Tricky Dick Bethesda

Fallout 4 came out in the tail end of 2015 after what was actually a fairly short hype period, the game only being announced in June that same year. That being said, there was a heck of a lot of hype built up in those few months.

If you've watched my Let's Plays on Dragon's Dogma, which you probably haven't, I do my fair share of ripping on Bethesda, regarding mostly their more recent releases. I really enjoyed Fallout 3, but objectively Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout: New Vegas brings the franchise to a new level. Skyrim was fun on the surface level for a while, and the modding community helped me keep interest in the game, but I think it fell flat in almost every aspect.

Being a pretty big fan of Fallout, (call me a casual if you want though, I never played the first game and didn't play much of Fallout 2) I was actually pretty excited for this new game to come out. Bethesda should know by now what works and what doesn't work in the Fallout universe, especially after seeing Obsidian beat them at their own game, right?

Sigh.

Fallout 4 almost seems unfinished. I've never been so excited to be playing a game, and then hit the 10 hour mark and totally lose interest. The graphics are nice, the gameplay is tightened up, but the game suffers from a pitfall that almost every major release falls into. There's so much time spent on the graphics, the fluidity of character movement and combat, the environments (which admittedly look great) that "unimportant things" like story, dialogue, and world-building all fall by the wayside.

Characters are completely bland, and there are no real dialogue options that let you change anything about the world you're in. Your character becomes a yes-man of sorts, and you're shoehorned into playing one arch-typical parent protagonist.

In New Vegas, you could kill literally everyone. Sure you might not be a psychopath and want to do this, but even if you accidentally kill a quest giver, you fail that quest. This was magical, because you actually affected the world around you. In Fallout 4, practically every single "named" character is invincible due to some connection to the main plot.

Nothing your character does or says matters, you just run and gun through the wasteland. Even charisma checks are few and far between, not really getting you much out of conversations other than a few extra caps.

If I were you, and you happen to be one of the six people on earth who haven't bought this game yet, I would give it a second thought before you do. To me personally, it would honestly be better if they just slapped the updated graphics and combat mechanics onto the exact story of Fallout 3, which at least had Liam Neeson.

-SK

Dark Souls for Babies

Winter Storm Jonas hit us here on the east coast pretty hard this past weekend, giving us almost 2 feet of snow to wade around in. Due to this, I was pseudo-trapped at my buddy's house, spending almost 48 hours on his couch doing nothing but playing videogames.

I believe I tasted heaven.

Anyways, the game of choice for the majority of this stint was Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, a beloved childhood game of mine developed by The Game Designers Studio, a shell corporation of Square Enix.

I had a blast playing this game on the Gamecube when I was way younger, and it's not just my rose-tinted glasses in action when I say the game still holds up. The graphics, gameplay, and combat system are all still pretty good! However, there is one problem, especially when playing the game in a room full of people. You see, back in the day of the early 2000's, practically everyone I knew had Gameboy Advances, which unfortunately for the dark times of 2016, are required to play the game multiplayer.

When I used to play this game, a bunch of buddies and I would plug our Gameboys into the Gamecube via adapter, and the Gameboys would serve as game controllers, complete with maps and other information on your own personal screen. Today, I'm the only person I know who still has a Gameboy Advance, so upon booting up Crystal Chronicles, I had to play by myself.

Back to the game holding up though...

Like most major titles on the Gamecube, the controls are intuitive and fluid, with unique game flavor built in along the way. I still consider the Gamecube one of the most inventive and creative consoles we've ever seen.

The game is just so magical, like most Final Fantasy games, however this one takes it to a whole new level. It vibes on a very storybook aesthetic, with a narrator reading the descriptions for the dungeons to you as if you were a small child being read a fable. All the characters, all the monsters, all the places, they are so high fantasy and storybook-esque that I seriously laud the creative director of the game.

But, there was on thing I didn't remember about the game.

Maybe it's because when I was younger, I was always playing with other people, but goddamn this game is really hard. Throughout my playthrough, I honestly could not stop comparing it to another Japanese-made game, Dark Souls, which I talked about in a previous post. A lot of the art direction is actually fairly similar, despite a more cutesy aesthetic in Crystal Chronicles.

But the game is fucking hard, just like Dark Souls.

One of my friends, who was actually playing Dark Souls while I played Crystal Chronicles (Multiple TV's) laughed at me every time I mentioned it, but it was uncanny to me.

Crystal Chronicles is incredibly unforgiving, some bosses taking 10-15 minutes to even kill. There's nothing particularly complicated about them, their health bars are just giant and if you're not constantly healing yourself, you're going to die. Regular enemies gang up on you and chase you forever, some of which also take just ages to actually kill.

Also similarly to Dark Souls, there is a very big "where the heck do I go" theme in Crystal Chronicles, with some of the levels being so intricate and uniform in design that getting lost is extremely easy.

