Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2024?

Duo Lingo, Impulse, Voro, etc. in my iPhone. Pulsar: Lost Colony and
Star Wars; The Old Republic in PC's Windows. I played a few free Steam
weekend and new iPhone's iOS games, but they (don't remember their
titles) were meh. I hope to play more for the new month. I did play more
this morning in my iPhone. :P


Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

Oh! What with all the holiday excitement and usual CSPIGA comments, I
almost forgot that we have THIS thread to do too! We can't start a new
month without talking about what we played LAST month... can we? I'd
rather not take that chance. So here we go again: let's talk games!

Oh, and I'm trying something new this month: providing URLs to Steam
(or elsewhere) where you can get more information about the game
(honestly, I'm not trying to get you to buy any of these. I just
figured maybe you'd like a link to screenshots or something). Is it
worth the effort or should I not bother?

I've been surprisingly busy with games this month so my list is a bit
fuller than usual (read: this next bit is gonna be _long_)

A List
---------------------------------------
* MechWarrior 5: Clans
* Magic Archer
* Pacific Drive
* Their Land
* CloudPunk
* Front Mission 1st: Remake
* Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (PS2)
* Teardown

A Novel
---------------------------------------

* MechWarrior 5: Clans
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2000890/MechWarrior_5_Clans/
I'm terribly disappointed with this game.

It should have been a slam-dunk. One of my biggest issues with its
predecessor (MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries) was the uninteresting level
design; everything was procedurally generated, and the various
missions very quickly became repetitious. "Clans" promised a full
campaign with hand-crafted missions. How could it all have gone so
wrong?

Visually, the game is fine; it uses an upgraded version of the
"Mercenaries" engine, and there is a general improvement to the
animations of the mechs. The first couple of levels look terrific too,
with a lot of lush vegetation, custom architecture and lots of
superfluous detail that make the world look real. The cockpits are
improved, with greater variation between different mechs and all
looking more three-dimensional. It all makes for an excellent first
impression.

But the further into the game you get, the worse it seems. Later maps
are far less detailed and interesting to look at. Some are downright
ugly; most feel quite generic. Worse, the level design is -with only a
handful of exceptions- extremely tedious. Most maps are just long
winding canyons, with no real open spaces or options to step off the
beaten path. In pretty much every mission you are led by the nose from
waypoint to waypoint, often not allowed to even progress to the next
arena until you fight off waves of enemy mechs.

The combat is, arguably, a slight improvement over "Mercenaries", but
it still is not very good. The AI is just terrible; it rushes straight
towards you, rarely making use of cover or even relying on its
long-range weaponry. Too often, combat devolves into in-your-face
brawls with multiple mechs picking away at one another from close
range. The respawning is particularly bad too; you will be forced to
mow down dozens of enemy robots per mission, with new enemies popping
out of indestructible hangers or jumping down cliffs that would leave
your mech smashed if you tried a similar feat. There's just no
strategy to the game, and ultimately your best tactic is to field the
heaviest mechs you can so you can endure the onslaught, making any
lighter robots in your arsenal practically useless.

Don't even get me started on the boss-enemies! Bosses... in a
MechWarrior game! They're incredible bullet sponges that don't abide
by the same rules the players have to follow, and feel completely out
of place.

There's little else praiseworthy about the game either. The cutscenes
are fine... except for the weird facial animations (what is with the
fat-lipped mouth movements?). The voice-acting is awful. The story is
dull. The characters are all unlikable. The music is completely
uninteresting. There are some areas where the visuals completely fall
apart (such as the missile impact textures, which are laughably bad).
And once you finish the game, that's it; sure, you can replay the
missions but there's no option for procedural missions to keep the
action fresh.

That's not to say I disliked everything. The battles did have a bigger
feel to them; you often are fighting alongside multiple other lances
and the narrative gives the impression that your unit is just a small
part of a much larger war. That's sort of neat. The improved MechLab
-where you can customize your robot's loadout-  has been improved, and
I liked the ability to research new upgrades (even if it feels
completely out of place for a BattleTech game). But these are all tiny
improvements on a game that otherwise feels a massive step backwards.

I really wanted to like this game. I broke my rule about not buying
games immediately on release because I was so excited about playing
another MechWarrior game. But in almost every respect, I was
disappointed by the experience. "MechWarrior 5: Clans" probably ranks
below all the other games in the franchise. It takes all the worst
parts of "MW5: Mercenary", does almost nothing to improve them, and
adds on a host of new flaws. It is not a good game.

