I'm taking a moment out of attempting Ultimate difficulty on Dragon's Crown to rant about a design flaw that's irritated me since... well, forever, I guess. For as much as I like RPGs, they can be infuriatingly hard to understand sometimes. But first, to show what they could be, we have to start from the beginning.

Easy Numbers: Ranges, Odds, and Modifiers in D&D

I'm a tabletop gamer at heart; I used to be in 4 weekly D&D campaigns simultaneously, I play European board games with the family during the holidays, and have a smattering of experience in games from Paranoia to Call of Cthulhu. The key trait of every tabletop game is everything has to be calculated by the players, therefore the mechanics have to be simple enough for humans to understand after a flip through the instructions and a trial session or two.

For instance, in original D&D, you determined your stats (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, etc.) by rolling 3 six-sided dice and adding their results; if you rolled a 2, a 3, and a 6 for Strength, you ended up with a total Strength of 11. This "roll several dice, add them up" occurs so often in D&D it's written in shorthand as 3d6. From this info, we can quickly infer several properties: stats can be anywhere from 3 (roll three 1s) to 18 (roll three 6s), have an average result of 10.5 ( (1+6)/2 * 3), and follow a sharp bellcurve where it's very tough to get numbers at either extreme (odds are 1/(6*6*6) = 1/216 which is less than 1%). Similar mechanics are involved for seeing whether you hit or miss (roll 1d20+modifier, see if it is equal to or greater than a defense value, yes I know that's not quite how THAC0 worked but that's because they chose a stupid way of calculating it) and seeing how much damage you do (roll several dice, add a modifier, subtract any resistance the target has, while it can get messy like 7d8+3d12+23-15 it's usually something simpler like 4d8+23). While some games do some tricks with their dice rolls, such as "roll 4d6, discard lowest roll" or exploding dice aka "every time you roll max number on a die, roll it again and add it to the result", the results of these modifiers are simple to understand ("discarding the lowest roll makes the result lean towards the higher end of the range" or "exploding dice means I could roll 50+ damage on a 4d6 if I'm obscenely lucky"), even if determining the exact odds require a calculator and an education in statistics.

So what does this have to do with computer/console RPGs? Tabletop gamers understand that in order to make strategic choices on what to do, you can't just know the inputs or the results, you have to know the mechanics that go on inbetween. It's not enough to be told that your character's stats have a range from 3-18; that range could be the result of a number of different rolls, such as a straight-up 3d6, a 4d6-drop-lowest, a 1d16+2, and so forth, each of which has very different effects on where most results fall in that range. You also need to know what effects those stats have on other rolls, which means knowing their mechanics as well. It's not enough to be told that Strength affects Melee Damage, we need to know how much it affects Melee Damage in order to do anything useful with it.

Well, guess what most computer/console RPGs don't do?

Dumbing Down Players with Black Boxes

Nearly every RPG gives us plenty of stats, and a rudimentary explanation of what they do, but that's it. We understand that Strength increases physical damage, while Constitution makes you harder to kill, but the game's instructions leave us at just that. And while that's fine for basic "I want this guy to hit hard, so I'll stack Strength on him" planning, it falls apart when you're trying to make tougher choices like "do I want more Strength or more Constitution?". For instance, in one of Dark Souls' dirtier tricks, it put soft caps on all of its stats without telling the player; it basically outsourced its instruction manual to its player base to figure out. I'm ranting about it now because it is extremely noticeable in Dragon's Crown, which has multiple modifiers influencing combat damage (like Diablo 3 or WoW) without a detailed stat screen showing the results (unlike Diablo 3 or WoW). For instance, as a sorceress, these are all of the damage modifiers I can get on my wands:

• Damage Range (Example: 187-249)
• +Intelligence (affects magical damage)
• +Luck (affects critical rate)
• +% Damage Dealt
• +% Critical Rate

Note there's 2 pairs of modifiers that do similar things, except one appears to be an additive modifier while the other seems to be a multiplicative modifier. Or are they? Does having two +50% Damage Dealt modifiers results in 200% damage (additive: 100%+50%+50%) or 225% damage (multiplicative: 100% * 150% * 150%)? I don't know. Do I get more damage out of +25 Int or +20% Damage Dealt? I don't know. What exactly does a Critical do? I don't know. I can't even answer the simple question of "which wand does more damage" without either experimenting and taking copious notes or looking up other people's experiments and copious notes online. Instead, I'm going on gut feeling and a lot of flailing around in the dark. Don't even get me started on trying to figure out bosses' elemental weaknesses, as between the random damage range, the modifiers, and each type of wand element having different attacks, it would require me to get 3 roughly equal wands and do average DPS experiments on them in a trial run. I am now grateful Diablo has the courtesy to straight up tell you what monsters are weak/resistant to.

This was alright back in the early days of RPGs when there was a roughly linear progression of weapons/armor from "least powerful" to "most powerful", but nowadays where you have to make choices about giant skill trees and each piece of equipment has 4-6 random modifiers on it, we need the information to properly make those choices, and games' insistence on hiding their math and outputting numbers in the quadruple-digit range isn't helping.

The Revolutionary Paper Mario

I want to contrast this with the original Paper Mario- no, not the sticker-based nonsense they're spitting out nowadays to mess with Dan Ryckert- and how it is covertly one of the best RPG systems to come out in the 21st century. No, seriously.

