Dungeon Crawler Mis-genre-ing

Like all things I seem to really enjoy, Dungeon Crawling is one of those niche genres that doesn't have wide appeal but does have an insanely dedicated following of fans.  I'm almost certain that in the past on this blog I've gushed, at length, about how much I love this style of game but for this post I'm here to complain about something that really chaps my ass which is the misgenre-ing (if that's even a word) of games in this genre.

A dungeon crawler is typically an offshoot of the RPG genre that revolves around an individual or group of people navigating a big maze, solving puzzles, killing monsters and surviving with what little resources they have all usually in first person.  Famous titles in this genre include Dungeon Master (Pictured above), Shin Megami Tensei, Legend of Grimrock, Etrian Odyssey and many more.  The real interesting part about this genre is that a large number of titles will require or ask the player if they want to draw their own maps.  Back in the day if you wanted to effectively navigate these dungeons you'd have to break out some square paper and get drawing.  More modern titles have an automap but, for example, Grimrock will ask the player if they would like to turn the map off or Etrian Odyssey actively forces you to draw your own map on the bottom screen of the DS.

You know what isn't a dungeon crawler though? Diablo, Zelda, any of those roguelikes on Steam.  Diablo is the one that comes up most of all whenever I go looking for dungeon crawl recommendations.  I don't have a problem with Diablo, it's a good game, but Diablo is an action RPG loot fest, extremely far removed from the style of game I'm usually looking for.

The reason this gets my back up is because dungeon crawling is an extremely niche genre and it's been mislabeled so much that now, finding a traditional style dungeon crawl is extremely difficult.  If you go on Steam and type in "dungeon crawl", you get a mix of classic RPGs and rougelikes with the occasional actual dungeon crawl peppered in there.  If I wanted a fucking roguelike, I'd search for fucking roguelikes, but I want a goddamn dungeon crawl.

Still, despite seemingly no one know what a proper dungeon crawl is, all is not lost.  There's a website dedicated to enthusiasts of the genre

http://www.dungeoncrawlers.org/

Not a hack and slash or action adventure in sight.  It's dungeon crawling heaven in there, from old to new, so go check it out.

Mahjong Madness #1

Silent Hill Book of Memories is THE WORST Game Ever Made

I'm so happy I didn't pay for this game.  I'm "happy" that it was given to me for free via my PS+ subscription on my Vita before Sony stopped making that a thing.  For a long time I thought that Silent Hill: Homecoming was the worst Silent Hill but this thing really steals this shit show like nothin' else.  But not only is it easily the worst Silent Hill game it is quite possibly the worst video game ever made BAR NONE.  Worse than Hydlide, worse than Action 52, worse than any game you could possibly ever mention.

The story, what little of it I've bothered to pay attention to, is about a guy who gets a book of memories.  The book is sort of like a Death Note but it comes pre written with everything that's happened to you up to that point.  You are then free to change the contents and the book will bend reality to fit whatever it is you wrote in it.  It's actually, in a non-Silent Hill setting, not a bad idea for a plot but that combined with the fact it's told almost entirely through poorly written notes and poorly voiced audio clips makes it completely uninteresting.

Game play wise Book of Memories is a hack and slash game with random dungeons.  Think Diablo but instead of having a huge budget it was made by a team that seem to have been paid about 32p and given a single tube of Pringles to share.  You start by making an incredibly generic looking character and picking a "gift", which ends up doing fucking nothing and then hacking your way through a bunch of dungeons until you reach a boss.  Rinse and repeat until you finish all the worlds.

The combat is clunky, unsatisfying and lacks any challenge whatsoever.  Part of the lack of challenge comes from the fact that your stats and gear don't actually mean ANYTHING.  The only stat that matters is strength and MAYBE if you want to make the game even easier on yourself, throw a few points into vitality.  Strength does the obvious thing of making you hit harder and Vit makes your first aid kits heal for more and makes your character harder to hit.  Couple this with the enemy AI being dumber than a pile of rocks and you've got one really tedious game.  Assuming that you have working fingers and you're more than 6 months old, the only enemies you MIGHT die to are the Bogeymen (From Downpour) because he's got a heal, and an AOE ground pound that takes 70% of your life and the Insane Cancer's (3) that explode when they die and if they hit it does about 90% damage.

