The Outer Worlds

 So, I got the game The Outer Worlds, made by Obsidian. Obsidian is basically the guys from Black Isle, who made Fallout 1&2, Planescape: Torment, and some other RPG's. Obsidian also made Fallout: New Vegas, the better sibling to Fallout 3.

The game is a First Person Shooter Role-Playing Game, or FePeSeRPeeGee. You travel between different planets in a solar system, and you interact frequently with other characters through a dialogue system very much in line with that of Fallout: New Vegas.

We'll start with what I like about the game.

The combat system is absolutely brilliant. Controls are precise, you can tackle enemies in any number of ways, there are lots of different kinds of weapons that operate completely differently. The combat system is so good that I could see it used in a regular FPS or a looter-shooter like Borderlands. In addition to your own weapons and abilities, each companion has a special attack that they can use with a cooldown that can hit like a ton of bricks.

Customizing your character is unsurprisingly well done, seeing as that's one thing that the guys at Obsidian have always been good at. Apart from choosing stats, you also choose skills to improve, IE pretty standard for this type of game. In this case, though, it's very seamlessly integrated into the gameplay. The skills you choose will impact in many ways how you'll tackle the world overall. Will you lie 'til your trousers conflagrate, or will you be threatening violence on everyone you meet? Or, for that matter, will you just pull out your gun and repaint the walls.

Yes, that last part is pretty much always an actual option that's written into the game.

Instead of one huge sandbox, the game takes place on a number of planets and stations in a solar system, where each location has its own little sandbox.

All in all, it's built to allow as much freedom to figure things out your way as it can.

As mentioned, you get a bunch of companions, and they all have really well-written personalities. They are three dimensional, have motivations you might not have guessed, and actually act as part of your conversations with NPC's.

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Now, all this sounds like a glowing recommendation, doesn't it? Well, that's because it is. Apart from the ending.

What the game does is not so much reach a crescendo as reach the point where the story takes off and it's time to make shit happen.

That's where it ends. It really bummed me out, to be honest. It really felt like the story was nowhere close to done. For those who have played Fallout 4, it's as if you made it into the institute, spoke to Father, then the game just ended, resolving absolutely nothing.

Oh, but maybe there'll be a sequel? Yeah, I'm sure it's likely there will be a sequel to a completely new intellectual property made by a company that's infamous for not finishing games on time.

Dammit!

Balance

This one...it's a tricky one. Took some thinking, but I hope you'll see the point.

Hollywood sucks at Opponent Balance.

Not familiar with the term? Not surprising, I made it up about 20 minutes before writing this. In essence, it's how you balance the power of two opponents in a story to make it interesting. A lot of movies, comics, and games are really terrible at this, but I'm going to focus on the movie industry for the moment. I might sprinkle some smaller examples of the others in for flavour, though.

One thing I must bring up right at the start is american wrestling. They constantly have to deal with these issues, and have to find ways of making them work in a setting that tolerates a whole lot less bullshit than comics or movies. So I will be using them as sort of a measuring stick. Wrestling also has a term called "getting your heat back", which basically is a combination of getting revenge and regaining what your character has lost by losing.

I think I'll have to simply start listing illustrative examples for this to work, so let's get this thing started:

Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

He's a good example. He is incredibly strong. Stronger, in fact, than even the Hulk. In fact, he is stronger than any one member of the Avengers. No single one of them has any hope of even hurting him alone.

What he represents is an opponent that is on a level entirely above that of the heroes. We don't expect any hero to beat him by themselves. He is the kind of villain who is used to galvanize the heroes into one group working together to beat him.

Ronan the Accuser doesn't get his own headline, because he's pretty much identical in this regard. Both are defeated when the heroes work together, the one thing we are rooting for them to do.

It's a simple archetype, and usually it is not fucked up.

That lizard bloke from Amazing Spider Man

He is a fairly good example. He is created in the same kind of way that Spidey was; a normal human altered by SCIENCE! to become something else.

So how well is he balanced against Spider Man? Fairly well through most of the movie; he can lay a beating on Spider Man, but Spider Man can counter very well when he's actually using all his abilities.

I'll lump him in with Dr. Ozzy Osbourne, or whatever his name is, where Spider Man has to fight much harder than the villain in order to stop the villain from killing innocent people as well as Spidey himself. I think that's a good way of maintaining a balance; you don't have to have the characters measure strength against strength, you can add other elements that cannot easily be quantifiable, sort of leaving the issue of Opponent Balance in the air.

Dave Bautista from Guardians of the Galaxy

He is a fantastic example of what not to do. Make no mistake, I love his character. I think Bautista just owns every single scene he is in, and the movies would be greatly diminished without him.

But in terms of Opponent Balance, he is literally useless. His great vendetta is against Ronan the Accuser, the aforementioned good example of a villain that is on a level above the heroes; one that no single hero can hope to defeat. And yet that's Drax's feud; against an enemy he can't even scratch. Heck, the worm they fight at the start of the second movie he doesn't even manage to injure at all.

In wrestling terms, imagine if a tiny little featherweight would try to fight, well...Batista with brute strength. It would be laughable. So how do you work with that? Will you have that character change strategy and use other methods against the villain? Or will they simply keep going and become pure comical relief?

Because, remember; we're not actually shown how powerful a fighter Drax the Destroyer is. We're told it. We don't really get any point of reference for how powerful he is, other than that he is less powerful than Ronan the Accuser.

In fact, he has a fight with Ronan, and loses completely. And what do the screenwriters have him do? Change nothing. Keep going the way he always did.

Drax did, however, get his heat back; in the end, he had an equal part in killing Ronan with the other guardians. He lost his first fight clean, he didn't evolve in strength, but got his heat back anyway.

Speaking generally for a moment, you always have to have in mind what the implications of losing a fight are, and what it says about your character. Let's say you have decided to book a match where your top face(good guy) goes up against your top heel(bad guy), and you want your face to lose. How will he lose? That will impact the face's character, and will be a deciding factor in how you'll have to move forward.

Let's say you book it so that the heel simply wrestles better, wins clean because he hits harder, moves faster, and has more heart. Then what? How will your face move on from that? Is he even in the championship picture anymore? You might want to simply book another match where the face wins clean instead. But then what? Why did he lose so decisively in the first match?

In Rocky III, Rocky loses like hell against Mr. T. It shows that he's lost the Eye of the Tiger, that intangible factor. He's no longer hungry for it. Then the point where he's finally ready to make his return to the ring is when it's clear that he's regained the Eye of the Tiger. That's a proper journey of a hero.

These are questions some screenwriters tend to ignore. And for some reason it's usually involving superheroes. That's why it upsets me when heroes are defeated clean by enemies on roughly the same level of strength.

Okay, I'll cut to the chase: I hate the dynamic between Venom and Spider Man in Spider Man 3. Venom is simply better; he's faster, stronger, has better webbing, he is simply superior. But he's not a character on an entirely different level. He's a dude, sized like a dude, who can be injured like a dude. When Spidey loses to him, that makes Spidey worse.

And Venom has him at his mercy not one, but two times, refraining from killing him in favour of just doing fuck all for a little while, waiting for him to get a cinderblock to the head and the arrival of Harry Osborne respectively. This is actually something that happens in wrestling as well, and usually it's the result of someone missing their cue to run in. All of a sudden the action in the ring can stop, and someone is supposed to run in and interfere, but doesn't show up on time, so they have to fill that time with something.

Anyway, Peter never gets his heat back on Venom. He's saved by Harry, which does nothing to make him look any stronger, and after that he uses some trickery to defeat Venom. He ends the movie with the fact established that he simply isn't good enough to beat Venom.

