Zombie Apocalypse | Reviews of indie adventure games, roguelikes, board games, and video games

Going over the edge, beautifully

2012-05-18T12:52:06Z

One quiet weekend some time ago, I randomly decided to play the adventure game The Journey Down after some screenshots on the Adventure Game Studio forum caught my eye. I soon found myself enjoying a lazy afternoon with an awesome game full of cheerful characters, good humor, and amazing art. I had such a great time with The Journey Down that I wanted to learn more about its unique style, and the game's developer, Theodor Waern of Skygoblin, kindly answered a few of my questions.

I've been keeping on eye on Skygoblin's site in anticipation of the next installment in the series---I can't wait to see what crazy adventure Bwana and Kito will find themselves in next.

Meanwhile, Skygoblin hasn't been idle. They've completely redone the first episode of The Journey Down, moving away from the AGS engine and instead creating a new version of the game using their own custom-built structure. The moment you start up the remake of episode one it's quite clear as to why Skygoblin opted for an upgrade.

I had already found the art in the original version to be gorgeous but this remastered version takes its character animations and its marvelous backgrounds to a level that is best summed up as "professional".

My initial experience with The Journey Down was buoyed by its exhuberant, happy-go-lucky characters and this new version builds on that good feeling with expert voice acting by perfectly cast actors---they talk exactly how I imagined the characters would sound. I love The Journey Down's design but it's the game's characters that make it so enchanting. Bwana is care-free incarnate and you can't help but cheerfully go along with whatever mischief he and Kito start. Their charm is one of the games' strengths and it was well worth playing the game again to revisit them.

Playing through the new version of The Journey Down was a lot of fun and its few tweaks to the gameplay and amazing graphics made it feel like I was playing a whole new game. It's great to see Skygoblin branching out and taking what used to be an indie project and turning it into a game that deserves to be a commercial success.

You take the high road and I'll take the zombie road.

2012-05-11T12:50:50Z

It’s rare to see a piece of fiction survive adaptation into a different medium. Most often the thing that made that fiction’s story, its characters, or setting popular doesn’t survive the transition to another form. That new work often serves too many masters by trying to keep the original design and yet create its own, new direction. Many times adaptations fail to capture the features of the original medium that made that fiction so compelling to its fans in the first place.

When I first heard that The Walking Dead comics were being turned into a television series I was both delighted and leery of the idea. I was ready to accept that the television series might tell a different story, cherry-picking from the original plot, but was worried that it would take an altered tone from what made the graphic novels so compelling to me. I love the comics’ brutal, exhausting pace as you follow survivors in a zombie apocalypse while they fend off hordes of the undead and barely contend with their own crumbling humanity. Especially compelling to me is that the graphic novels make me care or at least be interested in every character and yet make no character untouchable— anyone can be killed at any time. You (and the characters in the story) are forced to get to know people as quickly as possible since they often don’t stick around for long before being torn to pieces.

Without launching into too much of a diatribe about the failings of the television show (though, the end of season two was much improved and, let’s also be honest, I’ll keep watching as long as there are zombies), my disappointment with the TV series meant that I didn’t give much thought to the announcement of the The Walking Dead video game. I did, however, allow a grunt of interest when hearing that Telltale Games would be the developer since I’ve very much enjoyed their Wallace and Grommit series and the first Puzzle Agent game. I couldn’t help but wonder how they might approach the drama and tragedy of The Walking Dead since my only experience with Telltale was with their quirky comedies.

At the start of the first installment of The Walking Dead video game you're asked to make a choice about what kind of notifications you'd like to the game to display-- whether or not you'd like to be informed if a decision you've just made will have an effect on how the game's story plays out. I chose to keep the notifications on since I was curious about how dramatic these turning points would be and wanted to be aware when those moments happened. Many video games offer choices in dialogue with characters or with what actions you may perform but those decisions rarely mean anything. Most often games will still force you along the same path regardless of the things you've said or done and I wanted to find out if it would be the same case with this game.

Throughout The Walking Dead I was thrilled with how often the game gives its players choices that seem real and important. If you decide to support a certain character during an important group conversation the game posts a notification that the character will later remember that you stuck up for them. Or, a more intense example is when you're faced with situations where two people are in trouble and you must choose who to help, knowing the person left behind will be killed by zombies. It's the speed at which the game demands many of these decisions that makes it that much more thrilling. In dialogue you're forced to react and choose a response quickly before a countdown timer expires-- if it does expire your character simply says nothing which often leads to a worse conclusion. I still go back and forth as to whether keeping the notifications on was a good decision as the game’s story was so enthralling that the notifications seemed disruptive. Yet, specifically knowing when I had made a major choice made those decisions all the more foreboding.

