Ghost Master (PC)

The good: The game is chockfull of funny pop culture references. Sending ghosts to scare off mortals is great fun.
The bad: Random movement of characters can make solving each scenario unnecessarily long. The recommended roster of ghosts to use in a scenario may not be optimal. There is no indicator of how much time is left for a ghost to recharge its power. The 3D models aren’t as attractive as they could have been, and clipping problems are sometimes evident during cut scenes.
The tally: 7 / 10.

About the Game

Released in 2003, Ghost Master is a real time game in which you assemble a team of haunters to scare off mortals and release trapped spirits to join your cause. You start out with a handful of ghosts to send a group of college girls screaming from their sorority house. Over time, you get to recruit spirits to tackle more challenging scenarios.

After a briefing, you start each scenario by selecting which ghosts to bring with you to your mission. You can click the “Recommend” button to automatically select spirits to help you complete your objectives, but this roster isn’t necessarily the best for finishing your mission fast. In some cases, there may be hidden spirits that cannot be uncovered with the recommended roster. You may have to go through some trial and error to find a set of haunters that work best in a given scenario.

Spirits can only be positioned over objects or areas in the map that are associated with their manner of death or their strongest attachments in life. These objects or areas are called fetters. Spirits that can be bound over areas have more freedom of movement and a wider selection of fetters to choose from than those that can only be attached to objects.

Deploying ghosts on the map and activating their powers requires having sufficient plasm available for your use. Plasm is a kind of energy that serves as an expendable resource in this game. You start each scenario with a small amount of plasm that you can temporarily increase by frightening mortals. Over time, this gain in plasm will decrease as mortals calm down. Causing mortals to flee off the map will increase your plasm level permanently for the rest of the scenario. When you summon a ghost to the map or activate one of its powers, you tie up some amount of plasm in the process. Deactivating a power or removing a ghost from the map frees up the plasm that was used. If you attempt to use more plasm than you have, an alarm will sound, giving you a few seconds to deactivate powers or unfetter ghosts. If you don’t free up excess plasm usage in time, the scenario will end abruptly in failure.

Each ghost has several powers that require different amounts of plasm to use. Weaker powers cost less plasm to use than stronger ones, and some ghosts require more plasm for the same power that other ghosts may have. You use these powers to affect the behavior of mortals (usually by scaring them) or to change the environment somehow. Once used, most powers take some time to recharge before they can be used again. Unfortunately, there is no indication of how much time a haunter needs to recharge a particular power. Neither does the game indicate which powers need to be recharged and which can be used continuously. These are things you’ll need to figure out for yourself.

For most scenarios, you will need to cause mortals to exit the map in terror or to render them hopelessly insane. Mortals have three stats you will need to monitor from time to time; namely, Terror, Madness, and Belief. Terror indicates how frightened a mortal is. Each time a haunter scares mortals, their Terror goes up. If a mortal’s Terror is filled to capacity, that person will flee the map. Some haunter powers raise Madness instead of Terror. Mortals who go completely insane will not leave the map, but that’s as good as having fled for determining if you’ve achieved the scenario’s victory conditions. Belief determines how easily a mortal is terrorized. Those with low Belief are difficult to frighten. Fortunately, some haunter powers can raise Belief. You may need to use those powers to soften up skeptics before you barrage them with terror tactics.

In addition to these three stats, mortals also have a Conscious Fear and an Unconscious Fear. Mortals who are especially afraid of fire, for instance, will be more easily frightened when you activate fire-based powers. Unconscious fears are even more effective at terrifying mortals than conscious fears. Some haunter powers can uncover a mortal’s fear, but it isn’t necessary to know what they are to win a scenario.

A few mortals have the ability to banish ghosts that are fettered on the map. The game will immediately warn you if a mortal is banishing one of your spirits, at which point, you may have to unfetter the ghost to escape banishment. A haunter that is banished cannot be summoned to the map for the rest of the scenario, and if enough of your ghosts are banished, you will lose the game.

Many of the characters and scenarios in this game are inspired by TV shows, movies, and comics. Recognizing these pop culture references may get you chuckling. I’ve spotted references to The Evil Dead, Casper, Ghostbusters, The Three Stooges, and many more. The whole concept of gathering ghosts to scare off mortals makes this game immensely fun, especially when plenty of humor is thrown in. It certainly helps that many of the scenarios are cleverly designed.

When you complete a scenario, you are awarded gold plasm, which you use to purchase more powers for your ghosts. The amount of gold plasm you receive depends on your scenario score. While you can conceivably complete the game without purchasing new powers for your ghosts, having more powers at your disposal can help you complete scenarios faster. This grants you more victory points in turn. If you are not satisfied with how well you did in a scenario, you may replay it at any time.

