Now Playing: Check-in Edition

Things have been quiet here this month. You may have noticed. Time has been fighting against me. And losing. Like it always does. But it’s still putting up a fight. And that has cramped my schedule something fierce. I had started another post for this blog, a follow up on my old post on New Japan Pro Wrestling’s G1 covering this year’s tournament, only to run out of time to make anything notable about it before the G1 actually started. So it’s been a while, with no new content. And I don’t have the time to make anything new and notable.

So instead I’ll make this. A quick little number on what’s been going on in the games I’ve been playing. And hopefully it’ll be amusing for you. But to be honest, I’m mostly doing this for me. Because posting is a thing I want to keep doing, and when there’s something you want to keep doing, it’s best to make it a habit and then continue the habit, even as times get tight. So me posting this little thing now makes it more likely I’ll be in the frame of mind and decision-making capabilities to be making more serious posts later, capische? That’s a word I used. It means something. I think.

Whatever, let’s go.

Disgaea

You can check the full write up on this thing here. In that post, I highlighted how my original plans were to largely eschew the Item World grinding and focus on the main plotline through the game. That hasn’t exactly worked out. I’ve found myself stuck in this loop. I go into the Item World to make a piece of equipment I like much stronger. But if you do good at setting off Geo Chains, you can win more items within the Item World. And some of those are also pieces of equipment I like and want to make stronger. So I go in there. And get more items I really like and want to make stronger. And so on. The item world offers really complicated combat setups and battlegrounds, so I’ve actually been really enjoying the grind. Is it even really grinding if you’re having a good time with it? I don’t know. Going by definitions I’ve established before, probably not. So there. Disgaea’s not grindy at all.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy

I dated someone who was super into Fullmetal Alchemist. Hence how this game ended up in my collection. This was my camping game, recently. Because the DS I’ve been using for travel has been the worse for wear and it’s L and R buttons don’t work well anymore, and this game uses L and R for functions you can do on the touchscreen, so it actually worked out very well. I have multiple DSes. For reasons. It’s all Nintendo’s fault.

Anyways, this is about the sort of game you’d expect if you had an anime license and a bit of creativity but very little time and money. It’s a two hour game that runs through the entirety of the 51 episode Fullmetal Alchemist anime (the original one, not the Brotherhood version/Manga). So as you can imagine, it sums up quite a lot and doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’ve already seen the anime. But I have to say, I found playing an FMA beat ’em up rather refreshing, even if it was simple as all get out. And didn’t explain functions vital to progression in game. But more things should have beat ’em ups attached to them. I kind of miss beat ’em ups.

Xenoblade Chronicles

I really like Xenoblade Chronicles overall. Beautiful scenery and an excellent soundtrack, mostly likeable characters, Dunban and his sexy self, it’s a really great game. I’ve started it up a few times over the years, but never got all that far into it, comparatively. Because I always focus on doing all the great many sidequests the game has. The copious amounts of sidequests. The hideously huge amount of sidequests. I’d get started, get focused on doing absolutely everything, and then burn out 10-20 hours in and give up on it.

This time, I’ve taken some advice telling me that the sidequests are toxic, and played the game only completing the quests that were on my way or particularly interesting to me. And it feels like a completely different game that way. Plot’s progressing at a good clip, I’m constantly seeing new areas, it’s a lot more fun this way, overall. It’s always been a great game, but I’m feeling now that I never really got to see it at its full potential until I stopped worrying about the sidequests. It’s really as transcendent as its reputation suggests, now.

Way of the Passive Fist

Speaking of beat ’em ups, here’s a beat ’em up where you barely beat any of ’em up. It’s a game that grabbed me by its concept and how well it seemed to play out in video. You don’t have any regular attacks, and instead have to parry, dodge, and poke your way through a goon-filled wasteland, letting your enemies tire themselves out with their own attacks until you can simply knock them over. Each specific enemy has their own specific attack pattern, and streams can get quite complicated, particularly when you have a number of enemies packed in against you.

The game was fun, and lasted a couple of hours, but I felt it would have worn out its concept if it was any longer than that. It has just enough content to fill those hours, but even then, it started to feel a little stale by the end. Still, though, the combination of beat ’em up with a reaction type of gameplay similar to rhythm games was certainly not bad for most of it.

Scribblenauts

Scribblenauts is an amazing game. That doesn’t make it a good game, but it is really impressive the amount of content and viable options they gave you here. The central idea is that there’s an in game dictionary that is really quite expansive, and anything that’s in there, you can just create and insert into a scene to try and solve whatever puzzles or challenges are placed ahead of you. The amount of things you can work with are huge, and the game really opens itself up for some delicious lateral thinking. Like, for example, one mission has a bunch of soldiers against a group of zombies, and your goal is to get all the soldiers zombified before they kill all the zombies. You could set up a wall blocking their shots, and just remove it when the zombies get close. Or you could set up a series of blocks and ramps to give the zombies cover as they approach. Or you could just do what I did, and create a new zombie and just drop it right on the soldier’s heads. It also has a lot of possibilities for self-imposed challenges, and really shines when you get into parts where you’re expected to solve the same puzzle three times in a row with different solutions each time. And this is all in a DS game.

I just which it was more fun to play. The amount of things you can create is staggering and the puzzles offer ample opportunity to use them, but it is so fiddly and such a pain to control, and it relies on a physics engine that seems to hate all logic and good sense. The mental work you need to do is great, but I’ve had so many perfectly valid solutions ruined because they game just wasn’t taking input the way it was supposed to or something weird happened with objects knocking into each other. It’s a shame. This could have been so much more, had it had a better game behind it’s concept.

