The wife had recently purchased a laptop and it came loaded with a bunch of crippleware games, including Fate from the good people at Wild Tangent. She liked it enough to buy the full version. Curious, I loaded it onto our now clunky by comparison desktop, which I guess is my computer now and shows where I stand in the order of things, and gave it a try.
Ten minutes later, I uninstalled it.
I'm not going to say it's bad, because it's not a bad game. It's mostly a matter of taste, although in this case, it's the exact opposite of my tastes.
I'm not sure what possessed me to even bother. Fate is basically a Diablo clone with slightly cartoony graphics. Both Diablo games are installed on my computer, but I'm not the one who plays them, if that tells you anything. I had received the first one as a gift many years ago and I played it for about as long as I played Fate before giving up. This means I lasted longer at both games than I did Dungeon Keeper II, which was probably about ten seconds, but that's another story altogether.
It may be that the cutesy graphics made Fate look like a casual RPG-type thing and that's the sort of thing I would be all over. I have zero patience for a more in-depth RPG games which to me, seems to involve dicking around with pointless shit. The day I fart around with "junctioning" "marteria" or whatever to see what combination gives me the best stats is the day I attempt to reconstruct my foreskin using a piece of Naugahyde and a hot glue gun.
Anyway, after installing the game, which, yes, did try my patience, but install times are something you simply have to accept. At least I wasn't bombarded by nag pop-ups the entire time like when installing something from Microsoft. Click 'Install,' click 'Accept,' and we're off to the races. I like that.
Creating a character was simple enough. You have a choice between playing a male or female character. I usually select the female character since I would be looking at my character the entire time I'm playing because I'd rather be looking at a hot chick than some dude. Unfortunately, this gets kicked in the head since the female character doesn't look all that different from the male character aside from the pink shirt and the head.
Speaking of head, you can choose your hair style and face design. Many of the faces are grotesque like a troll doll with God of War face paint. This is weird because there are maybe six faces total. There are a lot more hair styles, although many of them are equally hideous. I eventually settles on a red head pony tail because I have a fetish. I then gave my creation the prestigious name of "Clitty McKnickers."
Ah, but I still wasn't done. You also have a pet cat or dog in this game, making it a spiritual successor to Nethack. You don't have any options for the look of your pet aside from being a dog or a cat. I found this disappointing. Not that I wanted to fiddle with stuff like my character's eye color or shit like that, but when given options to customize your character's look, or your pet's look for that matter, it seems like Fate gave me just enough options to make me wish there were more. In any case, seeing as I like cats more than dogs, I took the cat, despite the constant, annoying meowing that came from the laptop while the wife played. It was almost as annoying as our real cats! But, I'll bet the dog barks and whines the whole time, too. So the hell with it. I christened my pussy "Troit," which is short for "Detroit Rock Kitty," and I was on my way.
After a brief opening narration involving a town near the entrance to a dungeon and some undead evil on the 45th level that must be destroyed. This made me chuckle since I already knew I probably wasn't going to play this game for very long, so there was no way in hell I was getting to the 45th level of the dungeon. I find such opening narration annoying. Fortunately, there was an option to skip it so you don't have to watch it every time you start a new game and it was mercifully brief, if ladened with vague statements about my "fate"... hey! just like the title of the game.
Anyhow, Clitty and Troit head into town. I have made known elsewhere my thoughts on having to wander about aimlessly talking to random twit who wind up saying nothing of import most of the time. I can't tell you how many time's I've wandering in a town, spotting some random boob, then went over to talk to them only to go "Oh, yeah. This is the cockwhit who says 'I have a boat on my head.'"
In this case, though, I'm looking for a quest and I found one before too long, seeing as I've just started the game and haven't completed any. It also turns out that characters will have a "!" over their heads when they have a quest, which would have been a handy thing to know before making me wander about, but whatever. I found one anyway. The guy wants me to get some gem type thing back from some slime on the third level, to which I say, "Greaaaat." I have always loved slime monsters. Few creatures are more compelling than a bad-ass Jell-o mold. Jeez...