Dammit, here's the last example:

Wolverine from X-tremely fantastically shit movie

He's a terrible example.

He fights with Sabretooth, and gets his arse handed to him on a pewter platter.

Then he gets magical metal skeleton.

Then he beats Sabretooth.

Sabretooth is clearly fucking better to begin with at fighting! Wolvie gets an upgrade that he has done nothing to deserve and that he hasn't worked for at all. It's like if Apollo Creed walked up to Rocky, gave him a magic ring, and then Rocky could go an beat the living daylights out of Mr. T.

And Logan at no point gets his heat back, because you can't show you're better than someone if you're given a free fucking upgrade after losing the first fight!

Ian McCollum!

Neat and proper

I'll keep this one short and sweet, since it's basically a small thought-bubble that popped up.

In Minecraft, I decided to construct a small castle, or keep. I started out by leveling an appropriate area, then moved on to construct the floor section.

That's where I stopped. I looked at the ground and realized that it was almost entirely made up of soil. Soil is not a good foundation for a castle, so I had to replace the first layer. Through not insubstantial amounts of work I stripped away the soil and replaced it with cobblestone, the most basic form of mined stone in Minecraft.

But nobody will ever see it; I don't go around showing my creations to people. Heck, if I didn't brag about it in my blog, nobody would have ever even known about it. So what's the point?

It's my own flavour of roleplaying. Sure, I can roleplay in the traditional sense with other people, but when it's just me it doesn't quite work the same. See, my roleplaying takes place in my head. When I play games like Minecraft, there are conversations taking place, plans being made, and actions taken which only take place in my head. It could be that there's an imaginary companion that one has with which one discusses plans about expansions, buildings, or mines.

So my character looks at the soil, and realizes that it doesn't make sense to build a castle that way. So my character changes his plans. So my character explains to his illusory companion that the plans have changed. Not all those things can be represented in the game engine, but they all take place.

Every Man's Sky

Alright, a whole lot of people have been talking during the last year or two about how No Man's Sky has actually turned into a great game now, as opposed to what it was at launch.

And I'll be damned if it hasn't actually done that.

Hell, it might've turned into my favourite game at the moment.

Let's back it up a little, though. In 2016, a company called Hello Games released a sci-fi survival game called No Man's Sky to great fanfare. That is, they provided the fanfare all by themselves, because the game was...nothing. It was basically interplanetary Minecraft with all the charm and flexibility carved out with a screwdriver and set on fire. Quality, however, wasn't the big problem.

Lies were. As mentioned, the developers hyped the game to the sky(No Man's Sky, presumably). Most famously, head of Hello Games, Sean Murray, did a long interview prior to release where he lied about some features that proved not to be in the game, and misled the public about others.

In spite of this, I bought the game, knowing its limitations. Fact of the matter is that I've got a soft spot for those types of games. So I played it for a good while. And it...sort of trickled down the drain. I like the game less and less as time went on, and there came a point where the game seemed completely and utterly devoid of quality. So I stopped playing.

Maybe I ought to note that I played the game in between sessions of ECT. No, I don't agree that getting electricity sent straight into your brain multiple times can have any impact whatsoever on one's enjoyment of a video game. So shut up!

Time went on, and now and then I heard murmurs about how the developers were intent on improving the game. I didn't put much stock in those rumours, to be frank. They couldn't release a good game from the start, what made people think Hello Games would be able to piece one together afterwards?

I think my attitude there was unfair. Most of the time, if developers release a shit game they just hunker down, pretend it's good, and maybe sue some people to push the blame over to them. Hello Games, meanwhile, decided to man up and make the game something that matched what the players expected.

Part of it, I can admit plainly now, was that I disliked them because they lied and released a crap game. And when I dislike someone for what they've done, my automatic instinct is to keep holding that against them. Unless they actually make amends, which is what Hello Games did.

In the end, I kept hearing so much talk about how great the game was now and how the developers had really pulled the game out of the gutter. So I decided to try it again.

This time, it was not the same game anymore. There were NPCs to interact with, interaction with other players, storylines, it just goes on and on. What impressed me the most, though, was that now the game had direction. You were taught things in quests, you developed your character with help from the game itself, it just flowed. It's still huge and completely free to explore, but now they've added the pieces that were missing.

Also, you can get a mech suit.

Jurassic Morons

You know, I've been meaning to write this little feature for a while now. The one stumbling block, however, was how to actually express in text just how magnificently idiotic the, so far, two Jurassic World movies are.

I mean, I could just rage on about them for page after page, but I don't think that would actually convey just how much I want to kick the writers of those movies in the genitals.

So, here's my plan: we'll pretend that the park is being visited by J. R. Sensibleguy. The reason for his visiting the park is the fact that the main reason why everything went to fuck in the previous movies is because either there was no sensible person involved, or nobody listened to the one sensible person.

In fact, the whole series can just be renamed to "Why the flying fuck didn't anybody listen to Ian Malcolm?!", but that's beside the point.

Mr. Sensibleguy is hired by the InGen board to look into the park, the management, the plans for the future etc, and see if any of it is fucking stupid. His main interlocutor in the park is the manager. Let's name her...F. G. Coquesoaker. This first episode is about how the manager handles the situation with the Indominus Rex. Enter stage right.

Coquesoaker: Let's face it; nobody is excited by dinosaurs anymore.

Sensibleguy: *looks out the window* What the hell are you talking about, the park is literally packed with as many people as can possible fit, and everyone is having the time of their lives.

Coquesoaker: Hrm...but we need to innovate, invent new attractions for the visitors!

Sensibleguy: Okay, fair enough. What's on the board?

Coquesoaker: Allow me to present to you...the Indominus Rex!

Sensibleguy: Oh, okay. What's the deal with that one, then?

Coquesoaker: Well, it's huge and has lots of pointy teeth!

Sensibleguy: So does the T-Rex, what's so special about this new one?

Coquesoaker: Well...I mean, it's bigger, and has more teeth!

Sensibleguy: Right. Well, what else is special about it?

Coquesoaker: We don't know.

Sensibleguy: I...what? You don't know?

Coquesoaker: Nope.

Sensibleguy: But...how smart is it?

Coquesoaker: Don't know.

Sensibleguy: How strong is it?

Coquesoaker: Dunno.

Sensibleguy: How high can it jump?

Coquesoaker: Look, it sounds like I'm not getting through to you just how absolutely nothing we know about this thing.

Sensibleguy: These are important questions from a safety standpoint, how on earth can you safely keep the thing locked up, let alone use it as a park attraction if you don't know first thing about it?

Coquesoaker: Oh, we can't have that as an attraction. Way too dangerous!

Sensibleguy: So why the shit is it still alive?

Coquesoaker: Meh, it costs alot to develop, so we kinda cross our arms and pout over that one. Oh, holy shit!

Sensibleguy: *sigh* What's the matter now?

Coquesoaker: It's escaped! Look, there are claw marks on that wall.

Sensibleguy: Ooookay...but how did it get past the huge moat surrounding the paddock?

Coquesoaker: Don't have one of those.

Sensibleguy: *deeper sigh* Look, are those claw marks supposed to have come from that thing scaling the wall? Are you telling me it leaped, then clawed its way up like a cat that just barely missed a jump? And look at that monitor; the tracker says it's right there in the paddock!

Coquesoaker: The tracker is wrong. The I-Rex has clearly escaped.

Sensibleguy: Hey, before we do something (more) stupid, let's just check the cameras and look through the window at the paddock. Hell, it's tiny! And there is only one hiding spot; that clump of trees over there!

Coquesoaker: No, I don't need to look at anything, and it most definitely isn't hiding in that clump of trees just large enough to conceal an Indominus Rex! I will send in two people, completely lacking any equipment that would be able to so much as menace a house cat. Open the gate!

