At around hour six I made the decision to abandon war and exclusively play the free build mode. I should have known this moment was coming, considering my experience with the other games, but there's a part of me that just has to entertain the idea of playing these games "correctly."
Things in free build appeared to be going well for a couple of hours. My settlement was expanding. I was producing tons of surplus food and enough liquor and religion to keep my people happy at a high tax rate. Then, suddenly and without warning, I hit a cap on the number of hovels I could build. Since hovels determine your maximum civilian population, that also served as a cap on the number of agricultural and industrial buildings I could support. 128 peasants was my absolute maximum.
I searched online to find a solution (or at least an explanation) for this problem, and while nobody could tell me why it exists, I did learn that the cap does not apply on custom maps. So I spent a couple of hours playing around with the map editor, trying to create something I think will be enjoyable.
The next phase of my time with Stronghold Legends will be free build in "the Dark Forest," a map filled with far too many trees. My theory here is that the barrier they pose to expansion and settlement will be almost like a compelling infrastructure challenge.
I guess that's just who I am. Given a game where I can take control of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and face off against giants, dragons, and evil sorcerers, I'd rather fight against some trees. I choose not to think of this as cowardice, but as a down to earth practicality and concern with material prosperity.
Yep, no fear at all . . .
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Monday, February 12, 2018
Stronghold Legends - 5/20 hours
Stronghold Legends may well be the best game in the series. The addition of special units gives you much more flexible tactics on both attack and defense, and town management is streamlined, eliminating many of the more tedious chores that Stronghold 2 saddled you with.
Which makes it all the more tragic that I'm playing this game fourth, because I can't stand it. I'm just not interested in anything it has to offer. I don't want to be King Arthur. I don't want to engage in siege warfare. I don't want to build a fantasy medieval city. Without the sewage and vermin management of the previous game, there really isn't much of a point.
I thought taking a two game break would help me clear my head. All it did was make me more accustomed to games that had some hook that made me interested. I've already exhausted all the fun I'm going to get out of this series and there are still 55 hours left to go.
If you've been following the blog since the beginning, you may remember that one of the first things I revealed to you is that I don't like RTS games. If you've been paying especially close attention, you may realize that this dislike has rarely been born out in practice. About half the RTS games I've played so far, I've come to grudgingly respect, and even passably enjoy.
But the Stronghold series is reminding me why suspicion is my baseline attitude towards the genre. Everything you build is constantly under threat. And if you take the time to focus on sustainability or aesthetics, your faster enemies will destroy you. And even if you're in a position to win, you have to do so by destroying something another player has built. And you must always be clicking. There's no stillness to it, and precious little beauty, and everything functional is a weapon. I just want to spy, omnisciently, on a miniature manor economy, thriving in times of peace, is that so much to ask?
Anyway, I have to figure out some way to get through this. Some alternate set of goals. I could commit to beating the campaign, but I've got a super thin skin about that just now. Because defeat means starting to build all over from scratch, the difference between "loss that hardens my resolve to do better" and "loss that makes me want to quit in disgust" is not nearly large enough to keep me going.
I think I may have to draw on some deeper reserves of strength. Remind myself that if I can finish this before Friday, I'll be ahead of schedule on my goal for the year. Focus on the fact that I have only two more Stronghold games to go. It is ridiculously melodramatic of me to pretend that playing a video game that I'm slightly less than interested in constitutes some kind of epic trial of endurance, but if that's what it takes to get me through the day, that's what I'm going to do.
Which makes it all the more tragic that I'm playing this game fourth, because I can't stand it. I'm just not interested in anything it has to offer. I don't want to be King Arthur. I don't want to engage in siege warfare. I don't want to build a fantasy medieval city. Without the sewage and vermin management of the previous game, there really isn't much of a point.
I thought taking a two game break would help me clear my head. All it did was make me more accustomed to games that had some hook that made me interested. I've already exhausted all the fun I'm going to get out of this series and there are still 55 hours left to go.
