Flash - Glorg

Haiku-Review:

one button madness
disguised as an RPG
and one-eyed hero

Additional Comments:

Glorg! Glorg Glorg Glorg Glorg Glorg! Glorg!!

Now that that's out my system, it's time to complain about Flash games once again. Huzzah!

To be honest, unlike most of my endeavors into Flash games: boredom or a passing nudge from a friend saying, "Hey! Check this ridiculous game out," I stumbled upon Glorg in a rather unexpected way. I was trawling through the BCRecommender - a marvelous little site where you can randomly find great music on Bandcamp via other people's collective musical interests. It's all quite random, which I love, and helps dig up some stuff I'd likely never discover through Bandcamp's own rather limited search ability using arbitrary methods like tags and such.  Glad the function at least exists, but capping it annoys me to no end. Anyway, while indiscriminately rummaging through a flood music, I came across a mini EP by Danny Baranowsky: the soundtrack to something called Glorg. This immediately caught my interest because unlike the great wealth of music found on Bandcamp, this was a composer I recognized thanks his Binding of Isaac soundtrack. After a quick listen, I was more than satisfied with what I heard and downloaded it, but not only that, it struck enough of an interest to hunt down the curious, keytar-adorned, purple Cyclops and learn what his claim to fame is. Just who or what is this Glorg?

Didn't take long to track him down. Instantly, my curiosity was further piqued when I read Glorg was the hero of a game; the basic description of which described it as a one button RPG. Sold! The game stirred up memories of Super Press Space to Win Adventure RPG 2009. Despite that game being an extreme example of minimalism; to the point where it was downright silly, I loved the premise behind it. Minimalist games force developers to rethink common tropes and mechanics. Granted, Super Press Space to Win can be considered not only a satirical twist on gaming in general, but probably even on the single button genre as well. Single button games aren't new by any means - consider anything from the 2600. Though you could argue the technicality of it by pointing out most 2600 games made use of the joystick as well. Super Press Space to Win only used a single input - the space bar. Fair enough. And to help back the argument, Glorg makes, eh...mediocre use of a single button as well. I can only credit Glorg with caution as to the quality of gameplay when it comes to its use of a single input as at times it can be highly dubious and rather frustrating.

But what is Glorg? Glorg is a one-eyed warrior trying to make his way through a series of dungeons, clearing the path of evil denizens with anything he can find, quite possibly including the kitchen sink. Through his perilous quest, he can explore, fight, heal, collect treasure, and play a game of hot potato with some walking calculators. And he can do it all with the single press of a button. Well, that's not right, because sometimes you have to hold the button, or rapidly smash the button, or simply release the button. Ah! The downfall of a single button game rears its ugly head.

Here's the thing: Glorg really isn't that bad of a game. The difficulty is on the easier side, or at least technically it's on the easier side, and the game makes decent use of randomization. As an RPG, though an RPG that is stripped down to its core, it can be hard to come to terms with a single button format. Unlike Super Press Space to Win, where the game defined linearity to the point that it was obvious it was trolling you by having RPG in the title, Glorg is sincere. Super Press Space to Win's sense of RPGness and video game sensibility is totally blown out of proportion and results in something entirely jokey. Glorg tries to adhere to RPG canon in a more traditional sense as well as proper gaming values. You can improve your weapons as you quest, sell off weapons of lesser quality, heal when necessary, collect a bevy of loot, and level periodically. However, there's one caveat. The player has zero control over any of these elements. As such, any sense of Glorg being an RPG is nearly as vapid as Super Press Space to Win, except Glorg finds a way to present it in such a way that it attempts to give semblance to conventional RPG mechanics.

A lot of Glorg is out of the player's hands. In fact, the only thing the player really has control over is the fighting. The player has no say over which weapon he uses or when he can heal. If weapon B is greater in skill than weapon A, then Glorg will auto wield weapon B. Even if weapon A was previously better than a facsimile of weapon B two chests ago? Yes, because weapons are apparently assigned a randomized stat as opposed to every Witch Kettle being better than a Dead Mouse. I guess some dead mice are just more powerful than we're lead on to believe. Perhaps rigor mortis is creating some truly hardened rodents. But none of it really matters as I'm pretty sure each weapon is just assigned a randomized humorous name and the player has no control over the system anyway, so why nitpick? Same with healing, Glorg heals when the game has decided Glorg has lost enough health to initiate a heal sequence; if you have an available med kit.

