Land of Livia

Soooo...I read a blog post about why this guy couldn't give up working on his indie game. From the blog post, I found out that the app was called "Land of Livia" and it was supposed to be an RPG type mobile game that had a good story and had a free Prelude. This sounded like a pretty sweet deal, so I downloaded it.

I quickly realized that the description was a little...boasty.

They claimed that it had a good story, but more words doesn't necessarily equate to a good story. You start on your farm, a red dot on a green map, and there's a storm happening out in the ocean, which logically is the cause of your problems, right? So you're told about this red dot further down the road. Go there, you say. Cool. Wait 5 minutes for the travel time. You get there. What's available? An MMO style quest. There's wolves and they're prowling. And for some reason you need to kill them. This will take you 10 minutes. Press button to wait 10 minutes.

Oh dear God...

So this is the way things are. You go places which takes time or you complete quests, which takes time, or you listen at an inn which takes a lot of time. I was super not into any of this almost immediately, but the perplexing thing to me was that there were leaderboards and active chats with people who were obviously super into this. They would talk about where each other were from, where/in what quest to find certain items, and what sections were bugged. By the time I had noticed the leaderboard stuff, I was like 12th on it in some of the categories. There are not a ton of people playing this game, but some of them are ridiculously into it. The highest quest completer has done new/repeat quests over 1800 times. And it was because of my confusion of their fervor that I persisted at least until I finished the Prelude.

This app is nothing but grinding with time. You can't complete different quests without good enough gear, so you grind until you get a decent random drop. But grinding is just waiting. When you give up on getting gear that will make it a sure thing. You wait grind, hoping you'll land on the right side of the percentage of chance to beat the quest.

I'm SO over this game and I won't be plopping down the $3.99 to continue. Good luck to those who found joy in the wait. I surely did not.

Pokemon: Omega Ruby

I have been the absolute worst at playing new things lately. Well...new old things. I borrowed "Pokemon: Omega Ruby" from a friend and was therefore in kind of a hurry to finish it. However, I was more in a hurry to finish it because I was bored to death of the sameness of it all. I've only played a handful of Pokemon games, and I'm fairly certain die-hards are expecting not much deviation from the formula, so I very well may be in the minority to be annoyed by it.

You're a kid heading off to become a Pokemon trainer. Everybody thinks that's normal. Bye, possibly forever, kid. You have a friend that's a half step behind you and will battle you every time you complete some milestone. There's a group of adults with stupid plans that you have to foil. This time it's Team Magma. They want to awaken an ancient Pokemon. It's a bad idea. Everybody knows it. They'll figure it out after being beaten by a kid 42 times. Beat all the gyms. Go to the Pokemon League. Beat 5 people. Win. Roll credits.

The new bits, from the games I've played, were the ability to pick berries and plant berries, and the existence of secret hideout locations that were everywhere. I wasn't into that, so it didn't add a ton. They also added Pokemon-style beauty pageants you could participate in. I was also not into this. Everything else seemed very much standard, and after a while, it started to feel like homework.

I probably won't be playing anymore Pokemon games in the future, but if you're into replaying the same base storyline over and over, Omega Ruby is probably still your jam.

Thimbleweed Park

Thimbleweed Park is a delight. I am absolutely transported back to my childhood playing a point and click adventure.

It starts with a murder mystery near the town of Thimbleweed Park. You control two federal agents charged with solving this murder but who also have secret agendas of their own. You learn that the town is largely deserted after the Pillowtronics Factory burned down and its founder recently died. The town has descended into disrepair as a result of the fire, and the townspeople are definitely hiding something-a-reno. I'm looking at you Sheriff.

You later get access to other playable characters, Delores, an aspiring video game programmer; Ransome, the Insult Clown; and Franklin, a ghost with some unfinished business. Each of these characters have their own agendas and have their own puzzles to solve and also are used to solve the other characters' puzzles. Switching back and forth between them is nice because you're rarely in a position where you are completely stuck on all potential puzzles. So you can generally make progress of some kind and never want to rage quit or throw your computer off a cliff.

It's weird, though, but I like being stuck in an adventure game, to a degree. I like when they make me think outside the box. I like when I try a bunch of different things, many of which I thought was a damn good idea, but it's not quite the right one. I like when the actual solution makes me laugh. I'll throw an example at you. Quit reading if you want absolutely zero puzzle spoilers. I needed to get a book on the third level of a library, but the staircase was Out of Order, so sayeth the sign hanging on it. I thought maybe I needed to fix it myself. I did have wood available to me, but it was firewood, and I had no tools. There was a phone nearby. I thought perhaps I needed to call a repairman of some sort, so I looked through the many pages of the phone book. Nothing really fit the bill. On a lark, I just picked up the Out of Order sign, and I could then use the staircase. Ha! I felt incredibly pleased with this solution.

