Category: Multiplayer

Q-Up

Q-Up is a lot of different things. It’s a incremental game. It’s a competitive coin-flipping eSport. It’s a weird satire of live service games and tech startups. Oh, and it has a really cool grid based node engine building system, and slightly less interesting, but still compelling item system. Finally, it’s a game that I feel weirdly conflicted about.

Before I go any farther, I want to note that do recommend Q-Up. It’s a weird one, but if you like incremental games/engine building experiences, and enjoy strangeness, you’ll probably have a good time. And if you’re on the fence because of that “incremental game” element, Q-Up generally respects the players time. It took me about 6.5 hours to reach the “end” of the game, and I suspect it would have been closer to the expected 8-10 hours if I hadn’t played a lot of the demo to get familiar with mechanics beforehand.

If you’re the sort of person who really loves incremental games… well, there are some absolutely busted end-game builds, and semi-competitive ladders, and the folks on the games discord seem to be having a good time.

A lot of what I’m going to be talking about here, I already covered in my writeup on Q-Up’s demo. If you want a spoiler free discussion of the game, I suggest you go read that instead.

Q-Side

The premise of Q-Up is simple: it’s the hottest new competitive game on the market. Games are 4v4, and after queuing up, and getting placed in a match, you’ll either be put on Q-Side or Up-Side. A coin will be flipped. If it lands on Q, Q-Side team gets a point. If it lands on Up, Upside team gets a point. First team to 3 points wins.

And yes, this does mean that you as a player have zero agency over who wins or loses any given game of Q-Up. That’s the point. Something something comedy, something something frog.

But just because you can’t influence the outcome doesn’t mean you can’t change the results. After all, it’s not about winning or losing. It’s about getting as much stuff as possible.

Oh The Stuff You Can Get

Q-Up has four main resources, Q, Experience, Gold, and Gems. Lets start with Q.

After each flip in match, you’ll gain or lose Q. Winning the flip starts you out with a positive amount of Q, losing with a negative amount. Q determines your rank, with higher ranks giving more Q, and lower ranks give less.

This amount however, will be adjusted by your characters skills and items, which is as good a place to talk about experience and gold.

Experience points are… experience points. You get enough of them, you level up. When you level up, you unlock skills and skill points to use on the skill grid.

This is the engine building part of Q-Up. The skill grid is a set of interconnected trigger-able nodes. Nodes can trigger when you win, lose, or always. They can do a variety of things, including triggering other nodes. Nodes also have activation stock, a maximum number of times that they can be triggered during a given flip.

It will start out reasonable, and it will rapidly turn into something that is very much not that.

It’s a very fun and unique system, with each of the games eight characters having their own nodes and builds. Some want high numbers of combos, others generate Q by spending gold, or clone items.

Which brings us to gold and items. There’s a shop, you buy items in it. Then you equip those items.

They’re mechanically impactful, and very functional, but there’s nothing here that makes it different from any other item shop.

Which means it’s time to talk about gems! You get gems by ranking up, and recycling unwanted items. They’re used to unlock meta-progression-y style stuff, like the ability to stop shop items from rotating out, and extra item slots, and other things.

And this is the core loop of Q-Up. Play a match, get resources. Spend those resources to improve your build. Rinse, repeat. Often, in the middle to late portions of the game, that’ll involve reworking your build to generate a specific resource you might want, such as gems or experience points, or tweaking to maximize getting as much Q as possible.

So I’ve talked about the mechanics. I’ve talked about the theme. Which leaves the narrative.

Narrative

From here on out we’re talking spoilers. If you want to play Q-Up, this is a good time to leave.

Q-Up trades in a lot of different fields/themes. Fortunately for me, I think I recognize most of them, as they’re related to my job and interests.

This narrative starts out as one poking fun at what I’d generally group as “Live Service Games”, perhaps more specifically the “single match” live service game. League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, CS:GO, that sort of thing. This is where the game stays mechanically, but narratively, it’s going to become Mr.Toads wild ride real fast.

The writing is very good. I wish there was more of it.

I can’t think of a better way to dissect the narrative and the struggles I had with it, without laying the full structure, so here we go.

After you start playing Q-Up, at some point you’ll either get a 3-0 loss, or 0-3 win. This introduces you to Alice and Bob. Alice is the head of a quantum computing company and Bob is the head of the company running Q-Up. Alice and Bob are at least somewhat fighting over the company Bob is running.

This opens the second part of narrative, which is mostly about conflict between Alice and Bob. Notably, it’s also not told in any straightforward way, and most of the information you get given is filtered through the lens of “You just joined this project, and everyone is using terms you don’t understand, and acronyms no one’s explained” sort of energy.

