First up, I want to say that it took me a while to settle on a title for this. I couldn't really come up with anything good, and a part of me kept wanting to go with a "no man should have this much power" joke (partly because of what I want to discuss about this game). But I decided not to, because as a person that does not listen to "young people music," I associate that line with Giant Bomb, and not the song it comes from (I really hate that song, by the way). It's something I've had to remind myself of several times over the years. That's not just a stupid Giant Bomb joke, it's also a song that I hate (seriously, I turned the music off during that mission in Saints Row the Third where it played). (Also, I added this sentence after the fact, but I added more to the title to reflect that it's not just about Shadow of Mordor.)

He was a War Chief, by the way. Yes, that's his brain.

But enough about the inner workings of my mind, this is about Shadow of Mordor. Okay, but just a little more preamble first. Over the years, there's been a handful of games based on things that I've really wanted. Like, I really wanted a great Star Trek game, a great Man with No Name Trilogy game, a great Mad Max game, etc. And while I've gotten games that aren't actually based on some of these things that pretty much did what I wanted anyway (Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, etc), one that I had all but given up hope for was Lord of the Rings. (Also let's hope that Mad Max game ends up being good.)

Shadow of Mordor is that game. Pretty much. Though, not because I think the game is bad (overall I REALLY like the game a whole lot), more because I think it doesn't do a whole lot with the fiction it's based on, and in some cases, feels like it's being hamstrung a bit by having to work within a labyrinthine set of rules regarding what can and cannot be done within the Tolkien universe. Also it has some game play issues.

The Story.

I'm not going to get super deep into the story stuff here, because the story in this game is pretty standard stuff, and feels kinda half baked in a few spots. There's only twenty story mission in the game, and I'd say that close to half of them cover sub-plots that don't really add much to the main story (aside from adding a bit to the back story of the Wraith character, well, it's not a bit so much as it is a whole, but aside from a reveal in there that serious LOTR nuts would already have known, it's also pretty standard stuff). And some of the stuff in the story missions feels like it was thrown in solely to try to lure people into buying the game because of a thing from the movies. Specifically I mean Gollum, who adds nothing to the story, and at this point I've gotten kinda tired of. Though, while Andy Serkis was too busy being in movie of the year Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to be in this, the stand in (Liam O'Brien, aka one of those guys who is in EVERY video game (probably best known for being War in Darksiders)) sounds almost exactly like the Gollum from the movies, so at least the character was performed well, for what it is.

And the story itself in the game kinda reminds me of The Force Unleashed, now that I think about it. It's this thing set between two properties (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in this case, the two existing Star Wars trilogies in the other) that is trying to have it's own important story, but also retcon its way into the greater fiction...but without actually changing anything important from the existing movies (or books, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this game takes more from the movies, at least aesthetically). But the end result is that at a certain point, I know that the things these characters are going to do will ultimately be meaningless. I mean, there's no way Talion and the Wraith are going to kill Sauron and save Middle Earth, that would negate the existence of The Lord of the Rings.

The ending of this game left me in this weird place where I'm really excited for the next game (and unless this game is a colossal failure sales wise (not likely), there will be another), but also feel like whatever story it tells will ultimately be meaningless. I'm not going to spoil the ending of this game, but it's a, "Come back next time for when the real fight starts" ending. And I suppose it's possible that they could find a way to end this as some sort of tragic tale where Talion fails at the hands of Sauron, and they make it a big dramatic and sad thing. I kinda doubt that. The story here is told well enough, and the voice acting is good across the board, but I dunno.

But all of that is kinda secondary to what makes this game really great which is the part where it's a game where the enemies remember you.

I went to go and include a picture of Ratbag (the best character in the game), only to discover that he didn't have a page on the site, so I had to make one. It's not super detailed, but it exists now. I really liked him, he's sort of like the Lamar of this year. Great character that wasn't used as much as he should have been (though he's MUCH more underutilized than Lamar was).

The enemy of my enemy is probably also my enemy.

The Nemesis System. From the initial announcement of this game, this was the thing that the marketing was built around. A game where there was a hierarchy of orcs and uruks, all procedurally generated, and with the capacity to remember previous encounters with you. The kind of thing that sounds too good to be true, which resulted in most people (myself included) being really skeptical of the game. The rest of it looked interesting too, it was being sold as an open world stealth-ish game set in Mordor. Again, sounds too good to be true to someone that loves open world games, and stealth games.

