That's another reason why I'm so happy about the success of Double Fine's kickstarter -- it's made some of the developers of the great old RPGs take notice, and start to consider funding projects in a similar fashion.
I thought he was referring to Chris Avellone specifically. Some ex-Bioware devs are working on The Banner Saga and are looking to Kickstart that as well("in the coming weeks"), though they didn't work specifically on any legacy projects.
I was referring to Chris Avellone in particular (in combination with Tim Cain, who's currently at Obsidian), but I did also see the news about the Wasteland Kickstarter. If that actually manages to work out, it would be fantastic. I have my doubts though.
I think if the Kickstarter for Wasteland actually succeeds the sequel would probably end up closer in terms of gameplay to Fallout 1 and 2 then the original Wasteland .
I have yet to play an indie game I can't get through in an afternoon (even with all 20 trinkets in VVVVVV), so that's not really much of a surprise to me.
Today's Daily Deal is Eufloria, a game I know nothing about. £2.24 / $3.74
Eufloria is basically a space battle RTS that has a very lovely organic and artsy "flower" skin over it. There is no multiplayer, but the campaign is pretty solid. You claim planets, plant "seeds" which produce trees which are your "factories", and they produce seedlings which act as your units. Planets have different properties and pass them onto the trees, so the goal is to take control of the planets that are the best/that best fit your strategy so that your influence spreads faster than that of your AI opponent.
The game's mechanics are really simple and easy to grasp, but it's not really easy either. It's a solid game and I really enjoyed it, and it's obvious that a lot of care went into the aesthetics of it.
Eufloria is basically a space battle RTS that has a very lovely organic and artsy "flower" skin over it. There is no multiplayer, but the campaign is pretty solid. You claim planets, plant "seeds" which produce trees which are your "factories", and they produce seedlings which act as your units. Planets have different properties and pass them onto the trees, so the goal is to take control of the planets that are the best/that best fit your strategy so that your influence spreads faster than that of your AI opponent.
The game's mechanics are really simple and easy to grasp, but it's not really easy either. It's a solid game and I really enjoyed it, and it's obvious that a lot of care went into the aesthetics of it.
This. It took me a week to get to level ten and then I kinda wimped out because I knew I hadn't built my character well enough to take on Dredmor. And then I got the DLC which added five more levels. Hmpf.
Today's Daily Deal is The Guild II, a mix between an RPG and a life simulator. Or something. £2.24 / $2.49
There's also a couple of bundles with the game and its add-ons, so if you're into that sort of thing, you might want to check out the actual store page for all the details.
Today's Daily Deal is The Guild II, a mix between an RPG and a life simulator. Or something. £2.24 / $2.49
Great game. And for that price it's well worth getting. The screenshots on Steam don't say anything about what the game is really like, but check out playthroughs on Youtube if you're unsure.
Today's Daily Deal is Dead Mountaineer's Hotel, a good ol' fashioned point-'n'-click adventure game.
£1.74 / $2.49, and you can't really go wrong at that price.
Do you disagree that it was an adventure game or that it was the best adventure game of 2011?
Both. I don't agree that it's an adventure game not for mechanical reasons(first person, no inventory, physics/portal gun mechanics), but rather structural ones. It would be somewhat difficult to get in fully here, but the reason Loom is an adventure game and Portal is not comes down largely to an overall structure, the same way Star Wars is more of a fantasy film than a science fiction one due to a lot of underlying structural elements.
I used to be in the camp that saw Portal as an adventure game, in a way. On the surface it has a lot of core elements of the genre(puzzle completion as the gate for progression tied into an overarching narrative). The thing is that the adventure genre has a structural difference from puzzle games, and it seems that this kind of flippant application of the term "adventure" has opened the genre name for use by games that are puzzle games that happen to have stories, and puts "narrative" in an "equal but separate" place from "gameplay", and leads to foolish ideas like "Crappy puzzles in an adventure game can be made up for by solid story".
