Baud Attitude

So, I finished playing through both of the Disney Infinity 3.0 play sets I bought during the post-Christmas sales, which left me with only two PS4 games on the backlog.  One of them is Alien: Isolation, a game that I spent several hours with shortly after it came out, and lost a couple of those hours due to save point spacing.

I elected, therefore, to start “Warriors Orochi 3: Ultimate”, which is a heck of a name to saddle any game with.

While I’ve technically played a musou game before, it was Dynasty Warriors: Gundam, so I was able to more-or-less follow what was going.  WO3U is, by comparison, SUPER dense and full of all kinds of characters from early games, most of whom have really difficult-to-remember Chinese names.  It is being something of a slog to get going.

The real draw, of course, after playing both Ninja Gaiden Sigma games last year, is that I can eventually unlock the Ninja Gaiden characters and use them to cut huge swaths through fairly poorly-animated and rendered giant armies.  I’m not too proud to admit that.

On the plus side, even though I can’t remember anyone’s NAME (the main three characters are, in order, “Spear Guy”, “Baggy Pants Sword Guy”, and “Weird Spinny Weapon Kid”), the setting is kind of neat.  The schtick is that they’ve been fighting a war against overwhelming odds for YEARS, and they finally manage to launch a desperate strike against the heart of the enemy… but they lose, and just as they’re about to get wiped out, a woman (“Mysterious Floating Chick”) shows up to give them a chance to travel back in time to earlier battles and undo their mistakes.  As you save people from dying, they get added to your roster and you can go back into THEIR timelines to save even more people.

Mysterious Floating Chick is named Kaguya, by the way, and she has the only name I can remember because three terms of Japanese Literature were good for SOMETHING.

One nice gimmick is that, since you are constantly recruiting people and it would be terrible if they all started off at level one, you bank XP during missions that you can use to boost new characters.  By the time I DO unlock the Ninja Gaiden crew, I should be able to  bring them right up to standards. 🙂

Oh, short note about the Disney Infinity playsets:  The Force Awakens one was REALLY good, to the point where I kept replaying several missions to try to improve my scores on them, and that’s very unusual for me.  The “Rise Against the Empire” set, on the other hand, opened with a GREAT level where you run around Tatooine murdering sandpeople and punting Jawas into the Sarlacc Pit, and then went seriously downhill from there.  It pains me to say it, but if you’re looking at buying the game, maybe skip the Episode IV-VI set unless you just want the figurines.

I’m tempted by the Inside Out playset if it drops to 20 bucks or so (I’ve already seen it at 25, so it’s just a matter of time), and don’t know enough about Clone Wars to know if I care for that set.

When you can buy a high-budget, heavily marketed game for 9 bucks less than a year after it comes out, it’s a pretty good sign that it absolutely failed to meet expectations.

Usually, it’s the sort of ignominy reserved for games that just plain don’t work, or multiplayer-only games that failed to built enough of a community to sustain momentum past the next big multiplayer release.

Not that I’m pointing fingers at Titanfall, here, or anything.

The Order: 1886 isn’t broken and doesn’t have a multiplayer community to fizzle out. It’s also gorgeous, the sort of thing you could show off to a friend to demonstrate that, yes, your purchase of a new console WAS justified. The bits where you are ducking from cover to cover, fighting off waves of soldiers with an assortment of steampunk-themed weaponry, or sneaking through gardens trying to take out wandering sentries without being spotted, these bits are quite a bit of fun.

In between these bits, though, is an awful lot of walking slowly from point to point, some not-terribly-inspired clambering over rooftops, and frequent QTEs of the “press X to not die” variety.

There are several different KINDS of QTEs, at least. There are ones where you must press a button once, some where you press and HOLD a button while a progress bar fills, a few where you must mash a button repeatedly, and even some where a small indicator appears on screen and you need to move the camera to highlight it to reveal the button you need to press.

Oh, and there’s another form of QTE used for both boss fights, where you must move the right stick at the correct time to dodge enemy attacks before retaliating. It’s VERY Dragon’s Lair.

There are also two minigames for opening locks. Each of them is used once as a tutorial, and then four more times during the course of the game. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to count them, except that they stood out as “we could have asked you to hold down the triangle button here, but we thought we’d shake things up a little” moments.

In its defense, however, it’s a game about hunting werewolves in Alternate History London with lightning guns made by Nikola Tesla, and how cool is that? It’s a little hard to be entirely negative about it, even if it sort of feels like a six-hour-long movie you occasionally need to interact with to keep the story going.

For the price, it was a pretty neat movie.

After last week’s figure binge, I spent a little more time this weekend with the game part of Disney Infinity 2.0. Specifically, I played through the Spider-Man playset campaign and then Escape from the Kyln, which was one of the “Toybox games” included in the initial box.

I didn’t originally realize that the Toybox game pieces WERE games, because they look like the terrain modifier pieces you use for building toyboxes. I don’t have any particular interest in the creative side of DI, so I’d just stuck them on a shelf and forgotten about them.

There’s not a lot TO Escape from the Kyln; it’s a set of eight Guardians of the Galaxy-themed levels, all of which revolve around solving collecting keys to unlock gates while fending off a mix of Frost Giants, Venom Symbiotes, and, uh, the aliens from GotG whose name I can never remember. Those guys. It lets you use any Marvel character, so I used it as a convenient way to take all of the figures I hadn’t used during the playsets and get them to level 4 or 5, unlocking their Special move, Mid-Air Recovery, and Street Spike along the way.

Loki’s Special is a particularly fun one, by the way. It turns him invisible and creates a duplicate Loki who serves as a decoy to draw the attention of everything you’re fighting, so all of your opponents go and beat on your decoy while you hit them in their newly-undefended backsides.

The Spider-Man playset was a little more ambitious in terms of story and had some of the most engaging gameplay of the Marvel playsets. It was also the most straightforward set to unlock crossover characters in – I had the Hulk and Iron Man crossover coins collected within the first few minutes past the introduction.

It had an uncharacteristically difficult boss fight very early on, and it had several out-of-place rail shooter segments, but web-lining around as Spider-Man was too fun to hold any real grudge against the weirder bits. I got a particular kick out of being able to grab pedestrians and hold them under one arm as you swing around; it was an unexpected tribute to the Amazing Fantasy cover.

After finishing up Spider-Man and Escape from the Kyln, I went back to the earlier playsets and did all of the crossover character missions. For the most part, they didn’t add a whole lot to any of the playsets, but the Nova crossover mission in the Avengers playset actually had a cutscene and a tiny bit of story added to it, so that one is worth unlocking.

None of the DI 2.0 games were particularly amazing on their own, and needing to buy toys to unlock content that’s already stored on the disk is… questionable. Still, the tactile nature of the toys and the sense of ownership you get from leveling Your Own Personal Elsa is kind of compelling.

Side note: We’ve been working on a project where we convert one of the stray cats we feed into a garage cat, and so far it has been going fairly well… barring the part where he decided to show his appreciation by leaving a mouse head on the mat outside the kitchen door. No, Ned, we don’t believe you when you say that it’s the “best part.”