Chamomile Has A Blog

It’s December 6th as I write this, and also I’ve mastered the forbidden technique of shuffling my posting schedule around so that this comes out while there’s more than three days left to actually buy this month’s Humble Choice. What’s in the box?

Wasteland 3 is the third game in the series to which Fallout was already a hidden sequel towards. The guys who made Fallout wanted to make Wasteland 2 but were unable to get the rights away from EA, so instead they made their own. 25 years later, with the power of Kickstarter, someone finally got Wasteland 2 made, which I heard about, and then apparently also got Wasteland 3 done, which I did not. I’d want to play at least Wasteland 2 if not Wasteland 1 (it’s a DOS game from 1988, but I’ve had plenty of fun with those before and it’s considered a classic) before Wasteland 3, but it can’t hurt to snag 3 now.

Greedfall is a fantasy RPG that swaps your standard late medieval setting for a more 17th/18th century Age of Sail vibe. Apparently you’re exploring some kind of mysterious magical land in a way that may or may not be racist, I guess I’ll see when I get there. I vaguely recall some kind of criticism about this game at its release many years ago, but I never looked closely enough to figure out if there’s actually some lazy writing going on or if Twitter was just bored that day. Either way, it’s not, like, a Nazi manifesto or anything, so I’ll give it a look for myself (eventually).

First Class Trouble is yet another multiplayer deception game in the Mafia/Among Us genre where some number of people are the Mafia and everyone else has to try and figure out who. This one’s on a cruise ship and the infiltrators are robots. If I had a group I played with regularly, I’ll bet I’d enjoy the variety all the entries in this genre provide, but I’m not, and I don’t think these social deception kinds of games are very good when played with random strangers. Nobody knows each other, so it’s basically just a stereotype roulette where I find out whether this group of random strangers finds my use of statistics to be trustworthy or suspicious.

Backbone‘s pitch starts with “[y]ou’re not special. You’re not a hero.” Which would not be a terrible start if it were one of those video games where the premise is that, other than having unlimited retries, you aren’t any tankier or deadlier than a random NPC and have to get by in a world where three stormtroopers represents an overwhelming threat. That’s not what Backbone is, though, it’s a mystery adventure game with a linear plot. One of its promises is that players will “come to terms with the universal pain of existence and loss,” and it cites Sartre directly, so it’s a game that thinks it has something to say but is threatening to be a treatise on how the aimless ennui of being a mid-20th century French bougeouis academic is a universal human experience, when in fact that is both extremely rare historically and also not something I’ve personally ever experienced anything remotely similar to. You do play as an anthropomorphic raccoon, and weird stuff like that is normally a good sign for creative vision, but I’ve got a huge list of games to get to without spinning the wheel on whether this game’s artistic merit outweighs its pretentious solipsism.

Toem is some kind of adventure puzzle game where you mainly interact with the world by taking pictures of it. It sells itself as a chill, cozy experience. While I appreciate the cozy vibe that indie games have been gravitating towards (I think it might be the next indie phase now that “ruins of a forgotten kingdom which has suffered a mysterious calamity” seens to be wearing off), I don’t think this one has the gameplay to back it up.

Where The Water Tastes Like Wine is a game where you play as a real big skeleton (at least, you appear humongous on the world map – maybe that’s just because it’s the world map, but this isn’t just the scale being weird if you think about it, the game frames you as towering over the landscape) in depression-era America, gathering stories from some people to later retell them to others. It’s got decent visuals and really good soundtrack and voice acting, but its gameplay seems limited to trying to pick which story to retell to which character. There’s actual success and failure in that, but I still worry that this is one of those video games that really should’ve been a short film and stapled some gameplay on because getting short animated films Kickstarted is much harder than getting indie video games Kickstarted, and that the main thing added by the gameplay is that you can make the ending of the story really unsatisfying if you pick wrong.

