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Jan 8th, 2017 at 00:44:17 - DmC: Devil May Cry (360) |
I wrote a log for this, it got deleted, then I wrote a short version, but I don't like the short version because the game is worth more than 100 words. So here's a shot at re-writing the original...
DmC: Devil May Cry is a series reboot and sort of origin story for Dante. His mother was an angel and his father was a demon. They had twins who are Nephilim (half demon, half angel), Dante and Vergil. Over the course of the game, you'll save humanity from the Demon King Mundis, who is enslaving humanity through soft drinks that make people fat and stupid (Idiocracy, anyone??), controlling the world's major news organization, and driving countries into debt. Subtle social commentary...
Dante is still a sarcastic badass, but through the course of this game he "does what's right" and "falls for the girl," so he turns out to be pretty square after all. There is a lot of 'tude in the game, and the bosses like to curse at Dante. I was called all sorts of names that would have gotten me suspended from high school. Shocking for a video game, but the dialogue is fun and funny.
If you're playing DmC, you're playing for the stellar combat. It reminded me a lot of Bayonetta, which came out after the last Devil May Cry game, not just in the combat, but in the world and character designs too with the whole heaven/hell/limbo thing. Combat is fast and requires precision. There are a ton of moves and a ton of weapons. I think I had 8 or 9 weapons by the end of the game. Let me try to give a sense of the weapons and controls...
You begin with Dante's classic sword, Rebellion. Y and B attack, A jumps. X fires Dante's classic pistols, Ebony and Ivory. A number of variations on these (YYYY; YY [pause] YY; A+X; up, up, Y; etc., etc.) do special attacks. That's just his basic sword and guns. You get two more guns (press up to cycle), and "demon" weapons and "angel" weapons. The demon weapons are slow and strong, while the angel weapons are fast and good for AoE. Hold RT and press button combinations to use demon weapons (change weapons with d-pad right), and do the same with LT to use angel weapons. The number of moves is obscene, and each weapon has some specific purposes, so you'll use them all. It's hard to justify this amount of moves in such a short game. The pacing of getting new items and unlocking new moves is brisk.
DmC also features some simple, fun platforming RT+X grabs enemies and special platforms and pulls them toward Dante, while LT+X grabs and launches Dante toward them. Used in conjunction with double jump, jumping off enemies' heads, angel rush (briefly lunge through the air), and other moves, you can be airborne for a while in or out of combat.
Luckily, you get extra time to play around with the combat and platforming via secret stages unlocked by finding keys in limbo. There are platforming and combat time trials and some other types. I did probably 25% of them. The most challenging was a combat trial where you could only kill enemies if they were standing within ever-shrinking green circles. As one circle shrinks, another forms, so you constantly have to kite enemies around the arena from circle to circle, only attacking when they are inside a circle.
Finally, the visuals are stunning, especially in limbo. Limbo is like the real world, but fractured, turned upside down, and all out of sorts. Hard to describe. Watch a video of the first level and you'll get a sense of what I mean (this is the only "carnival" part). Other amazing levels include the night club and toward the end getting to Mundis's tower. The music is an industrial/nu metal soundtrack and gets grating after a while. After I played this for the first chunk of hours with headphones on, I had a massive headache, and I think it was largely the music. It's a loud game.
That's it! Definitely recommend if you want a big silly replayable action game with kickass combat.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jan 8th, 2017 at 15:28:40.
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Jan 4th, 2017 at 13:45:48 - Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist (360) |
I always like the Splinter Cell games because they provide reliable, fun, intense third-person shooter gameplay with heavy stealth elements. By this point, Ubisoft has essentially perfected their formula. Come up with some Tom Clancy story about military this and that and terrorism this and that. Sam Fisher is the only one who can save the day. Get a ton of fun gadgets and go mission to mission stealth killing terrorists until you foil their plot and save America. The story is always throwaway, the characters are always one-dimensional, but the gameplay is so awesome that the rest doesn't matter.
