Knights of the Cardboard Castle

So I bought the Complete edition of Anno 2070 on Steam a while back and recently decided to try playing it. But as you might have noticed, there aren’t any screenshots in this post. That’s because I couldn’t actually get the game to run. The game requires that Ubisoft’s proprietary Uplay service to be running, on top of the Steam platform itself. I’ve previously gotten it to work successfully with such games as Far Cry 3, Assassin’s Creed 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. But for whatever reason I just could not get it to work with Anno 2070.

I tried deleting and reinstalling a couple of times, then I went to Ubisoft’s website and downloaded Uplay directly from there, had the game linked to my Uplay account and then downloaded it all over again directly from Ubisoft’s servers. But then the Anno 2070 autopatcher insisted on downloading a large number of patches before the game would run and it just kept flaking out on me. The autopatcher doesn’t even detect a failed download and automatically retry downloading. It just stops responding so that the only way to move on would be to constantly keep an eye on it, notice when it has stalled out, cancel the existing download and restart it.

It could well be that I have a crappy ISP here in Malaysia and that my network equipment is faulty in some way. Yet, for what it’s worth, I have no problems whatsoever downloading and updating games directly from Steam. So after a while of this frustration, I decided that life is too short to spend it on troubleshooting a mere game and I can live without playing Anno 2070 even though I’d already paid for it. Needless to say, I will be extremely reticent about buying Ubisoft games in the future if they continue to insist on using their silly Uplay platform.

I first heard about this from the game diary threads on Broken Forum and promptly put it on my wishlist. I don’t have a lot of experience with these visual novel type games though I do know that Long Live the Queen has more in the way of game mechanics than most VNs. Some thoughts after finishing:

• It’s much shorter and simpler than I expected. I wasn’t expecting something as huge as Academagia, but it’s still pretty short. You could finish a playthrough in a single day if you’re dedicated. Two days, max. Granted, you could spend a lot of time on it if you really want to get all the endings and all the achievements but most people aren’t completionists anyway.
• The game mechanics are simple. There are only 40 weeks,which amount to turns. Each week you decide what morning and afternoon classes to take and what extra activity to do on the weekend. This mainly decides your mood for the following week. There is also usually at least one event every week to deal with. There seems to be pretty much no randomness at all. All events are pre-scripted and will trigger at the appropriate times given that conditions are met. I actually thought there would be at least some random events.
• The moods are innovative here. Learning progression is determined by them, for example, when you’re angry you learn military and weapon skills faster. In practice, this means that you want to keep all of your moods near neutral most of the time so that they will be easier to switch around as you like using your weekend activity.
• Playing the game to completion actually is rather hard, especially if you’re aiming for a good ending. I’m irked that success depends on trial and error, as well as memorizing events since they’re all pre-scripted. Most of it comes down to having just the right sequence of lessons and mood changes for the challenges you want to win, exacerbated by the fact that a number of the skills are almost never used. I guess there is some entertainment value in going through all of the possibilities but I would have preferred a game in which you can actually plan well and strategize.

The upshot here is that I found it kind of neat but a lot less substantial than I had expected. The story is just okay and I wish there had been more art for all of the special events. Now that I’ve satisfied my curiosity, I think I’ll stick to more traditional game formats.

Since I never pay any attention to game marketing materials, I didn’t know about this game at all until it started getting praised on Broken Forum. Even then, all I knew about it was that it was a stealth oriented action with some pretty funky powers. I didn’t even know that it was a first-person game or anything about its setting or art style.

• Because of this, I was very surprised and nonplussed about the first-person view. I had never played the original Thief games, so to me stealth games were always played in the third-person view which gives you superior situational awareness of whether or not your character is wholly hidden from view. I had also decided to play this with an Xbox 360 controller instead of mouse + keyboard, and the melee combat was giving me fits. I’d imagine mouse users can much more easily deal with the elegant way enemies tend to sidestep out of the way of a sword swing and slash at your side but I never could get the hang of dealing with this correctly with a controller.

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I’ve wanted to buy this for the longest time ever since I learned about it but wasn’t willing to pay full price for it. So I put it on the watchlist on Gamer’s Gate and waited and waited and waited. It never went on sale once. So when Gamer’s Gate recently sent me a discount code because I haven’t bought anything from them for a very, very long time, I went ahead and used it on this. It’s essentially a life simulation game with an interface that is a barely veiled spreadsheet. The premise here is that you’re a First Year student at the Academagia, the premier school for magic in the land. The similarities with the Harry Potter franchise are obvious, including choosing a house to belong in, forming a clique with friends and having magical sports events. The main difference is that this is set in a medieval fantasy world which has its own fairly extensive background lore.

