Steampowered Sunday Archives - Page 8 of 8

Far Cry 3

January 26, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #3

I guess at this point Steampowered Sunday is a real thing now. I have friends nudging me in certain directions towards games I have in my steam list that I have yet to play. Today I intended to play one game, but wound up playing another as I didn’t really plan ahead and pre-emptively install it. So instead I decided to choose a game I did install over the Christmas break but never got around to playing. One of my good friends snagged Far Cry 3 from my Steam wish list and gifted it to me during the insane Christmas sale. I had always heard really amazing things about the game, so it sounded like something I would enjoy.

Already Installed DirectX Checkbox

Be warned today’s post is going to be far more about the frustrations of trying to play a game… than actually playing one. I had installed Far Cry 3 beforehand, but never actually fired it up. So of course when I went to launch the game I had to suffer through the usual steam bullshit that involves installing every driver and redistributable known to man. You would think that by now steam would have figured out a way to set a machine level flag that says “we’ve made this sucker install directx over 10 times, surely we can take it easy on him now”. On top of the normal bullshit… I had to deal with something I had never seen before called UPlay.

I guess this means that I have never actually played a Ubisoft game on the PC, since this seems to be required to play any of them. For starters it took a truly silly amount of time to download and install, and then it prompted me for a login. Since I didn’t think I had an account, I stubbed out the normal “Belghast” login, only to be told that it already existed. At this point I scratch my head because maybe at some point in the past I did in fact set up UPlay. I notice there is a handy reset password option, so I went through the steps to reset it to my email address.

At no point did it say “dumbass you don’t have an account”, it just said it would be sending an email to reset my password. I waited a truly silly amount of time, refreshing the email window, and apparently locked my account out in the process. However no emails actually arrived even after scanning the bowels of my gmail account, and sifting through half a dozen broken english versions of “your battle.net account is being banned” phishing attempts. Turns out I am guessing I really do not have a UPlay account, either that or it was somehow set up on the PS3 and seemingly irrelevant to my PC. So either this happened or there really are more Belghasts out in the world, as a result I had to set up my account on an old username that used for years.

Gameplaying Time?

So finally I am able to log into the game and launch it. I am greeted by the usual cinematic that I ignore and keep pressing the escape key trying to skip out of as soon as possible. It appears that I am a rich d-bag, and have equally rich and d-bag friends that are amped about spending my trust fund on an island vacation. Apparently also at some point we think it is a great idea to skydive onto a pirate held island… because you know the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney never harmed us… so surely the real thing will just give us candy or something. Color me surprised when we manage to get kidnapped and held for ransom so our equally rich and d-bag parents to pay.

At this point after spending the first hour of the morning trying to get into the game due to the frustration that is UPlay… I am wanting to slaughter everything in sight. Just give me a gun, point me in the direction of a slaver and I will go Rambo on their asses and save the day. Conveniently for me, every single bad guy in the game seems to be wearing the same red shirt and red hat… making it super handy for drawing crosshairs down on them. I love it when bad guys shop at the same place, because I can’t be bothered to think before blowing them away.

But Wait… Stealth Time

There are few things I hate more in the world, than having to sneak around and be stealthy in video games. So when I finally get control of my character what do I get to do? Sneak around and avoid being seen as I play through a super on-rails cinematic. This is one of the things that frustrates me the most about modern games… namely those that started their life originally as a console game. They seem to relish the concept of making you play through a bunch of shit before actually letting you play the game. If I have to follow a predetermined path, while doing a sequence of events that are unchangeable… it is a cinematic. Letting me control my character as I go through the cinematic just makes it all the more unhinging.

For me the ideal intro to a game like this is the Elder Scrolls style… you arrive as a prisoner, someone breaks out out and then bam you are on your merry way causing mayhem. I guess the more I think about it… Oblivion and Skyrim both had some pretty frustrating “follow the dumbass npc” sequences early on… but they felt brief enough and in both cases you got to diverge from the script heavily if you desired. This on the other hand was sneaking about following a path set aside by your macho army brother… all the while you have nothing that you can really do other than throwing some rocks. Man I am a badass at throwing rocks… let me tell you.

