#indiebundlecruftdeathmatch

[stompsite]

indie bundle cruft death match volume 5: thirty game special

Okay. So. The first time I did this, I only did like 10 games. 20 felt pretty good, so I started doing that. This time, we’re gonna do 30, so that it ends on an even 100. Then we’ll go back to doing 20.

And here.

We.

Go.

EVIL GENIUS is so good that it’s in my regular rotation of games now. It’s basically a city builder, except it’s a base builder. Just scale down Tropico and you’ve got it, more or less. I really like it, but all my dudes keep getting killed and I run out of money. Trying to figure out how to get past that right now. NO, MISTER BOND, I EXPECT YOU TO LIVE.

CASTLE CRASHERS is extremely good. It’s a brawler. It’s fun. You should play it. I can’t believe I slept on it so long. SLAAAAAY.

CAYNE is an isometric adventure game from the creators of Stasis. I played the entire thing. It’s free, but it’s good enough that I recommend buying the $6.99 DLC the developers released for it, to show ‘em your support. What a great thing that was. Some of the writing was predictable--heck, the ending was obvious--but I enjoyed it nontheless. If you’re a fan of Sanitarium, play this. If you’ve never heard of Sanitarium... play Sanitarium. INCREDIBLE.

THE CAT LADY is an adventure game, I guess? I didn’t really enjoy what I played, so I gave up. ADIOS.

THE CAVE wouldn’t run at all. Black screen, no matter what I do. Shame on you, Double Fine, for releasing a game that is not fine, much less twice that. I have this game on Xbox 360 backwards compatibility somehow--probably through Games with Gold--so I’ll test it out there some other day.

CHAINSAW WARRIOR and CHAINSAW WARRIOR: LORDS OF THE NIGHT are tabletop games turned into video games. I wasn’t really into ‘em, so they’re going INTO THE DUNGEON.

As a platformer, CAVE STORY+ is not my cup of tea, and yet... I find myself enjoying it, somewhat. Enough to keep it around. WE SHALL CONTINUE.

CHAOS REBORN is a platformer/shooter thingy where you play as Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, who dies in a single hit whenever he gets shot. Not really my jam. BANISHED TO THE NETHERWORLD.

CHERRY TREE HIGH COMEDY CLUB is a visual novel where pressing the screenshot button refreshes the game. It’s got great ratings on steam, BUT I WASN’T LAUGHING.

CHOMPY CHOMP CHOMP is like Pac-Man kinda except there are four players and they’re all trying to eat the one they’re supposed to eat while avoiding the one they aren’t supposed to eat. GAME OVER.

CINDERS is a visual novel/RPG that retells the story of Cinderella. It’s got great ratings on Steam, so if this is your jam, play it. Sadly, it’s not mine. NO HAPPILY EVER AFTER HERE.

CITIES IN MOTION is by the guys who later made Cities: Skylines. It’s pretty neat. You basically manage a city transit company. I ran out of money in the tutorial. The interface is unwieldy. I like it! CHOO CHOO!

CITIZENS OF EARTH is a JRPG-style game, but you’re the Vice President of Earth. I find it charming. IT WINS THE ELECTION.

A CITY SLEEPS is a mixed-rated SHMUP from Harmonix. I had no idea it existed. Must have picked it up in a bundle? Didn’t enjoy it much. GO BACK TO SLEEP.

CLICKR is a matching game, and if you’re into that, it’s probably great. I’m not into that, so I can’t really speak to its quality. I CLICKED CLOSE.

CLONES features a kind of game design that seems familiar, but I can’t place it. Dudes keep walkin, and all you can do is alter the level so they go the way you want them to. ADIOS.

CLOSURE is a platformer where the only things that exist are the things you can see. So, uh, keep your light on. Quirky platformers and I don’t really get along, and haven’t since time immemorial. SHUT YOUR EYES.

CLOUDBUILT is a third person platforming game where I guess you’re an invisible psychic ghost of your sick and sleeping self? It felt... ‘off.’ Kinda like how Warframe feels ‘off’ after you’ve played Ninja Gaiden Black. The thing is, I like Warframe, even though it’s not Ninja Gaiden Black, so I thought I might keep Cloudbuilt around, but... ehnh. Truth is, I JUST WASN’T FEELING IT.

COBI TREASURE DELUXE is basically a match 3 game combined with tetris. It’s something I’d probably play if I had literally nothing else to play. It’s not offensively bad, it’s just not fulfilling what I get out of games. NO TREASURE HERE.

COFFIN DODGERS is Mario Kart but with old people who are trying to outrun death. DEATH CATCHES UP EVENTUALLY.

COIN CRYPT is actually kinda fun, but again, not really for me. I guess there’s a coin-themed world, and you go around spending coins you find to battle people? It’s got some kind of old console-game-that-thinks-it’s-an-rpg-but-there-is-no-roleplay thing going on. It’s neat. Just... do I really want to keep playing? ALL OUTTA QUARTERS.

COLDFIRE KEEP is a first-person game, which sounds exciting, until you realize it’s one of those grid-based dungeon crawler type games, not, like, an actual first-person real-time game. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t actually understand the appeal of this kind of game. Why not let me walk around in real time? Why navigate awkwardly on a grid? I thought people only made this game due to tech limitations, not the aesthetic, since they basically died after Doom came out, other than Grimrock. Reviews said to play Grimrock instead. Also, hey, way too verbose, game. KEEP TO YOURSELF.

