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Match three games and 10,000,000

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If you check my Steam gameplay time stats you might notice that I play a fair amount of ‘match three’ type games. These are the games with the moving tiles, or swapping jewels etc., until you line up three or more that match, and then they disappear, things happen, more tiles/jewels drop in and so forth. They are very casual soft core type games, Bejewelled probably being one of the best known of the genre (if indeed it counts as a genre). I have recently picked up another of these type of games, called 10,000,000 and I thought I would make a short post about why I play such comparatively simple and untaxing games quite a bit. I will say something about 10,000,000 as well.

Some ago I got Lucid on Steam and made a not very good YouTube video review of the Lucid game – that video was more about me testing out recording gameplay with commentary to be honest! I have had Bejewelled 3 for a while and have sunk 35 hours into it since I got it. More recently I watched TotalBiscuit’s WTF is … 10,000,000 and thought it looked interesting, so bought that as it was on a 20% off on launch offer. 7.5 hours of gameplay and less than a week later I have beat it. So yeah, I do play these things a fair bit.

I know this blog is straplined ‘playing on casual’ but I have explained that elsewhere, the reason I play these is that I find them an excellent distraction when I am ill, in pain, tired, on high strength painkillers and so on. Again elsewhere I have explained a bit about my health problems and disability and how computer/video games help when I am badly off with my problems – match three games seem to be like that, but more so. In that when I am very bad, or woozy, in pain etc. and can’t even cope with ‘regular’ games, I can usually spend some mindless time with a match three game. The other thing I can do when I am very ill is watch Let’s Play type videos on YouTube. For some reason both these things seem to work better than reading (or watching TV, which I very rarely do anyway) to distract me and not let my mind dwell on how crap I am feeling at that point. Or if I am being kept awake and am very tired but in too much pain to sleep they work too.

So, onto the latest one of these games I have been playing, 10,000,000. It has retro style ’8 bit’ graphics – the ’8 bit’ is in scare quotes as it isn’t really 8 bit but that retro graphics style seems to be being called 8 bit lately. Very simplistic, and not done that well to my mind, but the graphics don’t really matter that much in a game like this anyway. The gameplay has a twist in that you collect resources (gold, stone, wood) by matching certain tiles and use them to upgrade your ‘home’ allowing you to upgrade your attacks and character. You match different types of tile to give a magical attack or a physical attack; damage to different monsters is more effective with certain attacks so there is a strategy to it in some ways. You match chests to perhaps get items (magical attack orbs, one shot ‘big’ physical attacks, keys for the chests, food for health, scrolls), match keys to open doors and chests to get past them if you don’t have an item skeleton key, and so forth.

I did find the best strategy is not to hunt too hard for the precise best match for the current task but to keep matching as quickly as you can, the tiles falling down would often either line up or present a more obvious quick match for the attack (or key, or whatever) you require. It was useful to match wood, stone, shields (which give you shields to absorb damage) and keep an eye on the rest of the board waiting for attack combinations to present themselves. I had a lot of fun with the game, though I felt it to be a bit short, having beat it in 7.5 hours. Towards the end I ran out of things to spend XP, gold and resources on – I sort of felt that it would be nice to have a further stage where you could level up even more and so on, but for £3 or so I cannot complain.

Will I play it through again? I am not sure, it was fun to play through once, but probably not – at least not for a while. I might try to get the last of the Steam achievements but that will be about it for now. However I find myself popping back into Bejewelled now and again so I daresay I will play this one again in a few months. I haven’t played Lucid in a long time though, that game became a bit frustrating towards the end and the higher levels – and also that game was a lot more about the somewhat mesmerizing graphics and sound than the gameplay.

10,000,000 has distracted me from carrying on with Tomb Raider legend, which has been somewhat frustrating in places with control issues and lingering bug like features – but I hope to beat TR legend and will possibly do a blog post on it since I have some notes I have been making as I am playing it, mainly about the frustrations! The frustrations are mostly down to me, but I can see why some people prefer to play the game with a controller not a mouse and keyboard. But that is another post, when (if) I beat that game. Meanwhile, don’t look down on me too much if you seem me playing a lot of super casual soft core match three games if I am on your Steam friends list or something – I am probably feeling a bit rubbish and am distracting myself. And why not, it is still better than daytime TV.

Catch Up

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I wasn’t sure what to call this post, it is a sort of an update I guess. To make a long story short I now have a lower grade computer – but it has a better graphics card so it actually is a better gaming machine in most ways, e.g. higher FPS and higher settings on most games I have tested so far. Plus I lost all back ups, plus I am having to (try to) recover access, passwords, logins, etc. to all sorts of things and services – including game services. With online DRM this is most of my games. Sometimes the most unexpected things happen. The expense is not inconsiderable too.

I have also discovered that cloud saves are very variable, even on the same service (i.e. Steam). Borderlands (1) is fine, but I lost a lot of (i.e. most) progress in Saints Row 3. And of course anything without cloud saves I will have to start from scratch. The main one I am sad about for this is all of Mass Effect. Everything, my canon run through and save game ready for ME3, all gone. However, I guess I won’t mind playing through those again from the start, but this does mean that I won’t be playing ME3 for a long time.

So, two weeks off before I go back to work. I was looking forward to playing some games but not quite in the way I imagined a few weeks ago. I will see if I can get back into Saints Row 3 or if the loss of most of my progress in that game will put me off it. I can do the extra Borderlands 1 stuff I mentioned in my YouTube videos of the end of Borderlands 1. I might play some Tomb Raider of some sort – I have never finished Legend so that would be nice. Sadly though I have missed out the the betas for City of Steam (see previous post) and I can’t seem to recover my login for that, so I guess I will wait until it gets officially released and play some then from scratch.

I was going to do (sometime) some more YouTube vids, but this computer has a much lower grade CPU than my last, and also the disk is fairly slow to both read and write compared to my last box. So I doubt it will record games very well, so recording for YouTube is, for now, on the back burner. I might do some test recordings but if it is as laggy when recording as I suspect it will be then they won’t be very good, certainly not good enough to upload.

Still two weeks off should see some gaming get done, even amidst a boatload of hassle. I will be spending time with my wife and having some nice Christmas food, and all the usual stuff (although we make less of a fuss about the year end holiday(s) than most I suspect). Hope everyone out there has a great Christmas/Holiday/Feast of the Unconquered Sun.

Update: I have managed to reset the password to, and thus regain access to, City of Steam. Not sure why it didn’t work the first couple of times I tried it. Also there is still one closed beta session to go, so I may well get to play some more after all. I will probably try an elven or human character rather than goblin this time.

City of Steam

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Introduction

City of Steam is (or will be, it is in closed beta at the moment) a free to play, massively multiplayer online, role playing game (F2P MMO RPG). It is browser based, but don’t let that worry you too much. It isn’t built with Flash but with Unity and uses the Unity web player. I first heard about it via TotalBiscuit’s Hyper WTF is City of Steam YouTube video where he played through some of the game (an earlier beta I think) with the City of Steam developers Mechanist. That video is an hour and a half long by the way, so a very good look at the game.

The game looked interesting, and I thought that the graphics looked very good indeed for a browser based game – so I signed up for the City of Steam email newsletter, found them on Twitter and Facebook and followed them there, and kept up somewhat with the news. I was very lucky and got a key/invite to the closed beta due to being on the newsletter list (don’t think everyone did but not sure) and the first of four closed beta long weekends was on the 18th to the 20th of November so I had a go. It is beta, so there were problems obviously. There was a ‘black screen’ problem for most of the latter half of the weekend that meant I couldn’t get on and play it at all. That was fixed, but by that time it was Monday so I had less spare time to play games in.

