Before I Forget

I had an idea for a fun way to generate articles: go through my computer and pick out some contenders for Absolute Favorite Game, and then put them in a tournament bracket against one another.

BUT THE TWIST IS

In addition to deciding which one will progress in the bracket, I'll also take a moment to think about what it would be like if, for some reason, the two games were combined into a single property.  So in the case of Cook, Serve, Delicious and Borderlands 2, I'd have something like Shoot, Serve, Delicious, wherein Vault Hunters would go out during the day and run missions to hunt down rakk wings and skag tongues and whatever else, then come back at night to dish them out to hungry Psychos.  Or...something.

That seems like it could be fun.

Hoo?

Ray.

Not Done Yet from Twice Circled: Big Pharma

I started writing this post about a week ago, initially.  I got as far as writing "Not Done Yet from" before I got distracted by the game itself, and did not stop playing it until... just about now, actually.  It's not even out enough to be on Steam yet, so I don't have a real playtime count, but it's been many hours.

So!  Big Pharma is a... I'll call it a process management simulator?  The player is ostensibly the CEO of a brand-new pharmaceutical company, tasked with one of a few dozen challenging scenarios to overcome.  Early challenges are simple, like "raise a certain amount of revenue", and later challenges are more complex.

But that's not really important.  The scenarios are really just different expressions of the game's core mechanics, which for me are the real draw.  You start each game with access to some Ingredients, and a few machines that process these ingredients into marketable drugs by changing their concentration until it's concentrated (or diluted!) enough for the health benefits to kick in.

Simple!  However.  Each effect has a range in which it takes effect, so you don't always get the 100%-effective concentration, and there are times when the negative side effects will overlap with your beneficial effect, so you may need to go through some extra processing to eliminate or mitigate those side effects.  But that cuts into your profits, which impacts how many drugs you can import and how many machines you can buy to process them.

It seems, sometimes, like the game is trying to make a statement about the pharmaceutical industry: "they don't want to release good drugs, they just want to make money!"  But that's an easy idea, and a tired idea, and not an idea that especially needs a game made to express.  Ultimately, I don't think that's what they're going for.  I think the "pharmaceuticals" angle is just providing context for the real hook, which is this bizarre spatial expression of a very specific programming language.  More or less.

New from Spry Fox Games: ALPHABEAR

I got sick.  I thought I was just too sick to ride an exercise bike or be at work, but upon arriving home I realized I'm also too sick to even play Shadowrun.  All that reading would require me to sit upright, instead of maintaining the horizontality my body is so desperately craving right now.

Luckily, there are games on my phone!  Spry Fox sent me an e-mail just today to let me know about their new game Alphabear.  It is a word game, which automatically puts it in the "my jam" column, and a "make words out of a small set of letters" game, which gives me a kind of home court advantage.

Alphabear presents you with a field of squares; some are letters, some are bears, some are hidden.  You can make a word out of any letters you can see.  As soon as you make a word, the letters that comprised it will turn into bears, which are adorable in all the sizes and shapes the game presents.

Alphabear is never unpleasant to look at.

As is often the case with Spry Fox games, there are some neat computer things happening to make the largest possible bears.  This is something that the giant nerd in me appreciates, quietly, in the background.

The giant nerd in me also likes being rewarded for making giant words.  Plus, the giant-word-making also makes giant bears, which yields its own rewards.  The bar on any given board is set pretty low in comparison to the scores I've been able to achieve so far, but Alphabear does a good job of making that feel like nice things are happening to you all the time.

They wanted 4500 points to unlock The Golden Egg there.
I scored almost that much with just bears.

Alphabear is clever and amusing, without making unreasonable demands of the player.  This is more or less exactly what I want from a phone game.  It is free to download and play, which is nice; it employs free-to-play monetization strategies, which is less nice.  But, since we're not yet flourishing in a post-work society, this unpalatable necessity can be overlooked.  (You can also pay $4.99 once to rid the game of the "wait to play" drawback entirely.  I opted to do this almost immediately.)

