I haven't been playing much, but that's not the fault of the game. I think I may be coming down with a cold. I've got minor muscle fatigue and I've been coughing frequently.
Trine 2 is a fine game, with gorgeously drawn levels and well-balanced platforming gameplay that relies on an intuitive physics system and the unique abilities of your three characters. It is moderately difficult at places, but I've yet to encounter any dead ends or particularly frustrating challenges. I'd likely blaze through it if my concentration were at 100%, but I'm tired and cranky, so I've only been doing one or two levels at a time. My hope is that if I get some bed rest and some fluids, I'll be able to give it my full attention later today.
There's not much of a plot. I think goblins are invading, so the Trine reactivated and gathered the characters from the original back into itself for another kingdom-saving adventure. The characters are a little more fleshed out this time around (they finally get names) and their banter is the best part of the story.
Overall, I'm a little bummed about my lack of progress, but since it's not anything intrinsic to the game, I'm sure it will pass. At the very least, tomorrow is my day off and I'll be able to bundle up on the couch and play Trine 2 as a distraction from my biological misery.
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Monday, February 26, 2018
Trine 2 - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
Trine 2 is a sidescrolling game of action, puzzles and platforming where you play as one of Three Heroes who make their way through dangers untold in a fantastical fairytale world.
Join Amadeus the Wizard, Pontius the Knight and Zoya the Thief in their adventure full of friendship, magic and betrayal.
Trine 2: Complete Story fully integrates the Goblin Menace expansion campaign and the all-new unlockable Dwarven Caverns level into one mighty fairytale. All owners of Trine 2: Goblin Menace are automatically upgraded to the Complete Story edition.
Previous Playtime
11.6 hours
Expectations and Prior Experience
I've already played through the entire game with my friend Daniel, so I know for a fact that I'll enjoy it. And since it took more than 11 hours to finish, I know that I won't have a lot of wheel-spinning to do after I beat it again. It's likely that if I take the same approach as I did with the original Trine, of first beating the levels casually and then backtracking for 100%, the 20 hours will pass before I finish.
My big worry is that this game is definitely more multiplayer-optimized than Trine. You've got to split your level-up bonuses between your three characters, instead of getting equal xp for each. Also, if I recall correctly, the puzzles are more complex. The worst case scenario is that I get stuck behind an obstacle that is too hard for a single player to defeat.
I'm not too worried, though. Trine 2 was a pretty casual platformer, so it probably won't vindictively punish me for daring to play it alone . . . probably.
Trine 2 is a sidescrolling game of action, puzzles and platforming where you play as one of Three Heroes who make their way through dangers untold in a fantastical fairytale world.
Join Amadeus the Wizard, Pontius the Knight and Zoya the Thief in their adventure full of friendship, magic and betrayal.
Trine 2: Complete Story fully integrates the Goblin Menace expansion campaign and the all-new unlockable Dwarven Caverns level into one mighty fairytale. All owners of Trine 2: Goblin Menace are automatically upgraded to the Complete Story edition.
Previous Playtime
11.6 hours
Expectations and Prior Experience
I've already played through the entire game with my friend Daniel, so I know for a fact that I'll enjoy it. And since it took more than 11 hours to finish, I know that I won't have a lot of wheel-spinning to do after I beat it again. It's likely that if I take the same approach as I did with the original Trine, of first beating the levels casually and then backtracking for 100%, the 20 hours will pass before I finish.
My big worry is that this game is definitely more multiplayer-optimized than Trine. You've got to split your level-up bonuses between your three characters, instead of getting equal xp for each. Also, if I recall correctly, the puzzles are more complex. The worst case scenario is that I get stuck behind an obstacle that is too hard for a single player to defeat.
I'm not too worried, though. Trine 2 was a pretty casual platformer, so it probably won't vindictively punish me for daring to play it alone . . . probably.
Sunday, February 25, 2018
Stronghold Crusader Extreme HD - 20/20 hours
In the end, the extreme lifestyle was unsustainable. When the computer wasn't crashing, I found my thousands of troops unmanageable. The user interface isn't sophisticated enough to give complex directions to your troops. If you've got five different types of soldiers, you can select one at a time, but not two or three. And if there's a way to get your guys to move in formation, with infantry in the front and archers in the back, then I haven't seen it. I expect that if I had the patience to split my attention and carefully direct my troops one at a time, I would do much better. But let's be realistic, that's not going to happen.
That's why, towards the end, I went back to my faux free-build. I had a couple of ideas for experiments that would reveal some more of the game's mechanics to me. It turns out that you can sustain a population of 1000+ with nothing but apples, but I suspect that there's a limit to how many copies of a single building type you can have, because when I tried the same thing with wheat, my bakeries stopped attracting workers after around 200 population.
Overall, I'd say that Stronghold Crusader Extreme is a strong entry in the series. At first I thought it was completely unnecessary. It's just like Stronghold Crusader, but with fewer game modes. However, the removal of the unit cap, while seeming like a small change, really does profoundly change the way the game plays. I've never had to command quite so many troops before. That's likely why I was so bad at it.
I probably won't be playing Stronghold Crusader Extreme again. I liked seeing my little 2D troops and citizens scurrying to and fro, but I'd rather have more peaceful options for telling them what to do. It's probably no coincidence that I was happiest when I was cheating.
Still, I've only got one more Stronghold game to go and I'm pretty excited about it.
That's why, towards the end, I went back to my faux free-build. I had a couple of ideas for experiments that would reveal some more of the game's mechanics to me. It turns out that you can sustain a population of 1000+ with nothing but apples, but I suspect that there's a limit to how many copies of a single building type you can have, because when I tried the same thing with wheat, my bakeries stopped attracting workers after around 200 population.
Overall, I'd say that Stronghold Crusader Extreme is a strong entry in the series. At first I thought it was completely unnecessary. It's just like Stronghold Crusader, but with fewer game modes. However, the removal of the unit cap, while seeming like a small change, really does profoundly change the way the game plays. I've never had to command quite so many troops before. That's likely why I was so bad at it.
I probably won't be playing Stronghold Crusader Extreme again. I liked seeing my little 2D troops and citizens scurrying to and fro, but I'd rather have more peaceful options for telling them what to do. It's probably no coincidence that I was happiest when I was cheating.
Still, I've only got one more Stronghold game to go and I'm pretty excited about it.
Saturday, February 24, 2018
Stronghold Crusader Extreme HD - 15/20 hours
I've lost. I've been cheating left and right and I still managed to lose. The battle was pretty intense and I didn't build units fast enough to keep up with the enemy. I was quickly overwhelmed and all my extra gold was wasted, unspent.
I went and looked up a walkthrough to see how the level was meant to be played, and I was stunned by what I saw. The speed and precision of a skilled player is light years away from my half-assed fumbling. It was during this process that I learned what the "extreme" in Stronghold Crusader Extreme really meant.
Under the right conditions, this game allows you to control hundreds, or even thousands of troops at a time. The castle and siege mechanics of the base Stronghold game can't really cope with this. Instead of attacking walls with siege engines and ladders, you can just direct a swarm of melee units towards a fortification to take it down in minutes. When the armies really get going, it can be hard to even tell what's happening, the screen is so full of movement and chaos.
It inspired me to get extreme with the scenario builder. I created a large map, divided it in two parts with a thick wall, and then plopped down 50 unit spawners (set to produce the maximum number of units) on each side.
It took me a couple of hours, but I crashed the game. I thought it might happen right away, but it actually worked well for quite awhile. My best guess is that each side had about two or three thousand units active at once and the turnover was so, for lack of a better word, extreme, that tens of thousands of units were spawned and eventually killed. I'm not sure why it eventually broke. Maybe some kind of overflow error? Or maybe it was a miracle that it worked as long as it did.
My plan from here is to try it again, but as the other side. I wouldn't say that I used anything as sophisticated as strategy my first time round, but I'm not sure that matters. I enjoyed seeing the tiny pixelated hordes fight and die for my amusement.
I went and looked up a walkthrough to see how the level was meant to be played, and I was stunned by what I saw. The speed and precision of a skilled player is light years away from my half-assed fumbling. It was during this process that I learned what the "extreme" in Stronghold Crusader Extreme really meant.
Under the right conditions, this game allows you to control hundreds, or even thousands of troops at a time. The castle and siege mechanics of the base Stronghold game can't really cope with this. Instead of attacking walls with siege engines and ladders, you can just direct a swarm of melee units towards a fortification to take it down in minutes. When the armies really get going, it can be hard to even tell what's happening, the screen is so full of movement and chaos.
It inspired me to get extreme with the scenario builder. I created a large map, divided it in two parts with a thick wall, and then plopped down 50 unit spawners (set to produce the maximum number of units) on each side.
It took me a couple of hours, but I crashed the game. I thought it might happen right away, but it actually worked well for quite awhile. My best guess is that each side had about two or three thousand units active at once and the turnover was so, for lack of a better word, extreme, that tens of thousands of units were spawned and eventually killed. I'm not sure why it eventually broke. Maybe some kind of overflow error? Or maybe it was a miracle that it worked as long as it did.
My plan from here is to try it again, but as the other side. I wouldn't say that I used anything as sophisticated as strategy my first time round, but I'm not sure that matters. I enjoyed seeing the tiny pixelated hordes fight and die for my amusement.
Friday, February 23, 2018
Stronghold Crusader Extreme HD - 10/20 hours
I was feeling a little down about playing my fifth Stronghold game when I had a brilliant idea - I could cheat shamelessly. That way, I don't have to improve my RTS skills, I just have to keep pushing buttons until it's all over.
I've settled on two methods of cheating. The first is to just use a code I found online that gives me 1000 gold every time I enter it. This serves to make the outcome of missions an almost entirely foregone conclusion (sometimes I fail to pay adequate attention and get slammed by a larger attack than I can handle), but still requires me to fight through the brutal slog of the enemy's massive forces.
The second method is to build an extremely unbalanced map where the enemy stronghold has no access to my much larger and richer territory. Then I can treat it as a defacto free build map. It's been a fascinating journey so far, because there's no point to it besides increasing your population, but I've actually been finding it a fair challenge to get a population in the high hundreds. I set up one map to have realistic desert terrain and I capped out at about 350 citizens before I ran out of fertile land.
My current goal is to reach 500 citizens, which is harder than it sounds because you can have a maximum of 24 unemployed citizens at a time before your population stops growing. Of course, there's no opposition and no time limit, so I'm bound to get there eventually, but it's something to pass the time.
My plan for the second half of the game is to keep cheating, because I don't care enough about military tactics to stress myself out trying to get better at them. I'll probably focus on clearing the campaign missions with my bottomless purse once I finally fill up my makeshift solo map. It's not a proud or a wise way to handle the game, but I'm 90 hours in now and I'm not sure I have any pride or wisdom left.
I've settled on two methods of cheating. The first is to just use a code I found online that gives me 1000 gold every time I enter it. This serves to make the outcome of missions an almost entirely foregone conclusion (sometimes I fail to pay adequate attention and get slammed by a larger attack than I can handle), but still requires me to fight through the brutal slog of the enemy's massive forces.
The second method is to build an extremely unbalanced map where the enemy stronghold has no access to my much larger and richer territory. Then I can treat it as a defacto free build map. It's been a fascinating journey so far, because there's no point to it besides increasing your population, but I've actually been finding it a fair challenge to get a population in the high hundreds. I set up one map to have realistic desert terrain and I capped out at about 350 citizens before I ran out of fertile land.
My current goal is to reach 500 citizens, which is harder than it sounds because you can have a maximum of 24 unemployed citizens at a time before your population stops growing. Of course, there's no opposition and no time limit, so I'm bound to get there eventually, but it's something to pass the time.
My plan for the second half of the game is to keep cheating, because I don't care enough about military tactics to stress myself out trying to get better at them. I'll probably focus on clearing the campaign missions with my bottomless purse once I finally fill up my makeshift solo map. It's not a proud or a wise way to handle the game, but I'm 90 hours in now and I'm not sure I have any pride or wisdom left.
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Stronghold Crusader Extreme HD - 2/20 hour
Woo boy, this is going to be a tough one. Stronghold Crusader Extreme takes everything I like about the Stronghold series, and just sort of sets it aside, saying, "wouldn't you rather fight battles, instead?" There is no peaceful/economic campaign, but unlike Stronghold Legends, it also doesn't have a free-build mode. It's pretty much all skirmish matches, all the time.
