Thursday, June 22, 2017

Vacation Plays 1

Since leaving for the trip to Japan we are on now, I've played a lot of Mario Kart, both 7 on the 3DS's and 8 Deluxe on the Switch. The guided play options of the latter make it especially kid-friendly, which is appreciated. The games are pretty fun, as well.

I've also been playing a little more of Breath of the Wild, it being my focus for the trip, as far as progress. I've got all my quests from Kakariko and Hateno, and I've made my way to Zora's Domain to see about this first Divine Beast. I'm thinking I'm probably under-leveled as it goes in this game, having only five hearts and one stamina upgrade so far. I'm one shrine away from the next of either, though.

Since my last booklog entry, I finished up Corax and also read The Master of Mankind, and am now beginning Garro.

Corax took the titular primarch basically to his end as far as his heresy-era deeds. By the end, he's bloodied the traitors' efforts to push to Terra, realized some hard truths, and set off on what amounts to a suicide mission, presumably within the Eye of Terror.

Garro picks up Battle-captian Nathaniel Garro's story after his return from Isstvan III to warn the Emperor of Horus and the others' betrayal there. From other books I've read, I know enough to know he goes on to work for Malcador the Sigillite to form the Knights Errant, who are a force of legionaries plucked from their former legions, both loyalist and traitor, to be Terran Regent's hand among the various theaters of the galactic civil war.

The Master of Mankind is a pretty interesting and important novel in the series. It chronicles the actual conflict of import, to the Emperor, of the Horus Heresy--the war for the Webway. Nothing, not the space marine legions, the primarchs, or even the worlds of the Imperium matter as much to the Emperor's dreams for humanity as the Webway, which offers the possibility to travel across the galaxy without need of the Warp. Without that, humanity can never be free of its corrupting influence. What abhorrent lengths the man will go to toward that end are explored here. The book is interesting in the wider context of the Horus Heresy series and all of Warhammer 40,000 because this is the closest we are ever likely to be to seeing the Emperor's own point of view, and apparent fallibility. It also sets up one hell of a Chekov's Gun that will no doubt come into play sometime in the far, far future of the setting.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

I had unfinished business in the French Revolution with Arno Dorian. It is now finished. I cleaned up the Templar problems of Paris and Franciade, recovering a couple of pieces of Eden in the process.


Overall, Unity is probably one of the least interesting games in the series. It's not bad, just not particularly exciting, considering the potential of the setting. A lot has been made of the open world, icons-on-the-map overload of this game, but there's also the fact that Paris is a big, flat sprawl that mostly looks pretty same-y from one end to the other. There are a lot more interiors in Unity, and I did always appreciate the scale of the world. Big places feel big.


There have been a lot of young men with a lot of typical young men's problems in this series. Arno's is basically star-crossed lovers; he's the son of an Assassin raised by a Templar, her father, whose murder he's been framed for. He falls in with the Assassins after breaking out of the Bastille alongside one, and he's off to the races to clear his name and find the real killers, and reconnect with her along the way. The big bad in Unity is a Templar leader who is also a Sage, someone who is essentially a reincarnated soul of one of the First Civilization, and who apparently has some access to their genetic memory, from what I can tell.


This game has some more in-depth stealth sections and elaborate mission structures, but the controls are as clumsy as ever, which led to some frustration in later parts of the game. Enemies in Unity are tougher, as well, since they level up as you do, as you progress through the story.


I also played through the Dead Kings DLC for the game, which was a more self-contained story with a clear villain and arc for Arno. It wasn't bad, either, and featured a connection out to the broader series through Arno sending an Apple of Eden he found to the new Al Mualim in Cairo.


I guess I'm not done with the series, I just needed a break in the middle of this one. I'll get Syndicate sometime later this year maybe and play through that. Hopefully it'll have a bit of that Peaky Blinders feel, at least. Also, it's E3 time now, and Assassin's Creed Origins has just been revealed. I'll be playing that, certainly. I just hope mechanics will have changed.

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Mid-2017

Here in early June, already, it's been a pretty good year for gaming so far. I'm coming off two extended stays--Mass Effect Andromeda and a FFXI revisit, as well as having knocked out a few shorter games earlier in the year and knocked a bunch more off the backlog, if not completing them.


