Reviews

Waving the White Flag – Wartales

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On the surface, Wartales looks a lot like other games I like. I enjoy large-scale simulations, I like fiddly minigames with bonus rewards, I love RPGs, and I even sometimes play tactical games.  But in the end I stopped playing Wartales before getting to the second town, waving the white flag of freedom after 15 hours.

There are a few different reasons for this. One is that it’s not possible to focus on just a single aspect of the game. While you have the freedom to, for example, forge weaponry for your squad using the blacksmith “profession”, the materials required to do it must either be purchased in limited quantity or mined from nodes that respawn at unpredictable intervals and are spread throughout the map.  →  We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we play.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes

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It’s hard to confine everything I felt as I played Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes to a single post. Or even to the written word. A mixture of relief, frustration, sadness, and joy in different measures and different times will have to do. It took me months to gather my thoughts enough to write about it and months more to refine it and each time I have revised I’ve felt a little different.

Here’s a little bit of history, since this is the backdrop for my experience with the Kickstarter. You may know the original writer behind Suikoden (Yoshitaka Murayama) left the video game industry for years. I heard he specifically wanted to limit his time at Konami and it was an amicable split. →  Ratchet & Read

Raging Loop – More Rage than Loop

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It had been a while since I played a visual novel. Root Letter had left an unpleasant musty and earthy taste in my mouth, and only a crack gumshoe can predict when the next Jake Hunter will come out. Raging Loop has fairly good reviews and seemed somewhat well regarded by fans, who I learned too late I should deeply distrust because a huge swath of them are pervy weebs looking for hot anime girlfriends. Raging L, which I will hereby refer to as R Loop for brevity, is a horror themed Japanese visual novel with very limited gameplay – basically just selecting the answer to a question every hour or two. This is fine to me but may put off people who have played a video game or read a book. →  Go ahead, read my day.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord – More Mounts, More Blades, Less Fun

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The original Mount & Blade was the very first game I wrote about on videolamer. I was really impressed by the sandbox approach it used. The world advances, in real time, as you move from place to place (in a kind of real-time-with-pause simulation style). This has been done before, for example in Uncharted Waters or the excellent Space Rangers series. Mount & Blade adds excellent combat mechanics that incentivized (but didn’t require) a shield and allowed for seamless, interesting mounted combat. It also brings in a character growth system that extends to companions in your party. While other games might see you becoming a “superman” in a few hours, in Mount & Blade you max out at “mighty” – and will always be vulnerable to an enemy’s morningstar or crossbow. →  Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Post

A New Ratings System: A Framework for Inertia, Flow, and Satisfaction

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I did not enjoy Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.  Playing it felt like a chore much of the time.  I was satisfied, though, when I finished it.  This juxtaposition made me think more about how I feel about games and gaming.

There are games that I enjoy playing and that make me feel satisfied when I finish them (most RPGs).  There are also games that I enjoy playing that leave me feeling unsatisfied when I finish them (Roguelites).  Many games are somewhere in the middle – for example, grand strategy games such as Europa Universalis IV or Civilization get me into a flowstate, and there is satisfaction in seeing a nation develop over the course of a 10-hour multi-session save.  →  Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatarticle

Switch 2 Technical Review – Shocking frame rates exposed!

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Currently playing: Foretales

I haven’t been following the news for some time because what you don’t know can’t hurt you, like the origin of this blood I’ve been coughing up for three months. If ICE comes to send me back to Africa, where I have on good authority all humanity is from, I can let them know I haven’t been following their activity and they will let me go because clandestine police forces with vague accountability are anything but unreasonable. At least that was my experience during my brief internship for Pinochet.

But news of the Switch Deux did somehow make it past the spoons and forks guarding my cave, and like any caveman, I am wowed by shiny things. Yes, I immediately bought the console after deciding I wasn’t going to buy it and ignoring the preorder period while judging the marks who wanted to buy an expensive piece of hardware sight unseen. →  Ring of Read

Not Finishing: Forza, Hitman, and TMNT

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I’m still taking advantage of Game Pass here and there, playing bits and bobs of various titles when the mood strikes.

No, seriously, I’ve started and stopped a whole bunch of different games. And it feels …. great?

It’s been happening a lot to me over the last year or so. I’ve gotten so much better at putting down a game once I’m no longer enjoying it, or when I feel like I’ve seen enough.

It’s not necessarily something I do consciously. Sometimes I stop playing a game for a week or so, and rather than add it to the mental checklist of “games you need to go back to and finish,” I eventually realize that I’m just done with it, and proceed to uninstall. →  Read awhile, and listen.

Tux and Fanny – A Review

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Listen. You think you’re cool enough to be into Tux and Fanny? You’re probably not. Me neither.

But I will tell you all about it. This shit is wacky af. It starts with a soft spot for me, these two pixelated bamas want to kick around a soccer ball in their front yard.

Where do they think they are? PG County? I love it.

I easily (and purposely) get distracted by a million other side quests. Just to give you a spoiler alert, I loved this game. It made little sense, but rarely disappointed.

To set the scene, you are a weird Gumbo-like ?alien? living in a house with your bestie/alien brethren.

Sweet side note of this game, you can alternate between playing Tux OR Fanny, I know! →  Oreshika: Tainted Postlines

Nier Automata is No Nier Gestalt

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Folks, I tried to play Nier: Automata. I really did. But I don’t think I have it in me to finish it.

As someone who counts the original Nier as one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time, I’m as disappointed as anyone that the sequel to that experience fell short, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Here now are some of the problems I had with the game:

The Intro is BS

The introduction to the game can take up to 40 minutes to get through. At no point during those 40 minutes are you allowed to save the game. If you die, you start all over again.

The saving grace is that you can adjust the difficulty at any time, so there’s nothing stopping you from dropping to easy mode just to breeze through it all (easy mode lets you “auto battle,” where the game will automatically dodge and pick the best attacks for you). →  Reading. Reading never changes.

Review – Tyranny

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Currently playing: Master of Magic

Not long ago – it feels like yesterday – I put Tyranny on my New Year’s resolution list.  It’s still 2022, right?  I’m happy to report that I completed Tyranny.  I’m not sure I’m happy that I chose it for my list.  It looks unique, and starts out feeling different from other CRPGs, but by the end it feels like a reskin of other games.

Tyranny starts out on a high note – the animated style of the narration and Conquest portion of character creation mesh to give a very different feel from the typical beginning of a CRPG.  The backstory (fleshed out in Conquest), in which you are effectively middle management for the conquering despot Kyros, also feels fresh.  →  All you need is read.