GOGathon: Dilapidated Dungeons, Rusty Steampunk, and Videogame Outsider Art

Time for another dip into my backlog of old PC games. For this article I’m going to dip into a slightly random cross-section of games, where I don’t have much in the way of detailed comment to offer but do want to put some notes out there. First up I’m going to give a hyper-brief explanation of why the old Dungeon Keeper games don’t do much for me, then there’s slightly deeper dives into Arcanum and Drowned God.

Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2

Dungeon Keeper is a game series which has a fun “reverse dungeon crawl” concept: you play the manager of an underground complex of monster-haunted rooms, and you have to set up traps, monster encounters, and other dangers to wipe out adventurers invading your subterranean realm. In essence, it’s like a Dungeons & Dragons spin on Theme Park.

The original Dungeon Keeper is one of those DOS games which were ambitious enough at the time that we tended to overlook their limitations, but now seems tremendously awkward to play now, with the graphics and controls being sufficiently rudimentary as to be a pain to get to grips with. Conversely, Dungeon Keeper 2 plays reasonably well on modern systems, but not interestingly – after getting about halfway through the single player campaign I got tired and stopped playing due to simple apathy. The game largely relies on its quirky (and occasionally rather dated) sense of humour to keep you interested, and once the joke begins to wear thin there’s not much left.

Dragon Warriors? Dynasty Quest?

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Omega Force, the studio behind the Dynasty Warriors series of game, has developed a fine byline in applying Dynasty Warriors-inspired gameplay to other franchises. It’s rather inspired, then, that they should have got together with Square Enix to give that treatment to the Dragon Quest series. There’s already a Dragon Quest Heroes spin-off series of action RPGs based on the series, after all, and the adorable monster designs from Akira Toriyama has long been a strength of that series and provides plenty of fodder to create adversaries worthy of the battlefield – plus the whole “one character against an army who builds up tension to unleash special moves” gameplay of the Dynasty Warriors series fits the the fantasy JRPG genre nicely.

The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below is set in a world where the various cute Dragon Quest monsters and human beings live together peacefully. The player character is a (male or female at the player’s option) captain in the personal guard of Doric, King of Arba, who presides over this happy society. (Whichever captain you chose not to make your main character is still available to you as one of your party members.)

The Battle For the DS

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Wargames, from real-time squad-level strategy games to global-level turn-based civilisation-building affairs, aren’t a computer game format that’s much associated with handheld consoles. That appears to have changed, at least on the Nintendo DS – perhaps because it provides sufficient processing power to make reasonably complex games, or perhaps because of it’s incredibly easy and simple networking capabilities making multiplayer action possible to an extent undreamed of in the good old days of the Game Boy. I hear all kinds of good things about Advance Wars but, alas, I’m slightly too stingy to buy it new (at least at the current price).

That doesn’t stop me occasionally buying second-hand DS wargames. Sometimes I do this by accident; I was sure that Lostmagic and Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth Remix were RPGs until I played them. This time, though, I’ve done it on purpose, to see if these two alternatives to Advance Wars can scratch my nation-wrecking itch.