Rough Spot #1: Fast travel

Fast travelling in games like Skyrim means the player might miss out on finding caves and shrines and lairs and the occasional random quest. But Dragon’s Dogma world is so static, and there are so few area shortcuts between major zones, and the Pawns’ dialogue is so repetitive, that traveling overland becomes very tedious and can kill momentum.

Rough Spot #2: The Affinity System

I really wish I had known the Affinity System was also basically the romance system of Dragon’s Dogma. It was a little disconcerting to see my character jump into bed with whoever I had done the most quests for (in my case, that douchebag Duchess). Hopefully in the next iteration, not only will the Affinity system be more revamped, but it will be more transparent as to what it actually does so the player isn’t suddenly surprised by who their Arisen finds attractive.

Rough Spot #3: Pawn Dialogue

It seems all roads lead to Gran Soren. Tis weak to fire! THE TAIL IS SEVERED!

Okay, I never actually got tired of hearing my pawn belt out that the tail is severed, but I’m sure a lot of people did. I don’t know how many people knew you could decrease your Pawn’s chatter by a visit to the Knowledge Chair, but I do know that the Knowledge Chair seemed to present me with the same things to adjust without ever letting me choose what I wanted to change. Why must I sit at the chair repeatedly to gradually change my Pawn’s personality? Why can’t I get a list of options upfront and adjust them to my liking in one go? Hopefully Pawn customization is more stream-lined in the future.

But I had a good time with Dragon’s Dogma. Definitely one of my highlight games of 2012, which probably isn’t that surprising given the name of this blog.  Up next is the stand-alone expansion (remember when extra content for a game was called an expansion and not DLC?) to Alan Wake, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare.  Shooting shadow zombie creatures and collecting pages for the good of mankind! Or whatever the plot thinks it’s about.

It’s 2013 and I made two resolutions for the New Year: 1) Clear my horrendous backlog of unfinished and untouched games and 2) actually use this blog for its intended purpose of writing about the games as I play them. It’s not called a travelogue for nothing!

Yesterday, I sat down and wrote out a list of all the games I have either started and not finished or just plain haven’t touched. I alphabetized them, as I figured alphabetical order’s the way to go. And then I realized I was looking at a stack of forty-one games and darn near gave up right there.

But no! I am resolved to clear my backlog! With that mindset I looked through the games, chose a few that were already close to being completed, and settled in for the night with the only Vita title on my list:

Sine Mora –

Lemme make this clear: I’m not a shooter person. Twitch reflexes, precision movements, enemy memorization, most of those things that the Youtube videos of bullet hell games show off are not my strong point. My shtick is to fling myself around until I lose, and through losing, learn how to win (which should explain my love of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls). And boy howdy, did I lose often in Sine Mora!

So I’ll admit that Sine Mora- Suda 51’s side-scrolling shooter, bullet hell, shmup, whatever you want to call- is not my type of game.  I’m not really qualified to talk about it because I quite literally don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. I played through it anyway, but I can’t really seem to think of much to say about it other than that it’s very pretty, the plot is confusing, and mostly I just held down the Fire button and dodged as best as I could- usually into  a wall and exploded but, again- not a shooter person.

Now, as far as the hardware aspects… Sine Mora is a game that perfectly shows off how responsive the Vita thumbstick can be. Once I learned that I didn’t have to slalom my ship all over the screen like a drunk driver in a speed boat, I was impressed at the small, subtle adjustments to my ship that I could make. I mean, my ship still exploded constantly, but hey, I was able to dodge when I wanted to, usually into a wall. And the crispness of the screen- everything was beautiful, vibrant, and detailed, all the more to distract me with subtle details which got me blown up again.

If you’ve got a Vita and are looking for some quick action on the go, give it a whirl. It’s shiny and there are explosions and I’m really, really bad at it, but I still thought it was very well done.

Sine Mora is the first game in my backlog cleared in 2013. Just forty more games to go! Next up: Finishing Dragon’s Dogma’s post-game content.

Which then proceeded to sit on my HDD because, again, I’m fairly apathetic towards the game.

So there Amalur sat, gathering digital dust, as I hemmed and hawed about in some other equally tepid-to-bad console games (Armored Core V: tepid, Deadliest Warrior: bad, Tales of Graces f: lukewarm), and as I piddled and poked about on my usual PC fare (Minecraft, Minecraft, Minecraft, going /afk in Rift).

And then something curious happened. At PAX East I witnessed an upcoming MMO (Tera) that looked like it had some actually interesting combat mechanics. And I was craving an MMO with some good combat, as Rift’s combat is strictly traditional fare. So I prepared myself mentally to go poke about in Tera.

And then something even more curious happened: I realized that I already had a game with a better combat system and MMO trappings, downloaded to my HDD and waiting for me to double-click its icon.

And that is how my affair with Kingdom of Amalur started.

That’s not to say it’s somehow an amazingly good game. Amalur’s story still hovers between “meh” and “slight chuckle;” the world is still somewhat hollow despite the large number of NPCs; there’s no horse or other mounts, which in a gameworld of Amalur’s size somehow seems criminal; and the voice acting… sounds like the voice director told everyone to be as needlessly hammy as possible (Cam Clarke is in it; that should say everything right there).

But that combat. Oh, that combat.

Whenever I visit the GameFAQS boards for a new game, many of the new threads will be “I”ve played X, will I like this game?” Which always makes me want to tell people to rent it and see for themselves, despite how the former Gamestop manager in me already knows that people won’t rent it for themselves and will just ask other people. That’s the whole basis of “word of mouth” after all. So with that in mind, here are the comparisons I actually managed to come up with in the event you ever go “I played X, will I like Amalur?”.*

Amalur vs Skyrim – Skyrim is a slower, more methodical action RPG, more focused on giving the player a country and a story hook (if they want one), and then turning them loose to do whatever the heck they want without feeling the need to be constrained to the story at all. There’s more things to do in Skyrim as opposed to Amalur, and more ways to go about doing it. Amalur, meanwhile, is fairly linear in it’s expected playstyle: outside of completing quests and exploring zones, there is nothing else to do, no player houses to personalize with decorations (though there are player houses), no friends to make or spouses to marry, nothing. There is you, the quest, and the combat. Amalur has less quests and random caves than Skyrim, but to compensate each of those quests and side areas feel more unique than Skyrim’s. Even if Amalur reuses art assets, none of its areas feel exactly cookie-cutterish.