Sensibleguy: Tell me, you don't happen to have two gates, so that the animal will not escaped when you are letting those two people out or in?

Coquesoaker: Of course not.

Sensibleguy: Yes, I thought as much. It was an act of pure optimism to have posed the question in the first place. But...if you don't think the I-Rex is in there, then why the hell do you want to send two guys in to look?

Coquesoaker: Because it might still be in there!

Sensibleguy: In which case you definitely don't want to send them in there, because they'll make nothing more than a tasty snack for the dinosaur.

Coquesoaker: Oh fuck, it was in there! Close the gate.

Sensibleguy: Let me guess, the gate is slow as shit so the dino has plenty of time to run for it?

Coquesoaker: Yes, why?

Sensibleguy: Oh, no, nothing. I'm just beginning to see a pattern, that's all.

Coquesoaker: So, now the guard is dino-food, and the I-Rex is free as a bird.

Sensibleguy: What a shocker, who could've predicted it...

Coquesoaker: I know, right?!

Sensibleguy: Tell me just one thing: Do you have any way whatsoever of stopping that thing?

Coquesoaker: Oh yes; we'll send a bunch of guys armed with shock sticks and stuff like that, which obviously can't even hurt an animal that size, let alone incapacitate it.

Sensibleguy: I thought so. Oh well, first we'll have to do a full emergency evacuation of the whole island.

Coquesoaker: Nah, that'd cost money. Much better to waste a bunch of human lives. We'll just let that animal rampage for a bit, then it'll probably get tired and return to its paddock by itself.

Sensibleguy: *starts walking towards the door, then stops and takes out sunglasses* Here's what we're gonna do; we'll play it like Michael Crichton.

Coquesoaker: Why, what did he do?

Sensibleguy: *puts on sunglasses* Bombed the whole island to oblivion. [Exit stage left]

Voix aquetinge!

Voice acting is a tricky thing. Let’s see how tricky.

It’s one of those really tricky things to pull off in any video game. It’s got relatively small margins of error; sound too dramatic and you sound like a parody of 18th century theatre, don’t sound dramatic enough and you sound like you don’t give a shit. And it can really fuck up a game if you get it wrong.

Two Worlds is a game that had absolutely atrocious voice acting, and my attempt at playing it ceased after about the a third of a sentence. The iffy graphics and slightly sub-par controls didn’t bother me half as much as the silly speech.

The whole Resident Evil-series, I think, is just the biggest pile of dung you’ll ever find in the industry in this regard. The acting constantly sounds like it’s spoken by people who’ve heard about the concept of speech but haven’t actually spoken a word out loud in their entire lives.

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, meanwhile, got a lot of flak for its bad voice acting, but I don’t think it was entirely fair. Sure, the lines were often ridiculous and said in very questionable ways, but most of that I’d scratch up to bad directing rather than poor performances by the actors. The hilarious interactions between characters where lines were randomized weren’t the fault of the actors either, as that was due to terrible game design. The voice acting in Oblivion is something I’d describe as “Not good, but not awful enough to kick me out of the experience”.

Something that often causes problems for games is when the developers decide to bring in famous movie actors, thinking they must automatically be great voice actors. At least that is the most generous assumption. More likely they do it to capitalize on their star power for marketing purposes. This is a bad idea. Patrick Stewart in Oblivion, Sean Bean in Oblivion, Peter Dinklage in Destiny, Matthew Perry in Fallout: New Vegas. All of them completely phoned it in. That doesn’t make them bad actors; voice acting in a game is completely different from acting in a movie or TV-series. In the  case of Destiny, the devs even realized that Peter Dinklage made a shit performance, and replaced him with Nolan North, IE the guy who does the voice for every male main character in all of gaming.

But let’s not focus entirely on the negative examples. There are many games and entire franchises with stellar voice acting. One that I’ve followed for many years is Warcraft, where the guy basically in charge of storytelling, Chris Metzen, also is a fantastic voice actor. Dead Space has really credible voice acting for a very dramatic horror-action game.

Then there’s Simon Templeman. He is the greatest voice actor in all of human history. He also constantly sounds like he wants to piss in your cornflakes. He’s simply got the best evil voice in the industry. Funnily, then, that in the Legacy of Kain-series, he plays the perpetual anti-hero trying to save the world in his own way. Or an evil bastard trying to rule the world. Or just a guy with a personal vendetta against the Hylden lord. It’s not clear. Other than that series, he’s probably most well-known for doing the voice for Teyrn Loghain in Dragon Age: Origins and Admiral Han’gerrel vas Neema in Mass Effect 2 and 3. His voice is simply amazingly punchable, which makes it all the more satisfying when you actually get to punch his character in Mass Effect 3.

So, to sum up, I think the conclusion here is that we should all want to punch Simon Templeton, but not actually do it.

Toodles.

I could make you care!

Care.

Game developers want to make you care.

They want you to feel a connection with the world and the characters in it, so that you’ll feel that you are part of the world they have created.

They suck at this.

Whether it is because of laziness or just gross incompetence can be debated, but what is evident is that developers tend to display an impressive lack of knowledge of what makes us care. As is my way, I shall be tearing down a game that perfectly exemplifies this. My victim tonight? Fallout 4!

Mind you, I regard Fallout 4 as one of the best games in the world. This is not a (conscious) attempt at trashing the game, it’s just a case of it having the most egregious example of this nonsense I could think of.

They use a baby. It’s that cheap. At the start, you tickle the baby, your spouse dies when the baby is kidnapped, and you spend most of the game looking for the baby. But there is no reason whatsoever to care. I understand what Bethesda are trying to do here; they can’t be bothered to get into what makes people tick, so they intend to hitch a ride on the human instinct to protect infants. It doesn’t work, and here’s why.

Firstly, the so called “baby” looks like a creepy loaf of play-dough. What you have to realize about the automatic human affection for infants is that it actually requires an infant, and that abomination certainly isn’t it. There’s always the issue of the uncanny valley when depicting humans in media, and infants aren’t easier in this regard, they are more difficult! We regard them as more adorable and lovely, but that only makes it worse when they’re all wrong. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that movies and games that want to scare you always tend to contain demonic or zombified children. Letting us see that useless piece of clay won’t endear us to it in any way.

Secondly, they let the next step rely completely on the first one. In it, your spouse, a person you’ve interacted with for all of 58 seconds, is shot and your play-dough “baby” is stolen. It’s inevitable; since nr. 1 fails, nr. 2 goes down the drain, as it well might. We walk through the game with the character constantly whining about how he/she is searching for their child. But you don’t actually do much to find him. Fallout 4 is just a terrible environment for this particular type of story. “Woe is me, my son is lost, I need to find him! But first, I’m off to find some paint for the inside wall of Diamond city.”. In open-world games, the developers tend to tailor the game to that setting; you might run around gathering allies for a war or trying to find clues to ancient mysteries. These stories allow for you to go around doing various tasks, meeting people, uncovering secrets. But it doesn’t allow for hurriedly searching for your infant son!

But number 3 is the one that shows up to completely kneecap the whole thing. It’s when you get to the Institute and find out that your son was actually abducted some 60 years ago, and is now an aging man. Add to that the fact that said aging man is dying from cancer and wants you to succeed him as the head of the organization that kidnapped him from the beginning. There’s a lot to unpack here. You’re suddenly face to face with someone who is your son but is a complete stranger who has no actual connection to the infant you were looking for. How is a human being supposed to feel an emotional bond with this old man you’ve never met before? Fact of the matter is, the Shaun you were looking for, the infant who was kidnapped and needed to be saved, hasn’t existed for many years. Instead you’re faced with the leader of the faction that has clear as day been presented as the bad guys thus far in the game.

