Category Archives: Gaming

On New Space Invaders

August 18, 2014 Ashgar 1 Comment

The title of this post is a reference to how Nintendo has been titling their 2D game releases lately. Murf, this one’s for you.

Hangeki

Hangeki is a shooter from Pentavera, and as far as I can tell it’s their first game. Hangeki at first glance bears a very large resemblance to Space Invaders, but it plays pretty differently once you get past initial appearances. The objective is to kill enough enemies to earn a screen-clearing super-weapon (referred to as a Hangeki) and then use it to move on to the next wave. Repeat until you face a boss. Along the way, you can level up and earn some abilities that are powered by your chain meter (it goes up as you shoot things and down when you don’t). It’s somewhat moba-like in that you start each stage at level 1 and unlock abilities as you play, but you can choose what abilities to take in each slot. You can choose what abilities to take and in what order. Additional abilities unlock as you complete and perfect stages.

As for difficulty, the first stage is very easy. The second stage is slightly less so. Things ramp up quickly from there, as enemies expand from simple bullets to lasers and bombs and dashing. (Unlike a certain other game, lasers are telegraphed before they fire, to make dodging possible.) Your ship shoots automatically, but if you’re not hitting anything your chain will break and your power meter will drop, so positioning and planning is fairly important. If you destroy a column all at once, you’ll later break your chain if you’re forced to move to that column to dodge. I’m still learning, and I clearly have a long way to go if the global score table is any indication.

Hangeki comes highly recommended if you like arcade shooters. The combination of pretty lights, customizable weapons, and global high-score tables makes for a pretty enjoyable experience. I liked it more than I was expecting to, and at $10, the price is right.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust initiative. For ~~why I don’t browse kickstarter anymore~~ a good look at a shooter on Kickstarter, see C.T. Murphy’s post about Hive Jump.

Tabletop

On Placeholders

August 17, 2014 Ashgar

I was going to write about Hangeki, a game I enjoyed much more than RefleX, but I find myself away from my computer and that one deserves screenshots. Instead, you get more D&D.

A Dragonborn Paladin isn’t the most original of characters, but I think it’s what I’m going to play. I like lizard people, and I’ve honestly liked Dragonborn since the 4e Player’s Handbook. (I play Argonian in the Elder Scrolls games by default.) I like the “otherness” that races like that represent. The stereotypical class for Dragonborn is the paladin, and with the new options it’s finally a class that appeals to me. A new system seems like a good time to try something “standard”, so this is what it’ll be.

At the same time, I don’t want a stereotypical background. Unless I’m given a strong reason to do otherwise, I’m going to take the Outlander background, representing a character that grew up away from society. I want to break from the idea of the trained holy warrior because I dislike zealots. I liked the Guardian in GW2 for similar reasons. I still need to finish my character’s background, but I have a fairly good idea of where it’s going.

Gaming

On RefleX

August 16, 2014 Ashgar 2 Comments

I got this game as a gift during the most recent steam sale, and I was asked about it elsewhere recently. I like bullet hell and someone told me that this game was good, so I figured it was worth a try. I attempted to get screenshots for this, but the game doesn’t play well with the Steam overlay (or any alternate method of taking screenshots I tried), so you’ll have to make do with the few I did take.

Basics

RefleX is a vertical scrolling shooter (I don’t think I would actually call it a bullet hell for reasons I’ll get to later) with a bit of a twist. Instead of bombs, your ship has a reflective shield that slowly recharges. Enemy shots are color-coded: blue ones will be reflected, red ones will be destroyed, and purple ones can be destroyed by the ship’s fire (they will also be destroyed on the shield). Instead of lives, your ship has a durability meter. When it runs out, it’s game over, there are no extra lives. In context, what this means is that after making a mistake, you don’t get a life lost and screen clear to recover, and it’s possible to lose multiple hits in quick succession.

Impressions

Playing this game feels very different from other similar games, in that it feels like it tests your reaction time more than anything else. Unlike most bullet hell games where the difficulty comes from trying to find your way through the pattern, this one throws things at you too fast for there to usually be a pattern. (Some principles still apply, like streaming when there’s a line of bullets aimed at you.) The biggest offenders here are homing lasers that are fast enough that if you aren’t moving when they’re fired, you’ll take damage if not shielding.

Combined with the lack of screen clearing and invulnerability when you do get hit, death feels incredibly sudden and quite cheap. As with most shooters, a degree of memorization is required to know attack patterns and when you need to move in order to not get murdered, but attack patterns here are long enough that this is difficult. I prefer to know what I died to in games like this, and it’s quite difficult in RefleX. I don’t like it much as a result.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust initiative.

