Gametrodon

Author: MrBlueSky

  • Dusk

    Dusk

    Dusk is a boomer shooter that came out in 2017, and then finally got released in 2018. Or maybe it’s an arena shooter, because there’s some verticality? Or maybe a twitch shooter, which is how it describes itself at one point.

    Look, games in the vein of Doom have had 30 years of evolution. If you’re the sort of person whose played through myHouse.wad, you don’t need me to tell you shit about this genre. Honestly, leave this review now.

    On the other hand, if you’ve never played a Doom game, or like me, you’ve only played stuff like Wrath and Strafe, this is the writeup for you.

    I do want to quickly talk about the music in Dusk, quickly because I don’t really have anything to say about it. See, Dusk is going for a horror vibe, and no matter how much weaponry I ended up with, I found somewhere through the first act that game was scaring me.

    So I opened YouTube, pulled up a mashup of Ready to Die/Party Party Party from Hellsing Abridged, and used that on repeat for a bit as my background music.

    This is the energy I endeavored to bring to my play through. I don’t think it was the tone the developers were aiming for.

    This gradually transitioned into a combo of AJR, Panic At the Disco, and other random songs YouTube thought I wanted to listen to.

    If you’ve ever wondered what the inverse of Zen is, I would suggest playing through Dusk Episode 2, Map 6, titled the Erebus Reactor with This Town by Niall Horan playing in the background. The result was an emotional state where I found myself constantly torn between trying to not get blown up, shot, or fall into lava while wondering what I was even doing with my life, and if I’m going to die alone.

    Anyway, if you like horror themed shooters, Dusk seemed to do a good job. If you don’t, and for some reason have emotionally committed yourself to finishing the whole thing anyway, adjustments to soundtrack may aid you.

    This of course, won’t change the general vibe. Whether it’s a cursed farm, the worlds worst industrial park, or a research facility co-designed by Escher and Geiger, these are not pleasant places to be.

    Despite that, it did feel like the level design massively improved between acts. Dusk has 3 episodes, with about 10 maps each, and secret levels. I did not play any of the secret levels.

    Episode 1 was fun but a bit bland, episode 2 had a lot more variety in layout and design, and episode 3 has some downright nutty bits, with E3M7 probably reaching the pinacle of weirdo level design, being based around flipping gravity.

    And while they may not be pleasent, I found them fairly fun. Okay, except for some of the claustraphobic underground sections, but I enjoyed the larger maps.

    I also feel obligated to talk about the weapons. This is classic shooter, so you can carry all of them at once, there’s no reloading, and the only real cap on using them is ammo. My personal favorites were the super shotgun, duel pistols, and a explosive bolt thrower called the riveter. The most interesting one is probably the spectral crossbow which pierces multiple enemies, and shoots through walls, but it never really clicked for me. Generally, I just used whatever felt best in the moment, and only really felt ammo starved in boss fights.

    I really only have two complaints about Dusk. The first is bosses. I did not find any of them particularly fun. It’s hard to put my finger on why that’s the case, but mechanically I found most of them pretty dull. The second is an enemy type called the wendigo.

    Wendigos look like this.

    You might be looking at this, and going “That doesn’t seem particularly bad” and you’d be correct. But there are two things I can’t show in a still image.

    1. Wendigo’s (or maybe just a map trigger) make the lighting dim when they activate, and make a screech like a parrot being squeezed to death.
    2. Wendigos are often placed in dark enclosed spaces in the first two acts.
    3. Wendigos are invisible until you shoot them for the first time.

    The end result is an enemy that can organically jumpscare you every time it shows up in a level.

    I hate them. Fortunately they’re at least kind of rare, so my terror was generally short lived.

    I got Dusk on sale for just about $7. I had $7 worth of fun with it.

    Right now it’s $20 on Steam, but you can probably just wait for another sale. It’s not my favorite game I’ve played so far this year, but it also isn’t my favorite genre, so I don’t think that’s on Dusk.

    I thought the game was the most fun when it managed to blend it’s evocative tone with maps that were enjoyable to traverse, and least fun when it shoved me into coal mines filled with Wendigos.

  • Sir, We Have an Orc Problem

    Sir, We Have an Orc Problem

    I first saw Sir, We Have an Orc Problem in a random review I clicked on browsing BlueSky last night. I can’t find that review anymore. However, that review plus seeing another friend playing it on Steam was enough make me buy a copy.

    I am easily influenced.

