TL;DP Reviews: Community Edition (formerly "1 hour in" game reviews)

Veloxi wrote:
Mantid wrote:
Veloxi wrote:
danopian wrote:

Plot twist: the gaming world moves on from its current space sim renaissance to a massive return to train sims. $40 million dollar crowdfunding effort produces the ultimate train sim in which you can finally have multiple tea options at breakfast in the dining car.

Nooooooooooooooooooooo

Don't worry. If that happens, I'm sure someone will finally make a Space Train simulator.

IMAGE(http://www.absoluteanime.com/captain_harlock/index-ge999-2.jpg)

Oohhhhh, that would be very nice...

With lasers.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:
Veloxi wrote:
Mantid wrote:
Veloxi wrote:
danopian wrote:

Plot twist: the gaming world moves on from its current space sim renaissance to a massive return to train sims. $40 million dollar crowdfunding effort produces the ultimate train sim in which you can finally have multiple tea options at breakfast in the dining car.

Nooooooooooooooooooooo

Don't worry. If that happens, I'm sure someone will finally make a Space Train simulator.

IMAGE(http://www.absoluteanime.com/captain_harlock/index-ge999-2.jpg)

Oohhhhh, that would be very nice...

With lasers.

That'll only get unlocked at the $50 million mark. Keep filling up your digital trainyard with engines! They'll release the train-dogfighting module soon and we can take them out for a spin.

(oh gosh now I want this game)

danopian wrote:
doubtingthomas396 wrote:
Veloxi wrote:
Mantid wrote:
Veloxi wrote:
danopian wrote:

Plot twist: the gaming world moves on from its current space sim renaissance to a massive return to train sims. $40 million dollar crowdfunding effort produces the ultimate train sim in which you can finally have multiple tea options at breakfast in the dining car.

Nooooooooooooooooooooo

Don't worry. If that happens, I'm sure someone will finally make a Space Train simulator.

IMAGE(http://www.absoluteanime.com/captain_harlock/index-ge999-2.jpg)

Oohhhhh, that would be very nice...

With lasers.

That'll only get unlocked at the $50 million mark. Keep filling up your digital trainyard with engines! They'll release the train-dogfighting module soon and we can take them out for a spin.

(oh gosh now I want this game)

Tie Fighter?

The Game: Strider

Time Played: About three hours

Sponsored By: Myself I think?

Speed Run Review:

A nifty action game whose presentation will be reminiscent of Shadow Complex, but is not put together nearly as well as it or other Metroidvania inspirations. The draw here is combat and the ability to hook onto and climb walls for versatile exploration and platforming challenges.

Completionist Review:

The game starts off in a linear introductory level that doesn't really do a good job indicating the Metroidvania elements you'll be dealing with. With Super Metroid and Shadow Complex, the separate environments blend into one another mostly seamlessly, though each is uniquely designed to feel like its own sub-section. This is more true with Super Metroid, but even Shadow Complex has environments that stand out strongly from one another.

Strider instead insists on large maps that require loading screens between the different areas, thus keeping the world from feeling like one cohesive whole. This prevents the Metroid style formula and design from working 100%, as it takes more time to explore these larger environs fully, dead ends aren't always as easily memorable or identifiable and, truth told, many of the areas just feel so similar. Most of the locations and levels have very similar aesthetic properties, and as such it keeps much of the environments from standing out. It isn't until you reach the Black Market that things really feel like they switch it up a bit.

Which is where we get to the good of Strider. Climbing along walls and leaping around to hard-to-reach platforms is satisfying, as there is often something to be discovered somewhere (even if, especially early on, it tends to be a barrier to entry requiring some upgrade to access). Once you reach Black Market they begin introducing more environmental hazards and obstacle courses that aren't overly punishing and yet remain a lot of fun to work around.

Combat also starts off being pretty simplistic as well, but as you unlock more abilities the options open up. Charge up your blade to break shields or slay two or three guys at once, and then swing at just the right time to reflect a bullet back at your foe. Some of the boss fights are also incredibly satisfying, and even challenging.

There are plenty of collectible items to be found and discovered, but unfortunately the majority of them are trivial items such as concept art or setting detail. While these are nice, it would have been more pleasant if the health and energy upgrades were greater in number to increase the odds of finding a more practical and satisfying treasure in the corners of the map.

Will you keep slaying?

I'm probably going to fire it up again in a few minutes. It may not be as Metroid-y as I'd like it to be, but it's still a lot of fun.

Is it the Dark Souls of the Metroidvania genre?

I've yet to see a game over screen, so no.

(Link to this post for Doubting's archiving porpoises.)

This practice of remaking old games but not giving them new titles has got to stop. I spent the first half of the review thinking "is Shadow Complex a lot older than I thought?"

