Note: Sang-Froid is technically a beta right now, but it’s scheduled for release on Steam in March and you can already pay for it and get it downloaded to your computer so I don’t think I’m being too unfair reviewing it as a finished product. Hell, I even overlooked the two CTDs I got while playing it.
Sang-Froid is a tower defence-cum-RPG game that both looks and plays like a game from 1999. In the latter case, though, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I’m starting a new job tomorrow and posts on here may be a little bit sketchy until I get my accommodation issues sorted out — there’s one in the hopper for tomorrow, but past that I’m either going to have no time to write, or more time to write than I know what to do with. To keep things thematically appropriate, though, have this track from a game about another man’s first day on his new job.
I vacillated shamefully over writing this post. It’s my blog, and I can do whatever the hell I want, but Another World is one of those games that’s already quite well-respected by the gaming establishment and has had plenty of words written about its storytelling and depiction of an alien world. I prefer to cover the less well-known stuff on here and was doubtful I could say anything useful about it that hadn’t been said already.
On the other hand, I really like Another World. Seriously. It made a hell of an impression on me as a kid, to the point where I stole the box art twenty years later to make one of the header images for the site. In my opinion while there have been games that have been superficially similar – including the also-excellent Flashback made by Another World’s publisher, Delphine Software — there’s never been another game quite like it. It’s not quite an adventure game, not quite a platformer, not quite a puzzler; the cliché here would be to say it combined elements of all three but I think instead that Another World is its own thing entirely, and just happens to resemble that particular genre mishmash because it’s the best way of describing it given the way games subsequently evolved. Another World is, for lack of a better term, unique – and truly unique games are very rare, and totally worth discussing further.
I have a whole backlog of questions here and my answers to many of them are far too snappy to justify a full post, so I’m going to economise and do a three-in-one. HOLD ON TO YOUR BUTTS.
Gerry asks
I’ve noticed that when I have a string of some sort (be it a usb cord or an audio cable that I use to plug in my phone to my aux in my car stereo, or any other string-like item) it has a tendency to tangle. This happens all the time (depending on the environment) is there a branch of physics or science/math that investigates this phenomenon? (Chaos maybe?) Not to be confused with the Quantum physical term of entanglement or spooky action)
I doubt many people reading this will have heard of the original Karateka. It’s an old game originally released for the Apple II in 1985, at a time when Choplifter and Pacman represented the cutting edge of gaming. You controlled a tiny man in a karate gi who ran from left to right through a castle. Every so often he’d have to stop and fight a guard using his pro karate skills, and eventually he’d defeat the evil lord of the castle and rescue his kidnapped beloved, a princess. Apparently it was quite good by 1985 standards despite looking tremendously ropey today, but the only reason I’ve heard of it is because it was the first game by Jordan Mechner and basically functioned as a prototype for many of the elements he later implemented in the much better – and better-known – Prince of Persia1.
I desperately wanted to put Sang-Froid’s excellent soundtrack here but a) it’s not on Youtube and b) the game itself isn’t officially out yet. Instead, have this seminal track from Age of Empires, a game which was as much about the development of better agriculture techniques and tools as it was dismantling your opponent’s castle stone by stone.
Banner Saga: Factions had a soft release to Kickstarter backers on Monday. For those who don’t know, Factions is the free-to-play multiplayer component to the Banner Saga that Stoic developed first to make sure their combat system for single-player Banner Saga worked properly. The release of Chapter One of Banner Saga proper has been set (rather optimistically, in my opinion) for this summer, so it’s not going to be arriving for quite some time. While I’m waiting for it, though, I figured I’d dip my toe into Factions now that it’s out of beta to see if this much-vaunted tactical combat is all it’s cracked up to be.