Witch cards will drop: Fire

So I think of myself as an individual who dislikes adventure games, but when I look back over the games I've played since starting up this blog, there are a pair of adventure games - Primordia and Morningstar - which I actually look back on positively. And that's my entire line of adventure games, right there, so maybe I'm wrong.

Or maybe those were just good games.

Fire is an adventure (puzzle/exploration) game set in a fantasy stone age world, along the lines of something like There was a Cave Man, or maybe a better example is Bonk's Adventure or the Flintstone's. I wish there was a Bonk's Adventure game on Steam, that would be good to review, since those games are acid trips. The game does not have english writing nor english dialogue, instead conveying information entirely through visual and more basic sounds than pure language. Though it does onga bonga blap blap at you as well, I guess. Basically, Fire is "in the stone age" through the lens of a drug high sliding in the wrong direction toward a bad trip.

The game's interesting hook is that complete lack of writing; puzzles are not really themed in any meaningful way as per the setting. The last section I bothered to finished had you feeding berries to creatures who looked like cartoon bushes, which would then allow them to play music. Once you lined up the tunes, and then spoke to cavemen in masks, the music would reduce them to meat. You then feed the meat to baby birds, who go back into their eggs and...

Well, you get the idea. Basically, it's not "the stone age", it's just goofy illogical puzzles without much in the way of explanation. The game cheats a little, even, using visual elements that convey speech or convey the meaning behind speech. Pictographs are still text, you know? Visually the game is a total thematic mess, it's pretty obvious the art team just didn't care and made whatever they felt like making. The music and audio, on the other hand, are just there to chill you out and provide gentle ambience while you play. Those are good, or at least, good at suiting what the game needs out of music. I don't think people play Adventure games to rock out while going through the puzzle sections or something.

Basically, the game is a generic puzzle/adventure thing, but entirely lacking any story or narrative structure. You appear on a screen, try to puzzle out the development logic and then you get a firefly that teleports you to the next level. The game's humor is utterly puerile, and the visuals are often weirdly off putting. There's just like, a frog anus or dinosaur brains or people being electrocuted to death to go with happy smiling flowers and dancing dudes who melt into meat. If it was trying to be cute, it would be cute, but instead it halfway tries to be cute and then slops over gore in the other direction.

Basically, I dislike this game, and at about the halfway point I shrugged my shoulders and stopped playing it. The puzzles are a mix of hunting pixels for what you're supposed to click on and then from there warping your brain to logic out puzzles that have so little to do with the setting. Maybe it's normal for adventure games to be so lacking flavor and story, I don't know, but it doesn't feel normal to me.

Magic Duels: Nomrakrul

Last month, or thereabouts, was the one year anniversary of the free to play Magic the Gathering introductory product, "Magic Duels", made by Stainless Studios. The game has now seen three major patches since I last wrote about it, which was admittedly only ten months ago.

I wanted to do a follow up review to briefly address how the game has changed, but since this isn't an overly exciting prospect, I'm going to cut the usual introductory preamble short and just immediately go to a cut. That's not to say this is negative, but if you're not interested, why waste your time?

Morningstar: Descent to Dead Rock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Magic Duels: Short review

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

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

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

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

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.

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...

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2014 in review

As with previous years, this review splits games into four categories. I'm going to proactively not read my earlier YiRs and just assume I remember roughly a year later the system I was using. Maybe I'm not. If I recall correctly, it works like this. This is an entirely subjective, made up of nonsense system, based completely on my experiences. I tend to dislike things that are overhyped because I'm trying to figure out what is so great about it, and like things where people tell me they're bad because I'm always awaiting the game to take a big dump on my face.

Category A: Games that I think everyone should pick up and try if they have any faint interest in them. Games I came out of feeling like I'd really enjoyed myself. Something to branch out and try, and definitely something to pick up if you like the genre they are included in.

Category B: Games that I think, if you're interested in the genre, are definite good times. Not necessarily something to pick up if you're not into it, though, but maybe if you like the look. A bit riskier as propositions go. Most games I finish fall into this category.

Category C: Games that are decent enough if you like this or that sort of game, but not really the sort of game you should go out of you way to try. Games I quit near the end or games I was reluctant to finish tend to fall in here.

Category D: Games I regret play, regret buying or regret existing. I would advise against picking up category D games unless you find your tastes run in stark opposition to my own, which is mind you entirely possible.

To switch it up this here, I'm going to start with the games I don't recommend, and then move up the games I really liked. Whoa. Daring.

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

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

And yet man, I really love King of Fighters.

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

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

Magic the Gathering Online: Please no v4

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

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

here we have os/2

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

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

Long Card Road Home: Saturday Morning RPG

Nostalgia. Nostalgia never changes.

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

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

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

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

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

a pun, I think

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

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

ah hue hue hue hue heh

Long Card Road Home: Sweezy Gunner

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

Sweezy Gunner is that thing.

question mark

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

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

Yeah. It is kinda cute and fun.

Long Card Road Home: Blood of the Werewolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long Card Road Home: Chompy Chomp Chomp

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long Card Road Home: Hero Siege

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duel of Champions (MMDOC): Introductory thoughts

I like to pronounce it MMMdock.

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

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

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

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