Category: Gaming

First Look: Legend of Grimrock

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is going to be really short and no-frills since it’s pretty late and I didn’t have the presence of mind to take screenshots or anything.

Legend of Grimrock launched today and from my first couple of hours playing I’m going to say it’s delivering exactly what developer Almost Human Games promised they’d deliver: old school party-based dungeon crawling with updated graphics. I freaking LOVE IT!! I wonder how many others will, though. Lots of people say they want old school games until they actually start to play them. 🙂

When you first fire up the game you can use a pre-rolled party if you want to miss out on half the fun, or create 4 new characters. There are only 4 races: human, minotaur, lizardman and insectoid. I went with a Minotaur Fighter and a Human Melee-based rogue for my front ranks, and a human Archer Rogue and a human Mage for the back row. That’s how I assigned my skills anyway.

I choose normal difficulty and resisted the temptation to go truly old-school and turn off the automap since I had no graph paper handy. 🙂

Movement is turn-based and uses basic WASD controls. Q&E turn you 90 degrees, A&D sidestep. You can look around with the mouse but mostly you just use it to click on stuff. Combat is time-based. Click on a party member to have him/her attack and then a cooldown for that party member starts. Magic is a bit more complex. Clicking a magic user brings up a panel of runes. Choose some runes and click Cast to cast your spell.

So the game starts and my 4 party members are… totally naked with no gear. I start wandering through the hallways scrounging up cast-off weapons. I did get a knife for my melee fighter, which was great since he’d trained in daggers. But my Axe-Trained Fighter wound up with a mace and my Missile-Weapon trained back-rank Rogue wound up picking up a few rocks she could throw. My Mage experimented a bit and quickly figured out a short range flame spell.

Early enemies come one at a time and aren’t too tough if you have a Mage shooting fire out her palms. Health regenerates by itself, slowly, and there are plenty of doors that you can close behind you if you get low on hitpoints. Monsters don’t seem to heal while they wait around for you to come out and finish them off. There is a food gauge but most early monsters drop chunks of meat you can eat. I assume running out of food will mean you won’t regenerate health, but I’m not positive about that. There’s also a Rest option to speed up healing time but I assume (maybe I should look for a manual…I’m assuming a lot of stuff) you have to be somewhere safe. I locked myself in a small room when I used it.

Light is an issue. You probably want to yank a torch off the wall and give it to a party member if you want good light as you explore. In fact, grab a bunch of them because they do burn out (though if you stick a burnt out torch into a sconce it magically springs back to life).

Puzzles abound, most of them obvious up near the top of the dungeon. Throw a rock on a pressure play to open a grate, press the loose brick to swing open the hidden door. That kind of thing. There are shrines that resurrect and heal your party, but they seem to be 1-use objects.

I only made it to the second level of the dungeon tonight (and level 2 with my characters) but wow… this is EXACTLY the game I’d hoped it would be. It was like I was back on my Atari ST playing Dungeon Master again. Though you can’t repeatedly slam a gate down on a monster to kill it (man, did I abuse that trick back in the day), and the one time I trapped a monster in a pit it respawned back at its starting point.

Almost Human promised an old-school gaming experience and they delivered it. If you’re really nostalgic for the old days of dungeon crawling, but can’t stomach 1987’s graphics, then definitely check out Legend of Grimrock. Even if you only play it for a few evenings you’ll get your $15 ($13.50 if you hurry) worth of fun out of it. But be warned…if you just THINK you want some old school gameplay, you might want to wait for a demo or something.

Also, and I kind of hate to say this but…this would make a GREAT iPad game…

First Look: Anomaly – Warzone Earth for XBLA

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you’re a PC or mobile gamer, 11 Bit Studios’s Anomaly – Warzone Earth might be old news to you. The game originally came out on PC about a year ago, on iOS last summer and on Android earlier this year. Now it’s finally made it to Xbox Live Arcade and in turn I finally got around to giving it a try.

Anomaly is a tower defense game, inverted. Instead of placing towers to ward off incoming attackers, you control the incoming attackers trying to get past, or take out, fixed emplacements. You’ve got two tiers of control in order to accomplish this.

