Video Game Reviews and More — 2014/03/23
Video game reviews and more for The Media Outsiders
Once again we’re bringing you the best sales and deals of the videogame industry this week — and possibly things from outside the industry entirely.
Just not this week.
As always, you can follow the links given in this article to all of the sites where the sales are occurring and I do my best to make sure that videos, trailers, and informational content is linked as well, because nothing beats an educated consumer when it comes to deciding where you should put your hard-earned money. You not only spent all that time making a few dollars, you’ll be spending many, many hours playing the games that I suggest, so it’s in my best interest and your best interest to find the best places to put your cash.
IndieGala
IndieGala is running a particularly excellent bundle this week, their Supreme Bundle. As always with IndieGala, part of the money that you give goes to the developers and the rest goes to whatever the chosen charities of the week are. This week those charities are:
- Ablegamers
- Gala Project X
Since Ablegamers is a charity near and dear to my heart, you get the big Squid nod on this one. And that’s before we even get to the games that are in the bundle.
Supreme Commander
If you were a big RTS fan at the beginning of last decade, one of your favorite games was very likely to be Total Annihilation, a seminal piece of work by a designer named Chris Taylor. It brought huge scale, large swarms of fighting vehicles, and a very specific aesthetic to a field which badly needed it at the time.
Supreme Commander came out in 2007 and was Chris Taylor’s spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. Along with the focus on extremely large conflicts that TA possessed, Supreme Commander brought updated graphics, a cleaned up interface, and all new “experimental units,” late game constructs that were unique to each of the factions and generally fairly insane in design.
Giant mecha-spiders. Enormous bipedal war robots. Submersible aircraft carriers. Enormous flying saucers that were large enough to cover a quarter of the screen.
Crazy shit.
Together with a fairly decent single player campaign and an interesting plot with lots of creative premises, Supreme Commander stomped onto the field — commandingly.
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
No good game can survive long without a sequel which gets mixed reviews. So it was with SC. Besides, the story wasn’t done.
In November of 2007, we got that sequel. Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance added an entire faction to the game, the Seraphim, a pile of new units to the already extant three factions, new maps, and actual improvements to the UI. That’s right, Forged Alliance actually made the game better, bucking the trend in sequels. Not only that, but it was an actual “standalone expansion,” which meant that you didn't have to own Supreme Commander to play it — but it helped. (Without SC, all you can play was the Seraphim, which weren't bad but it actually made a pretty good selling point for the original when FA was released.)
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance was one of those most shocking of games — a good expansion. Gameplay stayed as wide reaching and insane as the original SC, the additional experimental units were just as nuts and fun to play with, and the competitive scene was — and is — both fairly aggressive and fairly helpful.
The presence of Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance in the Supreme Bundle are really good enough reasons to drop $6.89 (as of this posting) on the thing.
But there’s one more game worth talking about in here:
Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising
True old-school gamers will look at Hostile Waters and say, “hey, this looks surprisingly familiar.” A game where you command a aircraft carrier like battleship, going from island to island, taking them over and making them defense/mining/support-flavored, the ability to create air and land forces on your carrier and dispatch them remotely to destroy enemy positions, the ability to jump into any of those units and control them directly… You might get the feeling that this 2001 release was done sometime before.
And you would be correct.
In Carrier Command. In 1988.
That’s not to say that HW is not a good game — quite the opposite. The combination of the command at a strategic level of a massive carrier equipped with its own guns, combined with the ability to command autonomous units which can be taken over for more combat efficiency up against an asymmetrical threat (the inevitable enemy carrier with similar but not exact abilities to your own has a surprising amount of differentiation from you), come together to make a game which is disgustingly compelling. It’s a game you’ll come back to over and over again trying to do better, trying to be more effective, trying to get further in the game and to master the controls and conquer ever more quickly.
It’s a really good game, not only for its time a but for all time.
However, and this is the kind of caveat that comes with all of these indie bundles, the graphics of what was a AAA title at the time are starting to look a little dated. While that means that you will be able to play this game on any Windows-running PC that you might own — and that’s a big plus considering the fact that a lot of AAA titles of today are still demanding that we continuously upgrade — you can pretty easily tell the difference.
If that matters to you. If the fact that you are getting this game for a disgustingly small amount of money is insufficient for your needs — I think I can hook you up.
Carrier Command: Gaea Mission.
