Author Archives: Self Similar

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Lightsabers and Labyrinths

I haven’t really sat down and attempted to complete anything new but I’ve definitely played some odds and ends on PC lately that I feel are worth a quick mention.

First, let me step back in time to something I forgot to mention several months ago which incidentally happens to me a lot with my blog – I randomly decide to pick something up for a few hours and put it back down without it ever earning a mention here. Anyway, I was feeling the MMORPG itch and since I hadn’t touched my old World of Warcraft account in quite a while I decided to make a brief incursion back into the galaxy of Star Wars: The Old Republic. You might recall when I mentioned the game originally that, despite being kind of a cookie cutter WoW clone in so many ways, I was actually quite fond of it and planned to go back. While I really wasn’t truly ready to return, having long since decided that this would be a game best played in all of its graphical glory after I build a new gaming rig, I still somehow ended up getting sucked back in.

“The perks of dogfighting in an asteroid field.”

I played my my Sith Inquisitor through a whole new planet and got my first taste of the on rails space combat which was surprisingly fun and appropriately Star Warsy. Most of all, the game is still mainly most satisfying because I like my character which is to say I like the way I imagine my character. Make no mistake, this is a twisted amalgamation of the imaginary image of him I have and my head the very wrote and scripted ways he behaves (no matter what choices I make) in his storyline dialogs and cut scenes. This is still very refreshing to me and gives me a much greater sense of attachment to my character than I’d normally have in an MMORPG, or even a lot of single player games.

I got so into it, in fact, that I ended up rolling some new characters in some other Sith Empire classes just to get an idea for the other characters and storylines at my disposal. I played a ruthless female bounty hunter pirate and a goodhearted but dutiful imperial agent somewhat based on the titular character from the Rogue Trooper comics and enjoyed the hell out of both. While I intend to stick it out with my Inquisitor (when I return to the game sometime later) I can definitely see why some people with far, faaarrrr more free time than I opt to level up each of the classes in the game.

“An audience with Nem’ro the Hutt.”

Moving on, I got a bit of an itch to play a classic hack and slash action RPG. I’m not quite sure what inspired this but I decided to warm up the original Torchlight. Although I got fairly close to the end (or bottom of the dungeon, as it were) in my first playthrough as a Vanquisher I had never actually beaten the game. You may recall from a 2012 blog post that I was considering replaying it on Xbox Live Arcade and actually played around with an Alchemist at the time to do a little theory crafting, so this time I went through on Hard mode with a brand new Alchemist. It was fairly fun, though I more or less breezed through the first two thirds of the game until I reached somewhat of a difficulty spike in which my character switched from an iron cannon of doom to a wee delicate glass cannon and I suddenly found myself relying quite heavily on my potion stores. I started to feel a bit burnt out by the repetition and lack of good loot upgrade options but forced myself through to the end anyway. While I still standby my words of immense praise for the game I’m definitely curious about whether or not the team at Runic managed to fix these issues with Torchlight 2.

“Ember Lightning and Ember Shield all day long!”

While the loot system (and the rest of the systems, really) are essentially refined versions of those from Diablo 2, I felt like I so rarely ever got loot that was actually better than what I had that it made the whole looting, identifying, and selling cycle more of a chore than anything else, and it isn’t like this was because I was already wading through the dungeon in some exceptionally awesome, epic gear or anything. One thing that isn’t lifted from Diablo 2 but rather Diablo is the mission and story structure. Torchlight takes place in one town, in one large, somewhat randomly generated dungeon, and has a simple main plot and even simpler side quests. Diablo made up for this by having an amazing and compelling atmosphere and while Torchlight’s isn’t bad by any means, it doesn’t really hold a candle to that of the Diablo series.

So, after beating Torchlight (the final boss was bullshit, by the way!) I dusted off my last playthrough of Diablo 2 which I had also started all the way over a year ago in 2012 in anticipation for Diablo 3. I have to say, the Paladin isn’t my favorite class and act 5 (the expansion act) isn’t my favorite act either, or perhaps the dreaded ARPG repetition is simply in full effect by then, who knows. Regardless, I flailed Baal to a fiery grave.

