Day 8 - Just Cause and Borderlands

Just Cause

I've heard a lot about Just Cause 2. I've never tried it, but I've heard many people say that it's a large, crazy game and swear by the parachute and grappling hook mechanic. I'm looking forward to trying JC2, but it's number 157 on my list, so it may be a while. Today, however, I gave the original Just Cause a spin.

The game starts off with a cutscene that told me nothing, and then throws you out of a plane over the island. You're quickly taught how to use your parachute which can open and close mid-freefall. Or maybe the chute doesn't close, but you just have an infinite supply? Gameplay can be best desribed as GTA on steroids set on a tropical island. The shooting was very fast paced, with the enemies coming in waves, but not being altogether that threatening. After a bit of ground combat, the game throws you into the back of a jeep where you operate a mounted machine gun for an on-rails segment. You'll shoot down a dozen other jeep and a few helicopters too before everything is said and done.

Back at the base, you start getting a bit more story, but really not that much. My first mission was to liberate a prisoner, so I set off towards the prison. Breaking him out really wasn't difficult, you don't need to use cover (and in fact I don't believe there's any cover mechanic here), and you can easily dispatch the cops with only a few hits. I did a bit of driving, and it's very arcadey. You steer easily no matter what type of vehicle you have, or what terrain your own. I took a downhill trip through the jungle and came out completely unscathed, but if you hit a fence you will come to a complete stop. It's all very weird and doesn't play right.

I didn't get the grappling hook, although the controls screen tells me it's in here. I don't really want to spend more time on this game than I have already, 43 minutes was enough to tell me that this isn't some amazing gem of a game that I must experience. It does, however, hint that everything I've heard about JC2 could be amazing, if done in a game that's more developed than this one. I'm very much looking forward to trying Just Cause 2.

Borderlands

This is another very popular game that I never got around to playing. It's been described to me as "Diablo with guns," and with the sequel right around the corner I was looking forward to giving it a try. The opening scene was really well done, setting the tone and style, and I really enjoyed it.

This game acts as a first-person shooter with RPG elements. You have to aim and hit your opponent for the damage to take, but damage is calculated based on the weapons stats. Critical hits appear to be based on aim, for instance shooting a human in the head. There were several different weapon types, but I gravitated towards a pistol with a zoom for picking off those headshots, and an SMG for more close range action.

Through the first few quests, I was slowly introduced to a few characters and mechanics, learning how to purchase a shield and weapons / ammo, and shooting a lot of skags. I eventually made my way to the first boss, and got my ass handed to me by his two dogs. Luckily I was able to kill one of them while down, which gives you a second wind. I say luckily, but the whole thing felt like a scripted way to teach you about second winds, I'm not sure I even could have died there.

The game looks beautiful. Cell shading in 3D first person titles is rather rare, but when done right it looks gorgeous. This game is just oozing style all over the place. Unfortunately it's somewhat ruined by the constant forced travel through the same locations. I got very tired of running back to Zed very quickly. Perhaps I missed the option, but I really did not enjoy having to run all the way back to the town after defeating 9 Toes. Perhaps it unlocks later, but not having at the very least a Diablo-style waypoint system really hurt the experience.

I only played for an hour, wanting to save the full experience for Borderlands 2 which releases next month, but this experience did confirm that I will buy the sequel. The heavy focus on FPS elements, as well as the weak point criticals also lead me to believe that I should buy the title on PC again, and not switch to a console.

Notes

 I went back and played more Cities in Motion. The game is really appealing to me now that I've moderately successful. That being said, I'm still not rich and my infrastructure is not great. I have a lot of stops with tons of angry passengers waiting for their bus/tram, and traffic is building up quite a bit!

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 008

Day 7 - Metro 2033 and Cities in Motion

Metro 2033

This game is set in a post-apocalyptic Moscow, where nuclear war has rendered the surface uninhabitable and full of mutants. The survivors live down the in metros, using the tunnels to travel from town to town. Gameplay is your standard fare shooter, with a bit of horror mixed in.

The game is quite nice looking, but unfortunately the majority of it takes place in drab-looking locations, such as metro stations and metro tunnels. You'll occasionally go outdoors, where you're forced to wear a mask with a limited supply of filters. Speaking of limited, this game always makes me feel like I'm running out of things. Filters are hard to come by, and don't last very long, and Ammo is scarce, especially when you're fighting mutants. You can loot human corpses for a small amount of ammo, but it never feels like enough.

