Dragon Age Inquisition, Act 2

(remember, massive spoilers, I'm just trying to record my rambles here. I may make mistakes, this is all as best as I remember it)





So, Act 1 ends with a bang (to Evie's great dismay, she got Flissa out but was too slow to save Minaeve. Like, was literally standing on the fire trying to disarm it when it blew up, leaving a charred corpse, which was kind of traumatic, and she was my favorite of the Havensfolk too. Saved Threnn at least. But I was way too caught up to savescum so what happened happened.) Lots of big emotional scenes, dramatic stands, charging out to defy the Big Bad, potential heroic sacrifice to save the others... although I don't think Evie really thought she would die. She was kind of too angry to be scared, and as the player of course I knew the game wasn't over yet. And then the big stirring scene and the plans for the future.

By this point, Evie was absolutely ready to lead the Inquisition... not for religion, but to do what was right. It was her duty, and no one else could do it better. If people were going to make her a creature of myth and legend, she was going to use it. Maybe she was chosen, after all. (She'd lived through that craziness and come out with superpowers, hadn't she?) Maybe she really was the Herald. Maybe she would be Empress. There was no more reason to deny her destiny.

So emotionally, Evie was riding a high.

On a meta-level, I'd stopped thinking of all the heart options as necessarily flirtatious, since many of them just seemed NICE (After all, I was hearting on Cassandra all the time and it wasn't really being more than friendly) so when the option popped up to tell Cullen I was glad we'd both made it out of Haven alive, of course I picked it. I was glad we were both alive!

And then his voice drops, and with this painful intensity Cullen swears to protect Evie from anything like that ever happening again.

In her heart, right then, something went ping.

But it was silly, of course. He was just some boring old ex-Templar and she was pursuing an elf girl, when she wasn't flirting madly with Dorian or palling around with Cassandra. They parted ways. Meta-level, I didn't even figure out where Cullen's position on the Skyhold map was for a good while and couldn't visit him if I'd wanted to.

Evie went back to hanging out with her friends. Met up with the Bull and his Chargers. Started getting to know Varric a little better, and mediating between him and Cassandra. Preparing to find Hawke and the Wardens.

(Oh yeah Blackwall happened at some point but Evie found him a little unnerving, she mostly only hung out with him to try and find out info about the Wardens.)

At some point, still chatting up Sera, I got the pranks quest, and Evie set out to have a little fun... only to be dragged into Cullen's office and told to play a joke on him.

She couldn't do it. Josephine, sure, but Cullen? She could not bring herself to diminish or discomfort that man in any way, not even for a moment, not even for Sera. It was unthinkable.

And that's when she knew she was in love.

(Meta level, from checking the wiki it looks like this may actually be the last step with Sera before you start a romance properly. I honestly didn't know, because it pretty much happened just like this - after that point i went for Cullen with no hesitation, and never even had a conversation with a flirt option in it that I can remember until after Evie and Cullen were a couple. That kiss just about killed me.)

Dragon Age Inquisition

I've been talking about this a bit on Tumblr but since this was originally a gaming blog, I may as well put my long rambles here.

I successfully avoided the spoilers and was surprised by everything! This is your warning to look away now.


I rolled a human (double-dagger rogue, my standby) and went with the default name because Evelyn is very much a name I would pick for a character.

Face isn't far off default either, though I did tweak some things and she doesn't look QUITE like the youtube girls.

Went in as Andrastean-by-default who didn't really believe in much, and was VERY uncomfortable with being called the Herald. If there really was an Andraste, claiming to speak for her would be wrong, and if there wasn't, letting people believe there was would also be wrong. On the other hand, she's a noble and understands the need for leadership, so she was willing to go along with it to a point, while questioning religious fanaticism and blind devotion at just about every step. She wasn't too keen on the Inquisitor title not because she rejected power, but because she was uncomfortable about setting up ANOTHER major religious power when Thedas has enough trouble with the Chantry and the Templars. After the attack on Haven, however, she was more than ready to take up the reins of power. It needed to be done, and she felt herself more capable than others of controlling the situation - and of being willing to shut the whole thing down when the job was done.