The Walking Dead's moments of combat, while not frequent, were delightfully suspenseful--- making you click on certain spots or interact with the game's environment with precision timing. You are far from a zombie-killing machine and every encounter is tense and a near-death experience. Further, in most cases in the game, you’re not killing faceless, dead humans but people who are very real to the story.

The protagonist in The Walking Dead, a man named Lee who is on his way to jail for killing his wife, is a spectacular, deep character. You guide him through a world that’s falling to pieces only knowing small bits about him and his past and must make crucial decisions based on who you think he might be. The strong voice acting (most characters in the game are equally talented) made me truly care about the person he is and what he might become.

Without playing the second installment, it’s impossible to truly know if the decisions The Walking Dead asked me to make will have a real impact on how the plot of the series plays out for me. I’ve resisted (with difficulty) playing through the game again as the path I took told such a good story that getting a different result would only make me lose the feeling of ownership I have from the experience. Still, it is a video game and there are only so many paths the developers could have written and could possibly account for with more episodes to come. And yet, I very much hope that my specific choices will be important in the next episodes and that the story would have been different had I made different decisions.

The Walking Dead was a terrifying pleasure to play. If the freedom the game gave me was only skin-deep then it was a well-masked. The video game is exhausting, brutal, fast-paced, has interesting characters, and is aesthetically well-built— it perfectly captures what made the graphic novels so enthralling for me. Telltale has done a great job capturing the spirit of its game’s source material and I very much look forward to playing the rest of The Walking Dead series.

And this is the story of how your people came to die

2012-04-20T12:46:00Z

I very much love a management video game, especially those where I get to design the layout of the game’s world. Let me build a city and I’ll work to make the most efficient damn city you’ve ever seen. My citizens will be the happiest, best served, and yet least-taxed people there are! Or, in the case of Evil Genius, my lair will be the most maniacal, insidious beacon of villainy possible.

The beginning of a management game is when I have the most fun; the blank canvas offers exciting potential. But, invariably, the game reaches a challenge plateau---a point where I’ve either figured out the game’s algorithm for success or there is nothing new to do.

I had long stayed away from the game Dwarf Fortress as it terrified me. Even before playing I could tell the game was a magnum opus of video games---an epic masterpiece neither the world of gaming nor I had ever experienced before. The stories I read from people who play the game were incredible, wholly unbelievable, and utterly enticing. Trying to get started, I half-heartedly read wikis and tutorials thinking they would instantly help me understand how to play the game but they only revealed that this was a game that had to be taken seriously in order to be enjoyed.

The problem was that Dwarf Fortress has a terrible user interface---simply the worst. The options in the game feel nearly endless but the game takes little responsibility for actually teaching its players to play. It’s completely up to you (and thankfully, the internet) to figure what to do and how to do it. The game’s ASCII art, while allowing its developers to focus purely on mechanics, is tremendously overwhelming with the sheer amount of information being relayed. I’ve already made the “it’s like I’m trying to read The Matrix” joke with the game Brogue, but with Dwarf Fortress that truly is the case---it’s simply too much for a beginner to possible decipher without screaming and running away in terror.

I couldn’t ignore Dwarf Fortress’ siren call forever. I kept coming across articles describing players’ sessions with the game, whole epic tales written as short stories or even drawn out into graphic novels. It was just too hard to believe that a video game could produce such random and emergent game play and yet be able to keep its randomness from descending into nonsensical silliness. I found some decent tutorial videos to at least get me started. I decided I simply had to play and didn’t care if I bumbled through the game at first; I would figure it out despite every obstacle the game presented.

If I hadn’t already made this clear, Dwarf Fortress is a beast. The game simulates hundreds, if not thousands of details in a huge, randomly generated world. You pick a place in that world and lead a team of dwarf pioneers to try and establish a colony. You don’t directly control the dwarves but manage every aspect of the colony’s day-to-day life by issuing orders and assigning skills and professions to your people. Your colony’s population quickly grows and your citizens soon tire of the meager crops they’re growing, the dirt floors they’re forced to sleep on, and low quality booze they’ve brewed, among many, many other issues. Time seems to be your biggest foe as there are always a host of problems to deal with and never enough hands to help.

Whenever I start a new expedition in Dwarf Fortress I can’t help but say out loud to myself, “And this is the story of how your people came to die.”

The game is brutally difficult and it takes several tries to even get the basic mechanics down. So far my expeditions have starved, died of thirst, drowned (I accidentally diverted a river into my base), been slaughtered by a forest giant, been massacred by a goblin raid, and, most recently, brutally murdered by one of my own dwarves who went on a rampage after being possessed by an evil spirit.

Dwarf Fortress is at least consistent in one thing---even if you’re managing forty tasks at once, there will always be one detail you overlook that spells your doom.

