Dork Quadrant: Hypership Out of Control

HSOOC appears, initially, to be a shmup. It certainly looks like a shmup in the screenshots, but instead its more a topdown shmup with a gimmick. 'A gimmick' seems to be the running theme of this subset of reviews, though HSOOC is less "has a gimmick" and more "is built around a premise" when I think about it.

The premise is you're the usual sort of topdown shmup spaceship doing its thang when your space brakes are cut! Or, whatever, basically your space craft can not really slow down and goes increasingly fast. It's a very basic, very obvious idea that I'm not certain has really been explored all that much before. So instead of going from enemy to enemy, you're in a race against ... Well, you're just going fast and you're worried about running into things.

I got to use the Gotta Go Fast tag, which I didn't think I'd get to use til my regretful purchase of Sonic Lost World next year. (It's gonna happen, argh)

The game looks pretty good, and the sound track is enjoyable to listen to. I enjoy the tracks shifting between the different levels, though there doesn't feel like there's enough music but this sort of relates to the game's problems. The gameplay is largely simple stuff - the game is more or less score attack, though I imagine you can finish the game if you keep at it. There's no story line, though the levels do have little visual gags that make me smirk. One level just ... Has bees. And it goes oh no, bees!

Dork Quadrant: Weird worlds: Return to Infinite Space

Continuing on through my trek through my back log is Weird Worlds, which is ... Actually nothing really like the other games in this subset, neither having cards and in spite of the awesome looking title screen not actually having much shooty space action either. I fire up games to see if they run - a habit from darker ages when steam would install a million tiny files before hand - and watch the title screen to make certain I get that far before moving onto other things.

This game's title screen kinda lies, you know. It looks like there's going to be rigorously most shooty space battles, and on the most part ... Well we'll get into it.

Weird worlds: Return to Infinite Space is essentially a 4X game through the filter of having 1.5X instead of the full four. Unlike the other four in this so-called Dork Quadrant, it doesn't really involve being a topdown or side-scrolling shooter, and is instead a pointy clicky space map game. It reminds me a lot of playing Master of Orion Two, looking both visually similar and borrowing a couple elements, though this is not to say that the game is that deep or that uncreative.

Merely that if you're familiar with taking a space ship and exploring the stars on a 2d map with little distances between them, you'll probably find this game almost eeriely familiar.

The Dork Quadrant: Death Ray Manta

Games keep piling up, regardless of how fast I finish them or mark them undesirable in my ever bloating steam games list. I haven't quite topped a thousand, yet, but it is only a matter of time. In an effort to pick through a couple more games this month, I decided to set up a grouping of games - forgetting I'm supposed to play scary games this month, derp - with the intent of mining them for cards. And then forgetting to actually pick games with cards.

First up in this series of four space shooty ship games is the surreal neonfuture experience of Death Ray Manta, which is ... Perhaps one of the simplest games I've ever played, but also an excellent model for what a lot of games do not successfully do.

DRM is basically an extremely stripped down, colorful twin stick shooter. And I do mean colorful. You will be full of colors watching it. You move with one stick, shoot with the other, and as best I can tell gameplay does not really change on your end at any point. You accomplish three goals - not dying, shooting all the enemies you're supposed to, and picking up gems - and you finish each level when all the enemies are dead. The game flashes a lot of words and colors at you while jazzy music plays, but because it is so simple, you don't really get distracted.

The game is ... That's it. That's the entire game. What makes the experience good, besides the hyper trippy visuals and solid music, is that it does everything with a sense of brisk. It loads quickly, it runs quickly and it makes no comment about your beginning or ending. It isn't concerned with that you died or with making snarky passive-aggressive remarks. It just throws you back into the action, and it is easy to get in the groove and played for a couple minutes with a smile on your face.

A lot of games get this wrong. Loading times are always going to be an issue, of course, but DRM also just doesn't wander from the point. The story is that the manta has lasers in his head, so he blew up his house and lives in space instead.

Problem is, the game is just too simple and the difficulty is pretty flat. You die in one hit, and although the game doesn't move that fast, the screen is utterly swarmed with nonsense in no time flat. So you're going to die, often and a lot. It doesn't mean anything to you, and you just go again, but the problem does seep in - there's one track, and there's one track through the levels.

