave it another go when I finally upgraded to my next machine. Giddy with anticipation at the bug-fixes that came with the latest patch. Every time I play through it I play as a different clan and keep notice more dialogue differences. I struggle to differentiate between patch added content and stuff I just missed my last time through. Whenever I relate to someone about this game we have completely different experiences from our in game choices and it leads to a, “I wonder what happens if I do this,” marathon.
So many options and I want to see what happens for every one of them.
Gameplay
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is a first person/third person (your preference) action RPG game. Every vampire is defined by their clan, whether they want to or not. A characters clan determines their attribute points, skill points, and what abilities they can use — wanna dominate someone’s mind? Not as a Toreador you won’t. Every clan has also got a certain strength and a crazy weakness. Some weaknesses are as benign a losing more humanity when they do something untoward to looking like a literal monster like those of the Nosferatu Clan. Every character has feats scores which determine how effective they are at actions. Each of these feats is the sum of the relevant attribute and ability scores.
By ancient law and tradition everyone you meet will make you do something before they help you. I’m totally serious on this one, not only is it written into the rules of the table-top that all newbies have to work for the higher ups but they implemented that into the game. And I mean every-fucking-body will tell you to kill someone or find something before they’ll give up the goods.
If you thought no one would send the Mac-10 toting raver on a fetch quest, you’d be wrong.
The real meat of the game is exploring, wandering around, and messing with people’s lives for good or ill. And there’s something brewing in the Heart of LA, something that mixes together all the clans and supernatural into a giant pot that’s at risk to boil over. Naturally as the chose one — or whatever– it’ll lie to you to deal with it.
The Gush
I guess all of that content made but unimplemented paid off eventually because the programming in this game is really robust. Every character will remark on the character’s clan, attributes, and actions. Some things are effected by a characters humanity, preventing them from using their social graces if they grow too inhuman. Playing a Malkavian completely changes the game’s dialogue into nearly indecipherable babble that only makes sense in hindsight.
Complete with talking televisions and arguments with stop signs.
I’ve never played a game where I was more interested in speaking with characters. Usually I troll around, trying to find someone with a quest or something interesting to say but Bloodlines lead me to talk to everyone. Sometimes they would say crazy things, sometimes they would have cryptic hints about the crazy stuff going on, but they always had something interesting to say.
Speaking of characters, the voice acting in this game is really good. With VAs like John DiMaggio, Steve Blum. Phil LaMarr, and Grey Griffin they really knock it out of the park. The performances create characters I come to care about and really want to listen to. Combine this with Brian Mitsoda’s character driven writing and it creates an experience that’s oozing with charm and style.
This is THE White Wolf RPG game, accept no substitutions. There are no other games with the White Wolf license that are better designed or more well known. If you want to play Vampire but can’t get an RP group together, then this game will scratch the itch.
The Haunted Hotel. That is all.
The Kvetch
This game will not run or operate well without an unofficial patch and maybe a few mods. It’s almost absurd to purchase something with the knowledge that it won’t run on purchase but it’s something that comes with Bloodlines. The patches are easy to find and free (And the latest update was on April 20th, 2015) but it means plugging and playing isn’t an option. It’s a wonder to me that the distributor doesn’t just bundle the patch in with the game.
Sometimes the animations and textures are just downright ugly when I don’t think they’re supposed to be. I played a Toreador my first time through and they’re all a bunch of vain art divas so I checked myself out and I looked pretty good — especially for a dead guy. I went to open a lock and BOOM, I’m looking at one of the grossest hands in video game history. Then there are cinematics which include hoodlums shooting recoilless uzis into the air while the most stock sound effects I’ve ever heard for gunfire blast in stereo. It’s rough and blocky and breaks my immersion something fierce.
This game is pretty glitchy and crashy even when it’s been patched. I’ve seen bosses freeze, dialogue get skipped or misfire, and certain quests become broken for completely unknown reasons. This is just the stuff I’ve seen, mind you, there are horror stories out there about glitches in this game.
Unless my character has obfuscate, the power to go invisible, I can’t stealth. I don’t know what’s up with the stealth system but it seems like no matter how many points I cram into it it’s never enough. Normally it’s not a problem but there are some quests that can only be completed stealthily.
The fucking sewers. That is all.