Fortunately, finding the dungeon is piss-easy since the entrance is a big door on the east of town. None of that searching around for dungeon entrances like in Diablo, which I hated since the above ground section was too large for me to find anything quickly, but was too small for me to think it was worth my time exploring. Fate may have a similarly large-yet-too-small surface, but I didn't explore it much.
Before entering the dungeon, I decided to check out my equipment. It's usually a good idea to make sure you're, you know, armed before fighting monsters. It turns out that I was armed with a light hand axe, which I'll bet does piddling damage compared to the car bumper-sized sword that I would have found eventually, but it does do slicing damage and is a fast weapon.
And right there, I felt a sinking feeling. Damage types, and weapon speeds remind me of pencil, paper and dice RPGs like GURPS and why I have given up on those bastards. I haven't liked a weapon and damage system since the original Legend of Zelda, which was as complex as I ever care to get. A white sword does twice as much damage as the brown sword and the magic sword does twice as much damage as the white sword. That's it. Maybe this doesn't have the depth some players like to have, but... well, I'll get to my complaints shortly.
Also, I started the game equipped with three health potions. I was shocked, really. I would have though I would need to spend more time dicking around looking for a potion merchant to get some health potions and such, but the game started me off with three right there. It was reminiscent of old arcade games that start you off with three lives. Although in this case, I would need to remember to use the damn things before dying.
I probably could have spent time dicking around, anyway, if only to see what weapons and armor I could not yet afford, but I didn't figure out where my money was displayed until after I was knee-deep in the dungeon. I have assumed I had started with zero, but it turns out I had 250 gold. I guess I could have bought something, but I was already past impatient to start having some fun.
Clitty and Troit enter the dungeon and that damned cat started making noise almost immediately. Meowing, yowling, and purring(!). Who purrs in a dungeon? Honestly? They ran into their first monster, a stupid green gumdrop and I got a very special feeling in my happy place that was not unlike a kick in the balls.
First thing, that idiot cat charged right into battle like he had no will to live. This wouldn't bother me so much except the cat is supposed to be a useful helper. I fail to see what is so useful and helpful about it running to the far side of the screen and fighting a cluster on monsters behind a wall all by itself while I'm dicking around with the menu trying to figure out how to do things. It strikes me that some kind of command options to tell your pet what to do would be useful. Simple commands like "Stay" or "Sick balls" would be sufficient. And they may be there, but I didn't find them in the time I was playing. This is what's known as an intuitive menu system, kids.
The other thing is that this is a mouse-driven game. Some people like mouse-driven games . I am convinced these people are aliens who've been poisoning our atmosphere and oceans to prepare our world for conquest and habitation by their species.
Aside from Diablo, one of the few mouse-driven adventure games I've played was the demo for Freedom Force. Now, I rather liked the demo, probably because it's super hero themed and I have a weak spot for super heroes. I especially liked the opening mission where you control the Captain America-esque Minute Man character, wandering about the city, beating up bad guys and getting information to lead you to the level's objective. At times it was frustrating, such as when attempting to cross the street and getting nailed by a passing taxi. You would think a super hero would know to look both ways. But, eventually I got the hang of clicking on an area where I wanted the hero to go or clicking on thugs to whack them a good one with my big stick. It was slower to respond than if I was controlling the character directly using the cursor keys and pressing to hit people, but clicking on a baddie and then waiting while your guy hussled over there and eventually hit the baddie had an almost soothing, relaxed pace to it.
