Reviews

Review – BIT.TRIP BEAT (PC)

Gaijin Games | Nov 2nd, 2010

What do you get when you take the simplicity of Pong, a game that involves hitting small square “balls” with a rectangular paddle, and add in some musical aspects, a bit of plot, and ramp up the play mechanics beyond a 2 player game of tennis? Whatever it would be, it’s probably pretty close to BIT.TRIP BEAT. Ok, really the only thing they really share in common is hitting balls with paddles and retro styling. The general premise here is that you must deflect a series of rhythmic balls back with your paddle. They are more or less in time with the beat making this a bit of a Rhythm game, though not really in the traditional, Dance Dance Revolution/Guitar Hero sense. It’s not as straight forward as it seems either. You’ll start out with straight flying balls in a regular fashion but the game quickly becomes more complex with balls that stop or fly in series and move at angles striking just off from one another. It can get pretty complex at times.

As you deflect more you build up a larger multiplier for your score. You also change from various modes depending on how well you’re doing, which actually ramps up the difficulty some. If you continue to do well, you’ll go from all of the balls producing melodic notes and producing flashing sparks down to a very bleak near death black screen with white dots, no background music and only simple beeping to signify that you’ve hit anything. Miss too much in this basic distraction free mode, and it’s Game Over. It’s generally a fun game, you’ve gotta be quick and the chip tune style music is well mixed. It’s a bit short unfortunately. There’s only a few stages and songs to play though each song is pretty long and consists of several “stages” in itself. The recent Valve Potato Themed ARG added a nice Glados themed tune in addition to the original songs.

There’s even some bosses. These bosses are large blocks of balls which come out and shoot parts of themselves at you. There’s a bit of a benefit here because the ball color tends to correspond to how it acts and knowing what a boss is made from can help anticipate how to react. For example, the boss pictured here has simple yellow straight shooting balls but it also has a lot of the orange “bounce” balls which require being juggled for 3 or 4 hops before they leave the area. The simple graphics are charmingly well done as well, though when things start to explode or the background gets a little bright it can make the game difficult to keep track of. This is part of the game’s difficulty though there are times when it feels like kind of a cheap shot at artificially increasing the difficulty. So in summary, BIT.TRIP BEAT is a decent musical retro styled game that should appeal to fans of twitch style rhythm based gameplay. It could stand to be a bit longer but it’s a pretty solid and well made game otherwise.

Review – Din’s Curse (PC)

Mar 23rd, 2011

by Ramen Junkie.

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Note, This review originally appeared on DieHardGame Fan and this game was received for free as a review copy.

Din’s Curse: Demon War
Developer: Soldak Entertainment:
Publisher: Soldak entertainment
Genre: RPG
Release Date: February 23^rd, 2011

Din’s Curse is a Hack’n’Slash style RPG in the vein of Diablo or Icewind Dale. Using a random dungeon generator and real time combat and action, it is a more fast paced Role Playing experience than the more traditional turn based and story driven RPG. Each play through is, by design, different than the previous, though there will be some similar basic ideas and events. Din’s Curse is heavy on the customization options and it adds a lot to this style of game to set it apart from its obvious Diablo roots.

Primary among these differences is the time based nature of many of its quests. Most quests have some level of time limit in play. Some may essentially be infinite where you have to find some object buried deep in the dungeon, others may require more urgent action, such as finding a person from within the dungeon. In most RPG, a rescue mission will generally sit and wait for the player to arrive to initiate some sort of story sequence. In Din’s Curse, if you sit and wait around, the person you’re trying to rescue will likely be killed. Your choices also affect how the town people you’re trying to save will treat you. As you complete more quests for a particular person they may give you free items or discounts on weapons and armor. Completing more quests also will open up more optional quests as people trust you more. You’ll also be helping the townspeople become more powerful in the event that the town starts to become overrun by the monsters in the area.

