Dark Souls - A Brutal and Relentless Action/RPG Horror Title.

There's a game out there that is so difficult, so merciless and unforgiving of mistakes or poor planning and so punishing of failure that I'm almost afraid to play it. I am, of course, talking about Dark Souls, the action RPG that is as much an exercise in masochism as it is a hardcore gaming experience. Dark Souls is a sequel to Demon's Souls, an earlier game that I completely missed when it came out in 2009 because it was a PS3 exclusive and I draw the line at two consoles I rarely play. Dark Souls was released by Namco Bandai Games in the US on October 4^th for both the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360, and the relentless blend of action and frustration provides an answer to the gamers who believe that quicksaves and infinite lives have made gamers soft. This is clearly not a game for everyone, as people who want a more casual experience to relax and unwind will no doubt be very, very frustrated with this game, because it kills you the instant you let your guard down. And then it kills you again, and again, and some more, until you wonder if the game is mocking you.

Expect your character to die several times before you even get the package open.

If you are thinking "That doesn't sound like much fun," one thing I neglected to mention is that despite the relentless, even punishing, difficulty... the game is (almost) never cheap or unfair. Every death is due to a mistake in either choice of weapon, where and when to fight an opponent, or just plain old-fashioned not being careful enough. The setting starts out without a massive amount of background information or plot to get you going, as the world is corrupted and all but lost to the demonic hordes, and your motivation is simple: destroy evil. Dark Souls, unlike its predecessor, is an open-world game, with freedom left to the player to go in whichever direction they believe they can survive, with no indication of where that might be, as death waits around every corner. Every time you die, you learn something new. Death is a strict teacher who shows you your mistakes immediately and demands perfection, and the lessons are well-learned.

The combat system rewards care, patience and selection of the correct tools for the job, whether that is a nasty two-handed weapon, heavy armor and shield for defense, or magical abilities, all are available to the player but none will suffice in every situation. You cannot gain enough magical power to run through sections of the game blowing things up at will, and you will find the predictable result of trying is, of course, another death. When you die, you lose your corporeal form and your collected souls, which are used to upgrade your character and equipment, and you respawn as undead... with half a health bar. Get back to your corpse, and you can retrieve what you've lost. Checkpoints come in the form of bonfires which can be lit to rest and make camp, but when you rest, the foes you have defeated rise again, meaning use of a checkpoint is a strategic choice.

The beacon fire. A place to rest and reflect on what lessons repeatedly dying has taught you.

On its surface, Dark Souls is a single player experience, but online play has been incorporated into the experience in several unique ways in keeping with the themes of the game world. First, it is possible to leave scrawled messages for other players in certain sections of the game, though whether you choose to heed the warnings or suspect they might have been left by a player trying to lead you to a quick death is up to you. The spirits of other players can occasionally be glimpsed moving through the same sections of gameplay as you are working your way through, seeing these damned souls in action reminds you of the consequence of failure. You can also summon spirits of other players for co-op play, but who is brought into your game world is random and communication with your spectral ally is extremely limited, a very different experience from loading a game and jumping in with people from your friends list. Also be warned that PVP players may, while you are in your living form, invade your game to assassinate you to regain their own form. In practice, you'll spend so much time as undead that this won't happen very often, but it is not optional or consensual, further adding to the danger for players who are doing well.

So much more of the game is meant to be discovered through play that I feel it would be a disservice to spoil it in a review here, but I can mention in passing a few other features. Despite being thrown into the world with only a very basic understanding of what is going on, that doesn't mean there is no lore or story going on in the game. By design, the player must earn tidbits by peeling away at the surface of this fantasy/horror world, and not telling you too much all at once helps keep the disturbing and disorienting tone of the place intact. For replay value, there is the covenant system. Without spoiling too much, I can say that covenants are the combination of faction/guild and alignment system in the game, and joining one will significantly change the play experience beyond the typical "good" or "evil" playthroughs in other RPGs. Every covenant comes with its own advantages and price to pay for membership, and some may make sections of the game easier or harder, or affect objectives.

