Hey there folks and welcome to another instalment of An Hour With..., my still relatively new blog feature wherein I choose a random game from my enormous backlog and spend sixty minutes with it to determine whether I should PLAY it to completion, or PASS on the experience. The overarching aim of this feature is to help me whittle down my immense Pile of Shame by giving me some formative time with each title rather than simply casting games aside at random. If you're a newcomer to the series then you can get a flavour for what I'm trying to achieve my reading this introduction to the concept, or you can peruse the list of previous entries by means of the table below:

Today's game chosen at random by the Backloggery's awesome Fortune Cookie feature is the Xbox 360 version of a post-apocalyptic first-person shooter with survival horror elements, based on a popular Russian novel. What is it, and how will it fare through its opening hour? Read on to find out more...

The Game

Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter with survival horror elements, developed by 4A Games, published by THQ and released exclusively for Xbox 360 and Windows PCs in March 2010. Set in a near future vision of Russia, around twenty years after a devastating nuclear war, the surface world remains uninhabitable and the last vestiges of humanity have survived by setting up subterranean communities in the Metro stations beneath Moscow. Players assume control of a young man named Artyom as he journeys through the myriad tunnels and battles all manner of gruesome and grotesque mutants. The game received generally favourable reviews from critics, including a three-star review from Giant Bomb's then-resident expert on Eastern Bloc games Dave Snider. It spawned a sequel in 2013 subtitled Last Light, and both games were given the current-generation remaster treatment in 2014 under the title of Metro Redux. A third game in the series, Metro Exodus, is currently in development and due for release next year.

The History

Much like my previous entry for Resistance: Fall of Man, I don't really have anything noteworthy to add about my history with Metro 2033. I'm certain I acquired both it and its sequel through the Xbox LIVE Games with Gold scheme, when both games were offered up as freebies to Xbox LIVE Gold members back in August 2015. I don't grab every free game going, but the Metro games looked interesting to me with their post-apocalyptic setting and focus on survival as well as shooting. Fast-forward two years and although they've spent a lot of time installed on my Xbox 360's hard drive, I've not taken any time to play them. In fact, up until the time of this blog, I don't think I'd even launched Metro 2033 before. Of course, that changes today...

The Hour

Now that we've laid all the groundwork, let's get into this blog proper, shall we? The following handful of paragraphs will act as a stream-of-consciousness chronicle of my first sixty minutes with Metro 2033. Any actions I take in-game, as well as any thoughts or opinions that pop into my head, will find their way onto the page below. As usual, let me take this opportunity to warn anyone sensitive to spoilers that there may be some early-game plot developments revealed in this section. With my 360 controller in hand, I turn the lights out and draw the curtains to set the mood, and then launch Metro 2033 from the home screen...

Five Minutes In...

Metro 2033 begins in media res, putting me in Artyom's shoes mid-mission as he and an unknown ally make their way through one of the game's old Metro stations and towards the surface where they intend to rendezvous with another group. The Prologue chapter takes a few minutes to familiarise the player with the actions available to them in Metro 2033, some of which are familiar to me and some of which aren't - player movement, jumping, crouching, aiming and shooting are all mapped as expected, but I'm grateful for the game taking some time to get me acquainted with its novel gas mask mechanics. One of the first things I notice through this opening chapter is just how slow every action feels. Artyom's default movement speed may be more realistic, but relative to my experience playing Resistance on PS3 just a few weeks ago, it feels like I'm moving through treacle. Reloading my rifle is accompanied by an equally slow animation that leaves me very vulnerable to attack, to the point where I suffer my first death in the closing battle of the chapter, a very unexpected eventuality given I'm playing on the default difficulty (Brad Shoemaker would be proud, I'm sure).

Fifteen Minutes In...

Thanks to some generous checkpointing it doesn't take me long to make it out of the Prologue and into the game proper - the action rewinds eight days and placed Artyom back in his home station of Exhibition, just before everything kicks off. The next five minutes are dedicated to world-building and plot exposition as an NPC (who I presume is Artyom's father) leads him through the station to meet an old friend named Hunter. This section does the thing a lot of first-person shooters do in their opening minutes - it takes the gun out of your hand and walks you through a corridor of scripted events, to help breathe life into the world you're about to inhabit. Metro's attempt at this is a good one - Exhibition feels cramped and claustrophobic, but teeming with life as people go about their daily business. One thing I will say is that the audio cues aren't fantastic here - maybe it's the tight space forcing you along the path a little too quickly, but the end result is that everyone ends up talking over each other and it's difficult to isolate individual threads of conversation. Maybe that's what the developers were going for, but it just seems messy with the existing audio balancing.

As expected, things quickly go south - mutants invade the station's hospital just after Hunter's arrival, forcing a gun into Artyom's hand and thrusting him into battle with a pack of Nosalises (think Fallout's radioactive mole rats but on steroids). It's here that I make two observations, the first being that I really like the user interface in this game. It's slick, full of information, and I'm particularly fond of the way that it shows you which bullets you're using by displaying the base of the round on the screen. That's a cool little touch. The other thing I notice is that combat becomes incredibly clunky in enclosed spaces like the one I'm currently in. Up until now I've been using guns out in the open and have had a decent amount of room to move around my opponents and seek cover behind objects. Here I'm basically in a box with enemies gradually leaking into it. I end up abandoning my new revolver in favour of my combat knife, which seems to do a much better job at close proximity. Given this is a game set underground in the tunnels of the Metro, though, I start to worry a little bit about how the gunplay is going to feel from here on out.

Thirty Minutes In...

After this battle Hunter disappears into the tunnels in search of mysterious, powerful mutants known as the Dark Ones, leaving instructions for Artyom to contact someone named Miller at Polis station if he doesn't return. As you might expect, Hunter doesn't return, and so our adventure finally feels like it's starting to get underway. Except, it still kind of isn't. More tutorialising is in store as we pick up some more weaponry, some cartridges for our gas mask, and a dynamo of some sort that boosts the power of our flashlight. It's here that the game also introduces its economy to the player, explaining that pristine military grade rounds from before the war can be used as currency to buy more weapons, or traded in for a larger quantity of Metro-made rounds. These are much cheaper and more plentiful, but they are also less powerful than the military grade rounds. This presents the player with an interesting dichotomy, since using the pristine ammunition will make gunfights easier, but at the cost of literally throwing your money away. Whether the game does anything interesting with this premise remains to be seen though.

Artyom joins a travelling caravan heading from Exhibition to nearby Riga station, the first step on his journey to Polis. Unfortunately the caravan is hit by some mysterious force as it travels through the tunnels, incapacitating everyone but Artyom who must then fend off a band of attacking Nosalises while his companions recover and get the caravan moving again. It's a tensely fought on-rails section that mixes up the action nicely, and the double-barrelled shotgun that I acquire is the first weapon I've held that actually packs a punch. Maybe this isn't going to be so bad after all...

One Hour In...

No sooner has the caravan reached its destination than the action once again dissipates in favour of more gentle world-building. Artyom and his companions stop for a drink to celebrate their survival, giving another glimpse of life under what remains of Moscow. Unfortunately the events in the tunnel have put the station on lockdown, so Artyom splinters off from the caravan crew in search of another way out. It's now that he meets a mysterious individual called Bourbon, who says he knows of a "gap in the fence" so to speak that can put Artyom back on track to Polis. Time to hit the tunnels once again, on foot this time.

For the next twenty minutes or so Bourbon becomes my companion, walking me through the basics of Metro's stealth mechanics as we watch out for broken glass on the ground and tripwires across doorways. He's the only character I've encountered up to this point who's shown even a whiff of personality - his dry sense of humour and constant quips breathe a little bit of life into the journey through the dark, uninviting Metro tunnels. I wish I could say the same about his usefulness as a combat buddy, but that seems wildly inconsistent. One moment we're up against bandits and he does absolutely nothing, cowering behind cover and leaving me to root them all out. The next, we're even deeper into tunnels filled with poisonous vapours (my first opportunity to use my gas mask since the Prologue), and he gets stuck into the many Nosalises blocking our path. The inconsistency is frustrating, and it's compounded by the fact that I'm starting to run quite low on ammunition but haven't seen any opportunities to scavenge any replacement rounds as yet.

This section of the game culminates in a pretty big firefight - Artyom and Bourbon are refused passage at the gates of the next station, forcing them to fend off a pack of advancing Nosalises. I'm guessing this is supposed to be tense but all it succeeds in doing for me is recapturing the frustration of the fight back at Exhibition. Once again I have several enemies attacking me in an enclosed space where I don't feel like my gun is useful and I have to resort to my knife instead. Once we've seen off these attackers the guards at the gate recognise Bourbon and open up to let him and Artyom through. What follows is - yep, you guessed it - more downtime as we get more exposition and world-building within this new station environment. Feeling like I've seen enough, I check my watch and note that the hour is up. Not a moment too soon, I catch myself thinking...

The Verdict

If I'm being honest, the first hour of Metro 2033 hasn't made a great impression on me. Let's start with the positives though, shall we? First off, it just oozes atmosphere - the world of Metro feels believable, lived in, and is absolutely rammed with little details that help to suck the player into the experience it's trying to create. The dilapidated, ramshackle communities within each station feel warm and alive, a stark juxtaposition with the crushing darkness of the tunnels that connect them. The atmosphere is further compounded by the little snippets of narration that bookend each small session of gameplay, giving insight into Artyom's character as his journey progresses. It's a shame that he defaults to the silent protagonist trope during gameplay, as it creates a disconnect between the gameplay and the narrative thread.

Unfortunately that's where the whole thing starts to break down for me - the gameplay. Metro is a first-person shooter where the guns aren't fun or satisfying to use, and that's a major turn-off for me when it comes to this genre. With the exception of the shotgun, the handful of guns I used through the first hour lacked any kind of weight or impact to them, and the enemies I was firing them at didn't seem to react, to the point where I wasn't sure if I was doing any damage most of the time. There are some really neat ideas in here, such as the gas mask mechanics and the idea of pristine bullets also being currency, forcing you to make important decisions about whether to shoot them or save them, but they feel half-baked and out of place in the context of the game's linear nature. Also, given Metro is (by definition of its setting) a corridor-based shooter, there don't seem to be many opportunities to engage with the survival horror staple of resource scavenging. The BioShock games do this really well, I feel, and I didn't get that same vibe from the first hour of Metro 2033.

Metro 2033 is the first time where I feel like my verdict might be unfair, since it's painfully apparent that the game is still building up steam. But if an eight-to-ten-hour first-person shooter campaign can't grip me in its opening sixty minutes, then it's difficult to justify spending any more time with it just to see if it does actually get any better. There's just too much down-time, not enough action, and what action there is hasn't been fun to engage with. For those reasons, I'm going to PASS on Metro 2033 and remove it from my Pile of Shame.

---

Thanks, as always, for taking the time to read these ramblings. Next time on An Hour With..., I'll be dusting off my trusty PlayStation 2 and travelling back to the Wild West for some third-person gun-slinging action. Until then, take care and I'll see you around.

Daniel

---

Currently playing - Metro 2033 (X360)

Hey there folks and welcome to another instalment of An Hour With..., my new blog feature wherein I choose a random game from my enormous backlog and spend sixty minutes with it to determine whether I should PLAY it to completion, or PASS on the experience. The overarching aim of this feature is to help me whittle down my immense Pile of Shame by giving me some formative time with each title rather than simply casting games aside at random. If you're a newcomer to the series then you can get a flavour for what I'm trying to achieve my reading this introduction to the concept, or you can peruse the list of previous entries by means of the table below:

Today's game chosen at random by the Backloggery's awesome Fortune Cookie feature is the expanded edition of an early PlayStation title that many consider to be the founding father of the 'survival horror' genre. What is it, and how will it fare through its opening hour? Read on to find out more...

The Game

Resident Evil: Director's Cut is a third-person survival horror game released for the original PlayStation in September 1997. Set in the summer of 1998, it follows a team of S.T.A.R.S. operatives investigating a mysterious mansion tied to a series of grisly murders in nearby Raccoon City. It is a re-release of the original Resident Evil from the previous year, with a number of additional features befitting its subtitle. Among these are two new difficulties - Training mode, which reduces combat difficulty and increases ammo availability, and Advanced mode, which rearranges the placements of items, enemies and even camera angles to create a whole new experience for players already familiar with the original game. I've been unable to find any substantial critical opinion of the Director's Cut, but the vanilla version of Resident Evil was very highly regarded as a pioneer in cinematic storytelling and 3D visuals back in 1996 (although even back then, the infamous cutscenes and voice acting weren't fooling anyone).

