Category Archives: The Android’s Favorites

The Android Collects Random Objects (Adventure), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Kickbacks (Gog/Bribed), The Android's Thousand Untimely Deaths (Roguelikes)

FTL: Faster Than Light

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Recently released was a small indie game named FTL, or Faster Than Light, and after an eight-hour stint of WoW yesterday (WHY) I grabbed it and began to play. Then I went to bed very late. This is some SERIOUSLY addictive stuff right here.

FTL is described as a “spaceship simulation real-time roguelike-like”. This isn’t an inaccurate description. The premise is that you are the captain of a Federation starship carrying vital intelligence to put down a massive rebellion, and you’ve got to make it back to Federation space to deliver it. You do so by travelling across a number of sectors in space, jumping from star to star and investigating or dealing with whatever you find at each one, be it a station in distress, a trader, a pirate, a pirate disguised as a pirate, and so forth. Always trying to stay one step ahead of the rebels, who will sweep across each sector as you cross it and give you a serious incentive to press on.

But of course each consecutive sector is tougher and contains stronger threats, so you also want to explore and see what you can gather in order to upgrade your ship (Or just repair it after the inevitable damage you take), recruit new crewmembers, and so forth. When you’re in combat is when the real fun begins, and it’s the part that they mean when they say “real-time”. You have to juggle a number of things going on at once, directing your crew to the posts you need manned (Most things operate without crew, but they can make it work better and they can gain experience to increase this further) or reacting to various things occurring shipboard such as fires breaking out, systems taking damaged, or boarders teleporting over. Meanwhile you’ve got to decide how to use your various weapons against the enemy, what to target, whether to use or conserve missiles, and so on and so forth. It doesn’t look like much but once you’re in there it gets pretty freaking tense and engaging.

Things get way more frenetic than you might expect

At almost every star you visit you will be presented with a short text event requiring you to make a decision. Do you try and help that civilian ship under attack by pirates, or hope to sneak past? Do you want to investigate that abandoned station or just move on? These events form one of the cores of the game, and the whole thing depends on decisions you make in one way or another. They also tend to consist of the good old standbys of shows like Star Trek, so if you’ve ever wanted to deal with various unpleasant space gribblies, this is the game for you!

As for the “roguelike” appellation, well. This is some random shit right here. Your starting ship is predefined but almost everything after that, from the weapons you might find at a store to the events you encounter to the sectors within the galaxy itself is randomized. Some games will give you an easy time, some will bend you over and make you squeal like a schoolgirl on prom night. This is a game to be played and replayed, not played through once and put aside; each play will probably last under an hour and each time what you largely gain is knowledge and experience (You, the player, that is) although there are some unlocks that mix things up a good deal.

It’s also a game of hubris. Some boarders have teleported over and are attacking your weapons bay? Well we’ll just see how they like it if I vent all the air. Heh. Oh crap, their ship just blew up my O2 room. And now they’ve sabotaged my door controls so I can’t close the airlocks again. Now I’ve got to try and repair the O2 room AND door control with the air supply rapidly depleting and oh everyone is dead. The game explicitly tells you to be prepared to lose, and like any roguelike or Dwarf Fortress, that’s an attitude you’ll need to get very far with this. Losing is Fun. Still, Losing can Hurt as well, though funnily enough total defeat hurts less than losing a single crewmember can. Just between their name and a few experience-based stats you can grow attached to the little guys, and when one gets killed I tend to feel some guilt and sorrow – “Mattz was with us from the start, he saved the ship more than once! And I let him die!”

You can grab it now from Steam or GoG.com and I highly recommend you do so, it’s only the price of a movie ticket and you’ll get much more fun from this. EDIT: Thanks to commenter neothoron, who pointed out that you can also get FTL from the game’s official website for Windows/OSX/Linux, comes with a Steam key, and is DRM-free.

The Android's Aural Receptors (Music/Sound), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

Goodnight, sweet prince.

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As you may have recently heard, SCE Liverpool – formerly known as Psygnosis – is being shut down. To anyone who grew up playing the games I did this is a moment for reflection and, yes, perhaps a little bit of mourning.

