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Red Dead Redemption 2 (PS5) by dkirschner (Mar 9th, 2026 at 09:45:05) |
Yeah, this was incredible, as expected. The story, the character development, the historical setting, all incredible. My brother and another friend (especially the friend) were highly invested in me playing the game, so I was keeping them updated while playing. Another friend was supposed to be playing it at the same time as me, but I paused a couple months ago and he defected to Mass Effect for a break and never returned. I need to be like, "Dude, I beat it. Hurry up so we can talk about it!"
There are so many memorable missions, from the night out with Lenny (the game explores race and racism during this time and place, which was neat) to going to get the kid from the Italian guy to an epic train robbery to the final showdown, and even to the side missions, like collecting debts for Strauss (which seems so mundane), but realizing the damage that Strauss's money lending causes to individuals and families and then eventually kicking him out of camp. The characters are all flawed, and the main character arc of Arthur about made me cry throughout the last chapter (though I had a MAJOR plot point spoiled for me by a John Green book!). Truly, it is a story about redemption, with some characters growing and others succumbing to their flaws. Very human, very emotional.
Two main activities in the game are riding your horse and shooting people. Riding your horse could have gotten boring fast, but you have good control over movement and how fast you go, and have to manage horse stamina. You also encounter things along the road, from Strangers (capital "S") to meet (aka side characters with their own story arcs), to strangers (small "s") whom I usually ignored (aka random events to random NPCs like passing someone calling for help because he's getting chased by bandits, passing a person begging for money, passing a hunter stuck in a bear trap [I felt bad that I never helped the hunter]), to ambushes, etc.
There is a handy auto-ride system, where you can set a cinematic camera to take over as you go from one place to another. Arthur will actually ride the horse the whole way, but you can put the controller down and watch the beautiful landscape and bathe in the ambient music. You can also fast-travel using wagons or trains between towns, but I hardly ever did that.
Shooting people is pretty basic. You have a weapon wheel and an inventory wheel, and during combat you basically duck behind cover (R1), pop out and target someone (L2), which uses handy aim assist, flick the left control stick up to the target's head (because aim assist always centers on their chest), and pull the trigger (R2) for a headshot. Duck again, line up your next headshot, kill. Move forward to the next cover. Repeat until mission cleared. This did get repetitive by the end. I hardly ever used "dead eye," a slow time ability that allows you to shoot multiple enemies at once, and I hardly ever used items, including healing items, because you just don't need them. Weapons are just regular pistols and rifles and knives, whatever they had in the late 1800s. Combat was spiced up by the various contexts in which you fight (e.g., raiding a mansion, robbing a train, shooting on horseback, etc.), and it was engaging, but like I said, it did get repetitive.
Another thing that got repetitive, and that I quit doing after too long, was looting corpses and searching places for loot. Each "search" animation is way too long, and like I said, you don't end up needing health items, or any other items. You can always pick up new guns from the ground and ammo is plentiful. You can also buy guns and ammo too if you want. There is a "camp upgrade" element to the game in the earlier chapters, and I collected money and items to sell until I had upgraded everything, but that was a small portion of the game. Once I'd upgraded everything, first of all, the camp moves and you don't even have access to all the upgraded stuff for a chunk of the game (I don't think), and second of all, you don't need all the stuff anyway. So once camp was upgraded (by like chapter 2? of 6 + epilogues!), I basically had no use for money for the rest of the game. Sure, you can buy outfits and new guns and whatever, but none of that is necessary.
This made me feel like I went pretty straight through the main game, plus most of the Stranger missions, but didn't touch much else. I didn't mess with mini games, I didn't spend time in towns going to the theaters and whatever, I didn't mess with cosmetic things like giving myself haircuts or trying on outfits, I didn't do optional legendary hunts (those wild animals will kill you so fast!) or search for special gear or do the treasure maps, etc. That all sounds nice if you want to spend more time in the game and do everything that the Wild West has to offer, but I didn't. The main story was fantastic, so that was my focus, and I've played so many open world games and MMOs that I felt no need to hunt extra legendary creatures or collect special item sets.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was an epic tale. I can see why my brother and my friend were so excited for me to play it. Now I will be the one harassing other people: "Did you play RDR 2 yet?! Let me know when you start it! Keep me updated!" Next up from Rockstar later this year: GTA 6!
