Video Game Review: Desktop Dungeons (PC)

I wake up at 3 a.m., my heart racing. In my mind, I have just thought (or perhaps dreamt of) the solution to a particular puzzle that I had no luck on the previous couple of days. While trying to keep my brain focused on this solution, I boot up my laptop, launch Desktop Dungeons, beat that puzzle and then proceed to play it for another 3 hours because I can (and I am already awake anyway).

Desktop Dungeons is a game that I waited far too long to get, and now it is one of my favourite games. Rogue-like in it's delivery, Desktop Dungeons has 2 parts. Similar to games such as X-Com: Enemy Unknown, there is the base building part where you purchase and upgrade structures, and then there is the dungeon raids. The dungeon raids are played on a square-tiled board (similar to chess) where you move your hero around and kill monsters, gain experience, beat the dungeons boss, and escape with gold.

It is in these dungeon raids where Desktop Dungeons really shines. Each and every dungeon can be thought of as a puzzle. At the beginning, you always start with a level 1 hero of a class and race that you have chosen. Your goal is then to collect loot and gain experience until you are at a high enough level to take on and defeat the boss. There are no pathways to take or orders given, and nothing comes free in a raid. For example, you only regenerate health and mana when exploring new areas, but you want to keep areas unexplored to heal from high level monsters and monsters also heal when you are exploring. It is entirely possible to be at the end of a dungeon in a no-win situation with the boss despite having killed everything else in the dungeon due to poor resource management.

The games art-style is also a winner. Every hero is drawn in an overly cartoony way, and this extends to the villains and monsters as well. The dialogue is written very cleverly and with a very tongue-in-cheek attitude. This gives the game a very light-hearted look (which helps when you are on your fifth attempt at a certain dungeon) which hides the complexity of the game a little bit. Like allot of classic games, Desktop Dungeons is easy to learn but very hard to master.

If you doubt this, try playing it for a few (successful) dungeon raids then watch a friend start playing. As all their little mistakes add up to create an unwinnable situation, I challenge you to keep your mouth closed.

5 out of 5 booby-trapped waffles lying on my desktop.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

 

 

Imagine if your daydreams started taking over your life. For chronic daydreamer Walter Mitty, this is an everyday occurrence. Walter works as a negative-asset manage for Life magazine, meaning he pretty much just looks after photographic negatives in the basement. His daydreams become such a problem that he is almost incapable of holding a conversation with his eHarmony profile advisor or his new boss Ted (Adam Scott).

 

When Walter is unable to find the film negative of legendary photography Sean O’Çonnells (Sean Penn)latest masterpiece for the cover of Life's last news stand issue, Walter becomes the focus of Ted and his arrogant attitude. The worst of it, however, is only in Walter’s imagination. With the help of Cheryl (Kristen Wiig), his workplace crush, he must find the missing negative to save his job and possibly win over the love of his life.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is probably the best lifestyle-channel-let’s-go-to-Iceland inspirational movie you’ll ever watch. Walter’s 'zone outs' are fantastically humorous, similar to Family Guy’s. They never spiral out of control or turn into incoherent skits that overstay their welcome.

 

As the movie moves forward they eventually drop off as Walter starts to take control and have adventures in his life. The movie joyfully celebrates these moments of accomplishment, treating the audience to spectacular journeys of Iceland’s winding roads and a soccer game in the Afghan mountains. These scenes are all masterfully done with wonderful cinematography and music. Special mention should be made to the soundtrack which, while I haven’t listened to it yet, makes me want to walk into an airport and fly off into the unknown (most likely Iceland).

I do have a few nitpicks (spoilers ahead, I guess).

 

 

Among these, Number One: How amazing Walter’s mobile reception was as even atop an Afghan mountain he was able to get call from Todd, his eHarmoy profile adviser. Number Two: Why did Adam Scott’s beard look like he pasted well-manicured pubes onto his face. Number Three: How convenient the final picture from Sean makes Life magazines final cover match with Walter’s earlier daydreams of him being on the cover. It is not until after viewing the movie and having time to reflect upon it that these nitpicks make it almost feel like the epiphany journey could’ve been fake and in Walter’s head, almost like Ted’s pube-beard was in the Inception movie.

Stiller has crafted a film that punctuates Walter’s transformational journey from daydreamer to life celebrator, without feeling too heavy handed or cheesy. The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty is an amazingly beautiful movie about a man with a very active imagination who finally starts to take some risks and have some hobbit-quests.