The art direction, the monsters, the level design, and the difficulty... the game is seriously not that different from Dark Souls. Really. No seriously, I'm not crazy. They're not that different. Seriously though, you can go play Crystal Chronicles if you want, in fact I would seriously recommend it, but it's a hard game. Just like Dark Souls. Really.

Also I named my town "Dong".

-SK

Ample Parking Day or Night

I try to avoid doing reviews on here, because well, I just do. I'm more into word vomit and just detailing my experience with games. So this this isn't a review, or at least not an official one. 

I realize I'm a little late with this one, but I finally picked up South Park: The Stick of Truth, and already sunk 3-4 hours into it. The game is a collaboration between South Park's official studio and Obsidian Entertainment, company behind Knights of the Old Republic II and Fallout: New Vegas. I didn't actually know this going in, but when the company's splash art showed up before the game started I was pleasantly surprised.

I've loved South Park since I was pretty young and sneak-watched the first three seasons on DVD, which my parents had for some reason. Since then throughout middle school and high school, I enjoyed South Park probably more consistently than any other animated comedy. Even through the show's lows and lapses in quality, I always at least respected and admired the show's animation process and quick episode-making.

So when Stick of Truth came out, I was intrigued by it and always wanted to play it, but had enough games to worry about at that time.

So finally, almost 2 years later, I got the game (at a heavily reduced price) and the adventure started.

You start the game by making your character, a process almost a little too reminiscent of the custom South Park characters people used to make and use as their profile picture on Facebook. There are a lot of creative options though, and you do a pretty good job of capturing yourself, which is always really nice for a game. (See: my Dragon's Dogma Let's Play)

If you're a fan of the show, like myself and many people are, you'll almost feel like the entire game is one big inside joke. And it's awesome. All the major (and many minor) characters are represented, all with their respective voice actors. Speaking of which, the official South Park studio's heavy involvement in the game is amazing. The in-game graphics are completely indistinguishable from a South Park episode, and even the cutscenes flow together with the gameplay with the exact same animation.It honestly just looks really good. 

The jokes, like most South Park jokes, all land very effectively. The game breaks the 4th wall constantly in regards to the fact that it's actually a game. And the best part, your character's name becomes "Douchebag" regardless of what you actually put in.

South Park: The Stick of Truth is hilarious, crude, and charming in character, but also intuitive, well-constructed, and aesthetically pleasing in game design. I highly recommend this game, especially if you're a fan of the series. 

-SK

League of Legends Season 6 has Started!

Alas, it's finally arrived! Joy to the world, for season 6 of League of Legends has begun, ushering in a whole new year of competition, exciting twists and turns, and new champions!

Actually, I don't really care. League has a special place in my heart, being probably my most played game in the last five years, but there's no real magic or notability to the game anymore. And you're probably wondering now, "Then Jack, why are you making a post about it if you don't care?"

And that's a valid point, because I don't really know myself. I'm just gonna keep writing though. I can't stop.

Riot actually did a lot of cool things with League in Season 5, with a lot of champion updates and reworks, including Gangplank, Kog'Maw, Skarner, Mordekaiser, Darius, Quinn, Graves, and probably more, that's just off the top of my head. These include both ability reworks and visual updates. Not to mention other things like minor changes to a bunch of other champions, new maps like Poro King, and a look at redesigning the champion select screen (which still hasn't been implemented, so maybe this doesn't count.) Honestly, it's been a pretty impressive year for Riot.

With only one game to worry about, it's not really any surprise Riot can release such a good amount of content, especially when compared to other companies who do practically null across all of the games they manage.

The problem is, League just doesn't have the same allure it used to, and I honestly don't think I'm alone in feeling that way either. It seems as though the growth of the game has slowed, especially if you look at the boom happening around three years ago, when the game was expanding so fast Riot barely had time to go to the server store to handle the extra player load.

Not making a big write-up out of this, if anything it's more an announcement. I'll keep playing the occasional game of league, and as always you can find me with the summoner name killerskink. I'm passively optimistic about what season 6 will bring after the myriad of things Riot was able to accomplish in season 5, so let's all wait with mildly bated breath!

-SK

Doggies!

Episode 1 of Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen is up! You can check out the video here!

The Darkest Soul

If you're not familiar with Dark Souls or the "Souls" franchise, all you really need to know is that in the maybe 5 hours of playing it so far I have gotten through what is likely a total of 15 minutes of content. If you are at all familiar with it, you've probably heard somewhere that Dark Souls is "the hardest game ever" or "the most unforgiving fantasy experience of the 21st century" or even "God fucking dammit this game is broken as shit". Well, these are all accurate, and I've heard these all many times, and so I went into the game about 4 years later than everyone else with a certain expectation.

Dark Souls is definitely a difficult game, but it's very hard to describe why. If you're like me and you grew up on a mostly western buffet of games, even the hardest ones among them were pretty forgiving. I've played many fantasy RPG/adventure games, from Zelda to Elder Scrolls to Darksiders to Dragon Age to many more, but Dark Souls stands apart for multiple reasons.

