2532: Five Games You Should Get in the Steam Sale

Steam’s Winter Sale has rolled around again! As always, there’s a wealth of great games on offer. On the off-chance that you don’t already own some or all of these games, here are five of my favourites that you should check out.

Recettear (£2.59)

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I find it hard to imagine that anyone doesn’t have Recettear yet, but on the offchance you don’t, here’s the pitch.

Recette is a young girl saddled with an enormous debt. Fortunately, she has a shop with which she can attempt to clear said debt by selling items to the local community, as well as through making good use of the assistance of her fairy companion Tear (actually a representative of the bank keeping an eye on her finances) and the local adventurer’s guild.

Recettear is split into two main components. Firstly, there’s running the shop, which involves putting out items for people to buy, correctly answering their requests and haggling over prices. Secondly, there’s a significant roguelike-esque action RPG component in which Recette can hire one of the local adventurer’s guild to go into one of the nearby dungeons to fight monsters and acquire items that she can subsequently craft into more interesting items or simply sell as-is.

The closest comparison is probably Gust’s Atelier series, though there’s much less of a focus on crafting in Recettear and more on the dungeon crawling and customer interaction side of things. It’s one of the most charming games ever created, with a stunning localisation from the original Japanese by Carpe Fulgur, and is well worth your time.

Steam page

Binary Domain (£2.74)

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An absolutely wonderful third-person shooter, Binary Domain takes Gears of War’s po-faced, joyless over the shoulder cover-based shooting and ramps up the adrenaline to make something with a bunch more personality and drama about it, albeit with (arguably) a few more clunky edges to it.

In Binary Domain you spend a lot of time shooting the shit out of robots, all of which shatter into pieces rather satisfyingly. There’s a variety of upgradeable weapons to acquire over the course of your adventure, and some truly entertaining setpieces. The story is good, too, featuring a cast who are all much more interesting than the walking military stereotypes found in shooters that take themselves a bit too seriously, and the whole thing feels like it’s been designed on the understanding that games are supposed to be fun.

Steam page

HuniePop (£1.74)

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One of the absolute best puzzle games to be released in the last few years — hell, one of the only puzzle games to be released in the last few years that isn’t a free-to-play mobile phone-based Bejeweled ripoff — and a game full of endearingly cheeky humour designed by a team who doesn’t give a fuck about political correctness.

HuniePop is ostensibly a dating sim in that you build up your stats in order to attempt to woo the various girls on the cast, but the twist is that in order to have successful dates (or “intimate” encounters) you need to indulge in some mind-bending, highly strategic puzzle-solving using a combination of your pattern-spotting skills and the items you collect throughout the dating sim gameplay.

HuniePop is beautifully presented, highly playable, shamelessly lewd and an absolute pleasure to play.

Steam page

VA-11 HALL-A (£9.34)

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VA-11 HALL-A is a brilliant visual novel-cum-bartending sim in which you take on the role of Jill, a rather ordinary young woman who lives in a cyberpunk future and tends bar in the titular drinking establishment.

VA-11 HALL-A tells its story rather wonderfully through what it doesn’t show you — since the majority of the action unfolds from Jill’s perspective behind the bar, you tend to see the immediate prelude to and aftermath of important events in the game world rather than the events themselves, which allows you to develop a much more personal attachment to them by hearing firsthand accounts from people who were there.

There’s a wonderful cast of characters — effortlessly “diverse”, I might add, and without making a big song and dance about it at any point, unlike its spiritual predecessor Read Only Memories, which very much wanted you to know how progressive it was at every opportunity — and a compelling story to enjoy here, all beautifully presented in the style of an old PC-98-era visual novel from Japan. Except this masterpiece was put together by a couple of dudes from Venezuela over the course of the last couple of years.

Steam page

Assault Android Cactus (£5.49)

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One of the best shoot ’em ups I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing, Assault Android Cactus channels a variety of influences ranging from bullet hell shooters to Rare’s Jet Force Gemini to create a marvelously entertaining and meticulously designed twin-stick shooter for up to four players simultaneously.

