Game EXP: Deep Ones (NS)

Disclaimer: I received Deep Ones free of charge from the developer Sometimes You via IndieGamerChick through her #IndieXmas2018.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that I post about the game on social media channels including Twitter.  My article of the game reflects my own views and thoughts about the game without any outside influence.

A few things before I get into the meat of what my experience playing the game entailed.  Deep Ones is a self proclaimed love letter of sorts to the ZX Spectrum gaming system.  I have only once seen a ZX Spectrum operating in person back at PAX10 (Penny-Arcade Expo 2010), and while I did not personally play the game (I do not recall which cassettes were brought), it was an impressive and interesting experience watching the games be loaded onto the system via cassette tape in a way that I had never even conceived of before.  This might have put me at an immediate disadvantage to starting the game, but I still felt that the subject matter (H.P. Lovecraft inspired) and the retro-indie-esque-ness of the design were right up my alley.

Upon starting the game, I was greeted with what looked like a Buddha type figure sitting in front of a TV screen holding a controller.  As it turns out, it is actually just a depiction of Buddha sitting.  So this screen popped up with no text, no sound, nothing.  Convinced that the game had frozen after pressing all of the buttons on the Switch controller multiple times, I closed down the game and restarted.  The same screen came up without any further fanfare.  This time I let it sit for longer than the initial 10 seconds and did not see anything so much as Buddha blinking, or a hint of sound.  So I closed down the game again.  By this point I was getting a bit frustrated and a bit sad.  This was a game that I had received for free with the intention of playing and talking about in the Twitterverse and for a game that only wanted to crash made a little sad.

Well, after more than 25 seconds and less than 30 seconds, the screen transitioned to the opening title screen.  In a series of two replies, developer Somestime You commented that "It's a Buddha :) Buddha want to to be calm while game is loading.  That was the main idea behind this screen."  So, the title screen loaded and I was able to start playing.  Deep Ones, taking its name from aquatic creatures in the H.P. Lovecraft story "A Shadow Over Innsmouth," and after the intro movie where a giant tentacled creature from the deep pulls down your submersible, there does not seem to be much in the way of Lovecraftian lore.  This probably was not the best head space to go into a game that I thought looked visually interesting.

That being said, until I reached the battle against the gam of sharks, I was having a lot of fun, taking into account the limited mobility of the character, the inability to shoot while jumping, and the tendency of the game to have a split second delay from when I pushed the Y-button (which shoots the gun) to when it fired.  That fight against the sharks though nearly did me in.  I tried on three separate occasions to kill all of the sharks before my three health points were bitten from me, the second attempt last more than 25 minutes and I do not know how many lives.  After putting the game down for a day, I came back and barely managed to kill the last shark with one health point remaining, all before jumping off of the cliff nearby aiming towards a lone large seahorse that was eager to swim away at any moment.  While being chased by a giant shark.  And gaming pro tip for this section when playing on the Switch: use the directional buttons instead of the joy stick as I found it easier to move forward and up and down to avoid the obstacles.

I think that battle against the sharks was my biggest complaint during a couple of hours of gameplay.  The shark mini-bosses seemed to come out of no where and was significantly more combat heavy than any other time in the game, which consisted of invulnerable sea anemones that shot out projectiles, and killable walking sea turtles that also, inexplicably, shot out projectiles.  After traversing an area that was filled with various forms of undead pirate and what looked like TNT throwing prospectors, I have given up most hope of there being much Lovecraft in the game.  But, the game play is pretty solid and aside from a few misfires in the way of the slow firing pistol (or is it supposed to be a harpoon gun?), Deep Ones is a pretty fun game, but only if you do not at all mind the purposeful retro early 1980s appearance and style of play that came with the ZX Spectrum.



JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Look What You've Done To Me

First Impressions: Darkest Dungeon - Ancestral Edition (NS)

I am going to leave this article a fair amount shorter than I probably would put into a First Impressions article, but I feel like there is only so much I can say about a year old game that has already won a number of awards on a lot of the systems it has been released on. 

