Duo Lingo, Impulse, Voro, etc. in my iPhone. Pulsar: Lost Colony and
Star Wars; The Old Republic in PC's Windows. I played a few free Steam
weekend and new iPhone's iOS games, but they (don't remember their
titles) were meh. I hope to play more for the new month. I did play more
this morning in my iPhone. :P

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Oh! What with all the holiday excitement and usual CSPIGA comments, I
> almost forgot that we have THIS thread to do too! We can't start a new
> month without talking about what we played LAST month... can we? I'd
> rather not take that chance. So here we go again: let's talk games!

> Oh, and I'm trying something new this month: providing URLs to Steam
> (or elsewhere) where you can get more information about the game
> (honestly, I'm not trying to get you to buy any of these. I just
> figured maybe you'd like a link to screenshots or something). Is it
> worth the effort or should I not bother?

> I've been surprisingly busy with games this month so my list is a bit
> fuller than usual (read: this next bit is gonna be _long_)

> A List
> ---------------------------------------
> * MechWarrior 5: Clans
> * Magic Archer
> * Pacific Drive
> * Their Land
> * CloudPunk
> * Front Mission 1st: Remake
> * Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (PS2)
> * Teardown

> A Novel
> ---------------------------------------

> * MechWarrior 5: Clans
> https://store.steampowered.com/app/2000890/MechWarrior_5_Clans/
> I'm terribly disappointed with this game.

> It should have been a slam-dunk. One of my biggest issues with its
> predecessor (MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries) was the uninteresting level
> design; everything was procedurally generated, and the various
> missions very quickly became repetitious. "Clans" promised a full
> campaign with hand-crafted missions. How could it all have gone so
> wrong?

> Visually, the game is fine; it uses an upgraded version of the
> "Mercenaries" engine, and there is a general improvement to the
> animations of the mechs. The first couple of levels look terrific too,
> with a lot of lush vegetation, custom architecture and lots of
> superfluous detail that make the world look real. The cockpits are
> improved, with greater variation between different mechs and all
> looking more three-dimensional. It all makes for an excellent first
> impression.

> But the further into the game you get, the worse it seems. Later maps
> are far less detailed and interesting to look at. Some are downright
> ugly; most feel quite generic. Worse, the level design is -with only a
> handful of exceptions- extremely tedious. Most maps are just long
> winding canyons, with no real open spaces or options to step off the
> beaten path. In pretty much every mission you are led by the nose from
> waypoint to waypoint, often not allowed to even progress to the next
> arena until you fight off waves of enemy mechs.

> The combat is, arguably, a slight improvement over "Mercenaries", but
> it still is not very good. The AI is just terrible; it rushes straight
> towards you, rarely making use of cover or even relying on its
> long-range weaponry. Too often, combat devolves into in-your-face
> brawls with multiple mechs picking away at one another from close
> range. The respawning is particularly bad too; you will be forced to
> mow down dozens of enemy robots per mission, with new enemies popping
> out of indestructible hangers or jumping down cliffs that would leave
> your mech smashed if you tried a similar feat. There's just no
> strategy to the game, and ultimately your best tactic is to field the
> heaviest mechs you can so you can endure the onslaught, making any
> lighter robots in your arsenal practically useless.

> Don't even get me started on the boss-enemies! Bosses... in a
> MechWarrior game! They're incredible bullet sponges that don't abide
> by the same rules the players have to follow, and feel completely out
> of place.

> There's little else praiseworthy about the game either. The cutscenes
> are fine... except for the weird facial animations (what is with the
> fat-lipped mouth movements?). The voice-acting is awful. The story is
> dull. The characters are all unlikable. The music is completely
> uninteresting. There are some areas where the visuals completely fall
> apart (such as the missile impact textures, which are laughably bad).
> And once you finish the game, that's it; sure, you can replay the
> missions but there's no option for procedural missions to keep the
> action fresh.

> That's not to say I disliked everything. The battles did have a bigger
> feel to them; you often are fighting alongside multiple other lances
> and the narrative gives the impression that your unit is just a small
> part of a much larger war. That's sort of neat. The improved MechLab
> -where you can customize your robot's loadout- has been improved, and
> I liked the ability to research new upgrades (even if it feels
> completely out of place for a BattleTech game). But these are all tiny
> improvements on a game that otherwise feels a massive step backwards.

> I really wanted to like this game. I broke my rule about not buying
> games immediately on release because I was so excited about playing
> another MechWarrior game. But in almost every respect, I was
> disappointed by the experience. "MechWarrior 5: Clans" probably ranks
> below all the other games in the franchise. It takes all the worst
> parts of "MW5: Mercenary", does almost nothing to improve them, and
> adds on a host of new flaws. It is not a good game.