COMMANDER KEEN COMPLETE PACK may be an id game, but it’s a platformer, and, like... man, it’s a genre that just does not WORK for me. I wish it did. I mean, not wish strongly enough that if a genie gave me three wishes, I’d ask the genie for the ability to enjoy platformers, but like, I feel my life would be a tiny bit better if I could enjoy platformers. I’M JUST NOT TOO KEEN ON THEM.

CONSTANT C is another platformer. Look, if you came to me wanting quality opinions on platformers, uh, don’t... do that. Don’t ask me about that. It is not something I am into. OUT LIKE A LIGHT.

CONTAINMENT: THE ZOMBIE PUZZLER should have won me over, considering it features both zombies and match puzzles, especially because of it’s cool twist where you can only eliminiate zombies by matching people around them, but the zombies can infect those people... but I dunno. Maybe I don’t like matching games unless they feature collectible Pokemon? That might explain my love of Pokemon Shuffle. These zombies, on the other hand, SHUFFLE OFF TO OBLIVION.

CORPORATE LIFESTYLE SIMULATOR is like... imagine Pikmin, but in an office, and you fight zombies, and the Pikmin elements are downplayed and nowhere near as deep as in Pikmin. Like, people follow you around the office, and they can kinda fight, I guess, but... it wasn’t deep enough to be interesting. And maybe that’s the point; the devs spent a lot more time on the player’s personal combat mechanics, and it shows. If you want to brawl with zombies, enjoy it. WHERE YOU LEAD, I CANNOT FOLLOW.

COSMO’S COSMIC ADVENTURE. I didn’t think they sell this one on Steam anymore, because I don’t think the Apogee pack is available, but hey. I googled, and apparently they do. Still, it’s a PLATFORMER.

COSMOCHORIA wouldn’t let me take a screenshot because pressing F12 opens up its Chrome web inspection interface. It’s kinda like if Mario Galaxy was a 2D game? That makes it a PLATFORMER.

COSMONAUTICA sounds like my jam: it’s a management sim where you fly a space ship around doing missions. Awesome, right? Well, the UI is a little clunky and the information is sparse, compared to a game like Caravan. Being able to manage a ship and stuff is super neat! There’s one problem: the devs abandoned it. If the game had some kind of main quest-line, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t, I’d probably stick with it regardless. I don’t experience performance issues or anything... but it kinda puts me in mind of Banished.

I enjoyed Banished for the time I played it, but the more I played, the more I realized I wasn’t going anywhere. I was just kinda... figuring out how to optimally build a town, then doing just that. Repeatedly. I enjoy structure. The act of just flying around space, completing endless missions doesn’t appeal to me any more than building a town and surviving as long as possible does. I need more than that. Neither game is bad... but I think this is why Caravan works for me so well. It’s got a story. It’s going somewhere. I’m not just traveling between towns selling stuff. I’m on a journey. LOST IN SPACE.

COSSACKS: ART OF WAR is basically just Age of Empires 2, judging by the tutorial, which makes it the best video game I have ever played that isn’t Age of Empires 1, which most people don’t like as much as Age of Empires 2, but I do, because it is the only video game I have ever experienced nostalgia for. No, really, that economic system is virtually identical to Age of Empires. GO FORTH AND CONQUER.

It’s not like I hate the platforming genre, I just haven’t found anything in it to love recently, y’know? I enjoy Rayman’s 2D games. I like Conker’s Bad Fur Day/Live and Reloaded a lot. But the other platformers, man... so many of them, they just don’t excite me. I feel like I’ve seen everything they have to offer. There’s just “some gimmick” and a one or two button interaction with that. Sometimes you memorize button presses and repeat them before moving on.

“But, Doc, you can reduce any genre down to that.” Ehnh... I disagree. There’s a randomness to other real-time games where you don’t have to think about “when an enemy is gonna attack you” or something. There’s a lack of decision making because all you’re doing is moving between two points on a 3D plane. I don’t enjoy Pokemon Fire Red, a 2D game, for the “walking on a 2D plane” bit. I enjoy it for the monster catching/collection completion.

In platformers, that whole “moving on a 2D plane” thing IS the game. And that just doesn’t get my motor running.

Have I talked about this before? I almost feel like I have.

That’s 100 games we’ve done now. This time, we looked at 30 games, and six of them survived the culling, or 20%. This brings our total up to 78 games rejected, 22 kept. Since that’s 100 games, it’s a 78% rejection rate. Neato.

Back to 20 games per article next time!

[stompsite]

indie bundle cruft deathmatch issue 4: it takes twenty to tango

you know the drill: I play a few dozen million games I’m not sure if I want to keep around, mostly free stuff or stuff I got in bundles, and then I write a little mini-review of the game; it either stays or goes on the backlog. Right now, out of 50 games, only 10 have survived, while 40 were sent to purgatory. 80% of ‘em, banished.

What’s next?

