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  More Hamumu Revumus 06:14 PM -- Wed May 18, 2016  

Lemme just blast through a few games I've played in the last 6 months so that I have them reviewed and can stop trying to remember details (note: I already don't remember details or what exactly I liked and disliked, so deal with that!).

Mad Max
At first I loved this game. It felt like it was gonna be so awesome, and hearkened back to ye olde days of Autoduel on the Apple II (and also Interstate '76, more recently, which I loved the soundtrack to and lost). You younguns won't know about Autoduel, but it was great. You'd kill badguys to get money to upgrade your car and stick guns and flamethrowers out of every side in a top-down murderfest. Delightful.

Mad Max is the same concept, but in keeping with your usual AAA story-adventure-movie game, the RPG upgrades aren't very meaningful since you eventually get them all. The only question is which order you get them in. But it is fun to improve your car and decide how it functions. There's a lot I enjoyed, especially going into the bandit camps and conquering them, one by one. That's always satisfying.

What brings it down from greatness is a few things. The car physics are too real (though not very real at all, I admit) - it's just not that fun to drive, because the car feels heavy and hard to maneuver, and half the time you're skidding out of control. It gets better as you get upgrades (unless you upgrade your armor, which adds weight!), but even at the best it can be, it still isn't the responsive fun arcadey driving I would want to have. That completely put me off of the races you can enter in the game - they were horribly unfun, since the only joy in a race is the driving, which is not enjoyable here. I felt like a game focused around a car should have a fun car experience! I loved firing my harpoons at other cars, but not so much steering.

Also, the fighting suffers similarly - it just isn't as arcadey as it could be. It's the exact same fighting system as Batman Arkham games, only slower (you can't instantly switch from one move to another), which again brings that feeling of slogging through mud rather than dancing around free as a bird.

So all in all, it was close to greatness. I really tried to have a lot of fun (and I did keep playing all the way to the end), but it was just lacking that visceral control joy that you want from a game.

DmC: Devil May Cry
To clarify since it's poorly named, this is the reboot of Devil May Cry, where he's younger and has black hair. It's awesome. It definitely has joyful control funtimes. It suffers downsides in a lot of the same ways as other DmC games I've played - the upgrades are practically meaningless, doing the move you want is difficult and confusing, and the levels are pure railroading from one point to the next. But the actual murderin' is always fun, and I'm always a fun of games that focus on juggling hapless enemies with continuous attacks. Not my favorite game ever, but very enjoyable.

Saint's Row: Gat Out Of Hell
The BEST Saint's Row game ever. This is practically an expansion to Saint's Row IV, and thus is very short, but that's part of the charm. You're not dragging out an endless search for little powerups all over the place, or finding 400 unfun side-games to finish, or grinding out points for all your abilities. It's all completely focused - you get your upgrades, you kill everybody and blow up everything, and you rush to the finish in 4-8 hours. This game is the only one I can remember in the past 10 years where I stuck with it after winning to try to rack up every achievement just because I enjoyed what I was doing in the game. I am 2 achievements short: one for playing co-op, which I won't do, and the other for playing 20 hours. I have 19 hours played, but just leaving it on another hour seems dumb.

It's all about getting insane powers and annihilating everything with them. One of the weapons is the Ark of the Covenant. Another is a recliner with machine guns and missile launchers built in. The best gun is just a machine gun that shoots diamonds and makes everybody you kill explode into money you can collect. Plus you have wings, and one of the most fun flight systems in any game I can remember. It just feels good to run around and fight in this game. Two thumbs up.

Tomb Raider
Not the old one, the new one (not the newest one, but the first in the new series. Clear?). This is a really good game. It's fun to go around and collect all the secret things, and shooting guys with arrows is fun. Stealth is fun. But it suffers from AAA problems like Mad Max does, though not all the same ones: it has that same sort of "we want the animation to look good, so who cares how the gameplay feels" aspect, where you can't act at certain times just because it would mess up the animation (bad idea, developers: let me mess up the animation in order to have fun and feel in control!). It also has the usual problem of playing for 3 seconds and then sitting through a cutscene, again and again. The worst is when your character does things in cutscenes that you could've done in gameplay, like fighting someone or climbing a wall. Why am I watching something I could be playing? And it has the same thing as Mad Max, where the upgrades are meaningless since you eventually get them all - you only choose the order. Let me design a character! Play a role, perhaps even.

