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Big Robots and Bigger Grinds

As mentioned when I wrote about Iron Brigade originally, I bought the game’s DLC expansion, Rise of the Martian Bear, shortly after completing the main campaign. I didn’t immediately dive into it and actually ended up taking an even longer break than originally planned. In fact, it had been so long that I considered not even playing through it since I’d surely lost whatever skills I’d managed to build up over the course of the original campaign, and I’d read that the expansion was notably harder than the original campaign to boot. Alas, despite some reservations, I finally talked myself into it.

“Back in the trenches again!”

When I finally got around to playing it I discovered that the game had been pulled from Game Pass, popping up a licensing error when I went to launch it. Not entirely unexpected. What was unexpected was my inability to actually purchase the damn thing! When I went to the game’s store page I received a weird message that the game was only purchasable on Xbox 360 or on xbox.com. Ok? At first I thought maybe this was an odd side effect of having already had the game installed, so I went ahead and uninstalled it and tried again. No dice. I begrudgingly went to my PC and pulled up the Microsoft Store webpage. Oddly, I got the same error there. Finally I had to resort to booting up my old Xbox 360 and buying the game there, at which point it worked normally on my Xbox One once again. This whole thing was absolutely bizarre and I have no idea what the issue actually was – I could buy some other Xbox 360 games on my Xbox One, just not Iron Brigade. Perhaps this is some sort of licensing issue but that’d be even weirder since Double Fine is owned my Microsoft these days.

Anyway, onto the game. First, if you’ve read my original blurb on Iron Brigade, Rise of the Martian Bear doesn’t really change anything I had to say about the game back then. Instead, it adds a 5 mission sort-of epilogue to the original campaign and expands the level cap, adding a fairly large amount of new, higher level loot to compensate. The new maps are, of course, playable cooperatively as well as in Survival mode. And that’s about it! That was plenty for me though, and just like with the original campaign I replayed every level until I managed to get a gold rating on it.

“Fuck. This. Map.”

Getting gold on these maps was no easy feat given how rusty I was at that game. In fact, I was stuck on the DLC’s third level, Settlement, for quite a long time, trying a mind boggling number of variations in strategy and loadout before I finally nailed it. Things got so desperate that I even briefly dipped into Survival mode to try to score of the game’s more exotic, mode exclusive rewards to buff my damage output. Eventually I succeeded and brought my time with Iron Brigade to an end. For the record, a combination of carefully placed sniper turrets, a few machine guns turrets to help mop up Knobs, and aggressively running my dual Muerte Fiesta Numero 6’d engineering trench around the map to do as much of the actual Tube elimination legwork as possible myself was the key.

Rise of the Martian Bear doesn’t really do anything significantly interesting and the ridiculous story is perhaps even more throwaway than the original campaign, but it’s basically just a content pack, so if you really liked the base game (or absolutely loved it in my case) the expansion pack isn’t a hard sell. If you didn’t, well then there’s absolutely nothing redeeming for you here.

Besides that, the other game taking up a lot of my time lately is, of all things, World of Warcraft Classic.

“Checking out the original Dwarf model. D’aww!”

During a long and tedious build up that seemingly started from the moment the game was first patched and continued with consistent nostalgic whinging about “the good old days” of so-called vanilla WoW (and increasingly, the Burning Crusade expansion and even later eras) on every relevant forum out there and culminating with Blizzard finally caving and announcing WoW Classic, I never really owned that particular pair of rose colored glasses. Sure, I had some great memories of the early days of WoW and yes, some of the changes subsequent patches and expansions made were debatably negative, but there were also innumerable improvements, some quite major, along the way too. As I saw it, I was fine with the glory days of World of Warcraft remaining confined to exaggerated “back in my day” anecdotes and as an effortless yardstick to compare other, newer MMORPGs against.

In the summer of 2018 I changed jobs, going from working in IT departments consisting of just a couple of dozen people at best to working alongside literally thousands of fellow geeks. As the launch of Classic approached we ended up with more than a dozen people on my team alone signed on to play and I figured jumping on the bandwagon could be a lot of fun. When Classic finally launched and I joined my co-workers on Discord, I was surprised to discover that a lot of the members of my original World of Warcraft guild from back in vanilla along with numerous other friends I’d known over the years also logged in fighting the same launch day queues as we were. Remarkably, it seems like almost every last one of my online gaming buddies was drawn back into the fold. How long most of them stuck it out, I can’t say, but despite most of the gaming media I follow dismissing Classic, it seemed like it was actually a fairly big deal in my circles.

