The Secret of Success is Card Work: Ether Vapour Remaster

Man, I just don't know. What makes for a good shmup anyway? I want to say visibility and slick design make for a good shmup, but maybe I'm totally wrong or I'm just super awful. Well no, I am super awful at shmups, but they (I think?) mostly fall into the domain of really twitchy "challenge" games like torture platformers where I am completely not the correct audience anymore.

This is actually the fourth shmup I've played in recent memory - I played Jamestown in 2011 and liked it, but I'm hesitant to spend a long time getting good at twitchy games when I have so many other, more rewarding games to play. Then I tried Syber Arcade, which I reviewed as "good but short", and after it Satazius. After hitting the play button for Satazius my headphones begin uttering a sound I would describe as the sonic hybrid of a cat hissing and a wood chipper being run through a blender. You can assemble and re-assemble that sentence however you'd prefer, but basically it sounds super insanely awful and I just didn't play that.

I'll come right out and say that I liked Syber Arcade more than I liked this game by a pretty big margin. Ether Vapour is visually just not very distinct, which can really get irritating when the screen is covered in crap, and relies much less on tactics and much more on rote memorization. I do enjoy the fact you have three different weapons, rather than an upgrade system, but the lack of an upgrade system always takes away from shmups for me. That's the child in me, sure, but the gradius system of ridiculous power ups as you can momentum in the game is just thrillingto me. The other thing is that the game gives you very little wiggle room in bursts of fire, which is very difficult to deal with and maybe I'm just shitty but it kinda feels like I'm supposed to know better from replaying the game.

On top of that, enemies can be on other planes along any axis, meaning you can't hit them and it can be really difficult to quickly discern between a group that is, and a group that is not. Syder Arcade did this as well, but far less often and the art style there was more distinct. It just feels kind of messy and gross - enemies can be off your plane and firing at you, but you can't hit them back? It just strikes me as innately unfun. The one weapon allows you to 'lock on' and fire homing missiles, but this doesn't really have any intelligence in its targeting - You can shoot at enemies you can't fire on with other weapons, but it's only useful in boss fights since with multiple targets they seem to just shoot whatever you could hit normally anyway. The weapon also has lag in targeting and firing, which I just don't get. It seems to do less damage so it doesn't feel like it would be universally useful since enemies flood the screen if you don't kill them at a brisk pace.

The game allows you to turn on hit boxes, which is a great feature and it's amazing how tiny your hit box is compared to how big your ship's graphic is, but it isn't much help when you're avoiding enemy ships ramming into you. The effective area of the screen comes off as very, very small but also not very distinct. That lovely feeling of dodging and weaving between life threatening but very clear objects? Pretty rare, though it did crop up a little in the city level.

nice headband

Anyway, like I said, the graphics are a bit muddy and washed out, with plain backgrounds. The city level is just a blur of buildings going by. The buildings are grey. The enemy ships? Grey. The end result: Blargh, god I miss sprites. Watch someone play Blazing Star or any of the other Neo Geo shmups made when dinosaurs walked the Earth and yeesh. I know it's not all about graphics but this game looks like it could have been released before Shadow of the Beast, let alone a Neo Geo game. The audio is fine, the music the pretty usual fare. It does seem to stutter a little, and my system while being a year old and featuring a 460GTX is not at all below par. I don't really know if I'm just absolutely awful at shmups or if Ether Vapour is just entirely for another audience, but I didn't really care overly for the game. I'd settle into the groove for a bit, but it's hard to keep up with grey on grey on mushy grey then I'd die. There's also super anime as fuck story pages between levels, but I doubt it's going to do anything more than 'mysterious hero is mysterious, pew pew, bullets go into enemy FACE' so I turned that right off.

Frankly, maybe I'm just terrible at shmups, but what do I look back on playing other shmups recently as fun whereas this is just a chore?

Ether Vapour Remaster is the third game in a bundle I bought off Groupees for $2.25 that has cards. At this stage, I've actually profited on the exchange, which soothes the fact Satazius and Yatagarasu didn't really work. Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos is such a sweet name for a game, though I don't think I'll ever get around to that one.

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.

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'.

The Secret to Success is Card Work: Syder Arcade

This is going to be a weird one just on the back of things not working out as expected. See, like many steam users, I've got too many games and many of those games come with cards. Cards are nice, since they sell for a dollar or two in total but they encourage me to idle games using a program that reports to steam the game is being played. But I like to lead a review with my play time and idling prevents that from being useful. And sometimes, I just don't really get grabbed by a game but I don't want to badmouth it either. It just goes on the back of the list.

