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Jul 24th, 2018 at 10:35:54 - Firewatch (PC) |
I started playing this at my mom's house a couple weekends ago with my uncle and 14-year-old niece present. He's a conservative pastor man and so I stopped out of respect when Delilah started dropping F-bombs. My niece, sitting with me reading, says, "Why did you turn it off?" She was enjoying watching. I said, "Uh, because it's supposed to be widescreen on this TV and it's not, and it's not recognizing my controller right." Lame.
So I booted it back up last week and thoroughly enjoyed the game, though it's not perfect. Certainly the highlights are the dialogue, overall story, and voice acting, which is superb. Henry (main character) and Delilah play off one another so well, and their relationship evolves easily and naturally. I liked Henry's backstory and reason for going out into the wilderness, though I didn't like the ending because that's not what I see myself doing in his situation. The ending also leaves something to be desired in terms of finality. Everything is wrapped up, but nothing is concluded, if that makes sense.
The Wyoming forest is an excellent environment, and I love that they give you an old camera to play with and take photos. I felt alone, but immersed in the beauty of the mountains. At the same time, I felt connected to Delilah, while still feeling the distance between us, and by comparison, constantly reminded of the distance (physical, mental) between Henry and his sick wife. It's actually quite a sad game, dealing with illness and isolation and alcohol abuse and death and lying in impossible situations, but it weaves in all these funny and happy moments throughout.
I'm curious to re-play this sometime with the audio commentary turned on. It's not a long game. Took me a little over 5 hours. The main thing I disliked about it was getting stuck on ledges and rocks. It happened upwards of 10 times, and although I never had to reload because of it, it was frustrating. Looking at the map and compass could be a bit cumbersome when figuring out where to go, but I get that it is 1988, and I got used to it. Anyway, worth a shot if you like a good "walking simulator" mystery with excellent writing.
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Jul 15th, 2018 at 20:14:54 - Final Fantasy V (PS) |
I played about 5 hours of this and it didn't stand out besides being wonderfully nostalgic. Apparently this one was notable for the job system later made famous (and perfected, according to me) in FF Tactics and for having summons. The story was forgettable and the characters were overly cartoonish and pretty uninteresting.
The nostalgia was so strong though! It's such a simple RPG! Walk around the small 2D maps, talk to NPCs in towns to glean where to go next, buy your new gear, click on all the pots and treasure chests, sail to the next location, wander through the dungeon, fight the boss, go to the next town, etc. It's cool to see a 25-year-old game have all these Final Fantasy staples--the music, chocobos, the menus, summons, jobs, etc.
Of course I played the original Nintendo game when I was a kid, but my family had a Sega, not a SNES, so I missed all the rest until FFVII on Playstation, and have played all the main ones since that one, except the MMOs and XV. Anyway, I started to get a little bored and looked up how this one was rated compared to VI, which I also acquired, and apparently V is largely regarded as one of the worst, while VI is one of the best. So out with V, in with VI.
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Jul 9th, 2018 at 11:37:23 - Hand of Fate (PC) |
I was sold on the idea of Hand of Fate before playing it, and I tried it at a friend's house sometime last year, bought it, and just got around to playing it the last couple weeks. It's a mixture of deck building, dungeon crawling, and action RPG. You are "the player" sitting across a card table from "the dealer." There's no exposition. You're dropped into this mysterious situation. The dealer is an enigmatic figure, and I want to know more about him. Throughout the game, there is little in the way of story regarding who he is, who you are, and why you are there. The dealer tells you that you're playing "the game" that he's created, many have played before you, the dealer always wins, and all the players have died. And he alludes to the fact that somehow I’m regaining my memories through the cards, which leads me to believe I was some adventurer or another who maybe just stepped through the wrong portal and found myself here.
The dealer explains the game to you over the first level, but you’re figuring a lot out yourself (e.g., that some cards get locked to you until you fulfill their conditions, that the icon on the bottom of the card is a token that grants rewards for fulfilling conditions, that you can equip as many rings as you want, etc.). Very intuitive way to present rules and information. So *basically* how the game works is as follows:
- Deck building is fantastic and never gets old. You have two pools of cards, equipment and encounter cards. Equipment is your various types of weapons, armor, rings, and artifacts (trinkets that have some special use like making you temporarily invisible, giving you a fire aura, reflecting ranged attacks, etc.). Encounter cards are little scenarios that determine much of what happens to you in each level. For example, The Maiden can give you food, increase your max health, and bless you. Ambush gets you a combat encounter with an equipment draw card as reward. Dark Carnival has you choosing a series of chance cards as your character explores a weird carnival. There's usually some element of risk/reward with the encounter cards. The Altar, for example, gives you a 50/50 chance to be blessed or cursed. All these give the feel of a tabletop game with the dealer as DM. Anyway, you choose a prescribed number of equipment and encounter cards to fill your deck, and then you enter the level.
