Review: Flight Control HD

I  usually type out a list of points that I wish to include in the review. Here's an example for this game that I just reviewed on Steam.

Flight Control HD
* What it says on the tin, a casual flight control simulator in 2D
+ Simple graphical style fits well
+ It's fun and challenging
+ Turbo mode
  + ...which turns off when something is going awry
- When there's lot of aircraft on the screen, it's difficult to make out where the possible danger is happening
+ 9 levels
  + Special features of some levels
    + Wind
+ Fun, challenging achievements
* 3 hours

On to the review of Flight Control HD!

*****

Flight Control HD

Briefly: Flight Control is a decent, casual flight control simulator in 2D.

Now, Flight Control HD has little to do with flight control. Surely, there are planes, helicopters and airports and surely, you don't want aviational vehicles to collide with each other. Other than that, it's just fun and casual management of emerging chaos in pastel colours.

Planes on a plane!

You do get to control colourful planes. They randomly appear from the edge of the screen (with a convenient warning). If you wish, a handy tutorial will show you the ropes, but controls are fun and easy: just drag a path for the plane with mouse. Ideally, the path would end up in an airport, because points are scored for landing planes successfully. Each plane has a specific airport to land coincident by their colour.

You lose if two aircraft collide with each other. Since the game is in 2D this is hard to prevent for long.

While waiting for the inevitable, you can speed up the game. Conveniently enough, if two aircraft are on a collision course the game slows down to normal pace and highlights the two aircraft.

Even though this is nice, the highlighting backfires when there are many aircraft on collision course at once. It becomes difficult to see where the most urgent flying machine is. So you lose. And try again.

Dispelling the illusion

Initially I tried to do nice and pleasant-looking arcs and long-winded landings with the planes but I quickly noted that the planes can actually do 180 degree turns, which dissolved the simulation aspect.

Still, with a large enough number of planes to control, it does become difficult to manage. Different planes travel at different, albeit constant, speed with many having the same airport to land in adding to the complexity. A single game lasts just a few minutes at a time.

There are 9 different levels with varying difficulty (size, variety of planes) and even a couple with special features, e.g. wind that closes up certain airports. Special features are nice but they are only in place in few levels. There's a minor random element in most levels of slightly changing positions of the airports, of course coupled with a randomized appearance of planes.

A word on music: there's the same jolly, easy-going tune in most levels. Just a couple of levels have a special tune to fit their special theme. While the song is fine, it curiously stops after a while and doesn't resume for some time leaving you alone with the minor sound effects of collision alert and successful landing celebrations. Which are fine. It just weirds me out that the music is off for so long.

Conclusions

Even the nine levels do not last forever. There's content for a few hours of fun. For myself, 3 hours were spent on achievements, which were actually very well thought and enabled additional meaningful challenges. Then I spent an hour or so trying to beat my friends' highscores, regrettably without success. Consequently, leaderboards may or may not generate a few more hours of gameplay for you if you are so inclined.

The price is pretty good but since it is already an older game (almost 6 years old as of writing this), I'd recommend getting it on sale.

Review: Umbra: Shadow of Death

Hi! Another review! I posted this review of Umbra: Shadow of Death just a week ago on Steam. Here you go!

*****

Umbra: Shadow of Death

Briefly: Umbra is a rough gem, a physics puzzle platformer with a creepy setting. Visual style similarity borrowed from Limbo works splendidly and the game has still a nice amount of its own surprises to show.

Reading some other reviews out here, I admit Umbra does strike some similarities to Limbo especially in the first couple of levels and in the visual style. The similarities end there, as Umbra does its own thing while keeping being a physics puzzle platformer.

Story is pretty simple. Sisters get abducted by aliens. Fortunately for you, the big sis, the robot who took you breaks down and you escape to save your little sister.

Borrow a little something

That guy looks familiar.

While doing it extremely well, Limbo was hardly the first platformer using unfair traps: they were there in e.g. Dragon's Lair (NES version) and I Wanna Be The Guy (which took it to the extreme).

Umbra also has many mean surprise traps. In fact, you are likely to die to 95% of the traps when encountering them for the first time. Especially first and second levels are basically tributes to Limbo in this sense.

After that the differences grow larger. For one, big sister can swim and dive, permitting a couple interesting but oh, so slow-paced water puzzles. The character is slow at swimming and water takes aeons to drain or refill. Later on one gets to drive a truck through a couple of puzzle and death-filled levels and finally even carry and shoot a frickin' plasma LMG.

