Wasteland 2
inXile Entertainment, 2014
Windows, Linux, OS X, PS4 和 Xbox One
Originally written by RJS, translated by Nerdgamer-SH
In that candid 2012, Tim Schafer, a game designer who had worked on games such as Full Throttle, Psychonauts, and Grim Fandango, used a little-known platform, Kickstarter, to raise money directly from the public to develop a new computer game. He hopes to circumvent the inevitable regulation of developers, so that developers can fully follow their wishes and maximize their creativity. Schafer's goal for crowdfunding was $400,000, but it eventually raised $3.3 million, completely rewriting the crowdfunding model.
In the face of this achievement, game producer Brian Fargo saw an opportunity to do the same, rebooting a project that had been lingering in his mind for nearly two decades. Wasteland 2 is both the official and official sequel to Wasteland, Fargo's 1988 top-down squad-based RPG, and the unofficial spiritual successor to the classic isometric single-player games Fallout and Fallout 2. Fargo's roster of heavyweights includes heavyweights such as Alan Pavlish[1], Jason Anderson[2], Ken St. Andre[3], Michael A. Stackpole[4], Liz Danforth[5], and many of them worked on the original game.
Even more important than these names is Fargo's company, inXile Entertainment, which promises to revive the long-dormant style of gaming. They raised more than three million dollars, including thirty dollars that I contributed.
Character creation with a mix of attributes, skills, and traits offers many possibilities, but not every one is applicable in the game. Some attributes, such as strength, are not very general, and some attribute thresholds can also penalize some skill sets.
The Wasteland 2 Kickstarter campaign launched in March 2012 and raised $2933252 with PayPal donations.
Growing up with Wasteland, the announcement of this project meant it was an opportunity to relive my childhood. In the end, despite all the cynicism I experienced as an adult, I won the bet.
So, what exactly do we get? Wasteland 2 is the story of four newly recruited Desert Rangers[6] who resemble the post-apocalyptic cops of Mad Max, but with a more cowboy vibe.
What kind of people are this group of Rangers? The wonderful thing is that it's all up to you. Is it a desperate effort to protect the innocent? Is it a selfless mercenary who takes less and does more? Is it a diehard killer who kills criminals and victims once and for all? Is it a professional soldier in a leather-clad military uniform? Or drunks in gorilla costumes and underwear? There is even a way out for players who don't want to become desert rangers at all. Put tasks on hold, hurt the innocent, pickpocket, sneak attack, and even become your boss; You will find that the results of these actions are within the presets of the script, so that there is a complete alternative ending.
One of the big selling points of Wasteland 2 is the abundance of branching options, and it's well deserved. Joining a paramilitary can bring order to a turbulent trade route, but will be forced to fight the cults that currently control the region; You can also choose to side with the cult and experience a completely different set of tasks, either to balance each other, or to make everyone on both sides enemies. These decisions can have a significant impact on your game.
Wasteland 2's promises include character actions that fail due to skill checks. For example, when you try to save a drowning boy, you may end up killing him; When you go to investigate slave trade activities and intend to try to save an innocent girl, your actions are likely to cause her to commit suicide. A major victory in one mission can mean that another mission will be deadlocked or irrelevant, and your choices will have a real impact. Unless your squad is completely wiped out, messing up a mission doesn't mean the game is over.
The multiple endings of Wasteland 2 are one reason I love it. You don't have to play until you reach a so-called 'normal' ending to win, after all, how is it called 'win', it's a story, right? And you are telling your own story. So we redefined what it means to win.
——Chris Keenan
Director of "Wasteland 2"
The dialogue has a variety of choices and skill checks, but it also comes with a keyword search system to review unexplained parts of the original Wasteland.
"Accept failure and move on" is an unfamiliar concept for many players, but for those of us who understand it, the freedom it provides is invaluable.
The tasks range from serious to funny. You'll fight a group of organized murderers and storm their fortress in an hour-long battle bathed in blood and fear; Later, the world's only remaining shampoo was offered to save a person convicted of "dandruff" from execution.
