I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Borderlands

As was foretold in the Dead Sea Scrolls, this week I want to talk a little bit about Borderlands. Not too much, because truth be told I spent most of the week playing Sunset Overdrive, but at least enough to fulfill the prophecies, right?

I actually started playing Borderlands on the Xbox 360, because I found a pretty cheap copy of it at the local gamesmonger; I got on the Borderlands train late enough that it’s the GotY edition, I think (I don’t care enough to check). It plays pretty well on the 360, and certainly benefitted from the glorious infrastructure of Xbox Live. I only have 1 TV in the house, though, and my wife gets motion sick watching me play FPS games in particular, so my opportunities to play it were somewhat less than I would have liked. Luckily enough, Steam put the same GotY edition on deep discount a few months later, and I picked up a copy. Visually, the improvement cannot be understated. Control-wise, I have always been more comfortable with the KB+M combination than the dual-stick setup on most consoles, although I enjoy both.

From a co-op standpoint, unfortunately, there was no Steam integration. There was Gamespy. Gamespy is horrible, and I’m glad it’s gone, because I literally stopped playing Borderlands because Gamespy was awful. It is much easier to play on Steamworks now.

So in contrast to Rage, the graphics are much more stylized, and the gameplay follows suit. The guns are super weird and fun to experiment with, although the nature of randomly generated guns means that sometimes the guns you pick up are pretty useless. The gunplay itself can be pretty satisfying at times, but at other times, I definitely wished the guns felt a bit more like Rage.

One of the really weird things that I thought I would have enjoyed in Borderlands more than Rage was the driving. Borderlands uses what I refer to as “Warthog” controls, where the mouse steers and the keyboard is just for forward and reverse. Usually this means that you can pull off some pretty precise driving, but I found the Borderlands vehicles to feel pretty floaty. The driving in Rage has a much more solid feel to it, but for the most part Borderlands is the more interesting, more competent game.

The co-op of Borderlands is really where the game shines. It’s been said that if a game is only good when playing co-op, it isn’t actually a good game, and I kinda agree with that sentiment. Borderlands is boring as hell played alone, at least for me, kinda like Destiny is boring played alone - gunplay in Destiny is much more satisfying, though, but the frequency of loot drops in Borderlands is much higher, making it feel a bit more rewarding. Somewhere between the two of these games is a really excellent loot shooter.

I’m sure I had a point when I started all this but I’ve quite forgotten it now. Borderlands is pretty all right, which seems like I’m damning with faint praise, but it is a great game to play if you’ve got some buddies. It is one of many flawed games that I have in my Steam library, staring at me disapprovingly. Don’t judge me, Borderlands.

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Rage

Unintentionally continuing my post-apocalyptic gaming habit from last week, this week I decided to dive into the MEGA TEXTURES of Rage and see if I could remember why I stopped playing it. Right off the bat, I discovered that one thing that I dislike is the loading times. This thing takes forever to load! I will freely admit that I don’t have the greatest computer in the world, especially these days but goodness me. For-Ev-Er.

The second thing I noticed was that the character models looked amazing, and the textures in town look… not good at all. The MEGA TEXTURES looks fine when the texture is like, rocks and dirt, but when you get to buildings, or, say, a computer, it looks really crappy! Again, not the best computer in the world, but I have the settings up pretty high anyway and they are just not impressive at all. Maybe there’s some setting I missed, but anything that isn’t supposed to be a rock looks bad when you get close to it. Additionally (and I’m sure this is more my computer’s fault than anything else), sometimes upon loading in, the game more or less freezes, and crawls at about .05 FPS for a couple minutes before shaking out of it and running smooth again. Again, pretty sure if I had a beefier computer I wouldn’t have that problem, but it is still an annoyance.

Technical issues aside, the game plays pretty solid. I will fully admit that the time I spent with this game last week was mostly spent driving around and shooting rockets and machine guns at other cars, and that part of the game is immensely satisfying. The driving controls are WSAD (at least when you’re playing Mouse/Keyboard) and I was surprised to discover how well they worked. I hadn’t remembered the driving feeling as solid as it did, and it was a pleasant discovery to find that I enjoyed it so much. If this game just consisted of driving around and admiring the landscape, it’d be a pretty satisfying game all by itself. As it is, there is also an FPS in the whole mix, and that’s something of a different story.