I love Blade Assault’s sci-fi aesthetic, but it’s another Rogue-lite game. Rogue-lite games are major time investments and you spend a lot of that time re-experiencing the same content over and over again. For a game like Hades, I don’t mind – it’s really good at creating a game where build options are diverse enough that I can sink a lot of time into exploring them all and it doesn’t feel repetitive. But for a game whose main selling point is that it’s cool to watch a girl with pink hair and a trenchcoat slice robots in half with a katana, Rogue-lite means four hours of cool visuals and story stretched thin over twenty hours of gameplay.

Plus, their ad copy doesn’t capitalized the “Rogue” in “Rogue-lite,” suggesting that the genre is based on, like, being a rogue or something, and not gameplay similarity to the game Rogue. This is unconscionable and I am boycotting the game as a result.

Super Magbot is a platformer game where you can use a magnet ray to either attract or repel from certain platforms. This looks and sounds like a Flash game I would’ve played on Kongregate in 2012. It makes me kinda sad that this isn’t good enough anymore. XKCD was wrong. I mean, that comic was published in 2008 at which point it was very much true and it never claimed to be a permanent state of affairs, but here in 2022 browser-based games just aren’t the cauldron of mad creativity that they used to be. Genres that developed out of the limitations of Flash became irrelevant to a world where even cheap computers can run PS3-era graphics no problem. Free knock-offs of bigger games, like Portal: Flash Version or Feudalism (knocking off Mount and Blade, which wasn’t even out yet but which had been announced over a year ahead of the release of Feudalism), aren’t really relevant to me when I have a game backlog that’s currently bouncing back and forth between 165 and 175 games long, with new additions coming in for an average of about $4, plus I’m no longer 16 and working for hours on ChaCha to squeeze out the price of a single last-generation video game from GameStop.

So, yeah, Super Magbot is, to me, a relic of a forgotten age. People who like platformers in particular might dig it, though.

That’s two acquisitions from the Humble Choice, plus seeing Wasteland 3 made me realize I never added Fallout to the backlog because I got it through GoG, not Steam. I did beat the original Fallout, but I skipped past a lot of side content near the end to do so, and I’ve been meaning to go back and give it a thorough playthrough for like five years now. Also, it turns out I never got Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night into the backlog on How Long To Beat even though it was in my backlog category on Steam. So that’s four new games in the backlog, all of which are fairly long, sending me back up to 172. I spent November playing through lots of long games, mostly. Raji and Morbid were short, but also things I got that month and unloaded from the backlog almost immediately. The other games I completed were Project Wingman and Hollow Knight (using my cunning new strategy for the final few DLC boss rushes), and I’m also nearly through with Hades. While I’m pretty much totally cleaned out of very short games, these games were still much longer than games I could’ve been playing. So it’s up in the air whether or not I’ve hit the point where my backlog is expanding as fast or faster than it’s contracting (and it’s worth noting I may never hit that point – this month’s Humble Choice almost certainly added more hours of gameplay than I’ll actually have this month, but I haven’t really been keeping track of whether that’s typically the case).

As I discussed earlier, I’ve reached the point on Hollow Knight where I’m more frustrated than engaged by the last few bosses in the Godhome DLC. I’d beaten the Pure Vessel, the final boss required for 112%, in the Hall of Gods (where you can fight any boss as many times as you want for practice), but to get that 112% I need to beat them as part of a boss rush with nine other bosses first. I’d planned on practicing Pure Vessel until I could beat them three times in a row, which gives me pretty good odds of then beating them at the end of the rush. When that was getting more frustrating than fun, I decided I’d hack the game to give myself more health, increasing the bonus health each time I lost until I reached the amount I needed to win the boss rush. But that turned out to require editing save files in a way that 1) required me to close and restart the game between each attempt and 2) left me terrified I might somehow damage my 111% save file past the ability of a backup to restore.

So I adopted a new strategy: Fuck you, I’m invincible. Using this brilliant new plan, I was able to wrap up the game at 112% in about an hour.

