MrBlueSky, Author at Gametrodon

So you’ve never played a Pokémon game and you want to know what all the fuss is about.

One of the challenges in writing about games is that it’s often easiest to compare them to other games. The problem is that this is useless to readers that don’t have similar lived experience to you, and so you probably end up subjecting a non-zero portion of readers to this:

Never Seen Star Wars — Credit: Randall Monroe of XKCD, a webcomic that’s much funnier than my blog. Used under Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 Generic license. I think I’m doing this right, please don’t sue me Randall.

In this situation there are two options: Option 1, which is much easier, is to just sort of roll with it and everyone who doesn’t like and experience the things you like can suck it. Option 2 is try to add to your writing some sort of intro or explanation, or at least an easy gateway to the subject at hand.

This writeup exists because I realized I was doing that exact thing in my Pokémon Legends: Arceus review earlier. Instead of adding several extraneous paragraphs to that review, we have this post.

Anyway, Pokémon games! I’m a big believer that the best way to understand a game is to play it, so if you’ve never played a Pokemon game before, and you’re not sure where to start, here’re my suggestions on how to enjoy the series.

Go buy a Nintendo DS or 3DS, and a copy of HeartGold or SoulSilver, and play through that. The console will cost you between $90-120 bucks, and the game will cost you between $100 and $1200 dollars.

Gametrodon Alternate Option: If you want to avoid spending more on the game than the console, I personally recommend you pick up Alpha Sapphire or Omega Ruby instead, but you will need a 3DS for those ones.

As video game piracy is a very serious crime, I under no circumstances advise you to download a pirated ROM of the game, and load into something like DeSmuME or another emulator of your choice. Emulation is bad, bad, bad, and it’s your fault for wanting to play a 13 year old game whose price has skyrocketed to ridiculous levels because there’s no digital download or alternate purchase options available, you filthy consumer you.

In any case theoretical fictitious person, now that you’ve finished that playthrough, congratulations! You’ve played what is generally considered the best mainline game in the series. Every meaningful and primary mechanic that has been introduced over 25 years is present in that game. Cool!

Perhaps you don’t want to do that. Perhaps you have other things to do with your time or money. ~~Perhaps you think trying to figure out which torrent is the game, and which one is just a 30 gig WEBM of muppets fucking while Ram Ranch blares out of your speakers is not a fun time.~~ In that case, here’s a very brief summary of the Pokémon series.

A Very Brief Summary of the Pokémon Series

Pokémon is a 25 year old game series. In it, the player takes on the role of a child who wants to become a Pokémon trainer. Pokémon are, for lack of a better way of putting it, magic animals that can be caught in small spherical capsules called Pokeballs. The player is generally given a single starting Pokémon, but must catch all future Pokémon by battling and catching them.

Pokémon have several traits for battling, invluding their species, typing, stats, and moves. Species is the type Pokémon, i.e. Pikachu or Squirtle. Typing is an elemental affinity that gets used as part of damage calculation, both when attacking, or being attacked, like Electric or Water. Stats are also used as both part of damage calculation, and determine action order in combat. Moves are actions a Pokémon can take in combat. A Pokémon can know up to 4 moves at any point in time. Move effects can vary heavily, from simply dealing damage, to inflicting status effects, to temporarily changing stats or other features. There are a variety of other mechanical systems that can differentiate two Pokémon of the same species that might at first glance appear to be identical. They won’t be covered here.

The player can also battle other trainers’ teams of Pokémon. The battle system is one of the games’ two main systems. While it has received a variety of tweaks throughout the years that have changed the strategies and tactics available, the general base has remained the same. The player can bring up to six Pokémon into a battle, and opposing NPC’s or human players can do the same. Battles are turn based, and each round each player chooses an attack from a menu. There are several factors that can play into which attack gets executed first, but the primary one is whichever Pokémon has a higher speed stat. When an attack hits and would do damage, the amount of damage is modified by several factors including the type of the attacking Pokémon, the type of the move, and the type of defending Pokémon.