My earlier pronouncement of “magnum opus” really isn’t some gross exaggeration. The level of detailed simulation in Dwarf Fortress is incredible. Every dwarf is randomly generated with their own hopes, dreams, likes, dislikes, relationships, religious beliefs (and so on), all of which have an impact on their happiness with how you’re running the fortress as well as how they act.

Further, just about everything your dwarves use must be created from their very basic constituent parts. Soap, for example, doesn’t just “exist” in the game to be used in cleaning and in your hospital (once you have built a hospital that is). You must create it by rendering animal fats from your hunters’ kills into oil and then combine it from the ash you’ve collected from burning wood. Or, if you’ve settled in a region that doesn’t have enough wild animals to hunt, you can make oil by growing, harvesting, and milling a particular kind of plant. Just creating this one item takes many steps and a lot of focus— focus that is constantly tugged in many other directions as crises erupt everywhere.

Sessions with Dwarf Fortress deliberately end abruptly. The developers have adopted an approach where they don’t expect you to “win”. It’s definitely hard to get used to the idea that your fortress is not going to last forever and instead you must turn your mind to the goal of living longer than you did the last time you sent an expedition into the wild. I continue to get better and better at the game but have barely scratched the surface.

My next big goal is getting a stronger grasp on the game’s military system since not being able to properly defend my dwarves is currently my biggest failing. Soon I’ll learn how to deal with those bastard goblins (or die again).

Dwarf Fortress has an incredibly high barrier to entry and while I’ve praised it effusively here, it admittedly has a lot of flaws. I highly recommend using a few of the many mods that players have created for the game, like Dwarf Therapist (which allows you to better manage your dwarves’ skills) and a graphical tile set since the ASCII art is just too hard to interpret long term. The Dwarf Fortress wiki is a god-send and the game would frankly be unplayable without having it always open as a reference.

Despite hours of game play, I have a lot more to explore with Dwarf Fortress and haven’t even mentioned (or tried) its other mode of play called “adventure mode” where, in turn-based, roguelike style gameplay, you take a single adventurer into the world you’ve generated, fight monsters, and search for treasure. You can even delve into your former fortresses that were lost. Just reading the sheer depth of options available to playing that section of the game blows my mind all over again.

By far, Dwarf Fortress isn’t a game for everyone. But if you like management video games or have grown tired of not being challenged by your games, I can’t recommend this game highly enough. I’ll be playing Dwarf Fortress for years to come, knowing that it’ll keep sending surprises and the challenges my way.

Rooting For, Or Against the Setting of the Sun

2012-04-06T12:54:14Z

The best games are those that artfully balance the tension of losing versus the hope of victory. Even a victory can feel tarnished if it comes too easily so I want a game to make me feel like I’m always in danger, but my skill and a tiny bit of luck carried me through the end. I criticized the last board game I wrote about, Zombies!!!, as it failed to establish any sense of dramatic tension, expecting its zombie theme to hide its many shortcomings. That fragile façade quickly crumbled to reveal a game that was mechanically weak and ultimately quite boring.

Many of the cooperative boardgames I’ve played do a great job of presenting a real sense of danger. Perhaps that’s accentuated by the natural, joint sense of purpose established by that board game genre since the players are all working together. It’s easier to craft a story when it’s shared, when we can bemoan the same calamities and when we can exclaim over the same improbable success. In the end, however, strong mechanics must be part of that experience as you’re still playing a game.

I was eager to break out the board game Last Night on Earth as it seemed to do the things I was felt was missing from Zombies!!! and appeared to have a nice mix of cooperative and competitive game mechanics. Players are split into teams, humans versus zombies, and both sides have their own set of objectives to try and achieve before the sun sets on the game’s small town. For the human side that generally means getting the hell out of there or surviving for a certain amount of time; the zombie objective usually is something along the lines of “kill everything alive.” Game play can easily be boiled down--- each side moves their figures around a map built by tiles randomly placed at the beginning of the game, all the while fighting and killing each other and playing special cards to gain a cheap, competitive edge.

The combat in Last Night on Earth is simple enough that it won’t scare away a casual player but has sufficient nuance to satisfy more strategy-minded people. What especially makes combat interesting, and something I criticized Zombies!!! for lacking, is that death has consequence in the game where a human player’s death scarily adds a super-zombie to the zombie player’s side. For the zombie team, while they get a never-ending supply of the undead to work with, destruction of their creatures is not a good thing as swarming the human players is their key to winning.

