Day 21 - Defenders of Ardania and Cities XL 2012

Defenders of Ardania 

This tower-defense game sets itself apart from the rest in one major way: the battle is multi-directional. What does that mean? Both you and your opponent have the ability to create towers and send units, leading to a back-and-forth style of control over the field as your units hammer away at the opponents base. This also allows the game to have competitive multiplayer, a rarity in the tower defense genre.

The controls and UI are pretty clunky. The tutorial isn't very clear on what you need to do, telling you to press buttons by their action name instead of their binding. I restarted the tutorial once after getting stuck, and only make my way through it the second time after some keyboard mashing. Trial and error and a lot of looking up keys in the options menu finally led to a half-decent understanding, but still it's hardly intuitive. The UI isn't much help either, and feels off. For one, it's entirely non-interactive. In fact, your mouse cursor will actually go behind a lot of HUD elements, which feels quite odd.

The game got quite chaotic once they started pitting me against multiple opponents. At one point I was fighting a 4-way battle that may or may not have been a team-battle. After two opponents were defeated the third appeared to ally with me. Or maybe it always was? I'm not sure.

Paradox games tend to be very non-user friendly and buggy, and this one is no exception. If the gameplay is rewarding enough, it's often worth it, but in this case I'd say it isn't. There is too much unit management, and not enough tower building (each level gives you a cap of towers that's usually in the 5-10 range). Add to that the UI and control issues and you get a pretty unappealing package. I personally have no interest in multiplayer tower defense, but if I were looking for a single-player experience I would stick to Defense Grid over this any day.

Cities XL 2012 

Since there hasn't been a real Simcity game in almost 10 years, it's fallen upon Monte Cristo to make the next best thing. They been making a yearly installment of this series since City Life was released on 2006, and for some reason I buy it again each year. Very little changes in between each installment. Having not played 2012 prior to today I found very little that was different from the previous installment in my 69 minutes of play time today, but at the same time everything did work, and felt solid and comfortable.


For those who haven't played a game in this series I'll say that it feels a lot like Simcity but with less focus on resources and traffic and more of a focus on population. You have to balance providing housing, jobs and services for 4 different tiers of population, each with greater needs and value than the last. This is accomplished easily enough through the building of roads, zoning and buildings. The UI works well and the controls are simple but effective, making building a city relatively simple and quick. Money, while certainly a factor in your growth, is usually easy to come by, so long as you don't go crazy with the services.

For those who recall my many mentions of Cities in Motion it should come as no surprise that I very much enjoyed this game. Building a city is always fun, and Cities XL doesn't overwhelm you with annoying needs that you can't possibly met. Growth comes steadily and naturally, and the game is always rewarding you with additional buildings. For those who want to skip the progression, the expert mode allows you to unlock all buildings (and therefore all citizen types) right from the start.

If you haven't played a Cities game before, but you enjoyed the Simcity series, then Cities XL 2012 is definitely worth picking up. Compared to the previous 2 iterations, it's hard to say that anything has changed enough to warrant buying the full-priced game, and yet I consistently do, so that must be a sign. I enjoyed my time today and might come back for more in the future. I'm also looking forward to seeing how it compares to Simcity 4, but that is actually the very last game on my list, so it might be a while.

Notes

Two games from companies known for releasing buggy games, but one has had 6 versions to get it right.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 021

Day 20 - Tomb Raider: Underworld and Batman: Arkham Asylum

Tomb Raider: Underworld 

Yet another Tomb Raider game. This one was definitely the best looking of all those I've played to date, and seemed to be a lot more puzzle driven. The game opens with a confusing scene of you escaping a burning building and coming upon your friends who open fire on you. The game then flashes back to one week earlier and shows Lara on a boat attempting to find some hidden something-or-other, perhaps a tomb to raid, who knows.

What follows is an annoyingly long, slow and tedious underwater segment. Lara swims relatively slowly, and you're not given any instructions on what to do. I quickly enough located what looks like a puzzle, and the first piece to it, but it was fairly obvious a piece was missing. After searching the room thoroughly, and spending a bit of time trying to solve the puzzle with a piece missing, and then searching a wider area, and then trying to do the puzzle again, I was starting to get bored and frustrated. Just when I was about to give up on this endless and pointless swimming I found the hints button, which told me one thing I already knew (find the damn missing piece!), and one thing I wasn't sure of (look everywhere BUT here). So I sent myself on another hunt and located the final piece soon enough.

The water segment was not enjoyable at all. I spend a lot of my time trying to search the ground, but Lara can't look at the ground without swimming towards it, so it was a constant battle to get a decent view of everything while searching for the missing piece. There's some combat, a few sharks that are patrolling nearby to deal with, but the combat was uninteresting. I also don't understand why her pistols can fire underwater, but that's pretty common in video games.

The next area had some more ledge puzzles, which are never fun in Tomb Raider games. The one major difference with TR compared to Uncharted is that Drake will usually not jump towards nothing, and naturally jumps towards ledges. Lara will jump to anything, and also is incapable of looking behind herself to see if there's a ledge there. Platforming is not an enjoyable experience.