> * Magic Archer
> https://store.steampowered.com/app/2905170/Magic_Archery/
> "Magic Archer" was hyped up as that free game 'so good people are
> insisting they should be allowed to pay for it.' And even though there
> are, indeed, people making this demand, the game is in no way
> deserving of it.

> Oh, it's enjoyable enough... for a free game. But it's extremely
> shallow, even for the 'clicker' games it resembles. Click a button to
> set up a target, your archer will shoot arrows at it. Once enough
> arrows hit it, it breaks apart and you earn experience. Select which
> stat that experience gets assigned to; get enough, and the stat will
> go up. As stats rise, you unlock various quests (automatically
> fulfilled) and upgrades which improve the rate at which you earn
> experience.

> It's barely a game. In fact, after about fifteen minutes of play, you
> can buy an upgrade to automatically reset the targets for you, meaning
> past that point the game essentially plays itself. There's no real
> strategy, no way to lose, and the only 'challenge' is how fast you can
> get to the end.

> And, look, I'm not objecting to this. The game's retro-aesthetics are
> nice, and the speed at which you constantly earn upgrades ensures a
> constant dopamine fix. You're getting a unceaseless stream of rewards,
> and our brains respond positively to this. There's an extremely low
> barrier to entry; if you can click a mouse, you've all the skill you
> need to win the game. Even the most luxuriously played game won't take
> you more than a couple of hours before you're done. It's welcoming.
> It's fun.

> But it's got no challenge, no depth, and no replayability. It's a
> modern day equivalent to those Flash games of the early 2000s;
> something that briefly occupies your time and then you move on to
> something better. It's a palette cleanser; a respite from more serious
> titles. It's definitely not worth money. As much as I liked it, I'm
> not sure it was even worth the time I invested into it.

> Get "Magic Archer", sure. Play it, fine. But don't fool yourself into
> thinking it's anything but the most basic of clicker games, and even
> for free you may be overpaying.

> * Pacific Drive
> https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458140/Pacific_Drive/
> "Pacific Drive" got a brief moment of fame on its release, hailed as
> one of the best survival games -and perhaps one of the best games- of
> the year. But, let's face it; it's not that. It's a good game, sure,
> but in the end it's still a fairly unexciting example of the genre
> that quickly faded from public consciousness and is unlikely to leave
> any lasting mark on the industry.

> There's a lot to like about the game, though. It's stylized graphics
> --it reminded me a lot of the almost cartoony wilderness in
> "Firewatch-- do a really good job of presenting the eerie world in
> which we find our self. There's just the perfect blend of the alien
> and the familiar, and there's just a terrific atmosphere to the whole
> game. The music is surprisingly good (although I gravitated more
> towards the techno soundtracks while driving), as is the voice-acting.
> The driving is surprisingly fun. Imagine the bouncy planetary
> exploration of the first "Mass Effect" game... except done well. You
> feel every rock and tree you hit, but there's far less loss of
> control. Whether zipping down the broken roads of Washington state or
> through its heavily-wooded forests, the driving is amazingly
> satisfying.

> I liked a lot of the world design too. An isolated bit of wilderness
> now haunted by unexplainable 'anomalies' caused by Science Gone Wrong,
> "Pacific Drive" wears its heart on its sleeve when it comes to its
> influences, and it obviously took a lot from "STALKER" in the creation
> of its 'Olympia Exclusion Zone'. But where "STALKER's" Zone feels
> actively malicious against the player, the oddities in "Pacific Drive"
> feel less concerned with ruining your day. They're still incredibly
> lethal: you'll face off against weirdness ranging from radiation
> storms, exploding mannequins, giant balls of acid falling from the sky
> to gremlin dust-bunnies that glitch your car. There's just such a
> variety of foes you'll face off against, many of which do more than
> just cause hit points to deplete by a few points. Many you can't even
> fight (anyway, you go through this journey completely unarmed), and
> you must either avoid or endure their unwanted advances. They feel
> less like foes than other-natural forces that just happen to have been
> transported to Earth. It all works strangely well.

> So "Pacific Drive" has a lot to offer. Where it falls short, though,
> is its main gameplay loop. The game is a story-based survival
> experience; entering the world with nothing but the clothes on your
> back, you must scrounge for supplies and build up your inventory of
> tools (largely upgrades to your car) in order to complete a series of
> missions and escape back to the real. All well and good, except the
> game is exceptionally grindy and there just isn't enough variety to
> keep up interest for as long as this game takes.

