Eight long weeks of rolling: Divinity Original Sin

the review is actually negative, nice one steam

In gaming, there's a layer to reading reviews not quite as present in other entertainment mediums.

Gaming is very, very subjective. You might argue it combines all the subjective elements of other forms of entertainment and rolls them together, creating a truly finicky state. From there, you read reviews and wonder is that person's subjective view going to work with my subjective view? And it's hard to tell.

So, often enough, I hit on games that get rave reviews but I'm baffled at how high its marks are. Sometimes it goes the other way, sometimes bad games click. I do think there are some objective elements to gaming: Visual fidelity and quality, clarity of explanation and coherence in UI, so on and so forth. But most, if not all of it, is sort of up to the end user.

Divinity Original Sin is the byproduct of the kickstarter era of a couple years back. I think you could argue there's a pretty clean sweep of isometric-ish rpg-is titles born of KS; a "sequel" to Planescape Torment, a sequel to Wasteland, a "spiritual successor" to Baldur's Gate-ish and then whatever D:OS was supposed to be spawned from. I suppose on a level it is worth noting the game was marketed on its own graces, without claiming it's going to relive torment or BG2 or the lost direction Fallout took.

That being said, I can't really say I understand how or why this game is so positively reviewed. There's not so much hype to it, not really, as I don't know anyone who played it other than a friend I fear I unfortunately talked into it.

Sorry about that.

Eight long weeks of rolling: The Witcher 3

The Witcher series is one of the oddest progressions in the history of RPGs. It's also, maybe, one of the best attempts and best successeses at creating a real RPG that actually has you play a role in a story as opposed to a video game where a story plays in the background while you grind for goat butts.

The thing that stands out here is that the first Witcher game is weird and janky, and I rather liked it, but it was clearly limited by its engine. The Witcher 2 is much closer to realizing what they wanted to do, with an interesting and multi-threaded story that can go many different ways. The Witcher 3 realizes what Witcher 1 and 2 wanted to do - It's one of the few games I've ever played where the feeling of budget or design rarely if ever hits that sense of them wanting to do something

The Witcher 3 might ultimately be compared to Skyrim, albeit with mods so ladies can get their bits out, and then it would utterly crush Skyrim. That's not to say Skyrim is a bad game in any means, but Skyrim feels so bland and lifeless compared to the sharp wit of TW3. Though, to be fair, I have my complaints about the writing style as well, but Skyrim never makes you stop and pause to think about how much you're going to mess with people's lives. TW3 will trick you into it.

Witchers are tricky.

Eight long weeks of Rolling: Final Fantasy VI

I'd been eyeing picking up the PC port of FFVI with an emotional range running far closer to trepidation than excitement. I've always been worried that various games won't live up to my memories - FFIV, for example, is just kind of dull and dodgy - but Square put VI up for what felt like a low discount during BF sales.

I say "felt" because $4.80 USD doesn't really seem like a great deal for a >20 year old SNES game, port or no port, but as it turns out Square's webstore messed up and accidentally reversed the discount. So it was actually supposed to be less four eighty, not on sale for four eighty, and man I am not playing anything north of five dollars for this game. But I happened to have bought during the price error, so I guess that's good? Oh well, thanks store error, you save me the monies again.

Or technically don't, since it's not like I would have bought it if it wasn't at least this cheap.

Retro reviews: Phantasy Star II

Phantasy Star 2 was released in the odd period between the NES and SNES, where it felt like developers really weren't tapping the power of the Genesis at all. The original Final Fantasy is its immediate FF neighbor in the West, and while Phantasy Star 2 is visually more enticing than that, it is so much worse looking than FFIV. It's funny how these games are divided by years, but as a teenager, it never really connected how big the gaps in development were. Graphical quality was increasing in huge jumps, as both the technical development improved and the sprite art improved as well.

Actually it's kinda funny how people in the modern day have zero concept of the gaps between game releases. I read some complaint about how Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle (which is bad, don't get me wrong) made a guy "thankful" he had a SNES as a child. Alex Kidd predates the SNES by like, a year or something. You weren't playing Alex Kidd when the SNES was available, unless you rented it, at which point you were renting an old goofy Genesis game.

