Card to kill: Cat goes fishing

I have here a bottle of vodka. And what does one do when one has a bit of drink in their belly? Why, go fishing of course! It's time, it's time for Cat goes Fishing. I obtained this game from Groupees as part of a bundle, and I'm playing it for cards. It weighs in at 11 megs, which puts into the territory of games I played on my 486. I assume most of that is the ambient music that hums along in the background, and the rest is cats.

Cats and fish.

What is Cat goes Fishing about: It's right there in the title. Everything about this game is in the title. You are a cat - an adorb lil kitty, I might add - and you go fish. I mean, things that happen you can derive from the title: You're a cat, so there is meowing in this game. Though its pretty reserved. We'll say he's not a chatty kitty, just some meowing takes place. Other than the audio is mostly dings, casting and rocket noises.

You do attach rockets to the bait as a means of propelling the bait further along. This cat is also a master of rocket baiting in case you were wondering. Meow?

CAT-alog!

Joking aside, Cat goes Fishing is essentially an extremely obvious and extremely relaxing progress quest sort of deal. You cast out with a pair of clicks, catch fish, which can either complete quests for money and possibly experience, or just to sell for money to buy upgrades. Upgrades allow you to fish further out, or sink your bait deeper, or whatever else. You need to gain access to deeper in the ocean to progress further, and the catch (oof) here is that you need to fish smaller elemental fish to successfully reel in the larger, and thereby more valuable, fish. Smaller fish will also bite off your bigger lures, so there is some skill in getting the lures right where you want them.

You can also obtain hats, which are random drops, and then your cat wears a hat. TF2 comments aside, this is very cute. I don't know that there is much else to itemize or describe: You have a tiny cute cat. Then he puts on a cowboy hat.

I didn't exactly play Cat goes Fishing long. There's nothing super wrong or bad about the game, it is what it says it is. It actually reminds me a great deal of playing edutainment games in the computer lab as a child, as it demonstrates risk / reward scenarios and concepts like using money to make money in a simple, but pretty effective way. It's not a game I would recommend to other adults, but, I don't know that it was a game designed for adults.

Might and Magic Duel of Champions; A confused look at Time of Renewal

I've been playing MMDOC on and off for a year now. It actually holds the record for highest played game on my Steam account, although I'm not certain how much of that is owing to idling while chatting or waiting in queues as opposed to actually playing.

the weirdest lolicon

I'd been off MMDOC for a while when news that Ubisoft Montreal, the studio in charge of the game, was in some part dismantled and kicked off the project. While I don't necessarily respect the quality of their work, I did think they seemed like decent guys, so it is a pity if they lost their jobs for having the ill luck of competing in a market that rapidly changed with Hearthstone's arrival. Following that, I basically didn't pay any attention until news a "new" set was being released and would be ushered in by the "new" development team, BlueByte, known for their work on various not very good games, and Anno 2070, which I own but haven't played through yet.

There wasn't a lot promised with the new set. Most of the information came by way of the bizarre Chinese server. I always find it weird looking at news from Chinese versions of games, as the Chinese market seems to prefer women look extremely make up'd and rather chesty. What got really weird was looking through and finding art for twelve year old girls that look like this... Meanwhile they're not allowed to depict bones.

I guess on that end I'd fit right into China, the bones I mean, since I've never understood the love for the undead in modern fiction. Vampires, sure, but what is the deal with Zombies? And skeletons? Snore.

Crude photoshopping aside, the Chinese server continued to receive updates and new game modes while MMDOC was busy being transferred to BlueByte's domain, which is admittedly not a job I would want. Taking over major software productions is generally speaking brutal, thankless work, so I'm not trying to poop on the BB guys and/or gals. The "new" set, which was long since out in China, was finally set to show up on April the 15th. There was limited fanfare, and it finally rolled out of its cave...

Card City Nights: Hope you like Mana screw

I've played a lot of CCGs in my life span. I actually played them back before Magic dropped the tapping patent bomb and cleaned out the market, so there were lots and lots of odd little games to try out. I always miss the original LOTR, which had sweet art and a completely overcomplicated rules set. And I also always wish someone would pick up the design for the original battletech, which had the best compromise when it came to mana/lands.

There's always a lot of, hmm, let's say friction between ideals when discussing CCGs, as I often see people complain about game elements that the designers have kept intentionally, because it offers more and deeper game play, in lieu of simplifications that often ruin the late game or strategic depth. I'm always going to go back to Magic, because Magic is just the best after twenty years, but it's funny seeing someone who has played a twenty year old game for less than a month complain about elements that they barely understand. This game, thankfully, doesn't really delve into much of that and you won't really find that sort of friction - mostly.

