I done a stream! It went pretty well, and I enjoyed myself. Even had a few people chatting along. If you want to catch up on it, here it is archived on my YouTube channel:
As you can hopefully see from the thumbnail, we were playing the delightfully named Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armour – You May Be Defeated But Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King. This is a dungeon crawler by Experience, makers of, among other things, the Spirit Hunter horror adventures I’ve been playing recently.
I obviously talk more about the game in the stream itself, but my first impressions after a 3-hour session are very positive. It’s really interesting how Experience manage to make what is ostensibly the same kind of game feel cool and different between all their different titles. Mon-Yu is pitched as an entry-level dungeon crawler, but there are plenty of interesting little wrinkles for genre veterans, such as being level capped on each dungeon, meaning you have to figure out how to deal with the bosses without just outlevelling them.
There’s also an interesting equipment system, where equipment gains experience as you use it alongside the characters. Equipment has a “rank” which determines how much it can level up, so sometimes you have to make a decision between keeping your upgraded items or taking a temporary hit to your effectiveness while you power up something with a higher cap.
There’s also a really great “rapid battle” system, where if you know what you’re doing you can get all your characters to auto-attack or repeat their last actions without having to wait for all the animations and log entries to appear on screen. Combine this with the fact that the game has no random encounters — and by its level-capped structure, it discourages grinding to a certain extent — and you have a really interesting take on what has, over the course of the last few years, become one of my favourite subgenres.
Anyway, it’s half past two in the morning now because I made a video about sauce after finishing the stream. Watch out for that on my channel later next week. For now, I must sleep!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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.
Hello. My name’s Pete, and I’m a fully-functional human being able to perform tasks for you in exchange for money. I’m not actually that fussy about the tasks you’d like me to perform, so long as they at least fall under the category of “things that I’m capable of doing”.
Things that I’m capable of doing, if you were curious (which you should be) include the following:
Typing like the clappers (anywhere between 85 and 100wpm depending on how easy your test is)
Producing good-quality writing at short notice (as this blog which I update every day will hopefully attest)
Spotting mistakes in others’ writing and being able to correct them, with a particular focus on people who do not understand the difference between “your” and “you’re”.
Inspiring a viral trend of people to get off their behinds (or, more accurately, get back on their behinds, only in a different context) and get creative—see the One A Day Project, up to 105 participants at the time of writing.
5-Star “Poker Face” on Dance Central (but, eh, let’s keep that one our little secret, shall we?)
Teaching people who have no idea how to use a computer how to use a computer in terms they can understand.
Being honest about the things I don’t know or understand, and finding the information out for myself.
Being able to sit down in front of a new piece of software and get to grips with it very quickly.
Feature on, edit, produce and release a podcast (see: the Squadron of Shame, soon to return after our holiday break)
Using Aperture and Photoshop for photo-tweakage.
Having an opinion worth listening to (see: the number of people who are playing Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale at least partly because of my enthusing)
Write words on paper that people can actually understand without having to resort to words such as “timeously”, “leverage” and “monetize”.
You may think that the vast majority of experience on my CV isn’t exactly relevant to the position you’re advertising. And you’d probably be right. But man is far more than a list of past positions on a piece of paper. He is the sum of his skills, experiences, memories and adaptability. And I have all of the above in spades, meaning that I’d be more than happy to turn my hand to something new. And not only that, the fact that I can learn new things incredibly quickly and retain them easily means that even if I’ve never done the exact job you’re advertising before, I’m pretty certain that I could do well at it if you simply explain what it is I have to do first.
I’ve also been out of regular work since last March, which means that by hiring me you’d be doing your bit to help the UK out of its “millions of people unemployed” situation. I haven’t even been claiming any benefits, but might start having to pretty soon. By hiring me, you’d be allowing some of that taxpayers’ money to be spent on something useful rather than keeping me provided with Lemsip, toilet paper and Eccles cakes.
But above all, by hiring me, you’d be helping both yourself and me. You’d be giving me a job, some financial security, a reason to get up in the morning and something upon which to focus my efforts. And I’d be giving you a committed, grateful, industrious worker who will do his utmost to show you he’s the best damn person-who-can-fulfil-the-position-you’re-advertising ever.
So think about it, huh? Do you want the person who writes the predictable but completely empty-of-soul letter that proclaims how supposedly “passionate” they are about whatever your industry is, and how much of a “generalist” they are? Or do you want the actual human being?
Thanks for your time. I’ll be right here while I don’t have anything better to do of a day. Call me. Email me. Hire me.
