CivCity: Rome

Ah..."CivCity: Rome". I picked you up last October during the Extra Life 24-hour Charity Gaming Marathon. For the first 18 hours of that marathon, I powered through "Batman: Arkham City" from start to finish. After beating that, I was tired, sick of using a controller, and just wanted a game that was kind of running itself while I could also watch TV for a change of pace. Multi-tasking, bitches. These type of building games, like real-time strategy games, have a tendency to make me draw out missions way longer than they should. Build slow, watch em work...it's kind of calming.

Well...usually it's calming.

Apparently, back in October, when the last 6 hours of the marathon ended and I went into my sleep coma, I had left the game in the middle of a high stress campaign that required some skill that I had built up in those 6 hours of play but had since lost in the months that followed. The mission required me to send bushels of wheat to Rome whenever asked...which was frequently. Pushy emperor... If you missed the deadline, Caesar got pissed. I had forgotten everything I once knew in this game since I had successfully ignored its existence for 9+ months. Not knowing stuff made it difficult to plan a proper city. I needed wheat farms and mills and a trade dock and a large boatyard, a shit ton of wood... It was all very stressful, and as the months passed and each wheat deadline approached I watched my little workers scurry around, and I yelled at my screen, "HURRY YOU LOAFS!"

This was the opposite of calming. Because of my mad dash to mass produce wheat, I didn't organize my city very well, and it made it hard to upgrade my housing later because everything was thrown together...like Homer trying to put together a barbecue pit.

I couldn't for the life of me get their houses to upgrade to Large Insulas. The lazy bastards wouldn't go across the street to the bathhouse. More yelling of "IT'S RIGHT FUCKING THERE!" ensued. So many hours wasted trying to relearn the game and reorganize this shit show that I had created. (No more stopping playing a game halfway through. This I vow.) I finally completed this mission and had the chance to move on.

Moving forward, there were oodles of cities to choose from. Some peaceful missions, some military. Too many choices. Hate it. That's the same reason I hate Subway. Do I have to tell you every fucking thing? Can't I just point at the board and say gimme that one?

I have digressed.

This was one of the problems I have with this game. There is clearly a progression from easy to hard that is present in the missions presented, but cruelly they just give you all the options on the map and say "Just pick one, idiot." while I'm sure they quietly laugh amongst themselves at your expense. I looked up all the missions online, and I had apparently been a moron and picked one of the fairly difficult ones previously. If there's a logical progression of difficultly in the missions, make me do them in the right order. Save me from myself. The system they use is terrible because:

1. It makes it possible to play a mission that's way above your skill level, which makes you say bad things about yourself, and could result in rage quitting.
2. Having a shit ton of missions to choose from is kind of overwhelming. I thought this game might go on forever, but thankfully, the internet was helpful in debunking those thoughts.
3. When you complete a mission, that city isn't removed from the map. You can play it over and over. Why the hell would I want to do that? Your game is fun, but it ain't THAT fun.

After the growing pains of my first return mission, I got back on the right progression path and slowly eased into the rest of the game. It was back to being calming again. I built slow and managed my output of goods better. There's a bit of pride that happens when you only have to use one Granary, which fills up and empties out consistently, and everyone gets their rations. I found the exact right balance of food production to people. Awww yiss.

Each new mission, I got better at building up my city and upgrading the houses quicker. I mostly stuck to the Peaceful campaign, not because I'm averse to fighting or some such shit, but because the combat system in the game is really kind of terrible. You build structures to house and train your military, and then when people come a fightin', you take your soldiers out and run them toward the attacking horde. They clang clang clang a little bit, and then it's over. It's not fun. It's not hard. It just...is. Le sigh.

While we're on the complaint train, I just want to say that Civilization Rating is a bitch as a mission objective. I never quite figured out what made it go up, and it's infuriating because it slowly decays, decreasing your Rating over time. I thought building a Wonder (giant showy structures) would bump up my Civilization Rating tremendously. No dice. You gain as much with a Wonder as you do with adding a shrubbery. COME ON! Plus, because it takes a long time to build and they're ginormous, they play this ridiculously long video where it pans around the Wonder to show off the "beautiful" 3D structure. By the time they're done ogling the Wonder, what little Civ Rating I gained has already decayed away. Great...

