New Octodad trailer!

Say it with me: Finally, a reason to use this picture!

I just found out they're gonna make a new Octodad!



It's great news. The first Octodad was lovely. It wasn't really a "big" game, I suppose. It was more like a proof-of-concept. I seem to recall the whole thing was a student project to begin with. But still, the idea was quite novel (like QWOP, but with an octopus!), and the setting... How can you not adore a game about being a "loving father, secret octopus"?

Castle Story video with NEW GAMEPLAY

0:28 WOODEN WALLS CONFIRMED
0:28 WOODEN WALLS CONFIRMED
0:28 WOODEN WALLS CONFIRMED
0:28 WOODEN WALLS CONFIRMED
0:28 WOODEN WALLS CONFIRMED
0:28 WOODEN WALLS CONFIRMED
0:28 WOODEN WALLS CONFIRMED

Review: Boss S01

It seems I tend to write mostly about negatives in this blog, and if I do write about the positives of a thing it's usually because they inspired me to some idea which I thought was interesting. I'm actually quite okay with this, except...

Neither of this applies to Boss. There aren't any significant flaws that I feel are worth complaining about (shock!). While I intensely enjoyed the experience of watching Season 1, and can't wait for the next season, I find myself at a bit of a loss at describing exactly what is so great about it. But it is great. The greatness is not underrated- currently the Metacritic score is 78, and the user score is 7.7. I would have been happier with something like 85 or 90, but it's not a huge deal. I started this blog in the first place because I thought I had something to say that wasn't really said- and while I didn't really make a detailed survey of Boss's reviews, from what I've seen, most of what I thought should be said, was, and is said.

I suppose I liked the characters, even though they are all corrupt, vile scum. It was interesting how the justification for their evil-ness was not ham-fistedly shoved in my face, nor was it ignored. I don't know a damn thing about what politicians are really like, granted, but they seemed real enough. The correspondence to reality aside, I was not irritated by any nagging "But why does he simply not do that!?" type questions.

It's a bit weird, really. Everyone in this show is a despicable, contemptible asshole. I think some were meant to be "sympathetic"- in that they aren't explicitly and deliberately conniving jerks who rub their hands wıth glee in anticipation of their future exploits as jerks. I still hated those "not-deliberate-jerks"; perhaps in part because they were the good guys but they didn't win, and I didn't like that, admittedly. But even so, they were also cowards, or weak-willed, or stupid, or delusional. While unlike the "villains" of the show I was somewhat sorry to see them get screwed, they always "brought it upon themselves" in a sense. The funny thing is, sometimes they only brought things upon themselves because they really had no choice, or they were simply unaware of certain crucial facts which changed everything... Yeah, I liked the story, too. I guess it's sort of the thing that TvTropes would call a Thirty Xanatos Pileup- everyone is constantly scheming and the schemes inevitably overlap and collide.

It's not just that everyone is a chessmaster character, though. That's another thing I liked- they're just reasonably intelligent people as you would expect from those in their station, and they are understandably doing the best they can to look after themselves. It all rather makes sense.

The story, similarly, is enjoyable to follow as it constantly casts characters in very different lights from episode to episode. The finale's "big reveal", in particular, was incredible to watch.

I liked the stylistic aspects of it, too. For one, the dialogue was lovely. It was perhaps somewhat fantastical compared to what such people would sound like in real life, but who cares? It was wordy, it was fancy, it was elegantly convoluted, it was half-poetry, especially during the monologues, and I loved every bit of it. It was interesting, unique and fresh. I didn't feel like I was being fed lines from some big book of stock TV-series lines. They weren't probably weren't very original when judged by actual literature standards, but for a modern, mainstream TV-series? The dialogue in Boss blew me away.

The music was also perfect. For others it may have been just good, perhaps, but when I heard Erik Satie playing not once, not twice, but three times, I was already in love with the show as far as the music is concerned. There were plenty of slow, tense scenes with characters sitting in silence, and the minimalist piano score worked great for me in those.

Boss is basically a story about a corrupt (he's not exactly corrupt in the sense of being a cartoon kleptomaniac embezzling politician- but just like everyone else, he's not above ignoring ethics when his career is at stake, and it often is) Chicago mayor (played by Frasier!) trying to hold on to his power. It's a series where half the characters are magnificent bastards, and the other half, just bastards. You hate all of them, but there's this morbid fascination with which one will screw over which one next, and how they will all get out of the most recent trainwreck.

Yes, thematically, it's about corruption, unrestrained ambition driving underhanded measures, but also grim determination. "You survive one day at a time." the characters keep reiterating, and it actually works. It's very interesting to watch it work, too. Not just because the plot is interesting, and the characters are interesting, but because the whole spectacle is so polished and sleek in its rendering.

Score: 5/5

Review: Fort Zombie - The awesome game that never was

How does one start a review which doesn't primarily consist of whining like a spoiled brat? Oh, lovely. I'm already doing one of my least favorite vidya reviewer cliches and being meta in my introduction... Ok, let's try this again.

Fort Zombie is an RPG. It goes like so: Zombies have happened. They have taken over your small town of Piety, Indiana. They fucked it up good. You find yourself in the middle of all the chaos and decide to take over a building for use as your stronghold, scavenge supplies and gather survivors, and make a last stand against the zeds.

It's 3rd person. There's skills that increase as you use them. You need a search skill to discover supplies, you can pick locks. Each weapon also has its own skill: Suppose you have an M16, your final skill is determined by your "M16 skill" (starts at 0 and increases as you use the M16) + your assault rifle skill. This is a great idea- it's not too complicated, it's not too simple, and since weapons are scarce and you don't often have much freedom deciding who gets what gun, this leads to people developing favorite weapons that they are very good with. You often get situations where you find, say, a shotgun better than the one you have, but you are so used to the current one, that sticking with the old one is a better idea. This does wonders for naturally making your team organic and differentiated.