> Even the simplest of missions (either the harder story-based ones or
> just resource gathering) can take a considerable toll on your car,
> requiring you to go out to find even more resources to repair your
> vehicle. You can't stay too long out in the field either; the longer
> you're away from base, the higher the chance a radiation storm will
> hit, so you're limited to how many resources you can collect on each
> run. The upgrades aren't any of them that exciting, and the number you
> can affix to your car at any one time is extremely limited.

> Worse, as interesting as the world is in concept, it all looks very
> much the same: endless roads winding through forest and dale. You do
> get to some new climes --a radiation-wracked hellscape-- about three
> quarters of the way through the game which looks significantly
> different, but by then it's too little, too late (it's also too
> hostile a region to linger and take in the sights). Most of the game
> will be traveling the same roads over and over again, scouring the
> (randomly placed) buildings for resources to repair your (too easily
> filled) vehicle and slowly --ever so slowly!-- manufacture necessary
> upgrades.

> It's not that I ever found the game that difficult; the nature of the
> Exclusion Zone is that the harm it inflicts on you is largely
> reactive; you're only ever at risk if you stay out too long. But
> resource gathering is so slow, that inevitably you're going to push
> for longer runs just to finally see some progress. But the upgrades
> don't really help much and you never really feel secure on your
> drives; even by the end of the game, I felt almost as much at risk as
> I did at the start. There's no sense of satisfaction at having
> invested so much time and effort to upgrade your vehicle.

> Still, kudos to the development team for offering one of the most
> nuanced and customizable difficulty setting I have ever seen in any
> game. You can strengthen, nerf or even ban from the game outright
> almost every opponent/event in the game. Don't like those radiation
> storms? Turn them off. Think the acid should do much more damage to
> your car? Crank it to max. Want every chest to be filled to the brim
> with resources? That's an option.

> But I played on the default settings because... well, that's the way
> the game was intended to play. And I just don't think the intended
> game-play loop is much fun. You're quickly stripped of that sense of
> wonder and awe from exploring the strange world by sheer repetition,
> and left with a too-slow grind that offers little reward. "Pacific
> Drive" is a game with a lot of good ideas, but sadly is less than the
> sum of its parts; it ends up being a very average-feeling survival
> game that should have been a lot better than it was.

> * Their Land
> https://store.steampowered.com/app/2430990/Their_Land/
> I really hate dumping on this game. It's a student project, and it's
> free, so it deserves some leeway when it comes to judging it against
> its peers. But "Their Land" is just not a very good game.

> Visually, it looks extremely dated; it looks only a little better than
> a game from 2005, and that is largely because it's using a modern game
> engine and things like lighting are free. The worst is the character
> animations, which are obviously key-framed and lack any sort of
> fluidity or realism. The models themselves are extremely chunky too.
> But I can forgive that; obviously resources were tight and
> motion-capture isn't always an option. Less pardonable is the
> lighting; while it is technically impressive, in a cinematic sort of
> way, it's too often washed out in brightness or overly dark in actual
> gameplay. Appearance took precedence over practicality, and not being
> able to make out what's going on because the developer had so fixated
> on their vision is unpardonable.

> I'll give the writing a pass too. Not only are these students, they're
> obviously don't speak English natively. Sure, the story is terribly
> told and lacks in originality, but it's just enough to keep the
> adventure moving, so we'll let it slide. The voice-acting is pretty
> bad too but, again: student project. They aren't going to be able to
> afford Troy Baker. Maybe they could have afforded a better microphone,
> though. Or run some of the subtitles through a spell-checker.

> The gameplay is not very good. "Their Land" very obviously takes its
> cue from "Peter Jackson Presents King Kong", which diagetically plops
> you into a lost island environment and has you fight off bugs and
> monsters and savages, oh my. There's only a very minimal interface
> consisting of two quite unnecessary icons indicating your current
> weapon and stance... which are completely obvious in-game. Player
> movement is incredibly slow, and the controls needlessly clunky. The
> game consists of combat that isn't very much fun, and puzzles where
> the answer is always solved by running about until you find that one
> interactable object hidden in the clutter. It isn't fun.

> Still, I have to give the game some credit for its visual design (even
> if it does detract from the gameplay) and the look of its almost
> Cthullian monsters. It's a shame the AI is so braindead.

> As a student project, this is an excellent product. It reflects a lot
> of effort and a forthright desire to create something unique. A lot of
> "Their Land's" faults lie in a lack of experience and not having
> enough resources. I'd happily give them top scores for the project.
> But I'm not their professor and regarding this as a game -as something
> anybody would actually want to play- it is absolutely terrible in
> almost every regard. As much as I hate to say it, "Their Land" is not
> worth playing.

