Category: Video Game

You would really think I’d be caught up to all the various high-profile games I’ve played in the last five years.

I’m talking about Dragon Age 2 today because I feel it warrants a brief discussion.  I liked Dragon Age for it’s approach to storytelling and prefer DA2 to DA1 because of it’s comparison to Baldur’s Gate.  If you were gaming RPG’s in the late 90’s, you’ll get what I’m talking about.  I liked Baldur’s Gate, don’t get me wrong.  But I liked the graphical and technical approach to DA2 more.  I liked that they deviated from making two games with similar designs.  That each game has it’s own story, mechanics and approach to the world themes they share in common.

Now, I went into DA2 thinking as many Computer Gamers would think.  Get the PC version, it’ll be prettier.

Was it pretty? Yes.  Pretty-er? I’m not so sure.  My roommate got the Xbox 360 version and I got to compare the differences first-hand.

I appreciated the interface on console more than I did on PC.  I was looking for a single character experience with sidekicks that I didn’t have to manage and a quick and easy interface for using my special powers.  If you’ve played Fable or Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning then you’ll pick up the controls quickly.

PC was great for allowing me to pause the game, move between my party members and setup actions before unpausing and moving on.  I liked it, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.  Hindsight being 20/20 I figured I’d share, in case you were considering picking through the bargain bin for something new to play.

I love strategy games.  They allow for a pacing and approach allowing you a chance to theorize and consider.  Not as frantic and panic stricken as Fighting games or Racers.

Inside that genre you could ask me about almost any title and if I haven’t played it I’ve played something similar.  Whether or not I heard about it is another matter.

Mid last week I picked up a free smartphone game ‘Tiny Tower‘ also available on iPhone (more on that in a moment).  Tiny Towers sets you in a managerial position of operating a highrise starting with the first floor.  The lobby is in itself nothing special as I started on Android.  As a casual game it’s pretty solid, much akin to Game Dev Story what ate my weekend some months back.  You make income from tenants living in your residential levels to work in your various merchant levels.  Each floor you add gives you space to fill with merchants as you wish, each tenant working in a store unlocks the ability to ‘stock’ an additional commodity.  Stocked commodities sell, earning you cash you use to buy more levels.  Each floor can have one of six options, each option having many many variations.

Your tenants each have their own array of stats indicating where they’d best be situated and a dream job.  Placing a resident in their dream job does two things.  One, you get paid 2 Bux you can use to speed up stocking or trade for cash.  Two, one of the three commodities gets doubled for it’s output vastly increasing the profit margin from restocking fees.

Many of the concepts will be familiar to anyone who’s played a mobile/facebook game in the last three years.  The concepts of Do x, Get y are very similar.  It’s the Magic Money approach that caught me off guard and keeps me playing.  The Bux you earn from various tasks ‘can’ be bought with real money as with many games.  But they can also regularly and easily be earned by just playing the game.

Visitors will show up periodically including VIP’s that reward you in cash or Bux for helping them get where they’re going.  All in all, I can play this like a Facebook game and plug in for five minutes every hour or so.  Or I can keep playing, sending visitors along their way and making progress as I go.  That being said, I’ve logged more hours in Tiny Towers than I thought I might.  I had fun and for ‘Free’ I can’t suggest anything other than Try It Out.

XCOM has a rich and well respected history as turn-based strategy with strong combat themes.  The core idea is that aliens are attacking Earth and you’re the only line of defense.  I haven’t actually played the latest incarnation but everything I’ve read and seen suggests it’s a quality addition to the XCom lineage.  A word of caution, XCOM is and has always been a strong mix of Long-Term strategic resource management and Tactical effort.  From my understanding this isn’t a ‘fast’ game.

Summer was an ugly dry-spell for gaming as my interests are highly focused.  I played a significant amount of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning after the parent studio closed shop.  It was in the news, you can google the closure and read all about it.

I saw the closure as an opportunity to strike early and fast.  And so I bought a copy of KoA: Reckoning at barely under release price new.  I bought all of the extra quest DLC, hoping to avoid any future cutoff on account of the studio closure.

And then I played for nearly a week straight.  My girlfriend went out of town to visit family and so I spent more time focused on it than I might have normally.  Anyone who liked Fable but had some second thoughts I will heartily recommend to this game.  It’s great, it’s that single person quest game in a style similar to Fable but without some of the naggling mechanical breakdowns.  And sweet mother of god.. it’s long.  40 odd hours in and i’m only maybe 2/3 through the main plot and some of the side quests.  I wholly expect another 10 or more hours out of clearing all the major milestones.  This is a great game with crafting, questing and boss-style fights.  An Xbox exclusive, definitely worth checking out.

