Magicus (PC)

 I bought this game a few years ago, because the PC version also comes with a download of the Android version, and at the time, my phone was still just about capable of playing games, and I was interrested to see what stuff of interest might exist in the world of pre-paid phone games (a subject I'll get back to later). It's an RPG in which the battles take the form of match-three puzzles, but there's surprisingly a lot more to it than that.

 

When you enter a battle, the enemies will be at the top half of the screen, and the bottom half wil be filled with gems. Clicking any gem makes it disappear and also deals a little damage to the enemies. Getting three or more in a row makes all of the lined up gems disappear and deals more damage. After playing a while, you'll also get spells, which have various effects like damaging the enemy, healing you, or changing what's happening in your little gempit. Each spell has an associated colour, and to charge a use of the spell, you have to click or line up a certain number of gems in that colour. Around the same time as you get spells, you'll also get special gems. These are different-looking gems, each only appearing as a certain colour, and they all have special spell-like effects when cleared as part of a line.

 

Aside from battling, the main gimmick of the game is its one-dimensional dungeon design. You traverse the overworldby just clicking the name of a location you want to go to, but in dungeings, you can go backwards and forwards. Every step you take has a chance of causing a random encounter. This could be a battle, a trap, a travelling merchant, a fishing hole, or one of a bunch of other things. So, the main point of difficulty is resource and stat management. And there are a lot of both of these things. You've got items, experience points, coins, leaves, fish, lottery tickets and more. This might sound overwhelming, but they're all introduced very gradually so you aren't overwhelmed.

 

Some of you might also be thinking that this sounds a lot like a free-to-play game with dark patterns and so on, and I do agree: while playing it, I was heavily reminded of the time I've spent in the past playing Immortal Taoists. There is, however, one important difference that I've already mentioned: this is a game that you buy, and which contains no microtransactions. The problem with free-to-play games that are structured like that isn't just the cost of the microtransactions themselves, but the fact that the developers are financially incentivised to design the games in such a way as to make the microtransactions more attractive: make it possible, but tedious to make progress, give players daily login bonuses so they're hooked on comig back to the game, and so on. It's known as "Dark Patterns" in game design.

 

Using Immortal Taoists as the example, because it's the game of this type with which I'm the most familiar, the setting draws new players in, and the carrot of endless character progression is what keeps them coming back and either watching ads or paying money. It is endless, too. The "Live Service" nature of the games means they can always raise the grapes every time player get close to grabbing them (the player is Tantalus in this analogy, and the game developer is Tartarus). Magicus offers all the positive stuff those free-to-play games, but without the negatives: dying in a dungeon is a very minor setback, you're only shown new equipment when you're at least a significant part of the way to being able to obtain it, and above all: you're given a singular long-term goal at the start of the game (obtain seven magic orbs to save the land from monsters), that has a clear and definite endpoint. I kind of wish there were more games like this! There are interesting elements in free-to-play games, but they're poisoned by the psychologically harmful structure of those games.

 

There's other positive things I can mention about the game, too: its cute low polygon count graphics, your lovable companions and the slowburn bond that grows between them, the fact that though it's a first person game where your character is never shown, it's still canonical that your character is a woman, reflected in the equipment you can obtain and more interestingly (though only occasionally), in the attitudes various characters have in addressing you. Anyway, I definitely recommend Magicus, it's a unique, interesting, charming, and fun little game, and you can get it from DLSite for an absolute pittance.

Banshee (Amiga)

 It's a shooting game, and it's on the Amiga, so I'm sure many of you can predict that this won't be a positive review. I do have some nice things to say about Banshee, though, so look forward to that, at least. I'll start the slating here by stating that this game was only released on the 32-bit Amiga models, the 1200 and CD32. Why, though? There doesn't seem to be anything technologically strenuous going on here, and the 16-bit Mega Drive and SNES, and even the 8-bit PC Engine all have shooting games that are faster and more frantic.

 

That's not to say that Banshee is a bad-looking game, though. In fact, all of its positive qualities are in the visual department. But they're also all the result of some really great pixel artistry, not any special effects or graphical trickery. The game takes place in an exagerrated early twentieth century kind of setting, and all of the backgrounds and sprites are full of detail and life. One thing worthy of highlighting is the way that soldiers die. You're mostly fighting vehicles of varius kinds, but there are tiny little infantrymen running aorund and shooting at you, too. Sometimes when you shoot them, they'll fall over into a pool of their own blood, sometimes they'll crumble into a pile of bones. Sometimes, if you're quick enough on the draw to blow up the transport bringing them to the battle field, they'll flee from the wreckage, with their clothes ablaze.

 

For reasons I'll get into later, I only managed to get as far as the second stage, but it's set in the capital city of the enemy nation, and it's even more full of details. You see women pushing prams, soldiers on roofs who fall to their doom when you shoot them, or riding round the streets on motorbikes, with a gunner in a sidecar shooting at you. I could keep going on about all the cool little things I saw in the relatively small portion of the game I played, but I guess I have to get onto the reasons why all of these things represent a tragic waste of effort and talent.

 

The first problem you'll encounter is that your weapons feel incredibly weedy. Power-ups are rare, and seemingly ganded out at random, meaning a lot of the time, you'll only get useless junk (you can shoot the items to change them into other items, but each one only has between one and three possibilities, and a lot of the time, none of them will make you any more powerful. Another thing that seems to be random is how much of your power you get to keep upon death. Sometimes you'll stay at the same power level, sometimes it'll be slightly diminished, and sometimes it's straight back to the default peashooter. The second problem is one that dawns on you after you kill your first boss: the stages are insanely long. That first boss you kill, if it ended the first stage, would have represented the end of a stage with a perfectly fine and normal length. It actually represents you having gotten a third of the way through the stage, with two more boss fights to (eventually) reach and survive.

 

Another weird thing is that there's no music in the game! Not even in the CD version! I feel like shooting games as a genre are known for having great soundtracks, so one that doesn't have one at all seems very strange, and it feels a little cheap, too, to be honest. It really feels like the pixel artists for this game were let down by everyone else working on it. Looking at Lemon Amiga, this was very well received by magazines at the time, with no review scores lower than 80%. Now, the Amiga specialist magazines I can kind of see, they were clinging to a zombie system and some of the writers might not have played any console or arcade shooting games. But even Gamesmaster, a multi-format magazine, gave it a glowing review and a score of 83%! Doing their readers a disservice, all of them. I won't, though: don't play this game, it's not fun.