All in all, this is actually a really good game, way better than I had expected it to be before playing (I never liked Tomb Raider games in the old days). I would definitely recommend it.

Batman: Arkham Knight
If there is one series, besides Borderlands, that is my absolute addiction, it is the Arkham games. Okay, Diablo too. And Ratchet & Clank. Anyway, Arkham Knight is a clear-cut finale to the Arkham series, and it is a good one. At first, I didn't think so - unlike the previous games, this one really makes you work to get into it and understand how to play. I'm a veteran with probably a hundred or more hours between the previous games in the series and I was still mostly lost for the first couple of hours of this game. It does a terrible job of bringing you into things and teaching you and pointing you toward your objectives. Even by the time I finished the game, I never got used to the awful system they have for selecting which 'mission' you want to be working on.

So, once I did get used to how to play this game, it is what you'd expect: awesomesauce. Batman games are amazing. To be fair, this is probably the worst one, but that still makes it an awesome game. There is a fair amount of really annoying "car platforming" to be done, but the tank battles you do with your car are actually quite fun, for exactly the reason that Mad Max's fun is compromised: they don't care about realism at all, and your car can switch from normal driving mode into this pure arcade tank mode where you can strafe like you're playing Quake. It's instantly responsive, and really fun to control. It's not very "Batman", but I enjoyed it, which is more than I can say for most games when they switch from their normal gameplay to any sort of alternate mode.

There's also a bunch of great "detective work" to do (never enough - I really want a game like this that focuses in on crime investigation instead of fighting and shooting. The time manipulation you do to solve crimes is very cool), a megaton of hidden things to find (I found them all, because you're never done with Batman while the Riddler remains at large), and a lot of fun traditional Batman brawling with all the gadgets. I love the stealth parts as always. The story is also always good in these games, far more so than almost any other video game. That darn Joker, what a rascal! Anyway, it's a truly great Batman game, provided you can figure out how to play it. So that's it. A bunch of big games I played recently and thought you should know about.
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  How To Get Insanely Rich Making Videogames 11:28 AM -- Tue March 22, 2016  

I got an email the other day, not so different from many questions I have been asked over the years. It comes from an aspiring indie, and the details are always different, but the core question is the same: how can I make money making video games? So I started writing an answer, and it got wordy as I tend to do, so here it is for public consumption:

How To Get Insanely Rich Making Videogames*

I only ever worked for a game company for about 9 months at the end of my college years (I would've continued, but they folded!). After that, I had savings to keep me living (very very very very cheaply) for a year or two, so I decided to get in there and crank out a game. I ended up having it published by eGames, and this got me the money to keep going for a while more, while I built up my own website of games that I sold direct to consumers, and still do. I was all-in on indie game development, no side job.

But this is not a story for today. It was before 2000, and the market was unbelievably different. What I did will never work today. In those days, there were people making very good six-figure livings just selling games direct from their website, which is no longer a remote possibility. Everything is done through app stores now and only the top few games on each app store make any real money. It is a nearly impossible market to survive. I was very lucky to be in at the time I was. It just worked out, and even then I was on the absolute brink of bankruptcy right before Growtopia, as the market changed around me. I had calculated my budget and literally would have to decide which of my utility bills to pay if something didn't change within the next 3 months (Growtopia launched before that 3rd month!). I rode a few other waves along the way, making Flash games for sponsorship, and then later flash games for a specific company for pay. Those waves petered out very quickly, and if it weren't for the great luck of striking gold with Growtopia, I would've been done as an indie, forced into a job bagging groceries or flipping burgers.

It is all doom and gloom, sadly - there is no realistic chance to succeed as an indie today. It happens, sure, like it happened with Growtopia or Flappy Bird, but these are the 1 in a million smash hits, and you can't operate your life on the basis that you'll be 1 in a million. You need to plan to be within the middle of the bell curve, and have contingencies for the low end of it. And in the present day, the middle of the indie bell curve is probably around $1000/yr. Statistic completely made up by The Hamumu Institute For Not Learning. It's not a liveable salary, for sure. So what can you do to make it in an industry where the norm is total failure, and the glut of quality games is only growing?

