Category Archives: Previews

Demo Impressions: Fortune Summoners

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Recettear, Carpe Fulgar’s first import project for English speaking audiences, succeeded in large part because of its demo. A massive slice of the game, the Recettear demo worked so well because it was immediately apparent why we’d want to play it: Recettear was a snarky, action-packed shopping JRPG with a lot of cuteness but also with jokes that appealed to older players. We played the demo, got past our first impressions (“Otaku gibberish”) and bought the game en masse.

Fortune Summoners, their newest offering, isn’t quite as helped by a meaty demo. Not that I don’t appreciate it, but it won’t change your mind.

I’ll put my biases on the table, so you can compare your own: I’m not a huge fan of magical girls being cute and endearing. I love Japanese mechanics, but I prefer my RPG turn-based. I love schools. These are all what Fortune Summoners is: a cutesy, magical by way of not being magical girl moves to a new town and goes to a new school, a magic school. She fights monsters with her sword in a 2-D plain reminiscent of (but worlds from) Zelda 2. She has a stuffed animal she talks to at night, and …

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Purge Preview

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Purge - Looking Down

Warning: This preview contains moderate mechanical spoilers but no narrative spoilers.

Purge is Mirror’s Edge. No, it’s not like Mirror’s Edge, Purge IS Mirror’s Edge. A less polished version mixed with Borderlands-esque aesthetics and questionable stealth elements, but still Mirror’s Edge. Even at this early stage, it’s evident that there are very similar overtones of oppression, desperation, and parkour as a way of life rather than merely as a mode of transportation.

Purge does an excellent job of implying backstory and putting you into the Mirror’s Edge mindset from its very first moments.

Unfortunately, what’s currently available seems much closer to a proof of concept than a formal demo as much of its content is still very rough around the edges. The most obvious issues involve the controls and player character animations. While commendable for the progress made already, they’re still stiff, clunky, and only viable for novice-level platforming tricks. Other issues include a malfunctioning pause feature, a dearth of audio enhancements, some cringeworthy writing, and one of the most earsplitting sirens I’ve ever heard in a video game, but those are all things that can be fixed in due time.

ZOMFG! I suddenly find it …

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Preview: Defender’s Quest

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So hard to know what to do with these indie games. Defender’s Quest is a tower defense/RPG hybrid we covered a couple months back, and it’s set to be released soon in the traditional “Indie Beta”, which means it’ll be done and available for purchase but not quite done. I’ve given a poke at a late alpha version. It’s got the whole game inside.

Call it what you like, then. But I’ll call Defender’s Quest a damn good time, a triumphant marriage of two genres that should have always been together and a compelling yarn to boot.

Pretty much everything I said before about the game’s demo remains true in the full version, but they bear repeating: Defender’s Quest is a fairly standard tower defense game at heart, expanded upon by making the towers persistent, customizable characters. Each of the game’s six classes are surprisingly useful (well, one becomes redundant by the end, at least at this point of alpha) and feature fully fleshed out skill trees which enable you to specialize how they fight. Level up low level skills on characters and they’ll be useful to you no matter what; level up high level skills, and you’ll have to use mana …

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Predicting the nature of the Syndicate remake

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My prediction is that the upcoming FPS Syndicate will be a failure as a remake of the original game. The most succinct reason I can give for this is the remake doesn’t seem to include drivable cars.

There is one segment of the announcement trailer for Syndicate-remake that hints at vehicle riding. It shows the player riding the back of a hover-cycle while shooting down other hover cycles in a narrow alley. On EA’s official Syndicate-remake website there is one screenshot taking during this sequence which corroborates that, yes, the player is riding a hover-cycle through a narrow future alley while shooting other hover-cycles. The player is shooting behind himself so presumably someone else is steering the vehicle, presumably an NPC. The mission from which this footage is taken seems like an on-rails, vehicle, survival level where you don’t have any control of where you’re going and you can’t get out. There is no hint that you are able to drive. Every other screenshot and video shows the player traveling on foot while blasting away enemies with guns, punches, and slide kicks.

Syndicate, the one published in 1993, the one considered a classic in the lineage of video game history, it has …

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Gobbowl Impressions

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Since my current job gives me free reign over an Internet connection, I tend to avoid browser games for fear destroying my productivity. Even still my previous coverage of the game left me excited, so I was very happy to be given the opportunity to preview the game. The game was developed by Ankama games, whose previous credits include MMOPRG’s Dofus and Wakfu. After making my way through the game’s humorous tutorial and several games against other players, I’ve emerged with a lot to say about this bizarre game.  I’ve played all kinds of games across many genres of ridiculous combinations, but I can safely say Gobbowl is the first turn-based tactical sports game I’ve played. Up until now I’ve avoided sports games even more so than browser games, but Gobbowl proves you can combine two things you dislike to form something awesome. I never expected to enjoy a game like this as much as I have, in spite of thus far not being very good at it.

Set in the same world as its RPG brethren, Gobbowl simply involves choosing one of over ten preset teams and playing matches against other players. You can either choose to have an opponent …

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The Throat of Gaming: Skyrim

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I’ll say this: Skyrim is a counterfeiter’s masterpiece.

