Category Archives: Game Logs

Exploring the Decay

It’s been ages since I last did any serious gaming – I’ve been moving, changing jobs, and generally just very busy with other “real life” things. I’m all settled now though, so here’s a little about the last game I completed before I dive into something new…

“State of Decay”

Perhaps my favorite aspect of The Walking Dead (both the comics and the TV series) is how human-centric the story is – more than any other zombie movies, shows, books, or games I’ve experienced, The Walking Dead is about the people trying to survive this radically altered world. The struggle really isn’t about the zombies, and as the show’s many, many detractors have pointed out, it’s really *barely* about zombies at all, but it’s instead against a world whose infrastructure has been gutted, where the rules of society have crumbled, and where only those who can successfully adapt, for better and for worse, can make it. Be it a nuclear war or a zombie plague, this is the key to a good post apocalypse story in my opinion. Imaging survival in such a setting is what I find most captivating about the genre. At this point there have been more zombie related games than I care to try to count but few of them even attempted to capture this essence. Instead, most zombie related games resemble the zombie movies of the 80s (even the good ones!) where zombies are simply a specific variety of antagonist that needs to be defeated. State of Decay, by Undead Labs, changes all of that.

“Scouting from up high.”

State of Decay’s basic gameplay loop is what is so damn good: it’s all about that survival. In this case, “survival” simply means establishing a base where you can hole up and scavenging for enough supplies to maintain it as well as meet your character’s own individual demands. The most compelling part of this, for me at least, is the exploration involved in that scavenging or, really, anything else in this setting. While the process can become rather laborious and repetitive (more inventory room, please!) exploring and “clearing” all of these old abandoned and dangerous buildings never really gets old. There’s always a sense of creepiness as you sneak around in the dark trying to locate lootable containers, never knowing when a zombie might show up. Sure, a zombie probably won’t put you in much dangerous unless it’s one of the special “freak” class zombies, but sometimes getting mobbed by too many, in just the right way, can still put you in a very bad spot very quickly.

“A good pair of wheels is essential for exploration. Planes? Not so much.”

Back to the subject of establishing a base of operations though. One thing State of Decay does to make this interesting is that you don’t just play a single character. You can, sure, but you can also switch to almost any of the other survivors that are part of your enclave and play them too. The injury and fatigue systems in the game actually actively encourage it, even, as do the RPG like skill leveling and item systems. This also makes the addition of permadeath without entering into a total fail state a thing – your character can die, permanently, and the game keeps going. Speaking of keeping going, like other open world games, the world also exists as somewhat of a “simulation” with all kinds of systems in play that do not necessary tie directly into what is occurring to or around your character. More dramatically, some of these systems continue on when you’re not in game. It’s not uncommon to log in a day or two later to find that one of your survivors has died or that there are new missions waiting for you. All of these systems together alter the focus of the game from being about you killing zombies to being, like The Walking Dead, about you and your group of survivors getting by in this strange and twisted version of life.

“Did I mentioned the skill system? Oh yes!”

At this point my main criticism of the game is that it really doesn’t push far enough in either direction – as a more directed, story based experience, or as a sandbox open world game where you make your own goals. I feel like most people are probably drawn more towards the open world nature of the game but the systems in place don’t really allow for a huge amount of freedom or variety playing in a pure sandbox way. More potential base locations, more possible customization of them, more variety of item and resource types, and possibly more dangers (unlike The Walking Dead, fighting other groups of human survivors is almost entirely absent from State of Decay) might go just far enough to fix this though. As it is though, it comes quite close.

I know an enhanced Xbox One port of the game came out just a couple of months ago, and who knows, I may tackle the DLC for the original Xbox 360 and PC versions someday too, but what most people seem to want from the series right now is some type of co-operative gameplay experience. At first Undead Labs were pretty loudly toting that the next State of Decay game would feature co-op or maybe even be an MMO of some sort but lately they seem a little bit more coy on exactly what their next project is. Intriguing for sure!

