Toward the Verge: Strider

Strider!

Strider is a word used here for ... Like literally ninja. You're a "strider" from a "strider" school which teaches you to strider people to death. It's weird. They also call you "Strider" like it's a name but you are also a strider from that strider school, and they previously sent other striders to bestride the stride-able but they failed in their striding leaving all possible stridering to you.

Or something? In Ninja Gaiden do they just call the main character 'ninja?'

I had actually played Strider on the Genesis slash Mega Drive back when I was a young'un, but I don't have any strong memories of it. Reading wikipedia on the history of the release, it sounds like it was considered very highly as games go and not a metroidvania at all. Strider, here, is a Metroidvania and thereby covered vaguely under the toward the verge sub-banner of games I've played.

I'm going to be honest in that as a genre goes or has gone for me this year, this has not been what I would call a pleasant set of games. Generally speaking what you end up with are a lot of games with dull hallways, mediocre enemy placement, boring gameplay. No sense of exploration, of 'opening up' the game world or progression.

Strider is both the best and worst of the games I played in this regard. I didn't write many reviews, since there are more than a few games I feel like I might go back to in the doldrums between the two great sales, when I'm not trying to grind out many a card. Strider is a mix of a lot of elements that really make me wonder how much better it would have been if it wasn't crippled by being lashed to metroidvania elements.

It is also apparently inspired by Shadow Complex, so man, did that ever make me not want to pick up Shadow Complex.

The coolest thing about this game is that the Strider's scarf changes color when you change plasma options. You won't notice this early on, since you don't get a plasma change for quite a while, but you can actually change it on the fly and it slowly flows out. A lot of the visuals pick up on this sort of subtle element while the rest of the game hesitantly sits down before drooling on itself.

The final carddown: Commander Cool 2

It's not really the final anything, except I've finally got lots of cards sold for sale day. Finally! Cards down!

Commander Cool 2 is likely from one of my many groupees bundles purchases. While I talked about this with some trepidation back in march or so, Greenlight stepping up its game has led to an influx of indie games on my list, and with it a wide variety of titles to get my card on. Or I don't know, maybe it came from some other bundle, but whatever. It doesn't matter. I have this game for cards, and cards I shall seek.

I've been pretty happy with the greenlight into indies experience on Steam. Certainly most of the games aren't good, but it is an interesting way to experience gaming. It's nice to pick up a title, play for ten minutes and just throw it away if I don't care for it.

I'm not exactly certain what the story behind Commander Cool 2 is and I largely don't care. The game stars a dude who is a sarcastic epitome of "Commander Cool, too" and he is doing platforming levels in the stone age. The game is more of a "speed run" platformer in line with something like Volchaos, or maybe Dustforce, which is sort of sad to admit since Dustforce is noted as a good game and Volchaos was bad enough I'm not even sure I bothered to write up a review. Anyway, levels are short and platforming is quick. The game's load times are good, but it does have some weird shifts in design.

Steam sale holiday 2015: This is why we can't have nice things

It's time for another steam sale! It's time for who cares!

There are three things of worth to mention re: this steam sale. This is all text, and it's not even very funny, so feel free to not read this discussion of "the moar thangs change~"

The Death of Steam Sales

No, they're not going away, but I'm going to be honest in that no flash deals and no dailies all but instantly killed the sale for me and everyone I know in terms of enthusiasm. I just immediately bought Axiom Verge, a couple friends immediately bought this or that, and we all collectively moved on. I originally made a Steam account during a Steam sale quite a many years back, and in a lot of ways it shaped my perceptions of Steam as well as how I interact with friends regarding Steam. The big sales used to be an influx of discussion within my peers, with each of chattering about what we hope goes on sale, wondering if a game is worth it and mocking poor sales that over-estimate a game's remaining value.

There's no rush to f5 at 10 PST and there's no real excitement. No one really cares. It lacks the proverbial punch that previous sale models did, and it all seems to come down to one thing. Or two things. Well, a couple things.

Snore me out the door: Super Cyborg

The game is hard is not an excuse for lazy design.

Super Cyborg is a pixeled "homage" and by homage I mean clone of NES Contra games. The visuals are really good, with lots of variety and truly horrifying imagery. The monster design is garish and absurd, looking biological, alien and monstrous all at once and sometimes in ways you don't even recognize until you look at them longer. Then the music is really good, and the game feels good in motion. The menu screen looks great as the music fires up. You're pumped. This is going to be great!