First there’s a strategic map, accessed any time by hitting the Y button, where you plot your route to your destination. Your troops all follow roads in a single file line (at least in the first half dozen levels that I got through) and at each intersection you determine whether they should turn left, turn right, or go straight through the intersection. You can jump in and out of this map at any time, tweaking the route your troops take in response to battlefield conditions.

Once you’re done on the strategic map, your view changes to a nicely rendered map of the city and you appear on the field as a commander unit. He’s a pretty fast, quite durable unit with no offensive abilities. His job is (minimally) to draw fire, to run around and collect power-ups dropped by air support, and to use these power-ups to help keep your units alive. The three power-ups I’ve encountered are Repair, Smoke and Decoy. Repair forms a short-lived auto-repair circle on the map. Any unit that travels through it gets patched up. Smoke offers limited cover in a section of the map, and Decoy draws fire from all enemies within range (until the decoys are destroyed). There’s a least one more type of power-up that I haven’t uncovered yet. Some kind of Bomb. Yay bombs!

As you travel along the map fighting towers (your units, other than the commander, move and attack autonomously) you’ll also encounter nodules of ore. Destroying those converts them into cash. Cash is used to purchase or upgrade units. You can do that any time by pressing X. You can buy new units, upgrade existing units, sell units, or re-arrange the order of your units. In the 6 missions I played I was exposed to 3 kinds of units: an APC with good armor but mediocre firepower, a crawler with weak armor but good offense and range, and a shield unit that had no offense but placed a shield around the units in front of and behind itself.

As for enemy towers, there are basic machine gun towers, beam towers that you should only take on from the sides or behind (not always easy when you need to factor in the limited choices the road grid offers), Behemoths that are very powerful but slow to aim, and some kind of lightning tower that I haven’t quite figured out yet.

And that’s about it so far in terms of game mechanics. I’m playing through the Story Mode: chunks of an alien space craft have fallen to earth and covered Baghdad and Tokyo in strange domes. What’s going on inside? My military unit has been chosen to go in to investigate, and kick some alien ass at the same time. It’s not an epic tale but it’s enough story to keep your interest and get you to play just one more mission.

The game looks great and plays really well with a controller. It comes with some Xbox-y unlocks like stuff for your Avatar and so forth (I don’t play a ton of XBLA games these days…maybe these are standard features now?) and you get scored on each mission so there’s replayability there as you strive to earn more medals.

Like I said, I’ve only spent a couple hours with the game, so don’t consider this any kind of definitive review, but I had a really good time playing. I’d avoided the game on PC because I was pretty burnt out on Tower Defense, but I was offered a review copy of the XBLA version so I figured I’d give it a shot. I was very pleasantly surprised. Turning the tables and making you the attacker is a nice twist on the genre.

Old hands at the game may be tempted by the 6 Xbox-exclusive ‘tactical trials’ that 11 Bit Studios has created for the XBLA version.

Anomaly – Warzone Earth is 800 Microsoft Points, and of course there’s a free demo available.

Kickstart This: Gravitaz

Posted on by Nimgimli

Here’s the latest project to coax me to click that seductive “Pledge” button over at Kickstarter: Gravitaz. This is a near-future racing game similar to Wipeout. Of course, if you’re not a Playstation person you might not know what Wipeout is, but I think the early gameplay in the video below pretty much sums it up: high-speed, low-friction racing with weapons.

So why did I back this one?

First, Developer Glass Bottom Games is made up of industry veterans, most of whom were working on Lego Universe before forming their own studio. I’m confident they can deliver the product.

Second, they’re not asking for a lot of cash: $25,000 is their goal. We can hit that easy!

Third, their pledge levels are really low. It only takes a $10 pledge to get a digital copy of the finished game (PC & Mac are the initial target platforms). After that you can get all kinds of extras, but $10 is pretty damned cheap.

Fourth, full disclosure, I follow Glass Bottom Games co-founder Megan Fox on Google+ and she’s good people. I want to see her studio thrive.

And fifth and most obvious: I want to play this game!