Breathtaking environments and deadly foes are literally around every corner.

Is this a good game? The graphics are gorgeous, most reviews agree that the gameplay is incredibly tough, but in a fair sort of way barring one or two scenes that drift close to unfairness. The starting class is more like declaring a play philosophy than committing to a single set of options, as weapons, armor and abilities can be swapped out as needed to progress. If you are the sort of gamer eager to overcome challenges and believe firmly that modern games are too easy, this may just be the game for you. If dying over and over until you struggle toward the goal of hitting a beacon sounds too much like inflicting pain on yourself because it feels so good when you stop, I'd give this one a pass.

Fair Warning: I mentioned here that I planned to take a week off from posting as I get adjusted to a full-time job again, I plan to take that week from 10/15 through 10/22, so my vacation starts... now.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Blog Gadgets

There vill be.... SANDVICH! - Team Fortress 2 Free to Play, one week later.

And... I'm back. Many thanks to Sarah for her Origins articles, since I'd written all the articles posted last week before we left town, it was almost like I was on a 2-week vacation. (Do the unemployed get vacations?) Now, with that behind me, what did I do with the time I had not researching and writing articles, finding appropriate images and trying to ascertain as best I can their copyright status, layout and posting? Did I write the Great American Novel? Nail down that elusive job that'll make me adjust this blog's title? Charity work? Nope, I played a lot of video games. Those who know my love for Steam or who follow me on Tumblr can already guess which one.

Team Photo 2. Immediately after this was taken, everyone put on funny hats and started jumping around.

I don't cover nearly enough shooters, or so I'm told. I've declared my bias against the genre in the past, but it isn't as though I don't play them at all. I think my twitch reflexes aren't up to snuff to be really great at these sorts of things, so there might be a little bit of sour grapes in there somewhere. This might explain why it took over four years and the decision of Valve to make it Free-to-play for me to finally try Team Fortress 2. The game's been called “the most fun you can have online,” and I think I can see why. I'd like to take a few moments to explain TF2 to the people who haven't played it (yes, both of you) and then directly give some tips to others who just started playing from the F2P crowd on how to get started.

Released in 2007 as part of the Orange Box edition for Half Life 2, Valve updated the team-based multiplayer hit Team Fortress Classic with redesigned gameplay, a totally new, cartoony graphical style, enhancements to classes and changes to weapons loadout for each class. Using teamwork to accomplish objectives on levels was mastered by the earlier game, as before TFC, most multiplayer was deathmatch/arena style “kill everyone else” gameplay. Team Fortress features nine different classes, who perform different roles on the team, three are designed to attack on offense, three are defensive, and there are three specialist classes.

Classes? this is a game about HATS!

The classes are Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman, Heavy, Engineer, Medic, Sniper and Spy.

Offense:
The scout is super-fast, has the least health, can double-jump and carries by default a scattergun, a pistol and a baseball bat. Soldiers come equipped with the rocket launcher, (which allows for rocket jumps by blasting at your own feet while timing a jump) shotgun, and entrenching tool. The Gas-mask wearing Pyro has a flamethrower (which can ignite players and detect disguised spies) a shotgun and a fire axe.

Defense:
The demoman (a black scotsman with an eyepatch) has his grenade launcher for indirect fire, a sticky bomb launcher to set a field of remote-detonated mines, and a broken bottle. The Heavy has the most health, moves slowest, and has the devastating minigun, with a shotgun and his fists for backup. Engineers have pistols and shotguns, but their real strength is in building machines; their blueprints allow them to make dispensers to refill life and ammunition, teleporters to allow fast travel around maps, and deadly sentry guns to automatically defend positions.