I guess, to give the game its due, those skirmish matches are EXTREME!!! but all that turns out to mean is that army sizes are much larger and you now have a menu of special powers that you can use to shift the odds in your favor. These include summoning extra units, partially healing your army, or calling a rockslide out of nowhere. Each of these abilities costs a certain amount of energy, which gradually recharges throughout the battle.
It's a little early to say whether these EXTREME!!! changes will have a significant effect on the feel of the game, but the matches I've played so far have thrown me for a loop. In the first campaign mission, I was confused and dismayed by the sheer number of units the enemy was able to dispatch, mere minutes after the start. After I was torn apart by the AI hordes from nowhere, I played a random skirmish match, and that time I was the player with troops just appearing out of thin air. It felt kind of good to command hundreds of troops, in comparison to the dozens allowed by other versions of the game, but it won't be a satisfying strategy experience until I figure out where they came from and how to get more.
Honestly, though, this should be an optional mode in Stronghold Crusader. The strategy is fundamentally different, but the rest of the game - the art, the available units, the economy (when it is not being rendered obsolete by a generous stipend of phantom troops) - is identical to the older game. But, for some reason, it isn't, and so I have to go back and try and squeeze a military career out of a Stronghold game after all.
(Although, I have experimented with the map editor, and it occurs to me that if I strand the NPC noble on a tiny island with no access to the rest of the map, I could get a kind of defacto Free-Build out of the ensuing skirmish match . . .)
I guess, to give the game its due, those skirmish matches are EXTREME!!! but all that turns out to mean is that army sizes are much larger and you now have a menu of special powers that you can use to shift the odds in your favor. These include summoning extra units, partially healing your army, or calling a rockslide out of nowhere. Each of these abilities costs a certain amount of energy, which gradually recharges throughout the battle.
It's a little early to say whether these EXTREME!!! changes will have a significant effect on the feel of the game, but the matches I've played so far have thrown me for a loop. In the first campaign mission, I was confused and dismayed by the sheer number of units the enemy was able to dispatch, mere minutes after the start. After I was torn apart by the AI hordes from nowhere, I played a random skirmish match, and that time I was the player with troops just appearing out of thin air. It felt kind of good to command hundreds of troops, in comparison to the dozens allowed by other versions of the game, but it won't be a satisfying strategy experience until I figure out where they came from and how to get more.
Honestly, though, this should be an optional mode in Stronghold Crusader. The strategy is fundamentally different, but the rest of the game - the art, the available units, the economy (when it is not being rendered obsolete by a generous stipend of phantom troops) - is identical to the older game. But, for some reason, it isn't, and so I have to go back and try and squeeze a military career out of a Stronghold game after all.
(Although, I have experimented with the map editor, and it occurs to me that if I strand the NPC noble on a tiny island with no access to the rest of the map, I could get a kind of defacto Free-Build out of the ensuing skirmish match . . .)
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Hack 'n' Slash, Morphopolis, and Trine - Wrap-up
The hardest part of playing these three games is writing this post. Hack 'n' Slash, Morphopolis, and Trine all have puzzles as a fundamental part of their gameplay, but other than that they have nothing in common. Hack 'n' Slash is a bold experiment in what games can do that nonetheless falls short of reaching its full potential. Morphoplis is as much an art installation as a game (and I mean that as a compliment). Trine is the most traditional of the three, and probably not coincidentally the most well-executed.
Although, now that I think about, there is another thing they have in common - they are all short. Each one took less than 6 hours to beat. That feels significant to me. As you might have inferred from the blog's 20 hour play time benchmark, I come to games with a certain set of expectations, expectations formed in an era of gaming where "less is more" was not just nonviable, it was heresy. It was rare to be able to bring home a new SNES cartridge, and while the move to discs mitigated the costs somewhat, it wasn't until used games stores became common that games moved (for me) from a rare luxury to a regular form of entertainment.
Digital distribution, therefor, was a titanic shift. I was relatively late to the party, not buying my first downloadable game until 2012, and not fully embracing the practice until 2014. There's a part of me that still doesn't completely trust it, but it's mostly been silenced. It's too convenient to be able to shop from home, and prices are low enough that the risk is minimal. But more than just changing the way people like me buy games, it has also changed the way games are made. There's a whole new niche for games that would have been considered fatally flawed just 10 years ago.
By making a game shorter, or with minimal graphics, one could theoretically make it dramatically cheaper and faster to download (not to mention the benefits of being compatible with the widest range of the highly variable PC hardware). The third thing all three of these games have in common is that I paid less than 5 dollars for them. Hack 'n' Slash was $4.54, Trine was $1.68, and Morphopolis was an astonishing $0.24. I've had better deals, but only because we live in an upside down world where legendary games from a decade ago are given away as free promotional gifts and major franchises dramatically under-price their flagship games as a loss-leader for DLC.
I've lost track of what point I'm trying to make here. I guess it's that if someone said to me, "I have $6.46 to spend on video games, what should I buy?" I'd tell them "Fallout: New Vegas plus the DLC, and you'll have $1.47 to spare." But, if they came back and told me, "oh, I bought Hack 'n' Slash, Morphopolis, and Trine instead," I'd have no cause to criticize their choice.
Although, now that I think about, there is another thing they have in common - they are all short. Each one took less than 6 hours to beat. That feels significant to me. As you might have inferred from the blog's 20 hour play time benchmark, I come to games with a certain set of expectations, expectations formed in an era of gaming where "less is more" was not just nonviable, it was heresy. It was rare to be able to bring home a new SNES cartridge, and while the move to discs mitigated the costs somewhat, it wasn't until used games stores became common that games moved (for me) from a rare luxury to a regular form of entertainment.
Digital distribution, therefor, was a titanic shift. I was relatively late to the party, not buying my first downloadable game until 2012, and not fully embracing the practice until 2014. There's a part of me that still doesn't completely trust it, but it's mostly been silenced. It's too convenient to be able to shop from home, and prices are low enough that the risk is minimal. But more than just changing the way people like me buy games, it has also changed the way games are made. There's a whole new niche for games that would have been considered fatally flawed just 10 years ago.
By making a game shorter, or with minimal graphics, one could theoretically make it dramatically cheaper and faster to download (not to mention the benefits of being compatible with the widest range of the highly variable PC hardware). The third thing all three of these games have in common is that I paid less than 5 dollars for them. Hack 'n' Slash was $4.54, Trine was $1.68, and Morphopolis was an astonishing $0.24. I've had better deals, but only because we live in an upside down world where legendary games from a decade ago are given away as free promotional gifts and major franchises dramatically under-price their flagship games as a loss-leader for DLC.
I've lost track of what point I'm trying to make here. I guess it's that if someone said to me, "I have $6.46 to spend on video games, what should I buy?" I'd tell them "Fallout: New Vegas plus the DLC, and you'll have $1.47 to spare." But, if they came back and told me, "oh, I bought Hack 'n' Slash, Morphopolis, and Trine instead," I'd have no cause to criticize their choice.
Sunday, February 18, 2018
Trine - 7.5 hours (15/20 hours total)
Well, that's three games beaten in less than 15 hours. I guess I was right to bundle them together, even if they are only tenuously connected. Trine, especially, was a disappointment in this regard. I was really hoping I'd get at least 10 hours out of it. Shorter games do have their advantages, of course, but not so much for my particular situation.
Gripes about play time aside, Trine was pretty decent. The most surprising thing about the last half was that it turned out to really be the last half. The second 8 levels took almost the exact same amount of time as the first 8 levels. That's some good pacing. Although, it doesn't hurt that while the levels gradually get more dangerous (having hazards like lava and poison), they don't get noticeably more complicated. I did appreciate the last level, though. It's framed as a boss battle, but it was really just more platforming, albeit with an implicit time limit in the form of rising lava.
The story was nothing special. You're tracking down the two counterparts to the Trine, which have accidentally merged and thus created the undead problem as a consequence of their spiritual unbalance. But the explanations for why you are in a particular place at a particular time are hard to follow. I'm not sure it matters, though. At any given moment, your agenda is "get through these spooky and trap-filled ruins" and the story reflects that well enough.
At the very end, the three characters are given epilogues and "live happily ever after," which doesn't mesh well with the sequels, but I guess it would be pretty arrogant for the first game in a series to end on a cliffhanger.
I'm not sure where I'll go from here. I still have about 50xp left to collect (which amounts to less than 1 level's worth of advancement), so I could go back and try for the 100%, but I doubt it will take me 5 hours to do. Maybe if I finish quickly, I'll go back and do another run through Hack 'n' Slash, or see if Morphoplis has any replay value whatsoever.
Gripes about play time aside, Trine was pretty decent. The most surprising thing about the last half was that it turned out to really be the last half. The second 8 levels took almost the exact same amount of time as the first 8 levels. That's some good pacing. Although, it doesn't hurt that while the levels gradually get more dangerous (having hazards like lava and poison), they don't get noticeably more complicated. I did appreciate the last level, though. It's framed as a boss battle, but it was really just more platforming, albeit with an implicit time limit in the form of rising lava.
The story was nothing special. You're tracking down the two counterparts to the Trine, which have accidentally merged and thus created the undead problem as a consequence of their spiritual unbalance. But the explanations for why you are in a particular place at a particular time are hard to follow. I'm not sure it matters, though. At any given moment, your agenda is "get through these spooky and trap-filled ruins" and the story reflects that well enough.
At the very end, the three characters are given epilogues and "live happily ever after," which doesn't mesh well with the sequels, but I guess it would be pretty arrogant for the first game in a series to end on a cliffhanger.
I'm not sure where I'll go from here. I still have about 50xp left to collect (which amounts to less than 1 level's worth of advancement), so I could go back and try for the 100%, but I doubt it will take me 5 hours to do. Maybe if I finish quickly, I'll go back and do another run through Hack 'n' Slash, or see if Morphoplis has any replay value whatsoever.
Trine - 5/20 hours (12.5/20 hours total)
I've now gotten exactly as far in single-player as I did in multiplayer. It took me almost the exact same amount of time and I wound up with slightly more experience points. I guess it's fair to say that Trine works just fine as a single player game.
Some obstacles, particularly the large boss monsters, take a bit more effort to get past, but any savings there is offset by the ease at which I can simply switch to the optimal character to get past simple obstacles. The later games in the series definitely felt more optimized towards the multiplayer experience, so it will be interesting to compare once I get around to playing them. The game would probably be best with three players, each forced to stick with one of the three characters. It would actually be harder than single player, because certain characters are ill-suited to certain obstacles, and thus it would take more teamwork to get past them.
Although, I think it's fair to say that the aspect of multiplayer I miss most is the companionship of my good friend, and the unique challenges posed by the imprecision of communication.
I guess this is the part where I should actually try and explain what Trine is all about. It's a platformer/puzzle game where you can switch between three characters - a wizard who can conjure boxes and planks, but is useless for much else, a thief who is agile and has a ranged attack and grappling hook, and a knight who has a powerful melee attack and a shield that can deflect projectiles. The levels are scattered with various traps and obstacles that can be overcome with one or more of the various characters. The better traps are open-ended enough that you can take multiple different approaches. The best traps are the ones that require a combination of the characters' abilities.
I bought this game primarily for the plot. I thought it would act as an origin story for the heroes and the Trine, a mystical artifact that binds their souls together and appears, in later games, to force them to go on adventures. On that count, I am somewhat disappointed. Basically, there was an undead invasion, but it had not quite arrived at the Astral Academy, employer of the wizard and a place protected by the knight. For whatever reason, during this invasion, the thief decided to rob the Astral Academy while this was all going on, and the three characters just happened to be in the treasure room at roughly the same time. They then activated the Trine and the rest is history.
As of my most recent save, roughly half way through the game, the three are on a quest to undo the binding effect of the Trine. This involves finding its complementary artifacts - one relating to the mind and another to the body - and probably incidentally solving the undead problem along the way.
The characterization of the three is rougher than it is in the sequels, though I can see the shapes of the familiar characters starting to emerge. Their banter and overall group dynamics are the best part of the story, and it makes sense that future games will emphasize it more.
I expect I'll get through the rest of Trine with no real trouble and no real surprises. It will probably slow down in the second half, but I'd be surprised if it takes more than 4 more hours. Let's call it a prediction. My next post will be after beating the game (or becoming so hopeless stuck that I need to vent). We'll see how right I am.
Some obstacles, particularly the large boss monsters, take a bit more effort to get past, but any savings there is offset by the ease at which I can simply switch to the optimal character to get past simple obstacles. The later games in the series definitely felt more optimized towards the multiplayer experience, so it will be interesting to compare once I get around to playing them. The game would probably be best with three players, each forced to stick with one of the three characters. It would actually be harder than single player, because certain characters are ill-suited to certain obstacles, and thus it would take more teamwork to get past them.