Despite all the good things going for this game, some of the fun is sapped out of it when trying to figure out what powers should be activated to get mortals to do certain actions. For example, in one scenario, you need to send three mortals to a cabin to complete a ritual, but the mortals would first have to find a way to cross a raging river and a deep chasm. Since the solution to these and other problems isn’t always obvious, you may need to experiment with different powers before making headway.

This wouldn’t have been a problem if not for the fact that mortals move around the map randomly like characters in The Sims. Some will use the bathroom, take a drink of water, or converse with their friends at random moments. While it does seem natural to have mortals behaving in this manner, it doesn’t help if you have to wait a long time for a mortal to do a particular action, such as bringing a gift to a specific room. If you aren’t even sure that what you’re attempting will work as intended, then having to wait more than a minute becomes an exercise in frustration.

The graphics are another problem, albeit a minor one. Even considering that Ghost Master was released in 2003, its 3D models are not as attractive as they could have been. The graphics in older games such as Max Payne and Black & White are much better. In addition, Ghost Master has clipping problems that are especially evident during cut scenes. That said, none of these issues should seriously detract from the enjoyment of this game.

Room for Improvement

Considering the 3D technology that was already available prior to 2003, Ghost Master could have had better graphics, although this is really just a quibble compared to more serious issues with the game’s design. Having mortals move around the map and behave with clockwork predictability would have done much to decrease the waiting time in executing your plans. Knowing how much time a ghost needs to recharge its powers would also have made plan execution more predictable.

Conclusion

Ghost Master is highly entertaining, although a few unfortunate design decisions make it frustrating to solve some scenarios. Incredibly, Ghost Master doesn’t seem to have ever been cloned. Although games such as Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius also put you in the role of an evil mastermind, there are no other games that I know of in which you command ghosts to frighten hapless mortals. If scaring the bejesus out of little computer people sounds like fun (and believe me, it is), do yourself a favor and get yourself a copy now.

Valor (iPhone)

The good: Valor is an addicting war game with heart-pounding battles played against real people online.
The bad: The app has a tendency to lag. To be at the top of the leader boards requires spending a lot of time and money. Plundering villages can be a mind-numbing grind. Some players can't handle the tension of being attacked or betrayed by other players.
The tally: 6 / 10

About the Game

As a free-to-play massively multiplayer online strategy game, Valor is not unique in its field. Quite a few such games have been around for some time, such as Tribal Wars and Travian. What makes Valor stand out from the crowd is that it is an app for the iPhone and iPad, whereas the others are browser-based games that are typically played on a desktop or laptop. Being on a mobile platform, Valor can be played anytime and anywhere that has a wireless connection, which makes it a far more compulsive experience than anything its browser-based brethren can offer. This is both a blessing and a curse, as I shall explain later.

As an aspiring conqueror, you start a game of Valor by taking control of a small, undeveloped city. Your first task is to construct a number of buildings for resource production and troop recruitment. A building usually takes only a few minutes to construct initially, but upgrading it to higher levels may eventually take several hours. Each building that you  have adds to your point score, which is a loose measure of your power in this game. When you conquer other cities, their buildings contribute to your point score as well.

If you want your buildings to finish faster, you can spend gold to buy special items called speed ups, which can take away between fifteen minutes to eight hours of your construction time. Except for very rare circumstances, the only way you can acquire gold is by purchasing it online with real world money.

It won't be long before you'll be able to recruit troops for defense and offense. Troops allow you to raid other cities for more resources. The safest ones to attack are barbarian villages, which are computer-controlled cities that never retaliate. Attacking other players, however, is a risky affair because they may call upon their buddies to attack you in return. Early on, it is generally wise to raid only barbarian villages and weaker players who do not belong to a strong guild.

Joining a guild of players whose cities are near enough to support each other usually keeps you from being attacked during the early stages of the game. The fear of reprisal from other players often discourages one from attacking a member of a strong guild. In that sense, Valor is not unlike prison. Anyone who isn't part of a gang gets screwed over and over again.

The only way to conquer other cities is by producing a very expensive unit called the Scholar and attacking the city with it. Scholars are easily killed, so they are usually escorted by many other troops for protection. Once you conquer the city, you lose your scholar, which is integrated into the local populace. Each subsequent scholar that you recruit becomes more and more expensive to produce. By the time you have several cities whose resource production is maxed out, however, scholars won't be too difficult to come by.

