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The Tale of Garn Chapter 30

Warning: potential side quest (Fighters Guild) spoilers ahead!

From the journals of Garn:

Changing Careers

Having seemingly exhausted my supply of fresh work with the death of the would-be Ayleid king Umbanaco I’ve decided to take leave of the Imperial City once again. While I’ll keep it my base of operations for now it seems almost as if the city exists inside of a bubble where matters of the rest of realm have little bearing on life within. Not a good place for work unless you join the guard and even then I’d suspect it none too exciting unless you get a great thrill out of putting irons on pickpockets. Instead I’ve decided to ride east to the city of Cheydinhal where I’m told I can join the Fighters Guild. With this I hope to be able to receive some extra training, keep a closer ear to news from around Cyrodiil, and of course get some steady work, even if it does reward the guild’s honor more than my own.

At the Fighters Guild guildhall in Cheydinhal I’m directed to an Orc named Burz gro-Khash. While a few of the other guild members have at least a passing knowledge of me, Burz does not, and combined with his usual Orcish temperate, I expect little comfort from him as I work my way through the ranks. Indeed for my first assignment he’s given me little more than an errand to run, delivering supplies to some other guild members planning to clear out a nearby cave infested with goblins. Though the Orc tries to test me, it is only a test. Besides, stirring up an organization such as the Fighters Guild would be exceedingly counterproductive to my goals.

“Jump for joy!”

I receive quite a warm welcome to Desolate Mine. A pack of savage goblins ambushed me and slew my horse before it was over. Of course, they all paid. Inside I deliver the supplies. Impressed by my handling of the goblins outside, the other members have asked for my sword in cleaning them out. Naturally I accept. Between the four of us the goblins are no match. Unfortunately numbers didn’t appear to help the numerous dead miners we’re finding in the lower depths. I’m not sure what caused this incursion but whatever it was, the mine is now cleared. Burz is pleased with our performance and has advanced me from Associate to Initiate rank in the guild. The bad news is that if I want immediate work I’ll need to go elsewhere – he says the Anvil hall currently has a healthy backlog of jobs. It’s a long ride out west but it has been a while since I’ve visited the port.

“Speaking with Azzan, head of the Anvil Fighters Guild.”

Burz was right. The guildhall at Anvil is bustling with activity. I’m directed to the head of hall here, a Redguard named Azzan. His first contract for me as an Initiate is to deal with a rat problem in a local woman’s basement. Surely, despite my rank, he can tell from my arms and the way I carry myself that I am no novice fighter. Still, as with Burz, perhaps just a test. I go to visit the woman. Arvena Thelas, a Dunmer, apparently isn’t the victim of a rat infestation but rather she keeps pet rats and something has been killing them. Upon investigation I find a mountain lion in her basement, catching it in the act. The beast immediately turns on me as I disturb it but I’ve fought large cats many times before now and am able to quickly put it down. Anvil city seems like an unusual place for mountain lions. Arvena suggests I contact Pinarus Inventius, a local hunter, to help track down the beasts and thin their numbers.

“What am I, level 1?”

Pinarus gladly accepts the task and volunteers to take me to some spots in the foot hill outside of the city walls where he suspects we might find them. Sure enough, after a short hike we spot a small pride gathered under some trees. I summon one of my more destructive fireball spells and kill them all in one large blast. I return to Arvena to collect my fee but she’s not pleased to hear the news – apparently there’s already another mountain lion in her basement. I quickly put it down too but by the Nine, what could be luring them down here? She suspects one of her neighbors, Quill-Weave, could be responsible as she’s expressed a strong dislike for the rats before.