On a meta level I created a human because I intended to pursue Sera as my romance. This didn't quite work as planned. As a rogue herself, Evie appreciated the sneaky side of life and didn't mind taking fellow nobles down a peg, especially if they had it coming. On the other hand, Sera kept coming across as a shallow kid with no head for larger issues. Evie has a sense of humor, sure, but she is quite serious at heart, and sometimes mistrusted Sera's motives (worrying that she was only into having fun with no care of the consequences). They became friendly easily, but it wasn't clicking.

Evie and Cassandra started off with obvious antagonism, both because Cass thought she might be evil and because Evie did not approve of Seekers and fanatical religious types in general. Things quickly developed into a calmer mutual respect (Both being nobles who weren't quite what their families wanted, after all, and Cass being more open-minded than she first seemed). Evie admired Cass's strength. (On a meta-level I knew she was straight and never pushed hard enough to get the rejection scene, though I did pick a lot of flirt options when they seemed appropriate.) Even before the end of Act 1, they were on pretty good terms.

Cullen was someone Evie had little time for in Act 1. He seemed very busy drilling the troops and she had more interesting avenues to pursue. (Meta level, I incorrectly thought he was a 'chaste romance' and was even less interested.)

Solas, Evie found intriguing. She was very curious about all the magic shit going on and he seemed to have lots to talk about. She was always happy to hang out and listen to his opinion on things, and generally deferred to his judgment on anything to do with spirits or the fade. She trusted him. However, not being an elf, romance wasn't possible here.

Vivienne seems like a waste of a character (she never had much to say, other than vague comments about fashion) and isn't romanceable so eh. She's mostly only relevant because she was an example of a mage who behaved herself, which Evie appreciated, considering...

... that she sided with the mages and then spent In Hushed Whispers tearing her hair out and wanting to beat Fiona's head against the floor. YOU STUPID WOMAN LOOK WHAT YOU DID HOW COULD YOU SELL YOURSELVES TO BLOOD MAGE SLAVERS WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU I WAS DEFENDING YOU. I've heard that some people hated Fiona before the game (from the books) and felt sorry for her after this quest because she ruins her relationship with King Alistair and all. Nope! I didn't hate her before, but she's on my shitlist now. Largely because the game never really gave me the opportunity to chew her out as hard as I wanted to. Anything that happened to her was her own fault and she wasn't nearly sorry enough. By the end of the quest, Evie was pretty ticked off at the rebel mages. She doesn't hate all mages and certainly doesn't want them to be abused, but the rebels had, in her estimation, proved that they could not be trusted to make wise decisions on their own. So of course she conscripted them and agreed with Cullen and Cassandra that they needed to be watched. (This would have annoying consequences later.)

Hushed Whispers was also Dorian's introduction. Exciting stuff, and poor Evie did get a bit swoony over Dorian, who is quite charming and a huge flirt and gave her no reason to guess he wasn't serious, and they pretty much went through hell together during that quest. It was hard for her to trust a Tevinter, since she really did think they were all ridiculous villains at first, but the circumstances bonded her to him and gave her firm trust in him personally, after which she was curious and chatted a lot more about his homeland and problems.

Varric, Evie didn't have much to do with in Act 1. He was there, that's about it.

Iron Bull, Evie agreed to meet with but after he admitted to being a Qunari agent, she put him on the list of people never to be trusted. A useful ally, perhaps, but only as long as their interests were aligned, and certainly not someone to share secrets with. She was perfectly friendly with him, but would never take him along on anything important.

Josephine seemed pleasant but not very interesting. So much so that I almost forgot to list her here, adn can't remember ANYTHING she did during Act 1, or even where she was located. I kept desperately trying to talk to Leliana instead and getting brushed off a lot and feeling sad because I missed the friend I knew from previous games, who was obviously badly hurt by all that had happened... but of course Evie had none of that backstory and eventually it seemed like talking to Lelly was just annoying her so I had to stop.

So, leading up to In Your Heart Shall Burn, this is where I was. Plenty of people I liked hanging out with, some I gently tolerated, none that I had any real romantic inclinations for, and the people Evie was most interested in were the two that could never reciprocate. That would soon change.

(huge ramble should be broken up into multiple posts now!)