What could go wrong? Everything. Everything could go wrong. A speed run of the game is about twenty minutes long, it has that little real content. Obviously learning the game should take a lot longer than that, but the game doesn't try to make you "learn" in a way where you "get better".

Super Cyborg is built around two core axioms for difficulty: Pattern memorization and situational unfairness. The first one is what I meant by never getting better. You don't get better at Super Cyborg, you just learn the patterns and whereabouts of all of the things that kill you. Which is everything. This leads partially to the second axiom: The game puts you in spots where enemies can jump on you or otherwise attack you and you have to struggle to fight back. I mean incredibly stupid stuff like you're going up a slope, and your gun doesn't shoot up the slope, so you can't hit enemies casually walking down toward you. They just amble toward you, not a care in the world. Unless you have the spread gun ... Which we'll get to discussing in a moment. NES era design just feels like surrealism in this day and age. Instead of feeling like a bad ass, you're flailing around, until you memorize the spots you need to be, though sometimes there are no spots and you're just not supposed to be in X spot with Y gun so whoops u ded.

Oh, and most of the weapons are garbage, and you lose your weapon when you die, so if you die just start over and get the good gun again. Since without Spread, you can't hit most enemies. So you end up spending additional time hitting the re-start button, because the developer I guess never played his game and didn't realize the lives/continues nonsense doesn't matter. You have to have that gun, or the game is just insanely hard. The hardest points, by the way, the become moments where other power ups appear on screen and you have to desperately dodge getting the inferior weapon. Does this sound like good game design in action?

There's not really much to say about Super Cyborg. It's a very short, pointlessly hard game I got half way through. Needing to constantly restart and redo sections to learn patterns just made me feel like I was studying for an algebra test. There is a lot that could be done to bring the genre forward and refine it, but this game does nothing new with the gameplay. The game looks cool, but it is ultimately just 80s tier design.

If you look at the screenshots and think that looks radical, and you're up for pattern memorization based trial and error gameplay, there you go! You're the tiny niche target audience! It's a well made game for what it is, but what it is, doesn't interest me in the least.

Glorkian Warrior: Trials of Glork

I'm just going to call this game Glork.

There isn't much to really say about Glork, since it is ultimately a very simple game. You play as Glork, a three eyed "warrior" whose only skills are running around and carrying his super backpack. The super backpack is, however, a character in and of itself that talks. The super backpack fires without input from you, meaning unlike most shmups the game doesn't force you to hold down a button, which is sort of nice.

The game is a shmup in the sense very early games like space invaders were shmups, so I guess we can sort of call it that? When it comes to gameplay, the game isn't complicated. You run around while super backpack fires into very silly looking aliens that on the most part seem barely interested in your presence. You have about three screens to run across, and enemies can basically end up wherever in that space. Most of the game is firmly detached from interacting with you - enemies shoot missiles and fireballs, or spit flame, but very little of it seems directed at you - while you bob and weave trying to avoid attacks. You have a health bar with up to six hits, though most attacks take off 2, so you drop dead pretty damn quickly whenever things do manage to hit you. Healing is pretty rare, so cherish those 3 to 6 hits.

There are a range of enemies but they mostly just float around and make silly noises, and then there's a range of power ups. The game kinda suffers for the power up system, as the basic weapon takes several hits to kill just about everything but the power ups can be pretty bonkers at just sweeping the screen. Some of the power ups, but not all of them, are extended by eating "power crackers" that drop from enemies. So you run around collecting crackers, or more so, when you have a power up. I guess some of the power ups are more like power ups FOR power ups, and they also just happen to improve the basic gun albeit vaguely. Lastly, there are "boss" enemies, which are sort of grim for how grindingly slow they go down if you don't have a power up, but collapse like a house of waffles if you do. Fully powered up you completely destroy screens full of enemies in seconds, so the game's pacing can feel ... Weird I guess. The game has an unlock system but I'm not sure it really does much of anything. I mean you do unlock things, but mostly it barely changes the game.

Glork's main appeal is the silly writing and art style, coupled with goofy cutscenes that happen between games and other oddball bits. The music is also goofy and charming, and the whole presentation is more than the sum of its parts. It does a lot to make the game fun and pleasant even though it is actually kinda grueling and difficult in sections, and is basically just a primitive score attack game.

Anyway, outside of the cute art and the jokes, the game is a little lackluster. As I said, the moment where a boss spawns - which makes getting power ups obnoxiously hard - without a power up is just a big sigh as you grind away on it for quite a while, and you can end up with a lot of moments where there are two enemies on screen bobbing around without killing either of them for what feels like an eternity. I had a good two hours of fun out of the game, but exactly how I'm not quite sure. After a while it gets pretty dull, but for a game I honestly am not certain how I got or why I decided to play it, I certainly wasn't worse off for the experience.

