Month: May 2024

In the Amazing American Circus, there are fifteen different types of circus performer you can have, and you can bring three of them to any given circus performance, which is a card-battling RPG where the enemies are audience members you have to impress and who boo you on their turn. The mechanics are kind of thinly attached to the theme, but it’s a unique theme and the mechanics are still good, so I like it.

When I say the mechanics are good, though, there is a major hole in them, just one that’s luckily easy to ignore: There’s fifteen classes and basically no reason to care about more than three of them. You start with a juggler, an aerialist, and a clown, and you can recruit new performers at each town you visit. There’s three of the same class, so when you find a class you don’t have, you can pick out one whose starting hand of five cards is closer to the build you’re going for. Performers gain XP from shows, but leveling up gives you extra cards or upgraded cards without changing your limit of 5 cards per performer, and you don’t get any extra HP or anything, so a level 1 performer is completely usable even in the endgame.

However, you don’t get to pick out specific cards when you level up. You get a random selection of three. Since leveling up does take quite a long time, it’s very hard to assemble a build without pulling up the Wiki to see what cards are available and shoot for those…oh, except the Wiki sucks because it’s not a super popular game, so actually when you level up you have to look at the cards in front of you and decide if you want to use a reroll to draw three new ones completely blind. You have limited rerolls per level up (you can unlock more by buying an upgrade, which is theoretically useful, if you know what card you want), so you don’t know if you’re throwing away your best option or fishing for it until you’ve played with that class through multiple level ups.

And since there’s no point where retiring characters is required or even useful, there’s not really any reason to change things up except boredom. There’s more than enough depth to this game to carry it through three or four playthroughs, but once I found my team of Face Changer, Juggler, and Fire Swallower was an effective heavy-attack party, I was reluctant to switch out even after I started maxing the level on some of them. I did eventually switch out Juggler for Snake Charmer because that gave my party a more unified aesthetic (the Juggler looks like just some girl with a dream, which I love, but the Face Changer and Fire Swallower are both really extravagently costumed and the Snake Charmer was more consistent with that, whereas the Juggler looked less like we were an underdog circus with a limited budget and more like we really didn’t like our Juggler and refused to get her a costume). I’m glad to be figuring out a new class instead of just steamrolling through everything with a maxed out party, especially since I can always swap the Juggler back in if I’m ever confronted with a particularly difficult performance, but I would appreciate some more guidance on what these classes actually do and, for that matter, where to find the ones I’m missing. The Wiki doesn’t have complete card lists, but it does have a complete class list, and there’s a One-Man Band? Where?!

What this game is really crying out for is side quests that revolve around and require a specific performer. The game has tons of side quests and they’re great, highlighting cryptids, urban legends, and prominent historical figures of the vaguely 1880 to 1910 time period the game is set in, and they’re the best part of the game. Instead of having performers recruited randomly from towns you visit along the way, the game could’ve used the side quests as an opportunity to recruit specific, named performers with specific classes. A handful of the side quests work this way, or nearly work this way, which makes me think this might’ve been the plan at one point? Having a side quest that required you to use a specific performer for a couple of shows would’ve incentivized the player to get a feel for that class and then make a decision about whether or not to add them to the permanent line-up.

And then, instead of randomly selecting cards on level-up, the performer should be able to get any card they want each level up, including copies of or upgrades to existing cards. Put all the cards in front of the player and let them work out what build they want to go for, and get there within just a few levels. It’s fine if there’s some cards that you can only have a maximum of one of, like the Face Changer’s Dragon Circle, a heavy nuke whose primary downside is that after you play it you have to flip it over to Face of Failure, a terrible card that you play only to get it flipped back around to Dragon Circle (but ideally you’ll play a card like Defensive Change that lets you flip another card in your hand without playing it). This does mean that a performer will probably only spend two or three levels getting new cards (or new copies of existing cards) and then the rest upgrading them, but a lower level cap would be fine and also it would be fine if a performer is expected to have all five cards they add to the deck be upgraded when they hit max level (which is eight in the game as it is).

