A brand I keep coming back to is Logitech. I was a die-hard fan of their mouses until Mad Catz’ R.A.T. series won me over, and I’ve had numerous headsets and webcams from them as well.
Today I wanted to review one of my favorite gaming products by Logitech, the Logitech G930 wireless headset. This headset has treated me very well over the last 5 years I’ve had the pleasure of owning it. I’ve had it longer than any boyfriend I’ve ever dated!
As both a gamer and game developer, I spend a lot of time in front of my computer, so having a comfortable headset is key. The padded headband and adjustable lengths help make the G930 easy to wear. Usually the adjustable parts of headsets are prone to breaking, but the G930 has study metal where most headphones merely use plastic, helping this pair far outlast any other adjustable headset I’ve owned.
The ear cups of the G930 are well sized and fit well over my ears. This is an odd rarity nowadays with many headsets preferring a circular ear cup that is often too small and clips the top of the ear.
Unfortunately, over the years and hundreds of hours of use, the plastic coating on the ear pads has begun to flake off, leaving little black bits of rubbery material in my hair and around my desk. While replacement pads are only $6 on Amazon, I wish that better material choices were made for such a high-use product.
The sound of the G930 is crisp and clear, featuring Dolby 7.1 surround sound, and has a great range. While my Sennheisers handle bass a bit better than the G930, the G930 does a good job and covers the other ranges with sharp clarity. Though I keep my volume at a level that doesn’t cause my ears to bleed, the G930 can reach a volume high enough that I’ve used it as a speaker while quickly showing a video to friends.
The mic on the G930 captures sound clearly and is slim and out of the way. While temporarily using another headset, I found myself irritated with the mic picking up pops and being constantly in my vision. Being able to rotate the mic up while not using it is a great feature, though I wouldn’t always trust the auto-mute. While rotating the mic up is supposed to mute the mic, a friend of mine had an incident while using the restroom on a Skype call where the position did not mute his mic, much to his own embarrassment.
The combination charging-cable/USB extender that comes with the G930 is very convenient and has an impressive cord length. I feel like I should have made better use of this cable, because I brutalized the dongle thoroughly enough when using the headset with a laptop that I bent the connection between the USB connector and circuit board, which may be part of the cause of the headset disconnecting randomly during use. This was not an issue when I first bought the headset.
The volume control, mute button and programmable buttons on the headset are extremely convenient. The volume control wheel is well-sized, strudy and scrolls easily. Muting the mic also lights a small, red LED on the microphone, which can be glanced at quickly without removing the headset to check the state. Unfortunately, the mute does not seem to work with all applications. While the mute button works for Skype, vent and many other programs, Discord still picks up audio when the headset is in muted mode.
My absolute favorite part of the G930 is its wireless capabilities. The headset has an impressive range, allowing me to keep connection while anywhere in my apartment, and the battery holds a hefty charge, allowing hours of use between charges. Being able to pop up and grab a glass of water without missing out on conversation or pausing a song I’m enjoying is great. I’ve gotten so used to being able to get up and walk away from my computer with my headset on that I almost tore my head off walking away from my PC while using a wired headset!
Overall, this is a comfortable, well-rounded, quality headset that I would recommend to any gamer or active PC user, especially those who would enjoy and benefit from its wireless capabilities.
Duskers recently released after having spent several months in Early Access, luckily they have gone into a full release in good time and with great polish. This game skillfully blends three core elements: rogue like dungeons, tense claustrophobic space horror and puzzles. The game is split into exploration of individual ships, which function as your levels. Each is procedurally generated with a guessed at number of baddies lurking inside. Your job is to use your scrappy fleet of drones to outwit and outmaneuver those enemies to survive and piece together what catastrophe befell the universe. There are plenty of contenders, and you’ll keep a running log of all the front runners through your journeys.
All these planets, and you still can’t land.
The game display looks like a mash up of a retro-futurist mainframe terminal dream and a DOS computer aided design interface. Your connection with the drones is fuzzy, displaying a barely lit outline of the interior of boarded derelicts. This will wash out, scramble and occasionally drop entirely like an a UHF antenna in bad weather. Your much safer off with the overhead map view, where you can see the position and activities of all your drones at once. Controlling them the only way possible: both hands on the keyboard. That’s right, this game has a command line and beside some primitive joystick like navigation of individual drones, it’s the only way you can navigate.
Where you’ll be spending most of your time
And navigate you will, as ‘[na]vigate drone room’ is the essential command to move drones room to room. By stringing together commands on line with semi-colons you can order up whole sequences of events before moving to the next drone and getting it lined up for a day’s work too. Each command can be shortened to the minimum number of letters needed for it to be unique. If you’re into Cisco networking gear, you’ll love it. This game is not entirely unlike a light version of Robot Odyssey, the infamously difficult Robot building game from The Learning Company for old Apple II computers. Except maybe that death is swift, scary and permanent.
The overall ambiance of the game is spot on. Even the soundtrack is simply a collection of your drones clicks and beeps, alongside the background hums of empty spacecraft. Occasionally, you’ll hear the thrumming and screams of angry creatures trapped on board the drifting wrecks. Warning sounds will warn as ancient ships contort and lose integrity or are bombarded with space debris. The game has countless video effects, but they work into the mood instead of against it. Further, they’re mostly in the single-drone mode and won’t affect the overview screen you use most of the time. The simple seeming graphics bely that a full 3D engine is running with particle effects full bore. Despite that, I never ran into a single moment of noticeable latency or lowered frame rates, nor did the game ever crash and break the illusion. The interface is one of sitting at a spaceship control terminal, driven by an actual keyboard making it feel intensely real. It’s as spot on, with a good setup, as playing Elite with a VR headset and customized joysticks. All of this feeds into the slow, horror film pace of play.
