Every click burns a little brighter in Torchlight II

Though I’ve not really mentioned it much here on Grinding Down, I’ve actually been playing a lot of Torchlight II for the last month and a half. Well, more than I expected. It’s a game that I bought during the most recent Steam Winter sale for a sexcellent deal and boot up for a bit every now and then, like while I’m waiting for my hot cocoa water to boil or if I got a half hour to kill before Tara and I head off somewhere. Bits and pieces, clicks and flicks. So far, I’ve not really thought of anything profound or illuminating enough to create a blog post around, but having just beat Pokemon White 2, I see some similarities between the two, and that’ll do just fine as a place to launch.

Now, to start, I liked Torchlight. Alas, I played it first on the Xbox 360, and so I had to experience tiny text syndrome on my TV, which lead to me missing out on reading all the various loot stats and spells descriptions and just going with what seemed best, defeating the purpose of caring about loot and equipping my character to the nines. It was not the most involved way to play, I’m afraid, and I later purchased the very same Torchlight for just under $4.00 for the PC during last year’s Steam summer sale, which helped rectify that problem. Though I didn’t really play it again for too long as there were a number of other distractions available. And then I picked up its sequel, which quickly eradicated it from my mind as something I needed to play.

In Torchlight II, you do a lot of the same things from the previous game, but it all somehow feels new. Or at least polished to appear new. Switching things up, I am playing as an Embermage, which is a highly trained spell-casting class with elemental attacks. His name is Mosley, and he uses gem-enchanted wands and relies on a lot of electrical-based spells, as well as some random happenings. My favorite being when a giant meteor falls from the sky onto everyone. His pet is a Badger, but sadly, I don’t remember what name I gave it. This class is a great mix of things, and trying to decide on skills is a fun challenge, as the Embermage can totally go in a number of ways. It’s definitely spicier than previous classes like…the Alchemist (basically, a wizard) or the Vanquisher (in short, a ranger).

Allow me to now compare Torchligh II with Pokemon White 2, as well as probably enrage some diehard fans from either boat. In both games, there is always something to do. For the former, it’s clicking on things until they are dead and picking up loot; for the latter, it’s battling Pokemon to gain EXP or capture them for your team. It’s all about collecting, moving forward. That said, there’s a story around both these main game mechanics that exists high above, nothing more than a blur and disembodied voice telling you where you should go to next. You can, if you want, get invested in this, but there is very little point. I don’t remember any specifics from the the original Torchlight‘s story, and I couldn’t tell you what is going on in this one. Same goes for Pokemon White 2. The story is such a non-issue that it is nothing more than perfunctory, which is a disappointment, especially in a fantasy realm as colorful and quirky as Torchlight II.

And with that odd comparison, let me say that I’m really enjoying my time with Torchlight II. Constantly finding new and interesting gear is a joy, as well as customizing it with gems and enchantments to make it even more unique. You are constantly improving with every new piece of armor and skill perk. Everything is streamlined, and playing solo is completely viable, even against some of the huge raid-like bosses. My Mosley is creeping up near LV 20, and I have no idea where we’re going story-wise; I just head to the starred locations, click on things until a new starred location pops up, and then I head there. That probably sounds a little underwhelming, but all along the way I’m clicking and having an excellent time. Looking forward to more with Mosley, though I suspect he’ll be my only character and playthrough for Torchlight II. Eventually, the light will gently fade.

2012 Game Review Haiku, #39 – Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP

Find the Megatome
Work with moons, enter dreams to
Vanquish antlered ghost

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For all the games I complete in 2012, instead of wasting time writing a review made up of points and thoughts I’ve probably already expressed here in various posts at Grinding Down, I’m instead just going to write a haiku about it. So there.

2012 Game Review Haiku, #35 – Red Faction: Armageddon

Corridor after
Corridor of aliens
To boringly shoot

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For all the games I complete in 2012, instead of wasting time writing a review made up of points and thoughts I’ve probably already expressed here in various posts at Grinding Down, I’m instead just going to write a haiku about it. So there.

2012 Game Review Haiku, #33 – Eversion

Zee Tee to rescue
Princess of Flower Kingdom
Is eaten instead

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For all the games I complete in 2012, instead of wasting time writing a review made up of points and thoughts I’ve probably already expressed here in various posts at Grinding Down, I’m instead just going to write a haiku about it. So there.