Psygnosis was founded in the early 80s in Liverpool, UK. It didn’t take long for them to get noticed because of games like Shadow of the Beast, but they really started to shine in 1991 when they displayed some seriously canny foresight by publishing DMA Designs’ Lemmings. DMA Designs, you may or may not know, went on to change their name to Rockstar. In 1993 Psygnosis was acquired by Sony, though they would keep the name for eight further years, and it was here under Sony that they made their real gems.

Wipeout was the flagship title for the Playstation One, and the then-impossible level of graphics and the cool use of contemporary music to race holy shit flying race cars certainly sold the console to me, and to a few of my friends. It was like nothing we’d ever seen before. It was also hard as hell, which was pretty great. They complimented this by retaining their publishing acumen to help games like Destruction Derby, and made the little-known but extremely silly and enjoyable giant mech game, Krazy Ivan. Later was Wipeout 2097, the best iteration of the franchise and an extraordinary game still worth playing today.

When I was a kid their owl logo gave me nightmares.

But it would be another year or two, in 1997, that Psygnosis put out the two games for which I will always remember them, despite the brilliance of Wipeout. Colony Wars and later in the year G-Police were both superb, amazing sci-fi games, the first set in space (and with a wonderful, narrated in-game encyclopedia) and the second on Jupiter’s moon Callisto. Both featured all the things you could wish for in such games; dystopia, violence, futuristic weapons and vehicles, and “The Tsar and his battle fleet saw everything… knew everything… punished everything“. That same year also saw the release of their weird, experimental game Sentient, which was one of the most unique games I’ve ever played.

When the 90s closed the spark seemed to have gone out of the company, and despite the great sequels to G-Police and Colony Wars they fell back on Wipeout games and on their Formula 1 line, all very solid but somehow never as impressive as taking chances on Lemmings or the Discworld point’n’click games. Still, they will be missed, and not soon forgotten, by those of us from that era who grew up with all these amazing games thanks to Psygnosis.

The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Sleeping Dogs

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Here’s a game I’ve been playing a lot over the last week or so. Sleeping Dogs began as True Crime: Hong Kong, which wasn’t tremendously promising because True Crime was never a very good series in my eyes. But after much kerfuffle, being dropped by Activision and then picked up by Squenix, and being renamed to Sleeping Dogs, it managed to come out. Anyone familiar with vaporware and the like will know that commendation must be given just for getting a working game out the door after that; what’s all the more surprising is that this game is damned good.

You are Wei Shen, a cop on loan from the San Francisco PD to the HKPD in order to go undercover and infiltrate the Sun On Yee, a large and powerful branch of the Triads. You do this through basically being a far greater threat to stability, the innocent, or the police than the Sun On Yee ever could. It’s great! The game features fairly typical free-roam gameplay on the surface, but it has a lot of polish and features inspired by other games. For example melee combat, which is by far the mainstay of combat in this game, with guns and shootouts being somewhat rarer than is common in the genre is similar to the Batman: Arkham games, whilst there’s a lightweight implementation of freerunning that, when done properly by you, makes getting around on foot through Hong Kong’s dense urban maze a good dear smoother and quicker. If this sounds derivative or shallow then I’m here to reassure you, because the game may take inspiration from other places and it may not implement any one thing with the same depth as its inspirations, but everything works together so well that you’re going to be enjoying yourself pretty much no matter what part of the game you’re partaking of.

The story – so far at least – is surprisingly well-realized, with some great characters who you grow rather attached to before terrible things happen to them. The voice acting is especially brilliant, with a mix of Cantonese and English that is quite unique and fascinating. On that note I’ve never been to HK but this game really sells the atmosphere like few others do; the look, the sound, the music, everything is pitch-perfect and makes you feel like you’re there, even if you’ve never been. (And I’ve seen people who have been there say it’s a pretty striking representation.) The only real downside of the game is that the city is fairly small, but the extent to which it feels small varies considerably. They used a lot of tricks to make it seem bigger than it really is, and for me it works great because I’ve never yet felt at all confined. And what is there, generally speaking, is absurdly detailed.

Pic entirely unrelated, we just find it hilarious here at The Android’s Closet.

The music deserves a special mention. There are some absolutely great tunes in this game, and it definitely features the best (and best-named) classical station I have ever heard in any such game, Boosey & Hawkes. Tell me that’s not the best possible name for a radio station. And rolling through a nightclub, screaming people everywhere, having a shootout while Hudson Mohawke’s FUSE is blaring out? Baller as all hell.

