#oneaday Day 176: Take a Bow

Today, I played through all of the first Laura Bow game, The Colonel’s Bequest. I enjoyed it a lot! You can read more about my thoughts on the subject right here, and a full Let’s Play of the game will kick off on my YouTube channel from tomorrow. It’s just three (long) episodes rather than a lot of 30-minute episodes like I did with The Case of the Serrated Scalpel last year, as I felt that fit the format of the game a bit better, and the overall structure of The Colonel’s Bequest is… well, quite different from pretty much any adventure game I’ve played.

But enough of that. What’s next? The Dagger of Amon Ra, of course! This is the follow-up to The Colonel’s Bequest, and I’m going to do my best to play it through and record it tomorrow. I don’t know if it’s longer, shorter, easier, harder… the only thing I do know is that it uses point-and-click controls instead of The Colonel’s Bequest’s text parser, and it quizzes you on what happened at the end, so you need to make notes, just like Laura herself.

Then after that, I’ll start having a look at The Crimson Diamond. Plus alongside all this, I might do something similar to what I did last year (“3 interesting DOS discoveries”, “5 DOS games I always wanted to play” and “5 of the best early FPSes”) if I can figure out what I might want to cover for videos in that style. I haven’t started looking yet. Racing games is a possibility — a good excuse to bust out the Screamer series, perhaps? — or flight sims. Space combat sims? I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. Looking at shareware stuff I used to like is also a distinct possibility, perhaps from the perspective of “shareware games I always wanted to try the Registered version of”, since the only Registered shareware game I had back in the day was Wolfenstein 3-D, which I got for free after making some levels that were included in the official “Super Upgrades” expansion pack.

I’ve probably told this story at least once on this blog before, right? Well, regardless, I’ll tell it again, ’cause you might be new around here. It’s a story of delightfully happy coincidence.

Back at the time I was playing Wolfenstein 3-D on the family PC, I was involved with a local shareware library. I did a bit of part time work helping them out at local computer fairs, writing their catalogues and that sort of thing. I don’t remember getting paid for this, but it was decent experience and I got lots of freebies from the shareware library, which was nice.

Among those disks that I got for free were numerous Wolfenstein 3-D editors, and they worked with the shareware version. So I made a bunch of levels.

I forget the exact circumstances of how the next bit came about, but I was browsing the GAMERS forum on CompuServe one day, when I found myself in contact with a gentleman called, as I recall, Carlton somethingorother. He was a representative from Apogee, and he was looking for new Wolfenstein 3-D levels to include in the upcoming data disk for the game. There was money on offer for anyone whose levels were included. After consulting with my parents — online safety and all that — I submitted my pack of ten levels to him, expecting never to hear from him ever again.

Imagine my surprise when a few months later, I got a package from the United States containing a cheque for $200, plus a registered copy of Wolfenstein 3-D and the new Super Upgrades pack, which included my levels, along with a bunch of other community contributions. So technically I’m a professional game designer.

But anyway. Yeah. That copy of Wolfenstein 3-D was the only Registered shareware game I had, because it was the early days of the Internet (in fact, via CompuServe, our “ISP” at the time, you couldn’t even access the Web, and had to append “INTERNET:” to any email addresses you were sending messages to outside of the CompuServe service) and my parents weren’t super-into the idea of sending $40 overseas in the hope of getting a video game back, and they absolutely weren’t going to share their credit card information online. As such, I became intimately familiar with a lot of “Episode 1s” and not a lot else… so exploring the “Episode 2s” and beyond for some games I liked back in the day might be interesting, for sure.

I’ll think of something. For now, I think it’s time to just play something fun for a bit without thinking about how to turn it into an article or video. Come to me, Donut Dodo…!

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.

#oneaday Day 118: I left this too late again

Oh dear. Half past midnight and I haven’t written anything. Time to quickly think of something off the top of my head!

Err… quick! Video games! I bought Victory Heat Rally today. This is a game I’ve had my eye on for a while (though not as long as some other people have, from the sound of things) after I played its excellent demo a few Steam Next Fests ago. I’m going to do a full writeup and video on this at some point in the very near future, but suffice to say for now that it’s very good.

It’s a game that takes aim at Sega’s “Super Scaler” racers in style, with Power Drift being a particular inspiration. It doesn’t slavishly try to ape the retro style, mind — though there is a nice “pixelise” filter option for the visuals — and rather makes use of some nice pixel art for the characters, cars and some roadside objects, and low-poly environments. It moves along at a fair old clip even on my mini PC that doesn’t have a graphics card, and it’s a lot of fun to play.

Besides Power Drift, it also draws inspiration from Ridge Racer (drift-heavy handling, ’90s rave soundtrack), Sega Rally (rally stages with exaggerated handling), Mario Kart (multiple tracks set in a limited number of environments) and probably some others that I can’t think of right now because I’m tired. It takes all these elements and blends them together to make an immensely compelling game that I’ve played for about 5 hours this evening.

The first series of championship challenges is a bit easy, but the second ramps things up nicely to a good challenge level. There are also some truly infuriating bonus stages known as “Joker” levels where you have to race through checkpoints against the clock while performing some sort of precise driving task. The one I’m presently stuck on requires you to take full advantage of the “drift boost” mechanic the game has borrowed from Mario Kart and boost through various checkpoints. This is a lot harder than it sounds, particularly with the awkward placement of some of these checkpoints, and it has cause many expletives to belch forth from my mouth this evening.

