The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Skein Of Flesh (Stealth)

Dishonored. Also a TV show.

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Apologies for our lax updating lately, Pike and I have been completely engrossed in WoW’s Mists of Pandaria expansion. Contrary to our prior cynicism about WoW and Blizzard’s direction, and our nostalgic view of the Burning Crusade era, MoP is quite honestly the best WoW has ever been. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about, that’s just an excuse for being lazy.

In between long stints in Pandaria I’ve been putting some hours into some other games; XCOM I’ve already talked about, and I’m going to write something about The Walking Dead soon having just got it last week on the advice of my bro Barry Manilow, but today’s topic is Dishonored.

In Dishonored you are Corvo Attano, the strikingly handsome personal bodyguard of Empress Jessamine Kaldwin and her daughter Emily. Within a few minutes of starting the former is killed in front of you and the latter kidnapped, with Corvo arrested and thrown into prison for the foul deeds. So begins your career as a nightmarish magic assassin. Now, do you guys remember BioShock? Remember how it was hyped as a game with a huge variety of possible playstyles, but which really turned out to have only a tiny handful of situational options and tended to be very samey? Well, Dishonored is everything BioShock was promising to be; you truly do have a good array of tools and abilities to play with, and you can play in some dramatically different styles. Stealthy thieving pacifist, stealthy and precise assassin of your target and nobody else, stealthy murdered of everything, noisy murderer of everything, using or not using any of a half-dozen neat abilities. It’s a really neat mix.

What really sells it though is the world and level design. Both on the aesthetic level and in the literal “how things fit together” manner, Dishonored is a tour de force. The world works perfectly with your skills to let you explore in a way that never feels forced. When you use your skills in some creative manner you feel like you’re clever for figuring it out; routes are generally shown and/or hidden sensibly and you feel sneaky when you find them. The city of Dunwall, where the game takes place, recently underwent a whale-oil fueled Industrial Revolution, and is filled with all manner of devices relating thereto. It’s also beset by the “Rat Plague”, which is carried by the creatures and causes massive hemorrhaging. Upwards of half the city is dead of it, and when you see mounds of corpses disposed out, and entire districts abandoned, it’s a truly grim vision. All but the very wealthiest experience the troubles arising from this – you’ll see peeling paint and cracks in the walls of all but the most important buildings and those belonging to the very richest. It’s one of the most immersive and unsettling dystopian settings I’ve ever explored.


It’s also Asshole Simulator of the Year, for my money.

—

Now, to step away from Videogames for a moment, even thought Pike won’t give my head peace once she sees it. There is a TV show I would briefly like to mention. It is a show about superpowered people. But it is a show which is not about the powers, it is about the people. The powers are things to be dealt with, with realistic constraints that never seem like forced efforts to hamstring people but rather clever and logical downsides. The characters are amazing and you want to spend time with them, the show is witty and hilarious a lot of the time, but also dark as fuck at times. The show is called Alphas, and I would really quite like to see them make a Season 3 so if you like great TV go watch it and talk about it!

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO), The Android's Nonsensical Gibberish (It is too hot today/we are lazy)

WoW races that need to be playable

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As it turned out Pandas was a great idea, so with that in mind I hope for greater open-mindedness from Blizz regarding new playable races to be introduced over the coming years. Here are some suggestions that I, with input from Pike, would especially like Blizzard to consider:

1) Tuskarr. These are top of the list, and should have been playable since Wrath instead of adding DKs. They are The Best Race. They are big fat Walrusmans who build big Walrusman moai and I forget to finish my sentences AND they have the best lines! “Visit again when you can!”
2) Ethereals. They are the Second Best Race, and I can’t even begin to fathom why they’re not playable because they’re blatantly superior to everything else that isn’t a walrusmans.
(everything after this point is in no particular order)
3) Ogres. They really should have been playable since Day One, let’s be honest here.
4) Mantids. These guys look metal as all hell and I’d very much like to be able to say things like “It’s time to swarm.” or “I must speak with the Adjunct!”.
5) Grummles. I love them and their constant talk about luckydos is amazing. I especially like how their name is their luckiest luckydo, so some of them have names like “Half-eaten Fish” and “Wooden Spoon”.
6) Naga. The quests in Vash’jir where you are a Naga Battlemaiden are great, because you get to see how cool as heck Naga are. Turns out they’re refined, treat their underlings reasonably, and act with respect and decorum! Also they have that crazy spinny-blade blender move that minces everything.
7) Iron Vrykul and Iron Dwarves. Rock-based robots covered in baller glower runes? Yep I’m okay with that sign me up please.
8) Tol’vir. Yesssss these guys are also baller as hell. Hanging out in Uldum being big old cat-taurs looking like they really do deserve to be in charge? Do want.
9) Arakkoa. I wanted to be one of these bird-people when I first saw one in Hellfire Peninsula all those years ago, and I still want to. Because creepy bird-people.
10) Aqir. Yes more bugs. I like being a bug! I want to be a bug leader of a gigantic, terrifying hive-mind that consumes the world, deal with it!
11) Faceless Ones. Tentacles and a complete inability to have pronounceable names add together for a pretty amazing race.

