State of My Games (2021/01/30)

 Finished Book of Demons (Diablo clone), review is on Steam. 

Decided to try Zombie Army Trilogy, which is a recast of Sniper Elite V2 into a survival shooter similar to Left 4 Dead series. It is extremely difficult.

Went back to Human Resource Machine a bit, and found I am NOT much in optimizing for speed. :D  I can solve the problems quite easily, but often doing more steps than the program liked. 

Played chapter 2 in Crying Suns, and it was interesting alright, as different starting ships require very different strategies. Using a scrapper ship means you need to spam the enemy with as many squadrons as you can, as your squadrons are your fodder. Wonder what new ship will I get for chapter 3? Probably the church ship. 

Found PuzzleTronics for like 50 cents. It is a "swap the tiles" type puzzle where you try to assemble an electronic circuit properly to get the LED(s) to light up. There are 50 puzzles, and each should only take a few seconds, but it's pretty good clean fun. I think I'm on 25. 

Speaking of cheap, I also got Plane Mechanic Simulator, will be trying that soon. 

I am not sure if I want to go back to Wasteland 2 (Director's Cut). It is basically Fallout 1 and 2, as it was made by the same guy. 

I sorta want to go back to Phantom Doctrine, and sort of don't. 

Did finish Zombie Army Trilogy, which is basically Sniper Elite V2 turned into a zombie survival shooter where you need to defeat you know who after he unleashed Plan Z (Zombies) upon the world, hoping for mutual destruction, as this clearly can't be victory... Let's just say, even with unlimited ammo cheat and unlimited health cheat, I STILL died about 7 times, mostly during the final fight. 

The Rally Game War: the untold battles for a driving sim genre's soul

If you are American, you probably don't know much about rallying, which basically has AWD compact vehicles doing F1 speeds on dirt tracks through a forest, desert, and so on. You may have seen rallycross, which is basically the short-track version of rallying, at X-Games. Here, we'll talk about the various games of this sub-genre of driving games, and a battle for its soul. 

The rally games generally fall into three categories: arcade, semi-pro, and pro, depending on the driving model fidelity. Sega Rally is arcade all the way, Dirt series is semi-pro, and Dirt Rally 2.0 is pro, for example. But even within these games, you have the ones that adhere to a license, such as those with WRC license, and those who don't. The licensing got more complicated when RallyCross became an official event and had to be licensed separately. 

The professional races for rallying are WRC (world rally championship), and ERC (European Rally Championship). WRC has licensed an official game since 2001. From 2001 to 2005, Evolution Studios (UK) had them for PS2 only, and later, PSP.  (Evolution was later merged into Codemasters)

The license ended in 2005 and was picked up again in 2009 by Black Bean Games (IT), who contracted Milestone (IT)  to make the actual game, and they were published between 2010 and 2013, named WRC: FIA World Rally Championship, then WRC2, WRC3, and WRC4. 

(Sidenote: Milestone was well known for driving games, having started as Graffiti doing Screamer, then shifted to Milestone, and did almost exclusively driving games with occasional exceptions. They also did Sebastien Loeb Rally EVO, various motorcycle games in both road and mud racing such as MotoGP, Ride series, and various motocross games, and Gravel, which is a multi-discipline off-road racing game. )

The license shifted to Bigben Interaction (FR) who contracted Kylotonn (FR) to make the official game, from 2015 until 2022, named WRC5 to WRC11. 

(Sidenote: Kylotonn was not particularly known for driving games before the WRC5 series, having only doing "Motorcycle Club" before. They also did V-Rally 4, which is not bad.)

There were, however, many rally sims before the official WRC games came along. One of the most recognized was Colin McRae Rally for the PS and PC from Codemasters, based on the 1998 WRC season, and even before that, Screamer Rally (by Milestone!) and Sega Rally (arcade). Colin McRae Rally (CMR) went on to CMR2, CMR3, CMR4, and CMR2005.  However, WRC decided to license their own game starting in 2001, and CMR has no WRC license since CMR4.  CMR2 was so good, it was re-released in 2013/2014 for iOS, Android, and even Windows and OS X. Codemasters then rebranded the series as Colin McRae: Dirt in 2007. 

