Dark Souls III: There IS an easy mode.

Posted on March 30, 2018 by baudattitude

It’s been nearly two years since I decided to man up and see what all the hype about “Demon’s Souls” was about, and that lead to me spending most of April and May of 2016 playing through that game and then the three Dark Souls games.

This was entirely out of character, because I am not typically drawn to difficult games and the Souls fanbase rather revels in the legendary difficulty.

It turned out that, well, they’re not forgiving games BUT they reward patience and persistence rather than twitch reflexes, and that’s pretty well suited to a old guy.  I didn’t ever really feel like they were unfair… until I hit Dark Souls III, which was just BRUTAL.  It took me a good fifty hours to claw my way through and I wound up summoning other players to help with the vast majority of the bosses.

A good part of that, it turns out, was just because I decided that I was going to play a pure magic user – no pyromancy, no miracles, just raw sorcery – and I did this just in time to start a game that was really unforgiving to glass cannons.  I spent hours grinding INT up and collecting the four rings needed to make sorcery even halfway viable, and the result was… well, if I could make space between myself and the thing I was trying to kill, I could usually blow it up REAL good.

Dark Souls bosses rarely let you make any space, and the bosses in Dark Souls III are particularly keen on getting right up in your proverbial grill.

Anyway, I mentioned a few days ago that I’d been needing distraction and had started a second playthrough, this time picking the Knight starting class and working on the Yuria of Londor questline since I’d missed my chance to do it the first go ’round.

It went pretty well.

Actually, let me rephrase that.  It went shockingly well.  I gave the Soul of Cinder a merciless beat-down with only about 30 hours on the clock, and on my first try.  Excluding Pontiff Sulyvahn – I have NEVER been able to reliably parry in a Souls game – I didn’t get hung up on any boss for more than a few attempts and had a surprising number of first-attempt kills – all solo, with the exception of summoning Yuria for a fight because I wanted her armor set.   I didn’t even go nuts hunting down Estus flask upgrades or gear, with the exception of about two hours of beating up Lothric Knights so they would drop me their armor set.

Fashion Souls IS the true end game.

Some of this, yes, I did play the game about two years ago and I did remember a few things, but most of it was realizing that the game really wanted me to play a character who would go toe-to-toe with the bosses instead of running around trying to pew pew them to death.

So.  Lessons learned and all that.  I may have to rethink my personal ranking of the series, because I was quite harsh on this game when I originally played it, and it turns out I was just doing things wrong.

 

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

On Secret Weapons

Posted on March 21, 2018 by baudattitude

So, I had to be on a conference call from home tonight, and my only role was to sit and listen for my name and answer questions if asked.  We’ve been having this call every night so far this week and I have yet to be called upon, so tonight I decided that I would start a new character in Dark Souls III, and make a melee build since I’d had such an annoying time playing it as a pure sorcerer build the first time around.

It worked out pretty well, until I decided to start going after the Sword Master just outside Firelink Shrine.  I’d killed him on my first playthrough because, well, I was playing a pure sorcerer build and could just blow him up at range.  As a melee character, he was not quite such a pushover, and I died a few times.

Then my wife walked in and saw that I was playing a game while I was technically supposed to be working, so she shook her finger at me and said “shame!” and then walked over and put her hands over my eyes.  While I was fighting him.

So I flailed around a bit and then decided that discretion was the better part of valor and just pushed the stick dead forward until she said “HOW CAN YOU EVEN SEE WHERE YOU’RE GOING” and took her hands away in disgust.

And my vision was restored just in time to see 2000 souls added to my total, because apparently he’d fallen off a cliff chasing me, and then I went and picked up the uchigatana from his spawn point.

I love these games.

 

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

Star Wars: Battlefront II, March 21st Update: A New Hope?

Posted on March 21, 2018 by baudattitude

Earlier this year, I rented Star Wars: Battlefront II – mostly just to play through the single-player campaign since they actually did one this time.  In the process, I tried out the game’s “Starfighter Assault” multiplayer mode, and had way more fun than I expected flying around and getting shot down by other players.  So… when it showed up in a sale at 60% off, I went ahead and bought it.  I am weak.

