The Windows Are Gone

 

On my stream I like to do a little segment that I call "free game dumpster diving" which, I know, is a strange thing to call it considering that a lot of the things I do play end up being quite good but I started with that and I'm not about to change it now.  One of the things I played recently on that segment was a little thing called The Windows Are Gone which I found moderately impressive so I want to do a little post about it and shine some light on it.

The Window Are Gone starts out with a character moving into a new house as a way of getting a fresh start after experiencing some kind of horrible event.  It starts out quite simple with you just having to carry your boxes of stuff into the house but before too long things start to get a little creepy with a next door neighbor coming to say hi and things going bump in the....day.  Things going bump in the day I think is a smidge creepier because the day is when things aren't supposed to go bump.  Bump in the night? no problem, deal with that shit all the time, bump in the day? that's just fuckin wrong.

Anyway the story is extremely short and I want you, the reader, to actually go and play it so without getting into any spoilers things escalate pretty quickly and a decent horror experience ensues.  The story is pretty predictable and you can KIND of guess whats going on as early as the first little text message you get on your phone from another character but what the game lacks in originality it makes up for with absolute SPADES of atmosphere.  Come cool sound design couple with the not-quite PS1 visuals and some funky tricks with timers and triggers was able to actually get a little bit of a spook out of me and when considering that most AAA huge budget large studio bullshit horror games can't get that out of me, that's impressive.  

What Mr or Mrs ScaryCube has managed to show here is restraint, which I feel is a bit of a lost art in the genre in recent memory.  While a lot of horror games want to hit you with dark corridors, lound banging and BOO! CREEPY FUCKIN MONSTER! as quickly as possible The Windows Are Gone knows how to use its short run time to allow itself to build up properly.  Start with something mundane, get comfortable, get a little cozy even and then slowly IV Drip that spooky shit until the climax.  I've always thought that short stories are probably the best delivery method for horror literature and I'm starting to think that short, bite-sized games like this might be a more advantagous method of delivering horror games as well.  A solid 1-4 hour experience is proabably more conducive to making something truly scary rather than an 8 hour gory screamfest that you become desensitized to by hour 3 (Dead Space, you unscary fuck).  

Finally, the game allows you to actually open up the boxes and decorate the house which, in my opinion, was a way more entertaining part of the game than I ever thought something like that could be.  Move over Unpacking, The Windows Are Gone has got your fuckin number.

This post could be longer but I really don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't played it before and didn't see it on my stream.  It costs literally 0 money and is short as fuck so don't make any excuses, go try it now.

The Hatred For Epic Game Store

 

I've had the Epic Game Store on my computer for a good while now.  I downloaded it a while back after hearing they just give shit away for free.  Steam is still the number 1 platform I use for buying PC games but every so often I'll fire up EGS, look at what's free, add it to my library and then maybe tinker with it occasionally when I want to play those games.  For some reason though, whenever I bring up "oh yeah I got <game> for free on EGS" I'm occasinally hit with a lot of vitriol for the platform and I just don't get it really.

I wouldn't call the Epic Game Store a GOOD platform by any stretch.  In my limited time in using it outside of just playing free games it's been pretty dismal.  It lacks a lot of the features that Steam has, shopping with it is a sort of unpleasant experience and worst of all it doesn't have any features for gifting games.  There was one time I gave away a grand prize on my stream for a game that was exclusive to EGS (Maneater, on Steam now but then it was exclusive) and getting the game to this guy was a real ballache.  I didn't even buy the game on Epic in the end, I had to get a code on Humble and then send it to the guy.

I tried to do some Googling on why people hate it so much and there were some things about exclusivity and some things about giving data to Tencent and some things about a crappy refund but complaining about games companies being shitty is like complaining that water is wet.  The entire industry side of gaming sucks shit.  Every company on every service has shitty aspects, hating one over the other makes little sense to me.

I've heard some people argue to me that instead of using Epic Game Store for free stuff I should use the premium service on PS+ OR GamePass on PC.  What the people who make this argument fail to understand is that those are subscription services that cost me money month to month or year to year depending on what plan I pick.  When I downloaded EGS it did not cost me anything and then when I then proceeded to download Control, for free, I was able to play it start to finish completely for free.  The other thing that sounds ass about GamePass inparticular is that I've heard stories of people saying that games have been removed from GamePass.   Thanks to my huge backlog and other obligations sometimes it takes me a long time to finish a game so the idea that I'd be halfway through something when Microsoft decides to just yank it from under me is not a service I'm even remotely willing to pay for.  Even when Steam has removed games from its store they have still been avaliable to me if I already bought it, at least.

At the end of the day though, EGS is giving you free shit every week.  I've played some real bangers off that platform too.  Control, Death Stranding, A Plague Tale, Texorcist and Sonic Mania, just to name a few.  Sure it may be barren of features when compared to Steam and may have a couple of other shitty aspects to it but I have about 180 games on there and I don't even have a credit card registered.  Liking it less than Steam or another service is perfectly understandable but the red hot hate that some people claim to hold for it makes no sense to me at all

The Strange Grandstanding of Evo/Wave

 

Every so often on the stream (www.twitch.tv/taurinensis) we do a little segment that I have dubbed the Free Game Dive.  It involves going on Steam or websites like Itch, downloading free to play indie games and playing them through.  I've found some real cool little titles over the course of doing this segment so it's generally a lot of fun.