“Flinging flaming flails at foe’s frozen faces…”

While playing back through again my above statement about Diablo’s atmosphere was reinforced without question, and then some. I simply love the dark, serious, gritty feel of the world of Diablo and Diablo 2. The music and sound effects are particularly affecting – I ended up turning off the otherwise excellent music in Torchlight and listening to some podcasts and audiobooks while playing it but in Diablo 2? No chance! I’ve got to hear that eerie score and the those freaky ambient noises and sound effects! After this playthrough I’m now foaming at the mouth to finally load up Diablo 3, providing it stays true to those aspects of the series. My only hesitation besides the impending launch of the expansion pack is sending myself into some kind of horrible ARPG overdose but I don’t think I can resist, especially after the major pre-expansion pack patch that just dropped has renewed so much interest in the game again. Ugh!

X-com Versus the Zombie Menace!

Brace yourself for another shocking tale of my crippling case of backlogitis…

I pre-ordered XCOM: Enemy Unknown for PC back in 2012, anticipating the ever-loving fuck out of it after not having a turned based tactics game come close to the experience I had with the original X-COM back in the 90s, and here I am, finally playing the goddamn thing just after the release of its expansion pack over a year later… and I’m playing the Xbox 360 version to add insult to injury. I’m goddamn despicable.

The decision to go with the console release of XCOM: Enemy Within came about because I had never purchased the game on console and had heard repeatedly from various sources that playing with the controller was fine. Not only fine, but a lot of people preferred it to keyboard and mouse. Yes, even PC gamers. At first I found this unfathomable but I eventually accepted that it might just be true. This is 2014 after all. When Enemy Within was announced I figured it was my opportunity to pick up the complete “commander edition” version of the game in one package and play from the luxurious comfort of my couch. My only disappoint with this decision is that now I’m sure I’ll play through this game several more times in the future and when I do it’ll be on PC, so I’ll need to pick up another copy of the Enemy Within expansion pack regardless. Ah well.

“MEC troopers, never leave home without ’em!”

So yeah, I’m not going to go into why I loved the original XCOM: UFO Defense because I plan on putting together a retro review of it sometime in the next 20 years. Let’s just say that several aspects of the game struck me as more or less perfect and I wanted another experience that recaptured its glory. I watched all of the discussion regarding the various spiritual successors but always passed, played some other games inspired by its mechanics (such as Silent Storm, another game I need to revisit and review) but never got too far into any of them, and when I heard about XCOM finally picking up a biggish budget sequel I was thrilled. Finally, when the Firaxis game was announced and the first details were released I was quite hopeful that they’d finally put together a worthy sequel.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown isn’t really a sequel or a spiritual successor, but a full on, faithful re-imagining of the original game, updated with modern mechanics and presentation. While that sounds like a description for any update of an old game, it’s really quite literal with XCOM. It’s like they made a check list of everything that made X-COM “X-COM” and put it into this new version, only changing and (usually somewhat modernizing) the systems underneath to make the still very customizable, and still very brutal game more accessible in today’s market. To put it another way, it is almost as if the 2012 development team took the original design documents and concept art and made a new game without much knowledge of the previous one. Sure, a lot of the little details about how the mechanics work and whatnot are all quite different but on the surface it’s the same damn game. At the risk of losing some friends here, I’d even dare say that this new imagining of XCOM might even be better than the original in many aspects. It’s just that goddamn good! Awesome, dynamic squad based tactics, persistence through leveling soldiers, strategy via managing the XCOM program and researching technology trees on the geoscape. It’s all here!

Despite what the suits back at base, sometimes you just HAVE to use high explosives.

“Despite what the suits back at base say, sometimes you just HAVE to use high explosives.”

I played through the entire long campaign with the worthy additions of Enemy Within and the other DLC, and despite only playing on normal difficulty I still found the game to be challenging at times and damn rewarding to boot. I tried to avoid “save scumming” but there were a few times where I reloaded to avoid losing senior soldiers… oh, and I abused the hell out of it to beat that damn whale mission. The Xbox 360 build had a couple of hard locks and other odd bugs but nothing to truly ruin the overall experience. I could go on and on about this game, and if I had written about it while playing I probably would have, but for now that is all I want to gush over it about. Perhaps more the next time I decide to play through?

