Impressions

Impressions: A Kingdom for Keflings

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A Kingdom for Keflings
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A Kingdom for Keflings is a very cute game for XBox Live Arcade that caught my attention because it's one of those new games that makes direct use of the 360 Live Avatars in the same way that so many Wii games make use of Miis. The idea is that you play the game as your Avatar, who exists in the world of the Kelflings as a giant among small people. These small Kelflings want a great kingdom, and for some unspecified reason, you're helping them achieve this goal.

You start with a few Keflings and a large amount of resource-rich land. As a giant, you're able to work reasonably quickly to harvest basic resources and get the building process under way. This is essentially a resource management game; you could almost see it as  real-time strategy game, except that there's no opponent to fight. Much like Warcraft and it's ilk, you'll spend time chopping trees, mining stone and crystals, etc. all in the name of constructing buildings to unlock more advanced technologies to improve your kingdom and your Keflings themselves.

Though you are capable of gathering the resources you need yourself, you're better off putting your Keflings to work for you to handle resource gathering. This frees you up for the task of actually constructing all the buildings the new kingdom is going to need. That's something the Keflings can't do, so your time is much better spent focused on that.

In addition to the resource management part of the game, there's a bit of a collecting game as well. You can explore the land around your growing kingdom to find new tools that will help you gather different types of resources. Generally they'll be found smack in the center of a resource patch, requiring you to do some work to clear a path to the tool.

There's also a bit of a quest component. Once you've built your kingdom up to the point where you have a town hall, keep or castle, you'll be able to get quests from the Kefling you've put in power. These are largely resource quests, along the lines of "I need 50 magic gems, can you put them in the contractor's office for me?" So you'll go off, get the resource requested, put it in the building requested, and be rewarded with love.

That may not sound like much of a reward, but Love is actually another resource in and of itself. You need it whenever you build a new house to increase your Kefling population. Building a house is all well and good, but Keflings won't want to live in it until it contains love. Build a house, put love in it, and you get new Keflings to do your bidding. Quests are the primary means of getting Love, so you'll need to undertake them once in a while.

Constructing buildings is a pretty interesting process. It's not too heavy on the micromanagement, but not simplified to the point of pointlessness either. Among the many buildings you'll construct for your kingdom are various types of workshops. These workshops will take resources of various kinds and enable you to place orders for building components. The components are assembled and placed outside the workshop. Your giant then goes and picks up the component and you can put it wherever you want in the world. You arrange the components in the proper configuration (which you'll be able to see on the building's blueprint,) and when you have all the components in the correct configuration, the building is automatically finished off.

This may sound really simple, but you have a limited population of Keflings harvesting resources for you. You'll also have Keflings working at transporting resources from location to location, and others processing one type of resource into another. For instance, you may have one Kefling chopping trees into logs, one Kefling working in a saw mill, and a third Kefling transporting cut planks from the sawmill to your contractor's office. Your contractor's office is just one type of workshop though, you may have half a dozen others in your kingdom, and all of them need to be fed a variety of resources to create all the building pieces you'll need. Making sure you have all the resources you need where you need them can be a bit of an optimization dance. It's not too punishing if you mess up though; you can always have one workshop "build" a resource stockpile for you, which your giant can then move where you need it in a hurry. It's just tricky enough to be interesting but not so tricky as to be frustrating.

I started playing this game with the demo just last night and quickly found myself compelled to spend the 800 Microsoft Points required to upgrade to the full game.  It didn't claim ALL of my attention; Star Ocean - The Last Hope took the lion's share of it. But I did find myself playing it far more than I expected I would, given the fact that I had Star Ocean there waiting for me. That's a pretty good sign.

Speaking of Star Ocean - The Last Hope, that one is next on my Impressions list. Watch for a new post on it very soon.

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Impressions: Harvest Moon - Tree of Tranquility

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Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility
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Right off the bat I'll admit this is not the most timely impression. The game has been out for a couple of years, but I thought I'd write about Tree of Tranquility because I've recently had cause to start looking into what makes the Harvest Moon series tick and get familiar with it's mechanics.

I'm not a complete stranger to the series. I do have and enjoy a related game, Rune Factory,  for the Nintendo DS. Rune Factory involves a heavy dose of fantasy swords and sorcery though, which puts me much closer to it's target audience. The Harvest Moon series is all about building the biggest, most successful ranch possible by farming, raising animals, courting a potential spouse, getting married, and having children.

So what does Tree of Tranquility have to offer me, a guy who likes Half-Life 2, Burn Out Revenge, and Mario Kart? Well I also like The Sims series, so there's some common ground there. Harvest Moon is a similar life simulation game, just more stylized and specialized.

As the title suggests, Tree of Tranquility is a very tranquil, relaxing sort of game. You're a young rancher just moved to a new island, ready to begin a life for yourself. You start with your choice of 3 plots of land to work, and can buy more land later when you've gotten your feet under you.

