• Everyone’s first RPGs
• How Paul pronounces “Mario“
• RPGs aren’t what they used to be
• Neither are most other games
• Leveling is fun; grinding is not!
• GameCola has a Facebook page?!
• SPOILER: The butler kills Santa Claus
• Everyone misses Sprite Monkey!
• Are cross-genre games a good idea?
• Everyone e-mail Paul Franzen about World of Warcraft
• Wikipedia defines RPGs as “Loosely defined“
• There aren’t enough beards in videogames
• Magic Pengel is a great game
• Christian Porter is a terrible person

WARNING: This podcast does not include discussions about Phoenix Wright relationships. Sorry, everyone! The two remaining people who are still going to listen to this podcast, please enjoy! Thanks for always being there, Mom and Dad!

Special bonus! As mentioned in the podcast, if you e-mail us at podcast@gamecola.net, we WILL make fun of you on the next podcast! So, get to e-mailing!

GC Podcast #29

(You can also listen or subscribe to The GameCola Podcast on iTunes by clicking here.)

In an early episode of South Park, fat-boy Eric Cartman talks about how independent movies are “always about gay cowboys eating pudding.” The same can (almost) be said for Xbox Live’s Independent Games service—a service that allows anyone, anyone at all, to develop and publish their own Xbox 360 game. In “Minus the Pudding,” I plan to highlight the very best of what Xbox Live Indie Games has to offer, though, by “very best,” I actually just mean the games that aren’t Sudoku, fireplace simulators, or massagers for your private parts. Those are the pudding games of Indie Games, and I want to talk about the ones that aren’t.

Forgive me, my dear readers, but after playing Enchanted Arms, I don’t think I can go back to playing Xbox Live Indie Games. You might’ve seen this coming, considering how I described the game in my review, with phrases like “one of my new favorite videogames,” “I had the freakin’ time of my life,” and “as he beckoned toward me with his throbbing, engorged, magically possessed right arm, I felt the waves of passion finally overtake me. ‘Atsuma!’ I cried, not sure if it was in pleasure or in pain. ‘Take me! Take me now! Show me now what that arm of yours can really’”–you get the idea.

Since I’ve played Enchanted Arms, I now, officially, know what  fun feels like, and I don’t want to spend any more time on the joyless monsters that permeate the Xbox Live Indie Games service.

Which brings me to Try Not to Fart.

Yes, this is an actual game that actual people have ACTUALLY PAID MONEY FOR! Not only that, but—and I swear I’m not making this up—Try Not to Fart is one of the top-selling Xbox Live Indie Games right now. I think I speak for the entire sane population of the world when I say…what the crap? The game’s like Beavis & Butt-head, but minus all the clever wit. It has all the charm of a staunch Republican, and yet, somehow, people are spending their hard-earned pretend Microsoft money on it.

As much as I’d like to stop wading through all the pudding in order to promote the few decent Xbox Live Indie Games that exist, I can’t. If I did—and I don’t think I’m exaggerating too much here—people would stop making good videogames forever, since they’d realize they can make just as much money, if not more, by making games about the things that come out of their butts. And that’s not the kind of world I want for my future children. Or for you.

Or for America.

And so I toil.

War of Words

War of Words is basically what would happen if someone took Puzzle Quest, excised all the parts I didn’t like, and replaced them with a dictionary. (Which may sound boring to you, but ba-da ba-ba-ba, I’m loving it, as I’m someone who minces words both professionally and for pleasure.) It’s an RPG/puzzle game/word jumble hybrid where you have to use proper spelling to defeat goblins and try to rescue your helpless female relatives, who I guess do not know enough words to fend for themselves.

Each battle plays out kind of like a stage of Tetris: both you and the monster have random letters crawling up from the bottom of the screen, and you have to use those letters in order to spell out words in order to damage your foes. The bigger the word, the more damage you do, and if your crawling letters reach the top of your screen, you take massive damage and are forced to play Try Not to Fart.

If you were that horrible child in English class who’d remind your teacher when she forgot to administer the spelling test, you’ll probably get a kick out of War of Words.

Moon Taxi

Do you like audio books? Wouldn’t it be great if audio books were a videogame? That’s basically the premise of Moon Taxi—you’re the pilot of a taxi that takes people from the Earth to the Moon, and the whole game is listening to people’s stories while you try to collect words and not crash into asteroids. That’s actually the entire extent of this game’s gameplay, and I’m not complaining; I enjoyed how relaxing this game was. Though, I gotta think most people would be bored out of their minds, since the game is about as interactive as a chefoo.

I know the developers are currently working on a Part Two, and I’d like to see them advance the Moon Taxi concept a bit. Specifically, instead of short stories by independent writers, I’d love to see the game tackle public domain stories or even novels. I’d be much more likey to read Tom Saywer if I didn’t actually have to read Tom Saywer.

Of course, if they’re looking for more new stories…*ahem*: “My chest heaving nonstop and my alabaster skin quivering with fire and desire and raw sexual energy, I threw back my head in pure elation! ‘Atsuma, oh Atsuma! I don’t know where you learned to do that with a golem, but don’t ever stop! Don’t ever…oh! Atsuma! My magicore is yours for the taking!”

Gentlemacho

Gentlemacho is based on early 1900s silent films, and it’s about a man and his completely badass facial hair. SOLD. THE END. NEXT GAME.

