I May Have A Souls Problem

Posted on May 25, 2018 by baudattitude

So.  Dark Souls: Remastered comes out tomorrow, and I preordered the PS4 version ages ago.  Of course, between people who got their copies early and people who bought the PC version off Steam when it launched early, there are an awful lot of people already playing it and posting about it online.

I have commented in the past that one of the best things the Souls games teach is patience, so it is ironic that I am have been champing at the bit all day to get my hands on my copy so I can tear into it.  I confess that I checked the mailbox a couple of extra times just in case it had showed up.  This is not, by any definition of the word, a great display of patience.

So, when I got off work tonight, I decided that I was going to load up the original release of the game and mess around with a few different weapons that I’d picked up on my first play-through.  I went into Dark Souls fresh from playing through Demon’s Souls, and I had pretty much made exactly the same sort of character in both games – a lightly-armored, dex-heavy character who spent 90% of her time hiding behind a shield.

So, I took my end-game character down to the Kiln of the First Flame and spent some time hitting Black Knights with various weapons.  I figured the most important thing to do was to get in some practice with the Drake Sword, because it’s just so convenient to pick that up once you have a bow and a few dozen arrows, and I would grab that and then run to the Undead Parish and farm Balder Knights until I got a swag sword and…

…and that was EXACTLY what I had done last time, come to think of it.

So, I went through my Bottomless Box looking for other weapons that you can get early on, and I stumbled across the Zweihander.

I’ve never been a Big Damn Sword person.  Frankly, running around with a slab of iron that would make Cloud Strife blush seems just a little… brutish?  Not terribly appealing, anyway.

BUT.  I’ve seen an awful lot of people who absolutely rave about the Zweihander, and it’s not quite as ridiculous as the Ultra Great Swords, so I figured, you know, what the heck.  I’ll give it a try.

Several dead Black Knights later, I was in love with the thing.  I just wasn’t sure that it would actually work at low levels, so I was a little nervous about committing to going for a Big Damn Sword build.  I don’t remember if you can respec in DS1 or not, but memory is telling me that it’s Not A Thing.

Then, I remembered that I’d tried to get a friend interested in the Souls games by setting him down in front of my PC with a controller, and that I’d been shocked by how far he’d gotten with what seemed like a lot less effort than I’d had to put in… and his saved character was still sitting in the Undead Burg at like level 9.

Well.  It didn’t take much effort to run back to Firelink and make the mad dash through the graveyard to pick up the Zweihander, only to find that I couldn’t actually USE it without getting several points of strength, but some grinding took care of that…

…and then I blew through both of the early Black Knights, and the Taurus Demon, and the Bell Gargoyles, and let Lautrec out of his cell and pushed him off a cliff before he could go murdering anyone  and frankly I had to stop there because I probably should leave some of this for when I actually have the game I’ve been so impatiently awaiting.

It will be here tomorrow.  It had better be.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Gaming, PC Gaming, Souls | Leave a comment

Some thoughts about digital distribution.

Posted on May 21, 2018 by baudattitude

One thing I didn’t expect to get out of starting this blog, a little over 11 years ago, was the ability to look back and see how my attitudes had changed over time.

One of the big things I’ve done a 180 on has been the virtues of physical media over download services.  I used to be incredibly averse to owning digital copies of things; it felt so ephemeral compared to having something physically in my hand and I loved the look of a crowded shelf of (books/movies/games).

Also, I felt that the phrase “digital distribution” was, in itself, absolutely the dumbest phrase ever.  I actually still believe this.  It’s right up there with using “DRM” to mean only SOME copy protection schemes.

But, times change and the joy of having shelves full of Things has faded.  I’m also a lot more confident that digital services will probably be around for the long haul – I’ve lost one or two things to rights issues over the years, but the only major service I’ve ever used that is now completely inaccessible is Desura.  And, I mean, Desura.

The last physical disc game I’m planning to buy is the Dark Souls Remastered edition, which will be arriving this week, and I’m only buying THAT in physical form because, well, in this case I DO want it on a shelf.

I am still, however, buying Switch games as physical copies.  This is mostly because I don’t trust Nintendo with anything online.

Anyway.  This is all a lead-in to talk about a page that I stumbled across on Microsoft’s site.  It isn’t, in itself, anything all that interesting – it just shows your Xbox 360 purchases in purchase order – but I found looking at the last page to be a fascinating look back at the bygone days of roughly a decade ago.

One thing I did NOT notice at first is that there is at least one thing missing, which does lend some credence to my worries about the Great Digital Holocaust.  Specifically, I’m missing “Boogie Bunnies”, which was a really cute puzzle game that came out in the early days of the 360.  It’s still on the Microsoft store, however, and I have the option to buy it for $4.99… so I think that I may have bought it when signed into the wrong profile, or something.  A little weird, but let’s move on to talk about some of these.