For example: fire does extra damage to grass, grass does extra damage to water, water does extra damage to fire. There are also secondary mechanics that can modify/nullify move damage, such as Pokémon abilities. When a Pokémon runs out of HP, it can no longer fight. The player’s Pokémon gain experience points for knocking out opposing Pokémon, both in trainer battles, and wild battles, and level up when they gain a certain threshold of experience points. Whichever trainer runs out of Pokémon that can still fight first is the loser. When the player loses a fight, they lose a small amount of money, and are then returned to the last Pokémon center they visited, with no other penalty.

While exploring the world, the player will end up in random encounters and can attempt to capture wild Pokémon. Doing so requires using a consumable item called a Pokeball, or one of its variants. Different variants have different success rates, but generally speaking, lowering a wild Pokémon’s HP increases the chance of the attempt being successful, and inflicting it with various status conditions can also increase the chance of success. While the player can catch a massive number of Pokémon, only 6 can be carried with them at any point.

In terms of story and game progression, the player is given a hard goal, and a soft goal. The hard goal is generally to complete a series of battles with challenging trainers, almost always called gym leaders, and the soft goal is to catch at least one of each species of Pokémon in the game. The hard goal is what dictates actual progression between areas, with the player being unable to progress past a given point without defeating a specific enemy trainer. The form of these blockcades can be both organic, i.e. defeating that trainer gives the ability to cut down a small tree, and the player’s path forward is blocked by a tree, or inorganic, such as the NPC simply refusing to let the player past until they have been defeated.

The game worlds tend to be made up of towns populated by shops, small points of interests, and the gyms mentioned above, and are separated by various paths and small dungeons. Almost all towns have a Pokémon Center, where the player can restore their Pokémon to full health, and also change out the Pokémon they’ve caught with the ones currently on their team. Almost all games in the series are fairly linear in requiring the player to move through towns and challenges in a specific order. That said, almost every area is able to be revisited later once the player gains the ability to travel quickly to or between towns via flying Pokémon at some point in the game.

After collecting all the badges from the gym leaders, the games then generally have a final challenge in the form of a harder dungeon, followed by an area called the Pokémon League—several more difficult trainers in a row. Usually once the player enters this zone, they cannot back out until they either defeat all the trainers, or lose.

After this goal is completed, the player is often given free reign to explore the map at their leisure. This portion of the game tends to be referred to as the post-game, and what it contains can vary quite heavily between individual entries in the series. Some games contain bonus continents, while others simply add a few additional dungeons, with most falling somewhere in between.

Games tend to be released in pairs, with each given pair offering basically the same story and gameplay experience, but with some minor differences as to which Pokémon are available to be caught. Many games have some form of connectivity with other games, allowing Pokémon caught in older games to be transferred to newer ones, but usually only after the player completes the post-game.

And this concludes a brief summary of the mechanics of Pokémon games. The games have plenty of other features, some of which are common to many of the games, and others that only appear in one or two. But the core elements between the games—exploring, battling, training, and catching—are present in all of them. Anyway, I’m going to finish writing the actual review of the new game now.

Nobody Saves The World

Nobody Saves The World is great, and you should play it.

Nobody saves the world is pretty great. Between its use of its ability combo and form swapping mechanics, I found it to be an incredibly fun game. The only problem I have with the gameplay is that it mouse/keyboard simply doesn’t play well. A controller is basically required. Otherwise I had a fantastic time with it.

Nobody Saves the World is played from a top down perspective, where you take on the role of the Nobody, a short, blank eyed sort of blob person with no memories of their past. After waking up in a dilapidated shack, and “borrowing” a magic wand from the home of the great wizard Nostramagnus, you set off on a quest to find Nostramagnus, save the world, and figure out how exactly you got here in the first place.

I was gonna post a real zoomed out picture of the world map, but then I realized since this was from my NG+ file, it gave some pretty massive spoilers. So have a smaller one instead.

The magic wand you ‘borrowed’ ends up being the key to all of this, granting you the ability to shift forms. You start out only being able to swap between your pale blobby self and a rat that’s somehow still better in combat than your blobby self. But you’ll start to unlock more forms fairly quickly, such as Knight, Ranger, Magician (the rabbit-from-hat kind) and Egg.

There are 18 total forms available, of which I’d say 17 are meaningful and useful. (Plot twist: the useless one *isn’t* egg.)

There are two big things about the transformation system in Nobody Saves The World that I like, but explaining them is going to require a little bit more discussion of the other half of the game’s title: the “Saves The World” bit.

