Kudos: De Legende van de rots

Het was enkel vorig jaar dat wij herzagen Het Toenemen van Shady O' Grady Ster, knap bouwstijl-uw-eigen-rots-band sim een spel. Ik dacht het charmerend was, als een af en toe ruw-gescherpt beetje. Nu heeft een tweede spel in het genre mijn weg gekruist: Kudos: De Legende van de rots. Lees meer

Buschauffeur [Indiescene]

Alle het rennen spelen zijn, uiteindelijk het zelfde. Drijf snel een route. Er zijn geen verrassingen en zeer weinig originaliteit, en dan zijn er Buschauffeur, 

Verwanter aan een vluchtsimulator dan een het rennen spel, Buschauffeur ziet u drijf een bus over een keurig gedetailleerde stad, opnemend en afzettend passagiers.  Toen I eerst begon speel het schreeuwde ik hardop: „Het is Gekke Taxi on a bus!”  That comparison is only partly apt.  You do indeed pick up and drop off fares, but the similarities end there.  The game is divided into “missions” where you run a certain route in predetermined weather conditions (you don’t know stress until you’ve driven a bus in heavy snow.)  Bus Driver doesn’t have the spontaneity and mayhem of Crazy Taxi. It does, however, have game-play elements that you won’t find elsewhere.

First, you are driving a bus, and it feels right.  It handles like a bus.  It’s a slow, lumbering pig.  It has a huge amount of momentum, and takes a long time to get up to speed, to stop, and has a huge turning radius.  If nothing else, the game may increase your sympathy for city bus drivers.  Second, the game is a bit like an egg race.  By this I mean that if you stomp on the brakes too quickly, your passengers will become upset, and you’ll lose points.  Stomping on the brakes when no one is in the bus results in no penalty, but those situations are few and far between.

You also gain (or lose) points for obeying (or breaking) traffic laws.  Use a turn signal before changing lanes, get 10 points; randomly change lanes without signaling, lose 100.  Similar rules apply for stopping at (or running) red lights.  Collisions result in a hefty penalty.  

You drive through a fictional European city with varied environments as well as varied weather conditions.  Traffic is a constant hazard, and the clock will constantly tick away the seconds, reminding you of your inadequacies as a driver.  The controls are keyboard-based. I eventually settled on using my left hand to steer and my right hand to control the turn signals, flashers, and doors.  One annoyance is that there’s no mouse control even on the menu screens.

There are a few missed opportunities here.  It seems to me that one of the most interesting aspects of being a bus driver isn’t just the driving, but interacting with the passengers.  It would have been amusing for the customers to have a little more color — “Uh oh, here’s that group of drunk Danish football fans again.”  But this is a nitpick.  The game makes no excuses for being purely about driving, so I can’t be too upset about that. The lack of a tutorial gave me about 1 minute of angst when I first started playing, which is 1 minute too much.

Bus Driver is a charming game, strangely paced, almost languid, but I enjoyed its attention to detail and approachable controls. It’s rare that a driving game is able to surprise me in any way, and Bus Driver surprised me in several.  If you enjoy simulators, you should give it a look.  A demo is available at the publisher’s web site.

Armageddon Empires [Indiescene]

Some games require a huge buy-in. You need to invest a lot of time learning the system, understanding the interface and reading the documentation over and over. The problem with this, of course, is that the payoff may not be worth it. Beyond the learning curve could be great indie gems like Dwarf Fortress or Dominions 3, but you need to either find a walkthrough or commit to the self-education. Who wants to do that?

This is the dilemma facing Armageddon Empires, a new post-apocalyptic wargame from Cryptic Comet. It’s an old-fashioned game in many ways, most significantly in how you will need to read the freaking manual to get started. There’s not a lot of in-game help for you. There’s not a lot of clarity on when you need to right click and when you need to left click. The drag and drop tool is fussy, too.

But you’ll forget all of this once you master the system. Armageddon Empires is a game of exploration and area control. You explore hexes to uncover enemies and resources. As expected, you spend resources on bringing new units to field, but there’s an original twist here. You can also spend these resources on dice before each turn, high rolls determine who gets to go first. The person who goes first gets more action points. So do you save those green resources to move your hero from your hand or spend them on the chance of points you can use to buy more cards?

This either/or decision making is everywhere in the game, potentially turning the tide of battles by spending “fate points,” making an intimidating game quite intuitive once you get the basics in hand. It helps that the setting is familiar enough to not throw up too many barriers to understanding. Air, artillery, infantry, zombies, cyborgs, etc. Nothing that your standard geek can’t manage.

Armageddon Empires rises above the crowd, though, because it is a surprisingly sophisticated wargame. Your armies will start with a couple of units at most, but eventually you will need to manage their composition carefully. Air strikes will need to be timed to even the odds, all the while costing you precious resources which are rarely in high supply. Like the best strategy titles, Armageddon Empires expects you to balance the needs of the moment with the promises of the future, but it never makes you feel like everything is riding on an early turn or a single fateful decision.

Of course, a large number of you will just give up early in the demo. Those of you that stick around will be treated to one of the best new old strategy games in a while.

Carrier At War

Carriers at War is the latest in a series of remakes of classic SSG turn-based wargames. For those of us addicted to turn-based wargames, SSG is the Pablo Escobar of the game industry, known for some of the most famous games in the genre.

If the company’s products have a weakness, it is that the company hails from the antediluvian days of the computer gaming industry, and so, sometimes, do their user interfaces. SSG games range in design from elegant and simple (e.g. Warlords) to unplayably baroque (e.g. Battlefront). Carriers at War, I am pleased to say, is much closer to the former than the latter. It has the accessibility of Panzer General combined with the strategic depth of The Lost Admiral Returns.