I suppose if the game was this kind of shit and only this kind of shit, I would have bought it and play the damned thing daily. But it was all a lie, because in the second mission I was saddled with two more heroes and the game because what it always was, a real-time strategy game. Personally, I found juggling three super heroes like this to be unrewarding. I eventually put two of the heroes in harm's way until they went down so I could try to recapture that fun I was having earlier, but you really needed three heroes to complete this mission. I think I did complete the mission eventually by the skin of my teeth, but since this was obviously the way the game was going to play from now on, I turned my back on it. (Oh, there may be more solo missions, but I do not care)
Strangely, while Diablo and Fate are basically solo missions (Troit the idiot notwithstanding), they don't play the same as Freedom Force. I'm not sure what it is, but I seem to recall there was a bit of stealth involved in Freedom Force as you'd spot a baddie mugging some helpless old lady or something, and he would simply stand there while you calmly approached him and hit him in the head to let him know that a super hero was nearby. Whereas in Fate, the monsters spot you right away and charge right at you. This is probably more noticeable in Diablo thanks to Troit the suicidal running right to the edge of the screen to engage the monsters. But even so, the monsters don't seem to have much to do with their time save wait for you to show up and kill them while the thugs in Freedom Force did seem to have their own lives that you were thoughtlessly interrupting by beating them up.
This means that whenever there's more than one monster on the screen, the mother fuckers swarm on you like someone told them you have licorice in your pockets so I don't get that relaxed point and click fighting I did with the first level of Freedom Force. As such, this really shows off the flaws in using what is essentially a RTS game engine where you are given an army of one. Half the time I'll click on the screen and turn out to have clicked in the wrong spot, seeing as I suck at manipulating a mouse and Clitty would wind up facing away from the Jell-o mold while it casually nibbles on her backside. The other half the time, I will actually hit the damned thing, but Jell-o monsters are too resilient for a single blow from a light axe, so Clitty winds up just standing there like a dweeb while the Jell-o monster casually nibbles on her front this time until I notice it's not dead and click on it again. Both of these issues are compounded when Clitty find herself in the middle of a cluster fuck, as giant rats, giant bats, and malevolent desserts attempt to gang rape her from all sides, which happened a couple of times in the short time I was playing.
As frustrating as the combat is, when I'm just exploring the dungeon, it is amazingly boring. Effort must have been spent to make it this dull, or such is my theory. There are some interesting features for a dungeon, such as battle standards, barrels and what look like sacks of flour. Most of these features are just there, like wallpaper, while some are destructible. Some of these contain items, like coins and such, but most of them were empty, making me wonder why I bothered check to see what was in them and why the level designer bothered putting them there in the first place.
I did find a new weapon, a club, which was exactly the same as my axe except the minimum damage was one point higher, it caused crushing damage, and it was a "slow" weapon. I didn't even bother equipping it and this illustrates why I hate the weapon system. One measly point of minimum damage is hardly worth it for anyone except the dumbest of players to bother with. I never did find out the difference between crushing and slicing damage, but I'll bet some enemies are resilient or immune to certain types of damage. And this was a slow weapon? Frankly, I found the axe annoyingly slow, my shoddy reflexes notwithstanding. I would hate to see how long it would take Clitty to swing this club.
So, I'm wandering around, running into monsters and opening empty treasure chests (yes, really) when it dawns on me that I'm still on the first level and it just seems to keep going. To complete my quest, I needed to get to the third level, which I may not be equipped to do yet, anyway. So, I gave up. Which is fine because that cat was starting to really piss me off. Not only was the constant meowing getting on my nerves, but the fucker was much more effective in combat than Clitty was. I believe he had more kills and I had to use one of my health potions on Clitty, but he was barely scratched. Damn cat.
There are a bunch of features I really didn't get to explore which those who like this sort of thing would probably find nifty. Such as, you can give your pet items and then send them back to town to sell them. Diablo players may appreciate this option since they won't have to backtrack through the dungeon back to town to sell items to clear out their inventory. The deeper in the dungeon you are, the longer it will take for your pet to get back. Troit, however, was back before I figured out how to quit the game.
So... yeah. I didn't like it. Which is not to say that other people won't. For a casual game, I found it to be too involved. Had I continued, I'm sure I would have found it even more involved.
I really disliked the surface town idea since this would involve backtracking to the town to turn in the quest item. Undoubtedly, there would eventually be short cuts or a magic spell to make this easier. But until then, it would mean walking through areas where I had already killed everything, which would be dull, or the monsters would respawn and I'd get to fight them again, which would be even more dreary. I'm not sure which way this game works, but neither way is very appealing.
