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Indie Royale June Bug Bundle

Indie Royale are the guys bravely trying to play catchup to the overwhelming success of the Humble Bundles. The first real imitators on the scene, they’re easily dismissed as a rip-off attempting to cash in on Wolfire’s lucrative model. But that’s enough negativity; what they might lack in originality they make up for in quality. Where Wolfire usually have the bigger-name indie titles, Indie Royale cater more to titles you likely won’t have heard of, but that doesn’t make them any less worth your while.

The current bundle available is the June Bug Bundle, consisting of  PixelJunk Eden, Escape Goat, Noitu Love 2: Devolution, and Auditorium. Thrown in as extras for those prepared to pay a little more than the minimum are the Escape Goat soundtrack and an updated alpha version of Iconoclasts.

The first title, PixelJunk Eden, by Q-Games is only available for Steam (well, you can buy it on PSN but you won’t get that in this bundle) which might be a turn-off for some, but I’d wager the majority of PC gamers have embraced the platform by now. An entertaining and arty title, you play as a small critter called a Grimp, a portmanteau of grip and jump, because those are primarily what it does. Jumping around highly stylised gardens, and gripping to the plants therein, you defeat enemies to earn pollen, which will grow more plants for you to climb in search of items known as Spectra which are described as a “fusion of light and sound”. Collecting these will grow plants in the hub world of Eden unlocking new gardens to explore. If there’s a goal beyond fully exploring all the worlds and growing all the plants, I haven’t found it, but it doesn’t need it. The gameplay is both relaxing and addicting with a techno soundtrack that complements it well. The gardens are a visual treat, vibrantly coloured but usually monochromatic with every level focused on a different colour. The plants too are beautifully styled making exploration very rewarding. It’s not as fleshed out as a bigger title might be, but for a quick casual game I can’t recommend it enough.

Escape Goat makes its début in this bundle. Launching primarily on Desura, one gets the impression its inclusion is there to sell the platform (unsurprising as the guys who run Indie Royale also run Desura) but for those unsold on the platform a DRM-free version for windows is included. A pixel art puzzle platformer, Escape Goat sees a purple goat locked away in a dungeon for the crime of witchcraft. Quickly teaming up with a mouse who is also eager to escape, the dynamic duo set out reclaim their freedom. You find a sheep who informs you that eight of his brethren are also trapped down there and only once all nine are reunited can you all make your escape together. It’s standard jumping, timing and pressing switch puzzles for the most part, with a few extra mechanics thrown in courtesy of your magical mouse friend. The controls default to a Japanese format (zxcv and arrows instead of wasd), which is something that will forever irk me, but that’s a personal gripe and they can be rebound so it’s not worth losing sleep over. All in all, it’s not the most original of concepts (outside the quirky character choices) but still a fun title that will keep you occupied for a while.

Noitu Love 2: Devolution by Joakim Sandberg recently made its début on Steam but Desura and DRM free windows versions are also available in the bundle. It’s a fast-paced, pixel art styled, old-school beat-em-up/platformer. To me, it feels a lot like the old Rocket Knight/Sparkster titles, and that’s no bad thing. You play Xoda Rap, a ponytailed ninja girl in a green hoodie and star of the Peacekeepers League. Your city comes under attack by a robot army and you set off to defeat its leader, Darnicus Damnation. Utilising a variety of ninja abilities you must fight through swathes of enemies, interrupted periodically to fight a boss. The bosses range from robotic dragons to giant armed steam trains to rival ninjas and are all a lot of fun to fight, each requiring different techniques to effectively dispatch. Learning the techniques necessary is half the fun and you’ll routinely get your ass handed to you until you figure out the ropes of each fight. Alas, the game is disappointingly short for a single play through, but harder game modes and scoreboards for each level make for extra replay value for those who want to be challenged or who are more competitive. As part of an extremely affordable bundle though, it’s very hard to find fault with.

Last but not least, Auditorium by Cipher Prime Studios, available for both windows and mac in Steam and DRM free versions as well as a Desura version. A phenomenally simplistic game, you start with a stream of coloured particles, and by placing a few orbs which exert a force on particles passing nearby attempt to direct the particles to the destination of corresponding colour. Each time a particle hits its goal it will play a note. If the goal is hit frequently enough a small looping tune will form. If all the goals are hit enough the full piece of music will be revealed. It’s tremendously pretty, but often frustratingly hard. On more than a few occasions I’ve finished levels by waving the force fields around fast enough, but it does leave one with the feeling of “that was totally not how I was supposed to do that”. A nice casual game, it’s great as part of this bundle, but lacking any real depth I feel it might struggle to stand alone.

As an extra bonus the updated alpha version of Joakim Sandberg’s Iconoclasts has been included. As an alpha, it’s probably pretty unfair to critique it, so I’ll let you enjoy it as the surprise bonus content that it is.

For the asking price (£3.21 minimum at time of writing) this is an astonishingly good value bundle. Noitu Love 2 alone typically retails for £3.99 and would be more than worth it. To add to it a very solid puzzle game and a couple of artistic casual games makes it a must-have. Do yourself a favour and buy the Indie Royale June Bug Bundle.