It more than makes up for the freemium bullshit by limiting its "social media appeal" to a cute "bearphrase" at the end of each game.  Whenever your end-of-game reward reveals a bear (which has been every game so far), that bear will take a photo of itself and supply a Mad Libs sentence, with the blanks filled in by words you made that round.

The game does not know whether or not the result makes sense.
This is a good thing.

Alphabear is available (for free!) on Google Play (Android) and the iTunes Appstore (iOS).  Don't not check it out!

Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut

My recent gametime has been positively dominated by Shadowrun: Dragonfall.  I picked it up a while ago as part of a bundle, probably? and didn't really give it a go until I was reminded of it by a different Shadowrun game popping up on Steam.

In past Shadowrun runs (da doo ron ron), I've always gone for the Street Samurai.  I usually try to wrest as much uniqueness and novelty from games as I can, since I know I'm probably only going to be visiting briefly.  Much in the way that it behooves one to order a Bloomin' Onion to get the real Outback Steakhouse experience, I would roll up a Street Samurai, because I don't already know what that is.

This time I went with a Decker, the character class that realizes the Neuromancer hacker dream--data jacks being incorporated into your body for Reasons, computer systems somehow recontextualized as physical reality that can only be rendered in wireframe, the whole nine yards.  This appears to have been a good choice!  Staying somewhat clear of physical combat steered me into more of a charismatic and intelligent role, which (as it happens) is a good way to open up a bunch of interesting little plot widgets along the way.

Chiatra, Elven Decker.

The plot is good, but not great.  So far I've taken away a feeling similar to a well-executed tabletop session, helped in large part by the conversation/decision trees that account for your character traits.  My Decking skills have whisked me past more than a few encounters that would have been difficult to manage otherwise, and Charisma often gave me nonviolent solutions much more satisfying than the tactical combat version would have been.

Every time I interact with Shadowrun's combat, I feel like there's something I'm missing.  There's plenty of information about what's going to happen (hit likelihood percentages display above enemies, and so on), but my plans don't usually work out as I expect them to.  My team gets hit too often, the enemies don't get hit often enough, and the whole time there's a sense that that wouldn't be the case if I was just better at it.

At the same time, I often find myself thinking that the combat is too simple.  Every encounter seems to revolve around cover.  If you have cover, great; if you don't, Game Over.  Obtaining cover for yourself and denying your enemies the protection of cover is so crucial to success that I feel robbed of creativity.  Why waste time "exploring your options" when there's one optimal solution that will yield victory?  Nevertheless, I do like tactical combat, and I have a good time running those scenarios despite the potential for falling into a rut.

One thing I notice (though I can't say for sure whether it's something I like or dislike) is that the other options in a conversation or decision are still visible, even when you don't meet the requirements to take them.  This serves as a kind of advertisement for the replay value on offer.  "Imagine how things could have gone if you had enough medical training to mention the NPC's chronic illness by name!"

At the same time, the game has to transmit all the important information to all players regardless of their character choices, so more often than not the "different paths" all circle back to the same dialogue path anyway.  Will I remember enough about a specific encounter to get anything out of that difference if I rolled up a new character and played through the whole game again?  I'm not sure.  I do like having an idea of what I could have seen, though.  Really I think I'd want a "check this out" option to show me the other dialogue without needing to play through the hours and hours of (probably still fun!) content I'd need to to unlock it with another character.

One quibble: for a game so dependent on text and reading, the lack of options for the font size is frustrating.  Always has been, with the Shadowrun games--it's the reason I never played Shadowrun Returns for very long.  My PC gaming setup is on a large-screen TV in the living room, which admittedly is not ideal for text, but I've seen plenty of other games (even less text-heavy games!) that let players bump up the font size on the UI.