Despite the minimal graphics, battles in Valor are among the most heart-pounding experiences a gamer may have in a non-life-threatening situation. Hardly any other entertainment medium can induce as much fear as the realization that you are being attacked in a war game. Like building construction, it may take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours for an invading force to reach your city depending on how far the attackers have to march. As long as you are online, you will see an icon that shows you are being attacked as well as how many separate attacks are incoming. Unless you spend real world money to spy on your attackers, you won't know how many troops are attacking you nor what the composition of the troops is. The uncertainty of the outcome as well as the agonizing wait for the attack to hit is what induces so much fear and excitement in this game.

Valor has features for communication among players. Each guild has forums for members to post in. Players may also send private messages to each other regardless of their guild affiliation. These communication channels allow players to coordinate attacks or to send troops to defend guild mates. Players can also use private messages to arrange their transfer to other guilds, negotiate alliances, threaten each other, or send misinformation. More serious players rely on other apps such as Palringo or Qurki to chat with each other in real time.

Because players of Valor operate in a persistent world, attacks may come at any time, even when you're offline. Some of the better players may try to determine what your time zone is so they can attack you in your sleep. One underhanded tactic is for a player to act like your friend and to later ask where you're from. If they've gained your trust, you  will likely tell them the truth. When you're offline, you won't be able to call for help or dodge attacks.

When I was still playing Valor, I kept my iPhone with me at all times, even when I was asleep. I'd sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to keep my construction queue full and to make sure I wasn't being attacked. At one time, I even set my alarm so I could attack another player whom I knew would likely be asleep at that time.

Yes, I was hooked. I never played any other game during the two months that I was a Valor player. Eventually, I quit. It wasn't because of the tension that arose from the game, although I've heard that some players quit for that reason. Neither was it because of the betrayals that occurred, which I feel is par for the course in multiplayer war games. It was because I had allowed the game to take up too much of my precious time, and most of it was spent on unexciting activities. By the time I controlled four cities or so, raiding barbarian villages felt like a mind-numbing chore. Nevertheless, I had to keep at it to maintain enough resources for troop and building production.

The truth is that to be at the top of the leader boards, one would have to spend some real world money and a lot of time on this game. I never spent money on Valor, but I spent nearly all my free time on it. I wasn't among the top ranking players, but I was strong enough to keep the best ones from making any serious attempt to conquer my cities.

Room for Improvement

My biggest frustration with Valor is its terrible lag. It takes a while for the app to respond to button presses, which makes inputting data more painful than necessary. The world map takes a little too long to draw, although the latest version of Valor has reduced the lag in its map drawing considerably.

Another complaint that I have with the game is that raiding barbarian villages is time consuming without being fun. It would have been great if this process were automated somehow. Alternatively, the game could do away with barbarian villages by having all cities controlled by players only.

Finally, I don't like the idea of allowing players to spend real world money to give themselves significant advantages over other players. I realize that PlayMesh, the company that made Valor, needs a revenue stream to keep itself running, but the company could have used other business models that still maintain a level playing field in the game.

Conclusion

While the game play of Valor is nothing new, its being on a mobile platform allows players to stay online longer during the day. It's an addicting experience for people who are into war gaming. Nevertheless, like any other multiplayer strategy game, Valor can induce overwhelming feelings of excitement, fear, and anger that you won't find in other games like Monopoly or parcheesi.

High Noon (iPhone)

The good: Simple mechanics pack a lot of fun.
The bad: All avatars are male only, and there is no women’s apparel to buy at the store.
The tally: 9 / 10

About the Game

The iPhone is an amazing device whose portability, touch screen, motion sensor, and wireless connection have opened up new ways to play video games. One game that takes advantage of all these features is High Noon, a gunslinger simulator set in the Wild West.

The game play of High Noon is simplicity itself. Your objective is to win an online gun fight against a single opponent. At the start of the fight, you “holster” your weapon by holding your iPhone downwards by your side. When the battle begins, you aim your gun by tilting your iPhone. To fire your weapon, just tap the screen. You can aim more carefully by keeping your finger on your iPhone as you tilt it before releasing your finger to fire your gun. You may also use special items that you buy in the game to give you an edge, such as a sack of flour to blind your opponents with or a noose to hang them by their leg as you take shots at them. Whoever is the first to reduce their opponent’s hit points to zero wins the battle.

Each time you win, you are rewarded with a certain amount of gold commensurate to the challenge that your opponent gives you. When you’ve earned enough gold, you rise up in level, thereby unlocking new items to buy in the store as well as raising your hit points. Leveling up also gives you a small amount of wampum, a Native American currency that isn’t easy to come by in this game. While you can buy many items with gold, some of the more desirable ones can only be bought with wampum. You can use these items to customize your avatar, outfitting him with interesting clothes and hairstyles as well as weapons and special items to help you win gun fights. If you need more wampum, you can purchase it for real world money from the iTunes store.

