7. Afterfall: Insanity (PC)

This game received very little fanfare, and still doesn’t have an official support or community discussion forum anywhere online. It’s a damn solid third-person horror game, which clearly takes immense amounts of inspiration from the Dead Space series, especially in controls and user interface. The action is fun, the scares are scary, and despite some kinda lame writing, the story is actually pretty interesting. I look forward to seeing more from this studio.

Link: Afterfall on Gamersgate

6. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC)

I can think of at least a dozen close friends who would lovingly place this one at the top of their lists, easily, but for me, the end result of the game didn’t live up to the hype. The combat gets repetitive easily, and when you realize all the unpolished exploits that sit right in front of your eyes, it becomes difficult to ignore them, like a four-year-old pulling hard on your leg and begging for your attention the entire time you’re playing. Despite that, the exploration of the game is second to none, and I’ve paid more to MMOs just to wander around in that open beauty. I highly recommend the PC version, because as with all Elder Scrolls games, if you miss out on the mods, you are missing out on over half of the intended gaming experience.

Link: Skyrim on Steam

5. Dead Island (PC/X360)

While this game certainly did not turn out to be anything at all like that trailer, it did end up being one damn fun game. Two parts Borderlands, two parts Left 4 Dead, and a little dash of Grand Theft Auto thrown in for good measure, I had quite a blast running around on Bamoi Island and murdering zombies. While it certainly had its flaws, I found it to be a more effective zombie survival game than, say, the Left 4 Dead series. This was one of the first games I tested out with my new FragFX 360 game controller, and it worked so well that way that I ended up buying it a second time on the PC.

Link: Dead Island on Steam

4. EYE: Divine Cybermancy (PC)

This one really took me by surprise. One of my close pals recommended it to me, and I’m extremely glad that he did. This indie title is a first-person rpg-shooter hybrid, built in Valve’s Source engine. This game does not hold your hand one bit after you complete a very minimal tutorial mission, and I’m totally on board with that. There are so many elements to this game (hacking, leveling, cyberware, research, psi powers, etc) that new players to it will likely be very confused at the beginning. I was, and I almost put it away for good after a few tries. But I stuck with it and figured out “the trick” to it, and from then on it became one of my favorite all-time shooters on the PC. Best part is that it completely lacks a manual save function – in other words, your actions and decisions count, and when the shit hits the fan, you have to try and deal with it right then and there.

Link: EYE Divine Cybermancy on Steam

3. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (PC)

I was trying to think of a “I didn’t ask for this” joke, but the truth is, this game is exactly what I had been asking for for some time. Pretty much everything about this game blew my mind, and I devoured it hungrily and happily. Even the boss fights, which everyone else hates, weren’t enough to mar the final experience for me. Hardcore fans of the original game like to bash this one, but it’s hard for me to accept most of that bashing as anything other than grognardian teeth-gnashing. WHile the original had some important elements that were handled better that first time, this game stays true to its roots, and delivers one hell of a noir-esque cyberpunk ride.

Link: Deus Ex: HR on Steam

2. Dead Space 2 (X360)

Visceral Games somehow managed to take one of the most concept-perfect games ever (the original Dead Space) and make it even moreso. I don’t have a single complaint about this game. Not one. From the game’s fucking insane opening sequence to the very last line uttered in the game, it is action horror at its very finest, and I can’t begin to imagine how the upcoming third game could top it.

Link: Dead Space 2 for Xbox 360, on Amazon

1. Bastion (PC)

If you are a fan of Zelda-like game play, you are doing yourself a great disservice by not playing this game. I didn’t even touch it until the last handful of days of 2011, but that experience was enough for me to crown this my top game of the year. Everything about it amazes me, from the spot-on music to the story-meets-gameplay-without-pause narration, to the fun mechanics and the beautiful scenery.

Link: Bastion on Steam

Coming up next, perhaps a post on my favorite tabletop moments? Who knows…

As far as my table-topping goes, I’m in the middle of at least two games, with two more on the horizon. First is my Old School Palladium Fantasy sandbox game, which has had four gatherings so far and seems to be maintaining everyone’s excitement pretty nicely. This game is really doing a good job of reinvigorating me, both as an arbiter of events and as a creator of spontaneous content. I haven’t run this seat-of-the-pants in a long, long time, and it is quite simply titillating my gamer imagination. I go into each session with a mental picture of all the events happening in the world within a 20-mile radius of where the characters are, and as they move around, those events progress of their own accord. So far, the players have managed to hit up most of them quite nicely, and get themselves directly involved of their own volition. It’s wonderful.

