Rebuild 2

Link to Game

Anyone whose played the original Rebuild shouldn't expect the gameplay to be that much different, as it is send soldiers to kill zombies, send leaders to recruit more survivors, send builders to reclaim blocks and build things... keep doing this until you win.  This is why I'm not reviewing the first game.

Course, calling this a review would be rather... well, dumb.  As I don't really want to review the game, I just want to talk about my experience with it.  You'll get the idea several paragraphs in what I'm going about but first.

This is spoilertastic.  Proceed at your own risk.

Ok, so far it seems that I'm just going to do what I did in the last game, with odd window dressing of pretending my first real leader person is me!  Course, a major difference between this and the prequel is as opposed to having fixed classes everyone has five stats to represent the various jobs one has to do in the game (soldiering, sciencing, building, leadering, salvaging) which can be grinded up as the surviver goes to do various things.  There is also equipible items you can give to your peeps when appropriate (including a dog... just cuz).

That wouldn't make the experience stand out for me.  No, this would:

This had me actually sit there and think.  I totally did not expect to see this, and I was shocked when I read it, not sure what to do.  I had to keep up stats like happiness and food supply, and this just floored me.

The question of censorship came up.  I mean, think about it, most of us, if asked, would be against censorship in the sense that there were outright ban-able things.  That is easy for anyone of use to say... until you bring up ideas such as Nazism, religious fanaticism, and anti-democracy.  Would you support censorship then?

At a mechanics standpoint, would saying "The Zombie Condition" has a right to exist cause the happiness meter to decrease as people are angry that an unpopular idea is being put out there?  Or could be unhappy that I was imposing censorship in our new nation?

I said no, don't ban it, in the end.  The result?  Happiness went up 10 percent.  Apparently, where some were outraged, others were excited to read this thing.  Happy!

Course, later the book author wanted to create a church surrounding his controversial idea, and I drew the line there.  He quietly dropped the subject, but I didn't want to have people waiting in line to get bitten.

There were more of these.  So, lets go.

I hesitated as there might have been something wrong with our friend the scientist.  Course, looks can be deceiving and I let him in.  He annexes the lab I was using for pesticide research... jerk, and just stays there researching... something.  Its not made clear until later when he get an assistant from one of my sciency people, requests that we monitor the behaviour of the zombies while we fight them (which we did) and then he and is aid get killed by zombie test subjects and make me have to reclaim the square.

Course, it is one path to one of the many endings this game has.  The mad scientist was finding a cure for zombism using some rather amoral means.  So... hooray?

I was having constant food trouble, ontop of being a woman so the answer was easy.
 

I did say yes once, but it didn't give me happiness bonus (cuz the men did nothing but fight over the sickly whores).

There are two gangs running around in conjunction to what I'm doing: The Riffs, who seem to like blowing up zombies for shits and giggles and therefore ok in my books, and the Last Judgement, religious zealots who raid me and steal the town's food and are therefore not on my good books going into this.  Seriously, you would have to be having real trouble at this point to say no.

Alas, she explains that the Last Judgement is a cult ran by a sadist where women are slaves (cuz it says so in the bible).  Why this trope keeps popping up in zombie things beats me, though it is misandristic to think there would be men who want to have women slaves.  As I've already hinted: surprised?

Which makes this awesome!

Apparently the Riffs hated them too.  Attacking the Last Judgement is a way to an ending, though, as it makes everyone feel better to thump religious zealots and free women (is that it, rescuing women is something boys like to do last I checked) it doesn't solve the problem of the fucking zombies.

There is a helipad in the game that has a helicopter on it that gets broken at some point.  So, we get this witch-hunt scenario pop up where someone in the camp who might be just weird like the author of "The Zombie Condition" is being accused of sabotage.  I decide that there will be no witch hunt and said that we will not "round up some guys to get the 'truth' from her."  We simply had an eye on her.

Conclusion

I just loved this!  It added to the experience, of bring issues to a leader person that, at first sound easy, now are as hard as they actually are now that we are living it and not armchair quarter-backing while we watch some smuck making these choices (and sometimes the 'wrong' ones like censoring the book).  I think this is an elegant way to implement this, as when the question comes up you start thinking how this would effect what score I would get in certain places... which in a way is like real life.  As a choice you make has consequences, and making decisions in a leadership role impacts the society that you run.

Weighty, but brilliant.  Bravo!

Crystal Story

Link to game

Here's another time sink.

Crystal Story is a drungeon crawler where you control four people in turn based anima-tastic combat.

There, I've saved you the trouble if that line scares you.

Alas, the game's storyline.  Your a band of mercs tasked by this narcissist to hunt down this witch, incapacitate her, and take a photo of her and your new employer being all badass and slaying her.  Yeah, it promises to be one of those wacky-shit humour games.  It even has all the hallmarks of a silly anima game, where your party consists of a dumbass, a serious chick, a greedy dude, and this girl with a bigass hammer that is obsessed with beating the shit out of things with said hammer (though she does remind me of Presea from Tales of Symphonia).

Guess who's who?

Course, you crawl along the dungeon known as the Evil Cave chasing this bitch's ass, to help an incompetent rich dude.  This all the while crawling a 'dungeon' with JRPG music blaring through the speakers.  It isn't terrible music per say, but it is blantant midi JRPG tunes.  Again, I've saved you the trouble.

Crawl, crawl, crawl... course I played ahead!

So its pretty obvious that this is a JRPG flash title, that had to make compromises like a town that's a menu screen and the dungeon crawler mechanics.

Its my happening kind of town!

Course, it has the 'well duh' amenities, like a place to 'sleep and magically be healed of wounds,' go though my stuff and characters, get quests to go ontop of the overriding storyline, shop, and go to the Evil Cave for some hot witch and monster action.

Now, there are some things that I like in the game that I think are awesome.  For one thing, the game lets you augment weapons and armor up to your current level, making them more powerful and doing amazing things with your character's builds.

I also really like that there are four character classes (fighter, mage, rogue, and healer) to get skills from, and that every character can put ability points in any three of these classes.  Points they earn from doing side quests and leveling up of course!  Now, as a character's build matters to what they can do you have the opiton to re-spec the characters (for a fee of course).

Now, there is a reoccurring side quest where a woman keeps losing her cat in dangerous dungeons, and there is one about shit getting stolen, that you can get at the tavern.  You can also go to randomly generated dungeons outside of the Evil Cave and feed your pet slime for new items.

Or play timed Bejeweled.. cuz doesn't everyone love Bejeweled?

Oh, did I mention:

Turn taking encounters!

It isn't quite so bad.  There are monsters in the rooms you are in, and if you can avoid hitting them you don't have to fight them... though hitting one monster will cause all the monsters in the room to fight you.

This game is an epic that takes a really long time to load (I though Sonny was hard on a computer) which I should expect from a flash game that wants to be a console game coded my Otakus on Newgrounds (yes, I know the link takes you to Kongregate, shut up).

It is one of those, where either you like it or you don't.  I had some fun with it, and while the difficulty curve is sloped so that the later game actually gets easier and not harder, I have to say this addicting adventure is worth a peek, but only if anima RPGs and crawlers are your thing.