Knights of the Cardboard Castle

As your stereotypical nerd, I never play sports games with the notable exception of racing games. Even then, I only play the mainstream racers and only with automatic transmission instead of the enthusiast-class racing sims. Still, I’ve always been curious about the Football Manager series and how it’s really a turn-based strategy game and not a twitchy action sports game, so I picked it up the 2013 version during the last Steam sale. Keep in mind that I know almost nothing about soccer. I still don’t quite understand how the offside rule works, for example.

• This game is truly massive in scope. I know that most players will probably choose to play in a European league of some kind. But since I have no emotional connection to any particular league or any team, I opted to mostly play in my native Malaysia and actually chose the team of the state I’m currently residing in, Negeri Sembilan. I’m still somewhat flabbergasted that the game not only allows this, but seems to implement every little detail correctly, down to the history of the club, its current roster of players and staff. The works. And that goes for every football club in Malaysia, even the itty-bitty ones organized by local universities and companies. And I can find all this detail represented regardless of which of the many countries I am able to choose. I know that they built up this massive database over the many years that the series has already existed already but it’s still very impressive to a neophyte like me.

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I normally stay far away from Flash games, especially the ones on Facebook, but Swords and Potions 2 garnered some attention on a couple of gaming forums I frequent, so I had to check this one out.

• The premise here is that you own and run an item shop in some standard fantasy RPG-land. There’s an indie Japanese-made game on Steam called Recettear that does this. I’ve never tried that one but commenters have noted that this Flash game is actually better at the item shop aspect than it.

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My most recent assays in the adventure game genre have not been terribly rewarding. Despite this, after hearing so much about the adventure game version of The Walking Dead, and in particular about it is the best version of the franchise, being better than both the television series (which I bailed out of after the first season) and the graphic novel series (which I read only the first several arcs of), I simply had to buy it. I am now pleased to report that as incredible as this claim sounds, as far as I am concerned, it is perfectly true.

• The story is absolutely as riveting and emotionally powerful as everyone says. The voice acting is superb and the writing is, for the most part, excellent. This really is how The Walking Dead as it deserves be told. The kicker is that the game presents nothing new whatsoever. You’ll recognize similar situations, dilemmas, politics, character archetypes etc. from the tv show and the comics. But this game simply does a great job at distilling them and using these familiar elements in the best possible way.

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I’m not sure what possessed me to buy this game. It must have been a moment of weakness during one of the many sales on Steam and I was curious about the development story despite all of the bad things I’d heard about the game. Despite being many years behind the curve, here are my observations for what they are worth:

• The story is truly atrocious. As far as I can tell, the writers were forced to work around real-life historical events but this has the result that the opening moments of this game undoes almost everything that Ezio Auditore accomplished at the end of the last game. After spending so much effort acquiring the Piece of Eden in the last game and sparing Rodrigo Borgia, you lose it at the beginning of this game. So you spend all your time recovering it while fighting off the forces of Rodrigo’s son Cesare. And don’t even talk to me about the weird gap at the end between Ezio’s victory in Rome and his final confrontation with Cesare Borgia in Viana, Spain, no doubt to conform with historical events. And yeah, yeah, big spoiler, I didn’t like the fate of Lucy Stillman at the end either.

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Remember how much I loved the Arkham Asylum and Arkham City games? Well, as one review put it Mark of the Ninja is mostly the same, except in 2D. It’s a brilliantly realized, well-crafted take on the stealth genre. The lead designer claimed that he wanted to make a game in which ninjas actually behave like ninja, that is being masters of stealth and misdirection. At this, the game certainly succeeds being a purer stealth game than almost anything I can think of.

• The game’s visuals are amazing with a stylized 2D cartoony look. The cutscenes are pure Saturday morning cartoon sequences. The art design, incorporating anime elements in a Western setting (here ninjas fight soldiers with automatic weapons and bandits with explosive traps) is reminiscent of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’s evident that this saves them, this being after all an indie production, and yet this is precisely the right art style for this game.

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I held off buying Mass Effect 3 for a while because it’s EA and the only way to buy it in downloadable form is on Origin. But I always knew I would buy it eventually because I’d played both of the previous games and wanted to see the ending (however controversial it is!) I have to say that the experience with Origin really put me off. I had a hard time downloading the game and couldn’t download the free Extended Cut DLC at all. I’d download like 60% of it and then the downloader would silently throw it all away and restart from zero. This happened multiple times until I finally downloaded it via torrent from a pirate site.

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A year passes uneventfully. Then two. The restored Targaryen dynasty gains strength from month to month. At 17 years of age, Queen Daenerys Targaryen proves to be as good a monarch as it would be possible to imagine for Westeros. The essential goodness of her character, her skill with diplomacy and her fearlessness win over the lords of the realm, great and small. It also helps that her superb generalship makes the armies she commands a force to be reckoned with and her unmatched physical beauty makes all men enamoured of her. In January 301, the first child of Queen Daenerys and King Quentyn Martell is born. She is a girl, named Cerenna Martell.

The realm is at peace for the most part. There are still small wars as various minor lords vie for lands and titles but nothing that matches one Great House against another. From time to time, some nobles talk of making a push to seat Mya Stone or Prince Gulian Baratheon on the Iron Throne but nothing ever comes of it. Mya Stone eventually marries one of the Freys while Prince Gulian seems to become content with the pleasant castle of Summerhall and does not even support the faction pushing for his kingship. Queen Daenerys faces no credible threat and such is her popularity that it is hard to imagine any such threat emerging during her lifetime.

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While we suspected that another war would be brewing soon, we did not expect the reprieve to be as short as it turned out to be. Barely a month after the end of the last war, the High Septon at the Great Sept of Baelor calls upon to realm to throw down Queen Daenerys Targaren and crown Mya Stone of The Riverlands instead. Apparently he is quite upset about the acknowledged child of an incestuous marriage being the monarch of the realm. Once again it is a matter of supporting anyone who is not Daenerys Targaryen since the discontented lords who support this claim are mostly the same ones who support the restoration of Prince Gulian to the throne.

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