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Oct 18th, 2013 at 07:23:04 - Final fantasy 13 (PS3) |
What a strange game! It's always funny to me when so many people independently arrive at the same conclusions or opinions about a game. For example, FFXIII doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game at all until 30 hours in. There is about a 10-hour "intro" and the first 30 hours in sum feel like a tutorial once you hit Chapter 11. Once I got to Chapter 11 at the 30-hour mark, I hit a snag where the denizens of the newly-open world seemed very difficult/I had not yet been forced to be very discerning about building my characters. I went online and saw that practically everyone was saying the same things I was thinking (30-hour tutorial, completely linear up until then, difficulty spike, etc. etc.). The funniest thing is that pre-Chapter 11 is SO linear that about 98% of people specifically stated "30 hours" to get there. It's like you cannot even deviate from the expected time frame.
On with the details...I'll divide this up into pre-Ch.11 and Ch.11 onward so far.
Pre-Ch.11: FFXIII says "I'm going to tell you a story and you're going to like it. There are gonna be like 1000 cut scenes to tell it. I'll introduce you all the main characters and to the world of Cocoon. All the characters will be very enigmatic and you will have questions about their backstories and motivations. I will slap you over the head with a bunch of lore, about the old war between Cocoon and the lowerworld, Pulse, and about ancient, ominous and powerful beings with odd names called fal'Cie. I will tell you how fal'Cie use humans to do their bidding, humans that get branded and become l'Cie. There are good and bad l'Cie, good ones from Cocoon that get branded by Cocoon's fal'Cie and bad ones from Pulse that get branded by Pulse fal'Cie called, you guessed it, Pulse l'Cie. Once l'Cie get branded, they have a Focus (mission) that they must carry out, or else turn into a Cie'th (the undead, sort of). You will learn all of this lore because I will repeat it over and over in cut scenes and data logs and random dialogue and you will enjoy it because the battle system is going to be insanely simple and easy and perhaps boring for a loooong time. Muwhahaha."
Ok, maybe I made the game sound a little more sinister than it is, but you get the point. The game oozes with story. Luckily I do enjoy it and think it builds characters very well. You spend enough time with them, and bit by bit, learn who they are and why they are doing what they are doing. Some characters are great from the get-go like Sazh. Others are hopelessly annoying like Vanille, the ever-optimistic cutesy girl whose in-world movements and battle sounds usually sound like she's orgasming. Seriously, the noises she makes cause me to question the game's rating. If I could turn her moans and grunts off I would. I'm not sure why JRPGs so often cast these sexualized or otherwise annoying little girl characters in such important roles. Vanille also narrates the game. The other annoying character is...I can't even think of his name because I never use him. He's the one who wants to be a hero and wants to save everyone all the time. He epitomizes some of the story's questionable logic because his motivations don't make sense. They're too extreme. Though I do like the story overall, a lot of it involves great leaps of imagination. The rest of the main cast I do like, Hope, Fang and Lightning.
Gameplay-wise, you run a completely narrow path from story event to story event, battling some enemies and finding poorly hidden treasures along the way. Let's do combat. The game s.l.o.w.l.y. introduces combat mechanics to you over 10 or so hours, and even then it doesn't fully unlock what you can do until 30. You are in control of 1 character in battle, in your team of up to 3. The others are AI controlled, but you can program them sort of like you could in FFXII. How it works is this: Each character has access to a number of roles (commando, ravager, sentinel, synergist, saboteur, medic). I forget how many you start with with each character, but it winds up being 3 main roles, and then at Chapter 11, it opens up and any character can take any role. So, for example, Hope can be a ravager, synergist and medic; Lightning can be a commando, ravager and medic; Fang can be a commando, sentinel and saboteur; etc. Your job in battle is not so much to assign commands via menus like traditional turn-based RPGs, but to play the tactician and select combinations of roles for your characters. With the 3 characters I just mentioned, for example, you can program up to 6 combinations, which the game calls "paradigms," to choose among in battle. So I'll begin with commando, ravager, ravager. None of them can heal, so if I start taking damage, I push L1 and select the paradigm for something like commando, ravager, medic. Whichever characters are assigned to the roles, they will switch on the fly and start acting according to their new roles. All the paradigms have catchy names so you can choose them quickly. commando, ravager, ravager is Relentless Assault and if you swap a ravager there for a medic it becomes Diversity. Anyway, you learn these over time.
