Free To Play Again: A Look at Rusty Hearts and Puzzle Pirates.

Now and again, I check out the world of Free to Play MMORPGs. In years past, I'd have to rely on directories dedicated to the topic and download from a link to the individual game's website. Now, there is a growing Free to Play category on Steam, and I periodically check out the offerings there. What I look for in a game like this is, naturally, the same gameplay that I would like from a commercial/retail priced game. Of course, I expect that there will be both an in-game currency of some sort and a premium currency that can be purchased with real-world dollars, as these games are financed by the players who decide to buy something. I evaluate a F2P game on whether the options purchasable only with premium currency are neat options, or whether they are essential parts of the game. Games that provide too many in-game benefits for premium gear are "pay to win," and with too much content sealed off behind a paywall, the game isn't so much "free" as it is a glorified demo, shareware in disguise. With these criteria in mind, I've spent some time with two more games now available on Steam, Puzzle Pirates and Rusty Hearts.

Puzzle Pirates:

Towns, islands and decks of ships may get crowded, but you can pretty much teleport
 somewhere else if you aren't having fun.

This isn't my first time playing Puzzle Pirates, as the game has been around since 2003 and shortly after release I gave it a try. Three Rings Design has continued to add new puzzles and gameplay refinements over the years, and Steam support got me back in to see what had changed. Your character is a scurvy dog who looks like he/she escaped from a Playmobil collection and you are dropped into a world where virtually every task that can be performed is done so with a puzzle game. Players can work on or even own ships, become merchants, and attack other vessels or search for buried treasure. Back on islands, shops, inns and homes are owned and operated by players and working or playing in one of the many different buildings opens up new puzzles. Getting into swordfights, fisticuffs or drinking contests with other players have puzzle games all their own, and gambling on more traditional games like poker, spades or hearts can make or break a bucaneer's fortunes.

There's a lot of free content, with the basic puzzles to operate a ship available for free, including sailing, rigging, cannon operation, carpentry and bilge pumping. In-game currency is measured in pieces of eight, frequently abbreviated as "poe" and this money can be earned working ships for the NPC Navy or jobbing as temporary crew on a player-owned ship. Owning a ship, working a shop, or playing most parlor games are among the many activities that require a special badge purchasable with doubloons, the premium currency. Some of the locked away content is available to freeplayers daily, and many, many hours of entertainment can be had without spending a dime. Puzzle Pirates also gets major points from me on making premium currency purchasable with in-game money at a player-driven market exchange. Players can also join crews that may operate one or more vessels to launch their own expeditions, and buy custom furniture for player housing.

One of the many challenging cooperative or competitive puzzles representing labor in Puzzle Pirates.

As a character plays more of the puzzles well, skill levels in each of the games is tracked on a permanent profile. Characters can be visually customized with clothing and weapons that can be earned in-game or purchased with either poe or doubloons. Weapons can be used to make custom strikes in the swordfighting competitive puzzle, which is reminiscent of tetris, and is the last part of boarding actions taken when ships get into naval battles. Fist fighting is handled in a minigame that plays a lot like Bust-a-Move, with colored bubbles filling up the top of the screen that need to be "popped" by bubbles of the same color fired by a cannon from the bottom. Many of the puzzles are variants on popular puzzle games like Bejeweled, Dr. Mario, and Rocket Mania, with a piratey theme. I've won enough to buy a ship playing poker in a seedy tavern, brewed beer and clashed swords after a voyage spent cleaning and loading cannons or pumping seawater from the hold.

Rusty Hearts:

For now, you'd better like these three if you want to play Rusty Hearts, because even with customization, this is pretty much it... sometimes these guys will be wearing an afro or sunglasses, but little else changes.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum is the beat-em-up Anime MMORPG Rusty Hearts. Currently in beta from Perfect World Entertainment, Rusty Hearts is set in a moody gothic gaslamp horror anime where mercenaries fight vampires and demons in the service to a psuedo-military organization. The cutscenes providing the backdrop for the world, as well as the environments themselves are very pretty. The story and dialogue options are appropriately hokey and translated about as well as any standard anime series or video game. As of this article, you select as your base one of three characters, so in public areas in low-level zones, everyone looks pretty much the same. The dour swordsman Frantz, the foul-mouthed witches' apprentice Angela and the wanderer-turned brawler Tude are the three currently playable characters, but there is a fourth in the works.

The gameplay is fairly smooth, with various special attacks unlocked and trained as characters level up, and basic attacking, grab/counter, block and combo maneuvers make gamplay feel more like an arcade fighter like Double Dragon or Golden Axe than a typical RPG. Monsters drop equipment and potions as well as cards which randomly are hidden in a grid of rewards the player can blindly choose from when a dungeon is cleared. Players are ranked at the end of a level based on combo length and special move use (style) compared to how many hits they take, to get a letter grade that affects rewards at the end of a stage. Gamepad support is present, and recommended to save wear on the keyboard, but customizing keybinds for gamepad leaves something to be desired. Unlocking harder difficulties opens up cooperative adventures suitable for a party, with rewards matching the extra challenge.

Boss fights feature tougher opponents and more complex strategies than the standard
chaining of special abilities and occasionally blocking.

If you can deal with every player being copies of the same three people all over the place, in addition to new skills and better equipment, eventually costume pieces can be unlocked to give individual characters a custom look. The fast route to these cosmetic modifications is premium currency purchased through the cash shop, but some costume pieces can be earned by questing or bought with in-game money. Players who don't care about the appearance of their personal characters will find that most of the game is free, cash shop items having very little impact on game power. There is also a PVP arena, a guild system and customizable personal quarters, plus a game bank and player auction house. The difficulty scales very well with how much time a player wishes to put in, so a solo/casual player has a good experience as well as the more involved players interested in partying up and tackling tougher adventures.

Bastion – Indie Action RPG that is not to be missed.

