TES: Arena

What I really wanted to play was Morrowind, but before that I wanted to get some historical perspective from TES Arena and Daggerfall.

I guess I am still in the begging parts. I have a level 5 mage now, wandering around in towns, castles and wilderness trying to find something to do and advance my character.

There just seems to be so little incentive to continue. I usually don't consider myself a graphics playboy, but I think Arena's graphics were quite bad already back when the game was released, let alone now. I have hard time trying to immerse myself to the world, as in thinking it is a real world and not just a collection of similar looking boxy buildings and cardboard cutout characters. I have much easier time immersing myself to old games like System Shock, Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate 2.

So far I seem to be running in circles, just doing some mundane FedEx subquests which give me a little gold and experience, but they all are so similar and feels like the game is creating them on the fly, ie. there is an endless supply of them. Go to A to get a quest, go to B, and get back to A for the reward, within the time limit. Sometimes I go to wilderness and wander around in an empty world, sometimes getting to some building (dungeon) where I wander around in a twisty maze fighting enemies which may respawn out of nowhere just in front of my eyes. And then fight them by letting them get stuck to walls and corners so that I can hit them and they can't hit me.

I thought I'd get some real quests by going to palaces and asking the king's there, but so far they are just telling me to go away. Do i have to check all palaces to get actual quests?

Also the controls annoy me still. I reach for WASD all the time and then remember that I have to use the cursor keys to move around, and the way you swing your sword with the mouse is very cumbersome and non-intuitive. Also casting spells feels rather slow and cumbersome.

What usually keeps me interested into old CPRGs is the "develop your character"-aspect (the stats). i was expecting Arena and Daggerfall be just the right CRPGs for that, but so far I'm not really feeling the love there either. I can't really tell if my character is better now than on level 1, I still die rather quickly if an enemy is able to hit me in a fight, and my spells feel mostly useless and uninteresting. Does this part get better later on? I sometimes check mage's guild for new spells to buy, but the ones which sound anything interesting are still far above my budget. I think I still have to do 1000 more FedEx quests before having money to buy them.

One neat thing is the way how you navigate in towns, ie. people will tell you the general direction of the store or inn, and when you get close enough, people actually write the exact location to your map. Nice touch.

I checked also Daggerfall, but it just seems a bit polished version of Arena, with similar cumbersome controls. I was getting similarly bored as with Arena already in the starting dungeon, and the sword controls felt even worse than in Arena.

Maybe I'll still give Arena (and Daggerfall) a chance, but my patience is becoming thin, I am just bored playing them. Hopefully the same will not happen with Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, but the little I've played Morrowind managed to immerse me much better.

I gave up on Dragon Ave Inquisition. Collecting glass shards for a game just did not interest me. I thought Dragon Ave 2 was better. I thought it a poor ending for the series just like Mass Effect 3.

Also quit Panzer Elite Gog version as I could not get it to work with any mods. Have not starter Theresa Witcher 3 yet, will wait for the final version all patched before I start it. But since I had a quick look it may qualify here.

Cheers

Quality games I abandoned, not necessarily in 2015:

1) Ultima VII: it's wholly the fault of the interface. The font fits the setting, but is impractical and strains eyes. The scrolling is jerky, contributing to eye strain. There's too much fiddling with the inventory. The combat is very confusing; I don't even know what's going on until I either die or the enemies are dead – like those cartoon brawls where all you see is a cloud of dust and fists. All those things are putting me off, even though I know that the story and gameplay are top-notch.

2) Ultima Underworld: I know it laid the foundation of the genre, but the actual playing screen is too small, and I can't shake the feeling there are later games that do all those things much better.

3) Myst Riven: I keep coming back to it, and I keep giving up. I wish the game would give me just a bit of guidance, and I don't want to spoil anything for myself. I can travel the length of the starting island full of these strange contraptions. I fiddle around with knobs and levers, but they produce no substantial effect. I don't even know where to start – close to the beginning or further away? Where are the actual puzzles and what will I achieve by solving them? The first Myst was pretty straightforward in that regard.

4) Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver: respawning enemies and bad camera put me off.

5) Deadly Premonition: a surprisingly terrific game, but recently it's started crashing to desktop randomly. Since I can only save at fixed spots (telephones), I'm losing 15 minutes of progress at a time, and it happens often.