Puzzles are not as awesomely well made as in Limbo (duh) but they get the job done. In-game hint system keeps you from being stuck while actually being a hint instead of just telling the answer. Granted, most puzzles in Umbra aren't that difficult to require more than a simple pointing finger as a hint.

Danger and death everywhere

Unfortunately while cool, the truck levels were also the most frustrating in the game. This is because that later the game gets stingy with check points. There's a couple of 5-10 minute sequences where one can screw up in the end and have to restart in the beginning.

Deaths are not only due to traps. Fall damage is everywhere, as the protagonist can take only a couple of meters fall before dying or hitting her head. A little miss step and you're dead. There's even a sneaky surprise trap that uses this and consequently makes you drop carefully down every edge afterwards.

I also died many times because of faulty, buggy physics: by falling into the small crack in-between two crates and somehow being crushed; by impaling into the spikes that were on the underside of the moving platform I just climbed on; by peculiarly not grabbing the ledge I thought I landed on and instead falling to my death. Only after the first playthrough did I learn to avoid these fallouts.

How do you even drive this thing?

I played Umbra with Xbox 360 controller although keyboard would likely have been just as well. All keys and buttons can be remapped.

Controls are pretty good and smooth as long as you stay on foot. The big sister runs, jumps, hangs, swings and climbs like a pro. There's a bug (or a feature?) on jumps that whenever one jumps straight up, the character faces right even if you started facing left. It can be annoying if you really want to grab that ledge left, directly over you.

Swimming is slow as heck, realistic though it is. Big sis can even dive and hold her breath for half a minute. On the edge of water it's a weird as the game differentiates between diving and swimming. I once randomly encountered a bug where I was diving in the air but couldn't move or drown either.

Levels can be quite big.

Later levels stage the truck. Since the controls are entirely on or off, you can only full throttle or not at all. This is unfortunate, as you need to drive slowly to avoid crashing the car, so you have to smash the drive key to reach a reasonable speed but not over-do it. Weirdly, if you drive backwards, you can't brake or speed up forward meaning it's impossible to stop on a lean platform. You guessed it: this leads to certain death.

Finally, as this is not a twin-stick shooter, the gun is rather clumsy to aim, controlling the slope with right stick while shooting with the action key. When you get a gun, obviously you will be shot back. It's cumbersome to dodge the flashy blaster shots, as while carrying the gun you have to be stationary to crouch.

Also, there's no key to drop the gun that I could find, instead the gun just falls if you manage a slightly higher fall than a simple jump.

Technical side and style

If you read the above section, you can already tell that there are quite a many bugs and issues. I can only hope they will get fixed or alleviated somehow. That said, I really enjoyed my time with Umbra. Perhaps surprisingly I encountered no game-breaking bugs, and if one gets stuck (which unfortunately happened a dozen times) one could always restart from the previous respawn point.

Visually the graphical style fits Umbra marvellously. It's a bit more colourful than Limbo with some roughly but nicely coloured backgrounds every now and then, with red-yellow fire and the usual blue electricity.

Hanging around.

Even the Limbo guy makes an appearance as a rather obvious easter egg: there are side quest prisoners to save that strike a not-so subtle resemblance. No one explains how they got there though. Did the aliens get them too?

By the way, I enjoyed the soundtrack. It keeps the tone mysterious and dark but in an delightful way.

Conclusions

My very first playthrough was over 5 hours long, and then I did two playthroughs of about 2 hours to finish the rest of the achievements. There seems to be only one ending - I was hoping for a different one if I did a near-perfect run.

Umbra is after all a good game. It is rough around the edges and needs patience to finish. Plethora of bugs and lack of checkpoints in a few frustrating puzzles keeps it from being a great game. However, for a project done by a single person I can cut some slack. All in all I think it was well worth the price of 4 euros.

Review: Avernum: Escape from the Pit

This time it's an old review but it's a full one and it's my second most popular one to date. Most popular one is Gunman Clive but that I posted before I had fully completed it. Here's my review on Steam, and you can read a slightly updated version below.

Curiously, if you compare it to my recent review of Tales Across Time, I've changed a lot of things. Usually I begin with a TL;DR like passage "Briefly" (that I added here but it's missing from the original review on Steam). I've also discovered the art of subtitling, something I saw not fit to add here.

*****

Avernum: Escape from the Pit

Briefly: Remake of Avernum gets so much right by cutting edges short. Less hardcore than before, it's still one of the best indie CRPGs I know.

