The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Far Cry 2, in so many ways, is just a pain to play. You’ll spend the first hour or so totally confused about its mechanics. Why don’t my save points have ammo and health kits? Why don’t they repair my guns? Why do these random cars always hunt me down? Why do members of a faction I’m working for try to shoot me? Why is the game so damn hard? Why does every enemy take a million bullets?

My first play session, I played for about an hour, and after a bunch of dying, I got really frustrated. I promised Brer I’d try it again, though. On Easy, this time.
On Friday, I flipped it to easy and tried it again.

I’m totally hooked now.
Far Cry 2 is a game that is completely, completely mean to a player just starting it. It has tutorials and explains its mechanics, but they really only make sense after you play for awhile. It doesn’t tell you things like drinking bottled water refills your health, or that by finding the ammo stations in guard posts, you can “scout” them and make your map more useful. It never mentions the buses, which are critical to getting around. (The only reason I knew about them was from listening to podcasts.) It never mentions that you need to go rest at a safe house to reset your buddy rescue. It never really mentions that you can’t pick up weapons from enemies ever, because they will jam, and that instead you need to make occasional stops at your arsenals to pick up new copies of the guns you’ve bought so they don’t jam. It does mention that doing buddy missions will improve your safehouses, but it doesn’t really mention how doing this changes them from out of the way annoyances you go to just because you want to save or move time forward so you can fucking see to checkpoints you hop from one to the other from in order to make sure you’re always prepared for the battle ahead. The flow of this game is a mystery to the new player.

Once you plow through, get some money, buy some decent guns, and learn these things, though? The game starts to get really, really fun. Sure, it’s still bothersome that every person on the face of the planet wants to kill you. Sure, it’s still sub-optimal that there’s only the vaguest of plots. But suddenly, the world changes into this combat playground. You pick whatever loadout you want at your arsenal for your play style, and then you murder everything your way. Convoy to take out? You can wait at the side of the road with an RPG, or snipe the driver out of his seat, or run it off the road with a car. Whatever you think of in the rules of the world, you can probably do, and do effectively. It’s addicting like that.

Of the things I like about this game, the map has to be one of the best. It’s completely immersive. You press the map button, and your guy puts away his guns and pulls out a paper map and a GPS. It looks cool, and it’s just neat to have your map laid out in your lap while you drive, for instance. At the same time, it’s still completely useful. It transposes the information your guy is getting from the GPS on your paper map, so it has everything I need to know about where I’m going and how to get there. More games need this map system. I love it.

I really suggest setting the game to easy, as well. Even at normal, this game is kind of unforgiving. I die all the time on Easy as it is. I would compare Easy to the “normal” setting of Call of Duty 4. There’s little shame in it, especially in a game where most of the fun comes from dicking around.

If you would have told me I would be so into Far Cry 2 back when I bought it, I would have completely laughed at you. But damn, I’m into it now. I don’t know how much longer I’ll play it. I’m almost positive I won’t beat it. (I’m at about 20% completion as of this writing, apparently) But there’s a reason why it got Idle Thumbs’ GOTY. If this game was a bit more polished, it would be mind-blowingly fantastic. As it is, it’s a very, very rough diamond. Still, it was totally worth the 15 bucks I paid. I have no complaints at this point. I’ve gotten my money’s worth.

Mainly, this post is an excuse to link to this. CAN YOU SOLVE THE MYSTERY?!

Whew, now I can close the tab where I was keeping that open in order to remember to link to it in a blog post sometime. Tabs -1!

…crap, I should write something else, too. I need a good seg into something based on the mystery…

Nope? Nothing?

Oh well.

…

Um, okay… text… GO!

Why are things that try so hard to seem juvenile, badly-constructed, and badly written so funny? Something like this makes me laugh and fairly entertains me, whereas if someone were to present something to me that was as badly constructed as this, it would be painful to experience. I would want to punch someone for wasting my time.
I suppose it’s all context. This is meant to be funny. I don’t, for one second, believe this guy’s website is genuine. There’s just this inkling of being well-thought-out beneath everything. The english paper turned in to me that looks like this, or the internet comment with language like this is meant to be taken seriously.

