Golden Axe - 2/20 hours

I wrote some pretty venomous things about arcade games, and after playing two hours of Golden Axe . . .

Well, I regret the tone of my comments, but not the substance. I honestly don't know how I am going to finish this one. It's just moving from left to right, mashing buttons, until you are inevitably killed by some overpowered bullshit. After about an hour and a half of practice, I was able to get to level five from my limited stock of lives and continues, so there must be some skill involved, but the controls are so stiff, and the moves are so limited, that practice doesn't even feel worth it.

Because I was curious as to how long the game was, I downloaded a mod that would give me infinite lives. With that, I was able to beat the entire game in less than 40 minutes, losing 59 lives in the process (the game helpfully keeps track). Assuming that each continue cost $0.25, those 19 continues would have been $9.75 in 1989 dollars, and about $19.50 in today's money. Not as terrible as it could have been, but seeing as how once I committed to infinite lives, victory was inevitable, the thought of just standing in front of a machine and shoveling in nearly 20 dollars worth of quarters as the final boss lays me out yet again with his bullshit full-screen attacks fills me with this profound melancholy. We are so much luckier now than we were back then. That same 20 dollars could today buy me, well, 17 star wars games ranging from the serviceable to the sublime. I wonder how little kid me would have reacted to that news.

Adult me is over Golden Axe, however. There are 8 levels total, and two of those are bosses. That means that after just 90 minutes of practice, I was able to finish about 75% of the game. Since the final boss is, in my opinion, unbeatable by someone of my skill level, it's likely that I've already plateaued. Maybe, with luck and hours of practice, I could get to level 7, but that's going to involve running up against a wall time and time again.

I guess there's no choice, though. What's the alternative? Keep the infinite lives on and just replay the game 27 more times? If I'm going to do that, I might as well practice honestly. Who knows, maybe after a few hours I'll start sympathizing with my captor and I'll start to take pride in my side-scrolling brawler skills.

Nonetheless, prepare for my brain to turn to mush over the next few days.

Golden Axe - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

The land of Yuria has been invaded and is now ruled by the iron fist of Death Adder, who secured his throne by seizing the Golden Axe™.

Three brave warriors now rise to the challenge of defeating Death Adder and his soldiers and returning peace to the Kingdom.

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

It was free. I really don't know what I was thinking (in the colloquial sense), because even at a zero dollar price point, I didn't want it. I could say that I thought it wouldn't do any harm, but even that's not true. I knew, even then, that I did not want to play it, but I guess I was just filled with hubris. I was making such fine progress on the blog that I thought I could handle it. I never foresaw a day when I would be near-exhausted, dragging myself to the finish line, only to have this massive roadblock in the way.


Expectations and Prior Experience

As you might have gathered, I am not hopeful. I know Golden Axe. I've played Golden Axe. I can't say whether I've played this exact game, but if I haven't, then I'm sure it was a sequel, or a knock-off, or the game that it itself is knocking off. Either way, it's a late 80s/early 90s era side-scrolling brawler -  a genre that . . . I'm not going to say bad things about except that it's definitely not for me.

What I will complain about is arcade games, an evil fucking blight on the creative potential of the medium with a revenue model that makes free-to-play microtransactions look humane and considerate by comparison. The one unforgivable sin of early home consoles is the way they just directly and uncritically ported these concentrated bundles of anti-fun and inflicted them upon unsuspecting children, who subsequently grew up to think that unforgiving difficulty curves, lack of save points, and a gambling-esque system of limited continues somehow constitutes "classic" (or, god-forbid "hardcore") gaming. Once The Legend of Zelda came to exist, console games no longer had any excuse to suck.

But maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. I know a lot of old arcade games have their devotees, and that must be for a reason. And I'll be playing it on an emulator (Sega's official one, to be precise), so maybe I'll do like I did with Landstalker and abuse the save states to make it a more enjoyable experience. Or maybe I'll just tough it out. It's not like I have a stack of quarters on the line. If I stall out at the first level and just have to replay it over and over again, like I'm Johnny Gat in eternal side-scrolling purgatory, then at worst it will be reducible to the sensual experience of pressing buttons, which isn't too bad, all things considered.

Victoria II - 20/20 hours

Victoria II taught me to hate all politics. Here I was, ticking along nicely as a socialist constitutional monarchy (don't ask me how that's supposed to work), I was building state-run factories one after another and all together, the were pretty profitable, to the tune of 50 net gold flowing into my nation's coffers. Then the communists rebelled and they completely crashed my economy, averaging about -10 net gold from the same state-run factories. But there was nothing I could do about it, because they had a stranglehold on my nation's politics. So I had to wait around for the inevitable Jacobin counterrevolution (though I was a little scared, because it looked, for awhile, like the fascists were going to take over). In the meantime, the communists' subsidies to my factories were destroying my reserve of gold. Eventually, I shut down all but the two most profitable, and as my workers were diverted into my most profitable endeavors, suddenly I as seeing 200 net gold. The dictatorship of the proletariat wasn't looking so bad. I used the gold to build finish any stray infrastructure I needed and raised my reserve to ludicrous new heights. In the meantime, I also maxed out my social reforms, giving the workers full pensions, health care, education, the whole package.

Then the Jacobins took over. Yay for human dignity and the liberty of the individual and all that, but the damned "constitutionalist" party let my factories go bankrupt. Hey, guys, the cost of the subsidies was around 15 gold. The tax revenue they brought in was close to 300. Do you, perhaps, have a principled opposition to basic math? Well, congratulations, you destroyed the capitalist class more effectively than a communist revolution and a socialist king. I limped along to the end of the game with a net income of 10 gold, plus my truly staggering gold reserves, but I wasn't happy about it.

I guess, in the end, I really liked Victoria II. The political model was often confusing, when it wasn't frustrating (also, Hawaii is an oddly powerful choice, with the slight drawback that it can't fend off any sort of revolution), but it was fun watching a nation's ideological transformation. I wasn't a deft enough politician to handle Meji Japan, but Ethiopia was fun (if a bit lagging, even compared to other "primitive" nations) and I adored trying to get Hawaii into the big time (peaked at 15th most influential my second time through - the big problem is that there are not enough late-game sources of prestige that don't involve pointless wars of conquest). The so-called Great Powers were, perhaps, less interesting to me. The USA was fine when it wasn't offensive, but the brief time I tried Great Brittan (so I could claim to have at least sampled the game's titular Victoria) I was too overwhelmed by its size to do much of anything.

Of the three Paradox historical games I own, I think Victoria II is probably the least essential to replay. It covers the shortest, least interesting time period, it's the one that is the least charitable to non-European playthroughs, and it's the one I'm least invested in in terms of DLC (the last one probably shouldn't count as much as it does, though). I did like the pops system, and I might come back just to meddle with my people's ideology some more, but the game as a whole can't match the scope of Europa Universalis IV or the human drama of Crusader Kings II. Though, if I ever do get my act together and do the thing where you finish a whole game in one title and then import it into the next, then at least I know that I'll be able to finish strong.

Victoria II - 14/20 hours

I played Victoria II as the United States, from 1836 up to the civil war. Twice, actually. The first time, Mexico somehow entered into an alliance with Great Brittan, and every time I tried to expand west I had to simultaneously fend off an invasion from Canada. Of course, "expand west" is a naked euphemism, and it was entirely just and appropriate that I should have to defend myself from invasion while I was in the process of invading someone else, but I don't know, I was born in California, in the United States of America, and so I had to pursue "manifest destiny," for sentimental reasons, despite it being obvious bullshit.