Amalur vs Dark Souls – Amalur, and I realize that this might sound silly, has the more comprehensible story, if by that I mean only that the story is explicitly spelled out in Amalur while in Dark Souls the story is fed to the player in bits and pieces, and even then some of those pieces don’t seem to make sense, and the story overall is heavily on the cynical side. Dark Souls, of course, has the more unique environmental settings, and a far more difficult and punishing combat that feels more rewarding once mastered. Amalur is far more expansive in size of the world and content, but the extra areas start to feel like padding after a while.

Amalur vs Diablo – The longevity of Diablo and its clones comes from the ability to take your character into progressively harder difficulties for progressively better gear to make your guy progressively more super-powered so you can repeat the entire process until you get bored and tap out. Amalur throws loot at you wildly, lets you craft your own gear, lets you chose the hardest difficulty upfront, and once the game ends, that’s pretty much it for that character unless you have some sidequests you need to finish or buy some DLC. Amalur is finite with more more side content to compensate; Diablo is designed to be repeatable and encourages you to replay to experience randomly selected quests.

Amalur vs Fable – This is, by far, the closest comparisons one could make between two like-minded games (at least on this list). They have similar combat, similar world layouts, similar quest schemes… the major differences occur with story presentation (I can hate all I want on Fable’s stories, but I have to admit that the stories are generally entertaining up until the point I get disappointed/annoyed with them) and the character’s interaction with the world. There’s no morality system in Amalur, and again no spouses. No property mini-game to buy and/or manage. Amalur has the greater setting diversity as it takes place throughout a continent as opposed to Fable’s kingdom (with a few exceptions in Fable). Amalur has the tighter combat with more depth, but Fable 2 and 3 give you a dog and has the NPCs in the world react more to your presence and your choices. It’s a difference of degrees.

Amalur vs The Witcher – I’ve played all of ten hours of Witcher 1 and one hour of Witcher 2 and I have to say that I have absolutely no opinion either way because 1) W1 was made using the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine, so the combat is suboptimal due to system mechanics, and 2) I don’t actually recall much about the Witcher games except that Geralt gets laid a lot and there’s some decapitations and a lot of bad stuff happens to various people. So I guess, um, the Witcher series is a lot more adult-oriented in terms of tone, setting, and gameplay while Amalur, despite the blood, is a more light-hearted, arcade-style affair.

Amalur vs MMORPGs – Obviously Amalur is strictly single-player and MMOs are multi-player, so that’s an apples to oranges comparison I won’t make. So to compare it to things that are applicable: the MMOs I’ve played were boring and repetitive when it comes to their gameplay elements. We all know about the “press 1 to attack, wait for cooldown” style that WoW, Rift, Champions, et al have been using for years. Combat in MMOs are generally static affairs with individual skill boiling down to how well a player can do the same repetitive actions against the same monster in the same fight day in and day out, week after week, while waiting for a particular piece of equipment to drop that will make their same-old rotation generate a slightly larger number once those buttons are pressed (with the occasional move slightly to avoid environmental hazard throw in for variety). It’s a Diablo-clone taken up to 11 and filled with arbitrary gimmicks to stretch out how long it takes a person to accomplish anything. Amalur may not have fishing, or zones that require minutes to cross, or mounts, or raids, but it is more dynamic in its gameplay, and that can carry me for a long time, because dynamic means “challenge” and challenge means I’m not in any danger of falling asleep in the middle of a raid again. Perhaps the upcoming Amalur MMO will be a different story, once a social component is thrown in.

So I’m almost 40 hours into Kingdom of Amalur and I’m digging it. It reminds me of those few times in WoW when I took my character through every zone, completing each and every single quest they came across, for no other reason than I get some sort of amusement out of completing every single possible quest a zone has to offer. The fast travel system is a large boon to this type of gameplay as, in the absence of a mount, I can just pop back to a town, turn in a quest, pop back to the nearest place I was, and continue to blaze a trail across the entire country. The only real time I’ve backtracked for a length of time longer than a quest-turn in was when I hit max Detect Hidden and I went around hitting all the lorestones I had missed (each set completed gives a small stat boost in some way). Amalur makes me feel like I’m always progressing, and I do so enjoy the quest for progression.

*Subject to my own opinion and observations, blah blah blah, not an endorsement of this or that, I love puppies.

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.

The first point IGN addresses is the multiplayer modes. That is, it harps a bunch on Skyrim’s lack of multiplayer.

Multiplayer in a Bethesda game wouldn’t work, for a variety of reasons: it breaks difficulty, loot distribution, XP distribution, pacing, and level design, and modding. Can you imagine trying to run through a Vault in Fallout 3 with multiple people? Can you imagine how often you would get in each other’s way? Not to mention all the questions that start to crop up like weeds: do you allow other players to free roam the world (Fable 3’s Henchmen) or are they constrained to the host’s area (Borderlands Co-op)?  Can other players use their actual character in co-op (Sacred 2) or do they have an online-only character discrete from offline (Two Worlds II)? Do they gain experience/money/loot (Hunted: The Demon’s Forge) or do they get nothing (Dungeon Siege III)? What, if anything, would a second, human person actually add to a Bethesda game? Bethesda looked at it, realized it not only wouldn’t add as much as they want but would actually detract from their focus on the single-player, and decided against it. Now, that may not mean that The Elder Scrolls VI couldn’t have multi-player, but for the purposes of Skyrim, Bethesda’s set on perfecting their single-player experience, and for that I’m grateful.