Bethesda are just so comically bad at this. First they try to pluck your heart strings with the cheap trick of using a “baby”, then they drop that in favour of ordering you to care about an old man in charge of the evil faction! You’ve been trying to find and rescue him from his kidnappers, all the while he was sitting pretty in the Institute, grateful to his kidnappers for having “rescued” him, as he puts it. Okay, so the main character was robbed of experiencing their only child’s whole lifetime, but the Institute were nice to his son, so there’s no need for the main character to be upset.

“Ah”, you comment, forgetting that I’ve told you to shut up numerous times, “I see you’re upset, doesn’t that mean you care?”

I’m not upset at the Institute, or Shaun for that matter. I’m pissed at Bethesda for creating a story that is absolute bullshit, especially in this type of game. It’s like it’s carefully tailored to make us give no shit whatsoever about the main story. Heck, the Institute, their methods, and their goals are nuanced and interesting. The dynamics between the different factions and what they want to achieve is complex and doesn’t just make it a clear-cut “good or bad” plot.

Oh, you think it works as a sort of depressing revelation? Come on, this is Fallout; the series where there’s a vault entirely populated by clones of a guy named Gary, all capable only of attacking you and screaming “GAAAAAARRRRYYYY!”. This isn’t some Greek tragedy, it’s too silly for that. There’s a time and place for such a story. Fallout ain’t it.

In the end, there just isn’t a single reason to give half a fuck about the Shaun-angle. It’s pointless. The game could not only make do without it, the game would actually be a lot better without it.

Don’t try to fuck up my favourite game, Bethesda.

In New Vegas!

Lately, I have spent a lot of time playing New Vegas.

Wait, not quite right; what I’ve spent the most time doing is caring about New Vegas. What do I mean by that? Well, what the hell do you think the point of this post is?!

*breathes deeply*

Anyway, I tend to get stuck on games; playing them as much as I possibly can until I’m done with them. In general, that means either until the game is finished or, in case of Bethesda Games, I grow bored with them. Point is, I have a very easy time engaging in games. But New Vegas doesn’t just engage me, it makes me care. It makes me care about the decisions I make, about the characters I meet, about the enemies I mow down.

I’ve tried to deconstruct exactly why that is. The method I’ve employed for that is to make a comparison to other games.

In Skyrim, for instance, I can massacre the stormcloaks if I side with the empire or vice versa, but I don’t care. Those soldiers are little more than groups of pixels to be demolished. And that goes for really any enemy; bandits, beasts, even dragons. Perhaps it has to do with said interchangeability; if you side with either faction, you’ll be butchering the others in the same forts, in the exact same way. One side doesn’t have distinct locales or methods.

Meanwhile, in New Vegas, the fiends, for instance, are situated in a vault, and have a very identifiable aesthetic. They’ve got vulgar texts scribbled on walls, mutilated bodies lying around, all the lovely stuff. You know what kind of people you are dealing with just by looking at their camps. Caesar’s Legion tend to have large camps with lots of tents, while the NCR have barracks and bunk beds. As opposed to everyone and their dog, their dog’s uncle, and their dog’s uncle’s bollocks, live in the same early middle-age houses.

For my next trick, say a character from Skyrim whose history and fate you really care about.

None? Thought so.

Now, let’s do the same for New Vegas. The list is pretty darn long. For a start, you’ve got all the companion characters. The are superbly characterized, not just in terms of personality, but in terms of their life experiences. Cass came to be sitting at the bar at the NCR’s Mojave Outpost drinking herself half-blind after her caravan was burned to a crisp by unknown assailants. If you can convince her to come with you, you’ll end up trying to find out who was responsible, and bring them to justice. Along the way, you might pick up bits and pieces of her past, such as the story behind her full name.

Note that I’m very much including the player character in this. They are part of the world. All we know is that they are a courier who was shot in the head. Who knows what adventures they were up to in the past. Sure, the whole vault-dweller fish-out-of-water thingy was fun. The first time. Maybe even the second. But it’s gotten really stale. What was the history of this character? Oh, they just had a boring life in a vault. The end. The vault dwellers are a known quantity, and they don’t belong in the world they are kicked into. That makes immersion hard.

As an example of this point, I’d like to use the Elder Scrolls games. Again. There, you always wake up a prisoner of some fashion. It’s always the same deal in every game. But you are a part of the world. You had a life in Tamriel before you were imprisoned, a life the player is free to imagine. You could imagine you having a past that will come and haunt you one day, as actually happens in one of the DLCs to New Vegas.

Another thing that might contribute is the fact that New Vegas is rather…uncompromising. The moment I’m thinking of is when an officer is worried about the mental wellbeing of one of his rangers, because while in captivity with a group of raiders, she was raped. And you’re not in charge of fixing her, just finding a way to convince her to seek treatment. It might be hypocritical to be shocked by this when it’s a game where you kill a ridiculous number of people, but the fact of the matter is that war is run-of-the-mill in gaming. It’s what we’re expecting. The psychological consequences of someone being raped isn’t.

Of course, I won’t pretend like it’s not pertinent that it is a setting that appeals much more to me than the Viking stuff that makes up Skyrim. I feel that the developers did a stellar job with integrating the setting of the old west with that of the post-apocalyptic world. Contrary to Fallout 3, the world in New Vegas is one where the people aren’t just walking around in rubble, they are trying to rebuild civilization, and have reached that to a degree. Heck, they’ve gotten so far that they’ve got trouble with currencies. The NCR have their own dollar bills, but they’re worth very little as people don’t have confidence in it. The Legion denarius, however, are worth much more because they are gold coins that are backed up by an actual valuable good.

All in all, it’s an impressive game, especially given what they had to work with; the least stable engine in the history of gaming, and character models that look like stroke victims.

Now if only they could not remake it.

New Year's Eve!

I thought we should end this year on a positive note, so I'd like to talk for a small bit about one of my favorite game series; the Anno-series. It consists of a number of games with the name "Anno" followed by a year whose numbers add up to 9. That is, Anno 1701, Anno 1404, and so forth.

The games in the series are as follows in order of release:

Anno 1602
Anno 1503
Anno 1701
Anno 1404
Anno 2070
Anno 2205
Anno 1800

I'd say start no earlier than 1701, because the two older games are starting to look their age.

The latest game in the series is Anno 1800, and I haven't played that yet. Looking forward to that in the new year!

All of the games are in the style of real time strategy mixed with a large portion of city-building. You build and manage your settlements on different islands, while also conducting trade, diplomacy, and war with other factions. A lot of the concept is based on the fact that a single island can't possibly produce all the wares needed to feed, clothe, and satisfy the whims of, the population. Thusly, you have to branch out from your starting island and establish trade routes between them.

If I were to describe the feel of the games in general it would be...serene and stressful. Yeah, that's contradictory enough! Thing is, the music, the ambient sounds, the look of the waves, it's all just so soothing. It makes it the kind of games you can just sit and chill with for ages, picking away at the various things necessary to build your own little nation.

But it's also stressful, because you'll have about nine thousand different things to keep track of at any one time, and a whole lot can do straight to shit if you neglect even one of them. Additionally, it's not the kind of games where you can just take things as they come, you better think ahead. If an enemy manages to land an army on your island, you've actually got a big problem, as they can cock up a whole lot of things for you. If it gets that far, you've failed, because you should have stopped that from ever happening. When you start delivering luxury goods to your populace, you've better be damn sure that supply line is solid and has enough supply of that goods right from the start, or your economy can be fucked.