Nothing, really. There isn't a way to survive it except to be one of the smash hits. If the average is not liveable, then you can't live with the average. Which doesn't mean you can't do it, it means you have to do it on the side while something else is sustaining you. Then when you find that smash hit, you can quit your day job and be happy, but until then, it's just hard hard work.

I've never been willing to do that, because I know, from working at a game company, that my energy is completely sapped by a day job and there's nothing left to work on my own project. I know it from Growtopia too - I'd love to be doing other things, like entering 48-hour contests, but my brain is all-in on Growtopia. There's no creative juice left to make something else. I am just a TV and video-game zombie once the work is done. So I have been blessed with unbelievable luck, and coming from a privileged background, to be able to get away with being truly indie the whole time, and just scrape by until I hit the big time with Growtopia.

Brief aside: If you don't like my completely made-up statistics, here's a handy bit of info from Gamasutra: "Fifty-seven percent of indie game developers (including both solo indies and members of indie teams across all pay ranges) made under $500 in game sales." so I was doubling the reality! That article is interesting reading: 6 Key Points From The 2014 Indie Salary Report.

Anyway, while I definitely counsel that you need to have a day job, that it's just not possible to make it otherwise, I do have a strategy to offer: the only way to get one of those smash hits is a huge dose of luck. But luck isn't magic - it consists of being in the right place at the right time with the right game. So my formula for success is very simple: just keep making - and FINISHING and RELEASING - games. The benefits are many:
  1. Each game you release is one more chance at happening to be in the right place at the right time. If a smash hit is one in a million, then once you release 2 games, you're down to 1 in 500,000. And besides, hits are relative - I would've been ecstatic with two orders of magnitude less income than I got with Growtopia. That broadens the range of 'success' by a whole lot. If you have a "hit" that makes you $50,000, that is certainly enough to keep you going for at least a year (or two or three, depending on your location and lifestyle). Just to be clear, $50,000 is not easy. It's still deep into the very skinny nose of the bell curve, and getting worse all the time as the market gets more and more flooded.

  2. Each game you release, you get better at the art of making games. You will do better every time. Not every game will do better - some will flop completely (Mia's Happy Day), while some will catch fire (Robot Wants Kitty). But every time your skills will improve so the quality level will rise, and you'll be inching up that bell curve. You start at the bottom, you know, not the middle.

  3. Each game you release, you get better at knowing what works. Which means your "random" shots at the right time and right place get a lot less random. We made Growtopia knowing that a multiplayer game based on sandbox creativity and social interaction would do well. We did not know how well!

  4. Each game you release is one more game by you, so one more chance to catch a customer who might be interested in your others. Each one boosts up the others. Or it does if you retain ownership of your work and people can see your name and logo on the game! Selling out to a publisher isn't always ideal.

  5. Each game you release is an income stream. Many streams forge a mighty river. In theory. The streams do dry up over time, so you need to keep adding new ones, but I still make money (pennies) from games I made in 1998-2000. That's a long long stream, and with enough games, it adds up to pizza money. That's better than ramen money, anyway.

  6. Each game you release is the phrase I used to start the descriptions of each of these numbers. I wrote this one as a joke but I do want to add a real point: I said "release", not make. A game you don't polish to completion, and release to the public in a way that will actually reach a decent crowd (which today means an app store), might as well have never been made. Releasing is all that counts. Everybody's got the Greatest Game Ever half-made, it's the person who finishes and releases the Mediocrest Game Ever that makes money. And all those benefits I enumerated above, you don't get those without releasing your game. You don't even get notably better at making games until you release games. Because finishing is the hard part, and it's where all the lessons come in. Well, except for the really painful lessons you get after release, when people start to say what they think of your work!
So you are pretty well guaranteed not to get rich quick making games, and you're nearly guaranteed not to get rich in the long term either, but there's a chance. Most importantly, if you keep at it - which means keeping it funded with an alternate job - there's a very good chance that it can become a nice side business. In a decade or two of constant effort.

