WHAT is your quest?

Today's goal for gamers should be to play through Costume Quest if you own it. If you don't own it, well, you should. It's a remarkably funny and charming RPG that is centered around Halloween. Developed by Double Fine, Costume Quest sees the protagonist, Reynold, searching for his sister, Wren, (or vice versa, you can choose to play as either character), who has been kidnapped by Grubbins.

The guy on the left and the guy behind the desk are Grubbins. Apparently, they're Marxists.

Grubbins are nasty creatures that want to steal all the candy for their nefarious master (think Oogie Boogie from The Nightmare Before Christmas). Because your sibling is costumed as a piece of candy corn, the grubbins nab him/her, so it becomes your task to rescue her/him before curfew. Because, you know, you don't want your parents getting pissed. The dialogue is often funny, and the art style is very cute (done by a former Pixar artist), but by far the most fun in the game is the costumes. You start out as a robot, but you can unlock other costumes by finding them or collecting materials in order to make them. The cool thing about the costumes is once you enter battle, you become whatever your costume is, so once you engage a grubbin, you become a giant robot, or a giant statue of liberty, or a unicorn, or a vampire, or a number of other available outfits. The combat is traditional turn-based RPG fare, but with the timed button presses of the Paper Mario series that allow you to defend or do additional damage if you can time your input correctly. Along the way, you recruit the help of a couple of friends who freely swamp costumes with you whenever you desire it. The bulk of the gameplay is trick-or-treating where you encounter either people giving you candy (which allows you to unlock the next area once you get enough pieces) or a battle with a grubbin.

My only lament about Costume Quest is that it is short, and at $15 this can seem steep for some people who are used to getting more gameplay out of a game, but I still love it. To be honest, lots of games seem to have repetitive content in order to pad game length, and although some critics have described the gameplay of Costume Quest as redundant (and I won't argue with them there) I never feel that it outstays its welcome. While the rest of Double Fine's fans are clamoring for a Psychonauts 2, I hold out hope for a sequel to Costume Quest. Maybe next Halloween?

Costume Quest is available on PSN, Xbox Live, and Steam. It is half-price on Steam today, so don't miss out on this opportunity to nab it for cheap. If you don't have access to one of those services, I don't know what to tell you, other than "get with the times."

New Releases 10/30/2012

Ragnarok Odyssey

Today's new RPG release is for the PlayStation Vita. Ragnarok Odyssey, developed by Game Arts and published by Xseed Games, takes place in a world heavily based on Norse mythology. The word "Ragnarok" itself is of Nordic descent if I remember correctly, and it references a point in the future similar to the Christian belief of Judgment Day. More specifically, many of the gods in the Norse pantheon expire in a grand battle, and the world is covered in a flood before it is reborn and repopulated by two human survivors. The plot of Ragnarok Odyssey sees humans battling giants after the death of the old gods so the name isn't just a throwaway name that sounds cool.

Ragnarok Odyssey has an anime-esque art style that will most likely be familiar to any fan of JRPGs. The game was designed by the same people that made the Lunar and Grandia games, two series well-regarded in certain RPG communities. There are 6 different job classes to choose from and players can play online with four people. The game seems to follow the Monster Hunter model of gaming, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, some would argue this is exactly what the PS Vita needs at this point.

Allow me to clarify. Since its release, the Vita has struggled to find its place in a market traditionally dominated by Nintendo, and now dominated by tablets and smartphones. For years people were asking Sony for another analog stick for the PSP. Now that they have delivered some are saying it is too little, and too late. The Vita is slick hardware, no one is denying that (the majority of the reviews seem favorable to me, at least) but there seems to be the perception that there are no decent games for the thing, so hopefully Ragarok Odyssey can help alleviate that concern. Review scores have been favorable so far, and if Sony continues to release quality titles to the same acclaim, they may find themselves a capable competitor to Nintendo's 3DS, which currently dwarfs their sales numbers.

Ragnarok Odyssey retails for $39.99 for the Standard Edition and $49.99 for the Mercenary Edition that includes the soundtrack and a few other bonuses.

