Game Review: The Wizard's Lair

The Wizard's Lair is an unambitious Rogue-like with simple graphics and few controls. It reminds me of the Castle of the Winds. You move in two dimensions, pick up items (armor, weapons, and useable items), and fight monsters through the classic method of moving into one's space. The game's simplicity is its weakness. There's very little to maintain interest over more than fifteen minutes to an hour, depending on one's penchant for Rogue-likes. After several hours of play, including several deaths, I reached the tenth of thirty levels. It was a maze of serpentine walls with a boss monster and a mini-boss named, for some reason, Daniel, a unique experience in the game so far. It was the first interesting encounter I'd had since starting at level one.

Simplicity makes the game easy to play, but also obstructs use. The few commands and the rudimentary inventory system get in the way of play. When you have to set down one of your items to pick up a new weapon, just to check if it's better than what you have, or to pick up and use an enchant weapon scroll, it gets in the way of fun play.

Strategy begins and ends with manipulating your position and waiting. If you use your turn moving into a square next to a monster, you'll take too much damage in the long run; if you move and time everything so that monsters move into a square next to you, you'll win. Beyond occasionally using scrolls that blast all monsters near you, that is the extent of tactics. At least Castle of the Winds had ranged spells.

The Wizard's Lair is available for pay-what-you-want at itch.io.

From the Moment of Sensation

"Stop!" she cried as I tossed the pills in my mouth with a swallow of water. I spit them out. "What? Are they the wrong pills?" I checked the bottle. "Or are they expired?" I looked closer. "Okay, I don't get it. What's wrong?"

"That's the thing," she said, "they're the right pills. My research has discovered that even minor emotions and sensations create intangible thinking creatures, spirits of a sort."

"Spirits?" I said. "That's--"

"Crazy, I know," she said. "There's really no better term for them, but they're real, provably real. And your taking painkillers would've, well, killed dozens or hundreds of pain spirits. It would've been mass murder."

"Well," I said, "accepting your hypothesis for now, I'm taking the pills as an antiinflammatory, not for any pain. Is that okay?"

She visibly relaxed. "Oh, yeah, that's fine."

I took some new pills and cleaned up the mess the old ones had become. "Hey, what about the pain I don't feel now but won't feel in the future because I've taken these?"

"Oh, that's not murder. That's like, I dunno, contraception," she said. "It's fine."

I felt the blood drain from my face. "What's wrong?" she said.

"I'm Catholic."

The Monsters and the Ghost

Fire Monster and Vampire were walking through the dark forest when they heard a spooky noise: "WhoooOOOooo!" The monsters stopped. "See what it is," said Fire Monster.

"You see what it is," said Vampire.

They both looked around and saw nothing. When they turned back, a ghost floated between them.

"Ahhhh!" said the monsters together. "Get it!"

Fire Monster breathed fire from her mouth and threw fire from her toes, but the fire went right through the ghost and set a tree on fire. Vampire leapt upon the ghost and tried to suck out its blood, but Vampire passed through the ghost without touching it and bit the ground.

"Oh," said the monsters. Vampire spit out dirt.

"WhoooOOOooo," said the ghost.

"Maybe," said Fire Monster, "we should find out why it's here?" She turned to the ghost and said, "Uh, hi. How are you?"

"OoooOOOoookay," said the ghost. "I'm loooOOOoooking for newoooOOOooo friends."

"We don't need any new friends," said Fire Monster.

"Wait," said Vampire. "Maybe we can start a new club for monsters. We each have a friend, but we don't have a club."

"OK," said Fire Monster.

"OoooOOOoookay," said Ghost.

And that was the beginning of Monster Club.

Game Review: Watch_Dogs

A triple-A game like Watch_Dogs has gotten lots of attention. You can read more about it at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, for example. There's not much I can add to the great many voices that have already spoken about it. I don't need to describe it as an open-world, pseudo-hacker romp set in a Chicago where the government has achieved Big Brother status. There's no call to bring up the solid recon, cover, and sneaking mechanics that make navigating a setpiece such fun, or the highway hacking that lets you glory in wrecking enemy cars at just the last minute. It also means I shouldn't bother describing how easy it is to mess up infiltrations, either because the controls let you down or because something unpredictable happened, and how if you can't salvage the mission you have to start over. Why should I bring up how starting over means having to restart the recon, a slow process that feels rewarding and clever the first time but like drudge work every time thereafter? Or how the many vehicular takedown missions make cars so durable that practically the only way to take them out is through the quick time events that you have to trigger; even ramming into the target from the side at full speed doesn't usually put it out of commission.

And no one wants to hear about the joy I felt, after three times failing a mission to get away from the police, where I drove full-speed up a set of stairs and launched myself into an open parking garage that gave me cover from the helicopter and let me evade capture. Or the rage I felt when, leaving the garage afterward, hitting the wrong key brought out a firearm in front of a cop and started the hunt all over again.