Here are my very early impressions. Totally subjective, this is not a review and definitely not objective. If this article piques your interest please do go find out more about it! Finally a warning about spoilers; I do describe the starting missions – which contain the tutorials – somewhat in the captions to the screenshots in this article, so that could be spoilerish for anyone that wants to play through the story totally unaware of what is coming up. I don’t imagine many will be that spoiled by the opening missions/tutorial in an MMORPG but you never know.

Character generation and start

There are a fair few races you can choose from – check the City of Steam website for details, it is worth reading a bit about the world, races and classes and so on there. I chose a Goblin (a ‘greenskin’) – other possibilities are one of four different varieties of human, two sorts of elf (dark and light essentially) and three ‘greenskins’ (Goblins, Hobbes and Orcs) and also coming in the future Dwarves (which aren’t traditional fantasy dwarves but look to be steampunk cyborgs or something!).

For my class I chose Arcanist, specializing in electricity. There are a couple of favoured classes for each race (e.g. the other recommended class for Goblins was Gunner) and again will not go through any of that here, do check out the City of Steam site for information on all this. I will say that there is enough choice to make things interesting, but not so much it gets confusing and it is tricky to tell one race or class from another. For me personally it is a good balance of choice and complexity in character generation. So for my Goblin Arcanist, specializing in electricity my main attack is to throw lightning bolts at the enemy from a sword like technical device wielded in my right hand. I had a shield in my left hand for combat.

The actual first level arcanist skill calls down a lightning strike from above on the enemy, and has the usual cost in ‘steam’ (a mana equivalent I guess) and a cooldown and so on. There are skill trees to upgrade through as you level up, but you start with a race skill (the ‘Goblin jump’ in my case) and have to wait to gain some XP before getting the first and subsequent level skills for the class, so I have got ahead of myself a bit here as that is after character generation.

Playing the introductory missions which also include tutorials

The screenshots aren’t as good as the real thing (I took them with FRAPS and there isn’t a compression setting, and it appears to over compress a bit – at least that saves some disk space and data transfer for my web hosting account!) but clicking on the thumbnails will get you to larger images (1080p). But as I said the game itself looks better than the screenshots indicate, especially after an update they did towards the end of the first closed beta session.

Movement is by WASD keys, or click the mouse and the player character will move to that point, or by clicking and holding the mouse and dragging it. Right clicking and moving the mouse moves the camera position. I ended up using a combination of all three and after a while it worked quite well for me, but it is good they give a choice of WASD or mouse based movements, as that is very much a personal preference. I had a little trouble with clicking on enemies to attack them from a distance, missing slightly and having my character run up to a bunch of monsters. That is probably partially finger trouble on my part, but on the forums a few people mentioned that they were having the same difficulty.

City of Steam screenshot Escape from Delton

Escaping from Delton with Uncle Fizzgig, escorting him through some underground areas as our route to the railhauler station was cut off. Some enemies were down here.

City of Steam screenshot the Colossus fighting as Delton burns

Having made it to the railhauler station Todpullen the Goblin looks out over his home city of Delton, watching the Colossus fight the invaders as the city burns. The Colossus is on the left – the big steam powered robot thing, it is fighting the flying demon like invader. The invaders arrived out of the spire you can see behind it with the laser like red light beam coming out of it upwards. The spire dropped from above releasing all the ‘brood’ – the enemies – that started destroying things. There is some more explanation in game via a cutscene and voiceover that describes what is happening in context of the lore of the world that City of Steam is set in. You can see the quest tracking arrow at Todpullen’s feet pointing back at the railhauler station entrance, indicating he should be going there quickly – but I think that he would have looked sadly over his home town as the fighting goes on, one last time before escaping to the Refuge in Nexus (via a railhauler journey).

City of Steam screenshot on the railhauler

After some more things to do in the station Todpullen makes it onto the railhauler – a big steam train affair that is the main transport between cities.

City of Steam screenshot finding/rescuing cousin further up the railhauler

Todpullen’s cousin managed to get lost or run up the railhauler, and was cut off by some brood that seem to have followed them onto the railhauler. No one is quite sure why they seem to be interested in the railhauler or the refugees, but the train guards aren’t coping too well with these monsters. Since he is the protagonist, Todpullen sets off up the train killing the monsters and making his way to his cousin, who is fine. The yellow thing with three dots above the guard indicates that he can give you a quest (upon left clicking him and going through some dialogue). Doing so means you get to go further up the train and end up meeting (and hopefully killing or at least driving off) what seems to be the head monster for this railhauler infestation.

I won’t go into the story too much as this isn’t a let’s play but a first impressions of new game in beta. The world in which City of Steam is set isn’t a planet but appears to be an artificial construct, made by some long gone (perhaps?) race. They left a bunch of devices and stuff around, and the catastrophe that befalls Delton (Todpullen the Goblin’s home town) was caused by one of these. But another device – the Colossus – wakes up after decades or more of not moving to fight off the invaders as the inhabitants flee to a refuge that has been set up in another city (Nexus). See the screenshots and text above for a little of this. The invaders (brood) follow the refugees onto the railhauler which leads to more adventures in fighting them off.

As you play through this introductory story and the first missions, tutorial text pops up explaining how to use your skills, how to move, how to fight etc. I will admit that I had usually worked out how to do most of that beforehand, just by reading tooltips and experimenting with clicking on things and doing things. I am sure most gamers would be the same, but it was nice to have things confirmed by the (not intrusive) occasional tutorial pop up, and of course if I hadn’t worked out how to do something I got told about it as the game progressed.

The Refuge (in Nexus)

City of Steam screenshot arriving at the Refuge in Nexus

Having arrived at the Refuge in Nexus we step out of the railhauler station and take in the view of the new city.

City of Steam screenshot Refuge map

As above but showing the map of Refuge – a fairly big place.

The Refuge is an area of the city of Nexus where the refugees from Delton (and possibly elsewhere, I don’t know anything about the starting missions and origins of the other races) first end up when arriving and getting off the railhauler. The starting missions here, which also include some tutorial pop ups as you work through new stuff, are basically sorting out your house, doing creature clearance quests in dungeons/quest areas, getting favours from locals and signatures from officialdom etc. Apparently Todpullen the Goblin’s good deeds on the railhauler coming in help out a lot as officialdom looked favourably on me for that.

I only did a couple of these before running out of time on both the beta and having to do other things in real life like work. I haven’t done any co-op with others at all yet, so have just played it as a single player experience. Dungeons or quest structures are instanced, and they consist of the fairly familiar ‘kill creatures, break and loot boxes, do the tasks you need to do down there’ etc. RPG experience. Lots of clicking on stuff and power/skill using. Very satisfying if you are into that sort of thing (MMORPG, Diablo etc.). I started to get used to the combat system at this point and things were going a lot more fluidly. I levelled up and got myself a Tesla Turret. Which is pretty much what it sounds like, I could place down a little thingy of wire and whatnot and it would zap stuff as that stuff came near it. Great for laying one down then going forward and drawing back the mobs through the area with the turret zapping away as I pulled the mobs past it.

City of Steam screenshot flying steam bike! Beta testing complete with some bugs

A beta bug I suspect; a flying steam bike. Don’t think it is meant to do that once they are implemented properly.

I played a little on the last day of this first closed beta session in the evening after work. There are three more closed beta sessions, the next in a week or so and a couple more after that up to and including Christmas. There had been a two hour server downtime before my final chance to play the game and when I played the game again the way the graphics settings worked was slightly different and the game loaded my GPU a little more (I wouldn’t have noticed except I run the Open Hardware Monitor software to keep an eye on things). However, the game looked a lot better, it had a slightly lowered fps (from 50 to 45) when in combat (lots of particle effects with my lightning attacks!) but it really did look very nice indeed – for any game let alone a browser based one. I did another dungeon or two (still story wise associated with getting settled in Nexus) and below there are a couple more screenshots. Not sure you can see the improved graphics because of the way the screenshots compress the file though.