“I accidentally screenshotted hitting level 2. Also, sorry boars…”

After a lot of internal debate I decided to fully embrace my nostalgia, creating a character absolutely identical to the character I “mained” in vanilla – the same race and overall appearance, the same class, and I even managed to score the same name despite it coming from the in-game name generator. Gulmorok the orcish rogue was reborn (the original having since been converted into a dwarf and moved between servers multiple times in WoW proper, as discussed before.)

Personally, jumping back into what seems to be a pretty damn solid recreation of original World of Warcraft has been an absolute trip. It’s amazing how well I remember the zones, the enemies and the particulars of many of the quests, and even the idiosyncrasies of various mechanics. The original 2004 era graphics and sounds still hold up incredibly well too, which surprised me after long since getting used to the newer character models. What doesn’t hold up quite as well is the actual gameplay. In 2004 the design, a fairly shameless mass market friendly iteration on the EverQuest style of theme park MMORPG, felt pretty damn great if you were in to those types of games back then. Having long since moved on to successors like The Old Republic, Elder Scrolls Online, hell, even newer World of Warcraft expansions, the design of vanilla WoW certainly feels as dated as it sounds to describe it like that. It’s not so much “hard” as it feels like it’s been designed to just utterly disrespect the player’s time – tedious, grinding quests, huge amounts of travel between different areas, a poorly structured quest content flow, and of course the ever present joy of constantly bumping up against the poverty line, are all things probably best left in the past.

“Much, much later, grinding in the Alterac Mountains.”

Case in point, in my mid 30s, I’m having to constantly bounce between zones to do quests that are actually level appropriate (a luxury largely enabled by third party addons and data dump websites, by the way) and I know that, just like in 2004, I’m quickly approaching the level range where a lack of ANY appropriate quests becomes the problem, requiring grinding dungeons or mobs to stay properly leveled and geared. Adding to that, I’m playing on a PVP server for the first time in years and Blizzard just turned on the honor system, meaning that people’s willingness to go out of their way to gank you while you’re busy trying to complete a quest or otherwise mind your own business is at a peak. Of course as a rogue I’m uniquely equipped to deal with these assholes, or at least take opportunistic revenge on them, but it’s still annoying. Fun times!

While I have been tempted more than a few times to jump off the treadmill and devote my limited free time to playing through more single player games, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t having fun. The Azeroth that Blizzard built with World of Warcraft remains still somehow compelling to me, and looking forward to when PVP battlegrounds are finally launched and my co-workers and I can put together some “premade” groups is keeping a lot of us going for now.

In the meantime, Blizzard just announced yet another World of Warcraft expansion and Diablo-fucking-4, both of which have my attention. Despite being increasingly clear that they’re no longer the same company I fell in love with, Blizzard is still somehow managing to make a case for its relevance in my gaming life.

Settlement map screenshot taken from from misc. places on the Interwebz. The in game shot is actually mine though. An original Xbox 360 screenshot on here? Is this the end of an era?! Probably not!

Yes, It Is.

Back in early 2017 I made mention that my girlfriend and I had played through the first 4 episodes of Life is Strange and loved it but that our playthrough was “tragically” cut short before we could tackle episode 5. I talked about this a bit more here, but that original allusion was to a pretty shitty “real life” invasion into my gaming life. In the summer of 2016 my house was broken into and burglarized with my video game collection being one of the primary targets. Fortunately, I was in the process of moving at the time so most of my stuff had already been packed away and didn’t get touched, but one of the things that did disappear was my Xbox 360 which was still connected to my TV at the time. I wasn’t using cloud saves as my default save game storage back then so, worse than losing the console itself, I lost my entire history of Xbox 360 saves up to that point. Disheartened by the whole thing and not wanting to replay through almost the entire game in order to finish it, we regretfully put Life is Strange on the backburner.

“Our protagonist, Max Caulfield.”