I haven't played any of the other Ludosity titles, though I do own one or two of them, and maybe some of the other indie games that in some manner come under the heading of this game. The art style is from the same guy or gal who did Ittle Dew, with cartoony characters and backdrops, and then the card art comes from other games which somehow connect to this title.

owns

 

I would actually sort of argue that in a lot of ways Card City Nights, hereby shortened to CCN, is more of a board game than a card game, and a lot of the elements feel a great deal away from the usual TCG, CCG, DCG or whatever acronym we're supposed to use experience. It is sort of interesting reviewing it, as well, because when you start peeling away the layers of cute art and cute sounds the game does not feel like the designers played or researched nearly enough about card games to actually build a convincing experience.

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Kicking it Old School: Double Dragon Neon

80s nostalgia is pretty funky at times, with some games endlessly referenced as glorious masterpieces and others often forgotten. Castlevania for example comes up a lot, and I'd be the first to admit I've brought it up, but hilariously I think it might actually be well known not because Castlevania itself is a classic (which it is, but) however because the second game was so bad and the series kept going for quite a few years until I think recently fizzling out. Perceptions of what is "enduring" often seems to rotate around how the series continued into not longer being marketable.

I'd really like an Altered Beast indie game, on that note. Can someone get on that? Simple platforming, measured methodical pace, turn into a dragon? You'd think with the rise of furry games on Steam this would have a built in market. Maybe one of the modes could be, I don't know, a unicorn? Bam. Dollars.

Regardless, Double Dragon is remembered but I think it might be remembered due to being referenced or being in movies or other general things. (You got fifty thousand on Double Dragon??)  It's strange, it's like nostalgia only sort of works nowadays if people keep bringing it back up. Feels like I live in a generation where people are real eager to go 'so do you remember...' Double Dragon: Neon, however, is basically the 80s revival you want for every franchise you ever loved even if you never thought about Double Dragon. Like Altered Beast. And Sonic the Hedgehog.

I went there.

Neon is beautifully referential and direly tongue in cheek but quite concerned with being a fun game, which adds far more to the actual validity of the game for me than all the nostalgia in the world. It does use the fact it is homaging to punch a woman in the gut in the opening, but I guess if there's a way to justify brawling through legions of dudes, it's the fact they punched your girlfriend in the gut?

I honestly could have done without that, reference or not.

Dark

You know something is up with a game when you hear the lead character's voice and you go "That's Geralt!" and you look up Geralt's voice actor's IMDB and there is no reference to the game in question. Hum. It's not even sort of vague, it's like they told him straight up to play Geralt. Either that or it's another voice actor very explicitly instructed "Geralt. EXACTLY like Geralt. Also the dialogue will sound like Geralt. Good. Good."

Actually you know something is up when a game asks you to login upon starting, while being a single player game. It doesn't press you about it, and then it does have a proper decent settings menu, so it's almost immediately conflicted.

Shortly after I got through the early dialogue, the hat trick was in the back of the net. I was sent to do the tutorial. Actually, I should point out the tutorial is entirely optional, it doesn't appear to be forced.

The weird 'head of security' character tells you there's some, you know, thugs hanging around the club. Maybe you should take care of them? God, why is this dialogue so weird. It's interesting realizing this is very, very much an over the shoulder stealth game with cover mechanics and neat sounding vampiric powers to interact with stealth and leaping through shadows, not a stagger around a club while Geralt whimpers about his headache simulator as it implied in the first twenty minutes. On the other hand, ten minutes later and I'd murdered a bunch of what is very apparently a bunch of homeless people.

That is the best name you could come up with?

I don't even know how to describe this game other than that completely weird contrast. There's the core of something good, immediately, someone talented worked on it. But then you're just casually murdering hobos and it feels all so entirely out of whack. I mean I guess the hobos had guns, but that just seems out of place as well. I mean it goes Why am I murdering hobos? oh because the hobos had guns wait who is arming the homeless like so...?

I was warned this is a bad game, but it's almost jarring how good/bad it is. It's not like Blood Knights, where the game is just so upfront about being ridiculous, but more ... Just bad, but still clearly a production people put effort into. The engine actually runs fairly well, and I don't think I've seen this art style applied to vampire/stealth games before, but it looks quite nice...