"But why?" I can hear you asking. "Its math is so simple a 3rd-grader could figure it out."

Exactly.

Damage is simply Attack - Defense. Attack and Defense rarely go above the single-digits range; HP and MP cap out at 50. There's no random damage range and the stats & values themselves are reduced to a point where an increase/decrease of 1 is a big deal. You have an Attack of 8 and you're hitting an enemy for 6? Congratulations, you now know its Defense is 2, and you can make an informed decision about whether it's a good time to break out the lower-damage Defense-ignoring attacks. After playing numerous RPGs where I was doing 9000+ damage per hit without any real idea how I got that number, knowing the exact results of increasing my Attack or Defense by 1 (and fretting over which one I should pick) was a breath of fresh air. Paper Mario is a master course in how reducing game mechanics to a minimalist state can actually increase the strategy involved.

(As a sidenote, this is also why some games with RPG skill trees but no stats do a better job of giving the player meaningful progression choices than RPGs themselves do. Since they aren't able to fall back on abstract bonuses like "+6 Strength", they have to explicitly state how they'll change the player's gameplay with stuff like "Reload 20% faster" or "Increase combo size by 1".)

Fixing the Problem

So how can devs improve player decision-making in their games? It boils down to two things:

• Reveal the calculations (or, at least, the results) of every stat in the game.
• If it's still too hard for players to understand, change it until they can.

RPGs are about choice, whether it's narrative choices, character build choices, or strategy choices. Making good choices requires information about its mechanics and its results. Flailing about in the dark, making decisions based purely on guesswork, is about as meaningful as choosing whether to turn left or right based solely on a coinflip. It's unsatisfying at best and frustrating at worst.

I finally bought a PS3 this weekend during the Black Friday sales to play 2 games: Dragon's Crown and Disgaea 4. I'm a fan of both Vanillaware and Disgaea from my PS2 days, but missed their PS3-era games because I switched to the Xbox 360. I've been waiting for a cheap used PS3 to finally play them, so I bit when Gamestop was offering one for $110. This started a 3-day trial to get it completely up & running, which started with me realizing my console TV didn't have any of the inputs the PS3 supported (but my computer monitor did) and ended with me cobbling together 3 different converters so I could listen to game audio on my headphones (since my monitor doesn't have an audio output). All this just to play 2 games... well, one game so far.

Dragon's Crown is pretty good. I know most of the discussion about that game was over the female character models, and frankly I chose to play the Sorceress because I like her character model (and playing magic-users in general), so let's just get that out of the way first so we can get to the nitty-gritty about how the game actually plays. At first I felt a bit uneasy about how blatant her assets were in her character animations, but then I watched the Dwarf character piledrive an owlbear into the ground and decided I was taking the game far too seriously. Everything about the game seems stylized to the point of fantastic absurdity, from the barechested pygmy wrestler Dwarf to the giant Fighter whose legs clearly are too tiny for his massive upper-body. More importantly, it's never really emphasized outside of animations. There's no extra fanservice, no alternate skimpy costumes, no sexy dialogue pointing out her assets or making her into a seductress that crosses into uncomfortable "hey look at the sexy" territory. She isn't put in a skimpy swimsuit like Lara Croft or the Dead or Alive gals or poledancing like Bloodrayne or getting into arguments about measurements like way too many anime games; she's treated more like Chun Li or Cammy in Street Fighter 2, where the sexiness just exists and is secondary to the actual ass-kicking.

That comparison seems fitting when you realize Dragon's Crown is basically an unofficial sequel (and loving homage) to D&D: Tower of Doom, a side-scrolling brawler released in 1993 by Capcom that is, in my opinion, the best side-scrolling brawler of the 90s. Seriously, if you haven't played it yet, go do so; Iron Galaxy released a faithful, cheap port of it to Steam that'll probably be discounted to $5 during the Christmas sale. That's worth playing one of the forgotten gems of the 90s arcade era. The director of Dragon's Crown started his gaming career working on D&D: Tower of Doom, and anyone who has played it will get several moments of deja vu in Dragon's Crown, from the particular way Dragon's Crown lizardmen spin their spears like Tower of Doom troglodytes to several boss fights (including the titular dragon) whose mechanics seem ripped straight from Tower of Doom.

So how do the gameplay compare with its unofficial predecessor? Really good. Movement and attacks feel fluid, the control layouts make sense and become second nature after an hour or two, and special attacks & evasions are common and vital parts of surviving. You fight across 9 different locations, each with their own feel (from an undead-infested manor to ancient ruins swarming with demons and cultists) that encourages subtle changes in tactics and equipment loadouts. The most variance comes from the bosses themselves: you'll fight a tiny, lightning-quick Killer Rabbit in one stage, face a giant stationary Kraken on a time limit in the next stage, and top it all off by protecting a cannon from a horde of orcs to destroy a living gate. Time limits, escorts, solitary giant monsters or massive swarms of mooks, big bruisers and teleporting casters, Dragon's Crown hits nearly every type of fantasy fight you can think of and is all the better for it.

