Given that NASA successfully launched (and returned) the Orion capsule into deep space and back this past Friday, I’ve been thinking about the fantasy of being on other planets. There’s a lot that Destiny doesn’t get right, but making each planet that isn’t Venus (which honestly just looks like a jungle most of the time, apart from the sulfuric pools) feel like a real other world. Sure, it could have gone further—different gravitational pulls, or maybe different lighting based on distance from the sun and atmospheric composition (again I go back to Venus, which fails to look appropriately…sulfurous, terraforming aside), but whether or not these would’ve been any fun to actually experience is another matter entirely. The sight of the Martian plains, however, continues to look kind of gorgeous, and the moon’s surface looks appropriately grey and cratered (plus the human structures remaining still look like the idea of a moonbase to me).

I’ve always been drawn to the fantasy of being off Earth, if nothing else the idea of being somewhere so utterly different is intoxicating, especially if you’re the sort of kid who got picked on a lot in grade school and maybe always longed to leave everything behind. Other, better writers have talked about humanity’s urge to explore, and our wanderlust is perhaps best represented by the sheer amount of science fiction involving space travel we’ve managed to put together. I don’t ask for much—I just want to go to the moon or Mars and maybe chill out there for a while.

So it should be no surprise that my favorite games as a kid dealt in some way with space travel—particularly the criminally underrated and all-but-forgotten Commander Blood, which even today remains near and dear to my heart (and always will, regardless of how long ago it was I was able to get the damn thing running). More than any other game I remember, Commander Blood was built on exploring bizarre environments, from an entire planet that was essentially a scrap heap to a factory planet to the giant planetary mall that is Venusiaaaaaaaa, every world (and its inhabitants) was wholly unique. The game’s sense of humor appealed to a kid who had maybe read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy more than a few dozen times, the exploration and wild-looking visuals (and the soundtrack, oh man the soundtrack!) kept me entranced all the way through the end (and subsequent playthroughs).

That’s also a large part of what got me so excited for Mass Effect, of course—the presence of our home solar system (even though you couldn’t run around on Earth in the first game, which was a bummer) was a big deal for me. I loved the fact that in Mass Effect 3 you got to run around on Mars for a while (and had to deal with the lack of atmosphere and dust storms and everything—I love the idea of our never bothering to terraform Mars), as well as more than a few trips to Earth itself. I like the idea of leaving Earth and running around the galaxy, then returning to Earth for a little while. Any game taking place in outer space will catch my eye, although that doesn’t guarantee I will enjoy the experience.

There are plenty of shitty games that take place in outer space, or games that I just don’t manage to get into (I want to be interested in Eve Online so badly, because the mind-boggling scale of the galaxy is well-represented, but I just can’t get into it, and before you offer me a million suggestions on how to enjoy the game just bear in mind I’ve tried four or five different times to get into it). I am very tempted to pick up Elite: Dangerous, and in spite of the fact that I remain deeply, deeply suspicious of the claims of No Man’s Sky (did anyone get hands-on time with that game over the weekend? Has anyone ever had hands on time with that game? I just don’t know, man, it’s a two-man team and I just… am maintaining my skepticism for now) I want nothing more than for it to be everything they claim it will be. I was so excited for Destiny—and even after the initial disappointment I am still charmed by the stupid opening cinematic of astronauts bouncing around on Mars on their way to meeting the Traveler, because I want to see astronauts bouncing around on Mars before I shuffle off this mortal coil—plus the soundtrack for Destiny has that epic feel of how fucking amazing making it to another planet would be.

It’s a good time to be a fan of space-based games, and hopefully even Star Citizen will wind up being the Ur-space game I need in my life, but who can say? Until then I’ve got a Commander Blood CD to dig up (I could swear it’s in one of the boxes in my room somewhere).

Creds go further at Venuuuusiaaaa

UPDATE: I couldn't find my CD of Commander Blood, but I could find an .iso and a copy of DosBox, so GUESS WHO'S PLAYING A SHITLOAD OF COMMANDER BLOOD? THIS GUY.

I never thought that I would find myself, facing you good people of Giant Bomb dot com, admitting to the fact that I’ve played more Destiny in the last week than I’ve played any other game, including Dragon Age: Inquisition (which I actually spent all of yesterday playing, so this isn’t quite accurate anymore, but still). The thing is, when I get home from work at night and work out, I generally have time for one or two games, and that’s about it. This is also assuming that I don’t want to spend time watching television—or more accurately, watching Quick Looks or whatever. So for me to say that every work night last week (a three-day work week for me, but still) was spent sitting in a strike playlist or running the daily heroic story, is saying a lot (and over this long holiday weekend, I’ve spent at least two out of the three nights still playing Destiny, and there’s a nonzero chance that tonight I’ll play some more). There were a few moments during last week where I found myself openly wondering how it all came to this.

Me, several weeks ago

The answer, as I've come to understand, is twofold: socialization on one hand, and on the other (and perhaps more importantly), stability.