Unfolding across some beautiful-looking dynamic levels, Cactus will challenge your shooter skills to the limit if you want to attain the best scores and grades, but the game also remains accessible to newcomers who just want to blast their way through to the end to say they’ve beaten it.

The whole package is capped off with an amazing soundtrack and some brilliant old-school Sega-style “EX options” that can completely change the way the game plays, and is an absolutely essential purchase for anyone who enjoys a bit of quality arcade action.

Steam page

1857: Video About Vidya

So I took the plunge today and experimented a bit with making some videos. They’re rough-and-ready affairs, recorded live with no special effects, editing or indeed budget, but they gave me an opportunity to practice what it’s like to be playing a game and talking about it at the same time. (It’s harder than you might think!)

First up, I took a bit of time to highlight a Steam Early Access game that I’m terribly fond of: Witch Beam’s Assault Android Cactus.

(This video runs at 60fps if you whack it up to 720p resolution! Exciting! And, moreover, entirely appropriate for a video about Assault Android Cactus, since the devs are very pleased with how fast and fluidly it runs.)

I didn’t find this too challenging to do because I know the game very well already. (In fact, several earlier takes of this video where the mic level was all wrong saw me talking for even longer than the 9-ish minutes in this version; I felt I should probably avoid breaking the 10-minute barrier, though.)

The video was recorded using nVidia’s ShadowPlay software that I mentioned yesterday. It’s supremely easy to use, though there are some slight limitations: it doesn’t work in certain games that don’t use “true” fullscreen or that don’t use DirectX, and the audio recorded from the microphone is compressed somewhat, leading to the slightly “digital” sound of my voice you may be able to hear on the above video.

Still, I’m pretty pleased with how it came out.

Next up, I decided to try something a little more experimental: a blind playthrough (i.e. trying it without knowing anything about it) of a game from my Steam backlog, in this case the indie platform puzzle game 1000 Amps, which I acquired from some bundle deal or other a good while back and promptly never played even once.

This turned out to be quite an interesting little game, and the blind playthrough with commentary was an enjoyable means of exploring it. I don’t know if it makes particularly compelling viewing, but it was fun to sit there and talk about what I was thinking about and how it was making me feel as I was exploring and discovering it. It was kind of like sitting with a friend trying to figure something out for the first time, only the friend never said anything.

Actually, one thing I do quite want to try at some point is combining elements of the Squadron of Shame SquadCast, in which we discuss games in considerable depth, with this sort of thing. I feel going in “blind” but guided by someone who knows the game a bit better might make for some interesting discussions and an enjoyable format to explore. I shall put it to the relevant people and attempt to experiment with it while I find myself with a bit of time on my hands!

I fully intend to continue experimenting with these sorts of videos — and some other formats I have in mind, too — over the next few days and weeks. As I noted yesterday, I’m under no illusions that I’ll be able to make any money out of these, but you never know what grows from the seeds of ideas. It’s something I’ve been meaning to try for a while, and, well, no better time than the present, huh?

If you enjoy what you’ve seen here (assuming you watched them), do please feel free to share them around, like them, comment on them and whatever it is you kids do with the YouTube these days. There’ll be more to come soon, and having now dipped my toe into this crowded marketplace, I’m actually pretty keen to get back to it, if only for fun.

1801: Pondering Some More Games of the Year

So I mentioned yesterday that this last year has been a pretty bumper crop for great games, and I gave a few examples of some titles that I’ve particularly enjoyed, primarily in the last couple of months or so. I thought I’d continue today with some thoughts on some other games from throughout the year that have stuck in my mind for one reason or another, and which consequently I feel are probably worth your time.

Velocity 2X

The original Velocity, a PlayStation Minis title, put Brighton-based developer FuturLab well and truly on my radar. Blending an Amiga-style aesthetic with some modern, interesting gameplay, Velocity was something I hadn’t really come across before: a puzzle-shmup. It combined elements of vertically-scrolling shoot ’em ups with the mind-frying dimensional manipulation of games like Portal to create something enormously enjoyable, very distinctive and hugely addictive. I liked it so much I played through the whole thing again when they rereleased it with enhanced visuals on Vita under the name Velocity Ultra.

