Baud Attitude

The last time I stayed home from work sick – coincidentally, LAST december – I wound up watching 37 episodes of “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” in a three-day marathon session.  While this didn’t do anything for my masculine cred, as it were, it was a pretty good use of some sick time.

This time, I spent the better part of the day playing through Fairy Bloom Freesia.

That isn’t quite accurate.  Truth be told, I played through the story mode of Fairy Bloom Freesia over the course of a couple of hours on Saturday, when I was feeling 100% well.  There wasn’t an awful lot TO the story mode – it has 25 stages, every fifth stage features a boss fight and the story ends when you’re out of bosses.  The last boss is, I think, a three stage boss technically, but even so it’s a game that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

The problem is, once I was done with it, I kept looking through my Steam Library trying to find something else to play and I kept realizing that what I wanted to play was more Fairy Bloom Freesia, so what I did TODAY was go back and play through the 99-level “Guardian Mode” game that unlocked after I’d finished the story mode.  That took a little over 8 hours, bringing me to 10 hours played and not feeling like a single minute had been wasted.

That’s pretty good for an eight dollar game.

The guardian mode reuses all of the assets from the story mode, including all of the bosses at least a couple of times over.  It finishes with a Super Secret Boss that probably would have been a shock if they hadn’t put this Steam achievement in:

…but I digress…

I am given to understand that Fairy Bloom Freesia is a rather blatant clone of “Super Smash Brothers”, which I can’t particularly confirm or deny.  I played the Wii Smash Brothers for a couple of hours a few years back, but I can’t remember a single thing about it.  It may have been that it needed more fairies instead of Mario and Friends.

At any rate, every level is a fairly small arena, rather taller than it is wide.  Enemies – and there are only four types of basic enemies – drop in from the top, and you have to clear them all to get the next set of enemies.   Every few levels, the music and background change.

Wait, I’ve just described Tetris.

Hmm.

UNLIKE Tetris, then, Fairy Bloom Freesia has you bouncing around the multi-level arenas like a, well, like a small and terribly violent fairy with a healthy disregard for the less convenient laws of physics and a Divine Mission to keep her forest safe, no matter how many teeth she has to kick in in in the process.

As you beat things up, you earn mana points that can be spent to acquire and upgrade skills.  You can only equip a few skills at a time out of quite a long list, so there are in theory quite a few options for customization.  In practice, however, you’re likely to find a few skills that work for you and just hang on to them.  For my own part, I found that improved block + health regen + homing missile attacks meant that I could breeze through most parts of the game.

Periodically, the “beat everything up to proceed” missions are interrupted by ones in which you have to defend rather fragile structures while simultaneously beating everything up.  These are probably the trickiest bits of the game, and could be QUITE frustrating if it weren’t for a rather pleasant design decision – once you’ve failed one of these “protect mission” levels a couple of times, the “protect” aspect gets tossed in the nearest waste bin and you’re back  to just insert Foot A into Face B to continue.

It DOES get a little repetitive, but the enjoyment of the game – for me, anyway – came out of getting better at controlling Freesia and timing blocks and learning how to chain one attack into the next to rack up bigger and bigger combos and generally feel like, well…

Seriously, just go play it.

As a boy-type person, I am of course hard-coded to enjoy things blowing up.  I’m not saying I rate games and movies by explosions per hour, or anything silly like that, but it certainly can’t hurt to have the occasional houseboat blown into a million pieces just as the main characters throw themselves flat on the dock to avoid the blast.

Unfortunately, Patchwork is lacking in houseboats.  Maybe they’ll be in a sequel, if the creator does one.

I came upon this game by happy accident – I was reading a thread talking about various indie game bundles and saw a couple of references to a “Summerbatch” bundle having closed.

While I’d obviously missed the bundle, I’d never heard of the thing in the first place, so I went looking to find out what it was.  Turns out, it was a collection of five short adventure games.

Adventure games are not my genre.  They were The In Thing when I was a young lad in school, mind you, but I found them rather tedious and frustrating.

Still, one of the games in the bundle – Patchwork – looked fun and had been reviewed positively, so I figured that I’d give it a go.

Patchwork is a terribly traditional point and click adventure game.  You walk around a few screens, pick up various items, wave them over objects in the environment or objects in your inventory praying that they will light up and indicate that they can be used, get stuck on an annoying musical puzzle bit and eventually come to a happy ending.

The fun of these games usually comes from the story and the characters, and Patchwork does a good job of drawing you into both.

You begin the game as a scientist, Daniel, who has just finished his life’s work – a teleportation device – and is getting ready to test it on himself.  Meanwhile, in a parallel dimension, a young magician named Lin is prepping for an exam by trying to summon a demon.

What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Anyway, you wind up in the parallel fantasy world, with elements of your reality poking through like… is it stalagmites that poke up from the ground? I think so.  Poking through like stalagmites, then, and you must work together to complete a ritual to de-integrate the worlds and put everything right before the dimensional stress rips both worlds asunder.

OK, most of that was a lie.  The worlds aren’t being ripped asunder.