The various areas in Wasteland 2 are connected by a vast world map filled with deadly radiation, random events, and secrets. Once in an area, the game switches to a third-person top-down view similar to Fallout, except that the camera can be rotated in all directions. The game uses turn-based combat with certain strategic elements, but it focuses more on the numerical values of each item than on tactical applications. The "called shots" in the 2015 Director's Cut further deepened combat depth beyond a simple damage skill, such as a Ranger injuring an enemy's arm that could interfere with his purpose of action to buy his teammates time to take him down.
Characters are built not only with attributes and skills, but also with a similar Perks system as in Fallout. The representative of my team is a bloodthirsty Opportunist, who has an extra bonus after taking damage and can earn extra Action Points by killing enemies; There's also a thick-skinned, hardened, weathered melee butcher (Slayer) who is as flashing as a buffalo and almost indestructible.
In 2015, Brian Fargo co-founded Fig, a crowdfunding platform with other investors, where backers can make some of the profits from the projects they support. In 2016, inXile used the platform to raise $3121716 for Wasteland 3.
This brings us to the balance of the game. It doesn't do this very well, and at the end of the game's difficulty difficulty "Ranger", all my characters have a 100% hit rate on every attack, and the unevenly distributed difficulty curve means that my armor can defend against any non-nuclear weapon attack. While I can still have fun, for a real challenge, I recommend setting the difficulty to the highest difficulty, Supreme Jerk.
The game content is quite rich, and one of the representative is the gameplay that can take forty to fifty hours. It's a double-edged sword, which makes it difficult for players to replay Wasteland 2 on the one hand, and in turn difficult to understand the choices they make and their consequences. If I had made a different decision at the beginning, who knows what would have happened in the end? And is it worth another 40 hours to backtrack?
However, not seeing the outcome of all the choices makes me feel that the decisions I made were more genuine. Just like one doesn't read a "CYOA book" all over again, because that's not what it's meant at all. Meeting friends, making enemies, deciding who lives and who dies—my journey is unlike anyone else's. I have debunked the lies and spread the truth, but I have plunged the entire region into violence and chaos. I shot an innocent man, released a guilty man, and covered up my crimes for what I consider to be a higher good. "Am I doing it right?" "Can I do better?" Maybe one day I'll tell the story again in another way and see what happens.
The game interface is poorly laid out, but features like automatic loot distribution improve the actual gaming experience.
You can explore this post-apocalyptic wasteland, deal with radiation, encounter random events, and rehydrate with limited hydration through 3D maps.
__________
1 Alan Pavlish, one of the four members of the original Wasteland development team, was primarily responsible for scripting.
2 Jason Anderson, a famous British artist and illustrator.
3 Ken St. Andre: One of four members of the original Wasteland development team, along with Michael A. Stackpole, who was responsible for the game's setting and map design.
4 Michael A. Stackpole, one of the four members of the original Wasteland development team, was responsible for the game's setting and map design along with Ken St. Andre.
5 Liz Danforth, renowned illustrator, illustrated cards for the Magic The Gathering series.
6 Translator's Note: One of the most influential organizations in the Wasteland worldview, its organizational image is based on the real-life Rangers of Arizona and Texas, and their primary goal is to help those who have survived the disaster rebuild civilization and work for the future.
Rhythm Dungeon
Brace Yourself Games, 2015
Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4, Switch, etc
Originally written by RED, translated by Nerdgamer-SH
Crypt of the NecroDancer is a colorful roguelike game with unique mechanics where enemies attack and move to the beat of music.
The game's protagonist, Cadence, is an energetic girl who recklessly decides to break into the forbidden place in order to find her missing father. But soon she died... Although the evil NecroDancer[1] brought her back to life, the price came at the cost of an evil musical curse that tied her heart and way of sustaining her life to the rhythms of the dungeon. But there is still hope, if she can use the curse in turn and reach the deepest part of the catacombs to defeat the necromancers, she may be able to escape.
