Hot Tin Roof: A Female Lead Noir Piece

Different perspective here. I just finished playing Hot Tin Roof: The Cat that Word a Fedora and while it was fun yet in some ways confusing, buggy, and frustrating, I want to glance over that for now. One of the more interesting take aways of this game was the role of the female in this game.

Almost as if it was crafted to pass the Bechdel Test, HTR stars two leading females, albeit one is a block person and the other is a cat, but "casting" like this does make it pretty difficult to not pass the test unless the two only talked about boys the whole time, at which point it would probably be more successful at failing if it completely lacked dialog. In the case of this game, being a dialog driven platformer/adventure game, we see plenty of opportunity to satisfy the criteria. That said, this game goes beyond just passing the test in that it makes a concerted effort to make females equal members of the population of Tin Roof. Doing a quick count of things in my head, I can recall at least 10 major characters (cheating a bit with the 3 blind mice as separate, but I definitely recall them as 3 separate characters) in the game that identified as female. I'm not sure if I can't say the same for male, although if I make assumptions that the default gender is male it's maybe, but definitely not as many major characters.

What's interesting about that population distribution is that you may expect it to affect the story perception. A Noir piece is typically a male dominated genre where the female plays the role of the damsel in destress or at the extreme case, the femme fatale. So the introduction of not one but both of your lead detectives as female, many of the criminals are female, and a good scattering of side characters are also female, is a conscious effort to stray from the norm.

And it is noticeable. Every time a female gender is applied to a character, I found myself pretty much saying "oh, that's a girl?". Guess that might play into my narrative bias that assumes that everyone is defaults to male and is only otherwise if identified as that or they do something that is narratively matching to a female. The other option here is if they appear like a female, but that's the cool part of what this game does with this universe. With the exception of maybe Sally, who appears in a waitress dress and flush cheeks that makes her easier to identify as female, and Shelly for similar reasons, the characters are either block people or animals with gender neutral names (Jones, Franky, Buttons). What's important about this is that it becomes unimportant at a certain point that characters identify one way or another (although there are still some stereotypical male roles played by males here like the corporation CEO, the policy chief, the mob boss). The important part is the character that they are and the role that they play in the story, not the fact that after the character identifies in a certain direction. But does gender neutrality equal gender equality? I'm still not sure.

While this game is interesting in what it's trying to do, I'm not sure if this necessarily changes things as far as normal gender narrative expectations in stories are concerned. Some of that is it's just so ingrained in the way we perceive stories. At the same time I'm trying to imagine if this would have had a different impact if the characters were readily identifiable as female in appearance, and I'm not sure if it would accomplish the same as far as making for an interesting push for thoughts about gender in stories (entails sort of a applying this story to a Sin City visual which is interesting). What I do know is if there is going to be a sequel to this game, I do think that going into it as I meet new characters, I don't feel like I'd necessarily do the same "defaulting to male" that I would normally do for any other story.

Cannibal! The Game! (A Tharsis Report)

Ended up playing Tharsis for these last two weeks. Last week was pretty much a non-stop, gotta play 1-2 games every night. That was probably because that week was spent mainly losing the game. Something about these permadeath type games. When I can't beat them, I gotta grind until I can.

This one in particular was pretty tough because it wasn't obvious that I was necessarily getting better at the game. Sure my fourth game was definitely better than my first since I understood the game much better at that point, but the difference between game 4 and 10 were not necessarily obvious. Part of that is because any variance in the results of a game started to feel like it was just luck of the draw. "I got farther this time because I lucked out on rolling that 5" or "I lost early because I got screwed on that event in the engine room". Skill didn't seem to have anything to do with it.

But as I kept playing the average results got better. Yes I happened to lose in week 3 just on a play through today, but the overall end point was getting better. I was managing my overall resources better, not just concentrating on the ship's integrity, but the overall balance between health, dice, and mind (which still always is the last priority). The interesting thing about getting better at this game is that it doesn't become obvious until you see that one extra cutscene that you hadn't seen before, or you start making different decisions, like not responding to an event, but rolling in a room that has nothing in it, and seeing how that can benefit more in some cases.

So where do I stand right now? Typically when I pick up a game, there's two points in which I feel like I've beat the game. The first is your traditional, make it to the end. For Tharsis, it was playing in normal mode and reaching Mars (Still haven't played on hard, probably because normal is heartbreaking enough most of the time). It took pretty much that first week to get there, with lots of heartbreak in between. It started with me clearing all events up to the halfway point, and then getting destroyed by the next week. Then it was another play through where I got to the last week, but was hanging on by a thread, only to double lose there (when both all crew die and the ship breaks apart in the same turn). Then I had the most heartbreaking experience when I got to the end, but rolled just short, where if one crew member had an extra bar of health, I would have made it. Finally, a combination of luck and better planning got me to the end (by just one health for one crew member and the ship). Ending was pretty disappointing since it didn't say much, but I had finished the game. That said, I wanted a bit more.

