Avengers Mega-Post

When a movie breaks the record for largest opening weekend and causes one of the biggest nerdgasms of the last twenty-five years, you just know that a Mega-Post is the only way to truly delve into this phenomenon. Click the link to see some of our perspectives on one of the biggest and most ambitious movie releases in history.

[WittySciFiPun]:

I have to admit, my expectations for The Avengers weren’t that high. Not that I thought it was going to suck, but I didn’t think it would be much more than just an “okay” superhero flick. As while I enjoyed the first Iron Man, its sequel didn’t do much for me, nor did Captain America or Thor. So I had my doubts that a film containing all of these superheroes (plus others) could work that well. Boy, was I wrong. I would go so far in calling The Avengers my favorite Marvel movie adaptation of all time.

For me, what set the movie apart was its humor. Sure, other superhero movies have the occasional visual gag or witty one-liner here and there, but The Avengers has comedy fused into its spine. It flows throughout the film, bouncing alongside drama but never becoming overbearing. In addition, the chemistry between all of the main characters is fantastic, whether they are fighting against each other or working together. The different personalities of the Avengers team mixed perfectly, to my great surprise. The Dark Knight Rises will have to do something quite special in order to take The Avengers’ place as my favorite movie of the summer, if not the year.

Finally, I would advise watching The Avengers with a large audience. Not that it doesn’t stand up on its own (because it does, no doubt in my mind), but at times the movie just feeds energy into the audience, and at the packed showing that I went to, that energy was repaid in full. Cheering, laughing, gasping, almost always in unison- the reactions of my fellow moviegoers made the experience all the more exceptional. I’m pretty sure that watching The Avengers in theaters on opening weekend will be something that sticks with me for a long time.

Gray Anderson:

I have two opinions concerning the movie.  First and foremost, it was great to watch: I loved the banter among the characters (Joss Whedon did much of the writing, so I’m not surprised here…see Firefly for another wonderful example of this sort of work), and it says something about his ability to work with the characters and actors to achieve an end result that many of the best moments in the film involved the characters shouting at one another and generally not getting along well.  The action sequences were also quite good.

With that said, I really did not like how Loki was handled, while Nick Fury managed to be generally unlikable.  In Thor, Loki was scheming and switching sides every five minutes…but there was something about him that managed not to be terribly menacing or brazenly evil (at least by Hollywood standards).  Moreover, there was a solid argument to be had that of the two brothers, he was the competent ruler of the two: He might not have been the ruler that Asgard wanted, but in the long run his reign was more likely to be good for Asgard than the Thor of most of that film, and definitely likely to leave Asgard in a safer, more secure position.  This time around, Loki was just plain mad…and it was in many ways the sort of ‘sadistic bastard’ mad found in Heath Ledger’s Joker mixed with dictatorial megalomania.  Compared to his portrayal in Thor, Loki has devolved substantially.

Nick Fury also didn’t come across well, either.  As always, Samuel L. Jackson plays a wonderful badass…but there were also times when he was just an ass.  I’m not going to weigh the presentation of the character for comic book accuracy, but there’s a point in the movie when the main characters find out some of the stuff Fury was working on…and let’s just say that his lack of disclosure does not go over well.  At all.  At best, he’s a high-handed manipulator…but as even the characters determine, Fury is untrustworthy and duplicitous at times.  While this is understandable (and in some cases, yes, it is necessary), it also makes him at best something of an anti-hero…and unlike most anti-heroes, Fury lacks the likability of many of them.

Junior Varsity:

What I really admired about what the Avengers did was that the bad guy wasn’t all bad, and the good guy wasn’t all good. Let me explain:

Tom Hiddleston did a wonderful job capturing Loki in all his sneering evil. But there were some moments of the movie that we could see he was being pressured. When he talks to Thor on the mountain, that whole conversation was very brotherly, and we could see that Thor still wanted Loki to come back from the “dark side”. Then in his underground lair, the scene with the alien…thingy…Loki stood up to the alien, momentarily. Finally the moment with Thor on Stark tower, when Thor almost persuaded Loki to come to the “light side”. Sure, Loki might’ve been faking just to get his opportunity to stab Thor, but I thought it was a nice moment of doubt, which in my opinion, made him more than  just a cheap 2D villain.

Similar to this was the portrayal of SHIELD, Nick Fury in particular. In the comic book world, as in real life, one is always dealing with a certain amount of moral ambiguity. Samuel L. Jackson also did a great job, from the beginning. He stood up to Loki in the SHIELD facility, trying to save the Cube. Then all the business about SHIELD making weapons with the Cube technology, and Phase 2 showed a darker side. This also was echoed in the moment when Agent Hill mentioned that the collectible cards had been in Coulson’s locker. Then again at the end when the Board decided to launch the Nuke, and Fury did everything he could to stop it – against orders. So Nick Fury in my mind was also very interesting as a character.

