Flip down the fold-out seats and put your drinks in the armrest cup-holders, folks: it’s time for another movie night! (Given that it’s Thanksgiving, I hope you’ll forgive me for offering this in place of a legit story–I’m just running off to dinner with the family now. Enjoy, and we’ll be back to our regular coverage tomorrow!)
http://youtu.be/nr9Wcnb-tQQ
After writing about His Dark Majesty a few days ago, I felt compelled to check the game out. It took some doing, but I finally got FRAPS to play nice with the game so I could show my first impressions playing it. Have a look:
All in all, it’s pretty impressive for something running on an 8-bit Atari system. Among other things, I find the interface (designed around the Atari’s classic joystick-and-single-red-button controller) quite clever. My only real complaints are that the larger battles can be excruciatingly slow, and it is difficult to predict exactly what damage units will do to targets of varying defense levels. If those issues were addressed, I’d recommend this without hesitation. As it stands: if you want to go beyond the first three battles, you will have to be very, very patient.
Calvin French writes in to let me know that The Real Texas has been patched with a variety of bug fixes and interface improvements, as well as a new side quest. He further states that the game is now available at a discount on GOG.com, Desura and GamersGate.
He’s also released the game’s soundtrack for free, which you can grab right here. It includes the original .it files, so if you have any experience working with mods (the music format), you may enjoy playing around with those.
Multiplayer for The Banner Saga, the tactical-RPG-cum-viking-tale previously covered here, has just entered open beta. Now referring to this as The Banner Saga: Factions, Stoic Studio describes it simply: “a competitive multiplayer game where you fight against other players online to be the last one standing.”
Now, I don’t normally post about pure multiplayer outings on IndieRPGs.com, but the developers state that “everything you see here is how combat is developing for the single player game as well”–which essentially means that we can consider this a highly involving (and replayable) combat demo.
Interestingly, Factions features persistent characters that you can train, improve, and even promote in between matches. To keep from fundamentally unbalancing the game, however, Stoic say that Factions automatically matches players with comparable amounts of character training.
There’s a lot more to be said about the mechanics on offer here, but it would probably be simplest to just point you toward this video, which features a pretty thorough overview:
To get in on The Banner Saga: Factions during the open beta, you’ll need to shell out $15 and sign up right here. This nets you two Steam keys (one for you and one for a friend). Once Factions is complete, Stoic has said that it will be releasing it for free (though there is currently no word on exactly when that will be).
So, remember last year when Basilisk Games posted about how they’ve been working on Eschalon Book III, but they weren’t technically announcing it? (Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to me either.) Well, now they’re announcing it! Officially. Or something.
Basilisk Games is very happy to finally announce that we are, in fact, working on Eschalon: Book III. Most of our fans already know this, but we couldn’t officially announce it to the world until we reached a specific milestone in development.
So there you have it. There is some actual new news here, in that they now have an estimated release date of Summer 2013. So that’s good. Also, here are some (very nice-looking) screenshots for your trouble:
File this one under “new to me”: His Dark Majesty is an aggressively lo-fi turn-based fantasy strategy game “that takes the core elements of Advance Wars and The Battle for Wesnoth.” Developed by a small team, HDM was released back in 2010 for–wait for it–the Atari 800. No, really. (There’s a Windows version too, thankfully.)
The premise:
The world hath never been a safe and silent place, however its perils were familiar and well known. The Dark Army that descended upon the land one disastrous decade ago brought with it chaos and pain, and made of these simple worries only a memory. An eternity of dread and affliction became a certainty for the high-born and peasant alike. The virtuous king of the land hath been executed and his son left to rot in a prison cell. Memories of his life as the Prince of the land have faded away like mist, and only half-remembered visions, clutched tightly to his breast, of the sun upon an open field, or the smile on a maiden’s face armor his soul from complete madness. It seemed that all hope had been relinquished…
Though His Dark Majesty bears a lot of superficial similarities to Fire Emblem, characters are not persistent and there is no leveling or character advancement. This is pure fantasy strategy, in other words, not a strategy RPG.