More on roles: Different roles specialize in different things and give party-wise bonuses to their specialties. Ravagers specialize in 'staggering' opponents and their bonus makes other roles fill the stagger gauge faster. Stagger is an interesting mechanic. Every character, enemies and allies, has a stagger gauge. The stagger gauge fills when damage is inflicted on that character. It depletes whenever damage is not being inflicted. As the stagger gauge fills, the % of damage that character takes increases. Each character has a stagger point (say, 300%) at which the character becomes 'staggered' and the % of damage increase begins to rise much quicker, as (I think) all their defenses drop (no resistances) and you basically beat the hell out of the more-or-less defenseless enemy until the stagger gauge empties. The stagger gauge begins emptying as soon as the character becomes staggered. SO, ravagers make the gauge fill up quickly. This is great, except that in between attacks when the enemy is not staggered, the gauge empties. From ravager attacks, the gauge empties very quickly. So although they fill it quickly, they also empty it quickly. This is one great thing about commandos. Their attacks slow the stagger gauge's draining. Commandos are strong and provide boosts to damage. So if you have a commando and a ravager, the commando will inflict heavy damage and make the stagger gauge drain slowly, while the ravager will make the gauge fill quickly, offsetting the now-slow draining. If you had two ravagers, the gauge would deplete because they wouldn't be able to attack fast enough to sustain it, and thus the enemy may never become staggered. Sounds sort of confusing to write out, but makes perfect sense in-game. Suffice it to say, roles complement one another. The others are more straightforward. Medics heal, sentinels are tanks, saboteurs cast debuffs and synergists cast buffs.
Each character develops differently in each role. So for example, Vanille, Hope and Lightning all have medic as a main role. Vanille and Hope are the better medics as their characters inherently lean more toward magic. Lightning is also a very good ravager and commando, the latter of which relies on strength, meaning I can stack magic on Vanille and Hope, but that may not be a good idea for Lightning because then she'd be less useful when I needed her as commando. Also, each character has a "chrysarium" (spelling?!) which is where they spend points to learn skills. Each role has a chrysarium, which is like a skill tree. There they spend points earned in battle to unlock stat boosts and role-specific abilities. Vanille and Hope have access to better healing abilities earlier in their chrysariums than Lightning does. Vanille and Hope also will be learning things in the saboteur and synergist trees, respectively, that will have more magic boosts, whereas Lightning will be getting a lot of strength from her commando tree. Characters don't have levels in the traditional sense; they just upgrade stats and skills with points. Over time, characters become more specialized and can increase in role level. It becomes ever more expensive to upgrade stats and learn abilities the farther into the chrysarium you get, so you're sort of forced to specialize (or grind for points). I really like the chrysarium system, though I wish characters were EITHER more naturally different or more completely open. The way their development is now is that many are very similar to one another, but at the same time, I can't just mold them how I want. There are only slight differences between, for example, Vanille and Hope as medics, and even Lightning works fine as one. So they're very similar...yet Lightning can't be a synergist or saboteur and Vanille and Hope can't be ravagers (at least until Ch.11).
The same odd balance between freedom and restriction in character skill development exists in the game itself. As I've said, pre-Ch.11 is totally linear. Now that I'm in Ch.11, the game world opens up some and for the first time, I actually have an environment to explore. However, like the sort-of openness of the role system, I think the open world is an illusion too. But I'll talk more on the second portion of the game later.
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Oct 14th, 2013 at 09:55:42 - Incredipede (PC) |
I've decided to rename this game Incrediboring. I was at my dad's this weekend for family wedding stuff and played this for a couple hours on and off with my little brother. Even he didn't like it. Perhaps my biggest mistake was getting my hopes up that Incredipede would be more than it is. I didn't do any research on it before buying it, just grabbed it on sale for like $1.50 because I remembered my girlfriend telling me about it and that her friends were excited about it. My mistake, my mistake.
I thought the game was about creature building to solve puzzles, and it is, but to a very small degree. You control a creature called Quozzle or something similar. It's a single eyeball and has various appendages and muscles. Quozzle is awkward as hell to control, as difficult as Octodad but not as humorous. It's a simple app-style puzzle game where you traverse a path of levels in each world. In each level, you are supposed to try and get some object (a cherry, a rock, whatever mundane item it happens to be) and then get Quozzle to the edge of the screen. Quozzle's eyeball has to touch the object for it to be picked up. So that's it. Collect the item and reach the exit. Each level (through about 1.5 worlds at least on easy and normal) has only 1 or 2 objects and exists on a single screen such that the actual distance from beginning to goal is probably like 15 feet. The levels are small.