* Magic Archer
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2905170/Magic_Archery/
"Magic Archer" was hyped up as that free game 'so good people are
insisting they should be allowed to pay for it.' And even though there
are, indeed, people making this demand, the game is in no way
deserving of it.

Oh, it's enjoyable enough... for a free game. But it's extremely
shallow, even for the 'clicker' games it resembles. Click a button to
set up a target, your archer will shoot arrows at it. Once enough
arrows hit it, it breaks apart and you earn experience. Select which
stat that experience gets assigned to; get enough, and the stat will
go up. As stats rise, you unlock various quests (automatically
fulfilled) and upgrades which improve the rate at which you earn
experience.

It's barely a game. In fact, after about fifteen minutes of play, you
can buy an upgrade to automatically reset the targets for you, meaning
past that point the game essentially plays itself. There's no real
strategy, no way to lose, and the only 'challenge' is how fast you can
get to the end.

And, look, I'm not objecting to this. The game's retro-aesthetics are
nice, and the speed at which you constantly earn upgrades ensures a
constant dopamine fix. You're getting a unceaseless stream of rewards,
and our brains respond positively to this. There's an extremely low
barrier to entry; if you can click a mouse, you've all the skill you
need to win the game. Even the most luxuriously played game won't take
you more than a couple of hours before you're done. It's welcoming.
It's fun.

But it's got no challenge, no depth, and no replayability. It's a
modern day equivalent to those Flash games of the early 2000s;
something that briefly occupies your time and then you move on to
something better. It's a palette cleanser; a respite from more serious
titles. It's definitely not worth money. As much as I liked it, I'm
not sure it was even worth the time I invested into it.

Get "Magic Archer", sure. Play it, fine. But don't fool yourself into
thinking it's anything but the most basic of clicker games, and even
for free you may be overpaying.

* Pacific Drive
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458140/Pacific_Drive/
"Pacific Drive" got a brief moment of fame on its release, hailed as
one of the best survival games -and perhaps one of the best games- of
the year. But, let's face it; it's not that. It's a good game, sure,
but in the end it's still a fairly unexciting example of the genre
that quickly faded from public consciousness and is unlikely to leave
any lasting mark on the industry.

There's a lot to like about the game, though. It's stylized graphics
--it reminded me a lot of the almost cartoony wilderness in
"Firewatch-- do a really good job of presenting the eerie world in
which we find our self. There's just the perfect blend of the alien
and the familiar, and there's just a terrific atmosphere to the whole
game. The music is surprisingly good (although I gravitated more
towards the techno soundtracks while driving), as is the voice-acting.
The driving is surprisingly fun. Imagine the bouncy planetary
exploration of the first "Mass Effect" game... except done well. You
feel every rock and tree you hit, but there's far less loss of
control. Whether zipping down the broken roads of Washington state or
through its heavily-wooded forests, the driving is amazingly
satisfying.

I liked a lot of the world design too. An isolated bit of wilderness
now haunted by unexplainable 'anomalies' caused by Science Gone Wrong,
"Pacific Drive" wears its heart on its sleeve when it comes to its
influences, and it obviously took a lot from "STALKER" in the creation
of its 'Olympia Exclusion Zone'. But where "STALKER's" Zone feels
actively malicious against the player, the oddities in "Pacific Drive"
feel less concerned with ruining your day. They're still incredibly
lethal: you'll face off against weirdness ranging from radiation
storms, exploding mannequins, giant balls of acid falling from the sky
to gremlin dust-bunnies that glitch your car. There's just such a
variety of foes you'll face off against, many of which do more than
just cause hit points to deplete by a few points. Many you can't even
fight (anyway, you go through this journey completely unarmed), and
you must either avoid or endure their unwanted advances. They feel
less like foes than other-natural forces that just happen to have been
transported to Earth. It all works strangely well.

So "Pacific Drive" has a lot to offer. Where it falls short, though,
is its main gameplay loop. The game is a story-based survival
experience; entering the world with nothing but the clothes on your
back, you must scrounge for supplies and build up your inventory of
tools (largely upgrades to your car) in order to complete a series of
missions and escape back to the real. All well and good, except the
game is exceptionally grindy and there just isn't enough variety to
keep up interest for as long as this game takes.