I played for 52 minutes, and spent the majority of my time battling with the controls and levels in uninteresting ways. I had no idea what was going on and the "previously" video was about 30 seconds long and way of NO help at all in catching up on the story. Overall, my opinion on Tomb Raider was not changed, and my opinion of the series from Day 1 hold true for this one and I will not be coming back to this game.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

This and Arkham City are two hugely acclaimed titles that I've never tried before. I was definitely looking forward to playing this game and seeing if it really does stand up to the hype. Batman is definitely a good series, but I'm not the hugest fan, so I wasn't drawn towards this series in the past, when there were many other titles vying for my attention.

Arkham Asylum is a very polished and quality title. The game starts with a long introduction sequence, where Batman having just caught the Joker, is escorting him into Arkham Asylum. Everything is a bit suspicious though, as the Joker was caught just a little too easily. Soon enough, the Joker escapes and takes control of Arkham Asylum, locking everyone in/out, and starts wreaking havoc.

This action-adventure game gives you plenty of tools to use, and all of them feel well designed and work well. Melee combat is simple enough with attacks and counter-attacks being the core of it. You're given plenty of tools early on, such as the grappling hook, batterang and your trusty cape, all of which help you get around the levels and challenges. Gameplay consisted of moving along a linear path in a non-linear map, engaging in combat, and tracking down criminals. You're also getting a healthy dose of Batman / Joker interaction, with plenty of Harley Quinn as well.

The game looks very nice, sets a great mood and has some rock solid mechanics. I played for a little over an hour, and while I didn't feel like I achieved much, the game was certainly enjoyable. I probably won't come back to this game, but I'll be sure to pick up Arkham City at some point and play through that.

Notes

This week marks 40 goals met, 1 game completed and 2 failed goals. There are still plenty of games to tackle, though, and a long road ahead.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 020

Day 19 - World of Goo and X-COM Interceptor

World of Goo 

Yet another indie game made with a tiny staff. I'm all for the indie scene, I can appreciate a game made simple and cheaply if it has a good premise, but I am definitely getting tired of PC games that don't have the basics of PC games. My first attempts at launching this game had my OS/Monitor freaking out over trying to achieve the resolution that WoG set out: 800x600. I find it hard to believe that in this day and age a game would default to that resolution, but there you have it. Furthermore, a search on the forum reveals that the only way to change it is by editing a .txt file in the folder. Hardly convenient, this is the type of experience I expect when playing some of the older titles on Steam, those not designed for modern operating systems, not something made in 2008.

Gameplay yet another physics-based puzzle game. This time around you use goo balls to create structures by connecting them as points in an ever growing lattice / grid. They will support a certain amount of weight, but the goo is not steel, and will tip or sway fairly easily. Your goal is to build towards the exit pipe in as little time as possible using as few of the goo balls as you can. Each level gives you a goal of how many balls to suck, with extra balls being set aside for the giant tower-bulding metagame, where you're pitted against others in a leaderboard style to see who can build the tallest structure. As you progress you'll use different type of goo balls with different properties, such as the green ones which can be moved and reused.

Some of the levels were challenging, although I beat all of them with plenty of extra goo balls. The game doesn't really give you much direction on how to build, but if you've played one physics-based puzzler, it's probably enough to understand how to put your tools to use to beat a level. Some of them towards the end of the first chapter were getting pretty crazy. In one particular level the goal was so high up that the only way I could beat it was building as fast as possible to reach the suction power of the pipe before my tower collapsed.

The game is decent, considering it was created by only two people, but I'm pretty sick of physics games, and to be honest I didn't understand enough of how the goo balls and structures work to get passed the point where a lot of it felt random. I played this game for 55 minutes, enough time to beat the first chapter and try the tower mode, and that's probably going to be it for me.

X-COM: Interceptor 

Interceptor, from what I experienced, felt like it was a bit closer to X-COM than Enforcer was. Your setting is moved into space, as a line of defense before the aliens can reach Earth. In this game you manage a base and pilot interceptor space crafts in order to dogfight with alien ships.

This game is very old, and it shows. The controls support the mouse, but you can tell it was designed for a time when people still owned joysticks, or preferred to use the keyboard. I hoped in without learning the controls, and nothing made sense. I died very quickly. My second attempt went a bit better, I spent about 5 minutes spinning around in space attempting to kill a ship, but ultimately failed once again.

At this point I gave up. It's nearly impossible to aim as your field of view is so small, and the ships move so fast that I spent my whole time chasing down an indicator arrow. The few times I was able to get the ship in my tiny FOV I had a hard time hitting it with my laser beams. Forget the missiles, as if there's a lock-on mechanic I was unable to find it.

This game was infuriating, and I failed to achieve anything and left with a very sour taste in my mouth. I only played for 14 minutes, and at least 3 of those minutes were trying to find the menu/quit button. Seriously, there is not a single icon on the screen that provides that option, and escape does nothing. In order to access the menu you have to move your mouse cursor to the top of the screen, where there is zero indication of a menu, and then WAIT, and finally a menu will appear. Why? There is absolutely no reason to hide a menu as small as that one is, on a screen with that much available real-estate. Truly infuriating experience that I have no intention whatsoever of coming back to.