On easy difficulty, you do not get to manipulate Quozzle's limbs and muscles. Her shape is given and you just collect the item and reach the end. This is ridiculously boring. We played easy for a while until we couldn't take it anymore. On normal, you sometimes, but not always, get to build Quozzle. You start with the eyeball, then just drag from the eyeball to create limbs. Then you can create muscles that move either clockwise or counterclockwise. You basically have to figure out how to build her such that she is able to traverse rocks and lava and deal with wind and other obstacles. While initially cool to be able to build Quozzle, and I was beginning to have some hope for the game, you can do everything you're going to do the very first time you can build Quozzle. You don't get anything new ever. You just have to deal with some new obstacles. The thing is, none of the obstacles or objects to get are really challenging. They're mostly just irritating because of Quozzle's wonky movement and the fact that attaching muscles to turn clockwise or counterclockwise on various joints is just an exercise in how long your patience can last endless trial-and-error.
There is a level editor that I didn't play with and you can go online and see how other people completed the levels, how they built Quozzle. You can upload your completions for others to see. That's a pretty cool feature. You can make some neat-looking Quozzles, but with just appendages and clockwise/counterclockwise muscles, there's not a lot of options relatively speaking. Other games have done creature creation/manipulation way better. I'm thinking specifically of World of Goo and Spore. Even though I really didn't like Spore, the creature creator with its myriad options was super cool. Incredipede was just plain boring.
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Oct 8th, 2013 at 13:26:11 - EVE Online (PC) |
Quitting EVE after toying with it a couple months. All my free time is up and they are asking me to pay. Actually I have another 60-day card, but I'm giving it to someone who will get more out of it. About once a week, I think to myself, "Aw crap, my skills probably finished training a couple days ago. When is the last time I logged on?!" And I realize it's usually been a week. I just can't be bothered to log on and play! I just don't find it exciting, I don't have anything I want to do enough to go do it, outfitting a ship and doing pretty much anything takes a while and involves navigating a lot of menus.
On top of all that, about 10 days ago I got my ship blown up. Or rather, P got both our ships blown up. He'd lost a lot of ships, but I had been playing conservatively because, well, I don't wanna die. We'd devised a fun plan to play together where I would fit my ship with guns and armor and he would scout out hidden places to explore. I'd kill things and he'd salvage the goods that were left floating in space. We decided to warp to an anomaly in 0.7 space (1.0 is perfectly safe [high security, or hi-sec] and 0 is terribly dangerous [null-sec]). I guess we shouldn't have been anywhere but 1.0 or maybe 0.9 because we got obliterated. I warped in first to take out any enemies. There were about 30 of them and they toasted me. In my frantic state, I couldn't remember how to warp away from danger and my ship exploded. I should have warned P, but I think a part of me, since he brought me (lured me?!) into 0.7 space and certain doom, didn't warn him and he warped in right as I blew up and got blown up himself. He laughed his ass off and I was demoralized because I'd just spent 1/3 of my money upgrading all my weaponry and things just to go on this mission. P has had a mining ship and has been making money that way so when he dies it's not a terrible setback.
That death sealed the deal really. My character is currently in a replacement ship I bought somewhere between where my old one blew up and where all my stuff is stashed. I never even bothered to log in and fly back home. It would feel like starting over. No motivation.
So it turns out that what everyone says about EVE is true. EVE is hard. If you are still playing after 6 months, you'll play a long time after. I made it two. P said that he will stick around and try to get into EVE University still so that "I didn't just spend two months mining to make money." I don't want to do EVE University because it just seems like more time and more commitment. So long, EVE! It's been an interesting ride!
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Oct 8th, 2013 at 08:52:46 - Killzone 3 (PS3) |
Killzone 3 refines the gunplay that I felt was already excellent in Killzone 2. By "refinement" I mean it is more sleek and feels like every other AAA FPS in the 2010s. Killzone 2 had no auto-aiming and felt a little old-school in the gun department. I appreciate the crispness of aiming in 3, but it does feel like it bent to conformity. I think that's a big theme in the game's design, is just bending to what's hot. This involves a lot of Gearing like I talked about in my Killzone 2 entry, which is odd because I thought Gears of War was very unique. Maybe I should call it CoD-ing. I dunno. Either way, the production value was ramped up even higher. The game looks amazing and sounds great too. The "stealth" part through the Helghast wilderness was a visual wonder.
The story took a turn for the better too. There's more they try to tell in this game, which made it a little more interesting. You get to see some of the internal conflict in Helghast high command. Killzone 2 had these out-of-place Soviet-style propaganda posters up all over the Helghast city. They were weird because there wasn't really anything Soviet about the Helghast besides that they were very militarized. Like, no communist-leaning ideology, and I don't think they needed propaganda because everyone seemed to be on board with being a completely militarized society. Anyway, in Killzone 3, you meet the Helghast high command, or Senate or whatever they are called, and they are designed to look exactly like Nazis or Soviet-era Communists. I think this is silly more than anything since the society still has nothing to do with Nazism or Communism. One of the members even had a Hitler mustache. Go google pictures of the Helghast senate to see what I mean. Questionable artistic choices aside, their internal politics add a little depth to the story and that was a good thing.
