She Who Hunts Monsters

I read what had to be one of the weirdest articles I’ve come across in a while. Yes, I know it’s IGN, and IGN is some sort of joke in the game journalism universe, but it’s still about Dark Souls, and I wanted to see where they were going with the article.

It didn’t go very far.

The points of the article irk me.  It’s one thing to compare two relatively similar games, but this is almost going beyond apples and oranges into a whole other realm of incompatibility. View full article »

Oh my!

Here we are, post-PAX. I’ve got a can of Pepsi and Poets of the Fall playing in the background, so let’s gossip.

PAX Prime was pretty frickin’ awesome. On a scale from 1 to SuperJam, PAX Prime scored a grand total of Bloody Good Times All Around. There were games to see, and panels to attend, and developer parties to crash, and swag to get.

Let’s start with I got hands on time with: Minecraft 1.8. View full article »

Oh what a month-

It’s July! Actually it’s almost August but I haven’t had anything to talk about just yet.

July used to mean the summer slump, when nothing would show up and everybody just laid around and waited until Madden came in August to signify the fall season.

Once I discovered Harvest Moon, July started to mean a new Harvest Moon game every year. That lasted right up until I got tired of Harvest Moon.

Now July means Catherine! I used to think this upcoming puzzle/platformer was just another quirky Atlus title, and then I discovered that Michelle Ruff (Rita Mordio from Tales of Vesperia) played the part of Katherine McBride, and as a fan of Michelle Ruff, I immediatly went out and pre-ordered the collector’s edition of the game. So next week, I’ll have a new pair of boxers! And a very uncomfortable pillow case.

So beyond inFAMOUS 2, I haven’t been doing much game-wise. Just sitting back, playing Minecraft and Tactics Ogre, and relaxing. I picked up a couple of pen & paper RPG books (Paranoia: Troubleshooters and Unknown Armies). P:T looks like it will be a vast blast to play. UA, meanwhile, seems ridiculously over-complicated.

Oh, and there’s Terraria:

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I’m starting to love Terraria. Muahahaha.

I have been busy the past few weeks, mainly with work, but a bit with games. Here’s the breakdown. It’s long:

After suffering through the simulated head trauma that was the storyline of The 3^rd Birthday, I moved on to slaughter another childhood friend that I remembered fondly: Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Tactics Ogre, in return, let it be known that it wasn’t going to take none of that “nostalgia filter” guff from me and backhanded me across the room with its unrelenting difficulty.

As a pleasant change, it is just as difficult as I recall.

I’m sixty-five(?) hours in and almost done with Chapter Three (of four), following the Law route. There’s so much about this game that I love: the combat, the menus, the music, the classes. It’s everything that I loved about Final Fantasy Tactics and the original TO, cleaned up and given a beautiful, polished shine. It really makes the PSP release of FFT look like a steaming pile of dog vomit.

There’s a few downsides, of course, though it took me the better part of forty hours to find even one. The crafting system is poorly implemented and ridiculously tedious, the new class leveling system means lots of level grinding whenever I gain a new class, and there’s the fact that, without a guide, you can go the entire game without ever realizing how many potential unique unit recruits you missed.

But I’m still enjoying the game a great deal. Hopefully, I’ll have a review up in the next couple of weeks.

Other than TO, I’ve been puttering about in other games that require less brain-busting and stat-keeping.

I bought and finished Portal 2. It was a fun romp, both single-player and the little bit of Co-op that I played. But, oh my goodness, is the Steam engine showing its considerable age. I don’t think I’ve played a game with that much loading, on any system, for a good long while. I also picked up Witcher 2, which I haven’t played because I re-started Witcher 1 to get a save file, which I’m now not playing because I bought the Witcher novels. It’s Witcher overload!

Minecraft continues to tickle my fancy whenever I’m not paying attention to what I should be doing, snaking its tendrils into my brain more insidiously than TvTropes. I’ve started over half a dozen times, including a fresh new world with the latest 1.6 update. Prior to the update I messed around with mods for the first time, and found a farming mod that added a bunch of fruit trees and new crops, so now I’ve got the idea to recreate the villages from the Harvest Moon series in my world. I should probably take some pictures or a video or something for any folks interested, but my brain has been drawing a blank creatively as of late.

Starcraft II is played every so often. I’m still ranked Gold in the second season, and seem to be doing pretty decently. Zerg is still my weakest race by far, both playing as and against, and I’m all around bad at maintaining macro when I go on the offense, but I think that if I really tried and practice I could be a higher rank, perhaps even Diamond. But then that would mean less Minecraft. Decisions.

I haven’t touched a console (other than my PSP) since pre-PAX, so with a bit of boredom and general crankiness spurring me on, I finally sat down and played through Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light over the Memorial Day weekend, which I bought last year and had been holding off on for a Let’s Play with Greg that hasn’t happened yet. I love the game: it’s short, sweet, and explosive, and I really loved the final boss encounter.

Against my better judgment, I picked up Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale for Live. While I still can’t believe somebody took the ultimate turn-based tactical RPG and turned it into a hack-and-slash, I at least hoped it tickled the part of me that loved the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games. And it does. Kind of. Mostly, though, for a game that costs the same amount as Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, I was disappointed by the sluggish controls, the poor targeting, the bland characters, and the lack of voice acting. It might be fun with more people, but the game didn’t grab me in the ninety minutes I’ve already spent with it, and I think I’m going to chalk that one up to just a bad purchase decision.

