Recent reviews by zreese

A Comparative Analysis of Quake and Goblin Economics: Dynamics of Conflict, Resource Allocation, and Power Structures

Abstract

This treatise explores the parallels between the gameplay mechanics of Quake, a seminal first-person shooter, and the hypothetical economic principles governing goblin societies in fantasy literature. By examining the fundamental aspects of conflict, resource allocation, and power structures within Quake and goblin economics, this analysis reveals surprising similarities and offers new insights into the understanding of competitive environments and resource management in both digital and fantastical realms.

blah blah blah I could actually write the whole treaty but you get the joke. This game is fun. It's like Quake but with tiny unlockables that give you that "one more run" rush. It's good!

At the end of summer, everyone in town gathered on the docks after sunset. We lit a little candle and put it in a boat, then pushed that boat out into the sea. Phosphorescent jellyfish slowly started to move towards us. This went on for about two minutes with the sound of waves crashing quietly underneath it all. Those were possibly the best two minutes of my life of my entire adult life. I was young again.

Summary: Party Hard is a wonderful premise marred by quality issues.

Party Hard has a solid elevator pitch: "an 80s slasher movie where you play as the killer." That game practically makes itself. Tongue-in-cheek, stealth mechanics, appeals to anyone who was a teenage boy at some point. I was a teenage boy at one point. I still can watch a Friday the 13th movie if I stumble across it while flipping through channels at 1AM. Not even one of the good Friday the 13th movies, either. One of the high-numbered sequels, the ones that became inexplicably paranormal.

The game is as follows: you control a mask-wearing man with a knife and travel from party to party across the United States killing all participants. You do this by stalking them in a single screen, cut-away view of the party. You press a button and stab a person, then pick up their body and hide it somewhere. That's essentially the whole game, which is okay, because this game is an 80s slasher movie where you play as the killer.

There are a few issues with execution. There is no visual indicator for detection. Many, many times I thought I was totally hidden but someone on the other side of the party had a red exclamation point pop up.

There's no complex logic behind any given level. You just wait for people to separate from the pack, then you find a way to kill them. It can sometimes take a long time.

And in that long time, all you can do is wait. This is not so much a simulation of a party as it is a presentation of a party. There is no cause-and-effect. The party-goers seem undeterred by a police officer putting six people in body bags. They dance, they wander, while the police man walks back to his car. During a party at a ranch, an Oldsmobile races uncontrollably through the patio. A waiter offers a tray of drinks to the new ruby red smear on the grass. He didn't even blink.

That's the biggest problem with Party Hard: no one really does anything.There are no routines, no unexpected behaviors, not a fleck of individuality among these party-goers beyond being having varying appearances. The party-goers seem to have three states: dancing, wandering, and standing around idly. They mostly stand around idly. Sometimes little pink word bubbles pop up. But no one ever has a conversation. Just little one-shots, like "OMG!" or "YEAH!" It's as if every participant showed up to the party without knowing anyone else there.

There are other, smaller issues. Things that don't contribute to an overall good impression. Like the music volume control. I set the music to zero because it looped after about thirty seconds and drove me crazy. But when the music was set to zero, the voice-over in the interstitial cut-scenes didn't play. It's not a huge thing. It's not a game breaking bug. But it is the sort of problem that would be easily (easily!) reproduced and fixed during testing. To me, this indicates either one of two things: the developers did not do very thorough testing to the point where they didn't try playing the game with the music off, or they were aware of the issue but didn't consider it worth fixing before launch. Neither one of those is a good scenario.

It all adds up. The in-game tutorial tells you that smoke grenades can be used for cover, but doesn't tell you how to use them. If busted by a cop, you have to wait to be carried back to the squad car -- in real time -- before the big GTA inspired "BUSTED!" takes over the screen. It's sloppy. The sort of stuff that you'd iron out immediately in a polish pass.

I am legitimately disappointed. Party Hard suffers from an extreme lack in attention to detail. This doesn't feel like a finished game. It feels like a rough draft. I am hoping that it will improve with time through post-release patches and updates. As of now, I feel like I would rather have my ten dollars back.

I purchased Hardland on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2015, at 9:30 PM EST. I bought it because it had a great name. "Hardland." It evokes a lot. It was also on sale. The game took fifteen minutes to install.

I clicked through some menus and cutscenes. I was in control of an avatar that bore little resemblance to me. I could press keys on my keyboard and move my mouse to control the square little man and make him do things like walk around and swing a sword. I pressed keys to make him walk to a big swirling vortex.

I wandered for a bit, exploring. There were trees and rocks and other forest things. There were giant apples. They had words over them that said GIANT APPLES and they had a health bar so maybe they were enemies. I could attack them with my sword and eventually they would explode into an impossible number of giant apple slices. You could walk up to chickens and they would say "Bwock, bwock!" Perhaps a political reference? It's hard to say either way.

There were some pigs, both big and small. I killed the pigs with my sword, and then some other animals. The sword makes a satisfy ssssswop sound when it connects, but the sound effect isn't at all dynamic so it becomes trance inducing through persistent repetition. I found some people and killed them too. If you hit someone with your sword, their name turns red and they run away. But only for a few seconds. Then they forget that they should be scared of you and you can just walk up and strike them with the sword again. You can keep doing this until they die.

When people are killed things fall out of them. Cinnamon rolls, potatoes, forks, torches, hats, large bottles of poison, three-tiered fondant cakes. All sorts of things. I'm not sure what these people intended to do with all these things. I just left them on the ground.

