The Half-hour Hitbox: November 2013

And that was November, a month of new console generation releases, colder weather, eating everything not called turkey, and doorbusters, which is my new favorite word to hate. Seriously. Tara suggested that Black Friday sales should be called “I’m stupid!” so that when asked what people are there for, they can just say, “I’m stupid!” I kind of have to agree with her on this. We’re only a few years away from Black Week, seven days of stupidly saucy sales priced just low enough to get you into the stores and away from your loved ones. Me, I’m spending this day-after-Thanksgiving in my pajamas, writing about videogames and drinking coffee. Sure, I might go out later, but it’s probably only to Family Dollar for the sweetest deals this side of Pennsylvania. I don’t expect to be trampled.

But wait, that’s not what this post is supposed to be about. No, no. I’m here again to cover the handful of games I’ve played this month, but have not gotten a chance to really examine here on Grinding Down. There seems to be a lot more this month than previous Half-hour Hitboxes (Hitboxs?), and I don’t know why. I guess as the year winds down I am finding myself with more time to dabble. I have also continued to put in some solid hours with Primal, and I expect to beat it before 2013 comes to a close, praise the realm of Aetha.

Once more, to the list…

A World of Keflings

I was surprised at how much I liked A Kingdom of Keflings, which is a very relaxed town-building sim, with a focus on a soul-soothing soundtrack and straightforward missions, like build a house or a factory or put this Kefling in that thing you just built. So far, A World of Keflings seems to be all that over again, except now you can travel between various themed kingdoms for different missions–and that’s fine by me. I also like how you can begin building something, and your little Kefling worshipers will finish putting it together so long as you construct all the required pieces. You can also play with silly emotes.

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen

Last month, the big epic free RPG for PlayStation Plus subscribers was Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and this month, we got another doozy brimming with hours of content. Alas, I probably won’t see much of it. For some reason, Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen doesn’t fit properly on my TV, and even stretching it out is an ordeal, with the end result being sub-par. This makes for tiny text, tiny monsters, tiny inventory screens, and so on. I played about an hour’s worth of content, did a few missions, and recruited some Pawns to aid me in my quest to…slay the dragon that ate my heart? Sure, I think that’s it. I do, however, appreciate that you can play as a woman, as well as one with a bigger build.

Might & Magic: Duel of Champions

Honestly, I had no idea Might & Magic: Duel of Champions existed until it did, and I went straight to it from Penny Arcade‘s Twitter account the morning it was released on Steam, curious enough to give the newborn a shot. I mean, I no longer have a circle of friends to play Magic: The Gathering with, nor the money it takes to stay current and in the loop, so a free-to-play card game based heavily on the same CCG mechanics is right up my alley. Because I still desperately want to play, and this, from what I dabbled in, seems really good. I did all the training missions and the first real “hands off” mission, and I like the mechanics a lot, especially the ones that differ from the more traditional MTG stuff. However, sometimes the opponent’s turn goes too fast, and I have a hard time keeping up with all the action.

Kingdoms & Lords

Ahh. Yet another city-building game, but this time set in Medieval times. No, not the themed restaurant chain that I went to once as a wee lad, but rather the era. Oh, it’s also on my Windows 8 phone instead of something you’d get distracted by while perusing Facebook. Anyways, it has all the typical city-building and social elements that I experienced shortly in Little Big City and CityVille. Which is to say, there’s energy and only so much you can do in a single session. However, it holds a slight advantage over those previously mentioned titles because it has castles and soldiers and barbarians and so on. Plus, there’s Achievements to pop.

Star Wars: Tiny Death Star

This is both very addicting and simple. and over the last few weeks has become my go-to game for when I have five or ten minutes to kill. Basically, you’re helping the Empire build a Death Star, opening up apartments and shops and other nefarious levels for people to spend money at to raise some serious credits. You take these citizens to their required level via an elevator, and watch everything grow. I’m not sure if there is actually an end point, but right now I have 12 levels and 23 people housed and working, with more to come. The cutesy pixel graphics and sampled tunes really make Star Wars: Tiny Death Star a fun, light-hearted game, one that maybe shows that Disney won’t ruin the franchise. Regardless, I’ll continue to keep playing until the Death Star is fully operational.

