Hey there fellow bombers! I've been meaning to post a blog for a while now but when it came down to it I never managed to pull the trigger. I even have some rough drafts of a couple game of year lists that I never posted, I've decided to change that and just go for it. I like talking about and thinking about video games as much as every one else but usually struggle in which way to approach that in blog form. So I've decided to go about it with my backlog. I have quite a collection of Xbox 360 games I've been meaning to get through. I'm not sure how many of these it will take until I feel good to "move on" and start to play on my Xbox One and PS4 more regularly. So while I start to tear through my 360 backlog I'll write up on what I've beaten and hell, it might make me more motivated then I usually would to get through these stack of games.

The general format of the blog that I've decided on thus far will be me talking about two or three games I have beaten each entry, maybe less if I find I have a lot to say about a particular game. So far I have written these entries before hand a day or two after I have beaten them. After I talk about the games in question I'll then quickly write up some quick and dirty impressions of whatever game I have started next, or if I haven't decided on something yet I'll throw a few games in list form that I'm thinking about under taking and anyone can feel free to suggest what I should play from the list. So here we go, these first few entries will probably be rough, blogging is not something I generally do so if you have suggestions or tips that make it a more pleasant read I'll gladly take it into consideration.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

I remember playing the demo for this game back on the week of its release. I don’t remember much about it other than having no strong feelings for it one way or the other. I played it, took the demo off my drive and it faded from memory. A couple of years later it was on sale as part of some games for spring or games for winter promotion for the low price of about three dollars and some change, I promptly downloaded it and forgot about it again.

I decided to boot it up and play through it last month and I have mixed feelings about it all, it only cost me three dollars (twenty three if you factor in the story DLC I bought. Which, in my glorious bad luck the story DLC’s went on sale for half off a week after I had bought them.) So it didn’t exactly break the bank. The game however is guilty of something worse, half of which I would say was my own fault anyway.

Most of the content in this game is pretty damn boring. The main story and some of the faction quest lines are interesting enough, but the main bulk of the side quests are utterly forgettable and usually not worth the time unless you just absolutely need the experience. It made all the “single player MMO” comparisons I heard fairly apt, every major town and areas in between will have swaths of put upon NPC’s that are just waiting for once such as you to kill this thing, fetch something, or some other tasks. A lot of RPG’s are guilty of this stuff so it’s not exactly fair to beat up Amalur on it alone.

However, there is just too much of it, if the game scaled back on the side quests or tasks by about twenty five or thirty percent and put that into making more interesting aspects of the main quest or beefing up some faction quest lines I thought were fairly weak like the Traveler’s the game would have been all the better for it. The game valued quantity over quality and at some point (I would say once I got to the desert area on the lower end of the first map) I started walking by every poor bastard with an exclamation point above his head, feeling them staring holes into the back of my head.

The game when it came to quests needed an editor. The combat which I thought was very enjoyable. I went with a battle mage combo, I had a great sword for pure offensive power, chakrams which are nice and fast to break certain enemies out of attack animations or to get at a group of them and magic lightning and frost for crowd control. I also heavily invested into the Skelton I could summon to get some of the heat off my back, once you level that up all the way he becomes less of just as a distraction for enemies and feels like a contributing party member. I called him Barry the Skelton and we went on a tear in the nation of Amalur. The combat for all it’s positive points could only do much, once you’ve been going through the ins and outs of it for one hundred plus hours in the same boring side quest, even the combat would become dull.

I also won’t talk too much about it since there really isn’t much to say but I ended up hating the blacksmith crafting system. I mean, it works and you can create some cool stuff, which I absolutely did with being maxed level in that skill but the salvaging system absolutely makes it a pain in the ass. Salvaging equipment and only getting random elements of the armor/weapon makes getting the part of it you really want a huge pain. Many times I would salvage high level armor that has good abilities such as health/mana regen, more lightning damage, or would give me a high health boost, I would salvage and get something like simple bindings and that’s it. Simple bindings only give you plus five to health. I often found this unacceptable and when I would salvage equipment I would save right before and not be satisfied until I got something useful.

I don’t expect to get every element from a powerful piece of armor, but if the game instead let me choose one or two depending on how much different stats it had on it instead of just pure luck of the draw, I would have been okay with that and spent a lot less time at forge as a result.

I also thought the story DLC’s in this game fared better than the base game in terms of interesting content. Wondering the wrecked strewn beaches of gallows end and tracking down a murderous pirate was fun. The new player housing option of Gravehal Keep was also a cool addition and had a lot of interesting bits and bobs. People you would recruit into the keep would also have side things for you to do. The librian would help you translate old texts, the master of arms would let you test your mettle against captured monsters, the beast master would capture some monsters for you to keep and confer you bonuses. Your diplomat would go on good will missions to neighboring nations and conduct in trade, tribute, espionage or even conducting raids and all out way if you wanted to be a bit brutal. One guy would even go check the salvage of wrecked boats and would occasionally find survivors who in turn would also help me out. It was a very interesting DLC but sadly once I reached it I was beginning to reach a point of being done with the game and was just kind of running through it and seeing the best stuff and ignoring everything else. Which is sadly what Amalur did to me, it gave me so much chaff to wade through that I might have actually missed some secretly good stuff if it wasn’t so preoccupied with throwing nonsense at me all the time.

