2014. nov. 11.

Imagine what Baldur’s Gate would be if upgraded with modern, three-D graphics and some German precision. The River of Time (TroT) is based on the system and world settings of a PnP RPG famed as German D&D, and broadly speaking, it gives you the experience I’ve tried to catch in the first sentence. I suppose it was not a very good business decision to publish a game that can catch only a smaller part of a smaller part of the gamer audience in general. In the same time, this tiny group of gamers will rank it among the ten best CRPG of all time. But not because it is really one of the bests. It’s a decently manufactured stuff, all right, but it doesn’t punch too much weight. But the experienc is fascinating. Honestly speaking, Baldur’s Gate has no special place in my heart. I have several problems with it; at the end I felt like trying to brawl myself out of the nightmares of a power maniac Dungeon Master. There was no catharsis, no satisfaction from the well-finished adventure. To tell you an example, Icewind Dale was much more balanced. Of course, I don’t mention these two games at random. In spite of every flaw they have and beside every merit they have, their most important characteristic is that they symbolize a sort of barbaric-heroic age of computer role-playing games. Compared to the latest CRPGs they are like Conan books compared to the Earthsea series. If you doesn’t know/understand what I babble here, don’t mind about it, but I tell you that perhaps you won’t be able to handle TroT on its place. Because its rightful place is on the neo-barbaric-heroic shelf, and it has not too many companion there. You can put the first episode (Drakensang: The Dark Eye [TDE]) there, and maybe the recently released Legend of Grimrock too (although it is more like a neo-antique thing), but I don’t know more. Just a brief summary: The prehistoric age of CRPGs was marked by text-only games, and the transition to a new era can be characterized by Eye of the Beholder, Champions of Krynn and the early Ultima series. Then came the...

2014. Sze. 29.

If you liked Darksiders: Wrath of War, then you will love the second installment. Apart from the story that is simple like a pebble, everything is epic. The characters, the locations and generally the whole experience raise the series to such a level that I was just wondering about what can come in the third and the fourth part? Briefly for newbies: In the world of Darksiders the end came, so heaven and hell are battling and humanity is extinct. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse came, or in the first part rather just one, War, who tries to tidy up. But the Seventh Seal is not broken yet, and the Horseman was summoned by a great power to saddle the Apocalypse on him. It is typically the case of the chicken and the egg: no one can tell if the World’s End brings the Horsemen or the Horsemen bring the Apocalypse. Anyway, War does his homework with a gentlemanly cut (hmm… with some thousands of powerful cuts), and at the end he breaks the Seventh Seal. Because of this he goes to prison powerless, but his fellow companions hear the call and hurry down from the sky like falling stars. That is the point where the first part ends. The second one begins when his buddy, Death gets the general picture and looks after things to help War. It belongs to the story that the four Horsemen are members of the same race, the Nephilim, which they exterminated by themselves. They are like brothers, and this gives the motivation for Death’s quest. War mostly showed some deficiency in the area of anger management, but Death is another matter; he is not able to think little. He must pick on the biggest ones and gave no littler quest than to erase War’s sin to help the bro. If it was not enough to find it out: He wanna erase the Apocalypse and resurrect humanity. Here I must emphasize the bright twist; a Horseman of the Apocalypse, Death, the one-man-executor-squadron is fighting for the resurrection of a powerless race whose only thing to do in the multiverse is to live, mate, become sinners and saints while...

2014. Sze. 29.

Do you know the old, ternary apportionment of the world: Heaven is up there, Hell is down somewhere, and between them there is a planet called Earth? At the end, judgement day comes when spheres above and below are clashing together. Where else, if not in the middle realm? In the setting of Darksiders there are some great changes in the topic of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. According to the Bible, they are the messengers of God, forerunners of judgement day and harbingers of doom at His command. However, in the world of the game they are the last remnants of a race created before the angels, and judged to extermination like flawed prototypes. The last four members of the race swore an oath: In exchange for their lives they keep the Law, in Heaven and Hell alike. Featuring God is always problematic, regardless of media, so the developers decided to insert the Charred Council, a lower power under Him. The Council is — strictly in my definition — less an executing but a judging authority. The relationship is between God and the Council is not entirely clear to me, but in fact, it is not so important, have no influence on the game experience. The point is: This way the game picks up some kind of gothic fantasy style, avoiding sanctimony and blasphemy alike. The beginning of the story can be guessed from the foregoing: Forces of Heaven and Hell are battling on Earth (in the present era), then the Horsemen come and the party is on. Or rather, only one Horseman comes, War, who roughly spanks everyone but the big one at the end of the intro. As a dedicated executioner, he is hated by everyone, practically, so no wonder if all the angels and demons want to kill him at sight. The real conflict starts when it turns out that War came alone, and the other Horsemen were not summoned. The Council charge him with descending on Earth by his own will, but he firmly claims that he was called. Finally he gets a simple task: Without his former power he must prove his truth or die trying. During...