Specialists:
Medics have a needle gun, a bonesaw and the healing gun which restores life and builds up a “charge” that at 100% makes the medic and his target invulnerable for a short time. Snipers wield sniper rifles, naturally, which can one-shot most classes with a carefully aimed headshot, with a machete and submachine gun for backup. Finally, the Spy has his disguise kit, which allows him to look like a member of the opposing team, stealth watch which allows him to vanish, a revolver, a sapping kit to disarm engineer machines, and a butterfly knife that is a one hit kill in a backstab.

The unsuspecting Wild Engineer, and its natural predator, the Spy.

The combination of playstyles and different abilities across the classes really make this more than just your usual first-person shooter. An engineer or a spy are so different from a scout or soldier that it is almost like you aren't even playing the same game when you switch to certain classes. Different team compositions present strength or weakness depending on the map objectives (capture the briefcase, secure control points, or pushing a cart with a bomb strapped to it down a track that runs into the other team's base) and whether teams are on defense or offense. The game is fast paced, and as you play, different equipment for the various classes unlocks (weapons and cosmetic items like the hats the game's become famous for) both at random intervals and for completing achievements.

Unless you are a crack shot with great twitch reflexes, I recommend starting players learn the ropes by playing the pyro, heavy or medic classes, and maybe get a feel for the engineer and/or spy (though I think spy is a little trickier to learn.) Stick with groups of players and try to play an offense class while attacking, defense while defending while still learning the controls and pace of matches. For me, the toughest classes to play with any sort of skill have been scout and sniper, but I might just be a terrible shot. The community is all over the place, with intolerant, abusive and elitist toolboxes and helpful friendly folks willing to be patient with new players all over the place, sometimes on the same server. Unless you have a thick skin for online abuse, I recommend turning off voice chat in-game while learning.

My screen looks like this when I play the sniper, the instant before I pull the trigger
and the heavy moves 2 feet to the left.

I've had some great moments in the last few days playing TF2 with both strangers and friends. Detonating a cluster of stickybombs right under a scout trying to escape with my team's briefcase in CTF, blowing up a spy disguised as me, masquerading as a soldier and having an enemy medic heal me until I hopped behind him and backstabbed him, and earning hats and new guns along the way. It is also worth mentioning that an upgrade to a premium account (though that pretty much only means crafting and trading once you start to get duplicate items) comes with ANY purchase from the in-game store, and there are a lot of $1.00 items in there. I used a spare dollar from my Steam wallet to get a few spy-themed accessories.

I'm not impossible to find on Steam, if anyone has the inclination to look hard enough. If you add me on Steam, however, put a note in a comment, this blog's facebook page or email somewhere letting me know you came from the blog, so I know to accept. Now, back to earning hats.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Blog Gadgets

Board Gaming for Adults - Beyond Monopoly and Risk

For seven years of the near-decade that I managed a hobby shop and acted as the primary games buyer (more on that here if you missed it) a few friends and I would use the shop's back room to play board games. At least, that's how it started. By the end, weekly we had between five and eighteen adults turning up to play, and sometimes we'd start Thursday at 8PM and not break until Friday at dawn. I'm not talking about Risk, (which I despise) or Monopoly, (which I can take or leave) or really any of the Parker Brothers/Milton Bradley fare. There's a whole other category of board game, with greater depth and complexity than the pasteboard mass-market games found in the children's toy aisle. I've personally amassed a collection of several hundred of these.

The attitude that board games are for children is one, as far as I can tell that is more common in the US and Canada, whereas in Europe (particularly in Germany) the board game as an activity for adults is not a “fringe” notion. Even here in the US, the hobbyist market for board games beyond “playing with the kids on a rainy day” has been growing steadily in the last decade. There is a distinct difference in the style, design and presentation of games that are primarily marketed to the adult who is a board game enthusiast.

What most Americans picture when you say "Board Games".