Interesting to hear about the difficulty. I could barely make it past the first boss in the Genesis version, so this might be a welcome change.

It should be noted that I never played any of the original Strider games, and in fact mostly fell in love with the character based on his performance in Marvel vs. Capcom 2.

I would say that this is almost exactly how I feel about strider. Agreed: less metroid-y than I would have liked but still fun.

I did, however, hit a wall at an odd difficulty spike. There is a particular room with two of the brute like enemies. The room is small and they paint you with homing rockets. I dunno what I'm doing wrong but it has stopped me from launching the game for months.

Mantid wrote:

Don't worry. If that happens, I'm sure someone will finally make a Space Train simulator.

IMAGE(http://www.absoluteanime.com/captain_harlock/index-ge999-2.jpg)

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/4MuUwFE.jpg?1)

I'd rather go Space Truckin'.

Craft the World

TL;DR Review
Put Terraria and Dwarf Fortress in a bowl. Carefully remove overwhelming complexity. Add a liberal dose of wonky cuteness. Mix. Enjoy.

Got Some Time Version
I spent a couple of hours on this last night, and despite my ineptness, managed to thoroughly enjoy myself. Your task is to build up your dwarf's base and defend it against every increasing waves of enemies. To succeed, you've got to get your dwarfs to explore and mine the world about them for supplies, which you in turn craft into the tools, weapons, and construction used to defend yourself.

I missed some basic concepts about how the game worked and the tutorial seemed lacking, so as a result my base turned into a disaster. My sleep-deprived dwarfs kept drowning from exhaustion, or dropping down shafts, or getting pummeled to death by skeletons. But the first scenario in the campaign game is gentle and forgiving, and kept giving me replacement dwarfs to kill. By the end of my hour plus, I'd gotten a base built, and seemed to have the core mechanics of the game in hand.

As for negatives, there are a few places where the interface seems a bit counter-intuitive, and demands more clicking than I'd like to make. Sometimes it's hard to understand why your dwarfs are doing what they are doing, and getting things to work the way you intended can be a tad challenging. But the criticisms are minor compared to the pluses.

Pros
Fun crafting & crafting
Rich tech tree, yet not overwhemling
Nice balance between building your base and defending it
Cute, light-heartened ambiance

Cons
Some interface oddity.
Dwarfs are stupid.

One-Hour Recommendation
I'm definitely coming back for more. Thumbs up after one hour!

'Tis the season for more trading card grinding and TL;DP goodness!

Game: The Counting Kingdom (80 minutes)
Sponsored by: Humble Bundle: Get Your Learn On edition

"1 + 1 = 2" Review

Turn-based tower defense style casual game with the main game mechanic being addition. Has a very "Angry Birds" mobile platform feel to it. Probably best suited for pre-K to 4th grade, and 4th grade is stretching it.

"1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ..." Review

Normally my eyes glaze over when I hear the words "tower defense". There are few genres I summarily dislike, and tower defense is one of them. Any time I see the words "tower defense" in a Greenlight game, I instantly vote No. I don't see the appeal. Probably because I've played browser-based tower defense games, before it was even a real "genre", and they felt very boring. I hated the idea of just sitting there, fending off wave after wave of baddies, knowing that there was no real "win condition", just playing and playing and playing until you were defeated and/or got bored. Not how I like to play games.

But there was something about this game, when I saw it in the educational Humble Bundle, that I decided it was worth bringing along for the ride. Sitting here bored as the Sunday night football game turned from a rout to a roller coaster, I decided to open it up and take a look.