I really can't recommend playing the antebellum USA, though. There are a few reasons for this, so I'll start with the pettiest and work up from there.

The first problem, and shamefully, the most emotionally resonant for me, is that you are constantly presented with the same 4 or 5 event pop-ups. And if you're like me, and play on maximum speed all the time, they come around every couple of seconds, making the pre-civil war era a total click-fest. I wish there was some way to streamline the process, say "yes, I will always support the abolitionist side and no, I will never support the pro-slavery side." I suppose that maybe I could slow down and approach each event as significant. Vary my responses to try and soothe the nation's passions and balance the sides against each other. That would probably still be pretty frustrating, though.

The second problem is a bit more serious - Victoria II's political simulation never really feels like the America I know. It doesn't quite capture the sectionalist resentments or institutional obstructionism that so characterize our politics. When I refuse to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, I should have John C Calhoun breathing down my neck, trouncing me in elections. When I admit Texas as a free state . . . I don't even know what would happen, because it was a historically impossible outcome. The Senate would have stopped it and the screeching at the very suggestion would still be heard to this day.

This is the second European strategy game I've played that completely failed to capture the spirit of American politics. I don't necessarily want to blame Europe, though. Hell, I'm not sure it's really appropriate to call it "blame" either. I think the failure might be more because they're "games" and less because they're "European." An America that was bravely anti-slavery, or even an America that was capable of passing meaningful reforms in a timely manner is no more implausible than Hawaii becoming the Polynesian Wakanda. Victoria II allowed me to play nations outside of  its wheelhouse of "19th century European colonial powers" so I shouldn't necessarily complain when tools meant for a particular context prove ill-adapted to edge cases.

Plus, I'm not sure if American politics would necessarily make for a very good strategy game. There's strategy involved, to be sure, but the way the system is set up would make for some pretty poor game mechanics. It would basically be, "No, You Can't Do That, Idiot," the game. The US President is head of the federal bureaucracy, chief diplomat, commander in chief of the armed forces and has a conditional veto power over legislation, which maybe sounds like a lot of power, but is actually quite deceptive because most of those earlier duties are constrained (on paper) by legislation or Senate confirmation. What the President really does is wield soft power and influence to try and herd the cats of the legislative branch - as the only nationally-elected figure in the federal government, he basically is the government in the eyes of the people. That gives him some strong negotiating leverage, but that's only useful if he knows how to use it. An inept President, or one who faces a hostile Congress, can't do much except keep the seat warm for the next guy.

In recent decades, the legislature has delegated a lot of authority to federal regulatory agencies, and theoretically, the President can wield all sorts of powers this way, through hiring decisions, executive orders, and informally "making it clear" to his subordinates what he expects to happen, but getting too involved in the day-to-day running of these agencies is frowned upon and may provoke court challenges if the executive actions appear to be at odds with the intent of the law (or, let's face, even if they don't, but some lawyered-up ideological rival decides to try their luck.)

What this means in video game terms is that your strategy would revolve around being seen to do something, even if there's nothing you can do. Or doing something off the books, and not being seen doing it. And maybe that sounds intriguing, but I, for one, can't even begin to imagine how you'd present "you make a largely symbolic empty gesture that is destined to be struck down by the courts or instantly reversed by your successor" as a victory condition. At the very least, I don't imagine many people would find it plausible that the optimal strategy for passing civil rights legislation is spamming the "show penis" button.

A strategy game from the perspective of congress would be scarcely better. "Everything in the game, you have to do twice, minimum, once for the people and again for the states and sometimes the two want opposite things" is not a pitch I would dare make with a straight face.

So, you know, Victoria II simplifying things for the imperialist, parliamentary mode is not entirely unwelcome. It just feels weird. Like there's a part of me that knows its history and can't help going, "ha, like that would ever happen." Plus, despite the fact that the American Civil War is the centerpiece for a whole DLC, the game misses out on some important nuances that I think gamers of any nation would really appreciate - like the Republican party using the fact that the rebels were not technically states any more to ram through some radical constitutional amendments. Or the way they admitted a whole bunch of mostly-empty states to stack the Senate against the day when the largely Democratic South came back. It was a period in our history that was as much like a video game exploit as politics are ever likely to get, and it was left out entirely.

But the worst part of playing the USA in Victoria II is the bloodless way in which it presents the worst depths of human depravity. There is literally a "Trail of Tears" button. Why would I ever push that?! I kind of resent its presence, to be honest. It's a little like playing a WW2 game and being asked to efficiently prosecute the Holocaust. What's the point of including one of the worst atrocities in my country's history, so bad it was recognized as such at the time,which had no strategic or tactical advantage aside from the advancement of white supremacy?

Of course, the only effect it would have had, within the context of the game was some numbers on a spreadsheet getting significantly smaller (::shudder::). The presentation of slavery has a similar problem. You're never really forced to engage with the reality of slavery as a system. It's all just modifiers to your gold balance, obfuscated by two or three layers of game mechanics (slaves make farms more efficient, which makes aristocrats richer, which boosts your tax revenue, if your tax policy is set accordingly).

Even that wouldn't necessarily be so bad if black Americans didn't feel so lifeless as a populace. At one point, in my first game (where Canada and Mexico ganged up on me) I suffered a reactionary coup that abolished American democracy. But I never faced a slave revolt, not even as a popup, and I never saw the CSA have one either. And while the pre-civil war game had certain hypothetical decisions that never came to pass in the real world, like the plan to conquer Cuba and admit it as a slave state, there were no alt-history choices that advanced abolitionism and no post-civil war radical republicanism (that I saw). And the few mentions of slaves as people nonetheless cast them as an object to be bickered over by free whites. The inclusion of at least some black voices would have done a lot of good.

I think, overall, playing my home country was a mistake. I'm too close to it to ignore the flaws in presentation, and once more I was left wishing for a historical strategy game with racial and social justice as a central theme (perhaps the most futile of my recurring fantasies). I will say that I enjoyed playing the game overall, though. I do like managing pops and influencing economic and industrial policy. I just think I need to do it with a nation I know little enough about that it doesn't feel like I'm whitewashing the crimes of my own historical heritage.

Victoria II - 7/20 hours

My first game wasn't as bad as expected. I wouldn't say that I turned Hawaii into a "world power," but I wasn't colonized by those American bastards, and towards the end my economy was expanding nicely.

Actually, it was kind funny the way Victoria II charts a nation's prestige. At one point, I was the 15th most prestigious nation in the world, making me a "secondary power" and eligible to colonize other nations (if the British hadn't beaten me there first, which, of course, they did). This was entirely down to my cultural and technological achievements, which were the 4th greatest in the world.

I guess that's the upside of having no military whatsoever to distract you from peaceful pursuits. The downside is that the 3% of your country that is radically communist can overthrow your democratically elected socialist government and achieve . . . precisely squat because your nation was already the most progressive in the world with a robust planned economy and 0% unemployment. But hey, you managed to repeal women's suffrage, so great going guys.

Luckily, a democratic uprising occurred less than a decade later, and the communists were no better equipped than the socialists to deal with it. There was a white-knuckle moment for me when I thought these liberal rebels might repeal the minimum wage or whatnot, but it turned out mostly fine. I mean, the socialists were the largest single political bloc in the islands and they never regained the legislature because the liberals and the monarchists formed a coalition, but aside from the fact that my international reputation never recovered, it was fine.