I'd heard an awful lot about Bastion, and had a hard time understanding what all the fuss was about. This past weekend, I finally finished the title, and I get it. Bastion was first released a downloadable game, the sort of indie title you see all over Xbox Live Arcade, and it got rave reviews, and eventually made its way to PC via Steam, where it was a featured release. Some of the initial gimmicks are apparent from the demo, but Bastion is a game that continues giving based on what you put in, and most of the best of the game is left for the end. This bucks a trend I've commented on at length, where so many games focus on a strong opening and great buildup, and then cannot pay off the narrative, so they kind of "phone in" the ending. In Bastion, a gamer with a short attention span will miss out on something that I can call beautiful without fear of hyperbole.

Don't mind the anime-look or cartoon styling. There is nothing about
this game that I'd associate with any flavor of animation beyond visual design.

At the beginning of Bastion, your character wakes up from a post on a wall somewhere to find the world destroyed around him. We know this because as the world and controls are introduced, a narrator's voice tells us what is going on, describing the hero's actions (calling him only "the kid") as they happen. The narration changes based on actions performed, and the exceptional quality of the voice acting delivering the over 3,000 recorded lines gives a lot of the emotional weight to what might otherwise be a decent, but unspectacular, action-RPG hybrid. As the kid walks through the ruins of his shattered world, bits of the ground form up under his feet where he's about to walk. A few basic weapons are found, and we start to get into the heart of the gameplay.

PC controls are pretty simple, left-click for melee attacks, right click for ranged, tap the space bar to roll out of the way of danger, and hold shift to block with a shield or lock on to a target. WASD moves you around, the mouse controls targetting and the E key is typically used to pick up items or interact with the environment. The kid carries around blue tonics to restore health, activated with F, and black tonics to power his special skills, activated with Q. There are a lot of different melee weapons, ranged weapons and special skills to find and unlock throughout the game, and different combinations may make certain sections of the game easier. In addition to finding weapons and abilities, each weapon can be upgraded with items found throughout gameplay and "shards" of the shattered world. Passive bonuses such as extra damage, more tonics or higher movement speed while blocking are chosen for slots that open up as the kid gains levels.

Static screenshots really don't do this world justice, it must be seen in motion.

All of these upgrades are processed through buildings which can be constructed, and yes, upgraded at the Bastion, a floating home base/sanctuary that was to be used in case of disaster. Each structure can be built upon completion of a level, and the player chooses which order to build many of them in. Combat and exploration is fast-paced and fun, and character advancement and customization integrates well with the theme of rebuilding a world piece by piece. If this was all Bastion had to offer, it'd still be a pretty good game for the $15USD price tag. These elements are probably the least of the reasons I like this game. Gameplay is great, but what gets me is a good story, well told, and though it takes a bit to get rolling, this game has that.

The story is revealed bit by bit in the narration, details left out in earlier scenes explained a bit at a time at a perfect pace to match the tone of the game. The combination of the art design of the levels, the tone of the script and history of the world that was Caelondia before The Calamity, and what it has become creates a unique and internally consistent setting. Bits of character development for the principal characters are earned, line by line in dreamlike sequences where the kid fights wave after wave of creatures, each wave rewarded with another part of the story for the character we're learning about. The music, in particular the pieces with vocals, add to the atmosphere, and the soundtrack is amazing on its own merits. Some of the best scenes in the entire game owe their impact in large part to the music playing in the background.

Once the reasons behind everything that has happened, from The Calamity to events that unfold as the game progresses (which I won't spoil here) are revealed, the game pulls off a really neat trick. Games love presenting players with choices, especially difficult ones. The problem is, it is not easy to write a set of meaningful decisions without either one choice being obviously better in some way, or making the decision difficult by virtue of all presented options being things you'd rather not do. I hate it when games do this. It is poor writing to make a choice only meaningful because I need to choose between two things that are approximately equally unpleasant. Bastion has one of the most thought-provoking and difficult "Would you rather?" choices I've ever encountered to make at the very end, and another choice where you have to decide between someone getting perhaps what they deserve, and doing what is noble at great potential cost to yourself. Both of these situations are brilliantly crafted, and the payoff for making either choice made for an ending that had me smiling throughout the credits.

This is not a particularly expensive game, nor is it a 40-hour epic, but there is a decent amount of replay value, for at least one more go-round, and there are plenty of Steam achievements and ways to customize the difficulty (for greater reward) in-game. Collecting, achieving and unlocking everything possible will make this a hefty amount of content for a game that is a quarter of the price of a typical new release. Solid action, incredible story, and a game that manages to be beautiful and at some points kind of sad, while making the player think about the questions posed by the story... This one is a winner.

World of Warcraft Patch 4.2 – Rage of the Firelands

I've had a little bit of time to appreciate the material presented in the new content patch for World of Warcraft, and I think I'm ready to discuss a little bit about it. The release of a patch like this presents more content, new bosses, many of them are what would be a pricey bit of DLC or even a whole new expansion if released as part of many single-player or other non-MMO games. The story, for those who pay attention to it (as I do) is advanced with new cutscenes and quests, and a new Tier of raid content is introduced. The Tier 12 Raid picks up where the quests in Mount Hyjal left off, with Ragnaros the Firelord gathering his strength for another assault on Azeroth, and the war to enter the Firelands themselves to stop his return.

This patch brings back a lot of concepts not seen since the Vanilla WoW raid Molten Core, which also had Ragnaros as a final boss, and of course, flame and lava as the theme. Beyond those mostly cosmetic differences, this new content reminds me most of the Burning Crusade patch that introduced the Sunwell raid instance and the Isle that contained it. Both are lore-heavy, feature a new zone with an ongoing military conflict that is advanced through daily quests, and a wide-open raid instance that feels less confining than the traditional “Dungeon Rooms” of most raids. The patch also brings difficulty modifications (“nerfs”) to older raid content to enhance accessibility for more casual players, and introduces a new Legendary Weapon, a staff designed for DPS casters.

I like the new content overall, but currently I have mixed feelings about the environment that is currently present in WoW, and some of the burden of my lessened interest in certain aspects of the game falls at the feet of this patch. I feel that some elements were designed precisely as they should be for where Cataclysm is in its lifecycle as an expansion, but other aspects of this patch in particular feel somehow like

The Good:

The quests and raid encounters are rich with lore, tying into the Cataclysm plot well without having Deathwing turn up to cackle and twirl his evil mustache the way Arthas seemed to in every content patch in Wrath. The daily quests are combined with the phasing mechanic, which means the more you work personally on contributing to the war against the firelands, the more progress you will see. NPCs from many other quests and raids turn up to aid in the fight, I've seen Hemet Nesingwary, Argent Confessor Paletress and even Mankrik fighting alongside heroes in the war, it is nice to see these characters as people and citizens in a living world, rather than mannequins who stand around waiting to hand out quests or be killed in their own personal areas.