This was the biggest hurdle in the final mission. I had gotten really good at upgrading housing so that I got to the Palaces stage without too much consternation. I just had to get loads more people and bump up my Civ Rating to 95. Getting more people was easy. Build more structures. Ones that don't create any new materials or products because it'd screw up my delicate warehouse inventory balance. More structures mean more jobs, and more jobs bring all the boys to the yard. Population huge. Check. Onto Civ Rating.

Like I said, I still haven't quite figured this out. It did seem that temples bumped it up 1 point for each temple. This led to much chaos. I just wanted to finish the game, and I was so close, so I just started throwing shit anywhere. More temples, more temples...okay, stop temples. Now, gardens. A shit ton of gardens! Now some purdy statues. AHHHHH! The Civ Rating is going down the longer I wait. Just throw stuff anywhere! Click, click, click, click...clickclickclick! God, this looks awful. My nice organized town looks terrible now. Fuck it, more trees!!

That did the trick, but I felt kind of dirty afterward. It was like a giant statue vomited baby statues all over town.

Despite the issues I mentioned, "CivCity: Rome" is still a good game. Once I started getting the hang of managing my town efficiently, the game became incredibly addictive. Who wouldn't like a game that makes you shout things like "Go take a bath!", "Go to church!", "Shut up! It's fine!", and "There's olive oil in that warehouse, ya fucks!" Once I started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, I ran heedlessly toward it. I played til 3 in the morning last night; I played during my lunch hour; I played during our 20 minute break at work. I have a nasty habit of not finishing these types of games because they require such a time investment, but I kicked this one's ass, and I'm proud to knock another game off my backlog list.

Tiny Tower

I have yet to talk about any mobile games in this blog, and I never really intended to as I don't really count them among my backlog. This can mostly be attributed to the fact that most mobile games have no win condition. They're designed to be a quick distraction you can use to pass the time while you're on a bus or possibly sitting on the terlet.

However, I feel compelled to describe my experience with "Tiny Tower". There's something about Nimblebit games that suck you in against your will. It happened with "Pocket Planes", it happened with "Tiny Tower". I remember telling people multiple times that it is absolutely no fun but for some reason I keep playing it.

First, let me describe what "Tiny Tower" actually is. It's a management game. You are in charge of a tower in which you will build floor upon floor infinitely toward the sky. That's basically it.

You have a lobby and an empty floor, to start, to put either a residential apartment area, food establishment, retail store, recreation location, service, or creative business. You move people, called Bitizens, into your residences, but they can't just spend all their time holed up at home. These motherfuckers have needs...like Froyo. Build it and they will come.

The Froyo won't function without workers though. That's fine. I have a whole floor of people loafing in the residence I have renamed Shithole Apts. Swish. Each Bitizen you assign to an establishment will unlock a new commodity that is sold there, with three being the maximum number of workers at any one location.

Choose a product to purchase and after waiting an inordinately long amount of time, it will be ready to stock. Lather, rinse, repeat and your shop will be fully stocked with all three available items. But what's this? Eileen Miller hates her job at the Frozen Yogurt stand, as evidenced by her frowny face. I would be a terrible human being to allow her to continue this unfulfilling digital existence. She just won't be happy unless she's working in the recreation industry. It is her dream to work at a bowling alley. Dream big, Eileen.

Well, I'm raking in the frozen yogurt money and can build another story to this tower. I'll build a random recreation business, so I can whisk Eileen away from her personal hell.

What? It's going to take 14 hours to build this?!

Wow...this game is really no fun at all, yet I keep checking to see if my inventory needs to be restocked. I reorder and restock the shelves as necessary as construction of my new floor trudges on. If I leave these bastards to their own devices, we sell out of product, and they all go home. Get back to work you loafs.