It is also about robots: Steamworld Dig

Steamworld Dig is presented in the reviews that pop up when you look over the game news as a Metroidvania, which I don't think it is. In turn, I'm not exactly sure what Steamworld Dig actually is, beyond feeling like the partial combination of various other elements from other games.

First things first, the game's visuals are fantastic, the usual steampunk aesthetic getting its groove on with a mix of other styles. All the characters look good, and the game is just plain easy on the eyes. It feels a lot like playing Terraria, but it is more hand-drawn and in most ways better looking. It doesn't do quite as well in terms of how it uses its lighting, which is a bit disappointing since digging games really benefit from deep shadows and contrast. The lighting effects in Steamworld Dig are rather limited, and don't have the spooky impact they do in Terraria, which was sort of weird.

Second, it is mostly a platformer with digging options - it does have some Metroidvania elements to it, but it doesn't quite feel like one. At its very core, the combat is pretty light stuff, and most of the game is just exploring the mysteries as you dig down in a huge mine and then just keep going with little in the way of backtracking. You do get upgrades along the way, but they generally feel less like something you absolutely need and more like quality of life improvements. There's a good vibe to it, though, just as a certain element starts to drone on in your brain the game throws you an upgrade to make that get less annoying.

In this the gameplay is very satisfying and very soothing. It isn't a difficult game, more or less a casual title, centered on digging. You dig things up, sell them, buy and find upgrades. The game's story is actually very reminiscent of Primordia, which is weirdly ironic given I settled into playing both so close together. It's not exactly as dark as Primordia, but it has many of the same angles that do tend to feel a little grim.

The main elements of the gameplay are digging and then the interaction between digging and your various supplies. You have limited bag space, limited hitting power, limited health, light and water. All of these being depleted makes it pretty difficult to get around, and in the case of health, ultimately kills you. You can upgrade all of this stuff with money or "power orbs" which increases them in a pretty linear fashion over the course of the game. The Metroidvania, I guess, comes from the aforementioned upgrades which grant you running or double jump or the various sort of things you usually gets.

Steamworld Dig is pretty by the book, mixing elements from various other titles, but the clean visual style and simple gameplay make it a relaxing if a little monotonous title. I don't really recommend it in the pure sense of a fantastic, engrossing core title to spend your time on, but I do recommend it if you want something to sit in front of the screen with controller in hand for twenty minutes every once in a while.

Not everything needs to be the next big heart stopper. Sometimes it is alright to just be good, right?

The shadow of potential: Contrast

Contrast is humorously unique to me, for a couple of silly reasons. For one, the visual style and core concepts are just subjectively very appealing. For two, I swore off buying non-bundled games last year and Contrast didn't go on a deep enough sale until day 1 of that very same year. So I didn't buy it then, and actually, I can't remember how I bought it this year, and for three that sense of "not especially memorable" manages to permeate everything about the experience of the game.

Contrast apparently didn't do well on a financial and possibly critical level, and it isn't that hard to see why. Superbunnyhop reviewed it back in the day, but he also had an interview with one of the developers, who sounded rather ... Negative about the game's short-term sales. It might have done better in the long term, that proverbial spiky tail of the fictional dinosaur, but I kinda doubt it.

I'm kinda down on this game, if you haven't noticed.

It's about robots: Primordia

So, I'd be the first to admit I couldn't tell you the difference between a puzzle game, a HOG or an adventure game or any of the myriad divisions. I mean some games are puzzle games, but there are also games which have puzzles in them? They are puzzling but not puzzled out? I would also be the first to tell you that I delight in robots - robots are very important to me. And Primordia is about robots.

Or it is sort of.

Primordia is a well-written adventure (!?!) game centered on a robot with a wacky pun spewing sidekick that has to solve the essential problem of power, since another robot showed up, shot him and took his "power core" that provides power to his ship. And oddly that song does fit the theme of the game, somehow. The game's story slowly comes together, and I don't really want to spoil elements, but I found it sort of an interesting take on post-apocalypse sort of things since the robots don't really recognize it as such. Or much of anything as such, but since they're robots, you go yeah ok this makes sense.