To cross another one off of my pile of shame, I finally played through the first of Telltale’s The Walking Dead seasons. Being both a fan of the show and of adventure games in general, I’ve been wanting to play this game since I first heard about it and since then I’ve only heard more and more good things. Are they true? Yes, mostly…

“I wanted to post an example of TWD’s excellent, well written dialog system. So, yeah…”

The Walking Dead is a classic adventure game in most respects. Sure, the UI is stripped down and most of the puzzles probably barely qualify as being such in the traditional sense, but at its core it still plays unmistakably like the graphical adventure games of old. While there is still a lot of environmental exploration and “pixel hunting” for items, the items mostly serve to move conversations forward and add the occasional context sensitive action – there’s no tedious inventory management and item combination voodoo to deal with at all. The core of the gameplay instead focuses around the conversation choices you make and how those choices affect your story – who is in your group and how they feel about you, which in the end largely comes down to differences in dialog. That sounds a little simple but it works surprisingly well and while the ultimate outcome is more or less the same, your choices at least feel like they carry some real weight.

Not everything works well though. The action sequences are pretty much all god awful. I was almost shocked to even see them here at all – people have been complaining about crappy action and arcade sequences in adventure games since the 1980s. While there’s some variety there, mostly my problem with them has to do with my second complaint: the engine is pretty bad. There’s all kinds of issues: long loads, flickering, clipping, and general bugginess. It just generally feels clunky. This only really started to affect my enjoyment of the game when it came to those action sequences, especially when they resulted in a sudden death or fail condition. That leads directly to the final point, one I really wasn’t expecting, but instant deaths/fails galore! Really? I’ll fully admit that I’m a Sierra apologist but I thought the dudes at Telltale were big LucasArts fans. I figured they would detest this kind of thing. Ah well, at least they’re generous enough to automatically restart the gameplay right at whatever sequence killed you.

Home improvement time!”

Anyway, back to the good. The hand drawn, graphic novel inspired art style is good (sometimes even strikingly beautiful) even if the engine and some of the animation lets it down a bit. The voice acting is mostly fucking brilliant, with the main cast being among the best I’ve heard in a game. Telltale absolutely nailed the desolation, the desperation, and the overall feel of The Walking Dead setting too. Finally, the writing is great. I quickly found myself caring about the characters and, probably more telling, when I think back on my jaunt through zombie infested Georgia, I remember it more like I had read a novel or watched a good movie than I had played through it in a game. The more I ponder it, I’d have to chalk it up to a tricky combination of the basic setting and plot, the character development, and the agency the player is given behind how the story appears to unfold. It’s not just an infatuation with the excellent Lee and Clementine either, even the tiny stories from the 400 Days episode made an impact.

If you’re a fan of the Walking Dead show and/or comics and don’t completely detest graphical adventure games, please do yourself a favor and put this on your wishlist if you haven’t already played it. It’s brilliant. I played through the aforementioned “400 Days” extra episode and can’t wait to play through Season 2 when it is finished being deployed later this year.

Screenshots are PC not Xbox 360, as I swiped from the Steam Community. Thanks, glorious PC gaming master race!

Bayonets and Bats

Excuse my absence, and welcome to 2014! Despite the lack of updates I have, in fact, continued slowly slogging through my Xbox 360 backlog.

First, I was feeling like revisiting the World War II theater (most certainly inspired by recently watching HBO’s excellent mini-series “The Pacific”) and had a few selections in my backlog to choose from. I decided to finally check out Call of Duty: World at War’s single player campaign. I knew this was a risky move given my numerous issues with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s campaigns but I remembered it looking really cool when it came out and hey, this was Treyarch this time, not Infinity Ward, so I thought maybe they’d handle things a bit better. I thought wrong.

“It’s pretty, I’ll give it that much…”

As usual this is another Call of Duty campaign filled with insanely annoying “meat grinder” choke-points, infinitely spawning enemies, and less than seamless trigger points. I’d so much prefer to be able to have some freedom to flank around my enemies and use whatever tactics I can come up with to progress through the battlefield but that simply isn’t what Treyarch was going for here. I mentioned this in both my posts about CoD4 and CoD:MW2 and I don’t feel any different about it in WaW.

“The PBY mission was a little different, even if it was on rails.”