The original game featured 6 base classes, Warrior, Rogue, Priest, Wizard, Ranger, and Conjurer. Each of these classes have their own skill set to be upgraded as you level up. The skill sets are also divided into more specific class types. For example, the Warrior is divided further into Weaponmaster, Gladiator, and Defender. When creating your character, you can also combine specialties from two different classes to make a custom Hybrid class. You’d first select a primary skill such as Gladiator from the Warrior Class, then you could add a bit of magic with the Warlock specialty from the Conjurer class. Demon War adds the Demon Hunter Class, which is a class specifically designed to kill off Demon type creatures.

1. Story

The core story is one that is fairly generic, you’ve been cursed by the giant God Din and must do his bidding in order to earn your freedom. His bidding involves saving many towns from monsters and plagues and other threats by doing tasks for the people in the towns. It should be noted that the action takes place in the town or in the cave the town has been constructed around. Why the towns folk built their town directly on top of a cave full of monsters is anyone’s guess.

This story is mostly a throw away excuse for the basic replay-ability gimmick. You create a character, you save a town, you move on to another town. The town based gameplay makes for a nice stopping point for anyone wanting to play multiple characters without feeling like they are starting over with the exact same quests they just finished on the previous character.

There are also a large dynamic of mini stories and interactions. The towns and dungeons are randomly generated. They share many of the same basic traits but layouts and the quests that occur are all different each play. There are also time based elements that add to the urgency of the quests. You may find out that some Boss monster is amassing an army on Level 8 of the dungeon but you’re still on Level 2. You’ll have some time to get there but take too long and you’ll find that army storming the town and killing the townspeople. One person may complain they are starving, if you fail to donate to them they’ll soon die off. This randomness is the main draw point of this game.

Story Rating: Very Good

2. Graphics

This game is an RPG in the tabletop sense more than the console sense. This means your hero is fairly generic and it’s up to you to decide his look and story based on your actions and various equipment you find. This also tends to lend itself to an issue of generic-ness among everything. Even the difference between a male and female character are fairly indiscernible. This wouldn’t be so bad except that nearly all of the NPCs also use the same basic character model. The end result is that you have a town full of identical looking dudes being saved by one slightly different looking dude.

The dungeons get a bit better with a few varied environment styles and a decent selection of enemies to fight. Still it’s not always easy to quickly pick out a particular enemy from a group due to the dark and muddy look to everything. This can be particularly annoying if you need to “Kill X number of Y”. What happens is you end up slogging through a swarm of enemies then getting random pop ups stating say, “5 of 10 enemies left”.

The screen can also get confusingly busy times, especially as enemies start dropping items into a groups of enemies. You pick up items by clicking on the name and the name banners are a little large. This can lead to trying to beat back a horde of enemies while accidentally making your character charge head first into the melee to grab some random potion that was dropped. Often the name banners will obscure the screen making it hard to tell what is attacking you and which enemies need dealt with first.

Graphics Rating: Decent

3. Sound

Keeping in line with the somewhat mediocre graphics, the sound is fairly weak as well. There are a fairly limited number of effects to go around and there’s one particularly annoying screeching noise that occurs on a regular basis when certain enemies attack. The sound factor of this game is generally just unremarkable. Not much can be said about it positive or negatively.

Sound Rating: Mediocre

4. Control and Gameplay

Unfortunately, there isn’t any better way to explain the gameplay than to mention Diablo. The gameplay at its core is almost identical to Blizzard’s popular franchise. This isn’t actually a terrible point since it does a good job of mimicking the better aspects of Diablo. It also adds a ton of options and customization not present in Diablo as well which will be touched on in later sections of this review.

The real issue is that there’s almost too much going on at any one time. There’s a ticker of activities that runs in the lower corner of the screen that is easy to overlook. Given the time sensitive nature of many quests this can lead to missing opportunities and not even realizing it. Or worse, failing a quest you’ve picked up without realizing it.

The controls themselves are very basic. Most of the time you’ll be clicking the mouse button repeatedly to attack and move. You also have a pretty standard set of RPG menus to navigate for inventory, stats, equipment, and skills. There are hotkeys that can be assigned for attacks and skills as well.