Dark Souls, by comparison, as a spiritual successor of Demon’s Souls, had co-op built into the game design document from day one. And the article overlooks that this isn’t “co-op” in the Gears of War or Halo sense where you and a friend go through the entire game together. Blue and Black Phantoms (provided they hold to a similar system to Demon’s Souls’ phantom system) can only be summoned or invade when specific criteria are met. And it is temporary. There is no in-game chat in Dark Souls (the 360 version even disables the voice chat, though you can still form Live parties and talk through those). And unless you and your friend coordinate outside of the game, even finding your friend to play with them isn’t easy. And, again, it’s temporary. Dark Souls’ co-op is designed to provide temporary help to overcome a difficult spot, rather than cruising through the entire campaign with a chum or two.

Dark Souls is so difficult that you need the occasional help. Oblivion or Fallout 3? Not so much.

And besides, multiplayer in Dark Souls was disabled on release day anyway.

The next point the article compares is DLC and pricing. And I’ll admit that I do agree that $150 for the collector’s edition of Skyrim is a bit much even for me, because I really don’t need a metal giant bust on my shelf (despite having both the inFAMOUS 2 and Halo: REACH statues). The statue alone just isn’t enough swag to convince me to shell out the money for the collector’s edition of Skyrim. When you compare the regular edition Skyrim to the collector’s edition of Dark Souls, yes, DkS is the clear winner in this arena (and note that the hardbound mini-strategy guide was changed to a digital .pdf full version of the strategy guide, increasing the worth of the set).

DLC is a different beast. FROM Software doesn’t do DLC; there have been dozens of rumors of the shattered archstone in Demon’s Souls being released later as DLC which were not true. FROM Software likes to release 100% complete games (remember those days?). Excluding Broken Steel changing the ending of Fallout 3, Bethesda does the same thing as FROM Software: release 100% complete games. Bethesda seems to actually understand what the heck downloadable content is even for: adding new content that supplements the 100% complete game. None of Bethesda’s DLC has ever been “dummied out” content that the player can restore for added money. Most of their DLC comprises of either vanity items (say it with me now: horse armor) or short one to three hour episodes that give you bonus gear or housing upon completion that don’t fit into the expansion pack model.

And speaking of expansion packs, Bethesda is still one of the few companies that still make expansion packs for their games, instead of nickel and diming everyone with DLC. And they happily compile all of their DLC into retail discs you can buy in one go (Knights of the Nine came with all of the then-released DLC to that point. Yes. I own horse armor). And they actually make some of their DLC in response to player feedback. And their DLC is usually good. And sometimes they give it out for free. Really, as far as DLC goes, Bethesda’s on the far end of the spectrum when it comes to trying to rip people off.

Which is to say nothing of the PC version of Bethesda’s games and the modding community. The Lost Spires and the Dungeons of Ivellon easily rival any DLC Bethesda themselves have released, and Skyrim appears to be continuing that trend.

So, really, if anything I’d say that while FROM Software wins the initial purchase price contest between the two, Bethesda’s got a good handle on their DLC, expansions, and bonus content.

The third point brought up is “epic scope.”

“Scope” is a noun, and a ridiculously poor word choice to apply to a game. Seriously, look up the definition of “scope” and try to figure out which of those apply to a video game. The one that comes close is “A purpose, end, or intention.” Then you’ve got “epic,” which as an adjective means “Heroic or grand in scale or character.”

Let’s forget for the moment that you can’t measure the subjective definition of the word “epic,” because I’ll be here all day talking about how idiotic it that entire topic is. Instead, let’s pretend that you actually can quantify an opinion with the only way that remotely makes sense: time investment.

Now, the article goes into crap about the physical size of Skyrim being the same as Cyrodil in Oblivion but that Todd Howard says that Skyrim feels bigger “because of the mountains.” That might be the most out-of-context statement of the year, because Oblivion was actually pretty huge. Not Minecraft huge, because that’s just silly, but it was large. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about games with large geographic areas, it’s that the bigger the space, the less the content. The entire Grand Theft Auto series got progressively larger and larger in area until it peaked in San Andreas, which was an entire state (more or less) that could be traversed. And a whole lot of it was empty, navigation filler. GTAIV got rid of the wide-open state with three cities in favor of one, much more densly packed city. The result was that GTAIV, despite being smaller that San Andreas, felt much thicker in both detail and content than GTA:SA.

Skyrim, according to Todd Howard, is similar. Physically the same size of Cyrodil, but now they’ve increased the density of the region. You can (I’m assuming here) find all sorts of nooks and crannies and caves thanks to those self-same mountains. There are more animals, more people, more everything in an attempt to make the world feel more alive and more lived-in.  I know I’m going to be spending a lot of time exploring Skyrim for random odds and ends to decorate my player housing with, and Bethesda is known for not just hundreds of side-quests, but quite a few unmarked sidequests as well. There will be a lot of content in Skyrim, many many hundreds of hours in the default game.

And again, let’s not forget the potential addition of DLC or- for those of us going PC- modded content. I am going to be spending a lot of time in Skyrim.

Now let’s compare that to Dark Souls. Dark Souls is set to be one of those “an hour to learn, a lifetime to master” games. Only more like “a hundred hours to learn through repeated and constant death.” There is nothing random in Dark Souls; every monster, ledge and boss has been placed with deliberate care and an eye to balance. Once you know where something is, it will always be there, forever. As you die, and die, and die, your competence as a gamer grows in tandem with your character’s stats. Or you will become so frustrated that you will quit outright. The open-world design of Dark Souls is filled with peril at practically every turn, no guidance whatsoever. Everything is dead. And what isn’t dead is trying to kill you. And what isn’t trying to kill you is probably in the single-digits. If Skyrim is the equivalent of Legend of Zelda when it comes to roaming around, taking in the sights, and eventually finding dungeons to pillage, Dark Souls is Zelda II, where the instant you step off the grass you will die in total agony.