Use your detective skills to find treasures...

Black Closet is now available on Steam:



If you already bought the game from the hanakogames website, information on redeeming your free Steam key is available here.

Trading cards are live, so claim your key and get idling to collect your loot. :)


And don't forget, you can unlock the custom campaign mode to turn all your friends into schoolgirl minions!

Black Closet

.... is finally publicly available on the Hanako Games website!

If you're not familiar with the game, I did a fairly detailed explanation in this lemmasoft topic, but the tl;dr version is:

Yuri mystery-solving game
Five datable girls
Randomly generated mysteries
Upper-class boarding school
Lesbian secret police
Traitors
Cults
Bondage
Doom

It's... questionable to call this a visual novel, although there's plenty of dialogue. It's really more of a very weird RPG.

But draw your own conclusions, and tell me what you think! Get the demo here.

Rewarding Experiences

I've alluded to the problems with trying to set up an award for (niche especially) game narrative in longer, non-IGF-friendly games, but I thought I'd ramble about the topic a little to make the pitfalls more clear, and maybe some good ideas will come to light.

First off, if there were some sort of prestigious story game award, what sort of games would be eligible, and how would they be defined? I wouldn't really be happy about lumping every NaNoReNo entry into the same awards show as the latest Bioware RPG and the latest mainstream shooter, but I wouldn't want to start out with a VN-only show either. Too niche. So for starters:

- Only computer games in English with a primary or co-primary focus on narrative allowed.

-- This means VNs, digital gamebooks, some RPGs but not action ones, some adventure games but not pure puzzlefests, and some nebulous arty games that people argue about how to categorise in the first place

-- This would be trying to exclude AAA games in other genres, even though they obviously include narrative as a strong component. But how you actually judge that? Who would be making the decisions on whether Assassins Creed was 'narrative' enough to count? Do you try to cut them out by making the awards "indie only" instead, hoping that it's slightly easier to adjudicate? Or do you issue strict genre guidelines to include ONLY visual novels, RPGs, and adventures, and then fight over what games do and don't count as those?

-- Should freeware games be excluded, in order to keep the field size manageable, or just restricted to certain award categories?

-- What about games that aren't originally in English? What about freeware games that have been fan-translated, sometimes with or without permission?

-- Should games only be eligible if the original author actively submits them for consideration? That might limit the field, but it might limit it too much. An award's not very meaningful if it's only chosen between the games of the five people who were interested.

That's just some basic questions about the games themselves that would be up for awards. A much bigger problem is - who would judge it?

It is not practical to have a small panel of paid judges who are obligated to complete every game and compare them. Think how many hours some of these games take to complete! Think about paying a reasonable salary for 3-5 judges, at the very least, to play them exhaustively. Think how LONG it would take them, too. And, of course, a small group of judges, even esteemed judges, is obviously going to bring in their own set of biases that would make the award less representative of general opinion.

To get a wider range of opinion, you need a wider range of judges. But if it's pretty difficult to pay 3 people to play 20+ games, it's impossible to pay 200 or 2000 to do it. And, especially if all games released are eligible for awards, you just can't even begin to hope that everything will be played and evaluated. And of course, not only can you not afford to pay 200 judges, you might not even be able to get 200 free copies of every game to give out, especially not for a new contest.

So what does that leave you with? Calling out to the gamer populace to vote on the games they've personally played, and just sort of vaguely hoping you can get enough people to speak up and play fairly that you'll get a good spread of results? Well... it is sort of how the Hugos are supposed to work, after all.

If the judges are 'the gamers' rather than specially recruited judges or hand-vetted volunteers, then you need an organisation to make SOME attempt at verifying the identity of the judges and stopping people from signing up multiple times, as well as a barrier to entry to try and restrict this to people who are actually interested in the subject and not boredly clicking a webpage. This of course requires that you have created this central Gamers Association and someone is maintaining the membership and keeping track of the money (which will probably be used to pay out the awards), but one might find it a little hard to get thousands of people to sign up and pay money to get the chance to vote on their favorite video games. Or maybe it's easy, I don't know!

