Small World is an ingenious bit of design work for how it takes very simple rules and then breaks them in very simple ways. Every time you play, you create random pairings of races and traits, each of which alters the basic rules. You pick a faction from this lottery of randomly paired elements, and you play that faction until they’ve expanded as far as they can get. Then you pack it in for a new faction, leaving the old faction to linger for a while, earning you a few victory points until the remnants are picked off by younger thriving Johnnies-come-lately. It’s like world history. Greece, then Rome, then England, then America. But here it’s halflings, then giants, then sorcerers, then kobolds. I didn’t mean to equate America with kobolds. It just came out that way.
The beauty of Small World is how these combinations can surprise you. In a recent game against my iPad — games against humans are more gratifying, but not always an option at 11pm when you just want a quick fix — I happened across the priestesses, a modest race that gets to stack all its units into one region when it goes into decline. This is the priestesses’ ivory tower. The ivory tower is a convenient single target for marauding races who want to knock them out of the game completely, but until then it earns a hearty stack of victory points every turn. So you usually put the tower in the mountains, to help defend it. I mean, where else would you find any self-respecting ivory tower? In farmlands? On a plain?
In my game, the priestesses were paired with a trait called sea-faring. This means they’re the only faction who can occupy oceans. So as soon as they spread as far as they can go, as soon as I opt to pack it in to play a new race, it occurs to me that an ivory tower in the ocean can never be attacked. There is only ever one sea-faring race in a game, and since there’s no other way to attack or occupy an ocean territory, my ivory tower is basically impregnable. Overpowered? Perhaps. But the thing about balancing a game like this is that the other player could have just as easily gotten the sea-faring priestesses.
So my priestesses camped the ocean, recalling their glory days, raking in an extra six victory points per turn. My iPad’s rampaging wizards, then goblins, then amazons couldn’t do a thing about it. That was one of the few games I actually won.
Dariusburst: SP is about as rote a shmup as you could ever hope to play. SP stands for Second Prologue, so I guess Dariusburst proper won’t start until a later game. Taito, whose Space Invaders shmups are downright inspired, has carefully leached this prologue to Dariusburst of anything resembling enthusiasm, energy, variation, personality, or unique gameplay, much less innovation. They just sort of plop this one down without much more than overly colorful graphics. You could say Dariusburst looks suitably HD, which is a pretty decent acccomplishment for a universal app (contrast this with Cave’s universal shooters, with the pixellated oversampled look of a game punching above its weight class). At least Dariusburst controls well, which is worth noting given that Space Invaders Infinity Gene has a weird and sometimes fatal jankiness in comparison.
Beyond that, there’s not much to say beyond listing features. A typical game of Dariusburst progresses through a branching series of missions, each ending in a boss. The theme seems to be mostly gray robot shellfish with dashes of primary colors. The replayability, such as it is, comes from whether you go from level C to level D or from level C to level E. After that, will you choose F, G, or H? It’s a bit like plunging through a parking deck with no idea where you parked your car. Just pick a level and go with it. The only real claim to variation is that each of the four ships has different stats, but mostly different superweapons. Fill burst gauge. Empty for massive damage. Repeat. Some of the superweapons are more hands-on that your usual “press bomb button to clear screen”, but it takes a lot of rote shmupping to get much mileage from these.
With its forgettable competence, Dariusburst very nearly turned me off of the entire genre of iPad shmups. That would have been a real shame, since the iPad is ideally suited for shmups, even if they’re not normally your thing. The controls, graphics, and time commitment — anywhere from three minutes to an hour — are perfect for the iPad. If you’re used to controlling a shmup with a joystick, or even a mouse, you’re in for a real treat when you discover how gratifying it is to meticulously finger your way through a bullet pattern. What’s more, you can find some remarkable creativity in iPad shmups. I’ve spent the last two weeks very nearly rubbing the fingerprints off my right index finger, and not because Dariusburst: Second Prologue is any good. Instead, I’ve found some absolute treasures that I’ll be reviewing all week.
So, enough with the prologues. We’ll get to the real shmups starting tomorrow.
Political Machine 2012, the latest iteration of Stardock’s Presidential-campaign-as-strategy-game series, assigns numbers from one to ten for each of its candidates stats. I suppose I can live with the game giving Sarah Palin a five for intelligence. At least it’s higher than Michelle Bachman’s intelligence, which is four. That’s nothing if not charitable. I can maybe even live with giving Palin a four in fund-raising. But measly nines for charisma and appearance? That’s just hateful.
If you’re enough of a fighting game fan to know BlazBlue, you might consider this week an elevated wallet threat for the release of Persona 4 Arena. I can’t imagine the average Persona fan caring much about characters from the JRPG series appearing in a new fighting game. But I can imagine BlazBlue followers wanting to see what developer Arc System is doing next.
Scribblenaut developer 5th Cell’s next game might normally be a cause for an elevated wallet threat. But Hybrid looks like as bog standard a shooter as they come. Multiplayer, online, cover, space marines, zzzzz…
The excellent Payday: The Heist gets a $10 download called the Wolfpack. It adds two new heists, a new skill track, a sentry gun, and a grenade launcher. If ever a game needed a grenade launcher, it’s Payday, what with how all those cops love to clump up.
It’s a two-to-one split for the Total Recall remake on this week’s podcast. On a related note, the two-to-one split is inverted on the original Total Recall. Hmm. If you want to avoid spoilers, fast forward to the 53-minute mark for this week’s 3×3 of our picks for greatest squanderings of assembled talent.
