I made a big mistake when buying this game. Because it was on sale, and because I'm the sort of person who gets irritated if I feel like I'm playing an incomplete game, I bought all the DLC in a bundle. I thought I was buying extra decks above and beyond those available in the base game, so as to have a broader MtG experience. It turns out that I bought some extra decks, but the bulk of my purchase went to unlocking decks and cards that I could well have unlocked on my own, just by playing the game.
It's not so much the waste of money that bothers me. If wasting money on Magic: The Gathering was any kind of deterrent to me, I'd have stopped playing years ago. No, what bugs me is the lost opportunity to pursue these rewards in-game. I like the sensation of advancement. I like the way video games give you the illusion of progression by doling out rewards in exchange for completing challenges. That clear connection between effort and achievement is all too rare in our modern, post-industrial economy.
So, you know, I'm peeved that I managed to deny myself the fun of unlocking new cards. Especially since I have a feeling that the deck manipulation I've done with those cards (basic stuff like trimming useless life-gain cards or adding extra lands to speed up a slow deck) may have given me the edge necessary to defeat some of the toughest CPU opponents.
It's not that big a deal, though. I'm really enjoying this solitaire version of Magic. I like the sheer mechanics of playing a hand and overcoming a challenge. I don't have the foggiest clue what the hell is going on in the campaign's plot, but so long as it's an excuse for gratuitous card duels, I'm finding that I don't really care.
Monday, August 31, 2015
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Magic 2014 - 2/20 hours
I was lucky enough to get a change to play a couple of hands against a friend yesterday, and it felt really good to be playing Magic again. It's probably been about two years since I played against another human being.
It's weird how being away from something for so long, then coming back, can give you a whole new perspective. I'd never really noticed, until just recently, how luck-based Magic: the Gathering is. I mean, like everyone, I'd experienced the frustration of being "mana-screwed" (for the uninitiated: you have to draw and play "land" cards in order to cast spells, but sometimes, after a shuffle, those land cards will clump at the bottom of the deck, rendering you unable to do anything while your opponent kills you unabated), but I'm not talking about an amateurish "I lost because I didn't draw the right cards" mindset.
No, I realize that except for certain extreme circumstances, when I lose, it's almost certainly because I played poorly. It's one of those getting older things, where you realize that despite how much you love a particular hobby, you've plateaued at "mediocre," and will likely never get to be world class, or even especially good. However, I've come to realize that while my failures are largely attributable to poor decisions, my successes owe a lot to the luck of the draw.
For example, of the three games I played against Andorxor yesterday, I lost two, primarily because I took too many risks with my blocking. The game I won went down something like this "oh look, a card that makes a creature indestructible" . . . Next turn: "oh look, a card that redirects all damage dealt to me to an enchanted creature." Yes, there is a certain species of skill that comes in realizing the potential of those two effects to stack, but when you literally can never take damage from anything, the rest of the game basically wins itself.
The big mystery here is why I am so okay with this luck-based gameplay when similar mechanics in other games drive me absolutely batty. As far as I can tell, the answer boils down to essential human irrationality. I'm okay with the chance element in the table-top game because there's a lot you can do to mitigate chance in the course of deck-building. You play the odds, adding creatures and spells of a wide variety of mana costs, so that you are likely to have at least a few playable cards, regardless of how many lands you draw, and you build in more than one way to win, so that if your big combo doesn't come up, you can lean on your backup plan to save the day (although I may be a little weird this way, because I hate winning with my back-up plan almost as much as I hate losing). So, though chance may rule when it comes to the actual duel, if you've done the legwork beforehand, you can nudge chance into your corner.
Of course, in the video game, all the decks are preconstructed, so you can't do any of that preparation. Chance cannot be influenced. So, I shouldn't really like it in the same way that I like the table-top version. However, the video game reminds me of the card game, and that is enough to give me a good feeling, even if my favorite part of the card game is absent by deliberate design. Like I said, basic human irrationality. This thing looks like a thing I enjoy, thus I enjoy it, because things that look like things I like, I like.