That seems to be the key to the addictive quality of these games. It requires constant management. It's not fun, but it requires you to check up on your Bitizens numerous times during the day lest your whole tower ecosystem grind to a halt. Everything takes time to build or restock, and this keeps you coming back. For the impatient out there, you can speed this up though, with TOWER BUX! You can gain these slowly by playing the game or you can buy them immediately with real moneys. It's genius really... Who wants to wait 15 hours to build a Hat Shop? I got shit to do. (Note: I have never spent money on microtransactions, and I don't intend to, but there are apparently people out there that are making this monetization system feasible or it wouldn't exist. Right? Right.)

Anyway, I waited the whole time, used TOWER BUX I accumulated in-game, or used the various VIPs that arrived in my lobby to speed up the process when I chose, without spending actual money and slowly built up a total of 38 floors. I even went home on vacation and kept playing it. All while I was there, I tried to explain to my Mom why this game was terrible and that I wasn't quite sure why I kept playing. The Brainy Gamer wrote an article which echoed my experience of forced unfun. (You can read that here. He's way more eloquent than I and curses much less, if you're into that sort of thing.)

"Tiny Tower" is a hamster wheel. When you get enough money, you can build more floors, which require more workers, which require more residential areas to house them, which requires more floors, and so on and so forth. I was trying to form some sort of exit strategy because I wasn't enjoying myself but couldn't quite tear myself away. The way I usually do away with a game is to beat it. How was I to get that feeling of accomplishment in this sort of game?

My only hope were the missions. There were only...75 of them. *gulp* These missions require you to collect a certain amount items for a particular event and only one could be active at a time. Example: The "A Day at the Beach" mission requires 900 Sandals from a Shoe Store, 13,500 Tournaments from a Volleyball Club, and 1,350 Jumbo Swirls from a Frozen Yogurt. I had all those establishments, so I accepted the mission and started collecting. After finishing it, I found two others that required businesses I already had plus a Pub, which I didn't have. Therefore, I set out to build a Pub.

Upon building the Pub and completing those two missions, I looked at the remaining missions and thought, "What the hell am I doing?" It was like King Théoden coming out of the fog of control created by Gríma Wormtongue.

It no longer held any interest for me. I've been "Tiny Tower" free for three days. "Tiny Tower" is not a game. It is a constant obligation in the guise of a game, and I'm glad to be rid of it.

Ben There, Dan That

"Ben There, Dan That" is a point and click adventure game from a couple of guys who clearly have a love for old school LucasArts point and click adventure games. There's little references to the classics throughout the game. Ben and Dan's apartment, for instances, has posters up from "Day of the Tentacle", "Sam & Max", and "Full Throttle". Looking at the Day of the Tentacle poster elicits a Bernard quote of "Ooh baby, what a man.", while looking at the Sam & Max poster, Ben will talk about the "cheesy retro ambience", a la Max. I particularly liked when you looked in the mouse hole in their apartment, the character mentions that he doesn't keep money in there because that would be ridiculous. (Sam & Max reference) A bunch of little things like that stuck out to me as enjoyable just because you know you've had a shared experience with the game's creators.

I enjoyed their humor for the most part. They may have crossed a couple lines from time to time, but it was all in good fun. I will say that I don't agree on their stance that American Football sucks or that museums are boring, but they may be right on about American beer being akin to horse piss... These dudes are British, if you hadn't noticed. I guess my point is here, fuck soccer. Go 'Murica. Haha!

Regarding the visuals of the game, they appear simply drawn in a scribbly, couple steps above stickman kind of style. I don't mean this as a criticism as it was definitely distinct. I believe they made this game using Adventure Game Studio, which was of interest to me. I've wanted to create an adventure game myself, and this was a fun, enjoyable experience that was fashioned using this tool, so I will probably look into it further to potentially use it for my own purposes. Most excellent.