Your early days on the island will be spent preparing your first fields for planting, a grueling process that will drain your character's endurance pretty severely. Eventually you'll have enough land cleared of rocks, weeds and other impediments to plant some proper crops and start earning some money. The longer you play though, the more experience your character gains with each tool that he (or she) uses. You'll level up your tools individually; spend a lot of time watering crops and your ability to use the watering can increases. Plow a lot of land, and your plow skill increases. Use a scythe to clear weeds, harvest grasses and other produce, and your scythe skill increases. Fish a lot and your fishing rod skill increases, etc.

Leveling your skills in these and other tools is critical. The higher your skill, the more you can do with the same amount of stamina. Controlling the amount of stamina you use is central to the game, so anything you can do to cut down the stamina required to earn money will get you ahead. In addition to building your skill at using the tools, the tools themselves are upgradable either by paying for better types, or upgrading existing tools at lower cost, but with the requirement of supplying the increasingly rare ores needed for the work.

Once your skills have leveled up a bit you'll be able to finish most of your chores pretty quickly in each day, leaving you time to explore other elements of the game play. One of the chief elements you'll want to investigate is the 'courting a wife/husband' story line. Getting married and having kid(s) is one of the big criteria for the eventual success of your ranch, and one that'll take a long time to complete. I'm only a couple of seasons into my game at the time of this writing, so I haven't gotten very far in any individual story line, but I have learned that courting someone involves visiting them frequently and giving them a lot of gifts after you learn what they like and what they don't.

As I get further into the game, I'll post more about it. For now though, my impression is that it's an interesting "relax time" game with elements taken from RPGs, time management, and resource management games. Unlike most time management games though, you get the experience without the stress of any actual time pressure. It's a good way to spend a lazy couple of hours.

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Adventures in Windows Land Part 4 - One Week Update

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Half-Life 2
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When I last wrote about my Windows 7 adventures last weekend, my system was in a mostly usable state but with several big question marks hanging over it. 1) I had no sound, since I could not convince my X-Fi sound card to work with Win7. 2) My system was initially crashing, something I'd been experiencing for a couple of months in Vista as well.

I'm happy to report that issue 1 is now resolved; it was a relatively simple matter to fix. I simply installed the Windows Vista X-Fi drivers using compatibility mode, and much to my surprise, they worked fine; I can look forward to some testing of various games over the weekend. (My hit list of choice: Half-Life 2 and it's various episodes, Portal, and Fallout 3. I'd try The Sims 2 as well, but there aren't enough hours in the weekend.)

As far as issue 2 goes, the system has been rock solid since I blasted years' worth of dust out of the fans. Funny how that works, huh? I can't say for sure yet that it's fixed. The machine did run for a good 2 weeks straight over the holidays under Vista. But at this point, I'm pretty confident in saying Windows 7 is very stable and my machine is definitely liking things as they stand. Stay tuned for my post-gaming report sometime early in the week.

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Adventures in Windows Land Part 3 - Windows 7

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The install finished without a hitch and it wasn't long before I was running Windows 7. And I really mean it wasn't long; the news out there about how fast it boots is right on the money. From hitting the switch on the computer through booting to a usable environment, Vista takes about 5 minutes on my system. Windows 7? Less than a minute. Maybe a touch over half. Usability land isn't all rosey good news, though. The first program I tried to get set up was Google Chrome, my favorite browser. It turns out it has known compatibility issues though, and while technically it will run, it can't render pages, making it kind of useless. So I installed my second choice, Firefox 3. That one, I'm happy to report, does run perfectly well right away.

Windows 7 has a lot of new features, and I won't go into them all here because, well, because Microsoft isn't paying me for this. That, and I haven't even scratched the surface of what's changed in this thing. The new task bar is both good and bad. I like how you can pin applications to it, similar to the way MacOS works. I like the preview windows; they've improved over Vista's previews and now act as a selection mechanism for apps that have more than one window open. I don't, however, like the fact that the quick launch icons are gone now. I can understand why, since you can pin shortcuts to the bar, but as a creature of habit, it's going to take me some time to get used to that change.

I've had some issues with audio as well. At the time I write this, my Creative X-Fi sound card isn't supported, so I won't get to test out Fallout in the immediate future. It's a good thing the games I'm actively playing right now are console games; Animal Crossing: City Folk on the Wii and Persona 3 FES on the PS2 are going to be getting most of my gaming attention for a while, I think.

The Win7 interface has been cleaned up a lot from what we got in Vista, and for the better as near as I can see. I haven't dug too deeply into things like changing network configurations and other nitty-gritty details yet, but I was up and online with it in no time, and those things I have tried to configure have been pretty easy to get to. My adventures with Windows 7 are just beginning, and I'm sure I'll have more stories to tell, both good and bad, in the coming days and weeks.

For now, thank you for putting up with my long-windedness!