While these levels are infuriatingly difficult, the rest of the game seems pitched at a pretty sensible difficulty level. The opening championship eases you into things nicely, then things ramp up from there. I suspect the third series of championships will be genuinely quite difficult, if the escalation in the second series is anything to go by.

But anyway. Half past midnight, like I said, so I should probably close everything down and go to sleep. There can (and probably will) be more racing tomorrow.

#oneaday Day 93: The Truly Tragic Tale of the “Woke Content Detector”

One of the most truly insufferable things about the “gaming community” over the course of the last decade has been the rise of the “anti-woke” crowd, which started to really raise its head around the same time as the Gamergate saga — and, indeed, which many people still point to as the real point behind Gamergate rather than any legitimate concerns over ethics in games journalism.

To be clear and completely transparent, around the time of Gamergate being active I may well have expressed some sentiments and concerns that might have got me lumped in with this crowd.

However, I made an effort to distance myself from the movement as a whole, because I could see it was something of a scarlet letter, regardless of whether or not an individual had legitimate, worthwhile concerns.

My issues were always to do with the games journalism side of things, with my particular focus being on reviews and articles that treated Japanese titles (particularly those which featured sexually provocative content) unfairly and from an ill-informed perspective. I steered well clear of any discussions where it was clear people were being full-on racist and sexist — i.e. objecting to a game because it had a woman in a leading role, or a non-white person appearing prominently. I was entirely concerned with how certain portions of games journalism were treating specific games — and the people who enjoyed them — like absolute shit: nothing more, nothing less.

To put it another way, I always thought the people who were objecting to “woke” content in games were being massive weirdoes, and I didn’t want anything to do with them. Where games did feature obnoxiously over-the-top “look how progressive we are!” content, I tended to just steer clear of those — or perhaps comment on them in terms of alternatives that did the same thing, but better. To date, my favourite example of this is Read Only Memories and VA-11 HALL-A. Both of these games unfold in the same “world”, with the latter being a spinoff of the former, developed by a completely different team. Read Only Memories is absolutely obnoxious about how it handles progressive themes; VA-11 HALL-A integrates them extremely well into the plot.

But I digress. I have zero time for people who object to games purely on the grounds that they contain “woke content”. Particularly when the definition of “woke content”, as defined by the Woke Content Detector group on Steam, is so broad. I invite you to take a look at their official spreadsheet of which games are and are not “woke” and have a good laugh at it, and we’ll pick out some classics below.

Starfield

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly Pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Contains overtly pro-DEI messaging. Pronoun selection including the option for they/them. All populated areas are equally diverse. Many important people are POC."

Here’s a prime example of what this list is actually about: being sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic. I’m not sure much more needs to be said about this definition, other than to clarify for those who are somehow unfamiliar with Starfield that it is an open-structure role-playing game set in space, in which you play a self-insert character. Therefore having the option to select your name, gender, ethnicity and appearance makes a lot of sense. The implication of “many important people are [people of colour]” is that in The Future, we will have moved beyond white dominance and oppression of non-white people, but this is a bridge too far for the anti-woke crowd.

Civilization VI

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly pro-DEI messaging. Contains overtly pro-climate action messaging. Race swapped Suleiman and added historically unimportant female leaders. Global warming and carbon capture mechanics."

This one is particularly hilarious. A game about running a civilisation on our planet, and considering important matters that both occurred in history and which might occur in the future is “woke” for acknowledging things like climate change. I guess we add “climate change denier” to the “sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic” list. Some racism and sexism on open display there, too.

BioShock Infinite

A screenshot of the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly anti-western society and overtly pro-DEI messaging. Colombia's residents are hyper-exaggerated, racist caricatures of 19th century Americans. Heavy social commentary on racism."

Another good one. The funny thing about this one is that they clearly got the point of BioShock, but then got offended by it.

Forza Horizon 5

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Prnoun selection including an option for they/them. Uses unlabeled presets instead of clearly defined male and female options during character creation."

I have to include this one just for how stupid it is. Forza Horizon 5, the game in which you spend your entire time in a car, is “woke” because it allows you to choose how the in-game characters refer to you. Because only big strong boys play car games, you know.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Contains overtly pro-DEI messaging. Prominently displayed pride and BLM flags. The new POC main character overshadows Peter Parker."

This one is brilliant, because it’s criticising the fact that the protagonist named in the game’s title is “overshadowing” the character who is explicitly not the protagonist. Because he’s black. Let’s not beat around the bush here: this is racism. Again.

Disco Elysium

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains overtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Features multiple LGBTQ+ characters, including the player character. Heavy social commentary regarding communism. Whether pro or anti is unclear."

I’ll take “I played Disco Elysium and didn’t understand any of the big words” for 2,000, Alex. If you played Disco Elysium and didn’t understand whether it was pro or anti communism, you don’t deserve to be playing video games that have words in.

Final Fantasy VII

A screenshot from the Woke Content Detector database. Reads "Contains subtly pro-LGBTQ+ messaging. Contains subtly pro-climate action messaging. Forced cross-dressing. You start the game working for an ecoterrorism group."

And I have to include this one just for the giggles. Final Fantasy VII features “subtly pro-climate action messaging”. Yeah, Final Fantasy VII is real subtle about its environmental message, guys. Real subtle.

I’m utterly amazed at how committed these people are to being pathetic and weird. Because that is exactly what they’re being. There are 386 entries on their “Recommended” (i.e. “not woke”) list, while there are 746 “Not Recommended” (“WOKE!!!”) titles and 299 “Informational” (“A BIT WOKE!!!”) titles.