If you've been following the blog since the beginning, you may remember that one of the first things I revealed to you is that I don't like RTS games. If you've been paying especially close attention, you may realize that this dislike has rarely been born out in practice. About half the RTS games I've played so far, I've come to grudgingly respect, and even passably enjoy.
But the Stronghold series is reminding me why suspicion is my baseline attitude towards the genre. Everything you build is constantly under threat. And if you take the time to focus on sustainability or aesthetics, your faster enemies will destroy you. And even if you're in a position to win, you have to do so by destroying something another player has built. And you must always be clicking. There's no stillness to it, and precious little beauty, and everything functional is a weapon. I just want to spy, omnisciently, on a miniature manor economy, thriving in times of peace, is that so much to ask?
Anyway, I have to figure out some way to get through this. Some alternate set of goals. I could commit to beating the campaign, but I've got a super thin skin about that just now. Because defeat means starting to build all over from scratch, the difference between "loss that hardens my resolve to do better" and "loss that makes me want to quit in disgust" is not nearly large enough to keep me going.
I think I may have to draw on some deeper reserves of strength. Remind myself that if I can finish this before Friday, I'll be ahead of schedule on my goal for the year. Focus on the fact that I have only two more Stronghold games to go. It is ridiculously melodramatic of me to pretend that playing a video game that I'm slightly less than interested in constitutes some kind of epic trial of endurance, but if that's what it takes to get me through the day, that's what I'm going to do.
Saturday, February 10, 2018
Hell Yeah! - 20/20 hours
Hell Yeah! made the curious decision to have platforming challenges that relied on moving platforms and traps, but which also give less than a second worth of leeway. As a result, sometimes my missions would fail before they even started. Nonetheless, they were short, so I was able to finish all 27 in less than 2 and a half hours. I spent my remaining 40 minutes or so trying to finish all the DLC missions, but I stalled on the ones that required me to dodge moving, one-hit-kill sawblades. While getting 100% was not as impossible as I imagined, it was almost as unfun as I feared.
Overall, Hell Yeah! was an easy game to get 20 hours out of. It wasn't a great game to play, but it's clear that the designers had a lot of fun making the 101 different major monsters, and the "cute" level had a really catchy theme song.
(Because if I have to have stuck in my head, so do you!)
I think the main reason I was able to get through it so fast is because it was completely unlike Stronghold, and thus my mind was keyed to appreciate it more. It was good to stretch my platforming muscles again, even if my character did slide around too much and the controls sometimes got in the way with their unnecessary fiddliness.
It wasn't terrible, though. As much as I complained about the side missions, and the disappointing uselessness of the Island (made all the worse because I still think it was a neat idea), the core of the game was adequate. Which is to say that the mistakes it made were persistent, but small. Forcing you to do a QTE after defeating every major enemy could have worked if all 101 were unique. The imprecise jumping and aiming were only a major impediment in the most unforgiving circumstances - in the main game you usually had some margin for error. The humor was just a little bit too juvenile.
Look, I got the game for free and it was worth every penny. Yes, I'd rather be playing Super Mario World, but you can say that about most things. Hell Yeah! falls into that category of games that I do not regret owning, but am perfectly content to never play again.
Overall, Hell Yeah! was an easy game to get 20 hours out of. It wasn't a great game to play, but it's clear that the designers had a lot of fun making the 101 different major monsters, and the "cute" level had a really catchy theme song.
(Because if I have to have stuck in my head, so do you!)
I think the main reason I was able to get through it so fast is because it was completely unlike Stronghold, and thus my mind was keyed to appreciate it more. It was good to stretch my platforming muscles again, even if my character did slide around too much and the controls sometimes got in the way with their unnecessary fiddliness.