Space Giraffe was actually the reason I caved on the whole buying digital games thing.  It’s a shooter by Jeff Minter, and that’s all you need to know if you’re my sort of people.  It was 400 Microsoft points, however, and you couldn’t buy point cards for less than 800 points, so I bought Geometry Wars Evolved to use up the rest of the card.

Triggerheart Exelica and Omega Five and Rez… well, all of these are Japanese shooters of various sorts, and all of them excellent.  I actually owned the Dreamcast release of Triggerheart Exelica, so this may mark my first instance of buying a game a second time so I could have it on a new platform.

Undertow and Carcassonne were free games from Microsoft, for some reason.  I think Xbox live went down for a couple of days and they gave everyone some free games to apologize.  I’ve played like 10 minutes of Undertow.

Aegis Wing was another free game.  I think it was the winning game from some internal garage games competition or something.  It was OK, and free.

Oh, I just noticed one other thing missing from this list.  There’s no Yaris.  Man, that was a stinker, even for an advergame.

After that, we have Braid.  I didn’t pay for this one either, I actually won it from a Mountain Dew promotion.  Yeah.  Braid is about as far as you can get from the Dewritos stereotype, so I don’t get that either.  I didn’t particularly like Braid, but I’m told I have poor taste.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light was a very fortunate purchase that came out of “I have a friend over, so let’s see if we can find a couch co-op game to play”.  We blew through the entire thing in one sitting.  There may actually have been some Mountain Dew involved, come to think of it.  I still have never gone back to play the single player mode.

Perfect Dark was the only game I even came close to finishing on the Nintendo 64, and I’d always regretted getting stymied by the final boss, so I bought the remake.  Eventually, I even played it.

And, finally, El Shaddai, which seems to have been the first full retail Xbox 360 game I bought in a digital version.  It was crazy cheap, if I recall correctly – I think it was 3 bucks or something, which was enough to induce an impulse buy.  It’s one of a few games that I’ve tried out, hated, forgotten about for a few years, then come back to and loved, and it really deserves to make its way to the Xbox One backwards compatibility program.

So.  I bought Space Giraffe in August of 2007.   El Shaddai was February of 2013.  This one little page of results shows five and a half years of digital purchase history, and a third of the things on it were freebies.

Five years on from El Shaddai, I want nothing more than to have a library that I can sit down to without ever needing to find a disc.  If you told me that ten years ago…

Well, anyway.  So that page exists and it’s an interesting look back.  I’d be interested in hearing what other people see when they look at the same thing, or if anyone else has had the same change of mind, or if you’re still in the take-my-discs-from-my-dead-hands mindset.

I should do the same thing with Steam sometime.  Hmm.

Posted in videogames, Xbox 360 | 2 Comments

E3 2018: Hopes, Wishes, and Dreams

Posted on May 16, 2018 by baudattitude

It’s almost exactly one month until this year’s iteration of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, and gamers all over the world are starting to Get Hype about the futures of their favorite corporations and how they certainly will not be announcing that the next release of your Favorite Game Series Ever will be a wacky kart racer.

For mobile.

Free-to play, with Gacha elements.

In the spirit of the season, I would like to offer my own humble wish list, talking about those things I would most like to see and some more realistic expectations.

Sony: I’d like them to remember that they started putting out PS2 classics on PS4, and continue the series by releasing Fatal Frame 3 and Silent Hill 3. I’d also like to see announcements for Gravity Rush 3, a Bluepoint-remastered Demon’s Souls, and maybe a teaser for Horizon: Zero Dawn 2: Dawn Harder.

What I expect: Knack 3 and an announcement that they’ve given Yoko Taro a lot of money and a new foam head to make Nier: Automobiles: 2B’s Krazy Kart Racing.

Microsoft: I’m a huge fan of their backwards compatibility push and I think this is the year to announce Dreamcast BC, with Blue Stinger and D2 leading the list of games.  For bonus points, they should release a peripheral to let me plug in my VMUs so I can hear them scream.

No, really. I want to play Blue Stinger again.  I WILL go looking for Taco-Pen.

I’d also like them to add the Xbox versions of Fatal Frame 1 & 2 and Silent Hill 2 & 4 to their Xbox classic selection, and Onechanbara, X-Blades and Blades of Time to their 360 compatibility list.

I guess they could announce some Xbox One software, too, but I’m cool if that doesn’t happen.

What I expect: Halo 6, only now it’s a wacky kart racer and you can only play as Master Chief on a third of the tracks.

Nintendo: I’d like to get a new Fatal Frame game and remastered versions of Fatal Frame 4 and 5. I’d also like to see more unexpected crossovers like Mario / Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, because that was a mashup that just worked brilliantly, and up-scaled versions of the Metroid Prime games so I can play them with modern dual analog controls.

What I expect: Mario Kart, only now it’s a brown cover-based third-person shooter.

Bethesda: I really don’t care what they release, as long as they put out some games. They said that they had three projects to ship before the next Elder Scrolls game, and frankly they can release Dovahkin Karting if it gets them one step closer to ES6.