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My Hero: Doctor (DS) by jp (Mar 6th, 2026 at 18:01:32) |
From the back of the box this game looks like a "western realistic" Trauma Team game - use the touchscreen to do medical stuff like bandage a patient's arm or give them an injection. And it is...sort of? Weirdly every single "case" (mission) I played began with (and sometimes also ended with) a driving section - an ambulance of course. Here you have to dodge other vehicles and obstacles to avoid damage as you travel to a location where something happened or back to the hospital. Roads are full of other vehicles that have no qualms with suddenly changing lanes in front of you and such. You can collect "energy" (not what it's called in the game, but I don't remember the name in the game), and when you have enough you can turn on the siren - and this causes other vehicles to get out of the way (sometimes not fast enough). It's kind of a bizarre gameplay addition - and it doesn't help that the controls are kind of wonky and, from my experience, it really out stayed it's welcome even as the background locations you're driving through change.
I even unlocked a better ambulance (better driving stats)...and there's more to (eventually) choose from. I mean, the game's basic structure is pretty standard, there's cut-scenes with stories (everything so far seems to involve college kids of some sort). It makes me really wonder who the intended audience/age group for this game was. The name of the game would imply children (it's aspirational!) but the story seemed a bit more "grown up" - i.e. adolescent, but the gameplay was also quite simple..skewing younger again in my mind.
The more games of this kind I play (not top-tier first-party DS games), the more I wonder about the conditions in which they were made. Was this a game that was knocked out by a small studio in 6 months?
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Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom (PS4) by jp (Mar 2nd, 2026 at 19:08:07) |
Decided to quit suddenly because I realized I was just starting to grind for achievements and not actually having fun or enjoying the game. Which, in the grand scheme of things sounds like a bad thing other than I think that I quit in time BEFORE I got super tired and bored. So, leaving on a (little past) the high of the fun experience.
I was grinding the Dream Doors - and apparently there's a nice monster at the end that can be a real challenge - but, I didn't have a sense of WHY I'd want to do that. Here I mean motivation within the game's story. I was hoping for a nice story payoff if anything? It seems like there isn't, it's just a grind for resources and stuff and so...time to bail!
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Vampire Survivors (PC) by dkirschner (Mar 2nd, 2026 at 15:38:02) |
I first played this a few years ago on Game Pass and loved it. I rebought it on Steam because there was so much extra content. (I have since learned to avoid long games, roguelikes, and stuff with tons of replayability on subscription services; buy those instead!). Last summer, I replayed the game and started to dig into the DLC. There is practically an infinite amount of stuff to do in Vampire Survivors. I still feel this after sinking another 30 hours into it. The achievements and unlocks are extremely compelling and I could chase them all day. But it has finally started to feel repetitive. Longer 30-minute runs that result in like one unlock or just some progress through a map feel more and more like a time sink, especially as I have other games to get to, including newer games in this genre.
The DLCs (so many!!) have been interesting in that they alter the base game in interesting ways. The maps have rooms, islands, and more geographical features; they are not just massive plains with the occasional obstacle. Contra has a different kind of boss fight. They have new characters, weapons, evolutions, and secrets. The Ode to Castlevania DLC is massive, about the same size as the entire base game! It also has unique boss fights, and an even bigger map to explore, including different spawn points so you don't start over every time. I mean, really, I could just keep playing this forever...but I can't keep playing this forever! I must delete it. Maybe one day there will be another DLC that really piques my interest and the game will rise like a vampire from the coffin of my Steam library! I did see that they are releasing a first-person card battler roguelike, so I am sure I will get sucked into that too!
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Fabledom (PC) by jp (Feb 28th, 2026 at 18:37:25) |
This one is in the "sim" sub-group "city building" bucket for this semester's critical game design class. I'm generally not a fan of city building games since I find that the simulation part often runs away from me. I think I'm doing well, but then everything falls apart.
This game was surprisingly chill - it almost feels like the game you'd just keep on playing? As in, you start - and then just continue. I'm 6 hours in and I've just hit the point where I should be building palaces and having nobles prancing around. The game is basically a "Sim-City FairyTale Edition", but I've really liked the pace of it. At times things were going wonky, but I just kept going and slowly things have recovered (I took too long to build the hospital, so people died - once it was finally built it was funny to see a huge swarm of sick people mob it).
The economy is rather complicated with lots of different resources and I find it really hard to know if things are going well/poorly - there's time delays on everything of course, I just don't notice when "production" happens and whether or not it is sufficient for the demans of my populace. Basically though, it's always "make numbers go up" and then you run out of people to work - so make houses for them, and so on.