4 and a half day dreaming waffles out of 5

Movie Review: Once Upon A Time In China (1993)

 Do you hate kung-fu? Do you like when Chinese melodrama gets in the way of good action scenes? Do you like disconnected subplots? Did you enjoy getting lost in a department store without your parents when you were young?

 If you answered some of these questions, thank you for reading this blog. If you answered yes to some of these questions, you desperately need to waste 135 minutes of your life (that is 8100 seconds) watching Once Upon A Time In China. If not, go watch a Jackie Chan movie instead.



 This movie will teach you that Jet Li has dress swagger. And Kung-Fu just relies on a bunch of useless, useless twirling, flips and pulling on ponytails.

 Go get a waffle out of the bin, dust it off, and put it in your DVD player to get more enjoyment, otherwise. For sound, just pour maple syrup in your ears. 

Computer Game Review: Nation Red (2009)

Nation Red is a top-down shooter released back in 2009. What originally attracted me to this game was the survival element of being in an arena and fending off wave after wave of zombie. While Nation Red delivered in this, I did find the whole experience lacking over other, similar games out there.

There isn’t much of a story to this game. You start the game by choosing one of four classes (Medic, Gunner, Sniper or Scout) and are then put in the game. You use WASD to move, and the mouse to aim and shoot. There are some good mechanics here, such as reduced speed backpedalling. However, there are also allot of annoying mechanics. The fact you move incredibly slow with a melee weapon makes them nearly useless (for me anyway). As you kill Zombies, you get experience to pick perks (such as getting a free grenade every 30 seconds) which you deal with the increasing number of zombies.

 

And that really is all there is to the game. Single player consists of these arena’s and a specific wave to survive to. In multiplayer, up to 4 players each choose a class and go at it. The maps have a bit of variety but all boil down to the same thing: some zombie spawn points and some walls with a different texture on top. Sometimes the objectives change, as you have to hold zombies off a certain area or defend a structure in the middle. However, the gameplay and strategy remain the same throughout and most players just end up camping the spawn points. The small online community and only handful of maps doesn’t help as maps are simply repeated throughout. There are the possibilities of deeper tactics and teamwork, but for the most part this is what most online games boil down to.

 And at Nation Red’s core, that is it’s main problem. There is no sense of progression as you go through the levels and at the end you lose most of your progress. It would have been cool to pick some permanent wargear or passive perks for your character (kind of like X-Com) as you slowly level up your character.

That being said, it is still fun to jump on for a game or two of Nation Red every so often. It is hectic survival-type gameplay. However, I feel that this game had allot more potential than how it turned out, The addition of some persistent skills or customization for your character or some more varied missions would have done the game a world of good. At the moment, it is only good for some arcade-type action, but gets repetitive quite quickly.

2 out of 5 re-animated red waffles.

Book Review: The Long War (2013) by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

The Long War by Pratchett and Baxter is a sequel novel to the Long Earth (by the same authors) that feels like it falls flat in a way The Long Earth did not. In the world that these books are set in, humans have discovered the means to “step” into parallel universes that are essentially copies of this universe (and Earth) but mostly free from humans and other sapient life forms. There are essentially unlimited numbers of these worlds for humanity to spread across.

In The Long Earth, the hero of the book, Joshua, travels with an artificial intelligence, Lobsang, to explore the limits of these parallel dimensions. This kept the book relatively tightly focused upon the main plot while also having interweaving storylines of the characters and other species (such as Trolls) that they meet along the way. The Long War, in contrast, starts to feel like a war between the many disparate elements vying for page time and the attention of the reader. Even the final attempt to tie them all together feels very flat and forced, almost as if the authors realised the monster that they have created.

The main problem with so many different elements is that many of them don’t tie into what I gathered was the main plotline of the book (the Trolls fleeing from human-occupied worlds). Allot of characters were introduced (such as the geniuses Robertta and Lobsang’s new companion Nelson) which we spent quite a bit of time with that have no bearing on the main plotline.  In fact, these characters didn’t seem to have any impact on any of the many plots introduced.

This books suffers from a distinct lack of focus from the many stories it tries to tell. Having roughly five poorly developed stories is not the equivalent of telling one good story, and this is painfully clear here. The Long War seems to pick up new story arcs, spends a few chapters on them, and then drops them without a satisfying conclusion (or any conclusion sometimes).

Ultimately, this book feels like it spends all of its pages trying to set-up characters and stories for some sort of continuation of the story. While the writing still manages to entertain with Pratchett’s usual dry humour and observations about society, I do think the authors forgot to make sure that the characters had a purpose for this book or to have a consistent story arc and focus to make this a compelling read.

1.5 out of 5 step-wise waffles.