Even the simplest of missions (either the harder story-based ones or
just resource gathering) can take a considerable toll on your car,
requiring you to go out to find even more resources to repair your
vehicle. You can't stay too long out in the field either; the longer
you're away from base, the higher the chance a radiation storm will
hit, so you're limited to how many resources you can collect on each
run. The upgrades aren't any of them that exciting, and the number you
can affix to your car at any one time is extremely limited.

Worse, as interesting as the world is in concept, it all looks very
much the same: endless roads winding through forest and dale. You do
get to some new climes --a radiation-wracked hellscape-- about three
quarters of the way through the game which looks significantly
different, but by then it's too little, too late (it's also too
hostile a region to linger and take in the sights). Most of the game
will be traveling the same roads over and over again, scouring the
(randomly placed) buildings for resources to repair your (too easily
filled) vehicle and slowly --ever so slowly!-- manufacture necessary
upgrades.

It's not that I ever found the game that difficult; the nature of the
Exclusion Zone is that the harm it inflicts on you is largely
reactive; you're only ever at risk if you stay out too long. But
resource gathering is so slow, that inevitably you're going to push
for longer runs just to finally see some progress. But the upgrades
don't really help much and you never really feel secure on your
drives; even by the end of the game, I felt almost as much at risk as
I did at the start. There's no sense of satisfaction at having
invested so much time and effort to upgrade your vehicle.

Still, kudos to the development team for offering one of the most
nuanced and customizable difficulty setting I have ever seen in any
game. You can strengthen, nerf or even ban from the game outright
almost every opponent/event in the game. Don't like those radiation
storms? Turn them off. Think the acid should do much more damage to
your car? Crank it to max. Want every chest to be filled to the brim
with resources? That's an option.

But I played on the default settings because... well, that's the way
the game was intended to play. And I just don't think the intended
game-play loop is much fun. You're quickly stripped of that sense of
wonder and awe from exploring the strange world by sheer repetition,
and left with a too-slow grind that offers little reward. "Pacific
Drive" is a game with a lot of good ideas, but sadly is less than the
sum of its parts; it ends up being a very average-feeling survival
game that should have been a lot better than it was.

* Their Land
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2430990/Their_Land/
I really hate dumping on this game. It's a student project, and it's
free, so it deserves some leeway when it comes to judging it against
its peers. But "Their Land" is just not a very good game.

Visually, it looks extremely dated; it looks only a little better than
a game from 2005, and that is largely because it's using a modern game
engine and things like lighting are free. The worst is the character
animations, which are obviously key-framed and lack any sort of
fluidity or realism. The models themselves are extremely chunky too.
But I can forgive that; obviously resources were tight and
motion-capture isn't always an option. Less pardonable is the
lighting; while it is technically impressive, in a cinematic sort of
way, it's too often washed out in brightness or overly dark in actual
gameplay. Appearance took precedence over practicality, and not being
able to make out what's going on because the developer had so fixated
on their vision is unpardonable.

I'll give the writing a pass too. Not only are these students, they're
obviously don't speak English natively. Sure, the story is terribly
told and lacks in originality, but it's just enough to keep the
adventure moving, so we'll let it slide. The voice-acting is pretty
bad too but, again: student project. They aren't going to be able to
afford Troy Baker. Maybe they could have afforded a better microphone,
though. Or run some of the subtitles through a spell-checker.

The gameplay is not very good. "Their Land" very obviously takes its
cue from "Peter Jackson Presents King Kong", which diagetically plops
you into a lost island environment and has you fight off bugs and
monsters and savages, oh my. There's only a very minimal interface
consisting of two quite unnecessary icons indicating your current
weapon and stance... which are completely obvious in-game. Player
movement is incredibly slow, and the controls needlessly clunky. The
game consists of combat that isn't very much fun, and puzzles where
the answer is always solved by running about until you find that one
interactable object hidden in the clutter.  It isn't fun.

Still, I have to give the game some credit for its visual design (even
if it does detract from the gameplay) and the look of its almost
Cthullian monsters. It's a shame the AI is so braindead.

As a student project, this is an excellent product. It reflects a lot
of effort and a forthright desire to create something unique. A lot of
"Their Land's" faults lie in a lack of experience and not having
enough resources. I'd happily give them top scores for the project.
But I'm not their professor and regarding this as a game -as something
anybody would actually want to play- it is absolutely terrible in
almost every regard. As much as I hate to say it, "Their Land" is not
worth playing.