- Dungeon crawling is exciting. Levels are made up of a series of encounter card arrangements that your player, as a tabletop game piece, moves across. Find the exit, go to the next area, explore the area, find the stairs, and repeat until you find the level's boss in the final area. Each card you land on flips over and you resolve the encounter. There is *tons* of chance here, though you have some control over what encounters you will...encounter...based on what you chose to include in the deck. When you have to choose chance cards, you can have either a Huge Success, Success, Failure, or Huge Failure, which will change the outcome of the scenario. However, as I learned when reading an FAQ one night, the chance cards are not completely random! You're shown the cards, and then they are shuffled. But there is order to it. If you watch closely, you can follow individual cards as they shuffle. It’s not too hard when there is like one or two slow shuffles, but it’s pretty impossible when the shuffle speeds up and especially when there are three or four shuffles. But it makes your odds of the easy shuffle encounters almost 100%, which means guaranteed equipment or blessings or whatever. Prior to this, I'd just been picking the left-hand card every time because I thought it was random. But now, if I choose the wrong card, it feels like my fault!
Each level also puts different default curses on the player, and the dealer shuffles different negative cards into the decks, and this can make things really tricky! One level that stood out cursed me with "Whenever you acquire a curse, lose 10 max HP." You begin with 100HP, so 10 is a lot. I had runs where I was cursed down to 40 max HP because he also shuffled encounter cards in that would put a random curse on you. Another level curses you such that when you counter-attack, you consume a food (every space you move consumes a food, and if you run out of food, your health begins to drain, so you *really* need to manage your food) AND every character takes additional 50% damage. The next-to-last level, the dealer shuffled a bunch of Rusty Axes (the worst weapon) in my equipment pile, so it was difficult to acquire a good weapon. These starting curses and insidious dealer cards can really change what equipment or encounters you put in your decks. For example, to combat the "lose 10 max HP per curse" curse, I only included one helmet in my deck, the one that reveals the exit from each area when you enter an area, and then included every encounter card that had a chance to give me a helmet. Once practically guaranteed to get that helmet, I could make a beeline for the exit in every area, thus not veering off in unnecessary directions landing on more curse cards, and allowing me to attempt the boss with sufficient HP. The one that consumed a piece of food every time I counter-attacked and made everyone take 50% more damage meant that I couldn’t counter and I couldn’t get hit much. I wound up removing most of the combat encounter cards from my deck and luckily discovered a couple rings that let me heal in combat (one saved me on the boss).
- Action RPG combat leaves something to be desired. It hearkens back to simpler days of button mashing hack-n-slash games. A little slow response to buttons (e.g., slightly sluggish movement, you can get caught in combo or finisher animations, etc.), but there is a rhythm to it in the attacking and counter-attacking. It's almost got an Arkham/Shadow of Mordor feel. If this was polished, the game would be significantly more fun. As it is, the combat becomes nearly as frustrating as the randomness. Blessings and equipment can change the feel of combat, but it's generally basic and easy to get overwhelmed (e.g., 6 lava golems, multiple bosses at once). Some encounters just kill me (Lich, &#*!@ Kraken), and randomness plays in both to (sometimes) what monsters you will fight and what equipment, blessings, curses, and health buffs, you will have accumulated up to that point. For example, I almost rage quit after I unlocked the Kraken encounter, which becomes a locked card in your encounters pile (i.e., it cannot be removed until you defeat it). I kept landing on the Kraken, at least 6 games in a row. You can't flee from the Kraken, so you have to fight it, and the fight involves actually fighting the last regular boss, the King of Scales, whom I hadn't even encountered at that point outside the Kraken battle, WHILE trying to kill the Kraken. It was brutal.
This turned really detailed, huh. One of my favorite things about Hand of Fate is that you can play the game with different goals (e.g., progressing through quest lines; trying to kill a particular boss or complete a particular task; or going for the level progression). There is also an endless mode, and DLC that adds different modifications to your character (think classes). I wonder how differently Hand of Fate 2 changes up the formula. I mostly want to see improved combat. Super interesting game though, highly recommend checking it out.