I don't think adding a lot of complexity would aid the game overmuch, but I do think it could do with perhaps a different path through the levels determined by some element you don't recognize quickly and then maybe another music track or two. The game repeats through cycles rapidly, and while it is fun in little chunks, there isn't enough to keep it from getting repetitive.

I let my sister - who is definitely more of a casual gamer - give DRM a try. Unsurprisingly, she found it really enjoyable, and claimed it was "the game they would have made in the 80s, if they could have". So for a casual gamer, I think it's a fun little trip, and for me it was a decent enough aside.

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.

Jumpnshootman: Spaceport Hope

I picked up the space bundle on groupees because I liked the pixel art of this title, which was used as the background or whatever. I also like the name of the game, since it at least has ... A slightly different feeling from the general miasma of game names (retribution! evolution! origins!) in the modern day.

Spaceport Hope isn't a complex or overly long game. As implied, it is a Jump and Shoot mans. You play a smuggler or courier named Cole who transports drugs (of the beneficial kind, we infer) between regions and planets in 'the system'. You get framed, have to unravel the mess and visit every planet in the system to do so. The 'planets' generally have a level or two, maybe a dungeon, some loot and some other nonsense. There are more than a handful of planets, but not exactly a dizzying amount of content. I saw most of the game, through my playthrough, though I didn't get all the achievements, so I must have missed something.

The story is, as implied, pretty simple - But it's not bad. It's a little smarter than just 'kill the bad mans' and while the mystery isn't mind-blowing stuff, I found it a little better than the mediocre average. The plot isn't exactly save the universe stuff, and Cole is a catalyst not the be-all end-all savior of man, which is refreshing?

He's just a courier.

The game's visuals are generally good, though there is sort of a sliding scale in action. The levels and their background are fantastic, the scrolling background is just gorgeous stuff. Yes, it is pixel art, but it is really well done. I really like the set of screenshots I took, while it isn't hard sci-fi, it has some roots in trying to evoke stronger elements. The enemy models look good, and are well animated, and the weapons (of which there are many) have nice looking little animations. Your character isn't good looking, and the faces of talking NPCs are really terrible. It's a bit jarring, but most of the game looks good, if you're into pixel art. If you're not, well, it's simple stuff - but the color scheme isn't drab and it has lots of variety in the chosen palettes, so it's a little refreshing even for that.

The music and audio are nothing special, but they fit and aren't ever off tone. Good enough is good enough when it doesn't feel weird or too repetitive. They're just normal, nominal background sounds.

Gameplay ... Like I said, jump and shoot mans. Cole has a double jump, and is surprisingly maneuverable in the air. It feels good and slick, and not at all weighed down. You enable and disable weapons in the weapons menu, and then switch between them with shoulder buttons, or whatever the keyboard has. It's simple, satisfying stuff, though you will find most of the weapons useless and several of them life-savers. The rocket launcher and homing plasma gun are pretty much your go-to tools, once you get them, for most of the game. There is a weapon heat mechanic, and ammo in action, which can get a little grating. The cooldown mechanic is in, I think, to get you to chance your weapons on the fly. Problem being is most of the weapons just don't take to every situation. Weapons, other than your basic automatic rifle, draw from three pools of munition - fuel, missiles and shells or whatever you want to call them - which isn't as well balanced as it should be.

There are lots of boss fights, and a couple trickier platforming sections, which are the game's main charms. Most of the boss fights weren't too punishing and took a bit to figure out, then execute. I didn't have to attempt them a ton, so maybe they're a little too easy, but I did appreciate how most of them required figuring the boss out and trying different things. The platforming is pretty forgiving stuff, since Cole's double jump makes him insanely agile, but there's more than a few good sections.

All in all, Spaceport Hope is a solid execution of a simple premise. It does have some issues with dps uptime on some trash enemies and the weapon balance is a little off, but on the most part I found very little to actively complain about. It is a simple game of moderate length, so if this is what you're looking for to spend a couple days on, it'll be fine enough.

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+

Year of our lord 2015, played Pac-Man for the first time.