It's still pretty amusing to think that in this timeline sovereign Hawaii was the 22nd most influential nation on earth, and in the top 10 most culturally prestigious nations. And I have a feeling that if I'd had another 20 years, I could have become a secondary power once again. The capitalists were bringing in a net 300 gold (for reference, most of the game I was content with 0.5 net gold) and my factories were modernizing rapidly. It was getting to the point where I was going to have a modern navy just by running out of other things to spend my money on (those fucking liberals and their stubborn refusal to allow public subsidies of industry).

It was a pretty fun strategy game, though I have my concerns. "Westernization" as a prerequisite for "primitive nations" to become "civilized" is still gross, even when it proved little barrier to Hawaii becoming a cultural powerhouse on par with France. And the game's metrics of success are patently ridiculous. Even when I was 15th nation in the world, I would have more or less rolled over instantly in the face of any colonial power. I couldn't even thwart a half-assed extremist uprising.

Still, I should probably play the game "correctly" at some point. Before writing this post, I did a check-in with the USA, because I didn't remember seeing anything about the civil war, so I was curious about what it would be like in 1936. Hilariously, they were more than a half-dozen technologies behind me, though much to my dismay, they could have annexed me at any time, without even the pretense of resistance. It literally just took a single button click. I guess the fact that most of the west coast (including all of California) still belonged to Mexico must have turned their attention away from the Pacific.

The most curious fact, though, was that slavery was abolished. Maybe the civil war happened and I just didn't notice because I was too busy slap-fighting with the liberals over my plan for public railroads. However, my theory is that it was abolished with a simple political reform, which strikes m as . . . overly generous to my countrymen. I guess the only way for me to know for sure is to play the USA for myself.

Victoria II - 2/20 hours

The DLC broke the tutorial. It told me to do things the user interface would not let me do. I hope they don't turn out to be important. An incomplete, two and a half tutorial is not a great sign, generally, though. The good part is that the game looks satisfyingly complicated. The bad part is that I haven't even started yet and I already feel out of my depth.

The only other thing I've done is look at the world map. This was my favorite part of Europa Universalis IV, but Victoria II's map is less complicated and also a tad more racist. I mean, the historical disparity in technology between nations is a real and influential phenomenon, but labeling some nations "primitive" and others "civilized" betrays a serious lack of imagination. Then there are the big grey nameless parts of the map where people of color lived.

Which is the thing that worries me most about Victoria II, going forward. If the tutorial is still more or less accurate, it is a game about ideology, but it also appears to have an ideology. Not an especially malicious one - it can be boiled down to "Europe's ascent in the 19th century was inevitable and wars and colonialism are exciting game mechanics" - but something I just know I'm going to wind up struggling against.

I don't have a plan for my first real game, though. A part of me just wants to pick a tiny, "primitive" nation and try and reverse the course of history. But I'll admit, I don't look forward to being "partially westernized." And, of course, my lack of skill at the game means I'm jumping the gun on that sort of challenge.

Maybe I'll go with the United States, and try and set right what historically went wrong. Except, that feels kind of . . . gross to me. Like maybe it's inappropriate to play a game about oppression from any other perspective than that of the oppressed. I'll have to pop in at least for a little while to see how my country's history is portrayed, but anything else would doubtless feel like gravedancing.

I guess we'll just have to see. All I really want to do is focus on industry and commerce and found a democratic socialist republic with a minimum of bloodshed. The real question is how I manage to accomplish that without toadying before the "great powers."

Victoria II - Initial Thoughts

About The Game (From the Steam Store Page)

Carefully guide your nation from the era of absolute monarchies in the early 19th century, through expansion and colonization, to finally become a truly great power by the dawn of the 20th century.

Victoria II is a grand strategy game played during the colonial era of the 19th century, where the player takes control of a country, guiding it through industrialisation, political reforms, military conquest, and colonization.

Experience an in-depth political simulation where every action you take will have various consequences all over the world. The population will react to your decisions based on their political awareness, social class, as well as their willingness to accept or revolt against their government.

Previous Playtime

80 minutes

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

I had a vague idea about playing all three of the Paradox grand strategy games back to back - going from Crusader Kings II to Europa Universalis IV to Victoria II all on the same map. That didn't work out because it turned out that Crusader Kings II took an absurd amount of time for a single campaign and I'm actually pretty terrible at Europa Universalis IV. Anyway, it was only 11 bucks for the game and all the DLC, so I was pretty confident that I'd get my money's worth either way.

Expectations and Prior Experience

I played the tutorial awhile back and I really liked it. It was a complex strategy game that focused on ideology and diplomacy, and I could easily see myself getting lost inside it. The big worry here is that it will be overwhelming in its complexity and too difficult for me to master inside of 20 hours.


And normally this is where I give an optimistic counterpoint, but that last scenario is exceedingly likely. I've yet to play a Paradox game that didn't treat the first 100 hours as an extended tutorial and I have no reason to suspect this one is going to be any different. In fact, as an older game, it will probably be less friendly than later titles.

But you know what, it's all right. It's a complicated, sim-like strategy game, so it will probably be a pleasure to learn. And if I'm still out of my depth when 20 hours comes along, well I'm less than 2 months away from reaching my goal, and maybe I'll be able to come back to it while it's still fresh in my mind.

Toribash - 20/20 hours

I'm not sure whether I got better at the game or not. I won a few multiplayer matches, lost a lot more, and never once did I feel like my "skill" made a difference either way. The object seemed to be to grab the opponent and fall over on top of them. There's using leverage and momentum to influence the direction of your fall, and that takes some familiarity with the way your joints move your character, but it never stopped feeling random to me.

Nonetheless, I was responding intentionally to my opponents' moves and I had a strategy I was pursuing, so I imagine with a few more dozen hours of practice it would actually be pretty satisfying.

I'm probably not going to do it, though. Toribash is capable of some amazing things and there was a refreshing lack of the usual free-to-play nonsense, but it has a very steep learning curve and it takes a lot of investment to get to the good stuff. There were points where I loved it and points where I couldn't stand to look at it, and the thought of starting over from square one makes me anxious and stressed out.

But don't mind my grousing. Toribash has a lot to recommend it. Seeing those puppets ragdoll around the battlefield, occasionally getting brutally dismembered was consistently hilarious. And if the learning curve is steep, the ceiling for mastery is high. If you're the sort of person who enjoys seeking mastery and want something goofy and strategically complex, then you could do a lot worse.

Toribash - 10/20 hours

Why cannot I not improve my skills at this game? The more I play, the worse I seem to get it at it. I understand that even skilled play involves a lot of flailing around. Yet I don't think flailing around is the point.

I guess I just don't understand how the different parts of the Toribash body are meant to work together. I keep trying to plant my feet on the floor so as to have a stable platform for punches, kicks, and grapples, and I keep winding up ass over elbows, because the game interprets moving your joints as an all or nothing affair and I don't think there's any way to just "loosen" a leg to allow it to rest firmly, but flexibly, on the ground.

I think the whole project might be completely hopeless. I keep thinking about things I want my character to do, but those things are divided into a half a dozen smaller things, and each of those smaller things is highly sensitive to both initial conditions and the actions of all of my character's other parts.

There's not a doubt in my mind that Toribash can be a satisfying fighting/strategy/comedy experience for those who are willing to put in the effort towards mastery, but I feel like even if I weren't just putting in time here, I'd still never get to that point. It's fiddly, sure, but it's not fine-tuned, so I never really feel like I have control, and as much as I'd be thrilled with making my puppet perform intricate dance moves, that achievement is so far ahead of me that it's not even visible from where I currently stand. It's a lot of difficult work for essentially no pay-off.