Actually, even if you stay on the road in this metaphor, you will die in total agony. That’s the type of game Dark Souls is.

And eventually, unlike Skyrim, once you reach the end of the road on Dark Souls, the journey’s over. That’s it. Time to start over, with the same content, just on an even harder difficulty. Only now you’re far more familiar with the game than you were before, and will do better the second, third, or even the fourth time around. This means is that, combined with the finite amount of content available, as you become better at playing Dark Souls, you will find yourself spending less time in Dark Souls because you’ll complete each game cycle faster (whether or not you consider such a diminishing return a negative point depends on your point of view).

All told, across two characters, I’ve put in about 200 hours into Demon’s Souls. By comparison, I’ve put in about 400-500 into Oblivion (more if you count the time I spent developing my own mods as “game time”). I love both games. While I found both to be suitably “epic,” both games have different “scopes.” Different end-game, different mentalities in approaching the content, different methods of handling and exploring the overworld, different ways of handling the story… they’re different games.

Also, the article completely fails to compare, mile for mile, the size of Skyrim to the size of Lordran. Skyrim is denser than Oblivion. Skyrim has Oblivion’s fast travel system. Dark Souls is just bigger than Demon’s Souls. With twice the weapons/accessories of Demon’s Souls. Way to actually compare the two games you’re discussing to each other as opposed to their predecessors. And still get things wrong. Because Dark Souls has a fast travel system, too. Does that “quietly designate a tremendous amount of space as filler,” IGN article?

The fourth point the article brings up is the combat and challenge of the game. How many people were actually turned off by the challenge of Demon’s Souls? How many of those self-same  people are likely to get Dark Souls knowing that is far harder than its predecessor? In comparison, how many people played Oblivion and are therefore more likely to get Skyrim?

Yes, Dark Souls is harder than Skyrim will be. That’s kind of the point. Dark Souls is being marketed as a masochist’s dream game: it will punish you, and punish you, and just when you think you’ve gotten a handle on something it will punish you again. The game caters to a very specific mindset, and it’s no fault of FROM Software’s if people don’t like the high degree of difficulty the game represents. Some games are played for fun; some games are played for the sheer challenge. Guess which category Skyrim and Dark Souls fall into respectively.

Mods exist that make Oblivion as difficult as Demon’s Souls. Mods like Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, which I’ve tried. I subsequently deleted it as it just reinforced that I don’t play Oblivion for nigh-constant overwhelming difficulty. Sometimes a girl just wants to hunt some deer without the countryside  trying to destroy her.

I do admit that the controls for Oblivion sucked (and by extension Fallout 3), but Bethesda’s working on that. Personally, I look forward to stealthily creeping my way through a cave, headshotting everything I come across.

And that leaves us with the fifth “point.”

Dragons.

Yes. The Dragons. I don’t even-

It gave a headache then, and it gives me one now.

Maybe it’s because I played five years of World of Warcraft, but I really could care less about the dragons. For Skyrim, they’ll be flying upgrades/loot bags. For Dark Souls, they’ll be… flying upgrades/loot bags. I can only take so many dragons before they start to become redundant.

The key difference, therefore, will be if they make any sense in the context of the game. Bethesda treats their lore like a bible, with everything fitting in at every point without it seeming out of place. Pages of in-game books are written about a variety of subjects that exist for the sole reason of being read at the player’s leisure. Bethesda made every ending of Daggerdale canonical. All of them. Even the ones that blatantly contradicted each other. And they did it in a way that made sense. Therefore, the way the dragons look, their behavior, their purpose for being in the game will all but be guaranteed to perfectly align with the lore of Tamriel.

In Demon’s Souls, I killed a god. An actual, honest to goodness, dragon god. And at least two other dragons. And the two other dragons didn’t even need to die; they just happened to be there and I had 500 arrows, and I shot every single one into their pattern-repetitive hides while surfing the internet and smashing L1 whenever I heard a roar. There was no point to the dragons other the Rules of Cool and Difficulty. They didn’t even get the lore blurb that the Dragon God received. And the only thing I got for them was currency that I promptly lost by dying somewhere else.

Choosing one game over another because you liked the design of one set of monsters compared to the other game isn’t a reason why “Dark Souls will kill Skyrim.” It just proves that you like shiny character designs without knowing anything other than their purpose in the game.

Dark Souls is due out next week, and Skyrim isn’t due until November. They’re not even competing  against each other in the same month, unless you count Christmas sales. Really, the fact that they’re releasing five weeks apart shows that at least someone in marketing is cognizant that releasing the game with the shorter play duration first means they don’t have to compete against each other. It’s like the RPG developers are the only ones that realize that RPG fans will buy their games no matter what, and stage their release dates accordingly (remember Witcher 2? Pushed back to 2012 to avoid competing with Mass Effect 2? Or… Dragon Age 2? Some Bioware game I didn’t buy). And they will sell copies.

(Of course, there is now the problem of people turning in Dark Souls to pay for Skyrim…)

IGN could have spent so much time touting Dark Souls and helping to make more people aware of its pending release instead of going “neener, neener, Skyrim!” and trolling  just about anyone that suffered through that mass of opinionated blather. As it is, the article saddened me because it’s such unavoidable biased fanwanking (and not particularly good fanwank either) that many people might dismiss Dark Souls outright because IGN touted it over Skyrim.

So please, if you were ever thinking about getting Dark Souls, I urge you to give Demon’s Souls a try. It’s $20 on the PS3 and the multiplayer servers were extended until 2012! If you like that type of gameplay, a straight-up love letter to old school difficulty, then consider Dark Souls a try when it launchs October 4^th.

And if you ever wanted to just explore an environment and do whatever you wanted for hours on end, pick up The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition on Steam (or your console of choice). Even now there are so many tiny details to oogle over and so many vistas to take pictures of for your desktop. You can get it and every piece of DLC for $25! Not to mention the plethora of mods available!