Not that the main superheroes weren’t. I’m just giving these two as good examples.

So that might be a different perspective than just AVENGERS AVENGERS OMG YAY. It was very sophisticated, and I admire Joss Whedon above all, for bringing it to us.

Angel in the Mirror:

Okay, so, let me preface this review by saying that I don’t actually know anything about the Marvel Universe. I only know what I’ve seen in the recent Marvel movies. That being said, I’m always a little wary of superhero movies, because I’m afraid that if I don’t know the universe I’ll be lost. Far too often an adaptation seems to rely on people being familiar with the series and having read/watched the source material before getting to the theaters. The later Harry Potter movies definitely suffered from this problem. Some of the X-men movies also had that problem (not including First Class, which was a reboot of the universe entirely). 

I was a little worried walking into The Avengers. Even though I had seen all the previous movies, I still knew practically nothing about the Avengers themselves, or any enemies they might face. I’m happy to say, however, that the film stood up to the example set by the previous movies. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it, and I wasn’t ever lost or confused. Might it be a little confusing for those who haven’t seen the other movies? It’s possible. But, it’s easy enough to get the gist of what’s going on and not get too cluttered in who’s who and what’s happening. 

If you’re worried about seeing this movie because you’re not the biggest Marvel fan, or not the biggest superhero person, and you don’t know the stories, don’t be. It’s an easy movie to follow, at least, for someone who doesn’t know anything about Marvel. My friends who know the universe seemed just as satisfied with the movie as I was, but, I’ll let them have the final say on the adaptability of it. It’s a good movie that combines action, adventure, a little bit of drama, a lot of comedy….basically everything you could want in a movie. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a fun movie for a night out. 

Metaphysical Physicist:

To me, this movie provided a good balance of story, humor, and action.  Unlike other recent movies like say, the most recent Transformers, it was not endless battle scenes.  It seemed to me to have a nearly perfect balance of action, characterization, and humor.  The battle was what you’d expect from marvel, superheroes having minor disagreements that wreck small forests, or carving a path through a horde of enemies.  The characterization doesn’t do much on an individual level, but you do see the avengers growing closer as a team.  They go from rocky beginnings eating shwarma together at the end.  Still, to me the best aspect of the movie is the humor.  Of course personalities like Tony Stark (Ironman) the self-proclaimed “billionaire/philanthropist/playboy” will clash with those like Steve Rogers (Capt. America) the literal poster boy for following orders.  And when they do it’s hilarious to watch.  And just to make things more interesting, let’s throw in Bruce Banner (aka The Hulk), a guy with “legendary anger management issue.”  It’s the small moments of comedy that come from these personalities that make this movie truly exception, whether it be Thor reminded everyone that Loki is adopted, Ironman taking over a PA system to blast rock music as he shows up to save the day or the hulk commenting on what a “Puny God” Loki is.  Much as he did with Firefly Joss Whedon seemlessly merge humor and drama for a top notch movie.

My Backlog and Me, Part 3: Wrapping Up

The following is the final part of a three-part series reflecting on some of my ([WittySciFiPun]’s) gaming tastes and habits. 

As I conclude this series, I would first like to bring up a few things that I could never quite fit into my previous articles, but still somehow relate to the subject at hand.

For starters, I must mention that stories in games do not interest me. The quality of games’ stories does not factor into this; I’ll leave the debate over whether or not they can stand up to stories in other media up to someone else. I play games for their gameplay mechanics, their challenge, and their entertainment value. So protagonist X’s struggle against problem Y will never compel me to finish a game, no matter how exceptional the narrative is. If anything, I prefer to make up my own stories as I play games. For all of the story beats in the various quests in Skyrim, the most fun I have when playing that game is when I’m either exploring the overworld or sneaking around in dungeons. This is probably why I am fond of sandbox, open-world games, but no so much RPGs, which in my experience do not always have the best gameplay mechanics. Now, games in this genre usually make up for this weakness by incorporating deep stories, and while I understand how these stories can appeal to other gamers, they just don’t appeal to me.  This does not mean that I can’t appreciate a game’s writing, however; I especially appreciate when a game involves good humor, such as Portal 2 or Saint’s Row the Third.

