This game is...hard. It's got a steep learning curve, and you die a lot. It doesn't help that right next to the starting area is a graveyard full of skeletons that are extremely tough. They take about ten hits to kill (and I'm playing a knight), while they can kill you in half that, plus you fight two at a time! Then I come to find out you weren't supposed to go to this graveyard. You were supposed to go to a less obvious area that's the actual starting dungeon. There enemies die in a couple hits, and do far less damage. I wasn't supposed to go to that damn graveyard until many levels higher. Nice.
That lack of direction itself in an issue I have with this game. It is not at all obvious where you're supposed to go or what you're supposed to do. The first NPC in the game makes some reference to a couple bells I need to ring. He doesn't say why I need to ring these bells, and he gives only the vaguest directions. Modern RPGs have a little overabundance of directional help (e.g., a compass that tells you exactly where to go) which removes some aspects of exploration. This game has the opposite problem. Not only is there no compass of any kind, there is no:
Automap
Actually, no map of any kind
No conversation log
No quest log
Imagine playing most any RPG you've ever played...with no quest log. I feel like I'm eight years old, playing The Bard's Tale, or some other old school game where you needed a pad of paper to actually play the game. Dark Souls is what you call a Wikia game. :)
Death has two penalties: One, if you don't make it back to your corpse, you lose all your money. So, die twice in a row, lose all your duckets. Secondly, in this game, you collect "humanity," which is dropped somewhat rarely. You can use this to turn from undead back to a human. This gives you various bonuses, notably higher drop rates. The catch is that when you die, you revert to an undead form. Usually, getting back to your corpse and collecting your money isn't too hard. However, the humanity mechanic ads a significant level of tension to the game.
Like when...
I was human, and stumbled on a boss battle on the roof of an abbey, against two gargoyles.
And... I beat them on my first try!! I'm so happy right now. Sometimes, life is good. There are some tense fights in this game, and it's definitely a grinding game. I certainly succeeded in finding a grind to replace Too Human. Go Palantas.
Yes, I finally got it. I've been looking forward to this one for a while, obviously. I was a little worried about Square making it, but so far...it's pretty damn good. There are some tiny, bizzare quirks, like the X button selecting things in menus instead of the A button (WTFs up with that??). However one thing I can definitely say about this title: It is a Deus Ex game. The story is already invovling, the setting is plausible, and the characters feel real. I'm becoming more critical of stories in games, and this one is making me very happy so far.
I'm fairly happy with this bundle. When I said I beat Doom 3 yesterday, I should be more specific: I beat the Doom 3 campaign of the Doom 3: BFG Edition. The BFG Edition includes:
Doom 3
Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil (an expansion pack released in 2005)
Doom 3: The Lost Mission (a new expansion)
Doom (specifically, the four-episode Ultimate Doom)
Doom II
That's a healthy amount of content for a budget price. I paid Amazon $20 for BFG Edition (though oddly, it's gone up to $23).
As to the game itself, I had a pretty good time. It had a lot of scares in it. The game became a little formulaic towards the end. Virtually every appearance of a monster is an ambush of some sort. Monsters appear in one of the following ways:
They're already in the level, showing up when it loads, and you encounter them naturally (e.g., the way most shooters work).
They pop out of the walls.
They teleport near you, accompanied by appropriate audio and visual effects.
Those are in reverse order of frequency. Towards the end, most monsters teleport in, and it's pretty standard that one will appear in front of you and one behind. You come to expect it. There are a few cheap deaths, like a floor tile collapsing into lava, with no prior indication it would do that. There are a handful of platforming bits, which are annoying, but thankfully rare. The final battle, against the Cyberdemon, is a cake walk.
Doom 3 has save-anywhere, which is rare these days. The back of the box laughably boasts a "new check point save system." That's BS. The game has an auto-save system, which saves quite rarely, and at odd locations sometimes. You'll want to be saving manually at regular intervals, which is fine.
Artistically, this game is great. The technology was amazing in 2004, and is obviously nothing special now, but the art direction holds up. The Mars base is legitimately creepy. There are a few sections where you walk on the Martian surface, which looks great. Hell is scary and disturbing. If you glanced at the game during the Hell levels, you'd think it was a fantasy RPG (except for the plasma rifle in the middle of the screen). Hell in Doom 3 is far scarier and "Hellish" than any of the Oblivion levels in, you know, Oblivion. Graphically, this game is inspired.
Conclusion: Check out Doom 3: BFG Edition if you like shooters, particularly classic shooters.
It's national sound check day: 12-12-12!! Sort of an odd holiday. I was planning to complain about annoying achievements with this issue, but I decided complaining would be innappropriate on this festive occasion.
Instead I'm going to share a personal issue with you: I always need a game to grind. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, grinding is a term typically applied to RPGs, meaning to engage in repetitive, usually mindless gameplay, playing the same levels, killing the same critters, for a purpose indirectly related to progressing in the game. This purpose is usually gaining XP or finding a rare item. If you've read my blog recently, you know I just finished a 100-hour grind in Too Human to get some epic armor.
