I'm Not Dead (Surprise!)

Hey everyone, so you've probably noticed that I have uploaded... well, nothing, actually, for the last term. In my defense, it was a 7-week term and consisted of almost entirely assessment period and exams, so while I don't feel too guilty about taking the term off I do feel a need to at least assuage any presumptions that I'd abandoned this blog, or that I was dead, or anything like that.

So, a few things that I've been doing in the meantime that hopefully I'll get to cover in articles over the coming weeks, now that exams are over and holidays are all but upon us:

• I went to PAX Aus a few weeks ago with a friend of mine, so I'll be able to talk about panels and demos and such (which'll probably be happening on Wednesday)
• Over my hiatus, I managed to pick up Far Cry: Blood Dragon and the Anniversary Edition of The Secret of Monkey Island, along with a few others including some games that I've had for ages but will finally have time to review over the holidays
• Also, Christmas/Holidays are coming up! Haven't really thought through what I should do if anything for the holidays. Not really sure if I should do a "Top 10 of The Year"... come to think of it, I'm honestly not sure I've even done 10 games on here from this year. I might do a few recommendations for some of the games I've reviewed which are deserving of recognition, but a Top 10 probably won't be on the agenda this year. Failing that, if anyone has a suggestion of what I should do, I'd be happy to hear it.

So, with all that done, if anyone has any questions, suggestions for reviews or for this blog's holiday extravaganza, or just wants to say 'Hi', you can reach me at pressxtoreview@gmail.com

-Harry

Press 'X' to Review: Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt

Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt
Platform: PC/Steam
Developer: Ludosity, Remar Games
Premise: As a recent graduate from a school that trains healers, you must venture through Hurtland to heal the Prince and any passers-by who happen to be in need of your services.
Release Date: 01/12/14 

I picked up Princess Remedy a while ago, mostly due to it being both free and widely regarded as being pretty decent. However, I never got around to playing it because I had other stuff to play and limited time to dedicate to doing so. Recently, I found myself in need of something quick and easy to review so that I wouldn't have to worry about it interfering with the pointy-end of this term and preparations for going on holiday, so here we are. The first comparison that springs to mind is with Undertale, because it feels very much in the same vein humour-wise, with interesting background characters and things like a jealous chest that won't let you open it if you've opened other chests in that run through. Like Undertale, 'combat' also consists of a fairly simple system of dodging incoming projectiles that gets steadily harder to the point of ludicrousness the further you go through the game; and like Undertale, the aim of the game is to help people.

'Combat' in Princess Remedy takes a route somewhere between bullet-hell shooter and puzzle game. You enter by offering to heal someone, which then takes you to a separate area where you have to shoot all the enemies to cure the random passerby of their malady. This starts off fairly easy, when the game only throws one or two non-projectile enemies at you at any one time, and gets even easier when you start to unlock the AOE flasks. However, the difficulty swiftly ramps up throughout the game as they introduce projectile enemies. In addition, at certain points in the game your upgrades start to be a disadvantage, or at least a duel-edged sword. For example, cover is fairly necessary during a number of the later-game encounters. However, because combat involves the Princess constantly shooting, and because her shooting destroys cover in a fairly indiscriminate manner, if you have enough combat upgrades unlocked that you can destroy the average piece of cover in only a few seconds then you, like me, will swiftly find yourself in a situation comparable to being stuck up a particularly foul-smelling creek in dire need of a paddle on more than one occasion. In addition, it has a fairly annoying tendency of being easy to fail and taking a fair amount of time to retry an encounter. That being said, the difficulty curve is competently mapped out and I never felt unfairly weak or overpowered against the enemies.

Just so I know I've said this at least once here, there won't be an update this week because I'm on Enrichment Week in school, and have a bunch of homework I need to get done in the break from assignments that it's provided. Next week, however, we will return.

Press 'X' to Review: Besiege

Besiege
Platform: PC/Steam
Developer: Spiderling Studios
Premise: Conquer the world, one zone at a time, by building siege engines relying on physics, skill, and a frankly ludicrous amount of explosives.
Initial Release Date: 28/01/2015 (Early Access)

I picked up Besiege about a year ago when it came out on Early Access, but didn't get very far because a) a lot of the elements that I ended up finding useful during my recent run through hadn't been added yet, and b) my computer at the time couldn't really run it without slowing down to a crawl whenever things started to get particularly explode-y. However, since then it's received a number of updates and I've managed to get a better school laptop as well as something vaguely resembling a gaming computer, so in the absence of anything else to play this week that I could both play and review in the time allotted, I picked it back up.