The Verdict
This game has got its ups and downs but as I said, it is THE White Wolf RPG bar none. If you want to play in the Vampire setting or you want a satisfying Vampiric gaming experience in any variety then it’s either this game or nothing. It’s still being patched today and let that be a testament to how good this game is and how much work people are willing to put into it to help it flourish. I would suggest at least grabbing it on sale and then seeing where the night takes you.
We return to The Zone in the aftermath of shenanigans at its center. The zone is becoming more unstable — and yet safer in some ways. The military is stepping up their efforts to investigate the zone — although they’re shockingly ignorant of its workings. They begin operation Fairway, their bid to take over Pripyat and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and investigate the goings on there. They sent four helicopters into the center and they’ve lost all radio contact. You are Major Degtyarev being sent into Pripyat undercover as a Stalker to figure out what went wrong with the operation. You’re underequipped, underinformed, and otherwise unready to handle the rigors of the zone but it wouldn’t be a Stalker Game otherwise.
History
Sorry Stalkers in the making, I couldn’t find much of note about the development of the game. It was released by GSC Game World, like the other Stalker games and was distributed to the world by a cadre of different publishers. GSC was able to publish it in the CIS but Viva Media and Deep Silver released it in North America and Europe respectively.
It was released on October 2nd, 2009. It’s competition was Demon’s Souls (PS3), Saw: The Video Game (PS3 and XBox 360), and Brutal Legend (PS3 and XBox 360).
Experiences
If there was a feeling I felt the most in this game it would be confusion. I can think of no other FPS I’ve gotten lost in more. Between unmarked quest objectives, mysterious Zone stuff, and unclear instructions it’s difficult to figure where to go or what to do. It might seem like certain conversations are just they for flavor but many of them hint at tasks and most of those tasks offer no instruction whereas as some topics are just dead ends. ‘Find Barge and Joker’ translates into look it up or get lucky finding some dead bodies. It’s frustrating to have no clues whatsoever. If they mentioned something like, “Barge and Joker went west after the argument” or “They mentioned something about artifact hunting,” then I’d have some direction and feel like I wasn’t just wandering around and hoping for completion.
Gameplay
Like Stalker games before it Call of Pripyat is a horror based first person shooter. Unlike Clear Sky, however, there’s no longer a relationship between primary mechanics and story. There are no territory control mechanics or zone destroying threats this time around, the scales are much smaller and much more personal. The game is very much a sandbox that rewards the player based on how much they put into it. The reward for exploration is usually more powerful weapons or achievements that give the player additional benefits like free ammo or medical restocks in settlements. This game highlights the elements of survival in the zone much more, Degtyarev must keep himself fed and rested or his stamina, and eventually health, will suffer.
Even though it’s got fewer locations I’d say they’re better designed overall and they look great.
The game takes place in Zaton, a large swampy area, Yanov, a former train yard, and Pripyat, an small town. These areas form a sort of new frontier for the zone, these are areas that the player has not visited in either Clear Sky or Shadow of Chernobyl. Though the artifacts, mutants, and anomalies might be similar the politics and atmosphere have changed quite a bit. There’s no more Sidorovich, no more faction wars, and much fewer of the comforts they provided. Getting better gear will take a greater toll on the characters’ wallets or they’ll have to do some hunting. As such you’ll find fewer enemies in Exo-Suits or with incredible gear unlike Clear Sky which had a heavy soldier in nearly every squad.
You never know what you’ll run into in Call of Pripyat.
The Gush
Praise be to The Zone, the player can now shoot Bloodsuckers while they’re invisible. This might seem small but those bastards have been getting the better of me and wasting my ammunition for too long. They’re cloak is much less obvious to balance but I can throw a grenade and kill the damn things.
Not to say that they’re still not vicious as hell.
The world of Pripyat feels very alive. Squads of Stalkers go to anomalous areas to look for artifacts — and they can find them if the player doesn’t — while bandits will be on the look out for Stalkers to ambush and loot to steal. Mutants, zombies, and monolith leave their lairs and fortified areas looking for supple Stalkers to eat.
The quests in this game offer real choice as how to complete them. It’s no longer a matter of going here and doing this, it’s a matter of guys not knowing what to do and you fill in the blank. You go to pay someone’s debt and the assholes try to charge you interest, what do you do? You find a PDA holding information about someones secret weapons warehouse, who do you sell it to? The choice and consequences are yours.
Anomalous zones are now marked on your map so it’s much easier to find where to go artifact hunting. In addition you can now sleep in settlements so you can explore at night or during the day, whichever is your preference.
