I’ve been meaning to write on Caves of Qud for a long time, but it’s such a huge topic! In the meantime you may enjoy this Youtuber getting a “lesser victory” as a pacifist, never killing a creature, while playing a “Classic mode” permadeath game. (58 minutes) The video, of course, contains spoilers for Caves of Qud.
Making it much easier is that there’s a lot of ways to gain experience in CoQ without killing anything, so you aren’t stuck at level 1 the whole game. If you play a mutant character you can pick which mutations you begin with, with Force Bubble, Phasing and Precognition being a few that help you escape many forms of danger. And CoQ has a variety of items that you can use to overcome tricky situations, like mechanical wings, and a spiral borer for digging staircases.
Going for a bigger victory would be harder. The ultimate victory requires dealing with all seven of the Girsh Nephilim, which can be done without killing them but requires a special (somewhat spoilery) trick. I should save more explanation for that eventual article series on Qud….
A few days ago I linked to a nearly 10 hour documentary of the Gold Box computer D&D game Pool of Radiance. Maybe it’s something in the air, maybe it’s people desperately trying not to think about elections, but now there’s someone on Youtube talking for five-and-a-half hours of strategy for Kirby Air Riders.
It’s been some time since I obsessed in detail about KARs (my acronym for the sequel, it’s KAR with a plural y’see) here. I haven’t had the chance to play much of it, but I still like watching other people play, and the player who made the video, Moip, doesn’t just rank highly in the competitive scene, but she has logged 2,485 hours in it.
2,485 hours! I think that’s more than I played Animal Crossing New Horizons! It’s more than I logged in Smash Ultimate when I was running experiments on amiibo, running the game overnight with CPU players beating each other up! Both of those figures are over 1,000 hours, I think, but they aren’t as much as that, and I had far longer to log them; KARs has only been out a little less than a year so far.
Will any of you care that much about it? I don’t know, but I care about it, and I write on this blog, so you’re along for the ride. Even so, 5½ hours is a whole lot of obsession. The advantage to posting daily, as I say every so often, is if you don’t care about one day’s subject you can just come back tomorrow.
Even if you are interested in Air Riders though, 5½ hours is a formidable amount of time, even if you turn the speed up to double. Here are the basics of what they say about each machine:
Warp Star: Doesn’t like, pretty weak generally.
Wing Star: Really fragile, while not as fragile as Paper Star but being slower on the ground makes it easier to attack
Shadow Star: Great for City Trial for the combo of flight ability and offense. It’s got low defense, and lift is poor though, you probably won’t make it to sky islands on its own.
Wagon Star: The “master of being decent at most things.” One of the most solid generalists in City Trial, so long as you don’t care, at all, about flying.
Slick Star: If you can control it it’s pretty fast, not as fragile as Shadow, but has trouble breaking boxes.
Formula Star: Great for going straight. Recommended in City Trail to go for Boost and Turn. Being on Formula can make you a target.
Bulk Star: They love Bulk Star, but say they’d never take it in City Trial. Moip says it is good for keeping legendary pieces.
Rocket Star: Hard to control, but great boosts. Becomes hard for others to kill you because your movement is unpredictable. Low turn in the air.
Swerve Star: Feels good to break things with it and collect stats, but bad for PvP. You instantly stop when breaking, and being absolutely still is dangerous in City Trial.
Turbo Star: A favorite generalist pick. You can do something they call a “wall bounce” with it, which they explain in the video.
Jet Star: Very bad for heavyweights, but a good generalist pick for lightweights.
Wheelie Bike: Moip’s favorite generalist for City Trial. She explains you have to know how to build it: avoid Weight and look for Turn early. This gives you a lot of control and makes it safer to go for other stats. Takes some practice to get used to.
Rex Wheelie: Similar to Wheelie Bike. A risky pick with low stats. Very hard to control, go for Boost and Charge to make up for it. Has really good Top Speed scaling. Benefits from Turn too. A top pick for offense.
Wheelie Scooter: Great in City Trial early game due to high manueverability. Fragile though, and top speed is a little low.
Hop Star: Low acceleration, needs Boost.
Vampire Star: Normal state, it’s sluggish but has strong boost. Blood state: stats scale to extremes, and becomes the best machine in the game but for only a few seconds. Also it can steal items.
Paper Star: Extremely good flyer. The master of air farming and going for islands, but it’s very fragile. Great if you can stay in the air, but often dies in one hit.
Chariot: Great generalist for ground characters.
Battle Chariot: Great for battle, but Moip would only pick it as a generalist with a lightweight.
Tank Star: Aim for Boost and Turn. Makes it difficult for other players to tell where you’re turning. Pretty fast.