I live a solid fifty miles outside of Chicago city proper, something I did by choice because I like the city but I also like seeing stars at night—and more importantly I am not huge on going out often. My brother, with whom I am close (we’re twins! ISN’T THAT INTERESTING?), lives just outside of New York City. We like to hang out, but geography being what it is we tend to hang out online. We also grew up playing Halo co-op, so our predisposition toward another sci-fi co-op shooter from Bungie was basically a done deal. Like so many others, however, Destiny fell flat for me—we got through the main story quickly, scrabbling in the dust for something resembling a narrative (if ever a game needed more cutscenes, it’s this one), for something that would motivate us to keep playing. We failed to find it, of course. There’s really not much of a narrative, and once the strike playlist started to send us to the Summoning Pits multiple times in a row—the record is three, by the way—we both decided we’d had enough and pinned our hopes on the upcoming Master Chief Collection for our co-op needs. Until then, we’d pop in and out of Titanfall, which isn’t quite the co-op we wanted but at least wasn’t as awful as Destiny’s Crucible mode (which has never clicked for me, although it might now since Bungie have been patching the hell out of their game to fix balancing issues on basically everything since day one).

Until the release of the Master Chief Collection, my brother and I either just talked over Live while playing single player games—which isn’t as fun as playing co-op, obviously—or fired up the ol’ 360 to run around in Halo 4 or Lord of the Rings: War in the North, or Diablo III even though we’ve been through Diablo III a lot. Then, finally, the Master Chief collection dropped and it looked like our wait was over—except it wasn’t, because the Master Chief collection is a broken pile of garbage right now (we’ve gotten it to work a few times, and it’s been wonderful, but I’m comfortable saying that three out of every four times we’ve made an attempt, it’s ended in swearing and giving up after a solid 20-30 minutes). Suddenly I couldn’t bring myself to go back to Titanfall, both because there’s no co-op in Titanfall and, more importantly, because I’d played some single player Halo and there’s no shooter like a Bungie shooter…except, of course, Destiny. So one night, after another frustrating attempt to get back to our Halo 2 campaign (we’re literally stuck on the first Arbiter level—we haven’t been able to get the fucking thing to work since then), I grudgingly suggested we just play Destiny instead, because at least Destiny would fucking work.

I should add that in the interim, a few of my friends picked up Destiny (but not on the Xbox One, because that would have been convenient for me—no, they’re all on PS4s) and have gotten into it in a massive way. Like, running Vault of Glass weekly massive. It’s madness. I confess that part of me saw that and wondered if perhaps I’d not been willing to meet Destiny on its own terms (I wasn’t, and I still don’t quite know if I am), but I found myself thinking about whether or not I could get at least one other person to regularly run strikes with—being able to pick up a third player is easy, and most strikes don’t require much in the way of coordination or talking, but it does boil down to a crap shoot now and again (plus there’s no matchmaking on the weekly heroic strikes, where the real good shit is). So of course I tried to convince the one other person I knew to come back, but he only wants to run the Vault of Glass, so there’s no chance there (I was not anywhere near the right level, and the thought of running strike after strike to gear up was not, at the time, appealing).

It was my brother’s idea to give a copy of the game to our friend as a wedding present when he got married a few weeks ago. We started running as a proper fireteam of three, and the difference has been night and day. Nothing against running with strangers—if our third is not around, my brother and I will let matchmaking do its thing—but having a regular crew to run with means you learn about the way everyone plays and things run like a well-oiled machine. So that additional social aspect is now the thing that’s sunk its hooks into me—in essence, I started treating Destiny like the MMO it always has been, and my enjoyment has skyrocketed. It helps that the adjusted engram rates have meant I got several legendary items (purples are legendary, right? Shit, I don’t know. LEET PURPS, as we’d say in the old days of WoW); I got enough rep with the Vanguards to actually buy a nice-ass piece of chest armor and some gloves, which means I actually could in theory run Vault of Glass now…I think. It’s pretty great.

Last night I even discovered I had enough motes of light to buy an exotic engram off of the creepy dude who shows up on weekends (I’ve already forgotten his name).

It wound up being Titan armor. I play a Warlock.

Fuck this game.

AN: Yeah I know, there wasn’t anything up last week—somehow, talking about games just didn’t seem as important compared to some of the other shit that went down, so I funneled my efforts into other activities. Playing games last week was downright necessary for my mental health—a way to forget about everything for a few hours here and there before wading back into the messy work of trying to figure out a way to make the world less-shitty. Writing letters rather than blog posts, you dig? Yeah, you dig.

WORDPLAY, y’all. That’s what I’m bringing to the table today. Also, some minor spoilers for the very beginning of Dragon Age: Inquisition—so if you’re looking to stay pure, leave now (and then come back later once you’ve gotten past the introduction).

So last Thursday I found out all about the existence of a six hour early access deal on Dragon Age: Inquisition, if only I could be bothered to throw down five bucks to join EA Early Access or whatever it’s called for a month (Early Access membership would also give a five dollar discount on a copy of the game, and as I’d decided that this installment of the series would, as with its previous installments, be initially bought on something I knew could run it, I basically wound up paying full price for a game but got to play it early. Not a bad deal, if you ask me). The deed done, I fired up the game to see if it was, in fact, going to live up to the rather effusive reviews I’d seen sprinkled around the internet—Polygon with a 9.5, Rock Paper Shotgun with a “yeah this is good,” etc.

A bit of background: I’m a huge fan of the series—I wasn’t thrilled by Dragon Age 2, but I was willing to meet it on its own terms and came away having enjoyed myself (plus, the character interaction between party members, and indeed Hawk’s interaction with the various members of the party, were very strong regardless of the frankly inexcusable reuse of dungeons and environmental assets (the DLC was pretty good too)). I liked being caught in the middle of something over which I had very little control beyond trying to keep my companions safe through the madness—it was a nice counterpoint to the story of Origins; in one, you saved the world, and in the other, you couldn’t even manage to save your family, much less keep a city safe. It’s a topic I’ve written about before, so I won’t bother getting into it here.