Secondly, I’d like to expand on something that I briefly mentioned in my first article: my gaming “mood”.  It’s pretty simple, really: sometimes I want to play a particular type of game, and other times I want to play something else. If I have a busy schedule, for example, I’ll probably play something that is easy to pick up and play in short bursts, such as Super Meat Boy or Audiosurf, while if I have an entire day ahead of me with nothing to do, I may play something a bit longer- this is when I usually try to get one step closer to actually finishing one of my unfinished games. Other times, however, I just don’t feel like playing any video games at all, instead choosing to fall back to the internet to fix my boredom. And most of the time I end up just playing Team Fortress 2. I cannot state enough how much I like TF2: not only do I not tire of the game’s core mechanics, but now there are a few particular servers which I regularly play on, so I have a greater sense of community when playing that game as opposed to any other game, multiplayer or otherwise.

Well, now that those are out of the way, I’d like to take a look at the main consequence of my extensive backlog: I probably won’t buy that many video games this year. Not because I’ve decided to finish all my old games first- I don’t particularly care if I finish a video game or not- but because nothing that’s coming out in the near future has really grabbed my attention. (Now, I know that I’m saying this a month before the year’s biggest video game convention, E3, but I doubt that E3 will change much for me, especially since most of the “new” announcements will probably be games to be released in 2013 or beyond.) When I look back on what makes me finish a game, the factor of a game’s novelty stands out. I realize that while I look forward to new franchises, with their own unique ideas that separate them from the crowd, the industry as a whole is going in the opposite direction, with the big hits being sequels to well-established franchises (Assassin’s Creed III, Halo 4, etc.) and many gamers wanting sequels to these franchises and others. Now, I’m not condemning the game industry here, far from it- I am just one person, and I do not expect everyone to cater to my very specific tastes, nor do I care that many people have different tastes in gaming than me. And yes, I know that the desire for sequels within the industry is hardly a new thing, and that it’s been going on for at least a generation of consoles or two, if not more. 

But this year is special for me in that I think I can safely say that having a bunch of unfinished games in my library, due to losing interest in them, has finally burned me out in buying new ones. Because while I did enjoy my time with those games until I lost interest, I want to stop that backlog from growing. It will be a while before I buy a game again without being sure that I will finish it. And since that is not something you can discern from a few trailers and/or a demo, it’ll be a tough sell to convince me that I will actually finish it. Ergo, the amount of game purchases I make in a year will probably decrease considerably from last year to this year. However, I may buy more small, “indie” games this year, due to their usually short lengths, and the fact that they have more room to take risks in game design and mechanics, often resulting in novel and varied ideas. Of course, there are always the games that can’t be “finished”, such as purely multiplayer games or games such as Audiosurf (where the amount of content is determined by one’s own music library; each song is its own “level”). Mostly, it will be the big-budget, “triple-A” games that I will buy less of, due to the fact that most of them will be stuff that I’ve played before in some fashion, and that they tend to be the longest games in terms of the time it takes to complete them.

But lest one thinks that I am getting burned out on video games in general, let me assure you that this is not the case- while I may not be spending as much money on them this year, I will probably spend around the same amount of time on them. I still have plenty of games that I am still interested in playing, and who knows- maybe I’ll get back to some of the games that I didn’t complete long ago.

My Backlog and Me, Part 2: The Other Side of the Coin

The following is the second part of a three-part series reflecting on some of my ([WittySciFiPun]’s) gaming tastes and habits. 

Last week, I confessed to not finishing most of the video games that I play. But what about the ones that I do? What is it about these games that compel me to finish them? Well, just like how there are several factors of a game that can make me lose interest, there are also many ways by which a game can hold my attention. More specifically, there are certain qualities that these games hold, the most important of which being novelty, variety, and brevity.

Of course, just like the list in my previous article, I’m sure there’s a game that I’ve finished that doesn’t really “succeed” in terms of any of these aforementioned qualities. While I can’t think of any off the top of my head right now, one could probably start listing off a bunch of games which would remind me of a counterexample. So while the following factors generally determine if I will finish a game or not, they are by no means a concrete set of rules.

Novelty

 Like many other gamers, I enjoy new experiences in video games. So when a games sets itself out from a myriad of others by presenting itself as something unique (at least in a relative sense), I take notice. See Dungeons of Dredmor for example (which I have discussed previously): its charm and sense of humor is something I rarely see in a video game. Similarly, The World Ends with You, an RPG for the DS, won me over due to various factors that help set the game apart from other DS RPGs. Not only is it set in the modern-day Shibuya district of Tokyo — a far cry from the usual fantasy setting shared by most of its counterparts — but the game also features a unique and entertaining battle system that takes advantage of both the touch screen of the DS and the system’s two screens. Suffice to say, I beat the main story and then some of The World Ends with You, and all of a sudden I have an interest to play it all over again.