Xbox 360 screenshots swiped from Google image search, and probably actually PC screenshots. *shrug*

A Hero’s Journey

Almost immediately after beating and loving the first of the Mass Effect games I heard about a couple of others games that were purported to be attempting very similar things. The first was Obsidian’s Alpha Protocol. Apparently it was going to be Mass Effect meets a modern day spy thriller. How is that not amazing? Then there was Rise of the Argonauts which was Mass Effect set in ancient mythical Greece. Why not? I determined way back then that I’d be playing both of them. Period. While neither of these games turned out to wear that Mass Effect comparison quite so favorably, here I am…

“On our way to slay Medusa despite the lack of Perseus.”

Rise of the Argonauts is an RPG that is very much influenced by the “post-KoTOR” era of BioWare games. I definitely get a Jade Empire vibe from it but again the comparisons to Mass Effect are hard to avoid as well, especially considering the game’s Unreal Engine roots. You play as King Jason of Iolcus on his legendary quest for the Golden Fleece. Now, don’t get ahead of me too much here. I’m sure a lot of you have read about the myth of Jason or at least seen the rad Ray Harryhausen effects laden movie from the 1960s. This game takes innumerable liberties with the legend and indeed others so don’t think you already know the plot. That said, if you get a kick out of Greek mythology like I do then you’ll definitely enjoy some of references here.

After your journey aboard the suspiciously steampunk Argo kicks off you’ll be going relatively freely from place to place completing main quest objectives, doing side questions, and recruiting new members for your crew. Sound familiar? Despite the little bit of freedom you’ll have, you’re directed fairly narrow through the main plot and the games wraps up relatively quickly, which for me isn’t really a complaint – the length and the pace felt quite acceptable. You spend a surprising amount of time interacting with NPCs with a very Mass Effect like dialog system. Combat feels almost entirely separate from the conversations and even the exploration as it usually involves sections of the maps being cordoned off into little arenas with multiple waves of enemies that need to be defeated before moving on. There’s relatively little of it too, which isn’t such a bad thing since I never really got into the combat system.

“Heavy attack, heavy attack, block, whatever…”

The combat isn’t terrible, mediocre perhaps, but it just never “clicked” with me – whether an enemy blocked or dodged my blows, what weapons and attacks worked best for what situations, etc. just always felt fairly random and arbitrary to me. It wasn’t until one of my weapon/skill trees got nearly fully upgraded that combat became so easy I could simply stop feigning concern and do what felt the most cheaply effective. Even then, I didn’t care much for using many of the “active” special skills or powers as they took way too long to recharge and while boss fights could be challenging, the fodder wasn’t ever really worth wasting time using powers on.

“You’ll be seeing our protagonist from this angle *a lot* throughout the game.”

That said, there are some high notes as well. Although the dialog system didn’t seem to produce any decisions of consequence I felt like it was mostly well written and acted and Jason, while a little dry, is a fairly likable character, at least the way I played him as a devotee to Athena. Oh, and about that! I also liked the upgrade system, which had you earn “deeds” for meeting various goals, whether they be completing quests or more “achievement” like goals such as slaying 15 enemy mercenaries. You then chose which of four Greek gods you wanted to dedicate the deed too, essentially giving you XP to spend in that god’s particular skill tree. The dialog system incorporates this as well, with choices often differentiating between associating with each of the four gods rather than the more black and white, good savoir of humanity vs. evil dickhead choices RPGs usually give you.

Oh, I should also mention that a lot of the the videos and user reviews and whatnot I found online mentioned bugs and performance issues. Perhaps it helped that I had it installed on my 360’s hard drive and maybe its been patched since then too but I encountered relatively view bugs with the game and nothing I’d consider major.

“A meeting with Prometheus.”

Sticking with the technical stuff, graphically the game is quite a mixed bag. It left me a sour first impression with some extremely ugly pre-rendered (from the engine… why?) cut-scenes and some beyond awful animations. Once things got going for real though I started to admire some of the character models and designs as a whole. They’re not all good – the generic human NPCs found on Iolcus, for instance, are utterly fucking hideous, but some of the main characters such as Jason himself, are rather nice. Animations never get too much better but thankfully most of the other cut-scenes are kept in-engine so aren’t quite as jarring. Finally, the environments are, all in all, rather beautiful. There’s a lot of variety in color palettes and themes without feeling too contrived. I was especially impressed with my encounter with the Titan Prometheus down in… well, I don’t want to spoil it. Finally, the soundtrack is rather good for a game seemingly no one knows about and indeed a quick search resulted in a lot of people raving over it.