It's a fun game that I put more than fifty hours into, and after buying it on sale from Steam, that's a pretty good deal. I think if the gameplay had been smoother, and with fewer frustrating start-overs, it would've been the same amount of fun packed into thirty to thirty-five hours. And I would've preferred that.

Not to mention the bullshit over having to install Uplay. I hate that thing.

The Final Years of Rupert Murdoch

"I've decided to spend the rest of my life in the shower." If anyone else had said it, he would've been laughed out of the room. But no one laughed at Rupert Murdoch. He renovated his home, installing the world's largest on-demand water heating system. They added multiple showerheads, installed waterproof furniture, added televisions and a state-of-the-art sound system to the bathroom, and purchased waterproof tablet computers to manage everything in the house.

After a month in the shower, Rupert told his staff, "I'd like to go to the kitchen," but refused the offered towels and robes.

He tiled half the mansion, expanded the heating system by an order of magnitude, added showerheads everywhere, and installed a system of motion sensors to keep the showers on him wherever he went.

The following interview with GQ asked him why, and Rupert said, "I've always loved showers. At this point in my life, I have so much money I couldn't possibly spend all of it. Why not spend the rest of my life where I'm happiest?"

After Rupert's death three years later (he slipped in the shower), more than one of his obituaries read, "He died as he lived: In the shower."

The Wrong People

I suddenly realized I'd invited the wrong people. Everyone I'd slept with and everyone I'd killed sat at the table with me, waiting for appetizers. I tried to start some small talk, but for some reason everyone was angry with me. The main course arrived on a covered silver tray: a great big suckling pig, complete with the apple in its mouth. But with my face. I poked it to make sure it was real.

Chance turned to me from my left, blood flaking from a crusted wound where I'd cut him from ear to ear. "This isn't hell," he said, "whatever you might think."

Spider put a hand on my thigh from my right, giving me an erection. "This isn't a dream, whatever you might hope."

I laughed. "Obviously it's—"

"Not a hallucination," chorused the other side of the table. "Not brain damage," chanted six at the end. "You have not been kidnapped by the future for shits and giggles," said six more from the other end.

I looked at the assortment of fatally wounded and arousing memories. I thought about killing the living ones and fucking the dead ones.

I grinned. Might as well have a good time.

Game Review: Rogue Legacy

Rogue Legacy is a quality hack 'n' slash game starring not one knight, but scores of them, attempting to unveil the secrets of a mysterious, rearranging castle. Each is a descendant of the previous character, and now you know the source of the game's name: from rogue-like for the procedural assembly of the castle, and from the legacy passed down from generation to generation. Picking your new knight when the old one dies is fun. You pick from three characters  randomly-generated from a mix of characteristics including name, gender, class, and magic spell known, but also genetic traits. The traits range from goofy (excessive cussing) to useful (higher speed) to eclectic (replacing the castle tileset with a hacker-styled one).

The characters, and especially the traits, are a mixed bag. You never know what you might get, and some of them provide decided advantages for your run. My particular top pick was hypergonadism, the trait that gives your swings greater knockback on enemies. That kind of bonus provides a lot of breathing room when trying to dodge attacks left and right.

My greatest disappointment is that the system of genetic traits is not hereditary, at least not in any way I could divine. Since the continued lineage makes it obvious that your knights are having children, I hoped that I could breed my lineage through selective knighting. Sadly, I never found any evidence that it worked that way.

After picking your new knight, you spend any money your last knight picked up in the castle from killing monsters and destroying the bits and pieces of furniture. Furniture also drops potions that restore magic and turkey legs that restore health. The game itself calls this out as bizarre and theorizes that it's part of the castle's magical nature. It's also not worth asking how you can spend funds collected by someone who died in a castle you can never leave. Just don't.

You spend this money on permanent buffs, upgrades to classes, unlocking new classes, or unlocking new equipment discovered in the castle. (They are also mailed out to your descendants by magic.) The power curve and learning curve blend together. I died quickly the first several times, but after a while both my character's inherent power and my learned skill grew, and I began surviving long enough to discover more interesting things about the castle. There are multiple regions, each with a boss that you must beat to reach the final antagonist and solve the mystery of the castle. The enemies scale up in difficulty as you go, both in attack patterns and in raw damage and hit points.

After beating the game, you can continue with Game+, which introduces harder monsters. I beat it again and went to Game+2, but I think that's as far as I go. They're eating me alive out there, and I don't see the need to go back into the castle.

Rogue Legacy is a fun hack 'n' slash and is available on Steam for $15. I bought it on sale for under $5 and got almost 25 hours of play out of it. I call that a damn good investment.

Just a note: The game definitely plays better with a controller. As a primarily PC gamer, I didn't even consider this until I'd played for at least ten hours.