DLCOTY, More Like

Because I spend way too much time placing importance on things utterly and compltely without it, I am a little bit alarmed that it is already September 2013, and I only have one half-hearted contender for my Game of the Year in mind. I'm not sure that that is even a reflection on the quality of the 2013 release slate; indeed several factors have come together to prevent me from digging into this year's crop of games. First, I have been, more than ever, playing games of yesteryear. Yesteryear always has the advantage, of course, by dint of the fact that it encompasses every year that is not the current one. Second, my game time has been pretty drastically reduced since taking a new job mid-July--and it was suffering anyway, due to being busy with a two-year-old. Finally, I seem to have found a voracious appetite for DLC in 2013. DLC modules for Fallout 3 and New Vegas, for Dishonored, and now for Mass Effect 2 have all been keeping me pretty busy. Even Bioshock Infinite will probably have some good stuff out this year--oh, and I have been meaning to play the GTA IV DLC, as well. Strange how these things happen, isn't it?

I mentioned Mass Effect 2 DLC--I finally broke down and picked up ME3 for $5 on Origin, and so I also figured it was time to bite the bullet and use the busted-ass POS Bioware site/DLC distribution system to download all of the ME2 stuff. I hadn't touched the game since it was released in 2010, continuing to hold out for some uber edition that would not require me to jump through EA's ridiculous hoops to finish preparations for Shepard's third outing. Alas, that never happened. EA's (lack of) support for this otherwise great game is extremely disappointing. I guess it is the nature of a stupid profit-hungry beast, though, to forget its past and always focus on the short-term. ME3 and it's DLC are available on Origin, incidentally.

Ranting done, I plowed through several ME2 DLC packs this past weekend--Kasumi, Firewalker, Overlord, and Lair of the Shadow Broker, leaving only the final piece, Arrival, left to finish off. They were all pretty fair quality, with Shadow Broker being the best, and Firewalker the least best. I would say its fair to consider them all as read in a complete playthrough of ME2, for future reference. Long time readers may recall Mass Effect 2 being my GOTY 2010. Maybe it's just DLC being DLC, but I can't help but feel that some of the shine has worn off in the intervening 3.5 years since I played it the first time. It is still a lot of good fun, though.

Otherwise, I have spent most of the last several weeks flitting from game to game with little attachment. I am sort of trying to clear a few things off my backlog, but mainly it has just been a case of not feeling like committing to any one thing. The closest I have come to doing so is playing several battles of Tactics Ogre all in a row. I may get back to that after finishing of ME2 for good.

Here is a short and briefly annotated list of things I've touched lately:

Tomb Raider - Still pretty fun, still not exactly hooked, but want to be.
The Binding of Isaac - The stuff of nightmares, really. Fun briefly.
Fate of the World - Nice idea, but too much data-diving. I do that at work.
Sir, You Are Being Hunted - Not sure it holds up for 30-ish fetch quests.
Halo 4 - Yup, it's Halo. Sold with 360.
Red Orchestra 2 - Played a bit, fun multiplayer times.
Civ V - Getting my Hun on. Still in progress.
Final Fantasy XIV beta - Surprisingly nice time for a couple of hours. Sub no thx.
AC3 Tyrrany of King Washington - Looney tunes. No real interest in finishing it.

Rolling Start 2011

It's been a good long while since I've had a chance to update my progress in a blog post.  It's been really busy at work, and I tend to play games at home more than read or write about them.  I've had a very eventful gaming time these past few weeks!  I finished 3 whole games!  Quickly:

Bayonetta - I pushed hard through the second half of this game to finish it off before the end of 2010, but I really enjoyed it.  It's a must play for anyone who likes the action genre or Japanese gaming, or both!  I'm not big on either, lately, but Bayonetta was a load of fun.  This is probably one I would have played multiple times back when I was in school and had tons of time.  The combat is fun, smooth, and has a lot of depth to it if you want that.