Notes

This would have marked my 40th goal met if I had stuck with Interceptor for another 20 minutes. Not worth it, I would rather wait a day to hit 40 than lose 20 more minutes of my life to that game.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 019

Day 18 - The Political Machine 2012 and RAGE

The Political Machine 2012

This game has you taking on the role of a candidate for President of the United States of America in his or her campaign. Each turn consists of you moving around your candidate or other resources on a US map, and engaging in activities designed to help the improve the people's opinion of you, or lower the opinion of your opponent. One of the actions is setting up headquarters, which can help you can candidate awareness, money, political capital and PR clout. These are very useful, but very expensive, so you can't build too many of them. Other than that, you can start ad campaigns, conduct speeches and raise funds. All of these actions, as well as traveling, drain your candidates stamina. This, essentially, is what determines the limit of what you can do in a turn.

The point of these actions is to raise the awareness of your candidate, after all people won't vote for you if they don't know who you are, as well as the let them know what your political stances are. Each state has different top issues as well as a unique ratio of democrat and republican voters. Part of your task is deciding how best to brand your candidate on the local and national levels, and what states to target with your message. I placed a bit of effort into Florida, for instance, which my Republican opponent, Donald Trump, fought me on. I won Florida, in the end, which definitely helped secure my overall victory.

There's a lot to do, and in my 21-week campaign there definitely didn't seem to be enough time to tackle all of the issues, or even visit every state. Your stamina gets used up so quickly, and money was always tight too. And my opponent was always criss-crossing the country, which made me worried as I focused on one state per turn. I won decidedly, but that was a short game on easy. It still took a little over an hour. I do like this game, and I'm likely going to play it further, try some longer games, and see if I can engage in some longer elections. One thing that I haven't seen yet, and I'm not sure if it's missing or if I just didn't get there, is the candidates. Previous iterations of this game felt like they had more candidates, and as you won campaigns you unlocked more historical ones. You can always make your own candidate, but still, it's a progression / unlock mechanic that I really liked, which seems to be missing.

For a deeper look on this game, check out my friend ShinEmperor's Let's Play video.

RAGE

id software's latest title was largely ignored, but I had to give it a shot anyway. I've always been a fan of Quake and Doom, but RAGE is a bit different from those. Firstly, it deals primarily with humans, no demons or aliens from what I saw, and it also carries a much stronger narrative than I'm used to seeing in an id game. It's also much larger and more open. You start off the game being woken up from stasis in some Ark, and quickly make your way outside to a barren wasteland of a world. You're greeted by a local voiced by John Goodman, so you instantly know he can be trusted, and he gives you a lift to his settlement. What comes next is a series of missions that consist of driving to a location, getting out and shooting your way through things, ultimately reaching your goals. Once you've done all that, you'll zipline or shortcut out, ride back to town and repeat.

It may sound like gameplay is repetitive, and it probably is, but it's constantly engaging. The missions themselves are given to you by the locals and are usually something you want to do. The locations are varied enough, in my 2 hours of play I visited 3 or 4 dungeon-type locations, 2 towns, and lots of wasteland roads in between. The weapons are mostly standard, but feel powerful and reliable. You'll start off with a simple revolver, but later on you get a shotgun, sniper rifle, assault rifle and some other less technological weapons. One of the cool ones is a boomerang type device that decapitates enemies and then flies back to you. Unless it hits something and gets destroyed, that is, which happens a lot when indoors.

There's other mechanics that set it aside from your basic FPS. A money mechanic, which you can use to buy items, weapons, vehicle upgrades and ammo. Weapons have multiple ammo types that you can cycle through, with different uses, mostly revolving around added damage. Vehicles play a big part of this game, aside from the weapons and upgrades there's also races which come in three varieties: time trials, races and combat races (minigun and rocket). There's quests, side-quests, gambling and a collectible card game.

The game world is fairly linear, but is large and feels open, thanks to it's design. The game is very nice looking as well. I was able to run on the maximum settings at 60 FPS, which is nice too. At one point the game did warn me that I didn't have enough cores to enable "Texture Detail", but I didn't listen and everything turned out fine. There was a bit of pop-in as textures switch from low to high detail, but it's not too bad.

If I had one complaint, it would be the pacing. I spent so much time talking to people, traveling and exploring. I probably only spent around half the time actually in combat, or feeling any sense of danger. That being said, I really enjoyed this game, and I will probably come back for more.

Notes

I swapped TftD with TPM2012, which I had purchased after starting the challenge. That's right, I'm still buying games. I can't help it, I'm addicted to building my steam account! X-COM: Terror from the Deep will be played much, much later, when I haven't done an X-COM game in a long while.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 018

Day 17 - Plain Sight and Machinarium

Plain Sight 

I wasn't sure what to expect from this title based on the screenshots. I got a little worried when I saw XNA in the boot flow, as that's rarely the sign of a professionally made game. Plain Sight is a multiplayer game that pits robots against each other in small deathmatch arenas. Gameplay is fairly fast-paced, with robots jumping and boosting around, locking onto enemies and charging towards them. During all this, gravity is behaving very questionably, and any surface can be stepped on. It's all very disorienting, at the very least, and one of the greatest challenges is simply navigating around with the constantly changing horizon.

Your goal in Deathmatch is to kill enemies, which allows you to gain their energy (which starts at 1 but also includes the energy they stole through kills). Once you've passed a certain threshold you can hold E for a few seconds to detonate, turning your energy into points. You'll get multiplies in two ways: from normal kills and from self-destruct explosion kills. The multiplies will greatly increase the amount of points you gain from the self-destruct. Until you do this, however, you're vulnerable to being killed and losing all stored energy. It doesn't help that as your energy goes up, you become bigger, which helps you kill but also makes you a bigger, more tempting target.



