Backlog #5 - Albion

     This is one of those games that I've owned for years (almost 2 decades), yet have never gotten around to playing it.  I had heard it was good, and it even looked like the sort of game I'd really enjoy, but I was always either busy with other things, or knee-deep in some other game.
     So, here we go.

     Albion, by Blue Byte Software, was released in Germany in 1995, then later ported to english and released internationally in 1996.  I remember buying this on my lunch break when I was working as a technical support lackey for an ISP.  My main job was telling every poor sap who called to either stop using Windows 3.1, to reinstall Windows 95, or that it meant jack and shit that their modem supported "56k Flex".

     The game was released for MS-DOS, which, to you younger folks, was a popular command line operating system that PCs used "back in the day".  Many will argue that some of the best PC games of all time were released under this OS.
     To play this, I will be using a modified build of DOSBox called "DOSBox Daum".  It includes all sorts of extra things, as well as making many aspects of DOSBox part of the GUI, such as mounting cd images and resizing windows while maintaining aspect ratio.  (Honestly, I don't understand why this stuff isn't in the official build of DOSBox to begin with, but whatever.)

     The game starts out with you chilling in your room aboard the spaceship "Toronto".  Upon leaving, you're approached by your girlfriend who gives you lots of hints about plot stuff and what I need to be doing, other than searching for anything to take.

Wait, what?

     The graphics are awesome.  I mean, if you're a fan of "oldschool" pixel artwork, then this is good stuff.  It kinda reminds me of the game "Dreamweb", actually.

     You learn from others on the ship that, A- you need to go down to a planet to do "researchy stuff" for the company that you work for, and B- someone has died horribly from touching something he should not have touched.
     Other than these 2 points, it's all a matter of searching about for stuff to take.  I did manage to find the room of the person who got blown up, and found that he had gun ammo stashed.  Further searching led me to a guarded room, where the lethal accident happened, as well as another NPC that the game pointed out as a good friend of mine.  You can ask him about the guarded room, and he will tell you how to get into a maintenance tunnel that will get you in there without alerting the guards.

In the tunnels.

     Once in the tunnel, the game went from having an overhead view of you and your surroundings, to a first-person view, with you controlling it as you would a FPS.  I was kinda surprised by this, and after a few minutes of getting used to it, I'm finding it a pretty cool element.
     From this view, you can also access an automap.

Pretty handy.

     After navigating through some simple door puzzles, (push that, step on these, etc.), I was able to find my way into the upstairs room.  Searching here yielded more ammo and a gun.
     Now, in the tunnels, there's a pair of doors just before you go into the guarded room that can only be opened from one side of them.  One door closes once you open the other door to get up into the room, meaning you have no choice but to leave through the main door with the guards.  The trick here is that you're supposed to go back down into the tunnels and find a cabinet close to the door you can no longer open, and stash the gun and ammo in there.  This will allow you to go back into the tunnel from outside the room (again) and get the gun, only this time leaving the way you came in.  If you don't do this, the guards will take the gun and ammo.
     I had to reload my saved game twice to figure this all out, but it was cool.  I'm hoping there's more stuff like this further on.

     While doing all of this, while in the top-down view on the ship, you keep getting a message that you are needed in the hangar to prepare for exploring a nearby planet.  Since it keeps coming up every 2 minutes or so, I can't help but feel as though I'm being rushed where I really should explore.  In any case, once you accept the games demands of advancing the story, you're brought to the hangar to witness an exchange between yourself, the captain, and some guy that's going with you.

     Then I was given a small cutscene of myself and "Mr. Hofstedt" talking while descending to the planet, followed by the ship having tons of problems and then crashing.

     You crash, then find that the planet is not what you were expecting.  Both yourself and the Scientist seemed to be under the impression that it was a dry, lifeless, desert planet, but instead it's a lush, forest planet teeming with life.
     Then the ship explodes, and you're knocked unconscious.

     Then you wake up to this -

Uhm...

     You wake up and find that A- you been out for several weeks, B- you were saved by your scientist partner and some feline race that inhabits the planet, C- your partner has learned the alien language, and D- the new alien race isn't big on clothing.
     After all of this, you're told you're not well enough yet, and that you have to stay in bed for another month or so, in which time you too learn the new language (so the game will make sense from here on out), and you are finally able to get up and start figuring out what next.
     That's where I decided to save the game for now.