Time to Opine

New Releases 10/23 MIA?

 

This week's lack of a proper RPG release provides me the opportunity to talk about something that has bothered me quite a bit this generation of video games. Namely, the decline in RPGs being produced period. When Final Fantasy VII took the world by storm in 1997, the number of RPGs increased exponentially as developers scrambled to produce similar products to cash in on the success of the venerable franchise. RPGs had been mostly a niche until FFVII achieved mainstream success, becoming the first RPG played for many people. The first Playstation (hereafter forever more referred to as PS1) became the premiere RPG console, boasting a library that contains some of collectively-agreed upon classics, classics like Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy IX, Final Fantasy Tactics, Xenogears, Chrono Cross, Legend of Mana, Legend of Dragoon, Dragon Warrior 7, Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, and Star Ocean: The Second Story, to name a few.

Shout out to Google's image search.

RPGs typically had a slew of text back then in lieu of the voice acting prevalent in today's games. Text is much easier to develop than voice acting, as it doesn't require multiple voice actors and it can be rewritten without having to redo lines. Furthermore, lines have to be recorded, often well in advance of when the rest of the game is completed. This reduces some of the flexibility in designing games that developers used to enjoy back before voice acting became the status quo.  These days, in order develop a decent RPG, you almost need a cast of voice actors. Sure, there are indie games and handheld games that still rely on text to convey their narratives, but the majority of RPGs developed are AAA titles (the titles that get the largest budgets and are the most highly anticipated by fans).

Video games require voice actors not only capable of delivering their lines, but delivering them in a way that is believable in a medium that can be difficult to do so. To voice a cartoon character is an abstraction; the actor is one stepped removed from reality, representing an animated avatar that they must project personality through. I can only imagine to voice polygons it would  be even more of an abstraction. Some voice actors may not even see their characters in action until after the game is finished.

Although there were some games with voice acting on the PS1 (Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid come to mind), it wasn't until the PS2 that voice acting hit its stride, as the newly embraced DVD format allowed 4.7GB of storage, a dramatic increase over the CD's 750MB max.  Final Fantasy X proved that the series could benefit from voice-acting (at least, according to most fans), and the PS2 had a somewhat sizable RPG library, the newly found costs of voice-acting prohibited smaller studios from creating titles that rivaled juggernauts like Square-Enix.

This generation has quite arguably seen the fewest RPGs released. Halo and Call of Duty rule the roost, and developers flock to make similar titles in order to cash in on those respective franchises' successes. Does this sound familiar? The same thing happened with Super Mario Bros. on the original Nintendo. After Nintendo's success, the platform was flooded with platformers, many of them mediocre copies of Mario, but there were also unique games that improved upon the formula, just like some of the RPGs that followed Final Fantasy VII. I hope the next generation of games sees something for everyone being released, but I also secretly hope for the resurrection of RPGs dominating the charts. Perhaps I just yearn for a more simple time when I had to read games instead of them playing themselves for me. No doubt the first Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior helped me develop the skill when I was younger. They were like genre novels married to cartoons with computer graphics. These days most RPGs seem like soap-operas with overly melodramatic and cliché characters.  But maybe it's just me.

Now, get off my lawn.

Project Eternity Shatters Kickstarter Record

A New Paradigm

Project Eternity, the Obsidian Entertainment (Fallout: New Vegas, South Park: Stick of Truth) developed title which recently took up funding on Kickstarter, has successfully reached its goal by drawing some $3.9M to fund the project. The amount of money collected supersedes the $3.3M Double Fine (Pyschonauts, Costume Quest) collected for their Double Fine Adventure, setting a new record for the crowd-sourced funding site.

Project Eternity is interesting because it's a throwback to the way that RPGs used to be designed in the late 90s, from an overhead, isometric perspective. The amount of money the Kickstarter project generated proves there are enough fans of the genre to support development of such a title. And yet Obsidian would have been unlikely to secure funding for such a title through any of the conventional video game publishers.

