Baud Attitude

…on the topic of “Christmas Games”, Disney Infinity was something I bought myself last Fall.

Well, technically, I’d bought an Elsa several months prior, and she was cheerily holding down a spot on a shelf largely covered with plastic maids, but the Marvel set was the impetus to go all-in with the franchise, to the tune of the Avengers set, the Guardians of the Galaxy expansion set, and Hawkeye and Rocket figures just because I hadn’t spent enough money on plastic crap yet.

By “all-in”, of course I mean that I let everything sit, untouched, in its packaging for a couple of months, then hooked it up in late December and played the introductory mission to the point where I got out of Avengers Tower and suddenly had the entirety of Virtual New York to mess around in…

…problem was, it just wasn’t grabbing me, and I wasn’t really sure at any point what I was supposed to be doing.

I downloaded a couple of user-made toy boxes, and had a great time running around those as Elsa, freezing Chetauri and blowing up space bugs from Wreck-It Ralph, but I couldn’t get the enthusiasm up for going back to the Avengers playset – particularly as I’d completely forgotten all of the game tutorials and felt that I should REALLY start over from scratch.

I bought a Tinker Bell, too, somewhere in here.

Then, I had the sudden realization that I’d bought the Guardians of the Galaxy playset at the same time, and it would probably have more or less the same tutorials, and I should maybe give it a go.

That turned out to be the secret.  Guardians doesn’t have a Virtual New York, and it doesn’t have Nick Fury yelling at you to do things… but it DOES have a telepathic cosmonaut dog, and it DOES have Rocket Raccoon, and it held my attention a heck of a lot better than the Avengers playset did.

Part of it, I think, is that it’s a lot easier to balance a playset around the Guardians, because none of them have power levels that are THAT crazy compared to the others.  Technically, I think you CAN play through the entire Avengers set as Black Widow, but I don’t think I’d recommend it when you have Iron Man and Thor RIGHT THERE.

Anyway, playing the Guardians set helped me get the basic structure down.  The playset has a main story quest and several side quests that you can take for extra experience, and you run around the map looking for quest givers and then follow quest markets to blow up things that need blowing up or protecting things that need protecting.   It’s very like an MMO, come to think of it.

It took me a little over two hours to blow through the Guardians story, and having gotten the hang of things, it didn’t take too terribly long to finish up the Avengers set.

I did have to drop out of the story mode, go back to toy box, and download an arena sort of thing where I could grind up some levels on Iron Man, but that wasn’t too bad of a side trip.  It IS a little weird getting used to the idea that the figures themselves hold the levels & skills.

Anyway, I’m tempted to try some of the Star Wars-themed Disney Infinity 3.0 playsets now.  I can reuse the 2.0 base, and the software costs next-to-nothing on PSN, so I think it’s just going to be a matter of waiting for post-Christmas sales to pick up the Luke & Leia set.

I don’t play many driving games. Honestly, barring “Team Sports”, I’m hard-pressed to think of a genre that I play less.

I did have a blast with Flatout: Ultimate Carnage, which I bought solely on the strength of a friend’s recommendation. It was more destruction derby than traditional racing, with some wonky physics and a TERRIBLE licensed soundtrack, and I played it until I’d finished the single-player campaign and then went back to hunt down a few trophies.

I also played Need for Speed: Carbon, because it let me go drifting in a virtual version of the same car I drive on a daily basis, and even got all the way to the final race. I then got my doors completely blown off – it wasn’t even close – and put it aside.

What I’m trying to get at, here, is that there’s absolutely no way I would have ever picked up Need for Speed: Rivals on my own.

Fortunately, it wasn’t my call. My wife decided it would make a good Christmas present.

Turns out, she was 100% correct on this. Before I go on, a caution: I do talk about plot elements below, so, you know, spoilers etc.

While “racing” games aren’t exactly in my wheelhouse – no apologies – NFS:Rivals includes a campaign wherein you play as a cop ON THE EDGE, completely dedicated to busting illegal street racers at any cost.

For example, while you are driving around, you may spot a pesky scofflaw violating the speed limit.

Before giving chase, and hopefully turning their car into a pile of scrap from which the driver can be dragged and arrested, you must signal your intention to do so. This switches you from “Patrol” mode to “Pursuit” mode, and you have a pair of ways in which it can be accomplished.

First, you can pull up behind them and turn on your lights and siren. At this point, they will run, and your dispatcher will cheerfully authorize you to give chase.