This is not to say that a game has to be completely new or ground-breaking, but just new to me. Going back to Dredmor, I realize that it is not the first game of its type (a “roguelike”), but it is the first of its type that Ihave played. In addition, consider Resident Evil 4 and Assassin’s Creed II: these games, while not the first entries of their respective franchises, were my first forays into said franchises. Thus any and all of those series’ signature tropes and mechanics, whether introduced by those specific games or by their predecessors, were fresh in my mind when I played them. However, I’ve found that novelty alone usually only holds my interest enough to finish one game per respective franchise- while I completed RE4and ACII, I never got around to finishing Resident Evil 5, and I’ve been quite lackadaisical in my progress to play Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood through to its end. Brotherhood is perhaps the more representative example here- unlike the Resident Evil franchise, where I feel that RE5 lacks a certain element of terror that its predecessor had (for various reasons), I don’t think that Brotherhood is any worse than ACII; the problem is that the additions included with Brotherhood did not differentiate the game enough to extend my interest in the series as a whole.

Variety

 It feels like I am stating the obvious here, but how much a game mixes things up is something that very much impacts whether or not I finish it. Take Super Mario Galaxy (and its sequel), for example: the different levels (“worlds”) in that game vary quite a bit, and although some levels can be similar to others (there are a few worlds which heavily feature underwater exploration, for example), the objectives themselves are also varied enough that I rarely felt like I was doing the exact same thing more than once. (Full disclosure: I have not beaten Super Galaxy 2, but that is mostly due to not having my Wii with me at college. It’ll probably be something I’ll try and complete this summer. Hopefully.) Even small variation in games can sometimes be enough: while the base gameplay of the Genesis-era Sonic games remains relatively unchanged throughout the individual games, each zone has its own distinct theming, enemies and quirks to keep things interesting.

Brevity

To put it bluntly, it is a lot easier for me to reach a game’s finale if that game is rather short. Now, I’m not saying that games that go on for 20+ hours are a bad thing; they have their own niche in the market. But such games better have a good mix of novelty and variety in order to keep me playing through them. Pacing also plays a large part in holding my interest — if the game slows down to a crawl for some reason, such as due to some long and vast fetch quest, my interest wanes quickly. Another way for a game to hold my interest is to have short levels, much like Super Meat Boy or Sonic Generations; a stage in the latter game will take just a few minutes to complete, while a stage in the former will take just a couple of seconds, if that. These stages, while short, offer great replay value by challenging the player to complete them more quickly, for higher scores. The brevity of such stages also lets me play them in short bursts while still allowing me to feel like I have accomplished a lot.

So, you now know what makes me finish some games and not finish others. But what results from these decisions? How have these factors shaped my outlook on gaming in general? Next week, I will answer these questions and more, as I discuss some of the consequences that I have come across by not finishing most of my games.

What do you think? If you have any questions or opinions you’d like to interject, feel free to post a comment below!

My Backlog and Me, Part 1: The Confession

The following is the beginning of a three-part series reflecting on some of my ([WittySciFiPun]’s) gaming tastes and habits. 

I have a confession to make: I rarely finish video games.

Now, when I say “finish”, I don’t mean in the “get everything 100% done” sense. No, my deep, dark geek secret is that eight or nine times out of ten, I will simply not see a video game to its end, either by playing through it at an incredibly sluggish rate or just outright walking away from it altogether. But before any fellow gamers start to take out their torches and pitchforks, allow me to explain myself.

 Maybe the biggest factor that prevents me from finishing a game lies not within the game itself, but is rather the compounding of everything that interrupts my playtime of that particular game. As I have mentioned in my introductory post on this blog, I am a college student. This means that my time is often taken up by classes, homework, various clubs, and various other activities that occur during campus life. But even with this busy schedule, I still manage to have quite of bit of time to myself. However, these are not the only things I consider as “interruptions”.   For example, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the terrible effect that the internet has on my productivity. There have been several occasions where I tell myself “OK, just gonna check out a few sites, and then play [a video game],” only to then lose an hour or two just by surfing the web. Additionally, I will often stop playing a particular game due to other games. For instance, I have a habit of buying and playing new games even if I have yet to finish others, simply due to their novelty. Also, there is always the allure of multiplayer games, such as my favorite game of all time, Team Fortress 2. Multiplayer games appeal to me due to the human element involved, which has the potential to make a game more varied than any particular game mechanic. Of course, the more time I spend playing games that I can’t“finish” (since they don’t really have “endings” the way single player/co-op campaigns do), the less time I have to complete games that I can. Finally, while it may seem obvious, I can’t forget the 400-pound elephant in the room that is sleep. I am not one to pull all-night marathons to plow through a game- I enjoy sleeping a great deal, and I don’t get enough of it already. (I am, however, willing to take part in all-night gaming sessions with friends, but that’s a whole different story, as half the fun of those is the social interactions between the participants.)