By going to fans for funds, Obsidian is able to develop a title where they are not at mercy of a publisher pushing for a specific release date, something that they admit plagued both Fallout: New Vegas and Knights of the Old Republic 2. By removing being answerable to a publisher, Obsidian has the freedom to develop the game as they see fit, and to release once they feel the game is up to their standards.

But it's not an option for everyone. Both Obisidan and Double Fine were able to secure such large amounts of funding because they are both well-respected in the industry. For indie publishers, such an amount would be ludicrous to even try to fathom, and there are indie titles that fall far short of their goals. Many of them are quite a bit lower than Obsidian's goal of $3.5. The very spirit of Kickstarter is to help people complete and fund projects they wouldn't be able to otherwise, and surely many of the projects completed on the site are success stories of the same nature, but for every Obsidian and Double Fine success there are multiple projects that go unnoticed and unfunded. I will most likely pay for and play both Project Eternity and Double Fine Adventure when they eventually release, but not without wondering what other games I might have been playing if publishers let their developers have a bit more slack in the development process (crunch hours in the gaming industry are notoriously atrocious), as well as creativity when it comes to design decisions, freeing up Kickstarter for pure hobbyists instead of industry insiders like Tim Schafer and Chris Avellone.

Dungeons & Dragons and Dinner

Last Sunday my sister called me excited to buy her own set of polyhedral dice. For those of you that don't know, polyhedral means "many-sided" or multiple sides, in other words, all manner of sizes of dice from four-sided to twenty-sided, including the traditional six-sided dice, to be used for the game Dungeons & Dragons (and other similar games. Hey Pathfinder!) I apologized for my influence on subjecting her to very geeky things that she probably wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise.

For several Sundays in a row now my sister and I together with her husband and my fiancee get together to play a little bit of D&D. It started at my house, but since has moved to their place since they have a kid they have to take care of, which is just easier at their house. My nephew, Oliver, is two, and we tried playing a game once with him at the table. But he wanted to keep picking the dice up, and I got a little nervous each time that he would fling it somewhere or stick it in his mouth when we weren't looking. My sister swallowed a penny when she was two and damn near died, so I think we're all a little sensitive to the choking issue. For that reason, we've started playing when he's asleep, either when he's napping or while he is down for the night. But I digress.

In our last session, I brought cheese enchiladas that I made along with sides of refried beans and corn. I am the Dungeon Master. My sister, Amanda, is a level 2 Wizard named Lanin that doesn't like to use magic, preferring to stab things with her dagger instead of casting spells. I can't stop her. Her husband, Mikey, plays a Fighter named Regdar that deals and absorbs most of the damage. My fiancee, Randi, plays Carn the Rogue, which is like a sneaky-thief type character that can pick locks and disable traps.

In this encounter, the players were going after Tusenmaug, a blue dragon that can breathe deadly electricity. After slaying a Gargoyle and some goblins the adventurers were quite beat up. By the time they got to the dragon, things weren't looking too good. The fight with the dragon is meant to be the penultimate battle in the box set we are using, (there's an additional encounter in his treasure room after he is defeated) but ultimately my players were too wounded to continue, and so I had Tusenmaug take flight, living to return and fight another day. A more cruel DM than myself would have had those adventurers incinerated and told them tough luck and to re-roll new characters. Therein lies the beauty of D&D. The rules exist more as guidelines than for the end-all be-all say on how something should go down. I meant to take pictures, but the batteries in my camera were dead. Next time. 

The First Spark

Retro Review

All right, I know I said I'd shut up about Torchlight II, but after finishing the second game, I went back and played the first one again, which left me with a few thoughts I wanted to share. The first thing I noticed after going back Torchlight was how slow my character moved in comparison to Torchlight II. They seriously ramped up movement speed in the second game. Another large difference is that the environments in the first Torchlight 1 largely the same, whereas the environments in Torchlight II were more varied. In the first Torchlight there are 3 classes to choose from, with gender being fixed, which is one less class than there is in Torchlight II, but in Torchlight II you can also choose your gender. The pet system is also included here, which makes managing your inventory a breeze, although there is less options to choose from than in Torchlight II.

