MIDI Week Singles: "Destroyer" - Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth (PC)

 

"Destroyer" from Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth on Windows, mac OS, Linux, Steam OS (2014)
Composer: Geoff Knorr
Album: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth (Original Soundtrack from the Video Game)
Label: 2K
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Firaxis Games

I decided to use "Destroyer" sandwiched between our two articles for Frontiers Reach because when I was first making a trailer, I had this song in mind and actually made a short trailer.  A week or two ago when the Squire asked what a video was on my computer, I said it was "a boring video I made," thinking that he wouldn't want to watch it.  We now watch "the weird boring video you made Daddy" three to four times in a row nearly every morning.  I then made a longer video using the entirety of "Destroyer" so that both Conklederp and I wouldn't have to listen to the same 25 seconds over and over and over again.

Just like the first time we used music from Beyond Earth, I still haven't played the game and have zero context for its use in the game, but it does come pretty early in the soundtrack so my headcanon has taken that into account too.  The scene I conjure is a combination of a lone ship escaping an armada of aggressive ships and/or an entire planet entry sequence full of questioning and fearful looks without any dialogue.  However this song is used in-game, I just love how unabashedly dramatic it is, and that's it.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Pass Judgement on Humanity

Game EXP: Frontiers Reach - Part 1 (VSD)

  [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Frontiers Reach through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Frontiers Reach
Release Date: March 1, 2023
Systems: Windows, Linux, Steam OS
Publisher: Blind Alien Productions
Developer: Blind Alien Productions
Time Spent: 5h 18m

Before we get to the actual gameplay of Frontiers Reach, let's delve a bit into the process of getting the game to play on the Steam Deck.  But before we even get there, we have to acknowledge that developer Blind Alien Productions (Soliloquis) has stated on the Steam discussion pages that when playing Frontiers Reach in Linux, users should beware.  Not being entirely knowledgeable about all that is entailed in Linux, some of what Soliloquis mentioned went over my head, but the takeaway from what they were saying was that playing on the Steam Deck was not going to be as stable as playing on a higher-end PC. 

That was another thing, that Frontiers Reach is hardware intensive.  Soliloquis goes into various descriptions about advised hardware in the discussion pages, again, some of which I didn't fully understand.  I took all of this to mean that I shouldn't even try running in on my laptop out of fear of starting a low-level chemical fire.  So the Steam Deck it was.  At first.  And only for a short moment.

Come with me on this journey.

Once I booted up the game, the first thing that stuck out to me was that the "Escape to Skip" text on the opening story was cropped.  Then the opening menu was cropped too, and while I should have noticed the gear icon in the upper left corner of the screen, I missed it and just read about needing to have Nvidia Physx installed.  I then found that while I could move the cursor around on the screen, I couldn't select anything with either the A button or the RT, or really any other button.  I should also note that there was no video playing on the video screen, which I didn't notice this time around because I didn't know any different.  So after shutting down the game via the Steam menu, I tried again with the same result.  I then went into the compatibility settings and selected "Proton Experimental" having had good luck with it in the past.  Now, the game booted up the same as before, the screens were still cropped, but I was able to click around to actually start playing.  Sort of.  I should note that in the actual levels, from what I could tell, the screen was at the correct resolution, so I figured I could live with a cropped menu screen for the time being.

When I clicked "New Pilot" it would bring up a menu to create a character, and I could select from several character background traits, but I could not actually name my character since wherever I clicked would not bring up the Steam keyboard and even when I brought it up manually, nothing happened when I typed.  So I tried "Play Tutorial" which only made sense.  Here you start out as the kid of a farmer about to make a crop dusting run as your Dad goes over a preflight safety check, which works somewhat well as a quick rundown on the the cockpit if you're in cockpit mode.  Then the settlement you live in is attacked and you're sent out to defend the surrounding area.  And then flight controls became an issue from that point until the present day.  Yes, the Y-axis is properly inverted (unless you're looking around in the cockpit with the right joystick, then its regular up is up, down is down).