Fans of this guy will find a lot to love about 4.2.

The rewards for completing dailies and earning reputation are good, and the crafted items are some of the best I've seen in any patch since WoW launched. This means that good gear is attainable, but reasonable levels of effort are required, as even the crafted gear requires items that drop from raid bosses. The availability of epic gear is structured nicely for this stage of the game, with returning or new players able to play catch-up, but without it being so trivially easy that people who played since launch have grounds for serious complaint. (This, of course, won't stop many of them, but such is life.)

The Bad:

I personally enjoy raid encounters that ramp the difficulty up a bit, but some of the balancing between 10man and 25man raid bosses seems “off.” In certain encounters, the 10-man version is challenging but killable after a few night's practice, but the 25 man version seems insurmountably frustrating, with a single mistake by one raider to end the encounter with a wipe. This may be by design on its own, but it has some potentially unintended consequences.

What do you think he's been doing since Molten Core? Leveling up, same as you.

New raid gear can be obtained by killing bosses, earning reputation with the new faction, and using valor points. A side effect of 10-man raids being so much easier than 25-man raids is that if you are in a guild that wants to raid 25s, capping your valor points weekly is a brutal grind through old content. You might get a few hundred here and there for a boss kill, but you'll be spending many, many hours in heroic dungeons to rack up a few more valor points so that the week doesn't feel wasted. Personally, that grind sometimes makes it so I'd rather do something else, anything other than logging on to WoW.

The Ugly:

Players have developed some really bad habits since Wrath of the Lich King was released, and echoes of some of the development calls made in the name of greater content accessibility are still being felt. I'm all for WoW no longer only being playable at a certain level by elitist players and 95% of the subscriber base being locked out of content forever is a BAD THING. That said, when things are made easier, there is a certain class of player that isn't used to things being hard, and when presented with a challenge, they whine.

So you say the Legendary Staff of Dragons is actually powered by Noob Tears and Butthurt?

Nowhere else is the “whiner” factor more apparent than in any discussion regarding the new Legendary Item. Legendary Weapons aren't supposed to be something that eventually everyone in a guild gets. With a heroic amount of effort an cooperation, top guilds can expect to have one or two of these items in their entire raiding roster. New players (or those who learned the worst possible lessons from Wrath) aren't used to being challenged for the best gear. They only need to wait long enough, and it'll practically jump into their inventories. This isn't the case for the staff Dragonwrath, which is desired by every Mage, Warlock, Shadow Priest, Elemental Shaman and Boomkin Druid in the game.

The proliferation of the classes who might desire the item and the difficulty in obtaining even one for a whole guild is something that I am sure will create a lot of tension in many raiding guilds, and people will be kicked out of or quit guilds over it. This is the sort of weapon that characters will wait 5+ years to even be included in the game, and knowing they'll never get one upsets many, many people. (Hell, I'm 2^nd in line for one in my guild and I might never see it completed.)

Miscellany, and Overall:

The art style of the new items is cool, consistent with the theme, and overall the content feels very well put together, but the complaining that tiny spoonfuls of content are being stretched out over progressively longer periods of real time gains strength with every new patch, and cut features. I think that by the end of this expansion, people will be pleased with the way content was stretched out over the lifecycle of the product, for for now, we hear a new 5-man has been cancelled and we're disappointed and angry. We complain that encounters are too hard, but we called the game a “joke” back in Wrath for being too easy.

I like what I see in the Firelands, I just wish the grind of it all didn't feed the whiny, complainy voice inside me that wants to agree with all the gamers whose complaints I find annoying.  Sometimes, when faced with running another random dungeon, I'd just rather go play something else, and I wish that weren't so.  

Civilization: I don't quit playing, I go into remission.

This week in PC gaming, two things happened in two days for me. As a result of the Steam Summer Sale and the generosity of a good friend, I received a copy of Civilization V on Tuesday. Yesterday, Sid Meier's CivWorld for Facebook went into Open Beta. Playing so much Civ in two different forms in the last few days got me to thinking about my history with the franchise. I've now played every PC civilization title in the “main series” (excluding Call to power or any ports of console/moblie versions) and have played several board games based on the concept. They are always intensely addictive, and I never really stop playing a title entirely until the sequel comes out.

The pharaoh pictured is actually buried beneath all the work that piled
up for him while he was playing Civ. 

The original Sid Meier's Civilization was published by Microprose in 1991to immediate critical and commercial success. Starting as a group of nomads with the bare minimum to found a small stone age settlement and protect it, the turn based strategy game challenges the player to “build an empire that will stand the test of time.” Cities are founded, buildings within them created and the population is managed as military units explore and possibly go to war with other fledgling empires. Scientists labor at technological advances from basics like pottery and the wheel, through ages of time to building electronics, tanks and even nuclear weapons. Special bonuses are given for the civilization to first create “Wonders of the World,” projects of great cultural and historical significance such as the Great Wall and the Pyramids. Victory can be achieved through military conquest or technological supremacy by sending a successful colony ship into space.

As sequels to the game were released over the years, refinements and additions to gameplay and graphics improved things in many ways. “Great people,” individuals born with the ability to impact history in some way were added. The concept of culture as a tangible and trackable statistic used for slightly different things in different incarnations of the game was incorporated. New victory conditions, special powers for each of the cultures you may select at the beginning of the game and changes concerning politics, diplomacy and trade developed from sequel to sequel.

If your neighbors bug you, blow them up.