This is where that second beat comes in. Now that I had overcome the Iktomi with one crew member rancid in human flesh, I needed to either beat the game with all four making it, or at least making it without having to resort to canibalism (which also happen to be achievements in the game, not a coincidence that things line up like that). Got close last night with my second completion of the game. Everyone was accounted for at the end, but one person was short one health and there was an event that couldn't be overcome in that turn, so they didn't make it. That and I was canibalizing like crazy anyways, partially to see if I could make it to that achievement (still short. They just don't pack enough human on these humans anymore) but also because it just felt like I needed the dice.

Finally, I did it this morning. Every turn felt like it wasn't perfect, but it was good. I've got a potential no injury research on deck, but hold onto it for now since events incorporating injury are few at the time, and low and behold next turn there's plenty of them so the planning pays off. I'm high on dice right now, but gathering food is not a bad idea still, can hold onto that for next turn (events robbing you of food are relatively rare compared to ship damage and crew health).

Still, didn't mean that the last week was a cake walk. Was pretty much a guaranteed win case, but I wanted more than that. All four were in good dice shape despite some low health. Hadn't touched human meat at all, but side projects had left the Iktomi in sad condition where I needed to make at least two repairs, so on the surface that meant I needed to leave one person in the engine room to keep the ship together before the end. This is where research cycling kicks in.

I had plenty of dice for everyone and events not happening in the front were off limits if I wanted to get all four in the front, so sent the pilot up front first to stabilize things for the event there since we had lots of assist and he could secure healthy movements. Then I could bring the technician over, using her dice pretty much to cycle. Didn't get anything out of those, but got some bad options out of the way. Followed that with the commander, got some more cycling out of that, and finally got the repair arm, which is a 5 dice research, which I had 4 after cycling, so that left me with the Mechanic with 5 dice. Two options. One was to do what I had done in the past in moments that the ship was about to break, and put my dice into the engine room. 5 dice there means you have a more than likely chance of doubling up, between 2 rolls it's virtually guaranteed (5 dice not doubling is ~10%, making not doubling between two sets of rolls 1%, pretty good when it comes to ensuring a win). That said, I just needed a 3 or a 5 after moving Pacal to the front, which is 1/3 chance for each of the 5 dice, which comes out to ~13.1% for one roll, and I'm in an event free module at this point, so doubling that leaves a little less than 2%. I didn't actually do that math at the time, but felt like it was worth it, I wanted the perfect ending. Turns out probabilities work and I picked up that 3 in the first roll with an extra 5 that Pacal could use for repairs as well. Turned out after having extra dice after all that, I was able to cycle into a +1 ship research as well, which would have been enough, so turns out I had that as backup, dice rolls didn't really matter. I did it. "Perfect" Win.

At this point feels like I'm pretty much done with the game. I can play it again a couple more times to run up the achievements, but I've already completed all the side missions (more games need to do things like these situational game plays, it's just easy value when you've invested in making a game like this) and playing it after spending some time away from games like these is always interesting, but probably not too much of a reason to invest more in this game. Let's see what next month has in store for us.

That said...maybe I do need to try hard mode.

Clash Royale: Asynchronous Mobile Gaming Done Right

tl;dr, I've been playing this game over the last couple months, think I've got at least another couple months on it, maybe more if another update makes it interesting. It's decently designed, interesting, competitive, and overall just plain old fun, which in some cases for mobile games, does not always apply, including the last one.

k, some history. I've been playing random games on and off on mobile over the last several years, and this is probably one of the more interesting I've come across. Mobile has suffered from the fact that it's super young and the gaming world is still discovering what actually works on it. That said, this game feels very right.

It all starts out with the first time user experience. Freemium games require this to be high, since if I didn't pay for it, I'm not really invested in it, so there's very little cost to me just deleting a game after a minute of playing it for free. The FTUE on this one is solid because it's straightforward. You got a hand of cards that you play as troops, and those troops then attack your enemies towers while your opponent does the same against you. It turns out to be a wonderful mix of Hearthstone (card playing), lane based MOBAs (but simple two lanes and 3 towers per player), and Clash of Clans (deploy and let the AI take care of the rest) style game play. They have you play against a computer for these first couple matches while this start to make sense, then they throw you into the fold by having you play other players. This is when the game gets interesting.