The absolute worst part of this game though is the sound design.  There's no point during play you won't be either extremely annoyed or cringing so hard that your body turns inside out.  Go and look up an old game called Dark Castle, either play it yourself or watch the AVGN episode of it or something, but Homecoming sounds almost EXACTLY like that.

This is hands down, the worst game ever made.  The development team behind it should be ashamed.  I don't know diddly jack shit about video game development outside of making text adventures with Python and I could probably shit out a better game in a week doing everything by myself.  The worst part is that it tries to worm itself into the series by changing the character motivations from the first few games but thinking about it just makes me too mad but there's plenty of YouTube content out there that explains that side of it.

If you ever see it on sale, run, run and never look back

Gun Nac 1 Credit Clear

Had this video set to private for ages, oops!

Tau and Friends Play Silent Hill Part 3

River City Ransom

So I finished River City Ransom on Stream a few days ago and despite it being my second time to finish this game I've never said anything about it on this blog, which is weird considering how good it is.

On the off chance that you're not familiar, River City Ransom was a game released in 1989 for the NES and you play as a dude called Alex, and maybe one other guy if you're in two player mode, as you go around the town beating up thugs.  The game is actually the third entry in the "Kunio-Kun" series preceded by Super Dodge Ball and Renegade before that.

Gameplay involves walking around a town, beating up dudes until you find a boss dude, then beating him up and getting a hint on where to find the next boss dudes.  When you beat all the boss dudes you go to a school and beat up the final boss dude on the roof and the game ends.  As you beat dudes up they drop money which you use to go to the various shops and buy food items to increase your stats.  I have no idea what most of the stats actually do but you should just aim to get big numbers so you can relieve dudes of there cash in one punch rather than multiple.  It's got a small but open world so it's really up to you to explore and while this can be a little confusing your first time round you'll never really get truly lost.

Despite the NES being famous for having hundreds of really hard games, River City Ransom is kind of on the easy side.  It can be a little challenging at first but once you start to get your stats up and your head round the combat the game becomes an absolute cakewalk.  Late in the game you can pick up some cowboy boots that make your kicks strong enough to kill most enemies, including bosses, in a single attack so once you buy those it really is just game over from there.  My only complaint about this game is that occasionally the enemies will go absolutely crazy and just bully you in a corner until you die and you can't do shit about it.  However this is only really a mild annoyance because in this game death doesn't mean a restart, it just means you lose half your cash and go back to the last shopping area you visited.

So if you've somehow gone your whole life not having played this, go grab it.  I'm sure it's been released for virtual console or whatever given it's legacy and failing that I'm sure you could use some slightly more dubious methods to play it if you were that way inclined.  This series is actually still going too with some of the most recent entries being released for the PS4.  Go get to know good ol' Kunio-Kun, he's a stand up lad

Tau and Friends Play Silent Hill Part 2

Tau and Friends Play Silent Hill Part 1

Five Nights at Freddy's

I couldn't have been more late to this party even if I tried.  A game series that's gathered a massive following and that has tons of sequels but only now am I getting around to actually playing it for myself.  The curse of a large backlog I guess.

Five Nights at Freddy's is a horror game where you play as an after hours security guard in a chuck-e-cheese style pizza restaurant.  On your first night you get a message from the guy who worked there before you warning you that the robot mascots will wander the halls at night and if they see you they will attempt to shove you into one of the suits, killing you violently in the process.  Armed with nothing but some security cameras, light switches and a couple of doors, you must survive from 12am to 6am in the restaurant.  It sounds easy on paper but in practice it really isn't.

