Hey guys! It's been a while since the last time I actually wrote something up here, but that seems to happen a lot to me. Sometimes it's because I have nothing to write about, sometimes it's laziness, sometimes I was just too busy. This time, well, I won't go into the details, but the time since the last blog I wrote (over a month) has been...emotionally trying, let's say. No, nothing bad has happened. No one died, no natural disasters, nothing like that. It's just been kinda rough, but I'm feeling better today. And I've played some stuff since the last time I did one of these, so I figured I had to do this before I let it pile up so high that I never ended up writing about any of these games.
GTA V
This is the big one. I was so excited for this game that not only did I go out and buy it on release day, I actually went just slightly after the local K-Mart opened and got it as soon as I could. Part of that was because of logistical issues (ie, that was the only time on that day when I was able to go and get it), but I was really excited. And for some reason I feel like that last sentence implies that my excitement waned as I started to play it (that may just be me), but it didn't.
I really love the game. I think it has its flaws, some of which are dumb holdovers from previous RockStar games, like the accursed run button. But even that isn't as frustrating as it was in GTA IV, because of simple additions like making the character run when he has a gun equipped. You know, modern innovations. There's some other, minor things like pop-in and a few other weird technical issues here and there (I mean just the single player), but overall I had tons of fun with the...70-ish hours I spent playing the single player. I think it only took me about 50 to get to the end of the story, but I had to go finish up some of that side stuff, and find those stupid collectibles.
You know what, I think one of the side quest chains did break on me. It was the Michael one involving that Epsilon cult. I won't go into specifics here, because I don't want to spoil it for other people, but I know there were at least a couple more parts to it that I never got to do because they never called/texted me back (kind of like in real life (I kid, I don't use text messages)). I'm almost positive that I did everything that was required of me, but it never happened. Oh well!
I'm not sure what else to say. I think it's fun, I really liked the story, the acting, the writing (at least for the story stuff, I'm not counting ads and stuff), etc. While I think most of the radio stations in the game are pretty bad, I do think that local radio station out in the hills is fantastic. Especially when Trevor's friend gets on and starts talking about lizard people and banks creating digital clones of people. SPOT ON. The three protagonists are all great, though like many others, I think Franklin is criminally (pun intended) under-used. That said, Trevor quickly became one of my favorite video game characters of all time, so I'll let that slide.
I think the mission design for most of the game is really great, especially compared to a lot of other open world games. Especially those heists. Everything about them, from planning, to preparing, to actually doing them was great. One of my favorite moments in the game was when I had to steal a pest control van for that first heist. It was a really small, simple thing, but something about getting there at night, sneaking around back, and stealing that van felt incredibly satisfying.
I was a little underwhelmed with where some parts of the story went, but that was mostly my fault. Again, I won't go into specific details, but there was a moment in the game when I thought that the main story was going to lean deep into aliens, and government cover ups of aliens. But that stuff (spoilers) never happens, and I blame myself for creating this weird expectation. Well, that's not entirely true, there's certainly plenty of stuff in the game that hints toward aliens, but not really enough in the main story to have created this expectation.
And uh...I guess I should say something about the torture scene, right? I know it's been talked to death, but I didn't mind it. Hell, I thought it was kind of a fun mini-game. I dunno, maybe I just got the joke more than more people (I did think having a button prompt to water-board was hilarious for some reason), or maybe it's a sign of a much deeper, darker problem with my psyche. Or maybe it's because I don't think that hurting one dude and letting him live is any worse than any of the dozens of people that had been killed by just ONE of the three protagonists up to that point in the game. And I know that some (or maybe a lot, I'm not sure) have said that they thought it was out of character for Trevor. I dunno. He seemed to be having fun, but maybe there should have been a little more incentive to get him to agree to it.
I still think the real reason the scene is in there in the first place is that RockStar had to have SOMETHING in there to be "controversial." At this point they've done everything else, and that was probably the only thing they could have done that wouldn't have gotten the game an AO rating (you know, the mark of death). It worked, at least for a little while.
And I played about half an hour, maybe forty minutes of GTA Online. Despite the inclusion of Lamar (another of my favorite characters), I thought it was EXTREMELY boring. If I had been playing with friends, maybe that would have been fun, but as it was, I had no reason to play any more of it than that, and I have doubts about ever going back.
Those are my thoughts on GTA V, I really love it. I can't wait for GTA VI when that comes out in 2018.
