The Closeout Warrior

Most of the games on the Homestar Runner website are pretty terrible. They can barely be called games. They might waste a few minutes of your life, but in the majority of them you’ll have seen all there is to see within the first two or three seconds of playing. There are a couple of standouts, though, like Thy Dungeonman 3.

Thy Dungeonman 3, as you might surmise, is the third game in a series where the goal of the main character, the Dungeonman in question, is to obtain ‘ye flask’. Why does he want the flask? The game never makes it really clear, but don’t worry about that.

This game is a throwback to those text adventure games that I like so much, but is way easier to figure out.

Just look at those graphics! This game is as much an homage as it is a parody of those old text-adventure shareware games that I grew up with, and maybe that’s why I like it so much. Its appeal lies in its simplicity. Even without the aid of a walkthrough (*gasp!*) I was able to plow through the game in about two hours. Even if you had only a passing interest in text-adventure games, I would certainly give this one a try.

And I do.

So I did.

You can play the game here, if you’re so inclined.

It amazes me that simple, stupid games can get to be as popular as they do. Take this game, for example, you have a yeti with a bat, hitting penguins that jump off a cliff. The goal is to get them to go as far as you can. It’s all timing, you can’t really pick the trajectory you hit the penguin at, and once you hit it, it’s all up to Lady Physics to see how far it’ll go.

I played this game for about 10 minutes in a moment of weakness, and didn’t give it a second thought, until I found out that the games are going to be sometime soon retooled and relaunched for the mobile phone market.

Why pay to play a game on your phone that you can play on the Internet for free? I don’t know. I also don’t know why anyone would want to play this game more than about twice.

Short and sweet today, here’s an article I wrote up in 2002 about a game that’s still way more fun than it ought to be.

According to the game’s readme, the premise of the game goes like this… “The legendary superhero Spector has found, to his shock, that he cannot write off all the damage he has caused to the city out of his taxes unless he proves that he has sustained significant damage in the process himself! Now it’s up to you to ‘help’ him with this little detail..”

So what does that mean? Essentially it means that you now have a person standing at the top of some stairs just waiting for someone to shove him off. You score points based on the amount and kind of damage you do, with neck damage worth the most. The game keeps track of high scores and can send them to the author’s web-site so you can see how you stack up against other Porrasturvat players.

This game is pretty fun for a while. It’s (probably) not the kind of game you’ll spend hours at a time on, but it’s an awesome time waster.

Part of the After Dark Games collection, Mowin Maniac is another one of Berkely’s screen savers that was transformed into a game and thrown into a compilation. This one… not that good.

I never had the screen saver of Mowin’ Maniac, but the gist was that a crazy guy on a crazy lawn mower would zoom across your screen, cutting down the growing flora. How do you transform that into a game? By taking control of the mower, of course.

Your goal, obviously, is to mow all of the grass without getting caught by the creatures native to the yard (from yard workers with rakes, to zombies with… zombie parts). Anything that’s not grass (walls, tombstones, and the like) slow you down. Gas cans speed you up (and let you temporarily incapacitate your enemies). Get caught and you lose a life. Lose all your lives, and then you go play a game that’s actually fun, like Bad Dog 911.

I never had the chance to play the original Pirates!, but I had heard that it was a pretty good game. It let you play as a pirate, doing all kinds of pirate-y things, and, really, who doesn’t want to be a pirate?

Fast-forward a few years and the game is remade and released for the PC. Fast forward a couple more years and it hits the bargain bin. The game was, by all accounts pretty good, so I decided to pick it up.

The short version of the story in this game is that you’re the son of a well-to-do family, who is kidnapped and/or slaughtered. Your character is taken into servitude on a pirate ship where he grows up and eventually snaps under the tyrannical captain, mutinies, and takes over the ship. Then you get to be the captain of your own pirate ship, with all the benefits. From here you can do pretty much what you want: search for treasure, smash the boats of other pirates, woo a bride, swordfight, dance, infiltrate towns, manage your resources (money, food, weaponry), and search for the remnants of your family.

