Azure Dreams - Dungeon Cralwer meets town builder meets monster raising simulator

I really like dungeon crawler roguelikes for some reason. I was playing the more recent Crypt of the Necrodancer and I was wondering when this all started. The earliest I could remember enjoying something like that was Azure Dreams. The game is a dungeon crawler roguelike with a town building simulator, kind of like Dark Cloud in a way. Basically you spend the entire game trying to climb the 100 floor tower while collecting items. Each time you go in you are reduced to level 1. Everytime you die you lose everything you have. If you managed to find a rare wind crystal you can warp back to town and keep all the loot you find, which is used to upgrade the town. Unless you find a monster egg! This game has a huge variety of monsters which can be hatched and then raised to level and fight with you. Some monsters if you raise them long enough can evolve into new monsters as well. If you want to you can also fuse monsters together making them incredibly powerful. It basically has everything you can wish for.

When you first start the game you get a few cut scenes of your dad teaching you to be nice to girls and stop picking on girls. Then fast forward to a dark and stormy night where you are waiting for your monster hunter father to come home when suddenly the door bursts open and one of your dad's monsters walk in without him. Then everyone realizes he is dead because there's no way it will come back without him. Then fast forward a decade and its your 15th birthday! You're getting woken up by your tomboy childhood friend neighbor who kicks you out of bed, literally. You wake up talk to a priest, get blessed, blah blah blah, after an hour of talking you finally get to head into the tower. There you meet a random talking monster who wants to be your friend and the two of you head off into the dungeon to beat up monsters. Combat is simple. Everything is turn based and you have to walk in either of the 4 directions and even move diagonally. You may attack in front of where you are looking at or use and item. Every time you move or attack, the enemy will move or attack as well. Your monsters are AI controlled and will fight on their own. You may set the pet to fight normally, conserve mana, use spells, or support. Supporting monsters will cast support magic for your weapon every time you swing. It will boost your attack but at the same time drain its mana. Once mana is depleted the monster will be unable to fight and has to be returned into your bag. Mana also depletes over time while fighting/travelling around the tower as well.

Moving around the dungeon you will see the background change often. Usually every 5 levels you will reach a new area where different monsters will show up. Each monster has their own trait as well as skills. For example, a Kraken has electric skin that reflects damage back to the attacker. Its usually the first monster you meet in your mid teen floor and the first monster that will kick your ass so hard you sit there wondering what the heck happened. Something like a Block monster has really low attack but enormous armour. These are inherent traits in the monster that can be passed on in fusions. So for example, you can fuse a Kraken and a Block together to make a monster with both the electric skin and bonus armour. However, you can only keep the traits found on the original monster. Say you make a Kraken and it has both armour and skin if you fuse that to a Dreamin whose inherent trait is sleep immunity, you'll only keep electric skin and sleep immunity. You cannot pass the armour bonus down. You start off only able to bring one monster out at a time and later on you'll find another collar to bring two with you at a time. To find more monsters you need to collect eggs which are rare and a lot of the time not the monster you want.

So you beat up a few monster reach really far into the tower and then suddenly something comes over and punches you so hard you are one step from dying. If you die right here, all the eggs you have collected are gone, all the items and gold you got are gone. If you have a wind crystal, which are fairly common items in the dungeon, you can instantly warp back to town saving your hide and allowing you to keep everything. There is no way out of a dungeon except to use a wind crystal. There are no check points, no exit elevator no nothing. You might think this is an easy way to get out and you run no risk, think again. There are plenty of traps in the dungeon that can kill you as well as monsters using skills from across the screen killing you unexpectedly or a monster simply hitting too hard that you die before you can run away. When you get back to town, sell your items, you can spend the gold on upgrading the town or your own house. You start off in a little shack because your mom is a useless shit and didn't do anything for the last 10 years that your dad died except sell off his monster to get by. You need to support your family by beating monsters and spending that money on your house. Upgrading your house allows you to store more monsters and items as well as make it more visually pleasing. You can also buy items from the general store and customize your house to look more fancy. Besides upgrading the house, you can spend it on public buildings to help the entire town because they are useless shits that can't get anything done without the help of a 15 year old kid.