Bull Tank: Loves taking it with lightweights.
Transform Star: In wheel form, a mixture of Wheelie Bike and Wheelie Scooter. Too much Weight makes it hard to turn without stopping. Generally for wheeled machines, Weight increases grip and slows you down, so it’s important not to go for it too early.
Dragoon: A Legendary. Moip notes it can actually be a bit squishy for a Legendary. If completed early, says it’s best to farm air rings and sky islands.
Hydra: A Legendary. Extremely high offense, tends to one-shot most other machines.
Leo: A Legendary. Very maneuverable, generally high stats. Not invincible though, high offense machines can still kill you.
Due to project recovery I haven’t had a lot of extra time to spend on blogging, so I hope today you’ll be content with Dog Online, as linked from Aftermath, a web game in the vein of the Neopets of old and the Kingdom of Loathing of slightly-more-recent. Remember Neopets? It was popular enough to get actual console game spinoffs. A quick aGooglin’ reveals one was released just this year. Huh!
It’s the good and pure kind of web game that used to be much more common. Maybe it’s inevitable that things like this will eventually sell out, like Neopets did, and become a cesspool, so please enjoy it while it lasts.
Dog Online is in open beta, and it’s a little difficult to see how to get started. The Explore link just took me to the homepage until I created an account and adopted a dog. To do that, first you must go to the Dogtown Pound.
There you can pick one of three randomly-chosen pals, like this oddly-colored fellow:
When naming your dog you can’t name it after another dog that already exists in the game, and it took me several tries before I managed to adopt Plurpel.
Once there, you can buy plant seeds with coins (not real money!) from the Farmer’s Market, then plant them at the Farm. You can find tokens to play the Gatchpon Machine. You can buy bait from the Fishing Mart and fish at the Fishing Spot. You can play a couple of puzzle games at the Temple of Dog.
Part of the fun of this kind of website is exploring and finding everything there is to do. There’s a simple action game under the Games menu, Mimi’s Countless Children.
It’s the most fun if you’re a kid, but unlike Neopets Dog Online seems to be here mostly as a simple fun thing to do, without any visible profit motive. Again, it’s always possible that it’ll get ruined some time in the future, and these kinds of things do tend to either disappear or get ruined eventually, so please find as much joy as you can in its transitory nature.
But you know, I personally have just come off a 92 game win streak in Balatro. Sure it was on White Stake, and in specific circumstances, while Dr. Spectred has 100+ win streaks on Gold Stake. Yes you forced me to admit it, I’m nowhere near as good as they are! But I am one of the 0.54% of players who’s earned Completionist++ on Android, that’s got to be worth something, right? Right?
So, here is some information that may help you play, in case it’s useful. This is oriented towards winning, that is finishing Ante 8, not towards getting astronomical scores or reaching naneinf.
1. I think the easiest deck is Checkered Deck. It makes it nearly guaranteed that you’ll be able to get a couple of Flushes. All you need is a one card hand size increase, and a Flush becomes a certainty. The tradeoff is that Flush is the weakest five-card hand, only worth 15 chips, but it still delivers +4 Mult. One of the difficulties with getting a run started is getting past the early Antes, and Checkered Deck makes that simple. If you can put together a hand of at least four face cards or tens, you’ve made the first round’s requirement right there. On Checkered Deck Jupiter is the best Planet card of course, but Neptune also helps.
2. Even if you don’t pick Checkered Deck, it’s best to find a single hand you can make consistently and focus on it. It takes fewer resources to build levels and Jokers for more than one kind of hand.
3. Early money is extremely important. Money makes all other things possible. With enough money you can not only buy things you need, you can reroll to find more. Aim at getting full interest (normally at $25) every round, and then keep that much unless something really valuable comes up. Sometimes this means you have to make a hard decision between a useful Joker and building interest. Survival comes first, but you don’t get any benefit from blowing past score requirements.
4. Attack all of the game’s benefits simultaneously: Jokers, Planets and card modifications. Each of these things by themselves can win the game, but you’ll have to take them to such excess that you probably won’t get everything you need in time.
5. Planets are probably the hardest tool to use well, but are very important. Planets get you hand levels, which increases both base Mult and Chips. Since hand levels form the base of scoring, they all help empower Times Mult. This makes Telescope one of the best vouchers, and Trance one of the best Spectral cards. I like to open Standard Packs when I can to get cards with Blue Seals, even on Checkered Deck if it’s not a Heart or Spade, which is usually a really bad idea.