That said, I still like the game. I find its concept as appealing as I did when I first started, and the fact that I seem to be moving backwards in skill is a huge disappointment. I'm sorely tempted to just be a pure spectator for my remaining 10 hours, allowing those who have already done the work entertain me with their skills. Although I have to admit, going into a fight lobby and entering spectator mode makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. There's something almost voyeuristic about it. And, of course, I'm a free rider, not contributing to the community in any significant way.

Maybe I'll load up the parkour mod again and try to walk calmly from one end of the course to the other. It's just as difficult to learn as fighting, but at least I'll be able to measure my progress in the number of steps it takes me to completely screw up and fall to the ground in a heap of limbs.

Toribash - 5/20 hours

It's astonishing how much I take my body for granted. I don't have the best one out there, but after five hours of Toribash I am convinced that it is a freakin' miracle of nature.

The way Toribash works is that you are a bubble-figure with a simplified musculature. You've got a neck and abs, and two each of pecs, shoulders, elbows, wrists, glutes, hips, knees, and ankles, and these can have one of four motions - contract, expand, relax, or hold. And you also have chest and lumbar joints that can relax or hold or rotate left or right. The idea is that you select states for your various muscles to move your character and if you do it at the right angle, and with sufficient force, you will damage your opponent. Matches are scored based on how much damage is done, though if your character's body hits the ground, it's a disqualification and you automatically lose.

This setup allows for almost endless variations when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. There is nothing so scripted as special moves, or even basic attacks. Whether you punch or kick or dodge is based entirely on whether you can clench and unclench the requisite muscles in time. Unfortunately, as an absolute novice, my answer to that question is always "no." My "fighting style," such as it is, consists mainly of trying to fall on top of the enemy, rather than underneath them.

That's true even when I'm up against the training dummy. In these practice battles, the game has no time limit and I can carefully plot every single movement down to the tiniest nuance, and I still can't manage anything as elegant as "a move." Hell, I can barely stay upright. When I switched over to the parkour mod (Toribash is a free-to-play game with mods, possibly the only one in history), I could not manage to take even one single step. That's when I became acutely aware of the miracle of the human body. I could barely manage to navigate the game's 28,561 different modes of movement (and "manage" is being generous here), but my brain handles my infinitely more complex real-world body and doesn't even bother to intrude on my consciousness most of the time.

The funny thing, though, is that people can get good at Toribash. The fight I saw in spectator mode, between experienced players, were still wildly chaotic and usually wound up with both characters on the ground, but I could see reactions, saves, and counters. There was method to the madness. And the more generic replays you can watch from the setup menu are even better. I imagine they were meticulously assembled in practice mode, because no one has that kind of reaction time, but given enough time, experts could make the Toribash puppets dance like the most elegant movie martial arts choreography. I imagine that it takes both a deep knowledge of the game's mechanics, which I won't have time to achieve, and a steady patience for small details, which I'm inclined to save for more important things.

Still, that's the dream. To use a powerful tool to work mighty and improbable deeds. I'm never going to get there, but if I apply myself as hard as I can, maybe I'll one day be able to walk across a room without falling on my ass.

Toribash - 2/20 hours

I thought for sure that by two hours I would know how I feel about Toribash, but so far my emotions have been all over the place. At first I was intrigued, but then I got a chance to play around with the combat system and it was absolutely overwhelming. A couple of times I lost to the inert training dummy. To let my frustration cool down, I spectated a few online matches, to see how people who knew what they were doing played.

The experience was a mixture of goofy as hell and oddly awe-inspiring. It was nothing like the choreographed fighting in the movies. It wasn't even like something that could exist in any halfway rigorous physical framework. But there were technique there. It was clear things were being done with intent, and the interplay between move and countermove was beautiful to behold.

That set a fire in me to buckle down and learn the system, so I went back to the training dummy and hilarity ensued. At one point, I got the dummy into a headlock and wound up severing my own arm. At no point was anything I did elegant or practical. At best I'd wind up make contact with one minor blow before tripping over my own legs and falling over. It got to a point where I was just constantly laughing at myself.

I expect that the winds will shift several more times before this is all over. I'm not worried about finishing the game. If the worst comes to pass, I could watch in spectator mode indefinitely. In the short-term, though, I need to come up with a strategy for practice that gets me noticeably closer to not tying myself into a human pretzel. As it stands, I am so bad at this that I'm not sure I'm even capable of learning to improve.

Toribash - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

Toribash is an innovative free-to-play online turn-based fighting game where you’re able to design your own moves. It is a martial arts simulator (yes, we do call a game with full body dismemberment a simulator) where you move your character by controlling joints on their body. As each of them can have 4 different states, number of possible moves is almost endless, which makes fights unique.

Previous Playtime

0 hours

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

I thought its "fighting game meets turn-based strategy meets QWOP" pitch sounded pretty intriguing, and it was free, so I figured I had nothing to lose. I was more careless with my time back then.

Expectations and Prior Experience

I'm going in almost completely blind. Free-to-play games are always tricky, because their revenue models tend to make things worse, but I can't even conceive how Toribash is planning on making money. So it will either be completely innocuous or absolutely dreadful. I don't anticipate anything in between.

I expect that a turn-based game will be pretty easy for me to play. The real problem is that in most free-to-play games the single-player experience is an afterthought. I don't relish the prospect of diving into a new competitive community as an absolute novice, especially when the game is a few years old and most of the remaining player base is likely to be experts.

Still, what's the worst that can happen? I wind up sinking to the bottom of the rankings and stay there indefinitely? What else is new?

Killer is Dead - 20/20 hours

After I beat the game on normal mode, I needed a new task to occupy my time. Figuring that it couldn't hurt to aim high, I decided I would try and get a AAA rating on every mission (there's an achievement for it). Of course, just because I was ambitious didn't mean I'd lost all sense. I set the difficulty to easy and unlocked the special costume that gave you infinite blood (magic points, basically). I wanted a goal, but I didn't want a goal that would task me greatly.

And even with all my advantages, getting those AAA ratings wasn't trivial. I mean, sometimes it was, but other times the criteria for how to get a maximum rating relied on things that couldn't be waved away with nigh-invincibility. Infinite healing magic doesn't do you any good if the goal for the mission is to take no damage whatsoever.

I didn't get it all done. There were a few levels where I just couldn't push it over the edge from A to AAA. Ordinarily, it would bother me to leave things unfinished like this, but in the case of Killer is Dead, I'm willing to make an exception, because the reward for getting AAA on a level, more often than not, was underwear.

For the ladies. By getting the highest score possible in your regular ultraviolent shenanigans, you could unlock sexy lingerie for the sexy ladies in the ridiculous minigame that is to sexuality what Jar Jar Binks is to the Star Wars series.

I'll confess to a certain morbid curiosity, but I resisted the temptation. The special secret underwear remained in the shop, unworn by the objects of Mondo's affections.

Look, I'm not a prude. I think that there could very well one day be a good sex video game. It's not something that seems outside the realm of possibility. People have a fantasy about being heroic warriors, so they play action games. I have a fantasy about space travel and the construction of architecture and civic infrastructure on hostile alien worlds, so I play Starbound. People have fantasies about sex, and there's no better medium for bringing fantasies to life.