An ex-friend (our friendship ended abruptly when I was asked if I liked Half-Life 2 and said ‘no.’ He blocked me on all messengers and disappeared from my life forever. I never understood that) recommended BROKEN SWORD to me. He said I’d like it. I don’t think he understood me very well. Maybe the game is great, but I really struggle to enjoy the pixel hunting of point and click games. I don’t see how that’s enjoyable, and I think it kills narrative pacing. HASTA LA VISTA.

FACE NOIR suffers from the same problem, except, as a noir story, you’d really think I’d like it. But I don’t, because I really struggle with enjoying that kind of gameplay. SAYONARA.

CAESAR 3 should be something I love, as a city builder, but it’s one of those really old ones that’s super zoomed in with a kind of unflexible UI. Age of Empires which released a year prior, looks and plays better. Sure, the genres are a bit different--city builder vs RTS--but Ensemble’s just dramatically better at conveying necessary information to the players. THUMBS DOWN.

CAESAR 4 is clearly a sequel to the third, but it has a much better UI/UX thing going on, and I’m down with this. It refused to run without me running a .bat file as an administrator, but once I ran it, wow, what a game! THUMBS UP.

It is possible that THE CAMPAIGN SERIES: FALL WEISS is a great game, but the launcher said it would boot into 1080p and fullscreen, yet in the game, it booted into a 1366x768, and I had to restart the game to make it work. I have no idea what I’m doing. Maybe there’s a manual? I don’t know. I started a game, I picked Poland, and then the game played itself for like... five minutes? I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing and there was no tutorial. I SURRENDER.

CANABALT is an endless runner, a fun genre to mess with occasionally, but remember what I said last time? I like games about planning. You don’t plan in Canabalt, you just run. I think it’s exemplary of its genre, so if you’re into it, you’re into it. Me? Well, I need to keep coming up with clever phrases to say I rejected the game. So. RUN AWAY.

CAPSIZED appears to have nothing to do with actually being capsized, as far as I can tell. It’s a platformer, so I don’t really care about playing it that much. Also, I couldn’t get my controller to work with it, which is kind of strange. STRANDED.

CAPSULE, is an example of that kind of game where you deal with a fictional interface to play the game. You may be surprised to know how many of these games there are. It’s a lot. Anyways, with Capsule, you appear to be underwater. You move around and hope your oxygen doesn’t die out while moving from place to place. It was okay, but I think I got all I could out of it. ACTUALLY FINISHED.

CAR MECHANIC SIMULATOR 2014 shouldn’t have been enjoyable. It is, after all, supposedly a simulator. But you know what? I had fun. That was neat. I’m glad I played it. Still, I can’t see myself spending a lot of time with it. In first person, you explore a shop, take cars apart, buy the needed parts, and repair cars. It’s cool, but not quite for me. WRECKED.

CARAVAN is so good that I played it for two or three hours after I booted it up the first time.

Yeah.

It’s that good. I can’t think of a game quite like it. Maybe FTL? Kinda? But more about trading and less about combat? The combat itself is hard to explain, but really fun once you get to know it. Personally, I think the best combat is easy to understand, but it’s hard to hold anything against Caravan, which is too dang fun not to keep. WE JOURNEY ONWARD.

EVENT[0] was short enough that I beat it. It’s a walking sim. You solve puzzles. The puzzles are not well designed and the story is simple. Oh yeah, and the textures are low res, which is bad when you’re trying to solve puzzles. I found out later that you could hover over them with the mouse to see the text, but still, weird. A RESOUNDING BLEH.

CITIES XXL takes place on a world not like our own but also completely like our own. It is a city builder, but one of the “you just kind of build a city” varieties, and not one of the “build specific buildings and then do missions and stuff” kinds that I like, like Aven Colony and Tropico. MOVING ON.

Well, E.T. ARMIES seems pretty bad so far--the gun models are huge, the level design is uninspiring, there’s only one enemy type I’ve encountered, and the only guns I’ve located are two seemingly-identical assault rifles and my starting pistol, but I find it somewhat charming. The dev’s web page has expired; the translation seems a little iffy. But I’m having fun. A Steam review called it “surprisingly okay.” Yeah, that’s about right. FINISH THE FIGHT.

CARGO: THE QUEST FOR GRAVITY cannot be explained. It can only be experienced. It must be experienced. Wow. I can’t even begin to put into words what a horrible and remarkable and wonderful experience it is. I love this. Of course it’s by Ice Pick Lodge. Of course it is. GREAT FUN.

CROOKZ: THE BIG HEIST is a sorta-but-not-entirely turn-based heist game set in the 60s. I like what I’m seeing so far, well enough to keep it around. Game has an 87% positive rating on Steam, so it seems like people like it enough. IT STOLE MY HEART.

CLANDESTINITY OF ELSIE is an RPGMaker game with a weird name. I’m not wild about these games. If you’re into horror games that are delivered in a perspective not conducive to horror, by all means, check it out. I uninstalled it. BYE. 

THE CLUB has nothing to do with 50 Cent, but that doesn’t stop it from being pretty dang neato. It’s a third person shooter by Bizarre Creations. Some underground murder fight club sorta thing. Seems fun. Took a bit to get GFWL going, but I prevailed in the end. IT SURVIVES.