Tabletop

On Terrible Ideas, Re-examined

August 15, 2014 Ashgar

Wrapping up a week of posts primarily about D&D, I think I’ll take another look at that evoker from earlier.

Actually a Bad Idea

Overchannel does let you use it on spells from 1st to 5th level, but there really are limits to this sort of thing. Using it on Cone Of Cold is nice for your first maximized spell of the day, but as the second it will do 10d12 damage to you. At level 14 on average rolls you would have 80 hit points as a wizard (Con 14 assumed, which might be generous), so this is 65 damage to yourself on average and has a roughly 10% chance of dropping you from full HP. Fireball isn’t quite so bad, but 39 damage is a rather high number to be doing to yourself. If cast in a 5th level spell slot (the highest number for which you have more than 1/day). This represents a ~25 damage increase over casting it normally per target that doesn’t save, so you’re technically doing more damage out than you’re taking if you can catch two or more targets. It’s still a bad idea except in the most desperate of circumstances. Don’t do this.

Maximizing Potential

A generally better idea is to maximize something big for the one you get for free, and spend the rest on something like Chromatic Orb. As a first level spell, you only take 2d12 damage (average 13) from overchannelling this. It does 7d8 damage in a 5th level spell slot (4 points less when maximized than Fireball), but only hits a single target, and uses an attack roll instead of a DEX save (which is better for hitting monks/rogues and worse for hitting heavily armored fighters/paladins). Burning Hands (7d6) or Thunderwave (6d8) are other first level spells worth considering for use with this feature if you are a bit too close to a few too many enemies.

Since Concentration rules make CC in general worse than it used to be, I don’t think evoker is as much of a noob trap as Kodra makes it out to be. It just requires not overdoing it, and being aware that Fireball is not the only spell on your spell list.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust initiative. For a quick look at Divinity: Original Sin, check out Stargrace’s post from yesterday.

Tabletop

On Character Options

August 14, 2014 Ashgar

The Iron Kingdoms game I’m currently playing in is winding down, and with the launch of the new edition, it’s looking likely that I’ll end up in a D&D game soon. As always, the question becomes what to play. Since getting the book last week, I’ve been tossing a few things around. Since I happen to know that I’m going to be rolling stats for this character, what I play may depend on what stats I end up with.

The Default Choice

Now that there are a lot more animals to pick from, my default choice (a Druid focusing on shapeshifting) seems like a good option. The playtest druid encouraged focusing on martial stats, and wild shape provided a bonus to them (like in Pathfinder). The final druid lets wild shape replace your physical stats (like 3.5) but also adds the shape’s HP on top of your own. (To make up for this, most forms have fairly low AC.) I don’t know what race I’d use for this; Elf would be the obvious choice but I avoid playing elves whenever possible. Given the druid ability to mostly ignore physical stats, I’ll probably end up here if my rolls are particularly low.

The Bad Idea

I went over this one with a friend yesterday, but it would be entertaining to play a dragonborn (black dragon heritage) warlock for maximum bad ideas (also works with Half-Orc). I tend to avoid playing squishy arcane casters, but warlocks have a few options to help them stay alive and with blade pact at level 3, the ability to mix it up in melee themselves. This probably works better with a DEX-based character, but STR seems like it would be more fun. I haven’t played the big guy in the party in a while. It would take a lot of stats to make this work, however.

The New Toy

Paladins have 3 class options available to them. Oath of Devotion is similar to the traditional paladin, (with Flame Strike thrown in as a bonus spell for good measure). Oath of Vengeance is similar to the 4e avenger, and it’s a bit less supporty than the other options. The option I would play is Oath of the Ancients, which has a bit of the 4e Warden, making the paladin a bit less “holy warrior” and a bit more “defender of nature”. This gives it some spells from the druid spell list (including my new favorite, Moonbeam) and changed abilities (Channel Divinity allows you to turn fey instead of undead, for example). I like having a paladin that has “removed the stick”, so this might be an interesting thing to try.

All of these have a bit of magic and a lot of beatdown, so I guess that’s the sort of character I’ll be playing in whatever comes next. I expect some of my time is going to go into developing backgrounds for these characters, whether they see play or not.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. Two posts today to make up for the lack of one yesterday: Maevrim starts to write about her 15 games, and Thalen talks about what he wants out of the new Sierra.

Tabletop

On Min-Maxing

August 13, 2014 Ashgar

There’s a certain mentality when it comes to pen and paper RPGs, the drive to “win the game” as it were. Kodra speaks about this in his preface to his post from two days ago, and I want to expand on it a bit. (For the record, I think the big winner in Wizard schools is Conjuration.)

