I am so bad at this: King of Fighters XIII Steam Edition

No seriously. I don't just mean I am bad at the game, I am bad at playing the game. My left thumb starts to ache up bad from playing. Doing the charged special moves - which have some ridiculous name I can't even remember- starts to cause me pain pretty quickly. I feel like I'm wrestling a porcupine and I'm pretty certain I'm not winning the fight.

And yet man, I really love King of Fighters.

I really don't know a great deal about advanced fighter mechanics; I don't enjoy watching people play fighters, I don't really know much about EVO or salt or being salty or any of those things. I watched a little saltybet, which exemplified the actual Best Of Twitch chat in a weird role reversal of the natural order, but I've never installed Mugen, I haven't played a street fighter game in a decade and I know very little of Capcom's fighters. Divekick makes vague sense to me.

I am the person who is reviewing a fightmans game in the sense of not really knowing a great deal about the art of the fightmans. When I was a kid, I found doing a fireball in SF2 kinda difficult. I was not good at fightmans, and I did not like fightmans. So if you like fightmans, I'm going to sound like a blithering idiot, but if you're a casual like me, this is a review for you.

My Wallet's Heart is the Cards: 99 Levels to Hell

Actually, that is a bit dishonest, since this year Steam handed me like $25 for gems and some TF2 item I'm not even sure as to the reason for existing. But cards make up an even greater pool of my steam wallet, and this game has ... Or had, who knows when anyone will read this ... relatively valuable cards. It actually pooped out a foil, which is nice! I've gotten two foils this month, which is half the foils I've ever gotten after grinding out hundreds of cards.

This is a short one, because there isn't really a ton to 99 Levels to Hell. The game is an odd mix, in that it is both a twin stick shooter and a platformer, with some sort of procedurally generated roguelike nonsense going on as well. I'm not entirely sure on that, it feels like the levels are vaguely different, but who knows. In terms of gameplay, the game really is what it very much sounds like. I don't know that I like the twin stick shooting when applied to a boxy platforming world, it is sort of reminds me how frustrating it could get when taking aim in Terraria. Because platforming is often a very boxy, precise concept and twin stick shooting is messy spray and pray, the game has some weird dissonance going on. You are expected to aim down a lot, which doesn't work all that well. It is actually sort of funny - in the early levels, the scariest thing is a rat in a hole, because while you can just walk on by actually hitting the rat in the hole is brutally difficult.

Visually, the game resembles on at least a spiritual level Hero Siege, which I reviewed a couple months ago and quite liked. There's a lot of shared, happy to be immature, blood everywhere, don't worry about the tone style to this game that helps it get away from the fact the art assets are pretty basic stuff. I would say it is a step down from Hero Siege, but still in the same vein. It doesn't look like pixel artwork so much as just MS paint artwork, which isn't quite as satisfying though that might be nostalgia booting me around.

Enemy design is nothing special. Bats, floating skulls, robots, the like - The bosses are sort of novel looking, but the art frankly isn't the product of much talent, and when they get as big as the bosses do, welp there's your lot. The bosses are pretty cool in actual execution, though. Except the bat boss bugged out and jammed itself into a wall when I fought it...

The game also has traps, which it shares with Hero Siege, but unlike Hero Siege it doesn't seem very consistent. Some of the levels, the traps will kill monsters, other levels they don't and its just kinda wonky. The traps are visually distinct, but the game likes to 'ah-ha!' moment you with them, which is not nearly as amusing as you'd think.

The only real bad side to the visuals, if you don't mind looking at them, is the game's lighting issues are a little weird. The game is supposed to be dark, since you're digging your way to Hell, but it ends up feeling a bit too dark and some stuff is very hard to make out. Especially egregious are power-ups, assuming you can see them, it is hard to figure out if you actually want a power-up since you only have a weapon slot, an upgrade slot and an on-use slot.

As an odd treat, 99 Levels has surprisingly solid audio direction. I don't know if its the product of a kit no one else on the planet thinks to use or the guy behind it just knowing how to make properly matching audio, but it has a good solid snappy style to it. There is some amount of music, which goes loud angry guitar when things get intense, but mostly it relies on ambient noise to make it creepy. It works, and well, which really kinda contradicting the visuals.

Anyway, is 99 Levels to Hell any good? It comes off as fine, but it feels like a low budget title through and through, and the gameplay actually does manage to get pretty irritating in parts. The platforming isn't snappy or precise, and the whole twin stick aiming thing is actually rather annoying when paired with the boxy levels. The levels honestly feel a bit too small and a bit too dull for the shooting and platforming, it feels like they would have done well to be larger and had a bit more panache. Maybe some minibosses, or some less passive floaty goofballs enemies?

Basically I'd say this one is category pass, but if you see it in a bundle (which is where I got it), it's not a bad one to install for an hour or so of goofing around. I had fun with it, but much like Hero Siege, you get to a point where re-starting just feels like too much effort.

Monochrome slider: Betrayer

I don't know if Betrayer had a troubled development cycle or overly much about the game; I do know that it was made by 'at least some dudes' from the sweet team that made FEAR. While FEAR had a pretty iffy story that essentially did whatever it wanted and left you to pay the bill, it was a really enjoyable shooter with a really bad sequel.

You really hope that when they say "the guys who worked on FEAR" they like, left after the first FEAR and watched in horror as the second was made. Not the other option, that they worked on FEAR 2 and just left the digit out. You could say it makes too much of a difference!

(Snakefist)

don't want no skeletons on the lawn

Anyway the thing Betrayer is known for is its original prerelease materials depicted it with a very stark color palette of red on black, giving the game a weird perhaps even noir feeling to it. This may have done a lot to actually hurt the sales of the game, since lots of people went 'oh god my eyes they bleed red on black' and then wrote the whole production off. As it turns out, and the screenshots posted about here will display, Betrayer is on a rather unique slider system that allows you to set the contrast and intensity however you like. While I admit I didn't find I disliked the original artistic design, I do really appreciate actually getting to see some green in my gaming that isn't my wallet being devoured by steam sales so I flipped those sliders to see some glorious leaves. Such glorious leaves.