With gameplay, it's mostly what you would expect from a point and click adventure game but slightly paired down. You can LOOK at things, USE things, and TALK to people. That's it. There was no PICK UP, GIVE, OPEN, etc. to complicate things. USE did the job just fine. The inventory system is kind of clunky though. The object you just picked up would remain out to use rather than simply being put away in the inventory. It made it seem like you had to put it away yourself, which wasn't the case. Also, when you had several items, you had to page through your inventory because only one small line of them could be displayed at a time. This got cumbersome when you were trying to figure out which items to try to combine with each other. There were also some extra clicks necessary when trying to unselect inventory items when your combining of objects didn't work. This is all rather nitpicky though. It could have been improved, but none of this detracted from the game.

The only real technical issue I had involved the dialogue text. Each character was assigned a different color for their dialogue, and in some instances, this text blended in with the background or was some shade that made it difficult to read. For the most part, it wasn't a huge problem, but there were several characters that were slightly troublesome to read. The text speed was also iffy. I would read faster than they expected at times and click the spacebar to continue. If you pressed the spacebar too close to when the next block of text was going to appear though, it would cycle past the new text, and you'd miss it completely. Once again...being fairly nitpicky here.

"Ben There, Dan That" was a quick game, only 2 or 3 hours, but it's certainly worth giving it a go if you're a fan of the genre.

Mirror's Edge

Another backlogged game bites the dust. This time it's Mirror's Edge. This one would have likely languished in my backlog for ages if not for E3. Apparently there's a Mirror's Edge 2 coming out, which means hurry up and finish the first one, so I can pretend I've been looking forward to the sequel all along. I pulled that sneaky shit with Portal/Portal 2. Swish.

Mirror's Edge is set in a futuristic society in which the big bad government controls everything, eavesdrops on all your communications in the name of safety, and wants to put a bullet in you and your buddies' heads because you're "runners". Runners are couriers. Their job is to deliver messages and whatnot, circumventing the oppressive government surveillance that exists. The gubment don't like this, hence the bullets. You evade the baddies by running from rooftop to rooftop, climbing on scafolding, or whatever ledges, pipes, etc. you can get your hands around. You basically parkour around the environments, evading all the shooty bad people while trying not to fall to your death. ...but you will...a lot. Like most games where your character can fall to their death, it's best to have a cool head. Don't freak out. Calm your tits. Remember, spazzing results in splat. Lots of trial and error is the end result, which I didn't really mind. It would load back up quick, and you'd have another go at it.

I've never really seen a game like this in which your main goal is to run the hell away and gunplay is kind of secondary. There are guns, and you can use them, but it's not really a shooter. It's all about the running, which is enjoyable and a nice change of pace. Running the hell away was always my favorite part of Assassin's Creed, so I was digging this pretty quick. Jumping, sliding, and wall running around felt intuitive, and you needed to use a variety of combos and skills to make your way through each chapter. They don't hold your hand and tell you absolutely everything you can do, which had its pros and cons.

For the pro side, I liked that there was a bit of a sense of exploration and learning that occurred by not telling me everything. For example, I didn't know that some glass could be broke out by punching/jump kicking it. I learned this while trying to flee, and the only way out was to jump from one level to the other while busting out the glass of that second level while I was in midair. It was a nice aha moment that happened organically when I was spazzing out while being shot at and took a leap of faith. The fact that it worked surprised me and gave me a tiny sense of triumph.

On the other side of the coin, some things pissed me off because they didn't bother to tell me about important gameplay mechanics until it was absolutely necessary. For example, they didn't bother telling me that I could use "F" to zoom in and aim while holding a sniper rifle. I had taken sniper rifles from enemies before, and it bizarrely made the reticle disappear when I had one in hand. You couldn't aim accurately without it, and they failed to tell me the handy zoom hotkey. They kept this bit of information from me until I had a section that required me to pick up a sniper rifle from the ground and use it to shoot at a baddie convoy. This was also the first time that I realized I could even pick up weapons off the ground. It was never explicitly mentioned, and the only time I had a weapon in hand previously was when I disarmed a guy. I'm thinking this was an elaborate conspiracy to keep me running and jumping and getting shot rather than blowing the baddies away with my boomstick. I just assumed, okay this isn't a shooty shooty bang bang game. I was okay with this, but it was partially a lie.