5. Prioritize Jokers for the phase of the game you’re in. Early Antes: plus Mult, plus Chips. Late game: times Mult. If you’re struggling in the first three Antes, it’s better to get a good source of flat Mult or Chips than to go for a Times Mult Joker, until you manage to get your base Mult up a bit. But remember, the higher your main hand level, the more powerful Times Mult becomes.
6. If you have the spare money to fill them, empty Joker slots are liabilities. If you have the cash for it, there is little reason not to fill all your Joker slots. There are exceptions, like with Joker Stencil or Madness, or of course Rentals or Eternals on high Stakes, but lots of Jokers have no downside other than cost. Remember that selling a joker gets you half its price back. This is a reason why Perishable Jokers in higher stakes aren’t all that bad: you can always sell it even if it expires, and you’ll get half your money back.
7. Grab onto Common Joker combos. Some of the best combos involve Hanging Chad (retriggers first scoring card twice), which applies to any effect that triggers on individual cards. Hanging Chad and Photograph are both Commons, yet are still worth a total 8x Mult if your first scoring card is a face card. Or Hanging Chad and any Glass card, but be prepared to replace it.
8. The best card modifications vary depending on your jokers and where in the game you are, but really great are: any Seal but Blue and Red especially, Holographic, Steel, Gold and Glass. The worst modifications are Wild, +4 Mult and Stone, but Stone has uses in certain cases.
9. Most Building Jokers are better the earlier in the game you get them. Building Jokers are the ones that increase in power in some way depending on your actions. Green Joker increases by +1 Mult every hand you play, but decreases by 1 when you discard. Some of these Jokers require special play like this to make them powerful, and some have significant drawbacks: Ride The Bus and Obelisk can lose all their built-up power instantly. Supernova and Fortune Teller are building Jokers that don’t have to be bought early, because they are empowered by your actions even before you get them. The best ones naturally are the ones that raise Times Mult, which can be valuable even if you get them in later Antes.
10. After you win and pass into Endless Mode, most builds top out around Ante 13. The score requirement for the Small Blind of Ante 13 is 47 billion, over 100 times the requirement for the Small Blind of Ante 12, and they rocket up even faster beyond that point. Fortunately the last score achievement is for reaching Ante 12. There are ways of playing past that point, but I must refer you back to Balatro University for such rarefied air.
So now that I’ve won 92 games in a row, I’ve uninstalled the game. I’m not going to try to top that… at least, not until the long-awaited content update comes up. LocalThunk, please take your time….
I’ve enthused here before about Kirby Air Ride, and its improbable recent sequel Kirby Air Riders. Racing games, and more than racing games, from the mind that invented Super Smash Bros., and with more than a little similarity to the perennial fighting megahit, but at the same time completely different from it. In fact, there is no other big-publisher game in existence like the Kirby Air Ride games, especially its innovative City Trial mode.
If you’ve asked yourself how well would City Trial work as an e-sport-like competition, well we made a post here with examples of that last year. There is a pretty nice community of Kirby Air Ride fans that have created their own variant of the game, with play tweaked and unfavored events removed, that meets in a Discord. I refer interested players there.
The community on the Discord also plays Kirby Air Riders, which is a much expanded game with many customization options.
If you’d like to see how it works, here is a three game match (31 minutes) from a currently-running tournament. It makes, in my opinion, for interesting viewing, with some unexpected upsets.
I’ve already explained how City Trial works in detail before, but here is an overview that should help explain the above video. A number of players, up to 4 in Air Ride and 16 in Air Riders, roam around a sandbox city environment for a period of time, usually five minutes. The city contains a variety of different vehicles to switch to, stat upgrades to collect and time-limited powerups to use. They explore the same city, and can attack each other during this time, sniping at each other with a viciousness belied by the riders’ cutesy appearance; Grand Theft Auto isn’t nearly this chaotic or cutthroat.
Different events happen during the Trial, some of them helping everyone, some of them detrimental, and some of them a mixture of the two. There are also Legendary Machine parts that sometimes appear, and a player who manages to collect all three to one machine gets to ride it, and become extremely overpowered for the rest of the match.
When time runs out, the players’ stats are revealed to everyone, then they’re thrown into a random Stadium event. The players don’t usually know what the event will be, but sometimes the game drops them a hint. Sometimes, in Air Riders, they don’t all get the same event. Sometimes they get to vote on the event. There’s lots of Stadiums, and they each test the player’s stats, vehicle, and playing skill in different ways. You could end up with a Stadium extremely well suited to your machine and stats, or you could end up stuck with a fragile paper airplane in a demolition derby.