It wasn't terrible, though. As much as I complained about the side missions, and the disappointing uselessness of the Island (made all the worse because I still think it was a neat idea), the core of the game was adequate. Which is to say that the mistakes it made were persistent, but small. Forcing you to do a QTE after defeating every major enemy could have worked if all 101 were unique. The imprecise jumping and aiming were only a major impediment in the most unforgiving circumstances - in the main game you usually had some margin for error. The humor was just a little bit too juvenile.
Look, I got the game for free and it was worth every penny. Yes, I'd rather be playing Super Mario World, but you can say that about most things. Hell Yeah! falls into that category of games that I do not regret owning, but am perfectly content to never play again.
Hell Yeah - 16/20 hours
I beat Hell Yeah! a second time, which isn't too surprising, considering that it took me 8 hours the first time. Eight times two equals sixteen. But that's not counting in the three hours I spent getting the "jackpot" Achievement. It's a little distressing. Hell Yeah! isn't a bad game, but it's not a good one, either. It's not really fun enough to sustain three consecutive playthroughs.
I suppose I could try and tackle the side missions and go for a true 100% completion, but that's . . . problematic. See, every platforming game with a hint of ambition sooner or later gets the same idea - what if we gated collectibles behind optional levels which require an incredible degree of precision platforming - and in a great game, those challenges are often the best part. Unfortunately for Hell Yeah!, is hasn't really earned the right to torment me for the sake of completionism.
I don't know how to explain it, but, well, take "Luigi's Purple Coins," a Super Mario Galaxy level that has managed to impress itself upon my consciousness as a red haze of fury. I devoted the better part of an afternoon to beating that level. It took me something like 30-40 retries. But I never even considered giving up. Each defeat merely hardened my resolve.
Surely, part of this can be contributed to the fact that I was much younger then, and had more patience for doing pointless tasks that made me miserable, but that's not all of it. The thing about "Luigi's Purple Coins" is that the previous hours of Super Mario Galaxy are a tutorial for how to beat it. Every aspect of the challenge is something you've seen before, just recombined into a new and more terrible form. It's fair. After every failure, you can do a post-mortem and it's usually very clear where and when you made your mistake. Thus, you can always go in with a plan. All you have to do is a series of things you've individually done a hundred times before, simply executed to perfection without a single mistake.
That's not quite the way it is with Hell Yeah!'s side missions. They are usually extremely short (around 30 seconds or so), giving no room for error, but the challenges themselves are not carefully curated. You've got to run through a section of the level, and if the traps just happen to be in the start position, you'll be fine, but if they are midway through their cycles, it's impossible. You don't have time to wait for them to reset and trying to jump on them prematurely is a recipe for suicide. Or you'll have to navigate a harmless section of the level, collecting coins, but the time limit is so strict that if you don't do it frame-perfect, you don't get anywhere near the goal, and it's not clear at all where you made a mistake. Hell Yeah!'s controls aren't the best to start off with. Trying to play the game as if it were a finely balanced platformer just feels like a waste of time.
I don't know what I'm going to do next. The sensible thing would be to just start the whole game over again. Four hours should be just enough to beat it a third time. The only problem with that is my pride. There's this whole section of the game I'd just be writing off. My excuse is that it's not fun and I have no interest in playing it, but what if the truth is that I'm simply very bad at it and don't want to face up to the fact? Does that even matter? Should I be playing games for pleasure, or to improve my skill and experience every facet of what they have to offer?
I suppose I could try and tackle the side missions and go for a true 100% completion, but that's . . . problematic. See, every platforming game with a hint of ambition sooner or later gets the same idea - what if we gated collectibles behind optional levels which require an incredible degree of precision platforming - and in a great game, those challenges are often the best part. Unfortunately for Hell Yeah!, is hasn't really earned the right to torment me for the sake of completionism.
I don't know how to explain it, but, well, take "Luigi's Purple Coins," a Super Mario Galaxy level that has managed to impress itself upon my consciousness as a red haze of fury. I devoted the better part of an afternoon to beating that level. It took me something like 30-40 retries. But I never even considered giving up. Each defeat merely hardened my resolve.