I seek out Quill-Weave, an Argonian woman – apparently a famous author. She quickly sees through my questioning and rejects any notion that she could be responsible. I’ve decided on another approach. I’ll simply hide outside of Arvena’s basement, near the hole that the mountain lions have been entering through, and see what happens. Sure enough a few hours later, after night has fallen and most have extinguished their candles and torches, I spot Quill-Weave sneaking to the hole and tossing some rotten meat nearby. As she turns to leave I confront her. She continues to deny it at first but caught red handed she finally tells me the truth. She was hoping to lure the rats out so that the city guard would find them and dispatch them – she knew nothing about mountain lions. She begs my mercy and so I accept as I believe her story and her desire to avoid conflict with Arvena. I tell Arvena that she was mistaken about the Argonian and accept my reward, hoping that I closed this contract with the least amount of turmoil for all involved.

“I might have destroyed your shop, but I got the burglars!”

Azzan’s next contract for me is a little more interesting. Apparently a local shop has been getting burgled regularly during off hours. I head over to Lelles’ Quality Merchandise on the docks and speak with Norbert Lelles, a friendly Breton. He suggests simply handing me the keys for the night and leaving me to take watch in the dark while he heads to the tavern next door. Simple enough.

I’m sitting alone in the dark here for hours. I hear faint whispers and the unmistakable sound of boards creaking beneath heavy feet… the door opens. Three men, armored and armed, creep in. I draw my sword from its scabbard and command them to halt, ready to give chase in case they flee but, surprisingly, they draw their weapons themselves and surround me. The battle is chaotic and bloody, leaving three corpses and a mess of merchandise in Norbert’s floor. After fetching Norbert he seems quite pleased by the result though rather disturbed by the fact that all three men used to work for him in the past. Azzan is pleased as well and I’m being promoted to Journeyman.

Azzan has informed me that the next contracts suitable for someone of my rank would have to be assigned at the Chorrol guildhall. It has been quite a while since I’ve visited Chorrol but my last stay there was fair enough. It’s a fairly lengthy journey when taking safe roads, which I plan on doing. Upon entering the city I’m already hearing rumors about the guild – not surprising since both the Fighters Guild and the Mage’s Guild have a strong representation in the city. The talk on the streets seems to be fairly negative. I’m greeted by a Dunmer called Modryn Oreyn who seems to have little patience for new recruits. After explaining my assignment I think I know why: I’m to ride to Skingrad to look for a new recruit who has defaulted on his contract.

“Fallen Rock Cave. Ahhh, I get it…”

After my journey I immediately ask a city guard manning the gates if they knew of the man, Maglir. The guard is usually a good source of information as long as you can find one of the less stern ones. I’m told that Maglir can usually be founding drinking at one of the city taverns so I’m heading that way. Sure enough, Maglir was sitting alone with an ale at the West Weald. He seemed to know why I was there. He explained that although his task was simple, to retrieve a journal rumored to be in a local cave, the contract wasn’t paying enough for the risk. I asked him about this several times, and every time he shrugged off my statements with less and less concern. He suggests that if I want the contract I can have it, and that he suspects I can find the journal in Fallen Rock Cave.

I’ve decided to make my way to Fallen Rock Cave this morning to try to close out the contract. I’ll decide what to do after that. Maglir might be a dishonorable coward but he wasn’t wrong about the dangers lurking in this cave. It is quite infested with undead and considering the ruins I’ve been clearing out lately that’s saying something. I fought many skeletons, wraiths and ghosts in the this place, even a lich, and eventually I located the journal in a flooded passageway on the lowest level of the cavern. The loot isn’t spectacular but at least I’ll return to Chorrol with the job complete. In Chorrol Modryn is pleased enough about the contract being finished but demands to know what Maglir’s role in this was. Given Maglir’s disposition about the whole or ordeal I do not deny the truth and tell him about Maglir smugly defaulting.

“Another bar… I’m starting to sense a theme here.”

Modryn’s next job for me is in Leyawiin. An exceedingly long ride from here but apparently this is the life of a guild member who volunteers to travel rather than only work locally. Apparently there have been reports of some other members causing all sorts of trouble in the city’s taverns and inns. Sure enough, even after the long ride I catch them red handed in the Five Claws Lodge. The men plead their ignorance but in their drunken stupors admit their guilt as well. Still, their excuse rings true enough: the men claim that the Blackwood Company has been grabbing up all of the work in the area and that they’ve got nothing better to do without contracts. After reassuring the bartender that the guild would have them out of her hair soon I left to canvas the city for potential work.