Once you successfully complete a level, you return to town to identify (and divvy) the loot, which is various weapons and armor you can equip to improve your characters' stats ala Diablo, as well as level up and turn in quests to gain more skill points to put in various powers. This part of the game is weak: your equipments' stat increases are too subtle to really notice in the gameplay itself, as are the passive bonuses you can invest skill points in, and any spells you learn have to take up an inventory slot so you will probably only invest in 3-4 active spells. I often wondered how much of an effect my passive stat bonuses had, but the gameplay was too much (mindless) fun for it to really become an issue. I wish it had an advanced stat screen where you could see your total bonuses, though, including a breakdown of the numerical effects of your stats. (This game commits the all-too-common sin of giving you stats with only the vaguest description of what they do.)

I was originally also going to complain about some of the stranger design choices here (such as making players pay gold to choose a specific stage, or not being able to use the same equipment across multiple loadouts), but as the game opened up and revealed more game modes, it made sense. At the start of the game, things are straightforward: you get a new stage to beat, you defeat it and go on to the next stage, just like every other beat-em-up. But once you beat all nine stages, you have to go through them all again and beat a more difficult branch with different, harder bosses. When you choose which branch to tackle, you can also choose which loadout you use. But I can already hear you asking, why not decide that in town before you head out? Because at the same time, the game also gives you the option of chaining random stages together for increased rewards, which is the craziest idea I've ever seen in a side-scrolling beat 'em up.

Here's how the whole cycle works: after you beat a level, you're given the option to continue on to a random level or call it a day and head back to town. If you continue, you get a % increase to your gold, experience points, and loot quality, but you don't restore any lives, consumable spells/items, or equipment durability. You're basically fighting a war of attrition to see how far you can go before you run out of potions/spells/lives or your equipment breaks down and you need to return to town to get it repaired. However, if you switch to a new loadout in the next level, you get a fresh stock of items, spells, and equipment. So you naturally begin making extra loadouts filled with your 2nd-best equipment so you can keep going once your primary equipment is exhausted, or loadouts geared towards fighting through specific levels like the undead-heavy Keep of the Dead. You can technically make up to 9 loadouts, and you gain extra lives once you earn enough points in a run, so a dedicated player could make a run last multiple hours and earn a ton of experience points, gold, and loot in the process. It's a crazy, interesting idea that could only work in a beat-em-up with heavy RPG elements, and makes me genuinely interested to see how much longevity I can squeeze out of it.

What depresses me is Dragon's Crown's attempts to make the most interesting, long-lasting beat-em-up in years was overshadowed by a controversy over its art's sexuality the game itself really doesn't exploit or pay attention to. It's perfectly happy focusing instead on the giant freaking dragon attempting to burn you to a crisp, and how it can make slaughtering your way across a fantasy land a compelling experience. My nagging complaints about the game's interface and how it handles equipment can't deny I've sunk a good 20 hours into it just beating the first difficulty level (out of 3) and I still want to see how far I can make it through it before I ultimately get bored. This is the best game Vanillaware's created and deserves to be known for more than just how large the sorceress's breasts are.

Continued my 4th attempted playthrough of Space Rangers HD during the live podcast today. More RTS frustrations in my attempt to make more cash, namely from my robots moving and attacking erratically. There was one map I only won because the computer AI locked up and refused to move its bots; I quickly took advantage of the situation because I was on the verge of losing due to my bots not controlling well in tight corridors. Then on the next RTS map, they would run down ramps straight into the enemy forces and refuse to obey commands; I finally got around that by spamming move commands constantly. It almost feels like they tried to build an RTS engine around a physics engine.

At least the main game itself continues to be decently entertaining, aside from how overwhelming the pirates are. (Currently they have fleets of 12-14 ships in their occupied systems; the military sends, at most, 6-8 ships to reclaim it. It goes about as well as you would expect.) I spent most of my time completing missions alongside trade runs, including a text adventure to fix a DVD Player, until I died helping the military assault a Dominator-occupied system. Now that I'm starting over from the beginning, I'm hoping this run I can keep the pirates under control and make money & XP faster; the game really encourages you to do as much with your time as possible.

I also played a bit more Recettear during the podcast, getting through my next loan payment. Your initial goal in the game is to make weekly loan payments, which is actually much harder than it seems. The first time you play through it, you'll likely fail once or twice (which resets you to the beginning of the game with certain stuff intact, ala Dead Rising). On my first playthrough, I had to restart once. I want to complete a New Game playthrough without restarting at all, and now I'm on the very last one, which requires more money than the rest of them combined. I'm nervous about my chances of successfully completing this.

Regardless, Recettear is a good game to play while watching something: turn-based, requires a bit of thought but not too much, yet doesn't bore you to tears. I've actually been playing a lot of those lately; it's been a while since I've played something like League of Legends or Smite, and I've dropped Overwatch completely after the Halloween event. Perhaps I'll play a match or two of them later this week.

I'm feeling a bit loopy right now because I stayed up until 5 AM last night playing Space Rangers HD. I never intended to stay up that late, just planning to get from Point A to Point B across the map, but 2 RTS maps and an invasion defense later, I looked at the alarm and realized I had 3 hours until I had to wake up for work. It was a one-more-turn temptation that could put Civilization to shame.

