Well, that didn’t go according to plan. I thought this would be a good time to pick the blog back up again as we’re now deep into the autumn games rush, but unfortunately the universe has picked precisely this moment to drop a couple of significant changes in my personal circumstances on top of my head. Full resumption of posting will unfortunately have to wait while I sort out what I’m doing with my life, but in the meantime I do have a few smaller posts to throw in here as I was still writing during the 3-month drought, just not finishing stuff. So there should be something going on here if you check back every couple of weeks. By December I should be able to either resume a normal service, or I’ll have gone too far the other way and have nothing but free time to write things – either way I don’t intend to let this place lie fallow for long. Stay tuned.

The post Plan B appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I have been doing this blog for some time now. I started it back in 2012 — today sort of kind of marks its 5th birthday, in fact. At the time I was unemployed, had a lot on my mind and needed a constructive outlet for it, which is why if you check the Archive you’ll see 2012 had a fair variety of posts ranging from explanations of black hole physics (as much for my own personal reference as anything else) to lengthy peans to the old manuals that used to come with Microprose games. There were also a lot more of them, since I had far more time to write.

That all changed in 2013 when I finally found myself my first post-PhD job, which is also currently still my only post-PhD job as I’m somehow still there. The unfortunate burden of actually having to do annoying life-essential things for the first time meant that non-review posts were almost immediately jettisoned; doing the research required for a science post took 6+ hours of my time, while it takes me two or three to bang out a review. It’s the difference between spending a Sunday evening writing, and spending an entire Sunday writing, so it made sense at the time to focus on chunks of writing that were actually going to be manageable given my drastically reduced free time.

I will admit, though, that as we enter the Glorious Space Year 2017 the idea of writing another 40 reviews is starting to pall slightly; I’ve done 201 of them so far and it’s beginning to get a little repetitive. I’ve never written them for any other reason than that I enjoy doing so (although I am immensely gratified that other people enjoy reading them and value my opinion, and I very much appreciate everyone who has stuck with me this far), so the looming prospect of the act of writing becoming a chore is a rather alarming one that I would like to avoid if I can.

With that in mind, I am going to make some or all of the following changes to my output this year:

• I am going to try and write 4-6 science posts this year. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the largest amount I think I can reasonably commit to.

• I am also going to do more In Praise Of-style retrospectives of old games and mechanics.  Possibly a lot more, depending on how many ideas I can come up with.

• Consequently, the rate of full on review posts on here is probably going to become less regular – I may experiment with doing shorter-form reviews as I think condensing a cogent opinion into 1,000 words or so could be a challenging but useful exercise, but it’s more likely I’ll only crank out 25-30 reviews this year compared to the usual 40.

• Most importantly I’m only going to sit down and write a review of a game if I’ve actually got interesting things to say about it that I want to commit to text. There have been a few occasions this year when I’ve had to mentally force myself to write about whatever I’ve been playing recently when I didn’t really want to. It doesn’t happen that often as I usually have a lot of Opinions About Games, so I don’t expect this to affect my output all that much, but having that filter in place should stave off some of that looming ennui.

• Finally, and I know I’ve said this before, I will do my best to respond to most comments that merit one within a day, rather than the current turnaround time of a week. You guys are taking the time to write them, so I should prioritise taking time to respond to them.

Have a happy New Year, and one where you hopefully read more varied content on this blog.

The post Some Reflection appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

You’ll probably have heard of Crypt of the Necrodancer already; it’s a “rhythm-action roguelike” with a pun name so terrible it loops all the way back around to awesome, and which got a lot of positive press when it came out on Early Access around August last year. The concept was interesting enough that I broke my Early Access rule to try it for a couple of hours, but while I was pleased to see there was a lot of promise in the core mechanic of moving your character in time to a beat the amount of actual content present was a little bit limited, and so I left it to what I assumed would be a protracted period of Early Access limbo. However, developers Brace Yourself Games have shocked me by actually bringing Necrodancer out of Early Access a mere eight months after it first appeared on Steam¹ and pushing it to full release last week. Unlike its Early Access phase this is something that’s gone almost completely unremarked upon by the gaming press at large (or at least the parts of it I follow), and this confuses me, because this finished version of Crypt of the Necrodancer is the best roguelike I’ve played since Spelunky.