Recently, one of the games I finished as part of this segment was something on Steam called Evo/Wave, a short collectathon platformer in the same vein of something like Banjo Kazooie or similar titles.  The story is about an old AI called MagnaVex (get it?) drestroying some kind of computer core that causes the world to get all screwed up.  You, playing as a little robot dude, have to go into 3 worlds, collect some shit and reverse the damage that MagnaVex has done. 

According to Alexandre Isidorio, the guy who designed the UI, the game was made as a student project for a university course and as far as the game itself goes it's actually pretty good.  Having just finished Yooka Laylee and absolutely hating it playing a game like this which actually seemed to have a bit of thought and effort put into it was nice.  The final stage as well where you fight MagnaVex in a series of platforming challenges was particularly fun and did a good job of testing your skills with the games various power-ups, worth a shot if you have a couple hours to kill one day for sure.

But there's something weird going on with the games story, what little there is of it.  When you collect all the parts in the games three levels and are about to enter the final encounter with MagnaVex, a cutscene plays where he makes a bit of a speech about the current state of the industry, about how games have become unimaginative, constant installs and updates are annoying and companies are nickle and diming using at every turn and it's done in this sort of "old man yells at cloud" tone and yet, is he wrong though?

The constant installs and updates ARE annoying.  It's not something I've ever been too bothered by because I'm more than happy to just play or do something else while it goes on but the fact that the days of being able to just buy a game, slam it in my machine and just play right away are long gone IS annoying.  The fact that every time I fire up Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch and it asks me to do a software update on a game made THIRTEEN fucking years ago is cause for minor irritation.

The nickle and diming of the industry as well is also a well documented and often complained about side of things.  Battle passes, microtransactions and bullshit DLC featuring content that should have just been in the initial purchase are rampant not to mention the constant remaking of safe bet, classic games in a thinly veiled attempt to get you to open your wallet for that nostalgia hit

But it's the criticism of people that feel that the creativity has been largely sucked out of games in exchange for varients of the same thing that really rubs the wrong way.  I'm not one to say that ALL of gaming has become stagnant, I'm far too widely versed in the deepest, most obscure realms to honestly think that but I do feel that generally speaking gaming, at least the mainstream stuff, has sacrified being interesting in exchange for being mostly OK.  What I mean by this is that if you look that the libraries of anything from back in the day, take the PS1 for example, the games are widely varied, even within the same genre.  There's a lot of experimentation going on with style, mechanics and presentation and while it makes the sysem interesting there are quite a lot of just flat out stinkers on that system.  Nowadays I feel that everything is sort of made from a template, usually something that worked well in the past and while that means that truly, honest to goodness fucking AWFUL games aren't really all that common anymore the creativity within the medium has suffered greatly as a result.  

It's been a thing in the AAA scene forever but even the indie scene hasn't avoided falling into this trap.  At time of writing there are two big indie games that I am told are very good.  Lies of P and Sea of Stars.  I have yet to play either of these and people who's opinions I don't immdiately disregard have told me that they are good games and they sure as shit look pretty cool but Lies of P is just Bloodborne and Sea of Stars is just Chrono Triggter (it even has Yasunori Mitsuda doing the music, for fucks sake).  I'm always glad to have more of a good thing, sure, but it doesn't make me a cranky old boomer, like Evo/Wave suggests that I sigh a little at all the safe bets and appeals to nostalgia.

Still, Evo/Wave is an pretty good Free2Play thingie if you have some free time and nothing better to do.  The dev might have his head up his own arse on the state of the industry but this is a game that fucking NO ONE gives a fuck about so collect the shiny objects then turn it off and ignore his crap opinions going forward.

Dragalia Lost

So this is a game that came out last month for mobile devices that kept popping up on my Facebook feed after a few of my friends started playing.  The first thing I noticed is that it's an original mobile game that has a big fat Nintendo logo on it and along side that a big fat Cygames (Shadowverse, Grandblue Fantasy) logo.  After umming and arring about it for a while thanks to it's MASSIVE 2.5gb download size from the app store I decided to just give it a go.

Dragalia Lost has absolutely NO BUSINESS being this good of a game since it's just your typical mobile gatcha affair but for some reason I just can't get myself off the damn thing.  I have no idea what the story is since following a mobile story is like choosing to eat a bowl of shit but the game play is fun and the amount of stuff there is to do is just staggering.  The sheer amount of content is important considering the games recent release since usually newly released mobile games are a little thin on the ground at first and flesh out later but Dragalia is going all out right out of the gate.

The game itself is the same gatcha bullshit you see on the app store all the damn time.  Pull stuff, power up stuff, do dungeons to power up stuff even more rinse and repeat and grind grind grind ad nauseam.  There's two cool things about it though that set it apart from other games in the genre which is one, combat that's actually more interesting than just tapping until everything falls down and two, a level of polish that is rarely seen in the entirety of mobile gaming.  The combat has you using the touch screen to actually move characters and have them hack, slash and dodge through the environments.  When enemies attack the game will put these sort of markers on the floor, something I've seen done in other MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 which means that paying attention to things like positioning is very important. 

