Cards for Stars: Super Star Path

The endless march of bundles games and grinding cards off them continues on after a couple week break to learn how to paint miniatures again. (Not well, mind you). Up this ... Week? Day? is Super Star Path, which I acquired in the groupees #25 greenlight bundle not all that long ago.

Super Star Path claims to be a mixture of puzzle game and top down space ship shooter. I would say this ... Is sort of true? The puzzle comes from shooting the immobile and rather defenseless "aliens". If you set your shots up wrong, you end up with a dead end path, and then you die. There are also boss fights, at the end of each level, and some shooty elements in the later levels within the level.

The game is very polished; the controls work well, the options menu is fully featured, the graphic work, sound, music and voice acting are all quite good. The steam announcements from the devs make it sound like the game has problems, but on my aging machine I never hit a hitch and my hour plus of playing was all pretty smooth.

There is a full upgrade system and a large selection of ships to purchase. Unfortunately or fortunately, the ships don't play all that differently, each one generally have a defensive advantage, or a mild offensive advantage. Different defenses tend to be keyed to different levels, you are clearly supposed to do certain levels with certain ships. It's a little Megaman-y, if you will. The upgrade system is supplied by two types of drops, enemy specific ones or just getting gems off the run off the mill enemies that explode en masse.

The game has some real issues though, and after an hour, it starts to drag. It has much the same problem of say, Block Legend DX, where elements of the game can be kind of mindless then you have to really pay attention to bosses. Super Star Path is a lot worse, though, for this.

Basic problem: The main game is a bit meandering, and often you're just sitting there in a narrow path waiting to move forward and unable to shoot whatever is threatening you - a lot of which does not care about the 'blocks' in the way or anything akin to line of sight. The column is simply too tight, and the game's rng too often produces very narrow openings that just lead to periods of being bored. Several of the later levels are better about this, but there's a dull point midway through the game. The more frustrating problem is it is easy to slip up when fighting an enemy that doesn't interact with the "terrain" and end up blocking yourself in. The whole crystallized aliens thing requires trying to aim past the front row and while it's a cool mechanic, it doesn't interact well with some of the designs.

As for the other thing, the bosses play so differently from the rest of game it ends up feeling a little jarring. The bosses also rely on mostly not paying attention to them and just dodging their shots, which is ... Kinda dull actually? I guess that is a shmup thing, but I don't see why you can't do phased sections of the fight where you get some actual dps uptime. If you like shmups, it is quite effective.

Simply put, Super Star Path is a couple good ideas, a nice looking game and then a bit of a let down. In the first hour you see very little variety, and you can only get blocked in to slowly die to the screen moving on so many times before you yawn the game off your computer - frankly, it should just have a quick reload button, since why not? I had fun with it, and I do like the music, but the potential just isn't worked with.

I don't see why some of the levels didn't have wildly different terrain or branching paths or ... Turning or just any sort of variety to break it up. The guy (guys? gals?) who did it produced a polished, nice looking game with good assets, but they could have made a much better game with some minimal expansion. Anyway, if it looks appealing, grab it on sale. I'm not complaining about the first forty-five minutes, which is pretty fair for paying like forty cents or something for it.

Platformines: Turrarrrrerria

Platformines is a greenlight game released in the Bandai Namco bundle that I bought to get my hands on the new Pac Man game. I'm not really sure what to make of the game based on its title or its cover, but it is essentially a Terraria game by way of extreme simplification and 16-bit graphics instead of whatever the usual is.

The game is a platforming, run and gun treasure hunt by its own admission. There are four kinds of loot: A limited selection of guns, a limited selection of hats, gems and valuables. You run around randomly generated sections of the huge, huge map looking to complete your digger to escape the horror of the mines. And they are horrible, though I'm not really sure how you got there and even less how the giant titted saleswoman got there either.