What I found to be a coordination problem for me was that while down was up and up was down (as it should be for camera controls, especially in flight sims, but that's just personal preference), but left/right made the plane roll in their respective directions.  I've played several flight sims in the Ace-Combat franchise where there is a "simplified flight controls" option that allows for easier turning of the plane and there is automatic roll/pitch/yaw handling by the game unless you hold down a button for immediate use.  What I found difficult about this configuration was that to turn the plane to the left, you need to roll the plane almost 90 degrees and then pull up, all while flying around the mid-high subsonic range.  This made making small adjustments to the plane while trying to focus on stationary targets exceedingly difficult.  Part of me feels like a jerk complaining about this because it does make sense that that is what a plane would need to do to perform a turn, but because this is a video game, albeit a flight-sim, I was not prepared for this steep of a learning curve on just the tutorial mission.  This early on, after only a few minutes, I got the impression that this was a game that was developed by and for people who either already have a Thrustmaster HOTAS set-up or someone who could afford one as an accessory.

Thankfully in the tutorial though, your primary focus is on moving targets, other enemy aircraft, although there are flak guns that no one mentions or apparently wants you to concern yourself with even though after respawning, my ship had about 20% of its armor diminished by the time I took off after being peppered by enemy gunfire from all directions.  Maybe this was my all fault because I didn't take out enough of the enemy fighters so they all converged on me when they saw a helpless ship wheel out of the hanger.  Maybe it's just a Souls-like penalty for dying and respawning with less health until I learned to git gud.  Whatever the reason, it felt realistic, but also unfair and I was not a fan.

Lastly, after my final time crashing and respawning in the hangar, there was an announcement that stated in more eloquent and lore-appropriate terminology, that I had failed the mission.  I then sat with the ship still inside the hanger waiting for a "Try Again" or "You Died" or "You Failed" screen, but nothing.  The game was still running, the ship was still sitting in the hangar and I could rotate the camera enough to see structures burning off in the distance.  I tried pausing to bring up any kind of a menu, but nothing happened.  Not quite a freeze, and not quite a game crash, but something in between that required me to force exit the game by opening the Steam menu and closing the game.  This became a running theme for all but one time I played which we will cover in Part 2 on Friday.

So my first foray into Frontiers Reach while as plagued as it was by crashes, freezes, and unfamiliar controls, I still had high hopes for the rest of the game.  Not going into the game expecting everything to run as smoothly as one that's optimized for the Steam Deck definitely helped to curb my enthusiasm throughout and not be disappointed or discouraged.  Okay, maybe a little discouraged, but still hopeful for what we will be bringing you on Friday.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Right After Misbehaving

P.S.  On a side note, I did map the "H" key to the L4 back button on the Steam Deck to remove the HUD, which I ended up doing a lot more when I played the main missions and the "Instant Action" option.

Demo Time: Fear Underground (VSD)

Fear Underground

Systems: Windows

Release Date: TBD

Publisher: PlayGenix

Developer: PlayGenix

Time Spent: 15 Minutes

Something stood out to me about Fear Underground when I started.  First, there was an introductory movie showing the setting as England, 1450, so there was a reason why this character was wearing plate armor, as this will come up in just a moment.  There is a knight who collapses on the ground in the dead of night and is absorbed/taken by a rolling shoggoth-like mass which then crawls down a well.  The scene cuts to a sci-fi portal opening up to a metallic shaft like something out of Cube, eventually showing our deposited knight at the bottom of this vertical shaft.  Then I was brought back to the opening menu, but when I selected to actually start the game, I started with my knight character already in the bottom of the shaft.  There was no replaying of the opening cinematic to further develop the scene, setting, character, or environment.  I don't think I would categorize that as a criticism, but I feel like it would be something for PlayGenix to update before release.