Next is the Song of Ice and Fire game (loosely using the system, of the same name, by Green Ronin), for which the Torch of Arbitration has been passed on to my pal Sixten. We kicked of the new chunk of the campaign a coupla weekends back, and it looks like the next session is this coming weekend. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Also this weekend is a meet-and-greet session for potentially starting up a new Unknown Armies game. I don’t have much to say about that one just yet, because we haven’t discussed it as a group, but I want to see a story of normal folks from different walks of life brought together by mutual exposure to the Occult Underground. More on this as it unfolds.

Further down the road, probably after the Palladium games comes to its natural end, I’ve got an idea to try a Shadowrun variant in which all the magic is removed, and replaced with simple conspiracy. Magic has always been my biggest complaint about Shadowrun, as it just never seemed to fit right. I was introduced to the setting during the transition from First to Second Edition, and the art back then (some by the always-amazing Tim Bradstreet) depicted a far grittier thing than the more fantasy-inspired Shadowrun of today. Old School Shadowrun was like Ghost in the Shell, while modern Shadowrun feels more like Cutey Honey. My thought now is to remove all the magic from the setting, and replace it with mostly-unexplained conspiracy. Like the Great Ghost Dance, for example, wasn’t a magical event. For some reason a call came in from High Command to just let them go, and the US forces complied – and to this day, no one knows why. And Saeder-Krupp isn’t ruled by lofwyr, but merely an entity known as The Dragon. Is it a person? An AI? A cabal of conspirators? Something else?

All this Shadowrun-minus-magic is in my head thanks to my current obsession with the new Deus Ex: Human Revolution game, of course. Very few games have ever affected me as deeply, or tickled that Fun Spot so furiously, as this one. I’ve been taking a primarily non-violent, stealth-based approach to this game, but the story is so good and the characters so realistically portrayed, that there have been moments where in-game narrative events have successfully swayed my decision. “Fuck. That.” I’d say aloud, before switching from trust stun-zapper to armor-piercing guns and brutally taking out every last motherfucker in the room as an act of revenge that I didn’t know I wanted until only seconds before. The character Jenson radiates this almost-tangible aura of cool boredom that personifies him as the ultimate Gibsonian cyberpunk bad-ass. Every inch of the game emanates a complimentary coolness and enforces a setting-appropriate dirty dismalness, creating what I feel is the most amazing cyberpunk gaming experience to date.

Going back to the subject of Tabletop gaming for a monent, I want to take a moment and talk about two services which have revolutionized my game-scheduling: Agree-a-Date and Doodle. These are online tools that allow you to send out a poll of sorts to a group of people, letting them pick which of the arrayed dates are best available for their attendance. As an adult with a full-time job, an active social life, budding romances, and other hobbies, this makes scheduling gaming sessions much, much less of a headache. I’m moving away from Agree-a-date towards Doodle, because it’s less restrictive and not constantly advertising itself to me. But aide from that, Agree-a-Date has served me very well for small-gathering social functions.

I’ve recently set up a profile on RPGGeek, and have begun posting my plays there. Feel free to friend me.

Finally, the current design project codenamed Hagakure 66 has had some great new developments. I can’t share them just, yet, however. I want the revelation to be damn awesome. It’s on its way, though, most definitely.

I was going to mention this last week but got side-tracked: the Alliterated Games Forums are down for an indefinite period of time. No one was using them, and they were just collecting spammers and bots. If I bring them back up in the future, it will likely be as part of…

The new website I’m putting together! The current AG website isn’t all that easy to update without me breaking things, so I’m setting up a content management suite to handle the basics. My first order of business is to get the basic game pages set up and an official newsfeed. After that, having a forum again would be nice, but it isn’t a major priority. I also want to set up a cart application, so folks can buy things directly from my website, without me having to handle fulfillment through Paypal.

Alpha Protocol continues to rock my knickers. I am only halfway through the game, and I’m already itching for a second play-through. My current style is the suave, stealthy master of the silent kill. My second play will be all BigGuns McDoucheBaggins, the no-questions-asked bullet-loving commando. I am looking forward to see more of the drastic changes in story and play I’ve already sipped with the handful of checkpoint replays I’ve experimented with in the game so far.

One thing about it that I really dig – and wish other games would pick up ASAP – is the Social Mission. A lot of Alpha Protocol’s game play involves hands-on espionage, sneaking into secret complexes and doing all that cool stealth-action spy stuff that makes movies like The Bourne Identity awesome. But almost as many game missions are purely social: you arrive on scene, meet a guy, try and make a deal of some sort, and hopefully walk away with a new ally or piece of information. The clothes you wear in these missions frequently makes a difference, so you should remember to switch out of that tactical armor before heading off to have dinner with the syndicate honcho, otherwise you might piss her off with your incredible social faux pas. I love this, and aside from Mass Effect 2 – which only has a small handful of missions like these – I’ve not seen it implemented in other mission-based games.