Halo: Reach - the first game I played for my Resolution feature, as voted on by Call Of Podcast listeners.  It was good, but it doesn't stick out to me as much more than just another Halo game.  It's surely the apex of Halo multiplayer, but that's not really why I play Halo, and indeed I am not even subscribed to XBL anymore.  I thought the campaign was just kind of average, and definitely lacking in the wow factor that other missions in other series entries had.  The action all being centered on one planet and not on crazy space installations with epic landscaping is to blame for that.  I did appreciate the space flight and other vehicle sections new to the series, but those all together make up maybe 10% of the campaign.  I kind of wonder about the future of this franchise...

Fallout - probably the most unorthodox RPG playthrough I've ever had.  I kind of stumbled onto the endgame not really knowing that it was the endgame.  The whole thing ended up being shorter than I had thought it would be, and by a good margin.  The entire critical path of the game really only has two legs, though the second consists of two objectives.  First you find a water chip (by hook or by crook), then you're tasked with  destroying the leader of the super mutants, and separately destroying the source of the super mutants.  This is really all the direction you're ever given in the game; the rest is up to you.  You have to figure out how to use the resources present in the world, in the form of people you meet, the skills you gain, and the gear you're able to get your hands on, to accomplish your goals.  I hunted around until I sniffed out a trail for the water chip, and I joined the Brotherhood of Steel to get my hands on some power armor and heavy weaponry for the latter objectives.  There are other, equally valid ways of doing these things, all of which have an effect on the game's ending.  My game had a kind of bitter ending for several factions, as I'd inadvertently allowed the super mutants lay waste to the ghoul town of Necropolis and scare away all the residents of The Hub, as well.

I finished Fallout, but hadn't had enough, so the next day I jumped right into Fallout 2! I'm just a few hours in, but so far so good.  It's very similar to the first game, just with a few improvements having been made in the year between the two games' release dates.  In Fallout 2 you play The Chosen One, a descendant of The Vault Dweller, the protagonist of the first game, and you are sent out into the world in search of a Garden of Eden Construction Kit, or GECK.

It was high time that I jump into Assassin's Creed II, as well, so jump I did.  It's great so far!  Ezio Auditore da Firenze is a much more likeable player character than Altair was in the first game, and the variety of mission objectives and other things to do in the game is a tremendous improvement upon AC1.  I'll have more to talk about regarding this game at a later date.

That about wraps things up for now, aside from some light warfighting/manshooting I've been doing in Red Orchestra: Ostfront '41 -'45 and Battlefield 2, both excellent games, by the way.  More on those later, too.

Two New Contenders Enter The Ring

The Royal Rumble of my gaming time continues to get more and more packed. Borderlands and Torchlight come available this week on Steam, and I'm looking forward to playing both.

The last couple of weeks have actually been pretty sparse in terms of gaming. I played a few hours of Dawn of War II two weekends ago, and had a couple of sessions of Firefight, both times teamed up with one other, played just a bit of Yakuza 2, a little TF2 here and there, and a few minutes each of Rock Band and Red Faction: Guerilla, showing a friend how awesome it is. Oh, and there were two post-podcast sessions of Demigod, too.

It's been so light due to being sick, tired, busy, and spending time watching movies and reading. I'm reading Halo: The Fall of Reach at the moment. It's pretty good for a book based on a video game universe! Three of the existing 6 Halo books are by this author, so I'm pretty sure those at least will be worthwhile, too. The two Mass Effect novels I read were decent, but I'd say this is a little better. I was kind of worried that delving too much into the fiction would ruin my 'blank slate' picture of the Chief, and I guess that has been supplanted somewhat, but I'm not exactly put off by what the novel has presented.

Gutter Japanese Is Hard To Parse (Namen-ja ne yo!!)

I've dug several hours into Yakuza 2, the final untouched PS2 game in my collection. It's a step up from the original in several respects, not the least of which is the simple subtitling of the game's original Japanese voice-acting. The VA in Yakuza, the first, was done very well, but even so ended up an overall subtraction from the game's unique Japanese flavor. It may not matter to some who don't speak the language, but plenty of people find the presence of the VA (and script) that the game was designed around makes for a purer experience.

I'm enjoying it quite a bit so far, and more than I expected to, the mechanics and visuals being dated and clumsy as they are. My Japanese is far from native, but also far from a beginner's. Still, I have a lot of trouble trying to go just off the VA alone, especially when it's some gutter chinpira trash hurling insults, a Yakuza boss making proclamations, or a gruff police detective dropping technical terms all over the place. I can usually understand the female characters, though. Funny how that works, all things considered.