Moving on. I was happy the gameplay itself was entertaining because, quite frankly, I didn't know what the hell was going on with the story at times. It wasn't the strongest element of the game, but I was enjoying myself enough that I gave it a pass. It was generic, kinda rambley, and didn't really come to any kind of satisfying conclusion. Despite the shortcomings of story, Mirror's Edge was still highly enjoyable. There weren't that many bugs that I encountered, the movement was smooth, fluid, and there were plenty of action packed segments. It was a good game, and I'll likely pick up the second one after it comes out.

Thanks E3 for forcing this game to the top of my backlog pile. What else you got?

Cthulhu Saves the World

"Cthulhu Saves the World"is a bit of an homage to old school Final Fantasy-ish games. It's a 2D pixel-art style turn-based RPG. The story goes, Cthulhu awakens with aims to destroy all things, as he's Cthulhu and that's kind of his thing. Before he can get started on the destruction though, he is stripped of his powers, and the only way for him to reclaim them is to become a hero. Once he's a hero, he'll have his powers back and theeeeeen he can destroy the world.

He meets various characters along the way who will accompany him on his quest, who have various skills in magic and ass kickery. Your merry little band travels from town to town picking up quests to prove your hero status, fighting baddies along the way. The combat is not too easy but not too hard. There are certain boss battles that I had to try multiple times, so there was some sense of satisfaction in besting them.

I'm not going to lie, I got somewhat annoyed by the whole surprise battle thing. I much prefer Chrono Trigger style battles where you actually run into monsters that you see rather than just randomly being thrown into battle when walking throughout a dungeon. However, I did like that they implemented this system where you would only have to fight X number of battles for each location. If a dungeon has a max of 25 battles, once you have won 25 battles, no more random battles will occur in that dungeon, and you can explore it with impunity. The dungeons are kind of long, not that visually interesting, and therefore start dragging after a little while, so infinite battling would have driven me insane, me thinks.

Don't get me wrong, it's still quite enjoyable overall. The humorous writing was a big strong point of the game. I just wish there was more of it. I wish there were more NPCs to interact with, more cutscenes, more objects that can be interacted with, etc. One little extra nugget is a commentary option that populates question marks around the game world that you can click on to read developer notes on some behind the scenes things about that particular section of the game. They're interesting, but word of warning...if you've got the commentary on during your first playthrough, it often has some spoilers for what's coming up in that zone.

Overall, I enjoyed "Cthulhu Saves the World". I got it on Steam for like two dollars, and I got about 11 hours of entertainment out of it. Seems like a good deal to me.

The Tiny Bang Story

"The Tiny Bang Story" is an interesting little puzzle game. I enjoyed it, but it's not going to get a rave reaction from most. I'm not gonna lie, the reason I chose this as my next game was because I had so much to watch on my DVR, and I wanted a game that wasn't going to require my complete attention. Half attention on TV, half on the computer...it worked.

Each screen displays hand drawn backgrounds with puzzle pieces and various hidden objects throughout. The puzzle pieces depict the world, which has been blown apart (in convenient puzzle shapes). Assembling these puzzle pieces is how you reconstruct the world. You unlock new portions of the game world by solving mini-games/puzzles. These puzzles become available when you find a number of specific items to unlock each puzzle.

As I feel like my words may not have made any damn sense, look at this picture, and I'll attempt to make more of the sense.

The puzzle pieces are hidden in plain sight. See the green arrows. The top arrow shows one of these hidden bastards, and the bottom green arrow shows the count indicator. You'll need 22 more puzzle pieces according to this. Find all the puzzle pieces for a given level, and you get to put them in the world puzzle that looks like-a so.

To unlock the various mini-game puzzles, you need to find the number of objects for that particular puzzle, indicated to the right. In this example, looking at pink arrows in the first image, you see that you need 5 valves. There's one over there on whatever the hell that sphere is. It will unlock the valve puzzle seen below. Get it now?

