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Dec 30th, 2019 at 18:14:34 - Bloodborne (PS4) |
Okay, this is it. This is the one. I tried Dark Souls [checks notes] 3.5 years ago and found myself lacking. It was too hard. It has haunted me ever since. I've completed plenty of brutally difficult games. Why was Dark Souls different? My best guess is that it doesn't just punish you with time invested, but it really saps your potential progression. By that I mean, when you die, you drop all of your souls. If you die again before reaching the spot where you died to retrieve your souls, you lose them forever. Therefore, when you die, you lose the potential you had accrued to level up, and for all intents and purposes are demoted. Even though you hadn't actually spent the souls to level up, you HAD them. It's like you went to cash a check and you lost the check. You had the money, but you hadn't converted it into something usable, and it hurts just as much to lose.
SO, the PS4 I bought a few weeks ago came with a few games, Bloodborne being my most desired. I wanted to take another stab at a FromSoftware title and show them who's boss (me!). My ambition didn't go so well at first. I installed it, played an hour or two, and had flashbacks to Dark Souls. I couldn't get past the first area. I died over and over and over. It was so sad. Fuck that! I quit and picked up Nioh, another "soulsborne" game that had (gasp!) a tutorial that made me feel competent. After I went through the whole tutorial and played some of the first bit of Nioh, I had work for a week and when I came back to the PS4, decided I was not, in fact, done with Bloodborne. In fact, Nioh had prepared me (somehow) to be better at Bloodborne. Nioh had prepared me (somehow) to learn the lessons of FromSoftware games.
I booted up Bloodborne again, determined to figure out how to approach it. Fast forward a couple weeks and here I am, being successful (I think)! I've learned to deploy all my patience and all my caution. If you are slow, careful, methodical, and observant, you can tackle Bloodborne. I've written about a few extended examples, but I'm not sure what to sum up, so I'll make some notes, a couple quick stories, and elaborate later.
1. Learn enemy attack patterns. What are their tells? How far away do you need to stay? Every enemy can kill you, so don't take your chances. Wait for their tells and strike appropriately. It's not a race.
2. Don't be afraid to go back to The Hunter's Dream. In this safe zone, you can spend your blood echoes to level up, purchase items, and upgrade your weapons. Yeah, all the enemies will respawn, and that can be annoying, but you'll also learn that ...
3. You don't have to kill everything. You'll open ingenious shortcuts and learn what you can run past (often based on what probably won't drop good items anyway!), so respawning enemies are not always a big deal. Plus, you're getting better at the game, so you can dispatch them more easily.
4. Upgrade your main weapon. Yeah, there are lots of weapons, but the beginning Hunter's Axe has been working for me just fine. I bought everything else, but I've upgraded that axe as much as it'll go for now (level 6; how many levels of upgrades are there? A: At least 9.). Experiment with the weapons to see what suits you. And don't forget that you can hit L1 to alternate between two forms of your melee weapons.
5. You'll get past that first area and that first boss, the something-something-Cleric. The big bird thing. Terrifying. On the bridge. After being mauled by werewolves (explore and find the other way around). Once you get past that first boss, the game becomes easier. You won't have to farm health potions again (yet, anyway). This first area of the game is like a hazing ritual.
6. If you need help, summon someone. I'm playing offline, so I can't summon other players, but on the third boss, there was a summoning place there and I got an NPC. She tanked the boss (the one in the Grand Cathedral) and I chipped away at its health from behind. Victory. If you can't summon someone, refer to #1.
7. I'm so impressed by the interconnectedness of each area. Navigating can be disorienting, but keep wandering and you'll connect seemingly disparate locations. The other day, I wandered into an area with an enemy I couldn't kill, another area with some hazy demon that killed me, another area where I got killed by some sort of void energy that said "frenzy" on the screen, I wandered into a totally different zone (Forbidden Woods?), and through all this learned many different paths.
8. If you're not sure if you're supposed to be somewhere or not, you might need to die a few times to figure it out. Enemies crushing you? Maybe there's somewhere else to go first where you can gain some levels. It seems like wandering around and seeing everything is sufficient for being strong enough to tackle enemies and bosses.
More later. But I am LOVING this game now that I'm over the initial hump (seriously, through the first boss is just brutal). I can't wait to play more.
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Dec 30th, 2019 at 16:50:59 - Flow (PS4) |
My first PS4 completion on my brand new used system! I played Flow yesterday morning because I was up before my brother and mom at her house and didn't want to wake everyone up with Bloodborne. A nice, quiet, relaxing game would be better, I thought. I didn't really know what to expect; I haven't played any of thatgamecompany's games (criminal, I know, but I'll get to Flower and Journey soon).
Flow immediately reminded me of other "eat things and grow bigger" games like the incomparable Osmos. It's beautiful and sounds great (relaxing, right?) and the movement is simple and fluid with the motion tilt on the PS4's controller. Fortunately, the game is short because it sure gets dull quickly. Each level and each character are essentially the same thing and there is no variation in what you do.