Make your decisions of whether to get Dark Souls or Skyrim the proper way: by trying their predecessors and coming to your own conclusions. I personally, as a lover of difficulty and exploration, will be getting both when they release. Neither game will be “better” to me, because I’ve already been in love with them from the instant I heard they were announced, and I’m sure I’m going to be the ultimate winner because I’ll have a game that reminds me why I love gaming in the first place.

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.

I didn’t play much, but it feels really good. The new lighting made the transition to night smoother, and the torches I plopped down seemed to have a far brighter light than I recalled. Combat is a bit more dynamic: no longer can you just machine-gun fire arrows while strafing, and pop some pork chops when you’re low on health. Now the arrow distance and power are commiserate with how long you “draw” the bow, that is hold down the right-mouse button. When you do, your view gets all zoomed in and you move more slowly, but oh boy can you let it fly! I lost to a skeleton, as I hadn’t realized at first you were supposed to hold the button down, and just a simple click fires an arrow that almost immediately lands at your feet.

I did not see any Endermen, and didn’t notice anything unusual while fighting with an axe (supposedly you can block with melee weapons). I did, however, respawn in one of the NPC towns (empty of NPCs). It’s quite cute and homey, and a creeper immediately blew up a portion of the wheat farm. I took the wheat to make a loaf of bread, and found out something else: you have to hold down the button to eat food, now. There’s a cute little eating animation, and then your hunger bar refills. If your hunger bar is full, you’ll start regenerating health.

That’s as much of time as I managed to experience, though I did hang around. I saw someone mining deep within a chasm. There were new types of meat (and zombies now drop “rotten meat”). I saw some folks flying around in Creative Mode, too. Skill points were present, but not fully implemented as there currently wasn’t a way to spend them. I also didn’t see (or notice) the much larger biomes, rivers, or oceans, though I heard those were present.

Supposedly, Notch will be splitting 1.8 into a 1.8 and 1.9. We’ll see!

Outside of Minecraft, I played an abstract locked room puzzle indie game called Kairo, which according to this little card I’m holding should be due out in September for PC & Mac. I do so enjoy locked door puzzle rooms, and so long as nothing jumps out and tries to kill me, I’m sure I’ll love Kairo.

I really really wanted to get some hands-on time with Trion’s free-to-play, persistent world strategy MMO End of Nations, but every time I drifted by the display all the stations were filled. I’ll just have to keep my eyes on it, as the concept of conquering the world in the name of Guam makes me giggle.

Speaking of MMOs, I was with a primarily MMO-ish person, and so that comprised the bulk of what I saw. Here’s a brief rundown:

Star Wars The Old Republic – I know it’s hard sometimes to make an MMO actually look like high-octane non-stop awesomesauce action, but SWTOR didn’t even try. Guys, it’s kinda disheartening when the commentator for the PvP sounds like he can barely stay awake during the combat. I know I’ve heard of “sleeper hit” before, but the slow pace of the straight-up combat makes SWTOR look like more of a “sleeping hit.” People will buy it because it’s Star Wars, but, man, it was so dull to watch.

Wildfire – Someone in line to The Secret World described it as the “World of Starcraft that Blizzard didn’t bother to make.” Only with magitek bunny girls. We got to the exhibit – it’s more like World of Firefly (keeping in mind that I’ve never seen Firefly). It’s a comedy. And the bunny girl is a human with purple rabbit ears. I was disheartened and walked away with my hopes of creating Jazz Jackrabbit dashed.

Guild Wars 2 – Now here was something that stood out for something I don’t usually think about: the man demoing the game had a level 14 ranger decked out in a white waistcoat and breeches. My withered sense of fashion kicked in and I realized I could make the hottest outfit ever, perhaps even with a floppy hat! Stylish hunters are the best hunters. And they’ve revamped questing, bosses are huge and impressive, you can swap out specs on the fly and in combat, yadda yadda yadda, point me towards the hats!

Lord of the Rings Online – Kirstie got me into Turbine’s after-party, despite the fact that I don’t play, and have a seething hatred for LOTRO – but I will admit that the community managers are super awesome and approachable. And I do dig my Dungeons & Dragons Online messenger bag.

RIFT – I’m going to play RIFT again. Not because they gave me free stuff and let me into their after-party, but because… they gave me free stuff and let me into their after-party AND End of Nations looks spiffy. Also, there’s the RP to be had, and instances to run, and unlike SWTOR, every screen was showing something that looked like it was actually engaging. Nobody looked as dirt-bored at RIFT as they did at SWTOR.

The Secret World – I’m so buying this. So so so buying this. Saving the world in denim jeans and a baseball cap! I like the “no trash mobs” idea to instances, and using the mini-bosses to teach the mechanics of the major boss. I wonder if I can have a healer that heals by shotgunning teammates in the face. That would be awesome. I know I can’t (healer roles use a type of blood magic) but it amuses me to think that I could.

Some other miscellaneous things:

Skyrim is going to take my money and the shredded remains of my social life and I will not care one bit. I’m hovering between wanting to consume every shred of intel that comes out or completely avoiding it until the game is in my hands. So hard…

Path of Exile – an indie game in the vein of Diablo and Torchlight. It’ll be free to play, with any items you pay for being purely cosmetic. I’ve got the beta, the game’s graphics remind me of Titan Quest, and the skill tree is… oh my. I think it’s less a skill “tree” and more skill “forest.” Between this and Torchlight II, there will probably never be a reason to touch Diablo III. And isn’t that interesting.

Spider-Man: Edge of Time – I got only the barest glimpse of this game, and all I could wonder was who was voicing the Spider-Men. I would not mind if Josh Keaton took a role; Spectacular Spider-Man was my favorite next to the Animated Series and Christopher Daniel Barnes.