Fortunately, I work in a tech company. I have LIVED this exact experience. Multiple times. So again, I was pretty in my element for this bit.

This is the sort of thing I think you can only write if you actually have worked at one of these tech companies.

Anyway, this culminates with Alice attempting a hostile takeover, and Bob using you, the player, to stop it by proving that Q-Up is a game of skill, and not a game of gambling. You enter the Q-Up championships, and attempt to win your way to Novice rank.

Then things get odd.

I have a hard time summarizing what exactly happens next, because I’m pretty sure this is where the game starts playing around in the space of Information Theory. I don’t know anything about Information Theory.

Anyway, after you get banned from Q-Up by Alice, a sentient artificial intelligence intervenes in order to get you unbanned, and also to use you to free itself. At the same time, the server room for running Q-Up seems to start to collapse, because… again. I think something Information Theory related.

This leads to the finale of the game, where a pair of cosmic intelligence’s attempt to restart the universe.

It’s this last tenth or so of the game where Q-Up completely lost me. Not because it was bad, more so because I was just incredibly confused. The sentient AI part is mostly fine, and foreshadowed pretty hard, but it’s also not really paid off to the extent I would like. The same is true of the cosmic intelligence’s. To me, they just come out of absolutely nowhere, but I suspect that they may be trading in themes or ideas that I’m simply not familiar with.

It left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, because the rest of the game is actually fairly interesting. I was much more invested in Alice and Bob of all things then I was in any of the “whacky hijinks” at the end. And in the last moments of the game, that story got pushed to the wayside for cosmic strangeness.

It also doesn’t help that this last section of the game feels very short and sudden. Things are escalating, escalating, getting exciting… and then it’s all over.

Putting on the Introspective Critic hat for a moment

Given that Q-Up is already trading in a bunch of specific themes in it’s aesthetic and narrative, I think that what is actually happening here is that I am just out of the loop for the joke. This last portion of the game probably isn’t “random whacky hijinks”, but is instead Whose On First for quantum computing or information theory, or perhaps some third thing I’m completely unaware of.

Maximum insider baseball that I am no longer an insider for.

But it was incredibly jarring, because I had been an insider for the rest of it, and the result was that a narrative I cared about, that I was curious and excited about, suddenly felt like it pulled a Fish Guys.

It just left me feeling really weird about a game that I had, until that point, really enjoyed.

Hat is off, back to final thoughts

I like 90% of Q-Up. I like it’s mechanics, I love the theming and UI, and I love most of the story.

It’s the suddenness with which the story ends that really bummed me out more then the weirdness, if I’m being honest. Everything felt like it wrapped up too quickly. Q-Up is not a very long game narrative. The majority of the game takes place across 70 or so emails, and the finale across another 30. And that’s probably overcounting a bit.

Q-Up was $9. I think I got my moneys worth. But I wish I felt different about the ending.

I wish I could call the game a masterpiece, instead of just very good.

P.S. This is not my finest write-up. If it feels stitched together, that’s because, well, it is. I wrote 3-4 different versions of this, and none of them were exactly what I wanted. So instead, you get this mess. Sorry about that.

Have some gems.

Also.

TowerFall

Do you remember the Ouya? The Kickstarted Android console that cost $100 ($140 adjusted for inflation) and was never a commercial success? The one that released 12 years ago?

No? You don’t? Oh. Okay. Well, it was sort of a thing. Not a “thing” thing, but boy did people like talking shit about it, and writing articles about how it was a doomed to fail.

Anyway, when it released, one of its exclusives was TowerFall, a 2d multiplayer platform fighter. It became the Ouya’s best selling title, at just around 7000 copies.

TowerFall ended up being ported to all the other consoles, including Switch, and it was on Switch that I ended up playing it recently at a friend’s birthday party.

And this is how TowerFall should be played. A full six players. A giant screen. Preferably a crowd of onlookers. In this sense it resembles one of my favorite discontinued games, Killer Queen Black.

Unlike Killer Queen Black, though, TowerFall is every person for themself. Everyone starts with three arrows. Getting shot with an arrow or goomba-stomped kills you. After only one player is standing, the next map is loaded, and the next round starts. Victory points are awarded for kills, and the first person to reach 10 points wins.

Of course, there are a few more meaningful mechanics. There’s a dash that allows the player to grab arrows out of the air, and the screen wraps both directions, so falling into a pit to go up is an entirely viable strategy. There are also a few subtle catch up mechanics, as players who fall significantly behind get a shield that blocks one hit.