One of my favorite parts of Last Night on Earth is that it sneakily requires a teensy bit of roleplaying. Sure, that generally consists of the person who’s playing the high school quarterback character telling the player who’s playing the busty nurse what they’d envision their “last night on earth” being, or the zombies groaning a lot, but overall a story of the humans’ survival (or massacre) is being uniquely crafted with each session. One of my favorite games so far was when the human players had to make their escape by finding gasoline and keys to start up a truck sitting in the center of town. After finding the gasoline, but not yet the keys, one of the human players misguidedly decided to go ahead and fill the truck’s fuel tank while the search continued. In the process of doing so they were torn to pieces by the zombie horde they accidentally attracted to the site. The rest of the session was a blood bath as the remaining humans tried desperately to force the throng of undead away from the truck but only succeeded in adding to the swarm of dead.

Last Night on Earth has just about everything I’m looking for in a zombie themed game with plenty of tense moments, dramatic swings to either side of the fight, and strong game mechanics that create a real sense of consequence with their results. The game can drag a little if the zombie players don’t play aggressively enough, letting the humans wander freely, but is mostly well paced, with a good variety of different scenarios you can play, and plenty of cinematic action to make you feel like you’re fighting for survival— or, if you’re a zombie, the end of humanity.

Taking Turns in Hell

2012-03-23T12:50:00Z

Fresh off my introduction to ASCII roguelikes thanks to the fantastic Brogue, I was eager to dive into another game in that genre. I was, however, a little burned out on fantasy-themed games and one roguelike in particular grabbed my attention because of its source of inspiration. DoomRL is a fairly faithful version of the legendary first-person-shooter, Doom, but of course being a roguelike, the game uses turn-based mechanics. I was especially curious to try a turn-based game that focuses on ranged combat, something I have not seen often.

From the start there’s no denying DoomRL’s inspiration. The music, the menu’s sound effects, monsters, weapons--- seemingly everything is straight from Doom, except in an ASCII-art format. Very much like the original FPS, sound is incredibly significant while moving through the world as your limited field of vision makes hearing nearby monsters important— hearing a particular, familiar growl is often a clear signal to load a bigger gun than the one you’re using. The turn-based combat means you can take time to read a situation and DoomRL demands that you do so by making many monsters too deadly to fight head-on. Not that DoomRL doesn’t have moments where brawn beats brains, as there are instances when you need to muscle your way out of a crowd---making the shotgun my weapon of choice.

Ultimately my time with DoomRL won’t be long as there isn’t a lot to do in the game, nor are there many moments of emergent gameplay that make many roguelikes long-lasting experiences. DoomRL has Doom’s famous exploding barrels but that’s the extent of the game’s environmental interaction. Ammunition is a little too plentiful so there’s no resource management or need to be conservative with your items. DoomRL’s monsters aren’t exactly the brightest either— they will often accidentally shoot a barrel right next to them, killing themselves before I’ve fired a shot.

Even after playing DoomRL for a while now I still don’t quite understand its mechanics for dodging enemy fire. Dodging incoming shots can seem very random, and although it’s bolstered by constantly being on the move and by special perks you receive from gaining experience levels, avoiding damage never feels entirely within your control. Years of playing shooters have made me used to being rewarded for fast reflexes and reflex means nothing in DoomRL.

Whenever I eventually grow tired of DoomRL I’ll still check in with the game from time to time as it has been around for years and its creator continues to make updates. Over the few weeks that I was piecing this post together an entire graphical tile-set was added to DoomRL which improves the game’s experience drastically. While I’d love to snobbishly claim that the ASCII-art was better, the original programming used a very limited color palette making identifying items and monsters difficult at times--- pistol ammo was a light grey “|” and shotgun ammo was a dark grey “|”.

DoomRL is a lot of fun while you’re up for running around blasting monsters but eventually the limited interaction the game world offers, the fairly small list of available weapons and items, and its simple combat wears thin. I’m not sure the tropes of first-person-shooters translate very well into roguelikes but DoomRL makes a fun attempt of it and is certainly worth a try.

The Slog to the Helipad

2012-03-09T14:04:41Z

As I’ve written before about video games, it’s easy for games with a zombie theme to go wrong. For me, surviving a zombie apocalypse is not about mowing down hordes of the undead but the fight for survival while the world is falling apart. Recently becoming the owner of two board games with zombie themes I got to see examples of either side, where one game has what I’m looking for and the other does not.

I bought the board game Zombies!!! on sale without knowing a lot about it. I had seen on BoardGameGeek.com that the game has a lot of expansions (usually a good sign) but was conflicted about buying it as the game has a pretty low overall rating on that site. The folks at BGG are a tough group to please so I figured the low price was worth the risk. The evening I bought Zombies!!! I cajoled my wife into a game which she soon regretted.

The play of Zombies!!! is fairly basic. You, the surviving humans, are racing to a waiting helicopter to make your escape from a zombie outbreak. It is a competitive game where the first person to make it to the helipad wins. The landscape of the city is slowly revealed as players flip over tiles and attach those tiles to the existing design. Each tile has a set number of zombies that are to be placed on it and some have special buildings that contain bullets and health tokens. Moving your character piece and fighting zombies is a simple roll of a six-sided die. You may also play special cards which are designed to hurt your opponents.