One thing I noticed in Blacklist that I don't remember in previous games is that it encourages replayability and multiple play styles. There are three: assault (loud run and gun), panther (silently stalk enemies and kill), and ghost (remain undetected, non-lethal takedowns). You get the most points for playing in ghost style because it's the hardest, and I spent most of the game in panther style. Each action earns points for whatever associated style (e.g., a non-lethal takedown will give you 100 points in ghost style, then when you shoot the next enemy after he sees you, you'll get 100 points toward assault style).
There are a million upgrades to unlock with all the points you earn from playing missions. I just played the main storyline straight through, no side missions or anything, so I didn't upgrade much. I did upgrade my base to max, but was using the same basic guns the entire game! On normal, you can still win like this, but I hope it's harder on the hard difficulty. I did unlock all the gadgets, but didn't use them all. There are various grenades and gas bombs, a drone that you can use to recon and shoot enemies, mines, cameras, goggles and goggle upgrades (oh yeah, I didn't unlock all the goggle upgrades!), and more random stuff.
I'm looking forward to buying Metal Gear Solid 5 at some point because that series has similar gameplay and I know that game is supposed to be amazing. So this is a good holdover till then! Though I hope there are fewer cut scenes than in MGS 4. I'm not sure which is worse--the infinite cut scenes in MGS 4 or the cheesy phone conversations Sam Fisher has with his daughter in Blacklist. Anyway, that's all! [shoots out the lights and fades into a dark corner]
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Jan 4th, 2017 at 10:57:06 - Life is Strange (PC) |
HUGE plot twist at the end of episode 3. My girlfriend had been saying that the game was interesting and she really wanted to keep playing to find out what happens, but that she didn’t feel invested in any of the characters. The end of episode 3 changed that. It had us thinking about some crazy butterfly effect scenarios. I had predicted generally what I thought was going to happen at that point, and I was right! Sort of. I just keep thinking back to the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode where Homer goes back in time through the toaster and keeps altering the future – one where it rains donuts, one where Flanders is dictator of the world, one where everyone is a lizard person, etc. For my part, I’ve was invested in the characters at least since the end of episode 2 (really touching scene).
One comparison we’ve made to The Walking Dead is that character emotions in Life is Strange aren’t animated that clearly. You can’t see subtleties well. It makes it hard to discern what exactly a character is thinking or feeling about another character or an event, or to gauge sincerity and other things. Allison says that makes her care less about them. I like how they present these archetypal characters (high school jocks and cheerleaders, punk rock girl, paranoid war vet, cool teacher, etc.) then turn a lot of them on their head so characters are never quite how you stereotype them.
Some of the rewind time puzzles are really clever. The game, while surprisingly mundane for large part, consistently surprised me with moments of “what!?” and “wow, that is cool!” One part has you and Chloe breaking into the principal’s office. I keep realizing what Max is doing (or what I’m making her do) with her time powers just as Chloe realizes it. Reminds me of when I realized Max had powers as Max was realizing it. It’s weird. In a good way.
We’re still trying to figure out exactly how the story branches from options we didn’t choose, but we’ll wind up online for that (did other players kill Pompidou??). Oh, one thing that is wonderful about Life is Strange is that because of the time rewind power, you can always choose every major dialogue option and see how it plays out. In fact, after making a choice and seeing what happens, Max will usually second guess her choice and wonder if the other option(s) would have been better. You rewind, choose another, see what happens, then just go with the one you think is best. It’s great because it’s actually part of what the character can do, not just a gameplay mechanic. Like, Max actually IS rewinding time to play out her other options and considering them all JUST LIKE YOU ARE. It’s so neat.