#LoveYourBacklog 2021

Normally I don’t take part in these blogging community things unless someone delivers them to my doorstep, because I am a stone cold lone wolf that only plays by my own rules, or something like that.  But, well, Solarayo at Ace Asunder and Kim at Later Levels are running a #LoveYourBacklog challenge yet again this year.  And, well, you may have noticed posts have been a bit thinner, because I’ve been a bit busy with life stuff.  And I’m still busy with life stuff.  And I’m working on the next post in the Persona 3 retrospective, and those take some time, and I don’t want to do another two weeks between posts.  So I need some quick content here.  And I also really need to learn to get more comfortable with my backlog.  To have affection for it.  So maybe this would be a good exercise for it.  In any case, I’ve got reasons.  The sort of reasons a big sexy behemoth of the mind like me would have.  So let’s get down to it.  Let’s go through this exercise, wherein I learn to love the big, giant game base that’s taking up so much space in my virtual library and my soul.  

Let’s go!

Ok, so first, gotta lay the groundwork.  Expose just how large my backlog is, and… ugh.

Image courtesy of Later Levels

Ok, don’t like looking at that.  But that’s what this is for!  Learn to love it!  Anyways, I’m at 533, to be exact.  Although what I consider my backlog is a bit different than most people.  I’ve mentioned it some times around here, but years and years ago, I decided to try and playthrough all my games, beating every single one I could, by console generation, starting with the earliest.  I used to do it all the time as a kid, so I figured I’d give it another try as an adult.  Give some time to all my games, play stuff that I wouldn’t otherwise, build up my experiences and appreciation, and all that.  Thing is, as a kid, it didn’t take all that long.  As an adult, I have more money, and therefore, a lot more games.  And much less free time.  And I’m better at games, so I can actually stick through the whole thing rather than getting stuck and giving up partway through.  So it’s taking me years.

Anyways, what I consider my backlog are games that I haven’t completed as part of that quest to beat all my games organized by console generation.  So, a lot of them are games that are completely untouched, but there’s also plenty that I’ve already played and possibly beat, some more than once, that I still consider as being on my backlog because I did it outside of the console generation I was working on at the time.  I’ve gone through every game I owned at the time I started this quest, so that 533 number is just a shocking sign of just how many games I’ve bought or otherwise acquired in the past years.  I’ve slowed down on that quite a bit, starting February 2020, but man, I really need to pump the brakes even more.  Also notable is the composition of that backlog.  Of those 533 games, 142 are on consoles.  Almost 400 of those are in my Steam, GOG, or UPlay lists on PC, where the PC gaming ecosystem, between deep sales and bundles and giveaways and whatnot, makes amassing an absolutely massive collection of games very, very easy.  And that’s not even counting the games I have in my Amazon Games and Epic Games lists, where they constantly, unceasingly throw free games at me.  The console games, I’m trying to beat them all, while I’m only expecting myself to give a try to all the Steam, GOG, and Uplay games.  I put money towards most of the games on there, somehow, so that feels like I’ve made a commitment to try them, but if I’m not into it, I’m not expecting myself to beat all of those.  Amazon and Epic, it’s whatever I feel like.  I would never be able to keep up with the rate they give me more games if I expected myself to touch them all.  

Anyways, from that, it’s question time.  Or, more specific topic time.  Yeah.  That.

1: The effect that the 2020 apocalypse has had on your backlog.

Not a whole heck of a lot, really.  Here’s the thing, the coronapocalypse hasn’t exactly given me more time to spare.  I still work, my commute was never that big a deal, and a lot of the outside the home stuff I used to do, I replaced it with some other non-video game stuff.  I’m pretty much on the same schedule as far as gaming goes.  2020 has been the best year I’ve had in getting on top of my backlog in years, but I think that has more to do with some decisions I’ve made pre-pandemic to, you know, stop buying so many freaking games until I’ve played the ones I’ve got.  

2: The oldest game in terms of release date.

On my backlog, at least what I consider as such, the oldest game I’ve got that I haven’t worked off yet would be Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.  I didn’t have a computer as a kid, and didn’t get a solid gaming battlestation until well after I started my ‘Play all the Games’ quest.  So I used to be really interested in classic PC gaming, this whole sphere of my favored entertainment medium that I really missed out on.  And I’ve tried a bunch of them, and it turns out, I really don’t like most classic PC games.  I don’t know that I’d be able to eloquently explain why, I think I’m spoiled by modern games and the old school PC ones don’t have the nostalgia factor with me that makes one willing to look past the chinks and flaws and whatnot that old school console games do.  Although I’m able to pick up a lot of old NES games that I never had history with, and thus shouldn’t have nostalgia for, and have a grand time with them, but not old PC games.  For whatever reason.  Anyways, I’ll give it a try at some point.  Can’t say I’m holding out a lot of hope for it, particularly given what I’ve heard about how complicated this game gets, but hey, maybe it’ll surprise me.  

3: A game you bought on day one, only to not play it.

Nothing!  Hahahahahaha!  This is one area in which I’ve defeated you, backlog!  I rarely ever buy games day one.  If I do, that means it’s one I’ve taken a particularly strong interest in, and I play it as soon as I get the chance.  So, no, I can’t think of a single game, in all my glorious life, that I’ve bought on day one and then hadn’t started up soon after.  

4: The game which has spent the most time on your backlog

There’s been some long ones.  Looks like the absolute longest would be… Hitman Absolution.  Purchased in 2013.  7-8 years ago.  That’s… rough.  I’ve got to get on that.  I remember playing the tutorial level of that, but then didn’t dig the changes to some of the mechanics, so I didn’t go any farther.  Whelp.  Let’s knock that one up the list, a bit.  See how it tastes now that it’s had some time to age.

5: The most recent addition to your library.