* CloudPunk
https://store.steampowered.com/app/746850/Cloudpunk/
"Cloudpunk" reminds me a lot of Annapurna Interactive's 2022 game,
"Stray". Not for the obvious reasons that both take place in a
decaying futuristic city or deal with the humanity of artificial
lifeforms, no. Rather, the main reason to play both games is that you
enjoy their aesthetics. In  the case of "Stray", it's because its
protagonist is a adorably rendered cat whose movements are sure to
melt the heart of any cat-lover. With "Cloudpunk", it's the gorgeous
cyberpunkian cityscapes.

The game is beautiful, and this is despite (or maybe even perhaps)
that everything you see is made up of some very chunky voxels. But
there is such detail in almost every scene, and such terrific lighting
that you can't help but want to soar through its flying highways and
take in more of the view. It's "Attack of the Clone's" Coruscant, or
"Bladerunner's" Los Angeles, or "Fifth Element's" New York... except
in your face and yours to explore as much as you want. And there's so
much of it, with neighborhoods ranging from the dark abandoned Ventz
(the undercity), to a futuristic China Town, to the Spire (the only
part of the city with a view of the sky). You play "Cloudpunk" so you
can gawk at the city like some podunk tourist off the farm for the
first time.

You certainly aren't playing the game for its gameplay. There's really
not much too it, unfortunately. "Cloudpunk" could easily be subtitled,
'Fetch Quest: The Game', because that's pretty much all that you do.
Go to location X, pick up box, take to location Y, drop off box.
Sometimes the box talks, or it's a bomb, or -on occasion- is a
passenger; this all adds variety and spice to the world. But the
gameplay itself is all very samey. Except for two brief instances,
your skill in driving is not a factor; there's no time-limit on any of
the missions (you do pay for fuel though, so meandering about too much
will cost you, but it's not a steep price).

There are a variety of NPCs to talk to -some of them even trigger
their own fetch quests- and several characters have you go on extended
missions to locate various items. But beyond that, there's sadly very
little to actually do in Cloudpunk's world. Which is a shame, because
I could easily see myself getting lost living a virtual life in its
environs. But no, it's just drive here and deliver that. Sadly, even
the driving is a bit of a mixed bag; while I love soaring the
skylanes, mechanically the actual driving is a bit clunky and
inaccurate; your hover-car lacks the precise cornering that would make
the experience really enjoyable.

The story and characters are endearing, if somewhat trite: naïve farm
girl comes to Big City and has all the usual sorts of Big City
adventures. Still, even if there's not much originality, the
characters are well voiced and the tale is entertaining. Mostly
though, I like how it fills out the world's setting. But it's still
pretty forgettable by its end.

No, the real reason to play "Cloudpunk" is its visuals. I quite
enjoyed my time with it --enough so that I'm even considering buying
the DLC expansion-- but overall it's a fairly shallow experience. If
you watch the game's trailer and aren't entranced by its cityscapes,
there's little else in this game that will appeal to you; it's just
too limited. But if you look at it screenshots and think, "I'd like to
see more of that" then it's worth giving the game a shot. Even if the
gameplay isn't all I hoped it could be, and even if the story isn't
saying anything new, it's still fairly well done and I had fun with
it.

* Front Mission 1st: Remake
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2399730/FRONT_MISSION_1st_Remake/
I don't have much to say about this game, simply because I didn't
stick with it for very long. I vaguely remember having more fun with
this game back when I first encountered it on the SNES; it was an
interesting combination of anime styled-combat, giant robots, and
strategy. I suppose it still is, but it's also a game with an
incredibly trite story and tediously slow battles where the vast bulk
of each mission is simply moving your robots into position where they
are close enough to actually use their weapons.

The weird ziggurat-like map design --forgivable in the 8-bit days when
memory was short and pixels were large-- don't translate well to
modern visuals. I've little desire to get into the nitty gritty of
fiddling with each mech (sorry, 'wanzer') to min/max the perfect build
either. All in all, the entire experience felt extremely old-school,
where games demand you spend months getting through them. I just don't
have interest in that sort of experience anymore.

The most dedicated fans of the original will probably love that this
game's mechanics haven't been changed since 1995; me, I'd prefer
something a bit more fast-paced and modern.

* Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (PS2)
https://www.mobygames.com/game/12011/baldurs-gate-dark-alliance-ii/
In honor of the latest stable release of PCSX2 (a Playstation 2
emulator), I fired up "Dark Alliance 2", a game I haven't played...
well, in such a long time I've actually forgotten what its about. A
fact which probably says a lot about the game itself.

It's not that "Dark Alliance 2" is a bad game, but it is a fairly
shallow one. An action/RPG, is lacks even the minimal complexity of
"Diablo"; it's all hack-and-slash, with only a minimum of role-playing
elements. The basic strategy of buying the most powerful weapon you
can and clicking as fast as you can is as much strategy as you need to
get through the game (at least on the default difficulty). The game's
levels are incredibly straight-forward, and the AI is easy to cheese.

Still, for all its simplicity, it's nonetheless an entertaining
power-fantasy, even if it didn't challenge me in any way, neither with
its gameplay or story.  It offered a fairly steady drip of new weapons
and skills, and a surprising variety in enemies, including everything
from goblins to troglodytes to drider to dragons. The levels were less
exciting --small and blocky, they rarely stood out from one another
(despite some significant cosmetic differences) -- but you never
stayed in any one area long enough for it to become bothersome.

In fact, the most annoying part of "Dark Alliance 2" wasn't the fault
of the game itself, but of the underlying architecture; saving on the
PS2 was such a burdensome chore; slow and clunky, I eventually stopped
bothering entirely and instead relied on the emulator's save-state
functionality. It's amazing PS2 users didn't throw their consoles out
the window from it being so frustratingly slow.

But otherwise it was an enjoyable --if admittedly mindless--
adventure; not one I'm in a rush to play again (at least, not for
another decade) but neither anything I regret spending time with.

* Teardown
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167630/Teardown/
"Teardown" is a tech demo. It's a gimmick. It's neat, but it's not a
game. Or rather, it's not a good game.

It's gimmick is its fully-destructible voxel-built world. Well, not
fully-destructible, sadly. You can't smash up the bedrock, so there
are limits to how much of the world you can blow up. But if it's a car
or a building or pretty much any object on the map, you can smash it
into tiny cubes. It's neat.

But it's so limited. The physics engine is incredibly basic, and that
limits how much fun the destruction is. Blow down all the supports of
a building except for one tiny pillar of glass and that building will
stand indomitable right to the end. It's only once you knock out each
and every one of the supports that it falls... rather lamely. There's
no crumbling of the upper structures, no sense of collapse. It just
drops a bit. The work needed to blow things up right and proper never
matches the results. It's disappointing, especially since we've seen
it done a lot better in other games.

Worse, the actual game (it comes with a campaign) seems to
misunderstand why this game might be fun. You're tasked with various
criminal enterprises and given a variety of tools to do so:
sledgehammers, blowtorches, dynamite, the works. But the missions
you're sent out on never take full advantage of that capability,
thanks to all your targets being hooked up to alarms which, if
triggered, end the mission in 60 seconds. That trigger varies -it
could be stealing an object, or getting it wet, or on fire- but once
that alarm starts blaring, you're on the clock. This wouldn't be so
bad if you only had the one target, but almost all missions have
multiple goals. The idea is, I think, to plan your route ahead of
time, but it also incentives you to limit your destruction lest you
accidentally start the timer. Some missions forgo the destruction
entirely (one has you trying to beat a lap record in a automobile
race). The campaign is absolutely the worst thing about "Teardown".

There are mods, of course, which take a crack at improving the
experience, but the majority of these just enhance the idea that the
whole game is just a gimmick; "Here's a more powerful gun to make
destruction easier!" or "Here's an intricately detailed level for you
to rampage through!" None of them really give you any reason to do so
beyond the, "hey, that's neat" experience... and that wears pretty
thin after the third or fourth one.

The game's tech is fun, undoubtedly, but I wish it could have been
more robust and I wish there was actual reason to use it. As it is,
the whole experience became a lot more tiresome than it should be, a
lot faster than it should have. It's a neat tech-demo, but not
something worth paying for.

----------------

Well, that took forever. I *did* warn you.

Anyway, that's me for November. How about you? Did you have an excess
of spare time for video games, or was life putting up its usual
hassles? Either way, you gotta tell us:

What Have You Been Playing... IN NOVEMBER 2024?

--
"Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God ??? this is your spiritual act of worship." --Romans 12:1. Take this ant already!
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