Get Back in the Kitchen: Women in Gaming

Gaming has long been a boys’ club, this much is widely accepted. Games are given to boys growing up, whereas girls get to play with their dolls. They are marketed at men; badass dudes setting out to rescue the sexy yet helpless girl with lots of violence along the way. But the trend is changing, statistics suggesting that 47% of all gamers are women, and yet, as an industry – and indeed as a community – we rarely welcome this fact. E3, the biggest game expo in the world, continues selling everything through the medium of booth babes year in, year out, managing to alienate the entire female audience in one fell swoop.

Even when someone has the audacity to suggest that hey, maybe we could all get along, or maybe narratives that aren’t overwhelmingly sexist stereotypes could also be fun to play, the backlash is always astonishing. The sheer amount of malice that can come from some gamers when you suggest that broader appeal games could share a shelf with ultra-macho hack’n’slash or war simulator titles has to be seen to be believed.

Earlier this year, Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler was on the receiving end of this backlash. In an interview taken almost five years ago, she confessed to not being much of a gamer and felt that reduced-action options for those gamers who enjoyed narrative more than blasting through crowds would be a nice addition so that people like her could enjoy the medium. This seems like a reasonable suggestion, after all it would in no way affect those who still wanted to kill and maim their way to victory, while offering an alternate option for people like herself who wanted to enjoy gaming but found themselves lacking the wherewithal to finish titles. With her words taken thoroughly out of context and further quotes fabricated entirely a picture showed up on the internet alongside the cruel nickname “Hamburger Helper”. Quickly circulated around the usual places, 4chan and Reddit’s gaming forum, thousands of angry gamer guys set out, pitchforks brandished, to make life miserable for poor Hepler. She spent several days bombarded with hate mail and even death threats for something she’d said 5 years prior because she embodied “everything that’s wrong with gaming”. Never mind the fact that she is a writer and would have no say in gameplay design decisions, or the fact that in reality she was in no way involved in the writing for Mass Effect 3 (something she was accused of ruining), no, this writer, who happened to be female and have minimal gaming experience was single-handedly destroying the games industry. I can’t help but wonder what if Jennifer had been a man quoted as saying such things. We’ll never know, but I suspect the worst that could have happened would have been that he was dismissed out of hand. I think “everything that is wrong with gaming” is this ridiculous mob mentality hell-bent on destroying everything and everyone who doesn’t conform to the mob’s demands. There’s plenty of room for developers to make different products for different audiences, and even to include options within products to make it accessible to a bigger audience; there’s no justifiable excuse for sending death threats to a person who doesn’t want to spend their life making products tailored solely to one small audience.

And now just this week, the undesirables of the internet once again seized the chance to make life hell for the latest woman to speak out on the issue. Anita Sarkeesian of blog feministfrequency.com hoped to use Kickstarter to raise funding to create a series of videos to raise awareness of the issues surrounding gender in gaming. A noble cause, and one worth supporting, one might think. The internet hate machine had other plans, however, and she has been met with much the same response as Hepler.

In a much more positive twist this time, though, Sarkeesian received an overwhelming outpouring of support as well. Smashing her fundraising target of $6000 in no time she has now reached a staggering $150,000, over twenty-five times her goal. Unfazed by the haters, she’s now aiming to make twelve videos in total with a much higher production quality, having started with the expectation that she would only make 5. Hoping to spark discussion about female representation in the media and video games especially, we may yet hope to see female game characters with more personality than their chainmail bikinis.

As positive as it might be, I think it’s unlikely to change the attitudes of the gaming community at large. That’s something that will need a lot more work by a lot more than one person. It’s up to all of us. When you see someone in chat spouting racism or sexism, the easy response, one a lot of people will probably take (and I know I’ve been guilty of this too) is to ignore or mute them. Sure that’ll give you peace of mind for five minutes but they’ll only go on to do it elsewhere to someone else. Next time you see someone giving anyone else a hard time for being different to them take a stand, shout them down, tell them it’s not okay. You might be pleasantly surprised to find mob mentality works both ways. If you take the first step and tell them to knock it off, you can find others will back you up quite readily. If we can make this the norm, we might all be able to enjoy our chosen hobby a great deal more.

Anita Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter project is Tropes vs. Women in Video Games and at the time of publication has 9 hours remaining to pledge support.

GLHF

~Meroka

Spiral Knights: Free to P(l)ay.

Following on from Meroka’s encouraging article regarding the stigma surrounding Free-to-Play gaming, here’s why you should be giving Spiral Knights a try!

With a massive rise in Free-to-Play games it’s difficult for individuals to stand out, be long-lived and become profitable for the developers. So what makes a good Free-to-Play game? Accessibility, the chance to earn all content in the game without spending a real life penny. Community, a structure that allows players to interact, socialize and work together. Value, because if you are spending money to enhance you game play experience, it’d best be worth it. And new content, lots and lots of new content. Keeping players interested and involved in-game makes it more likely for the developers to generate more money from their customers. and because doing the same thing over and over again just gets boring.

Spiral Knights has been running as a Free-to-Play MMO for over a year now, and as far as it goes I’ve managed to rack up roughly £50 of spending in it over that time. And I can honestly say I feel like I got my money’s worth. Why spend that much on a Free-to-Play game? Allow me to elaborate over the course of the article, make a cuppa’ if you like.

Boosh and or Ka-kow!