Story -

The story of the first Torchlight is a more cohesive narrative than its sequel, but it still doesn't win any awards for originality or for advancing storytelling forward for the medium. There is an evil entity beneath the town of Torchlight. Enter the mines and delve down 30 floors or so to stop the big baddie and save the day.

Graphics - 

The art style of the first Torchlight is still cartoonish, which people decried when it first came out, since people were used to the gothic style of the Diablo games. I remember being impressed with the graphics when I first played Torchlight in 2009, but I had just been playing Diablo II, which was first released in 2002 before that. After playing Torchlight II and going back to Torchlight, the graphics aren't necessarily bad, but you can tell developer Runic Games learned a few new tricks to squeeze some more performance out of the Ogre engine.

Gameplay -

The same click, click, destroy and loot combo popularized by Diablo has been perfected by Torchlight.

Sountrack - 

Matt Ueleman's work is as good as ever here. The theme of the town of Torchlight is very reminiscent to the Tristram theme from the first Diablo. I think the soundtrack to Torchlight II is better, but that's not to say he didn't knock it out of the park here, too.

Replayability- 

Once you beat the game, there is an endless dungeon that opens up, which allows you to continue dungeon delving to your heart's content.

No Scores?

When it comes to review scores for video games they are often inflated as a result of a weird feedback loop between journalists and publishers. Journalists want to get exclusive content before anyone else, publishers want their games to get good scores, so they buy advertising on the sites where they are reviewed. To this end, journalists seem hesitant to rate anything below a 7 for fear of it being perceived as a "bad" game and losing advertising dollars or potential future exclusives. Furthermore, review scores are often used to denigrate the integrity of the reviewer. "Oh, he gave that game a 8, he doesn't know what he's talking about." Without a review score, there is no nice simple number to validate or invalidate the reader's opinion. Besides that, what one person may call an 8, another person may feel is a 7 or a 9. For all those reasons I'll be abolishing the number system for reviews in the future.

New Releases 10/09/12

"Death before dis- Well, uh, maybe we won't use that as the tagline."

Dishonored, a title developed by Arkane Studios, comes out today. Although not a RPG in strict terms of the word, (and maybe not even in loose-terms of the word - and technically, it's three words) publisher Bethesda's credits include developing and publishing some of the most well-known RPGs, including the Elder Scrolls franchise (last year's Skyrim, in particular) as well as the Fallout franchise. Despite Dishonored being billed as a stealth first person action/adventure shooter, I'm sure more than a few RPG elements will be included, but here are some I managed to tease out after researching the title for a bit.

First, there will be a character upgrade system. It seems like even sports games and first-person shooters are hopping on the RPG stats bandwagon, so it should come as no surprise that action adventure games are also including them, since they are more similar in gameplay than the formerly mentioned genres. There are also health and mana potions, as well as a magic system, which gives the player a choice of spells to choose from. In addition to these familiar fantasy elements, Dishonored also has multiple ways of achieving a goal, hearkening back to earlier Elder Scrolls titles, or perhaps, Planescape: Torment. 

Of course, one of the most important elements of a game is the plot, and Dishonored's sounds like one you would find in a RPG. The story sounds like it is full of political conflict, with the main character, Corvo Attano getting accused of killing the empress he was supposed to be protecting.  The game is set in a city similar to industrial London of the late 1800s, and we can expect to see a similar level of technology throughout the city of Dunwall, where our story takes place. Players can make choices in the dialogue that affect how others see and interact with them, not unlike the Mass Effect or Fable series. However, unlike those respective games, players will not be limited to choices that are ultimately black or white, but rather varying shades of gray. (Maybe fifty? Who knows).

The reviews have mostly been favorable so far, with the game carrying an average score of 89 on metacritic, across the 3 platforms it was released for (Xbox 360, PS3, and PC), with the PC version carrying the highest rating at 91. The game retails for $60, so unfortunately, despite the good press, I think I'll be waiting for a Steam sale. After all, winter is coming...