The randomness is part of the fun, but if you’re playing to maximize your wins you can’t usually risk putting all of your statistical eggs in a single hoped-for Stadium basket. Even completing a Legendary Machine is no guarantee of success. The ups and downs of Air Ride and Riders make for exciting viewing, but it’s largely without the posturing and negativity of many e-sports. I recommend watching a match or two, either the above-embedded video or one from the recent Skyah Summer Slam event, whether you’re interested in playing it or not.
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
It’s Spooky Season, and the best cartoon for that time of year has to be Patrick McHale’s Over The Garden Wall. If you haven’t seen it, go seek it out: it’s only ten episodes, each 11 minutes long, and tells a complete story.
If you’ve done that, or have already seen the show, then this will be of the most interest to you. About a year ago for the show’s 10th anniversary Julia Minimata used Adventure Game Studio to make a very short adventure game starring the show’s main characters Wirt and Greg.
It’s free to play in your web browser! It features the voice of Elijah Wood (yes, Frodo!) at Wirt, returning to the role, and music by the people who did the excellent music from the show, The Blasting Company. Another thing made by Julia is the longer adventure game The Crimson Diamond, so why not check that out too?
Wirt gets himself stuck in an apple tree (although he claims not to be), and it’s up to the whimsical Gregory to get him down. There’s only two rooms, but there’s an interesting connection between them to figure out. See for yourself.
Today’s post is a bit late, I had to pick people up from an airport late last night, but fortunately for me today’s topic is already decided: tomorrow is the beginning this this year’s two-day online Roguelike Celebration!
Every year has great talks, it really is an amazing place. It even has a chatroom attached to the video stream, and the chat is designed like a MUD! I can’t impress on you enough how awesome this all is. Come by if you’re of that inclination.
I have had a generally good time playing Romancing SaGa 2.
Until 2016, the 1993 JRPG had never been officially localized into English in any form, but then in 2024 Square-Enix made one of their upgraded remakes of it, giving it the whole modern-day spit-and-polish. As someone born in 1973, I refuse to use the term “glow up,” and am only camel-casing the title because it’s essential to the series identity. That’s the kind of thing that happens when someone with an English degree writes about video games.
If you’ve never played a SaGa game before, well, you might actually have, as the first three games in the series were renamed Final Fantasy Legend and released for the Gameboy. The words “Final Fantasy” at that time had a degree of name recognition in the US, paid for by Nintendo when they published the original Final Fantasy for NES. Nintendo wasn’t then, and has never been an altruistic company, as any publisher from the NES era would have told you, but it was good of them to sponsor this one, and the original Dragon Warrior, even if it was with future profits shining in their dollar-sign-studded eyes… and then both Square and Enix jumped ship to the Playstation because of Hiroshi Yamauchi’s refusal to use optical media for the N64. It wenteth around, and yea verily, around cometh it back.
The SaGa series has always labored in the shadow of its terminal cousin, despite it sharing some of the same talent in its origins. Generally SaGa games are much lighter on story, taking on a more simulationist approach. I’d say the games look generally more like a Western style RPG than Final Fantasy, so naturally the Romancing trilogy didn’t see US shores until they started rereleasing them. Instead we got Secret of Evermore. I tell you, there is no justice.
SaGa, famously, doesn’t use experience levels. Generally characters improve in statistics through use. In Romancing Saga 2, this takes the form of a system of weapon and magic skills, which each themselves have levels. When a character uses one in battle, it gets some points. The stronger the enemy, the more times it’s used, whether it defeats an enemy, even if it was a different character who used the skill, all of these things seem to factor in. Higher levels mean more damage, and also give the character a chance to learn better skills that use that weapon.
There is something you should know if you decide to play it, which is alluded to in the description on the eShop page but it’s possible not to realize it. At the start of the game you’re asked to pick one of two character models, one visibly male and one female. You don’t immediately play as either of them, however. You won’t see either of them until nearly the end of the game. Instead, you start out playing as Leon, the head of a small nation called Avalon, and his son and successor Gerard. The kingdom is beset by one of the Seven Heroes who are the major villains of the story, and both Leon and Gerard’s brother Whats-His-Name get killed. Gerard goes off and gets revenge on the scoundrel, and keeps going for a while, but eventually the game declares “XXX years pass,” where XXX is a number over 100.
Surprise! All of your characters are gone! Gerard too! The stories they had been a part of are just left hanging. I guess at some point Gerard got tired of avenging his family and saving the world, and decided to just do emperor stuff at home for the rest of his life.