The History

Resident Evil is a franchise that I've long wanted to dig deeply into, although I fear that I might be a bit too late to the party. My previous experiences with the series amount to playthroughs of three games - Resident Evil 4 on PS2 in 2008, Resident Evil 5 on Xbox 360 in 2010, and perhaps most pertinently for this instalment, the Resident Evil remake on GameCube in the same year. Since then I've amassed a digital collection on my PS3's hard drive that comprises pretty much the entire core franchise - the PSOne Classics releases of RE: Director's Cut, RE2 and RE3: Nemesis, the HD remasters of RE: Code Veronica X, RE4 and RE Zero, RE5 Gold Edition, RE6, and RE: Revelations 1 and 2. That's a lot of zombie-smashing action to get through, and I'm going to have to start somewhere. As the oldest release of the bunch, RE: Director's Cut is the obvious choice.

I deliberately glossed over my time with REmake so I could go over it in more detail here. I played through the campaign as Jill - as a newcomer to this style of Resident Evil game, I'd heard that Jill was the easier option, boasting access to a Pistol right off the bat and a couple of extra inventory slots to make item management less of a chore. Most of my playthrough took place in a darkened room on Hallowe'en, to maximise the scare factor. I was slightly put out by the tedious backtracking and frustrating inventory system, especially when the two combined to make puzzle solving take far longer than it had any right to be. I definitely enjoyed my time with the game though, drinking in the atmosphere and approaching every new room and corridor with almost palpable trepidation. I'm not sure how much of REmake will have stuck with me seven years on, but I'm hoping that my rudimentary memories of the its mechanics will work in my favour in some way as I tackle its progenitor.

The Hour

This is the part of the blog where the real magic happens - a real-time account of my first sixty minutes with the game in question, serving as a train-of-thought-style assessment of in-game actions and events, incorporating any observations that I make or opinions that I formulate along the way. As before, there may be some slight spoilers for early-game story beats within, so enter at your peril if spoilers for a twenty-year-old game are likely to be a sensitive subject for you. With that little disclaimer out of the way, let's boot up the PS3 and launch Resident Evil: Director's Cut from the XMB menu...

Five Minutes In...

After starting a New Game in Standard mode, I have to pick between two playable characters - S.T.A.R.S. team members Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine. Both are characters I'm distantly familiar with, having played as Chris in Resident Evil 5 and as Jill in REmake. This time, I opt for Chris - I've already seen this adventure from Jill's perspective, and I'm keen to experience the additional level of challenge that comes with his more limited inventory space. As the game kicks off I'm treated to an opening FMV sequence, merging live actors with CGI and puppetry to create a final product I can only describe as 'unique'. Resident Evil's terrible voice acting is well documented at this point, having given birth to memes including 'Jill Sandwich', 'Master of Unlocking', and 'I hope this is not Chris's blood'. Rather than describe it for you, I'll embed video footage below and let you judge it for yourselves:

After this opening cinematic and a little bit of introductory plot exposition designed to get Chris on his own, I'm finally put in control of our slightly steroidal protagonist. The first area in the game is a dining room whch is devoid of threats and offers plenty of things to examine, serving as a pretty good training ground for getting to grips with the game's fairly simple control scheme. Chris controls like a tank, which feels pretty clunky at first and is probably going to take some getting used to. After running a lap of the long dining table to get used to the walking and running speeds and turning circle, I turn my attention to the pause menu. It reveals Chris's six-slot inventory, two of which are currently occupied by a combat knife and a first-aid spray. Remembering how I struggled with Jill's eight slots in REmake fills me with a slight sense of dread at the prospect of making do with even less.

Fifteen Minutes In...

Through the next door is my first encounter with a zombie, which doesn't go quite as well as I'd hoped. The combat knife doesn't have much reach and I only manage to get a couple of blows in before it starts chomping on my neck. I change tack, pocket the knife and run out of the room. I arrive back in the mansion's central foyer to find Jill and Wesker missing and Jill's Beretta pistol lying on the ground. I add it to my inventory and swap it for the knife, then backtrack to the corridor with the zombie to put it down more efficiently. It's worth it, as I'm able to scavenge some more ammo from the corpse of its victim. Sadly there's nowhere else to go here as all the other doors in the corridor are locked, either from the other side or with a key resembling a sword. Guess it's time to abandon the west wing and head over to the east side of the mansion.

Through the blue door on the east side of the foyer is a small art gallery with paintings on the walls and a statue in the centre. Here the game introduces its first rudimentary puzzling mechanics, as some of the objects in the room can be pushed to access new areas. By shoving a staircase over to the statue I'm able to recover a map of the first floor from inside it, and moving a small bookcase reveals a hidden path leading to a prone zombie (which I'm clever enough to shoot before stepping too close) guarding some ink ribbons. These precious commodities need to be used to save the game, so I pocket them for future use. Another thing that becomes apparent in the gallery is the game's questionable translation, with the paintings described as featuring "steep scenery" and "a chubby woman". Not the most eloquent of adjectives, I think you'll agree. Oh, and I also notice that Chris has a cool little idle animation where he taps his foot impatiently, like a human version of Sonic the Hedgehog. It has no bearing on gameplay whatsoever, but it's a cool (and slightly humorous) little detail.

Forty Minutes In...

Having exhausted all the possibilities for exploring the ground floor of the mansion (for now, at least), it's time to head upstairs. Since I've just come from the east wing, I figure it makes sense to stay on this side of the building for now. The first door I try leads through a corridor and out onto a balcony on the exterior of the mansion. It's here that I start struggling to give RE: Director's Cut a pass on the visual front. It's an early 3D game, and as such I expect the blocky polygonal character models to have aged poorly. What's more disappointing is that the pre-rendered backdrops aren't looking too hot either. It's been forgivable up to this point where everything has been interiors, but out here the low-fidelity static environments are revealed for what they are. They just haven't aged as well as the pre-rendered art in games like Final Fantasy VII.

After being spontaneously attacked by crows I retreat back into the mansion. I spot a sparkling object on a shelf which turns out to be a key, but without knowing what it opens, I'm not willing to sacrifice an inventory slot to give it up. I start to think that RE: Director's Cut might be best played with a notepad at my side to keep track of all the things I need to go back for (or better yet, graph paper to plot out item locations on a map). Something to think about if I decide to play the game all the way through. Moving on to the next corridor, I notice two things. The first is that music cues seem to be tied to the presence of zombies - rooms with no enemies don't appear to have any music, while subtle strings serve as an audio cue to the presence of danger in the immediate vicinity. The second thing I notice is that the zombie encounters are starting to become more frequent, and I don't have enough ammo to deal with all of them. It could soon be time to find another strategy...

My next port of call is a small library where I pick up a book explaining the uses of medicinal herbs - useful information for the future, I'm sure. Just beyond this room is a staircase leading back down to a previously inaccessible part of the ground floor (not to mention even more zombies). I head down and make a break for the nearest door, only to find a safe room on the other side of it! It's a room I remember serving as my base of operations through the first stage of my time with REmake - there's a typewriter for saving in one corner, and a storage container for offloading excess items in another. I take the opportunity to save my game for the first time, re-jig my inventory and help myself to some more ammo from within the container. I also find a bag of chemicals on the ground near some gardening supplies - I wonder what they can be used for?

One Hour In...

With nowhere else to go around here, I backtrack along the corridors on the upper floor to return to the foyer. Now it's time to explore the upper parts of the west wing. Through the first door I'm greeted by a familiar sight from a new angle - I'm on a balcony overlooking the dining room where I began this adventure some forty-five minutes ago. I'm not alone either, as a pair of zombies approach me from opposite sides. My gunfire isn't quick enough and they catch me in a pincer movement, reducing my health to the red 'danger' level. I use the first aid spray and manage to take them down (almost running out of bullets in the process). This is the kind of situation that would probably prompt me to reload my saved game and try again under less restrictive circumstances, but with only fifteen minutes left to see as much as possible, I decide to plough on ahead for now.

While in this room I manage to push a statue off the balcony and down to the floor below. The crashing sound tells me that I probably want to go down and investigate the aftermath, but I put that off for now in favour of seeing more of the mansion. The next corridor features a new enemy type - zombies that can spit acidic bile in my direction to stagger me and allow them to gain ground. My ammo is rapidly depleting at this stage, so I elect to run past the zombies instead of standing my ground. It's only now that I realise speed could well be my best weapon over these lumbering monsters, especially if it conserves precious ammo for bigger encounters later on. My exploring ultimately brings me down a staircase and back into the dining room, where I retrieve a Blue Jewel from the shattered statue. Backtracking a little takes me to a small room with a tiger statue, accompanied by note about tigers having red and blue eyes. Putting two and two together, I place my new Blue Jewel into the statue and am rewarded with a Wind Crest. This sequence of using small items to solve small puzzles which reveal bigger items that in turn solve bigger puzzles is reminiscent of adventure games and adds another cerebral element to the horror and action that most people associate with the series.

Sadly, I don't get to find out what the Wind Crest is for. No sooner have I left the room with the tiger statue than I'm set upon by another reanimated corpse. I'm out of ammo, low on health, and the combat knife just isn't reliable enough to do the job. The zombie grabs me, sinks its teeth into my neck, and Chris Redfield collapses to the ground as the words 'You Are Dead' fade onto the screen. There are still technically three minutes left of my scheduled time with Resident Evil: Director's Cut, but that's not enough time for me to see anything new on reloading my saved game. I admit defeat and power down the PS3, calling this hour over...

The Verdict

I came away from Resident Evil: Director's Cut feeling positive about the experience but not really knowing why. On a lot of levels it's a game that is so dated that it almost voids its redeeming qualities with its negative ones. It's slow paced, the movement and knife combat are woefully clunky, and the cinematics and voice acting are the worst I've experienced at least since my two-month stint with Grandia at the start of this year, if not ever. The translation is questionable, the visuals lack polish and detail, and the user interface is basic and unintuitive. On top of all these quibbles, there's the glaring fact that a vastly superior version of this game exists in the form of REmake, a game that I've already played through to its end and came away from feeling satisfied by the experience.

But for all those things working against it, I couldn't help but be drawn into the action of RE: Director's Cut. I think that draw comes from two places, the first being my innate curiosity as an amateur video game historian. As I stated above, I now own almost every core game in the Resident Evil franchise, and there's a burning desire within me to experience this highly regarded and long-running franchise in all its incarnations. As somebody who grew up with the PlayStation, I'm used to dealing with low-fidelity graphics and clunkier control schemes, and don't necessarily see them as obstacles when judging my experience with a game. The second place that my affection for RE: Director's Cut comes from is in the intended structure of the player experience. It's a game built around the conceit of progress through failure, where every run that ends in death is a learning exercise that equips you with the knowledge you need to stand a better chance the next time through. It's like a survival horror version of Dark Souls, and I'm very excited to find out how the experience grows the further into it I get. For that reason, for now at least, Resident Evil: Director's Cut gets a PLAY verdict, albeit with the option to PASS further down the line should I stop enjoying the learning process.

---

As always, thanks very much to everyone who takes the time to read this blog. I'm having a lot of fun curating this new series and I hope it continues to entertain you all as much as I enjoy writing it. Next time on An Hour With..., I'll be taking a look at a post-apocalyptic first-person shooter adapted from a Russian science-fiction novel. Until then, take care, and I'll see you around.

Daniel

---

Currently playing - Resident Evil: Director's Cut (PS1C)

Hey there folks and welcome to another instalment of An Hour With..., my still relatively new blog feature wherein I choose a random game from my enormous backlog and spend sixty minutes with it to determine whether I should PLAY it to completion, or PASS on the experience. The overarching aim of this feature is to help me whittle down my immense Pile of Shame by giving me some formative time with each title rather than simply casting games aside at random. If you're a newcomer to the series then you can get a flavour for what I'm trying to achieve my reading this introduction to the concept, or you can peruse the list of previous entries by means of the table below:

Today's game chosen at random by the Backloggery's awesome Fortune Cookie feature is a first-person shooter from the earliest days of the PlayStation 3. What is it, and how will it fare through its opening hour? Read on to find out more...

The Game

Resistance: Fall of Man is a sci-fi first-person shooter developed by Insomniac Games and released in November 2006 (at least in Japan and the US - Europe had to wait until March 2007) as a launch title for the PlayStation 3. Set in our world, albeit on an alternate timeline where World War II never happened, the game puts the player in the shoes of Sergeant Nathan Hale, part of an American task force sent to England to assist in the fight against a mysterious alien race known as the Chimera. Combining Insomniac's established love of weird and wonderful weapon designs with a real-world setting and a first-person perspective, Resistance was very positively received at launch. It gave birth to a franchise which to date consists of two sequels and two handheld spin-off titles, the most recent being 2012's Resistance: Burning Skies for the PlayStation Vita.

