By level 3, I’d been in some dungeons, and I’d seen a dragon, so really it lived up to the name.  I am given to understand that dragons were actually not a part of the game at launch, a design decision that was met with some scorn, but eh, they have dragons now.

Level 3, however, was also the point where playing the game started dragging, which is pretty early.  Granted, they have a level cap at 20 so they need to start the drag earlier than your average 60 to 90 level game, but it was only a couple of evenings into play before I started asking myself if it was really worth the hours it was taking to get anything done.  I could have put some money into the cash shop for extra NPC helpers and healing items and such, but I wasn’t invested enough yet to care.

More than that, though, the character models were a bit dull and the armor not terribly interesting looking, which is a shame since the environmental graphics and sounds were really immersive.

So, that didn’t last long.

I’ve been doing more of the EQ2 thing since then, with a new guild that does some low-key raiding three times a week.  Getting into a raiding guild as a fighter class is pretty unusual because fighters are (a) fun, so everyone has one and (b) not actually needed that much for raids. It also means that I’m able to gear up fast because fighter loot drops at about a 25% rate and fighters make up about 10% of the average raid.  I get to watch the rogues and mages squabble over drops while I get kitted out.  :)

I’ve kind of hit the point where I’m not burned out on EQ2 but I also don’t see the need to put a lot of hours into it outside of raiding where I have a good chance at upgrading my character.  That’s a pretty healthy point to be with an MMO.

They are putting out an expansion soon to give everyone a little more grinding, so it will probably eat up a few more hours of my life once that comes out.

I was looking for information on that expansion when I came across a few blog posts talking about Lucent Heart, and somehow I wound up downloading the client and signing up for an account and making a character.

Technically speaking, I DID download Mabinogi a few months ago, but I just barely made it through character creation and the “welcome to the world, here’s your first quest” before quitting, so I guess this is my THIRD go with an f2p game but eh.

Like Mabinogi, Lucent Heart is an import from Asia, so my expectations were that it would come with a healthy emphasis on making a cute character that you can dress up in cute outfits while you grind away at endless streams of cute versions of monsters until your eyes bleed in a fashion that is rather uncute really.

From what I’ve seen so far, those expectations weren’t too far from the truth, but I haven’t hit the seriously grindy bit yet.  I made a mage and have been rather enjoying the way that (a) I can kill almost anything in two spells and (b) the game hands me a new set of clothes every five levels. Examples follow of the level 5, 10 and 15 outfits:

I LIKE the level 15 outfit.  Here’s an action shot.

I did get to level 20 before finally succumbing to the game’s pointed reminders that I’d been playing too long and should probably log off, but I didn’t get a screenshot of the level 20 outfit before doing so.  It’s blue and rather fetching.

Oh, and yes the game DOES tell you that you have been playing too long and should log off, both with a little flashing indicator and occasional messages that get more strident in tone as you ignore them:

Now, that second image up there has my level 13 mage standing next to a level 65 character, 65 being the level cap.  I am given to understand that Lucent Heart is pretty quick to level in until you get into your mid 50s, at which point things slow way down and actually getting a level 65 character takes weeks of grinding which is absurd in every way…

OH HAI EQ1

Anyway, the level 65 character next to me is kitted out in cash shop items, so they’re actually contributing to the keeping the servers up and running thing and also helping me make a slightly forced segue into this next bit:

Unlike DDO, there doesn’t seem to be a huge emphasis on the cash shop yet.  I DID get a quest at level 11 or so where I was given a cash shop item and walked through the process of entering the cash shop to claim and equip the item, but apart from that it’s more or less stayed out of my way.

Yes, I’ve gone in and looked at some of the for-pay outfits, but for right now I’m liking the free clothes I’m getting every five levels and don’t see the need to drop 17 bucks on a maid outfit.

Tempted yes, need no.

Anyway, I’ve gotten my little mage up to level 20 and don’t have any complaints so far.  It’s all very standard MMO fare; you get a quest from someone who needs you to kill 10 bees, you go kill the 10 bees and get back to the NPC and gain a level when you’re handing in the quest and all of a sudden an NPC who wouldn’t talk to you before will talk to you now and HE wants you to go kill bees too.  The “kill 10″ quests are actually usually “kill 25″, which would be a bother if it wasn’t a matter of running into a field full of the right sorts of things to kill, hitting tab to target one, nuking twice, hitting tab again, nuking twice again and occasionally running back to the NPC to get the next quest to go kill wolves and at this point you’ve learned enough that you’re going to go to every single NPC and get the quests from EVERYONE who hates wolves before you go and kill 30 of them.