The shooting (what little I spent doing it, I am not lying; I did races, time trials, and that side-mission that has you drive mail around to various post boxes for the most of it) was solid enough, which pretty much should be expected from an iD game. If the shooting hadn’t been at least a little bit satisfying I would have been surprised. The enemies are certainly there for you to shoot, but that is about all I really have to say about them. There are mutants, as any good post-apocalyptic wasteland is mandated to have, and there are crazy punk rocker British hooligans and whatnot. It isn’t the most inspired thing in the world, but it gets the job done.

The real treat in this game, as I alluded to before, the character models. I would say that these are some of the best character models of the last generation. My gold standard for facial animation has been Half-Life 2 for a while, but the character models in Rage are a real treat.

Also, John Goodman is in it for some reason! Everyone say hi and remember his hilarious Cyclops character in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

So I rarely plan ahead on these things, but I’m pretty sure next week is gonna be about Borderlands, because Rage and Borderlands are inexorably linked in my mind; also I played Borderlands about a day after I played Rage, and I can say that at the very least, I like the driving in Rage better, although I have definitely played more Borderlands because I have more fun. If there was a co-op mode in Rage, I might enjoy it more, but I’m a co-op kind of guy. Tune in next week, duders!

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Darksiders

As promised last week, I am going to pursue the whole Halloween thing by avoiding all the horror games that I don’t enjoy playing and play a nice post-apocalyptic action/adventure game instead. Before you ask, yes, I would like to play DmC for this but I only bought it less than a month ago, so it doesn’t manage to clear my self-imposed criteria for a game appearing on the Backlog. Don’t hold that against Darksiders, though, because I’ve spent the last couple weeks finding a few hours to play it and I quite enjoy it.

I am sure that this has been said before, but it bears repeating: Darksiders is The Legend of Zelda by way of Joe Madureira. I cannot say how this comparison holds up with regards to Darksiders II, but for the original, it is the most succinct explanation of what the game is and how it plays. I would point out, however, that the combat is deeper than that of the average Zelda game. The Horseman of War has a few moves on the Hero of Time. Also there’s a lot of blood, and the world ended a thousand years ago so if you were expecting to meet any humans that aren’t mindless husks thirsting for carnage then you will be severely disappointed.

I remember when I first heard of the game, I thought you were going to be a Horseman fighting against the Apocalypse. After playing through the intro at a friend’s house, I realized that no, the Apocalypse happened already and humanity is dead forever and you, as War, are just pissed that someone messed up the timing. Also, Mark Hamill is here to tell you all about the Apocalypse and dish some dirt on the various demonic and angelic heavies hanging around the ruined husk of the Earth. Everyone wins!

So I didn’t pick up this game for the entirety of the time that it was on consoles, and only got it on PC when it went on sale on Steam. I did this largely because while most reviews that I read agreed that it was a shameless love letter to the 3D Zelda archetype, they also seemed to agree that it got somewhat boring in the middle sections and maybe was not worth the full price of admission, so to speak.

Once I did finally pick up a copy, however, I sunk a few hours into it over the course of a week or so and then was probably distracted by other games that had released or gone on sale, and thus it fell to the bottom of my To Do pile. Every so often I would scroll through the list of installed PC games on Steam and pause on Darksiders, thinking “I should play more of this,” before scrolling past it to boot up some other game. This is more or less the essence of every game that I have written about here. So how is Darksiders now that I have left it alone for months?

As it turns out, it’s acutally very fun. When I missed my post last week I had already played another couple hours of Darksiders, and I booted it up last night to give myself a quick refresher before I sat down to write this, just a quick 20 minutes to gather my thoughts about the game. I ended up playing it for a good hour; lost track of time.

WarHorseman controls pretty well, and the camera is surprisingly generous when it comes to keeping all the action in frame. The combat feels meaty, and each swing of your ridiculously named sword has a consequence behind it that I found myself enjoying. There is a surprising amount of depth to the combat as well, and I found myself switching between sword and scythe in the middle of combos and laying waste to angels and demons alike.

And then they give you a gun that you never have to reload! It’s like Christmas!

Visually, the game has a great comic-book style, full of colors and intriguing monster designs. There was a fight that consisted of War punching a train car into a giant spider thing’s undercarriage, and every time the giant spider thing would rage and start to bring the ceiling down in an attempt to thwart War. Every weapon leaves a sort of colored trail when you swing it or throw it, and War looks like a hulking, angry gentleman with solid animation on all of his jangles and cape and hood and whatever else. This is a pretty game!