Surely, part of this can be contributed to the fact that I was much younger then, and had more patience for doing pointless tasks that made me miserable, but that's not all of it. The thing about "Luigi's Purple Coins" is that the previous hours of Super Mario Galaxy are a tutorial for how to beat it. Every aspect of the challenge is something you've seen before, just recombined into a new and more terrible form. It's fair. After every failure, you can do a post-mortem and it's usually very clear where and when you made your mistake. Thus, you can always go in with a plan. All you have to do is a series of things you've individually done a hundred times before, simply executed to perfection without a single mistake.
That's not quite the way it is with Hell Yeah!'s side missions. They are usually extremely short (around 30 seconds or so), giving no room for error, but the challenges themselves are not carefully curated. You've got to run through a section of the level, and if the traps just happen to be in the start position, you'll be fine, but if they are midway through their cycles, it's impossible. You don't have time to wait for them to reset and trying to jump on them prematurely is a recipe for suicide. Or you'll have to navigate a harmless section of the level, collecting coins, but the time limit is so strict that if you don't do it frame-perfect, you don't get anywhere near the goal, and it's not clear at all where you made a mistake. Hell Yeah!'s controls aren't the best to start off with. Trying to play the game as if it were a finely balanced platformer just feels like a waste of time.
I don't know what I'm going to do next. The sensible thing would be to just start the whole game over again. Four hours should be just enough to beat it a third time. The only problem with that is my pride. There's this whole section of the game I'd just be writing off. My excuse is that it's not fun and I have no interest in playing it, but what if the truth is that I'm simply very bad at it and don't want to face up to the fact? Does that even matter? Should I be playing games for pleasure, or to improve my skill and experience every facet of what they have to offer?
Thursday, February 8, 2018
Hell Yeah! - 8/20 hours
I don't have 100% completion, but I did finish the entire main plot of Hell Yeah! There is a lot about it I don't understand. It's set in hell. The mani character is the Prince of Hell, who is about to take over for his father, the recently deceased(?) King of Hell. So why is he a rabbit? Why does he have a spinning disc that drills through stone? He's on a quest to recover compromising pictures of himself in the bath with a rubber duck, but such low stakes imply that the game is meant for children and that belies the often gruesome violence that you encounter at basically every turn. And what's up with the toxic masculinity out of nowhere? The game begins with a newspaper clipping that says "The Prince is a Pussy" and it ends with the headline "Prince Still A Pussy." Who is the target audience for this game?
The game itself is . . . okay. I only cursed at it once, which is good for a platformer, but there's an indefinable alchemy that goes into making a great platforming game, and Hell Yeah! just doesn't have it. Maybe it's the QTEs that pop up every time you defeat a major enemy. The animations are funny (if, at times, needlessly gory), but after I've just fought your way through a spike-filled maze and subdued a challenging mini-boss, the last thing I want to do is play a rhythm mini-game to determine whether all that effort was worth it or not. I wouldn't say they add nothing to the game, but like so much else in Hell Yeah!, they give with one hand and take away with the other.
Like The Island, a potentially interesting feature that just sort of wound up being half-baked. The best part of this game is the unique design of the 100 major enemies you have to track down and defeat. So the knowledge that after you kill them, they are not gone forever, but reincarnated on a mystical island prison is pretty welcome. I'm not normally a sadist, but I like the idea of shipping all the boss monsters off to a labor camp, where they can mine for money and items to aid me on my adventure. It's cruel, but I am a demon prince of hell. Unfortunately, it's not an idea that has much payoff. In the roughly 7 and a half hours since I unlocked The Island, I only received one health item, which didn't do me much good because I was already at full health when I got it. In the end, the only thing I got out of the Island was a vague sense of satisfaction at seeing all of my enemies in a conga-line procession going down into a mine. That's not nothing, but it could be more.