One day, this man, this…gentlemacho (because he is a gentleman, but he is also macho) is drinking his morning tea, and he notices a strange strand of hair floating around in his cup. Before he can say “I was much more interested in The Avengers when I thought Edward Norton was going to be in it,” he hulks out, and his chesthair becomes sentient, grows its own beard, and instructs him to seek out the four freshest places on Earth in order to conquer body odor.

I’m serious—that’s actually what the game is about! It’s a platformer in which you can “control and extend your body hair as you please” (by the way, I now have a new answer for “if you could have any superpower, what would it be?”), allowing you to smack birds with your armpit hair and kill bears with your mustache. It purports to be the manliest game ever, and I’d be hard-pressed to disagree (after all, they haven’t made a game about my beard yet).

The controls are hard to get used to and the platforming is very Diet Coke, but your chesthair has its own beard, and you KILL things with it. Man, forget Enchanted Arms; bring me my enchanted beard!

Decay: Part 1

Decay opens with a cutscene of you hanging yourself, and when you take control, you’re in your bathroom, apparently OK. OR ARE YOU? Did you survive the hanging? Did you die? Was it all a dream? Did you forget to turn off the chefoo? You’ll never know, because this $3 game ends about 25-30 minutes after you’ve started, just as the game’s gotten going, but before it’s actually gotten good.

It’s a first-person point-and-click adventure game, kind of like a Nancy Drew game, except with fewer sassy female detectives, and more dead people screaming at you. It has a mix of both inventory- and environment-based puzzles, and it’s cursor-driven, meaning that professional adventure game developers will think it’s outdated and broken, and people who actually play adventure games will very happy.

If this were anywhere near a full game, I’d probably recommend that you check it out; but it doesn’t even feel like the full Part One of a game. I spent $3 on Decay, and I actually felt ripped off by it; after all, I could’ve used that money to buy Gentlemacho three more times.

Attack of the Verbose Dinosaur

Attack of the Verbose Dinosaur allowed me to fulfill a dream. That’s not something I can say about many videogames, with the obvious exception of Charm Girls Club: Pajama Party, which allowed me to fulfill my dream of one day being a teenage girl. The game is a cross between Rampage and your English class; it has you spelling out words on the sides of buildings in order to destroy them and kill everyone inside. Now, I’m not usually one for senseless violence, but this violence is actually pretty sensefull. Why? Because, the people inside the buildings, they…typ…lIk… DIS.

KILL THEM ALL!!

Yes, in Attack of the Verbose Dinosaur, you—FINALLY!—get to punish people for typing in text-speak, which is now my favorite videogame concept of all time. Unfortunately, the game takes that winning idea and mars it with one big mistake: It forgets how completely boring Rampage is. (Which is an honest mistake that anyone could make; how many times have you started up Rampage, thinking it’s going to be super great, and then quit five minutes later when you remembered that you could be doing something, anything, anything else?)

But that’s not the only problem. If you misfire, there’s no way to take your letter back from the building. (Or at least, I didn’t see a way to do it during the 10-minute trial.) It’s stuck to the side of the building, forever, and if you can’t figure out a way to make a word out of it, you’re pretty much stuck waiting for the timer to end so you can just lose the game. (To be fair, that’s actually my normal strategy in competitive gaming.)

A shame—if this game’s story had the gameplay of War of Words (or, conversely, if War of Words had the plot and/or dinosaur of Attack of the Verbose Dinosaur), it might just be a contendor for Game of the Year. (Especially now that Telltale’s Back to the Future is definitely going to be a hidden objects game about hippies.) Ah well!

The movie starts with a random orphan boy named Dastan, who is caught stealing an apple in the marketplace. He escapes the guards in an exciting chase sequence, then meets with Princess Jasmine in order to get the genie’s lamp, and–I’m sorry, that’s what happened in Aladdin.  What happens in Prince of Persia is that the Persian King is super-impressed by Dastan’s mad acrobatic skills and adopts him right then and there.  Kings adopt orphans all the time, you know.

The movie skips ahead fifteen years, when Dastan is super-buff and likes to wear unbuttoned/sleeveless shirts.  He has now won four Olympic gold medals for gymnastics, so his acrobatic skills are at their peak.  Of course, Prince shows off all of his fighting skills in a number of extensive action sequences while the Persians capture a city. As you would expect from an action hero, Prince single-handedly defeats hundreds of bad guys and gets his hands on the elusive Dagger of Time.

Things get interesting when they meet the beautiful princess who runs the city: Princess Cleavage.  She and Prince share the same aversion to clothing, so it should be love at first sight for the two of them.  However, she feels compelled to make a cutting sarcastic remark about how she hates the Prince every 2.5 seconds, so their inevitable romance is delayed until the end of the movie.  I’m told this is a shame because Jake Gyllenhaal, the guy who plays Prince Dastan, is really good at romantic scenes.  He’s done a lot of work with them in other movies, such as Brokeback Mountain,  which Heath Ledger totally deserves a posthumous Oscar for.