Now, once you've started making things into a popular vote based on nominations from this wide base, you run into the issue of campaigning. Should game developers and/or interest groups be barred from trying to push the voters to vote one way or another? And if so, how? Or is that totally fine, because that level of dedication should be rewarded? Are there other rules that can balance the possibility of one group trying to steamroll?

Of course, if this sort of awards thing were being organised there'd also be a lot of work that would have to be put into determining the categories, in order to reward different kinds of narrative instead of JUST having the 'best game' which will probably be swept by the popular thing. Categories might include things like
- Worldbuilding: setting, lore, consistency
- Player Agency: how much can the player shape the direction of the narrative?
- Multiple Endings: who does the most with the interactive ability to tell more than one story?
- Humor: obvious, but deserves its own category as its a writing thing often overlooked in awards
- Emotional Rollercoaster: not so much 'best drama' as 'most lasting impact'. what game's story most kicked you in the gut, or made you fall hopelessly in love with a sprite?
- Best Character: this is probably a more meaningful option than Best Dialog
- Best In Genre: to separate RPGs from VNs and so on (although there'd be an overall best as well)

And there'd probably need to be some rules restrictions limiting the number of categories a title could be up for final consideration in.


Again, this is all just the result of me thinking about it for a few minutes, and you can already see what a messy undertaking it could be, trying to manage it.

And even if I founded something like this and recruited 2000 people to judge it, people would probably complain I had an unfair advantage by virtue of being the founder, so I'd never be able to get awards, and what good is that? :)

Sunless Sea - why I find it frustrating

Disclaimer - I have only put a few hours into this game and am not good at it. I may be missing things that would make the experience suck less. Also, this is a PLAYER opinion and NOT a business opinion, this blog is for whining about games after all.

This is a game all about atmosphere. There's a cool, weird, unique setting, and a mildly randomised map to sail around and uncover. There are stories and fragments of stories scattered everywhere, dripping with implication and promise. That's the good part.

The vast bulk of your time in the game is spent staring at the screen as your ship slowly inches along through the murk and gloom, sailing between islands. Again, this is an atmosphere thing, they want the game to be slow. It does mean that you're wasting an awful lot of time doing not very much and can put hours into the game without accomplishing anything, and that has negative consequences elsewhere. Chalk this up as a medium part. It's not good or bad but it's a thing.

Your sailing comes at a high cost. Many people hate hunger timers in games. This game has MULTIPLE constantly-dwindling resources. You have hunger. You have fuel. And you have sanity. Sailing around means you're losing all three of these. You can, of course, buy more... with your extremely limited money supply... which you may or may not be able to earn any more of in your next sailing trip. Sorry, sucks to be you!

Even reviews that LIKE the game grudgingly point out that you can get horribly stuck in the game due to a lack of resources and a lack of any reliable way to earn them.

There is a sort of black belt around to the sea’s loose centre, within which relatively few ports of import can be found. That this means scant opportunity to resupply is one thing (and, really, you should only be buying supplies from places where they are known to be cheap anyway), but that there is nowhere to check in and grab a port report which you can submit back in Fallen London for reasonable rewards is a greater one. I have hit the wall in Sunless Sea a few times because I simply cannot earn money to fund a trip further out, let alone buy upgrades.

Very slow attrition, hitting the same few ports over and over will gradually bring in enough money and chance rewards to buy enough fuel to reach further flung territories, but at times I have found this too onerous. With a starting ship, the speed of travel can be so slow, the waiting maddening. An accurate representation of the life Sunless Sea means to evoke, but it does mean some players may bounce right off it a couple of hours in.

This is why I've pretty much given up on the game. I've had one or two really interesting sailing trips where I was getting to exciting new places and finding hints of stories... and then I've slammed into not being able to fuel up enough to go anywhere I haven't been before.

And then there's the combat.

Combat has been completely revamped from the earliest versions, so I won't talk too much about the old combat. It was kinda turn-based and, while playable, was not too exciting. Many people complained that it was even slower than the sailing, because you had to sit there staring at your timers and waiting for them to tick down, while doing nothing else.

A constant problem with, say, JRPGs, is that once you level up enough that the basic slime is not a threat, you are far more annoyed by the amount of time it takes to step on the random encounter square, sit through the transition, and then be required to set attacks for all your characters, before it will finally let you JUST SQUISH THE SLIME WHICH YOU CAN DO IN A FRACTION OF A SINGLE HIT AAAAAAARGH.