I've been back to Halo: the ODST campaign to mop up a couple of achievements, versus multiplayer, and a couple of solo attempts at Firefight. I'd rank the quality of my experiences in that exact order, actually. The lack of matchmaking in Firefight is pretty crippling to it's accessibility. What a shame that is. It seems like it would be a blast with a good group.

Another game I just keeping going back to is Geometry Wars. I've got a few pesky friends who keep beating my high score, and some straggler achievements that I would love to earn, but the game foils me at every turn. What a great game, though. Definitely in the top echelon of download-able games, indeed all games, this console cycle.

Loss For Words

I know what you're thinking. It's about time, right? I ramble on for paragraphs at a time here every week with impressions and stories of the games I've been playing, and now all of the sudden I have nothing to say? Well, you can thank the podcast I've started doing with Lonesteban, which you can find here: http://drop.io/mmh4vw1# and here: http://drop.io/knowzen

Now, an annotated pictorial:

I finished my Heroic playthrough of the Halo 3 ODST campaign, and I really enjoyed it. Next I need to try Firefight.

500 Wii Points I had otherwise collecting digital dust went toward a VC Legend of Zelda. This classic still holds up remarkably well, and the master quest is still hard as a diamond.

This is my character in Titan Quest, Yorthagonus, seeking an audience with the Spartan king Leonidas. I have to go kill a satyr or something first.

That's A Lotta Games

Just since the my last post, I have picked up Bioshock, The Chronicles of Riddick, Titan Quest, Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and Halo 3 ODST. Granted, the first three of those were only $5 each (and Bioshock was a double-dip just for the sake of having it on PC), but my stock of games is getting large. I wasn't able to hold off on Halo 3 ODST, being a both big fan of the series and genuinely interested in this slightly different take.


Perhaps the three aforementioned $5 PC titles harshen the perspective, but ODST is, by all accounts, not the value proposition it could be at $59.99. I bought it anyway, since the conception of the game I had in mind was, ultimately, worth my $59.99. Did I mention how big a fan I am of Halo? I've only spent an hour or so with the game so far, so we'll see where I come down on this one in the end. In the worst case scenario, it's probably one "for fans only."

I'm struggling to remember much that I've been playing over the past few days. World of Warcraft comes to mind. I must have sunk a couple of hours in, since I'm sitting at level 65 now.


There was a level of Pixel Junk Eden I played through and got another "spectra." That game is great just for the visuals and music, putting aside the fun and unique play it offers.


Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain was released on PSN for $6 last week, and 12 years of curiosity finally overcame me. It's a top-down isometric action adventure, just like I thought. Its pretty fugly by today's standards, too. Graphics from this era in particular just do not hold up the least bit. 2D games from years prior still look great, though--see A Link to the Past, Secret of Mana, etc. Otherwise, after an hour or so, it seems pretty competent if not great, and the plot is halfway intriguing. So, all in all, it's not bad for it's time, I guess.

Finally, STALKER. I spent more time modding it this week than actually playing it. A bit of searching around led me to a mod called STALKER Complete 2009, which basically takes the existing game and makes it look 10 times as nice and makes some nice changes to fix niggling little things that bothered players in the original version of the game. Almost nothing game mechanic-wise is messed with, so the game retains it's unique air.

My 2008 GOTY

Every site/podcast out there chooses theirs, so I thought I should, too. I'm going to limit this to 2008 games that I actually played in 2008, as opposed to older games I played in 2008 or 2008 games I haven't played yet. You have to draw the line somewhere.

I don't think I ever named a game for 2007, though, so here's that one first: BioShock. Honorable Mention goes to Halo 3.

Without further ado, my game of the year 2008 is: Metal Gear Solid 4. It was completely awesome, and as good a cap to the series and wish fulfillment as could be hoped for. Who could forget Metal Gear on Metal Gear battle, or Snake's agonizing crawl through that microwave tunnel? Unbelievable, I loved it. Pretty good control scheme, even!

Honorable Mention goes to Gears of War 2.

I didn't actually play that many 2008 games in 2008...