Can It Be Fun Time?

So despite your best attempts at avoiding being seen… your dumbass brother runs right into the pistol of the big baddy that you met earlier in the cage. So you get to play a fun game of trying to mash your space bar hard enough to keep your brother from bleeding out. Guess what… he bleeds out regardless of how hard you play whack a mole with your keyboard. In a strange turn of events… instead of just shooting you in the back like you would think the big ultimate bad guy would do…. he decides to release you out into the jungle. So once again I am thinking to myself… man can I finally have control of my character? Can I finally play this game and do shit at my own pace? NOPE!!!

What you get to do now is have a weird sequence as you run through the jungle avoiding bears and helicopters flying over, flashing the tree line with spotlights and trying to shoot you. During this odd sequence you are once again following a predetermined path, and you seem to be able to take damage but never actually die. At one point it told me to bandage myself, which I did… but it really did not seem to have much to do with success or fail. Eventually I followed the path, went out onto a rope bridge… I lost a fight with a helicopter and just like baby Moses got tossed into a river only to get found by a seemingly friendly stranger.

Thanks Three Dog

While he sounds absolutely nothing like him… this dude for some reason reminds me of Three Dog from Fallout 3. So I completely missed his name, because in my head he will forever be Three Dog. Basically he saved you because you have the heart of a warrior… which if funny because up until this point all your character has done is whine constantly about being in the jungle. I seriously expected him to break out the Dante from Clerks “I’m not even supposed to be here today”. Essentially he sets up the premise of the story. The pirate slavers are taking over the island and these mystical tattoo warriors are fighting back. Since you escaped the camp alive, you are going to be their great white hope to save the day. You will learn powers that somehow show up on your tattoo because… magic reasons.

So at this point… I am finally starting to wonder if I get to play the game yet or not. Three Dog gives you some cash and lets you go shopping for a weapon… which basically means you get to buy a pistol… because all you can afford is a pistol. Now he sends you out into the jungle on a few missions… the first of them is to destroy a jammer on a near by radio tower. All in all this goes pretty safely other than the fact there is a static spawn snake that just sits there are the base of the tower. A bullet to the head and you are up the tower and mapping the world. It seems that as you open up the towers you allow the vendors to get new and spiffier stuff.

Capture Objectives

Once the actual game started after wading through what felt like three hours of bullshit… it was pretty fun. Essentially the game play is a lot like Just Cause 2, where you move around the map weakening the presence of the enemy forces in your area. Unlike Just Cause however you actually capture the elements for your blue team. Unlocking new stuff gives you new power-ups in the form of magical tattoo powers, and unlocks new weapons. Additionally in each outpost you capture there is a mission board that gives you hunting and kill missions. Hunting seems extremely important in the game as it allows you to upgrade your backpack… allowing you to carry more weapons and equipment.

The kill missions however seem extremely frustrating. I took the first one, and like always I paid little attention to the mission introduction. Look I am a big dumb monkey, give me a gun and point me in the direction of the enemies and I will destroy them. I however rapidly failed the mission because guess what they wanted me to do… that’s right sneak around and do some ninja stuff, using the nifty new takedown move that Three Dog just taught me. I have a feeling that if this is the case… I will likely avoid these entirely because like I said before… stealth is not a thing that Belghasts do best.

Will It Blend?

All in all the game really is pretty fun, once they actually let you play it. This game would have been so much better had they just created a simple reason for you to escape and let you pick up from the moment you get rescued by Three Dog without having to suffer through the horrible on-rails pseudo game play. Hell I feel like it would have been better had your parachute just landed you in the middle of the native camp, and they simply told you that your family was captured. Bam instant call to action, and instant adventure time. If you can suffer through two hours of crap, then the game is pretty fun, or maybe you don’t dislike the modern on-rails psuedo-cinematic as much as I do.

