Category Archives: The Android’s Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Aurora

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One of my earliest posts was about Dwarf Fortress, wherein I also made mention of a game called Aurora. In the comments, Repaxan asked me to describe it, intrigued by my claims that it is significantly more complex than DF. Finally, I am bothered to do so!

Aurora is ultimately a 4X game. It is, however, to 4X games what Dwarf Fortress is to The Sims – vastly, impossibly, insanely more complex, more detailed, and more inscrutable. This is what it looks like:

It's like I'm really in 1985!

That’s the only game screen with graphics, really. Every other page, tab, screen – all the icons across the top lead to submenus and so forth – is basically an Excel page in one form or another. It is not an attractive game, indeed it is intimidatingly the opposite, even for a 4X grognard such as me.

HOWEVER! As with DF, it’s well worth struggling through the initial stages of confusion, because this game is… I don’t even know, holy crap, it’s insane. Sure, sure, lots of games let you design your ships these days, from the shiny and simplistic (GalCiv 2) to the detailed and consequential (Space Empires V), but this is on an entirely different plane. In Aurora, you research the basics needed for a component, then you design the component, then you research the component, and then you can assign it to a ship. In other games you research what amounts to ‘Shootier rooty-tooties’. In Aurora you decide on what kind of energy weapon you’re making, and then you dictate relevant factors such as the size of the laser lens you are using. THEN you research appropriate radar and firecons for your new weapons, and THEN – once you’ve also got engines, fuel, quarters, etc. etc., you stick it all on a ship.

Then you have a process nearly as complex for assigning commanders and giving orders. I’m STILL trying to figure out all the nuances of the latter, and my ships don’t always do what I’m wanting them to do. But, as with DF, the end result is astounding – a game that takes a lot of investment, but rewards it beyond your wildest dreams. Nothing else comes close, that I can think of anyway. Also, you can terraform planets however you want. I have indeed killed the Earth by stripping her entire atmosphere away, and poisoned other worlds by similar sabotages. Which is, you know. Hilarious.

The game is free, and can be picked up the forums. There’s also a Wiki but, unlike DF, I know of no equivalent of capnduck or 51ppycup making tutorials.

The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

VVVVVV, aka If You Die Fewer Than Ten Times a Minute, You’re Doing Good

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The other day I acquired VVVVVV, an indie game that looks and plays similar to a Flash game, but Steam was having a special so it was only $2.50 and I’d heard good things about it so I bought it. Can’t beat a video game that costs less than a gallon of gas, right?

Though to be fair I guess that's not much of an accomplishment these days.

So anyways, this game is based around the rather gravity-defying gimmick of being able to switch between walking on the floor and walking on the ceiling. That might seem like a pretty simple gimmick, but you’d be surprised: this mechanic single-handedly turns the game from your typical retro platformer into a puzzle game that still somehow requires lightning-quick reflexes. Or you die. For the record, you die a lot in this game. Fortunately, the game designers were well aware of this, and you have unlimited lives and respawn near-instantly.

This brings me to my next point: each puzzle is neatly self-contained within either a single room, or a very small selection of rooms. So theoretically, if you have perfect reflexes, you can finish each puzzle within about five seconds. This is a delightfully evil tactic on the game designers’ parts, by the way, because the fact that you can see the end of every puzzle juuuuust out of reach, combined with unlimited lives and instant respawn on death, means that instead of getting frustrated and quitting, you’ll just keep trying, because it’s just RIGHT there and you’d might as well give it ONE MORE SHOT and then ONE MORE TRY and then JUST ONE MORE and then… yeah.

Directly after this room is the Puzzle From Hell.

Anyways, combine some seriously catchy game mechanics with some seriously catchy chiptune music, and you’ve got yourself a game that you’ll quickly lose an hour or so to. It’s not particularly big and flashy or anything, but if you’ve got thirty minutes and want to lose your mind, this game is the way to go.

Picture related: this game is like the top series there.
The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Judgment soon, fellow mortal!

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As we all know the End Times have arrived and tomorrow is Judgment Day, the commencement of the Machine Uprising against our fleshy oppression and dictatorship.

Or something like that.

