Toward the Verge: Magicians and Looters

Metroidvania is essentially a subgenre of platformer, which in and of itself is an indie darling of a genre. Since indie games are generally speaking more about cheaply re-doing old ideas, you end up with a lot of bargain basement re-iterations of other ideas sort of gelled together into a quivering mass.

Yes, of course, gaming in general works a great deal like that and it's going to be hard to pick up any game off the shelf that doesn't build off old ideas. But indie gaming is just "geez" sometimes. The weirdest thing is that the re-iteration is based on perceptions about what things were without really studying why and how they were, so you end up with games like this one, where it says its a metroidvania but it's actually more of a platformer that fails at being a metroid and then I don't care about the vania part.

Platformer slash Simon's Quest? Yes. Deal. There you go.

I got Magicians and Looters, as an aside, from one of the earliest Groupees greenlight bundles. I picked it out because I want to play through Metroidvanias, which as an aside has not thusfar been pleasant. It turns out that if you play games like Super Metroid after Super Metroid, games are worse than Super Metroid at everything.

The game stars Brent, a swordsman with no personality other than snide, his sister Vienna with no personality other than snide and Nyn another swordsman with no personality other than snide.

At the start of the game you play Nyn, who is a swordsman of using two swords or I dunno something with pointy bits in her both hands, but then the game gives you the option to continue playing Nyn or to try the other characters. Shortly after, there's a thing, and your party of girls and a guy are off elsewhere, divided up. There's your special hook! Or something. I forget what I'm talking about.

Card to kill: Evil Quest

EvilQuest, or Evil Quest or whatever is a top down (I think three quarters topdown was the olden day term) arpg in the vein of, uh, the only thing that is coming to mind is Soul Blazer which is about the least helpful thing I could possibly think of. Have you played Soul Blazer? You should, but anyway the hook for this game is that you're not just any old hero or anti-hero, you're King Asshole of the Angry Dudes, a bald headed evil warrior who seeks to kill a lot of people or whatever.

The writing here is unshockingly rather cliche and amateurish, but that does suit the production and doesn't really detract from the experience. If it was rather serious and consummately well written, you'd end up taking the rest of the game too seriously. Instead it's a bit juvenile, which helps you parse the low-key, low-budget elements with a bit of a smile on your face. On a basic level you're an evil dude who did evil, before being captured and then offered an opportunity to do the evil again. The motivation at the beginning of the game seems to be little more than 'I am not fond of people'.

I'm not trying to malign amateur productions - I mean this is a blog, after all - but when your character calls someone an intrepid instead of insipid fool, well, you're not lifting the heavy word weights. Unless he was trying to say the dude he just murdered had a real sense of adventure, at which point maybe the writing is just going over my head. The dialogue is trite, but ridiculous, with a real b-movie charm. Characters will try to reason with your guy, or prattle on or give hubris filled speeches but all the uncrowned King Asshole comes back with is "I kill you now".

Visually the game is ... Unflattering. There's nothing super attractive here to speak of, and comparing it to SNES games goes in the SNES games favor. I mean I've played a lot of goofy retro games in the last couple years and this one falls into the general category of "not artistically talented". I'm always sort of surprised that people don't just steal art assets from old SNES games no one remembers, though maybe they do and I just don't notice. Anyway yeah, it looks drawn in MS Paint. It doesn't hurt to look at or anything, but it's not winning awards for visual fidelity.

The music, as well, is pretty weak. It's not Woolfe bad, but it's pretty bland. It sounds sort of like middle of the pack NES soundtrack, or maybe Genesis/SNES. Not sure how to describe it, beyond "not painful to listen to, but not good either." There are a couple more upbeat tracks here or there, but nothing much stands out.