Perhaps your friends don’t want to turn each other into pincushions. That’s okay! There’re also a few co-op campaigns: a 1-4 player one, and a 1-2 player one. It’s hard to find much to say about these. They’re fine, and mildly interesting, but in most cases I’d rather be playing the versus mode.

As a fairly mild point of criticism here, I will say that I generally dislike how the ideal strategy for some of the co-op modes was memorizing when/where certain enemies would spawn, and setting up to kill them immediately upon spawn.

It’s hard to think of much else to say about TowerFall. It’s fun. It’s fine. I think it’s best as a party game or in person couch co-op, and it’s one of very few games that works on one console at six players.

I’m going to get back to worrying about the collapse of society now. See you folks next week.

Interestingly, the designer Maddy Thorson would later go on to make Celeste, which sold a million copies in under a year. Slightly more than TowerFall’s 7000 on the Ouya.

Note: I usually try to take my own screenshots, but this week I’m just using images from the Steam store page, and I usually prefer to call it out when I’m doing that. Anyway. Hope your week is going better than mine.

Deadlock Preview

This isn’t a review.

Deadlock isn’t out yet. You can’t even play it without a closed beta invite.

They’re not hard to get, but still.

By the time Deadlock is out, it’s likely that it will have morphed into something completely different from what it currently is.

That said, even in its current state, I’ve already played 80 hours. So I do want to talk about why, and why you might enjoy this game enough to try to play it now.

Why You Might Like Deadlock

Deadlock is Valve’s most current semi-public project. It’s a MOBA/FPS hybrid, taking elements from both genres, and adding a few new elements of its own.

And that’s the first reason to try it. Most of the folks I’ve been playing with are Dota 2 and League players. If you really enjoy those games, and generally like FPS games, Deadlock might be for you.

The other big reason is if you have an appetite for novelty. There hasn’t been a game like this in a long time. Monday Night Combat and Super Monday Night Combat servers went down ages ago, and Deadlock offers a much greater depth from its MOBA elements than those games ever did. There’s also tons of weird interactions to discover, tricks to find, and just general space to play and explore the game’s systems.

This is a game where (at least at my skill level) it’s possible to win a fight with expert positioning and the ability to click heads. It’s equally possible to just have a good enough sense of the map to farm everything out, and show up to the fight with flush with items and wipe everyone out with abilities while being unable to shoot anything.

These are the things that make me love it. But they might not work for you.

…and Why You Might Want to Wait

Deadlock is unfinished. It is probably not quite balanced yet. And it can be kind of buggy. And has a bit of a learning curve.

Most of these (outside of the bugs) are positives for me. But if you’re the sort of person who gets really annoyed when someone on the enemy team shows up and kills you in two seconds, you may have a bad time. If you’re the sort of person who gets annoyed when a creep wave bugs, and doesn’t push properly, you are going to suffer.

And there is a big learning curve. Just like Dota, this game has dozens of items to learn, many of which have activated abilities. It also has one of the densest maps I’ve seen in a MOBA, and even after the 80 hours I’ve played, I only have a general sense of where everything is.

Also, the art, while quite good, is not up to the Valve standard just yet.

Overall, Though

Deadlock is likely to be my most played new game of the year. It’s entirely possible it actually replaces Dota 2 as my “lifestyle” game, a slot that Dota 2 has occupied for almost 10 years.

There’s no reason to rush to play Deadlock just yet. It’s likely that it will be a much more complete game by the time it reaches a full release. But while there isn’t any reason to rush in, I really cannot overstate just how fun I’ve found Deadlock to be.

Stalcraft

Ed Note: Most of this writeup was written earlier in the year, around Christmas, as was my time in the game. Some of this info may be out of date. Still, Stalcraft is weird enough for me to want to talk about, even if I don’t plan on playing anymore in the near future.

Stalcraft is strange. If you want to know why and don’t care about context, you can skip ahead to the section titled “The Weird Bit.” If not, let’s lay some groundwork, and do a normal review before everything goes off the rails.

Stalcraft is a F2P pseudo-extraction shooter that takes place in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. It’s inspired by the short story “A Roadside Picnic,” using much of the book’s language and terminology. The game’s title is a portmanteau, that thing where you combine two different words into one word. The words in question here are “Stalker” and “Craft”.

If you’re going “Wait, isn’t there another game that does this?” don’t worry. We’ll come back to that.

In the game, you’ve suffered a hallucination, and woken up in the Zone—the game’s shorthand for the Chernobyl exclusion zone. You pick one of two starter factions, then you slowly work your way up through the ranks of various bases, completing quests, and traveling across the map deeper and deeper to try to understand what caused you to end up in the Zone.