See, it turns out that two big problems have popped up at about the same time. The first problem is that the great wizard Nostramagnus who you “borrowed” the magic wand from has disappeared. The second problem is that a giant hivemind flesh blob thing called the Calamity has showed up and is trying to eat the entire world. Presumably Nostramagnus would deal with this if he wasn’t missing.

Anyway, since you have the magic wand, a few other characters decide that you might as well help collect pieces of the gem needed to reseal the Calamity, while they search for Nostramagnus before the world gets treated like a buffet.

Finding these gem pieces, all of which have ended up in large dungeons around the world, sealed by wand stars, is your primary goal. In order to unlock the dungeons, you’ll need to get enough wand stars, and occasionally convince the people guarding these places to let you in. As it turns out, “I am a very legitimate individual, let me through” is actually a pretty terrible way to get into a sacred mausoleum.

The Headquarters of the New League of Wizards. (The New LOW)

I think that’s enough background to give a good picture of the game’s primary gameplay loop. Explore to find locked dungeons, towns, and other stuff. Do side quests and mini-quests to get more wand stars, and unlock the game’s main dungeons. Clear the main dungeons to get MacGuffins to advance the story, giving you more areas to explore. I don’t think explanation quite does justice to how much fun doing all of the above is.

But anyway, remember when I mentioned several paragraphs ago that I like the game’s transformation system for two reasons? Let’s get back to that for a moment. A lot of games with transformation systems seem to use them as glorified keys. Turn into a penguin for the ice zone. Turn into a ninja for the stealth zone. Turn into a cop for the donut zone. But outside of the respective zones, each of those forms is often fairly useless.

NSTW doesn’t do that. While there are a few situations for where you need a form to travel, even those tend to be fairly open (i.e., if you need to get over a large body of water, the turtle, ghost, dragon or mermaid are all equally viable.) But the meat of the transformation system is all about combat, and it feels fantastic.

Form swapping can be done from both the menu screen, and by using the scroll wheel on the fly.

NSTW resembles an action RPG. Each form in Nobody Saves the World has a basic attack, and a passive ability, in addition to its base stats. These two abilities are locked onto that form, and they are fairly varied. As an example, the horse’s basic attack is a kick that hits behind the it, while the slug’s basic attack is a series of small projectiles that are fired after a brief charge time. The strongman has large slow attack that hits most of the area in front of him, while the ranger fires arrows. All these basic attacks regenerate mana when they hit an enemy.

But the forms aren’t limited to these attacks. As you rank up a form by completing its quests, you’ll unlock additional attacks, and when you hit various thresholds for just leveling in general, you’ll unlock additional passive slots.

Both the additional attack slots and passive slots aren’t locked however. You can switch them out with the attacks and passives of other forms that you’ve unlocked.

Here’s an example: the slug has one of the lowest base movement speeds in the game, but gets access to an ability that grants it 150% movement speed, and leaves a trail of slime on the ground behind it. You could equip the slug with the generic ability that raises its base movement speed to flat value that can’t be lowered. But you could also take that speed boost ability and put it onto the horse, who has one of the fastest movement speeds in the game, boosting its speed to ridiculous amounts, and traverse the map exceedingly fast. Of course, that still risks you running out of mana, so you’ll equip the ability that lets us spend health as mana, and now you have a turbocharged horse leaving a trail of slime behind it as it rockets across the map.

Maybe that’s not good enough though. Perhaps you want to add the strongman’s passive that makes it so that whenever you would bump into an enemy while slime sliding, you knock them back and deal damage to them if they collide with anything. Maybe you want to add the rat’s passive to build poison on hit, or the dragon’s that increases crit chance against the already slowed enemies.

Nobody Saves the World is absolutely chock full of interactions like this, and it encourages you to use them. Every single form has uses, and is fun to play, giving you a heavy amount of customization while also keeping the forms different through their built in basic attacks, and single locked passive.

And perhaps most importantly, Nobody Saves The World knows this, and it tries to show you these combos and tricks. Many of the quests to rank up a form require you to do something that the form’s basic skills won’t allow, and you have to figure out how to mix and match to best meet that requirement.