Only *since* Spelunky, mind; Necrodancer is not quite as polished or focused as Spelunky and I think it suffers a little for it, but it makes up for it with a sprawling plethora of items, weapons, enemies, encounters and game modes that serve to inject a huge amount of variety into the game. A better comparison would probably be Gaslamp’s now-classic Dungeons of Dredmor, which took a similar more-is-better approach to content and which was more than happy to let you kill yourself the first time you picked up an unknown item. And my god, you will end up killing yourself a lot in Necrodancer, either because of the items themselves or because of the way they interact in unexpected ways with the various different monster types infesting its dungeons.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. It’s probably best to start properly by outlining Necrodancer’s core gimmick: its music-based move-and-attack system. Necrodancer is set up with the typical top-down roguelike perspective where your character is controlled by the four arrow keys, but the twist it applies is that you should move in time to the irritatingly catchy music that accompanies each individual dungeon stage. Each beat of the music represents a single turn of the game, and successfully boogieing on through the level while hitting every beat will raise your coin multiplier, increasing the amount of money you get from killing enemies (very important) and having other beneficial effects depending on what items you have equipped. Missing a beat will reset your coin multiplier to zero and you’ll have to build it up from scratch again.

Doesn’t sound particularly groundbreaking, does it? The really clever thing Necrodancer does, though, and the thing which absolutely makes the game in my opinion, is that it has every single enemy type you encounter move in time with the beat of the music too. Each of them has their own movement pattern that you learn the hard way over the course of many, many deaths. It starts off simple, with slimes and zombies that move back and forth over fixed paths and skeletons who will move towards you every other beat, but soon ratchets up the complexity the further in you get. It’s in your interest to move in time with the music because doing so is the best way to avoid getting hit by monsters who are doing the same thing.

What makes this tricky is that the music in Necrodancer is so finger-tappingly awesome that your own hands will betray you. The need to stick to the beat becomes a compulsion, a high-wire act that, played right, will have you surfing through a level slicing up monsters left and right – but one wrong button press and you could find yourself stuck in a very bad situation indeed. And since the amount of time you have to think about what your next move is the amount of time until the next beat of the music, it’s very easy to fuck up and get stuck in a corner or paralysed by one of those sodding monkeys while other enemies beat the shit out of you.

Like every good roguelike, Necrodancer is very unforgiving of this kind of screw-up; you can buy a bunch of passive upgrades to make the single-zone modes a bit easier, but All Zones mode (aka The Way It’s Supposed To Be Played) gives you just three heart containers to start with and no easy way to refill them once you get hit. Your starting weapon is a terrible dagger that does one measly point of damage and can only hit enemies directly adjacent to you. The one concession the game gives you is that you will always have a shovel that you can use to dig through soft portions of the dungeon wall and maybe uncover a secret room with a pickup such as bombs or – even better – a chest that’ll have a useful item inside. Because you’re at such a disadvantage from the get-go the first three levels of Necrodancer are probably the joint hardest in game (drawn with the final zone, which I’ve yet to beat). You focus on not getting hit, keeping your coin multiplier high, and amassing enough money to buy one or two items from the level’s shop.

Every single level in Necrodancer is guaranteed to have a shop staffed by an opera-singing shopkeeper (who cuts in over the regular level music with an appropriately vocal version). These shops can sell anything from weapons to armour to magic rings to torches to spells; I really wasn’t kidding when I said there was a huge array of items in the game, to the point where you’ll see maybe five percent of the selection on a full runthrough. Most items are powerful upgrades in one way or another, and what I find interesting about them is that Necrodancer resists the urge to make them give boring bonuses like +1 to damage or whatever. Instead, nearly every single item will dramatically change the way your character plays. Most basic weapons do the same amount of damage as your crappy dagger, for example, but each of them also has its own specific attack pattern that hits a certain range of tiles in front of or around your character, allowing you to either hit multiple enemies at once or stand off and strike them from a distance. There are bog standard rings that increase gold pickup or make shop items cheaper, yes, but also rings that provide a single turn of invincibility after monster kills that can prove vital when you’re in the thick of combat. Even the torches can have special properties, providing trapsight or casting fireballs whenever you dig through a dungeon tile with its own wall-mounted torch.

Because they’re individually so powerful (at least compared to your starting equipment) combining two or more items together can end up defining your run. The last one I did featured a blood rapier (dash into an attack from two tiles away for double damage, recover half a life container every ten kills) and the invincibility ring mentioned above that also provided +1 to damage. This made my character sickeningly powerful on the attack, dealing 3-4 damage per strike (enough to one-shot most monsters), teleporting to the space my unfortunate target had  occupied and enjoying a turn of invincibility while I looked for my next victim. As long as I could stay in the rhythm of slaughtering monsters I was untouchable. I managed to keep this up all the way to the very last level, when the sheer weight of enemies and the speed of the beat overwhelmed me; the combo meant that I had to keep killing every single turn to stay alive and I couldn’t quite manage it. The run before that I’d picked up some levitating boots and a titanium crossbow, which had a long range, high damage and piercing properties, but which had to be reloaded every three shots by pressing the up+down arrows together. As soon as I forgot to reload and moved into an approaching monster by accident I was dead.