In summary, if you love BioWare style RPGs and Greek mythology and don’t mind going into it without huge expectations I’d certainly recommend Rise of the Argonauts. It’s a relatively short romp (for this type of game, at least) so I certainly don’t regret my time with it but I do have to admit that more than loving the game, it has me really wanting to play an actual BioWare game again ASAP.

As usual with Xbox 360 games these screenshots were stolen mercilessly, as is the way of Aries! I stole these ones, which are probably from the slightly better looking PC version, from http://www.computerbild.de. Danke!

Jamming Guns, Malaria, and Machetes

Oh, Far Cry 2! What to say about Far Cry 2? I’ve been struggling to sit down and write this game log much more than most. It’s not because I don’t have a lot of thoughts and opinions about the game but more because none of them are extremely well-formed or otherwise decisive at this point. Let’s just do this off the cuff.

To start off with, I never played the original Far Cry. It was definitely a bit of a staple of PC gaming during its heyday but I somehow (narrowly) avoided buying and playing through it. When Far Cry 2 was announced I thought it looked absolutely awesome – a very forced first person perspective which looked particularly unique in respects to interactions with NPCs. Conversations with other characters and buddy rescues immediately spring to mind as scenes I saw in previews that looked extremely intriguing to me, as did the overall gritty look of the game. When it was finally released there seemed to be quite a bit of disparity in reviews and opinion in general, with most people ranking the game as fairly mediocre despite a lot of critics praising it, especially in hindsight. Some such critics are the cast of one of my favorite gaming podcasts, Idle Thumbs, whose unanimous love for the game became one of their more infamous, self-referential in-jokes. This was probably what pumped me up the most about finally pulling the game out of my backlog… to see if it lived up to all of the hype.

“This exact scenario will play out at least 300 times in the course of the campaign.”

So what is it? Well, Far Cry 2 is an open world first person shooter set in a fictional civil war torn African nation. It’s a damn oppressive place for sure. You play as a mercenary who gets stuck in the country and ends up finding himself having to perform jobs for various factions in an attempt to gather the resources to somehow find a way back home. Honestly, that description of the plot is probably making it sound much more narrative driven than it actually is. For the most part the story barely matters. The aforementioned oppressive setting though, that matters! It matters because the game is oppressive in nearly every other way as well and that is perhaps its most standout element.

This has got to be the most purposely unfriendly game I’ve ever played. Some of the design decisions are quite interesting to dissect as, being a modern FPS and not one that is particularly concerned with tactics and realism, many of its systems are quite friendly relative to older games of the genre. This just serves to highlight the contrast of its more notable design conceits: your character starts the game with a crippling case of malaria which you end up dealing with for the rest of the campaign, ammunition is limited, weapons suck and even the good ones you purchase wear out quickly and start jamming at inopportune moments, you’ve got to travel fucking everywhere which is made more difficult by the fact you need to stop to fix your vehicle any time you take more than a tiny bit of damage to it, oh, and virtually everyone in the world seems to put an oddly high level of priority on killing the shit out of you, and ohhhh yeah, they respawn too! That’s just a taste. The interesting thing is, having some vague idea of what the game designers were going for here, I kinda liked it!

“First person driving, get used to it!”