The problem is that the sort of sex fantasies that make it into games are mostly terrible. The thing about sharing a sex fantasy is that it is, in itself, a sexual act. When I look at Natasha, or Betty, or Koharu through my x-ray specs and see them in the sexy underwear I bought them, I am not sexually engaged with the characters. I'm not even indulging a private fantasy. I am actually in a sexually charged conversation with the designers.

They are the ones trying to turn me on, to arouse my sexual interest. But they never seem to realize that. They'll present these images that are undeniably sexual, but they never dare to have them reveal any of the writer's own vulnerabilities or aspirations. If you met someone in real life who was as "sexy" as Scarlet the Blood-Drawing Nurse, you'd think her family was being held hostage by the mafia on the condition that she give you a boner. It's the complete opposite of what makes good sex so life-affirming.

In my experience, there have been only two games to actually get it anything close to correct - Saints Row IV and Fable 2. In SRIV, sex between the boss and any random member of their crew is the punchline to a joke (or, in a couple of cases, rooted in the resolution of a three-game-long plotline) and thus the focus is always in making a scene that is entertaining to watch. In fact, none of the "romances" (with the possible exception of CID) is especially sexy, which ironically is what makes them truest to what real sex is actually about.

And Fable 2 is just gross. In all likelihood, it is two unattractive people, making weird and disgusting noises in the dark, and you're probably only doing it because your partner has been complaining that it's been too long since the last time. Listening to a Fable 2 sex scene is deeply uncomfortable, even when you're all alone, and thus it is never not hilarious.

I didn't really mean to go off on such a tangent, though. Despite all the underwear, Killer is Dead is not a game about sex. I mean, you've got to beat the sex minigame at least three times to unlock all the optional weapons, but aside from that, it's a small part of the game. The bulk of Killer is Dead is a middling action game with fairly shallow mechanics and an impenetrable plot. It's a fine enough distraction for a lazy weekend, but it's never going to be anyone's favorite game.

I got it for free and I don't feel like I was cheated. There was enough game there to fill my time, which is more than I can say for certain other titles. I just wish that in the end it had more action, a more comprehensible plot, and less stuff that makes me embarrassed to be associated with heterosexuality.

Killer is Dead - 9/20 hours

Well, that was something all right. When I started Killer is Dead, I took copious notes, certain that the characters and plot would yield plenty of interesting commentary. I stopped somewhere around the fourth mission, because nothing I was doing made a damned bit of sense.

The game has some very striking imagery, like the time Mondo took a trip through his memories and all the principle actors were these onyx mannequins. Or when he was rescued from a near-fatal attack by a shimmering unicorn. Or the way the moon could be white, purple, or red, in response to the plot. And there's a part of me that thinks there might be some deep and impenetrable symbolism at work. That these images are revealing something about the human condition, even if their prosaic meaning borders on nonsense.

But another, more persuasive part of me thinks that maybe Killer is Dead is, in fact, nonsense to its core. Don't get me wrong, it's imaginative nonsense. It's nonsense that clearly has a lot of artistry and wit behind it. But if upwards of 3/4ths the dialogue was replaced by the Beatles' "Come Together" on a loop, I don't think any significant meaning would be lost.

The story, near as I can tell, is that it is sometime in the future and cyborgs exist. One type of cyborg is called "wires" and they don't have any personality or will of their own. And all the wires (or at least, all the ones you encounter) are controlled by a guy who forcibly took over the moon - because people live there, but in, like, regular looking mansions and not any sort of sci-fi dome or enclosure - and who now has his sights set on earth. Stopping him is the job of a government agency staffed by 4 people and which apparently has the mandate to accept assassination contracts given to them by private citizens, but only if the target is probably a monster, cyborg, or, in one case, a rogue locomotive with consciousness and free will. The newest hire at this government agency is Mondo Zappa, a grim-faced stoic who loves soft-boiled eggs, rescuing orphans, and going on creepy "dates" that mostly involve discreet staring, inappropriate gift giving, and fuzzily shot softcore sex scenes. Mondo is the brother of the guy who took over the moon, but he forgot until the second-to-last mission.

Killer is Dead's plot is at its best when it ignores its own continuity and embraces an episodic structure. When Mondo's boss gets hit by a train mid-mission, appearing dead for several minutes, only to return at the end with his cyborg parts upgraded from silver to gold, that is a pretty effective moment. The game becomes like a cheesy workplace comedy set in a seedy assassination bureau. When it attempts to tie that in with Mondo's mysterious past by revealing that the orphan he rescued was mind-controlled into pushing the boss in front of the train by a dream-controlling psychic entity who has also been manipulating Mondo's dreams and dancing around his suppressed memories, then it becomes an exercise in tedium. The world-building and characterization are not strong enough to support a mystery. When you have a character who can sprout 14 additional arms and wield a pistol in each, any answer will suffice for any question. It's not like its going to contradict some well-established logic.

Overall, I'm not sure how I feel about Killer is Dead's main campaign. It has the virtue of being short, I'll give it that. And there were some amusing and affecting moments. But it didn't really earn its surrealism, and it wasn't anywhere near clever enough to cheat. Perhaps it's gone over my head, though. Maybe I'm divorced enough from the Japanese action game scene specifically, and the broader Japanese culture more generally that I'm missing out on some allusions, subtext, and idioms. Perhaps Killer is Dead is a mutation of a mutation of a cliche that became a joke. That feels plausible, but I'm not about to do the weeks of research necessary to find out.

Killer is Dead - 2/20 hours

Whatever I was going to say about Killer is Dead had been completely pushed out of my mind by a single, infuriating thought - in order to beat the second boss, I had to do that thing that video games sometimes make you do where you push the button really fast or else suffer some deadly consequence. I managed to succeed eventually, but my finger is killing me.

This has always been a problem for me. At least since the drinking contest in Chrono Trigger, if not before. There's something about the motion that feels very unnatural to me. It always makes me want to give up in frustration. This latest time was so bad that I actually had to look up a youtube tutorial on how to rapidly push a button. The video said to keep your finger close to the button and vibrate your whole arm. It worked, but the effort to reward ratio was so out of whack that I'm not entirely sure it was worth it. It must be a mechanic with some constituency, though, because designers keep putting it in games. And they wouldn't consistently reuse the same legacy mechanic for 30+ years if they didn't have a good reason, right?

Whew, I'm glad I got that off my chest. I was a bit disappointed to learn that Killer is Dead is going to be another slow finish for me. Not because it is bad (pointlessly physical QTE notwithstanding), but because t is probably the most singularly NSFW game I've played since Sakura Spirit. And seeing as how I do the bulk of my gaming at work, you can see how that might be an issue.

Where to start. The biggest offender is the non-pausable, non-skippable cutscenes. I work alone on the night shift, so I could probably get away with the game's disgusting violence and gratuitous male gaze, but not if a customer can randomly interrupt me and possibly be exposed to disgusting violence sounds or the sultry inanities of any random female character.

Which segues nicely into my more general first impressions of the game.There's a thing I've noticed in other Suda 51 games, and the trend seems to continue here, where I can't quite shake the feeling that the game is taking the piss out of me. Or, more accurately, that it's taking the piss out of the person it thinks I am. It's like it's saying, "hey, you couch dwelling manchild with the obsession with violent media and the brittle heterosexuality, I'll bet you like cyborg katana duels and sexy ladies with no personality, right - well here's something flashy and aggressively dumb for you."

