Explorations

I seem to be playing (or trying to play) a lot of games about exploration lately.

I started playing Dark Cloud 2, a moderately cutesy Japanese action RPG with a heavy collect and craft element. It's too slow, and too hard. I say it's got exploration because it's got random mazes and you have to explore new recipes and upgrade paths. Also, there's a whole town building game to learn about as well. There's also fishing to try your hand at, and I'm only about five hours (out of a minimum of 30) in, so there may well be other new games to learn. The problem is, none of these games is very rewarding. If you win in combat, it's generally because you were careful, not because you were powered up, or pulled off a cool move (thanks to the clunky controls). Sure, you can go back to the easy levels and feel powerful, but you also feel like you're wasting your time when you're one shotting trash mobs that drop crappy loot. Leveling your weapons and other crafting requires better loot, but the drops are so varied and random, you have no idea if a trip through a level is going to be worth your time at all. Also the way you invent things by randomly combining photographs you take is entirely unfun. Even going to GameFAQs and cheating was worthless as the one recipe I could make requires ten of a rare item. (I've seen one drop the whole game.) Sick of that collection of boring, obscure mini games, I decided to pop in another collection of mini games in much the same vein.

Steambot Chronicles is a less cutesy Japanese action RPG with a strong crafting focus. Plus you can play in a band a do lots of other stuff. I'm barely an hour in, and outside of a completely unfair fight in the freaking tutorial, it's looking better than Dark Cloud 2, faint praise, but as both games are generally lauded by the same folks, I'm not holding out too much hope.

I took a look at some indie games. (I still need to check out this list, but one (One!?) thing at a time.) Most of them sucked out loud, but two of them were great. Knytt Stories is the closest thing I've found to Seiklus. High praise indeed. It's not quite as big or varied, but it brought back the simple joy that had been sorely lacking in my gaming of late. There are also additional scenarios for Knytt Stories I haven't dug into yet, so it may end up being just as long. I tried the author's other game (where you're a bouncing ball), but it wasn't very fun. The main game mechanic is being careful as the ball can be very difficult to control (or very boring as you have to stop and build up height again). Not as good.

The big exploration recently was Dwarf Fortress. I even created a mini blog for it. The short version? It's harder and more impenetrable than any of these other games I'm playing. But there's so much to the simulation, that's it's actually interesting. I just don't have the time to devote to screwing around with it.

There was also the big exploration of DooM editing, but I'll save that for another post. I've still got Gamma 256 to talk about, a game dev competition that restricted the authors to incredibly low resolutions. I didn't try all of them, but Bloody Zombies was the only one I tried that was amusing. I need to finish the list.

It doesn't really fit the theme, but I also checked out Infernal on GameTap. I recommend playing on easy, as the graphics and game setting are fun to experience (so far), but the gameplay is lacking.

Geeze. I guess I should update more when it's vacation and I'm playing games all day. :P