#i have played a Lot of city builders; it's my favorite genre (followed closely by photography game)

[lathrine]

Farthest Frontier is one of my favorite city builders on the market rn, but the way it chooses to display information sometimes is hilarious

hate it when i go to work and catch Fractured Bone from my coworker just because tim in marketing decided to show up sick. smh.

[stompsite]

indie bundle cruft deathmatch volume 3: ex box

So normally, I wouldn’t do so many of these in such short order, but I’m moving at the end of the month, and I’m moving to a place where the internet’s gonna be wonky, so I’m trying to store as many games on my hard drives as I can. As a result, I’m going through my “definitely not gonna play these again” games as quickly as possible. So, hey, here’s another one.

LOVERS IN A DANGEROUS SPACETIME is a 2d metroidvania, I guess? Except you pilot a spaceship with a partner. It’s fun enough, but metroidvanias and I don’t get along super good. It looks nice and plays okay, but I feel like it’s meant to be played with multiple people, rather than solo. I played it on Xbox, since I got it free on Xbox Live at some point. NAH.

MAX: THE CURSE OF BROTHERHOOD is a sidescrolling platformer about a boy who wishes his brother away. Kinda like Labyrinth, but, as far as I’ve played, without the brilliance of Henson or Bowie present. This isn’t to say it’s a bad game at all, but it’s not really gripping me. But it is a platformer, and I’m someone who’s been trying to figure out why I don’t like platformers for a long time.

I think I’ve figured it out.

One of my least favorite things to do in a video game are forced racing sequences. In these sequences, you mostly have to learn where everything is, memorize it, and repeat. I’m not one for memorization. It’s fundamentally uninteresting to me on a basic level. A good racing game involves some degree of skill; most races in games not meant to be racers rely more on simply memorizing the track.

Most platformers I’ve played don’t involve any kind of interesting or meaningful decision making. Sometimes you’ll get some puzzle solving, which can be enjoyable, but more often than not, platformers are about simply reacting to what’s there, and nothing more than that. See the path, follow the path. The enemies aren’t super intelligent; Goombas march back and forth, and that’s about it. These are games about memorizing the path and timing your button presses perfectly.

In a Sonic game, you might get a few choices, but that’s about it. Played a bit of Mario 3D Land lately and it’s the same thing; at its most difficult, it’s just a game about memorization.

I value a game like DOOM or Halo, where you get to look over the environment, plan your route, and act accordingly, reacting to changes in the situation as they arise. There’s a nice mix of “doing interesting things” at work in these kind of games.

I value improvisation. 

That’s why platformers aren’t very interesting to me.

Oh, and Max has a magic marker that changes the environment. It’s a rule that all platformers have to have A Gimmick, and that’s what Max’s gimmick is. SEE YOU IN ANOTHER LIFE, BROTHER.

SPEEDRUNNERS, because it’s a platformer (a racing platformer, but a platformer nontheless), definitely can be SENT TO LIMBO.

SUPER DUNGEON BROS: claims, on its store page, that it is a rock-themed dungeon brawler. Basically it’s kinda like Diablo, I guess, except that I wasn’t really having much fun, and I forgot to take a screenshot. I DECIDED TO PASS ON IT.

BONEBONE: RISE OF THE DEATHLORD sure seems like a mobile port to me. You shoot arrows at skellingtons. YAWN.

BRINE seems like one of those Fallout mods you get for someone who offers “realistic nights,” but it’s so dark that you begin to wonder if the person making the claim suffers from severe night blindness. Seriously, the ground is just, like... totally black.  It’s some kind of survival game with a 24% positive rating on Steam. I’M STEERING CLEAR.

BROADSWORD: AGE OF CHIVALRY is like, I don’t know, if Civilization were incredibly low-res? I’ve really struggled to enjoy hex-based 4X games. For some reason, Stellaris is my drug of choice, but even games like Civ are hard for me to enjoy. AWAY WITH YOU.

This is what screenshots from BULLET LIFE 2010 look like. Yes, they did misspell “Resume.” Reviews are about half and half positive/negative. I’m surprised there are positive reviews at all, but what do I know? It’s a 3D bullet hell shooter that doesn’t feel super... bullet... hell-y. But I didn’t spend a lot of time with it because the controls were a nightmare. Took way too long to discover that “W” was the interact button and “X” was fire. Oh, and by switching to full screen in the pre-load options menu, I booted up the game. Here I thought I’d be able to edit multiple settings. Silly me. DUMPED.

BULB BOY is an aesthetically wonderful point and click adventure game, which I may come back to some day. The problem is that, well, it’s a point and click adventure game, another one of those genres I really struggle with. If platformers bore me because it’s about reaction time and memorization, point and clicks bore me because they’re about clicking on everything you can until you figure out in what order a bunch of interactive objects are supposed to be placed. It’s a genre that can be brute forced in a way I personally find dissatisfying.

But.

