Author: Zubon

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Kickstarting

Three items to note for you on Kickstarter:

Have you seen The Gamers? There are two movies, and the creators have taken to Kickstarter to fund the third. I hadn’t realized they also had a series, so I must check out JourneyQuest. I pledged.

If you liked Defense Grid, would you like to support Defense Grid 2? Defense Grid: the Awakening is an enjoyable tower defense game. The million-dollar, “fund the whole sequel” stretch goal seems out of reach, but they are most of the way to the first goal. I pledged.

And in our MMO world, Shadowrun Online is seeking funding. I’m not sure what it means that the MMO is going for $500,000 and the smaller tower defense game is going for $1,000,000. Shadowrun seems to be planning to use every revenue model at once: having separate F2P and buy-the-box servers, plus “premium” subscriptions on the F2P server and selling quarterly expansions on the campaign server. The monetization plan, at least, is thorough. I’m not a backer, but I thought y’all might be interested in the project.

: Zubon

Scaling

Did you ever play The Addams Family pinball machine? I recall it as probably the best I’ve ever played. It was the highest selling pinball game ever with 20,270 units. Read that number again. Best selling ever. 20,270.

Standards of success vary across industries. Also, the modern market for pinball machines seems small.

: Zubon

Wikipedia calls it “the best selling pinball machine since the 1930s” (emphasis added), but the pinball machines of the 1930s were early pachinko machines, not what you would think of as pinball. The first pinball machine with flippers was made in 1947, so the early pinball machines were pure gambling games of chance. The Roger Sharpe‘s demonstration of pinball as a game of skill is a lovely comedy of errors that reached the right result by mostly luck. (The previous version I read said they switched machines due to technical problems, not suspicion of cheating.)

Quick review: Stacking

Stacking is an easy, family-friendly puzzle game themed around stacking dolls. Each doll has an ability, and you use those to solve the puzzles. It comes from the fine people at Double Fine. A 100% playthrough is in the 8-12 hour range; if you go straight through without fiddling with the optional content, probably half of that. This includes the DLC that is included with the PC version on Steam.

The puzzles are simple. You can usually solve them with a doll immediately at hand. They are also well designed in that they have multiple solutions and some of those solutions have multiple options. The introductory challenge has three ways to get past it, and one of those ways can be implemented in at least two ways. I solved some puzzles accidentally just by seeing what the various dolls in the rooms could do. If you are having trouble, the game has a built-in hint system with increasingly explicit instructions as you ask for more hints. You will likely need it for a 100% completion. Some of the solutions exhibit a bit of adventure game logic, and sometimes you might not guess which variations count as one or more solutions. For example, in the DLC, two ways of fighting off the ghouls count as the same solution, but another way is a separate one; there are several soup- and disease-involved ways to make a guard sick, and they count as three solutions. Also good luck guessing how to get some of the “hi jinks”; the common problem of “right idea, slightly off” arises.

The story involves saving Charlie’s family, which has been forced into child labor by the dastardly baron. It has a Victorian tone and takes a lighthearted approach to child labor, indentured servitude, industrial pollution, homelessness, and poverty. Seriously, it’s really cheerful despite the setting, kind of the opposite of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Stiff upper lip, no worries, our can-do spirit will see us through!

You will be spending a lot of time in cut scenes. It takes a while for there to be much gameplay, rather than a series of introductory stories. Every scene changes has a cut scene or two. They are done as silent films: dolls emoting while instrumental music plays in the background, and then a card with their dialogue. It is timed for a low grade level’s reading speed.

Fun, flexible, and silly. Largely worth the time, if you enjoy this sort of thing. Your price point may be below the $15 retail; I got it on a Steam sale. If you do not have any Double Fine games, there are frequent sales on the three-pack, and their next game is ever in the works.

: Zubon

[LotRO] Poor Party

LotRO has launched the Farmers Faire (guide, better than the wiki as I type this). The previous new event was the Treasure Hunt, so I am led to believe that the developers who brought you gems like the Haunted Burrow have moved on to other projects. Farmers Faire and the Treasure Hunt just aren’t very good. Granted, much of the festival content is a weak form of “click on this once a day,” but there have always been interesting things like dance lessons, emote-based trickery, shrew-stomping, and beer runs. The main new thing the two latest events bring is a chance to sell game tickets in the cash shop.

There are two things worth recommending in the Farmers Faire. Until a walkthrough is posted, “Fat Mayor” will be an amusing little puzzle quest. The major of Bywater is trying all the Faire foods, and he is slightly dissatisfied with everything, so you need to bring him an item in response to his complaint. Some of the prompts are clearer than others. “Manning the Market” is the other good quest. It is an umbrella quest with a half-dozen customers wanting things. They give you shopping lists that are intentionally written so as to throw you off unless you read the whole thing. The quests require reading comprehension, the ability to look around you, and a couple of guesses your first time through. There are two new mini-games, if you like scrambling to click on ground-spawns. Another one has text demonstrating why you might hate hobbits, which is genuinely amusing in text as well as genuinely irritating in-game.