However.  However.  I've been having a great time with it!  I've put in twelve hours already, and I'll be happy to put in as many more as it takes to see Chiatra through her trials and tribulations.  The Berlin imagined in Shadowrun: Dragonfall gives just enough context to get you interested, but not so much that you get bored clicking through pages and pages of data.  Most of the information about the world is transmitted through conversations, so it's much less "In the year 2030, the great states of man..." and much more "goddamn anarchy can be a real pain in the ass sometimes".  Which somehow makes it easier to fill in the blanks with my own imagination.

Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut costs $15.  That's less than any of these hamburgers.  And you'll take a hell of a lot more away from the game than the burger.

Historical Review: 32-oz. Nalgene bottle vs. Dell Inspiron 560

I used to write a column called DRUM: Dubious Reviews of Unrelated Materials.  You know, like how you'd compare two video cards' specs to see which was the better buy?  Except instead of two of the same thing, it was two things I had no business comparing to one another.  Like a plastic sport bottle, and a computer!

See below??

---

32-oz. Nalgene bottle vs. Dell Inspiron 560

I got both of these at around the same time, although I must admit to a bit of experience with the Nalgene before I pulled the trigger and bought myself the Dell. For all intents and purposes related to reviewing, though, limiting ourselves to the psychic context of their receipt, the products came to me in the same beat. Just beginning to feel I have the money to make commercial expressions, and looking to fill needs I didn't actually have before the money came.

So. Which was the better buy?

If we look at it just in terms of dependability and value for the money, there's no question: the bottle is miles ahead of the Dell. The Dell's CPU, vital to the performance of the machine, works in temperatures from 5 degrees to 74.1 degrees Celsius--basically, if water stops being a liquid, the Dell's going to be in trouble. The plastic the Nalgene is made of, on the other hand, runs from negative 40 degrees, where Fahrenheit and Celsius are magically the same temperature, to water's boiling point. You can brew coffee in the Nalgene; I'd feel uncomfortable putting my coffee too near the Dell.

Life expectancy, too, is a concern; the Dell was at the cheap end of the mid-range for these sorts of machines, and even the top of the line is going to be painfully obsolete in a few years. The Nalgene, on the other hand, almost can't become obsolete. The original line of bottles was introduced in the '70s, and I am a thousand percent certain that someone out there is still using one of the first production run. It's getting on to the point that there may be some heirloom water bottles trickling down through the generations. Assuming I don't run it over with a tractor or something, I'll be able to use this bottle long after the Dell is relegated to data storage.

There are lots of other places the Dell falls short. It's a faceless black rectangle, while the Nalgene is a pleasantly translucent blue cylinder andincludes graduated markings to let you know how much stuff's inside. The Nalgene comes in eight colors to the Dell's five, and it's dishwasher-safe, in the top rack. Sure, you can cram almost thirty times the volume into the Dell's case, but only when the functioning bits aren't in there, and then you lose a lot of the point of having a Dell in the first place. The Dell almost certainly had a bigger impact on the environment during its production than the Nalgene, and the Dell's carbon footprint only gets bigger as it's used. The Nalgene has no moving parts and requires no energy input whatever; its carbon footprint stays where it is. Good job, Nalgene.

However. Dependability and value aren't the only concerns when you're buying a computer, are they? After all, if that was all we wanted, we could just buy a huge chunk of rock and call it good. What I wanted from the Dell was exactly what I got; a clean, shiny box that plays my music and videos and makes games look great.

It makes everything look great, in fact, following the installation of a shiny new graphics card. That's where the Dell wins big points: sure, it won't last as long, and it doesn't hold up to the elements in any capacity, but it'll do what I want it to for as long as I need it to. And it's doing it very well indeed.

Graphics are astounding. Even the simple things are drastically improved over the laptop I bought in college, and for half the price. HD video looks fantastic, and I can--for the first time I can remember--put the graphics setting on my games to High without even a hiccup. The Dell could, if I let it, handle 7.1-channel audio; the best the Nalgene can offer me is a kind of woobly echo sound when I tip it up to take a drink. That's not even getting into the freebies that came with it. Best Buy gave me a year's warranty, six months of antivirus protection (although, since it's biologically inactive, the Nalgene is its own virus protection), and a free photo album, of all things. All Nalgene gave me was a twist-off plastic cap, and that because the bottle's mostly useless without one.