The game itself consists of not much more than the screen above.  You move the mouse down to the bar to open the camera and click the buttons on the wall to toggle the lights and the doors.  You'd think that you'd just be able to close the doors and just wait it out until 6am but the problem is that pesky little power percentage in the corner.  Turning on a light, closing a door, opening the camera all drain your power supply at an increased rate.  If the power hits zero then the lights go off, the doors fly open and the mascots are free to just walk in and give you a very bad day at work.  The crux of the game is quickly checking the cameras to get the rough positions of the mascots and only closing the doors when absolutely necessary.  Of course, once you get good and know what you're doing there's ways to game the AI to make your life a little easier but the game is pretty heavy on the randomness and sometimes you'll just die because the game wants you to.  It sounds really annoying but considering a night is only about 8 minutes and the restart is pretty much instant it's not so bad.

The horror in FNAF manifests itself almost exclusively as jump scares, which is usually something I hate but here I don't seem to mind it so much.  If a mascot gets into your room the game will leave you unawares for a moment before throwing the 3D model into your face with a loud noise quickly followed by a game over screen.  Kind of like any of those screamer flash games from the early days of the internet.  I think the reason I give it a pass here though is because it's not TRYING to be anything more than a jump scare game and it tells you this in its loading screen before the main menu.  It's not like, let's say, Dead Space, a game claiming to be at atmospheric romp through a derelict ship and then a good deal of it's "horror" coming from having Necromorphs jump out of small holes screaming at you.  While jump scares ARE cheap and I still hate them, at least the developer Scott Cawthon is up front and basically just flat out says to you "I'm going to jump scare you now, have fun!"

The game is cheap on Steam so I'd recommend going to pick it up.  I finished it in a single evening on stream (granted I had some help) but when you finish there's a sort of "hard mode" in the form of 6th Night and when you finish that you get Custom Night which lets you set the AI levels of each mascot to your own liking, so it's got some replayability too.  Even after the jump scares stop making you jump there's something rather compelling about the mechanics of the game that will keep you coming back.  Every afternoon I've been firing it up to attempt to clear a custom night with all the settings turned to max and it really is quite challenging.

If you're looking for a cheap horror experience, Freddy Fazbears Pizzeria is a pretty good place to go.

Sonic the Hedgehog Trailer

So the trailer for the new Sonic movie dropped and OH BOY what an experience that was to watch for the first time.

So I think everyone in existence who saw the design of Sonic for this movie recoiled at just how awful he looks in this film.  He just looks....weird.  I think what they were trying to do was to make him look "realistic" but now we have this..thing..that makes just a little bit of sick come up in the back of your throat every time you see him.  For me personally it's the teeth, whenever he opens his mouth and I can see his teeth it just weirds me out for some reason.  Whoever designed that and whoever OK'd that design really needs a slap upside the head.

But that aside, the trailer actually sort of impressed me.  It's not going to win any awards but if you go in expecting a dumb bit of fan wank based loosely on some video game source material this looks like a good bet to me.  Jim Carrey as Eggman/Robotnik really made that trailer for me, from those small clips I already really enjoy the performance he's giving out with it.  I mean, for a Sonic movie to be "true" to its source material all it really needs is Sonic, Eggman, robots and sonic destroying those robots.  In the trailer it shows Eggman chasing Sonic and some dude in a car where Sonic then gets out of the car and spindashes Eggmans vehicle causing it to fly off the road.  Sonic quips at him and then Eggman sicks some robots on him.  Can't get much more Sonic than that without making the movie just a 90 minute lets play of the first game.

For anyone who looked at that trailer and threw their hands up angrily like "oh my god what the fuck is wrong with these people?!" my reply to you is "what the fuck is wrong with YOU!?".  Video game movies have been shit since the dawn of video game movies.  Just because you ironically like the original Mario Brothers movie doesn't change the fact that it's a steaming pile of shit that has nothing to do with Mario.  I can hear people screaming at me now like "But Silent Hill is a good video game movie", which it's not.  Even the Mario Bros movie didn't misunderstand the source material quite as hard as that movie did, Silent Hill isn't just hot garbage but it's offensive hot garbage.  On top of that, don't forget the piles of boring, forgettable, shit video game movies like fucking Hitman and Warcraft that have come out over the years.

This will either be a good bit of stupid fun and be remembered for being so bad it's good OR it'll be a boring pile of nothing that everyone will forget about in 6 months after it's release.  I for one, can't wait to see it, I'll be in that line for the theatre DAY. ONE.