Play relevant month: Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon

There's not many games or releases or concepts I get hyped for. We live in something of a two pronged gamer assault world now - God, what does that sentence even mean - somewhere between the shitpipe that is early access and the other, shittier pipe that is triple A hype machines. We are constantly being blasted on the two sides of our faces. Yet games are largely all about the same level of quality, with a few stand out gems, but most are "fine" or even "fun but flawed". Yeah there's a couple really obvious stinkers, but usually if you don't like a game in this day and age it has more to do with genre and intent. So why get excited? There's going to be 2-3 more entries in that genre, that very year, in case you don't like a given individual game.

But Blood Dragon ... Well, for one, I had zero excitement for Far Cry 3 itself. The only excitement I get from Far Cry games is when I forget they're not Crysis sequels or whatever, but then, I wouldn't even get that now that Crysis 3 was the joke it was. However you take a brand new engine like Far Cry 3 and you commit to giving a DLC pack with some far out 80s action, I'm going to take notice. That first trailer really sells the idea. Then you announce it's going to be a cheap standalone attempt at a more experimental style of game? I won't lie, my ears perked up. Admittedly, the experimental side of Blood Dragon lies in the less than mainstream or at least less than modern mainstream because that really is quite the hammy 80s production. Or a 2013 production through the eyes of being an 80s production? Layers and layers of obscured tropes here son. It's cyber-boots on a human skull all the way down to the turtles here.

The actual resultant game almost has a sense of meta awareness to it, a box inside a box feeling of both playing and the game itself. It's petulant and juvenile on both levels, with weird quirkness that extends beyond the Play button on Steam. There is also this odd rub of being almost a truly indie production, with odd little problems and screw ups in design that surprise you given the pedigree of both the studio and the core title this one is based off. I mean I've read Far Cry 3 has terrible, terrible writing but I never heard anything about it being a bad game from a design stand point.

It's also sort of weird in that Blood Dragon almost feels intentionally mediocre at the start, luring you in with a rather bleh starting point then - When you stop expecting anything awesome to come out of the lumpy beginning and the oddities of uplay - actually gets really, really good. At everything. All of the things. And the voice actor is a wizard.

Of bad ass.

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Gravi

Puzzle, or more specifically torture platformers are not "for me". I take some solace in the fact that they're not really for most people, though there is a very vocal minority who clamour about them and I guess buy them. So I'm willing to admit, Gravi isn't for me but in spite of that it's actually still pretty neat. I don't mean that in the sense of They Bleed Pixels, though I guess mechanically it was pretty cool too. I mean Gravi is a neat take on a puzzle platformer that uses different mechanics as opposed to adding different mechanics on top of the base.

Gravi, which is also the main character, can not jump. Instead he can project matter onto surfaces, and that matter (depending on the size of the projectile) will attract him. There are two different projectile settings, either shooting a fifth of his load at a time, or all of it at once, which changes the range of the attraction as well as shrinking Gravi. Sometimes you want to be smaller, and sometimes abruptly becoming too big will kill you as well.

In other words Gravi isn't based on pixel perfect jumping, it's based on looser physics based trick shots and has an odd feeling to it that almost feels like playing pool, but with jumping puzzles? It's hard to articulate the exact strange feeling of the game, and while the difficulty isn't exactly level it fits in with the strangeness. It's mechanically different and while physics based puzzles have been a thing for a long time it's just its own sort of weird I guess. Also, Gravi doesn't adhere strictly to being a puzzle platformer - Sometimes a set of hazards are to be overcome with slapdashing forward, or precise timing, or a mix of all three, which creates a looser feeling in my mind that helps keep the "torture" platformer feeling from setting in. It's not always that you're failing the jump by two pixels, it's sometimes that you haven't figured out what you want to do and sometimes you need to let go, jam the directional stick forward and just blind luck your way through.

However, while I was hoping to get through a decent chunk of the game before just writing it off, Gravi is ultimately just another torture platformer, albeit it does have its own sense of flow and style that makes it a bit more interesting for a while. I eventually brick walled and received an achievement for dying too many times, which just prompted me to close, then uninstall, the game. Torture platformers have an element where you can tell the level development just went through a process of adding spikes or other hazards hap-hazardously and willy nilly to "increase the challenge". The problem is, honestly, you play torture platformers to overcome the difficult moments. No one is going to feel a sense of accomplishment over not twitching 2 pixels too far to the left and dying at a point the developer just randomly slapped some spikes onto "because um spikes go in torture platformers hurk". It's just brain dead design.