Colin McRae, unfortunately, died in a helicopter crash in 2007, the day after Dirt was launched in Europe. Codemasters chose to stop advertising in Europe and removed his name from future releases, though Dirt 2 was already announced. Dirt 3 and on has no Colin McRae name attached. Codemasters went on to released Dirt: Showdown, Dirt 4, and Dirt 5, while spun off Dirt into Dirt Rally hardcore sim series, and later, Dirt Rally 2.0, which would have a Colin McRae tribute pack released. 

There are also various independent rally games that are still talked about today, like Richard Burns Rally (something STILL being modded today even though it was released in 2004), Xpand Rally, and many many more. 

Rallycross was a rather recent addition. While it was officially invented in 1967, FIA did not recognize it as an official motorsport category until 2014 with formal rules and regulations. And impressively, Codemaster's Dirt Rally (released in 2015) was licensed as an official FIA RX game. In 2020, during the COVID pandemic, Dirt Rally 2.0 was used as an official World RX eSport. 

Yes, that was somewhat long-winded, but we have to cover all the players. So basically, what we have here are two camps: Codemasters (Dirt Rally series), and Kylotonn (WRC series), and a bunch of smaller players over the years, trying to fight for the soul of the rally games in general. 

And it appears that Codemasters is winning, as it was announced in 2020, that Codemaster has gained the official use of WRC license... and will be publishing WRC licensed games... in 2023. (Interestingly, Take Two was about to buy Codemasters, then Electronic Arts showed up with a bigger wallet... at about 1.2 BILLION bucks)

I have played WRC4 through 7 and was not too impressed with the effort. The driving model just feels a bit off compared to Dirt Rally, much less Dirt Rally 2.0. And driving model didn't feel any difference between the different versions of the games. It seems WRC8 and WRC9 may have improved driving models though. On the other hand, Dirt 5 is back to fun, not simulation. 

So the battle continues. Will there be a surprise contender later? We shall see!  We've seen 

State of My Games (2021/01/24)

 What has happened in my gaming? 

Have to give up on Vector Thrust (again). I was reminded why I didn't play the game that long: it won't recognize my bone standard Xbox 360 controller (wireless). And playing on a keyboard is a no-no. 

I'm at the point in Warstone TD I'm trying to come up with Mithril, but you only get those as mission rewards, and I ran out of missions to play as I don't play online. So that's that.  There are DLCs, but I don't feel like playing those at the moment.  

Played Trailmakers to the end, got enough to make the spaceship and left the planet. Did record a video of me trying to get 2-3 more items mainly as a demo. It's on my Youtube channel already and should be on my Steam feed soon. I do recommend it. 

Tried Duskers. This is one of those games I probably will never finish due to it just being... extremely hard, but extremely atmospheric. Basically, you woke from your cryogenic sleep to find you alone in the universe... every space ship or space depot you find was derelict or abandoned, no one alive anywhere, just a bunch old patrol bots, turrets, and nasties like the swarm, leapers, or the slime. All you have are a couple drones: you can remote control them, or you can issue them simple orders via the remote interface. But video feed could fail. Their equipment can malfunction. And your drones cannot fight the enemy. Best you can do is to contain them by locking them in other rooms. But your motion sensor may give inconclusive results. Should you take the chance? Can you live with the consequences? What happened to the universe? Will you be able to find out before your equipment fail? Or will you find another ship before yours fail altogether? 

Tried Forged Battalion, which is like Command & Conquer albeit on steroids. The plot is your typical underdog vs oppressive regime. The graphics are nice, but not spectacular. The main trick here is the extensive tech tree and the ability to customize your units based on the tech tree you unlock. Unlock treads instead of wheels? Your chassis got heavier and you get more armor and thus more HP. Unlock heavy barrel? Now you can equip your units with armor piercing (AP) rounds. Unlock armor? Make armored versions of your units. Combine the upgrades, but keep in mind your economy is still fixed and these new units would be more expensive and take longer to produce. Otherwise, this is still the same: make more units and crush the enemy base real-time strategy (RTS) game where you need to build the right number of structures to power your factories, produce the units, and so on. The fixed scenarios have pretty big maps and each has a twist or two. On the third mission you're already fighting against TWO enemies AND protecting an installation. And there are like 15 missions. Due to differences in tech tree things be hectic. I am not sure I want to play all 15 missions, as I know what the game's about now. 