Control and Gameplay Rating: Above Average

5. Replayability

With the lack of a real overarching story, the random nature is used to essentially create a new game every time you play. The dungeons are randomly generated in each town. A single town can be saved after a couple of hours of gameplay. This is one of the better differences between Din’s Curse and Diablo. This makes it easier to say, play a bit as a fighter, then, start a new game as a thief or try a magic based class. Your characters can be reused after you’ve saved a town, keeping all of their stats and equipment. Over time your characters will become very high level. Fortunately monsters level up to match your character to keep up the challenge.

Another extreme plus for replay is the shared chest. Your character has a personal chest for storing loot that is found that may not be immediately useful or that the player simply wants to keep. There is also a shared chest available which all characters can access. This is great for when your Fighter finds a good magic augmenting weapon that a Wizard could use.

The point is that the replay factor is fairly high. There’s good breaks in the flow to allow players to feel less like they are abandoning a character for another one and there’s plenty of options to help keep the player on their toes for future rounds. The built in randomness makes it less repetitive to try a new character as well. With the ability to mix classes for custom characters creating nearly 200 class combinations, you’ll want to play several characters at a time.

Replayability Rating: Incredible

6. Balance

This is one area that the game has working for it. There is a nice system in place when you start a Town that allows you to set the level of the monsters compared to your own level. If you’re having trouble you can set them really low level. If you think it’s too easy, feel free to level up the monsters higher than your character. If that’s not good enough you can also enable several custom options to make the game trickier such as the need to eat regularly or the option to play “Hardcore” mode where when you die, that’s it.

Balance Rating: Great

7. Originality

The basic concept presented here isn’t anything overly original. There have been plenty of item collecting dungeon crawling RPGs in the past. Din’s Curse does add a good amount of originality for it’s open style of gameplay however. You’re not locked into one set storyline and you’re not even limited by the idea that you may actually fail to save the town you’re trying to save. Things may simply all fall against your favor and the place becomes overrun. There will be another town to come back to next round. It’s not excessively original in its concept but if it were too different it wouldn’t appeal to its core target.

Originality Rating: Good

8. Addictiveness

Din’s Curse definitely falls into a category of gaming that relies on compulsion. The need to find better gear or to keep going because one more quest won’t take THAT long to finish is pretty good. The gameplay is a bit repetitive but it also has a good factor of regular reward. None of the quests are overly difficult or tedious to complete which gives it a bit of a casual gameplay feel despite its larger more time consuming RPG core. The myriad of options also work well to keep a player interested.

There’s also an online component to allow you to play with friends. This only helps push the competitive desire to keep going.

Addictiveness Rating: Good

9. Appeal Factor

Fans of dungeon crawlers and item gathering will like this game and all of its options. If you have an overwhelming need to fight monster after monster hoping for the last drop of your special Uber rare set item this game will deliver it to you. For the rest of us it gets a bit repetitious after a few rounds. There isn’t a ton of variety in the quests and the endless crummy items that are good for nothing but selling off in town get old fairly quickly. In short, if you like Diablo 1 or 2, you’ll probably like this game.

Appeal Factor Rating: Very Good

10. Miscellaneous

The real factor that sets this game apart is it’s dynamically generated gameplay. I know I’ve mentioned this before but it is a strong component of the game that makes it unique and helps make up for some of its presentation flaws. The simpler graphics and sound aren’t anything groundbreaking and does add some charm to the game. I used to be a huge fan of RPGs but as time went on, I found I had less and less time to spend on a lengthy story. Din’s Curse does a pretty good job of taking the RPG style of game play and making it more digestible in byte sized components. The random level system is great for this and the almost “Stage Style” nature of the Towns makes it easy to get into a game for a bit, complete a town, then take a break and come back later for some more. You don’t feel like you’re abandoning your characters and you don’t have to try to remember what you were doing last time you played it. Unlike Diablo, you’re not going to be playing the same two dozen quests every time you start a new game either. Yes there is some repetition and similarities in quests but there’s enough variety to make it less noticeable. Demon War also adds some options to engage Town People in combat so if you really want you can just go completely Chaotic Evil and slaughter everyone instead of saving them.