I don’t think any other game I’ve played has ever made me jump back from my desk quite as much as this. The levels are twisty and doors or airlocks can fail at random with relatively little warning, so you have to be careful. I found it best to keep most of the doors on a ship closed off, deciding on ‘staging’ rooms to keep myself from losing more than one drone at a time. Once, using the fuzzed out video feed of one disabled drone, I was able to watch an enemy slowly walk into a room I had opened for him. With one multi-part command I closed him off from my disabled drone and was able to space him and tow my precious scout back to the ship. This game revels in something that only computer games can accomplish so well, everyone who plays will walk away with their own narratives.
Definitely short-sighted.
There is some ‘dialogue’ to the game. Corrupted pieces of occasionally relevant information with which you build a database of the ways in which the universe could have ended. Piecing it together is not unlike going over a conspiracy theorists cork board of delusions and after quite a bit of play, I still have no idea what really happened. I’m not even sure it matters, but at least the self assigned objectives give you something to cling on to, hoping to make it far enough to get an inkling of the catastrophe together. Reading through these is one of the few ‘breather’ moments the game really ever gives you.
Much of the game takes place between levels, as in any survival driven strategy game. Drones have abilities built in, and some number of upgrade parts you have to add for basic functionality. These include generators, sensors of various sorts, weapons and salvaging equipment. You’ll scavenge new parts for your ship and drones from the hulks you board. If you’re lucky you’ll also pick up some fuel and new drones. When you’re really lucky, if you like a ship enough and have safely cleared every area, you can commandeer it for your journey. Their are some basic resources of the world, scrap and fuel. Fuel comes in two parts: propulsive and jump fuel. the former moves you around systems, the latter between them. There are multiple systems in each galaxy & you move between galaxies with jump gates. All of these are scavenged, propulsive fuel is also replenished (by ram scoops?) when moving between systems. Between levels, scrap is used to repair your drones, and their parts. It’s also required for buying new parts from automated trading outposts that have survived past humanity’s end. You’ll find that most repairs are pretty expensive, so keep backup parts and only repair what you have to for survival. For example, I tend to build up an inventory of generators, gathering arms and tow hitches as you can’t properly scavenge without all of them. Much of the game strategy is based on this aspect of never quite having everything you’ll need to survive. You can’t revisit levels, even when you just picked up that one part you needed. As an example: I find myself switching from using stealth, to lures, to room sensors, to motion detectors for detecting hostile movement. These all work, in very different ways, for avoiding being taken out by the hostiles.
Time to upgrade (or fix) my mods!
Learning the strategy, and calm careful approaches needed for this game will take a few hours. Even then, you may have runs cut short early from an unexpected turn. This game does not take it easy on you with a learning curve, outside of the built-in tutorial. You also must be prepared to occasionally be hit with a total oddball, such as an asteroid or losing video feeds while something important goes on. The precise balance of controllable and uncontrollable events will keep you on the edge of your seat. Many enemies are quite hard to predict at first. For example, swarms aren’t picked up by motion sensors, but by the loud buzzing you can hear on a drone’s feed next to their rooms. They can also move through the vents, so the room you’re in might not be as safe as you thought. Aside from this dangerous exploring, most of the game is run from the ship schematic overview, and by using preprogrammed commands to orchestrate drone movement. You can easily give a drone a whole sequence of rooms to scavenge and tell it when to return home. I do wish their where more commands along the lines of “once the drone has left room A, close its door” but the lightweight shell style of scripting works very well in this game. It is extremely robust and well though out. All considered, this game is extremely tense and on edge. It is rare to find a game that so perfectly conveys as sense of never being safe as this. Even save scumming with a force quit will not work on this game, it’ll simply act as if you had undocked, losing you access to the level you left and any drones you left behind. Those drones are pretty cute, with their little whirring movement and sometimes cutesy names. It makes it all the worse when they inevitably get smashed up. My stockholm syndrome cried out each time.
That said, with practice, patience and a freighter full of luck, you will eventually get into the rhythm of the game. On a good run, this means you’ll be able to explore further and further on each run and really make a bond with your drones and ship before they are reduced to dust.
My recommendation is to try this game, and when you do: BE PARANOID
I played this on my Ubuntu LTS / Steam / NVidia 960 machine with a provided download code and a ‘mechanical’ keyboard.
Total War Warhammer is Creative Assemblies newest edition into their long running series of real time strategy games. Warhammer is a solid addition to the Total War catalog, and represents the first non-historical foray by Creative Assembly in their world conquering strategy games. I got am playing this game as a veteran of both Atilla and Rome Total War games, so its safe to expect some bias in the favor of Creative Assembly, that being said, let’s get to the review.
I did love this game, but by no means is Total War Warhammer perfect. With the newest instalment we see great visuals especially with the campaign map itself. Warhammer models are famous for their specific detail, and Create Assembly has really worked hard to bring this level of detail to the individual models. Each unit seems lovingly sculpted with the care and time the most devout tabletop players, emblems stand out, hero units look unique and the whole world feels alive.