Gaea Mission was released in 2012, and you might notice that it’s made by Bohemia Interactive, the company somewhat better-known for making the ArmA series of first-person military shooters. You will also note that the graphics are kind of disgustingly pretty in a way that a lot of games don’t manage. What you don’t probably notice is that it is a loving and faithful re-creation of the original Carrier Command from 1988, even more so than Hostile Waters.
There are two other things that you will probably notice:
- Carrier Command: Gaea Mission is not in the Supreme Bundle.
- Carrier Command: Gaea Mission is available on Steam for $32.99.
That’s right, a game released in 2012 — two years ago — is still priced on Steam for over $20. That is almost unheard of, and probably suggests that it’s about time that GM went on sale either as part of a bundle (a Bohemia Interactive bundle would be awesome, though in the back of my mind I vaguely recall one that happened in the last year), or simply a straight up price-cut.
Again, not in the bundle, but something you probably ought to know about.
Ultimately, the Supreme Bundle has more than enough to be worth the seven dollars that they’re asking in the next week, if you are interested in really good real-time strategy games at all. The Supreme Commander series is still one of the best real-time strategy implementations available for any platform, and may eventually be joined by its spiritual successor — just as SC joined Total Annihilation which succeeded it — Planetary Annihilation. But we’ll talk more about that later.
Humble Weekly Sale
The IndieGala guys are not the only ones who love to give to charity. The Humble Bundle guys have been into that since the beginning. This week is no exception. Child’s Play and the EFF are this week’s recipients of the Humble Bundle charity donations. Unusually, this week you can pretty much ignore the basic bundle for having anything particularly interesting. Instead, we’re going to look over at the weekly sale (which has roughly 3 days left to go) which, as always, is themed.
This week: rhythm games.
I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for rhythm games, generally because I suck at them. I’m not going to lie, I suck it pretty much anything that requires that I have a sense of rhythm. However, I love games that take music that I already own and turn them into part of the game; for a while, that was a big deal and the Humble Weekly Sale appears to have taken that as one of the key drives for choosing games this week.
Which means I already have the good games in this bundle, but you may not.
Symphony
Vertical scrolling shoot ‘em ups. The genre so frequently referred to in the annals of videogame history that we even have a contracted word for it: shmups. What would you do if you could take a shmup, feed in your favorite song, and get what is essentially that music driving both waves of attackers coming in from either side and your weaponry?
You’d have Symphony.
You already know if you like shmups. You don’t need me to tell you. If you love Galaga, you already know it. If you love Galaga, you will love Symphony because it gives you an excuse to listen to all that awesome 80s hair metal that you use to listen to in the arcade while blasting lots of bugs. And that’s all you really need.
Oh, yes, your ship can be upgraded with all sorts of music-based weapons that fire and pulse in time with music and the whole thing is wrapped in visuals so flashy and bright that if you’re prone to seizures you should probably avoid this game.
Yeah. You’re already in.
Audiosurf
What Symphony did for shmups, Audiosurf did for driving games.
I know, I know — you're a little confused. How can you link rhythm games, driving games, and your own music to get a game which is exciting, compelling, and interesting? Clearly, you need to play Audiosurf.
Imagine that your music defines not only the kind of blocks that you need to dodge or pick up while playing Audiosurf, but the slope of the track and thus the speed at which your vehicle travels down the way. A fast, driving song (pun intended) will put you on a largely downward, fast-moving slope with hundreds of blocks lying interface at any given moment and almost no time to react. A slow, meandering tune — maybe some Belle and Sebastian — will give you a largely flat, featureless, uninteresting ride. Just like listening to Belle and Sebastian.
With tons of modes and an almost infinite number of possible tracks, Audiosurf is already one of those games that you pick up and play for hours on end while only intending to “play a couple of songs.” The fact that your progress immediately goes on to the global leaderboard means that you will forever be looking for more and more obscure songs that you can race on and be the best in the world — because nobody else has played it.
And then, months later, you’re going about your business and suddenly, out of the blue, you get an email that you have been bumped off the top of the leaderboard for the most obscure song that you thought you could ever find. And then you have to load the game back up, load the song back in, and race for the top. Because no one but you needs to be #1 on that song.
Note: Audiosurf 2 exists and is available on Steam for $15. Nobody cares. Despite the fact that the graphics were refined and there are rumors that gameplay might actually be slightly tighter, absolutely nobody got excited at the end of 2013 when it was released. That’s a problem because the network effect of competing with your friends is one of the big drives behind Audiosurf being the hit that it was. If you are thinking of holding off on Audiosurf because you might pick up Audiosurf 2 — don’t. Odds are good that your friends already have the first one and never even heard about the second.