But to my surprise, the system works, and works really well. It's not perfect, I definitely had a fair amount of repeats, both in the looks of the uruks (both in terms of physical appearance, and their armor) and in lines of dialog (I was told several times by different uruks that I looked like a stiff breeze would kill me), but overall, it works. I'm not the first to say it (and I doubt I'll be the last), but nothing makes you want to kill an enemy in a game more than having him mock you for killing you in your previous fight, ESPECIALLY in a cockney accent. And the presentation, with the dramatic zooms, and the sword clashes between Talion and the enemies, gives a lot more weight to it than it would otherwise.

I should have mentioned that it's not literally every enemy in the game that remembers you. While random enemies in the game will make comments about things that have happened in the course of the game (both in the main story and the exploits around the free roaming), they're still just nameless enemies. At least until one of them kills you, at which point the game assigns him a name and a personality. Then he gets promoted to Captain, and usually gets some radder looking armor to boot.

And this is where the system gets really interesting. This isn't just a list of named uruks that want to kill you, this is a military structure with ranks and a line of command. It's pretty loosely built, and rickety in spots, but it's a military nonetheless. And the Captains in this military are not content to just sit on their butts drinking grog all day. They roam the world, and usually want to pick a fight with you if you run into them (unless they have a Fear of the Gravewalker, in which case they run screaming from you). They don't just wander around aimlessly, they also do things like go on hunts, recruit uruks to join them, challenge other Captains to duels, and occasionally have a feast in which plenty of grog is drunk (grog in this universe, by the way, is apparently so explosive that an arrow (to be fair, ghost arrow) to a barrel of grog causes it to EXPLODE).

But, to make it more game play friendly, none of that stuff (aside from roaming the world) happens in real time. Instead, mission icons appear on the map. You go there, start the mission, and the game loads in the appropriate Captain(s), his/their crew(s), and whatever else is needed. I totally get why, and I see how this makes the game much more manageable than having all this stuff be real time, but it also make it feel like a video game. It doesn't feel like a living world so much as a video game where enemies roam around until you decide that now is the time in which a specific Captain is going to do a thing, and you want to intervene. And there could be a variety of technical reasons as to why it's done this way too, I don't know.

And none of those things happen until either you die, or decide to pass time in one of the towers in the world. There is a day/night cycle, like in all good open world games these days, but you could leave the game running for hours and hours, and none of those events will transpire if you're just standing still and doing nothing. Again, makes total sense from the point of view of keeping the game manageable for the player, but not so much from the point of view of making this feel like a living world.

Really, it's a testament to how good the Nemesis System really is that I'm complaining about something like this. The idea that I want the game to be more realistic, but also much more challenging in this aspect is something that most people probably wouldn't agree with me on. But I'm getting ahead of myself, I still have a couple more things about the Nemesis System to mention.

He's rhyming. Not the only Poet I ran into, actually.

One is that, very near the end of the game, there is an objective to "Defeat your Nemesis." And while I've heard that some people didn't really have a great experience with that (as it was some Captain they didn't really have much association with), for me, the game couldn't have picked a better uruk. There was this one Captain in the first area of the game, Zulgor the Oath-Breaker, that I must have had about ten run-ins with. He killed me, I killed him, he ran away, I took his eye and forced him to have a big metal eyepatch/fin looking thing on his head. And when I saw that it was him, I had a huge smile on my face, because more than any other enemy in the game, I wanted his head. And I got it. I should have saved a picture of him, but I never thought to do it.

That said, the fact that I wanted to kill an enemy that the game generated more than the named story character that killed the wife and son of the protagonist (at the very beginning, it's not a spoiler) says a lot about the quality of the overall story in this game. Anyway, back to what I was discussing.

Later in the game (once you get to the second (of two) area(s)), Talion attains the ability to brand uruks, and bend them to his will. This counts for both nameless enemies, and named uruks in the military. Both Captains and the War Chiefs. Not only will they fight by your side in combat, but they can be commanded to do things, like fight other Captains, attempt to become the bodyguard of a War Chief, or even challenge a War Chief to a duel to take over as War Chief.

That last one is important, because War Chiefs can be tough to take out. They don't roam the world, they stay tucked in safe inside their strongholds. I mean that in the sense that it's impossible to find them unless you are doing a mission, not in the sense that you can actually sneak in and find them otherwise. Missions to lure out War Chiefs range from relatively simple (let his pet Caragors (the animal thing in the game you can ride) escape) to really difficult (defeat a whole bunch of enemies without being hit). And when one does emerge, he'll be accompanied by his bodyguards, which are the Captains from the military. Or some of them, at least. I did see a video on YouTube of a guy that had literally every Captain in one of the areas (each of the areas in the game has its own army) be bodyguards to a single War Chief, and then have them all betray the War Chief at once. In fact, here is that video, because why not?

