Overlord!

I started on another old-but-good game just prior to picking up Skyrim.. Overlord, by Triumph Studios and Codemasters.

This game is a third-person RPG where you take the role of The Overlord: would-be master of a fantasy kingdom.  Your predecessor was the master of the kingdom.. but he was killed, the Tower was destroyed, and the Kingdom has been taken over by a bunch of do-gooders!

To assist you in taking back your kingdom you have minions.. goblin-like creatures who run around after you waiting for instructions.. you also have Gnarl, overseer of the minions, the narrator, and your advisor.  The tutorial teaches you how to control your minions via the task of subduing the Jester, who runs around mocking you until he’s taken enough of a beating!

Controlling the minions is initially very easy.. left click to send them in a particular direction, or shift-click to highlight an object for them to attack.  If there isn’t a direct path between you and the target, you can also use LMB+RMB to sweep them along a path.. for example, crossing a river via a fallen tree.. though later on in the game, this can be fiddly.. while you are sweeping them along the path, they aren’t using their own path-finding skills, and can end up walking into hazards 🙁

The minions will interact with whatever they encounter.. which means they’ll kill sheep and enemies, destroy pumpkins, smash vases and grab life force, loot and gear.  I found this hilarious, as they cackle and squeak as they run along smashing things.. and when they find anything they can equip, they will do.. which means pumpkins as helmets 😀

Collecting life essence means more minions become available, although the number you can have following you at once is limited.

You start off with just five, and move up to ten when you complete the first mission and recover the Tower Heart.  As you explore further you find more artifacts, allowing you to summon more minions.  The minions themselves also find better armour and weapons too, so your army becomes bigger and stronger!

Some of the first quests were more helpful than outright evil, such as shifting some Halflings off a farm for the Human farmer, or rescuing slaves.. but helping the Humans does mean they pay you!  The game allows you to be more evil if you want, though.. you can attack the Humans within the village and destroy their homes, but this will turn them against you and increase your Corruption level.  I may return to try this later, and see what happens! 😉

You can only summon Brown minions to begin with.. the other tribes are Reds, Greens and Blues, and you need to recover their Hives before they will serve you.

Different tribes have different abilities: the Browns are good all-rounders; fairly strong and with a decent amount of health.  Reds have a strong ranged attack allowing them to shoot fireballs at enemies, but they are much weaker than the Browns.  Greens are poison-resistant and can stealth, allowing for surprise attacks.  Reds and Greens are also able to clear away fire and poison respectively, allowing you and the rest of your minions to pass through unharmed, and reach new areas of the map.  Blues are rather different to the others, able to enter water without drowning, and revive other minions, but they will not attack enemies unless specifically directed to do so.  They have a magical attack too, useful for enemies encountered later on.

In some areas you need to choose which minions to send where, making sure to keep Reds out of range of enemies, or splitting Greens out from the pack to stealth and lie in wait.. so there is some strategy involved.. but it’s also rather a lot of fun to allow them to just wreak havok too.. smashing things, eating and drinking.. and even getting drunk and peeing on the carpet!

I also picked up the expansion pack, Raising Hell, which adds more missions to the end of the game, as well as sequel, Overlord II.  Steam sales.. 😉

The Humble Introversion Bundle

It’s time for another Humble Bundle, and this time it’s Introversion‘s games up gor grabs!

The main games in the bundle are hacking puzzle-game Uplink, strategy Darwinia and Multiwinia, a set of multiplayer game modes based on Darwinia.. and strategic thermonuclear wargame DEFCON!  For beating the current average price of the bundle, you can also grab Bit Blot‘s Aquaria, an underwater action-adventure, and Kloonigames‘ Crayon Physics Deluxe.. a physics-based puzzle game where you draw objects such as slides, weights and so on, to complete the objective on each level!

There are also a pair of bonus prototype tech demos: Subversion City Generator, which demonstrates the use of procedural generation by creating a complete city environment, and Voxel Tech Demo which explores destructible voxel buildings.

I already have Darwinia and Crayon Physics Deluxe, and again I find myself wishing I could gift the ‘spares’!

Dragons and Giants

Skyrim, Skyrim, Skyrim.. I’ve played nothing but this all weekend!

I was going to take a break for some Minecraft, since the new version is out and I wanted to work on my project.. but the CraftBukkit server itself has yet to be upgraded from 1.8.  I really should have checked on this before updating my client.. but I didn’t.. and now I either wait for the update, or go and backdate Minecraft to 1.8 again.. yeah.