Splinter Cell: Blacklist
As you may know, I'm pretty fond of stealth games, but I didn't get this right when it came out because it came out on the same day as Saints Row IV, and there was no way I was going to not buy Saints Row IV that week. And while that was definitely the right decision at the time, after the death of Tom Clancy, I felt obligated to go and play this game. It was certainly helpful that it was on sale for $40 that week, but I think it's a fantastic game that probably would have been worth sixty of my dollars anyway.
I should probably say that I have not always been a huge Splinter Cell game. I didn't play the first two, and only got three or four levels into Chaos Theory (I remember getting stuck). I did play Double Agent to completion (liked it a lot, it was a fun early 360 game), but skipped on Conviction (largely because I read it was pretty short).
But like I wrote about, I think Blacklist is fantastic. Like GTA V, it's not perfect. It does look kinda dated in some ways (apparently it's running on Unreal Engine 2.5), the character models look kinda rough, and I did have some technical issues (it froze once or twice, lighting broke a couple times in a really weird way that caused me to have to reload checkpoints). Some of that stuff may sound kinda damning (and really, we should be at the point where any game crashes are inexcusable, but whatever), but I think the core game play is absolutely solid.
In terms of pure mechanics, this is easily my favorite stealth game since MGS4. And in a lot of ways, this is a better game than MGS4, but not in all ways. MGS4 still has bigger environments, more routes, stuff like that. And say what you will about the story stuff in MGS4 (or any MGS, really), but it's at least more interesting than the story in Blacklist. Blacklist's story isn't bad, it's just a Tom Clancy story. I feel kinda bad saying that this way after he passed away earlier this month (on my birthday, actually, or maybe the day before, but the news broke on my birthday). What I mean to say is that if you are familiar with those kinds of stories, then you know exactly what Blacklist has in store. There are some twists, but nothing crazy.
Like I said, it's the game play that is the star here. Really tight controls, great level design (even if it does feel a little constrained some of the time). I really like the game's commitment to letting you play through without killing anyone...at least while you're playing as Sam Fisher (side note: new voice actor is fine, but he's no Michael Ironside). The game has these moments where you play as someone else either controlling a drone, or actually on the ground (in first person, no less!) where your only option is to kill. They're not bad (well, the FPS section isn't great), but they felt kinda out of place. Conversely, the level based nature of the game made it pretty easy for me to go back and replay the one level where I killed some enemies (before I got the hang of the game) so I could get the no kill Trophy. The fact that I was able to get through the rest of it (again, as Sam) without killing anyone is a pretty impressive feat on the part of the game designers. I almost never manage to play through stealth games non-lethally the first time. There's usually some moment where I mess up, or some action scene (mostly in MGS games) where going through with only non-lethal stuff is so impractical that it would ruin the moment the first time through. And there are definitely moments in Blacklist where I think Sam would have not shown the same restraint I did, but the fact that I never felt gimped in any way by going non-lethal is great. In almost every case I think that non-lethal is just as viable, if not more so, than going lethal. This is definitely not the case in some so-called stealth games that I've played in recent years (cough, Dishonored, cough).
I don't think I have much else to say on that for the moment. Well, while the torture scene in GTA V didn't bother me, there was something in Blacklist that kinda bothered me, particularly toward the end of the game. This is kind of a spoiler, but not really for the main story (and it probably won't mean anything to anyone who hasn't played Blacklist or Conviction). But there's a character in the game named Kobin (voiced by Elias "I never asked for this" Toufexis (I can't believe I spelled that right on my first try)) who was a villain in Conviction (or so I've heard). Early in Blacklist (the first level after the prologue) he gets captured by Sam, and held prisoner on Fourth Echelon's secret airplane. I didn't have any issue with that, at least until the end of the game when Sam seems to imply that because Kobin was somewhat useful throughout the game, he was going to be kept on the plane indefinitely, with no chance of getting a proper trial or anything like that. And when I say kept, I mean he is sitting in a cell behind bars, aside from the few times when he's needed outside of that cell.
I think that's kinda messed up! I'm not saying the character should be released and go free at the end of the game because he helped out Sam and crew, but he should at least get a trial, right? Or if he's going to be a permanent member of Sam's crew, then he should be shown a little more respect. I dunno. This bothered me way more than anything in GTA V.
But it's still a really fun game. I just wish I had someone to play those few co-op only side missions with. No, this is not me asking people reading this to play with me. I think something like this would require too much coordination, and I don't have a mic or anything, so I'm not going to do that.