Civilization V made some significant changes in the gameplay of the series with a cleaner interface, a move from square tiles to hexagons, and a different approach to combat and diplomacy. For the military-minded civilization player, the largest change is the elimination of the “stack o' doom” where piles of units could be stacked up in the same location. Deployment is more strategic and combat more dynamic with a limit of one unit per hex and ranged units able to fire over close combat units in support. On the diplomacy side, city-states have been added, single city nations who are not working towards a victory condition and with whom trade, war and negotiation is possible. Each opponent is working toward their own victory condition, and if you are ahead, it may be difficult to convince one of the other great empires to work with you. They don't want to lose any more than you do.

It is also worth mentioning that multiplayer support is better than ever, with the addition of single-computer hotseat play to internet and LAN gaming options. Community mod support is in the main game's interface, making it easier than ever to explore and use content created by fans of the game and pick and choose what you want to add to your experience. Downloadable content options include official “Cradle of Civilization” map packs and civilization expansions, adding more options to the already fairly robust set of features in the base game. Overall, between the gameplay changes, graphical updates and features both new and refined from previous games impressed me a lot, and I'm sure I'll disappear into this one for some time to come.

On to CivWorld on Facebook, a social game that made a whole lot of promises, and I believe that it delivered on quite a few of them, but it is not without its flaws... and one of them may be the game's Achilles' Heel. A lot of gamers have strong feelings about social media casual games. I neither love nor hate them as much as a lot of folks who have written about them, I can take or leave them, and see potential in the genre. Most social games are individual affairs with limited cooperation or competition with friends on the social network, and no real overarching goal aside from “get farther/do more.” That's not inherently bad, as the same can be said about a lot of other gaming, including many rpgs. CivWorld is collaborative and competitive with each player running a city, joining a civilization and contributing to their nations success or failure against other civilizations made of other players.

The elements of building up cities, collecting resources and armies and reasearching new technologies are all present. Culture, great people and wonders of the world are rolled up together in a single system where culture contributes to the birth of great people and great people collaborate on Wonders for their civilization. Cooperating with many other players to win “era goals” as time goes on is legitimately fun. Minigames exist to get a little extra science, culture or gold, and gold coins can be used to purchase extra production, food to increase population and military units, among other things. There's a good balance between “sit and play all the time” and “log in now and then for a few minutes: in terms of contributions.

The dangers of not investing in a military are disastrous one-sided conflicts.

There are a few downsides to launching this sort of game on this sort of platform. Though there are multiple paths to round victories, civilizations with large numbers of players find achieving many of those goals easier. The network stress of so many people playing also sometimes makes unusual and frustrating glitches happen, especially with joining or leaving a civilization. The thing that I like least is the method that in-game currency purchased with real money can be used. Though there is a limit on how much can be spent daily, “CivBucks” can be directly spent to get more resources usable toward victory. A Civ with multiple people willing to do this is at a competitive advantage, and you are also individually ranked in the game, something that CivBucks can affect directly. This leaves kind of a bad taste in my mouth, but I'll continue to play for free for as long as it is fun. At least they didn't commit the Cardinal Sin, in my mind, of requiring a player to spam or recruit friends in order to progress.

Overall, the play with history and strategic empire-building in a turn based environment is something both of the games I started playing this week do fairly well, and I'll stick with both of them for the time being. I remember waiting for Civ IV on launch day, the tragedy of accidentally breaking my play disc for Civ III, and how many times I lost all track of what time it was telling myself “Just a few more turns.” For now, I'm off to look in on my Greek Empire. We just discovered machine guns and the nearby Romans are rattling their sabers... which is appropriate, because that's about all they've discovered in the way of military technology.

There vill be.... SANDVICH! - Team Fortress 2 Free to Play, one week later.

And... I'm back. Many thanks to Sarah for her Origins articles, since I'd written all the articles posted last week before we left town, it was almost like I was on a 2-week vacation. (Do the unemployed get vacations?) Now, with that behind me, what did I do with the time I had not researching and writing articles, finding appropriate images and trying to ascertain as best I can their copyright status, layout and posting? Did I write the Great American Novel? Nail down that elusive job that'll make me adjust this blog's title? Charity work? Nope, I played a lot of video games. Those who know my love for Steam or who follow me on Tumblr can already guess which one.

Team Photo 2. Immediately after this was taken, everyone put on funny hats and started jumping around.

I don't cover nearly enough shooters, or so I'm told. I've declared my bias against the genre in the past, but it isn't as though I don't play them at all. I think my twitch reflexes aren't up to snuff to be really great at these sorts of things, so there might be a little bit of sour grapes in there somewhere. This might explain why it took over four years and the decision of Valve to make it Free-to-play for me to finally try Team Fortress 2. The game's been called “the most fun you can have online,” and I think I can see why. I'd like to take a few moments to explain TF2 to the people who haven't played it (yes, both of you) and then directly give some tips to others who just started playing from the F2P crowd on how to get started.

Released in 2007 as part of the Orange Box edition for Half Life 2, Valve updated the team-based multiplayer hit Team Fortress Classic with redesigned gameplay, a totally new, cartoony graphical style, enhancements to classes and changes to weapons loadout for each class. Using teamwork to accomplish objectives on levels was mastered by the earlier game, as before TFC, most multiplayer was deathmatch/arena style “kill everyone else” gameplay. Team Fortress features nine different classes, who perform different roles on the team, three are designed to attack on offense, three are defensive, and there are three specialist classes.

Classes? this is a game about HATS!

The classes are Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman, Heavy, Engineer, Medic, Sniper and Spy.

Offense:
The scout is super-fast, has the least health, can double-jump and carries by default a scattergun, a pistol and a baseball bat. Soldiers come equipped with the rocket launcher, (which allows for rocket jumps by blasting at your own feet while timing a jump) shotgun, and entrenching tool. The Gas-mask wearing Pyro has a flamethrower (which can ignite players and detect disguised spies) a shotgun and a fire axe.

Defense:
The demoman (a black scotsman with an eyepatch) has his grenade launcher for indirect fire, a sticky bomb launcher to set a field of remote-detonated mines, and a broken bottle. The Heavy has the most health, moves slowest, and has the devastating minigun, with a shotgun and his fists for backup. Engineers have pistols and shotguns, but their real strength is in building machines; their blueprints allow them to make dispensers to refill life and ammunition, teleporters to allow fast travel around maps, and deadly sentry guns to automatically defend positions.