Trying RAM pressure, which is a game in the style of XCOM, but with a global server so it's closer in spirit to MMO's like The Division, but it's still turn-based tactical combat. Alien ship and fragments have landed on Earth, and you, as a mercenary unit working for (US, Russia, or China) will attempt to wipe out anyone at the landing site and secure it for your side. Other mercs are doing the same. So you may be against generic PvE (play vs environment) enemies, or you may be facing other players in a much tougher fight. You may even be fighting the aliens too. Use the money you earned to upgrade your equipment and HQ, assign skills and perks to your operators, hire new operators as necessary to round out your team, and advance the plot: are there survivors? Can first contact be made peacefully? Or was all this just a warning of things to come?  Early access game is free, but you can support the devs by "buying" additional equipment in the game with real money. 

Right now, my reaction is a bit mixed. I'll put it in a different post. 

Some thoughts about Tower Defense Game Genre, and how MarZ could have been better

I would not say I am a tower defense game guru, but I can hold my own generally unless the game expects me to somehow figure out a tactic no one ever hinted at me before. I can perform a deep dive when I had to, and I did so for the game Defense Grid. 

If I play in easy mode, I don't expect to breeze through EVERY mission, but I don't expect to repeat the third mission multiple times and getting no hint on why I am not succeeding. This points to a problem in game design... bad difficulty curve, lack of hint system, or expecting the player to read the minds of the mission makers. And as it turned out, it was one of two major flaws in MarZ. 

So I decided to look for some help. After watching someone who aced the mission (no casualties, no damage to lander), he did it by fighting one or two fronts at a time, NOT mining resources if not needed. In other words, he's very quick in selling off his towers (or even refinery) to concentrate on a different front. You need the 100% refund perk to make this work though. Normal sell price is a 20% loss, and you need to continue mining to make up for that.  

This is where I also noticed I did NOT pick my perks... or used my slo-mo, and pause button. But really, how was I supposed to notice? If they want us to pick a perk, they should just tell us. And also with the "sell everything and rebuild it in a different direction". This could have been easily fixed by adding a few bits of scripted dialog between the levels, like "they are coming from the northeast!" and "Commander, sell off the towers and rebuild them to the northeast!" and so on. 

You can even make it reactive. If you hadn't rebuild the towers, make the dialog go "Commander! Build the towers toward the northeast! Hurry! Sell off the existing towers if you have to! You have the perk! Use it!"  Though I guess the perk doesn't fit into "reality". 

Which brings us to the other problem of MarZ... lack of alternate strategies and/or tactics. 

Most tower defenses ended up being "puzzles" instead of wargames... Albeit with very flexible solutions. You can often achieve the same results with a variety of mix of towers, depending on your specific tower defense genre: fixed path, or grid-based. Fixed-path TD basically have you spam the path with as many towers as possible, or if you can't make the towers as powerful as possible. Grid-based TD lets you force the enemy into longer runs so they have to go past your towers multiple times and get hit multiple times. 

MarZ, by limiting the number of overall towers available (through the use of "hubs"), rather than let resources be the overall limit of towers, basically limited the number of overall solutions available, since there are only 2 upgrade levels (the third one, "specialization", what I call the "plus upgrade", adds very little and is only useful for uber swarms near endgame and only for certain towers, and since tower damage doesn't happen that often, having a repair drone just automates repairs, not enhance combat power). Given that there only are like 5 towers in the game, that's a bit limited. 

MG -- your regular gun tower, the upgrade adds more guns for heavier enemies. Plus upgrade turns the triple cannon into a Gatling gun for super zombie gibbing action. No minimum range. 

Rocket  -- explosive warhead, proximity kills, the upgrade adds additional shots before reload. Plus upgrade adds a mortar for light damage at long range. Has a minimum range. 

Laser -- long-range focus on a single enemy, the upgrade adds more power and range. Plus upgrade adds prism, basically cascades onto multiple enemies for slightly less damage, but makes more kills. Has a minimum range.  