What I expect: Skyrim for AppleTV, and some random five-to-ten-year-old shooter ported to Switch so 30-something tech bloggers with young children can play it on their commutes and rave about how it’s brought them back into gaming.

Electronic Arts: I’d like to see another Titanfall game, EA Access for Playstation and a remastered version of the original Mass Effect trilogy, even though I just finally broke down and bought all of the DLC for the Xbox 360 version.

What I expect: Mako Kart Racing.

Actually I would play this. Please make this game.

Sega: You know, I don’t really have a lot of demands for Sega. As long as they revive the Panzer Dragoon, Shining Force, Phantasy Star, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe and Eternal Champions series, and maybe announce an epic trilogy of Ecco The Dolphin games, that will be enough.

What I expect: God, I don’t even know any more and I think I’ve driven the kart racer gag into the ground. Maybe they’ll put out another Yakuza.

Ubisoft: I unironically love the “Ubisoft Formula” so I’m cool with whatever they put out, as long as I can slowly unlock a map covered with icons and then check every one of those icons off a list.

What I expect: I expect to get exactly this.

Square-Enix: Look, I just want a release date for Kingdom Hearts 3, and maybe a series of videos I can watch to catch up on which characters are the Heartless or Nobody versions of which other characters and to remind me what the deal is with Organization XIII. Oh, and a new Deus Ex game that isn’t a prequel would be neat. Give me that.

What I expect: A montage of Lara Croft being impaled, eviscerated and fed through a wood chipper, in glorious 4k.

Koei-Tecmo: Biggest wish: DOA 6 is announced, and you can bring forward all of your purchased DLC from DOA5: Last Round

What I expect: DOA 6 is announced and you can bring forward none of your purchased DLC from DOA5: Last Round.

FROM Software: I want to see more of whatever it is they were teasing at the Game Awards in their “Shadows Die Twice” trailer, and I would like it to be another Souls-like action RPG.

What I expect: We will get another teaser trailer and still know absolutely nothing about the game.

Blizzard: This will finally be the year Starcraft: Ghost gets revived and re-announced. Also I want an Overwatch spin-off starring Mei.

What I expect: Loot boxes, and an on-stage announcement that they’ve decided to just remove the Alliance faction from World of Warcraft because – despite years of them trying to make their intentions very clear – players haven’t taken the hint yet.

Daybreak: If the staff can pool together and afford cab fare to the convention center, I’d like an announcement that they’re actually making Everquest Next, this time for sure.

What I expect: A hilarious road-trip movie where they don’t actually make it to E3 but learn valuable life lessons along the way.

…well, I’ll just cut it short here. Regardless of what YOU’RE looking forward to from this year’s E3, I think we can all agree that it’s a magical time of year and that, once the dust has settled <your personal favorite megacorporation> will obviously have “won” E3.

Posted in videogames | 4 Comments

Hello my baby, hello my Dharlu, hello my ragtime gal

Posted on May 14, 2018 by baudattitude

So, in an effort to avoid ever sticking to a single theme for this blog, today’s post is another one about comic books from the 1970s and how plot elements that seemed to make perfect sense as a small lad are actually kind of terrifying when looked at through adult eyes.  It’s a direct sequel to yesterday’s post, so go ahead and read that one first if you have a moment.

If you haven’t, the short version is that the JLA – that’s Justice League of America, emphasis on the Justice – solved a tricky computer problem by kidnapping a pregnant alien and keeping it locked up on the JLA Satellite.  You could easily argue that the laws of Earth don’t apply to aliens, or that they don’t apply to objects in orbit, but there’s still a high WTF factor there.

Anyway, I got curious as to whether the Dharlu situation – that’s the alien in question – had ever been resolved, or whether this had just been a one-off thing that had been forgotten.

Here’s the thing about comic books, though: nothing ever really gets forgotten, and the Dharlu does show up again.  The first time is only about a year later, in Justice League of America #141, cover dated April 1977.  This is the second half of a story featuring the Manhunters, a group of androids who were the precursor to the Green Lantern Corps but who got decommissioned for pursuing their goal of Galactic order with just a tad too much zeal.  If you made it through that sentence without just closing this page and finding something else to read, my hat’s off to you.

Context: At one point, the Manhunters trap The Flash and Wonder Woman on the JLA Satellite, surrounded by an energy field that will kill them in a few minutes.  The Flash could disrupt it, but he’s injured.  Fortunately, Wonder Woman remembers that there are actually THREE people on the satellite:

Let’s take a moment here, and consider the origin of the Amazons, Paradise Island, and technically Wonder Woman herself.  While I’m not sure if it had been explored as of the time this comic was written, the Amazons were originally slaves.  They revolted against their captors and escaped, eventually finding Paradise Island and building a world Free Of Man’s Tyranny.  So, here’s Wonder Woman admitting that she knew that the JLA was, well, keeping a woman in chains, which is just a little off but whatever.  At least she’s finally busting it out, even if it’s just because it happens to be able to sub in for the temporarily-incapacitated Flash.