For starters, it's not a real-time game, it's turn-based, which was a pleasant surprise. Reminds me of the board game "Castle Panic!", to which friends introduced me one boring Saturday night back in upstate NY (highly recommend it, if you like board games and tower defense, you can even play it solo). Mechanics are very simple: there's a 4x4 grid of spaces, your stronghold is on the far left, monsters enter from the right one square at a time. Each monster has a number value associated with it (which is clearly visible on their stomach). You have a set of three spells, each with a number value. You have to combine monsters such that their sum equals one of your spells, then cast the spell to destroy those monsters. You can only combine monsters which are touching, but you can combine as many as you want in any pattern (so squares are okay, as are long L-shapes). You can also combine spells to create a spell with their sum, either to take two spells which are currently useless and make a useful one, or to take two which are already useful, merge them and wipe out even more monsters in one strike (assuming the monsters all touch, of course). Points are awarded as score of spell times number of monsters defeated, hence the latter strategy I described is useful not only in being efficient turn-wise, but also it will give more points. I have to point out one glaring negative: apparently there is a cap on the spell value, which increases as you go along, but it's never made obvious what the cap is at each stage unless you try to merge two spells and it exceeds your cap. It may have something to do with the maximum monster value of the level or the maximum spell value you can get at the start of the level. I suppose the best solution is to stick to combining two spells at a time (don't bank on being able to combine all three of your spells at once) and make sure you have the spell ready before you select the monsters, lest you start combining, realize you've hit your cap, and having to resort to plan B (if an intermediate spell doesn't work for the arrangement of monsters on the board, for example). If combining spells doesn't work at all, you can discard a spell at the cost of a turn. You also have a set of magical items/potions which you can use to muck with the monsters: some allow you to change a monster's value (add, subtract or set to zero; don't know if a monster can go negative), one lets you shift the position of a monster one square in any direction, another freezes a row of monsters for a certain amount of time, and the last one, the most powerful, allows you to nuke a row of monsters (which you don't get until the final world). There are a set number of monsters for each level, shown by a progress bar in the top left. Old monsters only advance if they are "pushed" from behind by a new monster entering, as far as I can tell. Once the bar is complete, battering rams will push the remaining monsters towards your towers. The game is nice and will give you the exact spells you need to "clean up" any remaining monsters, if you have something like two solo monsters on opposite ends of the board, but they still pose a risk of damaging/destroying your towers, as do the battering rams. You earn points for defeating monsters (as I described previously), for achieving "full clears" (wiping the board clean), and for any towers you have left at the end of the round. The latter two bonuses are raised for each world. Your total is ranked by the Angry Birds/Candy Crush "three star" system, which is why I say it has that casual feeling. The game is also mostly visual, all menus and icons are pictures, which further suggests to me that this is a game which was targeted for mobile platforms.

As you advance, the game adds more mechanics, which is why I didn't say it was a game only for preschoolers. You get new combat items, as I described previously; a "doubling space" is added, which permanently doubles the number value of a monster that lands on that space (and add/subtract potions treat it like it's the natural value; a 5 that doubles becomes a 10, hit him with a -1 potion and he becomes a 9); monsters are added with higher and higher base values, some with special powers (one nasty endgame monster adds 1 to surrounding monsters each turn), and your spell values are increased to compensate (including that aforementioned maximum spell value which I never saw defined anywhere). It makes the game a tad more challenging, but not much. I think kids from K through 2nd grade would probably benefit the most, but the 4th grade upper-end I mentioned was due to the strategic element, trying to decide which spells/items to use on which monsters and whatnot, aiming to improve one's score/get three stars on every level, etc.

Will I keep counting?

Nah. As I already mentioned, this isn't a game for someone like me, it's for a grade schooler. I beat every level with three stars in 80 minutes. I think one level gave me trouble, got one star on my first try, two stars on the next try, and three on the third. What was weird was that the first board had doubling spaces, but on the retry, they were gone. Not sure if the board/monsters are randomly generated, because if so, what differentiates the levels from each other? There's a free play option, not sure if it's "endless" mode or what, but the difficulty is tunable there, if your kid wants some extra practice and/or you want to shut your kid up on a long trip.

Dark Souls?

Really. You really asked me that? And by you, I mean me, of course. I'm asking myself how hard this game is? 1/10. The 1 is only because the difficulty ramps as they introduce new mechanics, and because it did manage to trip me up briefly. If you fail twice in a row at getting a monster sum and spell to match, it shows you the monster sum of your current selections until you right the ship and start matching again (I got frustrated and clicked a spell twice, even after it had told me "monster sum too high!" on the first click, I had miscounted, DOH!). Easiest game I've played in a long time, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's one less game on my pile. Not sure how to feel about the fact that this game was on my pile, and that there's a few more from this bundle that I haven't touched.

Still, I think of all the games I've played from this bundle, this is the best game for young'uns. As I've said repeatedly, maybe too sophisticated for a pre-K child, even though it's called "Counting Kingdom" you have to know numbers up to about 50 and you have to be able to do two-digit addition. Not to brag, but I was a bit advanced during grade school (legend has it I was reading at 18 months) and I don't have kids of my own, so I don't exactly know when two-digit addition is considered "grade appropriate". At any rate, it's on Steam, and it has Steam Trading Cards, if that sweetens the pot either. So, that's all, folks!

Linky for OP
The Counting Kingdom (Bubs14)

Bubs14 wrote:

'Tis the season for more trading card grinding and TL;DP goodness!

Oh, good idea. Reporting in on my trading card grinding, which I "intended" to simply "let run in the background" but "accidentally" ending up playing while waiting for card drops.

Closure

2D platformer in which you can only interact with the parts of the level that are lit, set largely in the dark in industrial/H.R. Giger environments with a slight cartoony spin, using hand-drawn art (at least by appearance). Very buggy and crashed at the end of every other level but between needing to keep it running to get all the card drops and having more fun than I wanted to admit, I got through about 10 levels.