Speaking of Civilization, I debated whether to continue my Civ6 Game-of-the-Month tonight. The Game-of-the-Month is a long-standing tradition on the CivFanatics forums: a save of the first turn of a match is publicly released, along with a preferred victory condition, and players try to beat it as quickly as possible, posting their strategies and problems once they're finished. I just find it really hard to continue enjoying the game, simply because the AI is dumber than a sack of rocks. This is the kiss of death in a (primarily) single-player strategy game. I've had enough of Cleopatra settling a new town right next to my border and promptly accusing me of stationing troops along her wasn't-there-last-turn border. Even on Emperor (the 5th difficulty setting out of 9) the AI sucks at fighting wars so much it took 3 of them to fight me to a stalemate. And once I finally conquered the Arabian capital at Turn 220 (out of 500), I realized that was the only city he had built. At all. He had a Settler twiddling their thumbs in the capital, but for some reason the AI decided since they were surrounded by desert, they just wouldn't settle anywhere. (For comparison, most players have a 2nd city settled by Turn 40.) It feels like clubbing a baby seal, and makes the game so boring I'm really dragging my feet returning to it. Perhaps I should take this as a sign I should devote my time to other games. Like Space Rangers. Although I'm rethinking my time spent on the RTS aspect of it.

Now, the RTS part of Space Rangers is... special. "I-can't-believe-they-screwed-this-up" special. There are... facets of traditional RTSes I just figured were standard across them, like identifiable units and accurate movement. And Space Rangers just showed me a world without them. This is a world where the core mechanics of RTSes (units, movement, attacking) are vague and erratic.

Units is rather simple: you only build robots. Each robot has a similar-looking chasis. The rest of the robot is customized upon construction: you can change their weapons, how many of each weapon they have, and their legs. How much of this do you think is readily visible zoomed-out? If you said "almost none", you're right. The inability to tell which weapons you & your opponents have leads to spamming 1 or 2 different robot builds, because you can't build counters to the enemies' loadout if you can barely tell what the loadout is.

Movement involves each robot taking up physical space and having a turn radius. This leads to logjams on narrow paths and dancing routines on the open fields; your robots will regularly circle each other, get in each others' way, and move so far away from your chosen destination they stumble into enemy forces. I have to babysit them to keep them from getting themselves killed. Letting the AI control them is out of the question, ever since the match where there was only one enemy base left and setting them to the Capture Base AI caused them to walk away from it.

Finally, for them to actually fire, they need clear line-of-sight and have their torso pointed in the right direction. Did I mention your robots block each others' line of sight? And that torso rotation only goes so fast? I've lost track of how many times my units walked into the middle of an enemy force and didn't fire because it had trouble facing its target. This is an RTS where basic movement & attacking requires micromanaging, yet just ordering them to move an inch south causes them to scatter in every direction. It's like a Command and Conquer match where you only control drunk mercenaries on roller skates.

At least it's such a small part of the game you can choose to skip it entirely, although the alternative missions don't provide as much money or XP. Space Rangers does several things alright enough to keep me playing, but I'll save that for tomorrow because I'm about to pass out here from exhaustion.

On a sidenote, I listened to the VA-11 HALL-A soundtrack while writing this, which reminded me I should really get back to that game and finish it. Since that game involves remembering your customers' favorite drinks as a bartender, I shouldn't let it sit too long or else my memory of it will begin to go. So many games, so little time...

Trying out something new this week: posting my various gaming experiences and opinions daily. I'm not sure if I'll have enough content to keep this interesting, but won't know until I try.

Started out the day by picking out winter clothes at the nearest decent-sized town, which is a half-hour drive away. That is also, conveniently, the closest Gamestop location to my home; much as I dislike their practices, they're pretty much the only game in town if I want to buy games or consoles. (If you think that's the hardest part about gaming in a rural area, try dealing with an Internet connection that involves a wireless signal to a nearby grain silo that used to go on the fritz whenever the temp dipped below freezing.) I went there to ask how much I can buy a used PS3 for nowadays and learned they're having a Black Friday special on used PS3s for $120. I'm currently debating whether to get that with a return policy, or try my luck on Ebay (where apparently some of them go for as low as $80). I think I'll go with the Gamestop one just to get a return policy and avoid the hassle of shipping.

So why do I want a PS3 in the first place? So I can play 2 old console-exclusives that weren't enough for me to buy a full-priced console: Disgaea 4 and Dragon's Crown. I've been a fan of Disgaea ever since it hooked me back in college (something neither Tactics Ogre nor Final Fantasy Tactics could do), yet dropped off the series when I switched from a PS2 to an XBOX360 last generation. I have a similar history with Vanillaware games, buying the original Odin's Sphere and Grim Grimoire and even picking up a used copy of Muramasa for the Wii that I have yet to crack open. When I read that Dragon's Crown was a loving homage to the old D&D Tower of Doom arcade game (which I first discovered tucked in the back of a comic shop years ago; did you know Iron Galaxy released it on Steam a few years ago?), that guaranteed I was going to play it eventually. You could say I'm crazy for buying an outdated system for just 2 games, but I also bought a Wii U solely for Super Mario Maker (although I plan to pick up Hyrule Warriors, Bayonetta 2, and few other games for it eventually). Now I just need to find time to play all of those alongside my other games...