City of Steam screenshot another part of the Refuge

This screenshot and the next two are showing another part of the Refuge from three different angles, but approximately the same point (this one before Todpullen entered a dungeon, the other two afterwards). There had been some sort of update to the game (the server was down for a couple of hours) and when it came back the graphics looked a lot better, but I am not sure it shows so well in the screenshots.

City of Steam screenshot another part of the Refuge

City of Steam screenshot another part of the Refuge

Thoughts on it all so far

The story behind the world is very interesting and somewhat different from the usual fantasy fare, with a somewhat steam punk feel to it in places but I wouldn’t call it straight up steam punk. This might say a bit more about my lack of experience in many other MMORPGs, bear in mind that I haven’t played Diablo or Torchlight for instance but I do think I would enjoy those games and will probably play at least Torchlight at some point (I actually own the first one, just have never played it (it is in my pile of shame along with about a hundred other Steam sale games believe it or not)).

I can’t really address the MMO aspect as I didn’t do any of that, but for me I enjoy MMOs if I have people I know and am friends with (internet gamer friends or real life) to party up with and do co-op PVE. I really don’t like PVP at all, in any game really not just MMORPGs – I much prefer co-op PVE if I am playing multiplayer. For instance with respect to shooters I like Killing Floor but not deathmatch type games so much. So for me, I like it a lot so far, but was playing it almost like a single player RPG experience with run around lots of clicky combat and looting things – and a neat story behind it all. Would that keep me playing? Depends totally on how much content there ends up in the final game, and also if I make friends and end up doing the harder dungeons with them in a party. Or perhaps if PUGs (pick up groups) can be easily formed on the fly in the game. It can be dispiriting if you want to tackle a harder level dungeon and both no one you know is on, and also no one in the vicinity wants to do it. Whether that is a problem will depend on how popular and populated the final game ends up.

I am certainly looking forward to the coming closed beta sessions, there are three more up to and including Christmas. Also the open beta after, I will see how I go but I may well get into the game and play it once it is released – and probably buy some stuff to support the devs if nothing else, if I am playing and enjoying the game. I am certainly interested to see how the game gets on, and how it all goes. I do wish it well and hope it does well, I think it is enjoyable to play, has a lot of nice and different things about it whilst still being familiar enough for MMORPG fans to get right into it. I shall be playing more definitely.

Thoughts for others: if you like RPGs and MMORPGs, and think you might like the steampunkesque (sort of) nature of the world then check it out, visit the City of Steam website and maybe try to get in on the closed beta, or at least have a go at the open beta (or just wait for release if you don’t like betas). On the City of Steam site there is a list of places where you can perhaps get closed beta keys – or you can always become a supporter (pay money) to get one if you are really keen. The browser based nature of it with the Unity web plugin works well and shouldn’t put anyone off as long as they can get over the initial ‘browser based’ thing. I definitely think it is worth a closer look if the first sentence of this paragraph applies to you. It is free to play so it doesn’t cost you anything to try it out.

XCOM – Enemy Unknown, and an update

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Introduction

This is a post that is explaining why I have bought a game soon after release, at full price – and the special edition of that game to boot. I haven’t done that for many years, I don’t have a lot of spare cash at all so I tend to buy games once they get somewhat cheaper. Also this post is a bit of an update to record/explain why I haven’t played any games for two or three months.

XCOM – Enemy Unknown

The game in question is XCOM – Enemy Unknown. I had heard about this somewhat from news about it before release. I don’t remember the original X-COM (called X-COM:UFO Defense in America, but called UFO:Enemy Unknown elsewhere) at all. I played games from around that era at the time (e.g. Tomb Raider 1, the original Command and Conquer, the original Syndicate) but don’t remember UFO:Enemy Unknown at all. Anyway, a fair few people seemed excited about it, but also worried that it would get turned into a yet another shooter of some kind like the Syndicate remake. So I kept a vague eye out for reviews, trailers etc. but only a vague one.

The trailer that was released for the game really did, to my eye anyway, make the game seem like a 3rd person shooter. The trailer was mainly cinematic cutscenes, most of it taken from the introductory cutscene of the game. I only found this out later, the trailer just looked like a shooter with aliens on the other end. I think I read reviews of the game, in PC Gamer and on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I say ‘I think’ because I don’t remember getting much from the reviews, they didn’t pique my interest in the game and to be honest although I am sure they said that the game was a turn based strategy that really didn’t stick in my mind.

TotalBiscuit covered the demo of the game on his YouTube channel – TotalBiscuit’s analysis of the XCOM – Enemy Unknown demo. The demo wasn’t very good – in the sense that it didn’t seem to give a good idea of what the game was really like. But at least I started to realise the game was a TBS! Later I watched the WTF is … XCOM Enemy Unknown video from TotalBiscuit when it came out and I sat up and took notice. Just seeing someone play through the game on YouTube was a revelation. A metaphorical lightbulb went on over my head and I was starting to think that I would like this game.

So I went looking for more. I noticed that only one of the people I subscribe to on YouTube was doing a playthrough of the game – for some reason none of the let’s players I follow are doing it – possibly because a TBS isn’t as fashionable as the latest corridor MMS or episode 6 in an interminable franchise. However the playthrough XCOM Enemy Unknown – Evelyn’s Chronicle by Hathur99 was ideal. Feel free to check out Hathur99′s channel and you will see why I like his playthroughs, as long as you bear in mind I am a big fan of the Mass Effect series. I started watching his videos, and sat further up and took notice even more. I really liked the game, and it went from a ‘not even on my wishlist’ to me starting to look at prices and wondering how soon I could afford it.

So I stopped watching the playthrough videos (although I will go back and finish watching Hathur99′s playthrough once I have done at least one of my own) and was wondering about prices. To get to the point, with my wife encouraging me to get the game (probably to stop me moping) I got the special edition with various extras. This is my Christmas present from her and from myself to me (this is how I/we justified it). I got it from GAME as they have UK exclusivity on the special edition. The disadvantage of this is that without competition the price is always going to be high, but it wasn’t that much more than the price of the standard game. The advantage is that as I used to buy games a fair bit from GAME I had a bunch of loyalty points I could use up on the purchase. I also got a strategy guide too which lead to the previous post on this blog about printed strategy guides. I bought the guide with some spare PayPal money I had (from some internet business I do in my spare time – that isn’t video game related by the way).

The special edition came with the soundtrack (excellent by the way) and an art book (very interesting and helped me understand some of the look of the game that I thought was a bit strange), a clothing patch (which will get attached to a green polo shirt sometime, and worn to work to see if anyone at all recognizes it). There was also a poster showing the XCOM base (not called or callable SHADO sadly) but I don’t really have anywhere to put it, due to the other posters and things on the walls of my little computer/study room here.

I won’t be playing it straight away, as I explain in the next section. However, there is a final thought about this. If I hadn’t looked at actual gameplay footage on YouTube I would never have realised what this game was like. I don’t have much spare money at all, so I am careful with what non-essentials I spend money on – hence only getting games in sales and only when I am fairly sure I will enjoy them. If I had just gone by site and magazine reviews, the trailers, and the demo I may well have missed out on this game entirely. As I said I went from not even putting this game on my wishlist to buying the thing soon after release and buying the special edition to boot. That is unheard of for me at the moment, and totally down to seeing it being played by a gamer or gamers on YouTube.

Why I haven’t played any games for about three months

As I have probably said before, here or elsewhere, I suffer from chronic bad health. I have a progressive debilitating/disabling illness and during the last few months it has flared up very badly. When I get these flare ups I have to concentrate on my part time day job (as it were) as that pays the bills, and everything else gets put to one side. I am fairly bad on average, but when my problem gets really bad, it is awful. So yeah, I have been very ill for the last 3 months or so and am only just starting to (slowly, intermittently and with ups and downs) get a bit better from that. So basically I haven’t played games (other than a quick ten minutes here and there) since my Saints Row Three – initial thoughts blog post.

