Category: General

A friend blogging at The Unit of Caring writes about rubber ducks as the ideal of gaming … if you are a baby. Excerpt:

… the reason we enjoy different media at different ages is that interesting things are things that are the right amount of surprising and comprehensible. … Interesting things are in the sweet spot where they make enough sense you can form expectations and not so much sense that your expectations are wholly sufficient and the follow-through completely predictable.

And to a baby, the most delightful game in the world is ‘throw the duck out of the bathtub; throw the duck back into the bathtub’

She discusses what “the right amount” means to us and to a baby. Please do read for a delightful vignette. “Merlin” is the baby in question; she is not bathing an ancient wizard of inestimable power (or if she is, that is a different person).

: Zubon

The blog name is a reference to this post, discussing a concept better known as “earning to give.”

Two games in my recent rotation are Guild of Dungeoneering and Hand of Fate. Both use card-based mechanics and a bit of deckbuilding alongside roguelike elements. Both games set you against fixed challenges, where the path there is built from a player-influenced set of cards. Your weapons against them are player-influenced sets of cards.

Hand of Fate gives you more control over the enemy deck but less on how it comes into play. You pick out what cards (challenges) are in the dealer’s hands, subject to restraints like fixed cards for each quest and based on your progress through sidequests. Once that happens, it is all in the dealer’s hands. The dealer lays out cards on a path you must follow, sometimes with paths you can choose, but always with cards face-down. That is its most rogue-like element. You never know what you’re walking into until the card flips over, and there are few chances to flip cards other than walking into them. In Guild of Dungeoneering, the player has no control over which cards form the dungeon, but the player chooses which, where, and how many to play each turn. You are occasionally dealt nigh-impossible cards for your hero, but it feels like a lot more control. The interesting decisions in Hand of Fate come during deck construction, while they come during gameplay for Guild of Dungeoneering. Score one for Guild of Dungeoneering, since most of your time is spent playing.

Both games let you customize your hero and equipment. Guild of Dungeoneering gives you an expanding roster of heroes to pick from. Hand of Fate has an expansion that lets you pick “Fate” modifiers (characters). More choice up front for Hand of Fate, at an extra dollar cost, but less choice throughout the game. Equipment generally comes with victories in both games. Guild of Dungeoneering lets you pick one of a few choices for each victory. Hand of Fate has far fewer choices but more equipment slots and a fair number of shops to buy and sell equipment. You customize a deck of possible equipment finds at the start of each Hand of Fate game; Guild of Dungeoneering unlocks more cards with the same cash pool that lets you unlock more heroes, and all cards are available each time. Better equipment customization options in Hand of Fate, and more individual choices in Guild of Dungeoneering.

Hand of Fate has a lot of random events. Most of them are a card-based “subgame,” although the whole game is “pick one of four face-down cards.” Not a terribly interesting decision. Equipment and curses can influence it, which has led me to the question of whether the odds are as they appear or if the cards are simply a graphic covering a percentile chance, as the wheel is in Renowned Explorers: International Society. In REIS, the wheel always likes to show a very close spin, nearly winning or losing on each. In Hand of Fate, there is equipment that straight up eliminates a “fail” card from the mix, but other equipment refers to changing odds in a way that makes no sense if you have a 25% chance of getting each card. Hand of Fate also has a combat subgame, which is somewhat entertaining but not great; if you see combat as the centerpiece of a game, and why wouldn’t you in a fantasy quest about getting loot and killing foes, it is not a strong centerpiece.

Guild of Dungeoneering uses a card game as its combat. Each character and monster has base abilities and skills, which translate into cards. Your equipment adds skills, which adds cards. Specialize, and you get stronger cards. Diversify, and you get more variety in cards, but you still play just one per round. The card game is nothing enormously special, variations on two types of attacks and blocks along with some exotic effects. It is entertaining, but most of the decision seems to be made by how well your class/equipment plays against this sort of monster plus whether one of you gets extremely bad luck. That makes your play in the other level of card game very important, but there are relatively few chances to feel like your beautiful mid-combat play saved the day. You can play well, but stacking the odds in your favor is stronger than playing the odds.

On the graphics and atmosphere side, Hand of Fate is dark and brooding. It has an aura of mysticism, although it seems skin deep. Guild of Dungeoneering is cartoony and cute, its narrator somewhat meaner. Hand of Fate has a bitter fortune teller laying out the cards and commenting on your progress. Guild of Dungeoneering has a bard taunting death for every quest. Graphics for either game are decent enough for what they are trying to do.

I think I have been enjoying Guild of Dungeoneering more, because its card game combat is better than Hand of Fate’s combination of random choices and action combat. The card game combat is not top tier, but it does one thing pretty well as opposed to having two “meh” mechanics.

: Zubon

If you have never played Kingdom of Loathing, you probably should. It is one of those big, classic pieces of online gaming literature.

But literature has been defined as something you want to have read but not something you want to read. Maybe you want the newest and flashiest, not the classics? The makers of Kingdom of Loathing just released West of Loathing, a comedy western.

I have yet to try it, but “from the makers of Kingdom of Loathing” is self-recommending.

: Zubon

I often find myself trying a game, getting really into it for a day or a week, setting it aside for some reason or another, and then never getting the taste to pick it back up. I binged on Mini Metro but barely played it after the first week. (Still worth it, for the time and the money.) I have a dozen games on my desktop started but incomplete. I think I could binge the rest of the way through them if I started, but I have not had the intersection of mood and time to binge on them. And then I hesitate to start another with a dozen waiting there.

