Wizard Fight Race Steam Greenlight

Back in March I made a post about about Wizard Fight Race 7II, a game I made with a few friends in 72 hours. While we have a prototype as a proof of concept for the game, I believe there is still a lot more that could be done to improve it to the point where people might be willing, and interested in paying money for it. To that end, I made a concept page on Steam Greenlight to encourage community interaction and feedback. If you're reading this, and you feel like you'd like to give me a thumbs up (or down) or any sort of suggestions and input, then head on over to the Wizard Fight Race project page to leave comments and discuss the possibilities for the game with other interested steam users.

Towns (Steam Greenlight)

So this last week I saw a game that had recently been greenlit on Steam Greenlight called Towns. Now Towns is a game that is quite similar to Castle Story in a lot of ways, but with a number of differences. First, Towns in it's current alpha state has a lot more content than Castle Story in it's alpha state. That is, there are a lot more things to find and do in Towns. However, even though Castle Story has buggy building construction, Towns somehow manages to have even worse building construction. As both games are in alpha still, neither is really user friendly or good at directing the user to understand the interface and which things should be done.

One thing I've started doing in Towns, is to set a few commands for my town citizens to follow, then walk away and let them live their lives to see what they've done when I come back. Most of the time, I've come back to a ghost town where literally all of the town citizens have been killed and ghosts have spawned from their corpses. However, as I've managed to set up a fairly well armed standing army, the last couple attempts I've been able to return to a town population that was even greater than the one when I left. Right now my recommendation would be towns over castle story, just because there is more content in towns so far. It'll be interesting to see both of these games progress to see how much fun they can be when they are finished.

Do NOT buy From Dust

I recently pre-ordered From Dust from Steam because after watching some gameplay footage from the xbox 360 version I thought that the game would be excellent once it had mouse controls. When I finally played the game, I found out that they in fact did not really make mouse controls for it and instead made the mouse act like it was an analogue stick (which it is not). Other people complain about the DRM in the game, but for me the real problem is that they never made the correct version of the game, the one that you can play with a point and click interface.

I encourage everyone that reads this to never buy the game From Dust unless they fix the controls.

Steam Sales

So if you checked steam at all last week you would have noticed that there were many many deals on the store. I ended up buying a whole bunch of games for myself and as gifts for my family and close friends. At this point I don't know when I'll get around to playing any of them, but I always feel good collecting more games and supporting the developers.

Console game stores

With the recent "Welcome Back" program that Sony is running I've had a chance to use the PSN store. The store is somewhat useable, but it has a lot of areas in which it could be improved. I think perhaps the biggest improvement would be a web browser based store similar to the Steam store. I would be much more likely to buy stuff if I could have a tab open on my web browser all the time showing me what the current deals are, and letting me manage and view wishlists directly from the web. I think then Sony (and Nintendo could do this too) could afford to have many more sales on games, which would lead me to buy even more. Basically, I want my playstation to have access to the excellent Steam store user experience.

Windowed Gaming Woes

Yesterday, I saw that the Prince of Persia series was on sale on Steam, so I went ahead and picked up the games. I figured I could try streaming them to let my viewers have a different kind of game to watch. Also, I haven't actually played through any of those games yet. As you might be able to guess from my tone so far, I didn't actually get to stream any of the games. The main problem is that I can't stream a game that is fullscreen on my computer; it has to be windowed. As a result I spent the entire time of my stream last night trying to find a workaround to get the game into windowed mode. I tried something called UniWS (doesn't deal with windowed mode, but does make it widescreen), DXWnd (last updated 5+ years ago), and all forms of alt-enter or -window. It appears that there is no way to actually get the game into windowed mode at the current time.

However, there could be a sneaky work around by running the game in a virtual OS. I downloaded VirtualBox and installed Ubuntu 11.04 on it. Then I installed the 3d drivers from VirtualBox followed by installing wine and steam using wine. After that I mounted my steamapps directory so that I could copy the already downloaded Prince of Persia from my host machine to the virtual machine. Sadly, somewhere in this mix, the evidence of my graphics card didn't get passed down, so the PoP launcher claims that my graphics card doesn't have 3d capabilities. By the time I finished all of this it was nearly 3am, so I decided that I should get some sleep.

The plan for tonight is to try installing windows XP on VirtualBox to see if I can get it to work that way with one less layer of abstraction.

Trying out Terraria

I decided to pick up a game I saw on Steam today called Terraria. It looked quite interesting being a side scrolling platform type game, but with elements of construction and harvesting. In a way it's very similar to Minecraft, but in only 2 dimensions. You can still build enclosures through the use of wall blocks and they feel a lot like a home you might find in an NES platformer. You can even place tables, and ledges and other things to decorate your homes.

Another good thing about the game is that there seems to be a large variety of enemies to fight in the world. The first thing I found was a green slime, and I hit it a few times to kill it, granting me some coins. Terraria also has some sort of economy built in. I've heard rumors that you can somehow create rooms and have NPCs appear in them that will buy and sell things with you by exchanging currency you get from killing things.

Another feature I enjoy is the large variety of weapons available to use. I logged into my friend's server shortly after installing the game to find people running around with tons of different weapons that I didn't expect. I felt overwhelmed in that world however and left shortly after to explore things a bit on my own single player world. There is a helper guy that starts with you that gives you some idea of how to get started. He recommends you chop down some trees and set up a workbench to craft more complicated designs on. I only had a short time in which I could play the game, so I barely scratched the surface of the many many items there are to craft. This is definitely a game I'll be playing more in the future.

For your information, this is the trailer for the game:

Indie Game: Dwarfs!?

So today I decided to try out a new game that I haven't heard of before, so I got a game called Dwarfs!? on steam. The first thing I noticed from the video is that the dwarfs seem kinda like ants digging around underground, and honestly it feels a little that way. I consider this to be a good thing. But imagine if your ant could also fight using axes to keep back the mystical shaman they find hidden in caves. In reality, the standard game mode (called arcade) is quite simple, and gives you a time limit in which to explore as much area and as many caves as possible, while defeating any baddies you find along the way. Oh, and as dwarfs, you're also trying to collect treasure. As you gather treasure, you can use it to train more troops, close of dangerous areas of the map, and build new outposts to train troops to defend your miners. At $10 it's a pretty good buy that I would recommend to pretty much anyone that wants some single player strategy gaming.

Oh, and coincidentally, my high score at the time of writing is 5th on the 5 minute arcade mode on Normal difficulty. Here is the video:

Random Steam Game

I just found a great website to help me when I'm in an indecisive mood but want to play something on Steam. If you have steam and are ever faced with this situation, I recommend checking it out. I just tried it out and got Alien Swarm.