Specialists:
Medics have a needle gun, a bonesaw and the healing gun which restores life and builds up a “charge” that at 100% makes the medic and his target invulnerable for a short time. Snipers wield sniper rifles, naturally, which can one-shot most classes with a carefully aimed headshot, with a machete and submachine gun for backup. Finally, the Spy has his disguise kit, which allows him to look like a member of the opposing team, stealth watch which allows him to vanish, a revolver, a sapping kit to disarm engineer machines, and a butterfly knife that is a one hit kill in a backstab.

The unsuspecting Wild Engineer, and its natural predator, the Spy.

The combination of playstyles and different abilities across the classes really make this more than just your usual first-person shooter. An engineer or a spy are so different from a scout or soldier that it is almost like you aren't even playing the same game when you switch to certain classes. Different team compositions present strength or weakness depending on the map objectives (capture the briefcase, secure control points, or pushing a cart with a bomb strapped to it down a track that runs into the other team's base) and whether teams are on defense or offense. The game is fast paced, and as you play, different equipment for the various classes unlocks (weapons and cosmetic items like the hats the game's become famous for) both at random intervals and for completing achievements.

Unless you are a crack shot with great twitch reflexes, I recommend starting players learn the ropes by playing the pyro, heavy or medic classes, and maybe get a feel for the engineer and/or spy (though I think spy is a little trickier to learn.) Stick with groups of players and try to play an offense class while attacking, defense while defending while still learning the controls and pace of matches. For me, the toughest classes to play with any sort of skill have been scout and sniper, but I might just be a terrible shot. The community is all over the place, with intolerant, abusive and elitist toolboxes and helpful friendly folks willing to be patient with new players all over the place, sometimes on the same server. Unless you have a thick skin for online abuse, I recommend turning off voice chat in-game while learning.

My screen looks like this when I play the sniper, the instant before I pull the trigger
and the heavy moves 2 feet to the left.

I've had some great moments in the last few days playing TF2 with both strangers and friends. Detonating a cluster of stickybombs right under a scout trying to escape with my team's briefcase in CTF, blowing up a spy disguised as me, masquerading as a soldier and having an enemy medic heal me until I hopped behind him and backstabbed him, and earning hats and new guns along the way. It is also worth mentioning that an upgrade to a premium account (though that pretty much only means crafting and trading once you start to get duplicate items) comes with ANY purchase from the in-game store, and there are a lot of $1.00 items in there. I used a spare dollar from my Steam wallet to get a few spy-themed accessories.

I'm not impossible to find on Steam, if anyone has the inclination to look hard enough. If you add me on Steam, however, put a note in a comment, this blog's facebook page or email somewhere letting me know you came from the blog, so I know to accept. Now, back to earning hats.

Free Games Profile - 5 Games I've Been Playing That Cost My Favorite Price.

Not so long ago, I posted on my Tumblr a list I'd seen somewhere else about awesome free games. I like awesome, and free is right in my price range at the moment, so I've checked out a few of these in the last week or so, to answer the question: Do you get what you pay for, or are there good free games out there? One of the games is a pretty complete alpha of an inexpensive project, one is a free-to-play, also known as “freemium”, where you get a feature set for free, but there are additional options/content available for purchase. Yet another takes the structure found in Mafia Wars-type games and turns it on its ear to produce something very interesting. The last two are complete, finished and free, no strings attached.

The first game I want to talk about is also the oldest. Cave Story, originally called Doukutsu Monogatari, was developed by one man over five years, a labor of love. The PC release is an old-school platform adventure that is most similar to Metroid, with weapons that level up when golden triangles are collected. The story follows a robotic (or maybe cyborg) soldier who wakes up in a cave with no memory and stumbles into a village of friendly creatures who are under assault by a mad scientist and his hench-things. The action is familiar in an old-school way, very difficult in spots and the story progresses in unexpectedly interesting directions. The version of the game translated from Japanese to English became so popular that a remake of the title with enhanced graphics was made for the Wii, and a 3D version is coming to the 3DS. This one is a lot of fun, and there are several endings and bonus levels to discover.

The surprised looking Lunchbox is named Balrog. I just wanted to type that.

In the same vein of free platforming action game is Spelunky, with retro graphics and random level generation, Spelunky is fun, but it makes no claim to be fair. The cave explorer is reminiscent of Indiana Jones, complete with hat and whip, and in the opening levels there is a golden idol which can be collected that triggers a rolling boulder trap when touched. You start with a limited supply of basic tools, 4 ropes which allow climbing up into areas that you can't jump to, and 4 bombs which allow blasting through floors and walls. Other items can randomly be found through the levels as you collect treasures, fight monsters and attempt to evade deadly traps. There's a lot to discover in this game as well, secret areas, occasional NPCs to interact with, and in a nod to Temple of Doom, even sacrificial altars to Kali.

Snakes... why did it have to be snakes...

The free Alpha release of Desktop Dungeons reminds me of a cross between Realm of the Mad God and classic roguelike dungeons, only on a smaller scale. Every dungeon is a single screen large, you start out with the possibility of four races and four basic classes to choose from with special abilities, and if you can level up enough to defeat the boss monster in the dungeon, more features unlock with every win. The game is random, very difficult, even less fair than Spelunky in some cases (sometimes it really isn't possible to do much of anything as every monster you can reach kills you in one hit.) However, individual tries at the randomly created dungeons don't take very long, so a lot of dying and restarting makes this one addictive. Also of note, this game has altars to various deities who your character can choose to worship. The gods give piety for completing certain actions, and penalize piety for others. For example, a warrior god might grant piety for every monster killed, but penalize for casting spells. After several days spending more time than I'd like to admit on this one, I've beaten the dungeon only three times, once each with a warrior, thief and cleric.

This game has no business being this addictive. I may drop the $10 for the finished game.

