Ferragosto in New York
A lifetime ago I spent a couple of years in Italy, and one of the mind-benders for an American kid abroad - there were many - was the ferragosto, or August holiday. They have this elsewhere too, but we don’t believe in proper vacations here in the States unless you’re rich enough not to need them, in which case you can have as many as you like. So the whole notion of it was just weird.
For two or three weeks in August, basically, everything that wasn’t at the beach was mostly closed. To be fair, lots of Italy at the time was spontaneously closed for one excellent reason or another; I was on a train once, and I’m not making this up, that went on a 20-minute sciopero (strike) at a station with a cafe that everyone liked. “Strike!” they announced, and everyone filed off the train and went to the cafe. After some snacks and beverages, they gave the all-clear, and we all trooped back on, happy and satisfied and frankly not any later than we probably would have been anyway.
We don’t do ferragosto here, we get Summerhead instead. July was a great but tiring month for me, so I’ve enjoyed laying back on some of the days, getting little done, going to the movies (I love movies!), exploring the taxonomy of naps. My MMO of the moment, Secret World Legends, had its first public raid event, and though I suck at raids and my computer is too slow to properly render them anyway, I showed up to strobe through the action and die often. There was a special cosmetic outfit that needed to be built, you see. Actually two of them. So I was locked into daily appearances there for a while, to collect all of the bits, and that left the other games idle. Not so much to report, this time out. I’ve got a few screenshots scavenged, but I don’t know how far I’ll get toward completing this month’s hunt.
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Hunters Of The Dead
3 hours playtime
no achievements
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New York Mysteries: Secrets of the Mafia
12 hours playtime
19 of 20 achievements
Hunters of the Dead (2014) is a fun beat-back-the-undead challenge game - fun, though it’s not my usual kind of ride. The devs call it a tower defense game, but it’s tower defense only so far as Plants vs. Zombies is tower defense, which is to say not at all (once upon a time I dropped massive hours into PvZ, for reasons that completely escape me now, so I don’t drop that name lightly). On the cartoony main map, our steampunky undead-slaying team lives in a central Tower in the city, and we clear nearby structures, edging out from the safer center into risky territory on the fringes. Each building gives benefits once it’s ours - speedier healing, more weapons, more members for the team - and monsters get stronger the farther out we go. Combat takes place in a six-lane zone, with the bad chaps walking in from the right. We deploy to stop as many as possible; every enemy that makes it across damages the tower, which falls if it runs out of hit points.
Each team member has name, level, weapon, and stats - health, action points - that need to be kept up with trips to the hospitals and such. The weapons have a different firing ranges and patterns, and our fighters can only equip what they’ve unlocked during the game. It’s tricky to keep everyone alive, as some of the undeads fight from beyond, say, shotgun range. Lose too many and we’re ghoul toast, and it’s time to start again. Hunters is oddly complex; every time I think I’ve figured things out, I get creamed by a new enemy combo. At first our hunters are weak, but after each game there’s a chance to purchase upgrades that apply to all later attempts. Eventually we’ll be able to take on the Dracula boss to finally win - or at least I hope we will. I haven’t come anywhere close yet. This is my office-downtime game, since it’s made for short sprints.
New York Mysteries: Secrets of the Mafia (2014) is a very solid Hidden Object Game. The story is typically ludicrous - Mafia bosses are being engulfed by mysterious green mists and disappearing, and with each occurrence a child vanishes as well, after drawing a colorful butterfly; we will investigate. Some of the plotting is arbitrary and some of the mini-games are fiddly, but overall the gameplay is superior. There are no traditional hidden-object scenes, which is cool - instead we have work-it-through scenes in which we find a couple of things, assemble a few others, unlock this or that, and end up sensibly with an object that will prove useful. I mean, it’s all crazy business, but it’s fresh for the genre, so if you like HOGs then this is a good one, and if you don’t know what they are it’ll be baffling.
The game is over-infested with collectible objects, so we need 35 morphing objects (or is it 36), plus 9 each of neckties, briefcases, poker chips, and images of the Statue of Liberty. I know! Serious overkill. To make things worse, there’s an intermittent achievement bug on one of the morphing objects, which can get impossible to pick up. I’m currently missing only the bugged achievement, so I’m marking the thing Completed. I reported the bug to the devs with a screenshot, so I was there and would have hit the 100% if I could have. Might try a quick speed-through to that point under a new profile, or might not. It’s done in my mind, one way or the other.
Alreadies:
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Secret World Legends
53 hours playtime
no achievements
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The Witcher: Enhanced Edition
27 hours playtime
no achievements
Secret World Legends (2017) is the free-to-play reincarnation of Funcom’s The Secret World, which I had just started playing when they announced that the game would be reinvented. Naturally lots of people are furious about this or that. I didn’t play enough of the old game to be incensed about the new one, though I do think it was a mistake to lose the faction quests. It’s got a weird, dense, adult-oriented story, and that sells it for me. This title will probably linger here for a good while. I gather the grind gets daunting later on, but for now I’m having a blast.
I picked The Witcher (2008) as my July-challenge Long Game knowing that it would take me a long time to play it. Since Secret World Legends had temporary public raid running from the 1st to the 15th this month, with outfit pieces as rewards, I mostly put Geralt on hold for a bit - only so many gaming hours in the day, you know. I’m ready to get back in there and start, ahem, draining the swamp. The actual swamp, the one in the game. Of monsters.
lol
well, that’s also part of what makes us italians, you know.. italians! =P
Weirdness apart, hope you enjoyed staying here :)
yup, it’s that ferragosto in the title that caught my attention.