Basically, if your time isn't being spent making interesting decisions, you really resent your time being sucked away. So in that early combat mode, you queued up some actions and mostly sat and stared, waiting to intervene if anything went wrong. There wasn't any cool animation or anything FUN about the fight to watch, so yeah, it could get dull.

In the new version, combat takes place on the same sailing-around map as normal navigation does. This does add more possibility for doing things during the fight other than just waiting for your gun timer to tick down - you MIGHT be able to dodge certain kinds of trouble, or even make things worse by sailing your ship into a rock while you were paying attention to your guns, or sail into the range of more enemies, oops.

In some ways this works. Battling with pirate ships feels cool and nautical, both of you slowly wheeling around... Upgrading your ship has obvious benefits to everything, if you can ever afford it. And I assume that if you get good enough guns and stats you can eventually kill things pretty fast and not have the huge time sink. (Though I wouldn't know, since I've never been able to upgrade.)

What drives me nuts is the monsters. There aren't that many of them, at least, in the areas I've been to, and you can PROBABLY avoid most of them if you're careful. But once you have their attention, they can be tough to shake. You can use full engine power to try and speed up and dodge them (although the help doesn't mention this until several hours in) but that may make your ship randomly explode (so much for people claiming that the luck of the dice aren't critical here!). They can follow you a port and camp practically on your bow waiting for you to press 'launch' and take instant damage, which feels stupid to me and breaks immersion (I feel like getting a monster to follow you to port should trigger some sort of port event. Maybe they blame you for bringing trouble! Maybe they rush out and slaughter the crab that followed you home! Maybe they thank you for luring it in!) but even without story effects, RPGs generaly station guards around citypoints like this to avoid the stupidity of 'i will be immediately hit if I step outside and there's NOTHING I can do about it'

But the worst part is if you do engage with the monsters. There's no animation scripted for fighting them. So unlike pirate vessels, which will wheel around and fire guns at you like you're doing, monsters will just sort of drift nearby, then occasionally move in your direction and bounce off your hull with a little clink noise. It's stupid. It's not cool. It's not fun.

Look, this game put its effort into the writing, not the graphics. Fine! You don't want to animate a battle between a ship and a giant glowing crab, fine! But don't expect me to be having fun with 'clink'.

If closing with a monster shifted into an encounter, with words to read and choices to make, it might be more interesting. You could avoid the encounter by having good enough guns to shoot the monster before it gets that close. And if rabid zee-bats swarmed your vessel you could get descriptions of them swooping through and taking bites out of your rigging with the resulting damage, instead of 'clink'.

Other grumbles - the game really wants you to treat it as a roguelike and pressures you into accepting permadeath and starting over. But with a game that is this slow and this lacking in early-game differentiation, the prospect of starting over is massively annoying in a way that it isn't in something like Spelunky or Necrodancer, where I've sunk countless hours into delightful failure.

Also, from the RPS comments:

I did just make a catastrophic error caused, in part, by the chain-of-captains (though one could claim it’s inherent in any rogue-like game). I was trying to scrounge up enough cash to do something and sold what I thought was my old engine, having bought a new one. Oops. That new one I bought was with my _previous_ captain, just before he got killed. So I sold the only working engine for my boat and did not have the funds to buy a new one. Crap. I don’t think there’s an easy way to commit suicide in London, so I just started a new chain of captains.

Does that sound like fun to you?

Roundup

(See, Google, you did very nearly kill my blog with your unwanted changes. It's such a pain to use, I almost never do.)

So, uh, haven't posted in a while. A few things going on.

The "lesbian student council secret police" game Black Closet is now in alpha-testing. Because of all the randomly-generated mysteries, it's a pretty complex game to test. The art is still in progress, but even when the art finishes, this will probably be held in testing for a while to try and stomp out as many bugs as possible. If you want to join in (and get the game for a discount) visit the Hanako Games forums.