The game is pretty charming for a while, and as you can tell, I got a good hour of chillout gaming from it before it just spike walled me off from the rest of the content. While I know I'm not the target audience, having realized somewhere between They Bleed Pixels and Giana Sisters that PC platformers aren't for me, I'm actually not sure how good this game is as a torture platformer. The controls are weird and loose, and while the music is fantastic the graphics are a bit unnecessarily drab, which doesn't make for a great presentation. It is physics based, and while that's neat in places, Gravi is kinda hard to control at times which may turn off fans of the genre. Without that I'm somewhat at a loss as to who this game is aimed at.

I also had a lot of issues with Gravi's hit box, which feels oddly shaped, and several of the pinpoint movement sections seemed to kill him out of hand. I also couldn't tell if shrinking reduced his hitbox. The screenshot on the right is where I gave up on the game, and while I experimented with using the size changing and different mass shots to try to squeeze past, I couldn't determine if I was messing up the precision jump or if I needed to be smaller. Because I died most often to the incidental shit around it, I couldn't nail it down and just ended up getting sick of the sloppy controls then deleting the game. I don't think this is how puzzle platformers are supposed to work and like I said, it just feels like brain dead design.

I don't mind dying a hundred times to a challenging part. I'm not going to enjoy it, but I don't mind it conceptually. I do mind dying 80 times to incidental garbage for no reason to get 20 decent attempts on the jump. So, like I said, I'm not sure who wants to play this and I'm not sure a game that could have been a sweet chill out title didn't lean back a little on the stupider pinpoint precision jumping puzzles.

I got Gravi through a groupees greenlight bundle. The soundtrack is really good.

Steam Sale!

The holiday Steam sale starts a few hours, at 1am EST or 10pm PST, or at least so everything seems to point to. I wrote a detailed analysis of how sales work here but for the sake of brevity in a time of crisis I'll go over the five simple rules to steam sale by. Also, I'm not going to talk about amazon or gamersgate or whatever else. They all have sales too.

1. Don't just look at the front page - Almost everything is on sale.

2. Don't buy things unless they're a flash, daily or vote deal!

3. Exception to 2: Unless the sale is almost over, since maybe it won't get a daily deal. The larger catalogue sales often end the day before the end of the sale, and because of repetition they probably already had a flash or daily sale if they were ever going to.

4. There will be a metagame, it looks like it's about the same as last summer - snow globes to make into badges. If it's anything like last sale, sell them right quick, because their prices tumbled and never recovered. You can finish the holiday stuff at the end for a quarter what it costs at the start.

Granted I might be wrong, but I doubt it.

5. When you go to buy something, ask yourself "Am I going to play this in the next six months?" Remember - stuff goes on sale over and over again. It's not a one time thing.

Now if you'll excuse me I have a sobbing wallet, already beaten and bruised from Christmas shopping, to prepare for sale time. Don't worry boy, this year I sold cards all year to get ready, so it won't hurt so bad.

Also if you have a SA account, feel here to join the ongoing sale thread here!

Play Relevant Month: Call of Juarez Gunslinger

Cowboys, conceptually, are not a style I particularly feel overmuch affection for. I'm not a big fan of pistols or duels or anything of the like, or ridiculous hats measured in gallons, but I do consider the Old West environments a thing of beauty. I didn't quite recollect this here thought until I fired up this game and thought my goodness, this here is a pretty gosh darn title.

But no seriously, there really isn't enough variety in the art styles of modern gaming, when you consider how immensely varied the world around us actually is. Think about all the backgrounds and ideas you could do, then thing how similar most shooters or platforming games are to each other. CoJ:Gunslinger, or just Gunslinger for short from here on in, is one of those under-appreciated motifs in action. Even from the get go I have to say I love the stylistic variety, chickens running around, bright red bandanas, dried yellow grass against the blue sky, old wood hammered together - It's gritty and not especially pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but it's different and man shooters could use a great deal more different.