So if you’re looking for an open-world crime game you could do a lot worse than Sleeping Dogs. It’s not just a game that escaped from development issues to be released; it’s a game that did that, then both shed a rather ropy pair of predecessors, and then came out to be seriously impressive. I challenge anyone who plays it to refrain from starting to use Chinese words.

And in closing, Activision can eat all of the shit.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Grand Strategy and 4X

We got a question yesterday via twitter from reader Fuggle/Math asking how we would describe the difference between 4X games and Grand Strat games. Well, the reply would take longer than 140 characters so here we are~

Now, these two genres are pretty closely linked for obvious reasons. Both tend to involve the control of countries on a quest for dominance, be it local, global, or galactic. Both tend to involve building up your infrastructure and military and pushing large groups of units around. And if you play both then it’s hardly surprising that you’d end up trying to figure out what the difference is supposed to be. But let’s dig into it a little deeper and see if we can tease some answers out.

Let’s define 4X first, for anyone not sure of what it means. It should be 4E actually, because it stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. But X is the coolest letter, so there we are. Anyway the idea of a 4X game is to do exactly that; to begin from a single settlement (be it a city or a planet) and first discover everything around you, then move in to occupy and make use of it, and then to annihilate everything else you meet.

So far, so strategic. How does this differ from Grand Strategy? Well, a Grand Strategy game has a couple of key differences. You still Expand and Exploit, but the Exploration and Extermination aspects tend to play second fiddle. This is not to say that they are absent or that no GS game cares for them – EU3 has a strong exploration aspect for example, whilst almost all of them involve SOME degree of Extermination. But you tend to be able to win without needing to conquer everyone. Indeed that may be perfectly possible, as in Hearts of Iron, but it may also be fairly tricky, as in Victoria 2.

And in some cases it is the categorical imperative of those workers who have already set themselves free.

Perhaps the other big difference is that 4X games are almost invariably turn-based, whilst Grand Strategy tend to be Real Time With Pause. Both encourage you to take your time and think about things, but GS still leans towards being a bit more fast-paced thanks to this. GS generally tries to implement the diplomacy side of things with more rigor and depth than 4X, as well – though the extent to which any given game succeeds in this is, of course, up for debate.

The much, much quicker way to tell is by asking “Was this game made by Paradox Interactive?” If yes, it’s a Grand Strategy. If no, it’s not. Unless it is, but who buys anything made by Matrix Games at those prices?

The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Distracted Boss (Casual/Flash), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Thinking Cap (Puzzle)

Orcs Must Die! 2

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I’n honestly not sure whether having that “2” after the “!” is sending my sperging into overdrive or is tickling my fancy, but there you have it. Good game though.

Well that was a short review.

Okay okay seriously though! I picked up the original OMD! in the Steam Sale recently and it was something I really fell in love with very rapidly. It’s not a complex game in principle; in fact the title pretty much sums it up. It’s a quasi tower-defense game, setting up traps and guardians like archers to prevent Orcs and their assorted allies from reaching the ‘Rift’. The twist is that you aren’t a detached overseer, you’re a character down in the trenches and you can run around fighting the Orcs yourself as well as having all the traps doing their thing.

It is, in short, the bastard love-child of Kagero: Deception II and Tower Defense. It’s from a small studio, and in a couple of ways this shows in the sequel, but overall they have made some very solid improvements to the game. There is an array of new traps and tools to use, the new Sorceress character has a rather different playstyle from the War Mage due to her charm ability, and there are of course new traps and levels. Perhaps my biggest negative mark against this game is the small number of the latter, but it is redeemed somewhat by both the Endless and Classic modes, the former containing some levels that aren’t in the story and the latter being levels from the first game that can be played now with all your new toys (though only if you own the first one).

It’s a tr… oh you know where this is going, finish the line yourself!

It certainly doesn’t revolutionize the series, but it is a very solid sequel that I’ve already played even more than the original. Endless mode is especially compelling, and the new mix of traps, environmental hazards, and enemies means that although the game isn’t really difficult most of the time, getting 5-skull ratings on some levels requires some calculation and thinking on your part. Another change is that doing levels again nets you more skulls, so you’re not limited like you were in the first game, but it will still take some time to get everything up to where you want it, upgrades wise! (And the upgrades are far more involved this time around, replacing the Weavers entirely). A worthy sequel to a great game? That’s really all we can ask for!

