I Whine About Games

oops, i did it again

2008-07-26T17:19:00.000-07:00

that music thing?

1639199.

I think that'll do.

new music based DS game

2008-07-25T18:27:00.001-07:00

but despite Internet Geek Approved taste in music I don't think I'm interested. The gameplay looks much less interesting than EBA/Oeundan, there's no sign of story elements, even the dance-along monsters don't appear to have much variation or excitement in what little you can see there.

sore thumbs

2008-07-24T08:04:00.000-07:00

at last! all babies thrown.

what a surprise.... a douchebag on the internets!

2008-07-23T15:42:00.001-07:00

The faux-surprise is not that some people are upset about certain elements of the 'Fat Princess' game. The faux-surprise is at the sheer stupidity of the people mocking the people upset about the game.

Even worse is a writer at Shakesville, who took time out of doing her husband's laundry to write this: "Congrats on your awesome new game, Sony. I'm positively thrilled to see such unyielding dedication to creating a new generation of fat-hating, heteronormative assholes." As you can see, she uses "words" like "heteronormative" to sound clever and informed, a tactic which invariably fails and makes one look presumptuous and pretentious. [...] Word to the wise: Sarcastic fat girls don't go to the prom!

The game itself is not the best treatment of either women or fat people but it's not exactly reality-based and "It's just a game"... it's much less creepy than that japanese "Frantically lose weight so people will like you!" dating sim. There is such a thing as being oversensitive. But this quote, I can't tell whether he's intentionally choosing phrases to try and wind up feminists or whether he really is that dumb.

She accuses you of being a fat-hating heteronormative asshole, so you mock her for being fat and insist that she needs a man to make her life complete. But wait, if she's too fat to get a date, how come you think she's busy doing her husband's laundry?

boss battle, incoming!

2008-07-23T15:05:00.000-07:00

If the big shiny rooms full of powerups and the threatening music weren't enough, the NPC will now frantically beg you to save your game. You want to save now, right? RIGHT? RIGHT???

Complicated and difficult minigames entirely unrelated to the rest of the game right before the final boss requiring enormous amounts of reloading are not fun. And this game was doing so well!

(Yes, I got it eventually, but it felt more frustrating than excitingly challenging. This doesn't seem like a good time to make the player learn a new skill, particularly when failure means bad guys laughing at you and reloading and trudging up a lot of stairs again, rather than just trying again like most of the minigames do.)

indie rpg news roundup

2008-07-23T10:36:00.001-07:00

Since there's a lot of tidbits in there, linkies!

a moment's relaxation

2008-07-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

A little musical flash game on Reflexive. My first go scored 789758 - it was cute but I don't think I'll play it again any time soon.

ebooks, wallpaper, etc

2008-07-22T14:19:00.000-07:00

Not games, but fantasy, and I like fantasy, so!

Tor freebies - limited time publisher giveaway stuff

(I do, in fact, buy ebooks. But only in HTML. I don't have a portable book reader and I like being able to drag things into my browser window where I can resize them to my heart's content.)

Narrative character creation

2008-07-21T18:49:00.001-07:00

RPGs (and computer games in general) are notorious for starting you out with amnesia. This helps keep them from burdening you with too much detail at the start, but can be jarring later if you discover that the charming loner you thought you made is actually a mass-murderer from a large family. Or, if the characters stay ciphers forever, it makes it harder to engage with the game world.

At the same time, character creation can be a burdensome morass of obscurity, full of far too many numbers and unclear tactical decisions. This can be fun, but it can also be daunting.

I may have mentioned this idea before, but... What if you used a more CYOA style of character creation? Where you and the character generator build a simple story to express who your hero is and where e comes from?

Alishtera[type name here] is a [man/woman] reknowned for her [strength/cleverness/knowledge/fighting skill/piety]. She was born [in a small village/in the wild forests/into slavery/a noble's bastard] and grew up yearning for [adventure/freedom/revenge/love/fame]. Five years ago, during the war against the Pact, she [various activities...]