6) Little Big Adventure: obtuse goals, the character is difficult to control, weird save system, and enemies respawn. Just too archaic to be enjoyable.

7) Fallout Tactics: Jagged Alliance 2 does everything better.

8) Knock Knock: can't figure out the mechanics of the game. There aren't any concrete resources for this game either on the 'Net.

9) King of Dragon Pass: don't have the time to study the manual in-depth, and that's necessary to play the game correctly.

This really benefited being one of those games when you only had a few to play back in the day. Now it's a bit tough to put up with it's crap. You have no idea if your on the right track or just wasting time defeating the same enemies for no reason. The more you work out what your supposed to be doing the more areas open up and more powers you get, quite rewarding in that aspect. But definitely not without a lot of pain to get there.

There's another game which is very similar in that regard – Shadow Man. Only it's more enjoyable since you can save whenever you want, and enemies only respawn when you leave the level and come back, not when you quit the game and reload. So it doesn't feel as a slog.

Soul Reaver 2 fixed most of the problems the first game has and is a masterpiece of an ARPG imho.

Just a quick thing about LOG that maybe you don't know if you haven't played the style of game in the "old days"...the number one thing is learning the combat strafe shuffle- it's more important than gear. It's all about pulling enemies, one at a time, when possible back to spot where you have the space to circle around. Time it right and you rarely even get hit. Maybe you already know that though, in which case...yeah maybe your gear and skills really do need work. But come back to it, i think it's worth it as a game.

Well I had to learn that the hard way - do you remember the room with 4 or even 6 knights that you are trapped in level 2 or maybe it was 3, and the goal is to make them fall thru the middle square (unfortunately they fall on level 4 but there is no full happiness :D). Anyway I managed to kill 2/3 spiders with the door trick - stab/cast a spell then close the door and repeat, but the last time I was like on 50% health on my main strikers and before me was a room with 2 additional spiders, and exactly when I was prepared to take them down, a third unknown to me at that moment came from behind and sandwiched and butchered me, so I rage quit and uninstall for later. May be if I had concentradet only to axes on the minotaur and only in ice magic on the caster, and didn't put anything on dodge, as the walkthroughs suggested, and the game was set on 'easy' I would enjoy it much, much more.

I played LoG on "Easy", and you don't need to strafe to kill most enemies on that difficulty. However, what caused me to quit were the timed puzzles where you have to run/move quickly in a perfect pattern, requiring quick reflexes even after you've figured out what you're supposed to do.

Papers, Please

Intuition told me that I would not like this game so I wasn’t going to buy it but due to the game’s high popularity I spontaneaously decided to pick it up during a GOG Insomnia sale last year. Note to self: Don’t buy games just because the vast majority says it’s a cool game, especially not if it’s the younger Steam crowd who like anything that smells of relative novelty, articifial weirdness and forced originality. Papers Please does admittedly have a novelty factor but it wears off very quickly if this isn’t your type of game to begin with. After all the years I’ve been playing games and considering only I know my preferences in detail it makes little sense to rely on the recommendations of an entire community. Many people can go wrong as far as your personal taste is considered so rely on your gut feeling instead. If you don’t have that instinct, better develop it because you’ll eventually need it in RL. Once in a blue moon, a game that I thought would be crappy completely surprises me and I’m thankful to get such recommendations from a select few individuals but Papers Please is not such a title.

After about one in-game week, I killed off my entire Arstotzkan family because I accidentally unchecked the boxes for buying medicine. So technically speaking, I did get one of the 20 endings but I don’t consider that finishing the game. It’s supposed to run for 30 days which is said to take around 5 hours of playtime. I spent 1,5 hours to get to day 8 or 9 and then quit and uninstalled the game because I was not having any fun with it whatsoever and after that time mark it is practically impossible for a game of this type to become fun later on.