There's a lot going on in Dragalia that would take far too much time to type out so instead I'll just recommend that you go download it and give it a whirl.  It's free so worst case scenario is that you'll just be unimpressed by yet another gatcha title and best case is that it drags you in and holds your attention as violently as it has mine.

Dx2 Shin Megami Tensei Liberation First Impressions

I never thought in my life I'd be impressed to the point of gushing HARD on a mobile game but it's finally happened and OF COURSE it's a fucking Shin Megami Tensei game that has me frothing at the mouth with excitement.

I've talked about it before but just in case I'll cover once again what Shin Megami Tensei is before I continue in case a new reader has stumbled across this post.  Shin Megami Tensei is a long running series of RPGs that has been going since the old NES days.  It has its roots in tile based dungeon crawling but as the series has progressed that style has dropped in and out.  The big gimmick of the series is the whole "demon negotiation" thing where you can convince your enemies to join your ranks and use their skills in order to reach the end.  The series has seen some massive success recently with it's spinoff series Persona and at some point a Shin Megami Tensei 5 has been cited for release on the Switch.  In a VERY basic way just think of it as sort of Grimdark Pokemon.

So I woke up on Sunday with a big fat hangover and grabbed my phone only to find that Dx2 SMT Liberation was on the front page of the Japanese app store and despite my pounding headache I did a little squee and downloaded it.  As far as mobile games go it's not all that different from any other RPG where you collect monsters and battle them but if you're a fan of the series, especially the mainline series, the look and feel of the game will have you hooked pretty quickly.  EVERYTHING you expect from a tried and true SMT game is present in this title just sort of simplified a little bit because it's on a phone now but presented in a way that makes it perfect for short burst plays on a train, bus or while you take a shit.

 I'm not going to go into too much detail about how it all works because there's A LOT going on and I've not levelled up enough to see it all but curiously the game has only 2 out of 5 stars on  the app store.  Addressing some of these complaints I've seen in the review section will help you to understand something about how the game works though so here I go.

The first big complaint I've seen is that they say (in Japanese) that the demons and the artwork look like crap.  The game has opted for the older SMT look as opposed to the more modern art direction that they have used in games like Persona so this is more of a taste thing.  I started the series with Lucifer's Call on PS2 when it was still using that sort of older look so it doesn't bother me really, this is just a taste thing but be aware the art style looks a bit "dated" which will be nostalgic for some and hard on the eyes for others.

The one thing I can't forgive though is people complaining about the fucking "gatcha".  If you don't play mobile games then a gatcha is the way most games give you new items or characters.  You pay a number of whatever currency it may be and the game randomly gives you a character.  If you're lucky you'll get a rare thing and if you're not lucky you won't, it's the main way these free to play RPGs make cash by making people pull lots of gatcha for mad rare shit.  These are usually a big part of mobile RPGs but in Liberations case it's not such a big thing.  The complaints state that the gatcha is too expensive and the rate of rare shit coming out is too low, which is fine I guess but that's not really how your supposed to expand your roster of demons.

As you play levels, occasionally a demon will offer to talk with you and you enter a negotiation.  If you complete the negotiation successfully the demon will join you, this is how SMT has worked basically since the beginning.  From there, you have you fuse the demons together to make new ones in order to strengthen your ranks and this is the main way that the player in Liberation gets rarer things.  For example today I took a 1* demon and a 2* demon and fused them into a 3* demon with some sick fire skills.  The gatcha does give you rare shit but the game wants you to focus on negotiation and fusion, you know, the thing where you actually have to understand how the game works, rather than just dumb luck.  While paying your way into the rarest demons is an option and probably how Sega plan to make profit, doing it the old fashioned way is preferable and series fans will probably enjoy this more than just "push button, receive demon".

I've never been this hooked by a mobile game before so if you're a SMT fan then absolutely try it out and if you've never played one before then this free outing into the mainline may be a good place to find your feet. 

Dragon Quest Rivals First Impressions

Japan loves its card games.  Very close to my house there are about 4 stores dedicated to the buying, selling and playing of trading cards of which there seem to be hundreds of different games but you can also just hit up a used book store to buy individual cards for games like Yu-gi-oh and whatnot.  As well as that there are a bunch of digital trading card games some of which are exclusive to the arcade.  But the arcades not only have digital based card games but also games that actually spit out physical cards for use in the game, it's crazy.  Japan LOVES card games.

Japan also loves a bit of Dragon Quest which is basically one of the big boss boys of the RPG genre.  So of course Dragon Quest, like Warcraft, The Witcher and DotA have come out with their own card based video game for mobile platforms.  I usually avoid all the other card games on the IOS since I'm balls deep into Shadowverse and the idea of playing two different card games at the same time seems a bit pointless but the gameplay in DQ Rivals seemed different enough from something like Hearth or 'Verse to at least give it a go.

It's not completely unique, there are a number of similarities to Hearth.  The way the cards looks is pretty much identical and the idea that the character that you pick have their own special ability and cards sets seems ripped straight from that model.  Also the ranking system is basically the same as Hearthstone and of course it has that thing where you can earn "dust" in order to create individual cards if you're trying to make a specific kind of deck.  Basically out of the actual card combat they are fucking identical.