The Batman Telltale Series!  I dig Batman.  Telltale’s writing style wears a bit thin on me, but I heard it wasn’t that bad in Batman, and given that it’s a more optimistic subject matter than most of the licenses they scraped up, I was hopeful it’d avoid the “Everything’s horrible now because we say so” problem a lot of their games often ran into.  I’m kind of looking forward to this.  But I don’t have space for it in the schedule, so onto the backlog it goes.  That’s kind of a problem.  Part of the reason I’ve been better in 2020 is that I started teaching a class on personal finance as part of my case management offerings, and teaching stuff is a really great way to polish it yourself, and one of the major lessons in there is to not do that sort of thing where you’re buying stuff just because it’s accessible only to let it sit on a shelf for a while instead of actually enjoying it.  So I’ll need to make sure I’m getting into that in the near future, to justify that purchase.  

6: The person responsible for adding the most entries to your backlog, due to their good recommendations.

That would be, back when they were active, the Super Best Friends let’s play group were the biggest one.  They put out a lot of content, and did a really great job of covering relatively unknown obscurities, up and coming indie games, and whatever hotness they were most passionate about rather than constantly hitting up the most popular new games that would get them the most views, and they opened my eyes to a lot of great things.  Otherwise, I’ve gotten a fair few added to my library by my fellow bloggers, like Red Metal and AK.

And……….. that’s that.  Do I love my backlog yet?  No.  Not so much.  But it made for an interesting conversation piece here.  That’s got to be worth something, right?

Too Many Games

Here’s something of an absolute nonproblem. I’m starting to think I have just too many video games. Sometimes, I look at the size of my library, and the expectation that I’m going to actually play all these things, and I don’t know how I’m ever going to get near to do that.

I’ve been collecting games all my life. So at the point when, years ago, I started this quest I’ve mentioned several times here, to beat every game I own, or come as close to it as I can, the task was already staggering. But still feasible. After I started that, however, I got myself a gaming-capable pc. And that changes things. It is ridiculously easy to build up a massive digital library on PC with little to no investment. It started with the Steam sales, letting me build up a pretty big library for cheap. Then I got into Humble Bundle, which get’s you buying curated collections of games for really cheap, oftentimes getting the one game I wanted on there along with a bunch of others for less than the usual price for that single game. And it pitches in some to charity too, while you’re at it! Can’t complain with that. Oh, and they give away free games every once in a while if you subscribe to their newsletter. All well and good. But then one day, Amazon started giving away five games a month if you link your Twitch account with an Amazon Prime account, plus extras. Daedalic Entertainment and SNK both seem to be dropping big chunks of their back catalog on there basically whenever they feel like, on top of the usual Amazon collection. Then Epic Games came around, offering 1-3 free games every week. And now it’s starting to get overwhelming.

At this moment, I own 410 games on Steam, of which I’ve only bought 108 directly, and the rest came from Humble Bundles, Humble’s free giveaways, or the occasional gift or offer. I have 182 games on Twitch, all given through that Amazon Prime connection. I have 90 on Epic Games, all of which I got through their weekly giveaways. I’ve got a more modest 40 on GOG, many I bought myself, in addition to the freebies they offer, free games on purchase threshhold, copies they make of games in your Steam account, and one gift. On Uplay, I’ve got 24, from one Humble Bundle, some free ones they gave away, and copies of games I got through other clients that require a Uplay log in. On EA Origin, I’ve got 16, all Humble Bundle gains or games they once offered for free. There’s a decent amount of overlap in those numbers, but still, a massive amount of games in my digital PC library. Which isn’t even considering my sizable console games collection. Although, as an odd point, at this point I’m pretty sure I own more games digitally for PC than I do games for my console, in spite of the fact that I’m generally a console player. And between Twitch Prime and Epic Games, I’m adding double digits numbers of games to my library each month without dropping a dime (well, outside of my Amazon Prime subscription, which I’d be maintaining even without the Twitch deals.) I don’t even play through double digits worth of games each month.

I feel like what it means to own a game has shifted. During my developmental years, new games were somewhat of a rarity, while time to play was more ample, so my peers and I absolutely consumed games, beating them over and over again, exhausting their content, overcoming every challenge. As I came older, I was able to afford more games, but had less time to spend on them, and games themselves were designed more as full experiences in isolation rather than things that could sustain the kind of repetitive depth-plunging play of my youth, so I had more breadth of experience in games but less time spent with most individual games. Now, driving by the likes of the backlog producing deep and wide sales, the bundling, the free giveaways, etc., I feel like a lot of the games marketplace, especially Humble Bundle, Twitch Prime, and Epic Games, or itch.io’s recent 1,000 games deal are creating a games culture where you have libraries of games. You’re not intended to, and for many partaking of it, it’s not even possible to, play absolutely everything in there. But digital keys don’t take up any space, they don’t need upkeep, and as long as your machine can run it, they don’t degrade, so you have it in your collection, and who knows, maybe one day it’ll come up in conversation and get you interested or you’ll play something else by the makers and want to come back or you’ll just find a really weird itch that needs something particular to scratch. And there’s something to be said to that, too, having the virtual library where you may not check every book but they’re all there if you need it. I recently had the classic FPS Strife come up in a conversation I was following, describing how groundbreaking it was at the time. I would never buy the game myself. It’s too old, probably blown past by industry standards, etc. But, given that context, I’m kind of curious to check it out. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s right there in my Twitch library.

As I said, sometimes it’s overwhelming. I’ve still got this quest, beat all the games I own. And this is making that quest impossible. I’m also actively avoiding bundles now, even when it has games I want in it. I really don’t want to be making my Steam library run away any more than it already has. I just have too damn many games. But that’s really a problem with me, and my perceptions, and how I’m approaching it. It’s not a problem with all these agencies wanting to throw games at me for free, and all these developers happy to get into my library and take whatever financial benefit they do from the Humble Bundle/Twitch Prime/Epic Games giveaways. It is kind of ridiculous of me to be complaining that I have just too many games that I got for free or alongside games I was wanting to buy anyways that I got to pay an even lower price than usual for.