Metro 2033 uses a unique form of currency: bullets. Not the same bullets you use, mind you, but rather pre-war bullets, which apparently are nicer and therefore worth several hand-crafted ones. In the majority of the town hubs you can also trade these bullets in for weapons, ammo, health kits, etc. I spent quite a bit on ammo, and couldn't afford any of the interesting-looking weapons. Health kits aren't really a necessity, as your character does regenerate, albeit at a slower rate than similar shooters.

The game is cool enough, but it's not really my style. It never really feels epic or grand, and I'm not a fan of shooters with ammo limitations. The setting is interesting, but eventually you realize it's just an excuse to make more linear corridors. I played 68 minutes today, as well as some in the past getting me through the first two chapters. I think that's probably enough.

Cities in Motion

I'm a huge fan of the transportation simulation genre. Transport Tycoon DX being a fond memory in my youth, and I still play OpenTTD today. Cities in Motion continues the genre by providing a more in-depth simulation of public transportation. You're tasked with building and maintaining the public transportation of a city, which you can accomplish using a mixture of bus, tram, metro and other less used methods.

This game is hard. You can't go out and build anything and expect to make a profit. Routes must be built intelligently and carefully, especially at the beginning. I opted to play Munich in Sandbox mode, as I didn't want the campaign dictating how I design my infrastructure. After doing a bit of research, I opted to design a simple tram loop in downtown, keeping my tram stops off the street as much as possible to avoid traffic. I quickly added a second tram loop to that, then built a metro line going right through everything. By the end of all this I was making a profit of around $2,000 per month while paying off my loans. Not too bad.

Traffic is a bit of an issue on my third tram line, and some of my more central stations are too popular for the vehicles servicing them, but I'm not sure how to tackle those problems just yet. My next plans will probably to build bus lines on the outskirts leading to the tram and metro stations, then when my loan(s) are paid off I'll borrow some more and build more metro lines / stations. I'm feeling pretty good about what I accomplished so far, and I'm really interested in going back and growing it further. I'm not feeling rich, or successful yet, but at least what I'm doing is leading to progress.

Notes

There's been a lot of mediocre games this past week, but definitely lots of fun ones as well. If it takes me a bit longer to play the next titles on my list, it's only because I want to go back to some of the awesome games I've played this week.

Total time played above my goal: 7.12 hours

Album: Steam Challenge - Day 007

Day 6 - Thief II and Book of Legends

Thief II: The Metal Age 

The Thief series is an amazing series for those with patience. Unfortunately, that was never me, so my experience playing has always been limited. For the uninitiated, in this game you take on the role of a thief who accepts jobs which generally involve stealthing, breaking into and stealing from locations secured by guards. The game generally provides you with an several options on how to proceed, as well as plenty of option loot you can steal along the way.

You're provided a fair amount of tools and weapons to get the job done. The trusty Blackjack is an excellent tool for knocking guards out, if you can catch them unaware. Your water arrows can knock out torches, but not all lights, just as your lockpicks can open some locks, but not all.

In my 98 minutes playing, I completed the first two levels. The first being a relatively linear task which serves as a sort of tutorial. The second level opens up much more, and gives you a warehouse complex, packed with guards, to explore. Your primary goal is simple to steal 500 gold worth of valuables, and you are given plenty of opportunities to do so.

Stealth naturally plays a huge part of the game, and I found myself constantly seeking ways to get behind the guards without being seen. Knocking them out was easy enough, allowing me free reign to run around my secured areas. That's good, because the walking speed is slow, crouched or standing. Even the running speed isn't all that great. And there's a lot to do, and plenty of secrets to find. Even after 50 minutes on the second level, I only managed to collect 676 gold worth of loot of a possible 1811, and located only 1 of 13 secrets.

Thief: Deadly Shadows, the third installment of the series, is number 113 on my list, and Thief: Gold, the expanded original lies at number 156. I'm looking forward to trying both of those later on, as I definitely liked my experience playing today.

