A Bit More Time

Quick quick quick! Gotta get there before two, she said, and the bus was late and slow and dropped me at 1:54 and now I gotta move quick quick quick. Said she could help but only if I'm quick quick! Down the street, past the butcher, turn left, then the second right. Was that a right? Do alleys count or only streets? I don't know. If it was Google Maps I'd know, but this is creepy old woman directions and I don't know.

Creepy old women count the alleys, they've gotta count them, so stop staring and run past and count: one the alley, two the street, right and hey.

I've never seen this street before.

Where did this street come from?

Is that really a cobblestone road? Are those buildings made of wood? I've never heard of this part of town. Woah, horse! And why's that guy staring like he sees an alien?

Okay, back, reverse direction, turning right one way means turning left the other way...

There's no street there now. Is that guy walking toward me really wearing a sword?

Maybe I shouldn't've asked that weird old woman for more time before my report was due.

@ Is for Adventurer: Brogue

What I love about Roguelikes are the endless exploration afforded by procedural dungeon generation, experimentation with tactics from all the magic items, and a learning curve to tease my intellect.

Brogue delivers all those in spades, an excellent example of a modern-day Roguelike that follows in the footsteps of Nethack, Angband, and of course Rogue. It includes the other hallmarks of a Roguelike: permanent character death and ASCII graphics, and just describing it makes me want to go play it. (I admit it. I did go play it.) What makes Brogue stand out is two things: It streamlined and simplified the often-complex Roguelike game, and it brought a modern UI sensibility to the genre.

Acknowledging the invention of the computer mouse is a big deal. You can play the entire game without touching the keyboard if you like, though I found I preferred a mix of keyboard and mouse control. It came in most handy for dealing with my inventory and for quick-traveling to places I'd already visited after clearing most of a level. That alone saved lots of time.

Additionally, the game makes wonderful use of color, displaying degree of enemy wounds, showing alarms and magical effects rush outward in a wash of color, and displaying your inevitable hallucinations in a brilliant technicolor.

The game is also kinder than many of its brethren. It will stop automoves and alert you when something changes, as well as asking you to confirm when you want to do something that sounds stupid, such as jump into a chasm or drink a potion of incineration.

Simplifying the game has done much more for Brogue than the UI modifications. There are fewer distinct magical items and monsters, and far fewer commands than in its Roguelike forebears. There are fewer options in general, starting with character generation: there is none. Every character begins identical. It's the equipment you choose later on as you explore that sets you apart, and equipment is the only way you advance your character:

Potions of strength make you stronger, potions of life give you more hit points, better equipment makes you hit harder or harder to hit, magic staffs and charms give you distinct powers, and scrolls of enchantment make your gear better. You don't earn experience points, and fighting monsters gets you nothing but pain.

This is simpler, and it opens up an opportunity to make the game about cleverness instead of might. Since there's no reason to fight, it's a viable strategy to sneak around monsters and avoid them as they wander the dungeon. In many games, including many Roguelikes, you have to fight enemies for experience points even if you'd rather ghost through a level. That discovery alone multiplied the length of my interest in Brogue by at least two.

I am interested in some additional complexity, because the limited number of magic items gets somewhat repetitive. At the same time, I'm far from mastering all the many uses of even this limited selection. I'd also like to see the interesting experimentation start earlier. Perhaps if every character started with a special power instead of having to search for a level or three to discover a neat tool.

You can download Brogue for free.

Tread on Me

"Comeoncomeoncomeonnnnnn," said the tile, "step on me. C'mon!" The bathroom door swung open and someone walked in, missing the tile by one-fifth of a tilewidth. "Maaaaaaan," the tile said.

"Don't worry, 54," said nearby 73. "I'm sure you'll get stepped on soon. No reason to worry about it."

"I know, I know, but this is my ten-thousandth time. It's big!"

"Ohhh," said 73, "you'll be in the ten-kay club."

"Right!" cried 54. "And maybe, you know," it stopped.

"Maybe...?"

"Maybe when I'm in the ten-kay, 211 will be interested in me."

"Ohh, 211? Man, 211 is hot. Ho-o-o-ot."

"I know, right?"

"But totally attached to 240."

"Yeah, I know. And why wouldn't it be? 240 is totally awesome. 240 gets stepped on, like, all the time."

"And it's so nice about it, too."

As if on cue, 240 yelled across the floor. "Hey 54! Just heard about your near miss. No worries, man, you'll hit ten-kay any time now. You're awesome, bud!"

"See?" said 73. "Who wouldn't want to get next to a tile like that?"

"What's so great about getting stepped on," growled 1 from behind the propped-open bathroom door.

"Nothing, 1," said 54, "you just don't get it."

Unpleasantly of Cucumber

Her glass of water tasted unpleasantly of cucumber. In the end, that was what pushed her over the edge. Sitting in the judge's chambers, kept waiting for hours just to see an officious appointed individual who unreasonably had some say over how she used her home. The blast shattered the windows into shards, the largest smaller than a grain of sand, and demolished the heavy oak door. Splinters flew into the marble courthouse hall outside. Alarms rang throughout the building.

Security skidded to a stop in front of the ruins of the door and found her sitting comfortably in the judge's office, a small smirk on her face. Everything around her was crushed, shredded, pulverized, or generally annihilated.

"What happened?" cried one guard. "Ma'am, are you all right?" asked another.

"I'm fine," she said, languid. "But perhaps I shan't wait for the judge any longer."

She strode out of the hall, ignoring the guards' entreaties to wait, to see a doctor, to answer some questions. She passed the judge, who breathlessly wondered, "What happened to my office?"