It does mean I’m going to have to rethink my quest though. Not cancel it, because I’ve been enjoying how it structures things for me. But it needs to adapt to the new realities of the online personal library the industry’s using, at least in part, now. So far, my thoughts are to keep it as normal for all my console games, as those are all things I’ve invested in. Same thing with any PC game I’ve actually paid directly for, or the games that were the reasons I bought a given bundle. Those are all getting beaten. I have my challenge to myself. The hundreds of other PC digital games…. well, at least my Steam list, I’d like to at least give everything a try. Maybe not a full beat, but either play it until I tire of it or at least give it a sample. I’d like to do that with the UPlay list and EA Origin as well, as those are finite. Those aren’t getting added to. I’m already most of the way there on my GOG.com library, outside of the games there that are duplicates of those in my Steam library, so… good show I guess. As for the ever expanding Twitch Prime and Epic Games, I’d really like to do the same thing I’m doing with Steam, at least sampling of giving a run to everything on there, but I don’t know if it’d be possible to keep up, the rate they add games. I’ll probably just do what probably everyone else is, and play if I’m interested, leave it if not, and not sweat the growing size of the lists there, as it’s really a personal library I can check things out from whenever, and not a backlog. And although I have this drive to beat everything I have, likely driven by the way things were in my past, it doesn’t really fit the environment we’re in now. And I need to grow comfortable with that.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an hour before my next commitment, and I got Cultist Simulator from Twitch Prime a while back, and that game is absolutely baller. I need to get some of that on.

Eyes on Antihero

So, in general terms, an antihero is a bad person who’s really a good person.  It turns out, an Antihero is also a video game.  Who knew?!

Me.  I knew.  Man, I rule.  And now you do too, because I’m telling you about it!

So, Antihero is a turn-based strategy game in which you run a thieves guild.  In said guild, you manage a team of units to help you yank, gank, and shank, all in the name of robbing the rich to give to… yourself.  You’re like half of Robin Hood, here.  To be honest, the ‘hero’ part of Antihero doesn’t really show up in the game.

Antihero is one of those games that’s simple in concept but really solid in execution.  It plays a lot like a board game, honestly.  Except it’s a video game.  It’s a video board game.  Yes.  You play in a semi-randomized section of one of the three types of Englands that show up in fiction (it’s the Sherlock Holmes-type, for reference) and they have you and a CPU or other player facing off against each other, racing to collect enough victory points to win the game before your opponent does.

One of the things that I really like about Antihero is the way that your strategy has to evolve as you go along with the game.  Each game moves really quickly, and is over in about 15-20 minutes at most, yet there’s a really clear progression in strategy there.  In the early game, you might be able to make a really strong showing of it by denying your opponent access to resources and blocking them from scouting into your side of the board, while you snatch up and burglarize as much as you can.  If you just stick with that, though, you won’t be able to keep up as they start being able to move units through more territory and the places you’re stealing from run out of stuff to steal, so you’d better have built up a solid base of resource generation to keep you going by the mid-game.  And then in the end game, it becomes very difficult to keep units on the board but both sides should usually have enough to keep pumping more out, so it turns into a very aggressive war of attrition, and the guessing game of where to hit them hardest and where to place your own traps ends up ruling the day.

There’s two major resources to secure; lanterns, which buy you upgrades, and coins, which buy you units.  Upgrades give you access to more units, improve on their capabilities, and boost your resource generation.  You’re not typically limited as far as how much you can get per turn, but every upgrade makes additional upgrades that turn more expenses, and buying units increases the price of other units of the same type.  Another layer of strategy there, sometimes you’re going to be best served by spending your wealth on a number of units, while other times you should spread them out between turns.

I particularly like the way units are designed to deal with the way strategies change throughout the course of the game.  To start with, you’ve got your master thief, who’s basically the queen of the chess board.  This guy/gal is the lynchpin of everything you’ve got going on.  They’re in charge of scouting, stabbing, and stealing.  One of the big strategic keys of the game is working out just when to upgrade their capabilities over the capabilities of the guild as a whole.  Your units can only operate in the locations you’ve scouted, burglarizing is your man source of resources in the early/mid game, and your attack capabilities without the master thief’s contributions has a strict application limit, so a lot of your momentum swings on how you use your master thief.  This unit gets the most upgrades, as well, and you’re able to increase the amount of moves you can make in a turn, the damage they do, the amount of coins you get activities, the types of places you can steal from, etc.  They’ll get progressively more powerful as the game goes on.  And, they retreat back to your hideout at the end of every turn, making it impossible for the opponent to attack them directly.

Then you’ve got your urchins.  Urchins are pretty much the worker units of other strategy games.  Have them invade businesses, and they’ll get you benefits for it.  Usually that’ll be resources you get every turn, but sometimes it can be upgrades to your units, reduced costs, or even victory points.  They’ve usually only got one application, but it’s one that’s useful the whole game through.

Your gangs are another one of your backbones.  These are the things that make people hurt.  Got some goons blocking your way?  Give them a good drubbing.  An assassination target?  Send the gangs after them.  They can kick urchins out of buildings, too, paving the way for you to take hold of it yourself.  You get to upgrade them every time they succeed at doing something, building up the damage they do, the amount of urchins they can remove at once, or the amount of money they make when they succeed at something.  These guys are kind of funny, so absolutely vital in the early game, but they end up dying by the droves in the late game, so it’s hard to build them up much then.  Even so, the ability to remove urchins from locations is vital to managing your opponent, and even when they can only do one before dying, it’s still the most cost-effective way of doing so.