Sure, the massive travel distances for virtually every task were a huge bummer, and the fast travel points (which I used constantly) seemed almost purposely placed at equally inconvenient locations. That, and the frequency at which you encounter blood thirsty, incredibly determined enemies while traveling and the fact they do indeed respawn also felt more than a bit overwhelming at times, but otherwise? Bring it on. I enjoyed how the game made my character, and in turn me as the player, feel, well, not that special. You get dumped into this dangerous place and expect to be mowing everyone down and treated like some impervious god of war? Nope, not here buddy! You’re just a guy, and your experience as a mercenary isn’t enough to mean you’re safe when you’re facing 5 guys with light machine guns and satchels full of grenades when all you have is a rusty pistol and the cover of an old shack to protect you. While I don’t think this whole arrangement quite works as intended, when it does all click it creates some wonderful emergent moments that don’t feel exactly like any other game I’ve played. Here’s a taste:

An end of chapter mission (and one of the more structured ones, I’d say) has you having to assassinate a high ranking officer in his mountain top compound. Knowing I was at a pivotal story mission I poked around online trying to figure out how long it might take me to complete so I’d know if I could squeeze it into an already busy night and ended up a watching someone basically speed-run through the mission by sneaking to a rare sniping position, picking him off from afar undetected, and then making a brilliant dive off of an adjacent cliff into the river below. Given that the alternative involved a lengthy firefight against numerous enemies I decided to try this guy’s method.

“You can practically feel the explosions, especially when you get nailed by debris.”

I stole a riverboat near Pala and made my way all the way up north to Goka falls retreat at Mt. Thabamolaetsa, pulling onto land just outside of the compound’s docks to take out a few patrolling enemies from afar with my newly acquired dart rifle (a silenced sniper rifle, basically.) After that I carefully worked my way up the mountain to avoid alerting any of the guards to my presence. Unfortunately I completely fucked this up, as I found myself in totally the wrong spot on the opposite side of the mountain and ended up in a smaller but still protracted firefight regardless. Whatever, I survived and took up the appropriate position to finally snipe the officer and dive to victory. Only, not having done much leaping around in this game, I completely miscalculated my jump and instead of a beautiful James Bond like escape, I hit the ground below in a hilariously violent moment of sheer failure. A literal laughing out loud moment of ridiculousness. To compound it, somehow the buddy system kicked in and despite being extremely dead from this brutal face first dive hundreds of feet off of a cliff, my buddy showed up to revive me and drag me to “safety” and I completed the mission successfully, adding a hilarious “WTF?!” moment to my already brilliant death. Perfect!

Really, probably my biggest complaint about the game would be its length. I more or less got it when the game reached its half way point. It could have ended there, or maybe gone just a tiny bit longer, though instead it tosses you into a whole new map with a whole new set of almost identical objectives and missions to tackle. *grumble* At least it all went by a little more quickly at that point since I pretty much knew what I was doing.

“Even just looking at the map means you might get shot in the back or accidentally drive off of a bridge.”

Continuing with the negatives, the infamously jilted dialog and the (in my opinion) ineffectual story didn’t detract too much from the game but were definitely notable. While I mostly enjoyed the weapon and combat feel it didn’t seem quite varied enough, especially given the open world nature of the game. Further on the “eh” side would be the buddy system, which while unique and interesting at first, and certainly somewhat provocative, eventually grew to feel completely tiresome and unnecessary to me towards the end of the game.

All of those negatives and still I’m saying I liked it? Sure! The parts of the game that do work and are fairly unique really feel like they make the game something special, especially amongst triple A games. The weird, oppressive setting and equally oppressive gameplay systems, the gritty, immersive forced first person perspective that helps draw you in, the uncommon and beautifully rendered African wilderness you get drawn into, the minimalist and often in-game-world UI which lends at hand there as well, and on the perhaps more shallow side, the bizarre but often compelling fire propagation system, all deserve nods. There are other things I enjoyed as well such as the health/healing system and the utterly epic explosions but those are the most standout. I’m actually very much looking forward to finally playing through Far Cry 3 and seeing just how much of this game’s influence is still detectable and what systems they’ve completely scrapped. All of this when Far Cry 4 was just released? Wow, I think I’m officially a “patient gamer” these days…

Screenshots are actually from the PC version and stolen from various sites on the Internet. I actually played this on Xbox 360 for some difficult to justify reason but if this game has you at all interested you should be able to pick up a digital PC version for next to nothing and even mod out some of the annoying bits to boot!