The History

I'm afraid this section of the blog, dedicated to explaining why I own the game and whether I've attempted to play it before, won't be quite as interesting as it was in the last instalment of An Hour With.... I bought the digital version of Resistance: Fall of Man in a sale on the PlayStation Store back in October of last year. My main drive behind buying it was curiosity - I was aware of the franchise's reputation, and I've loved every Insomniac-developed game I've played to date, so it seemed like a smart purchase. I can't remember the exact amount I paid for it, but I doubt it would have been anything more than a few pounds. Beyond launching it and playing the opening five minutes a couple of times, I haven't touched Resistance before, so I'm going in pretty green today.

The Hour

This is the bulk of the blog, where I get down to the nitty gritty and provide a blow-by-blow account of my first sixty minutes with the game in question - in-game actions and progress, along with observations and opinions can all be found below. An advance warning that these next few sections will contain some early story spoilers, so anyone who hasn't yet played the game but intends to in the future may want to give this a miss. After powering on my PS3 I locate Resistance in the XMB menu and hit the X button to launch the game...

Five Minutes In...

As is usual for me, my first couple of minute with Resistance are spent in its Options menu. There's nothing much of note - the expected option to invert the Y axis is here, alongside a handful of controller layouts to cater for all FPS tastes. I decide to settle for the default layout, slightly worried about some of the controller mapping (putting grenades on a face button that a lot of other shooters use for reloading is bound to cause some hapless suicide bomber moments over the ensuing hour). With that, I return to the main menu and opt to start a New Campaign. Given a choice of three difficulties, I select Hard. I'm not the best player out there, but I can usually hold my own through an FPS campaign one step above the default difficulty level.

The game opens with a lengthy cut-scene that sets the stage for the ensuing action. It's pretty standard alternate timeline sci-fi fare - biological experiments in Russia, alien creatures wiping out human-kind, last-ditch resistance efforts by the survivors, and so on. The plot isn't going to set the world on fire, but the opening narration does enough to get me at least a little invested in what's going on, as does the setting (it's not very often you get a game like this set in jolly old England, after all). Interestingly, this initial cut-scene (and most of the others that come after it) isn't rendered in-engine. Instead, it's laid out like a field report with grainy static photos and pieces of intel filling the screen. I'm not sure if the effect is intended, but it serves to make the actual gameplay footage look all the more impressive once the sepia filter fades away and the action gets going. Considering it's a launch game running on hardware that's over a decade old at this point, Resistance still looks pretty damn good. I'm sure it must have blown away anyone coming to this from the PlayStation 2 as their introduction to the new generation (a judgement I feel qualified to make, having started this almost straight off the back of playing Beyond Good & Evil).

After a short loading screen, the action shifts to a first-person perspective and I'm handed the reins. Let's shoot some aliens!

Fifteen Minutes In...

I guess I'm not quite as good as first-person shooters as I thought. Either that or I've been completely spoiled by modern shooter conventions like regenerating health. I've managed to make it through the first level of Resistance at this point, but I've died a lot in the process. Enemy fire is frustratingly accurate, to the point where it feels like bullets are homing in on me at times, and the lack of regenerating health or discernible healing items throughout the level means I've inched forward in stages rather than feeling like I've made solid progress. It's become so frustrating that I decide to back out and start over again on the Normal difficulty level - I'd rather see more of what this game has to offer than keep bashing my head against the same encounters over and over again.

It's not all bad news though. The shooting feels great, the aiming is responsive and the guns I've used so far have been fun to use and mess around with. The Chimera's Bullseye rifle is particularly worth mentioning - its alternate fire can be used to 'tag' enemies with a homing beacon which draws all subsequently-fired bullets in their direction. It's really rewarding to land one of these beacons on an enemy, then duck behind cover, fire into the sky and watch as the bullets re-route themselves towards your painted target. It's a great design for a weapon and one that screams Insomniac, given their inventive history with the arsenals in the Ratchet & Clank series. I'm really interested to see what other kinds of weird and wonderful weapon designs the Chimera have up their sleeve. Hopefully I'll see something else before my hour with the game is up.

Thirty Minutes In...

Okay, maybe I shouldn't have scaled back the difficulty when I did. It proves much easier to retrace my steps through the campaign's opening level on Normal, but within a minute of the second level starting, new gameplay mechanics are introduced that dispel a lot of my concerns on Hard. Hale's four-section health bar can now be recovered in two ways - taking cover for a few sections will regenerate enough health to refill the currently depleted section, while generously distributed vials of a substance called 'Sym-Bac' will fill a whole lost section. It's a cool system similar to how I remember Far Cry 2 handling its health and healing. It also means I can afford to be a little more reckless and gung-ho in my approach to combat, which makes things a lot more fun and action-packed. This is how I like playing shooters, as opposed to spending forever ducking behind cover and emerging to take pot-shots now and then.

Within fifteen minutes I've managed to re-clear the first level and march through the second as well. The latter features a vehicle section towards the end that feels a little superfluous to me. It controls fine, and its weapons pack a satisfying punch, but it's incredibly overpowered and I'm not sure the gameplay actually warrants it (although it may pan out as slightly better for those playing in co-op, since they won't have to keep intermittently switching between the driver's seat and the mounted turret). It's too late to do anything about the difficulty now - I've got half an hour left with this game, and I don't want to spend it replaying the same levels over again. On to the third level...

One Hour In...

Resistance continues to throw surprises at me through the last thirty minutes I spend with its campaign. The third level plays very differently to the two before it - whereas those were tightly scripted corridor-based FPS levels, this one throws me into a much more open environment and challenges me to drive off waves of Chimera attackers. The more open level design adds an extra dynamic to the gunplay, making flanking a viable tactic for the first time in the game (up to now the levels have mostly been too narrow to approach enemies from the sides, forcing me to trade bullets from cover most of the time).

From here the game switches things up visually, as Sgt Hale is captured by the Chimera and transported to a conversion centre in Grimsby (and let me tell you, I never thought I'd be playing a game set in Grimsby, of all places). The war-torn streets of York are substituted for interiors that marry the red-brick aesthetics of industrial England with sleek, metallic structures not unlike those of the Combine in Half-Life 2. It's here that I'm introduced to my next piece of Chimera weaponry - the Hedgehog grenade, a thrown weapon that jumps into the air after landing and shoots a multitude of lethal spines in every direction on detonation. I giggle gleefully as my first attempt at using one sends two Chimera hybrids ricocheting off the walls in different directions.

The action moves on much as you might expect, and by the time my sixty minutes with Resistance is up, I've made it comfortably into the campaign's fifth level. Time to weigh in on the overall experience...

The Verdict

I've come away from Resistance: Fall of Man having thoroughly enjoyed my first hour of it. The combat, the core of the whole experience, has been almost constant fun from start to finish. I loved the feel of the guns and the inventive alternate fire modes that encouraged me to approach situations in a multitude of different ways. I liked the way the game mixes things up by including both corridor- and arena-style level design. I also found myself getting caught up in the story, despite its slightly schlocky, B-movie-esque qualities. There's something about the juxtaposition of futuristic alien creations with familiar English architecture that reminded me a little of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, one of my favourite books of all time. I'm particularly keen to find out what becomes of Sgt Hale given he appears to have been infected by the Chimera's Crawlers.

I do have some reservations about Resistance. Chief among them is the current dearth of enemy types - so far I've fought nothing but humanoid hybrids and the occasional pack of skittering leapers (by the way Sgt Hale, Lt Ripley called and she wants her Facehuggers back). I'm hoping that later on the game expands its repertoire of moving targets to include some slightly more weird and wonderful creatures. I'm also a little worried that the slow trickle of new weapon types might dry up as the game progresses, as if that does happen, my interest in seeing more might dry up with it. This is something that Insomniac have always done well with the Ratchet & Clank series, where half the fun of arriving on a new planet is heading to the Gadgetron vendor to see what new implements of destruction on offer. Even so, these relatively minor concerns aren't enough to put me off playing more right now, and that's why Resistance: Fall of Man gets a PLAY verdict from me.

---

That's going to do it for this instalment of An Hour With.... Join me again next time when I'll be putting the opening hour of another game through its paces to determine whether I should PLAY it or PASS on it - specifically, I'll be visiting an old survival horror game from the original PlayStation. Until then, thanks very much for reading this blog. Take care folks, and I'll see you around.

Daniel

---

Currently playing - Resistance: Fall of Man (PS3)

Hey there folks, and welcome at last to the inaugural instalment of An Hour With..., the new blog feature that I teased last month wherein I pick a game at random from my backlog, play it for sixty minutes, and then write about my experience with it. For a more thorough explanation of what this series is, I'd recommend checking out my last blog in which I introduced the premise.

For the first An Hour With..., I've delved into the archives and selected a launch title for the original PlayStation. Over the next sixty minutes, I'll be aiming to find out whether it holds up twenty-two years later. At the end of the hour, I'll be issuing it with a PLAY or a PASS verdict - a commitment to either play it through to the end, or strike it from my Pile of Shame forever.

The Game

WipEout is a futuristic racing game developed by Psygnosis and released in November 1995 as a launch title for the Sony PlayStation. Set in the mid-twenty-first century, it puts the player into the cockpit of a sleek anti-gravity racer and throws them around mind-bending tracks at blistering speeds, all while a pumping techno soundtrack drives the action inexorably on. Widely regarded as the PlayStation's killer app at launch (at least it was here in the UK), the game was praised for its pioneering use of 3D graphics and its thrilling sense of speed and atmosphere. It spawned a sequel and subsequently an entire franchise, the most recent instalment of which graced the PlayStation 4 earlier this year.

The History

My history with the WipEout franchise is pretty limited. The game I spent by far the most time with was WipEout Fusion on PlayStation 2, a game that I mainly remember for my ability to beat my sisters in multiplayer races using only one hand (I'd steer with my thumb and operate the face buttons with my middle and ring fingers, a technique that saw me round the track comfortably ahead of them even without access to the brakes on the shoulder buttons). As well as the sense of speed and incredible visual presentation, I remember really liking Fusion for its vehicle upgrade mechanics, giving the player access to various aesthetic overhauls and performance boosts which they could buy with currency earned from racing.

It was my enjoyment of Fusion that brought me retrospectively to the game that started it all, tempting me to part with a couple of quid for the PSOne Classics version on the PlayStation Store. Since that purchase I've launched the game a grand total of zero times, but with the launch of this blog feature, that changes today. While I also have the game downloaded to my PlayStation 3, I've decided to spend this hour with it on my trusty PSP - the WipEout games have always had that pick-up-and-play feel to them, and the fast-paced nature of races lends itself well to the on-the-go nature of a handheld console. I'm looking forward to checking it out and discovering exactly why this game was so beloved at the PS1's launch.

The Hour

This is the meat and potatoes of today's blog - a blow-by-blow account of the hour I spend with the game, detailing my actions, progress, and any thoughts or opinions that come to mind as I play. With WipEout freshly installed on my PSP, I launch it from the XMB menu and get settled into my favourite comfy gaming chair...

Five Minutes In...

One thing this feature is likely to highlight as it develops over the next few instalments is that the Options menu is usually my first port of call with any new title. I like to take a gander at the settings I'm able to change, and generally perform any quick quality-of-life improvements before I start to actually play the damn thing. In WipEout's case, the Options menu is pretty limited - the expected Save and Load functions, along with the options to adjust the volume for music and sound effects, and a handful of controller presets to choose from. Given the game maps its brakes to the L2 and R2 buttons by default, and these buttons are assigned to the PSP's diminutive analog nub, I quickly cycle through until I find a preset that maps them to L1 and R1 (the PSP's L and R buttons respectively). With that important change made, it's time to start playing proper.

Ten Minutes In...

I pass over the Two-Player Race menu given that I'm playing alone, although it is curious that WipEout doesn't support split-screen, instead demanding that two PlayStations be hooked together with a Link Cable to enable multiplayer (possibly because the developers couldn't replicate the game's sense of speed and technical pioneering twice over on the same screen at that early stage in the PS1's life cycle?). The One-Player Race menu offers up some expected choices - a Championship mode, a Single Race, and a Time Trial. Eager to get a feel for its full feature set, I choose the first option. I'm then given a choice of vehicles - unaware of any differences in handling between them, I choose the one I find most aesthetically pleasing (Anastasia Cherovoski's ship on the Auricom team, to be clear).

