Tag: Games

Friday Fun: Torchlight

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Did you play and love Diablo or Diablo II back in the day? Do you wish there was a modern equivalent?  If so, you can stop reading now and head over to steampowered.com. Buy yourself a copy of Torchlight for $20, and you’ll be in action rpg nirvana within a half hour or so.

The same principle applies if you played Fate some years ago – Torchlight is by some of the same folks and if you like Fate, you’re going to love Torchlight – it’s Fate on steroids with a shiny new coat of paint.

If you’re not familiar with these games, they’re easy to pick up and play, feature some light’ish rpg elements, tons of variety in setting, enemies, and most especially loot. You run around doing simple quests, fighting bad guys, leveling up, gathering up swords of +5 smacking of goodness, lather, rinse, repeat. They don’t necessarily require much heavy thinking but there are tactics that work and those that don’t, with plenty of health potions required for those who don’t want to bother thinking and just want to plow ever deeper into the dungeon.

I love the genre and this is the best example of it to come along in years. There’s a video below so you can get a sense of the gameplay. For now this is PC only but there’s a Mac version on the way due in January. For now you can only buy this via the digital download services but a boxed version is also on the way. There are also development tools on the way and the game is very Mod friendly. If this does as well as Fate did, expect tons of additional content, conversions, and more.

My only criticisms of the game are that I wish the loading was a bit faster and I wish they had included multiplayer, but man, it’s $20 and it’s a blast to play. Definitely worth checking out if it seems like it’s up your alley.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/ghQBj6Gfn10&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0

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Friday fun link: Robokill

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Ok ok, so you lack imagination and don’t appreciate my other friday fun link. Fine. I missed a week last week anyway, so here for your frenetic mouse clicking pleasure is Robokill, a flash-based action game built along Robotron 2084 lines. This is one of the best action games I’ve seen in flash, with great graphics and sound and tight controls. The link takes you to the demo, but it’s long enough that you’ll almost definitely get your fill, and the game is good enough that it’s worth considering a purchase.
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Game finished: Shadowgrounds Survivor

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I finished up Shadowgrounds Survivor this morning. It was on sale a couple of weekends ago on Valve’s Steam software distribution service for only $5. I had played the demo some time ago and liked it but hadn’t gotten around to spending the ~$20 to buy it, so when it came up for only $5 I jumped on it. By and large the game is worth $20 though there are some annoying glitches to be found playing through it.

It’s an old school action arcade game with some light RPG elements layered onto it. The plot is a riff on the old ‘aliens that look like the aliens from the movie aliens attack a space colony’ which has been riffed on any number of times, but it’s done competently enough and you can pretty much skip through it directly to the alien blasting action if you want. Controls are straightforward – mouse to rotate/aim and shoot and WASD/arrow keys to move your character around. Over the course of the game you get to use and level up three characters – a marine with a lot of firepower, a drunken russian with a flamethrower, and a lithe little assassin with some stealthy and long distance firepower. There isn’t much variety in terms of enemy types, but the game is about the blasting of the hordes and this never bothered me. The graphics themselves are pretty good:

The player electrocutes an alien.Image via Wikipedia

There were two major technical issues with the game. The first had to do with the camera. Often as you entered a level the camera would swoop around in an in-game cinematic, and this would sometimes then get stuck in a weird location leaving you unable to see the action, or even worse, sometimes after the cinematic I’d find my character trapped in the level geometry and unable to move or stuck in a confined area. Reloading from my last save always seemed to clear this up. The second problem was worse – there is a known save game corruption bug with the game which would always happen as you transitioned into a new level and would crash the game. This one is really annoying. There’s a workaround to this problem on the forums over on steampowered.com that involves downloading known non-corrupt save game files. I suspect this one would have pissed me off more had I paid more than $5 for the game, but for what I paid…ehh, I more than got my money’s worth.

Anyway, the game’s worth a look if you like action shooter games. PC only, price between $0 and $20 (it’s on Gametap if you’re a subscriber) depending on where you pick it up.