In either case it is worth a play through, so long as you don’t end up paying much for the game. This is definitely not going to be in the same league for me as Skyrim, Bioshock, Dishonored or even Just Cause 2. However it is still pretty fun and I like the map control aspect of the gameplay. I just wish there was more direct action early on that let me run amok and cause mayhem. Granted you have to understand that I have not played Far Cry 2 either, I have only actually played the first one. In that game you pretty much dropped straight into the action, and I was expecting the same from Far Cry 3. I figured sooner or later I would give a review that I didn’t just absolutely gush over the game like I did about Hammerwatch and to a lesser extent Steamworld Dig. I give Far Cry 3… 3 Mehs out of Meh.

Hammerwatch

January 19, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #2

Steampowered Sunday episode was relatively well received, and that was a pleasant surprise. So much so that it seems that my friends have conspired to grief me. When I set forth on this journey I probably had a years worth of games to play before I needed any assistance. However over the course of the week a good friend of mine, Ashgar, decided that I needed to play a game of his choosing. So we made plans yesterday to meet up this morning and play some Hammerwatch multiplayer. I have to say it was a really enjoyable hour, before I needed to leave due to some bad news.

Red Warrior Needs Food Badly

For starters, Hammerwatch is the fruition of the yet another Steam Greenlight process. You can buy it without discount for $10 from steam, and at that price I consider it well worth it. However thanks to the insanity that is the steam sale, you can generally get it at a significant discount. It is in every way the spiritual successor to the original arcade Gauntlet by Atari. For those with no cultural reference to this king of all quarter munchers… it is basically a four player game that focuses on each player providing a different class. From what I have seen the single player game is just as enjoyable, but the real fun comes from multiple friends working together.

Classes you have to choose from:

The Paladin

This guy is your basic melee class. Special attack includes a really handy charge and if you time it just right you can deflect projectiles with the basic attack. Upgrades later increase the frontal cone of the attack, which makes kiting mobs and killing them from the protection of a corner doable.

The Ranger

This is your standard archer ranged attack class. We noticed that there was a significant damage drop off the further the arrows travelled. Seemed to have the longest range of all of the classes but dealt the least damage. Special attack is a bomb which comes in super handy when clearing large numbers of mobs.

The Wizard

This one threw me for a loop a bit. I expected a long ranged fireball when in reality it only actually travels about 5 character lengths. The special however is a really powerful dragons breath like attack that does massive damage to anything in a short arc in front of the wizard.

The Warlock

The Warlock is the oddest class. It has the highest starting health, and really fast mana regen. However it’s base attack is a relatively weak dagger melee attack. The special however is a really powerful bolt attack with a range similar to that of the ranger but it seems to consume about half of the starting mana pool. This is going to lead to some really different game play as I figure there will be a lot of the time you hang back waiting on your mana to recharge.

Anyone who has ever played the original Gauntlet will recognize the game play immediately. This is one of those games that I highly suggest you hook up a controller for. Even moreso I found it far easier to control using a dpad as opposed to an analog stick. By default player one will be set up to use keyboard controls, so make sure you switch things up before getting into game if you choose to play it with a controller. The first thing to know about Hammerwatch is that the levels are custom designed and this is not a Rogue-like. That means traversing each level happens in a non-linear fashion. There were several times we had to go back to a lower level because a switch triggered something we could do down there.

We started playing the game on normal mode, but to be honest we did not even last the first level. On normal, heal options are very few and far between, so this lead myself and Ashgar to be moving around perpetually looking for the next apple or orange. The positive however is that unlike its predecessor you cannot shoot the food. You can however accidentally charge through two food items screwing your friend out of getting any. Yeah I did this a few times when there were apples placed between dart traps. Of note… the Paladin charge is totally a great way to cheese these. Everyone else has to time the traps… something I learned when I was playing the ranger later on.