The level of detail in the game is stunning
The user interface will be familiar to veteran total war players and easy to understand for newcomers to the series. There haven’t been many UI tweaks to this entry, but the ones that are there are mostly related to magic, new tabs for lore, with videos of each spell in action, and explanations of each lore, are some of the new features.
The addition of magic is well implemented with multiple schools of magic ranging from the lore of death to the lore of metal. On the battlefield you will now see your general as an individual who will be a capable warrior able to singlehandedly take on units of normal infantry. This is quite a change from the previous squishy lords. Its not mostly safe to charge your hero in to a large group of enemies and tie them up in melee combat. Your lord may not win against an entire unit of say heavy cavalry, but he will keep them engaged until you can find something in your army to counter with.
Watching units of flying creature’s crash into your lines as units of trolls and giants tear through your lines is a both an amazing and terrifying sight to behold for the first time. Creative Assembly has done an amazing job of bringing the visceral world of tabletop Warhammer Fantasy to life. You can feel the power of a strong magical spell doing its work as infantry units get tossed aside by a column of fire from the sky. Calvary crashes through ranged missile units, utterly devastating them, and your heroic lord holds the center of your line, his mace swinging back and forth with devastating effect. It’s all very stunning to see.
Stunning visuals are not the only thing this game offers, each of the four playable factions: The Empire, Dwarves, Greenskins, Chaos, and Vampire Counts, all look and feel and play very differently. Despite the difference between the races, anyone who has played the tabletop game will quickly see the similarities between game and tabletop. Each race keeps its most important traits without any one race being too powerful.
Dwarves are very heavily armored and able to absorb enemy charges and beat them back with powerful artillery and ranged units. They excel at defense and have powerful late game artillery that can devastate entire enemy units. Dwaves do not wield magic, instead they have runesmiths who capture powerful magic’s in runes and can release them on command. Dwarves excel at both ranged and melee attacks with a good balance of units and some of the most powerful cost effective artillery in the game.
Empire troops defend a wall in a high tier settlement
The Empire’s infantry and ranged units are not as powerful as some other factions, but they make up for it with powerful cavalry which used well to attack enemy units in the flanks and rear will quickly turn the tide. The empire is strong in magic fielding wizards, of three types Fire, Light and Celestial lores, each bring powerful spells to combat. The empire is in my opinion the most balanced faction, it possesses a decent amount of everything, war machines, cavalry, and monstrous creatures, and while none are devastating alone, together they form the best rounded army in the game.
The vampire counts field hordes of cheap infantry combined with death magic and powerful monstrous infantry. They trade the ability to have ranged units for large amounts of cheap infantry, and some seriously scary monstrous creatures that that can cause Terror in the enemy ranks. Their lords can raise the dead, quickly turning the tide of a battle that may not be going your way. They also get to corrupt the land they currently hold giving them bonuses and doing causing attrition to invading armies.
Chaos functions like a horde armies from the Atilla game where they have no permanent settlements and each horde builds and carries its own building with it. Chaos was a late announcement to the game, and was meant to be the first DLC, but anyone who pre-ordered got them for free. They get chosen warriors of chaos and chaos knights so though infantry and cavalry at higher tiers is very powerful. Chaos wields the magic of Fire, Death, Metal, and have some extremely powerful spells.
The Greenskins have powerful melee infantry and the ability to bring Trolls and giants onto the battlefield, plus once there fightness meter reaches its peak a Waagh army will spawn to aid in further conquests. goblins have the little waagh lore of magic ork shamans have the big waaagh also they get giants and trolls as there top tier units which is just cool.
Each race feels unique and even though there are only so many ways to do infantry and Calvary and ranged units, each race feels separate, but not so much that if you are playing say empire you can’t go and pick up vampire counts.
While Total War Warhammer has been well crafted and implemented it is not free from flaws. One problem I discovered quite quickly is that Empire and Vampire counts have a hard time keeping an economy that can support their armies and allow for new conquests. Few buildings especially for the Vampires add significant amounts of money and units. Meanwhile army upkeep ramps up very quickly. So these two factions will quickly be running either in the red or making very little money a turn making it quite challenging to build new armies.
Next up we have to talk about the AI which has plagued the total war series since the beginning. While the enemy army will for the most part be competent using its ranged units, plugging gaps in their lines, and trying to use units to outflank you, I experienced a bug where very rarely an enemy army will sit in place and eat your artillery shots. With the new focus on lords as individual units a new problem has arisen in that the enemy AI will often run their lord ahead of an advancing army and allow you to either kill him or do very significant damage to him before he has even reached your lines. Lords are way more powerfull than in say Atilla, or Rome, but you still can’t put them against an entire army and expect them to survive. So to say the Ai is more liberal with its generals is a bit of an understatement. This can be easily fixed with patches, and I hope that it will be.
The diplomatic mechanics have been significantly reworked from Rome two, it is now much easier to know where you stand with a faction. Confederating is now a much more useful and doable mechanic than it was in previous games. With this comes a very silly exploit that will hopefully be patched out. If you declare war on a faction that cannot reach you in several turns they will generally sue for peace and offer a sum of gold or whatever your factions variant is, which you will accept of course because you will need the money. Several turns after an ally will ask you to rejoin the war again generally with an offer of a sum of money, you can repeat the cycle over and over to farm gold. Obviously this is a slight issue again hopefully that will be patched and changed in some way.
Next let’s talk settlements. Total War Warhammer keeps in line with Attila and Rome two that the provincial capital has walls and can reach size five. Minor settlements have no walls to start, but, there are defense that can be added to them to give them walls. This is a nice feature, and since they top out at size three.