Each gun fight that you go through uses up a point of energy. When you run out, you have to wait some time for your energy levels to go up. Alternatively, you may buy and consume items that replenish your energy, but these items can only be bought with wampum. There really isn’t enough depth to this game for most players to play over long stretches of time anyway, so requiring players to take a break when their avatar gets tired isn’t a bad idea.

Room for Improvement

If there’s one quibble to be had with this game, it’s that all the avatars are male. There is no option to choose a female avatar and outfit her with women’s clothing. Consequently, the game misses out on an opportunity for hilarity by allowing players to cross-dress their avatars.

Conclusion

In summary, High Noon is proof that games do not need complex mechanics to be superb. It may be simple to play, but the challenge of tilting your iPhone to aim your weapon packs a lot of fun.

Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal (PC)

The good: A number of fairies have clever graphical designs. It’s tempting to try to catch them all. The combat system poses some fun and interesting challenges. Reloading a saved game is instantaneous.
The bad: The story is not engaging. Leveling up your fairies will require long, tedious grinding. Evolving your fairies will not always make them stronger. The graphics are dated by today’s standards. Only one save slot per game, and it is automatically used whenever you change areas. The game lacks an automap feature.
The tally: 8 / 10

About the Game

Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal was first released on December 2002, and it shows. The graphics are dated by today’s standards. Despite that, the game play is engaging, and if you can look past the graphics, you’ll find yourself coming back to Zanzarah again and again.

You play Amy, an eighteen-year-old English girl who is magically whisked to Zanzarah, a world where elves, dwarves, goblins, and fairies had happily co-existed until recently. It seems that fairies have gone mad, attacking hapless folk for no reason. To top it all, shadow elves have appeared on the surface and are attempting to take over the land. It was prophesied long ago that only a human can set things right, and of the six billion or so people in our world, Amy was inexplicably chosen to be that savior.

The story is where Zanzarah is weakest. It merely serves as a pretext for Amy to go on her adventure. There is no deeper motivation for Amy to help the folk of Zanzarah, no opportunities for personal growth and development. All the characters are two-dimensional, except for Amy, who has no personality to speak of. You will never feel any strong emotions toward any of the characters. There is a lot of potential for a story about a girl who meets fairies, but all this has gone to waste in this game.

In Zanzarah, elves, dwarves, and goblins are civilized folk, and they never resolve conflicts by beating up or hacking at each other. No, they let fairies do their dirty work for them. If you, as Amy, are to earn a modicum of respect from the local populace, you would do well to collect your own set of fairies and train them to defeat others. This method of conflict resolution seems somewhat stilted, and one wonders how the game would have progressed if someone like Max Payne or Duke Nukem had been chosen to save Zanzarah instead.

Make no mistake about it. Zanzarah is a Pokemon clone. You’ll even use something like Pokeballs to collect the fairies that you capture. Nevertheless, there are enough differences in its game play to justify Zanzarah’s inclusion in my list of standout games. Combat is implemented as a first-person shooter, in which you control one of your fairies and blast the opposition with its spells. Offensive spells are powered up by holding down the left mouse button and fired when you release the button. If you hold down the button too long, however, the spell will backfire.

Your fairy flies up whenever you click the right mouse button. Flying expends your fairy’s stamina, however, and if your fairy is too tired to pull itself out of a bottomless portion of the arena, it will die.

You can keep as many as five fairies with you at any point in time. The set of fairies that you have with you is called a deck, a term that seems to hearken to Pokemon’s incarnation as a trading card game. You choose your deck from your entire fairy collection, which is kept in your house in London, and you take your deck with you wherever you go. If, during a battle, you want to switch your current fairy with some other fairy in your deck, you may do so. Only fairies that participate in and survive a battle earn experience points, so if you find that your fairy is being beaten to within an inch of its life, you will probably want to switch it with some other fairy.

You will also meet elves, dwarves, and goblins who are fairy masters, just like you. They will challenge you to a duel of fairies, pitting their decks against yours. Since fairies fair better against some types of fairies than others, both you and your opponent will do a lot of fairy switching during the course of the duel. You cannot capture fairies that are owned by other masters, so feel free to obliterate them as you please. Sometimes, you will also be attacked by a group of fairies that have no apparent master. As these fairies are not wild despite having no master, you will not be able to collect them.