For the last few days, it’s been my go-to game for the couple of hours between getting off work and going to bed, and my “playing” to “respawning” ratio has improved considerably – as long as we are clear that we’re talking only about the Starfighter Assault mode, as opposed to any of the other multiplayer modes in which I spend more time waiting to respawn then actually playing.  I really don’t have the reflexes for the ground-based combat play modes, but Starfighter Assault is a much more casually-paced affair and has objectives that you can contribute towards even if you aren’t very good at one-on-one dogfighting.  It’s a lot like Splatoon or Titanfall in that way.

And, in that time, I have come to admire the utter bastard efficiency in which the card-based progression system was designed to point out to you how your frequent and unavoidable deaths are the result of having Worse Cards than the guy who just killed you, and (by the way) you could probably get some Better Cards if you just opened a few loot boxes.  This REALLY comes out in the game’s “Heroes Vs. Villains” multiplayer mode, where you not only have to deal with the other players having Better Cards but also with the problem that half of the characters on either side are locked and must be unlocked with currency earned at a glacial rate through repeated play sessions.  Want to play as Luke?  That will be 5000 credits. (A typical 15-20 minute multiplayer session nets 350 credits on a good run.  If you’re feeling short of credits, well, those are in the loot boxes too.)

Put simply, this is a heck of a greedy game, but today’s patch is going a long way to turn that “is” into a “was”.

For starters, you no longer get abilities or upgrades out of card packs.  Rather, if you spend a lot of time in the cockpit of an X-Wing, you will get more levels in X-Wing, letting you unlock the specific upgrades and abilities you want.  Now, if you get slaughtered by a guy with a purple-quality level 4 weapons upgrade card, you can just look at it as something you will eventually be able to get.  The other effect is that you can’t pick a particular game mode or unit that you’re good at and use that to grind upgrades for a different unit.

In addition, all of the hero and villain characters are unlocked.  Rather than having to choose between the four “free” characters offered to you at the start of a Heroes vs. Villains match, you now have a full complement.

These are some pretty good changes, and the end result is that this is now a game, rather than a thinly-disguised advertisement for loot boxes.  Honestly I think they’re wishing they’d released it like this instead of in a state that not only cost them sales and consumer goodwill, but which has inspired legislatures to start asking whether the industry is really capable of self-regulating itself.

One thing I will recommend, if you decide to pick this up now, is to make sure that it’s installed to an SSD.  I had it running off a traditional hard drive, and load times between maps were in the 50-60 second range.  On an SSD, they’re much less frustrating – and, as a side bonus, having this on an SSD means that I load into the hero selection screens faster than people using hard drives, meaning that I have a good 30 seconds to lock down Darth Vader before anyone else can try to choose him.

On second thought, maybe it’s best if you stick to a hard drive.  You probably don’t want to bother with that. Yeah. 🙂

 

Posted in videogames, Xbox One | Leave a comment

The Beige Box, Part One

Posted on March 19, 2018 by baudattitude

So, I mentioned that I had a new piece of very old hardware come into my home a few weeks ago, and I wanted to show off some of what I’d been doing with it in the meantime.  I also wanted to play around with recording some video content.

So, here it is.  You’ll have to pardon the frequent awkward pauses and the way my camera keeps deciding to shift between color profiles.  I have a tendency toward being dissatisfied with things and to decide that I need to tweak and fix them and this means that there are a lot of projects that I’ve never actually finished.  This is maybe a little far the other way.

Oh dang.  I forgot to say “don’t forget to like and subscribe”.  I feel like I’m breaking some rule or something.

 

 

Posted in PC Gaming | Leave a comment

TERA for consoles is a hot mess.

Posted on March 10, 2018 by baudattitude

So, I’ve been quite a fan of Enmasse’s TERA MMORPG for the last several years.  I got on-board at launch, went MMO-crazy as one does with a new obsession and played almost nothing else for several months, then retired it except for occasionally resubscribing for events and holidays.  That’s not a slight against TERA in particular, just a realization that I get very little else done in life when I’m in full-on MMO obsession mode.