Anno 1404 is so far my absolute favourite. 2070 is more modern, but some of the changes have made it less interesting. 2205 is the most futuristic one, but that has crammed so many mechanics into it that the whole idea of spreading out over islands and trading is gone in favour of having isolated regions where you simply build one settlement each. The whole aesthetic of 1404 is wonderful, from the way the towns look to the sound design, to the interface.

I do wholeheartedly recommend anyone to try out this series, 1404 in particular. It's intellectually challenging, but fair, and thinking things through in advance allows you to avoid a whole lot of pitfalls.

To sum up; buy Anno 1404, and have a happy new year!

This is not a Fable!

To entertain myself, I have now been playing the remastered edition of Fable. Yes, that Fable; the one from 2004.

For those not in the know about these things, the game was perhaps most famous for the job Peter Molyneux, the head of Lionhead Studios, did in hyping it to the stars. He claimed that it would be the most beautiful, revolutionary, immersive gaming experience ever. A game that would allow you to experience a living world where you are free to interact with other characters however you want.

The game that was actually released was…not a good game. In fact, it was shit.

Now, I don’t think it would be fair to judge the game by the lunacy of Mr. Molyneux, and so I prefer to judge it on its own merits. That said, it was a curiously unfortunate thing for Molyneux to focus on hyping up the immersion factor in particular. See, there is none.

What do you think about when I say the word “immersion” in a gaming context? A living world with different people going about their lives? Being able to interact and converse with NPCs? Good voice acting?

The developers of Fable clearly put a lot of work and effort into making sure the game has absolutely none of those.

The NPCs are all the same, and every single one speaks in ridiculous phony british accents. They can have different facial hair, or a different hat, but they don’t have personalities to begin with, let alone different ones. The extent of your interactions with them is using stupid emotes, like flexing, laughing, or belching. You can’t talk to them, you can’t hold conversations with them. You don’t even have a voice. And I’m not talking in the way most player characters in RPGs don’t speak but you still choose lines of dialogue. You simply just stand there gormlessly. You can marry them, but why the hell would you ever want to?!

I suppose we have to get to the combat, but I don’t want to. It is atrocious.

It’s a pretty standard affair; you lock onto enemies one by one, and you attack. If you want to experience the joy of “Whack, whack, whack, bigger whack”, you can use melee. If you want to shoot slowly from afar, you can use a bow. If you want to die, you can use magic. Seriously, magic sucks in this game! It does less damage than whanking things with a sword, but you have a limited mana pool.

The targeting mechanic is a topic all of its own. It’s not good. Not good at all. It’s absolutely terrible. It’s a pretty standard affair; you pull the left trigger to lock onto an enemy, and you proceed to turn him into mulch. Putting a spanner in the works of this is the fact that whether or not you hit your enemy is not so much dependent on your relative position and direction to your target, than whether or not you prayed to the correct gods this morning. When the time has come and your enemy lies dead, if you don’t release the trigger you will automatically target the next being in the vicinity, without any regard whatsoever for their attitude to you. Yes, I’ve killed quite a few peasants in my day because the targeting system decided that they were the greatest threat and not the huge demonic beast slightly behind them.

I suppose that should be enough. It should, but it isn’t.

When you knock down an enemy with a strong blow, you just have to wait for them to slowly stand up again before you’ve even able to damage them.

On top of it all, your melee attacks have a wind-up time; it takes a moment to swing your sword before it connects. Naturally the enemies have no such limitation; they can attack instantly with no delay. Because if there is one thing that aids your immersion more than anything it is the feeling that the enemies play by different rules than you do.

The story is barely worth talking about, because it’s so bog standard. Your village is burned down when you’re a child, and you grow up to be a great hero who defeats the great evil and saves the day. During this journey you find that your mother and sister actually survived. I’m not leaving things out for comic effect, that is actually all that the story is about.

And the game world? There’s even less to say about it; tiny little areas that you can “roam” around for 2 minutes. It’s linear. The line goes back and forth, but there is no open world to explore.

I purchased this game not that long ago, and this is my very first playthrough. Have no doubt; there won’t be another. I actually had fairly high expectations. The game had gotten rather good reviews from all the review sites I frequent, and I was perfectly aware that the hype over it was nonsensical. Add to that the fact that Fable 2 was an excellent game, and it was all around a dour experience.

I’ll be back with a review of Fable 2 once I’m done with that. Maybe it’ll turn out to be shit too.

Toodles.

End of the Trilogy!

After I finished the last post, I realized that I had just about enough rage pent up to squeeze out one more issue, making this a trilogy.

The story makes no damn sense whatsoever.

At the end of Mass Effect 1, the council was saved, they understood the threat of the reapers, and Shepard was about to go out into the galaxy to find a way to stop said reapers.

Then, at the start of Mass Effect 2, the Normandy was just out hunting spare geth for no reason whatsoever, and the council had "dismissed that claim" about the reapers.

Now we get to the start off Mass Effect 3, and Shepard has just spent the last few months in house arrest, doing shit all to stop the reapers, even though he knows from the DLC Arrival in Mess Affect 2 that they would be arriving in a matter of months.

This is the first thing that bothers me; did Shepard just sit in house arrest and do nothing for these months? Is that the Shepard that we came to know from Mass Effect 1? No, it isn't. The Shepard we knew would've broken out of the building, stolen a ship, and went off to pursue whatever leads he could find.

But he just didn't.

Then the reapers attack earth, and Shepard has to flee to...do what exactly? I understand that he has to leave earth; he won't do much good if he's dead, but what's the plan?

Well, if they had just said that there was no plan, that he was going to try to link up with Hackett and go from there, that would've made sense. But that's not what he does. He starts down a path that makes no sense; that he'll gather a fleet and come back to liberate earth. That's the plan that he sticks with for the rest of the game.

That plan makes is stupid.

Earth has no actual strategic importance when it comes to stopping the reapers. Even if they could conjure up a fleet large enough to defeat the reapers on and around earth, which they naturally can't, they would've gained exactly piddly squat regarding a final solution to the reaper problem. They bang on about how force of arms alone has no chance whatsoever of beating them, but then completely ignore that.

Prepare now to have Shepard fly all over the galaxy to gather a fleet to return to earth. Yup, that's what he spends 90% of the game doing. It's not critical to beating the reapers, and it's not going to be possible anyway, but that's what he spends the majority of the time doing. For no fucking reason.

Anyway, a few seconds after leaving earth Shepard is contacted by Hackett, the bigshot high-admiral of basically all the remaining human fleets, and told to go to Mars. On Mars they find plans for a macguffin that will defeat the reapers.

That's right; we're not 20 minutes into the game yet, and we already have the solution we need. Nevermind the fact that nobody knows what it does, how it works, or how to build it, it'll solve everything somehow.

But prepare to forget about it, because it will be built entirely off screen, in an unspecified location, with no direct input from you. Now and then Hackett will phone you up and go "Well, we're still building that thing. Hackett out.".

So, explain to me how, during an ongoing reaper invasion, they are able to funnel enormous amounts of personnel and materials to an unspecified location without the reapers finding out about it. Remember, the reapers are so good at finding info about the civilizations they destroy that they are able to basically wipe out all but the smallest traces of them from the galaxy. Yet somehow they can't find the macguffin.

Back to Shepard; after leaving Mars he leaves the solar system using a mass relay. A what? Of, right; those devices that allow interstellar travel that are the very first thing the reapers shut down when they take the Citadel, in order to isolate enemy forces and prevent them from gathering.

"B-b-but..." you stammer, "...the reapers didn't capture the Citadel...".

Case in fucking point. Why the flying shitstain didn't they do that? Oh sure, their little gambit with Sovereign failed, but they could just head to the Citadel and capture it. But instead they go straight for all the homeworlds of the major races for...some reason. There is literally nothing stopping them from simply taking the Citadel and shutting down the mass relays, which would completely stop everything that Shepard and co. do throughout the game!