The first major issue is exploration. Adventure games utilize exploration in a lot of ways, and have always been somewhat nonlinear in their own right. Now, you or others might be thinking of examples right now of games that have gone from puzzle room to puzzle room, with many aspects of an adventure(central character, mouse-based navigation, inventory use, conversation trees, etc etc), and are ready to argue this point right away, so I'm going to defend my stance on this:
Adventure games, even linear adventure games, feature exploration within a given frame. You reach out into the world without knowing, for example, what each thing is or how it exactly works. Even if you go from room to room in a linear fashion in an adventure game, each room gives you objects to explore. Portal's rooms aren't exploration-friendly. Unlike in the more linear parts of Machinarium, for instance, you are not invited to reach out and touch everything, to see the reactions of half a dozen new objects in every scene that will not repeat functionality(but this time slightly more complex!) in the next 5 rooms.
The next issue is that adventure game narrative cannot be separated from adventure game gameplay. Puzzles mechanically flow from the narrative, they aren't "excused by", "explained by", or "alongside" a narrative.
If you abstract out the vast majority of adventure game puzzles into core mechanics, they are nonsense. If you abstract out the vast majority of Portal's puzzles into core mechanics, you have physics puzzles. Q.U.B.E. is very similar to Portal in a lot of ways, but it lacks a narrative. It's not an adventure game, it's a puzzle game. Is Portal considered a puzzle game merely because they added voice acting and animations to puzzle-irrelevant plot sections? Is being a series of heavily focus-tested "puzzle rooms" excused, in terms of informing what *genre* the game actually is, simply because narrative aspects exist as basic framing?
I also disagree about the "best" part, even if we call it an adventure game for whatever reason. Portal 2's single-player campaign was, to me, disappointing in a lot of respects. Just as I started getting really interested, we move on to a new idea, and I'm back to doing simple tutorials because some people in Focus Group B started getting confused. Structurally, Portal 2 has an extremely awkward difficulty curve that forces you to be treated like a rote beginner several times throughout the experience. The co-op mode is better(and in fact it's really really good), but I doubt this is what people refer to because the concept of a narrative in the co-op mode is even less emphasized, and someone who is paying less attention can still see it as more of a physics puzzle game than an adventure, the way they seem to be branding the single-player campaign.
The rest was too long though, so I'll take your word for it.
EDIT: I assume you mean, Portal might be an adventure game, but it's not an Adventure Game adventure game. In the same vein as that Braid isn't an adventure game.
Darkness II - $24.99 Darksiders - $4.99 Payday: The Heist - $4.99 Saint’s Row The Third - $24.99 Warhammer 40K Space Marine - $14.99 Red Faction Armageddon - $4.99 Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II Retribution Complete Pack - $19.99
Today's Daily Deal is... uh oh. It's Jurassic Park: The Game. Gah, we're gonna get so many people saying how s**t it is. Oh well. It's crap, but it's only £7.47 / $10.19, so you pays your money and you takes your chances.
The Midweek Madness is also up and it's... Assassin's Creed: Revelations. Apparently to celebrate the release of the new single-player DLC The Lost Archive (not on offer), Revelations is half-price at £14.99 / $24.99.
I am SO tempted, I really am.
Couple of oddities on Steam I feel like mentioning. First is yet another Painkiller game. This one's called Recurring Evil and ISN'T ON THE UK PAGE YET GRR. It's also promising over 5,000 'uniquely spawned individual enemies', which is a nice way of saying it's little more than a cluckerf**k.
There's also another DLC pack for Saints Row: The Third, so if you didn't get the season pass you're gonna be out of money pretty damn quick. This one's the inevitable vampire pack, because SR:TT already has zombies.
The Midweek Madness is also up and it's... Assassin's Creed: Revelations. Apparently to celebrate the release of the new single-player DLC The Lost Archive (not on offer), Revelations is half-price at £14.99 / $24.99.
I am SO tempted, I really am.