So today I got back to Saints Row the Third to pick up where I left off. One thing I did notice was that I wasn’t playing on the casual setting for the difficulty. If you read that post linked above I mentioned that I was having a lot of trouble and bumped the difficulty down to casual. Well apparently I had been playing on hard, and so I actually bumped it down to normal. At least I am playing on normal now and am not having lots of problems in combat (enough to make it interesting though). I am still a bit all over the place driving the car but that is fine as that is part of the game in some ways.

As well as SR3 I want to play some more borderlands 1 as I explained a bit during my Borderlands 1 Final Boss commentated gameplay videos on YouTube. I would like to play through as the Hunter perhaps, or at least do some playthrough 2 with my old Siren character. As I also explained in those videos my game disk semi-died and I was waiting for a Steam sale, which happened, so I know have Borderlands 1 GOTY on Steam, and the save files just transparently loaded up so that is good.

So it will be a little while, and also dependent on my health not plummeting again, before I get to play my XCOM game. But waiting to play my new game is OK, XCOM is more about gameplay, strategy and tactics than the story so spoilers won’t matter so much. And it looks like the sort of game that can definitely be played through many times. I have played a little of the early levels to see how it runs, and it runs well and is going to be fun, but I don’t want to leave other games half done (as I have in the past) by getting distracted by ‘new shiny thing’ so will save it for Christmas, when I will have a week or two off work anyway. It is my Christmas present after all.

Update 10th of November 2012: I have just discovered that there is in fact another XCOM reboot in the works from 2K Games (for comparison here is the Wikipedia page on the strategy XCOM reboot – the one that I have just bought and I talk about in this post). I had got the news and anticipation in the press and on forums for my game mixed up with that for the new game, in fact until now I didn’t realise there were two games. Anyway, it looks like the ‘shooter version’ of XCOM is actually being redesigned to be a lot more tactical, so that could be good.

I guess the success of XCOM – Enemy Unknown has made 2K reconsider making it yet another shooter? I hope so, straight up shooters are nice, but not every game needs to be one. Variety is good and if it can be shown that games other than the mainstream shooter can sell well and make money, then we will carry on getting variety in the games that are produced.

Printed Strategy Guides

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Introduction

I have recently bought the BradyGames ‘Official Strategy Guide’ for the game XCOM – Enemy Unknown’. It is a good book, nicely printed, good illustrations and covers the game well in terms of gameplay. But it does say on the front of the guide that it covers Xbox, PS3 and PC versions – but once you get inside it doesn’t cover the PC version, not really. Admittedly the only difference is the controls, but when it is describing how you do something and only gives options for the console controllers it is annoying. I suspect their excuse would be that I should be playing it with a controller, not a keyboard and mouse. This got me thinking about printed strategy guides, and what they are like these days from my experience in the last ones I have bought (XCOM, Mass Effect 2 and Fallout 3). They, to my mind, aren’t really strategy guides but in fact game guides. I have also started thinking about why I still buy them for some of my games and whether I should bother in the future. Hence this blog post expanding on all that.

Lack of game manuals with modern games

You used to get manuals with games. Sometimes very comprehensive ones, going into detail about the game, the gameplay, the controls and so on. This was usual and normal, you just got a printed manual with the game. These days? You are lucky to get a 5 page pdf – and often that is a link to something on the web and not even on disk. Older games expected you to have read the manual and to have understood the controls before starting the game. These days the convention is to have a tutorial at the beginning of the game to slowly introduce the controls and lead you through the process of learning how to play the game. So the manual became less necessary and basically shrank to a small mnemonic device to refer to if you forget a control or two (e.g. if you take a break from playing the game for a while). Sometimes these terse pdf documents don’t even cover all the controls for the game!

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the modern way of doing things, a tutorial introduction to a game or tutorial level at the start (skippable for later playthroughs is nice) is a good way of doing things, as long as it is a good tutorial. With in game codices and so on a lot of the information that used to be in the (sometimes huge) game manuals you got with games is now in the game itself, which makes more sense in a lot of ways. There is more memory, disk space and so on these days so such information can be put into the game. Printed manuals are now more expensive than including the information in the game, which is the opposite of how it was when computers were more limited.

But all this has meant the demise of the printed comprehensive game manual that comes with the game when you buy it, and I think that the printed third party strategy guide has stepped into this position, for reasons I can speculate about, and have done below.

Printed guides vs the web

So, game guides that come in the game box from the developer are going, shrinking, going digital. Printed third party strategy guides appear to have evolved and moved to take their place. The in depth strategy guidance for a game is now on the web. Third party sites cover games extremely well – game FAQ sites and game walkthrough sites were the king for a while, but these days Wikis appear to have supplanted that (with a few outstanding exceptions, e.g. Stella’s Tomb Raider site).

The problem comes with deciding which site to go to or to trust. There is often more than one Wiki for a given game, a couple of ‘proper’ crowdsourced information Wikis and also probably one or two hosted on or from big gaming sites (to try and drive traffic). There will be several game walkthrough and guide sites, especially for the popular games. YouTube walkthroughs will abound for those too. Some of these are rushed out purely to drive traffic with scant regard for good information. A Google search will throw up a lot of hits, and often the entries high up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page(s)) get there by being good at SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rather than containing accurate content.

Another problem with Wikis etc. is that to become a good source of information, they need to ‘mature’ for want of a better expression. They need contributions from many gamers who have played and beaten the game. For that information to be checked and corrected by other gamers and so on. The early information just won’t be as good, because not many people will have completed the game. So if you want help with a recently released game that is a problem. Of course, mostly people like to beat the game on their own to avoid spoilers and because that is a lot of the point of a game (playing it yourself not just doing what someone else did to get through the game). But still the problem exists.

Finally for some smaller, less popular games, the Wiki information can be hard to find and navigate through on the guide sites. I personally have problems with the Binding of Isaac Wiki. On the other hand that game in particular has a lot of stuff in it that isn’t explained and it is quite hard to work out what it does – so it is hard to actually work out good information for the game to upload to the Wiki.

My use of strategy guides then and now

Strategy guides were – or should have been if they were good – additional to the game manual. They were carefully researched and written by someone who had thoroughly played through the game, more than once, and had figured out the tricks, tactics and strategies that could be used to help beat the game. They contained things to help you get through the tricky parts, or to help you collect all the secrets (or whatever) in a subsequent completionist run through. This latter point is how I used to use them (e.g. the early Tomb Raider games); I would play and beat the game, then get a strategy guide and play through again, using it to help me find the things I missed the first time. This function of comprehensive printed strategy guides has been completely supplanted by the web these days for the reasons above.

But now the ‘strategy guides’ are game guides, an overgrown game manual. You can still use them in the way that I outlined above, but they really aren’t as in depth, and also often contain incorrect information, or are missing information (see the next section). So for the ferreting out of missed parts of a runthrough of a game, getting all the secrets and so on, although it can be useful to have the game guide open on the desk next to you it is often as convenient to pause the game and Alt-Tab out to a web browser parked on a Wiki. Or if the game doesn’t allow Alt-Tabbing out (which it really should!) then researching the Wiki first before a given play session.

Whereas my older game guides from over ten years ago were well read, and look worn, the guides I have got for the occasional more recent game are fairly pristine. I might have looked up one or two things in them. In particular I found that the Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2 Prima guides had hard to read maps, and the in game maps were so much better I tended to just not use the maps and walkthroughs of sections in those guides. There wasn’t any strategy in them, the useful strategy for Mass Effect 2 I found on the Wiki or in BSN (Bioware Social Network) forum threads.

‘Official’ game guides only

Another thing is that game guides are ‘official’ and come out at the same time as the game. What happens is that the game guide publisher (e.g. Prima or BradyGames) gets an exclusive contract from the publisher of the game to produce the official game guide, and then gets early (pre-release) access to the game, or sometimes just information about the game. They are then on a deadline to publish the guide so it comes out at the same time as the game is released to the public. The result is by definition rushed, and often a fair few mistakes slip through.