So. Dependability and value are off the table, and the shiny graphics and games are out. We're left with basic usability issues. You'd think this would be a clean sweep for the Nalgene; what's easier than a bottle? But anymore computers are ubiquitous enough that they're almost as easy to use. For my purposes, there are three major categories here: setup, day-to-day usage, and special circumstances.

Nalgene wins for setup. I didn't have to do anything; there was nothing for me to do. I had the bottle, and therefore it was set up. The Dell required unpacking, hooking up cables, installing a graphics card, setting up operating system profiles, registration, antivirus setup and registration, and some further optional setup I declined to perform because at that point I couldn't be bothered.

For day-to-day usage, Nalgene actually falls a little bit short: it's less complicated, but also less interesting. I use it to make cold-brew tea at work, and I like that it's big enough that I don't have to do so more than once a day. It's a very "set it and forget it" type of usage. The Dell is active and exciting and always changing. I can watch movies and shows, and frequently do, and if I ever get sick of any of the games I've got I can switch to another or, thanks to Steam, throw a few bucks out there and get something completely new. (Or, as suits my particular tastes, something completely old that I didn't have the hardware to experience when it was new.) The biggest point for Dell, though, is that I have never once spilled its contents on myself while I was using it. The same widemouth design that makes it possible to get my cold-brew tea bags in there also makes it extremely likely that the tea will end up on my shirt.

Finally, special circumstances. Specifically, the circumstance of being drunk. This is where the Nalgene and the Dell come out about even, and even get some synergy going. With its wide mouth and twist-on cap, the Nalgene is perfect for mixing and even shaking delicious imbibables to slip me into our special circumstances. Then the Dell takes over, letting my heightened idiocy take its full expression on our vast and anonymous Internet with its games and blogs and so on. Both products have there dangers here: drunk-Delling runs the risk of putting something ridiculous or embarrassing on the Internet for all to see, and the Nalgene will put as much of your drink on you as in you if you're not paying attention. But overall, the experience is pleasant enough to come back again and again, stumbling onto game after game of online combat, the other combatants made tolerable largely through the soft-focus lens an evening's tipple brings.

So. Overall. Dell's shinier and more fun, the Nalgene is more dependable. And less costly. I could buy forty to fifty of these and not match the money I spent on the Dell. But then, what am I going to do with fifty Nalgene bottles? At its heart, the Nalgene was a purchase of convenience; I was sick of buying Gatorade just because it came in a one-quart vessel I could make tea in. Besides which, after the fifth such purchase I'd've spent enough to buy a Nalgene anyway. And if I'm going for unnecessary trinkets to make my life a little easier, the Dell's miles ahead. There's so much crap to do crammed into that shiny, soulless black box that I'm hard-pressed to think of a reason to slink back into my cozy home office. Given the option, of course, I'll take both together, thank you much, but if I had to choose just one...well, there are a thousand other one-quart vessels out there, but only one shiny box that brings my TV to its full potential.

Yay Dell!

Enter Skot! A LITANY OF GAMES

It's possible--no, likely--that I have a problem.  Not that I'm not enjoying it!  I don't even think it's doing me harm, per se, necessarily, as such.  So what's the problem, then?  Let's take a look at the games I played and/or bought this weekend.  (So far.  It's not over yet.)