In terms of mass market games, there are several types that are extremely common, and understanding what they are and how they work helps to understand how the hobbyist's gaming differs. There are traditional abstract strategy games which have pieces such as pawns, tokens or chits. All of the most ancient games fall into this category, including Senet (the most ancient game from pre-dynastic Egypt, with sets dating as far back as 3500 BC) and Backgammon (3000 BC). This category also includes games of “perfect information” such as Go, Chess and Checkers, where there is no random element whatsoever, the strategy developing from forcing an opponent to react to your moves.

A modern recreation of Senet, the earliest known board game.

Most other mass-market board games are successors to the older abstract strategy games, and either move pieces along a predetermined path of spaces on a board (the "race" game), a contest to answer questions or figure out a puzzle (the “party” game) or resolution of an armed conflict (the “war” game.) “Race” games usually focus on the “roll and move” mechanic to have players compete to be the first to either collect certain tokens (in-game money being the most common) or get their pieces to a certain spot on the board. Monopoly, Pachisi, and even Candy Land fit this category. “Party” games, also called parlour games, typically involve individuals or teams trying to guess or deduce hidden information. Charades, Trivial Pursuit, Cranium and Taboo all fit this category. “War” games have pieces representing soldiers or units of armed forces, and are typically won by capturing territory or destroying opponent pieces. Risk, Battleship and Axis and Allies are popular examples, though the difference between a mass-market war game and one designed for hobbyists is sometimes just a matter of complexity.

Hate, hate, HATE this game. Yes, there may be a chance that when attacking with overwhelming force that a lone defender can take no losses and kill an attacker. That chance should not be 1 in 6.

While there are many more types and styles of board game that are marketed toward children and young adults, hobby games tend to differ mechanically and in presentation in specific ways. The most popular game in this style is Settlers of Catan, a game I've called the “gateway drug” of board gaming, and many of the design choices that make hobby games different are present. The distinctive elements in the rules and structure of these games has separated hobbyist gaming further, by splintering off another style of game into its own category. The War game, with popular titles including Europa, Advanced Squad Leader, Diplomacy and a host of other titles from the now-defunct Avalon Hill focus on and detail military actions in a way designed to represent a simulation. They are more detailed and complex than their equivalents on toy store shelves, and repesent a hobby all their own, which crosses over into miniatures wargaming (a topic so large, it could fill several blogs – and it has.)

The Limited Anniversary 3-D Collector's "Treasure Chest" Edition of Settlers of Catan.  $469 USD retail... and yes, I have one.

The specific design elements that are common to the rest of the genre that includes the Catan series of games and its expansions is as follows:

• The games tend to be non-violent. Games in this style often abstract any sort of fighting, if it is present at all. Building, trading and otherwise growing something a player controls is the focus, rather than trying to eliminate something controlled by an opponent.
  
  
• Resource management is one of the keys to victory. Whether it is in-game currency, actions or “action points” per turn or numbers of pawns, tokens or cards, most of these games reward effective and efficient use of available resources to increase score, claim dominance on a board, or otherwise collect whatever is required to win.
  
  
• The impact of random chance is minimized in determining who wins. Many of these games feature dice, cards or other random tokens, but few use the “roll and move” mechanic that is common in “race” games. Though few are games of perfect information, where there are no random elements and every action an opponent may take is publicly known, a player can usually increase their chance of victory through capitalizing on good fortune, making timing and planning at least as important as a fortunate draw of a card or roll of dice.
  
  
• Players frequently simultaneously cooperate and compete. This concept, minus the “compete” is a subgenre I've written about before, but any trading game features this idea. Railroad gaming often forces players to use each other's lines to travel or ship goods, and games where players must collaborate, even briefly, to earn victory points are common. They key to managing these sorts of cooperative efforts in these games is usually helping someone, but not as much as they help you.