The game effectively simulates both of the grand challenges of strategic ship combat in the Pacific. Search is beautifully depicted (reports of sightings come in, but they are uncertain and often inaccurate), as is combat, where with each strike you must balance your desire to inflict a fatal blow on the enemy against the risk of leaving yourself without adequate defensive combat air patrol. The tension you feel after sending out a strike is exquisite.

One aspect of Carriers that it accomplishes grandly is playing the “What if?” game. The included scenarios – Pearl Harbor, Midway, Wake Island, Coral Sea, Eastern Solomons, Santa Cruz, and Phillipine Sea – cover the breadth of the war in the Pacific. A number of the scenarios also have variants (for example, a version of Pearl Harbor where the US was expecting the attack). The game shows the great extent to which warfare in this era was about information. One can’t play as the Japanese in Midway and not know that there are three American carriers out there, an advantage denied that nation in real life. Needless to say, this can lead to dramatically different outcomes than were seen historically.

Is there anything missing? A scenario builder would be nice, but given that most of the great Pacific naval battles of World War II are here, it’s hard to complain too strenuously. On the whole, this is a wonderful game for those who enjoy naval combat simulation games.

Rock Legend

I never wanted to be a rock star. I always knew that the life of sex, drugs and concert tours could be gained only though many years of practice and obscurity and maybe a little soul selling. Kudos: Rock Legend makes no effort to hide the drudgery and tenuousness of a music career. Finding the right band mates, practice, rehearsals, hand-to-mouth existence and getting squeezed by your record company hardly seems the recipe for fun. Oh, but it is!

You take the role as lead singer and assemble your band. You then have five years to make your mark on the music industry, starting with small gigs in local bars and working your way up to larger venues. Your band will need to stay motivated and free from stress, otherwise they’ll turn on each other or just stop showing up. When your lead guitarist quits because he hates the drummer, your rise to fame may never recover.

Rock Legend is spiced up by a couple of minigames. The songwriting game is a straight color matching exercise, influenced by your “inspiration” level and how much experience you have. It’s not very hard, but it’s nice to see that quality meter go above 80 per cent. The “music practice” game is a memory test that is best handled by simply writing down whatever pops up. You need to “practice” to stay sharp, but there’s a lot of tedium in this part. Maybe that’s the point.

Rock Legend, like its predecessor Kudos, limits you to a single activity a day and keeps the money tight to keep you hungry. It’s a better game than Kudos because the limitation fits the starving artist setting so well. The tradeoffs are compelling all the way through. Should you spend that last thirty bucks for a night out to build buzz for your next gig? When do you invest in a manager or sound mixer? When someone becomes a drunk, can you afford to fire them?

None of these decisions on its own is particularly interesting, but as a series of now-or-later choices that may or may not pay off, a fascinating fiction is created, and all without having to play a note. Getting out of the local band gutter is actually difficult, and almost entirely free of chance. It’s a little idealistic (hard work is rewarded more than hype) but the combination of good humor and delicious options will keep you humming along for a while.

Venice Deluxe

The term “casual game” doesn’t have a lot of intrinsic meaning.  It’s really a marketing term onto which a lot of contradictory expectations are heaped.  Casual games are games that you can download quickly.  They appeal to career women.  They’re simple.  They are addictive.  They can be bought online.  They play in browsers.  They have very few art assets.  They’re pretty and shiny.

Depending on what game you’re talking about, several of those above statements won’t apply.  One could argue that Oasis, for example, is “simple,” yet I found it to be challenging and engaging.  I’m no longer convinced the phrase “casual game” means much.   “Casual game publisher”, however, does still mean something, and to many people it means “PopCap Games.”

One thing PopCap has been doing consistently is pushing the boundaries of production values.  It’s no secret that Bookworm Adventures was one of my favorite games last year, and so I approach each PopCap game with some trepidation, afraid it is going to suck me into the same sort of debilitating addiction as their earlier titles.

Venice Deluxe is a game where you shoot vases, hearts, stars, and other shapes into predefined spaces on a game board.  In some ways, it’s like a much easier variant of Snood.  Bonuses are earned for bank and trick shots, and a number of “powerups” appear that change the gameplay slightly.

The production value, as expected from PopCap, is top notch, but the game itself feels a bit dilute.  It’s an awesome game for kids — I left a group of 8 year olds at the laptop for 2 hours, and they wanted to keep playing when I returned — but felt a bit light to me.  Definitely try the demo, but in this case, the word “casual” is appropriate.

PeaceMaker

Games can be laboratories, controlled environments to test a range of potential outcomes. The Serious Games movement is premised on the idea that games can be compelling teaching tools beyond the “simulation environment.” Read more

RIP 3: The Last Hero

Those of us old enough to remember arcade shooters probably don’t think about them often. They were a way station on the path to games with greater depth and less RSI. A good shooter was basically anything that had hordes of things to shoot at, powerful weapons, and the occasional power-up on the map. The idea was to let you get far enough to see new enemies and maps but not so far that you would finish on the first quarter. Insert coin to continue. Read more

Venture Africa

“Why, you’re beautiful, Miss Carrilou!” Those were the words I kept hoping Dr. Willoughby would utter to his traveling companion, kicking off a sequence of events ending in a May-September scandal. Willoughby would lose his seat at Oxford, and they would suffer the barbs of society but live happily for a time. Read more

Hot Dog King

As our regulars know, I’m a big fan of tycoon games. Be it theme parks, wildlife, or railroads, the thought of a long session of financial micromanagement makes my heart beat a little faster. Because of this, I walked into Hot Dog King with high expectations. Read more

Next Page »