In spite of the fact I owned a Sega Genesis - a generation 1 model, in fact, bought almost on the day of release in North America- I never finished PS2. The game was rather unpleasant in terms of difficulty curve, as it never really became super obvious as a small child that 90% of RPG difficulty
could be mitigated with grinding and just drawing maps. The game is already far enough back that my only memory is getting the first new party member, and how awesome the box art is. It also seems to have nothing to do with anything, but hey, whatever. That art owns.

I really miss the era of non-anime box art for western releases of Japanese games. It went away sooner than later, but that is some trippy shit instead of the cool but kinda plain Japanese release art. Stuff like this dying out reminds me why I hate weebs.

RPGs on the SNES and Genesis were more expensive than their less memory equipped cartridge compatriots, owing to the necessity of adding additional physical media within their plastic prisons - the so-called 'battery backup' that actually really was. (I've read some games, however, had flash memory instead) As such, PS2 - and many of its ilk - weren't games my friends and I bought when I was young enough that this game was new, but rented. It's such a weird thing, remember how you'd basically "borrow" these games from a store and you'd often be praying weekend to weekend - or weeks apart - that someone didn't send your saved game off to oblivion.

Bad gaming: Bound by Flame

So back in like February or whatever I was planning around doing a March bad games month while doing various RPGs and the like. Then I played more than a few bad games, in a row, and just felt exhausted with gaming. It turns out in order to play bad games, you need to have played good games. Too many bad games and you just hate gaming.

Bound by Flame was on the bad games list, but I didn't work up the energy to get down to it until April, and even then this game... Well, it has a Mixed rating on Steam and that's often for a reason. There's lots of games on Steam that get an unfair rap, and lots that get a gushy rating when they're nothing special, but straight to the point I would say this game definitely earns its Mixed rating. And yeah, I realize I played this in April... I tried replaying it recently and it's just a no-go. So this is a review written in april of a game I was so frustrated with I didn't get to it until now.

Bound by Flame is sort of the generic behind the back action roleplaying game we're all quite accustomed to at this point. I think comparing it to the Witcher is incredibly fair, as the game feels like a discount store version of the Witcher 2. This isn't to say the game is innately awful, but it shares a lot of the jank in writing and tone that makes the Witcher charming. Here it sort of works, sort of doesn't.

The basic story is there's a bunch of rather untoward cold-fueled undead and you're a mercenary protecting a band of researchers at the 'temple on top of the world'. The undead don't look or act anything like the warcraft Scourge, if you're wondering, or at least they don't early on. You end up - I guess this is a minor spoiler, but it is on the box - disrupting their ritual and have a demon stuck in your soul.

See, they're cold undead, so you fight cold undead with a fiery demon. There's a bit of witcher in there, but taken to the next level and I'm going to say I actually like the core thrust of the fiction even. I want to like this game.

Eight long rolling weeks; SRR: Dragonfall

Welcome to Rolling play game month(s) in which we spend eight weeks playing roles with the grenade that is the computer. Please enjoy your stay as we jack into steam for another exciting romp through fictional worlds with large, elaborate dialogue trees that don't do anything to actually influence conclusions and whatever else we like to pretend makes for roleplaying.

Choices matter. They matter because you make a choice, and then, that's what you did. Deep. Deep like the rolling pin games, on the computer.

Dragonfall is the follow up to Shadowrun Returns, which contained the campaign "Deadman's Switch" or some variation on that string of letters. A lot of people seemed pretty down on DMS, but I thought it was a pretty effective tutorial, which I've said about 75 times or something in the last year. Dragonfall inversely is meant to be more of a standalone adventure more suited to experienced players.

On a basic level this is a RPG with squad based tactical combat set in a cyberpunk world. Dragonfall (as a game) comes off as a fair bit more toward the dystopian than DMS, but not really to the point it feels like the setting isn't being used - more like the setting has more depth to it than the usual RPG nonsense, and different parts of the world feel different. Which is a good thing.

