Weregamer's Game Musings

The Wii U was (IMO) a dumb idea that (factually) tanked, evidence that Nintendo had no clue how to follow up what made the Wii a breakthrough product. But it looks like they may have figured out what they are doing right with the 3DS, and how to really cash in on the new trend toward multiscreen entertainment at home without being needlessly expensive, asymmetrically lame on multiplayer, and totally separate from their successful handhelds. http://kotaku.com/heres-your-first-look-at-the-nx-nintendos-upcoming-con-1788004927

I backed a project called "A House of Many Doors" a while ago on Kickstarter, and it now has a "Coming Soon" store page on Steam. This only matters because, unlike the normal case where every KS update seems like a "don't forget us please" marketing spiel, the ones on this have been insights into the author's ideas for how the game will be different and why he is making it. The backer update that accompanied the announcement about the Steam page is a great example, and I think maybe other folks might find it as intriguing as I do: "Without going too much into spoiler territory, the way to advance the main quest is by exploration itself. You need to gather a resource called 'Apprehensions,' representing your knowledge of the House and all its secrets and oddities. You can collect Apprehensions by writing poetry, discovering new locations, or completing side-quests. (Why did I choose this design? Well, I was fed up of the thing you g...

I have mixed feelings about Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I like a lot of the ways the mechanics have been refined from DXHR; I like that Eidos Montreal paid attention to how stupid the idea of "boss fights" in a Deus Ex game is. Overall, mechanics-wise, this is a great sequel to DXHR. But there's something just plain missing, and that's, for lack of a better term, the heart. I'm anticipating more hours of a fun stealthy choice-of-options game, but I'm already convinced that there's zero chance that it will give me anything to chew on, mentally, and isn't likely to even keep me attached to the character I'm playing. With only mechanics and no heart, this is simply not worthy of the Deus Ex name; it's just cyberpunk Thief. The original Deus Ex was a masterpiece in many ways - and notably, the stealth gameplay and shooter aspects were not high on the list: for example many shooter and stealth game fans rag, accurately, on the stupid guard AI. ...

This is a really clever idea, especially after some of the total boners on pre-order ideas by other companies in the recent past (I'm thinking of the craptastic thing Bethesda tried and abandoned for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.) . The pre-order bonus for Civ 6 will be immediate access to a Civ that all other players will get for free three months later. So it's not a financial offer - latecomers won't have to pay anything. But it's still a great incentive for those of us who would buy the game anyway, to take the risk of pre-ordering. Admittedly, Firaxis is one of the few companies that I don't feel I'm risking much to preoorder from. Even Civ: Beyond Earth , which was quite a bit weaker than I'd hoped and expected, was not such a disappointment that I felt I'd not have bought it if I'd waited for reviews. And Starships was clearly telegraphed and priced as a "lite" game. But this approach is something that I hope other companies will...

I picked up this title a while ago, and at first was very excited. It's clear that somebody finally actually made a MoM-alike that's actually a lot like MoM. Unlike most of the early attempts, you are the big wizard in the tower, not on the battlefield, and your decisions about magic are the central focus of strategy. The game setup screens had me really excited. It's presented differently but the choices are extremely similar to those in MoM - anything that wouldn't be infringing is practically verbatim, but the presentation is clearer and cleaner. The big change is the larger and interlocking array of spell schools, which are more or less lifted from recent games (IIRC it's straight out of Sorcerer King). In fact, the most striking thing about these screens is that they are still basically low-resolution, though higher than the ancient original. I think they are 1024x768x16. And the gameplay itself is very similar, with some new ideas stolen from the HoMM ser...

The Witcher is one of those titles that has gotten a lot of positive writing from thoughtful folks, not just hype. But bits mentioned in that positive writing tend to put me off; things that suggest that it eschews"wimp" features that will make the game playable despite having a life and only playing a few hours at a time. "Oh no, we can't have quest objectives on the compass, that would Break Immersion!" But then I also keep reading things like this, that show a quality of worldbuilding that might make it worth the frustration of a UI designed for people who have nothing else occupying their brains. I'm on the fence, still. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/06/17/the-witcher-3-folklore-rpg

If you're a TL;DR sort of person, here you go: Stellaris is not a 4X game at all. Its core design goes a completely different direction. It has some cool bits in it that will probably catch on in future 4X games, and by using mods to tune it I got a hundred or so hours of fun out of it before the honeymoon wore off, but in the long run it will likely be remembered as a non-4X game that was nonetheless a good influence on the genre. To go into more depth for those inclined: Pre-release, the big excitement about Stellaris was the hope for innovation in a 4X in ways to make the late game less of a grind - that period when you know you've won but the mechanics of getting the victory screen will take hours more. This was a bit of marketing poetry, or maybe outright disingenuous. At its core, Stellaris is not a 4X game. It's a pretty standard Paradox set-piece grand strategy game with a "1X" game bolted on the beginning to substitute for the real-world history t...