There are some things in the world that I don’t think should count for “being taken seriously.” I really don’t think that someone should have to dress a certain way to be taken seriously, for example. There are always extremes, but if someone is dressed casually, they can still present serious or professional thoughts, you know? That’s not a hindrance. When it comes to language, however, you can clearly hinder what you’re trying to say. Being too casual, or using too much slang can completely ruin your point for your audience. And not using spelling and punctuation anywhere near correctly, to the point where it’s obvious you didn’t even make an attempt, is not a sign of wanting to be taken seriously. I think it’s the fact that these people care less about the important point they may be trying to make than I do on these pointless blog posts or while messaging with other people just makes me angry. I’m not picky. You just have to try to be correct. You don’t have to succeed. But if you don’t try, fuck you. I’m not listening to you.

I feel really strongly about that, actually. Still, it’s all about context. One of my friends could talk like that for comedic effect, and I would play along. I wouldn’t be angry.

The bottom line is, I guess, that man, Context is really important, huh?
Yeah.

Today is a day when we marvel at the incredible ingenuity of the lapine race, and praise Frith for how rabbits can magically lay eggs on this faithful day.

No, wait… let me try that again.

Today is the day when someone rose from the grave and, in a surprise act of kindness, the zombie-hunters of the period did not shoot him in the head with a shotgun, as was the custom, but instead listened to his teachings and got possessed by a ghost that put tongues of flame over their heads for their troubles.

Or maybe it’s just the day that marks the end of this stupid fish-eating tradition as well as the end of availability of Cadbury Creme Eggs. I dunno.

In any case, Happy Easter. I know I’m going to spend the day doing absolutely nothing to celebrate. Although I guess we’re having some sort of large dinner. Yep.
EASTER!

So on this week’s Good Grief podcast, there was a string of iPhone and iPod Touch games mentioned that all sounded awesome. I wrote them all down for later reference. However, there was one game that I just couldn’t wait for, and that was TNA Wrestling. Yes, I know, a wrestling game? I don’t give a shit about wrestling. But this was described as a wrestling RPG with turn-based combat, branching dialog trees, and character customization. That’s such an odd combination that I really had to try it. So I went out and bought it, downloaded it, and hit the button to launch it on my iPod Touch.

It goes to a black screen for a few seconds, and then kicks me back to the menu.
I try again.
Same thing.
It won’t boot.

Frustrated, I go back to the iTunes product page. Ah, there’s a link to tech support for this game! So many people are playing it, surely there’s an answer.
It takes me to a “webpage coming soon!” page.

At this point I’m frustrated, so I post to twitter the situation.

To my shock, a few minutes later, I get this.
How he even saw my tweet, I don’t know, but I start up a conversation with this guy, who works on the game. He wants me to give him all the info I can so he can fix the problem in the patch they’re working on. He apologizes for my trouble. I give him my e-mail address and he sends me a bunch of questions to answer.
Today, he sent me a temporary workaround to try. I tried it. The game booted.

I’m about to try the game now, and I’ll let you know if it’s as awesome as I had hoped. But goodness, twitter is mind-bogglingly awesome sometimes. I would have just sat here, feeling like I threw my money away if it wasn’t for one nice and totally awesome guy on twitter. Instead I got amazing customer service, almost at random. Whee!

This is one of the reasons I quite like supporting smaller developers, too. Again and again I am all shocked and thrilled to have some one-on-one interaction and help from them. It’s just neat.
But yeah, now it’s time to try this wrestling thingamajig.

A few days ago, Brer and I were talking about lore. He was about to drop another Lorenado upon me about… something. He’s someone who does that. A lot. So that was happening, and then we got into discussing Lore in general, and how important it is. Also, how little I care to listen to it.