Although, I think it's fair to say that the aspect of multiplayer I miss most is the companionship of my good friend, and the unique challenges posed by the imprecision of communication.
I guess this is the part where I should actually try and explain what Trine is all about. It's a platformer/puzzle game where you can switch between three characters - a wizard who can conjure boxes and planks, but is useless for much else, a thief who is agile and has a ranged attack and grappling hook, and a knight who has a powerful melee attack and a shield that can deflect projectiles. The levels are scattered with various traps and obstacles that can be overcome with one or more of the various characters. The better traps are open-ended enough that you can take multiple different approaches. The best traps are the ones that require a combination of the characters' abilities.
I bought this game primarily for the plot. I thought it would act as an origin story for the heroes and the Trine, a mystical artifact that binds their souls together and appears, in later games, to force them to go on adventures. On that count, I am somewhat disappointed. Basically, there was an undead invasion, but it had not quite arrived at the Astral Academy, employer of the wizard and a place protected by the knight. For whatever reason, during this invasion, the thief decided to rob the Astral Academy while this was all going on, and the three characters just happened to be in the treasure room at roughly the same time. They then activated the Trine and the rest is history.
As of my most recent save, roughly half way through the game, the three are on a quest to undo the binding effect of the Trine. This involves finding its complementary artifacts - one relating to the mind and another to the body - and probably incidentally solving the undead problem along the way.
The characterization of the three is rougher than it is in the sequels, though I can see the shapes of the familiar characters starting to emerge. Their banter and overall group dynamics are the best part of the story, and it makes sense that future games will emphasize it more.
I expect I'll get through the rest of Trine with no real trouble and no real surprises. It will probably slow down in the second half, but I'd be surprised if it takes more than 4 more hours. Let's call it a prediction. My next post will be after beating the game (or becoming so hopeless stuck that I need to vent). We'll see how right I am.
Saturday, February 17, 2018
Trine - 2.5 hours (10/20 hours total)
My biggest fear going into Trine was that I would have to solo a game optimized for co-op play. The last time I did that was, I believe, Forced, which drove me to the edge of madness. Luckily, my timing happened to be such that I could play it with my friend, so I could put off facing that particular trial for at least a little while.
Trine itself is a decent platformer. The main challenge comes from collecting these glowing green experience point vials, many of which are placed in deviously hard-to-reach places. I suspect that if you played the game purely to get through the levels, with no regard for xp, it would turn out to be much simpler than it initially appears.
It's fine, though. I like convoluted platforming challenges in the pursuit of collecting doodads. That's like my third or fourth favorite video game activity. I would say it goes: voxel building, optimizing build orders, brawling through hordes of chump enemies, and then convoluted platforming. After that, it's probably dying of thirst, but the list gets real weird from that point on, so who's to say.
Since I don't want to wait another two weeks to finish the game, I'll have to play it on my own from here on out. The big worry here is that there were times in the game where the actions of the other player helped me advance, and while I don't think the game would allow me to play solo if it were impossible to finish, that doesn't mean it will be easy (or even fun).
The thing that gives me hope is that the version of Trine I have is actually the "Enchanted Edition," which upgrades the original Trine to the Trine 2 engine. Out of curiosity, I went back and selected the option that allowed me to play the original, unmodified Trine, and that version of the game doesn't even give you the option of playing multiplayer. This leads me to suspect that Trine was originally a single-player game and that the sequels seized upon its 3 character gimmick to make it a multiplayer experience, and then after that approach proved popular, went back and added multiplayer to the original. If so, then finishing the game on my own shouldn't be too difficult.
(Famous last words, I know.)
Trine itself is a decent platformer. The main challenge comes from collecting these glowing green experience point vials, many of which are placed in deviously hard-to-reach places. I suspect that if you played the game purely to get through the levels, with no regard for xp, it would turn out to be much simpler than it initially appears.
It's fine, though. I like convoluted platforming challenges in the pursuit of collecting doodads. That's like my third or fourth favorite video game activity. I would say it goes: voxel building, optimizing build orders, brawling through hordes of chump enemies, and then convoluted platforming. After that, it's probably dying of thirst, but the list gets real weird from that point on, so who's to say.
Since I don't want to wait another two weeks to finish the game, I'll have to play it on my own from here on out. The big worry here is that there were times in the game where the actions of the other player helped me advance, and while I don't think the game would allow me to play solo if it were impossible to finish, that doesn't mean it will be easy (or even fun).
The thing that gives me hope is that the version of Trine I have is actually the "Enchanted Edition," which upgrades the original Trine to the Trine 2 engine. Out of curiosity, I went back and selected the option that allowed me to play the original, unmodified Trine, and that version of the game doesn't even give you the option of playing multiplayer. This leads me to suspect that Trine was originally a single-player game and that the sequels seized upon its 3 character gimmick to make it a multiplayer experience, and then after that approach proved popular, went back and added multiplayer to the original. If so, then finishing the game on my own shouldn't be too difficult.
(Famous last words, I know.)
Morphopolis - 2.5/20 hours (7.5/20 total)
I figured out the connection between Morphopolis and Hack 'n' Slash - they are both puzzle games centered around bugs. . .
Sorry, I couldn't resist. Actually, Morphopolis is a member of a genre I'd heard about, but never really had any interest in - the hidden object game. Each level is a gorgeously colorful still painting (with some incidental, but not mechanically relevant animation) and the object of the game is to click on various items when prompted by the interface. It's slow-paced, casual, and relaxing. And if you get too frustrated by an especially well-disguised item, there's a hint button . . . which I would not say I abused, but which I probably should have ignored, for no reason other than to squeeze another few minutes out of the game.
Because there's nothing to do in this game but find objects and solve the occasional puzzle. I already have all 13 of the Achievements, because there are no side paths or concealed secrets. In Morphopolis, everything not forbidden is compulsory (okay, okay, that's the last one).
Anyway, I'm a little curious as to how this would stack up against Sakura Spirit in terms of sub-3 hour games I'd convinced myself to play for 20 hours in a row, but I'm nonetheless relieved that I don't have to try (honestly, I think only Portal and possibly Brothers could stand up to 10 playthroughs in a row, and even then it would be a close thing). It's a slight game, but I'd say it's definitely worth the 24 cents I paid for it. Hell, it would be a bargain at twice the price (which is a handy thing, because it's on sale for 51 cents right now).
Sorry, I couldn't resist. Actually, Morphopolis is a member of a genre I'd heard about, but never really had any interest in - the hidden object game. Each level is a gorgeously colorful still painting (with some incidental, but not mechanically relevant animation) and the object of the game is to click on various items when prompted by the interface. It's slow-paced, casual, and relaxing. And if you get too frustrated by an especially well-disguised item, there's a hint button . . . which I would not say I abused, but which I probably should have ignored, for no reason other than to squeeze another few minutes out of the game.
Because there's nothing to do in this game but find objects and solve the occasional puzzle. I already have all 13 of the Achievements, because there are no side paths or concealed secrets. In Morphopolis, everything not forbidden is compulsory (okay, okay, that's the last one).
Anyway, I'm a little curious as to how this would stack up against Sakura Spirit in terms of sub-3 hour games I'd convinced myself to play for 20 hours in a row, but I'm nonetheless relieved that I don't have to try (honestly, I think only Portal and possibly Brothers could stand up to 10 playthroughs in a row, and even then it would be a close thing). It's a slight game, but I'd say it's definitely worth the 24 cents I paid for it. Hell, it would be a bargain at twice the price (which is a handy thing, because it's on sale for 51 cents right now).
Hack 'n' Slash - 5 hours (5/20 hours total)
Confession - I cheated just a little bit. I know, cheating at a game about hacking, how could I? But it was only a little, and only towards the end. The hacking puzzles were getting more and more complicated until they reached a point where I had to go into a library where all of the books represented files associated with various objects in the game. I had to find the right book and then read it to alter different aspects of the final dungeon's puzzles. Most of the time, I was able to figure out what I needed on my own, but on about three separate occasions, I was so confused that I needed to look at a walkthrough to see if I was on the right track. It was usually pretty obvious in retrospect, but I hate being thwarted, so I regret nothing.
The perhaps overly technical ending aside, I had a lot of fun with this game. A lot of puzzle games, even if they're of different genres, have similar types of puzzles. Move a block to a pressure sensitive platform. Raise or lower water levels to access new areas. Unscramble a mixed-up password. Hack 'n' Slash had some of these, but it also had challenges that were genuinely unique. At one point, I had to move a platform that was programmed to undo any attempt to move it, so I had to go into the platform's logic and change a loop command from +1 to +0.
And that's not even getting into the late-game weirdness where my wrong solutions were as likely to break the game as leave me stranded. For example, there's this one chamber where you've got a countdown timer and if it reaches 0, the game crashes. I thought I was being really clever by disabling the timer, but it turned out that I just eliminated the timer's display. It still counted down at the same speed, but I could no longer see it. Ha!
The plot of the game is that a guy claiming to be a wizard is using his knowledge of hacking to hold the kingdom in thrall, and you have to solve various hacking puzzles to stop him. The game makes a special point of reminding you that he's not really a wizard, but the funny thing is that I've never played a game where your character's special abilities have felt more like magic. Most of the tweaks you can make are pretty simple and likely anticipated by the game's designers, but even at the beginning, when your options are limited, they feel open-ended in ways that other magic systems do not. Towards the end, when you start to get the most powerful tools, it's almost scary how much power you have.
The main flaw with Hack 'n' Slash is that it's not quite educational enough for how educational it is. This is largely a critique of the last hour or so, where you're given a dizzying amount of information that a layman like myself is ill-equipped to make use of. I think if the game held your hand more with these complex sections, it would be a fun way to learn about programming. As it is, I didn't learn much by following a guide and would likely have not learned much more through trial and error (at least not before I gave up in frustration). Still, I can imagine that this game might be a useful tool for an experienced person to introduce a novice to some basic programming concepts.
Overall, I'm happy with my purchase here. I think, hypothetically, I could have spent 20 hours trying to find new things to break, but it would not have been a productive use of my time. It was a very interesting twist on the puzzle/adventure genre and I'd definitely be interested in a sequel, but for now I'm content that a single playthrough has shown me the bulk of what Hack 'n' Slash has to offer.
The perhaps overly technical ending aside, I had a lot of fun with this game. A lot of puzzle games, even if they're of different genres, have similar types of puzzles. Move a block to a pressure sensitive platform. Raise or lower water levels to access new areas. Unscramble a mixed-up password. Hack 'n' Slash had some of these, but it also had challenges that were genuinely unique. At one point, I had to move a platform that was programmed to undo any attempt to move it, so I had to go into the platform's logic and change a loop command from +1 to +0.
And that's not even getting into the late-game weirdness where my wrong solutions were as likely to break the game as leave me stranded. For example, there's this one chamber where you've got a countdown timer and if it reaches 0, the game crashes. I thought I was being really clever by disabling the timer, but it turned out that I just eliminated the timer's display. It still counted down at the same speed, but I could no longer see it. Ha!
The plot of the game is that a guy claiming to be a wizard is using his knowledge of hacking to hold the kingdom in thrall, and you have to solve various hacking puzzles to stop him. The game makes a special point of reminding you that he's not really a wizard, but the funny thing is that I've never played a game where your character's special abilities have felt more like magic. Most of the tweaks you can make are pretty simple and likely anticipated by the game's designers, but even at the beginning, when your options are limited, they feel open-ended in ways that other magic systems do not. Towards the end, when you start to get the most powerful tools, it's almost scary how much power you have.
The main flaw with Hack 'n' Slash is that it's not quite educational enough for how educational it is. This is largely a critique of the last hour or so, where you're given a dizzying amount of information that a layman like myself is ill-equipped to make use of. I think if the game held your hand more with these complex sections, it would be a fun way to learn about programming. As it is, I didn't learn much by following a guide and would likely have not learned much more through trial and error (at least not before I gave up in frustration). Still, I can imagine that this game might be a useful tool for an experienced person to introduce a novice to some basic programming concepts.
Overall, I'm happy with my purchase here. I think, hypothetically, I could have spent 20 hours trying to find new things to break, but it would not have been a productive use of my time. It was a very interesting twist on the puzzle/adventure genre and I'd definitely be interested in a sequel, but for now I'm content that a single playthrough has shown me the bulk of what Hack 'n' Slash has to offer.
