Tag Archives: thoughts

Nov 13 2013
8 Comments
gaming

Thoughts: Desktop Dungeons.

map

It seems the brave new world of the Kickstarter/pre-order beta is here to stay, and with it comes many new and wondrous phenomena such as “paying for something nearly two years ago and then forgetting all about it until an email plops into your inbox telling you the game has been released on Steam.” This has happened to me at least twice in the last year alone, and now we have unexpected surprise #3: Desktop Dungeons, a game which impressed me greatly with its proof-of-concept alpha, opened the gates on pre-orders to great fanfare early in 2012, and then subsequently went almost totally silent until last Thursday when I was informed that I could finally go and get my Steam key from their website.

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Nov 06 2013
16 Comments
gaming

Thoughts: Battlefield 4 (Single Player).

skybox

It seems the universe has a sense of irony.

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Oct 28 2013
7 Comments
gaming

Thoughts: War Thunder.

suboptimal

I cannot figure War Thunder out for the life of me. It’s a pseudo-arcadey free-to-play game in the vein of World of Tanks, except in this one you fly a variety of WW2-era aeroplanes around maps that are unfailingly gorgeous trying to shoot down the opposition and bomb enemy ground targets. It’s also a grognardy1 dogfighting simulator where you have to worry about altitude and air speed and the actual combat part is limited to split-second high velocity diving gun runs at enemy aircraft. Each is accessed through a different game mode, and how they’ve ended up being so wildly different despite using exactly the same engine and the same assets is worth taking a closer look at.

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  1. If you’ve never come across this term before, it’s usually used to refer to the sort of wargame player who values historical verisimilitude more than they do simplicity or ease of play and inevitably ends up buried under a mountain of unit counters festooned with NATO symbols. ↩
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Oct 14 2013
11 Comments
gaming

Thoughts: Bionic Dues.

I’M WORKING ON IT

combat

A couple of things before we start:

  • Bionic Dues is an immensely stupid name. I can’t even figure out what it’s supposed to mean and it’s absolutely non-descriptive of what the game is about.
  • For the love of god, Arcen Games, please start outsourcing your art to somebody who can draw. Your art style was strikingly ugly when you released AI War four years ago, and time has not improved your rendering skills. I didn’t buy Valley Without Wind, and do you know why? It’s because it looked utterly bloody horrible. I’m hardly a graphics snob but I still value clarity of visual design as a gameplay feature, and Arcen’s games looking like a confused mess of photoshopped sprites actively puts me off buying them. I only bought Bionic Dues because a) it had giant robots and b) it said “roguelike” on the tin, a genre that is more tolerant of bad graphical talent than most.

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Oct 07 2013
19 Comments
gaming

Thoughts: Ironclad Tactics.

ironclad

Ironclad Tactics suffers from something of an expectations problem. It’s the next original game from Zachtronics Industries, whose previous game you should have heard of if you care about puzzle games at all: SpaceChem. I loved SpaceChem; it was an immensely clever piece of work and the only game I’ve ever played that’s made me think so hard I’ve given myself a headache. Moreover, its presentation and soundtrack managed to evoke an omnipresent feeling of “Science is awesome!” despite SpaceChem itself having very little to do with actual science, and that’s always going to score bonus points on a site called The Scientific Gamer. Following up one of the few games I would actually genuinely describe as inspired was always going to be tricky, and Ironclad Tactics falls intro the trap I half-suspected it would: it commits the (forgivable) sin of merely being okay. For most games, this would be enough. For something which is inevitably going to be compared to SpaceChem, however, “okay” falls some way short of the lofty standard set by its predecessor.

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Sep 30 2013
9 Comments
gaming

Thoughts: Spelunky HD.

whoa

I have to say I wasn’t 100% convinced about this HD remake of Spelunky. Yes, they updated the graphics, but that wasn’t an unambiguously good thing; the old (free) version was a rare example of pixel art done right and I was afraid that while going HD would bring a lot more detail the game would lose a lot of its charm. Similarly I had my doubts about the XBLA-first release, since this meant a focus on controllers over keyboard and I didn’t think the excellent keyboard controls would translate that well to an analogue control system. This is why it’s taken me a month or two to pick Spelunky HD up after its Steam release; despite the pedigree and proven talent of its designer, Derek Yu, I was a bit nervous that it’d just turn out to be the latest overhyped indie darling game that gets all but forgotten within a month of release.

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Sep 16 2013
22 Comments
gaming

Thoughts: Splinter Cell Blacklist.

I’m on holiday this week, so do not be surprised if there is no post on the 23rd September. Because I’m ON HOLIDAY.

stealth

Splinter Cell Blacklist can be viewed in one of two ways. On the one hand it’s a surprising return to form after the series nadir that was Conviction, remembering its roots as a stealth-based game and fusing it with Conviction’s movement tweaks to produce what might be the best stealth experience I’ve played in many years. On the other hand Conviction was so terrible that Splinter Cell could only go up from there, and I found myself constantly questioning my judgement while playing it: was Blacklist genuinely a good game, or was I simply so starved for a game that did stealth properly that I was prepared to accept what is, past those stealth-based elements, a very unpleasant game in terms of both tone and story?

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