The Secret of Success is Card Work: Ring Runners Flight of the Sages

If you caught me on a good day, when my memory actually works and asked me which game from my childhood I wish I could play as a child again with all the full delight of childhood I wouldn't answer Baldur's Gate, Sonic the Hedgehog or Final Fantasy IV. I'd likely answer either Herzog Zwei or Inner Space. Inner Space is something of a rare gem, a cute little "indie" title that offered an experience that mixed many genres, but was more or less built around Star Control style action with a rogue star fighter sort of deal instead.

Ring Runners reminds me a great deal of Inner Space, which isn't too surprising given there's probably some shared DNA in their ancestry, though I'd be surprised if the developers or anyone on the planet besides me has ever heard of Inner Space.

Regardless, after an hour of playing Ring Runners I had escaped from some essentially unknown facility that was never explained, which explodes, given a good ship, lost the good ship and was then assigned to pick up garbage for a while. Then the garbage king arrived and, in the garbage ship, forced me to do battle in some sort of trash related gladiatorial games. I had previously turned down the difficulty to get through a mission that felt bizarrely out of sync with the game's earlier difficulty in the hopes I could figure out later what I was doing wrong, but couldn't turn it back up, so I was sort of thinking if I had to spend another five minutes doing garbage gladiatorial games I would probably fall asleep at the keyboard.

The gunning in the space ships stuff is amusing enough, though not great, but fighting people in an arena in a garbage collecting cruiser is just fundamentally not something I ever want to be doing on easy. Or at all, but on easy I'm being punished for not understanding the one mission. So I dug around the options and found no way to turn the difficulty back up, but did find out I was playing 'the tutorial'. I thought to myself, of course, it's using missions to explain to me the mechanics, but certainly this will open up a more interesting, Inner space like experience right? Let's just skip the tutorial.

And then it just started vomiting increasingly larger piles of dialogue at me until I closed the program - Actually, I alt-F4'd, since you're not allowed to close the ring selecting map screen that doesn't really make much sense to someone who skipped the tutorial because it involved fighting in a garbage ship. And yes, I'm blaming the developers for that. You get one mission with the goofy garbage collecting ship to explain the mechanic - Not three in a row!

Ring Runners looks like a game I would have enjoyed immensely as a 12 year old, but the writing is really wooden and the inertia based 2d ship combat even after an hour of playing just felt jarring and way too zoomed in. I swear I've played Star Control 2 (Ur-Quan Masters) recently, on a notebook keyboard no less, and I had way less difficulty with the controls in that game than this one. I understand that if you continue to apply thrust in a direction in zero gravity without anything to cause friction or what not around you, you'll eventually have to apply an equal amount of force to negate that inertia but that's not a fun gameplay mechanic. At least I think that's what they're going for when you spin your ship three hundred and sixty degrees, apply afterburners and still ram into an object. You actually do have air brakes in space but that just begs the question as to why flying is such a damn chore if you're going to follow physics some of the time?

Also there's just too many buttons. I had less buttons in UQM, but felt more in control of the ships I was flying.

Anyway, in conclusion, I played Ring Runners for an hour and found it interesting enough that I'm not griping about the play time but it really didn't grab me at all. Quite liked the music though, and some of the more peaceful bits were super zen. The game felt pretty good when I had the sweet ship at the start, but then it took it away, put me in a garbage scow and then ... Do I need to keep going? Why would you do this? Why would you program in a mission to collect garbage?

You can tell they really wanted to jam dialogue based on the length of the title. Just go with Ring Runners! What's a sage? No, never mind, I don't want to know.

Old school space masters

why do you show me a broodhome when you won't let me

I can't do a counter since the Ur-Quan Masters isn't exactly a steam game. Provided free, the UQM is a port of a thing of a something, of Star Control 2. I am old enough to have played the Sega Genesis ports of Star Flight (done by EA) and Star Control (done by Accolade) which gives me a pretty decent historical grounding in this game. I'd read about SC2 as a teen and always felt a bit sour I couldn't - or hadn't, really - get a copy of it. It sounded great.

The game is regarded as a classic and it's hard not to see why, assuming you can see past the dated graphics and woefully dated gameplay. To get all the positive out of the way so I can get my complain on, for a classic game - fuck, for a game AT ALL - the voice acting and story telling is excellent. I love just listening to people talk, and the stories they tell are richly varied, if 80s as fuck. The combat is based around simplified physics of inertia and acceleration, but this gives flying the ships a real learning curve. It feels rewarding, though the AI is a tragedy. The music is wonderful and the world is vast, if a little hollow.