Overall, Hell Yeah!'s main virtue is that it is not entirely unpleasant to sit down and play for 8 hours in a single night, and it was not so off-putting that I dread starting over. Technically, I still have a bunch of optional side missions to complete, but since half of the ones I've already tried have required an annoying degree of precision, I'll probably just let them be.
The game itself is . . . okay. I only cursed at it once, which is good for a platformer, but there's an indefinable alchemy that goes into making a great platforming game, and Hell Yeah! just doesn't have it. Maybe it's the QTEs that pop up every time you defeat a major enemy. The animations are funny (if, at times, needlessly gory), but after I've just fought your way through a spike-filled maze and subdued a challenging mini-boss, the last thing I want to do is play a rhythm mini-game to determine whether all that effort was worth it or not. I wouldn't say they add nothing to the game, but like so much else in Hell Yeah!, they give with one hand and take away with the other.
Like The Island, a potentially interesting feature that just sort of wound up being half-baked. The best part of this game is the unique design of the 100 major enemies you have to track down and defeat. So the knowledge that after you kill them, they are not gone forever, but reincarnated on a mystical island prison is pretty welcome. I'm not normally a sadist, but I like the idea of shipping all the boss monsters off to a labor camp, where they can mine for money and items to aid me on my adventure. It's cruel, but I am a demon prince of hell. Unfortunately, it's not an idea that has much payoff. In the roughly 7 and a half hours since I unlocked The Island, I only received one health item, which didn't do me much good because I was already at full health when I got it. In the end, the only thing I got out of the Island was a vague sense of satisfaction at seeing all of my enemies in a conga-line procession going down into a mine. That's not nothing, but it could be more.
Overall, Hell Yeah!'s main virtue is that it is not entirely unpleasant to sit down and play for 8 hours in a single night, and it was not so off-putting that I dread starting over. Technically, I still have a bunch of optional side missions to complete, but since half of the ones I've already tried have required an annoying degree of precision, I'll probably just let them be.
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
Hell Yeah! - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
Hell Yeah! is a crazy action-adventure platformer... In Hell.
You are Ash, a devil rabbit and the prince of Hell. When some jerk finds it funny to post your secret intimate photos all over the Hell-ternet, you get VERY angry.
Time to seek out the bastard and destroy him once and for all. While you’re at it, why not use this incredible journey to kill everybody else?
It’s you against all Hell. It’s Hell Yeah!
Previous Playtime
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
A friend told me about a free giveaway. This and Golden Axe, and I was still very naive. I thought "wow, how often are video games given away for free?" Since then, I have passed up the opportunity to get much more interesting games. Literally the only thing that drew me to this was the price.
Expectations And Prior Experience
It's a cute, cartoony platformer, so it will probably be fine. I don't care for the title, but what does that prove? The Steam reviews list it as being pretty short, which is a real pain after my most recent game, but multiple playthroughs is much less onerous in a platformer, where there is an increasing level of skill and precision, than it is in a text-heavy adventure game, where it's just sitting passively and listening to the same damned story you've heard four times before.
Let's hope I can get through this with a minimum of bitterness.
Hell Yeah! is a crazy action-adventure platformer... In Hell.
You are Ash, a devil rabbit and the prince of Hell. When some jerk finds it funny to post your secret intimate photos all over the Hell-ternet, you get VERY angry.
Time to seek out the bastard and destroy him once and for all. While you’re at it, why not use this incredible journey to kill everybody else?
It’s you against all Hell. It’s Hell Yeah!
Previous Playtime
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
A friend told me about a free giveaway. This and Golden Axe, and I was still very naive. I thought "wow, how often are video games given away for free?" Since then, I have passed up the opportunity to get much more interesting games. Literally the only thing that drew me to this was the price.
