First Look: Eador: Genesis

Eador Logo

For the past two evenings I’ve been wallowing in strategy game nostalgia with Eador: Genesis. This is an older game, originally published in 2009 by Ukrainian developers Snowbird Studios. An English translated version hit GOG.com last week at a bargain price of $6.00.

If you have fond memories of Master of Magic, Warlords, or Lords of Magic then you are going to love Eador: Genesis. It’s got everything you can ask for: the city building and resource management of a 4X game, the leveling of an RPG and turn-based tactical battles of a classic strategy title.

The premise is that the universe of Eador is busted up into many tiny shards, and your goal is to create order in the universe by conquering each of these shards. Essentially each shard is a level/map/mission in the Campaign, but each one also unlocks certain buildings so there’s kind of a meta-game of deciding which order to conquer them in.

Once you decide on a shard to attack (and your first one is pre-determined) you move to a map of that shard where you get a citadel from which you can hire one or more heroes. Eventually you’ll hire troops to travel with these heroes, buy gear for the heroes, teach them spells and finally send them off to battle. Before you do that, though, you’re going to have to build the shops, temples and training grounds that can produce all these resources (this is where the buildings come in…you need to unlock buildings by conquering shards to get advanced units and gear).

The map is hex based and every hex is occupied, so every time you move you’ll have to either fight or negotiate with the occupiers of that hex. IF you fight and conquer the hex you’re going to have an unhappy populace on your hands. You can buy guards to help keep the peace, or erect buildings that make the local populace happier.
Lairs full of monster? Yes please!
In lieu of moving to an occupied hex you can opt to explore one you already occupy. Doing so will often uncover lairs full of monsters and treasure; good both for filling your coffers and leveling up your heroes and troops.

When it comes time to do battle you’ll move to a tactical, hex-based battle map with varied terrain that impacts attack and defense strength as well as movement costs . You place your troops and then participate in a turn-based battle. Generally (for me so far at least) your hero will be much more powerful than your troops and a big challenge can be letting the troops get experience by fighting, but not getting them killed. Dead troops are gone forever; a hero can eventually be resurrected.

After a battle both your troops and your hero may level up. If they do you get to choose from a pair of perks for that unit. Often these are as simple as +1 attack vs +1 defense, but sometimes they’re offered skills as well. Additionally a troop unit that performs exceptionally well will be offered a medal that gives them a stat bonus.
Battle!
And that’s the basic gist of the game. For every Shard there’s a Big Bad that you have to defeat in order to claim that shard. If you’ve never played this kind of strategy game it can be a bit daunting but if you have, you’ll slide right into Eador like a comfortable old shoe.

But speaking of old, the graphics of the game are quite dated and the game runs at basically 1 resolution (1024×768). You can run it full screen but on most modern monitors it’s going to be terribly stretched out if you do so. [Tip: The GOG installer creates two shortcuts, one to run in Windowed mode and one to run full screen; there are no settings in the Options menu for this.]

It’s also worth noting that this game is difficult, even on the easiest setting. At least I’m finding this to be the case. As I said, I’ve only been playing for two evenings but I lost the battle for my second shard and was thrown back into The Void. I can attack again but my funds are seriously depleted and that’s going to make my next attempt even more challenging. I may need to re-start the campaign; we’ll see. (There is no manual Save feature so I can’t just go back to before I attacked Shard #2 and try a different tactic.)

For $6, I don’t think you can go wrong if you’re a strategy gamer (unless you just can’t deal with the old-school graphics). Eador:Genesis has that “1 more turn” compulsion that can keep you up well past your bedtime.

Eador did well enough for the studio that they’re working on a 3D sequel, Eador; Masters of the Broken World. It’s currently in Steam’s Greenlight section and I hope you’ll give it a thumbs up. Based on what I’ve played of the original game, I’m really excited to see how the modern sequel comes out!

[Disclosure: I was provided with a review copy of Eador: Genesis.]

Confirmed! Me and adventure games don’t mix

I finished Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles tonight. It is a well-made adventure game full of jokes and fiendish puzzles and a nice enough story. In short, insofar as I can tell with my limited experience in the genre, it’s a solid adventure game.

And I am SO glad to be done with it.