Also just kidding Canadian money is like blue and plastic now. I haven't seen green money since 2010!

My Wallet's heart is the Cards: Freedom Fall

I don't know when or where I set out to buy Freedom Fall; I think I remember this game being reviewed on like ... I have absolutely no idea where I originally got the idea in my head that I wanted to buy Freedom Fall. Like an alcoholic, I seem to yearn for the self abuse inherent to my play experience vis-a-vis torture platformers. I am not good at torture platformers and I do not generally enjoy them. But I look back fondly on like, They Bleed Pixels or Rush Bros in spite of being terrible at them. Admittedly, I did find Gianna Sisters Twisted whatever to be like nails jammed into my eyelids, but I've been told by people who actually like torture platformers that game is unfun.

But I did, some point in the past, want Freedom Fall. I remember thinking it looked good to me, for reasons I can't articulate simply because I may have dreamed the entire thing up. Or, one supposes, the game could be a clone of another game I wanted. This has happened before.

So basic run down: Freedom Fall is a sharp and clear SNES looking platformer primarily about going down, although many of the later levels also go up, around, sideways and rapidly lose the whole going down thing. I actually do take this as something of a mark against the game, since the first few levels are really neat for how it almost feels like a combination of like ... Actually it just feels like that one section in Megaman 2. Or Tetris. As you can see from above, the game is pretty short, unless I missed some option to turn on half the levels or something.

Which would be dumb. Regardless; short game, short review.

Like I said, the game is sharp and clear looking. The art assets are good, animations are very SNES in their simplicity. Beyond the subdued in comparison to other torture platformers gore, the game is generally a cheerful looking set up, with the protagonist quite the dashing looking young rogue and the terrain reminding me a little of mario or sonic in the right ways. The music is good, the sounds are limited but good, its a fine platformer that doesn't ... over-spray like say Gianna Sisters, which wraps back around to eye torture.

Platformerwise the controls are pretty good. I wouldn't say pixel perfect, and the ledge grab thing feels really finicky, but I had very few deaths I thought were bullshit. The level design is good, but this kinda leads into my problem with the game.

So if I think back to my favorite platformer of all time, its Sonic 3 and Knuckles. S3&K divides levels into two acts, introducing then refining gimmicks, and you could probably extend the game out with a third act. Freedom Fall is a short game, but it isn't for lack of different gimmicks or ideas. There's lots of stuff the game just doesn't use enough of, lots of art assets they could have pushed into a couple more levels. I find it a little strange, because the game does great in all the hard stuff, and there are lots of things I could have done with seeing a bit more.

Basically, it could have used "another act" in each proverbial section.

I wonder if they just felt like the game's story - as simple as it was - could only carry so much content. While I liked the story graffiti which feels very natural and helps break up the visuals, I don't feel like it was that imperative, so I'm left wondering why the game didn't have a couple more levels. There's still leaderboards and refining your play, and I'm sure hard mode is hard, but I just wonder how much you can justify at the game's offering price point.

In short (heh), I quite liked Freedom Fall, but it is too short and probably not worth even a sale price purchase. If you see it for cheap or in a decent priced bundle, and you like platformers, I would recommend it, but the game disappoints in how its finally a torture platformer I enjoyed (probably because it isn't so hard) but it never really puts up the wall and has none of the usual longevity.

A brief discussion of Groupees and Greenlight bundles

ok wait what is going on here

I'm a pretty big fan of https://groupees.com/ which I believe was originally a website that allowed indie musicians to get their work 'out there' that gradually morphed into a bundle selling site. There is also of course indie gala and a couple others, and then everyone loves humble bundle. Groupes and Indiegala are more the reasonable fringe, or um, a reasonable facsimile ... most of the time...

One thing Groupees seems to have success doing is, under their own terms, is running "Greenlight" bundles, or bundles of indie games which 'promise' they will give you Steam keys to their indie games once the game is greenlit and so forth. Generally speak, I do believe other sites have tried running this sort of thing, but Groupees seems to have the most success with it. (I should put success in quotes, I think) They're currently running their 14th Greenlight bundle, which is over here, if you care. I have absolutely no idea how good any of the game in this bundle are. None whatsoever. So of course, I bought them all.

look at all these sweet sweet nickels and dimes

For a lot of people, a steam key is worth infinitely more than a desura key or DRM free link. Especially if sweet, glorious cards are up for grabs. But this creates an interesting conundrum, how often do you  actually get a key for a game? There are two hoops to jump through here: First, the game actually needs to get greenlit. Second, the key has to somehow make its way back to you. So, as a little discussion, I'm going to look over the Greenlight bundles I've bought and look up how many keys I've gotten vs how many of these games have been greenlit without sending out keys. Note that these bundles are often build your owns, or might always be, ie I selected these games for purchase rather than the bundle's contents being static. So maybe I didn't choose so wisely. Maybe I should have just voted anime.

Oh, and I'll list how much I paid too, just for the fun of realizing how much money I've wasted on this shit when I could have put the same amount of money into just buying Skyrim or something. As a note, I've read sometimes people will give out their keys by going through Desura instead of sending them to groupees. I consider this as fundamentally disingenuous and I'm not checking Desura for Steam keys

Whoops I forgot about Scary games month: Dead Space 2

The scariest thing about scary games month is the way, every year, like a creeping zombie the holiday sales crawl just a little bit further up the month. I fully suspect by the time I pass from this mortal coil that "holiday sale" will follow "back to school" in like, early september, and halloween will be a one day event where they jam candy at a 400% markup then it disappears from the shelves after being priced 'to move' into garbage bags full of candy while they rush out their Christmas cacophony. But we're not allowed to call it Christmas sales, which does actually make sense, since really who cares?

