September 9, 2023 - Day 252 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 273

Game: Rock of Ages 2

Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 28, 2017
Library Date: Feb 2, 2019
Unplayed: 1680d (4y7m7d)
Playtime: 15m

Rock of Ages 2: Bigger & Boulder is a bizarre tower defence boulder-racing game.

There's a bunch of games that never made it to being reviewed this year. Many of them were multiplayer games; some of which are still on sale, but invariably had no-one to play against, other than bots or the bizarre individuals who get their kicks from hacking a game and then killing anyone who tries to play.

There's another group of games that didn't make it. Frequently ancient, wouldn't run on Windows 10. Alas, their time has come and gone.

Rock of Ages II is a little weirder. It's just over six years old, but absolutely refused to load.

Load > Crash. Load > Crash. Load > Crash.

[Tech support mode on]

Event viewer is recording the crash, but not making it clear what's at fault.

To the Googles!

One fix says to disable networking.

That... actually works. Not a good solution, but it must be something new in Windows 11 network code, right?

Actually, no.

I went through a stage of this project where I just started all the games for a minute to shorten my "year" list for unplayed games.

When I started ROA2 previously *before* I upgrades, it had worked fine without crashing.

Digging into the Steam discussions: "Changing this global OpenSSL variable fixes it!"

No, thank you. I don't think I will.

A bit more on the Googles leads to a page on Intel's website, that explains that certain versions of UE4 contain an older OpenSSL library, that triggers a crash on 10th Gen and newer CPUs, and by setting that OpenSSL variable, it tells UE4 to ignore the SHA extensions.

However, it only needs to be set in the launch options for the game, not globally.

We're off to the races.

Literally. This is a game in which you play Sisyphus (I think?) and roll a boulder through an obstacle course towards the castle of your AI opponent (who are various historical figures acting in decidedly non-historical ways).

Inside your castle, workers are quickly carving your boulder from a solid rock. While this is happening, you frantically set up your various defenses to try and knock the AI's boulder off course, while they are doing the same.

As soon as your boulder is ready, you roll it towards their castle, and try to smash down their door. Boulder hits door, does damage, rinse and repeat.

First one with a smashed door loses. All of this is wrapped in a classical music soundtrack with Pythonesque graphical stylings.

I lost, beaten soundly by Joan of Arc (!)

I think, if I were in the right mood, Rock of Ages 2 would be:

3: OK

#RockOfAges2 #TowerDefense #MastodonGaming #Gaming #Project365ONG #Project365 #NewPlay