So Mister Adequate– being not just my co-blogger here at The Android’s Closet, but also my better half– bought me a couple of gifts recently. The idea was that one was my Christmas present and one was my birthday present (my birthday is in a few days.) He also graciously let me open them early!
Well. One of the presents was an Xbox 360 and the other was Skyrim.
Yeah. Best Birthday/Christmas gift EVER.
Anyways! Ever since then I’ve been dumping hours into Skyrim like there’s no tomorrow and it has really exceeded all of my expectations. It’s been a long time since I really got into a new video game in this way. Heck, it’s been a long time since I really got into a console game in this way. I keep finding myself wanting to return to this magical world and experience more of it. Even my beloved strategy games keep getting pushed aside so I can wander around Whiterun.
Fus ro derp?
Anyways, if you’re still sitting on the fence regarding whether or not to get this game for whatever reason, I urge you to look into it. I’ve just scratched the surface and I think this really is deserving of the title of Game of the Year. There’s just so much to do and the game accommodates all sorts of different playstyles, and it’s all beautifully put together.
Besides, I’m a giant fluffy tabby cat with a sword. I cannot stress enough how awesome this is.
I could tell you about its story, told at the very beginning of the game, a parody of religious tales which is certainly not the type of thing you’d find in your average video game.
I could tell you about the music, at times haunting and at times heroic, which will stay with you long after you’ve closed the game.
I could tell you about the art style, which is macabre and grotesque and not afraid to be so.
I could tell you about your character, a crying little boy who literally lobs his tears at enemies as projectiles and whose terrible life is told to you in the occasional short but effective flashback. He has no reason to live; he is unloved and unimportant, but he runs away from death anyway, for no other reason than, well… dying is scary and bad.
I could tell you about all of that in detail, but instead I’m going to tell you about the gameplay.
One of my better recent games.
This game is a masterpiece of simplicity. You run, you shoot, you explore your dungeons and you beat your bosses. This is all done extremely well, of course, but let me tell you about a few things that the game did to tweak this formula and improve it.
Firstly, in true roguelike fashion, there is permadeath. There are no lives and no continues in this game, unless you, by chance, manage to stumble upon a rare item which gives you a bonus life. But those items are few and far between. When you die in this game, you’re dead and you have to start the game over.
Secondly, the dungeons are randomly generated. No two games are alike. This goes together with the permadeath nicely because if you die, sure you lose your items and powerups, but it’s not like you have to redo a bunch of levels you’ve already done. Instead, you get to play through a whole new experience.
Thirdly, there are hundreds of little items and secrets in this game. Because your dungeons are randomly generated, you never know what items you’re going to find. All of the items do something completely different and interesting, and using them is often a surprise because you usually can’t tell what the item or powerup does just by looking at it. The game does keep track of which items you’ve found through the course of your travels, and finding all of these items (and cards, a whole different subset of items to collect) becomes this whole Pokemon-like minigame that keeps you hooked long after you may have otherwise stopped being interested.
Fourthly, the dungeon-crawling itself is just plain solid. It’s simple enough to be easy to learn and the difficulty is tweaked just enough that you’re always on your toes without feeling too overwhelmed– most of the time, anyway.
In short, this is what a 2-D action video game is supposed to be. I’m a sucker for things like the Humble Bundle or Indie Royale so I’ve played a lot of indie games lately, but this is probably the best of the lot.
You can find a pretty full-featured demo of the game on Newgrounds, and the full game is $5 on Steam. If you let the game grow on you, you won’t be disappointed.
Hello folks if you’re wondering where we are, well, there’s a lot of videogame to be played! Not a large number, but the ones which are there are HUGE!
First up is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which I wrote about last Friday! It’s still awesome. I’m still barely anywhere in it because there is just so much to do. I’m not sure it is possible to finish Skyrim, you just sort of reach a point where you feel that it’s enough.
Forget Tigh, Ivanova's in the game too!
Second is, of course, Saints Row The Third, which is both completely demented and completely AWESOME! I paradropped out of a helicopter into a penthouse and killed everyone until I owned the place then a helicopter chase across the city ensued and oh man you guys seriously need to play this game. Then I stole a street cleaner and pimped it right out so it reps the Row. I’m actually a little lost in this as well because it’s just SO HUGE and there is SO MUCH to do.
Also the Specialists are serious business holy crap that Deckers shock hammer is amazing.
And then there's these assholes!
What about you guys? What are y’all playing this weekend?