I levels mah dudes

I've been doing a lot of leveling up lately. I took a character all the way through the Mages' guild quest line in Oblivion, getting him up to level 7 in the process. That doesn't sound like much, but I spent around 14 hours total with the guy working my way up to Arch-Mage of the guild. I don't know what it is about Oblivion, because the game is kind of badly put together and dumb in a lot of respects, but the world they've built there is pretty awesome.

It's cool to see how all the little stories you get from random quests and the main quest lines interweave. Take for example the Count of Skingraad, whom we know from another quest is a vampire. He plays some part in the Mages' guild quest line, too. Then there are the plans by the Necromancers (the antagonists of the Mages' guild quest line) to learn to summon Daedra from Oblivion, which you learn of by seeing books on Daedra and encountering stunted, weakling Daedra in one of your final raids on a Necromancer stronghold. That whole idea dovetails nicely with the plot of the main quest line in the game, about the cult Mythic Dawn which opens all of the Oblivion gates, letting Daedra into the world to herald the coming of Mehrunes Dagon, lord of that plane.

I've created another character to take through the Thieves' guild quest line, he's a Khajit Acrobat. I want to see how a stealth class plays in this game. I might then take him through the Dark Brotherhood line, or create an Assassin for that. That will leave the Arena line, which I'm not really interested in, and the Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles quest lines, both of which require expansions. I think I'll hold off on those and get the PC version sometime for them.

The other night I felt like playing some more Diablo, so I jumped back into Lord of Desctruction, and fought through the middle third of that the fifth act of Diablo II. My Assassin is level 32 now, and I still don't have all of the skills unlocked. I think I've taken too scattershot of an approach with her. If I were to do it again, I'd focus more on one or two aspects of the skill tree rather than all three.

The last RPG I've been playing is WoW. I've got my Warrior up to level 10 now. I don't know what they consider zones in this game, but I'm at the third quest hub, which to me appears to be in the same big zone as the last two, which is called Durotar, and is where all Orcs start out. I've played solo the entire way so far, and only chatted with a couple of people, incidentally. At this point it might as well be an offline RPG, for how I've been playing it. I hear the game can be soloed all the way up to 80 now, but I wonder about the raids that start at around 60 or whatever. Do people still do them? I guess if I get that far I'll find out.

In comparison to FFXI, I'd say WoW is much more of a PC-centric game. Not a surprise since it was a) native to PC, and b) created in the West. The interface is well done, and of course the mouse and keyboard combination is integral to that. FFXI was much more built around a PS2 controller and keyboard combination. WoW is also much more user friendly, due to Blizzard apparently actually listening to their playerbase from time to time. There are handy keyboard shortcuts, lots of options to tweak, etcetera. And you can swim.

I played a little Halo online with some friends this week. We went 5-0 in a Social Slayer playlist, which was pretty remarkable. That's what good communication can do for a team. And finally, I downloaded SSFIITHDR, as I'm calling it. I suck at Street Fighter! I hop on to the online quick match matchmaker, and nine out of ten fights my opponent is Ken. No shit. the remaining 10% of the time is about half Ryu, and an equal distribution of the rest of the cast for the final 5%. I play Chun Li, having mastered Ryu and Ken many years ago, on the SNES. I've won maybe 2 matches online out of the 15 or 20 I've played. This game looks sweet in HD, though. It's too bad they couldn't add in more frames of animation, but that would have totally thrown off the gameplay, which at this point is more familiar to gamers than their mothers' faces.

Stasis

This week has been much the same as the last as far as gaming goes: lots of Halo online with guys I went to college with, a little Rock Band, and a little Nocturne. Most of my free time the last couple of weeks or so has been spent watching seasons of The Wire, but that's another discussion altogether, and I like to keep this blog focused on gaming.