While we’d been eyeing all of the subsequent Life is Strange follow-up games like Life is Strange: Before the Storm and The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit with some curiosity, with the release of Life is Strange 2 this year we were finally hyped up enough to revisit the original game. This time around we took advantage of it being on Xbox Game Pass yet again and played the Xbox One version. Jumping in, we found that we both more or less remembered all of the first episode though our memories of specific details slowly began to fade as we progressed, culminating in the entirely unknown episode 5 and a satisfactory ending to the game at long last.

Broadly speaking, the game is a stripped down modernization of the classic graphical adventure game in a similar vein to Telltale’s post The Walking Dead games or Quantic Dream’s adventure games. That is to say, extremely narrative heavy with your choices being reflected in-game, giving an illusion of a complicated branching story. A lot of those choices take place via conversations, and there are also minimal, easy puzzles based on exploration along the way to round out the formula. In Life is Strange’s case, a lot of the puzzle solving involves the main character’s ability to rewind time, also central to the plot itself. There are some more traditional adventure game puzzles early on but, as with The Walking Dead: Season One, that approach is largely abandoned after the first episode.

“Light, exploration-based adventure game stuff.”

Despite the similarities, Life is Strange does an admirable job of not coming off as some sort of a Telltale adventure game clone. Its systems don’t feel quite as obvious, at times feeling more like a “walking simulator” than an adventure game, and the total lack of QTEs or any sort of action gameplay goes a long way to helping. The game also supplements the already effective presentation with a phone text messaging system and an in-character log/journal system for even more exposition and depth.

The game starts off with your character, a teenage girl named Max, going about her day in a private school she’s recently transferred to after moving back to the town where she grew up. The mundanity of the high school drama quickly turns much more serious with a startling act of violence, the discovery of the aforementioned time manipulation powers, and an unexpected reconnection with Max’s childhood best friend, Chloe. Those (and other) inter-connected threads end up in a compelling balance of interpersonal drama and mystery with just a touch of the supernatural.

“The drama takes no time at all to kick in.”

The first episode is a little jarring to a lot of people as that’s where some of the game’s more infamous peculiarities are at their worst. Much has been made about the odd, stilted attempts to replicate teenage conversation which had so many people facepalming out of the game, the nonsensical description of Blackwell Academy as some sort of a prestigious art school that sounds like a private college (and indeed, most of the students are college aged) yet is referred to multiple times as a high school, and the sometimes annoying and unlikable personalities and behaviors of the main characters. While I don’t think any of those issues are anything to bail out of the game early over, a couple of them do warrant some further focus here, I suppose.

First, about the odd language that the characters, particularly Max and Chloe, use. Just about everyone seems to agree that it comes across as a little ridiculous and, at best, inauthentic. Some justify it as simply being the way teenagers actually talk, less us out of touch adults forget, while another common explanation is that Life is Strange’s developer, Dontnod, is French and likely even more out of touch about the way American high schoolers talk (which may also explain their lack of understanding about the American school system!) Regardless, this gradually improves as the season continues past the first episode, with the characters sometimes even seemingly jokingly referencing those earlier missteps. It’s no big deal even if it is sometimes incredibly silly.

“The infamous ‘Go fuck your selfie!’ line. Oh, and fuck Victoria Chase!”

Directly related are the characters themselves. Personally, I find their personalities and motivations to be easy to believe. Chloe’s overly rebellious behavior and shitty, selfish attitude is fairly thoroughly justified. This is someone whose struggles with her emotions and her place in the world, already an issue for a lot of teenagers, are amped up to 11 by the trauma of losing her dad and then her best friend when she needed a support network the most. Max, on the other hand, comes across as someone spends far too much time in her own head and, while not incredibly awkward, sometimes comes across as a little shallow when she does decide to come out of her shell and interact with people. When she’s thrown into all of these crazy new situations she’s, of course, thoroughly unprepared to handle them. I’ve known plenty of people with similar personalities as both characters myself, in fact Max reminds me a bit of teenage me – the conclusions about how the world around me works, what is and isn’t cool, etc., forming my own private reality which I did a fairly terrible job of expressing. Honestly, there’s a certain amount of accepting that teenagers can be cringey and a little overly self-obsessed that needs to happen to truly “get” any of these characters. Sure, they can be annoying, but I feel like the people who absolutely hate this game because of the characters probably lack some perspective and maybe even a little empathy. Sorry!