Gunslinger also reminds me, as anyone with half functioning brain will probably note, a great deal of Bastion in its good ways - A slick narrator chatters through much of the game and improves the experience immensely. Narration has always had an odd transition - It's so awful in movies, but it's so underused in games. I really like the narrator in Bastion and I really like the narrator here. Especially since the narrator isn't just concealing the story from you to lead you playing forward, he's an unreliable old chap who has had a couple to drink.

And who wouldn't enjoy a story as told by an old drunk cowboy?

Better than expected: Sacred Citadel

I picked up Sacred Citadel for less than a dollar when I grabbed the Deep Silver Humble Bundle. The game was recently released, but also didn't review especially well and I guess was considered something of a right off by the publisher for it to be slammed into the bundle. (right off? write off? Am I making a pun? Yes, unless you hate puns, then gosh no that's a typo) The bundle also had like, Risen 2 which I am willing to try for a dollar, and Sacred 2 which I've heard is actually pretty ok? So Sacred Citadel was just some like, throwaway 60~ metacritic game I almost didn't bother to even add to my steam list. But I did, since you get XP for your steam level and blah blah the metagame.

Sacred Citadel is a brawler, standard 2d style. I haven't played a brawler in a couple years, other than trying out Golden Axe on an emulator and finding it a bit too stiff to be enjoyable. Sacred Citadel is, I think, very close to Golden Axe, other than having what I imagine are more recent innovations to the genre. I am fully aware "more recent" can extend back something like twenty years here, yes sir.

In terms of presentation Sacred Citadel kinda surprised me out of the gate with its music. The music and game sounds are actually quite good, nothing too epic but suitably catchy to mix in with the gameplay. The art style as well is quite pleasing, it's very rounded and simple, but I'm a massive fan of 2d sprite style work and this is one of the nicest. I can understand that this is a matter of my subjective tastes, but when I'm playing a relaxing pick up game I like the screen to feel comfortable and visually simplistic.

There's lots of variety in the visuals as well - the game takes place across quite a few different landscapes, although they are mostly just a level plane with a pretty background, you do see some set pieces and the odd bit of jumping puzzle. The game also has a sense of humor and isn't some serious production, with a campy goofiness to it that definitely works with the art style and the game's status as a punchy brawler. If you want to just pick up a game to play for 5-10 minutes, I think Sacred Citadel does a pretty solid job of being a light hearted murdering spree. Some of the enemy designs are really creative and neat to watch in action, lots of personality in the art style.

Combat is - And now we get into the downsides - Pretty hit or miss. The controls are very simple and on the most part quite responsive, but your character can feel a bit floaty. For one, a button mash issues a combo, and your character (to the best of my knowledge, I only tried out two) doesn't really seem to care if there's anything to hit. As with many games the developers decided your character wants to move with the button mash sometimes, so you end up wondering where the idiot is going when you come out of a dodge roll and turn the wrong direction. The other issue is that enemies tend to knock you around nonstop, and you don't feel very steady on your feet. Enemies also have massive amounts of health as you get further into the game.

I don't really understand the appeal of being stunlocked all the time, so you end up feeling like you're supposed to dodge around and block a bunch. That's fine, but between the slightly off controls you end up with a great deal of wiggling around, not having fun. Enemies don't take well to being led, either, but then go down a bit too easy once they do. This might be a product of playing a Shaman, who is a light looking lass in a pink leotard. I don't know, because the last time I switched characters, it reset my other character and I don't plan on going back through the game with everyone if I can't level them in parallel. No idea why this is missing, maybe it isn't, but I can't figure out how I reset my ranger otherwise.

Regardless - Enemies have way too much health for this, probably as a component of the leveling system but I've found in some boss fights I end up fighting the added spawns what feels like nonstop, since you can't really get in to punch them down in the middle of also dodging a boss. There's also a couple enemy attacks that just shouldn't be in the game - one of the act 3 enemies yells and tosses a grenade into the air. It doesn't do much damage I don't believe, nor is it aimed at you all that well, but it's very hard to visually track in a busy screen and it knocks you down.Again, and again, and again. Especially when you're trying to focus on their caster bodies, who also knock you down...