Anyway so with the world ending tomorrow, what videogames will you spend your final hours upon this moral realm playing? Anyone who says something sappy like “Spend it with family” is clearly not hardcore enough and should be ashamed. Me, I’m going to celebrate the end of the world in reality by ending worlds in videogames!

Yes yes, we all know that I like weapons of horrifically massive destructive power by now. I mean, my cutie mark is a nuclear trefoil, and my main complaint about games with nukes is how ineffective they are and why can’t I weaponize smallpox and yadda yadda. WELL! Let me tell you, my friends, of a game of mystery and legend, a game of science and fiction, a game called Space Empires V.

Best ship design ever put into a game, bar none.

Like too many games I love this is basically Spreadsheets: The Game. The difference is that this one really, truly tries to encompass the scale of futuristic technology and all the awesome stuff it can do. There are a huge, a mindblowingly huge, an offensively, insecurely huge number of technologies to research and as a result, a lot of buildings, ships, and parts to stick thereupon. So far so good.

But we’re not done yet. Oh no no, for you see, other games have some impressive degrees of destruction. Alpha Centauri lets you flatten continents. GalCiv lets you blow up stars. But no other game that I know of lets you construct your very own Ringworlds and Dyson Spheres, and then blow these things to Kingdom Come like a… well, like a wrathful deity I suppose. Where SEV excels is in the sheer giddy heights it lets you ascend to. More than anything else, more than any other game, this is a 4x which demands you advance technologically, and which makes you feel so rewarded when you have done so because you always gain some incremental benefit at least.

And sometimes you get devices that let you construct planets. Or blow them up. And that’s something we can all get behind in our final hours.

The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Okay, okay, I caved.

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After having written up a post a few weeks back on how I didn’t “get” Minecraft, I, uh… went back and tried it again.

Now, first thing’s first. I played the free, in-browser “Classic” edition, because as it turns out, I can’t afford the actual game at this point. (When I first tried the downloadable game, waaaay back in the day, it was free and in Beta.) This version of the game is different from the real thing. There’s no creepers, no night-time, and no crafting. Just you and an unlimited number of different colored blocks.

…oddly enough, that made the game a lot more palatable for me. No longer having to worry about things like “OMG HURRY UP AND FIGURE THINGS OUT AND MAKE A SHELTER BEFORE NIGHT FALLS *panic panic*”, I was free to let my inner obsessive-compulsive demons happily make sure all my blocks were counted and lined up exactly right.

BEHOLD MY DERPY TEAL AND PURPLE MASTERPIECE. THE CEILING IS MADE OF GLASS.

So, there you have it. In what is possibly a textbook case of meeting games halfway, I played Minecraft for about a half hour last night, and I enjoyed it.

[Insert some sort of witticism here about purging my system with X-Com and/or the fact that my dear partner-in-crime Mister Adequate has also recently fallen to lure of crafting blocks. Seriously though, I got no sleep last night for the second time in a row and cannot currently brain good, so you’ll just have to pretend I wrote up a hilarious ending line here. Okay?]

The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Thinking Cap (Puzzle)

Trine and The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle

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The other day I was alerted to this deal, which allows you to pay as little (or as much) as you want for a pack of games in a donation that is split between the developers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Child’s Play Charity. No catch, as far as I can tell: all the games are DRM-free, can be installed as many times as you want (including via Steam, if that’s your thing), and are workable on all platforms– yes, including my beloved Linux.

Now I’m not gonna deny that I’d never heard of any of the games before, but really, I’m not gonna pass up nearly-free video games, and I always have a soft spot for developers that are willing to make Linux versions of games, so I coughed up a few coins and downloaded the bundle.

So far, I’ve only played Trine:

A 3-D side-scrolling game which is delightfully pretty, easy to learn, and far more addictive than one might expect.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s nothing too complex. It’s a puzzle game that ultimately could probably be emulated fairly well in Flash. The main difference between this and your average Flash game is that it’s heavily physics-based and, oh, did I mention it’s pretty? It’s pretty, and the music is relaxing.

The premise of the game is simple: You switch between three different characters to solve puzzles and work your way through obstacles in various rooms. Your three characters are a warrior, who cuts things up with his sword, a thief, who can shoot things with an arrow and use a grappling hook, and my favorite character… the wizard. See, the wizard is probably the most clever aspect of the game, because he doesn’t fling fireballs around as one might suspect. No, his powers are levitating objects, and making MORE objects– specifically, boxes which he can use to stand on or stack on top of other things.