Second remake of the classic Exile series' first part, Avernum: Escape From the Pit is classic roleplaying at its best!

Basically, you play as a party of adventurers, who were exiled into a huge cavern, Avernum, far below the surface of the world. You have to find a new purpose here, which basically means doing all kinds of odd-jobs and quests for mayors, wizards and kings of the underworld and, while you're at it, trying to escape your dark prison.




The controls have been streamlined for the 2010s. Like in Avernum, the first remake, the game is still isometric and tile-based. However, you can finally control the characters efficiently with a mouse. This works splendidly, though the controls have frankly lost some of the function of the earlier games: e.g. you can no longer close doors (unless I've yet to discover how). Also, the path-finding algorithm does some weird stuff sometimes when your preferred path is blocked, making characters run into wrong direction (and at worst, their DOOOOM). There's still no music (except in the title screen and the few cut scenes): use your favorite epic adventure music instead.

Skill system has basically been remade, though the comedic art of the skill descriptions has been appreciatively retained. Skills are now learned in trees, with a basic skill in the bottom and every subsequent skill requiring the below skills before they can be developed. Also, characters gain bonus traits every few levels gaining small bonuses to different skills and stats. It's a matter of taste if these are good or bad changes, but the whole works nevertheless quite fine.

Combat has always been a rather important part of Avernum series. Turn-based, the basics are still there. However, some additions and changes have been made. Warriors have gained special skills called battle disciplines to supplement their fighting ability, making them a bit more interesting and tactical than before. Spells have been remade as well since original Avernum. Particularly, all the curses have become area effects, and multi-hit spells are now cone or area attacks instead of simply hitting a number of targets.

Frankly, the hard-coreness of the series has dulled quite a bit with this latest installment. No longer are the dark dungeons truly dark, as you don't benefit from bringing a torch or casting light spells (which were actually removed altogether). There is no need to eat to satisfy hunger nor deal with dangerous diseases, and death is no longer so much a set-back as party is automatically resurrected and healed at a friendly town, removing the need for inns and renting rooms.

There are also some miscellaneous streamlinings: You may no longer jump down ledges (which was never that healthy anyway). Identification of magical items has also been removed (albeit hilariously explained by "adventurers having better training nowadays"), and potion making has become a trade secret of alchemists, so your party can't learn it itself any longer. Spiders no longer say "hi!" in a high-pitched voice audibly. Along with these changes Avernum has lost part of its legacy and spark.

What is left, however, is an excellent RPG adventure in a unique fantasy world. The streamlining makes the game more accessible and lets the player concentrate on what's really important: dialogue, exploration and questing. And their implementation is simply brilliant. There are tens, if not hundreds, of characters in the game who all have their own dialogue trees, and several tens of dungeons and towns to explore, everyone of them extremely detailed. Enemies are still dangerous, and mini-bosses and bosses are refreshingly difficult to beat.

Game is not only high-quality, for there's also quite a lot of it. My first play-through, on Hard difficulty level, lasted about 80 hours. Want to just experience the story? Play on Normal or even Casual difficulty, and you may even change it mid-game. However, the highest difficulty level, Torment, provides an amply named challenge for an experienced player, requiring advance planning and lots of re-exploring in areas that were previously too dangerous. Seriously though, I recommend playing your first game on Hard difficulty at max, as Torment can get tedious if you don't know where to go for the next admissible challenge.

TL:DR?

Excellent dialogues.
Robust tactical combat.
Addicting exploration.
Epic questing to become true heroes.

Not convinced? You may as well give it a try.
The demo is available, letting you play through, I believe, about one third of the full game.

Review: Tales Across Time

Hi again! It's been a while, eh? I always seem to say that.

As my reviews have gotten bigger and hopefully also a bit better, I'll start posting them here in my blog in addition to Steam. I doubt I'll get much traffic but you never know, and I can make them even larger here by including screenshots and videos if I so see fit. This way I can make them into a sort of portfolio for ease of access if I ever get into writing or similar.

My principle has been for a while that I review every game on Steam that I deem completed, usually by having all achievements but sometimes for other reasons. A somewhat bizarre effect is that I review a lot of short and easy games, but every now and then I'll stumble upon a rough gem or a hidden diamond and give it a shot.

Starting out this blog post, I reviewed Tales Across Time just last week and it being the last game I reviewed it's a good way to start this endeavour.