    Sir, We Have an Orc Problem, which I’ll now be abbreviating to SWHOP to, to the determent of my SEO, is an incremental tower defense game. It’s $9, and it’s fairly short. It took me about six and a half hours to beat the whole thing, and do a bit of achievement hunting.

    The loop is simple. Pick a map. Place towers. Start the map. Watch as orcs die. Did you kill them all before you ran out of lives? Great, you unlocked the next map. Did you fail to kill them all? Spend the currency you got to boost your towers.

    This is the biggest difference between SWHOP and most other tower defense games I’ve played. There’s no in-round building, or economic management element. Instead, all of your available towers and their power is gated by an incremental game style tree.

    There are three resources you use on the incremental tree, blue, red, and pink crystal. Red is used for unlocking new towers, and you earn it by beating new levels. Pink is generally used for unlocking large single upgrades for towers, and earned by beating levels without letting any mobs get through. Blue Crystal is used for everything else. Blue has 3-ish sources. First, lump sum bonuses for beating a level. Second, you can earn crystal by killing orcs. And third, there are unlocks that grant crystal at the end of finishing a level, based on the levels difficulty.

    This brings me to my big “problem” with SWHOP. It has the systems and functionality for an incredible tower defense game, but the part of the tower defense gameplay loop that is satisfying is completely subsumed by the incremental game elements.

    There are a few things that collide to make this true, so I’m going to try to pull them apart, and point out how they interlock to cause this problem.

    First, it straight up isn’t possible to beat the game without using the incremental game upgrades. You can’t. Without those systems, you cannot place towers, and you’re expected to lose the first level at least a few times before you get enough upgrades to beat it.

    Second, because this is the first lesson you learn as a player, its the easiest mindset to adopt going forward, and until the very last level of the game, you’ll be rewarded for it. While you could micromanage your tower placements, it’s easier to just buy more towers and bullet penetration until you can brute force your way through a level. It also makes it very hard to gauge why you’re failing a level. Was it poor tower placement? Or was it just because you’re not at the power level needed yet?

    And gauging that power level is hard, because enemy health scales between levels. On level 1, Orcs have a maximum of 6.4 health. On level 12, they can have 625. Upgrades are necessary.

    The end result is a loop that feels like it encourages you to turn off your brain a bit. My response to losing during a level wasn’t “Let me re-evaulate my placement”, it was “Lets just run it back so I can save up enough to get more penetration on my cannons.” It’s the zen of the incremental game instead of the planning of tower defense.

    This strategy falls apart on the last level, which I’ll be honest, I had to go and look up a guide for, because after spending what felt like an hour on this one level, I was getting a bit grumpy. SWHOP doesn’t have infinite scaling, so once I’d bought all the upgrades, I was booted back into playing an actual tower defense, while having absorbed zero lessons about the nature of the game over the last 5 hours.

    And it’s a shame because SWHOP does have what feels like a competent set of tower defense bones. Orcs move and flow in satisfying waves, towers feel physical in a fun way. Deploying towers and setting their line of fire is fun. And while I find the actual map designs a bit unsatisfying, their scale in parts of the end game is incredibly enjoyable. This doesn’t feel like an incremental game with another system bolted onto it, it feels like a tower defense game that got consumed by the nature of it’s upgrade system.

    Side Note: I will say though, I don’t get the line of fire system in this game. The short version is that you can set up a cone, and all tower shots will be within that cone. The problem is that it’s always better to just keep your shots concentrated on a single choke point then to spray and pray, even with towers like the flamethrower.

    Sir, We Have an Orc Problem gave me the mental feeling of scrolling on TikTok for five to six hours. It’s not really a bad feeling? But it’s not really a pleasant one either. This morning when I woke up, I’d actually forgotten that I’d played this game, despite having spent 6 hours on it yesterday.

    If you know that you enjoy incremental games, and need one to play, this might be for you. Personally, the most value I’ve gotten out of this one is that it’s kicked me out of my funk of not getting any writeups finished.

    I just wish I liked it better.

  • The Maine Renaissance Faire

    The Maine Renaissance Faire

    Note: Normally I would link to things/people I see, but most of these folks don’t seem to have a website, so instead I’m just gonna put the full title of the performer/store/thing in italic quotes near the paragraph about them.

    I went to a Renaissance Faire for the first time recently! It was pretty neat, and for once, I’m writing about an event before it’s completed, so if anything I write today sounds neat, you can get tickets here, and drive yourself down the Acton Fairgrounds in Acton, Maine.

    First though, some photo!

    Yeah, uh. That’s the only photo I took. Sorry.