But the card combat itself is where things get interesting.  Each player has 6 blocks on their side of the field where they can play monsters and the positioning of your monsters is pretty important when it comes to battle strategy.  So for example, in Hearthverse you can attack the enemy directly pretty much anytime unless they play a monster with a defender ability.  In DQ rivals, you have monsters with that kind of skill but you can also put all your monsters in a row which will create a wall in order to defend your character.  Then on top of that, if you have a monster with a cool ability you don't want getting murdered you can play another creature in front of them in order to defend.  It's a cool mechanic that means that you not only have to worry about what monsters you have but also where you put them on the board in any given situation.  Your hero also has an ability that they have to charge but I wont go into detail about that because it's pretty much the same as Hearthstone.

Right now I'm pretty sure its exclusive to Japan but it seems like there has been a decent amount of effort made to make a game that's familiar enough to fans of this mobile card  game genre so they don't have  to relearn a fuckton of new systems but different enough to make it worth playing past the tutorial.  If you can get hold of it, give it a go.  Shit is free so you have nothing to lose

Setting Up Let it Die

I've been very busy recently with a family visit to Japan so content has been a little thin on the ground but for Halloween I tried to do a little stream of Let it Die for the PS4.  If you've not heard of this game it's a sort of free to play hack and slash game made by Grasshopper Manufacture which plays a little like a Souls game and I think it has perma-death.  I've not really had much of a chance to play it however just setting it up was complete bullshit so I want to share my experience.

First of all just getting the game was bullshit.  I hopped onto the Playstation store and found it in the free to play section.  However, there was no download available that was free and I discovered that on the Japanese store the only option for you is one that comes with 2 units of the premium currency which I think is called Death Metals.  This means that the game was 108 yen which granted is only £0.70 but after being told that it was a free to play game I was a little pissed off about being forced to spend money on some in game shit I don't even know the purpose for.  While it was downloading I went and looked up Let it Die on the US and UK Playstation stores to find that on there the game IS actually free.  So really it's only the Japanese getting fucked over but it's still really annoying.

Anyway, the game loads up and the tutorial starts and I'm having a grand old time.  The game looks really nice, plays solidly and Death is a pretty interesting and funny character.  I'll talk more about the game itself once I manage to play it a bit more.  Once I finished the tutorial I was presented with another title screen and once I tried to hit go on that I got a big download message stuffed in my face.  Turns out the game only downloads the tutorial when you buy it and then downloads the rest later which resulted in me falling asleep while I was waiting and now I've not been able to play because I've been busy with family and work.

It looks like a really good game but the whole experience is a true testament to the really shitty side of modern gaming.

Poor Man Gaming: Shadowverse

Pianista

Pianista is a game that just randomly came up in an advert while I was scrolling through Facebook one day.  Usually I steer clear of mobile rhythm games because despite their fairly decent quality they are almost always full of bullshit that makes me quit.  However the idea of a rhythm game based on classical music piqued my interest so I gave it a try 

So the bullshit that I'm talking about with other rhythm games usually involves the collection and leveling of characters.  You can play a song perfectly in games like Love Live but still end up with a shitty rank because your characters don't have enough levels to earn you the required points.  Luckily Pianista doesn't do that.  You just pick and song, play it and you're graded based on your actual skill rather than any money-grubbing character breeding system.

The game has I think about 50 songs at time of writing with new stuff getting added every so often and songs are played on something called Tour Mode and clearing them in this mode unlocks them for your collection where you can play them freely.  There are 3 difficulty levels of play which are normal, technical and master.  I've not tried master yet so I can't say just how challenging it gets but if you aren't really all that familiar with the genre there are certain songs on normal that may give you a hard time.

As you play songs you earn gold and you can use this gold to upgrade your piano which will get you different bonuses and such but apart from that you don't use the gold for anything else.  There's also a premium currency which I think lets you cut down the wait time on your plays recharging but considering this is something I'll do a song or two with on the train that's not really an issue.  The game also has leader boards so if you're the competetive type you can see how you stand up to the rest of the user base.

My only real complaint is that you get 5 song points to play songs with and then after that you have to wait before you can play any more.  1 song point regenerates every 30 minutes so if you're just fiddling with it it's not much of an issue but if you have a long journey and you were hoping to jam out to some Chopin you may have to start spending premium currency or just listening to him on a music player and live without the game part.

Either way, it's free to download on the app store, the game looks slick, plays really well and has a decent number of songs for you to enjoy.  So unless you hate classical music you should probably go and give it a try.

Khimera: Destroy All Monster Girls Speed Run in 22:54

This game is free and you should race me

MMOs From My Youth

I don't play many MMORPGs any more unfortunately due to a combination of not having much time and a backlog of games in the triple digits.  However, back in my teens I played a hell of a lot of World of Warcraft starting with vanilla and quitting at the tail end of Burning Crusade.  However, before I gained some financial independence and I was able to pay the monthly fee for the game, I used to seek out free MMO games so I thought I'd share with you some of my old, F2P MMO experiences from back in the day.