If you’ve not tried your hand at Spiral Knights before, the styling is rather cutesy in an androgynous kinda way. Your custom Knight and a community of others have crash landed on a mysterious construction known as the Clockworks. Stranded, but not the first adventures here, you’re tasked with finding out what happened to Alpha Squad and reach the Core to find the strange power source that could potentially get you and all the other Knights back home.
The aim of the game is to descend down through the Clockworks by way of elevators through twenty-nine levels of increasingly hardened monsters. You fight with various swords, guns and bombs. It’s generally quite a treat.

Your main source of currency are Crowns, you earn Crowns by killing monsters, smashing boxes and by selling minerals and materials. You can then use them to buy recipes and gear from Vendors or try the Auction House and see what other players are selling that might be interesting or useful to you.
Heat is the Spiral Knights equivalent of experience. But instead of levelling up your character, Heat is distributed evenly between all of your current equipment. The more equipment you need to level up, the longer it will take to complete all their levels.
Prestige is a reasonably new feature that ranks you and every other player in the game. The more missions you complete, the higher rank you are. This only really serves to stroke a players ego, but it’s all in good fun.

RAWR!

It’s well-known that a large aspect of every MMO is its community. The nice thing about Spiral Knights is it’s pretty difficult to be a dick, easy to be a beggar, but not so much a dick.. Largely the game isn’t PvP apart from it’s fantastically structured mini-games, so chances of some higher levelled character butchering you while you’re bidding for your favourite accessory is out of the question.
Spiral Knights encourages you to fight alongside other players on your adventures, the enemies might be harder, but mostly you gain more heat and coins by fighting in groups, which is all shared equally. There’s even benefits to reviving your downed team mates by stealing their heat to level up your own equipment.

Where Spiral Knights makes in money is in Energy. Players are given 100 free Mist Energy that fills itself up automatically over 24 hours. Players use can use Energy in several different ways as a secondary currency, mostly by using 10 to travel down each layer of the Clockworks. But it’s also used for unlocking extra sections within levels, reviving yourself if your team mates are unable and it’s also used for crafting, which will advance your equipment up into the next Tier.
On these alone it becomes clear that you’ll eventually need more than 100 Mist Energy to allow you to decend into the harder levels and craft better equipment. This is where Crystal Energy comes in. Wondrous, marvellous Crystal Energy. It can be bought in-game by a handy Trade system where by the players themselves decide how much the energy is worth in Crowns, or you can get your wallet out and buy the energy with your own hard-earned real life cash.

This is a great system because it means you get to decide how much you want to invest into the game play, as well as being massively accessible to anyone who doesn’t want to pay for their Five-Star equipment and get months worth of genuinely great game play.
Until the expansion, Operation Crimson Hammer, it was entirely possible to earn every scrap of content in the game by grafting hard and being smart and restrained with your free Mist Energy. Although it’d take you weeks to be able to afford the crafting recipes and Crystal Energy needed, you won’t have to pay a penny for it and you’ll be able to appreciate a game that actually has a lot of mileage in it. But then there’s always the option to spent a little money, it’s actually pretty reasonable, and give your characters equipment a much needed boost.

I’m just as poor as everyone else, don’t bother asking me for anything ;p

And what do you get for your money besides cool gear? Well, by supporting Three Rings and their developers it gives them the opportunity to regularly put updates into the game. Of course it’s in their best interest to keep the gamers happy so they spend more money. And they do it well. In the last year that I’ve been playing this game, it’s come a long way. There’s been all kinds of costumes, accessories, new quests, events, features, story content and improved functionality. Spiral Knights just gets better as it goes along. And it’s thanks to the customers that it continues to be a successful game.

Operation Crimson Hammer was launched on February 29th of this year as an optional DLC. Being a big fan I had to try it. It came with a five new levels in different difficulties as well as exclusive gear at a price of £3.99. I have to say I wasn’t impressed, the new gear looks nice, I liked the new boss fight. But I don’t believe it was worth launching it as a separate add on at cost to the players. Especially when Spiral Knights have launched similar content in the past for free that I felt was inclusive and useful to alot of players. Not only did this restrict players that were unable to purchase the DLC online, it stopped players who already had the DLC from putting the exclusive items in the Auction House for other Knights to buy. Bad form.
I realize that the cost is trivial to most, but I’d use the same wording to describe the new content in the DLC. Not enough new enemies, no innovative or challenging objectives, just more of the same. It’s just not worth it.

Despite this, to say I got a 395 hours worth of enjoyment out of Spiral Knights over the last year, as apposed to maybe the two or three days I’d get from a big console title. Yes, I’m content with thinking I got my money’s worth, while supporting Three Rings.

Free to Play on Steam here, and by no means buy the DLC here.

GFG

~Scribble

Lamenting the Stigma of Free-to-Play

“So yeah, I’ve been playing this new game, it’s really fun, you should try it, it’s free!”

“No thanks, I’ll give it a miss.”

“What? Why? It’s free, all it’ll cost you is time and bandwidth just to try it.”

“Those games are always won by the kids with the richest parents.”

That’s paraphrased from a few different conversations I’ve had, but the general theme is always the same; if it’s free it can’t be any good and it can’t possibly be anything other than Pay-to-Win. The counterpoint I usually hold up at this stage is the wildly popular Team Fortress 2 from Valve. Already a cult hit, the game moved to a free-to-play model almost a year ago. All non-cosmetic items in the game can be earned without ever spending a penny, and Valve’s dedication to balance among the game’s items mean almost nothing will give you an advantage, anyway. Sounds good, right? You’d think others might have adopted this model for themselves. They have. Plenty have.