I went into Inquisition having largely attempted to ignore much of the lead up to its release—beyond knowing that Morrigan would show up at some point, and that Varric would be back, I know very little about what’s going on. The game starts off in a very interesting manner—while Origins begins with a massive defeat and dishonor, Inquisition quite literally begins with saving the world. It’s a neat little spin on the way games usually start, and as my dwarven rogue groggily exited the cabin in which he’d been holed up in, post-world-saving, to find a crowd surrounding the cabin, and people claiming he was the Herald of Andraste—some holy woman dwarves don’t even believe in, much less give a shit about, the whiplash was palpable. The game, blessedly, realizes the fact that this situation is ridiculous, so my dwarf has, on several occasions, pointed out that he doesn’t even really buy into the whole Maker/Andraste thing, much less that he’s the herald of anyone, though he is, of course, more than willing to do what he can to prevent demons from running amok (especially because that helps keep the mark on his hand from getting any larger, and subsequently killing him).

The six hour deal did not allow me to really advance the plot (it literally locks off everything but the first zone), but the first zone is so massive and chock-full of people to help, rifts to close, and ruins to explore that I burned through my allotment of time having hardly scratched the surface. One side-mission in particular, involving a missing Inquisition scout, was particularly amusing. I even managed to have several conversations with my newfound allies, all of which hinted at larger, more in-depth character arcs to be had as the game progresses. So far, I am most partial to Varric and Cassandra’s nigh-constant back-and-forthing, as Varric can’t seem to help but vex his one-time captor. He seems determined to not allow her to forget that she was his captor at one point, though the two seem to slowly be fumbling their way into something not entirely removed from friendship—though endearingly, Cassandra’s attempts to inquire into Varric’s personal life and the state of his friends from DA2 have suffered from a lack of tact on her part and a prickliness on his that outlines the fierceness with which Varric feels loyalty to his allies, which in time I’m sure will include our merry band of heretics (because the Chantry declared us heretics for declaring an Inquisition). I HOPE THEY BONE. I’m a bit less certain about the new mage fellow, although he seems harmless in his way.

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT THAT, HOW DO THE CONTROLS FEEL?

Pretty damn good, as it turns out! The tactical combat view could do with the ability to zoom further out than it does (it is difficult sometimes to see what is going on, especially when you’re fighting among trees), but it quickly became something I thought I’d only use a few times to something I’ve used in nearly every fight. It’s quick and easy to switch between characters, program in their next move, and then move on to the next thing. The AI is smart enough that you can kind of let it run for the most part, although potion use remains frustratingly difficult for them to grasp—even when you program them to use potions at x% health, they don’t always seem to do so (or maybe I just was burning through potions too quickly and didn’t notice). Fighting in real time is suitably chaotic, and while I opted to go for real time battle in smaller skirmishes (say, getting attacked by a few wandering Templars or apostate mages), I found myself dying with a stunning swiftness in larger battles. That may just be my poor situational awareness, of course, but I really do recommend learning to love the tactical view because it adds a depth to the combat that real time fighting just can’t match up to. Plus, people shout in slow motion, and that’s always fun.

IS IT BROKEN LIKE EVERYTHING THAT RELEASED THIS MONTH?

Nope! I ran into a bugged quest (the NPC refused to talk to me so I could give him the item he’d asked for), but a quick detour to do something else seemed to fix it. It was a minor frustration which I haven’t seen anyone else mention, so I’ll take that as a good sign. EA’s six hour limit also tended to crash the game as it attempted to launch, but then had to bring up the screen telling me I was down to x hours at the worst possible time, but, as I mentioned, that was part of the Early Access wrapper fucking things up and probably not indicative of the fully unlocked experience (it’s also possible that my Xbox was just being a piece of shit, as a cold restart seemed to fix everything). If the few bugs I ran into do happen to be something that happens for multiple people, that’ll be a real bummer, but I’m choosing to be optimistic about this.

Anyway, the takeaway from all this? Inquisition hits the ground running narratively-speaking, looks gorgeous, controls well, and promises to devour very large chunks of my life. I’m super-curious to see where the story goes (I know Morrigan’s involved somehow (I think she might’ve been the person who pulled me out of the fade), and my Origins playthrough had her knocked up with a god baby, so that could be super-interesting). We’ll see, in a month or two when I’ve finally finished the game and can have a think and write about it all.

AN: Yes, a day late this week. I blame my friends’ wedding, thus necessitating a later recording of our podcast, which really just threw everything out of whack. WAY TO GET MARRIED, FRIENDS OF MINE. GOD. Also did I mention I do a podcast? You can hear me ramble a bit more about Inquisition there.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am particularly unfond of the original Rogue. I’m fucking terrible at it, I never know what I’m doing, and I die within like five minutes of getting into the dungeon. At one point I drank a potion and wound up poisoning myself. Other games that have taken Rogue’s mechanics, by contrast, have almost always managed to capture my interest (I had, until recently, been particularly fond of Legend of Dungeon, and my brother and I have played a fair amount of Abyss Odyssey, although we have as of yet failed miserably at unlocking any of the other characters).