*****

Tales Across Time

Briefly: I've been a fan of Joshua's work since 8-Bit Adventures: The Forgotten Journey. Tales Across Time is their new game and I can say it's splendid work both visually and storywise, exploring tropes rarely used in gaming.

In Tales Across Time you play as several characters over three vastly different eras, all of which are bound together by a common antagonist. While there's no time travel, storywise it's got some similarities to such gems as Chrono Trigger and Eternal Darkness, though it's neither a horror game nor a grand RPG, as it's only few hours long.

The game was first introduced at Indie Game Making Contest 2015 that introduced the twist of growth. This early theme can still be seen through the area and the world changing with the eras. In comparison, the published game is a lot more polished both graphically and storywise, especially with the third story that looks to be expanded tremendously.

One game, three stories

First two stories are short, about one hour experiences. All three stories are very different in tone, from a simple exploration to politics to frantic chases and have different casts: after all, they occur at different eras.

In every story there are many characters to acquaintance in addition to the protagonist. Pretty much all characters are likeable and I found it refreshing that other characters are not idle but act in meaningful and interesting ways.

The natural main character for an RPGMaker game is a fighter. Thus, in the first story you take the role of the the seasoned warrior who guides the expedition to an old temple ruin in a desert. The story builds an anxious atmosphere of unknown danger and mystery.

As the guide you deal with any dangers (i.e. monsters) encountered. There are no random encounters, instead every combat is predetermined and usually unavoidable. I'll talk more about combat further down.

Skip ahead few unspecified years and there's the second story at a flourishing trading hub that has emerged out of the desert. Tone is very different, merry and oozing of expectation and happiness, until a twist turns it into a darker mood. Overall there's less exploration and more reactive action than in the first one.

Finally, again an era later the setting has turned from a mild fantasy one into a straight-out science fiction. The alarmed setting feels both mysterious and tense at the same time. The epic conclusion of the millennia long storyline, the third story is the longest of the flock taking almost 2 hours for myself, possibly because it's got more exploration than the first two stories.

Non-random encounters

Scrapping the usual random encounters and even levels, the combat system is refreshingly different. Without levels there is no grinding. Instead every fight is like a separate challenge or sometimes comparable to a puzzle. Usually every monster is only encountered once or twice to keep it fresh.

You even begin every fight at full health and half action points. Action points (AP) are similar to magic points: they are needed to perform special maneuvers like super attacks, full parries or heal-ups.

Normal attacks of different strength replenish AP, the weaker the attack the more AP replenished. This way you have to manage them to be able to beat the enemy. Consequently every fight is technically 1 vs 1, though supporting characters can do some critical special maneuvers as well.

Fights can get rather difficult, especially if you don't immediately see how to counter enemy moves and manage health and AP accordingly. I had to redo a couple of fights several times. Luckily, dying (or otherwise losing) usually only restarts you to the start of the current scene where the encounter happened and has no other adverse effects.

The only ability progression happens by story-based events or finding enhancing crystals hidden around, granting a few bonus max hit points or AP. I think other kind of improving would be unrealistic anyway since the stories occur over a few days at most. For a short game like this the combat system is perfect.

Visuals and technical side

For an RPGMaker game the graphics are top-notch and soundtrack is cool and fitting. I encountered a couple of bugs but they were quickly fixed after reporting them in the forums.

Otherwise, the only possible problems are:
1) the lack of Steam overlay (because of the engine) and the resulting clumsiness of screen capping (so you have to go to the forums and find the instructions) (also, take that and my laziness as a reason for my lack of screenshots in this first off-Steam review)
2) having only 4 save slots
3) inability to change controls the exact way I want (again because of the engine). If you can bear the standard controls it works well. I played with keyboard and also tested that my X-Box 360 controller handles correctly.

Conclusions

The whole game lasted just 4.5 hours for me. In comparison to their earlier title, 8-Bit Adventures: The Forgotten Journey, Tales Across Time is more story-focused and linear as this time around it's not an open world. That said, every scene in the game has a purpose and it's very focused on keeping the story flowing onward.

As a short title, I liked it quite a bit and it's cheap too. Call me crazy to say so but I even thought it was a bit under-priced: in my opinion, 5 € would've been perfect for this content.

So, want a good JRPG-style RPG adventure? Get this game.

*****

That's it! My first review on my blog!

I will want to post some of my older reviews here as well, edited to a better quality if possible. However, I'll publish at least one new one every time before posting an oldie to keep it fresh.

