Games Archives - Page 429 of 689 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Embracing Chaos

February 1, 2017 by Belghast

There are games from my childhood that I will always have an odd amount of nostalgia about. There are the obvious ones like Zelda and Mario… but then there are the ones where I latched onto with both hands and never quite understood why. Chaos Engine is one of those games in the second column because by all rights… it was not really a popular game in the United States. We never really had the massive Amiga Culture here that the UK did… and while I owned one… I didn’t get it until my college years for use with Digital Video production. However I did own a Sega Genesis and we did get Chaos Engine released under the confusing re-branding of Soldiers of Fortune. I played the hell out of the game but didn’t realize what I had been missing… because while a completely functional port it is in no way as good as the original. I bought my Amiga 3000 second hand… and it came with a box of crudely labelled Amiga floppies. One of which was called Chaos Engine, and when I fired it up… I felt immediately at home. The original Amiga game was so much better in every way than the port I was familiar with, and most importantly was the music. I’ve included a video I found of the game intro running on an A500. The game was essentially an isometric shooter but a much more interesting one than say Commando or Ikari Warriors. It allowed you to pick from a cast of characters… the Brigand, the Gentleman, the Mercenary, the Navvie, the Preacher and The Thug. Each with their own strengths and unique weapons, and also added a small bit of RPG style progression as you could use the money found in each level to purchase buffs to further customize the way the character played. Even today I have purchased every copy of this game that has come out… from a Windows 95 CD version that no longer functions to the more recent release on Steam.

While roaming around the floor at Pax South I came across what I could only describe as the logical successor. Tower 57 is a game that I didn’t even know existed before this convention. It apparently was on Kickstarter during August of 2015 and managed to raise roughly 55k dollars. Had I known about the game then I would have likely backed it, even though my track record with video game kickstarters is not that amazing. The game website describes it as:

In a dystopian, dieselpunk world, where Megatowers are the only enclaves of civilization, a group of extraordinary individuals is sent to infiltrate the reclusive Tower 57. Their skills, clips’ capacity & the ability to cooperate will decide on their fate.

Tower 57 is a top-down twin stick shooter with 16-bit inspired pixel art, destructible environments and heavy focus on co-op. It is also a modern take on what made AMIGA games so great back in the days.

What it felt like was a sort of Shadowrun meets Chaos engine, with a similarly interesting cast of characters. Unfortunately I didn’t actually get to start fresh when I gave the game I try… but it seems like I could largely pick between a female detective wearing a trechcoat and using a shotgun, and the diplomat which is a guy that looks like Abraham Lincoln with a flame thrower. The game has all the right quirky notes that Chaos Engine did, and a similarly Victorian Era meets Steampunk meets 1920s speakeasy feel to it. The artwork is absolutely gorgeous and the movement of the characters felt fluid, with interesting and challenging monsters that you encountered. In the Pax South demo it seemed to largely be locked to the sewer level, and I was amped to see the gameplay unfold very similarly to what I expected with Chaos Engine. Essentially doing something in one area of the map might unlock a secret area in another corner of the map, but also spawned multiple waves of mobs that you then needed to clear.

The game is functionally a twinstick shooter, and the demo was played with xbox one controllers. After a short period of time though I adjusted and managed to play my way through the level and get up to the mini boss at the end of it. Ashgar managed to beat it… I however managed to take out the main encounter… then got super careless and died to something stupid on my way out of the room. There was a line of folks waiting to take the controllers, so I stopped playing… but I would have loved to have had another shot at the game and tried playing some of the other characters. Reportedly on both the game website and the steam profile the final version will include seven different playable characters, each with their own weapons and traits. Another thing that I thought was really fun was the fact that the majority of the world appeared to be destructible. Sure this serves a purpose with explosive barrels, but even when it serves no real purpose it is glorious to see the entire screen erupt in a hail of debris without actually slowing down the frame rate. Reportedly the game will support local and online multiplayer co-op gameplay, which is admittedly something I am looking forward to. I am probably going to convince Ashgar to play through the game with me some weekend… which usually means he carries me super hard as I fail miserably somewhere in the background while looking for loot.