Dark Souls introduces you to a fairly familiar world of fantasy with dragons, undead, wizards, knights, what have you, but then dashes your expectations and forces you to forget everything you thought you already knew about dungeon roamers. This is the challenge, because it's not the combat. (Although that can be excruciating at times.) Your brain undergoes radical reprogramming when you play the game, to the point where it feels like Dark Souls is your first time ever holding a joystick. In fact, if Dark Souls was the first videogame you ever played, you would fundamentally be on the same skill level as someone like me, who has been playing games their whole life.

This is why Dark Souls's "hardest game ever" reputation was misleading, at least to me. However, people weren't lying about the whole dying thing. Once you learn the combat mechanics, which admittedly are painstakingly tedious, you can progress with (relative) ease. It's just that you have to get very comfortable with dying, and you need to use each death as a learning experience of what not to do next.

I don't mean like in 3D Zelda games where you might die and go "oh, I guess I shouldn't go in there." I mean like you're going to die on the same boss 15+ times, and while making the 20 minute trek back to the boss, while fighting all the same monsters that respawned, you need to really contemplate where and how you fucked up, and if you don't, you'll die again with nothing to show from the experience.

Another way that dying in Dark Souls isn't like dying in other adventure games is that surprisingly enough, you're really not penalized for it. In other games, although you might die less times overall, you'll probably have to go to a previous save file. That's not the case here though. When you die, you have to go back to where you were and recollect all the souls you dropped, but you keep all other items you found and whatever "happened" during your life still "happened." (Except most enemies respawn, but the real pain in the ass ones like bosses and mini-bosses don't.)

I'm going to keep trudging through Dark Souls, I hope that if you were considering playing the game, or you already have played it, you understand where I'm coming from and what I mean by the challenge of the game not necessarily existing mechanically but almost psychologically. Happy gaming, and praise the sun!

-SK

Counter-Strike, League, and the State of "Casual-Competitive" Gaming

One of the things that always keeps me coming back to games, and what makes them addicting for me, is the element of competition. I will admit that I often have to force myself through single-player games (unless the story is especially engaging) because one of the things I've always loved about gaming is the sheer ability to fuck up someone else's day. Conversely, the ability to have my day ruined by another human somewhere in the world (or next to me on the couch) is equally beautiful.

This is probably why I have been playing League of Legends consistently since just a little after its release, or around five years now. The game has its flaws for sure, and in fact, is nowhere even close to perfect given its popularity. But mostly anyone who has played the game can attest to its addictiveness. As of this post there are 128 champions in the game, all with unique abilities and playstyles that give the game one of the highest replay values I've ever seen in a game. The game has a massive competitive scene, rivaled mainly by Dota 2 and...

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

CS: GO, one of League's major colleagues in the world of esports, may have a similar level of competitiveness, but is a vastly different game in just oh so many ways. While League is fairly new, the Counter-Strike franchise has very deep roots in the early days of online gaming, which makes CS:GO an artifact of sorts, even if it is a newer game itself. GO does not adhere to the same "2010's and on" online etiquette rules that League or even Brawlhalla (another newer competitive game) adhere to. And I'm not talking about professional or even necessarily high levels of play, but I mean an area that I've decided to call "Casual-Competitive", which I feel is fairly self explanatory. (Okay it's just when you play a game for the competitive element or are competitively skilled as far as a normal player goes but don't play professionally or at the highest level of play)

I guess I can put it like this. When you play League, you have to opt out of the chat filter which will otherwise make all swear words show up as "****". You are more than able, and in fact are encouraged, to report players who use profanity or engage in trash talk. There is no in-game voice function, since it is speculated that it would cause unsportsmanlike conduct. People are banned for being "toxic", and Riot (studio behind League) make great strides to perpetuate League as some sort of safe-space where anyone can feel comfortable and unthreatened. Noble in a sense, sure, but totally dissimilar to what most people associate with fierce competition.

On the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, we have Counter-Strike, a relic of a forgotten, less sensitive past. I played CS:GO for the first time today in probably over a year, and was blown away by how different the atmosphere was. After being so enamored with League even despite the bullshit I listed up above, it was a breath of fresh air, in a sense. Although this air wasn't fresh. It was a fucking gaseous cancer filled with satan's farts. I went from League, a game with no voice chat and default chat filtering to a game where several 12-year-olds at once were calling me a "niggerfaggot" and blasting Kendrick Lamar through the voice comm. People talked (or yelled) about dicks, assholes, other people's moms, their own moms, just absolute ear cancer that lasted through the course of every single game. And you know what? I sort of loved it. When I play videogames with friends in real life (I know, people still do that?) I love trash talk. I believe it's what gives competition life, and keeps things interesting. It may suck if you're losing, which I certainly do plenty of, but that's what makes victory so much sweeter.

I'm going to continue playing League of Legends for sure, as I always do, but I will never stop resenting the fact that it coddles its playerbase like a doting overprotective mother. I would take the chainsmoking, physically abusive, aloof father that is Counter-Strike any day.

-SK