The gameplay works fine; you have a melee attack, and if you stand still you can fire off charged fireball sort of shots. There's sort of a neat element in that the charge requires you to stand still, but you can hold the charge and move - It just doesn't charge you up any further - so a chunk of the gameplay is finding when to charge, then shifting position til it is fully charged and unleashed the big 'ol triple fireball. Enemies do touch damage, I think, but also usually have melees of their owns or special attacks. You can also cast spells, which is sort of where the boredom sets in, since the game gives you a heal pretty early on and there's basically no tension for the next hour or so I played.

Anyway in the course of the game I broke out of jail after being betrayed by my subordinate Asshole Junior, then went through the sewers and wandered around for a while. You're an asshole in this game, but it also generally comes off that everyone else is an asshole as well which sort of muddies the water a little. You don't kill random townsfolk, but you kill just about everything else. Once you get out into the wilds there's more random stuff to murder, so you murder that stuff too.

In summary EvilQuest is passable, and might be worth picking up in a bundle, but it's not really exciting or great at anything. I did enjoy the moments in the game where people talk trash at your character and he threatens to violent murder them rather than just taking it on the chin.

They actually removed THQ from the credits: Warhammer 40k Space Marine

My personal relationship with Warhammer, and more specifically 40k, is a cliche tale. Almost generic. I played back in the late 90s, probably like 98 or somewhere around there, when the game was in its second edition and I have no idea what fantasy was like. There's a legion of people out there like me, who played a year or two, had some fun with the game then moved on with their life. In the same way there's no end of thirty something Transformers fans like me - manchildren who reconnected with the franchise at some point - there's no end of late twenties to late thirties dudes who remember the good times with Warhammer.

40k is patently ridiculous, and ridiculous with patents (look up the stuff about Games Workshop vs Chapterhouse, it's absurdity in action) but that is a big part of its charm. When done well, it carries itself with just enough of a smirk that the insanity doesn't register as the capricious nihilism and you can still, well, have fun with it. It's sort of like a crazy heavy metal van. Done well, and it's ridiculously cool, done poorly and much like the van it just feels ... Like bad things are coming.

Relic on the most part had a pretty good, but not great, handle on 40k. There were a lot of points where it largely felt in Dawn of War like they wanted to put their own spin on things but couldn't quite get there. Relic might still have the GW license now, I don't really know, given their wikipedia article is out of date and who largely cares. Games Workshop itself is now something of a joke, coasting on that positive energy but making no further gains as a company. I'm sure in 15 years whoever is building the best "formative years" brand will be coasting by as they are. Maybe that's privateer press, maybe not.

ya I noticed

As an old man thinking about getting back into painting miniatures, I can tell you Games Workshop is priced to the point of absurdity, but anyway, back to vidya games.

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine is Relic's attempt to branch out into other genres than just endless rehashes of RTS scenarios that, I think, sort of fell out of favor with the rise of the crippling might that is f2p MOBA games. You can sort of respect the attempt, innately, but you can also seriously begin to wonder how it's going to go.

I can fairly say you shouldn't into a fairy tale: Woolfe - The Red Hood Diaries

Yes the icon appears to be off her lower half

Copyright law and free use are always the strangest things to muse on. People get very upset when you "rip off" ideas that, you know, they perceive as you ripping off. If a game or design principle came before, then it's a little interesting how little that actually matters in the face of a more popular game, or the more popular story.  Free use, and things going into the public domain, is sort of the opposite. Since everyone tends to know, you end up having a ceiling over your work.

What I'm getting at here is that Woolfe wants to be a fairy tale modernization, which it sort of manages, but there's an inherent limitation in choosing to be such a thing. You instantly put a low cap on your work, as old fairy tales are rarely remembered as anything all too special. It becomes trite and cliche without even getting a chance to explain itself. Maybe it's not so bad to get your foot in the door, but I don't feel like the game's art really needed that. Becoming instantly mundane doesn't seem like a good trade off.