Card to Kill: Block Legend DX

I end up with a lot of games from groupees bundles, as I've mentioned earlier. The current system tends to poop out 1-2 games every two weeks, which tends to give me a lot of games to process into cards. Block Legend DX was sort of interesting to me because I immediately felt regret I'd added it to my Steam account when I could have given it to someone else.

After playing it for ten minutes, that emotion faded.

Block Legend DX is oddly enough a match two game, in a somewhat similar vein to Puzzle Quest. Unlike Puzzle Quest, the tiles you match can not be manipulated and only activate when clicked on, as well as offering their unique effect when triggered. You can match up melee attacks, spells, healing, blocking, so on and so forth. There is some bonus for chaining the same tile repeatedly, and they do more if you match up more than the initial two. You shape your character with leveling, so different classes and different leveling paths will result in a different evaluation as to which blocks to trigger.

You can also heal, which is slow, but more you're supposed to put up your 'shield' to block. The block bar is much shallower than your health pool, but much faster to refill, so combat sort of forms an odd rhythm of refilling your bar and then returning to whichever other element you're triggering. Out of combat, the blocks remain, which gives you a chance to reshape the "terrain" of your field and refill your various stats.

The game is all done up in cute, ye olde Final Fantasy style sprites or whichever sprites you associate with these. The game is definitely pleasant to look at, as it is very simple but very colorful and lively. A lot of it actually sort of wasted, since while you're staring at the tiles and trying to figure out your next six moves, your little character is dancing around, waving his or her weapon and frolicking while the enemy does as well.

The music is brutal. The tracks are about 23 seconds long and sound like Gameboy tracks. Not GBA. Original gameboy. The game also likes to play very, very loudly when you first start it up, which was unpleasant. It's weird how it looks so nice - I mean it's retro pixel style, but it's colorful and well done - but sounds so awful. It's all abstractions anyway, but there's a lot of effort put into the art, even if I think it's a mobile port.
 
The core system is actually pretty good, and each game takes about 10-20 minutes to play before ending. The first couple times you play the game, it's pretty sweet, then the bitter reality of the game starts to set in.

You march forward in a straight line, encountering random enemies along the way to the boss. There will be two, and exactly two, towns on each stage. 90% of the time, the town is useless, as it is either impossible to have the gold necessary to do anything, or you've already spent the gold on something else. Or you don't need an item, so it's still useless. You would think the developers would, I don't know, put something useful in the initial towns. I mean this seriously, you just can't have as much gold as it wants you to have early on, because they lazily have all towns scaled to the same costs throughout the game. So there's basically no point to it being there, and no one bothered to fix that because...? I don't know.

The problem really comes in as a matter of difficulty and just pointlessness. Random enemies are basically hapless, even if they were threatening, you can heal up between encounters. They become somewhat relevant on the third or I assume later boards, but they're still basically 30 seconds of who cares in between 30 seconds of who cares. So after it kicks in it doesn't matter, you just march forward to the boss, and the boss is dramatically more difficult. You need to hit a rhythm of block block heal attack attack in between boss swipes, which can be very difficult to do, or not difficult at all. If you chain enough damage combos you can flatten most of the early bosses, and if the game is receptive you can just set it up so you do.

This is a block matching game, after all, and while you can shape the initial field you get when you encounter the boss, you can't really play too many moves ahead while trying to play keep ahead on the block block matching. Most of the time, I found I died to a boss with it below 50% health, but I ran out of block blocks and just died. Or couldn't heal. Or it three shot me. Or it didn't give me any way to actually do damage to the boss.

On top of that, whenever the boss makes a move, you can't input any moves. Between the slow progression of tiles falling into place and the jilting inability to make a move every couple seconds, bosses are dramatically more difficult while not really intense in the right way. And you ONLY die on bosses, so the rest of the game is a huge waste of time. Lastly, and bizarrely, when you complete a quest it flashes a big old quest complete across the entire screen. It can and often will do this midbattle, which just adds to disjointed nature of the boss fights. Since the boss fights aren't very good, and they're the entire focus of the game, the game ends up ... Not very good.

So, basically, you spend about ten minutes or longer getting to the second or third stage boss, then you hope that RNG doesn't screw you or it splatters you in short order while you're essentially defenseless. On top of all of that, the game punishes you further for RNG if you run out of moves. Yes, when you're playing zenmode Bejeweled 3 it is possible to line up moves to make certain you don't deplete, but here you're trying to go block block heal attack attack, and the game is vomitting unnecessary blocks at you.

