LETS PLAY DOOM

E3 came and went (I assume) and it looks like it's another year of mediocre games. If you got excited about any of these games clearly you and I have completely different taste in things because I didn't see anything worth getting excited over.

EXCEPT DOOM

Not the Doom that they showed in the trailer. That Doom was slow and gory, like somebody looked at the turd that is Brutal Doom [1] and was like "Yeah! What Doom is missing is hyper-violent decapitation and a weapon select screen and really slow imps for some reason! Everything should be muddy and brown! Killing something should take up your entire screen for three seconds so you can look at an animation that totally won't get repetitive after you've killed your 50th demon!" What a joke! You're telling me that over 20 years they can't get somebody who actually likes Doom to make a sequel of it? There's nobody on the Bethesda team who has looked at what the Doom community is still producing in terms of wads and total conversions and mods? Nobody who understands that Doom is about movement punctuated with shotgun blasts, about space management? Doom is like a beautiful dance... a beautiful dance with chainsaws.

I didn't see any of that in new Doom, but that's fine. Old Doom, real Doom still exists and nothing can change that. [3]

This is the only Doom the world needs, and yet there are 4 of them.

Anyways, I'm actually a little grateful for the new Doom thing because it makes me think about what, exactly, I like about old Doom, and plus it's given me an idea.

SNIPER GHOST WARRIOR

FUCK YEAH SNIPER GHOST WARRIOR 2

Sometimes I wonder if it could get any dumber. If mass-market video games have reached their nadir.

And then I see this.

How is this a thing? Did they string together words and then make the single most bland advertisement ever on purpose? What's next? SNIPER DEATH WARRIOR? Or maybe the beloved SNIPER GHOST: WARFIGHTER. I'm thinking "DEATH WARRIOR: SNIPER OPS" could be the next big hit.

Look, guys. If you want the Call of Duty crowd that's fine, but if you're aiming a little higher, you might want to tone down the machismo. There are people that like realistic military simulations, and there are people who like to be Sniper Ghost Assassins. You need to pick one, and stick with it.

Although looking at the title, it seems like they've already picked.

Guardians of Middle Earth

Picked up Guardians of Middle Earth today, since it's free for those blessed subscribers of PS+. From what I understand, it's a Tolkien-themed "MOBA", which is cool. Wander back and forth an arena vaguely reminiscent of your standard fantasy landscape, beating down endlessly spawning hordes of goons while your enemies do the same. Sounds like a decent way to spend an hour or so.

Just a couple of things before I begin, though. One, MOBA is not the name for a genre, and anybody you've ever heard using it needs to stop. Seriously, it really needs to stop. This type of game is, according to your preference, either an action-RTS, an AoS (short for Aeon of Strife, one of the more popular custom maps in Warcraft III), or a dota clone. You're not allowed to make up genre names because you don't like the ones you've got. Metal Gear Solid claims to be "Tactical Espionage Action" but it's got a genre: Third Person Stealth. So fuck League of Legends for making up the worst genre name ever. Really? Multiplayer Online Battle Arena? Come the fuck on.

Anyways, Guardians of Middle Earth is a fairly standard DotA clone, with a couple of neat twists that I'm really enjoying so far.

First, and least important, is the grouping of the heroes into useful "Tactician, Warrior, Enchanter, Defender, Striker" instead of the tired "DPS, Healer, and Tank." But Nick, you might say, aren't they the same thing? Count again, my friend, and grab a seat while I explain.

Tacticians are a sort of supporty DPS. They have a lot of variety in what they do and how they fight. For example, Gothmog wants to utilize his seige equipment (catapult, battering ram) to smash his enemies. And he's got a bigass morning star to really bring the hurt. But Nori is more of a team player, buffing up his enemies with his abilities and debuffing his foes. He doesn't do much on his own. Felgrom is a tactician, too, but he's more of a direct "Let me explode everything" kind of guy. Using his abilities takes tactics because you'll kill yourself otherwise.

Enchanters, they're really more spellcasters than anything. You have Gandalf's generally melee-ranged buffs and debuffs, Lugbol's fiery effects, Ori's close-ranged lorecraft. They like to be casting spells and have generally poor melee abilities. Again, generally. Where Agandur has a pitiful strike, Gandalf's sword and staff are actually fairly good.

Strikers are your regular damage-dealing fighter chaps. Bilbo Baggins, Haldir, Gollum, and Legolas make appearances here. They're pretty straight-forward; they want to surprise you and then make you into a pincushion.

