mishmash

Let’s continue the tales of trawling for games.

Just look at that image. Like why would they do that. Hidden Post-Apocalyptic 3 Top-Down 3D has a 40% discount for a sweet deal of a steal at £100. That dev is clearly using 4D sales strats. ‘Don’t underprice yourself. You get that one sale and you’re set for life!’ This is a hidden object game, seriously, that at best looks average. It becomes clearer what’s up when you see the bundle offer. You can get it along with another shitty looking badly priced game for only £3. For some reason they think having a 99% discount on the bundle will get enough eyes on it for more sales. I guess. It’s got positive reviews too. I don’t know if they were also on a 99% discount.

It’s ironic that there is a noticeable lack of new game releases in the buildup to Xmas due to the winter sales. A total reversal of the pre-steam days. It may be different on consoles but going through Steam it’s clear that some devs avoid this period. I know a lot of them sell more games during the sales but it’s gonna be their older games. You don’t want to slap too big a discount on a new game. And the run up during December probably has a lot of players holding onto their cash for a binge bulk purchase in the sales. It’s an odd effect.

I think that’s why the December buzz list was smaller than usual and I think January could be affected too. Also I ran into quite a lot of new games marked by Steam as ‘not compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina or above’. That remains a bit of a mess for mac players. Some of those games may work fine anyway, at least that’s what I’ve been told. However, I’m largely ignoring them because I can’t be bothered with problems. And I won’t be the only one doing that. It’s not like there’s a shortage of games.

What else have I been playing? I got a fair way into Bots Are Stupid. It’s a programmer platformer? A precision thinking platformer? Basically it’s a platformer where all movement is controlled through simple code. ‘move right’ ‘jump’ ‘hook down left’ etc. I like the concept and made it to the first extreme levels, but in practice something felt missing. It felt like I should be able to do some crazy show off stunts without too much trouble and play about with it. In the end it was a lot of trial and error around timing simple moves. Maybe it needed a few more commands to fully grab my attention, or a change to the level designs. It’s well made but ultimately not for me.

Recently I’ve been mucking around with online card games, partly out of curiosity and partly due to a potential silly project on my mind. I’ve got limited experience with them but there is something attractive about a big set of collectible cards. Especially to a hoarding type with an interest in other worlds like me.

First I went to the source, Magic: The Gathering Arena, which for macOS users is only available through the Epic Games launcher. Considering it is one the most complex games to get good at I found it easy enough to learn the gist of how to play. The tutorials are well structured to introduce all the phases and packs. Once I started playing real people, I managed to win more than half the matches. The attack and defend phases between individual cards makes innate sense, as does whittling down your opponents HP. The instant cards that can be played anytime are great when I do it and annoying as hell when my opponent does it. It keeps things interesting.

Then I experienced what my noobiness would call the full force of card creep. I got a new pack as a reward which used two colours of cards. Thought, what the hell, I’ll jump into a match and learn as I go. Terrible idea. Every other card I drew was a wall of text and each one more impenetrable than the last. Some had two faces. New mechanisms and classes everywhere. Total brain freeze. Now I’m sure it’s possible to learn this over time but I also think it would be much more fun in real life with friends and not with a time limit for each play online. Either way you’re gonna have to be cool with a lot of losing in the process. Again, probably more fun with friends.

Despite that, Magic was cool enough. But I’m only trying these games out and moved on to something else I grabbed cheap in the winter sale, Ascension. I wanted to see games with fundamentally different approaches to gameplay and Ascension is the most different because you don’t engage in direct battle with your opponent. You play with a shared deck and with up to four players. Starting with a small hand the aim is to collect the most valuable deck from a pool of cards in the middle. Along the way you can win victory points but the bulk of your score generally comes from the value of all the cards in your final deck.

I found this the quickest game to learn the rules. The concept is quite ingenious. Strategising which cards to buy and when to buy them for maximum effect leads to many potential routes to winning. There’s a lot of value in drawing more cards into your hand because of the way each card is used to purchase more. A smaller deck with high value cards would be best but that doesn’t necessarily give you the card functions that work best. Lots of balancing going on.

One thing that niggled at me, was that I didn’t see a way to know how many points opponents had from their decks. Which is how it would be in real life. That meant it was a mystery who was out in front and by how much. It makes an exciting finish with the reveal but it also means I’m trying to play tactically in the dark. Fog of war I suppose. For a decade old game there was still a decent amount of people online to play against. However, Ascension is one of the few games with a good single player option and I spent most of my short time playing the AI.

Lastly I went for Gwent. As a CD Projekt Red game I was surprised the macOS version wasn’t on GOG. Instead it’s only in the App Store. Gwent is again different. Played in rows. Front is melee, back is ranged. The goal is to amass the most points in a round, and most importantly win two out of three rounds. Even more most importantly your hand is not fully refilled between rounds, which means being efficient with your cards and knowing when to throw a round is vital. That struck me as one of the best concepts for an online card game.

The overall feel is of a battle field where it’s all about attacking. Cards have HP points. Add them up for your score. All the while attacking each other to knock those points down. Playing only one card at a time keeps things simple and focused. Compared to Magic, Gwent’s starter decks for each, clan(?), seem even more distinct from one another. The aggro deck felt satisfyingly over powered. The swarm deck didn’t suit me at all and clearly takes a good deal more finesse to get working. Same goes for the sneaky deck. I got into an exciting and gruelling match playing boost against someone’s custom bleed deck. As with all these games Gwent’s cards also have a lot of functions that need to be learnt but I’m not feeling out of my depth yet. Although it’s the game I’ve played the least of so far. Both Gwent and Ascension have lots of expansions that I’ve barely touched on.

Of those three, the one I would be most likely to keep going with is Gwent. It would be very tempting to go with Ascension but being so old now does mean a smaller community. I also slightly prefer the battle orientated approach. It may also be that I like the use of a board for additional strategy. My previous favourite card battler was the original Duelyst, which heavily used a board and movement. Perhaps I should try Faeria. I recall getting a free copy of that somewhere. Bringing me to…

I’m starting to get on top of my backlog of unplayed games. Starting. As in I now have a handle on what I’ve got. By my calculations I have about 100 unplayed games for macOS. I have another 100 games for Windows; some of which can be played through GeForce Now. A lot of them were free from Epic and most likely will never be touched. That number doesn’t include anything from Twitch/Amazon. Every month I look at the free games from Amazon Prime, I enjoy looking at games and just seeing what’s on offer, and then I claim some of them. Not all of them because I’m so amazingly discerning, yeah right. But it’s a Windows only launcher and I’ve no idea how many games are on my account. I’ve been doing it for years. It could be another 100 that I’ll never even see again.

That idiocy aside. There’s still about eight PS3 games I’ve not played, and even a few for PS1 sat on a shelf. I think that’s about it. No small task but I’m not going to worry about it. Bizarrely that’s better than it was. Sort of. Gaming is weird. I’m not overly bothered by the size of my games library, I think that’s a better way to think of it than a backlog. I’ve no intention of finishing all these games. I mostly just want to try as many as possible before I’m unable to for whatever reason. I may update on this next year if I make any progress. Backlog games will pop up on mishmash from time to time with a release year in the title.