It's weird how being away from something for so long, then coming back, can give you a whole new perspective. I'd never really noticed, until just recently, how luck-based Magic: the Gathering is. I mean, like everyone, I'd experienced the frustration of being "mana-screwed" (for the uninitiated: you have to draw and play "land" cards in order to cast spells, but sometimes, after a shuffle, those land cards will clump at the bottom of the deck, rendering you unable to do anything while your opponent kills you unabated), but I'm not talking about an amateurish "I lost because I didn't draw the right cards" mindset.
No, I realize that except for certain extreme circumstances, when I lose, it's almost certainly because I played poorly. It's one of those getting older things, where you realize that despite how much you love a particular hobby, you've plateaued at "mediocre," and will likely never get to be world class, or even especially good. However, I've come to realize that while my failures are largely attributable to poor decisions, my successes owe a lot to the luck of the draw.
For example, of the three games I played against Andorxor yesterday, I lost two, primarily because I took too many risks with my blocking. The game I won went down something like this "oh look, a card that makes a creature indestructible" . . . Next turn: "oh look, a card that redirects all damage dealt to me to an enchanted creature." Yes, there is a certain species of skill that comes in realizing the potential of those two effects to stack, but when you literally can never take damage from anything, the rest of the game basically wins itself.
The big mystery here is why I am so okay with this luck-based gameplay when similar mechanics in other games drive me absolutely batty. As far as I can tell, the answer boils down to essential human irrationality. I'm okay with the chance element in the table-top game because there's a lot you can do to mitigate chance in the course of deck-building. You play the odds, adding creatures and spells of a wide variety of mana costs, so that you are likely to have at least a few playable cards, regardless of how many lands you draw, and you build in more than one way to win, so that if your big combo doesn't come up, you can lean on your backup plan to save the day (although I may be a little weird this way, because I hate winning with my back-up plan almost as much as I hate losing). So, though chance may rule when it comes to the actual duel, if you've done the legwork beforehand, you can nudge chance into your corner.
Of course, in the video game, all the decks are preconstructed, so you can't do any of that preparation. Chance cannot be influenced. So, I shouldn't really like it in the same way that I like the table-top version. However, the video game reminds me of the card game, and that is enough to give me a good feeling, even if my favorite part of the card game is absent by deliberate design. Like I said, basic human irrationality. This thing looks like a thing I enjoy, thus I enjoy it, because things that look like things I like, I like.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Magic 2014 - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
Ignite your spark with Magic 2014 — Duels of the Planeswalkers!
With over 12 million fans, discover what makes Magic: The Gathering the world’s premier trading card game.
Become a Planeswalker and travel the planes of existence unleashing a torrent of spells and creatures to devastate your opponents. Prove yourself in combat against Chandra Nalaar—a fiercely independent Planeswalker with an affinity for fire and quick temper—then battle your way through the planes to face the mysterious villain trying to pull Chandra’s strings.
Previous Playtime
4 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
I'm a long time player of Magic: The Gathering. I started with the Unlimited set way back in '93 or '94 (or maybe my first set was Revised, and I just traded for some Unlimited cards, he said, realizing that no one would care about the distinction). Point is, I've played this game for a long time. Love it. Sometimes it's hard to organize an in-person game, though. There's the scheduling, obviously, but even when you can get it right, there's all sorts of ancillary issues - do they have decks built, do you have decks built, do you bring extra cards to trade, is schlepping all that stuff around really worth it.
What I wanted, more than anything, was an updated version of the old Microprose game, where I could just play around with all the cards, build decks, and duel the PC whenever I felt like it, but I'm given to understand that such a thing will never happen again, because Wizards of the Coast hates joy. Magic the Gathering Online was out, because everything I hear about it makes it sound like a microtransaction hell. That pretty much left the Duel of the Planeswalker series, which intrigued me, but also got mixed reviews from Magic veterans.
Anyway, like so many other things on this blog, I wound up waiting until a sale brought it down to deep discount, and then snatched it up because surely, even a shallow and limited Magic: The Gathering game would have a lot to offer an inveterate M:tG addict like myself, especially if I'm only risking 3 dollars to get it. (Any longtime player of Magic should know that three dollars is pretty much the bare minimum you can waste on this hobby at any given time).