There isn't a lot to say about Primordia, given the gameplay is very simply and very soothing. The characters, pardoning the one, are very interesting and unlike Morningstar they're not intentionally pushed to be annoying. I wish I could have screenshotted more of the sidekick's puns, but unfortunately the game won't allow you to use the steam overlay screenshot tool OR the raptr screenshot tool (how that is even possible is beyond me) but will allow you to screenshot using the printscreen key.

Which makes no sense! Unfortunately that also advances the dialogue, so I'd see something funny and then the game would eat it. Sigh.

There Was a Cave Man

 

There is a video series done by Egoraptor in which he talks about the transition from original property to sequel, and what it means in game design, and so on. Although I've read egoraptor is a bit of a loon, I agree with almost everything he says, and the one episode talks about the tutorial level for Megaman X, and how it is amazingly well done. How it explains the body of the game's mechanics in a fluid, easy to adapt to manner.

One of the things that stands out when you play 'hard indie' games is the design process seems to really fail to grasp previously demonstrated good game design. Megaman X came out like, twenty two years ago, but you still rarely see good tutorial levels even to this day. Game design constantly struggles to articulate to the player how the game works, and the most mind-blowing thing is the predilection toward killing the player.

I mean, I get it. You heard you want to make the game hard, so the game is hard by killing the player. Checkbox, little animated check going in it. Grats. The problem is, man oh man, getting killed in the tutorial while you're trying to figure out the damn controls is just so obnoxious. If you're dying, shockingly, you're not really learning. You're re-loading.

There Was a Cave Man has such a tutorial level. The controls and scheme aren't bad - actually, I really like them - but getting down the rhythm of the dash and double jump takes more than the 0.13 seconds the game gives you before it starts trying to murder you. I really don't get the appeal of this sort of thing.

I mean as I write this, Fallout 4 just came out, and 1.2 million people on steam were playing it last night. Does Fallout 4 give you, I don't know, more than ten seconds to get a handle on things? Sure, Fallout 4 has no doubt a host of problems and I doubt I'm buying it til, I don't know, 2018 or something. But there's something for a product being immensely more complicated and yet far more willing to be approachable. Game difficulty was built around artificially extending the longevity of a product, not necessarily enjoyment in and of itself.

Woah Dave!

Woah Dave! is a single screen attempt at building what probably amounts to a retroclone from the arcade era. It feels very familiar, honestly blending elements from Mario Brothers the not super, arcade pixel art and Super Mario Brothers 2 (NES version) into one relatively cohesive game. If that sounds like I'm bashing it, well, it depends on how much design space you imagine there is within a single screen and how much polish you think the game should have.

Oh, and it sort of reminds me of Super Hang-On, although that's probably the sort of subjective memory absolutely no one will get.

At its core the game is extremely simple, but there is just a little more to it than you think there is. At first it just looks like you pick things (that eventually explode) up and throw them at things, which become more dangerous things if you don't handle them and while that is all there is to it, there is a weird sort of strategy to each of the levels that begins to become apparent, especially when things get out of hand. It simple, but I find it fun. It also sounds good, and the music is very catchy although there is really only one track or at least only one set of tracks that play as you get deeper into the level. They did not add additional tracks with the additional levels in the "deluxe" update, which is a little disappointing, primarily predicated on the fact the music is legitimately catchy.

There is a progression from the word go, with the lowest floor slowly being consumed with lava, and then various new enemies added once you've reached enough score, with some other modifications. It does give the game a sense of shifting change, but it's nothing major. Basically what you see is what you get. It plays smoothly and it plays pretty frantic, but that's about it.

The game is, as I said, simple ... But it in some ways even for the goal it sets out for itself are undermined by being a little too simple. As I said, one of the dangers is the things you pick up explode. The problem here kinda goes a little in a couple ways. For one, your character can leap out of the screen, which can muddle the things you're carrying or pick up things that haven't dropped on the screen yet. This is minor. Less so is how difficult it is to discern the remaining time of objects on the ground, especially if they stack up, which the game can happily do by itself. There's no real reason the game can't shade objects a little more, or shift their sizes a little to make them all not almost identical, and it can really add to the frustration for really no real design benefit.

The other thing about Woah Dave! is the game almost works against its best fun. Essentially speaking, you most enjoy it when you're scrambling around, struggling to try to keep up with the downward flow and ever upgrading aliens. The problem is that, due to the randomization of drops, you can never get behind - if you're ever behind, it is very likely the next drop you sorely need to catch up won't be the one you need or even worse drop onto something you need to deal with, preventing you from reacting. Once the screen becomes polluted with rapidly evolving foes, you're pretty much done. The best, frantic moments don't last long. It feels awesome to recover, but it is rare that manage to. On the other hand, drops are random, so sometimes they just fall in the same spot as the same item repeatedly and you get pretty bored.

