Towns - a neat little indie game with big ideas.

I like indie games. They are often easy to really get into - find a new indie game with a small but busy community, and help out. That's just what I've been doing with Towns.

So uh.. where to start?

Towns is a game made by a tiny european indie company called SMP, or Super Mal Parit. It's an extremely ambitious title, with aspirations to take all the best parts from building sims, city sims, tower defense games and even dungeon explorers. It's still in an early alpha stage (0.40.2 as of writing) but it's still fun to play.

The basis is that you start off with a small handful of unarmed civilians dumped into a randomly generated map, full of grassland, desert, snow and jungle. It's up to you to issue orders and guidance to your townies to keep them from starving or getting themselves butchered by the indiginous wildlife, which currently compose themselves mainly of hideious half snake half crab abominations and frogs wielding spears. You have been warned.

The actual gameplay is all done via mouse, with keyboard shortcuts for those who can use two devices at once. You click areas and buttons and tell your townsfolk to chop trees, hoard wood, build workshops and eventually mine downwards. And that's where the game may truly shine when it's complete.

Ah, that's better.

The eventual idea is that you build up your town and fortify it to attract Heroes - a part of the game that is currently non-existant. These heroes will then explore the sprawling, random, deadly-monster-filled dungeons below your town. Blood will be shed, heads will be lopped, and treasure will be looted and brought back for you to use.

This treasure will have two uses - attracting better heroes, and being crafted down (using the really neat, despite being early and buggy, production system) into weapons and armour to prolong the life of everyone in your town.

As I've mentioned, the game is still early - heroes are non-existant, so you only have civilians and soldiers to play with, but the game is still fully playable. Civilians can put up a heck of a fight if armed to the teeth with Hobgoblinite weaponry and armor. That being said, however, the aim of the early builds is not to live forever - you will eventually lose. Seiges can happen randomly, and occur more often and more difficult the longer you play, the deeper you mine, and the more townsfolk you attract. Eventually you will run into a seige of 100 dire wolves which will eat through your town. You will have to restart.

Fight! Fight! Fight for your lives!

And you will want to. How can you do things differently? More efficiently? Maybe you'll make huge cow farms this time? Go for a fully bread-consumption economy? Deforest the entire surface? Quickly attract 50 immigrants and raid the dungeon? Build walls around your entire town to protect against seiges? The possibilites are... well, not endless, but quite vast, for an early alpha.

So take a look, visit the official forums and grab the demo from the official site. And when you get stuck, visit the wiki. I'm an active member there and we already have quite a few pages up.

Go. Try Towns. Get slaughtered with a smile on your face.

Generations of mistakes crushed into one game - Sonic Generations Review

A brief warning: this review contains some very minor spoilers – mostly one or two bits about how the game systems work, a few level name spoilers, and the amount of levels in the game. You’ve been warned.

Also note PC gamers – you really need a gamepad for this. The keyboard controls are atrocious.

Sonic Generations is Sega's latest (at time of writing) foray into showing us the amazing things they can do with the Sonic franchise. Unlike their other recent attempts, which merely show how badly an experienced company can mess up a well-known franchise, Sonic Generations shows you a step-by-step on how exactly to do it yourselves!

I don't know either, Sonic. I just don't know.

The game is made up from a bunch of Zones, each containing two Acts, much like ye olden Sonic games of the distant past. The gimmick here, however, is that each Act 1 is played by retro Sonic, the small podgy pigmy of the Genesis/Mega Drive era,  which each Act 2 is played by the spunky new, taller Sonic from such successful  games as Sonic Heroes and Sonic Unleashed. Those sparkling gems of gameitude.

  

Past the title screen, the game drops you in as retro Sonic playing through the Green Hill Zone. You can run, jump, and even spin dash. The graphics look splendid, Sega really managed to recreate the magic of Green Hill Zone in HD. But, what's this? It's Omochao, the incredibly annoying (and thankfully, disable-able) small chao robot from Sonic Adventure, sitting on the ground in front of Sonic. That doesn't seem right.