If you can get past the chaos of it all, the game is actually pretty fun. There isn't much to the single-player experience, though, this is really a multiplayer game. I probably won't play any more beyond the 37 minutes I played, but I would bring this game out at a LAN party without hesitation.

I'm probably not doing a good job of explaining how fast paced and chaotic this game is, and how disorienting it can all be, so I've included gameplay footage of two short deathmatch games I played against the medium AI.

Machinarium 

Today is robot-awareness day, apparently. Machinarium is a flash game sold on Steam. I'm not even joking. Right-clicking, instead of being a useful button, brings up that annoying flash context menu, which is a terrible shame. You take on the role of a robot, and for no explained reason you start making your way towards... the right side of the screen, I guess. Gameplay consists on clicking to move to, interact with, pick up, use and combine items and the environment. You only use one button, and never the keyboard, in this title and it's infuriating at times.

Puzzles primarily consist of looking around to find what you can interact with, and then figuring out how to use it to move on. It's not terribly complicated, but the items usually blend in with the background environment and can be difficult to find. Combining items into others is usually pretty straight-forward, but the game doesn't allow any creativity. There is one, and only one, correct way to accomplish any given level, from what I saw.

The visual style is very unique, and probably the game's strong suit. It's got a hand-drawn style, and the world is a very interesting twist on robots living like humans. It's unfortunate that it's double letterboxed, but I really don't expect much from a flash game. I had no idea what the story was, or what was going on, but rather focused on progressing in the only direction I could. The main character occasionally has thought bubbles that appear to show him being bullied by the other robots, which I guess is leading up to why he's doing what he's doing? I don't know, as there's no text or speech there isn't much opportunity to tell a story.

I like this style of game, and I could look over a lot of the technical flaws if the game wasn't so damn slow-paced. The robot walks so slow, and that's only if you're the correct height. If you forget to adjust, and try walking while shrunk down or stretched out you'll waddle along at a snails pace. The fact that there's no way to interrupt walking to your destination doesn't help either. I played this game for 47 minutes, and I do not see myself coming back to it.

Notes

I went and got the Pillar of the Community badge on Steam the other day in hopes of getting invited to the new Steam Community Beta. No luck, so far. In order to do that, I had to upload a video, so I've been messing around with Youtube a bit. Yesterday I posted a video from my Quake 3 session, and today I added the Plain Sight gameplay video. The process to record, edit, compress and upload a video is a bit more time-consuming than I'd like, so I probably won't do these as a regular thing.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 017

Day 16 - XCOM: Apocalypse and Shellshock 2: Blood Trails

X-COM: Apocalypse 

While X-COM: Terror from the Deep is essentially a re-skin of  UFO: Defense, Apocalypse is the first true sequel. Unfortunately, it loses a lot of what made the original X-COM to great. For one, the sense of scale is all wrong. Why would you go from defending the entire planet down to defending just one city and expect me to feel as rewarded? I already had a fairly good idea what Apocalypse would be like, as I did play it enough in the past, but I figured I'd give it another shot anyway.

This title is one of the many games on Steam that is really just a dos title packaged with dosbox. It works well enough, as long as you don't plan to alt+tab, but neither Fraps nor Steam could take screenshots. After a bit of googling I found out how to do it with Dosbox, thankfully. The game looks dated, that's for damn sure. Part of that is actually because it has modern devices, such as scroll bars, but doesn't support modern things, such as scroll wheels. The UI is chock full of buttons, far more than I could imagine needing. It's almost overwhelming.

I played a few missions, took care of a few aliens and only lost one agent in the process. I tried both real-time and turn-based, and neither was particularly appealing. Turn-based has the downside of really not getting much done each turn, while the real-time had me spending a lot of time paused anyway, trying to control 4 squads, but at the same time I didn't feel like I had as much control. If I kept playing I'd probably stick to real-time, but with judicious use of the pause button. I went through a whole month and between buying equipment that you really need from the start, and paying my first months wages and upkeep I had already burned through half my starting money. I'm not really sure how to turn a profit in this game. I seem to recall raiding being extremely lucrative, but it essentially means attacking one of the earth-side corporations and stealing all their equipment, hardly a heroic thing to do.

In the end, while I love X-COM, Apocalypse is just not that good. If and when I feel the itch to play some X-COM, I will no doubt continue to grab UFO Defense or Terror From the Deep.

Shellshock 2: Blood Trails 

Ok, so this game is rated 40, which is one of only 4 games I own under 50, and my second lowest scoring game. I was definitely not looking forward to playing this, and in fact quite dreaded the experience. With that being said, the game wasn't that terrible. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty bad, but I've played worse.


Shellshock 2 takes place in Vietnam, I think, and probably involves Zombies. That's about all I understood, really. The game opens in a base of some sort, and a military guy that's wearing a mask and an accent speaking gibberish that I could not follow. Then there's an attack, and suddenly we're killing everyone for some reason. I had no idea who I was killing or why, but they were intent upon shooting me, so I wasn't going to argue the point. All the while there's hints of, I don't know, Zombies I guess. It was never clear. There's an odd injection you're given, and a bed-ridden man that lunges for you, weird noises, etc. Lots of foreshadowing, I guess.