Now, the games themselves (that is, the games that I have yet to finish) are obviously not blameless in this scenario, because while the aforementioned interruptions can be used as an excuse for taking an extremely long time to finish these games, they cannot really be used as an excuse as to why I stop playing some of them for an extended period of time (such as weeks, months or longer), or why I quit others cold turkey. No, these interruptions work in tandem with the fact that the games simply don’t hold my interest for long enough. Now, this may seem like an obvious conclusion to make, but I myself did not realize how hard it was for a game to hold my attention through its finale until I looked at some of games that I still haven’t completed: Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2, The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, the Bioshock series, etc. Heck, even Half–Life 2 took over three years for me to actually finish- started that game in the March of 2008 and did not see its conclusion until April 2011. (On the other hand, I then managed to get through Episode 1 and 2 within the next three months.) I’m not saying that these games are bad, or even that I didn’t enjoy (at least to some extent) the time that I spent with them.  Still, there was something or other about each of those games (and other games that I did not complete) that has kept me from playing them. Things like:

• Unpleasant mid/late-game mechanics: I appreciate variety in my games, and a game’s initial mechanics can only take it so far. Fortunately, developers realize this, and thus mix things up via level design, set pieces, and new mechanics, among other things. However, sometimes these things end up hindering the game for me rather than enticing me to play it further. For example, escort missions- I find it annoying to keep track of an AI character that can at times have a mind of its own. For as fun as I find Saints Row the Third, there was this one mission in that game which I had stalled on for quite some time. In it, you are tasked with protecting a plot-related vehicle from enemy vehicles by shooting an RPG from inside a helicopter hovering above the action. While in this escort mission the AI of the vehicle I was escorting was fairly straightforward, its health would be affected by the rockets I shot- a problem when I had to use these rockets to blow up the nearby enemy vehicles. Half the time, I would fail the mission by blowing up the vehicle that I was supposed to protect myself. Fortunately, I managed to get past that one mission, and thus the chances of me completing Saints Row the Third have improved considerably. (On a related note, I also get annoyed by important game mechanics being withheld from a game until a fair amount of progress has been made- for example, I would like to give a stern talking to whoever decided that the ability to doge roll in Dead Rising 2should be kept away from the player until they had already played the game for a good couple of hours. Yeah, not like that could have been useful earlier on or anything.)

• Ridiculous difficulty spikes and/or inordinately frustrating sequences: Before I get any flak for this, let me just say that I do like challenge in my games- I loved Super Meat Boy, for example, and managed to complete most of its stages (just need to finish the Dark World end boss, which I will….eventually). I just need to know what I’m getting into first. I like my games to have reasonable increases in difficulty, starting out relatively easy once I’m just learning the ropes and then reaching a more challenging level once I’ve mastered its concepts. What frustrates me is when I come across a part of the game that is much more difficult than anything up to that point and even for some time after that point. For example, I originally stopped playing Darksiders due to one miniboss early on in the game which took a lot of damage to kill and could kill me in just a few hits. This in itself wouldn’t have been too bad, except for the fact that each time I died I would be set back a ways away from my foe. So before I could try the battle again, I would have to traverse a barren landscape (there really wasn’t anything for me to do from this point except get to the miniboss) for a few minutes before waiting another minute or so for the miniboss itself to reach me. While this happening once or twice wouldn’t get on my nerves, those few minutes added up as I kept on dying and thus I stopped playing Darksiders for a couple of months. Eventually I came back to it, though, and beat that miniboss. And then I didn’t face anything that difficult until a good hour or so afterwards. I understand the concept of bosses being harder than other parts of the game and all that, but I still think that that one miniboss in particular was poorly timed. I’d like to note that this particular factor by itself does not turn me off from playing a particular game ever again, but just encourages me to take a break from it for a little while. If other factors are at play, however, this sometimes acts as the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

• Technical issues:  This doesn’t crop up too much, but I still want to mention it. I play most of my games on the PC, and while most of the time the games I play are pretty stable, crashes and other bugs do occur from time to time. While this doesn’t keep me from playing a game if I am interested in it enough otherwise (all the crazy bugs in Skyrim don’t stop me from coming back to that game, for example), for games that I have become disinterested in this can act like a death blow. A good example of this: a month or two back, I tried to get back into Resident Evil 5, after having not played it for a while; unfortunately, the game kept crashing on startup, thwarting my efforts. After trying a few fixes, all to no avail, I eventually gave up and moved on to different games.

The above list doesn’t account for all the games that I haven’t finished; a lot of the time, I don’t get around to finishing a game simply because it isn’t as good (or rather, attention-grabbing) as another game that I’m playing within the same timeframe. I can’t really further extrapolate on this point, as this greatly depends on my personal taste in games, as well as my current gaming “mood” at the time (something I will talk more about later).