I started out doing OK. I really enjoyed Chapter 1. Chapter 2 got me a little frustrated but after some time away a few potential solutions occurred to me and I started making progress again. In Chapter 3 I was having fun again and by now enough other people were playing that when I got stuck I could Google my way to a hint. By Chapter 4 I felt like I was doing more Googling than playing, and about half-way through Chapter 4 I ground to a halt. Tonight I found a complete walkthrough and used it to finish the game just so I could feel OK about moving on to something else.

I really want to stress that this wasn’t the game’s fault. Plenty of people are really enjoying Critter Chronicles and if you enjoy adventures you probably will too.

But I just don’t have the stamina for solving one puzzle after another like this. I could feel the frustration slowly building in me. I mentioned that the nice thing about pure point and click adventures is that as a worst case, you can kind of ‘brute force’ your way through a sticky spot by just trying to use everything on everything else.

The more I played Critter Chronicles the more impatient I got with myself and the more I went straight to brute-forcing my way through, and the more I did that the more aggravated I got with little things like the amount of time it takes to switch characters or for the cursor to go from ‘doing something’ to ‘ready for input.’

And by the time I got to that point, I wasn’t even noticing the puzzles I solved so I wasn’t getting that “Aha!” satisfaction from them. I just expected myself to get those and was frustrated with myself for not getting the others. I was in a bad place by the time I found that walk-through, actually angry at the game! (Silly, I know.)

Critter Chronicles isn’t a long game. Steam says I spent 9 hours on it. But I think for me to enjoy adventure games they have to be even shorter than that. I could probably enjoy an episodic game that came out in several parts, each part being 2-3 hours long, and with a few weeks between each part to let my ‘puzzle frustration toxins’ dissipate.

I -could- have just played 1 chapter at a time of Critter Chronicles and then waited a few weeks to go on to the next chapter, but I would’ve been setting myself up for failure that way, too, because the game has a lot of back-references and even in the 6 day time period I spent playing I’d totally forgotten about at least one character who was needed to solve a late game problem. Imagine if I’d tried to go back to the game weeks later?

Anyway, bottom line is, as much as I want to love adventure games, this foray back into the genre has proven to me that I just don’t have the brain/personality/patience to really enjoy them. Better to face this then to be miserable playing a game, right? I still have tons of other genres to love!

One more time though, I want to say if you DO like adventure games, then Critter Chronicles is probably something you’d enjoy! Don’t like my anti-adventure attitude sour you on this title!

EQ2: Heroes’ Festival

I decided to pop into EQ2 last night, something I’ve been doing at random times recently. At this point I’m mostly still re-exploring Qeynos and doing the quests involved with that (which scale to your level). Anyway I found out something called the Heroes’ Festival is going on. I normally ignore events in EQ2 since the stuff that’s always there is overwhelming enough but after a little nudging from Angela I decided to poke around and see what was going on.

I found one quest that I really enjoyed. (Sorry, I’m telling this story from the Good side..not sure how it works if you’re evil). It’s called Thumore’s Absence and it starts with an NPC named Milupet Cogsory who is near the big Claymore Monument in what used to be North Qeynos. Milupet is looking for Thumore D’armer who is apparently something of a legend at the Festival; you’re sent to locate him.

Well it turns out that Thumore is, well, sleeping. But a bunch of mages are preventing anyone from waking him up. When you investigate you’re told that anyone who touches Thumore also falls asleep and doesn’t wake up, so the mages are keeping people away from Thumore’s sleeping body. Of course, you agree to help by entering Thumore’s dream in order to see what’s going on. If you want to do a good quest, just go do it, but otherwise read on for spoilers.

[SPOILERS BEGIN]
When you enter the dreamworld there’s not much for you to do other than speak to Thumore, who needs you to recover shards of memory in order to wake up. This takes the form of a linked series of quests. For each one you’ll go through a portal and into a ‘slice’ of some high level (well to me and other noobs, anyway) zone where you’ll have to defeat some even-level mobs in order to collect the memories. I thought this was really neat, since I got a taste of a bunch of places I’ve never been, and got to fight a bunch of monsters I’ve yet to encounter, all without spending too much time traveling.