That’s a thousand and forty-five games that these people will refuse to consider because they might be exposed to a black person, a gay person or, heaven forbid, a woman. There’s no way you can look at that and not think it’s utterly pathetic.

Unless you’re one of them. In which case fuck off. I don’t want to know you.

#oneaday Day 57: The evolution of interactive fiction

I’ve been playing Disco Elysium for the last couple of evenings. I finally got around to nabbing it in its The Final Cut incarnation last GOG.com sale, and I felt like playing something a bit “different”, so I fired it up. (I’d also been waiting until the hype surrounding it had died down so I could approach it with fresh eyes and zero expectations or prejudices.)

This is a very good game, although it’s also a game for a very specific type of person. Despite having console versions, it is very much a game for those who grew up with PC gaming in what old men like me tend to vaguely refer to as its “golden age” — around the turn of the century, approximately. No, I’ll be a bit more specific; it’s for people who grew up with text adventures and subsequently found themselves particularly enjoying CRPGs on PC in the late ’90s/early ’00s.

The reason I say this is because Disco Elysium has a significant text component. All of it is voice acted — and for the most part voice acted very well, I have to say — but at its heart, it is a role-playing game in which the majority of its major happenings are conveyed almost entirely through text rather than flashy graphics or even animations. It takes some strong cues from the legendary Planescape: Torment in this regard, but it also successfully distinguishes itself as something that builds on what that game was doing, rather than simply aping it.

For the unfamiliar, the big Thing with Disco Elysium is that it’s a role-playing game that focuses almost entirely on non-combat situations. I’m not even sure there’s a combat system at all — after playing for (checks GOG Galaxy) 8 hours so far, there has not been a single fight. Instead, everything has occurred through a combination of exploration and text-based interactions.

This isn’t to say that Disco Elysium is a kinetic novel, either. Not only do you have a lot of choices in terms of dialogue options in most conversations and interactions, but the wide array of skills your player character has play a significant role in almost everything that happens in the game. And, unusually, this isn’t just the form of “SUCCESS/FAILURE” rolls to perform particular actions based on your skills — although those do feature at various points — but rather the various facets of your personality actually “speaking” to you, offering suggestions and commentary on what is going on.

For example, if you’ve put points into the Empathy skill, at various points in conversations your Empathy trait will actually chime in to “conversations”, giving you greater insight into how the person you’re talking to is feeling, or how you might be able to get through to them. Your Perception skill will “speak” to you and notice little habits people have. Your Drama skill will flamboyantly point out opportunities where you might be able to express yourself. And there are tons more besides these examples, suggesting that playing Disco Elysium with a different “build” of skills and stats will end up being a markedly different experience; it’ll still cover the same basic plot beats and events, but doubtless you’ll end up resolving various situations in different ways.

This is really cool, and it feels very much like a natural evolution of interactive fiction. While you don’t have quite as much freedom as in a traditional “text adventure” style piece of interactive fiction by virtue of not having a text parser to type in whatever you want, there’s a really strong feeling that you’re seeing the world through the eyes of the character that you have designed. And, interestingly, that character is designed not as an “ideal”, but as an absolute wreck of a human being.

Amnesia is an overdone trope, particularly in role-playing games, but having your player character waking up with a raging hangover and no memory of what got him into the situation he starts the game in is a great means of bringing the player into the game almost in medias res. You, the player, are discovering things about the game world and the story as the protagonist character is (re)discovering them, and you have a lot of scope as to how you want to play that protagonist, who is canonically a policeman.

Do you play things by the book and attempt to impress your partner with how you get your life back together and work hard on solving the investigation that has brought you together? Do you lean into the “weird” and start freaking people out with how you behave around them? Do you start spouting particularly extreme political ideologies at every opportunity? You have the option to do all of these things in Disco Elysium, right up to deciding that you’re the one who is going to bring Communism to the people, becoming a massive racist or turning into someone whose sense of self-worth flew out of the window along with his shoe prior to us joining the narrative at the start of the game.

A lot of it is smoke and mirrors, I’m sure, but I can’t remember the last time I felt like I was so completely being invited to inhabit the role of a game’s main character. The way Disco Elysium works strikes a great balance between having some things that are canonical fact about the protagonist, and allowing you to mould them as you see fit.

I’m not sure it would have quite the same impact if you had a completely freeform self-insert protagonist, because the temptation there is always to go down the “idealised” route, and a significant part of Disco Elysium involves how one deals with one’s own flaws — whether that be accepting them, attempting to overcome them, ignoring them in the hope they don’t mess things up further for you, or leaning hard into them. By forcing us to inhabit this absolute disaster of a human being, we’re put in a position where we can explore how we might get out of a situation that is pretty much rock bottom. Will we rise to the challenges life has thrown at us — at least some of which are our own fault? Or will we crumble under the pressure?

It’s a game that I feel could have only been made these days. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops — and if my take on the protagonist manages to survive to the end of proceedings.

#oneaday Day 31: Hypnospace

Decided I wanted a break from Dawntrail this evening, so I decided to give Hypnospace Outlaw a go, since I’d always been curious and it was cheap in the GOG summer sale.

For the unfamiliar, Hypnospace Outlaw is an adventure game of sorts, but rather than controlling a character you’re manipulating a computer from a fictional 1999 as it navigates around the “Web” of sorts. Technically “Hypnospace” is a Web-equivalent that people browse in their sleep through a special headband, but so far that doesn’t seem to have mattered all that much.