It gets points for not drawing TOO extensively from the stereotypical newbie monster pool while it’s sending you out to slaughter x number of y local wildlife.   I haven’t fought a single goblin, kobold, gnoll, giant spider, rat or skeleton yet.  Mostly lots of bees and wolves and violent animated corn.

Now while I do quite like the character graphics, the world zones are taking a little while to grow on me.  So far, it’s all been a blur of pastel colored outdoor zones and one of those techno-fantasy-mashup sorts of cities:

Eventually I hope to hit somewhere with a bit more foreboding atmosphere.  I expect it will be full of cute monsters, but as long as there’s some lava pits on the ground and the remains of doomed adventurers scattered about it should be fine.

Anyway, there are quite a few aspects of the game I haven’t had a chance to try out yet, but everything I’ve seen so far says that I’ll be sticking around to dig a little deeper.

Then of course Sony got hacked, and I discovered Rift which was great fun for a couple of months, and then I kind of had to put all MMOs aside in favor of actually getting settled in at a new job, and I was pretty MMO free for a while there.

Then the EQ2 team released a major content update that reduced the amount of treadmill time required for a bunch of things and this happened to coincide with me realizing that I could still claim the 45 days of free game time from the “We’re really sorry” package, and I wound up giving it another go.

They did a pretty good job with the patch, and I was having fun playing, and then they had a long double XP weekend over labor day that let me log in and finally max out my AA points.

AA points, by the way, are basically EQ’s way of differentiating between two characters of the same level; they allow you to take, say, a priest character and make him either a strong offensive character with lots of damage skills or a strong healer with limited damage ability but who can keep a group alive better.

It’s nowhere near as flexible as Rift’s soul system but I wound up a little disillusioned with that after a while.

Also, and more importantly: it’s different from the AA system in EQ1 because there’s actually a limit as to how many you can have and you cannot take all the abilities. In EQ1, the only limit to the number of AAs and number of AA abilities you can have is the amount of time you grind away gaining them, so the developers have to design content for people with thousands and thousands of AA points and somehow balance the same content for people with only a few.

Anyway, digression aside, I took advantage of the bonus XP weekend to finally get my character to the AA cap and felt pretty good about it.

Then Sony did something even more brilliant: they made a vast swath of the game easier.

See, there’s a truism in most MMOs, that the game doesn’t actually start until you’re max level. As a result, some games can be split into content you do to get you to the level cap and content you do at level cap.

With some games – and I will pick on Rift again here – the level 1 to level cap game is extremely linear. If you are level 30, the only place you can safely adventure is X, but when you get to level 35 it’s time to move on to Y but you had best not venture into Z anytime soon.

EQ2, on the other hand, is huge and sprawly, with dozens of expansions and content updates and little bits bolted on to the side. They’ve put IN a linear progression path you CAN follow, but you can usually sidestep the path and go find your own way.

Also, since EQ2 got to inherit an awful lot of lore from EQ1 and didn’t have to start from scratch, there’s a lot of story woven into the leveling, and going off the path means that you get to check out new quests and new stories.

It’s pretty neat, except that much of the story used to be gated behind needing 3 or 4 friends to finish a lot of the quests in the game. This is where the “the game begins at level cap” thing comes in – there’s plenty to do before level cap but good luck finding a group to do it with.

So they’ve addressed this in a pair of ways.

The first, which they did ages ago, was to alter a bunch of quests to be more easily soloable.

The second, which they did in the most recent content update, was to improve most of the low level gear. It means that an awful lot of the game is now trivial, but it also turns some of the remaining impossible-without-a-group lower level quests into simply very difficult.

I’ve actually started a new character as a result, something I don’t usually allow myself in MMOs, and am happily climbing the level ladder once again.

Well played, Sony, well played.

Playing a game in a language you don’t fully understand has an interesting side effect, by the way: all the jokes have huge buildup because of all the time spent looking up kanji; I find myself honestly laughing at some of the silliest gags just because I’m FINALLY GETTING THEM.

Getting through the prologue revealed, unfortunately, a tiny problem. See, as the prologue ends you get an introductory animation.