But enough of the discriminating details. Let's discuss the one element where the player has some definitive input: combat. Combat is easy enough to understand. You can hold for a charge, release to hit or click to block. It's all quite simple really, except when clicks and releases start getting confused by the game and you accidentally try to hit the enemy when you're trying to block or vice versa. And straight up, blocking in this game sucks. Attempting to block a charged attack is tough because there's no indication of the type of charge the enemy is doing. If the enemy charges there's a very good chance you're going to fail the block. Typically, at least in my case, you either throw a block too early while they're performing a full charge, or you wait while it turns out their charge was just a ruse and instead they throw a weakly charged attack. And you can't just spam blocks because either there's an inherent cool down happening behind the scenes (which I'm fairly certain does exist) or you're falling victim to basic click/release tomfoolery. Sparring as a whole is quite easy, but I think most of my deaths came to misinterpreting charged attacks. And once you fail a block, you typically begin to spiral into defeat as the strikes suddenly keep coming and the game begins to misinterpret your mad frenzy of clicks and releases as a desperate means to stay alive. These are the times you wish a second button existed to help differentiate the basic mechanics of combat. Stay out of a death spiral, however, and the game's a breeze. Sounds logical - don't get hit, but a single hit can easily disrupt the flow of combat and bring you to your knees if you're not careful. Same can be said for the tennis matches with the walking TI-81s. I think I was on the second to last level before I realized you can mash yourself out of a daze. Was wondering what the mash function described in the intro was for. Neglect mashing the button and the TI-81s will get a free hit in every time they hit you, and they hit strong.

All in all, Glorg's rather enjoyable for what it offers. It pretty much delivers exactly what it advertises, nothing more, nothing less. The common complaint seems to me monotony, and I get it. Maybe the developer backed himself into a corner going the one button route, but is it really any more monotonous than a cheap copy pasta turn-based RPG? Not really. Attack, heal, loot, move on - rinse and repeat. Pretty much the formula of any turn-based RPG, and exactly that here. Besides, considering half the shit put out by the RPG Maker community; at least Glorg is trying something different, something, perhaps, a bit rash. But it should also be said, Glorg's a time killer - the natural result of being a Flash game. It's a game that can be beaten in roughly an hour tops and is best played as a coffee break distraction - five minutes here, five minutes there kind of thing. I'd recommend the game as something to try, or as an experience in gaming minimalism, or a chance to enjoy a fantastic soundtrack. Or you can just grab the soundtrack for free over on Danny Baranowsky's Bandcamp page...or for any amount of your choosing to help tell Danny B., "Please make more amazing music, kthxbai."

Nano-Rant:

Likely the best thing about Glorg is its music, however, the game appeared to be plagued by a nasty bug that kept preventing the music from playing every now and then. Only when you traveled to a new area that played a different track would the music start playing again. For those ranting about how monotonous the game already is, once you strip away the music, the game practically becomes a trivial act of repetitious mouse clicking equatable to banging your head against the wall. Explore. Explore. Explore. Explore. Bleh....

Nano-Win

There is some badass box art that exists for this game, though I'm uncertain of its legitimacy as I can only find one site that even refers to it. Ah well.

Rating: 2.5 hot potato playing TI-81s out of 5

PC - Dark Quest

Haiku-Review:

I've a grand idea!
blatantly rip a great game;
make it terrible

Additional Comments:

Here's the thing. I love HeroQuest. I originally bought the game new way back when and still own the base game plus whatever packs I managed to find at the time. The game fascinated me, and even to this day, I prefer it over all other dungeon crawlers, no matter how sophisticated or strategic they may become. HeroQuest had a certain simplicity that not only worked, but allowed for instant customization. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find myself in a situation where I can play the game anymore. I think the last time I genuinely played a round of HeroQuest was sometime around the turn of the millennium, though I have played some other stuff since - ahem, Descent.

Nevertheless, my want for nostalgia led me to bumbling around Steam's vast library of games until I came across a game that appeared to transfer the very nature of HeroQuest into the digital realm. Ok, it's not the first game to do so; in fact, I've played some of the old HeroQuest titles. Fun fact: HeroQuest for the NES is the first game I started playing for Beat All Games. I just never finished it because it's boring as hell, and one of the buggiest games I've ever seen. Of course, it was never released, or officially finished for that matter, so what do you expect? Despite the NES game suffering numerous issues, some of the other versions I tried were not all that better. In the end, I decided the magic of HeroQuest was never meant to be experienced in the digital world.

Fast forward to sometime last year when I stumbled upon Dark Quest. I didn't have much confidence in the game, given its mixed, or mostly negative reviews, and previous experience with HeroQuest attempts. Sure, this wasn't HeroQuest, but it sure looked like HeroQuest. Hell, even the nefarious warlock game master, Azkallor was a direct rip of Zargon himself, or airbrushed just enough to prevent copyright infringement. Thing is, I rarely, if ever, rely on reviews by others. I have a penchant for neglected and/or brushed aside titles. I may dislike them in the end myself, but I often enjoy the journey of learning just how bad a game might be, or pleasantly finding a surprising gem. Well, hear this, Dark Quest is without a doubt, not a surprising gem. Right from the get go, as I was dropped into a dungeon with zero direction, I could feel any sense of fun slither into the shadows as I embarked on a quest clearly negligent of quality assurance. Be it awful grammar, shitty UI, clumsy control, or just general misgivings, Dark Quest is a disappointment among disappointments. I'm genuinely saddened that the game suffered from so many issues, because I really wanted to like the game simply because it was, or at least appeared to be, a proper translation of the HeroQuest mechanics. For a game that's so simple in play, how can everything go so wrong?