As your fairies level up, most of them will eventually have a chance to evolve into some higher form, yet another concept that was borrowed from Pokemon. Evolving a fairy will not necessarily make it stronger, however, so unless you want to collect all fairy types, you may want to cancel a fairy’s evolution before it takes place. The only way for you to know if a fairy’s evolved form is weaker or stronger than its previous form (short of looking it up on the Internet) is to allow it to evolve. If you’ve saved your game before one of your fairies evolves, you can revert back to your saved game if you prefer to keep you fairy in its current form.

It is tempting to try to have each fairy type represented in your collection even though the game does not reward you for catching them all. The appearance of your fairies range from the genuinely creative to the downright silly, so having a chance to look at each of them at your leisure may be motivation enough to complete your collection.

Considering the large number of fairy types to choose from, you are bound to spend a considerable amount of time leveling up some fairies only to find another fairy that you will want to use instead. Leveling up your fairies will turn out to be a long and tedious grind, a necessary evil if you are to hurdle the tough encounters that await you.

Saving and reloading are instantaneous for all intents and purposes. If Amy dies or loses a fight, the game will automatically reload from your save slot. Unfortunately, you only have one save slot per game, and this gets automatically overwritten every time you move from one area to another. Also, your character’s position in the game world is never saved, so every time you reload, you will be repositioned at the starting point of your current area.

The world of Zanzarah is vast, and you will have to revisit some of the areas a number of times. Fortunately, you will have a chance to get rune stones that can teleport you to some of the areas that you have been to. A number of areas have twisting paths that double back to themselves, which would have made an automap feature welcome, if only the game had it. Because the game lacks such a feature, however, you are bound to get lost in these areas quite often.

Room for Improvement

Zanzarah does a number of things right. A creature collection metagame emerges out of its design, just as it does in the Pokemon games. Its combat system is an improvement over Pokemon and makes for an appropriately brief and exciting experience. Nevertheless, I’ve mentioned a number of shortcomings that could have been improved upon. The story could have been better, and an automap feature would have been welcome. Also, it would have been nice if there was more than one save slot in the game and if Amy’s location could have been saved as well.

If I were to choose just one aspect of the game to improve upon, it would be to tone down the difficulty of the non-random encounters while increasing their number. The way the game is currently designed, you would have to seek out way too many random encounters to level up your fairies sufficiently to survive the non-random encounters that Amy will have to hurdle so as to advance the story. I would have kept grinding to a minimum, ensuring that each set encounter will prepare the players' fairies sufficiently to survive the next set encounter. I would have to increase the number of set encounters in the process, but at least I would have minimized the players’ reliance on random encounters that do not advance the story in any way.

Conclusion

Zanzarah is a fun game that offers its own unique take on the Pokemon formula. PC gamers who need a Pokemon fix need look no further than here. The game does have a number of shortcomings, but those can be forgiven because of its engaging game play.

Gratuitous Space Battles (PC)

The good: Designing spaceships and pitting them against an enemy fleet is fun. Space battles can be thrilling to watch.
The bad: Once you start a battle, there is nothing to do but watch it progress or abort it. Despite having only 2D graphics, the game stutters when spaceships start firing at each other, especially when played at high speed.
The tally: 7 / 10

About the Game

"Who needs backstory? Who needs resource-gathering? Diplomacy is so last year. Gratuitous Space Battles cuts right to the chase of sci-fi strategy games, and deals with large, completely unjustified space battles between huge opposing space fleets."

This is how the Steam store describes Gratuitous Space Battles, an appropriately titled PC game that was released on November 2009. This game is so unique that it defies categorization. Its manual describes it as a "strategy / management game," a category that does not quite fit because there is hardly any strategy or management involved in it. There is no resource management to speak of, and battles are resolved automatically after unit deployment. The Wikipedia describes it as a tower defense game, an absurd description because the units that you create are anything but static towers, and enemy units do not attempt to reach some objective on a map, thereby decreasing your remaining lives. Perhaps the best way to explain what Gratuitous Space Battles is all about is by discussing its mechanics.

The game play consists of designing space ships by choosing hulls and attaching a number of modules to them. There are three types of hulls that you may use: fighters are tiny, fast, single-pilot ships that are easy to kill but can get close enough to enemies to bypass their shields; cruisers are gigantic and ponderous capital ships that pack a lot of firepower and protection; between the two in terms of size is the frigate, whose firepower, speed, and protection are also middling. Each hull and module has an associated cost that contributes toward the total cost of a ship.

At the start of the game, you will have a fairly small number of hulls and modules to choose from. Each time you win a battle, however, you will gain honor, which is the currency you use to unlock additional modules and hulls. The amount of honor you may gain in a battle depends on your odds of winning it. If the game estimates that your forces and that of the enemy are evenly matched, you stand to gain only a small amount of honor. If the battle seems to be lopsided in favor of the enemy, you may gain considerably more honor, but you also put your fleet in greater peril.