Public buildings serve one of two purposes. One is a time waster such as bowling and casinos. The other purpose is to meet girls. Yes this game also lets you romance a bunch of girls that ranges from your childhood friend, to some dying sickly 8 year old, to some 20ish dancer from out of town. In the Japanese version you can also romance your rival but homosexuality is frowned upon in the west so it was removed. Marriage was also removed because the people involved are too young, as well as gay marriage being illegal. Romancing girls are pretty easy depending on which girl. For example your childhood friend, Nico, you need to build fountains and other "cultural" buildings and once your rival's sister starts showing interest in you because you reached very high in the tower, she will realize she loves you and that you are actually a really cultured person. The sickly dying girl needs you to build a hospital, then find a rare herb on a high level floor and give it to her and she will magically be cured, but still really weak and gets tired often. The waitress Patty needs you to buy a lot of food and she will realize she loves you because you spend so much in her shop. Once you romance a girl she will randomly show up every morning to wake you up and then give you a goodbye kiss when you leave. If you romance a lot, a random one shows up. However once you upgrade to a big house. ALL OF THEM will show up and wake you up and kiss goodbye. This really really drags on every single day. If you want to leave sooner then keep an ugly house. The mid size house isn't that bad looking but if you want to live like a king then you have to spend 5 minutes with your harem every morning.

Overall there isn't too much to do in this game, and its not really very complex but its highly entertaining and will keep you entertained for hours. Finding good monsters then evolving and fusing them gives a sense of accomplishment and progression. Upgrading your town and romancing girls are a great distraction from the endless dungeon crawling. If you like dungeon crawlers or monster raising games, don't miss this one. Its one of the most overlooked gems on the PS1.

Titan Quest - An endurance test on your sanity

First off I want to say my index finger is fucking sore right now and if I can avoid typing this shit out I would but the world must know of this piece of shit called Titan Quest. First of all its a Diablo clone. It would mean that you go around left clicking everything until it dies. While Diablo has a simple game play design, every single clone I met seem to fuck it up. Titan Quest over complicates things for the sake of over complicating.

There are huge trees you can pick skills from and mix and match with two trees into different classes. Each character can pick two trees and learn skills from either. But most of the skills are filler talents or garbage. So the best ones are the passives which effectively boils down to holding your left mouse button as its the most effective and the only way to get through the game. Your right mouse button will be hot keyed with the potion button for simplicity's sake. These skills do nothing to help you in your battle, so all you need is your mouse. Fuck the keyboard it does crap.

The difficulty is horrendous. I don't mind games with a challenge but if the challenge and difficulty of this game is how fast you can click your potion button then its a piece of shit. Whenever you go into town just go ahead and buy 300-600 potions. You will be hitting your right mouse button every 5 seconds or whatever amount of time the potions cools off. You'll burn through those potions in 20 minutes. Some monsters are so weak they do literally no damage then suddenly you meet a monster that can do 50% of your health in one shot and they come in packs. If you miss the potion by just one second you will die. Then you get asshole monsters that stun you for 1-2 seconds and if they stun you right when its time to hit your potion you die. This is Titan Quest.

The game started out fine, but as it progressed it just dragged on and on. What you seen in the first act is basically the same as the rest. The map is never randomized so every time you come back its exactly the same. This holds true for the multi player as well. Why no randomization? Too much work? The maps are long, tedious, and boring. Every map looks exactly the same. Some trees a large area with one exit and 2-3 minor caves you can explore for nothing. Quests are mindless and easily missed. As you reach further and further it gets more and more stupid. Once you reach act three you'll notice all the monsters moving at super speed and doing half your health in a single shot. Once you reach the final act the difficulty ramps up to asshole levels. Everything stuns you and you're standing there stun locked for five and up to ten seconds at a time. Its fucking frustrating to stand around doing nothing. If I wasn't on co-op I would be dead the second I got stunned.

Multi player in this game is shit as well. You go online with your single player character so if you want to be an asshole you can just hack all your gear. The problem with this game is the areas are so far apart theres basically no way to play with others unless they start at the same time as you. Going through one area for a minor part of the main quest would take thirty minutes to an hour. The way point portals are so far apart that if you're looking to group up for a quest its going to eat half your day. And the most grating part is chatting. HOW HARD IS IT TO DESIGN A FUCKING CHATBOX. To type you press T to bring up the chatbox. You type then press enter to send the message. When you hit enter the chatbox grays out so you can close it again by pressing T. If you want to talk more you press enter again. BUT if your trying to use skills or close it and it keeps trying to type out 1111111tttttttttttt11ttttt1t1t1t1t11t22ttt in your chatbox. Just to add salt to the wound you can't hold down backspace to clear it so you have to hit backspace 50x or just go fuck it and send it out because whose going to fucking break their fingers more.

