Review: Dungeons

I honestly can’t decide if the PR department behind the marketing of Realmforge’s game Dungeons were intentionally attempting to mislead the public, or if their campaign was simply misinterpreted by everyone. If you take a look at the trailer you might get an idea of what I mean.

If you’re a gamer, and over the age of ten, then I’m sure two words popped into your head the instant you watched that: Dungeon and Keeper. The trailer seems to go out of its way to conjure up the ghost of Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper and really that should have set the alarm bells ringing. Dungeon Keeper is a classic; a game that has never been bettered, not even by it’s own designers, and anything that attempts to imitate  it is going to have to work hard to live up to expectations.

In Dungeons you take the role of a Dungeon Keeper Lord who is unceremoniously ousted from his crystal throne by Calypso his demonic girlfriend. The rest of the single player game revolves around, building your power and plotting revenge all while gradually struggling your way back to the top of the Dungeon Lord premier league by defeating rival Dungeon Lords.

Like Dungeon Keeper Dungeons revolves around, well, your dungeon, but there the similarities end. In Dungeon Keeper the purpose of your dungeon was to keep heroes out long enough for you to complete your goals. In Dungeons the purpose of the dungeon entertain the heroes by fulfilling their various needs until their “soul energy” meter is full.

To help you accomplish this goal you have several tools at your disposal. Firstly there are the pentagrams. These serve the dual purpose of spawning monsters for the heroes to battle, and also increasing your area of influence. Unfortunately the monsters are not under your control, and they don’t stray far from their pentagrams. I found that it’s better to think of them more like slightly mobile turrets than as monsters. Next you can place treasure chests of various sizes that fulfil the heroes need to find loot. There are two room types available as well: Libraries that fulfil their need for knowledge, and armouries that fulfil their need for equipment. The last room type is the prison. It doesn’t fulfil any needs, but it is used to slowly bleed soul energy from the heroes after you’ve killed them. If you want to speed up the process you can build various torture gimmicks, but I rarely resorted to using these as the soul energy from imprisoned heroes usually was more than enough to get through the level.

The heroes will wander merrily around the dungeon, fighting monsters, looting and investigating, until their soul energy meter is full at which point they head for the exits with whatever loot their acquired. At this point you have to move quickly to intercept them with your avatar and kill them to harvest their soul energy. The game actually rewards you for slaying each and every individual hero by hand.  Needless to say this requires endless amounts of micromanagement to make sure the heroes aren’t killed by your creatures, traps and also remain happy enough to gain plenty of soul energy.

Soul energy is used to buy prestige items, basically decorations for the dungeon, that increase prestige. Prestige which buffs your avatar’s stats and also attracts more heroes to your dungeon. Gold is obtained by slaughtering heroes, and also from mining out rock and gold seams. The gold can then be spent buying equipment for the three room types.

While you’re busy keeping an eye on the heroes the game tends to throw several other level specific objectives at you. Some require you to fend off enemy dungeon lords by taking over their monster pentagrams and eventually destroying their dungeon heart, but others are fiendish acts of evil that normally boil down to smashing some crates or slapping a specific group of heroes around. The flavour dialogue often makes big things of the reason you’re performing an arbitrary crate smashing exercise, but you never witness any effects from your evil acts, and I think the entire game could easily have left them out and been better for it. It seems odd that you’re supposed to be a might dungeon lord, but you spend most of the time killing heroes and smashing stuff like a common thug.

If I were sum Dungeons up in one word I would say it is confused. There’s too much action for it to be an RTS style game like Dungeon Keeper, and there’s far too much micro management for it to be a hack and slash Diablo clone. The mechanic of having to kill the heroes directly clashes constantly with the quests which send you running all over the map away from where the action is happening. Worse still are the boss battles where you’re sent to another map entirely and have to listen to your nagging sidekick warning you that heroes are escaping or that your dungeon heart is under attack. I think at some point during the creation of the game someone realised this as a lot of the later levels have pre-made dungeons when you being the level, and they function perfectly fine without the player having to make any modifications. This is a boon in allowing you to get on with carrying out whatever mission you have, but it completely eliminates what’s supposed to be the main part of game-play: building the dungeon.

Worse still there’s at least two very badly implemented escort missions where you have to protect a stream of fragile monsters as they follow a fixed path through your dungeon. These levels are completely at odds with the entire premise of the game, and on top of that they’re boring and badly designed.

The game is further hurt by the lack of customisation. The player avatar absolutely begs for some kind of customisation options, but you’re stuck with the same default appearance throughout the game. It seems an odd decision to have an evil overlord figure that isn’t constantly on the lookout for new and improved equipment, but despite at least two missions being dedicated to recovering a magical weapon you never actually get to use it outside of a scripted cut-scene.