Once you have designed all the ships you intend to use, you may initiate a battle. At the pre-battle screen, you choose one of several missions to play then deploy your ships at the designated starting area. The strength of your forces is limited by the total cost of your fleet and the maximum number of pilots that the mission will allow. Some missions will impose additional limitations to your fleet composition, so you will want to pay attention to what those are before selecting your ships. Apart from deciding on your units' placement, you may also change the priorities by which any of your ships will attack each enemy ship type. For instance, you may decide that one of your frigates should prioritize attacking fighters over cruisers and other frigates. After setting up your units and choosing a difficulty level, you click the "Fight" button to watch the fireworks.

At this point, watching the fireworks is just about the only thing you can do, apart from aborting the mission. Your ships and those of the enemy will engage each other without your prompting. Fortunately, the battles are often thrilling to watch, much like your favorite sports games. All the graphics are in 2D, but the gun and missile fire effects are rendered well. It is satisfying to see enemy ships getting blasted apart piece by piece, and it is just as worrisome to see your own ships getting damaged in a similar fashion. Nevertheless, when too many ships start blasting each other simultaneously, the game may start to stutter, especially when the battles are played at high speed. You can tweak your video options to make the game run more smoothly, and you can play your battles at the default speed or slower to ameliorate issues with the frame rate.

There are no consequences for losing a battle apart from being unable to unlock the next mission. Since there is no loss of resources involved, you may simply go back to the drawing board to redesign your ships then jump into the fray once more. If you need more honor to unlock some much-needed modules or hulls, you may replay earlier missions.

Room for Improvement

Apart from technical issues with the frame rate, the major weakness of Gratuitous Space Battles is a lack of interactivity during combat sequences. Thrilling as the battles might be to watch, there is no meaningful player input involved in them. The game play would have improved much more if players were allowed to issue movement and fire orders throughout combat. Gratuitous Space Battles could have been a very engaging war game with this little addition of interactivity.

Conclusion

Gratuitous Space Battles delivers exactly what is expected from its title. Its game play revolves around designing fleets of ships from the ground up, but apart from that, the only interaction involved in combat is during ship deployment. The fights are exciting to watch, and it's fun to experiment with ship designs that will hopefully win battles, but a deeper level of player involvement could have been attained if the game had allowed players to issue movement and fire orders.

Academagia: The Making of Mages (PC)

The good: Academagia immerses you in the day-to-day life of a first-year middle school student at a school of wizardry. If you’ve ever fantasized about studying at Hogwarts, this game is for you.
The bad: Tons of text may deter those who are not inclined to read. The disorganized presentation is bound to confuse players. Like The Sims, there are no set objectives to attain.
The tally: 7 / 10

About the Game

Released on August 2010, Academagia: The Making of Mages offers a way for every Harry Potter fan to live out their fantasy of being a young student at a wizard academy. Academagia is a life simulation, a kind of role-playing game with no set objective other than to interactively experience a life that is not your own. The game manual tells us that life simulations are big in Japan but aren’t well known in the West. Apparently, the way you experience life simulations is by reading the situations that you are presented with and choosing your subsequent action from one of several options. If my understanding is correct, life simulations are close cousins of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books and are distant, non-graphical relatives of The Sims.

When you start a new game, you first create your character. From the outset, the number of options that are open to you is large, and the text that you have to wade through is sizeable. This is a precursor of things to come. The world of Academagia is rich and detailed, and to present it without graphics requires an impressive amount of text.

Once you’ve created your character, you are ready to live life as a first-year student of wizardry one day at a time. The core gameplay consists of tweaking your schedule for the current day and confirming your orders when you are done. By default, a typical day of school consists of two periods of class and one period of rest. You don’t have to stick to the suggested schedule. In fact, you may cut classes if you like, but if you do it too often, you’ll be risking detention.

Upon confirming your schedule, your actions will be resolved, and you will be presented with a number of events as well as several options for reacting to each situation. The color of the text indicates how likely you are to succeed with any given option. Green means that you will succeed. Blue indicates a high chance of success. Black means that you have an even chance of success or failure. Red indicates that you will probably fail, and purple means that you will almost certainly fail. The last two color codes aren’t particularly intuitive to me. I would have thought that purple would indicate a low chance of success and that red would refer to almost certain failure, not the other way around.

Your chance of success is determined by what skill is involved in any given option and your level in that skill. Skills are made up of several sub-skills, each of which has its own level. Your level in any given skill is determined by your level in the sub-skills that comprise it. I’ve counted fifty skills in my one play-through, although there may be more. Academagia reveals only the skills that you have at the start of the game or that you attempted to use during the course of your life as a first-year student. I never bothered to count the number of sub-skills that I’ve seen, but trust me, there are a lot.

