Knights of the Cardboard Castle

I first played King of Dragon Pass when it first came out in 1999. It was a pirated version naturally, probably bought at Imbi Plaza since I was 23 years old and just back in Malaysia from university overseas. I’d already known about the world of Glorantha from RuneQuest back then, so I wasn’t completely lost. But as I enthralled as I was by this completely new genre of game, I couldn’t make much headway in the game and eventually gave up on it. I’ve since played many, many other games of course, but I never forgot about KoDP and I was always conscious of the fact that there has never since then been any game quite like it.

After downloadable editions of games took off, I always thought that KoDP would be a fantastic candidate. I was not alone. As far as I can tell, many, many people wrote to A Sharp, the creators of the game, begging them to make and sell a downloadable edition of the game. For years, A Sharp swore up and down that the technology they used made this impossible and the only way to buy this game is to send money to A Sharp and they would send you a CD-ROM in an envelop.

But then the iOS took off as a gaming platform and suddenly A Sharp found it worthwhile to make a port of the game. It was released in 2011 and apparently sold quite well. Then despite the earlier claims, GOG.com managed to rework the original Windows version as a downloadable game in 2012. So now 14 years later, I finally get to play the game seriously and what better way to do that than with a game diary.

For those who know nothing about this game, here is a short introduction: it’s primarily a strategy game with lots of role-playing elements. All art is hand drawn and there are absolutely no animations. Many, many events take place and these are all described in text and you choose responses and options, not unlike an old choose-your-own adventure gamebook. Due to this, the game doesn’t feel hopelessly outdated by modern standard. You control a clan and the objective in the short game is to create a tribe and successfully lead it. In the long game, the objective is to eventually unite the tribes of Dragon Pass into a single nation and become King (or Queen). This game diary will be based on a normal difficulty long game. It will assume no prior knowledge of the game so it will be very verbose at the beginning to explain everything. Later, after things are set up, I will probably only describe the important events as they occur.

Hey, I finally get to write about a game that was actually released this year! Okay, this is just a free to play game and I didn’t really feel compelled to spend any money on this. Like all free to play games, it’s an online game that sells extra features for real money.

• This game naturally invites comparisons with DC Universe Online. The comparison isn’t quite fair of course, since DCUO plays more like a standard MMORPG while Marvel Heroes is explicitly an action RPG Diablo 2 clone. But of the two, despite the fact that I like the Marvel universe characters way more than I like DC characters, I find DCUO to be superior by far.
• The reason for this is that Marvel Heroes is a thoroughly mediocre game. It’s not actually bad, just mediocre. For example, it uses lots of familiar locales, but they all feel thoroughly generic. The theming is all over the place. In Manhattan, you may get attacked by mobsters, aliens, morlocks, AIM troopers, anything really. The story itself is pretty humdrum stuff. Being able to actually play as established superheroes is fun at first, but it’s just a gameplay mechanic with no attached story. I very much preferred the DCUO method of being a new superhero taking part in adventures side by side with established heroes. Graphics are mediocre

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This post covers the game pre-Enemy Within. Yes, this means I intend to get the DLC and replay this eventually. Like everyone else the original version was one of my favourites during the glory years of Microprose, so I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. Some brief thoughts:

•  I really appreciated the graphics upgrade. I didn’t think it would matter much before I played this new version but it did. Everything looks so spiffy. I even like all of the nice animation details. The side view of the base looks great even if it is non-interactive and pure eye candy. I especially the design of the new Thin Man alien type, right down to their reptilian eyes and unnatural movements.

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The premise and setup of this game intrigued me so it was on my watchlist from quite early on. It’s a zombie survival game but the main game interface is set up to resemble a diary. As events happen, more entries appear in the diary. There are three game modes so far, which roughly correspond to three different difficulty levels. Thoughts:

• The diary gimmick ultimately fails. There is some novelty value at first in reading all of the diary entries but after reading the same lines over and over again, you quickly learn to skip them. Your survivors kill hundreds of zombies over the course of a game. Do you really want to read that so-and-so bashed a zombie’s head in with a baseball bat dozens and dozens of times? From a game production perspective, it’s clear that doing it this saves the team from needing to create too many art assets. But I quickly found myself wishing for a more familiar, conventional interface.