After a while, they went free-to-play, with some great bonuses for us founders, and that made it even easier to occasionally drop in and lose myself for a weekend.  I even tried some of Enmasse’s other games when they had Tera-based promotions.

So, I was very quick to sign up to be in the beta when they announced the console versions.  They had the first technical test a few months back, and I logged in and ran through the new introductory zone and contributed my small bit of load to the servers.

Then, they announced a beta weekend, and sold it pretty heavily by advertising all the cool cosmetic stuff you could earn by reaching certain goals in the beta.

…So, naturally enough, I downloaded the beta on Friday night and played it for nine hours straight to hit the level cap.  And it was not a good experience.  Playing on an Xbox One S, there were constant missing textures and frame rates that dropped into the single digits, with frequent freezing that often resulted in the game simply crashing.

It actually crashed so often during those nine hours that I eventually started mentally sorting the KINDS of crashes.  There were the crashes where the controller would go completely non-responsive, but other stuff on screen would keep moving, the crashes where the screen and audio would freeze, but the game client wouldn’t close, the crashes where the game client would close and I’d be back at the Xbox One Dashboard, and the REALLY impressive crashes where I’d hear a horrible noise in my headphones and the console would simply turn itself off.

Being able to crash a console to that degree is a pretty neat trick.

Still, I stuck with it and got to the level cap because I wanted the pretty shinies.  They’d announced beforehand that the server would be wiped at the end of the beta period, so I assumed they’d wind up in the item claim section of your account after the live launch.  I even set some alarms so I would be sure to log on for the official stress test windows.

I took a TON of screenshots and videos while I was grinding up, and I was really ready to put up a post of “yes, it’s kind of unstable right now but best MMO combat ever etc etc etc”.

And, to be fair, they have done a fantastic job of making a controller-friendly interface, for the most part.  I was never able to figure out how to make separate chat boxes or resize the existing chat box, so following group or zone chatter was really difficult, but that was the only thing that really vexed me.  Technical issues aside, it’s TERA but on an Xbox.

Then, after my nine-hour grind session – the only time in the last I don’t know HOW long that I’ve actually stayed up late enough to see a sunrise from the wrong side – I figured I’d log on to the beta forum and see if I could find out any information about the “run dungeons with Enmasse employees” event.  And, instead, I found a thread about “Beta Rewards” and abruptly cancelled my plans to make the stress test events or play the console version when it came out.

The link behind “These Rewards” is to a set of three, honestly kind-of-ugly masks that are unlocked by posting screenshots to social media and so on.  The link behind “Open Beta Stress Test Rewards” is a link to, well, ALL of the mounts and cosmetics and other stuff you could earn through playing the game during the beta test.

So, let’s be clear: The beta test is running for three days, including tomorrow.  If you grind all the way up to level cap and get yourself the shiny gold wolf and the fire wings and halo, you will get to enjoy them only up until they shut down the servers and wipe everything for the end of the beta.  That’s pretty weak for the thousands of hours of data they’re getting out of the beta test weekend.

I’m not sure why they bothered having a CHARACTER SLOT as one of their rewards, since the Beta lets you create 16 characters already.

Right now, I’m upset with the company to a degree that has really quite soured me on recommending their game to anyone in the future.  I’ll update this if there is any new information to make me walk back some of the vitriol, but for right now I have lost the last six years of good feelings about TERA in one weekend.  If you’re looking for a console MMO, maybe try FFXIV or Elder Scrolls Online?

 

Posted in MMORPG, Tera, videogames, Xbox One | 2 Comments

Eleven Years Blog

Posted on March 2, 2018 by baudattitude

Another year of blogging down, and another 30000 or so views since this time last year.  For a blog that’s 90% me talking about playing games very badly, I’m kind of amazed it gets that much traffic.

Mind you, my most popular post over the last few months has been a post describing where you can find the code to open your Amazon locker to get your package out, so maybe I should thank them for making that process confusing.