Here is roughly 5 minutes of gameplay:
His Dark Majesty is free. On the off chance that you don’t have an Atari 800 or an Atari 800 emulator (as if), there is a Windows installer available on the download page.
I’ve been wanting to check out The Battle for Wesnoth for quite some time; over this past weekend, I finally indulged myself and recorded my first impressions as I did. This video shows the first two battles in the South Guard campaign.
You can find more of my thoughts on the game here.
The Battle for Wesnoth is a bit of a classic. It was first developed by David White and released for free back in 2003; because the game is open source, however, it has been further developed and extended by a small army of people over the intervening years. Wesnoth is so old that it gets the designation “old release” here, but it’s good enough that if you haven’t heard of it yet, I consider it my duty to inform you to check it out.
There isn’t a single premise to offer you here, because Wesnoth comes with roughly a bazillion different campaigns, each with its own separate characters and plot line.
The way to go here, I think, is to summarize the mechanics. Wesnoth is highly similar to the Sega CD turn-based strategy RPG Dark Wizard. If you ever played that game and liked it, it is quite likely that you will enjoy Wesnoth as well. Like Dark Wizard, Wesnoth features big hex-based maps, a wide variety of recruitable creatures that you can hire on castle tiles with your hero unit, a requirement that you pay to support your army, and the ability to level up and carry over units between battles.
As for the look and feel of the game, the trailer does a pretty decent job conveying it:
My only beef with Wesnoth is that for a game of this sort, it falls quite far on the “random” side of the determinism-randomness spectrum. Even in favorable conditions, your units are going to miss their attacks a lot. I recently recorded an IndieRPGs.com Checks Out episode with this game, so you’ll get to see for yourself later today. Still, despite moments of frustration occasioned by its heavy reliance on randomized results, Wesnoth is ultimately quite fun.
The Battle for Wesnoth is free: you can grab it for Windows and Mac, as well as Linux (though you’ll need to compile the binaries yourself for the Linux one). Impressively, there are also mobile ports of Wesnoth, though these are decidedly less free than the PC versions. You can get the Android port on Google Play for $3.99, or try a free demo. There are also iPhone and iPad versions on iTunes for $3.99 a pop.
Pete Biles of Mighty Rabbit Studios writes in to inform me that Episode 3 of Saturday Morning RPG (“To Bot or Not to Bot”) is getting released today.
The premise is simple:
The evil Botchangers, the Badbots, are attacking Shadow Valley’s Jean Claude Van Dam and stealing all the power! Marty must stop them to save the town.
Two points if you can guess what the “Botchangers” are meant to parody. And if you can’t guess, well, it should become pretty obvious once you take a look at the teaser trailer:
You can grab Saturday Morning RPG Episode 3 as an in-app purchase from within the game, or buy the “deluxe” edition of the game for $5.49 and get all three episodes up-front. As before, Saturday Morning RPG remains an iOS exclusive.
Jason Geyer writes in to announce Shadow Minion Village, a jRPG / sim crossover. He describes it like so:
A mutated crossbreed of a Sim, JRPG, and sandbox game. Control your shadow minions, build a village, craft weapons and items, and send them to their doom vs. horrible beasts of the wildlands.
Players create and control individual minions to toil and fight. Build houses, workshops, and plant crops to keep your minions fed and happy. Hungry minions tend to eat lesser minions, so you need to keep your eye on them. Features dynamic plant-life and beasts, a crafting and collection system, and party-based JRPG style battles.
Based on what the developer has said about it, Shadow Minion Village sounds like an open-ended Dungeon Keeper with side-scrolling exploration, item crafting, and jRPG-style battles. I’m not going to lie: I think that sounds absolutely terrific.
Your villagers will perform whatever tasks you ask of them, but will eat and sleep independently. Oh, about that:
If the minions run out of food, you’ll get a little warning Icon on the screen. You can ignore it for a while, but after a few minutes they’ll get sick of waiting and just eat whatever other minions they come across next, assuming it can beat it in a fight.
Oops.
Shadow Minion Village is being developed for Windows, with possible iOS and Mac ports. Geyer is aiming to release a free public beta sometime in summer 2013.