WipEout wastes no time in throwing me into the first race of the Championship, a three-lap run around a track situated in Canada. I quickly opt out of the first-person camera mode, finding the pitch of it a little too nauseating when I start crashing into the sides of the track (and I crash into the sides a lot in this first race). The physics are incredibly floaty and not very intuitive, demanding that I start to turn almost a full second before I might have to if my vehicle was on the ground rather than suspended several feet above it. Not only that, but almost all the weapon pick-ups feel ineffectual, with only a couple boasting useful lock-on targeting and there seeming to be very little difference in their overall functionality. In spite of the steep learning curve of the physics, though, I very quickly get sucked into the game's presentation. The bright colours and thumping electronic beats complement the fast pace of the action, and considering the game's status as one of the earliest full-3D home console games, it's technically very impressive. Sure, there's noticeable pop-in and draw distance issues as the game frantically tries to lay its track out in front of you before you reach the end of it, but that doesn't detract from the fact that it maintains a solid frame rate and commendable level of detail throughout.

WipEout's Championship mode demands that I earn a top-three finish to advance to the next race in the competition. On my first attempt I finish the race in seventh place. On my second try I wind up in fifth. Perhaps I need to go back to the drawing board with my approach.

Twenty Minutes In...

Backing out to the menu I choose a different racer (Daniel Chang with the AG Systems team) and restart the Championship from the beginning. This time I fare much better, finishing in second place and qualifying for the next race of the tournament. In all honestly I don't know how much of this progress is down to the change in craft and how much is down to practice - the new vehicle feels a little more responsive in the turns, but it may just be that I'm starting to get used to the game's weird floaty physics. Whatever the reason, Canada gets left behind and the action relocates to Japan for the second race in the Championship. This next track feels suitably different from the first, with a palette swap from wintry grey to lush green. The corners are a little more demanding and a couple of them require use of the shoulder-button brakes to tackle them effectively. All in all it feels like a fair ramping up of the challenge, and one I'll try to rise to.

Forty Minutes In...

My time in the F3600 Anti Gravity Racing League is over. Although I win the Japanese heat first time, I'm unable to secure a podium finish in the next race, situated in Germany. It's a definite step up from the previous two tracks in terms of difficulty, combining blind corners with fiendishly challenging slalom-style chicanes and culminating in a fuck-you, straight-out-of-nowhere sharp turn onto the final straight. Try as I might, I can't keep up with my opponents and the best position I'm able to secure is fifth. As a side note, it's pretty impressive how embellished this game's lore is - the near-future setting clearly gave the writers an opportunity to have some fun trying to second-guess the geopolitical climate, although they got it pretty darn wrong in Europe's case.

Not wanting to repeat the races I've already been through to get back to this point, I decide to back out of Championship mode and take to the Single Race option, to sample some of the other tracks available in the game...

One Hour In...

...and it's here that WipEout loses me. It turns out that the game boasts a painfully meagre roster of tracks to race on. In addition to the three I've already seen (Canada, Japan and Germany), there are only four other race locations in the game - Russia, the United States, Greenland (which I guess has annexed itself from the US in this alternative future?) and a hidden track on Mars which apparently only unlocks after completing Championship mode on the higher Rapier difficulty. Even by 1995's standards, that seems like incredibly slim pickings as far as track variety goes.

What this ultimately means for my hour with WipEout is that I spend the last twenty minutes doing Single Races on the three tracks that I haven't raced on yet. As you might expect, they continue to ratchet up the difficulty from course to course, with the Greenland track in particular boasting corners so mind-bendingly tight that I don't think I ever want to experience it again. In turn, what this means for my overall experience with WipEout is that in just one single hour of play, I feel like I've seen all it has to offer. There's no hook, no conceit to the gameplay that could get its hooks into me and keep me coming back for more. It doesn't have the incremental progression that gripped me in the case of its descendant Fusion. It doesn't have a wide variety of tracks to race on, because in sixty minutes of play I've seen all but one of them. All it has is the offer to reward my patience and repeated playtime with better positions and lap times. In 1995 that might have been enough, but in the real twenty-first century, it sadly isn't. Satisfied, I power off the PSP and put it down.

The Verdict

I don't want people to come away from this thinking I didn't like WipEout. Considering it's over two decades old, I think it still plays remarkably well. There's a purity and simplicity to it, and when you're not battling the physics, the ebb and flow of piloting an anti-gravity racer makes it rewarding to pull off clean laps with no interruptions. Judged as a product of its time, there's no denying that it's a complete technical marvel, and its visuals and presentation impressed me on multiple occasions throughout the sixty minutes I spent with it. It's easy to see why it was the game that sold so many PlayStations at launch here in the UK.

Unfortunately there's just no escaping the fact that in terms of included content, WipEout is a woefully barren experience, especially by modern standards. Six tracks just doesn't cut it in my opinion, especially without any changes in their configuration. It severely limits replayability and throttles the potential of the Championship mode to be something more than a series of half a dozen incrementally harder races. The hour I spent with WipEout was fun, but I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by not playing more of it. For that reason, it's going to receive the first PASS verdict of this blog series.

---

That's going to do it for this initial edition of An Hour With.... It's been a fun blog to write and I'm really happy with the format, although I may need to tweak a couple of things before the next instalment. Speaking of which, next time I'll be donating an hour of my time to a first-person shooter from the PlayStation 3's back catalogue. What is it, and how will it fare in its sixty minutes in the spotlight? Be sure to return to find out. Until next time, thanks very much for taking the time to read this blog. Take care, and I'll see you around.

Daniel

---

Currently playing - WipEout (PS1C)

Three months is a weird amount of time. It somehow manages to be a long time and a short time simultaneously. Case in point - it's been three months since my last proper blog entry. On the one hand, that's a hell of a long time to leave a blog dormant. On the other, I can remember writing that blog post just like it was yesterday. A lot has happened in those three months, but ultimately not a great deal has changed. And, although I haven't written one of these for fourteen weeks, you can bet that the possibility has never been far from my thoughts.

I've been actively trying to find the right angle at which to return to the blogosphere for a few weeks now. 'The Backlogbook', my attempt to consolidate my gaming patterns into weekly morsels of bloggery, went off the boil just three months into the year, curiously seeing its final instalment go live on April Fool's Day. As a project I felt like it had run its course - it was slipping from its weekly schedule and starting to feel like a chore to write, so I decided to step away from it for a while and rethink my approach. Since then I've assumed blogger's mantle twice, both times to promote my livestream of a Pokémon Gold Randomizer Nuzlocke as part of Giant Bomb's seventh Community Endurance Run (for those of you who didn't watch, I lost at the Champion - so near, and yet so far).

On reflection, I think the biggest problem with the Backlogbook was its scope. It tried to do too many things at once, acting as a platform for both a "the week in games"-style breakdown and a concerted effort to whittle down my backlog with unforgiving ruthlessness. This latter section, dubbed 'The Lost Pages', was conceived with the best intentions - my well-documented Pile of Shame had exceeded three-hundred titles, and an indiscriminate cull seemed like the best way to address that worrying statistic. In practice though, I very quickly reached a stage where I was axing titles without any legitimate reason. That fact was what ultimately led to me stepping away from The Lost Pages, and the Backlogbook as a whole.

That brings me more or less up to the present moment, which sees me returning with a new feature titled 'An Hour With...'. It's an exciting new spin on The Lost Pages - one that preserves the core idea of whittling down the backlog, but in a much more proactive way. Where the old formula failed was in its disregard for hands-on experience with the games I was getting rid of. As its name suggests, An Hour With... addresses this issue by adding an extra step to the process - a sixty-minute session spent with every game up for consideration. I'm hoping that by spending some time with these games, my formative opinions will put me in a better position to decide their fate. Once I've played for an hour and decided whether to scrap or save a game, I'll then write a short blog entry about the experience. To make sure they stay short, I'm going to limit myself to just an hour of writing time to get the first draft down for each entry.

I was initially planning to make An Hour With... a weekly feature, but since I have a lot of commitments on at the moment, I've decided to treat it as an "as-and-when" thing for the time being. I'll try to aim for around one a week, but if I don't hit that target then I'm not going to beat myself up about it. As for the Backlogbook, I'm quite keen to pick it up again, but minus The Lost Pages and written on a per-game basis rather than forcing an entry out every week. It's just easier to save everything up for a single entry than it is to scratch around for little things to write about each week, especially when the games in question are lengthy RPGs (here's looking at you, Grandia).

So yeah, that's what you can expect from this blog going forward. I'm hoping to get the inaugural instalment of An Hour With... up on the site within the next few days, with the Backlogbook making its return whenever I next finish playing something. Heck, I may even try and throw something together documenting everything I've played in the last three months (my list of games beaten this year puts the total number of titles I've seen the end of since April 1st at fourteen, so it would either be a really long post or an exercise in bullet points). As for what I'm playing right now, I'm shifting my attention between The Witcher on Steam, and The Walking Dead: A New Frontier on PS4, so expect those to feature in future entries.

Thanks for reading folks. I know this is all over the place because I've thrown it together in an hour and haven't done anything like this for three months. I promise the next one will be better. Until then, take care and I'll see you around.

Daniel

---

Currently playing - The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (PC)

As I write this, there are just under twelve hours remaining until I start playing my part in this year's Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run. In case you missed my announcement a couple of weeks ago, I'll be attempting a Randomizer Nuzlocke run of Pokémon Gold. The aim is to complete everything up to the first round of Elite Four and Champion battles with a self-imposed Nuzlocke ruleset (only one potential capture per area and fainting equals permadeath), plus the added challenge of randomising various aspects of the game, within twenty-four hours. For more details, hit this link - it gives a thorough explanation of what I'll be doing and how I'll be doing it.

The run is scheduled to start at 9:00am BST tomorrow morning (that's 4:00am EDT for everyone who lives across the Atlantic). For anyone interested in watching the carnage ensue, I've embedded my Twitch channel below:

This is, of course, for charity - specifically Pencils of Promise, an organisation dedicated to providing quality education to disadvantaged kids in developing countries. If you'd like to donate towards my run, hit up this link to my Pencils of Promise fundraiser page and make your donation there. Everyone who donates will earn the right to nickname one of my Pokémon (remember there's a ten character limit, folks). In addition, any milestones met before the run starts will push us up towards increased levels of randomness, as outlined below:

• $25 - Starter Pokémon will be randomized. Wave goodbye to Chikorita, Cyndaquil and Totodile, who knows what's going to be in Elm's Poké Balls? ACHIEVED!!!
• $50 - Static Pokémon (including Legendary Pokémon) will be randomized. Something other than Ho-oh might be waiting at the top of the Tin Tower... ACHIEVED!!!
• $75 - Trainer Pokémon will be randomized. Every Trainer battle will become a fight against the unknown. Or maybe the Unown. ACHIEVED!!!
• $100 - Item locations will be randomized. Is that a Potion or a Master Ball at your feet? ACHIEVED!!!
• $125 - TMs will be randomized. The moves contained within each machine will become a mystery.
• $150 - Pokémon movesets will be randomized. Every move learned by level-up will be a surprise.
• $175 - Pokémon base stats will be randomized. Will each capture be an offensive monster, or a defensive powerhouse?
• $200 - Pokémon types will be randomized. At this point, everything I know about the basic Pokémon meta-game gets thrown into question.

I'm excited, and terrified, and honoured to be playing a part in this awesome endeavour by the Giant Bomb community. I hope as many of you as possible will tune into the stream tomorrow and throw some words of encouragement (or even a few dollars) my way. Your support is what will keep me going throughout this challenge. That, and caffeine. Lots and lots of lovely caffeine. And hey, while you're at it, why not show some support to the other community endurance runners by checking out their streams over at Explosive Runs? I'm sure they'll be just as appreciative of your support and donations.

Thanks for reading folks. Take care, and I'll see you around.

Daniel

---

Currently playing - Pokémon Gold (GBC)

Hey folks, and welcome to the latest instalment of the Ba-

...hold on, this isn't the Backlogbook. What's happened here?

To tell the truth, it's been pretty difficult finding the time and motivation to put together the Backlogbook blogs on even a semi-regular basis recently. For that reason, I'm going to put that feature on hiatus for a little while, while I work out how best to present it in a slightly more dynamic and interesting fashion for both myself and you guys who read these things. I'm also feeling like it would be a good idea to retire the Pokemon Sun Nuzlocke Challenge, since it's become a drag to write and has really started to impact on my enjoyment of the game. The latter is definitely more open to appeal if anyone out there is desperate to continue reading about my Alolan adventures, but given the readership for the last couple of chapters was pretty low, I'm guessing nobody out there will be especially sad to see it go.

But that's not why I'm here today. I've opened this window to type up a load of lovely words about my involvement with this year's Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run. It's something I've wanted to do for years, but this year I finally have the hardware to back up my enthusiasm, so I'm going to make it happen. For those of you who are unaware, the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run is a community-driven game-streaming and speed-running weekend put on by users of this fine website. Now in its seventh year, the GBCER raises money for Pencils of Promise, a charity supporting the education of disadvantaged children in developing countries. It's a really worthwhile cause and, as someone who's seeking to train as a teacher in the next couple of years, it strikes a real chord with me.