Well, now that I have written so many words about not finishing stuff, how do I finish this article? Why, with a cliffhanger, of course. Stay tuned for next week, when I will talk about the games that I do finish, and how they succeed in holding my interest when so many others have failed to do so.

Battle Royale 2 Review

It’s Hunger Games Weekend here, so [wittyscifipun] and I decided we’d’d look at a movie that was obviously influential to the series: Battle Royale…2. How’d it go? Well, how does every other movie I look at nowadays go? You can watch our suffering here:

A Different Sort of "Dungeons"

You descend down the hall slowly and carefully. This room seems empty, for now. You prep your crossbow, however, just to be safe. Carefully avoiding the arrow trap nearby, you open the set of wooden doors in front of you. Suddenly, a horde of bats appears! Luckily, you’ve fought monsters like these before, so you pick them off one by one, not missing a shot. As the last of them drops to the ground, something else catches your eye- a simple chest, sitting by its lonesome. Bashing it open, you are overcome with joy upon discovering what’s inside- a pair of parachute pants! Not only will they improve your dodging greatly, but they’ll also go great with your rocket boots and magical sombrero. If anything, at least you’ll go out in style.

Welcome… to Dungeons of Dredmor.

Dungeons of Dredmor is a cheap PC game released in the middle of last year. I, however, acquired the game in December, thanks to the digital distribution service Steam’s annual winter sale (which is an event worthy of its own post on this blog). Now, I’ll admit, this purchase was a textbook example of an impulse buy: I knew very little about the game beforehand, and the game’s price was probably the main reason I bought it at the time. But after playing it for over two months now, I can safely say that I have no regrets buying this game.

Dungeons of Dredmor is a game in the “roguelike” genre. This genre is a subset of the RPG and dungeon crawler genres, characterized by procedurally generated maps (in other words, rooms, enemies and other dungeon features are randomized each playthrough), turn-based movement and combat, oodles and oodles of loot, and permadeath. If you’re not familiar with the concept of permadeath in video games, it’s pretty much what it sounds like- once your character dies, they are truly dead. Their associated save file is deleted, and in order to play again you must begin anew, with a fresh character. Although this may seem harsh, it actually works, at least for Dungeons of Dredmor- since the map changes with each new character, you still get a unique experience. Plus, the permadeath gives a great sense of progression to players: starting out, you will probably die fairly often in the earlier stages of the game, but as you play more and learn from your past mistakes you will be able to get through more and more of the game with each playthrough, until you finally achieve the game’s main goal, which, for me at least, was a highly gratifying moment. But if you still feel unsure about permadeath, don’t worry- you can turn off this mechanic in Dungeons of Dredmor if you so desire.

Now, the main goal of Dungeons of Dredmor is simple enough: descend down ten floors of a dungeon and defeat the evil Lord Dredmor in the last floor. The floors themselves are riddled with enemies and traps, and each successive floor is more challenging than the one that preceded it. Fortunately, you have many different ways to tackle these obstacles. You can choose to attack everything in close combat, using melee weapons and heavy armor to brute force your way through the dungeon. Or you can choose to be a cunning wizard, trained in various different types of magic. Or you can choose to be a sneaky rogue, dodging enemies and using ranged weapons to kill them from afar. Alternatively, you could be a combination of the three, or even none of the above, if you’re the experimental type. It all depends on what skills you use.

Suddenly, mustaches.

Skills are the backbone of your character. When you start a new game, you are presented with an illustrated list of the game’s skills, of which you pick seven. Some skills are straightforward- sword proficiency, enhanced perception, the ability to regenerate mana more quickly, etc. On the other hand, there exist such skills as Vampirism and Mathemagic (the magic of math, in case that wasn’t obvious). These skills all have associated skill trees, which include various different types of powers. These powers include both permanent and temporary stat buffs, spells, and various special abilities. For example, the last power in the Perception skill tree gives you the ability to use eye lasers every once in a while, which can set enemies on fire. Because at that point your eyesight is so good, it’s deadly. You get one starting power from each skill at the beginning of the game; additional powers are chosen once you level up, which occurs once you have accrued a certain amount of experience from killing enemies and disarming traps. Of course, you can only pick one power to gain at a time, so choose wisely. Eventually, you’ll have a slew of different spells and/or abilities at your disposal (spells require mana; abilities have a cooldown time) which you can use in combination with whatever weapons you have equipped in order to handle large groups of enemies with relative ease. Finding the most effective combo of attacks with your current character is all part of the fun.