CARMAGEDDON is alright, but I was struggling to get the controls where I wanted them to be, so I’ve decied to PASS.

CARMAGEDDON 2 SUFFERS THE SAME FATE.

Look at this screenshot. Does it look like a screenshot of a game you would enjoy? If so, then by all means, play CAST OF THE SEVEN GODSENDS: REDUX. As for me, someone who must’ve gotten this in a bundle and only redeemed it on the off chance it had trading cards to sell, this is the END OF THE LINE.

CASTLE is a game where you take blocks and drop them into place and build the eponymous castle. I did not particularly enjoy it, though I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. BESIEGED.

So, there you have it. 14 games passed on, 6 games kept. The real standouts here were CARGO and CARAVAN. I ultimately passed on a game that was kinda fun, CAR MECHANIC SIMULATOR, and I kept a weird, crappy shooter, E.T. ARMIES.

The total now is 54 to 16, meaning I’ve passed on 77% of games so far.

[stompsite]

indie bundle cruft deathmatch volume 3: ex box

So normally, I wouldn’t do so many of these in such short order, but I’m moving at the end of the month, and I’m moving to a place where the internet’s gonna be wonky, so I’m trying to store as many games on my hard drives as I can. As a result, I’m going through my “definitely not gonna play these again” games as quickly as possible. So, hey, here’s another one.

LOVERS IN A DANGEROUS SPACETIME is a 2d metroidvania, I guess? Except you pilot a spaceship with a partner. It’s fun enough, but metroidvanias and I don’t get along super good. It looks nice and plays okay, but I feel like it’s meant to be played with multiple people, rather than solo. I played it on Xbox, since I got it free on Xbox Live at some point. NAH.

MAX: THE CURSE OF BROTHERHOOD is a sidescrolling platformer about a boy who wishes his brother away. Kinda like Labyrinth, but, as far as I’ve played, without the brilliance of Henson or Bowie present. This isn’t to say it’s a bad game at all, but it’s not really gripping me. But it is a platformer, and I’m someone who’s been trying to figure out why I don’t like platformers for a long time.

I think I’ve figured it out.

One of my least favorite things to do in a video game are forced racing sequences. In these sequences, you mostly have to learn where everything is, memorize it, and repeat. I’m not one for memorization. It’s fundamentally uninteresting to me on a basic level. A good racing game involves some degree of skill; most races in games not meant to be racers rely more on simply memorizing the track.

Most platformers I’ve played don’t involve any kind of interesting or meaningful decision making. Sometimes you’ll get some puzzle solving, which can be enjoyable, but more often than not, platformers are about simply reacting to what’s there, and nothing more than that. See the path, follow the path. The enemies aren’t super intelligent; Goombas march back and forth, and that’s about it. These are games about memorizing the path and timing your button presses perfectly.

In a Sonic game, you might get a few choices, but that’s about it. Played a bit of Mario 3D Land lately and it’s the same thing; at its most difficult, it’s just a game about memorization.

I value a game like DOOM or Halo, where you get to look over the environment, plan your route, and act accordingly, reacting to changes in the situation as they arise. There’s a nice mix of “doing interesting things” at work in these kind of games.

I value improvisation. 

That’s why platformers aren’t very interesting to me.

Oh, and Max has a magic marker that changes the environment. It’s a rule that all platformers have to have A Gimmick, and that’s what Max’s gimmick is. SEE YOU IN ANOTHER LIFE, BROTHER.

SPEEDRUNNERS, because it’s a platformer (a racing platformer, but a platformer nontheless), definitely can be SENT TO LIMBO.

SUPER DUNGEON BROS: claims, on its store page, that it is a rock-themed dungeon brawler. Basically it’s kinda like Diablo, I guess, except that I wasn’t really having much fun, and I forgot to take a screenshot. I DECIDED TO PASS ON IT.

BONEBONE: RISE OF THE DEATHLORD sure seems like a mobile port to me. You shoot arrows at skellingtons. YAWN.

BRINE seems like one of those Fallout mods you get for someone who offers “realistic nights,” but it’s so dark that you begin to wonder if the person making the claim suffers from severe night blindness. Seriously, the ground is just, like... totally black.  It’s some kind of survival game with a 24% positive rating on Steam. I’M STEERING CLEAR.

BROADSWORD: AGE OF CHIVALRY is like, I don’t know, if Civilization were incredibly low-res? I’ve really struggled to enjoy hex-based 4X games. For some reason, Stellaris is my drug of choice, but even games like Civ are hard for me to enjoy. AWAY WITH YOU.

This is what screenshots from BULLET LIFE 2010 look like. Yes, they did misspell “Resume.” Reviews are about half and half positive/negative. I’m surprised there are positive reviews at all, but what do I know? It’s a 3D bullet hell shooter that doesn’t feel super... bullet... hell-y. But I didn’t spend a lot of time with it because the controls were a nightmare. Took way too long to discover that “W” was the interact button and “X” was fire. Oh, and by switching to full screen in the pre-load options menu, I booted up the game. Here I thought I’d be able to edit multiple settings. Silly me. DUMPED.

