Since this past August, I’ve been playing Magic: the Gathering Arena in their closed beta both on my own and streaming on my Twitch channel at geekingoutabout. I’m not that great of a player, so when I finally won my first game of Momir Basic, I thought it was good enough to create a video about it.
If you’re interested in learning more about this newest iteration of Magic, you can read this article I wrote for Twin Cities Geek and download the game for yourself at the Arena website.
Unavowed
Created, Designed, and Published by Wadjet Eye Games
Written by Dave Gilbert
Starring (from left to right): Logan Cunningham, Sandra Espinoza, Frank Todaro, Arielle Siegel, SungWon Cho (not pictured), and more
Art by Ben Chandler and Ivan Ulyanov
Music by Thomas Regin
Rating: Mature adolescents and above (adult language, gun violence, supernatural elements)
Official Blurb: For one year, crime-torn New York City has been at the mercy of someone hell-bent on destruction and chaos. Waking up on a stormy rooftop, you learn that this someone was you. At least, the heinous acts were carried out by your body, possessed by an angry demon that’s now loose in the city that never sleeps. The only force that can stop it is the Unavowed, a centuries old supernatural crime-fighting troupe that takes down evil in the shadows—and you are their newest member.
Pros: Voice acting is top-notch and all of the diverse characters have depth and are more than just stereotypes.
Cons: Some of the puzzles require a pixel hunt, and that can really take you out of the story.
It’s been a while since I’ve played a video game which did not involve mana, either land-generated or crystal-generated). As such, it took me a while to get into Unavowed, the latest adventure published by Wadjet Eye Games. However, after playing my review copy for approximately 32 hours with two player characters and experiencing four different endings, I can say that I’m definitely not going to wait that long before playing another one.
Unavowed takes place within the universe conceived within the partially-finished Bestowers of Eternity (2003) and then introduced by Blackwell Legacy (2007), also created by Dave Gilbert and published by Wadjet Eye Games. However, you don’t need to have played either of those games or the four other games within the Blackwell series to understand the world that’s been built. Because there is an already-established universe for its characters, the story that’s been built for Unavowed is very strong.
As a mystery, Unavowed does very well at dribbling out hints as to what has befallen the player-character (whose name and gender but not facial features can be chosen during the first scene) during the previous year. It is revealed that not only have you murdered your friends and colleagues, but you’ve also wreaked havoc over New York City by influencing or causing other strange deaths and disappearances. Joining the Unavowed is the only way you’re able to find out what happened to you which is done through investigating sources of demonic energy you (or the demon within you) has left all over the city. I found myself taking a lot of time to read through all of the dialogue, even some of the brilliant “idle stance” dialogue that Gilbert wrote for this non-player characters (NPCs), just so I could figure out more of the mystery and also so that I could unlock the next bit of story which could be uncovered when you speak to certain characters are certain times.
One of the big complaints that I’ve often read about point-and-click adventure games is that sometimes a puzzle isn’t intuitive enough for a player to figure it out without a hint. Some hidden object games have chosen to get around that by instituting a rechargeable “hint” bar where if you wait for long enough (or make an in-app purchase) you can get a clue on how to solve a puzzle. Unavowed does no such thing, but instead allows you to ask the other two members of your party what they think you should do next. Their dialogue responses often helped me figure out the next room or person I had to visit. I will state, however, that there were at least five times where I had to resort to performing a “pixel hunt” or consulting the provided walkthrough to figure things out. Whenever I did that, it pulled me out of the story and reminded me that not only was I playing a game, I wasn’t being very smart about it either.
And speaking of the dialogue, not only is it written well, it’s also performed very well. In an interview with me, Gilbert said that many of the voice actors he works with have an improv theater background and that professionality shines through. My favorite characters were Mandana and Vicki, not just because they were fully-fleshed out characters and not stereotypes but also because of the personality which Sandra Espinoza (Mandana) and Arielle Siegel (Vicki) brought to their lines. In fact, I love all of the characters in this game because their diversity and diverse personalities are so true to the New York City I called my home for over eight years.
