VG Reviews and More — 2014/03/16
Video game reviews for The Media Outsiders
Deals of the Week
Like every week, I like to dig around and find whatever is the most exciting, most compelling, and overall best bangs for your buck. Because nothing says lovin’ like an ongoing ability to get huge piles of games for surprisingly small costs. And this week has a goodly pile of options.
Humble Mobile Bundle 4
Like most weeks, the Humble Bundle guys have a number of things going on, but the primary bundle this week is not for the PC but instead for Android mobile devices. The Humble Mobile Bundle 4 is actually pretty good this week. One of these games actually have PC versions which is not included with the bundle, unfortunately — because it’s awesome. One of these games is guaranteed to be to anger inducing for me to play but for everyone else will be entirely wonderful. One of these games I actually already own on the OUYA and have enjoyed every minute of it.
Notable games:
- Catan — yes, a mobile version. Guaranteed to have the number seven come up far more time statistically than it ever should be possible to do if I’m playing, resulting in the Robber living in my personal space. For the rest of you, this ought to be awesome.
- Vector — a game in the style of Cannonbault in which the goal is to run from the left side of the screen to the right as fast as you can across multiple obstacles while being chased by guys with tasers. Surprisingly more beautiful than it sounds because the animations are extremely high frame rate and the responsiveness is quite good.
- Zombie Gunship — you’re in the gunnery chair of an AC-130 gunship, looking down the display and grainy black and white imagery of zombies overrunning a city. Your job: blow the shit out of them. Sometimes you protect people. If any game deserved a release on the PC, this one does because due to the aesthetic it absolutely captures the right mood and tone at every point.
- Breach & Clear — turn-based, top-down squad level strategy; you have a small group of men with a large collection of weapons and you need to execute on missions to breach and clear areas full of terrorists and criminals. This is probably the best game in the collection (possibly rivaled by Zombie Gunship). It also has a PC version if you don’t want to play it on mobile which is also compelling.
You’ve got a day left on this one before it disappears and the next Humble Bundle sale replaces it. You can have everything in the bundle for $3.83 as of this posting. For nine mobile games, that’s actually pretty good.
Humble Weekly Sale
Every week the Humble guys put together some additional short-term sales, generally from a single publisher, to go along with the main bundle. There’s three days left on this one and the publisher is one that everybody is familiar with: Sega. Sega has put out a ton of games for the PC over the years and some of them have even been good.
What’s good in this pile?
- Alpha Protocol — the critical reception that AP got was less than stellar, but I always felt that was a bit undeserved. While the gunplay in AP was never going to compete with your Call of Duty, what AP really is goes a different direction: it’s a role-playing game that just happens to be a first/third person shooter with a good chunk of stealth gameplay thrown in, just for fun. A lot of RPGs would do well to learn the lesson presented here of making decisions actually make a difference to the way stories evolve and turn out. Considering this is one of the games you get for even the basic, lowest contribution (under $1 if you are really cheap), you could do far worse.
- Company of Heroes — the original, the one and only, and odds are good that you probably already have this game. During that period when real-time strategy World War II simulators were all the rage, Company of Heroes stood out from the crowd thanks to developer Runic’s squad focus and frankly beautiful visuals. Also the fact that they were not worried at all about making war look too brutal. This game is also in the basic tier of the bundle, so there’s no reason that if you don’t have it already, you shouldn’t.
- Binary Domain — a squad-based first-person shooter, with a definite focus on telling a very specific and apparently quite well worked out story. This is probably something you should look at, simply because it’s not something that you see done at all, much less well. Also, it’s really pretty.
- 10 Classic Sega Genesis Games — I don’t think you need me to tell you anything except what sort of things are in here: Altered Beast, Crack down, Golden Axe 1-3, Shinobi 3… Look, if these games mean nothing to you, if you’ve never played them in the arcade or on the Sega Genesis itself, I truly feel for you. Altered Beast and Golden Axe alone should compel you to drop $6 on this bundle.
Ignore the fact that for $15 you can unlock Total War: Shogun 2 — I don’t care, you don’t care, nobody cares. $15 is simply too much for that. But $6 for everything else sometime in the next three days? That you should be aware of. That you should be interested in.
