I got another chance to play with my friend, and that was pretty great. If I could keep up this pace, finishing ibb & obb would be no trouble at all. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm on my own from here on out, at least if I want to finish it by the end of the week.
The biggest obstacle is that this game is mentally fatiguing. In a good way, but fatiguing nonetheless. I think it's because it combines obscure puzzles with precision platforming and just never lets up. Each level attempts to one up the previous levels, introducing ever more convoluted ways of manipulating gravity and bouncing on each others' heads.
It's immensely satisfying when you get past a new obstacle, but the game stretches muscles that you don't often have to use in real life. So every step of the game is a demanding mental exercise. It wears you out fast.
And that doesn't even take into account the actual platforming itself. The places where you have to land are pretty narrow, and you often have only a split-second window in which to land on them. It's fine when I'm well-rested, but after your third or fourth level of the day, my reactions start to slow and I start to get sloppy. There were a couple of times where my friend and I found a secret level, figured out how to solve it, but had to give up because we couldn't execute the complex maneuvers involved.
My conclusion is that once the sluggishness starts to set in, I just have to put down the controller and get some rest. I'm not sure how this is going to play out with my solo attempts. There's an added complication in the fact that I'm neither expected nor encouraged to be able to control both characters simultaneously, so I'm going to fail in execution even when I'm fresh and alert. That's just going to exacerbate my fatigue. I may have to learn to just lean into it, do 15 hours in one night and just let my brain melt out my ears.
Then again, I always say I'm going to do that, but only follow through maybe one time in five. I've got three and a half weeks until my deadline so I'm not too worried about overdoing it, though I did kind of hope that I have some time to see what this blog would be like if I were responsible and only bought games I intended to play immediately.
Things are getting kind of suspenseful here.
Monday, May 28, 2018
Sunday, May 27, 2018
ibb & obb - 2/20 hours
Two days in and I've got approximately one hour with multiplayer and one hour trying to go solo.
Playing with a friend is super fun. ibb & obb is an excellent multiplayer game. It requires precise communication and coordinated movements and the puzzles are just complex enough that it's an advantage to have two people, but not so difficult that you're often stuck with nothing do. Hanging out with my friend is the best part, of course, but as a team activity, it's worthwhile.
Playing by myself . . . eh. It wasn't the nightmare I was expecting, but neither is it something I derive a great deal of fulfillment from. Controlling the two characters is fine if I can do it sequentially, but on those occasions where I need both ibb and obb to act in tandem, it's a real pain. I've gotten through the first three levels already, but I am seriously expecting to hit a brick wall sooner rather than later.
I guess there's nothing to be done but keep plugging away. I'll probably be able to arrange some more co-op sessions before this is all said and done, but it's unreasonable to expect even my good friends to make themselves available for the 18 hours I need to hit my benchmark.
Learning to use both hands, it is, then.
Playing with a friend is super fun. ibb & obb is an excellent multiplayer game. It requires precise communication and coordinated movements and the puzzles are just complex enough that it's an advantage to have two people, but not so difficult that you're often stuck with nothing do. Hanging out with my friend is the best part, of course, but as a team activity, it's worthwhile.
Playing by myself . . . eh. It wasn't the nightmare I was expecting, but neither is it something I derive a great deal of fulfillment from. Controlling the two characters is fine if I can do it sequentially, but on those occasions where I need both ibb and obb to act in tandem, it's a real pain. I've gotten through the first three levels already, but I am seriously expecting to hit a brick wall sooner rather than later.
I guess there's nothing to be done but keep plugging away. I'll probably be able to arrange some more co-op sessions before this is all said and done, but it's unreasonable to expect even my good friends to make themselves available for the 18 hours I need to hit my benchmark.
Learning to use both hands, it is, then.
Saturday, May 26, 2018
ibb & obb - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
ibb & obb is a two player cooperative game set in a puzzle filled world where gravity goes both up and down. You can only succeed by working closely together.
Find a friend for some true local co-op couch fun or match up online.
Fall up and jump down through 15 levels filled with double gravity puzzles and discover 8 hidden worlds that will test your new non-Newtonian skills to the maximum.
All levels have their own unique music, composed by Kettel, known for his warm melodic electronica.
Previous Playtime
8 hours
Expectations and Prior Experience
ibb & obb is kind of a great game. It is a co-op platformer where each player controls one of these cute blob-like creatures and they navigate these stark 2D worlds that are divided into two separate halves with opposite gravity. So you can jump from the top of the screen, fall through a hole, and then bounce right back again when gravity reverses. To get through it, you often have to use your friend as a spring board for complicated gravity-manipulation tricks. I played it all the way through with my friend Daniel and I had a blast.
Now I have to play it mostly by myself. I'm not sure it's even possible. It's certainly not recommended, and inadvisable even if it was. I imagine it's playable, in the strictest technical sense, but only if you can split your attention and separately control two different characters with each of your hands.
It sounds like a nightmare, but I guess piano players manage to do something similar, so who knows, maybe it will get to be like second nature. In all likelihood I will be miserable the entire time.
But hey, it's the last game on my list, and if I'm not going to stubbornly insist on perversely playing games in ways their designers never intended just to reach an arbitrary deadline, then what is his blog even for?
ibb & obb is a two player cooperative game set in a puzzle filled world where gravity goes both up and down. You can only succeed by working closely together.
Find a friend for some true local co-op couch fun or match up online.
Fall up and jump down through 15 levels filled with double gravity puzzles and discover 8 hidden worlds that will test your new non-Newtonian skills to the maximum.
All levels have their own unique music, composed by Kettel, known for his warm melodic electronica.
Previous Playtime
8 hours
Expectations and Prior Experience
ibb & obb is kind of a great game. It is a co-op platformer where each player controls one of these cute blob-like creatures and they navigate these stark 2D worlds that are divided into two separate halves with opposite gravity. So you can jump from the top of the screen, fall through a hole, and then bounce right back again when gravity reverses. To get through it, you often have to use your friend as a spring board for complicated gravity-manipulation tricks. I played it all the way through with my friend Daniel and I had a blast.
Now I have to play it mostly by myself. I'm not sure it's even possible. It's certainly not recommended, and inadvisable even if it was. I imagine it's playable, in the strictest technical sense, but only if you can split your attention and separately control two different characters with each of your hands.
It sounds like a nightmare, but I guess piano players manage to do something similar, so who knows, maybe it will get to be like second nature. In all likelihood I will be miserable the entire time.
But hey, it's the last game on my list, and if I'm not going to stubbornly insist on perversely playing games in ways their designers never intended just to reach an arbitrary deadline, then what is his blog even for?
Titan Quest Anniversary Edition - 20/20 hours
All done with Titan Quest. I don't think it's a game that's going to linger in my memory. It was nice seeing the mythological creatures and having anachronistic historical cameos from figures like Leonidas and Imhotep, but the story is as shallow as shallow can be, and the art direction, while fine, had an unfortunate tendency towards the dun-colored that makes the environments blur together after awhile. I'd call it "serviceable." Nothing surprised, offended or inspired me. It was just a repetitive click-fest.
Though don't make the mistake of thinking this is a complaint. Sometimes all you want is a mindless hack and slash that you can play on autopilot. Randomized loot systems are almost always addictive, especially when combined with an rpg advancement system that balances out randomized rewards with steady growth. Titan Quest was no exception. I may not have been impressed with 90% of the items I picked up, but it was still pretty thrilling to get something powerful and new.
I may have taken a bit longer than expected, thanks to the instability of my personal life, but at no point did I feel like playing this game was a chore. I probably won't finish the main campaign, though. It was a nice change of pace going from Greek to Egyptian mythology, but it's not enough to make up for Titan Quest's sprawling maps, interchangeable enemies, and conservative character classes. I just can't foresee myself ever playing this game while Path of Exile still exists.
That said, I had fun. Overall, it was a fine game to be my second-to-last.
Though don't make the mistake of thinking this is a complaint. Sometimes all you want is a mindless hack and slash that you can play on autopilot. Randomized loot systems are almost always addictive, especially when combined with an rpg advancement system that balances out randomized rewards with steady growth. Titan Quest was no exception. I may not have been impressed with 90% of the items I picked up, but it was still pretty thrilling to get something powerful and new.
I may have taken a bit longer than expected, thanks to the instability of my personal life, but at no point did I feel like playing this game was a chore. I probably won't finish the main campaign, though. It was a nice change of pace going from Greek to Egyptian mythology, but it's not enough to make up for Titan Quest's sprawling maps, interchangeable enemies, and conservative character classes. I just can't foresee myself ever playing this game while Path of Exile still exists.
That said, I had fun. Overall, it was a fine game to be my second-to-last.
Thursday, May 24, 2018
Titan Quest Anniversary Edition - 12/20 hours
So, Titan Quest is kind of a dry game. Not dry enough for me to count it as a negative, but it certainly isn't one of those games I'm going to have memorable anecdotes about. . .
I guess I'll have to try, though.
So, the way you play Titan Quest is that almost everything is done with the mouse. If you want to go to a particular location, you click on it. If there's an enemy, you click on it to attack. You get various abilities that map to the numbers on keyboard. You press the number to activate the ability, but these are mostly interchangeable. There is some strategy to how they are used, but I find having too many abilities distracting, so I just bought the one that I mapped to the right mouse button.
I suppose I can blame some of the dryness on my tendency to favor passive abilities over a complicated active skill build. The issue I have is that all your active abilities draw from the same pool of resources and, cooldowns notwithstanding, there's not really much incentive to split my skill points among multiple abilities.
But mostly the game operates on such an abstract level that one enemy is very much like another and one area is very much like another. It's just a matter of click, click, clicking away until the text tells me I've run out of places to go.
I'm pretty sure I'll finish it by tomorrow, though. Repetition doesn't bother me, and finding new equipment and leveling up my character are still satisfying rewards. It's exactly the same sort of gameplay I enjoyed in Torchlight II and Path of Exile (and I do mean exactly), and if I were going to get bored with it, I'd have done so long ago.
I guess I'll have to try, though.
So, the way you play Titan Quest is that almost everything is done with the mouse. If you want to go to a particular location, you click on it. If there's an enemy, you click on it to attack. You get various abilities that map to the numbers on keyboard. You press the number to activate the ability, but these are mostly interchangeable. There is some strategy to how they are used, but I find having too many abilities distracting, so I just bought the one that I mapped to the right mouse button.