For my first ever foray into the GBCER, I'm planning to attempt a Randomizer Nuzlocke of Pokémon Gold. This is a domain I have some previous experience with - a couple of years ago I managed to successfully complete a Randomizer Nuzlocke run of Pokémon Red. My primary aim for this run will be to beat the Elite Four for the first time and complete the Johto portion of the game within twenty-four hours. My stream is scheduled to commence at 9:00am BST on Sunday 7th May, and will be viewable through my Twitch channel.

What's a Randomizer Nuzlocke?

I'm sure most of you who follow me are well aware by now of what a Nuzlocke is, but for those of you who haven't heard the term before, I'll explain. The Nuzlocke Challenge, also known as Pokémon: Hard Mode, is a set of rules self-imposed on a playthrough of a Pokémon game with the intention being to create a tougher experience and a more emergent narrative. The Nuzlocke has three core tenets which almost every single run abides by:

• You may only catch the first Pokémon you meet on any given route.
• All Pokémon must be nicknamed to encourage stronger emotional bonds between trainer and Pokémon.
• If a Pokémon faints in battle, it is considered dead and must be either released or permanently boxed in the PC.

I'll also be adding a couple of my own personal modifiers, for the sake of keeping things interesting:

• If the first Pokémon encountered in any given area is a duplicate of (or from the same evolutionary line as) a previously captured Pokémon, the player may search for another encounter (this is dubbed "dupes clause" or "species clause").
• Any Pokémon gifted to the player by an NPC may be kept and used as an encounter.

This isn't just an ordinary Nuzlocke though - this is a Randomizer Nuzlocke. This means that various aspects of the game's code will be randomized before I start, to make the run more challenging and exciting. Obviously the more the game is randomized, the tougher it will be to plan ahead or lean on my pre-existing Pokémon knowledge as a crutch. How random will this Randomizer be? Well, that's in the hands of my donors, but I'll get to that in a minute...

Donation Incentives

Donations can be made to my fundraising page over at Pencils of Promise. Donations will be accepted for the duration of the stream, but I'm eager to get donations in advance for a couple of reasons that I'll outline below.

First, as a donation incentive, I'm offering the chance to nickname a Pokémon to everyone who donates. Simply indicate the nickname you'd like me to use when you make your donation, and I'll make use of it somewhere along the Nuzlocke run. There's no minimum on this donation incentive, so be as generous or as frugal as you like. Just bear in mind that the Pokémon I acquire over the course of the run will be random, so I recommend picking a general name rather than tailoring one to a specific Pokémon. Oh, and try to keep it to ten characters or less - the game has a ten-character limit on Pokémon nicknames, so I'll be forced to take poetic licence with anything longer.

In addition, for every $25 I'm able to raise before the event, up to my fundraising target of $200, an additional random aspect will be added to the Nuzlocke. To begin with, the only aspect of the game to be randomized will be the wild Pokémon encounters, but the more money we raise, the crazier (and more potentially broken) the game will become. The milestones will be as follows:

• $25 - Starter Pokémon will be randomized. Wave goodbye to Chikorita, Cyndaquil and Totodile, who knows what's going to be in Elm's Poké Balls?
• $50 - Static Pokémon (including Legendary Pokémon) will be randomized. Something other than Ho-oh might be waiting at the top of the Tin Tower...
• $75 - Trainer Pokémon will be randomized. Every Trainer and Gym Leader battle will become a fight against the unknown. Or maybe the Unown. The Randomizer will decide.
• $100 - Item locations will be randomized. Is that a Potion or a Master Ball at your feet?
• $125 - TMs will be randomized. The moves contained within each machine will become a mystery.
• $150 - Pokémon movesets will be randomized. Every move learned by level-up will be a surprise.
• $175 - Pokémon base stats will be randomized. Will each capture be an offensive monster, or a defensive powerhouse?
• $200 - Pokémon types will be randomized. At this point, almost everything I know about the basic Pokémon meta-game gets thrown into question.

Disclaimer

Now for the important bit. In the interest of fairness and to make sure I'm not misleading anyone, I feel like I should make you all aware that as this Nuzlocke becomes more randomized (particularly if we pass $150), the difficulty increases exponentially. If I meet my goal of $200 before the run begins, there's a very real chance of me running into something like a Blizzard-toting Kangaskhan, wiping out and losing the Nuzlocke at a very early stage. If this happens then I intend to acknowledge the failure, but then continue to play the game without the full Nuzlocke ruleset imposed (I will most likely stick to one capture per route, but death will cease to be a factor). This is to give me a reason to keep playing beyond the loss of the Nuzlocke, and to make sure that people get the content they're donating for. I'm really hoping it doesn't come to that, but I feel like I need to lay that down just in case it does.

---

I'm really excited to be taking part in the Giant Bomb Community Endurance Run this year, and raising money for Pencils of Promise. Please donate, offer up your Pokémon nicknames, and be sure to tune into the live-stream on Sunday 7th May. It's going to be a lot of fun.

Daniel

---

Currently playing - Yooka-Laylee (PS4)

Blogging can be a frustrating game sometimes. You spend four days pouring your essence into a piece of writing, only for your computer to spontaneously restart while installing an update, casting every word you've written into the ether, never to be seen again. So it was a couple of weeks ago, when I put my laptop down vowing to make some finishing touches to my Week Ten edition of the Backlogbook in the morning. When I awoke, I was met with a screen proudly boasting that it was completely up to date, at the expense of some fifteen-hundred words. There was much cursing and wringing of hands, and I once again stepped away from the blogosphere for a couple of weeks. I'm back now though, with another bumper edition of my usually-weekly foray into my game-playing (and Pile of Shame-slaying) habits. Brace yourselves folks, because this instalment of the Backlogbook is going not just to ten, not even to eleven, but all the way up to twelve!

The Last Three Weeks' Logs

It's been a game-packed few weeks since my last blog here on Giant Bomb. I've played copious (some might say unhealthy) amounts of new PS4 release Horizon: Zero Dawn and I have a lot to say about that. I've also managed to throw a decent chunk of time into the PS3 version of Burnout Paradise, and even found the time to blitz through the campaign of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary over the course of a weekend. That all seems like a good jumping off point to start some video games related discussion, right? The one thing I still haven't played any of since my last blog is Pokémon Sun, which I feel absolutely terrible about. I know I need to pick it back up and get back into the swing of things, but it's difficult to find both the time and the motivation right now. Mark my words though, that Nuzlocke Challenge is coming back with a bang very soon.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

To say that my March has been dominated by Horizon: Zero Dawn is somehow a massive understatement. For the last month it has consumed my gaming schedule, wringing me for every spare hour I can find to throw at it. I've pulled all-dayers, I've pulled all-nighters, I've looked for any possible excuse to spend just a little longer with Guerrilla Games' captivating open-world debut. The end result of all that is a save file that clocks in at just under sixty hours, with an 88.44% game completion percentage and the main story completed. Horizon: Zero Dawn is the first game to captivate me to this extent in a very, very long time, the last being Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain when it released eighteen months ago. Perhaps it isn't surprising that the two games share some similar tropes - emergent open-world design, healthy helpings of stealth, and giant robot dinosaurs to defeat. I'm being deliberately reductive there, of course, but I've found myself seriously wondering what it is about Horizon that's entranced me to this degree. These next few paragraphs will attempt to answer just that. Be warned that I'm going to veer into some moderate mechanical spoilers and possibly some light story spoilers through this section of the Backlogbook. If you're playing (or planning to play) Horizon and don't want to run the risk of anything being spoiled for you, I'd recommend skipping ahead to the next segment of this blog.

I guess the most obvious place to start when talking about Horizon is those graphics. Questionable graphical quality never been a deal-breaker for me (heck, in my last blog I talked about replaying an old Nintendo 64 game), but I can honestly say I've never played anything that looks this good before. I've found myself actively avoiding fast travel just so I can explore and take in the beautiful environments and vistas that make up this lush post-apocalyptic rendition of Colorado. Aloy is beautifully rendered and animated, but the real stars of the show are the machines she hunts, all of which convey majesty and terror in equal measure. It's not just impressive on the macro scale, either - every single texture holds up to incredibly close scrutiny, and the attention to detail in the foliage in particular is just astonishing. It's not perfect, with perhaps the weakest aspect of the game's visuals being its lacklustre facial animation, but visually, Horizon is about as close to it as any game I've ever played.

Of course, all the polygons in the world don't mean anything if the gameplay doesn't hold up, but Horizon delivers on that front as well. It's difficult to pigeonhole the experience with total precision, but the broad definition of 'open-world action RPG' just about covers it. A lot of its influences are readily apparent - the exploration and bow-centric combat controls evoke Crystal Dynamics' rebooted Tomb Raider franchise, the questing owes a debt to the likes of The Elder Scrolls, there's Arkham-esque detective vision in the form of Focus mode, the world map is uncovered through Assassin's Creed style tower-climbing... I could go on, but to do so would be to do Horizon a disservice. While it borrows heavily from its forebears, Horizon's true success is in the way it brings all these disparate parts together in a way that's both cohesive and engaging. It's reminiscent of the original Darksiders in that respect, another game that wore its influences very openly while doing something unexpected and exciting with them.

Alongside these tried-and-true mechanics are a ton of little quality of life improvements that I hope other games will seek to carry forward. The transparency of the resources inventory, for example - Horizon is incredibly open about which of its resources have some practical use, and which are purely vendor fodder. As a player with hoarding tendencies, I found this invaluable when it came to paring down my item collection. This transparency extends to the crafting system as well, as the inventory menu not only lays out which items you need for each upgrade, but also tells you which machines or animals carry them. There's even the option to create an errand quest dedicated to gathering the materials necessary for a specific upgrade, providing useful direction to the components you need. I'll admit I'm not completely up-to-date with open-world game design, and some of these mechanics could well be borrowed from one of my gaming blind spots, like Far Cry 3 and 4, or one of the more recent Assassin's Creeds. Regardless of their origin, they're fantastic inclusions, and something I hope other developers will implement in their titles in future.

I touched briefly on the combat earlier, but it deserves more of my attention, not least because man-on-machine combat is without a doubt my favourite aspect of playing Horizon. Dealing with anything larger than a Watcher or Strider is an incredibly tense, tactical affair that calls to mind my previous experience with the Monster Hunter series. Every machine has weak points, and targeting those weak points will impact on its behaviour. There's a simple elemental system in play too, and a lot of the fun of combat comes from switching up Aloy's weapons and tactics to suit the machine she's currently up against. After reading some recommendations on the forums here on Giant Bomb, I bumped the game difficulty up to Very Hard right from the outset. The effect of this was to give the combat an almost Souls-like bent, where any enemy contact was potentially life-threatening and I really had to focus on exploiting weaknesses while minimising the risk I was putting myself in at all times. Every new machine was a thrilling, terrifying encounter as well as a learning experience, and every time a carefully-planned approach pays off it's incredibly satisfying (I know I'll never, ever forget the first time I took down a Fire Bellowback - that was a Tomb Raider T-Rex moment right there). It's a challenging, rewarding system that I never once tired of in sixty hours of gameplay. Perhaps the only thing I can say to its detriment is that it makes fighting the dumb human enemies completely boring by comparison.

The only aspect of Horizon that I haven't yet discussed is its story, and that's because I really don't want to spoil it in a major way for anyone who hasn't experienced it for themselves. Keeping things relatively vague, I'll say that the most impressive aspect of the game's storytelling for me was in its world-building. That's probably because most of the time, the game is building two worlds simultaneously - the lush, vibrant post-apocalyptic world that the player is physically exploring, and the mysterious pre-apocalyptic world that came before it. It's fascinating to witness these tribal future-people as they try to make sense of a world not too dissimilar to our own, and the scraps of flavour text scattered through the "ruins" Aloy explores paint an interesting picture of the possibilities lying ahead in our own not-too-distant future. It's a really successful sci-fi story that posits some really provocative questions about where we're headed as a civilisation. I like Aloy's character a lot too - I know a lot is being said about her being too "video game protagonist-y", but I feel like a lot of the perceived dissonance in her character can be put down to the fact she's grown up as an outsider, with access to otherwise lost knowledge on account of her Focus.