Miscellaneous Rating: Great

Story Rating: Very Good
Graphics Rating: Decent
Sound Rating: Mediocre
Control and Gameplay Rating: Above Average
Replayability Rating: Incredible
Balance Rating: GreatOriginality Rating: Good
Addictiveness Rating: Good
Appeal Factor Rating: Very Good
Miscellaneous Rating: Great

Overall Rating: Good

Short Attention Span Summary:

Din’s Curse is a decent Diablo style clone that takes the core formula and adds a lot to it. It’s primary drawback comes in its slightly dull presentation and somewhat repetitive gameplay, though the repetitiveness is part of the territory when it comes to this style of RPG.

Review – Shatter (PC)

Mar 15th, 2011

by Ramen Junkie.

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Sidhe | March 15th, 2011

I seem to be picking up a lot on Breakout clones lately. Or maybe it’s just games that at the core are remakes of older classics I’ve been hitting a lot lately. I suppose it’s an easy gimmick, take something people like, flashy it up and add a new gimmick or two, then throw it out into the world. I’m not really complaining or anything but Shatter, like BIT.TRIP BEAT and Meteor, has it’s core in the game Breakout.

It adds a few gimmicks to help keep it fresh at least.

It’s kind of hard to mention the music and graphics without admitting that I am biased. I am a total sucker these days for these style of flashy bright colored graphics with a heavy techno soundtrack. It’s like going to a rave without all of the crowds of people and drugs. In fact I enjoyed the soundtrack enough that I bought it and listen to it pretty regularly in a line between my BT tracks and the Portal 2 soundtrack.

The core gameplay involves clearing fields of blocks by reflecting a ball at them. As I mentioned before, Breakout. One interesting mechanic that has been added however is the ability to attract and repulse the ball from your paddle. This can be used to manipulate it’s path and clear out blocks more quickly. The push/pull mechanic also works on the little score diamonds you collect throughout the game, which can be useful for maximizing your score. You can push a pile of chits away until a score multiplier drops then suck them all in at once. This of course will also affect your ball so you’ll still have to be careful not to let it careen off the playing field.

There are also several different styles of playing fields. The horizontal and vertical oriented arenas are pretty easy to handle, the tricky one comes in the round arena. The physics feel a bit off to me which I find makes directing the ball to be a bit tricky. Also however the programming was designed to handle the push pull it doesn’t always work as expected on the circular stages. I’ve found that more often one will veer the ball to the left or right versus actually pulling the ball in the expected direction. It can be a bit tricky to follow but it’s not something that can’t be adapted to.

There are several modes available to play, most of which are to be expected in an arcade style game, story, time attack, endless, and bonus modes. The story mode is essentially a sequence of increasingly difficult stages with some “bosses” at the end of each world. The bonus mode is rather interesting. You get only 3 balls and you have to keep them going for as long as you can to rack up a high score.

There is also a coop mode available so you can play with your friends.

It’s quite a bit of fun if you like quick simpler arcade style gameplay. There are no major flaws with the gameplay or presentation which makes for a pretty solid experience.

Review – Poker Night at the Inventory (PC)

Nov 22nd, 2010

by Ramen Junkie.

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Telltale Games | Nov 22, 2010

So Telltale games, makers of something like 90% of the Adventure games on the market (maybe) had an interesting idea. Why not take the idea of computer poker, and instead of playing against made up kooky PC characters you don’t recognizes, why not throw in a cast of known characters from popular games and nerd sites.

Thus, you end up with Poker Night at the Inventory. You play poker against Tycho from Penny-Arcade, The Heavy, of Team Fortress 2 Fame, Telltale’s defacto mascot, Max, from the Sam & max series, and Strong Bad from the popular web series Homestar Runner. I didn’t even realize Homestar Runner was still around personally but hey, whatevs.