Just as a final note to help you picture the path to success, Growtopia was (based on quickly scanning my website) my 67th released game, released in exactly the 20th year since my first released game (SPISPOPD!). That's a whole lot of games and a whole lot of years, and I consider myself far beyond lucky that I was able to keep myself afloat for all that time before I finally had that success. Don't rely on luck though - get a real job, you bum.

* You won't.
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  Hamumu Revumu: Prototype 1 & 2 11:03 AM -- Tue February 2, 2016  

Prototype 1 & 2

TL;DR: The first one is insanity. The second one is insanely awesome. Infamous-style "superhero smashing up a city" free-roaming 3rd person action games, with tons of leveling up, and a funky little bit of very original stealth.

Kombat Kuality: Both games use roughly the same control scheme, which is sensible and quite playable. It's fun to run around chopping guys up, and your power level is significantly over 9000 - you can literally sweep through an entire crowd of enemies and leave them all chopped in half, or pick up a tank and throw it. The difference is this: in the first game, everything happens at such a ludicrous pace, and so much junk is being thrown at you from every direction, that you can die in the blink of an eye, or completely clear a battle without a scratch. You can be juggled by tank blasts until you die with no chance to escape, or you can dive bomb everybody and level the whole block. You never know until you try, and it is pure chaos and luck. It's pretty fun, but also very frustrating.

In the second game, all of that is cleaned up into gaming bliss. You can still mow down a crowd of guys, and you can still take massive damage, but it's understandable and expectable. The chaos is controlled, the feel is polished, and it is fun.

Story Stupid? The storyline continues on fluidly from the first game to the second, and while it's a little hand-waving just to get through the gameplay, it's also quite interesting and brings up some real philosophical issues. I actually spent a while thinking about the big issue that comes to play in the first game, which I daresay qualifies as a notable twist. It's definitely a video game, not a Russian novel, but I did have Real Thoughts while playing! There's also an element of sucking up peoples' memories as you play, to get little snippets of information building the bigger picture of what this world is like. Some of that is silly, and most of it is extraneous (I didn't need to get the memories of 50 different people who all think "wow, what we're doing here is pretty evil!"), but it does build a world beyond just you smashing up mindless drones.

Wrapid Wrap-Up: Prototype 1 is a questionable game. It's so utterly chaotic and just crazy that I can't even compare it to another game. It's kind of like a Ludum Dare game gone way too far. I couldn't put it down until the end mainly because I just couldn't stop wondering how this ever got released, and had to see the next level it would take things to. It's very buggy, in small ways like weird physics issues, and it's obvious that that's because they just let everything fly and couldn't possibly control everything. It's manic mayhem and I've never quite seen anything like it. You can jump up and down on top of a building until it collapses.

Prototype 2 is amazing. It's one of the best games I've ever played. It's all the ideas of Prototype 1, but smoothed out and polished down into a shining jewel. I think there are a lot of people who don't like this game for how it reins in the insanity of the first game, but I love it. The frustration is gone, but the slicing and dicing and car-throwing remains. It is a beautiful work of art. There is literally one criticism I came up with while playing: there are basically no boss monsters to fight. It's glaring enough that it seems like they ran out of money or something. The final boss could easily have transformed into a massive towering beast, but (spoiler I guess) it remains a human-sized thing for the entire fight. And prior to that, there's only one fight I would really classify as a boss fight (against a big beast), but it turns out to be super simple to defeat, and turns out to be just a regular big enemy you see later on multiple times. Not often, but it really loses the "big boss" punch. Luckily, the regular gameplay is so awesome, you're okay without the bosses.

I bought the RADNet add-on for Prototype 2 (which adds barely anything, but I'll take any more Prototype 2 I can get!) and will be starting over on hard difficulty one of these days. I can't wait to get back to it!
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  Hamumu Revumu: Dead Island 12:57 PM -- Wed January 20, 2016  

Dead Island

TL;DR: Fun action surviving the zombie hordes and leveling up!

Gameplay Gist: Well, you run around a zombie-infested tropical resort, bashing in skulls (there are guns eventually, but even then, you mostly beat things with a stick), finding and crafting better weapons, and leveling up and increasing various skills. In a way, it's just a dungeon crawler with a coat of tropical zombie paint over it, but the nature of zombies and the modern technology changes things in various ways. It's definitely all about completing those quests.