Laziness won out this time, and I went back into Skyrim..

I was rather chuffed when my power attack caused my character to climb on the dragon’s head!  For some reason, I get an error from Steam when I try to upload this screenshot.. or the one of me balancing on tiptoes on his head as he dies..

Yesterday’s explorations took me to a Dwemer dungeon.. I loved the look of this place, though to be honest I loved the previous Dwemer ruins and dungeons too 🙂

Various other explorations brought me face-to-face with some giants.  I say face-to-face.. face-to-crotch would be more appropriate!

The one I met on the road didn’t seem to have any interest in attacking me, whether by glitch or design.. but I got into a very tough fight with one later.  At this point I’m finding a nice variation in the strength of enemies, with the Giant being a decent threat, but wolves and bandits being easy meat 🙂

Happy Minecraft Day!

Epic block-building creation / survival game Minecraft is now “finished”!

This is a strange thought, considering that we’ve been playing it for over a year now.. and stranger still when you consider that nothing is really going to change.. according to Notch, the team are still going to be adding to the game over the next year.

Therefore, rather than being excited that the game is “finished”, I’m just looking forward to the next update, with new mobs, breeding, and of course all the new items which I can use in my creative project.. despite not having actually launched the game all week thanks to Skyrim and real-life!

More Skyrim

After picking this up at the weekend, I’ve played almost nothing else.. though non-gaming things have arisen to keep me from playing as much as I’d have expected by now 😉

I’ve now tried out woodcutting and mining, and I’ve been learning the Smithing trade along with Alchemy.. nice ways to make money.  I also make money in less nice ways.. lockpicking, if I find something reasonably unattended.. and if I come across bandits, I make sure to take all their possessions too!

Looting dungeons actually feels far more dangerous than in the previous games, with traps and slightly smarter enemies.. in my first dungeon, I was scared by the Draugr who played dead till I got up close, and in another, I had a fierce battle with a Giant Frostbite Spider..

As planned, I have progressed to dual-wielding swords, although I still dabble in Destruction for a few enemies.. in the past I have concentrated on magic, only carrying an enchanted weapon just in case, so this makes a change.  I’m loving the power moves, and have my eye set on certain of the perks in the One Handed Weapons tree which will allow me to decapitate my enemies!

I even have a follower, named Golldir!

I met him in a tomb while taking cover from a dragon I just couldn’t defeat.  He had problems of his own: a Necromancer who was fiddling with his ancestors.  After I helped kill him, he joined me in my travels.. he now fights for me in battle, and of course, I make him carry the loot 😉

My only complaint so far has been about the menu system and inventory.. I like having an unobstructed view of the game world while playing, but to change weapon or equip a new piece of gear I’m forced to start clicking and scrolling.  All the lists start near the bottom of the screen as well, which virtually guarantees that hateful scrolling will be needed.

We have large monitors and high resolutions now.. why not just use more of the screen and let us see our inventory at a glance?  In the previous games, equipped items all moved to the front of the list, but in Skyrim they remain where they are.  As you can’t even see your character on this screen any more, any accidental unequipping can easily go unnoticed as you don’t get that quick visual clue that something’s wrong!

I guess you can’t have it all, though.. and the rest of the game is fantastic..

I didn’t like monster-levelling in Oblivion, as enemies levelled with the character.. after a while, the wildlife was all replaced by high-level creatures, so it didn’t even seem to fit in with the area any more.  I was also finding myself accosted by bandits wearing top-notch gear with expensive swords.. with that kind of gear and ability, they should have been wiping out the nearby village instead of trying to mug me for my cash!

As for the effect on the story.. I levelled up a way before entering my first Gate, so when I was sent in with a few companions, they were struck down immediately by the over-powered enemies inside, and again, it felt wrong.

In Skyrim, I’ve only really struggled with a few larger enemies, such as the Dragon, and the giant spider.. these felt like a decent challenge, while attacks by wild wolves started off difficult and are now easy, as I’d expect as I’m now a bit more of a seasoned warrior.  All 12 levels’ worth 😉

Indie Royale Additions

The topic of indie games was brought up at work today, and somebody mentioned more additions to the Indie Royale bundle.

