Monday 30 November 2015

Free Video Game Review: The Secret of Tremendous Corporation

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after I've published the catch up articles over the next month. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

One of the things that I’ve learnt is that adventure games tend to not be my cup of tea. I’m not QUITE as harsh on them as, say, Yahtzee is, but I will freely admit that adventure games tend to leave me scratching my head about why people get the appeal behind them due to a few of the common threads about them being unimpressive to me. For starters, the ridiculously specific nature of some puzzles can easily grate on me because the solution runs on logic that often makes little-to-no sense when you think about it and the fact that the vast majority of adventure games often fall back onto the “only one solution to every problem” method of thinking (even if the solution is something as ridiculous as putting a carrot in a peephole to grab a ring and avoiding getting killed by having your eye burnt out by a laser you weren’t even told was behind the peephole) means that I tend to lose interest in them.

Still, I will admit that I can see the appeal behind it if you like this kind of thing, so I decided to give The Secret of Tremendous Corporation a shot. And, well...it didn’t change my mind on adventure games, although I won’t deny that it is a decent enough adventure game in its own right to warrant a playthrough if you like that kind of thing, which is all the more impressive when you realise the game was made in about 48 hours for a competition.

First of all, let me get the obvious comment out of the way: yes, the art style of the game is ridiculously simple. It goes for a hand drawn look that is somewhat reminiscent of what you see if you draw the whole game in pencil. While this probably isn’t going to be an automatic turn off if you like old fashioned graphics, it is worth noting that the art style is not going to wow anyone who has played any video game before now. Certainly, this is the part of the game I would have personally suggested the developers redo for the Steam release of the game, as the hand drawn style may make the game a hard sell for those who expect graphics more complex than your average scribbles on a sheet of paper. That said, it does make the game look distinctive (I’ve not seen a lot of games which use this sort of style even for cutscenes, let alone for the whole game), so make of that what you will.

I also will say that the puzzles do sometimes seem to be there to make a problem that needs to be solved which isn’t really necessary to do and which have solutions which don’t really make a lot of sense. The two main puzzles which spring out in this regard are fetching a newspaper from a shelf too high up to reach (why you would store a newspaper on a shelf that most people can’t reach is beyond me, but maybe it contains a fully completed crossword that the paper’s purchaser didn’t want someone to find before they submitted it off for a cash reward or something) which requires you to tie a book to a rope and cover it in chewing gum (because that’s totally not going to ruin the newspaper at all…) and opening a door by scraping a potato down into being a lockpick (I would point out why that doesn’t make sense, but you guys almost certainly are ahead of me on that one). I also find it a bit weird that the solution to a problem involves asking the receptionist for a code when, by all rights, she should not even know about the thing which requires the code in the first place, but I’m arguably nitpicking here.

The plot of the visual game is MAYBE a tad out there at points (a video game company able to make at least 10,000 games in a year is a bit hard to believe, even with the explanation offered by the game in the plot, and I find the idea of a secret company using a newspaper to place an advert for recruitment kind of ridiculous because it means that everyone who reads that paper will be able to spot the ad...potentially including people who are part of the same companies you are trying to bring down!), but, overall, there’s not a lot really wrong with the story. I think a few rewrites of the story to clear some of the more obvious plot holes would have helped improve the game a bit, but the core of the story, while cliche as all hell, is not bad. It isn’t going to win any awards for strong writing, but I at least found it fun, despite rolling my eyes like they were following the inside of a washing machine more times than I care to admit.

I suppose, if I put myself into the mindset of a old school adventure game fan, this is at least somewhat fun for a single playthrough. It’s lacking a bit of polish and it isn’t going to appeal to those who aren’t already fans of adventure games, but there’s nothing particularly wrong with it if you’re already a fan of this sort of game. It’s not personally for me, but, if you fancy giving it a shot and don’t mind a few logic issues, then there’s certainly far worse games out there.

Monday 23 November 2015

Free Video Game Review: Soccer Manager 2016

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after I've published the catch up articles over the next month. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

Well, I really got fucked in the ass when I missed this week originally. Previous week was a wasteland of free games (that I had a reasonable chance of playing: I don’t speak Russian!), then this week gives me a football game and ONLY a football game. Which would be fine if it weren’t for two things:
  1. I am not a football fan. At all. Seriously, there are very few things I’d want to do less than watch or play football by choice.
  2. I used my “get out of playing a game I really don't want to play free” card last time, so doing it this time feels like a cop out.
So yeah, this week’s catch up review is VERY much a case of me playing a game I had no chance of liking. Still, I will admit that, if I did have to choose to play a football game, I’d much prefer to be the manager because I could at least view it as a strategy game of sorts. After all, when you think about it, how a football game works could be argued as being a bit like an RTS: you have to select the appropriate player to make it easier for you to push the ball into the opponent’s side of the field or stop the opponent from doing that and tactically move the ball towards the player best suited for moving the ball further in should you encounter an obstacle.