So... buttons. One of these days I'm going to find a game that I like.
Ten minutes later, I uninstalled it.
I'm not going to say it's bad, because it's not a bad game. It's mostly a matter of taste, although in this case, it's the exact opposite of my tastes.
I'm not sure what possessed me to even bother. Fate is basically a Diablo clone with slightly cartoony graphics. Both Diablo games are installed on my computer, but I'm not the one who plays them, if that tells you anything. I had received the first one as a gift many years ago and I played it for about as long as I played Fate before giving up. This means I lasted longer at both games than I did Dungeon Keeper II, which was probably about ten seconds, but that's another story altogether.
It may be that the cutesy graphics made Fate look like a casual RPG-type thing and that's the sort of thing I would be all over. I have zero patience for a more in-depth RPG games which to me, seems to involve dicking around with pointless shit. The day I fart around with "junctioning" "marteria" or whatever to see what combination gives me the best stats is the day I attempt to reconstruct my foreskin using a piece of Naugahyde and a hot glue gun.
Anyway, after installing the game, which, yes, did try my patience, but install times are something you simply have to accept. At least I wasn't bombarded by nag pop-ups the entire time like when installing something from Microsoft. Click 'Install,' click 'Accept,' and we're off to the races. I like that.
Creating a character was simple enough. You have a choice between playing a male or female character. I usually select the female character since I would be looking at my character the entire time I'm playing because I'd rather be looking at a hot chick than some dude. Unfortunately, this gets kicked in the head since the female character doesn't look all that different from the male character aside from the pink shirt and the head.
Speaking of head, you can choose your hair style and face design. Many of the faces are grotesque like a troll doll with God of War face paint. This is weird because there are maybe six faces total. There are a lot more hair styles, although many of them are equally hideous. I eventually settles on a red head pony tail because I have a fetish. I then gave my creation the prestigious name of "Clitty McKnickers."
Ah, but I still wasn't done. You also have a pet cat or dog in this game, making it a spiritual successor to Nethack. You don't have any options for the look of your pet aside from being a dog or a cat. I found this disappointing. Not that I wanted to fiddle with stuff like my character's eye color or shit like that, but when given options to customize your character's look, or your pet's look for that matter, it seems like Fate gave me just enough options to make me wish there were more. In any case, seeing as I like cats more than dogs, I took the cat, despite the constant, annoying meowing that came from the laptop while the wife played. It was almost as annoying as our real cats! But, I'll bet the dog barks and whines the whole time, too. So the hell with it. I christened my pussy "Troit," which is short for "Detroit Rock Kitty," and I was on my way.
After a brief opening narration involving a town near the entrance to a dungeon and some undead evil on the 45th level that must be destroyed. This made me chuckle since I already knew I probably wasn't going to play this game for very long, so there was no way in hell I was getting to the 45th level of the dungeon. I find such opening narration annoying. Fortunately, there was an option to skip it so you don't have to watch it every time you start a new game and it was mercifully brief, if ladened with vague statements about my "fate"... hey! just like the title of the game.
Anyhow, Clitty and Troit head into town. I have made known elsewhere my thoughts on having to wander about aimlessly talking to random twit who wind up saying nothing of import most of the time. I can't tell you how many time's I've wandering in a town, spotting some random boob, then went over to talk to them only to go "Oh, yeah. This is the cockwhit who says 'I have a boat on my head.'"
In this case, though, I'm looking for a quest and I found one before too long, seeing as I've just started the game and haven't completed any. It also turns out that characters will have a "!" over their heads when they have a quest, which would have been a handy thing to know before making me wander about, but whatever. I found one anyway. The guy wants me to get some gem type thing back from some slime on the third level, to which I say, "Greaaaat." I have always loved slime monsters. Few creatures are more compelling than a bad-ass Jell-o mold. Jeez...