Until next time!

It's been a while again.

During the last month I have played several tens of games. Some are always there to return to but precious few are new and intriguing. I will discuss these four gems I think made the last month special.

Life Is Strange

This is one gorgeous adventure game we started with my wife a few weeks ago. We have only had time to finish the first Episode so far so we still have lots to see.

As an intriguing mechanism Life Is Strange gives Max, the protagonist, a time reversal power and makes it a puzzle-solving mechanism. Awesome, I say! Also the game looks really good. We have only touched the tip of an iceberg with the story and I'm eagerly waiting to see what's going to happen next and in what way Max' actions in the first Episode will come back to haunt us. I've heard good things about those consequences affecting the story but I wouldn't know until I see it.

8-Bit Adventures: The Forgotten Journey

Ah, 8-Bit Adventures. I seldomly really like JRPGs on Steam despite amassing quite a collection of them (too). 8-Bit Adventures was a pleasant exception to that infamous rule.

I grew up playing Dragon Warrior games on NES and later Final Fantasy games on SNES. 8-Bit Adventures managed to bring up many of the same feelings as those games back then.

In 8-Bit Adventures you control the three protagonists who have to go save the crystals and their dying world. Sounds familiar? It soon deviates from the deviously familiar plot to make something of its own. What was especially nice was that the pace was excellent: there was no time in my playthrough that I didn't have stuff to do. There is a lot of fighting but not at all as much as in, say, Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy games. All in all it was a pleasure to play it through.

You can read my review on Steam here.

Contradiction - Spot the Liar!

(Pic is from Steam Store page of Contradiction, as I didn't take any screenshots)

Ah, another game we played with my wife! Contradiction looked like something she would particularly enjoy, so we popped it up one evening and immediately played for a couple of hours into the night (frankly, maybe we should have started before midnight).

It's a detective adventure. There's been a suspicious suicide at the village. Detective Jenks is sent in to investigate. The story progresses through finding contradictions (hence the name) in the statements of people you interr... uh, interview. In effect it plays like many of those detective TV series.

What makes it particularly unique in today's world is that it is an FMV, full-motion video game, one where everything has been acted out on video by actors. It was originally funded through kickstarter with just 4000 £ (if one of the Steam reviews is to be trusted) so I think it was quite an achievement to make it up for such a small initial fund.

It was delightful to try and find the contradictions in peoples' statements! The acting's not bad either and we suspected pretty much everyone of something during the course of the game. I really hope it succeeds and they can make a sequel, and they need it to succeed to make it worthwhile to do one.

You can read my review of Contradiction on Steam here.

Duck Game

(No screencap this time: no time to take one during this game!)
Last but least I would like to give an honorary mention to the couch / online action multiplayer game of the month. There have been many good ones released in the past year but this one just came up.

Duck Game is rad. It's like Super Smash Bros. and Soldat were combined in the best way possible to create a fast-paced party game (with one-hit kills). Go check it out. If you've got a bunch of friends over it's a great time killer (duck killer?) to gather and play in front of the TV (or computer as is) and try to out-play each other with reflexes and wits. So far we have not suffered from any serious lag either despite playing it mostly over Internet and we've had a blast with it.

Cheers and game on!

Long time no see

I'm not much of a blogger, huh? It's been over a month since my first post. Well, it's better to progress slow than not at all. I finished the India campaign in Crusader Kings II very succesfully, so I just might write about that. However, I have more important things to do right now such as...

Killing Floor 2 in Steam Early Access

That's right, they finally did it. Just a couple of days ago Tripwire Interactive released the sequel to their award-winning co-op shooter Killing Floor. I burned almost 1000 hours on the first game, shooting mutant monster creature thingies with my wife who basically got into gaming with that game. We still have a couple of levels to complete on the highest difficulty, Hell on Earth, so we might still have to revisit it.

Killing Floor 2 (KF2) is currently in Early Access. This means it has way less content than it's supposed to, so I'd vouch only the fans should get it now. What is there already looks and feels fricking awesome. The faulty hitboxes of KF are a thing of the past. You can actually see your bullet move through the air and hit, so you can observe your headshots come to pass.

The existing three levels are pretty big, they look really nice and the blood stays on the floor. Not that we've had much time to observe the latter effect even on Normal difficulty that we have limited ourselves into for now because we can't beat the frickin' new boss.

Here's a picture of him after he tore our group of four friends apart.