In the first half-ish of the game, the tactic is to take out his bodyguards first, and then go for the War Chief. But in the second half, the better strategy is to take over their minds, and use them against the War Chief, thus meaning that one will rise to take the War Chief's place, and you have a branded War Chief. But it also can make something that would have been really challenging into something really easy.

The War Chiefs I killed in the first area were all pretty tough. But in the second area, I realized that when you tell a branded Captain to challenge his War Chief to a duel for the War Chiefdom, it creates a little mission outside the strongholds. They meet at a little tent, with few other uruks around, making the War Chief an easy target for you. Making it easier isn't the problem, the problem is that it makes it too easy.

Which brings me to my ultimate complaint about this game: It makes you too powerful.

Too much power.

One of my favorite things about the early part of this game is that it's not very easy. If you're good at timing counters in the combat, and keep on top of things, you'll be fine, but if you don't (and I didn't in the first couple of hours), the game is tough. And it doesn't go easy on you. This game is unafraid to completely overwhelm you with enemies. And I love that. Very few games these days make retreating a viable option, or an option at all, but this game does. Sure, that Captain might taunt you the next time he sees you if you ran away, but he'll taunt you even more if he kills you. And if you get killed by a random enemy in the process, you'll just have ANOTHER Captain to worry about. So, I learned fairly early that running away is often the smartest move in this game, and I loved that. It made the forces of Mordor feel intimidating and powerful. It made almost every encounter feel like a struggle, feel like I was genuinely fighting for my life to defeat the uruks. Made me feel like I had to try to be sneaky to avoid fights when possible.

But, like most games these days, I eventually became so powerful that I could breeze through most fights. With things like the ability to drain life from an enemy in combat, which would restore my health and make the enemy fight for me, the game lost most of its challenge. I mean, I still had to be paying attention, it's not like the game suddenly turned into Dynasty Warriors and became a boring snooze-fest.

What it did was turn a game where I felt like every victory was a triumph into a game where winning was so easy that it just felt like any other game. And so far as I could tell, there's no hard mode in the game that I could have switched to, and there's no way to turn upgrades off to make the game harder for myself. Normally I don't complain when I get overpowered in games, hell, sometimes being overpowered makes it more fun (Fallout 3 comes to mind). But in this case, like I said, that feeling of being overwhelmed was part of the appeal.

So it got me thinking about this in relation to other games, how I feel like there should be more games where retreating is a viable option, and there isn't a way to get overpowered. But then I remembered that games like that do exist, and they're things like Alien: Isolation. I think that's going way too far in the opposite direction, where retreat and hiding is the only viable option. That's also a horror-stealth game (a new genre name I just made up right now), which is completely different from an open-world-action-stealth game like Shadow of Mordor, and I feel like I lost the point I was trying to make.

Balancing games must be hard. I would probably be bad at balancing games, so I dunno.

That said, I did really love this game, and it's definitely one of the best games of the year so far. Hell, it's probably objectively the best game overall thus far, but let's not get into that. I gotta save some stuff for The Fifth Annual Moosies Video Game Awards Extravaganza. Hopefully this year I won't be recovering from being in the hospital, and I can go all out, rather than hobbling together a poorly thought out Luigi Choose Your Own Adventure. This year it'll be a WELL THOUGHT OUT Luigi Choose Your Own Adventure. Or something, I don't know yet. I have been messing around with Twine though...

Destiny Check In.

I've been trying to play less Destiny lately. And succeeding, somehow. I haven't completely stopped, but there have been a couple days this week where I didn't play any Destiny at all. And when I have played, it's either been just messing around in the Crucible, or playing with internet friends. I didn't want to fully stop, partly because I am still enjoying the game, but also partly because I got a new headset mic thingy for my birthday. Here's a picture of it:

It's a Turtle Beach P11, designed for PS3, but works fine with my PS4. And my computer, for that matter. It was about $40 on Amazon. It was recommended to me by my internet friend @krummey, who also uses it for his PS4. The audio quality of the speakers is better than that of my $20 headphones (with no mic) that I bought on a whim one day in Best Buy a couple years ago when I bought Dark Souls (also on a whim and also for $20), so that's nice. More comfortable to wear too, and I've been told by the people I've chatted with that the audio quality on the mic is pretty good.