The fact it’s set in 1999 does matter, however, because most of your interaction involves using a delightful parody of the early(ish) Web — a land of personal Geocities pages, primarily. Hypnospace is a managed service rather than a completely open free-for-all, and divides user pages into specific “Zones” according to their subject matter. As you progress through the game, you’re given access to more Zones and thus more pages to browse.

Honestly, just browsing through the wealth of information that has been composed for these fake Web pages is a lot of fun in itself. The world of Hypnospace Outlaw has clearly been thought about in great detail, and even though it is, by necessity, considerably smaller than the “real” Internet — even as it existed in 1999 — there’s a sense that you really are exploring a community, but through your computer screen, rather than on foot.

The actual “gameplay” part of Hypnospace Outlaw places you in the role of a volunteer “Enforcer” for Hypnospace’s manufacturer MerchantSoft. This affords you special privileges — among them the ability to wield a literal banhammer — but also effectively stops you from “existing” online for the duration of your contract. Your job as an Enforcer is to seek out violations of MerchantSoft’s “laws”, which include copyright infringement, harassment, illegal (disturbing or offensive) content, distribution of malicious software and commercial activities carried out via non-approved channels.

This starts pretty simple with you wielding your banhammer on some obviously copyright-infringing pages, though the game makes sure you’re aware of the consequences of your actions through the way the page’s owners update their sites as the game progresses. In subsequent cases you’ll have to track down cases of cyberbullying via “hidden” pages, only accessible via certain means, and infiltrate rebellious groups by effectively using social engineering techniques to glean sensitive security information.

So far — I estimate I’m about halfway through the game — no real “judgement” has been placed on the player character for the things they do, though only the most hard-hearted won’t respond to the anguished frustration expressed by those who feel they had the rules applied to them unfairly. It’s satisfying to find your way into what the creators of a page clearly thought was a safe, hidden inner sanctum and then effectively wreck it by blasting its most important components for rule violations — but it’s also hard not to feel a little uncomfortable about it. That, I suspect, is kind of the point.

I’m intrigued to see where the story ends up going, as it’s definitely been intriguing so far — even though it’s mostly been little threads you can tug at as much or as little as you want up until the point I’m at. I suspect some sort of “big plot” will reveal itself before the end, though, and I’m looking forward to investigating it further. I’ll post some more in-depth thoughts about it over on MoeGamer once I’ve finished it.

For now, then, a thumbs up, particularly if you lived through this era of the Web. While it’s very much a parody rather than a completely loving recreation, a lot of it is bang on for how things really were back then — and it blends this nicely with a thoroughly modern tale about controlling the flow of information, censorship and self-expression. Good stuff.

2494: Space Rogue

0493_001

I was pleasantly surprised earlier today to see GOG.com release an elderly Origin (old-school Origin the software company, not Origin the unnecessary piece of EA bloatware) title called Space Rogue.

I was particularly surprised to see Space Rogue on GOG.com, primarily because they had already released a game of the same name that had no relation to it — although in retrospect, given that a considerable amount of discussion around the newer game was along the lines of “hey, remember that old Origin game called Space Rogue?” I should have perhaps seen this coming. Still, it’s a pleasant surprise regardless.

I have very fond memories of Space Rogue. It was a game from the 16-bit computer era with everything that entailed, which usually meant a box packed with stuff other than the game disks. In Space Rogue’s case, there was a wonderful “in-character” manual for the spaceship you pilot in the game, complete with sarcastic notes scrawled “by hand” in the margins. I really miss this kind of thing; the only place we tend to get “feelies” like this any more is in limited edition releases of games, and those tend to be considerably more expensive than standard editions.

But I digress. Space Rogue was an interesting game for its blend of genres — part space sim, part RPG. Origin proved themselves to be masters of both over the years — with their most well-known series including Wing Commander (space sim) and Ultima (RPG) — but Space Rogue was an early example of mashing the two together, which makes it, to date, still pretty distinctive in its respective genres. Sure, titles like Star Citizen, No Man’s Sky and Elite have all taken a few tentative strides in the direction of allowing you to get out of your ship and do stuff other than fly around, but none yet have captured what Space Rogue did, which was include a fully-featured “walking around” mode as well as its 3D polygonal space flight sequences.

Details of the plot of Space Rogue elude me, though there are odd bits that I still remember. Of particular note was a lengthy sequence that I was thoroughly enamoured with as a youngster in which you play messenger boy between two sisters living on different space stations. The sequence culminates with one of the sisters throwing her arms around you and thanking you for all your hard work. I found this to be a satisfying conclusion to the episode, even presented purely in text as it was.

I also remember the space stations having various different designs, and greatly enjoying the experience of landing on the one that looked like an aircraft carrier in space. Elite Dangerous does very good space station docking sequences, but 20 years ago, Space Rogue was my favourite.

I also remember the spaceflight sequences having a peculiar “Newtonian” movement option, in which rather than adopt the usual space sim convention of always thrusting forwards and simply turning the direction you’re moving, you could spin your ship around and face one direction while moving in another, allowing you to, say, shoot enemies who were on your tail while running away from them.

Due to technological limitations of the time, not all of the space flight sequences took place from the 3D cockpit view. Long-range navigation unfolded from a top-down map that clearly used the same engine as the on-foot segments. While relatively primitive in comparison to the 3D graphics, it gave the game a good feeling of “context” and of moving across vast distances.