Beat Hazard: Ultra
So we've done shmups, and we've done driving games, what’s left? Only one of the greatest genres of video game ever created, and once you put it together with music no one is safe.
I’m talking about the bullet hell shooter. A game in which thousands of bullets come flying at you from every direction and all you have is a ship, your weapons, and super bombs — and probably an entire assortment of other weapons that you can pick up along the way. And in this case, awesome music. You may remember one of the proto-exemplars of this genre as Asteroids, one of the greatest games ever created. Now imagine Asteroids with your favorite soundtrack, way over the top graphics, and weapons and enemies which responded to the rhythm and volume of your favorite song.
This is one of the reasons that video games were created in the first place.
When Beat Hazard was originally released, it was already packed with an insane number of mods, weapons, and adjustments which you could unlock as you went through trying to destroy bosses and waves of asteroids. You controlled direction of the ship with your mouse and the direction of thrust with the keyboard, like other arena shooters. Simple, right? Ultra was originally a DLC which added weapons bosses and perks — and some indie music titles that no one cared about because using their own soundtracks was always better. It also added something incredible: co-op in head-to-head online play.
So imagine throwing down with your friends in Asteroids to your favorite songs which drive your weapons to ever more insane levels and throw even more insane waves of enemies at you as you go. And laughing at your friends’ failures.
I see I have your interest.
If you just wanted to buy Beat Hazard: Ultra on Steam by itself, you could have it for $13. And that would still be awesome. But why do that when you can have it as part of the Humble Weekly Sale?
This week’s Humble Weekly Sale has a very tight theme, and I think that serves it well. There’s something compelling about games which hook into something that already excites and moves people to such a degree as their personal music collection. And that something is awesome. $6 is more than fair for games which are guaranteed to give you an excuse to listen to more thrash metal.
And that’s really all we need.
Steam
Ah. Our old friend Steam. Having started as a buggy mass of crap, Steam has become the premier digital distribution platform for PC gaming and fully appears to intend to try and be the best distribution platform for their own console. The other thing that they do is run ridiculous sales on a constant basis. Not ridiculous as in “who would pay that?” but ridiculous as in “how can I not pay that?”
Every week brings a new sale in new games which are on sale, and if you're not keeping up with it yourself almost every day you're probably missing out on the sale of a game that you're really interested in. I can only do so much. But what I can do, I do for you here every week and hopefully some of the things that I'm about to show you are of interest.
Breach & Clear
Turn-based tactical warfare. It’s been a genre unto itself since the beginning, and now is no exception. It’s a gripping genre, though, prone to introducing one-more-turn-itis in anyone who feels even the slightest tug to turn-based gaming in general.
Breach & Clear came out originally on iOS but hit a real platform (ie. Android) in early January. It’s a surprisingly good game for being born on mobile, possibly because the return of largely limited resources, inherently restrictive price points, and a need to deliver fun fast is putting pressure on developers to make fewer sprawling, waste-of-electron messes and more laser-focused experiences.
B&C has in-game microtransactions and it remains to be seen exactly how pernicious they'll turn out to be on the PC. On Android, they’re not terribly intrusive but the desktop has a different measure for such things.
35% off until March 28th, $9.74.
Luftrausers
I think I'll just leave this here. If TB’s video doesn't sell you on it, I don't think you're the kind of person who'll enjoy it. You’re basically looking at high-powered old-school (deliberate) arcade action with the extra power of the modern PC devoted to the physical modeling of cutting off a powerful jet engine in mid-flight.
Plus, crazy plane mods that change the name of the plane as you go.
As TB says, if 10% off at $8.99 seems too much to pay for something like this, I think you can pretty much expect that it will be in some kind of indie bundle or sale sometime in the next 6 months. Given that it’s single-player only, getting into it late won’t make a bit of difference.
Though wouldn't it be cool if the developer added multiplayer co-op or duelling as a DLC like Beat Hazard? Multiple be-weaponed planes dipping and zooming around each other, taking on mad bullet hell waves of attacks together? Methinks we need to get Vlambeer on the phone!
Killing Floor
There’s just a mad pile of crazy in Killing Floor, and we've been playing it ever since it was new back in … Holy crap! May of 2009! But it’s held up extremely well in the face of 5 years of game development, not just as an engine but with a developer willing to stand behind it and keep backing with new DLC, new maps, new gameplay, and hooks into Steam Workshop so that if the official stuff’s not enough, you can get the stuff other folks have hand-crafted especially for your pleasure.