You don't run very fast, so it takes a long time to go from one village to another to find villagers. Perhaps the players should be able to kill someone and take their shoes and different shoes let you move at different speeds. Again, this is an early access game, and a lot can change, so maybe the developers have already thought of this.

While I was looking for the next village I found a knight named Bald Travis and I put him in the ground. That is to say: I hit him and he fell over stiffly and his upper torso clipped through the ground. His squiggly disproportionate feet stuck up like marigolds. All the people in this game are oddly dysmorphic. They are all short, stout, thick. It makes me think about why my own body is constructed the way it is, which is something I don't like to do.

I wandered some more. There was a boar stuck inside a tree, like the tree had grown through him, but he was still alive and thrashing violently. His name was Raggi the Maneater. I went over to try and help him, but merely making contact with him seemed to be fatal. My body went limp and a dozen bejeweled crowns exploded from within me. There was also one quarter of a watermelon and my quiet, un-beating heart.

At that point I decided I had played enough to form a proper assessment of all the game had to offer. This is a work in progress, and there isn't enough polish to hold my attention. It feels like there's a lot of obvious areas to improve upon. I wish I could remove people's shoes when they die, or otherwise dress them how I wanted. I wish the animals said more things when you talked to them. I wish there were mini-games, like maybe you mash keys and fill a meter to put a sleeper hold on a villager. Those are all things that would make a much more engaging experience for a player like me. But for now, Hardland seems aimless and unnecessary.

Wizards of the Coast and Stainless Games have listened to hardcore fans and finally given them what they want: a sales funnel.

I'm having a hard time grasping how Magic 2015 became such a mess. Previous games in the series have been wonderful, offering the components and mechanics of the Magic: The Gathering card game without the overly involved meta-game. Choose one of the pre-configured decks, play a quick game online, then step away from the computer and enjoy the other passions in your life. I contend that it is one of the most enjoyable ways to play Magic: The Gathering, if only because you don't have to interact with the sort of people who play Magic: The Gathering on a regular basis.

A common criticism of Magic 2015's predecessors was "Why can't I build my own deck from scratch using all of the Magic cards ever made?" This is similar to walking into a coffee shop and asking for a porterhouse steak. No one will argue that it's what you'd most desire at that given moment, but the resources exist for you to have that experience without making the world collapse and conform to your immediate needs. There is a game called Magic: The Gathering Online that allows players to have the "complete" Magic: The Gathering experience, such as spending hundreds of dollars to build the same deck that everyone else is using because of a mechanical exploit. That is it's own thing. You can go out onto the internet and type "Magic: The Gathering Online" in a search engine, with or without quotes, and spend lots of money on digital trading cards. The Duels of the Planeswalkers series has offered a different experience, more akin to a fighting game. It was a well balanced game that afforded many different play styles and allowed players to have fun regardless of their skill level.

Magic 2015 does away with pre-configured decks almost completely. You play a tutorial and then choose from a list of different decks. None of them are very good. You can not change your deck after choosing without deleting your save file and starting over. You must use that deck for the first section of the campaign. If you are patient you will eventually unlock the ability to build your own decks, but only after slogging through numerous battles with the starter deck.

When you win a battle, you are rewarded with a booster. This booster contains a few cards that are almost certainly worthless to you. Maybe you are playing with a black zombie deck. Your booster might contain three green cards that are not zombies. And you'll say, "Wow, I wish I could get lucky and open a booster with some good zombie cards in it!" The solution to this is to purchase a premium booster. These premium boosters contains the Good Cards. They cost $1.99 each. You can buy as many as you want. The only way to get the Good Cards is by buying premium boosters. If you buy enough of them, you might get a Great Card that wins the game when you play it. If you don't buy enough of them, you will be at a disadvantage when playing online against the people who did buy enough of them. These people will play a Great Card and you will lose the game.

It is important to remember that you have paid at least $9.99 for this experience.

Design decisions like these have turned a reasonably solid series into something foul. You should not buy this game. You should not play this game. If you want a casual game of Magic: The Gathering, buy Duels of the Planeswalkers 2014. It is well balanced and fun to play. If you want to spend exorbitant amounts of money building whatever deck is dominating the Magic: The Gathering meta-game, play Magic: The Gathering Online. If you want a real challenge, open a coffee shop that sells porterhouse steaks. Let me know how it does.

One additional item that I absolutely must mention as part of my "See Something, Say Something" campaign against offensive user experiences: the menus in this game are presented in a slideshow fashion, where you can only see one menu option at a time and have to cycle through each screen. This results in the inability to view menu options that are currently disabled. So it's impossible to judge your progress in the campaign, which is unfortunate because most of the game's content is hidden away behind various milestones. FAQs online told me that deck building was unlocked after beating Avanyc, but due to the poor menu system I was unable to determine how many more events I needed to clear before I reached that point. The "unnumbered list" menu system used in the previous games, as well as almost every single piece of interactive media produced since the beginning of time, would have been a much better solution for content navigation.

If you ignore the click-click-click combat, the strangers spouting specialized acronyms, the clutter of semi-opaque inventory windows... you will find puzzles. Glorious puzzles. And when I say puzzles, I mean it in the true sense of the word: these are enigmas designed to test your ingenuity. You will need to pay attention, write things down, reasearch, translate, sketch, stretch, shower, stew, contemplate, contemplate, contemplate, and even then you might not be able to put everything together. But when you do, oh! Such a sense of accomplishment. I have never experienced a game as stimulating and rewarding as this.