It's not perfect though. It is wired (wireless ones were out of my price range), and has this weird set up for how it's supposed to plug into things. If you notice in the picture, it has both USB and a headset jack (I don't know what the official terminology for those is) for plugging into things. It also has that little rectangle bit that is for adjusting "game" and "chat audio, and for muting the mic (which is handy). But, the way in which it separates the two audios is strange, to say the least. What you're supposed to do (on PS3) is plug the USB in for the chat audio, and plug the jack into that other cable, which you're supposed to plug into the red and white cables from the PS3, which you use just for audio while using HDMI for video to the TV.

I know, weird, right? Especially after @krummey told me he just plugs his into his PS4, but whatever. If I plug it into the PS4, I get game and chat audio, I just can't adjust them with the thingy. Which would be less of an issue with Destiny if Destiny had ANY options for adjusting in game audio, and wasn't also really loud. Still not a huge issue, because chatting in a PSN Party with audio set to prioritize chat set all the way to chat helps, but still leaves the game a tad louder than I would have liked. But hopefully future games I play and chat with will have in game audio settings like they should.

But as weird as it is, it has led to me being able to do things that probably weren't intended for the device. Since it takes in audio from both the USB and the jack, I can plug the USB into my PC (it needs to be plugged in for power) and plug the jack into my PS4 controller. That way I can get audio from both my PC and the PS4 at the same time. It's not perfect, because I need to stay really close to the PC to make that work. Unless, of course, I plug the jack into ANOTHER PS4 controller.

Sadly, though, my plan to plug the USB into the PS4 and the jack into another controller and have one output only chat and the other only game play didn't work. My plan had been to have two profiles on at once (one just being a guest account), and have one output just chat audio, and the other "all audio," thus letting me crank up the chat compared to the other. But when I tried doing this, setting one in one profile changed it on the other, so it wasn't working. I mean, unless I did something wrong and someone else can show me otherwise. But I doubt that many other people have tried this.

I do know that Turtle Beach sells a P12 that is designed for the PS4, but I didn't get that for a couple reasons. The first was that it was about $20 more expensive, and the other was that the cable is 2 feet shorter. The P11 has a 12 foot cable, but the P12 has a 10 foot one, and in the room I use my PS4 in (the living room in my house (still living with my dad)), 10 feet wouldn't cut it. Even with the 12 foot one, it's not really long enough to reach every spot on the couch I sit on. It's fine on the left and in the middle, but on the right (the farthest from the TV) it technically reaches, but I have to lean forward in a way that's not really comfortable, so I imagine that would have been the experience on the left side with the P12. Also, the P12 doesn't have the USB and jack thing on the end, so I wouldn't do PC and PS4 audio.

Or PC and Wii U audio, because for some reason the Game Pad still outputs audio even when I'm playing with a Pro Controller (in Super Mario 3D World, at least). But I'll get to that next time, I think I've written enough here.

Next time: On Dragon Ball Z, er, Moosey's Blog.

So, I'm almost at the end of Super Mario 3D World. Or I think I am, I'm near the end of the third Bonus World, and I have no idea how many Bonus Worlds there are. I also have Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze, which I haven't started, but I will soon. I'll also write up some thoughts on the Wii U Pro Controller (but the short story is that I really like it).

I also have a bunch of PS+ games to write about (including that free version of #DRIVECLUB, if they ever actually put that up), so that'll be a blog later in the month. And Bayonetta 2 is this month (I think), which I will play, but I suspect that finding it in a store may be troublesome. Wouldn't be an issue, given that all Wii U games are on eShop, but that game is 17.5 GB in size. I have 10 GB left. I have four games downloaded on my Wii U. Wind Waker HD (which I really should finish) at 1746 MB, Shovel Knight at 173 MB, Super Mario 3D World at 1663 MB, and Tropical Freeze at 10 GB. No, I don't know what Tropical Freeze is so big in relation to those others, but I don't have the room for Bayonetta 2 as it is, and I'm not paying a bunch of money for an external hard drive for my Wii U. I wonder why Bayonetta 2 is so large, though. I get why games on the new consoles/PC are so big (textures!), but not this. Unless that includes Bayonetta 1? Who knows.

Nothing else going on. Still haven't gotten back to writing my (third) book, but I swear I'm going to soon. I NEED to get back to it.

But yeah, that's it. See ya next time.

The Legend Returns...