Warriors are incredibly variable and make up the largest category, being everything from Thrain's hammerfest to Ugluk's gentle ministrations of whip and sword. This is kind of the catch-all category for heroes, but I think it's fun. They all play extremely differently.

Defenders are like Warriors but they heal, usually. Highlights include the Witch King, and the Great Goblin.

Anyways, all of the heroes have a great art style. It looks a lot like the movies- thankfully more like the latest Hobbit movie than the 2000 Lord of the Rings trilogy. Check it out: Gandalf looks like Sir Ian McClellan, and Legolas looks like Orlando Bloom. Arathorn looks kind of like Viggo Mortensen, which is weird but it would be his in-character dad (I kind of look like mine, too) and also Viggo kind of looks like a regular dude anyways so that's fine. A land of Mortensens sounds reasonable enough. The Great Goblin is directly from the movie, which is really awesome and the Witch King is too, but it's done in such a way that everything kind of fits together. The bad guys are bright and colorful and mean looking, and the good guys are wearing vibrant golds and greens and everything looks great, even when scaled down massively to get everything on the screen. I actually wish that more guys from the movie were here, like that metal-handed dude that rode the wolf everywhere. You know what I'm talking about, you saw that movie.

Moving is left stick and aiming is right stick.It's really quite easy to use, and means that you hardly notice the lack of mouse and keyboard. Your ranges are shown clearly, and the weapons have a bit of AoE to them, meaning that you can cleave hordes of baddies with your weapon if you angle it right. It's extremely satisfying and it makes you wonder why it hasn't been done before.
The rest of the controls are similarly obvious, with shoulder buttons to smack people around, or use "commands" (read: summoner spells from LoL) and the face buttons use your spells. The minimap is kind of hard to make out,  but serviceable and the spell effects are actually pretty subtle. I really dig it, I can't lie, and the little touches like the scrollwork on the targetting circle and the stylized arrow symbol for the towers shooting is kind of fun. The bushes, while a little silly, are much less silly than in the obvious inspiration, League of Legends, since they're put in places that make sense and it's really more of a thicket than knee-high brush. If you gave me some shubbery roughly seven feet tall, I bet I'd be a bit hard to spot as well.

The towers are upgradeable and so are the barracks, and with the complete lack of money that means the only thing you lose is time and also the irritation of having to go back now and again to re-do them if somebody changes them or you level. Oh, right, did I mention that there was no money? There is a complete lack of that, which is actually really good in terms of play. Farming is important only for experience, and there's no double-dipping if you kill somebody. You slay somebody, you get experience and they have to wait to respawn and then run back. It means that there's always the possibility of coming back if you're careful and if you play well.

Matches are short and about as soon as they start to drag, they're pretty much over. I think that the monsters and shrines really help. If you've got nothing better to do, you can go beat up a beastie, get a boatload of experience, and be stronger. Or you can capture a shrine, to make the fight in that lane go a little easier.

Now the downsides. The servers are apparently pretty slow; I thought it was just my connection, but on the forums there are numerous complaints about it as well, so keep that in mind. In my time playing, I've already been dropped three times.

Additionally, there aren't very many heroes around- not really a problem, since the ones that exist are so well designed, EXCEPT there are micro-transactions. So if you aren't willing to pay money (and an admittedly smallish amount at $2 per hero, but still, c'mon), you're locked out of half of the heroes. The Great Goblin, for example, and Bilbo Baggins. I can't imagine what they were thinking. I know it's not exactly a competitive game, but flat out disallowing heroes for no real reason is really annoying. Just make them really expensive and then give me the option of real-money unlocks, at the very least. I don't mind making 1.5 Middle Earth Bux per hour, because I'm playing anyways. I'd play if I wasn't getting "paid," because that's what you do when you like a game. But don't make me unlock gems and heroes and everything else and then go "oh yeah, by the way, you have to pay me for these ones." No, fuck you.

Seriously, the amount of unlockable things is a little silly. In another obvious "inspiration" from League of Legends, they've decided to let you customize your hero with Gems or Commands or potions that (you guessed it) get bought with the same money that you're trying to unlock new heroes with. I don't really mind, since at least this time you're actually able to unlock them with the money you get for playing the game, but it is, again, kind of annoying.

But, in case you can't tell, I'm kind of grasping at the periphery of the game here. The game itself is polished, fun, and really pretty. It was free for me (and for you too, if you have PS+), but normally it's $15 on the Playstation Store. If you have the XBox for some reason, I guess that's like 15 million MS Points or whatever. You do the math.