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Jun 30th, 2018 at 15:24:45 - Fatal Frame (PS2) |
I got this cool RCA --> HDMI adapter off Amazon that lets me play PS2 on my newfangled TV. It should also work with Wii, so I've been accumulating Wii games to exhaust that system now that I'm done with PS3 and Xbox 360. Fatal Frame was the last PS2 game I had, but I acquired a stack of Final Fantasy games, including V and VI (PS1), which will work with my new combo, so I'm also excited to see SNES era Final Fantasy games that I never played.
ANYWAY. Fatal Frame. I had a girlfriend once who was always talking about this game. She liked horror games. We had an Xbox version that we never played. At some point I bought a PS2 version, no idea why. I didn't even know I still had it, but I was cleaning and found it.
ANYWAY again. Fatal Frame has some serious pros and some serious cons.
PROS
- The atmosphere is terrifying. The game is set in a haunted old Japanese mansion. Creaky. Falling apart. The site of horrific rituals. Mean ghosts. The visuals and audio hold up surprisingly well. After I heard how good the sound design was, I played with headphones on. Good choice. It's totally haunting. Very immersive.
- It FEELS like survival horror games of the era (e.g., Silent Hill, Resident Evil). This is both good and bad. For example, the controls are tough to handle, but for the beginning of the game, it's not too hindering. As you walk, the fixed camera angles will change, forcing you to reorient yourself before you accidentally walk back where you came from or run into a wall or an enemy. The game is very dark, which makes your flashlight especially important. Right, this is all nostalgic in a good sort of way. But, it is bad because (see con 3).
- Puzzles and story. Thoroughly enjoyable puzzles to move the story forward. They haven't been difficult so far, but I'm sure they get a little harder. It's how the story uses puzzles that's really cool. So for example, one thing I picked up on is that the game centers around the "strangling ritual," which is basically that a sacrifice victim is drawn and quartered...well, no, fifthed (add the head)...with ropes tied around the to-be-removed body parts. In the game, you have to find five shattered mirror pieces and put them together. Puzzles are replete with Japanese folklore and imagery. The first mirror piece you've got to find a Buddha statue, and solving this puzzle reveals where some missing children have gone to, who were playing something called "demon tag," which is like a Japanese version of tag where "it" is a demon. Anyway, I enjoyed how steeped in Japanese folklore the game is. Really added to the atmosphere.
CONS
- Voice acting is generally bad. Par for the course for Japanese survival horror from this era though. The ghosts sound good, but the humans do not. Very flat and emotionless. Slow talkers.
- Combat. Combat in the game involves pointing your Camera Obscura at a ghost, holding the targeting circle over the ghost as it moves and as your shot powers up, and then pushing X when you want to attack (or square when the circle turns orange for a critical hit). I like the combat for its novelty and how scary it can be, but hate it for other overwhelming reasons. The ghosts are extremely irritating enemies. Yeah, they're scary, but as I played more and more, they became more annoying than scary. They disappear and reappear on another side of you, become untargetable, move through solid objects, and take a large chunk of your life per hit. Each hit slows you, and since you may be disoriented from a fixed camera shift (see below) it's not unlikely you'll get grabbed again quickly before you figure out which direction to run. Add to that limited healing supplies, and this became so tedious.
- As you progress, the clunky controls (a) break the immersion and (b) get you killed. Here's a prime example in combat: As you run from an enemy, the fixed camera will change positions, which sometimes makes you run in a direction that you don't want to go. Trying to control your character in tense moments breaks immersion. Add ghost teleportation in the mix, and the controls become extremely frustrating when you are hit and die because the camera keeps changing and the ghosts keep disappearing and reappearing. Worse, the sound doesn’t accurately tell you what direction ghosts are coming from because often the sound will change with the camera angle and not the ghost direction! You literally can't tell when this is happening when you're in camera mode because it's first-person and you don't see the camera shift. The ghost noises just seem to spin around you, then a ghost will kill you from behind when you were listening to the ghost sound coming from in front of you.
Add into that how the controls change while using the camera! You normally move with LS and look around with the flashlight with RS, like every other game. But for some reason when you go into the camera mode, LS moves the camera, and RS moves the character. I cannot tell you how many times I was hit and/or died because I'd go into camera mode and walk into a ghost when I meant to move the camera up, or moved the camera around when I meant to run away. It makes no sense! And you can't change it!
I had a harsh lesson in manual save points (and Fatal Frame's combat) the first time I played. I hadn't seen a save point in an hour and then got killed by a ghost. Had to play the first 45 minutes or so, after the tutorial, all over again. That repeated over and over, the dying, if not with so long between saves. I made it about 30% of the way through and figured I'd gotten the gist of it. Read the rest of the story and watched the ending bits on YouTube. Glad I played a little bit of Fatal Frame. Also glad to cut it short.
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