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.

Witch cards will drop: Porradaria Upgrade

This game isn't any good, and neither was my reason for playing it.

I'm still putting time in to grind out games that have cards, that I want to play. I idle stinkers, but I can usually spare the five minutes to see if a game is worth playing. Porradaria, on the other hand, caught my eye because looking over the 'badges' page you can see black bars across some of the cards. I paused, staring at them in confusion. Was he censoring his own trading cards? What the...?

So yeah I installed and played it to figure out what kind of brazen nudity this greenlit game had managed to sneak through. For reference, there is nudity of various kinds in Steam, I think? The Witcher's cards are censored, although maybe they're not anymore, and I'm not sure how censored the Witcher 2 is. I'm pretty sure Huniepop is censored, but I don't own it, and I know from people's discussions in the SA Steam thread it has an uncensored version. But Path of Exile had some minor nudity (mostly statues, iirc) and many other games might have similar little bits hanging out. I feel like there was a horror game I played recently that had some nudity. Oh yeah, the ghost psychic in Fear 2 had her bits out.

That was chilling.

Personally, I don't think nudity is all that big of a deal. It can be effective in horror or in showing decadence, but those big black bars of censorship made me genuinely wonder what the deal with this game was. So, you know, a bad reasons to waste an hour of my life.

Witch cards will drop: Blue Estate

Originally back in September, which I sometimes like to call Shootember, I was going to play through a mix and match of games that involve shooting. After playing Nuclear Throne, which definitely has quite a bit of shooting, technical problems and general apathy pushed me to play some other stuff. Blue Estate was on the list, having downloaded it after realizing it was something akin to a shooter without being a true FPS game.

Technically, I guess rail shooters are first person shooters, but with the rise of the first person shooter they went rapidly extinct with a handful of titles a year instead of being... Actually I guess they were never all that popular. The main difference between rail shooters and FPS games, to me, is actually less in the lack of movement and more what the lack of movement does to the game-play. Instead of being rewarded for careful placement and strategic play, it's basically all reaction time as your protagonist blunders into the line of fire over and over.

I honestly can't remember the last time I played a rail shooter and I definitely couldn't name one I thought was good or an exceptional product of the genre or whatever else. I'm not a great shot in real life and I'm not definitely not a great shot in this or in any other rail shooters. So we'll say this is one of those experiences where I find myself playing a game I'm not fundamentally suited toward playing, which is generally not an inspiring catalyst for a review.

On the other hand you've got to branch out and try different games, right? Even if all you end up doing is finding out you honestly don't like a given genre.

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.

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.

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.

Play Relevant Month: Fatalism of the Orcs, Again?

Sequels, man, sequels. There's still orcs. And they still must die.

OMD2 catches up with its spiritual "competitors" Sanctum and Dungeon Defenders by adding two player coop, adding the oh so sexy sorceress from the first game as a coop partner. I put those two in quotes because OMD1 was fun, those other two, not really. I think coop is largely the biggest and most evident element added to the game, the engine looks slightly better, the music and sounds remain excellent. The art style is cartoonish and the whole game maintains the same irreverence the first one had. You'd notice immediately if you say down to play OMD2 that it wasn't OMD1, but maybe it would take a bit to discern between the two if you were watching a stream or so.

The other big changes to the game are more behind the scenes sort of stuff. There are new map types and new maps, but those sort of blur past you. The game has a much deeper pool of traps to choose from, with more weapons and the addition of a "trinket" item type that has various miscellaneous effects. The biggest change to those is a grindy system where you acquire "skulls" as you did in the first game to upgrade and modify your gear. The first game has one upgrade per trap, whereas this game has a chain of basic upgrades, then a binary selection.

Planeswalker sounds like some sort of airfield enthusist

I've been playing Magic on and off for the better part of my life - Something in or around eighteen years, in fact. Magic computer games are generally overly complex, crash prone and fun through the pure delight of Magic the Gathering itself. The game's core system is largely really fun, and DOTP 2012 manages to hold onto that.

I still play online "real" magic, and as such, never played DOTP as a multiplayer game. I honestly can't imagine doing so, as multiplayer comes in two varieties - duels, which the game is poorly suited to for reasons I'll get into and then big "group" games, which the game might be suited to but inversely lacks basically all the reasons and is terribly slow for anyway.