The plot takes an unexpected U-Turn when the king is killed by an unknown person. The artist currently known as Prince is blamed for the murder, so he flees into the desert with Princess Cleavage.  After this, Prince fights a lot of soldiers, finds out about the Dagger of Time’s powers, learns the truth about who killed the King, starts a rebel alliance, gets involved with ostrich races for some comedy relief, falls in love with the princess, breaks into several heavily-guarded palaces, fights a crew of ninjas that don’t belong in Ancient Persia, goes back in time and saves the day.  Typical action flick material.

Actually, the movie follows the videogame pretty well, all things considered.  Prince does a lot of fighting and fancy acrobatics, he has a dagger that rewinds time, and he has to get the dagger to the hourglass before the villain can reach it.  That’s just like the game.  Sure, the other plotline–the one about the King’s death and the other princes–was made up just for the movie, but it’s a good enough story, and I went along with it.  Plus, the special effects team threw in a lot of small references to the games, which was nice of them.

Oh, and before I forget, the Prince of Persia looks just like Uncle Jesse from Full House.  I repeat: he looks just like Uncle Jesse.

I could not stop thinking about Full House while watching this movie.  Prince would be in the middle of an intense battle or something like that, and my brain would start shouting, “He’s got the same hairdo as Uncle Jesse!  The exact same hairdo!“.  Have mercy!  I noticed the Uncle Jesse hairstyle approximately fifty times in the movie.  Basically, every time there was a close-up of Prince, I was shocked by how much he looked like Uncle Jesse.  You’d think I would have gotten used to it after a while, but no.  My brain was stuck on permanent Full House mode.

This movie could have used a little bit of Full House fun, to be honest.  The comedy relief scenes are weird.  They star a fat guy who runs an illegal gambling organization that focuses on ostrich racing.  I don’t know if they were inspired by the episode where Kimmy gets a pet ostrich who attacks Uncle Jesse, but that’s a possibility.  In any case, Fat Guy makes a lot of humorous rants about  the government and bureaucracy forcing taxes upon small businessmen.  It was kind of funny, but it seemed ridiculously out of place.  I’m pretty sure ancient Persians didn’t spend a lot of time insulting President Bush’s economic policies.

GameCola fans will be happy to know that Prince of Persia is basically Beard Fest 2010.  This movie is jam-packed with beards of all shapes and sizes.  I truly mean that.  Every male character in this film has a beard, except for the bald guys.  You’ll see all types of facial hair, ranging from the standard beard to the scruffy goatee to the fuzzy, foot-long puffball.  Whenever they do a close-up on a character, his beard is always kept in full frame.  Take Prince’s brother, for example, the aptly-named Other Prince.  Close-ups of him look like this:

His beard is in full view.  His crown?  Half of it is off camera.  You get the sense that his beard is more important than his crown.

In conclusion, Prince of Persia is a decent-enough movie.  It doesn’t follow the game religiously, but there’s at least enough of a resemblance between the two that you can recognize it.  Other than that, the movie is your standard action flick, with a lot of fighting sequences, escape sequences, and big budget special effects.  If you like that sort of thing, I’d recommend this movie. If you just want to see Uncle Jesse on the big screen, that’s okay, too.

This makes the second videogame Paul has starred in, following the wildly popular testgame.exe, which has sold over 19 million copies this week alone.  Paul is hoping to build on the first game’s success.

“The main complaint we’ve received about testgame is the lack of beard,” Paul said in a press conference last Tuesday, which was attended by The New York Times, yours truly, and a rubber duck named Ernie. “People don’t want to see me clean-shaven. So the new game really focuses on the beard and all of its adventures. At one point, the beard grows out until it’s five feet long and gets elected President of China. It’s going to be awesome.”

The game will be rendered in top-of-the-line 8-bit graphics, which will hopefully not disappoint anyone.

Some of the major videogame companies have already reacted to the news. Sony reports that it has a new beard-based peripheral in development. Microsoft started delivering Xbox Live points to all unshaven gamers. Beloved Nintendo mascot Mario Mario gave a press conference insisting that he was still a member of the pro-mustache party.

“It’s going to be an exciting time for beard-lovers everywhere,” Paul said.  “This game will prove once and for all that beards are here to stay.”

Paul’s beard could not be reached for comment.

GameCola’s application to GDC was rejected this year, but we still decided to send an application to E3. After all, it says on E3’s registration page that ”Free admission to the exhibit floor is available to qualified industry professionals who register and submit their industry credentials by May 3, 2010.” Qualified professionals? That totally includes GameCola, am I right?

I filled out the first two pages of the application with no problems whatsoever. In fact, the application felt like it was made for GameCola, with all its specific questions we could answer. Web site name? Check. Gaming enthusiast, general media or specialized electronics? Gaming enthusiast. Beard or no Beard? Beard.

OK, I made that last one up, but still. It was a good sign that the E3 application was specifically designed to accept applications from gaming-based sites. I was feeling pretty confident about our chances of making it to E3.

Then I came to page 3 of the application, where they wanted us to print some things out and submit them by mail:

1. A copy of your driver’s license to prove you are over 18.
2. An article you wrote within the past six months, which shows your name, capacity, and the publication’s name.
3. A copy of your business card.

See what I mean about our chances? In order to show that we’re a legitimate web site, we need at least one article that contains the author’s name, capacity, and the GameCola logo. Well, that information is included on all of our articles! We’re so in! I mean, OK, maybe we don’t have business cards, but we’re rocking the other requirements, and besides, we can print some business cards up just for this occasion. What’s the last thing they want us to send?

