Tag Archives: game-a-day

2014!

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As if nothing happened!

Okay, I blacked out for a bit during the holidays and when I woke up I had a whole bunch of new games in my Steam catalog, but we can deal with this, we can work through it…

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+: This is…definitely not the Pac-Man I was used to.  This new edition has a whole bunch of different maps and modes and a lot of them are time-based instead of score-based, and the triggers that cause dots and fruits to appear vary, and there can be tons of ghosts, and sometimes the maps expands…

It actually works really well; the original Pac-Man was just about memorizing patterns, but in these variants you have to react to a changing board, think about what ghosts will be woken up by the path you take, consider how long you can go before resorting to a power pellet in an easy-to-get to place (but in very limited supply), look for shorter paths to reduce the time taken to get that next fruit, and so on.  It makes you face a whole bunch of different challenges at lightning-fast speed, but it doesn’t make it feel like an impossible task.  Even a scrub like me could survive the 5-minute time attack modes, the true humiliation not coming until discovering that my score ranking on the leaderboards was…lacking.

So yeah, it’s a fun, surprisingly well-designed update of a classic game.  And I’m not going to play it anymore.  As good as it is, it’s the kind of game that takes a lot of practice to perfect, and with my backlog, I just don’t have the time to spend replaying this over and over just to shave off a few seconds here and there.

Hammerwatch: This game has been described as Gauntlet-like, and that’s pretty apt; it’s top-down maze-navigating monster-killing with simple attacks as one of various classes. There are differences, of course. There’s a persistent stats/skill system that lets you improve your character as you progress.  The levels are enormous, so there’s more of a Diablo-ish feeling of exploration and there’ll be a ton of backtracking. There are ‘optional’ switch-hittin’ and button-pressin’ objectives on each floor, but the gold you find for upgrades is pretty tight, so you’ll probably want to make sure you do them anyway, leading to a lot of that backtracking. And if you’re prone to RSI, this game will murder your thumb (at least with the paladin that I’ve tried so far). You can carefully lure monsters in small packs, but there’s a combo system that really wants you to just dive in to masses of enemies and kill everything as quickly as possible, and there are a lot of enemies.

It’s been pretty fun so far, and I played a bit longer than expected due to that “just a little further…” effect, but I do wonder if it’ll start to get too repetitive and thumb-wrecking at some point. I’ve done one of four bosses so far, so I’ll keep going until at least the second boss.

Rocket Operative

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I’m still way behind, but I managed to check out two games today.

Rocket Knight is a fairly old-school platformer, run through the level jumping and attacking and collecting until you fight the boss at the end, but with a possum with a jetpack.  There are some neat moves you can do, and overall it’s fun, but the directional controls are really twitchy with the analog stick on my controller, so I was constantly shooting off in the wrong direction whenever I tried to go straight up.  Not really worth keeping.

And I also finally put some  time into Drox Operative, which I bought way back when it was in beta but never got around to actually installing.  That happens way too often these days…  Anyway, it’s a bit unusual in that it’s a Diablo-like much like Soldak’s other games, but with spaceships.  You start out in a solar system, fly around to planets to explore, fight enemies, start quests, collect loot, and it’s done with a typical ARPG stat/skill/inventory system.  It’s also like Soldak’s other games in that there are multiple paths to victory or loss, depending on how you ally with other races or succeed or fail at quests, and the world dynamically evolves; quest enemies are gathering strength and growing while you’re puttering around.  I’ll try and put some more time into this one.

Gotta Post Fast

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Yeah, I know…  While cleaning out some space on my Steam drive, I figured I should at least give some games one quick shot before deleting them.

Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is an okay kart racer, but it does still seem to rely on random luck a lot, and the PC version isn’t the greatest, with no multiplayer and confusing keyboard prompts that don’t actually work if you have a controller plugged in (you can’t even use the keyboard to enter your name).  There’s another just-released Sonic kart racer that’s supposed to be a lot better anyway.

Mars Attacks, Again

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Today I checked out XCOM: Enemy Unknown since, well, it just came out.  It still feels like I’m in the tutorial, as things have been heavily scripted and railroaded so far, but a lot of the feel of the old X-Com is still there, which is encouraging.  It’s a bit simpler than the original in some ways, having removed stuff like free aiming, action points, and kneeling/prone positions, but it adds in others like class specializations, skill choices, and varying mission and funding rewards.  Combat is still as brutal as ever, with a high attrition rate among rookies and those damn lucky shots the aliens always seem to get.  Definitely one I’ll be playing more of.