Here's the things I've particularly appreciated in this game's design (or that I thought were neat).
a. People live in houses (and bigger residential buildings), but there's always ONE person who is the head of household. That's their job.
b. When you pay for a new building you basically pay money, and decide where it's going. But you then have to wait for the resources for the building to be delivered/transported there. I often ran into an issue where I paid for a bunch of stuff, but no construction was happening because I didn't have enough planks or something.
c. My village has a cyclops that wanders around making people happy. So much better than terrorizing.
d. In winter, lots of things shut-down, this felt like a "vacation" for the farmers, which I let them have/enjoy.
e. I thought it was funny that Commoner's really don't like living next to peasant homes. So, a peasant home could be super desirable - but only for other peasants. It's the complete opposite for commoner's (highly undesirable). Basically, there's a class system and they don't like each other when it comes to living close by. (I'm assuming the same will apply for nobles, but I don't have any of those yet).
f. A common driver of unhappiness in the people is how far they have to walk to work (you can manually assign different people to different buildings). It makes sense - but this is all walking anyways...but still - distance from home-to-work matters! Apparently this is because workers go home to eat!
g. I liked how you could chop down trees but also have a little add-on forester hut so they grow back.
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Ghost of Tsushima (PS4) by dkirschner |
| Assassin's Creed vibes so far. --------- Slick, and does some cool things with its open world, but still has all features of typical open-world games. |
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most recent entry: Monday 24 June, 2024
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I went into this with almost zero knowledge of what it was. Within 10 minutes, after opening the map for the first time, I was thinking, “Oh no, I do not want to play another Assassin’s Creed game right now.” I played Odyssey a year-and-a-half ago and am haunted by question marks on a map and a ridiculously long (nearly 100 hours!) main-plus playtime. Ghost of Tsushima absolutely has Assassin’s Creed / Witcher 3 DNA, but it also innovates in some interesting areas. After finishing Odyssey, I wished for a “mere” 40-hour Assassin’s Creed game. Well, Ghost of Tsushima was basically that, but I realize that it’s not just the length of Odyssey that I disliked, but that the open-world formula is stale, even when it’s set in as beautiful a place as Tsushima.
So, I’ll talk first about the game’s biggest success. Sucker Punch created a cohesive feel to this game. Everything about it flows like the wind. When you are standing on a hill, looking out over a field of trees and brightly colored flowers, and the wind whips at your back, and you feel calm and peaceful and meditative, that feeling permeates the entire experience. The wind, the wind! How many games have tried to do something different in place of a traditional minimap with quest markers? I can think of none better than Ghost of Tsushima. The wind guides you to your destination, whatever you have set as a waypoint on your map. Flick the touchpad up and the breeze blows, indicating the direction toward your goal. I only looked at the map to set waypoints and to fast travel; otherwise, the wind immersed me in the journey.
Speaking of fast travel, it’s somewhat counterintuitive that they immediately let you fast travel through one of the most beautiful open worlds I’ve ever seen. Most games, for progression reasons, but also (I always imagine) to force you to look at the environment they’ve created, restrict your movement and fast travel until you earn it. Ghost of Tsushima says nope, everything about this game is going to flow, so players are immediately going to get a horse, be able to move as fast as they ever will be, and will be able to fast travel to any location they have previously visited. I appreciated this so, so much.
Another way the game flows is in your ability to go in and out of active quests, or “tales.” It reminded me of something I loved about MMORPGs, when you could run around collecting quests, then do a giant loop completing them all, then return to the questgiver area and turn them all in at once. You don’t “collect” quests like that here, but you can always just walk away and pursue something else of interest if you are in the middle of one, even a main story tale, and then return to it. This encourages exploring the environment. Often, I would be doing a tale, and I’d hear the bark of a fox, stop, find it, follow it to its shrine and pray; or hear the chirp of a golden bird, follow it to a new area of interest; pass by a torii gate to a mountain temple and detour to scale the cliffs, earn a charm, and take in the view from the top; then return to what I was doing. The game doesn’t punish you for exploring when you want to.
It’s neat how integrated the map question marks are in your exploration. There are multiple ways to be alerted to, and to find, those areas of interest. You can walk around and explore; you can complete an action that removes fog of war and discover new question marks from the map; villagers will alert you to tales and places of interest; the golden birds will randomly swoop down and chirp and guide you to somewhere you’ve never been; the fireflies will guide you to collectibles in town; the sound of crickets chirping in graveyards leads you to them; etc. And there are visual symbols for many such places, too: yellow glowing trees for fox dens; steam rising from hot springs for baths; tall banner flags for duels; torii gates for mountain shrines, etc. This bundle of modalities for finding areas of interest sometimes results in silly moments, though. You’ll obviously be going to a specific place, have it tracked on the map, and a golden bird will swoop down and “guide” you to it. For example, one time I was swimming out to an island—the only thing I could have possibly been headed toward—and the bird swooped down from over the ocean and started flying toward the island. Did it think I didn’t see it?! Obviously, I was going to the island! There were also times when the golden birds would lead me somewhere where I couldn’t figure out what it was trying to show me. Or when the golden birds would lead me somewhere, and I didn’t want to do whatever was there, so I’d leave, and then the golden birds would keep trying to bring me back there. Minor annoyance in an outstanding navigation system!