1) Sword of the New World

Sword of the New World was an MMO me and my friends played over one summer holiday from school.  It was released in 2006 in Korea and had English versions going live in 2007 and it had an interesting gimmick of multiple character control.  Most of the time when you think about MMOs you imagine controlling one player and then if you want to group up you have to find other players, right?  Well in this game you controlled up to 3 and from there you could party up with people for quests and stuff so even our small group of 4 players looked like a huge group of people in game.  That said though, aside from the multiple player control and the interesting world set in a sort of fantasy take on the Americas during the age of exploration, I can't really recall much else.

2) Rappelz

A friend of mine once introduced me to Lineage 2 back before it became free to play except instead of actually paying for it he showed me a private server that allowed us to play for free, it was a good time.  However, as you would expect, the private server got shut down and it was really that first experience with Lineage that gave me my first MMO itch.  Rappelz attracted me because, at least graphically, it reminded me of Lineage so I thought this might help scratch my grind itch.  It did for a while, the game play was nothing special but it played fairly well and it's gimmick was something involving pets that you had to collect and level in order to help you in combat and stuff. 

Interestingly it seems like this game is still available to play so you can check it out if you have a weekend to waste on an MMO from 2006.

3) Trickster Online

A very cutsey online game that I remember very little of which looked sort of similar to that other isometric MMO that almost everyone played but the name I can't remember right now.  Anyway, the thing I remember most about this game is digging. You could dig to get items and a lot of the quests I vaguely remember involved digging up stuff.  While it wasn't the best game I've ever played I was looking for something to go hard on the grind with and this said that it had a level cap of 300 which just blew my goddamn mind.  I didn't play it for very long and I probably got no higher than about 25 but it was the thought that counted.

I thought that Trickster went down for good years ago but a quick google search for the image revealed that the site is still up, the client is (probably) still available and the level cap is now 400.  I would kind of like to try it again but a grind that hard would mean I'd have to sever all ties with anything else I think so I'll stick to working on my endless backlog.

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It would be nice to one day find time or not have a backlog so huge that I could really sink my teeth into another MMO.  That said, I'd probably be staying away from the Korean F2Ps and trying something like Final Fantasy 14.  Maybe one day.

Sim City Build It

This isn't a game I thought I'd be so quick to blog about or even play at all.  Usually when I see phone games like this my mind immediately remembers complete rip off titles such as Dungeon Keeper or basically any free to play city builder for the phone.  Usually these games demand that you pay real money in order to keep up with the demands of the game OR ELSE it will fuck you for it and make it basically unplayable.  While Sim City Build It kind of does the first one, it doesn't do the second.

The aim of the game is simple, build a city.  You do this by purchasing residential areas, factories, government buildings, public services etc. and from there you just have to watch things grow.  This is a long running series that started life in 1989 and has sort of grown into one of those franchises that everyone with even a passing interest in games knows about.

SNES Version

The games have since been become extremely streamlined and very easy to get into.  I seem to remember Sim City being pretty hard to understand and manage back in the day but I played the original when I was VERY young so there is a chance that my memory is sullied by the fact I was just a stupid kid who knew nothing of city management.

Anyway the one big problem I have with the phone game is that it takes a long time to do anything.  For example, you level up by building residential areas and upgrading them, which in turn increases population.  Increasing your level will of course, unlock new features, which isn't a bad thing since it's sort of nice to have all the games concepts trickled to you rather than just having a big info dump and then saying "OKAY GO!".  The problem is, you need money to do anything and you get money by upgrading residences so you can't help but start levelling up and just when you start to think everything is fine BAM! it hits you with fire stations or sewage and you don't have nearly enough money to deal with these problems. 

So the only course of action is to halt all expansion and just sit and wait for taxes to roll in which of course is taking a hit because of the lack of the new thing it just introduced that you can't afford.  The pain of this goes away a little as you unlock things like a trade depot and cargo missions but it still  takes a while to get anything done.  That said though, having a building on fire or every member of your town shitting their pants due to no sewage system doesn't fuck you completely.  Your happiness will take a hit but with a little bit of patience you can fix the problem and be on your merry way.

Not bad for a phone game and great to just fiddle with between short tasks.  I'm actually surprised by how fun I'm finding it and the production quality on it is top notch.  Of course you can pay if you want but it's possible to get a fairly decent looking city without spending a penny and after that it's just patience.  It's free so it's not like you have anything to lose, go try!

Shadowverse First Impressions

A few months ago I was walking through a train station when I saw a big poster for a new mobile game called Shadowverse.  It looked like an exact clone of digital card collecting favorite Hearthstone so until the other day I ignored it.  However due to a friend starting to play I decided to jump on and give it a go and boy Im glad I did because this game is awesome .  

If you have played Hearthstone then you have basically played this.  At its core it's the same game but there have been a few tweaks to the systems which stop it from being an exact clone.  I'm going to start talking about the game assuming you have a basic knowledge of how Hearthstone works so if you don't I'm sorry if you feel a little lost.  

So you do the usual thing of playing monsters with a health and attack value and you use these in conjunction with spells in order to try and bring your opponents life from 20 to 0, just like Hearth.  However this time around the characters don't have active abilities and instead have passive effects that do various things to their decks.  For example there's one character who's cards get stronger depending on how many spells you cast while another who has various abilities depending on how many cards occupy her graveyard.  