On the purely technical side I found the game to be fairly unstable. It took seventeen reloads for me to avoid a crash while attempting to beat the final boss and in the end it was only sheer pride that forced me to keep trying.Several earlier missions caused freezes, or outright crashes, and most of these seemed to be tied to problems with scripted events. Surely such glaring problems should have been picked up during testing.

There is a kernal of a good idea in Dungeons, but it’s lost beneath a mountain of poor design decisions. There’s far too much micromanagement, and not enough actual management options. There’s humour, but not enough to give the game character. Ultimately I think Dungeons collapses under the weight of its own ambition. It’s a tower defence flash game on a blockbuster budget, and that’s not good enough to waste your money on.

Canada

Today marks the end of an era, but also a new beginning. My good friend John has taken wing for a new life in Canada and his wife Claire will follow soon. I find myself filled with a mix of emotions as he vanishes over the horizon. In my heart I’m happy for them, hopeful for what the future holds, and I know that they will do well in their new home, but I’m also filled with the bittersweet envy felt by generations left behind with the emigration of the people that were important to them.

This is not a time for sadness however, and this is not the seventeenth century. Communications flash across the Atlantic at he speed of light, the world grows smaller by the day and I know we’ll meet again soon on one side of the Atlantic or another.

Good luck my friends.

Summerlee

MissMiaw and I decided to take a trip to Summerlee, the Museum of Scottish Industrial Life. MissMiaw is a big fan of the place ever since she first went there as a wee girl. The museum stands on the site of the former Summerlee Iron works in Coatbridge. The museum has been operating since 1987, but has recently undergone a major refurbishment.

I was very impressed with the place.  The exibits all seem quite alive through the visible wear and tear of daily use. It’s not a dusty old gallery of relics either. A lot of the displays are interactive with videos and audio telling the history in the words of the people who lived it. The interviews with people that lived and worked in the Scotland’s industrial heartland are particularly interesting to listen to, and provide a lot of insight into the hard lives these people had.

Several large machines are on display. Each one still operating smoothly despite being over a hundred years old in some cases. The vast pit head winding gear that dominates the exhibition hall is particularly impressive as the pistons slide in and out along their greased guides and the huge cable drum spins around. It’s amazing to think that such a huge machine can continue to operate with the minimum of maintained even after all these decades. I would be very surprised if a modern version lasted that long.

After we had checked out all the exhibits we took a ride on the electric tram from the museum to the bottom of the hill where we found the most interesting part of the museum: the reconstructed miner’s rows. These are two rows of miner’s cottages, of the kind found throughout Scotland during the industrial revolution, with each one decked out for a particular era from the spartan single room dwelling of the 1880s to the more recognisably modern house of the 1960s. It’s amazing to think that entire families, often large families, lived their entire lives in one of those tiny single room dwellings without running water or even an inside toilet.

There’s also a coal mine that you can tour, but given how damp and nippy it was while we were there we thought it might be a bit dank and dingy. If we go back sometime in the summer I might brave it and go down for a look, but I might be a bit big for stooping in a pit.

I would highly recommend the museum to anyone that has an interest in the industrial past of Scotland, or even an interest in seeing how people used to live.

Nostalgia: X-Com

I’m not sure how accurate the dating is, but the Steam store page for UFO: Enemy Unknown, or XCOM: UFO Defence as it’s known nowadays, says that the game was released on New Year’s Eve 1994. If you’re one of the few people left in the world that’s never played XCOM I suggest you pick it up immediately while it’s only a quid. It might be slow, and a bit old fashioned, and it might have poor graphics by modern standards, but it’s got it where it counts: in the game play.

My first encounter with the XCOM series came a bit obliquely. Like many of my generation I was far more excited by waht was happening in the world of Sega Megadrive and Nintendo SNES games than in the dusty world of DOS games. Most of my experiences with PC Games had come via a friend’s dad’s dusty old PC2 clone. An ancient Tandy machine that combined the whole computer into a clunky single unit, and the height of gaming technology was four colour CGA graphics and various beeps from the tiny on-board speaker.

No exactly exciting looking is it? As eary games go, it was OK, but my old 8-Bit Atari XE could produce better graphics, and I didn’t have to use arcane keys to control it. To be fair though; Sopwith was already old by the time we were getting into computer games. It first came out in 1984 when home computers were still very much toys for the rich rather than a household appliance.