Lore is boring. World-building for world-building’s sake just puts me to sleep, and I will say that with absolutely no restrictions. One of the reasons I don’t read many fantasy novels is because nothing happens because the authors are so fucking obsessed about telling you every little thing about the world they made, and I honestly don’t care. Characters, mann. It’s all about the characters.

However, during this conversation, it did occur to me how much the very extremely fleshed out lore of Warhammer 40k was enhancing my Dawn of War II experience. The fact that this world that I am murdering things in is completely fleshed out makes everything work in a cohesive way. Everything that is happening makes sense and is not pulled out of someone’s ass. Lewt drops refer to people and events, and it’s clear from the little snippets of flavor attached to their descriptions that these are probably real people with a real background in the lore. Load screens are made significantly more interesting by delivering character backgrounds as opposed to “sweet tips” for gameplay and whatnot, though there are some loading screens with that, too.
However, the reason it is so effective is because it is completely optional and unobtrusive. I don’t mind reading pure lore segments in loading screens, because I wouldn’t be doing anything during the loads anyway. The clips are short, and only take me as long to read as it takes for the level to load. I learn about the world, but I’m not forced into unescapable walls of text. The mission briefings contain some lore tidbits, but they’re more focused on the characters or on simply giving you mission info. The lore isn’t the purpose. The lore enhances, it helps, but it isn’t the point.

That’s what lore should be. Lore is created because you’re doing the amount of world-building necessary to make a living world. Real, living fantasy worlds are totally sweet. However, much like how I don’t care to see exactly how they put polygons together to make the characters in my video games, I don’t much care what happened in the past to make a world move to this point. It’s necessary to make the world believable. I’ll love lore for that. But don’t shove it in my face. Include it for people who love researching that stuff somewhere out of the way, but that’s it. You know?

I’m nearly done with the single player in Dawn of War II, and I think it’s safe to talk about how awesome it is.
Cause it’s awesome.

The gameplay reminds me most of a really extra awesome version of Freedom Force and its sequel, only without pausing and giving orders that way. You have 6 squads to pick from, and you can take 4 into any mission. (though you always have to take your “Commander” unit) You move them around the map, killing people and taking strategic points. Each squad has different special abilities you can employ to kick ass. There’s a cover system that you can use to keep your people alive better. If a squad dies, another can revive the leader of the squad, and the “generic” members of the squad can always be replaced by capturing a beacon and teleporting down new initiates to fill out the team. During a mission, I’m figuring out who to send my melee-based commander towards to smack down, where to set up my turmulent squad of Heavy Bolters for maximum suppression of the enemy, and sneaking my Scout squad behind enemy lines to use demolition packs to blow up the building the enemy is holed up in while my Special marines throw frag grenades to thin enemy swarms. It’s hectic, it’s strategic, and it is a ton of fun.

The real fun, for me anyway, comes from the RPG elements. Every squad in a mission gains EXP when I kill things, and all squads get EXP for completing missions. During the missions, enemies can drop “Wargear,” also known as phat lewts, which you take back with you. You also get wargear rewards for completing the missions themselves.
Between missions, you hook up your Squad commanders with a wide variety of this wargear, as well as level them up in 4 disciplines: Stamina, Ranged Aptitude, Melee Aptitude, and Will. Every five or so points put into a specific discipline gives the squad a new special trait. Since you can’t completely level them up, what you put points in greatly influences what the squad does. For instance, if I take Cyrus’ Scout Squad and level up their Will all the way, then they become the masters of their Stealth skill. It costs less to use, and they can use a wide variety of special attacks without revealing themselves. I didn’t do that, however, I put most of their points into Ranged Aptitude, making them able to use special weapon attacks, like special explosive shotgun rounds, and be able to mark any target they attack, which gives a huge accuracy bonus to any other squad attacking that enemy.
On top of everything else, the Wargear, too, is not just basic “now you have more defense!” stuff. Avitus’ squad is my Heavy Bolters and turmulents. However, if I equipped them with a missile launcher instead, suddenly they become an unstoppable armor-killing unit, instead of a “large swarms of infantry” killing unit. If I equip a unit with Terminator armor, they become much better shielded and much stronger, but can no longer use some accessories and special abilities because they can no longer have finer motor skills. They gain the ability to equip things like huge mounted rocket launchers, however.
Basically, the way my squads turned out might be completely and utterly different from how you built yours. However, just looking at it, it seems like it would be extremely hard not to make a viable and useful build. You would have to try to make a unit that isn’t effective in battle, it’s just switching around what it’s effective at and how it goes about it. This is awesome to me. So much customizability, and no danger to it? I am so there.

