Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3

Red Alert 3 is a game designed to be stupid.  Not just any kind of stupid:  aggressively stupid.

Back in the '90's Westwood made the original Command and Conquer, and soon after that the original Red Alert.  Full Motion Video was the current plague on gaming.  Cutscenes featured terrible acting from no-name actors and actresses in front of green screens goading you into greater feats of tank rushing and attack moving.

When EA took over in the early 2000's, they held a secret meeting where they discussed the past success of the C&C franchise and what they needed to improve on to make their games popular to the modern audience.  Obviously, the continuance of the dead art of FMV was paramount.  Pencil more terrible B-list actors into the budget!  Give me Tim Curry as a Russian premier!  The asian chick from Battlestar Galactica as your personal assistant!  Michael Ironside as some general!  James Earl Jones trying hard not to cry!

After fucking up the Tiberium francise for a good decade and offhandedly fucking up Red Alert 2 for good measure, the C&C drones came up with the amazingly racist and fun-to-play Generals and its even-better expansion Zero Hour.  Generals was lots of fun despite a bad campaign, terrible FMV and shittily-coded multiplayer that, even if played 50 years in the future on quantum computers, will still bog down like you were playing Crysis on a Pentium 2.

Red Alert 3 attempts to copy some of what made Generals fun and fails.  Gone are the options to play each of the 3 races in a different fashion like Zero Hour let you do.  Each of the 3 races, Soviet, Allied and Gay Empire of George Takei, plays very differently.  This is even to the point of having buildings constructed in different ways, somewhat like Starcraft.  However, this just means that only the Soviets build buildings in a rational way and the other two races have you micromanaging the shit out of everything just to build a base. 

If you try to play a skirmish against the computer, then God help you.  The enemy AI's all secretly work together to beat on the puny human.  You'll see AI-controlled units all the colors of the rainbow attacking your base at the same time at regular intervals.  When you start a match these AI's will take over your map screen and broadcast shitty FMV acting at you while you scramble around for a few seconds trying to fend off attacks.  The speed of the game is way too fast for everyone except Koreans on Ritalin to keep up.

If you make the mistake of watching the intro movie you will want to take your own life rather than watch fat Tim Curry make an ass of himself by trying to approximate a Russian accent.  Instead of playing this game, send a letter bomb to the EA offices showing your appreciation for all their hard work keeping this long-dead franchise twitching.

Dungeons of Dredmor

The Indie Revolution in gaming is upon us.  What does that mean for you, the aspiring game developer?  Well, for you it means that you can grab your kid brother and cobble up something on your parent's Commodore 64, add some chiptunes and, voila!  You have your next indie sensation.  Send your gold copy to Gabe Newell (be sure to wrap it in cheese so he takes interest) and it'll be on Steam within 24 hours, probably part of another Humble Indie Bundle for $19.99.

Dungeons of Dredmor works on the basic assumption that you have no idea what Nethack is, and it's a pretty good assumption as the only people who do are dangerously obsessive Autistics who moderate the Nethack wiki.  This game flew across my radar when it appeared in PC Gamer's 100 Best Games of All Time list (which, shockingly, does not feature Deus Ex as its number 1 game any longer.  Now it's Portal.  More cheese, Gabe?)

Dredmor is pretty much Nethack lite.  However, that might be an unfair statement.  While Nethack has had a lot of work put into it over the years, making it possibly one of the most complex and difficult RPG's ever made, it has had absolutely no work done to it to make it remotely palatable to the average human being.  ASCII characters making up the visuals combined with a stark cliff face of a learning curve do not pull in the customers as well as graphics and sound.  I'm looking at you too, Dwarf Fortress.

So Gaslamp Games made an easier-to-play Nethack with Super Nintendo graphics and decent sound effects and music.  Chiptunes, of course.  That's the Indie hallmark, everyone loves chiptunes.  Retro is the candy that gaming nerds crave.

Nethack's staples still survive:  Hardcore game mode, where there are no loading saved games and character death is final.  Ramped-up difficulty that will have you slaying tiny blobs of goo one level and horrendous mind-raping abominations from Below the next.  You drink from fountains and they either make you feel good or poison you.  Your can choose for your character to be laughably inept to deal with the challenge of defeating a dungeon's worth of monsters, just for fun.

However, you won't see truly random happenstances like putting on a ring that's cursed, which you can't take off, which makes you float around and unable to go downstairs until you exit the dungeon the way you came.  You won't be able to kill a gnome and use your tinning kit to make canned gnome to eat later.  You won't drink a potion that turns you into a tarantula.