Now, last year, Nintendo marked the 10th anniversary (3/3/2017) of Baud Attitude by launching their latest console, but I don’t have anything that exciting lined up this year.  I am going to be doing a bit of video work and have a project lined up that I hope everyone will get a kick out of.

Here’s a sneak peek:

SO beige.  Look forward to it!

 

 

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A sad day for digital importers; JCB pulls out of the US.

Posted on February 15, 2018 by baudattitude

For a little over a decade now, I’ve been carrying around a JCB (“Japan Credit Bureau”) credit card, and it has been an endless source of amusement when using it to pay for goods and services.  I’ve occasionally gotten to use the 1-2 punch of handing a cashier a card they don’t recognize, and then handing them a (British) passport when they ask for identification.

OK, I’M A BAD MAN.

But, apart from its use as a payment method that virtually nobody in this country recognizes, it’s had a much more useful trait – most companies in Japan recognize it as a domestic card and not a filthy American credit card.  Which means that, for the last decade or so, I’ve been able to buy off the Japanese PSN and iTunes stores without the bother of hunting down points cards from dodgy resellers, and I have bought a ton of PSOne classics and other games that never made it out of the country.

It’s also been very helpful on the occasions I visit Japan, because it’s instantly recognized everywhere.

Sadly, that ends in a few months.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too shocked by this.  JCB only ever offered the card to people living in a few states (CA, OR, HI, maybe one or two more) and I’m pretty sure that it was just a status symbol for the company.  They sent me a Nintendo DS a few years ago for winning some sort of sweepstakes I didn’t even know I’d entered, and I’m pretty sure that wiped out any amount of interest they’ve made out of me over the years.

I’ve already gone and topped-up my PSN account to the maximum balance  (Y20000) which should last me a while.  So, really, this will only be a pain for iTunes on the occasion I want to buy songs from the Japanese store.  I don’t think there’s any way to preload your balance there.  Maybe the dodgy code resellers have gotten less dodgy over the years?

I’m just generally vexed about the whole thing.  I have rather enjoyed having my own version of Ford Prefect’s American Express card, and that’s being taken from me.  If you need me, I will be sitting in a corner and fuming.

(OK, maybe not so much with the fuming.)

Posted in Japan | Leave a comment

Press Y for Yuri: Nights of Azure 2

Posted on February 15, 2018 by baudattitude

I didn’t exactly plan things this way, but for some reason the last year has seen me playing quite a few Koei Tecmo games.  Nioh, Blue Reflection, Nights of Azure, Fatal Frame III, even Metroid: Other M by a technicality.  I also have Warriors All-Stars sitting on the very short list of “up-next” games.

I’d never really paid attention to them outside of the Dead or Alive and Fatal Frame series, so I was kind of surprised to realize how much variety exists in the games they publish.

So, let’s have an awkward segue here and talk about Nights of Azure 2: Bride of the New Moon – or, rather, the original game because it’s hard to talk about a sequel without its predecessor.  I played Nights of Azure in November and thought it was an awfully pretty game with some amazing costume design, a combat system that felt a little too floaty to be satisfying, and way too many different systems to keep track in what was, after all, a fairly short action RPG.  I also got a little tired of my best friend constantly running off to try to sacrifice herself to the Nightlord.

Some great news, then, in that a lot of the “why is there a ship trading simulator in my action RPG again?” systems were dropped for the sequel, your best friend doesn’t dwell TOO much on running off to sacrifice herself to the Moon Queen, and combat is greatly improved.  The first game had you running around with up to four little demon familiar pals at any given time, and some of the fights had me feeling like my best option was to stay out of the way and let my pets do a lot of the work. Not so in the sequel – while you do still have a couple of pets, they don’t feel quite so center-stage.  The most important criteria in pet selection is that there are a few kinds of gates that close off optional areas with treasure chests, and each of these kinds of gates can only be opened by a certain pet.

In fact, combat in general has a feel to it that is greatly improved.  It’s always difficult to define “weight”, but NoA2 felt “weightier”.

It’s still a button-masher, though, make no mistake.  Some of your demon pals can transform into different weapons for you to use, at least, each with its own moveset, so there’s more variety in your mashing.  I didn’t play around with the alternate weapons too much, however, since I always wanted to have a couple of door-opening pets handy.