It’s these RPG elements, combined with the short, not time consuming missions which I have already talked about, that really make me love the ever-loving crap out of this game. This is without having played the campaign in co-op, which I assume will be even more awesome, and without having even booted up the multiplayer, which is like a whole second game, really, on top of this one. The RTS portion is strong, but I would bore of it easily without the promise of new Wargear, trying out my new builds and the new abilities of my squads, and just basically building up a team I think is completely badass. It’s such a perfect combination of the two genres, it makes Warcraft III’s heroes seem downright clunky in comparison.

I can’t wait for expansions to this game. I can’t wait for Brer to have a copy so we can play co-op. I can’t wait for the new, more RPG-focused Company of Heroes expansion, which I will grab up immediately to try. Relic has basically bought a free pass for several more game purchases with how awesome Dawn of War II is. If it even vaguely interests you and your computer can run it, you are doing yourself a huge disservice by not playing this game.

So, continuing on our “Things with two word titles that have to do with places for walking” theme week here at the blog (not actually a theme week) I think it’s about time that I talk about The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the latest book in my novels class. This book apparently got a Pulitzer Prize for some reason, and is going to be a movie in theaters in November. Both of those things actually make little sense to me. I think this book is going to translate pretty horribly to the screen without major edits, which of course will happen, and then it won’t be the same story. I also don’t think it’s crazy award-winning material. That said, it is a pretty darn good novel, and was worth my time to read.

The story itself is a post-apocalyptic setting. America is destroyed somehow. There’s ash in the air. Somehow. You never really find out what happened or anything, and frankly, that is just fine by me. Because although this seems like a book, at first, about surviving in this harsh climate, it’s totally not. It’s a book about a father and a son, and how they grow over the course of attempting to get to the ocean. I’m pro-character focus, so I was all about this.

The book makes some odd narrative choices. The main characters are only referred to as “the man” and “the boy,” giving the whole thing a very removed feeling. Also, for no apparent reason, the book refuses to use quotation marks. Most dialog is just a list of short sentences, back and forth between the boy and the man. It, I suppose, just shows how useless the quotation mark is in these situations, because it was only really confusing when there was dialog in the middle of a paragraph, and that happened rarely. However, at the same time, I have absolutely no idea WHY you would just leave out the quotation marks. Nothing was gained by the choice, as far as I could see. It was just made arbitrarily, or via extreme hatred of the punctuation mark. It was odd.

None of the action in the book is particularly surprising for the setting. They deal with finding food, being starving, having to deal with cannibals and road gangs and whatnot. Again, this is all just a setting to drive the character interaction. That’s where the real meat of the book is.
You’ve got the man, who is all alone with his son. His son is the only reason he’s fighting so hard, and doing so much to keep them alive. At the same time, he’s developed a horrible cough. He knows his days are extremely numbered. He’s unsure what he’s going to do, so he stays positive, lies, keeps pushing forward. What else can he do? Meanwhile, you have the son, who is becoming an adult. He’s no longer buying the man’s stories of how great the world used to be and how it will soon be that way. He’s seeing more and more horrible things as the book goes on, and he realizes how the world works. He isn’t sure he doesn’t want to just die. He isn’t sure he wants to push on. He’s looking for a reason to, much like how he is the reason the man pushes on.
You’ve got this constant back and forth of the boy looking for answers and the man not knowing how to deal with the fact that he has exactly zero answers. It’s a compelling bit of character interaction, and it’s basically the whole book, so it’s good that it is.