Settlements
The major issue I have with this is that sieges and city assaults are just plain boring now. If you attack or defend a minor settlement without walls the battle takes place in a normal open battlefield instead of within the confines of the settlement. So gone are the days of your minor settlements using narrow streets and possible city centers on hills with small ramparts to station ranged units. This is a great loss as that helped sieges feel more alive and to give you a chance to overcome terrible odds with clever use of terrain and buildings.
Sieges of provincial capitals have also taken a huge step backwards in that instead of being able to attack from all sides choosing how you will overcome the enemy defenders and cities that generally had at least several defensible positions once you had breached the walls. Now you get one wall to assault two if you are really lucky, towers are only active if one of your units is standing with its influence box. Once the walls are breached you have maybe two or three large streets for the enemy to move down into the city center capture point. Also for some unexplained reason every unit in the game can run up to the enemy walls and pull out ladders and start climbing. Sieges have taken a huge step backwards taking a lot of the fun of it with them. The last issue with settlements comes that all factions cannot take any settlement Dwarves and Orcs can only control the others settlements and Humans and Vampires are the same this is by far one of the worst ideas introduced into total war it limits the gameplay potential as a whole and will kill replay value as the strategies and maneuvers you make game to game will end up being very similar since you are so limited on what settlements you can control.
All things said though Total War Warhammer is a fun game and a fine addition to the series many of the issues above will either be patched out at some point and failing that there has always been a thriving modding community for total war so the people will get what they want one way or the other. The game is beautiful with a lot of potential and the freelc of Britonia and they many other to be announced DLC packs will provide hours of fun for those willing to look past its minor issues. Beautiful with tons of potential I am looking forward to seeing how this game changes and grows as we go forward.
In-universe, when the world needed the heroes of Overwatch they were nowhere to be found but thankfully they’ve come to our consoles & PCs at just the right time to save us from the onslaught of generic grey/brown FPS games. This is not only Blizzard Entertainment’s first original intellectual property in 17 years but also the company’s first foray into team based First Person shooters. Can the folks at Blizzard capture the objective and prove that they can still innovate or is Overwatch a causality of its own hype?
It is almost impossible to talk about Overwatch without acknowledging what little we do know about the project that preceded it – Titan, we do know for sure that it eventually became the team based shooter we know today after a lengthy development period stretching all the way back to at least 2007 and included at least one full project reboot. Blizzard has publically said that Overwatch is not only their first new franchise but also a redemption story for Jeff Kaplan and his team – who up until the game’s November 2014 unveiling had lived in the shadow of the other Blizzard development teams. Like the heroes that comprise Overwatch the development team behind this game experience a great loss before being able to climb their way back to the top.
At it’s most basic Overwatch is a 6 Vs 6 team based shooter where co-operation and communication between teammates to absolutely vital to victory. Blizzard has taken hints from one of their other games, Heroes of the Storm, by eliminating the focus on kills (called eliminations in Overwatch) or the ratio between a player’s kills / deaths. Instead, teams must focus on the objective at hand – whether that is defending / attacking a given point on the map or escorting / stopping a moving objective called “the payload”. Player’s won’t find a traditional scoreboard upon death either, everything revolves the completion or failure of an objective and this gives players a sense of comradery even when playing with randoms.
Heroes are a core component of the Overwarch experience and the game does as much as it can, without locking you out of selecting certain broad categories of Hero, to ensure that your team is as balanced as possible. Each hero has a hand full of abilities which give them a unique play-style and toolkit but if you were to boil them down to the essentials you’ve got: Attack, Defense, Tank & Support. A successful team must be able to adapt their play-style and change heroes fluidly in order to successfully counter-strategies from the opposing team. A failure in maintaining a good team composition can make the difference between success & failure.
Overwatch’s gallery of heroes sports a roster of 21 colorful and eccentric individuals. Rather than list all of them here are just a few of the heroes that I’ve enjoyed in the week since the game’s release:
Bastion – Categorized as a defense hero this robot is able to transform into a powerful stationary turret at the press of a button. A well placed Bastion is able to rip through an entire team minus a tank in just a few seconds flat. The downside to bastion is that it takes several seconds for Bastion to switch modes, so a well-placed Tracer can be an effective counter to our robotic friend. Bastion’s ultimate allows players to transform into a mobile tank delivering a near insta-kill concussive blast.
Pharah– This armor-clad security chief is a no-nonsense combatant. Welding a medium damage rocket launcher & thruster pack, former Quake III players will be right at home with Pharah. Her primary attack launches a rocket straight forward while her secondary move allows her to jet into the air for a couple of seconds before floating down. Perhaps her most devastating attack is her Ultimate which sees her rocket into the sky and unleash a barrage of missiles at a given target area. If you’re looking for that old school arena FPS feel you can’t go wrong with Pharah.
D.VA – A professional Starcraft player who joined up with the Korean special forces during the story events leading up to the present. How did South Korea defend itself from the oncoming Omnic hordes? By allowing professional E-Sports players to pilot mecha, of course! D.VA has one of the highest health pools in the game and to offset this advantage her base damage is a lot lower than other tanks. She has a “defensive matrix” that allows her to negate all incoming projectiles in a frontal cone for a few seconds which is a great option when you are cornered waiting for teammates to help out. Her ultimate is perhaps my favorite in the game – she sacrifices her Mecha, bailing out and overloading its engines causing a miniature nuclear explosion killing all enemies within line of sight. The destruction of her mecha isn’t the end of the game for D.VA either, she continues on foot with a smaller pool of health and a powerful pistol!