I suppose I can blame some of the dryness on my tendency to favor passive abilities over a complicated active skill build. The issue I have is that all your active abilities draw from the same pool of resources and, cooldowns notwithstanding, there's not really much incentive to split my skill points among multiple abilities.
But mostly the game operates on such an abstract level that one enemy is very much like another and one area is very much like another. It's just a matter of click, click, clicking away until the text tells me I've run out of places to go.
I'm pretty sure I'll finish it by tomorrow, though. Repetition doesn't bother me, and finding new equipment and leveling up my character are still satisfying rewards. It's exactly the same sort of gameplay I enjoyed in Torchlight II and Path of Exile (and I do mean exactly), and if I were going to get bored with it, I'd have done so long ago.
Monday, May 21, 2018
Titan Quest Anniversary Edition - 5/20 hours
Before starting this game, I was certain I was going to zoom through it in just a couple of days. It seemed like exactly the sort of game I can play for hours on end without complaint. And nothing I've seen in my first five hours has disabused me of that notion. Unfortunately, real life events have limited my available game playing time to less than 3 hours a day (a tragedy, I know).
But given the small and sporadic time I've had with this game, I'd say my first impressions are favorable. Its plot is probably the shallowest possible interpretation of Greek mythology and history, but that's more than forgivable. Any excuse to bash satyrs and centaurs and maenads is fine by me, though the stretch where I had to tackle zombies felt more like generic arpg fantasy than anything specific to the setting.
Titan Quest's biggest flaw is probably its loot system. The basic Diablo-esque idea of randomized loot drops of varying rarity is strong. It makes every enemy into some kind of beautiful death pinata. Unfortunately, the gambling-like thrill is somewhat mitigated when all the prizes are blandly interchangeable and so weak statistically that they aren't even worth the inventory space to sell . I'm at level 9 and I'm still picking up level 3 equipment. It's a huge letdown.
I do like the class system, though. It's not spectacular, but it does a very specific thing that always makes me smile. You have two "masteries" (broad categories of skill like "warrior" or "storm") and each of the 36 possible combinations has its own distinct class name - like Conqueror = Warrior + Defense or Elementalist = Storm + Earth. It doesn't add a lot to any particular playthrough, because you only get two masteries and you can't change them, but I enjoy the knowledge that there's a broader possibility space. And I find the interlocking nature of the masteries to be very satisfying.
From here on out, it's just more hacking and slashing for me. I'm looking forward to it, but I can only hope that I have the time to really get into it.
But given the small and sporadic time I've had with this game, I'd say my first impressions are favorable. Its plot is probably the shallowest possible interpretation of Greek mythology and history, but that's more than forgivable. Any excuse to bash satyrs and centaurs and maenads is fine by me, though the stretch where I had to tackle zombies felt more like generic arpg fantasy than anything specific to the setting.
Titan Quest's biggest flaw is probably its loot system. The basic Diablo-esque idea of randomized loot drops of varying rarity is strong. It makes every enemy into some kind of beautiful death pinata. Unfortunately, the gambling-like thrill is somewhat mitigated when all the prizes are blandly interchangeable and so weak statistically that they aren't even worth the inventory space to sell . I'm at level 9 and I'm still picking up level 3 equipment. It's a huge letdown.
I do like the class system, though. It's not spectacular, but it does a very specific thing that always makes me smile. You have two "masteries" (broad categories of skill like "warrior" or "storm") and each of the 36 possible combinations has its own distinct class name - like Conqueror = Warrior + Defense or Elementalist = Storm + Earth. It doesn't add a lot to any particular playthrough, because you only get two masteries and you can't change them, but I enjoy the knowledge that there's a broader possibility space. And I find the interlocking nature of the masteries to be very satisfying.
From here on out, it's just more hacking and slashing for me. I'm looking forward to it, but I can only hope that I have the time to really get into it.
Saturday, May 19, 2018
Titan Quest Anniversary Edition - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
From Age of Empires co-creator Brian Sullivan and Braveheart writer Randall Wallace comes an innovative action role playing game set in ancient Greece, Egypt and Asia. The Titans have escaped their eternal prison, wreaking havoc upon the earth. The gods seek a hero who can turn the tide in an epic struggle that will determine the fate of both men and gods.
In this epic quest of good versus evil, players will encounter the greatest villains of Greek mythology, brave the attacks of Cerberus, and hazard the banks of the River Styx. Players will interpret the prophecies of the blind seer Tiresias, fight alongside Agamemnon and Achilles, and use the wiles of Odysseus to conquer this dark new adventure.
Are you ready for the quest?
Previous Playtime
4 hours
Expectations and Prior Experience
A Diablo-style game set in mythic Greece - there's no way this can go wrong. Or, at least, that's what I would be saying if I was going into this raw. As it so happens, I've played it online with my friend Daniel and I know for a fact that it conformed to my expectations. I had a little trouble following the plot, but I figure this time I can take it slow and actually read the dialogue.
And if it turns out that I still can't follow the plot, well, at least I'll be able to kill monsters and gather loot, and that's more than enough to keep me occupied for 20 hours.
From Age of Empires co-creator Brian Sullivan and Braveheart writer Randall Wallace comes an innovative action role playing game set in ancient Greece, Egypt and Asia. The Titans have escaped their eternal prison, wreaking havoc upon the earth. The gods seek a hero who can turn the tide in an epic struggle that will determine the fate of both men and gods.
In this epic quest of good versus evil, players will encounter the greatest villains of Greek mythology, brave the attacks of Cerberus, and hazard the banks of the River Styx. Players will interpret the prophecies of the blind seer Tiresias, fight alongside Agamemnon and Achilles, and use the wiles of Odysseus to conquer this dark new adventure.
Are you ready for the quest?
Previous Playtime
4 hours
Expectations and Prior Experience
A Diablo-style game set in mythic Greece - there's no way this can go wrong. Or, at least, that's what I would be saying if I was going into this raw. As it so happens, I've played it online with my friend Daniel and I know for a fact that it conformed to my expectations. I had a little trouble following the plot, but I figure this time I can take it slow and actually read the dialogue.
And if it turns out that I still can't follow the plot, well, at least I'll be able to kill monsters and gather loot, and that's more than enough to keep me occupied for 20 hours.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes - 20/20 hours
Eventually, I couldn't take it any more. I decided I needed a change of pace, so I decided to look through the workshop for mods.
That's where I found it . . .
THE CENTURION!
One hundred modules in one hundred minutes. A bomb so complex it required the installation of 100 other mods to go with it. I knew there was no chance I'd ever finish the thing, but I figured it would at least kill a lot of time.
And that it did. I decided I was not going to bother knocking myself out trying to get in under the wire. I would just take it easy, doing one exotic module at a time until my time ran out. I got as far as "the clock," which was the 16th one on the list. Not great, I'll admit, but some of those modules were downright complicated.
The worst one was "Cheap Checkout," where you had a list of groceries and you had to add up their prices (including multiplying by weight for certain products that were sold by the pound), apply a discount to groceries from a certain category (determined by the real-life day of the week) and then subtract the total from the displayed number to determine what amount you have to input to disarm the module.
Then there were other modules whose instructions were so unclear that I eventually had to look up tutorial videos just to figure out how to decipher the manual. Those modules could take me 10-20 minutes each. I actually wound up having to restart the bomb a couple of times, despite the 100 minute time limit.
I guess the temptation when designing a mod is to make it deep and weird enough to occupy a significant amount of the player's head space. It would seem like a real waste of effort to create something basic that could be finished in just a couple of seconds, and, of course, the space for iconic, easily described challenges is going to be very competitive. They probably work well enough on smaller bombs where they can shine as a centerpiece.
The modules I liked most, both modded and default, were the ones that felt like they could really be part of a bomb - cutting wires, flipping switches, monitoring the timer. There were times I wished that the game was about actually disarming fully simulated bombs, but then I remembered that doing so would be more or less the same as teaching the players how to build bombs themselves. Still, the modules that were basically just word puzzles often took me out of the experience. I guess it's just something I had to deal with.
Overall, I should not have played this game. I really enjoyed the multiplayer I played several months ago, but the memorization and streamlining I had to do over the last 20 hours has robbed the game of much of its mystique. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to enjoy it again, and if I do, it certainly won't be in the same way.
Sigh. The things I do for love.
That's where I found it . . .
THE CENTURION!
One hundred modules in one hundred minutes. A bomb so complex it required the installation of 100 other mods to go with it. I knew there was no chance I'd ever finish the thing, but I figured it would at least kill a lot of time.
And that it did. I decided I was not going to bother knocking myself out trying to get in under the wire. I would just take it easy, doing one exotic module at a time until my time ran out. I got as far as "the clock," which was the 16th one on the list. Not great, I'll admit, but some of those modules were downright complicated.
The worst one was "Cheap Checkout," where you had a list of groceries and you had to add up their prices (including multiplying by weight for certain products that were sold by the pound), apply a discount to groceries from a certain category (determined by the real-life day of the week) and then subtract the total from the displayed number to determine what amount you have to input to disarm the module.
Then there were other modules whose instructions were so unclear that I eventually had to look up tutorial videos just to figure out how to decipher the manual. Those modules could take me 10-20 minutes each. I actually wound up having to restart the bomb a couple of times, despite the 100 minute time limit.
I guess the temptation when designing a mod is to make it deep and weird enough to occupy a significant amount of the player's head space. It would seem like a real waste of effort to create something basic that could be finished in just a couple of seconds, and, of course, the space for iconic, easily described challenges is going to be very competitive. They probably work well enough on smaller bombs where they can shine as a centerpiece.
The modules I liked most, both modded and default, were the ones that felt like they could really be part of a bomb - cutting wires, flipping switches, monitoring the timer. There were times I wished that the game was about actually disarming fully simulated bombs, but then I remembered that doing so would be more or less the same as teaching the players how to build bombs themselves. Still, the modules that were basically just word puzzles often took me out of the experience. I guess it's just something I had to deal with.
Overall, I should not have played this game. I really enjoyed the multiplayer I played several months ago, but the memorization and streamlining I had to do over the last 20 hours has robbed the game of much of its mystique. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to enjoy it again, and if I do, it certainly won't be in the same way.
Sigh. The things I do for love.
