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.

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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

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Currently playing - Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4)