So, we're at the bottom of some pit without the option to try and climb our way out, so our only option is to move to the right.  Then it hit me.  This isn't a standard third-person perspective survival horror adventure game, this is a third-person side-scrolling survival horror adventure game, which is something that I feel is not all too common.  Your primary mode of moving is on your hands and knees since you're wearing full plate mail and moving through tunnels no taller than three feet.  So on one hand, this game plays on claustrophobia both in terms of visuals and as an actual gameplay mechanic.  Granted there was one area where I could have my character stand up although I couldn't find a reason behind the option to do so.  So your movement is going to be slow and limited as well as your actions, least of all because you are unarmed, but mainly because there is not a lot of room to make any kind of attacks while you're crawling through muck wearing 30-50 lbs of armor.  I did die in one instance because I was initially confused by a puzzle and what I was supposed to do, but the game thankfully autosave frequently and it only took me a minute at most to get back to where I had previously been.

Fear Underground is a strange and welcome addition to the current world of survival horror video games.  Its side-scrolling approach, especially while not going the pixelated/retro trend of horror 2D side-scrollers like Carrion or Lone Survivor, is unique in that regard, and unfortunately, I could see it being seen as a negative since the premise of a 15th-century survival-horror limits the player to only moving forwards or backward.  In classic survival-horror fashion though, there is some element of puzzle solving, both in terms of environmental puzzles and solutions that require specific objects that allow further exploration.  There was a thread asking for first-person and/or VR support, but I think that that would fundamentally change the game into something that it isn't.  For VR, would you need to actually be on your hands and knees or would playing while sitting on a couch have the same feeling?  There are also environmental elements like visually obstructing chunks of earth that add an element of tension as we know our character is moving but cannot see them.  With this perspective, we have simultaneous views of what is in front and behind us requiring the player to watch all sides of the screen at the same time.  It might be able to be done, but it may not be the same game and experience.

Yes, the demo is short, lasting only 15 minutes, but it was enough to get a general feel for what the game might eventually become.  I don't see this being more than a five to six-hour game as anything significantly longer than 10+ hours might run the risk of losing that feeling of fear, tenseness, and claustrophobia.  I would much rather play a well-crafted and tight horror game than one that tried to pad out the length with more of the same for needless hours.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
And The Soul Is Driven To Madness

P.S.  And despite how dark the pictures are, the game never felt too dark to play or understand what was going on while playing on the Steam Deck.

MIDI Week Singles: "It's Going to Change Everything!" - Human Resource Machine (NS)

 

"It's Going to Change Everything!" from Human Resource Machine on Windows, OS X, Nintendo Switch, Android, Wii U, Linux, iOS (2015)
Composer: Kyle Gabler
Album: Human Resource Machine Original Soundtrack
Label: Self Released
Publisher: Tomorrow Corporation
Developer: Tomorrow Corporation

Leave it to me to not finish a game after putting a couple of hours into it because I'm apparently too stubborn and prideful to look up a walkthrough to help with some, for me at least, very complicated puzzles.  But that was me with Human Resource Machine from The Tomorrow Corporation.  But why does that self-admission have to do with today's song?  Because this is the last song on the soundtrack and the title alone I feel like hints at the outcome of the story.  In the game, you are using single-function coding language tiles to solve puzzles to help automate a number puzzle.  For example,

"For each two things in the INBOX, first subtract the 1st from the 2nd and put the result in the OUTBOX. AND THEN, subtract the 2nd from the 1st and put the result in the OUTBOX. Repeat." 

Often there are optional challenges like "Use 10 or fewer commands" and "Complete in 40 or fewer steps."  When things click, the game makes you feel like a genius, and other times, you feel like you're just learning how to add 1 + 1 while the whole class is waiting for you to finish so they can start long division.

I'll likely go back to this game because I love The Tomorrow Corporation and I really want to see how the Blade Runner adjacent synth plays into the story.  I just love Kyle Gabler's music as there's often a depth of emotion that you may not have been expecting when you started your first day at work.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
No Compromise

P.S.  I'll leave this here just in case.