"In the future," she said in passing, I recommend you not tell a wizard that she may not zone her home for magic."

Endless Review: Endless Legend

My typical pattern with a 4X game, such as Civilization, Master of Orion 3, Galactic Civilizations, and so on is to play intensely for a couple days, realize how it devours my time and mind, and quit. The games are clearly fun, but after a couple plays at standard difficulty, there's nothing more for me to discover. I can make myself incrementally better, improving my efficiency notch by notch until I can beat AIs on higher difficulty settings, but that doesn't appeal to me. It's honing a skill that I'm never going to use anywhere else. I've already seen what there is to see, and replaying with another culture with different bonuses isn't different enough and hasn't been since I replayed Master of Orion 2 as the Psilons about a hundred times when I was fourteen.

Endless Legend isn't proof against that, but it does the best job of getting around the obstacle that I've ever seen. First, each playable faction breaks fundamental game rules in distinct ways, making them play very differently. Broken Lords don't need food, instead purchasing/creating new population with Dust (the game's magic-source-cum-currency). Roving Clans can move their cities on the backs of giant beetles, and can ban others from the marketplace. Cultists don't found new cities, instead making one giant city and converting minor villages to their cause. And so on.

On top of the unique mechanical advantage, each faction has a unique series of quests. The quest system is an addition to the game that I haven't seen before: accomplish a goal and get a reward. You can pick up minor quests from exploring the abandoned ruins scattered around the world, or by parleying with minor faction villages to turn them to your side. There are only so many minor quests, and they lost their luster when they started repeating after just a single full game.

But the faction-based quests are different. They tell a larger story of your faction's ascension to dominance over the world and grant access to faction-unique technology. And I love story. I want the story. Which is why my third playthrough left me miffed, when I realized that the next step in the quest chain was impossible to finish before the game reached its turn limit and awarded me victory by default. It really took the spark away to know I couldn't finish the tale. If I keep playing Endless Legend, it will be to see what the rest of the factions do and read their stories.

Combat is the one place I found Endless Legend to fall short. The game makes a big deal of using its exploration map as a local map for tactical combat, distributing your stacked units on the battlefield for combat. You place them in a deployment phase, then have six rounds to tell your units roughly what to do: either go here or target this unit. Then you release them, and they do something that vaguely resembles what you asked.

Often, one unit moved to attack and took a spot that another unit needed, making it so the second unit couldn't attack this round. Or an enemy went before your unit and provoked its counterattack, taking away its turn so now it can't do anything. Combat is also slow. In the end, I just selected automatic combat resolution every time, letting the game tell me who won quickly.

The game also falls short in stability. It had a habit of crashing on me. Sometimes I'd play through most of a game with only one or two crashes, but other times it would crash every other turn. (Granted, those are pretty long turns, but still.) It often happened when the season changed, and it would affect the course of the game, pushing back the season change by a turn because of the way the game recorded such things during the crash. It is good about autosaving every turn. If it weren't, I'd never have had the patience to replay an hour or more of game, and this review would've been very different.

All in all, I've had a very good time with Endless Legend. It's a fun game, and it's a pretty game, and it's inspired me to explore more 4Xs in search of what else I want in the genre. It found a way to keep me coming back past the initial rush of learning the rules, and that makes it far more valuable than most of its counterparts. I also have a lot of respect for Amplitude Studios and their ambitious cross-game Endless-series, at least tangentially sharing setting between this and their other games, Endless Space (a space 4X that I also enjoyed) and Dungeon of the Endless (which I'll likely play in the future).

Endless Legend is available from Steam for $34.99.

Escape from the Lost City

It burst from the wall of the crypt without warning, a venomous-green thing shining with a searing light that filled the chamber with angled shadows. A moment after it appeared it knocked Justine across the room. Her head hit the wall, and as the room went black she watched the monster advancing on Yesmin. When she opened her eyes, Yesmin was pulling her out of the crypt. The chamber where the demon had ambushed them was bright with red and green, blood human and otherworldly mixed in garish abstraction.

"J- j- j--" stuttered Yesmin.

"Justine," said Justine. Yesmin nodded. She shook her head and stumbled, and Justine noticed cuts, some still bleeding, all over her partner. She found her feet and started leading Yesmin through the streets of the abandoned city. "This way," she said. "How did you kill it?"

"Didn't," said Yesmin. "Couldn't. Had to get out." She stopped and doubled over against a wall.

"You did great," said Justine. "I can't believe you held it off long enough to get me out."

"Didn't," she said. "Couldn't. Had to get out." She retched, and her open mouth cast a burning green light on the street of the old city.

Murderers Anonymous

I checked that my face was covered, then stepped up to the lectern. "Remember that this is a safe place. Don't judge, because everyone here is trying. Who wants to speak first?" The first person up was fully covered with the robe and hood, but I recognized his tennis shoes from previous weeks. "My name is Mike," he mumbled, "and I'm a murderer."

"Hi, Mike," we chorused.

"I still remember when I lost control. He was just a kid, fourteen or fifteen, and I was older and so cool." We'd all heard the story before, but when he sat down, the front of his hood was damp.

"Thanks, Mike," I said. "Who wants to follow him?"

The person who replaced him had a reedy, grandmother's voice. "My name is Agnes," she said, "and I'm a murderer."

"Hi, Agnes," said the chorus.

"I'm afraid I fell off the wagon this week." I rolled my eyes. She falls off the wagon every week. "I took my rifle down to the park, picked out some man and shot him." She paused. "I'll try to do better next week," she said quietly, and then sat down.

Some of us are trying harder than others.