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
Now I'm getting into the free PlayStation Plus stuff. If you've forgotten, this was the game that made its way out of that whole debacle with Kurt Schilling and the State of Rhode Island (as I explained it to my dad when he asked me what this game was). There was certainly a lot more to it than that, but that's not what I'm writing (talking? I feel like I switch between verbs describing those two, very different acts on a whim) about here.
When I first started playing Amalur, I was quite bored. The combat seemed shallow, the world bland, and I still think it's dumb that the dwarves in the game are called gnomes. I know I remembered that here, when I wrote this, but literally every time in the game when someone says the word gnome, or I see the word gnome written out, it takes half a second for me to remember that the people I was referring to as dwarves in my head were really gnomes. And it took me quite a while before I really got into the game. I ended up playing through all of Blacklist and Shadow of the Colossus HD (more on that below) and some of Ico (also below) between the first few hours of this game, and everything I've played since. And I'm about...50 hours in. Still a good ways away from the end of the game. Maybe about ten more? I dunno.
But about, I think 10-15 hours in, I had enough new skills and the story was picking up (both in the main story and the big side quest lines for the guild-type groups) enough that I started really liking the game quite a bit. I still feel like the game is biting off more than it can chew in just about every way, but I'm enjoying it. I don't really mind the dated graphics, terrible facial animation, silent protagonist, generic quest design, technical issues, repeating voice actors (I've heard Cam Clarke (Liquid Snake) about 40 times as different characters), and the thing where entering a city or leaving a building inside a city plays the same "sweeping" view of the city EVERY time and then the camera flies through the geometry to where I actually am in a really janky way (pretty sure that's a glitch) as much as I did when I started playing. And this is because the combat is pretty fun now, the art design is, well, interesting (elves with pink super saiyan hair), and I am now at least fairly invested in the story.
Again, I haven't beaten it yet, and when I do I'll probably put in a sentence in my next blog (expected to hit some time in early 2014, given my current pace) giving my final thoughts, but I doubt my opinion will change substantially in the mean time. It's a fun game, and it's been good for killing time in this part of my life where I have no job and no prospects of actually getting one.
Shadow of the Colossus And Ico
Since these are both old games I'm going to try to keep this short. Both of these were (are, as of this writing, I think) free on PlayStation Plus. I had played SotC back in the day. Not when it came out, I think in 2007 when I bought a PS3 (when they were still backwards compatible) and I borrowed a copy from my friend (who, I should say, still has my copy of Uncharted 2 that he borrowed last year and still hasn't played, and hasn't returned it despite pretty much admitting that he's never actually going to get around to playing it because he does have a job and a life and all sorts of stuff keeping him busy (he knows I kid, don't worry)).
I really loved the game back then, and I still really love it now. There are a few spots in there that are extremely frustrating, and there was even one moment where I had to look up how to get past the first stage of the 15th Colossus online, despite having beaten the game years before (but given how poorly explained that part was in that fight, I wouldn't be surprised if that was what I did then too). But I think the good parts of that game are more than good enough to make up for the game's blemishes, and I still love its devotion to creating giant, open environments with nothing in them. I know there are a lot of good reasons for why most games don't just have big open fields with nothing in them, but I kinda like it when games do, even though this and Mass Effect 1 are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head (MAKO!).
Ico, however, I had not played before. I also haven't beaten it yet. I think I made it past the halfway mark, but I got stuck. I've gotten stuck a lot in that game, actually. I'm probably going to have to look up what to do next, because I think I spent close to forty minutes combing through where I am for what to do next, but couldn't figure out anything. I bet this will be a case where once I do figure out what to do, it'll either be something incredibly obvious that will make me feel dumb, or something so obtuse and weird that I will brush it off as bad game design. Well, that's a little harsh, but you know what I mean.
Overall I enjoy the game, but not enough that I had to go and finish it before spending so much time playing Kingdoms of Amalur. I'll go back to it, which is more than I can say for stuff like Jet Set Radio, which I deleted from my PS3 to make room for Amalur and the Blacklist install (8 gigs!).
So, what else has been happening in my life? Aside from the rough spots I mentioned above, I mean. Well, I played some more D&D the other day. Because of the incompetency of one of my friends, we ended up having to create new characters and starting over, so I made a new sorcerer named Nic Cage. He was thrown out of sorcery school while he was still an apprentice because he was too obsessed with finding ancient Freemason treasures. (I had created an alternate background that involved a flesh eating virus and an evil wizard named Ed Harris, but neither of my friends have seen The Rock, so I felt those references were wasted on them.)
