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Jan 15th, 2017 at 10:03:16 - The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (PC) |
Played this in one sitting last night. Honestly I had it confused with Everybody's Gone to the Rapture! So I really didn't know what to expect once it began. Some kind of detective story, which quickly becomes something of a murder mystery / missing child case.
It looks beautiful and immediately reminded me of a more dangerous Dear Esther. You play as a detective looking for a teenager named Ethan Carter who has been writing you fan mail. Somehow you know something is wrong with him, and you come to the tiny, remote mining town where he lives to seek him out. You don't take 10 steps before triggering a death trap, and then more death traps in the nearby woods. Follow the train tracks and discover a body. Wander through the field to the left, and find a strange artifact from outer space and go on a trippy chase through the woods following an astronaut. What the hell is going on here?!
You understand soon enough the gist of what's going on. Ethan writes stories, and you are encountering his creations, along with snippets of said stories to read. Through this interesting narrative presentation, you slowly learn more about the mining town, about Ethan's family, and about Ethan himself. Two main ways you uncover the narrative are through piecing together chronologies of deaths and solving puzzles. The death chronologies are far more interesting. You discover a body, then have to recreate the scene by finding the murder weapon(s) and various other items involved. Then once everything is in place, you are shown several images that you must put in logical order, and then the whole scene plays out once you order them correctly. It's pretty cool stuff.
The more I think about the narrative, the cooler it is. The suspense steadily builds over the course of the game, and the end throws you a surprise, one that makes the story very mundane. But on the other hand, that's cool because the game is short and sweet. The story doesn't get overly convoluted or outstay its welcome. It has something to say and it says it.
The downsides of the game include lots of walking and some irritating item hunting. I turned to a walkthrough one time because I couldn't find a rock. I looked for this rock for 15 minutes. I saw hundreds of rocks, many of which looked about the same size and shape as the one I was looking for. I also found a grenade, which was the same shape and size too, and I thought "aha! My character thought it was a rock, but it's actually a grenade I need!" but no, you do actually need a rock. Anyway, I couldn't find the damn thing, so I looked it up. There were a couple other moments where I couldn't quite see what I was meant to see as well. The environment is so nice though, and the music so excellent, that I didn't mind walking around looking for things, to a point.
So yeah. Nice little game with some interesting elements. Not mind-blowing, not required playing. Good way to spend an evening.
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Jan 14th, 2017 at 17:10:01 - South Park: The Stick of Truth (PS3) |
Tore through this the last couple days. This had no right to be as great as it is. I read the reviews and still approached with a grain of salt, but damn if this isn't like playing a South Park movie. It's hilarious (if you find South Park funny) and it's actually a fun RPG too.
My favorite thing about the game is all the memories it conjured. I watched South Park when it first came out. I think I was 16. I remember sitting in my mom's room on the couch watching it (not with my mom though; she tried to hate it, but eventually admitted she liked it). Every week, my friends and I tuned in to the new episodes. This lasted at least through high school, and I kept up with it pretty good through a few years of college too. I haven't really watched it since, but this was so familiar. So much from the old classic episodes are here. I helped Al Gore find ManBearPig. I rescued Mr. Hanky's children. I helped Stan beat up Shelly for stealing his iPhone. I shot magic missles with Cartman. You can look in all the boys' closets and poke around their rooms and see years of South Park paraphernalia.
The other best thing about the game is traveling to Canada. It typical South Park fashion, they poke fun at Canada, but you'll have to travel there for yourself to enjoy it.
The game is fun to play too. You explore the town of South Park and have varying access to people's homes and iconic stores. To enter a number of secret places, you'll need keys, but they all open up. Side quests are fun, but the real joys are the main story and also trying to "friend" as many people as you can on social media. You play as the "new kid" and your first quest is your parents telling you to go make friends. You meet Butters, who is role-playing a paladin, and he takes you to Cartman's castle, where you realize that the neighborhood kids are playing a humans vs elves larp. You get drawn into it, and the game goes from there.
Battles are turn-based, but active kind of like Paper Mario. Your moves require you to input various commands to make them successful, so the combat isn't button-mashing action-RPG fare or menu scrolling. It's solid, if easy. You choose a class. There is fighter, magician, ranger, and...Jew. I chose Jew because I was curious. Turns out all your class gear involves you doing more damage the more damage you've taken. Ha. I assume the other classes were straightforward. Anyway, you can equip anything you want and your class luckily doesn't restrict you, just determines your special abilities and standard equipment.
A couple things I didn't like about it include an early level cap. I did the last two or three areas at max level. I mean, sure I was already a badass who couldn't really lose, but still. Why not make the max level higher if people are reaching it so early? Give me some more ability points or something. Then, selecting special actions outside of combat is cumbersome. Every direction on the D pad enters a menu, and holding or pressing R1 and L1 also bring up radial menus. But you have to select with the left stick. Right stick doesn't do anything, and trying to select with the D pad brings up one of the other menus. There are more efficient ways to toggle special abilities that are less confusing. Aside from that stuff though, it's mostly great!
Definitely worth a play if you ever enjoyed South Park.