It’s also due to the portrait art by Ivan Ulyanov that I was able to empathize with the NPCs so well. Almost every line of dialogue was accompanied by a change in the character portrait that emphasized the emotion being conveyed through the tone in their voices. Best of all, even if you’re a person who has a problem hearing spoken dialogue, the characters’ expressions accurately conveyed the mood contained within the writing.
It’s because of this that you can tell that Gilbert spent a lot of time thinking about every line of dialogue. Much of this is due to one trick which he says in the interview was borrowed liberally from Bioware (Mass Effect, Dragon Age) where what you choose as your character’s dialogue has an effect on the NPC’s response back to you. As I was playing the game, I found inventing a personality for both of my player characters based solely on how I thought either of them would respond to a statement or ask a question. This, in addition to the mechanic of being able to pick two NPCs to make up a party help make Unavowed more than just another adventure game.
If this kind of adventure game is going to be part of the way forward for Wadjet Eye Games, then not only do I look forward to seeing more games like Unavowed from this publisher, I’m going to expect other adventure game designers to follow suit in their own way. And that, I think, is not a bad thing at all.
About four years ago, I worked as an administrative assistant for an indie video game publisher named Games Omniverse. Part of my job was to not only update all of the game design documents on the company’s internal wiki, but to write some articles for the company blog about games, specifically adventure games.
Writing those articles rekindled my love for adventure gaming, so when I was offered a review copy of Unavowed, the latest from Wadjet Eye Games, I jumped at the chance to not only review it, but to get an interview with its creator Dave Gilbert. All the show notes are under the jump.
0:01 – VidCast begins
1:13 – Introduction to Wadjet Eye Games and Dave Gilbert
9:15 – Gameplay begins
39:15 – Credits
Music Credits:
“roma pt. 2” by greyguy © copyright 2010 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
“Introduction” by Thomas Regin © copyright 2018 Licensed for fair use by Wadjet Eye Games.
Geekly Speaking About… is a video-cast (and former podcast) about pop culture and geek culture both old and new. Trisha Lynn is not a Bestower, but does believe in the cosmic power of the universe from time to time.
I’ve been watching the Rivals of Ixalan Pre-Pre-Release replay first on Twitch and later on YouTube over and over and I think that this is the best kind of marketing event for Magic: the Gathering that Wizards of the Coast ever fell backwards into. Why?
1. The people at Loading Ready Run who are hosting and producing these events have at least a decade of experience in being funny and entertaining while being professional. (Special kudos to James Turner, whose idea this all was, I think.)
2. Their online chat mods do not tolerate trolls. At all.
3. Their online chat community also does not tolerate trolls. At all.
4. The focus on the event is having fun and learning what the cards do, as all non-moneyed competitive events should do. (Note: Winning packs as prizes doesn’t count as money. No matter how much you try, you cannot buy groceries with packs of Magic cards.)
5. The guests they invite can be a diverse bunch of folks who are also entertaining, engaging, and friendly. Two of my favorites have been former Magic pro and current Wizards employee Melissa DeTora and Jimmy Wong from the Command Zone podcast. (Special hat-tip to Reuben Bresler of the Magic Mics podcast, whose Facebook post recap inspired this post.)
It’s these last two parts that are perhaps the most important key to drawing new players into the game or convincing lapsed players that they should head back into their Local Gaming Store to attend the set’s actual pre-release and perhaps start playing Magic again. I know that’s how I felt back when LRR debuted this show starting with the Shadows of Innistrad Pre-Pre-Release. I went to my LGS the following Saturday and went 0-4 in back-to-back events. By watching the show, I could not only see some of the cards that were released in the visual spoiler, but I could get a sense of how to actually play with them in a live situation.