Friday, February 16, 2018
Hack 'n' Slash, Morphopolis, and Trine - Initial Thoughts
I know, I know - this is my most spurious bundle to date. These games have almost nothing in common, not even if you squint (and believe me, I've been squinting). However, looking at the Steam reviews, Hack 'n' Slash is sub-5 hours, Morphopolis is sub-5 hours, and Trine, well, Trine I could probably do 20 hours with for no reason other than the futility of trying to get 100% on single-player in a game explicitly designed for co-op, but, realistically, it's a sub-10 hour game because who am I kidding?
I'm not even going to attempt a rationalization here. I could play these games multiple times each to get 20 hours in all three of them, but I don't want to. This isn't a Consortium situation, where the game is only 3-4 hours long, but there's something new to discover with multiple playthroughs. These are games that are designed to be short. I wouldn't gain anything by spreading them out, and the games wouldn't gain anything by my spreading them out (look at what's happened to the poor, inoffensive Stronghold series from my forcing myself to play it for 120 hours).
Anyway, no excuses. This is purely a time- and sanity-preserving measure. So let's break it down.
Hack 'n' Slash I bought because its central pitch of hacking the game while you're playing it sounded fun and innovative. It's a little worrying that I could potentially introduce game-breaking bugs this way, but I admire the audacity in even presenting that as an option.
Morphopolis I bought because it looks pretty. That's literally all I know about it.
Trine has the goofiest story of the three. My friend Daniel and I like to play co-op games on Saturday mornings. One weekend, he bought me Trine 3. We played it almost all the way to the very end, but got stymied by the final boss. Some time later, he bought me Trine 2, and we played that one all the way through. And it was in the midst of playing Trine 2 that I started to feel a familiar itch - I had every entry in a trilogy except the first one. The Trine series didn't have much of a story, but I'd missed out on the beginning nonetheless. Since it was less than 2 dollars, I just said "fuck it" and decided to add it to the list.
Despite the shamelessness of treating these three very different games as one, I'm actually feeling pretty good about this. I imagine I'll blow through Hack 'n' Slash and Trine is pretty much a known quality. The only one that makes me even slightly nervous is Morphopolis, but what's the worst case scenario here? Even if it sucks, at least it will be short.
I'm not even going to attempt a rationalization here. I could play these games multiple times each to get 20 hours in all three of them, but I don't want to. This isn't a Consortium situation, where the game is only 3-4 hours long, but there's something new to discover with multiple playthroughs. These are games that are designed to be short. I wouldn't gain anything by spreading them out, and the games wouldn't gain anything by my spreading them out (look at what's happened to the poor, inoffensive Stronghold series from my forcing myself to play it for 120 hours).
Anyway, no excuses. This is purely a time- and sanity-preserving measure. So let's break it down.
Hack 'n' Slash I bought because its central pitch of hacking the game while you're playing it sounded fun and innovative. It's a little worrying that I could potentially introduce game-breaking bugs this way, but I admire the audacity in even presenting that as an option.
Morphopolis I bought because it looks pretty. That's literally all I know about it.
Trine has the goofiest story of the three. My friend Daniel and I like to play co-op games on Saturday mornings. One weekend, he bought me Trine 3. We played it almost all the way to the very end, but got stymied by the final boss. Some time later, he bought me Trine 2, and we played that one all the way through. And it was in the midst of playing Trine 2 that I started to feel a familiar itch - I had every entry in a trilogy except the first one. The Trine series didn't have much of a story, but I'd missed out on the beginning nonetheless. Since it was less than 2 dollars, I just said "fuck it" and decided to add it to the list.
Despite the shamelessness of treating these three very different games as one, I'm actually feeling pretty good about this. I imagine I'll blow through Hack 'n' Slash and Trine is pretty much a known quality. The only one that makes me even slightly nervous is Morphopolis, but what's the worst case scenario here? Even if it sucks, at least it will be short.
Stronghold Legends - 20/20 hours
I discovered the hard way that the forum post that told me I could bypass the population cap by making a custom map was, in fact, referring to Stronghold 2. I first found out about this problem by playing free-build for a couple of hours on a special "archipelago" map I made especially for the purpose. That dispirited me, so I went and played the campaign mode for another couple of hours. Then I had a brainstorm - maybe they meant you could bypass the hovel cap by making a custom map with a bunch of hovels already in place.
So I fired up the map editor once more, and discovered that even on a custom map that was not currently part of a game, I could only place 15 hovels. Except . . . if I used the estate marking tool to divide my map into two different estates, I could place 15 hovels in each estate. Then, if I used the tool a second time to merge the two estates back into one, I could have a total of 30 hovels in a single estate. And if I repeated the process, I could increase my hovels arbitrarily.
My next move was to go into map editor mode and just create my perfect castle. It was huge and symmetrical and had living space for hundreds of residents, as well as a massive industrial output. Its only flaw was that it was empty, devoid of life and activity. But I could solve that by importing it into free-build mode, which I did. Only to discover that my dozens of hovels did not change the total population cap. 128 was my maximum number of citizens, and that's just the way it was always going to be.
After that, I just dithered about with my "dark forest" map for the remaining three hours. I can't say I won a decisive victory over the trees, though. I think I just put too many of them in there. Even after hours of clearing, my town was still too confined to build all of the advanced structures.
Overall, I'd say that if you were going to get just one Stronghold game, Stronghold Legends is a decent contender, but I was unable to manhandle it into a city-builder, so I'm going to have to pretend to hate it for awhile.
So I fired up the map editor once more, and discovered that even on a custom map that was not currently part of a game, I could only place 15 hovels. Except . . . if I used the estate marking tool to divide my map into two different estates, I could place 15 hovels in each estate. Then, if I used the tool a second time to merge the two estates back into one, I could have a total of 30 hovels in a single estate. And if I repeated the process, I could increase my hovels arbitrarily.
My next move was to go into map editor mode and just create my perfect castle. It was huge and symmetrical and had living space for hundreds of residents, as well as a massive industrial output. Its only flaw was that it was empty, devoid of life and activity. But I could solve that by importing it into free-build mode, which I did. Only to discover that my dozens of hovels did not change the total population cap. 128 was my maximum number of citizens, and that's just the way it was always going to be.
After that, I just dithered about with my "dark forest" map for the remaining three hours. I can't say I won a decisive victory over the trees, though. I think I just put too many of them in there. Even after hours of clearing, my town was still too confined to build all of the advanced structures.
Overall, I'd say that if you were going to get just one Stronghold game, Stronghold Legends is a decent contender, but I was unable to manhandle it into a city-builder, so I'm going to have to pretend to hate it for awhile.
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Stronghold Legends - 10/20 hours
At around hour six I made the decision to abandon war and exclusively play the free build mode. I should have known this moment was coming, considering my experience with the other games, but there's a part of me that just has to entertain the idea of playing these games "correctly."
Things in free build appeared to be going well for a couple of hours. My settlement was expanding. I was producing tons of surplus food and enough liquor and religion to keep my people happy at a high tax rate. Then, suddenly and without warning, I hit a cap on the number of hovels I could build. Since hovels determine your maximum civilian population, that also served as a cap on the number of agricultural and industrial buildings I could support. 128 peasants was my absolute maximum.
I searched online to find a solution (or at least an explanation) for this problem, and while nobody could tell me why it exists, I did learn that the cap does not apply on custom maps. So I spent a couple of hours playing around with the map editor, trying to create something I think will be enjoyable.
The next phase of my time with Stronghold Legends will be free build in "the Dark Forest," a map filled with far too many trees. My theory here is that the barrier they pose to expansion and settlement will be almost like a compelling infrastructure challenge.
I guess that's just who I am. Given a game where I can take control of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and face off against giants, dragons, and evil sorcerers, I'd rather fight against some trees. I choose not to think of this as cowardice, but as a down to earth practicality and concern with material prosperity.
Yep, no fear at all . . .
Things in free build appeared to be going well for a couple of hours. My settlement was expanding. I was producing tons of surplus food and enough liquor and religion to keep my people happy at a high tax rate. Then, suddenly and without warning, I hit a cap on the number of hovels I could build. Since hovels determine your maximum civilian population, that also served as a cap on the number of agricultural and industrial buildings I could support. 128 peasants was my absolute maximum.
I searched online to find a solution (or at least an explanation) for this problem, and while nobody could tell me why it exists, I did learn that the cap does not apply on custom maps. So I spent a couple of hours playing around with the map editor, trying to create something I think will be enjoyable.
The next phase of my time with Stronghold Legends will be free build in "the Dark Forest," a map filled with far too many trees. My theory here is that the barrier they pose to expansion and settlement will be almost like a compelling infrastructure challenge.
I guess that's just who I am. Given a game where I can take control of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and face off against giants, dragons, and evil sorcerers, I'd rather fight against some trees. I choose not to think of this as cowardice, but as a down to earth practicality and concern with material prosperity.
Yep, no fear at all . . .
Monday, February 12, 2018
Stronghold Legends - 5/20 hours
Stronghold Legends may well be the best game in the series. The addition of special units gives you much more flexible tactics on both attack and defense, and town management is streamlined, eliminating many of the more tedious chores that Stronghold 2 saddled you with.
Which makes it all the more tragic that I'm playing this game fourth, because I can't stand it. I'm just not interested in anything it has to offer. I don't want to be King Arthur. I don't want to engage in siege warfare. I don't want to build a fantasy medieval city. Without the sewage and vermin management of the previous game, there really isn't much of a point.
I thought taking a two game break would help me clear my head. All it did was make me more accustomed to games that had some hook that made me interested. I've already exhausted all the fun I'm going to get out of this series and there are still 55 hours left to go.
If you've been following the blog since the beginning, you may remember that one of the first things I revealed to you is that I don't like RTS games. If you've been paying especially close attention, you may realize that this dislike has rarely been born out in practice. About half the RTS games I've played so far, I've come to grudgingly respect, and even passably enjoy.
But the Stronghold series is reminding me why suspicion is my baseline attitude towards the genre. Everything you build is constantly under threat. And if you take the time to focus on sustainability or aesthetics, your faster enemies will destroy you. And even if you're in a position to win, you have to do so by destroying something another player has built. And you must always be clicking. There's no stillness to it, and precious little beauty, and everything functional is a weapon. I just want to spy, omnisciently, on a miniature manor economy, thriving in times of peace, is that so much to ask?
Anyway, I have to figure out some way to get through this. Some alternate set of goals. I could commit to beating the campaign, but I've got a super thin skin about that just now. Because defeat means starting to build all over from scratch, the difference between "loss that hardens my resolve to do better" and "loss that makes me want to quit in disgust" is not nearly large enough to keep me going.
I think I may have to draw on some deeper reserves of strength. Remind myself that if I can finish this before Friday, I'll be ahead of schedule on my goal for the year. Focus on the fact that I have only two more Stronghold games to go. It is ridiculously melodramatic of me to pretend that playing a video game that I'm slightly less than interested in constitutes some kind of epic trial of endurance, but if that's what it takes to get me through the day, that's what I'm going to do.
Which makes it all the more tragic that I'm playing this game fourth, because I can't stand it. I'm just not interested in anything it has to offer. I don't want to be King Arthur. I don't want to engage in siege warfare. I don't want to build a fantasy medieval city. Without the sewage and vermin management of the previous game, there really isn't much of a point.
I thought taking a two game break would help me clear my head. All it did was make me more accustomed to games that had some hook that made me interested. I've already exhausted all the fun I'm going to get out of this series and there are still 55 hours left to go.
If you've been following the blog since the beginning, you may remember that one of the first things I revealed to you is that I don't like RTS games. If you've been paying especially close attention, you may realize that this dislike has rarely been born out in practice. About half the RTS games I've played so far, I've come to grudgingly respect, and even passably enjoy.
But the Stronghold series is reminding me why suspicion is my baseline attitude towards the genre. Everything you build is constantly under threat. And if you take the time to focus on sustainability or aesthetics, your faster enemies will destroy you. And even if you're in a position to win, you have to do so by destroying something another player has built. And you must always be clicking. There's no stillness to it, and precious little beauty, and everything functional is a weapon. I just want to spy, omnisciently, on a miniature manor economy, thriving in times of peace, is that so much to ask?
Anyway, I have to figure out some way to get through this. Some alternate set of goals. I could commit to beating the campaign, but I've got a super thin skin about that just now. Because defeat means starting to build all over from scratch, the difference between "loss that hardens my resolve to do better" and "loss that makes me want to quit in disgust" is not nearly large enough to keep me going.