If anything I have said sounds interesting, I highly suggest you check out the game. I have a huge amount of nostalgia for Chaos Engine and this game is riding heavily on that fact. However Ashgar seemed to enjoy it just as much as I did, and he had never even heard of that game. Right now the game has an ambiguous “Spring 2017” release date… which to me means “any time before May” but to Square Enix apparently meant June when they were talking about Heavensward. Whatever the case… the game felt really polished and hopefully that means the game will be available shortly. You can pre-order now on Humble for $9.99 but to be honest I am more than likely going to wait for the steam release since I believe right now… humble disqualifies you from giving proper feedback on steam because it is not an “official purchase”. To be honest the whole “steam purchase” versus “key redemption” thing is a mess when it comes to reviews. Whatever the case it is definitely a game I enjoyed and I am ready to get my Chaos Engine game play back on.

Tale of Dice Games

January 31, 2017 by Belghast

It is bizarre to me how I went into Pax South thinking it would be largely about the Nintendo Switch for me… and it wound up becoming almost entirely about Tabletop gaming. More so it was the tale of dice games… and my experiences trying three different ones. There was King of Tokyo that I had never actually played, and while I found it enjoyable it wasn’t exactly the sort of game I was going to rush right out into the store and purchase. Then there was Dragon Dice… which sounded familiar at the time as a game that TSR once published… and it turns out that in fact it is the same game just self published by the creator now. The problem is that I looked in the general direction of the booth and got sucked in by an extremely motivated salesperson in the form of what I can only guess was the thirteen year old daughter of the creator. I sat down to play… and got Ashgar roped into doing the same. So we played and tried our best to wriggle out of the booth as soon and as politely as possible. It was bad… and not just in a general sense of not fun… but bad in a sense of whoever attacked first essentially put the other player on the ropes for the rest of the game and since attack and defense is out of the same dice roll… it made it extremely hard to ever recover. As a result we avoided anything else that was dice related like the plague… that is until while waiting in the hour and a half long Dauntless line I ended up getting into a random conversation with the folks I was standing shoulder to shoulder with as is the way of PAX. We started talking about our favorite games of the show so far, and one of these other folks mentioned Dice Throne. So before the night was up we wound up making our way over to the Dice Throne booth in the PAX Rising area, where unfortunately no one was giving demos at that moment. However they mentioned that in the tabletop area there was a completely different set up where folks had been playing nonstop. Little did I know that essentially this would be the last thing I played during my time at PAX and would eat up my last few hours.

I am of course swiping images left and right from the Dice Throne twitter and Kickstarter for the purpose of this post. The game itself is a weird mix of dice battling, action RPG and Magic the Gathering starter deck duels. Each player chooses a character to play from the current list of Barbarian, Moon Elf, Pyromancer and Shadow Thief… with Paladin and Monk playable at the show but ultimately stretch goals in the kickstarter. Each character comes with a unique play mat, card deck, five dice, and a sheet that describes their status effects that they can give to opponents and explains the chance of rolling a given symbol on the dice. What made the game addictive to me was the aspect that as you move through the session you can play cards on top of your playmat and upgrade your base abilities. Sometimes this is just a matter of making the abilities more efficient, or having a lower number of dice needed to trigger the effect. In the case of the game where I played the Shadow Thief… some of the cards actually served as two completely different abilities that you could then choose from. I personally only have experience with the Barbarian and Shadow Thief, but I think Ashgar and Paragon wound up playing Shadow Thief vs Paladin… in which I heard that the Paladin is completely brutal.

Regardless of the specific configuration the game is ultimately a game about duels… which admittedly is the part that makes me the most excited. I love tabletop games… but I don’t exactly have a wide circle of people that I can play them with locally. I mean I could branch out and just show up at a game shop and look for people to play… but that isn’t really my way. I am way too introverted to ever make that work. So instead I have limited opportunities usually one friend at a time to play things. Dice Throne is absolutely perfect for this situation because it creates a completely meaningful experience with only two players. In theory this game also works with any multiple of two, in that players can set up 2 vs 2 or 3 vs 3 scenarios and some of the cards would play perfectly into that situation. The reason Magic the Gathering comes into play as a reference for this game is that it is set up in a number of phases: Upkeep, Income and Draw, Main Phase 1, Offensive Roll Phase, Defensive Roll Phase, Main Phase 2, Discard Phase.