Book of Legends

Book of Legends is a find the hidden item type game with a Dan Brown style story, and slightly higher production values. The story starts out with a young man locating the secret "Book of Legends", but is being chased. Naturally he does what you'd expect any young man to do in his shoes: he mails the book to his sister. She doesn't take it seriously at all until some men in black come knocking on her door. Yeah, the story is pretty stupid, it's mostly an excuse to send you from location to location.

You'll start off in Washington, DC, where the book will lead you to your first clue and location. In each scene you have to use the clue from the Book of Legends linked to it to discover the secret, which will lead you to the next location. It seems like if you have a book with locations and clues you could do a lot better than starting at the beginning and hoping all around town, but what do I know?

After you complete a location you can do jobs there for money. These tasks are generally extremely simple and go by very fast. You'll have to do these, as you quickly finish up with Washington and have to pay a very expensive plane ticket to continue.

Overall, I'd say this game is probably the best "find the hidden item" game I've ever played, but in the end it's still a game in a genre that is more aimed towards young children. I see no reason I would continue to play this game beyond the 40 minutes I did to meet my goal.

Notes

I went back to Toki Tori this morning and almost immediately I beat the level that had me stumped yesterday. It's amazing what a fresh look will do in that sort of game. The solution wasn't even complex, and I was disappointed in myself for not seeing it earlier, but that's how it is sometimes.

Album: Steam Challenge: Day 006

Day 5 - Toki Tori and Patrician III

Toki Tori

My first experience with Toki Tori was as an android game, where I played very briefly and lost interest. The game concept is simple enough; your space chicken will teleport into the level, and you must guide it towards all the eggs to collect them so he can teleport out. Gameplay consists of moving the character and using the limited and unlimited powers that are a part of the puzzle. Some examples are the ability to lay a bridge tile, teleport a short distance and move bricks behind you. From what I experienced in the first 2nd set of levels, each puzzle is designed to give you sufficient abilities to complete the level, but usually only if you're efficient and follow the correct path. Logic plays a big part here, but thankfully there's a rewind feature to prevent trial-and-error from becoming tedious.

By the end of the 2nd world the levels were getting decently challenging. I was unable to solve the final puzzle as I eventually ran out of ideas. The game gives you a wild card, which is the ability to skip one level per set, to prevent you from halting completely. If you go back to beat the wildcard level you get it back, and can use it elsewhere. There's also a hard mode which I did not try.

For some reason it feels like this game just isn't made for PC. It could be the fact that you can't use WASD to move your space chicken, or the main menu that really looks like a mobile app, perhaps it's the lack of visible hotkeys for your abilities. Something just didn't click. A huge annoyance is that you have to scroll around to see the whole level, making it annoying to plot a route on a new challenge. I may come back to this title for the challenge alone, as that unfinished level continues to taunt me.

Patrician III

I'm not familiar with the Patrician series, but I do love trading and business sims. This particular title is definitely dated, the included setup app asks you to test resolutions to know what's supported, and caps out at 1280x1024x32. After selecting the highest resolution and attempting to launch the game it provided me with an obscure error about 800x600 not working! I fiddled around with it some more, and followed the suggestion on the Steam forum to add the title to the DEP exclusion list and eventually got the title running.

I started by launching the tutorial, because I thought I should learn to play properly for once, but that turned out to be completely non-interactive, and merely a long series of tiny text messages in the bottom corner of the screen. So I decided not to learn how to play the game, and jump straight into the campaign. There's a series of campaigns, and the one I selected was designed as an introduction. You will occasionally receive tips on how to proceed, such as what to trade for, and where, when to build, etc. Naturally, I ignored the majority of the tips and played with mixed success.

Trading is relatively simple, and there aren't so many goods that you can't remember them all. Towns produce and use goods and raw materials. You can build these facilities yourself, or rely on those available to other towns. Some simple trade routes were suggested at the beginning, with more advanced ones suggested when you can afford the more expensive items. I found myself simply going from town to town along the coast, picking up what was cheap and selling what was profitable. This worked well enough to get me money, but did not advance my career much.

There's some sort of mechanic with home towns that I clearly wasn't getting. For every trade you make, in any town, you will gain or lose reputation. Selling much needed goods to a town increases your reputation while buying the last of their stock lowers it. The game suggests many ways to increase your reputation in your home town, but it did not work out well for me, and my home town wasn't particularly fond of me. Meh, screw them, I'm rich.