After a few referrals I’ve found a local alchemist who, after being offered some rare reagents that I’d gathered on the last job, has agreed to contract with the guild for some other alchemical components. I return back to the Five Claws to give them the good news and the details. They seem genuinely happy about the opportunity for honest work again. Returning to Chorrol, Modryn is quite pleased with my work as well and has decided to raise me to rank of Swordsman, making me a full member of the guild at last. Perhaps I’ll get some less lackluster jobs now…

Projecting My Inner Starfighter Pilot

Last weekend I popped in another relatively old Xbox 360 game, Project Sylpheed: Arc of Deception. I’ve been itching for a space shooter for a long time and this one more than scratched that itch. I was highly skeptical too, given I’d heard it had complex controls and a whacked-out anime cliche filled storyline, especially believable considering that it was published by Square Enix.

What kind of game is this? Well, despite being the spiritual successor to the PC (and Sega CD) classic Silpheed it is more closely related to space flight simulators such as the classic Wing Commander series than a vertical shooter. It does make some obvious nods at the original like the design of your ship and the whole weapon outfitting thing though. Still, a space flight sim, a genre almost entirely PC centric, and almost extinct nowadays to boot, on the Xbox 360? Yep! Like I said, skeptical. 🙂

“Oddly most of the screenshots I found are from an older build with a slightly different interface.”

So the controls – a real cause for concern. They could have easily been too simple, a little too “arcadey”, losing too much of the “simulation” aspect of the genre, or way, way too complicated making them totally unsuited to a controller. Beyond all of that your fighter could have controlled like a floating tank too. Personally, I was pretty satisfied with them – after inverting my left analog stick, a quick run through the tutorial and I pretty much knew how to pilot my fighter. You can also customize your control scheme quite a bit too, if you fancy. I did have some problems though, ending with me cranking down the difficulty from normal to easy on my first run through, but once I got over that minor learning curve and started expanding and experimenting with my arsenal and developing tactics for taking down the larger ships the game actually seemed to get easier… and with that, much, much funner. Sure, those points would have probably been more welcome in the tutorial than in some crazy difficulty spike but I’m soooo glad I didn’t give in and put it down.

I really didn’t want to have to put it down either. It’s a beautiful game with a very, very “busy” look – you have a relatively complex UI that partially apes a HUD, again, owing to its sim style, you have a large amount of enemies flying around you, unlike most games in the genre, and you have a dazzling array of ship contrails, missiles, laser beams, explosions, and other effects all adding to the chaos. At first glance it looks amazingly hectic and although it can be at times once I got a grip on the game everything made sense and nothing really distracted me too much. The voice acting is… eh, okay, sounding a bit like your average anime dub. The music, while not bad, also doesn’t do much to impress. Then again it is usually obscured by weapons fire, explosions, and dialog anyway.

“I think the warning is due to the approximately 50,000 missiles on the screen.”

Then there’s the cut scenes – very anime inspired, and while not the prettiest CGI ever if you’re fan of anime and/or cut scenes in other Japanese games you may enjoy them. Personally, what got me was the obvious influence of some of my favorite space opera animes such as The Super Dimensional Fortress Macross and particularly Macross Plus which I appreciated to no end. Honestly, when I first saw the very Macross-like snaking missiles in the demo at a friend’s house years ago I knew that this was an immediate purchase. Thankfully much to my surprise the game’s cut scenes, dialog, and plot in general weren’t nearly as annoyingly over the top as I was expecting so unless you have absolutely zero tolerance for such things I think you’ll manage.