Don’t let this dissuade you from checking out Bulb Boy, a game that has a 91% positive rating on Steam, which, last I checked, is the same as DOOM. So, if you’re into the genre, you’re probably in for a treat. DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS.

What did I just say, CAPTAIN MORGANE AND THE GOLDEN TURTLE, about adventure games? Also, I have no idea what’s going on in the graphics here, but this sure doesn’t look like a three year old game. Also, it runs awfully on my GTX 1070, and there’s a review on Steam that makes the same complaint, but for a 1080. NOPE.

I was bummed out that Steam wouldn’t let me take screenshots of CARRIER COMMAND: GAEA MISSION. It’s not a great game from what I’ve played so far, but it’s interesting. Lots of little tweaks that Bohemia Interactive could do to make it play way better than it does. Maps feel huge. It’s neat. Obviously ARMA is their bread and butter, but... this has me intrigued. FINALLY, A GAME THAT STAYS.

Apparently there are earlier Deponia games, so I probably shouldn’t be testing CHAOS ON DEPONIA right now, but I went through the tutorial. Seems like an adventure game, made me chuckle. I’LL KEEP THIS ONE AROUND. FOR NOW. 

CITIES XL PLATINUM is a city builder, so you’d think it would stay on my list, but it won’t, and here’s why: city builders come in two varieties. There’s the Extremely Popular SimCity style, where you just kinda build a town and keep things running and that’s that, and then there’s the Less Popular But The Kind I Like games, like Tropico, The Settlers, and Anno. These games take you to different maps where you have specific objectives you need to complete. I find operating within those constraints much more enjoyable than the open-ended sandbox creation aspect of things. That’s just not my thing.

Cities XL Platinum is in the former style, unfortunately, which means I’m... like, I’ll give it a shot, but I’m not super into it. The performance issues I experienced weren’t great either, and Cities Skylines, which is from the Cities in Motion developers, is a much better game in this specific city-building subgenre. Forgot to screenshot. KICK IT TO THE CURB.

CLOUD CHAMBER is an online game that was, as best I can tell, removed from Steam. If you have it, you can... like, click on stuff, but you can’t play it, because apparently it, whatever it was, was an online game. WHAT’S THE POINT?

CONTAGION sounds cool, but I didn’t really enjoy the time I spent with it. A review says “it’s like No More Room in Hell, but costs money, and is worse,” and that seems about right. PASS.

COGNITION: AN ERICA REED THRILLER is a game I took a screenshot of, because I hadn’t been doing it or it hadn’t been working in the past few games. Apparently I ended up in Episode 2 even though I told it to go to Episode One. As you can see, people’s faces look... odd.

It’s a point n’ click where you spend like ten minutes in three different camera angles (one shot of two people talking, two closeups of their faces) where they mostly just talk about things that could’ve been said in far less words. It has 199 reviews on Steam, and the reviews are mostly stellar, so... hey, make of it what you will. The genre’s not for me, so I’M BANISHING IT TO OBLIVION.

DEADBOLT reminds me of Gunpoint. Like... uncannily so. This is fine, though, because I really liked Gunpoint. Now, you might be going “hey, Doc, I thought you hated sidescrolling games as evidenced by your above remarks about platformers!” Well, kinda. Deadbolt, like Gunpoint, keeps me engaged by letting me plan things. Observe. Strategize. Engage. That’s what makes it such a fun game. Best way I can describe this is if Gunpoint and Hotline Miami had a baby. The game wears its influences on its sleeves. I LOVE IT.

Word of caution: it gave me a black screen on Windows 10. I had to edit the ini, then it worked properly. Solution was located in the Steam Discussions.

BROKEN DREAMS wouldn’t let me take screenshots of it, probably because it was running in flash. It’s a quirky indie puzzle platformer, with an art design that I find distinctly off-putting. NAH.

DRAKENSANG refused to boot up at first, which is a bad sign, but I finally got it to work, and I was rewarded with a nice classic 3D PC RPG. It feels great to play, very Dragon Agey, if you’ve played that, though it’s got less “AAA Bioware” vibe and more of a “mid-00s German RPG” thing going on. Cool stuff. I had to reinstall the directx executable that came with the game and add “-windowed” to the launch options to make it work. NEAT STUFF.

I’m genuinely unsure where or when I acquired CLOSE YOUR EYES, but it’s definitely not my thing. It’s one of those games where the default controls are Z/X and Arrow keys. Close Your Eyes claims to be a horror game, but this RPG Maker-esque game did nothing to evoke any response in me as I played. I have no idea if it’s good or bad, but the genre and gameplay did nothing to draw me in. I was bored. AWAY WITH YOU.

Well, that’s 20 games. Of those 20 games, 4 of them stayed on the backlog.

The main thing I’m getting here is that genre’s pretty important to me, especially when it comes to being able to make plans. Adventure games and platformers tend not to emphasize strategizing, which is something that’s important to me when playing games. So games where you don’t do that, where you just react to stuff, that’s not as interesting to me.

Until next time.