Tag Archives: Review

Mobile Gaming Review: “Dungeon Village”

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Mobile gaming is a steadily-growing market. An estimated 50.4% of Americans (as of March) now own a smartphone. But I’ll be honest–when the whole discussion on mobile gaming started, I wondered whether or not it would ever really appeal to me and to gamers like me. Sure, Facebook had shown that social and casual games could be successful for the population at large. My concern was whether or not there would there be games for those who counted themselves as gamers, or whether we’d just be stuck emulating old SNES games.

Gradually though, I saw that the game selection could indeed cater to “gamers”. While there are of course many games designed for a more casual market, we have seen solid products aimed at the more traditional gaming crowd. And perhaps it is little wonder that one of my new favourites was produced where so many of the favourite games from my childhood were: Japan.

Dungeon Village (iOS $3.99, Android $4.99) takes the typical Fantasy RPG formula and turns it on its head. No longer are you the brave adventurer heading into dungeons: instead, it is a town simulation, and you play the guy who runs the town. You offer quests, sell magical items, and eventually (if you’re doing your job properly) host the homes of adventurers. The game itself is not a massive departure from other Kairosoft games in terms of structure or art (you may already be familiar with the first major release from Kairosoft, Game Dev Story).

They definitely are not trying to rewrite the book here, but the formula works and is fun to play. Your adventurers level up and you can spend money to upgrade their equipment or gift them items that they find in dungeons. They also have cheeky names that are references to famous RPG or literary heroes. Clown Stripe and Gilly Gamesh were both pretty amusing.

The town itself is also of great importance, though. Your heroes need facilities to buy weapons and armor, and an Inn (obviously). Later, you can gain access to more advanced buildings like restaurants and combat training areas. These facilities will boost your adventurers’ stats, but they also increase their satisfaction with your town, making them more likely to choose to settle down. Adventurers living in your town generate tax revenue at the end of the year, so keeping them in your town is a good goal to have.

As your town grows in popularity, you’ll find more and more adventurers lining up to defend it. Time to hand out those powerful magical artifacts to complete strangers and pay them to defend your lands and enter strange caves!

The game uses the tried-and-true pixelated graphics from previous Kairosoft titles. I personally love this art style, and as someone who has played through Final Fantasy VI more times than I’d care to admit I am definitely used to it. It fits the genre and feel of the game very well. There’s a fairly good variety of sprites, with different enemy types popping up steadily throughout the game.

The music is repetitive and you will turn it off almost immediately, but that’s essentially par for the course with Kairosoft titles. I recommend cooking up a playlist on YouTube with all your favourite RPG soundtracks and just running that in the background.

As with most Kairosoft titles, you get some excellent first value for your first playthrough, but secondary playthroughs may not be as interesting. Still, for $5 you get your money’s worth in one go, especially if you’re already a fan of the RPG genre. Make no mistake, this game is a gamer’s game. Not only would many of the references be lost on players who are not fans of the genre, but the concept of the game itself is probably not very appealing to them.

I give Dungeon Village a solid 4 out of 5. If it had better replay value and adjustable difficulty levels, I’d bump it to a 4.5. The lack of a decent soundtrack doesn’t really bother me since this is largely something that mobile gaming has yet to anyways.

Have you played Dungeon Village or other Kairosoft titles? Let me know in the comments!

Book Review – “Shadow Ops: Control Point” by Myke Cole

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I was lucky enough to have a book review of Myke Cole’s debut novel Shadow Ops: Control Point published on BuzzyMag.com (the same fine folks who bought my short story “Working Retail” a while back). The review is online at their site now, and I would appreciate it greatly if you’d head over there and check it out.

Here’s a snippet:

If there’s one thing I love in the world more than anything else, it’s literature that plays with genre conventions. So when I read about Myke Cole’s Shadow Ops: Control Point, I rushed over to Amazon and clicked the the button to send it to my Kindle.