The bonus games are shooters: Irukandji, and Bullet Candy Perfect, both from Charlie’s Games, creator of Scoregasm.  I have yet to try any of these games.. as I have picked something else up which is taking most of my free time 😉

Skyrim!

I was going to delay my purchase of this game, for financial reasons and in order to try and finish up a few other games first.

However, everyone has been talking about it.. and I found it harder and harder to avoid spoilers, even amongst friends who knew I was avoiding reading anything to do with the game.

I saw some trailers and other game info a long while back, and even then I only skim-read what I found, as I knew I wanted the game anyway.. based on my love for the previous games in the Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion and Morrowind, and before we even come to Bethesda‘s other offerings, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.

Dragons!  I was glad of this one..

Once left to my own devices, I wandered off the road slightly and very soon found a campsite complete with bandits.  Surprisingly, I was able to take them on.. providing me with new armour, weapons, and the odd bits of loot in the camp too.  Further along, I discovered three Standing Stones.. and a fantastic view!  I had forgotten how beautiful the game was in the months since I first saw screenshots 🙂

I’m playing more with sword than magic this time, although to start with I’m taking advantage of dual-wielding to allow me to use a sword plus magical attacks.. later on I’ll probably ditch the magic and go for two differently-enchanted swords, saving magic for a second play-through 🙂

It’s an Indie Bonanza!

I recently picked up the latest Humble Bundle, and just last night, the Indie Royale‘s Difficult 2nd Bundle.

Today, I saw a note on Twitter about more games being added to the Humble Bundle, and sure enough, there were more games listed on the page!  Lexaloffle, developer of Voxatron, has added three of their older games to the pack as a bonus: Jasper’s Journeys, with exploration, jumping and monster bashing, sliding block puzzle Chocolate Castle, and Zen Puzzle Garden, which I suspect will be anything but Zen after a while 😉

That’s not all, though.. they’ve also added a “developer bonus”, GISH, a side-scrolling platformer featuring a large ball of tar.. who goes underground to rescue his friend.  I actually had this game already, having picked it up as part of a huge bundle on Steam, but haven’t got any further in than the first few levels.  I loved the idea, but found the jumping and sticking mechanic fiddly, especially when trying to collect the little bonus blobs.

Over on the Indie Royale website, I found there was even more win.. DLC for Red Redemption’s Fate of the World: the Extras Pack DLC, Denial DLC and Migration DLC.  All these are set for download on Steam now.. while I go off to play more Gears!

The Indie Royale – Difficult 2nd Bundle

The Indie Royale is another indie bundle scheme along the lines of The Humble Bundle..

This is the second in the series, containing action-puzzle game Night Sky by NICALiS, Red Redemption‘s strategy Fate of the World, space-shooter Scoregasm, by charliesgames, and a pair of games by Size Five Games: point and click comedy Ben There, Dan That! and sequel Time Gentlemen, Please!

The deal is not quite pay-what-you-want, as there is a minimum price, but it’s still a bunch of games for a low price, enough to attract decent numbers.  The price starts low, and goes up as people buy.. but if the minimum price is beaten, the price is knocked down again.  Recent price changes and other stats can be seen on the site too.. it’s rather interesting to see the price change over time.

Currently, the minimum is just over £2, which doesn’t sound much.. but in the six hours it’s been on sale, there have been over 11,500 sales.. 🙂

The Initiation Station

Thinking about Saints Row 2 reminded me that I’d tried out the Initiation Station too..

The Initiation Station is the character creation suite for Saints Row: The Third, available to all, regardless of whether you’ve got a pre-order in for the game or not.  I played around with this rather a lot, with tears running down my face at some of the options, before settling on a normal-looking character to upload..

Purple overload?  Of course!  I have a great excuse for this game too, because purple is the Saints’ colour 😀

The Initiation Station has improved a great deal on the customisation available in Saints Row 2, with more individual sliders rather than categories for body size and shape.. including the “sex-appeal” setting which basically just enlarges boobs or crotch.  There are loads of hair colours and styles, make-up, tattoos, and of course clothes.. including some weird-looking bondage gear, furry and superhero outfits.. and the option to go without clothes if you should wish.. though things will be blurred 😉

Unlike in Saints Row 2, you start off with your choice of clothes rather than the prison jumpsuit.. as in Saints Row: The Third, your character and the Saints have the run of the city.. you start at the top.  I better get there first, and complete Saints Row 2!