One of the coolest parts of the game is the ability to purchase and mount various weapon systems – some pretty epic ones too. From your basic dog fighting machine guns and the aforementioned guided missiles, you also have things like anti-ship missiles, torpedoes, dumb rockets, and even massive battleship splitting energy cannons. There’s a fair amount of room for experimentation and customization there too. Like I said, at first I really wasn’t feeling the chaotic, largely weighted battles the game constantly puts you in but once I mastered some of these weapons my fighter became a god of battlefield and I was laying waste to practically everything single-handedly. Making strafing runs against entire fleets of gigantic warships, weaving and rolling in and out of their formations, leaving huge explosions in your wake is a surprisingly addicting feeling. The game totally capitalizes on this too because all of those weapons you purchased? You can start a “new game+”, keeping them while you work on buying the rest.

“Boooom! Destroy what destroys you. In this case, a destroyer.”

The game certainly has some shortcomings. The near constant chattering of your wingmen and even opponents can be a bit over done and even a little random, especially when it’s hard to make out over the effects half the time. Some of the (thankfully optional) side mission objectives are beyond esoteric even in the rare instances when they actually get pointed out to you. This ties directly into my comment about the battles being larger and more chaotic than most in games like this as I definitely feel like the mission/scenario design could have used a little more tweaking. One of the most damning things is the fact practically all missions and sub-stages have a time limit which is damn bizarre for this type of game. Sometimes it relates directly to your objective and therefore makes some sense though at other times it comes totally out of left field. Still, I don’t believe I ever failed a mission due to the time limit even if I did come incredibly close a couple of times. No, the real pisser here is that when you die on a mission you can automatically restart at the last sub-stage you were on (which is usually a pretty good checkpoint) but by doing so you lose all of your previous kill credits which will no doubt cause you to score a much lower ranking and therefore greatly reduced points to spend on weapon upgrades. This kind of makes doing badly a bit more punishing than it feels, creating a potential vicious circle of dying due to having crappy weapons but not being able to upgrade them due to dying. Whoops!

Anyway, I got over all of that shit. I mentioned that “new game+” feature? Yeah, I started a new game back on normal immediately after beating the game and replayed several of the missions and I almost never do that. That’s how much fun I was having with this game! I’m pretty sure that, like the classics of this genre, this is one I’ll dust back off and replay again some day – possibly several more times! It’s just a pity that this game is relatively overlooked both by Xbox 360 owners and fans of the space sim genre… but then again this type of thing certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and I’m admittedly part of what I’d imagine is a very small western demographic who both loves space sims and certain kinds of anime. Still, people apparently buy plenty of Ace Combat! *shrug*

As usual, Xbox 360 screenshots stolen. Thanks to Google Image Search for aiding and abetting!

Back to the Trenches!

I decided to hit up an XBLA game for a change – there are plenty of Arcade games that I want to play but it’s already challenging enough to manage my backlog of physical titles which often leads to me forgetting all about these excellent downloadable games. Still, every now and then I choose to hop into one. This time it is Toy Soldiers by Signal Studios.

Tower defense games are oddly hit and miss for me – when they’re done just right they totally click with me in a very satisfying, addictive way and when they’re not I usually can’t even be bothered to try feigning interest in them enough for a second try. Toy Soldiers is definitely in the former category. It takes the classic, simple tower defense gameplay, gives it an awesome World War I come toys theme, and adds in the ability to control towers and other units (tanks and planes) by hand to up their effectiveness and/or your score. It’s a very simple concept but executed almost perfectly with an awesome presentation and a healthy layer of polish.

“Surveying the (toy) carnage.”

The World War I theme doesn’t get visited in video games (or much else) very often and, if you think about it, the static trench warfare that is typically associated with it is right at home with the tower defense genre. You have troops attacking in waves, trying to reach objectives, and you can place certain defenses such as barbed wire, machine gun nests, mortars, and artillery in their way to hopefully wipe them out before they get there. Right on! As usual, the more enemies you kill the more money you make and the more money you have the more you can upgrade your defenses which you’ll need to do as enemy waves get more and more difficult. That’s it in a nutshell.