The Great American Circus is still a pretty great game overall. If you want to explore more classes you can always decide for yourself to swap them out more. In order to see all the classes, you will have to commit to using five in each of the three regions (technically four, but you can’t do the South and the Midwest in the same game, which is annoying), and I didn’t realize I might want to do that until way later in the game, and some better design could’ve fixed that. But it’s not like the game prevents you from fully exploring its mechanical depth. You can just decide to do that.

I replayed Fallout 1 recently – I don’t have a record of when I completed it, which means I had no date to enter into my How Long To Beat backlog of finished games, which I decided was as good an excuse as any to play it again – and as with every time I play this game, I am pained by how close to perfect it is, how relatively easy it would be to get that last inch. Fallout 1 isn’t maimed by the places where it’s slightly rushed, but just another three months of polish and it would be completely flawless. Here’s what’s missing:

First, there’s a broken end slide for the Hub because the quest to turn Iguana Bob over to the police is broken. All that’s missing is the dialogue for turning him over to the police. The only reason this would even take an afternoon to fix is because no one’s familiar with the source code anymore (even the original devs will have lost their intuitive grasp of the structure nearly thirty years later), so you’d need a while to familiarize/refamiliarize yourself with how to set flags and add dialogue at all. If Fallout had even one extra week of polish before shipping, this part could’ve been finished. Instead, it’s impossible to get the good ending for the Hub. It will disperse to the wastelands no matter what you do.

Second, finish the Boneyard. There’s a lot of wholly unimplemented quests in the game, but I don’t think the game particularly needs most of them, especially since all the major ideas the game missed out on got picked up and reintroduced into the setting in Fallout: New Vegas. We don’t need a second raider camp for the Vipers, because to whatever extent that content is missing from our lives, we have it now in New Vegas.

But the Boneyard is genuinely unfinished. Like the Hub, there’s a good ending that’s impossible to get in the current game because the side quest for it was never implemented (you can even get it in your quest log, but the spy you need to find is not in the game world). It’s also impossible to end up with a version of the Boneyard where either the Blades take over or the Regulators remain in power. An ending slide where the Followers of the Apocalypse take over is in the game files, unreachable due to the unimplemented side quest, but if you help the Blades defeat the Regulators or vice-versa while not helping the Followers, there’s just no ending slide at all.

Third and finally, fix all the timers. There’s some dangling bugs where certain activities that only cost you a few days on the pip-boy countdown for the water chip advance the calendar date by several weeks, which matters because the mutant army countdown is based on the calendar date, so the same action can bring you three days closer to Vault 13 dying of dehydration but twenty days closer to Vault 13 dying of super mutant invasion, not because it actually affects the timetables of those two things in different ways, but because of a bug.

Also, there’s claims on the wiki that the super mutants are supposed to take over every settlement in the game on specific dates, but despite blowing past the earlier deadlines even on my fastest playthroughs, the end slides are never affected the way they’re supposed to be. I’ve heard if you actually return to Necropolis after the deadline it will be taken over and the end slide will reflect this, but the Hub and the Brotherhood definitely don’t work this way and if you just don’t go back to the Necropolis it will never be overrun by mutants no matter how long it takes you to finish the game.

The game having a timer for its endgame to pick up when the water chip timer that dominated the early-to-mid game leaves off is a good idea. I understand why people didn’t like the half-finished version that the game shipped with and why the easy fix in the post-release patch was to add a 0 to the number of days on the timer rather than overhaul what happens when the timer counts down, but I think the game would be much better with a properly functioning timer.