With little single player content, save for a versus A.I mode that is more of a training tutorial to get your feet wet with new heroes before heading off into the competitive mode no discussion of Overwatch can be complete without talking about the game’s community. For the most part it was smooth sailing in regards to fellow players but every so often one or two players would decide that they didn’t need to play the recommended roles – a sniper on an attack phase is totally a legit strategy and there is no way 6 tracers (who has a very small health pool) could go wrong /s. Overwatch is certainly one of those games where it is better to play with a full party of friends than just going it alone in the matchmaking queue. Also, given that this is an FPS – be prepared for “salty” players to hurl slurs at you and ignore objectives to play Overwatch like a team deathmatch simulator. Sadly, like most popular online games there is an element to the community that is outright toxic and they can sometimes ruin the fun vibe that Overwatch works so hard to create.
How did someone not realize that maybe this particular skin isn’t the best idea?
Once you’ve mastered your favorite heroes and memorized all of the maps what is left to keep you coming back? Overwatch offers players experience after the match based upon a number of factors – damage dealt, healing done, number of eliminations, whether or not they were part of the winning team etc. Upon leveling up players receive a “loot box” which contains up to 4 collectible unlocks for their heroes – wheether that is a new skin, voice line or spray. These loot boxes are a great way to keep players engaged with the game long after they’ve seen everything there is to do, content wise. For some reason, Blizzard has decided to allow players to purchase loot boxes for .99 each, which would make sense if Overwatch was a free to play or budget title but the console version is a $74,99 CDN release. Also, some of the additional outfits are cool but hopefully Blizzard veers away from the cultural appropriation with the next infusion of unlockable content – one of Pharah’s unlockable costumes is literally a stereotypical North American aboriginal person complete with headdress. Not only does this make zero sense in the context of the character – she is of Egyptian origin – but a company as large as blizzard should be culturally aware enough to realize than an entire culture’s way of dress is not a costume for characters to throw on and murder each other in.
In the end, Overwatch is an entertaining and bright shooter than brings the popular “hero” mechanics from the MOBA genre successfully into the FPS space. With its focus on objective game types it does its best to ensure that every game is a fun experience, even if the community can sometimes hamper these efforts. At the heart of the game is its’ great cast of character, with 21 options available at launch players are sure to find a few heroes who resonate with them but even new players shouldn’t be afraid to step outside of their comfort zone and check out that one hero that they have 0 minutes of play time with. A lack of gameplay mode variety and some troubling unlockable costumes certainly take Overwatch down a peg but if you’re looking for that unique brand of Blizzard fun, Overwatch has your back.
Developers Virtual Basement bring the childhood pastime of backyard warfare with plastic army men into the modern era with their Unreal 4 engine powered team death match shooter The Mean Greens. This is certainly territory that has been covered by 3DO’s now defunct Army Men franchise on previous generation consoles, but no other title has made watching your plastic figure melting into a pile of goo like The Mean Greens has achieved.Read More
Review by our newest Reviwer, so new she doesnt even have an account: Kylie Trace
Sometime last summer I started hearing about Battleborn, a sci-fi/fantasy first person MOBA developed by Gearbox Software, the creators of Borderlands. Battleborn’s graphics are solid and have a cartoony feel that really adds to the colorful battlefield. The number of playable characters means that there’s something for everyone. I thought it looked fun, so I was excited to hear it was going to have an open beta which would give me the chance to check it out before its actual release.
The basic plot is that there’s only one star left in the galaxy and a whole slew of heroes from different backgrounds must come together to protect it from being destroyed. The heroes (known as Battleborn) come from 5 different factions, ranging from a crew of anarchists known as the Rogues to members of the LLC (Last Light Consortium) whose main focus is to continue to profit economically. Either way they all have to work together to stop the end of the galaxy, but you still get the feeling that everyone has a “this town ain’t big enough for the two of us” attitude when you read each of the characters back stories. These stories have to be unlocked and are pretty rewarding if you’re interested in the character, but it takes a bit of grinding. Sometimes a character’s lore is only unlocked if you get someone else to play one specific character with you 5 times. It’s just chance if someone else wants to play that character unless you can get someone you know to do it.
I had the joy of getting to test out the Fantasy Grounds program on Steam, specifically being able to GM a mini campaign, and I knew this was going to be a blast. In the past I had GM’ed a decent number of games, from D&D 3.0 to Pathfinder, to Mutants & Masterminds, to oWoD, to… well you get the idea.. sadly when it came to online play, it normally ended up being IRC with dicebots and an updated every few minutes Paint .img (yeah, not as old school as mud’s, but still pretty old)
I went in to the program with pretty high hopes and was not disappointed. The layout is very easy on the eyes, not cluttered as some programs tend to be, but how easy and intuitive the program is overall is amazing. To the side is a bar of common things, such as PC sheets and a Library for looking up and loading various rule sets for Players, and GM’s have those in addition to Story, Maps, NPC, Items and Notes; allowing you to look through story bits, maps, NPCs, and Items to view, edit, or create things for the campaign, with Notes being a nice big notebook for each campaign. Along the bottom is a row of dice for easy rolling, simply drag whatever dice you need into either the chat, or onto an enemy/object on a map to declare the results. Also on the bottom is a hotkey bar so rolls that might take a bit to set up can be saved for very easy access.
