Knights of the Cardboard Castle

This game needs no introduction and I must confess that I bought it only because I wanted to check out what everyone has been talking about. I fully expected to be disappointed. This is after all a casual game made by the people behind Bejewelled. Considering its target audience and lineage, I looked forward to writing a scathing review, relegating it to the depths of non-games like Farmville and its ilk which masquerade as the real thing. As someone who actually likes tower defense games, surely this would be a travesty deserving of double heaps of scorn and derision?

But as you’re doubtless expecting based on an opener like the above, despite myself I gradually came around to the opposite view. It’s no Defense Grid of course, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a perfectly competent and fun little game in its own right. Some thoughts:

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I’m going to start this one with another old geezer note about how I played the very first Prince of Persia back in the day. Still, I lose geek cred by admitting that it was on the PC (under MS-DOS) rather than on the original Apple II. I’m still amazed that this was done by one person working alone in Assembly. I actually went and looked at Jordan Mechner’s design docs when the source code of the original was discovered earlier this year. I never did play any of the sequels and skipped the Sands of Time trilogy entirely.

This version that I played recently is the 2008 reboot of the franchise, which is why it is simply named Prince of Persia again. As a reboot, it pretends that none of the previous games ever happened and starts you off with a fresh story and new characters. My impressions:

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Like many gamers my age, I was introduced into the world of gaming by gamebooks. Not the simple Choose Your Own Adventure series or its many clones but the ones with rules and actual game mechanics. In my case, the library of my primary school in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Chung Kwok Primary School, turned out to have a copy of Flight from the Dark, the first book of the Lone Wolf series. It was the only gamebook they had but it was enough to spark my imagination and eventually my Lone Wolf collection went up to Book 12 and I’d branched out into many other gamebook series as well.

Anyway I was recently surprised to discover that BGG actually includes one of my favorite of these books in its database, the Duelmaster series by Mark Smith and Jamie Thompson. These two writers are probably best known for their Way of the Tiger ninja assassin series, which I own as well. But the Duelmaster series is the only one of my childhood gamebooks that I still think about from time to time. They consist of a series of four titles, and each title comes with two books because this is actually a competitive two-player game. I know of other gamebooks that are designed for two-players but I believe that the Duelmaster books are the epitome of this little subgenre.

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To be honest, I mostly played this just to get it over with rather than because I have any real interest in it, so there’s not much to say. As with the first Monkey Island game, this was a remake of the sequel by a mainly Singapore-based game. I zipped through it by making liberal use of the in-game hint system rather than subject myself to the torture of figuring out impossible combinations of objects.

• Like the first game, the humor is mainly of the wry grin rather than the laugh out loud variety. There are more meta-jokes too, which can be tiresome if done too often and somewhat alarming in what was only the second game of the series, but I enjoyed them well enough. Example: Guybrush often asks others, “What is the Secret of Monkey Island?” in reference to how the first game never actually answered that question.
• As a nice addition to the traditional point-and-click only gameplay, there are some timing-based puzzles. There’s even one puzzle which uses a rudimentary physics system!
• There are three islands representing distinct play areas and you’re free to move back and forth between them. The problem is solving a puzzle usually involves visiting each of them multiple times. It’s horrible. The developers even mention that they did this to extend the length of the game. They’re honest at least.
• As usual, I was okay with the puzzles which worked logically, i.e. getting a parrot to help you find the treasure by feeding it crackers, and knowing that the parrot knows this information from its dialogue. But there were still plenty of item combinations which would have been impossible without the hint system, such as wielding a live monkey as a wrench to shut down a water pump. That stuff just makes no sense!

As you can probably tell, it’s more of the same old, same old. I enjoyed the developers’ commentary and the unlockable artwork pages (which shows how the artists built the game one painting at a time) more than the game itself. I’d say that this is further proof that adventure games, but I’ve been hearing good things lately about the Walking Dead game, so I could yet be proven wrong.

There’s no getting around it: Alpha Protocol is a talky game. There are lots of people to talk to and each of them has lots of different things to say. In fact, some of the missions in the game consist of literally nothing but extended conversations. For example, if your mission consists of meeting a contact in Rome, you’re shown a cutscene showing you sitting down at a cafe and it’s jaw-jaw time. All of it fully voice-acted of course.

But you know what’s even more amazing? Depending how what you say to which person or what actions you take in-game, many conversations down the line can go entirely differently or might never take place at all. For instance, after I’d finished my play through, I restarted the game as a veteran with a nice pool of skill points to play with right from the beginning. After going through the basic weapons tutorial, the trainer offered me an advanced challenge I hadn’t seen before. This consisted of shooting a colleague in the nuts with rubber rounds. From that point on, this colleague would frequently insert references to this incident in all his conversations with me. It blew my mind how much hidden content there is in this game.

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After playing through a couple of missions in Alpha Protocol, I headed over to QT3 to get a sense of what the buzz around this game was like back when it was released. It was a very enlightening read. Early reviews from news sites were almost uniformly bad and must have scared plenty of customers away. But as actual forum members got their hands on the game and played it for themselves, the tide of opinion slowly turned the other way. QT3 members went from cancelling preorders and shaking their heads over Obsidian’s latest debacle to calling it the second coming of Deux Ex and castigating reviewers for not “getting” the game.

After playing through the game (on normal difficulty but with a raw recruit character), I put myself firmly in the latter camp. Don’t get me wrong. There are tons of technical issues with the game. The user interface is horrid. Changing your readied power or gadget requires pulling up a configuration screen, taking you out of the main game. The hacking mini-game is great in concept but terrible in practice due to how unresponsive the controls are. Combat feel clunky, partly due to how rough the animations are. Instead of snapping in and out of cover like a skilled super-spy, you’ll be constantly fighting against the controls to get it to do what you want.

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I bought Space Pirates and Zombies mostly because Tom Chick gushed about it extensively and this game’s setup reminded me of Star Control 2. I really, really loved Star Control 2. Plus this is a game made by two guys who quit their day jobs and mortgaged their homes to work on for two years. I just had to support that. After some 60+ hours, I’ve finally finished it. My opinions on it are mixed so it’ll help to list out the things I didn’t like first.

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So I’ve been putting in some serious time into Defense Grid again. Very serious time. According to Steam, my /played exceeds 100 hours, making it by far the most played game in my library. I guess I just really like the tower defense genre in general and Defense Grid in particular. At first, I only meant to play the Resurgence and You Monster DLC but then I noticed that a previous update had wiped out all my previous medals and leaderboard entries. So not only did I go back to replay everything from The Awakening and Borderlands, I also played every Story mission until I got a Gold. How’s that for obsessive? I considered getting gold on all optional map modes too but that was just too tough. Poison Core and Frozen Core modes are evil!

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