I’ll skip the bit of the comic where the Dharlu does, in fact, save the day, because it really isn’t important and we should get right to the point where Wonder Woman apologizes to the poor gal for her involuntary confinement and bids her a tearful farewell OH WAIT.

Nope, it’s back in the freezer for you.  But we feel just super bad about it and we promise to get it all fixed soon, just as soon as those parts we need to keep the JLA computers running arrive.

I can’t find any references to the Dharlu after this point for quite some time.  The next time it shows up is actually in an issue of Detective Comics, during the time when DC had started publishing “Dollar Comics” (64 Pages! No Ads!) in an attempt to get newsstand space back from magazines, whose higher profit margins were displacing comics.  Yes, Virginia, there was a time when you didn’t need to walk into a specialty comics shop and face the judgemental eye of…of…well, of someone who would write long blog posts about the horrible things that the Justice League used to do to aliens.

Um.

A little self-inspection might be useful on my part, here.

Let’s get back to Detective Comics, issue #489, dated April 1980.  Dollar Comics were almost always made up of several short stories, sometimes to keep less-popular characters in the imagination of the comics audience, which explains why there’s an Atom story in the pages of a comic more typically associated with the Bat-family.

Short summary: The Atom is on “monitor duty” in the JLA Satellite, which is a polite way of saying that the JLA was off on important business and had no use for a guy whose power was… ah, heck, let’s just let the Omnipresent Comics Narrator cover it.

Not an AWFUL power, but yeah.  It’s going to get you stuck on monitor duty a lot, at least until Batman drops something that rolls under the fridge again.

Anyway, the JLA computer is having problems, so Ray shrinks down to go inside and check it out.  Let’s not fuss about the details, because they would drive you mad and we’re mostly here to talk about alien slave girls.

Anyway, the problem with the computer is immediately evident:

It’s got a bad case of aliens.  Specifically, the Dharlu has finally given birth, and now there’s a whole bunch of tiny purple guys floating around inside the computer and causing problems.  I know the feeling, really.  I frequently have computer issues that could easily be blamed on tiny purple guys clogging up my RAM.

Now, this is only a five page story, so I’ll just sum up the next three pages as a kind of mediocre fight scene.  The Atom’s powers don’t exactly lend themselves to cinematic action sequences, and it’s mostly him running away so he can get out of the computer and back to normal size.

Then he purges the Dharlu babies into outer space and all’s well again.  Note that, while he escaped from the computer by growing back to full size, he felt the need to shrink back down again so he could push the “Run Program” button.  At some point, Ray, we need to have a talk about your obsession with being the size of an action figure.

We also need to talk about these charges to AmiAmi on your JLA-issued credit card.

To the best of my knowledge, that’s the end of the Dharlu Saga.  It’s not a happy ending, but I guess there’s a tiny positive note?  She’s still locked in the JLA computer, but at least her kids got out to make their own way in the universe – and there was never a story where the baby Dharlu grew up and came back to get revenge for their mother, so I guess some things in comics CAN be forgotten.

That was over a thousand words to say “comic books are weird”.  I need to find more productive things to do with my life.

Posted in comics | Leave a comment

On Super-Heroes

Posted on May 14, 2018 by baudattitude

It’s my firm belief that the true golden age of comic books was in the 1970s.  The fact that this roughly coincides with my own youth is of no import and this minor coincidence should be disregarded.

The 1970s were the years where comic book publishers started pushing back – ever so gently – against the Comics Code Authority and its stifling mandates on “appropriate” story elements, but before the industry dove head-first into the Massive Crossovers and Grim ‘n Gritty drama of the mid-to-late 1980s.

That isn’t to say there wasn’t some seriously messed-up stuff in the 1970s.

Let’s take Justice League of America #130, for example, published in May of 1976.

There aren’t a ton of stories from this time that really stuck with me, but this one has always hung around the back of my mind, probably because the visuals are so bizarre.  I recently found that it was available on Comixology, so I dropped the $1.99 for the sake of nostalgia.

The gist of it is that Hawkman has been working on a new teleporter and security system so that JLA members – and only JLA members – can quickly get to the Justice League Satellite, which was their headquarters from 1970 until 1985.  As he’s demonstrating it for The Flash, an alien just happens to sneak into the teleport chamber, and the result is that the two heroes and the alien get mixed into three bizarre looking amalgamations as they beam abort the satellite, after which the alien tries to steal the satellite for its own purposes.  There’s a satisfying fight or two, the heroes eventually uncover the alien’s weakness, and the heroes and alien get separated back into their proper bodies, just in time for JLA #131, in which “Superman, Flash, Hawkman, and Aquaman fall victim to an attack on New York City by intelligent bees”.  I am not making this up.