...Actually, when put like that, football doesn’t sound that bad. Doesn’t excuse the fact I find it boring as all hell to actually watch, but hey, a revelation is a revelation! Now if only they would combine football with death traps...actually, wait, that’s basically Blood Bowl in a nutshell. Dang it!
Incidentally, someone get Games Workshop to remake Blood Bowl. They did brilliantly with Space Hulk and I would kill for an opportunity to play it!
Anyway, back to Soccer Manager 2016. Long story short, it’s not a BAD game, but I think it’s fair to say that this is not a game to get introduced to football games to, as I ended up stuck on the first match because the game kept refusing to let me move on after I’d put the new player on (my player had been red carded) because it wouldn’t tell me how to change my tactics and nothing I clicked on told me what I had to do to make the change. This is probably a game that could do with some sort of tutorial to allow those unfamiliar with this type of game a chance to get the hang of things properly, as that seemed like a really stupid thing to get stuck on for over ten minutes (and only ended because I went “Fuck this, I’ve got better things to do with my time than stare at this screen and be unable to move forward because someone didn’t think to explain how to move through this screen properly!” and closed the game down...yes, I'm impatient, but can you blame me for getting frustrated when I hadn't been told at all how to move forward and was stuck on what should have been an easy screen to navigate as a result?).
I also don’t like the fact that the game feels more like a browser game than an officially released Steam game, as it even has the buttons one would expect to find if they were playing the game on a browser. I will admit that this is a bit of a nitpick, since there are some good browser games out there, but having the game open with a suggestion to play the game through Facebook when you opened it through Steam is not a great sign. I opened it through Steam, why would I want to also open it through Facebook?
Still, quality wise, there’s not a lot of criticisms I have with it. Sure, it’s a simple game in terms of design and aesthetics (if not especially newcomer friendly), but I could see this being a decent time killer if you can’t afford Football Manager 2016 and need your fix of football team managing. The fact the game has in game purchases is something I personally have to frown upon, but it’s not to the ridiculous extent that Frozen Free Fall: Snowball Fight was, so that’s something at least. I suspect I probably COULD have gotten into this game had it been more newcomer friendly, but, as someone who has only played one football game in his life (and that was on the Sega Genesis), it’s fair to say that I probably couldn’t have been further from the target audience of this game if I tried. Which I guess is a good sign on one level: if I’m saying that I might have found this game to my liking had it been laid out to suit a newcomer to this type of game when I usually find football so boring that I don’t even bother to keep track of the names of football stars (I can name a few, like David Beckham and Gary Lineker, but mostly because I’ve heard of them for non-football reasons than because I actually hold any real opinion on them), that’s kind of like saying that you don’t think Fire Emblem: Awakening is that bad when you usually hate JRPGs and turn-based strategy games.
So yeah, if you’re not a football fan, this game probably won’t change your mind at all. If you like strategy games and football, you might want to get a more intuitive game than this one if you’re not already used to playing these types of games, but it should be a decent time sink. That’s really the long and short of it.

Friday 13 November 2015

Free Video Game Review: Everlasting Summer

Note to blog readers: this article is a catch up of an article that was meant to go up on my site, https://nerdcircleonline.wordpress.com/. If you wish to continue reading articles by me, you might want to move over to reading the site, as the likeliness is that this blog isn't going to be updated after I've published the catch up articles over the next month. With that said, I will NOT be taking the blog down and I will make sure it stays online should I be informed that it is due to be taken down, so you do not have to move over to the site if you don't want to.

One of the things that people will have noticed is that I tend to criticize free games for being too short. I know this might be a very unfair criticism on some levels (after all, free games aren’t designed with the intention of being huge games which will be played forever), but I also tend to do this in connection to a game that only has one ending as well, which I feel negates the issue a bit because these are games which are short and which offer little replay value. I guess you could say that I make this criticism not because I am demanding free games be huge expansive games, but because I like seeing a free game which actually has a long enough run time to keep you engaged for many hours and which offers enough variety that you don’t feel like you’re just doing the same thing over and over again.

One game which fills this category wonderfully is actually a visual novel I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while now: Everlasting Summer, a game by the Russian studio Soviet Games (the name’s kind of a giveaway). It’s also their first visual novel and they’re working on a second one at the moment titled Love, Money, Rock ‘n’ Roll (which is intended for release in the second quarter of next year). There wasn’t a lot of information about the company from when I did a search about them, so I asked them to quickly fill me in on the details (thanks, guys!).