The Kvetch
Apparently the whole voice acting department died in a fruit punch anomaly between this game and the last and GSC got their replacements from people on the street. The voice quality has dropped off hard since Clear Sky. I think they’ve got 5 voice actors, all told, and 2 of them voice almost everyone and they’re really bad. I don’t know what happened but get ready for some grating voices and painful deliveries.
Back on that whole direction problem I was talking about in Experiences, it would be so much better if they told the player that certain quest objectives are just on certain maps. I needed to get some poison to eliminate a Bloodsucker lair and I found some locked tanks on a jeep holding the stuff. I figure there’s a master key in a military or industrial facility somewhere and I check every factory or barracks I can get my hands on. I ask everyone about the damn things. As it turns out the keys are on other parts of the motercade the tanks were on. There’s no hint or indication where the key is whatsoever.
And I’m not the only one with this problem. There’s a whole Gamefaqs post devoted to this quest.
I don’t know if it’s a glitch, I wouldn’t put it past a Stalker Game — this game’s the most stable of the three but still has issues –, but there’s a mutant called the Burer — remember Mr. Ugly face up there? That’s him — who can knock your gun out of your hands. It’s an interesting mechanic and a little annoying but I think it’s cool. The problem comes when I can’t find the gun afterward. I don’t know if it’s falling through the floor or flying to some part of the room where I just can’t find it. But it means my prized shooter is gone and I’ve gotta reload my last save even if the beast is dead. It’s unfun, unfair, frustrating, and happens to me at least once a playthrough.
The Verdict
The gameplay is much improved and everything feels more thematic overall. There’s a lot of unfair or non-existant signposting that leads to frustration. Quests are sometimes difficult to complete because you won’t know what to do next and there are just too many hidden objectives and goals in the game overall. This game is a guide game. You’ll play it with a strategy guide for WHEN you need it. It’s still fun and it’s still Stalker and it’s interesting to see the ecosystem of the Zone just go. But it still scratches that Stalker itch.
The Mass Effect series is a single player science fantasy RPG which, by and large, dudes seem to think is about shooting aliens and girls seem to think is about boinking aliens. I’m sure there’s a good amount of crossover, but if you’ve never played it, just be aware that those seem to be the general ideas.
Before we go any further, please press play on the following video in order to get the correct atmosphere:
Credit here to the wonderful Miracle of Sound and everything power metal video game thing he does.
History and Development
Because the series is (so far) one long story, I’ve chosen to write a single review on all three Mass Effect games. Mass Effect One was announced by BioWare (our old friend) in 2005 as part of a trilogy so it’s not like people were ever confused about it being one big thing. You play the same character through all three games – a character who gets more and more fed up with everyone’s bullshit – and NPCs have their own development and story lines throughout the trilogy.
The point of this game was to be an RPG, never a shooter. There have been other games where the main point is killing dudes but Mass Effect was never one of those games. The whole point was to immerse the player in the world and really get the story across. The developers wanted them to connect to the characters, to really feel like they had a stock in their well being. They wanted the universe they made to be important to the player. This is an RPG in the truest of senses because really you are supposed to take on the role of Commander Shepard, the PC.
Which like, isn’t hard, because Shep is a BADASS
Of course they also were making a shooter so they did a ton of development with that. In the second game they apparently spent the first three months of development just reworking that part of the system, which is admittedly weak in the first game. But as new technology and graphics and ideas became available, as they got feedback from their players, the games got better in that aspect.
Mass Effect is the kind of game where you play one and you gotta play them all. That’s what happened to me. I played the first one under duress and ended up getting totally into it. They really do immerse you into the world. The characters are really endearing – people disagree with me on some of this but they are wrong – and the game itself is really fantastic. Well, the games. The first one has some…gameplay shit that gets me down.
There are some other things too but we’ll get to that.
Character Creation
The PC in this game is Commander Shepard, hero of the human space army (that’s what it is). Commonly known as “Shep” by fans, Shepard is customization in gender, appearance, class, and the specifics of their history.
I think the first game explains classes the best. There are three “categories”: tech, biotics (it’s the force, guys, but they gave it a different name), and combat. Three classes are purely one of those and three classes mix them. You have a lot of range on what kind of character you want to play even with only that. There aren’t a lot of abilities either so it doesn’t get hugely confusing. Really you have a gun and you shoot people and sometimes magic comes out of your hands. If that’s what you’re into.