You embark on expeditions to the town everyday, the town layout is procedurally generated. You can find food, medicine, supplies (to build base defenses), fuel (to power base defenses) and survivors. The survivors will not want to join up with you if you don't have good social skills, or if your entourage has high attrition rates. Sometimes you can find random quest NPCs.

There are many types of zombies. Now, I don't really have a zombie fetish like a certain group of people out there. I think the idea of a zombie apocalypse is stupid for many reasons, which were quite well described by Yahtzee in his Dead Island review already. Zombies are stupid, the transparent escapist power fantasy aspect of it stupid, and they don't really make for particularly interesting stories. I don't hate them, though. I think zombies are a great game concept- they're a slow, lumbering, dumb cannon fodder which is only threatening through sheer numerical force. They are a perfect antagonist whenever gameplay relies on hordes or waves of enemies: They are capable of making decisions, but not too smart, they are numerous but not fast, they are durable but not powerful. They have no self preservation instinct and no apparent leadership. But best of all, they have all these qualities without seeming dumb and illogical like an army of slow zerg, or a horde of human soldiers running to their death would be.

Fort Zombie uses zombies very well. The zombies in this game are supposed to go on doing whatever it was they used to commonly do in their former life: You get jogger zombies running after you, footballer zombies tackling you, cop zombies shooting you. It makes for a nice variety of enemies. Their AI also has the right idea: They'll chase you, and try to overcome obstacles, but break line of sight and they forget about you instantly, like the brainless idiots that zombies should be.

Also, not all missions this game generates are winnable, many are not worth your time and ammo. You often encounter powerful groups of zombies that you cannot beat. The game makes little effort to scale the difficulty- you have to choose your battles and know your limits, and know when a fight is winnable but still a waste of time. It's done very well and makes for a very fun, strategically complex game, especially for someone sick of the mainstream's dire fear of ever having the player lose or walk away from a fight.

Altogether, Fort Zombie is a wonderful little game. It's as if someone took one of the "awesome video game idea"s that everyone inevitably comes up with thinking about zombies, and made it real. It does everything right. It's gritty, it's harsh, it has lots of detail in places you want and no pointless micromanaging of things which don't matter. It's pretty much perfect... Pretty much.

You see, there's one unfortunate flaw: The game is unplayable. It's broken. It was never finished. The whole thing came out of Kerberos Productions's efforts to create an engine for their party-based space game Northstar, when they realized the engine they had could be quickly turned into a nice zombie game. The graphics are like those of a 2001 game, which isn't a big deal by itself, if only the game didn't also run like an 2001 game on 1999 hardware (and the game is quite recent, being released in 2009). There is a mod that removes physics, which supposedly speeds up thing quite a bit (I haven't tried it).

It also crashes, often and unexpectedly. To be sure, the autosave isn't awful, so you don't lose that much progress, but the long loading times make the each crash quite painful.

Strangely enough, there's also no music, except for the menu. And, while the silence does add to the atmosphere a lot of the time, there were certainly points when I felt like some music would have made the game seem less sterile.

So, it's a bit of a predicament, really. A great game, but I just wasn't able to play it. The controls are clumsy, the follower AI gets stuck and lost easily, the load times are too long, it crashes too much and the graphics performance is really sub-par. If only development on this continued...

If you are feeling brave enough to give this a try, you will need the wiki, because vital info is missing from tooltips. If you feel like you can't handle it, I would definitely recommend watching a Let's Play series. Even though the game is difficult to play in its current state, the kind of game that it was supposed to be is quite unique. There are probably others out there which are quite decent, but I was watching Revocane's videos. Incidentally, he rambles and mumbles like a paranoid schizophrenic, quite aptly given the game and character he is playing. Anyhow, good luck, and enjoy!

Score: 4/5

Bias: Would be 3 if this wasn't a Paradox game (MARRY ME PARADOX).

Goblin Camp

So, I saw this video:


And now I must play this. What can I say? It's dorfort with an interface. I'm a sucker for dorfort with interface. I hope there's a tileset out there... Not much of an ASCII fan, really.

If anyone has ideas/suggestion/stuff they want me to check out, feel free to let me know.

Castle Story, or, oh shit did these guys make a Dwarf Fortress with actual graphics!?

You have little guys. In a 3D world of floating islands. Which you can make them dig. And tell them to build castles. They fill up stockpiles with dug up earth and when a block is full it becomes bricks and you can use the bricks to build walls but you must build stairs or they won't be able to climb and also there's explosions and physics and...

Oh my god, I sound like a retarded child. But god fucking dammit, just try watching this without ejaculating forcefully:


It's called Castle Story.

That's the good news. Bad news is, you can't download Castle Story yet. They don't seem keen on releasing a quick alpha. It's a two-man team so maybe with enough demand they will... That would be so glorious! But anyway, their expressed attitude seems to be "we want to make a great game and not release before it's fun" with the implication that bugs and incomplete features != fun. Oh well.

I hope they don't repeat the failures of Minecraft with the same cavalier attitude to discarding planned features. Coming with a proper slicing function to see inside tunnels properly will make loads of difference, as will proper fluids (like dorfort did, cellular automata or bust baby) and sufficiently detailed production chains.

I'm also not asking for DF-level creature diversity, but pulling a Notch and adding like 5 enemies would be... Oh who am I kidding, I would still derive hours of orgasmic pleasure out of it, especially if they were actually unique mechanics-wise like Minecraft's enemies. But still, a few dozens of enemies, maybe some harpies and dragons and burrowing worms... Oh god, I'm getting hard just thinking about it.

Goddammit Sauropod! Release a beta already! I will hunt you down and whip you until you have a playable build!