Kombat Kuality: Thinking back, I'm not sure why I enjoyed this as much as I did. The fighting is actually pretty awkward. There's also an advanced control scheme available where you can directly aim your swings, but I tried that for about 30 seconds and turned it off. It's bad. Anyway, it's all quite simplistic without that - you just take your swings, aim for the head, and step back before you get bit. That's how it goes for the entire game, with just a few alternatives like dashing in and tackling a zombie, or triggering your Rage Mode to go nuts temporarily and punch their heads off. There are also special situations, like tossing a propane tank into a crowd and shooting it, or the various special types of zombies you have to handle in a different way. Somehow it just never got old even though I can't think of anything super interesting about the combat. You're always listening for that roar in the distance that tells you there's trouble.

Story Stupid? It's alright. The whole thing's a bit of a comic book as usual, but you're one of the very few people who are immune to the zombie virus, and you're trying to be a hero by helping people who are trapped in various places in the resort. Of course there are human villains and a government/military conspiracy, and a super-zombie (everybody loves those!). Pretty much everything you expect from a zombie story.

Wrapid Wrap-Up: I had been hesitant to get into this game from off-hand comments I had heard about it, but when I gave it a shot, I was very pleasantly surprised and totally hooked. Like I said above, I'm not entirely sure what the appeal is, but somehow it just works for me. Trying to collect items from all over, making forays into different areas, trying to combine quests so you don't have to make too many such forays, combining junk into super weapons, and clocking dead people in the head. It's just fun. There is enough variety in the situations and packs of zombies you encounter that you're constantly having to change up your strategy and pulling different tricks, and being surprised pretty regularly. Like walking around a corner face-first into an suicidal exploding zombie. The danger level is always just enough to keep you on edge and looking out for the energy drinks that are strangely scattered everywhere (and more strangely have a magical healing effect). I liked it all so much that I played all the way to the end, and then I started up Dead Island: Riptide almost immediately.

I did make the mistake of trying the new punching-focused character in Riptide, and I have to say I gave him a shot but I need to set him aside and try somebody else, or I think I might end up hating the game. Getting in close enough to punch a zombie is not fun. But other than that, my note on Riptide so far (a couple hours in) is that it's just about the same game, but improved in every way. Lots of really nice tweaks to spice it up.
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  Growtopia 2016 09:40 AM -- Sat January 9, 2016  

Where is Growtopia going in 2016?

You may have noticed the massive new update in Growtopia yesterday (or you haven't noticed it's massive, since many of the items are undiscovered...). In total, there are 29 new items added. Previously the goal for an update was around 10 items, but we did an update every 2 weeks. The new plan moving forward in 2016 is to do a single update each month, released as close to the 1st of the month as possible (this month was a problem because Apple shuts down for the holidays and we were transitioning from the every-other-week updates), so that each month has a 'theme' of its own, one major update which contains things you may not find right away, or may not even be obtainable right away (such as Carnival, Comet, or Locke items), so that as the month goes on, you piece it all together. There's also of course some items and changes to whatever holiday happens to occur during the month (Anniversary Week, in this case. Happy 3rd birthday, Growtopia!).

So what is the big idea here? We got more items this month than we would get in a typical month - on average there'd be 2 updates in a month, which would be an expected amount of 20 new items. But it was also easier for me to do. By doing a single big theme (Steampunk this month) instead of two smaller ones, it's much easier to make a variety of items. Previously I'd have to stop myself - "Oh, that's enough Adventure items for a pack, I have to move on to the next theme". And oh mama were there so many themes!! But now I can go crazy and put in all the things I'm thinking of. Or maybe not - there are actually a lot more potential items for the steam system, and I think I'll be adding them every so often, making it more and more functional. Maybe one day you'll be able to program your own games inside Growtopia, on a steam computer. Anyway, this new system of 1 big update per month allows each update to be fully fleshed out instead of just dipping your toe into a theme.