Example level: you have a glowing orb at your feet, and you pick it up so that the ground beneath you will always be solid. You navigate to a lamp and turn it so that it lights a stretch of the level you'll need to be solid later after you place the orb in a device to unlock the door. These puzzles at the beginning weren't difficult but they got trickier quickly. Even though it's just another spin on the endless 2D platformer innovation wheel of time, I enjoyed the gimmick and would play it more.

Cogs

Really smart tile-sliding puzzles mixed with a bunch of other mechanics - literally - like maneuvering steam through pipes, chaining together the eponymous cogs to turn mechanisms, striking bells in the right order and pace and melody. The promotional art did not do the game justice. The entire interface is presented as mechanical doodads that swivel in and out of the screen on hinges, and the music and clicking and whirring of the game just sounds fantastic. I played through the entire game to the credits rolling, which was the final puzzle, an actual box with a crank on it that you had to arrange pipes and cogs to turn to roll an actual credit reel. <3

140

I could not believe I had this sitting on my pile for so long. I ignored it because it looked like just another minimalistic 2D platformer, but it was one the best hours I spent playing a game all year, on a gaming-joy-per-minute basis. It's short and spends every minute delivering a tight, fun experience. You're a shape navigating a minimalist 2D world, with the ability to jump. You collect orbs and bring them to corresponding spots on the ground, at which point the beat drops and some great music starts playing in the background, to which the platforms and elements of the scenery start to move in relation to. To navigate through a hallway of spikes, for instance, you'd get the beat into your head and move in time with them to avoid getting splooshed. It's like Crypt of the Necrodancer in that regard. As you get more orbs deposited the music gets more intense and more layers get added, until you face off with a "boss," all of which were fantastic combinations of reflexes and moving with the beat. Highly recommended.

Crazy Plant Shop

I believe this was given treatment before, but here's another layperson's perspective. Crazy Plant Shop is an edutainment game focused on Mendelian genetics - dominant and recessive genes, multiple traits, that sort of thing. You own a plant shop and customers come in requesting plants with specific traits, and you have to try and acquire that plant either by buying or breeding it at a lower cost than what the customer is offering. Not having been in a biology class for over a decade now, and the game not giving you much tactical advice, I had a hard time. I repeatedly ending up having to spend more money on new plants with the right traits to be able to breed what was requested, and rarely seemed to have on hand what I needed. I remembered from that earlier TL;DP review that there's a trick to having the right plants on hand to be able to breed pretty much anything, and I could feel my brain grasping for that trick and getting close, but couldn't. It's charming, though, and the art is great. I learned things. Mission accomplished!

10,000,000

A match-three game mixed with semi-automated dungeon-crawling. Your character progresses down a hallway, meeting monsters, locked chests, and locked doors, and you attack those monsters or unlock those things by making certain tile matches. This, by itself, is OK. I've played better match three games, but it has a rhythmic quality that's numbing in a pleasant way. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that the game's true insidious nature is a mindless unlock quest. You first unlock upgrade stations with resources collected by matching resource tiles, then upgrade around 20 stats with money or experience from killing enemies or opening chests, all of which essentially improve your survivability in higher difficulty ranks, so you can accumulate points faster and thus escape the dungeon and win the game (at 10,000,000 points). In sum: when you see past the primal allure of the upgrade system, there is nothing to this game beyond the basic match-three game and some slight strategy in timing your use of items. When I realized I'd been snookered into playing the same simple tile matching for over an hour and was playing it for that dopamine hit from upgrading numbers, I pulled the plug. Try it perhaps but don't bother.

Influent

This was the most fun I've ever had learning second language vocab. You're in an apartment, given a machine that can look at objects and tell you what the word for it is in another language, and earn points for learning as many as you can, and stars for playing memory games to try and recall them. The apartment is packed with stuff but manages not to look cluttered, and is very pretty in a tactile, bright way. I chose the Spanish module when I bought the bundle this was in (the educational one?), but you can buy modules for a ton of different languages. My long-term concern about using this for language study is that, although you can learn verbs and adjectives associated with the nouns you learn from objects, there's no system in place to help you learn how to use those verbs or relate words to one another via grammar and helping words. Its usefulness seems limited to vocabulary building, and within that, primarily nouns, but it does that in a really fantastic way.

The Guild II: Renaissance

Sort of medieval Sims (but probably not at all like The Sims: Medieval), this apparently most recent installment in the series puts you in control of a person in renaissance Europe with a self-chosen career and stats and tasked with creating a thriving family/guild that can take down its competitors. I really wanted to like this game - it looks really deep, seems to have a lot of potential for interesting scenarios - but the interface is really convoluted and I couldn't figure out how to do basic things like make money off of a business (necessary for everything else), even after watching several Youtube videos. It reminded me of trying to learn how to play Dwarf Fortress, where you might be able to follow a tutorial to get the basic beginnings of a game started, feel a little accomplished, and then run off the rails immediately if you try to do anything else. If you have the patience for learning this sort of game I'd say it might be worth looking at, but I came away from it wanting to play the Sims. It also requires installing a fan-made patch, which was painless but took some time.