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Yep, it’s been more than a month since my last post. One reason is that I went on vacation for two weeks in October. The other is that I’ve been playing Dark Souls. And anyone who knows anything about gaming can tell you that finishing this game (for a first-timer at least!) takes a lot of time. But yes, I beat Dark Souls. Some preliminary notes:

• I’ve been wanting to play this forever. But Steam has region restrictions on sales of this game. I finally discovered that GamersGate would sell the game to me here in Malaysia and it activates on Steam. Lesson: regional restrictions on digital goods are stupid in an online world.
• The game looked shockingly ugly when I first started it up. I was very dismayed. Then I went digging and found the mod that unlocks the game’s resolution. Wit it installed, the game looked awesome. Dark Souls is unplayable without the mod. Get it. Also I played it with an Xbox 360 controller. The very idea of playing this with a mouse / keyboard horrifies me.

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400 Days is the DLC for The Walking Dead that is supposed to act as a preview for next year’s Season 2. Unfortunately, it’s pretty bad. So bad that even at its low, low price while on sale, I consider it a total rip off.

• It’s really short, much shorter than any of the individual episodes from the main game. Due to the way it’s split up into a section for each of the five main characters, plus an ending section, you spend very little time with each character, so it feels even shorter than that.
• Character models seem recycled from the main game. I swear that one guy looks exactly like one of the cannibal brothers from the main game. One of the main characters looks reminiscent of the game’s in-game model for Glen. It’s just so sloppy and lazy work. What’s worse is that some characters really are the same people that previously appeared, so you spend all your time wondering if everyone who looks familiar are supposed to be the same characters. It distracts from the story and is extremely annoying.
• Although the original game was actually extremely linear and offered few real gameplay choices, it did successfully evoke an illusion of choice. This DLC doesn’t even try. You’re railroaded from one conversation to the next, with almost no opportunity to just walk around to explore the environment and look at stuff.
• One recurring theme in this DLC is that all conflict is human vs. human. The zombies are barely in the picture at all. I mean in the final section, the recruiter walks around blithely with zombies in the background. She just doesn’t seem to see her as a threat and the zombies all just ignore her. It’s bizarre. Maybe since the next season is supposed to be set 400 days after infection, everyone who is still alive at that point really is so badass that zombies are an insignificant threat. But it’s a jarring design decision if true.

I could be wrong. Maybe the next season could have a really good story with really interesting characters. But 400 Days isn’t selling it to me at all. It feels cheap, rushed and completely bland. I really can’t believe they are charging money for this instead of offering it for free.

I’ve never been a fan of the Hitman series. The only one I’ve played before this was Blood Money and I only grudgingly completed that one by dint of slavishly following online walkthroughs. I just never really understood the game. It felt contrived and confusing to me. After spending way too much time on Absolution, I now understand what it’s about and yes, I have to admit that the Hitman way of doing things is pretty great.

• One of the main complaints many fans have about the 2012 version is that the levels are so much smaller than those in its predecessor. This is true. But paradoxically this change allowed me to better understand the exploration aspect of the game. The levels in the previous game were just too intimidatingly large with so many scripted NPCs and options that I found it bewildering. The smaller scope of this game allowed me treat each level as a small puzzle, to be replayed over and over again until I learned all their kinks.

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Shadowrun Returns was the first game I actually backed on Kickstarter, mainly because I was a fan of the franchise in high school and still own a 2nd edition version of the rulebook. This game was heavily anticipated and received a ton of publicity so I won’t go into explaining the lore.

• It’s very much a low budget game. No voice acting, 2D graphics, short game etc. All this is expected so I won’t be slagging it too much. Still, I am disappointed in the clunky user interface. There’s bad writing on the UI and item descriptions, you can’t even read the full text of the descriptions when buying items or choosing shadowrunners to hire, it’s occasionally hard to target enemies who are standing behind tall objects on the isometric map etc. All of those things shouldn’t cost much money to get right. They could also have given us a combat mode on and off button. Hey, if the player wants to have combat mode off while enemies are shooting, that’s not the designers’ problem.

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