Expectations and Prior Experience
I've already played a bit of this game, because even though I bought it mid-blog, I could not resist trying a couple of hands in my spare moments. I liked the campaign mode, but I was leery of getting too far into it, because I wanted to save something for when I had to play it for the blog. The sealed play mode was great, pretty much everything I want from a M:tG game, but I was deeply disappointed when I found out you only had so many deck slots, a finite number of booster packs per deck, and you could not reset deck slots after you exhausted the format. Exploration is the best part of the game, and to put an arbitrary cap on that is incredibly frustrating (I know, they don't want to cannibalize MGO's business, but frankly that just convinces me that my knee-jerk "MGO is evil" reaction was, in fact, justified).
Still, it was definitely magic. Even if the decks are limited to preconstructs, it's still pretty fun to test your wits and tactical acumen against the machine. And from what I saw, the preconstruct decks were pretty entertaining in their own right, so really, the only thing that's missing is the creativity and resource management of real Magic. Granted, that's my favorite part of the game, but I'm not so down on the rest that I won't enjoy myself.
Ignite your spark with Magic 2014 — Duels of the Planeswalkers!
With over 12 million fans, discover what makes Magic: The Gathering the world’s premier trading card game.
Become a Planeswalker and travel the planes of existence unleashing a torrent of spells and creatures to devastate your opponents. Prove yourself in combat against Chandra Nalaar—a fiercely independent Planeswalker with an affinity for fire and quick temper—then battle your way through the planes to face the mysterious villain trying to pull Chandra’s strings.
Previous Playtime
4 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
I'm a long time player of Magic: The Gathering. I started with the Unlimited set way back in '93 or '94 (or maybe my first set was Revised, and I just traded for some Unlimited cards, he said, realizing that no one would care about the distinction). Point is, I've played this game for a long time. Love it. Sometimes it's hard to organize an in-person game, though. There's the scheduling, obviously, but even when you can get it right, there's all sorts of ancillary issues - do they have decks built, do you have decks built, do you bring extra cards to trade, is schlepping all that stuff around really worth it.
What I wanted, more than anything, was an updated version of the old Microprose game, where I could just play around with all the cards, build decks, and duel the PC whenever I felt like it, but I'm given to understand that such a thing will never happen again, because Wizards of the Coast hates joy. Magic the Gathering Online was out, because everything I hear about it makes it sound like a microtransaction hell. That pretty much left the Duel of the Planeswalker series, which intrigued me, but also got mixed reviews from Magic veterans.
Anyway, like so many other things on this blog, I wound up waiting until a sale brought it down to deep discount, and then snatched it up because surely, even a shallow and limited Magic: The Gathering game would have a lot to offer an inveterate M:tG addict like myself, especially if I'm only risking 3 dollars to get it. (Any longtime player of Magic should know that three dollars is pretty much the bare minimum you can waste on this hobby at any given time).
Expectations and Prior Experience
I've already played a bit of this game, because even though I bought it mid-blog, I could not resist trying a couple of hands in my spare moments. I liked the campaign mode, but I was leery of getting too far into it, because I wanted to save something for when I had to play it for the blog. The sealed play mode was great, pretty much everything I want from a M:tG game, but I was deeply disappointed when I found out you only had so many deck slots, a finite number of booster packs per deck, and you could not reset deck slots after you exhausted the format. Exploration is the best part of the game, and to put an arbitrary cap on that is incredibly frustrating (I know, they don't want to cannibalize MGO's business, but frankly that just convinces me that my knee-jerk "MGO is evil" reaction was, in fact, justified).
Still, it was definitely magic. Even if the decks are limited to preconstructs, it's still pretty fun to test your wits and tactical acumen against the machine. And from what I saw, the preconstruct decks were pretty entertaining in their own right, so really, the only thing that's missing is the creativity and resource management of real Magic. Granted, that's my favorite part of the game, but I'm not so down on the rest that I won't enjoy myself.