I don't, and I know I've said this, feel much of anything special toward Shadowrun. As earlier RPG systems go, I never really played anything other than D&D. I don't even like D&D though, the only systems I have much of a soft spot for are the White wolf nonsense which is endearing in its completely ridiculous nature and BattleTech which just has the best world-building coupled with a legacy of endless failure. Shadowrun is just "there" for me, it is built out of disparate cyberpunk parts but doesn't really hum with its own energy. So while I think these games are cool, I'm not saying that out of nostalgia.

I kinda like or dislike this game on its own merits, even disregarding it as a sequel, since I barely remember DMS other than how good the story hook was.

Eight long weeks of playing roles: Fallout New Vegas

Was this game seriously made in 2010? Blimey, I feel sometimes like I'm stepping between eras whenever I pick another steam game to pick up. FF8 is 1999 or something, this is ten years after that and SR:R was 4 years from that?

Anyway! Fallout New Vegas is, according to most reviews I've read, the best of the "two" Fallout games produced roughly around the same time. I had something of a mixed opinion of Fallout 3, which was good but not great, and I've always been a little scared to fire up FO:NV. You see of all the bad mental habits I have, I think I'm a bit suggestible in a weird way. If someone tells me something is hot doody, I tend to gird myself and then be pleasantly surprised. If someone tells me something is amazing, I tend to pick out its flaws and not give it much room to breath.

Tell me Fallout: New Vegas is the hottest RPG title in the last five years for storytelling and worldbuilding, watch me sputter like a vagrant in a hot dog explosion as I try to get over how bad the mouse acceleration is. More on this later, though...

FO:NV also has the weird issue with Bethesda steam DLC pricing. Basically, a friend of mine bought me this game for a fiver a couple years ago, and I left it in my inventory. I used to do that, leave games lying there out of my library. Anyway, eventually the game went on sale for the same price, but with all the DLC packed in, and it was more to buy the DLC later. I don't know what Bethesda's deal is here, but I ended up buying the game again with all the DLC and leaving that copy sitting there. Which I still have.

I don't know how to feel about that, either. I do want to make the point that the played statistic above is an astounding thirteen hours off my in-game played time. That's a lot of time alt-tabbed looking at solutions, crashing to desktop, fixing mod orders and other general nonsense. Still, sixty plus hours is a lot of game, either way, and I guess playing with mods counts as gaming sort of anyway?

Eight weeks of playing roles: Shadowrun Returns

 

Roleplaying winter couple of months continues with some sort of successful kickstarter game. Hurray. It's cold out! Let's play the role of someone who can open their not frozen shut windows. Because I can't open my window. It is covered in ice. Is this ok?

I don't have any strong memories of Shadowrun as a teen; I'm not sure if I was too old or too young. I have the weird luck of having read Neuromancer in my formative years - like, to the point I was young enough that William Gibson marched me right past a sex scene and I didn't even know what they were doing - which I think shaped a lot of my ideas about how the future is going to go. Everyone should read Neuromancer, even if it isn't Gibson's best work. Shadowrun is, to my loose grasp of cyberpunk as a conceptual predecessor to the eventual genre it "became" Neuromancer by way of magic and other wackiness, likely making it more akin to the early Warhammer 40k lore which was also something of a melting pot of concepts.

Did you know Warhammer 40k actually originally had a sense of humor?

As for kickstarters, I was really excited when kickstarter first came into being as it represented gamers being allowed to choose what would be developed and influence the market in a more hands on, or wallets on, manner.  The end result however has been something of a mixed blessing. The whole cycle of Kickstarter into Early Access into Steam Cards into Steam Sale has really highlighted a lot of points where the game industry has problems that we all gleefully blamed on like, Electronic Arts and Bobby Kotick for the last decade and as it turns out those perceptions might not have been on the money.

See the joke there is kickstarter has wasted a lot of people's time and money, though I think it is less egregious than the whole green light early access "give me money for an unfinished product I don't plan on finishing chortle" set up.