Optimization is not Bad

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting your character to be better. Kodra and I occasionally talk about this sort of thing, we spent a lot of playtest time trying to figure out what was “broken”. When it came time to actually play the game proper, we mostly shied away from these things. Also, our usual DM probably would have murdered one or both of us if we brought in a triple-class character with an AC of 22 and 4 attacks per round at level 6.

But even in play, there’s no reason not to make informed decisions. While it might be fun to have a Monk with high strength, one with more dexterity will usually be better. While Rogues are proficient in clubs and longswords, class features are more effective if you use a rapier or dagger. If you’re a Wizard, you should probably try to have an intelligence of more than 8.

Roleplaying is Good

How much is too much depends on the playstyle of the group. An adventure that is a straight dungeon crawl may call for characters that are more combat-focused. If your adventures mostly require dealing with people in town and rarely getting into combat, then that wizard with 8 int might not slow you down too much, and will provide amusing RP possibilities. (You may also want to explore roleplaying systems that aren’t D&D; many others are better at this sort of thing.) Most groups will be somewhere in the middle, it depends on what your group finds fun.

When I feel it goes too far is when winning the game becomes a primary character goal. It can cause problems when not playing the same game as everyone else and rolls Pun-Pun when the rest of the party is more-or-less standard. There are more reasons for this than just roleplaying, an unbalanced party makes encounter design somewhat challenging. Things that challenge the super-character would crush the rest, and things that would challenge the rest are brushed aside handily. I think it’s better to come up with characters that fit the direction of your campaign, and see where it goes from there.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative.

Gaming

On “Sequels”

August 12, 2014 Ashgar 1 Comment

I would find it very difficult to write about the Robin Williams thing without getting extremely personal, and I don’t think I’m ready for that. At the same time, I’ve been thinking about it and so it must be mentioned. I am saddened by his loss, and I think that mental illness is not a topic that we (as a society) are good at talking about. I’m not sure what it’ll take for us to get better, but maybe this can be a start. It would be nice if we could talk about things without tragedy, but that’s a separate issue.

With that out of the way, I want to talk about Sequels. Geometry Wars 3 was announced recently, and so was Roller Coaster Tycoon World. The former actually has some people who were at the studio that made the first two games (but not the creator of the series), the latter does not. The game I mentioned yesterday (Sacred 3) was made without any of the team that made Sacred 1 and 2. There are probably lessons that can be learned from that going forward.

Cautious Optimism

I expect these games to deviate somewhat from their predecessors, RCT especially. (As an aside, deviating from RCT4 is likely to only be a good thing.) Chris Sawyer isn’t involved and hasn’t been involved for a long time. There has not been a game like Roller Coaster Tycoon since RCT3 10 years ago, and it’s not because people haven’t tried. That’s not to say the game will be bad, but it probably won’t be the same.

Geometry wars I’m more hopeful about, simply because there are fewer moving parts to mess up. While the quality of twin stick shooters does vary, I have some confidence that access to the IP and (hopefully) mechanics represented by the series will result in a fun game. That said, they could throw me for a loop and make it play like Star Fox, for all I know. Information isn’t exactly available yet.

I continue to insist that Sacred 3’s reception is mostly about its name, so maybe these examples should be careful. It’s too late for RCT4, but RCT World is at least being structured as a spin-off, and they’ve already said it won’t have microtransactions, so there’s almost nowhere to go but up from there. As long as the games that come out are good, I don’t mind if they’re not 100% faithful to the series.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. Take a look at Isey’s post from yesterday for an opinion on silent protagonists.

Gaming

On Steam’s Worst Game

August 11, 2014 Ashgar

Sometimes a game will release where users and reviewers disagree on how good it is. There are usually a few reasons for this whenever it happens. Recent games with server problems (Sim City, Battlefield 4) have resulted in the user scores getting review-bombed. Cult classics sometimes review poorly but are well-liked by players later (like Nier or God Hand). And then they’re this. Sacred 3 Released (in the US) last Tuesday, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. According to reviewers it’s somewhat mediocre (a few really liked it), but according to players it’s the worst thing since The War Z.

Bait And Switch

It’s absolutely worth mentioning that the game is a giant bait and switch, being named as the third game in the series but playing nothing like the previous games. Sacred (and Sacred 2) are dungeon crawlers reminiscent of Diablo, with randomized loot and an “open” world and everything else that goes with the genre. Sacred 3 is not like this. Instead, it’s similar to Gauntlet, but with some additional features. This means that you only have access to two abilities at a time, there is no random loot, and the levels are fairly linear with hidden secrets. Personally, I like 3 (so far) more than I liked 2, but this is clearly an uncommon opinion.

