Funtime Friday: Depression
No, I do not own a Vita.
No, I am not going to buy a Vita.
Unfortunately, the prospect of playing or purchasing with Sony’s brand new toy – as excited as the thought of getting my hands on the console version of Uncharted makes me – simply isn’t on the cards this week.
Why?
Because I’m moving house. Forcibly.
This is me right now.
Moving sucks, especially when the owner of the house decides the day before the lease expires that he wants it back – as in, wants it back without you in it. The difference in that one measly day actually translates into two months: if he’d waited 24 hours, I’d have been given 90 days to find a new place, but as it stood I only got 30.
Apparently there’s a tribunal or something where you can challenge these things. I never really had the gumption to anyway, although I’m a guy who prefers to operate on goodwill if at all possible (unless you exist on an internet forum, in which case I’d much prefer to reach into the monitor and strangle you half to death).
So, with the frustration of boxing things up, selling some of the things I can’t take and shipping the rest back home, what does a gamer do to relieve his depression? (Something I’ve hovered very seriously close to over the last few weeks.)
With Starcraft and Street Fighter 4 going off the boil of late – you really need to concentrate to get anything out of both titles – I turned to something that cheered me up immensely when I got my hands on the full version, mainly because it’s a very unique game and far, far better than the recent attempts to bring it back into the world of HD.
Dat castle.
It’s OK if you don’t recognise it, because you wouldn’t be the first person to register surprise when you hear that this was the first, and by far the best, iteration of Magic the Gathering to a video game. That’s right, that little card game that people spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on (with some able to recoup the investment through worldwide invitationals) was converted into a game in 1997 by legendary developers MicroProse and was one of the factors that led to the company posting its only net profit (the other factor, and admittedly the main one, was the release of Civilization II during the first half of the 1996-97 financial year).
What makes MicroProse’s version streets above the Duels of the Planeswalkers rubbish that’s popped up on Steam and Xbox Live was not related to do with the cards, the duelling system or the interface itself. Both games are largely similar in that regard (giving respect to the periods in which they were released, of course). The real differentiator is the screenshot above, where MicroProse opted to recreate the world of Shandalar – which MTG’s lore is based upon – as a single-player campaign.
The premise is fairly simple – each of the colours of magic (the game has 5) has a chief Wizard, if you will, who is looking to increase his or her influence on the world. The five bosses dispatch various minions around Shandalar, occasionally “tapping” random villages to increase their power level. Should they tap enough villages, that Wizard’s power will grow to a point where they can cast unspeakable spells that would result in the destruction of the world as you know it.
So the basic objective is to stop the Wizard’s from ending the game. You can’t beat the Wizards themselves for quite a while – not only are their decks too powerful, but you don’t even have the capacity to dispatch the guards that come out whenever you wander close to the castle. So you’re relegated to fighting the lesser freaks around the villages themselves, collecting cards, world magicks and other goodies that will let you become a more powerful spellcaster/deck-user/whatever it is you do in the world of Magic.
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