This may be my last Call of Duty campaign. In the aforementioned games I generally felt like it was the level structure that was bolted on to the otherwise great game systems (that work so well in multiplayer) that was the problem. This time I didn’t even enjoy the underlying systems. They just DO NOT work in single player with the insanity of the infinite enemies and the rest of the chaos going on. It’s always been pretty clear to me that the chaos of large scale battles is part of what they were trying to pull off with all of this scripted tomfoolery but I simply don’t find it fun or otherwise particularly gratifying. It’s cool to see the first few times, sure, but once you’ve seen behind that curtain all of the awe of these big set pieces fades away and you’re just left with trying to muddle your way through the remaining annoyances that make it all tick.

Oh, and I know people bitched about grenades in CoD4 but… what the fuck Treyarch? In many of the missions in this game I felt like the village idiot being pelted by frag grenades from every direction instead of rotten vegetables, and I must have looked like one too as I frantically ran back and forth trying get out of their blast radius or throw them back away like some kind of wildly incompetent juggler chasing his balls across the stage. Seriously, who thought this was fun?

“Nazi zombie invasion!”

I never played any of the multiplayer modes in WaW but they sounded like an odd (read: bad) re-skin of the same systems from CoD4. Dogs instead of helicopters? Okay then. Still, might be fun? The one thing I did do, which is also the most celebrated new thing WaW introduced to the franchise, was “Nazi Zombies” mode with some friends via split screen a couple of years back. Sure, it is a simple take on the now almost ubiquitous Horde/survival mode that was all the rage for a few years there, but it was one of the first ones I know of to introduce some new persistent wave to wave systems to spice up the gameplay. Boarding up windows and managing your weapons as your area of responsibility expanded was pretty compelling gameplay, especially when played cooperatively as intended. Of course this mode was expanded on greatly in later Treyarch CoD games so checking it out now is almost purely for the curious.

Onto bigger and better things, I finally got around to playing through Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum despite first playing (and enjoying) the demo way back before the game was released. What can I say? I’m slow. You guys should be used to this by now…

“This game could have ended so much more quickly.”

Arkham Asylum is, foremost, the best realized Batman video game ever. I say this for two particular reasons: Despite coming out at around the same time as Batman Begins, Rocksteady’s vision of Batman is unique, taking bits and pieces from all kinds of previous works and compiling them into something that really feels like the Batman that comic, cartoon, and movie fans love. The other is the gameplay, which is at last a good representation of what the character of Batman does. Sure, we’ve had plenty of fist fighting and grappling before, and even a little zip lining here and there, but Arkham Asylum combines fun fighting mechanics with a little stealth, a twist of vertical platforming, and a splash of puzzle solving detective work, all with an appropriate layer of super-inventor gadgetry item use.

While I didn’t grow to love the combat system as much as I suspected I might it’s definitely fun to dive into a huge group of thugs and tear them apart. I also really don’t think of this as much of a “stealth game” despite seeing a lot of people refer to it as one. That’s totally fine, Batman isn’t a ninja after all. He will, on the other hand, stalk you from the shadows until he has the perfect opportunity to suddenly hang your ass from the rafters to turn you into an example to the rest of your gang, and Arkham Asylum definitely delivers there. I wouldn’t have minded seeing a bit more puzzle solving and storytelling blended into the mix but I admit that’s a bit more subjective.

“Detective mode + gargoyles. The native habitat of the batmen.”

I was a little surprised at how blatantly “metro-vania” structured the game was, with the old “slowly gaining unlocks that allow access to previously inaccessible areas that you need to go back to paced out throughout the game” mechanic out in full effect. Thankfully most of the more tedious backtracking is allocated to the multiple item collection tasks in the game. These are completely optional and I chose not to go out of my way to participate in them this time though I definitely think I would have tried to 100% the game if I had played it back at release. That said, while I often really like metro-vania style games I think I’ll prefer the more open-world style of the later “Arkham” games when I eventually get around to playing them.

Overall, the triumph of Batman: Arkham Asylum is that it manages to make the player feel like they’re stepping into Batman’s shoes for a little while. It’s empowering and somewhat unique, but most importantly it’s damn cool. I’ll definitely be putting Arkham City on my shopping list!

As usual, Xbox 360 screenshots are stolen from people much cooler than me. Honestly, even if I had an HD capture unit I can’t imagine going through all of that work just for a few shitty screenshots.