Author: LepcisMagna

SPAAAAAAAACE!
Living Card Games
by LepcisMagna

I dislike Collectible/Trading Card Games (CCGs/TCGs), and in particular Magic: The Gathering (MtG). CCGs feel like the microtransactions of the board game world, and all too often are quite expensive to keep up with. Yes, there’s Pauper format, but simply removing all the more powerful cards to preserve rarity feels cheap, in more ways than one. Admittedly, some of my distaste for CCGs comes from a desire to have complete collections, which is pretty incompatible with the roughly 19307 cards (x4 copies of non-lands) printed for MtG. However, the artificial rarity is what really turns me off of CCGs. MtG is one of the worst, with “white border”, “black border”, and of course the “holographic” or foil cards (not counted in the above count). The rarity is there to preserve the secondary market, which forces WotC to ban proxies at official events. There are arguments for banning realistic proxies anyway (counterfeit cards), but I tend to disagree.

What luck, then, that Living Card Games (LCGs) exist! A way to have a fun, extendable card game without the hassle of a secondary market or being unable to purchase a specific card you want from the manufacturer. But there’s a lot of card games out there, and most are terrible. In this article, I hope to catalogue the ones I’ve either played or heard good things about and review them as I get to play them more. I’m going to try and focus on mechanics over flavor, since I’m pretty setting-agnostic when it comes to my preference in games.

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Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
by LepcisMagna

What’s this? A review that’s almost topical? If this keeps up, I might play Sekiro before it goes on sale. Probably not. Well, remarkably, I started playing this game before I had even a clue they were going to announce a sequel, and happened to finish my playthrough the day they announced it. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (hereafter just Vampire, for the sake of my own sanity) is a very special game, to the point that I’m having difficulty putting my thoughts into words. All at once, it is almost perfect and completely terrible.

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Dishonored 2
by LepcisMagna

Dishonored was the first game I ever pre-ordered, going against my usually standard rule about such things. It promised wide-open areas with multiple paths to victory. It promised fantastic magical powers to make even more options available. I was hyped, then I was let down. But despite my disappointment with the first, the sequel seems to have promise.

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Pillars of Eternity (Completed)
by LepcisMagna

No game deserves to be this good.  If you’re a fan of Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, or any similar cRPG, Pillars of Eternity and its sequel (PoE II: Deadfire) are probably a good purchase for you.  Sadly, both games still have their flaws, which is what I’ll be talking about for most of this review.  Don’t let that discourage you, though – they are both solid Tier One material and you should buy them as soon as possible.

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Nioh
by LepcisMagna

Nioh is in an interesting spot and in a difficult position.  It’s very much a Souls-like (it even uses practically the same door opening animation) with missions instead of an open world.  The mechanics seem solid and I very much anticipate finishing it at some point.  During my hour, my biggest issue was learning the slightly different controls (it was ported from PS4 instead of XBox) and getting in to the weirdly different flow of combat.  My only real complaints were the very dark levels (as above) and a few badly placed enemies.

The real trouble is that Nioh is very much under the shadow of its older brother, Dark Souls.  At least so far, there isn’t much motivation for me to play Nioh until I’ve squeezed every last drop of enjoyment out of all the Dark Souls.  Even once I’m done with them, I’ll probably drop in to Sekiro before heading to Nioh.  On its own, I’m sure it would be a Tier One game – but with Dark Souls in the mix, it’ll have to go in to Tier Two until further notice.

Steam link

Spintires: Mudrunner
by LepcisMagna

Back when I reviewed Euro Truck Simulator 2, Chezni commented that people “pay money to participate in a simulated experience of a profession that others describe as living in a ‘prison on wheels.'”  What better way to improve on the contemplative experience of Euro Truck Simulator than to drive enormous, ancient trucks in the middle of a Russian spring through roads which are 90% mud (and 10% river).  Welcome to Spintires: Mudrunner.

To be perfectly clear: if the above didn’t sound fun to you, you will not enjoy this game.  Even if it did sound like fun, you may not enjoy this game.  There is no plot and there is no real motivation for you to continue playing.  It’s just a sandbox filled with “bring this from point A to point B.”  And yet, it’s so exquisitely detailed and challenging that it’s fun.  Maybe I’m going soft now that I’ve trimmed my library so much, but this is just one of those games that’s fun to zone out to with podcasts in the background.  One amusing perk of this sort of game is learning how to control a truck trailer.  That doesn’t sound like it would be immediately useful, but I was helping my parents move a car the other weekend and was the only person in my family that knew how to back the trailer up to unload the car.  I may have looked at this game just so I could tell that story.  That being said, I don’t think I can recommend paying full price – wait for a Steam sale to get this Tier One game.

Steam link

Overload
by LepcisMagna

For those of you who have been playing video games for a while, you may remember a trilogy from the mid-1990s called Descent.  If you don’t, Chezni did a first impression of them a while back which I recommend you read – though I am a sci-fi fan, so they are definite Tier One entries for me.  They have also been re-listed on Steam for your enjoyment!  Even better, there was a Kickstarter for a reboot of the series a few years ago, and Descent: Underground should be out next year.  This is not an impression of that game.

Now, you may ask yourself: why did I just talk about Descent for an entire paragraph if this isn’t about Descent: Underground?  Well, a year after the Descent Kickstarter, there was a Kickstarter for Overload.  Also a 6DOF shooter.  Also in the same style as Descent.  With similar assets (down to the reticles, weapons, and enemy light placement) and gameplay.  To the point that its difficult to understand how both of these were allowed to exist from an copyright standpoint.  It’s as if the publisher got all the names, the developers got all the assets, and they shared all the mechanics.

In any event, Overload is a fun game (with VR support, no less) for those of you who enjoyed Descent but wished there was a modern version.  A solid Tier One entry in my book, and I look forward to Descent: Underground next year.

Steam link

Marathon Trilogy
by LepcisMagna

Somewhere in the heavens… they are waiting.

I used to be a Mac gamer.  I hung on every word of Steve Jobs’ keynotes – from the iMac to the iPod to the Nano to the iPhone.  Just watch the first few minutes of the introduction of the iPhone or iPod Nano.  It’s probably the best example of public speaking I can think of, and listening to Steve Jobs got me through speech classes and school presentations with flying colors.  These days, Macs have sadly fallen by the wayside (as I type on my iPad) and Jobs’ push for perfection in simplicity is lacking.  But for a while, Macs were the only way to go.

Why do I say all this?  Because during my time as a Mac user and as a gamer, the one flaw of the Macintosh was the limited selection of games.  The few we did get were spectacular, though.  One in particular stands out – specifically, the Mac-only Marathon Trilogy.

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Golden Krone Hotel (Again!)
by LepcisMagna

One of the first games I reviewed on PICD was Golden Krone Hotel.  I put it into Tier Two, because I figured that there would be far too many roguelikes ending up on my Tier One list.  This proved not to be the case.  Many roguelikes were terrible, and many others were just nondescript or uninteresting – I found myself constantly thinking back to Golden Krone Hotel.  Later, I was looking for it in my Steam Library, and was astonished to find I had put it into Tier Two.  After revisiting it, it proved to be just as fun as I had remembered.  It has been released from Early Access and just got its “Last Update” – I look forward to beating it (someday).

Steam link