The game started out fine, but its way too repetitive. As soon as you're done the four acts. You get to repeat the game in nightmare and hell mode. But they're called different names. Are you so fucking lazy to resort to redoing the game in another difficulty? And the game isn't difficult. I don't find clicking potion buttons over and over difficult. I find it tedious and stupid. Going through the game once is an ordeal already. The maps are too big, the way points are too far apart, the side quests are impossible to find, there are too many pointless monsters while traveling, and scenery are exactly the same. These things make the game longer than it should be. Only thing decent I can say about the game is the BGM is nicely done. But the BGM doesn't really appear that often only whenever the fuck it wants to. Theres are options to "decrease the rate it appears," "normal," and "increase the rate it appears." What the fuck? Why so ambiguous? Why can't we just have ON and OFF. Seems like the easiest options but whatever. Its not like you'll hear it over the grunting sounds of dying tigermen or mantises. Isn't the game about mythology? Why are the monster designs so bad. And why the difficulty inconsistencies on these monsters.

Of all the Diablo clones, this one is not the worst. But anything can be better than Torchlight so its not saying much. My fingers are still hurting and I'm done talking about this shit.

Torchlight - Outdated buggy index finger trainer

Remember the good old days where games all suck? Well now you can with Torchlight. Its made by the same people who made Diablo. So if you played Diablo you pretty much can expect everything in it in Torchlight. There are scrolls of town portal and identify. Also healing and mana potions and skill spamming with health and mana leeching. Pretty much everything that made Diablo is in Torchlight. Including the boring one town system and left clicking everything to death. What you will possibly gain from playing this game is a broken index finger or one that is so fucking powerful you can click 500 times a minute.

Back then when Diablo came out the idea was new. Everyone played it and went "Woahhhhhhhhhh." It was still pretty boring but when Diablo 2 came out that was when it really became popular. Multiplayer play really changes the game. But Torchlight is more like the first Diablo than the second. I haven't gotten very far but I can assure you its boring. Like Diablo your left click if your main attack. Left clicking a target will make you walk over and attack it, unless you have a ranged weapon like a bow then you will shoot at them. Your right click is a shortcut for skills/spells. There is a talent tree for every class. I use tree loosely here because its not much of a tree when there are no prerequisites you need to add. Pretty much a bunch of scattered senseless talents you wouldn't pick up or have no effect on the specific weapon or style you choose to play as. There is the warrior the rogue and the mage pretty much. It doesn't matter what class you choose you would be able to wear anything and use any weapon. You wanna be a gunner mage? Go ahead. A wand wielding warrior. Sure thing. Either way you would be spamming your potion key.

Before starting the game you can pick a difficulty and a pet. Looking around I see a Very Hard mode so I moused over it and it said, "Masochists only!" FUCK YEAH! A game that fucking caters to me! So I picked the rogue. I picked up a bow and started firing my bouncy arrow skill. It was pretty neat it pierces through the enemy and hits a wall or obstacle then bounces in an entirely new direction. It bounces like three times or something with a maximum range of some sort. Unfortunately the other skills in the game are underwhelming or senseless. You have talents to "reduce the requirement of armor by 1!" Oh wow. Why don't I just add a point into defense or strength and put that talent point in something better? The fuck are they thinking. Then you have shit like "lunge towards your enemies with a dagger" Which uses both melee and range damage to calculate the final skill damage. Why do I want that when I can spam the living shit out of the bouncy arrow. By the way, ranged weapons have a maximum range which is like only three characters away. The bouncy arrow can reach like 20 letting you kite indefinitely with it as long as you can outrun your target. It also doesn't have the shooting animation delay and weapon speed limitation of your regular attack locking you in place and letting the boss cast a ice fissure on you dealing 90% of your damage in one shot.