If they go past their initial goal they’re hoping to bring the game to iOS too (what, no Android love??). I’m hoping we go sailing past that puny $25K figure and get to the kinds of numbers where we backers can start chanting “TRACK EDITOR, TRACK EDITOR, TRACK EDITOR” (it sounds good chanting that, right?).

Anyway, check out the early gameplay in the video, read the pitch over on Kickstarter, then decide if it’s worth $10 to play the game they’re describing. To me, it was worth $30.

PAX Withdrawal

Posted on by Nimgimli

So another PAX East has come and gone. I wrote up daily ‘reports’ on the show over on Google+. Some of them were written under the influence of too much good beer with good friends, and none of them are particularly noteworthy or in-depth. I went to PAX purely as a spectator and didn’t corner anyone for interviews or insider information. But if anyone not on G+ wants to read them let me know and I’ll dump the raw copy into a post.

Short version: PAX was crowded and noisy and good for my soul. I was considering ditching the whole thing but Angela really wanted to go, and I’m really glad she didn’t let me follow my melancholy. I came back from the show with my love of gaming totally re-energized. Now the melancholy I’m feeling is from wanting to be back among my people!

The highlight of the show was, once again, the Tweetup. For me, it’s really the only time of the year I can sit around with serious gamers and just ‘talk shop’ for a few solid hours. We arrived at about 8:15 pm and packed it in at 2 am. My only regret is that I didn’t do a better job of mingling at it. @creeptheprophet & @grimnir_ are both people I’ve ‘known’ from afar on social networks, both were there, and other than hello and goodbye I didn’t spend time talking to either of them. I was always too engrossed in the conversation immediately around me. Maybe next year we need to set up the Tweetup like a Speed Dating Event!

Anyway, my apologies to everyone who was there that I didn’t talk to. It was definitely my loss.

Anyway, I’m back-logged on post ideas but I’m also back-logged on the day job, so I’ll do my best to get caught up. I jumped on a new Kickstarter project while waiting in line for a PAX Panel, and there’s a new project coming out today I want to talk about. Been playing some games, both old and new… lots going on, so stay tuned!

Oh, almost forgot. Turns out my phone with digital zoom is a terrible device for taking pics of fast-moving gameplay so very few of my shots are worth looking at, but Angela had a real camera, so check out her photo gallery from the show.

TGIT Gaming Wrap-up for 4/5/2012

Posted on by Nimgimli

Thursday is my Friday this week, as we’re off to PAX tomorrow morning.

It’s been a pretty tough week and very very little down time for gaming. In fact I’m heavily demotivated and I’m not even really looking forward to the convention. I’d kind of rather sit around the house playing games. I’m sure I’ll perk up once I start breathing the magic PAX Air, though!

Purchases This Week
I picked up Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magic Obscura from GOG.com last weekend. It was..sheesh, under $5 I think.
I also bought I Am Alive on PSN for $15-ish. Dunno when I’ll play it seriously but I wanted to send a message to the developer that PSN users want to buy their games. Sick of stuff hitting the Xbox weeks before PSN.

I also downloaded NFS: Shift 2 and Shank 2 on the PS3. Both were freebies for Playstation Plus members.

Played This Week
Raptr says I spent about 45 minutes playing SW:TOR and 15 playing (testing, really) Arcanum.
I spent a few hours on The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky early in the week, but otherwise I just fired up a few demos here and there. Wings of Steel grabbed my attention. Blades of Time did not. There were a few others that I barely looked at before deleting. Asura’s Wrath was one…I can’t even remember the others.

I played up to the title screen of I Am Alive just to see what gameplay was like, and ran 1 race in NFS:Shift 2

Plans For the Week to Come

PAX! Being away for the weekend will probably put me so far behind that I won’t get any gaming in next week, but if I do it’ll probably continue to be The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky.

I’m really looking forward to things getting back to normal next weekend!

Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter project

Posted on by Nimgimli

I tell you what, I have no idea how long this Kickstarter Nantucket Sleighride will last but I hope it never ends. All of a sudden all the games I’m most excited about are either Legend of Grimrock or a Kickstarter project!