My first shot of an XCom arrived some time after it had been released. A friend of a friend got involved with our quest to write an RPG and told us about a game he had been playing that would make an awesome RPG. That game was Terror from the Deep: the sequel to XCOM: UFO Defence. It’s essentially the same game, but with the difficulty turned up to eleven and set under the sea instead of on land. I was instantly hooked, and doubly hooked due to the infuriating difficulty curve involved in the game. In fact it would take me over a decade, playing on and off, before I would finally manage to beat the thing. Imagine my horror to discover that the game has a bug where all the difficult settings actually point to the beginner setting. If that’s how difficult it was on the easiest setting. I shudder to think what it would have been like on expert. I expect the aliens would burst out of the screen on that setting and try to take over the world for real.

Buy it.

Music: The Dissidents

One interesting thing about being down at my folks is the amount of old stuff lying around that I had forgotten about. I’ve just discovered an old CD-R with some songs that I downloaded from MP3.com when it used to be the place to find indie bands and unsigned acts. This was just at the cusp of legal music downloading when people weren’t entirely sure how it was supposed to work. The whole site basically worked in a similar way to Myspace, but without all the asshattery.

One band that struck a chord with me at the time was The Dissidents, and no not the similarly named band from Yorkshire that’s just appeared on the scene. These Dissidents were from Baltimore and were already cutting an album while their Yorkshire namesakes were still getting fitted up for their flat caps.

The first thing that attracted me to The Dissidents was their list of inspirations, top of which was Big Country, but once I heard a couple of their songs, which you could download for free as MP3s, I was hooked. They were different from Big Country of course, but you could feel a similar energy and lyrical power behind their songs. Like BC the songs, and the stories behind them, are deeply rooted in the country of their creation. If Big Country’s songs reverberate as anthems for the  working class of Scotland then it’s fair to say that many of The Dissident’s songs perform a similar function for America.  A lot of that was down to Thomas Kercheval the lead singer, guitarist and musical-jack-of-all trades. His lyrics remind me of Big Country in many ways, with positive and powerful messages grounded in the same kind of blue collar ethic that made Stuart Adamson’s songs so great.  Sadly their album was never released over in the UK, if it was ever released at all, but I still have three of their MP3s secreted away on that dusty old CD-R. The Dissidents broke up not long after completing their first, and only album, Valiant, but Tom Kercheaval is still recording, though under the name of Diss now. He even has an album on iTunes that I’ve been listening to. It’s more mature, and even mellower than the songs that I have from the Dissidents.

If you like Big Country I suggest you give it a listen.

Internet: The Bandwith Bungle

It seems that my folk’s broadband package isn’t quite up to my normal level of usage. They are with Eclipse Internet on one of their older “unlimited” usage packages. Of course, like almost all “unlimited” usage packages this one has a nebulous fair usage policy attached. Really the service is only unlimited outside peak hours. In the case of my folk’s connection that’s daily between 9AM and 11PM.

They got a warning the other day saying that we were  in danger of exceeding her provider’s Fair Usage Policy:

We’ve noticed that your current rate of download during peak hours [9am - 11pm] is close to exceeding our Fair Usage Policy (FUP).

Your usage status has been changed from Green to Amber within the Control Panel of My Eclipse to remind you of this usage warning.

Now I’ll shoulder most of the blame for going over whatever arbitary limits Eclipse have set. I have Steam installed on this computer, and I had installed Team Fortress 2 on it, but hadn’t actually fired it up in months. The instant I connected Steam it started updating about a year’s worth of major updates for TF2. Seeing as that happens all the time when I’m on my own connection I never actually thought that much about it. The thing got on with the updating business and I got on with mooching in the Steam Christmas Sale. All in I don’t think the TF2 download could have exceed more than a gigabyte or two of downloading.

I stopped a few other games that were in the process of updating and deleted them off the system, but I guess the damage was already done.  They got another email warning them that their downloads had continued to exceed the Fair Usage Policy and the service had been moved to “Red” on the control panel. In practice this means that the connection has been throttled down from 8Mbps to somewhere around 256kbps. Which, according to Eclipse’s blurb, should be more than enough to browse the web and send emails. Sadly, as this is not 1998, the internet needs a bit more than that nowadays.

I wish that ISPs would put some kind of black and white idea of what they expect to be Fair Usage in their contracts and on their websites. With my own service I get 40GB a month peak download, and 350GB a month off peak. I’ve never managed to exceed that yet, but I clearly know how much I can or can’t download in a month. These nebulous Fair Usage Policies are far too open and arbitrary. We’ve no idea if it was set to certain specific download limit in an entire month, or if it’s done by the amount done within a certain rolling time frame. It could even be done by session for all we know.

Still, sure we went over the usage policy, but a bit more transparency wouldn’t hurt anyone would it?