...we haven't beaten him yet. Either our level and/or skill is too low, but we have played only some 5 games. For first impressions the normal difficulty waves are rather easy but then there is a huge difference in power levels to the boss. Likely, our tactics are also inadequate for this guy. But still, we are also missing some perks that were more suitable for Patriarch (the original boss) killing in the original KF

Yes, the Early Access build has just 4 perks, missing for instance Demolitions, Sharpshooter and Firebug, all of which were very useful and powerful when fighting the old Patty. Patriarch itself will be introduced in a later update.

Our very own dedicated server

Before we got to play we had the nemesis I would like to call the Matchmaking. That's right, there are no listening servers any longer. Hopefully, they'll add them in the future but initially we were stuck with the public servers and no way to find a suitable server. Also, when looking for a game with the group, there was no feedback whatsoever that a game was being looked for. Now, these are all instances of stuff that's being fixed and why there is Early Access in the first place. Tripwire will be adding more servers too, amending the situation further.

But we really wanted to play and this system was denying it for us. So we needed to set up a dedicated server. For anyone interested there's adequate instructions in KF2 wiki, here:

http://wiki.tripwireinteractive.com/index.php?title=Dedicated_Server_%28Killing_Floor_2%29

After initial hiccups we made it work. Our server is private at the moment but I think it would be a nice public service (so to say) to open it for public after a while.

It was still not trivial to make it work. There was a faulty link (now fixed) in the instructions, and some port-forwarding was required to make the server show on the in-game server browser. I have previously set up a dedicated server just once, a few weeks ago in Minecraft, a difficult and exciting stuff to do when you have nerdy tendencies. It's now the unofficial server of the physics students and they have started to build the science campus around the student room, albeit irregularly.

Why, I even made quick & dirty dedicated server guide for KF2 myself, based on the official wiki. You can check it out here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=429704087

I will be updating it to make it as useful as possible, while retaining at least the quick aspect in setting one up.

Initiation

Greetings, fellow gamer!

At least I assume you're one because why would you care about a blog with such a title otherwise. First I should introduce myself. My name is Reko (commonly known online as Twistor) and I play, well, many kinds of games. Lately, it has been mostly the ones of computer variety but board games and pen & paper roleplaying games are not beneath me either. Here I'll be rambling about stuff I've been playing with in the near-past.

Right now there are two high-lights. The shorter one is that

I've got a new mouse! 

 

 It's a Logitech G402. Before, I had a Logitech MX518 (they say it's the legendary one) but it finally started having its dying strokes: randomly losing connection, which resulted in my avatar dying in games like Chivalry and Awesomenauts that require constant, precise control.

I really liked MX518. Thing is, they don't seem to sell anything similar anymore around here. Instead there are all these fancy but awkwardly shaped "gaming" mice with weird contraptions, excessive amounts of keys and I even saw one with two mouse wheels! But I wanted something simple with a modest amount of keys like I'm used to: G402 seems like a spiritual successor to MX518 in that respect.

The changes are the more clunky design (bad), the transfer of the change-of-DPI keys to the left (bad) and the addition of the lowest-DPI-key to the lower left corner (basically the only good thing). There's also a shiny blue G imprinted on the cover. Thing is, I'm still getting used to the new mouse and I tend to press the DPI keys on the left by accident, which can be fatal in a bad spot. At least the wheel is just one key instead of this shaky construction used in e.g. M500 that I had as a short-lived substitute.

Crusader Kings II: The Indian Empire

My recent excessive gaming project is to build the hugest empire of them all with India, in the ultimate Game of Thr... oh heck, it really is very much like Game of Thrones. The Crusader Kings II, that is! I got introduced to this game last spring. It's a rather complicated game where you control the ruler in some family (a dynasty) and try to make ends meet. Usually you have a dukedom, a kingdom or something and try to make it as powerful as possible without losing the position. Once you die, you continue the game with your heir.

Anyway, I don't know much of India previously. I started by building a kingdom and then continue towards an empire and finally create the empire of India. I've already built the empire of India but unfortunately the story before that has been lost in time (i.e. I didn't take many screen caps of the process). However, I will begin this blog by telling of the different phases of the history of my Indian empire. I hope to make it at least moderately interesting for you, my random reader.

Other stuff 

I play many other things as well, so if I encounter something at least vaguely interesting, I'll be sure to drop in a post here about it. I also write reviews on Steam so I'll be pointing you to them when I finish writing.

In the meanwhile,
Game on!