I can’t emphasize how sudden and jarring this is. If you know it’s coming it’s not so bad, but up to this point it seems like the game had been gearing up for you to play Gerard for the full runtime, but no it really isn’t that kind of game. You’re given a choice of several successors, each one of them of the different characters you have available to you at that point in the game. You pick one, and the are given all of the skills that Gerard had. This happens many times during the game, each advancing the game clock a hundred years or so. If you pick a different class than the previous one, they gain its starting skills in addition to what they had before, so eventually your emperor becomes the most versatile member of your party.
After the start, the game is truly non-linear. You can explore the world largely as you wish. In the original I understand it made things feel aimless, but this version offers to keep track of quests for you, and show markers on the screen so you’ll know where to go. After beating the first of the Seven Heroes who are the antagonists, you can attack the others in different orders. While I usually like the classic style of these games, Romancing SaGa 2 is so far-flung and varied that you’ll be playing for many many hours even with the game showing you destinations, and while the quest markers can be disabled I recommend leaving them on.
Timeskips happen whenever you pass a major quest milestone, but can also happen when you finish a number of subquests. Some subquests can only be done by specific kinds of emperors, like a male one (boo) or a Corsair, and you’ll be locked out of them until you have one that fits the bill.
One important thing about timeskips is eventually you’ll be looking forward to them, because of another of Romancing SaGa 2’s little features. Every character, including the emperors, has a limited number of life points, or LP. When a character runs out of HP, they lose one LP permanently. There are also some attacks, I hear, that affect LP directly. Some characters have buckets of LP (I’ve so far seen up to 26), but some being with as few as 6. When a character reaches 5 LP the number is displayed in red from then on. When a character runs out of LP they die permanently.
It’s not quite permadeath in the roguelike sense, you can always go back to a previous save if you wish, but it does mean you have to make a choice: abandon all the progress you’ve made since the last save (this version of RS2 autosaves on area changes), or keep going without that character. The game will generate a new character for you to fill in the role of the departed, who can then be added at a tavern. If your emperor character runs out of LP you have to pick a successor immediately. I don’t know if a timeskip also happens in that case, but it probably does. Whatever causes a timeskip, all of the next generation of characters will have a new supply of life points, and you’ll be grateful for it.
Losing even one LP hurts, because Romancing SaGa 2 is shockingly hard! I’ve been playing on the “Hard” difficulty, which is the difficulty of the original, and characters run out of HP all the time. Frequently a monster will decide on hate this day, and make a single attack that drops a character to very low HP, or even knock them out in one move. I don’t know if it’s that bad on lower settings, but I enjoy the challenge of scraping through every battle. If you too choose hate, and play on Classic, be prepared to use every advantage to its utmost.
I haven’t yet exhausted the things to tell you about Romancing SaGa, but I have run out of time to write things down about it. I’m sure I’ll be back to tell you more soon.
Plus:
Combat is genuinely fun and challenging. A game like this, I think, challenge is the point of it. There are three difficulty levels, “Casual” (you are supposed to sneer when you say it), “Normal” and “Hard,” a.k.a. Classic. Normal is intended for experienced RPG players… but Classic is harder than that, and is the difficulty of the original Super Famicom game. It is truly difficult, and it’s the one I’m playing on. I hear two more, even harder, difficulties are unlocked after completing it, for players who enjoy bashing their heads into solid brick walls.
Minus:
I can’t emphasize enough how the game sets you up to think it’s one kind of game, then without warning throws those characters and their story away. Do not get attached to Gerard, he’s a nice boy but he won’t be with us long.
The succession system, which periodically replaces your entire party with descendants of similar skill, sometimes causes subquests to break. Sometimes you can restart them, but I’m not sure if you always can.
As you advance the story and fight monsters, the “enemy strength” rises too, which makes all the monsters stronger. As a result, a time-honored tenet of battle RPG systems, that your characters get stronger, is overturned. The world increases in power as your characters do. Due to this, it seems if you build your characters so they’re generalists you’re shooting yourself in the foot, as it means they won’t have a way to keep up with the rising enemy difficulty. It’s better to raise them each to specialize in something and stick with it, and switch your party composition to meet different challenges. I consider this to be a grievous design sin in an RPG (I was not a fan of Final Fantasy VIII) and it’s the worst thing about Romancing SaGa 2, but there’s a lot else here to recommend.
it’s mentioned that in one player mode in the original Japanese version dying causes you to reset back to a checkpoint, Gradius-style,
that the game is known to increase the health of boss enemies if you have the blue Laser weapon,
that the game is generally easier if you play in the Player Two position,
that to begin the game with the lowest difficulty rank, it’s best to start the game when attract mode is showing Stage 7 (a space level),
and that the Player One position increases the game rank faster if you have the blue Laser weapon, while the Player Two position increases rank faster if you have the red Vulcan weapon.