In addition, not every trick will work in every dungeon. Some dungeons won’t have healing items. Some dungeons will have enemies that are status immune. In one particularly interesting one, all damage dealt both from and to enemies is multiplied by 9,999, and this dungeon isn’t a gag or a joke! It’s a puzzle to be solved with clever ability usage and munchkin tactics.

There’s a few parts to the combat system I’m not even covering here, such as status effects and elemental wards, but I want to talk about another thing the game does as well.

Purely on its combat alone, Nobody Saves The World would be great. However, in addition to that, it has some incredible art, and great writing. The feel of the world reminds me of something like Gravity Falls: a bright, vibrant place but with some bite to it. There are a lot of fairly funny moments, and also a few pretty powerful ones.

Okay, so let’s wrap this up.

I personally think that the highest form of praise that can be given to any piece of media is to engage with it, and for games that means playing it. For Nobody Saves the World, I played through the whole game, and then started the game’s New Game+ mode, and played through all of that. I’ve hit the game’s level cap, gotten every single Steam achievement, and completed every quest. The game is just incredibly fun, and the world, writing and art is so good that I went out of my way to play the whole thing twice.

Nobody Saves the World is available on Steam, and various consoles. It’s like $25, and its absolutely worth it.

PS: For anyone wondering how the egg could possibly be useful… Despite its incredibly low stats, it has a self heal ability. The heal doesn’t heal too much HP, BUT when you shift forms, your HP % stays the same, and if you equip the “Spend life as mana” passive, you heal more than you take. So you can switch to the egg, heal up to full, and then switch back to another form and be back at max health.

PPS: The second highest form of praise (and probably the first highest if you’re actually the developer) is buying the game for other people. I did that too.

Lost Ark

The mechanical gameplay of an ARPG, and the…. well, everything else of a F2P MMO.

Author’s Note: It turns out writing a review of an entire fucking MMO is hard. As such, this article is an overview of my feelings on Lost Ark. And while I planned on writing more about the game, after about 360 hours of playtime, I never got around to it, and now it’s almost 2023. So take this writeup as you will: a non-MMO players feelings on the game about 2 weeks post-release.

Lost Ark is a MMO-ARPG that was first released in Korea in 2018, and got published worldwide by Amazon about 2 weeks ago. I’ve had a lot of fun playing it so far, but I don’t like how it handles its in game cash store. Ignoring its grindy mechanics, there’s what amounts maybe 20 hour opening campaign that was quite fun to play through, and if you like ARPGs, but not MMOs, it may be worth downloading just to play through that.

Okay, that covers all the big points I’d like to make about the game, as per the Gametrodon editorial policy of not making you read 15 paragraphs to figure out if you’d like the game. Now it’s time for those 15 paragraphs, starting with a bit of context on the sorts of games I like. It’s relevant, I promise.

I dislike MMOs about the same amount that I do enjoy ARPGs. I have tried WoW multiple times and bounced off. I did the free trial of MMO Final Fantasy, and had pretty much the same results.

For ARPGs, though, Path of Exile is my second most played game EVER after Dota 2, and I’ve been playing Dota 2 for over 11 years at this point. Steam says I have 1600-ish hours in PoE, and all of that time was before I switched over to using the game’s standalone launcher.

Anyway, the point is:

1. Oh god I’m old, and I’m going to die
2. Lost Ark is theoretically a MMO-ARPG. This means it’s a combo of two genres, one of which I love, and the other I… well. Hate is the wrong word. Hate implies some sort of emotion. And I simply don’t care about MMOs.

Anyway, if you’re wondering how I feel about Lost Ark, all you really need to know is that instead of writing this article, I’ve just been playing the game non-stop. I sat down yesterday to write this, told myself I’d log in to get some screenshots, and then played for something like 5 hours.

The only reason I’m not playing right now is that I know that if I so much as boot the game up, the probability of this article being finished today drops to zero.

This is not to say that Lost Ark is perfect. I’ve logged ~~113~~ 146 hours in it so far, and I have some issues with the game. But I’m also not planning on stopping playing anytime soon. In addition, there are so many systems involved in Lost Ark that I can’t cover them all. So instead I’m going to try to give an overview of the game’s portions, and enough info to let you decide if you think you’d have fun with it.