Each character has a unique play style and you're bound to find one that matches how you like to play.  

The other big new thing here is the evolution system which allows you after 5 turns to start buffing your monsters for +2/+2 and an added effect if the card has one.  

This allows the monster to attack the turn its played (monsters only, mind you) and can quickly change the tide of a losing battle if you're clever with your evolution points which are limited to 2 for the starting player and 3 for the guy who goes second. 

There are other slight changes but these are the two huge things and everything else is sort of taken from Hearth from there.  Of course there is online play which comes in the form of standard ranked/unranked and 2 pick mode.  2 pick is almost identical to the Area in Hearth but you pick the cards 2 by 2 instead of one at a time.  Also you aren't kicked out of the mode for losing and your reward is based on how many out of 5 you win.  

One thing I really like about this game over Hearth though is just how easy it is to access the content and get cards.  The single play story modes are avaliable from the get go and the game gives you 20 boosters just for clearing the tutorial.  You can get cards by collecting an in game currency which is awarded to you for logging in each day.  I'm still playing the story modes so I'm unsure if online matches provide this currency but even if it doesn't getting cards still doesn't feel like a massive chore like it did in Hearth.

Shadowverse is a quality digital card game that people should give some time to.  This is especially true if you're the kind of person who played Hearth and wasn't happy with some of the direction it took.  I'm playing the Japanese version on my phone but I know there's an English version avaliable on Steam so give it a try!  

PS+: Best 5000 Yen Ever

Back in December my wife gifted me a PS4 for my birthday and since then I've been a member of Playstation plus.  Aside from Tekken 6, I never played my PS3 online too much and Xbox Gold pissed me off by being a pay to play service for online games but I decided to jump back into these kind of online services for consoles and see whats up and now I'm pleasantly surprised.

The draw of the PS3 over the 360 back when those consoles were all the rage was that you didn't need to pay for the PS3s online service to play your games online.  Xbox on the other hand required that you had Xbox Live Gold which where you would pay monthly to get shouted at down a microphone by 12 year old children who think they are really cool playing Call of Duty and Gears of War. You'd still have the 12 year olds on PSN but at least you didn't have to pay for that shitty experience.

Of course, times have changed and now, as far as I understand, you are required to be paying for PS+ in order to play your games online.  It's not that expensive, I dropped just over 5000 yen for a year long subscription which is equivalent to about £30.  Now I don't really have any games that are required to be played online but I'm still really happy with my decision because PS+ just goes and throws 2 free games at you every month.

Now I caught wind of the free games that were available on the UK PS+ service and I get the feeling that if I was living in England this post would have a very different tone.  This month the UK PS+ users got Zombi and some space thing I've never heard of while I got Earth Wars, a cool side scrolling hack and slash with slightly dodgy character animation and Skulls of The Shogun, a cool little indie TBS that's both challenging and charming.

Generally speaking, the free games spat out by PS+ have been pretty good.  Most notably I've had Metal Slug 3, Steins Gate and Toukiden Kiwami just thrown at me for no money.  The total value of all the games I've downloaded easily exceeds 20,000 yen  and it's only April.  By the time I have to renew my shit PS+ would have paid for itself purely in free shit. 

Paying to play online feels like bullshit when I can do it for no real extra cost on my PC but at least with Playstation I'm being showered with free shit.  Granted they put some crap games on there too but generally speaking I'm happier with the PS+ service than any other online gaming service that I've paid for in the past.

Final Fantasy Record Keeper First Impressions

So usually I'm the kind of person who will immediately dismiss a game released on the phone as casual garbage that isn't worth playing.  I don't know what came over me last weekend though but in a fit of extreme boredom at home I decided to download and try out Final Fantasy Record Keeper. 

What I got was actually a pleasant surprise.  Final Fantasy Record Keeper is sort of like a Final Fantasy all stars game where you collect the characters from the various games and then have them fight in strings of battles in order to progress through the games history mode.  Game play wise that's about it, all you do is fight, but for something that I'm fiddling with on train rides and things like that it works pretty well. 

That said, there are a TON of levels and a TON of characters.  Aside from unlocking characters you also have to collect equipment which also have a level and can be made stronger by using items or other equipment.  Each level also has a hard mode which is known as a "force dungeon" but at time of writing I've yet to try that feature out yet.  The game also hosts a number of events which will allow you to get high level items or unlock characters.

While it plays like a sort of typical mobile RPG, there is that sort of Final Fantasy polish to it and it all ends up being rather compelling and hard to put down.  So far my only criticism of the game is that the energy that you need to do dungeons is far too limited and it forces me to stop playing.  Generally speaking I run out of energy before the end of my 20 minute train ride between my house and work place, which would be annoying if I didn't constantly carry a portable system with me.

The game is free so instead of me harping on about it you should just go play it for yourself.  There is a lot to it, a lot more than you'd expect from such a basic idea and exclusive to mobile.  It seems that the Final Fantasy mobile games do actually have some degree of quality (apart from that All the Bravest thing) because my friend tells me that Final Fantasy G Bike is also pretty good so maybe that's worth checking out too!
 

New Rhythm Games!