Tesla -- slows enemies down, and pops tesla bubbles, the upgrade adds range and damage. Plus upgrade adds teleporter: sends one enemy back out of range. No minimum range.  

Drone -- sends drones out to engage any enemies, usually one at a time. Upgrade adds drones to the swarm, and each does more damage. Plus upgrade adds minefields. No minimum range. 

IMHO, the plus upgrades (or as the game designers call them, "specializations") are not all worth it. The only ones that are truly worth it, IMHO, would be laser, and drone. Tesla's upgrade, teleport, doesn't seem to work on bosses or minibosses, and you'd never want it to be this near anyway. Rocket's upgrade, mortar, doesn't fire often enough to be useful and is often landing in the wrong spot for faster enemies, IMHO. MG's minigun upgrade seems to be a bit too little too late. My credits and tower slot can be better used by one of the other weapons with more range or damage. 

When there are "obvious" choices in terms of tactics, tower mix, upgrades, and so on, the design is not as balanced as it could be. 

Let us compare it to two pretty classic tower defense games: FieldRunners, and Warstone TD. 

Fieldrunners is a grid-based TD with no tower limit. It only has four towers: gun, goo/ice, missile, tesla/laser. But there is no limit on the number of towers you can build, and it's a "build a rat maze" type tower defense game. So you can have a lot of different combinations and path designs. The extended mode adds two more tower types, but still the same game. 

Warstone TD has 5 unit types, But you are limited to how many units you can deploy limited to the number of "warstones" you own (and thus can plop down next to enemy's path). You only have 5 units types, but 2 of the units can have different upgrades: peasant > mercenary > knight / witcher > knight templar / inquisitor; and archer > amazon > shieldmaiden / assassin > valkyrie / ninja. So depending on how you upgrade your units, they can do very different things to enemy units. Thus, the tactics will be different depending on your upgrade path, even if you can only place so many units on screen. 

MarZ has limited number of towers, AND limited tower choices (with no specialization like Warstone), not path choices like Fieldrunners. So the tactics you can deploy is limited: just build up max towers you can build and max upgrade, and that's about it. No wonder it feels so... limiting. 

State of My Games (2021/1/18)

 "Finished" Warstone TD, Treasure Hunter Simulator (all achievements), and started on Crying Suns and finished Chapter 1. You can read about my overall reactions to THS in a previous blogpost. 

Right now I will go back and continue Crying Suns, as well as try some things in Warstone, basically trying the harder variations on the missions for Warstone TD, trying to get extra starts in the various battles, as it is an interesting tactical puzzle trying to fulfill the requirements, such as use only X unit types, or not use a certain spell. 

Since you *can* take some resources with you into each battle in Warstone (with the "backpack") you can sorta cheat by bringing some bonus damage items, extra spell scrolls, bigger mana reserve, more potions, and so on, but given you only have 6 slots, it is still a challenge. 

For example, one of the scenario requirements is "do not use Amazons". Since archers upgrade to Amazon, this basically asks you to stick with melee only, or archer only, no upgraded archers. And this can get dicey when enemies come in droves. But if you brought more than a few fireball spells... Hmmm...

Another was "let peasants make 75 kills", which basically requires you to put peasants, the weakest melee unit, all over the place, as there was only like 100 enemies total, and do NOT put up any archers, only use your spells to deal with the flyers. 

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Next is probably Detective Di, maybe go back and try Vector Thrust, do a couple more puzzles in Molek Syntez, or Human Resource Machine. 

Or I can start a new game in Duskers or Aven Colony. 

The Failure of "Treasure Hunter Simulator": how it trivializes archaeology and turned it into an unbalanced, buggy, hiking and metal detecting game

Treasure Hunter Simulator (THS) is supposed to be an archaeology game: go to different maps and try to locate historically significant artifacts. In reality, the gameplay was a mess, logically it made no sense, and programmatically it's a buggy mess. It was a failure in every sense of the word. The only good points are it has a relaxing pace, and when you turn up the graphics, the Unreal Engine makes the levels quite pretty. 

You can read my full review on Steam here. But we're here to talk about the failures. 