Another free game that I've actually been playing for a while now but only recently got back into is the fantastic Echo Bazaar. On its surface, Echo Bazaar looks like a Facebook game. You get a number of turns that refill slowly with time, you train skills by repeating actions over and over until a higher level of skill unlocks a new action to grind and train on. There are several things that separate Echo Bazaar from the pack of games released by Zynga for Facebook however. First, though you need to connect through Facebook or Twitter, Echo Bazaar is separate from the social networks aside from the ability to tweet short ads for the game for bonus actions once daily, and the ability to interact with friends and followers who also play. The setting is a Victorian London that fell deep beneath the Earth, claimed by the dark Masters of the Bazaar. Hell is literally so close they have an embassy, and demons and strange creatures walk alongside grubby urchins and gentlemen and ladies in a twisted and vaguely Lovecraftian setting dripping with mystery. Echo Bazaar also tracks decisions made in the course of telling your story, and makes those choices relevant enough that each player's experience is unique. My personal character is a debauched rake and hedonist, using a silver tongue and his wits to seduce, gamble and write poetry in society while searching for the Ultimate Game, a poker game with the Heart's Desire as the prize, and the Immortal Soul as the stake.

A game with secrets and souls as currency, be a thief, thug, scholar or some combination of all these.

The last of the free games I've been messing with recently is one of a category of games recently made available on Steam. I'm a big fan of free-to-play MMORPGs and multiplayer action games that make their money from a dedicated fanbase willing to part with a little cash in order to get something extra. I like the model a lot, in some ways this is the basis for Echo Bazaar. How much I like the structure, however, depends on how much content is behind a paywall. If the game has only a small amount of free content and makes me cough up cash for the full game, it isn't “Free to Play,” its a demo, and I feel cheated. A good way to get around this is to make most of the purchasable content earnable in-game over a long period of time. A few well-known games deserving of their own articles do this, including Dungeons and Dragons Online and League of Legends. Steam just put up access to Champions Online, Alliance of Valiant Arms, Forsaken World, Global Agenda: Free Agent and Spiral Knights.

I've been burned by F2P games before, this one seems worth the time investment.

I started on my “play to evaluate” on Spiral Knights, as I want to give each of these a fair shake on their own merits before judging them. Trying to play them all at once would ensure at least one game doesn't really get played nearly long enough to get a proper review. I started with Spiral Knights for two reasons, one, it was the most different of the five titles in presentation from other games I've been playing recently. The second reason lies with the developers. Three Rings is an independent studio that practically introduced me to the Free-to-play concept with their game Puzzle Pirates, that released in 2003. I wanted to see what these guys could do with a more ambitious project. Spiral Knights is best described as an Action-RPG like Legend of Zelda, but with a robotic, almost Lego, feel to the characters and multiplayer dungeons and towns. The game is very pretty, controls smoothly and is a lot of fun in party. The currency to enter a dungeon, resurrect when dead or craft items is “energy,” which can be refilled with time, real money, or tanks can be bought using in-game currency. Bonus! It passes my litmus test for “is this really free?” I looks forward to pushing into content and seeing where the content boundaries before it really makes sense to pay are.

I anticipate I'll revisit this topic many times as I do a LOT of gaming, and don't have a whole lot of budget for it, so finding my diversions without opening my wallet beyond WoW and Gamefly subscriptions takes up the time not spent writing, reading, looking for work or doing tabletop RPGs. I'll find the best and the worst that money doesn't have to buy, and come back and report on my findings.

Fable: The Journey at E3, Peter Molyneux's Legacy and Controversy as a Designer.

Wrapping up a week of E3 coverage, I've got one final article about video games, and then it is back to normal with gaming articles popping up now and again instead of every single day. Microsoft had the most tepid of showings of the big three console manufacturers, mostly pitching Kinect-based titles and sequels. Like clockwork, Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios trotted out in order to announce... a sequel, that uses Kinect for the Xbox 360. Now, it is easy to hate on Molyneux, and a lot of geeks are at the moment. Since Black and White, and throughout the development of the Fable franchise, he's caught a bad rap for exaggerating features and engaging in wild hyperbole about upcoming games, to the disappointment of fans when the titles hit shelves. The games are good, just not the revolutionary titles created through his overhyping. Let's not forget, however, that the man has been one of the most influential designers in video gaming, and was a titan in the industry before he became a target for nerds to vent their rage upon.

We were promised a world where every decision mattered. What we got was... kicking chickens.

Okay, before I get into trying to restore the image of one of the more vilified game designers through careful application of a history lesson, I'd be remiss in not talking about the elephant in the living room. The Fable franchise is a series of okay action-RPGs with elements like property and business ownership, marriage and family, and choices based on “good” or “evil” actions. I followed the development of the original game, bought into the hype and bought Fable for Xbox on launch day. Hoo boy, was I disappointed. So many features on the cutting room floor. Subplots set up and never paid off in the story. All these things you could do outside of completing quests, but never any real reason given to want to do them. I briefly played the two sequels, saw an improved (but still flawed) story, prettier graphics and some of the same problems. Most of what distinguishes the game from any other action-RPG is superfluous content that doesn't feel like it belongs there. Will Fable: The Journey be any different, or is it more of the same, with Kinect support as the newest gimmick?

Whew, that's out of the way. I want to believe in Fable: The Journey, but I fear that I know better. The reason so many geeks hate on Molyneux is tied to Fable. Black and White (which I liked, personally) had features missing or changed, but it was good enough that all would have been forgiven, until gamers felt betrayed and cheated by Fable, then the minor issues with Black and White were looked back on with a less favorable set of eyes. Unfortunately, the memories of gamers with regard to this single designer don't extend back far enough, and recent games have meant that his earlier triumphs are all but forgotten. I am, of course, speaking about his time with Bullfrog Studios.

Theme Park, one of the most imitated games from Bullfrog, Molyneux was Project Lead.