More important than the personalities of the characters are the emotions they manage to convey, and this is where Life is Strange seems to make its improbable grand slam home run. The writing combined with excellent voice acting by the two leads really made the characters feel relatable and realistic, and their friendship (at least when coupled with the choices that I made in my playthrough) felt touchingly genuine. Combined with the intrigue of the plot, the game is astonishingly affecting and absorbing. By the end of the second episode I was totally hooked. From the reviews and impressions I’ve scanned, I believe I’m far from alone here in appreciating this particular aspect of the game as being uncommonly fantastic.

“Max and Chloe’s relationship steals the show.”

This is a complete package though. The interface is fairly intuitive and never really gets in your way. The graphics are mostly very good with the only real shortcoming being the character models, which are perhaps slightly more realistic than the game can really pull off, with faces and especially lip-syncing sometimes looking a little janky. I definitely feel like they should have leaned into the stylized approach just a bit more even if they didn’t want to go full Telltale. The soundtrack, save for a couple moments where the songs don’t quite fit the scene, is excellent. Not only does it work well with the perceived tone of the game, but it goes along way to helping set it. I had “Obstacles” by Syd Matters stuck in my head for days after finishing the game. It all feels reasonably polished too.

“Your text messages and your journal provide just a little extra exposition.”

So, after a few years we finally made our way back to (and through) the final episode. I wanted to talk a little bit about the end, and yes, I’ll spare anything but the vaguest of spoilers. Episode 5 culminates in some bizarre and disturbing time shenanigans, the resolution of at least one of our major plot points, and a big, dramatic decision. Not every potential loose end is wrapped up. You never receive any answers about the nature of Max’s powers, for instance. As that’s not really focus of the plot I can’t say it bugged me too much. It also ends up that quite a few of the details introduced in earlier episodes that seemed like they might be important never go anywhere. Regardless of whether these were plot threads that got abandoned as the series developed or they were purposely misleading “red herrings”, they added a lot of intrigue and mystery to the game.

I’ve also seen many more complaints about this last decision being a binary choice which does little to account for all of your previous choices up to that point. While sure, it does feel a little forced and limited, I don’t think it does anything to invalidate all of the choices you’ve made up until then. As I’ve said in the past in reference to Telltale’s games, the choices you’re making aren’t so much about affecting the overall plot as much as they are about affecting the details of the story, particularly when it comes to the actions and reactions of both playable and non-playable characters in the world. It’s less about changing the plot and more about customizing the particulars of it, with some entertainment value coming from standing back and observing the results.

“The end times are here!”

Perhaps the oddest thing I’ve heard about the end (sometimes, but not always framed as a complaint) was that some players didn’t find Max’s relationship with Chloe to be compelling enough to make that final decision all that difficult. Since, as I mentioned, I found Max and Chloe’s friendship (we definitely read it as a close friendship, NOT romantic, by the way – interesting that such a potentially massive detail is so affected by your choices) to be one of the best parts of the game, this is quite hard for me to relate to. While I wouldn’t say the decision at the end was easy, both my girlfriend and I sided soundly in the same direction and were happy with the ending we got from it. Between that and the occasional complaint about plot holes I see, I’m fairly confounded by some people’s reads of this game. Maybe it’s a lack of empathy or any sort of ability to emotionally connect to a game on the part of some players, like I suggested earlier, or perhaps the differences caused your decisions along the way were greater than I realized.

Regardless, I loved Life is Strange and easily recommend it to those who like newer narrative adventure games and classic adventure games alike. Providing you’re able to fight your way through the all of cringey teenage dialog and drama, I think you’ll end up liking it. As for us, we already have the game’s follow-up prequel, Life is Strange: Before the Storm, installed and ready to start in the coming weeks.

As usual, these screenshots were liberally stolen from numerous places on the Internet. Most of them are from the PC version rather than the Xbox One version, but whatever. Also, the color palette isn’t quite this boring, and Max doesn’t only have one outfit – most of these shots were from the first episode to avoid spoilers!

Mecha Zombies!

