Category Archives: The Android’s Fellow Robots (Multiplayer)

Has There Ever Been Something Similar to Twitch Plays Pokémon Before?

Genuine question. I want to know. I can’t think of anything.

Now for all three of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, well, the good old BBC has got you covered (and so does Twitch of course.) Basically for the last week or so tens of thousands of people from around the globe have been trying to collaborate on a romhack of Pokemon Red. It’s about as chaotic as you might expect, although somehow the stream has managed to get about halfway through the game.

Essentially
Essentially

I keep trying to think of something that this can compare to but for the life of me I can’t. We’ve seen multitudes of people get together for a gaming event (like a game launch), even multitudes of people all in the same place in the same game (like Ahn-Qiraj in World of Warcraft), but all controlling one single character and trying to collaborate on a single player game?

I’ve been playing games for three decades and can’t think of something similar. This might be unprecedented.

Go check it out or alternatively help me think of a previous similar event of this scale so I stop beating myself up and racking my brains over it.

ARPG

With all the hubbub around Diablo 3 lately it’s probably been lost, but the Action RPG genre is actally a thriving one, with several exciting things on the way. I thought I’d quickly run through a few on the horizon in this post, so those of you who don’t already spend too much time hunting for loot can begin to do so!

First up we have Torchlight 2. The original Torchlight was a great little game, if lacking in a couple of areas, and the sequel looks likely to tidy up pretty much everything that was criticized to make for a great experience.

Next we’ll look at Grim Dawn. Grim Dawn is coming from Crate Entertainment, founded by folks from Iron Lore who worked on the fairly well-regarded Titan Quest. I’ve not played that myself but I got it in the Steam Sale so I will be giving it a look soon, but everything I’ve seen about Grim Dawn has me very very excited. Grim Dawn is also promising an open world where you can wander into trouble long before you’re prepared to deal with it, which sounds like a pretty promising angle to me, and the whole exploration side of things will hopefully be played up!

Taking a slightly different approach is the online-only Path of Exile, which gave us a truly glorious image of a skill tree I shall show you in a moment; it really puts Diablo 3 to shame. At any rate it’s another promising-looking ARPG on the way, and one whose funding through microtransactions looks to be backed up by people who have actually got a notion of why microtransactions cause some problems, and are trying to avoid them.

Meanwhile, in Spira…

There are also people trying new things in the genre, such as Nyrthos, being made by some Czech czaps which is aiming to be playable in browsers and on iOS. At first I was skeptical about that, but upon reflection, if they can get the pacing down properly, that might just work – ten minutes of ripping through baddies on your lunch break or on the bus could actually be a whole lot of fun. We’ll have to wait and see!

So if you like sitting around all day clicking the mouse incessantly and weighing up whether your new Chastity Belt of Frustration +3 is better or worse than your Codpiece of the Equine King then it seems like there are going to be a heck of a spread of options in the coming months! Tell us in the comments what you’re excited for, and let us know if we’ve missed any!

Earth Defense Force

As Pike and Mister Adequate are together “in real life”, to use a term, we shall be co-writing today’s blog post!  Obviously one of the first things we decided to do upon meeting up was to play some vidya, and we opted for a game that Mister Adequate brought along, called Earth Defense Force 2017, for Xbox 360.  It was the first time I’ve played it, but Mister Adequate has played it quite a lot, so we will start with him giving us some background on the game and his experiences with it.

Mister Adequate

I first heard of Earth Defense Force in an old issue of Edge magazine, which was reviewing the second one in the series – 2017 being the third – and though it was Japan-only at the time I was instantly taken in by the review which glowed with positivity. Some years later I saw EDF 2017 on Amazon and after confirming it was indeed the same series, I quickly purchased it and found it was even better than Edge had felt its predecessor to be.

EDF 2017 is a B-game. It is low-budget in every respect, from graphics to voice acting, and there is no reason for it to be considered anything other than a second-rate effort from a studio who had neither the budget nor the expertise needed to meet their ambitions.

Except, of course, that it is a sublime piece of brilliance that is incredibly difficult to put down. Despite (perhaps because of?) the low-budget nature of the game it is gaming in a classic form. There is little outside of the main point, which is shooting gigantic aliens with stupidly powerful guns, and what is there is so hilariously bad that it endears rather than repels. The core gameplay however is just immense fun, and the desire to collect all possible weapons drives you to keep playing and playing, as any good system of rewarding players does. In years of enjoying this game I’ve never grown bored with it – it is for all intents and purposes the progeny of classics shooters like Galaga and Space Invaders, and gaming is better for it.

Now I shall turn you over to Mrs. Pike Adequate for her opinions on the game, which she has only first played a couple of days ago!

Pike

The beauty of EDF 2017 is that it puts entertainment first and… well, I’d say it puts everything else second, but it really doesn’t because everything else just doesn’t exist in the game.  Powerups appear as flat sprites, the in-game physics are ridiculous, vehicle controls are about as terrible as you can get, and yet the game never ceases to be fun.

There is no story here because the game doesn’t need one.  Giant bugs are attacking.  So are giant robots.  And giant cyborg dinosaurs.   You have guns and your job is to go shoot them so they can drop more guns.  That’s it.  You do this for 56 levels or so and it’s beautiful.  This is gaming in its very purest form; a shooter without a big fancy budget or any semblance of realistic guns.  It doesn’t attempt to be anything other than what it is, and what it is is unabashedly fun.  Especially in multiplayer.

In other words if you’re looking for a simple, fun, and gloriously mindless multiplayer game, look no further than this one.  It is worth far more than the couple of bucks it will probably cost for you to pick it up.

Two Important Things!

Okay guys!  We’ve got two important things this morning.

Firstly, Syndicate is on GoG for $3 USD.

Secondly, thanks to some happy surprise events that caught both of us off guard, Mister Adequate is going to be coming to the USA for a few weeks early next month!  This means that Pike and Mister Adequate are going to be together for a little while.  Hotseat Civ, Hotseat SMAC, and hotseat… um, other stuff are already in the plans, but what else should we do?  Give us ideas for all your best multiplayer games for PC or Xbox 360.  Heck, if we can get a hold of more GameCube/PS2 controllers, give us all of your best multiplayer games for those, as well.

Discord's body is ready.

And now comes the hard part; the impatient waiting for the next twelve days to pass.  Oh, and also talking myself into cleaning and tidying up instead of playing Victoria 2.  Perhaps I can do both at once…