I remember the Crypt of the Necrodancer unfinished QL going up ages ago, but I have a fairly strict policy when it comes to buying unfinished games (i.e. I tend not to do it, and I certainly don’t do it for full price), so while I was intrigued, I filed it away as something to check out later and left it at that. Then of course Halloween happened, and with it the Steam sale, and with that the idea of dropping a tenner on a game which, while not finished, at least seemed solid enough that I could probably get a tenner’s worth of enjoyment out of it (which is a pretty low bar to clear, honestly).

Crypt of the Necrodancer is basically all I’ve been playing for the last two weeks.

I’m not sure what exactly it is that has caused me to become so addicted to this game, but the simplicity of the game (hit your buttons to the beat) and the fact combat is essentially based upon the idea of timing your movements against the movements of your enemies, there’s some kind of wonderful alchemy that transpires and the hooks of the game are dug deep.

Add to that the upgrade system, which rewards exploration and digging basically everywhere, and suddenly it’s not as much of a shock that I can’t seem to stop playing the game. It’s still unfinished—most of the alternate characters remain unlocked, and supposedly there’s different music and art to come, but it feels finished at this point—or at least it does to me. Any new content that gets added is all gravy—especially considering I’ve only just gotten to the second dungeon.

Can we talk about that second dungeon, by the way? I would have been happy with more of the same, but instead there’s a whole different environment and enemies that have been quite happy to beat the ever-living shit out of me whenever I’ve attempted to get down there.

If this game were to show up on Vita, I would have to buy a Vita, because I had to spend a lot of time out of the house this past week and having the ability to play this game out of the house would be too good to pass up.

AN: A short one this week, because there were just too many fucking Cooks for me to get to something more substantial—and while Crypt of the Necrodancer is fucking fantastic, there’s not much else to say about it (although it does show a trend I’ve noticed recently where a smaller indie game decides to go with a female protagonist, because why the fuck not. I like this trend!

TOO MANY COOKS

Blame for this week's entry is solely placed upon Cara Ellison's head, as her S.EXE articles on Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (which is a stupidly long title that I'm only going to type out the once) had me thinking about the fact that once upon a time I both paid money for the game, but had enjoyed it a fair amount and wound up booting it up to see what my character was up to. What I'd not realized was that a hard drive problem earlier in the year had rendered the game completely nonfunctional. So it goes.

I had Steam repair the installation, and then grabbed the community patch and fired it back up, believing foolishly that my save would somehow remain functional. It did not, of course, turn out that way, so I had to roll a new character. I was initially peevish about this fact, as I’d made some not-insignificant progress (including going through the haunted hotel, which scared the shit out of me, I don’t mind telling you) and for me, at least, a fair amount of fighting had been involved in that progress (I would say if you wanted the worst thing in VtMB, it would be the fighting). Still, it allowed me the opportunity to attempt a different sort of playthrough, and so I went with something completely different:

It has taken me a while to get back into the swing of things with this particular game, as some of the controls take some getting used to, and the game’s insistence that melee combat must take place in third person is… unfortunate, but I finished up the initial quest and took the first steps in hitching my wagon to the locomotive of insanity that is Jeanette, so there’s that.

Unlike so many before me, I’m not going to bother going into the stunning fact that this janky, broken game’s got something to it—for starters, you probably already know that, and the community patches have done a crazy-good job of solving most of the major problems—I mean they added entire paths to the storyline, showing the same sort of devotion that KOTOR II saw (another game I need to go back and fiddle around with more). That there is something to this game goes without saying, but that it is the only really compelling portrayal of vampires I’ve run across in games (I never managed to get into the Legacy of Kain series).

Vampires are not my monster of choice—I’m more of a werewolf fan, when it comes down to it (is there a good game about being a werewolf and going crazy every 28 days? That would be badass. Hit me up, programmers, I’ve got ideas. Maybe do something along the lines of James Urbaniak’s portrayal of werewolfing in the latest episode of Getting On with James Urbaniak). As monsters, the over-the-top gothiness very rarely does much to attract my attention—I’m not the target market, I suppose, and that’s okay. Tell me there’s a game where you get the sort of freedom of choice that VtMB presents, however, and I’m going to show up regardless of its gothier trappings (including, yes, the Asylum and its absolutely excellent portrayal of dancing). There are a ton of interesting things the game does with sex (indeed, Cara Ellison’s articles are about just that, and I should say that I agree with her that VtMB is the only game that’s used sex with any sort of effectiveness), of course, but it’s the ability to be a liar (and to be lied to in return!) that always intrigued me. The dialogue trees give you so many options on how to get information on a level that makes Deus Ex weep; I dumped some points into hacking and discovered that you can actually social engineer your way into most situations (or just use domination).

As for the first proper mission (i.e. the bit where you get your explosives back), I had previously elected to go in hard, using bullets and a baseball bat do the negotiations. This time around, however, I not only went in without a fight, I talked the fellow into selling me the explosives in exchange for a romp between the sheets (which never happened, because I got distracted while feeding on him and killed him—whoops). I left the house and waved to its inhabitants on the way out, stifling my own laughter as I did so. I had no idea any of this was possible the first time (although Cara Ellison’s articles indicated it was in fact a possibility, I never made the connection between her account and the mission I was on, because sometimes I am slow to draw connections between things), and had in fact already made a disastrous run on the house before I decided to see whether or not I could sneak in and steal the explosives without being seen. It was only when I was pulled into conversation that I decided to attempt to talk my way out of it. That the game allowed me to talk my way out of it was incredible, and something which games released in the last year wouldn’t account for, much less a game that’s been out for a decade.