Once you’ve recovered all the memory shards, Thumore thanks you but then implies that the memories you’ve retrieved are not his. Hmm. With no other choices open you leave the dream world to find…the mages are still there but Thumore is gone. If you talk to the mages they’re feeling groggy and out of sorts and they say they’ve never heard of anyone named Thumore. In fact no one has. Before the quest everyone was wondering where he was. After the quest no one has ever heard of him.

Eventually you find him in a ghostly form and he sends you off to help others trapped in their dreams, and that’s as far as I got. But I can’t wait to learn who or what Thumore is. It’s a mystery!

Now if you don’t read quest text then this whole series would be a lot less interesting but this time around I’m soaking up the EQ2 lore and quests like this series make me glad I am!

The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles – Hello Chap. 4!

Yesterday’s frustration with Chapter 2 is now a thing of the past. I’m happy to report that with Chapter 3 I was back to moving along at a decent pace while chuckling at the jokes and enjoying myself. I finished that Chapter tonight and now I’m in Chapter 4 and there’s some crazy stuff going on!

Not a lot more to add tonight but it does feel like Chapter 2 was the game’s weak point, at least so far. Critter’s lack of language really makes humor tough when he’s on his own. Of course part of the problem was that I missed an interaction and ended up beating my head against the wall for a bit longer than I should have. But tonight it was back to both myself and Angela getting a laugh out of the spoken dialog.

If anyone happens to play and needs any hints, feel free to ask. In fact tonight’s screen shot is something of a hint…

Hocus Pocus!

Kerbal Space Program demo

I need to thank Tipa over at WestKarana for calling my attention to this one.

Kerbal Space Program is a rocket simulation. In the demo version I’m playing, you build rockets by stacking stages together, then shoot them into space. Your goal? Well you make your own goals, really. My first goal is just to see how high I can get and still land safely. Rockets basically ‘snap together’ in the Assembly Plant — that part of the game is purely intellectual. But once you lift off you can try to pilot your ship, which I found out wasn’t all that easy:

That rocket had an SAS system (a computer-operated stabilization system) but I forgot to activate it. /facepalm I tried a few more times with that design and did better but didn’t get out of the atmosphere, so I decided to bulk things up a bit:

This rocket has a triple solid engine first stage, a single solid engine second stage, and then a liquid fuel third stage. I flew with the SAS system on but during the initial flight you can see the fins on my rocket starting to move; it was almost too much thrust, I think. At any point you can hit the space bar to detach a stage. Solid boosters are fire and forget but the liquid fuel engine has a throttle. You can see fuel levels going down at the bottom left of the screen.

A lot of gamers will watch these videos and be bored. That’s ok, this is definitely a niche product. You can fast forward a bit through the dull parts and you’ll want to do so. You can also see that I started playing with the camera as my attention drifted.

I’m not sure what the full (paid for) game adds; it’s listed as still in active development and I’m going to watch the site to see if that’s true before I spend money. I’ve been burned by buying ‘alpha’ software recently and it has me a little gunshy.

But if you’re a space/rocket nerd, there’s not much else like this on the market and you have to at least snag the demo and give it a go.

The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles – And I’m stuck

OK this is more like it! This is what I remember playing adventure games feels like…

So I made it to Chapter 2 of The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles. Chapter two switches focus to the Critter who doesn’t speak English (though some of his friends do). While I do have what’s essentially a ‘quest’ so I know what to do, I’m finding playing as the Critter a lot less entertaining than playing as Nate Bonnett. His constant gibberish gets on my nerves a bit, honestly. That might be the frustration talking, though. He’s animated well and is oddly cute in a Muppet kind of way. Mostly it’s the voice that bugs me.

I know what I need to do, and I even know basically how to do it, but I’m missing one link in the chain. The first thing Critter has to do is pick up an object that is protected by another character. The steps for doing this are long and random and this is when I started to lose interest. I did get past that though, mostly by just futzing with things until something totally unexpected happened, allowing me to get said object. I know my next goal, and I know the parts that I need to use to get it done — there’s some logic to this puzzle — but there’s just this one step I’m stumped on. I feel like I’ve gone everywhere I can go, tried using everything on everything else, “talked” to everyone until they’re repeating themselves… I’m just stuck.