• Anomaly 2 - Some kind of tower defense game?  I think?  Bought it because it was $3 and could be played on my phone.  Played the first mission, said "well, it's not exactly tower defense, but that's definitely the starting point," stopped playing because I was getting tired.
• Don't Move - The Humble Store had it on sale for fifty-something-percent off, but I went and bought it at full price on my phone anyway.  I had the suspicion that this was a game I could technically complete by leaving it running without doing anything.  It did not disappoint in that regard, as I found out by "playing" while playing Anomaly 2.
• Besiege - Finally!  It's been on my wish list for ages.  I came into a Steam wallet card, so I finally snagged it.  Played the first four or so levels.  I keep needing to take a break every level or two because I don't understand complicated mechanisms all that well, and the game is nothing but intentionally constructing complicated mechanisms to get things done.
• Borderlands 2 - There's 925 hours of play time on my Steam account for this game.  I added one of those hours today, because of nostalgia.
• Tales from the Borderlands - The source of that nostalgia!  Turns out immersing myself in a story set on Pandora made me yearn to also just run around and shoot shit on Pandora.  Whoops.
• NARUTO SHIPPUDEN: Ultimate Ninja STORM Revolution - I'm not responsible for the capitalization on that.  (I can only dream of being so wildly irresponsible with capital letters.)  Having watched all of the first Naruto series on Netflix very recently, I couldn't really pass this up when it was even mildly on sale.
• Nuclear Throne - Also purchased with the Steam card.  A roguelike, plus mutations, plus guns.  I'm not sure it should remain legal to produce games this finely tuned to a person's interests. That said, I only played it for about two minutes after the initial download, so...?
• 7 Grand Steps, Step 1: What Ancients Begat - This came as part of a Humble Bundle. Given that it is a "board-like" game with a coin-and-slot interface, I was not expecting to spend more than a minute or so checking it out.  Was proven wrong after four hours.  Whoops.
• MASSIVE CHALICE - I like this one!  I'll probably write about it in more detail.
• World's Dawn - It's like Harvest Moon, but promises to be different?  I backed it on Kickstarter, which just succeeded today or yesterday.  Also a demo was available, so I checked it out super briefly.
• Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Director's Cut - I watched a video for a different Shadowrun game, and that put me in the mood to play the other Shadowrun game I own, but then I realized I've started that one twice and didn't get very far either time but also didn't remember enough that I wouldn't have to start from the beginning again, but then I realized I had this one, so whew.  Whew!  I wanted to play "something tactical", and I got just that.

So...eleven?  Eleven games played for sure.  I feel like I'm forgetting one or two that aren't immediately look-up-able in my Steam and/or purchase history.  It's difficult to remember what I thought or felt about most of them, at the time.  Is that awful?  Is it awful that I own more games than I could possibly play, even if I were to quit my job right now and do nothing but play my existing collection, and not buy any more games, which if we're all being honest with ourselves was never really under consideration anyway?  I think possibly it is, but again, not really in a way that's hurting anyone.

But! That's not to say I couldn't be trying harder to extract something worthwhile from this heap.  I have thoughts!  And... opinions!  Maybe I could develop them through writing?  Maybe I could hone my capacity for insight to a keen edge, and slice poor purchasing decisions to ribbons!  Maybe I could just have an excuse to write.

Who knows!  The point is, if there's anything I cane meaningfully review, it's probably all these games I have lying around.  Expect writing about games?  I'd say expect Let's Plays and such of games, but I've never been super clear on how people capture the video for those, and I honestly don't want to deal with the (probably minimal!) hassle of getting all that set up.  So expect writing.  About games.

Yes. Good.

Beer Reviews, Part One

The Crucial Origin Story

Skot and I just moved to the Chicago area and boy do the grocery stores have a lot of beer available! Even more than Ohio, which is way more than upstate New York, or Utah, or Tennessee last I was in any of those areas.  Skot no longer drinks, but when called upon he is willing to help me with my beverage decisions and experiences.  It turns that even when you have to give something up, you don't suddenly hate everything about it!? Also he can smell, and I can't, and that may or may not matter (I wouldn't know).

So:

I took advantage of the increasingly-popular mix-and-match six pack option at the grocery store, to try to dive into this sea of booze without sinking a bunch of money into potentially unpalatable liquid. No one but me can drink this beer, so I need to choose wisely! (At least until I find some friends.)

