Rant 921 / 10 J Q K A

Runespell: Overture was kind of a good game.

Mostly good but far too short. No wonder it's called "Overture" - it's just an introduction to the real game, a tutorial prologue.

First, the battles. I love the poker-inspired mechanics. Simple.

But they're unbalanced. Then again, they're going to need a mathematician if they want to resolve this issue. That's not going to be cheap for an indie developer.

In the early game when HPs weren't high, I go for full house and four/five-of-a-kind. Later I go for royal flush.

Right from the start I'd start assembling the 10,J,Q,K,A of each suit. The trick is to flip my own cards to reveal new cards except for the last act because I didn't want the opponent to steal the last card I reveal in case it was one that I needed.

All unnecessary cards go to one stack, although each of these trash stacks must end up with at least a pair so that I didn't lose HP.

When I got the wolf priest ally, it became even easier. I cast his ability as soon as I could and kept flipping cards till I get the right ones. The game usually end by the time I hit the enemy with royal flush twice, because I'd have more than enough RP to cast more spells at him/her.

The only weakness to this is the Fear spells, especially the one that takes out 75RPs with one hit.


The spells seem unbalanced in their cost-effect ratio. For example, the ally with that 120RP ability that only does 40-50 damage is totally not worth it.

This ability is only good when everything else is on cooldown and you need need to deal a hard blow regardless of the cost.

Except by the time anyone has 120RP, you wouldn't need a hard blow to end the game.

Finally, maybe it's just me, or did they really call Italy by that name back in the 1200s?

Because nobody call China "China" until relatively recent times. Marco Polo, who lived in the 13th century, was responsible for spreading the use of this name in Europe, and the first recorded use in English was in 1555.

So I checked Wikipedia and they did use the name by then. In fact, they'd have been using that name for that region for about seven centuries by the 13th century.












Microsoft is about to give us the PC version of the Kinect.

No surprise there.

I'll probably get one after the hype dies down a little.










Grotesque Tactics: Dungeons and Donuts is a pretty interesting game. Some of the humour is actually humours.

As the title suggests, the combat is turn-based and the characters move on a battlefield split into square tiles.

In the game, the player is an emo shepherd. He wears dark colours, spots an emo haircut and talks like a faggot.

The story begins in an underground dungeon where a celebration party was interrupted by a man-eating magical mist.

Apparently, they were celebrating the end of the monsters in the dungeon.

Apparently, they were wrong.

As hopeless as it seems, the emo shepherd was able to... help in some way. I can't say how because there are three paths and it would be a spoiler.

After regrouping and finding somewhere relatively safe to stay, the emo hero goes on the quest to get everyone out of the dungeon and to safety.

Anyway this is actually the sequel but that isn't important because the hero gets "hero's amnesia" after the tutorial prologue.

















This video makes me sad.

Fifty thousand years of existence. Fifty thousand years!

And we're still producing people like that in a developed country.
















I think that's how a lot of people feel as they get older.

Anyway, why do people not try and appreciate new music?

I wonder if most of the people I know listen to dubstep.

Or am I just a strange person for liking some of those on Youtube?

I think some people just stick with what they grew up with because they associate it with "the good old days".

They don't actually like the music that much (except for some, but you probably won't be able to tell them apart without some serious analysis); they just like the feelings and perhaps the nostalgia that the music brings.

In other words, they find the present less likeable than what they think the past was like.

People like that need to rethink what they're doing, or recall all the crap they went through before today.