Regardless, I played it for more than a few hours and quite enjoyed my time with it. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it's good clean fun for a time, which is more than I can say for most retroclone stuff, you know?

Morningstar: Descent to Dead Rock

I was sort of hoping this would be a horror game, albeit a VN one, so I could quickly push through it and play through at least a pair of horror games for scary games month. Bad news: It's not a horror game. On the other hand, given my expectations for HOGs is rock bottom, the ironic title and fact it isn't horrible I will take as victories. Extra bad news: I forgot I never posted this review. Whoops!

I don't know much about Hidden Object Games, or even Adventure games in general. I consider the genre as sort of the opposite of the various genres lost in the rise of 3d: Adventure games were generally terrible, unenjoyable, and sort of a bad way to enjoy reading. The puzzle concept was largely about trying to figure out whatever nonsense logic the designer was employing, and every adventure game felt weirdly disconnected, poorly plotted out, or you could play leisure suit larry which was supposedly an adult game but as an adult feels more like a juvenile cartoon.

Regardless, much like platformers and pixel graphics, adventure games made a comeback and nowadays "HOGs" are apparently decent sellers for their investment of development time. I don't even really know how I ended up with Morningstar on my account - it might be a groupees bundle or maybe it came from indiegala or who knows - but it showed up and I installed it for whatever reason.

I can't really rate it relative to other adventure games due to this being my first in ten years or something; It is about two hours long, has no gameovers and is a gently paced adventure. The basic plot is your space ship, which appears to be a small cargo runner of a vessel, crashed on some generally off limits planet. One of your three man crew is dead, and your other crew member got a rod through his gut so yeah he isn't doing so great. You basically tromp around the little desert world, searching for mysteries and solving all the clues.

Visually the game looks pretty much like something I'd play on my 486, although obviously the resolution is up to modern snuff. The art is a mixed bag, with some elements looking quite good and others looking quite drab. There are a couple gentle FMVs, but don't expect any pulse pounding action out of this one.

The voice acting is ... It's hard to say? The VAs aren't fantastic, in fact are a little unlikable, but I definitely feel like the secondary character is supposed to be that way and the protagonist probably is at least a little. I like the fact they sound like they're of different races, at the least. You never see their faces since everyone is in space suits,

The story is ... Simple, honestly, and how you personally take it depends a little on your outlook as a person. You're trapped on a relatively hostile alien world, and your protagonist wants off, so while the game hints at a bunch of mysteries, you basically solve all the clues and work to get out of there as soon as possible. He's not an explorer, and while he's curious, it isn't his overriding concern.

I appreciated that, though I do feel like the game could have expanded out its assets a little bit with minimal fuss to give the game a bit more depth. On the other hand if you're the sort of person who wants all the mysteries explained, the game won't really gel with you.

Dork Quadrant: Enemy Mind

Rounding off my set up space shooty games is Enemy Mind, which I got from ... Actually I'm not really certain where I got this, though it was probably in a bundle? I believe this game was in Early access back in 2014, but is probably bundlefare at this point.
 
Enemy Mind is a shmup, and it is in space, AND it has cards - actually what this series was supposed to be about -  with really nice pixel artwork done in the more 16-bit style. The premise of the game, however, gets away from the general shmup thing with two slightly interesting twists on the general basics of the genre.

For one, the game has a core gimmick that shapes basically every design made in its design.

For two, it has a really neat story that relates back to its core gimmick. But the addition of a store is a 'for better or worse' arrangement, as it continues to add to the odd issues of the game.

The "gimmick" or "premise" depending on how you jive with it, is that your ship is not your ship. You are a psychic entity, capable of possession that leaps from ship to ship. You fight using their guns, you move using their skills and you die as they would die - unless you leap to the next ship.

It's nothing super hyper new, but it isn't on the other hand something I'm all that familiar with. I'm sure it has been done before, but I'm struggling to remember another example besides like ... Messiah or something.

Dork Quadrant: Hypership Out of Control

HSOOC appears, initially, to be a shmup. It certainly looks like a shmup in the screenshots, but instead its more a topdown shmup with a gimmick. 'A gimmick' seems to be the running theme of this subset of reviews, though HSOOC is less "has a gimmick" and more "is built around a premise" when I think about it.