Fortunately, finding the dungeon is piss-easy since the entrance is a big door on the east of town. None of that searching around for dungeon entrances like in Diablo, which I hated since the above ground section was too large for me to find anything quickly, but was too small for me to think it was worth my time exploring. Fate may have a similarly large-yet-too-small surface, but I didn't explore it much.
Before entering the dungeon, I decided to check out my equipment. It's usually a good idea to make sure you're, you know, armed before fighting monsters. It turns out that I was armed with a light hand axe, which I'll bet does piddling damage compared to the car bumper-sized sword that I would have found eventually, but it does do slicing damage and is a fast weapon.
And right there, I felt a sinking feeling. Damage types, and weapon speeds remind me of pencil, paper and dice RPGs like GURPS and why I have given up on those bastards. I haven't liked a weapon and damage system since the original Legend of Zelda, which was as complex as I ever care to get. A white sword does twice as much damage as the brown sword and the magic sword does twice as much damage as the white sword. That's it. Maybe this doesn't have the depth some players like to have, but... well, I'll get to my complaints shortly.
Also, I started the game equipped with three health potions. I was shocked, really. I would have though I would need to spend more time dicking around looking for a potion merchant to get some health potions and such, but the game started me off with three right there. It was reminiscent of old arcade games that start you off with three lives. Although in this case, I would need to remember to use the damn things before dying.
I probably could have spent time dicking around, anyway, if only to see what weapons and armor I could not yet afford, but I didn't figure out where my money was displayed until after I was knee-deep in the dungeon. I have assumed I had started with zero, but it turns out I had 250 gold. I guess I could have bought something, but I was already past impatient to start having some fun.
Clitty and Troit enter the dungeon and that damned cat started making noise almost immediately. Meowing, yowling, and purring(!). Who purrs in a dungeon? Honestly? They ran into their first monster, a stupid green gumdrop and I got a very special feeling in my happy place that was not unlike a kick in the balls.
First thing, that idiot cat charged right into battle like he had no will to live. This wouldn't bother me so much except the cat is supposed to be a useful helper. I fail to see what is so useful and helpful about it running to the far side of the screen and fighting a cluster on monsters behind a wall all by itself while I'm dicking around with the menu trying to figure out how to do things. It strikes me that some kind of command options to tell your pet what to do would be useful. Simple commands like "Stay" or "Sick balls" would be sufficient. And they may be there, but I didn't find them in the time I was playing. This is what's known as an intuitive menu system, kids.
The other thing is that this is a mouse-driven game. Some people like mouse-driven games . I am convinced these people are aliens who've been poisoning our atmosphere and oceans to prepare our world for conquest and habitation by their species.
Aside from Diablo, one of the few mouse-driven adventure games I've played was the demo for Freedom Force. Now, I rather liked the demo, probably because it's super hero themed and I have a weak spot for super heroes. I especially liked the opening mission where you control the Captain America-esque Minute Man character, wandering about the city, beating up bad guys and getting information to lead you to the level's objective. At times it was frustrating, such as when attempting to cross the street and getting nailed by a passing taxi. You would think a super hero would know to look both ways. But, eventually I got the hang of clicking on an area where I wanted the hero to go or clicking on thugs to whack them a good one with my big stick. It was slower to respond than if I was controlling the character directly using the cursor keys and pressing to hit people, but clicking on a baddie and then waiting while your guy hussled over there and eventually hit the baddie had an almost soothing, relaxed pace to it.
I suppose if the game was this kind of shit and only this kind of shit, I would have bought it and play the damned thing daily. But it was all a lie, because in the second mission I was saddled with two more heroes and the game because what it always was, a real-time strategy game. Personally, I found juggling three super heroes like this to be unrewarding. I eventually put two of the heroes in harm's way until they went down so I could try to recapture that fun I was having earlier, but you really needed three heroes to complete this mission. I think I did complete the mission eventually by the skin of my teeth, but since this was obviously the way the game was going to play from now on, I turned my back on it. (Oh, there may be more solo missions, but I do not care)
Strangely, while Diablo and Fate are basically solo missions (Troit the idiot notwithstanding), they don't play the same as Freedom Force. I'm not sure what it is, but I seem to recall there was a bit of stealth involved in Freedom Force as you'd spot a baddie mugging some helpless old lady or something, and he would simply stand there while you calmly approached him and hit him in the head to let him know that a super hero was nearby. Whereas in Fate, the monsters spot you right away and charge right at you. This is probably more noticeable in Diablo thanks to Troit the suicidal running right to the edge of the screen to engage the monsters. But even so, the monsters don't seem to have much to do with their time save wait for you to show up and kill them while the thugs in Freedom Force did seem to have their own lives that you were thoughtlessly interrupting by beating them up.