And so you could progress through character creation, picking a choice and then having the next part of the background story appear. Each choice you made would shape the eventual stats and skills of the character you would be handed, as well as setting plothooks for later. The story-generator could be as complex as you wanted... characters who were born slaves might get a very different set of possibilities for where they were during the war, in order to set up their current non-slave status.

watching Age of Conan over someone's shoulder

2008-07-21T13:04:00.000-07:00

Yes, it is impressive that you have lipsynch tech for your models.

However, if their mouths move realistically while their eyes stare blankly right at you, face never showing expression...

novelty ice cubes

2008-07-20T06:41:00.001-07:00

tetris style

I pretty much never use ice anyway, though.

FATE 2

2008-07-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

Wild Tangent responded to my support request solely by chiding me for calling it "Fate 2" instead of using the appropriate branding of Fate Unfogged Room Closet Balls Hockey With Elf Chicks, rather than by HELPING me in any way shape or form to run their game so that I could GIVE THEM MONEY.

Okay, fine. I HAVE PLENTY OF THINGS TO PLAY ANYWAY.

Seriously, wtf? Did they think I was going to respond with "Oh wow, I am so sorry I failed to use the proper name for your game even though I had indicated exactly what game I was talking about on the long series of dropdown menus when filing a support request through your website and a second-grader could tell what I meant by 'Fate 2'. Gosh, that was so inappropriate of me! I will buy *three* copies of your new product even though it doesn't even launch on my computer! I should be ashamed of myself for asking! Tee hee!"

I loved FATE. I was a shoo-in for a sequel. It didn't even have to be good. I would have bought it without giving it more than a few minutes playtest. All it had to do was run.

Well. So much for them, then.

(If you got here by search and are disappointedly looking for a game, there are other indie RPGs out there..... but if you're really set on trying Fate The Undiscovered Country Or Whatever you can find that here)

still throwing babies

2008-07-17T13:07:00.001-07:00

I'm somewhere in the Star Shrine at the moment.

well, there went my free time

2008-07-17T11:40:00.000-07:00

There's a new FATE game out!!

(If you're not familiar with them, super-cute Diabo-clone with pets and fishing. Hit stuff. Get loot. Repeat.)

Luckily or un, as the case may be, their stupid game manager software appears to be interfering with my ability to actually run the game. I click play, I get a blank screen. You can see the results of my request for tech support here.

sugar and spice

2008-07-16T11:36:00.001-07:00

I am now collecting links for figure skating games. Anyone got any more?

(Also, there is an obvious girl bias in these games. Poor boy skaters.)

visual novel adventures

2008-07-15T19:28:00.000-07:00

A neat upcoming game for those who enjoyed Fatal Hearts and Another Code / Trace Memory:

Time Hollow

Apparently you have some sort of time-travel power, so you jump back and forth in time trying to solve puzzles and help people, while fighting against the bad time-manipulations of a mysterious enemy. Some adventure-gamey puzzles, but the gamespot preview suggests that the focus is more on dialog and character development. Graphics look really nice, too.

physics

2008-07-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

Blow stuff up. Don't let stuff fall down!

http://armorgames.com/play/1871/totem-destroyer

random japanese stuff

2008-07-14T15:32:00.000-07:00

Exception - A shmup where you play a cube flying around other geometric solids, with bloom and blast. To quote the review,

Your little fighter cube flies along the x and y axis with omnidirectional firing. You have a health bar, as opposed to dying in one hit, so in that regard it is a tad forgiving. Three weapons are at your disposal: a straight, constant laser beam for focused fire; a chargable homing ray to take out swarms of weaker enemies; and, what is perhaps the most important weapon in your arsenal, the catapault, which is the device that employs the "blown attacks" mentioned in the product description.

