I don't know what it is, but there's something about this time of year that always makes me feel depressed. More than usual, I mean. I don't know if it's because unpleasant things tend to happen this time of year, if it's just getting used to the cold and the snow again, or if it's all of the above. Last year was especially rough, what with my being hospitalized with Crohn's Disease related issues (before I was even diagnosed with Crohn's Disease) and everything. Which isn't to say the last few weeks (or longer) haven't been...difficult, but at least I don't feel like my body is trying to destroy itself. Or, rather, at least not as much as it was last year.

Anyway, I could write a whole blog about this stuff, but I'd rather focus on the video games for now. That said, it does feel a little good to at least put some of this stuff into writing.

Far Cry 4

Far Cry 4 is a game that is very easy to be reductive about. Yes, it's very similar to Far Cry 3. Yes, it's a Ubisoft-ass Ubisoft game where the map is littered with collectibles, locations to find, towers to climb, animals to hunt, etc. But while there's valid criticism in there, I think that's also selling the game short. It may be a formulaic-ass sequel in an age of sequels, but it's a pretty dang good one, overall.

Far Cry 4, like FC3 and Blood Dragon before it, appeals to me on several different levels. First off, it's got pretty decent stealth in it. I won't say great, because I still prefer third person stealth to first person stealth, but it's pretty good. I generally prefer the greater sense of what's around your character that you can get in third person than you get in first person. I know the arguments in favor of first person, about immersion and stuff, but without things like peripheral vision, or any senses other than sight and hearing, first person games give you a lot less situational awareness than third person does. Well, a bit less anyway.

Then again, I say that after playing the entirety of Far Cry 4 with things like the aiming reticle and the mini-map off. Why? For the immersion. So, I dunno, I guess that makes me sound a little contradictory. Well, maybe not. There's a difference between wanting a little better view of your surroundings, and wanting a big thing in the corner of the screen showing you where enemies, collectibles, and all sorts of other junk are. Anyway, I don't want this to turn into me ranting about mini-maps, but suffice it to say I enjoy sneaking in Far Cry 4.

And much like the previous game(s) (if you include Blood Dragon, which I do), a lot of the stealth in FC4 revolves around getting a good vantage point and tagging everyone from afar. From that point, it's a question of how to tackle the situation. Get in close and use melee take-downs? Lure in wildlife to distract and/or kill the enemies? Creep around with the bow silently dispatching them? All are good options, but once I got access to suppressed sniper rifles, that quickly seemed like the most efficient way to deal with a lot of outposts, and other situations in the game. I also ended up ditching the bow later in the game once I got a good suppressed assault rifle, which filled that close to mid range hole.

There's other stealth related things, like throwing rocks to distract enemies, and moving bodies. Which, actually, is where the biggest change to the stealth is. In FC3, the only way to move a body was to do a take-down and use the move the body after a take-down skill. If I remember correctly, there wasn't a way to move bodies if you didn't do a take-down, or if you dropped the body after a take-down. Now you can, which is the biggest no-brainer thing they could have done based on FC3. Or, based on the stealth, at least.

The AI is on the one hand kinda all right, but also kinda terrible. They have pretty good eye-sight for video game enemies (at least on normal, I've heard they're smarter or at least more relentless on hard). But it's also a game where the enemies don't call for reinforcements unless they actually see you. You can kill a bunch of them, but if they don't actually see you, all they'll do is walk around looking for you. I'm just saying that if I'm guarding an outpost in the middle of nowhere, in a war-zone, and my co-worker guards suddenly get killed by gunshots and/or arrows, I'm calling for reinforcements. For all I know, that might not be the case if I had played the game on hard.

Speaking of, I know someone that did play on hard (which is why I know that the game is harder on hard), and after having finished it, I kinda wish I had. The game isn't a complete cakewalk, I definitely died, and more than just from stupid shenanigans (more on that later), but it's still not super hard either. I probably could have switched the game to hard mid-way through, and I suppose I still could and just mess around with outposts (I reset them after clearing them all for a co-op thing), but I dunno. Maybe.

I'd kinda like to redo the story stuff on hard too, because I really liked the campaign missions in this game. A lot of open world games these days have kinda lousy missions, but I think this game has good ones. They're not uniformly great, of course, but overall I enjoyed them. And the story itself is fine. Definitely better than in Far Cry 3, because I don't want all the "good guys" in this game to meet horrible ends. Some of them, maybe, but not all. Actually, that's a lie, I liked Sam the German a lot in FC3, but he doesn't show up until near the end.