Dude riding a levitating dugong? Free.

Valve, despite their sterling reputation for it, didn’t even pioneer this concept. The earliest example I’m familiar with of Free-to-Play, Pay-for-Hats is League of Legends. As a game I’ve covered before, I’ll jump straight to the business model. There are 99 champions to choose from to play but on any given week only 10 are available. You can permanently unlock a champion with currency in-game or, if you so desire, with real money. Each champion also has a number of alternative outfits available, which you can purchase with real money, and there’s also a few extra non-essential metagame things you can buy to make your life easier. So there’s nothing that’s absolutely integral to the game that can’t be earned for free.

Spiral Knights, in spite of recent DLC controversy, initially launched using a very similar model two months prior to TF2’s transition. My own personal vice, Super Monday Night Combat, uses an almost identical model to League of Legends. In my recent review of Moon Breakers I noted that while the accessibility of free content could use some rebalancing, it’s still all available to those who would put in the time.

Jelly King? Totally free!

So, in the light of so many demonstrably fun and balanced titles, irrespective of whether you’ve flashed the plastic or not, why are gamers, broadly speaking, still so opposed to the idea that a free product can be a good product?

While League of Legends may have been arguably the first to “do it right” so to speak, it was by no means the first to use free-to-play as a business model. There’s a long history of MMOs marketed as free-to-play and these have historically run the gamut of downright awful through to merely mediocre. I’d be lying if I said I knew the reasoning behind this, but these games have broadly speaking been of Korean origin. Keen followers of MMO games will likely have heard the term “Korean grindfest” thrown around. These are the ones I mean. Bland, slow-paced, mostly centring around the “kill 10 boars” type of questing, with no real effort to engage the player’s interest. The principal selling point being that unlike the big hitters out there it won’t be setting you back up to £10 per month, it’s completely free to play! Once upon a time, this would have been a unique selling point, drawing in a crowd just for the chance to get something for free. Those who stuck with it would find themselves inclined to invest, with exp boosts available to minimise the grind and a whole armory at their disposal for the right amount of money. These are the titles deserving of the moniker Pay-to-Win. Drop some cash and your character can have a glinting mithramantium sword, or that shiny diamontanium armour, then go hop into a game with those less fortunate souls.

These guys? They're free too!

The times, though, they are distinctly a-changin’. Developers, as they are wont to do (indies particularly), have seen where the Koreans went wrong and built upon that formula to create something a lot more friendly to the end-user, especially those with little or no money to burn. For the consumer, however, it’s a case of “once bitten, twice shy” and a lot of consumers have been bitten. Those wounds are going to need some healing before we see any degree of success in this area. The best any of us can hope to do is give them a shot. At the risk of repeating myself here, it’s free! Worst case scenario, you don’t enjoy it, wasted some time, but at least you took the time to try something new. In the best case, though, you might find something you absolutely love, purely by accident because you were open to trying new things.

GLHF

~Meroka

Free2Play Spotlight: Moon Breakers

My last Spotlight showcased Super Monday Night Combat. Uber Entertainment return this time in a publishing role, playing host to Imba Entertainment’s Moon Breakers. A company I’ve been able to find precious little information on, the game shares a number of credits with those of SMNC which, in addition to the naming similarities, leaves me wondering if they aren’t in whole or in part the same guys.

That’s an aside though. Irrespective of who actually made it, it’s available now on Steam and Chrome and it’s free to all who would partake, so that means it’s up to me to poke it with the review stick.

Moon Breakers is a space-based dogfighter with a WWII-era dieselpunk aesthetic. In layman’s terms, you fly in around spaceships that look like old planes shooting each other. In its genre there’s not a great deal to compare it against. Back on the N64 there was a Star Wars game called Rogue Squadron. Aside from its later Gamecube sequels it’s really the only similar game I can think of (I guess there was half of a level in Halo Reach, too). It feels like an apt comparison anyway, because it does feel very similar in terms of gameplay.

Pew Pew!

Your basic ship is armed with laser blasters and missiles. These are both projectile weapons and all your targets will be zipping about in three dimensions so you’ll need to get good at leading your targets with your shots quickly. Games consist of 32 players, 16-a-side with one team representing the government and the other being space pirates. Matches are your standard online multiplayer fare of team deathmatch, capture the flag and the like. Your justification for the conflict is the old SF trope of fighting over Helium-3, which is as good a reason as any.

Moon Breakers is straightforward enough to just jump in and get into the action quickly, but it feels like there’s a lot more to the combat that can only really be learned through experience. Dodging a hail of fire not only from the enemies but also from the numerous mounted cannons on the enemy’s flagship is as tricky a business as hitting things flying through space in the first place. Arenas take the form of an array of interesting asteroid fields, including one looking very much like a shattered moon. Aside from looking impressive these can be used tactically to take shelter from enemy fire or just as cover to try to slip through to the enemy base undetected. These are just my first impressions, too, I’d be quite confident in saying the more experienced players probably know a few more interesting tricks that haven’t even occurred to me.

That's no moon! Okay, I guess it was once.