Blizz please make Wilford Brimley playable.

What about the rest of you guys? Any races in particular from the WoW setting you want to run around doing dailies as?

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Favorites, The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

This just feels right.

Pike wrote extensive about XCOM: Enemy Unknown yesterday and I’m going to follow up on her post now that I’ve had the chance to spend a few hours with it. Through methods. As you can infer from the title, I’m a big fan. I’m a HUGE fan.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with classic PC games will probably be aware of X-Com even if they’ve never played it; it’s regularly highlighted as one of the best games ever made and this is not a reputation attained without sound reasons. It is an absolutely masterful blend of strategic and tactical thinking, it crafts an atmosphere of extraordinary tension, and it somehow manages to combine a very strong attachment to your troops with a massive rate of attrition among them. It also featured the torture of watching your brilliant tactical maneuvers getting completely undone and everything going to hell.

This game masterfully recaptures that. The mechanics are different in a lot of ways, such as the removal of Time Units (Something that caused a sudden intake of breath among X-Com vets when it was revealed) and the smaller squad sizes. But it’s an isometric tactical game with a strategic layer on top, and it’s all about tension and everything going downhill and your desperate efforts to pull it off despite all your best laid plans going the way of George and Lennie’s.

Moreno, Okamoto, and Mack were good soldiers, and good people. Their sacrifice won’t be forgotten. Also despite this loss the mission had a good outcome, because Classic Ironman is hardcore and this is XCOM.

Indeed, most of the changes are very sensible and nice ones and it’s patently clear that the team at Firaxis put a huge amount of work into figuring out what worked and what didn’t and then polished the thing nicely. Which isn’t to say it’s not buggy as heck, because many reports suggest it is, but the underlying design decisions and mechanics all seem to be very, very solid. One nice touch I’d especially like to point out is the addition of three characters in your base, your chief scientist, engineer, and your right-hand man. It adds a lot to hear their commentary on various matters, but their suggestions are never more than that. They’re a wonderful little addition that add a lot to playing.

What this game does though is it takes me back. Like an old war vet, playing this game reminds me of the original, and it pulls me back to when I was a kid playing that game all summer long, getting destroyed by Cyberdiscs and Mutons (Not to mention Tentaculats and Lobstermen oh god), and this just feels like a game from a bygone era, when they were unforgiving bastards that made you incredibly angry but were far, far too damn good and addictive to actually put down for more than five minutes.

If you were worried about this not being true to the original, you can rest assured that all the changes I’ve seen so far have allayed that fear completely. The mechanics and look may have changed but the spirit absolutely has not.

(It should be noted that Pike and I are both playing the PC version of the game, and indeed one of the few genuine criticisms I have is that the UI is clearly intended to allow consoles to play the thing. I’m all for a game this relentlessly ballcrushing on a console but I hope Firaxis patch in a few tweaks for the PC side of things.)

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Favorites

This is it. This is the game X-Com fans have been waiting for.

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So let’s talk about XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

I was originally going to wait until I’d clocked more hours in this than just the tutorial, but honestly I feel that said tutorial has got me confident enough to make a valid assessment, so here we go:

This is the strategy/tactics game of the year.

The short version is that they took the original X-Com: UFO Defense, beefed up the graphics and redid the UI, tweaked a very small handful of features, packaged it up and are selling it right now.

Sold yet?  No?

Here’s the long version, then: all of my fears about the game have been thoroughly laid to rest.  This isn’t an easy, casualized version of the game (unless you specifically put it on the easy difficulty.)  This isn’t Babby’s First Turn-Based Tactics.  This is X-Com.

In fact, that last sentence was something I just kept hearing in my head over and over as I played.  This is X-Com.  This is what it’s supposed to be.

Everything is there.  The rookies from every country in the world with the appropriate name.  The Skyranger.  The Interceptors shooting down UFOs.  The research.  The construction.  The money management.  The geoscape.

“Hidden Movement” is there; it’s called something different but it’s there and just as terrifying.

The music is there.  They redid the mission music from the original and added it as a track in the game and when I heard it I felt my heart jump into my throat.

Which leads me to my next and perhaps most important point; the sense of sheer white-knuckle thrill is there.