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Skyborn - 20/20 hours
Most of my last few hours playing Skyborn was spent on hard mode. It was definitely tougher. I died a couple of times, instead of never. However, it wasn't really tougher in an interesting way. The biggest thing I noticed was that my status-effect spells became extremely unreliable. One of the best parts of normal mode was that, unlike some of its inspirations, you'd actually have cause to use things like "slow," "defense down," and "poison" because they provided genuine utility without always being overpowering (granted, if you managed to stack a half dozen of them on the same boss, that did drop the difficulty considerably, but even so, getting to that point was a challenge in itself). You did get some collectible boss trophies by beating bosses in hard mode, but I'm not really vain enough for that to act as a draw,
Final summary of Skyborn - good, but slight. I like the characters, even if they are shallow. The world-building is thin, but it gets the job done. It looks nice, and I don't really hold the fact that it uses a lot of rpgmaker assets against it (that just shows me that it's possible to make a nice-looking game with rpgmaker). So much of this game rests on the charisma of its writing and art and on the residual goodwill from a bunch of classic games that fit a similar mold, but I don't really see that as a problem, per se. If I'd played a half-dozen games from the same company that were similarly charming, yet shallow, I'd start to take issue with their lack of innovation, but for my short time with the game, it was nice to have something comfortable and familiar that I could just chill out with and not think about too hard.
Final summary of Skyborn - good, but slight. I like the characters, even if they are shallow. The world-building is thin, but it gets the job done. It looks nice, and I don't really hold the fact that it uses a lot of rpgmaker assets against it (that just shows me that it's possible to make a nice-looking game with rpgmaker). So much of this game rests on the charisma of its writing and art and on the residual goodwill from a bunch of classic games that fit a similar mold, but I don't really see that as a problem, per se. If I'd played a half-dozen games from the same company that were similarly charming, yet shallow, I'd start to take issue with their lack of innovation, but for my short time with the game, it was nice to have something comfortable and familiar that I could just chill out with and not think about too hard.
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Skyborn - 13/20 hours
I finished Skyborn, and the finale went down exactly as I expected - you had a mission in the palace, and then after you defeat the villain you've been opposing for the whole game, it turns out there is there is some random alternate dimension of evil that you have to shut down to save the world. Pretty standard jrpg stuff.
Now that I've played through the whole thing, I have to say that Skyborn is pretty much the paradigmatic rpg. And while you could interpret that to mean that it's unoriginal and cliched, I actually find something admirable in its craft. Like, when you build a ship in a bottle, you're not really trying to come up with an innovative new ship design because the whole point is that at the end of this painstaking and delicate process, you wind up with something that looks like a ship.
If you view rpgmaker as a hobby kit, than Skyborn is kind of the ideal game. Someone used the hobby kit to make a thing that looks exactly like the sort of thing that was popular enough to inspire the creation of a hobby kit. Understand that it is without a trace of irony that I say I admire the creator's restraint in not attempting to reinvent the wheel.
I know from bitter personal experience that it is all to easy for a moderately clever person to get one good idea and then crawl so far up their own ass that they don't realize, until too late, that they don't know how to get the fundamentals right. Skyborn doesn't have that problem. It's pretty much all fundamentals, but within those constraints, it is rock solid.
I suppose, if I had paid money for this game, I might be upset that it didn't have anything particularly challenging or surprising about it (and I wouldn't recommend buying it at full price), but as a pure experience, divorced from any sort of financial interest, I found its familiarity comforting.
From here, I'll probably go back and beat the optional bosses (I think I have a save from before the point of no return, but I'll have to double check). That should take a couple of hours. Then, if I still have time left, I'll start over on hard mode, and see if the game is fair on the increased difficulty level.
Now that I've played through the whole thing, I have to say that Skyborn is pretty much the paradigmatic rpg. And while you could interpret that to mean that it's unoriginal and cliched, I actually find something admirable in its craft. Like, when you build a ship in a bottle, you're not really trying to come up with an innovative new ship design because the whole point is that at the end of this painstaking and delicate process, you wind up with something that looks like a ship.
If you view rpgmaker as a hobby kit, than Skyborn is kind of the ideal game. Someone used the hobby kit to make a thing that looks exactly like the sort of thing that was popular enough to inspire the creation of a hobby kit. Understand that it is without a trace of irony that I say I admire the creator's restraint in not attempting to reinvent the wheel.
