Játékok: vegyesvágott kaland

Deponia

Metacritic: 74

A Daedalic Entertainment point-and-click kalandjátéka, amit a nemrég megjelent Chaos on Deponia kapcsán vettem meg. Érdekes és humoros játék, viszont jó párszor bele kellett néznem a végigjátszásba. Az Achievementek relatíve egyszerűek voltak. Aki ismeri a The Whispered World játékukat, az most fellélegezhet, mert vége a végtelen dumának és a számtalan kattintható helyszínnek. Az irányítás egyszerűbb, mert elég az egér két gombjával utasításokat adni (akció+megnéz). Elsőre kb. 10 órába tellett, másodikra, a Droggleljug teljesítményhez már csak 1 óra kellett.

Értékelés: 80%

Chaos on Deponia

Metacritic: 79

Némiképp fejlődött az előző részhez képest. Továbbra is vicces és érdekes, de pl. az Achievementek harmada már korántsem olyan triviális. 12 óra játék után még 10 db hiányzik. Összességében jó sorozat, és amint megjelenik az utolsó, Good bye Deponia, érdemes mindhármat egy csomagban megvenni, és kijátszani.

Értékelés: 85%

A New Beginning: Final cut

Metacritic: 75

Ugyanattól a Daedalic Entertainment-től származik, de egy Deponia-nál korábbi játékuk, ráadásul konzolról hozták át. Ha játszottál a Deponia sorozattal, könnyen felismered a főhősnő rajzolatát (bár szerintem kicsit furcsán áll a lába.) Érdekes történet, puzzle-ök. Az Achievementek relatíve értelemszerűek, bár néha nehéz volt előre eldönteni, hogy most történet függő-e (90%), vagy speciális, újratöltést vagy újrajátszást ígényel. Nem rossz, de azért inkább leárazáskor érdemes megvenni. A vezérlés talán egy kicsit körülményes, mert 4 slotnyi akció lehetséges, amint a cél fölötti némi egérgomb lenyomva tartással lehet előhívni, á la The Whispered World. A Deponia irányítása jobban feküdt nekem.

Értékelés 75%

Lost Horizon

Metacritic: 77

Ez viszont már egy másik bandától van: Deep Silver, amit a Secret Files sorozatból lehet ismerős. A SF 3 előrendelésekor kaptam meg, meg is feletkeztem róla. Meglepően messzire jutottam benne, talán a korábbi játékokban szerzett friss tapasztalatnak köszönhetően, mielőtt a végigjátszáshoz kellett nyúlnom. Achievementek nincsenek benne.

Értékelés 75%

Kickstarter: Nexus 2

If you liked Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, here is a good news. The developers of the game started a Kickstarter campaign. The $650,000 seems to be a longshot, but worth a proper pledge, especially if you pirated Nexus 1 ;)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mostwanted/nexus-2-the-gods-awaken

BTW, Most Wanted Entertainment & HD Interactive gave us Joint Task Force, one of my all-time favorite tactical combat game.

Open Imperium Galactica 0.95.040 kiadása

Elkészítettem az Open Imperium Galactica következő kiadását. A Launcher-t elindítva máris frissül a játék.

Emellett még készítettem két kérdéssort (angolul és magyarul), aminek kitöltésével segíthetsz a munkánkban:

Angolul

Magyarul

Elegendő csak az egyiket kitölteni.

Preliminary: Legends of Pegasus

This is just a preliminary of a "concurrent" 4x turn based space strategy game just released: Legends of Pegasus.

Practically unplayable. Crashes, no-progression bugs, unresponsive UI and ships, bad tutorial, tiny font. I'll have to wait for a few patch turns. So many obvious bugs, I wonder how these could have get past testing? - Oh wait! Open-IG had several of such bugs! - Yes, but many got fixed within a few hours, and, my game is free. €40 is kind of an expensive.

Lessons for Open-IG so far: have a proper tutorial.

Endless Space

(Metacritic: 79%)

Summary: Nice looking game, but I failed to win on newbie...