"Dead space" is a good term for a horror game in a lot of ways even beyond being a puntastic little riff. There's a lot of dead space, filled with spooky but pointless noises, in just about every horror game I've ever played. Need to walk down the spooky empty corridor for your spooky surprise! Which is, unspookily enough, more zombies. Or sometimes, just nothing. Spooked you! You get nothing!

in a shocking twist, horror goes surgical

Oh I'm sorry, necromorphs. Which is basically like going through the dictionary and assembling two words which are as close to 'zom - be' as ghoulishly possible. Regardless, while I've always been a huge fan of the title of the game, I have largely mixed feelings about the first game. I really liked the crumbs button, the ship design and the way combat felt just different enough to be different. But horror largely isn't my cup of tea, and horror seems to mean 'colon sounds and raspberry jam' more than trying to build a scary atmosphere.

I feel sometimes like the feeling that violence is all around you gets away from 'horror' and turns more into being 'horrifying' if that makes sense. Dead Space 2 has even less restraint than the first game, it opens up with a reference to hallucinations that slowly unveil themselves in the first game then some totally hyper violent murder. I understand they're sort of going for a 'look at how real this shit has already got' moment, but horror is at its best when the shit is more implicit, less real so I don't even know how to start with this game.

Eternal RPG dilemmas: Final Fantasy Seven

So last year - or at least a year ago, it might have been two now -  I bought the full endless amount of games D&D pack, which had Baldur's Gate 1-2 and then some other stuff, including Planescape Torment which I've never finished. I managed to finish BG1, but BG2 just drags on forever and I ended up getting tired of it in the Underdark. I don't really have a lot of nostalgia for it, so maybe I never really liked it all that much, although I did really enjoy BG1 in sort of a weird mix of 'dear lord did game design ever have its head up its ass back then' and 'this plot is rather cool and punchy!'

a world of radiation poisoning metaphors

I don't really have a ton of nostalgia for FF7, either, but they feel like fair games to contrast off each other. I feel like I'll go back to BG2 eventually, since I never played the expansions but I had finished the original core game, but maybe not. Nothing about BG2 really blows me away, the game is good and nice looking but it doesn't rock my socks or something. FF7 though, that one I've finished but far enough back I don't remember much other than the story being pretty damn weird. I mean I fired the game up and realized it was almost 20 years old and felt kinda strange. Except that while BG2 looks like a modern indie title (which is to say, it looks fine if not good) FF7 just has some of the weirdest decisions. You are basically playing with 13 polygon characters on artifact riddled JPG backgrounds and ... Yeah it just looks weird. The FMVs fire up and you're just thinking good lord, how did this not look awful back then too!?!

But then I remember why I don't really have nostalgia - I hated that area of console gaming, where everything went '3D' and wasn't really ready for it. But whatever, let's see if we can beat some fun out of this ancient, bizarre RPG.

Whoops forgot to play games month: Remember Me

Yeah, kinda forgot to do much in the way of proper gaming for the month of august. I did play a great deal of MMDOC and some Beatbuddy, but neither are really worth talking about. Beatbuddy, as an ultra short review, is very pretty and relaxing but ultimately just rather dull. I'd hit puzzles where the solution was "swim very fast" and just stare at the screen in confusion. Because I was bored. Remember Me, however, is an interesting enough bit to actually get into.

I have to admit I was really excited, or at least mildly excited, about this game when I first saw images of it. The concept work is really interesting stuff, the memory ideas seemed neat as well, though it does have this sort of weirdly sanitized drug culture feeling to it. I was also really shocked at the general sentiment in the media that the main character was considered in someway unmarketable. Really? Nilin is like the best looking new protagonist design I've seen in years. Supposedly the issue is she's female, and men don't want to look at a girl when playing a third person game.

I dunno, this is just not something I'm wired to understand.

Remember Me, as to the game itself, is a touch weird to get into. The game is the strangest mix of high concept and generic video game. An hour in and it is still spewing random tutorials at you or vaguely explaining boring stuff like 'hit guy with special power up to break up the monotony!' and you're like 'zzzzz'. Nilin's gorgeous model aside, the game is pretty boilerplate. Inversely, the world of neo-Paris is fantastic, a really unique near future bit of sci-fi with lots of craziness and world building, all centered around what legitimately feels like a hopelessly defanged portrayal of drug culture.

On the other hand, neo anything feels like a dated 80s reference. Who calls anything Neo anything after the Matrix? I'm sure there's a guy in his late teens or mid-twenties who is like 'Neo-Paris? Keanu Reeves Paris? Whoa, what?'

Magic the Gathering Online: Please no v4

I love Magic. It is one of my longest lasting hobbies. Now, sure, right now I'm not playing in real life. I take breaks here and there, sometimes card games feel great. Other times card games don't feel so great, some years I don't play it at all and instead write 300k words or whatever. Other times the draft set is core set, which I would rather gargle than play, especially when it is as actively worthless as m15 looks to be.

I think the things that make Magic itself so endearing lies in the various oddities, silliness and so forth. The game is essentially an abstraction as all RPGs are of wizard hat battles, and therein lies the rub - The abstractions themselves make for a really neat game, one built on math and theories. Magic gets pretty stupid sometimes, of course, R&D is perpetually stuck between doing a terrible job and an good job due to the fact they need to codify their theories and stick to them or instead get weird thoughts like 'X isn't very intuitive!! We should change it' or 'this doesn't feel very green'. It's an abstraction, guys, it doesn't matter.

here we have os/2

But still for all the shit talk I've ever mustered up, Magic has gotten a ton better and is a really interesting and deep game. I don't know if it is for everyone, I feel like not, but it definitely is a game that supports all its game modes and allows for a huge amount of players.