• Be prepared to do a lot of reading. Seriously, there is a ton of text in here. The credits contain a very extensive list of all the writers who contributed to this game. It’s way longer than I expected. I was surprised to see how little background art the game contains. I thought they would at least have commissioned 2D drawings for some of the more important adventures, but it looks to me that the game reuses the same pieces of art over and over again. You don’t even get many choices for your character portraits, only two per gender. So you better love reading and be using your imagination to sketch out the scenes in your head for this one.

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I’m getting a bit bored of open world games and I knew that this GTA clone set in Hong Kong had birthing problems, so I approached it cautiously. I’m happy to report that though this game is far from perfect, it easily exceeded my expectations.

• The most obvious inspiration for this is Infernal Affairs. In the end, I would have preferred it if they had lifted more from the trilogy. The story is surprisingly decent for the most part, especially at the beginning. I loved how Wei joins the Triads and moves up their ranks, how he earns the trust of the other gang members, how he becomes alienated from his police handlers and so forth. But it all sort of falls apart the closer it gets to the end. I particularly hated that we never see him outed as a cop to the gang members he actually considers his friends. That was a huge missed opportunity. It felt to me like they ran out of time close to the end and pulled a rush job.

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This is another one of those non-game games that have gained attention recently. Unlike, say The Stanley Parable which tries to play around with videogaming tropes, or The Path, which offers a metaphor-filled, dream-like experience, Gone Home is straight-up storytelling. It’s a very short game, probably two hours or less and there’s not much point in replaying it since it’s very linear. Spoilers will also ruin it, so I’ll only post some very brief impressions.

• Overall I enjoyed it and found it very much worth the time. The game does succeed at evoking the right emotions. Reaching the end and working out what happened felt way more satisfying than such a simple story had any right to be.
• At the same time, I feel that this worked only because the game toyed with my expectations and mislead me. The visuals and atmosphere suggested one kind of story. Its denouement turned out quite differently. In a way this is quite clever. Us videogamers are always primed to assume the worst. But this sure won’t work on me a second time.
• Boy, the house sure felt big. The proportions felt off to me. Maybe houses and rooms in the United States really are this big.
• The visuals are okay but not great. A higher degree of visual fidelity would I think have helped this game a lot, reinforcing the impression that this is a real house, as opposed to a videogame level you need to navigate.

As I said, I enjoyed this one but I feel like its a one-time thing. I would like to see more games that are just trying to tell stories, but next time perhaps fill these empty spaces with people you can interact with please?

I quite liked the first Sword of the Stars and looked forward to the second one but of course its botched launch is now the stuff of legend. Most players considered it to be unplayable. But Kerberos continued patching and adding content to it. A while back I bought the latest Enhanced Edition at a deep discount since I’d heard that it is now considered to be in a playable state. I only just recently had the time to take it for a spin. The results were unimpressive.

• Let’s start with the poor production values and overall glitchy feel the game still has. Apparently the introduction cinematics were taken out some time back. The button for it still exists on the main menu but it’s been greyed out. If you really want to watch it you’re meant to go over to YouTube. Despite many complaints, user interface design is still extremely confusing and unintuitive, which can be seen even from the game setup screens when you choose the game’s settings and decide which player slot you want to control.

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It took me forever to realize that the people who made this game were also the ones behind Mark of the Ninja, which I really liked. The game genres are just so different though once again they make excellent use of stylized cartoonish graphics. Not much to say about this one since I barely touched its surface.

• It’s a rogue-like survivor, meaning you’re thrown into a hostile world with nothing and must scrounge and craft items to survive. Your character needs to eat and needs a source of light to fend off a mysterious monster that kills you in the dark of the night. In winter, you also need heat and probably warm clothing. There’s even a sanity stat. Being in the dark, standing in the rain with no shelter or just being near some types of enemies drains your sanity. When it drops too low, your character goes insane. The rogue-like part seems to refer to the fact that you can’t save and reload the game at will, i.e. the game autosaves when you quit a session but the savegame file is deleted when your character dies.

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