The catapault grows in strength with a power meter filled by dealing out damage to the enemy swarms. When it's ready to use, an outline of a box appears in front of your fighter. When the catapault is used, everything inside that box is flung away from your fighter with considerable force. The smaller and lighter the object is, the farther and faster it will fly. Skillful use of the catapault, especially when you let the power meter fill to its maximum, is the key to surviving the levels. It can be used offensively to fling hundreds of cubes into the oncoming hordes.

There is a demo downloadable here. It is quite playable even if you can't understand Japanese - the settings are in English, and when you get into the game, the left button, right button, and middle button will do you. (Be sure to LET GO of the left button before using the others.)

fun times with online rpg

2008-07-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

(using MapTool and a chat client)

Having my players discover the phrase 'Beware of Travis' carved into a wall.
Having one immediately yell about Taxi Driver and post a link to a picture of the character looking crazy with his guns.
Immediately grabbing the picture, cropping it down, and dragging it onto the map as the bad guy emerged from the secret door behind them...

Less good - MapTool crashed at one point and ate the entire campaign, so all the mapfiles and fog-reveals had to be rebuilt. Never had that happen before.

Also, one player is trying to convince me to rewrite all these 1st edition pre-advanced D&D modules into 4e. ARGH. I'm not doing it, but I have allowed some 'minor' (huge compared to what OD&D should be, minor compared to porting to 4e) rule changes designed to make the game an awful lot easier and more likely to achieve my goals.

See, I hate combat. I'm an explorer both as a player and a GM. What I really want is for my players to wander around the module, see everything, trip all the traps, go "ONOES", pick themselves back up again, and keep going. Killing them off is not fun. Life being slow and dangerous enough that the party proceeds at a crawl and wants to be fully rested all the time is dull. If letting the wizard cast Magic Missile once per combat instead of per day means the party will keep moving, then I'm okay with that.

Said player still thinks it would be more fun if we used 4e so the fights would be more interesting. BUT I HATE COMBAT! Fights are boring? Good, stop having them! :)

nonviolent resistance

2008-07-13T14:47:00.001-07:00

A Force More Powerful

I wonder if it contains any insights that would help create that thing I want to write involving repressive reeducation facilities...

aliens stole my sheep!

2008-07-13T06:34:00.001-07:00

Watch the little preview movie for Flock. It's cute.

Wanderlust Rebirth

2008-07-13T06:14:00.000-07:00

Co-op console-graphics RPG project (like a tiny mmorpg - play with a group), free beta of beginning of game available, more details at TIGsource.

i am intrigued by your ideas

2008-07-11T11:36:00.000-07:00

News of an upcoming direct-download site for older games, the sort that by now turn up in the bargain bin if anywhere.

Good Old Games

Pleasingly, they're offering DRM-free versions, or so they say. Which may be an acknowledgement that their target market are perfectly capable of obtaining pirated copies of those old games if they feel like being jerks, so why bother? They're buying because they want to pay for it, or want the safety of getting it from a reputable source instead of risking virus-riddled warez.

Of course, their version of 'old' is a bit eye-rolling for some of us who've been around a lot longer than that...

But if this is legit (and will allow non-US people to buy... GameTap won't, last I checked) it'll be a nice option to have.

once more from the top

2008-07-10T15:08:00.000-07:00

Remember that game about making fashion statements that I gave in and bought?

There's a sequel.

But according to reviews, it's not much more than the same thing over again.

Unfortunately, ever since gamezebo intentionally broke their site, removed a lot of user content, and trapped the rest away to where only registered people can see it, they're the same thing over again too. (You CAN get to the forums if you're not registered. But you can't get past the first page of posts, it just keeps reloading. And all the info that used to be right there on the review page now requires click after click after click to have any hope of seeing...)

stating the obvious

2008-07-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

Whoever has the license to Mahoujin Guru Guru really should make a DS game out of it.

If you're not familiar with it, the entire anime series is a super-kawaii parody of old console RPGs. But crucially, the magician girl character casts her spells by drawing patterns in the dirt with the end of her staff.

So, while there were some SNES games for it, none of them could work in the really obvious connection like a DS game could.