The sights and sounds of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP

The longer I don’t play any of those PC games I’ve gotten over the past year or so from too many indie bundle collections to name, the bigger my collection grows untouched with each new tantalizing bundle that adds to it. In fact, I’ve started passing up great deals simply because my digital collection is truly bloated. If I was to be honest, I still have a hard time remembering I have a gaming laptop now, as I mostly use my Macbook still, especially since that’s where I do a lot of my writing and all of my comics. My bad. But I finally bit the bullet, pulled the plug, kicked the can–what have you.

Seeing as Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is the new Braid/Cogs in terms of being coupled in nearly every new bundle that drops, I figured it was a good place to start. Plus, the look of the thing alone has had me intrigued since word-of-mouth about the little sound-based fantasy adventure came out, but since I’m the type of person who lacks both a smartphone and/or an iPad–and I can’t really even forecast when I’ll ever get such a device–I’ve had to wait  for it to get ported to the PC. Which was done back in May 2012. I got my copy of Sword & Sworcery from Humble Indie Bundle V, installed it to Steam, and quickly forgot about it because I have that tendency to do so. Maybe this is a forthcoming 2013 New Year Resolution in the works…

I guess the easiest way to describe Sword & Sworcery is that it’s an indie adventure game. Sound and atmosphere play extremely important roles, but there’s also some timing-based combat and puzzle elements to boot. You control The Scythian as he/she explores a mythic realm, uses a sword to do battle, and wields sworcery–song-based magic to get down to it–to solve musical mysteries. You’ll meet a small cast of humble locals as you move around the land, as well as some nefarious monsters, like a pursuing demon wolf-beast. There’s some other stuff that’s not really clear, like these tomes and mentions of antlered gods, but it all does a wonderful job of sustaining a fantastical yet believable other-world. Strange structures, that flipped Triforce symbol that appears now and then, an actual usage of a record to represent Side A and Side B of a place–moments of wonder, all of them. It makes each new location exciting to explore.

Let me take a moment to discuss the real meat of Sword & Sworcery: the music. The music, Grinding Down readers. It’s both calming and hypnotic, and at times absolutely unnerving. Just like the soundtrack from Fez. I’ve spent more time listening to the tunes than playing the game at this point. “The Ballad of the Space Babies” does something to my insides that I can’t, without a medical degree, accurately describe. But I’ll try. It fills me with air, it lifts me up. There’s a promise of friends whispered off the horizon, and cloud-walls that ripple with each breath to lead me there. I am floating, moving through space and heading home. Only I know the way. It feels like forever, but the speck of light is growing, crowning, now radiant, with eyes open. When I get there, they close; the ballad’s journey is over, and I’m safe.

Another part of the game that I’m enjoying, but those that follow me on Twitter are likely not is the fact that nearly everything can be tweeted directly from the game. Small bits of narration, descriptions, instructions, and even dialogue. I’m choosing my tweets carefully, but because there’s a lot of whimsy and downright silliness to the writing in Sword & Sorcery, it is often hard to resist tweeting out every encounter. For now, here’s some I’ve done:

More to come though.

So far, I’ve completed Session 1 and Session 2. Both sessions are around thirty to forty-five minutes long, depending how fast you move and how quick you figure out the song-based puzzles. The sheep one in Session 2  took me a little bit to figure out, but otherwise nothing too difficult. Moreover, the boss fight that completes Session 2 is more stressful than challenging, requiring constant attention and quick reflexes, which are probably easier to do on an iPad or phone that moving a mouse cursor left and right. I’ll get better, now that I know what to expect from these situations, but I got that Gold Trigon with only one star of health left. Whew.

I’ve taken some time off of work next week for the Thanksgiving holiday, and besides catching up on a lot of drawing for my 365 BAD COMICS project, I’m looking forward to playing some of these games of mine a wee bit more, with Sword & Sworcery‘s Session 3 high on the list. I’ll be back. Until then, keep clicking, listen hard, and float away.

Watching a videogame’s credits is an Achievement like none other

Many, many nights ago, I loaded up Blocks That Matter. It’s a puzzle-based platformer starring a little mechanical fella known as the Tetrobot, which can collect materials from the world and then build shapes out of them. You then use these shapes–as well as a few other abilities acquired along the way–to solve puzzles, bypass enemies, and reach the end of the level, which is always a purple portal. The main goal is to rescue your creators, these two Swedish goofballs that got kidnapped, but that’s kind of moot in the grand scheme of things. It’s quiet, cute, easy to grasp, with the potential for some serious brain-twisters, and full of love for the games that inspired itself.

