Posts Tagged fighting
Bullet-point review: Dungeons & Dragons – Tower of Doom.
Posted by The Management in art, games on June 29, 2010
In the 90′s, Capcom produced a plethora of side-scrolling beat-’em-ups. They were all pretty fun, but my favourite was an unlikely-branded D&D title, Tower of Doom.
The TSR/Capcom partnership actually spawned two individual games, but here are the notable bits for the first one:
— The most famous feature of ToD is the branching path structure. Periodically, the player is presented with 2-3 options of how to proceed, with each choice leading to a different area and boss. All these paths converge fairly quickly, but the extra choices are a nice feature and encourage multiple playthroughs.
Options, options...
— ToD’s overall structure is very similar to a typical beat-’em-up, but the game also contains lots of streamlined D&D/P&P RPG elements. Characters gain experience and grow stronger by leveling up, keys (or a thief character) are needed to open some chests, traps are virtually everywhere, there’s lots of treasure to collect, etc. There’s even a troll boss that needs to be burned once his health is depleted or he’ll simply regenerate.
— There are very few health-recovery items in the levels themselves, but the player can heal by collecting loot and purchasing health potions in shops. The shops appear in between levels and also allow the player to restock on usable items such as daggers and arrows.
— ToD contains lots of nice, little touches: the characters start the levels with their weapons sheathed (and the player can walk around unarmed until he presses the attack button), enemies can be damaged by traps, an extra victory animation accompanies a boss’ defeat, and all major stages and events are framed using unique illustrations. The game even contains some unique “Game Over” pop-ups that — if triggered during a boss fight — have the player’s enemy openly mocking him.
Upholding the D&D tradition, Cloudkill is useless against the undead.
— Magic spells execute a flashy animation while pausing the gameplay, and their effects occasionally carry on once the game has been unpaused. This works fine for the most part, but due to the rule of only-one-spell-at-a-time, it’s occasionally possible to not be able to cast a spell while walking around without having a clear idea as to why it’s not working.
— Like many other beat-’em-ups, ToD’s attacks are accompanied by hit-flashes that indicate successful hits and mask collision issues. However, unlike most other titles in the genre, the player can attack downed enemies, but can’t actually grab or throw them.
— If timed properly, it’s possible to slash projectiles out of the air with a basic attack.
How could they break -- the Beholder isn't even touching them?!
— Non-usable/equipable items are fairly rare, but they do provide passive bonuses such as extra attack and defense boosts. These items don’t usually last very long, though, as they get “broken” or “lost” if the player gets hit a couple of times.
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Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight bits.
Posted by The Management in games on November 9, 2009
Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight is difficult to pin down because it plays so much like a board game. It’s based on a hotseat model where each participant (whether AI or human) makes a single move before handing off the controls to the next player. This sort of multiplayer format has mostly been phased out in videogames, but asynchronous games are making a huge comeback on social sites like Facebook, so I figured it was worth a mention.
It might look bad, but you can actually survive one of these.
The bits:
- Moonstone can be played solo, but supports up to 4 individual players who start off with 5 lives each.
The world map, complete with a rather conspicuous location right in its center...
- The world map paths are entirely predefined, but the events at each stop are randomized.
- City stops and enchanted places provide the player with unique services. This encourages the player to explore them all in order to gain as many boons as possible. These boons include buying and selling magical items, gambling for gold, purchasing stats upgrades, and healing. Some of these stops can also curse the player creating a risk/reward system.
- Aside from the shops and unique story locations, most other stops initiate some sort of a real time battle. If the player is victorious, he receives a reward in the form of gold/items/magical keys.
- Fighting other players is automatically initiated when two players land on the same spot. The victor gains all of the loser’s inventory, including his key(s) which are necessary to complete the game, so quite a bit of back-’n'-forth naturally takes place between all the participants.
You can actually stab up at the enemy in the tree before succumbing to strangulation.
- Battles are split into one-on-one encounters, a series of one-on-one encounters, or group fights that force the player to simultaneously combat multiple opponents. All battles are quite gory and serve as a reward in themselves as they contain lots of unique animations and fatalities that predate Mortal Kombat’s (although other games like Barbarian also predate Moonstone on that end).
- Adding another random element to the game is a dragon that can appear on the world map. The dragon is a tough foe and will randomly swoop down to attack players regardless of their current location.
About
Hi, my name’s Radek Koncewicz, and I work as a videogame design consultant. I'm also the creative lead of Incubator Games, a small development studio I started with a few former coworkers.
I think a lot about videogames, and write a lot of it down too, so I figured why not make it public?
If you'd like to contact me, drop me a line at themanagement@significant-bits.com.