Magic Online, on the other hand, is a blight. And thanks to Wizards letting everyone do some prereleases for free, we can talk about an authentic v4 experience.

Long Card Road Home: Saturday Morning RPG

Nostalgia. Nostalgia never changes.

It's Steam sale time and me here at this blog is am playing many games to try to churn out the last few cards to sell during the sale. And by play, I mean idling games like this one and this one that I got from bundles. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm just not man enough to review visual novels.

Or play visual novels. I'm sorry. I'm just not strong enough. Not strong enough for this at all.

(I am totes buying that when it isn't that many cents. It just makes no sense to buy it now though.)

Anyway so unrelated to that I gave Saturday Morning RPG a try. The basic premise is its a "saturday morning cartoon" inspired RPG with a ton of QTEs in the combat system. I'm not sure if they still even show saturday morning cartoons, having not owned a TV or really watched much in the way of cartoons they'd show on saturday mornings (I really hope they don't show Rick and Morty to children, pls), but if they don't there was a point in time many whatever generation I am remember fondly when they would get a big box of disgusting carb laden cereal and then in a blissful sugar high watch advertising.

I mean saturday morning cartoons. Which were probably the first and purest convergence of media and product placement in history. I mean we all love Optimus Prime, but the dude was basically showing up to give us all 21 minutes of 'buy me! buy my friends! buy my enemies so you can hit them with my friends!' and having nostalgia for that is like looking back lustfully upon your real estate agent. But we can and we do, so here we are, with a RPG entirely centered around referencing that stuff.

a pun, I think

I don't think this game has even a hint of irony as Blood Dragon did, either. There is nothing all that meta, as best I can tell, about SM:RPG. It is really just supposed to be: here are references, do they amuse you? And it isn't especially aggressive or excited about them.

Well, I guess joining GIJOE, who are referred to as Private Johnson in game isn't exactly played straight.

ah hue hue hue hue heh

Long Card Road Home: Sweezy Gunner

Man, there's this thing. This thing, ok, where you start up a game and the opening FMV or intro cutscene or whatever you want to call it is just not the good. And your brain braces itself for suck and then ... Oh, wait no, this is actually not that bad. Hey, this is kinda cute and fun.

Sweezy Gunner is that thing.

question mark

The game starts off with a dreadful little cutscene that explains nothing and is weirdly jarring. The eponymous sweezy gunner itself, which is a sort of rolling tank thing with a face, is cute like thomas the tank engine. A sort of pleasant in the afternoon friendly rolling death machine. The pilot on the other hand is sort of a weird surly girl with a draconic stomach tattoo all out to say hi to the world talking to ... It doesn't matter. It is ideal we just forget it as quickly as possible.

I'm pretty sure I got Sweezy out of an indiegala bundle, and man oh man are indiegala bundles just a hot bed of card and card awful games. So expectations are cardly surprising at how low they are and the cutscene is a further lowering of expectations. But then the oddest thing happens.

Yeah. It is kinda cute and fun.

Long Card Road Home: Blood of the Werewolf

You ever play a game and think to yourself 'Man, I bet these people wish they made Castlevania?'

This is one of those games. I mean, it even has the medusa heads. Right off into the first level I start thinking - this jump arc is weird and it feels kinda floaty, and then the bats which act like medusa heads show up and I'm thinking oh god no this is going to be right into castlevania.

Then one of the loading screens read 'what a terrible night to have a curse' and my brain just starts screaming 'People who learned the wrong lesson from retro gaming! Wrong lesson! WRONG LESSON!' and then it just gets worse and worse. This game didn't get me to record setting install / uninstall, but man at moments it really did try hard. Nothing is ever going to beat Guardians of Graxia on that, though.

Keep beating it hard, Guardians of Graxia. Not even sure I'm remembering that game's name correctly, and I don't care, since anything with Graxia in the title is probably terrible anyway.

Blood of the Werewolf is a platformer in line with Castlevania by way of Super Meat Boy and whichever classic game had transforming between mother and werewolf mother. It also kinda makes me think of Megaman. Oh, no, it makes me think of Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. I was initially sort of interested in the game because part of my brain thinks the classy dame protagonist, who is also a werewolf, will not be exploded Super Meat Boy style. See, Super Meat Boy can be chewed up and exploded because he's a man of meat, and They Bleed Pixels was only a little disturbing since it is intentionally supposed to be some sort of occult dream. Blood of the Werewolf has a classy dame on the screen who is then violently exploded by a Sonic the hedgehog crusher trap.

I have to admit, maybe it makes me a big sexist moron, but seeing the lady I'm playing getting pulverized into a giant blood explosion kinda disturbs me a little. I know. I'm a bad person. I kinda thought this was going to be more artistic, less 'hey do you remember the platformers from the 80s' and I'm like "hey, I have ROMs of those, I beat them years ago I don't want anymore please stop"

Long Card Road Home: Risk of Rain

So platformers, roguelikes, let's talk these elements again. Because we didn't already discussed roguelike platformers back with Rogue Legacy, which is probably the game I've had the most fun with this year. Oh, and retro style graphics, those are a thing nowadays too right?

It's like a fucking holy trifecta of "this era's indies" or something. I mean seriously. This is entirely A Thing. If the AAA shooter slash "open world" is the top of the scene right now, then retro style platformer with roguelike elements is the bottom. Or the middle. The bottom is anime games. What if we took a novel ... ok .... and added vaguely animated pictures?!?