However, one of the Steam Achievements for Blocks That Matter is for watching the credits, a increasingly more common concept that I just can’t quite grok. You select CREDITS from the main menu, kick back for maybe a minute, possibly a minute and a half, and then you’re done, achieving a thingy. It pops up in the corner, like you did something magical. This one, in fact:

Videogames are not movies: Watch the credits until the end

Right. Nothing tricky about this at all, and yet it got me thinking about credits, and the whens and whys I would watch them. Certainly, if I didn’t see this Achievement while perusing the list on Steam, I wouldn’t have watched the credits on my own. At least, not until I beat the game, that is–if such a happening ever happens. It might not, considering they are totally accessible from the main menu. But I like watching credits. It is part of the “completing a game” process for me, where I remain sitting, absorbing the final moments of a game before it goes to black and then back to the main menu. Some credits are better than others, which leads me to believe that designers need to dangle a carrot on a string to get people to watch.

A couple other videogames in my collection have Achievements for watching the end credits or simply sitting through them to see something special at the end at least. Deus Ex: Human Revolution gave out an Achievement if you sat through their seriously boring, long, and numbing credits sequence for a little Easter egg that connected that game with the the original Deus Ex. Hint: think Robert Page, Project Morpheus, Chimera nano-virus, and the D Project. I think the original Assassin’s Creed did something like this too, a teaser for the next game in a way. Can’t think of more at the moment, but I’m sure they are out there. Feel free to school me in the comments below.

On the flip side, just the other night, I beat Borderlands 2. The final fight was beyond lame, as I was able to glitch the Warrior into submission by firing corrosive-based bullets at it through a lava-made waterfall after it killed me initially. Just don’t go back down into the area after respawning. Simple as that. Meh. That topic is for another day. The end credits were a lot of fun. No surprise, given the writing and general aloofness present throughout Pandora and from Gearbox itself. I liked that it went alphabetically, naming who did what voices, surprised to see so many actors/actresses taking on multiple parts. Did you know that Randy Pitchford himself voiced Crazy Earl? Well, now you do. Further down, everyone–and I do mean everyone–got to write a sentence or two, thanking whoever, whatever. A lot of these boiled down to gratitude for family and loved ones, but at least it was something different to read than copyright jargon. Also, while all this is all happening, some great concept art is fading in and out. It made me feel a whole lot better, and I didn’t even need to up my Gamerscore because of it.

Other memorable end credits include The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Suikoden/Suikoden II, which are the kind of motif endings that like to show you just how everyone in the world is getting on after the final evil was vanquished. The ones for ‘Splosion Man reminded me of that one time in college when I was at a college frat party and I drank some…um, nevermind. Portal because of that song.

Hmm…I thought I had a point in all of this, but I think I lost the thread somewhere. Basically, if your end credits are engaging and creative, you don’t need to toss in some digital trophy to make me watch them. Treat them with the same care and thought as your game’s plot or character designs. Just don’t give me a tiny list of never-ending names backdropped with uninteresting music. Give me something to read, something personal to take away. I’m watching these credits to see who was behind the thing I just put hours of my life into, whether that’s a good or bad spin; regardless, recognition is deserved. I am watching, but give me something to watch.

2012 Game Review Haiku, #23 – Shank

Glad to see Kill Bill
Get its own videogame
Great art, prosy fights

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For all the games I complete in 2012, instead of wasting time writing a review made up of points and thoughts I’ve probably already expressed here in various posts at Grinding Down, I’m instead just going to write a haiku about it. So there.

The first hour of Stacking will not blow your stack

I know the gaming industry is currently bloated and over-saturated with games based on hopping into Russian stacking matryoshka dolls and plots hanging on oppressive child labor and puzzles solved by flatulence, but if you could find it in your heart and busy schedule…please check out my coverage of Stacking‘s first hour. It’s a fun time. The game and the review.