But I am recommending it. It's as good as you thought it was going to be. Maybe actually better.

DUSTFORCE

Last night I played Dustforce until my fingers started to ache. My wife had gone to bed, and I'd have stayed up playing if I could manage to flex my fingers fast enough to get to the next level.

I couldn't help it. I was in the game's grasp. I was in the zone. I was running upside down over walls, zooming through bizarre enemies and over spikes. My character, a blue-clad janitor with a corn broom, was engaged in a midair ballet that I was the sole conductor of.

Let me explain. Dustforce is a fast-paced speedrunning platform games from Hitbox Studios, released sometime earlier this year. And it's glorious.

It goes like this: You're in charge of cleaning up around here. The mansion is full of dusty gargoyles and filthy servants who wallow in their own muck, the forest is unruly with leaves, and there's an alarming layer of slime on everything in the laboratory. You've got to jump, dash, double jump, walljump, and cling onto the ceiling like spider man in order to reach that dust. In order to get the very best Completion score (rated from D to S, in typical video game fashion), you've got to get every bit of dust. Yes, even the stuff on the ceiling covered in spikes and only reachable by a split second double jump dash. That's the point. If it was easy, they wouldn't need the Dustforce after all; they could do it themselves.

But it's not just about being thorough. You have to be both thorough and fast- and here's where the brilliance comes in. You have a limited amount of time to keep your "combo" going. Each bit of dust you sweep up gives you a point, and each strike you land against your dust-animated foes gives you a single point. Take too long getting the next point, or get smacked by an enemy, and your combo goes down the drain. In order to get the highest Finesse rating, you're going to need to complete the entire level without missing a bit of dust, in a nearly continuous path, without getting hit or landing on spikes or falling down any bottomless pits.

Obviously enough, the game isn't designed to be easy. Completing any levels beyond the first few takes multiple tries, especially when you're getting to grips with the controls. You will take a dozen tries to get your first double S rating, and you will start getting mad at the game. But the calm, tasteful electronic background music helps. So does the gorgeous, clean visual style. So does the fact that you're well aware the level is completable, if only you'd have done better. And that's the real fun of the game.

Dustforce is a game that knows you can beat it. You've got all the tools, and you can watch other people beat the same level you've spent the last half an hour trying to get right. So you do, and you pick up a trick or two. Then before you know it, you've mastered half a dozen levels, it's midnight, and your fingers ache like the dickens.

The only problems I've spotted so far is a tendency to get a bit slow on some levels, without any real indication of why. Sometimes turning off graphics options helps, and sometimes it doesn't seem to do much of anything. Some levels do lag, even with the graphics options all off, but not all the time. It's probably a problem with my aging computer, I'll admit, which is why it's hard to bring up. But it's there, and if you experience it like me, there's not much you can do about it except suck it up and bear it.

In addition, there's not a single hint of storyline. I can presume that the Dustforce is a team of janitors, because that's what they look like and they are doing a suspicious lot of cleaning. But it's not readily apparent why the dust animates gargoyles, or why slime animates televisions, or why it's important to clean up the leaves in a forest. I mean, you'd think you could just leave those there- it is a forest, after all. But where some people may be frustrated by a lack of purpose, personally, I'm happy there are no cutscenes, or poorly written dialogs. The only characters in the game will state a sentence when you walk past them, and nothing else. There are no quests, no items. No important NPCs. No questgivers. Dustforce has a laser focus on what it does. And luckily for it, what it does, it does very well.


No question about it: Dustforce is one of the best games I've played this year. Pick it up. You won't regret it.

SUMMARY:

GET IT IF: You like platforming games, speedrunning, or challenging gameplay
PASS IF: You're looking for plot, don't like platforming, or are easily frustrated
LI RATING: 9/10. GET IT.

Demon Stone

I draw inspiration from only two places: Books and Video Games. Movies aren't really my thing. You see, I tend to talk straight through them constantly, not in the irritatingly loud voice, but in whispers to whoever else is there. I'm not good at passively absorbing media, I'm really not, and in fact, I think that's one of the biggest problems with people today.

But that's a subject for another day. 

Today I want to talk about Demon Stone. 

A Playstation 2 game released in 2003, it's essentially a hack-and-slash brawler, a formula as old as video games themselves. Remember Battletoads, or Double Dragon, or Streets of Rage, or any of those games? It's the same concept, beating the shit out of hordes of similar-looking enemies and trying to get past them to whatever your destination is. 

