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I’ll admit (again) to a bit of clickbaitiness in this title, in that both these games have a fair amount of depth and I haven’t explored either deeply enough to know where that depth taps out. It’s possible that Alpha Centauri is a better game at high-level play that I’m not aware of.

Here’s the thing, though: I’m not gonna find out. I don’t care if Alpha Centauri is really great at high level play, because it’s a boring slog on Specialist (difficulty 2/6) and so far as I can tell there’s no particularly good counter to the Human Hive infini-base strategy except to rush them down before they can get it going, which absolutely requires you to start within easy attack distance of them. The game has a bunch of weird, fiddly micromanagement with unit equipment that I’ve always ignored as much as possible because I’m creating dozens of units and don’t want to futz with exactly which gun each of them is holding. The differences in behavior between AI factions vanishes even on Talent (difficulty 3/6) as they all become obsessed with killing Player One even if their faction is supposed to be angled towards a diplomatic victory.

Continue reading “Beyond Earth Is A Better Game Than Alpha Centauri” →

I’ve written before about how every build outside of human has become an afterthought to Outside, to the point where many players who only own the Anthropocene Expansion don’t even know you can play as an animal. As a tiger main, this is kind of distressing to me, and today I’m going to talk about a related concept: The human meteor.

Continue reading “Outside: The Human Meteor” →

At this point, I have played most of the Assassin’s Creed series. I never buy these games unless they’re discounted to about $20 or less, and even then only if I have nothing else to spend the money on. Money has been particularly tight recently, which means I still haven’t bought Syndicate or Origins, and I still haven’t gotten around to Unity. I think I’ve played enough of this series to offer a retrospective on where exactly things went wrong, as it is generally agreed that things went wrong. Also, rambling about video games is relatively easy content, so here we go.

Continue reading “An Assassin’s Creed Retrospective” →

In the GDC postmortem of Darkest Dungeon, one of the audience questions asked was what time the game took place in, and the response was anywhere from 500 to 1800 AD. This was weird to me, because the actual answer is roughly 1625. Now, the Darkest Dungeon guy does point to a few anachronisms that are way off from 1625, namely the generally Pictish vibe of the Hellion and the very 18th century look of the Highwayman, but both of these are matters of fashion, not tech. Fashion is wholly independent from tech, so declaring that woad paint is back in style doesn’t mean you can’t say your game takes place in 1625 anymore than putting Lovecraftian abominations somewhere in the general vicinity of Switzerland. We don’t even have any trouble calling Morrowind a medieval setting despite the fact that it doesn’t even particularly resemble anything from the real world.

Whether or not your highwaymen have knee-length coats and wear scarves isn’t ultimately that important to your setting, and you can make those kinds of choices based purely on what looks cool. No, when we ask what time things take place in, we’re talking about what technologies are available, because that changes what characters can actually do in the setting. So what tech do we see in Darkest Dungeon?

Continue reading “1625-ish” →

A surprising amount of my blog traffic comes from search terms like “Dark Heresy powergame psyker.” This is odd, because the one time I wrote on that subject, it was about how to twink out any concept. In D&D, combat is king and everything else is an afterthought (playing an intrigue-heavy game of D&D, while something I certainly recommend just because intrigue is fun, will not solve this problem, because it’s still true that it takes a small fraction of your character resources to become good at social skills, but it takes all of them to be good at combat skills). Dark Heresy 2 is an investigation game, though. Totally kicking ass at any one thing doesn’t automatically sort you into a higher tier than the competition. If you’re awesome at combat, great, but the team still needs to look for clues and talk to nobles, so if you’re going to powergame Dark Heresy 2, you start by figuring out what niche you’re going to fill and then you figure out what character options twink that niche out. There can’t be CoDzilla unless there was a character option so ludicrously overpowered that it let you outclass other archetypes in their own niche. This would make your one character practically a party unto themselves.

That said, those who are familiar with CoDzilla might recognize this as exactly what CoDzilla was. CoDzilla is a reference to the Cleric and Druid, two classes which, used properly, were drastically more powerful than anything else from the core books in D&D’s 3rd edition (Druid is nothing special in 5th edition and while the Cleric can pull off a decently broken bone lord build, a Wizard can do it better). They weren’t just better at killing monsters in general, they were even better at specific class niches unrelated to combat (for what little that’s worth in D&D). The Druid can’t just wreck monsters better than the Rogue, the Druid can sneak around and bypass locked doors better than the Rogue. The Cleric can’t just kill things in general, the Cleric can actually wade into melee and hack monsters to pieces as a frontline beatstick better than the Fighter can. At the point when the Druid is outsneaking the Rogue and the Cleric is outfighting the Fighter, why do we even have Rogues and Fighters?