Speaking of co-op, I got to play more Monster Hunter Tri with a couple of GameCritics.com pals. I would personally like to thank Red Bull for making gaming even semi-competently at two in the morning possible. I suppose I should finish my grinding for my Guild Armor, so expect an extraordinarily bad video of an Urugaan fight on my Youtube channel soon.

And that leaves me with Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, a game that I’ve been anticipating for a while but has somehow not had any coverage, much to the surprise of a few reviewers out there. For people wondering what the heck this game is like: imagine a fantasy version of Gears of War, with just a little bit less polish, a whole lot more exposed flesh (E’lara, our boobtastic elven female,  is basically wearing strips of fabric, while Caddoc, our burly human male, is rocking the tight pants and no shirt), and Lucy Lawless telling me to go do quests in a super sultry voice.

Well, as Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and Fallout 3 have proven, when a celebrity voice actor tells me to go do a quest, I say, “YOU BET, SIR!” (Or not even a celebrity, as I pre-ordered Catherine the instant I saw Michelle Ruff played one of the Catherines. <3 Michelle )

I’m playing through the Campaign, primarily as Caddoc, by myself (Greg and I are planning a Let’s Play), and I’m enjoying a good deal of it. It’s light fun, yet at the same time this game has some pretty heft meat on its bones, as I’m only up to Chapter Three after two nights of play- there’s definitely enough campaign here to make it worth my money. I agree with Gabe’s assertion yesterday: compared to what I’ve been playing recently, Hunted is most definitely a palate cleanser.

Which is good, because I can use some cleaning out before inFamous 2 next week!

Wait, that doesn’t sound good…

PS: You should totally pre-order Catherine and Dark Souls

When I was at PAX East in March, I stayed at Invisible Inkie’s house. While there, she went ahead and let me watch her play RIFT, in order to entice me to join the shininess. It failed miserably to entice, mostly because the game looked extraordinarily boring.

Of course, as we know by now, when I played it myself in April, something happened. Something “clicked,” and suddenly I was playing hour upon hour of RIFT, fluffing about the starting zone in a veritable frenzy of power-leveling and artifact-collection.

What changed? I wasn’t doing anything different from what I had seen Inkie do a few weeks before, in fact I might have even been in the same zone. So why was I suddenly enjoying myself so much?

It’s simple: I went from passive observer to active player.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of a video game playthrough , I can summarize it thusly: it’s a series of videos (or sometimes a screen-shot filled post on a blog or forum) of a person or persons playing through an entire game. Sometimes, the player adds commentary, reminiscent of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (these are the ones usually referred to as Let’s Plays). Sometimes the videos consist of just particular segments of the game, like perhaps the bosses or just the cutscenes. Sometimes the video series is just the game completely, from beginning to end.

It’s not hard to do a playthrough of a game and upload it to Youtube (I myself have done three complete games, and a smattering of other highlight videos), but it is hard to do such things well. That is, in a manner that engages and keeps the attention of the audience. Good game playthroughs have several things going for them: good quality for their medium (are the screenshots the right size? Is the video bright enough? The audio loud enough?), the skill of the player, the aim of the playthrough (is the player doing a speed-run? A 100% run?), the quality of the commentator’s dialogue (if any), and the ratio of gameplay to cutscene.

That last bit, I think, is especially important because, unless the gameplay is wildly off-the-wall or the commentator’s dialogue is interesting or informative enough to carry through the dullness, many games these days are really boring to watch another person play.

Such was the case with Deadly Premonition and the Let’s Play I did with my good friend Greg over on Snarky Gamers. Here is a title that had a curiously polarizing effect on the two of us: I, as the active player, love the game, and now consider it one of my favorites, while Greg as the passive co-commentator, wound up hating it so much that during the last few hours he would actively do something else on his computer, annoyed and bored with each new interminable cutscene as we worked our way towards the ending.

As the passive participant in the tale of Francis York Morgan, Greg had no say in what happened during the game. He wasn’t even in the same room with me, as we set up a scheme over Skype so he could see the action. And at most we recorded perhaps an hour or two of footage a week.

I, on the other hand, didn’t just watch someone else play the game. I played it myself in my room on my entertainment system. I edited together the video footage, often watching cutscenes a second time. And when we switched the game to Easy, I was the one that had to replay eight hours of gameplay, which I did over the course of one Saturday.

My increased (and continuous, as Greg only saw at most two hours of the game at a time) exposure to the game meant that I was suddenly far more invested in the story of Deadly Premonition and its cast post-replaying than Greg was or could be. The evidence of this shift in perspective is even noticeable in our recordings as by the time the episode rolls around post-difficulty change, I actually stop talking during the cutscenes in order to focus more on what’s happening, and continue to do so all the way until the end of the game.

Video games, as all of those learned people with PhDs love telling dull-as-bricks folks like myself, are an active medium. But audience participation alone isn’t enough without a significant investment of time on the part of the audience as well. This is the whole purpose for game demos and trial accounts, as it means the player isn’t 1) just watching something with no idea what’s going on (much like trying to watch any movie in twenty minute clips), or 2) playing something so short that it’s over before it’s even started.

To say it in another way: a game that may look boring when viewed, might actually be fun when played, so make sure you sign up for Gamefly or bum your friends for trial codes to their MMO of choice. You might surprise yourself with how much you you wind up liking something that you thought was a piece of crap earlier.

Completely unrelated to all of that, my RIFT account runs out May 9^th and I’ve already cancelled. More on the reason for that at a later time.