But SR:R is a kickstarter "success"; the game was made on time, I think, came out and people reacted to it in a pretty reasonable fashion. I've heard mixed opinions on it, but it's a roleplaying game and I had more interest in playing it than finally trying to get through Fallout: New Vegas (which is just so hyped I'm scared) and trying to figure out what the first Dragon Age actually "is". Is it Origins? No I mean yes it is on Origin and I have the full version, but which one actually is it? I don't want to think about it. What happened to putting numbers or clear titles after games?

Right I'm getting distracted. SR:R is a top down, isometric RPG with guns, magic and trolls. It is a mix of cyberpunk and magic, though it ends up feeling like the cyberpunk side is pretty subdued compared to the magic, so that might disappoint a little. As I hinted by mentioned Neuromancer, it takes from an oddly bog standard view of the future, in which nations no longer quite exist and huge megacorps do things for money. Very close to Syndicate, I believe, which this game feels like the more honest RPG cousin of.

I'm referring to the shooter that people wanted to be an isometric RPG there, in case you didn't care. You don't. Let's move on.

Eight weeks of playing roles: Final Fantasy Eight

You know before we talk about anything else I really want to say I was surprised at how long FF8 is, in both positive and negative ways. There is a fairly good amount of content in the game but it is gated behind wandering in circles and just the worst pathing elements good lord. Admittedly it isn't that much longer than FF7, but it really feels longer, but again, in bad and good ways... My in-game played time is rather different from my out of game played time, and I only saw the game over screen five times...

People talk about Final Fantasy games - Frankly, they talk about roleplaying games - Way above the level of enjoyment I think anyone actually gets out of them. You get this moment, when you ask someone what their favorite RPG is and their words just stop making any real sense. From Final Fantasy to the Witcher, to Baldur's Gate and back again, it all just comes off as 'good lord I need to justify this skinner box so hard'. I'm not saying these are bad games, not at all, but it sure does end up feeling like it when you sit down and play them again. Except the original Final Fantasy. God that game is just a bleak void of a skinner box. Argh.

Anyway, I mention this because Final Fantasy Eight is or was probably my favorite in the series, insofar as actual FF games and not like FFT or weird spinoffs or whatever. FF8 is the one I went into expecting was super bad, then found I actually just like every element of it. People bemoaned every element of it, often to the point of absurdity - Squall is extremely Cloudlike, and yet he was derided for elements he shared with the FF7 protagonist - and in the end uh, to be honest, the game didn't seem that bad. Seriously Cloud and Squall both do the '...' thing. Cloud, I guess, gets a bit of a pass since he actually has brain damage and then gets more brain damage over the course of the game, but still...

On the other hand coming back to this game, well... It's a little bit of a strange one, isn't it? The feeling, not the game. The game is pretty Final Fantasy ## you know? Like FF7 I was expecting to come back to disliking it but just playing it anyway because memory is a fickle thing. Here I came back to something I have actual nostalgia for and just being like man, this is just the damn oddest thing.

I mean yeah, the skinner box, the loot thing? FF8 drops much of that element, and I started to wonder by the end if the loss of big lewtz was a big part of why a lot of people really didn't "get" it?

Eternal RPG dilemmas: Final Fantasy Seven

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

a world of radiation poisoning metaphors

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

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

Long Card Road Home: Saturday Morning RPG

Nostalgia. Nostalgia never changes.

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

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

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

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

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

a pun, I think

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

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

ah hue hue hue hue heh

Eight Long Weeks of Roling - Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

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

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

But what would I know, about anything...

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

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

Better than expected: Sacred Citadel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a Skill Tree: Path of Exile

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

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

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

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

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

Magic 2014: Title mysteriously different and shorter

I haven't followed the Magic on Steam games too closely, so this is my second one that I picked up. I picked this one up almost entirely on the back of selling steam cards in the beta. I'm not quite sure why people pay as much as they do for steam cards, but it net me about $30 to blow on games, and the free scavenging ooze is something I want for my cube anyway. If that sentence makes your head hurt, welcome to Magic, mid-tier nerdery and gateway drug to worse things.