Late August saw the release of Guild Wars 2 which I already talked about.  I’ll just take this time to say it’s worth it.  If you like MMO’s, are tired of the classic quest grind but still want that fantasy ‘save the world’ experience, then this is for you.  I’ve invited a number of my friends to play and all my mmo-centric fans are enjoying it.  It’s a highly social game, rewarding you for helping players from a defeated state and for assisting them in combat.  Nobody’s penalized for partying, no xp share fractionalization for joining up with your four chums.  I’m still up to my eyeballs in thrill for the game even after three weeks of exposure.

Mid September saw the release of Borderlands 2 which is challenging FTL for what scraps of attention Guild Wars 2 is leaving behind.  Borderlands 2 is a FPSRPG.  That is, you shoot guns and do quests and get xp from the First-Person perspective.  And boy howdy does it have guns.  The first game had a randomization system proving that no two guns will ever be exactly the same.  Story tells that the sequel only does it better with refinements to this and other systems streamlining an otherwise well-structured system.  More of the adolescent humor dotted with quality plot development. This is the B-Movie Action Flick you’re going to go see with your friends even though you know it’s just going to have big muscles, guns and explosions.  You know what you’re getting in Borderlands 2 and dammit, I want to play.  But I’m holding out, Borderlands 2 is a co-op game and there’s no good reason to play alone if you don’t have to.

FTL is a space strategy game in the likeness of Rogue and Rogue-clones.  You have a ship, a crew and a series of random events based on where you send your ship.  At a measly 10 bucks I tried it out on a whim since I passed on the Kickstarter they ran several months ago.  I’m amazed and pleased.  Simple gameplay with a structured plot you can replay to experience random events every time.  A game I can pick up for five minutes and not spend 2 1/2 minutes just loading.  More of an rpg than really a space game, your crew gains xp, fights off boarding pirates and aliens and douses fires when necessary.  I recommend checking youtube as the screenshots don’t really do it justice.  And for my strategy/rpg fans surely you should give this an extra close look.

And that, was Summer 2012.  If nothing catches up to me in the interim, we’ll be talking again near the end of Fall.

-Mercator

I played three games this weekend that will later likely receive their own discussion.  Each is awesome for it’s own reasons.

Hero Academy

An amusing turn based strategy game where your team of dudes trash the other guys’ team of dudes.  It’s Multiplayer only with challenges in place to hone your skills and amuse you between turns.  A game doesn’t take a lot of time overall, but you can spend minutes with an individual turn just trying to decide how best to beat the snot out of your opponent’s healer.  Undo/Redo buttons in games is an insane addition to the “I can do that better” pursuit.

It’s only 10 bucks via Steam for us PC users or if you’re IOS enabled, I highly recommend you pick it up via your phone/tablet first (the character packs are cheaper).

Symphony

One look from across the room hooked me.  I love brightly lit games that don’t try to fool you with fancy sprites.  Thusly, I loved Geometry Wars and still do.  Symphony takes a similar approach with wireframed enemies flooding into your vertical scrolling battlefield.  Oh right.. the battlefield is your music.  Each level a song from your music collection you select.  Each level completed rewards you with a random upgrade you can unlock and upgrade via points you earn.

Like a weird combination of Gradius, Geometry Wars and Windows Media Player.  It has varying difficulty levels and of course some songs are harder based on tempo and where/when enemies come in to attack you.  I thought Dragonforce would be hard, but Rush’s 2112 was particularly abusive with it’s changing tempo.

My only complaint is that it doesn’t support songs over 10 minutes in length.  A rude discovery to be sure, I was enjoying it so much I started to envision practicing on my self-described Endurance Level with a select 45 minute track of Going Quantum’s Dubstep mix.

<cries>

Also 10 bucks and totally worth it.

EVE Online

I continued and continue to play EVE.  Not being one of those games you eventually ‘beat’, I pursue stronger economic footing and that right mix of people that makes playing consistently personally rewarding.

I left Etoilles Mortant LTD, a corp I’d been with for nearly a year after LMCG and I parted ways.  EML brought some interesting game services to my attention.  Namely, a ‘can system’ with connected API where you could check a website and see what you’d deposited and it’s relative value and what the corp noted as your owed amount.  A number of other services were available from the page I visited.  Services I think are incredibly handy and every corp should have.

I’m off to Lost Dawn Chaos, a multi-wing Corp with it’s foot in Mining, Missions and a host of other activities.  I’m liking them so far, the only thing I could ask for more is a corp with a stronger PST population.

I’m realizing potentials now that I wish could have been expressed to me a year ago, or two years ago.. Oh what hindsight will tell you at every turn.