While the gameplay is straightforward, things get complex in the fact that you build your 8 card decks out of various cards. At this time, there's about 40 cards available (>7.5 million permutations!) and you unlock and upgrade those cards over time, so not only do your options get more varied, you also become stronger (this is a freemium game that needs options for players to pay their way to the top after all). With each troop being a different permutation of various health, damage, speed, targeting preference/ability (troop v building/ground v air), area of effect, cost, or not even a troop (support/damage spells as well) the permutations and synergies quickly stack on top of each other into a form that can form players of differentiating abilities, strategies, and styles. For example, air is strong because it evades some attacks, but tends to have less health so they can get taken out by direct damage, but direct damage is not enough to take out tankier units, which push lanes well but can be easily directed away from the towers so they soak up more damage, from hoardes, but those are countered by area of effect units...

So now for what's wrong with the game. NO CAMPAIGN! Growing up I sucked hard at RTS games, but the part that I liked most about them were the campaign modes that forced me to play the game in different ways which also proceeded me through a story. Sure, that doesn't line up precisely with their freemium model, but it at least gives you something else to do outside of always competing or just playing the practice arena. Another option could be Co-op play, but that starts to get complicated, but potentially in a good way, which is what I'm really looking for.

Okay, enough ranting. I need to work on my game communication, but I guess that's what this is about. This game is fun, has some potential to do some other interesting stuff, could get boring but will probably last at least a little longer once they release the next content set.

Anyone else play this?

March/April Games - Tharsis and Clash Royale

First, to get things out of the way, yes I'm giving into the hype for the multiplayer game of the (two) month (going bi-monthly to try to encourage easier participation). Clash Royale has already taken up a lot of my time, mainly because it's synchronous pvp on mobile done right. Will go into more details about it later, but since we've had some issues getting participation in multiplayer games up, thought I'd try a free game. You don't have to like it, you just have to play it, and pretty sure you all have smart phones that can play this, so no excuses.

The single player game is Tharsis. I honestly have no ideas aside from the videos and the picture above that came up when I did a google image for "Tharsis Funny". Not exactly fun inspiring, but I could go for a Sci-fi Donner Party flick, especially if it's interesting.

Jazzpunk: Not sure I had fun :/

So this was an odd one.

Got excited to play an adventure game. For those of you unfamiliar with my gaming history, I've played a ton of those, leaning mainly toward the classic LucasArts ones that the company championed while it was unable to make star wars games back in the 90s. Those games focused on inventory based puzzle solving integrated in various interesting environments, anywhere from a pirate inhabited Caribbean (Monkey Island Series), an alien world (The Dig), ancient civilizations (The Indiana Jones Games) or even through time (Day of the Tentacle). One common thing many of these games held was story telling with comedy. Even the survivalist feel of The Dig tells the story with witty dialog in between a vast alien world.

Since those games there have been many games that have tried to replicate the adventure game. In fact some of the guys that originally made those games have started new companies, acquired the previous IPs, and remade or "continued the story" in newly made games. This game however, was different...

Jazzpunk is not a challenge to get through. The puzzles it does have are not really difficult, and if anything the game kinda solves them for you. The comedy is trying to be more witty than anything, playing off of a ton of robotic double entendres and being silly through randomness. Last thing worth considering given this was an adventure game is the story, and that is relatively non-existent. Sure they set it up as a spy flick, but as the story develops, it quickly spirals out into nonsensical stuff about a simulation and exploring a virtual environment, comes back into view when you need to save the director, but goes right off the map again, leaving no real ending.

So what does that leave us? This game pretty much failed me as far as any adventure game goes. Perhaps that means that I need to look at this not as an adventure game but something else. Mechanically it plays like a first person explorer, kinda like portal or something like that. Games like those need puzzles to solve or in the case of shooter, something to shoot. This game really doesn't have either of those. So it's just a matter of exploration, but there's no real reward in exploring. There's achievements, but those are lame. In some games, comedy could encourage exploration, but if it's not funny (maybe there's someone that likes this comedy, just not me) there's no point.

Pretty much, don't see what the point of this game really was. I guess there's some audience for random shit spliced together into a big pile of shit, but I guess it wasn't me.

Maybe I just need to replay this whole game high or something like that. Maybe then things would get funny.

My Car

It's got a friggin' Sombrero.

I think I'm gonna like this game...if I every figure out the controls. Might need to invest in one of them pc xbox controllers...

Update: Looks like wired xbox controllers work great on pc (dongles for wireless cost 5 bucks so that's an option too), now I just need a pc that doesn't super lag while I'm playing.

January Games: Jazzpunk and Rocket League

Tried to get more votes, but looks like this month is the weirdness that is Jazzpunk and the craziness that is Rocket League. Have fun with these ones.