On the Vista laptop I was playing it on, it displayed the first frame of the animation, played the music for the opening animation, and that single frame was all I saw for the next 90 seconds until it was out of music and continued on to the next screen of the game.

So I installed on an XP partition on my Macbook and… well, the video works fine.

Then, just for the heck of it, I threw the game onto a Windows 7 PC and had even worse luck.  Rather than getting a single frame of the animation, I just get an empty black window.

So, I could run the game on my Macbook, even through Parallels, and it works fine, but I went to the trouble of setting up a “Play Eroge here” desk with dictionaries and notebooks and so on and so forth and dragging the Macbook back and forth to the Eroge desk is going to mean a lot of plugging and unplugging components.

So now I’m taking the Windows XP MCE restore disk that I made on Day 1 of owning this laptop and blowing it back to its roots.  If I still don’t have video I’m going to be right chuffed.

This is probably going to break me.

But first, some backstory.

I went through a period of a few years where I kind of fell away from being an anime fan, for various reasons.  Lack of money, lack of time, lack of interest in the shows I saw on retailer shelves, disgust with fandom, and of course playing MMOs every waking moment of every day.

Still, there was enough residual fanboy in me to make me fly to Japan for a vacation in late 2005 after getting a deal on plane tickets that staggered belief.

That trip was really a sort of rebirth.  MMOs started seeming a lot less important afterwards, I started getting in better shape, and I started trying to pick through the last several years of anime to find the gems.  It was a good experience.

Anyway, we spent probably too much of our trip in Akihabara, and we just happened to be there in the month when Leaf launched two big titles: the PC version of ToHeart2 and the PSP version of Comic Party.

The result was that you saw Leaf characters pretty much anywhere you looked.

Not, mind you, that I really knew what I was looking at.  I’d seen the Comic Party anime but didn’t realize that it was based on a game (to be honest, I’m not sure I knew what a visual novel WAS at that point) and though I’d heard of ToHeart, it was in the context of “hey, it’s that anime that they kept talking about in the Comic Party anime” and I certainly didn’t know anything about the original game or its sequel.

Thing is, though, I kept running in to ToHeart2 in various media, and one thing lead to another and I eventually wound up buying a copy of the PC game just so I could get around to seeing what all the fuss was about.

Now, I had learned what a visual novel WAS by then, and I knew that, while it did have a fair bit of the “visual” in it, it also had an awful lot of the “novel” and that playing a visual novel consisted of doing a heckuva lot of reading and occasionally pressing the enter key to continue and not much else.  In addition, at the time (August 2007), spending $70 on a Japanese visual novel was basically spending $70 on a pretty box.  I’d taken a term and a half of college Japanese 8 years prior, but that was about it.

Four years later, I have my bachelor’s degree in Japanese under my belt, I have enough dictionaries to choke a horse, I have a vague understanding of grammar, and I am terrified that I am going to forget the Japanese that I spent four years and $40,000 learning, so I have finally started to play ToHeart2.

As I started off this post by saying, it might just break me.  I played it for about two hours tonight and all I’ve managed to do is wake up, realize that I’m alone in the house because my parents are away on a business trip, and had my house almost immediately invaded by the neighbor girl who my mother has given a key to so she can take care of me while they’re away.

It strikes me that guys in Japan must be seen as fairly helpless for quite a while.

Anyway, the thing that really slowed me down was the crazy idea that, whenever I hit a word I didn’t know, I’d write it down in a book.

I’ve revised that idea somewhat.  Now I’m only going to write down words if I have to look them up at least 3 times.

It’s STILL slow going.

I’ll see how long I last.

According to Firefox, there’s no such word as “completionist” but damnit if I don’t like the word and am going to stick with it.

Anyway.

I will admit that a big reason I wish this version of the game had come out for another system is that the Wii controls are just brutal.  Combat in particular, is a mess, even by Prince of Persia standards.  You control your character with the analog stick, which is all well and good, but the combat often has you trying to move with the analog stick AND shake the nunchuck and, well, it doesn’t always work out all that well.

The platforming controls are also pretty shaky at times, though thankfully not in the sense of, say, needing to shake the controller to jump.

See, most games of this ilk are pretty forgiving about camera angle changes.  In some PoP games, for example, if you need to hold the controller stick right to wall-run to a ring, and you keep holding the controller stick right after you hit the ring, you can press the action button again and it will wall run again to the next target, even if the camera angle changed during the initial wall run making “right” no longer the correct direction.

