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: 2002
Genre: Role-Playing
Website: --
Lee:
- Platform: PC
- Hours logged: 43.5
- Playthroughs: 1
- Rating: 8/10
Notes and Discussions:
- Lee (3/18/2014): I remembered playing Dungeon Siege just after I moved to Oregon nearly 10 years ago. A few weeks ago, I got the wild urge to relive that experience, and a Google search showed that Steam had the game. I was so excited to play Dungeon Siege that I bought the bundle containing all three games in the series. Did I mention that I love Steam? Which reminds me of this subtly hilarious moment in gaming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vewmAjTqGHg.
What did I like about Dungeon Siege? This game held a pretty decent nostalgic factor (though it was nothing compared to that of two similar entries in the gaming universe, Diablo and Diablo II). I have also been needing to get a good RPG going, and this game definitely satisfied. The game graphics were slightly outdated, but there was clearly a lot of effort put into the creation of the rich and appealing landscapes, structures, and dungeons. I also enjoyed the straightforward character leveling mechanism. Each of the characters in your party can gain experience in four different skills (melee combat, ranged combat, combat magic, and natural magic) by simply using those skills. When enough XP is gained in a particular skill, that skill levels up. And finally, another aspect that I enjoyed...the loot! My obsessive nature dictated that, out of the time I spent playing this game, hours were dedicated to sorting loot, equipping characters, and selling off the excess and inferior equipment.
The things that I didn't like were mostly related to interface issues. The controls took some getting used to. For some reason, I kept wanting to use the WASD keys to move my characters around, instead of clicking around on the screen with the mouse. The ability to select your party members by clicking on the actual characters (not just the character icons on the screen) led me to constantly selecting random characters from my party when trying to attack mobs or navigate through the different levels. The AI for the inactive party members seemed to have a lot of customization options, but none of it worked exactly how I wanted it to, and my dipshit healer and my mule kept getting lost or killed. I did use the character icons on the screen to select characters and open up individual character inventories quite a bit, but the icons ate up a huge amount of the screen real estate, and I found myself constantly moving the camera to see around them. Another camera issue that drove me crazy was the inability to bring the camera down closer to the ground to see from a character's point of view. If the character was standing in a doorway, then the door frame and wall were all that I could see until I did a "leap of faith" and walked into the room. It really pissed me off when there was a mob standing just inside the door that I would have noticed if I could have looked over my character's shoulder. Another complaint that I had was related to the Steam port of the game. Apparently, according to the nerd forums, after beating the original version of the game, the ending scene and credits would roll, and you could then use that character in a multiplayer world. When the developers stripped the multiplayer function of the game out before handing it over to Steam (or however that transpired), they removed the end scene and credits and dumped you back to the title screen. Kind of not cool. (Note that I looked up the original ending on Youtube, and it was pretty lame anyway, but still...)
While playing the game, I opted to remain loyal to the NPCs that offered to join my party for free, instead of hiring the stronger, more capable, less shitty mercenaries. OK, so I'm a cheap bastard even in-game... I trained every character in both melee and ranged combat, until a mage specializing in natural magic offered to join my cause (for free), whom I ended up using exclusively as a healer. About halfway through my playthrough of this game, I got excited about the idea of playing the game again, except giving each character only one skill focus and utilizing more magic users. That is when I started to notice the drudgery of killing thousands of mobs, level after level. I started hoping that each new chapter would be the last, but the game kept going. Then I ran into a seriously tough boss that I couldn't even touch without getting wiped out...so I "pulled a Lee" and switched to easy mode. In retrospect, I should have just started over right when I first got the idea of switching my play style. I might have had a slightly more interesting and captivating gaming experience.
I will come back to the Dungeon Siege series, but I think that my next RPG efforts will be put toward finally logging a playthrough of another old favorite, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Buckle up, bitches!
Year: 2012
Genre: Role-Playing, Platformer
Website: --
Shane:
- Platform: Android
- Hours logged: 14.0
- Playthroughs: 1
- Rating: 7/10
Lee:
- Platform: Android
- Hours logged: 6.0
- Playthroughs: 0
- Rating: --/10
Notes and Discussions:
- Shane (2/19/2014): This game was a welcome distraction during the holidays. I installed it originally because I had burned out from too many consecutive hours of Kingdom Rush... and Ridiculous Fishing was doing it's annoying "I won't pay attention to your controls now, nah nah nah" thing. Hannah's Grandma had just fallen and broken herself and I was sitting on my mother-in-law's dog... In all I ended up with several hours I could dedicate to the game while I couldn't do much more than hang out.
What I found was just enough story to keep me curious (if not interested) but not enough to get in the way. This is, after all, really just a platformer that has a few simple map puzzles built in. They bill themselves as an RPG but I wouldn't go that far. I never ended up immersed in the world, but I didn't care.
I could talk about the magic/gear combinations... but the only part of the game that really mattered was the progression from map stage to map stage while collecting gems and experience to make killing things easier. All of that was easier when I didn't think about it too hard. The last couple "stages" had some decently challenging timing puzzles that I enjoyed. Then the game was over. And I smiled.
Swordigo still sits on my hard drive. I don't think I am going to go back to it but I feel warmly enough about it's presence that I will drop it only when I need the space. It deserves at least that much respect.
- Lee (3/11/2014): I wanted to like this game more, but I really don't care for platformers. When I was a kid, I didn't have the patience to put enough hours into Super Mario Brothers to beat it. I played it a lot, but after dying in the same lava pit 300 times or getting whacked by tail of the level's boss after finally making it through the maze of fireballs and ass-puckering, bottomless pits, I remember wanting to scream and throw things. This game was like that at times. "Where the fuck is the Easy mode??"
