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!