Knights of the Cardboard Castle

The rest of autumn 1424 was supposed to be a time for celebration. We’d just added a new business to our empire and Harold Kant comes of age. He becomes a fully controllable character and boringly ends up looking like an exact clone of his father. As Georg had taken to making and storing barrels of Alderman’s Brew back at the house in his spare time, we even managed to complete a guild delivery contract when the event popped up. 600 cash and bonus guild reputation per barrel is nothing to sneeze at.

But then things start going wrong. First, our new brickmaker’s shop way up north gets burglarized. The monetary loss is less than 100, insignificant, but we don’t want repeats. It may even be Wilbur Eaton, that irascible rogue again, but we have no evidence. We hire a second thug to look after things up north.

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Georg starts Spring 1416 by engaging in a risk diversification exercise: he has another baby with Julia. This turns out to be a girl who the game names Clarissa. In the meantime Harold graduates from monastery school (with a certificate and everything) and later gets the option to start an apprenticeship. It costs 1,000 up front and poor Harold does even get a stipend. Georg has Harold become a patron just like him. We’re going to need someone to look after the family business when Georg kicks the bucket.

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Julia gives birth later that same autumn and it’s a boy! Our Kant family has an heir! Actually I think your family dynasty continues on even through daughters. The game suggest Harold as the boy’s name and in a fit of laziness, I click “Accept”. Georg, having no idea when Julia’s water will actually break, isn’t at home when it happens. I discovered that you can buy recipes from the guildhouse to make special goods. I have Georg buy a recipe for Alderman’s Brew, which uses 1 wheat, 1 honey and 1 weak beer as ingredients. It costs 150 but I’m getting bored of making the same things over and over again.

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Shortly after the magical midnight that causes four years to pass in the blink of an eye, I notice that Georg has quite a lot of unspent experience points. Apparently achieving milestone events in life earns you XP and gaining the Yeoman title counts as a milestone. You need to spend those XP to gain levels and since access to higher tiers of buildings is linked to levels, I go ahead and put some points into Handicrafts and Constitution (don’t want to keel over and die before I manage to beget some young ‘uns). This is enough to push Georg up to level 2.

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So I just got started playing Guild 2: Renaissance and have already run into some snags. It’s buggy for one and since it’s publisher JoWood Entertainment has gone into bankruptcy, support for it seems uncertain. Also, there is no in-game tutorial (I guess since it’s a standalone expansion, the developers simply assumed customers would already know how to play it from previous versions). Since this is a bit of niche game made by continental Europeans, there isn’t much information on it online in English too. In short: it’s the perfect game to write a game diary for. Watch me try, and probably fail, at living the life of a commoner in the Renaissance!

Since I have no idea what I’m doing, I’ll be going with a nice, small map and only one rival dynasty. The objective is to nurture a family through several generations, growing in wealth and influence and starting a dynasty. You lose when the last member of your family dies, either due to old age or more sinister causes. I’ll be going with the Transylvania map for this one, not that I’d expect to see actual vampires in a game like this. Note: as is usual for all my game diaries, all images are clickable to get to full 1920 x 1080 glory.

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I wasn’t expecting much from Dead Space, thinking that it was more or less a generic shooter. This was a 2008 game so I mentally prepared myself for less than stellar graphics too. Indeed the game menus seemed to justify this: they smacked of muddy textures and shoddy work. Later I learned that all of the UI elements in the game looked like that because they are all rendered in-game as 3D objects rather than implemented as crisp 2D surfaces. But I’ve since revised my opinion. This is actually one of the best looking games I’ve played recently and a solid, well-thought out game design to boot.

The Good

• It’s well-executed, incredibly atmospheric survival horror. The opening scene which shows your team approaching the gigantic mining vessel USG Ishimura is one of the best I’ve seen in any game. Not only is the first sight of the Ishimura utterly fantastic, you immediately get a sense of what’s going on, who the people around you are and what you’re supposed to be doing there. Just solid worldbuilding there. And I can’t help but give bonus points for any game that includes Oenomaus from the Spartacus series (okay the actor Peter Mensah to give proper credit).

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Like half the gaming population of the planet, I’ve been playing D3 this week. Unfortunately mine is Dirt 3. I considered giving Diablo 3 a pass due its high price and its online only requirement but I have such fond gaming memories of Diablo 2 that I will probably pick it up eventually. Dirt 3 isn’t a game that I remember paying for, I just found it as a gift in my Steam account one day, probably due to some kind of promotion. I really enjoyed the previous two Codemasters racing game that I’ve played and so looked forward to it. Unfortunately my expectations went largely unmet.

• It’s noticeably prettier than its predecessor. Damage to vehicles is faithfully represented on your car model, environmental effects like rain, dust and snow all build up as your car races through the level. But I also noticed that the levels are less spectacular now. Some have commented that this makes the tracks more realistic but I really appreciated the grand vistas of the previous game.
• Weather and time of day effects are new. You can now race the same tracks in a variety of different times and under different weather conditions. This makes a big difference to how each track looks and feels and is the single best addition to the game. And it’s not just a binary on-off toggle either. You can get everything from light snow gently frosting the surface of your car to full on “I can’t believe I have to drive through this because I can’t see shit in front of me,” blizzards. Naturally snow and rain changes the driving feel as well, just watch your sporty car slide across snow while it struggles to find traction. Combine snowstorms and night driving for lowest possible visibility races!

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I studiously stay away from all Facebook games. As far I’m concerned Farmville and its clones can die in a fucking fire. But this one, made by the guy behind the two Last Stand flash games has me hooked, at least for a little while. It has some similarities with Farmville: it’s the zombie apocalypse and you need to build up your compound to survive it. This involves building vegetable patches and rainwater catches to harvest the food and water you need to survive. But it also has a full on tactical combat mode when you and your selected team of survivors venture out into the city to scavenge for supplies.

There’s a complete RPG in there: character stats (melee and ranged weapons, movement speed, scavenging, engineering etc.), experience points, slots for weapons and gear. There are quests to do (clear zombies out of a zone, visit the ruins of a street checkpoint to collect weapons, ransack a supermarket etc.) and resources to collect. Eventually your compound will turn from a hut in a parking lot to a high-security fortress with watchtowers, security barriers and floodlights. Or that’s the idea anyway. Many features are still not implemented yet (you can’t even man watchtowers yet and there is no crafting) and at heart, it’s still a Facebook game (pay real money to get building projects completed faster!) so I doubt it’ll interest me for long.

But if you do like Facebook games or are just a fan of zombie apocalypse games, you might want to give it a spin.