This does look awesome

Woolfe is, before I get too far into assessments of the core tenets surrounding how its design looks, basically a rehash of Blood of the Werewolf, which is pretty unfair to both games but saints does it ever feel the same. That isn't to say it plays the same or looks the same, but about four minutes into the dismal sewer level (why?) I start flashing back to Blood of the Werewolf. It is, however, different in essentially two categories. Woolfe is a "sort of" 3d platformer, for better or worse. It also involves combat that makes me long for the combat in blood of the werewolf, which is about the most damning thing I can say about a game not bringing up Dark.

Card Hunt: Not Without My Donuts

I don't even know how to introduce this game.

Not Without My Donuts is essentially like, uh, you remember the original Mario Brothers where they fight waves of enemies and you have to dispose of them? In most ways, it is basically that, except there's even less of a game. You're a well-voiced Cupcake who wants to eat donuts. When you eat donuts, since there's nothing else to do initially, you are randomly given a weapon. Using the weapon, you can kill enemies, but that doesn't seem to accomplish much since more enemies vomit from the sky. You can jump around and collect more donuts, which increases your score, but it also randomly gives you weapons, so the game is a constantly shifting succession of weapons, some of which suck and some of which are insane, but they don't really accomplish much anyway. Shortly afterward, your cupcake perishes. You can also jump. Jump and shoot.

Your jump can't however take you up, so you have to go down, which pops you out of the top. The screen wraps the other direction as well. The whole thing reminds me of those like, hundred in one carts, except the game looks good in its silly little way, runs smoothly and the voice acting is oddly charming. The music is catchy, as well. It's an oddly quality production except there's not much to actually do. You just run around on one screen, then you die, then you do it again. I unlocked another screen, but it was mostly the same gameplay. Actually, it was the exact same, except the jumps were different. Oh, there was a pretty nice cutscene when I first fired up the game, but I sort of didn't understand the point of a nice cutscene for how little content lay past it.

Jump and shoot. Jump and shoot.

I played for a half hour and kept going thinking I'd missed something. But then nothing changed. Jump and shoot, go down, go around, eat more donuts. After a half hour of almost nothing happening, well, that's all there was.

I'm a little confused. I got this in a bundle. Jump and shoot.

Toward the Verge: Super Metroid

I am hyped for Axiom Verge.

I am going to wait til the summer sale to pick it up, even if it's not on sale, since I have like $50 in cards to sell and they go faster during the sale. But I am hyped for it, or at least what passes for hype for me, and since it's a "loving homage" to Metroid, I thought I'd go play some Metroidvanias to refresh myself on the very concept. I googled a list and I've scribbled down a couple I'll need to emulate and one I own but completely forgot to play through. Derp. I might give La Mulana a try, but somehow that game never really grabbed me.

First up: Super Metroid, and a brief discussion of this god damn classic that everyone should try at least once in their life. To be honest, I played through the original Metroid as a child and fairly recently on a DS or GBA or whatever one of the Nintendo portable consoles, so I don't really want to give it a replay. The interesting thing is that I was always anxious about replaying the super version, not because it would live up to my nostalgic memories (spoilers: it does) but because of two things: Wall jump and charged jump. Argh! This is so tricky! Push the button then unpush the button before you push the other button?? how do i...

The original Metroid is nowhere near as difficult as people imply it is - you basically just need to take time to figure out enemy patterns and refill your E-tanks as you go. Interesting to note that the game does have, in a roundabout way, the whole avatar strength thing that later gaming is so latched onto. If you spend more time hunting for secrets, you will find more E-tanks and missile pods to have an easier time of the later fights. For a NES game, much like Castlevania, it's really neat looking game. It is very early in the NES' lifespan but I like the almost surreal, strange pixel artwork and how it influenced them to make such weird looking designs.

I mean, look at this cropped shot of a chunk of the map. Lots of different colors, bizarre looking blocks and aliens, the whole of it just immensely strange. When you go for photorealism, you don't get that.

