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Sid Meier's Civilization VI (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 16th, 2026 at 14:13:25) |
Eh. I played for a couple hours and was bored. I know this is one you have to sink time into to learn and thoroughly enjoy. But I'd just rather not, now that I see just how expansive it is. I did enjoy the option to be Teddy Roosevelt, after whom I named my cat. Bully! I got this in a massive Civ Humble Bundle a while back and gave most of the expansion pass keys away. Should have given it all away! On to the next thing!
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Fallout 4 (PS4) by jp (Oct 13th, 2026 at 10:30:59) |
For some daft reason I was sure I had played this - a bit - way back when I was at DePaul on an Xbox 360. I remember starting inside a vault, designing my character, leaving the vault, and then wandering around in the wasteland for a bit. I was also confused by the VATS system, which I thought was cool - but I had trouble with the UI/understanding the controls. And then, I didn't play again...
...and now I realize, having played the beginning of THIS game, that I was confusing it with Fallout 3! Wow. I've never played Fallout 4 prior to a few days ago..which seems kind of wild to me.
I've been having fun so far, and I'm learning how to work the UI - I have to stop myself with the VATS since I often, by mistake, switch between enemies instead of between locations on an enemy. But, think I'm starting to get the handle of it. It's a neat system and I just learned (realized) that you can lock in several shots in a row, which is nice.
I did struggle with the "base building" because it took me a while to realize that when building stuff at the workbench you have to WALK AROUND to place the things - I was just frustrated that I had all the items, but the "x" (to buy/place) was disabled.
I hope to play more over the coming days...having sort-of-recently seen the show, I feel like I'm ready to dive into Fallout more than I have in the past.
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Drop Duchy (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 12th, 2026 at 18:12:59) |
This really grew on me. It's a clever blend of Tetris, a city builder, and a roguelite. There's no story to speak of, so I can just explain how the game works. You choose a faction, say, The Duchy (there are only three aside from DLC). You have a few starting cards. At first, cards are either production buildings or military buildings. Production buildings generate resources (you start with the basics: food, lumber, gold), while military buildings generate troops (archers, axemen, swordsmen). You'll start on a standard roguelite map, the Slay-the-Spire-type three-lane path, and choose to move along it from encounter to encounter. You'll land on resources, peaceful regions, or battles at first (more types get unlocked).
Here's how battles work. You're on a Tetris grid. Tetris pieces appear, just like that game, and you rotate and place them, just like that game. Except the pieces are different types of terrain (say, forest, plains, and rivers). And your production and military buildings are also Tetris pieces that appear. And your enemy's military buildings are also in the deck of Tetris pieces. Buildings have various conditions and results. For example, the Farm (production building) turns nearby plains into fields and generates food. The Watchtower (military building) gives an archer for each plain in range and three archers for each field in range. You already see the synergy between these two buildings! When you complete a row, it is considered "explored", and you get resources for every terrain tile in the row (food for fields, lumber for trees, etc.). The row doesn't disappear (as in Tetris), so you have a limited amount of space to place the blocks in the deck before the round ends. If you explore multiple rows at once, you get bonus resources. So, every match is a game of managing terrain, production, and military buildings to generate resources AND to limit your opponent from generating soldiers. That is, when their Watchtower piece comes up, you want to place it next to some woods or some rocks, definitely not smack in the middle of a bunch of fields, where yours hopefully is.
You are always trying to minimize the army the enemy can raise because at the end of the round, you fight. Battles are a rock-paper-scissors affair between archers, axemen, and swordsmen. You basically move groups of units into other groups of units which stacks groups and sends them into battle. This is kind of hard to explain, but the game provides clear rules for how it works based on the size and type of groups that you're moving around, and the order in which battle happens. Just know that you want to be on the winning end of those rock-paper-scissors battles and you want to really, really think through the order in which you group your troops. One miscalculation can ruin the whole fight and lose the game.
When you complete an encounter, you choose a new card, and are thus always growing your deck. You use the resources harvested during rounds to upgrade cards. So, at the larger deck-building level, you're looking for synergies between cards, building a deck with some sort of theme, and balancing production and military. Not enough production and you can't upgrade stuff. Not enough military and you can't win battles. In my last game, my first full win, I actually had the fewest buildings I'd ever had. I'd unlocked "technology" cards, which are passive (e.g., every time you explore a field, gain 4 additional food; or, all military building upgrades are 20% cheaper; etc.). I was able to synergize really well and build a deck focused on fields. Fields all the way! I turned woods to plains, plains to fields, got food bonuses for fields, had buildings that created plains and fields when placed, military buildings with bonuses for fields, etc. I pretty much annihilated Act 3 and the last boss.