You take control first of a "snake" creature underwater. Eat smaller creatures to get longer (this is visually mesmerizing), and then eat the red blob to descend to the next level in the ocean. It's neat that you can eat the blue blob to go back up, going up and down as much as you please. I did this a couple times when there was an annoying enemy (go back up to eat some more creatures and get stronger or go down to skip it), but I accidentally ate the blue or red blobs 20 other times and changed levels when I didn't want to. Eventually you will encounter enemies who can eat you. You never die, but rather go back up a level when you get eaten. Levels are small and take just a few minutes to clear, so this is no big deal.
Once you reach the last ocean level, there is a teleporter thing that warps you back to the beginning, where you are given a new creature, one that you have seen, to play with. Each new creature has some kind of ability setting it apart from others. There's one that turns green, and if you eat (part of) another creature while green, it turns green too and slows down. If you eat it while green, then all the little organisms it spawns upon death are green, and if other enemies eat those, then THEY turn green. That was probably my favorite. Another creature lets you repel others; another gives you big bursts of speed; and so on.
By the third creature (of 5), I was looking on the internet to see how much more there was because the game was feeling very repetitive and I was bored. I powered through and easily beat it. The credits are neat. I later learned that the game was released in 2006, which makes my problems with it somewhat meaningless. This was probably ridiculously impressive in 2006, evident by its history. I look forward to Flower, and then Journey in the future.
One other random story to note: I picked up a copy of Ian Bogost's How to Do Things with Videogames and had been reading it just a few days before. In a chapter on relaxation, he offers a brief analysis of Flow, pointing out that the game is not relaxing (you chase things around to eat them while risking being eaten by them) despite it's beautiful visuals and music. I found this to be true (boredom also came), and it got me thinking about other games that have promised to be low key and relaxing but are not. Or rather, it got me thinking even more broadly about games that coast on unique audio-visual style and polish, but are not much more than that. I'm thinking recently of Little Nightmares. I had to play it when I saw it, but it really wasn't very good, a sub-par 2D puzzle platformer mechanically. After that game is when I learned my lesson: Don't buy a game just because the art looks cool!
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Dec 9th, 2019 at 11:46:48 - Tales from the Borderlands (PC) |
I started this in August and finally finished. That was due to a couple dry gaming months, finishing a couple other games, and then finally completing the last 3 episodes of this this weekend. My initial impressions were really positive, but in the end I think I just am not a fan of Borderlands anything.
Telltale's storytelling is fantastic as always and the game mechanics are sound. Tales from the Borderlands naturally has a good deal of combat, including a pretty sweet finale, and gunplay mapped fine onto Telltale's style but could feel jarringly slow and disjointed during action sequences.
I suppose what I'm most impressed with is Telltale's (RIP) ability to do such mapping, to fit any franchise they've handled into their style of narrative game. I've played some of the Walking Dead seasons, A Wolf Among Us, and the Game of Thrones one, and they all feel so unique, wonderfully capturing the spirit of each universe. I know they did such a good job with Borderlands because I felt like I always do about Borderlands by the end! Some of the jokes landed, sometimes I laughed out loud, but a lot of the humor missed. The world and characters are wonderfully weird and wacky, which I sometimes appreciate and sometimes cringe at.
One funny thing is that I misread the romance options. I took the two main characters relationship as flirtatious when apparently it wasn't supposed to be. In fact, the guy can become romantically involved with her sister. I made him constantly reject her and not flirt with her because I wanted the two main characters to get together! My girlfriend thought this was hilarious. Does that mean I'm a bad flirt? Aw man! So really, Tales from the Borderlands taught me that I don't really like Borderlands so stop trying and that I'm a bad flirt. 10/10 learning things about myself.
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Dec 4th, 2019 at 20:57:56 - Mountain (PC) |
This is more a toy than a game, really like one of those interactive screensavers I used to have as a teenager. Remember the cute sheep that would eat your desktop icons? This toy/game/screensaver is designed to run in the background while you do something else.
It's a digital mountain floating through space. You can spin it around, zoom in and out, click on trees to make birds fly away (into space??), and toss around objects such as airplanes and soccer balls that fall to its katamari-like surface. If you fancy yourself a musician, there are three octaves of a keyboard you can bang out. Finally, if you tire of watching your mountain accumulate stuff, you can send an asteroid at it and start over.
There is no goal to Mountain. You poke it and prod it and see what happens. You leave it alone for hours like I did and get some achievements. At first, it was distracting in the background. Any time a heard a non-weather or ambient noise from it, I'd look and see what had happened. But after a while, it became soothing background noise, blending into the other noises in my apartment, and was really relaxing when I went to go read. All in all, that's a pretty cool thing!
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