The Poker part of the game is limited to Texas Hold Em style poker. It’s not a game style I’d played recently, most of my Poker experience is in Draw Poker. It’s not too difficult once you get the hand of it though I find the game is based a little more on chance than I care for. This brings up Poker Night’s biggest flaw. Texas Hold Em, as near as I can tell, is very much a game of bluffing. This could be pretty interesting with real humans to compete against since you can “read” them or whatever. When you’re playing against a bunch of computer controlled AIs, this thrill is almost non existent. The characters do have some built in little stories and tells but everything really just seems to be randomly played. It’s not real obvious who is bluffing and who has something.

This also works the other way. It’s pretty much impossible to truly bluff the PC AI. The closest I’ve found is that shoving your entire pot in at once will cause all of the characters to gasp and often will force them to fold. Often, but not always, and they will almost just as often bet it all and go bust with nothing. Someone needs to tell the AI that calling a bluff when you have even a pair is risky but doable, but calling a massive bluff with “queen high” then going bust is kind of a stupid move.

Speaking of the table chatter though. It gets old. There was a bug on the initial release that caused the dialogue to not be as random as it was supposed to be, but even with that bug fixed, hearing the same 2 or 3 stories out of the 4 characters gets a little old.

So you don’t have the risk of real money poker, but you do get the monotony of playing cards against a computer for nothing, which is fun for a bit but gets a little old after a while. Still, the game is extremely cheap and if you are into Team Fortress 2 you can earn some fun special items from the players so the $5 price point is pretty decent.The real missed opportunity here is in DLC. Telltale doesn’t seem to have any desire to push any sort of DLC fo this game but the potential is huge. Just think, for maybe another dollar each, they could add more character packs. Then each game could be built from 4 random characters from the pool. Even sticking with the pool of sources used, the obvious additions of Sam, Gabe, Any other TF2 Class, and Homestar Runner would be entertaining. Maybe they just charge another $5 for a new set + new play style. The option to pick between different Poker play styles would be another welcome addition.

Review – Movie – Julie & Julia

Oct 3rd, 2010

by Ramen Junkie.

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2009 – Meryl Streep, Amy Adams

So, there aren’t really too many movies about cooking. There’s probably others but the only other one I can think of off the top of my head is Ratatouille. If you haven’t figured out yet based on the cooking them of this film and the title containing the name Julia, the movie is about Julia Child.

It’s also a movie about some woman named Julie Powell.

I say also because this film is essentially two movies in one spliced together in 10 minute segments. This is possibly the movie’s biggest drawback. The plot of the film, in the sense of, the half of the movie involving conflict and resolution, involves Julie Powell, a frustrated working woman who decides to relieve her stress by challenging herself to cook all 500 or so recipes in Julia Child’s cook book, The Joy of Cooking in a 365 day time frame. Julie also blogs about her activities and gains a bit of attention over it. Interlaced within this plot is a bio pic about how Julia Childs got started in her cooking career. There are a few vague parallels involved with some of the events in Julia’s life and the troubles Julie goes through on her endeavors to help tie the two stories together.

The movie in general falls mostly into the “charming cute comedy” bracket. As I watched I kept wondering when it would turn into some sort of romantic comedy but there’s not much element to that particular genre involved here. Both Julie and Julia’s spouses are involved in the plot of each respective story but mostly in a supporting role. As such, there are a few laughs and if you’re interested in the life of Julia Child it’s certainly an interesting story to watch.

The real issue I have is that there’s very little to the plot. Part of what makes a good story is some sort of… something…. happening. Julia goes to cooking school and edits a cookbook, Julia writes her blog and cooks her food. There’s some vague issues that pop up but they are all quickly resolved. Also, most disappointing, the expected ultimate culmination of events, that is, Julie meets Julia, never occurs.

Now, I suppose it’s somewhat forgivable, I suppose that’s the limitation you get when you base a story on real life events. It just helped to seal the film’s ultimate empty feeling. Basically, it’s not necessarily a boring, there just isn’t much that happens that isn’t expected.