I'm in a weird spot for the next week or so, not sure what to play before heading to Japan for four weeks. I know that while there I plan to play more Switch. I'm not sure what else. Maybe just that. I should probably pick up Mario Kart, thinking on that. It does have the kid-friendly mode. My girls like it on the 3DS, and I'm not certain I want to take the 3DS.


I suppose I probably should, since I myself have a bunch of DS/3DS stuff I need to play. I am unsure, though, how much time I'll have to play games there, and think I might want to focus on Zelda. But then, it might be good to have systems to pass off to them during travel or while killing time at home.


And what about the Vita? I'd like to have it along as well, but does it make sense to have a Switch, 3DS, 2DS, and Vita? In addition to a MacBook and two iPads? And my kindle, of course.


Back to the topic at hand, though: what to play leading up to the trip. I just buckled down and finished Andromeda. Maybe I could do the same with AC: Unity? Or make more progress into Shadow of Mordor? Surely it makes sense to finish The Witcher 3 before Mordor, and I plan to do that upon returning from Japan. I could play more of Dawn of War III, or Warcraft III, or Starcraft II, or Stellaris, or Endless Legend or... but I don't think I'm in a strategy mindset right now. I'm leaning toward AC Unity or a backlog blitz, I suppose.

Overly Hearthstone Inspired Hack Job

The Elder Scrolls Legends recently came out on Steam and Android OS, and I was kind of curious about it, so I decided to check it out, wondering what Bethesda's take on the digital CCG might be like.


Turns out, it's a lot like Blizzard's. As in, they just ripped off whole swathes of Hearthstone and gave them a different skin. I could see doing that early in production, with a mind to go back and redesign later, but for the most part things are laid out extremely similarly to the way the other game does them.


It wouldn't be so bad, really, if more care had been taken in thoughtfully re-arranging menu or UI elements. The design of the game itself, sectioning the playfield out into lanes, adding runes to the life bar that explode and grant card draw as life is depleted, and the like, does seem to show more than a surface groping of Blizzard's mechanics, but the presentation here is awful.


Apart from the blatant copypasta, The Elder Scrolls Legends incorporates terrible voice acting, very bad cutscene art, and tutorials aimed at an idiot. The cutscene art is most puzzling, considering the art on the game cards is generally pretty decent. What you get in the interstitial scenes features not only uninspired fantasy pap for a script, but some of the ugliest photos-digitized-and-fantasy-filtered stylings this side of Mortal Kombat.


The one thing I was really curious about was if the developer could make something as fun as but less frustrating than Hearthstone. I don't think I'll play enough to find out, though.


I wonder if the idea of a continuously evolving CCG is inherently flawed. The ever expanding card base presents obvious issues of balance, which games like Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering before it mitigate by restricting structured play to only the most recent sets of cards. However, you will still eventually run out of ideas keeping the game fresh. Maybe that's only a problem for the individual player, and not so much the game's stewards.

Saturday, June 3, 2017

Paths Found

I have finally wrapped up Mass Effect Andromeda after some 80 game hours. It's a beast of a game, with some open world filler, but overall I had a pretty good time with it.

The combat was fun all the way through. Maybe that was a product of my character build choices--shotgun-centric, making liberal use of the dash and jump, with a heavy dose of melee damage and shield drain and fire thrower abilities from the tech skill path.

Plot-wise, Andromeda is pretty successful pseudo-reboot, set apart from the events of the original Mass Effect trilogy in both time and space. It's the story of the Milky Way races establishing a new home in a new galaxy, while at the same time helping the Heleus native Angara to fend of a militaristic empire of gene-consuming race assimilators called the Kett, to deal with the remains of an ancient race's AI constructs, and to weather the fallout of an apocalyptic war in the sector in the years the Andromeda Initiative arks were in transit from the Milky Way.

At the end of the game, a foothold is gained, allies made, and the Kett Archon fended off, but the rest of the Kett are still out there in the galaxy, one last ark is still making its way in Andromeda, and the Pathfinder and crew still have a job to do exploring and building a new civilization in their new home.

EA has made noises that sound like the game didn't perform to expectations, and while that's not hard to believe, given said expectations, I do hope we'll see a continuation of the series in Andromeda. Maybe DLC to begin with, to cover the arrival of the Quarians and other Milky Way races, and another game in the future, possibly a generation later, exploring the further integration of the new arrivals with the natives, and the looming threat of the Kett Empire.

In all likelihood, we get either the first or neither at all.