You see, Shadow Ops is a fantasy novel. Kind of. Mostly. The main characters in the novel are magic users, sorcerers, but they aren’t in Narnia or Middle Earth. They’re right here in the good ole U.S. of A. Other books have done this, too– Jim Butcher‘s The Dresden Files is probably the closest comparison I can draw–but Cole’sShadow Ops takes this genre mash-up to the next level. If Battlestar Galactica is a military drama that just happens to be set in space, then Shadow Ops is a military drama where the soldiers just happen to have magic instead of M-16s.

The review in its entirety can be read at BuzzyMag.com.

Various and Sundry Things I Learned from the Guild Wars 2 Stress Test Beta

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Guild Wars 2I’ve been a holdout on Guild Wars 2 for quite some time. I have yet to herald it as the “next big thing,” nor have I almost pooped myself in anticipation.

I know, I know. This makes me a bad MMO fan, and potentially a bad human being.

However, last week, one of my friends convinced me over lunch to pre-purchase it. Little did I know that I had done so at the perfect time: four days before the 7-hour Stress Test on May 14. After reading a few snippets and watching a few videos, I narrowed my profession choices down to either Necromancer or Mesmer.

With that being the only thing I had even pseudo-decided upon regarding the game, I logged into the Guild Wars 2 stress test beta and learned various and sundry things, a few of which I’ll outline here. In bullet form!

  • I need a new computer something awful. What I thought was bad lag in SWTOR is like watching live ballet to the way Guild Wars 2 manhandles my system. When the next update to the iMac drops this month or next, I’m investing in a 27-incher to Bootcamp Win7.
  • I play a healer. In Guild Wars 2, there are no healers. (For shame, ArenaNet!) Every class, however, gets numerous self and party heals/support skills. That’ll have to do.
  • I am torn between the Necromancer and the Mesmer. Both are fun, and both have their uses in PvP–which is where I’ll be spending most of my time. I’ll probably go Mesmer and use a staff at release, but we’ll see.
  • I hate loading screens. Hate them. The stress test really was at capacity–which is good. I was stuck at 95% on so many loading screens that I finally just called it a day and went for a ride on my bike. That’s what stress tests are for, after all.
  • Dynamic events are not dynamic at all. They’re just about identical to Warhammer Online‘s public quests, and that’s okay. WAR‘s PQs were the second-coolest thing about the game–the first being the phenomenal PvP no one would play with me.
  • You can PvP at max-level in structured PvP from the moment you log in. I don’t know what benefits/rankings/rewards you can reap from this, but I hope it’s worth doing because I can see myself avoiding the leveling game entirely for this.
  • I hate that I didn’t get a chance to try out WvW-style PvP. One of the loading-screen debacles kept me from moving forward too far. It happens. It’s a beta.
  • Charr = Worgen with horns. They even run like Worgen. I’m tempted to be a Charr Necro.
  • There’s a huge emphasis on story, with dialog cutscenes and everything. It’s neat, but I can’t say that I cared about it one iota. Maybe I will at release. The story’s likely really good, but Star Wars: The Old Republic, despite all its faults, has ruined me on other MMOs’ attempts at storytelling.
  • For a game without a subscription cost, it’s going to be worth every penny. Even in its beta form, it was polished enough to warrant paying the box price. I can’t say I’d stick with it at $15 a month, but I don’t have to make that call. From the few hours I played, it’s definitely worth snagging a copy, even if you’re just a tourist. This game is made for folks like us.

Book Review: “Arctic Rising” by Tobias Buckell

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My whole life, I’ve loved technothrillers. Since Michael Crichton first showed me what it would actually be like to have a pet dinosaur in Jurassic Park, I’ve had a spot in my heart for worst-case-scenario sci-fi thrillers.

Tobias Buckell was good enough to provide me with an ARC of his newest novel Arctic Rising, and I’m happy to say that its bleak, ice-free, near-future earth satisfies my hunger for a good technothriller just as well as Crichton, Koontz, or Brown always have.