The 50% off Hitman sale this weekend finally prompted me to buy the rest of the episodes (previously I bought Paris and Bangkok) and I spent 6 hours last night beating Sapienza twice, including an hour trying to figure out how to blow both targets up simultaneously once I realized you can drop a propane tank down a chimney. I also learned there's no indication in either the Opportunities or the Challenges you can remotely destroy the virus with a computer dongle. Once I beat The Icon bonus mission today simply by sabotaging the lights and poisoning his drink when he went on break (I wanted to get him devoured by robot teeth instead but got impatient), I decided to take a crack at the latest Elusive Target: a roaming chef. Once I realized he always went up and down the same staircase, and after a slight misunderstanding with the local security, I dropped a proximity mine for him and waited behind a wall for the inevitable kaboom. I finished the mission with a 1-star rating, but at least I finished the mission. With that, I wrapped up my Hitman play for the night and turned my focus to Space Rangers HD.

Ah, Space Rangers HD... I'm conflicted about the game. I initially got into it after playing a merchant in Caravan (horrible game), AL-FINE (bad game), and Recettear (great game) and a separate yearning for an open-world top-down space sim like Escape Velocity Override (cult classic). Space Rangers is a Russian series ported over to English by 1C, whom some of you might recognize as the developers of the King's Bounty remake. The game itself is an open-world space simulation, and I do mean simulation: every other entity in the game, from the other spaceships to the planets to the factions themselves, is doing things and growing/shrinking according to mechanics and AI. Other ships level up and buy equipment from shops, and you end up in situations where you run into the same annoying pirate in a different system months later (and he remembers he hates your guts). Battles play out even if you're not there, and several times I warped into a system in the midst of a pitched fight between 2 dozen ships, attempting to scavenge some of the loot before they finished up. Most appealingly to me, it's possible to shape the outcome of a war without firing a single shot simply by trading enough to finance a certain side. In addition to that, there's turn-based space dogfights, a crude (and frustrating) RTS minigame you can (thankfully) skip, and text adventures where you try to find an antidote on a death world, build a successful ski resort, or cook an award-winning pizza. It's an eclectic game that tries a lot of stuff and succeeds as often as it fails.

My current problem with it is the enemy faction that was added in the remake: the Pirates. Originally the game had the Coalition (your guys) vs the Dominators (robots intent on conquering the galaxy). While the Dominators are tough fights, they also play by their own rules and are manageable. The Pirates were an additional enemy faction added by the remake, and so far they feel like they're superior to the Coalition forces: they can retreat and survive while the Coalition militaries are coded to fight to the death, thus improving their experience levels and equipment until they're nearly-unstoppable juggernauts, and on top of that they (usually) have superior technology as well. This combination of factors means they usually outclass the Dominators as a threat, despite the plot explaining they're simply taking advantage of a Coalition weakened by the fight against the Dominators. In addition to that, the only way to stop them is to infiltrate their ranks and act like a pirate, which doesn't mesh well with the peaceful trader I'm playing. I wondered if my issues with the Pirates were just because I was playing the game wrong, but on the Steam forums there's a 4-page thread complaining about the Pirates' difficulty (including a developer response stating the Russian players never complained about how hard they were). As Sparky Buzzsaw put it, "Space Rangers HD is the kind of eastern European game that was never properly playtested".

Still, I don't like backing down from a challenge, so I've been reading guides on fighting the pirates to salvage my current game. With luck, I'll finance enough military build-up to start pushing the pirates back; I'll probably write more about the game as I do so, especially concerning the "I didn't realize RTS games could be so bad" minigame.

Since it's All Hallow's Eve, I wanted to talk about my favorite horror game of all time. It didn't like to decide what that was, since I've pretty much only played one horror game, but it's a doozie: Lone Survivor by Jasper Byrne. While his previous game, Soundless Mountain 2, was a direct homage to the Silent Hill series, Lone Survivor nails its atmosphere and mood while providing its own twist on the gameplay: you have your apartment as your central base, where you rest every night and try to live normally for a bit to retain your sanity.

The apartment is the defining trait of the game, your oasis of calm in a nightmarish world. Since you have to return to it nightly to rest, Lone Survivor alternates between harrowing exploration sequences and breathers to prepare for the next day. While it is inspired by Silent Hill 4: The Room, it is never invaded by the darkness permeating everything else; it reminds your safehold for the whole game. As you progress, you can hunt down various items (or foods) to stock your apartment with, each of which returns your life a bit more to normal, albeit briefly. While obtaining a gas canister for your stove so you can actually cook food is kind of clever, my favorite choice was deciding whether to spend a precious flashlight battery to play Game Boy for a bit.

The rest of the game feels like an average sidescrolling Silent Hill, with the usual stealth and combat against abominations of nature. Your various actions throughout the game (and how well you take care of yourself) determines which ending you get. Luckily it doesn't take long to finish: on my first playthrough, I was done in 4 hours, which I felt was a perfect length for the game.

Despite only lasting 4 hours and rudimentary combat/stealth mechanics, it has stuck with me to this day. While I don't think it's one of the best games released this decade, I think it's one of the most memorable games released this decade (alongside Asura's Wrath, another its-not-great-but-I-love-it game). Between how short it is & how cheap it is, I heartily recommend this to anyone who thinks they might be even remotely interested in it.

If you want to know more, Patrick & Brad did a QL about it years ago:

And yours truly wrote a review about it years ago, where I was elated how well it did the "survival" in survival horror. (Note this game was released back before survival games glutted the Steam market.) Finally, if you don't mind spoilers and need an extra "kick" to look at this game, I also made a thread years ago discussing my theories about the ending (massive spoilers).

