Dungeon Raid for the iDevices, like its cousins in the Puzzle Quest series, is a combination match-three game and RPG. Where most of the variants of Puzzle Quest are centered on a story, however, Dungeon Raid is simply a run for high score.

The puzzle portion of Dungeon Raid is fairly standard- you’re looking at a grid of tiles of five basic types: swords, skulls, potions, shields, and coins. Tracing a path through a series of three or more adjacent tiles collects them; the types have different effects. Skulls represent monsters; these have life totals and hurt you every turn that they’re on the board. Tracing a path through skulls damages them; tracing a path through both skulls and swords damages them a lot more. Collecting potions restores your life; shields repair and upgrade your armor; coins are used to buy better equipment. You’ll occasionally see much tougher ‘special’ skulls as well- these typically have some sort of special effect and are also much hardier and stronger than normal skulls.

The RPG portion is where the game gets interesting- as you defeat monsters and collect gold and shields, you’ll level up and earn upgrades to your weapons and armor, given in the form of a random selection of three or four potential upgrades. Defeating monsters gives you experience, which makes your character earn levels- in addition to increasing your statistics, this gives you the opportunity to learn ‘skills’, which can be used to trigger special effects. There’s a pretty wide variety of skills with a decent range of effects- each time your character gains enough experience to level up, you’ll get two of these at random. At the beginning of the game, you’re prompted to pick a race and class- each race has a unique ability, and each class has a unique skill (which is very likely to be offered to you at level-up).

Although it probably sounds pretty basic from the description, I’ve found that the resource-management aspect of the game is tremendous fun, and it’s what keeps me coming back for more- what skills do I want to focus on first? Is gaining levels to earn skills more important, or should I focus on the often-unique abilities that equipment upgrades grant me? Which race-and-class combination is the best?

My only real complaint about the game is that the method for unlocking and leveling up classes is atrociously slow- I hate to say it, but it feels a bit like it was tacked on to encourage people to play longer. Older versions didn’t have a race/class selection; honestly, I think it may have been better that way.

All that being said, it’s great fun and hazardously addictive- last I checked, it was only $3 on the app store, and it’s well worth your time.

- HC

I was kinda hoping that they’d turned it into a full game, perhaps for Android or something, but alas it is still just the GBC demo. But it’s a really cool GBC demo.

CHORUS:
I see you playin’ Angry Birds on your mobile phone,
and I’m like, Wii U! (Ooh ooh ooh!)
I guess Animal Crossing wasn’t casual enough,
and I’m like Wii U, and Wii Farmville too!

I said the bluer waters were full of dollars,
Heh, and it was true. (Yeah, it was true!)
But Apple went there too and now the water’s not blue,
so, Wii U!

Yeah I’m sorry, I can’t track your whole body,
but I can tell how much you weigh!
What’s so great about Xbox? It just emulates Atari,
while we’ve got all the classic games!

From back in the daaaay, we made stuff you’d want to play,
(Where’s Earthbound and Terranigma? Please let us know, Iwata!)
Heeeeey, they might show up some day.
(Go and post that on your rumor blog.)

[CHORUS]

Now I know, good games are a no-show,
among the fitness apps and shovelware,
but here’s a new Zelda! and a new Mario!
There, that should hold you for a year.

And now there’s a neeeewww way, to repackage our old games!
(The fifth remake of Ocarina! This time with a touchscreen-a!)
Yaaaay, and no easy way to pay!
(Why do we need your county anyway?)

[CHORUS]

Now baby baby baby, we don’t really mean to hurt you so bad,
(so bad, so bad, so baaad!)
We made Wii Fit for your mom and Big Brain Academy for your dad!
(your dad, your dad, your daaad!)
And we’re like uh… wait! Uh, wait! Uh, WAIT! Gamers!
We love you! We still love yooou!

[CHORUS]

I wrote an article on crowdfunding options for video game projects for Gamasutra. Check it out!

(five years? Already? Man, I feel old )

Final Fantasy 3- the Japanese version, not the “Final Fantasy 3″ released on the Super Nintendo here in the states- is sort of an interesting game. The NES version was an unapologetically difficult NES-style level grind, with an early class system layered on top of an improved version of the original Final Fantasy’s battle system. I don’t think I’m going on too much of a limb when I call it one of the best of the grindy, NES-and-early-SNES-era RPGs- it represents an improvement of leaps and bounds over the earlier Final Fantasy games and even compares well against then-competitor Dragon Warrior 3. Unlike the earlier games in the series, it was never ported out of Japan until the recent remake- at the time of the NES game’s release, Nintendo was pushing developers to the Super Nintendo.