Magic 2014, released in 2013, stars Chandra, daughter of Chandler, a cast member of Friends who also showed up in the Magic set Homelands back in 95 or some other year I can't be arsed to look up for the purposes of this joke. Chandra is a smoking hot fire mage with quantum freckles that she does, or doesn't have. She's woefully generic and archetypical, just like the rest of the cast - Garruk, who like to lift bears. Liliana, a goth with an infinitely boring troubled past. Ajani, a furry and lastly Jace, every under 17 nerd's repulsive super dork id. Would wear a fedora if he wasn't a magician, I'm sure. The storyline is essentially Chandra wants you to help her catch some mage that really boils her blood. I mean, more than usual. Like higher than a low simmer.

Magic 2014 features a sealed deck mode, which bizarrely people refer to as deck building as some sort of odd victory towards the eventual build your own decks mode that will never happen and a new title. Seriously, wasn't it called Duels of the Planeswalkers or something before? What happened? It also features lots of art of Chandra, who remains so astutely hot that she is actually either on fire or smoking in most of her imagery. I am never going to get tired of those puns.

fuel for the pun fire

Never, ever, ever. Now you're cooking with puns.

This isn't a full review in the general sense I like to do reviews. I like to either feel like I've finished the totality of a game and then show my played time, or at least feel like I absolutely hate the game and don't want to suffer anymore. In this case, this is a review of the product 'as is' just after release. I'll probably do a smaller totality review in six or eight months or however long it takes to release the mini-expansion and the new deck packs, and then put them on sale.

March out of RPG month: King's Bounty, Warriors of the North

Sequels are a nice thing. (Sometimes)

The first recent King's Bounty game, King's Bounty: The Legend, is one of those little fist pump moments Steam has brought to me. Like a fair number of old school gamers, one of my favorite games is Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which King's Bounty has a claim in the lineage of. HoMM4 was fine, but not as good, then HoMM5 just felt off somehow.  I didn't play enough of HoMM5 to really nail it down, but I know for a fact that HoMM games are supposed to take place on a hex map. I realize that sounds awfully specific and nit-picky, but the way units line up, block and defend is at the core of why I enjoy HoMM games. Getting the positioning juuuuust right and so on ... Just what makes the game "good" to me. HoMM5 didn't do that, and instead combat felt weird and I almost want to say floaty. Not floaty in the genuine pseudo physical lack of feedback feeling you get in an action game, but the step after, where your brain tries to process through the floatiness.

KB:TL stepped up to fill the hole in my heart. I bought it for 7.50. containing all of the (at the time) newly made KB content. My understanding is that KB:TL and Armored Princess are only KB games through purchasing the name, but I just enjoyed them so much I barely care. They're very HoMM-like, but in many ways discard the elements that make the game feel less story-driven than they should. Admittedly, AP is a worse game than TL, and then it has later revisions and expansions that in turn just make it even worse. Crossworlds was such an awful edition, at least to single player. Does this game have multiplayer? I don't even begin to know.

But then they released another sequel - Or more or less a campaign, packaged as its own thing. I gotta admit that there's only a handful of series I get excited about seeing new releases in - Crysis, for one. The Witcher 2 got me pretty hyped, and I guess I'm a bit interested to see how SimCity 5 is going to be. There's probably more but if I can't think of them. So another KB game, I'm hyped, etc.

Since it's almost impossible for me to dislike this game I'm going to be a bit more general about King's Bounty games, the more recent ones, and talk about why I really like them and the stuff I find sort of strange about watching the shift as modern influences drive their way into a game clearly made to follow up Heroes of Might and Magic 3. HoMM3 is, of course, always going to be a game that people go back to - It's a classic with enduring graphic quality, excellent soundwork and mostly a very good UI.

KB games take from that very intimately. In much the way a rip-off is called a loving homage if its a quality production...

Still RPG month: Risen

One of the ever increasing joys of the new age of computing is getting games from somewhere other than Japan. I'm not complaining about glorious Nippon, which has given so much, but it's nice to get another culture. I'm from Canada, so for me American games are pretty base, but Europe man, Europe is a bold new world.