As a basic magic game it offers some grounding in the setting, which helps build the single player some personality. It's not bad, though the art assets and deck designs for the various planeswalkers who act as opposing AIs does leave you a little annoyed sometimes. The various decks might be based around core themes, or honestly maybe they're not. It's certainly easier to simply imagine them as poorly conceived piles that don't really act on a theme. The art for the various planeswalkers offers a generally stiff reminder as to the innate childishness of Magic's art. The women are all slim, buxom and largely showing off as much skin as credible. The men are all either in the 'skinny but clean cropped sauve' look or big muscle bound hulks.

There is a golem, too, I guess. Oh and a cat person - who is thankfully male.

It's not really the sort of thing that really bothers me in most games but in Magic it's been literal years of hitting the lowest possible mark that common fantasy art will allow. Now that people give zero fucks about D&D, Magic art is just slim women with big tits about half the time. I don't mind slim women with big tits at all but fantasy allows for such a huge breadth of possibility that you think you could move past sticking tits on everything.

Yeah this just in, fantasy artists: Not actually creative.

The decks, as I said, are a mess. They're fun to tool around with, but innately a bit unbalanced. Opinions vary on what beats what, but I think the game fails terrible in terms of potential. The decks often lack focus, and the unlocks rarely allow you to move towards a more focused build. I feel like the idea of having a sixty card deck with two possible themes, then unlocks allowing a focus on either. The unlocks don't do this. They generally just build towards ... Nothing in particular, with many of the decks get unlocked junk that doesn't help the deck. Some of the decks are frustrating messes that feel like could have been more focused, using cards available in the existing pool, but weren't for reasons I'm unsure of. Given the game is at its best attracting as much positive sentiment as possible I don't really know what the excuse is.

Deck building is infuriating and essentially, poorly coded. The deck builder is worse than Magic online, which is worse than a freeware program used in 2002. That's really terrible. It's slow, sticky and I don't really understand why it needs to be the way it is. The worst thing is you can't adjust the number of lands in your deck, which is never more annoying than the one multicolor deck treating its nonbasic lands as spells.

The weirdest element is, to the best of my knowledge, the complete lack of nonbasic lands. This is a weird thing to put in a review but if I was designing magic for casual to advanced level players, I would literally take every step possible to remove mana screw and develop the game from the ground up to improve player choices as they relate to mana. Allowing people to build two and three color decks with ease is a concern for developers of the real game, but it is literally irrelevant here. The designers control the metagame absolutely and these concerns are nonexistent. A deck isn't "more powerful" by using two or three colours, since the general advantage of access to a deeper pool of choices is again irrelevant. So the excuse is ... I'm not sure. Nonbasic lands can be a little weird to use for new players, but they're no more advanced than several of the goofier card choices.

Admittedly, if given reign of such a project, I wouldn't use stuff like Proliferate or Legends at all either, and would probably only use a very limited list of nonbasic lands.

Of course, this leads into another problem - the game doesn't allow you to choose how spend your mana or what lands you tap for mana. This is a tremendous issue and one that weakens several of the decks. While the weirdness of the one Angel's kicker just randomly deciding to be less powerful "because" is certainly odd, any multicolor deck struggles to predict which mana will actually be available at a given juncture. This is horrible, terrible design and really highlights the weakness of the program.

Trying to fight and plead with the game for the usage of your resources leaves a lasting impression of disgust with the game. I believe they claimed they're fixing it in the next version of the game, which is sort of not really the salve to the problem. This is sort of why I would never play this game online. While Mtgo is innately a touch stressful given the fact that, while free on the most part you're essentially betting real money, the idea of losing matches not to bad draws or making mistakes but the game just randomly deciding to tap my lands wrong is uniquely horrific.

The other issue, of course, is that rather than thinking it through and producing the decks at all roughly the same power level, some are just better so I imagine instead of a decent variety of decks you just get nothing. I'm not really excited to find out - Sure, I can log on and try it out given I own all of dotp, but I own a mtgo account with packs and tix and a zombie deck I'm borrowing.

Which isn't very good, but I did say borrowing.

Regardless, dotp is a pretty good way to introduce magic with some unfortunate weaknesses in design, some of which carry over from the main brand and some of which I wish the main brand showed up to fix. It's not a very good advanced product, which I think is the intent, but it's a little frustrating. It was something like ten dollars total though, so I'm not griping too hard on it.

Still, better development would have lead to a better game. I mean outside the crashing, which the game does a ton. And the painful performance issues, but that might be the problem with it being a port.