The highlights include me trying to sell a flask of kobold blood in a village (I was somewhat inspired by V-Bomb and his jar of goblin blood), but when no one wanted to buy it, I just poured it down the well, and cast fire on the inside of my flask to make sure it was sanitized. Then I "accidentally" burned down the tavern with another fire spell, but I was able to talk my way past one of the town guards on our way out, despite the DM (who was also playing, as there were only three of us) saying he made that speech check pretty hard (I have 9 for my bluff skill).
I also played several hours of Lord of the Rings Risk yesterday. This was with different people. By the end of it, one of us (three were playing at the start) had quit, so I was playing his turns in addition to my turns in an attempt to defeat the other person, who had somehow managed to amass an enormous army. I was victorious, which is to say that after I wiped out the last of his units I declared it was a tie between "me" and the "other person" and that there would be everlasting peace in Middle Earth.
Then I said I was never going to play Risk ever again in my life.
I will probably end up playing Halo Risk with them before the end of the year. For whatever reason, they own LotR Risk, and Halo Risk, but not Risk-ass Risk.
Then we spent a good 30-40 minutes yelling at a Kinect while trying to search for the movie Kazaam (we were all yelling at once, intentionally). The best we could come up with was a trailer for the movie Steel. Now I really want to watch Steel (I have never seen Steel before).
What else? Despite intentions to see Machete Kills and Escape Plan, I have not managed to go see either, and at this point I would not be surprised if I missed both whilst they're in the theaters. That said, I absolutely HAVE to see Machete Kills at some point. And probably Escape Plan too.
No progress made on my second book. Part of the whole going through some rough stuff in the last month-ish made my ability to try to focus on reading through almost 400 pages for typos pretty much disappear. I'm going to try to buckle down and do that soon though. I'm really hoping that I can get it out there for people to read by the end of the year, but I am a little disgruntled that meeting that "deadline" will mean "publishing" it before any of my friends actually read more than 6 chapters. You may think that's a bad sign about the quality of my book, especially given that I had finished the first draft before the summer began this year, and I would probably agree with you if they didn't swear that what they had read was better than what I had done in the first book, but who knows!
When you spend so much time working on something without meaningful input from others, it can become basically impossible to actually judge the quality of it. And really, given the roaring success of my first book, at this point I might just be better off finding some way to put it up for free and just let people read it. I don't think it's better enough than the first one to succeed that way, and I don't really see it becoming successful for any other weird reason, so why even bother?
Maybe I'm just being pessimistic, but at this point I've almost completely given up on my dreams of becoming a famous author. Or even a moderately successful author. I'm definitely going to put this book up for people to read somehow, and I am going to write the final part of the trilogy eventually. It might just be a while, especially if I ever actually go out and get a job or something.
Oh, yeah, those delays. I'm really bummed that Watch Dogs and Drive Club (excuse me, #DRIVECLUB) got delayed. I know it's probably for the best, in the long run, but that PS+ Edition of Drive Club was going to be my go to, "here, look at this next gen game" game. Not because of its graphical fidelity (which I'm sure is probably pretty good), more because I don't want to be showing my middle-school aged sibling M rated games, and Resogun is probably going to be too hectic to show off, let alone let someone else try to play (at least for people who aren't great at video games). I guess I'll just have to show off AC IV without actually fighting or killing anyone. Sure, my younger sibling is mature enough to see something like that, but I just don't feel right, you know? Eh, never mind.
Maybe Knack will wind up being great. I really doubt it. But these delays do mean that I will probably end up buying Killzone Shadow Fall before the end of the year, just because. I did like Killzone 2 and 3 a lot, but I still think $60 is a lot to pay for a game like that, especially when I probably won't play the online a whole lot because I'm usually not good at that stuff. Who knows! All I know is that I'm not canceling my pre-order now, not when inFAMOUS Second Son is out early next year, and definitely well before anything resembling a price drop is going to happen.
But I do wish now that I had the extra money for and Xbox One and Dead Rising 3. Sure, that would probably be the only game I played on the Xbox One until Swery's game or...Uh...That game being made by the people who made Alan Wake. Remedy? Quantum Something-Something? As you can tell, I'm deeply invested in whatever it will be. (No, not interested in Titan Fall, see previous comments on playing games online.)
That's it! I've run out of things to write! Thank you for reading all the way through, I hope you enjoyed it. And if not, well, you probably didn't spend as much time reading this as I did making it (especially if you count making those dumb Luigi pictures).
P.S. Like usual, I did not edit this for typos, so I'm sorry!
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