A short list of the best of Peter Molyneux's time at Bullfrog:

• Populous (1989): One of the very first, and still probably the best of all the “God-sim” games, players guide a civilization to build, develop and worship while expanding their culture and reproducing in order to conquer an enemy civilization. The terrain was deformable, and many godlike powers including miracles and plagues were at the player's disposal.
• Syndicate (1993): A top-down isometric strategy game set in a corporate dystopia with cyberpunk elements. Control of cybernetic agents acting as assassins, recruiters (through drugs and mind control) and defenders of the corporate Syndicate with a detailed story, Syndicate influenced the design of many Real Time Strategy games that followed it.
• Theme Park (1994): The original “Tycoon”-style business simulator game, imitated countless times using different businesses as the focus (or the same, in the case of Rollercoaster Tycoon), Theme Park put the player in the hands of a combination designer/owner of an Amusement Park, managing rides, concession stands, park employees and tickets/promotions to build and profit by keeping guests happy and spending money.
• Magic Carpet (1994): Technically ahead of its time at release, Magic Carpet was a 3D first-person action/RPG with an Arabian Nights flavor. Players controlled a wizard who could fly around a landscape fighting monsters, accumulating power to learn stronger magics and fight rival magic users with spells. Unique for the time were the real-time terrain-changing/destroying effects possible with the magics, and the deformable/destructible terrain lent toward the beefy system requirements that held the game back as a commercial hit.
• Dungeon Keeper (1997): Another simulation game in a style later imitated by others, Dungeon Keeper took traditional roleplaying video games featuring heroes invading dungeons to slay creatures and collect treasure, and turned the genre on its ear. Players control the evil “Dungeon Keeper”, training monsters, digging rooms, setting traps and piling up treasure to lure adventurers to their doom.

Dungeon Keeper was hilarious, you had to keep monsters happy, trained, equipped and fed.

I'd love to see some of the boundless creativity and innovation from Molyneux's early career return to modern gaming, and I do think that the focus on where some of the Lionhead titles have fallen short of expectations have set him up for criticism. The tech demo for Microsoft's Kinect, “Milo” which so many people hoped would be a full game shows that the potential is still there, the studio just needs to execute on traditional strengths. I'd welcome a return to the simulation genre, pushing new technologies and new ideas. I liked some of the things about Fable, but I think I, like so many others, are hoping so much for the next Syndicate or Theme Park, that it is easy to forget about those early great games and ask “What have you done for me lately?” in our disappointment.

The games get prettier, sure... but can they recapture what made Peter Molyneux a great designer? 

Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG - Bioware at E3 2011, Almost Ready for Launch!

We're closing in on the end of E3 week here, and even a fairly ho-hum show has some gems, even if the best parts aren't surprise announcements. Bioware is closing in on a launch for their long awaited take on the MMORPG genre with Star Wars: The Old Republic. This is all sorts of exciting for me. I love Bioware RPGs, even the ones that disappoint me do so because I want more. My first-ever MMO was Star Wars Galaxies, though I didn't do much in it besides crafting and building structures. I also have a great deal of affection for how Bioware in particular handles the Star Wars setting, and I'm ready to see them make the leap from single-player experience to MMORPG.

A Star Wars MMO, and not a Gungan to be seen. Meesa glad to hear that.

Gaming in the Star Wars Universe is tough even for a developer writing for the single player game. If your game is set in the time of the films, there are all sorts of obstacles. Large-scale epic stories that this setting does best don't lend themselves well to a time period where we all know who is responsible for all of the major events. Add to that the fact that many people want to play a Jedi, but hate the prequels, and there just aren't very many Jedi around during the Rebellion Era. Stories are told in the background of established events, and they are mostly meaningless, or the fact that no mention of this plot worked its way into the films strains plausibility.

Add in the challenges of a persistent multiplayer world, and the challenges are nearly insurmountable. Bioware addressed this problem years ago when they developed Knights of the Old Republic. A gripping story, plenty of Jedi, room to play without disturbing canon, the distant past of the Star Wars Universe is ripe for development. Any character or element that is created new that doesn't have a specific place in canon? No problem, that bit was lost in the shadows of the distant past, the way details often are. Bioware gave their typical treatment to the setting too, with party members with their own attitudes, motivations and stories, and if you treat them right, you get to explore those tales with sidequests of a personal nature to your companions. Tabletop RPG geeks also loved that the combat system was based on the D&D-inspired D20 system.

If the lighting-fast block and parry of lightsaber combat actually is modeled correctly while still
feeling like MMO-style combat, it should be really, really cool.

How can the key elements of this setting be brought into the very different gameplay style of the MMORPG, without losing what makes Bioware games special? The developers have talked about this at length, focusing on a story told for each individual player that is just as important as the group experience. Bioware RPGs focus on individual actions having consequences, and those consequences having a direct impact on the gameplay experience. In Star Wars: The Old Republic, the first choice to be made is whether to play as Sith or Republic, which will also affect choice of classes (more on this in a bit) and starting areas. Though individual characters have the freedom to make “good” or “evil” choices, the morality of the Sith Empire isn't subjective, the developers have said that it won't be a “good guys from a certain perspective” thing, Sith are evil.

In both solo questing and group “dungeons” the impact of individual decision making is built in, with dialogue options (while talking with fully voice-acted NPCs, a first for an MMO) and “choice points” built into missions and quests. It's pretty obvious how this works for a single player quest, but the multiplayer missions and how they've made that work is the turning point that has made me decide to put down World of Warcraft, if only for a little while, when this finally releases. Rather than having a party leader make all the decisions, or making them up to party vote or some such nonsense, the narrative in individual missions provides key points, one for each player, to make a decision that will affect the rest of the mission, with consequences for all. If this can be pulled off without creating too much conflict or arguing with other team members after the fact, it is brilliant.

So, what can you play in Star Wars: The Old Republic? So far, for sure we've seen human, Twi'lek (like the dancing girl in Jabba's Palace) and Zabrak (think Darth Maul) as races in promos, and as I mentioned before, your classes are based on your faction. Both factions have four classes at launch, which doesn't seem like very many as compared to many other games, but the customization of powers and abilities as characters level supposedly will make this a non-issue. (We'll see.) For the Republic, the available classes are Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Trooper and Smuggler. For the Sith, there are Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor, Imperial Agent and Bounty Hunter. To my way of thinking, that looks like two flavors of Jedi for each, one dull sounding class (Trooper and Agent... really?) and one non-Jedi but still awesome class for each side.

Of course, not everyone will have a lightsaber. With the existence of the Smuggler,
though, expect this guy to be rare on launch day.