Buy Orcs Must Die! 2 if you enjoy quick, fun blasts of cartoonish violence and one of the better protagonists of the medium in the form of the War Mage.

Oh and there’s co-op too if you’re one of those freakishly disposed people who has friends.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

JUDAS!

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No, not the Lady Gaga song, as great as it is. No I’m talking about Jihad Sultans 2 Crusader Kings 2. Let me set the scene for you guys.

Using the Character Creator I began as a German-culture Christian in Gao, and quickly expanded to take the surrounding lands and form the Kingdom of Songhai. So far so good, but then my male line seems to just end and I have nothing but daughters for like 50 years, and despite the continuation of expansion at first I’ve been struggling to keep things together. Why? Because my country is full of FAITHLESS BACKSTABBING MENDACIOUS FRAUDULENT TWO-FACED DOUBLE-CROSSING PERFIDIOUS RECREANT TRAITORS, THAT’S FUCKING WHY!

I’m so mad. I try and be a nice, benevolent ruler. But people keep rebelling and that necessitates tyranny to keep the land together – which of course makes people dislike me further. There should probably be a fear modifier for a consistently victorious tyrant because I always manage to find a way to win, whether it’s by attriting the other guys to death in the horrendously bleak deserts of Africa, taking loans until I can afford the mercenaries needed to win, or through the sheer luck of capturing the leader of a rebellion in battle.

My current Queen, Queen Luna I of Songhai and Ghana, is only 35 years old and she just put down the “Third War to Depose Queen Luna”, the “Second War against the tyranny of Queen Luna” (Caused by people who you try to arrest or revoke the titles of saying “Nah bro” and revolting instead; but I only tried to imprison them because they were involved with other revolts!), and some random attempt at independence by some podunk no-account count of Povertania, West Africa. Oh and then my still-pagan neighbors in Tarkur took a shot at me and I had to cede some territory because it was in the middle of one of those other wars.

Why is there never a vassal swarm in my DEFENSE?

Twenty-two years on the throne and already in this mess. And furthermore thanks to not having ANY SONS EVER ARGH I don’t have people I can hand landed titles out to any more; so here I am sitting pretty with a ton more provinces than I can administer and nobody loyal to give the damned things to. Mom tried that with Duke Valerian II and he got outmaneuvered by Dukes Emich I and II, the latter of whom ended up with ALL THE DUCHIES. Which meant I had to fight 3/4 of my country simultaneously because Emich II was all “Oh ho ho ho I’m not going to settle for that oh no I’m Petyr Fucking Baelish, Littlefinger big ambitions, time to betray the daughter of the woman who gave me power in the first place!” So now my country is a ruined hellhole, going from the most prosperous and powerful Christian state outside Europe to an impoverished, contracting realm with no money, no manpower, and no loyal vassals in the space of twenty years.

I love this game.

e; Oh also there’s Rome 2 announced.

The Android can't be arsed with a real topic (Weekend), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Repair Shop (Meta-blog)

Back in the saddle

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As dear Pike said a couple of days ago we should be resuming normal service now that our visit has ended. It was supremely enjoyable and I look forward to her reciprocal visit to rainy old England in a few months. Still, let’s get to the videogames, eh?

What have you guys been playing over the past few weeks? Pike and myself mostly played our typical standbys, which is to say Civilization IV and a little bit of Earth Defense Force 2017, but things have come out that warrant attention. Dragon’s Dogma, which I have but haven’t yet played a great deal of, Max Payne 3, and Lollipop Chainsaw to name a few.

Or we could bring up E3 – a few things there looked real nice, I’m thinking Watch_Dogs, Assassin’s Creed 3, and The Last of Us. I may actually need a PS3 for that last one. Did anything at the show catch your eyes, folks?

Despite The Last of Us this situation won't ever change.

And as it’s Friday, why not; What are you playing this weekend? :D Anything you’ve finally managed to make some time for, or just some old favorites that help you relax?

As an aside are there any topics you want to see us talk about? We’ve had some requests before and I don’t think we’ve managed to remember them all; please let us know in the comments!