Players start out with 50 Health, 1 combat point or CP and 4 cards from their deck with the ultimate goal of reducing the other player down to 0 Health to win the match. Each round the players gain 1 CP during the income phase and draw one card, with the CP being spent to play the various cards they have in their hand. Each character plays a little different in that the Shadow Thief seemed to be all about hitting the 15 CP cap as soon as possible and then striking from the shadows with critical attacks that scale based on the current CP number. The Barbarian seemed to be about healing back lost health and avoiding taking damage by simply overhealing the incoming attack… all the while smashing with big attacks that can easily become unblockable. Barbarian absolutely was “my thing” but it also sounds like the super defensive Paladin might have been a good fit for me as well. Each round of attacks you roll your 5 dice and then take the symbols and numbers and try and make something with them. You are given two rounds of re-rolls as you attempt to hone in on the exact thing you need. There are also cards that shift your abilities so that you can make certain dice wild, or with “samsies” swap any dice to match any other dice. These however take the luck of the draw and the CP to play them when needed.

What I found most interesting is that essentially you are having to look at the symbols and the numbers to see what the best course of action is. All of the characters have something interesting that happens when you roll a small straight (4 numbers in sequence), and something interesting that happens when you roll a large straight (5 numbers in sequence). Then again there are other things that are super powerful that can play off of the other attacks. For example 2 swords and 2 “pow” symbols on the Barbarian gives you an attack that deals less damage… but becomes undefendable which when upgraded serves as an amazing way to finish off your opponent. The Shadow Thief allowed you to shift in and out of the shadows… allowing you to be essentially untargetable until you exit on the next round. Attacking from the shadows allowed you to roll an extra dice as you exited to deal a little bonus damage. Every hero has an ultimate attack that is essentially triggered by rolling five 6s, but in truth I found these pretty freaking hard to make work unless I had a wild card or two available in my hand. There is a lot more nuance that I feel like I cannot adequately cover after literally having only played two games. Suffice to say there is a lot of meat on these bones, and I am sure more than enough to start to develop even a bit of a meta game among players. I was not well suited for the Shadow Thief because the whole poke from the shadows thing is not really my deal. That said I know players that would absolutely excel at that game play style since essentially the Barbarian and the Shadow Thief are playing two completely different games. From what I understand each of the characters plays this way essentially with the Moon Elf focusing on dealing damage while defending for example.

The long and short of this is that as soon as I got back home on Sunday night I went out to the Kickstarter and backed the game. I was completely and thoroughly sold. As of this morning even though the page has not updated they have already hit the Paladin stretch goal so it will be included in the Champion version of the game. Next up is an upgrade to Linen Cards at $35k, Vacuum formed tray at $40k, Thicker Box at $45k and finally the inclusion of the Monk Hero at $65k. With 24 days to go they are already sitting at 200% of the original goal, and I have to think that Pax South is going to give them a lot of good exposure going forward. There was a pair of guys who had literally spent about twelve hours over the weekend playing the game… and wound up serving as surrogate coaches when we had so many people wanting to play the game in the Tabletop area. The rules are pretty simple and easy to pick up, and the game play while actually taking awhile to resolve itself… feels like it moves forward instead of stalling out. I have to say for something in prototype form… the game felt really damned polished. The cards and artwork all felt great… with the only complaint being sticker dice. However the first stretch goal was to upgrade to engraved dice so that will in theory no longer be a thing. I went with the $39 Champion edition which seems to be the point that the majority of backers are entering at, which in theory should give you access to all six characters and slightly nicer multi-tone dice. The base game will include four characters: Shadow Thief, Barbarian, Moon Elf and Pyromancer which sits at $29… so I felt that extra $10 was more than warranted even for the shot at two more characters. Dice Throne was definitely my tabletop game of the show… but in truth I think probably it was my game of the show as a whole. I highly suggest if you have the opportunity to check this out at any conventions between now and the projected November release date that you grab hold of it with both hands.