This game is just chock-full of poor design choices. For one, it tries REALLY hard to make sure you get motion sickness, or just generally can't see anything on the screen. This guy must be a bobble head, because anytime you're running, or in a moving vehicle, the camera bobs up and down violently in a very unpleasant manner. Then there's all the things that aim to obstruct your view, such as the iron-sights that take up far too much of your screen, the blood spatter that indicates you're loss of health that creeps way too far into the center of the screen. I like that there's the little touch of holding up your gun when wading in the water, but does the gun have to cover half my screen? Using the mounted machine guns is a challenge, as the fire from the shooting is twice the size of the aiming reticule, forcing you to stop shooting or guess what you're aiming at. Then there's the QTEs that on a keyboard ask that you use WASD, which is just about the least intuitive way to handle a QTE. Finally, there's picking up ammo, which requires that you press the space bar when standing at the precise spot the game wants you to.

There were a few bugs and polish issues as well. At one point, while using a truck as cover to shoot enemies far away, I got terribly annoyed by an enemy that seems to be constantly looping 2 or 3 taunts, so I turned to look for him. It turns out he was right behind me trying to attack me with a knife, but for some reason couldn't. I got stuck on a few walls while running, and died twice to some sort of room filled with smoke, but I'll chock those two up to design flaws. The game tries to be cinematic, but does that by wrenching control away from you unexpectedly. For instance, at once point I was priming a grenade to throw at an enemy when the game decided to turn me so I can look to my left, and caused me to release the grenade onto an ally standing right next to me in the room...

I think it's safe to say that I will not play this game again.

Notes

Got to take the good with the bad, I suppose. I picked up Sleeping Dogs the other day, but on X360. It's still technically a steam game, even if I don't own it on PC and it's not part of my challenge, but I might still write about it later.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 016

Day 15 - Cthulhu Saves the World and Quake III: Team Arena

Cthulhu Saves the World

I was looking forward to trying this game enough that I tagged it as one of my 10 "preferred" games, which doubles my target play time. Hopefully at the end of the challenge I'll be able to compare the games I tagged as preferred to those I beat / played a lot to see how accurate my guesses were.

CStW is an old-school style JRPG that looks like it could have been built using RPG Maker. Gameplay is your standard-fare SNES era JRPG, but with a sense of humor and doesn't-take-itself-seriously style of writing that sets it apart. The story starts out with Cthulhu losing his powers. He quickly discovers that his powers will return if he becomes a "True Hero", so there begins the slightly misguided quest to save the world.

As I mentioned, this game doesn't take itself seriously at all. All the monster descriptions are puns, Cthulhu frequently interacts with the narrator, your first party-member is a young woman who develops an instant crush on Cthulhu. I found the humor amusing enough, it's not too low-brow to be unenjoyable, but at the same time it's not terribly funny. There's very little over-arching storyline, mostly just an excuse to move forward on the linear path.

The game does a few unique things that I've never encountered in a JRPG before. The random encounters, for instance, have a cap based on the dungeon. Once the cap is reached, no more enemies will be encountered, but if you still want to fight you can always select "fight" from the menu. HP is regenerated to full after each fight, but MP is only returned a small amount, based on how quickly you complete the fight. This ensures that each fight is challenging, but that you have a pacing mechanism. The leveling system is cool, each time a character levels you're presented with two options on how to grow them. These could be different stat options, or opposing spells, or sometimes the single-target vs. multi-target spells, with each having different uses.

I played on Normal and still found the beginning very challenging. Having only two characters lead to one of them dying quickly VERY often. By the time I got my third character, though, things were getting quite easy, and the fourth just removed any need for strategy whatsoever. For those looking for a challenge, though, there are four different levels to play with.

I definitely enjoyed my time play CStW, but I don't know if I'll go back and finish it. I spent over 2 hours already, and completed 3 chapters. While I appreciated a lot of the unique gameplay, I'm not a huge fan of JRPGs nor was I crazy about their sense of humor.

QUAKE III: Team Arena

So soon after Quake 2, I get to try the third of the series. I have not played Q3 nearly as much as the second installment. Most of my memories of Q3 were playing on the Dreamcast, splitscreen, with my DC mouse. What little I played on the PC was more mod-based, such as Rocket Arena 3. Still, I booted up Team Arena and messed around with it for 44 minutes.


This installment adds color, which is nice, but not much else. Gone is the single-player campaign, as pointless as that was, but it made my experience less fun. I tried a deathmatch against the hardest level AI but got school 10 to 1, so I quickly moved down to "bring it on", which is about the middle difficulty, I believe. I played a few tournament modes, which are one on one deathmatches, and a CTF match. None were particularly entertaining with AI allies and opponents.

Team Arena messes a bit with base Q3 by adding new modes, power-ups and weapons. None of them really are needed, or work great, so I'm really not a huge fan of the tweaks. I'd play base game over this anyday, although I still prefer a modded Q2.

I'm sure there was a time in my life where this game was fun, but I've moved on, and there's little nostalgia leftover. I will not be coming back to this title.

Notes

I went back to Quake 2 a little, and progressed some. Unfortunately the game started getting quite difficult, and I was running low on health (no silly auto-regen mechanic here, just an equally rediculous mechanic where med kits can fix bullet holes and make you good as new). Unfortunately the campaign prevents you from changing the difficulty mid-run, so I'm not sure if I'll try to break that, press on or just give up.