You ARE, however, in an alternate dimension, and at the same time you are also trying to study for a test but have a strange guy in your house all of the sudden who doesn’t understand what magic is, because you play as both characters as you work through the game, gathering the components for the spell to send Daniel home.  This involves some light puzzle solving and a lot of walking back and forth between the game’s six screens trying to figure out with the orange that an NPC hands you right at the start of the game.

The two characters do see the world differently, though, which makes those six screens a little bit bigger world.  I of course neglected to get any side-by-side screenshots to demonstrate this properly, but here’a an example:

This is the “field” screen, and Daniel sees it like this.  If you walk on to this same screen with Lin, there’s a fire elemental playing in the camp fire and she has to negotiate with it for something necessary to complete a puzzle.

If I had one complaint, beyond the obvious one about the musical puzzle because there has never been a good musical puzzle in any game ever,  there is one subquest which must be completed in order to finish the game, but which involves Daniel stealing something from Lin in the process.  That one stumped me for a while because it simply didn’t occur to me at all that I might have to act like a jerk to proceed.  It’s a small enough complaint, I suppose.

Anyway, it took me about 2 hours to point and click my way through the world of Patchwork and get Daniel home.  I think that’s a little slow actually, I got hung up a couple of times on puzzles that adventure game fans would probably breeze on by, so it might only be a 60-90 minute game for those sorts of people.  Obviously that’s a rather short game, but it’s rather refreshing to occasionally play something that knows exactly how to stop in a way that makes you satisfied but also means that you wouldn’t mind another hit of it sometime.

To back up a few steps, I mentioned that I had found out about this game after the bundle featuring it had already ended, which meant that it turned out to actually be fairly difficult to buy.  The developer of the game hadn’t gotten it up on any of the traditional download services as far as I could tell.  Furthermore, the link to his site from the bundle page just takes you to his deviantart page and there’s no way to buy it directly from him.

Fortunately, the digital distributor who had handled the bundle is still selling the bundle through the end of the year.  It was about 8 bucks, which was a bit dear considering that I could have picked it up for much less if the bundle was still at the pay-what-you-like phase, and I’m rather used to the idea that 8 bucks gets me last year’s AAA title, but I decided that it was worth the risk and that I would just have to try to get 8 bucks worth of fun out of it.

It turns out that it’s pretty easy to do.

It’s rare that I buy a game within its first six months of release these days, and rarer still that I play it through to its conclusion in the same time frame.  Steam sales have conditioned me to wait for anything I’d like to go at least 75% off, and then to buy it for some non-specific future date when I have TONS of time to do nothing but sit on my keister and game the days away.

This will presumably be in the retirement home, at which point I hope I can get a computer that still runs Windows 7.

Half Life 2 Ep 3 MAY even have been released by then.

But I digress.

Anyway, I was compelled to buy Spec Ops: The Line during a recent Amazon sale because, well, partially because it was five bucks but largely because it’s become one of those games that people try to get you to play while trying not to spoil, which is pretty unusual for something that looks – on the face of it, and for about the first hour – like a pretty standard military shooter with your manly trio of manly mans going into a ruined future Dubai to rescue doomed people from a Colonel who was initially assigned to rescue them himself but has pretty clearly gone off the reservation.

That was a single sentence.  Somewhere, my high school Honors English teacher clutches her forehead at an sudden and unexplained headache.

As the game progresses, of course, this black-and-white ideal becomes more and more grey.  Your characters make bad decision after bad decision, generally with no choice in the matter, and the oft-repeated goal of rescuing the civilian population becomes more and more ironic.

There are a few spots in the game where you can actually make a decision for yourself.  Most of these have you picking the lesser of two evils, to be sure, but they do give you at least a moment’s peace.

So I guess I’m trying to say that the devs get full points for making a heck of an engaging story.

Also worthy of top marks: Dubai itself.  You’re coming into the city after it’s been hit with a disastrous series of sandstorms, and your running firefight through the former playground of the super-rich is made all the more memorable by, oh, using sand-filled supercars as cover or fighting yacht-to-yacht through a plain covered with grounded pleasure boats.  Occasionally you’ll wind up in some place the sand hasn’t yet gotten to, and the transition from post-apocalyptic nightmare to, oh, the opulent lobby of a gilded hotel borders on the surreal.

It’s a bit like being in line at Disneyland, really.  You walk down a very linear path and occasionally get to see cool set pieces designed to make you not pay attention to the fact that you’re standing in a line where your only options are to constantly shuffle forward and occasionally lean up against a stanchion to rest.

Mind you, Mickey isn’t ever going to pop up out of one of these set pieces and fire an RPG at you.

I came close to closing this post and then realized that I hadn’t actually addressed the game playing part of things.  Story and set dressing aside, the actual game is about shooting mans that are shooting at you, and it’s a generally satisfying game in that regard.  The creators went down the list of Standard Shooter Types and picked out “third person shooter”, “carry two weapons + grenades”, “cover system”, and “squad commands”, threw them into the Development Oven for 3 months at 350 degrees, and what came out was a satisfactory shooter pie.  Sure, the crest is kind of burned around the edges and the latticework top is skewed in places, but it tastes pretty good once you get it on your plate.