After a game you will receive ‘creds’ depending on your performance. I’ve received anything up to 3000 creds from a game but a better performance would probably net you more still. This rate of return is good for buying cheap upgrades to your ship but unfortunately saving up for a new, better ship will set you back anywhere from 180,000 to 3,000,000 creds. A bit of quick mental arithmetic and I get an estimate of 15 hours of gameplay, in which I perform well every match, just to unlock the single cheapest ship. By extension, that big one? 250 hours! You can probably see where this is going. Cred boosters can of course be purchased using your real money offering up to 10x return on the payout each game. That valuable He-3 you were fighting over? It turns out that you can just buy it with a credit card. $2 will net you 350 units of He-3 with, as usual, price breaks at higher quantities, and then that He-3 can be used as an alternative currency to buy ships. To put it in perspective, that 3,000,000 cred ship is instead 7500 He-3 and will set you back $38; the cheapest would work out at under $4.

So then how free is it? Technically, there’s nothing in Moon Breakers that is locked to free players. I stress the word ‘technically’ because it is such a colossal grind to unlock anything at all without spending any real money that it may as well be locked. It’s a shame then that after working so closely with the UberEnt guys they didn’t learn anything useful from SMNC’s pricing structure.

Stuck between a rock and... another rock.

As a game, it’s solid. There’s plenty of fun to be had in spaceships, more so taking down enemy flagships, Death Star style. For me it’s a lot more enjoyable played casually, just cruising around not playing for keeps. If you’re determined to be the best of the best though, you will either have a long grind ahead of you or be prepared to open your wallet.

Moon Breakers by Imba Entertainment is available for free now on Steam and Chrome

GLHF

~Meroka

The Dream Machine, Claymation Goodness.

Another arty point and click adventure? Ah, gw’on then.. Last one for a while I swear. Here’s a beaut’ from Cockroach Inc.

The Dream Machine is a clay and cardboard styled piece of animated game cake. Some that played video games in the 90’s will recognise the rare style, familiar with other titles like Neverhood and ClayFighter 63â…“.

Mr. Victor Neff and his hormonal pregnant wife have just moved into their first apartment together, and they’re both having weird dreams. This story explores the realm of the unconscious, specifically the dreams of all the tenants in Victor’s building. And the plot device that facilitates this bizarre story? A sentient machine in the basement that feeds on the dreams of the people around it. Victor must face this machine in its own realm to save his fellow tenants and his wife from becoming comatose, and an easy meal for the machine.

The dreams conjured up in the minds of the tenants are gorgeously crafted in equal parts morbid and magic. Advertising for the game generally makes a big deal about how it’s only made of clay and cardboard, and for good reason. There’s a lot of very skilled craftsmanship involved in the making of smoothly rendered claymation, which is quite likely why there are so few claymation games in existence. But given the nature of indie games, having to create games that stand out from the big sellers, it really brings this game into its own league.

I totally don't feel violated at all..

There’s a lot of dialogue in this game, but no voice acting. Being a fan of great voice acting I feel let down that I have to read such text heavy puzzles. I’m not entirely lazy, but having to read through all the text kinda diminished the games re-playability. Exploring the game for the first time gives you a great opportunity to enquire and learn about the different characters, but I wouldn’t want to have to go through this mountain of text a second time knowing the answer to each puzzle but having to blunder through a lot of reading. Though this is a minor criticism in full view of a great piece of art.

Amazingly though, there’s only two devs working on this game, Anders Gustafsson & Erik Zaring, who between them create the sets & characters and program in the animations & mechanics. With some very generous and credited help, Gustafsson and Zaring have revived a redundant and challenging game format and turned it into a mysterious and sometimes disturbing tale.

Just, awesome..

Currently, only three out of the five chapters of the game have been completed. So for the time being this is a game to invest in. You can buy individual chapters separately, though both chapters one and two come together on Steam. Or you can buy all five as a bundle so that your collection becomes complete as soon as the newest chapters become available, and you save a bit of money.
The first two chapters on their own are regrettably short. But I find this forgivable given that as the rest of the game is still under development and it’s not yet finished. I will hastily point out that the third chapter is significantly improved, both in puzzle mechanics and in style. So once all five chapters become available, you’ll find the game is just as long as any other, but twice as enjoyable for its unique visual perspective. Plus you can be very assured that the quality of game can only get better as new chapters are released.

I’ll be eagerly returning to this game once it’s complete.

Available on Steam here, or if you want to support Cockroach Inc. directly, here. But by all means, there’s a demo on both sites, you don’t need to take my word for how awesome The Dream Machine is.

GFG

~ Scribble

Botanicula, Terry Gilliam would be proud.

After reviewing Machinarium a few months back, I felt such an affinity with the style that I was compelled to check out what other works of wonder Amanita Design had previously come up with. And not only did I find a back log of creative gorgeousness, I also prepared myself for their newest release, Botanicula.
But not before trying out the free to play samples on their website. Here I first tried Samorost, a free point and explore game from 2003. From here it’s easy to see where the grass-roots of Machinarium and Botanicula were formed. Even in AD’s early stages as developers, they managed to graft together a scrumptiously unique world. Splicing stock images of organic wood textures, aged gears and valves, overlaid with hand drawn interactables and characters.
Although painfully short and in some areas lacking resolution, Samorost set a nice benchmark for its sequel Samorost 2. You can also play the first chapter of this game for free here, well worth a try.