New Releases This Week

Most new videogames get released on Tuesday. Why that is the convention, I cannot say, but I say most because there are the occasional exceptions. Torchlight 2 came out on a Thursday (9/20) because the developer, Runic Games, promised it would be out late in the summer, and September 20th was the last day they could get away with releasing and have it still be considered summer. Since it was a digital only release Runic didn't have to bother shipping boxes to retailers for release and so it was less important that they launch on the day of the week that titles usually launch.

I promise I'll shut up about Torchlight now.

Nintendo, on the other hand, has always marched to the beat of their own drum. In fact, they march to their own drum so often the adage about them marching to the beat of their own drum has become cliché. Their new releases typically happen on Sundays (again, I’m unsure as to why), as is the case for Pokemon White Version 2 and Pokemon Black Version 2, which come out October 7th.  Pokemon is one franchise I've managed to stay away from, so you won't be getting my thoughts on the games, but I'm sure tons of people will snap them up. Nintendo often gets called out on rehashing franchises, but Pokemon is a huge cash cow for Ninty, so yearly releases have become the de facto standard. I’m sure millions will buy one or both of them, but I won’t be one of them.

The only way to win is to not play.

No new actual releases today (10/2) as far as RPGs go. Resident Evil 6 came out today, and while apparently it's trying to be many things, a RPG is not one of those. I’m a fan of the series, but based on critics’ reviews, I might just skip it. At any rate, I won’t take up any more time talking about it here.

And Now We Wait

Saturday wrapped up the first half of the new season of Doctor Who, the critically-acclaimed cult sci-fi show whose popularity only seems to be snow-balling as of late. As a tribute to all things TARDIS (and in an effort to make the wait until Christmas somewhat shorter, even by a few minutes) I present my favorite five Doctor Who references in RPGs (in no particular order).

"We can't stop here, this is Deathclaw country!"

Fallout

Fallout is a post-apocalyptic RPG set in the future where everything has a 50's retro Americana aesthetic. Players who take a high luck stat in the beginning of the game have a chance to come across a random encounter of "an unusual callbox" which plays the iconic VWORP VWORP noise of the TARDIS as it dematerializes. When it disappears it leaves behind a motion sensor. Hope that wasn't too integral of a part for you, Sexy.

May not work on wood.

World of Warcraft

Wrath of the Lich King, the 2008 expansion to the world's largest time sink saw a quest that featured players obtaining "The Ultrasonic Screwdriver," a not-so-subtle nod to the Doctor's multipurpose day-saving device, the sonic screwdriver. The latest World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria, came out last Tuesday and saw the inclusion of a race of panda people (Jack Black must be spinning in his grave). How times change.

$169?! I'll just hop back in time and pick one up for a nickel.

Rock Band

 Pseudo musicians everywhere rejoiced when developer Harmonix included a purchasable outfit in Rock Band that allowed the players' avatars to be clad in the style of the fan-favorite fourth Doctor, Tom Baker. Okay, so maybe people didn't exactly rejoice. In fact, this reference was probably over most of Rock Band's younger fanbases' collective heads. Still, others such as myself thought it was cool. Cool cool cool. Whoops, wrong show.

Torchlight II

Torchlight 2 is chalk full of Doctor Who references, seemingly one for each doctor, but the Pocketwatch of the Tennant is my favorite. David Tennant played the tenth Doctor on the show from 2006-2010. He grew up watching Doctor Who and always wanted to play the character, finally getting his chance when the show was revived by the BBC in 2005. The pocketwatch is a fitting item to represent Ten, as it plays into a couple of storylines during his reign as the Doctor. Now I'm off to watch "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood" again and weep girly man tears. Allons-y!

Fallout, again.

This time the latest entry in the franchise, Fallout: New Vegas. The first two Fallout games featured a number of pop culture references, but in New Vegas all such references are tucked away in an optional mode that is activated by taking the Wild Wasteland trait. Securitrons (robot guards) around the strip will yell Exterminate! the catchphrase made famous by everybody's favorite pepperpot look-a-likes, the Daleks. Another reference features a direct quote from the show, "Hey! Who turned out the lights?" from the episode "Silence in the Library" that first introduced us to the character of River Song and the menacing Vashta Nerada. Here is the Fallout reference.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z205KRDEwjs&feature=related