The RNG failed me a bit as the upcoming games list features no fewer than three X-COM games.  Interceptor is unique enough, but TftD and Apocalypse are a little too close to each other that I'd rather not play both in one week. I'll probably skip one and save it for later.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 015

Day 14 - Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light and Chantelise

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

This spin-off Tomb Raider game was quite well-receive, and definitely unique.You control a spear-toting, grappling hook wielding Lara from a fixed-camera perspective. Gameplay in this game is a lot more fast-paced, with enemies often spawning all around Lara, but dying relatively quickly. the puzzles are still here, you'll have plenty of boulders to drag, spikes to avoid, items to climb. Your grappling hook can be used on the rings, but the spears really stand out. You can throw them into walls and then climb on top of them.

Each level gives you a series of goals to achieve, usually rewarding items for you to equip later. Some goals require finding the red skulls hidden throughout the level, or scoring above certain thresholds. The goals can be conflicting though, for instance some require that you beat the level, or at least a certain part of it, in under X minutes, while others require that you be quite thorough. My biggest gripe about these goals, however, is that the levels often prevent you from backtracking. For instance, I did not realize that destroying all the trucks was an objective until I had progressed passed a broken bridge that did not allow me to cross back. This happened again later on the same level, where I was forced forward with no way to return to where I was for the red skull.

The game is interesting enough, I imagine it would be decent fun in coop. As it stands, though, I'm not terribly interested in playing this game further, and I think I'll leave it at the 47 minutes I played.

Chantelise - A Tale of Two Sisters

Recettear is a great game, and the primary reason I bought this title. Chantelise, despite releasing later in English, is actually an older title. Gameplay consists of hacking and slashing your way through dungeon levels, eventually making your way to the end. You collect magic crystals, which can be used to cast spells, but otherwise you spend the majority of your time pressing the attack button. Of course, this is an asian-made game, so it really doesn't play well without a controller. Do people in Japan not have mice on their computers?

The gameplay is very simple. Aside from being able to equip two, and eventually three items, there isn't much in the way of character growth or customization to be had. I'm hesitant to even call this an action-rpg, and would lean more towards action-adventure. The game is also stupidly difficult for no reason. I made my way to the boss only to get destroyed in under a minute several times before finally giving up. Keep in mind that there's no checkpoints, so if you lose to a boss you must redo the entire dungeon.

I love Recettear for it's interesting take on shop-running, with ok dungeon battles in between, but Chantelise is nowhere near as good. There's no shop-running at all, of course, but even the dungeoning is unnecessarily difficult and unrewarding. I played this game for another 36 minutes (after having already given it a shot a while back), and still have no interest in playing it any further.

Notes

I've played 30 games so far during this challenge, with 39 hours having been spent so far. It's been a challenge, but rewarding nonetheless.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 014

Day 13 - SOL: Exodus and Swords and Soldiers HD

SOL: Exodus 

I bought this game because it reminded me of Freelancer, but I knew full-well it wasn't anything like it. In SOL: Exodus, the planet has become unlivable and toxic, so space ships are sent out on scouting missions in an attempt to locate a new world they can mess up. The game starts off with you locating a liveable planet, but quickly being attacked by a hostile alien race and forced to run away. Fast-forward to 10-years later, the newly promoted commander reaches SOL to inform everyone of the planet, and is quickly attacked by COD fighters.

I'm not really sure what's going on here, the story didn't make a whole lot of sense, and felt more like an excuse to trigger a lot of battles. Combat is similar enough to freelancer, but faster paced. Controls are a bit weird, though. Sure, you use the mouse to move around, and Q and E rotate your ship along the third axis, but W and A fire two of your weapons. Even after 41 minutes of playing, I was still accidentally firing unlocked missiles thanks to the W key. Enemies dies pretty easy, and there's always a dozen more for you to take on.

What really feels odd about this game is that you're always on your own. Sure, you'll have a large ship by your side, but that's really just a giant target with a health bar, ensuring you beat the level in an appropriate amount of time. Mostly it's just you against the hordes of smaller ships. Those aren't so bad, but when you have to take on a frigate or two by yourself, it's just doesn't make any sense.

SOL: Exodus isn't bad, but there's nothing about it to draw me in. Mindless combat that doesn't do much to draw me, and a story that makes no sense at all, and is just full of cliches. I do not foresee myself playing the game any more than I have so far. Freelancer on the other hand...

Swords and Soldiers HD

Yet another game that feels like it was once a flash game, turned into a full title. Gameplay consists of building units and casting spells. Most levels start with you creating a few more gold-gathering wenches, then using your upgrade panel to make a few other units and spells available. Once you start creating battle units, they will start walking forward until they reach an enemy, and will then fight to the death. If victorious, they will continue walking forward. What you get, then, is a steady stream of units constantly moving towards the right of the screen.

The story was mildly amusing, at least on the Viking campaign. These guys love meat, and most of the campaign revolves around protecting your meat, and then eventually seeking the largest chili in order to make the best hot sauce. It's ridiculous, but fun, and lays down a loose reason for each encounter. The enemy types vary quite a bit, with some of the larger units being quite challenging.

Overall I found the game fun enough, but it's also extremely repetitive. You don't have a whole lot of control over things, so it's mostly repeating the same setup, build and fight phases each level. It takes a long time for the units to make their way to the front lines, even with the rage spell, so you're better off just constantly making units. My favorite spell is definitely heal, and I find it the most useful as these guys do not last long when being focused on. I played this game for 60 minutes and almost completed the first campaign, but I don't see myself coming back to what is essentially a mobile game ported to PC.