The best way I can think of describing Besiege's gameplay is "Kerbal Space Program, but with siege engines and a vaguely medieval-punk aesthetic". The only other main difference is that if your siege engine manages to get to the moon, something has gone horribly wrong instead of horribly right. The builder is easy enough to use, although it would've been nice to know about the 'rotate' control before I was three quarters of the way through the first kingdom. That being said, something being poorly explained is the kind of thing that's only a problem once. Each level gives you a vague objective, something like 'Destroy 90% of everything', or 'Steal and deliver this crystal' and doesn't particularly care how you get from Point A to Point B, and I like that it doesn't hold your hand, but it would've been nice if it gave you a couple of ideas on what to build because I'll admit that despite the variety, I ended up relying on the same handful of tools. Pro tip: helicopters are relatively easy to build, easy to mod for a variety of objectives, and unless there are archers or heavy winds in play the only real danger to you is yourself.

Press 'X' to Rant: Multiplayer Only

An open letter to the developers of "multiplayer-only" games:

Dear developers,
I can understand why, over the past year or two, you collectively seem to have become entranced by the idea of making games "multiplayer-only"; It requires significantly less work than creating a balanced single-player and multi-player experience, it means that you can focus on a more polished and full experience in one court as opposed to having two thinner experiences in two, and you can apparently sell it at full-price with people calling you out on it left, right and center and still make a frankly ludicrous amount of money.

I'll grant you, multi-player is often very satisfying to be good at; there's something viscerally fun about knowing that you've bested your fellow man that you just don't get by playing against a computer. In addition, I'll grant you that multiplayer tends to take longer to get tired of than single-player, although this is largely dependent on who you're matched with or against. However, it does have one major problem which I've brought up previously in my RWBY: Grimm Eclipse review, and that is Ghost Town Servers. What happens six months down the line when most of the player base have moved on to the Next Big Thing?

Press 'X' to Review: RWBY: Grimm Eclipse

RWBY: Grimm Eclipse
Platform: PC/Steam
Developer: Rooster Teeth Games/Jordan Scott
Premise: Play as one of the four members of Team RWBY to fight the forces of Grimm, Explodey-Grimm(tm), and android guards who will ruin your day if you're in the same postcode.
Release Date: 05/07/2016

A.N: Just wanted to say that this blog finally managed to hit 500 views over the week (WOOHOO!), so thank you all, from the bottom of my heart. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

So, a bit of backstory: before it was a game, RWBY was (and still is) a web-show by Rooster Teeth. I quite like the show, although volume 3 did test that somewhat. There's only so much emotional trauma I'm willing to deal with in the span of 5 episodes. Anyway, the point is that I expected that Grimm Eclipse might follow the traditional curse of the movie/TV tie-in game. However, it was also made by the same people that made the show, which from experience is pretty much the best way to avert the TV show/game tie-in curse. So, now that I've actually played the thing, the one question that needs to be answered still remains: Is It Fun?

Press 'X' to Review: Pokémon GO! (Australia)

Pokémon Go!
Platform: iOS, Android
Developer: Niantic Inc.
Premise: Pokémon, but in the real world and with pretty much all the strategy and combat mechanics stripped out.
Release Date: 06/07/2016

Between the Darwin Police Department having to issue an official statement asking players not to enter their stations looking for Pokémon or to use the PokéStop, the Tennessee Highway Patrol needing to run posters asking drivers to "Stop before you GO!" because people were having car crashes by trying to hunt down Pokémon while driving, and that whole thing with people going into graveyards or the Holocaust Museum because they're set as Pokéstops, it's been practically impossible to have not heard about Pokemon GO! over the past month. There was apparently some controversy among the Americans about the fact that Australia got access to it first given that we quote "already have dangerous creatures waiting to attack us around every corner", to which I'll simply say that it's probably karma for having pretty much every release arbitrarily pushed back by a month or two for the last forever. 

For those of you that have somehow managed to avoid hearing anything about Pokémon GO! (presumably by living in Antarctica), it's an Augmented Reality game for iOS and Android where Pokémon are scattered throughout the real world, so you walk around and attempt to catch them, whilst also getting involved in a massive clan war between Team Instinct, whose philosophy is mostly "Eh, we'll wing it", Team Mystic, whose philosophy is that Pokémon battles should be approached more methodically, and then there's Team Valour who.... hmm. Look, you know the Hunters from Destiny? Whose philosophy was basically "Let's just run at the problem with a knife in each hand raised overhead while screaming 'LEROOOOOOOYYY JENKINS!'"? Yeah, Team Valour is basically that but instead of a knife in each hand they have pokémon. Personally, for me it was a toss-up between Instinct and Mystic, because both made good points. Mystic eventually took it, because I thought the Blue colour scheme looked better.