Feeding Frenzy 2: Shipwreck Showdown

It's a Popcap game, so it's mindlessly fun and addictive. You're a fish, you eat littler fish to get bigger so you can eat bigger fish, etc. until you're the biggest fish and your screen explodes with self-congratulatory colors. I don't remember what the first game was like, but this one has a campaign with a series of levels to beat which get progressively more difficult by adding bigger enemies and obstacles but also giving you more abilities and power-ups. The challenge of it came from having a limited number of lives and continues; if you lose all your continues you can start the next campaign from any level you beat, but your score resets, so screw that, right? On my second try I managed to play through all the levels without losing all my continues, but I think I was on my last one at the end with only a couple lives left, which was exciting and somewhat challenging. The screen's size was an irritant, because it doesn't display the whole field but follows you around in it, meaning you can turn around and run into a bigger fish that was just off the screen edge, but I eventually just learned to move more cautiously and it became a challenge rather than problem. If you're looking for a mindless fun time, I'd recommend it.

....good gravy, what have I done with my time

Edit: links for OP, if these little ones merit linking to:

Closure (danopian)
Cogs (danopian)
140 (danopian)
Crazy Plant Shop (danopian)
10,000,000 (danopian)
Influent (danopian)
The Guild II: Renaissance (danopian)
Feeding Frenzy 2: Shipwreck Showdown (danopian)

Bully: Scholarship Edition

Sponsor: Apparently...me, from the 2013 Summer Sale

Homework review

Just...don't.

Cramming for a final review

I remember hearing so much about Bully, and how awesome it was - back in 2008 when it came out. But for whatever reason, it was the one Rockstar game that I completely skipped. I guess 2013 me thought "now that I have a gaming PC, it's time to play this", and picked it up for a few bucks during the Summer Sale. I would love to go back in time and punch past me in the face, and spend that money on a coffee or something.

Take your standard Rockstar formula - open world, objectives, story missions, and everything else - and restrict it to a cliche filled satirical environment of a prep school. So far, these are all things that should turn my crank, but unfortunately, this came out in 2008, and has not fared well in the last 6 years.

I can deal with chunky, low-res graphics, but it's the rest of the package that gets in the way. Out of the box, it has gamepad support, but things just don't feel right. Input feels slow and laggy, camera control is worse, and the list goes on. The sound implementation is ... abysmal. Every sound effect and background noise feels like it's coming from the same place. And this is what wound up being my biggest turn-off. Imagine walking down the hallway of a school, and every side conversation that you should be able to hear being screamed into your ear.

Final Grade

D+ I can see what they were trying to do, and certainly give them an A for effort, but as mentioned above, this one has not aged well. I'd certainly go back if there was a HD patch or Remastered edition that came out, but for the time being, it's getting uninstalled.

Deception IV: Blood Ties

Sponsored by: Myself, many months ago

TL;DR: Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
This game is what happens when you get a psychotic with a Rube Goldberg facination. Just don't let anyone under age play it.

Long Review: I originally played this back in March or April when it first released on Vita in North America. I remember being quite uninspired by it. I thought it was overly complicated and too finicky, so I uninstalled it and didn't even think about it until last night, when I decided to give it another shot.

I'm not sure if they patched it, or if I'm in a more forgiving mood this time, but I'm definitely enjoying it more.

Premise: The devil has been locked up by 12 saints, and now, 3,000 years later, you play as the daughter of the devil, assisted by three daemons, who are, in order, the embodiment of elaborate traps, sadistic traps, and humilating traps. The four of you are luring the decendents of the 12 saints to their deaths so as to retreive fragments of a tablet. Once all twelve are retreived, you will revive/free your father the devil.

But rather than being a hack 'n slash, this is a crazy contraption (of doooooooom!) type game. You set a series of traps around a fairly large level, with the goal of stringing trap hits into a combo. The more you combo, the more points you get. Each trap is of one of the three types (elaborate, sadistic, and humiliating), and you get points in each type seperately, along with money. You use a combination of trap points and money to unlock new traps. Different traps do different amount of damage and effects, such as pushing/pulling enemies a certain number of squares, setting them on fire, etc. Combine those with the level's permanent traps (like the burning iron bull) for maximum carnage and points. It's worringly enjoyable to lay down a series of implausable traps, like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, and watching them execute perfectly. I got an enemy to walk into a rake on the ground, which forced her back a step onto a spring pad, which catapulted her to the side, where she was trapped by a bear trap, before being knocked by a pendulum scythe into the iron bull where she was roasted to death. Brutal, yes. Also quite fun. And after finishing this review, I'm going to go talk to a psychologist, just to be on the safe side.