4. A copy of the Web site’s business license or government issued documentation showing the business’s federal tax identification number.

Wait, what the? Federal Tax Identification Number? For a web site? Well, maybe our application can get in even if we don’t have IRS approval and…

Really? Our application got rejected because we don’t have a tax number? Even after we fulfilled all the other requirements?

NOT COOL, E3.

The only other way to get into E3 is to buy one of their pricey Expo passes for $400 ($500 for late-comers). E3’s slogan is apparently More Expensive Than the Systems We’re Promoting! Unfortunately, both those prices are way past our budget of $22, which is almost enough to buy an extra-large pizza. Minus the cheese.

…So, it looks like GameCola won’t have any live reporters on the scene at E3 this year. Darn.

I’m famous. It comes with the territory of running, editing, and writing for a website on the Internet. (It also doesn’t hurt that I require every GameCola writer to mention my name in every other article they write. If they include a picture of me, bonus points.) Because I’m famous, people often stop me on the street and ask, “Hey, aren’t you that GameCola guy?”¹ I nod, shyly, and after agreeing to sign their autograph book/P-Franz 8×10/private parts, the most frequent questions I get are:

1. Which one is Carl?
2. “Wow! Is that beard real?”
3. Can I touch it?
4. Please?
5. Why do you love Xbox Live Indie Games so much?
6. Please?!

I try to be polite, but, well, you know how it is. Anyway, re: XBLI, here’s the hot scoop: it’s because the people who make Xbox Live Indie Games sometimes do Neat Stuff. They’re not bound by the mores of modern-day professional game development; they don’t have to worry about things like investors, the ESRB, Metacritic, or whether their game will actually appeal to anyone. They don’t have to worry about making any sort of return on investment—they know they’re going to be making peanuts off of this game no matter what, so they’re free to just go crazy, experiment, and make something that no executive would ever agree to fund.

That’s how you end up with games like GoonyCru.

GoonyCru Day One

It’s hard to tell from the above screenshot, but this is a game about retail. Well, one aspect of retail, anyway; GoonyCru is basically the natural extension of the  Customers Suck! LiveJournal community (remember LiveJournal?). Where Customers Suck! is filled with retail horror stories of customers taking dumps on bathroom floors and smearing it all over the mirrors (this is true), GoonyCru asks the question: What if you blew up those customers with grenades?

I’m serious. This is actually what you do in this game. The story is this: Your store ordered a large shipment of golf balls, but whoopsies, the suppliers sent grenades instead! Concurrent with this problem, there’s a customer who needs to get something off of a high shelf. You, the bright, self-motivated go-getter, put two and two together, and soon enough you are launching your customers into the air with grenades. But watch out! If your customer takes too much damage, he explodes, his body parts fly all over the screen, you don’t get your annual bonus, and your children have the worst Christmas ever. (More on you ruining Christmas later.)

There’s a little more to the gameplay than that—for example, there are obstacles you have to avoid, like crazy men with chainsaws (what the hell store is this?!)—but the so basically is this: In this game, to progress, you have to navigate the levels by blowing up annoying customers with grenades. It’s the best game I’ve ever played in my entire life.

Word Duelist

Now, this is a game that wants to appeal to those select few who—like myself—think that playing with words is the most fun you can have besides blowing up annoying customers with grenades. It wants to be Magic: The Gathering meets the puzzles section of Highlights for Children, but it has one big problem: I’m pretty sure its dictionary is entirely made up.

For example, I was playing one minigame where, to win, using a group of assorted letters, I had to come up with a longer word than my opponent. I couldn’t see a single word in the jumble. You know what my opponent came up with? Chefoo. He came up with the word chefoo.

Chefoo.

After realizing that the computer had the ability to just invent words in order to beat me, the game transformed from “come up with a better word than my opponent” to “figure out what my opponent is typing, and then type it myself before he finishes.” Using this strategy, I was able to win 100% of the duels in this demo. I believe the game also has a two-player head-to-head mode, but for some reason, I couldn’t convince my girlfriend to tear herself away from Ace Attorney Investigations to play a rousing game of word jumbles with me. Well, I guess that’s her chefoo!

Santa Bomber

Michael Gray and I talked recently on The GameCola Podcast about why nobody ever makes videogames about Christmas. This game proves our point invalid, but I’m not upset, because putting on a big red suit and showing off my beard to small children has never been as much fun as it is in Santa Bomber.

Santa Bomber is basically Paperboy: Featuring Santa!. You’re flying in your sleigh on Christmas Eve, and you have to drop presents on people. The colors of the houses correspond with the colors of the presents they want (convenient!), and the number of lights on in the house corresponds with how many presents you’re supposed to drop. If you screw up a delivery, congratulations—you’ve just ruined some poor child’s Christmas. Also: ONE OF YOUR REINDEER IMMEDIATELY DIES. “Sorry, Rudolph!”

The best thing is that there’s no limit to the number of presents you can drop on a house; as long as you’ve reached the minimum, you’re set, Rudolph is fine, and Christmas is saved. This means that you can fly around being the BEST SANTA EVER, and just dropping an avalanche of presents onto every person’s house. And you can do this without any penalty whatsoever, because, just like in real life, Santa has an infinite supply of presents.