It’s really exciting to me, to be able to help these game designers make games that sound awesome. Suddenly I’m a fucking philanthropist!! Good games better the human condition, right? 🙂

Anyway the latest project to get me pumped is Shadowrun Returns, led by Shadowrun creator Jordan Weisman. His company, Hairbrained Schemes, created the very awesome Crimson Steam Pirates for the iPad last year. [Holy smokes, in looking for that link I found out CSP is on the Chrome Store, too!]

Shadowrun Returns is planned as a 2D, turn-based, party-based RPG that will come with a mission editor. It’s got some social aspects in that you can hire your friend’s characters as minions to take on your own missions. Weisman says it’ll come out for iPad and PC.

But no sense in me rattling on. Here’s the introductory video and of course there are lots more details over on the Kickstarter page.

They’re hoping to raise $400,000. They’re close to $60K $70K (went up $10K while I was writing this post!) now with 24 days to go and backers coming on-board at a brisk pace. $15 is the minimum pledge to get a digital copy of the game for PC. I went with a $30 pledge in order to get a book of stories written about the game.

The Secret World pre-orders: it’s all my fault.

Posted on by Nimgimli

I am what’s wrong with gaming today. At least, what’s wrong with MMO gaming.

As you’ve no doubt heard, Funcom opened up pre-orders for The Secret World today. To get a feel for how stoked I’ve been for The Secret World, here’s all the coverage I’ve had on the site: tag = The Secret World. (Spoiler: It’s 1 post showing a video.) I’ve also stated publicly that MMOs aren’t a good fit for me, and that I’m tired of subscription models that make me feel compelled to play in order to get my money’s worth.

The end result of all this? Of course I pre-ordered The Secret World this morning. I can’t help it. Curiosity about MMOs drives me. And I don’t even try to fool myself that this will be The One anymore. I’m sure I’ll play TSW for 2-3 weeks and then move on.

So why Pre-Order? Because I’m a sheep in sheep’s clothing. Oooo, I get to start 4 days early! Maybe. If I pre-ordered early enough. In those 4 days I’ll probably manage 2-3 hours of gametime! And I get to reserve a name! If I could think of one I felt like reserving. And play in beta weekends…though I’ve sworn off betas.

Essentially all Funcom had to do is throw up a bullet-pointed list of Perks and they had me. I’m not proud of this, but it’s the truth. And in being so weak-willed I just encourage game companies to keep dangling silly freebies in order to entice players to pre-order.

So I apologize to the gaming community for encouraging this type of behavior.

Now let’s start the griping portion of this blog post!

Pre-ordering is supposed to get you a name reservation. I signed up, gave ’em my credit-card info, got my “Thank you for pre-ordering” email but when I click the link to reserve my name I’m told I don’t have any Name Reservation ‘slots’. Hmm. And I have a big alert that says “You have a pending payment. Click here to complete payment” but when I click the link I just loop back to the same page with no options. So maybe I just need to be patient and wait for that payment to go through. I’m not irate about this, but I am a bit confused. [Update: OK just checked again and I had my name reservation slot, so scratch this one.]

Pre-ordering was supposed to get you 1 of 3 combat pets: A Doberman, a wolf, or a kitty cat. The wolf is super-awesome, the Doberman is pretty cool, and the cat is, well, a kitty cat. After I signed up my account page shows, under Your Products, “The Secret World – Preorder (Cat).” So what does that mean? I sure didn’t pick the cute little kitty. Is it a random selection? Is “Cat” just a placeholder and I’ll be able to pick later? Not at all clear. If I’m stuck with that cat I’ll be annoyed. I mean, I like cats and all, but I like ’em curled up in my lap quietly purring, not out doing battle with me. That just seems silly.

Last up, during the process of handing over $50 to play the game, you’re already getting DLC marketing prompts thrown at you. In addition to that $50 for the pre-order you can spend $15 (a social pet, a set of weapons, and a leather jacket), $60 (30 extra days of gametime, and additional character slot, an additional name reservation, a high-end talisman for each new character, 10 experience potions and a 10% discount on all social clothing purchases) or $200 (everything in the $60 bundle plus a lifetime subscription and an exclusive leather jacket) more in order to get various bundles of extra stuff. You can also buy additional character slots and name reservations for $9.99 each.