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Jan 13th, 2017 at 11:52:43 - Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (360) |
This is likely my final Assassin's Creed game until Ubisoft significantly shakes things up. It's hard to believe I've played five of these. AC3 was mediocre (and I didn't make a log for it, weird!), but I was intrigued by the American Revolution setting. AC4 was definitely better; in fact, I enjoyed a good portion of it, but the many things that annoyed me about it are just old AC staples.
For example, the hundreds of, or maybe even one thousand, collectibles (200 animus fragments, really?) is obscene! When I play AC games, I usually get most of the things because the platforming is pretty fun and there are rewards like money in chests or upgrades. This time though, after my first couple sessions, I vowed to ignore them unless they were right in front of me. Boy, did that speed things up! And even though I didn't upgrade half of the stuff that requires money, only found like one buried treasure chest--in short earned hardly any rewards from object hunting--neither Edward (main character) nor The Jackdaw (his ship) were ever that weak. I handled everything the story threw at me.
Doing all the extra stuff outside the main story would easily double the game's length. I'm looking at the "progress tracker" right now, and I completed 91% of the main sequences (I guess there are some other story-ish things I didn't do, probably at Abstergo), 11% of side missions (assassin contracts, etc.), got 32% of the collectibles, and completed 41% of the side activities (ok, not sure what the difference between side missions and side activities is). 58% "total synch." So yeah, double the length more or less.
It's difficult to like AC4 that much since I played the Witcher 3 DLCs before it. In fact, I hope that the Witcher 3 hasn't ruined open world games for me because it was so great. When I was first playing AC4, I really wasn't into it. In the Witcher, every side quest is very meaningful. They all add to the story, or to the world, or to your understanding of Geralt. Side missions/activities in AC, and pretty much all the extra stuff, add next to nothing. The assassin contracts sound something like this: "We found a templar. He is bad because he is a templar. Kill the templar." You can save pirates from guards, but you just kill the guards every time and the pirate joins you, but he is nameless. You can catch couriers, but you just chase them down and get some items. They are basically running treasure chests. It's disappointing that these extra things feel so instrumental to getting money and not fleshing out anything about the story.
And there is stealth in AC games, but I had just played Splinter Cell: Blacklist too, which is a really fun stealth game. AC4's stealth is simple and boring and unrealistic compared to Blacklist's, so I was like "well, this isn't fun."
But, after a while, you finally get your ship, The Jackdaw, and eventually get to wander the West Indies, and when the game opens up, there's good fun to be had. That's the big, new draw for AC4 is playing as a pirate and owning a ship. Instead of focusing on upgrading your hero like all the other AC games, in this one, you focus on upgrading your ship. The game takes place in the age of pirates, like early 1700s, and there are various colonial conflicts in motion. Therefore, you'll see all sorts of ships sailing about; some hostile, some not, but all affiliated with some country or another. As yours gets more powerful, you can attack and loot bigger and bigger ships. I never got to where I could take out the biggest, but ship battles are a lot of fun.
Other new things introduced by pirating are: attacking forts (this replaces the old attacking towers for territorial influence of previous games), finding sea shanties and listening to your crew sing (so cool!), recruiting crew members and using them to board enemy ships (very repetitive), using a diving bell to search wrecks for treasure (avoid sharks, jellyfish, and sea urchins!), scary storms on the open ocean, complete with rogue waves and sea devils that you have to sail straight into and avoid, respectively. Sailing from place to place listening to my crew sing about an old horse or girls in Spain or whatever was one of the best parts of the game. But by the end I was just fast traveling everywhere.
As with other AC games, I wish they would just give us a story of assassins and templars in a particular time period. I hate all the Abstergo metastory stuff. Its main consequence is to suck you out of the fantasy of being an assassin, which is a bummer every time. Yeah, please bring me back to the office where I work so that I can hold a PDA, walk slowly, listen to my boss refer to me as "you" because I'm nameless and it sounds really stiff and awkward, and I can hack my colleagues' (whom I never meet) computers. Some larger plot about templars running Abstergo and the COO goes missing from a conference. OMG who cares, let me get back to pirating!
BUT, I will say that Ubisoft loaded this metastory with jokes about game companies and working for one. The idea behind Abstergo Entertainment is really cool, especially after watching Westworld, and I would have much rather just learned more about Abstergo Entertainment rather than have it mucked up by a templar/assassin's plot.
The pirate story has its highs and lows. Ubisoft did a good job of building up Edward as a character, including his relationships with friends and family. There are several key moments of character development, like toward the end when he gets piss drunk and hallucinates how shitty he has been to a lot of people and vows to change his ways, and the end of the game is actually quite funny and sweet.
One thing that stood out to me is that after every memory (main mission), Ubisoft asks you to rate it out of 5 stars. Huh. Interesting. I wonder how useful of feedback they got from this. I rated a couple, then stopped. I don't recall seeing this in any other games (yet). Are there others that ask for player feedback in the game? All sorts of methodological problems with this method. Does how long you've played in one sitting affect your ratings? Who is more or less likely to rate? Anyway, done and done! Later assassins.