…Did I say that’s the best part of the game? I didn’t mean it. There’s another use for Santa’s presents, which is: dumping them on Bad Boys and Bad Girls and smothering them to death. And really, murdering annoying tweens is what Christmas is all about, isn’t it?

Soulcaster

If you’re inclined toward an NES-style RPG and don’t feel like playing through Dragon Warrior again, you could do worse than Soulcaster. (For example: You could play through Dragon Warrior again. Man that game stinks—and I say that mostly because I needed to use a strategy guide to figure out how to get out of the room you start in.)

Here’s what I liked about Soulcaster: Your character is a total weenie. Which, to be fair, is kind of the case for most RPGs, but here’s the shocking twist: This game actively embraces the main character’s weeniedom, instead of awkwardly making him out to be a chosen hero who, as soon as he picks up the legendary Sword of the Ages, turns into a total badass deathbringer.

No, in Soulcaster, your character is a total weenie, and he stays a total weenie. He never actually fights a single monster himself. Instead, he summons magical knights and archers and bomb-tossers to take care of the combat for him, while he hides behind them, or in dark corners, or maybe he pulls a face and says “BLARG! See, I’m a monster too! Please don’t hit me….” It’s great. Like how Light’s End revolutionized the RPG genre by removing all combat, Soulcaster revolutionizes the RPG genre by being a realistic portrayal of how a preteen douche would actually act in these circumstances, instead of romanticizing him and his whineyness and his drama bombs.

(Of course, I’m saying this, but I don’t actually know a thing about the main character in this game, or anything that happens beyond the first few screens. In fact, I’m not even sure the phrase “chosen hero” shows up at all in this game. I hope the developer isn’t reading this.)

(If he is, though, I’d like to tell him “thanks for making this game,” because it is quite a chefoo.)

1980s fallout shelter.

Remember when Elaine from Seinfeld didn’t want to open up her “vault” of secrets? Well, now she’s opening it. It’s Vault 101, and what comes out of it is you, some 19-year-old bearded man/woman, with the whole world in front of him/her (hereby referred to as him, because there are some cases in the game where characters do not use the appropriate pronoun). Oh, and what a world it is.

You see, the Communist Chinese have nuked the crap out of the Washington D.C. area. Whoops…thanks, George Bush. I guess we should have elected John Kerry 64 here. It’s the classic story of Dad runs away from home, and son must chase after Dad in a post-apocalyptic retro-futurist world. It’s the first time you’ve ever seen daylight, and the brightness overwhelms your character at first. After a few seconds, you pick up your 10mm pistol, tire iron, or whatever your weapon of choice is, and run away, killing the Capital Wasteland ruffians who murder anyone on sight, like those thugs in Terminator: Salvation.

Your mission is to find your dad, but more importantly, to do whatever you want. Help people, hurt people, sell salvaged junk, put live grenades in people’s pockets…the world is your oyster. A lot of people call this “Oblivion with guns.” My problem with Oblivion is that the story is boring and the magic system is very annoying, and to really succeed, you need to be good at specific skills. Fallout lets you play like you want.There’s a VATS system that turns the game from a fast-twitch first-person shooter into a turn-/statistics-based RPG where you can target specific body parts to cripple your enemy. Also, you can have one humanoid ally and your dog companion following you. Unfortunately they don’t really interact with you besides being a pack mule and helping you in battle, but it’s still good to have someone at your back.

You’re in an open world, and you can progress in the game however you want, and do whatever you want to do. After starting up initially and inputting your beard data, you can also choose you initial base stats, and take an aptitude test to determine your worldly “profession”; i.e., which skills are your main attributes (barter, energy weapons, pimping…OK not pimping, sorry). Most of this world is destroyed, but most of the major DC landmarks (Natural History Museum, Lincoln Memorial), are somewhat intact, so it’s a nice treat for anyone who lives in or has been to Virgina, Maryland, or DC.

Fallout 3 was winner of the GameCola 2008 "Most Beards" award.

In fact, I didn’t do many “main quest” activities until several hours into the game. Doing all the main- and side quests may take you around 90 hours, but that doesn’t include all the undocumented small quests, or the fact that quests can be completed several ways in some cases, given the Karma system. It also doesn’t include any of the DLC you can buy separately or get with the Game of the Year edition, if you’re so inclined. I can easily say that, for a single-player game, and perhaps any game at all, this has the highest replay value of all time. There’s just so much to do in Fallout 3.

There’s something for everyone: First-person shooter fans, RPG fans, beard aficionados (which I believe is 90% of the GameCola readers/writers). I can’t recommend this game any higher, and it’s probably as close to a perfect 10 as I’ll ever get. Just pick the damn thing up. You won’t be disappointed.

You'll fight robots, mutants, and pissed off humans.

GameCola Podcast 20: Something New

In general, there are two topics:

0:00 to 16:45 – Discussion of the new GameCola Website.
16:46 to end – Discussion of GameCola’s end-of-year awards.

And more specifically, we discuss these various topics (and more!):

• Paul gets fanmail from himself.
• The new GameCola site.
• Michael Ridgaway and Vangie Rich are engaged.
• Paul gives a history of GameCola and how the new site came about.
• The only non-staff member who has commented on the new site is Eric’s sister Genevieve.
• The future of Carbonated News.”
• Are 75% of the new comments whiny?
• There’s a roundtable discussion on everyone’s favorite part of the website.
• Paul shocks everyone by revealing that Terrence Atkins is a girl.