The item system is kinda shitty too. You can buy items in towns (assuming by some miracle you have enough gold, which is rare) or you can get them from matching the 'item' blocks. Yes, there's an entire set of blocks that eventually give you loot, which fills up a bar on the left hand side. Once it fills, you get an item, though I'm not entirely certain how it works entirely. You're supposed to use items on bosses, but you generally ends up in such a hectic rush that the whole process feels even more disjointed and shitty, assuming you found anything useful at all, which most of time you didn't.

Fundamentally, while I enjoyed my first hour with Block Legend DX, I wouldn't bother playing a second hour. It's just too rng driven, and the roguelike nature of the game means you're back to level 1 killing farting fairies again if the game spawns too many of the not-useful-in-combat blocks. I'm sure I could play better, but the issue here is that you barely get any practice playing the "real" game. It's minute after minute of grinding nonsense, then finally real combat that can be over before it began with a few bad falls. The core of the game isn't too bad, but there's too many block types, you can't swap blocks around and it just feels so random in a really bad way. Also the game's flow is terrible, and you're basically given no time to do anything.

March into Bad Games month: Blood Knights

I was tempted to type out 'bad games mouth' but I'm not sure that joke has any teeth. I totally forgot to game over march anyway, so this review is coming out in April and oh well.

I noticed, around the time I was finishing up Dungeon of the Endless, that I felt like I'd been very hard on the recent crop of games I've played. I've played through some really good games since the start of the year, and not really very many games I've taken seriously that were seriously bad. I mean Final Dusk was sort of alright, but nothing really to digest. FF8 is a weird affair, but it's an older game that feels sort of patched together to accomplish its goals. So I set out to play two games I was under the impression were bad.

I believe I got Blood Knights from bundle stars, who sell bundle which are ... Generally not as well priced as IndieGala or Groupees bundles, but do seem to often have somewhat higher profile games in them. I actually had, at best, little idea what Blood Knights was. I knew it was relatively poorly rated, and also knew it was sort of silly and SteamShots had done a review ages ago. I assumed it looked B-movie as fuck and good lord if you like b-movie cheese nonsense, this is actually a game for you.

Blood Knights is a basic behind the back, god of war slash darksiders slash zelda or whatever brawler where you play as a crusader trying to fight the bad vampires. At the start of the game you are bonded to a vampire, who wears very little in the way of clothing but does look like she could throw a punch at least. Apparently this is cast on you by a priest, who seems oddly nonchalant regarding making some sort of blood pact between the commander of his knights and creatures of the dark. Though to be honest she mostly looks "mean" not really much else.

If you're playing the game two player, you divide up the characters, but if you're playing by yourself you can swap between the two. More on this later.

For the first little while the game hints that your character is unnerved by the blood pact and the vampiress is really hostile to the whole thing, but she's self-serving at best so doesn't really mind killing her former comrades to survive. You sort of get the idea it's going to have tainted feedback or you're going to be made ill by it and then NOPE another vampiress vomits on you and then you're a vampire. I'm not kidding. The scene is totally your dude being like 'oh god some of it got in my mouth aaaaaahh'

And then your second in command kicks you off a cliff. This pretty much sets up how storytelling works in this game. Right off a cliff and into the loo.

Card to Kill: Final Dusk

I end up with a lot of card spewing games from Groupees that I would never normally play. As I write this, Steam enhanced reports of remaining card drops my account has $47 CDN sitting there. While some of that is bugged and some of that will be taken by Valve, you can get an idea of just how many Card games I end up with.

Mechanically Final Dusk is a puzzle game where the vampire girl runs along a set path, and then there are a variety of objects to interact with. The vampire girl has brain problems, likely from listening to the music on loop, and has to be guided, prodded and protected with all your bat energy otherwise she turns to stone and a pointless sad game over screen appears. I feel like this is a pretty normal puzzle game, sort of akin to a more interactive physics puzzle, but somehow it doesn't quite have the pleasing feeling a puzzle game does.

From the second level on, the game presents you the option of using your ... Bat-ness? ... to cover objects. This is about 3 minutes into the game, and I already hit a snag. The controls indicate you press 'Q' to use your bat powers to cover a light source, but the game doesn't explain how this actually vis-a-vis works.