I have no idea if Space Rogue is still a good game, but I’m interested to try it again anyway. While it’s not a game that ever went down in any Great Gaming History books or whatever, it’s nonetheless a game I consider to be a defining experience in my youth, and as such even if it plays like a dog in 2016, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for it.

2484: Further Adventures in Hong Kong

0484_001

Shadowrun Hong Kong continues to be an excellent game. The best thing about it, I think, is quite how varied the different missions are — and how the game is structured, allowing you to accept multiple missions at a time, but forcing you to focus on a single one at a time once it begins. This approach helps prevent the problem a lot of Western RPGs have, where you get completely bombarded with quests and have no idea where to go and which order it is “best” to do them in, leading to an unfocused, meandering experience.

Shadowrun Hong Kong, meanwhile, features missions that take maybe 30-60 minutes to complete, tops, each of which has its own set of objectives and mini storyline to follow through. And they’re not all a matter of “go somewhere, have a fight, get out again”.

Over the course of last night and tonight, I’ve completed a variety of missions and no two have been alike. In one, I had to infiltrate a museum and steal the most valuable artifacts possible without tripping the alarms. In another, I had to solve a serial murder case — this had the option of concluding without combat were I to let the culprit go free. In another still, I had to disrupt the qi flow in the offices of a company that took great pride in its geomancy.

What it kind of feels like — which is fitting, given Shadowrun’s background — is a tabletop role-playing session, with discrete adventures linked together to form a campaign, each of which features its own story, evocative narration and interesting characters. Where Shadowrun differs from other games that have attempted to evoke the feeling of tabletop roleplaying sessions, however, is that it keeps things focused and trims the fat.

It doesn’t have Baldur’s Gate’s problem of pretty much everything being lootable, only for you to discover to your dismay that 95% of the containers in the game house identical rubbish shortswords and suits of leather armour. It doesn’t have The Elder Scrolls’ problem of everyfuckingthing being pick-upable, making it extremely difficult to distinguish meaningful, helpful items from pointless window dressing, particularly if, God forbid, you drop a key item in the room where you’ve been storing all the thousands of wheels of cheese you’ve been hoarding “just in case”. And it doesn’t have the older Dungeons & Dragons games’ problem of sticking a little too rigidly to the tabletop ruleset and consequently not really taking full advantage of the benefits of playing on a computer.

The combat in Shadowrun takes this approach, too. It doesn’t overwhelm you with tactical options, but it does allow you to do things like take cover and use your weapons in a variety of different ways according to your proficiency with them. Not everyone in the party is necessarily a “combat” character, either — my protagonist, for example, is a Decker, which means she’s more suited to marking targets using her knowledge of technology than actually firing a gun or going toe to toe with opponents — though I must admit, this didn’t stop me from outfitting her with retractable cybernetic claws for close combat should the need ever arise. Who doesn’t want to be Cyber-Wolverine?

All in all, Shadowrun Hong Kong has been a pleasure to play so far. It’s telling an interesting story and its mechanics are really solid. Its graphics are nothing special but, having grown up on Baldur’s Gate and Fallout, this really doesn’t bother me all that much — and, like those old classics, Shadowrun’s visual shortcomings are more than made up for by its spectacularly good sound design, with excellent music complemented by ambient sound that shifts in volume and position according to where your character is standing on the map. It’s incredibly atmospheric and does a great job of immersing you in the setting despite unfolding from the typically rather impersonal-feeling isometric viewpoint.

A winner, then. And cheap in GOG.com’s current sale! Grab yourself a copy now and you won’t be disappointed.

2483: Shadows of Hong Kong

0483_001

GOG.com has a sale going on right now; it’s really rather good. Like their previous sales, they have a tiered reward system where if you complete various arbitrary tasks on the website and/or buy a couple of games, you’ll get some freebies, no questions asked. This seemed like an ideal opportunity to acquire a few titles I’ve wanted to grab for a while, even if I didn’t want to play them immediately.

Among the titles I nabbed in the sale today were two of the new Shadowrun games: Shadowrun Hong Kong and Shadowrun Dragonfall. I’ve spent a bit of time with the former this evening and come away very impressed — and a little surprised.

I’m not particularly familiar with the Shadowrun setting, but it’s a concept I like: combining hacking, grime-and-neon cyberpunk with orcs, elves and magic fantasy brings together two of my very favourite things, so Shadowrun was always something I was interested in. I’d just never gotten around to checking it out.

I went in expecting something along the lines of the old Infinity Engine role-playing games — that is to say, largely functional graphics, excellent writing, deep character and party building and a non-linear storyline in which you were free to pursue all manner of different sidequests at your leisure before deciding that yes, now was the right time to go and confront The Big Bad, whoever it was this time around.

What I got from Shadowrun Hong Kong was… almost that, but with enough differences to the standard formula to give it a very distinct identity.

I’ll back up a moment and give you some background. In Shadowrun Hong Kong, you play a player character of your own design, who can be male or female and any of the main races found in the setting: human, ork, elf, dwarf or troll. You can then either pick a starting class or build your own by spending “Karma”, the game’s skill point equivalent. There are no traditional experience points or levels in Shadowrun; you simply gain Karma in varying degrees for accomplishing various tasks. Consequently, you can build some interesting characters without having to “grind” as such.