Now let's talk about the annoying parts of the game. The game is real time, except when you are setting traps. You set traps in a grid system, however enemies do not move in a grid, but walk about freely. That means you must move yourself to lure enemies into the correct position. Not easy when you a) have a life bar & can take damage and b) enemies don't always move at the same speed or in a straight line. And if your first trap hits a little bit off, it may throw the enemy off track and the next trap in the sequence won't hit.

So the entirety of gameplay is manuvering, positioning, timing, and no small amount of luck to make all your carefully laid plans play out. But as the poet once said, the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray... and finicky doesn't begin to describe the system... nor does chaotic when you sometimes have two or three enemies coming at you at once.

When I first played it, those finicky parts drove me to uninstall the whole thing and forget about it for eight months. This time, I guess the system "clicked" better, and I was able to more effectively string together the traps for points. As a whole, I'm enjoying it a lot more.

Now let's talk about the elephant in the room... the adult nature of the game. If you look at screenshots, you'll see a scantily clad woman, with more scantily clad women on various BDSM devices. Combine that with the violent (though not bloody) nature of the game (use a spinning saw blade, shot at cannon speed, to throw an enemy into a cage, scissors, or an iron bull), and I'd definitely call this an adult game.

Despite the screenshots, though, I would not actually call it a mysoginistic game, for the simple reason that anything you can do to a female enemy you can also do to a male one. You can knock armor off both genders, leaving them in their underclothes. You can put women and men both onto the bdsm devices, etc. So it's high in sexuality, but also equality. Not a reason to let children play, certainly, but there's something to be said about equality in that sexuality.

And now let's ask the question, should one play it? Well, it depends on your taste in games (which could be said about every game, really). Do you like playing Crazy Contraption or Machine Inventor, but feel like it needs more violence? Do you have a high tollerance for finicky mechanics? Are you ok with sexualized characters? Then you might really enjoy Deception IV: Blood Ties. It took a while to grow on me, but I fully intend to play more, once my vita is recharged.

Obligatory Dark Souls Scale: Actually, possibly surprisingly, I'd rate this a 4 out of 5. The same things that make Dark Souls difficult also make this game difficult. There's a strong learning curve to the mechanics, and you really need to know how each enemy will act, what traps they're resistant and immune to, how to position yourself and get around enemies, timing, etc. It doesn't get a 5 out of 5 because there's not as much depth to Deception as to Dark Souls, since once you learn the system, there's nothing new to learn. Just variations on the same types of traps and enemies.

Still, it's becoming a very enjoyable game that I will continue to play, especially as I have a lot of travel time coming up.

Game: Bully: Scholarship Edition

Sponsored By: GameStop's bargain bin.

Crib notes review: Rockstar's best game of all time.

Textbook review: OF ALL TIME.

Gravey wrote:

Game: Bully: Scholarship Edition

Sponsored By: GameStop's bargain bin.

Crib notes review: Rockstar's best game of all time.

Textbook review: OF ALL TIME.

So...you're saying I should pick it up for 360 and give it a try?

McIrishJihad wrote:
Gravey wrote:

Game: Bully: Scholarship Edition

Sponsored By: GameStop's bargain bin.

Crib notes review: Rockstar's best game of all time.

Textbook review: OF ALL TIME.

So...you're saying I should pick it up for 360 and give it a try?

Maybe? I wouldn't say throw good money after bad, but I never had any technical problems with Bully on 360.

Gravey wrote:
McIrishJihad wrote:
Gravey wrote:

Game: Bully: Scholarship Edition

Sponsored By: GameStop's bargain bin.

Crib notes review: Rockstar's best game of all time.

Textbook review: OF ALL TIME.

So...you're saying I should pick it up for 360 and give it a try?

Maybe? I wouldn't say throw good money after bad, but I never had any technical problems with Bully on 360.

I'm actually playing it right now and enjoying it, with the sole exception of losing 8 hours because my save file disappeared. Same thing happened with FEZ, and I deleted the system cache to try and get it back, and apparently somewhere in that process, my Bully save disappeared. Wasn't even through the first year yet, so no big deal, but still a pain in the ass.

Also, FEZ is awesome, even though I had to play it 1.5 times.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Wasteland I: The Original Classic

Sponsor: Smoove_B

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/QsZwE7N.jpg)

TL;DR Review
Old School Post-Apocalyptic RPG, Surprisingly Deep for 1988, Painful Interface

Got Some Time Version
Welcome aboard the Wasteland time machine, taking you back to 1988! A time of the Soviet Union, Windows 2.1, and no Internet. Wasteland was a classic in its time, the first real post-apocalyptic RPG, but how does it hold up nearly 16 years later?