Alternately, you can pull up behind them, punch the boost button, ram their back bumper at full speed, then radio your dispatcher and report that the suspect collided with you and that you are naturally giving chase in response to this naked act of unsolicited aggression.

…

As you might expect, this sort of behavior draws some attention to your police department, and the FBI sends in a task force to investigate reports of rogue cops, relegating you and your fellow officers to desk duties.

So, you steal a sports car from the impound lot and start running people off the road until the FBI decides that, yes, street racers ARE a problem and re-instates you to deal with them.

Right now, I’m starting the 7th chapter (of 10), and I’m still not sure whether it’s an elaborately-crafted parody or a 100% earnest defense of the ends justifying the means.

There are things you can do that don’t involve crashing into ruffians, of course, and there’s even a campaign where you play as one of the racers, if that’s your thing.

My only complaints about the game are (1) loading times are a little extreme and (2) EA is really pushing the whole always-online thing, so by default you are dropped into a map with five other people. It took me a while to find out where I could turn this off, and apparently you won’t be ABLE to turn it off in the next NFS game, which is a bit of a downer.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

So, there’s an angel – a cupid, specifically – who has only one task between her and graduating from Angel School. She has to find an unpopular guy, put an Arrow of Love in him, and get him together with his one True Love.

It SHOULD have been an easy test to pass.

Unfortunately, modern cupids have progressed a bit beyond the bow and arrow, and her crossbow appears to have selective fire. Her chosen mook – that would be you, the player – winds up with 16 arrows in him, which has the effect of making him completely irresistible…

…ALMOST completely irresistible. In a cruel twist of fate, it turns out that the girl you like just happens to be the one-in-a-million who is immune to the effect of the arrows, and the only way you can undo the effects of cupid’s itchy trigger finger is to woo her, convince her you’re a stand-up guy worthy of her affection, and work up the nerve to confess.

You have one day.

Good luck!

Gal*Gun is a weird one, and it’s no mystery why it didn’t get a release outside of Japan. It’s pretty much a reskinned Virtua Cop or Area 51, with the gangsters or aliens replaced with classmates who are desperately trying to tell you how much they love you. You take damage for every successful confession, so your only defense is to use your concentrated pheromones to make them pass out in ecstacy before they can get their declaration of love out.

I DID warn you.

There’s a pretty fine line between tacky-but-fun and just-plain-creepy, but Gal*Gun generally manages to stay on the better side of
the line. There’s no nudity – the worst you’ll see is the occasional flash of white – and the main character comes off as almost painfully sincere in his rejection of his newfound popularity.

I’d have a very hard time recommending it to anyone who doesn’t speak at least intermediate Japanese, though. The core game is accessible enough – put cute pink crosshairs on classmate, squeeze trigger until they go “kyaaaaa~”, sink to their knees and explode into a burst of pink flower petals – but the humor and heart of the game comes from actually trying to get your crush’s attention, and that means talking to them and choosing the right response from a dialog selector.

Being a rail shooter, each path is a fairly short affair. Even with occasional pauses for looking unfamiliar kanji up, it took about 2 and a half hours to play through one path out of the four available. It tries really hard to encourage replays, with lots of unlockable art and character profiles in addition to the “good” vs “true” endings for each character, but that’s pretty scant payoff for hours upon hours of pretty repetitive gameplay.

As a light-gun game, it would probably be much better played with a Move controller. I don’t have one of those, but made do with the regular gamepad without too much difficulty.

It IS a PS3 “Best Price” release, and the current exchange rate makes it only about $25 US. Even if the novelty wears off pretty quickly, it’s probably worth it for any fan of quirky Japanese games who can get past the language barrier.

It’s been a slack month for posts. Mostly, of course, that’s because the majority of what I put up here is me talking about games I’ve been playing lately, and most of the games I have been playing through have been fanservice-heavy visual novels.

I did play through “Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor”, which was an interesting twist on Qix, but that’s an old game and has been praised to death by people who are much better at words. I’m also frustratingly close to finishing the main story of FFXIV’s “Heavensward” expansion, but wasn’t able to find a group over the weekend to tackle the final dungeon so I really can’t talk too much about that just yet.

On the other hand, I did play through the latest Call of Duty, “Black Ops III”, this weekend. I always feel a little guilty admitting that, because it absolutely ruins my image as a niche gamer, but they are spectacularly-polished spectacle games and I have really been enjoying the crazy futuristic stuff that Activision has been packing into recent entries in the series.