Dance Central 2 and Just Dance 3 – I played both of these, made a total fool of myself with both of them, and came out of DC2 wanting to go out and buy a Kinect and a copy of DC1 (congrats, Dance Central, as the first game to make me consider a Kinect). Maybe it was because DC2 had Sandstorm in the playlist, and so immediately sank a hook into my DDR nostalgia and reeled me in. But really I think it was that DC2 was more openly accessible to a first-time player; it was very clear when watching the two games how many more people were able to successfully do the dance moves in DC2 vs JD3, and I chalk it all down to the UI and the way the moves are presented on screen.

Just Dance 3 will also forever stand out as having the most disturbing dance demonstration ever, in that one particular move basically required the dancing couple to almost grind on each other. The two female exhibitors turned it into the most blatant and overt fanservice they could without making out on stage.

The other “couple” was a 10 and 12 year old pair of boys. They… That was just creepy.

In less creepy news, I finally found a video game vendor on the third day. I now own Contra: Shattered Soldier (PS2), Kid Niki, Radical Ninja (NES), and Trauma Center: Second Opinion (Wii). I’m going to play them now!

Vincent Brooks doesn’t have to worry about the Power Rangers busting down his apartment door. He’s got more realistic problems: the uncertainty of a new job, no cash, a stable girlfriend that wants to talk commitment… the general things that cause anxiety in a long-time stereotypical bachelor.

The giant towers that he’s forced to climb that can kill him if he falls, well, okay, that’s unusual.

So is the tale of Catherine, a game where you play as a man’s subconscious trying to help him survive his worst fears and influence his thoughts so he doesn’t make as much of an ass of himself during the daytime. It’s a dating sim. It’s a block puzzle. It’s gorgeously animated by Studio 4c (the same studio animating the new 2011 ThunderCats), and has stellar voice work from the likes of Troy Baker, Michelle Ruff, and Laura Bailey (as Vincent, Katherine, and Catherine respectively) among others.

I was initially skeptical of Catherine; when every trailer save for the last hyped up the story of Vincent and his infidelity without showing any gameplay, and most of the art details that came my way looked more blatantly sexual than the promos for Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix, I took it as a sign that maybe Atlus was worried that the gameplay wouldn’t be strong enough to sell the game. And when the gameplay trailer did come out a few scant weeks before release, coupled with a demo that led to many people going “Wait, it’s what type of game?” I became even more apprehensive.

But Atlus has yet to steer me wrong with any of the games I’ve picked up since I took a chance on Demon’s Souls, so despite my misgivings I carried through with my reserve. I stayed clear of the demo and only skimmed the initial reviews, eager to forge my own opinions and determined to go into this game with as much of an open mind as possible. The only external influence early other reviews had for me was the complaints of difficulty, and so I did my first playthrough on Easy to avoid the frustrating brain-busting rise in difficulty that others complained of just past the halfway point of the game.

I needn’t have worried. In addition to having a unique, mature and engaging story, Catherine was nowhere near as difficult as people seem to have made it out to be. I’m not sure what that says about me, and that maybe I’m just sort of block-puzzle solving savant, but I had a lot of fun conquering Vincent’s nightly terrors. While each stage does have a time limit in the form of the bottommost layer of the tower periodically falling into the abyss, I never felt pressured or rushed to play the stage as fast as possible.

This is a game about skill and observation, not twitch reflexes. During my time navigating Vincent’s nightmares, I came to realize fairly early that the time constraint is fairly nonexistent if a player is paying attention. There’s an ebb and flow to the tower climbs; faster sections require less complex block manipulation and have further spaced out checkpoints, while a difficult area will almost always have a checkpoint before and after the section. A particularly fiendish area may even have a checkpoint and an extra-life granting Mystic Pillow right near each other, creating nigh-unlimited attempts so long as the player always grabs that pillow. When the player manages to sync up with this designed groove, navigating the more flowing sections easily buys the time needed to approach the difficult area more deliberately, and creates a feeling of satisfaction when the perfect path to climbing a tower is discovered. This stayed true even when I started to tackle the tower under Normal difficulty.

The game is careful to avoid cheese, and for the most part it succeeds. If a player is stuck, it is more often than not because of something they did as opposed to some unexpected quirk that the game pulled. Most of my frustration, therefore, was caused by either Vincent’s loose controls, such as his preference to grab hold of a block in the background when I want him to grab a block beside him and shoving it off into the abyss (which accidentally resulted, on the final stage, the column containing my checkpoint plummeting off into darkness and left me laughing in hysterics because I killed the checkpoint), or the final story boss’ habit of changing special blocks in the perfect way to instant kill Vincent. Said boss, though, just as equally tended to give me blocks that let me skip vast sections of the tower– with the boss realizing and getting ticked, much to my amusement.

The camera can also be a source of pain. It’s rare that Vincent will need to scamper across the rear of the tower, but on those occasions where I had made it necessary the camera’s unwillingness to swivel all the way to the back so I could see Vincent (and Vincent’s controls reversing when he’s back there) often meant I just found it easier to restart and try a different method of climbing.

My only other gripe with the game is the sound. Several sounds- the stage music, Vincent’s sound bytes when climbing, the bell that tolls when the player is near the top of a tower- repeat endlessly and can drive to distraction. There is even one particular stage, arguably the hardest one, which starts right off at the top of the tower, with the bell already tolling, and it kept tolling through the twenty minutes it took me to solve that stage. I was so sick of that bell– it’s even present during the Landing, breather segments between stages where the player can save, buy items, and talk to NPCs– that I almost turned my sound off between stages in the nightmare. The music does an adequate job but is very noticeable looping, especially as there’s a one second pause between the end of the track and the start of the next repetition. The other audio issue, noticeable in the beginning and end narrations, is of the dub’s timing being off such that the voice actress’ lines run over each other. Given the excellent voice acting, the timing issues of the dubbing and the music and that non-stop tolling bell stand out all the more for disappointing in an otherwise wonderfully crafted game.