Unfortunately investing so much of the game’s fun into the items has a flipside; because they’re so powerful, and because the specific items that come up are completely random, it feels like the success or failure of a run will be decided during the first three levels when you’re scrounging together a decent set of kit. If you get some good drops you can keep your multiplier high and get lots of money, which lets you buy more items, which lets you get more money etc. etc. If you don’t, then you’re probably going to die when you reach the second zone and the difficulty level undergoes a step change. Yes, this is a problem that a lot of roguelikes have, but because Necrodancer’s variety is so heavily weighted towards its items it suffers particularly badly from it; it doesn’t have Dredmor’s class system or Spelunky’s secret shop that guarantee at least a chance of making it to the end of the game. I have no doubt that you could complete Necrodancer with a figuratively naked character if you were good enough — there are even characters available that severely limit your equipment choices and make things even harder for you, if that’s your thing — but after spending ten hours with it it does seem like getting good enough to do that would require a significantly larger time investment than most comparable games. Otherwise you’re heavily dependent on your item loadout, which is to say that you’re heavily dependent on an RNG. That, or I’m just terrible at rhythm action games².

It doesn’t help that Necrodancer isn’t particularly interested in handing over information. You’ll get a short description of each item before you get it up, but they’re so pithy as to be downright cryptic and unless you go to the Necrodancer wiki (of course there’s a Necrodancer wiki) you’ll be stuck figuring things out through a lot of trial and error. Because a lot of the items have negative as well as positive properties it’s very easy to kill yourself without fully understanding how. In Spelunky you always know exactly how you died, even if you were taken by surprise; here I found myself staring at the screen muttering “What the fuck…?” a little too often for my liking.

Aside from that not-so-little niggle, though, Necrodancer is an extremely solid roguelike with a huge number of mutators and extra features – most of which I haven’t tried because I’m a bit of a purist at heart, but I appreciate the thought. Its central gimmick does a good job of keeping you on your toes, while its vast array of items and monsters provides variety and some level of depth. So what if it’s a little too dependent on the RNG? There’s still a decent skill ceiling thanks to the music, and it even lets you practice against monsters and bosses that you’re finding particularly difficult if you want. It also has a couple of features that other roguelikes would do well to steal wholesale, like the ability to go to the leaderboards and watch replays of other players’ high-scoring attempts. I don’t think my involvement with it is going to be the long-term affair that Spelunky was, but it’s served to jolt me out of the gaming doldrums I’d found myself in recently and for now, at least, I can’t put it down.

The post Thoughts: Crypt of the Necrodancer appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Not that it’ll really be noticeable against the backdrop of my recent slow output, but I am taking my seasonal break along with seemingly the entire rest of the videogames blogging community. The Scientific Gamer will return on the 5th of January – and hopefully I’ll have used the break to actually write something for it! In the meantime, three things:

• Merry Christmas.
• Merry Russian Christmas.
• I am assembling a list of games to play in the new year. Currently I have Elite: Dangerous, Alien Isolation and Temple of Osiris, along with Dead State (which launched just before Christmas to a general reaction of “Are you really sure this game is finished?”)  That gets me through January, but up till March looks pretty dead in terms of new releases. So all suggestions and recommendations are welcome.

The post 2014′s A Goner appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

You know when I said that the spotty period was over and that I was going to be posting more regularly?

I lied.

Well, I guess I didn’t really lie as such. I just forgot that August is traditionally crazy for me what with Space School sucking up my free time for the first two weeks, and then work has seen fit to send me to San Francisco for another week so I can’t even think about writing until that’s all out of the way. It’s a shame to leave the blog for that long as I’ve been at it for long enough that it’s become something of a habit and feels kind of weird not to write anything, but important life things must take precedence. All being well, Scientific Gamer will return the week of the 25th August — we have a bank holiday that weekend, so I will have absolutely no excuse for not posting something. See you guys then.

(Oh, and I would also like you to know that even though finding time to respond is difficult these days I do appreciate the comment threads on here. I shall try at least to work through the most recent ones tomorrow.)