As I said at the outset of this section, I've put around sixty hours into Horizon: Zero Dawn. Every single second has been a joy, and I'm keen to put in even more time before I call the game completely done. As things stand, I'm around 10% off a 100% completion stat, and six Trophies away from a coveted Platinum. I'm almost certain that I'm going to pursue both before I return Horizon to the shelf, but even then I'm not sure I can say that I'll be "done" with it, and that's not a reference to the recently-teased upcoming DLC mentioned by the developers. As I said at the outset of this section, Horizon: Zero Dawn has impacted upon me in a way that very few other games do. That's something very precious, something that earns it a seat in the pantheon of my own personal all-time favourite video game experiences. It's going to be a shoe-in for my end-of-year top ten, but it's probably earned a spot on my top ten games of all time as well. As @jeff says in the tagline of his review, "Guerrilla's got something really special here." I couldn't have put it better myself.

Burnout Paradise

I don't believe I've ever been drawn into playing a game simply by listening to a song before, but that's what happened a few weeks ago with Burnout Paradise. I was walking back from work one evening, headphones piping music from my phone into my ears, when Paradise City by Guns n' Roses started to play. It was the first time I'd heard the song in a good few years, and it took me back to the time I spent playing the Xbox 360 version of Burnout Paradise back when I was still at university. Remembering I'd subsequently picked up the Ultimate Box edition of the game on PlayStation 3 a year or two back, I decided to spend an hour or so that evening revisiting the roads of Paradise City.

That revisit ended up turning into a two-week vacation, in which I earned my Burnout licence and saw the game's credits roll. Turns out that despite being almost ten years old, Burnout Paradise has aged remarkably well. There are definitely some wrinkles showing, most notably some of the low-resolution textures and a few archaic mechanical design choices, but those signs of age belie just how ahead of its time it was. With the benefit of hindsight, its sense of freedom, pioneering career structure and innovative online component feel like precursors to the modern trend of unique, emergent experiences in current game design. Sure, there are some niggling problems with it. The fact there are only five types of event leads to career progression becoming quite samey in long bursts, and the game is in desperate need of an option to mute DJ Atomika. On a more personal note, I struggled no end with the fact the mini-map in the bottom right corner of the screen doesn't rotate to match player orientation. But none of those flaws detract from what is still an incredible driving experience.

And the crashes... Oh sweet Jesus, the crashes! To this day, with the possible exception of Grand Theft Auto V, I don't think I've seen better cosmetic vehicle damage in a game. The way cars realistically crumple and fold on impact, the sight of wheels escaping from their arches and rolling away from their static chassis, the minuscule particles of debris that litter the roads after every single collision... No other dedicated racing game I've played even comes close. The crashes in Burnout Paradise are so joyous to witness that in some twisted way, even failure feels rewarding.

I feel pretty sated by the amount of Burnout Paradise I've played this month. I'm not ruling out returning in the future, especially since the Ultimate Box edition features all the DLC packs that I never got a chance to mess around with on the 360 - Bikes and Big Surf Island being the two most alluring propositions. For now though, I've had my fill of high-speed crash-filled open-world racing, and I'm ready to put Paradise down for a while in favour of a different experience. I'll close by saying that it's absolutely criminal that Criterion haven't been able to make another one of these glorious Burnout games. The thought of an experience akin to Paradise with current-generation horsepower behind it is an exciting one, but one that also seems less likely with every passing year.

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

Before Borderlands, there was Halo. Prior to our two-year-long co-op run through Gearbox's original loot-driven shooter, my friend Duncan and I were committed to playing through the entirety of the Halo franchise co-operatively. We made it through Reach and Anniversary before realising that we weren't in a position to play through Halo 2, and so our attention turned to Pandora instead. In the intervening two years, I've acquired an Xbox One and a copy of The Master Chief Collection, and so our quest through Bungie's Spartan space opera is able to resume. But before it did, I was quite keen to revisit the game that started it all, as a bit of a refresher for where we put things down back in 2014. I powered my way through the entire campaign of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary over the weekend of March 18th and 19th, and I've got some thoughts to share on my most recent excursion against the Covenant.

I'll start by saying that if you want to play the original Halo in 2017, then The Master Chief Collection is definitely the way to do it. The version bundled in here is more or less identical to the Anniversary edition of Combat Evolved that released on the Xbox 360 in 2011. The two main differences are the slight graphical upgrades (which get the game running at a higher resolution and a stunningly crisp sixty frames per second), and the improved switching between the Anniversary and original graphics (this now happens instantaneously rather than with a brief fade-to-black). Those changes might be minor, but they're enough to render the Xbox One version superior to its 360 counterpart. I know people have been critical of The Master Chief Collection in the past due to a plethora of bugs and glitches at launch, but save for a single crash on the campaign's eponymous second level, I didn't run into any technical problems during my eight-hour playthrough.

Now that I've praised the work done on the port, I'll shift to a slightly more critical tone when talking about the campaign itself. I have a lot of love for the original Halo - it was one of the first shooters that I ever played, and I think it holds up surprisingly well given it's over fifteen years old at this point. The shooting still feels great, the Covenant AI is still a lot of fun to fight against, and the story remains engaging. My biggest problem with Halo's campaign is one of pacing. I'm not as vehemently opposed to the Library level as a lot of other players are, but I'm still prepared to acknowledge it's one of the weakest parts of the game. It also really bothers me that the back end of the campaign ends up recycling a lot of environments, down to the point where Two Betrayals is essentially Assault on the Control Room run in reverse. Maybe it was a by-product of playing the whole thing in two sittings, or maybe I've just been spoiled by the tighter pacing of modern action games and shooters, but Halo really feels like it plods at points. At least it's something I know Halo 2 will address with its more varied environments and ramped-up set pieces.

I'm still glad I revisited the original Halo before Duncan and I get started on the sequel. I had a lot of fun going back through it, and as I said, it remains one of my most beloved first-person shooters for nostalgic reasons. Plus I will never tire of downing Covenant Hunters with a single well-place Magnum shot to the back:

The Lost Pages

As I'm sure everyone and their mother knows by now, this is the section of the Backlogbook where I sever my connections to games from my Pile of Shame, making peace with the fact that I'll never see them through to completion, and removing them from the total number of unplayed games in my vast collection. Usually I say goodbye to two games each week, but being as I have another three weeks' worth of blogging to account for, I'll once again be parting ways with a mammoth six titles today. Let's start as we mean to go on, with:

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

I've been toying with losing this one for most of this month, but I didn't settle on dropping it until this week. I know it's a well-received shooter with solid mechanics and I like those as much as the next guy. Well, maybe not as much as the next guy considering my general aversion to anything Call of Duty- or Battlefield-related, but the point still stands - I play my fair share of shooters. What makes this one easier to cut than say, Crysis, is the fact that it's a sequel to a game that I never actually played. Which begs the question, why would I buy a sequel to a game I've never played? The simple answer is, I didn't - Bad Company 2 was a Games with Gold freebie all the way back in October 2014. Turns out it's also a lot easier to say goodbye to a game when you haven't made a monetary investment in it. Sorry Bad Company 2, but I'm not signing up for this tour of duty.

Dead Head Fred

I bought Dead Head Fred way back in 2009 or so, on the recommendation of a former Giant Bomb user by the name of @jayge_ (anyone else remember that duder?). He sang its praises several times on these here forums, lauding its unique premise and sense of humour. I bought into his shtick and picked up the game digitally, vowing to get around to it some day. As you might have guessed, "some day" never came. I tried it a couple of times but never got very far, and what little I did play never managed to grab me in the way it did Jayge_. On that basis, I'm prepared to cut my losses and run from this one. Sorry Dead Head Fred, but I won't be giving you another chance to wow me.

Hogs of War

As a kid, I had a bit of an obsession with Worms. I remember playing the PlayStation version of Worms Armageddon pretty obsessively, spending whole evenings in the game's Free Play and Mission modes. What I really longed for was the same gameplay in three dimensions. So naturally, when I experienced Hogs of War through a demo disc attached to a copy of Official PlayStation Magazine, I felt like all my prayers had been answered. I had to wait around fifteen years before I finally got my hands on a copy, this time on PC through GOG.com. As you might have guessed, it didn't exactly live up to my expectations. Hogs of War looks and feels horribly dated in a way that renders it no longer fun for me to play. Even Rik Mayall's voicework can't save it from the scrap heap. Sorry Hogs of War, but this is one bit of bacon I won't be bringing home.

Jolly Rover

I was reluctant to cut another point-and-click adventure this week, after voiding two old LucasArts Indiana Jones titles from the backlog in my previous Lost Pages section. My rationale for deciding to submit Jolly Rover to the same fate in this instalment is one of separating the wheat from the chaff. I have a lot of point-and-clicks on my Pile of Shame, and realistically I'm not going to play them all. Logic dictates that I'm probably better off holding onto the genre's most seminal moments - the Broken Swords and the Tales from the Borderlandses - and letting go of the also-rans. Jolly Rover seems like a decent enough homage to the likes of Monkey Island, but there's no way it belongs in the point-and-click pantheon as a bastion of the genre, and therefore I can't justify keeping it around any longer.

ModNation Racers

I own two different versions of ModNation Racers, so I should probably clarify that this entry pertains to the PlayStation Portable version that I acquired for free almost six years ago. Anyone else remember that nightmarish PlayStation Network outage that struck back in the Spring of 2011, and Sony offered free games by way of apology to service users? Well, I didn't have a PS3 at the time, so I ended up with the portable incarnation of LittleBigPlanet and this kart racer. My reasoning for cutting my ties with ModNation PSP is another simple one - it's the inferior version of the product. There's no reason for me to keep this handheld port around when I have the full-fledged title available to play on home console. Sorry ModNation. I'll play you eventually, just not on PSP.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate

This is another title that's been dropped from my Pile of Shame once before, but found its way back in during the great data migration from Giant Bomb to the Backloggery last August. I have a real soft spot for the Monster Hunter series. I put a good chunk of time into Freedom Unite on PSP back in 2015, but I'm yet to make the leap over to the 3DS. The thing is, I own both Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate and the generally better-regarded Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. Under those circumstances, and given the time investment these things can become, there seems very little sense in playing both titles. I'd be better off cutting my losses with MH3U and moving straight on to MH4U. So that's exactly what I intend to do. Well, either that or skip 4U as well and pick up Generations instead. I guess time will tell.

---

Apologies for another lengthy blog this week. As I said at the outset, it's mainly down to those pesky Windows 10 gremlins halting my progress and forcing me to take a hiatus in order to compose myself before recommencing this entry. I'm hoping to settle back into a steady weekly schedule again, both for these Backlogbook entries and the Pokémon Sun Nuzlocke Challenge (which is definitely coming back very soon!). As we approach the end of 2017's first quarter, I'm thinking of looking back on the last three months (or should that be the first three months?) and crunching some numbers in the interest of science. If nothing else it might lead to some interesting projections for the remainder of the year.

As for where I'm heading next game-wise, I intend to wrap up those last few loose ends in Horizon: Zero Dawn and shoot for 100% and the Platinum Trophy, a feat that I'm hoping to achieve over this weekend. After that, I've decided to go back in pursuit of one of my big gaming white whales from last year. I am of course referring to The Witcher, CD Projekt Red's inaugural RPG and the gaming world's introduction to Geralt of Rivia. I played a not insubstantial amount of the game through the first two months of 2016, but ended up drifting away from it as the year progressed. Now feels like a good time to try and get back to it, in the hope of finally seeing the end of Geralt's first adventure (and ultimately moving on to his second and third). Alongside this, Alice and I are looking to start the second season of Telltale's The Walking Dead imminently, and I'd also like to get back to Pokémon Sun and crack on with the stalled Nuzlocke.

That's going to do it for this instalment of the Backlogbook. Join me next time when I'll hopefully have some thoughts to share on The Witcher, and my second time through Season Two of The Walking Dead. I've also formulated a thematic plan for the next few Lost Pages, so we'll see if that works in practice how I'm hoping it will work in theory. Until then, thanks very much for reading folks. Take care, and I'll see you around.

Daniel

---

Currently playing - Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4)

Hey there folks, and welcome to a massively overdue edition of the Backlogbook, my usually-weekly breakdown of what I've been playing and what I'll be slaying in a bid to bring my enormous Pile of Shame down below two hundred titles by the end of the year. I say "usually weekly" because I haven't been able to find the time to write one of these for the last two weeks. The main reason for this is that my mum has been pretty seriously ill in hospital during this time. So instead of taking a day or two out of my schedule to put one of these together, I've instead been travelling back and forth to the hospital to visit her. Thankfully she's doing much better now, has been discharged and is making slow but steady progress back at home. Now that she's out, life is starting to get back to normal for the rest of us, and that means I can resume a normal writing schedule again. I've got three weeks of activity to document, and a whopping six games to cut loose from my backlog. Let's do this, shall we?