The game was easy enough to pick up and play. Even though I only played for an hour and a half, I can see how it expands. You can buy additional ships, there's naval combat, although I don't know if it's interactive, and the production-chain mechanics are all here. I like this sort of game, and Patrician III did feel faster paced than Port Royale 2, so I may come back to it later.

Notes

12 games played, 249 to go. This is going to take a while.

Album: Steam Challenge: Day 005

Day 4 - The Last Remnant and Delve Deeper

The Last Remnant

Square Enix JRPG that looks an awful lot like Final Fantasy 11/14. The first thing I noticed here was that I needed to find my controller. The game supports keyboard, but not mouse, and all the callouts are for an Xbox 360 controller. The game opens up with a large-scale battle and some sort of weapon called the "Gae Bolg", which is pronounced just like my dirty mind expects it to.
You're briefly introduced to the battle system, but it's not until later that any of it makes sense. Characters are played as parts of a unit, which could be 2-6 characters, and you'll control multiple units in one battle. Your actions aren't numerous, at least not at this stage, and you can't control individuals. The unit will take your order and execute them on the battle in somewhat real time, and positioning seems to play somewhat of a part. The game does large-scale battles fairly interestingly, and I'm curious to see how it develops.

I only played for a little under an hour and a half, and this is a JRPG, so naturally the story didn't make any sense at all. The main character, who is searching for his kidnapped sister, doesn't seem to have any idea what he's doing or where he is. The people around him aren't the most informative either. There's a lot of hinting that the Remnants, which appear to be magical weapons, while very useful have a high cost. I'm sure there will be plenty of ethical, moral and philosophical speeches about the Remnants throughout the game.

I'm not crazy about JRPGs, and I only own this because of the Square Enix Complete pack. It looks pretty enough, and aside from the controller issues it feels good on the PC, but I don't think I want to play this any more than I have already.

Delve Deeper

Delve Deeper is a turn-based strategy game with a simple concept: venture down and collect treasure. It played as a multiplayer vs match, where each game has a set number of turns and all players share the same board. You'll control 5 dwarves which fall under three classes: Miner, Warrior and Scout, each with different attack, movement and item-carrying capacities. Each turn allows you to place one tile, to expand the network, and then move each dwarf.

Tunnels have valuable ore in them, depending on how deep you are they get more valuable. Ending a dwarf collects the ore, which can then be sold from your home base or a Teller in the caves. You'll also encounter enemies which can be killed for loot. Tougher enemies appear further down.

I really did not enjoy this game. Your actions per turn are very limited, and the game insist on showing you every other player's actions too. At the default speed that meant about a minute or two in between my turns as all 3 other players and the monsters each played one by one. I raised the speed to the maximum level "Ludicrous", but it still took longer than I'd like. The game itself isn't very deep, and I don't care to go back for it. If you're really in need of dwarven mining, check out Dwarfs!? instead.

Notes

Two uninspiring games of vastly different budgets, but nothing that caught my interest. I wanted to play The Last Remnant more as JRPGs take time to get going, but I found myself drifting to sleep.

11.5 hours down, 188 to go!


Album: Steam Challenge: Day 004

Day 3 - Overlord: Raising Hell and X-COM: Enforcer

Overlord: Raising Hell

I started tonight with the Overlord expansion I had to skip earlier. I've never played an Overlord game before, but thankfully going straight to the expansion didn't penalize me. It had an optional tutorial which taught be the basics of commanding and beating my minions, and then guided me through a series of increases in power and minion counts.

Overlord is very similar to Pikmin and that one mini-game in the collection of mini-games that is Brutal Legend, the gameplay consisting primarily of ordering your minions to do things. The first 54 minutes of gameplay was extremely simple. I primarily sent off my minions (of which I had only one type at this point) by left clicking. Occasionally, but very rarely, I might right-click to call them back. I quickly learned that the one spell I had (fireball) was very situational, and of little use the majority of the time. I could use my sword, but that Overlord, despite all his heavy armor, can take a hit about as well as my little sister can.