The recent DS port was a polished effort which retained a lot of what made the original cool, although with prettier graphics and a somewhat reduced difficulty level. I was honestly a bit disappointed by the latter. Finishing the original was a Herculean task, which required careful planning and foresight- finishing the remake, well, it was a hard RPG in the era it was released, but nowhere near as punishingly difficult of the original.

From the screenshots, it looks like the new iPhone version’s graphics are mostly recycled from the DS port but with higher-resolution textures. Square claims that there have been “new story elements” added, but I’m not sure what that actually amounts to- likely not much given the previous port, which added like one line of dialog per character. At $15, it’s also pretty pricey for an iPhone game.

It’s kind of interesting to see Square testing the water on the iDevices. The zeitgeist seems to be that the iPhone is an up-and-coming gaming platform, although I haven’t seen much in the realm of “serious” games for it; because of the nature of a mobile phone as a gaming platform, games that do well seem to be of the pick-it-up-for-10-minutes variety. Square’s published a couple ports and Final Fantasy-themed tower defense games, but only one “real” game- the mediocre Chaos Rings. I’m wondering if Square’s trying to position themselves to move onto the platform or build up a stock of knowledgeable development teams with these ports.

I kind of wish that Square would get around to paying attention to some of the non-FF games in their old catalog- I think that something in the vein of the Romancing SaGa games, with their reliance on lots of subquests and optional material, would be really well-suited for a mobile phone platform. Sometimes it feels like even Square’s executives have forgotten that there was a time when they were Lucasarts circa 1993 and not Lucasarts circa 2004.

- HC

…. Maybe I should back up a bit.

Echo Bazaar is produced by a company by the name of Fail Better Games, located in the real London, not the Fallen one. The premise in a nutshell is that at the height of British power in the Victorian era, the city is stolen by bats, brought underground, and transformed into a twisted, supernatural version of itself. In addition to the city’s normal population of society schemers, notorious highwaymen, starving poets, and daring rogues, the city now hosts a variety of supernatural denizens- devils doing their trade in souls, the Clay Men who provide cheap labor, the wandering spirit of a serial murderer named Jack-of-Smiles, and the Rubber Men, who appear to be immigrants from my neck of the woods. As you begin the game, you’re a new arrival in Fallen London, come to seek your fortune… As soon as you escape from jail.

Despite what you’re probably now imagining, Echo Bazaar doesn’t take itself terribly seriously- while the above setting could certainly become a Lovecraftian world of creeping unknowable horrors or a pedestrian Goth outing, the writing remains relatively lighthearted throughout. Your character reacts to most every event, no matter how creepy or disconcerting, with a dry British understatedness. The writing is really quite clever, and definitely the highlight of the game.

The game’s structure itself is fairly standard for the Facebook-game variants; you’re given a number of actions a day, which accrue with time. You can spend an action to play any one of a selection of ‘storylets’- actions you can take depending on your location and current statistics and inventory. These will generally produce a challenge for one of your statistics; you will randomly succeed or fail at these based on your statistics and the difficulty of the challenge. Either outcome improves the appropriate stat; later on, failing will also produce “menace stats” which will eventually cause you to come to a temporary Bad End- such as death or, even worse, scandal-induced exile.

Login is handled through either a Facebook or Twitter account; posting about the game on Twitter or your wall will give you some free actions. There are apparently a great many players who have kept a twitter account for the purpose of playing Echo Bazaar alone. The game runs on the standard free-to-play model, with optional transactions- real money can buy ‘fate’, which can be traded for ingame advantages. None of these are necessary, although some storylets must be unlocked with Fate.

Echo Bazaar’s setup makes it ideal for casual play- it’s a very easy game to play off and on, taking some time a few times a day to spend your actions and move on. The clever writing and the persistent mysteries of Fallen London have kept me coming back (albeit with the occasional break).

- HC

Hunty says: I was playing this a ton for a couple of months, but got burnt out pretty quick. On the upside, it’s a China-Mieville-themed Mafia Wars. On the downside, it’s a China-Mieville-themed Mafia Wars. I think I’m too completionist to play open-ended games like this, but as far as open-ended games go it’s pretty great!

Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King is a roguelike based on the d20 rules, better known as the D&D 3rd Edition rules. If you’re familiar with roguelikes, the title should give you a fair description of the game’s plot: explore a randomly-generated dungeon and defeat the Goblin King on the lowest floor.

Everything in Incursion is based on the 3rd edition rules; as you explore the dungeon, you’ll see Hearing and Spot checks go by. Your virtual rolls and all of the related math is visible to you as a player; the biggest deviation from 3rd ed that I saw was the replacement of the standard D&D spell memorization with a mana point-based system- probably a good change, all things considered.