The biggest thing to note is the progress I made in Nocturne; it was only a few hours' worth, but I made it through a couple of key boss battles and kind of got the momentum rolling once again. There was this gauntlet of 3 bosses ending with a battle against Thor, with no saves in between. Thor kept kicking my ass until started exploiting the game's battle system. Basically, if I go to fight him with a demon in my party who can null his lightning, then every time he uses it, it costs him the rest of his actions for that whole turn. So, finally I managed to down him, and go back to the save point to ensure I don't have to do it again, and lucky for that because the next time I set foot in that area, I get ambushed by Dante from Devil May Cry. It seems he's been set to hunt down a demon matching my description, and then he owns my entire party. Awesome cameo! Anyway, I came back at him with a bunch of phys-immune demons and beat him back so that now he's either questioning his orders or reporting back to Lucifer that I've passed his test. So now I get word that there is a powerful fiend lurking nearby, and I search him out, and find Daisoujou, some kind of Necro-Buddhist monk with a mean sutra who is currently blocking my progress. I'll figure him out later.

Aside from that, I've just been looking at how much I'm going to have to spend to get a nice gaming PC sometime soon. I'm thinking that I'm going to work on cleaning some more of my backlog out over the next few months, and then sometime around my birthday in February, get a nice rig to play some of this stuff on PC I keep hearing so much about. A quick list of stuff I want to get:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. & its expansion Clear Sky

Sins of a Solar Empire

Half Life series

Team Fortress 2

Left 4 Dead

Fallout 3

WoW (maybe)

Oblivion (maybe, for mods)

past games going back 10 years or more

future releases like StarCraft II & Diablo III

There's tons of stuff on PC, and I'm looking forward to, for once, having the capability to dabble in some of it. For now, though, I have to try to save up some cash, or at least refrain from spending too much while I've still got this massive glut of things to work through.

The Current Rotation

Most of this past week I've been going back and forth between Halo 3 multiplayer and Rock Band 2, with a little bit of Diablo II and SMT: Nocturne thrown in there for spice. This is the current status quo, and it's hard to imagine it changing much in the near future. Three of those games are the perennial type, ones that you can just keep coming back to forever and ever. The fourth is one of those cursedly long JRPGs that eat my life for months at a time. Perhaps for the sake of progress I should spend more of my time on Nocturne per time spent on the others.

I've gotten a number of remarkable achievements in this Halo 3 Indian Summer I've been having, including the Double Double (2 Double Kills in a ranked free-for-all game) today. I actually had 4 doubles that game. Relatively speaking, I was on fire. I still finished in the bottom half of the scoreboard, though. Tough crowd. Halo multi is a ton of fun, but it's a good thing I don't give a shit about my kill/death ratio, because it's terrrrrrrible. I'm the type of guy that like to just jump on a mongoose and go headlong kamikaze into the other team's base just for the thrill. I also like sticking guys with plasma grenades and blowing up warthogs with rocket launchers. This is making me want to go play some more.

Oh yeah, Tokyo Game Show was this past week. Yeah, I almost didn't know it either, with the lack of just about anything to speak of there. We got Halo 3 Recon announced, and.... ... .... Bayonetta looks kind of cool? Aside from that, the biggest story seems to be that Capcom's RE team is apparently pulling their head out and giving us somewhat of an intuitive control scheme for RE5. Sucks that it's co-op centered. How the hell am I going to find anyone to play with when all my friends are either on US Central or Japan time, and we've all got full-time jobs to boot? And I for one ain't going near an AI-controlled partner. I'd sooner play her with my toes on my guitar controller.

Squad Battle

I've been playing a lot of Halo 3 multiplayer over the last week or so, trying to rank up and get some achievements and medals--just for fun, really. With the new title update that came out last week changing the EXP rank system, 7 new maps I hadn't seen (and more coming soon), and this Keep It Clean--whatever it may be--being teased, now seemed like a good time. It also makes a good compliment to Diablo II and SMT: Nocturne.

I've been sort of drifting from one playlist to the next trying to find something that clicked. I spent a lot of time in the Double EXP Team Snipers list this weekend (and I totally sucked there). In the past I played some of the Lone Wolves playlist, but that just makes me tense since it's a big free-for-all and I kind of suck. Tonight I tried the Team Objective playlist. Huge mistake. You don't go play something that requires a lot of communication and competent teamwork with a bunch of strangers (half with no headset) on XBL. It just does not work.