**edit** I forgot to add, and it's been running (ha) through my mind the last couple days, that I wish there were more skill involved in the platforming, and that there was more of it. The old AC games had a lot of cool platforming challenges that were tricky and required some precision too. AC3 introduced this "free running" system, which means you hold R1 while moving and your character will just run and jump and climb and do whatever platforming automatically. You don't have to do much of anything. A side effect of this is that I get serious trigger finger since I spend most of the game with my right index finger pressing R1 to move. I feel it's over-simplified a key aspect of AC, which is movement. And when it doesn't work, it's really aggravating because it's not really anything you're doing. Sometimes your assassin will get caught on a fence, or won't properly scale a ledge, or attempts to jump up to the right or left of the correct path. And all you can really do it re-push R1 or mash A too or back out of it and go again. But it should feel smoother than this. That is all.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jan 14th, 2017 at 16:39:37.
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Jan 8th, 2017 at 16:18:41 - The Evil Within (PS3) |
Went on a marathon the last few days to complete The Evil Within. I wasn't expecting a whole lot due to the game's average reviews. But they generally agreed that it was a solid survival horror game a la the original Resident Evil, with scarce ammo and tough enemies. I think I enjoyed it more than the norm. It's highly engrossing largely due to the environments, combat, and good pacing.
It wouldn't be survival horror without a mental hospital, mad scientists, sadistic experiments, and traversing sewers, churches, cemeteries, factories, power supply stations, and ruined city blocks. It definitely knows its influences. The story is a bit convoluted, and I finally started following it about 2/3 of the way through. You're constantly being sucked into different places and seemingly different times and realities following several different characters (two cops, an escaped patient, a doctor) and being hunted/toyed with by Ruvik, the antagonist. It makes some sense in the end, at least as far as your character goes, but I'm still not quite sure why Ruvik was doing what he was doing (I just read the Wikipedia...definitely didn't piece together the details while playing). Trust me, the plot is in left field, and that's not what will keep you interested.
What will keep you interested is the combat. I played on Casual difficulty instead of the normal one because I heard the game was punishing. I recommend Casual. It was challenging in some places without being frustratingly difficult. In typical survival horror fashion, you have some guns (I upgraded the base pistol and shotgun a lot) and find melee weapons. Ammo was scarce, but if you are smart and burn enemies with matches and use traps and other fun opportunities, you will easily conserve it, on casual at least. Melee weapons are one-time use, but will kill just about anything you hit. You get a sweet crossbow and can craft your own bolts. Bolts themselves are scarce, but the crafting components are abundant. I had like 150 scrap parts by the end of the game (enough for 50 bolts, which is a ton). There are explosive bolts, bolts that freeze enemies, bolts that are like flashbangs, and a couple other types. Super useful.
You get crafting components from dismantling traps. In addition to Ruvik's experiments, he enjoys laying traps. If you see traps or bombs before they kill you, you can hold X to dismantle them and get crafting components to make bolts. There are all sorts of traps to get killed by: bear traps, barbed wire traps, tripwires, sticky bombs, sirens, etc. You can also lure enemies into some of them, or like shoot a sticky bomb as an enemy walks by. Great fun. There's a large stealth element to combat, and one thing you can do is toss bottles to lure enemies. Used in conjunction with traps, with stealth kills, with burning bodies, all fun ways to deal with enemies.
There are a lot of boss battles in The Evil Within, and most are pretty unique. My favorite was the long-haired girl (I think it's Ruvik's dead sister, Laura, or some monster version of her). You fight her two or three times and have to run her through a gauntlet of fire trying to shoot switches and mash buttons to catch her in jets of flame. It is INTENSE (which describes a lot of this game). I also thought the squid boss was cool, once I figured out that it camouflages itself. Before that, I couldn't figure out where it had gone, and it kept popping out little exploding worm babies endlessly. A couple boss fights are pretty typical survival horror stuff (e.g., the chainsaw-wielding butcher and "locker-head" which seems like a bad Pyramid Head ripoff). And still a couple are just plain boring and easy, like the one on the bus, and, unfortunately, the final battle on rails against Ruvik (although leading up to Ruvik is a harrowing series of wave attacks where I imagine many people will run out of ammo!).
Finally, the various environments you go to are very cool, topped by the in-progress destruction of Krimson City by Ruvik in the last several chapters. The city destruction is impressive. Otherwise, the game has a number of graphical shortcomings, such as slowly loading textures, stuttering after loading screens (I had one full-on freeze), and random other bugs. One time I had a bottle for a hand for a couple hours. It was the bottle that never broke.
In the end, you'll also be hunting for ammo and green gel, Evil Within's version of XP that you can use to upgrade weapon capability, ammo storage, sprint duration, health, and other random stuff. The upgrades are super useful and you'll want to poke around for green gel and hope you discover a lot of Madonna statues. Shoot these to get keys to unlock safes in your safehouse and get goodies. All in all, thoroughly enjoyable game. I haven't played survival horror like this in a long time, probably since the last time I replayed Silent Hill a couple years ago, and Resident Evil 4 before that. It's divided up into 15 chapters and I clocked about that many hours (probably a couple more due to dying), so easily playable in short chunks and nicely broken up.
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