The premise of Arctic Rising is engaging from the start: the polar ice caps have melted due to global warming and opened up the actual Northwest Passage (take that, middle school social studies teachers!), which in turn has created a whole new dynamic in terms of international trade, global politics, and climate activism.

The Good

Though the book is pretty different from Buckell’s other science fiction–there are no alien races or wormholes here–there is plenty that is distinctly his. Roo, a mercenary spy the main character Anika meets up with, is a Caribbean-born smart-ass who speaks in the stereotypical pidgin of an islander.

I can’t fault Buckell for Roo’s inclusion because he grew up in the Caribbean himself. As a Southerner, I’m sure that any novels I write that actually take place on Earth will have their fair share of people who say y’all.

Not only is Arctic Rising‘s protagonist a woman, but Anika is also a lesbian. However, nowhere in the narrative is it called-out as being anything out of the ordinary. There isn’t a single mention of the word gay, lesbian, or even homosexual. Nor is Anika treated any differently by any other characters. She just happens to be attracted to women, or more specifically, a drug-smuggler named Vy.

I love that her sexuality isn’t a simple plot-device or point of controversy. Anika is just attracted to women. It’s part of her as a character. Apparently in 40 years, the world will become much more tolerant. I hope Buckell is right on this one.

The Bad

The novel doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere, even though it is. Maybe I’m spoiled by reading too many trilogies and series that take themselves too seriously and try to be way too epic, but Arctic Rising was a short, fast, stand-alone read. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’ve included it here because I felt that the novel could have done for a little tighter plotting.

If anything, the novel suffers from a lack of sub-plots, moving from Point A to Point Z with style and flair, but very little else. It’s fun and it’s quick, but I constantly felt like I was being led to something bigger that never came–even though the climax and resolution were quite explosive.

The Ugly

There isn’t any more. There isn’t a series. Nor is there plans for one (as far as I’m aware, anyway). It was a fast read that kept me enthralled, but I want to know more. I want to know about how the world reacted as the polar ice caps were melting. I want to know about Anika’s past. I want to know what happens to Thule and the Caribbean post-Roo. What happens to Gaia?

Because it’s a stand-alone, I can’t know that, and it bugs me. I’m a sucker for backstory, and I’m the kind of guy who always buys a sequel when I even remotely like a book.

Conclusion

Arctic Rising by Tobias Buckell is a good book. At roughly 300 pages, the book is worth the price of admission. It’s not short; it’s just fast. Even if I hadn’t been given a review copy, I would have happily paid for the Kindle edition and felt no regret.

On top of all that, it has airships. And who doesn’t like airships?

Book Review – “The Raider’s Companion”

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Being a long-time fan of the MMO blog Epic Slant, when Adam “Ferrel” Trzonkowski mentioned he was starting a Kickstarter project for his next book, The Raider’s Companion, my ears perked up. And when he offered review copies it, I couldn’t type the email fast enough.

As a long-time MMO vet and raider, I wondered what The Raider’s Companion could offer me. Having raided in World of Warcraft since Tier 1 was the hotness because there was nothing else available, I thought I was old-school. But no! I actually fall into what Ferrel calls the second generation of raiders, so from the very outset, I knew that The Raider’s Companion wasn’t going to be a few hours of my life reading the same old stuff I get from Epic Slant and countless other MMO blogs.

In fact, The Raider’s Companion feels very fresh because it is written from the perspective of someone who loves raiding. The emphasis in the book is not on getting phat lewt, nor is it on how to best gear your specific character in a specific game. Ferrel instead angles the book from beginning to end around the idea raiding is something you should actively enjoy the vast majority of the time you’re doing it.

Rather than doing a typical review where I talk about the strengths and weaknesses of a book and how the author balances them all, I thought I’d go a different way with this. I thought I would take the three most stand-out quotes in the book and discuss them a bit.