I have a lot of hope for this game, though I don't think it is a “WoW Killer,” if such a thing is even possible anymore. I want to see the focus on storytelling change the landscape of a style of gaming where story is secondary currently, players groan as they skip quest text and suffer through cinema scenes so they can kill something else and take its stuff. I really hope that Bioware can tell a story compelling enough to make gamers demand that kind of narrative out of their MMORPG experience. One thing I do know for certain if that I'll be giving it a shot at release. I'll be doing the bidding of those who pay the best for a talented Bounty Hunter... the Sith of Korriban.


One last bit of site-related news, I'm now on Tumblr at unemployedgeek.tumblr.com, posting small updates on topics I've covered here or stories too short for a full article, tidbits about myself, links to these articles and reblogs of interesting tidbits I find around the web that are relevant to my interests. Check me out there, and I encourage tumblr users to reblog anything you find on my tumblr if you like it!  I'm also @DocStout on Twitter, and of course, I have the Facebook link at the side of this very page. Slowly moving into Web2.0 as though I were an actual young person!

The Elder Scrolls - Skyrim at E3, and a look back at the series.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about Nintendo's keynote address, and promised more E3 coverage. So far, the rest of the show hasn't done much to impress me, Sony announced a new handheld console that doesn't do anything for me at the moment, they'll need great titles as proof-of-concept as a legitimate challenger to Nintendo's stranglehold on that market. And Microsoft announced Halo 4. Whee. Some of the coolest stuff I've seen is a little more information on a game I already knew about, from a series I already love. The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim is Bethesda's newest RPG offering, and the soon-to-be-released game marks a series that's been consistently good throughout its 17-year history. I've written about Bethesda's tackling of the Fallout series before, but I want to specifically look at Skyrim in particular, and the Elder Scrolls Games in general.

Can Bethesda keep a string of hits going with the prevailing winds blowing against classic RPGs?

The first Elder Scrolls game was called Arena, released in 1994, it was originally supposed to be a fantasy Gladatorial combat game with traveling teams, and sidequests between the arena matches. In development, however, the RPG elements took over, the engine moved into a First Person perspective, and the Arena combats seemed more and more 'tacked on' until they were dropped altogether. The game was late to publication, full of bugs and critically panned, but the world established there gave it a cult following, and enough of a fanbase to support a sequel.

Daggerfall (TES II) embraced the few things that worked about Arena, and was a game massive in scope and ambition. The continent the game is set in was twice the size of Great Britain, with over 15,000 towns and settlements and 750,000 NPCs to interact with. Players could explore many, many different dungeons, own property, become a vampire or werewolf if infected by those creatures, and the story had six endings so different that reconciling them for another sequel required Divine Intervention. Complaints about the breadth of the game at the expense of depth, as most of the nearly half a million square kilometers of space was randomly or procedurally generated by the computer, so none of the locations or characters not in major quest locations had very much to them.

There really wasn't anything quite like it at the time, or since.

The third Elder Scrolls RPG, Morrowind, was released to nervous anticipation by fans of the series. It was so much smaller than Daggerfall, did that mean it was dumbed-down, or a step backward? Upon release, fans weren't disappointed. The sandbox, open-exploration concepts in earlier games were present, but they were enhanced by packing the terrain in with carefully thought-out features. Instead of hundreds of miles of randomly-generated terrain with a few static landmarks, ten square miles (26 km) of well-developed dungeons, settlements and other locations with planned monsters and characters worth interacting with. Factions and guilds to quest for and advance in as well as a main story that was in many ways even better than Arena's or Daggerfall's made Morrowind really something special. Due to Bethesda's release of a development kit to the modding community, this game is still being played today, nearly ten years after release.

Oblivion was about twice the size of Morrowind, featured a complete overhaul of the graphics engine, and refined the option to zoom out from first-person to play in a third-person perspective, though the animations were a little clunky and awkward in this mode, though they were improved from the same feat in Morrowind. The fourth game continued to refine some of the elements that made the first three games in the series great, and allowed dungeons randomly littered throughout the world to scale up as characters became more powerful. Monsters would get stronger, dropped loot would get better. The freedom to explore any area you could see, steal any item, kill any NPC (though some would make the game's main quest unfinishable) and customize spells and weapons improved. One downside to Oblivion, however, were the hellish portals that needed to be closed to complete the main quest. Inside each was a depressingly similar generic “hellish” dungeon to trudge through and hit the magic “self-destruct” button at the end.

Typically cutting-edge visuals for the time in each game usually means that a
new Elder Scrolls game is time for a new computer.

Each of the Elder Scrolls Games since Daggerfall has worked on being more “epic” in scale and ambitiousness of content, with thousands of pages of text forming the many, many books that can be found in each world, rounding out the lore and history of the setting. The worlds are getting bigger as new games appear in the series, but deeper at the same time, so we won't be seeing more miles of empty fields like we had in Daggerfall, but instead an ever-increasing and continually interesting game world. Expanding on this promise to keep getting bigger and better at the same time, we have the newest game in the series, Skyrim.

The focus on the return of dragons to the world of the Elder Scrolls is a powerful one, with a lot of the early demos shown at E3 putting the great wyrms, and specific fights against them on display. The powerful “dragon shout” abilities garnered from defeating the winged titans give characters abilities themed on draconian powers including fire-breathing. The third-person engine and animations have been greatly improved, making that perspective a more attractive choice for play, and the complete redesign of all user interface, menus, inventory and character options is aimed at accessibility. Having seen the gorgeous graphics and read about the planned scope of the world, and some of the great moments in preview videos like a dragon suddenly swooping down and snatching up a humanoid opponent fighting the character, and dropping his mangled body some distance away... I'm excited for it.

There are a few parts of the announcement that give me pause, however. Skyrim is being developed specifically as a console game for the Xbox360 and PS3, and they'll work backward from that for a PC port. “PC port of a console game” is a phrase that gives many PC gamers the jibblies, and for good reason. All the talk of streamlining and accessibility is a great idea, until you realize that games in the past that have attempted to do this did so at the expense of depth and have greatly disappointed their fans in the process. (I'm looking at YOU, Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2.) I'm going to remain optimistic, as I remember the panic when the size of the world for Morrowind was revealed to Daggerfall fans, and how unfounded that turned out to be.