Demo Time: Back to Hearth (VSD)

 

Back to Hearth
Systems: Windows, Linux
Release Date: TBD
Publisher: Marevo Collective
Developer: Podoba Interactive
Time Spent: 33+10 Minutes

Yes, I know how to add.  I first played Back to Hearth on the Steam Deck for this article, but then I downloaded it on my laptop to grab a couple of additional screenshots.  On the second playthrough, which also happened a few weeks apart, and apparently, between those two dates, at least one major mechanic added to and improved the overall experience of playing this game.  But we will get to that shortly.

Back to Hearth was an interesting title in that even with the description on Steam's store page, I still wasn't 100% sure what I was getting into.  The description does mention repairing a house, but the back of my brain continued to ask, "but what does that mean exactly?"  The genre is listed as "casual" while the visuals look like if Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing were played in first-person perspective if they took place in Ukraine after a nondescript disaster has displaced a significant portion of the population; although the demo doesn't specifically state Ukraine, but the developers are Ukranian and there is a character named Oksana, so I might be generalizing.  I really couldn't make out what it was that I was going to be doing, but the title and the visual aesthetic drew me in, so I downloaded the 188.5 MB demo and jumped in.

The premise of Back to Hearth, the game tells you right up front.  That you need to, "Clean up the yard and house, then start a fire at Home."  So you're essentially doing chores.  Before the update, all you would do was find something highlighted in yellow, and click on it (or press A) and the chore would be performed.  In this first area, you had to pull weeds, repair an outhouse, repair a greenhouse, upright wheelbarrows, etc while outside.  Inside, you have to make beds, right chairs, fix a beaded necklace (that I thought was a rosary), curtain rods, and the one that threw me for a good five minutes, was righting a bunch of clear mason jars on a shelf.  Again, all you had to do was find the object that was highlighted in yellow and click/press a button.

Since the update, you still perform the same actions on the same things, but now you might need an item or two to perform the task.  So to take care of the weeds, you need a hoe, but thankfully the items seem to be permanent and are not consumed, so you don't have to find a new hoe every time you have to dig up weeds.  Or to fix the greenhouse you need a hammer and [REDACTED] (Because we want to avoid spoilers, at least to some extent).  What I really liked about this addition was that it does lengthen the gameplay a bit, but it doesn't do it artificially.  You could just pull weeds (old corn stalks?) with your bare hands, but a hoe would make the job easier.  You could repair a greenhouse with your hands, but a hammer would make reattaching pieces of wood more sturdy; although I guess that the [REDACTED] could be used to handle the broken glass?

Once you think you are done with your chores, you find the wood next to the fireplace and select it, and this is when the game likely tells you that you still have tasks you need to complete.  Thankfully Podoba Interactive are not sadists and actually tells you if your uncompleted tasks are inside, or outside, or just a general statement about finishing tasks if they are things still to complete inside and outside.  Granted my first time playing it took me a long time to find the jars on the shelf that needed to be put right side up, likely because they are somewhat transparent and when I did first notice them, it didn't register that they needed to be cleaned up; but then they were highlighted in yellow when I approached them.

After completing your tasks and lighting the fire, people return to the house in a cutscene.  I think the choice for the look of the people is rather odd and doesn't entirely fit within the rest of the look of the world.  My first thought was of amusement and of a giant-headed Shia LeBoeuf.   I wonder if they would look strange or uncanny if there weren't any faces or significantly fewer facial features?  Maybe something like Lonely Mountains: Downhill?  I think it's just that there's too much detail attempted for how large the polygons are on the character models.  But, if each stage ends after completing a handful of simple tasks with a sit by a cozy fire with some world-building exposition, then I am all here for it.