BULB BOY is an aesthetically wonderful point and click adventure game, which I may come back to some day. The problem is that, well, it’s a point and click adventure game, another one of those genres I really struggle with. If platformers bore me because it’s about reaction time and memorization, point and clicks bore me because they’re about clicking on everything you can until you figure out in what order a bunch of interactive objects are supposed to be placed. It’s a genre that can be brute forced in a way I personally find dissatisfying.

But.

Don’t let this dissuade you from checking out Bulb Boy, a game that has a 91% positive rating on Steam, which, last I checked, is the same as DOOM. So, if you’re into the genre, you’re probably in for a treat. DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS.

What did I just say, CAPTAIN MORGANE AND THE GOLDEN TURTLE, about adventure games? Also, I have no idea what’s going on in the graphics here, but this sure doesn’t look like a three year old game. Also, it runs awfully on my GTX 1070, and there’s a review on Steam that makes the same complaint, but for a 1080. NOPE.

I was bummed out that Steam wouldn’t let me take screenshots of CARRIER COMMAND: GAEA MISSION. It’s not a great game from what I’ve played so far, but it’s interesting. Lots of little tweaks that Bohemia Interactive could do to make it play way better than it does. Maps feel huge. It’s neat. Obviously ARMA is their bread and butter, but... this has me intrigued. FINALLY, A GAME THAT STAYS.

Apparently there are earlier Deponia games, so I probably shouldn’t be testing CHAOS ON DEPONIA right now, but I went through the tutorial. Seems like an adventure game, made me chuckle. I’LL KEEP THIS ONE AROUND. FOR NOW. 

CITIES XL PLATINUM is a city builder, so you’d think it would stay on my list, but it won’t, and here’s why: city builders come in two varieties. There’s the Extremely Popular SimCity style, where you just kinda build a town and keep things running and that’s that, and then there’s the Less Popular But The Kind I Like games, like Tropico, The Settlers, and Anno. These games take you to different maps where you have specific objectives you need to complete. I find operating within those constraints much more enjoyable than the open-ended sandbox creation aspect of things. That’s just not my thing.

Cities XL Platinum is in the former style, unfortunately, which means I’m... like, I’ll give it a shot, but I’m not super into it. The performance issues I experienced weren’t great either, and Cities Skylines, which is from the Cities in Motion developers, is a much better game in this specific city-building subgenre. Forgot to screenshot. KICK IT TO THE CURB.

CLOUD CHAMBER is an online game that was, as best I can tell, removed from Steam. If you have it, you can... like, click on stuff, but you can’t play it, because apparently it, whatever it was, was an online game. WHAT’S THE POINT?

CONTAGION sounds cool, but I didn’t really enjoy the time I spent with it. A review says “it’s like No More Room in Hell, but costs money, and is worse,” and that seems about right. PASS.

COGNITION: AN ERICA REED THRILLER is a game I took a screenshot of, because I hadn’t been doing it or it hadn’t been working in the past few games. Apparently I ended up in Episode 2 even though I told it to go to Episode One. As you can see, people’s faces look... odd.

It’s a point n’ click where you spend like ten minutes in three different camera angles (one shot of two people talking, two closeups of their faces) where they mostly just talk about things that could’ve been said in far less words. It has 199 reviews on Steam, and the reviews are mostly stellar, so... hey, make of it what you will. The genre’s not for me, so I’M BANISHING IT TO OBLIVION.

DEADBOLT reminds me of Gunpoint. Like... uncannily so. This is fine, though, because I really liked Gunpoint. Now, you might be going “hey, Doc, I thought you hated sidescrolling games as evidenced by your above remarks about platformers!” Well, kinda. Deadbolt, like Gunpoint, keeps me engaged by letting me plan things. Observe. Strategize. Engage. That’s what makes it such a fun game. Best way I can describe this is if Gunpoint and Hotline Miami had a baby. The game wears its influences on its sleeves. I LOVE IT.

Word of caution: it gave me a black screen on Windows 10. I had to edit the ini, then it worked properly. Solution was located in the Steam Discussions.

BROKEN DREAMS wouldn’t let me take screenshots of it, probably because it was running in flash. It’s a quirky indie puzzle platformer, with an art design that I find distinctly off-putting. NAH.

DRAKENSANG refused to boot up at first, which is a bad sign, but I finally got it to work, and I was rewarded with a nice classic 3D PC RPG. It feels great to play, very Dragon Agey, if you’ve played that, though it’s got less “AAA Bioware” vibe and more of a “mid-00s German RPG” thing going on. Cool stuff. I had to reinstall the directx executable that came with the game and add “-windowed” to the launch options to make it work. NEAT STUFF.

I’m genuinely unsure where or when I acquired CLOSE YOUR EYES, but it’s definitely not my thing. It’s one of those games where the default controls are Z/X and Arrow keys. Close Your Eyes claims to be a horror game, but this RPG Maker-esque game did nothing to evoke any response in me as I played. I have no idea if it’s good or bad, but the genre and gameplay did nothing to draw me in. I was bored. AWAY WITH YOU.

Well, that’s 20 games. Of those 20 games, 4 of them stayed on the backlog.

The main thing I’m getting here is that genre’s pretty important to me, especially when it comes to being able to make plans. Adventure games and platformers tend not to emphasize strategizing, which is something that’s important to me when playing games. So games where you don’t do that, where you just react to stuff, that’s not as interesting to me.