And yet, for all its obvious self-awareness, it also feels like it's trying to have it both ways. Like, there's this "romance" minigame where you have to . . . and I swear I'm not making this up . . . discreetly ogle the ladies until you build up a "guts" gauge enough to give them a present and if you do it quickly and subtly enough and give a good enough present, your paramour's heart gauge will fill up and she will reward you with . . . I don't know, the loading screen said it would be a weapon, which is considerably better than some of the alternatives, but I'm willing to bet there's going to be a gross PG-13 sex scene (or at the very least, some heavily innuendo-laden dialogue) to go with it.

On the one hand, this is one of the dumbest things I've ever encountered. It could not possibly be this dumb on accident. I'm trying to work out what the hell is going on narratively, and I can't even. You need to cast surreptitious glances at your date's crotch so you get horny enough to act boldly, and that impresses the ladies somehow? It is, in fact, so dumb that I think it may swing back around to genius. It's like the distilled elemental essence of every romance minigame you've ever played. Imagine, instead of picking the correct responses from a menu to seduce Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams, all you have to do is stare at her tits a predetermined number of times. The only way it could be more on the nose is if you got a sex trading card afterwards.

On the other hand, if you think too hard about the thing where you look through your magic glasses to check what sort of present the ladies might like best, and at the same time their clothes disappear, you begin to realize that the game lets you (hell, encourages you) to leer at these lovingly-rendered virtual dolls in their skimpy underwear. I may feel like I have to cultivate a protective layer of irony to create some distance between me and this skeevy, juvenile business, and I'm almost certain that this effect was intentional, but it's still skeevy and juvenile, you know.

And that's the thing about Killer is Dead. I knew from the second I heard its funky opening soundtrack that this was going to be a game that put style over substance, but it wields the male gaze like a drunk with a sledgehammer. The first level has you hunting monsters in a house belonging to a woman whose cleavage takes up roughly half her body, and it's obvious from the first time you meat her that she's going to be the level's boss. But when the boss fight comes, the real enemy is a parasite that bursts out of her neck and proceeds to . . . wear her like a scarf. You're fighting a giant bug creature, but whenever it faces you, you're looking straight down this dead woman's astounding cleavage and to by the sheerest coincidence, the boss's weak points are hidden inside her splayed legs. It was disgusting and exploitative, and I don't know, is this what art looks like?

Is this art?

Certainly, the next boss fight, the one that gave me so much button-mashing trouble, is with David, the gold-lingere-clad king of the moon (aspiring) and the camera is not shy about putting his ostentatious codpiece right at eye level. And that couldn't be a coincidence either. Maybe Suda51 thinks sex is something you do with your eyes.

I feel like Killer is Dead is trying to say something. You don't break the fourth wall in the middle of a boss's establishing cutscene to say (and this is literally a quote), ". . . we'll get tons of complaints from the gamers. Isn't this supposed to be an action game?" unless you're trying to make a point. The problem I'm having is that every time I try to get a handle on what hat point is, the best I can come up with is "video games are beautiful gibberish - surrender to your id, loser."

From a blogging perspective, it's thrilling to have such a challenging game at such a late date. I was worried the bulk of my future posts would be some variation of "continuing to play strategy game X - strategy is sometimes weird, and also hard." Yet if I were playing this purely for my own enjoyment, I'm not sure how I'd feel about it. I like spectacle, but it's got to have heart. I get the feeling that this game regards heart as something that gets in the way of a good orgy (either the traditional kind, or of violence, take your pick.)

Killer Is Dead - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From The Steam Store Page)

Get ready for some seriously stylish action from renowned designer SUDA51. In this exclusive version for PC, players will be slicing, dicing, and shooting as the suave executioner Mondo Zappa. Prepare for the thrill of love and kill in KILLER IS DEAD!

Exclusive Features for Nightmare Edition:

New difficulty mode called Nightmare Mode. In this mode, enemies can only be defeated using the following attacks: Adrenaline Burst, Dodge Burst, Headshots, so the gameplay requires far more skill and tactics. Players will not be able to use the Final Judgement finisher (QTE mode) to defeat enemies.

Theater Mode - Rewatch cutscenes and get extended background information on characters, helping to unravel the story after your 1st playthrough

Smooth Operator Pack for console will be included, which includes X-ray glasses, bewitching outfits, stunning beauties, and a killer new mission and boss!

Previous Playtime

0 hours

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

Killer is Dead is the last game I got for free. I've seen games being offered for free since getting it, but every time, I thought "no, I'm too close to finishing my list, I don't want to risk that for anything I'm less than 100% certain about."

I was not 100% certain about Killer is Dead. It was last year and I was riding high on the fact that I was ahead of schedule to complete my 2017 blog goal, so I indulged myself.

But why this game, specifically. It was largely a matter of timing, but aside from that, well, gaming as a medium never really subscribed to the auteur theory, but this guy, Suda51, somehow managed to carve out an exception for himself. That intrigued me. And since I'd enjoyed both No More Heroes and its sequel, I thought the risk was minimal.

Expectations and Prior Experience

It's a stylish action game and is controller compatible. The only way this gives me any trouble at all is if it proves to be punishingly difficult, but seeing as how one of the selling points of the PC edition is that it adds a higher difficulty, I have to assume the base game is not too much of a challenge.

Regardless, I should probably savor it. Only two of my other remaining games have a noticeable plot (and frankly, I couldn't tell you a damned thing about Titan's Quest, despite having played it for 3 hours).

Robocraft - 20/20 hours

Wow, that was rough. It seems like every time I talk about finishing half a game in a single marathon session it comes off less as an enjoyable experience and more as something to be endured, but I think that's because I tend not to think of playing games I enjoy as "marathons."

Still, for the record, 10 hours of Robocraft in a row is far too much. There's only about 10 minutes of game here, and then it's the same thing over and over again. And while even that would be fine if I liked the 10 minutes, here it was just painful.

I think what it comes down to is that I'm not very good at piloting my robots. I was able to get up to silver league among the Thursday night crowd, but I'm pretty sure that, like 90% of that was getting lucky draws for my teammates. I don't think I ever got more than two kills in the same match and the less said about my many ignominious deaths the better. I would get stuck in corners, wind up doing donuts while trying to reverse, and my weapon accuracy was nonexistent. I felt sorry for anyone who wound up on the same team as me.

But I stuck with league multiplayer anyway. It was the only way I was going to get those blessed periods of respite where I got to sit around waiting for a lobby to open up. Once, it took almost 40 minutes! Though sadly, that was a one-time thing. The second longest wait was 5 minutes. I spent quite a bit of my time in absolute terror that I would be efficiently matched and then promptly killed.

But I don't think my experiences should be used to guide anyone either towards or away from Robocraft. I stubbornly refused to give up at something I was terrible at and at which I had no intention of improving. I think if I'd approached it with greater sincerity, and allowed myself time to cool down between disasters, I could have come to love this game.

At the very least, I genuinely respect it. I'm not thrilled about the loot-box grind, and despite all the parts I got from league play (another reason to do it is that you get a gold loot box, even for losing), I never really got rich enough to feel free when designing a new robot. But aside from that, the core concept is great. Building robots, seeing them modeled in the physics of the world, and then having a combat system where the shape and composition of your robot actually matters - all of that adds up to a very memorable experience. That such a thing is even notionally available for free continues to blow my mind.

It's just not for me, specifically.

Still, it's not the game's fault that I realized this at hour 13 and then forced myself to play for another 7 hours regardless. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's the sort of out-of-context problem that is impossible to design around.