My buffer’s running kinda slim, so I’m gonna make this a second post instead of editing the first.

I have realized that the problem with Project Wingman’s Conquest Mode is that it cannot decide whether it wants to be an Arcade Mode or an actual Conquest Mode, and choices made to support one harm the other, so it ultimately succeeds at neither.

If this were a proper Arcade Mode, then you wouldn’t have to pick one of four starting maps and spread out from there, you wouldn’t have to start at alert level 0 and let it slowly build up to higher levels, your choice of mission type wouldn’t be constrained by which happened to spawn into the maps bordering your current territory, and you wouldn’t have to unlock new planes after repeated attempts. The map would just be a fancy level select screen, you’d pick whatever mission type, starting alert level, and plane you like, and you could have a mode that cycles you through every map in random order, starting you at alert level 0 and building up to alert level 30, with an achievement for reaching alert level 10, 20, and 30 in this mode. Since it’s not called “Conquest Mode” and doesn’t feature territory control as a major mechanic, nobody would reasonably expect getting through all 43 maps at once is supposed to be doable in semi-casual play like beating the campaign is.

On the other hand, if this were a proper Conquest Mode, then the lower alert levels would be stretched out considerably and the later ones compressed to make up for it, so that the current alert level 10 would instead be alert level 20, and then alert levels 21-29 would escalate rapidly to catch up. There’d be a difficulty option for perma-death, but it wouldn’t be the default. The rate at which alert level rises would be tied to the number of unconquered territories you currently border, so you’d be incentivized to conquer territories in such a way as to reduce the length of your frontline, instead of the current mode where it’s the opposite, you want to have as much messy bordergore as possible in order to maximize your options for which mission you want to play next. The baseline alert level rise for bordering just one territory would be only 1/4 what it is now (and there would still be a toggle for cutting even that in half), so that with good border management you will generally be facing 1/2 to 3/4 of the current alert level rate, making it easier to reach the end without maxing the alert level out. Enemies would respawn at the nearest edge of the map to the player, or better yet, the edge of the map corresponding to friendly Federation territory, with no respawns possible if you encircle a territory before attacking it.

There’d also be close air support missions where you have to take out enemy tanks and artillery with friendly units on the ground, fortress assault missions where you have to blow up a specific heavily guarded enemy facility, fleet sinking missions where you have to take out enemy naval fleets, and ideally a mission to take out landships since those are already in the campaign, but that’s not as important and I’m already nervous about this proposal, because it so clearly requires expanding the game, whereas I usually try to keep my feedback on this kind of thing limited to what could have been accomplished with the same amount of time, effort, and money as was spent on what we actually got (every game would be improved with an extra six months and $1,000,000 poured into it, pointing that out isn’t really criticism so much as daydreaming). I think the additional mission types really are necessary to the concept of Conquest Mode, though, and if there’s not enough time or money for them, go with Arcade Mode instead. Each territory would have a specific mission type associated with it, so the Bering Strait is always a fleet sinking mission and Yellowstone is always a fortress assault. There doesn’t have to be any plot or unique dialogue associated with these missions, and the amount of enemy fighters, airships, and ground defenses (AA and SAMs and such) can still be determined based on alert level.

I liked Project Wingman’s campaign a lot, but its arcade Conquest Mode is more of a mixed bag. On the one hand, it got me to play the arcade mode seriously at all, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before on any Ace Combat game. I think maybe I sunk some time into Air Combat’s arcade mode under the six-year-old assumption that surely adults would not add a feature to a video game if it was not good so surely the fun part must be in here somewhere.

The way Conquest Mode works is that you have a big map of all Cascadia running from Alaska down to Baja California, split into 40-ish territories. You pick one of four starter territories, and from then on you can only attack territories that border a territory you control. Each territory requires completing some kind of arcade mission objective like score attack, AA suppression, or bringing down enemy airships. Whenever you’re in a mission, the alert level slowly but steadily rises. Whenever the alert level increases, more and stronger enemies begin spawning (although enemies are infinite and keep spawning no matter how fast you clear them out, the cap on how many enemies can be in the air at once increases with higher alert levels). The alert level persists between missions, so you want to complete missions as quickly as possilbe in order to keep the alert level down for future missions, even if you’re in no immediate danger.