In case you’ve been living under a rock on Mars with your fingers in your ears, Skyrim came out today. Skyrim is the latest in the ever-more-popular Elder Scrolls series, whose most basic principle is to present you with an open world and set you loose to do mostly as you please. I never played the first two, but the third one – Morrowind – because a game I love fiercely and which is deeply ingrained in my memory as an all-time classic. It wasn’t actually tremendously good in pure gameplay terms. It was just so vast, so expansive, so atmospheric and alien, so unapologetically ambitious, that its flaws were irrelevant, indeed they became charms at times.
TES IV, Oblivion, was another matter. The fighting was much improved, true, but everything else just seemed to be lacking. The better graphics were only applied to a very generic fantasy world; the portals to Oblivion were impressive at first but quickly became repetitive and tedious to explore, and presented anyway no sense of danger to the world. It was just a hollow game, and even with mods (barring Nehrim) it never became something I spent a huge amount of time with.
Here, then, is Skyrim. At first I was leery of what they were saying about it. Better AI? Better questing? Hah, okay, and I’m the Pope (Outside of Europa Universalis III, I mean). Only… that stuff does seem to be true, so far. Melee combat is much as it was in Oblivion, if a good bit more polished, but the alternatives, namely magic and archery, are truly brilliant. The interface, on the 360 at least, is slick and polished. I hear bad things about the PC’s UI though. I was worried about the simplification of skills, such as removing acrobatics and athletics (And I do still dislike that) but what is there is great, primarily because of the new perk system. Every level you get one point that you can put into getting some significant bonus in a given skill tree. I first chose, for instance, to halve the cost of my novice-level Destruction spells, and this made a tremendous difference to how I was going about fights.
What I’m finding is that I want to tell you not just about how I came upon some bandits, killed one, resurrected her as a zombie, and let her fight her former comrades while I burnt them from afar; I also want to tell you about how I found a treasure map on one of their bodies, and it was just the right amount of detail to show me where to look without being too easy. I want to tell you about how I walked into a store during an argument, asked about it, said I could help retrieve something, and this was reacted to in a natural way – they kept arguing, but the topic shifted slightly. I want to tell you about how I scarfed down a whole load of random ingredients to learn their alchemical effects, only to find I had crippled my stamina for a moment. I don’t just want to explain fighting mechanics, I want to relate stories to you, stories that I experienced in this world. And it is a world, and that is the magic of it. I ascended a fairly small mountain and as it grew stormier and snowier, I felt physically colder in my room. That’s when I decided I had enough to make a preliminary blog post on the game.
All this from two hours of play.
Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Alec Meer not only called Skyrim GOTY, but said “I’m sorry Morrowind – I love you, but I don’t need you anymore. I think, at last, there is a new Best Elder Scrolls Ever.” This is high praise indeed.
It’s very early for me to make any serious judgment on this game. But he might be right.
Also, Saul Tigh voices one of the characters. I am MORE than okay with this. Will someone turn off that DAMN MUSIC?
When Saints Row came out, me and my vidya bro Barry Manilow weren’t tremendously interested. It looked like a fairly run-of-the-mill GTA clone with some juvenile humor. Eventually one of us picked it up used for cheap and… we were pretty much correct in that assessment.
So we weren’t jumping up and down in our seats over Saints Row 2. This proved to be a mistake, because when I did eventually get it at the behest of other friends, it turned out to be seriously awesome. I’m replaying it now to get in the mood for The Third and it’s just so absolutely mental, massive, and not-giving-any-shits about the whole thing. It’s not a perfect game by any means but it’s one of those all-too-rare ones which really puts stupid fun first and everything else second. My current Boss looks like Jesus dressed in a cheap 70’s plaid suit. I cannot begin to emphasize how hilarious this is, especially when something goes down and the camera is up in his face as he’s about to tell Maero hard or something.
They might be led by an Internet Tough Guy but the Deckers seem to be a gang straight out of Jet Set Radio. Which is nice.
And in a few weeks Saints Row The Third is out. This is a big deal, because it looks like Volition have finally just gone over the edge, said “Fuck it”, and decided that even the remotest semblance of realism has no place in their game. I’m pretty sure some of the art assets have been pulled from Red Faction: Armageddon and there is all kinds of crazy stuff like lasers and a hoverbike and I don’t even know. Annoying punk kids? Luchadores? Classy Belgians? An anime game show thing with a truck that sucks up pedestrians and fires them and a gun that fires squid that attach to people’s heads, turn them into allies, then explode? It’s got it all! The level of both customization and sheer insanity in this game looks to be pretty much peerless and I am okay with this. (I just hope there are Summoner references as well how cool would it be for Joseph of Ciran to burst into the middle of a gang fight and summon a Blood Elemental)
I’ve said things before about videogames being art and deep and meaningful and how they are things to be engaged with and all that. And sometimes that’s true. But sometimes you just need to jack a sweet ride, pimp it up, and be totally ballin’.
