🚀 go-pugleaf

Let me just double-check; I've gotten these subject lines wrong too
many times recently. Is it April? Is it 2017? Yeah, that looks good;
let's get on with it.

Welcome to our end-of-month (or is it beginning-of-month?) thread;
time to talk about games again. I mean, we always talk about games
here in c.s.i.p.g.a (well, almost always) but this is the thread where
we talk about games we've played... specifically, the game's we've
played in April. Of 2017. Which it is - April the 2017, I mean; I
know, I double-checked. 

You all know what to do. Here's my list. 

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Short and Sweet
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* Homefront Revolution (new)
* Stronghold (1993) (replay)
* Ultima VII (replay)
* Raptor Call of the Shadows (replay)
* Star Wars Alliance (replay)
* Oh Sir! The Insult Simulator (new)

TL; DR 
----------

* Homefront Revolution (new)
The original "Homefront" (2011) was awful. A badly made "Modern
Warfare" clone, it took all the bad aspects of the genre - linear
levels, straitjacket scripted encounters, stupidly bombastic storyline
- and wrapped it in generic gunplay, visually unappealing graphics and
an idiotic set-up. The core of the game - playing as freedom fighters
waging war against foreign invaders in downtown USA - was interesting
enough, but the implementation was terrible. So when the sequel was
announced, you can understand if I approached the game with a great
deal of trepidation.

There is a lot to dislike about "Homefront: Revolution". The
voice-acting stands out with how terrible it is, and the backstory
remains idiotic even after they turned the whole thing into an
"alternate history" in some vain attempt to make a Korean invasion
seem more plausible (it doesn't help). The bad-guys are cartoonishly
evil, apparently now poison-gassing whole cities just for the LOLz.
The good guys aren't much better - some taking vicious joy in torture
- perhaps because the developers were aiming for a whole
real-politick, shades-of-grey attempt at realism -  but when the
villains are so unbelievably evil the whole thing just feels nasty and
flat. The maps are fairly large and reasonably detailed but
disappointingly the world is divided into distinct maps and transit
between them is controlled through level advancement, completely
ruining any feeling of an open world. Within each map the game falls
back on the usual tropes: hidden goodies and the usual
capture-the-base missions that have been the standard since 2008 and
Far Cry 2. The game does expect you to stealth often, but - again -
this system is poorly implemented, largely because the enemy attacks
immediately upon spotting you. "Revolution" also relies heavily on
respawning enemies to bump up the difficulty level rather than strong
AI, and at times the game feels almost like Robotron with how many
soldiers it throws at you.

So, another terrible Homefront game, eh? No surprise given its legacy,
right? Well, not quite. 

"Homefront Revolution" isn't a great game; I'm not even sure it's a
good game. It is, however, head-and-shoulders above its predecessor
and not completely without merit. Graphically, the game is
surprisingly appealing, with some very good lighting and textures (the
animations could have used work). The firefights were solid, with good
gun-play and level design that supported the close-quarters urban
combat. I found the motorcycle - the sole player-controlled vehicle -
a bit pointless; between the too frequent enemy spawns and the
rubble-strewn streets, it was just faster and easier to run everywhere
and I almost never used the thing. But the game had a solid
foundation; it was just everything built atop that foundation that was
crap. More variety in enemy types, a larger, more varied and cohesive
game-world, a more robust stealth system, more mundane enemies who
were individually threatening - rather than dangerous because they
were thrown at the player in waves - and more things to do in the game
beyond the token collectibles and base-capture would have made the
game far more enjoyable. 

(As an aside, the game's visuals - especially at night, with all the
tracer-fire and the imposing steel-clad fortress of the Koreans -
looked peculiarly post-apocalyptic and made me wish for nothing more
than this game be re-done using the Terminator license, perhaps as a
remake of Bethesda's "Terminator: Skynet" game from 1996. Anyone else
feel the same?)

"Homefront: Revolution" surprised me in that it wasn't as horrid as I
expected, and honestly I don't really regret the 20 or so hours I
invested into playing it, but it's really quite flawed and not a game
I expect to return to anytime soon, nor a game I could easily
recommend. There are just so many other, games that do it better.
 


* Stronghold (1993) (replay)
Having nothing to do with the 2001 medieval strategy game beyond a
similarity in name and genre, this 1993 game was one of the last-gasps
of SSI's D&D license. Contemporaneous with games like SimCity, Caesar,
Civilization and Master of Orion, it is a rather simplistic strategy
game compared with its bigger brothers, and left little mark on the
industry. I didn't install Stronghold thinking I was going to play it;
I just wanted to see if its graphics were as cute as I remembered. 