From there on, the game is basically a downward spiral. After beating Act 1, the "story" is revealed - a giant time eating shadow monster is destroying time and space, somehow retro and new-age Sonic are catapulted into the same time zone and must work together to stop it. They do this by playing through levels from older Sonic games, collecting... well, nothing, really, there's no reason to complete the levels other than "it makes the game progress". Once the levels are done, you go 

back and do some challenges, grab some keys, unlock a boss, then do it all over again.

Me too, Tails. Me too.

Also introduced is a strange skill system. As you beat levels, you are graded, as per normal for modern Sonic games, and are given an amount of points based on your grade. You can trade these for skills in Omochao's shop. These skills do a range of things, from giving retro Sonic a shield to start the levels with, to the ability to get a free boost as new-age Sonic, to a simple extra life. You also get 100 skill points - not to be confused with the points you get for finishing levels - and with these 100 skill points you can equip up to 5 of the skills you've  purchased, so long as the total "complexity" of the skills doesn't go over your limit. For instance, the first ability I listed up there costs 70 skill points to equip, so you won't be equipping much else with that one, whereas another skill that makes lost rings bounce around for 10 seconds before disappearing only costs 10 points to equip. It's rather complicated and unusual, and the screens for purchasing and equipping skills feel bloated and clunky, and the whole system feels unneeded since it's very possible to play through the game without touching Omochao's shop at all.

There are a total of nine full levels, three boss levels and three mini-bosses. Each full level contains two acts and several "challenges", little things to warrant replaying the levels for added bonuses. These range from racing a shadow of yourself to playthroughs using the elemental shields from Sonic 3 & Knuckles. These are fun, to start with, as you play through the first three levels (Green Hill, Chemical Plant and Sky Sanctuary) but quickly become frustrating and repetitive as you progress to the later levels (Crisis City from Sonic 360 and Rooftop Run from Sonic Unleashed strike out to me in particular - these levels were not good originally, why would I want to revisit them several times?).

I too felt a little sick later into the game.

That, I feel, is the major problem of the game. Once you are past the first three levels and the first boss, you are plonked into a bunch of levels you probably don't care about. Hell, if you are younger than 20, you probably don't care about the first three either. Who looks back on Seaside Hill from Sonic Heroes with positive nostalgia? Who remembers falling into the water for the 24th time because Sonic decided to clip through a platform with fondness? Playing through the game just made me sad as I remembered just how much Sonic has fallen.

I do feel I need to make a special shout-out to the music: much of it is remixes of older Sonic themes, with each zone sporting two versions: a more classic-feeling remix for retro Sonic's act, and a modern pumping remix for the new-age. They did a really good job on many of these - for instance, retro Sonic's remix of Escape From The City contains elements of the Endless Mine tune from Sonic 3. It was so unexpected I had to listen to it several times to make sure I really heard it, and it wasn't merely the little kid inside me desperately trying to hear something it liked.

You also unlock music as you complete challenges, and can change the music of any level to any of the tunes you've unlocked. There's something satisfying about playing new-age Sonic's frustrating Crisis City's act to the tune of Angel Island Zone. But it's not really satisfying enough, unfortunately.

Regardless, once you have beaten the game, you unlock a few bonuses to entice you to replay, but as of this review I haven't bothered. I have no doubt I will, eventually - I honestly enjoyed the first 3 stages, even if I didn't enjoy the later stages nearly as much - but I expect it'll end up depressing me to the point where I just uninstall it and try to forget the game existed in the first place.

Just like Sonic and the Black Knight.

Rocky Road

Yum yum yum yum etc.

For those of you who don't know, I don't consider myself to be much of a cook. I don't understand the science, and therefore, I don't like it. I don't know who corriander makes curry taste better, or why cinnamon and nutmeg remind me of Xmas, or why guacamole and fishsticks are a bad idea.