Gameplay Loop

After creating a character with one of the game’s two starting factions and being given a brief tutorial, you’re dropped into the Zone with a location for the main story quest, a base to return to, and about 5 bullets.

Most of Stalcraft’s gameplay loop takes place across the game’s various zones. Zones are permanently PVP-enabled between factions, and full of enemies

There are two primary parts to Stalcraft’s gameplay loop. Both parts have the player adventuring out into the zone. One is quests, and the other is just general looting and gathering.

A Hunting We Shall Go

Looting and gathering in Stalcraft is fairly simple. Load up your inventory full of bullets, go into the world, travel to various areas, and shoot everything that moves. Since this is an extraction shooter, if you die, you will drop your stuff. Well, not all of it. Some items, like your weapons and armor stay, as do a few quest items. But ammo, snacks, and med-packs are goners.

Stalcraft equipment follows a pretty standard F2P game sort of model, with each piece of being upgraded from older equipment. Doing so requires gathering various zone based resources. For PVP protection, when you’re killed the resources drop, but other players can’t use them.

Instead, they drop in a backpack, a container that can only be opened by the person who gathered the resources in the first place. The result is that it’s not really possible to progress your gear by PKing, but it is possible to PK for a profit by killing other players. Then ransoming their items back to them.

It’s a very slick piece of design. It forces players to engage with the primary system/loop, while still rewarding player killing, and preventing it from becoming a primary method of progression.

A Noble Quest

Quests, on the other hand, involve the same general “running around trying not to die,” but with a more story directed focus. And for every quest that asks you to kill 10 boars, you’ll get one that’s a bit stranger.

Crawl into a dog kennel, and solve a jumping puzzle.

Solve a mildly frustrating riddle.

Deliver these items.
Into an active volcanic area.

They’re some of the strangest and often incredibly hard things I’ve ever had to do in a video game. Sometimes that’s because they’re janky, and sometimes that’s because… well, you have to cross an entire map of enemy players to get to the place to actually do the damn thing.

The Weird Bit

If you’ve been paying attention, or looking at the screenshots, you might have started to put something together. Or maybe you also play a lot of games.

See, while Stalcraft now is a fully standalone game, that’s not what it started as.

You ready?

Stalcraft is/was a mod/private server for Minecraft, with the majority of the game, setting and world taken from the open world game STALKER, and its sequels.

The end result is that Stalcraft is a sort of weird chimera of design. Why are there so many (awful) jumping puzzles and riddles? Because those are comparatively easy to design and implement in Minecraft. Why do all the characters look the way they do? Same thing. Why are the characters and story so weirdly detailed and thought out? Because the whole thing was almost just ported over from another entire game.

To be clear: at no point did StalCraft team, as far as I’m aware, give a penny to anyone above. They just kind of… built someone else’s game inside their own game, and turned it into a generally fun, if aggravating extraction shooter.

It’s incredibly novel, and I’ve just never seen anyone do something quite like this.

That’s all very nice, but should you actually play it?

I played about 70 hours of Stalcraft before I burned out. Ultimately, this is a F2P game, with F2p monetization. Unless you have a huge amount of time or money to burn, you’re not getting to endgame.

That said, it’s an incredibly unique experience in the F2P genre. It can be tense, funny, and aggravating. I got killed and had my corpse camped, only to run back and die over and over again.

There was also a time I killed someone in an enemy faction sort of out of panic, looked at them, realized I didn’t really care if I killed them, rezed them, and then we just looked at each other and ran off.

I think what makes Stalcraft worth playing is how different, weird and janky it is. It’s not the same as something being good, but compared to so many other games, it’s interesting.

In many ways, the general experience reminds me a lot of Sea of Thieves, though slightly more dangerous. You’re dropped into a playground, full of glass, bits of irradiated metal, and told to go play with the other kids, some of whom will beat you up. And sure, the whole thing is cobbled together: those monkey bars are rusting, and some car somewhere is blasting Russian Christmas carols.

But god, if it isn’t fascinating.

Dinosaurs, Feet Pics, and Palworld

Ed Note: This week’s writeup is a bit of an experiment and possibly the most unhinged thing I’ve ever written. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Part 1: Dinosaurs

I had a cousin growing up who really liked dinosaurs. I only ever saw him during whole family vacations, and one time he made everyone watch an incredibly stupid TV show about what if dinosaurs could travel to present day or something. It was dumb, and when it was over I was glad, because it meant that I no longer had to care about giant stupid lizards. Then I could go back to talking about cool things, like Pokémon.