A lot of other folks I’ve seen playing the game have divided the game into early game and post game sections. I don’t hate this categorization, but I’m going to break the content down a little differently.

There is a solid early game campaign that is fairly linear, and has zero freemium bullshit. It’s not too different than playing through the story portion of Path of Exile, or the Diablo campaign. At the same time, it’s also sort of a tutorial for later content.

Generally speaking, I liked these portions of the game. The story is a solid B, the design of many of the actual areas is impressive, the dungeons are fun spectacles, and it’s just a solid ARPG. I want to make a quick special shout out to one specific feature here though, and that’s questing. See, Lost Ark looked at every other game that has you go out, collect eyeballs, and then return to Fred the Eyeball Eater and went “What if we just made it so that after you finish the quest, the person you turn into was in the direction you needed to go next as part of the main story instead of forcing you to trudge back into town with the eyeball sack” and it makes things flow a lot smoother. There’s almost no back tracking required for quests as part of the story progression.

I also really like how Lost Ark’s skill system works. You start with a large set of your abilities unlocked, and you can respec your combat abilities for free. This makes quickly switching things up feel fairly painless, and not the slog that it can be in something like PoE. I will also say that while playing through this first portion of the game, while I took a few deaths, there was nothing challenging enough to make me want to switch up my build. My main was an artillerist, a rocket launcher-toting DPS class, and it wasn’t until end game and raids that I actually read though what my abilities did.

The other part of Lost Ark though is the “end game” content, and this is where the Freemium and MMO genres rear their (ugly) heads. At certain points in the story, you’ll be blocked from progressing to the next part of story content until you reach a high enough item level. The way this works is incredibly simple: you stick your item into a gear upgrader, feed it magic shards until it’s full, and then spend more resources to try to upgrade it.

You can also just move your upgrade level to another piece of gear via gear transfer, though this does destroy the gear used as an input.

You’ll note that I said “Try,” because in Lost Ark, you only have a chance to upgrade your gear. If it fails, you’ll need to gather materials to try to perform the upgrade again.

Author’s Note: Apparently this a common mechanic in some Korean live service games. At least in Lost Ark, you only lose the materials invested in the failed attempt, instead of apparently destroying or downgrading your item?

So how will you get these materials? Well, by engaging in either the end game content, or exploring the world. Let’s start by talking about end game content. There’s a bunch of it, and it includes the following:

Chaos Dungeons – AKA “murder massive packs of enemies with your friends.”

Guardian Raids – ARPG Monster Hunter where your teammates are new to the idea of “not dying.”

Abyssal Dungeons – MMO-style raids, where you’ll learn that no one knows the raid mechanics, including you.

There are also several other modes, including PVP, Platinum Field, and Cube Dungeons.

While you can run end game content almost as many times as you want, you can only really get rewards from a given number of runs per a day. If you want more gear and equipment, you’ll have to find somewhere else to earn rewards (most likely something in the game’s islands and other content systems). You could also buy gear off the game’s in-game market, or from one of the gold farming sites you’ll see advertised by the bots spamming many of the chat channels day and night. But, most likely you’ll get them from islands.

Prepare to spend a non-zero portion of your time waiting around for Islands to pop, and not even be made about it, because TOOKI TIME.

Islands are one of the biggest portions of Lost Ark’s content. After a given point in the story, you get a boat, and can sail around, stopping on various islands. Islands tend to have their own stories and mechanics which can range from being mostly self-contained, to sending you on sprawling quests across the rest of the entire world, to just being permanent PVP murder holes.

Okay, so now that we’ve talked about everything I like about the game, let’s talk about the monetization.

Lost Ark is not the greediest or unfairest game I’ve ever seen in terms of monetization. With that said, it is 100% a “Pay for Convenience” sort of game. The game has a membership system at $10 a month that provides a variety of conveniences, and makes it so you don’t have to pay a fee to use the game’s intercontinental teleports. In addition to that, the game’s premium currency Crystals can be used to purchase gold somewhat like how WoW’s membership tokens work. Crystals can also be used to accelerate research cooldowns at your base, instantly finish daily quests, and reset the timer on stored warp points called “Bifrosts.” In simplest terms, there is no cash shop selling godly weapons, but you absolutely can spend real money to purchase materials to upgrade your gear.