Iron Brigade

Tower defense, but with the focus more on action, on running and gunning, and you certainly play a bigger part than some dude who just places turrets down to do your dirty work. You sit in a Trench, which is like a mobile war machine that can shoot guns and build defenses. and a race of aliens called Tubes are trying to take you down. Naturally, as Iron Brigade comes from Double Fine, there’s an attention to style and goofiness here that is immensely enjoyable, like all the cosmetic gear you can equip your soldier with–hats, mostly. I’ve only done a couple of the early missions, but like it. Strangely, I find absorbing scrap to be therapeutic and rewarding, much like I had in Red Faction: Armageddon.

ibb and obb

Earlier this year, everyone went ga-ga–and probably rightly so–over how the two boys in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons could be controlled by both analog sticks. However, if it is anything like ibb and obb, I’m out. Honestly, I barely made it through the first few levels, and they were more than frustrating. More so, I got frustrated at my brain, as I kept getting the characters mixed up, forgetting what stick controlled who, and so on. Which made for faulty platforming. This game seems better experienced with one player controlling one guy, and an other the other. I doubt I’ll play any more, unfortunately.

Mad Father

Um, I’m sorry. I really don’t know. I found a copy of Mad Father in my videogames folder on my laptop, so I guess I knowingly downloaded this at some point. Anyways, it’s a Japanese horror game that looks like an RPG from the SNES era, and I played a little bit before getting freaked out. There’s a lot of story up front with sepia-filtered flashbacks to boot, and no combat from what I experienced. You want to avoid these monsters. Also, a spoiler: the father is mad. And not in an angry kind of way.

Habla Kadabla

Just a short and easy point-and-click adventure game about a witch trying to recover her stolen enchanted cash register. I had some time to kill before heading out for the Thanksgiving festivities yesterday, and so I gave this a spin. The puzzles are quite easy, mostly inventory-based, though you do also have to make a potion, complete a jigsaw puzzle, and shoot some ducks. I like the art and humor of it all, but for someone that just got robbed, Habla Kadabla–that’s her name–really needs to stop smiling.

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The Half-hour Hitbox is a new monthly feature for Grinding Down, covering a handful of videogames that I’ve only gotten to play for less than an hour so far. My hopes in doing this is to remind myself that I played a wee bit of these games at one time or another, and I should hop back into them, if I liked that first bite.

Might & Magic: Duel of Champions battles for my attention

Readers of this blog should know that I love just about any and every CCG I can get my hands on, whether or not I actually have someone to play against. Part of it is the collecting aspect, the fantasy that if I get this card or that card or three of that card then I can really build something special and unique to my playing style. It’s all about dreams, and this definitely started with Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, and Lord of the Rings, which I played with a small circle of flesh-and-blood friends. I also have some other card games in stuffed away in a box in my studio space that I’ve never played with anyone, such as The Simpsons TCG, Gloom, and Wyvern; I just have ’em to have ’em.

However, over the years, my gaming circle has diminished, though there are the occasional spouts of Munchkin and Lords of Waterdeep with friends, which are board games with some card-based elements, but not enough to get my palms sweating. Alas, I’m pretty much alone nowadays in my affection for CCGs and TCGs, and since I have no one else to share that love with, I must resist and sit on my hands. Even when it comes to digital card games. Sorry, Cardhunter. Bummer, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. Too bad, SolForge. My apologies–argggh, fuck it.

I can’t hold out forever.