Writing: Google Docs & WordPress.com

In an effort to speed things up a bit I’ve been experimenting with the sharing options on Google Docs. I figured that because I’ve been using Google Docs for a lot of my writing recently I might as well see if there’s a fast way to share stuff with the world. I know the capacity exists because I’ve seen the “post to blog” button at the bottom Sadly; for whatever reason, the built in option to publish to WordPress.com doesn’t actually work. It returns an error of “(xmlrpc) Unexpected Response Type” and doesn’t go any further. Now I know that WordPress supports XML-RPC as it’s needed for several other pieces of software that I’ve tried over the last couple of years; so, the question is how to fix it?

With a quick search on Google I came across someone with the same problem in the official WordPress.com forums. It seems a bit of a backwards way to solve the problem, but it does work. I’m not sure why the built in version returns an error, and judging by the dates on the forum post I don’t think Google’s Doc team are in a hurry to fix it.

For more in depth instructions on how to publish from Google Docs to a blog take a look at this post on the Socialmediaguide blog.

I did discover one fatal flaw in this idea: the entire document is published as a single blog post. There’s no way force it to publish directly to a page, or even to make it cut the post down to an acceptable length. I’m sure that’s fine and dandy if you’re using Google Docs to write individual blog entries, but I was planning to use it to publish short stories which can range from two thousand up to about sixty thousand words. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen sixty thousand words appearing on a blog like this, but it’s a painful experience to sit and read it. I guess, for now, I’ll need to go back to the drawing board and find another solution.

Iblog

I decided to try using the WordPress iPhone app to see how well it works with the blog. So far it seems to be fairly intuitive and responsive, but it would likely take an age to write anything of substance using the iPhone’s tiny keyboard. Will probably be useful for writing short updates though.

Writing: Novel Musings

I’ve been thinking about trying to write a novel. Sorry, scratch that, I’m going to write a novel in 2011.I’ve been prevaricating and not writing for so long I really need to give myself a kick in the pants. The last few weeks have disappeared in a blur of doing very little. It’s got so bad I’ve not even been updating this blog. I really need to set myself some kind of goal, and try to stick to it. One year to write a book should be long enough surely? I mean Mills and Boon are churning out shite in half that time…

I’ve a couple of ideas, but at the moment I’m not sure what to work with. I’m certain that all of them could quickly be adapted into a feature length piece of writing, but I’m not sure if they’ve enough mileage in them to create something the size of a novel.

The two front running candidates I have are:

1. A fantasy story set in an average Dungeons and Dragon’s type world. The protagonist, unusually, is a henchman to the world’s Mighty Heroes. This one is sort of forming up to be a comedic work rather than a deadly serious swords and sorcery effort. I’ve already got quite a few ideas about how to play about with fantasy tropes and expectations. I’m not really shooting for a Terry Pratchett style humour, but if I can be half as funny and inventive as him it might turn out OK. I’ve actually given quite a lot of consideration to recycling stuff that was written for the Dragon Lords into this idea. Sort of a homage to the past.
2. A steam-punk story, based in an alternate Victorian England where things have gone down a slightly different path. The British Army are stomping all over those Bloody Colonials in steam driven fighting machines. Victoria is quite secure on the Throne, and foreign agents are everywhere trying to upset the apple cart. The lead characters are a brilliant aristocratic savant and a tough retired army Sergeant-Major who fill their days with espionage, scientific marvels and adventure till one day the mother of all problems lands on their doorstep.

Either would likely make an excellent story, but I’m leaning towards the first one as a novel, and the second one more as a series of short stories. I’ll endevour to keep this blog up to date from now on, but I promise nothing even though Miss Miaw will likely kick my ass…

A Very Zombie Christmas

First of all: Merry Christmas folks! Hope you’ve all had a good one, and that you got lots of loot etc.

As ever my esteemed missus MissMiaw has come up trumps in the Christmas present stakes this year again. In fact I would go so far as to say that she has possibly outdone herself this year.

Behold! The Christmas Health Pack:

Not bad at all eh? It looks a lot like the health packs from Left4dead. In fact it’s so good looking I was almost reluctant to rip it open, but it’s Christmas, and Christmas is for opening presents so I got stuck in.

First up was the list of contents:

Then some of the stuff packed away inside:

The Desktop Dalek is extremely funny. I’ll try and post up a video of it in action.

Here are the rest of the contents:

All in all I think you’ll agree that it’s An outstanding survival pack that should keep me in good stead until MissMiaw decides to come and rescue me from the living dead. Thanks my dear! I’ll need to come up with something even more inventive for you next year. X