As great as all this sounds, I just couldn’t get into this game. Sailing (and you’ll be doing a lot of sailing) is incredibly tedious, the combat with the other boats is kind of interesting, but it’s still fighting in boats (i.e. sailing in circles, firing cannons). When you do finally board, you are presented with a scripted fight where you pick out what moves you want to do to gain the advantage. It’s kind of fun, but gets pretty boring since you don’t really have direct control over your character.

You will eventually start to build up a crew which you must feed, keep happy, and eventually split the loot with. One of the more interesting things about your crew is that after a period you have to pay them their share of the booty, and disband them, otherwise they get frustrated, and mutiny. This creates a bit more tedium since you have to rebuild your crew every so often. Not as fun as you might think.

I did manage to seek out and find one treasure. It was pretty funny watching my group of salty seamen traipse across the landscape and become overjoyed when I found it, but it wasn’t enough to let me get into this game. I ended up shelving it after about 2 hours. If you can get more enjoyment out of it, then you’re a better Pirates! player than I.

Congratulations.

Nethack is a clone of Rogue, and is in a sub-class of games of games called Roguelikes. It’s not particularly important that you know the history of Rogue, but you should know that people that used computers in the early days were geeks, geeks with a lot of free time, a passion for games, and extremely limited computing resources. Using the primitive tools available to them, they created a game that is influenced heavily on Dungeons & Dragons, but with random dungeons, a plot, and a goal.

The goal of Nethack is simple: find and escape with the Amulet of Yendor. Achieving that goal is another story. Nethack’s simplistic interface belies its complexity. Here is a link to the guide book at the official site if you’d like a sneak peak at the burgeoning subtleties that lie just beneath the skin of the game, just waiting for you to scratch.

The problem is, though, that the game presents so much information to you all at once that there really isn’t a learning curve, there’s a learning wall with a curve at the top. So much stuff has been packed onto this game that nearly every button on your keyboard has a function, every character in the ASCII character set has a meaning, and you get to learn about it all.

I’m told that once you get into the game that each of its secrets beckons you deeper into its gaping maw promising greater riches for you to plumb the deeper you go. Which may be true, but I could never get into it.

I tried, I really did. Several times I’d install the game, read through the docs and dive in, only to be defeated by the control scheme and the pixelated, angular horrors that dwelt in the rectangular rooms. For those that traverse the dungeons and reap their rewards, I salute your perseverance. Your CON is higher than mine.

This is a review that I wrote for Stage Select back in October of ‘05. If the following wall of text is too much for you to process, I’ll just say that the game was completely awful.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve enjoyed an RPG. I’m talking about the classic formula of taking one character or so on an epic quest laden with engaging story telling and perhaps a life-lesson learned along the way.

I decided to try and find the compilation of PSO I and II that was released shortly after the GameCube’s debut, but I was unable to locate any copies (stores don’t stock games that have been out of print for 4 years? Shame!). So I headed over to the game’s official site to see if I could glean some information about where I could get a copy of the remade Original Two. Almost immediately I was smacked square in the face with the realization that the good people at SEGA have taken it upon themselves to release a *FREE* RPG set in the Phantasy Star universe, and all I had to do was pony up the $8.95 monthly fee. Oh, and there’s a free trial… more about that later.

Since I didn’t really want the time investment that a MMORPG would have offered, I did some research and concluded that this was the kind of game that could be enjoyed either singly or in a group. Fantastic! A genuine console-style RPG, with server-side saving that I could play for a paltry $2.25 a week? Sounds like a winner.

Or so I thought.

Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst does indeed share a lot with its console cousins. One thing you will notice right away when you fire up this game is that the character models look like they were lifted straight out of the Dreamcast and plunked into your computer. Nothing here is particularly ugly or anything, but there’s nothing here that’s going to really push my video card, either. Well… the teleporting screens looked nice.