Dredmor's graphics and crafting system are notably good and fun to use.  The character creation system is hilarious.  You choose 8 aspects to throw together in a mishmash and see what kind of adventurer you create.  You can have an armor-using mathematician magician who uses blood magic and crossbows, who specializes in mushroom magic to summon killer fungus to defeat his enemies.  And he's a sparkly Twilight vampire as well.

The game has a lot of referential and sardonic humor, which helps make it a fun little diversion.  If you're a neckbearded hipster then you'll love this game's many references, which are the nerd's lifeblood.

What really shows this game's Indie origins are the fact that it crashes every 15 minutes and gets old really, really fast.  Having a game that centers around you having a hardcore, un-revivable character who you play for a couple hours until he or she becomes really cool, then gets deleted when the game crashes, is not a hallmark of a professionally-made product.  Gaslamp Games then proceeds to not give a fuck, instead making a half-assed sequel with more references and chiptunes instead of patching the original game.

Thanks, but no thanks.  There's nothing I Dredmor than an unfinished product.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) - Breaking and Entering Evolved

Setting aside for the moment the fact that the original Deus Ex somehow keeps finding its way onto Top 10 Games of All Time lists (If not the #1 Game of All Time), it was still a game plagued with issues.  These issues have become popular to ignore by gaming journalists, who have been seeking for years to turn the "Best Game Ever" debate into something more complex than just "It was Half-Life.  Alternatively?  Half-Life 2."

Playing the original Deus Ex would lead one to notice some glaring problems.  Namely, horrendous voice acting, casual if unintended racism, retarded sound effects, abominable AI and convoluted plotline.

Now, this is a '90's action game so I'm going to let all those problems slide.  I'm going to do this namely because Deus Ex was the most hilarious game I've ever played.  A game that took itself so seriously and attempted to bring up so much deep commentary on government, religion, power and the future of humanity, one that allowed you never before seen freedom to complete missions in any way you wanted...none of that mattered when you were tasing the homeless in the streets, gathering up as many '40's of malt liquor as possible and downing them at once, breaking into someone's apartment and stealing their couch, beaning cops in the head with basketballs, and generally being a cyborg criminal nuisance.

My experience with Deus Ex can be summed up into my first impression gathered during the game's training mission.  As JC Denton you're set through a variety of simple trials to get you used to the controls, augmentations and inventory screens.  At the very end of the training mission, however, you encounter a GIANT ROBOT FIRING LIVE AMMO.  Evidently UNATCO is pretty serious about putting you through the ropes before sending you into the world.  In trying to escape this mechanical monstrosity I was introduced to the damage system that was able to calculate injuries down to individual limbs, even going so far as to immobilize them until you've received adequate medical attention.  I got my legs shot off and had to crawl across the finish line.


I continued to scrape along in agony as my superior congratulated me over the radio on my achievement and subsequently expounded at GREAT length on the happenings of the world, UNATCO, terrorism, the "gray death, etc. etc."  All the while I'm crying with laughter, screaming at my monitor for a medic and oh god why is no one helping me.

I'm happy to announce that, while the outright silliness of the things you could do in the game world have been toned down a bit in Human Revolution, most of what gave Deus Ex its flavor have returned.  Homeless people lie in the streets waiting to be shot with taser guns and brutalized with your augmented steel fists.  Apartments with easily-hackable door locks range far and wide.  The AI is still laughably bad, voice acting ranges from decent to horrendous (Eidos has a very specific stereotype in their minds on how blacks and Chinese people talk and act.)  You get to go to China for no real reason and check out people living in pods.  Poverty is everywhere, people whine constantly about the nature of humanity and augmentation and governments.

While there's no GEP gun to be found, the main difference in augmentations in this round is that they are all useful and pretty cool to boot.  They are also extremely expensive, so you really have to take some time to choose what to upgrade.  Do you up your hacking skills to be better at breaking and entering, or do you boost your battery system so you can punch more whores in the face before having to find a Cliff bar?

Sadly, alcohol is not nearly as prevalent in Human Revolution as it was in Deus Ex, leading to far fewer instances of wanton drunkenness on the job.  This is due to the fact that liquor gives a legitimate boost to your stats, temporarily pushing your health up past 100% like you were Bender or something.  The only way to replenish your battery power (after performing multiple lethal takedowns on Chinese civilians) is to eat powerbars, supposedly to "replenish nutrients."  So you can run out of powerbars pretty easily and be wandering through a Shanghai market where street cooks are frying up meat in woks left and right and there's shops full of snacks everywhere you look, but you go hungry because all Adam Jensen eats is a specific brand of candy.