As you may have noticed, this game has charm- a whole lot of it, in fact. Humor abounds in this game. Items have names such as “The Poncho with No Name” or “The Tome of Too Much Information” (the latter of which allows you to deal existential-type damage). The RPG genre is often satirized throughout- for example, side quests are attained by praying to The Goddess of Inconsequentia. All items, powers and enemies have humorous descriptions, and enemies frequently spout out insults or other lines of dialogue at you while fighting. Mana is restored by drinking booze, and destroying one of the many statues of Lord Dredmor littered around the dungeon will cause a gruff voice to yell “HEROIC VANDALISM!” But don’t think that this game is totally wacky and over-the-top with its humor- the jokes and references are subtle enough that they do not make you tire of them, instead providing the occasional comic relief as you struggle to survive on a particularly challenging floor. Also, this charm carries over to its art style, with beautiful hand-drawn sprites and wonderfully-animated enemies. Some of the enemies’ death animations in particular are so sad, you almost feel sorry for them.  But then you remember that a similar enemy almost killed you not so long ago, so all sympathy goes out the window.

Case in point.

Now, it is true that Dungeons of Dredmor can get pretty buggy at times. I’ve learned to save frequently, as the game crashed on me quite often. Also, there can be some odd glitches, such as enemies getting stuck in walls or certain buffs from items not immediately appearing when you equip them. But I can forgive the game for this, and not just because it was developed by a small developer nor that it is rather inexpensive (only $5). The fact is that this game has provided me with so many quality hours of gameplay (the exact count is 102 at the time of writing, according to my Steam stats), presenting a surprisingly strategic challenge without being overly serious. There’s more I could say about this game, specifically the various special features of the dungeon that show up now and then, but part of the enjoyment I had with this game was discovering that stuff by myself. So if you’re a fan of dungeon crawlers, I would highly recommend that you check this game out; and if you aren’t, I strongly suggest that you check it out anyway, as it deserves all the attention it can get.

One final note: if you want even more Dungeons of Dredmor, an expansion was released late last year, called Realm of the Diggle Gods. It adds more skills, items, and enemies, and expands the number of floors in the dungeon from 10 to 15. It too is also quite cheap, so don’t hesitate to check it out as well.

In another castle dungeon,

-[Witty SciFi Pun] 

Board Games: Like Video Games, But With Boards

Ever since my first semester of college, board games have quickly become a favorite pastime of mine. They have provided me with great social experiences- I have become good friends with the people that I regularly play with, and the general atmosphere is relaxed yet enthusiastic. Which is somewhat strange, when you consider that a large amount of the board games involve some form or another of treachery or sabotage. Take Scrabble, for example- you had the perfect 7-letter word lined up, and all of a sudden someone blocks you off by placing “cat” right in the middle of where you were going to place it. But I haven’t played Scrabble in a while. The board games that I play are more strategy-oriented, and less well-known, than the board games that you commonly hear about. I could try and fit them into one broad category, but I may as well let them speak for themselves. So the following is just a small sample of the games that I like to play, and that you should play too:

Scotland Yard: I’ll start with a game that is rather easy to learn and pick up, yet fun all the same. Its rules are indeed quite simple: one person plays as the mysterious Mr. X, a dastardly criminal who comes with his own hat (seriously- this game comes with an actual cap for the player to wear), while up to five other players play as policemen chasing him down across the streets of London (aka the game board). Mr. X’s starting location is secret, and Mr. X moves in secret, only revealing his location a few times during the game. The catch, however, is that while the police may not know where Mr. X goes to, they will almost always know how he gets to those places- after each move, Mr. X denotes whether he took a taxi, a bus, or the Underground to get to his new location. Since certain modes of transportation can only go through certain locations in London, the police use these clues to help figure out where the criminal is and where he could go. This is a classic game of cat and mouse, and can get incredibly close towards the end. The suspense that this brings plus the simplicity of the rules make this game great for inexperienced players.

Mansions of Madness: Similarly to Scotland Yard, this game pits one player against a team of up to four others. In this game, however, the lone player is not running from his opponents; rather, they are trying to stop the other players in their tracks. See, this game is an RPG-lite: there is a dungeon (some sort of haunted house/estate, which makes up the game board), a dungeon master (the “Keeper,” who (mostly) dictates the mysterious happenings and monsters throughout the game), multiple different scenarios (one of which is chosen beforehand by the Keeper, deciding which game board tiles, items and story beats are used) and a bunch of heroes (a group of specialists who have been sent to investigate said house/estate for whatever reason provided by the scenario). Now, note the word “investigate”: the heroes do not start the game knowing what they must to do win, but instead have to collect clues scattered throughout the game board, unlocking locks and solving puzzles (which are done by solving actual, physical tile puzzles) along the way. The Keeper, on the other hand, knows exactly what they must do, but they cannot simply kill off all the heroes, as the Keeper has a special win condition of their own (which depends, like most of the game, on the chosen scenario). So yes, it is possible to have a game of Mansions of Madness where there are no winners. Oh, and I should mention that this all takes place within the mythos of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, so the stories and designs of the game are inspired by his works, bringing a great atmosphere to the game. Considering that this game can sometimes take around 3+ hours to play, it is a great way to spend an afternoon, or even an evening, if you have the time.