This means that whenever there's more than one monster on the screen, the mother fuckers swarm on you like someone told them you have licorice in your pockets so I don't get that relaxed point and click fighting I did with the first level of Freedom Force. As such, this really shows off the flaws in using what is essentially a RTS game engine where you are given an army of one. Half the time I'll click on the screen and turn out to have clicked in the wrong spot, seeing as I suck at manipulating a mouse and Clitty would wind up facing away from the Jell-o mold while it casually nibbles on her backside. The other half the time, I will actually hit the damned thing, but Jell-o monsters are too resilient for a single blow from a light axe, so Clitty winds up just standing there like a dweeb while the Jell-o monster casually nibbles on her front this time until I notice it's not dead and click on it again. Both of these issues are compounded when Clitty find herself in the middle of a cluster fuck, as giant rats, giant bats, and malevolent desserts attempt to gang rape her from all sides, which happened a couple of times in the short time I was playing.
As frustrating as the combat is, when I'm just exploring the dungeon, it is amazingly boring. Effort must have been spent to make it this dull, or such is my theory. There are some interesting features for a dungeon, such as battle standards, barrels and what look like sacks of flour. Most of these features are just there, like wallpaper, while some are destructible. Some of these contain items, like coins and such, but most of them were empty, making me wonder why I bothered check to see what was in them and why the level designer bothered putting them there in the first place.
I did find a new weapon, a club, which was exactly the same as my axe except the minimum damage was one point higher, it caused crushing damage, and it was a "slow" weapon. I didn't even bother equipping it and this illustrates why I hate the weapon system. One measly point of minimum damage is hardly worth it for anyone except the dumbest of players to bother with. I never did find out the difference between crushing and slicing damage, but I'll bet some enemies are resilient or immune to certain types of damage. And this was a slow weapon? Frankly, I found the axe annoyingly slow, my shoddy reflexes notwithstanding. I would hate to see how long it would take Clitty to swing this club.
So, I'm wandering around, running into monsters and opening empty treasure chests (yes, really) when it dawns on me that I'm still on the first level and it just seems to keep going. To complete my quest, I needed to get to the third level, which I may not be equipped to do yet, anyway. So, I gave up. Which is fine because that cat was starting to really piss me off. Not only was the constant meowing getting on my nerves, but the fucker was much more effective in combat than Clitty was. I believe he had more kills and I had to use one of my health potions on Clitty, but he was barely scratched. Damn cat.
There are a bunch of features I really didn't get to explore which those who like this sort of thing would probably find nifty. Such as, you can give your pet items and then send them back to town to sell them. Diablo players may appreciate this option since they won't have to backtrack through the dungeon back to town to sell items to clear out their inventory. The deeper in the dungeon you are, the longer it will take for your pet to get back. Troit, however, was back before I figured out how to quit the game.
So... yeah. I didn't like it. Which is not to say that other people won't. For a casual game, I found it to be too involved. Had I continued, I'm sure I would have found it even more involved.
I really disliked the surface town idea since this would involve backtracking to the town to turn in the quest item. Undoubtedly, there would eventually be short cuts or a magic spell to make this easier. But until then, it would mean walking through areas where I had already killed everything, which would be dull, or the monsters would respawn and I'd get to fight them again, which would be even more dreary. I'm not sure which way this game works, but neither way is very appealing.
So... buttons. One of these days I'm going to find a game that I like.
