You know those moments in life where you go from feeling like your flying high and unstoppable to just crashing, burning, and feeling like there's no way out? No? Just me? Well, I know it's not just me, but you get the point. The last week has been rough for me. And it's not just going to magically get better over night. It's going to be rough for...months, maybe longer. I dunno. I also don't feel comfortable talking about it publicly yet. I'm mentioning this because it's probably going to affect my blogs. Either by making them less frequent, or not as good. I dunno. But, hopefully, in the end once I'm through it, I'll be better off. Just need to stay strong and all that, you know?
Helldivers.
Some games are about going on grand adventures, some games are about deep, long winded stories, and some games are about solving complex puzzles. Helldivers, meanwhile, is about shooting things until they explode, and more importantly, doing that with friends. It's the type of game that is pretty simple in a lot of ways, but has enough depth to keep you going if you want it.
Helldivers is about the distant future, in which Super Earth is attempting to liberate the galaxy and spread democracy to the poor planets out in the vast cosmos that don't have it. Which is to say this game has a really goofy patriotic tone that I think works wonders for justifies slaughtering your way through the never-ending planets in the game. It's also good for justifying a lot of the things that the characters say during missions, which ranges from amazing puns to just screaming things like "FREEEEEDOM!" But my favorite will always be, "How about a nice cup of liberTEA?" It took me about a week to get that joke too. I don't have subtitles turned on (don't know if the game actually has them, actually), but I doubt the pun is spelled out like I did it.
Speaking of the planets, all of them are procedurally generated (which leads to some interesting scenarios), and there's three different factions to fight. And all three factions are very different from each other both visually and how they fight, which is nice. There's bugs (which has invited a lot of comparisons to Starship Troopers, which I've only seen about 15 minutes of), cyborgs (random gears fly out of them when they die), and psychics, which look kinda weird and @artelinarose really hates fighting we when play, but I'm not really sure why because they seem totally fine. I dunno.
The only other thing worth noting about the "meta-game" (which probably isn't the right term in any way shape or form but I mean the "game around the game") is that there's some sort of persistent back and forth between the valiant forces of Super Earth and the three different war fronts with the different factions. If a lot of Helldivers are focusing on the bugs and succeeding, for example, then the bug forces will be pushed back. And supposedly, I think it's possible to actually "defeat" them, at least temporarily. Conversely, it's possible for Super Earth forces to get pushed back, which can result in missions on Super Earth "capital planets" (I think) where there's half a day or something (real world time) to drive them back. I've only managed to take part in one of those thus far, but at least conceptually I think this stuff is cool. It'll be interesting to check in on this in a year when, I can only assume, not many people are still playing, and see how the system is doing, and if changes have been made to accommodate a smaller number of players.
Don't get me wrong, that's not saying anything about the quality of the game. Far from it, I think it's great and I find myself wishing I played it more often than I do. It's just an issue where it's a game built to be played with other people. And, to be fair, I've had a much better experience playing it cooperatively with random people than I expected. Maybe not quite as good as Destiny, but the vast majority of Destiny, for better or worse, doesn't really require a ton of coordination between the players. Helldivers at least sometimes needs a basic level of, "Which objective are we going to next?" And honestly, sometimes I just don't feel like talking with random people online, you know? Friends, sure, that's half the reason of playing with friends, and I know @artelinarose and I have had a blast playing as much as we have together (and I have with the other friends I've played with, she's just been my main Helldiving compatriot). But I just feel kinda bad going and playing with random people, especially on more difficulty missions, without communicating with the other players. I mean, that's not the game's fault, that's totally on me. Maybe next time I'll try plugging my USB headset into the PS4 before trying to find random games, so I at least have the option.
Either way, the game is still super fun. The core shooting and action feels good, and there's just enough stuff around it to keep it interesting, and from feeling like a generic twin stick shooter. Things like making ammo management really important, because you lose the ammo in the magazine when you reload, and the vast majority of the time there isn't any ammo to find in the level. It happens, very rarely, but it certainly doesn't drop from enemies or anything like that. So it puts a heavy emphasis on not wasting ammo, and remembering to call in for more ammo. I mean, it's not the sort of thing where you're constantly out of ammo, instead it's just enough of a thing that you have to pay attention to it. Which I appreciate.