The other famous Terence

• Paul’s beard (he won’t stop talking about it!).
• Michael’s failed attempt to get Marianne Fenwick on the podcast.
• The 2009 GameCola Videogame Awards.
• Half of the games that were nominated for “Most Disappointing” were also nominated for “Game of the Year.”
• Using the analog stick to aim is hard. It’s much easier to aim on the PC.
• There is much talk about Tales of Monkey Island. For this game, the controls are better on the Wii than the PC.
• The old Monkey Island games might not be as much fun as the newer ones.
• Batman: Arkum Asylum is the Game of the Year!
• King Tut is not in the new Batman game, though.

It would be very cool if King Tut appeared as the main villain in the next Batman movie.

• It was a close race for Best Portable Game this year.
• Apparently, we are not all in this together when it comes to High School Musical.

Enjoy the podcast and the new site, everybody!

The Dark Spire unabashedly skips right over this nostalgic era, and instead firmly plants itself in a mysterious primordial period of gaming history, one that is likely to be foreign to all but the most ancient of gamers. This was a time before you heard the phrase “RPGs are all about story” bandied about, and the genre was instead all about mindlessly slogging through room after room in search of more and better loot, killing the same monsters again and again for more experience points and gold. In other words, it was a lot like WoW, if that helps any of you daggum kids make more sense of what the hell I’m talking about. Actually, who am I kidding, even I wasn’t really in on things back then…so let’s embark on this mysterious journey TOGETHER.

Oh boy, corridors!

The basic gameplay in The Dark Spire is similar to early dungeon crawls such as Wizardry, The Bard’s Tale, or Atlus’s own in-house revival of the classic dungeon crawl genre, Etrian Odyssey. You assemble a band of adventurers from a selection of class types, carefully outfit them with weapons and armor, bravely venture through the dark gates of the dungeon, and then watch in horror as the mutilated corpses of your party are promptly ejected a few seconds later. You will continue to do this until at least one of your party members is ejected merely as a limbless, eyeless, but still barely breathing torso. This lone survivor can then drag himself through the dusty streets by his tongue until he reaches the temple, where, with his last dying breath, he can demand an explanation from the gods, who will respond by feeling a little bit guilty and bringing your party back to life, now at Level 2. Repeat.

But whereas the brutal carnage in Etrian Odyssey is softened by a bizarrely cute anime aesthetic, The Dark Spire has a decidedly more Western vibe to its visuals and setting. It’s difficult to precisely define what makes for a “Western” vibe, so an example of the difference may be in order: Etrian Odyssey has lots of spiky hair and what appear to be 5-year-old girls wielding giant swords; The Dark Spire has more beards, and the only little girls in the game are evil dolls with half of their head missing. I suppose The Dark Spire shows a few signs here and there that it was made by a Japanese developer: David Bowie does make a guest appearance, after all, as mandated by Japanese constitutional law.

Actually, on the subject of visuals, the graphics in The Dark Spire are quite good for this sort of game. Granted, the enemies have absolutely no animation whatsoever, but the art itself is quite appealing and distinctive. The soundtrack is also of surprising quality with a rather catchy leitmotif (Pretentious Word of the Day Alert), and Atlus has included a bonus soundtrack CD in the package as their latest ploy to get you to buy into their marketing strategy of publishing nothing but weird games that no one has ever heard of. All around, the production values are quite high.

Corridors: now with less graphics!

This is, of course, assuming that you’re playing in “Modern Mode.” If you press “Start” at any time, you can open up an options menu that allows you to switch the game to “Classic Mode.” The synth rock will cut out and be replaced with beeps and boops; the detailed textures of the corridors will melt away and be replaced with empty black space punctuated by white lines to indicate walls and doors; the vibrant enemy art depicting a dynamically posed dual-wielding Grave Robber will be replaced by a small sprite of an unarmed middle-aged gentleman with poor posture. A screenshot of this mode is prominently featured on the back of the case for the game—in fact, it’s the only non-battle picture. The clerk at GameStop stared at it in stunned disbelief when I brought the game to the counter, almost offended that such a thing could exist in this day and age. Yes, you can basically “turn off” the graphics in The Dark Spire for the ultimate retro experience. In an apparent nod to the graph paper industry, you can likewise disable the button that shows the automap.

There are a number of not-so-optional retro elements to the gameplay. Take, for example, weapons and armor. Their effects are only vaguely described at best. The “AC Bonus” of armor is listed, but weapon damage is not, nor are you really told exactly how weapon damage and AC interact. You are therefore left to guess at the relative effectiveness of weapons based on their price, and even this isn’t completely reliable. Looking at the list of weapons available in the shop at the beginning of the game…

10 – Dagger
20 – Longsword
100 – Handaxe
100 – Quarterstaff
100 – Estoc
150 – Claymore
150 – Flail
250 – Shortbow
250 – Spear
500 – Battleaxe
500 – Cutlass
500 – Longbow
500 – Warhammer
3000 – Katana

… Based on price and your knowledge of stereotypical Japanese ethnocentrism, you might naturally assume that the Katana is mind-blowingly awesome. INCORRECT. The best weapon on this list is the Estoc, which you probably didn’t even pay any attention to because you have no idea what an Estoc is. (It’s a stiff anti-armor thrusting sword with a blade of triangular or diamond-shaped cross-section…dumbass.) It’s not just slightly better than the Katana: it actually does almost TWICE as much damage. Caveat emptor indeed.