I don't think there's really much to say about the story. Well, there is if you want to analyze stuff, and whatever. I did read a couple of decent write-ups about that stuff, but I dunno. I will say that I hope Far Cry 5 drops all the tribal mysticism stuff. I don't think it's as bad here as it was in FC3, and I do like the Shangri-La side missions in FC4 (that's not a spoiler, don't sweat it), but it's still hokey. I'd say it's better than FC3 was with its stuff, but that's just me. I wouldn't mind dropping the "freeing a war-torn area" too.

But if I'm on the topic of story, I'd go so far as to say I'd rather something with the tone of Blood Dragon be made into a full length big budget game for Far Cry 5. Well, maybe tone down the referential/meme-y stuff, but overall I think that type of really dumb thing fits the overall tone of the game play between the story missions better than Far Cry 4's tone does. That's not to say that FC4 doesn't have a sense of humor (it does), but it's too serious too much of the time. Especially when most of the fun of the game is had doing stupid stuff. What kind of stupid stuff? I'm glad you asked, because I prepared a video about it!

As a quick aside, I just want to say that I really, REALLY love how easy it is to record stuff on the new consoles. Well, really just the PS4, but I thought I'd try to be console neutral, but that didn't last long. I've not really used the Xbox One enough to know these things, because I still don't have an Xbox One. Anyway, I've gotten off topic again.

At a certain point, Far Cry 4 just becomes a crazy stuff simulator with some missions and stuff to do. It's a pretty good crazy stuff simulator too. Between the vehicles, the animals, and the randomly patrolling enemies in the world, there's plenty of ways to have stuff just happen. A driving gun battle with an enemy truck can turn awry the instant and angry rhino decides to butt in and overturn one of the vehicles.

Speaking of rhinos, those things are real jerks in this game. I know Jeff always goes on and on about the birds in this game, but I was only attacked by birds a handful of times in the game, and they never did any serious damage. But the rhinos? I died more than a few times to them, and they're really hard to kill. A lot harder than I assume actual rhinos are to kill, really. Same with the honey badgers, and really, a lot of the animals in this game. I get that realism wasn't a a goal, but it just seems like too much when a small little honey badger takes a lot of shots from an assault rifle to kill. I don't care how tough honey badgers' skin is (and apparently honey badgers are actually quite tough, and that's not just a stupid internet thing), one shot to the brain from an assault rifle would be able to kill one in real life.

But back to the crazy stuff. Things like being able to get the wingsuit really early in the game (and having infinite parachutes to use with it), and being able to get all sorts of explosives lead to a lot of stupid things that you can do. For the longest time in the game I carried a grenade launcher in my handgun slot. Which, more than anything else, I think is great that one of the handguns in the game is a grenade launcher. That also means that you can use it whilst driving cars, ATVs, or even the gyrocopters. Now that I think about it, those little copters have to be my favorite addition to the series. Partly because they let you get around faster, partly because they let you do things like land on top of the towers and just circumvent the entire tower climbing process (something that once got me accidentally killed, but let's not talk about that). But mostly I just liked flying around shooting grenades down on stuff. Though, I didn't really get much of that (or any) into my video. Oh well, maybe next time.

Oh, and then there's co-op! I'm a little torn on the co-op. On the one hand, this game is absolutely perfect for it. I've played a couple hours with my good internet friend @krummey, and it's a lot of fun. Some things like being in the passenger seat during car chases, and trying to line up the two vehicles so I could do a vehicle take-down are just plain fun. There's all sorts of stupid things to be done, and you can have a lot of stupid fun.

But the problem is that you can't do story missions in co-op. Or the side missions from named characters. And collectibles don't count for the co-op partner. You can get XP, and new weapons (which we found out when I dropped my end game hella good assault rifle on the ground, and krummey was able to pick it up and keep it), but no collectibles, and none of the side stuff (like outposts) counts for the co-op partner. Which is lame. I get why some of the story missions wouldn't work in co-op, but the collectibles and stuff should could. That's really unfortunate that they don't, but I still think the co-op is totally worth playing.

There's also a level editor, which I spent a little bit of time fooling around with. I didn't actually make a finished, working level, but I made some stupid stuff. Like watery honey badgers in a pit killing dudes. There's a thing to let you browse levels made by other people, and like a lot of games with user made content, some is really good, and some is terrible. But it's worth poking around in for a bit.