*sigh*

You know what, I fucking give up. I had other points to make about how the story is nonsensical, but it can't get dumber than this. The villains can just do this one thing that will guarantee their victory and prevent and attempts at thwarting them, which would instantly fail the entire quest of the main character, and the reason they don't do that is...they don't feel like it?

The writers didn't even pretend to think up a reason for it, they just completely ignored it. It's like a stormtrooper caught Leia at the start of A New Hope, before she had the time to input the plans into R2-D2, but just stood there and did nothing to stop her, for no reason.

Screw this game. They took a promising new IP and pissed all over it.

Bioware, screw you.

It's the reapers!

Quoting my last post: "They are lovecraftian horrors as written by a 10-year old."

Basically the one concept that the whole Mass Effect trilogy centers around, they are the main villains, they are the underlying threat of the whole game. Most of the game, your main character stands there shouting "We need to fucking do something about those cockslapping reapers you morons!" at everyone who doesn't really want to pretend they exist.

First we should probably talk for a little bit about what lovecraftian horrors actually are.

H.P. Lovecraft was an early-20th century author who wrote weird horror fiction. His favourite topic was unknowable cosmic monstrosities, which is something that countless writers have completely failed to capture ever since then.

See, these cosmic horrors aren't just big, ugly, and dangerous enemies. They are beings entirely beyond the comprehensions of mere humans. It's not that you don't at the moment know where they came from or what they are, it's that they are beyond those concepts altogether. What are they like? They warp reality by simply existing!

A human being cannot even begin to fathom the nature of these horrors. In fact, even getting a tiny little glimpse at what they are will instantly drive you completely insane.

How old are they? You're not getting the point; they don't fit into the concept of time. The whole idea of "time" might just be a notion in the smallest dreams of one of these entities.

They are not enemies. They are not invaders. They don't come to kill us or turn us into slaves. They don't give half a thimbleful of jizz about us. It's like if the transdimensional omnipotent Q from Star Trek were to be said to be "enemies" with a single bacterium. One is so far beyond the other that the latter couldn't even describe the very simplest qualities of the former.

But writers, especially for video games, just can't seem to grasp that. To them, lovecraftian horrors are just big, dangerous monsters with scary voices.

And the influences from Lovecraft in Mass Effect are really obvious. The reapers are huge metallic monsters, modeled after cuttlefish, tentacles and all, that are so powerful that no ship in the galaxy can even hope to stand up to one. When encountered face to face, they speak with deep, rumbly voices and go on and on about how they are "beyond your comprehension" and shit.

Yet, those morons in the writer's office just didn't get it, because the reapers are in no way "beyond your comprehension".

In fact, they are very much within our comprehension; we know roughly when they were created, who created them, why they were created, why they harvest the galaxy every 50'000 years, how they procreate, and the code for their luggage(it's 12345).

This is bullshit.

Hell, they talk to the regular mortals. They speak to them, mock them, try to scare them, give them hints to their motivations. They communicate with them as equals.

"But" I hear you interject, clearly not understanding what a blog post is, "they don't treat them as equals, they constantly drone on about how they are superior".

Well, what they say isn't the problem, it's how they do it. The reapers intentionally speak in the language of the mortal they're speaking to. They speak, then pause to allow the other party to answer. They never interrupt the other party even when they clearly think they are absolutely wrong. Heck, Sovereign, the first reaper encountered, even makes a point out of saying he's terminating the conversation when he doesn't want to talk anymore, as opposed to just shutting up and terminating the link.

All those things are signs of politeness. They treat humans as equals in conversation, no matter what they pretend to do. I regularly speak to customers at work who show considerably less respect in a conversation than that supposed cosmic horror does!

After all this, the idiots pretending to be writers try to shoehorn in that concept I mentioned about these monstrosities warping reality around them. Except the effect they have is that their mere presence makes people around them gradually agree with them without realizing it.

Yeah...that's not really the same thing, is it? That doesn't make you a transdimensional horror, that makes you a politician.

And here's the killing blow, literally: They can be killed.

Yup, these things claiming to be beyond the understanding of mere mortals and who have neither beginning nor end...can be killed.

But what kind of magnificent device must one use to even hope to injure such a being? Guns. Just lots of big guns. Shoot at it a lot with really big guns and it dies.

Are you fucking shitting me?

"B-b-but" the voices in my head whine, "maybe the writers didn't want to create proper cosmic horrors, and just wanted to take some inspiration from Lovecraft!"

*places head firmly in palms* *where I found palms in this climate is a question for another day*

Let's say you created a superhero. You call him Man-bat, give him a brooding personality, a batcave, and dress him all in black. Then you have him exclusively pick fights with people in the open street in daylight.

At that stage, you might whinge all you like about how you "Wasn't trying to copy Batman...", but we all know damn well that you were, and you completely missed the point of Batman.

The reapers in the first game are presented as basically machine gods, which periodically murdered all civilized species for some unknown reason. Don't fuckin' come to me claiming they weren't trying to copy Lovecraft's monstrosities.

Fact is, though, that even though the first game treats them with more reverence than the last one, it still fails, because it still communicates with mortals, and is killed in the end by shooting at it.

So, clearly, EA's writers are absolute hacks.

Mass Effect 3

Greetings and salutations, my loyal mini...ehm...readers!

Usually I wouldn't be one to start a post saying sorry for not writing more frequently, and I'm not going to do so this time either, as I rather thought the birth of our daughter was more important than letting you enjoy the most fantastic blogging in history.

I was going to dedicate today's post to dickpunching the reapers of the Mass Effect series, but since I happened upon plenty of other material that's actually presented much more centrally at times than the reapers, in a game that's about a war against the reapers, I decided to dickpunch a bunch of other concepts.

See, there is so much in Mass Effect 3 to love. They've perfected the combat, and really made active abilities a central part of it at last. You also get to experience a much wider range of different locales, and certain story elements that should have been solved ages ago are finally solved. I'll just go head and list some major issues that really frustrate me and make me like the game a whole lot less than I should.

Before I start, maybe I should explain what the reapers are. They are lovecraftian horrors as written by a 10-year old.

#1: Cerberus. They are a pro-human splinter group that wants to control the evil reapers and thus make mankind the supreme rulers.

In the first game, they were cameo opponents at best; you stop a few nasty experiments and there's some flavour text, but that's it.

In the second game, they are the ones who resurrect the dead Shepard and give him the resources to stop the agents of the reapers. They are then portrayed as ruthless and pragmatic, but in the end wanting to do the right thing, at least for humanity.

In the third game, they are pretty much the main antagonists. They are 100% evil, and during large parts of the game they are much more prominent than the reapers themselves.

Why the flying fuck was this necessary?

The reapers are the greatest threat the galaxy has ever faced! They intend to wipe out all civilizations and leave no traces of them. When you have that, why would you ever need another major antagonist?! Apparently the writers of Mass Effect 3 just have no sense of how to write a story at all. There is no focus, clear end goal, nothing whatsoever to stick to, because apparently there are two main enemies, and we don't have a clue what the hell one of them is up to!

Look at Lord of the Rings; there is one primary antagonist, and we know what he wants. Then, there is a secondary antagonist, and we know what he wants as well. He is then defeated so the heroes can focus on the primary badguy.

In Mass Effect 3, the two stories just run parallel to each other, and Cerberus aren't beaten until just a tiny little amount of time before the big showdown.

So, who are we fighting today; the bigtime badguys, or the bigtime badguys?

Now, speaking of Cerberus...