I think I may have to draw on some deeper reserves of strength. Remind myself that if I can finish this before Friday, I'll be ahead of schedule on my goal for the year. Focus on the fact that I have only two more Stronghold games to go. It is ridiculously melodramatic of me to pretend that playing a video game that I'm slightly less than interested in constitutes some kind of epic trial of endurance, but if that's what it takes to get me through the day, that's what I'm going to do.
Saturday, February 10, 2018
Hell Yeah! - 20/20 hours
Hell Yeah! made the curious decision to have platforming challenges that relied on moving platforms and traps, but which also give less than a second worth of leeway. As a result, sometimes my missions would fail before they even started. Nonetheless, they were short, so I was able to finish all 27 in less than 2 and a half hours. I spent my remaining 40 minutes or so trying to finish all the DLC missions, but I stalled on the ones that required me to dodge moving, one-hit-kill sawblades. While getting 100% was not as impossible as I imagined, it was almost as unfun as I feared.
Overall, Hell Yeah! was an easy game to get 20 hours out of. It wasn't a great game to play, but it's clear that the designers had a lot of fun making the 101 different major monsters, and the "cute" level had a really catchy theme song.
(Because if I have to have stuck in my head, so do you!)
I think the main reason I was able to get through it so fast is because it was completely unlike Stronghold, and thus my mind was keyed to appreciate it more. It was good to stretch my platforming muscles again, even if my character did slide around too much and the controls sometimes got in the way with their unnecessary fiddliness.
It wasn't terrible, though. As much as I complained about the side missions, and the disappointing uselessness of the Island (made all the worse because I still think it was a neat idea), the core of the game was adequate. Which is to say that the mistakes it made were persistent, but small. Forcing you to do a QTE after defeating every major enemy could have worked if all 101 were unique. The imprecise jumping and aiming were only a major impediment in the most unforgiving circumstances - in the main game you usually had some margin for error. The humor was just a little bit too juvenile.
Look, I got the game for free and it was worth every penny. Yes, I'd rather be playing Super Mario World, but you can say that about most things. Hell Yeah! falls into that category of games that I do not regret owning, but am perfectly content to never play again.
Overall, Hell Yeah! was an easy game to get 20 hours out of. It wasn't a great game to play, but it's clear that the designers had a lot of fun making the 101 different major monsters, and the "cute" level had a really catchy theme song.
(Because if I have to have stuck in my head, so do you!)
I think the main reason I was able to get through it so fast is because it was completely unlike Stronghold, and thus my mind was keyed to appreciate it more. It was good to stretch my platforming muscles again, even if my character did slide around too much and the controls sometimes got in the way with their unnecessary fiddliness.
It wasn't terrible, though. As much as I complained about the side missions, and the disappointing uselessness of the Island (made all the worse because I still think it was a neat idea), the core of the game was adequate. Which is to say that the mistakes it made were persistent, but small. Forcing you to do a QTE after defeating every major enemy could have worked if all 101 were unique. The imprecise jumping and aiming were only a major impediment in the most unforgiving circumstances - in the main game you usually had some margin for error. The humor was just a little bit too juvenile.
Look, I got the game for free and it was worth every penny. Yes, I'd rather be playing Super Mario World, but you can say that about most things. Hell Yeah! falls into that category of games that I do not regret owning, but am perfectly content to never play again.
Hell Yeah - 16/20 hours
I beat Hell Yeah! a second time, which isn't too surprising, considering that it took me 8 hours the first time. Eight times two equals sixteen. But that's not counting in the three hours I spent getting the "jackpot" Achievement. It's a little distressing. Hell Yeah! isn't a bad game, but it's not a good one, either. It's not really fun enough to sustain three consecutive playthroughs.
I suppose I could try and tackle the side missions and go for a true 100% completion, but that's . . . problematic. See, every platforming game with a hint of ambition sooner or later gets the same idea - what if we gated collectibles behind optional levels which require an incredible degree of precision platforming - and in a great game, those challenges are often the best part. Unfortunately for Hell Yeah!, is hasn't really earned the right to torment me for the sake of completionism.
I don't know how to explain it, but, well, take "Luigi's Purple Coins," a Super Mario Galaxy level that has managed to impress itself upon my consciousness as a red haze of fury. I devoted the better part of an afternoon to beating that level. It took me something like 30-40 retries. But I never even considered giving up. Each defeat merely hardened my resolve.
Surely, part of this can be contributed to the fact that I was much younger then, and had more patience for doing pointless tasks that made me miserable, but that's not all of it. The thing about "Luigi's Purple Coins" is that the previous hours of Super Mario Galaxy are a tutorial for how to beat it. Every aspect of the challenge is something you've seen before, just recombined into a new and more terrible form. It's fair. After every failure, you can do a post-mortem and it's usually very clear where and when you made your mistake. Thus, you can always go in with a plan. All you have to do is a series of things you've individually done a hundred times before, simply executed to perfection without a single mistake.
That's not quite the way it is with Hell Yeah!'s side missions. They are usually extremely short (around 30 seconds or so), giving no room for error, but the challenges themselves are not carefully curated. You've got to run through a section of the level, and if the traps just happen to be in the start position, you'll be fine, but if they are midway through their cycles, it's impossible. You don't have time to wait for them to reset and trying to jump on them prematurely is a recipe for suicide. Or you'll have to navigate a harmless section of the level, collecting coins, but the time limit is so strict that if you don't do it frame-perfect, you don't get anywhere near the goal, and it's not clear at all where you made a mistake. Hell Yeah!'s controls aren't the best to start off with. Trying to play the game as if it were a finely balanced platformer just feels like a waste of time.
I don't know what I'm going to do next. The sensible thing would be to just start the whole game over again. Four hours should be just enough to beat it a third time. The only problem with that is my pride. There's this whole section of the game I'd just be writing off. My excuse is that it's not fun and I have no interest in playing it, but what if the truth is that I'm simply very bad at it and don't want to face up to the fact? Does that even matter? Should I be playing games for pleasure, or to improve my skill and experience every facet of what they have to offer?
I suppose I could try and tackle the side missions and go for a true 100% completion, but that's . . . problematic. See, every platforming game with a hint of ambition sooner or later gets the same idea - what if we gated collectibles behind optional levels which require an incredible degree of precision platforming - and in a great game, those challenges are often the best part. Unfortunately for Hell Yeah!, is hasn't really earned the right to torment me for the sake of completionism.
I don't know how to explain it, but, well, take "Luigi's Purple Coins," a Super Mario Galaxy level that has managed to impress itself upon my consciousness as a red haze of fury. I devoted the better part of an afternoon to beating that level. It took me something like 30-40 retries. But I never even considered giving up. Each defeat merely hardened my resolve.
Surely, part of this can be contributed to the fact that I was much younger then, and had more patience for doing pointless tasks that made me miserable, but that's not all of it. The thing about "Luigi's Purple Coins" is that the previous hours of Super Mario Galaxy are a tutorial for how to beat it. Every aspect of the challenge is something you've seen before, just recombined into a new and more terrible form. It's fair. After every failure, you can do a post-mortem and it's usually very clear where and when you made your mistake. Thus, you can always go in with a plan. All you have to do is a series of things you've individually done a hundred times before, simply executed to perfection without a single mistake.
That's not quite the way it is with Hell Yeah!'s side missions. They are usually extremely short (around 30 seconds or so), giving no room for error, but the challenges themselves are not carefully curated. You've got to run through a section of the level, and if the traps just happen to be in the start position, you'll be fine, but if they are midway through their cycles, it's impossible. You don't have time to wait for them to reset and trying to jump on them prematurely is a recipe for suicide. Or you'll have to navigate a harmless section of the level, collecting coins, but the time limit is so strict that if you don't do it frame-perfect, you don't get anywhere near the goal, and it's not clear at all where you made a mistake. Hell Yeah!'s controls aren't the best to start off with. Trying to play the game as if it were a finely balanced platformer just feels like a waste of time.
I don't know what I'm going to do next. The sensible thing would be to just start the whole game over again. Four hours should be just enough to beat it a third time. The only problem with that is my pride. There's this whole section of the game I'd just be writing off. My excuse is that it's not fun and I have no interest in playing it, but what if the truth is that I'm simply very bad at it and don't want to face up to the fact? Does that even matter? Should I be playing games for pleasure, or to improve my skill and experience every facet of what they have to offer?
Thursday, February 8, 2018
Hell Yeah! - 8/20 hours
I don't have 100% completion, but I did finish the entire main plot of Hell Yeah! There is a lot about it I don't understand. It's set in hell. The mani character is the Prince of Hell, who is about to take over for his father, the recently deceased(?) King of Hell. So why is he a rabbit? Why does he have a spinning disc that drills through stone? He's on a quest to recover compromising pictures of himself in the bath with a rubber duck, but such low stakes imply that the game is meant for children and that belies the often gruesome violence that you encounter at basically every turn. And what's up with the toxic masculinity out of nowhere? The game begins with a newspaper clipping that says "The Prince is a Pussy" and it ends with the headline "Prince Still A Pussy." Who is the target audience for this game?
The game itself is . . . okay. I only cursed at it once, which is good for a platformer, but there's an indefinable alchemy that goes into making a great platforming game, and Hell Yeah! just doesn't have it. Maybe it's the QTEs that pop up every time you defeat a major enemy. The animations are funny (if, at times, needlessly gory), but after I've just fought your way through a spike-filled maze and subdued a challenging mini-boss, the last thing I want to do is play a rhythm mini-game to determine whether all that effort was worth it or not. I wouldn't say they add nothing to the game, but like so much else in Hell Yeah!, they give with one hand and take away with the other.
Like The Island, a potentially interesting feature that just sort of wound up being half-baked. The best part of this game is the unique design of the 100 major enemies you have to track down and defeat. So the knowledge that after you kill them, they are not gone forever, but reincarnated on a mystical island prison is pretty welcome. I'm not normally a sadist, but I like the idea of shipping all the boss monsters off to a labor camp, where they can mine for money and items to aid me on my adventure. It's cruel, but I am a demon prince of hell. Unfortunately, it's not an idea that has much payoff. In the roughly 7 and a half hours since I unlocked The Island, I only received one health item, which didn't do me much good because I was already at full health when I got it. In the end, the only thing I got out of the Island was a vague sense of satisfaction at seeing all of my enemies in a conga-line procession going down into a mine. That's not nothing, but it could be more.
Overall, Hell Yeah!'s main virtue is that it is not entirely unpleasant to sit down and play for 8 hours in a single night, and it was not so off-putting that I dread starting over. Technically, I still have a bunch of optional side missions to complete, but since half of the ones I've already tried have required an annoying degree of precision, I'll probably just let them be.
The game itself is . . . okay. I only cursed at it once, which is good for a platformer, but there's an indefinable alchemy that goes into making a great platforming game, and Hell Yeah! just doesn't have it. Maybe it's the QTEs that pop up every time you defeat a major enemy. The animations are funny (if, at times, needlessly gory), but after I've just fought your way through a spike-filled maze and subdued a challenging mini-boss, the last thing I want to do is play a rhythm mini-game to determine whether all that effort was worth it or not. I wouldn't say they add nothing to the game, but like so much else in Hell Yeah!, they give with one hand and take away with the other.
Like The Island, a potentially interesting feature that just sort of wound up being half-baked. The best part of this game is the unique design of the 100 major enemies you have to track down and defeat. So the knowledge that after you kill them, they are not gone forever, but reincarnated on a mystical island prison is pretty welcome. I'm not normally a sadist, but I like the idea of shipping all the boss monsters off to a labor camp, where they can mine for money and items to aid me on my adventure. It's cruel, but I am a demon prince of hell. Unfortunately, it's not an idea that has much payoff. In the roughly 7 and a half hours since I unlocked The Island, I only received one health item, which didn't do me much good because I was already at full health when I got it. In the end, the only thing I got out of the Island was a vague sense of satisfaction at seeing all of my enemies in a conga-line procession going down into a mine. That's not nothing, but it could be more.
Overall, Hell Yeah!'s main virtue is that it is not entirely unpleasant to sit down and play for 8 hours in a single night, and it was not so off-putting that I dread starting over. Technically, I still have a bunch of optional side missions to complete, but since half of the ones I've already tried have required an annoying degree of precision, I'll probably just let them be.
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
Hell Yeah! - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
Hell Yeah! is a crazy action-adventure platformer... In Hell.
