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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

[GW2] Unshiny Armor

There is a clever attrition mechanic in Guild Wars 2 with armor repair. Sure the developers get points for replacing death penalty and energy with something that basically gives players a few tries before getting penalized. It’s really clever because it’s so maddening.

A good, sane player will never repair armor until it becomes broken, where it no longer provides an armor value. Sure players will die every now and then, but apart from dungeons, actual death should occur less than a few times per level. This all depends on player bravado and sought efficiency of play, but in the beta weekends, I seemed to be replacing armor enough that damaged armor was never an issue. In other words, money is wasted on repairing armor, especially if it’s just going to be mulched to a salvage kit anyway.

The reason that devilish designer is so gosh darn clever is there is an icon that makes sure to let me know that my armor has a dent in it. It’s a small thing for sure, but so is my three-year old, who can give me headaches like you wouldn’t believe. The nasty icon just sits there glaring at me making sure I know how unclean I am walking around like a family minivan with a finger-painted “Wash Me” etched in to the dirty glass. It only thinks it pretends to sit there unjudging with no condemnation for trying to avoid gold-sink tricks.

So, I do my duty and head to the armor repair NPC. It’s nice enough that he lets me know I am doing the right thing, like how the auto mechanic makes me feel good for changing a $300 fluid that is still marginally okay. And, I feel stupider for it.

–Ravious

[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

[Eve] Shooting Blues

My lack of Eve updates should not be confused with a lack of gameplay or a waning of interest in New Eden…   Rather, INQ joining Surely You’re Joking [HAHA], one of the top wormhole alliances in the game, has created a serious obstacle to my ability to discuss the goings on in Eve due to the saturation of operational secrecy and security concerns related to just about everything we do.

…and boy do I have stories…  I would tell you them, but then I’d have to kill you.  

Continue reading [Eve] Shooting Blues

[GW2] Tales of BWE3

I came back from a long internet-less vacation on Saturday night. Exhausted from driving for 9 hours, I still had the will and energy to play a bit of the final hours of the Guild Wars 2 beta weekend event 3. Like Zubon, I knew going in to this beta weekend that for pre-release play, I was satiated until launch. Yet, it was still fun to get in there and play, even if temporarily.

Metrica Province

I decided to try an asura guardian in order to get a sense of the asura. I was actually a little unprepared for how my vision of their advancement over 250 years did not align with ArenaNet’s. Instead of the sterilized environment of Science, I was expecting, the asuran region still maintained a lot of organic depth. Sure, it was no palette of nature that the sylvari hold reign over, but it was clear that within the Eternal Alchemy, the asura feel intertwined with their environment. Continue reading [GW2] Tales of BWE3

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