#2: Kai Leng. He's a character that never appeared in either of the previous games. Apparently he came from some animated movie or some comic book or whatever.

You know what, EA? I don't want to keep up to date on three different fucking forms och media in order to know what's happening in the video game I'm playing. Why do you keep doing this; making gaps in the story of the the games that you fill in with other media? You know what, if I play a game I'm kind of expecting to be able to understand what the hell happens in it by...oh, I don't know, playing the damn game?

So, anyway, he's the loyal lapdog of the main antagonist of the game. Okay, one of the main antagonists of the game. Okay, the Illusive Man.

Notice how that paragraph points out both his place in the story AND his name, and an outsider would still not be able to reliable tell which faction he leads? That's not a sign of a good story.

Back to Kai Leng. Apart from being a lapdog and being spawned from a comic, he's also a super-duper-mega-awesome cyborg ninja! And he can do lots of awesome stuff, like be immune to bullets, vanish instantly at will, and jump backward 10 meters from the back of a flying car into the seat of another flying car!

*facepalm*

So, he's essentially a character from a Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid game transplanted into Mass Effect. What the everloving fuck? What absolute pathetic moron thought this was a good idea? Of course, we know someone must've loved him, because he shows all the classic signs of a writer's pet; everybody talks a whole lot about how dangerous and awesome he is; he pulls off stunts that are simply not possible in the setting in question; he gets cool oneliners; he's dressed all in black, has black hair, and has his eyes covered by some kind of cybernetics(or really weird glasses).

Hell, everytime he shows up is in cutscenes, so the player character just becomes a blithering idiot to show how awesome Kai Leng is!

There might as well be anime girls fawning whenever he shows up.

To remind you, this is in a game where some of your teammembers are; Cortez, a skilled pilot and technician who lost his husband in the invasion of earth; Tali, a member of the nomadic race Quarians, who is a mechanical prodigy; Garrus, member of the militaristic race Turians, who's got a strong sense of justice and likes to play it fast and loose with the rules.

He simply has no damn place in this game. He doesn't belong there. Not that such a minor inconvenience would ever bother the writer, who is clearly masturbating furiously every single time that character comes into view.

By the way, if you want a deeper analysis of the character, I can recommend [this link]. It's just a piece that I found on Google that I think nails it perfectly.

How does all of this translate into gameplay, then? Well, it really doesn't.

All those amazing things the game says he can do? They all happen in cutscenes. The only two times the game actually lets you fight him he has the moveset and abilities of a type of enemy you've faced lots of times through the game. During the first fight, you shoot out his shields three times, then he magically wins in a cutscene, and oh isn't he so fucking awesome? The only things making the last fight difficult are the enormous amounts of health they've given him and the fact that the area you get to fight him in is quite small. Even then, it's not a particularly hard fight.

And that is the perfect segue to...

#3: The cutscenes up the arse. This game is cutscene-tastic. It just doesn't want to hand over the controls to you if it can help it. It's pathetic really, how the game insists on showing off so much of it without any interaction whatsoever.´

But I get it; the devs want to make a movie, not a game, and you're ruining their movie by doing the stuff you do while playing it, man!

Here's the thing: in non-interactive media there is a saying; "Show, don't tell". It's simple; you should demonstrate things rather than just saying them. There's a character who is a skilled strategist? Well then, show him making smart strategic moves, don't just have other characters bang on about what an amazing strategist he is while you never demonstrate it in any way.

Well, in interactive media, there's another: "Do, don't show". Since gaming is a media where we are supposed to actively interact with the work in question, basing your game around the player sitting on its' arse and doing fuck all is a crappy strategy. Oh, this character has the ability to pull off these awesome moves? Then let us experience that in gameplay, don't just show that shit to us in cutscenes and leave the gameplay with regular old shooting mechanics.

Naturally, they insist on turning things into cutscenes when there's no fucking need to. You're holding back attacking enemies so you can evacuate a couple of civilians, and about a minute before everyone is seated and set to leave the game takes the reins and makes it a cutscene. Why the hell does it have to do that?! Was there any part of that last minute that couldn't be portrayed ingame?!

That might sound petty to you, but when that happens all the damn time you tend to get really damn tired of it.

Hell, they can't even do the cutscenes right. You know which single scene is the most common one? Have a guess.

...

...

Okay, did you guess "Prolonged cutscene inside of a shuttle while exciting stuff happens outside"? Then you can pat yourself on the back for being right.

They've decided that "Fuck it, we'll just let the player do as little as possible, we'll show them film sequences instead of all the cool stuff we want in this game!", and they can't even do that properly.

That's not to mention the fact that the last thing the devs would ever want is for their game to be judged as a movie rather than a game. It's got pathetic special effects by movie standards, the story meanders with lots of loose plot points just forgotten about, the pacing is all over the place, and the main character's actions are erratic at best.

Not to mention the worst one...

#4: Human facial animations. They are atrocious. It's like the job of animating the human facial expressions was given to a blind person who had heard descriptions of what human faces look like from another blind person who was also mute so he had to use sign-language.

I don't have much to say about this, other than that they've managed to cock up the facial animations royally in ME3, much more so than in the first game.

Next time, I'll be having a god at those damn silly reapers!

Supraland!

...

...

It's a game, alright?

I think the most succinct way of characterizing it is to call it an actionadventureplatformerpuzzlegame. It's kind of an open world, as much as it is a bunch of open areas between which you can travel freely through various means. The perspective is first person, and you have a sword...at first.

Let's get the least important bit out of the way from the get go: the story is extremely barebones, and hardly even there. But who the heck would play a game like this for the story? What, are you playing Super Mario 64 for the story?

It's like watching a porn movie for the lovely soundtrack; you're missing the point!

This game is all about the gameplay. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that I don't hate it, because it's got first-person platforming, which sucks. Why does it suck? Because it's impossible to see exactly where you're standing. This game kind of makes that a little better by allowing you to see your body and your feet, but it's still virtually impossible to both see your feet and see where you're going at the same time.

The main reason why I think I don't mind the first-person platforming so much is that the game gives you an increasing ability to compensate for the flaws. I won't spoil what those are, but I'm sure you can guess a couple of them.

In fact, the game has a great sense of progression overall. It's a game that usually clocks in at between 15 and 20 hours, but unlike boring as shit games like Star Control Origins, where you play the game in the exact same way at the end as you did at the beginning, Supraland has you get new tools and skills throughout, and new ways to employ them. You'll be tackling challenges very differently at the end than you did at the beginning. 

I think this is what makes the game consistently fun for me. See, even if a game is really fun in itself, if it goes nowhere and just repeats itself it won't be fun for long. Supraland left me with a feeling of "Damn, that was a nice game!", because it hadn't bored me stiff by the time it ended.

Note; what I just wrote isn't just applicable to gameplay. A game like Mass Effect has the same gameplay throughout, but goes to new locales, meets new people, etc. That's simply another way of adding variation. The thing about Supraland is that it belongs to a genre that hinges entirely on gameplay, and that means you need variety of gameplay.

The graphics are nice, subscribing to the "Low complexity/high fidelity"-school of thought, where the models and environments are simple, but the graphics quality is surprisingly high.

All in all, really a game worth playing if you want great gameplay, no story to speak of, and puzzles that'll sometimes have you think hard to find solutions.

That's all for now, have a safe journey home, and don't panic.

Kingdoms of Amalamadingdong

*snores loudly*

*jolts awake* Fuck Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning!

Oh, it's you. Hi!

So, Kingdoms of Etc. It's an open world action RPG that's sort of a deformed hybrid of Fable 2 and Skyrim. And I've never finished it.

It's not because it's difficult, because it isn't. It's not because of a bad story, because the story is quite good.