But before moving on to the intelligent bees, there’s just one last thing to take care of on the satellite.  This is a bit of the story that didn’t stand out as a kid but which is dark as all get out when read from an adult’s viewpoint:

Yes, Ollie, the latest member of the JLA is an alien.  It’s an expectant mother, in fact, something that Supes kind of stumbles over saying.  Apparently his weaknesses are Kryptonite, magic, and icky girl stuff.

So, as mentioned, this was published in 1976 and the JLA Satellite was eventually destroyed in 1985.  That means that, for nine years, the JLA held a pregnant alien captive, in an induced coma, because it made their computers work better.  The satellite was basically Space Guantanamo.

Katar explaining this isn’t that weird – I mean, let’s face it, this is a perfectly normal Hawkman solution to a problem.  I feel that one of the more liberal leaguers should definitely have spoken up at some point, though.

Posted in comics | 1 Comment

On Second Place

Posted on May 10, 2018 by baudattitude

I have a long history of making poor tech choices. I’ve owned Laserdiscs and Minidiscs, Sega Saturns and NEC TurboDuos, an eee 701 netbook and a Windows Phone.

Let’s just say that I have a knack for picking the winning horse, then betting against it, and I’ve gotten to see how a lot of companies deal with failure.

NEC, for example, pulled completely out of the US gaming market, while Sega followed up the Saturn with the too-beautiful-to-live Dreamcast and Nintendo… well, Nintendo released a console so popular as to make people forget that the Wii U ever existed.

THE POINT IS, I’ve noticed a pattern with dying technology at the point where it hasn’t officially been 100% cancelled, but the manufacturer is still putting just a hair of effort into supporting it. In the case of the Saturn, this got us Panzer Dragoon Saga and Shining Force III; the Wii U gave us Tokyo Mirage Sessions, Splatoon and Breath of the Wild… all brilliant games but far too late to save the systems.

The reason this has been on my mind today is a report, from Electronic Arts, where they estimate the current total installed base of modern consoles. It’s a report that a lot of people are using to compare the PS4 to the Xbox One and declare the latter not long for the world. This month also marks the fifth anniversary of both console reveals, so it’s a good time to look back over those five years and see how things have gone.

It’s no shock to anyone that the PS4 has just been an absolute juggernaut since its unveiling. It was the cheaper AND the more powerful of the two at launch, with a laser focus on gaming that contrasted strongly with Microsoft’s bizarre notion that what people really wanted from a games console was cable TV integration and fantasy football.

Oh, and let’s not forget Microsoft’s weird messaging around used games, or the privacy hysteria that blew up over the always-listening Kinect, as quaint as that last seems in a world where Amazon ships millions of Alexa-enabled smart speakers every quarter.

Frankly, they earned the “Xbone” nickname before they had even shipped a single unit, and it pretty much landed with a wet flop. It didn’t help, either, that the prominent “Day One”-branded launch consoles and games lingered on shelves, making it obvious that it just wasn’t moving, or that exclusives seemed to keep winding up on other consoles or being canceled outright.

Things haven’t changed all that much, as far as console market share is concerned, since 2013. I eventually wound up owning an Xbox One S when Amazon put up a bundle at a price that was too good to ignore, but didn’t foresee much of a future for it except as a 4k Blu-Ray player.

But, here’s the odd thing. Both the PS4 and Xbox One are coming up on their fifth anniversary, and Sony has been absolutely killing it with exclusives – Bloodborne, Horizon, Nier, God of War, Nioh, the list goes on. By all rights, the Xbox One should be looking like the Saturn right about now, but… well, at least in the US and UK, it’s a perfectly viable platform to game on. If you want to come home from a hard day at work or school and sit down to a few rounds of Fortnite or Call of Duty or Overwatch, it has you covered, and it’s better-than-even odds that any new game announcement will be PS4/XB1/PC.

This is, in my admittedly somewhat anecdotal experience, unprecedented. Normally third-party support is the first thing you lose when sales start to dip, and it’s up to the console manufacturer to shoulder the burden of keeping new titles coming.

Furthermore, if you want the best versions of games, or the best controller, and don’t mind reaching a little deeper into your wallet, you almost certainly want an Xbox One X with an Elite controller over a PS4 Pro. Granted, Microsoft is benefiting heavily from the state of the graphics card market right now – nobody is denying that the absolute shiniest graphics are to be had on PC, but when you can’t find or afford a reasonable GPU… well, an all-in-one box looks awfully tempting.

The heavy push towards enhancing their current box to play games from older Xboxes seems to be paying off, as well. I’ve had a lot of my digital Xbox 360 games happily pop up in the “Ready to install” list as the backwards compatibility improves, and I’ve repurchased some of the original Xbox games that I couldn’t own digitally at the time.

I’m still waiting on Fatal Frame 1 & 2, though, and Gunvalkryie if we want to get extra crazy. I suspect pretty much everyone has a little list of games they would like to see show up some day.

More importantly, while nothing’s been said on the topic, this sort of commitment to legacy titles makes it seem a pretty safe bet that Microsoft will carry the backwards compatibility into future generations of the hardware. If an Xbox Two happens to show up in the next few years, there’s this weird sense of confidence that I’ll be able to keep moving my library of games forward – a good thing, considering how the first year or so of any console tends to go.

