Soooo. What was it… ah yeah, the thing! Yeah. With the planets and stars and groups of dreadnoughts firing barrages of laser death at each other. That thing. Endless Space! Did you know that it went into beta just a couple of paltry hours ago? You should really check it out on Steam and pay a visit to its homepage to see why it’s causing a fuss. Having played a few hours of the previous alpha version, I can surely say that this could very well be the 4X space strategy game that people have been waiting for since Master of Orion 2 - that is to say, it’s completely turn-based with an interesting 3-phase tactical combat system. Just look at it – even at this early stage, it has a UI that makes a strategy geek like me quiver in delight…

The developers Amplitude Studios are taking the time and trouble to interact with their fanbase as much as possible with a system they are calling “games2gether”, allowing fans to have a direct say on what the devs focus their efforts on at any given time. It’s an ambitious way of doing things but it certainly seems to be paying off so far, and is just another example of the increasingly popular trend of involving the players at an early stage of the development process.

Today’s beta update adds a cargo bay’s worth of bug fixes and tweaks, online multiplayer functionality, and the remaining 3 missing races, taking the total up to 8. All in all, it’s really quite good, and should only get better as the beta rolls along.

Okay. Let’s get back into things with a predictable start. Diablo 3 is out, and many yays were heard across the multiverse! I have it. It’s a good game and I’m enjoying playing it. There’s no doubt that it’s polished with the usual addiction-causing Blizzard chemicals and it’ll absolutely keep me playing for many more hours than what I’ve already put into it. The inevitable “but”, though, goes like this: It feels more like My First ARPG than a true Diablo. I find it hard to overlook the dumbed-down character stats and slow-paced itemisation. I don’t think the method of drip-feeding new item mods into the game really works, and playing through on Normal difficulty becomes snoreworthy after your first playthrough. Then there’s that always-online-Battle.net-DRM-error37 thing, which is a whole internet meme in itself…

In the end, I’ve endorsed it by buying the game, so I guess I’ve partly signed away my right to complain. Still, its insidiousness – and terrible reliability to date – are a considerable downer. If I had to give D3 a score, it wouldn’t get any higher than 85%.

Fortunately, in a related and also completely predictable topic of conversation, Torchlight 2 should soon be pecking its way out of the Fabergé egg that Runic Games seem to be incubating it in. Briefly, I played a few hours of the beta, and I think it’ll turn out to be as good as, if not better, than Blizzard’s behemoth. I know enough to say that it’ll be completely unpossible to get more value for money in any game this year – assuming you like clicking monsters to make them drop shiny items to kill bigger monsters with. And who doesn’t, really?

I won’t crowd this post out any more – I’ll leave the rest of what I wanted to say for next time, to try and give me an excuse not to fall into a weird pocket dimension that apparently doesn’t have access to blogs. Notes to self: Endless Space, Mordor: Chronicles, Guild Wars 2. Possibly Definitely marmots.

Presumably as a reference to the 15th anniversary of the Diablo series, Blizzard will be releasing Diablo III to the general public of Earth on Tuesday, May the 15th. Fwee! Just another two months of nail-chewing to endure before we can all finally get our hands on the latest entry to the series that defined the term “lootfest”.

With it being such a short time away*, it makes me feel somewhat less impatient at not having gotten into the beta.  I’m hyped!

* Note: 2 months in “Blizzard time” is barely enough to have a nice cup of tea in, so yes, for them it IS a short time.

The main goals for this stage were to get combat working and to allow the player character to equip a selection of weird and wonderful items that are magically placed into his possession by the use of arcane debugging magic. I’d been at a dead stop for a couple of weeks after reaching the dreaded point where I had to formulate a reasonable way of calculating damage done by player and monster attacks… but several days of concentrated braincell burning, spreadsheet wrangling, and interface jockeying has paid off!

Barring a few rough edges, combat and equipment is working, and the video below illustrates how the flow of combat is displayed. As you could probably guess, bloodstains with numbers inside indicate damage dealt, a skull indicates the swing killed a monster, and the small diagonal slashes indicates a miss. Also present are shields, which indicate that you (or a monster) landed a hit successfully but, due to high defence, did no damage. Didn’t catch any of those in this short clip – but they’re there.

There are still rough edges, the most serious being the character’s uncanny ability to move and escape from combat at any point – but nothing some further hacking and bodging can fix!

Tomorrow I’ll be setting up a new level and giving the monsters some varied, real stats to properly check that the combat formula gives satisfactory results (and at least partly matches up with my test spreadsheet). Unless there are signs of serious problems I won’t spend too long balancing and creating real content at this stage, though… that lovely task will come much later. 

Zolyx’s Game Music Monday #22: Kate Z. – CityBomber (PsytroniKateZoid remix)

I like to understand the roots of a track, even if it’s only so that I can include a bit of artwork to go with the song in question – and after some tentative research, I couldn’t identify what was going on with City Bomber. Did it refer to this game, a clone of Blitz? None of the emulator images I could find had music anything like what I was looking for… but then, after what in hindsight was an unnecessarily long road, I came across Kate Z.‘s homepage and everything started fitting in much more smoothly!

So, there’s no need to keep passing over this fantastic remix any longer. It’s from the in-game tune of a game which was originally to have been published by Psytronik but switched labels to Visualize part-way through development – then never actually reached completion. It’s a shame, since the demo you can find through Games That Weren’t is really quite fun. Try it!