Friday, May 18, 2018
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes - 15/20 hours
I'm crawling towards the end, but the going is rough. I got to a point where I was doing the 3 module random bombs in 30-60 seconds, and I just couldn't take it any more. I was looking at potentially hundreds of bombs before the end. So I went back to the "extreme" bombs, to try and get my 9th achievement.
Then, after a little while, I did it. I didn't think it would be possible, but I defused the hardcore bomb, with 9 regular modules and 2 needy modules. The only place I have to go after this is the "exotic" bombs, which each have their own weird gimmick (like the "Blinkenlights" bomb, which has 5 simon says modules and not enough time to finish them in sequence). I've already got 3 out of the six done, but the other 3 are so tedious and demanding that even 30 second random bombs would be more entertaining.
I guess at this point it's a pure battle of wills. I just have to force myself to tackle bomb after bomb for the next 5 hours. Then, I'll never have to play this game again, completely obviating the whole reason it was bought for me in the first place . . .
I may not have thought this through.
Then, after a little while, I did it. I didn't think it would be possible, but I defused the hardcore bomb, with 9 regular modules and 2 needy modules. The only place I have to go after this is the "exotic" bombs, which each have their own weird gimmick (like the "Blinkenlights" bomb, which has 5 simon says modules and not enough time to finish them in sequence). I've already got 3 out of the six done, but the other 3 are so tedious and demanding that even 30 second random bombs would be more entertaining.
I guess at this point it's a pure battle of wills. I just have to force myself to tackle bomb after bomb for the next 5 hours. Then, I'll never have to play this game again, completely obviating the whole reason it was bought for me in the first place . . .
I may not have thought this through.
Thursday, May 17, 2018
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes - 10/20 hours
Somewhere around 7 hours I hit a wall. I'd finished 2 out of the 4 "extreme" bombs and I just couldn't do it any more. They were too complicated. The needy modules were too needy. There wasn't enough time. The pressure was more or less unbearable.
So I decided I would just coast to completion. Fire up free play and do 13 hours worth of easy bombs. I'm going to make it. It's only a matter of time. But damn if it isn't tedious.
Playing this game solo was definitely a mistake. It's gotten to the point where, just from pure repetition, I can do some of the puzzles on memory alone. It's not something I anticipated from the start, but it's obvious in retrospect. I can't help but think it's undermining the whole point of the multiplayer game. So not only am I busting my head in a pointless act of endurance, I'm also ruining the very thing I most liked about the game in the first place.
Ah, hubris.
So I decided I would just coast to completion. Fire up free play and do 13 hours worth of easy bombs. I'm going to make it. It's only a matter of time. But damn if it isn't tedious.
Playing this game solo was definitely a mistake. It's gotten to the point where, just from pure repetition, I can do some of the puzzles on memory alone. It's not something I anticipated from the start, but it's obvious in retrospect. I can't help but think it's undermining the whole point of the multiplayer game. So not only am I busting my head in a pointless act of endurance, I'm also ruining the very thing I most liked about the game in the first place.
Ah, hubris.
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes - 5/20 hours
I don't want to play this game any more - waaggh!
Okay, now that I got that out of my system, I can talk about my last three hours with Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. I've been trying to do the right thing and diligently improve my skills by attempting the advanced bombs. It went fairly well for awhile, but I think I hit a wall in the second-to-last difficulty tier.
A couple of bombs back they introduced a new mechanic called "needy modules" - bomb parts that could not be permanently disarmed, but which you had to interact with every 40-50 seconds or so to keep the bomb from blowing up. With bombs like that, you have to be constantly mindful of the needy modules, even while you are working through the regular puzzles. Splitting my attention like this is pretty much my nightmare.
I will give it this, though - after awhile, the repeated failures start to blur together. I've spent an hour on my most recent bomb and as a result avoided that repetitive malaise I was so worried about in my last post. The price for that is, of course, the frustration and mental fatigue that comes with an intractable problem.
I don't know whether I'm going to keep it up. Going after the achievement is an obvious goal, and that can help keep me motivated, but these higher level bombs are overwhelming and if I have to try and speed my way through the deliberately obscure bomb defusal manual another 300 times I'm going to explode in a tantrum the likes of which this blog has never seen.
But then, what's the alternative? Just play hundreds of easy bombs, learning nothing and killing time for another 15 hours?
Hmmm . . .
Okay, now that I got that out of my system, I can talk about my last three hours with Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. I've been trying to do the right thing and diligently improve my skills by attempting the advanced bombs. It went fairly well for awhile, but I think I hit a wall in the second-to-last difficulty tier.
A couple of bombs back they introduced a new mechanic called "needy modules" - bomb parts that could not be permanently disarmed, but which you had to interact with every 40-50 seconds or so to keep the bomb from blowing up. With bombs like that, you have to be constantly mindful of the needy modules, even while you are working through the regular puzzles. Splitting my attention like this is pretty much my nightmare.
I will give it this, though - after awhile, the repeated failures start to blur together. I've spent an hour on my most recent bomb and as a result avoided that repetitive malaise I was so worried about in my last post. The price for that is, of course, the frustration and mental fatigue that comes with an intractable problem.
I don't know whether I'm going to keep it up. Going after the achievement is an obvious goal, and that can help keep me motivated, but these higher level bombs are overwhelming and if I have to try and speed my way through the deliberately obscure bomb defusal manual another 300 times I'm going to explode in a tantrum the likes of which this blog has never seen.
But then, what's the alternative? Just play hundreds of easy bombs, learning nothing and killing time for another 15 hours?
Hmmm . . .
Sunday, May 13, 2018
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes - 2/20 hours
This is going to be a tough one. It's only been two hours, but it feels more like ten. It's not so much that the game is dull - the modules that make up the bombs are simple puzzles that are mainly notable for how tetchily they're described, but it's not nearly as monotonous as Secret of the Magic Crystals - it's more that the game is broken down into 3-5 minute segments. That means that I am going to have to disarm almost 400 bombs. And there's no way to escape how overwhelming that is.
It doesn't help that solo playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes isn't very fun. It's not a complete drag. When you've got just a couple of seconds left on the clock and you snip the last wire you need to disarm the bomb in the nick of time, that's a satisfying feeling. But mostly it's just reading instructions from a sheet of paper and then following those instructions as calmly and efficiently as possible. I suppose a video game that encourages you to keep your cool and not panic under a strict time constraint has some value, but I'm already a pretty mellow guy, so it's mostly just going through the motions for me.
This hasn't yet proved the disaster I predicted before I started playing, but let's give it time. I can feel something building inside me the more I play it, but I can't yet say whether it's resentment or resignation. Either way, there's no chance of me getting out of this completely unscathed.
If only there were some sort of metaphor that described my situation of sitting in suspense waiting for calamity to inevitably strike . . .
It doesn't help that solo playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes isn't very fun. It's not a complete drag. When you've got just a couple of seconds left on the clock and you snip the last wire you need to disarm the bomb in the nick of time, that's a satisfying feeling. But mostly it's just reading instructions from a sheet of paper and then following those instructions as calmly and efficiently as possible. I suppose a video game that encourages you to keep your cool and not panic under a strict time constraint has some value, but I'm already a pretty mellow guy, so it's mostly just going through the motions for me.
This hasn't yet proved the disaster I predicted before I started playing, but let's give it time. I can feel something building inside me the more I play it, but I can't yet say whether it's resentment or resignation. Either way, there's no chance of me getting out of this completely unscathed.
If only there were some sort of metaphor that described my situation of sitting in suspense waiting for calamity to inevitably strike . . .
Saturday, May 12, 2018
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
In Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, one player is trapped in a room with a ticking time bomb they must defuse. The other players are the “Experts” who must give the instructions to defuse the bomb by deciphering the information found in the Bomb Defusal Manual. But there’s a catch: the Experts can’t see the bomb, so everyone will need to talk it out – fast!
Rounds are fast-paced, tense, occasionally silly, and almost always loud. Everybody has a role to play whether they are defusing the bomb or deciphering information from the manual.
Puzzle solving and communication skills – and maybe a few friendships – will be put to the test as players race to defuse bombs while communicating quickly, clearly, and effectively.
Previous Playtime
89 minutes (real time: probably roughly double)
Expectations and Prior Experience
I should not be doing this. I don't want to do this. This is going to be an utter desecration of a fun and original game. But I swore an oath before god and man that I would play every game on my challenge list for 20 hours, no exceptions. And I didn't break that vow for Ship Simulator Extremes or for Sakura Spirit. I didn't even break it for Trine 3, a game I both enjoyed and respected and which didn't deserve to get hate-played 5 times in a row.
See, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is kind of a great game. Or rather, it is a game that has a kind of greatness. It has its flaws, and there's a lot of room in its premise that simply isn't explored, but as far as I know, there is no other game quite like it out there. Certainly, it was the first time I've ever heard of a co-op game where one player doesn't even need to be physically present, not even metaphorically through the internet. Where half the game is a pdf the second player reads from. Where the "main" player doesn't (and indeed shouldn't) know the rules of the game.
This game is about communication. It's about teamwork. It's about trust. The main enemies are the ambiguity and limitations of the spoken word. To win, you need to speak clearly and concisely and develop a partnership with the other player.
I won't be doing any of that. I will be playing this game solo. Despite the fact that this misses the entire point, and is as absurd and pointless as playing "telephone" solo. It's not really the way I want to do it, but that's the reality of my situation. Playing with friends is difficult, because I keep odd hours, and playing with strangers is, to my socially anxious hermit brain, practically unthinkable.
I honestly can't say how this going to go. I'm expecting a train wreck, where I can't do anything. Or maybe where things that were difficult when relayed over the voice chat become trivial when I have the manual in front of me. And that's the best case scenario. Worst case is that it's merely frustrating and dull.
To sum up: I love the game, and that's why playing it like this is going to be a nightmare.
In Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, one player is trapped in a room with a ticking time bomb they must defuse. The other players are the “Experts” who must give the instructions to defuse the bomb by deciphering the information found in the Bomb Defusal Manual. But there’s a catch: the Experts can’t see the bomb, so everyone will need to talk it out – fast!
Rounds are fast-paced, tense, occasionally silly, and almost always loud. Everybody has a role to play whether they are defusing the bomb or deciphering information from the manual.
Puzzle solving and communication skills – and maybe a few friendships – will be put to the test as players race to defuse bombs while communicating quickly, clearly, and effectively.