Kickstarter Link

Heavy Crowns

January 25, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve admittedly been pretty sporadic in my gameplay of Final Fantasy XIV since just shortly after the launch of Heavensward. For whatever reason the story this time never quite clicked in the same way that it did during A Realm Reborn. Additionally Alex never felt nearly as interesting as Coil… so it just felt like I was grasping at things to tie me to the game but struggling to find them. More than all of these I think the two dungeons per cycle business hurt the most, because it turned something that I used to love… Expert Roulette into a grind because there was always the dungeon you enjoyed… and the dungeon you disliked in every patch cycle. All of this said I have been poking my head in periodically and was at least aware of the mentor program. The idea being that Square would create a way to identify players who know lots about the game… which was an interesting theory. In practice it largely just means you have a Tank, DPS and Healer at the level cap. Also as I found out last night it apparently makes you feel like you need to run around barking orders and throwing shade on how bad you feel the rest of the party was doing. Even though I was attuned for it… I never actually ran the second of the 25 player raids called the Weeping City of Mhach. Collectively folks just call it the “Wiping City” and for good reason… because we died an awful lot but given that it was the first time myself or Grace had been in there… I thought we did largely okay.

The funniest part of the night was the Forgall fight… which involves becoming zombie but not going full zombie and avoiding some things while absolutely standing in others. In short it is the traditional insane dungeon fight that simply requires constant execution… and has mechanics that will straight wipe entire parties. It is a rarity that there are fights where you need to use the healer level three limit break… but during the course of this fight we used it at least twice… and there might have been a third time I didn’t realize. We were at a point where we had no tank and maybe three people total still up, and a bunch of us assumed we were wiping it out and running back. We were wrong… as the “Mentor” continued barking orders and telling people to rez this person or that person… during a contorted fight that felt like it took 20 minutes to finally beat. The truth is I had no clue what I was doing, but I finally got finished off by an actual fight mechanic as one of the attacks takes you to 1 hit point… and requires chain healing to keep the tank from instantly dying afterwards. We had maybe a single healer up at the time and I fell down hard… but just in time for another tank to get rezzed and pick it up. I feel like this was the sort of fight where we needed to play Yakety Sax … but slowed down to the point where it almost sounds like a funeral dirge.

The fight that I got the most enjoyment from however had to be Ozma… an encounter that I had heard about for awhile now. Largely I had heard about it being the group killer, in that it required a lot of moving parts that rarely got coordinated properly among the alliances. Thankfully I was on voice chat with my Free Company and they were able to give me enough of a heads up about what I should be doing. It also helps that early into the fight we lose the entire B alliance, giving me a run seeing the mechanics the first time and then allowing me to take that experience into the second smoother attempt. All in all we nailed it pretty well on the second go, and for the most part by the end of the encounter I learned everything that I needed to do to appropriately tank the fight. The reason we were running Wiping City however was to get me some gear… and unfortunately not a single tanky piece dropped. However I do feel confident enough to probably solo queue tank for the place and start soaking up more gear that way. The risk of playing FFXIV irregularly is that the game moves on without you… and I hit yet another wall with the latest patch. I was sitting at 220 from my last attempt to catch up… and this time around the first dungeon requires 230. There are of course a lot of more grindy ways to catch me up… but we were trying to take as many short cuts as possible.

Before disappearing and flaking out last time I had managed to put in some progress on the 235 weapon from Palace of the Dead and as I talked about yesterday our little run pushed me pretty far… but not quite over the tipping point. So last night once finishing the Wiping City, we broke up into a smaller group and did some Palace of the Dead and over the course of a few runs managed to get me to 39 weapon 32 armor. During all of the stuff I managed to accumulate enough Lore tombstones to upgrade my earrings to 230, and at some point during the evening Tam hooked me up with a set of 250 legs to replace my then lowest slot. I had enough cash accumulated to manage picking up the 250 ring as well since my next lowest slot was that. All together those four pieces of gear pushed me up to exactly 230 item level, and thus makes me viable for a lot more content including the dungeon that is blocking my quest progress. Unfortunately however I have had this patch cycle spoiled for me, because before I remembered to turn off player titles… I actually happened to be running Deep Dungeon with someone that was showing their new title off. Now I am not sure exactly how it is going to go down… but I know something is going to go down. Ultimately that is not necessarily going to ruin the impact, just a bit of a bummer to have it spoiled in a way that really should not have even been a thing. While I wouldn’t necessarily count myself as “caught up”, I am at least in a much better place than I was. I need to do a lot more palace of the dead so that I can pick up the next weapon… but that one requires 60 weapon/armor which is still a very very long ways away. My only revision of that content would be to make the end of sequence mini-boss drop one of whatever your lowest rank happens to be armor or weapon. Also of note… you can see that thanks to the new weapon I did some glamouring and am once more the Bunny Samurai.