That's actually 26 years (quarter a century!), which makes it all the more amazing.

Game: Lifeless Planet

Sponsored by: CatPhoenix and the Steam Sale

TL;DP Review: Lifeless Planet is a game that tries to wear a lot of hats, but fails to display any of them effectively or convincingly.
Also, spoilers to follow.

Long Review: What is Lifeless Planet? Is it a story game? Is it a platformer? Puzzler? Horror? Exploration? Survival? At times, Lifeless Planet tries to be all those things, but never pulls any of them off, leaving a lot of forgotten threads and the basis of what could be a good game, given focus.

The plot is simple, you are an american astronaut who, along with a small crew (at least one other person), was sent on a one way trip to a planet that's supposed to be lush, green, and habitable. They never say what planet they're going to, but they do say that they traveled at twice the speed of light for 15 years, so get out your calculators and a map of the universe, and see if you can figure it out. Upon crash landing, however, you find a barren and, dare I say it, lifeless planet, which quickly opens up to a Russian shanty town before moving at breakneck speed through set pieces and plot elements that are introduced, talked up, and then dropped without further ado or resolution. Shanty town becomes underground research station becomes cliffs becomes power station becomes strange alien gate... And your initial bread crumb trail of following your crew's footprints is dropped for a glowing green trail of footprints which becomes glowing green puddles which becomes crew footprints again... They never explain why, but, much like Dorothy, you just follow the path and forget about everything else. Actually, that's unfair, as Dorothy knew why she was following the yellow brick road, but you never really do. Other than, "because that's how the story moves along," of course.

And the entire game, or at least the hour I've played, is like that. You get Bioshock style logs which talk about plot points, never to be brought up again. Settling a planet for Soviet Russia becomes everyone's dead because virus becomes glowing green fungus (might be radioactive, but let's walk through puddles of it anyway) becomes aliens. Lifeless planet becomes "hey, there's a survivor without a astro suit on" becomes "survivor who?" becomes vanished alien species. Strange, foreshadowing forms in covered hospital beds that mysteriously disappear when you approach are used twice in about 15 minutes, then never seen again. Finding your crewmate only to watch him sucked into the ground is completely dropped, you never bring him up again or suggest you need to look for him.

Mechanics are the same way, with all the logs (written or spoken in Russian) automatically translated by your suit (presumably, though they never explain it), but a survivor's spoken Russian isn't... You start with one jetpack burst until you find leaky air canisters which mysteriously give you seven bursts which suddenly vanish while walking across power lines... The lack of oxygen is talked about as an issue, but there's no gauge and you only have to worry about it at specific scripted sections anyway, so take as long as you want exploring... not that you'll need long as the entire game is completely linear.

I feel like there was a team working on this game, and everyone was really excited about a certain idea each, and no one had the heart to say no to anything. So everyone's ideas are now in the game, and I'm sure they're proud of it, but there was too much to do any one idea properly. Which is too bad, because I can see the promise!

Bottom line, Lifeless Planet is too linear to be an exploration game, too simple to be a puzzle game, too straightforward to be a platformer, too obvious to be a story game, too tame to be a horror game, and too scripted to be a survival game.

And too short to be a full price game. I'm an hour in and, according to the walkthrough, a third of the way through.

Focus would have benefited the game immensely, and while I will finish, I will be very surprised if I am at all surprised or challenged by anything they do.

Dark Souls Scale: -5 out of 5. You will not be challenged by this game, even if you try to play it with your tongue instead of hands.

And if you do try to play with your tongue, please take a video and show us.

Updated!

Whew! You guys have been busy.

Also, I want to apologize to Malor. I cannot for the life of me figure out why the Steamworld Dig link shows the raw BB code instead of actually hyperlinking. I'm working on it.

UPDATE:

Okay, for some reason it's accepting HTML but not BBCode, and whenever I fix the broken link with the BBCode, it breaks the next BBcode link.

Working on it.

UPDATE 2:

Okay, I'm an idiot. Missing a closed URL tag. Fixed now.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

9.03M (Eleima)

140 (danopian)

10,000,000 (danopian)

Curses! So close to having a stranglehold on the numerically titled games review market. Does anyone know a good hitman?

danopian wrote:
doubtingthomas396 wrote:

9.03M (Eleima)

140 (danopian)

10,000,000 (danopian)

Curses! So close to having a stranglehold on the numerically titled games review market. Does anyone know a good hitman?

I think hacker would be better, as bumping off Eleima still wouldn't remove the review from the list...