Unfortunately that’s pretty much all there is to Zombies!!!. My wife and I found the game to be quite boring and at first I thought that it was because had we tried it with only two people, but a later session of four players revealed it to be no less dull. From the start I was surprised to find that Zombies!!! is not a cooperative game. The notion that I’m racing to leave fellow survivors to be eaten just didn’t work for me. Also, more importantly, there simply isn’t enough meat to the game. Only rolling a six-sided die to move means you are not going very far on a turn and makes reaching far flung buildings too hard. Plus, there is no incentive to do so; if you make it all the way to an outlying building and the helipad tile is drawn by another player, you’ve essentially lost the game. There’s no real penalty when your character dies so the game boils down to everyone waiting at the center of the city for the helipad tile to show up and whoever rolls the best for movement to get there wins the game.

It’s hard to fault Zombies!!! too much as I paid so little for it and the game doesn’t cost a lot even when not on sale. I can see why so many expansions exist for Zombies!!! as its mechanics are simple enough that new rules can easily be plugged in. Even so, I won’t be getting those expansions since my experience with the base game was so poor and it didn’t do enough to suggest that expansions would fix its problems. There is one silver lining to my purchase however, as Zombies!!! comes with a large horde of decent-looking zombie miniatures which I’ll gladly swipe if I ever need a zombie swarm for my next D&D campaign.

Zombies!!! fails to capture even the basic ideas of a zombie apocalypse and commits the even more grievous error of not being a good game. The game destroys what little drama it creates by making inaction more rewarding than risky decisions. As a character in Zombies!!! there is no urgency to make me race to the helicopter since I am never truly in danger, and a zombie-themed game with no danger, is no fun.

Thankfully the other board game I purchased uses its zombie theme fantastically and does so with great game mechanics-- more on that game soon.

9 Months to Life

2012-02-24T15:52:11Z

The good folks who create games using the Adventure Game Studio engine are having a bake sale of sorts, offering 14 new games for a pay-what-you-can price, raising money for the Child’s Play charity. I was sold at “14 new AGS games” but my money going to a good cause made the purchase extra sweet. Hurry, the Bake Sale ends on February 29, 2012, get your games now!

After downloading all 14 games I was unsure of which Bake Sale game to play first so I proceeded in the most obvious fashion, alphabetically. With that hard part figured out I started 9 Months In, a traditional adventure game about a pregnant woman in prison trying to clear her name before her baby is born.

The woman, Sarah, has been convicted of attempting to murder her husband. A former assistant district attorney she maintains her innocence claiming that the many criminals she convicted hold grudges against her and that she’s been framed. Her situation gets even worse as she wakes one morning to find her cell mate strangled to death, and since they’re in a locked prison cell, she is the main suspect.

I feel like I was cringing while starting to play 9 Months In and my face stayed that way through the first part of the game. Not from anything the game actually did but from a worry that things could easily go in a very wrong direction as its subject matter is fraught with peril. The game’s prison setting made it clear that Sarah was going to be in danger and that foreboding felt heightened considering her situation. It was nice however to find that 9 Months In didn’t treat Sarah as a helpless victim as pregnant women are often portrayed, instead showing her to be strong and resourceful in the face of harsh and restrictive conditions.

9 Months In is a little rough around the edges but none of its shortcomings are especially game-breaking. The story is certainly interesting but certain moments in the plot are clumsy or too convenient. The game’s voice acting is amateurish yet strangely endearing. I really like the game’s dark and grimy backgrounds which are well matched with the its moody soundtrack. My only real complaint, a fairly minor one at that, is that the game’s multiple endings are a little too subtly reached. I actually played through the game three times, the first two times getting the same, unsatisfying ending. It turned out to be a very small thing to trigger the “true” finish to the game and those extra play-throughs didn’t have enough variation to justify the different endings.

9 Months In is a great indie adventure game and it alone has made my AGS Bake Sale purchase feel well worth the price I paid (well, that and my money going to help sick kids). My choice to start alphabetically has started off well as I head into the rest of the Bake Sale line-up of games.

Introduction to the @

2012-02-17T19:08:37Z

Video games as a whole have never really fit into genres very well. For a time I had a Google alert set up for the search phrase “adventure game” so that I could try and catch gaming news as it happened, but found that the word “adventure” was being used too broadly. I was looking for point-and-click adventure games while the term was also being used to describe platformers and other action-oriented titles.