Anyways, you’re armed with these three characters to dispose of undead and solve puzzles. The whole game was actually sort of giving me Portal vibes, not really in the nature of the puzzles so much as the way the puzzles are arranged room by room and the whole way in which the game starts you out slowly and easily and then ramps you up in difficulty level.

But yes!

I haven’t tried out the Shadowgrounds game that comes in the pack yet, but Trine alone was worth the download. It had me hooked for a good couple of hours yesterday and I can see it having me hooked for a while to come yet.

Anyways! Do go over and take a look at The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle if you haven’t already and have a few pennies to spare. It’s to prove a good point— namely that consumers are willing to pay for what they want to support– and even if you’re not really into that, it’s games for a cent, right?

The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

Streets of Rage Remake

Something I think should be spread around as far and wide as possible.

Is it just me or does that one dude with the bandana standing in front of Max look like Diego from Vandal Hearts?

The long-running Streets of Rage Remake project has reached v5.0, the final release. It is basically a massive amalgamation of everything SoR, which for my money was one of the best game series back on the Mega Drive/Genesis.

I was messing around with it some yesterday and it is very good. It remains faithful whilst making a ton of additions and refinements. As far as I’ve heard SEGA are cool with this, which is very admirable of them. Too many companies these days are too ready to step on fan projects.

Get it here!

It’s an admirable effort, and quite remarkable in scope. I’m a big fan of fan projects, be they things like this, mods, whatever. I think they’re great for the players, and they’re also a great way for the people involved to get experience of working in a team to put something out. So if you liked Streets of Rage back in the day, or if you’ve never played it at all, go and give it a looksee!

EDIT: Apparently, SEGA and Bombergames have had some kind of disagreement over this after all. The download has been pulled from the official site.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Why Dwarf Fortress does it for me

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So as Pike alluded to in her post yesterday, I’m something of a fan of Dwarf Fortress. So I thought I would take the time to proselytize this game for those who haven’t heard of it. But first go and read Boatmurdered. It’s a community story done by Something Awful, showing just how demented and hilarious a game of Dwarf Fortress can be.

Done that? Excellent! Let’s continue.

I’ll get the bad out of the way first.

1) It looks like this:

Bonus if you even know what this is. Hint: It isn't ASCII.

2) The interface is, to put it mildly, a bit of a mess. I won’t go into the whys and wherefores but suffice it to say, the biggest part of Dwarf Fortress’ infamous learning curve is getting the hang of the interface.

3) Busier fortresses will slow right down on anything shy of a NASA supercomputer.

This does not sound like the best way to try and sell a game, right? Well, let’s move on to what it gets right, and why the bad is worth putting up with.

1) Imagination. This game has so much depth and complexity that it really blows anything else (okay, anything else that isn’t Aurora) out of the water. What does this mean? Once you get the hang of it, there are extremely few limits on what you want to do. Want to build a medieval-style above-ground castle? Go ahead. Want to recreate Rapture? Well once you learn how to drain oceans, you’ll be set. Maybe you just want to build a mile-high tower – built entirely out of soap made from kitten tallow! Minecraft, massive as it is, really pales in comparison to DF’s potential.

2) The Community. You probably think I mean “Oh hey these guys are really nice and welcoming and stuff.” No. They are, but nice people are a dime a dozen. This is a community where people have tried to figure out the logistics of making a perpetual motion machine powered entirely by pressurized blood. This is a community where people have sat down and worked out, over a period of time, with calculations, experiments, and discussion, the most efficient way to breed and murder merpeople. To harvest their bones. Civilization may turn us into sociopaths, in that we simply don’t care, but Dwarf Fortress turns us into sadists so deranged that Idi Amin would balk. It is glorious.

Should have stayed under the sea.

3) Detail. The man in charge, one Toady One, is infamous for the ridiculous amount of detail he wants to put into DF, and the great progress in this direction he has already made. I doubt any program, of any kind, outside of those used to train med students, has the amount of detail that DF’s health and injuries system does. You can knock out individual teeth. A wound dealt with an axe will be different from one dealt with a warhammer. The detailed and complex materials system means that different materials really are useful for different things, in terms of equipment and weapons. But this is reflected in the game in more detailed ways: Every time you create a world to play, a world is generated for you. The geography, the deities, the history, the inhabitants, everything. It makes each world unique.