It’s not the setting that makes me keep returning to the game—although the game’s sense of humor does earn the odd chuckle from me, and the hotel remains scary as shit forever, the wide swath of possibilities (like taking a job as a bounty hunter! Okay, bail bondsman. Whatever) available to you, and the surprising feeling that the world is alive (there are people wandering around doing their own things, and listening in to the conversations the police have is always interesting) in spite of the game’s age is still refreshing even now. I don’t think I will ever really finish the game—even the community’s immense dedication to patching and cleaning up the game does not make me sanguine as to the coherence of the game’s ending—but it will probably remain something that I fire up now and again, if only to wander around the city, beat a man to death with another man’s arm (or merely bewitch him in this case, as my new vampire is much less of a melee fighter), or pop into the club and look at some ridiculous fucking dance animations some more.

As a younger man—one with significantly more free time on my hands than I knew what to do with, courtesy of a disinclination toward social activities that were not sports-related (i.e. mandatory) and a group of friends with similar opinions, my brother and I spent a large amount of time playing video games through most of our schooling careers.

What this meant more than anything else was that we had time for the sort of lengthy epics typical of JRPGs at the time, and while I and my cohorts were somewhat late to the game, Final Fantasy-wise, we made up for it in enthusiasm once we’d managed to get into it (a process which involved convincing our friend to play Kingdom Hearts, then further convincing him that Final Fantasy IX was “basically just like it, but better” which, while the ‘better’ part was true, the ‘just like it’ part was a complete fabrication), even obtaining an old cart of the first game in the series so that we could begin at the beginning—though we’d never beat that particular entry.

I have a distinct memory of my father irately informing us that we’d wasted an entire summer on video games at one point, shortly before returning to whatever it was he’d come upstairs to do. At the time, we’d chewed through Kingdom Hearts and were two discs into Final Fantasy IX. We would go on to beat VII, VIII, and X, then waste some money on XI, and begin to suspect that we’d be finishing off any subsequent Final Fantasies as they came out.

Except by the time FFXII came out, we were all a little burned out on fantasy JRPGs, so we never quite finished it, and then XIII was… XIII, so we never finished that off either, and I tried real hard to give a shit about Lost Odyssey but never quite got there (although I think I got to the second disc? I don’t remember). Basically, I stopped caring about JRPGs entirely, partially because the settings were stale as hell, and partially because who the fuck has time for that sort of thing anymore?

Now I should make something clear, which is that our attempts at finding a good JRPG extended beyond the Final Fantasy series. Somewhere, probably in a box belonging to my brother, is a copy of Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne (or something like that), which I had briefly gotten super into, shortly before getting fed up at how long it took to get to a save point and losing something like an hour’s worth of progress (and so much demon fusing or whatever the persona fusion equivalent is). So when a friend of mine started talking to me about Persona 4 (post-college, because I’d already missed its release completely) I was naturally skeptical, and my friend, in spite of his enthusiasm for the game, failed utterly to sell me on the concept of the game (it does not help that he was on the Kanji boss fight and excitedly told me that he’d been doing it for like two hours). I stopped thinking about the game entirely for the next two years.

Then of course I broke down and started to visit Giantbomb regularly, which inevitably lead to being told that I should watch the Persona 4 endurance run, and by that point my fate was more or less sealed. I picked up a copy off PSN and started playing, in spite of knowing how the story goes (although it’s so long that I don’t really remember everything, even though I only finished watching the ER like a month or two ago).

I mentioned earlier that I don’t have as much time to play games as I used to—I have a job, and I try to be a sociable dude more than I used to these days, and while that’s still true, I’ve also gotten to the point where it’s nice to just set aside an hour or two a night to sit down and play something for a little while, then go to bed or whatever. Generally you’d think that a game like Persona 4 would not lend itself to short play experiences (I mean you just sit and hit x for a long time before you can even save for the first time), but through generous use of the Goho-ms I’ve got a good system going.

The fights in P4 are surprisingly satisfying, far more than I remember that sort of turn-based nonsense being as a general rule. I spend a surprising amount of time dicking around with Personae, figuring out what’s weak to what, and then attempting to burn through fights as quickly as possible. It is safe to say that it will take me a very, very long time to get through Persona 4—it is not the only game I’m currently playing, for starters, and will continue to not be the only game I’m currently playing because I like to have options when I sit down every evening—but it is strangely satisfying to have a JRPG that I actually enjoy sitting down to play again.

Maybe, if I’m lucky, I will even have Persona 4 finished by the time Persona 5 comes out (but I doubt it).

AN: Is there more to say about the Persona series, and am I going to end up writing more about it? Oh, undoubtedly.

I’ve never been too great with endings—the fiction I write, when I write it, tends to be open-ended when it comes to concluding events—and you might have noticed by now that even my posts tend to more terminate abruptly more often than they come to an actual conclusion. I don’t like things to end, especially when they are things I’m in the process of enjoying. It is part of human nature, perhaps, to avoid saying something is over—look no further than our predilection for discussions of the afterlife in our religions. We don’t like considering that things end—there’s always got to be more to the story, more to consider, more adventures to go on. We die, but after that we get to be ghosts, or go live in a magical city in the sky, or come back and start over again as a goat. It’s a comforting thought, to think we’ll continue somehow.

