The Closeout Warrior

As a concept, Dance Dance Revolution is pretty simple: stomp on arrows in time with the music. And it would seem that this would be an easy concept not only to imitate and (questionably) improve, but to clone. And clone, they did.

Stepmania is, at its heart, a DDR compatible program that does a very good job of mimicking all of its features and adds a few new ones (that I pretty much couldn’t care less about).

What is kind of neat is that there is a gigantic selection of songs that fans have converted into the proper format. Unfortunately, about 90 percent of these songs are either poorly done (like scrolling so fast that you miss the arrow before you can see what it is), or have button combinations that would be impossible to pull off if you were using an actual foot-pad (like hitting three arrows at once). Of course people have also recreated the levels from the real DDR machines, which I suspect was the main impetus for the creation of this game, but I’m paranoid that way.

Who is D.W. Bradley? A cursory search of the Internet tells me that he is a video game designer from way back, working on such games as Wizardry and Cybermage, games I’ve never played. But there in the store was a copy of D.W. Bradley’s latest masterpiece, Dungeon Lords.

I’m a sucker for a well crafted adventure game. Heck, I’m apparently also a sucker for an adventure game that I’ve only just heard of, regardless of quality.

Dungeon Lords is probably the most generically derivative medieval-themed adventure game that you’ll ever play. That may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your tastes. I don’t really know what the plot to this game is, I couldn’t stomach enough to learn very much.

Without going too deep into the specifics, I’m going to try and explain how this game works, or more accurately, doesn’t work at all. After the extremely basic character creation, you’re plunked down in the middle of some Generic Woods near a Generic Bonfire and get your first Generic Quest from the Generic Messenger to get into the Generic Castle-town. From here you have two options: wander through the woods aimlessly while slaughtering things or wander around the woods toward the castle while slaughtering things.

In an obvious nod to the Diablo series of games, you will be equipped with weapons and armor befitting a warrior of your chosen class. These items will lose durability with use and eventually break. This is important to note.

The real meat and potatoes of any adventure game is the amount of ’stuff’ to do, and the enemy encounters. I can’t really comment about the ’stuff’ part, since I never got more than one quest. The enemy encounters, on the other hand… Well, let’s start by calling them unbalanced.

Enemy encounters come in two types: creatures standing in a specific place on the map, and creature ‘waves’ that assault you every so often. Creatures standing in a specific place are by far the least common types of enemies. They guard bridges, guard huts, guard anything you might want to look at or explore. They’re a moderate threat.

The other way you might encounter monsters is in ‘waves’. Every so often, seemingly every five minutes or so, you will be assaulted by three or so monsters appropriate to the area. You defeat these monsters, move on a bit, get assaulted by more monsters, move on a bit, get assaulted by yet more monsters, etc.

Getting assaulted every few dozen steps wouldn’t be so bad except for a few things that cascade together into a gigantic mess of design:

1. Every time you get into a fight, your stuff goes down in durability, and you have no way to repair it until (presumably) you get to town. I never actually made it to town.
2. Since your stuff is perpetually decreasing in durability, it will eventually break. The monsters drop wearables so rarely that once your starting armor does break (and it will break) you will have that much less armor
3. Since you are wearing progressively less armor, you take progressively more damage from the area monsters
4. Since you take more damage from the area monsters, you die a lot. When you die you have a chance to not only lose some experience, but statistics as well. Statistics that govern your effectiveness as a fighter. Stats that can only be increased by leveling your character, making you weaker overall.

The game has other failings: the art direction, the sound design, the voice acting, the limited variety of monsters, and the ridiculously obtuse controls, but they’re not really worth going into. The biggest flaw with the game is the game itself. The design at its core is flawed, and the rest of the game just turns into a gelid mass of failure.

It’s worth noting that I actually got the Deluxe Edition of the game, the version of the game that had features that didn’t quite make it into the first game, like a map. Too bad they weren’t able to put any fun into it.