The Last Three Weeks' Logs

I may not have put together a Backlogbook blog for a few weeks, but that doesn't mean I haven't been playing video games. On the contrary, they've provided a lot of solace for me in recent days, giving me somewhere to escape for a few hours a night and just unwind from all the real-world stress I've been under. To that end, the last three weeks have actually been incredibly productive from the standpoint of actually getting stuff finished - I've seen the credits roll on five games in the last twenty-one days. Admittedly only two of those actually count towards whittling down the backlog, since the other three are games I've played through before. Even so, it feels good to have finished some stuff. Hopefully I can start carrying that momentum into games I'm yet to play and keep bringing down that enormous total. Let's begin where we usually begin, this time for the final time, with none other than:

Grandia

It feels weird to think that (end-of-year awards notwithstanding) this is likely the final time I'll be writing about Grandia on this blog. The twenty-year-old Japanese RPG has been a staple feature of the Backlogbook since its inception at the start of the year. But, like all good things, its tenure in these blogs had to come to an end eventually. On February 28th, my twenty-seventh birthday, after sixty hours of play across eight weeks, I finally saw the credits roll. I've already talked at length about almost every aspect of Grandia over the last two months, so I'll try to keep this week's entry fairly brief. Be warned that there'll be some end-game story spoilers moving forward, as I discuss the ending of Grandia. If by some chance you're in the same position I was in two weeks ago, you might want to skip over this part of the blog.

Grandia's story really ramps up through its final third, something I was worried wouldn't happen given its propensity for delivering isolated vignettes of story through most of the first disc. When the story turns at around forty hours in and becomes much more focused on the motivations of the Garlyle Forces and General Baal, things start getting a lot more interesting. The reveal of Feena and Leen (still far and away my favourite characters from the whole game) as Icarians, and of Gaia as the primary threat, take the overarching story to some great places through its last ten hours or so. It almost feels like you're playing a different game once you switch from the first disc to the second. There's a little bit of frustrating backtracking through the late-game areas, but that's somewhat mitigated by the presence of some tougher enemies (and any excuse to engage in more of Grandia's awesome combat is a welcome one).

I do have a couple of little issues with the execution of the game's final hours, and one is a by-product of the other. First, it was kind of annoying seeing Justin have to go through the typical anime "friendship is my strength" realisation in such a rushed, forced way through the last two or three hours. That's something that probably should have been done gradually, over the course of the entire game, rather than hastily shoehorned into its closing moments. The by-product of this is that a lot of the game's final few hours feel unnecessarily drawn out, just for the sake of squeezing yet more run-time out of an already lengthy journey. Thankfully the final dungeons, bosses and story pay-off that follow are more than worth enduring this bump in the road.

I'm not sure where I'm going to go now that I've finally ticked Grandia off the list. It's been such an ever-present fixture in my gaming schedule this year that moving on without it is going to feel weird. I'm thinking about replacing it with another Japanese RPG that I can play on the go, and right now the odds-on favourite is Dragon Quest III: The Seeds of Salvation, which I own the Android version of. I played through the first two Dragon Quest games last year and found a lot to like about them, so it would make sense for me to press on with exploring the series. Will I ever check out Grandia II? I'm definitely not ruling it out. It looks pretty cool, and is readily available on Steam should I ever get the itch. That being said, this whole blog is dedicated to the idea of whittling down my Pile of Shame, so I probably shouldn't openly entertain the thought of buying more games. Whatever happens next, I can safely say that I've had a lot more fun with Grandia than I ever expected to. It's got a phenomenal battle system with some interesting takes on traditional character development, a likeable enough cast and a story that might initially be a slow burn, but eventually goes to some really cool places. Thanks for the memories Grandia. It's been awesome.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

A couple of days before putting a bow on Grandia, I reached the end of Rise of the Tomb Raider. I said pretty much everything I had to say about it in my last instalment of the Backlogbook, and all of that still stands - I love the action, the exploration and the challenge tombs, but I'm slightly less keen on the more convoluted upgrade system this time around. I'm also significantly less sold on Rise's story than I was with TR2013's. That game had a better balance between character building and world building, perhaps to the detriment of its supporting cast, but the end result was a tightly woven narrative that built up the character of Lara Croft just enough to get the player invested. Rise just leans way too heavily on family melodrama for my liking, so much so that it detracts a lot from the plot surrounding the lost city of Kitezh and the Divine Source hidden there. I get that Crystal Dynamics are trying to humanise Lara and make her relatable, but it just didn't work for me. Thankfully the gameplay was more than enough to keep me hooked right through to the end.

Since finishing Rise's story I have been back a couple of times to sample more of its DLC (the 'Blood Ties' mission set in Croft Manor does a much better job of building Lara's character than anything in the main game) and explore its gorgeous environments a little more. My completion percentage currently stands at 84%, but I'm not sure whether I'll be going back any time soon for the coveted 100% marker that I seem to be seeking out in so many titles so far this year (I still blame LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga for awakening that force within me). I'd rather throw myself into other titles right now and keep ticking the backlog down. Next on the home console agenda is Horizon: Zero Dawn, which I picked up on release day last week but am yet to get properly stuck into.

Borderlands

I've mentioned Borderlands a couple of times in the Backlogbook, with reference to an incredibly long-running co-op playthrough of the game alongside my good friend Duncan. We originally set out to play through the entire game together way back in November 2014, and although various real-life happenings forced us to take a couple of lengthy hiatuses along the way, we finally opened the Vault and defeated the final boss on February 20th. I've been playing a Siren this whole time, wielding a bevy of elemental sub-machine guns and my powerful Phasewalk skill to deal with the Skags, Psychos and Spiderants of Pandora, while Duncan has stuck with Mordecai's sniping skills and pet Bloodwing. We made a pretty good team, with him picking off enemies from afar while I'd get up close and personal with Phasewalking.

If there's one thing I regret about our time in Borderlands (besides the prolonged breaks in our progress), it's that I wasn't more diverse with my equipment and approach. As with my original playthrough of the game seven years ago, when I chose Roland as my character, I ended up placing the emphasis of my build on survivability, leaning very heavily on shields that regenerated health and Transfusion grenades that transferred enemy health back to my character. It's a sensible way to play when you're alone and don't have the support of a friend (I know Jeff advocated as much when he reviewed the game on its release), but I wish I'd experimented a bit more with my loadouts this time around. I also maybe should have invested in a shotgun or two to match up with my up-close combat approach, but I ended up favouring the SMGs for their better elemental properties (my logical reasoning being that a higher firing rate means more chances to inflict status effects). These are things I plan to address when we tackle Borderlands 2, as I'll be going down a drastically different route when speccing my character for that.

Since Duncan checked out of Pandora I've been revisiting Borderlands on my own sporadically, to check out all the downloadable content that I didn't buy the first time around, but which comes as standard when playing the game through backwards compatibility on an Xbox One. It hasn't been as fun playing solo, but I've still had a pretty enjoyable time working my way through Zombie Island of Dr. Ned and Claptrap's New Robot Revolution. Although I've played it once before, the Secret Armory of General Knoxx is also on my agenda. Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot isn't, but there'll be more on that later. I highly doubt I'll end up engaging with Playthrough 2 - for as much fun as I had with the game, I'm not sure the draw of higher levels and better loot is enough to pull me back through all the same content a second time. I'd much rather move onto Borderlands 2 with Duncan, which I hope we'll be doing in the near future (and hopefully it won't take us two-and-a-half years to finish this one).

The Walking Dead

Another long-running playthrough came to an end this week, when my girlfriend Alice and I reached the end of the first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead. We started playing it all the way back in June of last year, working through the first episode in a couple of evenings, but various real-life happenings and her university commitments scuppered our progress. We didn't get around to the second episode until October, and then took another long break before playing the third at the end of January. Thereafter we picked up the pace a bit, and saw the conclusion of Lee Everett's story on March 4th.

This isn't my first time through The Walking Dead. I originally played it back in 2013, when I wrote this opinion piece about its approach to player choice. Nearly four years later, my opinion really hasn't changed. The fact it eschews the typical power fantasy omnipotence that so many games still rely on in their implementation of moral choice systems, and replaces it with a world that you're sometimes powerless to influence, no matter which choice you make, remains as bold and profoundly impacting as it was then. Other aspects of it haven't aged so well - the shooting segments from Episode Four spring to mind, and they weren't particularly great back then. It's interesting to see how, in retrospect, some aspects of The Walking Dead (like the aforementioned shooting sequences) are evidence of Telltale still feeling their way through this model they've since become synonymous with the industry's standard of. It's a game that, at times, isn't very sure of itself. In that respect, the fact it holds up so incredibly well is a remarkable achievement on Telltale's part.

Alice seemed to really enjoy the series too - she's a fan of the TV show, so she instantly warmed to the universe. We played with me in control and her making the decisions, and it made for a really fun shared experience. It was interesting to see which choices she made, how they differed from my own playthrough, and the impact that they had on how the story unfolded. We're planning to get around to the second series soon, and after that the mini-series centred on Michonne (I know she's really eager to get stuck into that one, since Michonne is one of her favourite characters from the TV show). We're going to take a little break first though, during which I plan to demonstrate the amazing Shadow of the Colossus to her.

Banjo-Kazooie

Towards the end of February, my good friend Matt announced to our group of friends that he was planning to replay Banjo-Kazooie for the first time in a good few years. Given my soft spot for 3D platformers of the 90s, even though I didn't grow up with Nintendo machines like Matt did, I decided to join him in the endeavour. While he fired up his old Nintendo 64, I turned to my Xbox One and my copy of Rare Replay. Banjo-Kazooie is a game that I've played only once previously, all the way back in the Spring of 2010, so I wouldn't say I was going in cold, but I wouldn't say I was going in particularly hot either. To make the experience run a little smoother, I decided to play along with an online walkthrough to hand, to ensure I didn't miss anything on my trip through Gruntilda's Lair.

As someone with no baked-in nostalgia for the Nintendo platform model, it's nice to be reminded that this breed of game is often the kind that best stands the test of time from this era. Because the mechanics are relatively simple and the graphics are bright and colourful, the experience of playing Banjo-Kazooie still feels reasonably fresh, even almost twenty years after its original release. The levels are pretty well designed for the most part, offering up a variety of challenges to complete in the same vein as Super Mario 64 and other contemporaries. It also has a great sense of character thanks to the vibrant cast (who'd have thought slapping googly eyes on a ton of inanimate objects could make them so endearing?), and a wicked sense of humour to match. Kazooie in particular is scathingly hilarious and quick off the mark in every situation, making her the perfect foil to Banjo's simpler, better-natured demeanour.

The logical next step from here would be to move on to Banjo-Tooie, which I own both on Xbox LIVE Arcade and as part of Rare Replay on Xbox One. I've never played the bear and bird's second outing, although I have invested a lot of time into their reboot adventure Nuts & Bolts (which remains one of my favourite games from the last generation of consoles). The other thing worth bearing in mind is that the series' spiritual successor Yooka-Laylee is due for release next month, so if I fancy something similar with a slightly glossier coat of paint, that's also an option further down the line.

The Lost Pages

At the start of 2017, I made the decision to drastically cut down my out-of-control backlog. One of the ways I plan to do this is by selecting two games each week, games that I'm realistically probably never going to get around to, and cut them from my list. The hope is that by doing this, I'll be able to bring the total number of games on my Pile of Shame down below two hundred, reducing that towering Everest of video game boxes into something slightly less unmanageable. Because I missed out on entries over the last two weeks, I'm now four games in arrears on this project. So, to restore balance and get back to where I should be, I'm cutting loose six titles this week. Let's begin with:

Aliens Versus Predator Classic 2000

I've been thinking about dropping this one for a few weeks now. I've dropped it once before, back when I kept track of my backlog here on Giant Bomb, but it managed to find its way back onto the list when I rebuilt it on the Backloggery. My main reason for wanting to keep it around is that it's spoken of pretty highly by its fans. I've heard that it's aged well, and the fact it has three vastly different campaigns for its three 'classes' of character is an intriguing concept. That being said, I find it difficult to justify its position on the Pile of Shame when I don't really have any love for the franchises that birthed it, especially when the PC isn't my preferred platform for first-person shooters, and I have plenty of other examples of the genre that I'd prefer to play over this one. Sorry AvPC2000, but nobody wins here.

