Yearly Archives: 2018

Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition and Season 3 DLC Character Sakura Available Starting Today

SF5: Arcade Edition - News

Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition is here, and comes with it a glut of new modes, balance updates, new V Triggers, and the third season of in-game content. Current and New Owners of SF5 will be put into the same player pool, with PS4/PC cross-platform continuing to move forward. Arcade Mode is finally here as well, representing six different story paths (Street Fighter, Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter III, Street Fighter IV, and Street Fighter V). Each character receives a new V-Trigger to change how they play, Team Battle and Extra Battle are also in the game. Special Challenges for fight money will be scattered through the year, and will also offer unique titles for success. Not to mention there are also a host of new visual changes/content to the game. This also marks the return of Sakura to the game as the first DLC character of Season 3, with Sagat, Cody, Blanka, Falke and G following this year. They can be unlocked with Fight Money, and Real Money for those who cannot wait.

Music Review: Harmony of a Champion (Pokemon)

Harmony of a Champion

by Jason Parker (Ragachak)

I love concept albums and other story-driven music pieces. Sure, most music has a story behind it, but entire albums devoted to one concept are, generally speaking, awesome and impressive undertakings. So today I have one that’s a little late because it’s been a frighteningly busy past month or so. But it’s one I didn’t want to leave behind, and ultimately I had to pick albums. There’s one I kind of want to come back to next week. We’ll see what kind of time I have available, but it’s in theory on the docket. Today we have the combined efforts of Materia Collective and Shinesparkers, in the orchestral narrative of Harmony of a Champion, celebrating 20 years of Pokemon Red/Blue. The album tells the story of a young, naive champion who sets out to become the champion of the Kanto Pokemon League. Combining chiptune, rock, electronic, and orchestral sounds, they blend together seamlessly to create a story that any Pokemon fan can find common ground with. Not so deep down, we all wanted to be a Pokemon Master. In addition, all of the profit going to Child’s Play, and it’s a marvelous charity.

“I hold the original generation of games in high regard for all of the wonderful memories and friendships that were born from playing them,” notes Shinesparkers creator Darren Kerwin. “Harmony of a Champion is an opportunity to experience the story of Red and his journey from a ten-year-old boy who grew up in Pallet Town to becoming a Pokémon Champion, through the inclusion of sound design across the album to add narrative and express the story more effectively.”

This one is definitely a hard one to pick favorites on, but that’s always the case. This album uses a series of music pieces broken into parts, which really threw me for a loop. Some of them as long as four or five parts. But I can see them instead of parts, but movements, such as you’d see in a classical piece of music. And in that, I appreciate what’s going on, and that each movement/part feels different as if it is moving that song’s individual story along. I also really love the track titles, but that’s not relevant to the actual music. But Shorts Come Highly Recommended is probably the best song title on the whole album. But let’s get started anyway!

Harmony of a Champion (Track 39): Let’s start with the title track! Coming in at 8:35, it’s really the single-longest track of the album, if you don’t factor in songs that have parts. Harmony of a Champion is a real audial treat. It starts with soft brass and woodwinds, and really gives you a sense of actual harmony. The battle is over, the champion was defeated, and now this young person has accomplished their goals. The song moves forward, swells and grows louder, as this young trainer realizes the magnitude of what they have done. The music sounds a lot more familiar, as it grows in volume. It almost feels like a triumphant march, but slows down, calms down. Hearing the Champion theme of Pokemon in a smooth jazz style is really something I did not expect. The movement from orchestral march to smooth jazz is seamless, and the woodwinds piping in again is a nice touch. We’ll leave the jazzy feelings behind again for something bombastic, a terrific way to end the piece. You’re gonna go far, kid.