Anyway so, Risk of Rain is a retro styled, roguelike platformer hitting all of those bases and hitting them hard. In fact the retro style goes further back, giving it more of a visual style from the atari era, but with far far more pixels on screen. The basic story is you're on a spaceship, it crashes, and alongside it crashes a bunch of junk on the ship. You can loot and use this junk, which is where half the roguelike elements come in. Also levels.

On the other hand, as opposed to other platformers, this is a shooty platformer, although it relies more on cooldowns and placement than pure button mashing as opposed to the obvious comparison, that being Megaman. I always sort of wonder why there aren't more Megaman clones in this era, but I think it comes back to the same reason there aren't Sonic clones - It is much more difficult to do.

I haven't actually played a true roguelike in recent memory - I plan on playing TOME this year, after getting through more of my card games in time for the summer sale - but I am under the impression that the cooldowns system is more from roguelikes than I think. Regardless, RoR is a ... shooty platformer roguelike with four abilities per class and tons of items?

Or something?

Long Card Road Home: Chompy Chomp Chomp

So, like many bundle buying steam gamers, I wait til things get steam keys not desura keys and then maybe give them a shot. Or, more likely, I don't. But I do tend to input keys that pop up on my groupees page. Since I'm grinding cards this month, and this game had cards, I installed it right after inputting the key.

I always feel sort of soft on stuff I get through bundles. I paid like, pennies for all the hard work people put in but man sometimes games just aren't. Chompy chomp chomp isn't exactly in that category, but it is real close.

CCC, as I'm going to call it, is visually attractive. I like the art style, the little monsters running around and going bite bite is nice looking. Then ... That's it. The audio direction is cute, and fine, but the actual game is just a somewhat complex version of playing a children's game of tag. There is also a single player mode that allows you to play another version of tag.

There's nothing really wrong with the game, though the load times are a little high, but there's not much really to the game either. The basic principle is solid, and the single player is not a bad set of ideas either, but there just isn't that much content with overly too small maps and total reliance on playing with other people. If I were going to recommend a party game for small children, this game would work out well, but anyone older and Hoard or Sacred Citadels which I reviewed elsewhere are just going  to be better Big Picture Mode games.

I do sort of feel like the game just needed to be a touch more ambitious. Just a bit bigger map wise, a couple more mechanics, maybe some maps with some second or third floors, or teleporters - Just something to spice it up a little.

The little Chompies really are so cute though! Look at his little flesh-devouring face!

Long Card Road Home: Hero Siege

Over the last few months in spite of giving up on buying new games for a year, other than bundles, my badges page has continued to bloat over with a seemingly endless sea of games with cards just waiting to be dropped. So, for the month of June as we all await the summer sale, I'm going to work on my card back log. My cacklog. My ... wait, that sounds ...

I acquired Hero Siege from the ShinyLoot roguelikes bundle on Groupees a couple weeks ago. In retrospect, I probably should have taken them up on more of the games available in the bundle, but Hero Siege and TOME looked about the best of the lot. I haven't picked up TOME yet, since it doesn't have cards, but Hero Siege looked like an interesting game to give a shot after enjoying fellow 'roguelikes'. I don't think Hero Siege is, by any means, much of a roguelike. It does have some pretty random elements, and I have to admit there is a certain charm to the whole "id potions by jamming them down your throat" school of thought.

My first experience in Hero Siege was - and I'm not making this up - playing for what steam records as two minutes. I think about half that was puzzling at the weird you can buy gems menus (Is this a phone game?) and what not, then playing maybe thirty seconds. A prompt flashed up on screen to start the next wave, maybe, and then while I was figuring it out my character fell over dead. I have no idea why.

It is possible I stood on a trap or something, but it feels strange just how much stuff in this game one-shots you right from the get-go. The game actively doesn't really feel like it wants you to play it. Unsurprisingly this actually frames a great deal of my experience with the game!

MMDOC part 2: The good, the bad, the dying card game

I've played a great deal of Might and Magic: Duel of Champions in the last few weeks, and I've come to terms with three things. First, MMDOC is at its core some of the best CCG design I've ever played and I hope people steal their ideas. Second, the game designers who are currently working on it seem divided down the middle between actually "getting it" and just making horrible formats. Lastly, the game is dying and playing is rather bittersweet.

The game managed a small bump in player base following the huge overhaul to its gui, formats and economic system, then returned on its downward spiral into oblivion. I will go over the reasons the game might be dying at the end, but I kinda want to talk about what the game does well and what it doesn't do well.

First and foremost - since this is ostensibly a review blog - I have to strictly say no, you should not start playing MMDOC. It has been over a month since the last major patch, going on two, and the developers have reacted with reluctance, ambivalence and open hostility to feedback. I feel like MMDOC is akin to recommending someone play Magic Online, except with worse community interaction on the official forums and a better client. And the fact it is hard to imagine a game that is shedding players at a tremendous rate is going to be around for much longer.

F2P games are extremely reliant on both critical mass and the "certainty of longevity" I suppose. As the player base continues to dwindle, it becomes difficult to imagine that the revenue stream can keep up, as without new players you won't find new whales and without players keeping the queues going players will just play less and less til they quit. As that feeling of dread sets in the mouse doesn't want to go to the cash shop.

But let's talk about the good, before we get really negative:

Greenlight is the perfect company to the indie paradigm

Indie, you see, has the airy pretension of a certain innate right to call itself art. And there are basically two metrics by which art is allowed to consider itself successful. The first is commercial success, but never too far, because anything that makes enough money loses the second metric. The second is suffering.

Civ casualties are a non-issue: Syndicate

I'm not sure I'm entirely rational when it comes to people's anger over remakes. XCom got remade recently, and although I'm told the game is good - a friend bought me it but I just couldn't make myself play it for more than a boring hour - it angers me richly. A fine bubbling brew of rage. But on the other hand, when other people get angry, I just don't have any sympathy. The explicit nature of Intellectual Properties is to create branding that attracts attention. If you're making value judgments about the outcome of a product, you worry about the studio that is making it or you worry about the individuals behind it. The actual 'brand' has limited meaning, and the willingness of gamers to get super hyped about IPS dulls my sympathy for their pain.