The other game I'm working on, codename Fantasy Gamebook Adventure. It is a GxB game, and the first game I'm labeling as a 'Hanabira' product, which means that I personally did not write the plot.... because this is a licensed adaptation of an actual gamebook from the 1980s. We're keeping the title under wraps for the moment, but if you really, really want to find out, there is a clue hidden somewhere on this website.

What is that website, you ask? Why, it's the launchpad for a time-traveling superheroine, of course! (Not written by me, written by a friend of mine.) There are no current plans to make a Paradox Girl dating sim (in which you would, naturally, date yourself) but, um, you never know. Really, there are no plans for anything like that, it's just that I think it would be funny.

You can probably guess I've been too busy to make much progress on the procrastination front. However, I did get a chance to play through fault: milestone one now that the English version is finally out.

And speaking of Steam, the winter sale is on, so you can currently claim discounts on any of our titles:






Of course, that's not the ONLY way to get a discount this season... there will be more details announced soon on our newsletter/twitter, so stay tuned.

... phew! The benefit of not blogging here often anymore is that I have more to say when I finally do?

Reception - as - dungeon

Since I don't have time to actually code this idea right now to make it play and see how it works, a slightly longer description of what I had in mind: not so much dancing as mingling, with the intent of trying to gain social influence with all sorts of factions.

So, you're in a big reception room / ballroom. There are many guests. You want to get to the important people to schmooze with them but it's crowded and there are many people in the way, so you'll have to encounter and defeat other folks as you run into them. There are many approaches you can use to try and defeat someone, from flirting to impressing them with your knowledge to 'accidentally' bumping into them and denouncing them for it, and a lot of this would depend on skillchecks.

If you lose the battle you have to withdraw from the ballroom for the week. If you win then your opponent gets out of your way, adjusts your influence with their faction (like XP - important people will give you a lot more influence for beating them) and, if you're lucky, gives you a present. (LOOT!) And then you can move on to the next fight.

This would therefore allow for all the trappings of turn-based RPG combat but in a social situation rather than a cutting-off-heads situation, since a ruling-focused LLTQ-type game can't really have the heir wandering off into dungeons. :)

"I know I wrote it down somewhere!"

Brainstorming ideas for making wussy wizards in old-school dungeon crawls less miserable to play / a better part of the group dynamic...

Instead of having to memorise all spells, you can cast spells from your spellbook - at least, those with a reasonable casting time that don't require a zillion components or anything. However, this is awkward, occupies both your hands, and limits your ability to defend yourself or see trouble coming, so you probably need someone to cover you. As well as reading a spell aloud being slower than casting from memory, there's also the time required to flip through pages in your spellbook trying to find the right spell.

Which in a computer game situation could lend itself to a game in which you play the wizard, the rest of your party is your hired minions that you order around, and turning spellbook pages takes a round, so the strategy of how you've organised your spellbook before the fight is relevant.

"A wraith? Dammit, why didn't I put a bookmark in front of the On Matters Of Undead section?"

"... note to self, next time put the 'Banish Demon' spell next to the 'Summon Demon' spell, just in case..."

If you go further along the line of being brilliant and in charge of all these goons, then minions might have basic AI (which can be tweaked in dialog between fights) but if you want them to do something particularly clever in a battle you have to spend your round yelling commands.

"No, backstab the hobgoblin! The hobgoblin!"

Child of Light

Interesting look to it, although it doesn't feel very RPG most of the time. I have some dubiousness towards ubisoft but worth seeking more information at least.

Let's Science!

Science Girls by Pocolla on deviantART (Above - bonus art, not an in-game image. There's more coming!) It's that time again! What time is it? Time to announce a game being available on Steam - Science Girls!
 The Steam release of the game has a bunch of little polish upgrades applied to it. New music, new animations, new map tiles, and so on (and yes, achievements). No new plot if you've played it before but a lot of tweaks to make the overall experience more enjoyable.

(Also, I notice that steam users have tagged the game 'Visual Novel'. Well, okay, if you say so. I generally don't think it counts because the talking part takes a clear backseat to the hitting monsters part, but... There is dialog, and it's in a VN-ish format, and there are some choices you can make and they have a small impact on the game, and it's RenPy, so... Close enough?)

You're the WORST!

"Don't read the comments" - well yeah, I broke that rule, but bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this.