So it’s fair to say that I was very much intrigued by the possibility of a sequel, particularly after I had the opportunity to get my hands on an early version at the Eurogamer Expo a while back, and test-drive the new side-scrolling platform sections. When the full game finally came out, I was delighted to discover that it very much lived up to its potential — and that even more so than its predecessor, it was a game that continually “evolved” the further through it you went, with each new level gradually introducing new mechanics to the player until the game you’re playing in the latter stages is almost unrecognisable from how it was at the beginning.

It has a lovely aesthetic, some excellent music and some supremely tight controls — utterly necessary for a game so focused on speedrunning as this. It’s a great addition to the PlayStation Vita’s library of more “quick-hit” games that are good for pick-up-and-play fun when you have a few minutes to spare — seriously, fuck 95% of mobile phone games nowadays — and it’s a supreme challenge for even the most skilled gamers out there.

Assault Android Cactus

I’m not sure this counts, given that it feels like it’s been in development forever and is still in Early Access, but I’ve certainly played it a whole bunch this year and really enjoyed it. Moreover, it’s been wonderful to see how the game has continued to grow and change as its development continues — not to mention the fact that its small development team are lovely people who are a pleasure to talk to, also.

Assault Android Cactus, even in its unfinished state, is an extremely solid take on the twin-stick shooter genre. Taking inspiration from Japanese bullet-hell shooters as much as more Western shmups such as Geometry Wars, Assault Android Cactus features an array of unique characters, each of whom have their own distinctive ways of attacking and fending off enemies. Some are conventional enough, others are… less so. For some players, it’ll be a matter of pride to master the more offbeat characters like Aubergine; for others, they’ll want to chase high scores with the more “traditional” characters like the eponymous heroine Cactus.

Assault Android Cactus benefits from a clear and easily understood scoring system — something which many of its Japanese influences cannot boast! — and there’s a strong emphasis on chasing the elusive “S+” rank for each level by attempting to chain all your kills together into a single combo while avoiding death. This is easier said than done on some levels — particularly the challenging boss encounters, which will give even the most seasoned veterans of the 8- and 16-bit era a run for their money.

I’m really looking forward to the finished version of this great game… and I’m especially looking forward to being able to take it on the go with me thanks to the upcoming Vita version!

Demon Gaze

I’m not going to pretend Demon Gaze is the best RPG I’ve ever played, but I have to give it an enormous amount of credit for getting me into a subgenre of RPGs that I’ve never really “clicked” with: the grid-based dungeon-crawler, or “gridder” to some.

Demon Gaze was enjoyable and unusual. Its Vocaloid-heavy soundtrack gave it a very distinctive audio-visual aesthetic, while its environments were varied and a lot of fun to explore. The Demon’s Souls-style online features, whereby other players could leave messages on the floor for you to discover, were a lot of fun and occasionally helpful, even amid all the distinctly… inappropriate messages that were also left adorning the dungeon floor at times. The level design was wonderful, making use of simple but effective mechanics like one-way doors, forced movement panels, floors that damaged you and other staples of the genre to create some challenging levels that taxed your brain. And the combat, although simplistic, was enjoyable and nicely streamlined.

It had a surprisingly enjoyable story, too. My past experience with dungeon-crawlers is that they’ve tended to skimp a bit on the narrative front, which is one of the things I tended to find most offputting — I’m a narrative junkie, after all. Demon Gaze, however, managed to strike a good balance between the mechanics-heavy dungeon crawling and the somewhat fantasy soap opera-esque happenings that went on back at the inn any time you accomplished something significant. The memorable cast of characters with whom you’d interact between forays into the dungeons more than made up for your custom-created party members’ relative lack of personality, though pleasingly, the game at least made an effort to incorporate said party members into “background narration” of numerous scenes just so they didn’t feel completely irrelevant to the narrative as a whole.

It was a challenging game, too, though arguably a little inconsistent with its difficulty level. It starts incredibly tough, gets much, much easier as you level — so much so that I had to whack up the difficulty level to its highest to have any sort of challenge whatsoever — and then gets monstrously difficult again right at the end, particularly if you choose to pursue the optional post-game extra ending, which you really should if you want to say you’ve had the full experience.