This game… not so much.  I have had far too many deaths caused by a camera angle change in the middle of a platforming sequence, and breaking myself of the control conventions I’ve grown used to has proven difficult.

So basically what I guess I’m getting to is that I really wish this had been ported somewhere where I could play it with a gamepad.

Putting PoP aside, I had a very surreal moment in D&D Online.

I was running around Stormreach, which seems to be the hub city for characters for quite a while, and it started raining, and then I just had to stand there and watch it and listen to it for a while.  Stormreach gets quite lovely in the rain, it’s full of all sorts of glowing lanterns that make for some fascinating patterns of light in the dark.

The first night I logged in to Everquest – and let’s put aside the fact that I probably shouldn’t be getting nostalgic about EQ again – it was dark, and raining, and I fell off the dock that I’d spawned on as a lowly level 1 cleric and nearly drowned before I got to safety.  Then, since I’d started my character on the western side of Antonica, I got to see a LOT of rain fall, especially while I was hiding in the guard towers in West Karana recuperating between fights.  It turned the world grey, and it reduced my already limited visibility to almost nothing, and it was in general a pain in the arse, but watching it rain in DDO made me realize that I’d missed MMOs with weather.

I can’t remember the last MMO I played that had rain.  Dark Age of Camelot did, I think, but that’s nearly as old as EQ1.  I’m pretty sure Rift didn’t bother with rain, and I don’t remember it in Everquest II either.  Some brief Googling turns up a forum post from 2007 on this very topic and it turns out that EQ2 DOES have rain, but only in a few zones and it’s pretty rare.  It also seems that Rift has rain and thunderstorms but I don’t remember ever being caught in one.

Regardless, it’s an awfully nice touch in DDO and makes me want to log in some more.

I don’t think it’s any shocker to anyone that my formative years revolved, in great part, around a bag full of polyhedral dice and a handful of friends with whom to roll them.

Dungeons and Dragons is something that I heard about at school in probably the 2nd or 3rd grade.  It was the latest in a list of things that adults thought were bad for me – other entries on this list were comic books and chocolate milk – so of course I was intensely curious about it.

I didn’t get my first taste until 1983, though, when TSR released their infamous “Red Box” D&D Basic Set.  A school chum got a copy and, needing someone else to play with, taught me how to roll up a character and how to play.

My first character had middling stats but got a lucky wisdom roll, so of course it became a cleric. This wasn’t a bad choice, in retrospect; D&D clerics at low levels are capable of hanging with the fighter classes in melee and add some spell power to the occasion.  It helped, of course, that we didn’t realize that you could only cast spells once per day, though since my friend was having me play through adventures by myself, it was probably a good thing that I was able to cast Cure Light Wounds as often as I wanted.

As an aside, the “Cleric” illustration in the D&D Basic Set looks like this, which was a source of endless amusement for my friend.  We were young lads in our “girls are yucky” years, after all.

Anyway, that basic set gave way to the expert set and so on, and then we eventually graduated to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and branched out into Gamma World and Twilight 2000 and, oh, all kinds of different games, and then we hit our mid teens and the whole thing sort of went by the wayside.

Recently, however, I’ve been back in a gaming group, in a campaign set in the Eberron setting, which is, as I understand it, the current Official Campaign Setting of Dungeons and Dragons.

Back in my tender years, the Big Trend in campaign settings was Realism, Realism, Realism – or, at least, a highly fantasized version of Realism which ignored the fact that most people lost all their teeth and died by the age of 30 and were considered to have lived to a Ripe Old Age.

Eberron, on the other hand, is Wizards of the Coast looking at Realistic Fantasy on one hand, and looking at how well the Final Fantasy games sell on the other hand, and deciding that setting D&D in a world with airships and magical Shinkansen trains might not be such a bad idea inasmuch as the kids of today want a little more Cloud and Tifa and a little less King Arthur and Guinevere.

Anyway, it’s taken a little getting used to as an Old Geezer gamer, which is why I recently signed up for Turbine’s free-to-play “Dungeons and Dragons Online”, set in Eberron and thus serving as a rather nice reference to all the back-story that the DM uses rather freely during our sessions but which I have very little clue about.

Eberron is full of that Deep Political Intrigue stuff, after all, with all kinds of Great Houses plotting and scheming against each other, all with Authentic Fantasy Names (which is to say, generally difficult to pronounce and impossible to remember) and it’s a little easier to keep track of when you can attach visual cues to things.