So it’s not unreasonable to think that Dark Heresy might have a similar problem. And usually it’s some kind of magic-y kind of class or archetype who has these kinds of abilities, because when you sit down to design a magic system, what you’re deciding is not what it can do, but what it can’t. It’s magic, so it can have whatever powers you want, and people who abide by the “throw in everything cool” school of design are going to throw in a list of powers so long and so obviously better than a mundane person doing the same thing that these cast-y types can plausibly be better than every single party member at their own specialties.

So is Dark Heresy 2 actually like that? No, not even slightly.

Continue reading “Dark Heresy Psykers Are Not D&D Wizards” →

Though too distant and too busy for ongoing D&D to be remotely plausible, my younger brother isn’t, like, on Mars or anything, so we do still email each other fairly regularly. Today, he emailed me some more sketches of the characters we designed for the D&D campaign. Pics below the break.

Continue reading “More D&D Art From My Brother” →

The really sickening thing about this teaser image is that they can continue using 1337 that’s been outdated for over a decade until Borderlands 7. And if they start adding subtitles around installment 4 or 5, as long running game series are wont to do, they could do it indefinitely.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a psychological horror game disguised as a visual novel. That much is obvious from its stern warnings that the game is not suitable for the easily disturbed despite otherwise marketing itself solely as a VN, so that’s not really spoilers, however I am spoiling the Hell out of it below the break.

Continue reading “Doki Doki Literature Club” →

Hollow Knight is a game I got during the Steam Christmas sale but only bothered playing just now. It may just be because I’ve only just started playing, and more flaws will reveal themselves over time, but Hollow Knight is an incredible game. I can’t find enough good things to say about it. Its atmosphere is amazing, the location – a fallen kingdom of sapient bugs called Hallownest – is interesting and new and varied and makes me want to explore it, the combat is fun and challenging. It’s something I’d recommend to anyone who likes Metroidvania games even a little bit.

One thing that I like about it that I couldn’t have told you I’d like in advance is how small and agile the player character is (at this point I’m not sure if you’re the titular hollow knight or if maybe the hollow knight is the main bad guy or just some critical piece of background lore or what). The player character is at least a little bit smaller than almost every enemy and NPC encountered and is kind of adorable, but the controls are extremely responsive, the arc of the sword slash is wide, and the mana you use to heal or attack at range is recharged by smacking enemies, which encourages (and as time goes on, more and more requires) a very mobile and aggressive playstyle. The juxtaposition between how cute the character looks and how very deadly he can be with just a little practice is strangely compelling.

So I spent most of my spare time playing Hollow Knight today, which is why I’m posting about it instead of making real content.

Google likes to serve me up ads for mobile games, since I do occasionally play them, usually just to have something to keep my hands busy while I listen to podcasts. This is how I ended up playing and subsequently hating Galaxy of Heroes. That’s not nearly as bad as this can get, though. Today I saw an ad for a game called “Galaxy War” (or maybe “Galactic War,” it’s hard to tell since the name is so generic that it’s buried in the store, thank God) that’s almost literally an asset flip of Unity’s free Space Shooter Tutorial. Now, it’s not quite an asset flip, since it does include some online leaderboard stuff that isn’t in the original tutorial, but the actual assets and gameplay are identical. They added some bells and whistles (probably Skinner box in nature) and called it a day.

Asset flipping isn’t new, but I got served up a video ad for this one while playing another (unrelated) mobile game. Usually this level of amateur hour sham shows don’t have an advertising budget. Like, Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire is just a Game of War clone (which is, itself, only slightly modified from Evony, which has been blighting the internet for nearly a decade now), but it’s at least got new assets. It might be copying Canadian Devil-grade fun-free mechanics that profit exclusively off of gambling addicts and advertising itself with a tower defense ad “demo” despite having no such gameplay in the actual game, but at least on the surface it appears to be an actual game of some kind. They don’t actually advertise the fact that their game is brazen theft.