But yeah, the XCom remake, in spite of being good, still angers me. Good figure. Go figure. Actually maybe that's why it makes me mad.

Syndicate is a FPS, though it falls more towards the goofy future shooter genre than the military sim genre. I feel sometimes like there's only three aspects of shooters and all games are just somewhere between the holy trinity of the Doom, the Deus Ex and the Call of Doot Doot Doot. That's incorrect, but you can place 90% of them on the graph. Syndicate is ever so near the deus ex. That's not much of a surprise, since the one might have inspired the other, though I'd have to go look that up and I'm just not doing that.

Like Deus Ex - HR mind, I didn't have a computer capable of running the original during the hey day of that particular game - you play a super-soldier augmented with technology, though I don't think they call it augments in this game. No, here everything is chips, with hacking and breaching chips and chipped guns, so forth, so on. The impact here is that your character has, much like DE:HR, abilities way outside just holding the trigger down and screaming at the top of your lungs.

Unlike DE:HR though, there's no stealth issues and civ casualties, as the tagline and your partner say, are a non-issue.

Back to forming plats and stuff: Rogue Legacy

So a couple of weeks back I finished up my write up on Guacamelee! and I felt kinda bad about it. The game was really charming, and much of the time I really enjoyed it, but it had multiple elements that just made me grind my teeth or get bored. Part of it I wrote off as simply a matter of platformers. I've played a couple here and there over the last few years, with few of them feeling as good as Sonic Classics or New Super Mario on the DS. Was that world? Whatever. Anyway, I did the only sensible thing about uninstalling a platformer I got fed up with - I went through my list of pending card games and immediately installed another platformer.

Rogue Legacy is a delightfully inspired fusion of ARPG, roguelike (or the genre that fundamentally spawned ARPGs anyway) and platformer with beautiful properly retro graphics that settles on basically dying, and passing to your offspring a horrible quest to be maimed horribly in the hopes of eventually, one day, taking down that damn nasty castle. The game really reminds me of Act Raiser, actually, on the visual level. It's a little bit weird since it reminds me of both parts of Act Raiser at once but hey that's cool.

So given I've been frustrated and irritated with platformers since like, 2010 or something, you'd imagine I installed this game, played it for ten minutes then uninstalled after I brutally died three times in very short order, right?

Actually maybe it reminds me of Soulblazer. Maybe it reminds me of 16-bit era games in a general way. In a good way. But not of Super Castlevania, which I played back in 2011 and found did not age quite as well as I'd hoped. Can I go with 'it reminds me of Quintet? Does anyone ever remember who that is?

Top Five things I'm not going to miss about MMDOC's open format

So after getting trapped above 1000 elo and roughly forced to play against people with actual, serious decks, MMDOC became something of a surreal game. After a bit more grinding I realized I should probably either spend the resources I had, or just stop playing the game altogether, which seemed far from optimal.

I didn't exactly enter the tournament scene or something. I tried playing jackpot, but it was largely a waste of time, as apparently players imagine that with such prizes on the line they should ... Take about a million years to do anything. Given JP only pays out to a tier I'd probably not reach to justify playing it, I just went back to grinding ranked matches to keep piling up wildcards, which got me to around 1200~ rating, peaking at about 1300 or so but no higher.

At about 1200 you start to actually play against tournament decks, though they tend to be a mixed breed of people who probably got stuck just over 1500 and then legitimate good players. Good players with good decks mostly crushed me, which I guess is how it should be, but bad players were quite the mix.

So with the patch hitting tomorrow and my time playing open drawing entirely to a close (spoilers; it sucks and they're killing it) I thought I'd outline the five things I found most disappointing about playing at the higher levels. This isn't really a review, it is just me venting.

Consider it therapy, or a discussion of how game design can go bad.

Duel of Champions (MMDOC): Introductory thoughts

I like to pronounce it MMMdock.

I've played a fair number of card games over the years, and the rise of the "f2p" CCG market has interested me. I have a MTGO account but after a run of trying to enjoy it a couple years back I realized that magic, online, is just not really a good translation. A friend has dragged me kicking and screaming back into real life Magic, which is actually great since we happened to bumble into a comic store in Oakville - a one Comic Connection - and the store is just fantastic, with a really great location and an awesome owner. So I do actually play Magic via Duels of the Planeswalkers and now in real life, but not on MTGO, because it's awful. I've had conversations with other players and many of them agree that regardless of the convenience of drafting without pants, MTGO is simply too terrible a platform to sink money into. Not that everyone feels that way.

Anyway so I do get the card playing bug here and there, and the MMDOC thread has floated around on the front page of Games on SA for a while. I'd read bits and pieces of the thread for a while, and recently it came up that the game would be launching an 'easier to get into' new base set with a new format centered on that set. Figuring what the Hell, I finally installed the game and gave it a try. This is a review of the game before the new base set launches and I'll explain why I started playing

I should mention that yes, there is a HoMM sucks now tag and yes, I have found Ubisoft's attempt at the franchise rather miserable. I haven't tried 6 yet, but the dev videos made it look somewhere between awfully generic, pointless watered down and incredibly weeaboo. I've played about a thousand hours of HoMM3 and I've always found it sad that the franchise has been treated so cruelly, but I'm not going to hold it against this game. Or even six, really, it just hasn't been cheap enough to bother playing a game that is supposedly super buggy.

I do admit that I really don't understand why they bought the IP only to basically use little beyond the name. MMDOC doesn't remind me, IP wise, of Homm3 at all.