I’m going to talk about the ending now.
—This is the spoilarz line—

The ending is expected, but I don’t know if it’s particularly effective or not. It’s a questionable thing. The man dies. The boy meets a family on the road and joins them, living on. You can see this as a fairly positive thing. The boy finds something to live for, his dad’s memory, and finds the “more people” and a kid his age that he’s been wanting through the whole book. The man died, but accomplished his mission of sorts. At the same time, you could look at it as a failure. This new family is too good to be true, and appears at exactly the right time. The boy abandons much of what his father taught him when interacting with them, though he does follow a few rules. (Not letting them have the gun, for instance) Perhaps the man didn’t succeed to making the boy into a man after all. He’s still helpless and needs a guardian, and those guardians might be planning on doing bad things to him. I don’t know. Would it be better having left the story right when the man died, and not knowing what would have happened to the boy? I don’t know. I do hope Mr. McCarthy tried that way, though.

Anyway, this isn’t some life-changing piece of fiction, but it’s an extremely solid and entertaining piece of fiction. I have no trouble recommending it. Whether the extremely slow pace and subtle character interactions survive on the big screen, though, remains to be seen.

(Note that this post will have extreme spoilers for The Path. If you ever plan on playing it, please don’t read this before you do and experience the game for yourself fresh. It’s that kind of game. When I go into spoilar territory, I’ll mark it.)

So, while perusing the Steam game catalogue, I stumbled upon the two games by the company Tale of Tales. They looked intriguing and artistic. One in particular, The Path, looked especially pretty. I wondered what it was about. I talked to Brer about it, and he ended up getting it for me for my birthday. I just got around to playing through it last night.

This game is not perfect. The controls, honestly, are not wonderful. There are weird decisions made for supposedly artistic reasons that kind of waste your time. There are game elements (a scorecard at the end of every chapter, collectibles, etc) that seem out of place in an “art game.” However, the game was so compelling that, once I started, I could not put it down. I kept going back to it as I had to see what the hell was going on and how the whole thing got put together. As I played, the more “gamey” elements slowly started to reveal themselves. I figured out that the “artistic” flashes of vision and such were mostly just a really weird HUD I could use to find my way around. Tooltips would sometimes pop up and tell me about an element of the game that I had absolutely no idea existed before, and it would totally change how I played. It’s a game of exploration then in both the forest and in actual gameplay, and that’s odd, but kind of cool. It looks pretty, it uses audio extremely well… if you want to point at a game in a “games as art” discussion, this is a pretty good one to point at. I didn’t spend the $10 it cost, but if I had, I would have found this experience completely worth it.

However, most of the enjoyment of a game like this comes from interpretation, and that means spoilarz. I have to talk about my theories about the game, so we’re heading deep being spoilarily lines now.