To the surprise of absolutely zero people, I play a vanguard which is basically like the Mass Effect version of the Incredible Hulk.
HULK SMASH!
I’ve also played as a sniper which I totally frakking suck at so that is, I’m sure, entertaining to watch. My gamer bro keeps asking me why I am meleeing someone with a sniper riffle. I have no good answer for him.
Physically, I’m going to start this by saying that character creation gets better. In the first game it’s a little rough. I mean, graphically the whole thing gets better so that’s a big part of it, but the first game does seriously feel like it could have used some more love in the character creation front. It has the same problem that the earlier Dragon Age games do with darker skin tones, though it does seem to try a little harder to make them available and natural looking. I think the main problem here is that NO ONE looks natural in the character creation
By the third game, the bugs in character creation have run their course and it’s pretty streamlined. It’s a solid system and it does what needs to be done and I can’t really ask any more of it.
Story
Bad things are happening in the galaxy. Commander Shepard and their crew of lovable misfits are sent to stop the bad things from happening. It turns out that the bad things are [SPOILERS] giant robot space bugs bent on galactic genocide for some mostly unexplained reason. No one believes Shepard about this for like, two games and then even then it’s a little iffy. It’s like that scene in “A Very Potter Musical” where the Minister of Magic refuses to believe Voldemort is back even when he’s standing right in front of him.
I’m reduced to using basically reaction gifs in blog posts to explain myself. A sad day.
The story is solid mostly. There’s a lot of side stuff because obviously when giant robot space bugs are attacking is exactly the time to help all of your friends deal with their personal demons. So yeah, also you deal with this hilarious bunch of assholes all the time who want shit from you constantly and make you do quests. Which honestly is a lot of fun because they are crazy people who do crazy things and make terrible decisions.
Yeah, ya’ll stand there and look heroic, I know what you really did.
There’s a thing about the end of this game that a lot of people don’t like but I’m actually not going to discuss that much. I’m a professional writer and I know that no matter how much people say your choices are going to matter in a video game, they probably won’t. So when people get up in arms about the end of Mass Effect 3, I just shrug and move on because it wasn’t surprising to me and it wasn’t a bad ending all things considered for a video game. I think people were looking for something that was literally impossible in regards to programming and writing so they can pretty much just shut up in my opinion. I’m not saying the ending was stellar or anything (because it wasn’t and it didn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense) but I found it satisfying.
Also BioWare should maybe have not pushed how great it was going to be and how all your choices were going to matter because…yeah, that didn’t help.
Gameplay
This part I will break up into three sections.
Mass Effect 1: Solid combat but uninspired. A lot of focus on just shooting people which I am really bad at. There wasn’t really much to say about the combat in this game because it was sort of just…there. It did what needed to be done and didn’t do anything else for me at all.
The maps were a little large and sprawling and sometimes it was easy to get lost, especially on the citadel. I know our normal blog runner stopped playing Mass Effect 1 for a long long time because he once got lost and was unable to get unlost and got frustrated and quit (sorry to out you, bro, but like, not that sorry. He also quit Dragon Age: Origins because he thought he missed an item on the first big boss, which is HILARIOUS if you really think about it.)
ALSO WOW THE MAKO WAS A THING. Let’s give you a car that handles like total shit but can drive straight up a mountain. Have fun.
I think my morality system was sort of weirdly broken on Mass Effect 1 because I kept getting “good” (paragon) points when I did horrible shit like shooting people in the face. It was pretty awesome though. I laughed.
Mass Effect 2: They cleaned up combat a lot for this game and really went in to tweak abilities. It’s pretty smooth for the most part though I definitely still sucked at shooting things. They also went from a weapon overheat system in the first game to an ammo system in the second which I was less about because I can’t hit a target the first time ever and I ran out of bullets all the time. Hence why I was meleeing people with a sniper riffle (ha take that).
Things got way more linear which I don’t mind too much. Some open world games are great but Mass Effect 1 was kind of a wreck about it so I’m glad they scrapped that part. Travel is a lot easier and you don’t have to drive your shitty lemon of a space car around to find resources. You can just scan planets. Which is time consuming and kind of a total pain but it is at least kind of calming and meditative.
They introduced conversation interrupts in this game which are totally hilarious. What that means is you can pistol whip dudes in the face in the middle of cut scenes and it’s hilarious. Take the renegade interrupts. I promise you will (almost never) regret it.
