by LepcisMagna 
I was definitely ready to make a list of squirrel puns while writing this review. Completing the game, however, drained me of all desire to make that effort. This is the first game I’m putting into Tier Four without hating it.
Continue reading “NUTS”by LepcisMagna 
Ah, Tier Four. I haven’t put something there for a long while now. Old Gods Rising, however, is offensively bad in every conceivable way.
Continue reading “Old Gods Rising”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.
Continue reading “Living Card Games”by LepcisMagna There are walking simulators and then there are walking simulators. The Town of Light is an exploration of a mid-century sanitarium. It might have been an interesting, contemplative experience except for one thing – the thing that can be the downfall of any walking simulator: a slow walking speed.
I don’t think I’ve ever gotten out of my chair after playing a video game and thought “Wow! I walk so fast! It’s great!”. Certainly, I do like my DOOM “walking faster than Usain Bolt running” speed, but this is the first time I’ve actually felt like my brain was moving in slow motion because getting from point A to point B was so
painfully,
tediously,
laboriously,
ponderously,
excrutiatingly
slow!
Beyond that, there are even times that the limited control a walking simulator is taken away – you can’t actually turn around, you can’t even look away from the 20 degrees in front of you – which makes me wonder why it wasn’t just a cutscene. I do understand that this is meant to be an exploration of deep psychological issues, but the way to represent that would be to make your choices meaningless (turning around doing the dream-like running thing), not to pretend you still have control. And so I add another game to Tier Four – for reasons that were entirely preventable.
by LepcisMagna I have an unfavorable impression of Double Fine studios. Their first game, Psychonauts, was fun. I haven’t finished it, but it was well put-together and seemed light-hearted and whimsical. Looking through their game catalog, however, I see very few other original games I recognize; exactly two, actually: Brütal Legend and Broken Age.
Apparently, they acquired the rights to remaster Tim Schafer’s previous work at LucasArts: Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle. Both are point-and-click adventure games, and you would think that they would be the least resource-intense games possible. Somehow, however, the remaster of Day of the Tentacle stutters uncontrollably when using the “Remastered” graphics on either of my computers. If I switch between the classic and remastered graphics, it stutters on both modes. This is unacceptable.
Worse yet, the remastered graphics are actually worse than the classic graphics. The charm and very soul of the pixellated introduction playing on top of Ranz des Vaches during an unskippable cutscene has been ripped out and replaced with what can only be called soulless iOS-like graphics.
Not for the game but for the Remaster: Tier Four.
by Chezni
Why do I–Why–Why do I have this. WHY–why do I have THIS. WHY DO I–WHY DO I HAVE–THIS. THIS! WHY DO I HAVE THIS–
YOU. You! It’s your fault Culling of the Cows? Did you make a deal with Pixel Puzzle Ultimate? Did you supply them with a picture in a desperate attempt to gain traffic to you game? Did everyone who had a copy of Culling of the Cows get a free copy of Pixel Puzzle Ultimate as part of the deal? Did they? DID THEY?!? Oh, you think you stop me? This is the last game in my Steam library. THE LAST. You want a review? You want a review of this huh? FINE. I’LL GIVE YOU A REVIEW.
by Chezni
Wow, we are really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
Look, I don’t care what you’ve heard, this is not a good game. I only have it because it was packaged along with some humble bundle or another. I have no idea why this ever became popular. You play as a cube of meat. You jump. You jump on walls. There are cinematics where you poop on people. The butt of many-a-joke is that your girlfriend gets beat up. Amazing. That about sums up this Tier 4 mess.
by Chezni by LepcisMagna I thought Ubisoft had only been making the same game for 10 years. It turns out it is closer to 15. Originally, I gave a pass to the original Assassin’s Creed because it was a novel concept – a freerunning game set in an open world with climbing puzzles. It was pretty neat. The sequels were terrible since as Chezni just mentioned, they haven’t changed the game in years – just better graphics and a different story. It turns out I was mistaken for even giving the original a pass, since the mechanics were already present in another game series by Ubisoft: Prince of Persia.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
As I played my hour, I started giggling. Then laughing. Then crying a bit, because this is just Assassin’s Creed in a more primitive engine. Since this game, Ubisoft has just remade this exact game over and over again. It has freerunning. It has the exact same buggy “no, I didn’t want to run up that wall, I wanted to run through the door” problems that haven’t been fixed in any of the AC games. It has the exact same weird bars you swing around on. It has the exact same horrible, horrible action camera. It has the exact same dagger stun locks. The only improvement brought by the original Assassin’s Creed was the open world (which, granted, is fairly significant), but at the cost of wallrunning and reversing time (which was actually fun). This game is forever tainted because of my experience with Assassin’s Creed, which affects my tiering. I can’t play it because it just reminds me of all the things I hate about Assassin’s Creed and what that series stands for. I could almost see myself playing it at some point because the time reversal seems fun and the characters/story interesting – though the dramatic cutscenes every time you sheath your sword or drink water (no, I’m not kidding) is more hilariously bad than fun. To Tier Three it goes – play Lara Croft’s Tomb Raider Legend or Anniversary instead.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
See above, only the composer played Doom in between. Add heavy metal, angst, sexism, and a worse camera…somehow.
Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones
Though the camera is still terrible, it’s less terrible than the previous two. The combat is more fluid, and the angst seems to be gone from the previous game. This one goes to Tier Two for me – I’m not sure I’ll play it soon, but it’s probably worth picking up at some point.
Prince of Persia
Ah, of course. The eighth game of the Prince of Persia series: Prince of Persia. Naming conventions are apparently no longer in vogue in the gaming industry. Ah well. At least it’s a fun game. The combat is a little simplistic and honestly a bit frustrating at times – they could really have used some sort of stamina mechanic – but overall the freerunning and attacking does feel more fluid. There does seem to be a bit of “collect all these things” leaking in, but the chemistry between the main characters keeps up a good level of patter. I can definitely see myself playing more of this – Tier One (Two Thrones might squeak in as well, now that I’m thinking about it).
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
This goes into my “Technical Issues” category because it would require that I install Uplay. I refuse. I’m a bit disappointed since not a single one of these games actually let me take screenshots and I had hopes for the most recent one. But Uplay isn’t worth the sacrifice.
Ubisoft
Ubisoft is a Tier Four developer. Between their ridiculous DRM, Uplay launcher, and rehashing of the exact same game over and over again, I have sworn off buying any of their future games (and playing any of their Uplay games). The soul of the company was slowly drained ever since the Sands of Time. I have considered doing an Assassin’s Creed series review, but there is too much pain (and the Uplay launcher, which is kinda the same thing) down that path. I have learned my lesson the hard way – they just don’t make good games any more.
by LepcisMagna 
I think this is the second game I’m going to put into Tier Four (Plankton doesn’t count – it was less of a game than Mountain). Part of this decision is that it was part of a 7-day challenge to make an FPS – and from that perspective it is an interesting exploration of some FPS concepts – but nobody should actually spend money on this.