—Beyond This Point Be Spoilarz—

There’s no doubt that the game itself is saying something about youth. You don’t just have these fairly young girls getting into these situations without having it saying something about the situation they’re in. Much like the Little Red Riding Hood story the game is drawing a lot of imagery from, I found the game to be a series of cautionary tales. Each girl’s story had a sort of “moral” and while I don’t particularly agree with all of these morals, I can totally see why someone would present them. It’s a play about the perils of youth and the things during your youth that can ruin you.
Ruby’s story is one of caution against getting into a relationship out of simple boredom. She’s goth, she’s pessimistic, and she finds a boy in the woods who offers her a cigarette. There were images of school, of a “pandora’s box” of sorts when I got to the house in hers. She’s opening up more than she can handle, and it destroys her. A beam falls on her head. Bam.
Robin’s story is one of caution against innocence. She runs around the forest, picking up drugs and saying “Yay, candy!” She plays in shopping carts. When she finds a werewolf in an old graveyard, she just wants to play. She hops on his back and rides him. She gets sent to a grave with flashing, gnashing teeth for it. For assuming everything is fun and will always be okay.
Ginger’s story is one of caution against getting tied down by friendship. This is one of the stories that most bothers me, actually. Ginger runs around the forest, talking about how nothing can stop her, and nothing can keep her down. When she finds a friend, however, with the happy music that comes with playing with her, the act of helping her when she falls DOES keep her down. It makes her small, as she walks through the house. It binds her up in barbed wire. This one really frustrates me simply because I don’t believe that helping your friends is a bad thing. You can take anything too far. Ginger didn’t. People don’t exist just to pull you down, but that seems to be what this one is saying. You’re better off alone, it says.
Rose’s story is one of caution against religious fanaticism or just religion in general. As she wanders about, she constantly thinks about the soul, about going to heaven, and about how she can get there. When she encounters a ghost in the lake, someone who knows about the soul and can help her float to heaven, she pursues him, with church-style organ music in the background. She floats up. In the house, this choice only seems to drown her. She’s gone in a whirlpool that sucks her down, not up. It seems to be saying to focus on this life, not the next.
Carmen’s story is one of caution against being a wolf yourself. Carmen thinks the forest is beneath her. Who would leave this butchered bird out there? She finds a campsite and goes about making it her own. She starts a fire. She grabs a beer. She takes the wolf hat from the Woodsman and puts it on herself. She takes all the initiative. Then she attempts to prey on the Woodsman, who hands her another beer and she flirts with him while sitting by the fire, trying to get what she wants. In the house, there’s sawing and moaning noises. She got it, for better or worse. But it doesn’t seem to make her happy. It creates a hall of burning fire. As she approaches the tree she tried to climb to ascend to predator instead of prey, it falls on her.
Finally, Scarlet’s story is a caution against too much devotion to art, which is kind of ironic. She talks about how nature isn’t beautiful, it’s art that’s beautiful, and how she couldn’t live without art. She finds an abandoned theater, and picks up a demon mask. Everyone hides behind masks, and that’s fine, she says. She plays the piano instead of speaking to the teacher in the audience, and only then does the long, white-haired teacher come and play with her and interact. The result is abandonment. The house is empty. Everything is covered in sheets, the furniture moved out. As the blue curtain rises, she falls. Nobody is waiting for her, and nobody is watching her. At least, not really. They care only about her art.
Finally, after you see all these stories, you get to play an epilogue as the girl in white who runs around the forest as you explore in earlier chapters. You can run all around the forest then, and you know where everything is, unlike with the other characters. However, she knows better than to fall for these traps. There are no wolves for her to find. She won’t let herself be caught. When you finally go to grandma’s house, you see her dodge the fates of every other character, in turn, and is then left finding Grandma, kneeling next to the bed and watching her.
It’s at this point that the game throws a bit of a twist in there, as you then see the girl in white again, standing in the character select room. The other girls come back, one by one. The girl in white has a huge red stain on her dress. She might have dodged all of the perils the other girls faced, but she isn’t perfect. She made mistakes of her own. You can’t be completely blameless, perfectly white. But before we can see what her mistakes are, she leaves, and the game is restarted.

What do you think? Does that work? Clearly the game is open to many different interpretations. I read one from a guy I was talking on twitter with about the game that was vastly different than what I thought. His commenters said different things as well. Depending on what you do in the forest, you see different images, too, so depending on how you play, you could get vastly different ideas.
However, I think that any game that can make me want to, I dunno, write an English paper about it explaining it completely on my own, without assignment provocation? That’s a good, artistic game, don’t you think? (Then again, maybe that says something about how good I am at writing literary analysis, if they all basically look like what I did up there. Heh.)