    Listen, the idea of cheese divination is one of those things I heard, and it just kinda took over my brain for a bit. Now, I did sit down to chat with the women running the both, who is a cheesemonger by trade, and learn about the history of Tyromancy, but I didn’t get a reading done. I just don’t like getting my fortune told for reasons that are neither here nor there to this blog post.

    Still, this is the sorta idea I will absolutely steal for a game at some point in the future.

    (Tyromancy by Rachel)

    Another great thing I saw, but also don’t have photos of was a performer named Sylvan Farelight, doing slight of hand. Specifically, he was running shell and pea games on a small table. There’s something about slight of hand that I find really impressive, so that was another highlight for me.

    (Sylvan Farelight)

    I then spent some time just wandering around the fairgrounds. I’ll be honest, while I can appreciate the effort that goes into a lot of this stuff, some of it isn’t for me.

    That said, I did see two gamified experiences I was very curious about. One I did get a chance to try, and one I did not.

    The one I did try was Treasure Hunt. This was a bit of a cross-faire escape room with various puzzles to solve to collect parts of various clues to solve a larger meta-puzzle.

    I will observe that while I did struggle with understanding these puzzles a bit, my friends did not, and it legitimately might have just been the result of not drinking quite enough water that day, and wearing almost all black, and doing a lot of walking and-

    Look. It might have been dehydration rather then puzzle design.

    [Treasure Hunt X]

    The second one was Adventures from the Wizards Tower! This was slightly larger system that seemed to work a bit like a combo of a stamp rally and DND. I can’t comment on the game experience at all since I didn’t play, but the presentation was incredible, and the folks running it were kind enough to talk to me a fair amount about the system, and how it works.

    One of the interesting things I do remember asking them was how they solved the meta-progression problem, since this is a game that runs across multiple Renn Faires. They explained that since they’re primarily PVE, everyone can contribute to any given challenge, even if for some challenges, some folks are going to be doing more then others, and also that sharing gear was something that had organically sprung up in the community.

    [Adventures from the Wizards Tower]

    Finally, I bought a bunch of 3D printed mini’s that I haven’t started painting yet from The Workshop of Many, and hiked back to my car.

    I do want to make 2-ish quick sidenotes on this one. First, the models I purchased were sculpts from Becca_3D. And second, the general “realistic Pokemon” aesthetic I believe is at least inspired a little bit by the work of RJ Palmer. Just a quick “credit where it’s due” thing here.

    (The Workshop of Many)

    Overall, this was a fun time, and I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had 1. brought a proper costume, and 2. it had not been a 4 hour round trip by car. But yeah, if I was closer I’d probably go again, and if you want to go, the last weekend it’s open this summer is coming right up.

  • Grump Week – Moon Colony Bloodbath

    Grump Week – Moon Colony Bloodbath

    It’s been a little bit since I’ve written about any board games. Not because I haven’t been playing any, but because I’ve mostly been playing old favorites (hello Tiger and Dragon!) or games I don’t think anyone needs me to review (hello 7 Wonders!).

    That said, a newer game has managed to sneak its head into my play sessions recently, and so it seems only fair to give it a writeup.

    Everyone please welcome Moon Colony Bloodbath! Now before we go any further, there’s one thing I want everyone to know.

    I fucking loathe this game.

    Gameplay

    Moon Colony Bloodbath is an engine builder. You start with a population of colonists, some money, and a few building cards. Then, via the power of sweat, grit, and repeatedly taking the mine action, you’ll turn this into a successful moon colony. Or at least, that’s the plan.

    Realistically, that is not actually happening. I have played several games of Moon Colony Bloodbath, and only in one was the end of the game reached, triggered by exhausting the event deck.

    No, the actual goal is to make your colony hold on just a bit longer than everyone else’s. Because despite this being an engine builder, at some point, things are going to start going wrong faster than you can make them go right.

    But first, let’s talk about building your moon colony.

    Each round you’ll flip up and resolve cards from the event deck. “Work” cards will let you take actions like building, mining, gathering food, or research. You’ll also have a hand full of building cards. Building cards are your standard engine building improvements. You take the build action to spend money to put them into play, and they buff your basic actions, or provide some other utility. Mining gets you money for buildings. Harvesting gets you food, and research draws you more cards.

    Most cards though, aren’t action work cards. Most of them are trouble cards, and these will have you pay resources to stay in the game. Maybe colonists, maybe cards, maybe food, doesn’t matter. And while more and more of these cards will be added each round, the total number of actions you can take does not.

    All of a sudden, as the small scale disasters build, you’ll eventually find yourself without any colonists. And now all those precious buildings, all those elegant engine pieces, must be scrapped to produce colonists and keep yourself in the game.