Endless Space is one of the latest stream of indie 4x space strategy games building on the gameplay of Master of Orion 2's turn based-slider adjusting gameplay. I'm personally not a fan of such turn based strategy games due the inherent difficulty: the AI seems to know and work along an optimal path whereas you are left with either exploratory play or strategy guides.

The first disappointment was the way the tutorial is presented. No voiceover (as usual) and presented as a screenshot of the selected screen and several text bullet points to its right. Maybe if the bullet points were applied in the actual gameplay window... At first, it was a bit difficult to remember each option, but as I played, almost every screen and function felt well polished.

One thing I missed is the ability to jump to the next and previous star system from within a system view. I had to jump back to the galaxy view or open the systems from the empire view listing.

The tooltips were well placed and very informative. The technology tree was intriguing and very diverse, although it would take a very long time or very large galaxy to research every bit of it within an acceptable amount of real time.

Galaxy- and empire-wide events were good ideas, although annoying sometimes.

The AI seems to be more challenging than the difficulty settings would suggest. I've seen reports about the AI winning easily with economic victory or total points. I thought I could win by military strength, but it soon turned out to be problematic. The AI had at least 25 fleets with the strength quarter of my forces, but they were constantly pounding on each of my fleets until destruction. Early colonization and expansion is penalized by the game and it may take long time to make all kinds of planets colonizable.

The music is acceptable, although sometimes too high pitched. The graphics is okay, maybe a bit fancy on the system view. I played all my battles on auto, so no comment on the simplistic card-based battles.

Conclusion: 70%. Maybe I'll play it one day again.

Once I've finished the Beta-2 of Open Imperium Galactica, I'll try the next of such games I have purchased recently: Galactic Civilizations 2.

Midnight Mysteries: Devil on the Mississippi battleship minigame solver

(I'm a bit behind in my games both bought and self-developed.)

I've been playing with the Midnight Mysteries series lately and I've come across a nice battleship-like minigame with an associated achievement: find all ship parts without missing a hit (called "Dead Eye").

 

 I have created a brute-force algorithm to solve this randomly generated puzzle. The algorithm sequentially modifies coordinates until the given layout matches the given coverage numbers.

 Two considerations:

1) The algorithm may find multiple, same looking solutions when two or three of the same kind appears in a row or column;

2) sometimes, multiple distinct solutions may exist without any safe shots. In the example below, two horizontal 2 length ships can be present at either (0, 4)+(2, 3) or (0, 3)+(2, 4). A safe shot would be to put one at (0, 4) and then see the graphics indicate if this is the beginning or end of the ship.

Code @ GitHub

FTL: Faster Than Light (closed beta)

I have mixed feelings about this game, FTL: Faster Than Like. It is said to be a rogue-like game, but I never played such games.

FTL is a Kickstarter funded independent and ongoing development. Think of it as a game with mechanics you always wanted to do when watching a Star Trek episode: command your crew around, transfer energy around, repair damages, etc.

After playing a few hours, I came to a bitter conclusion: this might not be my type of game. Here is why:

• No save option at all, not even session saves. Some argue that such kind of games can't work when saving is possible. For me, it was kind of a disappointment. If not anytime save, then at least some sector or multi-sector autosaves would be great so you don't need to start all over again. According to the devs, no such feature will be implemented.
• The gameplay seem to rely on precise action from your side, what to purchase, how to use, etc.
• Following the many defeats in the first and second sectors on easy (!), I turned to my old buddy, the Memory Editor, which seemed to be enough for about half the game. After that, defeat and start over. I didn't enjoy that.

I backed this project with the money 3 times of its probable cost after release, but I feel a small regret. Beyond this, I backed several other projects as well, which I will blog about in the future. My current observation so far is as follows: If you back an indie project, don't forget that you are supporting the devs to create their game and not yours. It is their idea, their programming style and their gameplay mechanics. It is yet to turn up if there is a relation between funding and this distance factor.