A new DnD campaign has begun!
And gods, I sucked at it. But more on that later.

It was pretty obvious early on we were in for a kind of odd new campaign. For one, we don’t have a tank. Our four person party has an Avenger (damage-dealer), a Druid (Controller, debuffer-style as opposed to AoE style like the Wizard), a Bard (a healer, but Kevin focused more on debuffs and controller-style moves, so…), and me, a Shaman (specced out almost full healer, with a bit of a buffing undercurrent, since one or two of the buffs were so cool I couldn’t pass them up). It’s not a normal party! Spaeth’s Lord Captain Allouishous is the only melee attacker, and he’s almost always going to focus completely on his “I hate you” target. Although I suppose Shauna’s Druid was focusing a lot on Beast form and getting up in the grill of enemies as well. It’s certainly different from the few other combinations I’ve played.
It’s also not going to be a normal campaign when Justin Spaeth is being the voice of reason and logically progressing things. Kevin and I were running the two “leader” characters but we just kept up (totally fun) bickering the whole time. I was attempting to play my character a bit, actually. She’s a multiclass Cleric, and I figured that if she was going to worship a god, as someone who is so in tune with nature and spirits and such, she was probably going to be pretty fairly dedicated to that god. So since she’s a follower of Sehenine, I was really pushing the “Blaze your own path, see new things, don’t commit” that Sehenine teaches. I did things that seemed neat. I talked to people who weren’t there. I argued that we should be going in random portals instead of actually finding our way places. Meanwhile, Kevin was being a Gnomish ladies man, and fighting hard for his right to follow every female we met and hit on them.
So while this fun stuff was going on (and it was fun, I hope, for everyone. I assume it was. We do this shit all the time when we play) someone had to step up and take the lead. I assumed it would be Shauna, because she actually gets into the roleplaying part more than you might think a girlfriend pushed into it by her boyfriend would. But no, it was Justin Spaeth, the most ridiculous person I know (and I love him for it!), who stepped up and made it happen. Intense.
The plot itself makes me happy for one simple reason. It seems to take place in the multiverse of the DnD world. This is super cool, because it means Jonathan is using the Manual of the Planes I got him for his birthday. Score! Useful gift! Bam!

We only got to one combat, and Jonathan was feeling out the power level of 11th level characters, so it wasn’t perfect, but it was fun. Spaeth’s Avenger seemed almost broken, but I think that something as simple as a Fighter class monster who can mark him will probably shut him down. Shauna had a lot of fun pouncing people and making them grant combat advantage. Kevin did a whole bunch of weird things.
Me? I rolled like shit.
Seriously, of my first… oh… 6 rolls? Nothing was above a 5. I rolled a 1 for initiative, I critical missed my first attack, I rolled a 2 on the second… oh, it was tons of fun! I think I hit maybe two times. No, three. I hit three times in the long single combat we played. Yep.
That’s not to say I didn’t see what Alena Brighttail could do, and liked it. Cause I did! My Healing Spirit combined with my Spirit Boon of my Paragon path is kind of godly for healing, and I love it. Basically, I have one target spend a healing surge. Then, everyone who is not the target who is next to Keiko, my Spirit Companion (or any conjuration I have made) gains 3d6 + 5 HP. The first time I got that off and it became clear how much healing potential I have, I was ecstatic. I also have my Protecting Strike, which can grant all kinds of temporary HP. I also like moving Keiko around the map, setting her up for Opportunity Attacks that will never happen but I can pretend they will happen.

All in all, it went pretty well, I think. It’s unfortunate we didn’t have more time, but thanks to my 6 AM shift, we couldn’t really push it much longer. Hopefully it’s not too too long until we can play the next chapter. I look forward to, perhaps, actually HITTING with some of my neat abilities next time.

So, on my twitter feed, one Jeremy Parish threw up this little tweet. It was obviously meant to dissuade me from checking out Legends of Zork. But dammit, I like KoL. It honestly inspired me to create an account on the spot. After a day or two of playing, I admit at being intrigued, but dammit, this game has a lot going against it.