Steam
Not wanting to get left out, Steam has decided that they too need to need to promote one of their publishers. Their choice?
Rockstar Games.
Now, this one is coming to an end relatively quickly — 18 hours from posting this. That doesn’t give you much time to get in on the crazy — and I do mean absolutely crazy — sales going on all the Rockstar Games products.
Grand Theft Auto, Three, Four, Vice City, San Andreas, and Episodes From Liberty City? Get them all for 80% off at $10.
You want all of Max Payne? The whole series, 82% off, $9.89.
You like LA Noire? 75% off at $7.49.
You miss the joy and pleasure of chasing around a convicted criminal as a convicted criminal, carrying off the messiest, most ugly, most brutal murders of other convicted criminals who are in your way, all while another crazy convicted criminal is filming and live streaming the whole thing? And by that what I mean is, “do you miss playing Manhunt?” Well, you can again for 67% off, costing you a fat $3.29.
Pretty intense.
Single Games
Not everything lives in a bundle, which is probably for the best. Sometimes individual games get some really impressive sales that you should probably be made aware of and dragged into. This week is no exception. We have four special deals on games which might be unexpected. Some of them have had mixed receptions, but that’s okay. That’s absolutely all right.
That’s why there are sales.
Takedown: Red Saber
Serellan Games originally brought this game through Kickstarter, and several people that I know got involved early on including myself. At its early release, many people were — how shall I put this gently? — severely disappointed. I won’t say it was a buggy mess, but a lot of people did. What was supposed to be an incredible entry in the FPS genre from seasoned game professionals got seen as a bit of a piece of crap and people felt extremely ripped off.
I didn’t. I had no expectation that at release Takedown: Red Sabre was going to be otherwise. There was simply too much hype, expectations were over the top and unrealistic. I knew that if I waited just a little while, the development studio had a sufficient devotion and dedication to the game itself that refinement was inevitable. And I was right. I was absolutely correct, as over the last six months Serellan has really put their backs into cleaning up bugs, adding maps, adding weapons, and generally just making the game better.
So when I say that it is perfectly reasonable to buy Takedown: Red Sabre at 90% off — that is, $1.49 for a single copy or $4.49 for a four pack, and that you will have fun with it most especially at that price, you should listen to me. Because you will. And you should.
Chroma Squad
Who never wanted to run their own sentai TV show? Everyone has. Everyone always wanted to turn their hand to trying to run the Power Rangers, everyone thought that they could make a better show, with more exciting props, more crazy, over-the-top creatures… More of everything!
In Chroma Squad, you can.
This is another one of those games that road on the early wave of Kickstarter excitement and, while it is not yet out, the producers are being extremely verbal and extremely upfront about how development is going which is extremely comforting.
This one doesn’t actually need me to talk about it in any great depth. The hybrid of management sim, giant monsters, cardboard props, and trying to balance it all while seeking an audience — that sells itself. Check out the trailer video and check out the fact that you can actually go ahead, now that the Kickstarter is done, and preorder the game, while realizing exactly how unusual that is.
Dehumanize Your Friends!
Some people may never have heard of the card game Cards Against Humanity.
Those people are sad and pathetic shadows of what human potentiality truly embraces. They are broken fragments of what could be a much greater whole, weakened by their lack of understanding of the world around them. They do not have personal understanding of that which trumps all other things, the one item which is the answer to all questions:
A bigger, blacker dick.
Alternately, it could be jerking off into a pool of orphans’ tears. Or it might be Ronald Reagan. All of these things could be directly competing to be the answer to the ultimate question.
You see, CAH is a game very much like Apples to Apples. It contains two decks of cards, one of which are primers, generally consisting of questions or statements with blanks in them, and another deck of cards which consists solely of horrible, twisted, terrible things which, when the Card Czar has placed and asked their question, you must choose from in your hand, one of which to play and be judged. The Card Czar then chooses which of the played cards is the best answer in their opinion, that player earns a point, and play proceeds.
This is a game about being as horrible as possible and knowing how horrible your friends are. It is, in a word, fantastic.