There is no way that such a system can produce a true strategy guide. So it doesn’t – you end up with what is basically an enlarged version of the old game manual that you used to get with the game in the box. Also with only one guide publisher getting each exclusive contract, there is no competition. You can’t look at reviews of two or three strategy guides (reviews by gamers who have used the guides alongside playing the game) and see which is best. There is only one. With this lack of competition there is also no pressure on the guide publisher to correct any mistakes in the guide with errata or an addendum – although errata do get published on the guide publisher’s website sometimes. The market for these printed guides is small enough that it probably isn’t economic to print second editions either, and who would pay for them anyway? It is the opposite problem with trying to find the best Wiki, walkthrough or game FAQ – in that case there are so many and also so many opinions that there isn’t any consensus as to which is best. You just have to work it out for yourself. At least it is usually free to access game Wikis and so on.

My collector tendencies

So, bearing in mind all the above, why do I still buy the occasional third party game guide? Basically it is a collector tendency in myself for games that I really like. I really like Fallout 3 in particular so I got the guide to go with it. Also that guide and the Mass Effect 2 one I got on sale and they were bargains. Mass Effect as a series I am very fond of indeed (just check the Mass Effect category on this blog!) – Mass Effect 1 doesn’t have a third party guide for the PC version (it was originally an Xbox exclusive) but I got the Mass Effect 2 guide and did try to use it with the game, but as I said just didn’t find it useful at all compared to the information on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, these are good books if you are into the game, and aren’t ‘bad’ at all, it is just that printed strategy guides in general aren’t as useful as they used to be.

So really I have these guides for recent games because I really like the games, and have a tendency to get things associated with the games. I also have Mass Effect novels, comics and graphical novels for instance. The latest guide I have bought – the XCOM one – I basically bought because for the first time in a very long time I bought a game on release date and am really looking forward to it. In addition I bought the ‘Special Edition’ of XCOM Enemy Unknown. So buying the guide too is part of my enthusiasm for this game. Why I am enthusiastic about it, and why I bought the special edition on release is another story and I might make a blog post about that topic on its own. By the way, I got the BradyGames XCOM strategy guide from The Book Depository and it was discounted and cheaper than anywhere else including Amazon (well, the UK Amazon – the US Amazon has it even cheaper but won’t ship to the UK for some things). The Book Depository is worth checking out if you are looking for a book and checking for the cheapest out there.

The manual for XCOM, even with the Special Edition, is just the same old five page pdf. Very unimpressive. The art book and the other goodies are very nice though. So a strategy guide to supplement the almost non-existent game manual is probably a good idea. Will I use it much? No idea, but I am happy I bought it – so don’t get the idea that this article is negative and I am channeling my inner grumpy old man (it was all better in my day!). Just some thoughts about how these things have changed. Due to the guide not covering PC controls though, I have still had to print out a crib sheet from the minimal pdf game manual with the controls on it.

My personal use of guides and ending thoughts

So, strategy guides – for me anyway – are nice to have things for games that I really like. More for the ‘collect things to do with the game’ than anything else, although they can be useful. I will probably still get the occasional guide, but not often and not for most of my games. They still have a place, but more along the lines of replacing the now nonexistent (mostly) game manual than as an actual in depth strategy guide. If you have more than one monitor and the game supports Alt-Tabbing out then you probably don’t need one at all. I will probably read the guides I have for research before second and later playthroughs. Sometimes even just read them for relaxation (yes I know that is probably a bit too nerdy for my own good).

As for the future I really don’t know how well printed strategy guides sell these days compared to both how they used to sell and to the sales level of the games themselves. The strategy guide publishers (at least the big ones, Prima and BradyGames for instance) also sell digital versions of their guides. So someone can have it open on a tablet or laptop as they play the games on the console, or as I mentioned above on their second monitor on the PC if they are PC gamers. I daresay things will move on, but I suspect there will always be a place for big glossy good looking books about games, partially because if done well they are nice things to have.

Catching up slowly

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I am slowly catching up with my backlog of games to play. As I have mentioned on here before I have a chronic progressive health problem which flares up and down and is painful. Thus, when I am bad I have to concentrate my time and efforts on the thing that pays the bills (i.e. work!), and thus gaming (and other things) take a back seat. However, and meanwhile indeed, Steam sales and GOG.com special offers continue apace so I tend to buy games at (what I regard as) bargain prices. Because, you know, it is a bargain. I daresay others do that as well when the Steam sales are on!

As a result I have a lovely selection of games built up that I haven’t played yet – or in some cases played (some of or most of) in the past and have bought again. For instance Half Life I am sure I have played before, but have got it on Steam now to play through properly. And a fair few other games too. Part of the problem is that if I am ill, in pain, on painkillers I tend to not want to start up a ‘big’ game, but tend to just relax and play something like Bejewelled 3 or The Binding of Isaac. Smaller games in the sense that I can just play 10 or 20 minutes of them. As a result I had ended up with a few games half played, and others waiting on me to get round to them.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like these games and wanted to finish them, and want to get on to the others. I am looking forward to it! So here is a little update on games I have beaten and what I will be playing next. More as a sort of diary for myself really, I doubt anyone else is that interested, but maybe someone is playing the same games as me out there.

Before going on to the games I have been and am about to play, I will mention a new addition to my blog roll, the links section on the right of the home page. That is ‘Dead End Thrills’ a site/blog devoted to extracting some gorgeous art from game engines and games. Do pay it a visit for some lovely eye candy, and read the ‘about’ section of that site so you know how much work the author is putting into getting these images out of the games.

Borderlands

I am talking about Borderlands 1 here for anyone visiting this post in the future after 2 comes out. I have beaten the main game and all the DLCs except for Mad Moxxi’s Underdome (which I don’t fancy and probably will never play). Just playthrough 1, with one character (the Siren). Great game, replay value in it so I will keep the savegame – but as I said above I have a bunch of other games to play so not sure when I will get round to playing it again. If I do I will try the playthrough 2, and also have a bash with a different character – I would like to try the game with the Hunter.

I will probably end up getting Borderlands 2 sometime after it comes out. However tempting it might be to get it on release I really do have so many games to get through I can’t justify it. Also I have a damaged game disk for my Borderlands 1 GOTY edition, so I was a bit nervous as I played through the game in case it decided to not recognize the disk totally and stop me playing it. So I am keeping an eye out for a Steam sale or something to get a digital copy for future installations etc. The save games swap across according to the internet.

I didn’t complete all the ‘fetch 100 of these’ ‘now fetch 200 more of these’ type sidequests. I did the zombie brains collectathon in the Zombie Island DLC and that was quite enough thank you. I probably missed a few other side quests too, but that will give me something ‘new’ to do or be a bit surprised by if and when I start the game up again in the future.

Fallout 3

I beat the Fallout 3 main quest and the Broken Steel DLC after that. I had already done the Operation Anchorage DLC fairly early on – to get the very resilient power armour which I will basically wear through the rest of the game. I have done a lot of the earlier side quests, but the ‘world’ of Fallout 3 is huge so I am sure there are more that I could go and do. But I will leave it for now, and come back to it later for the other DLCs. I really like this game, it was one of the first ‘modern’ PC games I got after I started to get back into gaming. Part of the reason I have taken so long to beat it is my health problems, but also this same game has spanned three PCs now – I have managed to salvage my savegames and continue. But it is sometimes hard to get back into a game even if you really like it, if you have had to not play it for a long time due to computer and/or other problems.

So I have stopped this for now to go on to other things, but will come back to it to complete it (i.e. the other DLCs) in the future. I also have Fallout New Vegas in my Steam library so there is that one too.