The graphics are, as I said, 16-bit pixel are. They're smooth and pretty good looking, the game is easy on the eyes and relatively clear to sight. The game has an obnoxious fog of war element that is on the most part just a nuisance and doesn't add much. There was a potential here for human enemies to cast light while nonhuman would not, but like everything else the game is just explicitly lazy and there you go. Terraria had lighting, it was a big part of how its engine ever looked good, but this ... does not.

Enemies come in a variety of forms. Most dangerous are people with bazookas, since although you suffer friendly fire damage from your bazooka, they can happily walks on all hazards and slam themselves in the face with rockets to seemingly no negative effect. Most of the other enemies are floaty nonsense, or hazards you can't damage, most of it pretty boring. The one interesting element is they have a variety of AI routines, so they might be more or less aggressive, or more or less willing to jump around, stay still, etc. It is actually sort of neat watching the different AIs run around each other, but there is actually basically no reason to pay attention to the enemies. They are almost uniformly better to just avoid, and pick off the dumb ones. There is damage on touch (because this game is lazy) even on human enemies, but there is no knock back, so you really can and should run through everything.

Loot is extremely boring, I think it might closely resemble Borderlands, which I've never played. There are four guns - though you never use the pistol, so basically there are three guns - which have a variety of stats. You get drops, and some of them have better stats. Everything else you take back to the saleswoman in the hide out and process into gold or credits or whatever dollars. You upgrade your bag and your health though her, that's the entire loot system. You can use gems found in the wild to heal yourself, which once you have the bag space, you should always hold on to do.

The game builds random levels, and in this regard, it reminds me less of things Terraria or on the other end of the spectrum Rogue Legacy, and more like the random map generation from HoMM3. Things are just sloppy and ill put together, which a lot of irritating dead ends and this creeping realization that anything that looks interesting just isn't worth interacting with. Going through a maze to find 2 bags of gold just isn't worth the risk of doing, or the time, or anything else. The hazard platforming is intentionally sloppy, because it is built with RNG it doesn't really bother to behave in any organized fashion. So the hallway of knives or traps basically just goes off at random, so trying to chart your way through it like you would a normal platformer doesn't work.

Basically while I like the tileset, the game is just so lazy about its level design. There is no real feeling you're going into a harder or easier area, and teleporters to go back to the hideout are always completely randomly placed. Usually they're in like, the ceiling, and you fall out of it and immediately take damage. I feel like if you re-worked the routine to make for somewhat more epic looking terrain, the tiles and graphics would add up to something interesting, but as is the game is incredibly repetitive and too zoomed in.

I had to turn the music off. It is bad. It's especially weird in that the visuals are clean and smooth, but the music feels like an agonizing random mess. Maybe the music was generated by a routine as well. It wouldn't shock me.

Anyway while I wouldn't say platformines was outright terrible, it is pretty mediocre and handicaps itself at every turn. The loot system is more limited than it should be - more gear could easily be done, but instead all of you have is hats - and the routine used to build levels doesn't make anything cool. As Terraria has light in the dark, Platformines has an awful fog of war system and range issues and just everything to make it extremely monotonous.

Basically, while the game is fun to tool around with for an hour or two, you come into the realization this is it and there's nothing new or exciting. If you look at like, Terraria, the world map has regions where you go 'dang that's creepy' and you find treasure you actually want. This game, well, you basically should just past everything hard and skip to each of the nine finish game items.

I eventually gave up, not because it got too difficult, as it remains about the same the whole way through, but because the map kept choking off any progress and after twenty minutes of getting no closer to the next item I just got the feeling the rng might just be total garbage and moved on with my life.

Surprisingly good: Super Panda Adventures

I've been preparing over the last few weeks for the Steam Sale. Years ago this would involve putting come amount of money in my steam wallet via credit card, which you should always do ahead of time so you don't miss a deal, and then fixing up my wishlist to reflect what I actually want. I don't do this overly much nowadays, since I have way too much of a back log. Nowadays I just try to push through some of the games-that-drop cards, then buy gifts.