Typically, you raise your sub-skill levels by training in them, which is one of the many actions that you can engage in during the day. When you raise enough of your sub-skills by a level or more, the skill under which these sub-skills fall will improve as well. There are other ways for you to raise a sub-skill, such as training on the job or going to some forbidden school of magic.

Six of the skills in the game are academic courses of study. Apart from training in those skills, you have to study them separately. Studying an academic skill will help you pass your exams but won’t improve your proficiency in that skill. In other words, studying will improve your theoretical knowledge, but training will improve your practical knowledge. Thankfully, there are no sub-skills that you have to study for. Instead, you study for the academic skill itself.

The way the sub-skills are organized under each skill is far from intuitive. For example, if you’re looking for the Artisan sub-skill, you probably would not think to look for it under the Sabotage skill unless you’ve been playing Academagia for quite a while. To cite another example, you probably would not think to look for the Patience sub-skill under the Malice skill, but there it is. I have no doubt that the designers have their reasons for choosing which skills to put each sub-skill under, but the result is confusing to those playing Academagia for the first time or so.

Apart from skills, your character will get to learn spells. Learning a spell requires that you first learn all the “phemes” that comprise that spell. Phemes are the building blocks of spells. Once you’ve learned all the phemes of a spell, you learn the spell as well. Spells can give you bonuses on your skills, so before you attempt to use a particular skill, you may want to cast a spell that will enhance it. You can learn phemes by attending classes, although there are many other ways that you can learn them. Neither the manual nor the game lists the spells that are available or the phemes that comprise them, so you are left on your own to discover what they are.

During the course of the game, you may want to build friendships with other students. Doing so will grant you bonuses in the skills in which they excel and will open up new opportunities for adventuring with them.

You are also bound to meet other students who will rub you the wrong way. During my play through, there was one student in particular who bullied my character often and caused him undue stress. I was so irritated with that bully that I attempted to harm her with my spells. None of the actions of first-year students are lethal, though, so I just wound up wasting time that I could have spent more productively on my training or adventures. I’m sure there is a lesson to be learned from this experience, one that can apply to real life as well.

The 2D graphics in the game are spartan, consisting of static pictures of the students, faculty, and environs. There are no animations here as all the action is illustrated through words. There are no sound effects in this game, although it does have some Baroque music. The music and artwork suggests that the world of Academagia is like a fantasy version of the European Renaissance period, unlike the modern times of Harry Potter's world.

Although I’ve played through Academagia only once, I’m impressed with the sheer variety of events that my character experienced. I’m pretty sure that I’ve barely scratched the surface of what a student of wizardry may undergo in this game. Academagia is a work of love, and it shows in the quality and volume of the writing. Despite the simplicity of the core mechanics, the game is oddly compelling, rather like a novel that you can’t bring yourself to put down even though it’s way past your bedtime.

Room for Improvement

A text-based game like Academagia has plenty of room for improvement. The most obvious one would be to present the game primarily through animated graphics with sound effects instead of just text. With the power of modern desktop computers, the designers missed out on an opportunity to engage players through many sensory levels.

Nevertheless, the biggest improvement in my opinion would be to reorganize the system of skills and sub-skills to make them more intuitive to find and use. As a role-playing system, Academagia is a mess. Re-engineering the fundamental mechanics of the game would go a long way toward making it less confusing to use.

Conclusion

Academagia is a deeply immersive game, one that offers you a virtual life as a young student of wizardry. As long as you don’t mind having to wade through pages upon pages of text and can tolerate the unintuitive presentation, you just might be drawn into its world.

Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim (PC)

The good: This real-time strategy game provides a clever mechanic for indirectly controlling units through monetary rewards.
The bad: Advanced and Expert scenarios may be overwhelmingly difficult to the point of frustration.
The tally: 8 / 10

About the Game

“…many have tried to pry the legendary scepter from the dead king’s hands. None have succeeded. And now, it’s our turn!”
– The Advisor

Released in 2009, Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim is the sequel to (you guessed it) Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, published in 2000. In both games, you play a king who can build structures for recruiting heroes, supplying their gear, researching spells, and defending the realm. Majesty and Majesty 2 are unique takes on real-time strategy gaming in that you cannot directly control the heroes that you produce. Instead, you set bounties for exploring areas, defending your structures, and attacking enemy units or buildings. You can also set a bounty for keeping heroes from entering an area, although you probably won't be using this type of bounty often, if at all. Having an indirect level of control makes sense in the context of the game. You are supposed to be a king after all, not a micro-manager.