Outside of stunlock, hit boxes are a little off on a couple enemies, and there's maybe too many lines of depth. Some aerial enemies can be oddly precise to hit while other foes are not. It lends a somewhat slapstick feel to the game and while it does sound nitpicky you need to bear in mind brawling is about all you do in this game. They really should have nailed down the feel of it. Getting knocked and bonked around the screen just doesn't work for me.

The voice acting in the game is outright terrible, though I'm not entirely sure that isn't intentional. It's very campy and silly, and the story is also pretty campy so maybe that's what they were going for. It doesn't bother me and I did chuckle here or there, so I'm not griping, just being level. The sound work is excellent however - hits sound solid, enemies chant and warble and everything has a bunch of wacky noises. I have no idea what the chant the orcs make it supposed to mean but they end up with way more personality than you'd expect.

Sacred Citadel also suffers a little for its RPG system - Which is to say, half of it is really obvious and cool. I'm totally good with gold, potions, gambling and loot. Those are all enjoyable things to put in a game! But there's some other stuff that the game doesn't really seem to want to explain. The B button on ye olden xboxen controller does some sort of special and I can not quickly determine which special I'm getting or what precisely some of them do.

I assume it's like golden axe where your special box picks what you do, but I'm not quite certain. There's also some sort of crystal system that does ... Something? I have no idea and it's completely unexplained in the in-game help files. Whether they're like materia or a temporary bonus or whatever, I have no idea and can't figure out how you even access them. (I actually googled it - Apparently, you just equip them and then they tick down whenever you're in combat. That's it. Why couldn't it just say that on screen? Is that hard to explain?)

You can argue it's probably documented somewhere, but shouldn't a brawler meant to be enjoyed with drunk friends be more or less an instant pick and play title? Seriously the one vendor offers you shit and doesn't say on the screen 'equipped and activated immediately, lasts for the duration giving a bonus for that time'. Like sure it's magic and she ain't gotta explain shit but ... No, no way, the game should explain itself.

Overall, Sacred Citadel doesn't hold tons of lasting appeal and is a pretty shallow title, but it looks nice and is easy to pick up and play. I think it's intended for a different sort of market - This would be a great game to fire up big picture mode and blast through an hour or so playing with buddies, maybe with some sort of drinking game involved. I think you only need one copy in that case, so it's probably worth grabbing on sale if you ever see yourself making use of that, but otherwise it isn't really as good a title as it should have been. There's real no reason to have every enemy in the game chain stunlock you and a bit more work on the "heft" of the gameplay would have really helped.

I wish more games were as easy on the eyes as Citadel, though. As 2d games go I haven't seen one so soothing in a while.

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Ether Vapour Remaster

Man, I just don't know. What makes for a good shmup anyway? I want to say visibility and slick design make for a good shmup, but maybe I'm totally wrong or I'm just super awful. Well no, I am super awful at shmups, but they (I think?) mostly fall into the domain of really twitchy "challenge" games like torture platformers where I am completely not the correct audience anymore.

This is actually the fourth shmup I've played in recent memory - I played Jamestown in 2011 and liked it, but I'm hesitant to spend a long time getting good at twitchy games when I have so many other, more rewarding games to play. Then I tried Syber Arcade, which I reviewed as "good but short", and after it Satazius. After hitting the play button for Satazius my headphones begin uttering a sound I would describe as the sonic hybrid of a cat hissing and a wood chipper being run through a blender. You can assemble and re-assemble that sentence however you'd prefer, but basically it sounds super insanely awful and I just didn't play that.

I'll come right out and say that I liked Syber Arcade more than I liked this game by a pretty big margin. Ether Vapour is visually just not very distinct, which can really get irritating when the screen is covered in crap, and relies much less on tactics and much more on rote memorization. I do enjoy the fact you have three different weapons, rather than an upgrade system, but the lack of an upgrade system always takes away from shmups for me. That's the child in me, sure, but the gradius system of ridiculous power ups as you can momentum in the game is just thrillingto me. The other thing is that the game gives you very little wiggle room in bursts of fire, which is very difficult to deal with and maybe I'm just shitty but it kinda feels like I'm supposed to know better from replaying the game.