And I also checked out the Forza Horizon demo.  Definitely a lot of similarity to Test Drive Unlimited, though you’re confined to the roads and it’s hard to tell from the demo just how much variety there really is.  The events were decent enough, though occasionally kind of bizarre like the race against a plane.  About the only thing I didn’t like is how it always asked if you wanted to do a Rivals race on the same track right after the event.  NO, I want to do something else now, not just redo the same race again!  A good chance I’ll pick it up, if I can find the time…

McTardy

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Coming out of another MMO stupor…  Today I tried both Bit.Trip Core and McPixel, two recent indie additions to Steam.

Bit.Trip Core is a lot like Bit.Trip Beat, with dots flying around that you have to hit, except that instead of hitting them back with a paddle, you shoot out from a center point in one of the four cardinal directions.  It’s tougher than it looks since your shot only lasts a split second, and it become hard to judge which dots will hit which direction’s center point first.  And much like Bit.Trip beat, it’s not really grabbing my interest.  Bit.Trip Runner is still by far my favourite of the series.

And McPixel is kinda like WarioWare for the PC, in that it’s a whole bunch of minigames where you have to figure out what to do within 20 seconds, or everything explodes.  It’s pretty random trying to figure out what the right thing to do is, but there’s a reaction animation to pretty much everything, and a quick breezy style to it that makes it kinda fun just to goof around and try things.  Definitely a keeper.

And I also played Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights Of Loving over the weekend, but they barely count as games and only took 15-20 minutes each to complete anyway.  An interesting experience and worth checking out, though.

Maybe The Towers Come Later

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(I’m kind of cheating by backdating this one, but I didn’t write about it the same day I played it for some reason.)

I finally got around to trying Dungeon Defenders, yet another tower-defence-style game, though I only really got through the tutorial map. Overall it seems decent enough, with my only real concern being that the first-person perspective and combat needed makes it really hard to watch your defences and evaluate how they’re actually performing, especially once the level becomes cluttered enough that you’re not really sure what effect it’s having on pathing.  I’d definitely spend more time on it though, and maybe get some co-op going.

And I Forgot To Study Too

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After a weekend spent mainly in Guild Wars 2, I tried out Academagia today.  It’s essentially Harry Potter: The Realism Sim, where you create a student, choose their attributes and specialties, go to classes, meet friends, have various events happen to you, and so on.  Not in the interactive adventure sense though, but through a whole ton of text and menu options, like those dating sim/princess maker-type Japanese games.

It looks like there’s a fair bit of depth to it in terms of what you can develop and discover, but it’s not really grabbing my interest, so away it goes.

Mine Is Probably Pretty Dark, Yeah

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Today’s new game is also a brand new…ish game, the just-released-a-couple-hours-ago PC port of Dark Souls.

It’s known mainly for being difficult, and oh yeah, it is.  The first boss took me four tries to beat, and that took a bit of luck.  Individual fights with regular monsters still have to be approached with care or they’ll knock half your health off.  You’re not just mowing through everything at breakneck speed, and upgrades are gradual.

It’s a refreshing change from the usual RPG type I play though, so I’ll certainly stick with it.  I did play a bit of the predecessor, Demons Souls, but never really gave it a proper chance.

Quite The Quandary

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I wound up putting a fair bit of time into Quantum Conundrum today, almost completing one of the three wings, so it’s not going to be a terribly long game.

It’s common to compare it to Portal, as it’s the same kind of solve-a-puzzle-as-you-go-room-to-room, but with dimension shifting instead of portals.  One dimension makes things lighter, another one makes things heavier (and there are two others I hadn’t reached yet), and you might need to put items on a pressure plate and block a laser but you have to be careful about the order you do things in because the laser will destroy the item in the regular and light dimensions but you have to shift to the light one to move another item that would normally be too heavy, and fans will blow around items that are too light, etc.

The puzzles that require some thought are fairly interesting, but unfortunately there are some segments where you have to position items and then jump across on them, and the jump mechanics aren’t so good, making those segments a bit frustrating.  Overall though, I think it’s still good enough to come back and finish off at some point.

At Least It Isn’t Greensleeves

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Yeah, I’ve been slacking a bit, going on vacation trips tends to derail whatever I’ve been working on at the time.  So, to get back into the swing of things, I checked out English Country Tune today.  I knew it was a puzzle game but wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but it turns out to be basically an advanced version of those Sokoban-like games.  Push items around a block maze to meet a particular goal, except with twists like gravity making the items drop, 3D aspects to the maze, ‘whales’ that run away from you and have to be pushed off the board, and so on.

The keyboard controls are a bit wonky due to how the direction you go in suddenly changes in spots when you move to a different orientation, and it’s sometimes hard to see parts of the level to see where valid places to move might be, but it’s a fairly interesting and challenging puzzler.  I wouldn’t sit down and play nothing but it, but I could see knocking off a puzzle here and there.