Notes

I beat the Massive Munich campaign in CiM, and attempted to move onto the US Cities DLC. Unfortunately the San Francisco map is causing me quite a bit of difficulty. It's a fairly large map, and they don't give you any basic lines to start from, so I'm finding being profitable and building a base to expand upon incredibly difficult. I will keep trying, though, and see if I can succeed, as San Francisco is definitely a cool city. I've always been fairly impressed with the combination of Muni, BART and Caltrain, so I'm looking forward to trying to improve upon their model.

I've met the goal for 28 games so far, with 233 still to go!


Album: Steam Challenge - Day 013

Day 12 - VVVVVV and Dear Esther

VVVVVV

This platformer is similar in looks and style to Super Meat Boy, but with a slighter lower difficulty. The game is of very simple design, giving very few options and just generally feeling old. This was also the only game I've played so far that didn't support steam screenshots or fraps either, so I was much more limited in my screenshot taking.

Gameplay is fast-paced platforming. You have three controls, left, right and action. The Action button does the basic things such as progressing the text and activating menus, but in gameplay this button reverses gravity for you. This means the majority of puzzles involve flipping the world around to get by obstacles. This makes the game simple and fast paced, but challenging nonetheless.

The world is fairly unique for a platformer. Each screen represents one tiny section of the world, and the levels are tucked into different corners. If you look at the map I uncovered (potential spoilers, I guess, don't click if you want to explore on your own), you'll see that there are different colored areas that represent the levels, typically a series of rooms you must take on in order. The grey area represents the overworld, and your oportunity to locate other levels. Just to make sure you don't get loes, computer screens will show you key areas on the map.

Despite the very basic graphics and the fact that it's a platformer, I really enjoyed this game. It's simple but challenging, and fast-paced and action packed. The one-big map is definitely cool and reminds me of Castlevania. I will likely come back to this game when I'm looking for simple platforming.

Dear Esther

Originally a mod, Dear Esther was recently remade as an indie title. There isn't much game to this title, which bills itself as a "pure story-driven experience", in fact I was able to beat the whole thing in 70 minutes. You're given free reign to explore the largely linear island, and occasionally the narrator reads from some letters. The controls are very simple, WASD to move, Q to swim up and that's it. Your character walks at a normal pace, giving you ample opportunity to admire the surrounding landscape.

Speaking of landscape, it's gorgeous. This is the source engine at it's finest. So much effort was put into every little bit of the island, with amazing detail. The landscape is bright and lively, the caves are amazing and unique and the sights are breathtaking. Even the insides of long abandoned buildings are detailed with little touches that add to the detail. Dear Esther is littered with tiny details so subtle you probably won't notice them the first time. Check out the album for more screenshots, but be warned, the screenshots encapsulate the majority of the game. I avoided taking any screenshots of the subtitles, to not give away anything, but the pictures themselves show me progressing through the entirety of the extremely short experience.


I guess this one counts as complete, because I was able to beat the whole thing. I'm not counting it towards the 10 games I've set as my goal, however, as the who experience was done in a little over one hour. I definitely suggest experiencing this game for yourself, but not at $10.

 

Notes

I'm still playing CiM. I'm into the second scenario of the Munich Madness campaign. This one sets you up with a much better metro system, which I've expanded upon, so I'm now filthy, stinking rich.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 012

Day 11 - Woody Two-Legs: Attack of the Zombie Pirates and Guardians of Graxia

Woody Two-Legs: Attack of the Zombie Pirates

This game was surprisingly fun, actually. You pilot a ship and must protect your treasure from the zombie pirates by using your cannons, duh. As the enemy ships die, they drop crates which come in three flavours: good, bad and random. If a ship makes it to your treasure it'll start loading up then run away, but worry not, if you shoot them down you can get it back (or at least some of it).

Controls can be a bit flimsy at times, as the collision detection turns you sharply when you come into contact with something, and you don't have a say in where you're going to turn. Enemies come in huge volume, and you will likely die, but it's not such a big deal. I lost on level 4 due to too much treasure being taken, but I guess it would have to be impossibly hard at some point as there appears to be only 5 levels.

The game was fast-paced and enjoyable, but I can't imagine it lasting too long, as there's only 5 levels. I played for 40 minutes before losing, so I may come back for more and beat those final 2 levels. There are leaderboards, but they don't do much to encourage my playing. The game also have 2 extra difficulty levels that were locked.

Guardians of Graxia

GoG bills itself as a card-based board game, but lacks what makes TCGs fun and interesting. Gameplay is relatively simple, you use mana to summon units, or cast spells. You can engage in battle, during which both players can play cards that increase one of two defense types (magic and physical), or attack power. Units on the board can move one or more tiles per turn, and positioning have an effect thanks to bonuses for having nearby allies.

I found this game very slow paced. It takes a long time to get going despite the boards being very small. Battles are fairly brutal, as my units tended to do very little damage, and there's a penalty for attacking and not defeating your opponent. I found myself pouring cards into battles and constantly sacrificing cards for that little bonus they provide.

The game may look like a TCG, but it's definitely not. There doesn't appear to be any way to customize your deck, so you're very much relying on the luck of the draw to decide what you can do on any given turn. Many of the cards were borderline useless, and ended up being used for sacrifices and not much else. I didn't care for this game, and I don't think I'll be coming back to it.