This coming weekend will be Free RPG Day! Every year I get excited about this one, as my favorite local game store Guardian Games always has a big shindig to celebrate. This year I’ll be running the new teaser adventure Final Sanction for the upcoming Deathwatch RPG from Fantasy Flight Games – the newest RPG in the Warhammer 40K product line. I’m not well-versed in the W40K universe, but this one looks nice – it’s the equivalent to me of the Starcraft storyline: Space Marines in massive suits of power armor fighting wave upon wave of infectious buglike monster hordes.

I leave you with a video for a song that’s been stuck in my head all morning:

Despite mostly-mediocre or slightly-above-average reviews, I have fully immersed myself in this game over the last few days, and plan to keep that up for the next few to follow. After completing the first two “chapters” of the game, I am convinced that like Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, Alpha Protocol is one of the best representations I’ve ever seen of core tabletop RPG concepts being implemented in a digital gaming format.

So far, I’m in love with this game, and want to tell you all about all of its awesome components, right there alongside all of its annoying and downright awful ones. But this isn’t a review. Don’t get me started on how I feel that most graded online game reviews are totally bunk. I’ll save that for a later time. No, this is more of an essay.

When asking gamers to declare “what defines a game as a RPG,” you’ll get a good variety of answers. Most console gamers will be quick to define a RPG as a game with a skill-based advancement system, where the internal mechanics of your character improve as you invest rewarded experience points into them. Many tabletop gamers will tell you that yes, advancement is fun or even crucial, but the ability to make choices for their characters is also pretty requisite. Without choice, you’re really only playing a limited combat-based board game with progressing development mechanics. Without choice, you’re not playing a role.

I’m in that latter camp. I feel that the true measure of a RPG is Choice, which comes in two forms: 1) Being given the options to choose paths, stories, and opinions for my character, and 2) seeing the choices I make actually bring about definite and sometimes drastic changes to both the present and future of the game. In most tabletop RPGs (aside from those run by really bad games-masters), you have the power to choose anything and everything your character does, says, thinks, and believes. When you make your decisions, you then see the consequences of those decisions in the world around you, and the story reacts accordingly.

With Alpha Protocol, Obsidian has brought forth a level of choice-based video gaming that surpasses that of recent titles like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Mass Effect 2 by leaps and bounds. While I definitely praise those latter titles for the diversity of options that they present to the player, I recognize that with Alpha Protocol, those options are both multiplied in availability and amplified in their immediacy. The choices you make in dialog, combat, mission approach, mission path, romance, in-game email responses, weapon augmentation, lethality, and more all have both immediate and long-term effects on the flow and outcome of the game.

In addition to directly affecting the physical play of the game, your choices affect the opinions of the other personalities in the game towards your own character – changes which then turn back around and affect you both mechanically and narratively. I might be inaccurate here, but I believe Bioware can be credited with popularizing (or even standardizing?) the sliding “alignment” scale in today’s gamut of video RPGs. Mostly evolved as a simplification of the D&D alignment system utilized in Baldur’s Gate and its ilk, this sliding scale of the character’s relative nature within the game world usually represents Good vs Evil, Light Side vs Dark Side, Cool Guy vs Complete Douchebag. With Alpha Protocol, the only such gauges are in the form of a versatile Opinion scale with each of the game’s other non-player characters. Dragon Age did this too, of course, but the difference here is that there are no “bad” choices: be their opinions of you positive or negative, there are no “wrong” outcomes. If a character dislikes you, they might push you harder in the field, or even open up new side missions that wouldn’t have been there had that character liked you. It works on the other end of the spectrum as well.

All of these things… these are what RPGs are all about, for me. Contrary to what the game industry’s choice of lexicon may claim, slapping a grind-heavy advancement mechanic upon a linear turn-based combat sim does not make a RPG. That comes from being given actual and frequent in-game choices, and then seeing the consequences play out around you. I believe that Alpha Protocol and the recent Bioware titles are but glimpses of the future of the video RPG. I’m less for the antiquated focus upon simulation of dice-rolling and chance-based mechanics in video RPGs, and more for the increased variety of both realistic and consequential choices presented to my character.

First, a link. Check out Universal Dead, a new low-budget web series about zombies. It’s… not bad. Not bad at all.