What do I mean by “properly functioning?” First, let the player know there is a timer. The staggered nature of the timer is perfect for allowing a player to feel like they’re always at risk of running out of time to save everyone and yet have no chance of running out of time to save anyone. 500 or even 400 days is a ludicrously long time to complete this game in. But because the timer is unannounced and there’s no indication of settlements being overrun (except maybe Necropolis?), players get tricked into thinking they’re off the clock once they’ve got the water chip and may end up wandering over the time limit by accident if they spend a lot of time criss-crossing the map. There should be a radio network linking different settlements together. Shady Sands should have a little radio hut where you can tune in to hear the latest wasteland news, using the radio item (the same one you use to turn forcefields on and off with computer hacking in the military base) should let you tune in as well, and when you finish up in Junktown, whoever you helped should give you a radio so they can keep in touch in case the town ever ends up in trouble again. NPCs in the Hub should also point you to the radio in the general store, saying it’s a good idea to have one.

Now, on day 90, you get a radio message from a survivor from the Gun Runners in Boneyard who’s fled to the Hub, letting you know that the Boneyard has fallen to a mutant army and it’s only a matter of time before they expand outwards (“it’s only a matter of months, maybe even weeks, before the mutants strike at the Hub!” or similar to help emphasize that this is a countdown, not a battle map). This causes a new sticky note to show up on your pip-boy in place of the water chip countdown. It’s got a spot on it for the water chip countdown if that’s still relevant, and it’s got a list of all the settlements in the wasteland in order of when they’re conquered, with the Boneyard on top, crossed out. The player doesn’t know exactly when the others will fall, but they get the idea that they are on the clock to stop this mutant army before it’s too late.

Second, sort out the timers on all the settlements between the Necropolis and Vault 13. According to the wiki, the timers for the end slides are (or are supposed to be) 90 days for the Boneyard on the Master’s doorstep, 110 days for the Necropolis, 140 days for the Hub, 170 days for the Brotherhood of Steel, 210 days for Junktown, 230 days for Shady Sands, 400 days for Vault 13 if you told the Water Guild about its location to extend the water chip timer, or 500 days if you did not. The only ones of these that are well-balanced are the Boneyard and the Vault 13 default. The Vault 13 default is so long that, provided the player actually knows they’re on the clock, running out of time is nearly impossible. The Boneyard is on a tight enough timetable that you have to have a good idea of what you’re doing to meet it, making it a good challenge objective for a second playthrough.

The problem is that all of the others are way too soon after the Boneyard, except the 400 day timer on Vault 13 if you did give its location away, which is still so easy that it’s not much of a tradeoff at all for extending the initial water chip countdown. Making the Vault 13 timer more aggressive would be bad because you get an instant game over if Vault 13 falls, but if that just isn’t true, if you can keep playing so long as there’s one settlement left no matter what it is, then extending your initial timer can cut Vault 13’s endgame timer by a lot.

Necropolis being packed pretty tight after the Boneyard might not be a terrible idea, since it serves as a backup objective for someone who was going for the save-everyone deadline but missed it by a hair. You probably missed both the Boneyard and Necropolis on your first playthrough, so getting one but not the other serves as a decent consolation prize.

But saving the Hub is way too hard. As the primary city of the wasteland, any victory that comes after the fall of the Hub is going to feel like a Pyrrhic victory, and you can get there just by making one extra trip back up to Vault 13 to check on things, going on a few caravan runs, and spending a bit too much time in recovery from the Brotherhood of Steel’s stat-boosting surgeries – a sloppy playthrough to be sure, but not excessively so. The Brotherhood of Steel is supposed to get overrun after 170 days, but it definitely isn’t and shouldn’t be, because they are the source of power armor and the stat boosting surgeries, which means it shouldn’t be possible to lose access to them unless you’ve seriously messed up.

Instead, I’d suggest that at 140 days, the Hub reports that scouts from the Crimson Caravan have spotted a mutant army massing and announce that all caravans are suspended as all guards and Hub police are massed into an army to fight them off, at 170 days they announce that just as Hub forces were at their breaking point, the Brotherhood of Steel pushed the mutant army back, leaving without a word and leaving everyone as baffled as ever as to their motives and whether this is a good thing in the long term, and at 200 days, reports come that the Brotherhood is under siege. At 230 days, the Brotherhood falls, and the Hub falls at 240 days.