Stronghold isn't a great game, but it's not really that bad a game
either. If anything, it feels a game too early for its time, released
before the technology could support its gameplay or before its
audience - strategy grognards still grumbling about the move away from
turn-based design - was ready for its hands-off approach. In gameplay
it is most similar to 2001's "Majesty", so much so that I checked to
see if the two games shared developers (they don't). Like Majesty, the
player doesn't have direct control over his units, but rather can only
influence them with the construction of specialized buildings. It's a
very slow-paced game, where much of my time was spent just waiting and
watching as my structures were slowly built and my heroes haphazardly
ambled across the map. It is actually possible in certain
configurations to win the game without fighting any battles, simply by
growing your city. This is fortunate, as the pathfinding AI of the
heroes you depend upon to defend your realm is abysmal, and its one of
the major strikes against the game. The game also struggles to provide
you with enough information; what it gives you is mostly two or three
menus deep, and sometimes not available at all (telling me that a
"Fire Giant is attacking!" is great, but I'd like to know where so I
don't have to scour the entire map, thank you). These faults, combined
with the glacial speed and lack of any real threat make it feel like
an early attempt at a "casual" strategy game. Played in a window in
the corner of my desktop while I'm working or surfing the net the game
is a fun distraction, but it just didn't have enough depth to be taken
seriously twenty-five years ago. It's a great concept - as proven by
Majesty, which greatly improved the pace and interface - but
Stronghold was just way before its time.

The graphics are as charming as I remember, however.



* Ultima VII The Black Gate (replay)
Whenever I think of Ultima VII, I think of twittering birds. This is
partly because the first time I played it was on a warm May morning in
1992, but mostly because that's the first thing you hear when the game
starts: a chirping bird (powered by the all the awesome fidelity of
the SoundBlaster's OPL3 FM Synthesis chip could provide). To this day,
when I hear chirping birds, I still flash back to that morning. It was
a slow start to the game, which made its big reveal a few minutes
later when the game's big bad shoved his fully animated face onto the
screen and talked - with full speech! - all the more memorable. Few
games before or since have impressed me like that intro did in '92.

In truth, that introductory cinematic was the high-point of the game,
but that's not to diminish the excellence of the rest of the
adventure. Ultima VII presented an amazingly vivid world, filled with
memorable characters that was - for its time - far more realistic and
alive than anything else on the market. Its NPC's each had their own
schedules, dialogues and character. The world was amazingly
interactive; "baking bread" - shorthand for the game's surprisingly
deep crafting system - became the rallying cry and standard for CRPGs
for decades to come. Completely mouse-driven, running full-screen and
without a visible GUI, the open world was picturesquely rendered,
impressive in scale and detail, and one that I enjoyed exploring and
virtually living in almost as much as questing... which I did, over
and over again. 

Well, it's been a quarter of a century later and it has probably been
at least fifteen years since I've last played this title to
completion. This has less to do with any interest in it and more due
to the fact that it holds no surprises for me; I overplayed this title
and have its story and map indelibly etched into my brain. Knowing
exactly what to do and what all the characters are going to say and do
destroys a lot of the wonder and mystery, and even when I try to
resist the urge I can't help but use short-cuts to bypass the more
tedious parts of the adventure. Worse, for all it boasted an
innovative interface on its release, these days playing the game feels
clunky; combat is completely out of a player's control, inventory
management is a mess and I started to dread locked doors because
finding the bloody key was unacceptably frustrating. (But at least
this time I didn't have to worry about the dreaded "key bug", where
keys disappeared into the ether; in 1992, I got to the very end of the
game only to discover the key to the titular black gate had vanished,
forcing me to restart the game. Ouch.). The actual adventure in Ultima
VII was actually fairly poor - it was a meandering quest with too much
filler and not enough direction, or even a proper villain - and it
hasn't aged well at all. The teleport- and trap-filled dungeons were
no fun either.

So I got very little satisfaction from the actual /playing/ of the
game. Most of my enjoyment came from nostalgic remembrances of
previous play-throughs and a technical and historical appreciation of
the title; the former with how ground-breaking it was (even if it did
use the hated "Voodoo Memory Manager") and the latter because its
shadow still lays long on the industry; for instance, all modern
crafting systems owe their existence to Ultima VII's use of the
technique to make its world more "realistic". So for all it was a
painful game to play /today/, but I nonetheless still consider it an
amazing title and one of the best CRPGs ever written.