On top of that, enemies can be on other planes along any axis, meaning you can't hit them and it can be really difficult to quickly discern between a group that is, and a group that is not. Syder Arcade did this as well, but far less often and the art style there was more distinct. It just feels kind of messy and gross - enemies can be off your plane and firing at you, but you can't hit them back? It just strikes me as innately unfun. The one weapon allows you to 'lock on' and fire homing missiles, but this doesn't really have any intelligence in its targeting - You can shoot at enemies you can't fire on with other weapons, but it's only useful in boss fights since with multiple targets they seem to just shoot whatever you could hit normally anyway. The weapon also has lag in targeting and firing, which I just don't get. It seems to do less damage so it doesn't feel like it would be universally useful since enemies flood the screen if you don't kill them at a brisk pace.

The game allows you to turn on hit boxes, which is a great feature and it's amazing how tiny your hit box is compared to how big your ship's graphic is, but it isn't much help when you're avoiding enemy ships ramming into you. The effective area of the screen comes off as very, very small but also not very distinct. That lovely feeling of dodging and weaving between life threatening but very clear objects? Pretty rare, though it did crop up a little in the city level.

nice headband

Anyway, like I said, the graphics are a bit muddy and washed out, with plain backgrounds. The city level is just a blur of buildings going by. The buildings are grey. The enemy ships? Grey. The end result: Blargh, god I miss sprites. Watch someone play Blazing Star or any of the other Neo Geo shmups made when dinosaurs walked the Earth and yeesh. I know it's not all about graphics but this game looks like it could have been released before Shadow of the Beast, let alone a Neo Geo game. The audio is fine, the music the pretty usual fare. It does seem to stutter a little, and my system while being a year old and featuring a 460GTX is not at all below par. I don't really know if I'm just absolutely awful at shmups or if Ether Vapour is just entirely for another audience, but I didn't really care overly for the game. I'd settle into the groove for a bit, but it's hard to keep up with grey on grey on mushy grey then I'd die. There's also super anime as fuck story pages between levels, but I doubt it's going to do anything more than 'mysterious hero is mysterious, pew pew, bullets go into enemy FACE' so I turned that right off.

Frankly, maybe I'm just terrible at shmups, but what do I look back on playing other shmups recently as fun whereas this is just a chore?

Ether Vapour Remaster is the third game in a bundle I bought off Groupees for $2.25 that has cards. At this stage, I've actually profited on the exchange, which soothes the fact Satazius and Yatagarasu didn't really work. Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos is such a sweet name for a game, though I don't think I'll ever get around to that one.

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Ring Runners Flight of the Sages

If you caught me on a good day, when my memory actually works and asked me which game from my childhood I wish I could play as a child again with all the full delight of childhood I wouldn't answer Baldur's Gate, Sonic the Hedgehog or Final Fantasy IV. I'd likely answer either Herzog Zwei or Inner Space. Inner Space is something of a rare gem, a cute little "indie" title that offered an experience that mixed many genres, but was more or less built around Star Control style action with a rogue star fighter sort of deal instead.

Ring Runners reminds me a great deal of Inner Space, which isn't too surprising given there's probably some shared DNA in their ancestry, though I'd be surprised if the developers or anyone on the planet besides me has ever heard of Inner Space.

Regardless, after an hour of playing Ring Runners I had escaped from some essentially unknown facility that was never explained, which explodes, given a good ship, lost the good ship and was then assigned to pick up garbage for a while. Then the garbage king arrived and, in the garbage ship, forced me to do battle in some sort of trash related gladiatorial games. I had previously turned down the difficulty to get through a mission that felt bizarrely out of sync with the game's earlier difficulty in the hopes I could figure out later what I was doing wrong, but couldn't turn it back up, so I was sort of thinking if I had to spend another five minutes doing garbage gladiatorial games I would probably fall asleep at the keyboard.

The gunning in the space ships stuff is amusing enough, though not great, but fighting people in an arena in a garbage collecting cruiser is just fundamentally not something I ever want to be doing on easy. Or at all, but on easy I'm being punished for not understanding the one mission. So I dug around the options and found no way to turn the difficulty back up, but did find out I was playing 'the tutorial'. I thought to myself, of course, it's using missions to explain to me the mechanics, but certainly this will open up a more interesting, Inner space like experience right? Let's just skip the tutorial.