So I was looking at the Steam discussion forum for a recently released game and found someone loudly proclaiming that he'd played many RPGs and this was THE WORST rpg he'd ever seen. Given that the game appeared to be a complete and playable title, I find the idea of assigning the 'worst' tag to it pretty laughable. I mean, there's impressively bad things out there. Try harder!

But then... what *is* the worst RPG? Either in general or for me personally?

The problem is that many RPGs which would fall into my 'worst ever' pile are going to be things that I disliked strongly enough to give up on after less than five minutes of playing. Sometimes that's just because they were super-super-oldschool games whose control schemes I could not figure out! (Lack of clear manual) Terrible experience for me that I hated, but known to be great games by people who managed to get into them.

So which would you rate as 'worse' - a game that I couldn't figure out how to get started and immediately abandoned, or one where I enjoyed the first hour or so but things went progressively downhill until I eventually gave up in despair? I obviously got more enjoyment out of Lionheart than I did out of Deep Labyrinth, but I don't feel like I can give any meaningful commentary about Deep Labyrinth because I didn't play it. I looked at it, said "No", and moved on.

I could point to some renowned kusoge and claim them as the worst RPGs ever, maybe even read some reviews to have a bit of context for that judgment, but even then the ones that we hear about enough for them to become legendary bad games are often filled with interesting-but-failed ideas that made them worth talking about.



If a game has okay elements but the gameplay is so poorly placed that it will bore you to tears, is that still not bad enough because there were some things in it that might have been usable in a better game?

Since games which ARE unplayable do exist, should the title of 'worst' should be reserved for them? Or are they at that point no longer games?

Naturally, a google search for "worst RPG ever" turned up 'Oblivion' in the top results. Yeah. Those multimillion-copy-sellin games are just the worst, aren't they?

Toki to Towa

No, I'm not playing it, I don't do consoles. However, some interesting elements came up in a review, so I'm going to muse on them even though I haven't played the game. If you're trying to avoid all spoilers, skedaddle.

The storyline involves a guy who dies on his wedding day and his wife trying to change the past to save him. It also happens that she has some kind of split-personality thing going on, so there are two of her with different skills that get switched back and forth between.

However... who, exactly, is the player meant to be empathising with? "Girl tries to save her man" sounds like you'd think she's meant to be the protagonist. Let's look at a few of the bits from the IGN review.

Sidebar text:

You will witness your own death at your wedding before traveling back in time with your wife-to-be in order to track down your killer!

So the sidebar seems to be going for "you're the guy".

However, the gameplay instructions seem clear that you are controlling Toki/Towa.

... Most of the time, anyway. Then there's:

the flimsy dating-sim sequences, in which you assume control of her fiance/dragon

Reviews talk about him as a pervert trying to see multiple girls naked, so I have no idea if these "dating" sections are just interacting with the dual Toki/Towa, or if he's taking a break from his wife trying to save his life to run around and score with other babes.

Nonetheless, the inclusion of this element seems to make it pretty clear who they think the player REALLY is.

Batman games are not generally interspersed with sections where you play Silver St. Cloud trying to decide between the "Batman" and "Bruce Wayne" personas. (Should they be?)

Even the IGN reviewer, who was complaining about this perspective issue, slides a little bit in that direction:

What's more, which of the two you end up with boils down to one ultimate decision anyway, making the smaller ones you make along the way meaningless.

Who you're with. Not who you're playing.

Looking over on Kotaku, they mention that the rest of the cast is pretty much cute girls, and that:

Due to Zack's predicament (namely being trapped in the body of a baby dragon), he is relegated to a computer-controlled support role in battle, while the player fights monsters with gun, dagger, and magic as Toki or Towa. This is an interesting reversal of the normal knight/princess relationship, as it is Zack who must be protected.

Yet it is Zack who is the narrator and player proxy character, not Toki or Towa. He's the only character whose thoughts the player is allowed to hear, and the player is occasionally allowed to choose how he interacts with Toki and Towa as well. And while Zack is the butt of the occasional joke, it is his excellent dead-pan humor in the face of danger that makes him capable of carrying the story—even if he is a bit of a pervert at times.