Unlike Gauntlet, gold is not simply a scoring mechanism. As you go throughout the level destroying barrels in the proud Diablo tradition, the coins you pick up get added to the purse of both players… which is a really nice mechanic. I know I started out trying to ration my pickups to make sure I was not absolutely looting Ash into the poor house. Additionally there are big coins that you can pick up called Vendor Coins. If you look up in the lower right hand corner of the above screen you will see at this point we had picked up 4 of them, and each one gives you a permanent .5% discount. The gold you collect is spent on vendors, and the above vendor is one that changes what your weapons do. For example Sword Damage 1 increased the total amount of damage I dealt, and Sword Arc 1 as I mentioned above changed my sword swing from a 90* arc to a 120* arc making it far more useful.

During the course of the hour we spent playing we found weapon vendors, combo vendors and stat pool vendors. The combo vendors introduced a new mechanic that if you kill 10 creatures within 1 second of each other you triggered your combo effect. For example I ended up buying an ability that procced a heal whenever this happened. Ash on the other hand decided to spend his gold on increasing the amount of time between kills, allowing him to get combos easier.

Obviously both are useful and needed abilities, but unfortunately at the time we were near the vendor we only had enough money to purchase one. Combo Nova was one I think we were both eyeing, as it did a huge AOE damage nova whenever you managed to get a combo. The stat pool vendors were pretty self explanatory, allowing you to either increase your total health pool or your total mana pool. I ended up purchasing a health pool bump which nearly doubled my total available health. We were not nearly as good as we could have been about breaking barrels and picking up gold, so I imagine we could have likely afforded a lot more if we were more carefully clearing the rooms.

My biggest suggestion while playing this game, is to trust your Gauntlet inspired instincts. There was a mechanic that we just instinctively dealt with that did turn out to be exactly what we thought it was. The game has mob spawners, that work just like they did in Gauntlet. If you look above you can notice there are two brown spots on the ground. I wish I had taken a picture of these before we destroyed them, but these were previously Beetle spawners. Just like in Gauntlet they appear in a room full of the same kind of mob, and slowly over time spit out more of them. They seem to be only triggered when you actually aggro the mobs surrounding them.

The strategy that seemed to work is that Ashgar would gather up the attention of the mobs that were already spawned kiting them around… and I would make a beeline directly for the spawners taking them out. One of the worst rooms we encountered had 5 worm spawners in them, and Ash through some streak of insanity managed to solo the encounter because I went off in a different direction. That is another thing of note… this game is not limited to having both characters on screen at the same time, so as a result you can wander off in completely different directions and get lost. I am thankful that we were both on mumble at the time as we went through the levels. Ash and I play together enough, and have a similar enough viewpoint that our crude directions were usually successful in allowing us to meet back up.

As you wander through the levels there will be various objectives. If you look at the top of the screen you can see four indicators with numbers beside them. These are in order… Bronze Key, Silver Key, Gold Key and Extra Lives. The keys work exactly like you would expect them to work based on the Gauntlet lineage. You pick up a key and then walk into a wall of the same color. There are many objectives that are hidden behind walls. One sequence involved us stepping on four different runes, which then spawned a vendor coin and a treasure chest when the sequence finished. The above image shows a sequence of four switches that apparently need to be activated to unlock the boss of the level. We however did not survive long enough to actually see what a boss looks like.

The bane of our existence seemed to be spike traps…which I did not unfortunately get a screenshot for. There were multiple varieties of these, some were switch puzzles that involved opening up a clear path through the spikes. Other instances were simply timed puzzles that involved moving through them in a pattern as they cycled on and off. In all cases however they were essentially a oneshot kill. Figuring these out pretty much accounted for most of our lost lives. I figure going in again we would fare far better. The nastiest surprise is while moving across a large field of synchronized spike traps… that mobs would in fact follow you across.