I’ve been dinking around with a preview build of a game called Hotline Miami, which reminds me of an ancient game I played, most likely, on the Apple IIGS. It was that long ago. I don’t recall the name. It was a top-down 2D adventure game in which you’re tasked with murdering supposedly random people because they’re actually demons who will usher in the end of the world. This means you’re basically a serial killer, but for altruistic reasons. You murder one guy by dropping studio lights on him while he’s being interviewed on a TV talk show. You murder another guy while he’s having sex. I recall top-down nudity, although that might just be how I remember it. The game — man, what was the name of that thing? — was notable for being dark and edgy at a time when most adventure games were funny and whimsical.
Anyway, Hotline Miami has the same look and sensibility. The gameplay is more action than adventure, based on using weapons to set up kills. It’s almost a stealth game for how you have to puzzle out each kill. It’s got scoring, lots of ultraviolence, a mesmerizing soundtrack, and a truly unhinged trippy sensibility reminiscent of Killer 7. You know, from back when Suda 51 was good.
Hotline Miami is out later this year, but I think the best way to get a sense of what you’re in for is to watch the above video of Hotline Miami developer Jonatan Soderstrom’s previous project, Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf. As near as I can tell, it’s technically a game, but probably best enjoyed as an awesome video that recalls the first time I had my mind blown by a Butthole Surfers album (drugs may have been involved). So for Hotline Miami, imagine that Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf video, but with thematic unity and more gameplay.
One of the best ways to bring your game low is to fumble the basics. Imagine a shooter where the mouse sometimes turns off. Or a turn-based game that sometimes just skips your turn. Or a driving game where the car occasionally turns left when you turn the wheel to the right. That’s the sort of stuff you need to work out before you make the rest of your game. 10000000, a high-pressure time-based match-3, didn’t get that memo.
Which is too bad, since the rest of the game is pretty addicting. Taking a page from the superlative Dungeon Raid, 10000000’s match-3ing progresses you through a dungeon crawling adventure. Match swords and staves to attack monsters, match shields to build up your defense, match backpacks to earn power-ups, and match keys to get into chests and through doors. Your grid is also clogged up with stone and wood, which you can match to build up your supplies. Use this to upgrade the castle where you’ll spend gold and experience points to improve your character between games.
The name — which is awful — is based on trying to get your high score to a million. This is impossible at first, but once you start buying better equipment and unlocking new abilities, a million points gets plausible. Perhaps even inevitable. A potion shop lets you equip elixirs to tweak the rules with modifiers like doing less damage in favor of a higher chance of critical hits, or converting stone and wood into gold. It’s got a pleasantly Bastion feel to it. And overall, it’s all the sort of stuff that will absorb any videogamer.
But unlike Dungeon Raid, this game has a hard time limit. A little adventurer runs along the top of the screen, encountering randomized obstacles that will gradually push him off the edge and end your game. It’s up to you to keep him alive by matching as fast as you can and, more importantly, as precisely as you can. But unlike most match-3s, you don’t simply swap the place of two tiles. Instead, you grab a tile and scroll the entire row or column as far as you want. However, when you grab a tile, even the slightest jiggle in one direction will confuse the game into thinking you want to go left and right when you instead wanted to go up or down. There is no room for this sort of interface-based frustration in a game this relentlessly timed, a game so ruthlessly based on hurrying up and dragging a tile so far, a game demanding speed and precision. All the cool stuff 1000000 gets right — the strategy, the long-term persistence, the loot, the leveling up — falls apart when I have to back up and align two tiles just so in order to convince the game that I want to move in the direction I want to move. It doesn’t happen often. But it happens regularly enough to kill what would otherwise be a pretty cool game.
Okay, Secret World, you got me. Issue #1: Unleashed came out this week and I couldn’t very well not take a peek. Besides, I can’t let a week at Quarter to Three go by without some gripe about the game. Which I wouldn’t gripe about if I didn’t like it so much. It would be so much easier if I simply didn’t like Secret World.
This week Rob “Chaplin” Harvey, an actual mechwarrior who was at an actual Mechwarrior Online tournament, joins us to talk about the upcoming free-to-play shooter and whether or not he won the tournament. We also take a gander at Mechwarrior Tactics, the upcoming free-to-play strategy game. Basically, it’s all things Mechwarrior this week. Because there’s not much else to talk about in the middle of summer. Oh, wait, there is! Summoner Wars, the Oculus, Telltale’s Walking Dead games, Orcs Must Die 2, and Smite. But other than those things and the resurgence of Mechwarrioring, there’s not much to talk about.
Dead Season is one of those rare no-budget zombie movies that gets it right. You can forgive the production values given it’s solid script and mostly effective cast. The hero, a dead ringer for Anthony Edwards named Scott Peat, isn’t your usual zombie movie hero. Instead, he’s a convincing enough everyman. Except for his godawful sledgehammer skills. Someone show that man how to hold a sledgehammer or he’s never going to level up. The heroine, who happens to the be the only character in the movie to wear shorts and I think I know why, is the weakest link. Imagine if Shelley Duvall was a hot redhead who couldn’t act.
One of Dead Season’s strengths is its use of Puerto Rico for a Dead Island style Caribbean zombie apocalypse. When it’s not trying so hard to be a Danny Boyle zombie movie with a John Murphy score, Dead Season has the downbeat conviction of an arthouse movie. It’s more concerned with the harsh reality of survival than the lurid fantasy of headshot special effects. If you’re going to make an amateur zombie movie, this the way to do it.
Dead Season is out now on DVD and video on demand.