At the end of the day, I’m glad I at least played it and saw it for myself, another RPG to be taken off the list, I usually have trouble seeing RPG’s to the end so I’m kind of surprised I stuck it out for this one. I would have liked to see the combat and magic system in this game, combined with the interesting ideas Gravehal Keep added from the Dead Kel DLC into a much smoother and tighter packed game. Amalur needed to learn that sometimes less is more and make the quests it does have be more interesting and fulfilling to do, instead of making a checklist of “we have 150+ quests!” and calling it good. I think it was Jeff on a bombcast or even his own review back when this came out said to avoid most of the side quests, that is absolutely the case here and I should of heeded the advice.

I would have felt better with my time in this game if I avoided at least fifty percent of the side quests I did. Amalur is a fairly good game weighted down by a lot of baggage. So unfortunately I do feel like a lot of my time with the game was not best spent. The quests that were good (I thought the main quest, the Fae House of Sorrow, Ballads and Warsworn quests were all pretty fun. The DLC main quests for Dead Kel and Teeth of Naro’s were also good too) and the combat was a lot of fun. It was fairly simple, but mixing between my two combat styles of light and heavy, mixed in with a healthy bit of offensive magic and my good friend Barry the Skeleton made even the boring parts of Amalur doable. I really would of liked to see this combat taken to an improved sequel but it seems like that will never be.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

Before I put my thoughts on The New Order down I figure I would mention that there will be some story spoilers. I don't go into a ton of spoiler detail but I do mention some and as a common courtesy I figured I would mention that. With the fresh release of the Old Blood expansion there might be some people looking to try out The New Order the first time and would hate to spoil anyone on story beats which is a big part of why New Order is so darned good.

I missed the boat on the initial fervor of this game and I regret I didn’t get to this one sooner. The original Wolfenstein 3D and Return to Castle Wolfenstein rank very highly on for me in terms of favorite shooters over the years. Wolf 3D was not my first experience with the first person shooter genre, that honor goes to doom, but Wolfenstein 3D is the first one I beat and got obsessed with. Growing up in a Christian household and being very young (I first played Doom and Wolfenstein 3D when I was six) my only access to Doom was playing it at friends’ houses. Wolfenstein 3D while still being fairly violent looked more palpable and inoffensive to my family and my father is a huge history buff, I absorbed many Civil War and World War 2 history from his as long as I can remember, so the act of shooting Nazis in a very cartoon manner, even if there was blood involved didn’t really bother him as much as all the demons running around Doom.

Wolfenstein 3D launched my love with the genre and I beat it over a dozen times and was one of the very few PC stables along with Command and Conquer and The Sims growing up, I was mostly a console kid, so I didn’t see many PC games so I replayed what I had endlessly. Return to Castle Wolfenstein was and still is one of my favorite gaming memories I have from the OG Xbox. I was thirteen at the time and remember being spooked by the monster designs and horror atmosphere amidst all the zombie blastin’ At this time Medal of Honor was pretty damned big and while I enjoyed those games well enough, I was always game to replay Return again, the combination of familiar sites of shooting Nazis seen in games at the time combined with the paranormal aspect was a combination I loved. I also remember being bummed out at the time by not being able to try out the online for Return, I had friends who would talk up how cool it was. I did have access to internet, but it was very slow and good for mostly just browsing the web. Whenever I tried to get online with various commander and conquers on PC it would chug up and become unplayable.

Which brings us to the New Order, I never did get around to playing 2009’s Wolfenstein I remember hearing it was merely alright and just let it get away from me. At that time, I was probably replaying Fallout 3 and any of its released DLC that year to really pay attention to much else. I was pretty stoked to finally play New Order for myself; everything about the release of this game seemed to have been hitting the right buttons. Headed up by ex-Starbreeze developers which made some of my favorite shooters for the 360 (I even loved Syndicate!), the shooting looked great and the word of mouth about how good the story and characters were had me pretty eager to check it out. For one reason or another I didn’t get around to playing it on release or in the year of 2014 at all. I picked it up a few months back on a bargain and for the 360 no less and I’m here to say I regret I didn’t play it sooner.

I can’t really say much else better or differently that has probably been echoed by this community, but the game is worthy of the praise heaped upon it and the game even performs admirably on the 360. Despite some rough looking environmental textures, longish load times from level to level (it only got noticeable when I would repeatedly die in a section and I played on Uber so there were a few bits of me seeing long load screens then I’d like) the framerate held up incredibly well, hardly noticed any dips even when the action on screen got chaotic. The cut scenes were pulled from the new console versions, giving me a glimpse of how great the game really looks, but despite some blemishes here and there it is surprisingly good version of the game.