Notes

Lots of relatively short games lately, nothing that's worth more than the minimum time in a while now, but it looks like there's some interesting titles on the horizon.

24 games down, 237 to go.
Hours of CiM played so far attempting to finish the campaign: 7.83

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 011

Day 10 - Diner Dash: Hometown Hero and Peggle Deluxe

Diner Dash: Hometown Hero

In this game you play a waitress named Flo, and your task is to make sure all the guests at your restaurant are happy. Basic tasks consist of seating the guests, taking their order, bringing their food, giving them their bill and finally busing the table. All this is achieved by clicking the appropriate location and watching Flo go.

The game is relatively simple, but can be challenging. There's always a lot to do, and the customers aren't terribly patient. As the game progresses, more advanced things get added, for instance there are teenagers with their cell phones who will annoy nearby customers, but if you seat them next to teenagers of the opposite gender they'll be too busy flirting to use their phones. Certain tables are reserved, and customers will expect to be seated for their reservation almost immediately. With all that in mind, many of the level goals are actually fairly challenging, requiring precision and thoughtful seating.

I was kind of bored playing through this, as I'm stuck in the campaign mode. I cannot beat the final zoo level for the life of me, and for some reason the game crashes when I select the ballpark. Endless Shift mode is alright, but it always ends the same way, with getting overwhelmed and having too many customers leave. I busied myself with re-playing the middle levels until my 37 minutes were up.

 

 

 

Peggle Deluxe

I imagine everyone has heard of Peggle by now, it was the casual game of choice a few years ago. For those who haven't, the goal of Peggle is to shoot your balls into pegs, trying to collect all the orange pegs to finish the level. Gameplay is simple enough, and the random nature means that even if you're having trouble beating a level, a bit of tweaking can lead to the run you needed to finish it up.

Peggle Deluxe comes with a ton of levels. The adventure mode includes 55 levels, after which Challenge mode is unlocked. It's a fun distraction, not requiring much thought, but still not mindlessly easy. I'm sure I'll come back to this title over the years when I'm looking for that quick distraction.

Notes

I'm still playing CiM, the campaign I started is progressing nicely, and the tweaks I made seem to have rendered the game more stable. For those wanting to know, I lowered the settings significantly and started launching the title without Steam. I'm not sure which is doing the trick, but all is well now.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 010

Day 9 - Quake II and Max and the Magic Marker

QUAKE II

I've played a lot of Quake in my day, and Quake 1 was a little too early for me, and I didn't play much beyond the shareware version, but I spent many hours playing Quake 2 online. All that, I'm ashamed to say, was done with a less than legitimate copy of the game, so I was happy to give this another go, for nostalgia's sake.

Quake is an ugly game, no doubt. Even the addition of OpenGL didn't help that much, and it wasn't until Q3 that color was added to the pallet. Still, the game is the same old fast-paced action-fest it's always been. I opted to start a new single-player game on hard, which is a higher difficulty than I typically take, but I felt anything less would be an insult.

There isn't much to say, really. I would go out and suggest you play Q2 if you don't have a solid reason to. It's a corridor shooter, that is insanely fast paced, and has no storyline to speak of. Yes, there are a few cutscenes, and this title actually gives you mission objectives, but I ignored all of it and it didn't change a thing. The weapons are satisfying, the enemies are challenging, but not absurd, and the levels give you the freedom to pass through using multiple paths.


I may decide to come back to this game and finish my playthrough, as there I definitely hold a soft-spot for this game, but we'll see. Singleplayer was never the strength of the Quake series, and there's only so many brown corridors you can shoot your way through before it gets old. If I do opt to continue the playthrough, I'll definitely lower the difficulty so that I can breeze through everything. What can I say, I'm lazy!

Max and the Magic Marker

Physics-based puzzle games are quite popular these days. Max and the Magic Marker takes on the genre but gives it a kid-friendly spin. Gameplay is basic platforming with one exception, your magic marker. As you play you'll collect ink orbs, which allow you to draw with your magic marker. Anything you draw becomes physical, and can then be interacted with. For instance, earlier puzzles have you making a basic plank bridge, nothing fancy. You'll make a lot of steps to climb things as well. You can retrieve ink from an item at anytime, so puzzles are more based on your effective use of the available ink, and trial and error is encouraged.

There's a few interesting challenges, but nothing too difficult. I managed to get the majority of the collectables that I could find, and only really got blocked in one instance, and orb that was just slightly out of reach with the amount of ink I possessed. Checkpoints are littered all over the levels, which is good because death is instantaneous if you touch one of the many hazards that Max hates. Each checkpoint also saps all your ink, making each checkpoint a unique challenge that's not dependent on your success or failure in previous parts of the level.

I don't really care for platformers or physics-based puzzle games, so I don't foresee myself playing this game further than the 47 minutes I did today.

Notes

I keep wanting to play more Cities in Motion. I considered making it one of my games to beat, and even started a new campaign with the intention of progressing through it. Unfortunately, the game has proven quite unstable, and lacks an autosave. I can't seem to play the Tokyo map for more than 5 minutes without a hang, and I spent an hour working on the Munich map without saving when it froze on me. I'll do a bit of research, as if I could make it stable then completing a campaign would be a lot of fun.

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 009