Mass Effect 3: HAHAHAHA THE COMBAT IN THIS GAME IS GLORIOUS. I think playing a vanguard I fired my weapon probably twice. The rest of the time I spent running across the map at an enemy and punching the shit out of them. Heavy Melee was introduced in this game which meant you got to literally punch space aliens in the head and kill them. I loved every second of this because I am a bloodthirsty monster.
Also some NPC would be like “DON’T GO ANYWHERE NEAR THAT BRUTE!” and I’d take one look at this huge hulking enemy with three layers of armor and go “I’m gonna punch it.”
The Good
Companions! So much fun! Such a punch of assholes and I love them all even the ones other people hate (mostly those, I will not lie to you).
Later game combat! Great system, well thought out.
Most of the plot! Good plot. Well done.
The Bad
Maps in the first game. Lack of cohesion of plot in the third. The Mako. The fucking Mako. I am never ever going to be over how crap that thing handled.
The Ugly
Sniper riffles and shooting people because I am terrible at it and also because the first game makes me worse at it.
Also like, there is some weird character design shit going on. I love most of it but then there’s like, Jack and Miranda and Samara in the second game which just like…they were so close to them being great and then like, somehow they fucked it up. At least Jack later gets a shirt so that part helped but it’s just like…wear something more then a band of leather across your nipples please.
Samara, well…it’s like they did well and then were like “BUT IT NEEDS TO BE SEXIER.”
Also did I mention THE FUCKING MAKO???
From here…?
Oh my god, buy these games. I got all of them on sale for like twenty bucks a few months back. They’re pretty cheap, they’re really good, and they’re a classic. If you haven’t played these games, you’re missing out on a real pillar of contemporary gaming. Buy this to be able to tell your children you were part of the Mass Effect generation. I believe people will be talking about this series for that long.
Next Month: World of Warcraft! A fucking classic in gaming that honestly I had never played before I needed to for this blog!
A distant Uncle(?) has left you the family estate but, like Luigi’s Mansion or the estate from Eternal Darkness, all is not as it seems. As it turns out this Great Uncle(?) dug too deep, performed dark experiments, communed with Outer Gods, and basically did every bad thing Lovecraft ever wrote about. As the sole beneficiary it lies to you to restore the homestead and the nearby hamlet. And defeat the evil your… Father(?) unleashed. Hire some eager adventurers and set them on the monsters of the dark — or have I gotten that the wrong way around?
This disclaimer shows up everytime you boot up the game reminding you that this isn’t a game you win, it’s a game you survive.
History
Darkest Dungeon started out as a conversation between Chris Bourassa and Tyler Sigman about how a real person might react to a crazy dungeon delving scenario filled with monsters, demons, cultists, undead, and giant vermin. Inspired by psychologically heroes, particularly Hudson from Alien, they formed Red Hook Studios in order to make this a reality. They funded the game through Kickstarter, raising $75,000 for the project. Darkest Dungeon is still in Early access and as of yet is incomplete.
Darkest Dungeon entered Early Access on February 3rd, 2015. It’s competition was Hand of Fate (Linux, PC, Mac, PS4, and XBox One), Oddworld New and Tasty (PC, Mac, Linux), and Evolve (PC, PS4, XBox One)
Experiences
It’s natural that the player connect with the party… and doing so will hurt you. Eventually the character you rely on will fail you. The best of them will go mad and jeopardize everything. The one you love the most, the one you named after yourself perhaps, will die. At this point, after 30 expeditions, I’ve grown cold to the lives of the adventurers in my employ. I send them with no supplies sound in the knowledge that if they die then I can replace them. If they survive they’ll soon join the higher ups who perform the really dangerous tasks. The whole while the cash keeps coming in and I keep getting ready for a huge expedition with my most powerful party members. But the bodies are piling and I almost feel a tinge of guilt that my best must stand on the corpses of so many others… almost.
So far, the dead number 22 and the game keeps track of their names and how they died.
Gameplay
You take control of a party of adventurers who are about to learn what horrors live below, and in, the estate — I love the eagerness they begin with and how it turns into jaded paranoia and fear of having to go back. They move forward in a formation of four ranks, with certain combat abilities only being usable in and of certain ranks — your opponents will try to fuck up your formation… but you can also mess up theirs. Every quest has a certain objective and when it’s complete your people can go on home. They can also leave prematurely but that’ll stress them out.