[In days of yore I’d always go for Lifetime Subs because they (illogically) remove that pressure to get my money’s worth out of a subscription gaming experience, but these days I just assume every MMO will go F2P within a few years of launch so Lifetime subs no longer seem viable to me. Anyone else agree?]

I have to say that I found all these offers a bit off-putting. All I could think was that if they’re pitching all this stuff now, by the time I get in the game I’m going to be smothered under all kinds of RMT offers. Asking me to spend real cash is fine (well, acceptable at least) in a F2P game, but if I’m paying a subscription I don’t want to see a bunch of ads for additional cost items.

All in all, I came out of the pre-order experience thinking “Hmmm, maybe that was all a big mistake.” but I’ve certainly wasted more than $50 on other games I never played much (~waves at SSX~), so I’ll stick it out. But come launch, Funcom better bring their A game if they want to convert me into a fan.

Adversity = engagement? A Legend of Heroes adventure.

Posted on by Nimgimli

I wanted to share a story with you.

I’ve been playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky on the Vita lately (though its a PSP game). I’m really not very far into it. Five hours maybe? The game features the typical (in JRPGs anyway) plucky young heroes out doing battle with monsters. In this case, the first two characters you meet are Estelle and her adopted brother Joshua. Their father is a Bracer, which is basically an adventurer-for-hire in this world. Estelle and Joshua have been training to become Bracers too; in fact they’ve just earned their certificate when the game begins.

Shortly thereafter, their father gets called away on business and it falls to our determined young Junior Bracers to finish up a few jobs he’d accepted before leaving. These are kind of semi-tutorial warm-up quests, or so I thought.

In the last of the three missions you have to escort a newspaper reporter and his photographer assistant to the top of a tower. We’d been to that tower once so I figured it’d be another cakewalk.

I was wrong.

As we climbed higher, the monsters got tougher. We got a little lost and had to backtrack a few times and every time we’d leave and return to a floor the monsters would have respawned. In LoH ‘random’ encounters can be seen on the map as you get near them. Once you spot the monsters you can try to surprise them, approach them normally or avoid them altogether. In the latter case, they’ll sometimes chase you. This isn’t normally a problem because you can outrun them outside, but in the confines of the tower, and with the addition of the 2 ‘guest characters’ that made our party ‘train’ longer than usual, that wasn’t always possible.

As I stumbled into battle after battle it dawned on me that I was going to get wiped out. I hadn’t spent any of my hard-earned Mira (cash) on upgrades or supplies. Estelle (who has a healing spell) was out of mana and my supply of healing items was all but depleted. And it’d been a LONG time since I’d saved.

I decided it was time to try to fall back and regroup, but that meant fighting my way out of the tower. I figured if I could get back to town I could rest and resupply and if I fought my way back to the tower I might gain a level in the process.

It was tough and I did wipe a few times (those gorgous game designers added a “Retry?” option to battles so when you do wipe you can try again using different tactics) but eventually I made it out. Threaded my way past random encounters on the road back to town and finally flopped down in an Inn. Whew!

At that point I looked up and it was 1 am and I had work in the morning. I’d totally lost track of time and was going to be exhausted in the morning, and to make matters worse, I’d failed to complete the quest!

And yet it was the most fun I’d had gaming in recent memory. In fact it was so much fun that I had to bring my Vita to work and sneak out at lunch and have another go at that tower. This time I paid attention and made a mental map as I went, rather than stumbling around blindly. I also bought some armor and a satchel of healing items before leaving town. And I made it to the top of the tower! Yay! And was only 20 minutes late getting back from lunch. Ooops!

So what’s the point of my little story? Well it dawned on me that having to go back to town like I did would be seen as a horrible flaw to a lot of today’s gamers. It could de decried as ‘pointless travel’ or even worse, as ‘grinding.’ We dislike anything in our games that slow us down and cause us to struggle.

But it’s the struggle, and frankly the fear of losing all that time and having to go back to an earlier save, that made my little adventure so compelling and exciting. In broader terms, without risk, rewards aren’t as, well, rewarding. Last night my ‘reward’ was making it back to town safely (I’d accumulated a lot of currency-ish loot during all that fighting, plus lots of experience).