A lot of sylvie’s strategy comes from rank management, and manipulating aspects of the game to make it more manageable, which is much more interesting to learn about than to just be told to “git gud.”
Have a look if you like, and if you don’t care about the commentary and just want to watch her deathless Raiden run without any of those pitiful human words, watch this video instead.
Long ago, back in the days of @Play on GameSetWatch, I did an interview with Keith Burgun about his mobile roguelike 100 Rogues.
100 Rogues was lots of fun, but the thing about app store apps is, if you don’t keep them updated and pay their access fee, they eventually fall out of publication. This is an awful fact about mobile gaming, and because of it 100 Rogues has been very difficult to play for over a decade. Well, no more: it’s now available on Steam for $7 from Paw Games, and it’s currently 25% off too!
Well, almost no more. The Steam version currently says it can’t find the executable “100 Rogues.exe”. I am running CachyOS Linux and the problem might be related to that somehow. I do find that if I go to the game’s home folder, ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/100 Rogues, and run 100_rogues_3_0_21.x86_64 out of it, it starts right up. I’ve notified Keith of the problem and they’re working on it. It may be a Linux-only issue, I don’t know if it’ll work right out of the box on Windows. If you get it and it won’t start, that is probably why. They just released this version, so I expect the glitch will be ironed out soon.
100 Rogues is a fun game from years ago that still has some interesting differences from the standard roguelike formula. Characters can’t move diagonally, and attacks happen before movement, so you can walk up to enemies without them attacking you immediately, and walking away from enemies lets them get a free attack at you! Roguelike gameplay has been so iterated upon in its standard form, since 1980, that kinds of bold changes help keep play fresh, to not fall into the same old patterns.
Long time roguelikers might find it a bit easy, at least on normal mode, but there’s a challenge mode included too. Give it a try!
I’ve seen some of these weird little messages (34 minutes), edge cases that appear when you talk to someone or witness an event at an unexpected time in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’s three-day cycle, or do it while one of the game’s many masks.
A few of the cases covered:
Tatl the fairy’s information on a couple of the bosses changes as you progress through their fights.
The guards blocking the exits to Clock Town usually use the presence of your sword to determine whether they will let you leave, but if your sword was stolen or is being forged they’ll notice and let you leave anyway. They also give you different hints on which dungeon to do next.
The Astronomer has special dialogue if you speak to him as a Goron or a Zora.
The residents of Clock Town each have their own little story of how they’re handling their impending destruction. The Swordsman especially has interesting reactions that change as the clock ticks down.
The Swordsman also, like the Happy Mask Salesman, has a reaction to every mask you can wear to his shop. The lady in the Treasure Chest game and the both the proprietor of the Trading Post and his employee have unique reactions to some of the masks.
If Deku Link can shoot bubbles they can play the archery game, not even needing a bow!
What’s great about all of these cases is none of them are necessary to win the game! It’s there for the players who try to experience Majora’s Mask’s story from every angle. Disable used a text dump to chart out all of the game’s dialogue on a web page here.
‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.
The opening to NAQBU, a free web game, certainly makes all the right references. Its name first shows up as MORIA, and its similarities to Robert Alan Koeneke’s early roguelike are obvious. If you sit at its title screen, it also shouts out to the makers of Rogue, Hack, Larn, NetHack, Omega, Angband and ADOM. I feel like this game was made for me directly: I’ve played all of them.
The town level; unlike Moria, each building is labeled
Your job is to descend into The Dungeon and beat the boss monster down there, as @-signs have done since time immemorial, which for the purposes of roguelikes is 1980. I would tell you what it’s called, but a lot of the monsters and items have non-English names that don’t fit easily into my memory. I don’t think they’re procedurally generated, some objects and monsters have names taken, or else derived from, from Mesopotamian mythology, and don’t seem to change from game to game.
Naqbu right now is a very young game, so any of this could change, but right now it plays like a very simplified Moria, with only ten levels and without its vaguely Tolkienesque theming. Like Moria, above the dungeon is a small town with various amenities, and also like Moria each level of the dungeon is regenerated when you enter it. A couple of its enemies even make cameo appearances, like the white worms of the early levels.
Each level of the dungeon has a name. This is the first level, the Reed Marsh.
While Naqbu (mostly) uses ASCII characters for its graphics, it isn’t a terminal game. It uses a terminal-like appearance as an aesthetic choice, which is also an approach used by some versions of Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud. Naqbu then applies a layer of extra glitz on top of that, which reminded me a lot of the terminal emulator cool-retro-term. Magic items produce character-based animations around you when used, and some dungeon levels have display gimmicks. This is sometimes a little distracting; an effect I encountered later in the game offset the player symbol a few pixels to the right, and so made it a bit difficult to figure out just where they were standing. A few monsters have screen-warping effects around them that also make it hard to target them with attacks sometimes. (A few of the screenshots included here are a bit distorted because of them.)