So conceptually, in my mind, this game is like the God of War series. Stay with me for a minute: both feature powerful protagonists out for revenge against a powerful enemy. Both are rooted in mythology, although I would say that Darksiders makes a few more changes to its source material. That said, I like Darksiders more than I like God of War. War is a more interesting and, dare I say, sympathetic protagonist than Kratos, who is just kind of a dick from beginning to end. I enjoy the visual style of Darksiders more as well, though its combat certainly borrows from God of War as well as the original Devil May Cry series. And quite frankly, the voice acting in God of War doesn’t hold a candle to that of Darksiders.

Darksiders starts off with the apocalypse and continues from there, which is not something that really gets done in video games. Killing off the human race in the first 30 minutes of the game is just not something that games are known for doing. I plan on playing it more once I post this, and I will certainly write about Darksiders II here once I get to it.

Back with a vengeance, y’all, this is the longest entry so far.

Hey all,

I was totally going to write about Darksiders, because that's the game I picked for this week, and even played, but all I can say by way of reason why I am not writing that right now is basically this: if you take medication for, say, chronic depression, you should be really careful about not missing your dose for the day, because sometimes that puts you in a pretty dark place and you don't want to get anything done and even writing a cursory blog post takes a whole lot of effort.

Now that I've revealed far too much, I'll say that I will make it up next week. Sorry, y'all.

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Lord of the Rings: War in the North

I spent a lot of time going back and forth on whether or not I thought War in the North was a game worth buying. At some point, I finally decided “hell with it” and picked up the game for the 360 (and coerced my brother into buying it as well) and we set off on a journey into Middle Earth, where I fully expected the story to be some bastardized Quest of the Ring lite where your character and his companions are sent to destroy a different ring of power that they have to throw into Mount Bad Stuff or something.

As it turns out, I was totally wrong! Your characters were some of the Rangers guarding the Shire, you get messed up by this crazy dude named Agandaûr, who has been tasked with subjugating the Northern Kingdoms by the Witch King of Angmar. So, Aragorn (who looks like a creepy Pinocchio marionette man, also of course Aragorn is your boss) tasks you with fucking up the plans of Sauron in the North in order to keep attention away from a super important mission that he can’t tell you about but it is totally a secret. So that’s cool, and a pretty solid foundation upon which to build one’s Lord of the Rings fanfic, which is more or less what this stuff is. We enjoyed playing it for a while, and then for whatever reason we didn’t play it anymore.

Until this week.

This week, a little game called Shadow of Mordor dropped, which is basically the greatest LotR game to ever be created, from what I understand. You might think that I started playing War in the North again because I didn’t want to drop the money on Shadow of Mordor right away, and War in the North would be just good enough to help me get through the excitement of the initial launch and safely wait until the inevitable sale. That’s not why I started to play it again, because I bought that game at launch and played it obsessively whenever I had a chance to do so, because the hype is real. Go play it, then come back and finish reading this, because duders, it’s amazing. I’ll wait here for you.

Welcome back. I was right, wasn’t I? That shit is bananas: B-A-N-A-N-A-S (that’s a good thing, right?).

Anyway, Shadow of Mordor is entirely the reason I decided to go back to War in the North, partially because I realized that I had done nothing but play Destiny and Shadows of Mordor all week and so I didn’t have a game to write about this week, and War in the North provides a combat system that is somewhat similar to SoM.

A few things I forgot about War in the North: firstly, that it was developed by Snowblind Studios, who also developed the excellent Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, a game that my brother and I beat multiple times across multiple difficulties and was the first game purchased upon obtaining a GameCube. War in the North, then, shares a lot of DNA with that excellent hack’n’slash game of yore, but with a pleasant Lord of the Rings veneer. Two, Rivendell has some pretty disturbing looking elves in it, namely Arwen and Elrond. Arwen looks as if she was sculpted out of butter and stood too close to a flame, and Elrond just looks creepy. It doesn’t help that sometimes Elrond’s hair glitches and becomes a bunch of lines that more or less can track Elrond’s movement pattern. Three, the dwarves all have excellent beards.