First off, I started Darkest Dungeons: Ancestral Edition three separate times.  The first was shortly after first receiving the game, then I put it down while I tried to finish Battle Chasers, and Thimbleweed Park.  The second time was because I felt that after over a months absence I should start over as I had put fewer than 30 minutes into the game.  The third time I started because I did not fully understand the control and button mapping, and made an error sending out a small group instead of the full contingent of four companions that I had in my roster.  Since then, I have made a couple of mistakes, not using items when I though I was, using the correct item at the wrong time which lead to three of my characters dying from their own individual heart attacks and one survivor needing two weeks of mental recovery in the abbey before I even considered sending her out again.

If you are asking yourself, why bother. I will put it to you like this.  The writing in this game is pretty amazing.  It is heavily inspired by H.P. Lovecraft (minus the antisemitic and overt racism) and there are times when a game tries to capture a period piece involving eldritch and cosmic horrors, but they just do not get the dialogue correct.  It just sounds too contemporary.  It is like someone read the Wikipedia page for the Cthulhu mythos, felt that the story should take place in the 1930s, but has no grasp on what books, stories, or dialogue sounded like.  Even the game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, which got a lot right, still had journal entries and spoken dialogue sounding like something out of 2006.

Darkest Dungeon on the other hand, nailed the atmosphere of Lovecraft and the sound of words (as opposed to me cannot seem to write well enough).  Granted it is not a perfect match for 1930s weird fiction, but damn it is wonderfully written.  The opening intro reads as follows:

Ruin has come to our family.

You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial, gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor.

I lived all my years in that ancient rumor shadowed manor, fattened by decadence and luxury, and yet I began to tire of conventional extravagance.  Singular unsettling tales suggested the mansion itself was a gateway to some fabulous and unnameable power.  With relic and ritual, I bent every effort towards the excavation and recovery of those long buried secrets, exhausting what remained of our family fortune, on swarthy workmen, and sturdy shovels.  At last, in the salt soaked crags beneath the lowest foundations, we unearthed that damnable portal of antediluvian evil.  Our every step unsettled the ancient earth, but we were in a realm of death and madness.  In the end, I alone fled, laughing and wailing through those blackened arcades of antiquity.  Until consciousness failed me.

You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial.  It is a festering abomination!  I beg you, return home, claim your birthright, and deliver our family from the ravenous clutching shadows. . .of the Darkest Dungeon.

If that text at all intrigued you, I recommend (highly recommend) watching the opening cinematic.

I have never heard of the voice actor Wayne June, who speaks the part of your ancestor and makes frequent comments and narrations during the game, but his voice is perfectly suited to the script that was written for the game.  If the above introduction has at all interested you, I also highly recommend watching the cinematic that begins the game once you start your file.

Now, on top of all of that is a lot of game mechanics that I feel I am still working out.  Be it five hours in finally figuring out how to find out the names of items and what they do before I buy them, and I think so far this is my biggest complaint for the Nintendo Switch port of Darkest Dungeon,  that and the text can be tiny at times.  The button mapping is not always as intuitive as I would have liked and there are times when if feels more natural to play it as a touch screen game, but some of the windows when playing in hand-held-mode are just too small for my yeti sized fingers trying to scroll or zoom in/out with two fingers.

And that is where I will leave it for today, which is more than I had originally planned on writing.  The writing, voice acting, and atmosphere of the game is amazing, but the button mapping could use a bit of work.  There is a decent chance that there will be a First Impressions Part II before the end of the year.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Too Late I Heard The Howling

Movie Review: The Void

A few weeks back, Conklederp and I watched The Void, an independent science fiction horror film that I had put on our Netlfix queue because the poster looked right up my tentacle filled alley.

I mean for one it's called The Void.  Then you have a person in what appears to be a cloak or robe of some kind, kneeling before an triangle shaped portal with tentacles pouring out of it, all in front of a backdrop of cosmic infinity.  Coupled with the sometimes-not-meaning-much "From the executive producer of [insert one of your favorite films here]" and you have a recipe for my own celluloided heartstrings.  

Without giving too much away, unless you go and watch the trailer, I would say that if you are a fan of John Carpenter films like The Thing, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness, and H.P. Lovecraft inspired films like Re-Animator, then while I cannot guarantee that you will like The Void, you may at least be entertained throughout.