As soon as I heard about Iron Brigade (called “Trenched” at the time) I absolutely knew I had to play it. Not only was I already a fan of the humor and fun stylized aesthetics that Double Fine tends to inject into their games but I’ve been a fan of the whole hybrid tower defense / action hybrid genre for quite a while now (as I’m sure I’ve thoroughly documented here with games like Toy Soldiers and Orcs Must Die!.) The fact that the action component looked a bit like the MechAssault franchise and that whole thing was wrapped in a wacky alternate history World War I setting to boot? Sign me the fuck up!

“Shooting some Tubes on the beach.”

So, there it sat, doomed to my backlog forever. I guess the waiting has finally paid off though as when I signed up to Xbox Game Pass there it was, waiting for me to play for sorta-free. Waiting 8 years to save 15 bucks? Seems like a reasonable strategy to me! 😉 Well, at least I didn’t buy it and then let it languish in my backlog like I do with most of the games I’m interested in. Anyway, the time was right to blow through a quick game so I rolled up my sleeves, hopped in my “mobile trench” and set off to blow some Tubes into smithereens.

As billed, the relatively simple action feels a lot like that of MechAssault; somewhere between the huge, slow mechs of MechWarrior and the relatively frantic action of something like, say, Armored Core. You move and look with the analog sticks while each trigger handles the weapons and equipment installed on each side of your mech. Your equipment can vary, as your mech can be customized with a huge array of different specialized parts, weapons, and paint jobs, all of which is slowly acquired in a sort of light version of the loot systems popularized by action RPGs and MMOs. While the customization itself pales in comparison to something like Chromehounds, I still found experimenting with different builds and loadouts to be quite a fun element of the game. Loading up a heavy chassis with a 6 heavy machine guns, or dual huge, heavy cannons is fantastic, and some of the steampunk inspired tech is ridiculously cool.

“Customizing our mech… err, I mean Mobile Trench.”

The rest of (and the bulk of) the gameplay is total, classic tower assault. Using the same third person perspective, you can place emplacements (turrets/towers) anywhere on the map limited only to the amount scrap you collect from enemies you kill. While there is a respectable variety of emplacements, the game only allows you to carry a certain number of certain categories of each one depending on the chassis of your mech, adding a touch more variety to the whole customization aspect beyond just what weapons you have installed. Of course there are a variety of enemies that demand variation in weapon and turret strategy, changing with each new map, and how efficient you need to be to get the rating you’re after

About the only negative I can attribute to Iron Brigade would be the story and the enemy design, which both feel kind of quick and throwaway. I mean, the Tubes are certainly unique, but I don’t find them to be all that cool. Eh, this is a relatively minor complaint though, as these elements certainly work well enough in service to the gameplay and the overall conceit.

“Emplacements absolutely everywhere, as it should be!”

I feel like there’s a lot more I could say about the game, so I’ll just wrap this up with a couple of things. First, for an early entry into Double Fine’s efforts to shift to smaller, lower budget titles, the team developing Iron Brigade put quite a lot into it and you can tell they had to practically restrain themselves for adding even more. The second thing is that funnily, this being a quick playthrough didn’t really go according to plan. You see, I LOVED Iron Brigade so damn much that I decided to keep playing until I achieved a gold rating on every single mission, taking quite a bit more dedication than a quick run through would have. I even ended up buying the game’s single expansion pack “Rise of the Martian Bear” which I’ll give a quick review of in a future update.

Oh, and if all of that wasn’t enough on its own, I also totally forgot to mention that the game also features something of an Horde-like Survival gameplay mode, and both it and the campaign support co-op with up to 3 other players so that you can actually show off your customizations. I never got around to trying either, but I can only imagine how fun this game must be to play cooperatively. Awesome.

You can download Iron Brigade for Xbox 360 (which runs flawlessly on Xbox One) as well as on PC. If you’re into tower defense and big, stompy robots, definitely check this one out.

“Back on the road!”