Until next time.

[stompsite]

indie bundle cruft death match volume two: the revenge of the revenge

this is how it works: I install a bunch of bundle games on my computer, and then I play them until I decide whether they stay or whether they go. Hopefully you get some entertainment out of the process.

Let’s get started.

BRIDGE IT (Plus): This is a game where you make bridges. It follows the same mechanics as the last bridge building game I tested. Like... basically, just a different art style, otherwise apparently the same game. I couldn’t even finish the tutorial because every time I clicked the “simulate” button that you need to click to continue the game, the program switched to my desktop as if I had clicked my clock instead. No thanks. GOODBYE.

BRIDGE PROJECT: Virtually the same game, based on the tutorial, as this and the other bridge game. Same fundamental “make a bridge by snapping things on a grid and then running cars across it” gameplay. Not funny like those gifs I see of other, funnier bridge building games. Weird how this is the only game made by this dev, and the other game was the only game made by that dev. My working theory is that there is a small industry of devs who make a bridge game, die, and then try to remake the bridge game, thinking they’ll get it right this time.

They never do, because it’s a game about building bridges.

I didn’t take a screenshot of this one because it looked just like the other one. PASS.

AGENT AWESOME: This game’s sense of humor is “let’s be as referential as humanly possible.” Like, maybe it gets really good later, but the poor initial showing combined with a weird “sort of real time, sort of turn-based, there’s not a lot to it” gameplay isn’t really interesting to me. It’s got a 70% positive rating on Steam, though. If it’s your thing, it’s your thing. It’s not mine. ADIOS.

A FISTFUL OF GUN: I’m a sucker for Westerns, and I’m intrigued by twin-stick shooters, though I don’t like many of them. Turns out I like A Fistful of Gun. A lot. Super cool aesthetic, neat weapons. Biggest issue I had was that I didn’t really understand the controls; the game kinda explains them, but its super minimal UI doesn’t do a great job making things clear.

My Big Game Design Belief is that a game’s controls should be invisible. The barrier between thought and action should be as minimal as possible. I like this game, but I definitely wish I understood how things worked early on. There are a ton of little tweaks that, I think, would have made this game a lot better.

But you know what? I had so much fun I played it for like 30 minutes, and I’m gonna keep playing more. IT LIVES.

A GAME OF DWARVES: Alphabetically, this game was sorted under G, but it was installed in the folder, and I saw it, staring at me, brightly, against a sea of uninstalled titles. I couldn’t resist installing it. Then I ran the game, and I was told “fatal error! this application must exit immediately.” I couldn’t use a mouse to click “okay.” I had to jam “enter.”

I looked on the Steam community discussions for answers, and found this thread, which indicates that the developers went out of business and would not continue supporting the game.

I did eventually get the game to work. What I played was pretty interesting, as management sims go, but I mean... look at that screenshot. The colors don’t blend well, the repeated tiles are a bit too much, the dwarf faces look... not great. That and the fiddly controls made me question if I really wanted to play it. I almost said yes. We PARTED WAYS.

RELIC HUNTERS ZERO: It’s a fun little twin-stick. Free. Not sure why, they probably could’ve made money on this. There’s nothing making me go “wow, this is special,” but it does seem, from what I played, like an exemplary example of the form. BACKLOG.

TUMBLESTONE: Okay, I’m breaking from the norm. I jumped on my Xbox while I was cleaning the apartment in preparation for a move, and I played a couple games there to see if I’d keep them around, or download something else. Tumblestone is a puzzle game. You have to ‘shoot’ three cubes from the bottom of the puzzle space, but you can only eliminate the cubes if they are of the same color. It was fun, but I didn’t see myself sticking with it. I forgot to take a screenshot. BEGONE.

KILLER INSTINCT KOLLECTION: This Xbox title is a fighting game. I still don’t find myself enjoying fighting games. I MOVED ON.

NO TIME TO EXPLAIN: Another Xbox game, this is a platformer that did not feel particularly great to play, but that’s true of all platformers and me. I’m just not that into the genre. IT’S NOT YOU. IT’S ME.

SUPER MEGA BASEBALL: EXTRA INNINGS is an Xbox game about baseball, but it kept throwing menus like this at me, and I don’t swing that way. Get it? A baseball pun. I didn’t play very long because I just wasn’t having a lot of fun, and I get the impression this is best played with friends. None of my friends like baseball. We’re strictly curler fans where I come from. STEE-RIKE.

Right. Back to the PC.

AI: RAMPAGE might be a good game, but I’m a very picky person when it comes to controls. This is a top-down game where forward movement is wherever your cursor is aiming. Also, the main menu is literally just every option available--settings, levels, you name it. One single massive screen. I tried to take a screenshot, but it came out black. NOT MY THING.

AIRSTRIKE HD appears to be a phone game (imagine how big that pause button in the lower right of the screenshot is on a 27″ monitor) made in unity where you fly back and forth dropping bombs on a civilian populace. You might drop them on more deserving folks than civilians later in the game, but I was so busy not having fun that I didn’t stick around to try out. There aren’t enough steam reviews to give the game a proper score, but most of them are negative. CRASH AND BURN. 