Visually, the game looks… all right. It is interesting to see the movie aesthetic applied to locations, armor, and enemies that weren’t present in the movies themselves, but stunning visuals were definitely not on the top of the priority list when this game was in development. The gameplay is tight and the controls are crisp and responsive. I’ve never found myself shouting at the game because I died; any time I die, it is because I allowed myself to be surrounded or didn’t dodge out of the way of a troll swinging an axe. It is entirely possible to keep going as long as one of the three heroes is alive to revive the rest of the party, so even defeat is generally very temporary. There are no finishing moves like you’d find in the Gears of War series to keep you from reviving a compatriot, just the risk of the reviving fellow getting killed in the midst of aiding a fallen ally. The game is also pleasantly violent, with limbs and heads flying off with an alarming regularity and plenty of black goo everywhere to remind you that you’re fighting orcs.

In the end, this game is a gem that pushes all the right buttons for me in terms of subject matter and gameplay. It reminds me of those many hours that I sunk into Dark Alliance and that, to me, is a great thing to be reminded of. When I do finally finish this game (and I totally will, it’s become part of my weekly rotation at this point) I am going to be sad to see it end. I’ll have to try and remember to play something else from my backlog for this week, though, because between this game and Shadow of Mordor I might forget to play anything else at all.

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: The Wolf Among Us

I have had The Wolf Among Us sitting on my hard drive for ages. I had actually gotten pretty far into the first episode when I first got the game, but for some reason I had never gone back to the game after that first time. I read a lot of articles about it, and I saw that a lot of people were into it, but I still never booted it up.

I feel like I made a mistake in not going back to the game sooner, because let me tell you, I have been wasting my goddamn time by not doing so. While the gameplay of WAU can be distilled down to “walk around, do some QTEs” it is delivered in a suitably cinematic way so as to mask the shallowness of the actual moment-to-moment gameplay. What makes that game (and The Walking Dead, from what I have heard; that’s a game I won’t play because ugh, zombies again and also I don’t have any love for the comic or the TV series) work is the story that the minds of Telltale have spun that so far feels very much like Mother Goose’s Chinatown.

I can get behind a concept like Mother Goose’s Chinatown. Bigby T. Wolf is a gruff, unlikeable fellow who smokes and drinks too much and has a past fraught with huffing and puffing whatnot. The game goes out of its way to remind you who he is by almost immediately confronting him with one of the three little pigs, which is such a great scene that I was pretty well sold on the entire game at that point. There’s a bit of a hopeless love interest in Snow White, a flying monkey from Oz, and, by the end of Episode 2, a picture of Ichabod Crane fingerblasting a glamoured troll.

Let’s all just pause and enjoy the imagery of that last bit. I know that I damn near fell out of my chair.

Perhaps my most enjoyable moment of The Wolf Among Us (and there have been many enjoyable moments in this game!) was the final choice offered at the end of Episode Three, not the least because I literally had been talking to my brother about how I was going to rip out Tweedle Dum’s fucking throat AND THEN I COULD. It was glorious. The story has engaged me and the soundtrack is perfection.

The gameplay, though, is mostly shit. Investigating stuff, looking at bits and bobs, and listening to Bigby talk either to himself or to whoever else is in the room is fine. The timed conversations are great. The QTEs fucking blow, and although I’ve never botched one enough to actually be confronted with a Fail State (does this game even have a fail state) there have been enough moments where I’ve been like “oh, I have to move my suddenly sluggish mouse over there” and then not been able to for me to become just frustrated enough to dislike them more than I normally would.

It’s not enough to stop me from playing this game, though. I’m in too deep, owe too much to too many bad people. Storm’s coming, and Bigby and I aren’t gonna be caught out in the rain.

Side Note: Hey, if you have any interest in what I do and you want more of it, my aforementioned brother and I have a podcast that we just started. You wanna give it a listen, maybe subscribe to it, you go ahead.

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Deadly Premonition

What with the release of Dark Dreams Don’t Die (D4) this week, I thought there’d be no better game for me to go back to than the Twin Peaks simulation that is Deadly Premonition. I remember first seeing the game at a friend’s house on the Xbox 360, and being blown away by the weirdness of the entire experience, from the overly lengthy introductory film full of weird discordant jazz and entirely unconvincing crying to the clunky driving mechanics and less-than-ideal combat controls. And it was twenty bucks! A bargain!

I never actually picked up a copy.

Then, of course, there was the release of Deadly Premonition: Director’s Cut. A PC version! That sucks! But I sure did buy it, and all I can say is thank goodness for GeDoSaTo, because otherwise I’d be playing that game at the same ugly resolution and texture quality as before. Instead, I get glorious 1080p visuals and much improved graphics. Well, not that much improved. There aren’t any miracles to be found here, but it does improve things.