I’ve started solving, I assume, the next puzzle since I’ve jammed random things together and done things that I can’t undo. I’m hoping the game doesn’t support ‘dead ends’ that require a re-load because I haven’t been saving except at the end of a session.


I think I need to put the game away and come back to it in a few days. Sad though, since I so enjoyed my first evening of playing and aside from 1 hint I looked up, I solved Chapter 1 quickly enough that it never felt like the game was dragging. But now I just feel like I’m running around in circles and I really want to get back to Bonnett and his dilemma.

This shouldn’t be seen as a knock on the game, which still seems to be a solid adventure. I just felt like I needed to share this in case other adventure-wary gamers read my first post and thought maybe this game would be a great ‘starter’ adventure, but so far Chapter 2 isn’t as easy (for me at least) as Chapter 1 was.

[Update: Right after finishing this post, I fired the game up again and found the one object I hadn’t tried using on the one hotspot, and got moving forward again. So that’s typical, right? As soon as you complain about a problem, it goes away. Like taking your car to the shop because it’s constantly stalling but when you get it there it runs perfectly!]

BG:EE – THAC0 and Dire Wolves

Tonight’s plans got somewhat derailed by a bunch of excitement in the G+ community, and then I had to d/l a new patch for BG:EE, so I didn’t start playing until nearly 11.

Traellan’s new friends want him to travel to some gods-forsaken place to investigate the metal shortage but before we went anywhere we had to sort out our gear. Which meant I had to dredge up ancient knowledge of D&D rules, leading to a stupidly enjoyable conversation with Angela (who used to play D&D — I never did outside of computer games) about what THAC0 stood for and whether THAC0 20 was good or bad, and if lower AC was better than a higher AC, and things of that nature. (I did get a manual but of course I haven’t read it.)

Finally we were ready to set off. We spent a bit more time exploring the area around the Friendly Arm Inn, and found a priest who charged us the unholy sum of 100 gold to identify a magical belt we’d taken off…well, someone we’d fought. (Almost spoiled the surprise!)

100 gold! Can you imagine? And I thought it was the cut-throats who were out to rob us.

Just outside the Inn we encountered a pair of hobgoblins in foul temper. I must confess I was worried but Khalid and Traellan stood shoulder to shoulder battling the creatures while Imoen filled them full of arrows. It turned out not to be much of a fight. Not like that Dire Wolf…

And then it hit me. The metal shortage could wait. I had to go take my revenge on that pesky Dire Wolf. So back we went to the area outside of Candlekeep. It took a bit of time to find that wolf but when we did, we dispatched it in relatively short order, though I has happy Jaheira had a couple of healing spells memorized.

And that was about all of our adventuring for this evening. We’d been traveling for over 16 hours, night was upon us. Jaheira needed time to remember how to cast her magics, so we decided to make camp. More adventure awaits us tomorrow!

The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles – First look!

I don’t like adventure games. Let’s get that right out in the open first thing. I wish I liked them. I want to like them. I ought to like them. I like narrative driven games, and adventure games (most of them anyway) are strongly narrative driven. My problem with adventure games is that basically I suck at them. My mind is just not good at solving what I call “passive puzzles.” In order to work a problem I need to be able to fiddle with it. To try different things in different ways. Fiddling with parts of a puzzle keeps my mind working. When I get to a point where it’s just time to stop and stare at the puzzle pieces in order to come up with a solution, my brain just locks up and starts thinking about pizza or something.

And now along comes a traditional point and click adventure game, The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles, which is a prequel to the well-regarded The Book of Unwritten Tales. I fired this one up last night, feeling a bit resentful about the whole process because I knew I was in for a lot of frustration. I’m sure you know where I’m going with this: I was up until almost 1 am playing and even then it was an effort to tear myself away because I was enjoying myself so much.

I wish I could tell you what the game is about, but so far I’m still in the opening scene. I’m Nate Bonnett, a roguish fellow who fancies himself a sky pirate, and I’ve won a ship by cheating in a game of cards. Now the ship’s owner has sent a bounty hunter (a female orc with an inexplicable accent that I pegged as Scottish but Angela says is Mancunian – what do I know, ugly American that I am, and I apologize in advance to my British readers) to bring both ship and myself back. My task is to evade this bounty hunter. Thus far this task has eluded me but I’m making slow progress.