ARMORED FIST 3 is presumably a sequel to Armored Fist 2 and its maximum resolution is 640x480. I picked this one up because it was cheaper to buy the Novalogic complete bundle on sale with the money I’d earned from selling trading cards than it was to buy all the Delta Force games that I wanted. The controls are strange; I’m suspicious of games that tell you to use the arrow keys, but when it asked me to switch to F9 to change my camera, then didn’t tell me how to switch back, I knew we wouldn’t be getting along. Why this tank simulator from 1999 doesn’t use more modern controls or resolutions, I’m not sure. The reviews are “mostly positive” right now on Steam, but I don’t think I can enjoy this. TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES.

AVENCAST, according to Wikipedia, was made by a developer that “had little or no formal education in game development field.” It took them four years to make, and they initially set out to create a Diablo clone. This game does not really control like Diablo at all. It also spends a great deal of time in menus like the above. Too many words, not enough “go do stuff.”

It’s not a bad game, though. Like, there’s nothing here that makes me go “ugh, wow, this is terrible.” It just doesn’t pique my curiosity. It doesn’t make me want more. The controls aren’t terrible, but they aren’t great either. The premise isn’t that interesting--it literally starts out by telling you that this is the story of the greatest mage ever, or something like that, effectively killing the stakes--it just kind of feels old and uninteresting to me.

This is coming from someone who likes the Gothic games. What I’m saying is, your mileage may vary, and I almost kept Avencast around, until I decided that, quite frankly, I probably won’t be spending much time with it. Besides, mages are so much less interesting than rogues.

AX:EL’s menus make no sense. No, really, look at this. What does it mean? What does any of it mean? There is a ship, but what kind of game is it? I have no idea. The tooltips aren’t that helpful. One button says something like “patrol,” and if you hover over it, the tooltip says “patrol mode.”

Anyways, turns out there’s a campaign in here, if you dig long enough. Briefly, I suspected this was some kind of multiplayer only game. It is not. There is a campaign. It involves dogfighting. Turns out this is basically an Ace Combat style game, which is neat, but it is easy, there’s no tutorial, and the assets look like something I could make, and I’m not an artist at all.

AX:EL wasn’t unfun from what I played, but it puts up so many barriers to the gameplay that it can be needlessly frustrating. SEE YOU, SPACE COWBOY.

BLOODSPORTS.TV sounded cool until it asked me if I had ever played in the “top down hero game” category or somethin like that. I tentatively clicked yes. IT’S A MOBA.

BLOOP RELOADED is just Bloop with nicer graphics. And writing like the above. You drag lines between things and make liquids go down those lines into the things. The end. Quoth the raven, NEVERMORE.

CALIFORNIUM: Imagine PKD’s walking simulator. Mysterious enough to keep me going. Has people to interact with, to a small degree. Would I like a game that actually has mechanical depth and complexity? Sure. But... I’m gonna finish Californium. THIS IS GOOD STUFF.

CHRONICLES OF MYSTERY: THE SCORPIO RITUAL has nothing to do with the Xbox One X. It is a point and click game. I’ve never seen the appeal of these games. You just click on stuff until people do what you want them to, or you do weird things to solve puzzles. Old Man Murray explained this at length so I don’t have to.

I love when Steam’s game description character limit gets overrun. INTO THE FLAMES.

DEFENDERS OF ARDANIA gave me a black screen and wouldn’t quit when I tried to alt tab or anything. I tried lookin for solutions, but found none. I CAST YOU OUT.

20 games. 3 survived. 17 were condemned to purgatory.

[stompsite]

indiebundlecruftdeathmatch vol. 1: reckoning

As detailed in this piece, I have a problem, and that problem is random games I’ve acquired without meaning to over the years.

I’m going to play them as long as I feel like, and then I’m going to jot down some notes, and I’ll do it until I get bored or other duties demand my attention.

So here goes.

BOOSTER TROOPER: This is a side scrolling deathmatch game. Because it’s a sidescroller, I don’t really care about it. Production quality isn’t great. I’m pretty sure this game was made in like 24 hours with a bunch of sample game assets. PASS.

BOREALIS: I have no idea what this game is about. I booted it up and the menu was just a bunch of symbols. When you hover over the symbols, they say things like “survival.” In a game with a tutorial, I might know what this means. As it stands, I had no idea what to do until I visited the store page.

I tend to approach games as an impatient customer when I don’t know anything about them. Don’t get me wrong, I give them all a fair chance, but it’s a really useful tool to come at a game like someone who doesn’t have the time or money to put up with a game. It really makes you appreciate the best games, and how they communicate well with the player. Borealis does not.

Also, I said I’d take screenshots, but Borealis showed up in the background, despite being a full screen game, and it wouldn’t let me take screenshots. PASS.

I have restarted my machine to see if it will take screenshots.

BOTANICULA: This is a point and click adventure by Amanita Design, a developer I have heard of, but I’m not sure why. It’s pretty cool. Again, I cannot take screenshots. It’s gorgeous, it’s charming, the puzzles aren’t hard or anything. Just click until you find a solution. Let yourself steep in the ~vibes~!