Shorts Come Highly Recommended (Track 14): I couldn’t avoid talking about this track a second time. It’s worth it. This one as far as transitioning goes, is my favorite. Shorts Come Highly Recommended is the theme of Route 4, where the Younster says, “I like shorts! They’re comfy and easy to wear!” and that’s his reason for the Pokemon Battle. This track is pure orchestral goodness in all its glory. It’s fascinating to hear Route 4 with stringed instruments, and it’s very soothing. You’re walking down Route 4, admiring the flora and fauna because this is a very green trail. Literally, it’s packed with young, green Pokemon Trainers. But then you into the Youngster. He likes shorts, you see. The pizzacatto here that moves into the Pokemon Battle theme is delightful. The violin, leading into the viola and cello packs quite the punch. Sure it starts off peaceful, but it quickly descends into that battle theme, because this kid isn’t going to let you go without a fight. But you have a powerful starter, and he has Ratatta. He’s no match for you

Grand Marche Sur La Pont Papite (Track 17): Something more peaceful. This is one of the major Pokemon Red/Blue themes, and it’s done in an appropriate march. Trumpets, drums, everything about it is suitably heroic and bombastic. The addition of what I believe to be fifes are a nice touch, I have to say. It starts off strong, slows down and relaxes as the trainer walks out into the world. It won’t take long for it to pick back up though. This is a march, after all. This trainer has things to see, other trainers to battle, and friends to make. It’s a nice contrast to some of the more aggressive, battle themes you find in Pokemon. This is just a march with some tasteful violin/viola added to set the tone of the adventure.

R (Part 3) (Track 30): I love R (Part 2) too for its sheer sinister sound, the real crescendo of these three tracks (assuming these are Team Rocket related, I get that vibe), but the electronic sound of R (Part 3) is really a nice way to round it all out. With the haunting singing in the background, it gave me chills, and I won’t lie about it. It reminded me of Key of Twilight from Yuki Kaijura somehow. The melody in the background stays the course until about halfway through, and it resumes that cybernetic chiptune sound that I’ve grown to love about this song. There’s a bit of chatter in the background, but it’s hard for me to pick up, only having one good ear. But I do like it as a touch to the song.

Like No One Ever Was (Part 3) (Track 36): This is part 3 of a 5 part/movement song, Like No One Ever Was. This is it, it’s time to prove your worth. All the walking, all the training, all the new friendships and battles have come to this. That kid you met at the start of your journey, always a step ahead, he’s here, waiting. Your rival. The music is suitably dramatic, combining electronic sounds with an orchestra really compounds that sense of urgency. The horns blaring, the chiptune sounds really tie it all back to Pokemon. There’s a point about halfway through where most of the music stops, except for a few horns and a quiet chant, and this feels to me like the point where the battle has swung out of your favor. Your rival smirks, asking if that’s all you have. The theme kicks back in though, the familiar music once again heard, and that’s when your rival knows that he’s gone too far and that there’s no stopping your dream. I really love this album. The music stops, your opponent defeated. Quiet steps are heard, leaving him behind to claim your victory. Then all that is heard is a few trailing off piano keys, and soft singing. The battle isn’t over. There are still two more parts to the song, so I guess this battle isn’t quite done yet. There are Pokemon that still have not fainted.

I cannot recommend this highly enough, and it’s for charity. SO GO BUY IT:

Harmony of a Champion on Bandcamp
Harmony of a Champion on Spotify

Spellforce 3 Review

by Jason Parker (Ragachak)

Spellforce 3 Review - The March

Get used to seeing this. Everything is far away and everything is slow-moving.

Spellforce 3 is a curious blend of RTS and ARPG elements. When they work, it creates a fluid, brilliant game – but it doesn’t always work so well. It’s a game that feels as if it’s fighting against itself, trying to create something wonderful but tripping on its own heels. The RPG elements and storytelling are mostly well thought out. You play as the son of the evil Isamo Tahar (who you play against in the tutorial), and this taught me a valuable lesson about Spellforce 3: do not get attached to a character that isn’t your main character. Not ever. So many times my choices led to disaster. I could not tell if it was because they’re always scripted to leave or fight me, or if it was by my own actions. The idea is wonderful, and the story, though a bit stale, is still presented quite well. The idea of a sudden magical curse or plague felt as if I had heard it more than once. But I love the presentation of the characters, and how they interact with one another.

