Guild of Dungeoneering

In her autobiography Felicia Day said I should sometimes focus on things other than video games. Completely forgetting that she and Ryon had reviewed a video game that I put in my steam wish list. She's personally responsible for the hours Eryn and I are wasting playing Guild of Dungeoneering. Or at least 50% responsible.

I've followed the same pattern I use for XCOM and most other turn-based strategy games.  I've named the fighters after family and friends.  Here's Erwood the adventuring chump, and Kyle and Bruiser.  He should have known to call himself Kyle I.  He didn't last long.

See.  Kyle II.  Yet still with that Robert Smith The Cure look.  That's totally like him.

The game lets you build a dungeon around your characters and then engage in card battles with the enemies you place (and a few you don't) to finish the levels.  A bit like Cardhunters, but much more fun and the music - along the lines of Brave Brave Sir Robin - is 1000x better.  As you adventure, you accumulate gold to buy new classes and a few new card types.  The attacks and defense are limited to magic (blue) and physical (red), blocks against those colors, bypassing defense, and speed (go first).  That's 95% of it except for gaining or losing cards beyond your basic three.  Each class and each monster also comes with some special skills (block all damage and your opponent takes a damage for instance) to vary the pace.  I like the ranger with his speed.  Very easy character to play.

There's also a trophy room and, best of all, a cemetery. Here you can see the tombstones of those who have gone before.  Jen's name fits on her tombstone, but calling her Jennife is a joke because often they cut her last letter on forms.

And then I played some more (there's a mime class, hence Marcel).  Wehttam is Matthew spelled backwards.  Really.  It is.

 And then some more.  Kyle III has been lasting longer than his predecessors.  It's rough, because with every adventure you start over completely from scratch.  No armor.  No weapons.  No skills.  So it's a bit more like a puzzle game than an RPG in that respect.  I suspect if they ever Version II it, they'll add some retention of items and skills and some impact for the rooms beyond the good and bad fountains that show up sometimes when you place a hallway tile.

Worth my time.  I hope the developer puts the money toward making it even better.

XCOM

I finished a round of XCOM: Enemy Unknown for the XBox 360 yesterday.  I don't finish much on the XBox (or the Wii, or the PS2 for that matter). I'm just not willing to dedicate the time, even when I'm laid up in bed for a month or two.  I did finish all the achievements in Minecraft, but you can't really finish that game, you just wear out.  The same can probably be said of Skyrim and definitely of Call of Duty. XCOM is a fond memory for me, because back in 1994 and 1995 (around the time we were moving between Richfield and St. Louis Park) I played a lot of XCOM: UFO Defense and Terror from the Deep.  The new one doesn't bring back the joy I had when I was twenty years younger and it looked like this.  I found myself a little disappointed because I missed the buttons and the imaginative detail I put into the less well rendered soldiers.  But I renamed quite a few of the soldiers to compensate.  Kyle died twice, and only Kyle III was around to participate in the end, although he was back at base recuperating.  And a combination of a sniper named after myself and a psionic solider named after Amy from Doctor Who (red hair, despite a Japanese last name) won the game.  Eryn got into it when she realized I'd renamed the characters and that they'd been developing a bit of history over the course of the game.  She's started playing now that I made it through it once.

Given how much time it takes to win these games, I wonder that I ever had the time to play through these not once, but many times each.  I was working hourly wages about 50-60 hours a week at the time.  It gets stranger for me when I realize 1995 was four years before I started at my current job as a contractor (I went full time about two years later), so in 1996-1997 I had been at my first full time contracting gig for a year.  That seems about right given I remember how excited I was when VB 5.0 came out in 1997.  This computer technology is one to two years older - max, probably less than a year for Terror from the Deep - than when I started working as someone who programmed computers with Visual Basic 4 (16 bit).

And yet, here I am again, finishing a game of XCOM.