Basically, I’m just impressed at Microsoft’s stubborn refusal to cut their losses, and I’m looking forward to seeing that they do next.

Posted in videogames, Xbox One | 2 Comments

On Second Looks

Posted on May 7, 2018 by baudattitude

Anyone unfortunate enough to follow this blog for any length of time has probably run into one or more of my frothing rants about Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. I’d been a big fan of the series since the first entry, and ACIV felt like a game designed by people who didn’t particularly LIKE the earlier games. It certainly seemed designed FOR people who didn’t like the earlier ones, as well – there is an awful lot of, oh, let’s call it Internet-gamer-hipsterism from people who will cheerfully talk about how ACIV is the only one that was any good.

So anyway, when I originally played it I got about 4 or 5 hours in, hated the experience, and stopped. I kept the disc because, well, it was a gift and I would have felt bad about selling it on.

I mentioned a few days ago that I’d gone back to AC2 to finish off the platinum trophy, and apart from taking a few minutes to get my head back into the control scheme, I am happy to report that it’s still a really fun game to run around in.

But, it got me thinking about the Assassin’s Creed series in general, and I had a bit of an epiphany: if people who DON’T like the AC series love ACIV, then maybe I would enjoy it if I went into it pretending that it was just another open-world action-adventure game.

It turns out that willfully ignoring the previous games I’d played in the AC series (seven, including portable spin-offs) was the key to actually enjoying ACIV. If you play it as a game about a random guy who really just wants to sail around, build a cool pirate ship, and kill a lot of Englishmen, it’s a lot of fun. As much as “Ubisoft towers” have become a much-maligned design feature, they make for a very satisfying gameplay loop for someone with a checklist mindset, and I do love me some checklists.

Also, since the various structures you have to climb around on are all fairly low-to-the-ground affairs, it serves as something of training wheels compared to the more grandiose architecture found in actual cities. I understand that the next game is set in Paris, which does have some actual BUILDINGS, so that should make for some more interesting parkour.

In addition, playing this game just after spending most of April drowning myself in Halo lore means that I now have a little more perspective on what a franchise looks like if it’s allowed to grow uncontrolled. If ACIV had demanded that people finish all five mainline games to understand what was going on, it would have meant asking people to play multiple 30-40 hour games just to get the two or three hours of metastory included in each one, and that borders on crazy talk. Having a main character who isn’t familiar with the game’s two warring factions or with the weird First Civilizations stuff means that all of this can be explained to the player again, getting them ready for future sequels.

So, I had a much more positive view this time around. It doesn’t mean that I love everything about ACIV, because I still found plenty to gripe about. The story segments tended to rely very heavily on “tail this guy without being seen until the story finally tells you you can kill him”, and the controls weren’t always up to the task of guiding Edward in and out of stealth and up and over buildings at the right times. The stealth missions where you were forced to tail someone on water didn’t suffer from the same control issues, thankfully, but were still somewhat marred by very slim margins of error at avoiding detection.

Also, fully upgrading your ship took a lot of grinding for materials and hunting down upgrade plans, and I couldn’t help but notice that both materials and upgrade plans were available for purchase in “Time-Saver Packs” for real-life money. That’s more than a little tacky for a $60 game.

Finally, the best way to earn money in ACIV is by playing a minigame where you build up a fleet of ships and then send them back and forth on trading missions. It’s fine in its own way, but it was a little pace-breaking to need to occasionally stop running around and stabbing the English so I could play with little toy boats for a few minutes. Ubisoft published an iOS and Android app so you could play this minigame while not at your console, and the app still works if you have it, but it’s been pulled from the Android app store completely and wasn’t ever updated to a 64-bit app on iOS – I was only able to use it because I have an old iPad that’s stuck on iOS 9.3.5. This isn’t unique to Black Flag, and isn’t NECESSARY to enjoy the game, but you are getting a slightly lessened experience because of this particular bit of software rot.

So, short version: While I still have plenty of things to complain about with ACIV, framing the game as a reboot / introductory game means that I’m able to see the positive aspects of it, and I am taking back some of the rather nasty thoughts I’ve had about this game. I’m sure that Ubisoft, being a multinational corporation that sells millions of games every year, will be happy to know that a random blogger has forgiven them.

Posted in PS4, videogames | 4 Comments

On Trying New Things

Posted on April 26, 2018 by baudattitude

So, one side effect of playing an awful lot of Halo recently is that it got me curious what Bungie had been up to since Halo Reach.  That lead me to the local Gamestop’s 4-for-$10 bin to pick up a copy of Destiny, which I will try at some point so I can see how the single player campaign stacks up against the Master Chief saga.  Of course, I also had to pick three other games out of the same bin, and I had the crazy notion to try something COMPLETELY out of, and I pray you will forgive me here, completely out of left field.