Previous Playtime
89 minutes (real time: probably roughly double)
Expectations and Prior Experience
I should not be doing this. I don't want to do this. This is going to be an utter desecration of a fun and original game. But I swore an oath before god and man that I would play every game on my challenge list for 20 hours, no exceptions. And I didn't break that vow for Ship Simulator Extremes or for Sakura Spirit. I didn't even break it for Trine 3, a game I both enjoyed and respected and which didn't deserve to get hate-played 5 times in a row.
See, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is kind of a great game. Or rather, it is a game that has a kind of greatness. It has its flaws, and there's a lot of room in its premise that simply isn't explored, but as far as I know, there is no other game quite like it out there. Certainly, it was the first time I've ever heard of a co-op game where one player doesn't even need to be physically present, not even metaphorically through the internet. Where half the game is a pdf the second player reads from. Where the "main" player doesn't (and indeed shouldn't) know the rules of the game.
This game is about communication. It's about teamwork. It's about trust. The main enemies are the ambiguity and limitations of the spoken word. To win, you need to speak clearly and concisely and develop a partnership with the other player.
I won't be doing any of that. I will be playing this game solo. Despite the fact that this misses the entire point, and is as absurd and pointless as playing "telephone" solo. It's not really the way I want to do it, but that's the reality of my situation. Playing with friends is difficult, because I keep odd hours, and playing with strangers is, to my socially anxious hermit brain, practically unthinkable.
I honestly can't say how this going to go. I'm expecting a train wreck, where I can't do anything. Or maybe where things that were difficult when relayed over the voice chat become trivial when I have the manual in front of me. And that's the best case scenario. Worst case is that it's merely frustrating and dull.
To sum up: I love the game, and that's why playing it like this is going to be a nightmare.
Celebration (premature)! I did it (kind of)!
Reaching 20 hours on The Bard's Tale marks a major blog milestone. Every single one of the games I bought for myself has either been played for 20 hours or beaten entirely.
This moment, right now. That's what it's all been about. That's the goal I set out with when I started this blog, nearly four years ago. I did it.
I can't entirely describe what I'm feeling right now. "Happiness" doesn't really cover it. I've got tears in my eyes, and they are not tears of joy, nor of relief, nor of mourning, but somehow all three. I can only imagine that it will be even more intense when I finish the blog for real.
To be honest, though, this moment was not what I was expecting. I thought for sure that I would be all fired up to finish the last three games and make it "official" or, failing that, that I would become complacent and feel unmotivated to do the rest of my challenge list because the "main" blog was complete. In reality, I just feel kind of numb, like I can't believe I'm really here.
But you know what, I'm going to save the eulogizing for when the blog is actually dead. For now, I've got work in front of me. The end is in sight and I can make it if I stay focused.
Onward!
This moment, right now. That's what it's all been about. That's the goal I set out with when I started this blog, nearly four years ago. I did it.
I can't entirely describe what I'm feeling right now. "Happiness" doesn't really cover it. I've got tears in my eyes, and they are not tears of joy, nor of relief, nor of mourning, but somehow all three. I can only imagine that it will be even more intense when I finish the blog for real.
To be honest, though, this moment was not what I was expecting. I thought for sure that I would be all fired up to finish the last three games and make it "official" or, failing that, that I would become complacent and feel unmotivated to do the rest of my challenge list because the "main" blog was complete. In reality, I just feel kind of numb, like I can't believe I'm really here.
But you know what, I'm going to save the eulogizing for when the blog is actually dead. For now, I've got work in front of me. The end is in sight and I can make it if I stay focused.
Onward!
The Bard's Tale - 20/20 hours
I waited to talk about the story until this post because I was certain that I would reach the end of the game before the 20 hours came up. The Bard's Tale just seems like that sort of game, and if it were made today, it likely would have been 10 hours long and super easy. But it was made in 2004, and you couldn't trim the fat from a game back then. People would riot.
If I were playing purely for pleasure, I think I'd like The Bard's Tale's length. There's a lot of padding - unnecessary backtracking through dungeons, maps that have useless empty space, and gimmick missions (like when you're trapped on an ice floe) that start out fun, but wear out their welcome by dragging on and on - but in a certain sense, padding is the game. You're hacking through monsters, exploring caves, and managing your summoned creatures. That's the stuff you want to be doing.
Or, at least, that's ordinarily the case. The best part of The Bard's Tale is the cutscenes, and given the length of the dungeons, it sometimes feels like the good stuff is being carefully rationed, like I'm not allowed to enjoy dessert before I finish all my vegetables.
Because The Bard's Tale can be very funny. Like there's this runner throughout the whole game about "Chosen Ones," people who have seen the chaos in the world and risen to the occasion to act heroically . . . only to fail miserably (and often fatally) because they don't have The Bard's worldliness and unique skills. And that's funny enough in a cynical way (The Bard always vigorously denies being a "Chosen One" himself), but then sometime these goblin creatures will pop up and sing an Oompa Loompa-style song about how the Chosen Ones have failed and The Bard is doomed to follow in their footsteps. And they have never failed to crack me up.
Where the story becomes tricky is in the character of The Bard himself. The game is always very explicit that The Bard is a contemptible anti-hero, only in this for money, fame, and the promise of sex with the princess, and, indeed, NPCs and plot points will heap degradation and scorn on him as a constant reminder that just about everybody thinks he's a twerp. He even has a delightfully antagonistic relationship with The Narrator, breaking the fourth wall to trade barbs with the disembodied voice that describes his actions (and which gives as well as it gets, often with withering sarcasm). Indeed, I'd say that the relationship between the Bard and the Narrator is the emotional core of the game. It doesn't hurt that the two characters each have stellar voice acting that really sells their fucked-up chemistry.
However, if we're looking at the arc of the plot as a whole, then it looks poised to give The Bard everything he wants. And that's kind of gross. I mean, he explicitly says that the only reason he's trying to save the princess is because she promised to have sex with him, and now he's really close to saving the princess and nothing about the game suggests his motivation has changed. There's probably some big plot twist coming that will pull the rug out from under him, but it's coming late enough in the game that I'm starting to have my doubts about the sharpness of the satire. For all his complaining and general scumminess, The Bard never actually refuses the call to adventure, and thus it sometimes feels like I'm seeing a thin coating of anti-hero over an otherwise bog standard rpg protagonist.
I suppose that could be the satire. That your typical rpg hero could easily be framed as a lecherous amoral mercenary with only a little effort. But I think a more likely explanation is that parody tends to be an example of the thing its parodying, and the writers didn't give as much attention to the plot and setting as they did to The Bard's between mission banter.
Because you've got to have those long, time-wasting dungeons somehow, and a plot parody might accidentally force you to try something novel with the gameplay.
That being said, I really enjoyed my time with The Bard's Tale. Doing 20 hours in 3 days was only about 25% me trying to free room up in my schedule to drag my feet on Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It is exactly the sort of game I used to play obsessively on my days off, before I started the blog.
I'm almost tempted to keep playing the game until I get to the end. I'm on chapter 12 (out of 13), but I hesitate because I'm pretty sure those last two chapters will take 5-8 hours, and I'm pretty eager to start Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes so I can get to procrastinating as soon as possible.
It's very likely that I will one day return to The Bard's Tale, after all this blog business is done. I'll probably start a fresh save file, so I can use a guide and get all the treasure chests and secret dungeons I missed, but that won't be a hardship. Excessive padding is only a problem when you have other things to do.
If I were playing purely for pleasure, I think I'd like The Bard's Tale's length. There's a lot of padding - unnecessary backtracking through dungeons, maps that have useless empty space, and gimmick missions (like when you're trapped on an ice floe) that start out fun, but wear out their welcome by dragging on and on - but in a certain sense, padding is the game. You're hacking through monsters, exploring caves, and managing your summoned creatures. That's the stuff you want to be doing.
Or, at least, that's ordinarily the case. The best part of The Bard's Tale is the cutscenes, and given the length of the dungeons, it sometimes feels like the good stuff is being carefully rationed, like I'm not allowed to enjoy dessert before I finish all my vegetables.
Because The Bard's Tale can be very funny. Like there's this runner throughout the whole game about "Chosen Ones," people who have seen the chaos in the world and risen to the occasion to act heroically . . . only to fail miserably (and often fatally) because they don't have The Bard's worldliness and unique skills. And that's funny enough in a cynical way (The Bard always vigorously denies being a "Chosen One" himself), but then sometime these goblin creatures will pop up and sing an Oompa Loompa-style song about how the Chosen Ones have failed and The Bard is doomed to follow in their footsteps. And they have never failed to crack me up.
Where the story becomes tricky is in the character of The Bard himself. The game is always very explicit that The Bard is a contemptible anti-hero, only in this for money, fame, and the promise of sex with the princess, and, indeed, NPCs and plot points will heap degradation and scorn on him as a constant reminder that just about everybody thinks he's a twerp. He even has a delightfully antagonistic relationship with The Narrator, breaking the fourth wall to trade barbs with the disembodied voice that describes his actions (and which gives as well as it gets, often with withering sarcasm). Indeed, I'd say that the relationship between the Bard and the Narrator is the emotional core of the game. It doesn't hurt that the two characters each have stellar voice acting that really sells their fucked-up chemistry.
However, if we're looking at the arc of the plot as a whole, then it looks poised to give The Bard everything he wants. And that's kind of gross. I mean, he explicitly says that the only reason he's trying to save the princess is because she promised to have sex with him, and now he's really close to saving the princess and nothing about the game suggests his motivation has changed. There's probably some big plot twist coming that will pull the rug out from under him, but it's coming late enough in the game that I'm starting to have my doubts about the sharpness of the satire. For all his complaining and general scumminess, The Bard never actually refuses the call to adventure, and thus it sometimes feels like I'm seeing a thin coating of anti-hero over an otherwise bog standard rpg protagonist.
I suppose that could be the satire. That your typical rpg hero could easily be framed as a lecherous amoral mercenary with only a little effort. But I think a more likely explanation is that parody tends to be an example of the thing its parodying, and the writers didn't give as much attention to the plot and setting as they did to The Bard's between mission banter.
Because you've got to have those long, time-wasting dungeons somehow, and a plot parody might accidentally force you to try something novel with the gameplay.