Wasteland I: The Original Classic

Sponsor: Smoove_B

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/QsZwE7N.jpg)

TL;DR Review
Old School Post-Apocalyptic RPG, Surprisingly Deep for 1988, Painful Interface

Got Some Time Version
Welcome aboard the Wasteland time machine, taking you back to 1988! A time of the Soviet Union, Windows 2.1, and no Internet. Wasteland was a classic in its time, the first real post-apocalyptic RPG, but how does it hold up nearly 26 years later?

After an hour of play, I'm happy to say: surprisingly well. The game has remarkable depth considering the restrictions of the time. A playthrough can take over 50 hours, and there is an immediate richness apparent in sheer number of skills a character can develop. The world seems huge and the gameplay deep.

However, there are clear caveats. If you need eye candy to get your gaming juices flowing, skip this one, as the graphics are retro all the way. You're reading your combat results as they scroll down the screen! And if you expect a UI experience that will guide you along and hold your hand, skip this one as well. I spent about 20 minutes rerolling my party to get good stats, and five minutes into the game found myself typing things to ask a crying boy about, only to be told over and over and over: "I dunno what your talking about." I still don't know the keystrokes to view the enemy party in combat, or view my own party inventory. Unless you've got a knack for these things, you'll probably need some of the support documents that come with the game, including, yes, the manual.

Pros
Visionary for 1988
Experience RPG History
Surprisingly Depth

Cons
Painful Interface
All the Heartaches of Old School RPGs
Graphics Suck

One-Hour Recommendation
Will I continue playing? Yes, but not at the moment. I'm still currently on a long run with Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and a simultaneous double-dose of retro graphics and keystroke gameplay will be a bit too much for me. Once I fade out of DCSS, I'm definitely hoping to fire this one up for a run through.

wanderingtaoist wrote:
Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Got Some Time Version
Welcome aboard the Wasteland time machine, taking you back to 1988! A time of the Soviet Union, Windows 2.1, and no Internet. Wasteland was a classic in its time, the first real post-apocalyptic RPG, but how does it hold up nearly 16 years later?

That's actually 26 years (quarter a century!), which makes it all the more amazing.

I'm so glad that we have people here who made it all the way through elementary school and can get the math right for the rest of us.

Thanks for pointing out the error! I've fixed it in the original.

danopian wrote:
doubtingthomas396 wrote:

9.03M (Eleima)

140 (danopian)

10,000,000 (danopian)

Curses! So close to having a stranglehold on the numerically titled games review market. Does anyone know a good hitman?

If you want to go all technical, Eleima's review has an M in it. Sure, it might mean 9.03x10^6, but it has a letter.

Might have to amend my Bully recommendation above. First it deleted my save file near the end of year 1, which wasn't too bad, only a few hours. Last night, got hit by a glitch that turned the screen black while I was kissing some redhead. Eunice came stomping up, screen went black except for the health bar, I could move around a bit, then it said I was knocked out, faded entirely to black, and wouldn't respond except to use the Home button go back to the dashboard. Lost 4 hours of progress, because it doesn't auto-save whatsoever.

This one's my fault. Save your games, kids.

Bully, getting real sick of your sh*t.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

Updated!

Whew! You guys have been busy.

My Craft the World review was omitted! Seriously, who's in charge of this place! All those hours carefully wordsmithing every sentence, for naught. Oh, the pain!

Kidding aside, here's a formatted link, in case it helps:

Craft the World (Godzilla Blitz)

Taharka wrote:

I think hacker would be better, as bumping off Eleima still wouldn't remove the review from the list...

True. But she'd still be out there, plotting reviews of numerically titled games. Can't have people cutting into my territory - my control must be absolute. That way I can build hotels and when people land on them the rent'll be sky-high.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

If you want to go all technical, Eleima's review has an M in it. Sure, it might mean 9.03x10^6, but it has a letter.

She has you in her pocket, doesn't she?! Conspiracy!

Godzilla Blitz wrote:
doubtingthomas396 wrote:

Updated!

Whew! You guys have been busy.

My Craft the World review was omitted! Seriously, who's in charge of this place! All those hours carefully wordsmithing every sentence, for naught. Oh, the pain!

Kidding aside, here's a formatted link, in case it helps:

Craft the World (Godzilla Blitz)

Fixed.

I must have accidentally deleted it while I was debugging the link tag issue, because I had the Counting Kingdom review listed twice.

Any other errors will have to wait until I'm back at my computer.

Gravey wrote:
McIrishJihad wrote:
Gravey wrote:

Game: Bully: Scholarship Edition

Sponsored By: GameStop's bargain bin.

Crib notes review: Rockstar's best game of all time.

Textbook review: OF ALL TIME.

So...you're saying I should pick it up for 360 and give it a try?

Maybe? I wouldn't say throw good money after bad, but I never had any technical problems with Bully on 360.

And it's now on sale on XBLM for $3.74 for today/tomorrow, or maybe all week.