I am about halfway through the game and enjoying breaking as many laws as humanly possible, surpassing what he term "humanly possible" even means as I see through walls, jump from 5-story buildings and land without a scratch, punch through walls and immobilize transients with a sonic cannon.

Final Verdict:  I never asked for this.

Dwarf Fortress: Tales of Promise and Failure

Dwarf Fortress (Or:  Armok, God of Blood volume II, Dwarf Fortress) is a game that appeals to me much in the way Nethack appeals to both me and to people with sick senses of humor like me (but who, unlike me, are obsessive and Autistic.)

Namely, it's a game about losing.  Losing in surprising and horrifying ways.  Ways that are also funny.

The Aspergers-afflicted shut-ins who play this game refer to this aspect of the game as "Fun."  "Fun" being a sarcastic way to describe grim failure.  Most of the work the creators of this game have done in creating Dwarf Fortress is to create ever more varied ways for you to lose.

This game has levels of complexity that dwarf (fuck you) supposedly complex games like Civilization and Master of Orion.  It revels in demonstrating to you how intricately it can create an entire planet of dwarves, elves, goblins and humans.  In a matter of minutes it will randomly generate hundreds of different biospheres that rate landscapes based on terrain, local wildlife, vegetation, geology (including dozens of types of rocks, minerals and ores that make up the dozens of subterranean levels), danger level, local civilizations and, of course, how blatantly evil the surroundings are.  Whereas in Civ your biggest concern is which river you plop your first city next to, in Dwarf Fortress you have to worry about whether your first Dwarf settlers will be instantly surrounded and devoured by hell rats.

And, even better, the biggest Autistic masochists can play the game with its original graphic options.  Meaning, there are no graphics.  Everything is in fucking ASCII format, so a dwarf is represented by a different-colored happy face, an arrow is a <, a dog is a d, a monkey is an m, an elephant is an E, and a horrendous hell-beast is a D.  If you care about your sanity at all, you can download a tileset that somewhat attempts to represent the world in a more convincing way than a lazy bunch of letters and punctuation marks.  You'll also turn the default music off IMMEDIATELY and play some internet radio instead (I recommend either classical music, or dubstep.)

After a random world is generated, the game will then spend about 10 minutes generating an entire HISTORY of that world, including notable historical figures, events, heroes, cities, tomes and legends.  It's sort of retarded and pointless, but the game likes to flaunt this aspect of itself.

You start Oregon Trail-style with about 8 dwarves showing up in your chosen area.  The lives of these brave few midgets now rest in your incapable human hands.  As in Nethack, there are shortcut key-presses to remember, menus to delve through, jobs to assign, food supplies to manage, rock to dig through, labors to assign and train, structures to build, caverns to carve, smooth and decorate, and lots and lots of time to waste.

Over time more dwarves will stupidly join your doomed civilization (And don't kid yourself, it's doomed.)  Your society will swell through accumulation of useless, stupid Dwarves with titles like "Cheesemaker" and "Miller" who steadfastly refuse to make cheese and mill, instead choosing to drink dwarf beer and fuck and make useless baby dwarves who instantly become targets for goblin pedophiles.

I don't want to list every way in which your Dwarves can be brutally maimed over the course of their adventures, but here are a few of my favorites that I've either encountered directly or read about from Autistic people posting online.

-A Goblin kidnapper appears in your fortress, luring you into sending all of your poorly-trained militia after him.  Soon after they leave the safety of the fortress they are set upon by well-armed Goblin raiders who kill or cripple your soldiers, leaving the rest of your Dwarves to be murdered in their bedrooms.

-Human traders enter your area, bringing with them valuable items for trade as well as some Yaks.  One of the Yaks goes insane immediately after appearing in your territory.  The Yak tramples the humans and goes on a months-long rampage through your fields and into your fortress itself, killing about 4/5ths of your Dwarves.

-Your Dwarves dig too greedily and too deep, attracting Cave Trolls, Albino Alligators, Imps, Tentacle Demons and Forgotten Winged Poisoned Elder Snails.

-Your Dwarves go insane through lack of clean water and turn on each other.  Lack of laws and prisons mean that murderers go unpunished, and bad feelings send your society into a spiral of revenge killings.

-Herds upon herds of elephants roam through your lands, stomping your Dwarves into paste and camping the bodies of the dead.  They feast on any other dwarves who idiotically try to loot the items left behind, or even those who attempt to bury their fallen comrades.

-You choose the least evil (and therefore happiest and most magical) area to place your fortress...and your settlers are murdered by Unicorns.


More stories await those brave enough to read through more text than the game itself in my future updates.