The loop of the game's flow is easy to master, with players having to find and defeat the mini-bosses of each level before arriving at the stairs to the next level before the music stops. The game recommends moving and attacking to the rhythm of the music, as this will allow you to increase your combo slots, which in turn will allow you to get more coins from enemies and strengthen certain weapons, in addition to the effect of turning the ground into a disco floor. Every four levels you explore, you'll encounter a difficult musically-themed boss, such as the Death Metal, whose music accelerates.[2] The real difficulty in the game is how to understand the enemy's behavior patterns and use them to create favorable conditions for yourself.
Each attempt will bring you one step closer to victory, not only because your skills have improved, but also because between games you can unlock new weapons, magic, and power-ups for future use. Players can also unlock new characters by completing certain achievements or conditions, each with additional characteristics, such as Monk's immediate death as soon as he picks up coins. In fact, in order to experience the full story, players must complete the game three times as the enemy becomes increasingly difficult.
Without Danny Baranowsky's memorable soundtrack, the game wouldn't have been so successful. With the gradual update of the character-specific mix, the genre of the game has ushered in a shift from electronic dance music (EDM)[3] to electronic synthesizer (synthwave)[4] to metal music[5].
In the dungeons you'll find weapons that change the range of your attacks, as well as armor, bombs, keys, spells, and other consumables.
Rhythm Dungeon features 10 characters with different gameplay styles, including Bard, who doesn't need to follow the rhythm. The DLC Rhythm Dungeon: Amplified adds 4 additional characters and several new game modes.
Launched in 2019, Cadence of Hyrule is a spin-off from Rhythm Dungeon in conjunction with the Legend of Zelda series. The game is exclusive to the Nintendo Switch (NS) platform, but the PC version of Rhythm Dungeon can be modted to include characters from games like the Mega Man series and Undertale.
All in all, Rhythm Dungeon is a lightweight, captivating game that also offers an addictive experience. You'll gnash your teeth when you make mistakes that kill you prematurely, but trust me, you'll gain more every time you return to the initial point. Of course, Rhythm Dungeon wasn't an RPG, but we didn't think of it as an RPG in the first place. Before killing another evil dragon to save a kingdom, sometimes a disco is actually not bad, isn't it?
__________
1 Translator's note: The boss behind the game is a necromancer who owns the magic item Golden Lute (also a boss in the game).
2 Translator's note: Literally, it is a heavy metal musician-style Grim Reaper.
3 Translator's note: EDM (Electronic Dance Music) literally means electronic dance music, the main feature is mainly composed using synthesizers, drum machines and DAW software, with a strong rhythmic rhythm of electronic music, mainly used to accompany dance.
4 Translator's Note: Electronic music is mainly made using synth sounds, adding drum machines and 80s melodies, plus some aesthetics and techniques of contemporary electronic music.
5 Translator's note: The main characteristics are thick and unrestrained, the style of music with certain offensive performance and causing the listener to feel restless, subdivided into black metal, death metal, torrent metal, new metal, doom metal, gorgeous metal, heavy metal, industrial metal and other heavy music.
Information from The CRPG Book Project:
The book took four years and was completed by 119 volunteers.
Editor-in-chief of the original English version: Felipe Pepe
Original project website: https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Use 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Copyright note for the Chinese edition of The CRPG Book Project
What you're seeing is part of the CRPG General Guide. This Chinese version is created and distributed online under the license agreement of the original book.
Chinese Editor: Compilation Committee of CRPG General Guide
Chinese version of the project URL: https://crpgbook.cn
This book (CRPG Tongjian Edition) is in the Chinese physical edition, and we welcome all heroes to join our compilation committee, please visit https://crpgbook.cn/contact/ for details.
The translated version of this Chinese is licensed by CRPG Tongjian @indienova, and indienova will maintain a dedicated CRPG channel in addition to regularly publishing related game introduction articles. In this channel, you can not only read in a graphic format similar to the original book, but also freely switch between Chinese and English versions at any time.