Next up – Mass Effect 2

Yes that is right, Mass Effect 2. On my last computer I beat Mass Effect 1 and loved the game – I think Mass Effect (1 and 2) are my favourite games up there with Fallout 3, and the Tomb Raider series. The combat was a bit flaky, probably because the game (this is ME1 I am still talking about) was originally an Xbox exclusive so the PC port was always going to suffer. But I didn’t mind the combat or the inventory management (two of the main criticisms aimed at ME1). I loved the epic storyline, the characters and how you can play your Shepard to vary the way the story goes. I liked the ‘proper’ science fiction consistency of the in game universe – posit that the mass effect exists and works as stated, and the rest just follows. No hand waving or ‘a wizard did it’ type space magic.

So I got Mass Effect 2 for a good price, imported my save game, started to play and kinda realised I was screwing up how I wanted things to go. Then my last computer broke. I salvaged my ‘canon’ ME1 savegame so I can hopefully import my Shepard into ME2 on my current computer and play the game. This time I have all the story based DLC and have even gone so far as to read the books and comics/graphical novels that come before ME1 and inbetween ME1 and ME2. For an overview of the books and comics, and how they fit with the games see my post Mass Effect – the whole story. I have also become reasonably spoiled on how ME2 goes as that is hard to avoid when you are playing it so long after it comes out. But I don’t mind game spoilers myself (I know most people hate them).

So, as long as my paragade Femshep (sole survivor, colonist, vanguard) imports OK into ME2 I am hoping to do a reasonably completionist run and end up with a loyal squad and ‘no one left behind’ (I told you I was spoiled on how things go!). I have the Prima guide and will not be afraid to use it (or look things up on the Wiki and/or forums) if I get a bit stuck. Then I will read the books and comics that come after ME2, and then I can consider what to do about ME3.

Mass Effect 3?

Mass Effect 3 looks very much like there is going to be some single player ‘campaign’ DLC coming up, that will be in-game chronologically set before the ending. I have already blogged about my thoughts on the day one DLC for Mass Effect 3. And I am thoroughly aware of the ending controversies and reactions, and indeed the ending itself. Interestingly I suspect that even though I have seen the endings, that won’t spoil the rest of the game for me too much as the endings seem to be very disconnected with the rest of the game (and of course the previous two games, and the books and comics). So I will probably wait until all the single player DLC is out, get the game itself and the DLCs, and take ‘my Shepard’ through to the conclusion of her story. Which will probably be, in my head, a bit before the controversial game endings that has/had some corners of the internet in a kerfuffle.

With such a final end to the whole story arc at the end of ME3, I really do want to do all the single player DLC during my run through. Loading up a prior savegame to do any DLC when I have already beaten the game doesn’t appeal to me, bearing in mind the main reason I like the Mass Effect games so much is the story and characters. It just seems to make much more sense to me that if I am going to play the pre-ending single player DLC I will play it before the ending (i.e. before I have played through the game to the ending). I just hope Origin will work for me to allow me to play Mass Effect 3 and its DLCs, a lot of people are having trouble with it.

I very much doubt I will even try multiplayer for Mass Effect 3. That has even more problems with connectivity, the EA servers and Origin than the single player game does. Also the ME3 MP ‘community’ is very unforgiving of noobs, so I have no desire to spend my time online in the game getting vote kicked out of lobbies because I am new to the game.

After that

Saints Row the Third, From Dust, and lots more. Probably SR3 first though as that game looks like loads of fun. I have all the Half Lifes so far published to go through some time too. I might even LP Half Life – again like this blog more as a sort of diary for myself that happens to be public than any expectation of too many people watching/reading it. Perhaps I will do Dead Space and LP that instead so everyone can hear me jump and yell as horrible things happen. Or Bioshock 1 and 2. Yeah I have enough games in my backlog to keep me quiet for a fair while!

A matter of personal preference

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This isn’t strictly game related as it could relate to anything really, anything that is subject to personal preference. Films, TV shows, food, music, etc. However, recently it came up in the context of a game, so I will mostly talk about it in that context here. I said to someone something along the lines of ‘$GAME is an excellent game, but not one I would particularly enjoy playing I think’. Which game it was doesn’t matter, the fact was that it was a popular game, one which received good reviews from both games journalists and gamers. It was good in all sorts of ways. But it was in a genre that I didn’t like much and don’t enjoy playing that much. The other person’s view was that my statement along the lines of ‘it is a good game, but I don’t personally like it’ was an oxymoron or something. He was of the view that if I thought a game was good I had to like it, and conversely if I didn’t like a game how could I possibly say it was good?

Let’s take an unrelated example – black coffee. I really like black coffee, strong ‘real’ (i.e. not instant) coffee. I don’t drink it much because it disagrees with me (drank too much of it in the past and eventually my digestive system rebelled!) but I could have a cup now and again. My wife hates coffee, especially strong coffee. The smell, let alone the taste, make her sick. So I abstain most of the time at home and don’t miss it that much. However, would my wife say that ‘coffee is awful’ as a flat out statement? A set in stone rule for the whole of the universe that coffee is very bad, awful, disgusting etc? Well no, it is a matter of personal taste – some people like coffee, some don’t. We all have our personal preferences, differing tastes, we are all different. It would be a very boring world if everyone liked and disliked exactly the same things.

Back to games. I don’t particularly like horror themed games where the protagonist is weak. That is, I don’t like to play them much. I have seen LPs of (for instance) Penumbra, and Amnesia the Dark Descent and think they are very good games. Well written, good gameplay, controls, graphics etc. I can definitely see how they would be enjoyable to play. Just not for me. Other examples might be yet another corridor cover based shooter with regenerating health – I don’t mind those sort of games at all but so many games these days are like that, the game in question would probably have to be a bit special for me to get excited about it and go and buy it. But there are a lot of gamers out there who love corridor shooters – which is of course why there are so many games in that genre, they sell lots and thus are commercially successful. Commercial success is important, as if games lose money dev studios go out of business, which in turn means no new games, and I don’t think many people want that. Some politicians might I guess.

However it seems that in games the attitude of ‘I don’t like a game therefore it must be bad, and anyone who does like the game is nuts’ is very prevalent. Possibly this is true in other things, but just looking at YouTube comments (for instance, and I know I have picked a particularly extreme example of bad behaviour on the internet there) games invoke fairly intense reactions – lots of fanboy on fanboy textual violence. This reaches across platforms, genres, dev studios, publishers, digital content delivery systems – the lot. No matter how innocuous the difference between two ‘things’ still some people, somewhere, will have an badly spelled invective spattered argument about it. PS vs Xbox. Console vs PC. Origin vs Steam. BF3 vs MW2.

In my personal opinion the only really bad games are ones which hardly anyone likes and are commercial failures. But that is just an attempt at definition of ‘bad game’ as those games probably have a loyal fanbase somewhere who love them. So for those people, they aren’t ‘bad’. However, the main point of this rambling post is that a lot of people conflate personal preference with an objective definition of ‘good’ or ‘bad’. So, some games journalists loved the ending to Mass Effect 3. A lot – I suspect the majority – of Mass Effect fans didn’t like it. So the games journalist calls this mass of fans, loyal fans who make fan art, buy all the games and DLC, who love their Shepards and pre-ordered the collectors edition of Mass Effect 3, ‘entitled whiners’ or words along those lines. Admittedly some of the reactions against the ending were way over the top, so you have to filter those out. A lot of the reactions were very considered and reasonable in how they set out why that person didn’t like the ending. Definitely not just whining.