And now AD pitches its newest characters into a beautifully unforgiving world of tiny point and click adventures. Mr. Lantern, Mr. Twig, Mr. Poppy Head, Mr. Feather and Mrs. Mushroom, a loveable bunch. Set on an adventure to safeguard the last seed of their home tree and to stop the corruption of an evil parasite that’s spreading through their world.

Friend??

I tripped six kinds of balls playing this game. Be prepared for nothing to make any kind of sense, and to be able to make a lot of seemingly wrong and pointless interactions, with amusing sound effects.. Botanicula takes puzzle solving to a new level by making your goals simple, but how to achieve them very difficult to understand. You’ll be asked to find keys, turkeys, conker babies and a host of other bizarre objects, even where to use them becomes very obvious. But how to obtain said objects.. Utterly incomprehensible and very trial and error based.
Unlike Machinarium, you engage more with your surroundings, hovering and dragging some objects as opposed to just clicking and consuming them. And when most of your environment reacts to your cursor, it becomes challenging to know just where to start, so click, drag and hover over EVERYTHING!
Also unlike Machinarium, you’ll not be given any kind of in-game hints to decipher the cryptic tasks at hand. But cleverly, all interactions count for something in the grand scheme. Throughout the game you’ll be presented with cards for every creature you successfully interact with. And with one hundred and twenty-three cards, you can tell there’s an impressive amount of character design gone into this game. And the more you collect, the more prizes you’ll be presented on completion of the game.

I WANT ONE! O_Õ

Botanicula is just so endearing! The seer amount of immersion you can have with this game, coupled with a multitude of strange and wonderful characters really gives Botanicula a charm that quickly dissipates the frustration of not knowing where you should be going or how to find what you should be looking for. And instead flips it into curiosity.
The map feature, coupled with basic symbols that roughly sum up what goes on in each map section will quite easily guide you through the twisting maze of branches, roots and general foliage. Without this it would quickly become confusing navigating from place to place. Becoming accustomed to the set up is very easy, it even gets relaxing to play through once you’ve begun to understand the inner workings and methods of the game.

The critters you’ll meet all through your journey have their own little duties to perform, helpful, hindering or just for their own amusement. Constantly check what unique items you’ve procured on your travels, eggs, beach balls, idols, worms, they’re all useful in one way or another and as a bit of a hint, you’ll only be able to drag them off the tool bar once you’ve entered the right scene you need to use them in.

I just don't understand!

Something I’m very glad AD changed about the game play is the speed at which the characters move. Guiding Josef on his journey through Machinarium was at times frustratingly slow. But these critters move very quickly across the map, allowing you to explore much faster.. Easing the irritation caused by not know where you need to be and what exactly you should be doing.

It has the tell-tale flare of AD’s masterful blending of textures, but with a much brighter and cheery atmosphere than its predecessors. Even after a quick play through you’ll come to appreciate the effort AD’s small team of graphic designers have put into yet another master piece. These games really are an art form, akin to something cooked up in the mind of Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam and his legendary cut-out animations.

With this much raw talent for story telling without conventional verbal means, it’s difficult not to get drawn into the plot. Another game well done.

You can view trailers and buy Botanicula on Steam here, or direct from Amanita Design’s website here.

Look out for Samorost 3!

GFG

~Scribble

Free2Play Spotlight: Super Monday Night Combat

I’m not gonna lie, I’ve been back and forth on this, debating whether to review Super Monday Night Combat or not. I’m biased. Well, I feel biased. It’s not like I work for Uber Entertainment, or even that they’re paying us for advertising or sponsorship. I’m not even a prominent enough player to be one of the lucky chosen few to go to PAX as one of Uber’s exhibitors. But goddamn do I love me some Monday Night Combat. So take the following with a pinch, nay an entire shaker of salt.

Monday Night Combat started out as a DOTA-style class-based shooter on the Xbox Live Arcade. Somewhat successful, it was ported across to PC on Steam. As predominantly multiplayer games with smaller marketing budgets – and by extension fanbases – than things like Call of Duty tend to do, the game’s community dwindled. It disappeared off the radar for some time until PAX prime last year with the announcement of Super Monday Night Combat. And that’s what we’re here to throw our free2play spotlight on!

Let’s start at the beginning. I wrote about DOTA not so long ago, so I won’t go into the fundamentals again. It’s a class-based third person shooter. Being a free shooter is relatively new territory to begin with, so kudos for pioneering, there. Whereas the original MNC had 6 classes and they all played to greater or lesser extent like TF2 classes, SMNC ups that to 15 at launch and there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on with them. Notable newcomers include Cheston, the tommy gun-toting gorilla thespian who throws barrels like Donkey Kong; Captain Spark, the superhero raised and trained in martial arts by hyperintelligent electric mer-eels; Karl, a reconnaissance cyborg programmed by his upper class creators to believe he is human, with a monocle and moustache to match; and unveiled at PAX East, Leonardo freaking da Vinci, cloned from the DNA extracted from a fingerprint found on a sketch of a badger-powered military tank (to save on war elephants). Enough said, I suspect.