At least: As far as I can remember. Pac-Man is one of the 'forgotten' gaming icons, unless your name is Adam Sandler, something that didn't really hold on through the years, though more so than like ... Bubsy the cat. I honestly don't know that I played the original Pac-Man or any revision in the past, so this is a review of this game without really knowing what tier of update it is. I'm just going to shorten the title to Pac-Man, I'm not referencing any other game or version of this game. That's it, here we go, ghosts on the chomp

Gaming revivalism is an interesting concept to me, since you end up with a lot of weird phrases and ideas mixing with what ultimately amounts to marketing via the hook of nostalgia in your soft unprotected rump. Franchises at this point sort of co-exist in a market space dominated by franchises, and names don't really have a meaning beyond being "okay" for mainstream play. Pac-Man probably doesn't have the star power of say, a Ubisoft or Nintendo mass-produced product, and as such, isn't exactly a revival so much as just a game based on Pac-Man.

Like I said, I don't really remember playing Pac-Man (older versions) at any point in my life, so I don't really know or remember what the "core mechanics" are or how faithful this game actually is. It feels like a Pac-Man game but I don't necessarily think it feels like the original, or the maybe more popular Ms Pac-Man which I think I've heard was the definitive edition?

As you can tell, I don't know very much about Pac-Man and wasn't especially hyped about Pac-Man.

Cards for Stars: Steel Storm Burning Retribution

Retribution is going to be one of those dirty words I stop wanting to see in titles.

Anyway: this game didn't have cards up until recently, but I can remember ages ago wanting to play it and ending up with it in a bundle. Pre-cards, I apparently played four minutes, but it might have been before I got my first controller for my PC.

Post-cards, well, here I am.

Steel Storm: Burning Retribution is four random words strung together, titled a three quarters from the back shooter. It plays sort of like a twin-stick and sort of like a shmup - I think this sort of game used to be quite common and now is not quite so.

Steel Storm BR has most of the basics down pat: the controls work well, the game looks fine, the weapon loadouts feel good and the weapon sounds work nicely. The little hovertank feels pretty good, a bit less requiring of frustrating finesse compared to the usual twin stick controls while still engaging your hnads in a nice way.

The music isn't very good. The problem lies in the usual, the NES problem: tracks are too short and there's too much downtime where the music becomes the core of the experience.

The game itself drops the floor out from under itself. Combat feels good and relatively slick, but it becomes very obvious very quickly that the camera angle cripples you. As best I can tell, you just can't hit enemies "off the screen", which happens almost instantly once you try to dodge away from incoming fire. The enemy seems to basically not exist off the screen, they don't follow up or pursue you, they just dawdle around. You can seemingly hit them with the MIRV special weapon, but I haven't found the other weapons can reliably snipe them while you're off dodging, so you end up with combat often taking a really long time.

The game also does a lot of things that dilute the enjoyment. For one, as I said, the camera is just so far up that you can't really get into the groove of fighting through multiple enemies - you're constantly pedaling back and forth out of conflict. The game also uses health packs, but there really isn't much threat in the game except for the other big thing I dislike. Enemies are initially placed on the map, but that's not all that dangerous since as I said they don't pursue and don't really come after you. So the game teleports enemies on top of you, en masse, which is about the only time you're really threatened. You never die to attrition, so these weird health packs that heal 25% just feel monotonous. But since you're never really under any threat from placed enemies, I guess regenerating health felt like too much.

Also the game has keycards and unlocking doors and all that jazz, but it doesn't really do much other than set off teleporting enemies and pad out the game's length. The doors and stuff just end up looking really lazy, it's not like you're lowering defenses or using special circumstances to blow through them, they're literally "a forcefield" that sits around "the target". It's boring.

Basically the game's core is good, but the AI is way too lacking and the camera is awful. If you could see more, fight more at a great range with more visuals going off I think the game would have been pretty exciting. You get these great moments now and again, but on the most part it just feels sluggish. The teleporting enemies thing just leads to cheap, irritating deaths that coupled with the plodding out of combat pace make for a really dull experience. I finished the tutorial and a pair of missions and just found it too plodding.

As an odd note, I re-watched superbunnyhop's two parter on Rage and Doom a couple days ago. He talks about the gameplay of Doom as being a top down shump extended out to psuedo-3D - something akin to Maximum Carnage or Smash TV, maybe - but this game really is just that, but not in 3D. Keycards, circle strafing, dodging slow moving projectiles. It could have been great, but instead it's too slow and too plodding.