The opening of Shadowrun Hong Kong sees you contacted by your onetime foster father Raymond Black, who urges you to come to Hong Kong to discuss something very important. When you arrive there, you’re met by your adoptive sibling Duncan, an ork man that you grew up with but subsequently became estranged from following an unfortunate run-in with corporate security in your past. Your reunion is far from joyful, since Duncan doesn’t quite know what to make of you having spent so much time apart from you, and before long it becomes clear that something very bad indeed is going on. A group of mercenaries that Black hired to escort you are murdered along with Duncan’s superior officer Carter, and all of a sudden you’re on the run, thrust into Hong Kong’s seedy underbelly to wipe your old identities clean and take up the mantle of Shadowrunners: individuals who work on the fringes of society, often doing illicit deeds for whoever will pay the most. Your eventual aim is to determine what has become of Black, and perhaps to make sense of some mysterious dreams you start having shortly after the story begins.

So far so RPG. Where Shadowrun Hong Kong diverges from what I expected is in its structure: rather than unfolding in a large open world that you can explore at will a la Baldur’s Gate or the first two Fallout games, Shadowrun Hong Kong is instead mission-based. There’s a “hub” area from which you can interact with NPCs, purchase equipment and accept new missions, but each of these missions are self-contained areas that combine a variety of different gameplay styles, each telling their own mini-story along the way, ultimately — I presume, anyway — combining to tell the entire narrative.

The missions are pretty varied; none of them appear to be simple “get to point X” or “kill Y”. Rather, you’re often given a fairly vague objective — perhaps with some optional additional tasks along the way — and then left up to your own devices to decide how to handle it according to how you’ve built your character and the party you’ve brought with you.

One of the first missions in the game, for example, sees you having to deliver a message from the local crime lord Kindly “Auntie” Cheng to one of her underlings, who has started to take things into his own hands a little too much. In order to get to the recipient, you can fight your way in through the guards that block the entrance (in which case you’ll fail the optional “don’t kill anyone” objective), or you can sneak across the rooftops, or you can hack the electronic locking system in the basement, or you can learn the keycode to another “secret” entrance. Along the way, you’ll encounter a number of side objectives, including assisting a young woman who is researching qi flow in the area and retrieving a stolen credit stick from an old man who is mugged by one of your target’s henchmen. Most of these side objectives can be resolved in multiple ways, too; for example, when attempting to recover the credit stick, you can fight the guy and take it by force, attempt to smooth-talk your way through the situation or use your knowledge of criminal culture (assuming you have it) to appeal to his sense of “honour among thieves”.

If and when combat does erupt, the action switches to mechanics straight out of the more recent XCOM games. Each character has a number of “action points” per round, and these can be used on moving, using items or performing various attacks with their weapons. More powerful techniques, spells or items tend to take multiple action points to perform, and some also have a “cooldown” of a number of rounds before they can be used again. There’s a simple cover-and-flanking system in play, allowing you and your enemies to gain tactical advantages over one another through careful movement, and as your characters grow stronger they have more and more different abilities available to use.

Hacking, meanwhile, results in a gloriously abstract minigame straight out of a 1990s RPG whereby you control an “avatar” of yourself in cyberspace, attempting to avoid the various security measures or brute-forcing your way through using “combat” programs if necessary. Reach your eventual destination — be it a valuable piece of data or simply the method to unlock an electronic door — and you’ll have another minigame within the minigame, whereby you’ll have to remember numerical combinations and then decrypt a sequence of glyphs before time runs out. And, in true cyberpunk tradition, fucking up hacking can damage your physical body, so you have to be careful.

The whole thing is tied together by a wonderfully evocative script written by people who actually know how to write, combining vibrant, descriptive narration with believable dialogue. In many ways, it’s as much a piece of interactive text-based fiction as it is an RPG or tactical strategy game; whatever it is, I really like it so far, and am looking forward to playing some more as a much-needed break from all the Palace of the Dead in FFXIV!

2482: Palace of the Dead: Solo Guide

Been soloing a bunch of Palace of the Dead in Final Fantasy XIV over the last few days, so I thought I’d assemble some tips for those who are looking to challenge it.

General tips

Take your time on the early floors. You want to equal or exceed the boss’ level when you reach it, so clear each floor thoroughly rather than rushing through. You can safely avoid enemies once you hit level 60.
Stay aware of your surroundings at all times. Most floors have patrolling monsters; keep an eye out for these and engage them in the corridors between rooms before pulling the monsters in the rooms themselves.
When fighting on the normal floors, DPS as hard as you can. Summoners, use Garuda-Egi. Tanks, use your DPS stance. The quicker things die, the easier a time you’ll have. In most cases you’ll probably want to concentrate on one enemy at a time — pull from a distance whenever possible.
When fighting bosses, the priority is on doing mechanics rather than DPSing as hard as possible. Summoners, get Titan-Egi to tank for you. Tanks, use your tank stance.
Drink potions whenever you can if you’re not at full health. The last thing you want is to die to a landmine or exploding chest.
Save Pomanders of Serenity for floors where Auto-Heal is disabled. Most of the other floor effects aren’t really anything to worry about, but Auto-Heal not working can really fuck you up.
Don’t use Pomanders of Safety and Pomanders of Sight on the same floor because they’re redundant. Safety removes all traps on the floor, and Sight allows you to see traps and thus avoid them. There’s no need to use both.
Pomanders of Alteration are a gamble best used before you hit 60. If they spawn Mandragora-type enemies on the next floor, that’s free EXP. If they spawn Mimics, however, you’re in for a miserable time.
When using one of the transformation Pomanders, remember that you’re not invincible. The Manticore may be able to kill everything in a single hit (assuming Knockback isn’t disabled by a floor effect) but its HP and defense are the same as yours in your regular form.
Transformations are immune to Toad traps, and Pacification/Silence doesn’t affect the transformation’s ability. Landmines are still very dangerous, however, particularly as you can’t drink a potion to heal yourself while transformed.
Save Pomanders of Resolution for the floor 100 boss. You’ll need all three during the fight.