Gameplay Problems

THS can be accurately retitled as "hiking and metal detecting simulator", since all you do, except for the few "side jobs", is to hiking around the map, and use metal detectors all over the place, then dig holes all over the place finding the "treasures", which often turned out to be junk, like old nails, soda can tabs, etc. Only occasionally you will find something worth a little more. An old sawblade may be worth $10. A good condition Medieval helmet may be worth 350. But usually you find lame stuff like old medallions, old doorstop, old buttons that may be worth $5 on a good day. 

You will need TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS to afford the best metal detectors, which doesn't quite work the way you expect them to. You'd think detecting large objects is easier, but not in this game. Detecting large objects is only reserved for upgraded detectors. Your default model can only detect shallow and SMALL objects. Huh? 

Frankly, with the amount of random junk lying about, there really is no sense of discovery, but drudge work, as you "grind" your way through more junk to find the few treasures in order to afford the better stuff. Having an artificial "delay" for "identification" when it's an object you've seen only the 100th time does not help with the immersion at all. And since most of the time you are looking DOWN at the ground to get the detection right, the beautiful vista and level design are wasted, except for the few who appreciate the graphical touches and take screenshots. 

It also really makes no sense for some maps to charge an entrance fee... to a supposed archaeologist! 

The job pays are also absurdly low. For example, one of the jobs on the Syrian Temple map, pays $380. However, the entrance fee to the map is $300!  So your net pay is $80! And since they only give you one job at a time, you can't even queue them together, and thus save on the entrance fee! They had to be paid each and every time! 

State of My Games: January 13th, 2021

Finished MarZ, as mentioned in a previous post. 

Tried Greed Corp, a turn-based tactical combat game, decided while interesting, it didn't quite grab me. 

Played 80 hours on StarCralwers, leveled all 8 classes to level 30 (level cap) (or very close to it) and did one ending. Did not feel like playing New Game Plus, which is MOTS. So that's that. 

Finished Radio Commander, which has you giving orders to your units on a battlefield, but since all you have is a radio, fog of war is extremely heavy and thus, tension is extremely high. But there are only 9 missions plus quick battles. On the other hand, the game has two more things going for it... relatively low price, and ability to give commands via microphone and voice recognition for full immersion. 

Also finished Unheard, turns out I had ONE case left, and that was a bit of fun. Voice acting was a bit over-the-top, but it's an intriguing game where you try to piece together the puzzle based on full-audio surveillance of every room on the premises. There is a DLC, but I'm not sure I want to play it. :D

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Will probably move onto Detective Di, Warstone TD, Crying Suns

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Other games I've tried? Hmmm... 

Within the Warhammer 40K series, I've tried: 

Deathwatch -- a squad of five space marines against a whole Tyranid invasion. Think XCOM-lite, and mobile port... and boring grind

Kill Team -- action game where you take TWO space marines through an Ork invasion

Mechanicus -- turn-based tactical combat where you are taking controls of the Adeptus Mechanicus against a planet full of Necrons, and figure out how to upgrade your tech-priests so they survive the fights. And you're fighting against a timer. If the Necrons achieve full awakening, you won't be able to stop them. 

Space Marine -- take control of Captain Titus, Ultramarines chapter, and a seasoned veteran. You're sent to stop the Ork invasion, but you end up fighting against a lot more other enemies of the Imperium as well in order to secure the Imperial Forge World. A third-person shooter with melee weapons. 

Space Wolf --the Space Wolf chapter ship was ambushed by the Chaos Marines of the Word Bearers and crashed on the world of Kanak, a feral world full of barbarians, vile creatures, and chaos marines. You will emerge victorious, by conducting turn-based card-based combat against all foes, obtaining more cards, merging them for upgrades, and fight off all comers. Not bad, as they are still giving free loot as promo codes every week.  And there are PvP multiplayer as well. DLCs add additional shorter campaigns. 

Battlefleet Gothic Armada -- fleet combat in Warhammer 40K, take your fleet against the chaos forces.

I also have

Vermintide (regular Warhammer, not 40K) -- a multiplayer PvE shooter where you need to go, with your friends, as one of the many classes available, to fight the "end times" horde of vermins. 

Warhammer Quest -- choose your own adventure with die-roll combat

These I'm not too keen on. Fantasy doesn't really grip me.