Where this program really shines though, is in its automation: In each character sheet, be it PC or NPC or enemy, you are able to do many rolls with a simple click and drag. Want your Fighter to attack a Kobold? On your sheet is an attack (and a damage) blurb that you simply click then drag to the Kobold on the map, it auto rolls your attack and calculates it against the Kobold’s armor, then states if the attack is a hit or a miss (showing the roll in chat, of course), then simply do the same with damage, which it automatically deducts from the Kobold’s HP. The whole thing allows you to be focused on the story, the battle, the *gasp* role-playing! (ok, side note, but the enviromental lighting change, being able to tint your and the players screens a specific color to highlight night, being around a campfire or in a forest, is one of the coolest things ever)
In addition to the awesome things it does for DURING the game, it does equally awesome things for a GM in setting up the game and campaign. Not only does it have TONS of content which can be bought and downloaded from the site, but it allows you to create your own content incredibly easily. From creating some new enemies (including setting a token image to them) to new gear (I LOVE making custom magic gear for my campaigns!) to using your own maps (with an awesome little tool to set how large the grid is for moving around on it) to, and probably the most amazing, setting up push-pins to link specific rooms/areas/events to story events (no more having to have a few windows open on “if they does this, this happens” notes, just have a push-pin for each room and click on it as they explore), this program has it all.
And now a change of Narrator:
Hello im fionna fox, and I have never played D&D before. Tonight I got the chance to play (with the help of fantasy grounds) my first ever mini campaign with Espy, Erika, and Rae. Going in to this the most knowledge I had of D&D was basically what I had heard in highschool and what I knew from random people telling me things. So basically nothing.
In order to better understand what the hell I was doing I called upon an experienced Dungeon Master (DM) in the form of Espy who had run several campaigns in the past. She assured me that I would just have to “play along” and that the game would do the rest.
So in the more than capable hands of Espy, I plunged in. for our mini campaign we had three players “against” one DM whom I would later learn to was quite cruel in her application of all types of various baddie and traps in order to try and kill us. So I chose the “archer” sort of character because I always liked playing with arrows and hitting things, and went in as blind as could be.
I expected quite a bit of dice rolling to happen, but in reality it was mostly in the first turns just us moving around and seeing what was right in front of me. The Dungeon Master tools gave Espy the ability to lay out all of her story text on prompts if she wanted, but I dragged all of us in to skype because I could and I thought it would be fun.
So with Espy on the mic we started our adventure, we were outside a dungeon which we were to clean out of its infestation of nasties. The first room held a foursome of kobolds (which I am told is the lowest form of enemies) our team of a warrior, a wizard, and a ranger (me), cleared these out quite quickly. After we cleared the ones that we had could see Espy revealed the rest of the room, and we went from there. Her DM tools allowed her to draw on the map the areas that she wanted to show us and leave other areas blank.
Combat was a breeze, each of our character sheets were rife with stats and things that I had no idea what they meant, but Espy was just able to direct me to click on a various thing, for example if I wanted to attack I would click and drag a dice that was in the weapons area on the character sheet over the top of the monster I wanted to attack, and the game would roll and calculate damage for me. Mostly for me it would calculate misses, and then tell me that I was bad at life.
When damage was done to me Espy would simply tell me how much damage the game said I took, all calculated based on those mysterious numbers on my character sheet. It was honestly the best way I could think of to let me play Dungeons and Dragons and not have to learn any of the complex systems behind it.
Fantasy grounds made me able to understand what it was like to embark on an epic D&D campaign with out having to do all of the paper work. I really think that’s where this games strength lies, in its ability to bring together the strength of the DM who tells the story with the fun of playing a game, so you dotn spend all of your time doing math.
Over all I love the experience of playing Fantasy Grounds, it was enjoyable and easy to get in to. Espy tells me that it has many more under-the-hood options for DM’s and that its not as transparent as it is to the players, but that its still WAY easier to do than it would be on paper. Perhaps than the advantage of Playing Fantasy Grounds over say paper D&D is not that you get to play with people who are not local (this already exists on multiple sites) but the ability to bring new people in the fold of the game, by removing the major intimidation factor that sometimes comes with something that has so many rules and so much paper.
Fantasy Grounds can be bought on Steam, or their site fantasygrounds.com (which has one-time pricing and subscription prices)
Warning: In order to discuss Quantum Break’s plot effectively this review does contain spoilers up until the end of Act 1 and also contains descriptions of late game abilities.
Finnish developer Remedy Entertainment returns with their first console game since 2012’s Alan Wake’s American Nightmare. Originally revealed alongside the Xbox One in 2013, after three years of development and a protagonist change can Quantum Break live up to expectations? Don’t skip time forward to read my closing paragraph – keep the timeline clear and read about why Quantum Break is one of the most ambitious sci-fi games available on any platform, not just the Xbox One.Read More
Hyper Light Drifter is an incredible and intense experience. It pulls at you with war, death, illness and loss, but it never says a word. A surreal game without any written nor spoken dialogue. The game isn’t easy either, I would say it is one of the most difficult in its genre. This grinding frustration makes the game all the more worth it when you finally do defeat one of the bosses.