And then it just started vomiting increasingly larger piles of dialogue at me until I closed the program - Actually, I alt-F4'd, since you're not allowed to close the ring selecting map screen that doesn't really make much sense to someone who skipped the tutorial because it involved fighting in a garbage ship. And yes, I'm blaming the developers for that. You get one mission with the goofy garbage collecting ship to explain the mechanic - Not three in a row!

Ring Runners looks like a game I would have enjoyed immensely as a 12 year old, but the writing is really wooden and the inertia based 2d ship combat even after an hour of playing just felt jarring and way too zoomed in. I swear I've played Star Control 2 (Ur-Quan Masters) recently, on a notebook keyboard no less, and I had way less difficulty with the controls in that game than this one. I understand that if you continue to apply thrust in a direction in zero gravity without anything to cause friction or what not around you, you'll eventually have to apply an equal amount of force to negate that inertia but that's not a fun gameplay mechanic. At least I think that's what they're going for when you spin your ship three hundred and sixty degrees, apply afterburners and still ram into an object. You actually do have air brakes in space but that just begs the question as to why flying is such a damn chore if you're going to follow physics some of the time?

Also there's just too many buttons. I had less buttons in UQM, but felt more in control of the ships I was flying.

Anyway, in conclusion, I played Ring Runners for an hour and found it interesting enough that I'm not griping about the play time but it really didn't grab me at all. Quite liked the music though, and some of the more peaceful bits were super zen. The game felt pretty good when I had the sweet ship at the start, but then it took it away, put me in a garbage scow and then ... Do I need to keep going? Why would you do this? Why would you program in a mission to collect garbage?

You can tell they really wanted to jam dialogue based on the length of the title. Just go with Ring Runners! What's a sage? No, never mind, I don't want to know.

What a Skill Tree: Path of Exile

This isn't really anything beyond a moderate depth look at Path of Exile simply because I don't quite have it in me to truly master another ARPG. I suppose if this were a Blizzard game, well, I'd have less issue claiming mastery - but PoE's gearing and skill set up system is an arcane mystery in its own right. Since PoE is innately free to play with a reasonable f2p model, I don't necessarily feel like a deeper review is fundamentally necessary regardless - If the game sounds interesting at first blush, why not give it a try? The only upfront cost is a 2.7 gigs (on steam) download, which should be reasonable for most.

I downloaded this primarily because I'd sort of considered it, discussed it with a friend and then he was like "hey you want to give it a try?" after it hit steam and again, why not, it's free. I can talk for ages about how different and wild legitimate f2p gaming is but really, there's just something to be said for this process being somehow both more and less enabling than buying software. Anyway, Path of Exile is an ARPG in the vein of Diablo 2. Like a true Diablo and/or Torchlight game, it apparently had a seven year development cycle. In many ways it tries to do one of two things: stay unreal close to its roots and then get as far away from them as possible.

At its core, as with all ARPGs, Path of Exile is a smashy/clicky  gameplay model. You hunt into the wilds for pants, using a variety of furious mouseclicks to get there then you acquire pants. In terms of its combat model, PoE feels much closer to Diablo 2 than Torchlight 2 - which is to say it's pretty nimble but not quite as zoomy fast as Torchlight 2. Combat is not as visceral either, but again, this ties it closer to Diablo 2 than its fellows. As such the core gameplay is very close and there's really not much I can say. It's akin to describing the word 'like' to someone who doesn't speak english - It's just too embedded in my sense of gaming. It's very solid as far as ARPGs go, feeling more responsive than Torchlight 2 except for issues of netcode which we'll get into.

Whatever else I'm going to go on about in this discussion, it's worth noting that Path of Exile is essentially and utterly a sequel to Diablo 2. It expands on the gameplay elements, but it carries so much of D2 throughout its DNA that you can straight up say - If you liked Diablo 2, and you're not a blizzard fanboy, you'll like this. I have encountered a couple weird opinions where people still in love with Blizzard just spew weird rationalizations at me for hating it.

I mean, don't get me wrong, there's still lots of things wrong with this game. But it shares almost all of them with Diablo 2 on the most part, so if you played hundreds of hours of that the only real excuse should be 'I think I've seen enough ARPGs for one life, thanks'.