Dungeon level three, the “Seven Gates.”
Moria-likes vs Hack-likes
Being a Moria-like, Naqbu is a tactical game about fighting monsters. In Moria-likes, such as UMoria and Angband, even though they have some item identification such as in Rogue, the creatures that live in the dungeon are the chief obstacle of the game. The alternative are Hack-likes, where it’s more like the dungeon itself is your true enemy, and the monsters that live in it, while a big part of the challenge, are just one aspect of it. Naqbu doesn’t even have traps in its current form, and only a few kinds of bad item.
When you find a better weapon or suit of armor, you automatically switch to it.
Naqbu has a lot of little comfort features. When you find a piece of equipment in the dungeon that’s better than what you’re currently using, the game will equip it to you automatically. That’s possible because none of the weapons or armor have any special functions at the moment, and there are no cursed items. There’s not much question whether one item is better than another, since it mostly comes down to numbers. Equipment power thus is largely the result of how much exploring you’ve done, and how deep. You can find scrolls of enchant weapon and enchant armor, and there is some minor strategy around whether you use them immediately or to wait until you’ve found a really good item, but with the game’s current difficulty I didn’t have any problems winning it on my first try even using them as soon as I found them.
Naqbu uses a Moria-like item identification system, which seems kind of like it plays lip service to Rogue’s challenging identification. There are a small number of bad items that give the ID system some teeth, there’s only three kinds of bad potions and just one bad scroll. All of the bad potions can’t be sold in the town shops, a pretty obvious tell that they’re useless. None of the bad items inflict any permanent harm on you either, so it’s a matter of saving potions until you have three with prices of 0, using one of each of them on the town level to identify them, then you’ll never be fooled by them again for the rest of the game. There aren’t a lot of different kinds of magic items anyway, making it a simple matter to learn what they all are, despite the complete lack of identify scrolls in the game.
Dungeon level 5.
The Dice Are In Charge
There’s a phenomenon in roguelikes where, after a certain point, it’s like the random number generator plays your character, where it determines your character’s strength more than your playing strategy does. All the best equipment is found in the dungeon, and how much you can boost them depends on how many enchant scrolls you find. For the most part it’s obvious how to make use of these items. There are no real decisions to be made there.
Rogue had some interesting risk/reward aspects with its items. There were monsters and traps that could decay your weapons and armor, but leather armor couldn’t be rusted, meaning every scroll of enchant armor that went into one was permanent, but otherwise it was the weakest armor.
You could wear a ring of maintain armor, but those were rare, and also increased your hunger rate slightly. You had a hard choice to make: did you hope to find strong banded mail or plate mail and put all of your enchant armor scrolls into them then try to preserve it, or did you pile them all into leather armor? What happens if you put on cursed armor then? Enchant armor scrolls will uncurse it, but you’ll then still have mostly-bad armor with a single plus added. Alternatively you could hope to find a scroll of remove curse, then switch to a suit that’s a better home for that plus.
Dungeon level 7.
Potions of raise strength drunk when at maximum strength raised that maximum, but rattlesnakes could drain strength and you might not ever find a potion of restore strength to get you back up to maximum. And all of these items had to be identified to know when to best use them. If it’s easy to identify items, then it becomes a lot more obvious what the optimum moves are. That’s what I mean by the random number generator playing the character: if you find an improvement item, you just use it right away, because there’s no reason not to. Hard item choices make the challenging combat more interesting by giving a player a way to blunt the monsters’ claws and teeth, but it’s not something that’s a real part of Naqbu.
It’s true that identification helps you know what to keep and what to drop, but there isn’t much drawback in using the bad items anyway. They certainly won’t harm your player’s long-term state, like Hack’s scroll of destroy armor or potion of sickness can. In practice, you use all the potion and scroll types once, and from then on you just never pick up the bad ones. In my run of Naqbu, I knew all the bad items by dungeon level two, so there was no strategy to it at all.
All of this is usually true of Moria-style games anyway. Because the dungeon levels can be regenerated endlessly, there is no real limit to the number of state-improving items that can be generated. This means that, at some point, the design expects the player to have spent time improving their state up to maximum or close to it. This is a reason why I tend to prefer Hack-likes, which generally don’t let players generate endless items, and tend to become broken when they do, as with Nethack’s exploit (now fixed I think) of farming black puddings. I’m not sure what can be done to reconcile this, but maybe Naqbu’s creator Jason Steuber can think of something? Or maybe he doesn’t see it as an issue that needs to be solved, I’d say that’s valid, but more on that further down.