Anyway, so, uh, D&D Online is a game that, until recently, I knew only as “that game that couple was hooked on while their kids starved” which isn’t the best association to have with a game.  Also, it was one of the early high-profile examples of Pay-To-Play games converting to Free-To-Play-With-Cash-Shop, which is to say that it had sort of a stink of failure about it.

Since then, of course, plenty of top-shelf games have done the same and the stigma is somewhat lessened.

Anyway, I spent a couple of hours downloading it, was rather impressed that it asked me if I wanted to use DX11 graphics, was rather underwhelmed by the “DX11 graphics” once I finally got into game and was out-and-out astounded by how poor the character models were for a high-budget MMORPG, but I put that aside in favor of running around the starting area and getting some quests on.

Hey, I just last year subscribed to Dark Age of Camelot and played it for a couple of months, I’m obviously not THAT picky about graphics.

So far it’s, well, it’s not a very polished experience.  Quest givers are a little tricky to find and the first hub town you come to after the newbie area is pretty confusing so far.

That said, I’ve gotten to level 3 – which is not half bad, in D&D terms – and I’m looking forward to starting to tackle level 3 instances so I guess they’ve managed to get their hooks in a bit.  It helps that I got a Big Flaming Sword as an early quest reward.  If you want me to play a game centered around killing things to gather Shiny Objects – which is, after all, a pretty good way to describe any MMORPG – giving me a Big Flaming Sword is a pretty good way to start.

And, after all, the price is right.

I have to confess that I ran into a bad case of writer’s block about a month ago.

See, after finishing Defense Grid, I decided to play through Brutal Legend, and when I was done with it I simply couldn’t find any way to write about it.

I mean, I loved the story and characters, the art, naturally enough the music… I just hated the fact that the story was far too often interrupted by painful bits of having to play a game I wasn’t really enjoying.  It was at once one of my favorite games of the year and one of my least favorite games, and I simply didn’t have any way to put that into words.

In the intervening month, I’ve played through Hydrophobia, Singularity, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, and even taken a couple of hours to play through the bridging DLC that connects Fear 2 to the copy of Fear 3 I have waiting for me to play it, but it all keeps coming back to “man, I should really write something about Brutal Legend”

So, I’ve decided to leave it at what I’ve written so far and get on with today’s topic, which is Price of Persia: The Forgotten Sands.

I did, of course, play Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands last year.  I’m quite a fan of the series, where “the series” is something I define as having started with Sands of Time and then not having any more entries until POP ’2008.

But, I played it on the PS3, and I discovered recently that the Wii version was, in fact, a completely different game and rather well thought of.

Shortly after finding this out, I stumbled across a copy of the Wii game for a hair under 20 bucks, added it to my library, and then forgot about it until the other night, when I finished Ratchet & Clank up and started trolling the shelves for something different.

I’m about three hours into it now – well, since the game doesn’t count the time spent dying, maybe just a HAIR over three hours – and I am nothing but impressed.  Even with the grapevine telling me that the Wii version was something different and good, I had really anticipated Yet Another Shoddy Wii Port, and what I got was a game which might just be my second favorite PoP game yet, and which might even have stood a chance of dethroning Sands of Time if it weren’t for the wagglecombat and the latest in Homicidal Camera Technologies.

It’s pretty (and I hope you’ll just mentally add “for a Wii game” in where it’s appropriate), the environments are nicely atmospheric, the banter between Prince and Companion (something almost completely lacking in the PS3 version) is nicely snarky, and it promises to provide me many more hours of fun times dodging whirling saw blades and arrow traps with Inexplicably Infinite Arrow Supplies.

As a system, the Wii is diving heads on towards its date with the clearance bins.  Its life has been marked by an awful lot of pathetic shovel-ware, just enough first-party titles to keep the Nintendo Faithful, well, faithful, and a bare handful of third party games that have been worth a damn.

As it dies, it’s awfully nice to have found one more title to add into that last category.

So, if past years are anything to go by, there’s a Steam Summer Sale coming soon, and if you like cheap games, it’s like a little Christmas in June.

It’s also a reason to pause and reflect on the games I bought in the last Steam Summer Sale and to think about how many I haven’t beaten yet.

That’s quite a few.

Hmm.

At least I did take a few days and play one of those previously-neglected titles – Hidden Path Entertainment’s “Defense Grid: The Awakening” – so I feel like I’m not just shoveling money into Steam’s coffers with nothing to show for it.