And too much stress is really dangerous.
Speaking of stress, when your characters reach 100 stress points they’ll reach a breaking point which will typically cause them to acquire an affliction which makes their behavior more unpredictable and stresses everyone else out — but rarely causes them to fight more powerfully against the darkness. When a character reaches 200 stress they suffer a massive heart attack and die. Characters don’t die when they run out of health, they instead enter a state called ‘Death’s Door’ at which point the next attack against them has a chance of killing them.
Being on Death’s Door stresses them out and it’ll stress you out.
Completing quests nets you Heirlooms, gold, and trinkets which you can take back to the Hamlet and spend. The Hamlet is equipped with buildings that relieve stress, train and upgrade your adventurers, buy trinkets, and remove negative traits from characters such as phobias or diseases. Buildings are upgraded with heirlooms– which can never be taken away– and adventurers are improved with gold — which can easily be spent on expeditions that end in disaster.
The game has got his marvelous pre-Victorianesque setting where crossbows and flintlock pistols cohabit.
The game’s still in early access and as such has no definite goal. Doing quests in areas unlocks bosses and conquering the challenge is a reward in itself but other than that there’s not great conclusion yet.
The Gush
The designs of all the characters is unique and expressive. The different color palettes of the heads alone allow me to differentiate between characters of the same class. After so many battles animations get a little old and sometimes they drag and make battles seem like they take forever. The characters convey a lot based on appearance alone.
There’s something immensely satisfying about my party having their back to the wall and someone reaching their breaking point and becomes virtuous. The pause between the initiation and the reveal builds so much tension. It’s a small victory and I usually pump my fist or launch my hands into the air shouting, “YES!” repeatedly whenever it happens
YOU GET ‘EM PLAGUEY!
The game has created this bizarre system where the town’s upgrades are really what push the difficulty down. Nothing can be done to harm it or undo the work you’ve done to it. You can dump comically large sacks of money into an adventurer, keeping their mind and weapons sharp, when they suddenly turn into a critical hit magnet and die.
If you put together a particular team of adventurers the game will sometimes give them a themed title. I don’t know why I like this so much but I will occasionally mix and match team members just to see if they’re ‘The Misbegotten’ or ‘The Merciless’ or something.
The Kvetch
This game relies a lot on luck. Between your crits, enemy crits, getting surprised, surprising other parties, where the goal is in the dungeon, whether you scout or not, what every interactible item in the game does, and what enemies you fight, it’s difficult to determine where your strategy ends and the Random Number Generator begins.
Sometimes you get the triple crits, and sometimes they get you.
The game has got this really weird difficulty curve. Instead of getting more difficult as the game goes on, the game kind of gets easier. It takes more time to keep your high level characters in ship shape but it’s easier now than it’s ever been to me to reduce the stress of my characters or upgrade their gear. The big reason my people keep dying is because I use them like cannon fodder and pinch my pennies a little too hard, not because the challenge has gone up. Then again, higher level enemies grow more powerful to match the skills of your higher leveled characters.
The Verdict
This game scratched an itch that I didn’t even know that I had. It’s wonderfully eldritch and addictive in the same way that the Binding of Isaac is but it gives me a little more control. I’m really curious about what they turn it into, what classes they make next, and what or if there will be a grand conclusion to this all. I’m not sure if it’s worth 20 dollars but it’s definitely worth 15 so I’d recommend catching it when Steam runs its next sale.
In another world there was once a man, a wizard named Eldred. He was not a hero, he was more a villain in truth. Wanting to destroy his enemies he summoned a creature that had a hard time differentiating enemies from everything — perhaps it was a cruel bit of irony as Eldred saw enemies everywhere. In any event Eldred fled across the astral void to another world. This world had five gods vying for power and would appreciate the service of a capable wizard. But… history has a nasty way of repeating itself. Run, cast spells, endure death, and choose your deity wisely in this third person Real Time Strategy game.
History
Sacrifice was made by Shiny Entertainment, the makers of Earthworm Jim and MDK. David Perry directed the project with music by Kevin Manthei and creature design and modelling by Joby-Rome Otero. The total team was around 25 people. Sacrifice also had stellar voice acting. With performances by Brad Garret, Tim Curry, Jennifer Hale, Tony Jay, and Paul Eiding — this game has got a near dream team of talent voicing it.