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Kickbacks (Gog/Bribed), The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

Guys!

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As you know we are unofficial GoG.com mouthpieces because they sell loads of great games, but this is a particularly special one.

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/sid_meiers_alpha_centauri

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. $2.99 USD. You know what you do.

Pike keeps this picture handy.
The Android's Favorites, The Android's Fellow Robots (Multiplayer), The Android's Nerf Gun (Shoot 'em up)

Earth Defense Force

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As Pike and Mister Adequate are together “in real life”, to use a term, we shall be co-writing today’s blog post!  Obviously one of the first things we decided to do upon meeting up was to play some vidya, and we opted for a game that Mister Adequate brought along, called Earth Defense Force 2017, for Xbox 360.  It was the first time I’ve played it, but Mister Adequate has played it quite a lot, so we will start with him giving us some background on the game and his experiences with it.

Mister Adequate

I first heard of Earth Defense Force in an old issue of Edge magazine, which was reviewing the second one in the series – 2017 being the third – and though it was Japan-only at the time I was instantly taken in by the review which glowed with positivity. Some years later I saw EDF 2017 on Amazon and after confirming it was indeed the same series, I quickly purchased it and found it was even better than Edge had felt its predecessor to be.

EDF 2017 is a B-game. It is low-budget in every respect, from graphics to voice acting, and there is no reason for it to be considered anything other than a second-rate effort from a studio who had neither the budget nor the expertise needed to meet their ambitions.

Except, of course, that it is a sublime piece of brilliance that is incredibly difficult to put down. Despite (perhaps because of?) the low-budget nature of the game it is gaming in a classic form. There is little outside of the main point, which is shooting gigantic aliens with stupidly powerful guns, and what is there is so hilariously bad that it endears rather than repels. The core gameplay however is just immense fun, and the desire to collect all possible weapons drives you to keep playing and playing, as any good system of rewarding players does. In years of enjoying this game I’ve never grown bored with it – it is for all intents and purposes the progeny of classics shooters like Galaga and Space Invaders, and gaming is better for it.

Now I shall turn you over to Mrs. Pike Adequate for her opinions on the game, which she has only first played a couple of days ago!

Pike

The beauty of EDF 2017 is that it puts entertainment first and… well, I’d say it puts everything else second, but it really doesn’t because everything else just doesn’t exist in the game.  Powerups appear as flat sprites, the in-game physics are ridiculous, vehicle controls are about as terrible as you can get, and yet the game never ceases to be fun.

There is no story here because the game doesn’t need one.  Giant bugs are attacking.  So are giant robots.  And giant cyborg dinosaurs.   You have guns and your job is to go shoot them so they can drop more guns.  That’s it.  You do this for 56 levels or so and it’s beautiful.  This is gaming in its very purest form; a shooter without a big fancy budget or any semblance of realistic guns.  It doesn’t attempt to be anything other than what it is, and what it is is unabashedly fun.  Especially in multiplayer.

In other words if you’re looking for a simple, fun, and gloriously mindless multiplayer game, look no further than this one.  It is worth far more than the couple of bucks it will probably cost for you to pick it up.

The Android's Favorites

Multiple copies

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A couple of days ago, my co-blogger Pike found herself with a modest sum of extra money. She duly went to her local videogaming emporium in order to acquire a new one to play. And what, you ask, did she come away with?

Sonic Classic Collection for the Nintendo DS. If I recall what she told me correctly, this is the fourth copy of the first few Sonic games she now possesses. It’s quite silly! Yet it serves a purpose, of course; none of her other editions are portable, so they cannot be easily played in bed, or at all in other rooms or while on a lunch break at work, and so forth.

I, meanwhile, have three copies of UFO: Enemy Unknown. The thing with older games like this is that there you are, wanting to play it but not wanting to mess with all the stuff you need to do to get it running on a modern OS, when suddenly it gets released on Steam, or on GoG, or what have you, and it’s very easy to just pay a few bucks to get a new working copy. Likewise I have three copies of Deus Ex, and I’m sure there are a couple of others!

Doubled, or indeed Trebled! Even... quadrupled?

Do you folks out there have similar experiences? Owning several copies of the same game? Perhaps for different platforms, perhaps updated rereleases, perhaps you lost one, bought another, then found the first one? Do tell us in the comments!