I did - I had a wonderful time. I was up in Pietrasanta for a little over a year, then traveled around for a while, and ended up in Roma for about eight months.
Thank you for an enjoyable, fun-to-read update! Was the person who announced the sciopero an employee of the cafe? And, what is Summerhead??
Hunters Of The Dead looked kinda interesting…enough for me to activate my bundle key in any event. I don’t like tower defense but this seemed kinda different?
New York Mysteries: Secrets of the Mafia was pretty good too– I like the fragmented object scenes (FROGs) more than the typical HOG scene as well. And I was fortunate not to encounter that bug.
I’ve added Secret World Legends to my wishlist. I know it’s free– but I use the back end of my wishlist to track f2p games I want to play someday. I know I don’t have time for an MMO (and my backlog will simply suffer even more), but if I were to play another MMO, it would be this one. I am a big fan of The Longest Journey / Dreamfall and have always been intrigued by an MMO from those guys (although of course many of those guys are now at Red Thread Games). And now that it’s f2p, there’s no real reason not to, right? The fact that apparently one the main “drawbacks” of playing strictly f2p is that you have mission cooldowns…doesn’t sound like a problem to me!
You’re very welcome! Glad it was fun to read, I like them that way.
I was going to give Hunters of the Dead away, but something about the look of the game ingtrigued me, despite the extremely middling and tart reviews. So I activated the key to see what was in there. I’m glad I did. It’s a casual game, and I’m having a good time with it.
The sciopero definitely came from the train crew, but who knows? Maybe it was a cafe run by an Uncle Luigi, or a place with a cute waitress that had caught someone’s eye (I suspected this latter at the time). It was certainly a welcome stop.
My favorite MMOs, and I think I’ve said this elsewhere, are the ones that are single-player games in a shared environment. Thus I have no interest in Warcraft, and am not really moved by the idea of Rift, and so forth. But I have played and enjoyed MMOs that encourage or accommodate solo adventures: Lord of the Rings Online, Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2, Neverwinter, and now Secret World Legends. In Secret World the writing is superb, and the characters are wonderfully acted and presented. Many of the quests are the usual routine, fedex assignments or kill x grumpties or whatever, but many of them are tricky or unexpected (and a lot of the characters you’ll meet through the quests are fully whacked out). Some missions are designed to be hard, and often they really are - occasional internet research is a feature (check out the Black Watchmen for more of this sort of thing - it’s a solo mission game, mostly consisting of unraveling odd mysteries through cleverness and web research, and is a Secret World spinoff). I tend to tire of MMOs after a few months, so time will tell, but where I am now the game is mighty good. I haven’t been bothered by the mission cooldowns, as the missions are pretty densely available and I don’t go back to that many, usually only the Stealth missions after I fail to be stealthy the first time (it can be quite hard).
As a fresh player your biggest issue is likely to be weapon proficiency - I came in from The Secret World, so I was given all of the weapons unlocked, to play with at my leisure. Not so for new players - it’s fairly expensive for f2p players to unlock more than a couple at the start of the game, so be thoughtful about that choice right at the start. Also, you’ll only have one character slot. You can buy others, and I think they’re fairly cheap - buying extra character slots is one of the standard ways I toss a little coin to the devs of f2p games if I enjoy them - but the game really encourages having a go-to main rather than a crew of alts. The way weapon leveling works - lots and lots of leveling and fusing and then leveling other items to fuse with the first one again - can be grindy for people who like playing healers and tanks, since your main solo build will often need to be a capable DPS type, so you’ll need to level a separate set of weapons to take full advantage of the abilities for healing and tanking. But people do it, so it’s clearly possible. And the first couple of zones are great fun to play. Creepy New England seaside town! Haunted amusement park! I’m guessing you’ll enjoy it.
Thanks for the additional info. Ah, I guess the weapon gimping is another way to “force” people to pay at least some money. Fair enough– I don’t mind throwing some money at a f2p game if I’m enjoying it, and character slots and especially bank space are a great way to do it. Maybe I’d have to buy some weapon proficiencies too (if that’s even an option).
I don’t think you can buy proficiencies - I hope not. What you can buy with money, either in-game currency or a cash shortcut, is the unlocking of the weapons. When you start you’ll have two free unlocks, for your primary and secondary weapons. After that you have to pay to unlock the others. Once they’re unlocked, it’s on you to level them through play.
These purchases are all possible with in-game tender, but money - you buy a cash-only currency called Aurum, which converts at potent rates into game coin, if you want to go that way - makes it quicker. Bank space and inventory space can be bought with either currency, and lots of cosmetics (Secret World has plenty of cool outfit options, all of which need unlocking through gameplay or purchase) and sparkly stuff are also available.
Okay, yeah– by “proficiencies” what I really meant was “unlocks.” Otherwise might as well start buying XP/levels via the cash shop. o.O
Good to know that these things are available both via in-game currency and via money–>Aurum.
Oh, and Summerhead! Just a way I think of my head, in summer - not always screwed on properly, or containing the right ingredients. Distractable, variable, sometimes stuffy and sweaty, sometimes sweet and warm.
Oh okay– I thought Summerhead was some kind of NYC ferragosto-like equivalent. Or maybe a pagan ritual of some kind?