I also can't taste things very well. My wife tells me a good cook should be able to taste all the ingredients in a meal, and if not, that the ingredient was pointless. I know what she's trying to say, but to me that sounds like it's a better idea to live off of peanut butter sandwiches than really try anything exotic.

That being said, I can cook an okay seafood curry (so long as I have curry paste to start with!), and I can make simple cakes and whatnot. A vague interest in the hobby is there, but it's more often than not crushed under my other hobby: being on the PC 27 hours a day.

Now available with icing sugar!

So, finally, I've found a YouTube channel that may help to kindle the former hobby by using the latter: MyVirginKitchen. It's run by a fellow Brit named Barry, who cooks very interesting dishes and shows off how easy they are to cook. I'm skeptical about the ease of some of them (but you must remember: I'm very lazy), however I found one that I was willing to try: Rocky Road.

I've always loved Rocky Road. I know it's one of the worst things you can possibly eat, but isn't that true for most things that are genuinely nice to eat? As mentioned above, my tastebuds are kind of dysfunctional, so anything that tastes this good to me must be a winner.

Thanks to the wifey for these artsy shots.

Being someone who has, against his will or not, popped back and forth to the USA more times than he'd like to remember, I've sampled more than my share of bad-for-you food. And I have to say, as a dessert, Rocky Road is probably the best. The fact that I can make it so easily is both a blessing and a horrible artery-clogging curse, I think.

As you can see from the pictures, it turned out well. I was impressed with myself and moreso with Barry for making such a simple to follow recipe. You just need to remember to pace yourself while eating it - it's very decadent.

So, good show, MyVirginKitchen. I'll be staying subscribed and maybe trying out more dishes in the future. Once I've worked off this one. Which won't be 'til after Xmas at this rate. I didn't time this very well, did I?

Dreams

I had two weird dreams last night. In one, I was being hunted down by family members, and the other I was RoboCop and really had to use the restroom.

In neither was I exploring tombs and villages, or slaying dragons. Which is weird because Skyrim came out yesterday and it's freaking amazing.

More on that later.

BookCrossing

The other day the wife and I went to the library in our city centre. She signed up for a library card (had to use my address, but they didn’t mind that she wasn’t a UK citizen), and as we were looking around upstairs, we came across a rather eclectic collection of books upon a shelf marked “BookCrossing”.

Neither of us had heard of BookCrossing before, despite later finding out it’s a somewhat international thing. It works like this:

You find a BookCrossing book. A BookCrossing book is a book, any book, that a person has registered on the BookCrossing.com website, pasted a book ID number inside the cover, and has “released” into the wild. This could mean many things, from donating to a library’s BookCrossing (I’m going to just call this BC for the rest of the article, okay?) shelf, to “accidentally” leaving it in an airport, to donating it to a charity shop, to leaving it in the park. The idea is that the next person finds it, notices it’s a BC book (most of them have a big sticker on the front explaining the site) registers it on the BC website, reads it, then releases it into the wild.

This way, a book builds up a little backstory for you to read on the website. The book I got, which I’m reviewing in a separate article, had never been read before, and therefore it only had two journal entries on the website: one saying it was being donated to the BC cause, the other saying it was being left at the library. Lucky me for accidentally finding it!

The BC shelf at Milton Keynes library is free to use, I don’t even have a library card (shame on me!) and they didn’t mind me just picking up a book and carrying it out of the library. I’ve already read it, and need to decide where I’m going to leave it. I might give this one back to the library when we return, just to make sure it isn’t accidentally thrown away. That’s the risk when you’re a BC book!

So visit their site, http://www.bookcrossing.com, to learn more. My username there is FungusTrooper, check back later to hopefully see more books that I’ve found!

New Blog

Hello everybody, and welcome to my new blog. For those who know me personally (or not, maybe?), you'd know I already have a blog, but this one is for much more light-hearted content.

I'm going to review books and games and generally post about things I'm interested in.

So, without further ado, welcome, again! Hope you enjoy your stay.