Let’s talk about Firaxis’s most controversial choice, which is the removal of time units and the replacement of them with a fixed set of moves.  They pulled this off really, really well.  There is still a sense that you can move a certain number of steps if you also want to shoot something, and thanks to a very clear UI you know exactly when you’re going to overstep that boundary.  It doesn’t change the core mechanic, it just makes it easier to “read”.

They have also added a “talent tree”,  so to speak, to your soldiers.  Different soldiers come with a different specialty– or “spec” if you will– and as they improve you can pick up talents for them.  Some of the talents are a real difficult choice because they could all be useful in different situations.  This also ups the stakes, considerably, because it makes it all the more acute when one of your really spec’d out guys dies.  (And he will.)

The other thing they added that I was originally iffy on– occasional cuts to a third person view of your soldier as he shoots or moves– was pulled off superbly and does nothing but heighten the tension.

I don’t have much else to say here that isn’t a fangirly mess of random letters and numbers and exclamation points.  All I know is that the guys at Firaxis have outdone themselves with this one and pulled off something which I didn’t know could be pulled off.  Absolutely worth every cent of the full price.

In closing: over a year ago, when I didn’t know that this game was in production, I made a post about what an X-Com reboot would need to be a worthy successor.  Firaxis followed it word for word.  Much love.

Available on Steam and also for consoles.

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Shower of Giblets (Hack'n'Slash)

Torchlight is a Great Little Game

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Happy weekend all!  Pike here.

I haven’t been posting much on this blog lately, and I do apologize for that.  The truth is that I’ve been having an obscene about of fun with the lastest WoW expac so I’m playing a lot of that.

Today, however, I thought I would give something new a shot and I booted up Torchlight, which I have somehow never played before.  And I promptly wound up playing it for the next few hours, because it was just that addictive.  For the few of you who haven’t played it, it’s an action-RPG along the veins of Diablo, and it is just wonderful.  You can pick from three classes and I promptly picked alchemist because the guy is wearing goggles, and I think I made the right choice.  I love hurling poison bolts at my enemies from afar, watching them all expire, and then going around and collecting all sorts of great loot.  It’s simple, straightforward, and a whole lot of fun.

Also, one of the questgivers is a steampunky robot.  I approve.

The sequel recently came out and I look forward to playing that as well, but for now I’m having a blast with the original!  Anyone who hasn’t looked into this series should really do so.  It is well worth the price!

The official Torchlight website is here: http://www.torchlightgame.com/

And now, here is a cat picture, because it’s always time for cat pictures:

Cats are also the best choice of pet in Torchlight.
The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's Party Cannon (Holidays and gifts), The Android's Red Flag (Quasi-political ramblings)

Vidya season and Mr. Adequate is mad

It’s that time of year, when the dearth of summertime videogames leaves us behind and we begin to be swamped by an increasingly heavy deluge of videogame releases over the months running up to Christmas. Mists of Pandaria, TL2, and Resi 6 just came out, soon arriving is XCOM, then there’s AssCreed III, Dishonored, Farming Simulator 2013, Halo 4, Hitman: Absolution, ZombiU, Company of Heroes 2, and a bunch of other games besides on the way. In short, it’s a busy time for folks like us – please tell us in the comments what you’re looking forward to in the coming weeks and months, and any cunning plans you have to avoid other obligations in favor of the important things, i.e. playing videogames!

But despite this deluge of delectable distractions I’m not altogether happy. No sir. Let’s take one of the games in the above list, XCOM. Now obviously anyone will be well aware that Pike and myself are tremendous fans of the series, and from what we’ve seen the new tactical game actually has a chance of being a true successor of that series, especially with things like the difficulty modifiers for NG+ runs (In fact a couple of those, such as depleting Elerium stocks, are even more hardcore than the original!) So hooray, I can’t wait until Friday so I can play!

Please mister can I have some videogames please?

Wait, Friday? Well yes, because as you may recall I live not in the glorious United Syndicates of America but in the Union of Britain. And whilst Americans typically see things released on a Tuesday, Brits instead have Fridays. This makes some sense of course; you can grab your new videogame and run home to spend all weekend playing it. In times past it was of little consequence, but the ever-increasing ubiquity of the Internet means that this sort of thing is utterly ridiculous in this day and age.

X-COM is a digitally distributed game. I’m sure there are physical copies, but who buys those for PC games anymore? No, we’ll mostly be getting the Steam version, no doubt – and yet Steam will distribute this game to people in the UK days after those in North America. If you folks can begin to see sense in that, I’d love to hear it, because I sure as hell can’t. The really weird thing is that many companies are learning you can’t get away with that anymore, because the same distribution channels opened to them by the Internet open less savory methods up as well. I want to play X-COM, I really really do, so why am I being made to wait an arbitrary few extra days? Because it seems to me that I’ll be able to get it elsewhere without needing to wait for no reason. I hadn’t intended on turning this into a treatise on piracy, but one of the lessons learned over the years is that perhaps the single biggest thing you can do to prevent piracy is to make your product as absolutely convenient as possible for people to get. The lack of paying money is only one appeal of piracy – getting what you want how and when you want it is also a huge incentive.