Holy goddamn all of a sudden at my local arcade there's been a couple of new rhythm games just popping up.  I've had a chance to give em both a go and since I'm having a bit of a slow period where it's hard to come up with topics, I'll spend a little bit of time talking about them.

The first is Chunithm, a rhythm game developed by Sega and apparently made by the same people who gave us that weird washing machine game Mai Mai

As what seems to be fairly standard for Sega-made rhythm games, the cabinet is all fucking weird and has all these bright lights and flashy bits on it for no purpose other than to look kind of cool and to pull your attention from all the other machines.

The game itself is fairly standard rhythm fare but the controller kind of looks like a piano keyboard but it's a touch panel rather than actual keys.  You have to slide, hold and tap your way through the songs but the game also has a sensor bar just above the controller so some notes demand that you throw your hand up in the air like you just don't care. 

The game also let's you unlock songs and characters with abilities as you play.  Last time I played there was an event for Persona 4 Dancing All Night so there are few Persona tracks and you can unlock the cast of P4 to help you clear songs.  At time of writing I've unlocked Rise and Kanji with Naoto on the way.  The music is also pretty good with plenty of stuff familiar to anyone who's played rhythm games for a while in Japan, there's also a few good original songs but best of all you can play All I Want (The Offspring) from Crazy Taxy and Concept of Love from JSRF!  What more could you want?

The second game that's just come out is CrossXBeat.  I can't for the life of me find a picture on the net of the cabinet so here's a shitty phone pic of me playing it

As you can see the game is just a big touch screen and notes fly at you every which way and you have to tap them in time with the song.  While it's not quite as fun as Chunithm, it still boasts come cool songs from Phoenix Wright and Megman 2 as well as a bunch of original stuff. 

There's not really much to say about this one, it's just your kind of standard rhythm game.  The one feature that does stand out though is the fact that if you have an Aime(?) card, I don't really remember if it's that, you can play once a month for free which is pretty cool.

However this game pisses me off with the way it presents difficulty levels to you.  Most rhythm games have a numbering system that's pretty consistent.  Level 1s are obviously the easiest, 8-12 is kind of medium level and 13+ is hard.  Cross Beat just says fuck all that where level 20's seem to be piss easy and the numbers go all the way up to fucking 60+.  This is fine but there's no good indication of what "Lvl 25" means the first time playing so there have been times when I've been wasting my time with easy shit when I want something challenging instead.

 After some practice I'll see if I can get some videos of these games up so keep an eye out for that.  If you live in Japan then you should absolutely give these games a shot, if you don't then I suppose you can just sit there and be jealous?  I kid, if you want to play Cross Beat there is a mobile version available on the Japanese app store so you could give it a try if you wanted.

Spooky's House of Jump Scares

You know, when I download a title from Steam that costs exactly £0 and has a name like this I'm not exactly expecting a masterpiece.  Hell, I'm not really expecting anything more than a couple of horror themed jokes and a game that you can finish in about 10 minutes. 

Well I was fucking wrong here

Spooky's House of Jump Scares is a strange game.  I've actually forgotten what the plot is even though it scrolls for you every time you load up the game but I think it's about someone with an interest in history hearing some stories about this old house and going in to check it out.  As soon as you get inside you are confronted by Spooky, a cute ghost that tells you that the house contains 1000 rooms and challenges you to get to the end of it.

Game play for this game is very simple, walk through a bunch of corridors and press E when you get to the end of each room.  Occasionally, the game will throw a puzzle or two at you and you must spend a little time to solve those but most of them are just things like "find the key" or "read the bit of paper with the door code on it".  While the game play isn't particularly great and the story isn't anything new or interesting it's the way the game delivers it horror that makes it a real success.

Now the horror aspect to this game is really hard to talk about because part of the reason it's so effective is that you aren't expecting it to take the turn that it does.  The first few levels are populated with cute little cardboard cutouts of  animals and cartoon skeletons but don't let that put you off because if you press on you really are in for a bit of a surprise.  I really don't want to say any more than that but let's just say that by the end of the game, even those cute little cut outs had me jumping in my chair a little bit.

The game also features multiple endings which adds some replay value but a single play through of this games 1000 rooms can be a little draining so getting the other ending is not something that I have got around to yet.

The game is free to download and play on Steam and I would encourage you to give it a go.  It's a hard game to talk about but don't read anything other than this going in and you're in for a really good time.  Sometimes it's the simple stuff that gets under your skin the most.

Sonic Runners

I really don't understand how Sonic is still going.  For YEARS they've just been pounding out shit game after shit game and yet there are still legions of fans for this guy.  There are still groups of people who actually get moderately excited for an upcoming Sonic game and considering the quality of these fucking things I have no idea why.

That's when I was surprised when my friend said to me "I've got this really cool new phone game" and when I peered into his screen I saw it was a Sonic title.  At first I just laughed and told him to get out with that crap but the next day I started to get curious so I ended up downloading it.

Sonic Runners is one of those auto running type games.  If you're not sure what I mean by that then it's a kind of game where you character just runs forward and all you have to do is tap/swipe the screen to avoid obstacles.  Quite frankly, the novelty of this genre ran out after a few days with Temple Run and yet I haven't deleted the game off my phone yet.