Lone Survivor is normally $15 on Steam (still worth it), but for Halloween it's discounted to just $5. If you have any interest in horror games or just want a taste of it, go pick it up.

With Halloween quickly approaching, my thoughts drifted to my favorite horror games of all time. That didn't take long, honestly; while I'm a fan of some horror games, most of those are from a distance, and the number of actual horror games I've played is rather slim. The first one that came to mind was... Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness.

"But wait," The voices of the old-time computer gamers cry out, "That's not a horror game!"

I say it is. Quest for Glory 4 is a horror game in the old sense of the word, back when it was more about foreboding atmosphere and dreariness rather than the dark side of humanity and jump scares. The game cribs heavily off Slavic folklore, the Cthulhu mythos, and the old black & white Universal monster flicks, but the tone itself leans most towards the monster flicks: there's dark things afoot, but you're a hero and you're going to drive them out.

The whole Quest for Glory series is about being a hero, but the previous games felt like standard fantasy fare: a bright and cheerful town is threatened by evil, so you go vanquish it before the town is harmed. The evil has already taken root in Quest for Glory 4, from the various undead who roam the lands to the cultists' abandoned monastery at the edge of town that none of the townsfolk dare approach. The townsfolk themselves are gloomy and wary of outsiders, and many of them openly doubt you're here to help them (or that you could actually do anything about it). It's telling that the most friendly and helpful person in town is a Dr. Frankenstein expy who obviously has a few screws loose.

But despite the doom & gloom, it's surprisingly humanistic as well. The same burgomeister who eyes you warily also argues against burning a random gypsy at the stake just because he was found right after the gravedigger disappeared. The same townsfolk who gave you a cold shoulder at first genuinely warm up to you as you help them out, thanking you for bringing hope back to their lives. Even several of the monsters (including one of the Big Bads) have sympathetic backstories, and you "defeat" them by helping them out rather than fighting them to the death. As dreary as the game is, it also does a great job of making you feel like a hero who's bringing light to a dark land rather than a glorified errand boy.

The gameplay itself is a mash-up between King's Quest and old CRPGs. At the beginning of the game, you choose whether to play as a Fighter, a Mage, or a Thief, which determines your combat abilities and your main method of solving problems. You can even import your character from previous games in the series. The combat is a bad arcade minigame that's nothing to write home about; the meat of the game is in the King's Quest-style puzzle-solving, and the multiple (usually minor) solutions to them depending on which class you are. It's nothing outstanding, but it'll keep you entertained through the story bits (and, perhaps, encourage you to replay the game as a different class).

But have no doubt, the story and the characterization are why you want to play this game. It nails the feeling of dreary Slavic folktales, and Halloween itself, in a way few other games do: gloomy and macabre, but with its own beauty and optimism, too. (Not to mention a dark sense of humor...)

You can buy Quest for Glory 4, along with the entire series, at GOG for just $10.

For the next 18-ish hours, most of the Endless franchise is on sale at Steam, to celebrate the release of the latest Endless Legend expansion & early access to Endless Space 2. For $20 total, you can pick up Endless Space, Endless Legend, and Dungeon of the Endless, which are some of the best sci-fi strategy, fantasy strategy, and dungeon crawler... -ish thingy... to come out in recent years. I'm planning to do a more in-depth series on these games and why I follow them so closely, but since this sale will be over in less than 20 hours, a quick summary now will be more useful.

Endless Space I can't discuss in-depth, because I've never played it. It was their first strategy game and from what I heard, it was a middling clone of Master of Orion 2 with a few decent ideas, such as hero units, wildly different factions, and the use of ancient nanomachines as a universal currency. The Endless race referenced in the title was an ancient race of precursors who created Dust (nanomachines-doubling-as-universal-currency), along with numerous other breakthroughs in genetics and computers, before erupting in a civil war over whether to stay flesh-and-blood or go virtual, subsequently wiping themselves out of existence. The player races are upstart species trying to master Dust to control the galaxy (except for one race who's actually trying to eliminate all Dust in the galaxy; yes, the races are that different). This sets up the framework for the other 2 games in the series.

Endless Legend is the game I hopped onboard the series with; it's a Civilization-style game set in a seemingly fantasy world with draconic humanoids, all-devouring bugs, and animated suits of armor. However, as you progress through the game's plot, you learn that Clarke's Third Law is in full effect here ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic") and the whole world is actually the remains of an Endless planetary genetics lab. Oh, and the climate control is about to fail, plunging the whole world into an eternal ice age, so you might want to learn how to get that ancient spaceship functional again before that happens.

Coming to it after Civilization 5, I was impressed at how different it was. Each faction had wildly different mechanics: one could never negotiate peace, another relied on Dust instead of Food for population growth, a third one had mobile cities and had to rely on mercenaries to fight for them, and so forth. Each faction also had 3 different core military units out of 5 total types, and with certain weapons gaining bonuses against certain types, you had to think hard about who you were planning to fight. The landmasses were divided into regions, and you could only build one town per region, so you not only had to decide which regions to expand into but where in the region to settle. The varied mechanics and the unusual fantasy sci-fi story made for an intriguing game, and I played this $30 game more than the $60 Civ5. Even though I only finished one match (the typical Civ-type late-game boring grind is still in effect here), I do not regret any of my time with it.