I played through the introduction, initially, and then for whatever reason never picked up the game and played it again, until this week. This week, I decided that I was gonna play Deadly Premonition again, and uh, then I guess I forgot that I was going to do that, and spent most of the week playing Destiny again. But, Sunday night I managed to set aside some time and booted up the game.

It crashed.

So, twenty minutes of googling and fixes later, I actually got the game up and running. It is… ridiculous. Here is a list of things that I did:

-Had breakfast with an old lady who I had to shout across the room to talk to.

-Read the future in my coffee. Twice! Apparently I’d have a great time at a theme park, if there were any theme parks in the game.

-Experienced the clunkiest-ass driving mechanics since GTA III.

-Talked to a weird deputy who knew far too much about squirrels and rodentia.

-Found a dumbbell named Arthur and returned it to its rightful owner.

-Looked for a key.

-Found four keys, none of which were the correct key.

-Searched in vain for the correct key, got pissed, quit the game.

I can’t find this key! It’s pretty damned frustrating, because I am fairly certain that I searched the Sheriff’s office from top to bottom. I hate to turn to a walkthrough this early in the game, but I think that my patience is outweighed by my desire to see more of this freaky fuckin’ game. So I will probably look into it later this week, because of course I will be coming back to this game. How could I not?

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Bioshock Infinite

I don’t know if there is a game that I have had such mixed feelings about before launch than Bioshock Infinite. When it was first announced, I was lukewarm on the whole concept of another Bioshock game; I thought they should have probably stopped after the original, and had not bothered to pick up or play Bioshock 2. Then I saw the teaser footage and, well… I got really excited.

I got really excited for a good long while as the hype for the game ebbed and flowed according to the tides of various gaming conventions. Then, suddenly and without any real reason that I can put my finger on, I stopped caring at all about its release. The game came out, and I didn’t buy it, and that was the state of things for a while, until it went on sale during a Steam Sale (a recurring theme in my backlog of games).

Hey, it’s a pretty fun game! It’s incredibly colorful, and the animation, especially that of Elizabeth, is really top-notch. The shooting is… well, it’s solid. A lot of enemies appear to exist just so you don’t get too much ammunition, and if we’re being honest, some of the Vigors make a lot of encounters trivial (Lookin’ at you, Bucking Bronco). That’s not necessarily a bad thing! I wish the guns packed a little more punch, but hey, can’t win ‘em all.

I haven’t beaten the game, obviously, but the story has been more or less thoroughly spoiled at this point and I actually am interested in seeing how it all comes together over the course of the game. I like the weird sci-fi parallel universe time travel stuff and so this game is right up my alleyway. It runs passing well on my computer and I don’t know really know why I haven’t beaten the game yet. I think that at the time, and even now, I am having a bit of FPS Fatigue.

So, anyway, I will probably play this game some more at some point down the line, but if I am going to be very honest with all of you (and of course I am, why wouldn’t I be?) I haven’t actually gone back and played any of the games on this Backlog since I’ve written their respective entries, except for The Last of Us, which I have played a couple times since then; it’s still in my PS3 drive, come to think of it. Funnily enough, a lot of the reason that I haven’t gone back to the games that I’ve written about is because I keep looking for a different game to write about.

Well, that and Destiny. I’ve been playing a lot of Destiny. That’s a whole different post, though, for a different time.

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: The Witcher

I have lost three save games in the time that I have owned The Witcher. The first, because I grew angry at the Steam version of the game and switched over to the GoG.com version. Surprise! The saves from my Steam game didn’t work with the GoG version because of reasons, I guess? I don’t actually know what was going on there. The second set of saves… I’m not actually sure what happened with them. I just know that when I booted up the game in March ’14, I didn’t have a save game anymore, so I started again.

Not surprisingly, I stopped playing around the end of March and didn’t pick up the game again until this week, largely because I was looking for a game to write about. “Hey, Witcher 3 is coming out at some point,” I thought, “maybe I should beat the first two before it does!” So off I went, to load up the game and then curse silently to myself when I realized how much time I lost.

Seriously, I have to talk to the Revered again. The Reverend. That guy is tiresome as hell.

Actually, if I’m being honest with myself and with you, most of the townsfolk in that starting town are tiresome as hell. The drunk merchant – Odo, I believe – he’s a barrel of fun, but everyone else can get fucked (and at least two of the townswomen do, if Geralt plays his cards right, and that is a whole different conversation, especially given what I already wrote in my Killer is Dead entry). I think that I sort of just have to face the fact that a lot of that starting stuff in The Witcher is just super boring. There are some monsters to kill, and that’s fun. There’s a Choice that you can make, which should be interesting but I don’t know why I would ever choose to side with the townsfolk because they are all wretchedly boring people. The game doesn’t get interesting until you go to town, and it’s a bit of a slog to get there.