The first moment where I really realized I was playing a European game was playing through King's Bounty: The Legend, a game I played through more than a couple times, where the main character married a 'Frog Princess' and she talked about having tadpoles. Whoa! Europe! What's going on? The Witcher is pretty weird like that too, Dwarves making jokes about tying Carrots to their dicks. You don't do that over here, all games are glum excursions through ultra violence. American games is brown town splattered with blood. You are only allowed to make jokes at the specific joking moment.

I picked up Risen entirely because of Risen 2, that being, Risen 2 sounded sweet. Pirate RPG! Well damn son, I like pirates. Let's try the previous game, made in 2009 (which isn't too far back!) to see how it is while we wait for the second game to go on sale. This is an excellent plan, one that can't possibly fail. Besides I paid $5 for it, which is the 3rd best class of price.

First class is the EA Origins coupon error, which allows you to buy any games under $20 for free. So Dragon Age: Whatever and Shank 2 were free. (Actually I guess Dragon Age wasn't quite free, since it's 21 gb, so there's an opportunity cost to getting that one installed) 2nd best is the Witcher price of 2.50, which is less than the price of just about anything worth buying. I'm digressing rather than talking about Risen. Risen isn't bad, but it's kinda hard to talk about.

Risen feels a ton like the opening of the first Witcher game, though much less in terms of both grounding you into the game mechanics and flavor. On the other hand, while it looks similar, it looks a fair bit better. The engine itself isn't that impressive, but it has some nice touches like dust motes, pollen and waves crashing that pleases the mind. The UI on the other hand is downright primitive, rustic like you'd playing a SNES game that somehow got ported to 3d. I'm not kidding here, it looks like Magic Sword or something.

But I mean, SNES games are sweet, right...

Actual RPG month: Witcher 2

There are only a handful of gaming thoughts I have that come to mind from 2012. Stuff like "I wish homm games didn't suck now" and "I wish I could still enjoy Final Fantasy games" come to mind every year. But 2012 is a year of many new games for me, but not many memorable games.

First one is probably damn, seriously, every shooterish game I play I miss the vivisecting, the UI and the crumbs button from Dead Space. Most games would legitimately be improved by a more integrated UI that feels more natural, and blowing legs off things is always cool. I think that sort of gunplay was in RAGE and Fallout, but never as well done. The crumbs button itself remains something I miss every time though, in every game. I'm not saying I need a button to tell me exactly where to go all the time, but if you're going to say 'go to such an such a place' a route or maybe just something that spins me in the right direction would be so very nicely....

Second one is, god DLC is annoying. Why isn't DLC just always something naturally added to the game? I want to get ME3 this year, and I don't want to pirate it, but I seriously shouldn't have to go through a fucking circus to get the DLC running. I looked at ME2's DLC and it was like, blah blah, bioware bux forum this EA login that and I was like fucking whatever.

Third one, I really wanted to play Witcher 2. And here we are.

Witcher 2 is neat for many reasons. I liked the Witcher for, in order of things I like: the atmosphere, the setting, the truly grey morality, the potion system, the characters I liked, the fact the main character actually had sex, the combat and the characters I didn't like. There is, for future reference, a difference between genuine human sexuality and that weird hundred year old librarian virgin thing in Mass Effect. The Witcher was yeah, a little sexist kinda, but at least it was an honest and earnest portrayal of a manwhore. It is a portrayal of euro-centric style middle ages, which is like the apex predator king of all sexists, the sexism that walks like a monster truck. All of these I expected moving forward, but the Witcher 2 also brings up its game with a gorgeous engine.

It is just so awesome that a company that doesn't have a bajillion dollars can be completely successful beyond the "indie" scope and produce a game that looks triple A. And it got ported to consoles, or at least, the Xbox360. So I fired the game up after finishing Fallout 3, watching the gorgeous intro and started the tutorial.

Took me about ten minutes to hit a bug in the tutorial. God. Fucking. Damn it. PC gaming!