Speaking of bosses, I had no idea how they would do this. I thought bosses would just be like regular battles but with buffed cards, or maybe with more cards. But no! Boss battles fundamentally alter the grid in some way, alter your typical strategies, etc. For example, the last boss (who had killed me once before) requires "bribes," or else it'll throw you military buildings to deal with. To bribe it, you have to generate x resources over y turns and keep it up throughout the match. Every time you don't meet the bribe amount, the enemy sends a military building. And, every time you place a piece, there are squares on the grid that will automatically generate enemy troops if you place a piece there, and the squares change every piece, so you're constantly working around restrictions on the grid too. The first time I fought this boss, I got overwhelmed and lost. This time, the boss didn't send a single military building and I beat it by almost 100 troops, which is a lot.
This was inevitable, I think, because there are a ton of upgrades in the meta-progression. Tons of new cards, even new mechanics. For example, you can unlock religious buildings and the "faith" mechanic, unlock mercenaries, unlock the "constellation" mechanic (which lets you manipulate a piece every 10 or so pieces, depending), you can unlock technology cards, "noble" cards, and so on. You also upgrade your starting decks and resources with each faction as you play them. I am really tempted to win with each faction before setting the game aside, but I have so much other stuff to play. I'll keep it installed and probably come back in the future!
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Beacon Pines (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 9th, 2026 at 11:18:41) |
Cute little narrative game with a good, darker-than-expected story. The art style is excellent (I love the different ways that tears come out of the characters’ eyes) and the sound and music perfectly complement the setting and story. You play as Luka, a kid in Beacon Pines who discovers that some strange things are happening, and all the adults, including his grandmother, seem to be involved. Hmm…! Pal up with some friends to uncover the town’s secrets.
It features a mechanic where the narrative branches based on words that you discover (e.g., shame, fight, flight, chill, etc.). In certain situations (“turning points”), you can select from some words to use, which will change the course of the story. This was intriguing, but wasn’t used to its full potential. The game’s description oversells the impact of turning points. If you use the “wrong” word, you get a “the end” shortly thereafter. The game’s description says that using different words DRASTICALLY CHANGES EVERYTHING THAT FOLLOWS and that you’ll jump back and forth between ENTIRELY DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE STORY! Not really. At a “the end” screen, you go back to the turning point (through a menu) and choose a different word. You’ll either get another ending in a second, or it’ll be the “correct” word that continues the story. There are some actual branches, but interestingly, the game still proceeds linearly. For example, you have to go down branch A to get to branch B to get back to branch A. In other words, there is only one way through the story. Oddly, there are some words that are never used. You can’t just choose any word in your stock during turning points; only specific ones are available, which narrows the potential of this mechanic further.
This mechanic reminded me a bit of Great God Grove, which is another “word game”, wherein you use phrases spoken by NPCs to solve dialogue puzzles. Instead of using whole phrases or sentences, here you just occasionally are prompted to use a word to complete a storybook narration, which determines what a character does and therefore what happens. Great God Grove also felt limiting. I suppose that is because language is near limitless, and that makes for tough narrative design.
Despite its simplicity, I thoroughly enjoyed playing through the mystery of Beacon Pines. I wonder if they’ll make a sequel. I’d be interested to see what Luka and his friends get up to next!
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Crime O'Clock (NSW) by jp (Oct 8th, 2026 at 09:44:19) |
First, what a banger of a name for a game. Ha!
I picked this up from the box art. It looked like this was "MicroMacro: Crime City" in videogame form. A good thing in my mind. What made MicroMacro cool/fun is that it's a giant "where's wally" with an extra twist - you have to find things but then also "trace" them over time. So, a character might be dead in part of the "map", but you can look around to and see the character still alive walking to the place where they're dead, and so on. So, you trace time through space.. it's hard to describe.
This game - at least from what I've played so far does exactly the same thing with two differences. First, the map (illustration) changes - so, there are different maps for different snapshots in time (some things change others stay the same from what I can tell). Second, there are occasional mini-interactive activities you have to do (not quite enough depth to call them minigames) - these represent "computer analysis" moments - like tracing a cell phone being used to towers, or identi-kit-style assembling the portrait of a perp. They take place in a sort of "computer network" visualization that's all black background which is in direct contrast to the main map that's on white.
The art style is all black line drawing comic-style characters (like MicroMacro, but different enough) on a white background with color used very sparingly for UI-stuff.. I think it looks great.
The maps (only played on one, the tutorial and the first case) are fun to look at with lots of little easter egg style details.
I think I'm going to enjoy this!