There are a couple of welcome twists, in that you can change to any of your party members at any time (chosen from warrior, wizard, and thief), you can upgrade your equipment using the piles of gold dropped from dead enemies, and you can string together nifty little combos from the attack buttons.

The game itself is pretty varied, always having you fight different types of enemies using different combinations, and it has interesting and ever-changing landscapes. In the game, you'll fight slaad and orcs in a forest, and some sort of robot in a wizard's tower where the tower itself is fighting off the invaders, and you'll fight a giant spider on top of a flowing raft. The enemies avoid your front, instead opting to leap at you from out of melee range, or circle around you and try and stab your back. They block your attacks, and will counterattack when they're able. It's not the most excellent AI, but it's certainly serviceable, and it makes the swift and leaping orcs feel different than the slow and cludgy slaad mallot-warriors.

Demon Stone reminds me of the best parts of actually roleplaying- there are cool locations to explore, cool things to fight, and plenty of neat loot to find. It's D&D stripped down to its most basic form, and it's still eniminently playable due to the excellent presentation. The graphics are good by early PS2 standards, and they're at the very least serviceable. There aren't any big hitches, and the players swing their swords and staves and daggers pretty fluidly. Everything just kind of works, which is awesome. A game like this lives and dies on its fighting system, and this one doesn't disappoint.

In fact, the fighting system is so good I've been trying to think of ways to include combination-type moves into a game's fighting system. For example, in Demon Stone you can hit X-O-X to perform a trip move, where X is the basic attack and O is the shove/kick move. You smack them with your sword, shove them back, and then sweep your leg underneath them, where you can subsequently jam your sword into their newly-prone form. Or you could hit X-O-L2 and impale your foe on your sword. Or daggers, if you're playing the rogue for some reason. It's really a pretty cool mechanic that adds a bit to the game. Do I need to just shove him back? Should I try and stab him and risk missing? It's these sorts of moves that add a taste of tactics to the game, which is welcome in a genre that mostly promotes endlessly jamming on a single button in hopes they get into your swinging range.

It's probably possible, and there's got to be an elegant way to express this sort of thing. In the meantime, this is going to get tied into my houserule that "On a natural 20, in addition to dealing maximum damage, you get an additional non-weapon attack", which means that every now and again, you get to smack some dude with your sword, and then turn around and wail on his buddy with your shield, or slash the guy and then shove him off a wall, or trip him, or punch him in the face, or whatever it is that floats your boat. But it doesn't have the same feel as Demon Stone, much to my distaste. It might just be simple enough to work, however.

Sorry about the less-than-interesting post, but you gotta write about what you're thinking about, right? If you're at all interested in fantasy-themed PS2 games, especially ones at bargain bin prices, you gotta check it out. I got my copy for $5 from Gamestop, which is usually criminally overpriced. I heartily recommend it, especially if you still have your old PS2 kicking around somewhere.

Creativity and You

I know that there are multiple ways to be creative, and that different things work for different people, but I'm also known to be insane and disregard what other people say to me.

For example. When I want to sit down and write, I refuse to read anything related at all to what I'm writing. I have this tendency to let my prose get Vancian when I read Jack Vance, to get archaic when I read Lovecraft and to get direct when I read Frank Herbert's Dune. And it doesn't feel right when I merely ape another person's style. There's no satisfaction in it.

The only way to avoid it, then, is to seclude yourself from the outside world's creativity and find what's inside your head. And then to write it. To create it from nothingness.

There are people out there who work best when they take another person's idea, a fairly recent idea, and try to do it better. They fix things a little to make the game they thought they were getting into, with their own little idiosyncracies and whatnot.

This is what's happening in the video-gaming community today. Any look at amateur game makers will show you three hundred thousand Super Mario clones, Sonic clones, Space Invaders, Breakout, and the like. There's nothing wrong with learning, or practising based on what you already know to try and get accustomed to the software, hardware, and programming language you're using, but what are you accomplishing?

Is there any point to publishing what are, in all reality, your scraps? Did you ever find Monet attempting to sell his daily sketches and pass them off as real art? If he did, wouldn't you find that crass and pretentious?

The point is this: Publishing things, and attempting to show them to the world, should be about increasing the value of the entirety with your contribution. In other words, if you haven't got something creative to give to the world, don't give them anything at all.