You are Ash, a devil rabbit and the prince of Hell. When some jerk finds it funny to post your secret intimate photos all over the Hell-ternet, you get VERY angry.
Time to seek out the bastard and destroy him once and for all. While you’re at it, why not use this incredible journey to kill everybody else?
It’s you against all Hell. It’s Hell Yeah!
Previous Playtime
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
A friend told me about a free giveaway. This and Golden Axe, and I was still very naive. I thought "wow, how often are video games given away for free?" Since then, I have passed up the opportunity to get much more interesting games. Literally the only thing that drew me to this was the price.
Expectations And Prior Experience
It's a cute, cartoony platformer, so it will probably be fine. I don't care for the title, but what does that prove? The Steam reviews list it as being pretty short, which is a real pain after my most recent game, but multiple playthroughs is much less onerous in a platformer, where there is an increasing level of skill and precision, than it is in a text-heavy adventure game, where it's just sitting passively and listening to the same damned story you've heard four times before.
Let's hope I can get through this with a minimum of bitterness.
Hell Yeah! is a crazy action-adventure platformer... In Hell.
You are Ash, a devil rabbit and the prince of Hell. When some jerk finds it funny to post your secret intimate photos all over the Hell-ternet, you get VERY angry.
Time to seek out the bastard and destroy him once and for all. While you’re at it, why not use this incredible journey to kill everybody else?
It’s you against all Hell. It’s Hell Yeah!
Previous Playtime
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
A friend told me about a free giveaway. This and Golden Axe, and I was still very naive. I thought "wow, how often are video games given away for free?" Since then, I have passed up the opportunity to get much more interesting games. Literally the only thing that drew me to this was the price.
Expectations And Prior Experience
It's a cute, cartoony platformer, so it will probably be fine. I don't care for the title, but what does that prove? The Steam reviews list it as being pretty short, which is a real pain after my most recent game, but multiple playthroughs is much less onerous in a platformer, where there is an increasing level of skill and precision, than it is in a text-heavy adventure game, where it's just sitting passively and listening to the same damned story you've heard four times before.
Let's hope I can get through this with a minimum of bitterness.
Consortium - 20/20 hours
The positive opinion playthrough turned out to be much easier than the negative opinion playthrough, which is nice. I didn't learn any new information from it, because I'd had positive opinions from every character in the game at one point or another in my first three runs, but it was a high note to end my time with Consortium on . . . or it would have been, had I not finished it at the 17 hour mark.
That left me with a tough decision. I had just enough time for one more quick jaunt through the whole plot, but playing the game six times in as many days would have been almost entirely pointless. The only thing I had left to get was a handful of incidental Steam Achievements.
So I did something kind of risky. I just went back to my previous saves and loaded files for right around when the guide said the achievements were available. Because one of them involved playing through 21 levels of the training simulator, they took longer to get than I might have feared. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite long enough. I wound up at 19 1/2 hours with 37/39 Achievements. Since the last two looked actively unfun (keep all the civilians alive in the training simulator and end the game with neutral attitudes from every character), I decided to just grit my teeth and finish the game again from right where I earned that final Achievement.
Consortium is a fine game, but I highly recommend that you not play it five and a half times in a row. I was seeing new material almost to the very end of my 20 hours, but it was small and incidental, and nothing compared to the large bulk of the dialogue that I had to sit through every game.
I didn't care for the "traveler from another dimension" subplot. I thought it added nothing in particular to the story (except for the revelation at the end of an optional dialogue chain that suggested the previous inhabitant of Bishop 6's body was a second mole), and I actively resented it every time the ARG was mentioned. However, putting that aside, I was still interested in seeing what happens in the sequel, even after so many repetitions. That's a real credit to the writing, characters, and worldbuilding (although I am extending some trust on the supposed identity of the Churchill Tower terrorist - it had better not be as stupid as it looks). The main reason I don't just buy and play the sequel right now is that it's still in early access. I also worry that there might not be a chapter 3 and, of course, I don't want to commit to playing it for 20 hours. But two or three years from now, I will definitely be diving into the further adventures of the Consortium . . . unless I forget.
That left me with a tough decision. I had just enough time for one more quick jaunt through the whole plot, but playing the game six times in as many days would have been almost entirely pointless. The only thing I had left to get was a handful of incidental Steam Achievements.
So I did something kind of risky. I just went back to my previous saves and loaded files for right around when the guide said the achievements were available. Because one of them involved playing through 21 levels of the training simulator, they took longer to get than I might have feared. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite long enough. I wound up at 19 1/2 hours with 37/39 Achievements. Since the last two looked actively unfun (keep all the civilians alive in the training simulator and end the game with neutral attitudes from every character), I decided to just grit my teeth and finish the game again from right where I earned that final Achievement.
Consortium is a fine game, but I highly recommend that you not play it five and a half times in a row. I was seeing new material almost to the very end of my 20 hours, but it was small and incidental, and nothing compared to the large bulk of the dialogue that I had to sit through every game.
I didn't care for the "traveler from another dimension" subplot. I thought it added nothing in particular to the story (except for the revelation at the end of an optional dialogue chain that suggested the previous inhabitant of Bishop 6's body was a second mole), and I actively resented it every time the ARG was mentioned. However, putting that aside, I was still interested in seeing what happens in the sequel, even after so many repetitions. That's a real credit to the writing, characters, and worldbuilding (although I am extending some trust on the supposed identity of the Churchill Tower terrorist - it had better not be as stupid as it looks). The main reason I don't just buy and play the sequel right now is that it's still in early access. I also worry that there might not be a chapter 3 and, of course, I don't want to commit to playing it for 20 hours. But two or three years from now, I will definitely be diving into the further adventures of the Consortium . . . unless I forget.
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Consortium - 13/20 hours
The "negative opinion" playthrough was my longest one yet. I had to save and reload several times. It turns out it's much too easy to get someone to like you by accident. At one point, I threatened to kill someone and it raised his attitude by +3 points. Granted, it was a villainous warlord, but other, less cartoonish characters had similarly unpredictable reactions. At another point, I had to reload and then completely avoid meeting a certain character because I could not figure out any way to offend him. Luckily, this involved running out in the middle of a meeting with the leader of the Consortium, so it wasn't too out of character for my irresponsible rogue agent. In the end, I wound up getting drummed out of the organization entirely.
I will give Consortium this, though - playing as an asshole did change how the game felt. It was definitely more of a thriller, with a lot more hostility and suspicion. Of course, much of that extra negativity was directed at me, but you can't have everything. My main disappointment with the asshole playthrough is that the pivotal moment of the whole story, and the most noir-ish moment in a game that is, ostensibly, a murder mystery, is one you can only witness if you fail to rescue another character earlier in the game. It wouldn't be so bad, except that the rescue mission is so easy that you'd never stumble upon it accidentally. You literally just have to walk into a room, suffer a slight bit of damage, and press the action button. In order to fail it, I had to turn around and leave as soon as I entered the chamber.
Which is a shame, because it would have been a thrilling mind-screw if I'd encountered the scene organically. One of the ship's engineers tells you some secret information and then suddenly the oxygen starts to leave the room. With his dying breath, he accuses the ship's pilot, a man who is consistently portrayed as a technical genius, but who is having a suspicious amount of trouble overriding the door lock, of being in league with the enemy. It's a great mislead, because the pilot was very aggressively friendly, and thus a good suspect for the end game, but the only reason he fails is because he's injured by the accident you failed to save him from earlier in the game. If you first see the scene as I did, after a successful rescue, the pilot manages to save the day in the nick of time and any suspicion you have of him is immediately dispelled.
I guess what I learned from this playthrough is that the content for a good mystery is there, in the game, but it's too well hidden. Consortium doesn't go out of its way to toy with you. It doesn't give you superfluous information and let you draw wrong conclusions from your bad assumptions. Instead, it requires you to deliberately search out confusion. For example, this was the first runthrough where I actually found the evidence that implicates the true traitor, but it was in a cupboard and by the time you're able to find it, the game has already trained you to ignore cupboards by having literally every other container in the game contain nothing of interest.
I'm guessing it's an artifact of Consortium being an indie game. With a game like Skyrim, there's probably a person whose only job is to go through every map and ensure that all the cupboards have a setting-appropriate amount of clutter and also the occasional useful potion or unique outfit. Or maybe there's an algorithm that does it. Either way, they had the resources to put in plot-irrelevant discoveries. A smaller production would probably need to be more parsimonious with its dead-ends.
If I were playing this game purely for pleasure, I think this is where I'd walk away. I still have 13 achievements to acquire, and several of them are plot-related, but I think I've seen 90 percent or more of the dialogue, and I'm right at the cusp where the satisfaction of learning new things is perfectly balance by the annoyance of having to watch almost everything for the fifth time. So, of course, I'm bound by honor to do violence to my memories of Consortium by repeating it until I can't stand to look at it any more. I blame Interdimensional Games. They should have made it 5 hours instead of 4.
I will give Consortium this, though - playing as an asshole did change how the game felt. It was definitely more of a thriller, with a lot more hostility and suspicion. Of course, much of that extra negativity was directed at me, but you can't have everything. My main disappointment with the asshole playthrough is that the pivotal moment of the whole story, and the most noir-ish moment in a game that is, ostensibly, a murder mystery, is one you can only witness if you fail to rescue another character earlier in the game. It wouldn't be so bad, except that the rescue mission is so easy that you'd never stumble upon it accidentally. You literally just have to walk into a room, suffer a slight bit of damage, and press the action button. In order to fail it, I had to turn around and leave as soon as I entered the chamber.
Which is a shame, because it would have been a thrilling mind-screw if I'd encountered the scene organically. One of the ship's engineers tells you some secret information and then suddenly the oxygen starts to leave the room. With his dying breath, he accuses the ship's pilot, a man who is consistently portrayed as a technical genius, but who is having a suspicious amount of trouble overriding the door lock, of being in league with the enemy. It's a great mislead, because the pilot was very aggressively friendly, and thus a good suspect for the end game, but the only reason he fails is because he's injured by the accident you failed to save him from earlier in the game. If you first see the scene as I did, after a successful rescue, the pilot manages to save the day in the nick of time and any suspicion you have of him is immediately dispelled.
I guess what I learned from this playthrough is that the content for a good mystery is there, in the game, but it's too well hidden. Consortium doesn't go out of its way to toy with you. It doesn't give you superfluous information and let you draw wrong conclusions from your bad assumptions. Instead, it requires you to deliberately search out confusion. For example, this was the first runthrough where I actually found the evidence that implicates the true traitor, but it was in a cupboard and by the time you're able to find it, the game has already trained you to ignore cupboards by having literally every other container in the game contain nothing of interest.
I'm guessing it's an artifact of Consortium being an indie game. With a game like Skyrim, there's probably a person whose only job is to go through every map and ensure that all the cupboards have a setting-appropriate amount of clutter and also the occasional useful potion or unique outfit. Or maybe there's an algorithm that does it. Either way, they had the resources to put in plot-irrelevant discoveries. A smaller production would probably need to be more parsimonious with its dead-ends.
If I were playing this game purely for pleasure, I think this is where I'd walk away. I still have 13 achievements to acquire, and several of them are plot-related, but I think I've seen 90 percent or more of the dialogue, and I'm right at the cusp where the satisfaction of learning new things is perfectly balance by the annoyance of having to watch almost everything for the fifth time. So, of course, I'm bound by honor to do violence to my memories of Consortium by repeating it until I can't stand to look at it any more. I blame Interdimensional Games. They should have made it 5 hours instead of 4.
Sunday, February 4, 2018
Consortium - 9/20 hours
Third run completed in almost exactly two hours. This is not a good sign. Some of that can be chalked up to my refusing to say anything to anybody and thus cutting out about half the dialogue, but the larger part is surely just me getting used to the game and knowing where everything is. I expect future runs to be almost as fast.
Playing a silent protagonist wasn't as funny as I had originally hoped. There were amusing moments, where my lack of response flustered, annoyed, or confused the NPCs, but mostly they just skipped conversations. The oddest thing about it was that my results were almost exactly the same as my first game, where I went with my gut. The only real difference between the two was that in my most recent game, I didn't tell the doctor I was a dimensional traveler.
This can mean one of two things - either I did really poorly my first time through, or the bulk of this game is listening to NPCs talk and the plot is only marginally affected by having you there at all. I suspect that I will have to act as extremely as possible in future runs to find out which theory is correct.
Going forward, I plan to use a guide to help me snag as many achievements as possible. For my next run, I intend to be a total pariah and go for the achievement for everyone having a negative opinion of you. I expect it will be unpleasant and frustrating, but if anything is going to trigger a different story, that will be it.
