Year: 2003
Genre: Role-Playing
Website: https://www.kingdomofloathing.com
Shane:
- Platform: Browser
- Hours logged: 13.0
- Playthroughs: 0
- Rating: 7/10
Notes and Discussions:
- Shane (7/24/2014): I really have a thing for browser based games. A friend of mine from my WoW days who works as a game developer used to talk about wanting to build up his own game development company to create a passion game with a small following (2 - 4 thousand folks or so) to retire and muck around with content. When I play browser games like KoL, I think of this friend and smile.
Some of my favorite elements of Kingdom of Loathing are its simple art, intuitive and basic controls, minimal starting options, and absurdly complex amount of content in mid to late game. The dialog is pithy and clever throughout with pop culture references shoehorned in wherever possible. The classes are uniquely un-heroic sounding and the quest givers, by and large, really aren't impressed with you. All of this combines into a remarkably consistent feeling game that has plenty of reasons to play a bit tomorrow.
Which brings us to an important point. This game limits your interaction with it. There are a maximum number of actions that can be taken each day. You get a free 40 actions at rollover each night when the servers go dark for a bit of maintenance. More actions are available through eating and drinking items that you find or craft in the game. You can carry actions over from day to day, but only to the hard limit of 200 at a time. This left me with a strange compulsion to try and maximize my cocktail crafting to get the most actions and stat boosts that I could each day. Then I found out about the phases of the moons in the game giving bonuses to the stats gained on certain days...
And this is why I only gave the game a 7. I am not willing to devote my life to it. I actually did love many parts of it. I am also not done with it, but I did get exhausted by all of the content. I played the first few days without the aid of the wiki. I then spent a few days looking just at items that stumped me as to their usage. A few days after that I found myself googling the title of every quest and every item. I was spending as much time on the wiki as I was in the game itself.
*Shane's note* As I was writing this post I ended up pausing here for several weeks. Whatever closing passage that I was going to write but couldn't figure out how to word is now interestingly unimportant. I haven't returned to this game in the last several weeks. Admittedly I spent much less time at the computer during that time, and what time I did spend gaming I was playing with other people.
I think it is telling that I wasn't able to finish my thoughts on the game earlier. It is also fitting that I have nothing more dramatic to say now. I still feel that I will return to this game at some later time. In the mean time, what time I have to play games is likely to be spent with more "quick reward" fare.
Year: 2014
Genre: General
Website: http://dogeminer.se
Shane:
- Platform: Browser
- Hours logged: 4.0
- Playthroughs: 2
- Rating: 4/10
Notes and Discussions:
- Shane (2/27/2014): I gave myself a playthrough on this one because I bought all of the upgrades offered. It took me a couple days to accomplish this but the time logged is "active" time.
Dogeminer is a CookieClicker knockoff. I was digging around on one of the dogecoin subreddits and someone posted this. In short, I saw it, played it, smiled a lot and used it to learn a bit more about javascript. I seem to have a weakness for these silly side projects that people throw down. Goes to show you that there is an audience for damn near anything a person wants to make.
Year: 2014
Genre: General
Website: http://dhmholley.co.uk/civclicker.html
Shane:
- Platform: Browser
- Hours logged: 10.0
- Playthroughs: 1
- Rating: 6/10
Notes and Discussions:
- Shane (3/25/2014): I love finding this kind of thing. I played the hell out of Cookie Clicker (also by Ortiel) and Candies Box in the past. This game is in the same mindspace.
It starts with very few options. Summarizing a quickplay would play out about like this:
Click the resource buttons until you can build a hut. Once you have a hut, click more resources until you can buy a worker. Have the worker start collecting resources for you until you can buy more huts and more workers. Keep this up until you can unlock stuff. Build a military when you can. Use that military to invade other towns, gaining you more space to build and more resources.
There are some added quirks. Things like dead bodies need to be buried in graveyards. Graveyards are expensive because they cost herbs, which are a second tier resource which cannot be directly "mined." You have a chance of getting an herb when you get a wood. (Skins work this way with food. Ore works this way with stone.) If you don't bury the dead then your workers will get sick and not produce. If you don't have enough space to build then your people get mad and produce less of whatever function you set them to perform.
The game is one of formulaic balance. It... feels RIGHT to me. I can sit in front of my browser and feel really good that I throw more workers at agriculture so that I can have more workers getting other resources so that I can have more soldiers so that I can raid bigger targets to steal more land to build more houses for more workers... You see the cycle. It makes me feel all warm inside. Like there is an order to the universe. Must be how the faithful feel.
Then we get to the other reason I love these games. They are built with JavaScript. I have an awesome job right now where I get to break things. All day long, I am tasked with breaking things. Software things. High tech things that people poured thought, time, love, and other fluids into and most of the time they are really proud of those things. Given that most of my job involves breaking things on the internet I encounter a lot of JavaScript. Here is the problem: When I started this job, I knew NOTHING about JavaScript.
So then I found these browser games. I play through, learning how the developer intended it to be played. I give it a playthrough, because I owe the creators that, then I dig in and start mucking with the numbers. I use this to learn stuff. And I rejoice! Messing with these games taught me how to use the console in my browsers to track which functions call which variables and where all of this is stored. I had to learn how the DOM was built to know what I was looking at. In order to "cheat" I had to study and that made me powerful... or something.
Uh... Moral is... if you really want to do something, come up with a really good justification. Then do it. And make sure you learn something.
