NFOpocalypse

In Dominus, you control the ruler of a small province, which consists of a castle, outlying towns, city walls, forests, and the like. It’s divided up into about thirty different area maps. Your goal is to defend the province against eight invading tribes, which have randomized personalities. You combat these tribes using your own armies of monsters, traps, and spells. Additionally, you have four generals at your disposal, which you can use to automate setting up area defenses and other attacks. You win the game when all of the invading tribes have been eliminated, either through warfare or diplomacy.

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One of my hobbies is collecting old PC games. Over the years, however, I’ve amassed a large number of games that I’ve never gotten around to playing. I would like to play all of these eventually, but I don’t have a lot of time to invest into playing them all to completion. Therefore, I’m going to play them all for an hour or two and discuss my preliminary findings. I’ve chosen to start with strategy and war games.

Home of the Underdogs calls Silicon Knight’s 1993 D&D-licensed title Fantasy Empires as “one of the best fantasy games ever made.” I was not as impressed.

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Okay, let’s put aside the fact that war doesn’t really make much sense in real life. We’re talking about games, here. This is a gaming blog.

I’m not a historian by any means, but I don’t think I need to be one to tell that something’s a bit off when one of the CPU-controlled players, with whom I’ve had very little contact, declares war on me even though I’m not controlling an important resource, blocking some strategic position, or otherwise being much of a threat. Potentially, I could turn this into a long rant on why AI in 4X games can be so lacking, but I don’t think that’s the actual problem, here.

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In the last decade video games have gone from being something nerds did instead of meeting the opposite sex to that thing almost all people do instead of meeting the opposite sex. While video games have become possibly the largest entertainment industry in history, they have also gained some of the most sickly parasites of all. I speak, of course, about hack critics. While you are playing a game to enjoy it’s deep mechanics, gorgeous art, or complete lack of either, your critic counterpart is busy picking big words from a thesaurus so he can shit on your favorite new title. The OBRR is the line in the sand, and I stand on one side armed with poor grammar and crude language. Watch where you step.

Let’s start this off with the most obvious fart-sniffer on the whole goddamn Internet

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Don’t you just love that nice alliteration? But the crassness and vulgarity of this article’s title captures the essence of it perfectly. Sometimes when a series moves forward, the hardcore fans bitch and moan because the game isn’t exactly like it was before. Fuck Fallout fans. Fuck them so hard.

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I don’t care what everyone else says. Akitoshi Kawazu is a genius. He work’s with an indie gamer mindset—unafraid of experimentation and rejection, and just making whatever game he feels like making at that moment. So, I’d like to talk for a little bit about the first SaGa game I played—Final Fantasy Legend 2.

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Nothing like a good indie competition to get my blood boiling.  The folks over at Eegra (which is one of the best gaming humor sites on the web) recently hosted an indie game competition, giving out some sweet cash prizes to all who participated.  Some of the entries showed promise but fell flat (Color Wars) and some were downright outstanding (Go Beryllium!).  I’ll be sharing my favorites soon enough, but if you just can’t wait, here’s the original article, and both Tim W’s and Derek Yu’s take on the winners.

Another Atlus game in the Shin Megami Tensei series (and spinoffs), Digital Devil Saga is bizarre. I don’t mean the regular kind of bizarre, which is what Persona 3 or Final Fantasy X might fall under. Digital Devil Saga is downright creepy in its employment of the surreal, creepy, and extraordinary elements of its plot. Perhaps the biggest element of this insane aesthetic is in the fact that you consume your defeated enemies. Not only that, but the enemies you defeat used to be human. So, in essence, Digital Devil Saga is about cannibalism.

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Just some indie news, since I happen to be a HUGE independent game junkie. James Silva (who did Survival Crisis Z, which I happen to like so much) is gradually getting closer to the completion of his next project, an XNA game called The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai. He’s posted a status update on his developer blog, and it has some interesting things on it. For example, there will be a ranked story mode that is about equal to the hardest difficulty. There’s also going to be 3-play co-op in unranked story mode. Sweet.  Check his post for his complete status update. I’m no uncouth enough to post the whole thing verbatim!

To put this into context, I tend to go through phases when playing videogames. It normally goes along the lines of first-person shooter, American RPG, Japanese RPG, Strategy RPG, Turn-based Strategy, Real-time strategy, and then repeat at FPS. This is just how I function as a gamer. There’s individual games within those genres that I always play, and there’s some genres that are always good to play at any time. For example, I always play shoot-’em-ups. I always play Team Fortress 2. And when it comes to Japanese RPGs, I always play Persona 3.

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