However, tonight I also discovered the Squad Battle playlist tonight, and I think that's the one for me. It's typically six-on-six Team Slayer and first team to 100 kills wins. It's a huge chaotic mess, and it's a blast. You're usually on bigger maps with lots of vehicles and heavy weapons to play with, and since teams are big, the impact that one great or one sucky player has on the overall outcome of the game is somewhat mitigated. Also, the action seemingly never ends since there are so many people around, and it's so crazy and unpredictable that you never seem to get into that arch-nemesis mode with one particular guy, which does nothing but piss you off . They also throw in some Capture the Flag game variants and probably King of the Hill and Oddball, too. Fun stuff.

I did play some more Nocturne over the weekend, too. I've put in like 10 hours with the game so far, and it's OK so far, but hasn't really grabbed me just yet; it's still early plot-wise. I made it to just past what is apparently one of the toughest encounters in the game, an early boss that is a choke point for many people, the Matador. It took 5 attempts, and a couple of hours of level/money grinding so that I'd be able to fuse a demon I needed for my party and buy the "magatama" I had to have to withstand his attacks (it's a demon thing that fuses with the main character to grant immunities and skills). This game is quite a bit harder and less forgiving than your average Square Enix RPG. Come to think of it, so was Etrian Odyssey, and they were developed by the same team at Atlus if I'm not mistaken.

I need to get farther into Diablo II Act V, Lord of Destruction. I've only done like the first zone and quest so far. I'm trying to experiment with new ways to play my Assassin, but skill points are becoming much further in between as I hit the level 30 range. To this point I've kind of done a one-point-in-everything jack-of-all-trades approach, and so nothing I have is especially powerful just yet. After I finish the game I want to try a Druid or Necromancer, I think.

Blasphemy, Heresy, and Apostacy

Killing God (or the applicable god-like being) has been a staple of the JRPG genre since the 16-bit days, if not earlier. A couple of my favorite instances are (spoiler alert?) Xenogears and Final Fantasy Tactics. Chains of Promathia was pretty awesome, too.

I find the more deicide-centered JPRG plots to be some of the more interesting ones out there. On a related note, I read the book of Revelation as a pre-teen, more for the horror than anything, and I thought it was awesome as an apocalyptic fantasy. Thus, I became interested in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne when I heard the plot's conceit: Tokyo is rent from the rest of the world and rolled up as the the inside of a sphere, it's own little "Vortex World" in a new dimension, with its physical and spritual natural laws still undetermined.

Demons of various types, along with a handful of human survivors, and many souls of the newly-dead, roam the new landscape, and the main character is young man chosen by a mysteriously Luciferian young boy become a half-demon steward of this new world, helping by his actions to determine its future. It appears to go from here toward a multi-partisan conflict between 3 main ethos that the main character can act in concert with, or ignore altogether, and reshape the world accordingly. I read there are six possible endings to the game, and Devil May Cry's Dante guest stars.

The central gameplay device seems to consist of recruiting wandering demons (mostly those encountered in random battles) into the main character's party, leveling them up, fusing them, and using their affinities to exploit enemies' weaknesses. It's close to your typical turn-based RPG gameplay, with a little bit Pokemon flavor in the demon recruitment and management.

It's pretty decent so far, but I do have to knock the environments; the overworld is a total classic RPG throw-back, which isn't terrible, but it has a laughably bad blue peg-looking thing as the party icon that you slide around to go places. The towns and dungeons and such are better, explorable in full 3-D, but they're sparsely populated and can be very bland (when they're not twisted and cool), reminiscent of Crisis Core on PSP and games like Shinobi and Maken X (another Atlus game), among other Japanese PS2/Dreamcast games. However, the demons and other creatures around, the character designs by Kaneko Kazuma, are extremely inventive and cool.

I wonder, though, if even an RPG as promising as this one is really worth the time investment. Would a better way of exploring the three themes in the title of this post just be to read a book? I'm sure there are plenty of philosophy books out there raising these questions, and even some good fiction based around them. Maybe my friends reading this could even recommend some?

Narrative in games has always been a major attraction for me, but these days I have a lot less time to devote, and a lot broader tastes in gaming. I find myself more concerned with a game's central play mechanic in addition to the narrative as a means to satisfy that itch that sends me to my consoles in the first place. Hence the reason I have jumped back into Halo multiplayer some this week, and have played a lot of action-y (especially 2-D) titles and Diablo lately.