Similarly, in fiction I like a good open-ended conclusion to a story. A little mystery when it comes to the fate of everyone involved is a good thing, or at least I think it’s a good thing. You don’t know what happens to everyone at the end of Against the Day, just that things changed and some folk moved on and others didn’t, and some folk are happy and some still aren’t and probably never will be. Blade Runner doesn’t so much end as it does show the beginning to the next chapter and stop (and if rumors are to be believed, there will eventually be a sequel of sorts, which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but then again Blade Runner was the last really great Ridley Scott film so maybe it is better that it never gets off the ground). In the same vein, Mass Effect 3’s original ending doesn’t bother to tell you what happens to everyone after Shepard’s final decision—depending on the ending you selected and what you’ve done up until that point, you see a few survivors and what they might be up to, but that’s it. This is the part where some of you might be getting ready to close the browser window in disgust, but hear me out here:

Mass Effect 3 is one long goodbye to Commander Shepard, and a pretty powerful meditation on our inevitable mortality. You see the effect Shepard has by running into those from the previous two games with whom you interacted. There are few moments more satisfying, for me, than running into some random NPC who I kept from enlisting with mercenaries, and suddenly he’s a soldier for the Alliance. Even hearing my companions reminisce about past exploits was entertaining, and having a hurried choice in the second game wind up having serious repercussions in the third game was more satisfying than it had any right to be. As I frantically attempted to stop the apocalypse from happening—the actual, real apocalyptic end of the galaxy I’d come to know—I kept running into those I’d helped, or failed to help, before. That a group of colonists from the first game would show up to help fight in the third was, for me, immensely satisfying (and made unlocking the Synthesis ending easier, naturally). The people I’d elected to help were present and accounted for, and while I will freely admit the ultimate fate of the Rachni was fucking garbage, the ability to angrily wipe out the very race I’d given a second chance was tempting indeed (I’ve gone down both paths on that one, for the record).

But it is not the bulk of the game that caused a good old fashioned rage explosion, it was the Final Choice, and, more damningly, the Three Colored Flash.

Look, I’ll be real here: the three colored flash isn’t the best way that cutscene could have gone down—surely there were other things you could show—but not knowing the ultimate fates of my compatriots is the sort of thing I live for. The synthesis ending in particular served as a great way to close the loop of what was, after all, one of the larger running themes throughout the series: what is our relationship with technology. The potential for disastrous conflict is, of course, one of the old standbys of science fiction—and an inevitability according to the Reapers (who are themselves AIs), and one they are there to prevent from destroying the galaxy—just, you know, destroying these comparatively young species who are getting all set to fuck everything up again for the stories that have yet to be told. The Reapers are an early end, but their reasons are for those of inevitability—better to stop things now, rather than allow them to potentially get out of hand.

It was refreshing for me, then, that rather than succumb to the inevitable (which is how I see the other two endings—either you destroy all AIs, which will inevitably be rebuilt and cause trouble just as planned, or you take control of the Reapers and assume that as millennia drift by you will somehow be able to retain your human perspective. The third option—marry the organic and artificial together, leveling the playing field in terms of processing power and, presumably, forcing the two sides to understand one another—is the only option that lacks the inevitability of the other two. Rather than repeating or deleting, you create something new.You lose Shepard, yes, and I’d be a goddamn liar if I said I did not get a little choked up (and if you play the piano music near me, I might still get choked up), but you gain a whole new set of possibilities.

I'M NOT CRYING YOU'RE CRYING, SHUT UP

Possibilities which, of course, the game does not feel the need to explore. Instead, you are given the final image of Joker and Eva—whose relationship with one another has served as a microcosm of the larger conflict and its possible outcomes—stepping off the Normandy, irrevocably changed and ready to confront the wilderness of this new world. I felt sad as I watched Shepard scatter herself to the four winds, but the ending shot of Joker and Eva made me excited about the possibilities of the new galaxy I’d had a hand in creating. Shepard’s tale was over, but there were no limits to what could happen next, making the halting of the apocalypse that much more satisfying. Rather than ending the story, the game chooses to start a new one.

AN: I’ve got another playthrough of Mass Effect 3 going on RIGHT NOW, so don’t be surprised if this comes up again. Like most games, there’s more to talk about than can be discussed in a single sitting.

A combination of work stuff and catching a cold means that when it came time to write this week's post, I got about two paragraphs in and then realized I hadn't done enough work to bring the ruckus in my usual manner, so I'm giving this week a miss.

If you're disappointed about not being able to read my opinions about video games this week, why not listen to them instead? Episode four of my brother and I's podcast went up yesterday.

Back with a late post next week, because I've got a wedding this weekend and that's going to jack up my schedule a bit again. But this time I'm working on something, honest.

I’ll give the orcs this: they are more than willing to lay aside their numerous and varied beefs with one another if it means killing a human. They’ll be vocal about it too; interrupting one captain’s duel resulted in Gashnak (or something like that) the Eagle-Eyed informing me that first he was going to kill me, then he would kill the fellow he was dueling—or perhaps, on second thought, they would just both kill me together. You know, as a team-building exercise. The other orc in the fight was obviously a bit miffed that Gashnak still thought he could take him, but on the other hand reckoned he would just as well kill a human (or more accurately, a “filthy tark,” because they love throwing that word around and frankly I love that they keep using Tolkein’s made-up words that show up all of once in the books) while he was at it.