Thugs can block off areas.  Neutral thugs will pop up randomly or around assassination targets over the course of the game, but if you want to keep your opponent from scouting out a certain area or reaching a certain resource, you can send a thug of your own to block it off.  They don’t have any offensive capabilities of their own, but you can make your opponent waste some moves in dealing with them, which is crazy effective in the early game.  As your opponent scouts more and more territory, their usefulness starts to wane, but you can always also add them to a gang to boost its health.

Saboteurs are one time use units that are pretty cheap.  They’re the only other unit other than the master thief that can scout, so if you need to extend your reach but the head honcho is busy, they can at least reveal some more street for your other units to prowl.  Their true utility, however, comes in the traps they lay.  Got a business where you just need to make sure your urchins are unmolested?  This guy can plant a bomb there.  It’ll last for a couple turns, and the first unit that tries to mess with that building will be stunned.  It makes the master thief lose all their remaining moves, and it leaves gangs and truant officers helpless in the streets, waiting to be picked off, all while your happy urchins are still there, unfettered.

And then you have truant officers and assassins.  Both one time use units, the best at what they do.  Both the most expensive units available.  Truant officers will roll up, and in the creepiest way possible, remove all the urchins from a building.  Assassins will strike for a whopping six damage, more than any other unit in the game and enough to slay almost anything except for the later assassination targets, before vanishing.  Both are only available by the time you reach the late game, and the economy on them isn’t great, as given enough time you could have a gang do the same work for much less cost, but smart use of them can really turn the tide for you.

To win the game, you usually need to secure six victory points.  There’s a bunch of ways to do that, but there’s three that’s available on every map.  You can spend lanterns on bribing someone to get a victory point, although the cost of doing so increases each time you do.  You can fulfill contracts for assassination, taking out random targets with more health than you typically have available at that point, although again, the amount of health they have will increase every time one of them falls.  And you can fill a church with urchins, learning enough from confessions to secure blackmail, but this is the only type of victory point you can lose, so you’ll have to defend those urchins until the game is won.  Scenarios may also present you with other means of scoring victory points, such as by stealing a ship’s cargo, sneaking into a masquerade, or overcoming a palaces security and burglarizing its jewels.

The game has a campaign mode that’ll take you through all of these, as it tells the story of master thief Lightfinger as he ousts all the other thieves guilds from NOT LONDON and establishes his control over the city.  It also has an exhibition mode that I spent a fair bit of time in, and a multiplayer mode that might mean something to me if I ever played these things with anyone else.

All in all, I want to call back to what I said earlier.  It’s a really simple concept with a very solid execution.  I had a lot of fun with it.  There’s not a whole lot of meat there, though.  The campaign mode will take you maybe 3 hours, and when you’re done with that, you’ve seen pretty much all the game has.  Short games don’t bother me at all, and it’s really good for a quick bit of fun, but if you’re expecting something with staying power, this is not it.  It is really satisfying to get a good strategy going, and although you will probably use the same basic model throughout, the different scenarios and actions of your enemies will require a fair bit of variation to that.  It’s good for my thinking cap, is what I’m saying.

Being the Butt of the Joke: The Bard’s Tale

Humor is not always nice to everyone.  Humor has to be subversive in some way to find its mark.  It has to go against expectations, explicit or implied.  And targeted humor goes against the expectation that we’re all good to each other, which, as it turns out, is a pretty core one in this whole human journey we’re on.  Because we’re all good people.  So yeah, making fun of people is one of the more effective ways to get a chuckle going.  Because we’re all bad people.  Making fun of people in real life, when they’re not in on the joke, is kind of a crappy thing to do.  Making fun of fictional people, though, what’s the harm in that?

Aside from making you feel bad for the guy you’re probably not supposed to feel bad for, normally, not much.  Video games bring a new dimension to that, though.  That guy, everyone’s butt monkey, the target of every joke even though he’s not actually all that bad?  What if that was you?

At least, that’s what I ran across in my playthrough of The Bard’s Tale.  I was going to go for a review, as I’ve been doing around here, but the game’s not enough to make for an interesting review.  “Competent but kind of bad” pretty much sums it up.  The only really notable point is the game’s humor.  It has a lot of it.  It’s in an odd Scottish style, which I wouldn’t have known was a thing before playing it, that may not land with a lot of people, but it does make the humor unique, at least.  A lot of it is at the expense of the titular Bard.  Which, ok, sure, he’s not a good person.  He could use a good few pokes at him.  Thing is, though, he’s also you.

And that leaves me curious for how all these jokes should be landing.  It’s not the only game to be leaving the PC with the occasional thrust.  It sure felt quite a bit different when it’s just so constant, however.  The Bard, and by extension, you, never seems to catch a break.  Even the people who are happy to see you there usually have some jibe in place that the game pulls on you.  And sometimes that has gameplay implications, like when you’re told to find a character and you end up finding 5 with the same name and have to go between them all multiple times over before getting to the next plot point, or when you get to the end of a big old monster sprawl to rescue someone that can point you to the incredibly obvious place you need to go that’s right next to him, but the Bard can’t understand his brogue so you have to spend around 15 minutes backtracking and re-backtracking to bring someone there who could understand him and tell you to just go in the glowing portal thing.  Really, when it gets to the point the jokes are dragging out the gameplay, the joke’s not on the character.  The joke’s on you.

In any case, for a rather unremarkable game, this is the facet that stuck out at me.  It’s pretty common to have one of those characters in a work.  The perennial lovable loser.  The butt monkey.  The guy for whom luck goes sour in the most hilarious of ways.  And yeah, you can make that work.  Video games play by different rules, though, and no matter who the protagonist is, there’s going to be parts of you there just by virtue of them being your avatar to this world.  You’re going to sympathize with them more.  And good natured ribbing is one thing, but when you’re the butt of every joke and it never lets up, well, it’s not fun to have the whole world laughing at your expense.  That’s an additional level you wouldn’t find in most media, but it’s right front and center in games.