Oh, right, you also have a human/demihuman partner, or rather your choice of several different partners, and you get to do all sorts of pair attacks based on your buddy. As you spend more time with a given partner, you’ll unlock story events with them, and all of the characters turn out to have some pretty interesting backstory.  To be honest, the whole “saving the world from eternal night” kind of faded into the background and I found myself a lot more invested in learning more about the different characters.

Soooo, that leaves the bad parts of the game to talk about, and unfortunately there are quite a few.

If you played the first Nights of Azure and grew to know your way around its fairly large and interconnected maps, the biggest shock is likely going to be the drastic reduction in environmental variety.  The sequel has a total of seven areas (and a DLC area), and quests will have you revisiting each area over and over again until you are foaming at the mouth the next time you get sent to clear out the monsters in the Spirit Forest AGAIN.  The maps are also made up of very small segments, and it just feels like it was designed around devices with intense memory constraints.

That same feeling of being designed for last-generation devices extends to the monster variety, or lack thereof.  With the exception of a few bosses, you’ll see the same handful of creature designs in every zone – there’s no sense of place to them.

Finally, I really should not have bought the Switch version, because it’s a mess.  I talked myself into it because it had a downloadable Fatal Frame outfit and I thought that it’d be, you know, maybe a little bit of a downgrade but what the heck, right?

If you’re playing on the built-in Switch display, it’s… passable.  I actually wound up using the Switch in desktop mode for about two-thirds of my play sessions, and it’s much easier to overlook the criminally-low-resolution textures when you’re looking at a screen that size.  Blow it up to the 43″ set I use for most of my gaming, though, and it looks like something from the lower end of the PS3 library – and that may be stretching things.

Looking at the download size of the Switch version – 6.8 GB – compared to the 20GB PS4 version says a great deal about what happened here.  I suspect they squeezed the heck out of everything so they’d be able to ship it on an 8GB cartridge, and it absolutely shows.  I mean, you’ve got a mostly-fully-voiced game with a fair bit of dialog, some FMV cutscenes, and of course a typically-great Gust soundtrack… something had to go somewhere.

So, I guess what I’m leading up to is that my IDEAL Nights of Azure 3, should they eventually make one, would be the game systems of the second game combined with the world and visuals of the first game.

And I’ll probably get the PS4 version next time.

Posted in Switch, videogames | Leave a comment

Entirely Objective Commentary on the Quality of Star Wars: Battlefront II

Posted on February 6, 2018 by baudattitude

I’m not a big multiplayer gamer, so I really can’t explain why I bought the 2015 “Star Wars: Battlefront”, an almost-entirely-multiplayer game.  I fell into the trap of “no, really, we added single-player content!” without realizing that the single-player content consisted of exactly one type of mission in a scant handful of settings AND didn’t actually contribute towards increasing your level or unlocking anything in the game.

That was bad enough, but then I bought it a second time because they marked down the “Ultimate Edition” to practically nothing during a PSN sale.

When the sequel was announced, with an honest-to-goodness campaign mode, I was all aflutter with anticipation… and then came the Great Lootbox Kerfluffle Of 2017, and I figured that I could be perfectly happy just waiting a couple of months and renting it.

So, I did that this weekend.  I am happy to report that there is a single-player campaign, it’s pretty decent now that they added the three missions they held back until after the release of The Last Jedi, and it is definitely worth the three dollars it will cost you at your local Redbox to play through.  If nothing else, the level where you play as Lando is absolutely hilarious.

But, after finishing the campaign, I realized that I still had the disc for a few hours and that it couldn’t hurt to try out the multiplayer.

Indulge me for a moment, here, while I rave about the indisputably-most-awesome ship to ever come out of the Star Wars movies, the BTL Y-Wing Starfighter, a vehicle my wife describes as “oh, the ugly one”.

It’s not an unfair description, really.