Both Conklederp and I very much enjoyed the movie, even when the Netflix DVD skipped for a couple minutes around the 20 or so minute mark, but neither of us would call it a perfect film.  There were some gaps in the story that we felt could have been filled. and at times the acting was what you might expect from your standard B-Movie fare.  We both agreed however that this was probably the closest film we had seen that approximated a story that Lovecraft would have penned had he been alive today; although I do not recall any racist or antisemitic under/overtones.

I give it 5.47 out of 7.89 Tentacles, because why not?

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Instrumental

Monthly Update: February 2016

Happy February everyone!  Happy Year of the Monkey too.  According to the great Wikipedia, we're intelligent, dignified, optimistic, and sociable (when I have to be, but that's not my strongest characteristic), but we're also apparently vain (I do like my hair), arrogant, reckless, and snobbish.  Although I feel like it nailed the health problems with possibly being prone to social anxiety disorder (of which I'm sure that I exhibit a number of symptoms during various social interactions).  But anyway. . .

Let's see, what was I up to last month?  I started the winter quarter (with only one more to go and then I can be an official number cruncher) which means that I haven't been as gameable as I might normally be otherwise.  It also means that I'm still not reading as much as I would like to be as I will typically get in a few pages before I fall asleep for the night.

But gamewise is why I'm here today.  I feel like January could be characterized by both The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (which I have briefly talked about) and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.  I've presently put in just under 25 hours into Redguard and I actually wish that there was more talking and investigating in this game than running around and fighting (partly because I'm bad at the fighting mechanic in this game), because this game is chalk full of Elder Scrolls lore from the 2nd Era. . .sorry, I just got lost reading again getting that link set up.  I think I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the game, but I before a current quest I'm on, I thought I was at the end of the game and I recently found out a way to talk to a character whose dialogue responses sound as if I was supposed to have talked to him within the first few hours of the game.  It's still a great (and dated) game that I look forward to finishing and hopefully get around to writing about.  Regarding Shadow of Mordor, that's another beast all together.

Oh, and just last night, I started up Dead Space 3 since I had been listening to the soundtrack and wondered why I hadn't played this apparent very black and not too horror-y (and last) game in a series that I love (although the second game not as much as the first).  Presently I am liking it, even though it is more action-y than the first game, but how much horror can a single protagonist take before they're just used to killing necromorphs?  I see it as like Ash from Army of Darkness compared to Ash from The Evil Dead.  Plus I'm getting some serious At the Mountains of Madness vibes from the past lore of the series taking place in an icy wasteland.  More Lovecraft appropriately placed into stories is never a bad thing.

Also, probably on Friday, I will put up an article about an alpha for a game called Clustertruck that's been a lot of fun (with a large helping of frustration).

January also marked the one year anniversary of our D&D group, or at least most of them since Conklederp (Dagnar Ungart) and Tula Tealeaf have been with us since the beginning and Xob and Lark (Chreekat) joined in later at various points; The Notorious CRC was killed off, but that was her request when she took classes back east last summer, and Lululeevaloolalay the High Elven wizard has been taken over by Conklederp since she's also a magic user and who doesn't like casting magic missile?  If the group keeps up the pace they maintained in the last session, I feel like they'll finish the quest when we meet again later in the month.  I have a couple of ideas lined up, either a quest I wrote last year or an official quest. . .and now that I think about it, I think I'll do the quest I wrote since it's written to be a short-ish-type quest rather than a long campaign.  I might even work in some elements from my quest into the official quest if those events inspire me to do so.

And holy damn, how had I almost forgotten to mention the X-Files season 9!?!!?  While I feel that the first episode has been the most alien-lore heavy and the weakest of the three episodes (the fourth will be airing tonight), I like what the Chris Carter has done with the story so far.  Here's hoping that this will lead to a 10-13 episode Season 10, since that seems to be the formula for high production TV shows these days; I'm not complaining though.

Well, it's been lovely chatting with y'all today, but I've got another test to do for a class in particular (this'll be the fourth test in a week), so I should probably get on that.


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Tells Me What To Say