As I continue to be unemployed, and have nothing going on (not counting the occasional odd job working with my dad), I've been able to get a good amount of video game playing in. And some other stuff too, but I'll get to that after the games.
Now, if you read my previous blog, you may be wondering why this isn't about Alan Wake. Assuming that I am correct in remembering saying something about not having finished that in the previous blog. Well, I'm waiting until after I play Alan Wake's American Nightmare before I write up that stuff. As a novelist myself (albeit one who has only sold a handful of my book), a lot of that game spoke to me on a personal level, so I'm letting that one wait for a bit.
BioShock Infinite, however, is a game that I am prepared to write about. Spoiler free, of course. Although, I feel like anyone who REALLY cared about the story in that game has already played it. Conversely, I didn't play it until last week, so I guess I'm not one to talk. Actually, I changed my mind.
SPOILERS. For BioShock Infinite.
Okay, let me say this, before I get into anything about the game. About a month and a half-ish before I played the game, I was in the chat for a live video on Giant Bomb. I don't remember what it was, or when it was exactly. But I do remember that at some point before the video actually started, I saw someone say something in the chat. This something was framed as being a spoiler for BioShock Infinite, and I assume the a-hole who did that was intentionally trying to spoil the game for people who had not played it.
However, at the time my thinking was, "Man, what that guy wrote is so dumb that it can't possibly be the actual thing in the actual game, right? He was just trolling. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to force that thing out of my mind. It was one of those things that even if I did my best to ignore it, it would pop up every once in a while, particularly after I actually started playing the game.
What the person in that chat wrote was that Father Comstock was Booker from an alternate universe.
So, I played through the whole game with that in the back of my head. That thought popping up every time something appeared that seemed like it would be a link to the two. Every time Wounded Knee was mentioned. And every time I kept telling myself that it couldn't possibly be the case. They wouldn't dare have a dumb twist like that, which was already used in the game inFAMOUS (though, I should say that the two twists are completely different in context).
But then that was the twist. And I didn't care for it. Still don't, really. At first I thought it was dumb, and not properly explained. But after beating the game I went and watched GB's video of Vinny playing through the last chunk of the game with the rest of the guys talking over it. And I mean literally right after. Well, not literally. I ate a sandwich in between. And whilst watching that I talked about some of the story stuff with a couple of my friends, and then it started to make some more sense. Now I'm at the point where I think the ending (and that twist) is "good" in the sense that it accomplished whatever goal it was that Ken Levine and company set out to accomplish, but I still don't really care for it.
Okay, enough spoilers. And enough about the story. Overall I enjoyed it, and I want to go through it again at some point.
Now I'm going to write about the game part of that video game. I know a fair number of people describe BioShock Infinite as being a game where the combat is good, but not great. Or as a game where you "slog" through the combat to get to the story stuff. But I didn't think either of those things were the case. I outright loved the game part of this game. If anything, it was probably the part of the game that I found to be most consistently enjoyable.
The story, as I said, lost me with that twist at the end. The world is fantastic, and beautiful, but there's a bit too much indoors stuff where it's easy to forget that everything is taking place on a big city floating in the sky (though I could see that being argued as an issue with the game play and/or level design). Actually, the fact that this is a city in the sky is kinda inconsequential to the game as a whole. It could have easily been a more grounded setting (yeah, I know) and still been exactly the same game (though maybe that was the point? I dunno, I'm done talking spoilers for this insane game)).
Anyway, game play! It's fun, there's a lot of variety, but it's a little easy. I played on normal, but what I heard about playing on hard (from Drew on the aforementioned GB video) is that the game gets too hard on hard. Maybe I'll try playing it on hard at some point, but probably not. While it was a little easy, the lack of extreme challenge did give me more opportunities to experiment. If the game was super hard, then I probably would have just tried to figure out whatever weapon and Vigor combo was the most efficient, and then using that all of the time.
Which isn't to say that I was always trying new things, and doing something different in every other combat encounter. I did, by the end of the game, get into a groove of mostly using the Hand Cannon as my weapon of choice. And I did really like the combo of using Bucking Bronco to lift a bunch of enemies into the air and then using Devil's Kiss to engulf them in a sea of flames. But I would be lying if I didn't say that half the appeal of using Bucking Bronco was that a horse neighing plays EVERY TIME you do it, and I think that's hilarious.
As I said about, I really loved the "world" of BioShock Infinite. All the uber-patriotic imagery, and deified Washington/Jefferson/Franklin stuff was great, but I wish there was more of it. That stuff kinda disappears for much of the game, which makes sense given the parts of town you go to, but I still would have liked to see a little more done with it, or maybe have some more of the Founding Fathers show up in statue form.
And I guess those are my pseudo-rambling thoughts on BioShock Infinite. I really loved the game, and I'm definitely going to play through it again before the summer ends.
But now that I've gotten that out of the way, it's time to get down to some SERIOUS business. Fast. And. Furious. 6.
OH MY GOD THIS MOVIE.
Movie of the year!
I couldn't believe the ending! Most excited I've been at the end of a movie in a LONG TIME.
And all over the surprise appearance of Jason Statham in the time period of Tokyo Drift. Okay, the whole movie is fantastic, but that ending got me unreasonably excited.
That's all I have to say on that though. Other than to say that you should see this movie. Now.