Some of my favorite titles in this style of board game (some of which will likely merit a writeup all their own) are Twilight Imperium, Junta, Bohnanza,Ticket to Ride, Puerto Rico, Domaine, Merchants of Amsterdam and Ingenious. More than a few in my collection were also designed by the same man, Dr. Reiner Knizia, a mathematics professor who I've been lucky enough to meet several times. There is an exception to virtually every broad generalization I've made so far in this article, and I'm sure a few elements I've overlooked. Any other board gamers out there? What did I overlook or gloss over in the text? Let me know.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Blog Gadgets

What's Playing: Borderlands and the Mad God

 Despite several posts explaining that the life of an unemployed geek isn't all web browsing, collecting unemployment and playing video games, I do manage to play quite a bit. The last week or so there have been two games that command a lot of the time I allow myself for computer gaming. One of the offerings is a completely free MMORPG (kinda, it'll need some explaining,) the other has been out for a while now, but I noticed how cheap it was on Steam and parted with a few dollars.

Since I'm going to be talking about games I like, it is only fair that I declare my usual bias. I usually play PC games, with a focus on RPGs, and I'm not a huge fan of modern first person shooters. I grew up on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom1&2 and Duke Nukem, so seeing all the new brownish-grey FPS games starring nearly identical space marines or WWII soldiers makes me turn up my nose saying “Eh, I played that game back when it was GOOD.” I also prefer single player or co-op to multiplayer deathmatch.

My bias means I've never played Halo 3, it also resulted in a 100% decrease in being called racial slurs on X-Box Live.

Because of my bias, most shooters have to have something else there for me. I loved Bioshock and Left 4 Dead, and it took me a long time to get around to picking it up, but I'm now really into Borderlands. Steam had the Game of the Year edition, packaged with all 4 pieces of DLC for $30, so I took the plunge. Borderlands basically is what happens when Halo and Diablo have a baby and send it to finishing school at Mad Max Academy. 4 character classes, with experience and levelling, a WoW-like skill tree and a very, very Diablo approach to loot. Guns drop off of enemies of varying quality, color-coded and with variations in gun manufacturer (affects a weapon's base stats somehow), clip size, damage, rate of fire, reload rate and possible elemental/status effects making the randomly generated possible guns somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.

All four of the misfits you cam play in your search for the holy macguffin, in this case, a Vault. So if you watch this game backwards, it's Fallout 3.

The world is post-apocalypse sci-fi with a dark humor bent, and lots of quests, vehicle combat a la Halo, interesting boss fights and drop in/out cooperative online modes give the base game a lot of bang for the buck. The 4 expansion packs add a zombie/tongue-in cheek horror with The Zombie Isle of Dr. Ned, Arena “game show” style survival combat and a bank for those extra guns in Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot, and two raises to the level cap and more guns in the last 2 pieces of DLC. To be fair, I haven't played very much of either Claptrap's New Robot Revolution or The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, but I understand that the latter focuses on vehicle fights. So far, I've started playthroughs with Mordecai the Hunter and Brick the Berserker.

The other game that has claimed quite a bit of time is harder to categorize, but I'll try. Realm of The Mad God is a free 8-bit mmorpg with unlockable classes, gameplay that feels more like an old school shooter (more Gradius than, say Contra) and PERMANENT DEATH. You start with simple controls, each class has 1 special power (priests heal, wizards fireball, etc) and can equip 3 types of item. Game play is fast-paced, with quests basically being “Look, that guy over there! Go kill him!” Leveling up and getting better equipment happens faster in a group, and some of the big challenges can only be assaulted with a large team. Once 25,000 monsters die on a server, the Mad God teleports the entire server to his lair where everyone tries to kill him, and a few of the survivors get some very nice loot.

The game goes quickly from "Cool! 8-bit Pirates!" to "Ohmygodohmygodohmygod."

The speed of leveling up takes some of the pain out of death, which like in the “roguelike” rpgs that obviously inspired this outing is permanent. You die, you lose all your stuff and can make a new level 1 character. You can, at any time, hit F5 to teleport to safety, leaving those around you to a possible grisly end, though lag spikes can and do kill characters. Depending on how far you got before you died, you accumulate “fame” when the character dies and this affects the maximum possible stats on your fresh character. It looks like the optional “pay us money” parts of the game are truly optional and purely cosmetic. I played this game a little and watched hours just melt off the clock. Very addictive.