You can still get power armor (and some of the other loot normally available from there) by getting past the super mutant garrison and retrieving it (the mutants don’t need any special dialogue or anything, they’re just a bunch of bruisers left behind to camp on mostly the first level), but you permanently lose access to the surgeries and no one will show up to help you fight at the military base (for all the help those three losers are when they don’t even follow you inside). Likewise, while you can pick up some amount of leftover loot from the Hub (and get piles of XP from fighting the mutant army occupying its five maps), it’s eradicated as an interactable location.

Once they’ve captured the Hub, the mutants also capture the location of Vault 13, if the Hub traders had access to it. Without the Hub or the Brotherhood to fight them in the field, the super mutants can go wherever they want – Junktown will hold their walls against the army, but they won’t meet them in the field if they go around. Since nearly everyone in Vault 13 is sufficiently unaffected by radiation as to be a prime candidate for mutation, it’s a priority target, and it falls after just 255 days as the mutants make a beeline for it. Junktown goes at 270 days, and Shady Sands at 320 (it’s remote). If Vault 13’s location wasn’t given to the Water Guild, they hold out until day 500 because the super mutants don’t know about it. They think they’ve won and put no particular effort into doublechecking.

The drama around the fall of the Hub and the Brotherhood should make clear to the player that they’re still very much on the clock, and even 245 days is a very generous time limit to finish the game up within, so the player would have to have been completely ignoring the time limit to lose Junktown, Shady Sands, or Vault 13 (even with the Water Guild knowing where they are – the water chip deadline isn’t super harsh, so the price for extending it doesn’t have to be that severe, just not so lenient that it’s virtually guaranteed not to come up unless you go looking for it).

A player who didn’t take the fall of the Boneyard or Necropolis seriously might struggle to save the Brotherhood and the Hub, but even then, not by much. The battle for the Hub, from the first time the Crimson Caravan reports they’re in danger to the point when the Hub falls, lasts 100 days. The entire game is expected to be completed within 90 days if you know exactly what you’re doing, so while saving the Hub adds enough time pressure to make you think twice about making a second trip to the Glow to clean out extra loot, it shouldn’t be hard to do.

So now the game has Junktown, Shady Sands, and Vault 13 as settlements that are nearly impossible to lose, the Hub and the Brotherhood as settlements that are on a tight enough deadline to stop you from thoughtlessly wasting time but which you will almost certainly save in your first playthrough, and Necropolis and the Boneyard as settlements that require fairly efficient gameplay to save, with no room for a stray caravan trip or any unnecessary visits to remote locations like Vault 13 or the Glow (and pretty limited tolerance even for extra trips within the core region of the Hub, Junktown, Necropolis, Brotherhood of Steel, and Boneyard).

This is, by far, the most drastic overhaul to the game, but it’s part of the game’s original plan. The only thing I’ve tweaked is the exact number of days it takes to get there, everything else is reimplementing a super mutant march that was always supposed to be in the game.

The Amazing American Circus is a card battling RPG where the premise is that your battles are circus performances. In terms of mechanics, it’s identical. Your audience is your enemy, they inflict damage on you by booing and sneering, and once you inflict enough entertainment on any given audience member, they start to cheer instead. This does not heal you, they just stop inflicting damage, just like a slain orc.

The game takes you from one end of the continental United States to the other. You have to choose whether you want to go through the Midwest or the South to get from the west coast to the east, which is annoying, but the writing on the side quests is fun. You often encounter cryptids and ghosts, and sometimes blunder into major historical events of the late 19th and early 20th century, in a way that makes it clear that the exact year the game takes place in is a non-committal mumbling sound.

When you arrive in Michigan, you can go hunting for a vaguely Nessie-esque lake monster (not that specific shape, but same idea), and as is often the case, you’re given a chance to express skepticism or belief at the existence of this monster. We’re about halfway across the States now, so it’s pretty hard to get this far without seeing a bunch of the supernatural. Side quest completionist that I am, I had a girl possessed by a fire demon, a clown cured of alcoholism by a magic ritual, and a literal ghost in my circus troupe. But a lake monster? Come on, no way, I’m totally with Scully on this one.