Winning accumulates prestige, which can be used to permanently unlock new aircraft to fly that persist even if you start a new game in Conquest Mode (there is an option to reset progression if you want to, though), and credits, which can be used to purchase wingmates and airships as backup and which reset if you start a new game, plus the wingmates can theoretically be shot down although even the weakest of them never seem to (the internet says they have some unknown but stupendous amount of HP). If you get shot down, you have to start over, so the only way to win is to beat all ~40 missions in one go.

I like Conquest Mode, and while there’s a couple of tweaks to be made, they mostly fall under the umbrella of “arcade modes are bad and we shouldn’t have them,” which is not necessarily an opinion held by wider audiences. You break from market trends at your peril, and Conquest Mode is already less arcade-y than most flight sim arcade modes.

Continue reading “Project Wingman Conquest Mode” →

My buffer is getting dangerously low right now, something which happens when I play longer games. A bottomline summary of a complete game is an obvious subject to wring a post out of, but if a game takes 30 hours to complete, then I am not getting through three such games per week. As single-digit hour games start disappearing from my backlog almost completely, multi-post needs to be the future, or alternatively I might cut back to weekly posts instead of 3/week if I feel like I’m getting too much filler.

For now, though, let’s just look at all the games I’m playing right now:

Continue reading “More Games Should Have Hades’ God Mode” →

Project Wingman is the game made by people who thought VR Ace Combat would be so cool but Project Aces kept blocking their number, so they made it themselves. Its main selling point is VR, a thing I do not have, but it also works on regular monitors and I like Ace Combat games. So how is Project Wingman at being an Ace Combat game?

Well, I can’t speak to Ace Combat 7. But earlier installments in the series have a Hell of a place in my heart. Air Combat, the US title for the first Ace Combat, is one of the first video games I ever played as a tiny baby Chamomile. When an elementary school friend offered to play Ace Combat 4 in co-op together a few years later, I realized that this series had gotten away from me, and throughout high school and college I scrounged for old Ace Combat games to play on my PS2 during the era when I couldn’t afford the PS3 and series’ like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry and even the newer Ace Combat installments were passing me by, and I dived through GameStop bargain bins to find Ace Combat 4, 5, and Zero going for $7 and it became such a staple of my library that I at one point played it and nothing else for over a month, completing it multiple times in a row and unlocking absolutely everything. There is maybe one video game franchise that would be harder to compete with here on my blog where stacking yourself up against the games of my childhood is a serious handicap, and that is Kingdom Hearts (even Hollow Knight has to stand on actually being good – I played it long after the nostalgia window closed, and if Silksong is a bomb, I doubt I’ll have much trouble letting go of the series).

This was my specific experience, but pretty much the entire target demographic for this game had some kind of history with Ace Combat like that. I lead with this, because there’s no way to review Project Wingman without comparing it to Ace Combat, and it wouldn’t be fair to Wingman to admit up front that I am not exactly an unbiased perspective on that comparison. At the same time, Wingman’s aiming itself square at people with very similar bias, so there’s a very valid perspective that it doesn’t matter that my vision of the comparison is clouded by nostalgia a bit – because that is also true, in one way or another, for most people who will play this game.