The post August Hiatus appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I’m on my Christmas holiday for the next couple of weeks, so this blog may be quieter than usual until the new year. “Usual” already being pretty quiet compared to 2012, of course; it turns out being in full-time employment sucks away all of your time and energy and leaves you a withered, lifeless husk of a human being whose atrophied claws are hardly capable of accurate touch-typing. I’ve been toying with the idea of maybe starting fortnightly science posts again next year since I feel like I’m losing my edge a bit when it comes to the physics, but it’s probable this will go the way of all resolutions. In the meantime I’d like to thank my regular readers — in defiance of all logic and sanity, I do have a few — for their comments and conversations over the last year; your feedback is greatly valued and one of the reasons why I still scrape up the time to sit down for a couple of hours each week to bang out a game review. I hope you all have a fantastic Christmas and New Year, and we shall see what the future holds for the Scientific Gamer.

The post Christmas Again. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This post will self-destruct in five seconds.

The post Whoops. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Yes, it’s one of those periodic posts where I make excuses for the distinct lack of posting recently. There have been things getting in the way the last couple of weeks and I’m having trouble finding enough times to both play games and write about them, or do the background research necessary for science posts.  This is nothing new; I write this blog because it’s a genuinely healthy thing for me to do and the trickle of posts will never dry up completely, but this state of affairs looks like it is going to continue and I just wanted to save anyone still reading it some time by outlining when exactly they should be checking for new posts (if they don’t have reader programs that do it automagically, that is.)

• Mondays. There will almost always be something posted on Mondays because I’m never going to stop playing games and I’ve usually got something to say about the games I play; the only reason last week got missed was because the game I was playing was Fire Emblem and I’m not really in the habit of doing 3DS games on here. (P.S. Fire Emblem is really good and you should buy it if you have a 3DS and I’m totally up for Fire Emblem chat in the comments.)
• Wednesdays. There will usually be something posted on Wednesdays now that I’ve realised I can mine the rich new seam of particle physics. I don’t know it as well as I do astrophysics but that makes me more likely to write about it, not less, since it’s actually genuinely useful for me to go off and learn about it. That being said, science posts do take a hell of a long time and I’m not going to be able to do one every week.
• Fridays…. are something of a question mark. For example, today there was going to be a post about the power of games to stealthily educate people and I spent the last couple of days working on it, but then I realised at the last moment that I didn’t know nearly enough about conventional game pedagogy to state anything beyond the bleeding obvious, which is why you’re getting this post instead. Maybe that post will resurface in a couple of weeks, but it reflects the difficulty I have filling that third slot; writing about old games isn’t much better because I usually have to go back and play the old game in question again, which is something I really don’t have time for now. Treat Friday posts, when they do appear, as a nice bonus.

Tl;dr version: checking back every Monday is probably the most efficient way to read this blog for the time being, so really it’s business as usual since I started my new job. Life catches up with us all, I guess.

The post It Isn’t Easy Writing A Blog. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

No review today because I’ve been slightly preoccupied with trying to sort life stuff out and so haven’t had a huge amount of time to play new games. If you’re bored and were expecting me to entertain you, though, do not worry! I spent a couple of hours yesterday uploading all the “reviews” I wrote in 2011 because I thought they needed a more permanent online home than a forum thread (and so that I could refer to them when needed), which are now available in the archive (scroll to bottom). Be warned, though; some of them are kind of bad both because of the more conversational tone of a forum and because I have been slowly getting better at the whole writing thing with practice. Not my best work.

Anyway, back to finding somewhere to live for the next year.  See you Wednesday!

The post Brain Empty. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

In the UK we have a tradition where the entire country basically knocks off for a week between Christmas and the New Year, and so that’s what I’m going to do too. But first, a self-indulgent retrospective.

I made 246 posts in the last year, with about 200 of those having actual content. If you multiply by an average post length of 1,500 words – which I think is lowballing it, personally – that’s 300,000 words written in twelve months, which is apparently half the length of War and Peace. I’m no Tolstoy, and there have been a couple of snags along the way; generating five posts a week was proving to be too much like a full-time job resulting in my slacking off over the last six months, and if the science drought continues much longer I’m going to have to rename the blog “The Gamer”, which doesn’t really work as a unique selling point. Still, I feel pretty pleased with myself for sustaining a semi-regular writing schedule for so long.

I know I’ve picked up one or two regular readers who I didn’t already know and force into reading the blog at gunpoint; to those people – and to everyone else – thanks for sticking with me so far! I intend to carry things on into 2013 for as long as possible on the Monday-Wednesday-Friday timetable, and while it’s possible things may sputter out further down the line I still feel like I have a lot of writing left in me, so fingers crossed I can make it through another year even if I don’t produce quite such a crazy amount of words this time around.  Here’s hoping you all have a great holiday season, and I’ll see you back here bright and early in… oh, probably the second week of January.

Merry Christmas.

The post A Christmas Message. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.