Great Qin Warriors is a game that is so ludicrously bad that, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear was a giant practical joke put on by the developer, Epie Games, because a game cannot be this bad by accident.

The story is convoluted, and I know that I wasn’t able to fully wrap my head around it from the intro movie, but here’s what I think I learned: In the Mysterious Future humanity has built this crazy-powerful super weapon, which has inexplicably created a second earth that’s the opposite of the real earth, i.e. the new earth is evil. So, obviously, war breaks out between the two earths and their armies of giant battle robots. In the ensuing battle, a hole is ripped in time and sends the robots back in time to feudal China where a giant land-war is taking place. Robots from each side of the conflict join opposing sides of the war, and are christened the Great Qin Warriors. At least that’s how I remember it. I don’t feel the need to watch it again.

After the completely bizarre intro, we’re thrust into the game proper. I was only able to force myself to play the first stage. This stage consisted of a gigantic square-shaped open snow field with a building plunked in the middle, which I think was a Chinese temple (the back of the box proudly proclaimed something to the effect that this game was the finest digital representation of Chinese culture and buildings yet created). Scattered around the level are evil people in evil giant robots and evil gun turrets on the (I assume) neutral temple. Both the evil robots and the evil gun turrets have the ability to shoot and hit you from a distance so great that you can’t even see them to fire back. Your goal, although not explicitly stated in any place that I could find, seemed to be to destroy everything hostile on the map without letting your giant robot get destroyed.

This shouldn’t be so hard of a goal, but the level is absolutely enormous. If the robots were people-sized, then the level would be the approximate size of a 4×4 grid of football fields, except not quite as flat and without the lines drawn on the ground.

Another problem is that the levels are incredibly sparsely populated. The absolutely enormous level should be teeming with enemies, with plenty of foliage to hide behind to provide a sense of immersion. What the level actually has is about a dozen enemies hidden in the corners furthest away from you. You can’t see them, but they can sure see, shoot, and kill you.

Also, hidden somewhere within the level is something that looks like a portal that provides a minuscule influx of new evil robots. I was not able to destroy the portal directly, but I was able blow up all of the evil robots that came out of it, thereby destroying it.

The level took me nearly an hour, and the bulk of that time was finding the lone robot in the corner of the map that I didn’t fully decimate. I had damaged the thing, but it was stuck in the corner waiting for me to come back and finish the job instead of chasing me for any length of time. Then I uninstalled the game and decided to never play it again.

There is no part of this game that is fun or makes sense. Even at $1 it was seriously overpriced.

Based on the reviews I read, Titan Quest promised to be a fun distraction. It was a pretty blatant ripoff of the very successful Diablo II formula: run around the landscape, kill things, gain levels, spend skill points, etc. etc. Only this time, it’s set in ancient Greece.

There’s a story, but it really doesn’t matter what it is. You get to slog through ancient Greece and search for monsters to kill, which will make you stronger and give you the ability to kill stronger abominations. Your character will start out the same every time and how you fight and develop your fighter will ultimately determine its class.

As you level up, you get Skill Points. You can spend these skill points in up to two Specializations. Picking two Specializations that benefit each other will make your character a force to be reckoned with. Sounds like some built-in replayability. If you can stand the game.

I’ve started the game three separate times so far, and each time peter out after a couple of hours, barely making it to Level 10 (out of 99 or so). I’m not sure why. I think it comes down to the presentation. It’s not really clear why I’m fighting, and as a consequence, I don’t really care about the people that inhabit this world. They’re just going to have to deal with their problems without me.

Oh, but I can get the Special Edition Best Buy version of the Expansion pack, with limited edition Best Buy armor. I didn’t really get to see what that meant, but I couldn’t shake the thought of running around ancient Greece fighting mythical beasts clad in a blue polo and khaki pants.

Okay, yes, that would be pretty hilarious, but not worth the price of admission.