I actually wrote that coverage some weeks back, and since then I’ve come to beat the game as a whole. That means I can speak a bit more about what happens after the “emphatic yes” answer to that oh-so-critical question at the end of the post. It’s not a terribly long game experience, but I padded Stacking out a bit by searching for special dolls, different answers to puzzles, performing hijinks, and generally just exploring the levels and looking at all the adorable details instead of immediately moving on with the storyline. There’s a lot to see and experiment with, and that’s part of the charm, that it is paced to your liking. Between this and Costume Quest, Double Fine has created some great “introductory” videogames for friends and family members that you might want to get interested in playing a game. They are safe and still quite rewarding.

Overall, story in Stacking is more about style than telling, which is a small slight. It’s predictable but acceptable, with a beginning, middle, and end, but it’s how it is presented via silent film style that really keeps you watching. Little Charles Blackmore meets a wide range of dolls, and the larger they are, the more intimidating. I think my favorite is Cromwell the Terrible, capable of giving anyone and nearly anything a royal wedgie. The final fights switch things up, requiring you to have previously paid attention to doll powers, as well as know how to play rock, paper, scissors. Nothing too challenging.

I do have another complaint to add though, one that is really only discovered in the later levels. Well, honestly, they are too big. Not in the sense that you can get easily lost, but when you have to traipse back to the beginning part to find one specific doll…it can really feel like a sojourn instead of a skip.

At some point, I’m gonna hop back in to clean up some Achievement-related tasks and give the DLC The Lost Hobo King a try. I am expecting more of the same–which is fine–but if the gameplay of “solve X puzzles to complete level” gets mixed up even the tiniest of bits…well, that’d be a great surprise. I’ll be sure to let y’all know.

The sounds, saunter, and signing off of the Steam summer sale

This has been my first Steam summer sale. And by that I mean the first summer to come around where I have a computer capable of running some videogames. Not all of them, mind you, as my ASUS laptop can only do so much, but most, and most definitely all the indie or previously downloadable-only ones, which I prefer over the AAA titles. For those, like Batman: Arkham City and whatever the latest Assassin’s Creed game is called, I’d rather play them on my Xbox 360 than have to deal with slow downloads, configuring a controller for my laptop, and tweaking settings to get it playable.

And so, here are all the darlings I was able to snag during the crazy affair:

• Terraria (purchased for $2.49)
• Portal 2 (purchased for $4.99)
• Tiny Bang Story (purchased for $2.50)
• Trine 2 (purchased for $3.74)
• Fallout: New Vegas – Ultimate Edition (purchased for $9.99)
• Stacking (purchased for $3.74)
• Torchlight (purchased for $3.74)
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (gifted to me by Greg Noe when on sale for $2.49)
• Monkey Island Complete Pack (purchased for $8.74)
• The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (purchased for $2.49)

That’s a total of $42.42 spent, which is not bad. Also, the answer to life, the universe, and everything…twice. I think that is a win no matter how you look at it.

Of my new purchases, I’ve played a few, but only sparingly. I loaded up Terraria to see if it worked and…yup, it did. Think that game requires some time and devotion to get into. I also did the same with Fallout: New Vegas, just to see how it runs on my laptop; fine, fine, and it is quite a change to go from watching a loading screen on the Xbox 360 for minutes to blinking and missing them on the PC. The biggest reason for buying that game all over again–not just because I love it so–is mods, so I’ll have to look into which ones are the bees’ knees. Stacking‘s a lot of fun, and you’ll be able to read more about that once I finish up my coverage for The First Hour. And then there’s Torchlight, which I’ve fallen back into hard. You see, when I first played it on the ol’ Xbox 360, I struggled with being able to read anything, and so it was mostly guesswork as to what items and weapons to equip, taking away a lot of fun inventory management. Yes, I said fun inventory management. But on the PC, everything is spectacular, and all that text is mine to devour and ponder and make decisions upon. I’m loving it all over again. Plus, it was a whole lot cheaper than buying Diablo III.

I hope to try out the other games I got before the world implodes, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. If you can help, please help.

So, how’d you make out with this year’s Steam summer sale? Share your purchases and good deals below!

2012 Game Review Haiku, #16 – Hector: Badge of Carnage, Episode 2

With some help, Hector
Discovers who the sniper
Is, by Merlin’s beard

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For all the games I complete in 2012, instead of wasting time writing a review made up of points and thoughts I’ve probably already expressed here in various posts at Grinding Down, I’m instead just going to write a haiku about it. So there.