The premise is you're the usual sort of topdown shmup spaceship doing its thang when your space brakes are cut! Or, whatever, basically your space craft can not really slow down and goes increasingly fast. It's a very basic, very obvious idea that I'm not certain has really been explored all that much before. So instead of going from enemy to enemy, you're in a race against ... Well, you're just going fast and you're worried about running into things.

I got to use the Gotta Go Fast tag, which I didn't think I'd get to use til my regretful purchase of Sonic Lost World next year. (It's gonna happen, argh)

The game looks pretty good, and the sound track is enjoyable to listen to. I enjoy the tracks shifting between the different levels, though there doesn't feel like there's enough music but this sort of relates to the game's problems. The gameplay is largely simple stuff - the game is more or less score attack, though I imagine you can finish the game if you keep at it. There's no story line, though the levels do have little visual gags that make me smirk. One level just ... Has bees. And it goes oh no, bees!

Dork Quadrant: Weird worlds: Return to Infinite Space

Continuing on through my trek through my back log is Weird Worlds, which is ... Actually nothing really like the other games in this subset, neither having cards and in spite of the awesome looking title screen not actually having much shooty space action either. I fire up games to see if they run - a habit from darker ages when steam would install a million tiny files before hand - and watch the title screen to make certain I get that far before moving onto other things.

This game's title screen kinda lies, you know. It looks like there's going to be rigorously most shooty space battles, and on the most part ... Well we'll get into it.

Weird worlds: Return to Infinite Space is essentially a 4X game through the filter of having 1.5X instead of the full four. Unlike the other four in this so-called Dork Quadrant, it doesn't really involve being a topdown or side-scrolling shooter, and is instead a pointy clicky space map game. It reminds me a lot of playing Master of Orion Two, looking both visually similar and borrowing a couple elements, though this is not to say that the game is that deep or that uncreative.

Merely that if you're familiar with taking a space ship and exploring the stars on a 2d map with little distances between them, you'll probably find this game almost eeriely familiar.

The Dork Quadrant: Death Ray Manta

Games keep piling up, regardless of how fast I finish them or mark them undesirable in my ever bloating steam games list. I haven't quite topped a thousand, yet, but it is only a matter of time. In an effort to pick through a couple more games this month, I decided to set up a grouping of games - forgetting I'm supposed to play scary games this month, derp - with the intent of mining them for cards. And then forgetting to actually pick games with cards.

First up in this series of four space shooty ship games is the surreal neonfuture experience of Death Ray Manta, which is ... Perhaps one of the simplest games I've ever played, but also an excellent model for what a lot of games do not successfully do.

DRM is basically an extremely stripped down, colorful twin stick shooter. And I do mean colorful. You will be full of colors watching it. You move with one stick, shoot with the other, and as best I can tell gameplay does not really change on your end at any point. You accomplish three goals - not dying, shooting all the enemies you're supposed to, and picking up gems - and you finish each level when all the enemies are dead. The game flashes a lot of words and colors at you while jazzy music plays, but because it is so simple, you don't really get distracted.

The game is ... That's it. That's the entire game. What makes the experience good, besides the hyper trippy visuals and solid music, is that it does everything with a sense of brisk. It loads quickly, it runs quickly and it makes no comment about your beginning or ending. It isn't concerned with that you died or with making snarky passive-aggressive remarks. It just throws you back into the action, and it is easy to get in the groove and played for a couple minutes with a smile on your face.

A lot of games get this wrong. Loading times are always going to be an issue, of course, but DRM also just doesn't wander from the point. The story is that the manta has lasers in his head, so he blew up his house and lives in space instead.

Problem is, the game is just too simple and the difficulty is pretty flat. You die in one hit, and although the game doesn't move that fast, the screen is utterly swarmed with nonsense in no time flat. So you're going to die, often and a lot. It doesn't mean anything to you, and you just go again, but the problem does seep in - there's one track, and there's one track through the levels.

I don't think adding a lot of complexity would aid the game overmuch, but I do think it could do with perhaps a different path through the levels determined by some element you don't recognize quickly and then maybe another music track or two. The game repeats through cycles rapidly, and while it is fun in little chunks, there isn't enough to keep it from getting repetitive.

I let my sister - who is definitely more of a casual gamer - give DRM a try. Unsurprisingly, she found it really enjoyable, and claimed it was "the game they would have made in the 80s, if they could have". So for a casual gamer, I think it's a fun little trip, and for me it was a decent enough aside.