The New Order has some of the most satisfying combat I’ve seen in a shooter in years. Being able to smoothly blend from taking out everyone on the down low with throwing knives, stealth take downs and leaning from around the corner and dropping a guy with a silenced pistol to a complete 180 of duel shotguns loaded with shrapnel ammo and turning a hallway into a corridor of destruction and viscera remained entertaining from start to end. Since I played on Uber difficulty, I took every opportunity to go quiet to lighten some of the opposition, but if I got caught, assuming nobody got the drop on me (you can go down pretty quickly on Uber and taking on shotgun dudes head on is basically suicide) I would go loud and tear apart the Nazi regime with a smile on my face the entire time. Over the years I have been getting somewhat bored of shooters, unless the combat was so satisfying or had a great story and setting to offset the combat if it wasn’t all that. New Order is a triple threat, as I said the shooter combat is some of the best I’ve seen, the alternate setting of a world taken over by the Nazi’s in the 60’s and a investing story with some fantastically written characters that feel human, The New Order had it all for me. The perk system also added something for me to work towards, the feeling of getting stronger and more deadly each level. I managed to get all but three by the end of the game, out of all the perks I got the most use of the stealth tree. I got deadly with throwing knives and the silenced pistol sniping.

On the story front, I went with the Wyatt timeline. In hindsight it probably would have been best to have gone with Fergus, solely for gameplay reasons. In the Fergus timeline you can get permanent health upgrades, while in the Wyatt timeline you find armor collectibles which don’t increase your maximum armor threshold of 100. Armor you pick up gives you more armor at one time with each upgrade, so by the end of the game helmets were given me ten armor and body armor suits were giving me max armor. It was useful, but since I was on Uber, the max health upgrades would have been more useful but I still saw the game through.

With the Wyatt timeline I did get to see J, the games love letter to Jimi Hendrix and his death was both parts heart breaking and awesome, when he started playing the star spangled banner I pumped my fist and dispatched his Nazi killers with a shotgun blast to the dome. Some characters in this game got to do more than others, I would of loved to see more moments of Wyatt and J hanging out (the discussion Wyatt had with J about playing clarinet in college was pretty funny) or Klaus and Max. Klaus was one of my favorite characters and had my favorite line in the game, he like everyone else was written very well but I wish he did more. The only complaint I had with some of these characters is that I wish I got to see more of them; I got attached to everyone in my rag band of resistance fighters. Even BJ feels human and more than just a gung-ho jarhead, his relationship with Anya made him feel like a man who just wants to carve out a bit of happiness in his own life, but won’t rest until he comes out on top over the Nazi regime, dead or alive.

I also enjoyed the vagueness of the ending, if BJ actually gets out alive or not, since after the end credits you hear the sounds of a helicopter that could infer he got picked up in time to avoid the blast. Once that credit song rolled after BJ tells them that their clear I’ll be honest and say I teared up a little. Part of me hopes BJ isn’t actually dead since it’s the first time we’ve seen this character written so well and with so much heart. If there is to be a proper sequel I would also take the main character in that game being whoever you ended up sparing form the first level, Wyatt or Fergus, it would give us a familiar main character and make the transition smoother instead of just “Here’s some random dude or gal you don’t know!” Whatever Machinegames ends up doing with a proper follow up to New Order or if The Old Blood expansion is all we’ll see for a while then I’ll be pleased as punch that we got an absolutely outstanding game and one of my favorite shooter stories in quite a long time.

I definitely see myself returning to this game on Xbox One at a later point and time when I can snag a cheap version and playing through the Fergus timeline and also playing Old Blood. So even though I feel a pang of sadness being done with this and not seeing more of its wonderful cast of characters, I’ll get to revisit it with better hardware and have an all new expansion to try out, pretty pumped to be a Wolfenstein fan right now.

Well, that's it for this inaugural episode of Tales From the Backlog! Hope it was a fairly enjoyable read and as previously mentioned I'll take any hot tips to make further ones easier/better to read.

Coming up next!

I have already started on the next game in my grand undertaking. I've started playing Murdered Soul Suspect. I've beaten the first proper level and on my way to the church. I hear the game is fairly short so if the rest of the game is ghost sleuthing mixed in with hiding from demons so I can sneak up on them and stealth exorcist them that will be fine by me. I'm a sucker for murder mysteries and solving the case as the victim itself is a nice bit of novelty. Only other game I can think of it recent memory that did anything like that was Shadow of Memories (man, remember that game?) in the early PS2 days. Other than the frame rate getting super choppy and I do mean chainsaw in a tree choppy out in the town portions of Soul Suspect I am enjoying what I'm playing so far. That's all for me right now. After Soul Suspect I've been thinking about playing through Batman: Arkham Origins or that free Horizon 2 Fast and Furious DLC that came out last month, we'll see when I get there.