So, because of the no reason whatever, British fans of X-COM (A British series, I’d point out) have to wait longer to play it. If all this seems like I’m getting mad about videogames, well – I am!

I am as mad as the grumpiest cat
The Android's Aural Receptors (Music/Sound), The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Kick! Punch! It’s all in the mind!

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For obvious reasons Dwarfs make the best Brewmasters, so when Pike and I rolled a couple of Monks I chose Dorf as my race. I quickly found that the best reference to anything in WoW is sitting down there in Coldridge Valley.

This is a reference to Parappa the Rapper in the Year of Our Lord 2012.

Based on this alone I’d be quite happy to call Pandamans a shining success, but as it turns out absolutely everything about this expansion I’ve seen so far is solid goddamn gold. I’ve no doubt my dear co-blogger Pike will have a lot more to say on the subject seeing as she is the one who is actually good at this videogame, so I shan’t go into it in too much detail, but I cannot stop playing this freaking game. Would you like to know more? Well then, let’s consider that the Panda Inn music is peerless:

Just wait until the kazoo kicks in.

Oh, and Pokewow? The thing I long scorned as a shameless gimmick intended to bring in people who would otherwise have no interest in the game? I was COMPLETELY WRONG in every way. Pet Battles is absolutely freaking insanely brilliant and addictive and anytime I find myself at a loss for other stuff to do, welp, time to set REAPER PRIME on some chumps. (REAPER PRIME is a Tiny Harvester about ten inches tall.) And I think that’s the key to what MoP has done right – there’s a huge variety of things to do open to you and a lot of them require minimal investment of time to get started. For all the old man “danged kids” lamenting Pike and myself do I have to admit I’m pretty glad to see the narrow idea of what endgame is in the past.

I should go play some bad games so I stop fanboying over stuff but, heck, I just want to enthuse about how great videogames are so here we are, with constant posts about great games!

The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is Almost Here!

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As you can probably imagine, we’re pretty hyped about this game.  And with just two more weeks to go, the hype here at the Closet is really starting to reach fever pitch, and we’re getting desperate while waiting and resorting to criminal and altogether unnecessary things like playing WoW all day in the meantime.

Fortunately for those who want a sneak peek, there’s a demo available!  Being a demo, it obviously doesn’t include much, so opinions on it vary, but it may be worth a look if you absolutely can’t wait.

As for the full game, don’t worry– I’m sure we’ll be talking about it quite a lot as soon as it hits the market!

The Android Collects Random Objects (Adventure), The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Shower of Giblets (Hack'n'Slash)

Torchlight 2

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In between huge bouts of WoW and considerable addiction to FTL, I’ve also been playing the long-awaited release of last week, Torchlight 2. The original Torchlight was a widely lauded game, and rightly so, of the Action RPG genre – which is to say a Diablo clone. Indeed, Runic Games was formed partly by exiles from the Diablo 2 team and this shows in a variety of ways. I was rather late to the TL bandwagon but I had a blast with it recently, and the polish and love of Diablo was present there too. It wasn’t a perfect game, but I would argue it had shortcomings rather than flaws, and that these shortcomings were deliberate choices made in order to ensure a polished final product. Entirely reasonable and indeed much more commendable than overstretching limited resources and doing nothing properly.

Torchlight 2 however has had the budget, built on the success of the first game, to try to overcome those shortcomings and so far I have to say it looks as though it has succeeded fairly comprehensively. It’s a far larger game, with a much greater variety of locations. It has one more class, and all four classes seem somewhat more malleable in playstyle than the previous iteration’s. I will admit that I would have liked to see more classes still, and I’ve heard reports that the game isn’t properly balanced for every playstyle (e.g. berserkers can have an especially hard time, I hear, when enemy damage starts to ramp up). There are more items, more characters, more locations, just plain old fashioned more of everything, but in my own play experience the game’s polish hasn’t suffered for for the increase in quantity.

Sweetie Belle explains the appeal of ARPGs with commendable succinctness.

Bearing in mind I’m not tremendously far through the game yet, everything so far seems to sparkle with both polish and love and it’s just a really good, satisfying game that lets you carve through hordes of monsters in order to get experience points and loot. It’s not a complicated concept, but it is what we humans like, so it’s not like there’s much room for complaint about it.

The game also has multiplayer, the absence of which was by far the original’s greatest and most bizarre shortfall, but I’ve not yet had the chance to mess around with it. Pike and I are planning on some playing soon though so if anything about it is striking I shall report to you all.

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.

[disgusted noise]