The fact that you’re actually supposed to be playing with toys takes little away from the game – units are animated and are fairly realistic. In fact I often found myself forgetting that the sun was actually a gigantic desk lamp and that my tank had a huge winding key sticking out of the back of it and finding myself immersed in the gritty battlefield. Still, having the units break into pieces and vanishing instead of turning the toy-box into a horrid gore-fest is actually a pretty smart way to get around any ratings concerns. Using toys also gives the developers license to more or less do whatever they want. How about we fight a massive uber-tank this time? What if flying saucers show up instead of tri-planes? Again, pure genius.

“About to fuck up some toy horses… and probably my own guys.”

The maps are pretty varied and are often quite challenging, sometimes involving a bit of trial and error though if you play conservatively enough with your cash flow you can often adapt to surprises in the enemy waves. In some of the trickier scenarios finding just the right balance between managing your turrets and controlling a turrets or units is key to a successful defense. There aren’t many types of turrets and units available at first glance but each turret can be upgraded and not all upgrades are of the simple “+1 damage” variety. For instance, I sometimes preferred a level 2 anti-infantry gun for tracking and killing off cavalry quickly versus a level 3 which is basically a small canon, and thus fires and tracks a little less quickly despite doing a lot more damage over a wider area.

I ended up playing through the campaign on normal difficulty as well as playing through the campaign+ mode (which thankfully mixed up the maps from the normal campaign a lot more than I was anticipating) and both DLC campaigns including “Invasion!” which added all kinds of flipped out new enemy units and culminated in you fighting a giant robot. AWESOME! Sadly I didn’t get around to try multiplayer but I can easily imagine it being a ton of fun. I can’t wait to get my hands on Toy Soldiers: Cold War now though I’ll likely wait a while before leaping into that one.

Digging waaaay back into the physical backlog I also played through The Darkness by Starbreeze Studios. Being a fan of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay on the original Xbox and thinking the concept looked cool I’d been wanting to play this one for quite awhile. Unfortunately I came out on the other side mostly disappointed.

“Viva la aim assist!”

First, the game in case you’ve never heard of it or more likely have forgotten about it by now: It’s a first person shooter where you play a mobster who gets possessed by The Darkness, some kind of wacky demonic presence that wants nothing more than to kill mofos and eat their hearts. Doesn’t everybody? The Darkness grants you some powers and abilities in additional to the normal FPS running and gunning you’re used to which should help aid you in hunting down the mob boss who is trying to rub you out. Additionally, it thrives in the darkness (go figure!) so sneaking around in the shadows and shooting out lights becomes a major factor in the gameplay as well. The other big gameplay twist is that you’re mostly running around in a small but semi-open world city (complete with side missions!) rather than the usual level based structure we see in FPS games. You’ll also make a few trips to a twisted, dark re-imagining of World War 1. Yes, another World War 1 game… err, sort of!

The game looks and sounds great, I particularly love the use of the first person view, though overall it feels very last gen at times – maybe this is because of it being very early in this generation or maybe it’s a Starbreeze thing. I don’t really know. The sound is pretty excellent overall – good voice acting, for instance. I was concerned about Mike Patton being the voice of The Darkness since I’m a big fan and was worried that such a bizarre role would somehow come across poorly but I should have had more faith in him as he hits a home run with his performance here. Really, the only thing I found difficult to live with was its controls: maybe I’ve been spoiled by some of the newer shooters out there but they’re a bit on the clunky side in The Darkness which is definitely not what you want in a console FPS. Still, thanks to a heavy dose of auto-aim they’re serviceable enough.

That leads me to The Darkness powers themselves. I was actually pretty surprised by how little your possession by The Darkness actually gives you. Looking at them all on paper it seems like a nice selection of abilities to augment your character but their execution was a bit rough around the edges, both in terms of using the powers and of how some of the special mechanics they introduced were used in the game. In other words, so close but yet so far…

“The Darkness knows how to party!”