That being said, I really enjoyed my time with The Bard's Tale. Doing 20 hours in 3 days was only about 25% me trying to free room up in my schedule to drag my feet on Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It is exactly the sort of game I used to play obsessively on my days off, before I started the blog.
I'm almost tempted to keep playing the game until I get to the end. I'm on chapter 12 (out of 13), but I hesitate because I'm pretty sure those last two chapters will take 5-8 hours, and I'm pretty eager to start Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes so I can get to procrastinating as soon as possible.
It's very likely that I will one day return to The Bard's Tale, after all this blog business is done. I'll probably start a fresh save file, so I can use a guide and get all the treasure chests and secret dungeons I missed, but that won't be a hardship. Excessive padding is only a problem when you have other things to do.
Thursday, May 10, 2018
The Bard's Tale - 9/20 hours
I've come to realize why I didn't finish The Bard's Tale all those years ago - from time to time, this game descends into some straight up bullshit. A description in text can't quite convey the nuance of it, but here's my best try. About six hours into the game, you have to go through a dungeon called "the forest tower." It's long and somewhat arduous, with winding, trap-filled hallways and hordes of deadly plant creatures. That's fine. At the top of the tower, you fight a boss, Herne, who has a really high defense, summons endless waves of minions, and has an AoE poison attack that never fails to wipe out your own summoned companions. Still fine. It took me half a dozen tries to beat, but it was still fine.
But then, after all that, the game makes you fight your way back out of the dungeon. And the enemies you face are absolute health sponges with AoE attacks that they sometimes use three or four times in a row, rapidly enough that you never recover from your knockdown animation and wind up dying without being able to respond in any way. The trick to beating them proved to be a combination of a really aggressive attack, kiting as many as possible away from their groups, and luck.
It was just a poorly thought-out sequence. I was fresh off a grueling dungeon and looking to take a breather back in the village, cash in my loot, and chase a couple of hidden treasure chests I'd previously missed. But no, it was right back into the fray, and against my most difficult non-boss enemies yet. Terrible pacing.
And The Bard's Tale is sloppy in a lot of little ways like that. Save points coming before unskippable cutscenes, which are themselves before boss fights. Events that render previous areas of the map inaccessible coming without any sort of warning (so that I was unable to go back and get those previously mentioned treasure chests, for example). Damage scaling rendering your summons obsolete. The fact that you can only save at a save point, and those are far between. The "B" button being used for "confirm."
It's not a bad game, but it definitely shows its age. There's a lot to like about it too. It's often funny (the bit when you kill a wolf for the first time and the game take the piss out of rpg loot mechanics is hilarious). The combat is engaging when it's not throwing unbeatable cheese at you (which isn't often, and would be nearly unremarkable if the save points were closer together). The story is easy to follow, and . . . actually I think I'm going to wait and do a whole spoiler post on it tomorrow.
Overall, I marathoned it last night and I didn't even have to force myself to keep playing. I may well have played it all night even if I didn't have to play it for the blog (oh, who am I kidding, I'd have given up at the Forest Tower and pouted about it being "too hard.")
But then, after all that, the game makes you fight your way back out of the dungeon. And the enemies you face are absolute health sponges with AoE attacks that they sometimes use three or four times in a row, rapidly enough that you never recover from your knockdown animation and wind up dying without being able to respond in any way. The trick to beating them proved to be a combination of a really aggressive attack, kiting as many as possible away from their groups, and luck.
It was just a poorly thought-out sequence. I was fresh off a grueling dungeon and looking to take a breather back in the village, cash in my loot, and chase a couple of hidden treasure chests I'd previously missed. But no, it was right back into the fray, and against my most difficult non-boss enemies yet. Terrible pacing.
And The Bard's Tale is sloppy in a lot of little ways like that. Save points coming before unskippable cutscenes, which are themselves before boss fights. Events that render previous areas of the map inaccessible coming without any sort of warning (so that I was unable to go back and get those previously mentioned treasure chests, for example). Damage scaling rendering your summons obsolete. The fact that you can only save at a save point, and those are far between. The "B" button being used for "confirm."
It's not a bad game, but it definitely shows its age. There's a lot to like about it too. It's often funny (the bit when you kill a wolf for the first time and the game take the piss out of rpg loot mechanics is hilarious). The combat is engaging when it's not throwing unbeatable cheese at you (which isn't often, and would be nearly unremarkable if the save points were closer together). The story is easy to follow, and . . . actually I think I'm going to wait and do a whole spoiler post on it tomorrow.
Overall, I marathoned it last night and I didn't even have to force myself to keep playing. I may well have played it all night even if I didn't have to play it for the blog (oh, who am I kidding, I'd have given up at the Forest Tower and pouted about it being "too hard.")
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
Distant Worlds: Universe - Follow-up
I couldn't do it. I couldn't have a game completion based on sleep-playing, despite my myriad of very good and reasonable excuses. I wound up playing another couple of hours today, so that if you take the ten I played early this week with the three I consciously played yesterday with the five I played months ago, it would add up to 20. Or, in other words, my 28 hours total, minus the seven hours I left it running while I was asleep, are more than my threshold.
It's not the usual way I do things, mind, but I'm feeling a lot more relaxed about it. Expect another post like this in a couple of weeks when I start freaking out about the 5 hours that didn't quite fit into my regular schedule.
It's not the usual way I do things, mind, but I'm feeling a lot more relaxed about it. Expect another post like this in a couple of weeks when I start freaking out about the 5 hours that didn't quite fit into my regular schedule.
The Bard's Tale - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
Now includes original classic games The Bard’s Tale 1, 2 & 3!
You are the Bard, a selfish rogue weary of pointless sub-quests and rat-infested cellars. Through magical song you summon characters to join your quest for coin and cleavage!
Prepare to immerse yourself in over 20-30 hours of adventure, featuring:
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
It's funny. The last self-purchased game I play for the blog is also the one that I most clearly remember picking out. This was while I was playing Bastion, and I remember making an offhand comment about how the narrator reminded me of the one in The Bard's Tale. At the time, I wanted to compare the two, but I couldn't remember the xbox game well enough to say anything cogent about it. I subsequently picked up cheap in a sale in the hopes of illuminating my Bastion experience.
Ironically, it has now been so long since I played Bastion that I probably won't be able to make the comparison from the other direction, either.
Expectations and Prior Experience
I played this game on the xbox, many years back, but it's all a fog.
. . .I remember it being funny? I definitely remember that I didn't finish it, but I can't recall why. Either it was too difficult or I got distracted by something else. I think it was standard ARPG fare, so I'm sure it was the latter.
Anyway, I don't anticipate any particular difficulties with this game. The reviews are good. The haze of my memory is vaguely positive. The genre is practically can't miss (hell, I almost enjoyed Two Worlds, for crying out loud). It would take an unforeseen catastrophe to make this anything less than tolerable (and who knows, it might even be great).
Now includes original classic games The Bard’s Tale 1, 2 & 3!
You are the Bard, a selfish rogue weary of pointless sub-quests and rat-infested cellars. Through magical song you summon characters to join your quest for coin and cleavage!
Prepare to immerse yourself in over 20-30 hours of adventure, featuring:
- 50 enemy types (not counting bosses!)
- A vast world to explore with towns, wild forests, rivers, castles, towers, secret dungeons, snowy mountains, caverns, haunted tombs and more
- A full cast of bizarre NPC’s
- Over a dozen special boss enemies to defeat
- 16 magical characters to discover and then summon at will to aid you
- Over 150 unique items of weaponry, armor, instruments, tokens, artifacts and loot!
- More Song & Dance numbers than any other game, including a zombie dance-off!
- Over 14 hours of outstanding voice-acting from top Hollywood talent, including Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride) as the Bard, and the inimitable Tony Jay as the Narrator
- Classics Games—includes original classic games The Bard’s Tale 1, 2 & 3.
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
It's funny. The last self-purchased game I play for the blog is also the one that I most clearly remember picking out. This was while I was playing Bastion, and I remember making an offhand comment about how the narrator reminded me of the one in The Bard's Tale. At the time, I wanted to compare the two, but I couldn't remember the xbox game well enough to say anything cogent about it. I subsequently picked up cheap in a sale in the hopes of illuminating my Bastion experience.
Ironically, it has now been so long since I played Bastion that I probably won't be able to make the comparison from the other direction, either.
Expectations and Prior Experience
I played this game on the xbox, many years back, but it's all a fog.
. . .I remember it being funny? I definitely remember that I didn't finish it, but I can't recall why. Either it was too difficult or I got distracted by something else. I think it was standard ARPG fare, so I'm sure it was the latter.
Anyway, I don't anticipate any particular difficulties with this game. The reviews are good. The haze of my memory is vaguely positive. The genre is practically can't miss (hell, I almost enjoyed Two Worlds, for crying out loud). It would take an unforeseen catastrophe to make this anything less than tolerable (and who knows, it might even be great).
Distant Worlds: Universe - 20/20 hours
I was trembling with anticipation as I walked from my bedroom to my computer. Would my automated empire be functional and prosperous? Would they be galactic overlords? Would they even still be alive?
Unfortunately, in my eagerness, I interrupted the autosave and corrupted the save file. All I know about that version is that they had at least 60 fleets. Luckily, there was an earlier autosave from a half hour prior.
The AI was not exemplary, but it survived. It went from 3rd place overall when I went to bed to 7th when I woke up, but that could likely be attributed to the other AIs being more successful. It had more colonies, more technologies, and an unimaginably huge military. But the NPCs were even bigger. I doubt I could have done better myself.
The most astonishing part of the fully automated playthrough was that it somehow earned 16 achievements. Sixteen. Most of them were for fighting wars that I would never have approved, likely because they were totally ineffectual. The AI destroyed 1000 enemy troops, conquered 50 enemy colonies, and destroyed more than 100 enemy vessels, but also somehow failed to eliminate even a single enemy faction. It also earned the achievement for being at war for more than 90% of the time, which is absolutely bonkers.
I guess I'd call it a qualified success.
Enough, at least, that you should only imagine a moderate amount of hysteria in my voice as I announce that I'm moving on. This is undeniably my least legitimate completion since Sakura Spirit, but it doesn't really bother me as much as it should. Me getting 20 hours in this game was always pretty much inevitable. Indeed, I started this entry with 5 hours and I wasn't even trying to play it.