On July 3rd, to celebrate the national holiday (I guess) and not having to lug any more stuff from Ohio anymore (definitely) I tried three of my six chosen bottles. Below are my very unprofessional, non-connoisseur impressions.  Disclaimer: if you can't already tell, neither of us are "beer experts," which I'm sure is a thing that exists.  Probably don't put much faith, if any, in our experiences.

Off Color Brewing: Scurry

Skot pointed this one out because look at that art! It includes both rats and bees, which are two of the best living things! It's got a hand drawn feel to it that is incredibly endearing! Even the name is cute! But what is the beer like, though?

On the bottle it calls itself a "dark honey ale," which reminded me of basswood and buckwheat honeys, which I greatly enjoy. However it turns out that the "dark honey" in question just means honey plus molasses, which is a little less exciting but probably way cheaper to make.  In fact, the beer has so much going on that the overall effect is...kind of bland.  It's a dark, but strangely lightweight, thin beer. There are "summer porters" that have this watered-down nature and I'm not much of a fan. It's 5.3% abv seems pretty average as well.  The local brewery who produces this beer kindly listed all the ingredients (even the "secret" ones) and I'm no expert but it seems like there are too many. Four kinds of malts ranging from pils to chocolate, three kinds of hops, the aforementioned honey and molasses, and oats are all piled into this beverage for a cumulative effect that is reminiscent of Newcastle Brown Ale or possibly Yuengling. Skot's sniff test concurred with this assessment. Which kind of stinks.  I think the good people at Off Color Brewing were shooting for more????

Bottom line: probably not going to purchase again. It's not overly sweet like some of these kinds of beers, but it didn't really stand out or taste actively great to me. Sorry, Scurry! I got another beer from this brewery though for part two of the taste test, so maybe I'll like that better?

Two Brothers: Domain DuPage

Two Brothers, another Chicago brewery, is not as interested in giving away its secrets as Off Color Brewing.  I find the graphic design on all of their products pleasing, and the colors used in this label probably prepped me in some unconscious way for the warm, red tone of the beer itself.  So how does this brewery describe this "French country ale"? As "food friendly," inspired by an extended visit to France, and amber in color.  Thanks, Two Brothers, for that insightful information! All snark aside, though, this tasted exactly as I expected. A bit sweet, a little more boozy than Scurry (5.9% abv), overall pleasant and something I probably will drink again. Skot was no help at all with this one, as his whole reaction to it was: "It smells like beer."  I may have been eating when I tried this beer so I can probably say it isn't food unfriendly but because of the sweetness it wouldn't be my first choice for many meals.

Goose Island: Honkers Ale

Uncannily similar in color to the DuPage, this beer was my favorite of the three. (And I don't think it's just because it was the last one.)  I have had Goose Island before and I get the sense that it produces on a much larger scale than the other two breweries (though I have seen Two Brothers before as well). Again with the red notes on the label to possibly indicate the color of the beer.  And also a goose's head in case you can't remember who made this beverage.  It describes itself as an "old English style bitter," which even though I am not familiar with that type of beer is what made me want to try it, and then it throws a lot of what I would consider a grab bag of beer descriptors out there, like "fruity hop aroma" and "rich malt." I'm sure that means something to someone but Goose Island, you had me at bitter.

Skot's sniff test yielded a "bitter but very mild scent" report.  On the first go it was bubbly and light, and much less sweet than the previous beer.  The aftertaste hit me some moments later, and it was bitter as promised!  I wish I had more to say about the flavors that could convey how enjoyable this drink was, but I can't. It wasn't even that alcoholic for a beer, clocking in at 4.3% abv.  It was just pleasant as heck.  So unless you have some kind of opposition to Goose Island (I think I've met at least one person who does) I think I recommend checking this one out!

To Be Continued

There are still three beers in my fridge from this week's purchase. I can't predict right now if I will do them in one batch like these or individually, but this was fun. (For me.) 'Til then, this is Chelsea signing off!