And Dungeon of the Endless... whew, this might take some explaining. Dungeon of the Endless feels like a game idea they came up with while drunk and decided to run with it. The premise of the game is your prison ship got blown up above an ancient planet and your escape pods burrowed a dozen floors down into an abandoned Endless laboratory filled with plenty of hungry creatures... of course. Your goal is to get your ragtag group of survivors up to the surface by exploring rooms to find the elevator on each floor, fighting monsters and gathering resources and equipment along the way.

"So it's a dungeon-crawler roguelike, right?" Not quite; you also have to gather resources and protect yourself by building modules in powered-up rooms, which you light up by spending Dust from your Power Crystal. You have to be careful which rooms you light up because every time you explore a new room, enemies can spawn in dark rooms and attack your survivors, your modules, and your Power Crystal.

"So it's... kind of a strategy game, too?" Well, once you actually find the elevator, you have to power it up by carrying your Power Crystal to it. The problem is, carrying the Power Crystal causes infinite enemies to spawn and rush the Power Crystal. You need to set up your defenses to defend your carrier's route and protect him with the other survivors while infinite enemies throw themselves in front of you. And once you get to the next floor, you do it all over again.

"So it's... I don't know what to call that." Neither do I, honestly. It's the type of game that crosses so many genre boundaries simple definitions fail to describe it well. It reminds me of games in the early 90s that stretched the boundaries of existing genres and sometimes created entirely new genres. It shows the Endless devs are perfectly willing to toss strange and new mechanics into a game just to see what pops out. It doesn't hurt the plot and the characters of the game itself are weird & absurd, like a fictional extension of the game's mechanical oddities.

As for its connection to the other games? Well, the prison ship is from Endless Space. And the world you crashlanded on? The setting of Endless Legend. The survivors are even the predecessors to a few of the factions in Endless Legend.

This series is weird. I love this series.

You can currently buy all 3 of these games for $20. If you have any enthusiasm for turn-based strategy, I'd suggest you do so, if only to try out a strong alternative to the industry standards of Civilization, Master of Orion, and Galactic Civilizations.

I thought I had things under control...

Previous Entries

Spring

Summer

Autumn

1st of Winter: Wind & Rice

As I start the winter, my initial goal is clear: I'm running low on food so I need a Hydroponics Farm, and since hydroponics & sunlamps take a lot of power, I need a Wind Farm as well.

I start out by tweaking my work priorities, clothing, and drug assignments:

This is one of my least favorite parts of RimWorld: optimizing your colonists' clothing and drug usage requires a lot of micromanagement. For instance, melee combatants can use personal shields, but ranged combatants can't, which requires 2 separate outfit parameters. Tattered armor still provides protection but reduces colonists' mood, so I've doubled the number of outfits to command colonists to wear it when there's a threat. Not only that, but Jackets provide more protection against gunfire, but don't protect against the cold as well as Parkas, so I've doubled the number of outfits again so I can command my colonists to wear jackets in the warmer seasons. It works, but it's clunky and I wish it didn't involve so much micromanagement.

With my food supplies running low, I respond to an alert a pack of alphabeavers have invaded my region with rejoicing. I had reached the point of RimWorld where you are happy about threats because it means more food. I send out a hunting party and slaughter a dozen of them, which provides plenty of meat and beaver hides for more parkas.

By Day 3, I have half of my Hydroponics farm up & running and growing rice:

Now that I have 2 entrances, one to my main base and one to my wind farm, raids have gotten... rather confused about where to strike, either splitting up and half taking each side, or them running back & forth between the two.

With all these raids, and me stripping and keeping all the clothing and weapons they drop, I am rapidly running out of storage space. Nearly all of my space is crammed to the gills due to my packratting.

However, I'm handling all these raids and food shortages just fine, so this should be an easy winter to-

Oh.

Oh no.

6th of Winter: Burn It All

The equivalent of 3 tanks is assaulting my colony. Two are equipped with inferno cannons, the other is equipped with a minigun. All 3 have a longer range than my pulse rifles (my best weapons), and they are tough to kill.

I draft all my colonists and pray for minimal casualties.

Things start out bad. The inferno cannon shots burn up the power line from my Wind Farm to my colony, and 2 of my top gunners get caught in the fire. Val burns to death as the flames consume her. I manage to take out the 2 inferno cannoneers, but over half of my gunners are downed or injured, fires are raging through my Wind Farm, and the minigunner is attacking my other entrance.

Just then, two groups of friendlies arrive to help take them out, including one of my colonist's wife. They break out inferno cannons and frag grenades and make mincemeat of the last mechapede, thankfully without any of them dying.

I spend the next day or two treating my wounded, stamping out fires, and desperately trying to harvest my hydroponics rice before it dies from lack of power. I supplement my less-than-expected harvest by slaughter a herd of elk.

10th of Winter: Tilting at Windmills

A few days later, once I've rebuilt my Wind Farm, one of the power lines near them explodes. Several turbines are destroyed in the fires that follow. While I'm stamping those out, I get a distress call on the radio:

Ugh, of all the possible times... I would ignore it if she wasn't Yukiko's sister. I offer safety and try to prep the colonists not beating out fires for combat.

Dammit, the pirates chasing her have a Triple Rocket Launcher. It's a one-use weapon with punch; if he fires it off, it's almost guaranteed one of my colonists will die.