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Clickr

I actually played Clickr well past the point of getting my cards, but somehow it just sounds like a pun name suits a silly little game. Clickr was on my wishlist, on Steam, for a long time before a friend bought it for me for Christmas after I bought them a game a day for a week or something. Steam sales are good for buying but they're really good for gifting!

Clickr is a very simple to learn puzzle game that relies on little more than three button presses. First and foremost is 'the clickng' which allows you to remove most pieces from the playing board with a click of the mouse. Your goal in doing so is to produce four squares of the same color, which join up to become a clickable big square that generates points. The game also allows you to rotate the board, with gravity always obeying whatever down currently is. There is little more on the basic level than this, you can also get 'turn squares' which increase points, chain combos and some game modes have 'block' and 'star' pieces which behave slightly differently. There's a fair amount of depth in the core gameplay even if the basics are very, very simple.

Presentation wise Clickr appears to me to be rather, well, Asian in origin with very cute graphics and an adorable sound track filled with happy noises. Apparently the studio behind the game is from South Korea, which wasn't my first guess, but I won't post my first guess since it kinda shows how poor I am as a white canadian man at telling different cultures apart. I digress; the game is smooth looking, the interface is good and like I said it is filled to the brim with large amounts of cute. My only real complaint with the art style and presentation lies with the skin feature. The game allows you to reskin it to your pleasure, but there's only three skins, which it could have used more!

In terms of content there really isn't a "basic" Clickr game. You open with puzzle mode, which is actually far more cerebral than it appears at first blush. I didn't really notice until stage 21 (which, if you buy the game, you'll probably notice as well) as to what is going on. After that you get battle mode and push mode, which are sort of "vs" game modes against the AI. Battle mode requires paying attention to the other player far more than push mode, with rewards for timing your stars and minetraps against the AI's wave of forces. It's a good extension to the main game, and fun in its way. Lastly there's a puzzle mode that centres more around turning than clicking, which is referred to as IQ mode. IQ mode feels like a more nuanced shifting block puzzle.

Each of the main modes will have a handful of additional tweaked modes based on them, such as a battle mode where you don't get stars but get tons of stones to make mines with instead. Most of these game modes are slightly different, but don't really offer a big enough change up to really make you enjoy a mode you've grown tired of.

Regardless, if there is one complaint about Clickr it ties back to why I had the game on my wishlist in the first place. I don't really go in for puzzle or match games. I really liked Bejeweled 3, but I only played it for a week or two before getting tired of it. You know who does like Bejeweled 3 a ton? My mother. So I've been looking for other puzzle games to put on her computer, and Clickr unfortunately does not fit the bill. There really aren't many casual modes for this game and the relaxing content dries up after the first hour. Past that, it isn't a casual game, and after a while success required something like 2 clicks per second. I'm not really fretting, it was never for me and I did have fun with it, but it's not casual enough to gift to my mother.

There's nothing really wrong with clickr, other than being a bit too hard, but if you're looking for another match puzzle game to fiddle with, it's a well made title with some cutesie graphics and a silly sound track. The presentation is good and the game, while simple, is pretty good.

Fresh from the bundle farm: Guacamelee!

I don't really know if Guacamelee! is made by individuals of a Mexican pursuit, descendent or what not. As with many individuals born so far north of anywhere humans should actually choose to live, Mexican culture comes through the filter of an entire country of homogenization, leading me to only two conclusions: Mexicans have a flair for colors that require seizure warnings, and delicious. (the country in that example is the one between, in case you misunderstand)

I can not, unfortunately, eat Guacamelee! but I can describe it as Mexican Luchadore Super Metroid. Or maybe just Super Luchadore Mextroid? That sounds racist. Forgive me. Really, Super Metroid is one of my favorite games of all time, given I did play and beat the original Metroid as a small child and the basic design philosophy is likely to be one of my favorite of all time. Later Metroidvanias don't really hold up to me, becuase Metroid and Super Metroid both had this feeling of exploring an alien world.

Guacamelee! certainly isn't a classic - I'll set the tone right here, Super Metroid is a classic and Guacamelee! adds things to the model which flatly worsen the game to no real benefit in many cases - but it's amazingly charming and the art/music are (maybe?) culturally inspired by Mexican motifs, which gives you this really unusual and outlandish feel. Outlandish to someone born where there's two feet of snow still on the ground I mean. Many of the Super Metroid abilities are translated into this crazy wrestler world, with things like the bizarre Maru-Mari having a unique but equally bizarre version in this game. Not gonna spoil it, because it took me a moment when I realized what it was and I was very amused.

Grinding on that tower like a pop music video: Prime World Defenders

I'm a big fan of Tower defense games as what I mentally refer to as "coffee games". Games you can pour your first copy of coffee and then play while you slowly savor your home-brewed, fresh ground steaming beverage. As such, this is going to slant this review in sort of a weird manner, because Prime World Defenders is a tower defense game that gained things by losing it.

PW:D is made by Nival Entertainment, who I don't know overly much about. I believe "Prime World" is a brand for their grouping of products, though I haven't looked into any of the other ones there's at least two more. Nival apparently did some of Heroes of Might and Magic V, which I found incredibly boring. I have something like a thousand hours logged in HoMM3 and quite a few in HoMM4 even, so I was rather surprised to find HoMM5 incredibly dull and not at all what I was looking for. I'm not going to hold it against Nival though, since I have no idea how much of it was their fault. Ubisoft continued to plow on, with the next developer further simplifying odd elements of the game and adding weeaboo shit. Do you really think people who have trouble with turn based strategy games have trouble with things like hexes and the fact there's multiple currencies? People don't have trouble figuring out how different monies work. We're capitalists. Money is 90% of what we do!