Cue a purchase of Sony’s MLB The Show 15.

I’m not a huge sports fan in the sense of having a favorite team for each sport and dividing the year by which season we’re currently in, but I do enjoy watching baseball.  It’s a nice medium between the glacial pace of American football and the frenetic speed of basketball, which tends to remind me of a rather chaotic game of Pong played with five paddles to a side.

We will, for the sake of this discussion, completely forget that hockey exists as a sport.  I hold two passports, neither of them is Canadian, I am therefore not actually required to understand or care about winter sports.

I did have a Canadian friend try to explain the draw of curling to me once, and she summed it up as a sport where you get to do a lot of drinking while other teams are taking their turns.  That seemed like a fair explanation.

Anyway.  Baseball.  Meditative, but not sleep-inducing, and played in enough sheer volume that nobody really takes any individual game all that seriously and there’s generally some happening somewhere any day of the year between April and November.  The perfect sporting experience.

Mind you, the last baseball GAME I played was “Hardball”, on the Atari 8-bit.  While I like the sport, it’s not like I’ve gone out of my way to seek out digital representations of it during the last few decades.

Anyway, The Show has a single-player career mode called Road to the Show, where you start off as an amateur and try to make your way up through the minors and on to the roster of a Major League team.  The ’15 version is, of course, completely out of date with regards to modern player rosters, but that doesn’t particularly bother me.

Anyway, it sounded promising, so I added it to my stack of cheap games and brought it home.

When I played baseball in school, I always had a terrible time judging what pitches were actually safe to swing at and which I should let go by, and it turns out that I’m equally as bad at it when trying to do it with a virtual bat.  The “Road to the Show” starts off by having you play through three exhibition games, and I went 1-for-12 at the plate, with only slightly better performance on defense, and wound up being drafted 24th in the fifth round of the draft.

It doesn’t help at all that the game’s commentators seemed to take a sort of devilish glee in making light of my abject failure as a batter.  There IS such a thing as rubbing salt in the wounds.

So… short version, it was a cheap way to find out that maybe I should stick to spectating.  I mean, “The Show” is marketed as kind of a sim-heavy game, so it’s possible I’d do better with a version of the sport that was a little more arcade-style, but I’m not sure that such a thing even exists.

Posted in PS4, videogames | 2 Comments

On Procrastination

Posted on April 25, 2018 by baudattitude

While I haven’t talked much about the series in a few years, I used to be quite the fan of the “Assassin’s Creed” games.  I had something of a break with the series after III, which was the point where Ubisoft decided to take this pretty impressive meta-plot they’d had running over the first five games in the series and throw it out, followed by making a game about pirates and slapping the Assassin’s Creed brand on it.

I understand that recent games in the series are a little closer to the original concept, and I keep meaning to check them out at some point, but every time I think about it I am reminded by how disappointing Black Flag was and then I don’t.

But, that aside, I wanted to talk about Assassin’s Creed II and something that has been vexing me for, oh, nearly 8 years now.

Back when I originally played AC2, in 2010, I got really into 100% finishing the villa and buying all of the gear and tracking down all of collectibles and doing optional stuff, and this culminated in spending most of an evening sitting on the couch with my wife, with her holding a map of feather locations, finding every single one of the bloody things.  This was extra fun because, well, I’d picked up a bunch of them during the course of the game up to that point, so we were never quite sure whether I wasn’t finding one because I’d already picked it up or whether I wasn’t finding one because we weren’t reading the map correctly.

At any rate, after finishing that particular scavenger hunt, I realized that I’d gotten what is widely considered the hardest trophy to get and that it couldn’t be too hard to actually get the platinum trophy.  This was something I hadn’t considered doing in any PS3 game up to that point, so it was a Big Decision.

Sadly, I then discovered that the game had a single missable trophy (“Fly Swatter”) tucked away in a non-repeatable mission, and that I’d already missed it.  So, I put my dreams of shiny trophies aside and didn’t actually get a platinum trophy in ANY Playstation game until 2016.  That was for Senran Kagura: Bon Appetit!, by the way.  I have no shame.

At some point, Ubisoft put out a DLC episode for Assassin’s Creed II, and they put a repeatable section into that DLC where you could actually get the trophy I’d missed.  A cynical person would say that they could have saved everyone a fair bit of time by just letting you pay $5 to have the Fly Swatter trophy unlock, but maybe someone thought that would be just a little TOO obvious.

Anyway.  I am a bit stubborn at times, so it took me quite a while before I broke down and bought that bit of DLC.  It was during a PSN sale, so at least I wasn’t spending full price just for the opportunity to go back and get one darn trophy.  This is how I justify things to myself, you see.

Then, of course, I didn’t actually get around to PLAYING the DLC until a couple of nights ago, when I’d finished up the Halo games and needed something different.

It turns out that going back to a game after 7 years can be a LITTLE tricky to get the hang of, but… well, eventually I managed to figure out the controls and finally cross that one nagging item off my never-ending to-do list.