* Raptor Call of the Shadows (replay)
I played the 2015 remake of the game, but only to avoid any
difficulties in getting the game running on modern hardware. I played
it because I wanted a brainless shooter and I remember liking the
soundtrack. The game is fine.

And that's pretty much all I have to say about it. It's a vertical
shoot-em-up from the '90s and - beyond its soundtrack - is pretty much
forgettable. Raptor's major distinguishing feature is that you buy new
power-ups between missions, which lets you tailor the game somewhat to
your play-style. It does result in a lot of extra grinding - you play
and replay earlier levels to earn the cash for the aforementioned
power-ups - and some of the later levels are brutally hard unless you
do that. But assuming you have the necessary arsenal, the game is an
adequate shooter. Not exceptional, not bad. Just fine.

It's got some rocking music, though.



* Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance (replay)
It's more than time for another X-Wing game. I think everyone who is a
fan of the space-sim genre can agree on this fact. Unfortunately, it
doesn't seem as though Disney - current owners of the Star Wars
license - have any immediate plans in that direction, so like many
gamers I have to get my fix re-playing the older games, which are a
bit long-in-the-tooth. Fortunately, fans of the series have modernized
the game somewhat and it's still a looker, even if it's not quite up
to the standards set by games like Elite or the
never-going-to-be-released Star Citizen. 

The gameplay of "X-Wing Alliance" remains as solid as ever, even if
this title is far more forgiving than that of its predecessors. But
spiraling an X-Wing through a cloud of TIE Fighters, trying to get a
bead on a target as you simultaneously balance your shields and manage
your speed and power settings, is an artful experience that I have
greatly missed. It is far more fulfilling than the more arcadey
versions released since, either as stand-alone titles (the "Rogue
Squadron" games) or as part of larger games (e.g., the "Battlefront"
games). But oddly enough, it's not a game I can ever finish.

It's the campaign, you see; it's rubbish. Too many of the missions are
focused on propelling the story forward rather than just launching a
mess of enemy fighters at you and letting you swat them out of the sky
like the annoying bugs they are. The worst are the ones that have you
bumble about in your family's star-freighter; the ship is slow, clumsy
and under-powered and the missions are tedium defined. I struggle to
fly the campaign, and rarely do I get past the halfway mark before I
give it up. Instead find myself gravitating instead towards the Quick
Skirmish feature where I can set up my own battles. Even so, the lack
of mission variety proves its undoing, although the sheer number of
different fighters - 58 with the mods - is impressive. It's just the
campaign that is so lackluster.

But even if I never finish the game again, I know I'll keep returning
to it, just to hear the wicked scream of a TIE Fighter as it roars
past. That's /classic/ gaming, that is.


* Oh Sir! The Insult Simulator (new)
+"Oh Sir!" is, at heart, intended as a party game; something you play
with others. It has a rather clever set-up - two twee Brits politely
exchanging insults over some inconsequential difference - and its
retro-art is charming... in a retro-art sort of way. But it's
lacking... something.

As a single-player game, it really doesn't stand up on its own merits.
The gameplay is too minimal and too dependent on chance to be much
fun. It also has a disturbing lack of content; with a mere handful of
characters and locations, it doesn't take too long before you start
hearing the same insults (or segments thereof) again and again. The
gameplay itself is fun - each round, both players have a limited - and
shared - pool of words with which to create their insult, and the game
is as much as building your own zinger as preventing your opponent
from doing the same. Unfortunately the end result - a point value
assigned based on how insulting your creation is - seems random and
non-coherent. The different characters have certain weaknesses (for
instance, insults against their social status, parentage or country
may grant bonus points) but even this isn't certain. Even as a party
game, played against friends, the game is limited. The insults are too
nonsensical, and the charm of the game's weirdness lasts about ten
minutes. After that, people quickly start looking for greater depth -
and there just isn't any to be found.

According to Steam, I got 66 minutes of gameplay out of this title,
and that was only by really, really trying; I think most people will
move on after half an hour, and never return. It's just to thin on
content and concept to stick with it otherwise.

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And that's what has occupied my time. How about you? 

What have you been playing in April (check) of 2017 (check)?