So it's good, and I like it, on the most part. But let's complain, because man is this game easy to complain about. If you are a huge fan of this game, don't read on, because while I "liked" Star Control 2, I think it's largely a majorly overrated turd of a game (though I admit, this could mostly be down to issues with the port)

Mass Effective Moral Choice System

Damn, playing some old games. Well, older games. Sort of a weird hybrid RPG sort of dealio from a company that I guess became considerably more famous following its release, or something, fuck I don't feel like looking up Bioware. I feel like this is the Baldur's Gate company, but maybe it isn't and maybe it doesn't matter. RPGs are so painfully overhyped its just atrocious. People like to forget this but there's a point in RPG development where people start confusing tedium with challenge. People will go man, Final Fantasy, great fucking game! Maybe it is, but I got a couple hours in and remembered they literally buried any good elements of the game under a huge heaping of tedium. And there's no story. And the combat sucks. Wait, why is this considered a great game? What at all was good about this game? Well, it's a RPG, so that's just what people expected! This is, mind you, from a generation of design school that eventually concluded RPGs should punish the player. People would actually argue that World of Warcraft was going to fail because unlike Everquest, it didn't punish you enough. Because mindless tedium is challenge. Yep.

So yeah I've gone through Baldur's Gate and maybe half the Icewind Dale stuff. I think I finished maybe 10% of Planescape Torment and just found it agonizingly dull. Maybe I got further, but I can't remember. There's text and dialogue and characters doing shit, but I just remember hoboy tedium, walking around this crazy town having boring adventures. Tedium, just endless tedium and bad systems and bad combat. But it's ok because it's a roleplaying game, so gargle those tedious cocks and slowly suck that roleplaying goo out. Hoboy.

You must gather your party before venturing forth.

Anyway so Mass Effect doesn't like me watching streams on twitch tv. Seriously! This is the second game in a row that goes crash happy if I've been watching my friend play MTGO. I was going to write a like two paragraph review about how overhyped nvidia's drivers are (how is this even possible) but it turns out its probably adobe flash or something shitting in my crappy computer's pipes. Fuck you Adobe, I hope Steve Jobs comes back from the dead and ravages you with his zombie aesthetics just all up in your shit. The game is pretty unstable to begin with, but if I've played a stream it crashes in a couple minutes tops.

Right off the bat the game gets me with two things I'm a total sucker for: Nice looking space shots and good music. Damn it Mass Effect, how did you know this was my weakness? The music is seriously the first thing that hits me. It isn't outstanding by any stretch of the imagination, but it's good. And sometimes good is enough to carry me through the start of the game.

Games go in two different ways with little deviation and this isn't meant to be an insightful point. Either games are painful at the start and then open up, or the start is awesome but then gets really shitty. Mass Effect tends greatly more towards the latter, as the beginning is weird and obtuse. The game's combat is honestly pretty bad. There's a ton of neat ideas in it, but it feels flakey and strange. A particularily stunning moment was a firefight with Krogan. I knocked him down, at which point my gun overheated. He healed to full, while my allies, a few feet from him, ignored him before he bumrushed me in melee. Then beat me to death while I wondered how melee worked.

I wasn't really mad. I clearly fucked up, but it's a pretty weird moment where you hit someone at point blank with a shotgun and then they just get up before punching you out. While your allies look on, perhaps in disgust. I'd be pretty disgusted. With this game.

Combat outside of this is pretty hohum, but even a couple hours into the game I find myself wondering exactly 'what just happened'. The game isn't being obvious about information - I have no idea if my allies are dying to critical strikes, if an explosion hit them, if they're debuffed, whatever. Cover seems a bit dicey at times and the game constantly puts you in ambushes, which does the design no favours. The whole cutscene before an ambush thing is ... Not especially well thought out. The grenade system confuses me as well, grenades seem to have no arc or interest in gravity. They just sail onwards, to infinity and beyond. Given they're not all that powerful to begin with, their status as "like a bullet but harder to aim" was a bit dull. On the other hand the weapon system seemed really good after a while. Most games with 'points in guns' you end up wanting to put all your points in one gun, then not use the other ones. The class I picked had access to two guns, and both of them felt equally useful but in different bits. Also the overheat system encourages some weapon swapping no matter, which felt fine.

Roleplaying games having pretty terrible combat isn't anything new, but the thing that really stands out in this game is just how little information is presented to me in combat. One of the things World of Warcraft (and perhaps all mmorpgs) spoils you on is the ability to analyze what you did wrong. If Mass Effect offers me a timeline showing exactly where I fucked up in beautiful detail, I haven't really found the option. When I die, I'm often not sure if I'm off the beaten path, doing things wrong or just ... unlucky. It's an odd feeling. Basically: Combat is kinda bad at times. It's also pretty different and doesn't drag itself out most of the time though.