Restless Weekend

January 23, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, because at least for me it centered around recording our “Games of the Year” show on AggroChat. This is generally speaking a huge ordeal given that our show is made up of six very different minded people. Back during the days when we had four regular hosts it was less of a proceeding but now that we essentially have six people each picking three games a piece… that means we wind up talking about 18 games, which as it turns out divides neatly into two 9 image panels. The above image is the first of these and serves as the backdrop for our normal show card of sorts, however with the text over it you can’t necessarily make out all of the images involved so I decided to post it here. You can as always find the show on AggroChat or my method of choice for sheer simplicity of listening… YouTube. The reason why this largely dominated my weekend is because we ultimately recorded two podcasts that were both two hours long before I set down to edit them. Post edits they both clock in around an hour and twenty minutes, which really is shocking given that I did not actually time anything out in an attempt to make them work as relative set pieces. I guess however if you set out to record nine games per show… the end result comes out fairly evenly. I did make an attempt to shuffle the deck in such a way as to put the games I thought we would most likely talk the longest about divided evenly among the shows.

So we recorded from 8 pm CST until just after midnight, and then I got up around 7:30 Sunday morning and edited until 12:30… and as a result every other element of the weekend felt like it was shoved to one side or the other. Of course all of this madness has a purpose since the double episode is timed perfectly to cover the absence of myself and Ashgar as we go to Pax South. Now in theory Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen could record without me… but that would mean I had the forethought to have the mess that is our show in a state that I could easily hand over the reigns to an understudy. I have not planned ahead that far, and while I do have a series of Audacity and Photoshop projects to speed up the process… I am not sure if I could even properly explain what exactly I do each week. It is my hope however that I managed to not only publish yesterday, but also schedule everything else to publish next Sunday while I am driving home from San Antonio. Staging a publish to happen without me is always a fraught thing for me… because so rarely does it actually work as intended. Even if it does… I am literally stressed beyond reason until I see the tweets show up in my timeline from the publish process actually doing its thing appropriately. In the grand scheme of things however… it is not the most important thing in the world… but it is important to me.

As far as gaming went this weekend that was equally scattered. I patched up Final Fantasy XIV and made it far enough to hit the first instance gate, before ultimately walking away. Similarly I patched up Wildstar, created a Chua Warrior and played to around level seven before once again walking away like a bored child. As far as gaming that managed to last for more than an hour… we had World of Warcraft where I finally hit 35 points on my Protection Artifact and started pushing up Fury instead. I have gotten back in the habit of logging in each day to do my Emissary quest because now there is also a potential legendary upgrade waiting at the end of the grind. I started doing my Time Walking dungeons… but only managed to make it through the first one tanking it before once again wandering away. The game that seemed to stick the hardest was Elder Scrolls Online where I completed a good chunk of Malabal Tor, a zone where I am already completely enthralled by the storyline… even though it involves largely nothing but elves and their internal politics. I’ve decided that the Bosmer are what it takes to make me really enjoy Elves. I am really enjoying the whole lore regarding the Green Lady and the Silvenar, and I guess in truth that was an aspect of the lore that I had either forgotten or ignored in playing other Elder Scrolls games. I even managed to have a few emotional gut punches last night, when I lost characters that I actually really liked during one quest chain. In truth all I want to do right now is hide in my blanket cocoon on the couch and play more ESO, but that said I do want to at some point get a Mythic+ in for the week since I have a +5 Maw of Souls key.