Perhaps the biggest barrier for someone who’s on the fence on whether or not they’ll want to spend their money on a new game they haven’t seen is wanting to actually see what it’s like; the PPRs are perfect for that kind of demonstration, more so than Wizards‘ own Magic tournament streams. Because it’s partially produced by the company, there’s some sort of quality control. However, because LRR was first and foremost a sketch comedy troupe, it’s going to be entertaining. Best of all, because they actually play the game themselves, the way they speak and interact with the game is completely natural and not something that you’d get from any mainstream video content producer or marketing company.
It’s a bit too late for me now to attend the Rivals prerelease because it’s happening this weekend. However, with the return to the game’s initial starting plane Dominaria this April, I may decide to dust off my card sleeves and see if I can actually win a round this time.
After all, practice does make perfect.
It’s been said that being at a Magic the Gathering Grand Prix is very much like attending an anime or comic book convention, and I find that Day Two of this event is not different. After having sold some of my extra cards for $15 and signing up for another “small” draft, walking around the play area, I saw many of the same faces I’d seen yesterday. There’s a comforting familiarity in seeing people you recognize at such a big event like this, even if it’s only someone you saw in passing or someone you saw while sitting on the #GPMinn Twitter hashtag.
The players are gathering at their tables. The Super Sunday registration has closed. The pager which will call me to a draft table is waiting for a signal.
Welcome to Day Two of GP Minneapolis.
11:15 am: I drafted a red-black Zombie Vampires deck, but only the Vampires really wanted to come out to play. I ran only 14 creatures because I really wanted to keep things tight (and that’s all I could find in the draft), but instead of filling the rest with spells, I probably should have just put more land in because I don’t think I ever got beyond 5 mana once. I even had to mulligan down to 4 in G1 and though the second game felt a little better and a more even match, I ended up losing that one, too. At least I was able to hate-draft a Westphale Abbey.
12:06 pm: Round 12 resulted in a loss for Meghan Wolff (8-3-1) from Magic the Amateuring, and I was able to get a little bit of time before her next round for a brief interview; hopefully, I’ll be able to edit it soon and get it up on the website. Our conversation focused a lot on her role as a recently elevated ambassador to the game after their invitation to the 2015 Community Cup where she gave a fantastic speech defending their Avarice Amulet Ironroot Chef brew which charmed not only the live Twitch audience, but the flavor judges as well. Her main takeaways for anyone who also wants to contribute to the community is to find an angle or niche which you feel is underrepresented and to find a co-host (or more) with whom you have a lot of chemistry but also who will help creating content be less of a chore for you. Another thing she mentioned is that being a competitor on Day 2 is manifesting a little bit of Impostor Syndrome; however, judging from the reaction of a mother and her two girls who had also come up to say hello before the next round, Wolff is definitely the real deal.
1:39 pm: South Dakota player Brooke Schieffer had just turned around to see that time for Round 13 was drawing to a close, so she did the only thing that she could do at that point: she played her Great Aurora. This move effectively reset the game and put herself onto a huge mana advantage with 21 cards to draw to her opponent’s 17. In the interview I had with her (which will hopefully go up later), Schieffer said that she had always wanted to build a deck around the card, and after Tireless Tracker and some other cards came out in later sets, she realized she could find a way to make a RG Ramping Humans deck work. She runs Chandra, Nissa, and the new Arlinn Kord in her deck and during the round, I saw all three come out to play. A casual player since Shadowmoor, Schieffer only started getting serious with Standard decks, but stressed that she is not a fan of net-decking–and with her now 9-3-1 record, that strategy seems to be working pretty well for her today.
2:34 pm: Ben Wood, whom I met yesterday, is 4-1 for today, 11-3 overall and playing a 4-color Rites deck. Though he doesn’t play the card a lot, he managed to bring out Ulamog to exile a bunch of his opponents’ cards.