The other elements of the game though are good to great. Cutscenes, as mentioned, do tend to over stay their welcome. As a basic design consideration, no game should ever do a cutscene then do something you can't save that might kill you. Want to put a cutscene before a boss fight? Too bad, it's shitty design and no one appreciates it. This isn't cinema, guys. You can do a cutscene just before the boss where they give their speech, allow the save and then have the fight. If you don't, either that or the fight is too easy or you have to constantly waffle your way through boring ass cutscenes. Not worth it me hearties. Moral choice systems are largely as meaningless as they were in the earliest days of gaming. I've never really understood why designs fixate on 'good' and 'bad', when really you're always sort of a good guy no matter how you play. Why not build the choice system around, say, greed, duty, law, disorder and passion? With special bonuses coming from both your dedication to an aspect but also your mix of choices. There's a big difference between the nobility of following a law completely to the letter and undertaking an epic quest on your own path to save some downtrodden orphan, but they're both good. Also, there's just as big a gap between a charming rascal who does under the table work and undermines the authority of his government, and a murderous fiend who does that moronic Chaotic evil thing that doesn't exist in real life. I'd like to play a charming rascal, but the derpy murder is fun play style is rather boring.

You murder tons of people in every roleplaying game ever made. And they're not even people! They're bit and boops from the computer.

Designers never really seem to take advantage of that and I'm not too sure why. The difference between 5 points in the "Law" column versus 3 points in Law and 2 points in Passion aren't hard to determine going in or coming out. So you get a slightly different power? Big deal. It's also harder to minmax and gives the player a great sense of freedom to just play the fucking game. I'm not even sure what the good and/or bad points actually did.

I played the game without any real minmaxing, I even let the autolevel system do its thing on the most part. This was sort of a mistake, since the game is a little retarded about electronics/decryption of objects, but I flipped it off, maxed those skills and flipped it back on. Score.

The back story feels like someone played Star Control, or whatever else. Ancient species cyclical hoo hah monitored other life forms precursors the halo the bugs the whatever, I don't know. It's a mash up of various ideas, not really too creative but decent enough. I enjoy the dialogue and I like the politics. I didn't totally like the whole romance angle, it feels a bit forced and stilted at times, but much of the game's progression is like this. Anywhere you go, people immediately know just about everything. You become a Specter and instantly there's people crawling all over you for help that only you can provide. I can understand this from a military angle, but random gangsters? Feel like they'd take a bit to learn through unofficial channels. Anyway the romance probably would have been better had it possessed a bit more randomness. Then again, the eventual sex scene was pretty tasteful and I can't really fault the game for stilted nature - doing it between missions (the romance, not the sex, ugh) is because they didn't want players to miss it. The rest of the characterization is pretty good though, I especially liked the Citadel Security turian that joins the squad after a bit. Also your lieutenant was a pretty well acted dude, though I did find the racist human female rather ... Flat.

The worst element of the story is how ridiculously limited the evidence given or needed at various points is. Your superiors will believe an audio recording, but not a recording of various scientists on the one planet talking about their experiments? Like, uh, you're telling me your space man's suit doesn't have a camera?

They have those now! In real life! I think they had those in desert storm!

The game actually reminds me a fair bit of Morrowind - Which also had great music - in many of the good and bad ways. Morrowind, mind you, had incredibly worse combat. When I say Mass Effect's combat is bad, it's bad for gaming in general. It's certainly no worse than any roleplaying game I can bring to mind and probably a great deal better than most. Level design makes or breaks it, with some of the levels having snipers that shoot you from a million miles away and other levels paced well. Plus it does have shot guns. I love shot guns.

Unlike Morrowind, while I really liked this game, I don't think I'll be replaying it, at least until my next system. I believe this is the second unreal engine game to crash constantly on my machine - thankfully unlike Darksiders which I didn't bother to finish, Mass Effect is pretty decent about autosaving.

Lastly, I want to specifically talk about the last two big moral choices at the end of the game. There's a pair of them, which have some influence on the ending and perhaps the next game. The first choice has three options - though I'm not too sure which one specifically leads to what. The tactically correct decision given the situation is ... Bad. What? Then, following that, the tactically correct choice for the next option is ... Good?

Seriously, good and evil become increasingly dumb concepts when you're in some way 'evil' for making the correct choice. At least within circumstances where you've murdered 800,000 Geth who just want to know why beep boops their boing :(