Others are just crap. They have a few sentences of amusing text you can read out of game and no play value. One of the Market quests is effectively “click on this box repeatedly until you get ‘quest complete.'” One is “keep fishing until you get ‘quest complete.'” Two others are “keep fishing until you get ‘quest complete,'” but the quests are explicitly luck-based and you might fail them because you caught the wrong thing. One of the quests is unable to function with high populations, and the Faire areas will be heavily populated for a while; this quest gates another, which we know to exist only because a deed calls for completing it three times.

If you must have every deed, there are at least eight here, depending on how many tiers of “beat the mini-game X times” there are. There are also new cosmetic items.

: Zubon

Update: the wiki has a guide now. You can’t reasonably get drunk hobbits, but the drunk elves in Lothlorien work.

[GW2] One Shot

Maybe it’s a matter of scaling, but the GW2 tutorials (and several early events) have the horrible design of including bosses with AE one-shot abilities. The boss spawns, activates an attack you’ve never seen before, and 15 people are on the ground. This is not a fun introduction to the game.

Maybe they’re trying to introduce everyone to the “downed” mechanics during the tutorial. You struggle with that while the people who were not in the AE finish the tutorial event. Congratulations on your victory, hero!

Don’t assume someone five minutes into the game will recognize what is about to happen.

: Zubon

Quick review: QUBE

If you liked Portal’s gameplay, you will like QUBE’s at least 75% as much. The developer video included with Portal 2 explains their original plan: no portals, no Chell, no GLaDOS. QUBE is that, also with no story. What QUBE does have is about 4 hours of puzzles in an environment that feels a bit like running through Aperture Science.

QUBE stands for Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion. The first puzzles relate to colored blocks that do different things. Later puzzles start rotating rooms, using light and magnets, and letting you decide which color boxes should be.

The puzzles are not enormously difficult. Most of the time, once you understand what the tools in a room do, the solution is intuitively obvious. The more interesting puzzles come at the end of a sector, when you get complex interactions instead of new tools.

It can be glitchy. I had boxes teleport, spring away, and disappear entirely. One point requires precision platforming in the dark. About 90% worked as intended for me, and the rest eventually worked.

There is no story and only hints of a setting. There are no words. If you loved Portal for the humor and tone, this will not do anything for you. It just has puzzles in a 3D environment.

: Zubon

[GW2] Mounting the Learning Curve

Guild Wars 2 has special mechanics for its classes. I have no idea how they work and have no idea where in-game would explain it. I assume the wiki has some information. I also assume that there will be more information available somewhere, sometime, but that it felt suboptimal to implement that while major changes to those mechanics are underway.

I tried two new classes for the last BWE, Mesmer and Thief. I knew that Mesmer abilities revolved around clones and confusion. Okay, first fight, I have just my basic attack, here we go. Bam, bam, why is there a clone of my by the enemy? There’s another one. Oh, they’re gone. Trying that out of a few fights, my basic power was flipping between three different versions faster than I could read the text on what it was doing. Oh, so those little lights indicate how many clones I have out. I’m not entirely sure what the clones do beyond what it says (use one attack).

The Thief comes with a Steal ability, which picks up an ability from the target. That will involve learning some icons to make full use of it. Thieves stole the GW1 Assassins’ shadowstep, and they have Initiative dots. Initiative is … I don’t know. It looks like an energy system of sorts, because I at one point did not have enough initiative to throw a dagger. Skimming the forums, it looks like they’re mid-revamp (or maybe just balancing heavily), so it seems unprofitable to learn much now. Having played only a few levels, it only mattered once, and it mattered by stopping me from doing what I was doing. I presume it matters more later.

Part of a GW2 training area will need to be an explanation of what your class mechanics are doing. Maybe that comes later in life. I was only getting to Engineer kits on the first character I tried, and the Elementalist’s element swapping is intuitive once you notice the icons. I haven’t even looked at half the classes, so I may have quite a bit to muddle through. I can see level 20 players in groups saying, “Is that what that does?” for the next two years.

: Zubon

[GW2] Pre-release Cash Shop

Guild Wars 2 has been testing the gem (cash) shop in each of the BWEs. In this final BWE, they are doing it for real: you really buy gems, which you can use this weekend and then they will be reset for release. I find this an interesting economic model, and not necessarily a bad plan on their part, but I’m only as far as thinking, “…interesting.”

If you’re going to pre-sell the game, why not pre-sell the bonus toys, too?

: Zubon

Character slots seem to be $10 each, but I’m not sure where folks got the quote of 800 gems/slot. The game launches with 5 races, 8 classes, and 5 character slots (across all servers, characters are not server-bound except for WvW purposes).