Neither captain wound up really “winning” the duel in the strictest sense, because I slaughtered both of them. Gashnak had about five seconds to savor his victory before I set him on fire, then chased his cowardly hide down and away from his friends to dive into his mind, gain some intel, and snap his mind like a brittle twig. I really like snapping the minds of captains like brittle twigs—you get great intel, for starters, and it gives me a feeling like I’m really using the whole buffalo. There are few things more satisfying than grabbing an orc unawares and dominating his tiny brain, sifting through its contents to find out which captain hates which and whether or not anyone has a date to orc prom. I think Plugshit the Incontinent has a crush on Fluktarg the Cowardly!

I’ve gotten almost comically invested in the social lives of orcs, even if they are trying to kill me. There are few things more entertaining than listening to the lowly peons talk shit about their captain, because they saw him turn tail and run away from the Grave Walker. Occasionally, they sound like they’re plotting to do away with their captains—although I’ve not yet seen any orc naturally rise through the ranks by murdering his superior. It might be something that doesn’t happen, although with the way Shadows of Mordor keeps surprising me, I’m not willing to rule it out completely.

By far my favorite thing (at least so far) has been my relationship with Pugh the Disgusting, some random-ass orc captain that was already in power when the game started. He was low-ranking, and showed up unexpectedly while I was busy trying to kill someone else. He’d heard of me, or so he claimed, and killing me would show how powerful he was. But oh, the poor dear, he wasn’t actually all that powerful. In fact, I failed killing my original target, but I sure did have time to kill Pugh. Or more accurately, his own men had time to kill Pugh as I used him for a shield (I might have also shanked him a few times).

Now, I’d heard that sometimes a captain will come back and seek revenge, so I wasn’t terribly surprised when he showed up in the middle of another melee looking slightly uglier than before (and bear in mind, this is an orc whose title was “the Disgusting,” so he wasn’t winning any Miss Mordor competitions to begin with). Now he had a scar splitting his face where an errant axe had hit him (not my fault! Sort of!), and seemed very insistent that having left him for dead was a mistake. This time he proved correct, slightly, as I got distracted whaling on his ass again and fell to the captain I’d set out to kill in the first place, a spear throwing fellow who had, at this point, got the better of me four times. I really, really did not like the spear throwing fellow—and he really, really liked gloating about how many times he’d killed me whenever I took another crack at him.

So Pugh got a little notoriety because he’d at least been in the same general vicinity when I got killed, and thus could be said to have survived an encounter with the Grave Walker. He moved to consolidate power by holding a recruitment drive—a drive which I took it upon myself to visit. Earlier interrogations had informed me that Pugh was quite vulnerable to stealth attacks, so it was a simple matter of climbing the wall around his encampment, distracting him so that he’d wander over, and plunging my knife into his neck from above. At this point, you could say that shit was on, at least in his mind. I had other, more powerful captains to kill, so sending his corpse back down the ranks wasn’t exactly the victory of the century or anything.

Pugh though, he got super angry, and also now he had some real ugly scars on a face that was already covered in pustules and the like. He also invested in better armor and, apparently, was wise to my stealth-killing ways. He and three other captains hunted me down while I was attempting the delicate task of finding some herbs and debating whether or not to look up Gollum for more information on my wraithly companion. I made short work of the rank and file, but the three captains proved more trouble than I’d expected. Discretion at this point was the better part of valor, so I fled the scene—but not too far, just enough to get them to reorganize into hunting parties and spread out again. Then I waited for them to separate and, well, you should know by now. Two captains died, and imagine my surprise and delight when old Pugh showed up again, bellowing angrily that his men all referred to him as the Scarred now (as if that wasn’t an improvement upon being known as the Disgusting. If you ask me, I did him a favor). This time I managed to separate him from his men, and then it was interrogation time. I gained intel on one of the highest-ranking captains (I haven’t tried to go for intel on a Warchief yet, and I’m not sure you actually can until you get to a certain part in the story missions, but I could be completely off base there), left him for dead, moved on.

Now, nobody will follow him. He doesn’t travel with a coterie of hangers-on anymore, he just shows up randomly, tries to kill me, and winds up providing me with more intel. Meanwhile I’ve got heated rivalries to deal with, and high-ranking captains I desperately want to kill, but every time I get involved in a mission, there’s Pugh, bringing up the rear and yelling that his men no longer respect him. I have made it a point to not kill him unless I am able to interrogate him, because the dude is a goldmine. He seems to know everything about everybody, presumably because he keeps lurking around their camps offering to help kill me.

Crazily, the whole back-and-forth I have with Pugh is like, one tiny section of the game. I’ve got rivalries going with other orcs that are so heated I actually curse at them when they show up. Of course, these other captains manage to kill me every so often, which makes me a little more engaged—but none of them have shown the dogged determination that Pugh and his (seemingly) unending quest to kill me, at least once. Maybe I’ll just lay down and die for the guy, give him a victory for a change.

Then again, fuck that guy.

The Nintendo Gamecube was the first gaming console my brother and I ever bought with our own money. Until that time, we’d made do with the few consoles we’d been fortunate enough to receive as gifts (a NES and a N64) and a gaming PC that was, in fact, the product of cannibalizing three broken PCs into one, mostly functional PC. We all saw the Ganondorf tech demo, and the Eternal Darkness fog demo, and made the conclusion that the Gamecube was going to be the system we would invest in (plus I mean, we already had these other Nintendo systems).