I couldn't get a good screenshot of the part where David Bowie reprises his role from Labyrinth, so I figured I'd just use a shot from Labyrinth and hope nobody notices.

This really doesn’t matter that much, however, because physical attacks take a back seat in the second half of the game to offensive magic. Enemies can come at you in up to four groups per battle, and each group can have up to nine individuals within it. So that’s 36 against your four heroes, which can make for a very long fight if you’re sitting there plinking away with your weapons turn after turn. Far better to just end it with a single spell…and then do the same for the next battle…and the next one. I imagine that the strategic planning for most battles goes something like this:

WARRIOR: All right, they’ve got us outnumbered. I’ll take up position in the front line, and I’m going to need an armor boost. Next, we’ll want to take down the warlock in the back row as quickly as possible. Then, we’ll need someone to-
MAGE: HEY.
WARRIOR: Yes?
MAGE: I just cast Extinctio on the monsters. They’re all dead.
WARRIOR: …
PRIEST: …
THIEF: …
MAGE: Is there a problem?
WARRIOR: There’s no “Extinctio” in “TEAM,” Gary.
PRIEST: Yeah, Gary, what the hell?
THIEF: What the hell, man?

In fact, the balance is tipped so far in favor of offensive spells that you’ll probably want to dual-class all your characters as mages when the opportunity presents itself (except for your mage, who you’ll dual-class as a priest). At that point, planning really goes something more like this:

SAMURAI: I’M GOING TO CAST EXTINCTIO.
WIZARD: NO, I WANNA DO IT.
DRUIDS: NO, NO! ME! ME!
MONSTERS: OH ****.

OK, I guess what I’m getting at is that the combat in The Dark Spire is a bit simple, and a bit broken. Thankfully, it can also be ended rather quickly (by spamming Extinctio, if I haven’t made that clear enough yet), and the encounter rate is fairly low compared to other games of the genre. You’ll have a tough time starting out, but once you get over the initial hump, you’ll be steamrolling over monsters in no time…except for the occasional ambush on later floors, where your entire party will be killed in a single turn by breath attacks. But that’s really a trifling detail.

Oh man, this looks like a tough fight. Wait, no, I'll just cast Extinctio. Again.

So what then is the draw of The Dark Spire, if not the combat? Why should you pass up the greater class and skill variety of Etrian Odyssey in favor of casting Extinctio every turn for 40+ hours? Well, The Dark Spire has some nice things going for it in terms of non-combat gameplay. Whereas Etrian Odyssey pretty much consists of nothing but random-encounter-monster-genocide from start to finish, The Dark Spire actually has some decent puzzle and exploration elements. There are a lot more hidden doors and secret passages to find, objects and characters to interact with, switches to pull, and warp tiles to test your cartographic skills. These puzzle and exploration elements are wrapped up in some rather well-done flavor text and dialogue—some of it quite humorous, with odd references to everything from Monty Python to Star Wars.

Despite its odd quirks and its tendency to be almost too retro for its own good, I found The Dark Spire an interesting and reasonably enjoyable experience. It was perhaps at times more “interesting” than “enjoyable”: like all turn-based RPGs, it can start to get a bit stale and tedious in the later parts of the game, and you’ll eventually be begging the damned thing to just end already. Replay value is also virtually nil: there’s really nothing significant to be gained by playing through with a different party combination, or anything in the way of alternate paths you can take. But the art and music are good, there’s a bit of humor, the exploration is fairly engaging, and some of the puzzles give you a nice fuzzy “Oh ho ho, I’m so smart” feeling.

So would I recommend it? Well, actually, no, unless you’re really into this sort of game or just want to be able to say “Oh, classic dungeon crawls? Why, yes, I’ve played my share of those” should you suddenly find your old-school status challenged (which can happen ANYWHERE, ANYTIME). There’s probably more enjoyable things you could be doing rather than galloping up and down the same corridors again and again. A very niche product, only for those who possess the hardest of cores and the oldest of schools. (Or who just want the free soundtrack.)

NOTE: While one may think that the “Novelty” score should be 0 based on my description of the game, I would argue that the game’s total lack of novelty is in itself quite novel, at least in a sort of artsy-fartsy postmodern way.

GameCola’s Maryland Branch
Baltimore, MD 21211

December 2, 2009

Mike: Hey Vangie, remember when we used to write for that site?

Vangie: Which site?

Mike: Oh, you know, the one with the guy with the beard…actually a lot of the guys had beards…Gamebeard! That was it!

Vangie: I don’t think I ever wrote for “Gamebeard.” I mean, I don’t have a beard. I will never have a beard. Why would I write for a site about beards?

Mike: No, you wrote about all our wacky misadventures…with beards…

Vangie: OK, dispensing with the beards, that does sound vaguely familiar. What was that other thing you said?

Mike: About my wacky misadventures? (Aside: I do so love my wacky misadventures!)

Vangie: No…games. You mentioned something about games.

Mike: Oh, right! That other, other site we used to write for. GameCola! Still lots of beards there too, as I recall. I wonder what happened to that one.