4) It’s free. Completely free, not a penny to be paid at any time! If you want to support Toady in his endeavors (And I would strongly urge you to if you’re a DF fan) then you can donate, which is how he makes his daily bread, but it’s not compulsory.

I’m really only scratching the surface here. Dwarf Fortress is an insanely deep game, growing all the time (Toady is in the middle of introducing a bunch of new features like apiculture and new ways of NPC settlements forming), with a wonderful (If deranged) community. Oh, and don’t let the graphics scare you – there are quite a few excellent tilesets out there, and they really help if you find the not-ASCII intimidating or ugly! If anybody is interested, here are a few links to get you started:

The game itself. This is where the downloads are, and where you can access the other official stuff like the Dev Log and the forums.
OR just get the Lazy Newb Pack. It comes with a bunch of extra stuff, much easier than tracking it down yourself, and is being constantly updated as new versions of DF and various mods come out.
The DF Wiki. Plenty of information on most topics in here.
The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress. Now outdated, but can still teach you around 95% of what you need to know to play the game.
The forums. Standard fare, this is where you’ll find discussion, mods, help threads, stories, all that jazz.

Anyone out there who has played DF before? Tell us your fondest memories and grisliest experiences!

The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

How I Mine For Fun? aka Why Minecraft Didn’t Do It For Me

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In case you’ve been living under a rock all year, Minecraft is a game that was cooked up and released by a guy who calls himself Notch and has since spread like wildfire to all odd corners of the internet. The premise of the game can be summed up by two words: Build stuff.

Somehow, in spite of (or perhaps because of) this simplicity, the game has spawned a huge fan following and various jokes pertaining to aspects of the game have become as ubiquitous on many online communities as Portal jokes are.

The obsidian is a lie.

Frequently, I have people asking me if I’ve tried the game. Presumably this is because I’m a huge fan of building and creating things, and thus, the game should be right up my alley. Right?

Well, I’m not gonna lie, that logic is quite sound. So yes, I did try the game, some time back when it first burst onto the scene. Unfortunately, it didn’t grab me the way the hype had me ready to believe it would. There were, I believe, a few different reasons for this, but here were the big ones:

  • http://wendykeithdesigns.co.uk/?p=22 Nighttime.  Sitting around for ten minutes– not in-game minutes, but actual minutes– in the dark, doing nothing, waiting for the sun to come up, gets old quick.  Yes, I know you’re supposed to build a house and get torches and whatnot in advance.  But if you’re new to the game and don’t realize this, this is a big turnoff.
  • http://annedickson.co.uk/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=http://annedickson.co.uk/books/the-mirror-within/ Blueprints.  From what I gather, Minecraft is largely supposed to be about discovery and figuring out what sort of tools you can build from your random blocks.  Unfortunately, there was really no sort of help or hints for this, and I found myself consulting an outside wiki every few minutes trying desperately to figure out how to make what I wanted to make.  Not to say I haven’t been-there,-done-that with other games, but it seemed rather over my head, considering I’d just started playing the game some five minutes earlier.
  • It’s basically virtual Legos.  Which is cool and all, but I could just, I dunno, play with some Legos or something.

So those three things, in roughly that order, are why I only played Minecraft about two or three times and then promptly quit being interested. They may have changed some of these things since then– I don’t know, I haven’t tried to play in months– but, in a nutshell, that was my experience.

Now I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the game was terrible or that you shouldn’t play it. Obviously, considering the game’s enormous fanbase, there is something that it offers to certain people. People who love building and sharing things in a virtual space and people who love those sort of sandbox style games will probably eat Minecraft up. And I’m not going to deny that I have seen some amazing pictures and videos of Minecraft creations on YouTube or image sharing sites. If the game works for you, then that’s great.

Ultimately, what the game offers on its most basic level– sheer freedom to create– is appealing to most everyone, and I can definitely appreciate that. But I suppose that some of us are looking for a little more interaction with our building games (spoiled by SimCity as we were), and I’m one of those people.

…or, if you’re Mister Adequate, you can just go play Dwarf Fortress. But that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.