They tried to tell more narrative with your squad too, not in the sense of backstory or anything, which I think is a shame and something that I would have WANTED them to do like Gears of War, but in terms of the relationships between the characters and having them display more emotions and things. This was still welcome, like Rico expressing regret for spoiler spoiler and Narville finally admitting his plans aren't always correct and letting Sev and Rico gung-go it. The only problem with this approach is that sometimes it interrupted otherwise exciting gameplay segments with cut scenes. I only didn't like this when those gameplay segments were too short. Other times it was fine, but the length of gameplay segments/frequency of cut scenes was disjointed.
Another aspect of the game that made it feel disjointed were many of the "gunner" segments. These were the times when you get in a vehicle that is 100% on rails and you just aim and shoot at things. This actually happened a lot and, while visually and kinaesthetically pleasing, was just sort of lame because you can never actually drive the vehicles and you have no control over anything in the segment except shooting at things. And all the weapons for all these vehicles are the same. Left trigger fires missiles or rockets. Right trigger is the machine gun. These didn't even have to be in the game. They just felt tacked on, there because they had to be because gunner segments are cool and that's what Call of Duty does. Since they did put them in, they should have been more open-ended and given the player more control over driving at least, or changed up the weapon types or something to add variety. There were also "did it because we have to" style stealth and horror elements. One level in particular has you stealthing through a gorgeous Helghan environment sniping and stealth-killing (another addition to the game, Gearing) enemies silently by pressing L1 when you get near them. Very out of place gameplay in the context of the rest of the game. The horror bit was lame too, felt forced, and reminded me exactly of when you go in the refinery or whatever in Gears and find the mutated spider thingies...what a coincidence, you're also in a refinery here and find mutated spider thingies!
There was *slightly* more gun variety in Killzone 3 than 2. They added some type of energy gun that was fun to use and...I think the bolt gun was new. They also let you detach machine gun turrets and carry them around, which was sweet. You can carry 2 primary weapons in Killzone 3 instead of K2's 1 primary. So you can always have 1 "heavy" weapon like the machine gun turret or sniper rifle and 1 normal weapon like a submachine gun or assault rifle, and then of course the pistol. This was an obvious improvement from Killzone 2 because you could switch weapons on the fly and expand your tactical repertoire to deal with a variety of situations.
Unfortunately though, again, there isn't much enemy variety. You fight all Helghast soldiers with different guns. This time there is a melee version that rushes you, some with lightning guns and one with a jetpack. Oh, by the way, I was excited to be able to use a jetpack. I think it was a feature on the box. You only get it for one level! It was lame. They also had tiny bits of levels with low gravity, which was also poorly done. Anyway, jetpack enemies. There were like no boss fights in the game, which was disappointing. There was a giant segment where you take down a big walker but it wasn't that great. Toward the end of the game, the levels get very corridor-y. You just go down corridor after corridor after corridor and fly an underwhelming spaceship gunner part for the finale. It was in the corridor-y parts that they bring the low gravity trick. The low gravity trick could have been cool if it was used for anything at all, but it wasn't. Enemies don't take advantage of low gravity and neither can you. If you jump you just float up in the air, a simple target for enemies to shoot down. Yet when your AI teammates jump, they don't float. Hmm. Enemies also float when you kill them, for whatever reason. Alive - grounded. Dead - float. Huh?
Oh yeah, before I forget, one more Gearing thing. You can revive your AI teammates and they revive you too. This was sort of stupid because half the time they wouldn't revive you and half the time they would. When they won't, they say things like "There's too much enemy fire" and "You're too far away." Most of the time I argue they definitely could reach me if they'd just run and do it. Then sometimes like they wouldn't revive you if they'd recently revived you and other times they'd do it 3 times in a row without a problem. I didn't like that there were no hard and fast rules so that I never could guess very well whether or not I'd be revived. Anyway, not that huge a deal.
Last thing I'll say to wrap up...the end sucked. It ends abruptly, no epilogue or anything. After a trilogy of games, I expect an epilogue or some wrapping up or something. Then there was a little part in the middle of the credits that I won't ruin, but was just dumb.
Killzone 3: fun game, worth playing especially if you like the series. Beautiful game. Killzone 2 is the better one. Read there's a sequel for PS4 on launch. Wonder how it'll compare?
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Oct 8th, 2013 at 11:49:58.
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