Citadels: And now, for one of my favorite board games, which technically doesn’t involve any sort of board at all, funnily enough. Each player acts as a fantastical medieval-era noble, in charge of creating a city that’s better than any of the other players’ cities. They do this by constructing “districts”- cards that represent different buildings (manors, churches, taverns, etc.) or other features that a city might have, such as a park or a great wall. To build a district, you must pay a certain gold (in-game currency) cost, which is conveyed on each district card. After that district is built, however (done by placing the card face up in front of you), its cost now represents the number of points that it is worth at the end of the game. So one must find a balance between building low-cost districts to complete your city quickly (as the game ends once someone builds eight districts) and having districts that are worth more points. There are also special districts which provide certain bonuses to help you throughout the game. But in essence, this is all secondary to the main mechanic of the game: the different role cards and how they are chosen. Throughout the game, players will play as one of eight different roles: the Assassin, the Thief, the Magician, the King, the Bishop, the Merchant, the Architect, and the Warlord. These roles have certain powers associated with them: the Merchant, for example, gets an extra gold during their turn, and receives one gold apiece for each “green” district that is in their city at the time (as districts are categorized into different colors). Other roles, however, have more menacing powers- the Warlord, for example, can pay to destroy another player’s district, and the Assassin can choose a role to assassinate, causing whoever has that role to miss their entire turn. Note the wording of that last phrase; the assassin cannot name a player to assassinate, but rather a role. That is because these roles (which are themselves represented by cards) are constantly changing hands from round to round, and in each round there is at least one role that is not in play. Roles are chosen at the beginning of each round in secret, with the order of who picks their role first being determined by whoever last played as the King. After everyone has chosen their role, the roles get called out by the King in order, from the Assassin to the Warlord. Thus when a player chooses his role, they must not only consider what power works best for them, but also the actions of the other players- if you have a lot of “green” districts, for example, you may want to pick the Merchant, but on the other hand whoever picks the Assassin may want to assassinate the Merchant, wanting to stop you from acquiring the gold from those districts. Thus this leads to bluffs and double bluffs and a whole bunch of head games, which is as infuriating as it is ingenious. I’ve ended up writing a bunch more about this game than I ever expected to, but I just love it so much that I can’t help but gush about it. It just contains a bunch of hidden depth that I did not expect playing before playing it. There are a bunch of different game-winning strategies, and every game that I have played so far has played out differently. And I haven’t even touched upon the expansion, which includes a whole new set of role cards with their own powers. Seriously, Citadels is great stuff.

There are more board games that I’d love to talk about, but I don’t want this article to take up the whole page. So keep an eye out for future posts- there are countless board games out there, so it’s not like I’ll be running out of stuff to cover anytime soon.

Always Be Shuffling,

-[Witty SciFi Pun]

A New Challenger Appears!

Hello!

First time actually writing on this blog (although you’ve seen me once before, on Vidcast #1), so I may as well start out with an introduction. My name is Alex, or [Witty SciFi Pun]. Why that name, you ask? Well, I was going to use an actual pun, but I couldn’t pick just one, and so I decided to take the whole “meta” angle with it. I won’t be writing too often- just whenever I have something I want to write about and some free time during my busy college life.

I have many “geeky” interests, so what I write about will vary from post to post. I am a big fan of science fiction movies, of both the good and so-bad-they’re-good-again varieties. I’m planning to major in chemistry, and have an affinity for science in general. High-tech stuff fascinates me, and I spend way too much time looking at funny/stupid stuff on the internet. Also, I’m British, so you may see me write about stuff from that side of the pond once in a while. First and foremost, though, I’m a gamer: I enjoy video games, board games, Nerf Wars, a few sports, etc. I’ll admit that my so-called “busy college life” would be much less busy if I didn’t play games so much. With great fun comes great procrastination, and all that.

Anyways, I hope that you’ll enjoy my future posts; I definitely look forward to writing them.

Until next time,

-[Witty SciFi Pun]

Red Shirt VIDCAST #1!!! Featuring the Lesbian Alien Sex Song

Hey guys. Remember those podcasts we used to do, but couldn’t when winter break happened? Well, we’re back in a big way. To signify our shift into providing more video content, we’ve decided to make video podcasts instead (also, Jason and Andy made it look like so much fun). So, here’s our first attempt. You’ll have to excuse the fact that we seem so far away; the room in which we wanted to film was unusable, and we had to improvise. Enjoy!