Continue reading “Project Wingman” →

Raji is a mid-powered game from 2020, not AAA but not indie pixel art either, and yet it’s straining the limits of what my machine can handle. Now, my machine is a 2021 rig, but graphics card prices being what they were at the time, I splurged on a beastly processor and skimped on a pathetic graphics card and hoped my processor would carry the load. For the vast majority of video games, this has worked out, but some more recent video games expect you to have a graphics card that isn’t made out of moldy cardboard as well as a good processor, and Raji has sort of been one of those. I am beset by processor lag and crashes and I had to turn down the resolution and the graphics quality to get past them. The thing is, this game’s graphics are pitiful compared to something like Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate or Far Cry 2, which run just fine on my computer. There’s never more than a dozen or so moving characters on the screen at once, whereas AC:Syndicate would have to contend with five or even ten times that many, and the quality of individual models is comparable in detail. Raji has better art direction, but I don’t know why that’s putting more pressure on my processor.

My tentative conclusion, though I am no expert, is that devs are taking for granted that their users will have at minimum mid-tier equipment for the year of release and get sloppy with optimization past that level. This is probably a fair assumption, but since my PC is much harder to upgrade than anticipated (turns out the power supply unit is basically impossible to replace because of some kind of proprietary plug so only a small selection of Dell PSUs will connect to the motherboard, and Dell is out of stock for anything stronger than 180W with no word on when they’ll have the 300W back in stock or make anything bulkier than that), but it’s still frustrating when a game that doesn’t look any better (in terms of pure detail and power) than 2015 games my computer breezes through will cause the machine to lag or even crash.

But okay, what’s Raji like besides the way it interacts with my bizarrely min-maxed rig? Raji tells the story of the titular Raji, an Indian (dot, not feather) twelve-ish year old circus acrobat who has the misfortune of being in town when demons invade and kidnap her little brother Golu. Raji has exactly one half of the skillset needed to be the Hindu Prince of Persia, and video games being what they are, she acquires the second half pretty much the second she touches a spear. It is a divine superspear sent by Durga, the Hindu goddess of motherhood, war, and being totally metal (though it should be noted that like half of all Hindu gods are the god of being totally metal), but I’m not sure how much of the explanation is that the spear imbues its wielder with fighting prowess and how much is that we’re letting Raji’s acrobatic expertise carry over seamlessly into combat because this is a video game and we don’t want to wait until act 3 to be competent at fighting demons.

Either way, the game’s combat is very good compared to its most obvious predecessor, the Prince of Persia series. Like Prince of Persia, Raji includes acrobatic wall running and pillar leaping connecting together combat arenas where you fight spooky monsters. Unlike Prince of Persia, the part where you fight spooky monsters is actually fun, which is good, because it happens a lot more often. Raji is a master of the most important of all circus acrobatics, invincibility frames, which is good because the demons she’s fighting do not spend any time fucking around. While the combat is perfectly manageable on Normal difficulty mode, there is not a single enemy in this game that you can facetank. The game offers both an Easy mode and a Story mode (as well as some harder options) and clearly expects anyone who picked Normal mode over those other options to be ready to tackle a proper challenge immediately.

I really like this decision. In many video games, you’re thrown against some kind of weakling goblin enemy early on to build up your confidence, establish familiarity with the controls, and get you having fun before they throw a real challenge at you. In Raji, you have a thirty-second combat tutorial against some training dummies, and the instant you finish it an ogre of a demon spawns in to start swinging his club at you, and he will absolutely win a straight fight, so you have to start doing flips and shit immediately. He’s slow, and if you hit the X (on PS configuration) button your i-frames begin immediately, even if you’re in the middle of an attack animation and don’t actually start the dodge animation for another half-second, so the gameplay is not at all punishing, but despite being easy enough, it sells the idea that Raji is a twelve-year old circus acrobat fighting for her life against much bigger, much stronger enemies by skipping the warm-up.

And Raji looks great in a fight. She cartwheels and flips around when dodging, you can stun enemies by spinning around a pillar and hitting them with Durga’s divine lightning and you can run up a wall to jump off of it for a powerful dragoon strike from above. Prince of Persia had similar acrobatic attacks, but they didn’t offer much reward for how tricky they were to set up. Raji makes these attacks noticeably more powerful than your standard, thus encouraging you to actually use them. Each of the four weapons in the game have different finishers for different enemies, which often involve using the enemies themselves for wall runs or jumping points for flips before stabbing or shooting them mid-air. I doubt this game will hold my attention long enough to bother getting good enough at it for the no-hit difficulty option, which is kind of too bad, because its animations definitely sell me on the idea of being faster and cleverer than my stronger and more durable enemies, exactly the kind of mood where no-hit runs make you feel like a legend.