It's because it bores me to death.

Or, rather, the game itself doesn't bore me to death by definition, it just vastly overstays its welcome, like if my father visited for any time whatsoever measurable by science.

Let me explain:

It is a pretty good RPG, if hugely generic. It's bog standard, but fairly competent. And it works.

For awhile.

The problem is that the game is very very long, suggestive tone of voice optional. The character I've played the most clocks in at 109 hours or so, and the end was nowhere in sight..

"Ah, but..." says the FBI agent monitoring my activities ever since "The Event" took place, "...you like long games; you've played Skyrim for yonks, and Fallout 4 for three yonks!".

True, I like long games. If they have the gameplay to warrant it.

Kingdoms of Avocado doesn't. It has exactly two activities; 1) Go talk to person B, and 2) Go to point B and kill everything. At times they spice nr. 2 up with you having to pick up something at point B, but I won't honour it by calling it a separate activity when the main instinct in an RPG besides murdering everything with a health bar is picking up anything that glitters!

Those two activities can't carry the game for over 100 hours. It just can't possibly do that.

It's no exactly improved by the fact that there is no roleplaying in this supposed "Roleplaying" game. Alright, that's not completely true, at times you get to choose between being a dick or being a good guy. As in, you get two conversation options and pick one. I can't really call it roleplaying though, because your character has no character whatsoever, ironically. NPCs speak, and you can click on certain topics to mention them, or in certain situations you can make the choice between dickish and goodish.

You can buy a home, but it's just a place where you can have different crafting stations gathered in one place. You can't decorate anything, you never eat or drink, and you can't even sit down by the fire.

At the end of it all, imagine if the game had been, faffing about included, 20 or 30 hours long. I'd be writing about it as a fun, if a bit repetitive, action RPG that had an interesting story.

Instead, I'm writing about how it is a dull slog that completely drowns out the story by its boredom alone.

Hope I'll have the strength to finish the damn thing...

Iteration time!

This is gonna be good...

I don't like Dark Souls.

It's true.

Now, half of humanity will be thinking "Yeah, he's too much of a n00b, and not 1337 enough to beat it!", and the other half will be thinking "What kind of magic is making pictures appear on this rectangle on my desk?!"

Frankly, I don't mind being too bad at a game to beat it. The list of those games is quite long. But that wasn't it. I have beaten plenty of games that were hard and that required lots of practice.

So, it eluded me for the longest time why in the world I didn't like Dark Souls. But after much brooding, I got it! That's right; iteration time!

Now you're either thinking "What is iteration time?" or "The box next to the rectangle is making noises, what witchcraft is this?!".

Iteration time is the time between you cocking things up and you being back in action to cock things up again. For instance, in Super Meat Boy, the iteration time is extremely short. When you die, you reappear instantly at the start of the screen to try again.

This is something that all developers must take into account. How long iteration time do you want, and how will it be managed? Way back when, the most common way of all was having lives, which gave you a number of tries with short iteration time, but a long one if you failed more times than that. See Super Mario Bros. and the likes thereof.

In the g(l)ory days of PC gaming in the 90's, basically all games managed it by letting you save whenever you wanted, allowing you to have as long, or indeed as short, iteration time as you'd like.

Nowadays, everybody, their uncle, their uncle's dog, and their uncle's dog's favorite chew toy uses autosaves of one kind or another. Usually it's simply pre-determined checkpoints in the game, where the game saves automatically, and you have little or no control over when it saves.

Dark Souls uses campfires as checkpoints. When you die, you are returned to the last campfire you activated, and all your souls are dropped on the ground where you died. What this means in practice is that if you die fighting a boss, you can face a fun little romp of 15 minutes to get back to the boss every single time you die. And this is in a game whose tagline is basically "You'll die lots of time trying to kill bosses!".

D'you know what feeling that invokes in me? The same feeling that you get if you've played a game for two hours without saving, and your computer crashes. Despair, sadness, frustration, fury.

That's idiotic game design.

Having to trudge back for a quarter of an hour every single one of the eight times you die on a boss isn't fun, challenging, your engaging. It is a waste of time. There is nothing gained from it whatsoever.

Except for padding out the runtime of the game, of course.

Funny thing, Darksiders 3, a really poor knockoff of Dark Souls, that I will be ripping into furiously in the near future, does that one thing better. It always has checkpoints, in this case summoning points for a demon named Vulgrim, right before bosses, minimizing iteration time.

When what amounts to little more than the third rate porn parody of your game gets a crucial part of gameplay right more than you do, you've fucked up.

Fuck Dark Souls.

And fuck Darksiders 3!

From DOOM to DIABLO!

Doom!

DOOOOOOOM!

Being found out

In his second autobiography, The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Fry expands upon the fact that he experienced rather a peculiar thing when he first came to the University of Cambridge, where he attended Queens' College. Namely, the defeating feeling that he would, at any time, be "found out".

This, he explains, had no relation to any fear of people realizing that he was homosexual, nor that he had a history of crime and imprisonment. Neither of those seemed to bother him as much as the real fear; that he would be "found out", and I realize the use of quotation marks will at some point begin to annoy, as being a big, fat, pretentious fraud. Surely, at some point, people would come up to him and question him about his knowledge of the great minds of the world, or theories of which he had never heard, and he'd be exposed. It would turn out that it had all been a mistake, he wasn't supposed to be there at all.

Although he never attributes this to his cyclothymia, that is the particular flavour of bipolar, or manic depressive, disorder from which he suffers, I cannot help but feel it is an odd coincidence.

There I go again, being melodramatic. Oh, how well his words suit my life, 'tis as if he was writing about me!

Bollocks, the lot of it. I might just as well have an emo haircut and listen to The Cure. In fact, if I were you, I'd stop reading right this instant. Go head, leave me to my arrogant wallowing.

Is he gone? Good, I hate that guy.

So anyway, I do not mean to say that his situation is directly applicable to mine. I only wish it to serve as a means of introducing the concept of this fear, which I do indeed share.

It might be at work, where I languish in fear that everyone will realize that I'm simply not good enough at what I do. I bring nothing to the table, so why am I even there? Someone more suitable would do it better!

In private, I cannot shake the feeling that people think I'm an arsehole. An annoying, self-centered twat. They'd rather not see me at all.

To be honest, my fear actually has less to do with a sincere beliefs that people holds these views of me, than that they should. 'tis oh so easy to dismiss the views of others. "Oh, they're just jealous because I'm so amazing!", or "They're simply arseholes themselves!". It's much harder to dismiss your own views. My friends don't say they don't like being around me, I tell myself that they should.

I can hardly imagine that anyone has scrapped more recordings of music they've made because they suck. Alright, I may be able to imagine it, but don't let that disrupt my hyperbole, please.

And they're not good enough because I'm not good enough, or at least that's what my head is telling me.

I'm not saying this to garner sympathy. Not that a single person will believe that, but I'm more interested in getting people to understand depression.

In vino veritas

Last night, the missus and I went to a strange place nextdoor to one of those old men's fellowships that dot the city of Örebro, and attended a wine and cheese tasting.

It was far less pretentious than I had feared it would be, and something has to be said of a sommele...somi...wine expert who manages to talk about the qualities of fine wine without making you want to punch him very hard in the face.

Unfortunately, it was entirely impossible to avoid the fact that the topic of the whole affair was wine. In fact, it was all that the cheese could do to reduce the flavourly impact of precisely those qualities in wine for which I care the very least.

I can not with any honesty say that this event in any way caused an epiphany in me, or for that matter impacted my view or preference with regards to wine in any way, shape, or form.

Indeed, give me a box of Barefoot White Zinfandel Rosé, and I'm as happy a camper as can be.

Good night.