Anyway, “Defense Grid” is a tower defense game with all that implies.  You have towers, see, and you have hordes of ravening aliens, and you need to place towers in strategic ways so that they can shoot at the hordes of ravening aliens, and you can upgrade towers and use them to shape the flow of the incoming aliens and that’s all well and good but it’s not the reason to buy the game.

The reason, as I see it, is that your computer partner is one of the more fleshed out characters I’ve seen in a video game lately, which is quite a feat for a disembodied voice.  He’s been dead for over a thousand years – preserved as an AI in case his skills were needed to beat back aforementioned aliens, he misses his son and he really misses raspberries.  He cheers you on when you’re doing well, he has a fairly good set of witty comments he uses infrequently enough that they’re still usually funny, and he doesn’t judge you too harshly when you lose, which I did a lot.

The game keeps track of your stats, you see, and looking at my stats revealed that, over the course of playing through the game’s story missions, I had 114 losses to 20 wins, which is not a good ratio at all.

Simply put, I’m not at all surprised that the designers elected to have frequent autosaves and to let you step back through the autosave states by simply pressing “backspace”, because there were lots of times where I thought that I was doing great, that my towers were defending and so on and so forth and then I’d get curbstomped by a sudden invasion of something I wasn’t ready for.

The last level, in particular, was a test in perseverance.  It took me the better part of two hours to figure it out, and my final victory was, well, it relied on a completely unexpected quirk in alien pathing, where I accidentally added a tower and watched, gleefully, as the entire invading army switched to, basically, walking down one side of a row of towers, turning around, and walking down the other side of the row of towers before continuing on towards their goal.

It was pretty glorious.

With 114 losses, it took me 13 hours to finish the story mode, and – excepting certain frustration near the game’s end – I had fun the whole way.  There’s a certain joy in building up unassailable defenses and watching as your forces repel attack after attack, and there’s an equal near-adrenaline-rush feeling that comes on as you watch your defenses fail and need to figure out what you’re going to do next.

Oh, as noted, it features absolutely no unicorns whatsoever, so I get to salvage a few tattered shreds of the remnants of my masculinity.

And that’s always a good thing.

My excursion into casual gaming is in no way an indication of any sort of unicorn fixation.  It’s a curious coincidence and nothing more.

I do not have a unicorn problem.

Let’s proceed, shall we?

Popcap’s “Peggle” franchise was, before Angry Birds came along, the Most Hated Enemy of the Hardcore Gamer, or so I’ve gathered from lurking in various gaming forums over the years.  It’s a sort of pachinko-meets-Puzzle-Bobble sort of affair, where your goal is to, well, let’s have a picture for the audience:

As you can see, the screen is covered with an awful lot of little blue things, and a few little orange things, and your goal is to bounce pachinko balls off the assorted things and eventually hit all the little orange things.  You’re given a limited number of pachinko balls, though you can earn more during the course of a level, and there are assorted little green and purple things that give you power-ups or more points or what have you.

Basically, it’s the sort of thing anyone should be able to pick up and understand within about five minutes, which probably explains some of the ire thrown its direction.

Now, being the Hardcore Gamer that I am, I certainly wouldn’t pay for such nonsense.  There’s no shooting things in the head, there’s no world rendered in assorted shades of brown, and there’s certainly no World Changing Dramatic Storyline told through Carefully-Crafted Set Pieces.

On the other hand, if Valve decided to give me a ten level version of this fluff, tarted up with references to the games of the Orange Box, you couldn’t fault me for giving it a spin, right?

Well, they did, and it sat in my Steam library for a couple of years, and then I decided to give it a go – again, no unicorn fixations, honest – and it took me about half an hour to play through the ten sample levels.

After that I went back and started playing them again.

That’s a bad sign.

Deciding to see what happens if you clear every OTHER colored pin on a level before you clear the last orange pin, that’s another bad sign.

For the record, you get treated to the following two screens:

And:

Now, I of course am far too much of a Serious Gamer to be swayed by bright colors and cheery music and other such trivial kerfluffle, and I certainly will not be buying the full version.

…

…

…well, at least not until the Steam Summer Sale.

So I noticed something very odd when I booted my Windows box yesterday, specifically something very odd on my Steam friends list.

I had two friends on and actively in-game, and both of them were playing something called Secret of the Magic Crystals.