Playing a silent protagonist wasn't as funny as I had originally hoped. There were amusing moments, where my lack of response flustered, annoyed, or confused the NPCs, but mostly they just skipped conversations. The oddest thing about it was that my results were almost exactly the same as my first game, where I went with my gut. The only real difference between the two was that in my most recent game, I didn't tell the doctor I was a dimensional traveler.
This can mean one of two things - either I did really poorly my first time through, or the bulk of this game is listening to NPCs talk and the plot is only marginally affected by having you there at all. I suspect that I will have to act as extremely as possible in future runs to find out which theory is correct.
Going forward, I plan to use a guide to help me snag as many achievements as possible. For my next run, I intend to be a total pariah and go for the achievement for everyone having a negative opinion of you. I expect it will be unpleasant and frustrating, but if anything is going to trigger a different story, that will be it.
Consortium - 7/20 hours
It's not a great sign that I was able to complete my second run of Consortium in 3 and a half hours. At that rate, I'll need three more full playthroughs and the better part of a sixth. If I come to be even more efficient . . .
But that's a problem for the future. For now, I'm mostly concerned with teasing out the secrets of the Consortium universe. It's not going well. Having played through the game a second time, it's become clear to me that it is mostly a series of conversations, with some flexibility on the order, but only minimal cross-influence between them. I did see a whole new scene because I allowed a certain character to believe we were speaking confidentially. The first time through, I told him we were being monitored because I assumed the game would find another way to give me his information as a reward for being honest (though I now realize this isn't that sort of game). However, the additional scene wasn't particularly enlightening. I met with Knight 15 (don't ask me about the Consortium's rank system - everyone keeps yelling at me every time I try and get some clarification) before the traitor attacks, instead of just going directly into the confrontation.
However, that confrontation was short-circuited because I correctly guessed the traitor's identity and Rook 25 (again, don't ask) cornered her before she could hack the power armor and make it go berserk. I'd love to credit my amazing deductive skills for figuring out the answer to the game's central mystery, but honestly, I had no evidence and I just played a hunch - someone once told me that this character couldn't possibly be the traitor because of her backstory, and I was like, hmm, why would the game go out of its way to make her seem innocent when, in fact, there is no evidence against anybody?
I mean, there's probably evidence to be found somewhere in the game, but after two times through, I haven't seen any. Which is kind of the opposite of how a locked-room mystery is supposed to go. There should be too much evidence, and everyone should have a motive, and as the heat turns up on the investigation, they should turn on each other and attempt to convince the investigator that it was anyone but them. But Agatha Christie this is not. The crew of the Zenlil stayed loyal to each other, refused to believe any of them could be a murderer (one of them even doubted a murder had taken place), and consistently counseled me to just wait until we landed so the authorities could handle the matter.
Like I said, Consortium is not that kind of game. It seems to almost resent the fact that it's a story. The biggest culprit is the framing device. I guess I understand why it's there - if you want to establish a theme of choices and consequences, then the concept of multiple close-copy alternate dimensions is a tempting one to play around with. And if you're doing a many-worlds setting, then leaning on the fourth wall and saying that the real-world player is, in fact, simply watching from another, more distant dimension, and thus part of the game's story in a much more direct way than usual would seem like a fun extension of the same basic idea. However, as near as I can tell, the only reason this alternate dimesion stuff is included in the game is to make the player feel like an idiot.
It occasionally crops up in your dialogue options, but almost without fail, if you pick those options, the people around you will react negatively - either thinking that you're dicking around amid serious business or that you're purposefully being evasive, or that you're losing your grip on reality. Which would be fine if it only came up as a smart-ass dialogue option, but sometimes it's a major plot point. There's a guy who asks you your name, but that's not something you know, because everyone always calls you by your code name, Bishop 6. Try to dodge the question and he calls you out on it. And then he asks you again. Select the dialogue option where you give him a name, and it turns out to be the wrong one. And then he asks you again. Tell him the truth and he acts really smug about it . . . and all the other witnesses think you're fucking around.
And don't get me started about your meeting with the AI that runs the Consortium. He not only knows your true origin, he gets upset if you don't know about the real world Consortium ARG. I mean, come on, that's a 1% reference at best.
Anyway, my next move is to replay the whole game, but always pick the "say nothing" response. Given how resistant this game has proven to respecting quality of life video game tropes like random NPCs being happy to lecture you about the basics of the setting (seriously, Rook 25 responded to a simple history question by taking an attitude hit and telling me to read the codex), it seems likely that being a "silent protagonist" is not going to win me any friends.
But that's a problem for the future. For now, I'm mostly concerned with teasing out the secrets of the Consortium universe. It's not going well. Having played through the game a second time, it's become clear to me that it is mostly a series of conversations, with some flexibility on the order, but only minimal cross-influence between them. I did see a whole new scene because I allowed a certain character to believe we were speaking confidentially. The first time through, I told him we were being monitored because I assumed the game would find another way to give me his information as a reward for being honest (though I now realize this isn't that sort of game). However, the additional scene wasn't particularly enlightening. I met with Knight 15 (don't ask me about the Consortium's rank system - everyone keeps yelling at me every time I try and get some clarification) before the traitor attacks, instead of just going directly into the confrontation.
However, that confrontation was short-circuited because I correctly guessed the traitor's identity and Rook 25 (again, don't ask) cornered her before she could hack the power armor and make it go berserk. I'd love to credit my amazing deductive skills for figuring out the answer to the game's central mystery, but honestly, I had no evidence and I just played a hunch - someone once told me that this character couldn't possibly be the traitor because of her backstory, and I was like, hmm, why would the game go out of its way to make her seem innocent when, in fact, there is no evidence against anybody?
I mean, there's probably evidence to be found somewhere in the game, but after two times through, I haven't seen any. Which is kind of the opposite of how a locked-room mystery is supposed to go. There should be too much evidence, and everyone should have a motive, and as the heat turns up on the investigation, they should turn on each other and attempt to convince the investigator that it was anyone but them. But Agatha Christie this is not. The crew of the Zenlil stayed loyal to each other, refused to believe any of them could be a murderer (one of them even doubted a murder had taken place), and consistently counseled me to just wait until we landed so the authorities could handle the matter.
Like I said, Consortium is not that kind of game. It seems to almost resent the fact that it's a story. The biggest culprit is the framing device. I guess I understand why it's there - if you want to establish a theme of choices and consequences, then the concept of multiple close-copy alternate dimensions is a tempting one to play around with. And if you're doing a many-worlds setting, then leaning on the fourth wall and saying that the real-world player is, in fact, simply watching from another, more distant dimension, and thus part of the game's story in a much more direct way than usual would seem like a fun extension of the same basic idea. However, as near as I can tell, the only reason this alternate dimesion stuff is included in the game is to make the player feel like an idiot.
It occasionally crops up in your dialogue options, but almost without fail, if you pick those options, the people around you will react negatively - either thinking that you're dicking around amid serious business or that you're purposefully being evasive, or that you're losing your grip on reality. Which would be fine if it only came up as a smart-ass dialogue option, but sometimes it's a major plot point. There's a guy who asks you your name, but that's not something you know, because everyone always calls you by your code name, Bishop 6. Try to dodge the question and he calls you out on it. And then he asks you again. Select the dialogue option where you give him a name, and it turns out to be the wrong one. And then he asks you again. Tell him the truth and he acts really smug about it . . . and all the other witnesses think you're fucking around.
And don't get me started about your meeting with the AI that runs the Consortium. He not only knows your true origin, he gets upset if you don't know about the real world Consortium ARG. I mean, come on, that's a 1% reference at best.
Anyway, my next move is to replay the whole game, but always pick the "say nothing" response. Given how resistant this game has proven to respecting quality of life video game tropes like random NPCs being happy to lecture you about the basics of the setting (seriously, Rook 25 responded to a simple history question by taking an attitude hit and telling me to read the codex), it seems likely that being a "silent protagonist" is not going to win me any friends.
Saturday, February 3, 2018
Consortium - 4/20 hours
I was worried about potentially spoiling the end of Consortium, but I'm not sure that's actually possible. There were events that happened, but putting them in the context of a narrative might be a bit difficult. The fact that you're playing a game in the world of the game is mentioned often enough that it feels important, but it's so confusing that I couldn't tell you why it's important.
The problem may be that Consortium is not a complete story. It is merely the first part of a trilogy. Plots are set up, but they're not resolved. Granted, I didn't solve the game's central mystery, so it's likely that some of this comes down to my incompetence, but the game ends on a cliffhanger. It tells you which of your decisions are significant, but nothing about their consequences. Presumably, they're waiting for game 3 to do that, but seeing as how game 2 is still in early access, I'm not expecting that to happen any time soon.
I should probably just learn to enjoy the texture of the experience. Appreciate the subtle differences in dialogue and context that come from making different decisions and befriending different characters. It would fit the game's intimate scale. It's set in a confined space, with only a dozen or so characters, and it's over in four hours. I should be expecting depth rather than breadth.
And who knows, maybe it's there, but the game flat-out tells you that it always ends the same way, with you falling out of an airplane in a sabotaged freefall suit, having failed to detect the second traitor in the organization. Can there really be enough variation in-between for the game to be satisfying on five different playthroughs? I'm skeptical.
It's not that I don't think there will be some significant differences in the story, it's just that you're given a detailed list of all the significant choices that might have branching consequences and while combinatorial explosion might mean that there are thousands of technically different playthroughs, the realities of making a game (or, for that matter, telling a story) mean that they should all be fairly close to each other in feel.
It remains to be seen how big an issue this is going to be. Even if I weren't doing this for the blog, I'd probably play Consortium at least 2 more times - once to see what happens in a totally nonlethal game and again to see what happens if I choose the "say nothing" option every time it becomes available. I also want to discover the identity of the traitor, purely for my own edification. Playthrough 4 is going to be the real test of this game. That's when I'll be moving outside my normal crpg patterns and start playing the game purely because it promises to be different.
The problem may be that Consortium is not a complete story. It is merely the first part of a trilogy. Plots are set up, but they're not resolved. Granted, I didn't solve the game's central mystery, so it's likely that some of this comes down to my incompetence, but the game ends on a cliffhanger. It tells you which of your decisions are significant, but nothing about their consequences. Presumably, they're waiting for game 3 to do that, but seeing as how game 2 is still in early access, I'm not expecting that to happen any time soon.
I should probably just learn to enjoy the texture of the experience. Appreciate the subtle differences in dialogue and context that come from making different decisions and befriending different characters. It would fit the game's intimate scale. It's set in a confined space, with only a dozen or so characters, and it's over in four hours. I should be expecting depth rather than breadth.
And who knows, maybe it's there, but the game flat-out tells you that it always ends the same way, with you falling out of an airplane in a sabotaged freefall suit, having failed to detect the second traitor in the organization. Can there really be enough variation in-between for the game to be satisfying on five different playthroughs? I'm skeptical.
It's not that I don't think there will be some significant differences in the story, it's just that you're given a detailed list of all the significant choices that might have branching consequences and while combinatorial explosion might mean that there are thousands of technically different playthroughs, the realities of making a game (or, for that matter, telling a story) mean that they should all be fairly close to each other in feel.
It remains to be seen how big an issue this is going to be. Even if I weren't doing this for the blog, I'd probably play Consortium at least 2 more times - once to see what happens in a totally nonlethal game and again to see what happens if I choose the "say nothing" option every time it becomes available. I also want to discover the identity of the traitor, purely for my own edification. Playthrough 4 is going to be the real test of this game. That's when I'll be moving outside my normal crpg patterns and start playing the game purely because it promises to be different.
Friday, February 2, 2018
Consortium - 2/20 hours
In any rpg, you're going to get a division between the action-filled combat parts and the more passive story sections, and usually, even the wordiest of games tends to rely much more on the former than the latter. Consortium, so far, appears to reverse the balance. It's hard to say at just 2 hours in, because these are often the most plot-heavy, but it appears that most of my time is going to be spent in conversation menus, attempting to choose the responses that unlock the potentially branching paths through the story.
For my first time through, I'm just going to play as intuitively and naturally as possible. Which may not be as easy as it seems. There is some weird stuff lurking in the corners of this game. Like at the beginning, where one of your fellow officers is telling you about your current mission and in the process dips into information about your character's backstory. I did what I was trained to do by any number of rpgs past - respond with ignorance in order to encourage the npc to deliver more exposition. But then the strangest thing happened, the character started to get really angry with me. At first, she accused me of messing with her, and then she became concerned that I was having a mental breakdown. She sent me to see the doctor and things got really weird.