Each guild that you construct allows you to recruit specific types of heroes; namely, clerics, elves, dwarves, rangers, rogues, warriors, and wizards. You can also build temples that allow you to recruit archers of Helia, beastmasters, blademasters, paladins, priestesses of Krypta, and priestesses of Agrela. These heroes have minds of their own and will go looking for adventure or picking fights with monsters as they please. As mentioned previously, you can direct their efforts by offering monetary rewards for various tasks, although you cannot choose who will respond to your bounties. Heroes will earn experience points each time they attack an enemy creature or structure, and they can gain gold that they may spend at your commercial establishments. They may also die if they are not careful, but you may resurrect them from the local graveyard for a fee that rises in proportion to their level.

Everything that you do – from constructing buildings to casting spells – is fueled by the taxes that you collect from the local populace. Some buildings, such as the marketplace, can generate more revenues than others. You can increase taxes from the marketplace by building trading posts at specially designated spots. Defending these trading posts and the gold-laden caravans that they spawn is going to cost you by way of spells, protection bounties, or defensive towers.

Despite being unable to control heroes directly, you'll be busy setting up your structures, issuing bounties, and casting spells throughout the game. You will also need to scan the realm for developments that may warrant your attention. It is tempting to occasionally watch a fight in one area, but if you spend too much time watching, you may lose track of another battle elsewhere, and before you know it, down goes one of your buildings, along with all the research and upgrades that you had invested in it.

Anyone who has ever played Dungeons & Dragons knows that having a balanced mix of heroes in any party is crucial for survival. In Majesty 2, however, heroes will tend to gallivant by default without regard for teamwork. To rectify this situation, you can construct a pub and initiate research on party formation. When done, you can use the pub to gather heroes and form four-person parties with them. The members of a party will then travel together until death does them part (or until you disband them, whichever comes first).

Come to think of it, having the king dictate when parties should be formed and who should comprise them seems odd. This design decision is not consistent with the rest of the game, where directing the populace is one step removed from immediate control. Party formation is a new feature that was not present in the first Majesty game. It is a welcome feature to be sure, but one that seems out of place with the rest of the game.

At the start of each scenario, the entire land is shrouded in a fog of war, except for a small area surrounding your initial buildings. The land is dotted with enemy structures that periodically spawn hostile units, so it is generally a good idea to encourage your heroes to explore the land so you can set attack bounties over these structures.

The campaign scenarios range in difficulty from Novice to Expert. The more difficult scenarios are sufficiently varied to require different strategies and build orders to succeed. Herein lies the rub. The later scenarios are so punishing that you are bound to fail in your first few attempts while you try to discern the pattern in the enemies’ attacks. Exploring the land early makes for good policy, but in some scenarios, early exploration will trigger an immediate assault from powerful enemies. Building defensive towers around your town is usually a good idea but not in one scenario, where the boss can huff and puff and blow your towers down. If you make a mistake somewhere along the line, your enemies will accumulate and overwhelm you with sheer numbers. The only way to gather sufficient intelligence for victory (short of reading a walkthrough) is to try different strategies and fail often until you find one that works.

On the shallower side, the 3D graphics are attractive if not spectacular, and the music and sound effects are pretty good. The actor who plays your royal advisor sounds a lot like Sean Connery and does an excellent job of narrating events. The voice acting for the bosses, however, leaves something to be desired.

The setting of the game is generic fantasy, albeit with a dash of humor that adds to the game’s entertainment value. Two of the bosses are clearly inspired by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, particularly the movies by Peter Jackson. Seeing them made me smile with recognition.

Room for Improvement

While the core mechanic is solid, most gamers may find the later scenarios of the game difficult to the point of frustration. Perhaps the developers should have included a difficulty slider to let players choose just how much punishment they can handle. The easiest difficulty level should be challenging enough to allow most players to win on their first or second try with little sweat. Even in the hardest scenarios, the opposition should be strong without overwhelming the player. It is all right to have enemies attack in large numbers, as long as there is some brief respite between attacks to allow  players to recover a bit and adjust their strategy. When the enemy reaches the point where your units are being pounded relentlessly, you will have no recourse but to end the scenario.

Conclusion

All told, Majesty 2 offers players a chance to be a king in a generic fantasy world. As a king, you will be building structures and issuing bounties, but you will not have direct control of the local populace, which makes perfect sense. You will be able to order specific heroes to band together, which does not quite make sense, but doing so will improve your heroes’ chances of survival. Most players will probably be frustrated with the difficulty level of the later scenarios, but those who persevere may enjoy the interesting challenges of directing the citizenry through fiscal incentives.