One of the biggest faults, and I found this to be a fault in the literal video game translations of HeroQuest that I've played as well, is that the game attempts to adhere to the board game as much as it can in all the wrong ways. The only real reason to play a digital incarnation of the game is because you can't manage to get a group of friends together to play the real thing. It allows for a single player experience in a game that just never allowed for that in board game format. Well, it can be done, but it's pretty boring. Trust me. I attempted such a feat many times as a kid as HeroQuest was a wee bit too nerdy for most of my friends. A drag.

So here we are, a way to play single player dungeon crawls, but the greatest thing of all is that the digital realm allows, or should allow for vast amounts of automation. But somehow, every interpretation of a dungeon crawl rooted in a board game, the mechanics come off as clunky. The automation feels half-assed. I'm not looking for a game to play itself, but there's a noticeable break in flow every time I have to swap characters. True, it allows for freedom of choice among character movement, but somehow I feel it could all be done far better. Honestly, I'd rather have assigned play than the current system. If anything, that would properly imitate traditional board game play.

Another annoyance is combat in general. The dice rolls are done behind the scenes, so we have no real inkling as to what's going on. Other than Thorin, the Dwarf, being able to block damn near every hit and Zerin, the Wizard, producing a guaranteed hit for one point of damage, it's all just a hodgepodge of shitty RNG that somehow benefits neither the player nor the computer. Nothing appeared to have any bearing on anything. Weapons offered differing abilities as opposed to increased stats, which is fine, but pretty much all of the alternate abilities are useless. There was a distinct lack of armor to help increase the odds. Yes, there is armor, but I question whether or not any of it has any purpose, other than maybe the boots, and that's a really questionable maybe. Thing is, as was the case with Thorin, I'd rather have no armor just so damage is happening somewhere. When facing a foe who can equally block everything, the long drawn out battles that can ensue are infuriating - rather, they're dreadfully boring.

That's the underlying theme: boredom. If the developers ever played any of the original HeroQuest video games, they'd realize board game dungeon crawls make for tough translations. They essentially made all of the same mistakes the various HeroQuest ports made. The only real improvement here is the dungeons defy the constraints imposed by the original HeroQuest board layout. Even on the rare occasion where they attempted to add some substance to some of the dungeons, such as having to obtain gems to unlock a door, the game feels hollow - it exists because it can, and nothing more. There is a genuine feeling of apathy running rampant throughout this game on the developers' part. Every single element of the game screams indifference, nothing more so than the town which feels like a cheap afterthought. Ok, it could be considered an improvement over the menus of the original game, I suppose, but it's merely eye candy. I'd rather have had them focus on a more robust store system than trying to entice us with what appears to be a town system where we can buy potions - only one of which has any viable use, weapons and armor, all of which are useless, and magic...um, nope, again, all entirely useless. Even the toolkit to disarm traps is questionable in its importance. Considering Zerin and Zantor, the Barbarian, can't even "search" for traps until they're sprung, ideally you need to have Thorin constantly leading the pack since he's the only one who can buy a toolkit - misappropriation of the original rule found in the HeroQuest rulebook if they were indeed trying to emulate the game to such a degree, which appears to be the case considering the evidence at hand: traps, toolkits, and dwarves. Whatever. The overall sum of traps in the game versus the cost and forced style of play to warrant the use of the toolkit in the first place is nil to none. Take the hits and be done with it. There is literally nothing in this game, as far as equipment is concerned, that has any value whatsoever, except for health potions. And those might as well not exist because there's a very good chance there's no benefit.

Then, to top it all off, there's a wonderful little fate mechanic. Now, the idea in itself isn't so bad. What is bad is the frequency in which it occurs. Now then, if there was some substance behind the fate rolls, I could probably accept their avid regularity. For instance, Zantor has dramatically been relieved of one point of health because he just fell into a hidden pitfall. I suppose we could use our imaginations for that, but come on, even HeroQuest, the board game, had wonderful flavor text in its hazardous treasure cards. Then again, given the atrocious grammar prevalent throughout the game, perhaps it's best the game skimped as much as it did on additional flavor. But again, it comes off as a general blasé by the developers. There's just enough material present to quantify it as a game, but anything beyond that - totally unnecessary.

