Reviews PC

Computer games are a conspiracy to make consumers buy new hardware.

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.  While traveling between those spots, you’ll be accosted by brigands or boars, forcing battles that are unavoidable and unskippable. So yes, you can forge equipment, and you should forge equipment since it’s so useful, but you can make maybe two or three pieces every few hours of gameplay before you need to spend more time traveling and fighting. →  We have the best words.

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.

As revisions came in for the original games, new factions and weaponry were added and eventually Mount & Blade: Warband came out. Warband could be considered Mount & Blade II but was more of an expansion, adding more complex politics and a couple of new factions as well as multiplayer. →  Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this post!

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.  Not enough games have you start as middle management, assigned to a failing project and expected to turn it around.  I’m still left waiting, however, for a CRPG that features a lengthy change control board meeting (where you need to pass a skill check to stay awake). →  Oreshika: Tainted Postlines

Some Itch.io Game Reviews

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Around a year ago, I joined a fortnight-ly Itch.io game club after picking up the Palestinian Aid Bundle.  The club leader would post a (semi-curated) random game, and everyone would play through it.

The large itch.io bundles are perfect for buying entirely more games (and sprites, and rulebooks, and engines) than you need, while feeling like you’re helping to make the world a less terrible place.  It’s the perfect way to build up a crushing, overwhelming backlog and get some unusual games without a large investment.

Here’s a sampling of the games I played and enjoyed from the bundle:

Closed Hands 

This is an interesting visual novel about a terrorist attack in the UK and political/social reactions to it, told from five different perspectives.  The timeline varies by perspective, and each perspective is (typically) linear in one direction or the other, so you have a fair amount of freedom about whether you want to go forward or backwards in time.  →  Ask not what this post can do for you - ask what you can do for this post.

Thoughts on Wasteland 3 from Quarantine

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As I sit here in the few hours of peace I will have today, and maybe this week, I must consider how best to populate this site with content. Some goober in my kids’ day care was diagnosed with COVID last week, and in what I would consider an abundance of caution (and I am generally for more money spent, more masking, more testing, more boosters, more lockdowns, and more bleach drinking) the school has closed for the week. So we have 10 days without day care despite the kids not being sick (after copious testing, at least). Anyway, life sucks at the moment but here are some thoughts on Wasteland 3.

CRPGs

I really like this genre. Why do I play other games between finishing every good PC RPG? I don’t know, good question. After this maybe I’ll play Pillars of Eternity 2 or Tyranny. Theoretically, jumping between genres and consoles helps prevent burn out. This is a good theory because while I am enjoying Wasteland 3, some large number of hours in (I leave it running constantly so Steam’s clock isn’t useful), I am getting a bit bored of the overall loop. →  Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Post

Affordable GOG Game Recommendations Part 2

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Currently playing: Don't Starve Together

More GOG recommendations, continued from Part 1 here.

More Strategy games

Knights & Merchants: The Peasants’ Rebellion – If you’re into sims, this sure is a sim. When I had the time to play the original release (which had no fast-forward) I reviewed it. I find myself mostly agreeing with my earlier self; it’s an interesting game if you’re into the idea of building a supply chain from scratch, sort of like a peaceful, less dangerous cousin of Dwarf Fortress. I’d probably recommend the more recent Banished over this one, if only for the clunky combat K&M requires you to engage in – but if you want to build a medieval ant farm and then leverage it to crush your enemies, this might be your game.

Seven Kingdoms 2 – This is a deep, relatively slow-paced RTS that was largely ignored at release. I’ve never actually met another real-life person that played this, so if you claim to have played it I will assume that you are a robot but have good taste in games so you’re cool. →  The review for ‘Shark Sandwich’ was merely a two word review which simply read ‘Read Sandwich.’

Affordable GOG Game Recommendations Part 1

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Since videolamer has begun the process of following in Buzzfeed’s esteemed footsteps, it’s only natural that we reach for the low-hanging fruit of picking out games we played and telling you to play them. GOG (www.gog.com), briefly branded as Good Old Games, is stacked with tons of games created by incredibly talented developers years ago, most of whom will never see any of the money you spend because the rights have been sold and resold dozens of times over. But at least if you spend money on these 20-year-old games, it will assuage the slight twinge of guilt you might have felt if you pirated them.

Many of these games are more than 20 years old. Some run in DOS/DOSBox, but many have fan patches available. Check the corresponding GOG forum first – there is typically a stickied topic for mods/patches. All of these games are $9.99 or under on GOG, and many go on sale frequently.

Role-playing games

Dark Sun: Shattered Lands – I personally have been meaning to get back to this game for years, having not played it for at least 15. →  Genghis Khan II: Clan of the Gray Post

Playing a Classic Game for the First Time: Heroes of Might & Magic 3 in 2022

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I had a classic game on my shelf for literal years, unplayed. It’s not the only one – although it’s one of the more prominent ones. It’s simultaneously a symbol of the dying physical game release and the lost excess free time of my youth. It’s the Heroes of Might & Magic III collection – the base game, plus two expansions, on one DVD. I bought it at a used book store for $10.

Might & Magic started as a first-person RPG series. King’s Bounty was a spin-off of that series, where you play a hero leading an army on a quest for magical artifacts. Heroes of Might & Magic then took the strategic combat of King’s Bounty and made it into a turn-based strategy game – you take command of a nation, with heroes serving as your generals. As part of a standard campaign, you send heroes out to explore and gather resources as you develop your cities enough to send armies along with those heroes. →  Oops, I did it again.

Review – The Last Remnant

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I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about The Last Remnant. On the one hand, its Akitoshi Kawazu pedigree shines through, with an incredibly nuanced battle system that never fully makes up for its terrible plot. On the other hand, that battle system is really very good and worth playing the game for on its own, it’s just that the plot was made even worse – seemingly deliberately – to balance things out.

Kawazu has a long history of working on the SaGa games, and it is entirely reasonable to call TLR a stealth entry in the series, since it has many of the hallmarks. Aside from standard battle system/plot dichotomy, there’s a wonderfully imaginative world that very little is actually done with, entertaining side characters that never really break into the third dimension, incredibly good music that has only bits and pieces of substance to go with, and enough sidequests to deliberately avoid the main story for hour on end. →  All this can be yours, if the read is right.

Portal 2 Review Part 2/2: The Negative Review

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“Any motion picture–such as 2001:A Space Odyssey; Demon Seed; Silent Running or Forbidden Planet–or Star Wars–in which the most identifiable, likeable characters are robots, is a film without people. And that is a film that’s shallow, that cannot uplift or enrich in any genuine sense, because it is a film without soul, without a core. It is merely a diversion, a cheap entertainment, a quick fix with sugar-water, intended to distract, divert and keep an audience from coming to grips with itself.” — Harlan Ellison

It is probably safe to say at this point that everyone loves Portal 2. Just look at Metacritic, just look at the sales charts, just look at what anyone, anywhere is saying about it. So what’s even the point of different publications hiring different reviewers anymore? If every single review is glowing and adores the game for all the exact same reasons, then it seems not only natural but efficient to squash them into a giant aggregate number anyway. →  Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 5: Golden Post