So we saved our money, and just a little over a year after the system released, when public opinion had already turned and nobody seemed that interested in the system anymore (or more accurately “nobody,” because I think the backlash was probably smaller than I thought, and was a sign of the sickness that permeates the industry ideologies even today, but definitely in the previous two generations), we picked up a refurbished Gamecube for $100 sometime in December 2002. We had, through obligation (or at least through a desire for cheaper games), subscribed to Game Informer at the time, which is why when news of the Capcom Five broke the month before, I had looked at some early concept screens for Killer 7 and thought to myself “yes, this is a game I will definitely buy for the Gamecube, when the time comes.”

2002 is a long way from 2005, however, which is when the game actually released, and I’d moved away to New York for college and started playing World of Warcraft—so very, very much World of Warcraft, such a stupid, stupid amount of World of Warcraft—and did not in fact have a television to hook my Gamecube up to (not until later in the year, anyway, and it didn’t matter at that point because we were busy hooking up Xboxes to play Halo 2 multiplayer, and did I mention World of Warcraft?), so by the time it actually released I missed its arrival completely, and instead spent time in the goddamn Molten Core for like 8 hours a day. Fuck the Molten Core, is what I’m saying.

I spent the next year drinking heavily in Oxford and fully committing to the sophisticated aesthetic that Oxford brings (i.e. passing out in gutters, but they were brick-layed gutters from the late 19^th century—such history!), but I’d also become convinced that I should study postmodern literature, which led me almost inevitably back into Killer 7’s orbit. I’d even looked up the website for the game (which is still around!) and watched the trailer; promised a “surreal action adventure” I of course felt the desire to play it almost immediately.

YEAH, look at that. That looks crazy. Comparing it to the first trailers that released for the system is also pretty fun:

Check out that old Garcian! Also, Kaede is wearing trousers. It was a different world.

As it turned out, a friend of mine owned the PS2 version, and so while relaxing at his apartment one day I popped it in and was almost instantly disappointed. The opening cutscene was suitably bizarre, and I liked the style, but the graphics seemed muddy, and the controls on the Dualshock 2 were sluggish (I also really just don’t like the way the sticks on the Dualshock 2 felt), so I played a little bit of it (through the tutorial and up to the second or third floor of the apartment building) and then shut off the console, feeling cheated. I looked up a bunch of reviews of the game, and was pleased to find most publications indicated that the Gamecube version of the game looked and played better.

Obviously I would need to hunt down a Gamecube copy of this game which, I was warned by the internet, was getting fairly rare and hard to find. It became the thing I’d look for whenever I happened to be in the store for something else, and eventually I saw what I so desired: a copy in the bargain bin at my local Gamestop for $10 (well, $9.99, but you get the idea). I snapped it up immediately and rushed home to throw it into the Wii (the Gamecube having been donated to a friend of ours who really wanted to play the Resident Evil remakes). The game loaded up and I was basically lost for the next week (possibly longer). The Gamecube controller is a unique beast, something commented upon this last UPF, and for me remains one of my favorite controller designs. Much like Killer 7, it doesn’t make immediate sense just looking at it, but once you start playing a game that knows what the controller is everything falls into place. Metroid Prime especially applies to this, as I remain stunned at the appearance of an exploration-based FPS that tied movement and aiming to the same stick without being a complete pain in the ass to use (and this is post-Halo, which basically set the standard for how a FPS should control on a console). I don’t know if it is my favorite controller now—I think I probably enjoy the Xbox One’s controller the most these days—but every time I pick up a Gamecube controller there’s an almost immediate familiarity and feeling of coming home. It was like a big old apology for how fucking weird and unwieldy the N64 controller was.

I had to know what was going on—had to get to the bottom of whatever mystery was quickly unraveling before me (who was the guy with the sparkly hand? What in the world was the nature of the seven Smiths? What did any of this have to do with Japan?), so I played it nightly, getting stuck on some things (there were a few sections that just had too many enemies for me to take down, because I hadn’t figured out the upgrade system just yet), although the game’s signposting makes it pretty clear what needs to happen to move from one section to another quickly. Some of the bosses were exercises in frustration (that goddamn parking lot shootout, for one), others were laughably easy (Ulmeyda), but each one was something new. When I reached the final few stages, and the Smith’s story unfolded (and Samantha died (again? Maybe?)), I was rapt, trying to figure out just what the shit was going on and why I was suddenly chasing Iwazaru through the basement of my trailer home. When the game’s credits rolled, I sat back and wondered what exactly I’d just experienced, having decided to allow Japan’s revenge upon the United States. Is that what I should have done? I wasn’t sure.

The title screen showed up again, yellow this time, and I launched a second game almost immediately.

Author’s Note: Apart from being a sign than I have finally disappeared up my own ass, this is also to say that I was ill last week so that’s why there wasn’t anything posted. Enough folk seem to read and enjoy these posts that I figured an explanation was necessary. I’d also like to thank you all for reading and commenting on my posts, even the more boring ones. I’m having a lot of fun trying to write something interesting every week, so it’s good to know when I’ve managed to succeed a little.

If this isn’t enough for you, my brother and I also just started a weekly podcast where we yammer about games, because that seemed like a good idea at the time. You can find it here. See you all next week! I think I will give Killer 7 a break for a bit, although there’s more to say—always more to say.