I sat down at my Xbox the other day, and it occured to me, "I have nothing to grind on." I was in the mood to play a game, but I didn't wan't to pay much attention to either the gameplay or story, and I wanted to watch a film or show at the same time (I often do this). So it's Christmas time, and I need a grinding game.
I'd been considering Sacred 2 for a while. However, I learned recently that the studio behind Sacred closed. I really don't want to deal with unpatched bugs.
Then I heard about Dark Souls. Dark Souls has excellent reviews, but what really sold me was 360a's description: "This game is not for the casual gamer. It has quite a steep learning curve to it, but if you manage to adapt to it, this game is very rewarding and fun." That sounds right up my alley, so I decided to buy it for myself for Christmas. I got it for $16 new on Amazon; I'm sure the story and gameplay would have been much improved if I'd paid $60 one year ago, but that's life.
So, anyone have experience with this series? This is the first Japanese game I've purchased in years. Will this make a good grind? Am I gonna like it?
On the First Day of Christmas, my Xbox gave to me...a really hard achievement. (Sorry, I couldn't think of something that rhymed.)
I just got the achievement "Relics of a Forgotten Past" in Too Human. The description for this achievment is "Complete a 7-piece Elite armor suit." This is an insane achievement. The drop rate for each piece of this armor is incredibly low. The highest that can be arranged is 4%, after killing the first level boss, which require that you play through the entire first level, a process that takes at least a half hour. Do the math on how long that should take.
I have been working on this achievement with my current character for literally two years, off and on. It's taken over 100 hours of grinding to get this. Only 3% of people on Raptr who have played Too Human have this achievement. In the process of getting this achievement, I have killed 77,578 enemies.
The following continued bragging will only make sense to people who have actually played Too Human...
I got this achievement with my Human Champion. I have 152 hours of play time with this character. I have never died. That's right. On my status screen, under deaths, it says zero. What's more, I don't yet have the "Valkyrie's Folly: Die 100 times" achievement. I'm going to make sure that's the last achievement I get. Yes, I have managed to get that good at an obscure game. :)
This game is tense! This is the sort of game you play at night will all the lights turned off. I'm playing on Veteran (hard), which means you can only take a few hits before going down. If a demon gets close and melee hits you, your view oscilates wildly, making return fire very difficult. You REALLY don't want monsters getting close to you in this game.
I've been asked what I think about the changes to the game, notably the flashlight. For those of you who don't know, the original Doom 3 had an unusual mechanic: The flashlight took the place of a weapon. You could hold your flashlight or a weapon, but not both. If you think that sounds stupid, that's because it is. The BFG Edition gets rid of that nonsense. The space marine now has a flashlight integrated into his armor, that he can use in conjuction with a firearm...just like every other shooter ever that has a flashlight. The flashlight now discharges pretty quickly, to prevent you from using it constantly. The game is still incredibly atmospheric with this change, and it gets rid of one of the most ridiculed and contrived elements of any shooter ever. So yes, I am a fan of the new flashlight system. If you're one of the dozen people on the planet who liked it the old way, I'm sorry the BFG Edition doesn't include it, and you also need to get your f*cking head checked.
Yesterday, I complained about the game not having separate volume controls for sound, voice, and music. A caveat to that complaint is that you don't really need one for music. The game does not have a conventional score. At select moments in the levels, music will start playing. These are rare and all of them highten tension. Doom 3 might be one of the first shooters to contain music in this fashion. In all early shooters (Doom to Quake), the music just played constantly. Half-Life changed this a little, where musical numbers would play at certain triggers. Same thing essentially with Halo. However, I can't recall any shooter prior to Doom 3 that had horror movie-type music. A musical cue in Doom 3 might be only a few seconds long. They're not "songs" that continually play generally. It's well done.
I've been playing one of my Thanksgiving presents, Doom 3: BFG Edition. I'm enjoying it a lot, both as a gamer and as a shooter historian. Various thoughts follow, and I guess you could call this a mini review...
It's amazing how games have come along graphically. When Doom 3 was released in 2004, it was without question the most technologically advanced game in existence. Nothing looked better than Doom 3 on a good PC. Fast forward to today. The Doom 3: BFG Edition looks dated. Environments look good, but that's as much from artistry as technology. Monsters look unmemorable. Human characters in cutscenes look kinda bad. It's amazing how things have advanced.
Gameplay-wise...well, it's Doom 3. I have a great affection for all things Doom, so I'm enjoying it. Doom 3 is one of only two games ever to actually make me jump. It's also retro compared to shooters today. There is no recharging health. You have to hunt around for health packs. Ammo is limited. If you're patient enough to explore, then you'll be fine, but ammo is not unlimited like in Halo or Call of Duty. The gameplay just feels old, like Halo: Combat Evolved was never released. I like it. If that's not your thing, then you probably won't like it.