For anyone still in any doubt, the whole game is just as over the top. Set in the not too distant future in a heavily capitalistic state (MNC implied totalitarian too, though there is less allusion to this in SMNC) you’re fighting primarily for the purpose of televised entertainment. Money acts as experience and money will buy you many advantages, from traps to healing and buffs to additional bots (the DOTA creeps). Bullseye, the MNC mascot will appear periodically and shooting him will make him drop money and prizes. Chickey Cantor, a giant cyborg chicken, will appear later on to fight players and defeating him will reward the entire team with a variety of buffs. Oh, and bacon is the most powerful powerup in the game. The whole affair is tied together with commentary from two charismatic hosts, GG Stack and Chip Valvano. Some lamented the loss of Mickey Cantor from MNC. Oh hell, I lamented the loss of Mickey Cantor, but it didn’t take long for these new personalities to grow on me. Clearly the product of the same excellent writing, the voice acting may be different but the dialogue is just as hilarious as their predecessor’s.

The game’s been in beta for about 7 months now, so testing and balancing has been extensive and it’s come out of it well. Sure, some classes will always be strong against others, but that’s just how class-based games tend to work. There are plenty of moves that will undoubtedly be called “cheap”, but nothing you can’t avoid if you know what to look out for. On the whole combat is considerably less lethal than pretty much all other shooters on the market so tactics and teamwork will give you a much-needed advantage and you can stay alive more if you don’t run in alone. Of course, some classes work better that way but you’re still going to struggle to take on a crowd by yourself.

The one critical question, I suppose is “how free is it?”. Quite free. Out of the 15 pros (characters) 6 or 7 will be available to play for free each week. The others can be unlocked permanently for a fee. Most pros are $1.99 and a few of the pros demanding more skill to play are $7.49. After each match, you’ll be awarded with “combat credits” and if you save up enough of these you can buy pros with these without ever having to open your wallet. Really, the only things you’ll find with only a real money price tag on are cosmetic items, ranging from $1.99 for reskins to $14.99 for the really cool stuff. You can sometimes get these after games in a similar fashion to TF2’s random drops, too. Obviously if you have your heart set on the cool demon wings specifically you could be waiting a while, but hey, you wouldn’t be prepared to pay if it were so easy, right? There’s also combat credit and experience boosters to purchase, but as is fortunately becoming the popular trend, they have no actual impact on games themselves, only serving to help you unlock new stuff faster. Personally I’ve bought a few of my favourite pros and a new outfit for my main, the Assassin. About £20 in all, I reckon and half of that was on cosmetics. But I’ve sunk a lot of time into this game and will continue to do so, so I feel like that’s not an unreasonable price tag for the entertainment.

So that’s Super Monday Night Combat. If you’re looking for something new to play and you’re strapped for cash you could do far worse than SMNC. I’m not sure you could do much better, either. I don’t know why you’re still reading; I mean, it’s free to go and have a look, isn’t it?

Super Monday Night Combat is totally free on Steam on PC.

GLHF,

~Meroka

Button Mash talks to Dejobaan’s Ichiro Lambe

Dejobaan Games are the incredibly talented guys behind such titles as AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity and The Wonderful End of the World. Today, Dejobaan’s intrepid leader Ichiro Lambe talks to us about the life of an indie developer, amongst other things.

Button Mash: I know as indie developers you all work 30 hour days, but on the off-chance you do get some downtime what games do you like to play to unwind?

Ichiro Lambe: Yesterday, my fiancée and I had a small dinner party with a few local game developers. We ate shabu shabu, drank wine, and talked about normal human things briefly, before descending into industry talk. Because that’s what we live for. Always. Forever.

But: I like experimenting with mixing drinks; Leo (my biz guy) and I co-own a garden; and I like to go out dancing. I used to salsa dance, in particular, but I think those days are behind me. Alas!

BM: What’s your all-time favourite game?

IL: Katamari Damacy. It’s joyous. It drips with character. It’s fun alone, or with other people. And you can be a spectator and still enjoy it. Plus, the title song:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwyfeksaeG8

I mean, that’s the most joyous song I know. Also, your father starts out saying things like, “We can believe in you for 8 minutes”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwyfeksaeG8

Jesus. Japan is insane.

BM: Your games frequently feature rather offbeat humour, do you have any notable influences or things that inspire your work?

IL: My father once said to me, “Son, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” I have lived by those words for decades.

BM: What was your favourite indie title featured at PAX East?

IL: Och! Our own Drunken Robot Pornography. But if you’re going to twist my arm and make me pick someone else’s, I’ll say that it’s Retro/Grade, in part because of Matt Gilgenbach’s heart-wrenching story behind it. The man is both insane and awesome, and probably spends 80 hours a week on it, working his fingers to nubs, and his nubs to dust. He uses genetic algorithms to optimize the shaders, for God’s sakes. As a developer, I love games as much for what goes into them as what comes out.

BM: What titles that people probably don’t know about should we look out for this year?

IL: Och! Our own Drunken Robot Pornograpwaaaaaaait a second, you’re not going to get me twice, Mister Biggin. Fine. A Valley Without Wind, by Arcen Games (http://www.arcengames.com/w/index.php/games/avww-features), is juuust now starting to get press. Kotaku said this:

“Well, it’s a platformer. I mean, it’s not, it’s a roguelike. But totally a platformer. Really, it’s a dungeon-crawler. It exists for exploration. Well, no, for upgrades. Actually, it’s kind of an adventure game. Also there’s mining. With magic. And I think I can build a town.”