Two Steps Forward

That’s not to say there’s no character development whatsoever. Characters gain levels and can unlock additional skills or skill variations to buy. Weapon Spirits are (so far) unlocked via the storyline and provide some additional benefit and drawback to your character, that is the same across all character options. The first one you find (The Battlemage) decreases your energy earned but gives your hits a chance to generate chain lightning. Different primary weapons can change the effects of your normal attack, and all of these can be upgraded with gold and experience.

One Step Back

However, the writing is Bad. There was a constant attempt to be funny, and it doesn’t really work (maybe because I’m not 12 anymore). The dialogue is particularly bad from the main villain, and his voice acting is even worse. Your constant NPC help has a better voice actor, but still terrible (and frequently, annoying) lines. This is my largest complaint about the game by far, and I might see if I like it more by turning off the voice entirely.

I’m only a few hours in (most of which is trying the characters to see which one I liked best), so perhaps my opinion about the game will change, but as of right now I’d call it a good, but not great game. I’d recommend it if you like fighting lots of enemies, looking for secrets, and co-op (which I’m hoping to talk some people into soon).

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. For something I can relate to, see Simcha’s day 10 post. With this post I’m a third of the way through, with 20 posts to go.

Tabletop

On Terrible Ideas

August 10, 2014 Ashgar 2 Comments

D&D had always been fairly good at allowing this, but the new edition does seem to have a lot of potential for amusing bad ideas. The new edition is no different, and maybe even better. A lot of these were in playtests or teasers, so I hope there’s no problem with me posting them here.

My personal favorite by far I mentioned yesterday, the Wild Magic Sorcerer. I’m not the biggest fan of tables for loot, but this table for wild magic effects is awesome My personal favorites are “07-08 You cast fireball as a 3rd level spell centered on yourself” and “53-54 You are immune to being intoxicated by alcohol for the next 5d6 days”.

Also worth of mention is the overchannel feature for Wizards specializing in Evocation that reads as follows:

…When you cast a wizard spell of 5th level or lower that deals damage, you can deal maximum damage with that spell. The first time you do so, you suffer no adverse effect. If you use this feature again before you finish a long rest, you take 2d12 necrotic damage for each level of the spell, immediately after you cast it. Each time you use this feature again before finishing a long rest, the necrotic damage per spell level increases by 1d12. This damage ignores resistance and immunity.

This is the only printed way of accessing the maximize spell effect. I know at least one player who would abuse this, mostly to their detriment.

An Honorable mention goes to the Warlock class, for being entirely based on a questionable idea. I feel like this class is just asking for your DM to inflict you (and your party) with a variety of unfortunate encounters courtesy of (or tangentially related to) your choice of patron.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. I’m a slacker and don’t have another post to highlight for today.

Tabletop

On D&D Next

August 9, 2014 Ashgar 2 Comments

For those who have not heard, the Player’s Manual for the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons released yesterday. I don’t know what the official term for this edition is, but since they’re no longer calling it D&D Next I’m just going to call it 5e. I played a bit with the playtest packets that were out near the end of last year, but there were some balance issues there. I look forward to giving the full rule set a bit of a workout.

Something Old

5e is a return to the ways before 4e in most cases. There’s a mostly familiar set of classes (Warlock is the only class that wasn’t in the 3.5 Player’s Handbook), although there are some changes I’ll mention later. Gone are the encounter/daily/at-will powers from 4e, returned are the concepts of spell slots and spell levels (although these don’t work exactly like they used to either). Also gone are fort/ref/will defenses, but the saves that they were replacing are a bit different now. It’s a return of familiar things, without just being 3.5++, like Pathfinder.

Something New

A completely new concept (for D&D anyway) is the advantage/disadvantage system, where you can roll 2 d20s and take the higher or lower of the two depending on which one you have. Things like Sneak Attacks and various bonuses and penalties were reworked to use this system. The action system is also changed up a bit, in that (generally speaking) players get to take an action and a bonus action per turn, with movement being separated from that system. (This means that you can do things like move in between attacks if you have more than one, or move, attack, and move again, etc.) Advancement is also a bit different, since feats are semi-removed from the normal level progression.

Something Borrowed

A concept from 4e that did stick around is the concept of class variants. Most classes get to make a decision at level 3 that affects the rest of their progression; A few classes (like Clerics) make this decision before then. There’s a lot of variation locked in these, including an option for the Fighter that adds spellcasting progression, a Druid option that makes wildshape far more powerful, and this Sorcerer option which looks like a terrible (but awesome) idea.

Something Blue

I’m a bit sad about the staggered release of the books, since the player’s handbook doesn’t contain much about magical items (probably in the Dungeon Master’s Guide) and had only a tiny list of creatures (which is unfortunate for both Druids and DMs). I like what’s there, and I especially like the variety of class options available, but I just with there was a bit more.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. For an interesting look at what solving an ARG is like, check out Kodra’s post about The Secret World launch ARG.