Anyway the idea here was going to be - I would play a game til I got the card drops, then move onto a couple other titles with cards I probably won't get around to writing full reviews of. It's not as serious a process, but I could preface it as such! One problem: Syder Arcade appears to be too short to obtain all four of its card drops. I'm certainly willing to admit maybe I just missed a mode unlock or something, but eh, we'll get into it...

I have a real soft spot for side-scrolling shooty ship games and graphically this game is a joy to look at.  The engine is pretty smooth, the ships all look good, the characters (all four of them) look great during the little silly pseudo cutscenes and the enemy ship designs are visually pleasant. There's sort of a weirdness to how they seem to be two very distinct styles of design, but whatever I don't think thematic linking is all that necessary in a shmup. While I have a soft spot for spaceship bullet hell games I am not fundamentally any good at them - I might have been decent as a child, but I don't have the visual responsiveness necessary to be any good now. So I played through 'the campaign' on the 2nd up difficulty, which was a bit too easy in parts.

The art assets really shine on the HUD, it just looks quite nice to me and information comes readily. The game also does audio alerts and the announcer voiceovers are good, but not spammy. You fight some giant bug monster stuff and then descend to an ice planet, with a sort of mediocre boss fight...

Then, abruptly, the game just ... Ended? A little credit bit starts playing and one of my big issues with the game comes up - I can't quit the game! So it's just rolling along with these credits and I quickly tire of watching names, so I alt-f4 and flip through the campaign menu, realizing these are all just levels and not individual campaigns. Which is sort of a bummer. And seriously, I hit every button on my keyboard and gamepad. Is this an amiga reference? I have no idea.

The game does come with a survival mode, which I gave a couple tries to, but the fact of the matter is - to me anyway - the enemies are way too bullet spongey. So I'm basically focusing all of my efforts on dodging enemy fire, not really killing anything and then the screen is covered in enemy units. This works pretty nicely in the campaign since you end up dodging around against a limited number of foes, but in survival it reminds me of playing a RPG and wandering into a zone you're too low level to do. Just sitting there, plinking away ineffectively. Maybe that's something shmup lovers are big on, but it didn't work for me.

The music and audio clips are excellent - Well, I think one song wasn't so good, but I generally quite liked what was hitting my ears. The game also does this neat thing where you can flip directions and turn around, which is pretty neat in the campaign and again really unenjoyable in the survival stuff. Again I'm not sure if this is common as I haven't played so many shmups, but it's new to me.

So, to conclude, I liked the game and I was given it so I'm not fretting too much, but an hour of play time for $10 is probably too much. Maybe pick it up cheap, or maybe the devs will add some content later on? Hard to say and hard to recommend as such, but the complaint "there isn't enough" is not so bad a complaint when it ends with "because I wanted more!"

Scary Games Month: FEAR 2 is a game about diet cola beverages

Time for another horror game, as it is scary games month still, the even more bizarre sequel to the rather bizarre FEAR, which is an acronym for "First Encounter Assault Recon" which I guess works well enough. Fear 2 (there's no way I'm capitalizing every usage of the word Fear in here, I hope you don't mind) is sort of an odd sequel because Monolith sold then regained the rights to the Fear series somewhere within development, resulting in (supposedly) some of the oddities in the story. Regardless, the original is from 2005 while the sequel is from 2009, but I'm not entirely sure it looks it.

Fear is kinda noted for three different things: One, slow-mo bullet time! Hard Reset has some of this too but it's way better in Fear ie actually useful. I think bullet time was supposedly pretty common at about the original Fear's era of development but the mechanic has mostly fallen off. I kinda like the mechanic since it offers you another resource to ration out in combat, though I admit it's basically a pale shadow of the Crysis suit's tactical options. For those uninformed, during slow mo you move somewhat faster and enemies move much slower and you can toggle it on or off as you go.

Second, Fear is a little unusual in being a consistent running horror fps series. Most horror games are over the shoulder third person, or are less reliant on gunplay, which makes for an odd dynamic. I have to admit straight up that I didn't find the original Fear all that scary if at all as opposed to Doom 3 which did get me a little bit here or there. But I'll talk about that more later.