Not RPG month, I swear: Fallout 3 GOTY

The humor of buying this game is I never really intended to. I can't remember why, but FO:NV was on my wishlist, so a friend bought it for me. Or maybe it wasn't and he just bought me it, I don't know. I'd never played through FO:3 and I was told FO:NV totally replaces three.

I'm a little weird in this - If there's a sequel that totally outpaces the original, I always want to make sure I give the original a fair shake, because there's no going back. So I bought FO:3 because someone else bought me FO:NV when I didn't really want either. Then I started playing FO:3 when there are other games I felt like playing, but I just finished a controller game and I was trying to avoid RPGs since I wanted to play Witcher 2 a year after the first one. So I started playing ... A controller game that is also a RPG.

Ahem. I'm playing it KB+M though!

Fallout is a little weird for me as well because I never played the originals. One of my close childhood friends had three 'favorite' games: X-Com, Master of Orion and Fallout. Oh, and probably Simcity, but I'd played that before I knew him. So he loaned me two of them and I don't think I ever loaned anything else. X-Com and MoO are amazing classics, so I never played Fallout. That's sort of dumb, but for some reason I just never did even though he raved about it tons when we were kids. That's probably pretty shameful as my PC gaming cred goes, but I honestly don't have any cred. I just played lots of X-Com.

And it wasn't hard.

I do not necessarily like the post-apocalypse dystopia setting in any broad sense of the term. Though I don't think that post-apoc is necessarily as bad as say, time travel, it has a certain way of ruining any thematic sense. Stuff just gets thrown in without any real sense of logic, creating game worlds that lack any sort of coherence. I do love Dark Sun mind you, but fantasy post-apocalypse is a pretty rare treat comparatively. I like to classify Morrowind, likely my favorite true fantasy rpg, as sort of in that vein as well. Granted, I know basically nothing about Fallout's setting, but I'm leaning against it almost on an innate level.

So Fallout probably always had its work cut out for it. But hey Rage managed it, right?

A year in the making: Darksiders!

The time played on this, which I provide to give a vague idea how much play I got out of a game, is all sorts of screwy. I picked up Darksiders like, last year? The summer sale I want to say? I was pretty excited to play it or at least vaguely interested. Mostly on the basis of really liking the art style. Also, I waited a while, because I wanted a controller to play it with but was looking for a deal.

Problem being is my previous PC had little interest in running Darksiders, or at least enough disinterest that I eventually gave up about half-way through. I'd blame the game, but tons of stuff was crashing on that PC for a variety of reasons. Mass Effect 2, which I noted back in its review, would crash in the exact same way and had the same engine. I fixed that by going to windowed maximized mode, but Darksiders being more of a port wouldn't let me. So it got shelved and now it's back.

Darksiders is a weird experience for me in that I've never really played 3D Zelda games. I've been told repeatedly Darksiders is a huge rip-off primarily of Zelda, but I largely don't see it for lack of experience. Zelda is a weird one for me, in that I picked up the first 3D version and it sort of became the figurehead for how much I hated the transition to 3D from 2D. I played through the proverbial golden age of PC gaming and was never too impressed with where 3D took most games. So I never played past the first dungeon, and more for baseline reasons like 'I hate how this game looks' and 'I hate 3D controls'. LTTP was like Super Metroid, I wish they'd made another like ten of that game. So much so that I played the gameboy Zeldas. No, the original Gameboy. Have you looked at that thing? Horrifying. My old eyes can't even tell what's on a Gameboy screen nowadays. Is that Link? Or a turtle? what

So I really have no idea how innovative Darksiders probably isn't. To be honest, when people say games are innovative or whatever, I just think they're showing their ignorance. Games and books feel creative because we have pretty limited perceptions of the vastness of the medium. I probably say it too and I'm probably showing my ignorance when I do it. The only real spot you can have truly exciting creativity in games is in controls and UI, which I doubt Darksiders, Zelda or whatever the fuck else have really broken new ground in

And seriously if you count a game as unique because of storytelling: BOOKS.