Distant Worlds: Universe is probably the third-best real-time space 4X I've played so far (behind Star Ruler 2, but ahead of Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity), which puts it in an odd place. I have absolutely no objection to playing it for another 20 hours more, but I can't imagine any circumstances in which I'd want to play this and not Stellaris. That may well be because Stellaris makes you do a lot of tedious micromanagement that Distant Worlds: Universe automates away. (For those of you who are new to the blog - that is not a typo).
That's what I'm going to remember most about Distant Worlds: Universe, the fact that it can, indeed, play itself indefinitely. As much as I enjoyed being the chief galactic executive, I couldn't help but feel more than a little superfluous to the whole enterprise. Granted, I would have kept the AI out of a few of its more disastrous wars, but I doubt I would have come any closer to total victory. The only reason I won the game I controlled manually was because I set the number of opponents to 1.
If I do play it again, it will be to redeem my honor as a human being. To learn exactly what it is the AI does, and then find a way to do it more efficiently. A worthy challenge, to be sure, but one that is only sparsely connected to my usual reasons for playing a space 4X game. It will take a very particular mood for me to want to revisit this game.
Maybe, when I do, I'll just leave it on all day again, see if I get another result - that I could do indefinitely, just for the sheer fascination of pitting AI against AI. I never did figure out why they would bother to include a mode that required no human intervention whatsoever, but maybe that's it. Distant Worlds: Universe is my own little sci-fi-themed robotic gladiatorial pit, and I am the blood-crazed emperor who decides its fate.
I'll try not to let the power go to my head.
Unfortunately, in my eagerness, I interrupted the autosave and corrupted the save file. All I know about that version is that they had at least 60 fleets. Luckily, there was an earlier autosave from a half hour prior.
The AI was not exemplary, but it survived. It went from 3rd place overall when I went to bed to 7th when I woke up, but that could likely be attributed to the other AIs being more successful. It had more colonies, more technologies, and an unimaginably huge military. But the NPCs were even bigger. I doubt I could have done better myself.
The most astonishing part of the fully automated playthrough was that it somehow earned 16 achievements. Sixteen. Most of them were for fighting wars that I would never have approved, likely because they were totally ineffectual. The AI destroyed 1000 enemy troops, conquered 50 enemy colonies, and destroyed more than 100 enemy vessels, but also somehow failed to eliminate even a single enemy faction. It also earned the achievement for being at war for more than 90% of the time, which is absolutely bonkers.
I guess I'd call it a qualified success.
Enough, at least, that you should only imagine a moderate amount of hysteria in my voice as I announce that I'm moving on. This is undeniably my least legitimate completion since Sakura Spirit, but it doesn't really bother me as much as it should. Me getting 20 hours in this game was always pretty much inevitable. Indeed, I started this entry with 5 hours and I wasn't even trying to play it.
Distant Worlds: Universe is probably the third-best real-time space 4X I've played so far (behind Star Ruler 2, but ahead of Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity), which puts it in an odd place. I have absolutely no objection to playing it for another 20 hours more, but I can't imagine any circumstances in which I'd want to play this and not Stellaris. That may well be because Stellaris makes you do a lot of tedious micromanagement that Distant Worlds: Universe automates away. (For those of you who are new to the blog - that is not a typo).
That's what I'm going to remember most about Distant Worlds: Universe, the fact that it can, indeed, play itself indefinitely. As much as I enjoyed being the chief galactic executive, I couldn't help but feel more than a little superfluous to the whole enterprise. Granted, I would have kept the AI out of a few of its more disastrous wars, but I doubt I would have come any closer to total victory. The only reason I won the game I controlled manually was because I set the number of opponents to 1.
If I do play it again, it will be to redeem my honor as a human being. To learn exactly what it is the AI does, and then find a way to do it more efficiently. A worthy challenge, to be sure, but one that is only sparsely connected to my usual reasons for playing a space 4X game. It will take a very particular mood for me to want to revisit this game.
Maybe, when I do, I'll just leave it on all day again, see if I get another result - that I could do indefinitely, just for the sheer fascination of pitting AI against AI. I never did figure out why they would bother to include a mode that required no human intervention whatsoever, but maybe that's it. Distant Worlds: Universe is my own little sci-fi-themed robotic gladiatorial pit, and I am the blood-crazed emperor who decides its fate.
I'll try not to let the power go to my head.
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Distant Worlds: Universe - 10/20 hours
I knew I was going to get overwhelmed trying to play Distant Worlds: Universe without automation. I just didn't expect it to happen as quickly as it did. It was the ship design that got me. I set research to "fast," as I usually do in these sorts of games, so that I might see the deeper reaches of the tech tree, and the end result was that I could not keep up with the proliferation of parts and ship classes. So I caved and set my ship designs to "auto" and once that taboo was broken, it became too easy to offload the parts of the game I didn't like to the AI.
It also didn't help that even at maximum player involvement, half the game is controlled by the AI anyway. Distant Worlds: Universe has a mechanic called the "private economy," where things like mining and trade are not directly controlled by the player, but instead by their simulated citizens, who do things like build civilian freighters, mine rare materials, and run luxury cruise ships around your colonies. It can be a bit frustrating when they hire all your construction vessels to build their mining stations or clog up your space port's build queue when you're trying to establish a new colony, but I have to admit, they do bring a sort of life to the game's world.
What they also did was rapidly expand my empire beyond my (admittedly limited) ability to easily comprehend. What I wound up doing was compromising with the game - automated ship design, fleet formation, and anti-space creature/pirate patrol; fully manual research, colonization, and taxes; and everything else handled by pop-ups that prompt me to decide on various plans suggested by the AI. For example, the game will periodically show me a message saying that my "advisors" recommend I build 10 more ships - 3 escorts, 4 destroyers, 2 cruisers, and a capital ship - and that this will cost 50,000 credits - do I approve the expenditure or not?
It's an interesting way to approach a strategy game, I'll give it that. It does genuinely make me feel like a space executive. I'm presented with a plan that someone else came up with and I have to use my broader knowledge of the strategic situation to decide whether it makes sense. I could see a really intriguing game built around that premise.
Where Distant Worlds: Universe falls short is in delivering a sense of internal politics. The plans I receive don't have any agenda behind them, they're just churned out by the same algorithm that the AI uses to make decisions for the enemy factions. You don't have to worry about things like private rivalries, hostile ideology, or the subversive incompetence of your subordinates. You just have to decide whether you can afford a particular action at a particular time.
Using my hybrid approach, I was able to effortlessly win a fast game at the lowest difficulty. The way Distant Worlds: Universe handles victory is pretty interesting too. Your score is broken down into 4 categories - economy, population, territory and a fourth "racial" category that gives you specific objectives for your particular faction. Each category is worth up to 25% of your final victory. Once you reach a certain threshold (default is 80%) you win. The cleverest part is that there's no extra victory points for exceeding your goals. The economy condition requires your private economy to be worth at least 1/3 of the whole galaxy's. If you reach that 33%, you get 25 victory points. If you happen to be at 50%, you still only get 25 victory points. If your economy tops out at 20% of the galactic total, you'd get roughly 15 victory points.
In theory, this could force you to take a balanced approach to your strategy. Especially with the racial victory conditions, which can call for just about anything in the game - I've seen spy missions, mutual defense treaties, tourism income, and building a particular wonder, to name just a few.
In practice, all three of the generic victory conditions measure the same thing - the general size of your empire. Oh, you can fiddle with tax policy to encourage population growth, or micromanage your ship designs to artificially boost your resource consumption (and thus the robustness of your private economy), but the easiest way to advance in any of the three is to conquer your neighbors. It is rare to have one of the conditions without the other two, and I'm not sure it is possible at all to have two without the other one.
I'll have to fiddle with the game setup to see if I can customize victory into something a little more interesting. Speaking of which, the setup screen in this game is amazing. It seems like a small thing to single out, but it gives you so many options. There are a variety of presets that correspond to different historical periods in the game's lore. And if you set up a custom game, you can choose all sorts of details about the game's difficulty, the overall galactic environment, and the nature of your enemies. It's a little like creating your own setting prior to starting the game.
I think my next move is going to be to try something wacky - I will be playing Distant Worlds: Universe in my sleep, literally. One of the options in the automation settings is "Rule in Absence (full)" which sounds like the game plays itself on your behalf. The very idea of this intrigues me. Why would you even bother to create something like that? Who is it for?
My plan is to turn off the victory conditions, set the difficulty and game speed to "normal" and let it run while I go to bed. Then, when I wake up, I'll check on the condition of the galaxy and see how well my AI viceroy did.
I'm sure some of you are thinking "Hey! That's just a cheap way to get out of playing Distant Worlds: Universe for another 10 hours," but that's not what's going on here. My reasons are threefold - 1st, I actually like this game, so I really have no pressing need to get out of playing it. 2nd, this sort of ridiculous experiment is exactly the sort of thing I'd do if I were playing the game purely for my own pleasure. 3rd, this is a game mode made available by the developers themselves. They gave it its own, flavorful name. None of the other automation settings has a poetic alias. "None" isn't called "Obnoxious Micromanager." They are all just blandly functional. Except this one.
So maybe I was meant to do this. Maybe I'm the target audience for full automation. Maybe they created "Rule in Absence" especially for someone in my situation.
Unlikely, I know, but we are already so far past the horizon of plausibility that I can't even be sure what's real anymore.
It also didn't help that even at maximum player involvement, half the game is controlled by the AI anyway. Distant Worlds: Universe has a mechanic called the "private economy," where things like mining and trade are not directly controlled by the player, but instead by their simulated citizens, who do things like build civilian freighters, mine rare materials, and run luxury cruise ships around your colonies. It can be a bit frustrating when they hire all your construction vessels to build their mining stations or clog up your space port's build queue when you're trying to establish a new colony, but I have to admit, they do bring a sort of life to the game's world.
What they also did was rapidly expand my empire beyond my (admittedly limited) ability to easily comprehend. What I wound up doing was compromising with the game - automated ship design, fleet formation, and anti-space creature/pirate patrol; fully manual research, colonization, and taxes; and everything else handled by pop-ups that prompt me to decide on various plans suggested by the AI. For example, the game will periodically show me a message saying that my "advisors" recommend I build 10 more ships - 3 escorts, 4 destroyers, 2 cruisers, and a capital ship - and that this will cost 50,000 credits - do I approve the expenditure or not?