I don’t really have a proper topic today, because insomnia is a lot of fun and has left my brain quite mushy and useless today! So I’m just going keep moving from topic to topic though it won’t be one long incredibly unbroken sentence and hopefully something will stick!
Let’s see then.
I finished Dead Island yesterday. My verdict remains much the same: It’s a buggy game from a developer who clearly has no idea what they are doing (The most recent patch broke the game entirely and they had to roll it back before fixing it; I don’t really know how you miss the “Nobody can play your game because it doesn’t even start” bug but there you go.) and it is a ridiculous amount of fun. You go to three major places in the game; the Resort, the City of Moresby, and the Jungle. Weirdly it’s Morseby which is the most hectic, tense, and meaty part; the Jungle was a quick and pleasant jaunt in comparison. Also as someone on SA said, the presence of an honest-to-god sewer level in a game in 2011 is personally offensive to me.
Mowen? More like BRO-en!
My efforts to give HoI3 another shot have failed because I keep playing Victoria 2 and EU3 all day. It’s not my fault, PDM keeps getting updated and I must also bring the Light of Islam to the world as a unified Arabia! I’ll try and play some HoI3 soon though.
I picked up MoO2 on GoG.com recently (I know, it’s shocking that it took me this long) and I can already tell it’s very much worthy of the praise it receives. That said I’ve more been messing around with GalCiv 2 lately, largely because MoO2 doesn’t seem to play nice in a window.
Oh, and if you’re playing any Gears 3 lately, make sure you give the mutators a try in Horde mode. Super Reload is amazingly fun.
Finally, I’ve come across a freeware RPG called Exit Fate, which apparently hews to the Suikoden school of game design. Will give it a try and report back on how true this is and so on.
Speculation about a new GTA game is always going to be widespread and wide ranging, and until I get news that it’s going to be something I really don’t want, like GTA Stockholm or something, I’m going to talk about and dream about GTA being set in the future.
1. Scope for all kinds of neat toys.
What is the coolest thing about the future? All the crazy gadgets we hope to have. Rayguns, flying cars, moonbases, robots, etc. etc. San Andreas already went a little in this direction towards the end, with those crazy jetpack missions and suchlike, but the scope for including all kinds of completely crazy vehicles, weapons, and other gadgetry is never going to be higher than in a game set in the future. Given that the point of the GTA series is fun, and that R* seem to have realized this in making Gay Tony much more flamboyant and contain much crazier missions than IV, a setting where pretty much anything you can imagine can legitimately be said to exist opens the door for that.
We could even imagine a future where there is a Dreamcast 2...
2. Scope for social commentary.
“But Mister Adequate!” I hear you cry “GTA relies so heavily on making commentary on the period in question! How could a future GTA do this?” Well, okay, it can’t actually comment on the future proper for obvious reasons, but it CAN comment on our imaginings of the future. And it’s not like we have a shortage of that. R* can quite easily poke fun at futurist utopians like me, as well as cynics or those who feared despotism and destruction, or anyone else. Moreover, it’s not hard to imagine issues in the future which will parallel existing or historical ones; clone rights, human-robot marriage, and so forth and which would be ripe for making fun of, as well as letting R* comment on current events with references to ‘history’, e.g. “Remember back in 2013 when we legalized gay marriage and within a month, the military collapsed because of all the gay sex?” or whatever.
3. Variation in setting.
Of course, there are a multitude of visions of the future, both in terms of individual ideas and broad movements. This doesn’t constrain, it does the opposite. R* has so much to choose from that they could use a great deal of it to create a varied and engaging environment. The high-end part of town could be all 1920s modernism in appearance and style; the middle-class suburbs 1950s all streamline moderne and raygun gothic; the business district could remind us of Mirror’s Edge with businessmen in their mile-high gleaming towers overlooking a city rife with crime, poverty, and misery; the densely packed urban areas reminiscent of Blade Runner and Judge Dredd, with blocks of intolerably densely packed buildings overlooking perpetually gloomy and rainy streets, all while, off in the distance, the Space Elevator that carries hopeful immigrants to Mars is always visible and is the dream of millions. This ties in again with #2; what if America’s population was falling because people were so desperate to leave?