Unfortunately, a lack of polish does mar the game’s last few levels. Enemies are tanky to the point of tedium in the mystic ruins stage, and the final level in the desert of Thar has basically no opposition at all until you hit the final boss, who is also a hit point sponge of a slog. It doesn’t help that the plot’s pacing is so dreadful that there’s absolutely no story momentum going into this final confrontation. You bounce around different locations from Hindu legend pretty much at random and then when you’ve run out the bad guy turns up for a final confrontation. And then in the ending cut scene, I guess the world is destroyed or something? The good guys seem to fail their objectives, at least, but the protagonist and the little brother she’s been trying to protect the whole time both survive, though they seem stranded in a desert. If we take the image in the end credits as diagetic, they find a camel and make their way back to civilization, which has survived, so I guess the bad guy completing his doom ritual had no effect on anything?

Continue reading “Raji” →

In Hades, you are Zagreus, an extremely obscure figure from Greek mythology who was the son of Hades and also somehow secretly Dionysus. Except, in the game Hades they drop the second half, you’re just Hades’ son, and you’ve decided to bust out of Hell and into the surface world to find your mother Persephone, who’s departed the underworld. Presumably bringing eternal spring to the surface, I guess? I dunno, I haven’t actually beaten the game and met Persephone yet, and I don’t know if the game addresses it.

Hades is a Roguelike, where every time you die, you are washed down the River Styx back into the House of Hades. Since you’re Hades’ son, from there you can walk into your old bedroom, jump out the window, and bam, you’re back where you were at the start of the game, at the very beginning of the long road out of the underworld.

I’ve talked a lot about good vs. bad openings, mainly in relation to Assassin’s Creed games, which are miserably long to get going. They’re lucky they hooked me in the first game when I didn’t have this problem, or I never would’ve developed the attachment to their open world games that’s compelled me to seek closure on their stagnant quality rather than just walking away immediately. Hades is an example of an opening done right. When you first boot up the game, you probably have a vague idea of what it’s about from osmosis, so odds are you know the basic premise, which the game tosses you into immediately and without explanation. If you don’t, your very first pickup comes with a message from Athena saying that the Olympian gods are gonna help you bust outta there, which establishes in under thirty seconds the setting and your goal. It’s not until you die for the first time (or maybe until you reach the first boss, if you’re able to get that far on your first run) that you get tossed back to the House of Hades to talk with Hypnos, Achilles, Nyx, and Hades himself.

Imagine if the Assassin’s Creed guys were put in charge of this game (specifically Assassin’s Creed, too, WATCH_DOGS and Far Cry aren’t as streamlined as Hades, but they usually contain themselves to just the one prologue like a regular video game, not like Assassin’s Creed, which regularly indulges in two and has had four in the past). The flashback scenes you unlock later in the game where you get fired from your miserable job in Hades’ accounting department and then go snooping through his files at night to discover your mother is Persephone, and not, as Zagreus had been told, Nyx, the goddess of the night, those two scenes would be at the beginning of the game, in order. There would be a scene where Achilles does some sparring with you to establish how Zagreus learned to fight, and a conversation with Nyx that establishes that she is using her powers to keep Zagreus’ movements hidden from Hades. There would be at least one scene with both Thanatos, god of death, and Megaera, the least insane of the three furies, to establish Zagreus’ romantic history with both of them. The sparring with Achilles would probably include a combat tutorial to keep the player awake, and there might be a fight with Megaera at some point while establishing her history with Zagreus, for the same reason, but it would be like two hours before you got to the actual Roguelike gameplay where you’re busting out of Tartarus.