Some game journalists in particular seem to be so certain that their personal views are ‘right’ and everyone else is ‘wrong’. Not all, and there is always the suspicion that advertising revenue from larger publishers can sway the opinions of some sites or publications. There do seem to be some instances of what used to be called ‘airplay hits’ in the heyday of commercial radio (i.e. before the internet and mp3s) where a song would be played a lot on the radio and enthused over by the DJs, but didn’t get bought much by the music (7″ vinyl even) buying public. It isn’t always advertising money driving opinion, a lot of it is that ‘professionals’ in any industry that provides services or goods for the public are sometimes in a very different mindset to that very public. They lose sight of what people like and want (the consumer’s personal preferences in general) compared to their own likes and dislikes. So, these games journalists aren’t Mass Effect fans (going back to that example) – they play hundreds of games per month, and will view Mass Effect 3 in terms of itself, not in the context of a fictional universe that people can be very engaged in. They aren’t fans of video games – they are professional players of, and writers about, video games. Sometimes the difference between those two relationships to games in general (or a given game in particular) can really lead to some interesting disconnects between gamers and those that consider themselves important in gaming.

Trying to drag all this to some conclusion, I would say that just because I like something doesn’t mean everyone should, and that something is objectively good. All it means is that I like it, me, just me. Others might too and that is cool. Similarly just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean it is ‘bad’. It might be bad, especially if no one else seems to like it much, but if a lot of other people are fine with it, and enjoy it, then the chances are that it is just my personal preference. I wouldn’t dream of calling someone else (who likes the thing I don’t like) all sorts of horrible names and insults, just because they happen to have different preferences to me. I just wish more people would abstain from that kind of behaviour too.

Please note that I am talking in this post about matters of personal preference or taste – not things that can be assessed objectively (if a game runs at 12 fps on a dual GTX 680 monster rig then yeah, it needs a bit of optimization work). Also it is not the negative opinions about things that I object to at all, but the conflation of those opinions with facts. Someone might not like regenerating health in shooters, and prefer to pick up health packs along the way. The argument might be that it takes away some of the gameplay complexity of the shooter if you don’t have to look for and/or hoard health packs because you can alway just duck behind the convenient chest high wall. That is fine, I can understand the argument and understand why this person holds that opinion. But if that person then goes on to say that regenerating health shooters are all objectively bad, and everyone who plays them is insane, then that is silly. By the way, I don’t mind either mechanic in shooters, before someone thinks I don’t like regenerating health.

I could say more in this post, it could be three times the size if I kept going with everything I might want to say. I picked out the Mass Effect 3 ending as an example (as that issue was particularly polarizing and caused a great deal of heat on various fora (mainly the BSN (Bioware Social Network))) – but there are other examples. I am personally going through a ‘can’t work out if I am going to like it or not’ problem with the new Tomb Raider. What I have seen of it seems at variance with what the devs are saying in interviews. But I am not going to come out and say ‘the new Tomb Raider is going to be objectively bad and everyone should dislike it’, partially because I haven’t worked out if I will like it or not, and mainly because of what I have been waffling about in this post. I might end up not liking it at all, but even from what I have already seen in trailers and gameplay footage it looks like it is going to be a good game – even if I don’t like it because it is too unlike the Tomb Raider I know and love (feel free to click on the Tomb Raider category link on the right of this blog) and too much of a linear corridor shooter (with bow not gun), or too much of a survival horror game rather than action/adventure, or whatever. The new Tomb Raider looks like it is going to be a very good game, and that is true whether I personally like it or not.

I could also say more about this attitude being a problem in real life – especially if a prominent and popular media channel (a tabloid newspaper or the BBC) or someone with power (politicians) decide that their personal preference is actually objectively ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and thus legislate or move the opinions of people in order to cause legislation. We see this with the occasional media campaign against video games, or a few politicians getting together to move a private members bill (feel free to Google that if you are not from the UK) to outlaw some or all video games. Luckily the antagonism towards gamers and gaming is enough of a minority opinion that games haven’t been banned yet.

I want to say more, I could go on for thousands more words, about the attitude of the ME3 studio (Bioware, or rather some of their representatives) towards their own fanbase, about why the E3 gameplay trailer for the new Tomb Raider made me cringe and facepalm horribly in places, about some of the rants I have been on the receiving end of because of my disability. But I won’t – I don’t expect many people to have read this far in this tl;dr waffly post so I will finish here.

Lucid puzzle game review vid up on YouTube

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I have recorded and uploaded to YouTube a commentated review of the Lucid puzzle game. Feel free to check it out here: Lucid game commentated review on YouTube by Todpullen. Do read the description of the video as there are a couple of corrections in there of things I said in the commentary. To summarize if you don’t want to watch the vid, Lucid is a very relaxing puzzle game of the ‘destroy the blocks by picking contiguous same-colour groups of them’ type puzzle game. But what I like about it is the lovely soundtrack, music and graphics. Very relaxing and a nice change of pace. I shall add links to the game devs and the Steam page for the game below.

YeaBoing, Lucid devs – a warning, their site looks like it has just emerged from a time warp from the mid 90′s, and is a bit hard on the eyes!

Lucid game steam page.

Feel free to check out the vid and let me know what you think – constructive criticism very welcome. Comment on the YouTube page or here, either is cool.

The effect on my game buying habits of the Mass Effect 3 day one DLC

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There is currently a fair bit of discussion concerning the upcoming Mass Effect 3′s day one DLC ‘From Ashes’. You get this as part of the (sold out in the UK at least) collectors edition, the digital deluxe ‘premium’ download edition (Origin exclusive I believe) or by paying extra for the DLC on day one. The price point is $10, no idea how much it will be in £. I won’t go over the arguments as to why this is not a good thing, feel free to Google to find articles on it. If you want to watch/listen to a critique of EA/Bioware over this topic by TotalBiscuit on YouTube click here for for his ‘Why I think Bioware has gone too far with Mass Effect 3′ – careful of spoilers in that YouTube footage, it shows gameplay from the demo. I have tried to avoid spoilers in this post, but there is a lot out there on the web so careful with that search engine.

Mass Effect 3 would have been one of the very few games I would have considered buying at or soon after release, at full price (I am also considering Borderlands 2 which comes out in the Autumn as it is looking very good). As I have explained in other posts most of my games I tend to buy sometime after release when they are cheaper, or even waiting for sales and deals on them. But I really like the Mass Effect series, and to be honest Mass Effect 3 does look very good. However, even before this day one DLC was leaked and subsequently confirmed/announced I was already getting a bit fed up with the storm of marketing and blatant monetization push for this game.

Multiplayer – I almost certainly won’t (be able to) play this. Not just because I don’t have many friends into gaming, let alone Mass Effect specifically, but also I play on the PC and Origin really doesn’t work very well for me. I suspect it would be very hard to get it to work for online multiplayer matchmaking. This may have something to do with the generally rubbish ping times and internet service in the UK in general, and from Virgin Media in particular for me, but I know others have problems too. It seems that the ‘war resources’ you get from multiplayer whilst theoretically not essential to the single player campaign help enormously with getting to the ‘best ending’ of the game. I may usually not play on veteran but a lot of people do, and that may well make it essential for them to play multiplayer to get their desired ending to the series – it is more than just one game, it is the final game in a trilogy. Also, how long will EA run the servers for the ME3 multiplayer? If they shut them down after 6 months or a year, and you want to play through the game again (as I am sure many will want to!) then you might have to do without the extra war resources from the multiplayer (they ‘decay’ so you can’t store them up, you have to play the multiplayer concurrently with any single player campaign you are doing). That is a big if though, by the way, I hope they will keep them up for years and have no information that they won’t.

Then there are Facebook games, iOS games and so on. I refuse to spam my friends and family on Facebook just to feed the EA/Bioware marketing machine, so that I can get the full benefit out of my bought on a disk single player game. I don’t even own an iOS or Android device so can’t play that bit of the ‘game’. Extra DLC with an art book? Extra DLC with some action figure toy dolls? All exclusive? Dear oh dear.