Vangie: As I recall, it had to something to do with a misguided attempt to make the site “better and more fun” for users.

Mike: You know, I’ve heard the head editor of that site only feels joy when he makes big promises and then breaks them. And our hearts.

Vangie: Well, I heard that he was still trying. Apparently, the new GameCola is not dead yet. He sent out an e-mail to the staff about it just the other day.

Mike: Yeah, he tried to send me a picture of the new site…but truth be told, I think it was just a picture of his cat in a pair of sunglasses.

Vangie: Ooh, kitty! Good idea!

Mike: Vangie, stop Googling pictures of kitties…wait, wait go back! Hah! Oh, that Ninja Cat… < chuckles>

Vangie: What were we talking about? Oh, yeah, GameCola!

Mike: We like GameCola.

Vangie: We are devoted readers AND writers of GameCola.

Mike: We visit GameCola all the time.

Vangie: (Now dear, it’s not nice to lie.)

Mike: Ahem…GO TO GAMECOLA!!!

Mike: Although, technically, they’re already at GameCola if they’re reading this.

Vangie: Ah. Forgot about that.

Mike: Well…Thank you, Loyal Internet Audience? We appreciate you humoring us.

Vangie: And Paul.

Mike: Paul! That’s it! THAT was the guy with the beard!

Vangie: Right. Seriously, though, the new site will be up soon. Testing has actually begun! And there is lots to look forward to. Old favorites will be back…

Mike: Like “Quantum Geek!”

Vangie: And “Gamer Girlfriend.”

Mike and Vangie: …and a bunch of other stuff.

Vangie: Plus podcasts and blog updates.

Mike: And brand new features that can only be done justice in the format of a true website.

Vangie: Because that’s why Paul scrapped the old format.

Mike: Right. That, and the coup.

Vangie: I’m looking at you, Zach Rich.

Mike: Don’t worry, it will be a failed state within a matter of weeks…days…maybe hours…

Vangie: Ahem. So anyway, stay tuned. It’s almost here.

Mike: It’s right over the horizon!

Vangie: In the meantime, we leave you with a picture of Paul Franzen…

Mike: To direct your hate at.

Vangie…and a kitty.

Mike: To direct your sorrow at. Kitties make everything better.

Vangie: They really do.

Mike: Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some wacky misadventures to get back to.

Vangie: And I have to go follow him around with a notepad and pencil. (Not really.)

Mike: (from the other room) Hey Vangie, what do we have that’s flammable?

Vangie: Sigh. Anyway, Dear Readers, please continue to be patient, and keep the faith. We’ll see you soon.

Love,

Mike and Vangie
Staff Writers
GameCola.net

• A comic by Michael Gray about the whereabouts of the new site. Spoiler alert! He has no idea where it is. Neither does anyone else.
• Video playthroughs of a Flash game, a game about hitting dogs with baseball bats, and a game about how Phoenix Wright is not a drunken piano bum.
• A Mike Ridgaway-only edition of The GameCola Podcast, in which he plays through the first level of Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time.
• Michael Gray fanfiction about Phoenix Wright and Nancy Drew (sadly, not in the same story).
• A review by Mike Ridgaway of Little King Story for the Wii, which is apparently not the same thing as LittleBigPlanet or My Life as a King.
• Video playthroughs of the UK-exclusive puzzles from Professor Layton and the…Mysterious Village? Mysterious? Man, British people are weird.
• A review by Mike Ridgaway of A Boy and His Blob for the Wii. According to fellow GC staff writer Lizo, this game is a contender for Game of the Year in the 2009 GameCola awards.
• A post by Paul Franzen about how all turn-based RPGs should be remade as action RPGs. He is so right.
• The GameCola Podcast #17, in which Matt Jonas, Nathaniel Hoover, Michael Gray, Paul Franzen, and Elizabeth Medina-Gray talk to themselves (but not each other!) about the PS3 price cut, licensed games, and the games they were all playing at the time.
• GameCola’s arrival on Twitter and TVTropes. We would’ve joined Twitter earlier, but Paul still thought it was funny to call Twitter users “twats,” and we were waiting for him to get over it.
• Videos of all the deaths from The Adventures of Willy Beamish, a game that some GC staff members are still too terrified to play, even though it came out in the Middle Ages.
• A preview of the upcoming DS game Miles Edgeworth: Ace Attorney: Investigations.Exclusive! A GameCola-exclusive preview! Pay attention, because that’s the last timethat’s ever gonna happen.
• A recipe for Lizo’s World-Famous Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies. (You’d understand their relevance if you’d listened to GameCola Podcast #17.)
• A Very GameCola Thanksgiving, courtesy of Nathaniel Hoover.
• The things Mike Ridgaway is thankful for this Thanksgiving. Somehow, he forgot to mention beards.
• The debut article of GameCola newcomer Justin Luschinski, who talks about the Half-Life 2 mod Pirates vs. Vikings vs. Knights. What, no ninjas?
• Michael Gray’s “Carbonated News” column for November 2009, in which he somehow sneaks in a jab at President Obama’s healthcare plan.
• The controversial “Dear Readers” column by Meteo Xavier that was—no, seriously!—too extreme to be posted to the main site.
• A complete video walkthrough of Final Fantasy VI Advance by Michael Gray. It’s 111 videos long.