I did, however, manage to make it exactly 50% of the way through the game before finally giving up. At one point, I quit for a couple weeks after getting stuck trying to beat a hooded, fireball-shooting boss at around 42%, but I came back to it and killed that bastard. I'm not likely coming back this time. Games should be fun. Grinding a game to the point of frustration is not fun to me. It just reminds me how bad I suck at platformers.
Despite my frustration and eventual surrender, there were a few things that I did enjoy about the game, including the simple, on-screen controls. There were icons for "move left," "more right," "swing sword/pick up item," "jump," and "shoot fireball." Using the double jump feature to get up on ledges was pretty fun (but having to use it to solve puzzles was frustrating at times). The adventure and exploration parts of the game were enjoyable, and I was also intrigued by the simple character leveling mechanism. Not losing your XP after dying was a nice surprise too.
I had originally wanted to play through some of the old Nintendo platformer games (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, etc.) as part of this video game project, but I am second-guessing that plan a bit now.
Year: 2013
Genre: Adventure, Role-Playing
Website: http://playstarbound.com/
Lee:
- Platform: PC
- Hours logged: 13.5
- Playthroughs: --
- Rating: 10/10
Shane:
- Platform: PC
- Hours logged: 22.0
- Playthroughs: --
- Rating: 10/10
Notes and Discussions:
- Lee (2/18/2014): I think we may have stumbled upon the next heavy-hitter in the "Life Consumption" category of video games. Given the depth of the content that this game has to offer (and if Minecraft is any precident), I anticipate the time invested to crawl up to within the range of a couple hundred hours.
From what Shane has told me, there is a ridiculous amount of stuff to do in this game...and it's still only in development. My point here is that I have only experienced a tiny fraction of what this game has to offer. But I did want to take the opportunity to share some initial thoughts. There will be more discussion to follow as I further flush my life down the Starbound toilet.
First of all, my favorite game (with the possible exception of Diablo II) is Minecraft. So far, this game seems to be a two-dimensional rip-off of Minecraft, albeit a more complex and potentially more challenging one. The mining and crafting mechanism are very similar. There are villages full of NPCs. You can grow and harvest crops and trees. And shit wants to kill you.
There are many notable differences, however, like the ability to travel to other planets. (Last night, I dumped some coal into my spaceship and traveled to a frozen moon near my "home" planet. Neat!) There also seems to be a lot more variety in the mobs that you encounter, though they all seem to drop either leather or raw alien meat. Among the dozens of small differences that I've noticed so far, a minor one is that you don't seem to be able to grow trees underground (one of my favorite things to do in Minecraft). I'm sure that I'll be making many more comparisons between Minecraft and Starbound in the future, but suffice it to say that I think there are enough differences to provide a new and exciting gaming experience.
For me, the most satisfying thing to do in Minecraft is to find a fun spot on the surface of the terrain, then start digging out a base underground. So naturally, (after stealing some torches and wood from Shane's base,) my first Starbound task was to set out and find a place to call home. I selected a location at the base of a cliff and, using my Matter Manipulator omnitool, began mining a diagonal tunnel down through the earth. Eventually I dug into a cavern, where I built and placed a crafting table. Using the table, I crafted a bed, a door, and a pickaxe. With the pickaxe, I carved out a cave in the sandy dirt, placed the bed and a torch inside, and installed the door at the cave's entrance. The basics...complete!
Over the next several hours, I built a bow for hunting, and I made a farm to grow corn and wheat (also lifted from Shane's house) so that I would stop dying of hunger. I also dug deeper and explored more caverns. The moment I found my first treasure chest at the bottom of a cavern lake, I knew I was hooked on this game! Stay tuned for more...
- Shane (2/25/2014): When Lee and I were looking for another game to play together I had several ideas. We had just come off of a few frantic weeks of "Firefall," the end of which left us both happy that we played it but there was not enough content to give us more reason to drop in more hours. I was pulling for "Dungeon Defenders." I bought it in a Humble Bundle quite a while ago and played 5 or 6 hours I figure. I also had "Payday 2" and was really excited about that one... but none of these options seemed like things that Lee and I would get that old thrill of "Playing Together" with.
I had seen some screenshots from "Starbound" on r/gaming. It piqued my interest with its whimsical feel. When I then saw some gameplay videos on the Steam page it seemed worth it.
There are a few things that really rustle my jimmies with a new game. This may seem odd but one of the most important points is the environment the game runs in. Multi-player games that allow me to build a dedicated server excite me. I feel more ownership over the experience when I get to do server set up duties on top of whatever else the game is supposed to do. "Minecraft" was this way, "Half-life" and its kin did this for me. I turned my linux server into a server where my brother and I frolic through the pixelated forests. I like that.
Other elements that keep me coming back are solid build trees and collecting items to get better items. I get the feeling that a lot of that functionality has yet to be implemented in this game but they have enough so far to keep me playing, and I love collecting resources for building ever more interesting creations.
The functionality that I look forward to more than anything else, at this point, is selling produce for pixels. Oh my, when we can do that, I intend to set up massive farming structures, piercing the skys of dozens of alien worlds. I will "spawn in" villagers to tend the farms and go on adventures to find exotic plant types. I feel all fluttery in my guts with anticipation of it. Someday.
There have been some problems. We have gone through one character wipe so far (The devs have promised that they aren't going to do any more. They think they have that functionality figured out enough.) and a world wipe (We are going to have at least one more of these before all is said and done.) that reset us to zero. I had some problems with the last patch that cratered my on-ship storage (I lost many hundreds of metal bars and other valuable items.) and deleted several of the installation pieces I build in my "house." This type of bug is not uncommon with pre-release software but all the same, it is a blow when it happens.
I will make more time to dive into this world soon I hope. There is more content being released and SO MUCH more content already in the 'verse that I have yet to experience. I look forward to collecting it.