4. Music.
As with #2 there seems on the surface to be a problem here, but #2 itself actually solves the problem. Assuming the setting is fairly unpleasant (And it’s GTA, so it will be), it’s pretty easy to say “Well everyone’s on a massive nostalgia kick because things suck” and then voila, you can pick any music from any period. For contemporary stuff you can just get people like Brian Eno to create it – he knows how to make it sound like the future. If done right the setting could be sublime precisely because it isn’t so constrained by a specific era.
The future sounds like the 80s and looks like ponies.
I spent the great majority of yesterday playing Gears of War 3. Now, Gears is not the highest-minded game series ever made, it’s true, but it also highlights why not every game has to aspire to being meaningful and special in that sense. Because this is gaming at its absolute finest, it is sheer, unadulterated fun.
Gears of War is a game where people are made of muscles the size of oak trees. Pretty much everyone can take a stupid amount of punishment before dying, they’re as strong as oxen, and the whole game is basically Violence Is Fun Part 3: Electric Boogal…ee? Whatever. The point is you shoot a lot of stuff. And it’s great. Now I’m doing Gears a bit of a disservice because it does actually have some rather good characters and does some heavy stuff story-wise (Both far better in this than either predecessor), but really, the main point of the game is killing lots of Locust.
Everything here has been polished to an impressive degree. Absolutely everything about the game shows attention to detail and refinement, everything works brilliantly, the whole system just feels like it’s put together properly out of a lot of solid and well-tested parts.
As a tribute to my good friend Paul, here is a picture of Carmine.
I’m being a very poor blog person here because I’m not really conveying what it is that is good about Gears 3. It just… it just works, really really well, and is stupidly fun to play. I’ve not even touched the improved Horde mode yet, though I messed around in Beast mode (Where you play the Locust side in a Horde game, basically) a bit and it was just glorious. Epic Games seem to have held nothing back here. You fight the most ridiculous, over the top enemies, all sorts of insane things happen, and the game includes one of the best siege defenses I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing through in any action game.
In short, if you like FUN, get GoW 3. I guess it won’t convert you if you’re not a fan, but if you’re on the fence I would wholly endorse joining in now and getting into some multiplayer with friends, because few games do multiplayer as well as this one does.
So as you may recall I’ve written about Dead Island before, but now that it’s out and I’ve had the chance to spend some time with it, I thought I’d give some of my opinions on it.
The very abbreviated version is: Dead Island is one of the best bad games I’ve ever played.
Let me elaborate. It’s a shoddy piece of programming. It slows down at times for no discernible reason; sometimes you’ve got a bunch of zombies and it goes smoothly, sometimes there’s two and it stutters horrifically. There’s noticeable pop up. Textures can vary wildly in quality. The controls were very obviously designed for the console, to a degree that kind of makes me long for Oblivion, because this is far worse and it gets very tedious very quickly.
There are some poor design choices as well. Everything respawns being the main one. Everything – zombies, vehicles, weapons, items, little stacks of cash tucked away inside people’s backpacks and stuff (More on money later). It doesn’t make sense. You end up just learning the game, and once you’ve been through someplace once there are no more surprises. Hardly making the best use of an open world. It also harms the immersion, both in the obvious ways (“Didn’t I kill this guy the last four times I went this way?”) and the slightly less so (People desperate for food/water/booze in a world where everything respawns within minutes).
Remember the previous DI post, where I talked about losing quest hubs and stuff? Yeah, well, there are safe zones in this game. Some infected (Running zombies, just like L4D) managed to get in because there’s a very conveniently placed rock for you to use, and apparently they can do. For a moment I thought “Oh shit here we go!” but they just charged directly at me, got their heads smashed, and elicited no response from the surrounding NPC survivors.
Pretty much my face when that occurred.
In fact, so far at least, it seems that there is no interaction between the living and dead aside from yourself and some scripted encounters. There are other survivors around the island, but unless you get an escort quest or something, they’re not going to be getting themselves bitten or cracking any heads. Worse, if someone isn’t an escortee or the like, you can’t give them a slap/hug/whatever and say “Yeah I know you had to do some bad shit, but we gotta get to safety, come with me.” They just sit there lamenting whatever they had to do to survive over and over.
You also have to pay cash money for stuff. I mean, I can sort of understand why you’d still care about money to some extent – it suggests there will be a normal world tomorrow to spend it in. But yeah, really having a hard time buying that people would hold back on helping you out when their lives are so acutely on the line. Nevermind the workbenches – you pay to repair and upgrade items, but there’s nobody there to pay! Apparently some ethereal miser demands payment in exchange for sticking your weapons back together.