Like I said we started the game on Normal and found it to be extremely challenging. Briefly before I needed to log for a bit we tried playing different classes on Easy mode. Primarily the only real difference that I could tell is that they were a lot more healing options. Where on normal there would be a single apple spawn, there might be three on easy. The mobs dealt the same amount of damage and seemed to spawn in the same numbers. We did extremely poorly because really… we chose classes that were not well suited for our play styles. I tried the Ranger and Ash tried the Wizard. In truth the Paladin/Ranger combo was just about perfect for the two of us, so I think switching to playing the game on easy we would have made it through to the boss without any issues. I think we did fine for two complete noobs to the game.

One of the cool things about dying however is that you get a nifty graphical breakout of all of the statistics of the last play session. As you can see, Ash totally kicked my ass in total damage dealt. While not worth taking a death for, it does seem to a little bit of a consolation prize that you get to see the cool info about what just happened. To wrap things up, if you were like me and you spent large chunks of your childhood feeding your allowance a quarter at a time to Gauntlet… this is a game you will really appreciate on so many levels. If you are like Ash and way the hell too young to have experience Gauntlet when it was an actual thing… but tend to have an appreciation for the classics. This also will likely be a really fun experience for you.

However if you are someone who needs cutting edge graphics and deep story interaction. This is not your game. It is old school quarter munching dungeon crawling at its finest. However in this case you cannot simply feed the beast more money to save your sorry ass. You have a limited number of lives and cannot pay to make up for your lack of skill. I figure given time I will cease sucking quite as bad as I did during this little play session. I would definitely buy the game again given the chance, and I might gift it to someone in the future to spread the madness if playing this becomes a regular occurrences.

How Are You Liking This?

So I am curious… how are you enjoying Steampowered Sundays? This is only the second one but I am curious about what you like and don’t like about this approach. I am also interested in any suggestions for types of games you would like to see me play. Generally I am looking for a game I can get in for a few hours Sunday morning and get enough of a feel for it that I can do a write-up. Additionally I am limiting it to games that I have either not played at all, or have only played for less than an hour… preferably less than 30 minutes. I have a large backlog of games so I am sure I can keep finding something that sounds interesting each week.

SteamWorld Dig

January 12, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #1

This is the beginning of a brand new segment for my blog. In truth for awhile now I have been trying to come up with a good way to start this feature. Originally I was going to call it “Sunday Indie Sunday” but that never really got off the ground. The idea behind Steampowered Sunday is really simple. Over the years I have built up a large backlog of titles from steam sales and the various humble bundles that I have never actually played or at the very least not really played enough to feel like I have given the game its due.

My goal is to grab a “new to me” game each Sunday and give it a decent amount of play time. Afterwards of course I will be writing a blog entry about the game. This isn’t necessarily a review, but more my thoughts and impressions about the game play I just experienced. My friends are already talking about griefing me by adding more games to my list. So we will see how far I can actually make a dent and if I can actually keep up with this feature.

Steamworld Dig

The first title to explore seemed like an obvious pick… since the feature is called Steampowered Sunday, then why not delve into a game called Steamworld Dig. This however is a playthrough that almost didn’t happen. It seems that I found a bug in FRAPs, that no one really expected. It seems as though frap is configured to ignore Steam, and instead of correctly searching for steam.exe in memory, they are just ignoring any process with steam in the title. As a result… SteamWorld Dig seems to be incompatible with fraps. Luckily I remembered that you can also take screenshots through the steam overlay with f12. While this is not exactly what I like to do… as I tend to disable screenshot functionality and have fraps do all the work… that way all of my screenshots end up in the same directory… I made do.

I picked up Steamworld Dig some time ago during one of those insane steam sales. Basically if it is a game that I have been wanting and it drops at or below $5 then it is pretty much an instant buy for me. I know sooner or later I will get around to playing it, and especially now with this new Sunday feature. The premises is deceptively simple… Metroid-Vania with Mining. In the game you play a robot miner who is coming to Tumbltown to follow in the footsteps of his uncle. The uncle had the claim on the mine directly below the town, and as such your are exploring the mine looking for resources and upgrades.