The other big benefit is that each update can be very meaningful. You're not going to see a month of "assorted random items". This month we introduce the powerful new steam technology, next month it's... well, you'll see. But it's an entirely new gameplay element again. I know what I'm adding in July and that's fun and different, and I have one other big idea definitely to come this year. I can't promise I have (or will come up with) 12 big game-changers like steam machines, but I do have a lot of big ideas, and if there isn't something game-changing in a month, at least there will be a big meaty update!

And the last benefit is just for me: even though it's more stuff for you, it's still less work for me! And it's more fun. I get to work on the crazy ideas I enjoy tinkering with instead of spending so much time cranking out basic items for biweekly updates that there's no time left to experiment. And my real secret hope in my heart is that this more focused work will give the time in between updates to actually set my brain free from Growtopia, and spend a minute thinking about anything else. Who knows, maybe enter a Ludum Dare again one day even? It would sure be nice.

So you can look forward to a single large update each month from Growtopia going forward. At least until we figure out why that's a terrible idea and switch to something else entirely!

Bonus: here's a screenshot from an upcoming update, you figure it out:
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  Hamumu Revumu: Oceanhorn 04:37 PM -- Tue November 10, 2015  

Oceanhorn

TL;DR: A modern Zelda clone! Cute.

Gameplay Gist: Top-down action-adventure. If you know Zeldas, you know this - you travel from island to island, and on each one you encounter a dungeon, during which you gain a new item that lets you do something new, then you have to beat a boss using this item. You can then move on to the next dungeon, or go back to earlier places to use your new item to reach various bonus items you couldn't get before. I didn't realize until I wrote that how Metroidvania-ey Zelda games are.

But this has all the other Zelda stuff too - when your life is full your sword shoots, there are little bloopy enemies that look like Zelda enemies, your life is made of heart icons, there's a little tune for secrets (although it seems to play at all the wrong times in this game), you smash pots and chop grass for gems, dungeons have regular keys and a master/boss key, bombs and arrows are a major element, etc. All sorts of little touches ripped straight out of Zelda. Intentionally though. This is an homage more than a rip-off.

Kombat Kuality: The combat is not great. Like older Zelda games, it's basic and not super compelling. It's also super easy. Mainly the enemies are just there because running through empty dungeons to get to each 'puzzle' would seem much more dull.

Story Stupid? You bet. It's right out of Zelda, just the most basic Macguffins to pull you along to collect all the pieces of the Triforce (not called that in this game, but yeah, that) and reach the final boss. It's a little bit compelling, in that there's definitely a sad feeling to the whole thing, like this is a run-down world that is sort of falling to pieces, and everyone you meet is the last of their tribe or something similar. But no, not much of a plot.

Wrapid Wrap-Up: All in all, I was honestly quite hooked. In hindsight now, I say the things I wrote above - not super interesting, nothing compelling about the gameplay, the puzzles are as mindless as in any Zelda (the definition of a puzzle is basically "you have to recognize that you need to use a certain item", as opposed to anything you truly have to figure out). But like any Zelda, those little rewards and cute animations keep you hooked. You just have to know what the next new item will be, and you get a thrill out of completing each dungeon, even though it feels equivalent to successfully moving the beads around on one of these:

You know? Like you solved a puzzle made to challenge an infant. But it's still solving something, and triggers that endorphin hit. So I'm hard-pressed to "rate" this game. I don't have anything great to say about it, but it was a very polished work of art, and it did its job as a game - hooked me in and kept me playing non-stop to the end. So why don't I love it? I don't know. I did when I was playing it, but that was a month ago. I guess you should play it. It's a nice game. Just don't expect anything groundbreaking or life-changing. Just some simple fun.
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  Hamumu Revumu: Platformines 11:26 AM -- Sun September 27, 2015  

Platformines

TL;DR: Mindless randomized platforming mayhem.

Gameplay Gist: You need to explore a randomly generated side-scrolling world, collecting tons of little trinkets and random weapons as you go, all in an effort to collect special guns you can only use in a special room to rebuild your mine machine to get out (yes, that's really weird). It's basic jumping and platforming, combined with a lot of shooting with 4 kinds of weapons at really strange and mostly harmless enemies.