That said, as always with humor, it’s a different matter when it hits right.  A few of the jokes, like when the Bard joins in on a tavern jam session and ends up inadvertantly playing in a song that is insulting him all over the place for accidently setting a doomsday demon free earlier in the game, that was funny no matter how close to home it was.

Mumbling about Muramasa: The Demon Blade

Man, you remember the Wii?  I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but for all the flak the Wii got for “having no games”, it sure had a hell of a lot of good games.  In a lot of ways, I feel the Wii got everything that the indie games market is covering now, before indie games even had a hope of making it.  In the face of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 pushing HD graphics and high processing power, but correspondingly high development costs, the Wii offered a more modest rate of performance at a much cheaper, and correspondingly less risky, development price.  Games didn’t port well to and from the Wii and you didn’t see it’s larger install base buying as many games as the other consoles, so it didn’t see that many AAA releases.  But established companies shooting out more experimental and creative secondary-level games?  That it had in droves.  And lots of them were really good.  At this point, my Wii library is pretty comparible in size to that of its competitors, and I find myself really glad for that.

Case in point, there’s Muramasa: the Demon Blade.  Oozing art style, combat that’s at the same time buttery smooth and awkward, a game that’s not trying to make the huge statement of its AAA counterparts and is just there to be fun.  That last part is really representative of the Wii’s output for me.  How did it play out in this case?  Let’s find out!

Muramasa is made by Vanillaware, who at this point were notable for Odin Sphere and later because well-known for their beat-em-up Dragon’s Crown.  It’s a side-scrolling action game where you play as one of two characters roaming around beautifully drawn depictions of the various areas of feudal Japan, as you slay your enemies, collect the Demon Blades, and…. do things to get stuff done.  There’s a plot, but frankly, it really doesn’t matter.

And yeah, it being Vanillaware, the art is the most prominent part of this piece.  And it is great.  Everything is lavishly hand-drawn, incorporating real-world art techniques from feudal Japan in a way that makes things look completely fitting to the setting even as they’re stunningly gorgeous.  Most of it looks even better in motion.  Being hand-painted, animations are a little limited, and some of them do look a little janky, but for the most part, they really breathe life into these characters and locales.

The bosses are probably visually the best part.  If you’ve been playing video games for a while, chances are you’ve probably been pretty well exposed to lots of classical Japanese culture and mythology.  Muramasa draws from that well pretty heavily, but doesn’t just add art to it, it’s often dropping some really interesting twists on the classical mythology as well.  Inugami goes from classical mythology of being a dog poltergeist to the version here of being a blasted scary being with rows of teeth that never end.  Raijin keeps all they fierceness and aggression he’s had in classical mythology, but he’s in the form of a muscular battle woman here.  I found it interesting, seeing the unusual takes on familiar features all over the place.

Eyes on Neon Drive

There’s something to be said for those games that will take a simple concept, distill it down to its purest essence, and then build something beautiful out of it.  Something that’s so simple to talk about, yet so complex in its execution.  You get that in your Tetrises, in your Pac-men, and now, in your Neon Drives.

We’re going to call Neon Drive, made by the how-the-heck-do-you-pronounce-that developer Fraoula, a ‘Rhythm Driver’ here.  Yeah, we’re breaking the boundaries of genres even as we recreate them.  Ok, not really, because Neon Drive is really just a rhythm game at its core, but it takes place in a car, on a street, you know, driving.  So like I said above, really simple in concept.  At its base level, there four lanes you can move between.  Your car automatically moves forwards, and obstacles come along the path forcing you to switch between lanes in time with the music to avoid them.

And that’s that.  Well, mostly.  Again, really simple in concept.  And yet they make it work.  It’s not an epic experience or anything, but I had a good time with it when I first came across the game a few years ago, and I had a good time with it again when I picked it up just recently.

The music and aesthetics are a big part of it.  Most of what I know about the 80s, I know from games and movies trying to be deliberately retro, so I’m pretty sure the era was all about neon and sci-fi and synth-heavy soundtracks and that weird segmented sun and really, really bad hair and clothing.  Except for the last bit of it, this game seems to pull it all off well.  Especially the music, that really stands out.  I do have to commend this soundtrack, it’s pumping and driving and manages to not get old even as you listen to the same segments over and over again because this game is really hard.  And it sounds so appropriately 80s, and is tailored really well to the challenges you’re facing in the game.  The music and your movements mesh together so naturally, sometimes it feels like you could get through the obstacles with your eyes closed if you just followed along with the music.

And then you crash and burn because even with all that, the game is hard.  It’s very heavily skill-based.  It requires reflexes, planning, and absolute precision, and it will make you replay the same sections over and over and over again until you get it right.  It’s interesting how it builds those skills up in you, however.  It can take you a long while to get there, but once you get to the point where you can beat a level, you’ll be able to do it again and again like nothing.  I remember, it took me about two hours to beat all seven levels when I first played the game a few years ago, a feat the developers have stated makes me certifiably superhuman.  I hadn’t touched the game at all in the interim, but picking it up again here, I was able to move through that same set of levels with very little trouble.

Then I got to the new 8^th level.  That one is absolutely brutal.  I hate that this game keeps track of how many times you’ve tried but failed, because I truly embarassed myself on the last one.  If you can beat that one, you’re a better Neon Driver than I.

It is pretty short.  There’s only 8 levels, and if you can get through them in a single go, each level only takes you about two minutes.  I feel like it makes full use out of being compact, though.  Each level switches up the gameplay somehow halfway through, whether by switching perspectives, turning the obstacles into oncoming traffic, transforming your vehicle entirely, etc., and each one does it in a different way.  Again, I finished it my first go around in about two hours.  The 8^th level can extend that some, if you’re going to put in the time to get through it.

