Welcome to ScaryLemon.com. I’ve just spammed, er, invited a bunch of people to the message board, so this will probably be your first visit. Right now, I have a few poorly-written reviews, some of my crummy hastily-drawn sketches, and a message board. We’ll see where it goes from here
Thanks for visiting!
Posted on June 16th, 2007 by Nathan
Filed under: Personal Blog | Comments Off
The problem with P.N.03 is that it doesn’t play how it looks. In every way, it looks like a sci-fi Tomb Raider clone: You play an unfeasibly-proportioned chick in skin-tight clothing, who jumps, does flips, and shoots the hell out of things. You run from room to room, jump on stationary platforms, shoot things, and occasionally fight a boss monster. When I first tried to actually play it like that, I immediately hit a wall of controls that just didn’t seem to do what I wanted. As a platform game, it was a mess. Any sense of flowing action was broken up by a score for each room. The game kinda sucked, but it had a neat style so I kept playing.
Eventually, I figured out that the overall game really wasn’t a platform game. It was really more of a shooter, where the platforming was secondary to shooting the baddies. The auto aim was kind of strange, and the enemies were as dumb as bricks. It sucked a little less, because once I got the controls it at least seemed like a fair game, that I could tell what difference my actions made.
What I finally decided is that P.N.03 is a rhythm game. The background music never goes much past driving beat: The gameplay, as intended, is: Find an enemy robot thing, learn it’s attack pattern, dodge around it. Approach, shoot, jump left, shoot, jump right, shoot, kill it. Or maybe shoot, jump back, wait a beat for the missile approach, jump forward, shoot, kill. It’s a music game, like Frequency or Guitar Hero, but instead of loops it’s explosions. Now that I’ve figured that out, I’ve decided that it’s a pretty good game, but one that I certainly can’t recommend for everybody.
Posted on June 16th, 2007 by Nathan
Filed under: Commentary | No Comments »
This was the first component of Metagaming’s not-D&D game, written by Steve Jackson and packaged in a little half-page sized box for a low price. By itself, it’s a game of gladitorial combat with generic fantasy races with generic fantasy weapons. Each player makes a character, which consists of splitting points between two stats, and fights it out. The rules themselves take the form of “A.1.d – Table of things a character can do in half a turn”, which pretty much consists of “move or fight”. That makes the turn structure surprisingly like the current version of D&D, but worded in an 80’s wargame kind of way. There are a lot of special rules for things like grappling, and being knocked down that add complexity, but don’t add any particular depth.
As a 1-on-1 fighting board game, it’s pretty bad: After a couple of turns, it winds up being two players trying to roll high until someone’s ST score hits zero. As a skirmish game with more characters, all the options make it slightly too much of a hassle to keep track of what each character is doing.
There are several companion games: Wizard adds magic to the game. I never got around to playing it, because playing as intended would require each character to be at least a little familiar with the mechanics ahead of time. To be blunt, I don’t know anyone who’s that interested. The other companions are Advanced Melee, Advanced Wizard, and Into the Labyrinth, which all together turned the game into a standard tabletop RPG called The Fantasy Trip.
When Steve Jackson left Metagaming, the rights to Melee (et al) stayed with that company, so he wrote Man-To-Man, which turned into GURPS. Much later, Guy McLimore (who worked on later revisions of Melee) formed Microtactix, who now publishes Compact Combat, which is mechanically similar the original and is available as a downloadable purchase through rpgnow.
Overall, Melee is entertaining in a nostalgic way, but it’s not a whole lot of fun without other players who are feeling similarly nostalgic. You might also need beer.
Posted on June 16th, 2007 by Nathan
Filed under: Commentary | No Comments »
Did you see Cars? You know, where all the people are cars instead of people? Seek and Destroy is like that, but with tanks. They don’t have faces, but basically everybody on the planet is a cute little cartoon tank. The turret is this huge thing with a stumpy gun barrel on an undersized, cute body, based on real tanks.
Playing the game is pretty much average shooter stuff: left stick moves, right stick aims the turret. All the action is in 3rd-person, but the camera doesn’t automatically follow the gun: For that you have to hit R2. Also, circle is the fire button, so what should be straightforward becomes a matter of driving around, roughly aiming the turret, then setting the camera, then fine-tuning the gun, then stopping aiming the turret long enough to actually fire. The combat itself is you vs. a horde of weaker tanks, but the camera controls make it pretty much impossible to avoid wandering into the middle of a big group of enemies. When my tank finally blows up, I never seem to be sure of why.
At some point, you unlock a ton more tank types, and you can start getting parts that you can bolt on the sides of the tank. Things like jets, wings, or you can replace your gun barrel with a huge chainsaw. That part’s pretty neat in a shooting-paper-doll kinda way, but you won’t want to play long enough to get this stuff, because the main gameplay, the moving-and-shooting part, is a clunky mess. You’re better off having missed this one.
Posted on June 16th, 2007 by Nathan
Filed under: Commentary | No Comments »