The first thing that will happen to you is that you will go to the website and expect text. Glorious text! It’s a Text Adventure Game property, surely there will be tons of text! Text oozing out of all pores!
There’s no text in this game.
Or, instead, the text is extremely minimal. There are no grand descriptions of anything in the game, for instance. Locations are just a picture and a title. Enemies are a picture and a scrolling stat display. There’s nothing particularly text-y about this game. And that’s going to turn off the people who wanted to play it almost immediately, I would bet. Because they’re coming to this game because of the license, right? That’s why you have a license attached to a game. And the game is designed to turn those people off.

This game shouldn’t be a Zork game. It should exist, but it shouldn’t have this name. That’s what I’m saying.

I was immediately turned off too, but I decided to give it more of a try. Over a few days of playing, I got to see what this game is actually trying to do, and it’s something I can get behind. It’s a shame most people are going to be totally turned off to it.

Basically, do you remember Ogre Battle? Were you one of those people who were completely frustrated with not being able to control your characters in battle? A lot of people were, and they stopped playing. But some people, like me, found the real game. It’s all in the setup. In the pre-battle strategy, and in the maneuvering around the map. That’s where the real fun is, not in the battles. You can get really deep into that part and have a lot of fun, if you want.
Legends of Zork seems to work the same way. All battles and adventuring is automated. You just get a result screen. Then you decide whether you keep adventuring (which is a risk: if you die, you drop all the loot you’ve collected since last you banked it back at your base) or waste a turn heading back to camp to heal and put away what you’ve earned. At camp, you adjust your equipment and your “battle stances” to set up how your character is going to automatically act in battle. You buy more shit. Then you set your person to go and the adventuring happens again. Automatically.
It’s actually kind of like Progress Quest with strategy. You just watch your character increase in strength with little input, but then you have decisions to make. You have to balance your encumbrance, and make sure you can carry all your loot back to base. You have to balance your HP, and make sure you go back before you die, but that you don’t waste turns healing pointlessly when you didn’t need to. You have to learn what stances the enemies in an area use, so you can set yourself up with appropriate stances to counter them when you send your person in.

There are benefits to the game being built like this, too. A whole day of KoL or Twilight Heroes can actually take quite awhile to play out. There is no way a day’s worth of Zork turns will ever take me more than 15 minutes to play. Most days it’ll probably be less. That’s a benefit, to me anyway.
Also, it allows them to put in co-op, of a sort. You can take quests and join parties in this game. Once in a party, you set aside a certain number of adventures per day to spend on your party’s adventures. Then you all go out as a team and split the goods, slowly completing the quest. This is the kind of thing I had envisioned for my armchair browser RPG, and so I’m very interested in it. The fact that you can also auto-join quests to always be working on one, even without friends, is a bonus.

I originally didn’t mention their “premium” content, but I can’t really avoid it. KoL, Twilight Heroes, Forumwarz, etc… they want you to donate. Oh yes. But they don’t constantly bother you with it. Every time I am low on turns, it tells me I really have to spend some money to get more turns. Why do I want more turns? I have too many turns to play in these games as is. I want something that makes the turns I do play more fun, and there is nothing like that. I don’t appreciate it pushed in my face. I donate to these other games because I want to support the awesome people making them. This is a clear signal that I should never donate any money at all to Legends of Zork.

Anyway, that obvious problem aside, Legends of Zork isn’t quite the instant throw-away game it seems to be at first glance. It manages to be mechanically interesting, at least to me. I will keep playing for awhile longer. However, it really could use some text. Some Zorkness. With this exact same gameplay, some sort of AI that would generate text and descriptions for these battles, and a more respectful to the player plea for money, the game would be a very easy recommendation. As it is, it’s probably a game for people who enjoy planning more than actually acting. And for the stupidly curious. Like me.