For the last few days I’ve been going back and forth between Dragon Age and Alpha Protocol. My current goal in Dragon Age is to play as a solo Archer Rogue + Dog combo for as long as I can manage, outside of the few spots in the game where other companions are forced upon you. I’ve always been a fan of odd “challenge runs” in video games, and I figure this one would be called the “Post-Apocalypse” DA run – survivor + dog, in other words.

Alpha Protocol has been fun. I see a game series in the making here, and this one’s a good start. It reminds me a lot of the original Mass Effect – awesome in many ways, but marred by some rather aggravating design choices. I’m only a few hours in, though, so I’ll save my full decision for a later time after more hands-on experience with it.

I met a few awesome folks and sold a few more copies of Cannibal Contagion this past Memorial Day. Guardian Games hosted their second annual “May of the Dead” celebration, and I was there pimpin’ my game and hanging out with my fellow nerd. Had some great talks with a fellow from the local chapter of the Zombie Squad, and ran a hilariously fun session of my game for a new crew of survivors. Thanks for playing, folks!

I’ll close this post with some thoughts on video game trailers. First, read this article. Go ahead, it’s a good read. Watch all the trailers.

Done? Understand that I get where the writer is coming from, and I whole-heartedly disagree. I want actual game-play footage in my video game trailers, goddammit. Without actual gameplay footage, I might have made the mistake of purchasing any number of generic “guns plus one cool trick no one else does” first-person shooters. I want to actually see how this game is different. You can take a shitty game, give it an awesome story, and fill the trailer with so many awesome cinematics and popular industrial tunes and the consumers won’t know the depth of your deception until they pay for it and hate it, because you never showed them the actual game.

I want to see the game. I don’t give a rat’s ass about marketing cinematics which most likely won’t even be in the final product, and probably look better than that product will, too. Yeah, that new Deus Ex trailer looks cool, and shows us a wonderful cyberpunk world with a compelling story. SO did the trailers for Neocron. Remember how much that game sucked?

So far, my quest has been well-fought but hard-won. I’ve lost a few circumstantial allies on occasion, including a poor scavenger who got caught in the crossfire when those no-good Talon Merc goons jumped me, but thankfully, word is getting out: Shrike’s gunning for the bad guys, and the bad guys be scared. Just last night I donned my favorite leather jacket², pumped myself up on Buffout and MedX, and took out an entire clutch of nasty Raiders using only a Louisville Slugger I had affectionately named Pablo. I barely had time to catch my breath as I led my assault, needing to take them out with as much celerity as possible so as to maximize the effectiveness of my chemically-skyrocketed battle prowess. I charged through their compound – one insultingly forged out of the ruins of an old elementary school – and wiped their filthy souls from the planet with minimal injury. Then I slept off my wounds in their own beds, dragged their bodies into a central heap, peed on their dead leader’s corpse, and set them all ablaze with their own flamethrower before leaving the next morning.

I fucking hate Raiders.

What’s next for Shrike? Word is there’s some “family” of villains terrorizing the poor nearby settlement of Arefu. An easy-on-the-eyes dame named Lucy ain’t seen or heard from her folks up there in quite some time. As the new sheriff of these parts, I reckon it’s ’bout time I let these cheeky bastards know who’s now in charge ’round here. Time to go give this family a taste of the Baseball Bat o’ Justice. Pablo’s a close talker, a real social type.

This past Monday night saw another session of my weekly Savage Worlds game. I’ve become a bit slack with this game, owing in no small part to the increasing difficulty of me running games on Monday nights. This campaign’s days are acknowledgedly numbered, but thankfully this most recent session really got my blood pumping again. I eagerly await the ending few sessions of the series, in part because gaming on Mondays is takings its toll on me, but mostly because I really want to know what happens next. The beauty of running this game largely from the seat of my pants is that when it gets me, it really gets me, and I’m as eager to know the future as the players are. I’ll wait a few more sessions before I post things in detail, though.

I’ll end this post with a little idea: Iron Kingdoms, done with Warhammer FRP 3rd Edition. I think it would rock.

Footnotes

¹ PS: thanks for the bitchin’ coat and hat, Luke. RIP
² Tunnel Snakes rule! *shove*

I implore you: go play this game tonight. If you have already played it, go play it again. If you’ve never played it, get it off GoG.com or eBay and immerse yourself. It will only occupy about 10-20 hours of your life, but they will be nigh two dozen spans of sheer awesome.

And now that I’ve typed this much, the final battle anthem is coursing it’s synth-operatic pulses through my speakers, and I want to go home so badly and re-visit the world of Hillys, and take Miss Jade on another adventure through its intrigues, and then kick that guy’s ass to hell and back again.