Robocraft - 10/20 hours

In my last post I said I was going to wait to write about Robocraft's crafting system because I had mixed feelings about it and I wanted to stay positive. Now that I am free to be as catty as I want to be, the time has come.

The crafting system is potentially very powerful and as I browsed the marketplace, I saw dozens of really cool looking robots, ranging from whimsical, impractical creations to killer death bots that could plausibly be in a sci-fi horror movie. Which brings me to my first main complaint about the crafting system - the selection of parts available to you is basically random. And while you can have multiple robots, you can only use a given part once. So if you want to use your rarest parts on a second robot, you have to go back and strip it off the first.

This really limits my creativity and experimentation. I have so few viable parts that I have to deconstruct my older robots to make new ones, and if I commit to buying new parts from the shop, it will influence almost every robot I make from that point forward. The worst part is when I get a new rare part that gives me a great new idea, but then realize that I'll need to grind for hours to get enough duplicates that my bot is viable in combat.

It's immensely frustrating. I mean, I get it, it's a free-to-play game and its entire business model revolves around inciting deadbeats like me to pay up. But I don't think I can think of any time I've felt more manipulated by the free-to-play model. There are all these cool things just out of reach and my cheapness is keeping them away from me.

Though that's not really fair. Because there's no way for me to simply give Robocraft money and then just have everything I want. I can buy a premium membership, which will double the rate at which I acquire loot. Or I can buy loot boxes directly. But in both cases, the outcome is still random. My vision is constrained by the scarcity of parts, but that scarcity can only be alleviated by time (or, I suppose, by dropping a truly obscene amount on lootboxes until I get multiples of every part). In a way, this is almost worse. If there's one lesson I've definitely learned from doing this blog for four years, it's that time is always in short supply.

The other thing I don't like about the crafting system is that it's oddly under-featured. Maybe I've just been spoiled by Starmade, but there are a lot of powerful tools that are simply missing here. You can only put down one block at a time. There's only one available axis of symmetry. You can't copy or paste sections of ships. You have to enter a separate menu every time you need to place a different part. And the thing is, this isn't Minecraft. Navigating around the environment while trying to build isn't part of the challenge. You're just this floating presence which places parts with the mouse buttons. There's no need for the bot creation process to be this slow.

Yet despite my complaints, crafting robots remains my favorite part of Robocraft. Though I've yet to come up with a design that excels in PvP combat (and have been much too afraid to inflict Octohealdron on my fellow human players, seeing how ridiculously it handles vs the AI), I do like seeing my creations given life.  And I would gladly play a game that had Robocraft's building and combat systems, if it distributed parts in a way not meant to maximize profits from obsessives and gamblers.

Robocraft - 5/20 hours

Because of my ridiculous blunder in the last post, I am going to try and make it up to Robocraft by saying only positive things about it.

The damage system is pretty neat. Your robots are composed of several pieces of equipment, held together by blocks. As you get hit, you lose blocks from your robot, in the locations the hits are suffered (you can also lose equipment directly, but it tends to be tougher than your standard blocks). This adds an interesting layer of strategy to the fights. You can aim for specific systems on the enemy bot in order to try and take out their weapons or movement, and it is often wise to position your own robot so that the less vulnerable areas get shot first.

This also ties in with robot construction more generally. Robocraft operates with a physics simulation, so if your robot is lopsided, it will lean. If you lose your front wheels, you have to go in reverse, dragging the useless half of your robot behind (in front of?) you. It's not the tightest simulation out there - I once saw a legged mech get sheared in half and then hop around on one foot blasting with its remaining laser arm, but the way I see it, its looseness allows for some memorable stories and  keeps the game from grinding to a halt every time someone loses a single wheel.

I also enjoy going into the factory section and seeing the robots other people have built. They are all much too expensive for me to buy with my limited resources, but it's still fascinating to see what other people have done with the game's creation tools. It's like a mechanical, less interactive version of Spore.

So, you know, there are things I unabashedly enjoy about this game. It's not all complaining about the economy or whining because I'm bad at team death matches. You'd probably expect me to mention the fun of building robots (and it is fun) as part of the positives, but I have some reservations about the construction system, so I'll wait for a post that isn't meant to be purely complementary to talk about it.

That being said, I was able to construct a massive octohedral robot that fired healing beams and was nearly impossible to destroy (despite moving like what it was - a 4 story tall 8-sided die with jet engines strapped to it.) I called it the Octohealdron and it was the highlight of my day.

Robocraft - 2/20 hours

Imagine a building game that was purposefully hobbled by wedding it to the worst part of a collectible trading card game, and then use that as the basis for a serviceable, but bare-bones action game. That's Robocraft.

Building your own robots is cool, but Robocraft doesn't give you the parts right away. It doesn't even (necessarily) give you the parts eventually. Instead. you get loot boxes from playing online and the loot boxes contain a random assortment of parts and those you use to build your robot. You can break down your unneeded parts for an in-game currency and then trade that currency for different parts, but the exchange rate is not favorable, and you can only get parts of the first two rarity levels that way. That's right, parts come in rarity levels, like in trading card games, and the "epic" and "legendary" parts you can only get through random chance.

It's the exact opposite of what makes building games great. Keep in mind, I like crafting games that make you unlock recipes and force you to build the tools to build the tools for end-game content. In fact, that's the very reason I've allowed Starbound to so thoroughly distract me as of late. However, the difference here is that in a more conventional crafting game, you can make a plan about how to get the really good stuff. In Robocraft all you can do is ceaselessly grind away in the hopes that the parts you need drop by chance. It strikes me as a massive waste of time.

But I guess that's free-to-play for you. Although I'm not sure that spending real money would be all that much of a help. As near as I can tell, the only way to spend money on this game is to get a "premium membership" which doubles the amount of items you get from lootboxes and gives you a better exchange rate for recycling parts. Thus even if you give Robocraft your money, it's still a random grind-fest where you hope the gods of chance give you the parts to make a cool robot.

And those gods are not kind, I can tell you. One of the epic rarity parts I got was an aircraft wing. A single aircraft wing. The game is unkind enough to force you to double grind for things that naturally and exclusively come in pairs. Under most normal circumstances, this would be sufficient for me to uninstall and never look back.

But I am committed here. So I'll keep playing. It probably won't be too bad. Despite my complaining, it really is a hoot to build a robot piece by piece and then drive it around. I just wish there was something more interesting to do with it than team arena deathmatch. Yes, battle bots are one of the main robot archetypes, but it just feels perfunctory to me, like they didn't bother to build a game around their CCG-esque crafting system and just offloaded the work of creating a challenge to their players. That's likely the main downside to the free-to-play model. There's just not enough incentive to polish the parts of the game that don't make any money.

CORRECTION: I was mistaken about the in-game shop. You can buy epic and legendary parts with the regular in-game currency. This mitigates a big complaint I have about the game (and man, do I feel like a fool for overlooking the purple and gold items in the big list), though it does make its lootbox-driven economy all the more baffling. Why not just give players a budget in currency and allow them to build based on that? Why make people go through the process of breaking down their useless parts to afford the ones they really want? I have an uncomfortable feeling that Robocraft is trying to pull something here, but seeing as how I was so clearly wrong about something ridiculously simple, I am going to withhold judgement.