     So far I'm liking this game a lot, and am sort of upset with myself for not playing this back when I had originally got it.  A few other things -

     - I wish searching items was different, in the sense that there seems to be many cabinets and shelves, etc, but very few have anything in them.  If something is empty, you can't search it at all, so there's lots of being told that something is just a wash basin, instead of it just being empty.

     - I'm hoping that any sort of level advancement just hasn't been shown to me yet in the game.  Back on the ship I manged to gain a level by smuggling the gun past the guards.  My character screen shows "training points", but I have no idea what to do with that.

     - I wish there was some sort of character creation instead of having a predetermined role, but whatever, I can live with it.


HuckleCat

I've had my fill of Destiny

     Over the last month or so since it has come out, I have been playing a lot of the game "Destiny" by Bungie, the creators of Halo.

     What started out as a pretty satisfying FPS has slowly degraded into an insanely repetitive and unrewarding grindfest.

     I really wanted to like this game.  I was hoping it would be one of those games where I played it for months on end, sort of like a FPS Diablo.  Honestly, I do like the game, but now that I'm at the point where I'm doing the same shit over and over and over in an attempt to get materials to slightly upgrade the gear that I have, only to come out empty handed, I find myself no longer giving a shit.

On left, my Hunter, on right, Titan.

     You start out choosing one of 3 classes, then one of 3 races.  While the races only offer cosmetic differences, the classes each offer a variety of bonuses and special attacks which help greatly to completely unbalance multiplayer games.   (Supposedly, via rumors, the game was originally supposed to have a different storyline depending on the race that you picked.)

     The plot of the story is that years ago, mankind discovered a large floating object on Mars called "The Traveller".  This object launched us into a technological golden age, and also went and terraformed Venus, Mars, and the Moon.  The downside, is that there's a galactic evil force, called "The Darkness".  This has consumed the galaxy and wiped out all other races, except mankind.  And the Fallen, from Venus.  And there's also those big dudes, on Mars.  Oh, wait, and those shady "Awoken" guys from "The Reef".
     Actually, the Darkness does not make any sense.  The only "real" bad guys seem to end up being these robot guys, called "The Vex".  Both the big guys on Mars (Called "The Cabal"), and The Fallen have been fighting against them.  There's also another race of bad guys, called The Hive, that show up on the Moon and Earth, but then they're all forgotten by the time you get to Venus, so, whatever, fuck those guys.
     Despite the 2 common enemies that make sense, The Vex and Hive, both the Fallen and the Cabal fight you anyway, even though the sensible thing would be to join up.  But, hey, video game.

The games only sense of diplomacy in action

     The story is so flawed, and everyone is bitching about it.  You can find all sorts of other sites bitching about the holes as well as conspiracy rumors about what "The Darkness" is.  One idea is that you yourself are the Darkness. "The Traveller" causes war everywhere it goes. Then there's also the weird detail that your army, "The Guardians", are really nothing more than an undead army, carrying out missions that basically revolve around committing genocide.
     While this story twist would be awesome, it's highly unlikely.

     Bungie has made totally clear to everyone, despite the "story", that the game does not really begin until you hit level 20.  See, the maximum level that you can attain is 20, but high level armor has something called "light", which really just equates to item levels, as seen in games like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV.  Through the "light" of your gear, you can gain "light levels" up to level 30.

     This is where the repetitive grind starts.

     At this point, all you can do is either run the same missions over and over, or run the same multiplayer matches over and over, or, if you have 5 other friends that play at the same time as you, run the same raid over and over.  All of this just with the hopes that you either find better gear, or materials to improve your current gear.
     The problem with this, other than the boredom that sets in, is that you rarely obtain any of the things you actually need.  It ends up being tedious and unrewarding.

     As far as the endgame Raid goes, there's no way to match up with people playing.  Unless you have 5 other friends that play at the same time as you, you're screwed.  No Raid for you.  Bungie seems to think this is a good idea, because they won't add matchmaking for it.  They also won't add any way to socially interact with others other than pointing, waving, and dancing.

Another awesome raid candidate I can't communicate with.

     So that's it.

     Right now I have a level 26 Hunter, and I started a Titan, but at this point I just don't feel like playing it anymore.
     I mean, the game looks great, and plays well.  It just seems unfinished.  It's a shame too, because you can see where it ultimately could have been awesome, it just falls on it's face so badly.

     Eventually Bungie will add more to the game that may or may not fix the problematic storyline or stale content, but by that time I'll be onto Diablo 3, Far Cry 4, and many other older games.

     In the meantime, maybe someone should send Bungie a copy of Borderlands 1 and 2, so they can see how to do this right.

HuckleCat