Spellforce 3 Review - Curses

The game waffles a lot between vile swearing and “heck” a lot.

While the story is completed voice-acted, one of the major drawbacks to it is that lines run together a bunch. You’ll be listening to someone say something, and as soon as their line was finished, the next person starts speaking with no gap between them. It doesn’t hurt the game in any way, but it does hurt the immersion experience plenty. Between that and the on-again-off-again swearing . . . is “heck” a swear word in this game? Because for the first several hours, I only heard heck, until a pivotal, spoiler moment in the game, where there’s a barrage of f-bombs, just . . . over and over again! So it was confusing, and I won’t lie that I laughed quite hard at these serious, gritty, world-weary soldiers using the word “heck” in a serious moment. It was so bizarre. This is a tale of heartache, and how cruel the world is. This is not a world that appreciates magic users, thanks to the Mage Wars. So the story is solid and interesting, but there are simply choices that make it awkward and clumsy. But how’s the actual gameplay?

Spellforce 3 - RTS

The screen almost always feels incredibly cluttered. Useful info, but clutter.

So, you have parts of the game that are an ARPG, where you have a small party that goes exploring on a map or dungeon, using abilities on hotkeys, moving the map with cursor, and rotating the map with Page Up/Page Down. This is the strangest design choice for me because you have to move the map a lot. These maps always have a lot of clutter: large outcroppings, buildings, deep ravines, mountains, anything to visually get in your way. The default movement speed for the mouse and the rotation is very (very) slow, and until I upped it, this drove me mental. You can customize these characters in a variety of ways though, using White and Black Magic despite mages being hated (you’re a state-sponsored mage, so I guess it’s okay), equip armor and weapons, powerful talismans that can bring you back to life, or alter your abilities to create fun, powerful combos. Your powers that you unlock via a skill tree are assigned to various hotkeys, and this actually worked well for me.

Spellforce 3 - -RealStrategytm-

This is the intense level of strategy I experienced.

These ARPG stages feel kind of slow moving, but the action is solid. There are a nice variety of enemies to fight, from regular animals, big creepy bugs, other humans, orcs, elves, et cetera. A nice motley of fantasy things to murder and loot. It’s not always clear where you need to go though, and you can’t pull the map out easily at all (that I found). The mini-map is pretty frustrating to use. If you aren’t immediately in an area, the fog of war covers the land, unless you’re in an RTS section, and even then, you can only see areas with your settlements on them. The maps don’t always show you where you’re supposed to go Quest-wise, and I found quite a few quests that simply didn’t work. Thankfully, most of them were side-quests, so I did miss out on experience and valuable rewards as they simply wouldn’t work (for instance, enemies didn’t trigger). I am not the only one who has found a bunch of bugs like this, but I will give them credit where it’s due: they are updating the game quite frequently. I do feel like a longer time in development and testing could have routed a lot of this. There were enough bugs to make me think the game simply was not ready to go live, despite how pretty it is.

Spellforce 3 Review - Clump

This is our clump on the way to a new fort.

The RTS sections of the game were kind of lacking if I can be frank. There are plenty of buildings to unlock, and by killing enemies you can unlock more blueprints (I unlocked an epic Elven Ranger blueprint for example, but couldn’t use it because I didn’t have the building requirements) but the problem for me is that the units are simply incredibly weak. They all move incredibly slow, I had buildings that were losing HP for seemingly no reason, and the only real recourse I had to was to simply zerg rush every encounter. It did not feel like I used any actual strategy. Instead, I built tons and tons of units, getting to the cap, and running slowly as a mob to the encounter I needed. You can build lots of settlements on these maps to increase your resources, but I encountered a new problem at this point. I was surrounded by wooded areas, with plenty of fish in the water and boars to hunt in the wilderness. I had people assigned to the building, but more often than not, they stood around and did nothing. I got very tired of hearing “We need more lumber!” when we were literally surrounded by it. You can’t click the peasants and send them into the woods like you can in Warcraft, Starcraft, et cetera. I would have been much happier if this had simply been an ARPG where you manage a party and defeat things and level up. That part of the game, outside of camera rotating, was very polished and left me with a good feeling. The RTS sections were a chore.