Magic Duels: Short review

Magic Duels is the latest in the long line of constantly title changing Duels of the Planeswalkers products. It changes a couple things from the earlier products, though I haven't played last year's version (in spite of owning it) so I can't speak too keenly to how much was changed from there. I know there was some actual pay to win gating involved, of which there is not here, so breath easy if that came to mind.

The biggest change over is that Magic Duels is not only free to play with the usual cash stop circumstances to govern its possible longevity, but also that it promises to be updated on a regular basis as opposed to the previous yearly version with an expansion, built from the full back card pool.. They had originally hoped to get the first major update out last week, but pushed it back over QA issues that I can forgive, especially since I never paid for the game.

As such, this isn't going to be a super complicated, in depth review. I just want to give a general lowdown on the product, especially since it is ultimately two core things that make it easy to try - It is first and foremost Magic which is a well known product everyone should try at least once, and second it is completely free to give it a shot and honestly it is totally playable at the free level.

I've actually waffled around a lot on how to review this game, since it's hard to really not recommend, so I've decided on a very tight three main points of discussion review rather than meandering around and maybe missing the point.

Jumpnshootman: Spaceport Hope

I picked up the space bundle on groupees because I liked the pixel art of this title, which was used as the background or whatever. I also like the name of the game, since it at least has ... A slightly different feeling from the general miasma of game names (retribution! evolution! origins!) in the modern day.

Spaceport Hope isn't a complex or overly long game. As implied, it is a Jump and Shoot mans. You play a smuggler or courier named Cole who transports drugs (of the beneficial kind, we infer) between regions and planets in 'the system'. You get framed, have to unravel the mess and visit every planet in the system to do so. The 'planets' generally have a level or two, maybe a dungeon, some loot and some other nonsense. There are more than a handful of planets, but not exactly a dizzying amount of content. I saw most of the game, through my playthrough, though I didn't get all the achievements, so I must have missed something.

The story is, as implied, pretty simple - But it's not bad. It's a little smarter than just 'kill the bad mans' and while the mystery isn't mind-blowing stuff, I found it a little better than the mediocre average. The plot isn't exactly save the universe stuff, and Cole is a catalyst not the be-all end-all savior of man, which is refreshing?

He's just a courier.

The game's visuals are generally good, though there is sort of a sliding scale in action. The levels and their background are fantastic, the scrolling background is just gorgeous stuff. Yes, it is pixel art, but it is really well done. I really like the set of screenshots I took, while it isn't hard sci-fi, it has some roots in trying to evoke stronger elements. The enemy models look good, and are well animated, and the weapons (of which there are many) have nice looking little animations. Your character isn't good looking, and the faces of talking NPCs are really terrible. It's a bit jarring, but most of the game looks good, if you're into pixel art. If you're not, well, it's simple stuff - but the color scheme isn't drab and it has lots of variety in the chosen palettes, so it's a little refreshing even for that.

The music and audio are nothing special, but they fit and aren't ever off tone. Good enough is good enough when it doesn't feel weird or too repetitive. They're just normal, nominal background sounds.

Gameplay ... Like I said, jump and shoot mans. Cole has a double jump, and is surprisingly maneuverable in the air. It feels good and slick, and not at all weighed down. You enable and disable weapons in the weapons menu, and then switch between them with shoulder buttons, or whatever the keyboard has. It's simple, satisfying stuff, though you will find most of the weapons useless and several of them life-savers. The rocket launcher and homing plasma gun are pretty much your go-to tools, once you get them, for most of the game. There is a weapon heat mechanic, and ammo in action, which can get a little grating. The cooldown mechanic is in, I think, to get you to chance your weapons on the fly. Problem being is most of the weapons just don't take to every situation. Weapons, other than your basic automatic rifle, draw from three pools of munition - fuel, missiles and shells or whatever you want to call them - which isn't as well balanced as it should be.

There are lots of boss fights, and a couple trickier platforming sections, which are the game's main charms. Most of the boss fights weren't too punishing and took a bit to figure out, then execute. I didn't have to attempt them a ton, so maybe they're a little too easy, but I did appreciate how most of them required figuring the boss out and trying different things. The platforming is pretty forgiving stuff, since Cole's double jump makes him insanely agile, but there's more than a few good sections.

All in all, Spaceport Hope is a solid execution of a simple premise. It does have some issues with dps uptime on some trash enemies and the weapon balance is a little off, but on the most part I found very little to actively complain about. It is a simple game of moderate length, so if this is what you're looking for to spend a couple days on, it'll be fine enough.

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+

Year of our lord 2015, played Pac-Man for the first time.