Lately the video game genre label of “roguelike” has been applied to games that borrow elements from the genre and its founding game, Rogue. Sometimes the comparison seems reaching as the game described may only be tenuously related to roguelikes, but I think the term’s use is ultimately a good thing. There are many reasons Rogue spawned its own genre and video games iterating and borrowing from the game can only stand to keep Rogue’s memory alive. Further, it has attracted players like myself, who want learn more about the genre’s history and are curious about what the term “roguelike” actually means.

It was not until fairly recently that I realized that I had more experience playing roguelikes than I had thought, not previously connecting Castle of the Winds, RogueSurvivor, and Dungeons of Dredmor. However, having playing roguelikes with graphical tile-sets still didn’t quite feel legit. I wanted to delve the dark and scary depths of ASCII art roguelikes where you the player are a simple “@”.

I had heard of Brogue through a few channels and thought it would be a good game to try first. Upon starting the game I was immediately dropped into a terrifying land of confusing symbols with a non-existent user interface. It took some focus and patience but as I played, the interface slowly didn’t seem so obtuse, moving around the game’s dark dungeon became clear, and I gradually began to see symbols not as abstract representations but as the things they were actually supposed to be. That musical note over in the corner? That is a mysterious magic scroll waiting for me to come pick it up. What is that left bracket across the line of red dots? Why, it is a shining suit of armor sitting on an outcropping of rock, reached by a rickety rope bridge of course! When my wife asked what the heck I was playing, I joked that I was reading the matrix. I was no longer seeing a series of symbols but a world full of adventure and a dank dungeon filled with danger.

Moving past Brogue’s dense presentation I quickly discovered a game that is incredibly fun to play, entertaining, and yet difficult to master. The first few levels are fairly easy and give you a chance to stock up on supplies but thereafter the game quickly punishes sloppy game play. Each step in Brogue needs to be carefully measured and enemies approached tactically. Most importantly, your inventory of items must be carefully managed and used appropriately. Even worse is when you find items that aren’t labeled, and you won’t know their use until you take the risk to try them. Is that red potion an elixir of healing or a flask of incineration? You had better stand next to a body of water before opening it just in case. Luckily once you’ve tried an item any future versions of that item are then labeled. This creates an identification sub-game within Brogue as using an unknown item in the face of danger can save or end your life.

My favorite thing about Brogue is its emergent game play. You never know what the effects of particular actions might be and your approach to a situation is always different. Once, I crept into the entrance of a room that opened onto a giant underground lake. The room was filled with goblins and I, having just survived a tough fight, was in no condition to take them on directly. I threw a potion of incineration at the goblins and mis-clicking, accidentally threw it into the lake. The potion exploded and turned the water into a cloud of steam which quickly scalded the goblins to death. Brogue is full of such moments where confrontations with monsters are often better resolved in ways other than stand-up fights.

Fear my army of Monkey Allies!

Despite my initial fears, Brogue’s interface actually is quite good, and besides its deliberate item description masking, the game is very generous with its information. Highlighting enemies provides a helpful description of them and any special abilities they may have. Practical shortcuts abound in the game as well. I simply adore Brogue’s auto-explore function which puts the game on autopilot—extremely useful after you have died for getting through the first few levels again so you can quickly get back to deeper floors of the dungeon.

Brogue is a brutal game and I have yet to get past the 20^th level (there are 25). Bad luck and inattention will bring a quick death, forcing you to start the game completely over. Typically such treatment would cause me to abandon a game but I have yet to die and not be able to identify my misstep. Items are randomly generated so sometimes you may get an inferior selection but in most cases my death is directly connected to some bad decision on my part.

Brogue has turned out to be the perfect starting place for someone new to ASCII roguelikes. The game is smart, well-designed, and it forces its players to be patient and efficient. Also, Brogue makes no apologies for its toughness but does so without compromising the user’s experience—a rarity in today’s gaming. Now that I have crossed the barrier of entry into roguelikes I am excited to see what else is out there.

The Floppy that was Left Behind

2012-02-03T13:34:34Z

Years ago, shortly after my family’s Commodore 64 died, my parents bought a used IBM. It came fully loaded with Window 3.11 and everything! My young brain immediately started dreaming of all the new games I could cram on to the thing. It would be many chores and weeded vegetable beds later until I had the cash to start buying new games, but providence was on my side. Whoever had sold the PC to my parents had left a floppy disk in the drive: Castle of the Winds: Lithransir’s Bane.

A rogue-like with a graphical tile-set, Castle of the Winds: Lithransir’s Bane was my first introduction to the genre. I was stunned to discover the game’s depth, the vast range of items to be found, and the zoo of monsters to fight. In the game I soon found a love for battling elemental dragons, finding swords specifically enchanted to fight giants, and for chasing purse-stealing thieves. Castle of the Winds gave me my first experience with “character builds” where you did not just develop your character by assigning particular skill points but you also collected certain magic items to complement those choices.