Eventually, I presume, I will encounter the titular critter.

So what makes this adventure different? Well part of it just may be me changing. In truth I haven’t actually tried an adventure game in years. But in terms of game mechanics, the game’s developer (KING Art, with Nordic Games as publisher) has kept the number of possible actions low enough that when I get stuck I can sort-of brute force my way through a solution. I have a finite number of ‘hot spots’ to interact with (shown by holding down the space bar) and a manageable number of inventory items to attempt to use on these hot spots. When logic fails, just trying every combination (in other words, ‘fiddling with the problem’) can jar something loose. That’s still not to say the game has been easy for me and in one spot I did get stuck and had to head to the Internet for a solution. In that case it turned out I’d just missed a combination.

The game is intended to be funny and Angela (who was sitting next to me playing EQ2) and I were both laughing from time to time. Humor is really subjective, and while many of the jokes worked, some of them just died on the computer screen. They jokes are kind of all over the place and include lots of pop culture staples (references to how fast the ship can do the Kessel Run, for example) and some self-referential 1-offs (Bonnett suggesting dressing up as a game developer and re-writing the first chapter as the solution to a puzzle). The voice talent so far is good but not great; it’s certainly doesn’t get in the way of enjoying the game.

One detail I really want to make note of. In the first chapter there’s a lock-picking puzzle and I have to say that it is by far the best lock-picking puzzle/mini-game I’ve ever encountered. It really feels like picking a lock, at least insofar as my experience as an honest and upstanding citizen (ha!) has taught me about lock picking.

If you played and enjoyed the first game I’m sure you’d enjoy this one as well. If like me you didn’t, then this one could be a good place to start. It’s a shorter game (roughly half the length of the original) but cheaper as well, listing at about $20, but available for $16 until December 12th. There’s a demo available as well.

I hasten to add that you shouldn’t consider this a full review (I get some confusion about what is and isn’t a review sometimes). I’ve only spent one evening playing and I haven’t gotten very far. I’m just sharing the fact that (so far at least) I’m enjoying an adventure game for the first time in years (maybe ever?). For all I know the difficulty ramps way up in Chapter 2 and I’m going to need a ton of help, but that’s where you come in. I’m selfishly hoping some of my adventure-playing readers will pick the game up so they can give me some hints!

[Disclosure: I was provided with a review copy of THe Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles.]

BG:EE – The Friendly Arm Inn

Beamdog sent over a patch to the PC version of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition tonight. Unfortunately the client doesn’t give you much info, but over in the forums are some patch notes. Looks like it’s almost all bug fixes, but while I was there I noticed a warning: Intel Integrated Graphics are NOT supported in BG:EE. That’s going to be a bummer for a lot of laptop users and I hope they can find a way to make them work.

As for me, firing up the game for Day 2 was quite enjoyable now that the initial learning curve is behind me, and I am already used to the graphics. Mind you I’m still learning things but tonight was more playing and less figuring stuff out, if you know what I mean.

Our Hero, Traellan of Edgewood, and his childhood friend Imoen were en route to the Friendly Arm Inn when I realized there was a lot of unexplored area that I was leaving behind. “I always explored the whole map.” Angela noted and me, ever curious, had to concur that this made good sense.

It made good sense until we encountered a hungry Dire Wolf, anyway. Thrice the foul beast slaughtered our merry, but much too small, band. I’m still getting the knack of things. Imoen has a wand of magic missile but using it tended to draw the wolf’s attention and she’s a slight thing that can’t take much punishment (Thief – she has 8 hit points!) Even though Traellan wears the badge of a Fighter he’s still not all that tough either.

After the Gods of Reload brought our heroes back for a third time, I decided to leave exploration for later, and we pressed on, sticking to the relative safety of the roads.

Although we met a few odd individuals along the way, the trip was more or less uneventful, though Trae’s head was spinning with fatigue by the time they staggered through the gates leading to the Inn. Inside were a motley bunch of revelers and it didn’t take us long to decide that the skulking half-orc Dorn was best avoided, and that the Druid and Fighter who were old friends of Traellan’s father made for better traveling companions. With introductions made, Traellan rented Merchant’s Rooms so that he and Imoen could get some much-needed rest before setting out in the morning.