We beat the game last night, and in the end, we agreed that it was worth playing, beautiful art and music, great character development, and all around impressive narrative in a video game with the rewind time mechanic. Sure, Max and Chloe make some stupid choices that don't make sense (call the police, geez!), but given the amount of dialogue and characters, it's great. But, if it wasn’t a video game, the story would be sort of blah. I’ve read/watched/played a hundred things about time travel, the butterfly effect, and chaos theory. They’re almost always neat because these are almost inherently cool ideas. We liked the end, both of the murder mystery plot and the tornado plot, though Allison claims she called who the killer was in the first episode (She said it but also said a lot of other people!).
Also, the game started to drag on and on. I think it could have been several hours shorter. I was getting tired of the long dialogues between Max and other characters especially in the midst of really urgent events. Toward the end, these dialogues were really saccharine sweet and cheesy, and Max and Chloe’s “best friends forever” stuff was irking me. I guess we all had friends like that (or maybe you were that friend), but I don’t relate.
I don’t want to go into details about plot because spoilers, but we’ll be talking about it for a few days I’m sure. Our big question was which ending is canon? And also, we wanted to know like…why/how did Max get time rewind powers? And what happened to people and Arcadia Bay after the game is over? Some pretty big questions left open. But the character relationship stories were wrapped up. Yay!
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Dec 31st, 2016 at 15:11:11 - Life is Strange (PC) |
First impressions of Life is Strange are positive. It’s definitely something that was super hyped up for a long time before I’m getting around to it, which is sometimes a detriment to the experience. I immediately notice similarities to other media like Twin Peaks, Gone Home, and Telltale’s The Walking Dead. I also see a hefty dose of Steven King (found Cujo, Carrie, and The Shining references so far) and other Steven King-influenced media like Alan Wake. It’s actually very funny because I’d *just* finished Twin Peaks an hour before starting this and didn’t know they were related. Sidenote: The last chunk of episodes of Twin Peaks are terrible. Once you know who killed Laura Palmer halfway through Season 2, just stop watching and pretend it’s over.
We are 1.75 episodes deep into Life is Strange. Episode 2 is about to be over. You play as a high school girl at a private school for photography. She’s just left home to attend, but she did grow up there, and her old best friend is still around. Long story short, you find out you can rewind time. You, the player, realize that you can rewind time along with the character, and it is brilliant how they facilitate this double realization.
The high school (or I guess I should call it like boarding school) is fleshed out. The game explores the cliques, the teacher-student relationships, even the mysterious behaviors of the principal and the groundskeeper. Like Twin Peaks, everyone’s business is all interconnected. The security system that the school security guard wants to install might be a good thing because there was (maybe) an abduction and there is serious bullying and crime going on, but he might be a seriously creepy dude and seems paranoid after his service in the military. There are a lot of rich kids, it being a private school, and one of their families basically owns the school. Therefore, the kid can get away with a lot, and he does, and the principal tends to take his side on things.
Your character is looked at by others as an outsider, and this is definitely a theme of the game. It’s already dealing impressively with heavy stuff like drugs, sex, rape, assault, teen suicide, guns, broken families, depressed towns, and in the midst of all this there’s some supernatural stuff going on and this slowly growing feeling of dread that something bad is happening in the town of Arcadia Bay. I imagine the power is a metaphor for growing up or adolescence (episode 1 is called Chrysalis). Nonetheless, the game is beautiful, and capturing interesting moments in time through photography is encouraged.
One of the most impressive things is the feel of the high school and all the students. The writers did an outstanding job creating teenagers. Sure, some of the things they say are awkward or dated already (slang is like that, especially now), but it sounds quite authentic. They have their cliques, which are very archetypal here, and they all interact with one another in and out of class. There’s tons of drama that you can participate in, and many of your choices have consequences. These are usually small, but there are bigger ones too.
Can’t wait to see where this goes. There’s a lot to explore and items to poke around and look at, like Gone Home (but with less repetition), and it makes the world feel full and lived in. The pace is slow, and not a whole lot has happened aside from high school drama so far, but I expect it to pick up.
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