Oh wow, a 97% positive rating on Steam? Dang. Not surprising, considering I’m not a point and click guy and I like what I’ve played. Pick this one up, guys.

Good stuff. IT STAYS.

BOXES WITH GUNS: Well, I clicked on it and it said it was missing the executable, which is obviously Not A Good Look. 214 files failed to validate and had to be reacquired. I tried to run it again and it claimed that Steam Must Be Running To Play The Game. Steam is totally running, because that is how I was able to launch it. I haven’t had this much trouble with a game since Hitman: Blood Money.

haha wait what

It’s not really my genre and I’m not too interested in the screenshots. Pretty sure, looking at all the awards it got, it came from groupees years ago. Anyways, HARD PASS.

BRAID: a game I don’t remember ever buying, but apparently it was added to my account in 2009??? I guess it’s a platformer so I probably don’t care about it at all, but hey, let’s try it out.

Huh. Another game won’t launch.

Screw it, I’m booting DOOM to see if I have problems. I’ve run Doom before, so if it isn’t working, it might be that Steam is broken.

For whatever reason, restarting Steam fixed the issue where restarting my computer did not. Anyways, Braid is a platformer, and like all platformers, I don’t really find “mash one button at the perfect time to jump” to be particularly interesting or engaging gameplay. As a quirky puzzle platformer, I’m sure it eventually gets good, but that’s true of every quirky puzzle platformer. I don’t really find it fun.

Nice looking game, great music, not my genre. PASS.

This is BRAINPIPE: A PLUNGE TO UNHUMANITY, though the title screen just says BRAINPIPE. I don’t know how to play. It asks you to select your skill level, which is just, like, a numerical value and you slide an eyeball along it. I don’t know what the eyeballs are for. I don’t really know how you play the game. You kinda just... fly through a tube and if you click it slows down time?

Not really interested in spending time here. BEGONE.

BREACH AND CLEAR: It’s some kind of tactics game. The intro video was boring, which gave it a Bad Look, but you know what? This looks fun and I’m going to try playing it later. Great menu, though none of my default squad sounds Russian, which is weird because the game indicates it’s the Russian special forces. Font’s a bit annoying; they use what looks like Helvetica and then something more boring for the menu. I got an achievement for four-starring a bunch of missions, despite having zero stars. Weird little bug. LIVE TO FIGHT ANOTHER DAY.

BREATH OF DEATH VII: Okay, apparently this runs on XNA. It’s basically a game stylized as an old school JRPG, minus the extremely good art that a lot of older JRPGs had. I am not really into JRPGs, but I do enjoy the sense of adventure and the artistic quality of some of the older games, especially a game like EARTHBOUND.

Basically, everyone died a long time ago and you’re a skeleton in a world where basically everybody is undead, but being undead doesn’t make you evil. It’s a JRPG, so the gameplay itself really isn’t that interesting. That’s just how JRPGs are.

The sad truth about JRPGs is that there’s basically no roleplaying involved. They’re mostly just adventure games where you can kinda go wherever you want and sometimes you navigate menus as an extremely abstract form of combat.

Their charm doesn’t lie in the gameplay, but in the adventure. A JRPG lives or dies by its story. SUIKODEN is interesting because of the narrative it sets up, the cute, schlocky adventure. It’s not because you tell your party to attack or heal.

Breath of Death VII commits two crimes: first, it could stand to break up some of its text boxes so they don’t feel quite so wall-off-text, and in doing so, the game would stop violating one of the most important rules of design: don’t let a single word dangle by itself. If the text box uses ALL THE WORDS and then you have an entire text box for just one word, you’ve failed. We learned this in design school on, like... day one?

The second crime it commits is that its humor is mostly referential. There’s a Castlevania reference early on. These jokes only work if people are in on the joke, and while JRPG fans who probably have played a lot of console games know all about its inside jokes, people who don’t get the reference don’t really see the point.

Referential humor is basically just “hey, remember that thing? You didn’t expect to see that here, so it’s jarring, which is funny.” Thing is, you do that too much, and it gets grating, because now the audience expects it, so... it’s not funny.

I’ve said way too much about a game I’m actually LEAVING ON THE BACKLOG. What can I say? I was charmed by what I’ve seen and I look forward to playing more. It’s just more fun to talk about what’s broken and why than anything else.

THE BRIDGE: huh, interesting. M.C. Escher’s "2D logic puzzler.” But ehnhnnmhmmhmmnooo. no. I just don’t feel strongly enough to keep it around. I forgot to take a screenshot of this and the next game.

BRIDGE CONSTRUCTOR: it’s one of those puzzly bridge building games. Not feelin it. BYE, FELICIA.

Anywho, I’m feelin really tired. That’s a bunch of games. Most of them aren’t staying on the backlog. Without meaning to, I’ve just gone through ten games exactly. Three of them are staying on the backlog. My standout here was Botanicula, believe it or not, though I could see myself loving Breach and Clear if it’s good enough.

The biggest takeaway I have from these games is this: if you’re making a game, the most important thing you can do is to make it extremely clear what everything does and how it works. Why are people gonna stick with your game if your game’s not immediately grok-able?

They aren’t.

Until vol. 2, my friends.