They basically started out as users of a Russian messageboard (lichan.ru, if you’re curious: it’s changed its name since then to lichan.hk, but Russian speaking tech guys will probably be able to find the archive somewhere) aimed towards anime and other traditionally Japanese medium fans and the site had mascots made by site members (kind of like the Angry Marines from 1d4chan, I guess). There was a thread in 2008 where the idea of making a visual novel based on these mascots was brought up and it became very popular, so people willing to work on the idea were brought together to start working on it. There was a lot that changed behind-the-scenes involving team members dropping and joining the team, concepts changing, artwork being reworked and scripts being rewritten, but a final team came together and worked on the project. However, over time, the game started to distinguish itself from the “Ilchan mascots eroge” idea, so the game had its title changed to suit the change in direction, opting for Everlasting Summer. It was released in November 2013 and was eventually put onto Steam, with two free DLCs added to the game while it was there as well (and an English translation).
They talked a bit about Love, Money, Rock ‘n’ Roll as well, but I’m going to have to save that discussion for another time (likely when Love, Money, Rock ‘n’ Roll comes out, since I am curious to check it out). For now, though, let’s start talking about Everlasting Summer and why I have such a high regard for the game.

Everlasting Summer has a plot which is surprisingly complex, involving a character travelling back in time (sort of: it’s difficult to explain properly without spoilers) to a camp where everyone seems JUST off enough to make you (and protagonist Semyon) realize that there is something wrong about the place, but you can’t place why. As the story goes on, the story gets weirder from there, with the end result involving a mysterious figure who seems trapped in a time loop…
It’s not a story to think too hard about, basically. Still, by the standards of your average visual novel, it’s actually rather deep: there’s a lot thrown at you in it, but it is done well enough that you don’t feel overwhelmed by it. I could very easily picture this sort of game (with some adjustments) making for a fairly solid independent film, which is a good sign in my book!
The characters are all also very good. I think the only one which breaks with reality a bit is Yulya (a catgirl), but, well, this IS an anime visual novel, so it’s somewhat excusable in a “would have been more surprised if there wasn’t one” kind of way. I’m also wondering how the team got Miku into their game (I am not joking: she even LOOKS like Hatsune Miku and part of her character involves her being a good singer! Subtle...), but I get the feeling that I’m approaching things from the wrong perspective on that one, although I wouldn’t suggest showing the game to Crypton Future Media’s lawyers any time soon. I think, if I had to pick a personal favorite character, I would have to go for Slavya, but none of the characters are badly written at all. They might fall into the level of being stereotypes for some people, but I can’t say that I personally found the stereotypes to be a problem (plus, you kind of have to have characters in a dating sim which cover a lot of bases and don’t usually have the time and space to go into a lot of depth with the characters, so it’s arguably justified to have characters who seem a bit stereotypical in these types of games due to the nature of them).

The art style is where I find things get a bit iffy. The backgrounds are very well done indeed, but it’s with the characters themselves and the occasional picture that includes them as the main point where I feel things are let down a bit. It just seems a bit amateurish to me. Not bad, I should stress, but I’ve seen more professional looking artwork in other visual novels and this problem lets Everlasting Summer down a bit. I can’t complain too much in good spirit because it is a free game and originally started out as a game for forum characters, but, speaking as a critic, this is one of the areas where I would have expected better than I got.

Still, if there is one thing which I feel makes the game a good free game to play, it’s the sheer replay value of the game. This isn’t a game you will play once and everything will be the same, no matter what you do: there’s so many endings that you are almost encouraged to play it several times just to see them all, and getting all of them requires some genuine effort. It gets better when you learn that there’s actually a game inside the game (it’s basically a variant of Poker), which has consequences upon the whole game depending on how you do in it, so you do need some skill in the game if you want to get every ending. It’s not a major thing overall, but I like little touches like that, because it makes playing the game require some degree of skill aside of memorizing the appropriate option to get to the desired outcome.
As a quick note, I played the game as it was available upon Steam, which means that the adult content was not available in my copy of the game (it is easy to restore the adult content, as a quick search online will be able to point you in the right direction very quickly, but I opted not to do that while playing the game for this review). I don’t feel it detracted from the game at all, in all honesty, although I would certainly encourage people who want to play the game as intended to do so.
Overall, even in the censored version, I found Everlasting Summer to be a very enjoyable visual novel. Is it perfect? No. But it’s very well made and I have very few complaints overall, so make of that what you will and check it out if it sounds like your kind of thing!