It is always a good sign when the wordy, irritating blob of tutorial text doesn't actually cover how to properly use a skill. Also I noticed running it in windowed mode it had that moronic "windowed but locked" set up, where your cursor can't escape the window. That is optional, mind you, but I'm not really sure why it should ever be turned on. As far as I can tell after a good twenty minutes of limping through levels, you press 'Q' and then slide your mouse over the object you want to cover... Once I figured that out, I could get the mechanic to work most of the time, but not always. It never felt quite consistent.

If there's one thing you don't want out of a puzzle game, it is even the slightly margin of error introduced in the control scheme. Certainly it is ultimately user error, but I'm not even sure why it is possible to make such an error.

Art asset wise, Final Dusk has the weird smell of clip-art ... But other than that is actually quite crisp, clean looking and maybe a little weird if you don't like ... I dunno what we're supposed to call the princess here. They clearly portray her as a bratty teenager, so we'll say she's 16 and pretend? Ok? Anyway her sprites are good, the bat sprites are good, and cutscene art is pretty nice looking. I guess I can forgive it, since she's sexualized in sort of the "for teenage girls" ways, and I sort of imagine this game is aimed at teenage girls so maybe there you go?

Or you know, waifu hunters.

The music is awful. Like really, really awful. There was one track that just bored a hole in my skull until I turned it off, maybe there were other tracks later on but I didn't hear them because I feared permanent brain damage. I then put on the tracks for Sol Survivor, which are really good and make for excellent ambiance while doing puzzle games that don't otherwise have good sound tracks. Like this one.

nope.jpg

I got to a level early on where I realized you're supposed to, in the planning stages, winch furniture up an elevator. Like you move the dresser over to the elevator and then you - yes, I'm serious - crank it up "by hand" to the next floor. During the planning phase. I don't know what happened, I blacked out for a moment and when I came to the game was uninstalled from my computer. It is a mystery!

Anyway I like the basic ideas behind Final Dusk's gameplay, and the art is actually nice, but the control issue is just so freaking irritating that it makes the game frankly impossible to enjoy on any level. Between fighting with the controls and the tedium of slowly setting up the levels to run the track, and the game deriding you for "setting a checkpoint" when all it does is redo all the nauseating busywork because the controls flaked out on me, I just kinda fell asleep in my chair. I really don't want to repeat the two minutes dragging furniture around. If I wanted that type of gameplay, I'd stop putting off cleaning my basement.

I do feel like maybe I'm not the target audience. Maybe this game is for twelve year old girls, not me, and that's fine, but I still kinda actively hated my time with it.

I completely forgot to post this one back when I finished the game. I always feel bad posting negative reviews. Then I tried playing it again. God, the music, urgh.

Roguelike fatigue: Dungeon of the Endless

The Endless line of products is sort of amusing to me in that it was the Steam Holiday Auctions that really shifted my focus onto them. I wanted to do one completed auction, just to get the achievement, but on the most part most games seemed like people were bidding on them with a day or two to "the sale" with an amount of gems worth more than their sale price.

I mean, just as an aside, but if you ever wanted to see that psychological issue f2p games exploit where the conversion of currency causes individuals to lose track of the value of a dollar, wow. Watching people spend $12 in gems on a game that is going to go on sale for $5 in less than 24 hours is impressive for seeing that particular mechanism in action. It wasn't like you couldn't just immediately sell the gems for $12, the market was the same number of mouse clicks away!

Anyway so the one game that did seem to be a reasonable price ... Wasn't this game. It was Endless Space: Emperor Edition, or Gold, or whatever which displayed the wrong item and with the DLC price included was a pretty reasonable amount. So I looked it up and realized they'd apparently made three games, sort of, in the shared universe. That's really cool, but apparently Dungeon and Space are the weaker titles to Legend...

But I ended up with this game, because it has some sort of weird arse coop set up and I think a friend bought it for me to play with them (I think?) while I got Space from the auction. I haven't even unpacked space yet, since its been wall to wall games this year, but I'll get around to it probably after I finish off Dungeon or more likely get sick of Dungeon.

Dungeon is especially interesting, though, because when you peel away the pixel graphics and the excellent audio you're left with the guts of several games connected to a roguelike skeleton. It is actually really weird, the game hybrids elements from tower defense to the point it almost feels like a Heroes of Might and Magic game, or a city builder, and there's some weird ideas I feel like came out of horror even.

If I was going to give it a genre, I'd peg it into "Roguelike flavored quasi-reverse tower defense" and then just keep talking because that tells you nothing...