I guess there was a beta for Might & Magic: Duel of Champions a couple months ago, but I only ever first heard of the game when it released–for free–on Steam recently. You can mostly thank Penny Arcade for tweeting about it, but I decided enough was enough, clicked “play,” and waited for the game to finish up its installation thing, which did not take very long. However, before I could partake in any collectible carding, I first had to create a Uplay account, much to my disliking–a minor annoyance at best. But then it’s right into the action of this fantasy-themed strategic online CCG where you choose a hero, build an army of creatures, cast spells and fortunes, and defeat your opponent as swiftly as possible. Basically, Magic: The Gathering, but a teensy bit different in a few areas, just enough so that Wizards of the Coast does not come armed with lawyers and paperwork and turn one Lightning Bolts.

Duel of Champions opens with a faction selection: Haven (protection and healing), Inferno (attack damage), or Necropolis (infecting and stealing life). Depending which one you align with, you’ll see a different story and deck of cards to muck around with. I went with Haven as it reminded me the most of white weenie MTG decks, where it is all about small creatures and protecting yourself with spells. The campaign starts with a lengthy, but vital tutorial that teaches you all the basics before padding off main story missions. Each encounter has some–well, to me–throwaway dialogue at the beginning that ties into the plot, and you battle with cards to earn XP, gold, and seals. To win, you have to damage your opponent’s hero until he or she has no more health.

In order to play cards, you not only have to use stored resources (like mana, but not), but also a combination of three different tracked elements: Might, Magic, and Destiny. Each turn, the player can increase one of these stats or their hero can use a special ability to do something else. I think the Haven hero lets you draw an extra card? Sorry, I don’t remember. Also, each player has eight event cards on the side, which are shuffled together and brought out in twos. These rotate around with each use and can only be activated once a turn if you can pay for the cost, with effects that generally target all players, negative and positive. They remind me of portals/dungeons from Munchkin and planes in MTG, in that they often are the vital game-changers in any round.

After all that, there are three main types of main cards found in every hero’s deck: creatures, spells, and fortunes. Data printed on creature cards correspond to an attack score, a retaliation score (damage dealt back to an attacking creature), and its overall health points. Health does not regenerate at the end of the turn like in MTG, meaning you have to be always aware of who is hurt the most. Spell, so far, are rather straightforward, such as raising the strength of a creature or healing its wounds. Fortune cards are like mini-event card that seem to only effect you and play around with the rules of the game.

And so it goes: you play cards, perform your actions, attack, and prepare, and then the other player goes. An opponent’s turn can sometimes go by in a blink of an eye, so you have to be paying attention, but truthfully…it’s a bit lifeless against artificial intelligence, but it’s all I have currently. Not terrible, mind you; just void of something. I suspect once I’m further along I can do a little online multiplayer and see what that’s like, but for a free card game riffing on what MTG created, it’s pretty good and has enough tweaks to make it a wee bit more interesting than a blatant clone. I certainly am playing it more than I did that other Might & Magic title. And if you read through all this with wild, excited eyes and totally grokked all that I wrote, please come over and play card games with me on the weekend. I have plenty to try. Any time is fine.

The Half-hour Hitbox: October 2013

I can’t believe we’re already on the third iteration of this passably new Grinding Down feature, which, in retrospect, I should have put together years ago. The months surely do seem to be flying away, but even that won’t stop me from writing a wee bit about the handful of games I got to play a wee bit of in the last thirty or so days. Again, this is probably not everything, just the ones that stick out like bright red sticks in the mud, and I solemnly swear to return to several of these at some point. Heck, I might even still be playing a few of them right now. Besides, I always seem to get a lot of gaming done during the Thanksgiving break, as I rarely go out shopping, preferring to spend those chilly days warm inside, hands on a controller, eyes somewhere far away. Which is all just to say that appearing on the Hitbox does not mean you’re a one-hit wonder, destined for forgetting.