As the doctor interrogated me about my symptoms, the conversation tree gave me the option to tell him that I was a character in a video game being controlled by a player in another dimension and that everything around me was simulated. A nearby witness begged me to stop with this foolishness, but the doctor believed me and eventually put me in a sci-fi scanning device, whereupon it was revealed that I had extremely atypical thought patterns, consistent with being mind controlled by a second, artificially implanted, personality.
I may not have paid enough attention to the Steam store description. I read the words "have developed a satellite (iDGi-1) capable of opening a digital rift through time and space" and kind of just assumed that they were describing the futuristic plane the game is set on. If I'd bothered to take in the sentences both immediately prior to and immediately following that one, I'd have realized that they were, in fact, referring to the game's framing device. The conceit is that this magical satellite is in our real world and that by playing the game, I am actually accessing this satellite and communicating with an alternate reality - the world of the game. Consortium actually takes place on a high-tech, but otherwise normal airplane, and not, as I originally thought, in some sort of time-traveling, dimension-hopping space plane.
Why the game needs this framing device, I can't say. Presumably it's going to have some kind of payoff, later on, but for now, despite having incontrovertible physical evidence that my character, Bishop 6 (a code name), has been compromised by an unknown third party, the Consortium has decided to let me keep doing my highly-sensitive, if vaguely defined, military/police troubleshooter job. Maybe it's just an in-joke, meant to make fun of idiots like myself that insist on staying to the perverse and nonsensical path of total ignorance, but if that's the case, why tout it as a selling point on the game's Steam page?
The practical upshot of this detour is that I am not completely lost about who I am and what I'm supposed to be doing. Someone's been murdered, and despite being in a confined space, with a limited number of people, nobody's a suspect and aside from assigning me to investigate, my superior officers in this secret(?) military(?) organization appear to be mostly content with waiting until the plane lands and having the professionals on the ground handle the investigation.
I think what I'm supposed to do is observe as much as I can, read the in-game lore documents, and then, because multiple playthroughs are explicitly canon, thanks to the game's framing device, use my knowldge from the first run to make better choices on subsequent runs. But if that's the case, I haven't quite gotten into the spirit of the thing yet. So far I'm playing as if I were a nameless detective with severe amnesia, bumbling my way through this investigation with zero law-enforcement instincts.
I'm hoping it will all make sense in the long run.
For my first time through, I'm just going to play as intuitively and naturally as possible. Which may not be as easy as it seems. There is some weird stuff lurking in the corners of this game. Like at the beginning, where one of your fellow officers is telling you about your current mission and in the process dips into information about your character's backstory. I did what I was trained to do by any number of rpgs past - respond with ignorance in order to encourage the npc to deliver more exposition. But then the strangest thing happened, the character started to get really angry with me. At first, she accused me of messing with her, and then she became concerned that I was having a mental breakdown. She sent me to see the doctor and things got really weird.
As the doctor interrogated me about my symptoms, the conversation tree gave me the option to tell him that I was a character in a video game being controlled by a player in another dimension and that everything around me was simulated. A nearby witness begged me to stop with this foolishness, but the doctor believed me and eventually put me in a sci-fi scanning device, whereupon it was revealed that I had extremely atypical thought patterns, consistent with being mind controlled by a second, artificially implanted, personality.
I may not have paid enough attention to the Steam store description. I read the words "have developed a satellite (iDGi-1) capable of opening a digital rift through time and space" and kind of just assumed that they were describing the futuristic plane the game is set on. If I'd bothered to take in the sentences both immediately prior to and immediately following that one, I'd have realized that they were, in fact, referring to the game's framing device. The conceit is that this magical satellite is in our real world and that by playing the game, I am actually accessing this satellite and communicating with an alternate reality - the world of the game. Consortium actually takes place on a high-tech, but otherwise normal airplane, and not, as I originally thought, in some sort of time-traveling, dimension-hopping space plane.
Why the game needs this framing device, I can't say. Presumably it's going to have some kind of payoff, later on, but for now, despite having incontrovertible physical evidence that my character, Bishop 6 (a code name), has been compromised by an unknown third party, the Consortium has decided to let me keep doing my highly-sensitive, if vaguely defined, military/police troubleshooter job. Maybe it's just an in-joke, meant to make fun of idiots like myself that insist on staying to the perverse and nonsensical path of total ignorance, but if that's the case, why tout it as a selling point on the game's Steam page?
The practical upshot of this detour is that I am not completely lost about who I am and what I'm supposed to be doing. Someone's been murdered, and despite being in a confined space, with a limited number of people, nobody's a suspect and aside from assigning me to investigate, my superior officers in this secret(?) military(?) organization appear to be mostly content with waiting until the plane lands and having the professionals on the ground handle the investigation.
I think what I'm supposed to do is observe as much as I can, read the in-game lore documents, and then, because multiple playthroughs are explicitly canon, thanks to the game's framing device, use my knowldge from the first run to make better choices on subsequent runs. But if that's the case, I haven't quite gotten into the spirit of the thing yet. So far I'm playing as if I were a nameless detective with severe amnesia, bumbling my way through this investigation with zero law-enforcement instincts.
I'm hoping it will all make sense in the long run.
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Consortium - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
Game One of the iDGi-1 Trilogy.
A murder mystery, on a plane, in the future.
CONSORTIUM could be described as a first person science-fiction role-playing experience. It also can be played like an adventure game.
The story begins in our world - the "real world" - where we here at Interdimensional Games have developed a satellite (iDGi-1) capable of opening a digital rift through time and space. Anyone with an internet connection can travel through this rift and awaken within an alternate dimension from our own - the "game world" - in the year 2042.
Previous Playtime
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
This is one of those games I got for free. Sometimes people on Steam give away free games (apparently) and there used to be a time when I would just jump on every such opportunity. Consortium was towards the end of that period, where I knew I had to be more discerning, but was not yet inoculated against the allure of "free."
Expectations and Prior Experience
A murder mystery on a sci-fi space plane sounds like a cool and unique idea for an rpg. I am anticipating a lot of juicy commentary here. My main worry is that the reviews say it's short and that you're meant to play through multiple times to explore different paths. If that's true, there should be 20 hours worth of content here, but the last time I played a game with 20 hours of content spread out over a dozen different playthroughs was Long Live the Queen. And while I liked the game, I admit to going a bit stir-crazy there towards the end.
Still, it will be nice to have a narrative to follow again. I'm hoping it will be enough to keep me obsessed, so I can knock this one out in 3 or 4 days. But even if it's not, it probably won't be bad enough to push me behind my schedule.
Famous last words, I know, but what can I say, I'm feeling like an optimist today.
Game One of the iDGi-1 Trilogy.
A murder mystery, on a plane, in the future.
CONSORTIUM could be described as a first person science-fiction role-playing experience. It also can be played like an adventure game.
The story begins in our world - the "real world" - where we here at Interdimensional Games have developed a satellite (iDGi-1) capable of opening a digital rift through time and space. Anyone with an internet connection can travel through this rift and awaken within an alternate dimension from our own - the "game world" - in the year 2042.
Previous Playtime
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
This is one of those games I got for free. Sometimes people on Steam give away free games (apparently) and there used to be a time when I would just jump on every such opportunity. Consortium was towards the end of that period, where I knew I had to be more discerning, but was not yet inoculated against the allure of "free."
Expectations and Prior Experience
A murder mystery on a sci-fi space plane sounds like a cool and unique idea for an rpg. I am anticipating a lot of juicy commentary here. My main worry is that the reviews say it's short and that you're meant to play through multiple times to explore different paths. If that's true, there should be 20 hours worth of content here, but the last time I played a game with 20 hours of content spread out over a dozen different playthroughs was Long Live the Queen. And while I liked the game, I admit to going a bit stir-crazy there towards the end.
Still, it will be nice to have a narrative to follow again. I'm hoping it will be enough to keep me obsessed, so I can knock this one out in 3 or 4 days. But even if it's not, it probably won't be bad enough to push me behind my schedule.
Famous last words, I know, but what can I say, I'm feeling like an optimist today.
Stronghold 2 - 20/20 hours
I played 20 hours of Stellaris over two of the last three days. So in theory, Stronghold 2 shouldn't be that difficult. I think the problem is that I've exhausted my interest in the series. That's not a commentary on any of the individual games, it's just that real-time battle tactics have never been something I've cared a great deal about, and while I can usually get through RTS games by focusing on the economy, 60 hours is a long time to spend trying to force a game into a more congenial genre.
It's not really fair to the game, though. If I had done the sensible thing and only bought the single most appealing entry to the Stronghold series (which seems to be Stronghold Legends, from my superficial perusal of their Steam pages), I'd have undoubtedly finished the game with some kind of backhanded comment like, "assaulting and defending castles isn't really my thing, but I like that I got to build something practical and test it out, and RTS games aren't too bad as an occasional change of pace."
Because that has been my honest opinion of every Stronghold game I've played so far . . . taken individually. But I'm not playing them individually. I'm playing them as a series, and it's getting to the point where I can scarcely look at the screen without radiating 100 megawatt "I don't care" beams out of my eyeballs.
I'm going to take some advice I got from the rpg.net forum and play two games before returning for Stronghold Legends, though I'm not sure how viable this is going to be as a long term strategy. I'm getting to the point where my only remaining games are ones that I've put off playing, for one reason or another.
Out of the 23 games I have left, I'd say that there are five that I'm genuinely looking forward to, and have been saving so that my last few months aren't a total death march. Then there are four that are on the list purely because I have a friend I play weekly co-op games with. Those games have been fun, but I'm dreading playing them solo (like, seriously, how am I supposed to do 20 hours of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes). Six of my remaining games I got for free. They were interesting enough that they were able to tempt me for a price of zero dollars, but were not necessarily things I'd buy on my own. Three games look decent, but are probably too short to play for 20 hours. One game I bought purely because I thought the title was funny. Three of them are Stronghold games. And the last one is Age of Wonders III, a member of a series I actively disliked, but which I'm hoping is modern enough to downplay the things that annoyed me about its predecessors.
I've got to have hope, though. I've got exactly 20 weeks until my self-imposed deadline. That still gives me six days per game. I figure I'll probably pick up a couple of days with some of the rpgs and grand strategy games. I just have to keep my fingers crossed that it's more than I lose with the ones I'm starting to dread. . .
(Sorry, Stronghold 2, you deserve better than that, but there shouldn't have been six of you.)
It's not really fair to the game, though. If I had done the sensible thing and only bought the single most appealing entry to the Stronghold series (which seems to be Stronghold Legends, from my superficial perusal of their Steam pages), I'd have undoubtedly finished the game with some kind of backhanded comment like, "assaulting and defending castles isn't really my thing, but I like that I got to build something practical and test it out, and RTS games aren't too bad as an occasional change of pace."
Because that has been my honest opinion of every Stronghold game I've played so far . . . taken individually. But I'm not playing them individually. I'm playing them as a series, and it's getting to the point where I can scarcely look at the screen without radiating 100 megawatt "I don't care" beams out of my eyeballs.
I'm going to take some advice I got from the rpg.net forum and play two games before returning for Stronghold Legends, though I'm not sure how viable this is going to be as a long term strategy. I'm getting to the point where my only remaining games are ones that I've put off playing, for one reason or another.
Out of the 23 games I have left, I'd say that there are five that I'm genuinely looking forward to, and have been saving so that my last few months aren't a total death march. Then there are four that are on the list purely because I have a friend I play weekly co-op games with. Those games have been fun, but I'm dreading playing them solo (like, seriously, how am I supposed to do 20 hours of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes). Six of my remaining games I got for free. They were interesting enough that they were able to tempt me for a price of zero dollars, but were not necessarily things I'd buy on my own. Three games look decent, but are probably too short to play for 20 hours. One game I bought purely because I thought the title was funny. Three of them are Stronghold games. And the last one is Age of Wonders III, a member of a series I actively disliked, but which I'm hoping is modern enough to downplay the things that annoyed me about its predecessors.
I've got to have hope, though. I've got exactly 20 weeks until my self-imposed deadline. That still gives me six days per game. I figure I'll probably pick up a couple of days with some of the rpgs and grand strategy games. I just have to keep my fingers crossed that it's more than I lose with the ones I'm starting to dread. . .
(Sorry, Stronghold 2, you deserve better than that, but there shouldn't have been six of you.)
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