    This, then, is the latter half of the game, where we switch from the “Moon Colony” portion to the “Bloodbath” bit, as you desperately try to keep someone, anyone, alive. You need to keep literally any sort of engine functional for as long as possible before it’s fed into the unceasing maw of the event deck.

    This seems like it would set itself up to be a comedy of errors, but it isn’t. Not really. I’ll talk more about my problems with the tone later, but I’ve found the later parts of Moon Colony Bloodbath to be an exhausting slog. You know that feeling of taking your last turn in a euro game? That one where it’s not tactically logical to do anything but maximize your victory points?

    Moon Colony Bloodbath is taking that turn over and over and over until someone dies. It’s a dull math problem where your choices might not even matter if someone else is doing significantly better than you, and where you will never have enough resources to actually build back up again.

    In short: it ass.

    Now, I will admit that this opinion is not shared by my friends. One loves it, and the other thinks it’s pretty good to great. Well, at least mechanically.

    This brings me to my second big problem with the game.

    Art Direction and Aesthetic

    Despite my complaints above, I think I’d feel more generous to Moon Colony Bloodbath if it felt funnier. It doesn’t for a lot of reasons, but a big one is the art.

    The art of Moon Colony Bloodbath is bad, but not in a “technical execution” sort of way, more that it doesn’t commit to saying or doing anything. A sort of “I don’t think the art director understood what bloodbath means” sort of way. The game seems to be going for a pulpy tone, but never really commits to the bit. Nothing ever rises to the quality of shit like this.

    Or I dunno, stuff like this?

    There’s a real level of comedy you can do with these things, but it’s just not remotely present.

    Then there are the few cards that attempt to be funny… and look, they’re just bad. They’re really bad, and I hate them. One player character that’s a Rastafarian. The flavor text implies he’s giving the moon colonists weed. It’s uncomfortable, and just feels weirdly racist.

    The art direction totally fails to elevate the game in any way, and it sucks because I feel like it’s obvious how to land some of these jokes. There’s a robot that is mechanically butchering and cooking colonists, but its art looks like an ad from a 1950’s Skymall. There’s a locker full of organs, and it doesn’t even elicit a giggle.

    Like. C’mon. Stick a human leg in the pot or something, or a skull on a cutting board. Instead, though, we get this bland miserable retro-futurism Americana.

    I call this a failure of art direction, because as far as I can tell, Franz Vohwinkel (the artist who illustrated the game) has a pretty decent portfolio, especially of magic cards. He seems to be a perfectly good artist.

    But it seems like someone told him he was illustrating a euro game, and forgot to mention that it’s a euro game where everyone fucking dies.

    Anyway

    I don’t like Moon Colony Bloodbath. I find its gameplay miserable and its art static and dull. It provides neither the satisfaction of fictional buildup, or a particularly amusing black comedy.

    It is a slow, grinding, and dusty chokehold of dull math and duller choices.

    Oh! And it’s $50 fuckin bucks!

    [Editor’s note: as someone who bought and loves this game, all I have to say is “skill issue.”]

  • A Rant about Comics Part 2 – Grump Week

    Hey, so this post is a bit of a bummer. Maybe read Part 1 first, where I talk about a bunch of cool comics you should read?

    For the better part of a decade, I’ve been trying to figure out why I quietly loathe most American comics. I’ve gone through a variety of theories, ranging from reasonable to something an incel might hear and go, “Hey buddy, maybe tone that one down a bit.” I’m gonna lay them out here, and discuss why I’ve discarded each one over the years, including the most recent theory.

    Things I thought in high school

    Theory #1 – Japan is just better at comics.

    Yes, this was a thing I actually believed at one point. Look, I was probably 14. I don’t think this anymore mostly because, despite how I sound about this sort of stuff, I’m not a weeb. Nationalism doesn’t really explain it.

    Theory #2 – The disconnect between artist and writer results in garbage.

    Another high school theory, but one I still reflect on a fair amount. The comic that made me discard this was Death Note. After all, if Japan could turn out something like that via a writer/artist collab, clearly the problem didn’t arise from artists and writers having separate visions.

    Theory #3 – Endless reboots, weird numbering, and other stuff make it effectively impossible to actually READ a comic.

    It’s at this point I started looking inward, trying to figure out if perhaps the problem wasn’t with the comics themselves, but with my consumption of them. These days if I want to read something, I know where to find it, but prior to me really understanding the internet, if I wanted to read comics, I had to actually go find them.

    Like, physically in the world.