Oh...oh...wait... Something else I nearly forgot. A time limit, or rather a turn limit. Why does this exist? I'm genuinely puzzled by the inclusion of a turn limit. First off, unless you have no clue how to play video games, not just this game, but video games in general, and even then make wasteful decisions for the first fifty turns purely out of spite because some awful friend is making you play this game, you will never even remotely come close to being a victim of the turn counter. So again, I have to ask why this exists. Timers of any sort are implemented to add fake difficulty because it creates a sense of stress on the player. No longer can the player relax and instead, they have to be quick-thinking. Timers work wonders in platformers as the player is constantly on their toes and therefore far more prone to making foolish mistakes. Here, despite fog of war existing in a sense, a timer of any kind has zero bearing. The player can take all the time in the world to strategize a plan of attack, which unfortunately for this game is nothing more than move in and attack. Not to mention, the player has freedom to view the entire board, or dungeon if you prefer, save those areas under fog of war. The only thing that could have any bearing on the player falling victim to the turn counter is the shitty RNG. That's it, and that's a rubbish reason to have to fear a timer. If combat is going to be broken to the point where Thorin and some hobgoblin are going to exchange hits for 50+ rounds because they both only have a...I'd say 1/6 at worst based on the original game, but it appears to be more like a 1.24 chance, or worse, to hit, then you can't include a timer mechanic. It's an unfair mechanic in which the player has no way to combat it through skill or what have you. If at least weapons and armor manipulated dice rolls, then maybe I could see at least a hint of argument for it, but as is it brings nothing to the table. 99.9% of the time, it's an ineffectual mechanic and the other 0.1% is bullshit because horrible use of RNG may steer you towards disaster; not because the game bested you, but because you've been stuck in a fucking stalemate. It's walking a thin line akin to soft-locking. I'd rather die to the hands of the enemy than volleying pointless attacks back and forth with no hope for gain until the turn counter reaches zero.

Of course, these examples are taken to the extreme as any sense of stalemate becomes moot as long as both Zantor and Zerin are hanging around; especially Zerin. But sadly, that only circles around to the original issue of a pointless timer mechanic. So...I'm at a loss.

Dark Quest brings nothing new to the table if you've ever played a HeroQuest adaptation. To be honest, I'd recommend those who might want to give Dark Quest a try, seek out one of the original HeroQuest ROMs for the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, or hell, even the unfinished NES port. While none of them are really any better, they're not any worse either, and if anything, they make use of all the original goodness bound to the HeroQuest world. But if I could make an even better recommendation, seek out an original HeroQuest board game. Sure, you might have to dish out a few hundred dollars these days, but you'll immediately understand why this game, along with all of the early HeroQuest digital adaptations, are utter crap, and you'll have one helluva blast in the process. Despite the reviews and even some of the initial shock of how clumsy this game is, I was determined to enjoy it, because I felt like many of the people behind many of those reviews missed the point of the game or misinterpreted how the mechanics should function. Nope. Everyone was pretty much on point in regards to this game being a badly done and unoriginal copy of something that was vastly superior in every way imaginable.

All that being said, there is a Dark Quest II which came out late last year. It does appear to be a marked improvement over the first game and although the first game is rubbish, I  am willing to let bygones be bygones and give Dark Quest II a try. But my brush up with the first game was enough warning to at least make me wait until the game receives a deep discount.

Nano-Rant:

Why does opening a door a picking up gold count as a move ending action? This is probably the most moronic decision in the game. First off, if the developers are going to try and adhere to original HeroQuest rules as much as possible, there should just be a collect all loot button to instantly pick up everything in a room. But then, perhaps that's where the idea of a turn counter comes into play. Do I dare risk a couple extra turns for some much needed (not so very needed) gold? Oh wait, I still have 70+ turns remaining and I'm nearly done with this dungeon. If this is the case, one idea steeped in stupidity - the timer - has effectively forced stupidity on other mechanics. And if picking up gold forces the player to end the turn, then sure, why not doors as well? It's a fantastic domino effect of ineptitude and misunderstanding the dependence of various game mechanics on each other.

And before I forget, I have come across an alternate box art mock-up that depicts the noticeably missing Elf. Um...? Elf? Where are you?

Rating: 1 incorrect usage of word division out of 5*

*Seriously? "F-
ear"?

Bravo, my friends! Bravo!

I'm not trying to be the notorious "Grammar Nazi" or some such epithet that people love to casually throw around, but that example of improper word division blew my mind when I saw it in game. That's something you have to go out of your way to create. But then, considering every piece of dialogue and backstory are obviously snippets quickly churned through Google Translate, should I really be that surprised by such an egregious use of the hyphen? Eh, yea, I am, because even Google Translate, or any word processor for that matter, knows not to divide one syllable words, never mind a single letter and then whatever remains.