Demon Gaze was definitely one of my biggest surprises this year, and it makes me much more inclined to seek out other dungeon-crawlers in the future — something I wouldn’t have thought to do prior to giving it a shot.

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More to come in the next few days.

1677: Twin Sticks

I love a good twin-stick shooter, though I must confess I wasn’t really aware of it as a sub-genre of the shoot ’em up until Geometry Wars on the Xbox 360. (Fun fact: that game, more than any of the other early titles on that console, was the reason I picked up my own 360. Fast forward a generation and I find myself unable to justify a PS4 for Resogun — a game which is, admittedly, jolly good. Hmm.) I guess I was sort of aware of it with Smash TV on the Super NES — and what I thought was an extremely peculiar control scheme when I played it — but I never played the original Robotron or anything.

Since Geometry Wars, though, I’ve been a big fan of the twin-stick shooter, and it occupies a similar tier of affection in my brain to Japanese “bullet hell” shooters.

It was Geometry Wars 2 that truly cemented my love of this shmup sub-genre — and it was partly a result of the growing world of online console gaming. These days, we take online leaderboards and multiplayer functionality for granted — hell, it’s in most mobile phone games — but in the earlier days of the 360, online functionality was still new and exciting. And Geometry Wars 2, although it handled it incredibly simply, worked brilliantly.

All Geometry Wars 2 offered in terms of online functionality was a separate leaderboard for each of its game modes, with the display of your friends’ scores prioritised. While you were playing, the upper-right corner of the screen displayed the next friend’s score that you needed to beat to move up a spot on the leaderboard, and it was surprising how enormously distracting this could be — to such a degree that some people even advocated putting masking tape over the corner of your TV so you weren’t tempted to look while playing.

It worked brilliantly, though, and all the more so for the fact that, when Geometry Wars 2 came out, absolutely everyone was playing it. Herein, however, lies something of a mixed blessing: while the games industry has grown into a multi-billion dollar behemoth since that time, the sheer number of games around at any given moment these days means that it’s become gradually less and less likely that we’ll ever have a communal, shared, international experience like that ever again. Games like Geometry Wars 2 are now considered by some to be too simple for computers and consoles, instead finding a “better” home on mobile. (I’d question whether or not it’s actually “better”, however, since mobile phone control schemes for this sort of game still suck immense quantities of balls.)

That, thankfully, doesn’t mean there aren’t still devs making these games, however. In fact, two of my current favourite non-narrative games are relatively recent twin-stick shooters: Assault Android Cactus on PC (coming soon to various other platforms) and Super Stardust Delta on Vita.

Assault Android Cactus is the work of small Australian independent developer Witch Beam. I was completely unaware of the game prior to the Eurogamer Expo last year but a chance encounter with a preview build a few days prior caused me to frantically schedule an appointment with the developer’s representative, who had flown over especially for the show. Their enthusiasm for their game was infectious — and it was clear they’d done their homework, citing classic Japanese shmups as their inspiration for the game, which despite being a twin-stick shooter very much had its own identity. Today, the game is still in Early Access on Steam awaiting its finishing touches, but it’s already one of the finest shooters I’ve ever had the good fortune to play. I can’t wait to take it on the go with the Vita.

Super Stardust Delta, meanwhile, is a twin-stick shooter from Finnish developer Housemarque and, I didn’t realise, a distant offshoot of a series that originally began back on the Amiga. Combining elements of Asteroids, Geometry Wars and Ikaruga, Super Stardust Delta is, once again, proof that you can take a simple base mechanic — twin-stick shooting — and make it into something unique and enjoyable. It’s also one of the most beautiful-looking games on the Vita, so if you want something for Sony’s underappreciated handheld with which to impress people, it’s a fine choice.

Anyway, the beauty of a good twin-stick shooter is that a single play session is only short. So I think I’m going to go sit in bed and play Super Stardust Delta for a bit before sleep. That sounds like a good way to close out my last week of freedom before work starts next week!