Metagame Elements
Maybe Naqbu’s most interesting features come from its inheritance system. As you play and build up gold, you can improve your house to store more items, and expand your pack to carry more. Your house persists between lives: later characters will be able to take advantage both of stored items and its increased size. There’s also a bank where you can save money between lives, and even pays you interest for money saved, a notably Larn-like feature. A new character also inherits a percentage of earned experience points from
Now I should note that I won my first game of Naqbu, so I can’t say if any of these features work. I’m taking the game’s word for it, and making some assumptions about them too. As it stands now the game is too easy for these features to matter for that much. Now, it’s a good thing that you don’t have to use them to win, it’s possible to go too far in that direction, which is a problem I had with Rogue Legacy.
Building a Better Dungeon
Right now Naqbu is unbalanced in the player’s favor. It’s really too easy. It’s possible to die, yes, but with proper care and timely item use the game is very winnable. Please don’t take me as some kind of final authority in roguelike design, but I have played a lot of them. I think what Naqbu could use is a general tuneup, a lot of different game systems tightened up a bit.
Naqbu has scrolls of recall, which teleport you back to town after a delay of around 20 turns, and for 3,000 gold you can build an obelisk at your house that will teleport you down to the deepest level you’ve been to. That eliminates a lot of traipsing through the same dungeon levels, which is important when the monsters on the early levels are no longer a significant challenge. But nothing prevents you from doing it anyway if you need to restore your stocks of items. The dungeon levels are rebuilt every time you reenter one, complete with a new stock of items to find, so it’s an endless source of supplies. There are shops on the town level, but it’s unlikely that you’ll need them much beyond the first couple of levels.
Stacks and stacks of items.
Items don’t have weight themselves, it seems: you can carry multiple suits of armor to sell in town without issue. Naqbu has Moria-style inventory limits. That means items of the same type automatically get pulled together into stacks, and carry limits are by slot, so you can have as many potions of a type in a stack as you can scrounge up. By around dungeon level 8 I had a stack of like 40 cure light wounds potions, and a not-insignificant number of stronger types. I also had a big stack of short-range teleport scrolls for getting out of scrums, and a few potions of speed, an underrated resource in many games, to tip combat odds in my favor. There are some nicely challenging monsters in the deeper dungeons, but by the time you reach them you have so many help items from exploring the earlier levels that you’re never in much danger.
If I were to try to improve Naqbu, I would tighten up each of its game systems a little bit. Maybe limit item stacking a bit. Implement a better state improvement system, where the choices aren’t all obvious. Add traps. Lessen the item generation so the player has an incentive to use the shops on the town level. Add some more kinds of items, so the player will have to choose between what to carry, and to make identification harder. Make equipment power more from intrinsic properties than just increasing their numeric power. Give more early-game monsters interesting properties besides just hitting you.
Maybe some of these problems I identify are from my own dissatisfaction with Moria-style design, but Moria makes up for it by having a lot of really mean monsters too. I think there’s room for Naqbu to make an identity for itself, not by making the monsters harder, but by making itself a bit more Hack-like and getting its challenge there, making it harder to build the player’s state.
It’s possible that’s my own biases speaking. There are lots of people who prefer Moria-style play, but if Naqbu wants to remain on that route, I think the monsters will have to get harder to make up for it. Naqbu currently limits player experience level to 25, which I reached by dungeon level 9. When you can’t grow the player character through experience any longer, there is a lot less incentive to explore the dungeon, and the focus on the game moves almost entirely to gaining more items, and if you have enough items to win by that point there’s really nothing else left to do. There is no more improvement in state left to gain.
I notice that there are no duplicates on this list. I don’t know if a single player can have more than one entry on the scoreboard.
Naqbu maintains a universal score list. At the moment there are only fifteen players on it, and five of them are winners. This proves pretty handily that the game isn’t very difficult. My own game is currently 4th place on the list as I write this.
I feel like there’s more I could say, but it’s almost 5 AM as I write this, and it’s already really lengthy. I threw it together quickly and obsessively. I wanted to get something out there, not just to contribute my opinions to the author while the design is still malleable, but also to get the news about the game out quickly. I think it’s a shame that there’s only been 15 players of Naqbu so far. I think all of its problems are due to the fact that the game’s only a couple of days or so old as of this writing, and that it has lots of potential. I have so many things to keep a watch for that I find it hard to make promises, but I’ll try to set aside a little sliver of my overtaxed brain to check on Naqbu’s progress in the coming weeks.