After picking up a “Good Luck, High Five!” bracelet from Wolff and Maria Bartholdi (who was sadly defeated by her co-host during Round 14), I realized that my Day Two was slowly coming to an end because I have to leave in a bit to drive a friend back to the airport. As I sit in the middle of a hall where the number of attendees playing in the Main Event is decreasing, I can’t help but think of the amazing people I’ve met today and yesterday. No doubt, there are also a few non-great people here whose saltiness I’ve either overheard or read on Twitter. But for the most part, everyone at this Gran Prix has been nice, friendly, sporting, and welcoming.
I know I’m a casual player, and until something in my financial situation changes, I’m likely to stay a casual player. But I’m glad to know that should I ever decide to get more serious as a player, there’s a great community waiting for me.
Shortly after sitting down outside the convention center to set up this blog entry, I turned around to see a friend whom I had first met at my very first Friday Night Magic event way back during the end of the Return to Ravnica block. He gave me a huge hug, and then proceeded to tell me about the bad beatdown he’d been given last night by Reid Duke.
To the left of me, a former Austrailian was sleeving up a Commander deck which he’d just bought. Like me, this was also his first Gran Prix (GP). After a wide-ranging conversation which included talking about dangerous creatures from Australia and the voting procedures of the Democratic Farm Labor party, the three of us aren’t in the event decided to sign up for a draft, and my friend headed off to play his Round 3 (he’s 2-0 right now).
Welcome to Magic the Gathering.
12:07 pm: We were told that we were the last people to fill in the next “small” draft to fire, so we immediately headed over to the Gathering Point. But even then, there was still a lot of waiting going on. I have a lot of empathy right now for the two organizers who are trying to call out people who have signed up for their draft and who are competing with the person on the PA. Hugo, a person in my draft pod, has been waiting for 1.5 hours for this draft to fire.
2:02 pm: Well, that certainly was a thing. The first pack of the draft didn’t show me anything fun so I defaulted to white flyers because I like flying creatures and I started with green humans. Turns out that my opponent who was seated four seats away with me also was playing green/white and it feels like he picked up all the better cards. I’m going to see if I can have my friend Michael Simon (who recently made the Top 8 at GP Albuquerque) take a look at what I drafted here and tell me whether or not I was insane or just addled in the head when I drafted this deck.
G1 had my opponent stuck on land while I played out my creatures and just whittled him down. Lost the second two games in a row, but I’m choosing not to count the second game loss as entirely my fault because I had to mulligan to 5 and poorly chose to keep a hand that had only 1 creature in it just so I wouldn’t have to mulligan to 4. The middle game was pretty good, with both of us developing our boards well, but in the end he was just able to do more with his creatures.
Gonna lick my wounds, perhaps get a bite to eat, see how folks are doing, and maybe jump into one of the more expensive drafts.
3:09 pm: Just off to the side of the hall is the feature match area. Round 5 saw well-known professional players Yuuya Watanabe (18th) and Owen Turtenwald (2nd) facing off against Andrew Wagener and Greg Orange, respectively. It felt a little strange to stand around next to the tables at watch the games play without any context and/or explanation of what was going on. Orange and Turtenwald finished first, with Orange taking the round, 2-1. I managed to get a little interview with him which I may upload later on tonight. While writing this entry at the tables outside, I also met a gentleman named Kelly Hoesing, who is 5-0 heading into Round 6 and just beat two-time World Champion player Shahar Shenhar with his Bant Humans deck. Quoth Hoesing: “[I] ran him over with little dudes because he couldn’t get a Languish.” The amazing thing about Hoesing is after his last day of school as a high school teacher, he hopped into his car and drove all the way from Nebraska to be here by 8 am to play.
4:38 pm: Early in Round 6, I happened upon a producer and her videographer who are doing a story on Top 8 pro player and renown deck builder Sam Black (8th). Her name is Michaela Vatcheva and as her videographer was getting B-roll of his match against Ava Adams (whom I think is the female player who currently has the best record), Michaela told me that after meeting Black through a mutual friend, she realized that his would be a great story to tell and pitched it to the folks at Wisconsin Public Television, where she works. That was six months ago, and she said that she started to learn how to play just so that she could not only tell the story well, but tell it accurately. I pointed out Melissa DeTora (who is here doing the text coverage for Wizards) as being someone she should speak to if she needed to speak to another pro about Black’s prowess as a player and I also told her about Tifa Robles and the Lady Planeswalkers Society. Michaela said that she would probably have her piece edited in a few weeks, and you bet I’m going to try and find it online when it’s done.