> * CloudPunk
> https://store.steampowered.com/app/746850/Cloudpunk/
> "Cloudpunk" reminds me a lot of Annapurna Interactive's 2022 game,
> "Stray". Not for the obvious reasons that both take place in a
> decaying futuristic city or deal with the humanity of artificial
> lifeforms, no. Rather, the main reason to play both games is that you
> enjoy their aesthetics. In the case of "Stray", it's because its
> protagonist is a adorably rendered cat whose movements are sure to
> melt the heart of any cat-lover. With "Cloudpunk", it's the gorgeous
> cyberpunkian cityscapes.

> The game is beautiful, and this is despite (or maybe even perhaps)
> that everything you see is made up of some very chunky voxels. But
> there is such detail in almost every scene, and such terrific lighting
> that you can't help but want to soar through its flying highways and
> take in more of the view. It's "Attack of the Clone's" Coruscant, or
> "Bladerunner's" Los Angeles, or "Fifth Element's" New York... except
> in your face and yours to explore as much as you want. And there's so
> much of it, with neighborhoods ranging from the dark abandoned Ventz
> (the undercity), to a futuristic China Town, to the Spire (the only
> part of the city with a view of the sky). You play "Cloudpunk" so you
> can gawk at the city like some podunk tourist off the farm for the
> first time.

> You certainly aren't playing the game for its gameplay. There's really
> not much too it, unfortunately. "Cloudpunk" could easily be subtitled,
> 'Fetch Quest: The Game', because that's pretty much all that you do.
> Go to location X, pick up box, take to location Y, drop off box.
> Sometimes the box talks, or it's a bomb, or -on occasion- is a
> passenger; this all adds variety and spice to the world. But the
> gameplay itself is all very samey. Except for two brief instances,
> your skill in driving is not a factor; there's no time-limit on any of
> the missions (you do pay for fuel though, so meandering about too much
> will cost you, but it's not a steep price).

> There are a variety of NPCs to talk to -some of them even trigger
> their own fetch quests- and several characters have you go on extended
> missions to locate various items. But beyond that, there's sadly very
> little to actually do in Cloudpunk's world. Which is a shame, because
> I could easily see myself getting lost living a virtual life in its
> environs. But no, it's just drive here and deliver that. Sadly, even
> the driving is a bit of a mixed bag; while I love soaring the
> skylanes, mechanically the actual driving is a bit clunky and
> inaccurate; your hover-car lacks the precise cornering that would make
> the experience really enjoyable.

> The story and characters are endearing, if somewhat trite: naïve farm
> girl comes to Big City and has all the usual sorts of Big City
> adventures. Still, even if there's not much originality, the
> characters are well voiced and the tale is entertaining. Mostly
> though, I like how it fills out the world's setting. But it's still
> pretty forgettable by its end.

> No, the real reason to play "Cloudpunk" is its visuals. I quite
> enjoyed my time with it --enough so that I'm even considering buying
> the DLC expansion-- but overall it's a fairly shallow experience. If
> you watch the game's trailer and aren't entranced by its cityscapes,
> there's little else in this game that will appeal to you; it's just
> too limited. But if you look at it screenshots and think, "I'd like to
> see more of that" then it's worth giving the game a shot. Even if the
> gameplay isn't all I hoped it could be, and even if the story isn't
> saying anything new, it's still fairly well done and I had fun with
> it.

> * Front Mission 1st: Remake
> https://store.steampowered.com/app/2399730/FRONT_MISSION_1st_Remake/
> I don't have much to say about this game, simply because I didn't
> stick with it for very long. I vaguely remember having more fun with
> this game back when I first encountered it on the SNES; it was an
> interesting combination of anime styled-combat, giant robots, and
> strategy. I suppose it still is, but it's also a game with an
> incredibly trite story and tediously slow battles where the vast bulk
> of each mission is simply moving your robots into position where they
> are close enough to actually use their weapons.

> The weird ziggurat-like map design --forgivable in the 8-bit days when
> memory was short and pixels were large-- don't translate well to
> modern visuals. I've little desire to get into the nitty gritty of
> fiddling with each mech (sorry, 'wanzer') to min/max the perfect build
> either. All in all, the entire experience felt extremely old-school,
> where games demand you spend months getting through them. I just don't
> have interest in that sort of experience anymore.

> The most dedicated fans of the original will probably love that this
> game's mechanics haven't been changed since 1995; me, I'd prefer
> something a bit more fast-paced and modern.

> * Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (PS2)
> https://www.mobygames.com/game/12011/baldurs-gate-dark-alliance-ii/
> In honor of the latest stable release of PCSX2 (a Playstation 2
> emulator), I fired up "Dark Alliance 2", a game I haven't played...
> well, in such a long time I've actually forgotten what its about. A
> fact which probably says a lot about the game itself.

> It's not that "Dark Alliance 2" is a bad game, but it is a fairly
> shallow one. An action/RPG, is lacks even the minimal complexity of
> "Diablo"; it's all hack-and-slash, with only a minimum of role-playing
> elements. The basic strategy of buying the most powerful weapon you
> can and clicking as fast as you can is as much strategy as you need to
> get through the game (at least on the default difficulty). The game's
> levels are incredibly straight-forward, and the AI is easy to cheese.

> Still, for all its simplicity, it's nonetheless an entertaining
> power-fantasy, even if it didn't challenge me in any way, neither with
> its gameplay or story. It offered a fairly steady drip of new weapons
> and skills, and a surprising variety in enemies, including everything
> from goblins to troglodytes to drider to dragons. The levels were less
> exciting --small and blocky, they rarely stood out from one another
> (despite some significant cosmetic differences) -- but you never
> stayed in any one area long enough for it to become bothersome.

> In fact, the most annoying part of "Dark Alliance 2" wasn't the fault
> of the game itself, but of the underlying architecture; saving on the
> PS2 was such a burdensome chore; slow and clunky, I eventually stopped
> bothering entirely and instead relied on the emulator's save-state
> functionality. It's amazing PS2 users didn't throw their consoles out
> the window from it being so frustratingly slow.

> But otherwise it was an enjoyable --if admittedly mindless--
> adventure; not one I'm in a rush to play again (at least, not for
> another decade) but neither anything I regret spending time with.

> * Teardown
> https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167630/Teardown/
> "Teardown" is a tech demo. It's a gimmick. It's neat, but it's not a
> game. Or rather, it's not a good game.

> It's gimmick is its fully-destructible voxel-built world. Well, not
> fully-destructible, sadly. You can't smash up the bedrock, so there
> are limits to how much of the world you can blow up. But if it's a car
> or a building or pretty much any object on the map, you can smash it
> into tiny cubes. It's neat.

> But it's so limited. The physics engine is incredibly basic, and that
> limits how much fun the destruction is. Blow down all the supports of
> a building except for one tiny pillar of glass and that building will
> stand indomitable right to the end. It's only once you knock out each
> and every one of the supports that it falls... rather lamely. There's
> no crumbling of the upper structures, no sense of collapse. It just
> drops a bit. The work needed to blow things up right and proper never
> matches the results. It's disappointing, especially since we've seen
> it done a lot better in other games.

> Worse, the actual game (it comes with a campaign) seems to
> misunderstand why this game might be fun. You're tasked with various
> criminal enterprises and given a variety of tools to do so:
> sledgehammers, blowtorches, dynamite, the works. But the missions
> you're sent out on never take full advantage of that capability,
> thanks to all your targets being hooked up to alarms which, if
> triggered, end the mission in 60 seconds. That trigger varies -it
> could be stealing an object, or getting it wet, or on fire- but once
> that alarm starts blaring, you're on the clock. This wouldn't be so
> bad if you only had the one target, but almost all missions have
> multiple goals. The idea is, I think, to plan your route ahead of
> time, but it also incentives you to limit your destruction lest you
> accidentally start the timer. Some missions forgo the destruction
> entirely (one has you trying to beat a lap record in a automobile
> race). The campaign is absolutely the worst thing about "Teardown".

> There are mods, of course, which take a crack at improving the
> experience, but the majority of these just enhance the idea that the
> whole game is just a gimmick; "Here's a more powerful gun to make
> destruction easier!" or "Here's an intricately detailed level for you
> to rampage through!" None of them really give you any reason to do so
> beyond the, "hey, that's neat" experience... and that wears pretty
> thin after the third or fourth one.

> The game's tech is fun, undoubtedly, but I wish it could have been
> more robust and I wish there was actual reason to use it. As it is,
> the whole experience became a lot more tiresome than it should be, a
> lot faster than it should have. It's a neat tech-demo, but not
> something worth paying for.

> ----------------

> Well, that took forever. I *did* warn you.

> Anyway, that's me for November. How about you? Did you have an excess
> of spare time for video games, or was life putting up its usual
> hassles? Either way, you gotta tell us:

> What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2024?

--
"Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God ??? this is your spiritual act of worship." --Romans 12:1. Take this ant already!
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