I get the impression that in the full game, there will be more information about the disaster as you travel from to each homestead bringing families back to their homes, as well as who exactly you are as a character within this world.  In the original demo, you could argue that you play as an omniscient force making repairs, but with the update and now needing tools to complete repairs and tasks, that doesn't seem to be the case.  I am interested to see how much development and building there are in the mechanics as you progress from homestead to homestead and if tasks become more complicated, or if it is just more of the same.  Either way, the Back to Hearth is now on my Steam wishlist, if that tells you anything about how I feel.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

She's Gone to Heaven, So I Got to be Good

Monthly Update: March, 2024

 

God damn.  I don't know where to start.  I'm upset about Nex Benedict being murdered.  I'm flabbergasted about Alabama's ruling on extrauterine children regarding IVF procedures.  I'm horrified by the innocent people who have been kidnapped and those killed in retaliation.  And here too.  Pretty much everywhere.  And then more idiots who are still yelling about fabricated anythings just because their fabricated cultural policies don't seem to be favored by the majority of the US.

This has been my venting space, where some of the shit that just sits and boils, then gets edited down into bite-sized chunks because I can't do this all day and I'm sitting here comfortably in an office looking out a crows in a tree and a small coffee shack-on-wheels where people are buying $4 cold brews; that's actually not a bad price for a large 16 oz cold brew.  I'm in a literal seat of luxury, although our previous HR guy had tried to get me to replace my chair for upwards of two years.

[Insert Meaningful Transition Here]

You may've noticed that over the past couple of weeks, we've been posting exclusively Demo Time articles on Mondays and Fridays.  That was all in thanks to Steam's Next Fest (Is it Next Fest or NextFest?) that happened last month from the 5th through the 12th where publishers/developers would share demos for their upcoming games.  During a previous Next Fest in October, there were a couple of games I played and had planned on writing about, but at the end of the week, the pictures I had taken while playing on the Steam Deck were no longer accessible because the demos had been delisted.  This time I played more than one demo a night for the duration of Next Fest, which resulted in 17 games, and one No Man's Sky, which released a demo to coincide with their Omega expansion/DLC/Update.  Since I was playing everything on the Steam Deck and most of these were games that were officially untested, several games didn't work that I have piled into a compilation article rather than giving an entire article to "Yup, the exact same thing that happened here is what happened with REDACTED.  Nothing more to add."  I had thought about posting them more frequently, but then I found that I was still putting in a fair amount of time even though some demos only lasted me 10 minutes.  All of that is to say that it's likely that a lot, if not most of March will be filled with the remainder of the Demo Time articles that I didn't get to last month.  

And speaking of demos, kind of, we have an announcement to make:

[It's actually coming March 11th]

The impetus behind this A24-level trailer for written articles was brought about because of Keymailer, a third-party company that connects content creators (primarily YouTube and Twitch streamers) to game publishers to have their games advertised by giving out game codes in exchange for playing their games.  Yes, it's kind of like selling myself to play games, but I'm okay with that.  The problem though is that a lot of companies won't just give out codes to random schmoes, but only to "accredited" people which means having a certain number of Twitch subscribers, YouTube subscribers/views, etc, or your own website and not one powered by Blogspot, WordPress, or likely Tumblr.  So while I do have a Twitch account and have had a couple of streams there (three in the last 5+ years), I do have an active YouTube channel, but our primary focus is here, with occasionally decently written words strung together in a semi-cohesive and understandable manner.

But what if we had videos for our articles?  I'm not talking about video essays because no one here has the time or financial resources to start up that nonsense; and I also perform horribly on camera.  I'm talking about the occasional (as in whenever we receive review codes for games that actually interest us and see ¶5 Sentence 1) video with royalty-free music (see ¶5 Sentence 1) that uses screenshots (until I figure out this whole video capture from a Steam Deck business) I take during regular play.  The video editing software I'm using also doesn't have a save function unless I pay for the Premium edition (see ¶5 Sentence 1) so don't expect Oppenheimer any time ever.