6:19 pm: Two of the players I began the event following have both dropped. Ian Dixon is someone I first met in the original Desert Bus For Hope chat room, back when the chat was in IRC and not on Twitch. He’s one of the people who is instrumental in ensuring that the chat room was free of trolls and other terrible people and when the Loading Ready Run crew began streaming more often, he became a moderator in their chat room, along with many others. Ian’s also a good player in his own right, but today the cards were not with him and his loss in Round 5 put him on a huge tilt.
My friend Michael Simon‘s GP ended one round later, and he was kind enough to go over the GW Flying Humans/Druids deck I played at the top of my day while we were waiting for round results. I was gratified when he reassured me that my instincts were okay and I had drafted the deck very “reasonably.” He said that I didn’t pick any blanks and that along with my main deck cards, I even was able to pick up some good sideboard cards. Of course, I didn’t even remember about my sideboard while playing my deck. Something to remember for tomorrow!
8:20 pm: With time called, Round 9 and Day 1 of GP Minneapolis is in the history books. My last walkabout for the day included run-ins with Erin Campbell and Kriz from The Girlfriend Bracket where we talked about the importance of creating podcasts for both Spikes and Johnnies, congratulating both Meghan and Maria from Magic the Amateuring for making their first Day 2s and grabbing a picture with them, and running into Suzy, a player from my old stomping grounds of New York City who was just killing it on text coverage play-by-plays of top players and other folks. (In other words, she was out-Tweeting me, and I am just fine with that.) As we were walking over to her group of folks, a tall familiar-looking gentleman greeted her, and she introduced me to him. I tried to play it cool, but as they walked away, I immediately had to berate myself for babbling like an idiot in front of Jon Finkel, “the Nicest Man in Magic.”
Thus endeth my Day 1 here at GP Minneapolis. What will be in store for me tomorrow?
In the ongoing debate on whether or not video games can be art, one of the lynchpins is that art is supposed to have or reflect a statement about the world, pose questions about it, and elicit reactions to it. There are major releases like Heavy Rain which embody this type of marriage between video game, philosophy, and art, but that doesn’t mean that an indie developer can’t join in the fun as well.
Alexei Andreev of Bent Spoon Games is one such developer who over 11 months, starting last January conceptualized and released his very first game called Girl with a Heart Of. As noted in the press release, Andreev hopes that with his game, he can get people to think about what it means to be human and whether or not you can transcend it. It has a lofty goal, but we here at Geeking Out About wanted to see if he was able to achieve it. With review copies in hand, co-editor Jill Pullara and staff writer Jonathan Cherlin journeyed along with main character Raven to the city of Underfoot, and here’s what they had to say (with many spoilers) about the game:
Once again, here’s our final take:
Girl with a Heart Of
Created by Bent Spoon Games
Designed by Alexei Andreev
Art by Choo Kiau Ping and Alice Bessoni
Music by Nick Pittsinger
Rating: 13 and up
Pros: Great music, multiple endings and ways to control the narrative, decent replayability, great fighting mechanics, good world building and mythos, ideal for a mobile platform
Cons: Not enough use of fighting mechanics, not enough substance
Jon: Girl with a Heart Of had incredible music, an appropriate art aesthetic, and good / innovative gameplay concepts. It had a good idea for a story that was, unfortunately, never brought to fruition. My other problems with it were that the music cut out after two minutes of entering any area. Also, that there was no dialect to the dialog, which made for a stale reading experience. However, I applaud the developer for creating a creative and innovative game with limited resources. But next time, either keep within a small scope or pool your resources for a bigger game.