There's a similar thing with secondary, or I guess actually tertiary guns. Every mission you pick a regular weapon (of which there's a good number of options, and all are upgradeable) and a pistol (also upgradeable). But, there are stratagems (series of button presses to summon things like ammo, guns, mechs, and even an APC) for things like heavy weapons. The one I like the most is the heavy machine gun, but there's also a rocket launcher, flamethrower, and at least a couple others, I think. You don't start the mission with them, you have to call them in, and you can only carry one at a time. And if you die, it gets dropped and you have to pick it up again.
But that isn't always the easiest thing to do, because they game can get HECTIC and HARD. If you're in a situation where three of the four people in the squad have died, and you're surrounded by enemies, often the smartest thing to do is just retreat, get to a safe-ish spot, and then use the stratagem to respawn the other players. If you can get back there and get that gun back, then cool. But it's not always worth it. Especially given how easy it is to die in the game. Not that you die instantly to regular attacks, more that there's a lot of different ways to die very quickly, and often as the result of other people you are playing with because there is friendly fire on EVERYTHING.
It's also really easy to just mess up on your own and die. The very first mission I played, I didn't know what I was doing, at least beyond the basic controls that I learned from the tutorial. I had seen footage of Giant Bomb playing it, but that didn't make me an expert. Anyway, I just decided my drop zone into the mission randomly, and ended up starting in the middle of some mines. And then, literally the very first step I took, I stepped on a mine and died. Then, at the end of the mission, I was crushed by the extraction shuttle because I didn't realize that could kill me too. Then there's things like the time someone (not me) accidentally threw a grenade, and killed the entire group because no of us realized it had happened fast enough to respond, and we were tightly bunched up. Sometimes you'll just be crushed by the drop pod of someone entering a game midway into it, or by someone's stratagem.
I know some of that stuff might sound infuriating, and I can totally understand people being angry at some of these things. But, I personally think this game is at its best when things are going just wrong enough to be funny, but not so wrong that you actually have to start missions over (it's game over if everyone dies, or if you run out of lives when playing alone). It can be an absolute laugh riot if you're playing with the right person or people, and stuff is going "wrong" in just the "right" ways. I know @artelinarose and I have cackled several times at the hijinks that have ensued when we played.
It can be a ton of fun in the right circumstances, and if you have people you can play the game with, whether locally or online, I highly recommend it. If not, $20 is a bit steep for what's in there, but that said, I've absolutely loved my time with it thus far, and I hope to play a whole lot more of it in the future. It's not perfect. I wish there were more options for customizing the characters appearance, because I've yet to see any gaudy pinks yet. I also think it's a bit silly that even when playing online, it restricts all the players to one screen, and the camera doesn't pull out far enough to let you get very far away from each other. It's not a huge complaint, and in most cases I think it'd be pretty dumb to split up too much, but it does feel a bit restricting.
It's a fun game. I recommend it.
Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris. Cloud Saving on PS4.
I'm not going to lie, I don't actually have much to say about this game. It's fun, well made, and I enjoyed it a lot. I think it might be a little too short for the regular $20 asking price, but that stuff is so subjective, and also I got it on sale. If you liked the previous game, you should play this one, and if you are looking for a shooty puzzle solvey top down-ish game, it's for you. There's not really anything interesting to say about it, frankly. But, I do have some things to say about...Well, I'll start with a story about something that happened whilst I played the game.
So, I was playing the game, and enjoying it. I had been playing it for a couple hours a day, just going through at a fairly leisurely pace. I got to a point where, at the time, I thought I was 80% into the game, though it later turned out I was on the final level before the final boss fight (like I said, I wish the game was longer). I wasn't very far into the level when the game crashed and I got sent back to the PS4 main menu. I wasn't too upset, because while the game had not crashed yet, it certainly wasn't the first PS4 game I've played that has crashed. Hell, Apotheon crashed on me at least ten times earlier this year.
The difference is, Apotheon never crashed during an auto save, and even if it had, that game keeps several auto-saves and lets you save whenever, so I never had to worry about data loss. Not so in Temple of Osiris, which managed to crash during an auto-save. The only auto-save. So, when I tried to load back into the game, it said my save was corrupted, and my only options were to back out and try again, or to create a new save. So, I tried it again, and was met with the same message. My next thought was, "Well, I'll just go download my cloud save from yesterday, I'll have to replay some stuff, but it won't be too bad."
Then I remembered that cloud saves hadn't been working for me for a couple weeks. Since before I started playing the game. I didn't have a cloud save. And, understandably, I was pretty upset about this. Upset that because of Sony's ostensibly shoddy online infrastructure, my only option was to start the game again, from scratch. Instead, I moved on and played other stuff for, I dunno, probably a week or two.