I also returned to Telltale’s The Walking Dead series. I ended my last article about Telltale with the semi-optimistic news that all three of the games I discussed had planned sequels in the works for 2018 and 2019, with the first one of those on the list being the finale to The Walking Dead series. Well…

*deep breath*

A hell of a lot has happened since then, hasn’t it? The first episode of The Walking Dead: The Final Season was released in August 2018 to favorable reviews, with the second episode slated for release in late September. Just days before it was to be released Telltale announced they were closing down, immediately laying off most of their staff and killing their in-development and upcoming releases. While they did end up releasing that second episode, with two more episodes to go, it seemed like the series wouldn’t actually receive its finale after all.

Rumors swirled about other companies offering ex-employees jobs, or potentially attempting to pick up The Walking Dead or some of Telltale’s other titles, but it was actually Robert Kirkman’s own Skybound Games that stepped in and negotiated finishing the remaining two episodes, hiring a number Telltale’s former staff on a contract basis to see the season to completion. I’ve got mixed feelings about whether or not it was right to prioritize finishing the game over taking care of the employees who lost their jobs in more substantial ways, or if I should continue to support Telltale with my money, but nevertheless I’m selfishly thankful, as once the fourth and final episode was released and the reviews looked decent, I bought the entire season and my girlfriend and I cautiously jumped in.

“Keeping AJ in line is damn stressful work.”

Almost immediately we were totally engrossed. Taking place several years after the events of A New Frontier, you’re finally back in (a now teenage) Clementine’s shoes, wandering the desolate South with a much older AJ. The change in the character dynamic alone is massive, with Clementine coming across as more and more mature and AJ now a fully fleshed-out character. AJ is by far the more interesting of the two, being raised post zombie-apocalypse, he has his share of childhood trauma induced behavioral issues (to put it in a super generalized, spoiler free way.)

While the gameplay doesn’t stray from the typical post-TWD Telltale formula, The Final Season starts out very strong with a great sense of being able to drastically affect the story with your choices. Telltale fans know by now that this is absolutely essential to keeping the player from feeling somehow “cheated” by choices that ultimately have little real consequence. In fact, I found struggling with making decisions in this season to be particularly intense, especially when it came to those choices that directly related to influencing the young, impressionable AJ. We always felt like we were somehow making the wrong decision and oftentimes we were despite our best attempts to do the right thing. Very effective.

“Many new characters join the cast for the finale.”

As with A New Frontier, the new engine and updated art style are running smooth and looking great. There were some great set pieces this time around, and as usual the voice acting was mostly stellar. Playing the Xbox One version (on a normal Xbox One S) the only real complaint I can leverage is that load times between scenes were much longer than I remembered from any previous Telltale games. I’m really not sure what is up with that, as from a quick glance around the ‘Net it doesn’t seem to be a common complaint. The final two episodes, the ones finished by Skybound, fair slightly worse overall though – it seems like they didn’t quite get as much polish, with noticeably more performance hiccups and glitches. Given how they were developed this is completely understandable.

I had some similar issues with the game’s action scenes which were more palatable in the early episodes and felt more sloppily implemented in the later ones. Even the checkpoints were placed less generously in the last two episodes, and that only served to make those action sections that much more frustrating. Again, this is almost certainly because of the accelerated and probably relatively chaotic development under Skybound resulting in less playtesting and refinement. These issues didn’t ruin the experience for me by any means though they are worth noting given the unusual circumstance.

“The Whisperers also make an appearance.”

I’d certainly rank The Final Season above A New Frontier, and I enjoyed that one more than most people so that’s not meant to be faint praise. More importantly, I’m happy that the series didn’t get unceremoniously axed half way through its finale which could have easily happened. Instead, it felt like the series got an appropriate sendoff and given how many people have loved the series, whether they bailed after the first season or made it all the way through the finale, and how influential this new style of adventure game has been, I’d say that’s a pretty big deal. It’s not entirely surprising that Skybound was able to help wrap up the season as one of the more spectacular things about the series is how strong it’s been start to finish despite many of the key players changing over the years. I mean, I was skeptical about Season 2 after finding out that Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin had left and it turned out to be my favorite season.

In summary, if you’re a fan of the series than it’s an absolute no-brainer: play this! If you had your fill after a couple seasons, or the Telltale formula wore out its welcome on you, then it’s probably not worth coming back for this one last hurrah as it’s unlikely to change your opinion.

As usual, what should Xbox 360 and Xbox One screenshots are PC screenshots borrowed liberally from various places on the Internet.