But I sure remember liking this game! Honestly, I still do; the combat is at least engaging, even if it can be a bit frustrating. There’s something about running around town with the head of a cockatrice hanging off of Geralt’s belt that is just a satisfying state of affairs. Even now, the game world looks pretty good for an oldie, even though there’s only about 3 different faces for the generic townsfolk. I’m definitely gonna play this one again. Hopefully, I won’t have lost my save!

What I really want to do is play The Witcher II, but I can’t bring myself to play that game before I beat the first one, especially since there’s an option to import my Witcher save into the sequel. Even if there is demonstrably very little difference between the stock experience and the experience I would have with an imported save, I just cannot help myself. It is my geas.

Side note

This entry is super short, because what with one thing and another I only had one night to play The Witcher because I spent pretty much every other night playing Diablo III, both on PC and on the Xbox One. I cannot seem to escape its loving embrace. So much loot, so many particle effects. I can’t help myself! I’ll try to make up for it next week.

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows

This is it: four weeks in and we’ve come to the first truly questionable purchase in my catalogue. I don’t know that I generally buy weird games, but I do sometimes buy horribly broken ones that have no business charging $15, let alone any money, for you to buy. Yes, I’m talking about Out of the Shadows. You might think that Mars: War Logs sets the standard for poorly made mid-tier games, but you’ve clearly not played this game, or ever read Dan Rykert’s review of it.

I went to see the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film; a movie that the Internet had told me in no uncertain terms was an awful movie with no real redeeming features. I sat down in the theatre with one thought in my mind, “Surely this can’t be any worse than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III!” You know something? I was right! The movie actually ended up being pretty enjoyable, and to me it seems like it got beat up far more than it deserved in the court of public opinion. I mean, I could be wrong. I have a sort of blind spot when it comes to my TMNT.

This brings me quite neatly to Out of the Shadows. I had heard rumblings about it being a game in trouble: there was barely any marketing, nobody had played the game, the game came out and it was a broken mess, but I still went out and paid for the Steam version of it! There weren’t many options in terms of presentation or customization, but I dove in headfirst, ensorcelled by a series of slick pre-launch trailers promising Arkham-like combat and seamless 4 –player cooperative play.

What I got was visuals worthy of a solid B, a surprisingly stable framerate, some janky controls, and a completely broken online system. Also, the developer seems to have vanished from the face of the earth and never bothered fixing any of these problems. I played the game, beat the first Chapter solo, got to the final fight of the second Chapter, got killed because of a boss-fight glitch, and never played it again until I came back from seeing the new movie and thought to myself “Man, I am gonna give that game another shot!”

Well, apparently there was a patch released at some point, because the game controlled much more smoothly than I remember it doing when I first played, and the performance appears to have gotten even better on the PC. Online play is still all busted, though, so my main reason for getting the game (playing Raph to my brother’s Donnie and beatin’ up Foot Clan) remained unrealized. I went hunting around the Internet, searching for a solution to my online woes. Short of faking a LAN game through Hamachi, there wasn’t anything new in the wild. Desperate for my online Turtles fix, I turned to my 360, and discovered that they are selling this game for $5. This game is probably worth $5. That’s what, a quarter-twomp? It’s nothing.

So… the online works on the 360. That’s the one good thing I have to say. Otherwise, the performance is absolutely wretched; the framerate isn’t even at 30 fps enough to consider that the default; any time you and any other turtle attempt a team move or any time your turtle does a particularly flashy move the framerate stutters and probably drops to around 15, and there are some particle-heavy effects during an average fight. At some point, you will get caught on the world geometry, and if you’re lucky you’ll be able to get yourself unstuck. It’s a mess of a game.

But you know, when there are four of you (yes, there were actually two people other than my brother and I playing OOTS on a Saturday evening in the year of our Lord 2014) and the framerate hasn’t dipped and nobody has to do that shitty hacking minigame and you’re all fighting ninjas and Mousers, the game is pretty fun. It delivers on its premise fairly infrequently, but when it does, it’s totally great. It makes the horrible mess that the game is even worse because the potential is so blatantly there. It bummed me out.

I’ll probably keep playing it.