It's an interesting way to approach a strategy game, I'll give it that. It does genuinely make me feel like a space executive. I'm presented with a plan that someone else came up with and I have to use my broader knowledge of the strategic situation to decide whether it makes sense. I could see a really intriguing game built around that premise.
Where Distant Worlds: Universe falls short is in delivering a sense of internal politics. The plans I receive don't have any agenda behind them, they're just churned out by the same algorithm that the AI uses to make decisions for the enemy factions. You don't have to worry about things like private rivalries, hostile ideology, or the subversive incompetence of your subordinates. You just have to decide whether you can afford a particular action at a particular time.
Using my hybrid approach, I was able to effortlessly win a fast game at the lowest difficulty. The way Distant Worlds: Universe handles victory is pretty interesting too. Your score is broken down into 4 categories - economy, population, territory and a fourth "racial" category that gives you specific objectives for your particular faction. Each category is worth up to 25% of your final victory. Once you reach a certain threshold (default is 80%) you win. The cleverest part is that there's no extra victory points for exceeding your goals. The economy condition requires your private economy to be worth at least 1/3 of the whole galaxy's. If you reach that 33%, you get 25 victory points. If you happen to be at 50%, you still only get 25 victory points. If your economy tops out at 20% of the galactic total, you'd get roughly 15 victory points.
In theory, this could force you to take a balanced approach to your strategy. Especially with the racial victory conditions, which can call for just about anything in the game - I've seen spy missions, mutual defense treaties, tourism income, and building a particular wonder, to name just a few.
In practice, all three of the generic victory conditions measure the same thing - the general size of your empire. Oh, you can fiddle with tax policy to encourage population growth, or micromanage your ship designs to artificially boost your resource consumption (and thus the robustness of your private economy), but the easiest way to advance in any of the three is to conquer your neighbors. It is rare to have one of the conditions without the other two, and I'm not sure it is possible at all to have two without the other one.
I'll have to fiddle with the game setup to see if I can customize victory into something a little more interesting. Speaking of which, the setup screen in this game is amazing. It seems like a small thing to single out, but it gives you so many options. There are a variety of presets that correspond to different historical periods in the game's lore. And if you set up a custom game, you can choose all sorts of details about the game's difficulty, the overall galactic environment, and the nature of your enemies. It's a little like creating your own setting prior to starting the game.
I think my next move is going to be to try something wacky - I will be playing Distant Worlds: Universe in my sleep, literally. One of the options in the automation settings is "Rule in Absence (full)" which sounds like the game plays itself on your behalf. The very idea of this intrigues me. Why would you even bother to create something like that? Who is it for?
My plan is to turn off the victory conditions, set the difficulty and game speed to "normal" and let it run while I go to bed. Then, when I wake up, I'll check on the condition of the galaxy and see how well my AI viceroy did.
I'm sure some of you are thinking "Hey! That's just a cheap way to get out of playing Distant Worlds: Universe for another 10 hours," but that's not what's going on here. My reasons are threefold - 1st, I actually like this game, so I really have no pressing need to get out of playing it. 2nd, this sort of ridiculous experiment is exactly the sort of thing I'd do if I were playing the game purely for my own pleasure. 3rd, this is a game mode made available by the developers themselves. They gave it its own, flavorful name. None of the other automation settings has a poetic alias. "None" isn't called "Obnoxious Micromanager." They are all just blandly functional. Except this one.
So maybe I was meant to do this. Maybe I'm the target audience for full automation. Maybe they created "Rule in Absence" especially for someone in my situation.
Unlikely, I know, but we are already so far past the horizon of plausibility that I can't even be sure what's real anymore.
Monday, May 7, 2018
Distant Worlds: Universe - 4/20 hours
I'm not entirely sure I have a handle on this game. The tutorial wasn't very informative. It showed me the basics of how to move my ships around and navigate through the menus, but it didn't go into strategy. There was no sense of how all the various mechanics hung together, or why I would want to do one thing over the other.
But maybe that's asking too much of a tutorial. The other, larger problem with Distant Worlds: Universe is that so much of it is automated. The default settings have the AI handle virtually everything, from setting tax rates to deciding your future research to colonizing planets. I played the introductory map for three hours and I could not tell you what function I had in the inner workings of my empire. I sometimes overrode the automation when I thought it wasn't prioritizing research correctly. And it always asked me to confirm or reject diplomatic actions and intelligence missions. But largely the game played itself. I wound up being the most powerful empire in the galaxy and I could not say word one about how I did it.
I suppose it's admirable that a game give its players so many powerful tools to customize the experience. I, for one, appreciated not having to manually direct my units to patrol my borders on the lookout for pirates and deadly space creatures. However, I think having all the options enabled definitely makes for a weaker game. I was barely connected to my space empire and I certainly never felt fully in control of its direction or character.
My next move will be to set up a "pre warp" game, turn off as much of the automation as I can, run the game on slow speed, and see if I can work out the logic of the simulation. Then, when I know a little bit more about the inner workings of the game, I can scale the automation back up to a level I'm comfortable with.
My gut tells me that Distant Worlds: Universe has a lot to offer, but I need to approach learning it in a systematic way. Just going by how large the automation menu was, this game has a lot of moving parts, and any one of them could be the thing that trips me up.
But maybe that's asking too much of a tutorial. The other, larger problem with Distant Worlds: Universe is that so much of it is automated. The default settings have the AI handle virtually everything, from setting tax rates to deciding your future research to colonizing planets. I played the introductory map for three hours and I could not tell you what function I had in the inner workings of my empire. I sometimes overrode the automation when I thought it wasn't prioritizing research correctly. And it always asked me to confirm or reject diplomatic actions and intelligence missions. But largely the game played itself. I wound up being the most powerful empire in the galaxy and I could not say word one about how I did it.
I suppose it's admirable that a game give its players so many powerful tools to customize the experience. I, for one, appreciated not having to manually direct my units to patrol my borders on the lookout for pirates and deadly space creatures. However, I think having all the options enabled definitely makes for a weaker game. I was barely connected to my space empire and I certainly never felt fully in control of its direction or character.
My next move will be to set up a "pre warp" game, turn off as much of the automation as I can, run the game on slow speed, and see if I can work out the logic of the simulation. Then, when I know a little bit more about the inner workings of the game, I can scale the automation back up to a level I'm comfortable with.
My gut tells me that Distant Worlds: Universe has a lot to offer, but I need to approach learning it in a systematic way. Just going by how large the automation menu was, this game has a lot of moving parts, and any one of them could be the thing that trips me up.
Sunday, May 6, 2018
Distant Worlds: Universe - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
The Universe is Yours!
Distant Worlds: Universe is the newest chapter of this critically acclaimed sci-fi series, adding incredible new features and an exciting new storyline. Universe is also the ultimate collector’s edition, the first time all previous Distant Worlds releases have been included in one package, along with an updated manual and greatly expanded modding support.
Distant Worlds is a vast, pausable real-time 4X space strategy game. Experience the full depth and detail of turn-based strategy, but with the simplicity and ease of real-time, and on the scale of a massively-multiplayer online game.
Vast galaxies are made to order: up to 1400 star systems, with up to 50,000 planets, moons and asteroids. Galaxies are so deep, fun and immersive that you won’t want to finish the game. Build, expand and improve your empire while playing through one of the storylines, with victory conditions or in an open-ended sandbox mode.
Each galaxy is packed with life and activity. Encounter other empires, independent alien colonies, traders, pirates and space monsters. Explore star systems, asteroid fields, gas clouds, supernovae, galactic storms and black holes. Discover evidence of civilizations long since past, uncovering secrets about the galaxy's troubled history...
Best of all, you can play the game your way: enjoy a quick, intense game in a crowded sector of space or take your time in an epic game spread across a vast galaxy!
Previous Playtime
5 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This Game
I'm usually a pretty soft touch when it comes to space 4X games, and Distant Worlds: Universe had an extremely ambitious pitch. Seriously, I cut off like 2/3rds of the store description because who the hell needs to read a huge feature list second hand off a gaming blog.
That said, this particular game is one I danced around for quite a while. It costs $60 and rarely goes on sale. I wound up buying it half off, despite that being more money than I usually like to spend on a franchise I'm not familiar with, probably because I was psychologically manipulated by the desire to not "miss out" on a "limited time" deal.
Expectations and Prior Experience
I haven't gotten much past the tutorial and game setup screen, but I've like what I've seen so far. It appears to be an extremely fiddly empire management game set in a huge sci-fi galaxy. I don't see any iteration of that failing to delight me.
. . . Although . . . that might just be because I'm purposefully wearing blinders here. StarDrive fell flat for me, despite being, on paper, comfortably in the center of my wheel house. It's possible that Distant Worlds: Universe is similarly flawed, and I'm about to spend 20 hours with a game that mocks me by closely resembling something I love while lacking all the qualities that make it loveable.
That's pretty unlikely, though. I already have five hours on this game despite buying it in the middle of the blog, and that's usually a sign of something that gets its hooks into me fast. Worst case scenario is that it's tolerable, which is something I really need after Golden Axe.
The Universe is Yours!
Distant Worlds: Universe is the newest chapter of this critically acclaimed sci-fi series, adding incredible new features and an exciting new storyline. Universe is also the ultimate collector’s edition, the first time all previous Distant Worlds releases have been included in one package, along with an updated manual and greatly expanded modding support.
Distant Worlds is a vast, pausable real-time 4X space strategy game. Experience the full depth and detail of turn-based strategy, but with the simplicity and ease of real-time, and on the scale of a massively-multiplayer online game.
Vast galaxies are made to order: up to 1400 star systems, with up to 50,000 planets, moons and asteroids. Galaxies are so deep, fun and immersive that you won’t want to finish the game. Build, expand and improve your empire while playing through one of the storylines, with victory conditions or in an open-ended sandbox mode.
Each galaxy is packed with life and activity. Encounter other empires, independent alien colonies, traders, pirates and space monsters. Explore star systems, asteroid fields, gas clouds, supernovae, galactic storms and black holes. Discover evidence of civilizations long since past, uncovering secrets about the galaxy's troubled history...
Best of all, you can play the game your way: enjoy a quick, intense game in a crowded sector of space or take your time in an epic game spread across a vast galaxy!
Previous Playtime
5 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This Game
I'm usually a pretty soft touch when it comes to space 4X games, and Distant Worlds: Universe had an extremely ambitious pitch. Seriously, I cut off like 2/3rds of the store description because who the hell needs to read a huge feature list second hand off a gaming blog.