Until I was talking with my good internet buddy @krummey, who I told the story to. But his response left me even more upset. Why? Well, he informed me that I had most likely just hit the limit for the amount of cloud save data Sony allots to people, 1 GB. I went and checked, and it turns out he was correct. I had hit the limit.
Now, there's a whole bunch of problems with this. First off, you don't even get cloud saves on PS4 unless you are paying for PlayStation Plus. Second, it was not made clear to me that there was a limit, or that I had reached that limit. The PS4 had told me that it wasn't able to upload my saves to the cloud, but the messages it gave didn't say why. Nor was I ever warned that I was approaching the limit of my cloud save space. Also, 1 GB isn't exactly a ton of space. Sure, most save files are about 10 MB in size, but those can add up. Especially when you play games like Dragon Age Inquisition, and you play them like I do. I had over 200 MB worth of saves just for that one game. And there were a few other games that did that same thing where it uploaded ALL of my saves, particularly inFAMOUS. So, I went and deleted a bunch of stuff. I'll never need saves for games like Stick it to the Man in the cloud, after all. Nor do I need ALL of my Inquisition saves (but I left one it there).
But, obviously, this didn't solve the problem with Temple of Osiris. So, you may be wondering, did I end up playing the entire game again? The answer, is no. How? Well, frankly, I'm surprised what I did worked. Instead of just starting over, I went into the notifications on my PS4, and scrolled down to where it said it couldn't upload my Temple of Osiris saves, and found one from before the game crashed. And I decided to try uploading that one again. And after that worked, I tried downloading it. Then I went into the game, and was amazed to see that it worked, and I was back in the game. It wasn't up to exactly where I was, but replaying one level was much faster than replaying the entire game.
Like I said, I'm surprised it worked.
I beat it, and that was that. It's a fun game. I forgot to PlayStation Share any pictures of it, so that was just a bunch of text because Giant Bomb doesn't have any good pictures on file and I feel bad now so here's Waluigi.
Sony really should change how this cloud save stuff works. I'm not saying every single user needs unlimited storage, but 1 GB isn't enough. Maybe make 1 GB what non PS+ people get, and give everyone else 10 GB, or something. I dunno. But it should be more than it is. And I totally understand this isn't something they can just do, and do for free. But I think it'd be worth the time and money for them to do that. In the long run, at least. More people are going to run into this issue before the lifespan of the PS4 is up, and I hope they change something before it becomes a widespread thing.
Anything else?
I managed to beat another boss in Rogue Legacy this morning whilst I was listening to the Bombcast. This time it was Ponce De Leon (the boss in The Maya(?)), which was the third one I've beaten. Took me a little over 20 hours to get to that point (thanks Trophy for playing the game for 20 hours that I got this morning!). Rogue Legacy is still great, and I think it's a perfect podcast game, because almost all of my time playing it has been whilst listening to podcasts.
Played some more CoD: AW. Still fun.
I've been playing this month's PS+ games too. I beat Counter Spy, and played enough of Olli Olli 2 to write about that one (I've got two levels left, not counting the ones you get for five starring levels). And hopefully I'll have Valiant Hearts finished, and play enough of that Oddworld remake to write about those for a PS+ Catch Up next week. And maybe I'll download that Sherlock Holmes game on PS3 and poke around in that. I still have Deadly Premonition The Director's Cut, though, if I want a detective based PS3 game to play. Which I definitely will...eventually.
Then this afternoon, instead of finishing this blog, I got talked into playing Jamestown + and DoA 5 LR with Internet Friend Jay over Shareplay. And, well, I got talked into downloading the free version of DoA 5 LR because Jay said Hayabusa is free and he was the one character I played and he seems all right. So, I guess I'll play some of that? I doubt I'll spend any money in it.
And looking ahead? Well, Bloodborne is next week, and you can bet I'll be playing that. It'll be good to finally have a (hopefully) really good PS4 exclusive to play. Then Axiom Verge is out the week after, which I'll get because it looks rad and I told the guy who made it at PAX East that I was going to get it. I even got a pin for standing around talking to him and a PR guy about the game. I'll probably play Titan Souls when that is out, then MKX is in April, and who knows what else then! More PS+ games, of course. But now I'm looking too far ahead.
Anyway, thanks for reading. See ya next time.
I got those pins at PAX East. The other is for Black Ice, which seemed cool. Great logo, if nothing else.
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