The halls of the goblin king are significantly more interesting (and, for that matter, prettier) than the pits of Angband or the Dungeon of Doom. The standard mostly-featureless square rooms of traditional roguelikes have been replaced by themed rooms, complete with short flavor-text descriptions. Exotic terrain is much more common in Incursion than it is in most roguelikes- you’ll frequently encounter flooded rooms filled with water or lava, walls of ice, and themed rooms like barracks or libraries. That being said, it’s always pretty clear that you’re traversing discrete, randomly generated rooms- there isn’t a real overall ‘plan’ to the dungeon. Monsters frequently appear (or at least spawn) in thematically-appropriate rooms. Although you’ll be meeting a lot of ‘standard’ beasts, the author has dug a little deeper into the Monster Manuals than you might expect; you’ll see more exotic creatures in addition to the standard assortment of orcs, goblins, and zombies. In general, monsters are rarer and more powerful than their equivalents in Angband or Nethack; according to the game’s website, the idea is that any monster should pose something of a threat.

The inventory interface can be a bit clumsy, but it’s not bad once you get used to it. On the other hand, taking something out of a chest and putting it in your pack is way more difficult than it should be.

My biggest issue with the game off the cuff was the character generation system, which seemed awfully top-heavy for creating the disposable characters you play in a roguelike. Unlike the streamlined pick-a-class of Nethack or even Angband’s stat-rolling, incursion uses a more-or-less complete 3rd Ed character generation process. If you knew the system cold, you could probably breeze through it, but as someone who hasn’t generated a fresh character in years, a screen full of 30 feats and skills to choose from is a bit overwhelming.

Despite all that, I imagine that a 3rd edition devotee would find a lot to like in Incursion- most of the rules seem to have been recreated faithfully and it’s significantly better presented than many roguelikes.

- HC

As a chronically disorganized individual, I frequently attempt to impose order on my life through to-do lists. I’ve resorted to increasingly high-tech means of doing this; a little shopping list pocket notebook eventually gave way to a text file on my Treo, which gave way to Google Tasks. A few months ago, I ran across the trailer for Epic Win, which speaks for itself far better than I could.

Needless to say, upon its release, picked it up immediately. Having spent most of the last three months racking up experience and treasure, I have to say that while it’s good for what it is, Epic Win does lack in some seemingly basic task organizer-type features. The only feature for categorizing tasks is the ability to assign tasks you create to one of five RPG-derived categories, which don’t line up particularly well with real life. Scheduling things could be better. There’s no way to make hierarchal tasks.

But when you complete somehing, it explodes dramatically off your list, and a bar which is eventually converted to goofy items fills. It makes my inner gamer smile every time, and it’s just so much more satisfying than putting a check in a box.

- HC

Like Final Fantasy 8 before it, Chaos Rings has relatively few enemy types, each of which has a “level” associated with it. You can tweak the strength of enemies in a given dungeon before you enter it- if you’re aggressive about this, it actually makes combat a fairly intense affair, where you’ll need to think carefully before every move and give some thought to what enemies will do and how you’re going to survive the round. These are the moments when the game really clicks, and you have to be concerned with the otherwise-ignorable intricaces of the battle system. Do I want to have my characters make conservative single attacks, or make a pair action- doing more damage but exposing both characters to attacks at once? Should I risk casting a fire spell on this ice-elemental enemy, knowing that doing so will make me more susceptible to the wind-elemental attacks wielded by the other enemies?

These periods don’t last long, though. Sooner or later, you’ll gain a couple levels, and then most battles become a cake walk- a simple matter of tapping ‘attack’ until all enemies are dead, then collecting your gold and exp and moving on.

This seems to be the sort of thing that happens to a lot of JRPGs- I recall Tycho of Penny Arcade observing about Square’s The Last Remnant that “I’ve never found a “boss” or “rare spawn” enemy in the game that I could defeat purely by stratagem – only by more levels.”

Shouldn’t we be beyond these shenanigans by now?

It always disappoints me how frequent this sort of thing is in the JRPG world, especially in a market where there’s less and less excuse for it. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable suggestion that combat should be meaningful- that you should have a chance at dying (however small) in any given encounter, it should be part of a greater resource management challenge (as in most 8-bit-era Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior games, most of the Shin Megami Tensei games, etc), or fun enough to stand on its own as a game. I’d even go so far as to suggest more drastic solutions, such as eliminating levels and character development as a reward for random encounters entirely.

I realize that this is one of those things that every game blogger harps on at one point or another, but it boggles my mind that having pointless, mandatory stops where you tap ‘fight’ a couple times and then move on isn’t universally recognized as a bad idea.

- HC