I know from bitter personal experience that it is all to easy for a moderately clever person to get one good idea and then crawl so far up their own ass that they don't realize, until too late, that they don't know how to get the fundamentals right. Skyborn doesn't have that problem. It's pretty much all fundamentals, but within those constraints, it is rock solid.
I suppose, if I had paid money for this game, I might be upset that it didn't have anything particularly challenging or surprising about it (and I wouldn't recommend buying it at full price), but as a pure experience, divorced from any sort of financial interest, I found its familiarity comforting.
From here, I'll probably go back and beat the optional bosses (I think I have a save from before the point of no return, but I'll have to double check). That should take a couple of hours. Then, if I still have time left, I'll start over on hard mode, and see if the game is fair on the increased difficulty level.
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Skyborn - 9/20 hours
I may be in the minority here, but I like grinding. I like watching my numbers go up. And I like the idea that with enough patience, I can obviate a lack of skill. I even like to grind in games that are relatively easy, because then I can feel like I have incredible super-powers, that I somehow managed to earn.
Skyborn is a game where grinding is neither possible nor necessary. There are a finite number of enemies, and they don't respawn. This is a little vexing because it means you can make bad purchases in the shops and wind up with not enough money for the equipment you really want. This hasn't been an issue yet, because, aside from the arena, this game is super easy, but you know, maybe it will be someday, and that stresses me out a little.
I will say, though, that after nine hours with this game, I am confident that my enjoyment of it is about 75% nostalgia. It plays exactly like the sort of games I enjoyed as a young man, and while it doesn't quite have the complexity of something like Final Fantasy VI or the charm of Chrono Trigger, it is a solid second-tier offering. There's something comfortable and calming about its menu-driven gameplay and bare-bones plot (seriously, I can describe the last four hours as "I went to a place and got a thing" and be only slightly short on the actual details - the place I went was Nordenwald Forest and the thing I got was Ether Fuel, also I dicked around in the Arena and recruited a new party member who is all backstory and no personality).
I have a feeling I'm pretty close to the end, however. I've just built my secret weapon, and we're about to infiltrate the Skyborn headquarters to free the half-breed captives, which means that, if this game is at all what I think it is, there should be one more late-game plot twist, and then a final dungeon after that. I'd be pleasantly surprised if the end game did something different, but structurally, Skyborn has been extremely conservative so far (the one wrinkle came when Claret made a deal with the villain to let her brother out of jail - it was obvious that she would change her mind and not betray the rebels, but he would count on that and just follow her to the rebel base - which is exactly what happened, but then afterwards there was a gratifying absence of the expected "we trusted you, how could you do this" scene).
Fingers crossed that the last few hours of Skyborn blow me away, but even if they don't, I expect I'll have a mildly pleasant time.
Skyborn is a game where grinding is neither possible nor necessary. There are a finite number of enemies, and they don't respawn. This is a little vexing because it means you can make bad purchases in the shops and wind up with not enough money for the equipment you really want. This hasn't been an issue yet, because, aside from the arena, this game is super easy, but you know, maybe it will be someday, and that stresses me out a little.
I will say, though, that after nine hours with this game, I am confident that my enjoyment of it is about 75% nostalgia. It plays exactly like the sort of games I enjoyed as a young man, and while it doesn't quite have the complexity of something like Final Fantasy VI or the charm of Chrono Trigger, it is a solid second-tier offering. There's something comfortable and calming about its menu-driven gameplay and bare-bones plot (seriously, I can describe the last four hours as "I went to a place and got a thing" and be only slightly short on the actual details - the place I went was Nordenwald Forest and the thing I got was Ether Fuel, also I dicked around in the Arena and recruited a new party member who is all backstory and no personality).
I have a feeling I'm pretty close to the end, however. I've just built my secret weapon, and we're about to infiltrate the Skyborn headquarters to free the half-breed captives, which means that, if this game is at all what I think it is, there should be one more late-game plot twist, and then a final dungeon after that. I'd be pleasantly surprised if the end game did something different, but structurally, Skyborn has been extremely conservative so far (the one wrinkle came when Claret made a deal with the villain to let her brother out of jail - it was obvious that she would change her mind and not betray the rebels, but he would count on that and just follow her to the rebel base - which is exactly what happened, but then afterwards there was a gratifying absence of the expected "we trusted you, how could you do this" scene).