Game play is very simple; Sonic runs and you tap the screen to jump.  You have to collect rings and gems to build score, kill enemies and save little animals.  It never ends, you just keep going until you die and the longer you play then the harder it gets.  Once you build up enough points you can fight Dr Eggman which will net you some extra rewards.  There is also a story that unfolds as you beat each area but I find myself just skipping through it because I'm pretty sure the scripts to Sonic games are written on the walls by a monkey with the pen jammed up its asshole.

Outside of the running you have to level up your characters so that they get more score or item effects last longer or you can play a little roulette game to get companions.  The companions come in the form of Chao's or remote controlled objects and bestow various effects when equipped.

You can pay for a special currency so that you can continue when you die or buy new companions but the currency is awarded to you slowly as you play for free so they micropayments don't really get in the way of the overall experience.  Also the games doesn't throw constant "BUY THIS SHIT NOW!" messages in your face which is nice because the idea of paying money for an iPhone games makes me want to vomit.

So to conclude, Sonic Runners is actually pretty good and considering that it's totally free its worth a try at the very least.  It's probably the best endless running game I've ever played which isn't saying much but I guess that's one point in it's favor. 

Then again, you could just play one of the originals or Generations and use your phone for better games like Super Monsters Ate My Condo or Mahjong Mobile......just sayin.....

Code of Joker: F2P Done Right

I've been playing a metric fuckton of Code of Joker recently and if ever there was a standard for what a F2P game should be then THIS is it.

I'm going to assume most people won't know what CoJ is but a long time ago I did a blog post about it so have a read here to clue yourself in.

http://identitygaming.blogspot.jp/2013/10/return-to-game-centre-code-of-joker.html

As a quick summary, it's an arcade trading card game that plays a little like Pokemon, Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh all slammed together into one really fun card battling experience.

Back when it was first released you'd pay a certain number of credits to charge an energy value.  You would spend those points to play games and any points left over at the end would be converted into currency for you to buy new cards with when you came back at a later date.

However this all changed and the game went free to play.  Code of Joker now works on a system similar to every iPhone game under the sun.  You have an energy meter that has 100 points and playing a game costs a minimum of 40.  These points recharge over time and 100 points is enough to play 2 games for exactly no money.

The complaint that I hear with a lot of free to play games is that there's a significant amount of stuff locked behind a pay wall.  If not that then it's a case of a lot of over powered, game breaking stuff being locked away from people who don't want to spend money. 

Code of Joker is not like this, you are not locked out of anything if you don't put any money into the machine with the exception of cosmetics.  The only thing putting money in the machine does for you increases the rate you get cards since you get 1 or 2 cards as a reward per game.  But even if you do decide to put money in, 200 yen ($1.60 or £1.10) gets you a maximum of 7 games.  7 fucking plays, for 200 yen!  That shit is NUTS!  £1 on a UK DDR machine would get you 3 songs, which lasts about 12 minutes while Code of Joker you can play for an hour or two for the same price AND receive a load of free shit while you do it.

This is how Free to Play games SHOULD be.  Locking people out of things or charging in order to win is stupid, pisses people off and turns them away.  If you provide paid options that actually reward the player without pissing off those who don't pay too hard then you have a recipe for success and SEGA have fucking nailed it here.

Only If

Only if is advertised as a surreal adventure puzzle game on Steam that costs exactly £0.  I never heard of it until recently when I saw a friend playing it.  When we spoke about it the idea sounded kind of interesting and since I have nothing to lose I thought I'd give it a go.

The game is about some guy who goes to a party, gets drunk and wakes up in some unknown house.  Shortly after craziness he stumbles into a room with a radio that has a guy on the other side telling him all sorts of weird stuff like he's called the cops or that the protagonist will die soon.  The kicks off the adventure of you trying to work your way out of the house with the evil man on the intercom being a dick the whole time.

The game play is standard first person stuff.  Hell, if it wasn't for the reference to Unity during the ending credits I would have assumed the thing was a Half Life 2 mod.  You look around rooms for keys and or switches and press E at them and hope that things happen.  Despite being advertised as a "surreal adventure puzzle game" there isn't anything here that you haven't already seen a thousand times before YEARS ago.

Graphically the game is also nothing special but some of the levels did look pretty cool.  There is one segment in particular where you have to platform on big pillars that are suspended in mid air.   The area sort of reminded me of something from Alice: Madness Returns but without the budget. 

The game is also piss easy with almost none of the puzzles requiring any real brain power to beat.  On top of that, there is a segment where the game just fucks off the puzzles and decides that it wants to be a platforming game and the platforming controls fucking suck.  Once you figure them out it's not so bad but the game never explains how they work and it's a real pain.  You see, the distance in which you jump depends on how long you hold the space bar for and if you let go you just lose all momentum and plummet downward.  Once you figure out what the fuck is happening it's pretty easy but it's annoying and why did it never tell me that?

I could probably complain a lot more but lets remember one thing and that's that it was free.  It's also inoffensively long clocking in at less than 2 hours for a first time play through.  Despite some of the things I just said though, I actually sort of had fun with it.  It killed a little bit of time on a lazy Sunday afternoon and I came away mildly entertained. 

Give it a go, maybe you'll enjoy it more than I did.