In between bouts of block-pushing shenanigans, Vincent’s personal problems, and the player’s role as his subtly-influencing subconscious, play out in hilarious ways. I dedicated my first playthrough not to seeing what would happen if I chose willy-nilly, but by being as much of a flagrant Vincent/Katherine-shipping fangirl as could possibly be without turning into a forum troll, and attempting to answer all of the karma-esque meter questions in the way that shoved that bar as far into the blue as I could get it. It was a plan that almost ruined itself because, at the  risk of spoilers, Katherine isn’t exactly the shallow love interest most dating-sim games would portray her trope to be; it’s not every game that a third of the way through takes the fangirl by the scruff of her neck, and makes her think that maybe Vincent was tempted by Catherine for  reasons greater than Vincent’s being a dog that just wants to hump an easy skank.

Vincent can, in and out of his dreams, talk to other people around him, each of whom has their own personalities and woes. If the player talks to them enough, he or she can even influence the people to do the right (or wrong) thing to resolve their situation. Like Vincent himself, this is less about telling the player the NPC an obvious solution, and more about subtly influencing their behaviors and watching them act of their own volition. Talk to a fellow sheep about being more confident while on the Landing, and in the real world his waking self starts to gradually become more self-assure about what he wants. Don’t talk to them, or decide to be a jerk, and one night that particular person will no longer show up on the Landing or in the bar. It’s chilling to check the nightly news and the hear the anchor dispassionately list that NPC as one of the latest victims of the deadly nightmares.

Catherine has a bit of an Inception quality to it. It’s a game presented as an Outer Limits or Tales of the Crypt-esque story of horror and maturity, with a protagonist that’s a badass determinator in his dreams and a confused software engineer in his waking life, being chased by literal metaphors of the things he fears the most: babies, marriage, whatever the Stage 3 boss was supposed to be. I had, and am still having, a tremendous amount of fun with it, what with the six additional endings to find, gold trophies for perfect runs to earn, and bonus puzzle areas- both in the form of an time-limit free arcade game (found inside the main game, inside the tv show, inside the game itself) and a high-score arena that can be tackled solo, co-op or competitively- to complete. Minor quibbles aside, this is easily one of my favorite games of the year.

But somewhere around the halfway point, the shiny polish of Cole’s new powers begin to wear off, and I started to realize I was playing a slightly re-arranged, slightly more polished copy of inFamous. I stopped doing side-missions. I stopped hunting for blast shards to increase Cole’s energy supply. I just started plowing through story missions in an attempt to see the ending. I’d go back later, I told myself, to work on those trophies and the Evil ending.

As of this writing I have yet to touch inFamous 2 again.

Why did I fall out of love with inFamous 2? What happened?

inFamous 2, despite engendering the same feeling of visceral joy as inFamous, never seems to get any deeper or more profound than the summertime treat bought from the ice cream truck. I had tremendous amount of fun while I was playing the game, but whenever I stopped, I could  never quite recall what had happened or why I enjoyed it. I just knew I liked it, like some sort of rote reaction or conditioned response. I like superheros; inFamous 2 is superhero game; ergo, I like inFamous 2. And formulaic love is just as shallow as it implies.

Don’t get me wrong. Like eating an ice cream sandwich on a hot day, when I was actually playing inFamous 2 I really enjoyed it. But just like an ice cream sandwich, after consumption, I threw out the wrapper and went to see what else I had to snack on.

inFamous 2 doesn’t really do anything wrong. It hits many of the points that made the first game such fun.  The general flow of the game remains similar to other titles in the genre in that while traveling around an open-sandbox world, you start missions by approaching a glowing marker of a particular color: white for the main storyline, yellow for side missions, and green for user-generated content. (User-generated sections are custom missions that other players can play and rate from a pre-set, yet extensive list of options. It’s relatively easy to generate a quick “Defeat all enemies” scenario, or set up some rings for a checkpoint race, and an active community forum can provide help for more complex ideas.)

Keeping in line with the original inFamous’s Karma system, there’s an occasional Good side/Evil side mission that, upon completion, will lock out the mission of the opposing alignment. One change over the two games is that these lockout missions are no longer strictly side missions only—several story missions in the game are given by two characters of opposing morals, and these missions can be wildly different in so far as location and goals.

A trademark of the game is having Cole traverse the city by rooftop jumping and powerline skating. They are visceral pleasures that I will never get tired of — Cole really gets around, and climbing buildings to get where he’s going is made swifter by the addition of vertical cables that rocket him up the sides of buildings in seconds.  However, heaven help the player that actually wants to jump onto a vertical power line. Jumping directly towards one will cause Cole to float over and attach himself to any nearby outcropping in furious defiance of all logic. That aside, by the mid-point of the game the entire city can be traversed purely from the rooftops, and rooftops can be gained even faster than before. If half the missions involved just racing across the skyline, I would be a happy gamer.

Cole’s expanded powers are all great to play with. Each “Blast Core” Cole activates gives him a new electric-based power to replace the ones he loses at the start of the game, such as reinstating his electric sniper rifle or his electrical rockets. On top of his original electricity, Cole also gets a choice between adding ice or fire powers to his arsenal. I went the ice route in my first playthrough, though I didn’t bother with most of them. (A side note: my love goes out to whoever designed the Lightning Hook. It is ridiculous fun yanking an enemy off a rooftop or ripping them off the street to go flying through the air. It’s too bad that this power is so far relegated to pre-order DLC, though.)

Even the few cons are similar to the first game: to start with, there’s a fair amount of assets obviously recycled from the first inFamous, notably Cole’s idle animation, the karma and energy meters, and giant cranes the player has to scale. Such things aren’t noticeable, though, unless one is paying attention and looking for them.