The remix itself is brilliant, featuring a sublime mix of samples both old and new alongside a great bit of drumming and guitar work that plays to the action and theme of the game nicely. Hopefully it pleases your ears – it surely does mine!

Tune in next week for more blippy beats! 

Tonight I can offer no more than a very brief writeup of my choice of tune, but that’s probably okay, ‘cos since when has anything I’ve written about this stuff ever been that engrossing? Cue the clicky vid!

This would of course be the haunting melody of The Armageddon Man‘s in-game theme, with this particular remix coming from Trace (also known as Kent Walldén) back in 2002. Off the top of my head, I think this is the first track I’ve featured that was originally composed by David Whittaker – why on earth it’s taken me so long to get to some of his fantastic compositions, I have no idea…

Against a backdrop of an increasing nuclear arsenal across the entire globe, your job in this game is actually quite freeform. Although you should technically try to keep the peace for as long as possible, you have complete control to intercept communications, order troops around between countries, authorise government requests to increase nuclear armaments, and watch as the results of your decisions come to fruition. An intriguing tactical strategy game from Martech back in 1987.

I had just embarked upon a new Roguelike adventure. On a whim, I had renewed my acquaintance with the rec.games.roguelike.announce newsgroup for the first time in an epoch, and lurking within were announcements relating to the usual long-standing suspects – epic saga ToME, fast-paced DoomRL, Rogue-with-mechs GearHead, classic Angband and its variants, and many others. But there were also lots of unfamiliar names, a testimony to the rate at which the Roguelike scene has expanded over recent times. Looking down the list, something drew me toward Brogue by Brian Walker – was it the clever name or the enigmatically plain description? Or was it just the fact it had an unusually solid-looking version number of 1.6? It’s impossible to say. Further investigation was required!

I was looking at a typical ASCII dungeon of hash signs and dots. But this dungeon had colour, variety, and life - not the usual console window of decidedly 8-colour visuals. Yes, yes – not judging a book by its cover is all well and good, but there’s no harm in making a good first impression, is there?

“Cool – there’s plants that block my vision. Let’s try walking through them. Oh, they grow back! Perfect for hiding in! Neat. Wait up, what’s that over there? Oh hello there, mouse control – this takes me back to playing Larn on the Amiga!” Good first impressions indeed. But there was plenty more to surprise me…

Brogue refines pretty much everything that was in the original Rogue. It takes what I thought I knew about Roguelikes and then tells me that actually, old boy, there’s a better way of doing this. Want to know what that monster is? Just hover the mouse pointer over it and you’ll get instant information. Want to move somewhere? Fine. Click and you’ll follow a highlighted path. If anything major happens along the way then the autopilot stops so that you can consider things. Although there are initially times when this mouse behaviour can get in the way, it quickly becomes intuitive.

“Oooh! Water! And it’s all shimmery ‘n stuff.” I had descended a couple of levels and was greeted by a softly coruscating patch of sky and cobalt blue tiles – an underground lake, just one of the several environmental additions that make the game more satisfying to explore. Walking through the shallow edge, I suddenly got zapped by a previously submerged eel and quickly hopped back to dry land. The eel milled around for a few turns in frustration at losing its prey, then disappeared, slinking back into its watery home.

You don’t just wander through a series of boring rooms – almost every place you go has some feature that can be beneficial or hazardous in the right circumstances. There are gaping chasms into which you can dive to quickly descend into the depths, or cross by frail rope bridges. There are sizzling lakes of lava. There are even boggy areas wreathed in explosive marsh gas. As nice as they are to look at, they also allow for new ways to attain victory in fights you might not ordinarily win – not prepared to go toe-to-toe with that Ogre quite yet? Lure him into a swamp and then casually sling a fireball somewhere into the gas. Boom! The fiery fallout will do the rest.

Meanwhile, after having found a reasonable number of Potions of Strength – vital attribute-boosting elixirs that let you effectively use heavier weapons and armour – I was feeling pretty confident. I ambled into a plain-looking room, and in the far corner was a pedestal with what seemed to be a key lying on it. How curious.

“What’s this for?” I thought to myself, strolling over and snatching the perfectly ordinary key from its resting place. A faint mechanical click punctuated the silence… and a portcullis clanked shut at the far doorway to imprison me. Just in front of it, a cleverly hidden vent started wafting out an unknown but toxic-looking vapour. It was a trap! But even as the gas eddied weirdly towards me, I remembered the spare scroll of teleportation I had in my pack. Breathing a word of thanks to the RNG, I read it and left the deathtrap behind. This time, quite by chance, I was lucky – but such luck can never be relied upon…

As you first play the game, you will inevitably get taken by surprise at these devious traps, and is isn’t always easy for veterans to recognise them either. The key I had narrowly avoided death for opened an iron door to a small treasure room stocked with tempting loot, but even then there was a trick: These rooms only let you take one item. And guess what? Sometimes one of those items will be another key… leading to another treasure room. Like the many other interesting things this game does, it’s a simple idea that genuinely adds to the fun – and to the tactical decisions you must make – as you explore.

There are many refinements, modernisations, and even surprises that Brogue has up its voluminous sleeves and to talk about it in any more detail would ruin a lot of the fun of discovery. For what my tuppence is worth, though, I’d very much recommend everyone – from the curious passer-by to the grizzled veteran – should give this one a go. It’s a good introduction to the permadeath world of Roguelikes, as well as being a great game in its own right. Wander over to the Brogue homepage to download it. Two thumbs up!