The minions are really the stars of this game. They'll do whatever you command, which is primarily to smash things. Intelligence doesn't come into play though; the game warns that they will pick up equipment automatically, even if it's useless. That being said, I still laughed when a couple of the imps put on their pumpkin heads. They pick up gold they find and take it to you saying adorable things like "For the Master".
There's a tower that you collect upgrades for, and gold you collect, but so far everything was 100% linear, and therefore not rewarding in the slightest. I'm not sure where that mechanic is going. Overall the game was very simple and repetitious. I found myself mostly just spam clicking on everything and not really having any option for strategy. I'm sure the game gets deeper, but I don't foresee it shedding the linear and repetitive gameplay enough to see it through.

X-COM: Enforcer

I love X-COM, UFO Defense/Enemy Unknown, Terror From The Deep and even Apocalypse are among my all-time favorite games. Recently 2K has decided to revive the franchise, somewhat, first by announcing a shooter called XCOM. For all those, myself included, that think no good can come from this need look no further for proof.
Enforcer puts you in the role of a character, who I suspect may be a robot, named Enforcer. I'm not sure what X-COM game had enforcers, but there you have it. You start off in a lab where a scientist tells you (with full voice acting!) that you're an Enforcer and he wants you to kill aliens, or something, I dunno. It was hard to listen to him. A brief tutorial teaches you how to kill enemies, and more importantly their spawners, and warns you that you can only ever carry one gun, then throws you into the first mission.

The game, based on the Unreal Engine, definitely looks and feels like Unreal Tournament with more color, but that's where the comparison ends. Gameplay is very fast-paced, primarily consisting of you running around and killing everything around you. Enemies drop data discs that can allow upgrades, and you will find weapon spawns on the ground. Weapons spawned will come with a small amount of ammo, and if that runs out you'll resort back to your laser pistol. The problem is, though, that the weapons you pick up aren't really much better. All the enemies I encountered died in one hit, only the spawners and bosses took more, so why would I want a flamethrower with a quarter of the range, or a saw blade launcher with half the fire rate? Neither one was particularly useful, but you are CONSTANTLY running over weapons. Even if you have a preferred one, it's fairly difficult to hold onto it for long.

By about the third or fourth level I left the base and entered a town, where I imagined my goal was the save the people. I spent a good 10 minutes killing all the aliens on the map, but couldn't proceed. It wasn't until my rage got the better of me that I realized running into the townspeople somehow saves them. That's right, killing all the aliens doesn't do shit, but let me run into you and I'll... give you a piggy-back ride out of here?

You collect data disks while playing, and if you manage to get all the letters to spell BONUS in any level, you get to visit a bonus level that's chock full of crates to shoot with more disks inside. Plus you get bonus disks for clearing levels. All those disks can be used to upgrade your weapons, special abilities and character in ways that are not at all clear. It's all really pointless too, as you can plow through anything with little skill.

This is a terrible game that is good for little other than some mindless action. It feels like Gauntlet with a gun, but not in a good way, because that would be awesome. The 37 minutes I played this game was a stretch, as I was ready to quit after the second or third level, and I will not be going back to it.

Notes

Work and life prevents me from playing as much during weeknights as I'd like, but progress was still made today. I've acquired several missing downloads, so I'm more prepared to tackle the list going forward.

8 games down, 190 hours to go!

Album: Steam Challenge: Day 003

Day 2 - Space Empires IV, DEFCON, Section 8 and AudioSurf

Space Empires IV Deluxe

4X games can be amazing fun. I have very fond memories of playing Master of Orion (and slightly less fond memories of the two sequels). They also tend to be the turn-based strategy games that require the most micromanagement, and that can get tedious very quickly, and can be so complex that it's near impossible to get into it.
Space Empires IV is old enough that it only supports one resolution: 1024x768. If you play on anything higher you get letterboxing so bad you'll have to squint to read anything. I tried to find a patch or fix but in the end I opted for dropping my resolution down. The interface itself is not very intuitive, and there's so much data to be seen, but luckily the game itself isn't too complicated. I've played SE4 before, so I was able to skip the tutorial and hop right in.
As a passive player, I focused on research and colonization, making friends with the locals. Most of them were more than willing to engage in trade with me, save for one unfortunate event where one of my scouts got stuck in foreign territory and it got shot down. By the end of my 3 hours of playing I had 15 colonies in 4 systems and was in the process of building up a fleet, which I'm not ashamed to admit was not for self-defense purposes.