So that's what we've been up to and what we're going to be up to for the next 30 days.

Don't forget to share, subscribe, and smash that LIKE button.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

You Are Here To Devour

Demo Time: Half Sword [UPDATE] (PC)

 

Half Sword

Release Date: TBD

Systems: Windows, Linux

Publisher: Half Sword Games

Developer: Half Sword Games

Time Spent: +15 Minutes

Well, I downloaded the Half Sword demo on my laptop just to see how different it played with using the mouse and it did feel a lot more intuitive just using a mouse instead of the touchpad, and after playing three times, and dying three times, I can definitely see the appeal and the fun in this wacky and bloody wobbly fighting sim.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I first had to turn down the graphics as they defaulted to Epic settings and my laptop was maxing out at 8 fps.  I then switched it to low settings and it jumped up to 79 fps, then 49 fps at medium, so I left it there.  During the actual gameplay, the frame rate dropped to 20, but that was something I could handle for a few dozen additional pixels on my player's bald little pate.

I found it a little more difficult to actually grab the weapon that was on the table as I kind of had to aim above where I had the mouse cursor on the screen.  I don't actually know what the mechanism behind that could be, but it was still something that I noticed.  But I was able to grab an axe-like small pikeless halberd-like weapon, but I was swinging like an inebriated maniac and wasn't able to make contact with my like-dressed assailant; to note, the game auto-equipped it in both hands.  But then I noticed that the 30-second timer to continue at the top of the screen was not 30, but was 60.  This number wasn't a timer, but a score.  This fueled me a bit more to continue even though I had never won a single combat encounter.

But then the game crashed.

I decided that I would lower the graphical quality to low because I have no qualms about playing a game that doesn't look great as long as I can play the game and I know what it is I'm doing.  This time around, the first table I found had a blue Colovian Fur Helm (because that's what I'm going to call it from now on until I find something different or am corrected) and a bearded axe.  This time around, I was successful in killing my opponent and maiming the second before I too was killed.  During combat, I was prompted to double-click to make a thrust attack, and while I don't know if this was weapon-specific, this tactic never worked regardless of the weapons I ended up using.  This time around, for those keeping score at home, I scored 250 points.

My third and final encounter was my most successful run.  I found what I think was a bident (like a trident, but two) and had a great time with this weapon primarily because of its reach.  I didn't need to have great combat skills because I could swing the bident around wildly (swerving the mouse around wildly) and with luck puncture some part of my enemy's body.  In one encounter I just slashed the guy to death with repeated lacerations across the chest.  In the next, I slashed the guy's pants open at the thigh, and then a bident up under the jaw is what did him in.  In the third encounter, I punctured the guy in his chest then proceeded to shake him side to side to keep him off balance until he died.  The fourth guy managed to somehow either disarm me or wounded one of my arms which made me drop the bident and so I ran away, ended up finding a small mace-like object, but couldn't get in close enough before he beat me to death with a pair of forge tongs.  Plus I got a final score of 420.

Half Sword ended up being a fun demo even on the lower graphical settings and occasional hiccups, but I don't know if I would buy the game for my current laptop as playing on the Steam Deck was, well, you can read about it here.  What I learned, at least in these early combat encounters, was that reach was vastly more important that the weapon itself.  It will be interesting to see what the final game shapes up to be.  Will it be an endless combat arena to achieve a higher score?  Will it be like a puzzle where you go to pre-generated rooms with a set selection of weapons and armor to go up against a specific number and type of enemy?  Will there be a progression system where you can buy/sell equipment to use in future combat and what would the penalties be for dying, because you very much die.  Will you be able to create your character?  Will there be a weapon/armory encyclopedia for equipment that you've found so that you can actually know the name of the weapons/armor you're using?  Half Sword is still very much in early development so I look forward to eventually killing armed opponents in as many goofy and bloody ways as possible on either platform, but the Steam Deck will need further optimization.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

По сырой земле, что в твоих слезах