Fortunately, he wanders into my snipers' line of fire and they take him down before he can shoot it off. Unfortunately, the others head straight for my Wind Farm. Sammy goes down fending them off, and while she's writhing in the ground in pain she's hit by several other bullets in the crossfire. Luckily I don't lose any colonists to this assault, but my Wind Farm is in ruins.

I shoot a glare at Yukiko's sister as I haul Sammy to our improvised medbay for treatment.

Wow, I hadn't realized how much she got shot. This is my first colonist that nearly died to blood loss. Fortunately I patch her up, and after nearly losing all her blood and recovering from a stomach/arm infection, she's (finally) back at full health, except for her shot-off ring finger.

Fortunately, I have enough spare steel & components to rebuild my Wind Farm, but I'm sick of them constantly being caught in the crossfire. I queue up building a wall around them to properly fortify my Wind Farm.

While building it, the Chemically-Fascinated Yukiko decides to try some Flake the raiders chasing her sister dropped... and immediately gets addicted to it. When there's only 3 doses left. She continues binging on it.

I really dislike Yukiko and her sister right now.

I rebuild my Wind Farm without incident, aside from an attack by psychically-enraged squirrels, and resow my Hydroponic Rice farm. I might actually have a harvest without incident!

And then the solar flare hits, killing off that harvest.

Conclusion

Regardless, I managed to survive the winter, have a reasonable supply of food, and have nearly completed my Wind Farm Wall with only one death for the whole year.

As for what I have planned for the next year, once I stabilize my food supply, carve some more rooms out of the mountain, and buff up my security, I can focus on researching ship construction and stockpiling enough steel & plasteel to construct an escape ship... assuming my colony doesn't get wiped out by mechanoids. (Those 3 mechapedes got close to wiping me out completely.)

I don't know if I'll continue doing a post-per-season, just summarize the most important things that happened (the first year is the most exciting time for a colony), or just end this feature here. Regardless, I think I'll take at least a week's hiatus from it; I overdosed on this colony between playing through an entire year in less than a week and making posts on each season, and I need to recharge my batteries with something a bit more casual...

Like an Intense Random colony set in a flat Tundra with an average annual temp of 10F and almost no wood/steel to build with. Joy.

At least I haven't had to cannibalize anyone yet.

TheFlamingo352's blog post last week about morality system in RPGs cited 2003's Knights of the Old Republic as his first example, joking it showed his age. That makes him rather young to me, as the first game that popped into my mind was 1985's Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. It's the granddaddy of every morality system in games today. It and Ultima Online are the reasons Richard Garriott could never produce another good game again and still be regarded as one of the most influential game designers ever.

Before we delve into the meat of Ultima 4's virtues, I'll start with a little history. Ultima 1-3 were your typical fantasy RPGs with space shuttles, time travel, and demonic supercomputers (no, really). However, after that trio of hugely-popular RPGs, Richard started getting letters complaining about there really wasn't any punishment for the players running around killing everyone in town and stealing everything that wasn't nailed down. He decided they actually had a point and set out to make a game revolving entirely around being a good hero.

Ultima 4 has no great evil to vanquish. The people don't need a saviour, they need a role-model, and Lord British has asked you to become one for them. How? Master the 8 Virtues, claim the title of Avatar, and delve deep into the Great Stygian Abyss to read the sacred Codex of Wisdom. (Yes, you fight through the final dungeon to read a book.) 90% of the game revolved around mastering those 8 Virtues.

And what a diverse list of virtues they were! Three core principles of Truth, Love, and Courage were mixed to form:

• Compassion
• Justice
• Honesty
• Honor
• Valor
• Sacrifice
• Spirituality
• Humility

Each of them not only have a town dedicated to them (and a dungeon dedicated to their opposing vice which you had to clear), but a separate karma meter you had to fill for it. And you had to fill all of them; no cutting corners for the Greater Good.

Each virtue also had a character class dedicated to it, which led to a character creation process posing as a Personality Quiz: Answer 7 questions to determine which virtue is most important to you! For example, if your childhood sweetheart asks you to fulfill your promise to marry her while you're on a spiritual quest, do you abandon it to marry her (Honor) or continue with it regardless (Spirituality)? If several of your comrades are wounded in a pitched battle, do you help tend their wounds in the back (Compassion) or stay at the front lines to keep the enemy away from them (Valor)?

These questions pose some of the most prickly dilemmas in the game, as they highlight how different "good" choices can conflict with each other. I imagine that, as a D&D fan, Richard took inspiration from the "Chaotic Good vs Lawful Good" debates that still rage to this day. The 8 Virtues show how multifaceted and complex "Good" can be, as compared to the usual Good vs Evil morality.

The problem with most games' Good vs Evil morality systems is that people do not like to be evil. Evil play in games is a cathartic release, a way to unwind for a few hours rather than a story players want to tell. It is all a question of "do you want to be a dick?" And for most people, the answer is "no, I want to be good". But everyone's idea of good is different, and it is in the nuances of which Good behaviors you pick when they come into conflict with each other that make for a compelling story.

Games often fall into Good vs Evil morality systems because it is easy to apply the choice of "be a dick" or "help others" to every situation under the sun. A morality system focusing on the conflicting aspects of Good requires complex situations to justify it. It is the altruistic version of a sadistic choice, all the more interesting because it forces a decision between universal virtues rather than temporary characters.