The game employs an inventory system that looked deceptively like Minecraft, but in reality at least to the point at which I have played, you can only remove blocks, you cannot ever replace them other than with ladders that can be purchased for 5 coins each. The result is that initially you can only store quantities of three different ores at the same time. This quickly becomes an issue as before getting very deep you are regularly getting half a dozen different ores. This involves a lot of running back and forth to the surface to sell your wares in the little town. Each time you sell you are working towards an upgrade threshold cap. Each time you earn a certain amount of money you unlock additional new upgrades.

The upgrades are then purchased with the coins you are earning from selling ore. Initially you have access to the trading post and Cranky’s upgrade store, but I am assuming much like Bastion that over time other places may open for business. The first upgrade you can get is to your pick axe which similar to upgrades in Minecraft allows you to mine existing ore types faster, and the ability to break new ore blocks that you previously could not. Similarly in the second tier of upgrades you can add an additional bag slot allowing you to carry up to four types of ore at a time. This of course means fewer trips back up to the surface, and more time down below mining.

As you explore, you will uncover caves that shoot off of the main dig. These usually hide power ups and unlock new functionality. For example the waygate above gave me the ability to equip run boots, which means while pressing down X on my 360 controller I can run, and in the style of Super Mario World, jumping while running increases the range and height of the jumps. Additionally there are blocks that disintegrate as you walk over them, so in many of these puzzle caves the only way to get through is to run quickly over top of them. All of this progression will seem extremely familiar to anyone who has played a Metroid of Castlevania game. unlock tools so you can get to new places and unlock more tools.

The game play gets progressively more and more difficult which adds an interesting spin on the Metroidvania genre. Since you cannot replace rock, you are essentially making your own playfield at all times by the choices you make as to what to dig and where to dig it. This means you can make life hell as you remove the wrong block at the wrong time. The game play is more about what you choose to leave standing and less about digging down to a specific objective. Above you can see my first death as I managed to get squashed by a rock that until this point I did not realize would fall down when I mined under it. This is also a decent time to highlight the lamp bar on the upper right corner of the screen.

As you dig down your lamp light decreases at a steady rate. There are various fossils that will wake up when you get close to them and spawn worms. Killing these will drop an item that does two things. Firstly it will refill one bar of your health, and secondly it will add oil to your lamp meter letting you stay down longer. The only problem is it becomes pretty easy to dig deeper than you can possibly return from on a single lamp charge. There really seems to be no penalty for going without lamp other than the fact that you cannot see what you are doing. This means that you cannot identify what type of block you are mining your way into… which is suicide since there are the boulders that can crush you placed throughout the levels at an ever increasing pace.

The Wrap-Up

The game play is extremely fun and I found myself spending an hour or so playing the game before reaching a point at which I thought I could realistically write up this blog post. The only thing lacking with the game seems to be a point. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, but both Metroid and Castlevania and the modern equivalent Guacamelee all have a narrative that drives the pace of the story ahead. SteamWorld Dig on the other hand has a series of small objectives, but I am not sure if I am really building towards anything meaningful. I am digging so that I can get stuff that will let me dig faster. I don’t really care about the cast of robots that inhabit Tumbletown… yet. Over time this might change, but at an hour into the game I really am not feeling like there is some great purpose behind what I am doing.

That is to say, the game is completely enjoyable without this deeper meaning. The game play is fun, the controls are responsible and it has as good of a wall jump implementation as I have seen. The problem is it just feels like there should be something more. I mean I realize you wander into the town and find your dead uncle, but this doesn’t seem to cause much intrigue or story to happen. Hell at this point I would even take a pokemon-esc “I want to be the very best” dialogue sequence to explain why I care about mining. I realize these are robots, but even robots should have a reason why they are doing things.

Would I purchase the game again after having played it? Honestly yeah I would suggest folks picking it up, but only doing so at a deep discount. The game play is fun enough and it seems like a glorious time waster. It is the type of game you can just zone out and enjoy the mechanics of. The animations are cute and the sound design is really nice in places. I just keep hoping that eventually I will uncover something even vaguely resembling a plot.