Many of the places you find on Tsushima yield peaceful, meditative moments. You can sit on a rock and compose a haiku, for example, and meditate on “perspective” or “loss” or whatever. Instead of forcing you to walk everywhere, inviting you to sit and meditate is how the game encourages you to appreciate the beauty of Tsushima. They worked it into the story, into the setting; it flows.
Finally, the combat flows. It is exquisite, of the “easy to learn; hard to master” variety. It took a while to get comfortable with because it helps if you are observant and calm, not easy for an action game. In many games, you can button mash, but Ghost of Tsushima rewards precision. For example, if an enemy is doing an unblockable attack (indicated by a red flash), you need to press circle just once to sidestep (then counter-attack!). If you press it twice, you’ll roll too far away to counter. There are a lot of combat toys to play with, from various types of bombs, arrows, knives, darts, things that distract enemies, stances that counter different enemy types, and so on. I will say that the stances seemed unnecessary, unless I was fighting a boss-type character. Enemies come in four flavors: sword guy, shield guy, spear guy, arrow guy…I feel like there was a fifth. And there are some easier and harder versions of each. The stances give you some special attack power against whichever enemy type, but once you learn to parry and dodge, you can kill enemies of all types just as quickly.
I must mention two fantastic elements of combat: duels and standoffs. It’s a samurai game, so of course you can duel. These are cinematic! They are always boss (or mini-boss) fights. They were difficult at first, but became much easier by the end, so much so that I killed the last two bosses without dying. There is one annoying thing about the duels though: your health doesn’t refill beforehand. You don’t always know when you’re going to duel, so it’s not like you can just heal up in preparation. And once you start a duel, as far as I could figure, there is no way to quit (unless you saved it beforehand?); you just have to keep trying. A few duels began with me at almost zero health and with no resolve (resource used to heal and use special attacks). Those ones resulted in me having to perfect the fight, at least until I could generate enough resolve to heal myself. On the plus side, I got really good at the combat. I imagine this was done on purpose to increase the player’s resilience or perseverance or something related to samurai values. The other awesome combat mechanic is the standoff. When you approach a group of enemies, instead of charging in or going stealth mode, you can challenge them. You hold triangle and release it when the enemy attacks for an instant kill. Later, enemies start feinting, and I lost my fair share of standoffs from being too trigger-happy. You can upgrade an ability such that once you win the initial standoff, you can one-shot the next two or three more enemies who come charging at you. I really enjoyed entering combat with a standoff instead of sneaking around. The stealth in this game is passable, and there’s really nothing else to say about it!
The main downside of Ghost of Tushima for me is that the pacing is weird. I mean, it’s not a downside per se, but made me single-mindedly pursue completion by early in the second act. In the first act, I pretty much completed all the side quests and explored every “?” that I saw (though by no means did I explore the whole map). At the end of the first act, therefore, I had unlocked most of the sword techniques, all but one stance, and upgraded all my weapons most of the way. One thing that really helped with that latter achievement was the charm that doubles the amount of resources that you find. Once I found that charm, I was in Upgrade City. So, by the second act, I didn’t have much more to upgrade. The side quests aren’t all that compelling. The larger arcs follow your main companions’ personal stories, and the smaller quests are just “go here, kill Mongols.” They are often set up like they might be in the Witcher 3, like people are being dragged to their deaths in a murky lake. Whereas in the Witcher, you’d discover some cool monsters with compelling intrigue, here it is always bandits or Mongols. Always. You might think there will be something supernatural going on (the villagers are all superstitious), but there isn’t. It’s always bandits or Mongols! The main story tales are the main attraction, so by the beginning of the second (of three) act, I just plowed through those and finished the game. In the second act, I was still doing incidental question marks, but by the third, I ignored everything else. The “blue” tales yield special weapons and armor, but they generally took a while, and I realized that whatever armor I got from the main story was better than all the special quest armor anyway.
So, that’s the Ghost. It’s got everything you expect in an open-world game, with a tight theme and nice flourishes, like the wind guide. The main story is interesting, and you effectively are put in the shoes of a 13th-century samurai who struggles with tradition, honor, and family. If the story’s presentation were as great as the presentation of the open world itself, it would be even better. But, even though I enjoyed the story, I found the characters forgettable, probably because the voice acting and animations are pretty stilted. I said the story was interesting, not exciting (save for the massive act-ending battles). Some levity (besides the one sake trader) would be nice. If you are into open-world games, I’d recommend this one as a gem that goes at a slower pace than you might be used to; it’s often meditative. People who are into samurai stuff will no doubt enjoy it. For me though, I think I appreciated it thematically and in terms of a lot of design stuff more so than I loved the experience. Like, it was cool, but I don’t want to play more of it (and, indeed, I opted out of the DLC island).
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