So I won’t buy it soon. I will wait until I am fairly sure all DLC has come out for it, then I can look at the DLC and pick which bits I think are essential to the story and just buy them, along with a copy of the main game which will probably be cheaper by then. This is essentially what I have ended up doing with Mass Effect 2 although it wasn’t so deliberate, it just ended up that way. I will probably end up spoilt (in terms of the story) by the time I play it but I am not that bothered by spoilers. If it turns out that I cannot get some DLC (because it is an exclusive to something that I cannot get) and that DLC is ‘proper story content’ (not just cosmetic or a fancy gun) then I guess I will be somewhat disappointed. EA and Bioware know that they have a big loyal fanbase for this game series, so really can milk them for scads of cash. That is up to them, their game their rules. But it causes resentment and bad feelings towards the company from that very same fanbase, who might not be so loyal now. I just hope their marketing middle managers and the executives have factored that bad feeling into their spreadsheets somehow.

Humble Bundle Distractions

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Distracting from what?

See my earlier post beating or finishing? if you want, but I have a couple of games now reinstalled on this computer, and savegames rescued from the old one, that I want to beat before going on to other things. That is, at least finish the main questline and any DLC that I want to do. These games are Borderlands and Fallout 3 to start with. For Borderlands I have all the DLC (the GOTY edition actually) but don’t fancy Mad Moxxi’s Underdome as a single player. I have never played co-op Borderlands, which is a shame as it looks fun and possibly one could say the game is meant for co-op play. The Mad Moxxi DLC looks good for co-op but not so much for single player. Serves me right for being Billy No-Mates I guess and not having any friends into gaming! Anyway, I want to beat the main quest and the DLCs The Secret Armory of General Knoxx and Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution (I have done The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned).

Then I would love to finally finish Fallout 3 and its DLC! I am a fair bit of the way through the main quest and have done the Operation: Anchorage DLC, but I want to beat all the DLC and the main quest (again I have a GOTY edition on disk obtained in a sale). Don’t get me wrong, I love these games and am looking forward to playing them. But with work and my ill health meaning I tend to be very fatigued in my spare time, sometimes it is easier to just start up a game that doesn’t require a disk, exiting other apps, long loading and unskippable intros, etc. Hence me getting distracted by one hour play sessions with a couple of the humble bundle games, and hence this post. Also Fallout 3 isn’t behaving itself on Windows 7 for me, if it keeps playing up and I can’t fix it I might have to give up on the game, but that would be a shame. I have edited the .ini file to try and fix the ‘can’t cope with multiple cores’ problem, so hopefully that will work.

After Borderlands and Fallout 3 I have my ‘get ready for ME3 canon run through and beat the game at last’ run on Mass Effect 2. I couldn’t salvage any ME2 saves from my last computer when it comprehensively broke, but at least I have my ME1 final save to import into ME2. Not that I wouldn’t mind ME1 on here to run through again (I have only ever done femshep vanguard paragade, want to try an infiltrator at least) but I do have a stack of unplayed games to beat first! Dead Space 1 and 2, F.E.A.R 1 and 2 and DLC, Bioshock 1 and 2, and etc. But, apart from occasionally at the weekend when I don’t have office stuff to catch up on (which is most weekends sadly) I find myself just right clicking Steam and launching a humble bundle game.

As for all these games on sale I have stocked up on you could do a lot worse than check out SavyGamer – link on the right of the home page in the blogroll. Plus Steam sales of course.

The Humble Bundle(s)

The Humble Bundle site can be found here – Humble Bundle – and you can also follow them on Twitter at @humble. Each bundle is only available for a while. The idea is that you pay what you want and some of the money goes to charities, check out their website for more details on how it all works. I have got all bundles so far except number two and the current Mojam one I think, and I always pay over the average as the deal is incredible value, let alone with the charity contribution too. You can adjust how much of your money goes where with sliders so if you only want to support some of the charities, or give more to the devs or whatever you can adjust that. Anyway, this paying over the odds for later bundles means that I have got two copies of a couple of the earlier ones (which is an offer they sometimes do if you pay over the odds).

Onto these games that are distracting me from, er, other games. The two main ones I have been playing are Crayon Physics Deluxe and the Binding of Isaac, and I go into them a bit more in the subsections below. There are loads more in my Steam library from the bundles though, I haven’t even installed Super Meat Boy, Bit Trip Runner, JamesTown, etc. yet! I have two copies of Cogs, which appeared on one of the earlier bundles, so my wife has the non-Steam one and loves it. The graphics are lovely and have a steampunk theme if you like that too, follow that link to the game’s site for a trailer and some screenshots. My wife has beaten the main mode but is still slowly working through the puzzles getting the full gold stars on each level. There are two challenge modes (time limit and moves limit) and she is working through those too. Cogs was just one game in the bundle and (if you are into that sort of puzzle game) gives hours of entertainment. I only played it a little on my old computer and haven’t reinstalled it on the current one yet.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

If you go to Crayon Physics Deluxe you can see the trailer video on that site and/or download the demo for a better explanation of what it is than I can do here. You solve puzzles by drawing with virtual crayons and the drawn objects become ‘real’ and obey physics (gravity, momentum, inertia) and it is these objects that interact with each other and the scene of each puzzle to solve it (you have to get a ball to hit a star). As well as the included levels there is a sandbox mode and you can download other user created puzzle levels if you want (in the ‘playground’).

I spent more time on Crayon Physics that I expected I would. You get one star for solving each puzzle level, but to unlock the final level area (the island in the middle if you have seen the game) you have to get extra stars by solving puzzles in certain ways – an elegant solution and an old school solution. When you have done all three solutions (the extra ones have limits on what objects and the number of objects you can use) you can declare a solution ‘awesome’ and award yourself an extra star. You have to get a fair few extra stars round the various puzzles to unlock the final level, which you then have to beat to get the end credits.

The reason I played more of it than I expected was that I kept going back. Getting the extra stars required to unlock the final area was getting tricky so I often thought to myself ‘that will do, I won’t try any more’ then a few minutes or hours later I would think ‘ooh I can try that, hang on let me boot it up one more time’ and there you go. I eventually beat it and unlocked the final level, beat that and saw the end credits roll and I think that has sated my Crayon Physics desires for now! But it is a lovely little game and I am glad I got it in the bundle and tried it out.

The Binding of Isaac

There is no home page for this game as far as I can see (let me know if I am mistaken!) but the steam page is here The Binding of Isaac on Steam. Do be warned there are some fairly disturbing themes in this game, especially if you think about it a bit. Feel free to Google it but you play/control a small child who has escaped from his mother (who hears God’s voice telling her to kill Isaac and proceeds to try with a big kitchen knife) by jumping into a trap door in his room, which leads to a series of randomly generated basements with various horrible monsters. Powers ups, perma death and randomized dungeon lead it to be described as roguelike (see this excellent RPS article – Wot I Think: The Binding Of Isaac for instance), but it is real time not turn based. And a definite challenge by my standards (which may or may not mean much!).

It is addictive, fun, and I am always trying to do better. I haven’t even beat the first few levels let alone ‘beat the game’ – which actually involves beating it 11 times (I think) including the final boss, and the final-final boss, 11 times. Then you unlock the final-final-final boss or something – I am so far off doing that that I haven’t even looked it up yet, and I tend to look things up on game Wiki’s a lot! I won’t spoil any more, feel free to check it out – it is only a fiver on Steam even when not on sale or in a bundle. There is a wiki for it: The Binding of Isaac wiki so you can look up what the various power ups do before you try them (some of them debuff and do odd things).

Finally

Anyway, there you go. There are a lot more ‘humble bundle’ games in the bundles I have that I haven’t mentioned, and a lot more mainstream games I haven’t played, but I will get round to them eventually. If you want to see let’s play footage of the two humble bundle games I went into above then you can check out these on YouTube:

The reason I selected those two let’s plays is that they are by LPers (directors?) that I subscribe to and watch occasionally, and it was seeing those let’s plays linked above that led me to 1) go ‘hey those games look fun’, then 2) go ‘I think I have them from the Humble Bundles’ and 3) start to play them. So if you don’t want to pick the games up to play, but like to see commentators do blind runs on them, check out the above YouTube links.