At its heart, is this game really a standard bishoujo romp with a perverted male lead and a cast of hot babes, faintly protesting "Oh, but the girl is the hero!" as an olive branch to female players / disguise of bishoujo roots from people who fear hentai / sales gimmick to stand out?

Or is it an innovative female-protagonist adventure that got male-pandering elements jammed onto it for marketing reasons?

Or something else completely?

Will those people who scoff that a woman could not possibly be the one doing the saving even notice this thing exists? And if they do, what do they think of it? I can't exactly ask, since it's not like I'd know any of those people!

Fake Geek Guy

So someone who I won't name (please don't track him down, that's really not the point here) is doing a playthrough of Magical Diary and generally moaning about what horrible suffering it is to have to play this thing. However, one interesting bit in the latest post jumped out at me:

Pass Blue Magic class and learn the spell Truesight. It allows magic users to see through illusions in the current area. So basically Dispel Illusion, for us nerdy D&D types, gotcha.

Or, you know, TRUE SIGHT. For us nerdy D&D types.

True Seeing (d20 SRD)
True Sight (Baldur's Gate)

Long May She Reign

There is now a listing for Long Live The Queen on Steam's greenlight.



If you would like this game to be available there and get some new updates as well, click on through and vote Yes now!

self-indulgence

Interface design is not really one of my skills. However, I lack the patience to wait for artists to do everything, so I always fool around with it anyway.

Of course, once my icons are squeezed down into super-compact form it's almost impossible to make them out. I wonder if anyone can even hazard a guess as to what this is all meant to represent...



(Even if I do keep these, you'll see the icons better in the zoomed-in cards, and the skills would be explained first, so it wouldn't be QUITE this mysterious...)

once they're hooked you can change the rules

Pondering game mechanics for RPGs I will never write.

So, you start off as PUNY FIRST LEVEL SCUM struggling your way through deadly dungeons. Only there are these wonderful magic potions you can use which temporarily boost your effective level. And they stack. Take a few of these and suddenly you're super-powered and can slaughter the opposition.

Of course, they have limited duration... and while you're boosted, you don't earn XP.

But that's okay! You don't need XP when you've got power potions! As long as you can kill stuff fast enough to earn enough gold to buy more potions, everything is fine!

... until you get later in the game and somebody achieves a stranglehold on the power potion supply. Now, if you want more, you're going to have to work for us... or else you're going to find yourself in big trouble up against the monsters in the current level of the game.

Sure, it'll get eyerolls as an obvious drug metaphor, but the point is that it ties in gameplay mechanics and story consequences without having to railroad or make a huge ooga-booga moral posture about it. And it doesn't have to be a drug metaphor - ANY sort of reliance comes with weaknesses. Your DRM could turn on you. Your publisher could drop you. Your job could fire you. Windows could release a new OS that doesn't allow games to run.

If you've planned ahead, carefully balanced your resources, and not relied too heavily on the power potions, you may have levelled up for real and still have a supply handy to take on the final boss.

If you've planned ahead, the company layoffs hopefully won't leave you at a complete loose end.

If you're relying on one thing only, then all anyone has to do to control you is to control that one thing.

silly gamer conversations

(Paraphrasing, of course)

"Do you have the Witcher 2?"

"No, I have 1. Still in its box."

"It's on huge sale at GOG."

"Oh. Huh. ... yeah, but I have a zillion games in my backlog already. I have never played 75% of the games I own at GOG."

"If you have 1 you should get 2."

"I have had 1 for almost two years and still haven't played it. And I only have 1 because someone bought it for me, I think. If someone wants to buy 2 for me sometime, cool, but otherwise I should restrain myself to things I have some slim chance of using."

"It's only cheap today."

"It'll be cheap again someday."

"... this is true, and something these sales rely on you forgetting."

spaaaaaaaace

desire to make something geeky and crunchy to hide from all these words I'm having to write: overwhelming!

actual practical use of roguelike space dungeons: very little!

buried under backlog

I am so far behind in my gaming that when I went to GOG to redeem the gift someone sent me (the Back To THe FUture adventure games I'd been kinda interested in) I discovered a bunch of other games I'd purchased and totally forgotten about...