And, you know what?  That’s all I’ve got to say about that.  It probably comes across a lot better in action than it does in spoken word, so check this out to see a bit of what I’ve been going through.  

Eyes on The Witcher

The Witcher’s become kind of a big name in games.  One of the prime examples when you think of Western RPGs.  It’s a little weird, looking at the first game in the series, and realizing nobody expected that game to be successful.

It makes sense.  A game by a developer that had never done a project from the ground up before that goes deep into the lore of the obscure Polish novel series it’s based on that has never had any presence in the greater market?  Yeah.  That’s not going far.

Except it did!  The first Witcher game is a lot of fun!  And more than that, you can tell it’s made with a lot of love.  A lot of love by people who don’t know perfectly what they’re doing, sure, but that care for the material just oozes out.  The creators are obviously big Witcher nerds.  And more than anything else, they wanted to deliver the feeling of being the Witcher in the Witcher’s world to you.  And it makes for a good time doing so.

So, to get this going, in this game, you are Geralt, the titular Witcher.  The game takes place shortly after the final novel in the series, in which Geralt, total badass that he is, got killed like a chump by some random farmer with a pitchfork.  Makes things a little awkward that he’s up and walking around here.  It’s awkward for the people in-universe too.  Geralt did, explicitly die there.  Then he came back to life, sans his memory.  This is a plot point.

And there, you come in.  Yeah, typical “amnesiac hero so we have an excuse to explain all the stuff to the newbies” thing, but it feels more natural here than it does in a lot of other properties.  I think the amnesia was better implemented throughout.  You are Geralt.  As a Witcher, your job is to find monsters and witch them.  Usually, there’s people who will pay you to witch specific monsters.  Sometimes, you have to witch people too, in pursuit of your goals, but never for pay.  Also, you get to carry three swords.  At the same time!

The game’s definitely a lot more plot- and setting- based than it is combat based.  Not that there’s not plenty of combat, it’s just not where the focus is.  It wants you to feel the world of the Witcher.  Which isn’t a happy place to be.  I don’t think it goes full out dark fantasy, but man-eating monsters are a very common occurrence there, people are horrible to each other, and everyone’s survived several different wars in their lifetimes just to get to this point.  The most common enemies you face are either creatures that feed on the dead or are the risen dead themselves.  You spend more time in the grungy underbelly of the host city than any place nice, and even the nice places aren’t that great.   It’s largely typical medieval fantasy, but it’s really interesting to see it from a different perspective, filled to the brim with classic Polish folklore and beasties.  The novels originally were pretty significant for taking the classic fairy tales and giving them dark twists.  They’ve moved well beyond that, and you don’t see those elements directly in this game, but that’ll give you an idea of the level this is on.  I feel like the big strengths of the Witcher’s setting as a whole lie in its subtleties.  It’s not a big super-unique fantasy setting, but it does have some twists on it that show how much thought went into these things.  And it’s kind of neat how much of that world building got carted into this game without being super explicit about it.  I played this game before I ever read any of the books, and it never felt like I was missing out, but now that I’ve read a couple, it interesting to see the little bits they imported without ever bringing real attention to it.  Like, in the novels, the only women that ever wear their hair down are royalty, prostitutes, or sorceresses, all women who are in control of their own occupations and lives.  The game never calls direct attention to it, but they still bring that feature right over.

The plot is… it’s interesting.  It has some depth to it, although it can be rather simple in points, but it does go in some interesting directions.  It only carries over a handful of characters and one major faction from the novels, but the style of tale it tells fits in with the original stories fairly well.  It is a bit stop and start, though.  Part of that is natural, coming from trying to carry an involved plotline in a somewhat sandbox world, while the rest is just from the plot and game structure not quite matching up.  The Act structure often brings things to a rather abrupt stop and shift, often when the transition is unexpected.  I lost out on both the best weapons in the game because the Act I was in ended without warning before I had all the sidequests I wanted to do done.  In any case, you’ll have long moments of moving slowly, before everything gets moving at a good clip once again.  I won’t call it persistent pacing problems, because it’s always at the player’s control, but you may not always elect to move through the lines as fast as you’d otherwise like.  In any case, it’s a decently ambitious plot, but the Witcher was obviously designed with gameplay progression in mind first, and story delivery second.  Still, it is multi-faceted enough to hold your interest when the plot does arise.  It plays really nicely with Geralt’s amnesia, in a way a lot of games ignore.  By that to mean, it actually addresses it more than twice.  Geralt has explicitly lost things in losing his memory, both becoming more gullible as he doesn’t have his experiences to draw back on, as well as losing track of who he is and his place in the world.  He has multiple conversations with old friends trying to figure out the role of witchers in this world that might be moving past them, and there’s some times where he has to recreate his personality and choose who he wants to be going forward.

Outside of wandering around and talking your way through situations, most of the gameplay comes through combat.  The combat engine here is really interesting to me.  It’s similar to the Dragon Age games, where all the action you’re seeing on screen are really just visual representations of a bunch of dice rolls going on behind the scenes, and a visual representation that doesn’t always match what’s actually going on.  You’ll see Geralt making some total acrobatic moves on his enemies, completely stun-locking them so they can’t even move, and his HP will still be chipping down bit by bit.