Recently released from a 2013 Kickstarter, I received my digital copy of Hyper Light Drifter. The project was originally presented with a 2014 release when I signed up. The Kickstarter proved enormously successful and raised far beyond its original goals, leading to an expanded game being released on many platforms. Alex Preston, who started the studio “Heart Machine”, to make this game cites numerous inspirations: these include The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Diablo, Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind and, surprisingly, his own illness.Read More
I would like to find the brilliant mind who thought to themselves, what if we took the shooting of borderlands and Destiny, and smashed it in to the RPG world Diablo 3, then set it in an open world modern New York and made if feel real and plausible? After I met them I’d probably kiss them, because their idea was no doubt the grain of inspiration for the Tom Clancys: The Division. Just to give you an idea of how obsessed I am with this game, I finished the main story in about 10 hours, since then I have logged over 40 more hours of gameplay. In two weeks I have played this game enough to make it a full time job for a week, and I still have only scratched the surface of what is possible just in the base game.
Where do I even start a review of this massive game? With such an expansive open world, and very little direction or need to do anything beyond move around and shoot things, The Divison honestly feels like a true open world shooter. The game starts off with a small section of you being prompted to go through Brooklyn, which serves as an early start/tutorial area. If you played the beta you have seen this area. This is the one place that the game feels like its pushing you somewhere. Beyond this tutorial, and a first cut scene the game is 100% open world.Read More
The new platformer / smash’em’up “Slain!” is the first release of its developer Wolf Brew Games. “Slain!” was KickStarted exactly a year before its release to a figure just shy of $20,000. It is currently out on Windows, Linux and Mac via Steam, with releases planned for WiiU, Xbox One, PS4 & Vita in June. The game is a retro style platformer with some light puzzle elements and very much in the style of many older “hardcore gamer” games. It has more in common with Castlevania or Ghouls & Goblins than it does with Super Mario World. This means it doesn’t really feel, play or look as you’d expect if your experience of “retro” really means “Nintendo 16-bit era”. The graphics aren’t shiny happy and you’ll kill everything you run into with a bloody glee. This is not a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s fantastic to seen something along those lines. Beyond just the graphical difference of goomba stomping and swords, those games had serious differences in their play and controls.
Lovely pixel art
To start with the best points, the game’s art is phenomenal. The pixel art is detailed and fresh, showing that plenty of time was taken on it. Further, levels have several layers of parallax and on screen effects. Sadly, despite trying every graphical quality setting I couldn’t get the on-screen mess, splatters and glow to tone down, making it hard to play through at times. That “mess” is mostly 3D layers, effects, blood, parallel overlays. It’s not a bad choice and fits in solidly with the graphics being almost exactly what I’d expect of a well-designed PS1/Saturn-era game, but it is impossible to tone down and can make it hard to see what I need to see in order to avoid instant death. The underlying pixel art, and some touches, such as seeing the floating medusa heads before reaching the “Hive” is fantastic and reminiscent of top notch games in that art style. A lot of the pixel art in the parallax layers is great as well.
The music is well done, there are great and varied metal tracks throughout. I do wish there were more pauses though, the music is always on full blast regardless of your character pausing, fighting, or beating up a mini-boss. The sound effects do mix in well. Largely, I suspect the developers simply didn’t have time to add in more variety to the backing tracks. The music lends a serious element to the game and works well for slicing and dicing your enemies.
Unfortunately, the dialogue works against that. The writing is extremely basic, peppered with the use of instant messaging shortcuts such as “tho” and “btw”. Unfortunately, this wrecks the “mood” of the game. Further, much of the dialogue in the game is fairly light hearted. Not only does most of it just not hit my funny bone, it also cuts against the serious feel of the game’s graphics and music. This takes you out of the immersion. This is the start of the many problems with the game.
“Ugh, MOM, five more minutes!”
For one, there’s no cloud save. Your saves are stuck to a single system, no good in case you often switch between OS installs or machines. In fact, the save system simply isn’t all that well thought out. The game auto-saves at each major level, but not at each checkpoint. There is no easy way to manually save or check where your last save is, so be prepared to play through some small or not so small sections all over again without expecting it. If there is a save icon or screen, I missed it. A full-on save screen would be appreciated, even if it can save almost instantly. The checkpoints are extremely frequent and do allow for any meaningful progress to be maintained while you’re playing, and there is no life limit since you’ll die almost as often as Super Meat Boy. These checkpoints help keep the game from being frustrating for the wrong reasons, but with the shaky save system it’s just not enough.
Of the bosses, some of them are extremely repetitive, especially in the first level where you can simply bash through all of the mini-bosses if you time the first swing right. There are occasional AI glitches, for example the Thorn Beast boss simply stopped moving, letting me kill it easily. Further in, the fire hounds stopped moving too, although they at least kept shooting at me. Some moving platform puzzles didn’t sync up right, meaning they could be easy to get across or extremely hard depending on your timing. One “skeletress” simply didn’t attack me while I hit it from another, moving platform. Basic enemies, for example skeletons and the rat-claws can simply be bashed through and most of them have extremely simple movement, never jumping, maintain a constant speed and floating enemies bouncing off walls at predictable angles. Outside of certain bosses, the initial difficulty isn’t quite enough for a game of this nature. Most of the bosses had very basic attack patterns, opting to simply swing away at your character instead of being animated into doing something more interesting.
The simple bosses are good considering the awkward controls. While only three of the Xbox buttons and two shoulder buttons are in use, but instead of weapons switching with R2 and L2, the directional pad is sacrificed for weapon switching. For a retro platform this is a disappointment, and the pre-game configuration didn’t seem to be able to fix it. I couldn’t get the game to play at all with my Steam controller [Update: managed to get this working, but using the bottom most buttons and top most shoulder pads together is no fun], and the controls are mostly not configurable. Since this game supports SteamOS, I found that very concerning. I found the keyboard control layout to be okay after learning it, but different from most games’ usage of the bottom row for no obvious reason. In the end I stayed with my trusty Xbox 360 gamepad.