That said, this particular game is one I danced around for quite a while. It costs $60 and rarely goes on sale. I wound up buying it half off, despite that being more money than I usually like to spend on a franchise I'm not familiar with, probably because I was psychologically manipulated by the desire to not "miss out" on a "limited time" deal.
Expectations and Prior Experience
I haven't gotten much past the tutorial and game setup screen, but I've like what I've seen so far. It appears to be an extremely fiddly empire management game set in a huge sci-fi galaxy. I don't see any iteration of that failing to delight me.
. . . Although . . . that might just be because I'm purposefully wearing blinders here. StarDrive fell flat for me, despite being, on paper, comfortably in the center of my wheel house. It's possible that Distant Worlds: Universe is similarly flawed, and I'm about to spend 20 hours with a game that mocks me by closely resembling something I love while lacking all the qualities that make it loveable.
That's pretty unlikely, though. I already have five hours on this game despite buying it in the middle of the blog, and that's usually a sign of something that gets its hooks into me fast. Worst case scenario is that it's tolerable, which is something I really need after Golden Axe.
Golden Axe - 20/20 hours
I may have stated it before, but it's been awhile, so I will make a confession - I count time spent looking at guides and walkthroughs as time spent playing the game. No nefarious purpose to this, and it doesn't usually amount to much, five minutes here or there, mostly, but if I'm playing a game and need to look something up, it doesn't make much sense to close the game just to be a total stickler about my goal.
Which of course segues neatly into the part where I reveal that I've bent my own self-imposed rules for the sake of convenience. A certain portion of my time, roughly 2 hours, was spent watching Golden Axe speed runs.
It wasn't entirely an excuse to goof off and not play Golden Axe - I learned quite a bit about the game in the process - but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't primarily motivated by a desire to pad my playtime. Nonetheless, I'm going to count it, because it relates directly to the game, it's not something I would have done if I hadn't been playing Golden Axe, 18 hours is still way too much time for me to be playing this game, and also it's really convenient for me to do so.
What I learned from the speed runs is that I am nowhere near the top tier of skill in this game. One person beat the whole game in 9 minutes and didn't get hit once. A tool-assisted run managed it in 7 minutes - the credits took longer than beating the game. It was mind-blowing. Watching them improved my play in the long run, even if my performance tanked in the short term as I attempted to replicate the powerful, but difficult moves I saw in the videos.
Sadly, I never actually reached my goal of 11 or fewer deaths. I got close. Twelve, as of my latest playthrough. I did reach a point where I could consistently reach the final boss when playing the unmodded version of the game, which isn't nothing, but that fight is total bullshit, and I could never master the frame-perfect jump-stab that the speedrunners used to keep Death Bringer permanently stun-locked.
This is usually where I'd announce my disappointment at getting so close and resolve to play a couple more times just to see if I can squeeze out that last bit of efficiency, but this time, I'm good. It is difficult to express how little I care about mastering Golden Axe. I started this game with a rant about arcade games, and while I'm not going to repeat it, out of a desire to avoid excessive negativity, nothing I saw here changed my mind. Designing a game to maximize the money a player will spend to keep playing leads to artistically barren games, and it is kind of shocking to me that console games of that era retained the "limited continues" model of the arcade games that preceded them. I guess it just goes to show that when an idea gets embedded in a culture it can endure long after its usefulness has passed.
So, to sum up - I am not qualified to say whether this is a good game or not. What I like about games is so at odds with what Golden Axe is trying to do that it's like me trying to critique a movie in a language I do not understand. I simply have no context to appreciate what the game does well and what it does poorly. Watching the speed runs was amazing, and I will always be grateful to Golden Axe for that, but it was a mistake for me to buy this game, even at a price of zero dollars. It absolutely was not for me.
Which of course segues neatly into the part where I reveal that I've bent my own self-imposed rules for the sake of convenience. A certain portion of my time, roughly 2 hours, was spent watching Golden Axe speed runs.
It wasn't entirely an excuse to goof off and not play Golden Axe - I learned quite a bit about the game in the process - but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't primarily motivated by a desire to pad my playtime. Nonetheless, I'm going to count it, because it relates directly to the game, it's not something I would have done if I hadn't been playing Golden Axe, 18 hours is still way too much time for me to be playing this game, and also it's really convenient for me to do so.
What I learned from the speed runs is that I am nowhere near the top tier of skill in this game. One person beat the whole game in 9 minutes and didn't get hit once. A tool-assisted run managed it in 7 minutes - the credits took longer than beating the game. It was mind-blowing. Watching them improved my play in the long run, even if my performance tanked in the short term as I attempted to replicate the powerful, but difficult moves I saw in the videos.
Sadly, I never actually reached my goal of 11 or fewer deaths. I got close. Twelve, as of my latest playthrough. I did reach a point where I could consistently reach the final boss when playing the unmodded version of the game, which isn't nothing, but that fight is total bullshit, and I could never master the frame-perfect jump-stab that the speedrunners used to keep Death Bringer permanently stun-locked.
This is usually where I'd announce my disappointment at getting so close and resolve to play a couple more times just to see if I can squeeze out that last bit of efficiency, but this time, I'm good. It is difficult to express how little I care about mastering Golden Axe. I started this game with a rant about arcade games, and while I'm not going to repeat it, out of a desire to avoid excessive negativity, nothing I saw here changed my mind. Designing a game to maximize the money a player will spend to keep playing leads to artistically barren games, and it is kind of shocking to me that console games of that era retained the "limited continues" model of the arcade games that preceded them. I guess it just goes to show that when an idea gets embedded in a culture it can endure long after its usefulness has passed.
So, to sum up - I am not qualified to say whether this is a good game or not. What I like about games is so at odds with what Golden Axe is trying to do that it's like me trying to critique a movie in a language I do not understand. I simply have no context to appreciate what the game does well and what it does poorly. Watching the speed runs was amazing, and I will always be grateful to Golden Axe for that, but it was a mistake for me to buy this game, even at a price of zero dollars. It absolutely was not for me.
Friday, May 4, 2018
Golden Axe - 9/20 hours
This is going to be rough. I'm fairly confident that I'm going to finish this game, but I'm going to have to pass through darkness to get there.
I resolved to stop saying negative things about the game, so let me say what I like about it. The backgrounds are colorful and distinct, the characters have nice designs, and the music is pretty good. I also like the little dragons that you can steal from the enemy and ride into battle, though I think the player gets knocked off too easily. It makes me sad when my creature runs away, and I start to miss it almost instantly.
Now I'm going to say something that sounds like a criticism, but is so clearly a demonstrable fact that I don't think it even counts as "negative." There is not enough to this game to support playing it for 20 hours. If I were playing it without the infinite lives cheat, I wouldn't have beaten it yet, granted, but even so a full playthrough is 40 minutes, maximum. And since there is no plot and the gameplay is about as simple as a brawler can be, I don't anticipate having any great insights in the coming hours.
My plan going forward is to keep playing the cheat version over and over again until I manage to complete the game in 12 lives or fewer. Once I reach that benchmark, I'll know that I can, theoretically, beat the game with the cheat mod disabled. It's not so farfetched a goal - my most recent completion was in a mere 14 lives. With the knowledge that victory is possible, I will disable the cheat and try and beat the game "honestly."
I've sometimes talked about going back and disassembling my various game bundles. You know, instead of counting Portal and Portal 2 as a single game, just knuckling down and playing Portal 10+ times in a row. Golden Axe has disabused me of that fantasy. As much as I need to discipline myself when talking about the game, it's not boring. For the whole 40 minutes of its run time, you're actively making decisions and maneuvering your character in life-and-death situations. Playing its 8 short levels 30 times in a row is probably not much different than playing a massive 100 level, 20 hour campaign. At least, not in the particulars of the moment-to-moment action.
Yet the utter weariness I feel at completing the entire game and then immediately going back to the main menu to start all over convinces me that even a great game would become unbearable by the third or fourth repetition. Even Consortium, which built itself entirely around the pitch that you'd need multiple playthroughs to see everything, could not quite pull it off.
At least, for now, I have the quest for ultimate mastery to distract me. Hopefully I progress at exactly the right pace to achieve my ultimate goal exactly 11 hours from now.
I resolved to stop saying negative things about the game, so let me say what I like about it. The backgrounds are colorful and distinct, the characters have nice designs, and the music is pretty good. I also like the little dragons that you can steal from the enemy and ride into battle, though I think the player gets knocked off too easily. It makes me sad when my creature runs away, and I start to miss it almost instantly.
Now I'm going to say something that sounds like a criticism, but is so clearly a demonstrable fact that I don't think it even counts as "negative." There is not enough to this game to support playing it for 20 hours. If I were playing it without the infinite lives cheat, I wouldn't have beaten it yet, granted, but even so a full playthrough is 40 minutes, maximum. And since there is no plot and the gameplay is about as simple as a brawler can be, I don't anticipate having any great insights in the coming hours.
My plan going forward is to keep playing the cheat version over and over again until I manage to complete the game in 12 lives or fewer. Once I reach that benchmark, I'll know that I can, theoretically, beat the game with the cheat mod disabled. It's not so farfetched a goal - my most recent completion was in a mere 14 lives. With the knowledge that victory is possible, I will disable the cheat and try and beat the game "honestly."
I've sometimes talked about going back and disassembling my various game bundles. You know, instead of counting Portal and Portal 2 as a single game, just knuckling down and playing Portal 10+ times in a row. Golden Axe has disabused me of that fantasy. As much as I need to discipline myself when talking about the game, it's not boring. For the whole 40 minutes of its run time, you're actively making decisions and maneuvering your character in life-and-death situations. Playing its 8 short levels 30 times in a row is probably not much different than playing a massive 100 level, 20 hour campaign. At least, not in the particulars of the moment-to-moment action.
Yet the utter weariness I feel at completing the entire game and then immediately going back to the main menu to start all over convinces me that even a great game would become unbearable by the third or fourth repetition. Even Consortium, which built itself entirely around the pitch that you'd need multiple playthroughs to see everything, could not quite pull it off.
At least, for now, I have the quest for ultimate mastery to distract me. Hopefully I progress at exactly the right pace to achieve my ultimate goal exactly 11 hours from now.
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