I had Elite Dangerous on my Steam wishlist for ages but it never dropped in price enough and many people complained that it’s pretty but rather boring. In the meantime, this little gem is both cheap and widely praised, including by Broken Forum’s space game aficionado, I decided to give it a whirl. It was basically made by only two guys working out of a garage.
80 Days is an amazingly innovative game by the same people who were responsible for the videogame adaptation of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! Inkle specializes in narrative game like these and if how much I liked this one is any indication, I have a feeling that I will be buying many more games from them.
For a very long time, Games Workshop refused to allow anyone to make video games based on their licensed properties. But now that they’ve jumped on the digital bandwagon the floodgates are totally open and there’s been all sorts of adaptations, some of them of dubious quality by rather small companies. This is one of the lower budget adaptations for their Battle for Armageddon boardgame by Slitherine, a company known for its hex-based wargames. I wouldn’t say this is low quality but it does have rather low production values, including spelling errors scattered around which are somehow still even after multiple patches.
As I’ve mentioned plenty of times elsewhere, I grew up with gamebooks as a kid and I’m still fascinated by how they could be adapted to digital media. The Fighting Fantasy books were never my personal favorite series but I was always impressed by the incredible variety of genres they included. It’s not a big surprised that I preferred the non-fantasy books to the all too common fantasy ones. This computer adaptation of the standalone Sorcery! books unfortunately is fantasy but they’re pretty much the only ones available so far. Since I never played these books back in the day and I am intrigued by how well they pulled off the adaptation, so this was one of the main reasons why I plonked for that narrative bundle a while back.
After months of playing this, I’m think I’m finally ready to put it down and write a post about it. I’ve since clocked well over 200 hours on it according to Steam, well above anything else except Skyrim, and I still haven’t come close to doing anything. I’ve gone everywhere with probes, landed Kerbals on the major, easy to reach planets and moons, and set up some cool orbital and surface bases. But I’ve barely played around with space planes, I’m never going to send Kerbals on a one-way death trip to Eve and the very thought of trying to grab an asteroid in solar orbit and bring it back to Kerbin fills me with chills. Even so I think I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth and I’m stopping here before it sucks up all my life.
I’m actually mostly playing Kerbal Space Program at the moment but that’s such a complex and time consuming game that I felt like mixing it up with something lighter. I got this as part of the Humble Narrative bundle recently, though I only very rarely buy those. This game got some good mentions on Broken Forum when it came out and I know that it’s very short so it seems like a great fit.
This post covers the mini-campaign that was included in the Extended Edition of Shadowrun: Hong Kong. This was released for free to all owners of the original game and was one of the KickStarter campaign’s bonus goals. In the event, the release passed almost without notice. Even now, there doesn’t seem to be any walkthrough or guide for it on the net, which is pretty remarkable given that there’s a guide for every little game out there. Still, it’s free and there are Steam achievements for it so I had to play it.