Attacks are fairly simple, there are three weapons, each has two swings. You get all of them after the first level and two during the first level. These weapons affect monster types differently, which is nice. The main swing always has a button-mash combo, the other decapitates basic enemies for Mana on their final hit point. You do get two “spells” that use up mana, and in return give you a ranged fireball and a screen-wide explosion. In theory, combined with the enemies that require well timed attacks and restraint on the combos, this is a great system. In practice, I found most enemies could be smashed through and the timing to be frustrating. That said, I think the control problems are something that mostly require tweaking. Further into the game enemies became more difficult on average and it’s okay to only need somewhat careful timing & memorization on mini-bosses. Assuming they patch in more configuration of the controls, this part would be acceptable. The movement back and forth or while jumping is okay, jumps are not in the “fluid” Mario style, but the choppier older platformer style that allows for pixel perfect precision. As there are plenty of lava-floor scenarios in this game, it was a good decision and works well, even if it doesn’t look fluid.
The floor is lava.
The game’s configuration menus are extremely awkward. Audio can be configured within the game, but is the only thing that can be. All of the graphics, resolution & controls that can be changed are configured pre-game. This pre-game configuration pops up every time, the game never launched directly into play for me. Further, after that screen, my mouse cursor refused to hide on either Linux or Windows, leaving a cursor on top of the game at all times. I’m not sure if this is something the developer can fix, or an underlying problem with the platform they chose to write the game on. The developer seems aware of many of these problems. They released a note on the Steam page promising the following:
“As of this week we will be using an updated SFX professional. We don’t have a timeline on the SFX re-haul but it will start this week. As soon as we know the date it will be delivered we will let you know!
The first patch is going to take care of: bugs, in game text, control pad, transition screens in game and we will also be looking at Keyboard lag and menu bugs, again this is in the works but don’t have an exact date. We will let you know as soon as we do.
We are of course looking at the combat system and some other additional issues, but do not have specifics or timelines as final decisions have not been made.”
This is good, as it shows the developer cares and is aware of at least some of the issues I pointed out. Still, if they were aware of these issues, they probably should have held off on the release itself. I am hoping that some soon to come patches will put this game into a recommendable spot, but I cannot recommend it fully at this time. “Slain!” Is not a long game, not inherently bad for an affordable indie title. That said, combined with the frequent checkpoints, I could see someone decently good at these types of platformers & okay with slogging through its rougher spots beating it in a day.
Overall, especially with something of a glut of games available today, I can’t recommend this game. It is genuinely gorgeous, and has good music, but the gameplay at its heart fails to pull together.
Having never played a Deponia game before, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. 10 hours of time looping nonsense later, rather unfortunately, I still wish I didn’t.
Deponia Doomsday follows the entirely unlikable lead character Rufus, as he self-narrates his way through time and space. Along the way he runs into a fairly large cast of characters, that range from the rather funny Nilbot (Chillbot, Killbot, Illbot), to the frankly offensive Manly-man-turned-manly-forced-transwoman Lotto (later Lotti). Confused by that description? Don’t worry, I’ll come back to it. Read More
So I have heard a crap ton about this game, seen in on Youtube and seen it on stream. Honestly I thought it wasn’t for me. So when our Editor in Chief @kitsune86 said “hey you wanna explore some H1Z1?” I was pretty eager. I had started looking in to this game when I wrote a news story about how the game was splitting off in two separate games; the survival aspect and the battle royale. I was given a chance to try the battle royal by the developers and this is my log of the results.
Review by Robyn Robo
Back in 2014, a new independent developer in Finland by the name of Bugbyte started making mobile space combat games called Battlestation. Now, they’ve made their first PC release on Steam with Battlestation: Harbinger. This game has obvious mobile roots, but makes for a fun, affordable and instantly gratifying desktop game. Written in Java, the game runs on Windows, Linux and OSX. I tested on Windows and Ubuntu 14.04, and I had no issues with it. In fact, it should run on any machine with a GPU built in the last decade.
Bugbyte has had an interesting history. The company is a tiny one, with the only 3 staff being the founder and his brothers. They went nearly bankrupt in the current mobile games market and pulled through via a Reddit AMA, Kickstarter, and other new funding and social sites to make it to their Steam release of Battlestation: Harbinger (simply referred to as Battlestation for the rest of this article). There, Battlestation is currently available for ten dollars, with 20% for its launch week. Assuming it takes off, all is financially well that ends well.
Battlestation is an interesting game, combining select 4X elements to deepen a Rogue-like (permanent death and random levels) space combat game. The battles involve small to midsized fleets with careful, pause-able, real time maneuvering. The closest analogy I could think of to this game specifically is a 1990 release by the name of Star Control, also known in its open source incarnation as Ur-Quan Masters. You can also customize your ships with new items you build, buy or loot as you make your away across the map, jumping from system to system
Popcap’s long-running feud between photosynthesizing plants and armies of the undead returns to the 8th generation of consoles in Plants Vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 for Windows PC, Xbox One and Windows PC. With a little under two years between backyard brawls should players revive their interest in this team-based shooter based upon a mobile game? After playing the Xbox One version for several hours I’m ready to rate Electronic Art’s latest title.Read More