And now, back to video games. Specifically, Dead Space 3.
Dead Space 3 is pretty good. It's a lot like the first two, only with more filler, and too many enemies. Not too many in the sense that it's too hard (at least on normal), too many in the sense that enemies often keep pouring into a room long after I felt like that encounter should have ended. The core combat in the Dead Space games is solid, and fun, but the suspense and surprise of the encounters in the first two games is gone. In its place are rooms with vents on them that enemies WILL crawl out of, and they will keep crawling out of them. And then some more crawl out.
But like I said, the core combat is solid, and I still got a lot of enjoyment out of the game. I just think that had it been a shorter, more focused game, it probably would have been better. And I don't say that very often. I like long games. Granted, I didn't HAVE to do all of the non-co-op side missions, but I wanted those upgrade circuits. For upgrading.
The weapon crafting in the game is well done, but not really necessary. I played through most of the game with the plasma cutter, which was how I played through most of the first two games. I didn't just use the stock plasma cutter, of course. I did end up upgrading it so it was a lot more powerful, but at the end of the day it was still a plasma cutter that I could rotate the beam of.
The other weapon I ended up using (more toward the end of the game) was half "chain gun" and half shotgun. I did have something along those lines with me for most of the game, but it wasn't until the last few hours where I got it powerful and fast enough that I felt it was useful. Because of that I kinda want to go back in New Game Plus and use that thing some more, but I don't want to just yet. Maybe after I play some other stuff I'll go back and mess around with that.
Story wise, I think the game almost ventures into "so bad it's good" territory with its weird love triangle, and other goofy things. But not quite. Don't get me wrong, the voice acting in the game is good. But the villain of the game would be a better fit in a Bond video game than Dead Space. And don't misread that, I said Bond video game, the assumption being that the bar for that would be lower than a Bond movie, given that there's only really ever been one good Bond game.
And I cannot understand why the proper laser sights are turned off by default. Dead Space 2 did the same thing, and I'm sure there are tons of people who played these games without even realizing that was an option (though, that's their fault for not looking through the options). Why would anyone want a lame targeting reticle when you could have rad lasers that are actually being shot out into the environment?
Speaking of which, Dead Space 3 is a really nice looking game. Granted, a year from now we'll be into the next generation and (hopefully) the standards will have risen (you could argue that they already have, given PC games). But for now, the (colored) lighting in the game is absolutely beautiful. It was in Dead Space 2 as well, of course, but I feel like they stepped it up even more than last time.
I think that's it for what I have to say about Dead Space 3.
John Carmack, who I hear is a fan of colored lighting. Or made a game with colored lighting in it.
Almost completely random pictures aside, I have other things to say as well! I know I'm running long (even for me), so I'll keep it short-ish.
On Memorial Day (Monday of this week, for you non-Americans) my dad and I went over to my cousins' house for a cookout. And while we did normal cookout things like eating grilled foods, and watching RoboCop (forget Fast and Furious 6, now THERE'S a movie), we also went out to the backyard to attack bottles of water with swords. And, as luck would have it, my cousin had bought a new sword.
This newest one is a katana. Nothing special or fancy, he even told me that it was a cheap Chinese knock-off. But still, it looked like a katana, and it was easier to use that his other sword, which is frankly too large to be using for chopping bottles of water. And, after a while, we decided that since his aforementioned large sword and his dagger had names, that the katana needed a name as well.
Now, the way too large sword was named Steven Seagal. This is partly because the sword, like the original, is large and slow. And also because my cousin looks kinda like Steven Seagal, and I think he did it as a way to get use to stop calling him that. The dagger, on the other hand, is small and agile, and thus is named Jean-Claude Van Damme. So, we decided to use a similar process for naming the katana.
Now, Steven Seagal is often associated with Eastern martial arts, and that type of stuff. Thus, naming a western sword (I don't know the terminology, but I can tell you that the sword is a replica of one of the swords from Lord of the Rings, Aragorn's, I think) after Steven Seagal was silly. But it gave me the idea to name the katana after someone not associated with Eastern martial arts. Mark Wahlberg was of course the first thing that popped into my head. But that wasn't quite good enough. So we went with Marky Mark.
Then we thought it would be smart to spell it differnetly, as the sword is a cheap Chinese knock-off. But then we decided that "Marcy Marc" would be read as "mar-see mark," and that wasn't right. So Marky Mark it was.
This is apparently the only picture of Mark Wahlberg that comes up when you embed a picture of him from Giant Bomb. I'm a little disappointed.
Okay. Next up on my video gaming is Alan Wake's American Nightmare. Then I'm finally diving into Metal Gear Rising: REVENGEANCE. Can't wait.
Oh, and if you're looking for an electronic book to read, you should try mine. It's only a dollar. Or whatever the equivalent in your country is. It's available in these, and other markets around the world: US Link. UK Link. Canada Link.
The people who have read it tell me it's pretty good, so there's a wringing endorsement for you.
And here's Luigi. But I was running perilously low on good pictures of straight-up Luigi to use, so instead I've created a mash-up of Luigi and a shot from a game discussed in this blog. I present to you, Luigibeth.
I forgot to say that I really liked Elizabeth in that game. Fantastic character. Well voiced, well written, and great facial animation.
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