Left: Cool, Awesome, Knows Ice Beam. Right: Dead, Stupid, Probably a Bird Anyway

These family vacations took place on the beach, and involved long walks up and down the coast. We spent the walks looking for cool animals to put in a bucket of water for a bit, and then put back in the ocean. I also spent a lot of that time talking about how cool Pokémon were, and which one was the best. That’s a really easy question to answer because it’s Kyogre.

This is the best Pokémon and if you disagree you can eat shit.

I have wanted a Kyogre since I was like 9. I am now 29 and the thought of being best friends with a giant whalefish that I could ride through the waves and across the ocean still fills me with sort of indescribable joy.

Which is to say, I have had the fantasy of having my own real life Pokémon for a very long time.

Chapter 2: Feet Pics

The wonderful thing about the internet is that if there is something you really want, and there are enough other people who also really want it, someone will eventually make it and upload it.

The less wonderful part of the internet is that goes in reverse.

Feet pics are probably the most benign version of this. I don’t get off on nicely manicured toes, but enough people do. So if you’re attractive, and know how to file those nails, you can open an onlyfans, snap a few shots below the ankles, and pay your mortgage. It’s the invisible foot of the free market. In modern society there is no god other than money.

Credit to PaladinGalahad. This image contains a link to their deviant art, and if you click on it, you know exactly what you’re getting in to.

In the best case scenario, your kink is widespread enough to either become mainstream (like breasts) or at least popular enough that it gets its own Quentin Tarantino.

Behold, the Patron Saint of Foot People

Chapter 3: Pokémon Games vs Pokémon Franchise

There’s a deep dive in dissecting the Pokémon games, but the short version is that they have been selling the exact same formula for 25 years, and it is a good formula. Well, not good. Passable. These games are passable JRPGs carried by their combat mechanics and let down by virtually everything else. Story, art, progression: they’re all mediocre in Pokémon and sustained by turn-based combat mechanics that are old enough to drink.

The franchise has never changed, but its audience wants more. Pokémon has never once delivered on the desires of its audience. I think the best example of this is Pokémon Go. The game is a pedometer strapped to a GPS with pictures of Pokémon doodled on it. It could have solved world obesity if it wasn’t managed by a company with the dexterity of a walrus on horse tranquilizers.

Behold: A billion dollar game.

The point is: in the same way that some people really like dinosaurs or feet pics, other people really like Pokemon.

Chapter 4: Enter the Challenger

The well of discussion related to Palworld has been poisoned. The arable land it sits on has been burned. The earth has been salted. Because on our internet it’s more profitable be a pundit with quick takes than engage in being a reasonable human being.

Everyone discussing Palworld falls into one of two camps: they are either ready to suck the game’s developers off, or they are trying to find the devs’ addresses so they can send them a mailbomb. There is not a lot of middle ground.

Palworld is the incarnation of the open world Pokémon game that a subsection of Pokémon fans have wanted for 20 years. It is a game a game where you can capture a mammoth the size of a school bus. It is a game where you can hatch and ride a falcon.

Palworld materializes a fantasy that some audiences have had for longer than they’ve dreamed of threesomes, or having a stable job and being a homeowner. This is ultimately what Palworld offers. If that is not a dream you have chased for a majority of your life, you are likely to be disappointed.

What you’ll find is an open world crafting sim with a monster collection mechanic, and more bugs than bug type creatures. So far I’ve seen an infinite duplication glitch, a grappling hook that doubles personal lag switch, more pop-in than a pop-up book, enemies and friendly units unable to path, and a full on multiplayer game save file with over 25 game hours just get deleted.

This game is buggy as hell, and I’ve played 40 hours of it. And I want to play more.

Palworld sold 6 million copies because it satisfies, even poorly, a dream I think many of us have had for years. It is at best serviceable and at worst barely functional.

The game fulfills some of my deepest fantasies, but not even I would not argue that it is a good game. It is a functional game. Everything about it works and is fine.

I love Dumud so much.

But where other games ask me to do dumb shit like mine rocks, this game lets me mine rocks with a giant fish. Somehow that is enough to make me play 8 hours straight after work without eating.

In another game, if an NPC I controlled got stuck on a cliff, and starved because it couldn’t find it’s way down, I would lose my shit. Here I just shrug and carry them back to the food bowl.

Seriously, how did he even get up here.

Palworld doesn’t feel meaningfully innovative in almost anyway. Even its creature designs feel uninspired, and the rest of the game feels like it was built out of assets purchased from the Unreal marketplace. It’s a bizarre mish-mash of aesthetics and theming, and has some really weird design.

And none of that matters, because it has a fat fish boy and I love him.