…well, Ghosts was pretty bad, in retrospect. It had a cool dog, at least.

I’ll warn you in advance that some of the following will contain story spoilers. I don’t think they’re anything particularly bad; I’m not going to talk about the Big Twist Ending or anything. Still, I usually avoid going into specifics and I’m breaking from that pattern.

Because it’s set 50 years in the future, CODBLOPS3 gets to pretty much throw reality out the window. It doesn’t have the hover bikes of Advanced Warfare, or anything like that, but the plot centers around human augmentation, specifically direct interfaces between brain and computer, and there are a lot of pretty trippy scenes where virtual / augmented reality starts bleeding in to the real world. This is kind of a cornerstone of the Black Ops subseries, come to think of it.

Most CoD games have pretty unambiguous endings – the overall plot may be all kinds of twisty and full of double-crosses and things that are Not As They Seem, but eventually the story leads you to The One Bad Guy Who’s Responsible For All The Bad Stuff, and you kill him. Sometimes, you get to wear giant stompy robot suits, which is a plus in my book.

CODBLOPS3, by contrast, had a seriously ambiguous ending, and I’m not ashamed to admit that it had me reaching for Wikipedia for a plot summary immediately after finishing. I needed some help understanding what had just happened, and I’m still trying to process it. I’m pretty sure that it will wind up as one of my favorite CoD stories; I just need some time to think on it.

The missions are better at simulating some freedom of choice than previous CoD campaigns. They’ve been very successful, over the years, with a formula of “walk from point A to point Z, shooting everything as you go”, but BLOPS3 adds a lot of branching paths to each campaign level that really open things up. It’s no Deus Ex, and “stealth” is never a real option, but it does a good job of distracting you from realizing that you’re basically playing a carnival shooting gallery with pretty graphics.

You’re also given the option to choose which weapons, gadgets, and augmented abilities you take into missions, which is something that took me a few levels to realize and really get the hang of. Some of the abilities are FUN, particularly one that lets you hijack enemy robots. There was one particular firefight, against a swarm of enemy soldiers and their Don’t-Call-It-A-Tachikoma robot, that was a particular source of frustration until I realized that I could, if I avoided being shot for long enough, turn said Tachikoma to my side. I was rewarded with shouts about said robot being compromised, an achievement went Ping, and I got to let out all that pent-up frustration in a matter of seconds.

Apparently, there’s even a second “Nightmares” campaign that has you playing through much the same events, but with a largely different story, and that might give more insight into exactly what happened. I’m rather keen to give it a try.
That said, the game treats one of the female characters with a particular kind of brutality that I’m surprised anyone ever thought was OK, and I’m particularly perturbed by it BECAUSE it’s such a big release – Activision proudly announced that it had made $550 million in its first weekend, and that is a ton of copies sold.

The game’s first half has you facing off against an organized crime / private army group lead by a brother and sister pair. As they are villains in a Call of Duty game, you’re going to wind up killing both of them; this should not be a surprise.

The brother gets cut down by a hail of bullets in a chaotic scene; it happens so quickly that I didn’t actually realize that he’d been killed until the characters start talking about how his sister is going to be mad now.

The next time you meet his sister, you just happen to need to open a biometric lock that needs her handprint.

So, you knock her unconscious and cut off her hand. You even have a little gadget that seems to exist solely for the purpose of cutting off hands, it’s a sort of wrist cuff thing that clamps on and makes a happy little whirring sound.

Then you have another conversation about how she’s going to be SUPER mad.

The NEXT time you run into her, you wind up killing her by holding her head in the path of an open flame, while looking directly at her face. There’s no “tasteful” camera cut away or anything, you just get to watch yourself burn someone alive.

Both of these are done in cutscenes, removing the player’s “agency” and absolving them of any actual guilt – there is no BioWare-style paragon vs. renegade choice involved.

In the context of some weird niche game that won’t ever sell more than a few thousand copies, it’s distasteful but largely ignorable. In the context of a game that will probably sell probably ~20 million copies, it’s pretty terrible.

I’ll get off my soapbox now.

There’s also a multiplayer mode. I played two matches and served mostly to boost the kill count for the opposing team. I think I’ll stick to shooters like Titanfall and Splatoon, where you can help your team out even if you’re absolute bollocks at the shooting other players part.