The gameplay starts off easy with simple tasks, check the passport date and issuing city etc but every day the number of things you need to keep track of increases. This would be manageable if there wasn’t time pressure which gets worse every day because the gameplay elements don’t rotate as new ones are introduced, they simply accumulate. In order to enjoy this game, you have to be the multitasking secretary type who can manage many simple tasks in a timely fashion without making mistakes and (more importantly) without suffering brain damage. There’s nothing wrong with people like that and someone has to do these jobs but it’s definitely not for me, not in RL and even less so in a game. The closest job to Papers Please I’ve held in RL was as a security guard where I had to patrol an entire industrial site by myself and also had to work at the reception desk, check people’s IDs, open and close gates by remote control, answer phones, investigate and deactivate false alarms, connect calls and monitor various systems. None of those tasks were difficult by themselves but when you have to keep track of many things, it can get stressful. I would not want to do this type of work again, not even in a game. I’m more into doing exactly one interesting thing at a time rather than 10 uninteresting things.

Screwing up can be entertaining in some managerial sims but in Papers Please, it’s just aggravating because mistakes translate to lost income and if you don’t have money to take care of your family, it’s game over long before you reach day 30. You have some leeway to let people through who legally wouldn’t have the right and you can do this 3 times a day without getting a penalty. This is perhaps the most interesting part of the game as it has some story consequences. However, if you’re already struggling and let 3 people through whom you shouldn’t have due to your lack of multitasking skills then you won’t have that leeway, meaning you’ll miss out on some possible occurrences and endings.

In terms of graphics and sound, the game is objectively crap and by far the most ugly game in my entire collection. I’m a big fan of pixel art when it’s good like in Halfway or the 320x240 AGS adventures by Wadjet and a number of other indie studios. But Papers Please is just very ugly in terms of its art style and quality which has nothing to do with the resolution.

The saving system is excellent and can be regarded as a real silver lining. Whenever you screw up a day, you can always revert to an earlier date of your choice. Savegames progress as a tree so multiple failed attempts can revert to the same earlier savegame. This tree system is great for people who want to experience all the different endings without having to start the game many times over. If Papers Please was a permadeath roguelike, it would be 100% worthless as a game and I wouldn’t even bother to speak about it at all.

I’ll not play this again as I didn’t have any fun and found the gameplay increasingly aggravating. It’s not for me and I would have regretted playing this even if it was for free. Nevertheless, I hope other games of this type can use the excellent save system found in Papers Please.


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Little Kings story

just didn't like it for some reason.

I got up to the Nom Nom Nom guy - beat him and then decide i did not want to play it ever

Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II

Bugs up the Khyber and unbalanced to hell. Restarted five times and could not find the single upgrade path the developers must have tested that worked. The most broken game I can ever remember playing, which is quite a shame, as the parts that did work were quite enjoyable.

Here's hoping the upcoming Complete build thing is not alpha like the original games obviously were.

Darkseed

By far the worst adventure game I've ever played and I've played quite many. The graphics, eerie atmosphere and Giger art direction are great but the game design renders Darkseed pretty much unplayable. What breaks the game completely are the many dead ends you can maneuver yourself into, and there are no logical clues that will help you avoid those dead ends.
The time of day changes as you play and if you don't do certain things at a certain time, you'll be screwed later on and there's no other option but to reload from a way earlier save. Add to that a 2 pixel sized object pixelhunt, worse than the one in Prisoner of Ice which at least has some logic to the placement of the object even if you can only discover it by sweeping the scene with the cursor.

Darkseed also has some interface mechanic issues where it's not entirely logical when to use the "walk to" vs the "use" cursor. I'm glad that I downloaded this on an abandonware site because paying money for this broken game would be a bigger crime. I voted for Darkseed on the GOG community wishlist but I now wish I could unvote - as for Darkseed 2, I heard that one is much more fair and a better game overall so that one might deserve a vote. Both games aren't for sale anywhere at the moment.

Unless you have the divine patience to start the game many times over to notice what you need to pick up and do in which place and exact time, stay away from this game. Fortunately, I realized the problems fairly early into the game. Once I checked a walkthrough to verify my suspicions, I quit the game because at that point I could see that I'm not missing out on anything here but a very frustrating experience. The Giger art made me curious but it's not worth it just for that, better to play Shadow of the Comet and from what I hear, Darkseed 2 is miles better.


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If you're struggling with cash, there's a little trick/exploit you can use: you can pay for food and heating on alternate days, i.e. buy food but don't pay for heating on one day, forget about food and pay the heating on the next. Your family will go hungry/cold for a day, but there won't be any long-term consequences, and you'll save lots of cash. Medicine should be bought as soon as possible, though. But even without that trick I managed to pay all my bills every day and save up enough money (legally) to move into a better flat.