But hey, it’s free, and I can play online for free for two weeks. I can not, however, use my subscription to PSO III (which does incedentally work for episodes I and II) to play. I’ll have to shell out another $9.00/month if I decide I want to play them both. Yeah, not likely.

So I have two weeks to figure out if this game’s worth the monthly fee. Sounds doable.

So I fire up the game and get down to the business of creating my character. You have four classes of character to choose from, and then four types within those classes. Those familiar with the story of the game will no doubt find these choices to reflect on the rich lore and history surrounding the PSO universe. I am not particularly familiar with it, so I had to rely on the in game help. I decided that I would pick a class that was easy for beginners to play (according to the description), and out of those I picked the one with the lowest HP, on the asssumption (since the game told me so) that she would get some kind of neat-o techniques later. Fair enough.

Then I loaded up the game, and here’s where it started to break down. One of the first things you’re likely to notice is that the controls are the standard WASD layout that’s become the de facto control scheme for PC games any more. So far so good. It took me a few minutes of fumbling to realize that the mouse is not enabled in any way by default.

So, no, you don’t use your mouse to select people that you want to talk to. When people get in front of you, they become highlighted, you then can press the ‘Enter’ key to ‘Enter’-act with them (ugh, did I just type that?).

“So how do you control the camera, then?” I hear you asking aloud. Well, forget about using the mouse. You can press the ‘Up’ arrow to snap the camera behind you. That’s all you get, as the camera tries to stay mostly behind you anyway. Want to see if an enemy chasing you has broken off pursuit without stopping and turning around? Too bad.

“But,” I hear you asserting with an arrogant air, “there are three more arrow buttons.” Indeed there are three more arrow buttons. The ‘Down’ arrow being defaulted to ‘Attack’, the ‘Left’ one being defaulted to ‘Stronger Attack That Misses More’, and the ‘Right’ one is defaulted to ‘Healing Item’. Bear in mind here that when I say ‘Attack’ I do not mean ‘Auto Attack’, I mean ‘Swing Your Weapon’. Enemy encounters boil down to you repeatedly mashing the ‘Down’ button, and yelling at your character because she isn’t swinging the sword as fast as you’re slamming the keys.

Enemy encounters turned frustratingly tedious and difficult right out of the gate. Due in part to the abysmal control scheme and my character having the constitution of a soap bubble. My rough and tumble adventurer has a lifespan of about three hits. This worked out perfectly since the first enemies I encountered came in a group of three. Admittedly, that probably wouldn’t have been too bad of a problem until I found out that for some reason my character couldn’t kill them in less than six or seven hits each. Even that wouldn’t have been so bad had I been able to swing my weapon with anything resembling speed, but I couldn’t. By the time I got about one or possibly two hits in, all the creatures in the area would congregate around me and strike me all at once.

Then my character died. A lot.

I did manage to devise the strategy of picking a monster out from the crowd, thwacking it with my Bonk Stick, and then retreating to the safety of the… um… ’safe area’ at the beginning of the level until I had managed to dispatch the three creatures. All in all it was a process that took about half an hour. Then three more appeared. By this time I had blown through the meager allotment of health potions you start the game with as well as the paltry sum of money you are given to start the game (I blew it on health potions), and I had to do it all again.

Ugh.

Okay, pick an enemy, hit it once, run away. Pick an enemy, hit it once, get over confident and try to hit it twice, get slaughtered, revive at the hospital. Repeat. About ten times. After I dispatched the creatures I fully expected the sealed doors at the opposite ends of the play area to open and usher in the part of the game where the Fun begins. Instead, SIX of those crappy monsters rose out of the ground at once.

“Screw that!” I shouted at my PC. I then uninstalled the game, cancelled my account, and set the paper I printed out the control reference on ablaze.

And I never even made it to level 2. Pity, that.