KF seems to go on sale pretty regularly, but at 75% off for the next 8 hours or so, you can get a fat wad of stuff for cheap. Like everything ever realeased as DLC or added characters for $13, or 6 copies of the game for $100. That is a lot of tactical shooting zombie action.
While Left4Dead may trump KF in visuals and the defined structure of campaigns, the indie game has maintained a steady presence in our regular play by the absence of tightly defined campaign, meaning that a map can be designed purely as a place to make interesting kills or be chased by waves of the infected. Plus L4D2 never seems to go on any kind of mad sale and doesn’t have nearly the devotion of a modding community burning in its undead heart.
Not a lot going on in the world of Steam this week; two of the noteworthy bits are simply new releases. We're early in the Spring release cycle and next month promises some fun releases and probably a number of surprises.
What We're Playing
Firefall
Yes, still. Despite the problems with in-game crafting and the economic system, I’m still playing this game simply because it is so much fun to shoot things right in the face. And it is! Firefall is an excellent shooter, delivering exactly where it needs to every time. That’s unusual.
This weekend was an opportunity for people to try the Nighthawk Recon/Sniper battleframe, and the judge from the number of crosshair icons I saw on the map, a lot of people were taking advantage of the opportunity. Red 5 has been making use of weekends during the “open beta” to encourage people to try out different battleframes or play styles, and that’s quite cool.
I need some people to go thumping with. It’s very sad.
Tic Tactics
That’s right. A mobile game. Tic Tactics is just extremely pretty on the Nexus 7, and as an expansion of the classic tic-tac-toe gameplay, it brings a lot of complexity to the table.
Essentially, you play on a 3 x 3 grid of tic-tac-toe boards, a play on any of which direct switchboard your opponent makes their move on next, which ultimately means that in many cases you want to be making multiple successive moves on the same board while forcing your opponent to play elsewhere.
It’s actually harder than it sounds, and it sounds pretty hard.
But it is extremely pretty and it doesn’t require much in the way of surface thought, so it makes an excellent “thing to play with while not playing with other things.” We’ll see how it goes.
SolForge
Sometimes you miss the world of CCGs. Those who’ve played a lot of Magic: the Gathering know what I’m talking about — there’s just something about the idea of creating a deck, dealing other hand, and making the best strategy you can out of whatever you have.
That’s exactly the it’s that SolForge scratches.
The fact that I can play a game on the desktop and then move over to my tablet to finish is just gravy.
SolForge just released an expansion set of cards, Rise of the Forgeborne, adding what is frankly a much-needed set of dynamics in the new cards, including what is effectively “dual color” should characters — creatures which have an innate synergy with a faction not their own.
I have an itch and SolForge scratches it. It’s hard to generate higher praise than that!
Planetary Annihilation
I mentioned PA earlier, and now it’s time to revisit that. I talked about it before, mentioned how both Eric and I were involved in the Kickstarter, and finally — finally — he managed to get the game installed on his Mac last night, so we could try to put together a multiplayer game of what is hoped to be the successor to the Supreme Commander legacy.
I don’t mean to sound discouraging, but — it was nontrivial. And ultimately it didn’t come together because, well, who in the world has a pointer device without mouse wheel support? That would be Eric.
That wasn’t the only problem. The actual performance of the game itself on the Mac, particularly on planets with forests, appears to be fairly terrible. We had trouble even getting loaded when I had a verdant green planet as our homeworld. Not good. Once I changed things to be a little less heavy duty on the planetary demands, we could actually get loaded in a reasonable amount of time.
That’s when we discovered that PA has no way to remap zoom in and zoom out from mouse wheel to any other keystroke — and that’s bad.
Playing PA by myself, I never seem to have that sort of problem. Playing single player on any kind of complicated map that I like is pretty easy, and it’s extremely pretty. But that’s not the measure of a game like this — this kind of game is meant to be multiplayer competitive and multiplatform. That introduces a host of complications, and since the developers of PA have stated very aggressively their interest in being included on the Steambox, that’s going to require that they focus a lot more resources on making the game run well on Linux and by extension Mac.
Lots of hope still not dashed. We’ll keep you in the loop as things develop. Maybe we’ll even managed to play a full game and tell you about it afterwards.
A man needs dreams.
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 there along with all the notes and chat logs from the live showing.
See you next week. Taste the flaccid rainbow.
