Category: Tier Two

 

The age-old tale of the legendary triangle that builds the foundation of every fantasy–the fighter, the wizard and the thief.

 

Trine is a lot better than I thought it would be. Ever since the game’s release I’ve avoided it because of the masses that heralded it as amazing. I simply assumed that the fools had no perspective. Turns out, they were right; Trine is a pretty nice game–and not just for its visuals. Trine is a bedtime story. It’s a fantasy tale of a mystical world of beautiful things populated quickly by three simple heroes. There is no grand backstory or deep character motivation for any of the big three. They are who they simply are, as is needed by the tale that is told around them.

 

Continue reading “Trine” →

 

Ahh… the classic tale of a girl and her fishing pole. And bipedal fish.

 …I’m guessing that says Umihara Kawase by the way. I actually have no idea. I can’t read Kanji.

 

The SNES era was a realm of trying out cute and simple ideas. Finally, we could display more than 12 different colors at once for our sprites, and likewise our levels could be quite a bit more dynamic. There were armfuls of stinkers, but there was also a wealth of really interesting designs that made absolutely no sense–but they never had to. (Ninja Baseball Bat Man is a perfect example of this, and yes I know it came out as an arcade machine, but it was still the same era.)  Umihara Kawase is exactly that kind of game. It makes no sense when you think about it, is filled with images and ideas that you would relate with a stoner’s dream but works in such a snappy cute and fun way that you can’t help but enjoy it.

 

Continue reading “Umihara Kawase” →

 

Tower Defense games SUCK! Except for Bloons. And Gemcraft. Oh, and especially…

 

Defender’s Quest is a tower defense game with high energy. The world is infested with an incurable plague. Without much ado, you are introduced to the main character–a girl who is dying. Before she expires, she’s carried off and thrown into the pit of dead and dying bodies where all the sick get cast. Upon running into a fellow infested, the infested goes berserk, forcing the girl to fight back. Summoning strength from an untapped part of her spirit, she summons herself to the “halfway place,” a realm between the dead and the living. Calling with her mind to the nearest hero, she summons a sarcastic berserker to her side to protect her.

 

Continue reading “Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten” →

 

Well, you know what they say, right? Imitation is the greatest form of flattery!

 

ZanZarah is certainly… unique. And then at the same time not. Its setting, characters and overall mood is its own. You play as Amy, some British teen, who finds a magical box in her attic. Upon opening the box, she’s swept away into a fantasy world with goblins, pixies and fairies to name a few. Being accepted as “the chosen one,” it is the hope of the denizens of ZanZarah that Amy will battle the Shadow beings and bring peace to their world, quelling the now fierce body of fairies that attack anything that tries to pass by. You’ll talk to owls, uniquely modeled plant people and discover fantastical creatures that certainly have an interesting look.

 

Continue reading “ZanZarah: The Hidden Portal” →

 

Winston Churchill once said, “When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.” I think he left out the part about the colostomy bag though.

 

At it’s core, “The Ship” should be good. It should be a right-proper game about pretending to be a well-rounded dapper gentleman (or gentle-lady) enjoying himself on a cruise whilst inwardly walking the line between frantic and psychotic as you both tried to avoid your killer whilst you stalked your prey. It should have been a game that perfectly captured the essence of the board game “Clue” in digital format. It should have been a game about dashing good looks, wild costume changes and a devilish boat-owner. It should have been. It was so close.

 

Continue reading “The Ship” →

 

Was your favorite part of Mount and Blade the combat? Did you want it to just be a little bit… less absolutely terrible? My friend, you should get acquainted with…

*cough* …that’s “Chivalry: Medieval Warfare…” in case you didn’t know. I know it’s super small in the picture.

 

Lepcis has a saying that I’m growing rather fond of. “Dark Souls ruined this game for me.” It shocked me when I realized that Dark Souls as a series has been the exclusive title I’ve played over the last 10 years when it came to desiring a metal-clanking sword swinging frenzy of life or death. Sure there have been a few exceptions (Mount and Blade obviously) but most of those exclusions had some other facet of gameplay driving the ship forward (Mount and Blade’s kajillion other medieval simulations, also obviously). Chivalry seems like a great game but… I found it all to be a bit simple. It’s as if I’ve picked up a childhood toy, fondly fiddled with it for a bit, reminisced about good times but then quickly put it down, desiring to move on to something else.

 

Continue reading “Chivalry: Medieval Warfare” →

 

Technicolor violence anyone?

 

Hotline Miami… I feel a bit out of my element here as I lack the knowledge of where to put my gaming thumb on the fanbase of this series. Having beaten the first Hotline, I may be able to start there. HM 1 was a game that celebrated violence, sex, drugs, hallucinations, rampages, rape, cruelty, murder, depression, murder again and insanity to the extreme. What made this all acceptable? Two things: 1. It’s all displayed from a top-down pixelated brightly colored viewpoint, so we as the onlooker don’t quite get a close-up view of it all. 2. It’s presented almost as an art-piece.

 

Continue reading “Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number” →

I just spent the last half hour dressing up a little girl and trying to get birds to poop on her. I’m going to jail aren’t I?

 

I’ve actually been trying to get this one to work for a while, but have been too frustrated to make any progress. For whatever reason, my gaming PC (well laptop) which so far has been able to run any game I put into it on max settings, could not seem to power through this mobile to PC port with higher than single digit FPS. The fix was actually quite simple, but dredging up the mental energy and fortitude to pursue the fix was something I lacked until now. On the unlikely off-chance that you too are experiencing the same problems, simply open up your BaseEngine.ini file and implement the following changes I found on one of the Steam forum posts:

bSmoothFrameRate=TRUE to FALSE
ImageReflectionTextureSize=1024 to 2048
TerrainMaterialMaxTextureCount=16 to 32
TerrainTessellationCheckDistance=4096.0 to “1024.0”

Ran perfectly fine after that.

 

Continue reading “Lili: Child of Geos” →

 

… … …  click here for 100% realistic simulation of Chezni*

 

I broke down and traveled through the Uplay realm to play this one. I had to. I’ve been waiting literally years  to play this one. Ever since I saw my brother play this back in 2013, it genuinely just looked fun. Like, lots of fun. A game where you wear a Hawaiian shirt, run around and shoot terrorists and boars and have access to a quantity of guns and rides that would make Rambo jealous? I’m in. The problem is (and a big reason why Lepcis and I are doing this Steam challenge to begin with) is that I bought a pack of Far Cry games and *forced* myself to play through and 100% the first two before I’d let myself play this one. Truth is, while the first two weren’t bad games, they weren’t the one I wanted to play. Call it thick-headed gaming machoism or perhaps completionist masochism but it’s the truth. That was the kind of gamer I used to be before we started doing this. Anecdote in mind but out of the way, there’s no way I was going to let even Uplay ruin this one for me.

 

Continue reading “Far Cry 3” →