Are there any other great rpg/shooter hybrids you love that I forgot to mention, or maybe don't know about yet? Let me know in the comments. Also, don't expect any April Fool's Day Pranks in tomorrow's post. I don't think I've been doing this nearly long enough to pull that sort of malarkey.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Blog Gadgets

Co-Operative Games (Unplugged)

 When geeks typically think of Co-op, we think video games, usually first person shooters with a cooperative campaign mode, or maybe classic arcade games where 2-4 players could team up to beat up hordes of bad guys and work together to progress. I guess a lot of other forms of gaming are cooperative as well, as tabletop RPGs are cooperative in nature (unless you play with one of THOSE groups, or are playing Paranoia.) I love all these games dearly, but I'm not talking about any of these.

Red Wizard Needs Food - Badly. I show my age by using this as an image instead of something like Left 4 Dead.

I'd like to discuss a fast-growing niche in the tabletop board gaming world. The cooperative game, and its twin sibling, the co-op game with a traitor. My first board game article touched on one of the more complicated and popular games in this sub-genre, Battlestar Galactica. There were a whole lot of games released before BSG unleashed suspicion and paranoia into deep space.

The earliest ancestor of this style of game (as treated by my narrow definition that eliminates games with one defined 'antagonist' like Scotland Yard or Fury of Dracula) that I could find evidence of is Arkham Horror. AH was first published in 1987, with a redesign and re-release in 2005, making the first proper game of this type still one of the most popular today. Investigators in the 1920s fight monsters, dig up clues, and close Gates To Worlds Man Was Not Meant To Know. Players work as a team, trying to prevent the return of one of the Great Old Ones from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Personally, I love the new edition of Arkham, with or without expansions, there is so much going on and it fits the cosmic horror theme, running around with tommyguns and eldritch tomes, defeating cultists and going insane from shoggoths.

Remember, any wins are temporary. The Old Ones will eventually destroy all When The Stars Are Right.

Five years before Arkham was re-released, though, Fantasy Flight put out the game that introduced me to the cooperative board game genre. Lord of the Rings, by master designer Reiner Knizia had a group of hobbits playing against the board itself, attempting to bypass challenges and complete the classic Heroic Journey before the Eye of Sauron can claim victory. I loved this when I first played it, but the years have not been kind, as other games reveal a key flaw. Every turn, the game says “I'm going to make you lose," and the entire play is spent reacting, merely trying to stop it. This means most key decisions are made randomly, and all the players can do is react.

On the upside, any homoerotic hobbit bed-bouncing is entirely optional.

A few years later, we have the first really popular game with the “secret traitor” mechanic, Shadows Over Camelot, published by Days of Wonder the same year Arkham Horror was re-released. This is the one that really got me going on the co-op board game, and I still play it six years later (as recently as Sunday, matter of fact.) Players are Knights of Camelot, and every turn, on one of the many areas and sub-boards representing threats to Arthur's Kingdom, something goes wrong or gets worse. The balancing act of resource management in dealing with these issues and completing these heroic quests is that one of the Knights may be a traitor working for Camelot's downfall. It is random every game, with 8 loyalty cards (and 3-7 players) it is also possible there is no traitor at all.

This game is typical of Days of Wonder... impeccably made, art and components both sturdy and very pretty.

More recently, we've seen a mini-flood of these games, highlights being Pandemic, Forbidden Island and the new Co-op questing D&D boardgames like Castle Ravenloft, based on classic adventures. There's just something different about the mood and atmosphere in a game where (at least most of) the table shares victory or defeat. I actually like a game in this style that beats us as a group of players occasionally, the challenge makes the victory over the common foe that much sweeter. Even if the foe is a deck of cards and a little collection of plastic and cardboard.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Blog Gadgets