Third, Fear is notable for having a story that appears to have been crafted in the most bizarre, brainstorming think tanking flow of thought manner. And by that I mean the story has conceptually solid moments but upon reflection the combined narrative is less plot more shambling gestalt. The words "cohesive" and "consistent" are completely missing from Fear, with Fear 2 likely going even a step further since it's apparently the product of some odd IP losing and gaining process.

The original Fear centres on the adventures of THE POINTMAN, who over the course of the game is blah blah who cares. There's a couple twists but they're all so far from removed from a connective context that you blink at it then shrug. The plot also centres on ALMA, who is not ATMA, a little girl who has psychic powers and they never really explain much of this. The source of her powers, which are far closer to Warhammer 40k Chaos warper stuff than any vision of 'psychic' I've ever heard of, is never really explained. Also she isn't really a little girl by the time she "dies" but they juxtapose the ideas around so as to make you think they somehow impregnated a seven year old. Multiple times. While she was in a coma. She could still talk and yell while in the coma though, since the word coma is entirely utilized for the purposes of making it sound even worse.

But it only gets worse and man oh man, I'm pretty sure Fear 2 isn't going to disappoint. What's even funnier is that for all the attempts at making the story sound heinous and "horror", I actually find the setting outright mundane. I'm not sure if this has to do with the complete higher brain function shut down necessary to absorb the science fiction elements from the story without going into convulsions or if its the general detachment of the horror elements from the primary gameplay which is shooting the bleep bleep bleep out of many dudes.

(note: there are more spoilers than I would usually drop during this review!)

Scary Games Month: Doom 3

Ha, oh man.

Turnabout is fair play, right? If I'm going to talk up Doom the First to the detriment of modern games with modern engines, I should certainly be willing to play Doom 3 right? It is scary games month and what's more scary than the slow, sickening decay of everyone who worked on Doom? You're thinking about Rage, right? But remember, Daikatana ties into this process as well! Daikatana is like a game version of the star wars prequels. I mean, the actual movies, not pod racing on your kinect or something. That analogy doesn't make overly much sense... Doom.
 
Anyway Doom 3 is a 2004 release into the Doom series and an actual new game as opposed to Doom 2, which was honestly just an overlong map pack with some additional small features - but no stage maps, and the lack of maps seriously worsened the game for me. I have no idea why that's such a big thing - Look at it, it's nothing! But Doom 2 didn't have it and I was sad as a fourteen year old. It kinda goes back to how world building mentally works when you're young, but it's entirely a thing.

By modern conventions Doom 3 would probably just be titled Doom, given its status as a remake of the first game. There was a lasting complaint back then that Doom 3 was a horror game out of nowhere, but that just comes off as an issue of gamers not really comprehending what is horror at all. The original Doom maybe doesn't feel spooky when you're a hardened veteran of shooters, but show that shit to most people and it's pretty damn horrifying. I mean episode 1, episode 3 had entire walls made out of screaming people and so on being you were actually in Hell. Mind you Doom 3 went to horror school and picked up all of the tropes, but stuff like jump scares and lights going out when you picked stuff up were in the original game. Shit just moved so slow and randomly I guess people didn't really pick up on it so much as a horror thing. Maybe it's totally a gamer thing though. I see blood sprayed fire hose style across the walls and I think "did the demons like, do that intentionally? It seems like it would be a ton of effort". Whereas a little old granny would be like "AAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

It does go to show you how silly it seems to complain about developers and publishers addressing new games with their original title; Doom 3 isn't, on any level, a fundamental sequel and just calling it Doom would simplify expectations a bit. Or combine both elements and title the game "Doom: Horror Manshooter" then everyone would have known what they were getting into. Maybe just "Doom: Horror manshoot starring tiny flashlight"

Steam Sales: An attempt at a comprehensive End User's Guide

It's October now and that means the biggest crunch of Steam Sales is rapidly approaching us. This is a handy-dandy guide to understanding how the Steam Sale structure works for you, the end user, and to buying a giant pile of games you will fundamentally never play but as inexpensively as possible. Ahem.

For reference, I'm going into my fourth year of having a Steam Account. I got an account to get into a sale and that's basically how I frame my entire experience with buying off Steam. In these three years I have accumulated about ~300 Steam games at an average cost of 'give or take' $2. Steam Enhanced gives a figure of $415 spent, but that number is a bit complicated, since I've gotten Steam keys from all over. Anyway, let's begin!

this remains the most honest macro of all