The game also feels as though it has more glitches than inFAMOUS. For example, Cole will often phase through solid objects, and there were several times when the camera stubbornly refused to cooperate in hectic firefights by pointing straight down and spinning in rapid circles. Vehicular escort missions are just as much of a pain to complete as they were in the first game, and if the Good ending is the canon ending, well… Let’s just say that it’s going to be interesting to see how Sucker Punch writes their way out of that dilemma. It’s not a bad ending, per se, it’s just very… definite.

If you liked inFamous, you’ll like inFamous 2, but don’t expect long-lasting appeal here. Players who didn’t like the repetitive missions of the first game, or who want a story more interesting than “Super-powered Guy spends several in-game days fetching objects to power another object” won’t be likely to be won over by the addition of yet more quests, similar missions or the occasional buggy gameplay of inFamous 2.

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:

.

I’m starting to love Terraria. Muahahaha.

It was a dark and stormy night when I finally launched Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

“Put on headphones,” the game whispered to me.  “Play with the gamma turned down.  Yeah, we know it’s one in the morning and you’re short on sleep and the lights are off and you’re all alone in a big scary house while a storm rages outside, but this is just a video game.

“You play video games all the time.

“Trust us. You’re safe. This is nothing more than a systemic arrangement of 1’s and 0’s. You can do it.”

Successfully lulled into a false sense of security, I proceeded to play one hour of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. And then I shut it off and, despite repeated attempts, never managed to play it again.

I’m not sure what to think of a game that scared me so badly that I literally never wanted to play it again for fear of soiling myself. I hunt monsters. I destroy monsters. By rote and by choice I am a weekend Space Marine, armed to teeth against the ever-present horde of the Zerg or the Orks or whatever game I’m playing. I stood toe-to-tooth against a giant, flying, saber-toothed cat with a scorpion tail and wore it’s fur as a battle bikini. I am a frickin’ superhero, and superheros aren’t afraid of some drafty corridors and uneven lighting.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent does not care what power fantasies I entertain in other video games. Amnesia cares only that I be scared out of my mind in the shortest amount of time possible in the greatest way possible.

And that is why I’m never playing it again.

YAY!

I had fun with it. I was amused by it. I had frustrations with it. I finished it, or at least I finished the adventure for the single player. And then, by some stroke of ill luck, I deleted my clear game file, thus rendering fourteen hours of progress extinct in a puff of digital smoke. And even then, as I stared at the pristine spot where my upgraded Caddoc had once been, I didn’t feel anger. Instead, I just started to laugh softly.

Accidentally wiping my save file and having to start over for all the unlockables seemed like an unexpected yet elegant end to this game.

In my last post I mentioned that the game was a fantasy version of Gears of War, but I don’t think that’s accurate. Gears of War is a third-person shooter; at least one character in Hunted is very much melee, and having him hang back, taking cover behind a chest-high wall while he waits for his opponents to pop out so he can shoot them with his crossbow feels wrong. Except for two puzzle segments where I played E’lara, I went through the entire single-player adventure as Caddoc, and it was there, as Caddoc and I rushed towards enemies and beat them all to death with his giant glowing axe, that I realized that the melee experience is nothing less than Dungeons & Dragons: The Tower of Doom. You can’t get much more old school, hack-and-slash than that.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge feels like a great re-imagining of what an old school arcade game should be like today: short, steady bursts of progression with swift combat and a level designed to funnel you towards the end, and the appropriate set-piece boss fight that closes out the chapter. Each character has three “lives” before you’re kicked back to the last checkpoint. Comparing weapons is a simple matter of checking which has the larger number. The story doesn’t seem to try and rise above its “Here’s why you’re killing stuff” premise. Rinse and repeat until the credits roll. There’s even an entire mode (the Cruicible and its level editor) that whole-heartedly embraces its arcade roots. The only things the game seems to be missing is a giant glowing arrow that flashes and beeps brightly, urging you towards your next destination when you hang around a completed combat area for to long, and a poorly-translated “CONGRURATIONS A WINNER IS YOU” screen featuring the protagonists posing after the credits rolled.

A WINNER IS YOU – THANKS FOR PLAYING

The arcade nostalgia that Hunted engendered within me does mean that I took an issue with, of all things, the side quests. Do I explore or do I keep going? If I explore I’ll get new weapons, but as the enchantments are temporary then they may not be worth it, and to spend half an hour solving a puzzle for a weapon that will have twenty-five or so charges before becoming weaker than a regular dropped weapon was starting to lose it’s appeal. By the end of Chapter 4, I found myself actually growing a little tired of the exploration side-game. And it seems inXile understood the side-quest fatigue because by Chapter 5 the sidequests and riddles are mostly gone, the chapters are shorter, and the game feels like it’s picking up speed and barreling towards the ending as soon as possible before the fatigue makes you quit entirely. I appreciate a game that starts to realize its wearing out its welcome and just gets on with it.

I also appreciate the AI. While no substitute for an actual person, the computer’s control of E’lara was servicable. Only on occasion did I become annoyed with the AI, usually when E’lara’s pathfinding took her out of the combat (and once, when a door glitched and she actually was trapped in the room behind me, leaving me to complete an entire section solo- thankfully not a puzzle section requiring her flaming arrows), and the rare moment where I, as E’lara, was dropped repeatedly to my death by an AI Caddoc that would move off a switch holding my bridge up over a spiked pit. These would be wholly unremarkable AI comments if AI E’lara, perhaps in the developer’s acknowledgement that a human partner would be a massive jerk at least once, scripted E’lara to almost kill me with a trap while coyly joking about doing so, and endeared the AI to me just a bit more than the normal robot pal. After that, I made sure to keep an eye on her.

Hunted feels rough and not quite refined in almost every aspect of the game, but honestly if I hadn’t deleted my clear file I would be re-playing it again, as E’lara, on the hardest unlocked difficulty (appropriately named “Old School”). It’s a good, solid fun romp that doesn’t take itself seriously, which makes it a great game when you just want to play something for a few hours at a time. Perhaps that’s why I don’t feel to bad that I wiped my save file: you always have to start from scratch in arcade games after you’ve won.