Recently I have been delving deep into the world of rogue-likes, learning their history and how modern releases continue to draw inspiration from the game for which the genre is named. Now armed with a bit of knowledge I see where Castle of the Winds borrowed heavily from the genre and even blasphemously deviated from it with mouse-based mechanics and save states.

Sadly, re-visiting the game after getting a little bit of education about the genre makes Castle of the Winds lose a little of its luster for me. I have quickly grown to enjoy the emergent game-play rogue-likes tend to encourage and there really is not any of that in Castle of the Winds. Now I want to be able to throw items at monsters, interact more with the environment, and run into random situations I may never encounter again in another session with the game.

Even so, I continue to load Castle of the Winds from time to time as it, like many rogue-likes, is the perfect game for the person who likes to multitask. If I suddenly get the urge to check Twitter or need to check my email, it is very easy to Alt+Tab away and come back later as the game waits for you. Also, to the game’s credit, it is not easy to beat, especially now that I’ve restricted myself from saving the game.

I do not know if the person who sold my parents our old PC meant to leave Castle of the Winds: Lithransir’s Bane in the disk drive and I certainly would have missed the game if I were them. But I like to imagine that they did it on purpose, somehow knowing that some kid needed a video game for their new computer, and for that I am grateful.

(For those of you who might be interested, Castle of the Winds' developer, Rick Saada, has both installments of the game available on his site: www.exmsft.com/~ricks/)

Slaying monsters with my upgraded tears

2012-01-12T15:00:00Z

Sometimes all it takes is an unusual concept to make me interested in playing a particular video game. When I first heard that you shoot enemies with your tears in The Binding of Issac, I was instantly curious. It is funny to me though, as once I actually started playing The Binding of Issac, it was not the game’s theme that kept me around but its very solid design.

Loosely following the biblical tale, you play as a little boy named Issac whose insane mother watches too much evangelical Christian television and thinks that God commands her to kill Issac in God’s name. The game starts as an escape fantasy for Issac as he “finds” a trapdoor in his bedroom floor and then progresses through different levels fighting gruesome parts of his psyche.

The Binding of Issac’s developer, Edmund McMillen, specifically modeled the game’s play after the classic Legend of Zelda and that influence definitely shows as you move room to room attacking monsters and finding keys and bombs. As I mentioned before, Issac’s main weapon is his tears which he emits in a steady stream to kill his enemies. The upgrades to his tears, so to speak, are a lot of fun and so are the various other special weapons you can get. The “laser” tears are among my favorites.

What I like especially about The Binding of Issac is that it rarely misses the mark on pure game mechanics and its extra little details are more than just window dressing. The game’s controls are very smooth and perfect for its style of play where precision dodging is needed to avoid enemy attacks. Also, each special item Issac picks up is drawn onto the character model itself resulting in a quite spooky and unique-looking character each time you play.

You will indeed play The Binding of Issac quite a few times since it is set up in a rogue-like style where you cannot save and if you die, you start completely over. Considering that the items and levels in the game are randomized, this can make play-throughs quite varied---in some sessions you will get a great combination of weapons and in others the items you find are rather ineffectual.

From what I understand from interviews with the developer, The Binding of Issac was a bit of a side project for him but even so, the game was clearly made with a lot of love---a creepy, skeletons-in-the-closet kind of love. The game is full of smart and thoughtful design and if you were ever a fan of Zelda’s game play it is well worth picking up.

Resolution to Explore

2012-01-05T15:00:00Z

It was a childhood dream of mine to discover Bigfoot. I had a map showing all of the U.S.’s major sightings hung on the wall next to my bed and I looked at it every night before I went to sleep. I watched the grainy, shaky Patterson video a billion times, analyzing that hairy mammal’s awkward gate and cursing the footage’s lack of focus. I read every book and article a kid with limited transportation options could get a hold of in the days before the internet. I soon became the preeminent expert on tall tales, fairy tales, fables, myths, legends and parables—anything unbelievable, far-fetched, or grossly unproven fell into my realm.

I focused on Bigfoot mainly because it was a creature that seemed accessible to a kid living in southern Maryland. The lochs of Scotland were too far away and even traversing the wilds of New Jersey to find their devil was beyond my reach. But Bigfoot sightings had been reported all over the country and my family living in a rural area made it seem like a reasonable target.

I was no fool though. Deep down I knew there was no Bigfoot. I wanted there to be a large, elusive beast still somehow living undiscovered, shunning civilization at every turn. Drunk, lonely, crazy— even at the age of twelve I could read between the lines of the accounts from people who saw the creature. Still, I ran around our fields, pretending to find tracks and even made a plaster cast once, insisting the resulting mold looked like a footprint of a large humanoid.