Sacrifice used the same engine as their previous game, Messiah which drew a lot of fire from expectant fans and people who opposed its religious connotations. These attitudes lead Shiny’s director, Perry, to make Sacrifice in total silence only breaking it months before release to advertise the game.
Sacrifice was released on November 17th, 2000. It’s competition was Megaman Legends 2 (PS1), Banjo Tooie (Nintendo 64). and Tomb Raider Chronicles (PS1 and Dreamcast).
Experiences
When I played through the game I was a goody-lil’-two-shoes 12 year old so naturally I chose to follow Persephone, the goddess of justice– justice spelled in all caps while decapitating something–, because I’m a good guy and that’s what good guys do. I played through the game and beat the big bad and felt accomplished because I saved the day but then I wondered what happens when I play someone else. As it turns out, the story is exactly the same but there’s so much more going on than any individual god is aware of. Playing through every campaign is the only way to get the full story. Some of the events and betrayals and backstabbing blew my mind.
Gameplay
Sacrifice is an odd game. It’s a third person real time strategy game and it’s just as weird as it sounds. Instead of playing an omniscient commander who has full knowledge of the battlefield who orders things around, you play as a spell casting ground commander with no combat capabilities — soooo you’re Gandalf without the swordplay. Every wizard serves one of the five gods of the realm except for a few who are freelancers or mercenaries.
The wizards have such interesting designs and the altars are so spooky.
Wizards can summon creatures, cast spells, and order troops.. A wizard can only produce as many troops as it — and there are some wizards that are ‘its’ and not ‘whos’– has souls. Wizards can purify souls captured from enemies in order to add more souls to their supply and some creatures are worth more souls than others. Contrary to popular adage wizards do not die when they are killed, they are merely rendered incorporeal and incapable of casting spells until they get enough mana shoved back into them. As such the goal of most missions is to desecrate your opponents altar which banishes them from the realm.
The Gush
It should come as no surprise that the voice acting in this game is super good. Tim Curry’s voice is delightfully sleazy while Tony Jay’s is appropriately wise and yet off in some way. Everyone delivers an absolutely amazing performance — except some bit parts and peasants which sound like they were recorded from across the room.
The Good Old Games version of this game comes with a digital version of the manual and each of the sections concerning the gods is written in that deity’s voice. It also includes an abridged history of the world which sheds some light on situations in the game. If you get the game get it through Good Old Games.
The creature design is really great. Even the palette swapped creatures look incredibly different from their counterparts and it’s explained that all the palette swapped creatures are the same creature but raised in a different environment — nice save developers, nice save.
The way the textures slide over things makes everything look alike but not the same.
Everything in this game is oozing with character. From the gods and the wizards with their taunts and incidental dialogue to the creatures and their descriptions and actions in the game.
The Kvetch
There are some situations where I wish so dearly that the wizard had a melee attack. No matter how weak or useless or utterly crappy it would be I wish they could do something besides getting punched in the face. Naturally, wizards have attack spells but the cooldown on them is so long that there’s usually not enough attack spells to go around. What really irks me is that some wizards even have weapons — the Hachimen have a sword — and they make no use of them.
SWING IT! SWING THE SWORD! IT’S RIGHT THERE!
Melee attacking creatures are typically not very good. It stands to reason that they’re meant to take out weaker ranged attackers but enemies can move out of the way and sometimes they do so seemingly out of reflex. The only thing Melee units are really good at is destroying structures but if they’re something guarding it then they’ll usually die before they can rush the gap.
The main mechanic of a real time strategy game is selecting units and ordering them around but the 3D environment makes this really difficult. It’s usually best or easiest to order a unit to guard you or a structure and let them make their own decisions.
This game has got multiplayer but I’ve never been able to get in a game. The community’s probably too small to support a multiplayer atmosphere. So it’s just this bizarre vestigial limb or redundant organ that no longer serves a purpose.
The AI is really predictable and gets easy to counter.
It’s really difficult to select and order units without using control groups. If you don’t keep on top of what creature is where then it’s really difficult to get things in order. The minimap is useless for controlling multiple units because everything on it is just a colored square. Are those my melee guys or my ranged guys? I don’t fucking know they’re all just white dots! This game demanded that I be more organized than ever and it was a real chore.
The Verdict
This game is rock solid. It’s well worth the ten dollar price tag. It’s an experience that wasn’t recreated until Brutal Legend did something similar. It’s got a compelling story and just enough character to keep me wishing there was a sequel.