Some may give the adventure genre shit for this pick everything up that isn't nailed down approach, but to me, having a bunch of garbage in your inventory that has a purpose that will in time become clear makes carrying all that junk all the sweeter once you figure it out. And once you get stuck, the inevitable try using everything on everything else tactic gave me joy. I have heard people declare that a weakness of the genre, but one of my favorite ridiculous solutions of adventure games ever was in Sam and Max: Hit the Road where you use the broken golf ball retriever, combined with a severed hand, and a giant magnet and used this frankenobject on a giant ball of twine to find a lost mood ring while Max comments on how highly improbable that was to have worked.

One thing I really liked about this game was that they know how people who like adventure games think, so they'd use that to throw you off or they'd throw little Easter eggs in there for those long time fans of the genre. For example, I really enjoyed that due to my pick up everything not nailed down approach, I ended up with a severed head that looked like the Navigator head from Monkey Island. That alone made me smile, and I didn't really expect it to have a use. Later though, I came across one of those find your way through this non-navigable forest puzzles similar to that same Monkey Island puzzle the Navigator head was from, so I whipped it out. It did indeed lead the way, not to the location I needed to progress the storyline, but to the location of previously dug up treasure for "another game", which was Monkey Island. Yes. Yesyesyes.

Overall, I was just awash in nostalgia and grinning the whole time to have this new adventure game enter the arena. It is of the same family of games that I grew up with, love, and have played over and over and over. It makes me happy that as games continue to focus on better and better graphics that there are still people willing to make and people itching to play a funnily written pixel art game. I hope there are more to come. Ron Gilbert, I will play anything you make, sir.

You Must Build a Boat

Holy dang, I've been slackin' on updating this blog. It's not because I haven't been playing things. It's because I haven't been beating things. Overwatch has kind of been monopolizing my gameplay time. However, on a vacation flight to London recently, which afforded me many hours of downtime, I played "You Must Build a Boat" until it was squashed.

“You Must Build a Boat” is a puzzle/matching game. I played it on mobile (iOS), but I believe it is also available on Steam, though gameplay works really well on a mobile device.

You start out with the tiniest of boats and a sparse crew, and you must build a bigger boat to travel further into the depths of the river for reasons. You do this by completing quests during dungeon runs and collecting items and crew and resources to upgrade your abilities. This all sounds a little complicated, but it’s not. It’s a simple but fun game.

To begin a dungeon run, you go up to the top of your boat and talk to a dude. There’ll be an Add Quest button. You can add up to 3 quests in each dungeon run. They start out easy like “Use an item”, defeat some jackoff. The positive of rolling with three quests is that you can complete more quests in one run. Efficient! The downside being that adding more quests also adds more dangerous creatures to fight or harder chests and the like. But that doesn’t scare you, now does it?

During a run, the dungeon is shown at the top of the screen. Your little avatar will run from left to right, encountering beasties, chests, or traps. Below the dungeon view, is the meat of the game. There are tiles in rows and columns that you can slide to match like tiles. Matches must be horizontal or vertical. None of that diagonal bullshit. 3 tiles or more matched gets rid of the matched tiles and performs whatever action those tiles represent. So, if you are fighting a beastie, and you match 3 swords, the beastie will take damage. If you match 4 or 5 swords, it’ll take more damage. Chests require keys to be matched, beasties require swords or magic tiles to be matched. Traps can be disarmed by matching whatever icon they display. Shields give you a shield barrier. I told you this was simple.

It’s a fast paced game. The world is constantly moving forward Super Mario style, so if you take a while getting rid of an obstacle, you’ll get pushed off the edge, which means, try again loser. As you progress, you’ll get resources through these dungeon runs so that you can upgrade your weapon stats, magic stats, shield stats, etc, so you’re not such a pile of mush.

Once you complete all the quests of an area, you’re good to pull up anchor and move on to the next area, with a bigger, swankier boat, and a new crewman. New crewmen generally give you the option to upgrade or buy different things. New areas also mean new, more difficult baddies. Some have caveats like they are invulnerable to physical attack, for example, so you’ll have to focus on magic attack tile matches with them. You get the gist.

The quests get more difficult as time goes on as well. One of the final ones that gave me the most trouble was matching 356 tiles in a dungeon run. That took many a try. Most of the time though, you just put all three quests possible in there, and you complete things without actually specifically trying. You’re just playing the game. With the match a bajillion tiles one though, you throw strategy out the window and just match match match…and hope it’s enough, and then curse when it’s not. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This is a great game to pass the time. I got surprisingly into it, and it made time fly by while I was on that long ass flight. (There might have been a pun in there, and I hate myself for it.) I think I spent almost 12 hours playing “You Must Build a Boat”, and for a mobile game, that’s pretty damn long and well worth the price of admission. Once you beat it, you can restart at a higher difficulty, but why? I have conquered you, game, so get out of my face. Thanks for the lols.