Borderlands: Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot

One of the great things about using the Backloggery to keep track of my Pile of Shame is that because all the content is input by the user, it's incredibly flexible for tracking expansions and DLC. One of the arguably not-so-great things about it is that because of that flexibility, any unplayed DLC ends up counting towards my total number of unfinished games. For that reason, I think I'm justified in cutting loose any DLC packs that I have no intention of playing as part of this feature. The inaugural add-on to suffer this fate (although by no means the last, I'm sure) is Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot, a Horde-style colosseum-based expansion for the original Borderlands. I've just wrapped up a long-running co-op playthrough of the game with my friend Duncan, and decided to stick around to sample some of the DLC I missed out on the first time through. While I really enjoyed Zombie Island of Dr. Ned and Claptrap's New Robot Revolution, I was left underwhelmed by the time I spent with Mad Moxxi. The removal of character progression and loot drops, the two biggest hooks that drag me through these games, leaves the DLC feeling hollow and kind of pointless. I've more than had my fill of Borderlands by this point, and I don't feel bad about skipping over this one at all.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

A long, long time ago, a precocious young gamer with a thirst for new experiences discovered the point-and-click adventure genre. His first taste was the remastered version of The Secret of Monkey Island, which whetted his appetite for similar games. In the weeks and months that followed, he amassed a sizable collection of the genre's most revered works - Sam & Max, Broken Sword, and perhaps most curiously, a discounted bundle containing some of LucasArts' famous output from the early nineties - The Dig, LOOM, and two titles based on the Indiana Jones universe. But then, a terrible thing happened. The youngster was drawn in by the hedonistic temptations of the rejuvenated open-world genre, and the point-and-click collection was left to gather dust...

That's pretty much how it happened, as I recall. I have every intention to get back to some of those classic adventure games, but with the benefit of hindsight, I also think I need to be realistic about which ones are worth my time. Just as with Aliens Versus Predator above, it's my lack of investment in the franchise, coupled with the fact that there are much better examples of its genre already in my collection, that's going to see the Last Crusade disappear from my backlog. Sorry Indy, but I need to crack the whip on this one.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

Everything I've written above can also be applied to this, so this is all you're getting here. Hey, be thankful this is at least some original content. I could have just copied the previous paragraphs and pasted them here verbatim. Now move on to the next game already.

Red Faction II

The second first-person shooter in my Steam library to suffer the chop this week is Red Faction II. I used to own its predecessor on PlayStation 2 and had quite a bit of fun working my way through its campaign. It had a decent arsenal of weapons, a solid story, and featured environmental destruction technology that was a good few years ahead of its time. I remember getting creative with the GeoMod tech to approach combat situations in some pretty novel ways, a primitive precursor to the emergent, reactive gameplay that so many games boast these days. By comparison, what I've played of Red Faction II doesn't even seem like it's from the same franchise. The story set-up doesn't hold my attention, and the GeoMod tech doesn't seem as ambitious or well utilised. Part of me worries that maybe it's a snap judgement on my part, but my thoughts feel vindicated by the games' Metacritic ratings - Red Faction II on PC boasts a rating of just 64, compared with the original's much better score of 78. Everything just points to it not being as good as its predecessor, and I don't want to waste time playing an inferior sequel. I'm sorry Red Faction II, but it's just not happening.

Theme Park

I really like Bullfrog's 'Theme' series of tycoon games. They have a ton of character, a lot of irreverent humour, and solid strategic mechanics that task the player with balancing the books and keeping customers happy by providing quality (and profitable) services. I played a ton of both Theme Hospital and Theme Park World when I was a lot younger, and a few years back I even went as far as to play the former right through to its final scenario. I've not spent a huge amount of time with the PSOne Classics version of Theme Park, but compared to its vibrant, character-driven successors, it seems almost dull by comparison. I know the core gameplay is intact, and that's what should really matter, but I really don't see anything unique to this title that I couldn't get in a more polished and enjoyable form from one of those follow-up Theme games. Sorry Theme Park, but I'm shutting you down.

---

And so we finally reach the end of a very long instalment of the Backlogbook. It's taken me the best part of six sittings across four days to write this, so I'm sure it's horribly disjointed and all over the place, but right now it's 1am and I'm too tired to care any more. To be honest, I'll be kind of glad to see the back of this and spend my time playing some damn video games instead.

Moving forward, I'm pretty sure I'll be devoting the vast majority of my game time to Horizon: Zero Dawn on PS4. I've only had the chance to play an hour or so of it thus far, but from what little I have played, it's certainly shaping up to be something very special indeed. I sense it could well be taking over Grandia's resident spot in these blogs for the next few weeks. I'm also still crawling through Pokémon Sun, so the next chapter of the Nuzlocke Challenge should be up for your reading pleasure over the weekend. That should be plenty to keep me busy until next week's Backlogbook. Until next time, thanks very much for reading folks. Take care, and I'll see you around.

Daniel

---

Currently playing - Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4)

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's this week's instalment of the Backlogbook! Once again I must apologise for the delay in getting this out, but the start of this week has been a little busier than usual, what with dental appointments and Valentine's day preparations encroaching on my writing time. Fear not though, as I've still got plenty to say about my time spent with Grandia and Rise of the Tomb Raider last week. What's more, I'll be cutting another pair of games from my immense Pile of Shame, in my ongoing effort to whittle down my backlog. If that all sounds good to you, then make yourself comfortable and pour a nice warm cup of hot chocolate. The Backlogbook starts here!

This Week's Log

Once again, I didn't get as much chance to play games as I might have liked last week. I did manage to claw back enough time to play a substantial amount of Pokémon Sun for my ongoing Nuzlocke Challenge. As always, I won't be going in-depth on that here, but anyone who's interested in my progress can catch up with my adventures in Alola by following this link. The time I spent with other games was divided pretty evenly between Backlogbook mainstay Grandia and Lara Croft's latest - Rise of the Tomb Raider. Find out how both games fared this week by reading on below.

Grandia

It was another slow week with Grandia, albeit slightly better than the previous week. I managed to put another four or five hours into it, progressing Justin's journey beyond the Tower of Doom, past the desert oasis of Zil Padon and further south towards Milda's home of Laine Village. At this point I feel like I've exhausted things to say about the game's mechanics and aesthetics, but I feel the need to say that even around forty-two hours in, I'm still not tired of that awesome battle system. The steady trickle of new skills and spells feels like a primitive rendition of the bread-crumb trail of rewards that so many non-RPG games implement experience gain to mitigate these days, and to see it done so damn well in a game that's almost twenty years old is pretty neat. It's still frustrating trying to level up my Water-elemental spells, since many of the healing spells are so damn ineffectual, but that's really just a small quibble.

I'd speculated that Grandia was going to shift back to its episodic mode of storytelling as I began disc two, and for a little while that seemed like it was going to be the case. The overarching quest for Alent and the Icarians seemingly fell by the wayside again in favour of the more insular perils of Cafu Village. Pressing on a little further though, it's becoming clear that Grandia is beginning to intertwine its main narrative much more closely with these vignettes of smaller stories. The Garlyle Forces, the big bad who we seem to have been chasing across the world for most of the game, are finally starting to show their hand and make good on their evil potential. It's really rewarding to see the main story start to come together and grow alongside its characters. Speaking of which, there's a revelation concerning Leen that hits just after visiting the Tower of Doom, and I'm desperate to see how that pans out. Her and Feena are undoubtedly my favourite characters in Grandia, so anything concerning them and their relationship as sisters has me on tenterhooks right now.

I'm still quietly optimistic that I can make it through the rest of Grandia before the end of February. That leaves me two weeks to push through what remains of Justin's adventure. It's been a very slow burn, but I'm still really excited to see where the story goes now that it seems to be approaching its final act. I just hope the payoff ends up being worth the huge time investment that Grandia has turned out to be.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

I've sunk maybe half a dozen hours into Rise of the Tomb Raider since I first popped it in my PS4 on Friday night. Since then I've played through a decent portion of the main game (my completion percentage stands at 35% at the time I'm writing this) and poked around in the first couple of missions of the Baba Yaga missions. Having come into it fresh off the back of replaying its predecessor, 2013's Tomb Raider, I feel like I've played enough to say that Rise is very much cut from the same cloth. The exploration, the puzzles, the combat, and the Metroidvania-style inventory of progress-gating gadgets and equipment have all made it into the sequel intact, and by and large everything feels smoother and improved upon. In fact, I did think about once again just linking to my original appraisal of the previous game from back in the Spring of 2013 and leaving it at that. But even from my limited time with the game thus far, I've identified some unique points to wax lyrical on below.

While the core action remains much the same as the 2013 reboot, Crystal Dynamics have made a few tweaks to the minutiae of the formula here and there. Some of these I really approve of. The optional challenge tombs, for instance - in TR2013, these were minor distractions from the main adventure which really amounted to individual puzzles, many of which didn't require huge amounts of ingenuity to solve. Rise addresses this by making its challenge tombs much bigger, by making the puzzles more involved and multi-layered, and by giving them unique stories told through hidden documents scattered throughout them. So far I've encountered about four or five of these tombs, and every single one has been a joy to explore and figure out.

Changes that I'm less keen on involve the game's upgrade system. In TR2013 upgrades were bought with a single catch-all "currency" called salvage. It was a simple system that ensured the player was never far away from the next inventory improvement. Instead of this, Rise disperses its upgrade currency into a multitude of different categories - feathers, wood, cloth, ore, animal pelts and several other materials join salvage, and each has its own role to play in crafting and upgrading. In some scenarios I really like this, especially the way it plays into crafting arrows, healing items or makeshift grenades on the fly. Where I'm not quite as sold on it is how it ties into the inventory upgrades. Each upgrade now requires a couple of different materials to craft, needlessly muddying the previous game's comparatively clear process. Factor in the limits imposed on Lara which mean she can only carry so many of each kind of material, and the upgrade system starts to become something I'm not especially keen to engage with.

Based on my current completion percentage, I imagine it'll take me a couple more weekends to push through the rest of Rise of the Tomb Raider. At this point I'm still undecided about going for the coveted 100% completion that I sought out in its predecessor, partly because I know that doing so is going to slow me down, and partly because there seems to be a lot more stuff to do in Rise than there was in TR2013. At the very least I'll check out the rest of the Baba Yaga DLC that comes bundled with the 20th Anniversary edition on PS4, and maybe I'll dip my toes into the Endurance mode just to see how that plays. Right now though, the bottom line is that this is definitely more Tomb Raider, and that's definitely alright with me.

The Lost Pages

And so we move on from the games that are worthy of my time to those that I just can't spare any time for. The Lost Pages is the place where I part ways with games that I've acquired, but will most likely never play. The aim is to pick two games each week, make my peace with them and remove them from my backlog, with the long-term goal of reducing my backlog to below two hundred titles by the end of 2017. This week

Saints Row: Gat out of Hell

I liked the original Saints Row. I really liked the improved sequel when I played it a few years later. By all accounts, I'll probably really enjoy the acclaimed third game in the series when I eventually get around to playing it. But for all the enjoyment the series has given me over the years, I'm not so deeply invested in its unique brand of crazy that I feel compelled to play what amounts to an expansion pack for its less well-received fourth iteration. I picked up Gat out of Hell for the PS4 purely because it was free with PlayStation Plus a few months ago, and I figured it would be a nice shorter distraction once I'd gotten through the third and fourth games in the series. But speaking practically, my time would be better spent on games I really want to play than on distraction titles like this. If I end up really, really liking Saints Row: The Third and Saints Row IV and find myself hankering for more of the same, then I can always reinstate Gat out of Hell to the list. But for now, I'm happy to leave it deep in the bowels of the underworld. Sorry Johnny.

Terraria

I never "got" Minecraft. I see its appeal, I understand why people enjoy it, but I guess it's just not for me. The way I learned that it's not for me was by dabbling with Terraria, the 2D Minecraft-like that took Steam by storm when it launched a few years back. Not being in possession of a competent PC at the time, Terraria's more modest requirements ensured it won out over its three-dimensional inspiration. Since then I've tried to get into it a couple of times, but I just can't find any enjoyment in the flow of its gameplay. Gathering materials and using them to craft new objects is fine when it's auxiliary to the core game experience, but when it becomes the main focus of the game itself, that's when you lose me. The whole thing just feels so aimless and unfocused. I get that's kind of the point, that the player is supposed to make their own fun with the tools given to them. That kind of experience just isn't for me, and I'm okay with that. That's why I'm happy to bury Terraria and forget about it.

---

That's a wrap, everyone. As always, thanks very much for reading. This coming week is looking like it's going to be a bit light on opportunities for video games, particularly with a friend's birthday celebrations taking up a big chunk of the weekend, but I'm optimistic about making some more headway in all three of my current "on-the-go" titles. That means that next week you can expect some more musings on Grandia, further analysis of Rise of the Tomb Raider, and additional pruning of my Pile of Shame. Thanks very much for reading folks. Until next week, take care and I'll see you around.

Daniel

---

Currently playing - Grandia (PS1C)