Maybe this is the difference between an ‘old school’ gamer and a ‘new school’ thinking, I dunno. I’m just doing that ‘thinking out loud’ thing I do.

Anyway, be that as it may, I’m really enjoying Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, with it’s strictly turn-based combat and quirky, chatty (text only) characters.

Kickstarter projects that need your help

Posted on by Nimgimli

So speaking of Kickstarter… I’m backing a few projects that haven’t yet met their goals. Figured I’d share them here in case they seem interesting to anyone else:

The first one is the one I’m most hesitant about: Class of Heroes 2 Deluxe for the PSP. This is a collaboration between MonkeyPaw and Gaijinworks to bring a deluxe, physical version Class of Heroes 2 to the PSP. Gaijinworks, to me, = Vic Ireland of Working Designs fame, and that’s why I’m backing it. However my understanding is that they’re localizing CoH2 no matter what…the Kickstarter is more about a big fancy packaged edition and some general enhancements to the project. I’m not interested in physical copies of anything, so I’m just kicking in for that ‘general enhancements’ part. Also, they’re trying to raise $500,000, which is a pretty big number for a PSP game, I think.

Update: There’s been an update to the Kickstarter page for this making very clear what funding will add to the project:
-A Physical Deluxe Pack to be made
-English Voice Acting in the Digital and Physical releases
-English Opening Song and Video in both releases
-Extended game fixes and features (extra save slots, better controls, etc)
-Translation and release of Class of Heroes II webcomic series

Next up is Tortured Hearts – or, How I Saved The Universe. Again. This one bills itself as a satirical, old-school RPG, but what grabbed me is the artwork (see the video below) and this bit about the party system (a party-based RPG? Yes!):

This is a single player game, with 8 possible companions (unless of course you donated $5000, in which case you can be your own companion). It is quite possible to play solo. If you choose companions, you can have up to five in a party for the classic 6-person party. However, not all these companions get along with each other. They have their own personalities, skills, and agendas. The PC and the companions have approximately 100,000 words of dialog with each other. Much conversation is initiated spontaneously by the companions and occurs between them as well as with the PC.

These folks are hoping to raise $300,000; I’m hoping they make it.

Last is The Dead Linger which is “a first-person zombie survival sandbox in which you can venture into a vast, undead world, surviving and exploring in whatever way suits you best.” Nope, I’m still not tired of re-killing zombies! I like the sandbox aspect of this one; believe it or not I was getting a bit of a Minecraft vibe when reading about it. First, you can play with up to 16 people in your zombie sandbox, and then there was this bit:

You’ve found a hideout. Now what? Barricade it! Fortify it! Defend it! You probably need a place to keep your stuff. You might need a place to house your clan, or maybe you just like a particular building you found. If you choose, you can fortify and defend

This one is from an established team with a game out on Steam (Detour) and they’re only looking for $60,000. We ought to be able to get them there, right?

I’m backing a few more projects but they’ve already made their goals so no need to promote them, but just for the sake of completeness:

FTL Kickstarter ends. Now we wait for the game!

Posted on by Nimgimli

FTL, the indie spaceship simulation rogue-like, finished their Kickstarter drive today. They were hoping to raise $10,000 to help finish the game. They barely squeaked by, finishing up at $200,542.

This is a game being made by a team so tiny they don’t even have a company name. It’s just FTL by Matthew Davis and Justin Ma. And they got as far as getting a demo onto OnLive and winning a couple of Independent Game Festival Honorable Mentions (for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and for Excellence in Design) without any funding (as far as I know).

Now they’ve got about 20 times what they were hoping for. I wonder what they’ll do with it? If it costs them $10K to finish the game, will they just pocket the other $190K (hopefully using it to fund their next game). Or will they try to add $190K worth of new features to FTL?

They must be overwhelmed, to be honest. Estimated launch date is this August. Maybe they’ll quit their day jobs and work full time on the game. Who knows?

I just know I’m looking forward to playing it! I kicked in enough to get into the closed beta that’s supposed to start in May because I was too impatient to wait for August. 🙂

Congrats to Davis and Ma, and here’s hoping Kickstarter continues to be a great way for people to get unique game ideas funded!