Enemies to watch out for

Hornets, found in the 1-10 block, have Final Sting, which will do a shitload of damage if you let it go off. You can actually run away from it and avoid the damage if you get far enough away, but it’s best to try and kill the hornet before this happens.
Slimes, found in the 11-20 block, cast Rapture if you take too long killing them. This will almost certainly kill you, so kill them as quickly as you can.
Gaze attacks — marked by a very obvious glowing purple eye over the enemy model while they’re casting it — can be avoided completely by simply turning your back to the enemy. It’s particularly important to do this when dealing with Palace Cobras (petrification), Palace Deepeyes (powerful paralysis) and Palace Pots (Mysterious Light, which causes heavy damage and Blind).
Morbols will show up in the 11-20 block towards the end, complete with Bad Breath attack. Run towards them for the easiest path to avoid the large cone AoE.
Wraiths have a huge AoE attack that causes Terror. If you can stun it, do so. Otherwise, run for dear life as soon as you see the marker appear.
Palace Skatenes will cause Sleep on you shortly after they cast Chirp. This isn’t a huge issue, however, since you’ll wake up immediately upon taking a hit.

Boss tips

Floor 10: Palace Deathgaze

Pretty easy, and if you’ve fought basic Deathgaze-type enemies in the game you’ll know what to expect. It has a heavy attack called Whipcrack that will do a chunk of damage, so pop a potion after it does this. Stormwind (a large cone AoE) and Bombination (circular AoE) can both be avoided. Aerial Blast covers the whole arena and causes Windburn (damage over time for a few seconds). It will cycle through these abilities until one or the other of you are dead.

Floor 20: Spurge

The Easy Way: Level to 35 or 36, pop a Pomander of Strength and a Pomander of Lust and then just go ham on Spurge and you’ll probably kill it before it summons its first set of Hornets if your gear is up to snuff.

The Proper Way: There are two main phases to this fight, and they simply cycle around and around. In the first, Spurge will twat you for a chunk of damage with Bloody Caress, then fling two circle AoE attacks at you — one around itself and one aimed at you. During this time, keep your HP topped up and wail on Spurge as much as you can. The second phase starts when Spurge moves to the side of the arena. At this point, two Hornets will spawn, and Spurge will stay in place, occasionally shooting a large linear AoE attack called Rotten Stench. Avoid Rotten Stench while knocking the Hornets down as quickly as possible — otherwise they will use Final Sting on you — before returning to the punishment on Spurge.

Floor 30: Definitely-Not-Hydra

Pretty easy. When it hits you with Ball of Fire or Ball of Ice, immediately move to avoid the effect of the circular area the attack causes — damage over time for Ball of Fire and slowed movement for Ball of Ice. Keep hitting it while this is going on, and try not to bait any Balls of Fire or Ice into the very middle of the arena. When Definitely-Not-Hydra moves to the centre of the arena and starts casting Fear Itself, stand inside its hitbox to avoid the attack completely. Then repeat the process.

Floor 40: Ixtab

Ixtab will spew void crap over the ground every so often — move out of this to avoid damage. He will then summon two Bhoots which you should kill as quickly as possible to avoid being caught in their attacks. He also has an arena-wide attack that causes Terror, often causing you to stumble into the Bhoots’ area of effect if they’re still up. Aside from this, not a lot else to say.

Floor 50: Edda Blackbosom

Pay close attention to what Edda is doing. If she uses Cold Feet, turn away to avoid its Terror effect. If she uses In Health, you’ll either need to get well away from her or stand right on top of her — react quickly to the AoE marker, but you have plenty of time to get from one extreme to the other if the cast goes off. If you get hit by In Health, one of the letters on the floor will light up. The more of these lit up when she casts Black Honeymoon, the more damage you’ll take. Aside from this, she’s pretty straightforward. Watch out for In Sickness, which causes Disease and slowed movement; cleanse this off yourself if you can.

Floor 60: The Black Rider

A few things to watch out for here. Firstly, keep out of the large purple circles he drops on the ground at all cost — they cause Bleed, which deals heavy damage while you’re in them. Secondly, watch out for the aether sprites he summons around the outside of the arena and don’t get caught in their blasts, as these deal extreme damage. Their appearance will often coincide with his charge attack, a linear AoE marker that follows you around. While this is casting, make sure your back is to a “safe spot” away from the aether sprites to avoid being knocked into their blast radius.

Floor 70: Big Snake Thing

I can’t remember Big Snake Thing’s name, but it’s a big snake thing. The most important thing to do in this fight is move Big Snake Thing out of the watery patches it drops on the ground when it casts Douse. While it is in these areas, it gains Haste, which makes it nigh-impossible to avoid Electrogenesis when it casts. Aside from this, Big Snake Thing should cause you no real difficulty.