2014. Sze. 29.

  Once upon a time, after the release of the game I tried the paying version out in a free weekend, and I wrote my first impressions about Champions Online, but that is not actual anymore. Cryptic Studios (they gave us the Star Trek MMO too) restarted the whole heroismo in a partly free version with microtransactions. What you basically must know about the game can be summarized in short: The game system and the setting is based on Champions PnP (Pen and Paper) superhero role-playing game, and the microtransaction model doesn’t decrease the enjoyment level. Of course, if you pay for the game, you get more possibilities, but that doesn’t mean that you can be stronger with the bought options. For example, you can entirely customize the powers and appearance of your hero, while free players can improve their characters only in given directions. However, because only the style and the side effects (stunning, freeze, poison, etc.) make differences between the powers, paying players get no better or stronger things, but they have significantly more options. Mentioning style… How can a superhero video game grab players who doesn’t know the original PnP role-playing game? With style, of course. There are no Marvel or DC comics characters known by millions to make the setting unique. The gameplay is the same as offered by other MMOs and superhero games: You beat the bad guys and take the reward. Graphics is prime, but this is a requirement nowadays. What do remain, if not the style? And the game is stylish, that’s a fact, or I can write that it’s rioting in cool elements. So that somewhere I can’t even interpret the abundance offered by the developers. It’s because I have a character, it’s appearance was made unique during character creation, and I don’t wanna change it. Well, a few days ago I gave her a cape, but I don’t get used to the sight and I’m not sure I will keep it. In words, I have a unique toon and I wouldn’t buy 99 percent of the costumes in C-Store even if I could. Maybe the devices and some other things, but I don’t feel the...

2014. Sze. 29.

I can’t stop ranting about MMOs, and there was a time with another beta test session. It ended long ago, but since then I didn’t have any mood to start the game and play again. At the end of this article I will tell you why, but first I want to glorify the game. Maybe it sounds like I have a split mind, but this is my opinion: The game is all right, but I don’t like it. It’s not MY game and that’s all. It all started with a newsletter from Funcom (i.e.: Anarchy Online [AO]) – I was playing AO for a time, so I have a registration there – calling me to try this new flick out. I did. It was worth the time. In the newsletter mentioned above I found such sounding phrases like “Easy to learn, challenging to master” and “Bloodline Champions is set to become one of the most important games within its genre.” Not to mention the two gaming rigs I could win. I never win but what if I do after all…? I beg to inform you that Funcom delivered the goods. Indeed they created the next milestone in the category of arena-based multiplayer games. Well, it’s square that the big score is not in the requirements of the genre, because there are a number of arena games and it’s unnecessary to throw just another subgenre to the players. Possibly Funcom thought the same, because it is like this: Register, search a match, choose a character and you can grind the enemy as you can. Implicitly, the game has its own world (there are some short texts for the mood, and they plan to publish a world map, but it’s still in the lap of the gods). But what is the big novum? The keyword is: Balance. With a capital B and emphasized several times. Because there is no character development in the game, and the main ability scores are similar – regarding Hit Points there are only 10-20 points of difference among most of the characters (they have 160-180 HPs). Only the tanks have more (around 220), but they are weak in other areas. Besides,...

2014. Júl. 26.

A strange fashion had evolved in the game industry: Big publishers and developers are making only “products”, while independents are considering the medium of video games as a form of artistic self-expression. Personally, I support this idea, because sometimes we get much cheaper and more enjoyable stuff from the latter than the expensive games of the former. It can be the hand-drew Machinarium, the awfully genial Braid, or the Bastion from the action-adventure genre, the independent developers prove such creativity that big fishes — who are mostly just mining their franchises — can be envy of. The story is simple like a peg: An apocalyptic event named the Calamity smashed the world apart, and only some floating parts remained from it. Our main hero, the Kid awakes on a floating land like that, but soon he finds the only stable point; the Bastion. He is helped by old Rucks — who is, in the same time, the narrator of the game — to collect a splintered energy crystal, the Core, which can physically rebuild the once country, Caelondia. The elders might count on the Calamity, because they made a machine under the Bastion that can produce buildings and landmass by the help of the crystal splinters. Of course, there is more. Two more survivors (Zulf and Zia) turn up, but they came from another country — and there is a diary that tells a lot about what caused the Calamity. To continue the mandatory circle, lets take a look at the background! Seven people + two years = Bastion. The Supergiant Games was founded by two guys who climbed up from the pits of Electronic Arts, because they wanted to try some ideas and anyway, they wanted to do a much steadier work. One of the founders was writing, the other was developing the gameplay, but they needed a musician, an artist, a narrator, another writer and a helping hand in general. They made it frankly, even if there was some people in the team who never met before the release of the game. This is where art begins to grow. The world is fantasy based with a little steampunk tone in the equipment,...