Jill: This game clearly had a lot of heart put into it, with a world that is interesting to hear and read about, and an epic battle between light and dark always looming in the distance, and you, Raven, squarely in the middle of it all. Because your heart is special, you and you alone have the ability to stop this endless war between Light and Dark forever. Along your journey you’ll make friends out of enemies, enemies out of friends, learn magic, and have the power to influence the people around you.
This almost sounds like a Bioware game, but it’s not, it’s the indie game Girl with a Heat Of and it broke my heart.
Now there are some games that are just no good, and this is not one of them. Anyone who loves video games, and role playing games especially, will see all the good in this game, but they are also the ones this game will disappoint because this is simply a Chekov’s Gun situation.
And it’s a really big shame, because it’s these things that are being built up to, that I was really looking forward to, that never happen. At the end of the day, when I get the wall of text for the ending, I have that dropping feeling in my heart, the way my mother must have felt when I dropped out of college: You could be so much more.
I do urge you to give this game a chance, it has a lot going for it, and knowing that you may be disappointed in it may let you enjoy it more than I could, having to go into it blind. Try to enjoy it for everything it is, and not what it promises to be.
To purchase a copy of “Girl with a Heart Of” at $5.99 USD for your PC or Mac, you can click here. It’s also available at $2.99 USD for Android devices as well as the iFamily of devices.
If you’ve been listening to our “Geekly Speaking About…” podcasts, you’ve probably heard co-editor Jillian Pullara and me talking about Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect series of games from Bioware. While she’s mostly played the PC game version and I rocked the Xbox 360 version, we both have a similar sensibility towards the main character in that we think she totally kicks ass. Lowell Greenblatt also loves playing Commander Shepard and thinks that he’s got a real compelling story to tell.
But the problem between us is that our Commander Shepards are different genders. And that got us to thinking: Could playing the character in the Bioware game as the opposite of your preferred gender change your perception of the game?
Reference links and show notes, after the jump:
Is your Commander Shepard female or male, and why? Would you be willing to play as the opposite gender for a while? Why or why not? We welcome all answers and feedback in the comments.
For gamers who also play the stock market, Tuesday was a good day. After all, not only did L.A. Noire hit the market, but stock prices rose for studio Rockstar Games’ parent company Take-Two Interactive.
According to Conrad Zimmerman at Destructoid.com, the price of shares rose as high as 10% of their starting value on the NASDAQ, before finally settling on a price of $17.10 at the close of business yesterday, netting an overall 7.75% increase.
This is all due to the successful launch of Noire, which currently has a MetaCritic score of 92 for the Xbox 360 version. Even the picky French site GameKult.com had decent things to say about the gameplay differences between Noire and its other open sandbox gaming cousins:
Globalement moins drôles et plus répétitifs que les à-côtés d’un Grand Theft Auto ou d’un Red Dead Redemption, les délits de L.A. Noire ont tout de même l’avantage de faire découvrir certains coins un peu paumés de la ville et d’offrir des points d’expérience supplémentaires.
or:
Overall less funny and more repetitive than [the extra missions in] Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, the crimes L.A. Noire still have the advantage of discovering some bewildering corners of the city and provide additional experience points.
L.A. Noire is available on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
The [Firmware] game features a robust moral choice system, where your actions really do affect the world. Do you accept the User Agreement, or don’t you? This was an agonizing decision, since you never know what could happen later. I remember that unbelievable moment in Firmware 2.0, where I accepted the User Agreement and the Kaz Hirai was harvested for delicious ADAM. Is that right? It’s been so long since I did anything but download Firmware on the PS3 that my memory is a little hazy.
—Jim Sterling at Destructoid makes the best of a necessary console update, in the wake of last month’s credit card security breach of the PlayStation Network.
UPDATE: And… apparently, the influx of PSN fans who updated their firmware and wanted to game crashed the network, forcing parts of it offline again. How is it that Sony didn’t anticipate that?