I'm also playing the game as I would an old-timey game: I'm not worrying about achievements on my first playthrough, at all. I didn't even look at them. It's kinda nice. I've been playing too many games accompanied by a laptop lately, looking at it every 15 seconds. (I blame this 50/50 on my own OCD and on developers' decisions to put obnoxious Easter egg hunts in their games).
I should mention that the disc also comes with Ultimate Doom and Doom 2. Good stuff. Not everything is good with this compilation however. There are some bizarre decisions. The controls cannot be customized, at all. That's not terribly unusual with console games, however both Rage and Quake IV (id Software's last couple games) had some customizability. You'd think this one would too. The options menus in general are sparse. There's a single volume control. That's a little cheap, seeing as games 20 years ago had separate sliders for music and sound effects.
These are minor issues, though, in my opinion. What separates BFG Edition from other recent remakes in my mind is the bargain price. This game was not released at $60, and I got my copy for $15 over the holiday. For the amount of Doom content on the disc, I think that's a good deal. If you're looking for a modern shooter, leave this one alone. However, if you are a fan of Doom and want a huge dose of nostalgia, pick this one up.
There were four films I was anticipating in 2012: The Avengers, Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Hobbit. I'm one for two so far on that list, as Prometheus was a big disappointment. Here are the major problems I had with the film:
Lack of a main character. There are 17 people on this ship, and only five of them are identifiable in any way. Of those five, I'm not at all sure which ones I'm supposed to empathize with. When the extras start getting killed off, it's like "So what?", but then when the five identifiable characters start having conflicts, it's very difficult to determine who the "good guys" are.
Plot holes/general silliness. Imagine in Alien if after the chestburster popped out of John Hurt, everyone just shrugged and went about their business. There are some truely inexplicable character actions in this film, which brings me to...
Performances. The guy who played Magneto from X-Men First Class is the only person delivering a performance here. Everyone else could have been played by anybody.
Lack of resolution. There are several subplots in this film that go absolutely nowhere. They don't tie into the main plot, because surprisingly, there isn't a main plot. I cannot identify a primary conflict that was resolved in the story. It's a collection of B-plots, most of which go nowhere, and are only ended by someone dying horribly.
The closest thing to can compared Prometheus to is one of those awful Saw movies: People you don't know or care about die in various elaborate ways. There's no resolution to the plot, nor could there be, as there is no overarching conflict in the film at all.
Today I was reading trivia on the Internet, as I often do, and I came across an interesting bit of videogame history. In the early 80s, a group of programmers formed a company and began programming games for the Atari 2600. Atari sued them for doing this and lost. That company was called Activision. Isn't that amazing? Today console manufacturers will do anything to get third party developers on board. In 1982, they sued them for doing so. What a complete reversal.
I was discussing preorders with a friend recently in my comments, and I decided to respond at length. He said to me, "It costs the same to pre-order as it does to buy the game at launch without a pre-order."
No, it doesn't cost the same because you are giving a company money prior to receiving the good or service that your money purchased. That is called a loan. In the case of this loan, you are not charging GameStop or EA or whoever any interest. That is called getting ripped off. If you are a shrewd business, you can convince a horde of suckers to give you money, interest-free, for something you have not yet given them. This used to be called lay-a-way, and it was one method that companies used to prey on the poor. Now game publishers are doing basically the same thing, except they're preying on...gamers who don't have their thinking cap on. (I had used a nastier word.)
I'm not really sure why people get suckered into this sort of thing. Tell me, would you go for this deal: Your local grocery says to you, "We've noticed you normally buy $200 of food per month. Tell you what, pay $50 in advance on next month?s food. Next month, you can pay the remaining $150 and get your items. We won't give you any sort of discount, nor will your food be any different than anyone else who pays for what they get at the moment, nor does giving us that $50 in advance actually guarantee there will be food here if there's some sort of crisis." So who would go for that deal? (If anyone said yes, then tell me, and I'm going to get out of private security and become a grocer.) No sane person would, but for some reason, that line seems to work on gamers.
If I don't address this, someone will in my comments. Somebody reading this is thinking, "But when you pre-order, you get special in-game items." Let's revisit our grocery scenario. It's exactly the same, except they add, "Give us that $50 in advance, and when you come get your groceries, we'll give you a free stick of gum." Yay. The pre-order extras are almost always trinkets of insignificant value. I think my comparison may be too generous there. A stick of gum is worth ten cents or so, versus $200 in groceries. The Golden Lancer is worth basically nothing, versus the $70 Gears 2 Limited Edition cost.
The fact that publishers don't offer a discount to preorders is insulting. Why is there no discount? They are taking your money for a service they have not yet provided. They should give you something in return. (And no, a worthless trinket to one of their other games doesn't count.) Tell me, if I preorder a game, and then the release date of that game gets pushed back, do I get to charge GameStop or EA or whoever a late fee? Why not? That's the way it works when a business gives me a loan and then I'm late repaying. The next time a GameStop employee asks if I want to preorder Next Big Shooter III, I'm going to respond, "Would you like to give me a ten dollars bill for the games I'm probably going to bring in here to trade in three months?"
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