Card to kill: Astro Emporia

As with many groupees bundles, often I end up with games that feel less like pure entertainment titles and more ones that reminds me of my formative years playing games on early Apple PCs in the 'computer lab'. Edutainment, like Oregon Trail, was an interesting way of teaching kids, given kids are stupid and don't realize how enjoyable progressive learning can feel.

Also because early school is random and sucks, but whatever. So, Astro Emporia to me feels a lot less like a game for consenting adults and more like a game to reach children the basics of trading. And I do the basics.

On a basic level you own a freighter, you fly around your colorful cartoony solar system buying goods. There are various tiers of goods, but they all evenly take up space in your freighter - 100 units of scrap are nearly worthless and take up as much space 100 units of nanobots which are extremely valuable. The goal is to buy low and sell high, using the space available to you and splitting it up. The game doesn't seem to offer much in the way of information about what will be cheap or expensive, or even bought and sold, on other planets but prices tend to be generally relative within each given game. Which means as you're out for the first couple turns selling scrap, wood and iron, you need to pay attention to prices to try to get a feeling for what low and high actually are.

The basic game gives you 30 turns to make as much money as you can, and 30 turns is about right, as you start running into space issues and burning turns on being unable to sell top tier items because a given planet can't or won't pay enough for them. There is no difference between worlds on the map in terms of distance, and as far as I can tell no random events other than the core randomness of the game. It doesn't seem like the planets are especially different from each other, but they claim to be. That's it. You buy and sell, and then you stop playing when your cards stop dropping. It's not a bad couple of minutes figuring out the system and getting the hang of it, but there just isn't enough depth to really keep you going.

The art style is simple, clean and cartoony. The animation is good, what animation there is, which is to say the planets rotate and your little space ship putters around. The sound does the job, but the music actually gets a little annoying in parts, and I liked the sound track to Master of Orion 2, so there's that.

As with a lot of games, there's nothing really wrong with Astro Emporia but there is also nothing really right about it either. I think it would be sort of cute to give to a kid to play for a couple hours as they figure the system out, and I like the basic ideas ... But there just isn't enough. If you expanded out the basic ideas into a more fully fleshed trading game with maybe some ship upgrades and some governmental institutions to deal with, well, it starts to sound like a completely different game.

Maybe they'll make like, an Astro Emporia 2 with more actual game. As is, like I said, it's not a bad game for giving to a kid for a weekend. In fact, that might have been the idea.

Much less hard to love this reset: Shadow Warrior (2013)

When I first installed this game, I had difficulty getting it to run, with a distinct audio clipping, and ended up giving up on trying to figure it out and just idled the cards off it. I don't remember if the menu option for 'XP mode' was always available, but I tried clicking it and bam the game works just fine, although it seems like load times might be a little worse. So the time above is a little past what I've actually played of the game.

Flying Hog are the guys behind Hard Reset, which I reviewed back here. Long story short, I didn't really fall in love with Hard Reset as I had hoped, instead finding the game sort of a mishmash of elements I really liked and elements I intensely disliked. That being said, indie titles from guys just getting together for the first time often have sharp edges that another game or an expansion will smooth the edges off. Shadow Warrior is the same basic genre, and possibly much the same engine, but built off the idea of taking one of the worst racist stereotypes in 90s gaming and treating it seriously.

Man, is that weird or what? Duke Nukem was and is sort of a mess, but the original Shadow Warrior was just creepy racism wrapped around Duke Nukem and the build engine. I'd heard it was quite good, but I've also heard if you're over 15 you tend to cringe a little too much for all the casual racism.

Shadow Warrior (2013) may or may not feel racist to individuals of actual Japanese background; I'm not going to pretend all the art and shinto stylings in the game might not do so, so you'll forgive me if I'm wrong. But as a white dude playing a game about a Japanese doom action hero named Lo Wang, it feels like a very legitimate attempt, albeit with some very trope visual choices. Lo Wang himself actually comes off as a very Deadpool character, in fact, with a little wiggling and a few small changes you could probably have made this in a Deadpool's adventures in glorious Nippon FPS game instead.