Kombat Kuality: Not great. You just shoot in the four directions, and there's no real complexity or anything interesting. The guns aren't super exciting, you mostly just hop down into a space, fire a few shots, and then hop out before the enemy bullets get to you.

Story Stupid? No story. Your mining machine is here and broken, and the parts are scattered around the 'mine' just because, so go get them. Then you escape and there's nothing much for an ending.

Wrapid Wrap-Up: On the one hand, I played all the way through to victory (which didn't take super long, Steam says I have 4 hours played), so it compelled me on. On the other hand, it's the kind of game you're supposed to keep on playing on higher difficulties and I'm sure the 'pros' would say "that's where the game really starts!" Well, it didn't compel me that much. I can't say I recommend this very odd-looking and odd-playing game, but I had my fun with it for 4 hours!
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  Hamumu Revumu: Xeodrifter 03:12 PM -- Wed September 16, 2015  

Xeodrifter

TL;DR: A very short mini-metroidvania full of challenge and fun!

Gameplay Gist: There are 4 planets you can visit, and you visit each one multiple times as you gain your new powers that let you get to new parts of them. On each trip, your goal is to reach a boss (the same boss every time, but with more abilities), and kill him to suck a new power out of his corpse, which in turn lets you reach new places. There are also a lot of hidden powerups you find with these powers as well. One fundamental power you get is the ability to jump into the background of the game, where you are now teeny tiny (perspective!), which is really cool.

Kombat Kuality: This is a pure platformer: run, jump and shoot! It's well executed so the controls feel good. Your only attack (until much later when you gain a powerful but generally useless super-shot) is just a simple plink of a bullet. What's fun is you can upgrade it in 5 or 6 different ways and tweak it to the situation at hand. Wavey bullets are really useful in the levels, but not needed at all against the boss, so you can dump those wavey points into more damage or fire rate when you get to the boss. The controls just feel good, except the super-clunky way that you toggle between your normal gun and the super shot. There are plenty of unused buttons, it would've been no trouble to just put that on another button instead of having to pause the game to switch it on or off. Also, the boss does have one really annoying power where it turns invincible for a long period of time and you just have to dodge until that's over.

Story Stupid? This is definitely not a story game. Yes, the story is truly stupid. Your ship is stranded, and for some reason this monster has eaten? your warp core, so you have to fight it 7 or 8 times across these four worlds to get it to cough it up and you can travel again. Interestingly, there's no dialog and almost no text at all in the game, which works pretty well, but there's no story to be delivered, so I guess that's why.

Wrapid Wrap-Up: This game feels like a really really good Ludum Dare entry, with a few weeks of extra polish added. It's exactly the kind of game you see in LD, and short enough to make sense there too. I recommend it, it was free with my PSN subscription this month, so yay for me! I plowed through it in an afternoon and couldn't quite stop until I won.
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  Hamumu Revumu: Of Orcs And Men 11:39 AM -- Sat August 22, 2015  

Of Orcs And Men

TL;DR: A linear action-strategy-RPG, with stealth action... yeah, it's different!

Gameplay Gist: This game surprised me multiple times. From the trailer videos that made me buy it, I expected a normal action-RPG: slash at the monsters with your sword. It is not that, the videos are lying. Rather, the combat is in real-time, but you can slow time waaaayyyy down to issue orders to your two guys. But that's not all. Before you get into a fight, you can sneak up on guys and backstab them in typical stealth-game style (avoid line-of-sight, avoid dogs since they can smell you, the usual things), so there are less guys to fight when you do reach a point where two guys are facing each other so you can't avoid being seen. The entire game is totally linear (minus the ability to take on a few side missions or not), you just play one level after another, where you traverse from one end to the other, killing everything on the way. But it is fun to do that!

Kombat Kuality: The fighting, once I actually understood it (which was not during the incredibly vague tutorial, but rather a few fights later as I pieced it together), is actually quite fun. There's hardly any variety to it, you'll pick a couple of things and really stick to them, but it's satisfying to have the big guy taunting everybody onto him and laying down AOE smacks while the little guy is tossing daggers at specific targets. Even more fun is that the big guy can throw the little guy at enemies for huge damage or to get him up to archers you can't otherwise reach. So, don't go in expecting a hack n' slash like I did, but if you expect a real-time tactical battle where you are giving orders to two different units, you should have fun with that.