I mean, seriously? That’s awesome. I also just like the guys I met at Arcen, and would love to see ’em make miiiiiiiiiillions of dollars with this one.

BM: Do you have any advice for aspiring developers starting out in the game industry?

IL: 1. Meet as many other game developers as you can, and talk to them regularly. There’s no force more uplifting than a group of like-minded devs who say, “You can do it. Now, get off your ass and do it.”

2. Actually do something. Tiny. No, smaller than that. Get something done in a week. It can be ugly, but it needs to be finished.

3. Put that tiny thing out there, and get people to beat on it. Then repeat from step 1.

BM: And finally, do you think you could defeat Valve’s Gabe Newell in a game of chess?

IL: Yes, but I would want the rules to allow us to cheat. So, for example, I’d see if another Valvite would be willing to fake a code emergency (“Our pointers are null reffing! We need garbage collection in here, STAT!”), and while Gabe was gone, I would swap out the pieces with live baby mice.

Let’s Talk About DOTA

Defense of the Ancients. DOTA for short. It’s a strange beast. I’ll begin by describing the basic premise because I’ve known plenty of hardcore gamers that didn’t know what it was.

It began life as a mod for the RTS game Warcraft 3. Instead of having a hero unit commanding an army into battle, and permitting the player to command all units from above, DOTA simplified the strategy and made the focus the hero. Your base will continually spawn an army of grunts, usually called creeps, the enemies’ bases will do the same and, taking control of your hero and only your hero, you must help push forward against the opposing army to reach and destroy the enemy base. Each hero is equipped with their own abilities and it often ends up like TF2 on steroids, with over a hundred different characters each with differing abilities, strengths and weaknesses. Balancing all that must be a nightmare. Defeating enemy heroes and creeps earns you exp and you can level up your hero to have a greater impact on the game. As it happens, this concept became a huge success and has become a genre in its own right. One of the problems facing it though is that nobody has any clue what to call it or what it really is, so that’s something I want to explore now.

One of the first games to follow in DOTA’s successful footsteps was Demigod. This was soon followed by the now wildly successful League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth. All these three have a very similar play style. In contrast to DOTA’s top-down RTS perspective, these three had a third-person RPG perspective, but the gameplay was very similar. They play more akin to something like World of Warcraft than an RTS. So can you call it an RTS when it’s essentially the same game? Probably not, and there are a few ideas out there on how we can define it. The simplest one is DOTA-like. As far as naming convention goes, it’s not without precedent, after all we have roguelikes, named for the game Rogue. But even then, the genre has come a long way since its origins and something like, say, Monday Night Combat, whilst the fundamental mechanics are there, doesn’t really bear all that much resemblance to the W3 mod.

League of Legends coined the descriptor MOBA, or Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. That strikes me as a rather broad description. It’s a title that fits equally well to League of Legends, Unreal Tournament, Smash Bros or even Mario Kart. They’re all multiplayer games involving battling other people online, often in an arena of some kind. What else can we call it? Valve, with their upcoming DOTA 2, have pushed the name ARTS or Action-RTS. As for what kind of action-to-strategy balance DOTA 2 brings, I couldn’t say, as it’s still in closed beta and naturally everything’s pretty hush-hush. With the kind of fortune I couldn’t have planned, I’ve landed an invite today so I’ll be able to find out shortly. As I’ve already mentioned, I feel RTS is a bit of a misnomer for the genre now, broadly speaking, but equally there’s exceptions. Having had the privilege of being introduced to Carbon Games‘ AirMech at PAX, I’ve seen that strategy doesn’t need to be completely absent. AirMech combines the usual infinitely spawning creeps with the ability to buy more advanced units and then, because your avatar can morph into a jet plane, pick up the units and ferry them about the battlefield strategically. Crazy 300 actions-per-minute Korean pro-gamers will be restricted by the plane’s movement speed, so strategy elements are held back to a pace that the normal human brain can handle, but without sacrificing them altogether and turning the game into a World of Warcraft battleground or a simple team deathmatch.

Sometimes though, you do just want to chill out and blow stuff up. Uber Entertainment‘s Monday Night Combat and newly launched free-to-play Super Monday Night Combat are great for this. It’s a third-person shooter, really, when you’re playing it. A lot more tactical than your typical shooter fare these days and a lot less lethal in combat, making teamwork and strategy a lot more profitable, but if you’re not a god among gamers you can still dive in and make a dent. The creeps, towers and bases are all there and all work like you’d expect, but it feels so much more like you’re playing TF2 than Warcraft 3.

On the whole, it’s pretty trivial to take any two of these games, view them side-by-side, say they’re pretty much the same and bundle them all up under a single label. If absolutely pressed to, I’d still go with DOTA-like because that’s where it all started, and anyway there are hundreds of different roguelikes, all uniquely different, they still all get thrown in a big pile together. No, it still doesn’t adequately convey what the hell I’m talking about, but I’m content to explain it over and over again ’til we all know that it’s a genre. A rich, diverse genre that’s still in it’s infancy. I’m certain Eul never anticipated all this when he first sat down to make a fun variant of Warcraft 3, and I’m equally certain developers will continue to surprise us by trying exciting new things with it. It’s something I very much look forward to seeing where it goes.

GLHF

~Meroka