The “Darkness Vision” which was supposed to be kind of a nightvision+ kind of sucked. The “darklings” you can summon to help fight with you were barely useful and died or otherwise vanished way too quickly. The “Creeping Dark” power seemed awesome but was needed perhaps too little and could sometimes be a little disorientating to use. The “Demon Arm” power also seemed to be required a little too infrequently and mostly served me as a way to quickly (err, usually) take out lights without wasting all of my ammo. The guns seemed nice but also seemed to deplete your darkness too quickly to be useful. Finally, the last power you get, the vortex, was almost an “I win” button but even that was perhaps a little too iffy to target and, on top of that, a bit too sensitive to range. I found myself occasionally landing it just a bit too far and having it sitting there seemingly close to my enemies as they stood their attacking me, unaffected.

Keeping track of your darkness power levels was kind of head scratching to me at first. The game frequently referred to having to stay out of the light and in the darkness to fuel your Darkness powers, and referenced how certain abilities drain your Darkness at different rates, but this Darkness power is never represented anywhere in game that I ever noticed. Having a meter on screen or SOMETHING would have gone a long way into making my darkness powers feel more useful as well making the whole “staying out of the light” and “hunting for hearts to eat” thing a bit more urgent and fun. I’m guessing this was done in the name of having a minimal UI (your health also goes unrepresented and guns and ammo display can be a little sketchy as well) but to me, in this case, it largely detracted from the experience.

The open world structure is kind of pointless. It worked well in the Riddick but in this game it didn’t really serve to help immerse me in the environment at all. Instead, it just felt tedious having to travel around everywhere, back and forth to the same bite sized hunks of map, loading screens in between. Perhaps a real, seamless open world and/or better navigational aids could have helped this a bit but ultimately I just didn’t think it fit well with the story.

“You’d think with this much firepower a single schlub with a gun wouldn’t be owning me.”

Finally, the story. I understand that The Darkness was based on a comic book series and perhaps I’d have some better appreciation for it if I had ever read any of it, but as it was, it didn’t do much for me. There seemed like so many missed opportunities to take it into more interesting places. For instance, your character, Jackie, hardly has any sort of reaction to being possessed. Really? You’d think suddenly having an evil demonic entity sprouting out of your body and speaking directly into your brain might elicit SOME kind of reaction. Nah, not so much. I mean, you could tell an entire series of stories based JUST on him dealing with this shit! Instead Jackie hardly has any sort of reaction to anything! There have definitely been times when the silent protagonist thing has worked just fine in video games but The Darkness is pretty ham-fisted with the whole thing. One minute he’s blabbing about meatballs or making some vapid comment about riding on the subway in a loading scene and the next he seems entirely unfazed by having his entire life, and even his entire concept of reality, turned upside down. Come on, guys…

The death cut scenes and the loading scenes were interesting touches and add a little more flavor though the loading scenes in particular often felt bizarrely out of place and were where the worst of the horrible Italian-American cliches came in. Honestly, Jackie didn’t really need any help feeling like a one-dimensional moron, but whatever. Despite my issues with some of these scenes, and I don’t say this a lot, I think the whole presentation, both in terms of the story and of the flawed open world structure I mentioned earlier, would have worked so much better if the game were more linear with more cut-scenes or at least more focused on the narrative. As it is it just doesn’t feel well executed to me.

Technically it is fine, and even conceptually it’s quite solid, I just feel like they designers missed a lot of opportunities to capitalize on what could have been a much more exciting game with more unique and cool mechanics and a much more engrossing story. It came close to being something really special and I’m quite curious to see if the developers of The Darkness 2 will be able to succeed where Starbreeze couldn’t. Not a bad game overall but probably not really worth revisiting if you missed it originally. All of that said, the very last cut-scene was surprisingly touching and having the credits roll on to a Tomahawk song was awesome!

As usual, Xbox 360 screenshots mercilessly looted from teh interwebz. Yarr!