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Shadow of the Colossus (PS2) by ETA |
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most recent entry: Friday 25 January, 2008
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Entry #2:
GAMEPLAY:
After spending yet another hour with SotC I must say that the games flaws are definitely out shining everything it does right at this point. The navigation is simply horrible, and I am not just talking about the “navigate by sword” feature (which is horrible too mind you). The combination of constantly fighting the camera and a bleak, more or less featureless landscape make finding where I am suppose to go a burden. The map (access via the pause menu) might as well just not be there because it provides no help at all
Once I do eventually find where I am suppose to go things don’t get much easier. What I am supposed to do and how I am supposed to do it is never very clear in this game. And I am not sure if that is intentional or not? Coming to a giant swamp with a big “tower” looking thing with some obvious ramps in the middle scream “climb me!”. So naturally you do, but once at the top you have to navigate a series of jumps are not very obvious. The slow, slightly unresponsive controls and god awful camera don’t help making this pin point jumps any easier.
Once you finally do get to a boss/level (since they are pretty much one in the same in this game) the fun finally starts. But in my little over one hour of play I only got the chance to have one fight! The rest of that time was spent trying to find my way and doing other tasks that made me want to turn the game off and not even bother with it.
The battle itself was fun once you figured out how to climb the monster. The crypt hints are never any help in these battles. I guess I was suppose to figure out that “The armor he is wearing looks weak…” means that I am supposed to get the monster to take a swing at me while I stand on this little stone circle and move out of the way which results in him hitting the stone, breaking his armor and allowing me to climb up to his weak points to kill him…Its so obvious right? I don’t know why it took me 15 minutes and a crap load of luck?
Why am I going you boring details like this instead of discussing the game play? Well because over 1 hours of gameplay in this game is equivalent to one boss fight and a lot of wondering around. Not much interesting to report about I guess. I suppose I could have played for another hour. But quite frankly, I don’t think I want to continue play this game any longer.
DESIGN:
This game is one odd duck. This actually fights with the colossi are great. But everything else rangers from tolerable to awful.
I’ll start with the colossi battles. Simple put, whoever came up with the type of gameplay design was a genius. No levels, well not in a traditional sense, instead each level in a giant monster that is you must platform hop on. This opens up a lot of gameplay possibilities. How many other games offer dynamic and constantly changing levels? Even the design of each boss is exactly pulled off. Each one offers a few different ways to navigate them each of which has their own advantages. For example, in one battle you can climb up the front or back of a colossus. The front gets you to its kill point quicker but is harder to navigate and hang on while the back is pretty easy to climb and avoid being thrown off, but then you have to get to the kill point in a round about way. However, despite their technical greatness (in both innovation and originality) they wear out their welcome quickly because of the games other major flaws and are not enough to hold this game up on their own. Basically, the game falls down when it comes to design is everywhere else.
Lets start with the most superficial part of the experience: The music. Simply put, its terrible. It does a nice job of dramatizing battles, but it becomes annoying very quickly. The fact that it repeats so much and a boss battle can take about 30 minutes to complete means it wears out its welcome quickly. Moving on to the visuals, they are bland and unappealing. The landscape looks boring and plain and while the art style is not bad it is nothing unique or special if feel (though the monsters do look nice).
I know I keep harping on it, but the camera is the single worst design element in the game. Its hard to tell if it is just badly programmed or if the designers intentionally made it so it focuses on what they thought you should be looking at at any given moment. Its almost like they wanted to have a fixed camera, but at the last minute changed this minds and gave control to the player.
Inconsistencies in what you can and cannot climb on are also a major drag. Why I can’t just hop on a colossi’s foot and start climbing is beyond me since it looks like it is the same texture and surface as other areas that I can climb on. In fact, that fact that you have to usually wait for some kind of “action” on the part of the boss in order to start climbing it is one of the biggest draw backs to the battles. These monsters move slow, and if you have to wait for it to swing at you with a giant sword or rear up on its hind legs to get in into a position for climbing is just bad design. It makes battles longer and more frustrating than they have to be and to me seems like a mechanism to add challenge to the game in an underhand manner. Instead of, for example, by designing more complicated or well thought out levels/bosses the designers just decided they could extended the battles by making you wait anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to get another shot at it.
On closing, I’d like to say that the controls are stiff and unresponsive (which again I don’t know if that was intentional or not), the horse controls like a tanks (and for some reason pushing forward doesn’t make it move forward, you have to hold down X) and gets in your way during battle, and the “fetch quest/go to x and do y” structure of the game is not that appealing to me. Overall, ever element in this game’s design seems to work against it or adds a layer of challenge as lazily and inefficiently as possible (i.e., to extend the life or increase difficulty without having to put too much thought into it).
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