This turned out to have been the Steam Daily Deal, making a five dollar game about raising magical horses into, apparently, an irresistible deal at $2.50.

Browsing the Steam thread on the Penny Arcade forums – a wretched hive of classy gentlemen – reinforced this impression. Grown men, who by all rights ought to have been living out vicarious male fantasies in Duke Nukem Forever or similar were, instead, raising and training unicorns, pegasai, and fire-breathing horses.

Obviously I needed to investigate this for myself.

As part of my campaign to skew Steam’s OS usage statistics – and because it just seemed a more appropriate platform for magic horses – I switched back to my MacBook and laid my money down.

First impressions were positive. The first thing you see, after selecting a save slot and engendering your character, is an actually-rather-attractive farm, with weather effects and a day/night cycle. It’s basically a menu from which you choose activities – you don’t ever walk around your farm, as far as I can tell – but it’s a really pretty menu.

It’s not the main draw, of course, so I dutifully followed the tutorial advice and trotted off to the stable to meet my first horse.

See what I did there? Honestly it takes a force of will not to fill this entire post with horse jokes.

Anyway, I met my first horse and it was a little disappointing. It didn’t have wings or breathe fire or anything, it was just a little colt sitting in a stable.

Again following the tutorial, I picked a brush off a nearby hook and commenced grooming.

Brush brush brush brush BAM.

My colt exploded into a full-grown unicorn.

Now, as far as mythical horses go, the unicorn is one of the duller ones. That’s a bit harsh, I suppose, but once you’ve gotten past “it has a horn and can detect virgins”, there’s not much to them.

Nonetheless, I had a unicorn. It was time to get to training.

Training takes place in the corral, and consists of mini games where I sent my unicorn jumping over gates, or walking down forest paths, or – and this was actually a little disturbing – dragging heavy loads along the ground, all of these while playing a little mini game involving pressing arrow keys at the right times.

This enhanced my unicorn’s stats, but also tired it out. After a couple of training sessions, he needed to go back to the barn for more brushing.

Brushing seems to really be at the core of the game. You have three different brushes – for body, head, and hoof grooming – and it seems like you really need to vary which you’re using; sticking to the body brush alone won’t get your horse back in the mood for more training.

A couple of rounds of training followed by grooming had most of my unicorn’s stats at or near the maximums, and it seemed like it was time to get to questing, which is how you earn money, which you use to buy more horses, or upgrade your buildings to hold more horses, or buy things from the in-game store to improve your horses, or well I didn’t really get too far into this; it seems pretty deep really.

Money, however, seemed like a good thing to have more of even if I didn’t quite have a handle on all the uses for it, so questing it was.

After the mini games in the training session, questing was a little disappointing. I opened my mailbox and the first quest was a simple request from a neighbor to go deliver a letter. Accepting this quest sent my unicorn prancing off-screen, leaving me with nothing to do but watch a clock tick away.

A minute or so later, he came back, a little tired, and I got a gift of 30… Well, 30 of whatever the in-game currency represents.

Since he wasn’t too worn out, and since I wanted to keep the money flowing in, I immediately opened and selected the next quest, from a neighbor who needed a horse to plough something.

Disaster struck.

A minute later, as my unicorn slunk dejectedly back on-screen, something was obviously wrong. He needed medical attention.
In the barn, I was able to do a checkup and determine that he needed medication – medication that was going to wipe out most of my earnings for the day, but essential medicine nonetheless. I dropped the 50 currency on the medicine, got a sparkly hypodermic, and then couldn’t figure out how to actually apply it.

It is an oddly helpless feeling to be staring at a sick unicorn, knowing you hold the key to its recovery, and yet unable to figure out how to make the two interact.

Worse still, when I closed the game to see if I could find any advice online, I apparently exposed a bug that resulted in the game not actually saving my progress, meaning that my unicorn simply poofed into the ether, lost for all time.

Now, this is clearly a game aimed at young girls, and I believe that this sort of bug is simply unconscionable.

Imagine, if you will, that you are the father of a young girl whose magical horse has just fallen ill and then – for all intents and purposes – died.

Imagine the Talk you are about to have with your daughter.

I don’t think the Dead Unicorn Talk is something anyone should have to endure.

That aside, there’s a lot of the game I haven’t seen yet, so it might be worth another go-round if they fix the save issue.

After all, those unicorns won’t brush themselves.