So, well, it only took me seven years, seven months, and 4 days to get back to AC2… but I DID get around to it.  You know.  Eventually.  I can’t decide whether I should be proud of this or not, but I am at least satisfied.

As an aside, “An Old Friend Returns” may be the single most common “you beat the game!” trophy I’ve ever seen.  I look at the completion percentage for most games I play, and even really popular ones frequently have completion percentages in the 30% range.  People really loved them some Ezio.

 

Posted in ps3, videogames | 3 Comments

Halo Month, Part 7: I don’t know why you say Halo, I say goodbye.

Posted on April 24, 2018 by baudattitude

Technically, I did not absorb EVERY piece of Halo-related media in the last three weeks. There are a few comics, a whole mess of audio logs and terminal records, and a couple of books I didn’t get around to.

That said, my most recent dive into the Halo lore – reading the “Shadow of Intent” and “Smoke and Shadow” novellas, playing “Halo Wars 2” and its DLC, and going back to read the four graphic novels that make up the “Escalation” comic series – was a hell of a binge and a good place to stop and call this experiment a success.

I had intended to skip the Halo comics, for the most part, since they didn’t seem to be particularly important… but it turns out that 343 decided to stick the plot that happened between Halo 4 and 5 into Escalation, including resolving the fate of Halo 4’s main antagonist, and it also ties into the original Halo Wars game, which looks like it will be a big part of upcoming events.

So, even if you ignore every other comic series, this one seems pretty essential. Also, you should read it before Halo 5, not after like I did.

Ignoring the fact that I read them out of sequence, I liked them a lot. They’re definitely not standalone affairs, and I continue to marvel at just how obtuse this series is if you’re not reading everything ever published for it, but I suppose that the intended audience for a Halo comic is someone who has probably at least played most of the Halo games and is looking for some content to fill the time between new entries.

Leaving the comics aside, I also read two short (and digital-only) novellas, the first being “Smoke and Shadow” which took kind of a look at a few average joes just trying to get by in the post-war universe and getting themselves wound up in a bigger mess.  It’s a good setup for a solid mystery/adventure, and a perspective that is a nice change from all of the “the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance!” high-stakes drama. It ended kind of prematurely, though, probably because it ties into Halo Wars, was released before Halo Wars 2, and couldn’t actually have a real ending without knowing where Halo Wars 2 was going to wind up. That’s a mark against it, but I will be looking forward to any sequels.

I also liked “Shadow of Intent”, even though it was yet another Elite novel. Your reaction to it will likely be directly proportional to how curious you were about what happened to that one Elite with the weird face in the Halo 2 cutscenes.

Finally, Halo Wars 2, which was yet another surprisingly-enjoyable spinoff game. Once I got it installed, anyway.

The first Halo Wars seemed to be very deliberately separated from the mainline games, and I expected that the sequel would likewise be happening in a place and time set well away from them. Instead, it takes a path that stretches credulity just a tiny bit to get it closer to the events of the numbered games, but… well, you know, that’s not really all that important. The thing I like about any RTS is the process of building up a massively-overpowered army and then using it to steamroller over the entire map, and Halo Wars 2 was just as good as the first game at scratching that particular itch. The fact that the end ties directly in to the end of Halo 5 as well (with one of the better “stuff just got real” moments) is just a bonus.

The base campaign is pretty short. I think you could probably blow through it in a day if you approached it in a businesslike fashion, and the two DLC campaigns are even shorter. I took about three nights to go through all of it. Now, I’m a big fan of shorter games, and got it for half price in the recent Spring sale, so I’m 100% happy with what I got for what I paid… but if you are paying full price this might be a tougher sell unless you’re interested in the multiplayer.

As an experiment, I even tried the gamepad controls for a level or two, and they weren’t bad.  This is definitely something you could play from a reclining position on the couch, if you were in the mood – I wound up going back to mouse & keyboard, which fit my tastes better, but I did miss the easier camera control of the more console-centric controls a little once I’d done so.

So, that makes 17 novels, 3 Novellas, 5 graphic novels, 4 movies and 11 games, just to be caught up for whatever Halo 6 turns out to be. At some point, they really need to figure out a way to bring the player up to speed on all of the different bits of the storyline, though I’m not sure how you’re going to do that without a “Thank you for purchasing Halo 6! Please watch this massive clip-show of a movie before you start!”

It looks like it will probably be bringing the crew of the ship from the two Halo Wars games in contact with the crew of the ship from Halo 5, and I can’t deny that I’m looking forward to that.

I also can’t deny that, as crazy as the prospect of doing a deep dive into all of the games and media tie-ins was, I enjoyed the experiment. It has me really tempted to do another play through the Mass Effect games, this time with all of the DLC installed. That was another series where the games just didn’t flow well at all, and I have to suspect that most of that was because I was just playing the vanilla versions.

Maybe I should take a little break before I do that, though.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames, Xbox One | Leave a comment