Gaming

Review – Rimworld

Did someone say Dwarf Fortress? But quicker? More efficient? Easier on the eyes? Feeling more coherent and finished?

Ah yes, the world of colony management. From the days of Spore‘s weird pseudo-RTS colony mode, to the incredibly interesting BanishedOxygen Not Included, even something like Prison Architect— it seems like colony management has really exploded of late, especially on the more indie side of things. Of course, you can’t really say how much of it would exist without Dwarf Fortress, which feels like the godfather of too-deep one-more-hour colony management simulators.

But the caveat is that Dwarf Fortress has drawbacks. I’ll be the first to admit that, as of this writing, I have put maybe an hour in Dwarf Fortress in the past ten years– but before that? Even putting 3-4 hours a day into it, I constantly had to google if something was possible, how to do it, etc. It has its drawbacks, but Bay 12 Games has always been uncompromising in their vision, for better or worse. With Rimworld, though? It seems they took the ‘idea’ of Dwarf Fortress, but made it into a completely coherent game. They saw what people enjoyed about the game, and what wasn’t popular, and chose to focus on the things that worked, the things that people… well, cared about. That’s not to say that Dwarf Fortress’s adventure mode isn’t an absolute marvel of technology – because it is – but it’s not what most people went to Dwarf Fortress for.

So what did they go to Dwarf Fortress for? Managing a colony of assholes with their own personalities, constantly being pushed to their limits, dealing with strange events and rare enemies– and that’s exactly what Rimworld gives you.

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Posted by Robert Wall in Gaming, 0 comments

Review – Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot

Wait, I still do gaming content? And reviews? What’s the world coming to?

Yeah, it turns out I still like video games. It’s just hard to find time to thoroughly review them, what with having a life and all that. I actually finished this game off weeks ago and haven’t done much with it outside of messing around, but it’s certainly… a video game! Of all the Dragon Ball Z games I’ve played, this is definitely one of them.

Is it good? Is it bad?! I’m… not actually sure. I’m writing this in hopes that it will somehow organize my thoughts into whether or not I would recommend the game to anyone. On the one hand, I definitely feel like I enjoyed my time with it. On the other hand, did I really? Really? There’s that pang of guilt that I was only enjoying it because it was taking me back to a classic story that I’ve heard 800 times before, but not in a decent few years.

So let’s review a video game, yeah? That’s something I’m vaguely sure I can still do.

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Posted by Robert Wall in Gaming, 0 comments

In Retrospect: My Top Ten Games of All-Time

I’ve always lacked a certain level of self-awareness, and that seemed to show up more when I did top-10s than at any other point. Nothing makes that more obvious than thinking I was clever when I called my random top-10 posts “Venn’s Ten” with all the pride of a clueless writer with no, well, self-awareness. So here we have a chance to redeem myself, looking back at what I ranked as my top 10 favorite games of all time, circa August of 2012.

I had a few simple rules that I went through when I did this ranking, which I’ll go ahead and quote here:

  • Only one game for a series
  • A series with major changes to the games cannot be ranked as a series
    • Rock Band has no major changes, so it can be
  • Console games are a-okay

And, well, that was it. So, without delaying my constant need to shit on something people enjoy (even if it is myself!), here’s my 7-years-later retrospective of what I thought the pinnacle of gaming was in 2012!

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Posted by Robert Wall in Gaming, 0 comments

Gaming: 2019 in Review

I always enjoyed lists for how easy they were to write, and the short-form meant that I could try and just write quickly and publish without lots of time letting something I write sit and stew, so it feels like a pretty good place to begin with me getting back into the swing of things. So, here we go. It’s been quite a while since I gave Torchlight 2 a game of the year nod, but let’s see what it’s like, writing about games seven years later.

As a quick aside, I didn’t really play quite a bit that came out this year, and I have a backlog bigger than I ever would’ve expected myself to have, going into my late 20s. For the grand majority of the year, I was running two D&D groups while having a full-time job and owning a home, so free time for things I wanted to try with no guarantee of being interested in was scarce. So without further adieu, completely arbitrary categories for my games of 2019!

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Posted by Robert Wall in Gaming, 3 comments