Expectations And Prior Experience
It's a cute, cartoony platformer, so it will probably be fine. I don't care for the title, but what does that prove? The Steam reviews list it as being pretty short, which is a real pain after my most recent game, but multiple playthroughs is much less onerous in a platformer, where there is an increasing level of skill and precision, than it is in a text-heavy adventure game, where it's just sitting passively and listening to the same damned story you've heard four times before.
Let's hope I can get through this with a minimum of bitterness.
Consortium - 20/20 hours
The positive opinion playthrough turned out to be much easier than the negative opinion playthrough, which is nice. I didn't learn any new information from it, because I'd had positive opinions from every character in the game at one point or another in my first three runs, but it was a high note to end my time with Consortium on . . . or it would have been, had I not finished it at the 17 hour mark.
That left me with a tough decision. I had just enough time for one more quick jaunt through the whole plot, but playing the game six times in as many days would have been almost entirely pointless. The only thing I had left to get was a handful of incidental Steam Achievements.
So I did something kind of risky. I just went back to my previous saves and loaded files for right around when the guide said the achievements were available. Because one of them involved playing through 21 levels of the training simulator, they took longer to get than I might have feared. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite long enough. I wound up at 19 1/2 hours with 37/39 Achievements. Since the last two looked actively unfun (keep all the civilians alive in the training simulator and end the game with neutral attitudes from every character), I decided to just grit my teeth and finish the game again from right where I earned that final Achievement.
Consortium is a fine game, but I highly recommend that you not play it five and a half times in a row. I was seeing new material almost to the very end of my 20 hours, but it was small and incidental, and nothing compared to the large bulk of the dialogue that I had to sit through every game.
I didn't care for the "traveler from another dimension" subplot. I thought it added nothing in particular to the story (except for the revelation at the end of an optional dialogue chain that suggested the previous inhabitant of Bishop 6's body was a second mole), and I actively resented it every time the ARG was mentioned. However, putting that aside, I was still interested in seeing what happens in the sequel, even after so many repetitions. That's a real credit to the writing, characters, and worldbuilding (although I am extending some trust on the supposed identity of the Churchill Tower terrorist - it had better not be as stupid as it looks). The main reason I don't just buy and play the sequel right now is that it's still in early access. I also worry that there might not be a chapter 3 and, of course, I don't want to commit to playing it for 20 hours. But two or three years from now, I will definitely be diving into the further adventures of the Consortium . . . unless I forget.
That left me with a tough decision. I had just enough time for one more quick jaunt through the whole plot, but playing the game six times in as many days would have been almost entirely pointless. The only thing I had left to get was a handful of incidental Steam Achievements.
So I did something kind of risky. I just went back to my previous saves and loaded files for right around when the guide said the achievements were available. Because one of them involved playing through 21 levels of the training simulator, they took longer to get than I might have feared. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite long enough. I wound up at 19 1/2 hours with 37/39 Achievements. Since the last two looked actively unfun (keep all the civilians alive in the training simulator and end the game with neutral attitudes from every character), I decided to just grit my teeth and finish the game again from right where I earned that final Achievement.
Consortium is a fine game, but I highly recommend that you not play it five and a half times in a row. I was seeing new material almost to the very end of my 20 hours, but it was small and incidental, and nothing compared to the large bulk of the dialogue that I had to sit through every game.
I didn't care for the "traveler from another dimension" subplot. I thought it added nothing in particular to the story (except for the revelation at the end of an optional dialogue chain that suggested the previous inhabitant of Bishop 6's body was a second mole), and I actively resented it every time the ARG was mentioned. However, putting that aside, I was still interested in seeing what happens in the sequel, even after so many repetitions. That's a real credit to the writing, characters, and worldbuilding (although I am extending some trust on the supposed identity of the Churchill Tower terrorist - it had better not be as stupid as it looks). The main reason I don't just buy and play the sequel right now is that it's still in early access. I also worry that there might not be a chapter 3 and, of course, I don't want to commit to playing it for 20 hours. But two or three years from now, I will definitely be diving into the further adventures of the Consortium . . . unless I forget.
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