Fingers crossed that the last few hours of Skyborn blow me away, but even if they don't, I expect I'll have a mildly pleasant time.
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Skyborn - 6/20 hours
My internet went out yesterday, and I was forced to play Skyborn in offline mode. This led to Steam's counter falling out of sync with my actual playtime. That annoyed me greatly. The in-game counter doesn't track things like reloads, new games, and time spent in the menu trying to get my controller to work (it turns out that when rpgmaker says it's going to map a controller button to "c," that doesn't mean the "c" button on your keyboard, but rather the third function of the particular game you're playing). So, six hours is really my best guess.
But that's just fussy bookkeeping stuff. How is the game itself? Well, first, it's an rpgmaker game. No value judgement there, but there's no mistaking it for anything else. If you've used rpgmaker before, it's pretty obvious how the game was made, and it does nothing particularly surprising with the engine.
That being said, it's probably as good a game as you could possibly expect, given how it started. It doesn't do anything to transcend or reinvent the rpgmaker formula, but it uses the toolkit provided in more or less the ideal way. The level designs are diverse and interesting to look at, filled with various geegaws and set-dressing that nicely toes the line between "barren" and "cluttered," the characters are not terribly deep, but they are appealing types and snappily written, the plot is easy to follow, but entertaining, and the combat, while not exactly groundbreaking and a little on the easy side, does manage to pull out one good trick with the "threat" system. If this game was released on the Playstation back in 1998, we might well be talking about its place in the pantheon of classic rpgs.
But it's not 1998, so Skyborn is merely good. The titular Skyborn are a winged race of fanatical racial purists who are oppressing the humans of this steampunk world. You control a party of adventurers who form the core of the rebellion, as you search for the components of an invention that will turn the tide of the war. Naturally, you fight a bunch of monsters along the way, but like most of the best 2-d rpgs of years past, the enemies are visible on the main map, and you can choose when you want to fight. Because the main character, Clarice, is an inventor, there's also a mining and weapon customization system, so you can tailor the strengths of your party to your particular play style (I'm all attack, all the time).
Like the old-school rpgs it's emulating, it's shallow, but charming. I'm not sure how much longer I have to go to the end, but I expect I won't mind playing through again on hard.
But that's just fussy bookkeeping stuff. How is the game itself? Well, first, it's an rpgmaker game. No value judgement there, but there's no mistaking it for anything else. If you've used rpgmaker before, it's pretty obvious how the game was made, and it does nothing particularly surprising with the engine.
That being said, it's probably as good a game as you could possibly expect, given how it started. It doesn't do anything to transcend or reinvent the rpgmaker formula, but it uses the toolkit provided in more or less the ideal way. The level designs are diverse and interesting to look at, filled with various geegaws and set-dressing that nicely toes the line between "barren" and "cluttered," the characters are not terribly deep, but they are appealing types and snappily written, the plot is easy to follow, but entertaining, and the combat, while not exactly groundbreaking and a little on the easy side, does manage to pull out one good trick with the "threat" system. If this game was released on the Playstation back in 1998, we might well be talking about its place in the pantheon of classic rpgs.
But it's not 1998, so Skyborn is merely good. The titular Skyborn are a winged race of fanatical racial purists who are oppressing the humans of this steampunk world. You control a party of adventurers who form the core of the rebellion, as you search for the components of an invention that will turn the tide of the war. Naturally, you fight a bunch of monsters along the way, but like most of the best 2-d rpgs of years past, the enemies are visible on the main map, and you can choose when you want to fight. Because the main character, Clarice, is an inventor, there's also a mining and weapon customization system, so you can tailor the strengths of your party to your particular play style (I'm all attack, all the time).
Like the old-school rpgs it's emulating, it's shallow, but charming. I'm not sure how much longer I have to go to the end, but I expect I won't mind playing through again on hard.
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