Years ago, this was summer vacation and I could burn through those games. Now I am thinking about cleaning out my house, and procrastinating from both cleaning and gaming.

: Zubon

Do you often give games a second chance after a bad first experience? So many games, so little time. You chanced an hour or two, do you want to chance more? After all, it takes a while to get the swing of a game or learn the rules.

That is an odd experience for games. Rules mastery is usually a requirement for having a meaningful opinion. There are few movies anyone would say you should try watching a few times to see if it grows on you. There are TV shows people will recommend watching until they grow the beard. Even then, it can be hard to suggest someone sit through about 10 hours of weak Buffy the Vampire Slayer until “School Hard.”

There are plenty of games I am not offering a second chance, like the DC deckbuilding game. Deus has kind of meh, but maybe it will grow on me.

Video games often run 40 hours. If the first two hours are weak, do you even press on to four?

Kill Ten Rats started as an MMO blog. Those run 1000+ hours. Can you really say you even tried World of Warcraft after two hours? But I remember mostly liking the first two hours I played way back when. And my wife tried it, saw it as similar to Guild Wars (which she did not care for), and for her purposes I cannot say she was wrong.

What game did you give a second chance? Did it work out well?

: Zubon

What if we reduced an idle game to its purest form? Pixels Filling Squares: a game in which pixels fill squares. You can click pixels and squares to get more pixels and squares.

: Zubon

Mini Metro is a minimalist subway simulator. You design the public transportation system for a city that is growing and expanding. You keep going until commuter demand exceeds your ability to keep up.

The gameplay is so absorbing that my first play session was a 7-hour binge. This is a sim game stripped down to its cleanest essentials. The visuals are similarly clean. It looks like a subway map. The mechanics go mostly unexplained but are straightforward. Shapes go to shapes. Link the shapes. If you are familiar with public transportation at all, you will get the idea. A really elegant mechanic is that the screen is slowly but continuously zooming out, expanding the amount of city you are covering. The controls are simple but occasionally clunky if you are trying to do something precise in a hurry, like drag a train to another track with an impending crisis.

Variation in the game comes from having more than a dozen cities and then some randomness within each map. You start at a random point in the map, and I am not clear on whether the zooming out is straight up or pans as it goes. Cities grow randomly, so the placement and pattern of shapes is unknown as you start. Every in-game week, you get another locomotive and your choice of two randomly selected bonuses (train carriage, another line, tunnels, interchange).

Your ability to shift train lines, tunnels, and bridges around quickly is something real life transportation planners would envy. I think they would find the randomness realistic. Not only does growth defy urban planners’ dreams of molding it, you get both districts that perfectly mix functions and entire chunks of the map that are defiantly single-purpose, which is sometimes convenient and other times a nightmare to plan around. Sometimes your plans will be foiled because the upgrade you want is randomly not available. That feels really realistic, where the need for a new line is obvious but politically forbidden for no reason that anyone can explain adequately. Make do with a bigger interchange, skippy.

Fun, compelling, elegant.

: Zubon

Renowned Explorers: International Society recently came out with an expansion: The Emperor’s Challenge. This as an Asian-themed expansion, with four new crew members and a new map. The titular challenge is a new game mode, which changes the goal of the game from “gain the most renown” to “complete a series of random challenges before the timer runs out on each.”

As far as I have played it, the new content seems enjoyable. The new crew members have the sorts of abilities I like, with a mix of abilities so they probably have something you like. If you like the base game, “more of the same” is a good thing. I am apparently still somewhat burned out from having worked on 100%ing the game. (Tip: do not try to get 100% of the treasures in REIS unless you are already very close. You can invest quite a lot of time for a chance of having a treasure appear on a map, and then you have a chance to get that treasure. Many treasures * % to appear * % to acquire equals a lot of time, especially when many of them are mutually exclusive.)

The new game mode is not my cup of tea. It changes a strategic game into a more purely tactical one, and it is frustrating that you can be given challenges that are impossible to complete. Granted, that is part of the game, and you just work on the other challenges until your rival clears the ones that are impossible for your team/map/combat (nothing is ever impossible for the NPCs). It’s like a scavenger hunt mode, but not all the things to find are on the map, and the usual fog of war hides the map, and you still have the normal limits of needing to manage supplies and keep improving your team in the usual ways.

If you enjoyed REIS but thought it could use more randomness, this is your perfect DLC. If you do not like increased randomness in your gaming, this is not for you.

: Zubon

Ellipsis is a minimalist avoid-em-up, where you much touch four blue circles and escape without touching any non-blue things. If you touch any non-blue things, you die. The real goal is to touch five blue circles per level, carefully enough to collect all the smaller blue circles in them, and escape before the timer has gone down a single green circle. That is how you 100% a level, and you must score perfectly on every level to 100% the game.

There are no words. The gameplay explains itself. The map is very pretty. The difficulty curve is erratic, as levels that are easy to 100% sit next to ones that are difficult even to finish. You do not need to play all the levels, although there are bottlenecks on the map. Ellipsis is good for “bite-sized” gaming, as each level goes very quickly (unless it is one you need to play 20 times to get the timing to 100% it).

Ellipsis is a game that rewards manual dexterity, timing, patience, and persistence. Ladies, get yourself a man who can 100% Ellipsis.

The game also teaches the important life lesson that you might as well kill yourself if you make the slightest mistake. Or at least the quest for the 100% achievement does.

: Zubon