Find the things, unlock the puzzles, solve the puzzles, advance to new rooms, repeat... After the end of the level, you'll be able to put together the puzzle pieces you've found. At the end of the fifth level, the puzzle of the world will be complete, and you win...I guess. I say I guess because it's not abundantly clear it's over. It turns out I'm a fan of credits. It pissed me off in Skyrim, and it pisses me off here. Just roll the credits. It gives me a sense of satisfaction. Humor me...

But instead of credits, you're in a new room where all the characters seen throughout the game are now gathered together. There's a wall of all the mini-games/puzzles you've completed, which can be replayed if you're into that sort of thing...or you can just call it a day.

I'm done. Onto the next game...

LIMBO

Well, I finished LIMBO. How can I describe LIMBO? It's a critically acclaimed platformer that I'd call enjoyable with a side of confusion. We'll start with the enjoyable...

I really like the sparse black and white art style they've gone with throughout the game. All the foreground elements were black silhouettes with multiple hazy background layers moving at different speeds to give a sense of depth. It's like that multiplane camera technique you see in old Popeye cartoons. It looks great.

Something you learn early on in this game is that death is around every turn, it's varied, and it's brutal. Pits with spikes, bear traps, a spider the size of Shelob, giant saws, machine guns, or...a mere three feet of water...all perilous. (Yeah, drowning is hella easy in this game.) The point is, there are lots of ways to die, and unlike a lot of games, when it happens, it had a tendency to make me recoil a bit. You'll be flung like a ragdoll, chopped into tiny pieces and violently strewn about, smashed, electrocuted, and probably impaled by a giant spider leg.

Part of this feeling of brutality comes from the excellent sound design in this game. I keep mentioning the spider because I think this thing was the cause of my first death, and it was memorable. The tremendous thud as its leg went through me and into the ground seemed to have a lot of force due to the sounds associated. Plus, the spider just walks away, my lifeless corpse still impaled on those pointy legs. What an asshole... The sound design is just very good. It's believable, and there's an economy of sound that causes anything out of the ordinary to make your ears perk up. You'll pause momentarily and perhaps proceed with a little more caution. In most games you won't notice the sound design at all unless it's so poor it calls attention to itself. It's nice when sound is used effectively to enrich the experience.

Regarding controls, you're limited to your arrow keys for directional movement and the control key for interacting with the world. (Pull a crate, flip a lever, etc.) It's not very complex, but it doesn't need to be. In a way, I felt like the limited amount of actions I could perform made the world all the more foreboding and scary. If something's attacking me, there is a relatively small number of things I can do. There are no weapons, so I can't fight it head on, which is unusual in the game realm. It seemed to make you feel a little more helpless in this dangerous world.

As you navigate through the world, the world evolves, bringing new challenges and perils. You start in a forested area and as you progress, the locations gradually becomes more industrialized. This evolution and variety of scenery made it very enjoyable to explore the world and as a result, nothing ever got too familiar. I wasn't sure where I was going or what I was looking for, but I was enjoying looking for it.

And that brings me to the perplexing bit... While I was playing, I didn't know what I was looking for, and after a time, there I sat, done with the game, and I still wasn't all that sure what I had been looking for. If you look at the tagline of the game, it reads, "Uncertain of his sister's fate, a boy enters LIMBO". Ah...I was looking for my sister. There was a person there at the end. A lady person... I suppose that was her...which means I win. Yay? I'm unsure how I was supposed to draw that conclusion by the content of the game alone, but I'll take that as a given since you bothered writing it and all.

There are a lot of theories about the meaning and symbolism present throughout the entire game and especially regarding the ending. A lot of them seem to be reaching a bit and others sound like total bullshit. I've never been one for symbolism and such though. *shrug* The developers keep the theorizing going by saying that it's up to the user's own interpretation. You smug bastards... I know you had a certain intent when you made the game. Nothing you did was on accident.

I won't go into the various theories because there are A LOT of them. Besides, LIMBO is definitely worth a play and going into it with preconceived notions about the meaning is going to alter your own interpretation, which will give the devs sad feels.

So yes, it was an enjoyable game, and they made me ponder on symbolism, which I hate. That's quite a success. I'm still pondering it, in fact, so my hat goes off to them. Well done, devs. Well done.