And I think that's about all I have to say about Far Cry 4 for now. It's a ton of fun, and definitely one of my favorite games of the year. Definitely worth playing if you like doing stupid stuff and explosions. There's a late game rocket launcher that basically shoots a spread mortar round, and it's nuts.

Oh, okay, two last nit-picky things before I move on. The first is that the guy on the radio station in game repeats himself way too often. He has a few funny things (like his line about how one of the three sex positions he knows is, "I'm sorry," and something about honey badgers being "fueled by hatred), but he repeats too often. The other thing is that the option to turn off touchpad controls (for using the inventory that you normally use with L1) is glitched. You can disable it by backing out to the main menu and going back in, but it needs a patch to work properly.

Still though, it's a great game. Pagan Min is a good villain, but I wish there was more of him. Okay, now I'm out of things to say.

Super Smash Bros. For Wii U

Let me get this out of the way: I love Super Smash Bros as a franchise. I loved the first one, and played a ton of it with my dad, and with my friends. I absolutely looooooooved Melee, and played a ton of it with my dad, and with my friends. I don't even know how much of that game I played, especially if you count going over to friends' houses and playing on their GameCubes. I even loved Brawl! I know that's kind of the black sheep of the Smash Bros games, but I enjoyed the core game play of it more than even Melee. And it had that cool Subspace Emissary mode, and it had Solid Snake. It even had a bunch of dialog between Snake and other MGS characters voiced by the original voice actors (well, maybe not for Mei Ling, she sounded off).

To be honest, I wasn't really excited for the Wii U games until this summer. See, that was when I got a Wii U, and I started spending a lot of time on Miiverse. Too much time, to be honest, but being in there and chatting with crazy people that are obsessed with Nintendo games did a lot to remind me of how much I loved those previous Smash Bros games, so I got hyped. I got really hyped. And then I played the actual game.

And god damn do I love this one too. :D

You see that? I used a smiley face thing in my blog text. When I have ever done that? NEVER! Not in my blogs, anyway. That's how serious I am about this. I wrote a capital D after a colon. But there's a certain feeling that I get when I play this game. A certain part of my cold, dark heart that warms up when I do.

It makes me feel like a kid again. This is something I've touched on when writing about the other Wii U games I've played this year, but I think this is the best example of it yet. It's reductive to say that it's the same old thing, just with a new coat of paint, but that's kinda the case. But I also don't care because it's something I haven't had in years and I love it so much I just find myself stumbling for finding the right way to sum up how I feel about this game.

Let me put it this way: Playing this game with a bunch of other people locally is the most fun I've had playing a video game all year. I'm not saying it's the best game I've played all year, you'll have to wait for that (but I'll have more on that subject later), but it's just so gosh damn fun under the right circumstances. :D There! I did it again! Someone knock some sense into me!

But it's not just the factor of being with other people, the actual game itself is still great. Even having played a lot of the previous games, I couldn't really tell you about the small game play tweaks and changes over the course of the series. I could talk about the rosters, the items (some of them anyway, there's a lot), the stages, etc.

First though, I gotta talk about eight player mode. Now, I haven't actually gotten to play with eight people, but I have played with six (and one time we turned on two AI fighter to have a full eight (though eight player fights with AI pop up frequently in the single player modes)). And for as chaotic as four player is, six player is even more chaotic. I can totally see how a lot of people wouldn't like that, but I did. I think it's a ton of fun, and I hope to play more of the game with more than four people playing at once! Though, not all levels are available in 8 player, which includes a lot of the new ones which feature some of the cooler level gimmicks (like a DK one where you can use barrels to move between the foreground and background), and that's a bummer. I can only imagine it's for frame rate reasons, because a couple of the ones that are available are really small. But to be fair, the frame rate is pretty dang good. I still kinda wish there was a "let us be idiots and break the frame rate" mode, but I get why that wouldn't be in.

Anyway, back on topic (I added that paragraph after getting way farther into this blog because I realized I hadn't mentioned the eight player mode).

I do think this one has the best roster overall, and easily the biggest. Some of the new characters are fantastic picks. Shulk and Lucina quickly became two of my favorite characters. Shulk is partly because he has an alt outfit where he is only wearing underwear, which I am 100% in favor of, but also because he's a great character to play, and a great example of how the people that made this game managed to find clever ways to work the mechanics of Xenoblade Chronicles into Smash Bros. Or, some of them, at least. See, Shulk uses The Monado (his big fancy laser sword thingy), which lets him do things like briefly see into the future, and has some other different things I don't remember super well off hand because it's been a couple years since I played Xenoblade. But, Shulk in Super Smash Bros has different "stances," for lack of a better word. Tap the B button and Shulk changes the setting of The Monado so that it affects his stance. Jump lets him jump higher, Speed makes him run faster, Smash makes him send opponents flying farther, and so on. They also have negative effects, to keep it balanced, but the point is that he's the only character in the game with that as a mechanic. And that's cool!