At least: As far as I can remember. Pac-Man is one of the 'forgotten' gaming icons, unless your name is Adam Sandler, something that didn't really hold on through the years, though more so than like ... Bubsy the cat. I honestly don't know that I played the original Pac-Man or any revision in the past, so this is a review of this game without really knowing what tier of update it is. I'm just going to shorten the title to Pac-Man, I'm not referencing any other game or version of this game. That's it, here we go, ghosts on the chomp

Gaming revivalism is an interesting concept to me, since you end up with a lot of weird phrases and ideas mixing with what ultimately amounts to marketing via the hook of nostalgia in your soft unprotected rump. Franchises at this point sort of co-exist in a market space dominated by franchises, and names don't really have a meaning beyond being "okay" for mainstream play. Pac-Man probably doesn't have the star power of say, a Ubisoft or Nintendo mass-produced product, and as such, isn't exactly a revival so much as just a game based on Pac-Man.

Like I said, I don't really remember playing Pac-Man (older versions) at any point in my life, so I don't really know or remember what the "core mechanics" are or how faithful this game actually is. It feels like a Pac-Man game but I don't necessarily think it feels like the original, or the maybe more popular Ms Pac-Man which I think I've heard was the definitive edition?

As you can tell, I don't know very much about Pac-Man and wasn't especially hyped about Pac-Man.

Cards for Stars: Steel Storm Burning Retribution

Retribution is going to be one of those dirty words I stop wanting to see in titles.

Anyway: this game didn't have cards up until recently, but I can remember ages ago wanting to play it and ending up with it in a bundle. Pre-cards, I apparently played four minutes, but it might have been before I got my first controller for my PC.

Post-cards, well, here I am.

Steel Storm: Burning Retribution is four random words strung together, titled a three quarters from the back shooter. It plays sort of like a twin-stick and sort of like a shmup - I think this sort of game used to be quite common and now is not quite so.

Steel Storm BR has most of the basics down pat: the controls work well, the game looks fine, the weapon loadouts feel good and the weapon sounds work nicely. The little hovertank feels pretty good, a bit less requiring of frustrating finesse compared to the usual twin stick controls while still engaging your hnads in a nice way.

The music isn't very good. The problem lies in the usual, the NES problem: tracks are too short and there's too much downtime where the music becomes the core of the experience.

The game itself drops the floor out from under itself. Combat feels good and relatively slick, but it becomes very obvious very quickly that the camera angle cripples you. As best I can tell, you just can't hit enemies "off the screen", which happens almost instantly once you try to dodge away from incoming fire. The enemy seems to basically not exist off the screen, they don't follow up or pursue you, they just dawdle around. You can seemingly hit them with the MIRV special weapon, but I haven't found the other weapons can reliably snipe them while you're off dodging, so you end up with combat often taking a really long time.

The game also does a lot of things that dilute the enjoyment. For one, as I said, the camera is just so far up that you can't really get into the groove of fighting through multiple enemies - you're constantly pedaling back and forth out of conflict. The game also uses health packs, but there really isn't much threat in the game except for the other big thing I dislike. Enemies are initially placed on the map, but that's not all that dangerous since as I said they don't pursue and don't really come after you. So the game teleports enemies on top of you, en masse, which is about the only time you're really threatened. You never die to attrition, so these weird health packs that heal 25% just feel monotonous. But since you're never really under any threat from placed enemies, I guess regenerating health felt like too much.

Also the game has keycards and unlocking doors and all that jazz, but it doesn't really do much other than set off teleporting enemies and pad out the game's length. The doors and stuff just end up looking really lazy, it's not like you're lowering defenses or using special circumstances to blow through them, they're literally "a forcefield" that sits around "the target". It's boring.

Basically the game's core is good, but the AI is way too lacking and the camera is awful. If you could see more, fight more at a great range with more visuals going off I think the game would have been pretty exciting. You get these great moments now and again, but on the most part it just feels sluggish. The teleporting enemies thing just leads to cheap, irritating deaths that coupled with the plodding out of combat pace make for a really dull experience. I finished the tutorial and a pair of missions and just found it too plodding.

As an odd note, I re-watched superbunnyhop's two parter on Rage and Doom a couple days ago. He talks about the gameplay of Doom as being a top down shump extended out to psuedo-3D - something akin to Maximum Carnage or Smash TV, maybe - but this game really is just that, but not in 3D. Keycards, circle strafing, dodging slow moving projectiles. It could have been great, but instead it's too slow and too plodding.