It's definitely fun, but I would wait until it's at a deeper discount. It's just a really short game (maybe 5-6 hours for the main story), not worth full price.
I wouldn't buy it, no matter what the price is, because by doing so you're only supporting them in making these kind of things. And really i wouldn't know what to do with it beside of maybe using it as a showcase for demonstrating what can go wrong in game design and other aspects but i own other bad games already and there always is YouTube.
I need to stop buying games. At least until I can complete a few more of them so I don't feel like I'm just throwing my money at developers so that I can look at a digital photograph of boxart.
I'm going to stay away from sales and bundles for a while. I've spent a lot on them in the past few months. My wallet needs a break and my savings account is gathering dust.
I wouldn't buy it, no matter what the price is, because by doing so you're only supporting them in making these kind of things. And really i wouldn't know what to do with it beside of maybe using it as a showcase for demonstrating what can go wrong in game design and other aspects but i own other bad games already and there always is YouTube.
Hey, that's your call. I'll probably pick it up on XBox once I've finished Brotherhood (sometime in 2014, at this rate).
Midweek Madness
In celebration of the launch of the latest DLC, The Lost Archive, take 50% off of Assassin's Creed Revelations!
Offer Ends Thursday at 4pm Pacific Time.
-50%
$24.99 USD
Today's Daily Deal is... uh oh. It's Jurassic Park: The Game. Gah, we're gonna get so many people saying how s**t it is. Oh well. It's crap, but it's only £7.47 / $10.19, so you pays your money and you takes your chances.
I caved in and bought it. Let's see how bad it really is.
It's definitely fun, but I would wait until it's at a deeper discount. It's just a really short game (maybe 5-6 hours for the main story), not worth full price.
To be it 5-6 hours, you have to run through the story like a mad man. A more or less normal playthrough of main story alone would take 10 hours, which is still not much, I agree. But, personally, I've got 30 hours out of the single-player experience (was being a completionist AND still didn't get full 100% synchronization yet) AND more than 20 hours of multi-player fun. And 50 hours of enjoyable experience for 25$ is really not bad. And I even consider it, personally, to be worth the original price tag because I'll continue playing the multiplayer.
EDIT: Which reminds me... the DLC 'The Lost Archive' is total bullshit, buy it only if it will be, like, at 2$. I had hopes UbiSoft fixed the first-person view experience for it, but... it's still annoying as hell. Actually, originally I had hoped that the DLC would be a third-person experience (because Desmond Memories gameplay kinda... sucked)... and I REALLY hoped that it would be more Altair action (because... yeah. For a game where Altair's return was advertised so largely, he's in the game roughly for the same amount of time as Cristina is in AC:B...).... but after I learned that it's the first-person thing, hoped they'd fix it and make it more fun... they didn't...
Eh, I'd probably still buy that DLC - if the price was right.
Today's Daily Deal is RIFT, the Mumorpeger. 4.99, whatever your currency (grr). You'll need a credit card to activate this, since it's a subscription-based MMO, but the first month is free with the game itself.
There's also a Collector's Edition with a few extra bits for a few extra bucks - check the store page.
To be it 5-6 hours, you have to run through the story like a mad man. A more or less normal playthrough of main story alone would take 10 hours, which is still not much, I agree. But, personally, I've got 30 hours out of the single-player experience (was being a completionist AND still didn't get full 100% synchronization yet) AND more than 20 hours of multi-player fun. And 50 hours of enjoyable experience for 25$ is really not bad. And I even consider it, personally, to be worth the original price tag because I'll continue playing the multiplayer.
EDIT: Which reminds me... the DLC 'The Lost Archive' is total bullshit, buy it only if it will be, like, at 2$. I had hopes UbiSoft fixed the first-person view experience for it, but... it's still annoying as hell. Actually, originally I had hoped that the DLC would be a third-person experience (because Desmond Memories gameplay kinda... sucked)... and I REALLY hoped that it would be more Altair action (because... yeah. For a game where Altair's return was advertised so largely, he's in the game roughly for the same amount of time as Cristina is in AC:B...).... but after I learned that it's the first-person thing, hoped they'd fix it and make it more fun... they didn't...