Basically, the Y-Wing is the A-10 of the Star Wars universe, a thing that looks like the designers slapped a few guns and a pair of oversized engines on to a cockpit, realized they were late for lunch, and figured they could just stop there and maybe come back later and make it pretty.

They never did.

The Y-Wing does not get a ton of respect, especially when set next to the more famous X-Wing and the annoyingly-twee A-Wing, a starfighter best known for its practical use as a kaiten during the Battle of Endor.  It’s possibly best-known on screen for flying directly down a trench and getting blown up, though it was shown in a little more respectful light during its appearance in Rogue One.

But, I love the thing, warts and all, and I’m pretty sure that it hasn’t been flyable in any Star Wars video games made this century.  So, you may imagine that I was very gleeful to see THIS in Battlefront II:

I pretty much spent the next several hours sucked blissfully into the multiplayer, and wound up driving the disc back to the rental kiosk with scant minutes to spare.

Now, blissful fun times aside, I’m not fond of the way that Battlefront II pushes its loot boxes on the player – particularly as the game shows you all of the AWESOME GEAR the guy who just killed you had equipped at the point where he killed you, with a not-at-all-subtle-hint that if YOU just had the awesome gear, YOU would be the triumphant victor.  EA fully deserves all of the bad press and push-back they got when they decided to tack loot boxes on to a full-price retail game.

Anyway, after I got back from returning the disc, I decided that I’d had a lot of fun with the multiplayer in Battlefront II and maybe I’d take a go at the game I actually owned.  People had to still be playing it, right?

Get used to this screen.  It turns out that, no, people mostly aren’t still playing it.

Also the ship selection is terrible:

…so, as much as I may grumble about it, I will probably give EA some money for Battlefront II: The You Can Fly A Goddamned Y-Wing And It’s Amazing Edition.

You know, when it’s on sale.

 

Posted in videogames, Xbox One | 3 Comments

RiME

Posted on January 27, 2018 by baudattitude

Video game enthusiasts love creating words to describe genres by taking a couple of game titles and mashing them together, it’s the sort of practice that has given us “Metroidvania” and “Soulsborne”, and it’s very useful as shorthand for knowing what you’re getting yourself into when you put your hard-earned cash on the counter.  There isn’t, however, any term for games that try very hard to evoke the sense of playing an Ueda Fumito game, so I would humbly like to suggest “Icolossus” as something that is both confusing to pronounce and drives auto-correct barking mad.

RiME, then, would be an Icolossus.  It’s got the haunting music, the stark visuals, the strong use of environmental storytelling, and the overall sense of isolation.  Your character wakes up on the beach of a gorgeous sunny island, without much sense of how you got there, and you quickly make a cute fox friend and go on a puzzle-solving adventure.

It really IS a pretty game, and the trailer does a good job of showing off several of the environments you will be running and clambering through:

Anyway, on this island, you do a lot of climbing around and finding keys and pushing boxes and feeding fruit to cute happy pigs and the sky is blue and the sun is shining and there’s absolutely no sense of the massive tonal shift that awaits you about five hours later.

At this point, I will say that I won’t spoil too much of the ending, but I will warn any prospective player that the last sequences of the game seem crafted to punch you right in the stomach, repeatedly, until the end credits blissfully roll.

The only other game I’ve played from Tequila Works was “Deadlight”, which has some similarities to RiME – both are fairly short affairs with very distinctive visual styles, both involve traversing the ruins of a once-majestic civilization (we will, for the moment, consider Seattle “majestic”), and both go right for the feels.  On the other hand, while “Deadlight” could be tooth-grindingly-difficult at times (Goddamned helicopter level, I am looking at YOU), RiME is a relaxed, almost casual affair, with very few things that try to kill you.  One of the levels has you darting between patches cover to avoid the attentions of a hungry, roc-like bird, but it never gets terribly tense and I actually wound up feeling a little sorry for the bird at the end.

RiME launched at thirty bucks for both major consoles and PC, and has been discounted on several occasions since. My retail copy was all of $16, and I’d call it a bargain at that price. You probably won’t spend more than an afternoon with it, but I suspect the experience will linger for quite some time.

Posted in PS4, videogames | 2 Comments