Regardless, if you have Steam enhanced installed, you can sort steam by Highest Drop Value. Super Panda Adventures was reliably in the upper section, taunting me to give it a try. Ironically, SPA is a lot of things I didn't really expect it was going to be. For one thing, it is actually a bit Metroidvania, though the levels are unfortunately not interconnected. You do backtrack, though, and the levels have multiple exits that feel surprisingly open. The game's art and play actually reminds me of the "tertiary" platformers of the early 90s, stuff more like Bonk's Adventure and Keith Courage, than mainstays the early Castlevania or Mario.

The game definitely feels some influence from those games, don't get me wrong, but it feels like a big fat mixing pot of platformers of all kinds stewed together with that slightly jank oddness that is indie development. It is what you expect, on the most part, with a little bit of what you don't expect. For another thing, because I implied there was more than one, it's actually a pretty solid little title that I found way more enjoyable than I was expecting.

I mean frankly "indie" plus "platformer" is generally "headache" in my mind.

Card Crusade: Riddled Corpses

Riddled Corpses is the byproduct of yet another Groupees bundle, or so I think. I'm not entirely certain which one and I'm not going to look it up, but I want to stress that most card grind games I write short reviews on I didn't exactly buy them. I also want to mention the game doesn't let me take normal overlay screenshots, so this has less images than I'd like

Riddled Corpses is a zombie themed very arcade era twin stick shooter. You moved with one stick, shoot with the other. And you will move, and you will never stop shooting. That's almost the entire game right there, except you also get screen clearing bombs and a time freeze power that doesn't really work the way you'd expect. Seriously though, you move from zombies and you shoot zombies. Zombies primarily do touch damage, though higher power enemies spit gunk at you and the like.

Visually, Riddled Corpses is a pretty simple and clean looking pixel game. It does have some sort of dynamic lighting going on, which looks pretty cool sometimes and at other times seems to blotch out random parts of the screen. The pixel artwork is good, solid work with lots of variety and the animations are simple but satisfying. Admittedly the game isn't exactly a joy in motion, but it's a twin stick game where you shoot zombies and that doesn't really require or benefit from insane graphical fidelity. Visibility is crucial and that is a problem we'll come back to.

The audio is good. There is no speech or voice acting that I found in an hour of playing it, but the music is decent and the sound effects are mostly good. I do find the zombies seem a little ... Less than invested, we'll say, in being shot but you kill a ton of them so it's probably for the best.

In fact, the game is largely pretty good, except for two glaring issues. The first one, which I mentioned above, is that visibility was not precisely the cornerstone of the UI's development, meaning there's a ton of clutter on the screen and things will happily hang out under there. This is primarily an issue of difficulty, but it feels unfair that you can't see something because it is hanging out under the player 2 press start flashing nonsense.

The game's other big issue may or may not offend. In the first playthrough I was rather bemused - I lasted a couple minutes, but it seemed like absolutely everything was taking ages to go down. Were cars destructible terrain? Am I supposed to do a move and shoot phase on the mini-boss? Would I always have the identical same weapon? As it turns out, the game drops "gold" which can then be used to upgrade your character, buy other characters and the like. The grinding isn't super horrific, but it took me a couple attempts on the game's first level to get to the second level, and that level's required DPS was once again well above what my leveled weapon was pointing out. Basically, a big part of the game is being an extremely stripped down ARPG. Get loot, upgrade your mang, shoot many zombies until your current level isn't enough to push you forward.

Obviously play skill is important, but I honestly don't think you can DPS some of the later waves even in the first level without a decent chunk of upgrade. So whether or not you like grinding in your pick up and play game, well, that's on you.

There's something odd about the controls. I'm not entirely certain if it has something to do with the xbox one's deadzones or the game, but it acts really odd at times. You find yourself pressing hard left on the stick but firing sort of on a diagonal. I honestly couldn't quite figure it out, but it wasn't quite as responsive as I'd like.