Story Stupid? The story was alright. This is an extremely profane game. The writing was not done by a native English speaker, and it shows sometimes as they awkwardly insert F-bombs in places where they really don't belong, but boy do they like inserting them. In the end, I was compelled to find out what would happen. Like I said, it's totally linear so there's really not much to consider, you just sort of travel through this storybook, fighting the words on each page to get through. But it's a decent story, about Orcs having been enslaved for a long time and the underground among them fighting for freedom, and of course various political maneuvers. And it has a nice small, realistic feeling, story-wise. You don't travel the world seeking the parts of the Chalice Of Power to defeat a dark wizard, you really do a small enough thing that it's feasible that two guys could be doing it (and even then, you require the help of a lot of other people), and yet it does have international, possibly world-changing, repercussions. Pretty well-done now that I think about it.

Wrapid Wrap-Up: This is not a AAA game. It shows, with some clunky quality issues, but if you can respect the effort of the indies who made it, it's really actually well-done in many ways. It's almost too good to not be AAA, except it's definitely not good enough to be AAA. If that makes sense. All in all, in many ways, it's not what I expected for sure, but in the end I just kept going because I was having a lot of fun. It's also pretty short, which I totally appreciate. That's what I want in a game.
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  Hamumu Revumu: Wolfenstein 06:48 PM -- Thu August 13, 2015  

Wolfenstein: The New Order

TL;DR: Good nazi-shooting fun, pretty much normal FPS stuff.

Gameplay Gist: This is a story FPS. So you watch a cutscene, then you travel a (mostly) linear path killing everyone in the way, dive behind cover, throw grenades, collect ammo and oddly scraps of armor that you fuse to your body apparently to protect yourself, then you reach another cutscene, and the cycle continues. That's really it. There's a level-up element in the form of "perks" you unlock by accomplishing certain feats (like "kill 15 guys from cover with the pistol" to make your pistol hold more ammo). That's sorta fun, but there's not enough of it. You can pretty much ignore it completely and just play the game. There is a nice element of stealth here, where it's an action FPS so if you fail the stealth, you're totally fine - you're still capable of gunning down everyone in a 3-mile radius, and the stealth gameplay is nicely simplified. I enjoyed stealthing as much as I could and was very disappointed whenever it came to a point where stealth wasn't possible (which was often, towards the end of the game).

Kombat Kuality: Great. As FPS shooting goes, this is perfectly good. The downside I would say is the weapons aren't super interesting. You do eventually get a couple interesting weapons, but 99% of your shooting is just a pistol or machine gun, standard bullet blasting. It's not Borderlands! You have a few tricks up your sleeve like slide kicks and the ability to shoot while sliding which I could never ever do, but for the most part it is point and shoot, well-implemented.

Story Stupid? The story is pretty good. I was interested. It's very silly, but in a way that takes itself so seriously that I don't know, I felt like I was missing a tongue somewhere in a cheek. But it definitely has a lot of characters you notice and pay attention to without really wasting excessive time with pointless dialogue or "journals" or whatever that you wouldn't care about. Or at least I didn't pay attention to those - there are indeed some articles and stuff you can find in the game, but I quickly stopped reading them. The story is quite insane, and it's ludicrous how your character is some kind of unkillable monster in human form, and that they send you personally to do everything, but hey, it works as videogame logic.

Wrapid Wrap-Up: I was happy to keep going in this game. I had fun all the way through... or I did, right up until the stupid final boss. Yep, like so many games of yore, this is a game that has to ramp it up beyond all reason (and far beyond any fun) with the final boss just to make sure you have a challenge, or that it's epic enough. Surely you can make a final boss feel epic without making it ten times harder than everything before it? Prior to the final boss, nothing in this game was hard at all (and that's hows I likes it!). I died a few times total in the entire campaign. But that boss was insanity. Anyway, good game, super melancholy tone totally at odds with the "shooting nazi robot dogs" gameplay, very enjoyable. Very adult as well, not recommended for children.

Super Score: 84/100 Kampfengrupferkriegpanzerdrakken.
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