    So, my theory was that it was hard for me to ever finish a run of an American comic, given how meandering they were, as opposed to something straightforward an easy to read like One Piece, where each numbered chapter just went into the next, and that this was the cause of my dislike.

    Unlike the other theories above, I think this one actually WAS true, at least at some point. But it’s not true for me as an adult.

    Theory #4 – While both Japanese manga artists and American comic book creators work in an industry that demands too much work for too little pay, the differing ownership models is a motivating factor in quality.

    So I moved onto just blaming capitalism. It would be nice if this was the real problem… but here’s the thing: I still don’t think it is, mostly because the shit that manga artists put themselves through is not the sort of stuff you do if you “just want the money.” You gotta start by having some sort of passion for art if you’re gonna work 12 hour days for 6 days a week year in, year out, and even then, you can just fail.

    Things I’ve thought as an adult

    Theory #5 – I am an immature child, and cannot appreciate comics made for adults.

    Again, another attempt at turning inwards. “Perhaps,” I thought, “as someone raised primarily on Shonen Jump, I simply lack the maturity to read stories that aren’t intended for 14 year old boys.” Perhaps I’m just not cool enough for shit like Rick & Morty, or Game of Thrones.

    Anyway, I spent part of this weekend reading all of Something Is Killing the Children, and y’know what? Nah. Fuck you. It is not my fault that I don’t like your slaughterhouse bullshit where we have kids and their families getting butchered by shadow monsters.

    Also, I think some of it is also that we have enough awful shit in the real world like Epstein and the protestors killed by ICE that I simply don’t have the tolerance to be pulled by the heartstrings about this fictional shit. We have real organizations that should care more about children than they actually do, and allow evil things to harm them. They’re called the Florida prosecutor’s office.

    And lest you think I sample unfairly: this is the shit that’s winning the Eisner for best writer.

    So no, I don’t think it’s my lack of maturity that’s preventing me from appreciating your fine writing. I think it’s the fact that I’m tired of watching kids being shredded like tissue paper in service of a narrative that doesn’t seem to do very much.

    Theory #6 – Anything I read from Japan is good enough for someone to want to translate/localize it, while the same is not true of American comics.

    This is one I came up with earlier this year, and I was convinced that I had finally figured it out. See, any Japanese manga I read had to be popular enough to be localized, or good enough that some fan group decided to translate it.

    This, then, meant that when I read manga, I am only ever reading the cream of the crop: the finest cultural exports of soft power sampled and sifted before being passed across to me. Whereas for any given American comic I picked up, I was sifting through a pile of detritus that could just as equally be someone’s magnum opus as it could be their way of paying rent that month.

    And then I read a bunch of popular modern American comics like Absolute Batman, and DC KO, and there just wasn’t a single one I didn’t look at and find myself annoyed by.

    Theory #7 – Format differences mean that American comic book artists and writers are working with far fewer pages than Japanese manga creators, and as a result end up creating an accelerated (and poorer) product.

    This is the closest I have to a working theory, though realistically, it’s probably a combo of a few of the above. Something like Absolute Batman is working with 24 pages a month. One Piece (okay not all the time) gets 16 pages a week, meaning they get more than double the physical space to work with (admittedly on shorter deadlines).

    Surely, then, this is the reason that stuff like Jujutsu Kaisen can spend 64 pages (4 WHOLE CHAPTERS!) on a side showdown between a literal joke character and the secondary villain, whereas DC KO can’t even spend a full 10 pages on having Superman fight Darkseid.

    One Other Quick Rant

    There’s a trope in American superhero comics that I saw crop up multiple times in my binge-read over the weekend that makes the comics all feel incredibly hollow these days. I’m going to devote a small portion of this write-up to shit talking it:

    The Truth Will Save the Day!

    In short, the idea that if you can just show everyone a video of the Bad Guys doing The Bad Thing, you have won. And just.

    No.

    No it fucking won’t. It probably hasn’t had the ability to do this since 2016. Maybe earlier.

    It’s not just comic books that do this. Disclosure Day by Spielberg also has a similar ending, and The Expanse does a bunch of times as well.

    It rings hollow in our age of misinformation, and I find it harder to suspend disbelief for this trope than to suspend disbelief for the latex skin-suits and tighty whities.

    This narrative needs to die.

    In Conclusion

    A lot of popular American comics kinda suck ass. There is no magic bullet to save the world. You should read Guts County, Hilda the 13th, Nothing Doing, and Wrestleheist.

    I’m going to go jump in some freezing water, and then play Mina the Hollower.