It was never really about the creature. Like many young boys I craved adventure, wanting to be the hero and intrepid explorer of my own great story. I mapped my family’s property, marking places likely to hide treasure. I pined for the next chance to go into our house’s crawl space and look for hidden caverns under our home while my father worked on the plumbing. When the limits of our land became too cramped for my exploration I would walk through the woods and fields of several neighbors’ properties to a secret pond deep in the forest that had been formed by converging streams dammed by beavers. The journey to get there was always filled with peril and marked by strange monsters like huge deer leaping rows of eight-foot-high corn in a single bound, barking foxes, and dive-bombing hawks carrying away fat rabbits in their sharp talons.

Today, my home is littered with dragons, the slightly newer symbol of that desire for adventure and legend since Bigfoot-themed art is too hard to come by. They represent my search for something bigger and greater but also the many dragons I have had to slay in my own not-so-mythical life. I realize that I do not do enough exploring these days, something I resolve to fix in this new year, both physically and creatively.

Deception and Dead People

2011-11-18T15:26:33Z

Sometimes when you play a video game it just clicks with you. Sometimes, while playing, you have to stop for a moment and exclaim, “Wow!” These moments can be experienced with many games, even if in some small way, but they are mostly fleeting. Games that consistently inspire that exhilarated feeling throughout their play are special works indeed.

The morning I decided to start playing the indie adventure Blackwell Deception I couldn’t stop until I finished the game. I kept running into chill-inducing moment after moment and had to see it to the end. I enjoyed the first three games in the Blackwell series and was curious to see where developer WadjetEye Games was going with its fourth installment. One of the best parts of playing the first three, since I played them back to back, was that I got to see their growth over time. This fourth game continues that maturation with thrilling storytelling mixed with smart game play.

Blackwell Deception’s storytelling is so strong that I largely forgot that I was even playing a game. Its puzzles are a mystery and their connections can be solved through investigation, logical deduction and footwork, but they never obstructed the game’s focus.

You play as writer turned medium Rosangela, and are accompanied by her sarcastic spirit guide, Joey. Rosa and Joey continue to find and help restless ghosts move on to the afterlife and their story continues with the deeper and darker tone that the third game initiated. The duo find that they are unable to ignore events larger than their business of helping dead people.

It’s this business of helping murdered spirits that I enjoyed the most. Like many movies or books, there’s that fun period before the main conflict occurs where the characters are going about their lives with no huge consequences. The Blackwell series uses this structure as an opportunity to teach players its game mechanics by having players help a ghost who is not necessarily related to the main plot. I like this short prologue as it revels in the pure, fun idea of being a medium who helps dead people.

Every game in the Blackwell series has great graphics and animations but their professional voice acting is what truly sets the mood. Blackwell Deception is no exception with every character perfectly cast, especially Rosa and Joey. That voice acting combined with well-drawn character portraits communicate exactly the story the game is trying to tell.

I love the emotional highs and lows I experienced with Blackwell Deception. It was a weird combination of satisfaction helping these poor murdered people and melancholy brought about by the realization that despite my assistance there was no bringing them back to life.

Simply put, you need to play the Blackwell series of games as soon as possible. Each of them is well made and this new, fourth installment is no exception.

Getting Back to Adventure

2011-11-11T13:00:00Z

I have been on hiatus from adventure games, reaching this stopping point after playing a few indies that I did not enjoy and then playing the very enjoyable Gemini Rue. My patience for decoding adventure designers’ logic had reached its limit and then playing the masterpiece Gemini Rue made me feel like I had reached a place where I could freely invest some time in other video game genres.

After a good detox period the list of adventure games that had since been released got too long for me to ignore and I decided to play Arden’s Vale, an indie adventure that looked interesting. Screenshots on the AGS forum very much reminded me King’s Quest 4, one of my all time favorites.

A short adventure game, Arden’s Vale is a bit a fun. It has a very clean and confident art style—it knows what it wants to be. The game’s story is simple and to the point which is what I needed to play coming back to the adventure game genre.

I would not recommend Arden’s Vale to non-adventure game veterans, especially if you have not played Sierra's games, as classic adventures are heavily referenced, almost to a fault. I do not like it when games break the 4^th wall and Arden’s Vale goes a little too far acknowledging you, the player. It seems at odds with the game’s grim opening sequence which is not lighthearted at all. Also, blatantly self-depreciating moments exist in the game when the developer seemed to want to cover for supposed shortcomings—unnecessary in a game otherwise so skillfully made.

I enjoyed Arden’s Vale for a quick reentry into the adventure game genre. It gave me a few nice reminders of basic adventure game mechanics-- at one point I was stuck in the game as I hadn’t thought to interact with items in my inventory. Arden’s Vale is a cute indie project and I am very interested to see more games from its developer.