Luckspeare
Reviews
Barotrauma (Windows)
Oh my god someone finally redid Brattaccas right.
The Good
It's procedural and roguelike without being obnoxiously so -- I personally despise rigorously enforced saving without the option to play otherwise.
The submarines are awesome. It's like playing one of those old sub daigrams.
The atmosphere is very appropriate and well-done.
The Bad
It's hardcore-difficult single-player, and I haven't played multiplayer yet. It's primarily designed for multiplayer so far, and the single-player campaign isn't complete.
There can be some goofy behavior from AI crewmembers, though they're mostly reliable.
The Bottom Line
Okay, Atari ST nerds, this one's for you.
If you had an Atari ST and saw the much-hyped game Brattaccas by Psygnosis (1986), you might have been excited and amazed by the concept. It was this immersive, semi-physics-based, semi-free-form 2D platform action-adventure with a fairly dark and serious sci-fi plot, and it had goofy ragdoll physics. And everyone was, like, tall and lanky.
Unfortunately, though, the technology wasn't really up to the task, and it played at a fairly choppy 10 or 12 fps (guesstimating here) with significant control lag, and was kind of difficult to play. Only a serious hardcore player who tolerated a lot of jank could make it through to the end, and I wasn't one of those.
But the promise of Brattaccas remained, and it kind of stuck in my mind over the years as this amazing concept only partly fulfilled.
I don't know if the makers of Barotrauma were channeling Brattaccas, or inspired by it, or even know of the game, but they seem to have done it. I've only played like 9 hours so far, but it gives me this weird childish giddy feeling from those days, like they did it! Here it is!
Enjoying it so far. It has the jank, but it's a smooth, sort of lampshaded jank. Like, you even have a button to just randomly ragdoll yourself to the floor, and you will be using it. And on top of that this dark, really-well-thought-out and really-fascinating sci-fi concept behind it: a submarine space colony on one of Saturn's moons, where only the deep oceans are life-sustaining and anything closer to the surface is subject to deadly radiation and cold. Complete with factions and political intrigue.
What I've seen so far is awesome. It's got an intimidatingly complex crafting system, amazingly evocative atmosphere, and full moddability, including the ability to design and use custom submarines.
I'm done fanboying here -- I'll likely update this later when I become more familiar, but I just had to gush about the whole Brattaccas thing/feel going on here for those who'd get it.
By Luckspeare on August 1, 2023
Crawl (Windows)
A modern classic and a hell of a lot of fun
The Good
- Excellent pixel art and animation
- Excellent sound design and chiptune music
- Fun, frantic arcade-style gameplay
- Well-polished and evocative of the best of 1990s coin-ops like Gauntlet
The Bad
I can't actually think of criticisms for Crawl. It does pretty much everything it does well, and is a masterclass in polish and presentation in its style.
The Bottom Line
Crawl is a great indie frenemy-co-op arcade game that just oozes charm and polish. Everything from sound design and chiptune music to the pixel graphics and animation are just spot-on, and if this were a 1990s arcade game, it would be a genre-defining classic up there with the best of them.
It's an action-slasher dungeon crawler in which up to 4 doomed adventurers (either player or bots) proceed through a dungeon in which THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE. At any given moment, one player is the adventurer, and three of the players are vengeful spirits working together to kill the adventurer, but also competing to get the last killing blow. Whoever can kill the adventurer, knocks him into being one of the vengeful spirits, and takes his place as the living adventurer.
The main vehicles of this are traps and pentagrams. Traps can be controlled by the spirits to trigger and launch attacks at the adventurer, and pentagrams transform the spirits into physical monsters (the kinds of which are chosen at the beginning of each game) who can then attack the adventurer.
As each game session progresses, the longer a player spends in either mode, the more currency (gold for the adventurer, ectoplasm for the spirits) each player gains for upgrading. Adventurers are upgraded in the item shops, and manifestable monsters are upgraded at the end of every level.
This function, particularly the monster upgrading, serves as a leveling feature, since, if you have a bad game and can never seem to become the adventurer, you'll get a lot of ectoplasm for monster upgrading, making you have the most deadly monsters, which gives you more chance to be THE ONE.
At the end, there are big monster bosses to fight, and THE ONE wins if he can defeat it. Meanwhile, the petty vengeful spirits, if they can't win, at least want to help the monster boss beat the adventurer.
By Luckspeare on November 2, 2022
No Man's Sky (Windows)
Very pretty but shallow
The Good
• Beautiful graphics and visual design
• Fairly laid-back spaceflight -- much less stressful than, say, Elite: Dangerous
• The ability to have your own freighter and design the interior, and to dispatch missions from it
• Base-building is pretty decent though clunky (but to be fair, most games' base-building is clunky, and often clunkier than this)
The Bad
• Shallow game depth -- "a mile wide and an inch deep"
• Space combat is essentially a minigame
• The story is pretty whatever
• Lots of grinding, only to realize you're really grinding toward nothing
The Bottom Line
That's pretty much how I'd sum up the feel of this game, after the initial wow of the graphics and atmospherics is done: grinding toward nothing. This is a problem with many survival games with either no goal, or a goal that is barely discernible. It's a big system with procedural content that really is designed to be played "forever" until boredom sets in, with little framework to give it real structure. I'm really tired of these types of games.
By Luckspeare on November 4, 2021
Dog Daze (Atari 8-bit)
A humorous little gag game that was good for a few nights of fun with a friend.
The Good
It was fun to play against a friend, competing for who can urinate on the most fire hydrants. Good for a few laughs and unexpected turnarounds.
The Bad
It was a simple game. Once you've played the game a few times, you have seen everything it has to offer. It was a basic multiplayer arcade game with little depth.
The Bottom Line
An enjoyable two-player diversion for a night or two, good for a few laughs with a friend.
By Luckspeare on September 8, 2021