Lucina, on the other hand, is just a copy of Marth, but I think she moves a little faster so I dunno. She's cool though.

And then there's Wii Fit Trainer and Duck Hunt. I'm not particularly great with either of these characters, but I absolutely love that they are in the game, as full fledged characters. Most people would probably just make characters like that into support trophies (basically Pokeballs but with not-Pokemon, if you haven't played one of these games since Melee), but they're characters, and given just as much respect and focus as anyone else. Well, maybe a little less focus in things like the Events mode, but I'll get to that later.

The roster's not perfect, though. While Mega Man and Pac-Man have both joined Sonic as third party characters (and both deserve it), Snake is nowhere to be seen. And he's not the only causality, because the Ice Climbers are gone as well. And, there's reasons for both, even if I'm somewhat speculating. I'm all but certain Snake is out due to the Big Boss Kieffer Sutherland/David Hayter kerfuffle. Ice Climbers, from what I've read, are gone because of the technical limitations of the 3DS version of the game.

Which brings me to my biggest complaint about the game. Some aspects of it feel like they aren't all that they could have been because the 3DS version exists, and because they had to hold back on certain things. Now, I'm not 100% sure that's why Ice Climbers are out, but I'm sure enough. Things like forcing parity in the roster, and at a certain point, even having the 3DS version and having to have people work on that meant resources weren't being used for the Wii U version. I'm also using this as an excuse as to why there isn't a big story mode like Brawl had because I can't think of any other reason. I mean, if there is a legit reason that you know of, please tell me. I want to know.

Though, there is still a fair amount of single player content. There's still classic mode, where you fight through to Master Hand at the end. Now you can bet in game currency to make it harder, but get better rewards (and the harder it gets, the more involved the final boss is, first adding Crazy Hand, and...I won't spoil what happens after that (not that it matters without a story mode)). There's All-Star Mode, where you fight every character in the game in a row, in reverse chronological order of release, for some reason. There's Events Mode, which is probably the highlight of the single player content. It's basically the Challenge Mode from the most recent Mortal Kombat game (and also Injustice I guess). There's a bunch of challenges with some little "story" justification, and they require different things. One has Falco keeping Game and Watches from landing on a ship (that one was really hard), one involves Wii Fit Trainer beating up on two extra fat Warios to get them in shape, and so on. They're fun, and there's a fair amount of them (there's 55 total), and there's a separate two player Events Mode with different events. I didn't get too far into that, but it's cool!

There's other weird little modes, like the Home Run Derby where you have to hit the sandbag as far as you can, and other stuff. There's the new Smash Tour Mode, which is meant for four players, but I didn't really care for it on my own and only played it enough to unlock the Pac-Land stage. Which, brings me back to what I was trying to get at with Wii Fit Trainer and Duck Hunt. They didn't make the Pac-Man stage a Pac-Man maze. They made it based on Pac-Land.

Pac-Land.

That's hilariously dumb in a way that I adore. Everything about this game is just full of stuff like that. Want to adjust how frequently songs play on individual levels so you can set it so that only those songs from the Sonic Adventure games play? Go for it! Want to set the items so that you only get hammers? Want to be one of those people that only plays on flat levels with no items? Want to customize characters with different special moves? Make a custom Mii Fighter of Steven Seagal? All of those are in this game! Though, I haven't really messed around with customizing existing characters at all, but I did make a Mii Fighter of my Mii as a Vampire Princess, which I quite like.

I know I was complaining about the lack of a big single player mode, but there's still a ton of content, and a ton of weird little options in this game to let you play it your way. Though, I do wish there were a few more options for playing online. Well, at least for playing online with random people. Playing with friends online lets you set all the same options you have for playing locally (aside from having more than four people). Though, you can't do something like have three people playing on one Wii U, and have one person be online. No more than two per Wii U, for whatever reason. But playing with random people limits options a lot.