Well, I may have been exaggerating a bit, but not by too much. 100% completion for me took around 15-18 hours, with around 2/3 of it taken up by side missions, and some of that spent sitting around waiting for money to build up so I could buy those stupidly expensive books. I also found Revelations much, much easier than the previous two games, and never really had to replay a sequence to get 100%. So yeah, ymmv.
I do agree the bizarre 1st person puzzle sequences suck. You can tell they were developed by an external studio.
Comments
Well, not just consider.
I was referring to Chris Avellone in particular (in combination with Tim Cain, who's currently at Obsidian), but I did also see the news about the Wasteland Kickstarter. If that actually manages to work out, it would be fantastic. I have my doubts though.
Super Meat Boy?
That one. It cannot be done that fast. No way.
Also: Eschalon Book 1
Yes, these are all games that I acquired after making that post over two months ago and have not yet played, save for a few minutes of Dredmor.
Today's Daily Deal is Eufloria, a game I know nothing about. £2.24 / $3.74
Oh shut up. I've only gotten to Mom once. And I didn't win. And that was only after some incredibly lucky powerup acqusitions.
The game's mechanics are really simple and easy to grasp, but it's not really easy either. It's a solid game and I really enjoyed it, and it's obvious that a lot of care went into the aesthetics of it.
I must have.
This. It took me a week to get to level ten and then I kinda wimped out because I knew I hadn't built my character well enough to take on Dredmor. And then I got the DLC which added five more levels. Hmpf.
There's also a couple of bundles with the game and its add-ons, so if you're into that sort of thing, you might want to check out the actual store page for all the details.
Great game. And for that price it's well worth getting. The screenshots on Steam don't say anything about what the game is really like, but check out playthroughs on Youtube if you're unsure.
£1.74 / $2.49, and you can't really go wrong at that price.
I used to be in the camp that saw Portal as an adventure game, in a way. On the surface it has a lot of core elements of the genre(puzzle completion as the gate for progression tied into an overarching narrative). The thing is that the adventure genre has a structural difference from puzzle games, and it seems that this kind of flippant application of the term "adventure" has opened the genre name for use by games that are puzzle games that happen to have stories, and puts "narrative" in an "equal but separate" place from "gameplay", and leads to foolish ideas like "Crappy puzzles in an adventure game can be made up for by solid story".
The first major issue is exploration. Adventure games utilize exploration in a lot of ways, and have always been somewhat nonlinear in their own right. Now, you or others might be thinking of examples right now of games that have gone from puzzle room to puzzle room, with many aspects of an adventure(central character, mouse-based navigation, inventory use, conversation trees, etc etc), and are ready to argue this point right away, so I'm going to defend my stance on this:
Adventure games, even linear adventure games, feature exploration within a given frame. You reach out into the world without knowing, for example, what each thing is or how it exactly works. Even if you go from room to room in a linear fashion in an adventure game, each room gives you objects to explore. Portal's rooms aren't exploration-friendly. Unlike in the more linear parts of Machinarium, for instance, you are not invited to reach out and touch everything, to see the reactions of half a dozen new objects in every scene that will not repeat functionality(but this time slightly more complex!) in the next 5 rooms.
The next issue is that adventure game narrative cannot be separated from adventure game gameplay. Puzzles mechanically flow from the narrative, they aren't "excused by", "explained by", or "alongside" a narrative.
If you abstract out the vast majority of adventure game puzzles into core mechanics, they are nonsense. If you abstract out the vast majority of Portal's puzzles into core mechanics, you have physics puzzles. Q.U.B.E. is very similar to Portal in a lot of ways, but it lacks a narrative. It's not an adventure game, it's a puzzle game. Is Portal considered a puzzle game merely because they added voice acting and animations to puzzle-irrelevant plot sections? Is being a series of heavily focus-tested "puzzle rooms" excused, in terms of informing what *genre* the game actually is, simply because narrative aspects exist as basic framing?