Some people play CAH in person. At a convention, it’s definitely one of the most exciting late-night card games that you’re going to find. It ranks right up there with Let’s Kill in terms of games that I truly love playing at 3 AM after having a couple of drinks.
Some people play Hangouts Against Humanity, a version of the game which is been digitized and moved into Google Hangouts and turned into the ultimate nonlocal party game. This, too, is awesome at 3 AM after having a couple drinks — but it’s more awesome after someone else’s at a couple of drinks.
Dehumanize Your Friends takes is almost full circle back to the living room. Everyone runs the client application on their Android device, which acts as their hand of cards and their general interface. But the party interface is up on the big screen TV where your Chromecast is connected. That’s right, this is a game devoted and dedicated to playing in a group in the same room using the Chromecast as the central point of display. Just like playing HAH, except everyone is in the same room and no one has to clean up the cards afterwards.
I love my Chromecast. It is more than paid for itself over the months since I purchased it. DYF is just going to make it that much better.
(DYF used to be called Cards Against Civility before the CAH license holders decided to pretend to be less cool than they presented themselves as over the years and gave the creator some static. It’s still the same game, it’s still hideously offensive, and it’s still awesome.)
5150: New Beginnings — Urban Renewal and 5150: New Hope City PI
I’m a gamer. Pretty much unrepentantly. I’ve written books which have been published by RPG companies. I’ve produced videos of groups playing role-playing games in public spaces (some of which you could’ve probably been in). I’ve run games at conventions. Walls of my bedroom are literally covered with role-playing games (on shelves, you freaks).
When I say “I am a gamer,” that’s not so much an admission as it is a warning.
My taste in tabletop role-playing games has shifted over the years. Like everyone, I started out early with extremely mechanical systems which I felt were more reflective of the way I wanted to see my virtual worlds run. Orderly. Structured. Directed from above. Luckily, I moved out of that phase relatively quickly and started looking for new, more exciting things in my field of entertainment. The last decade has been excellent for that, with the rise of GM-less play and the development of low mechanical complexity systems. These are all excellent things.
Side-by-side with that, however, my interest in tabletop wargaming has also evolved. And lucky for me, so has the medium. There has arisen a type of tabletop wargaming which is far less focused on “having the right mini,” or “having just the right figure with exactly the right weapon to match up with exactly the right point value in your exactly right army.” (I’m looking at you, Warhammer 40k.) Instead, there’s an increasing focus on play with what you have, play with the terrain you have, just play the game.
Nowhere has that aesthetic been more exemplified than in Two-Hour Wargames and all of their lines of tabletop wargaming systems. In fact, they take it one step further — not only do you not need a GM to play tabletop wargames in the THW systems, you don’t even need someone to play against. That’s right, you can play same side, single player wargames produced by THW.
That’s pretty exciting stuff. But they’re not content with just doing that.
5150 is their umbrella “science fiction” line, including Star Army (ground-based combat running up to a Company’s worth of figures), Battalion Commander (commanding up to, unsurprisingly, a Battalion’s worth of figures), Star Navy (large fleets of capital ships in space), Fighter Command (focusing more on flights of fighters at much smaller scales), and the game that fits into a very strange niche, New Beginnings — which is really just individual characters at what is effectively an RPG scale in the 5150 setting. New Hope City PI is the first supplement for the latest (and presumably last) edition of New Beginnings.
Amazingly, THW maintains the single-player option in New Beginnings. There aren’t a lot of RPGs that you can actually say you can play a meaningful game or series of games alone, and yet… That’s exactly what you find here.
This literally just came out yesterday and I haven’t had the time to sit down and really dig into it. But I’m looking forward to the experience and as things come out, I promise I’ll make sure that to talk about them either on TMO or in my own gaming space, Operation BSU.
And that’s it for us, tonight. You can find full reviews and quite a bit more nattering, as always, over on The Media Outsiders, broadcast live at 10pm Eastern, and streamable both on TalkShoe itself and recorded and listenable both on the host site and the blog along with all the notes and chat logs from the live showing.
See you next week. Taste the flaccid rainbow.