Floor 80: Definitely-Not-King-Behemoth

This is a daunting fight, but fairly straightforward if you know how to handle all the mechanics. Firstly, when DNKB casts Charybdis, move well away from the AoE marker because it will drop a tornado. Said tornadoes inflict a heavy damage over time debuff if you get sucked into one, and periodically they will suck in everything around them — there’ll be a very brief AoE marker to show the effective range of this when it happens, so to be safe don’t be anywhere near the tornadoes. Next, when DNKB walks away from you, follow him, because he’s about to use Trounce, a massive conal AoE attack that is much easier to avoid if you’re right next to him. Thirdly, at around 10% HP remaining, he will begin channelling Ecliptic Meteor, and unlike the other times in the game where this happens, there’s nothing to hide behind. Try and kill him before it hits, but don’t worry too much if it does — it hits for about 80% of your HP, so if you’re topped up before it happens, you’ll be safe and free to finish him off after the attack.

Floor 90: The Godmother

This is a bit like the final boss of Pharos Sirius (Hard). Attack The Godmother until a red bomb spawns, at which point you should stun its Blast ability if you can and kill it as quickly as possible while avoiding the AoE markers from the untargetable smaller bombs that spawn around it. When it’s down, return to wailing on The Godmother. When a blue-grey bomb spawns, hit it with an instant ability while facing The Godmother to knock it towards her. You want the blue-grey bomb’s Hydrothermal Combustion ability to hit The Godmother and interrupt her ultimate attack. From here, simply repeat these two processes until The Godmother is down.

Floor 100: Nybeth Obdilord

Try to make sure you have three Pomanders of Resolution by the time you reach floor 100 — block 91-100 seems to throw them at you, but save them up from earlier blocks to be safe if necessary. Nybeth himself isn’t too much of a threat if you take care to avoid his AoEs, particularly the large cone-shaped Doom attack. The important mechanic in this fight is the adds that he spawns at roughly 90%, 70% and 30% of his HP remaining. As soon as they appear, pop a Pomander of Resolution and use Kuribu’s attack to firstly kill the enemies, and then use the ability again on their corpses to remove them permanently from the fight. Click off the transformation before you turn your attention back to Nybeth. Repeat two more times and you’re home free.

2479: Palace of the Dead, Solo

0479_001

One of the things that had me most interested in patch 3.45 for Final Fantasy XIV was the ranking system for the Palace of the Dead dungeon I talked about yesterday. This tallies a score for you whenever you play with a fixed party (be it solo or up to four players) and thus allows you to compare your progress against other players from around the world.

Alongside the introduction of this ranking system came a few rebalancing changes to make soloing Palace of the Dead a lot more practical than it was when it was first introduced; previously, anything above about floor 20 at a push was very difficult if you were by yourself, but now, you can theoretically go up to floor 100 and beyond if you’ve upgraded your gear enough and your skills are up to snuff.

One of the things I’ve appreciated about Palace of the Dead since its launch was the fact that since it’s largely impossible to “outgear” it — your regular gear has no meaning inside, only your Aetherpool upgrade levels, and even those are capped and synced if they’re too high for the floor you’re on and the level you are — you had to actually play properly. That means no cheesing mechanics, no standing in AoEs because you have enough HP to just soak them up, and swift punishment if you don’t know how to play your job properly and effectively, sometimes in an unconventional party lineup.

Today, I made it to floor 60 solo, initially using Arcanist to go as far as floor 50 (my Arcanist hadn’t yet reached level 30 and thus couldn’t be upgraded into Scholar or Summoner, but the experience point rewards from completing these floors were enough to get me from 23 to 30 without too much difficulty) and subsequently as Summoner.

Arcanist/Scholar/Summoner aren’t classes I’ve played much in the past, though I found Palace of the Dead’s accelerated levelling to be quite a good way to learn how they work. In particular, levelling Arcanist to 60 without Summoner’s extra Job abilities was a solid way to learn the basics of how the class worked, then upgrading to Summoner built on that foundation. I am now regretting the fact that I haven’t levelled Summoner prior to today, because goddamn, that class is fun.

The reason I picked Arcanist and Summoner to run solo is that they seemed the most naturally geared towards soloing in that they have the option of summoning a tank pet that can maintain the enemies’ attention while you cover them in festering boils and fling magic at them. The tank pet doesn’t get a lot of use in party play — largely because you normally have an actual human-controlled tank there that can perform the role better than an AI routine — but in Palace of the Dead, Topaz Carbuncle (Arcanist) and Titan-Egi (Summoner) have both proven invaluable, particularly when it comes to the bosses.

And speaking of the bosses, soloing floors 1-60 today has given me a new appreciation of these fights. When tackled in a party of four, they’re mostly rather easy (with the possible exception of floor 80’s boss, which has been the source of many a party wipe so far), though from floor 60 onwards they do start to have some more interesting mechanics. Solo, however, they all present a pretty formidable challenge as you have to dodge their mechanics, chug potions to keep your health topped up (assuming you’re not a healer) and somehow in the middle of all that find time to fling a few damaging abilities in their direction. I’m sure you can already see how helpful a tanking pet would be in this situation!

Thus far the secret to successful soloing seems to be having decently levelled gear — currently mine is around the +64 mark, which has seen me safely to floor 60 so far, and from this point onwards the upgrades from the silver chests are less likely to fail, too, so repeated runs will eventually push it up towards +99, which I suspect will be strongly recommended to tackle floor 80 and onwards.

According to the leaderboards on The Lodestone, no-one on Primal data centre has made it to floor 100 solo yet. I have little doubt that will probably change by tomorrow — I think someone on Reddit from another data centre had done it already — but for now it’s fun taking aim for the top spot. And if I don’t attain that top spot, well, at least I’ll be able to say I’ve done it.