And thus ended tonight’s session.

More than this happened, but I’m trying to leave out certain surprises for now, in case others like me who haven’t played wind up reading this. I actually think I’m already farther than I’ve ever gotten in the game in the past!

Also apologies in advance for switching from “he” to “I” and back again. I do that kind of “internal role play” thing when I play a game like this, so in my mind, I am Traellan and vice versa.

Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition

I have a confession to make. I never played much of Baldur’s Gate when it came because I, uh, didn’t like it very much. ~ducks the incoming volley of rotten vegetables~

Honestly it was so long ago that I don’t even remember why I didn’t like it. I just know I tried to get into it a couple times and never did. I admitted as much when I was offered a review copy of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition for the PC, but the marketing person I was talking to and I thought it might be interesting to see if anything about the game can change my mind. Also I have Angela hanging around me and she adored the game when it first launched (and she’s waiting anxiously for the iPad version to release).

So the first thing you need to know is where to buy it. As far as I can tell you can only get it via Beamdog which is yet another PC digital distribution service vying for your dollars. The PC version costs $19.99. The good news is that if you don’t want another digital service client installed on your machine you can just download the game the old-fashioned way, or so I’m told. I used the client.

The game should be out on iPad later this week, and Andorid and OS X in the weeks and months to come.

So what’s Enhanced? Well the game runs full screen on modern machines, for one thing. I believe there was a patch to allow Baldur’s Gate II to do that but it was never made for the first game, at least not in a way that made things easy for casual players. They’ve added a new tutorial which stands apart from the game, and there’s now a kind of endless dungeon mode if you just want to practice your combat. There’re a few new NPC characters to potentially join your party. In the tablet versions these are DLC but they come included with the PC version. You have Rasaad yn Bashir, a calishite monk from the far south and the first Monk NPC in the game. Then there is Neera the Wild Mage, a half-elf from the High Forest. She’s the first Wild Mage NPC. Last up is Dorn Il-Khan, a half-orc Blackguard bent on revenge. Blackguard is a new ‘kit’ for the Enhanced Edition and the player can choose to go that route as well. Blackguards are apparently kind of anti-paladins.

The old 3D cut scenes are gone, replace by hand-drawn animations. There’re new portraits and a couple of new voices to round out the Enhanced Features.

I decided to run through the tutorial first. I’m going to be honest with you; even though the game is “Enhanced” it does still look dated, and it took me a while to get past that. If you don’t have at least some tolerance for ‘retro gaming’ you might struggle with this one. The tutorial is fairly long and for the most part not very exciting but it does use a bunch of NPCs you’ll be meeting up with later. You can create a custom character for the tutorial and if you save your game, you can later Import that character into the main campaign and with the character comes a bit of gear you’ll pick up while learning to play. Every little bit helps; Baldur’s Gate is one of those games that reminds us how much easier games have become over the years. I managed to die in the tutorial!

I’ve barely gotten started on the real game; I spent most of my evening running around CandleKeep doing odd jobs for people. Baldur’s Gate is a huge game and kind of slow to get going. On the other hand I found myself being bothered less and less by the dated graphics and started to really enjoy reading all the lore sprinkled throughout the game. When you right click on a shortsword to get it’s stats, you don’t just get some numbers; you get a few paragraphs about the weapon as well (you can ignore these of course).

What made it even more fun for me is Angela’s reaction to a lot of the quips from NPCs. Heck even I remembered some of them. The Innkeeper proclaims: “My hotel’s as clean as an elven arse!” and half-way through his comment she’s quoting along with him.

I took a first tiny step on what will be an epic journey if I stay with it; a journey not only though the Forgotten Realm but through the history of gaming. Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition feels old, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We’ve gained an awful lot in the gaming world in the years since the original was published, but we’ve lost some things as well. I really enjoyed the feeling of rediscovering a piece of gaming history.

I’ll see how long that feeling lasts, and I’ll try to document my travels through the game here at Dragonchasers.