I also disagree about the "best" part, even if we call it an adventure game for whatever reason. Portal 2's single-player campaign was, to me, disappointing in a lot of respects. Just as I started getting really interested, we move on to a new idea, and I'm back to doing simple tutorials because some people in Focus Group B started getting confused. Structurally, Portal 2 has an extremely awkward difficulty curve that forces you to be treated like a rote beginner several times throughout the experience. The co-op mode is better(and in fact it's really really good), but I doubt this is what people refer to because the concept of a narrative in the co-op mode is even less emphasized, and someone who is paying less attention can still see it as more of a physics puzzle game than an adventure, the way they seem to be branding the single-player campaign.
The rest was too long though, so I'll take your word for it.
EDIT: I assume you mean, Portal might be an adventure game, but it's not an Adventure Game adventure game. In the same vein as that Braid isn't an adventure game.
Reminder: The above sale ends tomorrow.
The Midweek Madness is also up and it's... Assassin's Creed: Revelations. Apparently to celebrate the release of the new single-player DLC The Lost Archive (not on offer), Revelations is half-price at £14.99 / $24.99.
I am SO tempted, I really am.
Couple of oddities on Steam I feel like mentioning. First is yet another Painkiller game. This one's called Recurring Evil and ISN'T ON THE UK PAGE YET GRR. It's also promising over 5,000 'uniquely spawned individual enemies', which is a nice way of saying it's little more than a cluckerf**k.
There's also another DLC pack for Saints Row: The Third, so if you didn't get the season pass you're gonna be out of money pretty damn quick. This one's the inevitable vampire pack, because SR:TT already has zombies.
It's definitely fun, but I would wait until it's at a deeper discount. It's just a really short game (maybe 5-6 hours for the main story), not worth full price.
In celebration of the launch of the latest DLC, The Lost Archive, take 50% off of Assassin's Creed Revelations!
Offer Ends Thursday at 4pm Pacific Time.
-50%
$24.99 USD
This is so tempting for me
I caved in and bought it. Let's see how bad it really is.
To be it 5-6 hours, you have to run through the story like a mad man. A more or less normal playthrough of main story alone would take 10 hours, which is still not much, I agree. But, personally, I've got 30 hours out of the single-player experience (was being a completionist AND still didn't get full 100% synchronization yet) AND more than 20 hours of multi-player fun. And 50 hours of enjoyable experience for 25$ is really not bad. And I even consider it, personally, to be worth the original price tag because I'll continue playing the multiplayer.
EDIT: Which reminds me... the DLC 'The Lost Archive' is total bullshit, buy it only if it will be, like, at 2$. I had hopes UbiSoft fixed the first-person view experience for it, but... it's still annoying as hell. Actually, originally I had hoped that the DLC would be a third-person experience (because Desmond Memories gameplay kinda... sucked)... and I REALLY hoped that it would be more Altair action (because... yeah. For a game where Altair's return was advertised so largely, he's in the game roughly for the same amount of time as Cristina is in AC:B...).... but after I learned that it's the first-person thing, hoped they'd fix it and make it more fun... they didn't...
Today's Daily Deal is RIFT, the Mumorpeger. 4.99, whatever your currency (grr). You'll need a credit card to activate this, since it's a subscription-based MMO, but the first month is free with the game itself.
There's also a Collector's Edition with a few extra bits for a few extra bucks - check the store page.
Well, I may have been exaggerating a bit, but not by too much. 100% completion for me took around 15-18 hours, with around 2/3 of it taken up by side missions, and some of that spent sitting around waiting for money to build up so I could buy those stupidly expensive books. I also found Revelations much, much easier than the previous two games, and never really had to replay a sequence to get 100%. So yeah, ymmv.
I do agree the bizarre 1st person puzzle sequences suck. You can tell they were developed by an external studio.