The stats make no sense. You have strength which adds 1% of melee damage per point and it will help you carry heavier items. Dexterity adds 1% of ranged damage per point. Health adds hit points per point. Defense which adds defense per point and is required for better armor. Ok what the fuck. I'm spamming the shit out of dexterity then all of a sudden I need like 16 defense for an armor. I ignore the shit out of that and then a new item drops, I need like 30 strength to put on a leather cowboy hat but I don't need any strength to hold the massive fucking cannon in my hand. WHAT THE FUCK.

Back then when Diablo 2 came out everyone was excited and played the pointless grinding game. Now our standards are higher, looking back at Diablo 2 we can see what a terrible game it is. There are people who enjoy these kinds of games but think carefully for a moment. What is it that you liked? Randomly generated dungeons? The ablility to see your character get stronger? Taking out waves and waves of monsters? I don't know. But I can tell you that this game doesn't get any respawns at all. You can go down a floor and go back up a floor and all the chests would respawn with rare loot but none of the creatures are there. What? Also want to point out that going to a different floor would take up to 30 seconds in load time. Nothing you can do but twiddle your fingers/toes/hair/mouse wire/cat's tail while slamming your head into the back of your seat going "COME ONNNNNN COME ONNNNNNNNNN WHAT THE FUCK IS TAKING SO LONG!" After the fucking hour it takes to load you meet a mob of monsters then you just spam the living shit out of your bouncy arrow and they all explode into oblivion. Then you take the next set of stairs down and repeat the process.

It also has stupid shit named mobs like in Diablo 2. These giant differently colored mobs with unique names. They all have dumb shit like Versusius the Vile who has a poison attack, Hamrock the Cold with a freezing attack, Cocknballs the Hard with stone skin. They die just as fast and they don't respawn. Yeah it adds fame for you when you kill them. But what does fame do? I DON'T KNOW! Do you have anyone to play with? No? Do you have quests that need fame? The fuck do I know! This game doesn't explain anything.

What about quests? Isn't there a story or something of some sort? Yeah, if you only like one town with a boring shit ass story. Like this magician chick you meet right out of town with a buff warrior dude beating the shit out of everything. This dude rushes off and the chick stays behind and tells you to help him before he gets into trouble. Obviously this is foreshadowing the horrible death he is about to incur. Isn't this a great way to start off a game? A scantily dressed mage girl and another stronger man that might threaten your alpha male authority. Then he suffers a horrible death by the master of the mage girl who was "turned evil!!!!!" by corruption of some sort and the girl goes "boo hoo my friend is dead please kill my master for me!" Then she stands around in town the whole time while you go back down slaughtering everything. In the end you probably kill the guy and the girl swoons over you and you wander off into the distance carrying her in your gigantic tree arms like Tarzan. Luckily before I could get there I hit a horrible bug where I can't go further.

I was stuck and couldn't move forward. The lever I pulled did nothing and checking on the forums sometimes doors and shit would get stuck if you don't open them in the right position. You'll need to reload the game or other stupid shit. I did that and it didn't work. So I just went fuck it because I don't want to start over again. I kept reading around and noticed how many bugs there were. Its already patch 1.5 or something which is at least 5 patches and they still have these bugs? Why did I even play this? I didn't really want to but hearing people talk about "the best thing while you wait for Diablo 3" I just had to see what the buzz is about. Its shit. Plain dirty smelling shit. You're better off waiting for Diablo 3. I don't really get Diablo 3 either. Its either going to hit or miss. It might piss off the "true Diablo" gamers or make them happy but lose the new players with a boring game. I personally is not looking forward to that game. If you want to play a dungeon crawler why don't you play something like Recettear? Its a short game on steam you can purchase for cheap and you spend your time paying money back to a fairy as a shopkeeper and you can hire adventurers to go dungeon crawling with you fighting bosses and picking up loot.

That game was fun. I didn't mind the grind because it was actually entertaining. You had more shit to do than walk down and left click everything and watch it walk over and swing and spam the shit out of potions. The left clicking games should be banned. Nothing has sucked this hard for me for a long time. Not even Persona can reach this level of suckness. Its a whole new level of suck. And the worst part is enough people liked it that they are making a sequel. Who the fuck liked this game? People who have a time machine from the 1997? The worst part is I can't even review the whole fucking game. My character is trapped by a bug that wouldn't fix itself. After playing the game I went and read the reviews laughing at every single bullshit line they typed out and then at the side I see "Games like Torchlight you might like... The Last Remnant. " That speaks for itself.