Haha… well, it’s good to see that we’re still making games that that are teaching our tub-jawed meat-brained male populous how to be a good-guy stalker. I am of course talking about Hydrophobia: Prophecy.

Hydrophobia Prophecy is an “action” game where you take control of Kate Wilson, an engineer on some… ship… whereupon waking up on her day off, her peaceful home life is ruined by an unforeseen terrorist attack. To be fair though, most terrorist attacks are. In order to escape, you’ll control Kate as she runs around through water-filled corridors while some thick-headed smooth-talker tells you what to do and comments on your every little action. All the time. It never stops.

It’s hard to get a good feel for the rest of the plot beyond that in just an hour. While Kate seems to dream of drowning, she doesn’t seem to have a fear of water. The terrorists are boring and generic–kill all humans because they are overpopulating the earth (ship?). Generic cryptic “Kill Yourself” phrases and other messages are scrawled all over the place, many of which are only viewable when using Eagle Visio–er, I mean–hacker vision. Apparently this is the first chapter in a 3-part game that was cancelled after chapter 1. I have never understood why so many developers shoot themselves in the foot with this tactic. Very few single-chapter game series survive.

Gameplay is basically all the staleness of old Tomb Raider with none of the fun. Pathways are largely linear, stupid annoying collectibles are littered everywhere with little meaning to their collection and ladders–LADDERS my FRIENDS!–will be climbed. Admittedly, the water’s pretty and flows realistically, but it means little if that’s all we have. There’s a bit of acrobatics in Kate’s arsenal such as the ability to scale certain pipes on the wall and to swing from one pipe to another ledge (covering a distance of about 3 feet which, while realistic, is a tad dull) but it’s nothing special and frankly games should stop using the existence of linear wall-scaling as a substitute for real game mechanics. Even older Lara Croft’s exploits were not so painfully linear. No doubt later on we would gain some sort of power or fighting skills, but for a game that’s rated at 4~6 hours long I can’t imagine they would be that great.

The worst aspect of the game by far though is storytelling itself and the heavy lean towards the good-guy stalker syndrome. I once heard a quote concerning the newer Tomb Raider games that effort was being made on Lara’s model so that the players would want to “protect her.” This idea is repulsive on so many levels. There is absolutely nothing wrong wanting to protect a person. There’s nothing wrong that if the person you want to protect happens to be female. The problem is, that this is not how the sweaty-palmed male-targeted audience will receive these games–and it’s not how the developers designed them either. Kate is designed to be sexually appealing to hetero-sexual men. She’s well endowed, wears a skimpy skin-tight tank-top, taut jeans and has no bodily defect that would be considered unattractive. Kate is designed to titillate her male viewer, stimulating their primal urges into associating feelings along with the game that aren’t really there in substance.

Keep in mind here though, that Kate’s appearance alone isn’t the source of our problem. Our problem is that while she’s spunky, energetic and active, she’s also timid, innocent and needs the constant direction of the man in her ear, the alleged “Scoot.” Scoot is who the male audience is supposed to want to be. He’s fit, muscular, has a commanding American accent and has complete omniscience to Kate’s whereabouts and actions at every second of the journey. Jump to a ledge and he frets over her choice to take a dangerous route. Run into a corridor filled with water and he passionately yells at her “Don’t stop! You can do it!” Kate asks Scoot to leave her and find safety and Scoot responds with “No, don’t even think about it. You’re my responsibility and I’m staying.” Why is Kate Scoot’s responsibility? Why does her safety belong to him? Chivalrous bullshit, that’s why. Unless Scoot is Kate’s father (which is about as likely as getting the second chapter for this game) or some similarly audience-informed explanation, Kate belongs to herself. You want to know what’s worse? In the original Hydrophobia (yeah, this one’s a remake) Scoot was fat and had an Australian accent. He was not the mold that male players were supposed to inject themselves into so that they could feel one step closer to their precious Kate. The good-guy stalker syndrome devalues people (and in almost every case women exclusively) by assuming that their existence depends on the good-guy stalker.

In the end, this strikes a hard Tier 3 garbage level, only avoiding Tier 4 because the water really is so damn pretty. Otherwise? Why bother playing this misogynistic piece of crap. Old Lara Croft would have a thing or two to say about being sexy and “needing protection” and she’d probably say it while gunning down Bengal tigers, awakened dinosaurs and raider thugs with an arsenal of weapons that would make even Rambo nod his head in respect.

Steam Link

Why the heck do I have so many RPG Maker games?

I… can’t even stomach this one enough to give it a proper review. I’ll just sum it up that playing this game is like walking into someone’s fanfiction. The main character is a hot-headed mechanic who’s going to be married off against her will to some rich snob. There’s political turmoil in the form of racial oppression from a race of winged beings, of whom our hot-headed mechanic is self-righteously angry at all the time. In order to escape her fate, she steals the airship she was fixing and flies off into what could only be guessed at to be a generically dynamic series of events that one might describe as an adventure. Oh right, I should have mentioned that there are airships. Why Airships? Because… steampunk I guess. Honestly the airship wasn’t that important and I’ve never been a fan of them in fantasy games anyway.

There are some unique sounds and of what little I heard, the music is original but if you’re familiar with RPG Maker games you’ll hear plenty of recycled material. The art and sprites work the same way–it’s about 50% new and 50% reused. Inherently this is not bad, say if the game was actually interesting in either the mechanic or storyline aspects, but this is not the case. The mechanics seem average and as I’ve already mentioned a bit concerning the story–I feel like I’m reading the secret diary of a teenager’s fantasies. It’s not that there’s anything wrong a diary of this sort on it’s own, it’s just I’m not sure why I would want to play a game about it, let alone buy it (which apparently I did at some point).

Here’s one that popped up a lot that I just could not ignore. Why is there a midget knight? Well, it’s because our main character is a custom sprite that’s bigger than the generic RPG maker sprites. Our poor knight on the other hand is… you guessed it–a generic RPG Maker sprite. You’ll run into this a lot with the NPCs.

No EXP in combat means that the game likely focuses on story aspects and not so much on grinding. This is actually a mechanic I can get behind… but it’s the only one. It’s not that the combat is bad, but it’s generic and let’s face it, we’ve moved away from it for a reason–it’s too simplistic. There needs to be something more–something else appealing; this isn’t the 1990’s where a working combat system justified the making of an RPG. Nowadays, and RPG must justify the working combat system. Since all this game seems to offer is material that would appeal to a Twilight Fan, I’m relegating this to a Tier 3 position. It’s not at the bottom of Tier 3, but still undoubtedly belongs there because of one simple question: Why would you want to waste your time with this?

Steam Link

Ahh….Tides of Time.  Wait.  That’s a board game!  Yep – part of our semi-weekly tradition is to find and play a random board game.  This time, I thought it might be a good idea to write up a quick look at our experience with this game – again, the requirement to give each game a fair shake (usually an hour) stands.  In this case, we played three rounds at our FLGS.

Tides of Time styles itself as a glorious adventure of “merciless cunning, grand choices, and a deeply tactical game in only 18 cards”.  None of that is contained within the box (Not even the 18 cards – for, you see, there are actually 19 cards).  Chezni and I played several rounds, but (as might be expected), the limited number of cards does lead to limited strategy.  While its possible we were just missing some crucial aspect to the game that makes for the grand choices specified on the box, it really does seem like this is just a case where too little was included to make an engaging game.

The one redeeming aspect to the game was the card art – on extra large cards, no less.  Sadly, even that is not enough to save this from Tier Three.