20171216135343_1

I was glad to see people playing; I was just hoping to join in.

There’s a distinct lack of formation for such a heavy military game. You just grab everyone and run in a clump. A very, very slow clump. There’s no speed-up, they all just take their time, casually meandering from place to place. And if you don’t have at least one character with a heal ability, expect those units to die kind of fast unless you seriously outnumber the other force. I did not get much of a chance to explore the multiplayer, however. Almost every instance was “server too old,” meaning I can’t join; otherwise they were protected, or I would wait for 20 minutes for people to make up their minds on what team they wanted to be on and what they wanted to do. I like that you can do campaign co-op, allow alliances, play as Orcs, Elves, Human or Random. If you want to explore maps in a skirmish format, you can do that as well, picking one of six maps, changing the number of heroes, and the abundance of resources. This made me think of the games of old, playing against NPCs in a pitched RTS setting. It felt better here than it did in the actual game.

It Is Your Destiny: Good (3/5)

Spellforce 3 Review - Character Creation

Spellforce is definitely good. Perhaps more polish, and Tahar would be smiling.

Honestly, this game is not bad. There are a number of things wrong, but the story is compelling, the voice acting is solid (even though lines ran together). I don’t feel like it will have a lot of replay value though, with the exception of the multiplayer, which I had a very rough time getting into. It’s a little frustrating to build a huge army up, only to find out that you’re going into an area where they can’t follow you because it’s an ARPG-style dungeon crawl section of the game.

Fans of the franchise will likely think differently and absolutely love it, and to their credit, there were anywhere from 50-100 matches going at one time, which says a lot to me. The units look so small and can be very hard to see in the large maps. It’s hard to tell when I’m hitting things, and when you have 75 units in your clump, it’s exceptionally frustrating to click on lootable items. I feel like Grimlore and THQ Nordic were trying to do something really unique here. Ultimately, it feels more like a prettier Warcraft 3, moving away from the RPG with strategy elements that made Spellforce famous and moving towards RTS with some RPG elements. There are some genuinely annoying things about it, but I’ve loved watching the story unfold, and basking in a visually stunning RTS. I think they should pick a direction and go in it, instead of waffling somewhere in the middle.

Note: A game key was provided for review purposes.

Masters of Anima Unveils its first Gameplay Trailer

The new project from Passtech Games (makers of Space Run) will be coming to all consoles as well as PC this spring: Masters of Anima!  The gameplay trailer shows off Otto on his quest against evil, with tactical, action-packed battles where your decision-making is critical in a very quick timeframe. Summon and control large armies of up to 100 Guardians, who obey your commands with intuitive and innovative gameplay made from the ground up for controller play as well as keyboard/mouse. Otto, apprentice of Anima is able to wield mighty powers that are the source of all life on Spark. If Otto can only overcome Zahr and his Golems, and attain the rank of master, he can wed his bride, and save the world.

 

Conqueror’s Blade Beta Opens Next Week

Booming Games is proud to announce that their beta test for Conqueror’s Blade will be opening up next week. The PC “world” sandbox title set in a medieval world is coming on January 26th. Players can register for the beta at this link and promises to recreate vast medieval civilizations and shows their legendary fighting styles and weapons in a tremendous theater of war. Strategic players will develop powerful Generals while tactically selecting the most effective Legions for each battle. There are several Generals in the game, each featuring different armaments and fighting styles. Generals may deploy multiple weapons with a unique set of skills that can be acquired and unlocked as players level up. A players army can consist of anywhere from 16-40 men, and each legion uses a different set of skills and has a place on the battlefield.  From high damage in the cavalry to the archer’s flaming arrows, every legion has a use, and it’s up to the players to utilize them.