Anyway, general conclusion is I'd give the game a pass, but if you like grinding or really want to play a decent twin stick, it is decent. But it is also super grindy which for me takes away from the appeal of the game. More than anything, though, it is how weird the controls end up feeling - like I said, that could very well be the xbox one controller not quite working right, but the deadzoning gets really obnoxious and kinda cut enjoyment of the game.

Toward the Verge: Magicians and Looters

Metroidvania is essentially a subgenre of platformer, which in and of itself is an indie darling of a genre. Since indie games are generally speaking more about cheaply re-doing old ideas, you end up with a lot of bargain basement re-iterations of other ideas sort of gelled together into a quivering mass.

Yes, of course, gaming in general works a great deal like that and it's going to be hard to pick up any game off the shelf that doesn't build off old ideas. But indie gaming is just "geez" sometimes. The weirdest thing is that the re-iteration is based on perceptions about what things were without really studying why and how they were, so you end up with games like this one, where it says its a metroidvania but it's actually more of a platformer that fails at being a metroid and then I don't care about the vania part.

Platformer slash Simon's Quest? Yes. Deal. There you go.

I got Magicians and Looters, as an aside, from one of the earliest Groupees greenlight bundles. I picked it out because I want to play through Metroidvanias, which as an aside has not thusfar been pleasant. It turns out that if you play games like Super Metroid after Super Metroid, games are worse than Super Metroid at everything.

The game stars Brent, a swordsman with no personality other than snide, his sister Vienna with no personality other than snide and Nyn another swordsman with no personality other than snide.

At the start of the game you play Nyn, who is a swordsman of using two swords or I dunno something with pointy bits in her both hands, but then the game gives you the option to continue playing Nyn or to try the other characters. Shortly after, there's a thing, and your party of girls and a guy are off elsewhere, divided up. There's your special hook! Or something. I forget what I'm talking about.

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.

They actually removed THQ from the credits: Warhammer 40k Space Marine

My personal relationship with Warhammer, and more specifically 40k, is a cliche tale. Almost generic. I played back in the late 90s, probably like 98 or somewhere around there, when the game was in its second edition and I have no idea what fantasy was like. There's a legion of people out there like me, who played a year or two, had some fun with the game then moved on with their life. In the same way there's no end of thirty something Transformers fans like me - manchildren who reconnected with the franchise at some point - there's no end of late twenties to late thirties dudes who remember the good times with Warhammer.

40k is patently ridiculous, and ridiculous with patents (look up the stuff about Games Workshop vs Chapterhouse, it's absurdity in action) but that is a big part of its charm. When done well, it carries itself with just enough of a smirk that the insanity doesn't register as the capricious nihilism and you can still, well, have fun with it. It's sort of like a crazy heavy metal van. Done well, and it's ridiculously cool, done poorly and much like the van it just feels ... Like bad things are coming.

Relic on the most part had a pretty good, but not great, handle on 40k. There were a lot of points where it largely felt in Dawn of War like they wanted to put their own spin on things but couldn't quite get there. Relic might still have the GW license now, I don't really know, given their wikipedia article is out of date and who largely cares. Games Workshop itself is now something of a joke, coasting on that positive energy but making no further gains as a company. I'm sure in 15 years whoever is building the best "formative years" brand will be coasting by as they are. Maybe that's privateer press, maybe not.

ya I noticed

As an old man thinking about getting back into painting miniatures, I can tell you Games Workshop is priced to the point of absurdity, but anyway, back to vidya games.

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine is Relic's attempt to branch out into other genres than just endless rehashes of RTS scenarios that, I think, sort of fell out of favor with the rise of the crippling might that is f2p MOBA games. You can sort of respect the attempt, innately, but you can also seriously begin to wonder how it's going to go.