Quote the First: “The Good Ole Days”

Regarding the original EverQuest:

 Groups are formed once more and the strategy is explained in text. “The healers will sit on the stairs and heal the main tank. Everyone else will charge the dragon and do the best they can.” These are simple instructions for a very daunting task, but they are enough. The planning was quite clear in those days. Kill the dragon before you all die.

Doesn’t that just sound fantastic? It does! No raid videos, no addons, no DDR-like movements for your characters. Just you, a hundred other people, and a dragon. Mano a mano a mano a mano…you get the picture.

The example above is from Ferrel’s own EQ guild. Nowadays, even PuG raids have adds to watch for, phases to switch, whatever. He talks about a time when the games were not about numbers or parses. The Raider’s Companion discusses the evolution of the MMO raiding game, and actually does a fine job of making it all feel epic. I could see why raiding became a thing based solely on the book.

Quote the Second: “Are We Having Fun Yet?”

Regarding strategy and banging your head against a wall:

If all else fails, always remember that you can change your mind and try something else later on. Nothing is set in stone, so try to remember to keep your eye on the end goal: enjoying yourself and having a good time.

I am guilty of playing MMOs to win and not to have fun. Sometimes, that boss just has too much fire, and I stand in all of it. My raid leader tells me not to, but I do. Sometimes, there’s that one person in the raid who you know is barely looking at the screen during the fight. Sometimes, your raid leader just might not be able to tell you all how to get from Point A to Point Z by way of all the ridiculous points in-between.

When that happens, just chill out. It’s okay. Remember that you’re playing a game you enjoy with people you like. The end result of MMO raiding is not all the shiny purple items you can use to deck your character out. Those bird shoulders on  your druid are awesome, but what good are they if you hated every second of time you spent getting them?

It’s all too easy to forget that we’re actually playing a game. We treat MMOs like work so often that the raids become a second job. Ferrel does a fantastic job keeping the reader aware that these encounters are supposed to be fun.

Quote the Third: “Storytime”

Regarding how intense the content can be:

It is fine to enjoy receiving a new item. It is perfectly acceptable to lust after a particular piece of gear. Just remember that as a raider, if you make gear your focus, you are on a quick road to burnout. No piece of gear will satisfy you the same way a last-second victory squeaked out against all odds can.

Stories. MMOs are about stories to me, and not the kind of stories that BioWare is telling in Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’m talking stories about you and your friends doing something so stupid, so ridiculous, that it shouldn’t have even been possible. And how it got you from a 3% wipe to a first kill.

All I have to say to my friends is “Hey, remember that time in Wetlands?” and they immediately know what I mean. I had a Warlock in 2004 right after WoW was released, and the game glitched. Instead of letting me run away from the eight-ish oozes chasing me, my gnome was punted all the way across the zone for everyone to see. It wasn’t monumental, and it wasn’t important. But it was funny, so we remembered it.

Each game is different in the kinds of stories you get to tell, but I can’t honestly say that I remember getting very many individual pieces of gear. I remember tons of raids, though. I remember Drewbie calling out Team Retard on Garr. I remember the Priest-call on Nef and how I killed the guildmaster with it. I remember when I finally stood in one too many fires and earned the nickname Professor Stands-in-all-the-fire.

But I have no idea what gear I got any of those nights. I do remember the stories.

Conclusion

The Raider’s Companion could have been just another hack job, wannabe book. Instead, Adam Trzonkowski put together a fantastic little volume here that reads quickly, and honestly, opened my 14-year-veteran eyes to how other kinds of raiders do what they do.

More than anything, the book puts things in perspective. If you’re a new raider, I suggest picking it up so that you can learn what’s going on and gain some perspective. And if you’re an old, grizzled, dragon-slaying veteran, I suggest picking it up so that you can learn what’s going on and gain some perspective.

The Raider’s Companion can be purchased at Amazon (ebook or paperback), Apple’s iBookstore, or directly from Epic Slant Press.