Anyway, as I said, Prime World: Defenders is a tower defense game, but with something of a twist that takes over a great deal of its gameplay and resources. That twist is free to play style grinding, though as far as I can tell there are no in application purchases in PW:D. Maybe f2p is the wrong description, but it feels like someone had some good ideas vis-a-vis f2p CCGs and then grafted those ideas onto a tower defense game.

It's sort of interesting because whether or not you like this game likely starts and finishes right from the question of whether or not you can appreciate a very upfront and obvious skinner box. Actually, to be frank, the game is probably a hybrid of the core gameplay of a tower defense with the addictive spicing of a Diablo game on top of it. Does that sound good?

Eight Long Weeks of Roling - Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

So after a couple weeks of playing shooters, more shooters, even more shooters and a few random games mixed in between more manshooting than I've ever done before, I feel like it's time to return to my roots - Or rather what eight years of World of Warcraft (or maybe just what felt like eight years of WoW) have left me as the only type of game I'm any good at besides Magic the Gathering.

Kingdoms of Amalur has one of those weird stories - Well, I mean development stories, though it's got a pretty weird in game story too - Where it bankrupted its studio but was also a mmorpger that didn't end up as one. It's also a game that is much easier to obtain outside Steam, so I'm actually playing the Origin version of the game instead. After sort of realizing you can either not use Origin and uPlay, or play their games cheaper, I just sort of gave up on avoiding it. I don't know anything about how poorly the studio did - I know a bunch of people lost their jobs and apparently Rhode Island suffered to make this game, which sucks to hear, but the software industry is a very odd one to break into. I always feel like a studio, even one with lots of venture capital lined up, should try to break into the market with a series of games to get their name and brand out there.

But what would I know, about anything...

To talk about Origin briefly, the client looks fine, but isn't anything special and the overlay feels rather primitive while a bit more visually pleasing. I prefer the orange gradients of Origin to Steam's grey to grey downer, but once you get away from the slickness it's just a fair bit jankier and it feels like it is missing features, or links to elements that Steam provides. Though I do like that it specifies which DLC are installed in a group as opposed to Steam's iffy implementation. I don't have any friends on Origin though, since I use their client rarely, so maybe it has really nice voice chat and I just don't know. Origin itself doesn't take screenshots - A steam feature I adore - but KoA itself does just by hitting printscreen, which is pretty nice. It took me a little bit to figure out where the "time played" display is, but it's there.

Weirdly enough, KoA itself gets excited about achievements, but of games on my account (about ten or so) only Dead Space 3 has any reference to achievements. I guess Steam does this from time to time as well, but it seems a little weird that an EA published game put out recently wouldn't integrate achievements into the client. I looked it up, and apparently Steam does? What?

Which bundle was this in: Retrovirus

So imagine my surprise when I download a game that starts with "Retro" in the title and expect an entirely different game, one I'm not altogether excited for at all, and instead end up with something I didn't even realize existed and is actually from the guys who made Sol Survivor - which I really liked - that is more or less a Descent style game. Descent, in case no one has ever heard of it, was a moderately successful fully three dimensional fps in which you played a little space ship and I don't remember much else about it. It was a long time ago, and anyway, it was a sweet game that had a bunch of sequels ... And let's not get too far into describing ancient games.

I really liked Sol Survivor and never realized the guys (or gals, who knows) who worked on it were doing anything at all, let alone anything that might appeal to my nostalgia bone. So when I fired it up and the neat little opening video began running I was sort of staring at the screen in complete confusion. When did I buy this? I thought I bought something else, something I wasn't too excited to play.

Retrovirus feels like a fusion of Descent and the best I can come up with is ReBoot by way of Tron. The world design is top notch and interesting, although the game isn't quite as pretty as the model and texture work would allow. The game's story focuses on a "worm" which is infecting the system, and running through the system trying to piece together how to fight it while butting heads with various other major agencies within the system. Your character "agent" has no voice, but the game's story is mostly explained through dialogue delivered by 'Oracle' and her contemporaries, who are a mixed and oft times silly lot.

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2013 in review

As with last year, this is a set of mini reviews summarizing my recollections of games I played over the course of 2013. Unlike last year, I'm going to be really frank about something: I don't necessarily recall, with perfect accuracy, how I felt about the games while I was playing. This is more or less a summary of how I feel about them a week, a month or almost a full year afterwards. This is after digestion, these are the lasting impressions.

I divide this into four categories, which work in the following somewhat conflicting ways. Category A is the games I think, regardless of your tastes, you should give a serious look at and try because I really enjoyed them. Category B, inversely, are game I think you should try only if you like the genre they're in, but otherwise I felt pretty highly about them. Category C are games I liked or sort of like, but I'm not really recommending unless you're already inclined towards them, or I had problems with getting them running. Category D lastly are games I just stopped playing and/or can't really see personally ever telling anyone to play.

You may notice this review system is entirely subjective. While I do my best to be impartial about things that aren't objective in nature, the truth of the matter is, you're going to have to look at my reviews and decide if you agree with me or don't. If you do, then my opinion is worthwhile, but if you don't maybe you like the games I don't like, and vice versa. As an aside, where I put my experiences does not interrelate with where you put yours. If you really liked a game and I didn't, it doesn't matter, it just means we disagree and you can probably look at the review to figure out why. I get hung up on stuff that doesn't matter to most people, but I do tend to talk about why.

To me, that's the idea, to talk about flaws and facets, and then maybe other people can figure out from my subjective opinions how they'd mesh with their subjective opinions. Because ultimately we're not all that objective, except I will say I'm a fanboy of absolutely goddamn nothing and that's my thing.

Also these reviews are not, as with last year, of games entirely from MY 2013. Many of them are older, but some are more recent, but I feel like hey - how often do you get to read a review of complete games years later, or compared to modern titles? The point here is to discuss if this $5 title is still worth your money four years after its release, and how shit ages, and if we have time how many donkeys power uPlay.