SE4 is definitely not a game for short sessions. Even with 3 hours of play, there were still plenty of expansion opportunities out there that didn't require going to war. Not to mention I barely scratched the surface of the research opportunities. Definitely a very enjoyable game, and the ship design element is just the level of customization I love to have in 4X games. I hope to come back to Emperor Viper and the Viper Empire (I'm great at making original names, aren't I?) before I forget where I stand and what my plans were. I'm also looking forward to seeing how Space Empires V compares, as I never tried it in the past.

DEFCON

Well, it was bound to happen eventually, but I didn't think it would be on day 2. I could only stand to play DEFCON for 27 minutes, while my goal was set at 41. I have no one but myself to blame though, as I didn't know what I was doing. I had played the tutorial in the past, and really didn't feel like sitting through it again, so I thought I'd hop on against and AI and wing it. Well, I lost. And I lost HARD.
For those of you who have not tried DEFCON before, it's basically a strategy game involving global thermonuclear war. You place the predetermined amount of radars, missile silos and air bases around your country, and deploy your fleet in the surrounding waters. Every item has it's purpose, radars detect enemies and shoot down air support, silos nuke enemy cities and defend against incoming nukes. The strategy comes into play in where you place your resources, and how you use them, and I definitely did not have the strategy.
DEFCON stays on the list, and maybe I'll come back to it later.

Section 8

I'm not really sure how I ended up with this game, as I knew nothing about it and what to expect. Section 8 feels like a title that was designed for multiplayer, with elements from Unreal Tournament, Tribes and Enemy Territory mixed in. The single-player campaign is listed in the main menu as the third option, further cementing my opinion that the title is MP first. There's next to no story, I played through the first 3 missions and learned little other than the fact that you're a soldier that drops down onto a planet via drop-ship and fights an enemy. I'm not even quite sure if they're supposed to be aliens or not, but I assume so.
Gameplay-wise it's your standard objectived based missions. Go to point A, secure the area, activate the console, etc. Then a checkpoint is reached and you move on to the next objective. I can see this working very well in a multiplayer environment, with the offense pushing in and the defense attempting to hold them back.

To help you in this you can customize your loadouts. In the campaign you unlock items relatively slowly, so by the 3rd mission I had tried 4 weapons and little else. You also get to select 10 passive slots, which do things like give you enhanced attack power, armor, shields, etc. It feels a lot like Tribes, but I don't know if the customization goes as deep.
Speaking of Tribes, there's also jetpacks and vehicles, although both are a lot more limited. Your jetpack can only fly for a few seconds, and then needs to recharge, so you don't really get the aerial battles. The vehicles seem to be ordered by spending money. I'm not sure how that mechanic works in MP, but in the campaign there's a few places where you're given money and told to call in turrets or a tank.
The game is decently paced, but it's obviously a multiplayer game. The large-scale maps and jetpacks make me shy away, as games with those features tend to have much higher learning curves. I played this game for 54 minutes, and I think that's probably enough.

AudioSurf

Rhythm games are definitely one of my favourite genres, but I'm not entirely sure AudioSurf falls into that category. It's definitely a music game, but you don't play music to a beat. Instead you pilot a ship flying down a track that rises, falls and curves to the beat of your music. Your goal is to pick up the colored blocks that are on the path and align them into connected groups of three.
Different characters have different abilities and mechanics. For example, the Mono is quite simple, grab the colored blocks and avoid the grey ones. The pusher, on the other hand, can push a block left or right depending on what mouse button you're holding when you grab it.
I had already played AudioSurf a bit in the past, and today's 50 minutes helped confirm that I'm not really a fan of this game. Yes, the fact that you can play with your own library is amazing, but the game itself just doesn't appeal to me, and feels only loosely connected to your music.

Notes

I had to skip two titles from the list today. I had assumed that Overlord: Raising Hell was a standalone title, as it appears in the Steam game list. It turns out, though, if you don't have Overlord installed the game simply does not launch. No error message or anything, either. I'll grab Overlord and come back to it later.
On a similar note, The Last Remnant was on the list, but I haven't downloaded it yet. I'm on a monthly limit of 120GB with my ISP, so 12GB downloads really take their toll. For now it remains unplayed.

7.6 hours played, 191 to go!

Album: Steam Challenge: Day 002