…Two minutes in I’m hunting a creature through the wintered foliage—an elk or something, I don’t know. Whatever it is it’s too stupid to know I’m out to kill it; that the sudden sharp turn of the wind is a prediction of future events; or that the blizzard building around us is a metaphor of its soon-to-be.

Infinitely more cautious is that creature we call reality, giving chase to our subtlest attempts to corner her. The reason for this is perhaps evident: reality, unlike the maybe-elk of my first excursion through Skyrim, is dependent upon us for her existence…upon the human brain’s ability to select between a real world and a false one. And from millisecond to millisecond, we’re doing just that—guesstimating the gap between the two.

As I play I’m consistently shocked at just how much Bethesda got right this time: from the apprehensive footfalls of a stray dog cresting a hill to find me standing there, to the ever-autumnal splendor of a town nestled in the elbow of a mountain, Skyrim feels…well, “real” isn’t the right word for it…faithful.

In film it’s called the …

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I ain’t afraid of no Phantasmaburbia

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It’s long been my opinion that indie developers should latch onto an obscure but happily received classic and run with its ideas. The indie platformer community has done this with Super Mario Brothers 2 (or Doki Doki Panic) and I’ve long held that the indie RPG community should do the same with Earthbound. Unfortunately, Earthbound is an easy mark to miss. There’s a combination of wistful and wonderful that make it ever so tricky to emulate; the closest anyone’s come in recent years has been Space Funeral, which was wonderful and weird.

And now we have (or we will soon have) Phantasmaburbia, a game about suburban ghosts where two clicks on the “Don’t Care” button in character creation lets you name yourself Venkman. It’s being developed by the man behind both indie RPG hit Dubloon and the highly appreciated by me Assassin Blue, and it hits that Earthbound spirit perfectly.

Available now in demo form only, the game follows a teenager whose town is attacked by ghosts. Tasked by his ancestor to defend his family, his friends, and his world from ghosts, he goes busting with a samurai sword. It’s delightfully absurd, and it hits all the right notes: it’s absurd, it’s …

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Preview: The Bridge

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Most indie gamers can remember when they first played Braid. The 2008 game kind of put indie development on the mainstream map, and it established to the fringe gamer that there was more than just mainstream, big budget entertainment out there. It wasn’t all blood and guts.

The game also spawned a tidal wave of quirky puzzle platformers with obscure stories.

The Bridge fits that category to a “T”. It owes a lot to Braid, so much so that despite my best efforts I’ve spent 100 words describing that game’s impact. The Bridge is quirky, it’s got a distinct art style, and it has puzzles that will make you feel really clever or light your brain on fire, in equal part.

The currency of the puzzle game is making the player feel smart, and The Bridge excels at making you feel clever. At it’s core, the central mechanic is rotating the world around your charming professor protagonist so that he as well as other objects slip and slide around, enabling you to get to the door to the next level. Simple stuff, but tricky, and above all elegant. The game then adds to this gravity power the ability to invert the world at …

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Defender’s Quest Impressions and the Future of the Tower Defense

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Let me tell you a story that’ll get around to Defender’s Quest. This is the only way to start without hyperbole.

I’m writing this piece in a coffee shop in Amherst, Massachusetts. When it gets sufficiently late, I’ll head on over to Antonio’s Pizza to get a slice and a coke. They make weird pizza at Antonio’s. I’ll probably get a slice with chicken, bacon, and ranch dressing, because it’s literally made for me. I love chicken, I love bacon, I love completely unnecessary fat to go along with them, and I love pizza. Further, I love the coke because it reminds me of a time when I wasn’t a recovering soda addict—it reminds me of when I was a kid, and I’d just drink coke, eat goldfish, and play Final Fantasy VI (then, it was III).

That’s Defender’s Quest, among the newest of tower defense playthings (and not to be confused with Dungeon Defenders, review forthcoming). It’s a game made specifically for my niche. It is a tower defense game with old-school RPG trappings, characters who level between fights, and, as it proudly proclaims, a story written by a real English major*. …

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Impressions- Dungeon Blitz beta

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Dungeon Blitz, for the benefit of the vast chunk of the human race that has never heard of it, is a free-to-play MMO, currently in Beta, that is best described as a “side-scrolling semi-metroidvania-ish-shooter-beat-em-up-thingy”. Now Dungeon Blitz is, as far as MMOs go, not a hard game. That needs to be said before anything else. There are no character builds that must dogmatically be followed to create a character capable of fighting a boss without being reduced to a reddish non-Newtonian fluid. Character level only determines what level of equipment you can use, and equipment is distributed evenly enough that you’ll rarely run into something capable of doing more than sneezing at you derisively before having its soul ripped from its body and stored in your EXP bar (this is how I assume it works). Losing all of your health doesn’t boot you back to level one with no equipment and a sign over your character’s head that says “This person is a moron. Mock him in your spare time.” Instead, you’ll be forced to pause for a grand total of ten seconds, all enemies will regain their health, and your ancestors will be forever shamed. That’s it. And, most …

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