Overall though, I’ve found Lost Ark fun. There are a variety of systems and collectibles I haven’t really touched on in this article, including the world bosses and timer events, the Stronghold mechanics, and skills and how the passive abilities called engravings work. But the end result is fun game, even if it has some weirdness, like the gender locked classes, and Pay 2 Progress Faster mechanics.

Peggle Deluxe/Peggle Nights

Author’s Note: Between various things, this week has been long and not entirely productive. As such, this writeup for Peggle is somewhat phoned in. With that said, Peggle and the two games I mentioned yesterday are worth playing, but this writeup is somewhat content light.

I have a hard time writing a “review” of Peggle for the same reason I’d have a hard time writing a review of a jar of Peanut Butter. There’s a lot similarities between the two, mostly the fact that if you place either of them in front of me, leave, and then return several hours you will discover that I have consumed the entire thing, and upon asking for my opinion, I will respond with “It was pretty good,” and “Do you have any more?”

The point is, like peanut butter, I like Peggle, and I enjoy it, but I can’t quite tell you why. That won’t stop me from trying.

Some brief history: Peggle was published by PopCap games, back before they acquired by EA. I mention this not because “Ah, yes, the good old days” but more to give a sense of time, since that was back in 2007 when you could do exciting things like eat in restaurants. And also because the maximum resolution supported is not high.

This image of the menu is maybe 80% to scale.

So, if you expect things like “adjustable resolution” and “performance sliders” you may be about to have a bad time. Otherwise, let’s continue.

You might notice that this review has two games in the title, Peggle Deluxe, and Peggle Nights. And you might wonder why I feel confident in reviewing two games at once, and the answer is simple: Peggle Nights is effectively just an addon pack for Peggle Deluxe. Peggle Nights has new levels to play, and one new character. And that’s it.

The game has a variety of modes, including Adventure, which has you play through a series of levels as a character, duels, where you take turns with another player or a computer trying to get a high score, various challenges, and just a freeplay mode.

Outside of the challenge mode, though, the various levels play somewhat similarly. You click to launch balls, and they bounce around hitting pegs.

Green pegs give you a boost based on the character you’re playing, blue pegs give points, and the goal is to get rid of all the orange pegs. If you score above a certain amount of points, you get an extra ball, and if you get the ball to land in the pot at the bottom, you also get an extra ball.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’m just gonna post this GIF and call it a day, since that has to be worth at least several thousand more pictures.

Peggle is simple, enjoyable, and it’s incredibly compelling to going for a high score in a level, or to just try to beat it for the first time in adventure mode. It’s the same sort of pleasure as things like pinball, where it feels like a combination of skill and also just being at the mercy of the board, and as such you just keep playing.

Peggle is something like 15 years old at this point, but you can still find it on Steam and various EA stores if you’re interested, and I am out of effort to continue writing about it, so I’m just gonna end this post here.

Mini-Games – Peglin Demo and Crow Story

Two free things, ones a demo, and ones just a short game to check out.

Today we’re gonna be talking about two very different games, with… actually pretty much nothing in common. Maybe the amount of time it takes you to play through them? They are respectively, Peglin and Crow Story. Oh, also, they’re both free.

Crow Story is a very short 3D platformer. Playing through the entire game will take you less than an hour. You control a tiny little crow, and you try to make it to the end of each level. There is a story, but it’s told without dialogue, and it’s kind of “Blink and you’ll miss it.”

There’s not very much to Crow Story, but the game doesn’t ask much for your time, and as such it’s a perfectly reasonable way to spend an hour, just hopping around, and swearing when you screw up and get thrown off a ledge.

It’s a small, simple project, but it’s a complete project, and I think that’s worth praising. You can play it here.

Peglin is a roguelite game that uses Peggles breakout/pachinko style mechanics for dealing damage. You venture from area to area, collect items, and just try to survive. Right now it’s just a demo on Steam, but it could turn out to be something fairly interesting.

While I’m not sure how I feel about the trend of “What if we took X and bolted on Roguelike Mechanics?”, I like it a hell of a lot more than “What if we took X, made it a freemium mobile game, and added a lottery ticket system?”

You can play the demo here.

That’s all I’ve got for now. More posts up later this week. Dishwashing has been brutal recently.