So yeah, the combat engine is interesting, here.  There’s not a lot of performance-based stuff you can do.  Essentially, once you’re in combat, there’s not a lot of choices you can make, and your skills won’t make much of a difference.  You get up to a five-hit combo with proper timing, but the timing is very easy to pull off, to the point that when you’re far enough into the game that enemies start presenting a challenge, you can get the full combo almost by rote.  You can switch styles at a whim, but in almost every situation, there’s a clear ‘best’ style to use, so you don’t get much utility out of that.  You do have some status-inducing bombs you can use to really change the tide of battle and a few spells you can mix up in combat, but other than that and your choices of target prioritization, all the other things you ‘could’ do to affect the outcome of battle take too long to have a meaningful effect. The core of the combat gameplay is going to play out as it plays out once you start the fight, and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

That’s because the big meat of the combat engine is in preparation.  You may not be able to do much to change the result of a combat encounter after you start the fight, but you’ve got a huge amount of things you can do before it.  From the start, you carry at least two swords, one steel for humans and one silver for monsters (both are for monsters), each of which can be forged and reforged with a variety of buffs and effects.  Each of those swords has three styles, one for heavily armored enemies, one for evasive enemies, and one for groups, that get different moves and effects depending on the choices you make as you level up.  And then you get a huge array of potions and blade oils to add additional temporary effects to you and your weapons.  You can’t just take an unlimited amount of potions, those things are somewhat toxic, and as you take more than a handful Geralt starts feeling the sting from them, so figuring out the most effective combination of the limited amount of potions you can take is vital for success.  The game is really big on having you do the in-universe research on the monsters and situations you’ll encounter and figuring out what you’ll need to counter them.  You have to find books.  Knowing about the monsters clues you into what they’re weak to, what swords and styles are best for them, and gives you extra ingredients for making your concoctions.  Books also contain the recipes for your potions, blade oils, and bombs which prove so vital, and enable you to gather alchemical ingredients in the wild.  The in-combat gameplay is very simple, but the mental work before it is anything but, which lends to a really interesting take on the typical RPG sword and claw business.

I guess I should also talk about one of the more famous/infamous parts of this game.  So, there’s porn in it.  Not like, hardcore porn or anything, but, well, Geralt has a lot of sex.  It’s pretty integral to the lore, a chaste Geralt would be like a virgin James Bond.  In this game, when you have sex with someone, you’re treated to a really tame kissy kissy fade out like you’d see most every other time something like this pops up.  And then you get a beautifully hand-drawn picture popping up that shows you what the character looks like naked.  It’s not an omnipresent thing or anything, and, with a few notable exceptions, you can ignore the sex scenes without missing out on plot or in-game rewards, but this is before the age of bathtub Geralt, so the sexual appeal is pretty one sided.  I’m a pretty sexually open person, so getting to know what a bunch of fictional people’s breasts look like doesn’t bother me at all, but if it’s not to your taste, I can’t fault you at all for not wanting it in your video games.

Overall, the Witcher does show a lot of signs of being a freshman game.  Designed pursuing the ideal over execution, the untempered ambition of the piece, and a fair bit of jankiness that experience probably ironed out of the later ones.  For all it’s flaws, it’s a really good game.  It delivers a unique experience, and it’s totally accessible yet becomes even deeper on repeat playthroughs and after having read the books.  It’s grown a little dated, but the game was solid enough to launch a very well regarded franchise and position its company well enough to put together the closest thing Steam has to a competitor.  I enjoyed my time with it, and I look forward to jumping into future games in the series.

Doing the Bad Ending Well: Red Dead Redemption

The second game to fall before the might of The Quest happens to be Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar’s 2010 mix of Grand Theft Auto gameplay and the Western genre.  This game’s pretty well known, so if you’re looking for an opinion piece on it, that ground’s already covered.  If you want the Aether take in particular, I didn’t like it that much.  Even when I was in the mood for a good rooty tooty point and shooty, I found this wide open sandbox to be full of things to do but very little that was worth doing.  But that’s not why I’m here today.  I want to talk about one of the parts of the game that I did like, the ending.  And I want to talk about why I like it.  Because that’s a weird space for me.  The ending to Red Dead Redemption does a few things that I normally absolutely despise when video game endings do it, but they work for me here.  Let’s explore why that is.

Suffice to say, I am going to spoil the hell out of Red Dead Redemption’s ending.  If you haven’t beaten the game yet and you’d still like to, I wouldn’t click that ‘Read More’ button.

Demon’s Souls

Moving into the next stage of my quest to defeat all the games I own, I knew the first game I conquered had to be a statement piece. Something that would make all the other games of this generation, who had been previously watching from the sidelines, quake in fear knowing the unstoppable domination that was coming for them. It was very purposeful that the first game of this generation I chose to target was perhaps the harbinger of a wave of pointedly very difficult games, Demon’s Souls.

I did a bit of research online before diving into this game. From what I understood, the goal of this game was to ‘git gud’. Every single challenge everyone brought up was met with the command from other players to simply git more gud. So by my understanding, as you defeat the challenges throughout the game, you collect more and more gud, and once you collect enough of this ‘gud’, the magic governing this world then transforms your player character into an amazing asshole that posts on the internet without providing anything of value.

Hmm… maybe I’m halfway there already.

Luckily, playing the game, I found that the internet has a very different understanding of the game than what it actually has to offer.

Demon’s Souls is Dark Souls’ somewhat less cool older brother. I love the Souls series’ design philosophy, the idea of building a huge challenge, but having it all centered around the idea that no matter how skilled a player they are, with enough preparation, practice, and patience, anyone can beat any challenge therein. That’s absolutely interesting to me. Things are absolutely tough in Demon’s Souls. At no point is success a given, and there are always true threats available. But everything is made to be overcome. Things are hard, but never overwhelming.

Demon’s Souls also carries with it a very interesting variation in combat design too, one that did carry over to later games. In nearly every combat oriented game out there, offense is key. In most games, your main advantage over AI characters is not that you’re better equipped or innately stronger than they are, although that is often true. It’s that you’re more aggressive than they are. You will launch more attacks per unit of time as one person than they will as a whole horde. You will attack while dodging. You will attack while navigating obstacles. You will attack while maneuvering between cover. You will attack when you wake up, when you eat your breakfast, when you brush your teeth, when you go to work, and every single moment throughout your day, your attacks are key.