Oh but cracking heads. Forget everything I’ve just said about the game, because really, what it’s about is cracking heads. And this, at least, it does well. Smacking a zombie feels great, visceral. Knocking one aside with a metal pipe is satisfying as hell. Cracking or entirely removing limbs? Yep, you can do that, and they’ll flail the jelly-like appendage at you without much effect. And this is before you start playing silly buggers and modifying the game files.
The game is pretty atmospheric, it does a great job of juxtaposing a tropical paradise with living hell. When you’re walking around and you hear a zombie breathing or roaring or whatever, it’s unsettling, even if you’ve killed a hundred of them already and one more won’t be able sort of problem. The evidence of what’s going on is grim and pretty omnipresent; one minute it’s a picturesque tropical scene, the next you come across someone whose skin appears to have all been eaten.
There are also a nice wide variety of weapons, and what is more, the weapons degrade and break at a pretty believable speed for once! The human skull is one of the toughest structures nature has devised, so you’re not going to be able to break thousands of them before you need to exchange your paddle for something better. Similarly, this is one of the best implementations of stamina I’ve seen in a game. You’ve got a lot of it and it recharges fairly fast so you can sprint a long way, but if you go around swinging madly you’ll run out faster than you expect, and then you’ll be in trouble. It works excellently in doing what it is meant to do: Making you fight with an eye on your tactics.
It should be noted I’ve not played a terrific amount of the game yet, and I’ve also not played multiplayer. I’m confident that messing around with some friends would make the game much better. It’s not a ‘good’ game, so I can’t in good conscience say to everyone “go out and buy it now”, but it is a fun game and once the price comes down a bit, if you see it when there’s a bit of a slow spell of other releases, or if you just want to crack a whole lot of heads and collecting way too many weapons that you then have to sell ONE AT A TIME with a confirmation message for EACH AND EVERY ONE, then yeah, Dead Island is a sound purchasing decision.
In the old days, before your time, there was a company called Blizzard. Yes yes, I know, they’re still around today, but they’re not the same Blizzard. Back then, when they made a game, you sat up and took notice. Back then when they made an expansion, it added a great deal of content.
I remember it clearly. I had just awoken, the sleep barely rubbed from my eyes, when Pike came with grim news. Blizzard. Diablo III. I thought perhaps that they had bowed to the silliness about “too much color”, and made it all brown’n’bloom. But no. Diablo III, I learned to my endless horror, would be subject to the following;
1) There would be no offline play. You must be connected to b.net to play the game.
I saw this and I was mad. It is monumentally stupid. It encourages piracy rather than reducing it. It has consistently proven to be a poor idea when previously implemented.
2) There will be an auction house where you can use real money to purchase in-game characters and items from other players.
I saw this and I was leery. I can understand Blizz’s desire to undermine gold farming and so forth, and legitimizing something we all know already happens anyway is not such a huge deal. Still, it seems dreadfully crass and overwhelmingly all-encompassing in this instance. I just don’t want to log into a game, play for awhile, decide to look for an item, and be presented with real-world prices. I’ve enough money woes as is without my escape being filled with constant reminders of it too. Still, I play single player for the most part, and this doesn’t provide anything that some grinding and luck won’t get you anyway – it’s optional, and I can tolerate it despite the bad taste it leaves.
(Though given that Diablo is essentially Grinding for Gear: The Game, my solution would have simply been to make players unable to trade anything except to people in their group at the time the item dropped. I imagine this would have caused plenty of rage too though.)
3) No mods allowed. You read that correctly.
Now let me be quite clear about this. This doesn’t mean Blizzard won’t be supportive of modders or include any tools that make life easier for them. What they mean, in fact, is that the EULA will specifically forbid them. They are not merely not officially supported, they are avowedly not permitted. And because you have to be online to play, even if someone makes a mod, you’re likely going to have to do something like download a crack in order to actually use it. Suffice it to say, this is a truly mindboggling step to take from the company’s whose modded games have spawned such things as DOTA and Median XL. I have waxed lyrical about the virtues of mods previously, and I really cannot quite wrap my head around who at Blizzard thought this was a good idea, why anyone agreed with them, and why the nice gentlemen with the wood-paneled station wagons have not yet carted the whole shower of them off to get the help they so patently require.
In short, I cancelled any notions I had to ever purchase D3. Which is a damned shame, because I loved the first two, and I love most of Blizz’s games, and I actually anticipate that if I did play it, I’d enjoy it immensely. But I simply cannot sanction this sort of nonsense with my patronage.