Okay. Here’s October, in a nutshell.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Many moons ago, on the Xbox 360, I downloaded and played the huge demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. I swear it was around 2 GBs or something near that. Anyways, I found it an okay experience, with the bright, fantasy-ready colors being my favorite part of the standard action RPG fare. However, it suffered from tiny text syndrome, which made the lackluster dialogue and subsequent dialogue trees even harder to endure. A shame, as I am always mildly interested in big, epic RPGs, the kind that hold more than enough to keep one busy for a few months. Thankfully, this month, the game was given out for free to PlayStation Plus subscribers, and so I got to try again, and the tiny text is no longer a problem. However, I have only played a sliver further than I did in the demo, and I just can’t commit to it right now.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes

A puzzle game with a surprising amount of attention spent on story and characters. The actual puzzle part revolves around grid-based battles, wherein you have to move units around to create super units to deal damage and protect yourself. It’s easier seen than described, and I thought I was doing well with it, but the difficulty ramps up dramatically fast after the first chapter, leaving little room for error. Might & Magic certainly has a lot of style, but its hooks aren’t very deep in me; I also tried battling online and got my tush handed to me by, what definitely sounded like, two little boys.

Tetris Blitz

Another free game on my Windows 8 phone. It’s Tetris on speed. Speedy Tetris. Speed the Movie: Tetrisication. Whatever you want to call it. Basically, you have two minutes to clear out as many rows as possible and score big. This is helped immensely with power-ups. Of course, since it is a free-to-play title, there’s microtransactions and ads for them everywhere, and it seems sort of hard to get a really high score without paying a little money for those killer power-ups, which are quite expensive if you are attempting to pay for them with the in-game currency. Meh, that’s not me. But it’s a decent two minute killer, and who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky and score over 200,000 points all by my lonesome one day. Stay tuned for that…

Halo 3

Another month, another Halo game tried. This time, it’s Halo 3, given to us petty Gold members for free from the Microsoft overlords, and I played the first two levels on whatever the default difficulty is–and it went all right. Not really following the story much, since I never played anything in the series before it, but Master Chief is found on some planet, told to go forward and shoot aliens, and, well…there you go. Died a bunch of times, actually, as I don’t yet have a grip on the combat. And at some point, Tara came over and said, “You’re playing this again?” She thought it was Borderlands 2. Not sure what to make of that.

Poker Night 2

Already wrote a bit about how bad technically Poker Night 2 is, and I’ve not really gone back into it since then. Sorry, Brock and Claptrap–not your collective fault. Though now I am tempted to at least check out some of those Sam & Max games I have on Steam…

Dead Island

There’s a good amount to like about Dead Island, but I just can’t get over its breakable weapons. Now, for starters, I’m actually okay with weapons having durability and such; in fact, some of my favorite games, like Fallout: New Vegas and Dark Cloud 2, have you constantly repairing your gear to ensure you are in tip-top shape. However, on this island of living dead things, your weapons break fast, and you can only carry so many with you, which left me a number of times empty-handed and surrounded by enemies. Not an enjoyable system, especially when you can still lose a weapon you spent a lot of money on improving and upgrading. I get that it’s more realistic, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Otherwise, it’s good, with plenty of side quests to keep you busy. Love the kick button and looting every suitcase I come across. Some of the voice acting and character models are sub-par, but the zombies are effective and varied. Also, I’m going to admit that it took me several tries to get a vehicle moving, as for the longest time I didn’t realize the steering wheel was on the other side. Oops!

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Despite my lackluster love for Batman as a superhero character, I’m quite enjoying my time exploring the inner (and outer) workings of Arkham Asylum in…um, Batman: Arkham Asylum. It’s a mix of Super Metroid, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and the combat from the more recent Assassin’s Creed games, and it’s totally a blast. The attention to detail is perfect, and everything really gels with one another, from the Riddler stuff to the exploration and even the boss fights. Alas, of the bunch, this one seems like the best, so I’m trying to take my time with it.

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The Half-hour Hitbox is a new monthly feature for Grinding Down, covering a handful of videogames that I’ve only gotten to play for less than an hour so far. My hopes in doing this is to remind myself that I played a wee bit of these games at one time or another, and I should hop back into them, if I liked that first bite.