Robocraft - Initial Thoughts

About The Game (From the Steam Store Page)

Build insane, fully customisable robot battle vehicles that drive, hover, walk and fly in the free-to-play action game Robocraft. Add weapons from the future and jump in the driving seat as you take your creation into battle against others online!

BUILD - Combine blocks in an easy-to-use editor interface to create a futuristic robot battle vehicle armed with dozens of different weapon options.

DRIVE - Jump into the pilot seat and test out your robot design against AI. Jet cars, tanks, flying warships, helicopters, drones; almost any vehicle is possible in Robocraft!

FIGHT - Battle online in vast battlefields against players from all over the world on dedicated servers.

Previous Playtime

5 minutes

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

Well, it was free, so that was an inducement. Although, at the time, I was naive to the ways of Free-to-Play games, and thus valued it more highly than I  should have. Though I will say that its pitch was pretty effective - building your own robots and then testing them out is exactly the sort of thing I can't resist.

Expectations and Prior Experience

The biggest worry is, obviously, that it will be the worst kind of Free-to-Play grind, where all the cool parts are locked behind many hours of repetitive gold farming. But I'm also concerned that it might be a little too gladiatorial. I'm looking at the description and it appears to be one of those games that revolve around PvP and that's never been my thing.

But if the game is generous enough with resources that I can build a lot of goofy and improbable robots, then I'll probably be content, even if I don't win a lot of battles. (Unless, of course, my robots become lastingly damaged between fights, in which case I will be inconsolable.)

Blood Bowl 2 - 20/20 hours

I kept up my perfect defensive record to the very end, but it was a close thing. The opposing team was just three squares away from the end zone on the second to last turn and would have easily dropped it in. So I made a hugely risky move and blitzed the enemy with my weakest character. It shouldn't have worked, but I rolled astoundingly well and stripped the ball at the last possible minute. It was a thrilling play that saved me from a tie game. These clutch moments are the best part of sporting entertainment.

The worst thing about sports is the machismo. At first, I thought Blood Bowl 2 was a parody of macho football culture, what with its over-the-top violence and sociopathic disregard for the sanctity of human life. But the more I played the game, the more I became convinced that there was little irony in its revelry in its own excess.

Like, every time you score a point, the game cuts to the cheerleaders and lingers on them for an unnecessarily long time, and at least with humans, there's no joke there. It's just scantily clad women doing sexy dance moves for the benefit of the male gaze. The orc cheerleaders were funny - they wore maces as pasties - but even they were shown in a very salacious way. And, of course, the fact that even in the context of a fantasy setting with all sorts of inhuman races, the players were all men and the cheerleaders were all women helps make it feel less critical than it should be.

Overall, though, I liked Blood Bowl 2. Despite my success against the AI, I never got to a point where I felt confident and in control. That's only natural, of course. People play this game for hundreds or thousands of hours, gathering in leagues to test their skills in the spirit of sportsmanship and honest competition. It would be arrogant in the extreme of me to think I could waltz in after 20 hours and have any sort of notable skill. I will never be more than a dabbler in this hobby, and that's fine. For all my grousing and foot-dragging, I enjoyed broadening my horizons.

I'll probably play Blood Bowl 2 again from time to time, but it's unlikely to become an obsession. I don't have the drive for domination that makes for true a champion.

Blood Bowl 2 - 10/20 hours

I was planning on finishing Blood Bowl 2 in a pair of marathon session over my days off, but I got distracted, again, by Starbound. It's made me feel vaguely guilty, but it's not something I could necessarily pin down. Why now, when I am so close to finishing the blog?

I think it's a combination of things. Part of it is a weird combination of exhaustion and dread that I'm not sure has a name - I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and my mind is prematurely unwinding itself in anticipation of a well-deserved rest, but at the same time time, finishing my four-year-long project feels like closing a chapter on my life, one that has brought me a lot of joy and fulfillment. So, there's a certain appeal in just not thinking about it.

The other, perhaps larger, factor in my procrastination is that I have a hard time playing Blood Bowl 2 for more than one match in a row. It's one part precise strategy game, where positioning your pieces carefully is of the utmost importance. But mixed into that is a gambling game, where most of your important actions are left up to a roll of the dice, and the consequences for failure can be quite serious. And then it's all wrapped in this sort of frenetic attitude. There are not many things in this world more sedate than board games, but when a video game version of a board game has violent attack animations, a cheering crowd, and announcers who play up every chaotic thing that happens, it can feel a lot more stressful than it really is.

Which isn't to say I don't like the game. I do. The randomness can be amusing, and there's something very satisfying about perfectly positioning your little guys to block an enemy's movement or score a touchdown. I just feel more comfortable doing one match at a time and then cooling off between sessions. In fact, if I were to stretch this out over 10 days, I'd have literally no complaints . . .

Except maybe the AI. I've finished 2/3rds of the campaign mode so far and I've allowed 0 enemy touchdowns. In fact, only the dark elf team even came close, and that was mostly because I had gotten lucky on my early game injury rolls, set them down about 5 players, and I got a wild hair to aggressively foul at every opportunity in the hopes of winning the game by default.

That being said, I'm not sure I have it in me to finish the campaign mode. Each match just keeps getting harder and harder, not because of the enemy's tactics (the AI doesn't seem to realize that the goal is to win the game by scoring touchdowns), but just because they keep throwing bigger, tougher enemies at me and at some point something's got to give. I already wince every time one of my players gets K'O'd - a permanent injury that forced them out of my roster would be emotionally devastating. I'm one of those people who resets Fire Emblem every time he loses a character, and though the Blood Bowl 2 gang is not as charming, I still managed to get attached.

Which I guess says good things for the game as a whole. Only things you care about have the power to hurt you.

Blood Bowl 2 - 2/20 hours

Five days and only 2 hours, it's inexcusable, really. My "defense" is that I played Starbound for about 30 hours in those five days. That was a mistake, not only in terms of time wasted, but because I'd forgotten how good it feels to just play a game because I want to and not because it filled some arbitrary slot on a pre-determined schedule. It was enough to give me doubts about the moral mission of the blog.

Which shouldn't reflect on Blood Bowl 2 in any way. My two hours was pretty spread out, so I'm going to be a little vague on the details, but so far, it's a fine game that I'm happy to play. It's a parody of American football in board game form where the teams are all these different fantasy races like orcs, dwarves, or elves. But that's at a pretty high level of abstraction. In the particulars, it is a turn-based strategy game of positioning, resource management, and area control. It doesn't always feel like the game of football, but that might have as much to do with it being British as it does with it being a board game.

Blood Bowl 2's greatest strength is the way it skewers the violence of real football by very slightly exaggerating it. It's funny to see these goofily dressed fantasy figures smash each other into the dust for the sake of a ball, and you can usually rely on the game's announcers to deliver an amusing quip about the action. Of course, like many of America's most enduring cultural institutions, real football is already a celebration of excess that borders on self-parody, so I can't really say that the orc and the vampire who call these Blood Bowl games are more entertaining than, say, John Madden.

I've been playing the campaign mode, which introduces the game's rules piecemeal, making each match slightly more complicated than the last. It came as a real shock when I learned that picking up the ball requires a dice roll that may fail 1/3 to 1/2 of the time, but I think I can get used to it. Seeing the little guys on my team knocked out and injured, however, is probably something that's always going to take an emotional toll.

I can't say with certainty that I will finish Blood Bowl 2 in a timely manner. There's still a lot I want to do with Starbound. What I can say is that its combination of precision board game tactics and over-the-top violence will definitely bring me back . . . hopefully before it's too late.