Well, first off, I should mention the two big options when playing with random people. You can either play "For Fun," or "For Glory." For Fun is playing regular matches of time on regular stages with items turned on. It's the unranked mode. For Glory, however, is played on flat levels with items off, and is ranked. There's other options for things like a 1v1 mode, and team battles, but I haven't messed around with those two. I have played a fair amount For Fun, and For Glory, and I've enjoyed both.

At least when the game isn't laggy. Some matches are completely fine, and play just about as well as the game does offline, or at least as close as is possible. But some matches are unplayably bad. Some start off fine, then get terrible, then get fine again. Sometimes the game literally stops, and a Smash Bros logo appears with a spinning line around it, and the timer stops until it starts back up again. And it's a real bummer when sometimes the game isn't playable online because of the lag.

There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, either. I played for quite a while with @rmanthorp, who lives in Scotland, and it was totally fine. But then I tried playing with another British friend (who shall remain unnamed because he was banned from GB), and he quit before we could even get through one match because it was so laggy. He and I have played Mario Kart 8 online a bunch of times, and never had issues, so I doubt it was his internet connection.

Hopefully they can fix it. Given that it does work at least some of the time, I'd like to think it's not irreversibly broken, but I don't know. If it does get fixed, then the lack of a story mode and lack of Solid Snake remain my only complaints. But if not, well...the lack of an online mode that works consistently is one of them too. Really, it's worse than those other ones.

But, as it is, I still love the game, and I'm still going to play a whole lot more of it in the future, both online and off.

Now I just wish I had the 3DS version so I could get that free soundtrack! I don't really care about getting Mewtwo as DLC, and I don't have a 3DS to play it on (even if I did, I don't think I'd want to play there), but man, I wish I could have that soundtrack. The music is just so damn good. Which it should be, given that it's basically a greatest hits collection of Nintendo music. And those songs from the Sonic Adventure games.

The Fifth Annual Moosies Video Game Awards Spectacular Thing.

That's right. It's that time of year again! The time of the year where I put far too much time and effort into a game of the year thing! Now, as you know if you've been following me for years, you know that the format isn't exactly the same from year to year. In some cases, it was because I wanted it to be bigger and more ambitious than before, like the year where I had two separate Moosies Awards (one for the games of that year, and one for the games I had played from previous years). But sometimes it's because of reasons that were outside of my control, like being hospitalized and not having as much time as I had planned.

In that year, I did away with the old system of having all sorts of somewhat goofy and somewhat serious awards and just did a top ten. A top ten hidden within a Luigi themed choose your own adventure that pushed the limits of what you can do in a blog on Giant Bomb. And while the temptation to go bigger and crazier is there...at a certain point I have to realize that I have my limits. At a certain point it becomes too much, and people stop caring because they don't want to go through that much crap.

That doesn't mean I'm downsizing, or at least not too much. I fully plan to continue the saga of Luigi and Sam Fisher as they adventure in a an adventure of their choosing. But doing it in a GB blog showed me the limitations of that system. So, I need to branch out. As much as I would love to make a game-ass game, that's beyond what I am capable of. I am, however, capable of making a text adventure in Twine. The only issue is finding a place to put it online, since I don't think that's a thing I can do on Giant Bomb. I'll look into that.

So, the current plan is to do a top ten like last year, where I give out the awards as a part of the top "ten" list, and include a link to the supplemental Luigi story in that post. That way my top "ten" list can be viewed on its own, but the Luigi thing still lives on. I think that's reasonable.

And don't think that I'm giving away all my tricks and secrets prior to the blog. Oh no, I wouldn't do that. I've still got something up my sleeves.

As for when it's coming? I'm not sure, but probably close to the end of the month. I ordered Dragon Age Inquisition on Amazon, and I'd like to be able to play it for The Moosies. It probably won't arrive until next week, which might be too late, I dunno. I also wish I could play D4, or Sunset Overdrive for The Moosies, but that ain't gonna happen either, because I still don't have an Xbox One. Aside from that, I think I've managed to play everything this year that I really wanted to. I'm sure I'm forgetting something, though. I always do.

But that's it for this blog! I don't know when the next one will happen. I might not do a full PlayStation Plus Catch-Up this month, given that I've already played Injustice, and don't want to play 3 ports of PS2 games for it (The Hitman HD collection). And there's Deadly Premonition Director's Cut, which I most certainly will write about, but not until I've finished it. And I likely won't start it until next year, at this rate.

And that's it! Thank you for reading, I think this was a bit longer than I usually write. As a reward, here's a close up of Shulk's butt, as featured in GameButts.club.