Merry-go-round broke down

I re-discovered Steam this week, and as a direct result thereof, sort of un-discovered my studies.

Of course I already knew you could download demos on Steam, but for some reason it never seemed to hold any interest to me. Only now do I realize what a great tool a demo is! You can try out a ton of games, and thus draw inspiration from certain design decisions and/or pick apart the gameplay in the demo for further analysis in your head, without having to pay a fortune for all of them.

So I downloaded some demos. I also bought a game.

Uplink
This is the one I bought. It only cost 10 bucks, and the exchange rate of DKK to USD is favourable at the moment, so I took the chance and bought it before trying the demo. I haven’t regretted it yet. It’s sort of a puzzle game with RPG elements, you get a rig to hack from, a list of missions to choose from (more missions become available as your rating rises), and access to a shop with hardware and software upgrades. More difficult security systems require you to purchase more powerful hacking programs and more CPU power and storage for your machine, and you can route your signal all over the world to buy yourself more time to poke around the target system in. When you’re done, you delete your logs and disconnect, and then you mail your clients about your success.

The only major annoyance is that it’s sometimes a little unclear whether you actually completed the mission or not, especially when you’re in a great hurry to disconnect before the trace finds you, and few things are more annoying than destroying your reputation because you tell a client you did what he asked without knowing you actually failed. Fun game so far, and it’s not the sort of game that always tells you what to do.

Shadowgrounds
This was advertised on Steam as an RPG, but that’s a big fat lie. Shadowgrounds is a top-down shooter, and the only feature that might be construed as RPG-like is that you can upgrade your weaponry. I suspect the demo had been packed with more enemies and weapons than the actual game, because it gives you 6 out of 9 weapons within 3 levels. It was fun though, it was decently story-driven and made me want to play it some more. Additionally, it actually comes with a co-op mode(!!), so I think there’s a great possibility I’ll purchase it if I can find somebody to play co-op with. Only down-side: No saving in singleplayer, and you get limited respawns (no idea what happens when you use up all your respawns – surely they won’t make you start the game over?).

Silverfall
Silverfall was… well, a disappointment. Visually, it’s beautiful and very stylish, the environments are atmospheric and detailed, and the characters and weapons and everything is cell shaded, which gives it a lovely, refreshingly cartoonish fantasy look that I instantly fell in love with. Unhappily, I quickly realized it was a Diablo-style action RPG. It’s not so bad that you have to click once for each attack you want to make, if I haven’t got carpal tunnel yet, another Diablo-clone won’t cause it. The problem is in the quests. I thought singleplayer gamers got rid of the “Go out and kill 10 zombies”-style quests when such quests became the foundation of the MMOG supergenre, but apparently Monte Cristo is about 10 years behind on that count. And when you die, just like in WoW, you respawn back in The Villageâ„¢ (okay to be fair, it’s a refugee camp) without any of your gear, and you gotta run to your grave and retreive your stuff. I mean… come on.

To add insult to injury, the dialogue is generally pretty badly written, with some grammatical fuck-ups here and there, and the story pretty much seems to be “Undead attacked Your Villageâ„¢ and drove you out of your home, so now you must kill them and… save the world, or something”. The character system seems good though, especially the way your character is aligned not according to good/evil, but according to nature/technology, so I’d probably have found an element of steampunk in there if I’d have bothered to keep playing through the demo. And everybody loves steampunk, right? Totally not worth the lame story, contorted dialogue, and boring quests though.

Zen of Sudoku
Heheh. I really like sudoku. Yeah, I know: It’s for old ladies and math teachers. But I think it’s good recreation, and Zen of Sudoku probably has the most juicy interface of any game I’ve ever played. The sound and animation it makes when you fill out a row or a column is a reward in and of itself, and the whole GUI is filled with little tactile rewards like that. I doubt I’ll buy it, because when I do sudoku, I do it on my DS or on, well, paper, but if I suddenly figure out I need to be able to play sudoku on my laptop or something, Zen of Sudoku will be my first choice.

Aside from that, I downloaded the Defcon demo, but I haven’t played it yet. I hear it’s good, so I’ll probably get around to it in the weekend. I also hear Deus Ex is now available via Steam, so there is now no longer any excuse not to own the game. Interestingly, though, it looks like many of the DX screenshots on Steamgames.com is from some pre-release beta build. It’s good news that DX is on Steam though, because now we must assume DX is perfectly compatible with newer machines (although I wonder if they’ve built in some sort of multi-core CPU control, or if you still have to bypass that manually or with a Microsoft tool), and it’ll be really easy to get a hold of now, so TNM’s fan base is secured! Yay.